San Francisco has a “significant” but undetermined amount of building assets facing a multitude of operational, maintenance, and climate adaptation challenges, according to a new report from a San Francisco civil grand jury. The report, “Building San Francisco: Designing, Constructing, and Maintaining City Infrastructure,” was released June 20, and takes the city to task for not properly planning, building, and maintaining its $18.9 billion of facilities.
The report faults a lack of proper oversight, costly bureaucratic delays, and the need for changes during project development for inflating costs to the city’s taxpayers: “Because time is money, proper planning is critical when budgeting capital building projects. The city issues bonds in tranches and does so only as project funds are needed, thus reducing interest expense. But doing so requires knowing when the funds will be needed, making project planning that much more important.”
As an example, the report notes the fire department’s Fireboat Station 35, whose initial budget of $38 million ballooned to $51 million, “with significant portions of the cost increase due to changes to the plan after the design had been contracted.”
The report says maintenance of the city’s capital assets has been “rough” for the past couple decades, and the city’s projected budget deficits are likely challenges going forward. But the jurists also said the city has problems of location, design and/or construction with a number of recent, expensive building projects they inspected. They list problems ranging from public art blamed for damaging a fire station’s entrance gate to flooding at new police and forensic buildings.
The Department of Public Works (DPW) comes in for the lion’s share of the responsibility for the problems identified in the report. It offers consolation of a sort to the department for putting it in the spotlight: “When the Jury investigated Fireboat Station 35, we uncovered a more nuanced and complicated story than first appeared. The Department of Public Works was recovering from years of turmoil related to the corruption scandal and criminal conviction of its department head, a period of significant numbers of open positions, and the disruptive effect of the COVID-19 pandemic. The net effect of this turmoil was damage to DPW’s reputation within other departments.”
DPW was “recovering from years of turmoil related to the corruption scandal and criminal conviction of its department head, a period of significant numbers of open positions, and the disruptive effect of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Though noting the delays and costs that can be tacked onto projects by repeated mandated consultations with the city’s many applicable commissions, the civil grand jury looks for help to the Public Works Commission, which was only established in recent years as a result of the November 2020 passage of Proposition B.
“The recently created Public Works Commission’s oversight role is not yet determined which presents an opportunity for the Commission to define for itself how it will provide oversight of the Department of Public Works,” the jury reports. “Oversight is crucial to ensure taxpayers get value for money and that the city gets high-quality infrastructure, especially for critical life-safety operations.”
Despite the city’s operating budget basically doubling from 2013 to 2023, it failed to properly lay out funding for maintenance of its assets. The jury says that $2.7 billion in “renewal” projects (basically preservation efforts) and $6.7 billion for “enhancement” projects are needed over the next decade for the city assets in need of repair, but it says the true amount of “degraded assets” is nearly impossible to figure out.
City residents are unlikely to be shocked to hear that red tape, too many commissions, delays, and high expenses make developing anything difficult in San Francisco — it’s kind of “on-brand” for the city — but the grand jury did offer ideas for getting things under control.
The jury recommends the city should analyze and report on the state of its facilities and any fixes needed thereof; boost the effectiveness of the Public Works Commission in overseeing the Department of Public Works; assess completed capital facilities projects to look for deficiencies in design or construction; and push DPW to inform other city departments about its calculations of labor costs.
Civil grand juries are made up of volunteer city residents brought together by a Superior Court judge for one year to investigate local government agencies and officials. City leaders have 60 days to respond to the report.
