Politics
Column: A small-city mayor takes on big money and political propaganda
Steve Younger might have loved a pleasant, quiet retirement on this charming waterfront neighborhood within the northern a part of the Bay Space.
However Younger is a sociable kind and was wanting to make new acquaintances after he and his spouse moved right here in 2012. He’s not the type to hang around in bars, the 70-year-old Younger stated, and he doesn’t play any aggressive sports activities. So one method to meet of us, he figured, was to serve on an area board or fee.
After a number of interviews, Younger landed a spot on Benicia’s Planning Fee; it helped that he had spent his profession in native authorities, retiring as a pacesetter of Sacramento’s Housing and Redevelopment Company. His appointment to the fee led to his election to the Metropolis Council, which in flip positioned Younger for a profitable 2020 run for mayor — and a struggle with the oil firm that looms giant on this small metropolis.
Younger’s victory, and the deep-pocketed marketing campaign towards him, has positioned him on the intersection of two of the extra insidious developments in politics at this time: the flood of limitless cash and the gutting of native information media, which has left a void too simply stuffed by propaganda and misinformation.
“I perceive that it’s authorized,” Younger stated of the unimaginable quantities of money sloshing round campaigns from the White Home to Metropolis Corridor. “I perceive the Supreme Court docket stated it’s OK. But it surely’s not proper. And in my opinion it’s not democratic.”
So Younger is pushing again as finest he can, recruiting unbiased marketing campaign fact-checkers and searching for a municipal ordinance to forestall digital manipulation of political advertisements and different willful deceit.
“Individuals can say no matter they need,” Younger stated, “and in case you don’t have the cash to refute it, it can stick to voters.”
Benicia, which is one in every of California’s oldest cities, is residence to about 28,000 residents, a thriving artists colony and a sprawling oil refinery owned by Valero Vitality Corp. The San Antonio-based agency is town’s largest employer and taxpayer, a serious political power and a supply of appreciable native controversy.
The 2 worst refinery accidents within the Bay Space in recent times occurred in Benicia. Final month, San Francisco public radio station KQED reported the plant had launched extreme ranges of hazardous chemical compounds for greater than 15 years earlier than regulators found the emissions.
Naturally, the place there’s smoke, there’s an try to achieve political affect.
Within the final two elections, Valero spent tons of of hundreds of {dollars} supporting its most well-liked candidates for mayor and Metropolis Council, and concentrating on these, like Younger, who favored tighter regulation of its refinery. (The title of Valero’s political motion committee, Working Households for a Robust Benicia, is clearly extra palatable than Massive Oil Firm Spending Enormous Sums to Preserve Small Neighborhood Underneath Its Thumb.)
Main companies definitely have a proper to weigh in on issues affecting their companies, their workers and the communities the place they function. Based on the Supreme Court docket, that constitutes political speech protected by the first Modification. Companies are entitled to as a lot speech as they care to buy, which is significantly greater than your typical voter or candidate for native workplace can presumably afford.
“Companies can primarily purchase elected officers … by pumping cash into getting their most well-liked candidates into workplace,” or by opposing these “not as beholden or sympathetic,” stated Sean McMorris of California Frequent Trigger, a nonprofit good-government group.
In Benicia, the high-priced marketing campaign towards Younger by Valero and its allies included mailers that darkened his complexion — presumably to make him seem extra sinister — and distorted his voting file and efficiency on the Metropolis Council. A number of assertions, Younger stated, have been patently false.
He gained however.
As we took a driving tour of town — beneath a cloud of blossoming Bradford pears, previous white picket fences and Craftsman houses, by means of the economic park that homes Valero — Younger spoke of the pleasures, and frustrations, of serving as mayor. The job pays $525 a month and comes with healthcare advantages. That’s not loads given the fixed calls for, plus added pressure over masks and vaccinations, however it’s rooted Younger locally and, as he as soon as hoped, launched him to a lot of individuals.
“I prefer it,” he stated of his place, after temporary consideration.
What he can’t abide is the outsized political affect of town’s company Goliath. Elections in a spot like Benicia must be decided, Younger stated, by candidates knocking on doorways and assembly voters, not by whoever wields the heftiest pockets.
So together with Vice Mayor Tom Campbell, Younger got here up with two proposals to manipulate campaigns and attempt to stem Valero’s affect.
The primary sought to determine a form of municipal reality fee. However the metropolis legal professional famous the excessive authorized bar dealing with lawmakers in the event that they sought to enter the marketing campaign fact-checking enterprise.
Younger then approached the native newspaper, the Benicia Herald, in hope its meager employees will start truth-squadding political advertisements. If the paper is prepared, candidates “might use that in some future mailing or social media submit, saying a 3rd celebration has checked out this and it’s false.”
The second proposal, to forestall digital manipulation — like casting a candidate in shadow — and different types of digital fakery, is about to go earlier than town’s Open Authorities Fee for consideration.
“I need to have one thing in entrance of the council by summertime,” Younger stated because the solar glinted off the Carquinez Strait, “as a result of clearly this must be in place earlier than individuals begin voting.”
At a time when democracy is underneath assault, the decimation of native media — typically a neighborhood’s solely supply of professionally gathered information — has turn into extra worrisome than ever. With out somebody protecting a watchful eye and holding the highly effective to account, these with the cash and means to have their approach will solely develop extra influential.
Younger’s effort is one small step in a single small metropolis. But it surely’s one thing, and a worthy instance others would possibly select to comply with.
Within minutes on Wednesday morning, San Francisco got a new mayor — and a new plan for an emergency declaration intended to combat the fentanyl scourge that has killed thousands of people in the city over the past five years and has turned some neighborhoods into sidewalk drug markets.
Daniel Lurie, a Democrat, was sworn into office outside the gold-domed City Hall and began to detail his campaign promises about fighting the city’s drug crisis, which has claimed more lives in the city since 2020 than have Covid-19, car crashes and homicides combined. Mr. Lurie said that he had told his police and sheriff’s departments to redirect their personnel — moving from a temporary, sporadic effort to break up drug markets to a permanent, 24/7 operation.
He vowed that by this spring, police officers would have somewhere new to take people picked up for using drugs or for acting erratically in public — not just a jail or a hospital emergency room. A crisis center in the Tenderloin neighborhood will be staffed with health workers who can guide those who need treatment.
“Widespread drug dealing, public drug use and constantly seeing people in crisis has robbed us of our sense of decency and security,” Mr. Lurie said from an outdoor stage under sunny blue skies. “I refuse to believe that this is who we are.”
His declaration of a fentanyl emergency, which he promised after winning the hotly contested mayor’s race in November, consists of a package of ordinances that will speed its way to the Board of Supervisors, akin to a City Council, on Tuesday for what is expected to be swift approval.
The declaration would streamline the hiring of new city workers and the building of homeless and drug treatment facilities. A new ordinance will also allow the city to accept private donations to help fund Mr. Lurie’s promised 1,500 new shelter beds within six months.
Mr. Lurie, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune and the founder of an antipoverty nonprofit, said that fixing the city’s drug problems would be the only way to ensure that San Francisco itself makes a full recovery. Doing so, he argued, would be central to luring back office workers to downtown, tourists to hotels and small business owners to vacant shops.
“Recovery is possible, but it needs to be more than a possibility in San Francisco,” he said. “It must be our mission.”
Many of the proposals are familiar, and the packed crowd at the inauguration was full of former mayors and other city officials who were unable to make similar ideas a reality. Not in a city with a police department that city leaders say needs hundreds more officers; with a notorious bureaucracy that bogs down many city projects; and with lowered tax revenue that translates to a budget deficit approaching $1 billion over the next two years.
And then there is Mr. Lurie’s total lack of experience in government. The job of mayor is his first elected position.
Still, there was an aura of hope, as a who’s who of San Francisco filled the plaza. Paul Pelosi walked slowly to his seat with the help of a purple cane, more than two years after being bludgeoned with a hammer by an intruder looking for his wife, Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker.
California’s first lady, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, was there, too, though her husband, Gov. Gavin Newsom, could not attend because of the wildfires ravaging Los Angeles.
Mr. Lurie, who will accept only a $1 annual salary, owns a $15.5 million vacation home in Malibu, a beach town west of Los Angeles that suffered extensive damage in the fires. When he was asked Wednesday morning whether his home was still standing, a consultant whisked him away. His wife, Becca Prowda, an aide to Governor Newsom, said the couple did not yet know the home’s fate.
Mr. Lurie’s mother, the billionaire Mimi Haas, who donated $1 million to her son’s campaign and knocked on voters’ doors on his behalf, said she was “very excited” and confident he would turn the city around. She married the late Peter Haas, Levi’s longtime chief executive, when Mr. Lurie was a child.
Golden State Warriors Coach Steve Kerr addressed the crowd, comparing Mr. Lurie to a coach who can succeed only with the help of top-notch players.
“We have been through an awful lot in recent years, and our city has taken some hits, but we are bouncing back,” Mr. Kerr told the crowd. “Just like the Warriors, we have to bring our individual talents to the table with the idea of making the whole better.”
If Mr. Lurie is the coach, it is not clear who will be City Hall’s Steph Curry. Mr. Lurie has so far hired mostly outsiders from the business world to help him run the mayor’s office. On Wednesday, he said that in terms of department heads, “you all will see a lot of change.”
President-elect Trump pointed to a strategic benefit of the one-bill approach to budget reconciliation that he’s said he prefers during a closed-door meeting with Republican senators on Wednesday evening at the Capitol.
By combining legislation relating to both the southern border crisis and taxes into one reconciliation bill, Trump suggested that one issue could potentially force some lawmakers to make a difficult decision. For example, if a Republican doesn’t support a piece of the tax component, they would also have to vote against the border provisions because they are in one measure.
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Trump explained a strategic component to his one-bill reconciliation approach. (Getty Images)
With portions of Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act expiring this year, the party is looking to act quickly. But the tax debate in 2025 is expected to be more divided among Republicans than that regarding the border. In particular, there is some disagreement in the party on state and local tax (SALT) deductions, which can benefit some states more than others and have been hit by some Republicans as inefficient.
“If somebody, for example, in the House is balking because there’s not SALT in the tax agreement or some other provision they want, if that also means they’d be holding out and voting against the border, it might make it harder for them to do so,” Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., told Fox News Digital. “That’s a very valid point.”
While SALT was not posed as an example of this by Trump himself, it was mentioned by a GOP senator in a side conversation among other attendees as they went over the advantages of a one-bill approach, Hoeven said.
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Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., speaks May 4, 2022, on Capitol Hill in Washington. Hoeven faces a defector from his own party and a lightly funded Democrat on Tuesday, Nov. 8, in his race for a third U.S. Senate term from North Dakota. (AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib, File)
A source familiar told Fox News that Republicans are preparing to go with Trump’s one-bill preference, but they are also keeping the potential for two bills, one on the border and another to address taxes, in their back pocket in the case of any significant obstacles.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., told Trump that if one bill is what he wanted, that is what they are going to try first, the source said.
A number of senators have their own preferences for two separate reconciliation bills instead, and some made their cases to Trump during the meeting. However, the conference is set to move forward with Trump’s one-bill approach.
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Thune was “adamant” about supporting Trump’s agenda as leader, one senator said. (Reuters)
Greenland, Canada and the Panama Canal came up during the discussion following Trump’s remarks about each. Trump has recently said he wants U.S. to take back control of critical trade medium the Panama Canal, while also expressing interest in making Greenland and Canada part of the U.S.
Sources familiar told Fox News that Trump brought these up himself during the meeting, telling senators at one point that these countries “were screwing with” the U.S.
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Canada Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks with media outside Rideau Cottage on Monday, Jan. 6, in Ottawa. (AP/Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press)
Several GOP senators took the opportunity to tell Trump that his comments on Canada were “transformative,” the sources said.
The senators believe his approach to Canada is already managing to change the country’s “behavior” and could have even contributed to the recent resignation of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the sources added.
SAN FRANCISCO — Four hours before he took the oath of office Wednesday to become San Francisco’s 46th mayor, Daniel Lurie started his day walking through the bleak confines of the Tenderloin district with the city police chief and passing out coffee to people at a homeless community center.
It was a deliberately symbolic move by Lurie, a nonprofit executive and heir to the Levi Strauss family fortune, who won office in November largely by appealing to disillusioned voters weary of the public drug use, brazen retail theft and sprawling homelessness that during the pandemic became commonplace in the Tenderloin and spilled into the downtown financial district.
Mayor-elect Daniel Lurie and his wife, Becca Prowda, take part in Wednesday’s inaugural festivities.
(Gabrielle Lurie / San Francisco Chronicle)
In his inaugural speech shortly before noon in front of San Francisco City Hall, Lurie pledged to crack down on the street anarchy that has plagued some areas of the city in recent years, feeding a “doom loop” scenario endorsed by conservative pundits.
“This is where our comeback begins,” Lurie said to a crowd of thousands that included his wife, Becca Prowda, daughter Taya, 13, and son Sawyer, 10, along with outgoing Mayor London Breed and a host of local and statewide political figures.
“I’m asking all of you, every single one of you, to join me in reclaiming our place as the greatest city in the world with a new era of accountability, service and change,” Lurie said.
Daniel Lurie is sworn in as San Francisco’s 46th mayor.
(Gabrielle Lurie / San Francisco Chronicle)
Lurie, a moderate Democrat who had never held elected office, entered the mayoral race as an underdog against Breed and three other City Hall veterans. In an election seen as a referendum on the city’s post-pandemic struggles with homelessness and street crime, Lurie pitched himself as a change agent who could lead San Francisco into an era of recovery.
His campaign gained momentum as he promised to end open-air drug markets and arrest fentanyl dealers, push homeless people into drug and mental health treatment and reinvigorate a downtown economy drained by the exodus of tech workers after COVID-19 shutdowns made remote work an easy option.
Lurie was able to spread his message broadly by drawing on personal wealth. He funneled nearly $9 million of his own money into his campaign, while his mother, Miriam Haas, widow of deceased Levi’s executive and heir Peter Haas, contributed an additional $1 million to an independent expenditure committee backing his election.
Lurie’s inaugural speech, though light on policy details, offered a glimpse into how he planned to accomplish the bold goals he laid out on the campaign trail.
“San Francisco has long been known for its values of tolerance and inclusion, but nothing about those values instructs us to allow nearly 8,000 people to experience homelessness in our city,” he said. “Widespread drug-dealing, public drug use and constantly seeing people in crisis has robbed us of our sense of decency and security.”
At the top of his to-do list: introducing a package of ordinances declaring a fentanyl state of emergency. Lurie said he would ask the Board of Supervisors, an 11-member body that acts as the legislative branch for the city and county, to quickly approve the ordinances, directed at curbing use of the deadly opioid and allowing the city to “bypass the bureaucratic hurdles standing in the way of tackling this crisis.”
The board gained five new members in the November election, a turnover expected to bring a more moderate tone to a board that for years was seen as ultra-liberal and often tussled with Breed — also a moderate — over tough-on-crime policy proposals.
Lurie said he would work to embed more behavioral health specialists in first-responder units to address the overlapping crises of homelessness, addiction and untreated mental illness, and announced plans to open a 24/7 center as an alternative to jail for police to bring people in need of treatment and other services.
He also said he wants to expand a city program that provides funding and assistance for bus tickets and other transportation to send homeless people who aren’t from San Francisco back to their home communities.
And in the face of a projected $876-million budget deficit, Lurie promised “zero cuts” to sworn police officers, 911 operators, EMTs, firefighters and nurses on the front lines of public health emergencies.
San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott said he was encouraged by Lurie’s plans and his recognition of the need for “around-the-clock resources” not just for police, but also for city workers across departments working to solve San Francisco’s public safety and health challenges.
“The Police Department is 24/7 … but a lot of the departments that we rely upon to help solve some of these problems aren’t 24/7,” he said. “It’s not all about enforcement. It’s not all about policing.”
Scott said he would like to see Lurie continue recent efforts by Breed’s administration to more aggressively clear sprawling tent encampments that have fanned out across the city, as well as public health efforts credited for a sharp decline in drug overdose deaths in the city last year.
The chief medical examiner’s office recorded 586 fatal overdoses in San Francisco in the first 11 months of 2024 — a nearly 23% decrease, or 174 fewer deaths, compared with the first 11 months of 2023. San Francisco public health experts attributed the decline to the widespread availability of naloxone, a medication that can rapidly reverse the effects of opioid overdoses, as well as more emphasis on prescribing buprenorphine and methadone, medications that treat opioid addiction long-term.
On Tuesday, Breed’s last full day in office, her administration noted that crime rates had also fallen in 2024, with reports of car break-ins dropping 54%, property crime down 31% and violent crime down 14%.
Though San Francisco’s struggles have made national headlines in recent years, particularly in right-wing media promoted by President-elect Donald Trump, Lurie largely left national politics out of his messaging, nodding only once during his speech to the “great sense of fear and loss about the state of our country right now.”
“San Francisco must be a city where every individual feels safe, valued and empowered,” he said. “That means standing firm against discrimination and fighting for the dignity of all communities, no matter what comes our way.”
Lurie said the city is showing progress and maintained that “hope is alive and well in San Francisco.” But he warned that “lasting change doesn’t happen overnight.”
Still, “if we are consistent, if we have vision, if we aren’t afraid to make tough decisions,” he said, “San Francisco will rise to new heights.”
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