City Hall, as usual, is determined to make the Nov. 5 ballot a chore for San Franciscans. It’s expected to feature up to 14 different propositions for voters to decide upon, ranging from a controversial plebiscite to fully close the Great Highway to vehicle traffic to bond measures aiming to fund schools, mental health facilities, street safety, and affordable housing to new revisions to the city’s business taxes and proposed new taxes on Waymo and Uber revenues to fund Muni.
But eight of these are amendments to the City Charter, which, if passed, would make longer-term changes to how the city and county conducts business; the Board of Supervisors has proposed all but one. These proposals often reflect long-term conflicts or problems that haven’t been resolved among the supervisors, the mayor’s office, and interest groups. Others ratify agreed-on compromises. Others dovetail with concurrent campaigns for public office, such as this November’s race for mayor.
“We get a ton of ballot measures because one, legislators often don’t feel like doing their jobs and defer hard work to the citizenry, and two, legislators (and mayors) put things on the ballot to use as a vehicle to get their names out there for current or future campaigns,” San Francisco political analyst David Latterman told The Voice in an email. “This also includes raising money that can be ‘flexible’ for these other campaigns. And of course citizens put things on the ballot as genuine policy initiatives. There’s a lot less of those, though, than the other two.”
What didn’t make it
The last of the approved Charter Amendment measures passed a second reading vote by the Board of Supervisors Tuesday. Meanwhile, a handful of the proposals that could have significantly changed local government failed to make the cut. These include a controversial plan to change the process of revising supervisorial district lines and another to make the director of San Francisco’s police oversight agency an elected official.
Meanwhile, outside of City Hall, a charter amendment proposed by centrist good government group TogetherSF that would give more power and resources to the mayor’s office was withdrawn in May due to concerns over Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin possibly being elected to the office.
Dueling commission fixes
TogetherSF’s other charter amendment, which did make it to the ballot, albeit after an emergency revision last year, would limit the number of commissions and advisory bodies the city establishes. It’s one of two measures dueling over the matter and quite possibly the most complicated issue on the November ballot.
Under the TogetherSF plan, dubbed the “Cut the Dysfunctional Bureaucracy Initiative,” all but the 22 commissions responsible for basic city services would be abolished. A task force would be set up to determine what other commissions should be established, limiting the number of new advisory bodies to 65. Each commission would be reevaluated every 10 years. The measure also increases mayoral authority over the appointment of department heads and commissioners.
Meanwhile, Board of Supervisors President and mayoral contender Aaron Peskin has submitted a competing, more incremental measure that would first set up the task force and then lead to another charter amendment based on the task force’s recommendations. Peskin was able to get six other supervisors to support placing his competing plan on the ballot. Supervisors Matt Dorsey, Joel Engardio, Myrna Melgar, and Catherine Stefani opposed it.
Dorsey, Engardio, and Stefani, along with state Senator Scott Wiener, are supporting the TogetherSF plan. Mayoral contender Mark Farrell set up his own committee to raise funds for the measure, which has raised close to $1 million.
Both measures will require a majority of voters’ support to pass. Depending on financial and other analyses of the measures, a determination may be made that if both pass, only the measure with more votes will be adopted.
“The City Attorney’s Office will need to provide guidance regarding the implementation of these measures should they both pass, Elections Director John Arntz told The Voice in an email. “Possibly, such guidance may not occur until after the election.”
According to a San Francisco Civil Grand Jury report, the city currently has 115 commissions, task forces, and similar advisory bodies. A new report on city governance from the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Organization (SPUR) identifies 126 such bodies.
The Civil Grand Jury report also found that up to 10 percent of city staff time is spent on supporting commission meetings, while 15 percent of commission seats are regularly unfilled. A report commissioned by TogetherSF last year from the Rose Institute of State and Local Government at Claremont McKenna College, which inspired the measure, found that San Francisco had up to twice the number of commissions as comparable jurisdictions. Meanwhile, the new SPUR report notes that “the purpose, roles, and responsibilities of the city’s many boards and commissions are often unclear.”
Recent efforts at the ballot to reorganize departments and commissions would appear to show that it’s hard to get rid of once a commission is established. In 2020, voters approved a plan to cleave street cleaning and related functions away from the Department of Public Works (DPW) and shift them to a new agency with its own governing commission. Two years later, voters approved another measure to abolish the agency but retain the commission. Another approved ballot measure in 2022 to establish a more comprehensive commission to oversee homelessness policy was watered down to preserve other existing and duplicative bodies.
The very model of a modern inspector general
Another Peskin brainchild heading for the ballot is a plan to create a new position of inspector general in the controller’s office and grant that office new subpoena and search warrant powers to be used by the new position.
Peskin is selling the plan as a mom-and-apple-pie anticorruption measure, making it hard to oppose politically, especially given the multiple scandals involving city agencies that have erupted over the past few years for which the Mohammed Nuru case was the tripwire.
That makes it an excellent political jiu-jitsu play for Peskin’s mayoral campaign and a possible grist for any pro-Peskin independent expenditures. True to form, all 11 supervisors supported placing it on the ballot.
Affordable housing and children’s services funding
Two charter amendments affect funding for two significant services: affordable housing and children and youth services.
The first, again from Peskin, will establish an “Affordable Housing Opportunity Fund,” which would set aside up to $8.2 million per year to subsidize the rents of low-income seniors, people with disabilities, and families through an existing voucher program. The funding source has yet to be determined, but the city’s affordable housing nonprofit community has pledged support right out of the gate.
The other, principally sponsored by Supervisor Myrna Melgar, would create an “Our Children, Our Families Initiative” under the mayor and superintendent of the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) to develop an accountability mechanism for expenditures from the city’s Children and Youth Fund and SFUSD’s Public Education Enrichment Fund.
Police staffing and first responder pensions
Three remaining charter amendments deal with aspects of retirement benefits for the city’s first responders.
The first of these, sponsored principally by Dorsey, changes the procedure for determining required staffing levels for the Police Department and sets up a Deferred Retired Option Program effective from 2025 to 2030 that would provide bonuses to cops who delay retirement.
The measure, put on the ballot by an 8–3 vote of the supervisors, is the latest chapter in a saga of struggles to find funds to hire new police officers or retain existing ones.
The last ballot drama in this space occurred during the March 2024 primary election season over an earlier proposal, Proposition B, that would have appropriated funds to hire more officers in line with a 2020 study. The measure ended up being nerfed with a requirement for a new tax in committee, based partly on concerns from other first responder unions, to much acrimony. That led to its defeat at the ballot box, with Dorsey, its original sponsor, leading the charge against it.
This time, the acrimony stayed in City Hall. The supervisors’ Rules Committee, led by Supervisor Hilary Ronen, tried to stall the measure. Still, a changed political environment led to board President Peskin taking it out of committee and having the board send it to the ballot with a supermajority. Ronen then resigned as Rules Committee chair in protest on July 16.
The remaining two measures deal with worker benefit issues and were referred to the ballot unanimously by supervisors. One allows most of the city’s registered nurses to buy service credit for time previously worked in per diem positions and changes the retirement plan for 911 operators; the other, principally sponsored by Stefani, allows firefighters to retire early to avoid further adverse health impacts.
