Don’t shoot the messenger, but yes, things can get worse

The good, the bad, and the ugly from San Francisco’s last election

Prior to this past November’s election, San Francisco voters were hopeful about big change coming to City Hall, in particular, a relatively fresh-faced Board of Supervisors, and a mayor who has never held a job in politics — or any job, really. As we settle into mid-January and those newly elected officials take their seats, that hope has already faded for some folks expecting a quick fix (“Get rid of all the drug dealers now!”), and I would argue it will fade a lot more in the coming months. “It can’t get any worse,” one friend, also a three-decades-plus San Franciscan, said to me recently. Don’t shoot the messenger, but yes it can get much worse. Is there some good that came from the latest election? Of course, but there is also some bad and some downright ugly. Let’s start with the mammoth in the rotunda: the budget.

Everyone’s heard the scary numbers: San Francisco’s budget for 2024–25 fiscal year is $16 billion, and for 2025–26 fiscal year it is $15.5 billion. According to the city’s website, the annual budget deficit could climb to $1.4 billion by 2027 if costs continue to outstrip revenue. How does that compare to other Bay Area cities? Let’s take a look at the capital of Silicon Valley, San Jose, Calif., which has a handy-dandy Financial Transparency Portal (hint, hint, San Francisco). According to that portal, San Jose has an annual budget of approximately $3 billion. The General Fund 2025–2029 Five-Year Forecast was used as the starting point in the development of the budget. For the General Fund, a revised Base Budget shortfall of $4.5 million was projected for 2024–25, followed by a shortfall of $37.6 million in 2025–26, with “subsequent small shortfalls over the remaining three years of the Forecast.”

Without a doubt, the largest expense for any large city is labor. So how do San Francisco and San Jose compare? San Jose is the third largest city in the state, with the fourth largest budget for city employees. The city has 8,600 employees, costing $1.1 billion in 2023, which is about $1,100 per resident. “We are an A-Z operation — we run an Airport and a Zoo and everything our community needs in between,” Carolina Camarena, a spokeswoman for the city manager’s office, told the San Jose Mercury News.

The bad: While San Jose has one city employee for every 112 residents, San Francisco has one city employee for every 21 residents. That’s right — despite having 125,000 fewer residents, San Francisco has more than four times the number of public workers. Proponents argue that is at least in part due to San Francisco’s unique position as a city-county hybrid; however, the numbers are as shocking as the gargantuan budget itself, with San Francisco’s 40,000 employees costing each resident $7,000 annually.

The good: If you live in San Jose, see above. If you live in San Francisco, keep reading.

The ugly: While new San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie ran on a platform of cutting the fat, so far, he’s only added to it. Lurie has four policy chiefs, each responsible for one area: public safety; housing and economic development; public health and well-being; and infrastructure, climate, and mobility. Lurie has an additional staff of 26 people beneath him (for comparison, London Breed ran her office with around 11).

Considering Lurie campaigned on a fully staffed police force, “police alternatives advisor” should make constituents a little nervous. Katherine Chu served as policy advisor on police alternatives for former Mayor Breed’s administration. On LinkedIn, Chu describes herself as a civil rights and social justice attorney, an advocate for “social justice and public safety reform” who is dedicated to issues relating to “homelessness, the criminalization and prosecution of poverty, and economic justice, gender justice, and racial justice.” Because Mayor Lurie ran on a tough-on-crime platform, Chu’s prominent role in his administration seems counter to that mission. Where is his “fentanyl alternatives advisor”?

Another pick that goes against Lurie’s campaign stance is Alicia John-Baptiste, former head of the politically influential urban policy think tank SPUR, who will oversee “infrastructure, climate, and transportation.” SPUR strongly supported the permanent closure of the Great Highway via Proposition K, which won in November thanks to voters who live nowhere near the Great Highway. While campaigning for mayor, Lurie quietly said he was against Proposition K, but hiring John-Baptiste, who not only spent a decade at SPUR but prior to that worked as chief of staff at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, brings more anticar policy preferences to the table. A former SPUR employee (who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution) corroborated that. “I expect Alicia to run a one-sided agenda that will continue to close streets, keep slow streets, add bike lanes even if biking isn’t relevant to a given neighborhood/community (example: Chinatown), advocate and implement congestion pricing, and continue to drive anticar rhetoric. SPUR in the past year-plus has partnered closely with Abundant SF [which is] paying the salary for one of Alicia’s colleagues.” Abundant SF was the money and might behind Proposition K, so expect them to keep their cozy ties to City Hall through their cozy ties to SPUR.

District 3 — Aaron Peskin is out, Danny Sauter is in

We launched the Voice of San Francisco with my four-part series depicting Aaron Peskin’s rise from NIMBY activist to recent mayoral candidate, where he came in behind incumbent London Breed and winner Lurie. Because Peskin was termed out after his second eight-year term as District 3 supervisor (making him the longest-serving supervisor in San Francisco history) the seat was wide open. As he did during his break between terms with David Chiu, Peskin tried to handpick a successor in Sharon Lai, which he hoped would allow him to continue running the office behind the scenes.

This time, it didn’t work out, with Danny Sauter taking the win. Sauter was endorsed by moderate political groups as a YIMBY running in a district hampered by the “NIMBY Tyrant of Telegraph Hill” for decades. While Peskin likes to pretend his hatred of building density is about historic preservation, foes believe it’s really about view preservation for him and his wealthy friends. According to S.F. Planning Department records, just two six-story buildings (735 Davis Street and 88 Broadway Street) have been erected since 2005. The views from Telegraph Hill, which sits between 100 to 285 feet of elevation, are protected by 40-, 65-, and 84-foot height restrictions legislated by Peskin starting with his first term as District 3 supervisor in 2000.

San Francisco’s 40,000 employees cost each resident $7,000 annually.

The good: For the first time in decades, Peskin has someone in his old seat who owes him nothing — heck, Sauter might just undo those height restrictions and build high rises in front of Peskin’s 180-degree views.

The bad: Sauter is a card-carrying member of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, a lobbyist group that gets the majority of its funding from taxpayers via the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. Members of the group tend toward the progressive, ridiculously so when it comes to the police. “Black and brown people are often deeply harmed or even killed by interactions with the police, and the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition decided in 2020 to end any formal relationship with SFPD,” their website states. “Because policing is interwoven into nearly all current solutions to bike theft, some of our recommendations do involve minimal contact with the police, but we identify those and try to propose alternatives. We encourage everyone to consider the potential impact to human life of involving the police in any situation.”

The ugly: Sauter prefers “diversion programs for those arrested for dealing the deadly opioid fentanyl” (we know how well diversion worked under Boudin). Sauter also “strongly supports evidence-based policy” and is open to supervised consumption sites (note to Danny: those are still illegal, and with Donald Trump as president are more likely to be targeted and shut down). As for those who use drugs in public, Sauter would like them to receive “resources and connections to service.” He only believes in mandating treatment “if there is harm posed to the person using drugs, or to the community,” and he leans toward “approaches to addressing the fentanyl crisis that are not as penalizing” (note to Danny: selling drugs and using them in public is illegal).

District 5 — Dean Preston is out, Bilal Mahmood is in

The good: Not only did socialist Dean Preston lose his seat on the Board of Supervisors, but he even lost his own precinct. Ouch.

The bad: Successor Bilal Mahmood is a self-proclaimed “progressive” who refused to endorse popular incumbent District Attorney Brooke Jenkins despite her only competitor being a public defender turned deputy district attorney under Chesa Boudin’s regime whom Jenkins fired, along with a dozen others, when she took office. Mahmood also came out against Proposition 36, which overwhelmingly won in November, with 70 percent of Californians voting in favor of the measure, which will increase penalties for repeat theft and certain drug offenses, like fentanyl dealing, by rolling back parts of Proposition 47, which reduced penalties for the same crimes. This would allow prosecutors to hold repeat offenders accountable and disrupt the deadly fentanyl trade.

The ugly: Mahmood is left of progressive, proven by his undying support of Lateefah Simon, who replaced another far-left politician, Barbara Lee, to represent Oakland in Congress. In 2011, Simon became the program director of the Rosenberg Foundation, which teamed up with the George Soros and his Open Society foundations to push a successful 2014 voter ballot initiative decriminalizing retail theft and drug dealing called — you guessed it — Proposition 47. From 2016 until 2022, Simon served as president of the Akonadi Foundation, founded by progressive donors Quinn Delaney and Wayne Jordan, to removepolice from Oakland schools and fundother antilaw enforcement efforts, making a cumulative salary of $2 million. Simon also funneled funds to radical organizations including the Anti Police-Terror Project (which advocates for police abolition while enriching family and friends) and “dark money” powerhouses like the Tides Foundation. Simon left Akonadi in 2022 to lead the donor-advised fund of Netflix CEO Reed Hastings’s wife Patty Quillin, who gave $1.5 million to former Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón and supported recalled San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin (and Quillin, like her wealthy, white contemporaries Delaney and Jordan, donates to antipolice causes from behind the walls of a gated mansion). There’s some ugly for Lurie here as well: Simon is on the board of his “antipoverty nonprofit” Tipping Point Community.