The Weekly Digest (April 13, 2025)
Happy Sunday, Brionies! Here’s what you need to know about local politics this week and beyond:
San Francisco City Hall
Tuesday, April 15 at 2pm: Regular meeting of the Board of Supervisors (agenda here):
Item 1: Mayor Lurie will make his monthly visit to the Board. None of the Supervisors submitted a question for the mayor ahead of time, so the content of his address will be at his discretion. Perhaps he will want to talk about…
Items 13-15: ...which he is sponsoring. These resolutions approve amendments to various grants for housing and/or shelters in the city. Mostly these are just extending deadlines for existing deals with providers, but one is doubling up the number of shelter beds in the contract, from 120 to 240. Your Prop C dollars at work.
Item 16: A resolution to adopt the City and County of San Francisco 10-Year Capital Expenditure Plan for Fiscal Years 2026-2035. That’s right, folks: As the 20th century showed us time and time again, five-year plans tend to go a bit sideways, so the central planners down at City Hall decided that the move might be to just double it. Someday, someone might come along with a 20-Year Plan, which – of course – would be absolutely ludicrous. Ten is the key number!
Items 17-22: Here, the Board returns to its true raison d’etre – real estate development and property management. Loans to build housing, funds for emergency shelters, leases for community centers, etc.
Happenings around town
Briones Society events
Thursday, April 17 at 5pm, online
What is the Briones Society? What is our mission and what are our core principles? How can you get involved? And where the heck does the name “Briones” come from? Join us for a half-hour Zoom meeting to learn the answers to these questions and more. We look forward to meeting you!
Other events of interest
Amplifying Afghan Voices: A Conversation on Media Freedom in Afghanistan
Tuesday, April 15 at 4pm, The Hoover Institution
Riding the Budget Strain: Fiscal Challenges for Muni and BART
Thursday, April 17 at noon, SPUR Urban Center, 645 Mission Street
Thursday, April 17 at 6pm, The Commonwealth Club, 110 The Embarcadero
What we’re listening to
Ourselves! Episode 24 of the Briones Society Podcast gathers the Briones Besties again for a lively discussion of local politics, including the latest on the closure of the Great Highway and the (potential) recall of Supervisor Joel Engardio. We also cover obscure Christian Slater movies from the Nineties, as well as one Bestie’s beef with Taylor Sheridan. And it all comes in at under an hour. The Briones Society: all killer, no filler.
What we’re reading
The park (and we’re using that term very loosely now, apparently) on the now-closed portion of the Great Highway finally has a name: Sunset Dunes, which primarily evokes spice mining, sandworms, and Fremen sietches. Fun for the whole family! An opening celebration was held on Saturday.
Meanwhile, Supervisor Connie Chan is floating the idea of putting a measure on the ballot to undo last November’s Proposition K and revert back to the cars-on-weekdays/no-cars-on-weekends arrangement that prevailed for the past few years. This is most likely grandstanding on Chan’s part, as she is unlikely to find six other supervisors to back the effort. In any case, she said she’d only move forward if the Engardio recall qualifies for the ballot, which is hardly a certainty.
Oh, and one other thing: Initial data shows that, to the surprise of absolutely nobody, closing the Great Highway has made traffic on the west side worse.
With DOGE doing its thing in Washington, DC, many have wondered if a similar effort can be launched to root out waste, corruption, and fraud here in California. Enter newly appointed US Attorney Bill Essayli, who has announced a task force to investigate our state’s homeless industrial complex. It’s a target-rich environment and we hope that Essayli and team are able to finally hold people accountable for wasting billions of taxpayer dollars.
Mayor Lurie is opening up Market Street to Waymo’s self-driving cars – his latest effort to revitalize downtown. Some of us Brionies see this as a practical first step, while others among us wish that the mayor would have opened up Market to all cars. What do you think?
Quick hits
Meet the politician that could make or break California’s housing effort. What’s her plan?
Why Are Judges and Public Defenders Undermining Maryo Lurie’s Fentanyl State of Emergency?
Steph Curry kills his Dogpatch HQ project over dispute with local union
Stop this train. Scott Wiener’s public transit bailout should be halted in its tracks
This week in San Francisco history
It’s the big one: On April 18, 1906, at 5:12am,, a massive earthquake estimated between magnitude 7.8 and 8.3 struck San Francisco. The quake ruptured approximately 296 miles of the San Andreas Fault, causing widespread destruction. Fires ignited by broken gas mains raged for nearly four days, destroying over 500 city blocks and leaving more than 3,000 people dead. If you haven’t read what is hands-down the best San Francisco book ever published, Gary Kamiya’s Cool Gray City of Love, we recommend picking up a copy – if for no other reason than its excellent and harrowing account of the 1906 quake.
Palate cleanser