Daniel Lurie will take the oath of office and become the next mayor Jan. 8 in a ceremony at Civic Center Plaza after a series of events that include a weekend of “neighborhood cleanups.” His inaugural celebration later that day will take place in Chinatown.
Then he’ll have to figure out how to run the city.
He will have a narrow, possibly workable majority on the Board of Supes (although the billionaires didn’t get all they wanted.) Interesting interview in Mission Local with Chris Larsen, who said in effect that the plutocrats made a mistake this election; they could have lived with any of the mayoral candidates except Peskin, so they should have spent all of their money on the Board of Supes races:
“We spent, what, $20 million on a mayor problem that we didn’t have?” said cryptocurrency billionaire Chris Larsen, who backed Breed with nearly $1 million. “And we just squeaked through on the Board of Supervisors which, of course, is the heart of the problem … We should have focused on that 100 percent, should have been an eight-to-three board instead of a barely six-to-five.”
So that’s what we have to look forward to in 2026—although it will be hard for Larsen’s folks to make that big a shift. The even-numbered seats are up in two years, and most of them are already held by tech-friendly folks.
Unlike Breed, Lurie won’t owe his election to the tech oligarchy, which has held considerable sway at City Hall for the past 14 years. The late Mayor Ed Lee listened and outgoing Mayor London Breed counted the likes of Ron Conway as close advisors. Tech companies got tax breaks—and more important, got to test their products, even illegal products, with impunity.
We are now seeing the results. Thousands of apartments have been converted to hotel rooms thanks to Airbnb. And, as even the outgoing director of the SFMTA now admits, Uber and Lyft—which operated illegally for years—and now the robotaxis have been systematically damaging Muni.
From the Chron’s exit interview with Jeffrey Tumlin:
When Uber and Lyft were founded in San Francisco, they made grand promises about the end of car ownership, solving traffic congestion and improving the efficiency of the mobility system.
I think Uber and Lyft had the opposite of their intended effects. Uber and Lyft are very convenient, but they have worsened the efficiency of the system. Many people have a hard time understanding the difference between user convenience and system efficiency. …. Uber, Lyft and now Waymo are a big part of why Muni funding is down.
A challenge we face in the mobility world is a challenge of geometry. When I walk or bike or take Muni, I take up one-tenth of the roadway space as I do when I drive my own car, or take an Uber, or take a Waymo. So, if I am choosing my individual user convenience, I am worsening system efficiency and causing the overall roadway system to have less capacity to move people.
The mistake here: This wasn’t the “opposite” of their intended effects; it was the exact thing these companies wanted and planned to do. Uber made that clear in papers it filed when it went public: Its goal is to destroy public transit around the world.
This was made possible, or at least made easier, when Lee directed his staff not to take any action against these illegal taxis and when Breed did nothing to stop the arrival of robocabs.
Now Lurie will have to manage an existential crisis at Muni, a huge budget deficit that Muni officials and some state legislators are saying can only be solved with a new tax to fund transit. Tumlin: “We’ll be talking about all the different potential sources of revenue. All of them are hard. But the only thing harder is letting Muni collapse.”
Those discussions are already underway, and will continue in January—meaning one of Lurie’s first major policy decisions will involve some sort of new revenue sources for Muni. Based on what Tumlin says, and what numerous studies have shown, the most obvious solution is to make Uber, Lyft, and Waymo pay for the damage they’ve done. That’s what Prop. L on the November ballot would have done. Prop. L won with 56 percent, but for complicated political reasons, another tax measure, Prop. M, got more votes and nullified L.
There was a reason the big tech companies gave money to Yes on M; they didn’t care about the tax reform, but they wanted to block Prop. L.
There’s no reason Lurie can’t bring that idea back.
Instead, expect a push for a sales tax—the most regressive kind of taxation, and thus the approach that Big Tech and Real Estate like best.
This will be a big test of his ability to stand up to the plutocrats.
He’s going to have the same problem as winter turns into spring and he has to put together a budget that covers a shortfall of at least $800 million and possibly more than $1 billion. He’s going to have to slash essential services—or look for more revenue.
Taxes are difficult, since for the most part they require voter approval, and there won’t be another regular election until 2026. The supes could, of course, call a special election just to vote on new taxes.
The deficit isn’t a short-term problem; it’s not the result of a recession. It’s the result of structural changes in the city, the collapse of the downtown-centric economic model and a tax system that relied too heavily on it.
So Lurie, if he has any designs on more than one term and any interest in the city’s future stability, needs to think about the future. And one major source of revenue is there for the taking, so to speak:
If San Francisco bought out or seized by eminent domain PG&E’s electricity infrastructure and created a municipal utility, the city could clear hundreds of millions in new revenue every year. I’ve looked at the numbers repeatedly; it’s all public record. PG&E has to break down its revenue by city, and it’s not hard to estimate expenses (again from public records). Add in the interest on revenue bonds, which the city can issue without going to the ballot, and the bottom line isn’t difficult. I’d estimate today it’s close to $500 million. Pretty much every public power system in the country makes money.
That won’t happen this year, since PG&E will fight bitterly, in court—but if we’d started five years ago, we’d have that cash now. The deficit wouldn’t be so terrifying.
Welcome to City Hall Room 200, Mr. Lurie.
