San Francisco Board of Supervisors President Rafael Mandelman signaled yesterday that the legislative body would seek a compromise approach to implementing Proposition E, the voter-mandated reform of the city’s onerous commission system, passed in 2024. The remarks were made during a Committee of the Whole hearing during Tuesday’s regular board meeting.
“I hope that members of the task force will not take offense, if I say, from the outset, that it is highly unlikely that I, or any other member of the word of supervisors, will introduce that particular charter amendment, or that this board would send that particular charter amendment on to the voters in November,” Mandelman told colleagues at the meeting, in response to the first draft of a charter amendment drafted by the task force created by Proposition E.
“Now, I have asked the city attorney’s office to begin working with us on drafting a charter amendment to implement some of the recommendations,” Mandelman went on, describing “a host of recommendations that are noncontroversial, [where] there is consensus support for a whole bunch of the work that was proposed. … I think what is gonna be interesting over the next six weeks is that there may be a diversity of perspectives on where the juice is worth the squeeze.”
San Francisco currently has over 150 boards and commissions, of which about 115 are active, with over 1,000 seats filled by local stakeholders to advise and/or make decisions on policy areas ranging from law enforcement oversight to arts funding to land use. Only 42 of these bodies are mandated by the City Charter. In many ways, the commission system has evolved into yet another ad hoc check on the elected mayor’s power to achieve policy goals.
Meanwhile, in recent years, increased demand for housing, the restoration of police services, and policy reforms related to homelessness have prompted attempts, including by the city’s donor class, to reform the commission system to remove some of the ball-and-chain-style impediments to mayoral power.
In November 2024, voters considered two ballot measures: Proposition D, drafted by the PAC TogetherSF Action, which would have capped the number of commissions at 65, and Proposition E, which would instead mandate a task force to study the matter. Proposition E was introduced by then-Board President Aaron Peskin, and observers considered it a “poison pill” measure to counter Proposition D. Proposition E ended up winning with about 53 percent of the vote.
But despite the “poison pill” assumptions, the Commission Streamlining Task Force mandated by Proposition E has been busy. Its final report, issued after holding 23 public meetings, calls for reducing the total number of commissions to 86. It also calls for standardizing the structure of commissions, clarifying their responsibilities, and setting similar standards for things like the appointment process and term limits.
“We did hear from over a thousand people,” said former city controller and task force member Ed Harrington. “Our staff spent multiple hours talking to staff and advocates as we went through this process. And people may not have felt listened to if we didn’t agree with them, but we tried. We made a number of changes to what’s there, and it is before you, in the next few months, to deal with as you want to.”
People may not have felt listened to if we didn’t agree with them, but we tried.
Ed Harrington, former city controller and Proposition E task force member
All along this process, advocates for bodies like the Commission on the Status of Women, Human Rights Commission, Environment Commission, and Youth Commission, as well as the five separate boards that oversee aspects of homelessness policy, loudly objected to the plan. Those groups now had the chance to air their concerns at Tuesday’s hearing, and they took up much of the next two hours to do so.
Speaking on behalf of two bodies dealing with children and youth services, Margaret Brodkin, the former longtime executive director of Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth and a longtime commissioner, told supervisors, “Our charter is a declaration of our values; taking commissions out does not create efficiencies. It doesn’t mean less work. It only makes our commitment to issues subject to political whims. Let’s not join the antiwoke movement by taking a chainsaw to the values embedded in our charter.”
Brodkin’s comments, including those characterizing reform of the commission process as being comparable to the abortive DOGE campaign waged on agencies in Washington under the Trump Administration, were echoed by other traditional opponents of paring down the bodies, including from the nonprofit service sector, organized labor, and opponents of development.
Former Board of Appeals and Planning Commissioner Douglas Engmann, a historical opponent of increasing housing supply in San Francisco, told supervisors, “We are in the middle of a political issue … when you have the president of this country attacking DEI, attacking services for families and children, attacking climate changes [as a] hoax, how can we, as a city, and you, as commissioners, demote the Human Rights Commission, the Human Services Commission, the Disability and Agents Services Commission, the Children’s and Families Commission, the Youth Commission, and Commission on the Environment? It’s the wrong message.”
Sunny Angulo, a former chief of staff to Aaron Peskin and a board member of Arts for a Better Bay Area, told the board, “I think it’s a shame and a disappointment that public input is really only being solicited right now on the Prop. E task force recommendations per a voter mandate, given the sweeping charter changes that are being proposed by the mayor. As of right now, it’s confusing and overwhelming, and the board is really abdicating. … It was a horrible idea to restructure entire departments via the ballot box, and that wasn’t Prop. E’s intent.”
Next steps for Proposition E implementation include a decision by the board on how to dispose of an ordinance containing various Administrative Code changes recommended by the task force, as well as the Charter amendment. At the hearing’s end, Mandelman again signaled the going would be iterative and slow.
“We have more like a month to six weeks to see what in the task force recommendations and the rest of the conversation about charter reform that can be put forward as a Board of Supervisors contribution to the conversation,” he told colleagues. “Even if we only did the noncontroversial elements, that would be a big chunk of charter reform, and it would be a positive contribution. We may do a little bit more than that. But I don’t think we’re gonna touch many of the live wires that folks have expressed the greatest concerns about.”
