San Francisco’s 540-page city charter is chock full of silliness, like requiring the SFMTA to run cable cars on the (opens in new tab)same schedule they followed in 1971 (opens in new tab) and specifying that the law library employ a (opens in new tab)bookbinder (opens in new tab).
But the charter’s flaws go deeper than quaint anachronisms. The document, which functions as the city’s constitution and can be changed only by voters, also mandates so much fixed spending that the mayor has discretion over just 18% of the budget. It sets specific rules for labor relations and pension payments, areas that should be adjudicated by legislators, not voters. And because the charter codifies much of the city’s organizational chart and appointment powers, it means the mayor has little say in hiring, firing, and the very structure of municipal government.
These and many other bugaboos are why Mayor Daniel Lurie has embarked on a hastily organized spring cleaning of the unruly charter. Such an effort hasn’t happened in 30 years, and it has (opens in new tab)good-government types (opens in new tab) salivating over the possibilities. Lurie recently convened a (opens in new tab)working group (opens in new tab) of the many special-interest advocates whose organizations would be affected by charter reform and tasked them with helping him craft a voter referendum for the November ballot.
Its mission is more or less clear: Remove as much sludge as possible from the charter, shifting some laws to the city’s easier-to-change administration code and killing off what deserves to die. And believe me, there’s a lot that belongs in the morgue.
“The premise of this charter reform is a working theory that fewer processes and rules will actually make it easier for us as a body to deliver what people want,” Alicia John-Baptiste, the mayor’s infrastructure policy chief and point person on charter reform, told me in an interview last week at City Hall.
Yet the very carefulness of John-Baptiste’s wording belies what’s likely to happen behind the scenes. Early indications suggest the mayor will settle for the boring-but-important reforms that focus on government efficiency and structure — while leaving for another day controversial measures that will provoke fights with the most vocal and powerful San Franciscans.
Already, the mayor’s team has kicked the can down the road on reviewing issues in the charter that are certain to infuriate organized labor, including collective bargaining, pension mandates, and the ability to strike. “They are off the table,” said Rafael Mandelman, president of the Board of Supervisors and Lurie’s legislative sidekick in the charter reform effort.
Another red line for labor is the ease of placing ordinances on the ballot for voter approval. The charter allows measures to sprint onto the ballot with signatures from 2% of registered voters — far below the norm in California — or four out of 11 members of the board. It is one of the reasons San Franciscans face a long list of incomprehensible questions each Election Day: Special interests would far prefer to work the levers of power via voters than allow the legislature to legislate.
At a closed-door meeting of the working group on Dec. 10, powerful labor leader Mike Casey declared he was adamantly opposed to changes to “ballot access” features of the charter. Labor is particularly protective of the provision that allows a minority of the board to place initiatives on the ballot. “We can count on four supervisors to back labor,” Casey, who represents hotel workers, told me after the meeting. “If they go down that road, we will fight them.”
Perhaps the biggest fight the mayor faces — one I predict he’ll quickly concede — is over voter-mandated spending requirements in the charter that gum up the budgeting process. Services that fund everything from children’s and elder programs to public schools and the library sit in the charter as near-permanent mandates. Even the well-endowed San Francisco Symphony has a decades-old financial commitment in the charter (opens in new tab), stuck to it like a barnacle that never goes away.
Or consider how the San Francisco Public Library gets its annual $185 million in funding. In 2022, voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure that guarantees a fixed percentage of the city’s budget, known as a baseline, and a similarly etched-in-stone slice of property taxes, called a set-aside, to fund libraries. Because voters said so three years ago, this mechanism is stuck in place until 2048.
It’s also why any effort to change such commitments will elicit howls from advocates of the affected groups, who can mobilize armies of pissed-off San Franciscans who support their causes.
Emily Garvie, executive director of Friends of the San Francisco Public Library, told me that set-asides and baselines are critical to maintaining funding levels for libraries, which otherwise would be targets for budget cuts in tough times. I told her I thought tying the hands of the mayor and the Board of Supervisors until the middle of the century is a lousy way to govern. “For library advocates, it’s a necessary way to govern,” she responded.
I’m sympathetic to Garvie’s argument, and not just because I love the library. (Have you used (opens in new tab)its app (opens in new tab) to reserve books?) Because baselines and set-asides are allowed under the charter, it is incumbent on leaders to protect their turf by using them when they can. The brewing fight over them is similar to the kvetching over the treatment of advisory bodies in the Commission Streamlining Task Force, whose charter-specific recommendations will be wrapped into the mayor’s initiative.
But just because San Francisco’s feudal lords and ladies seize the imperative to protect their fiefdoms doesn’t make it right for the rest of us. What’s best for San Francisco would be to ask the supes and mayor to decide on funding priorities every year, to be accountable for what they decide to cut or keep, and to be able to operate as nimbly as possible.
At the Dec. 10 meeting, Lurie told the members of the working group that they had a “generational opportunity to help our government function efficiently,” according to a copy of his prepared notes that I obtained through a public-records request. The group plans to meet privately three more times, with a goal of getting a draft initiative to the Board of Supervisors by March.
Practically speaking, that leaves it little time to tackle the most complicated and politically combustible issues, which is why I have heard muttering that the working group mostly gives the mayor the appearance of having consulted a broad swath of engaged citizens, while he and a smaller coterie of city machers work out a deal.
“We have a very strong commitment to advancing some of the critical changes that will let us actually do our work over the next several years,” said John-Baptiste. “The consequentiality of it matters more than the controversy of it.”
She’s right, but only partially. I’d argue that it’s the controversial stuff that would really move the needle. But if consequential is all we can get for now, we’ll take it.