How to Fix San Francisco's Broken Government
By Jay Donde
Last November, San Francisco voters approved Proposition C, which created a new oversight commission for the City’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing. That body joins the more than 100 commissions, committees, councils and working groups – supplemented by a city services auditor, a budget and legislative analyst, a city attorney, a district attorney, an Ethics Commission and a Civil Grand Jury – already tasked with overseeing the delivery of municipal services.
Under the watchful eye of this impressive edifice, we ought to have the cleanest, most efficient government in the world. Instead, over the last 20 years:
Multiple City officials have been indicted on federal corruption charges;
Our annual budget has ballooned at twice the rate of inflation, from $5 billion to $14 billion, while the population has only increased by approximately 5 percent and comparably sized cities fielded budgets between one third and one tenth of ours (a fact only partially explained by San Francisco being a consolidated city-county);
Numerous investigations have found a slew of “nonprofits” with multimillion dollar City contracts failing to account for large sums of money or using their contract proceeds to benefit senior executives’ friends and family; and
Residents have grown increasingly dissatisfied with government’s delivery of services and management of public matters across the board, from sky-high numbers of unsheltered homeless individuals, drug addicts, and mentally ill persons on the street, to property crime rates that dwarf those of other major cities, to a school system with the worst racial achievement gap in the state, to a public transportation grid on the edge of a fiscal cliff, and, finally, to a Kafkaesque bureaucracy that has businesses fleeing in droves.
According to one ranking, San Francisco is the second worst-run city in America. It’s a miracle that we’re not number one. But, it’s important to remember that this dysfunction isn’t endemic. San Francisco was once a city that, while in many ways imperfect, still “worked” – and it can once again if we find the political courage to enact a series of common-sense reforms:
Less money = better government. A city of 800 thousand residents shouldn’t have a $14 billion budget. Period. A bloated city coffer only serves to attract the incompetent and the corrupt. As Jesse James once answered when asked why he robbed all those banks: “Because that’s where the money is.” We should cut budget in half – back to where it was in 2014, when San Francisco had more residents and the City delivered better services.
Elect at-large members to the Board of Supervisors: Prior to 2000, supervisors were elected at large, meaning the 11 members of the Board were the highest vote-getters in citywide elections held every two years (the supervisors’ terms were staggered). In 2000, we moved to a system in which each supervisor is elected from one of the city’s 11 districts. This move was pitched to voters as a way to ensure that historically underrepresented communities would have a voice on the Board and their votes would not be subsumed in citywide elections by a majority that often ignored their concerns. While a laudable goal, the result has been a Board elected by powerful neighborhood groups and incentivized to serve parochial interests, yielding a collective action problem that blocks much-needed housing construction and homelessness services from moving forward. Adding a handful of at-large seats to the Board would go a long way toward advancing shared solutions to citywide problems.
Reduce the number of commissions and transfer their authority back to the mayor. San Francisco’s mayor is limited in how much power she can exercise over the executive branch. In part, that’s because of San Francisco’s unique status as a city and a county, which affords the Board of Supervisors some executive powers. But it’s also because the policies and administration of many City departments are determined by bodies whose members are appointed by a combination of the mayor, the Board, and other interested parties. The intent is to encourage public participation and ensure consensus before major changes in policy are implemented. Again, a worthy goal, but the result of this shared governance model has been sclerosis in reform and a neverending blame game between the various branches of government when things go wrong. For most departments and programs, there should be a single elected office in control, enabling voters to identify where the buck stops and hold the appropriate representative accountable.
Elect a Board of Auditors. The 100-plus commissions in San Francisco not only govern various departments and agencies, they’re also charged with oversight of those same bodies – despite the fact that leading audit standards organizations, both in the public and the private sector, agree that auditor independence is the sine qua non of effective oversight. As noted above, many commissioners are appointed by the mayor and other elected officials, so any criticisms they levy of how the City is run could potentially cost them their positions. Just last year, a scandal erupted in City Hall when it was revealed that the mayor had insisted her appointees pre-sign resignation letters for her office to hold in escrow in case they stepped out of line. While this may be appropriate for agency administrators, it’s not for officials whose duties include investigating corruption and waste. Even the city services auditor is hired by the controller, who is appointed by the mayor. San Franciscans deserve the option to elect oversight officials who answer directly to them and who are politically incentivized to focus exclusively on cleaning up City Hall. Creating an elected Board of Auditors would align San Francisco with the majority of other California counties and US states whose auditors (or controllers with audit powers) are elected, rather than appointed. It would also professionalize the city’s audit function by entrusting it to full-time, qualified civil servants, rather than a patronage network of activists moonlighting as commissioners.
End addbacks. San Francisco’s budget process culminates every summer when the mayor submits her proposal to the Budget and Appropriations Committee, which then refers a consolidated budget ordinance to the full Board of Supervisors. By the time the budget is up for a final vote at the Board, there have been months of amendments, hearings, opportunities for public comment, and analyses by various financial and legislative oversight bodies. The process is actually a respectable example of transparency and participatory democracy. Then, at the last station, the train goes off the rails. Prior to the Board’s final approval, some portion of the budget is reallocated (sometimes due to a department overestimating its resource needs for the coming year; sometimes due to disagreements between the mayor and the Board over legislative priorities) to a general slush fund that supervisors can reallocate to pet projects. Can members of the general public submit requests for funding? Practically speaking, no. This “addback” process typically involves supervisors soliciting politically connected city contractors and activist groups for proposals, or those same contractors and groups huddling with supervisors’ staffs into the wee hours of the night before the budget ordinance is due. Last year, $88 million dollars were distributed through addbacks, which are often used as a way for supervisors to direct funds to specific contractors – despite this being illegal – and for those contractors to avoid going through the City’s standard competitive bidding process.
Strengthen enforcement of the firewall between City contractors and elected officials. Even the most casual observer of San Francisco politics is familiar with the city’s “nonprofit industrial complex,” a phrase broadly used to describe a system in which activist organizations pour money, volunteers, and resources to support their favored candidates (and their favored candidates’ pet projects) in the expectation that, once elected, those same candidates will award the organizations lucrative municipal contracts – often for services that perpetuate, rather than solve, the city’s problems. Although City contractors are already barred from using funds to support individual candidates, this prohibition is routinely skirted through the use of shell companies, creative accounting, and election materials that prominently feature candidates without expressly endorsing them. Some of these activities can only be prevented by closing loopholes, but in many cases all that’s missing is stricter enforcement of existing law.
Many government employees are competent, conscientious, and committed. But, over time, even the most well-meaning public servant can’t function effectively in a system that almost seems designed to fail. The result is a city that spends $60 thousand on a tent and $20 thousand on a trash can. The reforms outlined above aren’t a panacea, but they’re important first steps on the path back to a San Francisco that doesn’t spend $1.7 million on a toilet. Our government is broken. Let’s live up to our reputation as the City That Knows How and fix it.
