The Weekly Digest (June 2, 2024)
Happy Pride Month, Brionies!
Here’s what you need to know about San Francisco politics this week and beyond:
City Hall
Monday, June 3 at 10am: Regular meeting of the Rules Committee (agenda here)
Item 1 – Ordinance to streamline Vision Zero transportation projects by authorizing contracts without following regular rules, such as those relating to the environment, competitive bidding, and certain labor practices. To fall within this exemption, a department head must determine that the project is for the construction, repair, or improvement of public facilities “with a primary purpose” of implementing Vision Zero.
TAKE ACTION
The Rules Committee is almost certainly going to recommend that the full Board approve the foregoing ordinance, which is why it already appears on Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting agenda as Item 40. While the City’s contracting process does need to be streamlined, San Francisco’s recent experiment with no-bid contracting has been an abject failure, resulting in widespread corruption, waste, and fraud. Enough is enough. Tell the supervisors how you feel about this ordinance by clicking this link, which will create a ready-to-go, pre-populated email that you can send from your preferred email client. The entire process takes three clicks — the link above, choosing your email client, and hitting send — and less than 15 seconds.
Tuesday, June 4 at 2pm: Regular meeting of the Board of Supervisors (agenda here)
Item 4 – Hearing to consider four applicants to the Our City, Our Home (OCOH) Oversight Committee, which was established by passage of Proposition C in 2018. The OCOH fund is intended to increase housing and services for people experiencing homelessness, and the dollar amounts at issue are no joke: $295.7 million in OCOH funds were expended in fiscal year 2022-23. The OCOH Oversight Committee has a pretty hefty responsibility: it makes recommendations to the Mayor and the Board of Supervisors about how to spend those mega-dollars. Qualifications for serving on the committee are set forth in this document. We notice that the experience of homeless people and homeless service providers are amply represented, but Joe and Jane Taxpayer? Not so much.
Items 13-16 – Resolutions regarding four contracts for homelessness services, two with Urban Alchemy and two with Episcopal Family Services. Total for all four contracts: ~$80 million.
Thursday, June 6 at 10am: Regular meeting of the Government Audit and Oversight Committee (agenda here)
Item 2 – Resolution authorizing the mayor, Recreation and Parks Department, and various other agencies to seek donations from private entities and organizations to support San Francisco in hosting giant panda bears from the People’s Republic of China, notwithstanding the Behested Payment Ordinance, which would ordinarily restrict soliciting from persons or entities that would be considered interested parties to those departments. On her recent visit to China, Mayor Breed secured an offer to borrow two giant pandas, but she needs to raise $25 million to build a panda-safe enclosure and make other infrastructure upgrades to our rundown zoo. Critics have noted the opportunity for corruption if supervisors relax the fundraising rules, but the board materials are panda-positive, noting that “San Francisco has a rich history with pandas,” and remind the supervisors that in 1984, two pandas named Yun Yun and Ying Xin visited for three months, drawing more than 260,000 visitors, roughly four times the average attendance at that time and the busiest months the zoo has ever experienced.
Items 4-32 – Ordinances adopting memoranda of understanding with a variety of unions.
Happenings around town
ConnectedSF Hosts SF Budget Deep Dive: Can We Address the Shortfall?
Wednesday, June 5 at 12:30pm, online
Thursday, June 6 at 12pm, online
Thursday, June 6 at 7pm, Cowell Theater, Fort Mason
Saturday, June 8 at 12pm, Golden Gate Park
Bayview District: Tuesday, June 4, 5-6pm
What we’re reading
This week’s theme is Your Conservative Friends Told You So: Failed Progressive Experiments. First up, National Review roasts Mayor Breed for finally recognizing that defunding the police was a really bad idea: “Ahead of a November election where public safety is expected to be a top issue, Breed is proposing to boost funding for public safety by over $100 million. The bulk of that increase, or $46.7 million, would go to the city’s police department, which would have a record high budget of $821.6 million next year, up from $774.9 million.” As Roland Fryer’s research has shown, reducing police costs lives. Mayor Breed’s alternative – the Dream Keeper Initiative – has been a $120 million boondoggle with little to show in the way of tangible results. Unfortunately, re-building a hollowed out department short 500 officers will be a lot harder than tearing it apart.
Our second featured failure is Proposition C, the 2018 measure that levied an additional tax on businesses with over $50 million in gross receipts and set aside the proceeds for homeless services. As Sanjana Friedman reports this week in Pirate Wires, “the measure, which generates around $250 million per year, has nearly tripled annual spending on homelessness. What does the city have to show for it? On the body count front, apparently nothing. According to newly released data, the city’s overall homeless population has actually increased by 7% since 2022 — despite Prop C money flowing to the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing (HSH) since 2020.” Not only did Prop C fail to help the people it was designed to support, it placed an enormous tax burden on financial technology startups – treating them especially harshly under a tiered system – and several of them left town as a result. San Francisco now has “record-high office vacancy rates of around 37%, plummeting tax revenue, and a two-year budget deficit hovering around $800 million.”
In honor of Pride Month, we recommend this overview of the gay conservative movement in San Francisco.
Quick hits