Lurie wanted San Francisco to bounce back. Now he’s got an affordability crisis

For years, the overwhelming perception of San Francisco was that of a crime-ridden liberal hellhole from which residents were desperate to escape. Now it feels like the hottest city in the country. The reversal comes as AI money pours in, with companies filling long-empty downtown offices , and their high-income workers driving a red-hot housing and rental market . Mayor Daniel Lurie, who rose to power in 2024 on a campaign promise to focus on public safety, has prioritized reselling San Francisco as a city on the rise — one Instagram reel at a time . It’s a remarkable turnaround for a city that spent years trying to convince residents, employers, and investors that its best days weren’t behind it. Now, as that recovery takes hold, it is reshaping Lurie’s governing agenda. The boom that is reversing the doom-loop trend has also revived San Francisco’s oldest challenge: affordability. Lurie, who spent his first 18 months in office cleaning up San Francisco’s streets , is discovering that he has a more pernicious problem to solve. “I am the first one to say we are not where we want to be,” the mayor said this week in an interview with The Standard at his City Hall office about his proposals to mitigate the high cost of living. “We have to make this city more affordable, so that families can stay here and thrive here.” That San Francisco is expensive is not breaking news. But if living costs were pricey before, there’s no adequate adjective to describe current conditions. The typical home value was about $1.4 million in June , according to Zillow, which city economists reference for their data analyses, a 9.5% increase from the year before. The median monthly rent has surged 19% over the last year to $3,558 , according to Apartment List’s July report. Those numbers illustrate the paradox facing City Hall. The economic recovery that has made San Francisco one of the country’s most attractive real estate markets is also making it harder for many people to afford living here. “It has been the fastest increase that I’ve ever seen in one single season,” Compass agent Ruth Krishnan said. Before you ask: “Yes, AI is definitely part of what is increasing the price, and it’s probably going to increase it more,” she said. “Now these companies are going to go public, and there is going to be even more money.” Ted Egan, San Francisco’s chief economist, said the eye-popping prices come after a “major adjustment” during COVID, when tens of thousands fled the city, according to state population estimates , chilling the housing market. During that time, San Francisco went from being extremely expensive compared with most cities to just expensive, Egan said. Rents that were once three times the national average are now a little more than double. Even so, “our rents are growing much faster than in other places, and AI is the big reason for that,” said Egan, who himself made the choice to relocate out of San Francisco to a smaller city outside the Bay Area. But the consequences extend well beyond the housing market. Rising prices are forcing City Hall to confront a broader question: Who can still afford to live in San Francisco if the recovery continues at this pace? San Francisco prices long ago pushed out a good chunk of the working-class population. But the appealing new image means that even some high-earning workers can’t afford to stay — fueling the fear that the city is becoming a haven solely for millionaire AI and tech workers. “This is not an issue that is unique to lower-income workers versus middle-class versus even tech workers,” said Supervisor Bilal Mahmood, who recently clashed with the mayor over grocery affordability legislation . “Every single person I represent in District 5 has said it is too expensive to live here.” Lurie told The Standard it shouldn’t be — and can’t remain that way if the recovery is to last. “I want families working in every industry to be able to stay and afford to live here,” he said, adding that San Francisco’s economic recovery is dependent on a diverse workforce outside the tech sector. Lurie is acutely aware that San Francisco has ridden a series of tech booms and busts over the past three decades. While AI is fueling the latest resurgence, the city can’t afford to become overly dependent on a single industry again, he said: “It cannot be one industry, and that’s why we’re talking to business leaders of all backgrounds, saying, ‘We want you here.’” Part of that strategy is recruiting universities to the city, including Vanderbilt , which Lurie hopes will create a more stable mix of jobs and activity beyond the AI sector. He said the city is talking to universities focused not just on technology but on arts, culture, and manufacturing. “We have focused on how we attract universities. Not one, but multiple universities downtown. How do we get more professors and teachers, and how do we have more life in our downtown core?” Diversifying the workforce, however, will require far more housing. Lurie pointed to his signature Family Zoning Plan , which he said will pave the way for tens of thousands more housing units over the next five years. He is also working with Supervisor Myrna Melgar to shore up funds for affordable housing through the city’s Housing Trust Fund . “We need to build more housing. For decades, we in this very progressive city have said no to new neighbors,” Lurie said. But affordability is about more than housing, he pointed out. He has also zeroed in on two of the biggest recurring expenses for families: childcare and transportation. He noted that San Francisco is “the first city in the country to provide access to free early childhood care ” for certain families with children up to age 5. “I’ve had many parents say, ‘You’re saving me $36,000 a year per child,’” Lurie said, emphasizing that San Francisco is the first city to offer such a robust program. ( Take that, Mamdani .) “If they have two, that’s $72,000. It’s made a big difference for some families.” Lurie has also worked to qualify a local parcel tax for the November ballot that is expected to generate around $150 million annually for Muni, plus another $10 million to strengthen transit services. “I want people to be able to get around our city so they don’t have to use rideshare, they don’t have to buy a car, they don’t have to have car insurance, they don’t have to pay for monthly parking.” Cyrus Hall, a transportation advocate, said Lurie’s support is a major boost. “The fact that he is popular and the fact that he is willing to spend political capital on this is great,” Hall said. A thriving transportation system is critical for working-class families who can’t afford car expenses and rely on an affordable public transit system to get around town, Hall said. But Lurie admits that some of his efforts will take time — long after he leaves office — before families feel the broader financial impact. “The unfortunate part is it’s not going to be solved overnight,” Lurie said. “When you have 30-plus years of not building enough housing, it’s going to take us years and years to get there, if not longer.” Critics say that’s exactly the problem. Whether the Family Zoning Plan will make a meaningful difference is debatable. San Francisco faces a state mandate to plan for more than 80,000 new homes by 2031 . The city completed 2,832 units in 2025, with roughly half designated as 100% affordable, according to the Department of Building Inspection. So far this year, 413 units have been completed, 276 of them affordable. “The problem with affordability in San Francisco is we are always working on the thing that we should have been working on 10 years ago,” said Mahmood, who is a renter. “The city is doing the bare minimum to comply with state laws, rather than thinking about how to fundamentally solve the problem.” Laura Foote, executive director of YIMBY Action, said San Francisco is “at best treading water” on solving the housing crisis. She argues that the city should pursue more aggressive short-term measures while waiting for new housing to be built. More immediate action to lower costs, Foote said, could include declaring a housing emergency to streamline production, waiving all impact fees, or proposing “ single-stair reform ,” which would allow certain apartment buildings to have one exit stairway instead of the required two. “I’m not saying they are doing nothing,” Foote said. “But there are bolder actions they are not taking that would have an impact today.” Advocates worry that without immediate action, San Franciscans across the socioeconomic spectrum will continue to leave. They range from hospital workers and police officers who were born in the city to young parents who hoped to raise first-generation San Franciscans but are giving up on that dream because it feels unattainable. Kim Tavaglione, executive director of the San Francisco Labor Council, warned of a future in which restaurant, hotel, and construction workers can’t live in the city they serve, and first responders are forced to turn down jobs because commuting to a San Francisco hospital isn’t possible. “There is nowhere for them to go,” said Tavaglione. She worries that Lurie, an heir to the Levi Strauss family fortune, is relying on “ corporations and the billionaires, the millionaires ,” to rebuild San Francisco, “but without a plan on where people are going to live.” “Working people are the only ones who keep neighborhoods vibrant,” she said. “So losing working people will destroy neighborhoods.” Whether San Francisco’s comeback becomes a broad-based recovery — or a boom that benefits primarily those who can already afford it — may be the question that defines Lurie’s mayoralty.

SF was headed for Mamdani-style grocery stores. Those plans have been spiked

Supervisor Bilal Mahmood said Mayor Daniel Lurie and another lawmaker have derailed part of his government-backed grocery store proposal after it was kept off the agenda of a committee hearing. He said Amazon also played a role in its destruction. The proposal, a two-part ballot measure authored by Mahmood last month, would establish a fund to subsidize grocery stores and levy a tax on vacant supermarkets and pharmacies owned by large businesses. Mahmood said he received a call Thursday afternoon from Supervisor Connie Chan, chair of the Budget Committee, informing him that the tax proposal would be stricken from Wednesday’s Budget and Finance Committee agenda. Chan told Mahmood of her disapproval and signaled that the mayor was opposed to the legislation, he said. “This is frankly just bad governance at the board,” said Mahmood. Mahmood said Lurie and Chan’s intervention makes it difficult for the proposal to move forward since it needs to be heard by the full Board of Supervisors by late July to make it to the November ballot. The dispute highlights competing visions for reviving San Francisco’s economy. Mahmood argues that vacant grocery and pharmacy sites should face financial pressure to reopen or lease to another operator, while Lurie has emphasized incentives and public-private partnerships to encourage businesses to return downtown. “Mayor Lurie is working to bring grocery stores to San Francisco’s communities,” his spokesperson, Charles Lutvak, said in a statement. “More taxes won’t achieve that. We support the Affordable Grocery Fund and will continue working with Supervisor Mahmood and the entire board to bring more grocery stores to the city.” Robyn Burke, a spokesperson for Chan, said the supervisor “agrees” with the intent of the measure, “but she also understands that much work needs to be done to this measure. Supervisor Mahmood has amendments he wants to make to his legislation. With that, she came to the conclusion that this measure is not ready at this time.” Mahmood says he has faced stiff opposition from business groups opposed to the proposal, including Amazon. The supervisor said a lobbyist for Amazon suggested last month that the retail giant could mount a campaign against the tax and requested that its vacant Whole Foods storefront on Market Street be exempt from the legislation. The supervisor declined to grant the exemption. Amazon lobbyist David Noyola denied this. “Amazon is in full overdrive trying to kill this ballot measure,” Mahmood told The Standard, adding that the company doesn’t “want to be held accountable for the zombie stores they hold,” using a term critical of companies that close a storefront but continue to hold the lease. Pro-business groups, including the Chamber of Commerce and Advance SF, have expressed skepticism about the idea to the supervisor. Nationally, the idea has proved controversial as moderate Democrats contend with a growing populist fervor within their party and the country reels from an affordability crisis. Amazon’s Whole Foods site on Market shuttered in 2023 after being open for a little over a year, emblematic of the anxieties surrounding downtown’s post-pandemic economy and worsening street conditions at the time. Since then, Lurie and others have launched efforts to rehabilitate the neighborhood, as office vacancies remain a challenge. Recent figures show some recovery as artificial intelligence companies increase demand. In April, the Downtown Development Corporation, a group created by Lurie’s allies in an effort to revitalize the neighborhood, announced a $25 million initiative to help businesses with below-market rate loans and move-in grants. Mahmood said he is spearheading the ballot measure because of the growing problem of disappearing supermarkets and pharmacies across the city, as well as rising food prices that are a national problem. Mahmood’s district covers the Tenderloin, a neighborhood known for a lack of pharmacies and supermarkets. The city in 2024 opened a free grocery store for low-income residents in the Bayview. Mahmood’s ballot measure would have a dual purpose. It would create a fund, fueled by philanthropic dollars or city coffers, to subsidize the conversion of corner stores into grocery stores with fresh foods or, as New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani has suggested, to lease out city-owned spaces at below-market rates to affordable grocers. It would also tax vacant grocery stores and pharmacies operated by large chains at $3 per square foot in the first year, $5 in the second, and $10 annually thereafter, capped at $250,000. Mahmood maintains that the tax would not affect small businesses, and that the affected companies would be able to avoid the penalty if they lease their vacant space to someone else, abandon their lease so someone else can take it over, or reactivate the storefront themselves. He said the argument businesses have used to defend closures — that crime and homelessness make it difficult to run a storefront — doesn’t pass muster. “I recognize during COVID there were concerns, but the data show that crime is down,” he said. “That excuse is no longer valid.” Amazon’s vacant Whole Foods site is roughly 65,000 square feet. A report from the city controller on the proposal’s cost is pending, said Mahmood. He claims the measure could generate several million dollars in tax revenue. Noyola pushed back against Mahmood’s description of Amazon’s position. “That’s an inaccurate characterization of a conversation I had with Supervisor Mahmood. Full stop,” the lobbyist said, adding that the business community at large tried to propose an exemption for the downtown neighborhood, not for the Whole Foods site specifically. Mahmood stood by his account, saying Noyola told him Amazon spent $250,000 opposing Proposition D — the Overpaid CEO Tax that failed in June — and could spend a similar amount opposing his measure. New York City’s Mamdani, whose progressive politics have proved popular after a slate of congressional wins by democratic socialist candidates during the city’s June primary, announced his first city-owned grocery store in May at an affordable housing complex in the Bronx. The SF Board of Supervisors’ rules committee is set to vote Monday on the fund aspect of Mahmood’s law. Mahmood said he has four supporters of his proposal: Supervisors Cheyenne Chen, Danny Sauter, Stephen Sherrill, and Myrna Melgar. He would need a vote from one more supervisor to move the fund measure from the full board to the November ballot.

After Swalwell and Platner, Cheyenne Hunt is building a new #MeToo movement

Former East Bay Rep. Eric Swalwell dodged more than a decade of misconduct rumors on Capitol Hill. Maine U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner withstood allegations of physical misconduct, disturbing Reddit posts, and a Nazi tattoo. Then they encountered Cheyenne Hunt. A 29-year-old political activist, attorney, and content creator with a vast social media following, Hunt has spent several months organizing women behind the scenes to amplify allegations of sexual misconduct, including rape, against both Swalwell and Platner . She has connected accusers with lawyers, therapists, and reporters while using her own online platforms to share their stories. The result: Swalwell resigned from Congress, shelved his campaign for governor , and has largely disappeared from public view amid multiple investigations into his alleged misconduct. Platner is thought to be on the verge of dropping out of his Senate race after losing critical endorsements from key progressives , including Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and California Rep. Ro Khanna. Swalwell and Platner have denied the allegations. “This is a reckoning,” Hunt told The Standard on a Thursday morning in June from the living room of the inland Orange County house she shares with her boyfriend, where stacks of law books fill three large shelves and a vase of pink peonies serves as the backdrop to the Zoom calls that fill her schedule. “No predators in power.” Hunt hasn’t had time for a break in the three months since the Swalwell story broke. Her days start early and end late, a drumbeat of staff meetings and check-ins with organizers. She forgets to stop and eat, she said, and her boyfriend often reminds her she needs a meal. During a day spent shadowing Hunt, The Standard watched her prepare for another cycle of chaos. In between back-to-back meetings, she was on frequent, feverish calls with a Politico reporter working to break the Platner story. Even she is shocked by what has unfolded in the weeks since her friend Annika Albrecht texted to ask if Hunt would post a video about the sexual harassment Albrecht claims she experienced from Swalwell . Hunt didn’t know that her March 31 video , which has generated more than 150,000 views on TikTok and Instagram, was the beginning of not only Swalwell’s downfall but her new mission. But Hunt wasn’t working alone. Arielle Fodor, a content creator and former teacher who goes by “Mrs. Frazzled” online, had also been posting cryptic messages about rumors of misconduct by Swalwell. Hunt, Fodor, and Albrecht teamed up to take the allegations that were circulating on social media to reporters. They collaborated with CNN for a story that broke April 10 with Albrecht’s allegations, along with accusations from three other women that ranged from harassment to sexual assault. Hunt has since resigned as executive director of the advocacy organization Gen-Z for Change and started Reckoning Action, a political organization with the goal of ending misogyny in places of power. Fodor is an adviser to the group, as are some of Swalwell’s accusers. Hunt said the group’s goals are to change sexual harassment laws and raise enough money to build a robust network of legal aid and other support services for victims. But this is not a millenial #MeToo movement. A key pillar of Reckoning Action is leveraging social media to inspire cultural change. TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram are increasingly where people — especially Gen Z — find, read, and talk about serious issues, Hunt said. And with her 220,000 followers on TikTok and 222,000 on Instagram, she is uniquely positioned to use social media as a tool to spark another #MeToo chapter, this one adapted for a digital-first era. “If you’re not having conversations with people where they’re listening, then you’re not in the conversation at all,” Hunt said. “It was content creators that blew the door open and found all these sources and made it happen.” ‘I had something to say’ Hunt’s political activism began in California’s rural Lake County, where she was raised by her single mom and grandmother. Hunt moved to Orange County when she was 14 and, two years later, graduated early from high school. She went to the University of Denver and moved back to Orange County for law school at UC Irvine. It was at law school in 2020, when she joined Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s office as a Senate Judiciary Committee law clerk, that Hunt found her calling in politics. She arrived in D.C. just as the first impeachment trial against President Donald Trump was beginning. It was evident how toxic a workplace the Capitol could be, Hunt said, especially for the many “hungry, ambitious young women” staffing lawmakers’ offices. “Many of whom this is the first job that they have ever had, and they’re looking for their big break,” she said. She returned home for law school graduation and to take care of her dying grandmother, then moved back to D.C. to work as a Big Tech accountability advocate at Public Citizen, a left-leaning consumer advocacy organization. “She’s a troublemaker,” Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen, said of Hunt. “A good troublemaker.” Weissman said he was impressed by Hunt’s creative approach to using social media to identify and solve problems. “It’s not just having the information, but how to frame the information, present the information, in a way that excites people in the algorithm nowadays,” he said. “And she had found a key.” Disillusioned by the lack of Gen Z representation in Congress, Hunt returned to Orange County with a plan to run for Congress in 2024 against Republican Rep. Michelle Steel in what was then California’s 45th District. She lost badly, earning just 8% of the vote in the March primary. “At the end of the day, like, I had something to say,” Hunt said of the experience. “There was a generation of women that was completely unrepresented at the federal level, and I wanted to take my swing at it.” As executive director of Gen-Z for Change, an organization that uses social media as an advocacy tool for progressive causes, it became her job to be “chronically online,” she said. But after the Swalwell news broke, Hunt said it became clear that she needed to focus on the strategy full time. She started Reckoning Action and, as executive director, oversees a team of about half a dozen women and men. “I have a habit of doing things that people think are insane,” she said. “But I think them through. I didn’t want to start something unless it was really clear that there was a place in the movement for it and that it would be sustainable.” Responding to #MeToo backlash Hunt said hundreds of women have reached out in the weeks since Swalwell resigned with their own experiences of sexual misconduct. It became clear from those conversations how much had changed since the #MeToo movement first went viral in 2017. What she learned: #MeToo is out; the manosphere is in. “I just think that we see politics so often function as a pendulum, where there’s progress, and then there’s backlash,” Hunt said. “And the backlash to the #MeToo movement was a generation of men that, for the first time, was realizing that they may not be able to act towards women with impunity anymore, and that was stark.” Young men are increasingly enamored with media figures like Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Christopher Rufo and the late Charlie Kirk, and even far-right extremists like Nick Fuentes, an antisemitic white nationalist streamer. Hunt blames much of the rise of the manosphere on social media and its proliferation of right-wing accounts that once existed on the fringe but in recent years have exploded into the mainstream. Right-wing content creators have gamed the algorithm to prey on lonely young men, Hunt said, “offering them something that looks like community and is really just isolation, for their own kind of political agenda.” Hunt worries about women too. After a decade of the #girlboss, women seem less interested in the C-suite and more intrigued by the “Make America Healthy Again” and “trad wife” movements. From Hunt’s perspective, the same digital rabbit hole that pulls men into the manosphere is working to drag women back to the 1950s. “That’s why MAHA content exists,” Hunt said. “It starts because they’re, like, making banana bread, and then at some point they start talking about, I don’t know, fucking ivermectin or something.” A key pillar of Reckoning Action is promoting “narrative change,” not just through stories in traditional news outlets but through social media. Hunt wants to replicate the right-wing playbook of going viral, but to the left’s benefit. To do that, she envisions contracting with left-wing influencers on paid anti-misogyny campaigns, leveraging their specific brands to appeal to broader audiences. Hunt imagines collaborating with the podcast “The Basement Yard,” a comedy show with Joe Santagato and Frank Alvarez, who spend an hour gabbing about random topics. Under Hunt’s playbook, they would be paid to spend a few minutes railing against misogyny. “The people that listen to ‘Pod Save America,’ they already agree with us,” Hunt said. “That’s not going to reach new audiences and make meaningful difference. It’s not going to break out of the echo chamber. We need content that can compete with their content. Entertainment-first content.” Fodor has been doing this for years. Users might come to her initially for education news , but they will also find her “gentle parenting” spoofs on political topics, like a recent video in which she pretends to talk to a kid about how “yucky” it is that the Supreme Court ruled in favor of states with bans on transgender kids playing in girls sports . “I think everybody tries to hit it differently. And that’s kind of a cool thing about content creators,” Fodor said in an interview. “Is that everybody is pulling on their little thread in their corner in their own way.” Omar Wasow, an assistant professor of political science at UC Berkeley, said social media has always been an incubator for social and political movements, many for progressive causes. The #MeToo movement started with a hashtag, of course, and the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 began with the video of George Floyd’s murder spreading online. “In the U.S. and around the world, we’ve seen movements that can emerge almost out of nothing,” Wasow said. But the right has commanded social media in recent years, to great political effect. “It’s not just activists who are taking this up. It’s the most powerful people in the world in the current presidential administration,” Wasow said. Hunt noted that right-wing influencers have become “masters” at pushing online fringe ideas that eventually make their way into real-life politics. What was once considered “radical” is now law, Hunt said, like the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade and subsequent state legislation to criminalize women who get abortions. That same strategy won’t have an immediate impact for Hunt’s cause, she conceded over a lunch of vegan pho at a favorite Orange County Vietnamese restaurant. “I’m known for being pretty impatient, but I also understand that’s going to take time,” she said. “Institutional change takes time.” Her goal of ending misogyny in places of power is going to require a coalition of “unlikely bedfellows” working together. One of her goals, for example, is to change House ethics rules to make it safer for accusers to come forward with claims of inappropriate behavior. Reckoning Action is already working with the Democratic Women’s Caucus on the effort, but Hunt acknowledged, “we’re gonna need everybody on board,” perhaps including some Republicans. Old and new media partnerships But there could be limits to Hunt’s vision. Putting such an emphasis on social media is risky, said Juliet Williams, a gender studies professor at UCLA. The country’s major tech companies are run by “a bunch of super regressive dudes” who have cozied up to Trump. Old-school, grassroots organizing is still important, she said. “There’s no feminist Elon Musk,” Williams said. “Technology, social media, influencing — these platforms are not why #Metoo didn’t go where we wanted it to, and it’s not what is going to save us now.” There’s also a line that content creators can’t — or shouldn’t — cross. Both Hunt and Fodor said there was a limit with the Swalwell allegations that they felt comfortable posting on their pages. That’s when they turned to legacy newsrooms with the story. “I don’t want to see creators thinking that they should be talking about sensitive sexual assault stories or anything that’s of that level of consequence,” she said. “Because they don’t have the resources to do the corroboration and the independent fact-checking and what needs to be done for those [stories] to be told in a way that’s absolutely unimpeachable.” But even news organizations can’t prevent the repercussions victims may face after coming forward. A private investigator has contacted at least one former Swalwell staffer about her time working for the congressman, according to the news site NOTUS . Swalwell’s attorney Sara Azari confirmed to the outlet that she had hired the New York firm Beau Dietl & Associates as part of an investigation into the allegations. Azari did not respond to The Standard’s request for comment. “That is purely an intimidation tactic that is all about intimidating these women and trying to silence other ones from coming forward,” Hunt said. It’s why many women never come forward with their stories, said Gloria Allred, a women’s rights attorney who has represented victims in cases against Harvey Weinstein , Bill Cosby, R. Kelly , and Jeffrey Epstein. Allred said she wants women to know there is “another option.” “And that’s within the justice system,” she said, which allows victims to receive compensation for alleged abuse without any impact on their public image or threat of retaliation tactics like defamation lawsuits. “There are still some people who do not wish to live their life on the internet.” Allred said. “I understand the desire that young women have to hold the accused accountable. I agree that the accused should be held accountable. The real issue is, how can they best achieve that with the minimum harm to themselves and a maximum benefit to themselves?” If there’s anything Sacramento lobbyist Samantha Corbin has learned since she helped launch “ We Said Enough ,” the #MeToo movement in the California Capitol, it’s that “no one cares about women.” Corbin said since the coalition launched with an October 2017 letter exposing the “pervasive” culture of sexual harassment in the Capitol, she has received weekly calls from people alleging misconduct in and around the Legislature. The group notched some initial wins when several lawmakers resigned amid allegations of misconduct. Additionally, the Legislature in 2019 launched a Workplace Conduct Unit to independently investigate anonymous complaints of wrongdoing in the Capitol. The unit has received roughly 840 complaints, according to a February report, and “resolved” around 97% of them. Corbin acknowledged how difficult it is for advocates to maintain the momentum and progress made after a news cycle ends and public attention inevitably turns to other issues. “You consistently have to have people who have energy, who have a new way of telling the story and engaging people,” Corbin said. If Hunt is willing to carry the baton — and use new tools to tell women’s stories — then “fuck yeah, girl, get it.” Beyond Swalwell and Platner During a recent Zoom meeting with Reckoning Action organizers, Hunt was grappling with what comes next. The group was planning several weeks’ worth of social media and Substack content, not just on Swalwell but on other topics that could help push their anti-misogyny message. She was also preparing, ahead of Politico’s Platner story, to face down the same accusations that surfaced during the Swalwell allegations: that she was secretly working with Republicans to sabotage Democrats, that she was a shill for billionaires who want to buy U.S. elections. In his statement denying the allegations, Platner accused “out-of-state establishment operatives” of working to sabotage his campaign, a characterization that Hunt laughed at during her CNN interviews . These are the moments when Hunt refers back to her mission: No predators in power. “Period,” she said. “Women should not be sacrificed at the altar of the next election,” she argued. “If you think that it’s politically strategic to knowingly put someone in power that has a history of violence against women, then you are ceding the moral high ground that we so frequently claim to differentiate ourselves as Democrats.” Hunt, and Reckoning Action at large, has called on Platner to withdraw from the Senate race before a July 13 deadline for Democrats to replace him. Beyond Swalwell and Platner, Hunt has big plans over the next year for Reckoning Action. She wants to hire more organizers, and dreams of getting federal legislation introduced this year to ban politicians who are accused of misconduct from using campaign funds for legal bills. (Swalwell has used more than $300,000 in campaign funds to pay his attorney , according to state financial records.) The team also wants to ramp up messaging around the “Epstein class” and to target vulnerable Republicans in the midterms who voted against making the Epstein files public . Hunt was spending her birthday Tuesday evening recovering from the exhausting media blitz following the Platner revelations and fielding a steady stream of profile requests from reporters. “Eventually, this reckoning media moment, it will end,” Hunt said. “Does that freak me out, that we won’t squeeze every bit of juice out of it that we possibly can? To hold every single predator accountable that we possibly can? Yeah.” For now at least, the reckoning is still trending.

Scott Wiener got heckled at the Trans March. Then he got a ton of donations

State Sen. Scott Wiener may still be recovering from his beratement at Dolores Park , near the Trans March, but Power Play has learned his rough day had a silver lining. Over the weekend, Wiener’s congressional bid saw the highest number of donors in a single day since the campaign launched. “Since Friday, I’ve just had a tidal wave, an outpouring of support,” Wiener told us. “I have hundreds and hundreds of unread text messages I have not gotten to yet, and direct messages and emails and calls from people.” “I’m just really grateful,” he said. A spokesperson for the campaign declined to share the number of donations or the amount raised. We caught up with Wiener at the Alice B. Toklas LGBTQ Democratic Club Pride breakfast, where his viral video was the talk of the annual event, attended by hundreds of volunteer organizers, politicos and their staff under the rainbow-hued lights of the Embarcadero Hyatt. Even gubernatorial hopeful Xavier Becerra had something to say about the incident, telling us, “We want people to be able to express their First Amendment right, but do it in a way that respects one another.” Other support emerged online. Mayor Daniel Lurie condemned the incident as “targeted, hateful, and antisemitic.” The Senate Democratic Caucus called the “harassment and violence” unacceptable, noting that Wiener has advocated for LGBTQ+ people even when it wasn’t politically popular. Retired Politico journalist Carla Marinucci said on X: “I don’t care where you are on the political spectrum — this is an abhorrent attack on an elected official who has dedicated years to public service.” A video of Friday’s incident that went viral, racking up millions of views over the ensuing day, shows Wiener being hounded out of the park by a crowd of people flipping him off and denouncing his past support of Israel. The guy who filmed it, a longtime critic of Wiener named Dimitry Yakoushkin , can be heard shouting: “It sucks because you’ve been wonderful … for trans people, and you’ve been terrible … on Gaza.” When Power Play caught up with Wiener a couple days later, he said his views on Palestine are clear. “I believe it’s a genocide,” he said. “I’m not going to support funding for the Israeli military, and I’m not taking AIPAC money. These are all like crystal-clear positions that people choose to ignore for purely political reasons.” — Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez SAVING IT UP : Lurie has accumulated a Levi Strauss-level fortune of political capital during his 18 months in office. Most elected officials would relish the opportunity of spending it in pursuit of building their political dynasty. Just look at New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani , who leveraged his popularity to establish himself as a political kingmaker with a list of congressional primary wins last week. Instead, Lurie is reluctant to flex his political muscles, choosing instead to stay on the sidelines of San Francisco’s — and California’s — biggest ballot box battles. He didn’t help former Supervisor Joel Engardio , an ally on the board , when he was recalled from office in September. He declined to endorse anyone for California governor. Instead of coming out firmly on one side of the business-vs.-labor tax battle in June, Lurie told voters to reject both Propositions C and D . So it will likely go to a heated contest to replace retiring Rep. Nancy Pelosi in Congress, a once-in-a-generation race with lasting consequences for San Francisco. Lurie has so far avoided adding his name to either Supervisor Connie Chan ’s or Wiener’s endorsement lists — and his spokesperson, Max Szabo, said the mayor has no plans to. Things could always change. And in that case, Lurie would have to weigh the risks and rewards of either choice. Lurie, a moderate Democrat, is more politically aligned with Wiener, a pro-business YIMBY who is backed by some of the same wealthy donors who supported the mayor. But, but, but … Wiener was a staunch ally of former Mayor London Breed , so it’s not unfathomable that Lurie would withhold his endorsement. And, yet … the race is Wiener’s to lose. Lending his support to Wiener and having a like-minded congressman in Washington could benefit Lurie’s political agenda in San Francisco. That would almost certainly fracture Lurie’s ties to Chan, a progressive with whom he’s had an unexpectedly good relationship despite their vast policy differences. Plus, she’s endorsed by Pelosi, a San Francisco icon whom Lurie interned for in college and called a mentor when she announced her retirement in November. Still, Chan did not support Lurie in the 2024 mayoral race. And despite their good working relationship, she has still opposed some of Lurie’s policy priorities, including his signature Family Zoning Plan. Wiener’s and Chan’s campaigns did not respond to requests for comment on whether they had sought the mayor’s endorsement. Szabo declined to comment on Lurie’s decision not to support anyone. But one person familiar with the mayor’s thinking said Lurie “doesn’t alienate people who he needs to work with.” “He understands the importance of maintaining working relationships with everyone on the board,” the person added. “I think he has worked well with [Chan]. And that’s not a foregone conclusion in politics. I would expect that to be the biggest hurdle. Because he and Scott are more aligned.” — Hannah Wiley PROGS HURTIN’ IN SF : Mamdani’s clean sweep of endorsed congressional candidates during the June 23 primary has everyone asking why the heck are progressives doing so well on the East Coast but can’t get their act together in San Francisco . Lincoln Mitchell , a Columbia University politics professor who splits his time between New York City and San Francisco, spoke with Power Play on why the East Coast city is seeing such a lefty renaissance — and why San Francisco isn’t. The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity. How is the progressive voter in New York different from the one in San Francisco? Mamdani’s core base is not the proletariat; it’s the precariat . It’s the 30-year-old who has a college education, maybe even a decent job, because the market is tough, not easy in New York, and maybe is struggling and working at a couple of gigs to make ends meet, and just doesn’t have a big enough apartment if she and her partner want to have a kid. “How am I ever going to afford to raise a kid in New York?” That is different than, “How am I ever going to afford food for the next two weeks?” And it’s the former that are Mamdani’s base. Those people in San Francisco, I think they skew more rightward because they’re all there to work in tech and AI, for the most part. Has San Francisco changed culturally in ways that hurt progressives? I think New York is still a place where young people go with a dream. San Francisco has become a place where people go with a good job in AI. When I was growing up in the ‘80s, I can’t tell you how many times as a kid in San Francisco, some hippie-looking dude saying, “Yeah, I came out here in 1972 because of my girlfriend or the Grateful Dead show.” But now we’re in 1992 and they’re still there, right? That’s not San Francisco anymore. “I came out here because I could get a really good job with Google, but now I’m with Anthropic.” Is there any chance for progressives to regain political territory? If the AI boom continues and suddenly you know just the rental market goes up and up, that income just gets greater, then there’s no chance, right? This just becomes a different city. So, from that respect, no. — Gabriel Lorenzo Greschler WHAT JUST HAPPENED? They’re calling it the craziest ballot negotiation deadline in years. In a frantic dash to avert a transfer tax apocalypse, state legislators introduced one compromise, scrapped it, and introduced and passed another — all in a matter of days. Let’s back up. The powerful Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association qualified a measure for the November state ballot in May that would cap transfer taxes at 0.11% of sale value and require a two-thirds majority for voters to pass new ones. For context, that would slash San Francisco’s transfer tax rate by roughly 98%, wiping out a major source of revenue that the city — and many other California cities, particularly in the Bay Area — relies on to fund public services. So East Bay Assemblymember Buffy Wicks devised a legislative compromise — a bill introduced Monday that would cut most transfer taxes to 1.5% and some to 3% — in the hopes that she could convince HJTA to pull its measure. Her solution would still mean cutting SF’s 6% transfer tax in half, and housing justice advocates hated it. HJTA wasn’t sold either , and president Jon Coupal announced his group’s measure was staying on the ballot. By Thursday — the deadline to finalize ballot measures for November — Wicks’ bill was dead, and a new deal was on the table: a constitutional amendment requiring a two-thirds vote to approve future transfer taxes while leaving existing ones untouched. The legislature quickly approved it, and Coupal agreed to withdraw the original initiative. The compromise pleased almost no one. Anti-tax hardliners wanted the original measure to stay on the ballot. Progressives argued lawmakers should have fought it instead of negotiating. Even some YIMBYs who wanted existing transfer taxes reduced came away disappointed. “Politics is often about navigating imperfect choices. Today’s vote protects critical local funding and removes a catastrophic threat to the fiscal health of our cities,” Wicks said in a statement. But there is one thing everyone can agree on, expressed best by tenant advocate Shanti Singh who was in Sacramento Thursday: “Today has been the biggest clusterfuck I’ve seen in six years of doing this.” — Max Harrison-Caldwell POLITICS IS IN VOGUE: City Hall opened its doors to an illustrious guest this week: Fashion icon and former editor-in-chief of Vogue , Anna Wintour . Wintour was spotted leaving City Hall on Thursday afternoon with her swagged-out entourage before ducking into a black luxe SUV, according to a City Hall employee. A few moments later, the mayor’s Chief of Staff, Staci Slaughter , exited the building. The Mayor’s office declined to comment, but a spokesperson for Conde Nast confirmed that the reason for Wintour’s visit revolved around Vogue’s exploration of having Vogue World in SF, “Anna’s trip is an exploratory one to listen/learn,” they said, The night prior, Wintour co-hosted a party at Penny Coulter , the mayor’s chief of protocol at her home in Presidio Heights to some six dozen of the city’s biggest power players from Garry Tan and Paul Pelosi to Democratic megadonor Susie Tompkins Buell . Read more in The Waggle here . — Sam Mondros DOUBLE YOUR DOLLAR: San Francisco’s budget is finalized, with little fanfare and little controversy. The process got wrapped up on Thursday, and in a surprise to any veteran of the usual long nights and harried weekends, this was tied up in a bow rather quickly. Look for Chan to crow about a few budget wins on the congressional campaign trail: Free City College’s debt relief fund for impoverished students was restored, and nonprofits that were facing massive layoffs are now facing far less draconian cuts. The Mayor’s Office also added back funding for the Board of Supervisors staff and the City Controller’s Office. One group within the city government that not only emerged unscathed but came out ahead in the mayor’s budget is the Mayor’s Office itself. Its salaries and benefits costs totaled $9.2 million under Mayor London Breed in the 2023-24 fiscal year. By the 2027-28 fiscal year, Lurie’s budget has them reaching $10.7 million. Now, to be fair, some of that owes to cost-of-living increases. But not all of it. Lurie instituted a new policy chief structure, with top-tier mayor’s office staffers advising the mayor on key areas, such as public safety and homelessness. That came with a cost — under Breed’s administration, only four mayoral staffers busted the $200,000 salary range (not counting Breed herself). Under Lurie, eight staffers now bust $200,000. As of this week, according to the San Francisco Department of Human Resources, the mayoral staff at the top of the range include Alicia John Baptiste at $276,432, Kunal Modi at $276,432, Ned Segal at $276,432, Staci Slaughter at $276,432, Jessica Macleod at $253,739, Sophia Kittler at $222,622, Aly Bonde at $217,214, and Han Zou at $207,085. — J.F.R.

The ethnic studies class that taught Sydney Sweeney, Elon Musk and political activism

Last July, an American Eagle ad of a blonde-haired, blue-eyed actress in head-to-toe denim closed on a pun: “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.” Critics called it a racist dog whistle. Others thought the outrage was overblown. The company’s stock price soared . Within weeks it had become a ninth-grade lesson at San Francisco’s Washington High School. A presentation slide from three of the school’s ethnic studies classes, a year-long graduation requirement at the San Francisco Unified School District since 2024-25, claims that the pun implies that Sweeney’s white DNA makes her “more beautiful.” The slide labels the premise “eugenics,” asserts the ad is “oppressive,” and sits “in a racist political context with [Sweeney] being a Trump supporter.” The slide is one of hundreds of class materials posted on the Google Classroom platform of Washington High ethnic studies teacher Sarita Lavin that offer observations on culture-war issues, U.S. history, and the power of political activism. SFUSD teachers are permitted to use their own supplemental materials, but Lavin’s lessons largely replace the “Voices” curriculum. The “Voices” textbook shows up in the materials only a few times over the course of the year; on one occasion, students were asked to critique it. Controversy has sometimes followed the district’s ethnic studies course. Last spring, the district’s homegrown ethnic studies curriculum came under fire for what some viewed as a political agenda. Superintendent Maria Su planned to pause the class for a year while the district reviewed alternative curricula. Instead, the district piloted publisher Gibbs Smith’s “Voices: An Ethnic Studies Survey” at all schools this year before adopting it permanently in April after a controversial review process . As the school year comes to a close, SFUSD finds itself under a federal investigation for its policies and curriculum by a Republican-led House committee. Su will testify Wednesday , along with the leaders of schools in Chicago and Virginia’s Loudon County, on how the district handles teaching about race, gender, and identity. The hearing, “Breaking Trust: Attacks on Parental Rights, Inappropriate Content, and Legal Abuses in America’s Schools,” is part of a broader federal campaign to root out “wokeness” in public agencies, inspired by the second Trump administration. Audra McGeorge, a committee spokesperson, told The Standard specific targets include professional development documents that label perfectionism and individualism as characteristics of “white supremacy culture.” Inside the classroom Starting in 2025-26, SFUSD created rules around supplemental materials, which are required to be aligned with district goals, curriculum objectives, and academic standards. The process includes a feedback form with which parents can request a district review of the materials. If materials are under review, then they are prohibited from being used in the classroom until a final determination is made. “Any time we receive a question or concern, we conduct an appropriate review,” said Laura Dudnick, SFUSD’s communications director. “Because this matter may involve personnel-related issues, we cannot comment on specific details.” Most of Lavin’s class is a discussion of the culture and traditions of ethnic groups, from food to art, along with the U.S.’ historic treatment of minority populations. Another topic that Lavin’s class dealt with was the school’s namesake, George Washington. The “Voices” curriculum portrays some of the complexity of Washington’s legacy, including his “scorched earth” strategy in the Revolutionary War. Lavin’s materials take a different approach. One slide walks students through Washington’s response to “No taxation without representation” — “He was the slave torturing leader of the Revolution,” it reads. “The British were not giving him the ballot, so he gave them the bullet.” “Americans LOVE this story,” it continues, and “celebrate on the 4th of July, have BBQs and blow things up because we just LOVE the idea of a man FIGHTING for his people’s freedom! It’s very American!” Another slide lists the names and ages of people Washington enslaved. Lavin could not be reached for comment. The lesson echoes prior controversies at Washington High. In 2019, the school board voted to paint over a 13-panel, 1,600-square-foot mural that depicted Washington as a slaveowner and tyrant against the Native American population. In 2021, the board voted to rename Washington and 43 other schools after entities with no association to racism or slavery. Both efforts were reversed after the three board members which were eligible for a recall were all overwhelmingly recalled in 2022. Another assignment from Lavin’s class asks students to chart “at least 12 ways you see hegemony in your life today” and to identify “something oppressive everyone accepts.” A slide defines hegemony as “oppression society treats as normal.” Examples listed include “white women in public schools,” “baby boomers in U.S. government,” and “English-only instruction.” Another slide labels the male/female gender binary as “hegemonic.” Two parents who sat on the district’s curriculum review committee for “Voices” — and raised concerns — reviewed Lavin’s materials at The Standard’s request. Dana Bernstein, who has taught history at San Jose City College for 25 years, described the materials as “worse than ‘Voices,’” and said they present the framing of oppression versus resistance “as fact.” Scott Kravitz, another SFUSD parent, rejected the idea that the lessons depart from the “Voices” curriculum, which he said “opens the door to this one-sided narrative with a focus on activism and violent rebellion.” Modern-day activism The class materials also wade into local controversies. One slide asks students how Dr. Martin Luther King would have felt about DA Brooke Jenkins “charging 78 peaceful protesters on the Bay Bridge with multiple trumped up charges.” By the time the slide was shown in class, those protesters had taken a plea deal of five hours of community service and restitution in exchange for dropped charges. Another contemporary issue in the class materials deals with “Karen.” Slides walk students through real and hypothetical scenarios in which a nosy middle-aged white woman confronts a Black person in a park. The class’s syllabus states that the purpose of the course is to train students on how to carry on the actions of their “revolutionary ancestors.” “In this class, students will… examine systems of power, creatively and collaboratively studying how activists of the past and of today have resisted these systems,” the syllabus says. “Most importantly, they will apply their knowledge to their lives to take action on both a personal and community wide scale, will develop knowledge (and love) of self, practice solidarity and pursue self determination.” At least one assignment instructs students to engage in political activism. Students are directed to email a government official about an issue affecting Latine (a term used in the class for Latinos) people, choosing from a suggested topic list, including U.S.imperialism in Latin America, immigration enforcement, and sanctuary schools and cities. The students had to provide a screenshot proving they had sent the email. An example letter Lavin provided is addressed to Gov. Gavin Newsom, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, and Sens. Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla — whom the letter incorrectly identifies as a congressman. “My name is Sarita Lavin and I am a US citizen writing to you today to express my deep disgust and disappointment with the current treatment of unaccompanied minors in our nation,” the letter begins. Power and capital One slide, titled “Cops Aren’t Workers,” tells students that police “unions” “are not true unions,” describing them as having “historically been against workers” and existing to “protect the interests of wealthy/powerful bosses over the people.” The prior slide displays a grid of corporate logos, including those of Target, Costco, and Coca-Cola, alongside the claim that “all of these companies use forced prison labor (aka slavery) to make products.” Another slide displays the faces of tech CEOs Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sundar Pichai — with Elon Musk’s face crossed out and replaced by an explosion. Musk and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon are called “Nazis.” The course materials also address the topic of ethnic studies teaching. One slide catalogs “arguments made by the anti-[ethnic studies] crowd in SF,” including claims that it is “anti-white racism” and that it “teaches students to be political radicals and activists.” Lavin told KQED in September that “Voices” is flawed because “it has no mention of trans people or queer people or their struggles, which is pretty appalling considering the student populations we serve and the fact that we are in San Francisco, which has been a historic hub for queer resistance and rights.” A week earlier, dozens of SFUSD employees spoke at the Aug. 26 board meeting on the “Voices” curriculum, and it was approved. Among them was Lavin, who said ethnic studies is the only academic intervention proved effective for the district’s Black students. “I would like to ask the board — to ask Maria Su — have you ever been to an ethnic studies class before you declared it problematic?” Lavin said. “A lot of things have been said about ethnic studies, mischaracterizing ethnic studies — screenshots pulled out of who knows where.”

‘No idea what she’s doing’: Staff of SF’s disaster department turns against boss

There’s a revolt inside San Francisco’s emergency department. Staffers are calling into question the competence of a leader who played a critical role during the city’s COVID-19 response and a mass blackout, and who would oversee the city’s response in the event of an earthquake. Employees of the Department of Emergency Management say Executive Director Mary Ellen Carroll displayed a lack of knowledge during the widespread Pacific Gas & Electric outage in December and is laying off a key financial leader while foisting that work onto unqualified subordinates. They further allege that Carroll is cutting back staff at an emergency watch center that serves as eyes and ears to head off the city’s worst disasters. A petition is circulating within the agency alleging a “vote of no confidence” in Carroll’s leadership. A growing number of the staff wants Mayor Daniel Lurie to toss out Carroll. “She doesn’t have any idea of what she’s actually doing,” one staffer alleged, in a message echoed by others who spoke to The Standard. “She’s not interested in knowing what the staff is supposed to do.” Another said Carroll “always has questions” about what various divisions within the DEM do and how they function, adding, “There’s always a hesitation, a delay, and long discussion. It doesn’t really feel good. It seems she isn’t fit for the job anymore, if she ever was.” Are you a City Hall worker? We want to hear from you. Email powerplay@sfstandard.com to get in touch. The complaints come as San Francisco’s emergency management apparatus faces mounting pressure from federal funding cuts and citywide layoffs. The department — unlike others in the city — has almost no vacant positions to eliminate. When tens of thousands of residents lost power on a Saturday in December, Carroll was at a hair salon, internal communications reveal — and her first message to the department’s response thread came roughly an hour and 20 minutes after coordination began. Current and former employees say leadership failures and staffing reductions are undermining the department’s ability to coordinate the city’s emergency response. More than half a dozen current and former staffers came forward to The Standard under the condition of anonymity. “We’re really genuinely worried about the state of the city if a big disaster happens,” one said, “whether it’s a cyber attack or a huge earthquake that could happen any day now. It’s pretty horrible.” While it’s unclear how many have signed the petition, news of the document has spread widely among emergency personnel, with staffers across multiple divisions saying their peers are all discussing it. Flyers were left on the floors of various rooms of the department with a QR code linking to the petition. “Over the course of her tenure, it has become increasingly clear that Ms. Carroll lacks the essential knowledge and operational understanding of critical public safety functions,” the petition states. Those functions include 911 dispatch, the disbursement of Bay Area homeland security grants, and emergency medical services. “These are not peripheral areas of our mission, they are core services, and the absence of informed leadership places the public at unnecessary risk.” Jackie Thornhill, a spokesperson for the Department of Emergency Management, denied the claims. “DEM leadership, including Director Carroll, are in constant communication with staff from all divisions and work 24/7/365 to lead the Department through San Francisco’s everyday and not so everyday emergencies,” Thornhill said. “We staffed up dispatch and are responding to 911 calls faster than we have in years, and DEM continues to coordinate all major emergency activations.” Carroll was appointed to the position by London Breed in 2018 after serving at the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. Her last reported salary, in 2024, was $327,000, according to Transparent California. Carroll is also a member of the board leading the Big City Emergency Management Association, which advocates for the interests of emergency departments across the nation. Concerns around Carroll’s competency bubbled to the surface among widespread dissatisfaction over this year’s impending City Hall layoffs. San Francisco’s $643 million budget deficit has led Lurie to send out 127 pink slips across city agencies, including DEM. The department was already in a troubled financial position after President Donald Trump cut federal counterterrorism dollars disbursed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency , which DEM sends across the Bay Area. While other city departments fended off Lurie’s layoffs by eliminating vacant positions, DEM has long maintained a 1% job vacancy rate, Thornhill said, leaving few alternatives when faced with budget reductions. Among those layoffs were personnel in the department’s emergency watch center, described by the city as a central information hub for emergency communications and notifications. The watch center is essentially the government’s disaster watchdog, monitoring emergency requests and escalating issues when they reach the level of a disaster. As The Standard’s politics newsletter, Power Play, reported , the staff of four full-time employees has been reduced to two. That it is too few when trying to provide the backbone of emergency response, staffers say. The watch center is supposed to be operational 24/7, and while it never reached the goal of full coverage, the staff shortage has reduced working hours to 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., then later to one eight-hour shift. On-call staff cover off hours, though they do not monitor emergencies at the same level. “We’re not as aware of what’s going on in the city because of these gaps,” one staffer said. “When the next big disaster emergency happens, everyone will wonder” why the city’s emergency response would face slowdowns, one staffer alleged. “The board of supervisors, even the mayor — are they OK with a fatality? Is that what it takes to recognize [this is] critical?” Thornhill countered that some cities have no watch center at all and that the center provides an additional layer of monitoring to emergency situations. One of the most concerning examples of Carroll’s incompetency, staffers say, arose during the PG&E blackout in December. Despite her years heading the department, Carroll didn’t know how to access a needed conference room and set up an emergency operations center to coordinate the city’s response. She did not know which staff from across the city should be included. On a vital multi-department call on the afternoon of the outage, roughly 30 people initially attended out of a total of 80 who were invited. Coordinating city departments is one of DEM’s key responsibilities. Lurie himself called out the lack of some key personnel. One staffer recalled him saying at the meeting, “This is important; every department should be here.’’ The Standard reviewed digital records of the call’s attendance to verify the claim and spoke with others who verified the mayor’s concern. The mayor’s spokesperson, Charles Lutvak, said Lurie’s comment at the meeting did not stand out as significant in the crisis response. City government ultimately stepped up to ensure San Franciscans got what they needed in a crisis, he said. Some people who were absent from the call were optional attendees. Department staffers view Carroll’s performance differently. “When the extended power outage happened, she was running around with her head cut off,” one said. WhatsApp messages obtained by The Standard through a public records request show that Carroll’s first response in a leadership chat coordinating response to the outage came roughly an hour and 20 minutes after the team began. The watch center flagged 15,000 San Francisco households losing power. “I am down the street on Haight getting my hair cut,” Carroll wrote to the leadership team. “As soon as I am done I will swing over to Turk to monitor and assess what we may need to do.” An hour later, the outage had spread to 129,000 PG&E customers. The texts show that Carroll delegated responsibilities for establishing emergency provisions for neighborhoods. She led efforts to speak directly with PG&E leadership and the mayor’s office and advised staff on how to convey the severity of the incident to the media. Thornhill said the message thread doesn’t represent all of Carroll’s actions during the blackout and that she led the initial incident management calls that coordinated between the mayor’s office and public safety departments. Thornhill added that PG&E outages affecting more than 1,000 customers are routine, occurring every few months, and that the severity of the incident did not become apparent until later. Separately, some are concerned about the department’s ability to process federal funding after Carroll laid off a division’s chief financial officer. The Trump administration has slow-rolled FEMA emergency grant funding, which was initially aimed at counterterrorism but later used more broadly to address disasters. Since the duties of the laid-off CFO who disburses those funds still need to be performed, Carroll asked two staffers in a lower job classification to take on those responsibilities. Some are concerned that those low-level analysts are not qualified to perform such a task, which requires additional training. “There’s a lot of mistrust in the organization on the whole because of Mary Ellen’s behavior,” one staffer said. Between the layoffs and allegations, “it creates a lot of mistrust, and instead of doing the work, people are trying to figure out what’s going on around here.”

Scott Wiener wins big in primary, promises to fight ‘disaster of a regime’ in Congress

State Sen. Scott Wiener on Tuesday night looked and sounded like a man who’s ready for Congress. And if he goes on to win the general election in November, he does not plan to spend his time in the House sitting quiet. “I’m polite, but I’m not quiet,” Wiener told a crowd of roughly 300 supporters after taking a commanding lead in the polls over Supervisor Connie Chan and tech centimillionaire Saikat Chakrabarti in the primary contest to succeed Rep. Nancy Pelosi as San Francisco’s representative. “I will not wait my turn.” “The people of San Francisco sent a very clear message. And the message has been received,” Wiener said. “San Franciscans are ready for bold, forward-looking leadership. For real results, not just words. And a new generation of leaders, a new generation ready to take on the hardest issues facing our country.” Continuing the four-decade legacy of the liberal lioness Pelosi, Wiener vowed to take on the Trump administration’s “disaster of a regime” that has “commandeered this country, that is tearing down our democracy and the rule of law, that is getting us into disastrous wars.” But he also said he refused to “go back to the pre-Trump status quo” and pledged to push the party in a more daring direction on issues like healthcare and transgender rights and to take a stronger stance on the “unforgivable” immigration policies being pushed by the White House. “We need to have our immigrant neighbors’ backs,” he said. “And the same goes for our LGBTQ community, particularly our trans community. Because in San Francisco, how we roll is we have people’s backs. Even when it’s unpopular. “We need to go to the mat for trans people,” he added. “We are not going to let them eliminate trans people.” Wiener noted that his early primary success does not guarantee victory in the general. He acknowledged that he is up against “institutional” challenges. Supervisor Connie Chan, who in early results appeared headed to a head-to-head with Wiener in November, was endorsed by Pelosi, a San Francisco icon with wealthy donors and powerful political players on speed dial. “When I first ran for supervisor, and parallel to today, I had a whole bunch of institutional stuff against me. And we have that again today,” Wiener said. “And we did the work, and we made the case and won, and we’re going to win this race as well.” Wiener said he is expecting a competitive race in November, likely against Chan, who had virtually doubled Chakrabarti’s votes with 29% of precincts reporting Tuesday night. “She and I are very different,” he said of Chan. “I am known for what I have done. She is known for what’s she’s opposed. Whether it’s transit or housing or car-free JFK or whatever the case may be. And San Franciscans want a forward-looking vision.” He thanked his competitors for participating in the Democratic process and what was a “spirited primary.” “But it’s San Francisco, so we would not have it any other way,” he said.

Mayor Lurie releases his budget next week. Here’s how Trump royally screwed it

More and more, San Francisco’s 2026 budget process is resembling a slasher flick. Shadows are dancing across City Hall’s marble-wrought grand staircase, with President Donald Trump threatening to leap into view, ready to gouge hundreds of millions from the city’s coffers. The threat is real: Roughly $2 billion of San Francisco’s $16 billion budget flows from Washington, funding hundreds of grant programs across nearly every city department. Trump has already started turning off the tap. With a $643 million deficit looming, Mayor Daniel Lurie has days to reveal how the city absorbs the pain — and who feels it most. Trump has already made real cuts to healthcare. And while San Francisco has fought back — filing more than a dozen lawsuits against the administration and winning most of them so far — a single appellate loss could imperil billions. Fear that Trump may further upend any number of federal revenue streams undergirds every hard fiscal choice in front of Lurie. On June 1, the mayor will propose his draft budget to the Board of Supervisors and voters, revealing the true extent of the bloodletting. Trump’s policy choices are projected to disenroll up to 45,000 San Franciscans from healthcare and tens of thousands from food stamps. To protect those programs, Lurie is trimming across all 55 city departments rather than gutting public health and human services, his budget director, Sophia Kittler, told The Standard. “This is a loss to the whole city,” Kittler said. “We’re treating it as a citywide deficit.” The impacts are already here. Government layoffs loom, and nonprofit social safety-net programs know they face the chopping block. In anticipation of deep layoffs, labor has signaled a historic general strike is possible next year. In the meantime, tens of thousands of San Franciscans may lose crucial services, from food stamps to doulas. So what can San Francisco do to save itself? And how devastating will the impacts be? The answers are uncertain, but the city is preparing anyway. Threats in the shadows Since it’s a city and a county, San Francisco is uniquely vulnerable to federal meddling. Large counties often administer healthcare, serving as a pass-through for federal funding, creating a single vulnerable pot of money. But the city also depends on federal and state grants, both of which are primarily funded by the federal government. Trump could whisk much of it away with the stroke of a pen or the tap of a button on his social media platform, Truth Social . Much of it is also at risk in court. San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu is litigating more than a dozen lawsuits against the federal government, most of which touch on funding to the city. “Our legal efforts to defend our communities and protect our federal funding are paying off,” Chiu said in a statement. “We have seen many early wins in the lower courts, preserving billions of dollars in federal funding for our city.” Yet the risk still persists. The largest of these suits seeks to challenge the Trump administration’s effort to axe grants for any program it deems related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. As Chiu’s office wrote , Trump’s rules sought to instill his anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ+, anti-choice, and anti-equity policy preferences on federal spending. A court granted a preliminary injunction against Trump imposing new restrictions on those grants last year, Chiu’s office said the decision preserved billions in funding that help San Francisco support early childhood development, critical health services, safe and effective transportation, and housing to our most vulnerable. Each lawsuit represents a distinct fiscal vulnerability, a situation that insiders speculate will prompt Lurie to budget cautiously. He doesn’t have much room for error — the city has about $433 million in its federal-risk reserve fund, which Lurie and the Board of Supervisors created last year. If the worst federal funding losses happen, it won’t be enough. One Big Beautiful screw you You might’ve noticed that downtown still isn’t the hotbed it once was. That carries economic implications, since the city largely fills its general fund coffers from taxes generated by employee-filled high rises, including property taxes. In that weakened economic state came Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act , also known as H.R. 1, which threatens to see tens of thousands of San Franciscans lose Medi-Cal coverage and CalFresh food access — which in turn will prompt a roughly $300 million, two-year loss in federal payments to San Francisco to administer those programs locally. It isn’t a straight cut. Instead, the legislation implemented stricter work and filing requirements and is projected to cause people to lose their care. The Lurie administration budgeted $34 million to help those people navigate stricter filing requirements and retain access to Medi-Cal and CalFresh, but it remains to be seen how successful the effort will be. The funding losses primarily hit the Department of Public Health and the Human Services Agency. Those program losses equal roughly half of the city’s $643 million budget deficit. Lurie’s office chose to distribute the pain of that funding loss across the city’s 55 or so departments. Kittler said the other choice would be to decimate public health programs and food stamps, and that wasn’t a choice at all. Stemming the bleeding The Board of Supervisors will haggle with the mayor over budget details throughout June. There aren’t many choices before them. The city can either cut its funding or increase its revenue. Both choices carry risk. As nonprofit leaders have told The Standard, Lurie’s intention to cut community social service programs may have downstream impacts: if nonprofits that help tenants fight their evictions lose funding, for instance, more people may pressure homeless services in the coming months. Supervisor Conie Chan, the budget chair, laid out another plan in an early-May budget briefing with reporters. She said San Francisco shouldn’t live in fear of D.C. “You can absolutely plan that way. But then what you will end up with is just cuts and cuts and cuts,” Chan said. Instead, she said, Lurie should dip into reserves until 2028, when the Overpaid CEO Tax would begin generating an estimated $300 million annually. Dipping into reserves could leave San Francisco vulnerable to other Trump cuts, which may be anathema to risk-averse Lurie. It is also wholly dependent on voters approving the tax in June. Lurie opposed the tax. But if it does pass, he’ll have one more tool to forestall the worst of Trump’s cuts, whether he wanted it or not.

Lurie promised a permitting overhaul. Its builders say it was troubled from the start

Soon after Mayor Daniel Lurie took office in January 2025, he set out to solve a problem that affects nearly every San Francisco resident and business: the nightmare of getting a permit. Lurie’s effort to overhaul the permitting system, a tangled mess of antiquated software and arcane procedures that has long been the bane of the city’s homeowners, contractors, business owners, and tradespeople, culminated last summer with the announcement of a $5.9 million contract for a San Francisco-based tech company called OpenGov. The promise: a hassle-free, one-stop, online shop that Lurie branded “ PermitSF .” OpenGov’s contract with the city, signed in October, did not come without controversy. The Standard reported that a majority of city staffers preferred a different software, claiming OpenGov lacked necessary features. Additionally, the company was found to have eyebrow-raising links to Lurie and some of his circle. The mayor’s office denied any favoritism, insisting that OpenGov was the only company capable of meeting the city’s aggressive timeline for launching PermitSF. Lurie had given the city until February 2026 to get some form of new system working. But the high-stakes project has been beset with extensive delays and concerns over key deficiencies in OpenGov’s software, according to documents obtained by The Standard and interviews with five former OpenGov employees and current city staffers. The delays in implementing the new permitting system should come as no surprise, the former OpenGov employees say: From the beginning of the city’s expedited, no-bid contracting process, the company harbored doubts about the city’s timeline. The former staffers said delays were almost a certainty, as OpenGov had never undertaken such a large or complex project. Are you a City Hall employee? We’d love to get in touch. Email powerplay@sfstandard.com. According to the contract signed by the city , 15 types of permits — for projects ranging from kitchen and bath remodels to fire alarm and sprinklers — were to be transferred from San Francisco’s old system to the PermitSF platform by March. The new, OpenGov-powered platform would allow residents to file for those permits online, rather than having to visit the Permit Center. As of Tuesday, about two months after the deadline, only seven of the permits are available on PermitSF . The rest are scheduled to go live by June, according to the company. But a city official overseeing the project told The Standard not to expect all of those permits to be available on the platform before the end of summer. The halting progress, alongside issues with the software’s capabilities raised by city employees, renews a critical question: Was OpenGov the right company for one of the most technically complicated projects the city has undertaken in recent years? For some former OpenGov employees, the answer is an unequivocal no. “Our system was not prepared for it,” said one ex-staffer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisals. “When they go for these deals, they just promise, promise, promise. … There was knowledge that this was a much bigger lift than what was going to be possible.” Another added: “We didn’t have any of the stuff that we promised [the city]. … The money was very important to [the company]. I think it was more the prestige for doing it for a big city like San Francisco.” Some city employees concur that OpenGov’s permitting software lacks important features, leading to missed deadlines and a rush by the mayor’s office to celebrate progress on PermitSF even as the system remains limited. “It’s been amateur hour, to be honest. I’ve never seen anything like this before,” said one city worker. “The ability to spin absolute failures as success is absolutely wild to me.” Lurie said in a statement, “It’s clear our new portal is working.” He added, “We’re seeing strong adoption, faster processing, and more flexibility for applicants, exactly what San Francisco needs to move projects forward. By modernizing how permits are submitted and reviewed, we’re making life easier for San Franciscans and helping accelerate the housing and investment our city needs.” In a statement, a company spokesperson said, “OpenGov remains committed to supporting San Francisco’s permitting transformation and working alongside its teams to deliver the project.” The company deferred questions about the project’s timelines and contract to the city. Questions about the software’s efficacy come at a crucial moment for both the company and the Lurie administration. OpenGov’s contract is up for renewal, with members of the Civil Service Commission set to vote Monday on a new $6.5 million, six-year contract that is subject to the approval of the Board of Supervisors. The proposal is already facing objections from IFPTE Local 21, a union that represents more than 13,000 city employees and has been critical of Lurie’s leadership at times, including his decision to lay off 127 city workers to help close a $643 million budget deficit. Lurie has staked much on the project's success. In February, his office trumpeted the system’s launch , signaling to voters that he was delivering on one of the pillars of his 2024 mayoral campaign of making government more efficient. However, as with the campaign promise to create 1,500 shelter beds in six months , City Hall has quietly walked back some of Lurie’s ambitious targets. Elizabeth Watty, director of current planning and one of the managers of PermitSF, admitted that there have been hiccups in the project’s rollout. “If we were to do it over again, we probably would have selected different things to work on for this first year,” she said, referring to the types of permits the city prioritized for launch. “Once you start digging in, you’re like, oh, it’d be great if we could actually launch this instead. But this was enumerated in the contract.” But Watty defended the city’s adoption of the OpenGov-built platform, describing the “first phase” as “foundational” to the city’s overhaul of an antiquated system. “I think we’re really excited to be able to kick off phase two with all those lessons learned under our belt, too, and have this opportunity to structure the contract in a way that gives us more of that nimbleness to do it the right way for permitting to be successful,” she said. Michelle Reynolds, a spokesperson for the Office of Small Business, one of the departments involved in PermitSF’s execution, said the city’s permitting is “notoriously complex,” and the initial February launch was undertaken in four months, something the city “has been trying to do for over 15 years.” “ OpenGov’s approach is to use their pre-built tool as a foundation, off of which they develop additional features that San Francisco needs,” she said. “That is not a limitation, it’s a deliberate risk-management strategy, and it’s already working.” Reynolds said the new contract will require OpenGov to train city staff to maintain the software indefinitely. The city projects it will be “cost neutral” by the fourth year of the contract, she said, because of savings through letting go of old permitting systems. A contract leads to an inquiry Software procurement doesn’t usually court controversy. But that wasn’t the case with OpenGov, which was founded in 2012 by former CEO Zac Bookman and conservative entrepreneur Joe Lonsdale. The company, which was acquired by cable conglomerate Cox Enterprises in a $1.8 billion deal in 2024, touts 2,000 government clients, for whom it modernizes the old, creaky software that many cities and states depend on. In addition to streamlining permitting, the company builds out systems to manage licensing, budgets, procurement, and tax and revenue collection. When Lurie launched his permit reform initiative at the beginning of 2025, the search for a software provider began. Watty; Ned Segal, the mayor’s chief of housing and economic development; and Florence Simon, the office’s former innovation director ( who was fired in March ), sought a company that could take on the complex endeavor of overhauling a system that, in Mission Local columnist Joe Eskenazi’s words , was so old, “it wouldn’t even get carded.” San Francisco has hundreds of permit types, and a whopping 20 software programs have been used to coordinate their approval across multiple departments — a migraine-inducing exercise that Lurie and others have argued inhibits business and lowers confidence in local government. A winner in the PermitSF sweepstakes was announced in the summer. “We’re just trying to make life easier, more efficient, more effective, and deliver faster for the people of San Francisco,” Lurie said in an Instagram post Aug. 26 about the selection of OpenGov. However, questions quickly surfaced about the company’s selection. The mayor’s office never issued a competitive bid, arguing that doing so would have delayed the self-imposed February deadline. Instead, it asked dozens of software companies to showcase their products to the city, an informal process known as a “request for information,” rather than the traditional bidding procedure known as a “request for proposal.” In April 2025, a month before the city notified companies that it was looking for a permitting solution, Segal, the former COO of Twitter, introduced OpenGov’s then-CEO to another city official. “Zac can help us think through permitting technology,” Segal said in an email, adding a smiley face. “Zac has been patiently waiting for the right partner.” By July, Segal and his team had narrowed the competition to two companies: OpenGov and Vancouver-based Clariti. Documents obtained by The Standard show that city staffers across departments flagged OpenGov as having “gaps so significant” in its features that it “shouldn’t be considered” and expressed concerns about the product’s cost. A majority of staff preferred Clariti, though there were worries about one department’s past experiences with the Canadian company. The Standard reported on the links between OpenGov and Lurie in October. Katherine August-deWilde, who leads the Partnership for San Francisco , a business group that provides policy advice to the mayor, was an adviser to OpenGov at the time of the deal. (August-deWilde no longer remains an “active” adviser to the company, a spokesperson said.) Lonsdale and Bookman, who stepped down as CEO in April and now serves as chairman emeritus, have collectively given tens of thousands of dollars over the past decade to Tipping Point Community, the nonprofit Lurie founded. Financial records show that Lurie and his family held investments in OpenGov through a fund overseen by another Tipping Point donor. In response to these revelations, Supervisor Jackie Fielder, who has sparred with Lurie during his mayoral tenure and remains wary of tech’s power in the city, launched an inquiry in November into how the OpenGov contract was procured. (Fielder went on leave in April , citing mental health issues, and is expected to return in June.) The Standard obtained a draft version of the Board of Supervisors’ budget and legislative analyst report, which has not been released publicly, finding that the OpenGov contract was eight times larger than the average new software contract procured through the same no-bid process. While investigators found the selection process did not violate city requirements, the report states it did not abide by best practices and that the procurement of OpenGov was “less transparent.” The report’s authors urged the board to adopt a policy prohibiting the procurement methods used by the mayor’s office. A small but working product The budget and legislative analyst’s report pointed out another aspect of the deal: The mayor’s office’s “key justification” for the no-bid contract was that OpenGov was the only company that could meet its deadlines. But records released on a weekly basis by the company show that those deadlines haven’t been met. The OpenGov contract was supposed to deliver the 15 permit types on a new system by March 16. On that date , the company released an update spelling out that there would be an eight- to 14-week “extension for remaining workflows.” Today, the public can obtain permits through PermitSF for window, door, and siding replacements; fire alarms; sprinklers and water flow; special events; and contractor authorization. According to the city, between February and April, 772 permits were processed through the new platform — 10.2% of all permits issued during that period. Though its reach is limited, some front-line city staffers who are working with PermitSF said the platform has made their jobs easier. “We do the same type of review, we do the same type of back and forth with applicants,” said Dakota Spycher, a staff member of the planning department. “It’s just all in one system. We don’t have to write on [a] physical form. We don’t have to enter information into a system that was created in the ’90s, and we don’t have to create a new record ourselves. So it’s really streamlined.” Spycher pointed out that he can access the platform remotely, allowing him to tackle an influx of permit applications even if he isn’t at the Permit Center, an option that wasn’t available before. Another SF Planning employee said she can spend more time with customers answering questions. The mayor’s office pointed to data that it says shows success: Fewer people are going to the Permit Center, and wait times to get a permit from the San Francisco Fire Department have decreased from an average of 30 minutes to 14 minutes. But there are many types of permits not yet on OpenGov’s platform: reroofing, solar, electrical, kitchen and bath remodel, and a handful of others that require more technical work than those that went online in February. Beyond that, there are many more complicated permit types to transfer to the new system in the coming years. Reynolds from the Office of Small Business said sign and reroofing will be completed in June, “with additional permit types rolling out shortly after.” The delays, said city employees, can be attributed in part to the software’s limited or lackluster features related to customization, data access, and reporting and analytics. City staff have put together a list of more than 50 enhancements they say the software needs, according to a copy of the internal document obtained by The Standard. The issues include problems with basic labeling, gaps in the permissions controls governing who can edit data in the system, and a lack of integration with the city’s existing systems. One former OpenGov employee agreed with the city staffers’ sentiments, saying the company is “not even close” to its competitors in terms of feature parity. The person estimated that OpenGov software can handle approximately 25% of what other govtech firms, like Clariti and Tyler Technologies, can do. Said one current city employee: “I think San Francisco is funding the research and development work of OpenGov.”

5 takeaways from The Standard’s investigation into Lurie’s permit project

Obtaining a business or residential permit in San Francisco is like that check-engine light on your car: a big fix that you keep putting off, even though you need to do it. Since taking office in January 2025, Mayor Daniel Lurie has attempted to bring the city’s byzantine permitting system into the shop, promising a one-stop, modernized platform, PermitSF, that would make life easier for residents and businesses. But an investigation by The Standard reveals that the project has faced significant setbacks. Former employees of OpenGov, the firm hired to oversee the overhaul under controversial circumstances , said the govtech company had internal doubts about the city’s deadlines. City employees said the software, which was procured through a no-bid contract, lacks critical features that have led to delays in the permitting revamp — criticism that mirrors concerns voiced last summer when the mayor’s office was choosing software for the project. Lurie had given the city a year to get a new permitting system up and running, and his office said OpenGov was the only company that could meet the aggressive timeline. OpenGov’s $5.9 million contract with the city — eight times higher than the average new software contract procured through no-bid contracts — was supposed to deliver a full slate of permits on the new platform by March. Roughly two months later, less than half are available on the website. “It’s been amateur hour, to be honest. I’ve never seen anything like this before,” one city worker told The Standard. “The ability to spin absolute failures as success is absolutely wild to me.” The mayor’s office is defending its progress, all while seeking a renewal of the OpenGov contract that will go before the Civil Service Commission on Monday. Here are five takeaways from The Standard’s story. The city chose OpenGov because it could meet deadlines After OpenGov was selected by the mayor’s office through an unconventional no-bid process last summer, The Standard reported on some unusual circumstances of the contract, including links between company executives, the mayor, and Tipping Point Community, the nonprofit Lurie founded. The city’s justification for not conducting a formal bidding process was that OpenGov was the only govtech firm that could meet the deadline. But that bet hasn’t borne out. The company was supposed to deliver 15 types of permits — from bathroom and kitchen remodels to fire alarm and sprinklers — to the new PermitSF system by March 16. Today, only seven are available online. OpenGov says the rest will be delivered by June, but a city official told The Standard not to expect everything to be completed until the end of summer. The contract renewal is facing pushback The city is seeking a new, $6.5 million, six-year contract with OpenGov that would lock the permitting system into the software for the foreseeable future. While the first year of the contract has faced hiccups, city officials admitted to The Standard, they claim future iterations of the software will offer more flexibility. That hasn’t stopped some from trying to put the kibosh on the contract extension. IFPTE Local 21, the public-sector union that represents more than 13,000 city workers, claims that the software lacks critical features and isn’t being integrated properly with the city workforce. On May 4, the Civil Service Commission, the body overseeing the approval of the contract, voted unanimously to push the renewal hearing to Monday after asserting that the city had not provided the required documentation showing union objections. The contract is also subject to the Board of Supervisors' approval. This isn’t the first time Lurie has missed an important deadline During his 2024 campaign for mayor, Lurie promised to create 1,500 shelter beds in the first six months of his term, a signature proposal that helped propel him into City Hall. Almost immediately, there were signs that this would not come to fruition: In January 2025, a homelessness adviser to Lurie told The Standard that his 1,500-bed commitment was a rhetorical “ slip up .” By July, as the six-month mark approached, the mayor dropped the ambitious plan and said he would instead focus on a smaller number of “the right beds,” while directing city agencies to tackle drug addiction and mental health issues. The promises surrounding PermitSF carry similarities to the shelter rollout. However, in this case, the city has been able to release a small, working product with OpenGov instead of scrapping the project entirely. Staff have been frustrated by the software’s lack of features When the mayor’s office was searching for software to overhaul the permitting system last summer, staffers raised concerns about OpenGov’s capabilities, saying its features had “gaps so significant” that it “shouldn’t be considered.” Those concerns continue, with one city worker telling The Standard the city is effectively subsidizing OpenGov’s research and development department. City staffers have created a list of more than 50 problems with the software, according to a document obtained by The Standard, including a lack of integration with the existing system and gaps in the permissions of who can edit data. OpenGov employees backed up the city workers’ assertions; one said the company can handle roughly 25% of what its govtech competitors can do. PermitSF is making some workers’ jobs easier All the criticism doesn’t diminish the fact that some city workers are pleased with the new OpenGov platform. The Standard spoke with two members of SF Planning who described a program that, while limited in the types of permits it can issue, has made their jobs better. “We do the same type of review, we do the same type of back and forth with applicants,” said staffer Dakota Spycher. “It’s just all in one system. We don’t have to write on [a] physical form. We don’t have to enter information into a system that was created in the ’90s, and we don’t have to create a new record ourselves. So it’s really streamlined.” But there remains a wide variety of permits to transfer to the OpenGov platform. The city has hundreds of permit types, and many are much more complicated than the ones that have been modernized. Whether Lurie’s project can execute on those remains to be seen.

Asian Art Museum

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judicial assignments; court administration (CRC 10.603); CEO direction

The Abatement Appeals Board provides a final review process for City permitting decisions. It ensures fair and efficient adjudication of permit-related disputes before an impartial panel. The board holds authority to make binding decisions on appeals concerning notices of abatement.

Abatement Appeals Board

Abatement Appeals Board Commissioner 1

Abatement Appeals Board Commissioner 2

Abatement Appeals Board Commissioner 3

Abatement Appeals Board Commissioner 4

Abatement Appeals Board Commissioner 5

Abatement Appeals Board Commissioner 6

Abatement Appeals Board Commissioner 7

The Access Appeals Commission provides final reviews for a wide range of City permitting decisions. It ensures an efficient, fair, and expeditious permit issuance process through an impartial panel. The commission holds authority to make binding decisions on appeals related to City permits.

Access Appeals Commission

Access Appeals Commission Commissioner 1

Access Appeals Commission Commissioner 2

Access Appeals Commission Commissioner 3

Access Appeals Commission Commissioner 4

Access Appeals Commission Commissioner 5

The Adult Day Health Care Planning Council advises on the development and improvement of adult day health care services. It provides expertise in healthcare planning, policy recommendations, and program evaluation. Key responsibilities include assessing community needs and advising on service delivery enhancements.

Adult Day Health Care Planning Council

Adult Probation Department supervises individuals on probation and facilitates their reintegration into the community. It provides reentry and rehabilitative services, including victim restitution and financial assistance for crime victims. The department values public safety, offender rehabilitation, and community partnerships.

Cristel Tullock

The Advisory Committee of Street Artists and Crafts Examiners evaluates arts and crafts applicants and monitors program compliance. It conducts studio visits and public screenings to ensure adherence to established criteria. Members also revise program criteria and undertake additional tasks as needed.

Advisory Committee of Street Artists and Crafts Examiners

The Advisory Council on Human Rights advises on anti-discrimination laws and racial equity initiatives. It provides expertise on reparations and public policy impacts on Black communities. It guides efforts to establish partnerships with Historically Black Colleges and Universities in San Francisco.

Advisory Council on Human Rights

San Francisco Airport manages air traffic operations and ensures safe aircraft movement. It provides parking facilities and maintains airport infrastructure to accommodate travelers and staff. The department oversees ground transportation and coordinates with airlines for efficient passenger services.

Mike Nakornkhet

The Airport Commission oversees policy and strategic planning for San Francisco International Airport. It makes key decisions on airport development projects and financial management. It ensures compliance with regulations and collaborates on initiatives like terminal naming.

Airport Commission

Airport Commission Commissioner 1

Malcolm Yeung

Jose F. Almanza

Mark Buell

Susan Leal

Airport Director

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Animal Care and Control Department

Virginia Donohue

Animal Care and Control Department, Director

The San Francisco Arts Commission oversees the integration of arts into city life and ensures public access to cultural experiences. It makes decisions on public art programs and allocates grants to support local artists and performances. The commission actively shapes policies affecting the arts ecosystem in San Francisco.

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Debra Walker

Suzanne Ferras

Jessica Rothschild

Seth Brenzel

JD Beltran

Marcus Shelby

J Riccardo Benavides

Nabiel Musleh

Charles (Chuck) Collins

Lydia So

Arts Commission Commissioner 15

San Francisco Arts Commission invests in a vibrant arts community and shapes cultural policy. It enlivens the urban environment through public art programs and supports diverse artistic expressions. The commission facilitates meetings and discussions to engage the community in cultural development.

Ralph Remington

Arts Commission, Director of Cultural Affairs

The Asian Art Commission determines policy and administers the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. It oversees museum operations and collaborates with the Asian Art Museum Foundation on fundraising efforts. Commissioners ensure the museum's strategic direction and financial sustainability.

Asian Art Commission

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Asian Art Commission Commissioner 27

Asian Art Museum showcases Asian art and culture through exhibitions and educational programs. It offers diverse collections and hosts special events to engage the community. The museum fosters cultural appreciation and understanding by providing access to its extensive art collections.

Dr. Soyoung Lee

Asian Art Museum, Director

The Assessment Appeals Board #1 hears property tax assessment appeals in San Francisco. It evaluates evidence presented by taxpayers and the Assessor to determine property values. The Board has the authority to make final decisions on assessments regardless of property type or value.

Assessment Appeals Board #1

Assessment Appeals Board #1 Commissioner 1

Assessment Appeals Board #1 Commissioner 2

Richard Lee

Stephen Wasserman

Adena Gilbert

Paul Bellar

Quirina Mitchell

Hilary Winslow

The Assessment Appeals Board #2 adjudicates property tax assessment appeals for San Francisco taxpayers. It evaluates evidence presented by taxpayers and the Assessor to determine accurate property values. The Board exercises authority to render final decisions on residential properties and specific real estate assessments.

Assessment Appeals Board #2

Assessment Appeals Board #2 Commissioner 1

Assessment Appeals Board #2 Commissioner 2

Assessment Appeals Board #2 Commissioner 3

Claire Ervin Lee

Louisa Mendoza

Joyce Lewis

Nicholas Goldman

Michelle Domingo

The Assessment Appeals Board #3 provides a platform for San Francisco taxpayers to contest property tax assessments. It conducts hearings where evidence from both taxpayers and the Assessor is evaluated. The Board makes binding decisions on property assessments based on presented evidence.

Assessment Appeals Board #3

Assessment Appeals Board #3 Commissioner 1

Assessment Appeals Board #3 Commissioner 2

Assessment Appeals Board #3 Commissioner 3

Marc Dickow

Assessment Appeals Board #3 Commissioner 5

Assessment Appeals Board #3 Commissioner 6

Assessment Appeals Board #3 Commissioner 7

Assessment Appeals Board #3 Commissioner 8

Assesses property, applies exemptions, collects transfer taxes, and records official documents.

Assessor-Recorder

Joaquín Torres