With the budget process continuing, City Hall has a packed agenda reaching beyond the usual fiscal fight, including major proposals to expand San Francisco’s Housing Trust Fund, create a public bank, overhaul the city’s commissions system, and continue an exemption allowing homelessness officials to directly solicit private donations. Commission business includes a large number of public art projects at sites all over the city.
On Monday, the Supervisors’ Rules Committee will mull four consequential pieces of legislation. These include a charter amendment to extend and expand the city’s Housing Trust Fund, part of a deal struck with stakeholders to ease financing for housing construction. The other part of that compact, significant reductions in inclusionary housing quotas for new housing construction, was given the nod by the Planning Commission last week.
Also on the Rules Committee agenda are charter amendments to authorize the establishment of a public bank and reform the city’s commissions system, and yet another six-month exemption for the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing from the city’s Behested Payment Ordinance, allowing it to directly solicit funds for shelter and homelessness services.
(Moore) began her final season on the commission by being fined $12,000 by the city’s Ethics Commission for violating conflict of interest laws.
Budget process-related committee meetings also resume on Monday. So far, despite some elaborate street theater demonstrations, including activists singing carols at City Hall and a group of eccentric oldsters seeking to Mau-Mau Mayor Daniel Lurie while dressed as characters from the Wizard of Oz, there’s no major insurrection against Lurie’s budget. Key talks are around specific restorations of funding cuts. Dealing with the long-term structural deficit and transit funding crises remains an issue; the latter remains dependent on the fortunes of the November election.
One housing-related footnote on tap at Tuesday’s full Board of Supervisors meeting is a resolution commending long-serving Planning Commissioner Kathrin Moore. A retired architect, Moore is retiring after serving on the commission for two decades as a champion of neighborhood association-driven NIMBY sentiments and the whims of the former Board of Supervisors president, Aaron Peskin. She began her final season on the commission by being fined $12,000 by the city’s Ethics Commission for violating conflict of interest laws.
Wednesday’s budget committee meeting is reserved for public comment, which will generate long lines of speakers, and the Controller, the Budget and Legislative Analyst, and the Mayor’s Office of Finance will present to the committee on Thursday.
Meanwhile, in commission news, on Monday the Small Business Commission will take on Supervisor Danny Sauter’s bill to expand paid parental leave for local workers, and on Thursday the Visual Arts Committee of the Arts Commission is set to approve public art projects at multiple sites around the city, including the Chinatown Public Health Center, the Geneva Car Barn, San Francisco Airport, Ingleside Police Station, Golden Gate Park, and McLaren Park.
