Monday’s mayoral debate at the County Fair Auditorium in Golden Gate Park brought the race for Room 200 to the city’s west side. Despite a boycott by progressive standard-bearer and Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin, it provided a spirited exchange between remaining candidates, focusing less on ideology and more on policy and incumbent London Breed’s record.
The Empty Chair
The event, hosted by KTVU Channel 2, Stop Crime SF and Stop Crime Action, ConnectedSF, and a host of neighborhood groups, attracted a crowd of close to 300 people but came under attack from Peskin, who declared the sister Stop Crime organizations as too partisan to sponsor a proper debate.
In addition to Peskin’s boycott, the event came under attack from progressive Ryan Khojasteh, who is running against District Attorney Brooke Jenkins. Jenkins was presented with a “Crimefighter of the Year” as an opener to Monday’s debate by Stop Crime SF. Khojasteh called the award “crossing the line from issue advocacy to political campaign intervention.”
In the end, progressive attempts to impugn the legitimacy of the event allowed for a more spirited discussion of what policy approaches and skills are needed to tackle the city’s stubborn problems, with ideological imperatives largely taking a back seat.
“You all are here tonight to learn the difference between us here on stage,” Philanthropist Daniel Lurie told the crowd in his opening speech. “The difference is not in years of experience, but the right type of experience to address the crisis facing our city.”
In addition to Lurie, Breed, former supervisor and Interim Mayor Mark Farrell, and Supervisor Ahsha Safai participated in the debate. Meanwhile, an empty chair was provided for Peskin, which amused attendees.
You might have expected a debate sponsored by an anti-crime group to focus primarily on what has become San Francisco’s political bete noire – the nexus of drug addiction, homelessness, and petty crime that’s claimed hundreds of deaths last year and has often made navigating the city’s main streets complicated. While candidates fielded questions on crime reduction, homelessness, and the drug crisis, they also tackled economic recovery, the budget, transit, and other subjects as connected issues.
Breed Defends Her Record
It goes without saying that Breed’s effectiveness as an incumbent during a challenging period was a primary focus of the debate, and the mayor defended her record right out of the gate.
I’ve led San Francisco through challenging circumstances,” Breed told the audience in her opener, noting the loss of Mayor Ed Lee and the Covid-19 pandemic, with its resultant social and economic effects. “We need to take a moment to realize we’ve been through a lot. I became mayor after the tragedy of losing Mayor Lee. I helped this city through one of the most challenging public health crises in a hundred years, and we saved lives.”
Later, she outlined how she was able to raise extra shelter beds and successfully lobby for changes in state conservatorship laws necessary to ensure those beds would be used to get people experiencing homelessness off the streets, often with resistance from the Board of Supervisors.
The usual tension between Room 200 [the mayor’s office] and Room 250 [the Supervisors’ chambers] loomed large in this debate, mainly since Breed and Farrell both served on the body. Safai currently serves there, where he is often at loggerheads with her.
“I’ll tell you one thing, the Board of Supervisors, we led the effort to pass Mental Health SF; this mayor has never fully funded it,” Safai told the audience, referring to a plan to reform the city’s mental health system adopted with the support of Breed and the board in 2019 as a compromise between dueling proposals.
“What Ahsha said about Mental Health SF, he’s not even been at the table,” Breed retorted. “I’ve been working with other supervisors to not only provide funding but increase the amount of funding to add almost 400 new beds for mental health support in this city.”
Farrell targeted Breed’s record on crime, at one point accusing her of “defunding the police.”
“When I was chair of the budget committee and when I was mayor, we grew our police department to record staffing levels,” the former Interim Mayor told attendees. “Mayor Breed defunded the police department two years ago to what represented 20% of the operating budget […] 25% of the police department that existed when I was mayor is eviscerated.”
It’s a reference to her diverting police funds in 2020 to the Dream Keeper Initiative, which aimed to turn around economic challenges for Black San Franciscans in reaction to the national outrage over the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis that year. Breed later restored and increased police funding in subsequent years, often in conflict with the supervisors.
She shot back at Farrell, alleging that when he was interim mayor, “violent crime was up 40%, property crime was up 70%, car break-ins were up 115%. And in fact, my budget for the police department is $200 million more than his budget was during that time.”
Budget, Economy, and Transit
Breed found it somewhat more difficult to defend herself on other bread-and-butter issues as contenders answered questions on downtown recovery, transit, and the budget.
“Let me ask everybody in this room, over the last 12 months, have you seen $2 billion of additional spending on behalf of the city government on community health and welfare? No way we are spending inefficiently and ineffectively,” Farrell told the crowd. “I committed on day one when I launched my campaign that we would fully audit all the nonprofits around our homeless industrial complex here in San Francisco.”
Safai went further.
“The Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, which started out in 2016 as a $100 million department, has grown to over $700 million […] 18 months ago, we ran a ballot measure that set mandatory audits for the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing. We did those first audits last spring. They had to call in the FBI.”
And Lurie piled on more.
“We have an outdated, ineffective, and corrupt city hall bureaucracy. As Mark mentioned, 248 nonprofits are working on housing and homelessness,” he told attendees. “There are many good nonprofits. Are there 248? No, we need to streamline […] how we do contracting.”
Breed responded that incremental reforms toward better scrutiny were, in fact, taking place.
“We’ve done everything we can to make investments and hold organizations accountable.
We’ve taken away resources from organizations that were not doing the work they committed to doing. It is easier said than done,” she added. “I have balanced our budget every single year without cutting staff. And there’s a lot of talk about what is easy to do, but when you get in the weeds and deconstruct what has been up for decades, we still get results.”
Farrell, Lurie, and Safai also targeted Breed on the work of the Metropolitan Transportation Agency, which oversees both streets and transit, citing the impacts of improvement programs like those on Taraval Street and West Portal Ave. on drivers and businesses.
Farrell and Safai repeated pledges to refrain from renewing the contract with MTA Director Jeffery Tumlin. [Tumlin’s contract is up for renewal in December, and he hinted to The Voice back in April that whether he would seek to renew his contract would depend “on the outcome of the November election.”]
In contrast, Breed noted that Muni, the transit agency run by the MTA, recently received its highest rider satisfaction marks in 20 years and that, basically, infrastructure is hard.
“I understand that many of our capital projects are creating many problems in our city. [But] do we want sinkholes like what happened in Pacific Heights, or do we want to stick to our already existing Dig Once policy when going into Taraval to replace pipes older than everybody in this room?” Breed told the audience. She added, “These are the hard things that we have to do, and I agree that, on some occasions, MTA is not doing a good job with outreach.”
Although Peskin skipped Monday evening’s proceedings, some uninvited candidates did have a presence. Supporters of insurrectionist Ellen Lee Zhou staged a table before the debate. MTA transportation engineer Shahram Shariati stayed outside late to greet attendees and hand out buttons.
His campaign slogan, featured on the buttons, is “Keep Calm.”
