A San Francisco task force convened for months as part of a 2024 voter-approved ballot measure intended to pare back the city’s network of commissions.
Jessica Christian/S.F. Chronicle
San Francisco moved forward Tuesday with a controversial proposal to streamline operations by eliminating dozens of commissions and advisory groups, part of an effort to make city government more efficient.
Supporters of the plan say the city has too many overlapping, outdated and unnecessary commissions while opponents say the public will lose important forums to share feedback.
The Board of Supervisors on Tuesday voted to eliminate 43 commissions and advisory groups and plans to come back next week with more changes that would go before voters, but many of the more controversial changes proposed by a City Hall task force may never be implemented.
Community groups have criticized the plan, arguing some bodies slated for elimination, such as the Shelter Monitoring Committee and the Urban Forestry Council, provide valuable places for San Franciscans to be heard in City Hall.
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Rejecting or making changes to the ordinance would have required the support of a super majority of supervisors. The ordinance was written by a City Hall task force convened as part of a 2024 voter-approved ballot measure intended to pare back the city’s network of commissions.
Six of the 10 supervisors voted in favor of the ordinance, with Supervisors Myrna Melgar, Connie Chan, Chyanne Chen and Shamann Walton voting no.
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Melgar said that while she supported the overall intention of the streamlining process, she had serious concerns about some of the changes included in the ordinance, particularly the elimination of the Early Care and Education Oversight and Advisory Committee, on which she had served.
“I want to emphasize that most of what’s in this ordinance is necessary and should be enacted,” she said. “I just wish there was a way to do it without taking the other recommendations that I feel need more work or have unintended consequences or negative consequences.”
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Melgar said she would be interested in passing additional legislation to address some of her concerns.
In addition to the ordinance, supervisors will also craft a charter amendment, a more exhaustive process that will require approval from San Francisco voters in November. Board President Rafael Mandelman said he and his colleagues have been working over the last several months to draft such a measure, which he plans to introduce next week.
The fact that the city must pass an ordinance as well as a ballot measure reflects the complexity of the city’s commission system. Some are enshrined in the city’s administrative code and can be changed by lawmakers, but others are written into the city’s charter. Voters must approve any changes to those commissions directly through a ballot initiative. The ballot measure will eliminate some groups, and make other changes including moving some commissions out of the charter and into the code, so that future changes may be made by supervisors.
Community groups and advocates have raised alarms about some of the task force’s recommendations, which they say could erode oversight and give the mayor undue power. Mandelman said the charter amendment he plans to put forward will shy away from some of the task force’s most controversial recommendations, including proposed changes to the Police Commission and Sheriff’s Department Oversight Board.
“Most of the items and issues that have provoked the greatest concerns have been addressed and removed” from the charter amendment, Mandelman told the Chronicle on Monday.
The current draft includes roughly “150 changes to the charter, but I think they’re going to be consensus, proper-functioning-of-government changes that shouldn’t send anyone into the stratosphere,” he added.
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Some of the groups slated for elimination do valuable work for vulnerable groups, including homeless people and shelter populations, according to advocates who spoke in opposition to the proposed cuts at last week’s Rules committee meeting.
Jennifer Friedenbach, the executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness, said at the meeting that the Shelter Monitoring Committee was established in 2004 to establish minimum standards of care for city shelters.
“At the time, we had people who were sleeping on mats without any bed covering a couple inches apart, sharing communicable diseases, no toilet paper, no soap to wash your hands,” Friedenbach said. “These issues still persist, as well as poor treatment of residents. And it’s incredibly important that this body continues.”
Streamlining proponents, including members of the task force, argue that the committee’s core functions should be performed by city staff. But Friedenbach disputed that notion, telling supervisors that city workers do not have the time or the “trust of shelter residents.”
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Not all of the ordinance’s changes are controversial. Of the groups the ordinance will eliminate, the majority were inactive, according to a presentation by Ed Harrington, the streamlining task force’s chair, to the Board’s rules committee last week.
The measure will make other, smaller changes to some task forces too, including changing some of their names and adding standardized term limits for board members, which Mandelman described at the Rules committee as “a lot of useful clean up.”