Residents meet face to face with Mayor Farrell.
If Jessica and Jeff Ravetto harbored any unease about their 10minute meeting Friday with San Francisco Mayor Mark Farrell, they didn’t show it.
Nor did their precocious 5-yearold daughter, who sipped on orange juice and asked how much longer it would be before the meeting began.
Early Friday morning, the Ravettos were biding their time outside the mayor’s office, awaiting their chance to sit down with Farrell, face-to-face, to talk about what they see as the city’s most pressing issues.
It was to be the first meeting of the mayor’s inaugural series of twice-monthly open-door chats, meant to provide residents the chance to speak their minds to the mayor directly.
“I think the mayor’s office should be transparent and accessible to everybody,” Farrell said before the encounters began. He was bracing for questions and concerns tied to some of the city’s most obvious problems: homelessness, street crime and the soaring costs of housing. Some people did want to talk about those things, but the first batch of meetings provided an even broader sample of what’s looming large in the minds of San Franciscans.
The Ravettos, who registered for the chat and were chosen in a lottery, had come to impress upon Farrell how difficult it is to raise a
“We go to the playground, and all everyone is talking about is when or where they’re moving.” Jessica Ravetto, San Francisco resident
family in the city. A constellation of challenges, including housing costs and transportation shortcomings, were pushing many of their friends with children out of San Francisco, Jessica said.
“We go to the playground and all everyone is talking about is when or where they’re moving,” she said. “And the biggest concern is that if the city continues to lose families and kids, that there are fewer people who are really invested in the future of the city.”
Their daughter was set to enroll in kindergarten, and the family was waiting for the results of the San Francisco Unified School District’s student assignment system. The Ravettos were worried that their daughter could be placed at a school far away from their home in the Anza Vista neighborhood.
Combined with a limited school busing system, the rising cost of a Muni ride and the city’s continued emphasis on getting cars off of streets to ease congestion, Jessica said the city should be working harder to figure out ways to make it easier for families to get their kids to school on time.
“It feels like I’m wearing a backpack and all my friends are wearing this backpack, and bricks are constantly being added to it until it weighs us down so much that we can’t even move,” she said. “Honestly, we’re going to take the car every time.” She also came equipped with some recommendations, like making Muni free for kids under age 13 and creating a new city department tasked with improving city life for families.
Flanked by a pair of aides scribbling in notebooks, Farrell, leaning forward with crossed arms, said that with three young children of his own, he understood where the Ravettos were coming from.
“We have to drive a lot of time, just because we’re pingponging — we have flag football at City College and a baseball game in the Sunset and a basketball game — I totally understand those concerns,” Farrell said.
In all, Farrell conducted 16 meetings Friday, each 10 minutes long. A total of 169 people applied online to meet the mayor, who will continue seeing residents on the first and third Friday of each month.
After the Ravettos came Suzanne Maykel-Fox and Christopher Bluse, who asked for the mayor’s support in setting up a community benefit district for the middle Polk neighborhood. Later, Desi Danganan, after whipping through a slideshow on his laptop, asked the mayor to consider lowering event permitting fees, which he said would be a boon to his growing organization, SoMa Pilipinas.
Del Seymour came to ask the mayor to allocate $98,000 to hire more staff at his organization, Code Tenderloin, which provides job training and placement for poorer residents. Carolyn Moniz, citing homelessness, asked the mayor to point her toward volunteer opportunities so she could help make a difference. Farrell pledged to send her a list of local organizations that could use her help.
Outside the mayor’s office, Naj Daniels was waiting for her chance to ask him why he was supporting the Police Officers Association’s ballot measure to arm officers with stun guns. Christian Knipfer was planning to regale Farrell with a tale of transit woe: The 48-Muni bus line was so unreliable, he said, that he had to move in order to be closer to work.
When he got his turn before the mayor, David Lockmiller gave a harrowing and somewhat graphic account of a nasty food poisoning scare he endured last October.
“It was so bad I thought if I closed my eyes, I might not wake up, he said. He came to ask Farrell to bolster the city’s inspections of retail food markets, which he described as spotty. Lockmiller believes he was sickened by food he purchased at a grocery store.
“Thank you for bringing this to my attention,” Farrell said. “We’ll be back in touch to let you know what we can do about it.”