Supervisor Danny Sauter has a job that — in his own words — is exhausting, exciting, and can get very petty and really personal fast.
“Frankly,” said Sauter during a Thursday night conversation with Mission Local managing editor Joe Eskenazi at Manny’s Cafe, “having a life outside of City Hall is probably a good thing to give me balance, and it probably allows me to approach this job with a much more clear-headed perspective.”
Sauter oversees the district with the most seniors, the densest parts of San Francisco, and a large portion of downtown which has yet to find a new direction — all while working with the imprint left by his predecessor Aaron Peskin, who had represented District 3 on and off for two decades.
That’s where being a father and having a family life with his wife, Chelsey, and their 14-month-old baby girl can be really helpful.
Fatherhood has also helped him focus on measures aimed at making San Francisco more family-friendly, he told Eskenazi. The city, like many other big cities, is generally known as a tough place to raise families. There are “more dogs than kids in San Francisco,” said Sauter, repeating what data confirms.
His newly unveiled STROLLER Act (short for Supporting Tomorrow’s Residents with Opportunity, Livability, Learning, Education, and Resources) aims to make life easier for young families. “Informed by my personal experience this past 14 months, also in partnership with the fact that we have a lot of young supervisors right now, we felt this was the right time to do this,” said Sauter.
The STROLLER Act is not intended to be revolutionary, but a package of initiatives “to try and move the needle just a little bit,” said Sauter. It would expand eligibility for paid family leave: Currently workers need to have been on the job for six months to claim family leave, but the bill would move that forward to start that eligibility window at just 90 days of employment — a change that would particularly benefit people in high-turnover jobs such as hospitality.
Sauter’s bill also aims to make a more family-friendly public transit system, which “sometimes feels magical, sometimes feels maddening. That even gets more complicated when you’ve got a stroller in one hand and maybe a kid in the other hand,” he said. A hearing with the SFMTA and BART will be held in July to dig into details such as whether all escalators are working, whether there is enough signage to help families move around stations, and what BART and Muni plan to do about family fares.
“It was not just a decade ago where you were not allowed to take a stroller onto the bus without folding it up,” Sauter said. “Now, you do not have to take the child out of the stroller,” added Eskenazi, a father of an 11-year-old.
The STROLLER Act would also expand diaper changing access and shore up support for nursing parents at work.
Sauter’s most recent ordinance, introduced May 5, would ban the retail sale of nitrous oxide, often called whippets, which have become popular in San Francisco and across the country.
The canisters are “right there, front and center” and “being sold at an alarming rate” at virtually any corner store in the downtown area, the Tenderloin, and parts of Sauter’s District 3. The whippets are often branded as Galaxy Gas, Miami Magic and Cosmic Gas to attract young adults, said Sauter, “and it is, unfortunately, working.”
Nitrous oxide whippets are banned in Bay Area jurisdictions such as San Jose, San Carlos, San Mateo and Santa Cruz. “It’s time that we do as well,” he said. He’s currently heard no opposition to his bill.
A supervisor of 17 months, Sauter is on a board full of new blood, which in February voted 7 to 4 to submit a ballot measure that would bar the mayor or supervisors from serving more than two terms in their lifetimes. Currently, they can serve third terms after sitting out for four years.
Sauter’s support for the measure, Proposition B, is politically entangled with the perception that Prop. B is intended specifically to block a potential Peskin comeback. Peskin is, as it turns out, the only person who has successfully returned as a supervisor after two terms.
“Are you concerned, regardless of their intentions of putting this on the ballot, that this will be perceived as a means of knocking off a candidate before the election has started?” Eskenazi asked.
“Some people certainly are reading it that way,” said Sauter.
Eskenazi noted that Prop. B would’ve been relevant to less than 0.6 percent of the nearly 700 mayoral and supervisorial candidates since 1990 — “but it would’ve applied to 100 percent of the Aaron Peskins.”
“I would have to think that since you certainly were not the preferred successor for Supervisor Peskin and the fact that you won and it wasn’t close would lead to you being a strong candidate, regardless of who ran against you,” said Eskenazi.
“Do you want this?” Eskenazi asked Sauter “Do you need this?”
Sauter responded that he was proud of his campaign and had confidence he could successfully run again against any competition. “I’m confident in the results we’re getting and [whoever] my future opponent may be, I am completely fine with the cards laying how they may on that.”
The conversation with Sauter is one of a series in which Eskenazi is interviewing all of the sitting supervisors. Here are some earlier interviews. The next will be at 6 p.m. on June 3 with Supervisor Bilal Mahmood.
