Plucky billionaire-funded outfit TogetherSF released a report this week about what’s ailing San Francisco government. And in only 76 pages, it managed — amazingly! somehow! — to say the very same things that TogetherSF’s billionaire backer Michael Moritz said in his curious February New York Times op-ed.
That is: San Francisco’s mayor, the beneficiary of perhaps the strongest strong-mayor system in America, is actually weak. As Moritz put it in The Gray Lady: “mayors have been stripped of much authority while remaining convenient heat shields for the [Board of Supervisors].”
Or, in the academic language you get when a wealthy individual can have a think-tank convert his ideological fixations into a position paper: “San Francisco’s 1996 Charter was designed to invest power in the Mayor, but subsequent Charter amendments have reduced the Mayor’s capacity to govern.”
There’s a lot to unpack in this report, even in this one sentence. For the mayor of San Francisco remains clothed in immense power. In the most recent budget, the amount of discretionary money allocated at the whim of the mayor was more than 57 times higher than the grand total shuffled about by the 11 supes in the add-back process. That frantic add-back process was, as usual, the only part of the budgeting cycle that garnered much in the way of media or public attention.
We wrote as much back in February. We also wrote that the claim that the mayor has been “stripped of much authority” to the point that she cannot effectively govern this city is “akin to the former editor of the Chronicle claiming that they simply had to retain Willie Brown’s column because Willie Brown is an everyman.” That is, you’d have trouble making a less accurate statement — in one page or 76.
And this, incidentally, is more mention of Willie Brown than you’ll find in the totality of the TogetherSF report penned by the Rose Institute of State and Local Government of Claremont McKenna College. (Of note, while mayoral chief of staff Sean Elsbernd is a board member of the Rose Institute at his alma mater, he made a point of not participating in this report. “Big bright line,” he said.)
While the report enlightens us by noting the composition of the Board of Supervisors going back to the Millard Fillmore administration, at no point does it note just who was the first mayor to rule under the 1996 charter. Or why voters — and, yes, every subsequent alteration to the charter has been voter-approved, and many of them wildly so — might want to deviate from a top-down system both wielded like a cudgel and played like a Stradivarius by Mayor Willie Lewis Brown, Jr. (yes, from 1996 to 2004).
This report drew on “in-depth interviews of approximately 30 San Francisco leaders” — current and former elected and appointed officials and others. These sources are kept anonymous to ensure candor.
But it’s not hard to figure out who many of them are. It’s also not hard to figure out who they aren’t. Former Assemblyman and supervisor Tom Ammiano says nobody reached out to him.
You’d think he’d be relevant: Ammiano was the top vote-getter as a citywide-elected supervisor — and this report spends a great deal of time analyzing the possibility of adding some citywide supes — and served a stunning 14 years as both a citywide and district supe. “Maybe they thought I was dead,” he joked. Or, more seriously, “maybe they knew what I’d say.”
Or maybe they knew what they’d say. The issues touched in this report are not only Moritz’s hobby horses, but all the matters tub-thumped in the past by TogetherSF: a weakened mayor and empowered Board; problems induced by district elections; problems with San Francisco’s unwieldy constellation of committees and commissions; and problems induced by San Francisco’s Norse saga-length ballot. The preordained nature of this report is hard to miss; it’s the Pepsi Challenge of academics.
But are there some valid issues here? Hell yes there are. San Francisco is governed poorly, both on an individual and systemic basis. Are there policy suggestions worth looking into here — and, considering the vast wealth backing TogetherSF, are we likely to eventually be voting on all this? Hell yes to that, too.
But the central thesis here, that the mayor’s very “capacity to govern” has been compromised, remains a desperate apologia. And don’t take my word for it: I called up a handful of this report’s sources, and none of them felt that way, either — even if they supported many of the policy suggestions here.
“You’re dealing with the personality and ability of a particular mayor,” said one.
Specifically, Mayor London Breed has been in charge since 2018. The warranty has long since lapsed. And, despite attempts to blame the state of the city on the Board or city commissioners or DA or federal judges or this city’s feckless voters, the buck stops with her. Period.
“The problem is not the Board or the commissions. They are not in the way,” said another source for the TogetherSF report. “They may make it more difficult, but if you’re a strong mayor, you make it work, and if you’re a weak mayor, you don’t. … Absent being a king or a dictator, sometimes you have to deal with people.”
San Francisco’s problem, the government veteran continues, is “a lack of overall management in the city.”
Print that out and frame it.
Reading through this report, one might be overcome with disturbing memories of Cher straddling the big guns on the U.S.S. Missouri: “If I could turn back time,” she sang. “If I could find a way … ”
This report glances back through a rose-colored mist at the 1996 charter, which enhanced the power of the mayor; San Francisco previously had far more departments running under the aegis of an unelected city administrator, as is the case in many other counties.
But that charter was not carried down from Mount Sinai; it was crafted by city officials, and then ratified by city voters. And all the subsequent departures from it have also been ratified by voters. The ’96 charter is not some manner of Platonic ideal.
Its creators would tell you the same. And they’re not hard to find; 1996 is not the Middle Ages. They’d tell you a lot, in fact. For starters, says one of the charter’s co-creators, it was originally envisioned not as a document meant to install the mayor as an elected Sun King but, rather, to more fully merge city management under “a professional city manager who worked with the mayor.”
But the framers didn’t get the mayor they were expecting. “We were designing this with a weak mayor in mind, Frank Jordan. Not a dominating mayor, Willie Brown. Willie didn’t need someone to help him with government.”
No, he did not. Nor did he want someone. The city administrator job was fobbed off on the first of a series of affable and unassuming bureaucrats, and Brown grabbed the reins. Unlike the present day, few accused the former mayor of governing poorly or not putting in the hours; Brown’s problem wasn’t that he governed poorly or passively.
The ’96 charter, then, didn’t exactly do what this report’s authors seem to think it did. But, to be fair, the ’96 charter apparently didn’t do what its own authors thought it would, either.
One of the major (voter-approved) departures the city has taken from the ’96 charter is to give the Board of Supervisors a minority of the appointments on some city commissions. The report notes that this city has far more commissions than most any other city, which gums up government.
You know what? That’s a fair argument. TogetherSF has, in fact, cited my work in making that argument. That’s gratifying, but I wish they’d noted the unsubtle message of that story’s headline: “Inefficient by Design.” (emphasis mine).
San Francisco’s uncountable number of commissions did not proliferate, unseen, like mold in a closet. Rather, in many cases, they were deliberately created and nurtured by politicians looking to deflect the attention of loud and monomaniacal people — by providing them with somewhere to go blow off steam as either a public commenter or even a member of a commission.
This was a tool wielded by even the strongest of mayors. Brown was well known for creating “blue ribbon advisory committees” often enough that his government contemporaries simply refer to them by the acronym “BRAC.” The purpose of these groups was to stow nettlesome activists safely away in a room where they’d spend their time crafting a report the mayor could then thank them for, put in a desk drawer, and ignore.
If TogetherSF, or anyone else, wants to move the ball forward on eliminating some of this city’s redundant or unnecessary commissions, more power to them. Even more power if they take on the mayoral allies handed sinecures overseeing some of these commissions.
This report makes the claim that, even though the mayor has the majority of appointments on virtually every commission, it’s actually the Board of Supervisors that has the advantage. That’s because either six supes — or, in the vast majority of cases, only four of them — must agree to a mayoral nominee while the mayor receives no such commensurate veto.
And this makes sense, until you remember the mayor gets more picks. To claim the Board controls these commissions would be akin to stating that the U.S. Senate controls the U.S. Supreme Court. It’s an argument that immediately draws into question the seriousness of those who’d make it.
You could say the same about this report writ large, because its overarching hook is that San Francisco’s immensely strong mayor isn’t strong enough — and, apparently, that any form of vetting or check on her powers is inherently problematic (it was only in February that the mayor tapped a nominee for a homeless oversight commission who had bilked the federal government out of $20,000 and inflated his resume).
That’s too bad. Because San Francisco does have too many commissions. The benefits of adding citywide members of the Board are worth analyzing. The barrier for both elected officials and the general public to place items on the ballot is too low. These are all worthwhile discussions to have. One has to wonder, however, to what end TogetherSF is advancing them.
All of their proffered solutions, it seems, would do little to alter the outsize role of a coterie of wealthy political players. On the contrary, they would enhance it.
As quoted in the Chronicle, Breed said she hadn’t yet read the report, but she agreed with it.
And then she pointed to the situation with the Police Commission. Because — really — it’s all about the Police Commission.
It’s all about the mayor’s ire that, through her uniquely spectacular own goal, she antagonized and alienated her own appointee and lost control of the commission. This is what the mayor is talking about when she claims that her powers are circumscribed because she can’t hire and fire department heads. But the mayor, again, is clothed in immense power. She controls every commission and can move department heads around as she sees fit. Other mayors did.
If Breed wanted to fire the police chief, it’d be, perhaps, the final dramatic, time-buying act she could undertake as the public grows ever wearier of crime, filth and lunacy on city streets and her options to deflect blame — the Board, the liberal DA, unwieldy commissions, federal judges, voters who deviated from the ’96 charter — grow thinner.
Make no mistake; the mayor can still fire the chief unilaterally. But without lockstep control of the Police Commission, she can’t ensure they’ll enable her to hire a preferred successor. But, you know what? That could still get done. It just requires having some conversations. It requires doing some work.
Absent being a king or a dictator, sometimes you have to deal with people. But you’re dealing with the personality and ability of a particular mayor.
Overall, I believe the article is well written. There is definite bias against the TogetherSF proposals, but acknowledgement that some of the proposals are worth discussion, which is a great way to have a constructive debate about much needed changes in city government. The obvious decay/rot we have experienced in Breed’s administration with the even worse Board of Supervisors just isn’t working. I don’t know of anyone on any side who is happy. I think all San Franciscans can agree the mayor is feckless and ineffective. Therefore, we need a change. The alternative is … Peskin??? That’s really depressing. Structural changes need to be made or the city will continue to decline. At least TogetherSF is making proposals and trying. Dismissing them as the agenda of the wealthy just puts you in the camp of defending the status quo or tilting the system even more radical. Let’s have a discussion, agree on changes, and get them done!
Peskin?? SERIOUSLY? we have his protege out here in D1… I’m a 5th generation native. For my money the entire BOS and the mayor all move on. The slide into the abyss has gotten worse these past 5 years
Brilliantly written article and very helpful to counter this false narrative being pushed by billionaire Michael Moritz, the owner of the SF Standard and it associated political action group TogetherSF.
I go back to Moscone and although no expert on the Charter I would say that strong willed mayors (Brown was mentioned here) have never let enumerated powers or lack thereof or opposition from the Supes or the bureaucracy stand in their way.
Can you please do a separate piece about the other recommendations and their pros and cons – PRCV, hybrid district & at-large BoS, the ballot reforms (higher threshold for measures & those proposed by BoS, etc)?
Thank you, Joe for an excellent article on the worst mayor of San Francisco in recent history, her bullshit think tanks and her boondoggles, aka Commissions for cronies. It reminded me to contribute to your excellent publication, which I did this morning.
Kanishka is a piece of work. She was so zealously pro-developers that she even found our pro-developers Planning Department not friendly enough to her benefactors and that’s why she left to work for Farrell and then for the mayor’s office until the ideologue billionaire funded her new gig. The sad thing is that despite the mayor’s incompetence and dysfunctional administration, she’ll probably get reelected because the majority of voters in this town are conservative ideologues whose moto is the old adage: “she’s a son of a bitch but she’s our son of a bitch”. I have zero hope for reform or a competent mayor and as much as I want to see Peskin at the helm, I don’t see how the conservative ideologues would get past their bias to vote him in.
As for these Commissions, I cannot agree more. The first on the list should be the Planning Commission, which is a farce. Not only they’re a waste of time but they’re also a drag on the City’s budget because even though they don’t get paid much for their service, the City pays for their and their families’ health insurance. What a boondoggle!
Very intereting. I’ve often wondered Why commissioners sit there at regular intervals (and (maybe) listen to the people taking turns talking and then vote)
I second DK and would really appreciate another article on District Elections and adding at large seats.
Given that London’s falling down, should this make the ballot and pass, it would be hilarious to see a strong Mayor Peskin.
That TogetherSF is anti-democratic has been clear from the start.
Kanishka Cheng opined that the Tenderloin doesn’t deserve more open space for its 30,000 residents (approximately 3,500 of them children) because she wouldn’t take her kid there. But when the “action” part of her “think” tank decided to illegally wheat paste their stupid fentalife posters around the neighborhood, she expected people to believe TogetherSF was being bold – as if no one had ever illegally wheat pasted gimmicky messages before (I’m think of all the multibillion dollar corporations whose advertising departments hire people to post stupid corporate messages on walls, plywood around construction sites and on windows telling us to buy, buy, and keep on buying.
Where to begin with the strange and terrible history of connection$$$ among these parties. It’s pretty rich that false messengers like Kanishka Cheng (wife of Jay Cheng of the SF Realtors Association, SF Chamber of Commerce) continues to promote phony “studies” from SoCal think tanks after wasting money on gross, phony wheat paste billboard ad campaigns that mock the suffering of addicted people. Does Tech billionaire and free market venture capitalist Sir Michael Moritz (who funds recalls, newly formed Astroturf neighborhood groups and Super PACs) think he’s getting his shilling’s worth? From my seat, it’s all a spectacular failure and waste of money. People like Cheng, Moritz and Sean Elsbrund consistently underestimate the intelligence of San Franciscans. Remember too that in a former life, Ms. Cheng made her living on London Breed’s communications team. She was an aide to Mark Farrell when he was a supervisor and temp mayor. And before that Cheng worked in the Planning Department. Tell us again about omnipotent demon district supervisors and weak mayors and powerless city departments. Puhleez.
Anti-democratic? Your hyperbole makes reading any further pointless. Instead of attacking the messenger, how about address the problems or better yet, have some constructive suggestions. Otherwise, I guess your happy with the current state of decay?
I would say that Cheng (CEO of TogetherSF) was being anti-democratic when she opined that residents of the Tenderloin don’t deserve more outdoor space because she wouldn’t take her kid there and despite the community’s explicit support for the project as indicated by the results of the Tenderloin Community Action Plan Participatory Budgeting process.
Though I’m sure you’ll remain on her side, you can view her snotty nonsense here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKdtm9arx8A
Visited your fair city about 5 years ago. Generally was impressed qith the beauty though the amount of drug users walking around stoned was off-putting as well as the sight of a “buck-naked” man waltzing down the street. I’d have to say that the beauty of the place was marred by this kind of nonsense being allowed to happen. “Broken window theory” was used by Mayor Koch in NYC years ago to get things going in the right direction.
Joe is always worth reading, and he makes a lot of good points while displaying an all-too-familiar tendency of my fellow-San Franciscans to score points while not being constructive. He provides useful context about the actual events around the the 1996 charter and points out that Willie Brown didn’t seem to be limited by its terms and subsequent amendments. But a politician like Brown comes along once in a century, and we have a sorry history of mayors before and after Willie that all failed to run the city well. It is ridiculous to say that any mayor in SF is clothed in immense power because Willie Brown got shit done. I grew up in NYC, East Coast mayors are way more powerful. Breed may indeed be the wrong person the city needs to lead it today, but I don’t think she’s the worst mayor we have had, she is just a limited politician with an above-average amount of corrupt skeletons in her closet compared to others.
Like Joe I like a lot of what this report recommends. Why doesn’t TogetherSF just wear its biases on its sleeve? Moritz is a billionaire that wants to fix things, and he is a big financial and political supporter of Breed. Why not just say so? Why not include dissenting voices like Amiano, who deserves to be heard?
The reality is that drastic measures are needed to run the city better. Moritz may just be the latest rich guy in a long storied history of rich guys in SF that feel like they know better, but I didn’t see anything in his report that is specifically anti-democratic. I see apathetic participation as the biggest problem–moneyed interests and a few loudmouths and nonprofits control things, and non-plutocrat people like me who just want to raise a family and have a decent life here don’t really matter, and life here can really suck for most residents. Making it better is going to probably take a little less democracy for a while, hopefully we can correct it later.
But there needs to be an order to these reforms. Radically streamline the commissions and fix the balloting process first, before giving the mayor a lot more direct control of departments and power to staff all the department brass and deal with the unions. I am super disappointed in Breed as a leader, but who is an alternative who can be both ruthless and consensus-building? That a walking HR violation like Peskin is actually mentioned in some of these comments just shows how stunted our political pipeline and succession planning are in SF. We need a new generation of leaders, maybe not ones that are totally captured by a billionaire or a union or a progressive advocacy coalition, or are uncorrupt but totally impolitic. Maybe we should start using the Youth Commission to actually groom leaders of the future, rather than the clowns on the School Board.
I don’t pretend to understand the ins and outs of the laws here, but I used to live in New York City. There, when Mayor Bloomberg wanted to close much of Times Square to cars, he just did it; no one could stop him until the next election. That’s not true here. The New York City Mayor also has total control over the schools, including the sole ability to appoint the Commissioner. No school board. It seems to me that, compared to NYC, SF’s mayor is quite weak. Maybe that’s good and maybe it’s bad, but it’s a pretty easy refutation of the article’s thesis, that S.F.’s mayor is “the beneficiary of perhaps the strongest strong-mayor system in America.”
I would love to understand how the US Senate does not control the US Supreme Court? “Stolen seat” during Obama was a big Democratic conversation starter and fund raising ploy when Merrick Garland did not even get a hearing? What am I missing? Also what is with the Peskin love? Didn’t the guy work around term limits to continue being part of our life?
The soccer mall idea is all on our (strong) mayor, London Breed. You can’t blame Stefani, Engardio, Dorsey and Mandelman for that. Those (plus Pekin whom you mentioned by name) are the supervisors you had in mind when you said the board is populated by idiots, aren’t they?
Every Department’s and every division, subdivision, and group’s budget runs through the Office of the Mayor. Every Department, whether they have a Commission, an Advisory Committee, a what-not must have the approval of the Mayor’s Office before they get a dime.
Who has the power in City Government ? What a dumb question.
Correction to my previous comment: the City doesn’t pay for the Commissioners’ health insurance but it lets them join their group insurance if they pay for it themselves.
And one more point: the Planning Commission and all other Commissions have 4 appointees by the mayor vs. the 3 that the Board appoints. So regardless, every Commission’s hearing results in a 4 to 3 vote in favor of the mayor’s agenda with the single exception of the Police Commission where one of her appointees decided to cut loose and stopped being a yes-man.
I am a total sucker for any essay about city government that refers to Lincoln’s speech on passing the 13th Amendment no less than three times.
Then, sir, this is the essay for you.
JE
So many great lines in this one Joe.
“You’d have trouble making a less accurate statement — in one page or 76.”
“A top-down system both wielded like a cudgel and played like a Stradivarius by Mayor Willie Lewis Brown, Jr. ”
Almost makes me miss Mr. Brown and his aforementioned SF Chron column. Even though he destroyed a lot of the NE Mission and Soma with live-work mostrosities, I suppose he did get stuff done 😉
The Charter revision in 1996 was originally designed to move most of the management of the City under a City Administrator, akin to what most cities have as a City Manager. The initial City Administrator was to be the-then Chief Administrative Officer. The problem was that after Rudy Nothenberg retired from the position of CAO, Frank Jordan’s initial appointment, Judge John Ertola, was rejected by the Board and Jordan, in an attempt to bolster support among the Asian community in the upcoming mayoral election, then appointed Bill Lee, who was in the Health Department’s Environmental Inspection Division. Barbara Kaufman, who was heading the Charter Reform Committee, did not like Bill Lee and so converted the strong City Administrator to a strong mayor form of governance. Joe, as you point out, Willie came in and made it an omnipotent king form of government. Subsequent charter amendments have chipped away bits and pieces of the strong mayoral governance, but fundamentally, the mayor still wields enormous power in the City. I don’t disagree Breed is a weak mayor. But that weakness is not due to a structural issue in the Charter.