San Francisco, CA
Mayor-elect Daniel Lurie proposes rejiggering San Francisco mayor’s office
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.”
San Francisco is having a civic nervous breakdown because the brother of President Donald Trump’s son-in-law is buying a minority stake in the Giants.
Not Donald Trump. Not Jared Kushner. Joshua Kushner. And not control of the team. A minority stake.
Apparently, that is enough to send parts of San Francisco’s activist and media culture into full panic mode.
One Giants employee posted a video from Oracle Park turning in their uniform and quitting because Kushner was buying into the team.
Social media lit up with complaints about “MAGA ownership” and Trump-world influence invading one of San Francisco’s most beloved civic institutions.
There is just one problem. Joshua Kushner is not exactly Steve Bannon in a Giants cap.
He has historically donated heavily to Democrats and has occupied a very different political lane than his brother Jared and the Trump orbit. But nuance never stood a chance here.
For some in San Francisco, the name “Kushner” was enough. That is the story.
The Giants are not some random expansion franchise nobody cares about. They are one of the oldest and most storied franchises in Major League Baseball history — with eight World Series titles and a lineage that includes Willie Mays, Barry Bonds, Buster Posey, Madison Bumgarner, and Bruce Bochy.
Oracle Park is one of the great settings in American sports. Giants-Dodgers is still one of baseball’s defining rivalries. Generations of Northern Californians are emotionally attached to this team.
Which is precisely why the reaction has been so revealing.
Nobody was arguing about payroll. Nobody was debating the farm system. Nobody was asking whether this helps the Giants close the gap with the Dodgers in the NL West.
The panic was political from the first pitch.
That tells you where we are now.
Sports ownership used to be judged mostly by whether owners were competent, stable, and willing to spend money to win. Now it is an ideological background check.
Who donated to whom? Who attended what fundraiser? Whose brother married whose daughter? Who might show up in the owner’s suite?This is what happens when politics becomes religion. Everything becomes a loyalty test. Even baseball.
The irony is almost too perfect.
San Francisco is not exactly at risk of becoming a MAGA beachhead because a Democratic donor with the wrong last name bought a small piece of the Giants. But symbolic politics runs the city now.
In Democrat circles in San Francisco, politics is not just something people believe. It is something they perform. It is identity. It is status. It is social sorting.
So even indirect association becomes contamination. Joshua Kushner does not have to be Trump. He does not even have to be conservative. He just has to be Kushner.
That is enough.
To be fair, Giants ownership was already politically sensitive. Current owner Charles Johnson has drawn years of criticism for conservative political donations.
So this latest development landed on dry grass.
Still, the reaction says more about San Francisco’s liberal elite than it does about the Giants. The city’s activist class cannot even let baseball remain baseball.
A minority owner becomes a political emergency. A family connection becomes a scandal. A business transaction becomes a moral crisis.
This is not normal.
Fans used to argue about batting orders and pitching rotations. Now they investigate ownership family trees.
And the Giants are not being bought by Donald Trump. They are not being turned into a Trump campaign surrogate. They are not replacing team mascot Lou Seal with a MAGA hat.
A minority stake is changing hands. That’s it.
Yet for the loudest voices in San Francisco, even that apparently requires public anguish.
If this is the reaction to the brother of Trump’s son-in-law buying a minority piece of the Giants, imagine what happens if Donald Trump ever throws out the first pitch at Oracle Park.
Jon Fleischman, a longtime strategist in California politics and a lifelong baseball fan, writes at SoDoesItMatter.com.
San Francisco, CA
Casting shade on shadows: S.F. supervisor seeks to bar using shadows to block new housing
Shadows cast by tall and not-so-tall buildings alike have long been used to block housing in San Francisco, and Supervisor Bilal Mahmood wants it to end.
The District 5 legislator is announcing a law on Thursday that would eliminate the ability for people to say shadows cast by a building are an “environmental concern” that can be used to delay, and possibly block, new housing.
“In San Francisco, we’ve literally paid the price of being too afraid of our own shadow,” Mahmood said, pointing to data showing that shadow-based concerns were used to delay or block 2,195 housing units in 11 projects since 2017.
Whenever a new housing project is proposed in the city, its developer must create an environmental impact report on a variety of factors, like toxic waste and seismic hazards.
San Francisco requires that report to include a shadow analysis noting whether the new building will cast shade on any open space in the city. Mahmood’s legislation would get rid of that requirement; it is not in state guidelines, and most California cities do not consider shadows an environmental factor.
The environmental impact report is intended to help politicians make an informed decision about whether to approve or deny a development proposal. But any resident can file an appeal if they think environmental impacts were not fully considered, which can delay, block, or alter projects.
Shadows ultimately led to a delay for the infamous 469 Stevenson St. project from 2021, a 495 unit building on the site of a Nordstrom parking lot in SoMa.
Some SoMa residents were concerned that the project, which contained about 100 affordable housing units, would gentrify the area.
But gentrification alone is not a legal reason for supervisors to block a project. So residents filed an appeal alleging the project’s environmental impacts were improperly evaluated. The Board of Supervisors ended up siding with them in an 8-3 vote, citing shadows cast on nearby Mint Plaza in their decision.
The developer was forced back to the drawing board and had to redo his environmental report, delaying the project by several years.
Even when projects are 100 percent affordable, shadows cast uncertainty: Residents near 16th and Mission’s “La Maravilla” housing project, a 380-unit project next door to Marshall Elementary that broke ground last month, raised concerns that the development would darken the school’s playground. That forced the nonprofit developers to hold meetings and negotiate with residents about the issue.
Mahmood said even if appeals are ultimately rejected, the length and cost of the appeals process makes it difficult to produce housing projects and leads developers to avoid building in San Francisco.
“The housing problems we’re facing are death by a thousand cuts,” said Witt Turner of the Housing Action Coalition, a proponent of the bill. “We need to start sewing them up one by one.”
San Francisco is required by the state to plan for 36,000 more housing units by 2030, and the city’s best guess is that even under the most favorable scenarios developers will build less than half of that, and in four times as much time.
Mahmood, a YIMBY, has made streamlining housing a focus of his 15 months in office. His new legislation eliminates certain intermediate appeals and hearings and shortens appeal timelines, mostly from 30 days to 15 days.
The bill will be evaluated by the planning commission and the Board of Supervisors in early summer.
The bill is no silver bullet, however. Environmental appeals often cite more than just shadows when seeking to change projects. In the case of the Nordstrom parking lot building, for example, a failure to properly consider the seismic impact of a building was also a component of the decision.
YIMBYs have long pursued reform to CEQA, a California law outlining the environmental appeals process.
“We shouldn’t let outdated laws get in the way of building housing, which is actually important to making progress on our climate goals,” Mahmood said.
Chinatown fatal crash victim ID’d, safety measures proposed
The victim killed in Friday’s Chinatown crash was identified Monday by the medical examiner as Cutberto Zamora-Martinez, 49, of San Joaquin County. At a meeting on Monday, city officials said the cause of the crash is still under investigation.
SAN FRANCISCO – The 76-year-old man arrested for a March 27 crash in San Francisco’s Chinatown that left a man dead has been charged with vehicular manslaughter.
Zhuo Ming Lu on Tuesday pleaded not guilty to the charges against him, and denied the allegations against him, according to the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office.
In addition to the charge of vehicular manslaughter, Lu is charged with driving a vehicle in the commission of unlawful acts and driving at unsafe speed without gross negligence.
The crash
The backstory:
Authorities said Lu was attempting to park near Grant Avenue and Jackson Street when his vehicle jumped the sidewalk and crashed into the landmark New Lung Ting Cafe, also known as the Pork Chop House. The vehicle struck two pedestrians: Cutberto Zamora-Martinez, 49, of San Joaquin County and a second person who has not been identified.
“The victims were transported by paramedics to a local hospital. Despite the lifesaving efforts of first responders and medical staff, one of the victims was declared deceased at the hospital,” a release from the district attorney’s office states. “Another adult victim was treated for non-life-threatening injuries.”
One fatality
Dig deeper:
Zamora-Martinez had been working in the area, according to a GoFundMe page. A San Francisco Police Department source close to the investigation told KTVU the victims were carpet installers arriving for work.
The fundraising page described Zamora-Martinez as a husband and father who was the sole provider for his family and “a humble man who wanted the best for his family.”
Police said Lu remained at the scene of the crash and cooperated with investigators.
Court date
What’s next:
Lu was arrested in April, and was later released on his own recognizance. He was ordered not to drive, and to surrender his driver’s license and passport. The court also ordered the Department of Motor Vehicles to suspend Lu’s license.
He is scheduled to appear for a pre-trial hearing on Sept. 30.
The Source: San Francisco District Attorney’s Office, previous KTVU reporting
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