Mayor Daniel Lurie has filed papers to put a trio of measures onto the November ballot to remake the city charter, the constitution that undergirds San Francisco government.
Experienced government hands often liken tinkering with the charter to brain surgery. A more apt metaphor, however, might be entering into a marriage: The consequences (likely) aren’t fatal if you make a mess of it but, for the sake of everyone’s sanity, well-being and bank account, you’d really want to do your due diligence and get it right.
Just reading the words “charter reform” can numb voters like a few shots of NyQuil (but without the medicinal benefits). Hey, we get it; it’s not sexy. It is important: Altering the charter can induce profound consequences with ramifications that can carry on for years and cannot easily be reversed.
But, separate and apart from the substance of the mayor’s proposals, let the record show that:
- Lurie is gathering signatures to enact a ballot measure that will make it harder for you to gather signatures to enact a ballot measure.
- He is cluttering the ballot to stave off future cluttered ballots.
- He is doing this in the name of fostering greater cooperation between the mayor and Board of Supervisors, but Lurie is choosing to bypass the Board of Supervisors and go straight to the voters, at great monetary expense.
And that’s the way it is, regardless of one’s feelings about the content of these three measures. Also: There could be more. The Board of Supervisors may yet add several additional charter amendments to what appears to be a loaded November ballot. Vamos a ver.
Regarding the content of the mayor’s three amendments-to-be, there’s a lot in here: Even people who participated in the charter-reform working group that was created to push out this legislation — people who ostensibly should know what’s in these proposals —did not know what’s in these proposals.
Multiple participants said they’re surprised to learn about some of what’s actually in here, and how much it would enable Lurie to do.
Most notably, one of the measures would give the mayor the ability to vastly reshape city government by reorganizing or even consolidating 24 city departments.
That includes the big ones, the ones you’ve heard of: Police, fire, public works, public health. At present, any reorganization or consolidation would require a vote of the people or, more likely, a series of votes. Pass this measure and it doesn’t.
Is this, on its face, a terrible idea? Not necessarily. It’s hard to say San Francisco is presently running like a Swiss watch.
But it makes one a bit uneasy that legislation enabling the mayor to make sweeping changes to two dozen departments — perhaps reducing some to husks and shunting their duties and vast workforces elsewhere — has been undersold in promotional materials as merely reorganizing “department reporting structures.”
It also makes one a bit uneasy that, according to participants in the charter-reform working group, these extremely consequential details were not discussed.
Multiple sources have confirmed to Mission Local that, in fact, the proposals you’ll be voting on were circulating before that so-called working group even finished its meetings.
If voters approve Lurie’s charter amendments — and it’s difficult to imagine these haven’t been polled extensively — the possibilities for him to reshuffle the city’s departmental deck are broad.
He would all but certainly advance his quest to detangle San Francisco’s Gordian permitting knot by consolidating the planning and building inspection departments, a goal he made public in January.
Where things would go beyond that is murkier, but the Department of the Environment’s general fund budget has already been gutted, so it may essentially be wound down, with its present duties and personnel placed elsewhere.
That’s the crux of what this amendment would allow the mayor to do. There are mandatory duties enshrined in the city charter, and that’s not changing.
What would change is this: Now the mayor could reassign those duties to a different department. He could make one department subservient to another or reduce a department to little more than a plaque on an office door, with all its personnel and responsibilities migrated elsewhere.
Pass this charter amendment, and the mayor can start deconstructing and reconstructing some of the city’s biggest departments like Lego sets, without going back to the voters to cross every t or dot every i.
That, to borrow Joe Biden’s inelegant phrasing, is a Big Effing Deal.
A common critique among government players was that the mayor’s forthcoming ballot measures were small-time. Well, like Rick Blaine, they were misinformed. Being granted the ability to reorganize or consolidate two dozen departments sounds big-time.
It sounds an awful lot like charter effing reform.
This sure seems like a bigger (effing) deal than unilaterally hiring or firing department heads — which pretty much happens already — or being able to boot commission appointees on a whim, for no reason. Those are the charter-reform bullet points you’ve read already (assuming you’ve read any).
Another Lurie proposal would centralize city procurement under the City Administrator. Maximizing city buying power is a solid idea, but the mayor and his allies appear to already be overselling it.
In a letter accompanying the proposed charter amendments, Lurie and Board President Rafael Mandelman cited the 2022 example of the $1.7 million Noe Valley commode as an example of decentralized procurement gone awry.
As Mission Local wrote at the time, 57 percent of that $1.7 million was soft costs: Design, fees, management, insurance, etc. Experts told us that’s three or more times what a project’s soft costs should be — which, of course, has nothing to do with procurement.
Those swollen soft costs were indicative of inefficiencies, and even corruption, within departments that can’t be rooted out by mere legislation, let alone procurement legislation. So the use of this example by the mayor and board president is concerning.
Voters may glaze over when they hear the term “charter reform,” but their reaction to terms like “election reform” may not be so benign. The most contested of Lurie’s three amendments would figure to be the one about ballot access.
San Francisco has, by far, the lowest threshold in the state for getting material onto the ballot. The power of labor, the last bastion of the city’s desiccated progressive movement, would clearly be mitigated if it was harder to place items on the ballot via signature-gathering, or via a minority bloc of the Board of Supervisors.
“Over the last year, [Lurie has] seen how City Hall can, at times, water down reforms,” wrote a spokesman for the mayor’s campaign. “These issues are too important to be delayed by City Hall factionalism.”
That explains why Lurie isn’t even trying to get six votes for his proposals from the supes and is going straight to the voters.
This sets up an intriguing scenario: Government theorists and practitioners can tell you that San Francisco’s ballot threshold is too low, and it probably is. But the fact is that voters like voting — and tend to react poorly to proposals that would abridge their existing ability to vote.
So, in the event labor deigns to spend money to fight this among the many issues on a packed November ballot, voters may be hearing more about “election reform.”
To be fair, Lurie is also moving to reduce his own access to the ballot, too.
Only in San Francisco can the mayor unilaterally put a measure before voters. And only in San Francisco can that bloc of four of 11 supervisors put a measure before the voters. Lurie’s proposal would nix his own ability to unilaterally place items on the ballot. And the board would require six votes moving forward.
Beyond ballots and voting, this would fundamentally shift the M.O. of wheeling and dealing at City Hall.
It would do more than merely force our lawmakers to make laws: Removing the mayor and legislators’ ability to even threaten to easily lob items onto the ballot would radically alter both the sorts of legislation introduced, and the means of negotiating it.
It could tone down the vituperative and high-energy style of politics that has come to define San Francisco City Hall.
But Lurie went further: The mayor’s charter amendment would also quadruple the signature requirement to place items before voters.
Currently, you must amass 2 percent of the registered voters to place items on the ballot in this city. Berkeley requires 5 percent. Los Angeles requires 15 percent. We’re anomalies here. By a lot.
Those are the facts. But these are also the facts: Gathering signatures costs money. So quadrupling the signature requirements is essentially a monetary barrier. For the wealthiest among us, who are increasingly overt in their aims to funnel obscene sums into politics in a truly vulgar display of power, this is no real barrier.
Every extra percent of signatures required is just, to crib from Sergio Leone, a few dollars more. You can state that San Francisco’s ballot threshold is too low, and also state that raising it only burdens the non-rich. Both of these things can be true.
Daniel Lurie is calling for charter reform to help him better govern, despite having a reliable majority on the Board of Supervisors and the most pliant board in recent memory.
But it may not always be so. If, in the future, he can’t reliably push items through the supes, he may yet rue his decision to make it harder to go directly to the voters.
There are, Oscar Wilde wrote, two tragedies in life: One is not getting what one wants. And the other is getting it. It remains to be seen which will befall Mayor Lurie.
Any SF resident who has engaged with a City department for a non-trivial permit or license knows the process is arbitrary, inconsistent, and slow. With unpredictable and high costs. It resembles a legislative process of multiple involved committees, hearings, and arcane procedural rules. The lesson is political connections are a prerequisite to get reasonable reliability and efficiency. As a result, most residents fear dealing with City regulations/processes as they fear being party to a lawsuit. So they ignore City regulations and essentially conspiring with neighbors to avoid a dreaded “complaint” that brings them to City attention. The bottom line is resident are cynically alienated from City government. That makes us susceptible to believe every allegation and conspiracy of City misconduct however unfounded. And vote for candidates who exploit those beliefs.
“Getting a building permit is hard, let’s consolidate all power in the executive branch” sir I promise this time the trains won’t run on time.
Most of our local politicians rightly criticize Trump’s unilateral extra-legal maneuvers to increase his power – and line his pockets. Although so far Mayor Lurie has refused to utter the orange jackass’s name in public, he at least lip-syncs some of the key critical talking points against fascism.
The Lurie-Mandelman conspiracy explicitly intends to make our already too-strong executive branch even stronger by gutting citizen input and restricting elected legislators’ participation in governing. Their quest to consolidate decision making (and roadblocking) in the hands of a single person loudly echoes the Trumpian agenda.
I suspect that a fair number of the electorate think that there is already too much “citizen input” into the legislative process. The same few hundred usual suspects seem to show up at every City Hall meeting, with hours of “public comment”, whilst the Supes roll their eyes and check their phones.
Lurie won office on a fairly clear promise to untangle the bureaucratic blob and legislative logjam. This initiative deserves support in order to fulfill that mandate.
The initiative already lost last year. But that was the voters who stopped it. You know, the very people who are made irrelevant by making the mayor a king.
So since you think that there are usual suspects who show up at meetings and advocate against YIMBY, we need to weld shut ballot access for everyone?
Lurie won by a substantial margin running on a platform of streamlining our sclerotic local government. So we should give him the tools he needs to do that.
There is such a thing as too much democracy. It leads to paralysis.
Daniel Lurie 102,720 26.33%
London Breed (incumbent) 95,117 24.38%
Aaron Peskin 89,215 22.86%
2% and 3.5% are not substantial margins.
In that case, can I decide that your vote doesn’t count? How about your “voice” such as what comes through in your comments?
Go check the results it was not a landslide for Lurie. In fact he got most of his votes as 2nd place votes in RCV.
If you have a problem with the same community busy bodies using all their time at public meetings wait until you hear about the same old astroturf groups and insanely rich people literally buying our government.
As someone who is pretty ignorant, I have to ask – would it be crazy to simply ban paid signature gathering?
Depends how much you trust your mayor or legislature. Because initiative petition is your only way to change a bad law or recall one of them.
The real question raised by this piece is how do we macerate desiccated progressivism so that progressives put forth an affirmative vision of a charter, and does not face an extinction level event without putting up a fight?
Otherwise, this is but a preprandial stroll for San Francisco’s libertarian right wing.
I had to look up the $3 word “prepandial”: apparently it means “before a meal” but I’m not understanding what the meal is supposed to be in this metaphor. Like, expanded political power? Honestly don’t get it.
Also fwiw the right wing of San Francisco politics, such as it is, seems obsessed above all with strengthening the police and so can’t be called “libertarian” in good faith, I think. Reasonable people can disagree on points of wording of course.
Either you’re at the table or you’re on the menu.
Lurie’s playing a game of musical chairs with the table with this charter reform.
And of course I spelled it wrong
Hmmm consolidate executive power, reduce legislative power, reduce popular authority, increase police budget and leverage police for personal security, all in the name of efficiency, while blaming all the failures of the past on the people who try to protect the rights of the average resident. Add in a voter base who are so adamatly behind him that they’d forgive the guy just about anything and worship him if he wipes his own butt without help.
Seems really familiar.
Campers,
Basically, the Mayor wants to return to Willie Brownville by removing the Gonzalez reforms from the first years of the ‘Class of 2000’ .
His proposals go even much further and from a distance appear to have been written by Trump’s staff.
He wants to remove the protections accorded City workers by the Civil Service laws and Union contracts.
The total work puts meat on the bones of the Billionaire Class national campaign to achieve Minority Rule through Ruse and Subterfuge.
Vote ‘No’ on ‘Yes’ !!
go Niners !!
h.
I need more expert analysis of what could go wrong if these initiatives pass.
I’m appalled that Lurie is just standing by regarding the Tenderloin resident who was shoved by an overzealous security guard–why can’t Mayor Lurie intervene regarding strongarm tactics toward the most vulnerable among us?? I, for one, am watching this circumstance carefully. The outcome –whether our Mayor feels unnecessary strongarm tactics are acceptable–will affect my vote on Lurie’s proposed initiatives.
Roberta,
The Mayor is a nice guy who happens to think that Revenge beats Reform and has further empowered our SFPD which has hundreds of Lateral Transfer officers hired off the LE underground railroad for Rogue cops.
Then, they make them training officers.
I recall one trained his sidekicks to wear someone else’s name on their uniforms and cover their badge numbers.
Goes all the way to the top.
One of the guys in Fajitagate’s old man became Chief after getting charged with a crime for trying to cover up the strong armed robbery by 3 off duty drunk cops of a bag of fajitas from a gay waiter who never had a chance and twenty years down the road he’s still being harassed by SFPD and their relatives in his housing.
This is serious cause Lurie is further empowering these guys and …
Look, it starts with getting an elected Police Chief who promises Foot Patrols and doesn’t say like the new head of the SFPOA that making more money is his most important goal and he got em 14% more and he already made $586,000 dollars last year.
We should put this on the Ballot in November to let us elect our Top Cops like we did in a time when almost every single one of us was an immigrant.
Can we make an online Petition and gather 53,000 signatures before July one at a time ?
I didn’t know you didn’t need a live signature gatherer but my mail keeps getting hit with a Billionaire effort to get me to sign and process a Petition online ?
Go Niners !!
h.
Fake progressive Saikat voted for the billionaire for Mayor and joined billionaire astroturf tech bros in donating big money to Bilal to u seat Preston.
Lurie is nice guy social media fluff up front, while he is harassing people in the TL and engineering a total take over of SF for the benefit of the rich.
Not a nice guy.
Really excellent article, made me think a lot. I’m not sure what to think. To me, we already have a city with a strong mayor, meaning the mayor has a lot of power. As someone who can be skeptical of government power, mostly in the realm of surveillance and policing, I fear the consolidation of power in one person (dictatorships and the like). However, as a city employee myself who acts in good faith, I tend to believe that government has a lot of capacity to do good and make life better for people but if often weighted down by bureaucracy such that labyrinthine processes result and things never get done. I can see why streamlining and simplifying could be helpful for making progress on some things.
My fear is that having an even stronger mayor could result in ugly authoritarianism when it comes to “public safety” but from an Ezra Klein abundance perspective, streamlining some government functions to enable stuff to get done, like building housing for example, seems like a plus. So not sure where that puts me with respect to these ballot measures…
Also, after watching the ridiculous waste of time and money that recall elections brought us, I do think it should be harder to get those onto the ballot. I think to recall an elected official should be really hard – like 20% of the population hard. But getting “tax the rich” type measures onto the ballot shouldn’t be as hard and like Joe said, higher thresholds only burden the people who can’t afford to pay more to get on the ballot.
These are incredibly complex issues and my fear is that most voters won’t read the fine print and pay attention and try to understand the implications of these things. Open to advice!
Breed gerrymandered the board in 2022 and now Lurie is coming for the SF constitution. At a time when the federal government is going full oligarch-fascist, your local government is in complete lockstep.
As others have stated, Lurie barely won his election with a scant 26% of the vote, followed closely by Breed with 24% and Aaron Peskin with 23%. That most certainly IS NOT A MANDATE. This charter reform legislation attempt to give the strong mayor even more power is a clear overreach by newbie billionaire Lurie. What is the point? How will this idiotic strategy make the lives of San Franciscans better? How does it solve our many challenges and problems? Why is Lurie trying to jackhammer it through? Voters don’t want it.
Giving the Mayor more power over Executive Branch Departments is a bad idea. Increased hire/fire power over department heads means that more departments report the mayor – and whatever the mayor’s agenda is – rather than prioritizing the needs of the city first. This mayor and previous ones already use and abuse their power over department heads who directly report to them. Departments end up being poisoned by top-down grandstanding and agenda coming from City Hall.
I guess its fundamentally a bet on:
-the current system, for a variety of fair/unfair reasons, is bloated, unable to reform, and headed off a cliff
-commission reform allows for quicker re-organizing / bloat cutting etc
The question is what happens if we dont reform