San Francisco lawmakers return from summer recess on Tuesday to consider multiple thorny issues, including Mayor Daniel Lurie’s permit streamlining agenda, corporate pressure on behavioral health workers, and how to keep Fleet Week from becoming a goat rodeo. They will likely also approve what may be the largest employment-related payout involving system-wide discrimination in the city’s own workforce in recent history.
Street tree appeals, Kaiser hearing
Two items of note on Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors’ agenda are a controversial bill on street tree standards and appeals and a resolution on labor negotiations at Kaiser Permanente.
The street tree bill revises current permitting rules as part of his larger PermitSF effort to make housing development approvals faster and less cumbersome. The mayor, along with main board sponsor District 4 member Alan Wong, says the rules are unnecessarily bureaucratic. In contrast, tree advocates say the changes make it easier for developers to remove trees or avoid replacing them. It would allow developers to pay a $2,600 fee instead of replacing a tree, cull some independent review from the process to remove hazardous trees, and pool resources for the Department of Public Works (DPW) to plant trees in neighborhoods that need them.
The suit was filed in 2020 amid a notably embarrassing episode at the Department of Human Resources involving Rebecca Sherman, an employee who forged documents purporting to settle another Black employee’s discrimination complaint for nearly $514,000.
At a Land Use Committee meeting on July 27, members added some softening amendments. However, neighborhood groups still strongly oppose the bill, and there was almost an hour of public comment, mostly against it. District 6 member Matt Dorsey’s office requested additional language clarifying DPW’s intent to prioritize restoring street trees in designated underserved neighborhoods, and the request was accepted.
Board of Appeals President John Trasviña voiced opposition to a provision removing the ability to appeal city hazardous tree designations to the Board of Appeals, noting that overturning such declarations was rare. District 5 member Bilal Mahmood offered amendments to restore appeals to the DPW director and the Board of Appeals, but the committee accepted only the former. The Board of Appeals voted unanimously to oppose that aspect of the legislation at their most recent meeting last Wednesday.
The resolution against Kaiser follows a July hearing on talks between the provider and behavioral health clinicians, many of whom serve city employees, where the new contract would give Kaiser broad latitude to introduce AI into behavioral health care with no safeguards against firing human clinicians, loosen restrictions on outsourcing, and control more of how clinicians work. The roughly two-hour hearing featured copious testimonials from clinicians and National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) members, but no representative from Kaiser showed up.
Scrutinizing OpenGov contract
Supervisors return to scrutiny of Mayor Lurie’s signature PermitSF agenda at Wednesday’s Budget and Finance Committee meeting. This hearing, called by District 9 member Jackie Fielder, aims to investigate why the contractor OpenGov was selected and what impacts automation will have on the city’s permit system.
On a political level, it’s less about whether the city bought the right software than about amplifying allegations that the mayor jumped the city’s normal procurement setup to get the arrangement he wanted, as both Lurie and his wife, Becca Prowda, had some indirect investments in OpenGov via a family trust. Some OpenGov executives had previously donated to Lurie’s former nonprofit, Tipping Point Community. Moreover, the selection of OpenGov ran counter to city staff recommendations.
A highlight of this hearing will likely be the review of the recently completed Budget and Legislative Analyst (BLA) report, which concludes that the law wasn’t broken in the process, but accepted procedure was — notably that the Mayor’s Office sought a waiver from competitive bidding despite a multiplicity of automated permitting software products being available on the market.
Fleet Week: Damage control
Thursday’s Government Audit and Oversight Committee features a hearing called by District 2 member Stephen Sherrill on planning for this year’s Fleet Week in the wake of issues that occurred at other recent public events.
Last year’s Fleet Week had problems, but they couldn’t really be placed at the feet of City Hall. The federal government shutdown took place just beforehand, and the event’s biggest traditional attraction, the Blue Angels, couldn’t participate. Canada’s Snowbirds team took over as air show headliner, and the most notable visiting ship was the Colombian Navy flagship ARC Gloria, a three-masted sailing vessel. More relevant to City Hall are concerns about recent mass events earlier this year, such as the transportation meltdown during the July 4 fireworks, when over 40,000 additional riders bogged down an overwhelmed Muni. Lurie called the transit delays “unacceptable” and made it known he wanted the root problems solved specifically before Fleet Week this year.
Sherrill has requested that the Municipal Transportation Agency, along with the Fire and Police Departments, the Recreation and Park Department, the Department of Emergency Management, and the Mayor’s Office, testify at the hearing.
$8.7 M payout over discrimination
Finally, also on Thursday, is the settlement item: an $8.7 million class-action payout to settle a suit by four city employees alleging that Black workers were systematically disadvantaged in pay, promotions, and discipline.
The plaintiffs pointed to San Francisco’s own employment data, including that Black employees made up about 15 percent of the city’s workforce but accounted for 32 percent of labor complaints. They also cited data showing that Black employees received disproportionately high numbers of corrective actions and were less likely to be promoted. The suit was filed in 2020 amid a notably embarrassing episode at the Department of Human Resources involving Rebecca Sherman, an employee who forged documents purporting to settle another Black employee’s discrimination complaint for nearly $514,000. That gave plaintiffs a powerful argument that the city’s system for dealing with discrimination complaints was itself dysfunctional.
