San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie began laying off 127 workers on Monday as part of a budget-cutting process.
Stephen Lam/S.F. Chronicle
San Francisco began laying off 127 city employees Monday as Mayor Daniel Lurie tries to reduce the recurring deficits that have dogged the city’s finances since the pandemic.
The city on Monday was telling affected workers in 18 departments about the job cuts, which are intended to help Lurie fulfill his previously stated plan of reducing salary and benefit spending by $100 million. A total of 500 jobs are still on the chopping block in the next city budget, which Lurie must propose by June 1. San Francisco has more than 30,000 employees.
Some employees were getting 30 days’ notice of their layoff, while others were getting 60 days’ notice, depending on civil service rules.
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Lurie is moving ahead with the layoffs despite a recent city report that said the expected two-year deficit had fallen to $644 million, a more than $230 million improvement from the previous projection. But the mayor warned at the time that the city wasn’t “out of the woods” yet, and he reiterated that view on Monday.
The job cuts being implemented by Lurie’s administration reflect some of the deepest employment reductions City Hall has seen in years as the mayor tries to stabilize San Francisco’s $16 billion budget. For years, city spending has been out of sync with its tax revenue, which has been constrained by a weak recovery from the pandemic, particularly downtown.
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In last year’s city budget, Lurie originally planned to eliminate 100 filled jobs, but the two-year spending deal ultimately cut only about 40 of those after negotiations with the Board of Supervisors. Lurie has been signaling for months that this year’s budget would be a harder problem to solve, especially in light of the financial hit City Hall is taking due to changes in federal benefit programs being implemented by the Trump administration.
Lurie said in a statement Monday that San Francisco could either “take action now or be forced to do twice as much in the coming years” to solve its budget difficulties.
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“The steps we’re taking today are a painful but necessary continuation of the work we’ve been doing since last year to manage taxpayer dollars responsibly and deliver the best possible services for San Franciscans,” Lurie said. “That work will continue as we prepare a responsible budget that sets up our city for a broad and durable economic recovery.”
Among the 18 departments affected by the layoffs are the departments of public health and economic and workforce development. The City Administrator’s Office and the Human Services Agency are also affected, as are civilian roles in the Police Department. It wasn’t immediately clear exactly how many jobs were being eliminated from every affected department.
The layoffs are likely to further inflame tensions between Lurie and some of the city’s most dominant public-sector labor unions. He already had a major disagreement with those groups over Proposition D, a June ballot measure they are pushing to raise taxes on companies with highly-paid executives.
Two of the dominant unions representing city workers, SEIU 1021 and IFPTE Local 21, released a statement Monday denouncing the layoffs and reiterating their support for Prop D. The unions said the cuts are “drastic” and would be “felt in every corner of San Francisco.” And they said the layoffs were proof of the harmful effects of President Doald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which the union-backed Prop D is designed to counter in part.
“Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ is a massive giveaway to the super rich and corporations at our expense,” IFPTE Local 21 President Bianca Polovina said in the statement. “City leaders must support fair solutions that stand up to Trump and his corporate backers in our budget.”
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Supervisor Connie Chan, who chairs the supervisors’ budget committee, urged the Lurie administration to keep an open dialogue with labor unions. She said in a statement Monday that she hoped the mayor would prioritize cutting vacant jobs first. In addition to the 127 layoffs, Lurie is also freezing more than 2,000 vacant jobs.
“I expect the Mayor and his budget team to continue their conversations with labor leaders and to ensure we do not balance the city budget on the backs of our workers and (sacrifice) critical city services,” Chan said in her statement.