San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Group pulls stronger-mayor ballot measure
A moderate political advocacy group has halted plans for a November ballot measure aimed at strengthening the power of San Francisco’s mayor.
The We Need SF to Work Initiative would have given the mayor the sole authority to appoint and remove members of most of the city’s commissions and delegate responsibilities to deputy mayors.
TogetherSF Action founder Kanishka Cheng said Wednesday the group decided to stop collecting signatures for the ballot initiative due to “lack of clarity in voters’ minds” about who will be the city’s next mayor — and voter concerns that it might ultimately empower a victor they oppose.
The decision comes less than a month after Supervisor Aaron Peskin — one of the city’s most prominent progressive politicians — entered the race against Mayor London Breed and a crowded field of other moderates vying for the office.
The group is still gathering signatures and campaigning for another initiative, Cheng said, that would also empower the mayor. That one would cut the number of city commissions in half and cap the number at 65. That measure also gives the mayor the power to appoint and remove twothirds of the members of city commissions and to appoint and remove most department heads.
The decision to abandon the first initiative is not the first setback for TogetherSF Action. Just weeks after the group announced its effort in December, its leaders pulled the commission reform initiative over worries that by eliminating certain commissions, the ordinance would actually hand more power to supervisors. They later resubmitted it.
Cheng said the idea behind taking these issues to the voters is to help make the city’s government more effective.
Cheng said the group is “still moving full steam ahead” for the second initiative, called the Cut the Dysfunctional Bureaucracy Initiative.
“Fundraising is going well and we are continuing to pick up the support for this measure, and look forward to doing everything in our power to ensure its victory this November,” she said.
Cheng said TogetherSF Action has gathered most of the signatures it needs for that measure. Both efforts sprang from a report published in August by the Rose Institute of State and Local Government at Claremont McKenna College that was commissioned by TogetherSF Action’s community organizing arm, TogetherSF.
Peskin on Wednesday accused TogetherSF Action of prioritizing politics over public policy.
“Nobody talked about needing a stronger mayor when Ed Lee, Gavin Newsom or Willie Brown was mayor. And apparently they won’t be saying that if I’m elected mayor either,” he said. “I’m surprised they just pulled one (proposal). They should pull both of their backroom, venture-capitalist-funded train wrecks of a Charter amendment off the ballot before they do real damage to the city we love.”
Eric Jaye, a longtime political consultant, said the move was a “political ploy all along, and they just publicly admitted it.”
“If it was based on principle, it would be irrelevant who the mayor was, is or will be,” he said. “If they truly believed the city’s strong mayor needed to be stronger, they would have gone forward with the measure.”
Cheng and her cohort argue that San Francisco’s government is rigid and slow to adapt, and vesting more power in the office of the mayor would help cut through red tape and bloat.
Currently, the mayor is constrained by city laws that require commissions to consider a pool of candidates and submit appointment recommendations. In many cases, the mayor may not fire department heads — that responsibility falls to city commissions.
Critics dispute that argument, however.
“San Francisco already has a strong mayor arrangement,” said University of San Francisco political science professor James Lance Taylor.
The mayor controls most of the budget, Taylor said, along with the police department, the sheriff, the jails and many of its commissions.
“Giving more power to the San Francisco mayor — regardless of who it is — is really not necessary,” he said. “Because it’s already there.”
The commission reform measure, meanwhile, would give city officials 16 months to eliminate or consolidate the city’s more than 130 commissions and other oversight bodies and advisory groups, with a hard cap of 65. The law would require supervisors to review the streamlining recommendations and by August 2025 create a list of commissions to retain.
If the board does not act within that time, nearly all commissions would be eliminated by the end of that year, with the exception of 22 core commissions such as those handling transportation, public safety, civil service, elections and ethics. Supervisors could re-create dissolved commissions after that deadline if they wanted to, so long as they remained below the limit of 65 civic bodies.
While TogetherSF Action has abandoned one proposed Charter amendment to strengthen the mayor’s office, the commission reform proposal would achieve similar ends: It would allow the mayor to appoint at least two-thirds of the members of the surviving commissions and give the mayor sole authority to appoint and remove most department heads. In a blow to the Police Commission, it would also give the city’s police chief sole authority to adopt rules governing police officers’ conduct.
Proponents of the measure have raised — and spent — millions of dollars campaigning for the proposed amendment, according to campaign finance filings.
In December, Cheng created the Committee to Fix San Francisco Government, a Coalition of San Francisco Civic Organizations Dedicated to Improving the City’s Future to push for the reform effort. It has raised more than $2 million this year, with $750,000 of that coming Neighbors for a Better San Francisco, an advocacy group run by Cheng’s husband, Jay Cheng.
Venture capitalist Michael Moritz, who has also provided millions of dollars in funding to TogetherSF and serves as treasurer for TogetherSF Action, donated close to $1 million to the ballot effort, campaign filing disclosures show.
The proposed reforms have also drawn support from Breed opponent Mark Farrell, whose committee has raised about $140,000 in support of the measures.