Burk Delventhal — city’s expert on its governing Charter
The flags atop City Hall were lowered to halfstaff this week in honor of Burk “Buck” Delventhal, a quiet giant of local government who played a role in pivotal moments of San Francisco history during his nearly 50 years as a city attorney.
He died Saturday at age 76, leaving behind a legacy as a preeminent legal scholar, a passionate devotee of history and a generous spirit who uplifted all who came within his orbit, said friends and former colleagues.
“He was a legal mentor, colleague and friend to all of us, but he was an even better person, and San Francisco was deep, deep in his heart,” said City Attorney Dennis Herrera during an emotional tribute to Delventhal at Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting.
“The only thing he loved more than his family and his friends was his city,” Herrera said. He was driven always by “his true belief in the power of all of us to work together to make a difference in the lives of everyday San Franciscans.”
As the head of the city attorney’s governmentlaw division, Delventhal was often referred to as “the oracle” of the City Charter, effectively San Francisco’s Constitution. Delventhal left an imprint on “virtually every piece of groundbreaking legislation or legal challenge that San Francisco was involved in over the last 50 years,” Herrera said in an interview Wednesday.
Questions both big and small about what the Charter allowed almost inevitably crossed his desk, and his advice, informed by his deep knowledge of the law, served as a lodestar to city officials for decades.
“Buck told you straight — and with a smile on his face — that what you were trying to do was illegal and impossible, and then you knew it was time to drop it,” said Supervisor Aaron Peskin, a frequent partner of Delventhal’s in his icy swimming excursions into San Francisco Bay.
Delventhal was at the center of the city’s response to one of the most turbulent chapters in San Francisco’s history: Dan White’s assassination of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk in 1978.
Three days before White shot and killed Milk and Moscone, White and his lawyer sat in a judge’s chambers opposite Delventhal and thenCity Attorney George Agnost.
White had resigned as a supervisor, citing corruption at City Hall and the difficulty of surviving on a supervisor’s salary, but he changed his mind and wanted his old job back.
But word had spread quickly that Moscone was not planning to reappoint White to the Board of Supervisors after his resignation. White was seeking a restraining order that would have prevented Moscone from appointing anyone else to his seat while he built a legal case that he had not officially resigned.
The judge denied the restraining order, and for White, it may have been a final straw. Three days later, Delventhal was informed that White wanted to go another round in court, still seeking the restraining order. Delventhal was preparing his arguments when White assassinated Moscone and Milk. He worried briefly that White might come after him, since he sparred with his lawyer in court. That day, Delventhal watched from his secondfloor office as the bodies of Moscone and Milk were carried out of City Hall.
Shortly after, he was called to write the opinion on how the supervisors should select the next mayor. Milk was dead, White was in jail and thenSupervisor Dianne Feinstein couldn’t vote for herself. Delventhal, interpreting the Charter, decided that, of the eight remaining supervisors, it would take six votes, not five, to make a majority.
More than two decades later, Delventhal was again at the heart of an unprecedented— albeit a far less traumatic — controversy. When a mayor leaves the state or the country, it’s customary to appoint an acting mayor to perform mostly perfunctory duties. In October 2003, thenMayor Willie Brown instituted an acting mayor rotation among all the supervisors when he went to China on a trade trip. One day, it was thenSupervisor Chris Daly’s turn, and he seized the chance to appoint two people to vacancies on the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, a gutsy power grab.
Brown said Wednesday that his Chinese hosts were skeptical that a plane could be found to return the mayor home quickly.
“But when I told them, ‘There’s been an attempted coup in my city,’ they made it happen,” Brown said.
It was Delventhal who had concluded that the acting mayor had the power to make the appointments, much to Brown’s chagrin. They had long since reconciled, though Brown insisted Delventhal had gotten the law wrong.
“He lived a good life and he gave the city a good life.”
Delventhal is survived by his wife, two children and a brother.