Supes seek to ease brutal budget battles

After slogging through the reliably disjointed and bruising business of passing San Francisco’s multibillion dollar budget this year, city officials have begun to explore ways to reduce the political friction inherent in the annual process of deciding the city’s finances.

Supervisor Malia Cohen last week directed the city’s Budget and Legislative Analyst’s Office to survey how other municipalities decide on their budgets, with the goal of finding ways to improve San Francisco’s process, including making it more transparent.

Cohen was motivated largely by an eagerness to avoid repeating a particularly grueling round of negotiations this year surrounding a pot of so-called “add-back” money — funds the city’s supervisors spend in their own districts.

This year’s negotiations were marked by tense, sometimes fiery City Hall meetings that stretched into the small hours of the morning, with supervisors and their staff arguing over how large the add-back pot should be and how the funds should be spent.

Despite being seen as crucial to providing needed services, the protocol for distributing the tens of millions of dollars in add-back funds has been derided as a messy and opaque process conducted with little to no public oversight.

Exactly how the budget analyst’s office will approach its research is being deter-

mined, but Severin Campbell, the office’s director, said she expects to focus on San Jose, Sacramento, Los Angeles and other large cities in California. Her office is on a tight deadline: The report is to be published in September, following the board’s annual recess in August.

“This is our opportunity to come up with some new ideas,” Campbell said.

Cohen, who chairs the board’s budget committee, has also asked the City Controller’s Office to solicit feedback on refining the budget process from other supervisors, department heads and nonprofit organizations as a way to marry more qualitative data with the analyst’s office’s quantitative report.

“If we have a better process, we’ll come to better decisions,” Cohen said. “No one should be afraid of reforms.”

The board is scheduled to take its first vote on the budget Tuesday.

Each year, the city’s pot of add-back funds is assembled after the budget analyst’s office combs through the budget and recommends cuts, primarily from departments with leftover funds thanks to staff attrition or unfilled positions. That money is then “added back” into the budget, and it’s up to the supervisors to decide how to spend it. The add-back funds — which totaled $46 million this year — are then sent to specific city agencies that contract with local nonprofits and other organizations that provide a variety of social services.

This year, each supervisor received $1 million to distribute in his or her respective district, leaving $35 million for the board to allocate to citywide projects.

But the haggling over how to apportion the add-back money is done almost entirely behind closed doors.

Add-back discussions routinely take place after midnight, as advocates for local organizations wait for supervisors and their staff in the corridors of City Hall to press their cases for funding in private meetings.

This year, as has been the historical trend, the final addback list wasn’t finalized nor publicly published until just before the budget committee voted on June 23 to send the budget to the full Board of Supervisors. Cohen had said previously that the absence of several supervisors on that day, including fellow budget committee members Jane Kim and Norman Yee, added to the difficulty of reaching consensus more swiftly.

“The amount of decisionmaking that’s crammed into a 48-hour period — that is the real part of the process that needs to be reformed,” Cohen said. “And this desire for more transparency is not a new feeling, and I’m figuring out the best way to go about doing it.”

With this year’s hectic sprint to the finish line in mind, Cohen specifically asked the budget analyst’s office to report back on the timelines that other governments use as they work through their budgets.

Many of Cohen’s fellow supervisors endorsed efforts to improve the city’s budget process.

“I’m hopeful that we’ll finally get something done,” said Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who had served on this year’s budget committee as a substitute during Kim’s absence. Peskin said he supported adjusting the timeline to give supervisors and their staff more time to deliberate. He’s also in favor of more transparency to the add-back process.

“I think everyone should stand up and say, ‘This is what I’m advocating for in add-backs, and this is why.’ It should be done in public. There’s no reason for it to be done in the middle of the night in back rooms,” Peskin said.

Supervisor Hillary Ronen said during last week’s board meeting that she believed there was “consensus among all of my colleagues that the budget process is broken. If we believe in an open, accountable and fair process, then our budget process doesn’t reflect that.”

Ronen, who represents District Nine, encompassing the Mission, Bernal Heights and Portola neighborhoods, wants the add-back process modified so that more money shifts to districts with higher rates of crime, poverty, homelessness and underperforming schools.

“I have to be blunt: For the last few decades it’s been districts Six, Nine and 10 have been used as the storage space for all of the city’s problems. And yet there’s this sort of trend that each district gets the same amount of staff and add-back money,” she said. “It’s not the same amount of work, and if our district is going to take on our share of the city’s problems, we need to at least receive our fair share of resources.

“We need to look at what other cities and counties do and take those lessons and assess what we can replicate here,” Ronen said.

At last week’s supervisors meeting, Katy Tang, a member of the budget committee, called the add-back process “horrible,” and urged her fellow board members to engage more with the mayor’s office while the budget is being assembled so that funding priorities can be set earlier, curtailing the last-minute brawls over add-backs.

“Let’s not continue just to argue and fight over the cookie crumbs at the very tail end,” Tang said.

“If we have a better process, we’ll come to better decisions. No one should be afraid of reforms.” Malia Cohen, District 10 supervisor