Ex-city planner alleges intimidation over objections to Lurie’s permit project

Mayor Daniel Lurie’s controversial permitting reform project, PermitSF, faces a new wave of questions after a former City Hall employee came forward Friday with allegations about the contracting and rollout of the system built by the San Francisco firm OpenGov. Michael Christensen, a principal planner at SF Planning who also worked at the SF Permit Center, left his job in December over concerns that city officials were intimidating workers to stay silent about the system’s shortcomings and that a former manager had asked OpenGov to build a backdoor that would allow city leaders to bypass staffers’ permitting decisions. Christensen worked on the team implementing OpenGov’s software platform, which was selected by the mayor’s office last summer under unusual circumstances to revamp the city’s convoluted permitting system. As detailed in two whistleblower complaints, a letter filed to a city commission, and an exclusive interview with The Standard, Christensen claims that internal dissent about the project was suppressed by leaders of the project, that OpenGov vastly overpromised on its capabilities, and that the new system is not as efficient as the city’s pre-existing infrastructure. Christensen said that Liz Watty, director of current planning and one of the managers of the project, told him last year that OpenGov promised it could revamp San Francisco’s entire permitting system in one year. The city ended up focusing on a narrow scope of permits in the first year, but even those deadlines have not been met. Christensen said Watty told him to report colleagues who expressed concerns about OpenGov, but he declined to do so. Watty did not respond to a request for comment. Michelle Reynolds, a spokesperson for the Office of Small Business, one of the departments involved in OpenGov’s implementation, denied Christensen’s claims about his conversations with Watty. Christensen also said that Florence Simon, the former director of the mayor’s office of innovation, asked prospective software companies during last year’s procurement process whether they could build a system that would allow city leaders to override staffers’ permitting rulings if there was disagreement or any delays. He said OpenGov agreed to build the feature. Other companies under consideration for the project — including Clariti, the software firm that a majority of city staff preferred over OpenGov — said they would do so only within legal requirements. “I never wanted to leave. I wanted to retire from the city,” Christensen said. “But the internal politics, the blatant hostility … it made me feel I’m no longer working for the place I was before.” Simon, who was fired from the city in March , said that her ask of software vendors was simply whether users could get visibility into the permitting platform to help speed up delayed permits, and that the inquiry did not include access for any elected officials. She said that she had never spoken to Christensen about this feature. Christensen’s remarks come two days after The Standard published an investigation into the adoption of OpenGov’s system and the trajectory of PermitSF , the name the mayor has chosen for the modernization effort. Interviews with former OpenGov employees revealed doubts within the govtech firm about meeting the deadlines. Meanwhile, city staffers detailed a lack of features in the software that has impeded their work. At a budget hearing Wednesday, Supervisor Connie Chan cited The Standard’s investigation and expressed skepticism about PermitSF , asking city officials for more information. Charles Lutvak, a spokesperson for the mayor’s office, said in a statement, “For years, our permitting system has been failing San Franciscans — wasting people’s time, frustrating small businesses, and holding back housing and our economic recovery. Fixing it will take time, it won’t always go as planned, and there will always be people who defend a failed status quo that works for special interests, but our job is to deliver for San Franciscans, and that’s what PermitSF is doing.” He said the city is open to input on the project, including anonymous feedback. “We have one job: to deliver the fastest, easiest, most transparent permitting system for San Franciscans,” Lutvak said. A spokesperson for OpenGov deferred comment to the city but said the company offers “an established, commercially available government software platform used by more than 2,000 agencies across the country.” ‘I t didn’t do any of the things we needed’ After procuring the OpenGov software last summer in a no-bid contract valued at $5.9 million, Lurie launched a limited version of a new permit system in February. But PermitSF is still months behind schedule, despite the mayor’s office insisting last year that OpenGov was the only company capable of meeting its aggressive deadlines. While city officials acknowledged that the project has hit roadblocks, they believe it has laid a foundation that will bring genuine reform to the city’s permitting infrastructure in the years to come. Some city employees told The Standard that the new platform has made their jobs easier, and the mayor’s office has cited statistics showing that OpenGov is speeding up permitting. But other city employees are speaking out against the project. Christensen’s concerns were outlined in a May 7 letter he submitted to the Civil Service Commission, a governing body that will decide Monday whether to proceed with a $6.5 million renewal of the OpenGov contract that also includes $22 million in licensing fees over five years, with the option of a one-year extension. The contract is subject to approval by the Board of Supervisors. IFPTE Local 21, the public employee union that represents more than 13,000 city workers, has pushed back against the contract extension. The union has been a major critic of Lurie, most recently over his decision to lay off more than 100 employees to close a $643 million budget deficit. Christensen said in his letter that the OpenGov-powered platform, which currently allows the public to obtain permits for windows, siding, and door replacement, along with a handful of others, is less efficient than the city’s preexisting systems. He said residents previously filled out a one-page application that would often be approved the same day. The new system, he said, asks dozens of questions that extend the process to days or weeks. The mayor’s office maintains that the new system is more efficient, has cut wait times in half for fire permits, and has reduced trips to the city’s Permit Center by 15%. Christensen’s exit in December came approximately two months after the city signed its first contract with OpenGov. Last year, as Lurie was launching PermitSF, Christensen was asked to play a lead role in the project’s implementation. “My departure from city service was a direct result of my concerns about the project, having been asked by department leadership to report colleagues who might ‘cause problems for the project,’ and having experienced direct retaliation after I filed two formal whistleblower complaints with the SF city controller’s office,” Christensen wrote. The letter claims that OpenGov maintains significant control over the software, unlike similar products, thereby making dozens of city staff positions obsolete. This was the subject of Christensen’s first whistleblower complaint, filed Oct. 15, which the controller’s office portal shows is still under investigation. His second whistleblower complaint, filed Nov. 17, raised concerns around OpenGov funding a white paper about San Francisco’s permitting process, something Christensen argues was a misuse of the contract. Such research, he contends, should have been conducted by city staff. The controller’s office portal shows that the investigation was referred to the Civil Service Commission. A spokesperson said the controller’s office doesn’t comment on the status of whistleblower complaints. Christensen declined to say who had retaliated against him for filing the whistleblower complaints. He said he is speaking up now because OpenGov’s contract is up for renewal and is urging the Civil Service Commission to deny it. “There was consternation that we had selected a product that staff had really looked into,” he said in an interview. “And that it didn’t do any of the things we needed it to do.” Other city employees have written in support of the contract. Natalia Fossi, a principal planner; Sylvia Jimenez, an SF Planning team manager; and Darcy Bender, who did not specify a position, wrote letters to the Civil Service Commission urging it to renew OpenGov’s contract. “We have launched multiple permit types in a matter of months,” wrote Bender. “Anyone who has worked in city technology knows how remarkable that timeline is. The public who apply for these permits and the staff who process them every day are already experiencing a difference. That momentum is real, and it is fragile. Further delays to this contract put it at risk.”

Lurie’s permit project gets grilled after SF Standard investigation

This article is from Power Play, a twice-weekly newsletter rounding up the latest City Hall and local politics gossip. To sign up, visit The Standard’s newsletter page . Hours after The Standard’s investigation into Mayor Daniel Lurie ’s permit overhaul was published, Supervisor Connie Chan had sharp questions for department heads at a Wednesday-afternoon Budget and Appropriations Committee meeting. Former employees of OpenGov, the company hired for Lurie’s permitting modernization effort, told The Standard they knew the firm would miss deadlines, and current city staffers said the software lacks important features. Lurie awarded OpenGov in a no-bid contract , claiming it was the only company that could meet its deadlines. But deadlines have been blown through. SF Planning’s director, Sarah Dennis Phillips , and the interim Department of Building Inspection director, David Kane , were in the hot seat as Chan had pointed questions about the permit overhaul in light of The Standard’s reporting. The exchanges became tense at times. The city is seeking to renew the OpenGov contract for six years, at a price of $6.5 million — a decision that must go before the Civil Service Commission before heading to the supervisors for approval. Chan’s suspicions are part of a bubbling skepticism against Lurie’s permit efforts. The Civil Service commissioners have already delayed a hearing to approve OpenGov’s contract renewal after claiming that the city did not provide them with enough information about opposition to the project from a public-sector union. Some commissioners expressed serious concern about the contract during a May 4 meeting before pushing the vote to this Monday. Phillips defended the adoption of the software, stating that the department is “very happy with the results” and that the “system is performing.” She conceded that there had been bumps in the road on timelines: “We are erring on the side of doing permits correctly, rather than in volume. That does take more time, and it means things are moving more slowly than we think.” The current contract was set to deliver 15 permit types by March onto a new OpenGov-powered platform. Today, fewer than half are available. Chan remains wary of the project’s trajectory. She asked the departments to provide evidence that OpenGov is making permitting more efficient and to outline a Plan B if OpenGov is shelved — a nightmare scenario for Lurie. She quoted The Standard’s reporting in which a city employee said San Francisco is essentially subsidizing OpenGov’s product advancements. “I’m not inclined to fund the research and development of OpenGov,” Chan said. “What I’m inclined to fund is the development of a permanent permitting system that actually works for San Franciscans.” — Gabriel Greschler Got tips? Send to us at powerplay@sfstandard.com . In the pipeline THE BIG SAIKAT SPEND: The centimillionaire congressional candidate Saikat Chakrabarti has pledged to spend whatever it takes to win. Now he’s helping local propositions too. On Tuesday, Chakrabarti dropped a cool $100,000 into the campaign for Proposition D, the Overpaid CEO Tax. If approved on the June’s ballot, it would raise taxes for any company with a wide pay gap between the CEO and the median salary of workers worldwide. The measure is backed by a bevy of unions that hope the funds will plug San Francisco’s budget hole: SEIU Local 2015, SEIU Local 1021, IFPTE Local 21, AFSCME 3299, and Teamsters Joint Council 7. That begs the question: Will Chakrabarti’s contribution help him finally make inroads with labor? “Labor bases its support on the shared values candidates have with working families,” a spokesperson for the Prop. D campaign stated succinctly. Chakrabarti is certainly making his case. “These companies just received massive federal tax breaks under Trump, so asking the largest corporations, that are paying CEOs more than 100 times their median employee’s salary, to contribute a little more isn’t going to hurt them,” Chakrabarti said. “But cutting homelessness services, emergency response programs, and public safety resources would hurt thousands of San Franciscans.” For her part, Chan has so many unions supporting her congressional run she could practically start her own labor council. Though Chakrabarti shares labor’s values, unions are loath to endorse wealthy candidates for any office. But if the alternative is state Sen. Scott Wiener, who pissed off SEIU California enough that they un-endorsed him, it’ll be interesting to see if progressive labor collectively holds its nose to back either of them in June. — Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez YOU’RE WELCOME, L.A.: San Franciscans are generally proud to beat L.A. with our superior burritos, walkability, and fog over smog. However, we’ll have to begrudgingly concede that we’re on par in one respect: Both are now the scene of the political shenanigans of Jay Cheng , the consultant who earned Lurie’s ire and recently parted ways with Neighbors for a Better San Francisco under mysterious circumstances. Power Play readers will recall the rumor of an ethics investigation into Neighbors that may have ensnared Cheng. Cheng makes a cameo in an L.A. Times article last weekend detailing a dark money campaign to attack Los Angeles City Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez, a Democratic Socialist. Dark money refers to political spending wherein entities fund other entities, which fund other entities, to disguise the true source of attack ads. The piece highlights Cheng’s role as a consultant for a nonprofit working to elect “centrist” and “moderate” candidates to office in the City of Angels. It’s one of the first clients of his new shop, Jay Cheng Strategy. When reached by text, Cheng said he now has clients in multiple cities to “help them move in a moderate direction, like we did in SF.” He declined to name those cities but said he will do so in the coming weeks. When asked about the accusations in the article, Cheng replied, tongue in cheek, “Wherever there is dark money, there is Jay Cheng!” You don’t say! — J. F. R. THAT WAS FAST: Conor Johnston and Eric Kingsbury, who were staffers to Mayor London Breed , came forward Monday to accuse their former boss of appointing Supervisor Stephen Sherrill to his position in the hopes that she’d get a job from Michael Bloomberg. Sherrill issued a statement asserting that the vetting process for the supervisor seat was rigorous, and that she’s proud of Sherrill’s record but, curiously, doesn’t outright deny the chief allegation of a quid pro quo. Either way, we’ll be darned if Sherrill’s chief opponent in the June election, community activist Lori Brooke, didn’t move quick to capitalize on the accusations. Her campaign snapped up www.stephensherrill.com , which redirects to The Standard’s article. Cheeky! And it whipped up attack mailers using the most salacious quotes from Mission Local and The Standard, which will flutter into District 2 voters’ mailboxes this week. “District 2 deserves better than a supervisor who has made their career in backroom political deals,” Brooke told Power Play. We doubt that’s the only hit coming. Considering the avalanche of money from four independent expenditure committees supporting Sherrill, Brooke will need every swing. — J. F. R. TABLOID TIME: San Francisco’s media ecosystem is apparently booming , and we sure welcome some competition — for better or worse. The infamous San Francisco Inquirer, which the Chronicle , Standard , and San José Spotlight debunked three years ago as a political operation backing a Bay Area-based tribe , is active again, publishing sensational headlines about the race to succeed Rep. Nancy Pelosi . Recent stories on the site, with no authors listed, are critical of Wiener and Chan, while offering more favorable treatment to Chakrabarti. “Pelosi declines to endorse Wiener, widely seen as a stunning rebuke,” one headline says . Well, stunning to who? We all know who the speaker emerita’s preferred candidate is. The site’s founder, Matt Ricchiazzi , an East Coast-based consultant accused of running fake news websites , denied any involvement with the campaigns. “I don’t have any client interests in the race. I’m just sharing my opinion about the contenders,” Ricchiazzi told Power Play. Chan’s campaign blasted a story on the site linking the Chinese American immigrant to the Chinese government’s influence. “These are dirty and racist tactics. Whoever is paying for this is a coward and is furthering anti-Asian hate for personal and political gain. It’s despicable,” said Julie Edwards , Chan’s spokesperson. Federal campaign filings do not show payments to Ricchiazzi connected to the race, but Chakrabarti may have a friendly relationship with the tribe that paid Ricchiazzi, according to a 2025 social media post . His campaign denied any relationship with Ricchiazzi. If there’s one good thing to say about the website, it’s packed with ads promoting local businesses — including our favorite Hook Fish Co. and City Lights Bookstore. — Han Li KUMBAYA: Four years ago, Supervisor Shamann Walton was scrutinized for dressing down a sheriff’s cadet who was serving as City Hall security. Walton called the cadet the N-word and later accused staffers of the Sheriff’s Department of targeting him for his scrutiny of the office. Recriminations followed, alongside hurt feelings and a lot of fear . Breed called on Walton to apologize. My, how things have changed. At the Board of Supervisors’ regular meeting Tuesday, Walton led a round of praise for the sheriff’s cadets, who, importantly, are not sheriffs in training; it’s just a classification of an unarmed segment of the sheriff’s staff. It was a wonder to see. Led by Walton, nearly every supervisor heaped kind words upon the cadets — who stood by a podium at the Board of Supervisors chambers, beaming — for their demeanor and professionalism. So, what gives? Are we all friends now? That’s right, Sheriff Paul Miyamoto told us outside the chambers. The relationship has “had its ups and downs,” Miyamoto admitted, but Walton “actually reached out and wanted to recognize the cadets for the work they do. I think it was intentional to make sure they feel appreciated.” “Everything else,” the sheriff said, “is water under the bridge.” — J. F. R.

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.

Yale University considering San Francisco for satellite campus

Watch out, Harvard alums. Yale University, the New Haven, Connecticut, institution with a $44 billion endowment, is considering establishing a campus in San Francisco, The Standard has learned. School officials and Mayor Daniel Lurie’s administration have been in talks since at least December over the Ivy League university’s expansion, according to emails obtained via a public records request. While the type of campus Yale is pursuing is not immediately clear, the correspondence shows that the university’s plans are being spearheaded by Jeff Brock, the dean of Yale Engineering. The emails also show that other universities are looking to expand their campuses to the city, though it isn’t clear which ones. If Yale establishes a satellite school in San Francisco, it will mark the second university Lurie has lured to the city in recent months. In January, Vanderbilt University announced that it is taking over the century-old California College of the Arts campus in the Design District. The move came after CCA had been struggling financially for years, despite emergency injections of funding from the likes of Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia. In March, Lurie announced the launch of Third Coast Foundry, a workspace in the South Park neighborhood for students and researchers at eight Midwestern universities. The space will be open under a two-year pilot program. A deal with Yale — which has the second-largest endowment in the country — would solidify the city’s ability to attract highly competitive universities, in addition to Bay Area heavyweights UC Berkeley and Stanford. While the mayor’s office declined to share which locations are being considered by the school, an expansion could be part of Lurie’s plans to inject energy into downtown. Former Mayor London Breed had also proposed bringing universities to the city’s center. The mayor’s office declined to comment. A spokesperson for Yale provided the following comment: “Yale officials accepted an invitation from the mayor’s office staff to take a tour of the city; we don’t discuss the details of private meetings, but there are no current plans for a satellite campus.” The university has 6,740 undergraduates, 8,750 graduate and professional students, and 5,744 faculty members. It opened in 1701, making it one of the country’s oldest universities. Jonathan Meeks, a Yale alumnus and executive at private equity firm TA Associates, introduced Ned Segal, Lurie’s chief of housing and economic development, to Brock via email Dec. 22. Brock is “leading the business plan for a potential Yale SF campus,” the email states. “It would be great if you guys could speak and you can walk him through some of the learnings of the other institutions that are considering the move.” A Feb. 18 email shows that Yale’s leaders gave the thumbs up to Brock to go ahead on the proposal. “The president [ Maurie McInnis] wishes to proceed with gaining more information and has looped in more stakeholders for a follow-on meeting that will take place next week,” the email states. Brock and Cynthia Beach, Yale Engineering’s senior director of development and external relations, toured San Francisco on March 10. Segal; Faisal Ojjeh, a San Francisco strategic initiatives analyst for housing and economic development; and Ben White, assistant chief for that office, showed the Yale officials around. The group visited two sites. Upon leaving San Francisco a couple of days later, Brock sent a heartwarming message to the mayor’s office. “I forgot to take a selfie with the Mayor, but I managed this one from the airport!” Brock said, attaching a photo that was redacted as part of the public records request. It was likely referring to images of Lurie seen at San Francisco International Airport.

To protect and prosecute: The tough-love doctrine of Brooke Jenkins

4,324 contacts. 236 lobbyists. One very busy City Hall

Who was the most-lobbied San Francisco official in 2025? If you guessed Mayor Daniel Lurie, you chose wrong. It was San Francisco Airport Director Mike Nakornkhet and his staff, who were contacted more than 400 times — almost all by lobbyists for one company: Waymo. That includes 30 times on just one day in November, as the autonomous vehicle maker was pushing to get its robotaxis into SFO. We took a peek inside 2025 Ethics Commission data to better understand the $13.4 million City Hall influence apparatus. San Francisco’s lobbying machine is especially active, insiders say, because of the city’s political prestige and bureaucratic friction. It’s a city for the politically ambitious where it’s also notoriously difficult to get anything done. For comparison, on the other side of Silicon Valley, San Jose had fewer than one-third as many registered lobbyists as San Francisco had last year. San Francisco officials were contacted 4,324 times by lobbyists in 2025, or nearly a dozen times every day. Nearly 40% of those contacts — 1,720 — were related to building permits. Transportation came next, with 955. Human rights ranked last, with only three contacts. Companies large and small rely on lobbyists. The eight-location gym chain SF Fitness hired one who spent all of last year trying to secure building permits for a location at 1600 Jackson St. in Nob Hill, contacting city officials 113 times. Meanwhile, Two Sigma Investments, a $70 billion New York hedge fund, reached out to the San Francisco Employees’ Retirement System no fewer than 99 times — not to influence legislation but to pitch a pension fund investment. For businesses that can afford it, lobbying can feel like a capitalist’s dream. While roughly 236 lobbyists were registered in San Francisco in 2025, a handful of pros dominated the field. Rich Peterson of Lighthouse Public Affairs brought in nearly $2.9 million from 51 clients. Chris Gruwell of New Deal Advisers earned slightly less — $2.6 million — but represented the most clients, with 56. But that doesn’t tell the full story. While San Francisco requires outside lobbying firms to disclose their client lists and fees, large companies often employ full-time in-house staff to influence policy. Those lobbyists are required to report when they contact public officials, but they report only the portion of their salary that corresponds to time spent lobbying, not their full compensation. The true cost of influence at City Hall is a mystery and almost certainly far higher than the numbers suggest. Here are the five companies whose lobbyists contacted San Francisco officials the most in 2025, what they wanted, and whether or not they got it. The busiest companies Waymo: 678 contacts No company worked City Hall harder than Waymo. The robotaxi company, owned by Alphabet, hired lobbyists who contacted public officials more than three times as often as the next busiest client — almost entirely as part of a push to get its vehicles into San Francisco International Airport. Waymo ran two parallel lobbying operations: an outside firm that was paid $10,000 a month and an in-house team that targeted airport staff, the mayor’s office, the city attorney, planning, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, the Board of Supervisors, and the Police Department. By year’s end, the company was also playing defense. When a beloved bodega cat died after being struck by a Waymo on Oct. 27, Supervisor Jackie Fielder called for stricter public regulation of robotaxis . In the following weeks, Waymo’s lobbyists contacted seven different supervisors, asking them to oppose any restrictions on autonomous vehicle operations countywide. It all seems to have been worth it. In September, Lurie announced that Waymo had been granted a permit to operate at the airport. By January, the company had begun offering rides to SFO. Meanwhile, Fielder’s call for more robotaxi regulation appears not to have found other takers inside City Hall. “SFO followed a measured and deliberate process to evaluating the permitting of Waymo at the Airport,” a representative for the airport said. “Other companies have also expressed interest in providing autonomous vehicle services at the Airport, and we have engaged with them in a similar, consistent manner.” Union Square Alliance: 207 contacts The business improvement district that manages Union Square spent the year lobbying on multiple fronts: pushing the Powell Street Corridor Improvement Project, campaigning for more police resources and physical barriers to deter retail theft, and trying to bring life back to the neighborhood’s public spaces with food trucks, holiday events, and a Winter Walk street closure. Starting in June, it turned its focus to securing its own future, lobbying the Recreation and Parks Department to extend its contract to manage Union Square Plaza. Teamster Joint Council 7: 203 contacts The Teamsters represent more than 70,000 Bay Area workers, and in 2025 their primary concern was automation. The union monitored autonomous vehicle policy at every city agency that touches transportation — the airport, SFMTA, the mayor’s office, the city attorney — and in July lobbied every member of the Board of Supervisors in support of a ban on commercial deliveries by autonomous vehicles. The union was also fighting to protect San Francisco’s production, distribution, and repair zones — areas set aside for the kind of blue-collar work Teamsters depend on — from encroachment by tech companies seeking permits for laboratories and outdoor testing. When DoorDash sought to use an industrial site in the Mission to test delivery drones, Teamsters appealed the city’s approval and lobbied the Board of Supervisors, coming out victorious . In December, the board approved legislation requiring companies to obtain a conditional-use permit before converting outdoor PDR spaces for testing purposes. Pacific Gas and Electric: 148 contacts PG&E spent the year meeting with Lurie’s office sometimes multiple times a week, pitching itself as a reliable partner on service planning and long-term grid capacity — seemingly in an attempt to fight off San Francisco’s ongoing effort to municipalize its electrical grid . Then, a major power outage that began Dec. 20 sent PG&E lobbyists scrambling into the new year, with three contacts to the mayor’s office on Jan. 2 alone. The company brought in a new lobbyist to manage the fallout and began making the rounds to every relevant city agency. Hines: 142 contacts The Texas real estate giant responsible for building the Salesforce tower spent 2025 grinding through the permitting process for one of the most significant development opportunities downtown: the old PG&E headquarters at 77 Beale St., a sprawling Financial District property where Hines plans to build the city’s tallest building. Lobbyists contacted the Planning Department, the city attorney, the Office of Economic and Workforce Development, the Department of Building Inspection, the Fire Department, and Public Works. The most-contacted officials Nakornkhet’s office was contacted far more than any other agency or official. Lurie came second, with 297 contacts to his office, most from PG&E, Union Square Alliance, and Waymo. The Board of Supervisors was lobbied more than any city department, and Matt Dorsey of District 6 — a major area of development — was contacted the most. Dorsey was also lobbied by the SF Deputy Sheriff’s Association more than any other supervisor. Fielder, who represents District 9, was contacted by the Teamsters more than any other supervisor. Waymo didn’t contact her once. City planner Corey Teague fielded contacts from a range of corporate rezoning campaigns, all the way down to advocates for a pickleball court. So what about AI? San Francisco is home to the world’s most powerful AI companies, but aside from Waymo, their City Hall lobbying footprint was modest in 2025. Anthropic spent $80,000 hiring lobbyist Alex Tourk at $20,000 a month to meet with the mayor’s office, SFPD, and city HR to pitch a partnership with Claude. OpenAI, which used the same lobbyist in 2024 to support business tax reform, filed no contacts of city officials in 2025. For now, it appears Bay Area-based AI companies are more focused on lobbying at the federal and state levels, where policies could dictate their futures. This story has been updated to include comment from SFO.

How is Lurie doing on mental health and homeless crises? These 7 charts tell the story

On any given day, the SoMa Rise sobering center temporarily offers the comforts of housing to the homeless. Day after day, people living on the streets shake off their addictions to fentanyl or alcohol just long enough to amble through SoMa Rise’s front door on Howard Street. There they receive the basics — a bed, a shower, a meal — and sometimes more, including referrals to treatment. For Mayor Daniel Lurie, the 4-year-old program has become a model for how to help San Francisco’s most desperate. It has also become an emblem of how to pay for such services. One year after Lurie announced Breaking the Cycle , his signature strategy to combat homelessness, addiction, and mental health issues, the city is changing the way it bills for some homeless services to mirror its fiscal success with SoMa Rise. Under changes ordered by Lurie, the Department of Public Health is billing more programs to CalAIM, a Medi-Cal program, instead of charging the city directly. That change has saved the city $11 million in the last year. If an initiative to expand CalAIM billing to more programs is successful, it may free up hundreds of millions of dollars in San Francisco’s budget each year, according to Public Health Director Dan Tsai. “That is a huge amount that otherwise would have had to have been fully funded through general fund dollars,” he said. The services of around 31 other nonprofits may soon be billed to CalAIM. City officials are “turning over every stone” to identify more public health programs that can be funded this way, Tsai said. The strategy is helping to alleviate twin crises for San Francisco’s public health infrastructure: the city’s $877 million budget deficit and potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in federal Medicare cuts. One year in, many of the initiatives in Lurie’s Breaking the Cycle program mirror the new billing scheme — producing structural changes that may take time to fully realize. But others of the mayor’s roughly 20 distinct proposals within the program remain stymied. By analyzing city data on homelessness, addiction, and treatment outcomes, The Standard endeavored to highlight Lurie’s successes and challenges with Breaking the Cycle. The verdict: Street homelessness is visibly less of a problem, paying for it has become easier, and street teams are reaching people in need more quickly. But when it comes to getting them permanently housed, there’s still a steep hill to climb. Lurie’s most obvious success on homelessness is one you can see: There are fewer tents on San Francisco’s streets. The number is even more stark if you consider where we were in 2022, when more than 500 tents and similar structures were counted. Breaking the Cycle marshaled San Francisco’s nine disparate homelessness street teams, stretched across multiple city departments, under one banner at the Department of Emergency Management. The city’s response is more coordinated — and faster. Quicker response times improve the overall effectiveness of the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, according to its director, Shireen McSpadden. “Obviously, the shorter this can be, the better for the client, and also the better for the cost of the system,” she said at a March 6 Homelessness Oversight Commission meeting. But the street teams are hobbled by a lack of shelters that can accept homeless people. And other beds have been “taken offline,” meaning they’re no longer being used. Lurie notably failed to hit his campaign promise of creating 1,500 shelter beds, pivoting his messaging to vowing to build the “right” kind of beds, like the 2025 expansion of sober-specific and stabilization beds at Eleonora Fagan Center and the Salvation Army Harbor Light Center in SoMa, Hope House on Sixth Street, and Wells Place in the Marina. Crisis stabilization beds at 822 Geary, which opened in April 2025, provide an avenue for people who otherwise wouldn’t find shelter, said Vitka Eisen, director of Healthright 360, a major health provider in the city. “There are people who come into our central access intake who are just really not regulated. We don’t believe that they would be safe,” Eisen said. “Now we have a place to send them.” Still, others wait. San Francisco’s shelter waiting list remains a pernicious issue. When a person seeking assistance approaches a nonprofit or city agency, their information is entered into myriad databases that don’t communicate with one another. Reforming that system was one of the goals Lurie committed to within a year of launching Breaking the Cycle, and a pilot program to unify those client systems is ongoing. Meanwhile, an effort to encourage cities across the region to do more to take care of their own homeless populations — so they don’t come to San Francisco — has yet to bear fruit, though the mayor’s office said there is “active outreach.” The persistence of family homelessness in San Francisco continues to rankle advocates and civic leaders. Former Homelessness Oversight Commission member Christin Evans called out Lurie’s program at a March 6 meeting. “The challenge with Breaking the Cycle is that if you look at all of the details in there, it’s not family-centric or senior-centric,” Evans said, referring to so-called “invisible” sources of homelessness, where people sleep in cars or couch-surf. “It’s very much focused on visible homelessness.” Tipping Point, the anti-poverty group founded by Lurie, committed $11 million toward a family homelessness prevention pilot program last year. While seniors haven’t been a focus of Breaking the Cycle, Lurie took heat from the southeast community by opening Jerrold Commons, a homeless shelter focused on seniors and people living in RVs. Perhaps the most promising statistics are those related to the administration of buprenorphine, an anti-opioid hailed as a breakthrough in addressing fentanyl addiction. There were 624 accidental overdose-related deaths in 2025 , according to the medical examiner’s office. That’s nine fewer than in 2024 and well below 2023’s high of 810. While Breaking the Cycle is complex, its main thrust is reforming homelessness efforts to better integrate healthcare, said Kunal Modi, the mayor’s policy chief on homelessness. “One of the challenges San Francisco has had over the past decade was we took a very ‘social service only’ lens to what is a crisis that is much broader than that,” Modi said. “The primary thesis is that we need to approach this fundamentally as a healthcare problem.” That healthcare-centric approach is what enables the city to bill CalAIM for more services. The number of people who have exited homelessness into city-supported housing this year is down. However, at the Homelessness Oversight Commission’s March meeting, McSpadden said she believes the city is still on track to meet its five-year goal to take 30,000 people out of homelessness. Progress in housing people living in RVs parked in the city’s southern neighborhoods has also faced challenges. Under Lurie’s large-vehicle program, the city bought back 49 vehicles, and 71 households moved out of vehicles into housing or shelter. There are still hundreds of people living among roughly 300 vehicles, which were granted permits exempting them from the new two-hour parking limit. Homeless advocates have criticized Breaking the Cycle for prioritizing temporary shelter over permanent housing. Homelessness Oversight Commission member Sharky Laguana argued that permanent housing is expensive, and it makes more financial sense to heal people through sobering and other treatment centers, as Lurie is trying to do, rather than a housing-first strategy. “We’re in a situation where we made a commitment to a policy choice that if we don’t make some changes in how we’re moving forward, there simply won’t be money left for anything else,” Laguana said. As part of last year’s budget, Lurie negotiated with the Board of Supervisors to siphon $34 million from a fund focused on housing toward bolstering the shelter system. It’s a fundamental difference in philosophy: Breaking the Cycle concentrates on healthcare and shelters as the primary levers of alleviating homelessness. Many advocates, on the other hand, believe the chief way to end homelessness is to give people homes.

Ready to rumble: The 37 most powerful labor leaders in San Francisco

Tech’s pick for governor, Matt Mahan, makes his case for running California

He’s from the largest city in Northern California. You know, the one down south from us? Starts with “S.” Be careful poking fun at San Jose when you’re speaking with Mayor Matt Mahan. The gubernatorial candidate is a fierce defender of his city, one he says has made progress on housing and homelessness, reasons he thinks he should become governor . A pro-business moderate, Mahan has attracted big donations from deep-pocketed techies, with his latest campaign total coming in at $8.5 million, according to a source familiar with the matter. An independent committee has raised millions more and spent $1.4 million for an ad during the Super Bowl . “My values are very progressive,” Mahan said during an interview this week on our podcast “Pacific Standard Time.” “My means are very pragmatic.” Here are four takeaways from our conversation with the gubernatorial hopeful. San Jose’s unaffordability could be Mahan’s liability While San Francisco is known as a pricey city, San Jose is the most expensive urban area in California, a recent report shows. Mahan said San Jose has been unaffordable for decades, describing the city as a “victim of its own success.” He also pointed out the flip side: The area has provided unparalleled upward mobility, citing a study by Harvard economist Raj Chetty. Mahan said housing reform measures are one way to bring down costs. But it remains to be seen whether he can successfully navigate affordability while his more progressive counterparts across the country, such as New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, have used the issue to criticize centrist Democrats. Fighting Trump isn’t one of his main priorities Mahan has taken a similar tack to San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie, arguing that a well-run Democratic city is the best defense against President Donald Trump. “I think that we have a duty to deliver and demonstrate that our values in California work in practice, that they actually create communities that are safer, more vibrant, more inclusive economically, and that create more opportunity for people,” he said. “That, to me, is the most important thing.” The message stands in contrast to Mahan’s opponents in the gubernatorial race. During a Feb. 3 debate , every candidate aside from Republican Steve Hilton expressed fierce criticism of the president. Mahan’s position could be strategic, as he is trying to woo independent and right-leaning voters ahead of the June primary. Unions could become a thorn in his side Mahan has had a strained relationship with San Jose’s unions, sparked by his strategies on housing for the homeless and pay increases for city workers. Asked about the teachers strike in San Francisco and what he would do about it as governor, Mahan voiced support for unions while noting that cities need to be fiscally responsible when it comes to salary increases. “We do have to operate within the realm of reality,” he said. “We’ve got to be able to say, ‘Well, if we only project revenue to go up 3% a year, we can’t give a 4% raise year after year without cutting services.’” That stance could cost him, as labor unions are expected to launch multimillion-dollar campaigns in support of their chosen candidates. He’s trying to stay above the fray While Gov. Gavin Newsom regularly skewers Trump in provocative social media posts, Mahan is hoping that voters are hungry for a politician who’s not lashing out. In August, Mahan wrote an opinion article titled “ How about less time breaking the internet and more time fixing California? ” in which he argued that Newsom’s social media strategy “doesn’t solve real-world problems.” During the “PST” interview, Mahan said, “Sometimes our politics gets overly partisan and performative and just becomes contentless attacks and trolling and memes.”

Asian Art Museum

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Adult Probation Department

Airport

Arts Commission

Office of the Assessor-Recorder

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Office of Economic and Workforce Development

Environment Department

Ethics Commission

Fine Arts Museums

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Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing

Human Rights Commission

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Health Service System

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Public Library

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Office of the Mayor

Public Defender's Office

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Port

Public Utilities Commission

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War Memorial

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General City Responsibilities

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Culture & Recreation

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Public Works, Transportation & Commerce

Public Protection

SF Civil Grand Jury

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

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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

Animal Care and Control Department manages animal sheltering, adoption, and emergency response services. It enforces animal-related laws and regulations, ensuring the humane treatment and safety of animals. The department also provides public education on responsible pet ownership and animal welfare.

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.

Arts Commission Commissioner 1

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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

Asian Art Commission Commissioner 1

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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

The Ballot Simplification Committee ensures voter materials are clear and understandable. It reviews and revises ballot language to accurately reflect propositions and measures. The committee advises on simplifying complex legal and technical terms for voter comprehension.

Ballot Simplification Committee

The Bayview Hunters Point Citizens Advisory Committee provides policy advice on planning and land use matters in Zone 2 of Bayview Hunter's Point. It offers expertise in land use policies, zoning issues, and urban development. The committee advises the Board of Supervisors, City Boards, and commissions on relevant projects and initiatives.

Bayview Hunters Point Citizens Advisory Committee

The Behavioral Health Commission advises on mental health policy implementation and quality service delivery. It reviews and advocates for effective mental health services, ensuring policies meet community needs. It educates stakeholders to integrate mental health considerations into broader health strategies.

Behavioral Health Commission