San Francisco Mayor-elect Daniel Lurie is proposing to overhaul the mayor’s office and bring in several “policy chiefs” to serve as his deputies, a bid to “enhance effectiveness and accountability” over the city’s sprawling 56-agency bureaucracy.

The move partly harkens back to a system that San Francisco had until the early 1990s in which “deputy mayors” supervised city departments. San Francisco voters did away with the system by passing Proposition H in 1991, a move largely fueled by anger about the high pay of deputy mayors at the time. 

Since then, the mayor has leaned heavily on a single position to corral the city’s department heads: the chief of staff.

Currently, all department heads report to the mayor through the chief of staff. The proposed changes would add four more chiefs overseeing public safety, housing and economic development, public health, and “infrastructure, climate, and mobility.”

Those four chiefs would report directly to the mayor, sidestepping the chief of staff, and administer city agencies — with the public safety chief overseeing the police and sheriff’s departments, for example, and the public health chief overseeing the health and homelessness departments.

Each chief, Lurie said in a statement, would “provide strategic alignment” over their collection of city agencies and work as “a partner to department heads.” The “portfolio of agencies” under each policy chief would represent “between $2 and $6 billion in public spending.” 

“The changes we’re making at the top will help break down barriers to effective governance that impact every San Franciscan,” said Lurie in his announcement.

Ben Rosenfield, the ex-city controller who earlier joined Lurie’s transition team, pointed to San Francisco’s status as a city-county, saying the arrangement “comes with a lot of good” but also “a remarkable amount of complexity.” 

“For the last 20 years, we have organized those 50-plus departments in a very specific way: They are direct reports to the mayor, and they work day to day through a chief of staff,” Rosenfield said. “How can you have 50 direct reports and do more than manage the very top?”

Lurie, Rosenfield added, had “a number of specific goals and projects” to launch upon assuming office on Jan. 8, “but fundamental to all of those is, ‘How do you want to organize your office?’” 

The specific responsibilities of Lurie’s new policy chiefs were unclear, and Lurie’s team did not yet say which departments each would oversee.

That is perhaps because Prop. H as passed in November 1991 has explicit prohibitions against “employing on behalf of the Mayor any employee … whose duties include supervising any City department.” The language in Lurie’s announcement seems to sidestep that restriction, stating that each policy chief will be a “partner” to department heads.

The 1991 ballot measure also capped all mayoral staff salaries at 70 percent of the mayor’s compensation — a direct rebuke to then-Mayor Art Agnos, who had a cabinet of seven deputy mayors each of whom earned $94,000 or more, according to a 1991 San Francisco Chronicle article. That’s about $220,000 in 2024 dollars.

The deputy mayor system was, at the time, criticized as being akin to “the commissar system in a Marxist dictatorship,” according to the 1991 Chronicle article. The campaign prohibiting deputy mayors was led by then-Sen. Quentin Kopp, partly in an attempt to hurt Agnos in the 1991 election, which Agnos subsequently lost to Frank Jordan.

Much of the successful campaign for Prop. H centered on the lavish salaries of Agnos’ deputy mayors, as recounted in this 1991 Chronicle piece. It’s unclear how much Lurie’s deputies will be paid, but 70 percent of the mayor’s $364,582 salary is about $255,000.

The proposed change is directly influenced by the urban policy think tank SPUR, which in August published a report concluding that “the lack of clear, coordinated action to address big challenges has led to a growing perception that the city government isn’t responding quickly enough to meet the growing needs of the people it serves.”

SPUR’s top two recommendations: Eliminate rules restricting “mayoral staffing and management” by striking portions of the city charter instituted by Prop. H in 1991, and restructure the mayor’s office to allow for “a more manageable number of direct reports.” The report pointed to New York and Washington, D.C., as examples, which “use deputy mayors or other senior officials” to coordinate across departments.

“Delegating authority to deputy mayor-like roles would streamline the overall reporting structure and provide a clear chain of command and accountability,” the report continued.

The proposal is also similar to an aborted effort last year by District 8 Supervisor Rafael Mandelman to put a proposition on the ballot allowing for deputy mayors.

Lurie, for his part, is moving to fulfill a campaign promise he made repeatedly while stumping for votes: increasing accountability in City Hall.

The term, repeated six times in Lurie’s policy chief announcement, was also a buzzword of Lurie’s campaign — it was taped to the wall of his campaign headquarters and hung behind him on a poster at his election night party. During his acceptance speech, Lurie promised his administration would be about three things: Accountability, service, and change.

“The current way of doing business at City Hall is outdated, ineffective, and lacks focus on outcomes,” said Lurie in today’s announcement. “I am restructuring the office of the mayor so that your government is coordinated and accountable in delivering clean and safe streets, tackling the fentanyl crisis, rapidly building housing and ensuring a full economic recovery.”