Oakland, S.F. mayors both want more power. They took opposite roads to get there.

They were bound to be foils.

San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie presides over a center of global commerce, billionaires and tech elites.

Across the bridge, Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee leads a city of working-class holdouts.

Both leaders, however, want the same thing this year: They’re pitching voters on approving November ballot measures that would greatly expand their powers.

Yet they have gone about their efforts in starkly different ways: Lurie’s campaign spent $4.5 million on signature-gatherers to put three charter amendments before voters in November, part of a nearly $14 million campaign funded by the mayor’s allies.

Lee, meanwhile, opted to bring her measure before a divided city council, which put it on the ballot. The campaign to pass the measure has raised $460,000 this year.

The Oakland measure also involved far more community engagement meetings. Lee put herself in the hot seat for multiple rounds of live-streamed questions from city council members and residents during three hearings at City Hall. The Oakland mayor sat in the chambers for the duration, often taking the heat from dozens of speakers. 

Oakland council members were so divided, in fact, that Lee’s vote broke the 4-4 tie to approve the charter amendment for the election. 

Lurie, on the other hand, did not bring his measures to his elected colleagues for discussion or a vote. For community feedback, he relied on four working sessions in Room 201 at City Hall from last December through March, before his measures were introduced. 

There, a 31-member panel of mostly pro-business and moderate allies — and three representatives from labor — sounded off on the proposed changes. Lurie attended portions of the meetings. The group allowed only emailed comments at the first session in December, and eventually allowed spoken comments later.

The mayor’s office says it held six smaller group meetings on top of that, for a total of 10 meetings of varying size.

Either that community engagement process was superficial, as Lurie’s critics described it, or the mayor can process feedback at a remarkable clip: The mayor unveiled his three proposed ballot measures — now known as Propositions D, E, and F — just one day after his working group’s final meeting in March.

And that was six weeks before the city released a formal summary of the charter working group’s input.

Lee’s Oakland charter working group, by comparison, held 14 community meetings from October through December, counted more than 750 attendees across all of them, and conducted a resident survey on the city charter and mayoral power that purportedly elicited 433 responses. 

Oakland’s working group released its formal recommendations in January, which were then further discussed at two more community meetings in February, for a total of 16 meetings. Lee waited months after that to unveil her ballot measure, in May.

Lee’s charter working group was much smaller than Lurie’s, with only eight members to Lurie’s 31. 

Three people sat on both cities’ working groups: Fred Blackwell, CEO of the San Francisco Foundation; Zach Goldman, a labor leader with SEIU Local 1021; and Ben Rosenfield, the San Francisco city controller from 2008 to 2024 and senior advisor and public finance expert with SPUR, an urbanist think tank, who co-wrote the group’s charter recommendations for San Francisco last November. 

None of them responded to repeated phone and text messages seeking comment on the differences between both cities’ approaches. 

SPUR, specifically, shaped both mayors’ charter efforts more than any other outside group. A spokesperson for the organization declined to comment.

Lee did not respond to a request for comment. 

“As we developed these measures with a roughly 30-member working group in partnership with President Rafael Mandelman, Controller Greg Wagner, and City Administrator Carmen Chu, we invited public comment multiple times and earned support from small businesses, labor unions, and residents across the city,” said Charles Lutvak, a spokesperson for the San Francisco mayor’s office. 

“Mayor Lurie ran on fixing this system, with his City Hall Accountability Plan. San Franciscans voted for it in 2024, and they’ll have an opportunity to enact these reforms in November.”

Biggest changes to S.F. city charter in decades

Lurie’s charter changes are a package of three measures:

• Prop. D, if approved by voters, would make it harder for residents to put measures on the ballot (and remove the mayor’s own ability to unilaterally do so)
• Prop. E would empower the city administrator to reform San Francisco’s contracting procedures
• Prop. F would give the mayor sole power to hire and fire certain city department heads 

Board President Mandelman, who partnered with the mayor on convening the working group and co-introduced the three ballot measures, said there was consensus going into the sessions that the charter should be changed — the meetings helped decide which changes were viable. 

The think tank SPUR made 10 recommendations on San Francisco charter changes last November. Some did not fly, like a charter amendment to allow for more discretionary spending in the city budget, too hot a topic for many. 

“The working-group meetings were helpful in understanding what might be doable this year or what might be too hard and too complicated and what would require a whole lot more analysis,” Mandelman said. 

In Oakland, voters will decide on just one ballot measure pertaining to multiple changes to mayoral and city council powers. 

If passed, Measure EE would change several things:

• Oakland mayors would gain the ability to appoint more department heads, and the authority to veto council budget decisions
• Mayors would lose the ability to cast tie-breaking votes on legislation
• Council members would gain the ability to directly communicate with staff, call staff to give testimony on an issue, and override the mayor’s veto of legislation with a two-thirds vote

Gail Wallace, a board member at League of Women Voters in Oakland, was one of the leaders of the East Bay city’s community engagement process.

“During the Charter Reform Group’s outreach, residents repeatedly emphasized that they want accountability from elected officials on public safety, homelessness, infrastructure and basic services,” said Wallace. “Measure EE addresses these community demands. It leaves no doubt which officials to hold responsible for delivering core city services.”

San Francisco’s mayor was not sure he could win his new powers from the supervisors.

Lurie and his advisors “were not confident they could get the measure they thought the city needed through the Board of Supervisors — and I would agree,” said Mandelman, who chairs the supervisor meetings. At least, he said, not in a way “that reflected the direction the mayor wanted to go and what I thought was right.”

Christin Evans, a progressive small-business advocate who attended the San Francisco working group meetings as an observer, described the meetings as “superficial.” 

“It was not like, ‘Here’s a draft of the measures we’re considering and let’s go point-by-point,’” Evans said. Instead, Evans said the meetings felt like window dressing for measures the mayor had already determined he wanted.

“This group didn’t seem interested in hearing from the public. They did not engage with the public in a meaningful way.”

That’s not to say intimate community workshops are the norm for San Francisco ballot measures, of which there are a whopping 10 on this November ballot, plus a regional transit tax and state measures.

Proponents of Proposition I, which the mayor opposes, did not hold any such sessions before pushing for a reallocation of real-estate tax revenue for affordable housing on the November ballot.

Neither did Supervisor Myrna Melgar for Proposition C, which instead got public hearings at City Hall. Proponents for the other ballot measures did not respond when asked for information on their community engagement.

The mayor’s measures, in that way, have been an exception, and Mandelman defended the process. 

“We got a lot of letters. Concerned stakeholders definitely made themselves heard, and there was no shortage of feedback for the mayor to consider as they put D, E, and F together,” Mandelman said. 

The supervisor said he’s jaded by the public comment procedure generally.

“I’m not sure how much more would have been added to that by a very long public comment process where many people stand in line to offer a two-minute comment. I have experienced many hundreds of hours of that comment on the community college board and as a supervisor,” he said. 

“My takeaway, 14 years later, is that I’m not sure how much that kind of public comment actually informs outcomes or is useful to decision makers.”