Tech bigwig leads push for tax overhaul in S.F.
San Francisco’s tech companies — along with their angel investor and mayoral booster Ron Conway — are starting to flex their muscle.
And the first push is with Mayor Ed Lee’s call for tax reform.
At issue: the current payroll tax, which taxes businesses based on how many workers they have and how much they pay them, versus a proposed gross receipts levy, which taxes them on their sales.
New-tech companies such as Salesforce, Zynga, Riverbed, Twitter and Yelp — with their fast-expanding workforces and high-earning initial public offerings — want
out of the city payroll tax.
And it’s been tech investor Conway — who stepped up with a $670,000 independent expenditure committee on behalf of Lee’s mayoral campaign last year and also picked up the tab at his election-night victory party at the Palace Hotel — who has been beating the drum the loudest.
“While we have not taken a position on any specific proposal at this time, we are in favor of a gross receipts-based tax solution … to reform San Francisco’s business tax structure and incentivize job creation,” Conway said in a statement to us, declining an interview.
Conway has fused about 200 tech companies — including a number that contributed to his independent campaign for Lee — as part of sf.citi, an advocacy and civic group.
The mayor, in turn, has proved to be one of the tech industry’s biggest boosters — picking right up on the plan first pushed by his predecessor, Gavin Newsom, to grant a payroll tax exemption to Twitter and others that moved into the run-down Mid-market area.
Now Lee is heeding the tech interests’ call for a citywide tax overhaul — something both he and some of his mayoral rivals pledged during last year’s election.
While the mayor has shied away from saying just what the new tax structure should look like, Conroy has been plenty vocal — some even say pushy.
At a closed-door City Hall powwow with 60 business leaders last week, he said his tech members hoped to create 8,000 new jobs here in the next year, but needed the less burdensome gross receipts tax.
The catch: It would hit the city’s old-line financial services, banks and commercial real estate companies that have benefited under the current system — and that puts the mayor in a tough spot.
Lee insists he simply wants the business community to work out a plan everyone can live with — so long as it doesn’t impede the growth of high-tech jobs in the city.
In other words, he wants a gross receipts tax plan to take to the voters this fall. Strike force: A measure headed for the November ballot that would narrow California’s “three strikes” law has some very big players behind it — making for some very interesting bedfellows.
The measure, which is aimed at keeping low-level offenders from taking up prison space for life, is the joint brainchild of the NAACP, Republican District Attorney Steve Cooley of Los Angeles County and an ad-hoc Stanford University think tank.
The signature drive to qualify the measure was funded in part by liberal billionaire George Soros ($1 million) and investment banker ($500,000). The campaign will be run by
whose past races include those of Gov.
Lt. Gov. and state Attorney General
— who beat Cooley
enforcement tool. In the Navy: Democratic Rep. Bob Filner of San Diego has certainly got folks talking with his letter to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Navy Secretary Ray Mabus urging them to name a ship after slain San Francisco Supervisor and gay activist Harvey Milk.
For years, after all, San Francisco’s gay community was none too welcoming of the Navy, because of the military’s longtime ban on openly gay service members.
But Filner says naming a ship after Milk — who served as a Navy officer in the 1950s — would promote equity in the military after the recent repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.
“I’m intrigued,” said state Assemblyman and Milk protege Tom Ammiano. “If it did happen, we would have to have the Village People at the christening.” EXTRA! Catch our blog at www. sfgate.com/matierandross.