Mayor Daniel Lurie has dismissed Florence Simon as director of the Mayor‘s Office of Innovation, The Standard has learned. The departure represents a major pivot for City Hall’s reform efforts less than a year after Simon, a former McKinsey consultant, was hired, and just as her department was set to expand.
The mayor’s office described the departure as a mutual decision, but a source with direct knowledge of the situation said Simon had been let go.
Florence Simon served in the U.S. Department of Transportation in the Biden administration.
The office, essentially an in-house consultancy that implements tech solutions across San Francisco government, has been the tip of the spear for Lurie’s efforts to streamline city operations. Its work touches on such torturously bureaucratic areas as permitting reform, transit project management, and police hiring.
The Board of Supervisors in February approved a $7 million, three-year grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies to partially fund the office, expanding its team from six to 10 people, under Simon’s purview. The city is also contractually obligated to kick in $2 million for the office’s operations.
“We’re going to do everything more efficiently and more effectively,” Lurie said on Instagram (opens in new tab) in February. “And this grant of $7 million is going to help us do that.”
The Bloomberg Philanthropies’ grant stipulates that “i-teams,” short for innovation teams, should not “execute existing plans or solutions”; instead, they should “challenge assumptions” and conduct research to craft new solutions to pernicious city problems, like police hiring that drags on too long, or ensuring people had access to food stamps.
A presentation of the office’s recent work shows it is wrapping up several projects it undertook in 2025 at the mayor’s behest. The new Bloomberg grant agreement, signed in February, shows a need for teams to “first complete research” on “new solutions.” That language suggests a possible conflict between the mayor’s existing priorities for the office and the philanthropy’s desire for new initiatives backed by independent research.
The Mayor’s Office of Innovation led the implementation of Lurie’s permitting reform effort by launching a software platform called OpenGov as part of a February 2025 executive order. Simon was hired the following month.
According to a source with knowledge of the office’s strategy, the permitting reform work diverted the office’s attention away from projects conducted under Mayor London Breed’s administration — such as reforming the city’s homelessness client management system — which were of keen interest to Bloomberg Philanthropies when its first grant to the office commenced in 2021.
A Bloomberg Philanthropies spokesperson did not respond to questions about Simon’s departure, saying only that the organization was pleased with the office’s performance.
A spokesperson for the mayor’s office said in a statement, “We are grateful for Florence’s service to this office and for her accomplishments solving some of San Francisco’s most complex challenges. We wish her continued success in her future endeavors.”
This is the second recent personnel shift for one of Lurie’s key priorities, following the announcement this week that the head of the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, Shireen McSpadden, will retire in June.
Shireen McSpadden, who led the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, announced her forthcoming departure last week.
Simon served in the U.S. Department of Transportation in the Biden administration, and, like other Lurie hires, is a former McKinsey & Company consultant. She was hired as director to replace Stephen Sherrill, who was appointed to the Board of Supervisors at the end of 2024 by former Mayor London Breed.
Under Simon’s management, the office took on more projects than it had under Sherrill, a review of legislative documents shows. It helped develop a dashboard to coordinate how four city departments respond to reports of violence and supported rapid-response teams at the city’s transit agency to improve bus safety and cleanliness.
OpenGov itself was controversial. In November, Supervisor Jackie Fielder called for a watchdog review of a $5.9 million contract awarded to OpenGov after an investigation in The Standard revealed that one of Lurie’s chief policy advisers, Ned Segal, had disregarded recommendations from city employees to contract with another company that was offering a cheaper software option. It is unclear if Simon’s stewardship of the software system had any role in her dismissal.
Under Simon, the Mayor’s Office of Innovation implemented a new tool, ASTRID 2.0, that enables street teams to book shelter beds for people in need, which is estimated to save the city $3.6 million annually.
The Mayor’s Office of Innovation was formed in 2012 with the hope that San Francisco government could become as technologically nimble as the Silicon Valley companies that thrive in the area. The renewed funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies announced in February created additional roles for data science and product management personnel, who will help expand the scope and impact of the office’s projects.
Simon’s dismissal came a month and a half after the expansion was enacted.