{"id":398798,"date":"2026-07-15T02:46:09","date_gmt":"2026-07-15T02:46:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/398798\/"},"modified":"2026-07-15T02:46:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-15T02:46:09","slug":"san-francisco-supervisors-pass-sweeping-changes-to-city-code","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/398798\/","title":{"rendered":"San Francisco supervisors pass sweeping changes to city code"},"content":{"rendered":"

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted 7-4 Tuesday to pass an ordinance that makes sweeping changes to the city\u2019s municipal codes, despite objections that the 362-page ordinance<\/a> is too broad to be covered by a single vote and concerns over changing some important reporting requirements including those around surveillance.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The ordinance, sponsored by Board President Rafael Mandelman, originated at the city attorney\u2019s office, whose staff partnered with a lab at Stanford University to use AI to identify redundancies in the city\u2019s codes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Supervisors Myrna Melgar, Connie Chan, Jackie Fielder and Shamann Walton voted against the legislation.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A previous vote, on June 30, was postponed<\/a> by Mandelman for two weeks after several supervisors \u2014 and Angela Calvillo, the board clerk, who seldom weighs in on legislative discussion \u2014 raised concerns that the proposal was so broad, they could not make sense of all the changes being made.<\/p>\n

Calvillo described the ordinance as a \u201cdeviation from the norm<\/a>\u201d and Supervisor Melgar said she relied on AI \u2014 Anthropic\u2019s Claude \u2014 to understand the specific changes in the ordinance.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Many of the proposals reduce or remove requirements that mandate reports about certain aspects of city government.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Supervisor Fielder raised concerns about how the ordinance changed the frequency of the city\u2019s audit of its use of surveillance technology from every year to every five years.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI think the frequency of this report is crucial to honoring civil liberties and the intent of our city\u2019s strong surveillance technology policy,\u201d said Fielder.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Supervisor Walton echoed Fielder\u2019s comments. \u201cThese reporting requirements are in place for a reason,\u201d said Walton, who added that the ordinance should have been broken down into smaller pieces of legislation.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Melgar agreed with the substance of the changes, she told the board, but took issue with the process of combining so many of them together. \u201cThere are policy implications for streamlining and getting rid of reports \u2014 that I think are policy decisions,\u201d said Melgar.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think that the process was sufficient to encompass the entire breadth of what\u2019s happening here,\u201d Melgar added.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Before the meeting, Melgar said she would look into introducing trailing legislation, which allows supervisors to follow-up with changes to existing legislation, at a later stage, to address concerns that weren\u2019t addressed before the vote.<\/p>\n

Amendments made in the last two weeks include restoring reporting requirements that provide information to the Department of the Status on Women (among those requirements: the police department and district attorney\u2019s office have to share domestic violence data).<\/p>\n

The recent amendments also restore reporting requirements on sexual harassment, and for reports on the number of small businesses served by case managers at the city\u2019s Office of Small Business.\u00a0<\/p>\n

At the meeting, Mandelman suggested that work remains to be done to streamline the city\u2019s codes. \u201cI hope this is not the end,\u201d he said. \u201cBecause I do think our code needs much more pruning.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted 7-4 Tuesday to pass an ordinance that makes sweeping changes to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":375441,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[101,103,102,104,106,105],"class_list":["post-398798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco-headlines","tag-san-francisco-news","tag-sf","tag-sf-headlines","tag-sf-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=398798"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398798\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/375441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=398798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=398798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=398798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}