They were bound to be foils: San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie presides over a center of global commerce, billionaires and tech elites. Across the bridge, Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee leads a city of working class holdouts.<\/p>\n
Both leaders, however, want the same thing this year: They\u2019re pitching voters on approving November ballot measures that would greatly expand their powers.<\/p>\n
Yet they have gone about their efforts in starkly different ways: Lurie\u2019s campaign spent $4.5 million on signature-gatherers to put three charter amendments before voters in November, part of a nearly $14 million campaign funded by the mayor\u2019s allies. <\/p>\n
Lee, meanwhile, opted to bring her measure before a divided city council, which put it on the ballot. The campaign to pass the measure has raised just $37,000 this year.<\/p>\n
The Oakland measure also involved far more community engagement. Lee put herself in the hot seat for multiple rounds of live-streamed questions<\/a> from city council members and residents during three hearings at City Hall. The Oakland mayor sat in the chambers for the duration, often taking the heat from dozens of speakers.\u00a0<\/p>\n Oakland council members were so divided in fact that Lee\u2019s vote broke the 4-4 tie to approve the charter amendment for the election.\u00a0<\/p>\n Lurie, on the other hand, did not bring his measures to his elected colleagues for discussion or a vote. For community feedback, he relied on four working sessions in Room 201 at City Hall from last December through March, before his measures were introduced.\u00a0<\/p>\n There, a 31-member panel<\/a> of mostly pro-business and moderate allies \u2014 and three representatives from labor \u2014 sounded off on the proposed changes. Lurie attended portions of the meetings. The group allowed only emailed comments at the first session in December, and eventually allowed spoken comments later.<\/p>\n The mayor\u2019s office says it held six smaller group meetings on top of that, for a total of 10 meetings of varying size.<\/p>\n Either that community engagement process was superficial, as Lurie\u2019s critics described it, or the mayor can process feedback at a remarkable clip: The mayor unveiled his three proposed ballot measures<\/a> \u2014 now known as Propositions D, E, and F \u2014 just one day after his working group\u2019s final meeting in March<\/a>. And that was six weeks before the city released a formal summary<\/a> of the charter working group\u2019s input.<\/p>\n Lee\u2019s Oakland charter working group, by comparison, held 14 community meetings from October through December, counted more than 750<\/a> attendees across all of them, and conducted a resident survey on the city charter and mayoral power that purportedly elicited 433 responses.\u00a0<\/p>\n Oakland\u2019s working group released its formal recommendations in January \u2014 which were then further discussed at two more community meetings in February, for a total of 16 meetings. Lee waited months after that to unveil her ballot measure, in May.<\/p>\n Lee\u2019s charter working group was much smaller than Lurie\u2019s, with only eight members to Lurie\u2019s 31.\u00a0<\/p>\n Three people sat on both cities\u2019 working groups: Fred Blackwell, CEO of the San Francisco Foundation; Zach Goldman, a labor leader with SEIU Local 1021; and Ben Rosenfield, the San Francisco city controller from 2008 to 2024\u00a0and senior advisor and public finance expert with SPUR, an urbanist think tank, who co-wrote the group\u2019s charter recommendations for San Francisco last November.\u00a0<\/p>\n None of them responded to repeated phone and text messages seeking comment on the differences between both cities\u2019 approaches.\u00a0<\/p>\n SPUR, specifically, shaped both mayors\u2019 charter efforts more than any other outside group. A spokesperson for the organization declined to comment.<\/p>\n Lee did not respond to a request for comment.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cAs we developed these measures with a roughly 30-member working group in partnership with President Rafael Mandelman, Controller Greg Wagner, and City Administrator Carmen Chu, we invited public comment multiple times and earned support from small businesses, labor unions, and residents across the city,\u201d said Charles Lutvak, a spokesperson for the San Francisco mayor\u2019s office.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cMayor Lurie ran on fixing this system, with his City Hall Accountability Plan<\/a> \u2014 San Franciscans voted for it in 2024, and they\u2019ll have an opportunity to enact these reforms in November.\u201d<\/p>\n Biggest changes to S.F. city charter in decades<\/p>\n Lurie\u2019s charter changes are a package of three measures:<\/p>\n Prop. D, if approved by voters, would make it harder for residents to put measures on the ballot (and remove the mayor\u2019s own ability to unilaterally do so)<\/p>\n Prop. E would empower the city administrator to reform San Francisco\u2019s contracting procedures<\/p>\n Prop. F would give the mayor sole power to hire and fire certain city department heads\u00a0<\/p>\n Board President Mandelman, who partnered with the mayor on convening the working group and co-introduced the three ballot measures, said there was consensus going into the sessions that the charter should be changed \u2014 the meetings helped decide which changes were viable.\u00a0<\/p>\n The think tank SPUR made 10 recommendations on San Francisco charter changes last November. Some did not fly, like a charter amendment to allow for more discretionary spending in the city budget, too hot a topic for many.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe working group meetings were helpful in understanding what might be doable this year or what might be too hard and too complicated and what would require a whole lot more analysis,\u201d Mandelman said.\u00a0<\/p>\n In Oakland, voters will decide on just one ballot measure pertaining to multiple changes to mayoral and city council powers.\u00a0<\/p>\n If passed, Measure EE<\/a> would change several things:<\/p>\n Oakland mayors would gain the ability to appoint more department heads, and the authority to veto council budget decisions<\/p>\n Mayors would lose the ability to cast tie-breaking<\/a> votes on legislation<\/p>\n Council members would gain the ability to directly communicate with staff<\/a>, call staff to give testimony on an issue, and override the mayor\u2019s veto of legislation with a two-thirds vote<\/p>\n San Francisco\u2019s mayor was not sure he could win his new powers from the supervisors.<\/p>\n Lurie and his advisors \u201cwere not confident they could get the measure they thought the city needed through the Board of Supervisors \u2014 and I would agree,\u201d said Mandelman, who chairs the supervisor meetings. At least, he said, not in a way \u201cthat reflected the direction the mayor wanted to go and what I thought was right.\u201d<\/p>\n Christin Evans, a progressive small business advocate who attended the San Francisco working group meetings as an observer, described the meetings as \u201csuperficial.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt was not like, \u2018Here\u2019s a draft of the measures we\u2019re considering and let\u2019s go point-by-point,\u2019\u201d Evans said. Instead, Evans said the meetings felt like window dressing for measures the mayor had already determined he wanted.<\/p>\n \u201cThis group didn\u2019t seem interested in hearing from the public. They did not engage with the public in a meaningful way.\u201d<\/p>\n That\u2019s not to say intimate community workshops are the norm for San Francisco measure, of which there are a whopping 10 on this November ballot, plus a regional transit tax and state measures.<\/p>\n Proponents of Proposition I<\/a>, which the mayor opposes, did not hold any such sessions before pushing for a reallocation of real estate tax revenue for affordable housing on the November ballot. Neither did Supervisor Myrna Melgar for Proposition C<\/a>, which instead got public hearings at City Hall. Proponents for the other ballot measures did not respond when asked for information on their community engagement.<\/p>\n The mayor\u2019s measures, in that way, have been an exception \u2014 and Mandelman defended the process.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe got a lot of letters. Concerned stakeholders definitely made themselves heard, and there was no shortage of feedback for the mayor to consider as they put D, E, and F together,\u201d Mandelman said.\u00a0<\/p>\n The supervisor said he\u2019s jaded by the public comment procedure generally.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m not sure how much more would have been added to that by a very long public comment process where many people stand in line to offer a two-minute comment. I have experienced many hundreds of hours of that comment on the community college board and as a supervisor,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cMy takeaway, 14 years later, is that I\u2019m not sure how much that kind of public comment actually informs outcomes or is useful to decision makers.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"They were bound to be foils: San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie presides over a center of global commerce,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":509441,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[168965,6702,7917,166103,636,35072,21973,101,103,102,104,106,105],"class_list":["post-509440","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-francisco","tag-ballot-measures-2026","tag-board-of-supervisors","tag-campaign-finance","tag-city-charter-reforms","tag-daniel-lurie","tag-election-2026","tag-rafael-mandelman","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\/509440","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=509440"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/509440\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/509441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=509440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=509440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=509440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}