The most fascinating portion of the Louvre may not be the Venus De Milo or the Mona Lisa (good luck pawing through the cellphone-wielding hordes on the latter) but, rather, its less-traveled and dimly lit basement. Here one finds the foundations of the medieval castle that once stood here. But you’ll find more than that. You’ll find … crap.
You’ll find the remnants of 12th-century lunches, or other odds and ends that were tossed over the battlements and down into the moat or dropped down the privy. In essence, these are the things that were flushed down the toilet. You can learn a lot about society from the bottom up, it turns out.
That’s still true. It’s certainly true here in San Francisco. Life, essentially, is a series of trips to the toilet — and this city’s spending habits on toilet paper reveal much about both municipal life and municipal spending habits. You can learn a lot about San Francisco and its budget from the bottom up, too.
In 2011, your humble narrator put in a public records request with the City Administrator for any and all toilet paper expenditures. I did so again six years later. It’s been six more years, so last month, I did it again.
In 2011, San Francisco spent $833,113 on toilet paper. By 2017, that figure had increased sharply, to $1.19 million — a hefty 43 percent surge in only six years. At this pace, toilet paper spending in 2023 should’ve reached $1.7 million. But it won’t.
The good people at the City Administrators’ office — who extracted toilet paper spending out of larger contracts at our behest — came up with the figure of $1.03 million for 2022, and $550,599 through the first six months of 2023. That’s a lot less. Even adjusting for inflation, $1.19 million in January 2017 has the buying power of $1.5 million today. And toilet paper is surely more expensive now than in the recent past. So what happened?
Well, 2020 happened. And 2021, and 2022 and, so far, 2023. God help us in 2024. The pandemic continues to exert a transformational influence on this city.
Mayor London Breed has attempted to cajole private-sector workers back to the city’s bereft Downtown offices: “It’s time to take the pajamas off or, if you put on covid pounds, go downtown and buy some new pants,” she said at a 2022 event held at Salesforce Park (without Salesforce — an unsubtle dig).
For the record, Breed did not opt to punctuate that statement with a blast from an air horn. You’re not going to believe this, but her approach didn’t work: Not only are private-sector employees still working from home, it’s more than clear that goodly numbers of public sector workers are still working from home — and flushing at home. This is what the toilet paper data reveals. But it reveals more.
In 2011, around 56 cents of every dollar the city spent on toilet paper went not toward the relief of city workers, but to stock up San Francisco International Airport. By 2022 that ratio grew even more lopsided: 79 cents of every San Francisco toilet paper dollar went to the airport.
It’s not surprising the airport is spending more on toilet paper now than it did 13 years ago: Inflation has been significant and toilet paper, specifically, costs more. It’s also not surprising that most of the toilet paper goes to SFO: San Francisco has tens of thousands of employees, but SFO has tens of millions of passengers.
But here’s what’s surprising: The airport’s 2022 passenger count is only marginally higher than passenger numbers in 2010. And yet the portion of toilet paper directed to the airport instead of the rest of the city has exploded.
The toilet paper data is clear: It points toward appreciable numbers of city workers, as the mayor would put it, in their pajamas — and, presumably, buying pants online.
Elsewhere
$217,530
Elsewhere
$366,971
Airport
$466,142
Airport
$813,562
In 2010, about 56 percent of San Francisco’s toilet paper budget went to the airport.
By 2022, that had risen to at least 79 percent, according to City Administrator data.
Elsewhere
$366,971
Airport
$466,142
In 2010, about 56 percent of San Francisco’s toilet paper budget went to the airport.
Elsewhere
$217,530
Airport
$813,562
By 2022, that had risen to at least 79 percent, according to City Administrator data.
Chart by Will Jarrett. Data from the City Administrator.
San Francisco’s budget is big. San Francisco spends a lot on toilet paper. This is neither revelatory nor illuminating. It’s less pulling a rabbit out of a hat than pulling a rabbit out of a rabbit hutch.
Rather, San Francisco’s toilet paper numbers help to contextualize a budget that is almost inapproachable in its vastness. Toilet paper’s municipal price tag of almost exactly $1 million is also nice and neat; it’s easy to compare it to other costs.
So, if you take a look at the 94 items accounting for the $42 million the Board of Supervisors redistributed during June’s add-back session in the current fiscal year, you’ll find that all but eight of them are an expenditure at roughly at the level of toilet paper or less — with many being way less. Virtually the only media coverage and public engagement with San Francisco’s budgeting process, and its resultant leviathan budget, is spent covering arguments over these toilet paper-sized costs — while virtually everything else in the $14.6 billion budget goes lightly scrutinized.
Introducing the Toilet Roll Measure (TRM): Mission Local’s contribution to the time-honored American tradition of measuring things using anything but the metric system.
One toilet roll equals $1,031,093, the amount San Francisco spent on toilet paper in 2022. Let’s see how that stacks up to other expenses haggled over in this year’s budget.
Establishment of the Office of Reparations was one of the most contentious items in this year’s budget process. It has been afforded $2M per year for all the associated staffing and admin costs.
Street cleaning in the Mission was added back into the budget at the cost of $225,000 per year – less than a quarter of the city’s TRM.
The SRO Collaborative and the Code Enforcement Outreach Program were both initially cut from the budget. Both programs helped low-income people with housing, the former by advocating for families in SROs and the latter by pushing landlords to deal with problems.
After outcry and much debate, the programs were reinstated at a cost of $4.8M per year.
Altogether, the 2023-24 addbacks add up to around $42M. This was high compared to typical years and came after several weeks of back and forth between departments and supervisors.
Not all city costs see so much scrutiny. The police budget supplemental approved in March gave the department an extra $25M to fund overtime costs. It was approved by supervisors in a 9-2 vote.
The addback process monopolizes elected leaders’ time and media coverage of the budget, but it pales into insignificance next to even the city’s smaller departments.
In November, funding the Public Library was the most popular proposition on the ballot, securing over 80 percent of votes. The department costs around $200M to run annually – roughly 194 TRM.
And costs that get precious little press during budget season, such as healthcare, often account for a vastly higher sum.
The funding for Zuckerberg San Francisco General is $1.2B, making up a little over a third of the Public Health Department’s total funding. That is enough to supply 1,164 San Franciscos with toilet paper for a year.
We’ve written a lot about the budget, the Board of Supervisors’ Lilliputian role in it — and, commensurately, the mayor’s Brobdingnagian role. It’s a bit of an exaggeration to say the Board’s input is akin to the value of toilet paper in the city’s budget. But only a bit. The discretionary money the supes wrangled over in June was only about 1.7 percent of the discretionary funds controlled by the mayor.
This isn’t to say the mayor is bad and the supes are good, or vice versa. This is simply the nature of the city’s strong-mayor system — and our strong mayor is strongest when it comes to setting a budget. In San Francisco, budgeting is an adversarial process. By design.
Are mayors incentivized to intentionally and strategically defund organizations that they know the supes will spend time and effort working to backfill? Yes. Are departments, mandated to make cuts, incentivized to ax popular programs that they also know the supes will spend time and effort working to backfill? Also yes.
As we’ve previously noted, the add-back process is a spectacle; competing community groups are made to line up and tell piteous tales during public hearings like a deranged municipal version of “Queen for a Day.” The reality TV-like pageant of plugged-in nonprofit workers gathering in the halls and wheedling for money “is used by mayors to show that the board is not serious, and they are,” notes an erstwhile mayoral staffer. “But that’s silly. The overwhelming majority of spending is done in the departments, where special interests have already gotten their piece of it.”
Yes, people are lining up for handouts during add-backs. But when you reach a certain level of clout, you don’t have to line up for anything. And by the time the budget has reached the board, it’s essentially more than 99 percent finalized. Municipal rancor over toilet paper-level money in a $14.6 billion budget that’s almost entirely set is how we do budgeting here — and cover it in the media.
It doesn’t have to be. The budgeting process is lengthy. And, while it’s not a spectacle, it’s not opaque. Attention must be paid: It makes little sense to neglect coverage or input on the budget until it’s 99 percent complete. Especially in the forthcoming year, which promises to be the worst budget since the Great Recession and promises a municipal document worthy of the Book of Revelation.
“The overwhelming majority of spending is done in the departments, where special interests have already gotten their piece of it.”
San Francisco does not do “zero-based budgeting,” in which expenses must be justified every term; we are less writing a script each year than fiddling with a vast Google Doc. While that’s understandable with a budget as large as San Francisco’s, it is alarming how little of this city’s budgeting discussion is actually performance-based. Budget items become calcified, and discussions tend to focus much more on personnel, and personnel costs, than on what that personnel is actually expected to accomplish for those costs.
That’ll be something to think about during forthcoming histrionics over toilet paper-priced line-items after 99 cents of every dollar has already been apportioned. Billions in baked-in bucks will have essentially sailed through. But this is the way we do things.
It doesn’t have to be. You can, indeed, learn a lot about San Francisco, and its budget, from the bottom up. Maybe it’s time to flush our status quo down the toilet, too.
Graphics by Will Jarrett.
At least the toilet paper at the airport is presumably being used. $225 k to clean Mission Streets makes one wonder why they’re not cleaner.
Thanks, Joe – good article punctuated by good illustrations. I especially like the one at the top because it’s illustrative of how wrapped up (no pun) City Hall can get. During the decades that I lived in San Francisco, it seemed as though errant children with a lot of time on their hands were bent on creating Halloween prank artforms with endless yards of bunting, possibly considered fun and decorative by the children, but a damned nightmare for anyone having to hack their way through all that “decor” in order to get anything done that required city approval.
I no longer have “a dog in the fight,” as is sometimes said, but I visit often and wish good things for the City. It’ll be interesting to see if or for how much longer things’ll be allowed to keep traipsing along the ole well worn path.
(“You sweet summer child” has been directed my way more than once. . . . 😏)
Im not convinced, given past experience, that the budget process, and sums, is not opaque. Given that, it wouls be useful to break out health care. Most of it goes to SFGH. What about the rest? How much does DPH get, and how is that broken down. given it’s tragic performance in 2020-21, it would be useful to know, by TRM or other metrics
I work for the city and I can unequivocally say the toilet paper that is purchased at our department (DBI) is worth the money paid for it…in fact they purchase paper that is so thin that you can barely pull the roll because it breaks…surely it’s not Charmin
San Francisco was once “The City That Knows How.” Not any more.
Until the people elect PUBLIC SERVANTS rather than POLITICIANS, there is no chance anything will change.
This was great! Good big picture article covering an important topic for our city. Only thing I don’t necessarily agree with is the piece around SF being a ‘strong mayor city’ but that’s ok, I’ll take this level of insightful analysis any day.
This whole toilet escapade seems like a bunch of crap to me, Joe.