San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
S.F. needn’t a queen, just a competent mayor
Residents of San Francisco recently witnessed the full power of our mayor’s office on display during the APEC conference, when Mayor London Breed ordered the streets cleared of homeless encampments and open-air drug dealing to shield world leaders from evidence of our city’s dysfunction.
Breed issued the orders and those orders were followed because the mayor runs the police department — and every department. She has near total control over the city’s bureaucracy, and she certainly had all the power she needed during APEC — just as she has all the power she needs right now to clean up San Francisco.
And yet the same billionaire backed group aligned with Mayor Breed that brought you the grotesque “That’s Fentalife!” advertisements has announced its newest campaign effort — giving our mayor even more power. These business titans want to eliminate many of the voter-approved powers of the city’s citizen oversight bodies, blaming too much public engagement for our city’s woes.
Apparently, cleaning streets so fouled that they are a national punchline is something Breed can only accomplish on command for the world’s elites, but not for the rest of us without giving her more power. Don’t believe it.
I have worked as a political advisor for, or against, every mayor since Dianne Feinstein. I’ve watched how these mayors have deployed their virtually unprecedented “hard power” and their significant “soft” power to get things done.
Breed could, for instance, order police, adult probation, and the Department of Public Works to shut down the fencing of stolen goods on our streets, which fuels our epidemic of retail thefts, with three phone calls to the heads of these departments, who report directly to her. It might take three follow-up phone calls every day to make sure they were successful — but if we had a mayor focused on her job, that’s what would happen.
Working on Dianne Feinstein’s anti-recall campaign I personally saw her command her driver to stop her limousine and order the occupants (me and her police escort) to pick up street trash and put in the trunk (“I’ll throw it out when I get home, she said). Soon after, her staff reported seeing the director Public Works leaving the mayor’s office, in a particularly serious mood. The streets felt noticeably cleaner after that. That’s what happens when a mayor takes personal responsibility, rather than playing
the political blame game.
I sat in Room 200 at City Hall and watched Mayor Willie Brown ask pointed questions of his department heads — and saw them squirm when confronted by a mayor they knew wouldn’t stop asking tough questions until they delivered results.
I saw Mayor Gavin Newsom deploy both this kind of hard power, but also command a national stage to use his soft power to drive forward innovations on the environment, homelessness, marriage equality and other important priorities.
It is certainly true that San Francisco has some checks on mayoral power. The Board of Supervisors has the authority to approve city budgets. But mayors have no obligation to actually spend items passed in these budgets. It is no wonder that mayoral requests for budget authorizations are generally approved, like Mayor Breed’s recent request for police overtime. Supervisors know that if mayors don’t get what they want they can simply refuse to spend funds the supervisors have requested.
The mayor’s backers also claim she lacks sufficient authority because the Board of Supervisors, must approve a handful of her appointments to our citizen-led commissions. That’s like saying the Supreme Court is controlled by the U.S. Senate, because the Senate must approve presidential appointments.
In other words, it isn’t true. San Francisco is the only dual city and county in California. Our mayor has control over our regional airport, our region’s water system, our own utility — and more. For this reason, San Francisco has long been called an “Imperial City.” But our mayor became truly imperial in 1995, when a Charter overhaul gutted the power of the Chief Administrative Officer while mayoral power was dramatically enhanced.
Since then, there have been only minor checks on this powerful mayor system — mostly as a result of scandals. For example, the recent reform providing more citizen oversight of the Department of Public Works came after widespread corruption was uncovered, including then-Director Mohammed Nuru (now serving seven years in federal prison) giving illegal unreported gifts totaling thousands of dollars to his close friend Mayor Breed. The new citizen oversight is not only a guardrail against future corruption, but a tool to demand better performance.
Sadly, the new proposal to gut citizen oversight is just the latest in a series of blame-game tactics employed by Breed. She blamed rising crime not on her dysfunctional police department and her own support of defunding the police — but on the reform-minded district attorney. That tactic worked, so now Breed controls both the police department and she appointed an ally as district attorney.
But with crime and grime still rising, Breed needs someone else to blame. This time it is the voters, and the few tools we have to fight corruption and hold our city government accountable.
Giving even more power to a mayor who has failed to effectively wield the enormous power she already has will only deepen the crises in our troubled city and delay the adoption of the real answer to our problems — demanding results from City Hall now.