Your humble narrator recently spoke to a San Francisco building inspector. It’s 2026, and, every day, he gives the contractors he’s dropping in on the same greeting a San Francisco building inspector could have delivered in 1926: “Permit, plans and job card, please.”
For those of you old enough to remember when checking out a library book entailed stamping a paper card, that’s more or less what a job card is. It’s a literal piece of paper in which every one of the city’s many inspectors writes his or her notes following an inspection. It is, again, 2026 and San Francisco is still deploying the latest in pencil-on-paper technology.
In February, San Francisco went live with OpenGov, a permitting system intended to be the One Ring to rule all the myriad, archaic permitting systems. It was, in the abstract, a stellar idea. Job cards and card catalogs belong in the realm of nostalgia.
But the devil dwells in the details — and, in San Francisco, he’s got rent control.
OpenGov was unilaterally given a $5.9 million initial contract by the mayor’s office over the objections of department staff, which scored another contractor much higher. But that would be water under the bridge — if OpenGov was performing well.
Well, it isn’t, at least not yet. Mission Local’s Brandon Pho last week reported that it’s still only handling straightforward, simple permits and there is not a plan to lay out how it will matriculate to more complicated tasks or fully integrate across more city departments. At this point, city workers from different departments told Mission Local their teams are still forced to use the old permitting system simultaneously with OpenGov.
OpenGov has not yet replaced a paper job card with a virtual version — meaning inspectors cannot presently review their colleagues’ notes from prior inspections via the system. On non-OpenGov permit inspections, inspectors are still relying on pencil-on-paper job cards to review their colleagues’ notes. “Lots of people,” laments one inspector, “got horrible, horrible handwriting.”
No matter. On Wednesday, a Board of Supervisors committee advanced a vote on extending OpenGov’s contract to the full board. While there is now an option to pull the plug after one more year, this contract could extend to 2031 at an additional $33 million. Again, there have been no coherent plans yet presented on how OpenGov will achieve the complicated tasks it presently cannot handle. Nor is there a plan to fix the myriad problems popping up on even the simple tasks it is now assigned to do.
In other news, last Monday the mayor’s office announced a major shift in how it would structure future contracts for homeless services, with providers now being subjected to performance-based metrics. Coming in the same week the supes advanced the warts-and-all OpenGov contract, it’s enough to give you whiplash.
The nonprofits ministering to the city’s homeless will have to show their work, explain how they’ll meet their goals — and be compensated based upon deliverables.
The for-profit, untested tech firm shoehorned into its position by the mayor’s office, meanwhile, was subjected to none of this.
Is compensating homeless providers based on their deliverables and performance a good idea? No.
It’s a great idea. With Chief of Health and Human Services Kunal Modi leading a platoon of McKinsey people now ensconced atop city government, it’s no surprise that San Francisco would be gravitating toward performance-based contracting, just as Major League general managers have been gravitating toward analytics.
Within the realm of San Francisco homeless services, this has been in the works for years. But first the city had to work to standardize homeless service contracts — so that outfits doing similar things aren’t compensated in wildly different ways under wildly different contracts. The next step is to lard performance-based contracts with tangible deliverables. It won’t be enough anymore to simply be remunerated for every toilet paper roll you buy or bottle of water you disseminate. Now providers will be incentivized to meet the actual outcomes that the city is seeking.
The impetus for doing this, we’re told, is not the reason half-bright misanthropes on Twitter seem to think it is. The goal here is not to punish lazy or even criminal providers who amass government money and don’t do work. Rather, it’s to detect problems before they become catastrophic: Performance-based contracting will require intensive and ongoing contract monitoring, and the city can potentially intervene in a constructive way rather than a punitive one.
Why has this taken so long? Many reasons, but the most significant one is: It’s hard. Many homeless service providers are on five-year contracts with set renewal terms; the city was not in a position to simply alter them by fiat. The city has to determine which deliverables are true signifiers of “success” and what success in this realm even looks like — and incentivize providers to produce that.
But the devil, once again, dwells in the details: Formulating these contracts is a bear. If the city is sloppy in the way it incentivizes providers — and rewards them merely for the raw volume of people served — yes, that could lead to more able-bodied homeless people getting services and attention that would better be directed to harder-up people with intransigent problems.
At some point, San Francisco is going to have to think deeply about what it wants to get out of shelters, outreach, permanent housing — everything. It’s hard.
Less hard, city officials say, would be formulating a performance-based contract for OpenGov — with actual deliverables and deadlines, and carrots and sticks for meeting them or missing them.
This, of course, is exactly what the city didn’t do.
On Wednesday an analyst with the Board of Supervisors Budget and Legislative Analyst said that future payments to OpenGov would be tied to deliverables. But those deliverables have not yet been defined. Nor has the timeline for delivering them.
It’s a bit odd to be working out these basics well after a contract is awarded — let alone extended.
And, to be frank: If this city’s two prior elected mayors and their right-hand people eschewed a formal bidding process and unilaterally directed a contract to a favored provider to which they had connections, it’s the sort of thing that would elicit an FBI investigation, not a shrug.
So that was an inauspicious way for OpenGov to start things off. And it’s still not going great. OpenGov cannot yet handle the complex tasks that populate the San Francisco permitting system. And if the simpler tasks it is used for trigger ancillary requirements, OpenGov cannot yet deal with it — forcing city workers to continue using the archaic software system OpenGov was supposed to supplant. Or, you know, read horrible, horrible handwriting.
City inspectors and contractors tell me that it’s slower to turn around a rudimentary permit on OpenGov than it would have been to wander down to the Building Department and get it over the counter.
Yes, installing new, overarching systems is complicated. But lots of things in city government are complicated — like homeless services. A wave of the hand and “it’ll get fixed,” isn’t very reassuring. But that’s essentially what we’re doing with OpenGov.
“This is such an obviously good move that we wonder why it has taken this long to get here,” was the hot take of political pressure group GrowSF, regarding performance-based contracting for homeless service providers.
“Every city contract should have clear deliverables, and if we aren’t getting what we’re paying for, then we should end the contract.”
Again, the contrast between the responsible new approach for homeless contracting and the city’s handling of OpenGov could give you whiplash. Assuming, of course, you give it even a moment’s thought.
The Building Department recently circulated an internal memo noting that, come Sept. 14, plumbing, electrical and mechanical permits will come under the aegis of OpenGov. Also on Sept. 14, customers applying for simple, “no plans” kitchen and bath permits will be directed to OpenGov.
Good luck to them: It will be a test for the nascent system. This is the sort of “deliverable” that you could’ve tied to a “performance-based metric.” But, again, that’s not how this went. So, hopefully things go well.
But, if they don’t— well, hopefully they do.
“It’s like the Iran war,” grumbles the San Francisco building inspector. “We launched into this thing without a plan.”
