San Francisco, CA
So far, Mayor Lurie's fentanyl plan is missing just one thing: A plan
In the days leading up to Daniel Lurie’s swearing-in, political types about town said that, in order to be a successful mayor, he’d have to lead differently than he campaigned. As Mayor Lurie, rather than Candidate Lurie, it would no longer be enough to present broad and vague messaging. A mayor, at some point, has to say not just what they’re going to do but how they’re going to do it.
Last week saw the introduction of Lurie’s first piece of legislation, which ostensibly aims to combat fentanyl and mental illness on the streets, boost law-enforcement hiring and other laudable goals by speeding up contracting. But, beyond speeding up contracting, there are no specifics about how this plan would actually accomplish its underlying goals. As such, all this plan is missing — is a plan.
But there’s plenty of stuff in here about stripping away oversights of whatever it is the city chooses to spend money on. It was not until Board President Rafael Mandelman asked for it that the Board of Supervisors was given any say — at all — in the rapid-fire assignment of contracts worth scores of millions of dollars.
What’s that mean? It means that Lurie, who has never before worked in government and, prior to his swearing-in, had never held conventional employment, was calling for no oversight whatsoever for his department heads to enter into an unlimited number of no-bid contracts. You could call Lurie’s ask “audacious” — if you were generously inclined.
Of note, Mohammed Nuru, Tom Hui, Barbara Garcia and Sheryl Davis were all department heads in San Francisco. And now they aren’t. Nuru, of course, is in prison. It’s a bit mind-boggling that he’s the only one.
So, it’s all a bit on the nose, really: It’s exactly like Lurie’s campaign. Not only is it broad and vague, it’s expensive. The contracts he proposed to be ratified sans oversight could be for up to 10 years and up to $50 million; with this kind of money the city could re-sign Klay Thompson.
As a means of shedding oversight and allowing department heads to expediently enter into good-sized pacts or leases, this legislation is a great plan. It’s ingenious if I understand it correctly. It’s a Swiss watch. But you’d expect it to be: This is what you get when you have an experienced government savant like Ben Rosenfield on your mayoral transition team.
Rosenfield is great at what he does, but — and this is important — it wasn’t his job to specify where the money should go or, more fundamentally, where it’s going to come from. Yes, there are waivers in here that would allow Lurie et al. to privately fundraise, but that’s not likely to cover more than a sliver of the money needed to rapidly expand shelter beds, treat street drug-users or any of the other goals herein. San Francisco’s deficit is hovering a shade under $1 billion and, guess what? Donald Trump is getting sworn in today and could stiff San Francisco or claw back some $415 million in reimbursements for FEMA money that we’ve already spent.
Government-watchers with long institutional memories have told us that they can’t think of a precedent for a mayor to ask for significant new powers, as Lurie has done, without offering any specifics on what they will be used for.
But here’s the thing: They’ll be granted. It’s likely that Lurie will essentially get what he wants.
We’ll have to wait and see if the board, or anyone else, asks about the scant details that we do know. Thus far, they’ve brought about more questions than answers.
Bolstering law-enforcement hiring is a goal of the mayor’s legislation, but it’s not immediately clear what private fund-raising or no-bid contracting could do about that. It’s not as if the beaver fur top hat will be passed among the city’s wealthy elites to supplement cops’ salaries. The more intuitive steps would be outsourcing background checks or the hiring of recruiters — but the city already does this. In recent years, in fact, the city has done an awful lot and put significant resources into recruitment and retention. And yet, here we are: San Francisco has not quite 1,600 sworn officers and the most recent academy class graduated 11 officers of an initial 45 recruits — an alarming 75 percent attrition rate
(It warrants mentioning that the city’s crime rates are at near-historic lows. Also, accidental overdose death numbers are at a five-year low. But it seems nobody’s in the mood to hear about this.).
Lurie also wandered off the map when he last week told reporters that San Francisco could “add beds” to General Hospital — which left actual medical professionals at General Hospital gobsmacked. In fact, the Department of Public Health has already submitted half a dozen applications to get up to $140 million in state money for behavioral health beds. But adding these 180-odd beds — at half a dozen or more sites citywide, not just at the General — would require mounting significant procedural, logistical and political hurdles. And, also, it would require that money, from the state. That’s coming on the state’s dime and on the state’s time — that is, not fast.
These are all major challenges, which is why Lurie’s job is majorly challenging. Yet, barring unforeseen lunacy, his initial legislation will pass. And now all that remains is saying what he wants to do. And how he intends to do it.
Following pushback, there is now a provision in here that the board has 45 days to review a potential contract and vote it up or down. Without that, the board had zero input. So the supes hve that going for them. Which is nice.
Truth be told, the board, which must approve city contracts of $10 million or more, does not spike all that many of them — or, for that matter, reject all that many mayoral appointments. But the oversight provision, in and of itself, can serve as a deterrent for corruption or ineptitude. Put another way: Does anyone think it’s a grand idea for the city to begin rapidly spending lots and lots of money while specifically telling all parties ahead of time that nobody is going to be doing any front-end oversight? Hopefully nobody who reads the news would say that.
So that’s kind of a big deal — and to cast that obligation to the wind would’ve been a wholesale abdication of the board’s responsibilities. Expect more pushback, starting at the Budget Committee. Expect board members to call for reductions in the 10 years and $50 million limits for the no-bid contracts.
But nobody is going to try to derail this. Nobody wants to open up the board to charges of obstructionism.
That seems wise, at least politically. With 45 days to review a contract, anything egregious ought to be bird-dogged by the supervisors. Concerns about abandoning competitive bidding are somewhat mitigated by the fact that the sorts of outfits that can minister to drug-users or oversee shelter beds are not great in number — and, more likely than not, are already here and already have city contracts. No one is pushing to bring Halliburton in to do this work.
The Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, meanwhile, already has license from the Board of Supervisors to ignore competitive bidding requirements on contracts regarding homeless services (A cynic would note “and here we are.”). Lurie’s legislation would expand that ability to other departments.
When all is said and done, the board will retain one of its core raisons d’être. If time and money limits are reduced, its members can claim they mitigated the potential damage if and when things go sideways. And Lurie can claim the political win after the board passes what he and his people continue to — unfortunately — refer to as a “state of emergency” ordinance.
But is this going to actually help solve the problems? Will this make things better? Those do seem to be the $50 million questions.
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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