If all goes well for Alan Wong, the new District 4 supervisor, his tenure will be longer than that of his predecessor, Isabella “Beya” Alcaraz, who lasted all of a week in the job.
He doesn’t have much more time to settle into the role, though, if he plans to defend his seat in a special election in June to finish the term of Joel Engardio, whom voters recalled in September.
(Primer for the understandably confused: There will be a special election in June. Then, in November, when Engardio would have been up for reelection, a regularly scheduled election will determine who holds the seat for four years.)
Chief among Wong’s immediate concerns will be Natalie Gee, the most prominent candidate vying for the position. The two have much in common. Both are Cantonese-speaking, native San Franciscans. Both have enjoyed labor’s support. And both have worked as aides to progressive supervisors.
If Wong was a safer choice — the moderate Westside Family Democratic Club told Mayor Daniel Lurie last week it supported him — it seems to be because he is less strident than Gee and more convincing about bringing together the fractious community.
Indeed, it was a bit of a head-scratcher that Lurie considered Gee seriously at all, and I suspect he did it so he could say in good faith that he had given her a shot.
Make no mistake, though, voters will listen carefully to Gee over the course of the campaign, as I did on a recent Saturday morning. We met for coffee in an airy cafe in the Sunset, after Alcaraz resigned and while Lurie’s team was vetting her.
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She was midway through telling me about her upbringing and career when I began to smile. No one will question the 40-year-old Gee’s preparedness for the job — in stark contrast to Alcaraz, who hadn’t previously shown an interest in government.
As a fifth grader in San Francisco’s Portola neighborhood, Gee attended community meetings with her Chinese-immigrant mom. At San Francisco State University, she worked at a summer program that connected Asian and Latino youth. Since then, she has been a campaign field director for District 9 Supervisor Hillary Ronen and later her legislative aide, did a stint with the policy-oriented Civic Edge Consulting firm, and now serves as chief of staff to District 10 Supervisor Shamann Walton.
“I’ve actually been working in government for a really long time,” she said.
All along, it defied credulity that Lurie would choose Gee, simply because her policy positions are so opposite to his. She is a die-hard, pro-labor progressive whose appointment would dash the dreams of San Francisco moderates hoping to dominate the legislative branch of government.
That doesn’t mean, however, that even voters who like Lurie won’t consider voting for Gee, who talks a good game about being a cooperative progressive. She insisted, for example, that like Connie Chan — the board’s leading progressive, who has an avowedly chummy relationship with the mayor — she too can work with politicians on the other side of the ideological divide. “We may not align 100% politically, but at the end of day, we love San Francisco, and we want to make it better,” she said.
In fact, on issue after hyper-local issue, Gee is attempting to thread an ideological needle — despite her progressive credentials.
I asked her to run down her campaign platform, and she first brought up public safety, mentioning that she wants to see more cops walking the beat on Irving, Noriega, and Taraval streets. The San Francisco Police Department is generally of the view that having cops on foot is a luxury it can’t afford until it is fully staffed. The head of its union (opens in new tab)publicly opposed Gee (opens in new tab) for comments she made in a questionnaire while running unsuccessfully for the Democratic County Central Committee. (He cited her support for requiring cops to carry Tasers instead of guns and other positions viewed as being against the force.)
Gee said she is wary of surveillance cameras, especially if they can be accessed by federal immigration authorities. But she likes speed cameras. “I’ve seen how they have slowed people down a lot,” she said, adding that she’d favor their use on Sunset Boulevard, a notorious speeding zone.
No surprise, Gee voted against Proposition K — the measure that closed a section of the Great Highway to create the concrete park known as Sunset Dunes — and favors a ballot initiative that would ask voters to reopen the roadway on weekdays. In conversations with pro-park leaders, Gee has been promoting a ballot measure in June as a let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may effort that would give Sunset voters an opportunity to blow off steam, even if that effort is likely to lose. Unpopular in the Sunset, Prop. K passed easily last year in a citywide ballot, and the park is getting more popular as time goes by.
On the hot-button ticket of transit, Gee also presents as a progressive who might find common ground with the mayor. She told me she supports the mayor’s idea to impose a parcel tax on property owners to plug a budget gap for Muni, though she wants to exempt senior citizens living on fixed incomes. I asked where she’d suggest the city find revenue to make up for her exemptions. “I know labor is trying to put together a CEO tax right now,” she said, alluding to the topic of my last column. “I would be in favor of supporting that, because I think everyone needs to step up and pay their fair share so that we can protect the essential public services that serve our communities.”
Some of Gee’s positions are less doctrinaire but obvious political dodges or deflections. I asked the graduate of the prestigious Lowell High School her opinion of the controversy that pitted the Asian community against a progressive effort to broaden the public school admissions process. “I don’t go there,” she responded. “It doesn’t matter to me. The students and the parents who go there at the moment should have a say. I graduated 22 years ago.”
On how to solve the perennial argument over traffic flows near the ocean, she recommends a transit study. “That’s one thing that we didn’t really do when we closed the Great Highway,” she said. In fact, Gordon Mar, when he was supervisor, requested exactly such a study, which led to the exhaustive “Great Highway Concepts Evaluation Report” (opens in new tab) in 2022.
These and other debates promise to continue the bizarre drama over choosing an elected representative for 51,000 registered voters in one polarized section of the city. Whoever wins in June — when there also may well be another citywide referendum on Sunset Dunes — the seat will be up for a full term in November. At least the supervisor elections will be run in a predictable fashion, unlike the reality-show-like process the mayor’s office hastily threw together in the wake of its previous debacle.
Gee told me Sunday she was grateful to have been considered this time around. “For me it was never about receiving the appointment,” she texted. “Rather, it was about demonstrating my willingness, desire, and qualifications to serve as supervisor.”
She has a point. This nutso process wasn’t pretty. But it was a form of local democracy in action. A mayor, who used his considerable power poorly when he appointed Alcaraz, got an earful from constituents and is trying to make it right quickly. Voters will get their say soon enough. And eventually they will be able to pass judgment on Lurie himself.