Election ad fact-check: Will Props. D, E, and F really ‘Clean up City Hall’? 

The Federal Trade Commission regulates truth in commercial advertising, which is why Dannon can no longer tell you that eating yogurt protects you from the flu.

But the FTC argues that fact-checking political ads is not its job, on the grounds that politics don’t qualify as  “commerce.” 

Some states, California among them, have tried to pass stricter rules. But courts have  tended to rule against them.

In short: Lies are pretty easy to get away with in political advertising. People dissatisfied with this status quo have called for Congress to create a “neutral government regulator” to oversee political speech — perhaps by mandating a system of warning labels that would have to be added to political ads that contain false or unverified statements.

That would take a broad coalition within Congress to pull off, however, and these are tough political times for federal legislators who favor neutrality or regulation. Or government. 

Until then, we have the Poynter Institute’s PolitiFact keeping tabs on the truth, but it sticks to the big, federal races. Meanwhile, my mailbox, (like yours, I’m sure), fills up every day with an avalanche of dire warnings and big promises.

By far the tallest stack of fliers is made up of those exhorting me to vote Yes on Propositions D, E, and F — which makes sense, because Mayor Daniel Lurie’s Yes on D, E, & F Committee has raised, at the time that I write this, an unprecedented $13 million. So I dove into that one first.

Mailer No. 1: Prop. D stops special interests from flooding your ballot with deceptive initiatives that bend City Hall’s rules to benefit them, not you.

Prop. D makes it harder to qualify ballot measures at the city level in a variety of ways. This particular argument in favor of Prop. D puts a lot of weight on how you define “special interests.”

When then-Supervisor Joel Engardio put Sunset Dunes on the ballot, he was part of a small group that leveraged their power as elected officials to put their idea in front of citywide voters.

That makes them absolutely a “special interest group” — as were the voters who recalled Engardio and then gathered the 10,582 signatures required to put Sunset Dunes back on the ballot. 

There is also an entire signature-gathering industry, with companies that pay workers up to $15 for each signature they collect. And San Francisco has a small group of politically engaged residents who have the resources to hire as many signature gatherers as they need to get their pet projects on the ballot and before city voters. They are also, arguably, special interests.

Would Prop. D stop special interests from putting initiatives on the ballot?

No. Quadrupling the number of signatures needed to qualify for the ballot will not deter anyone with enough money from putting their own strange ideas before voters, should they be so inclined. 

Mailer No. 2 (Prop. E) : City Hall budgeted $1.7 million for a toilet. Flush City Hall’s waste. The $1.7 million Noe Valley bathroom is how SF’s broken system works. No centralized standards or tracking. $6 billion gets spent every year — and too much goes down the drain. 

Mission Local is well aware of this toilet. It soared to heights of fame unseen by most toilets when, in 2022, Rec and Parks’ then-director Phil Ginsberg presented state Assemblymember Matt Haney with a $1.7 million cost estimate for a 150-square-foot toilet (about $5,000 per square foot) that Noe Valley residents had, for years, sought to construct. 

The new toilet ultimately cost the city about $200,000, after a Nevada-based toilet company took pity on the people of Noe Valley and donated a modular toilet, as well as a significant amount of money and resources to deliver and install it. It opened, with great fanfare and poop-themed cupcakes, in 2024. 

The $6 billion is how much San Francisco spent on all contracts with outside agencies in fiscal year 2025-2026 — a number that has been steadily rising in recent years. 

Would voting Yes on E eliminate $1.7 million toilets once and for all? 

Hard to say. Prop. E makes changes to the way that the city makes deals with outside suppliers. It wouldn’t address the fact that, of the $1.7 million allotted for that commode, 57% of the money was tied up in soft costs — non-construction, management money, which experts told Mission Local should never exceed 20 percent of a project.

Those would be your Noe Valley toilet architecture and engineering fees (up to $300,000), project management (up to $175,000), and construction management (around $150,000), all of it to be paid to the city’s Department of Public Works. 

This looks less like a legislative issue and more like featherbedding. 

What Prop. E actually would do is give the city administrator (who reports directly to the mayor) “exclusive authority” over most contracting laws (taking power away from the Board of Supervisors in the process) and removing the power of the Board of Supervisors to make any changes to those laws before voting on them.

It also takes away the board’s ability to amend or vote on city contracts, unless they are expected to produce $4.5 million or more in revenue or cost the city more than $25 million. 

When delivering the toilet price breakdown, Ginsberg partly blamed legislation passed by the Board that prohibited city departments from doing business or contracting with companies located in 30 states in the country, due to their anti-abortion laws, anti-LGBTQ rules or voting restrictions.

Those rules have since been altered. But again, the toilet price tag wasn’t so much the toilet itself, as the unusually high estimates to manage the toilet’s design and construction — by this city itself.

Could the city administrator use their newfound powers to muscle internal departments into lowering city costs?” Maybe, but this claim is specifically about that $6 billion in outside contracts.

The mayor’s office’s passion for issuing its own contracts has already led to controversy. The city’s ambitious $5.9 million permitting-overhaul contract with OpenGov was approved by one of Lurie’s policy chiefs last October, despite accusations by city staffers that OpenGov’s product had “gaps so significant” that it “shouldn’t be considered.”

Since then, OpenGov has repeatedly missed deadlines and rolled out software so buggy that it’s made the permitting process even more time-consuming.

Despite this, the mayor’s allies asked to extend the OpenGov deal to 2031 for an additional $33 million (later negotiated down to 2029 for $22 million, after pushback from the Board of Supervisors). 

The analysis of Prop. E written by the controller’s office states, cryptically, that Prop. E “would have a minimal impact on the cost of government, although at a level that cannot be determined at this time.”

For now, I will say the same of its impact on the city’s toilets. 

Mailer No. 3 (Prop F): “What does it take to remove an ABUSER at City Hall? 5 accusers? No. Restraining order? No. Rape charge? Still No … The Inspector General ruled [Sheriff’s oversight commissioner William] Palmer violated 14 city laws amid reported sexual violence. But under the city charter, none of this is cause for removal and Palmer is still in power.” 

Prop. F makes it easier to remove people from city commissions, and William Palmer happens to be among the first appointees to the sheriff’s oversight board, which was created by a 2020 ballot initiative to investigate charges of misconduct against the department. 

Palmer was popular enough to be elected board president — but, since 2023, his life has also been punctuated by repeated accusations of violent behavior, including a restraining order filed by an ex.

Palmer was arrested in May 2023, then arrested again in November 2023 on sexual assault charges. He remained in county jail until April 2024, when the DA asked to have that case dismissed, citing a “lack of evidence.”  

Palmer denied all accusations and said that the sheriff’s department was out to get him.

While then-Board of Supervisors president Aaron Peskin and several other supervisors urged Palmer to resign, the board didn’t have the nine votes it needed to suspend or remove him, or a clear case that Palmer had committed official misconduct, since he hadn’t been convicted of anything. 

Then, on Sept. 11 of this year, a report from the Office of the Inspector General dropped, which appears to be the source of that “violated 14 city laws” quote.

It cites examples that could be used as direct justification for removing Palmer, including Palmer repeatedly describing himself as president of the oversight board after being pulled over by the sheriff’s department for having expired license plate tags in Dec. 2025, as if Palmer expected that to be justification for letting him go. 

To be fair, this does lend some credence to Palmer’s argument that he’s being harassed by the sheriff’s department — traffic enforcement is almost always done by the police, and pulling drivers over for expired tags is relatively uncommon following a 2024 policy change.

The stop also appears to have been unusually punitive; rather than just writing Palmer a ticket, the sheriff’s deputies had his car towed to an impound yard. Palmer also claimed during the stop that he was being pulled over as retribution for visiting the women’s jail in his capacity as an oversight commissioner a day earlier.

A few weeks before this, 17 women had filed a claim with the city, alleging that a group of sheriff’s deputies had ordered women at the jail to strip down in front of each other while the deputies laughed and filmed them with their body-worn cameras. 

But the inspector general’s report also describes security and body-camera footage of Palmer trying to use his title as board president to try to contact a woman who was being held in a secure ward in Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, which is well outside the scope of his official duties.

That same month, the Board of Supervisors voted to suspend Palmer, a prelude to removing him from office. They’ll have to hurry: Palmer’s term expires in March 2027.

The standard for removing someone from the sheriff’s oversight board is relatively high compared to other commissions. In 2025, when Mayor Lurie asked the Board to vote out reform-minded police commissioner Max Carter-Oberstone, some suspected that it was to ensure that Lurie would have enough allies on the commission to approve his next pick for police chief.

But Lurie didn’t have to offer an official reason (though, privately, Lurie told supervisors that Carter-Oberstone had been rude to staff in the mayor’s office). Voting out Carter-Oberstone also only required six votes, not nine. 

Would voting yes on F make it easier to remove someone who has been accused of being corrupt and abusive from a city commission? 

Yes. In Proposition F’s rewritten city charter text (SEC. 4.137. SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT OVERSIGHT)  the line “members may be removed from office only for official misconduct” is crossed out. If voters approve Prop. F, that means that there no longer needs to be any reason at all to remove questionable commissioners like Palmer — or, in fact, anybody. 

Changing an (admittedly strict) standard for removal to no standard at all, though, is not the same as stamping out corruption. It just makes it easier to remove anyone, whether they’re corrupt, a whistleblower trying to stop corruption or just someone who did something to annoy whoever happened to appoint them. 

Board appointees (like Palmer) will still be harder to remove than mayoral appointees, though — even though the standard for removal is lower, it will still take a public process, and a 9-2 vote to remove them. 

I still have a lot of political mail to sort through. Got a claim that you’d like to see fact-checked? Send photos (or links, if it’s online) to heather@missionlocal.com. In the meantime, here’s a link to Mission Local’s voter guide.