“Small Ball”— a strategy for progressing towards a goal
by proceeding in small steps or by addressing small matters.
—Merriam Webster
We hang in the balance
Dangle ‘tween hell and hallowed ground
Every single one of us could use some mercy now.
—Mary Gauthier “Mercy Now”
On April 17th Mayor Lurie made remarks concerning his first 100 days in office. The speech covered the expected ground of accomplishments of his first 100 days, including a fact sheet on his specific accomplishments. He claimed pride in what he had accomplished so far but humbly concluded he is not “satisfied.”
No such reserve was present in his biggest boosters evaluation of the first 100 days, the San Francisco Chronicle, which claimed that Lurie “had plenty to boast about” given his remarkable adeptness at “bridging divides between the city’s political factions.” It concludes that his “quiet competence” has kept the city sane in a “time of chaos,” observations far more clear to the editorial writers than to the rest of us.
It seems clear that events left unmentioned indicate more turbulence than the Chronicle editorial was willing to admit.
The mayor himself has fired his press aide and one commissioner so far. The press aide was let go for the simple reason that she let it be known that the mayor was so unsure over his control of the bureaucracy that his new policy of not allowing department heard to speak to the press without a clearance from the Mayor’s Office was now in effect The commissioner was let go because of “disrespect” shown the mayor’s staff.
At least 20 city departments, including the largest, Public Health, simply ignored the mayor’s budget “guidance” of submitting a budget with 15 percent cuts giving him instead one with far fewer cuts, making it impossible to address the current $850 million deficit. This novel and “chaotic” situation taken by city departments was again somehow missed by the chronicle editorial writers.
Also ignored was the fact that one of the mayor’s supervisor allies was in the midst of being recalled and the matter of the voters ire, the vote to create a new park on the Great Highway, was itself facing a lawsuit, events seriously undermining the claim that Lurie has some sort of “special sauce” in “bridging” the city’s political “divides.”
The 2024 campaign for mayor was supposed to be all about the “outsider” new guy throwing the “insider” old guys and gals out of City Hall and changing its direction. One of the major accomplishments Lurie claims in his remarks is “that for the first time in five years, people believe San Francisco is headed in the right direction.”
He implies it is because of his actions over the last 100 days, and not a sigh of relief that after five years of former Mayor London Breed’s mismanagement and corruption she is finally out of Room 200 and the city can now proceed without her. That happened election night, not 100 days later.
In fact, Lurie has consolidated the old billionaire-insider influence and continued all of Breed’s major policies. He has kept all but two of the major department heads (he abruptly changed the Director of Public Health, see below, as well as filling a vacancy at SFMTA), made no significant commission changes, and doubled down on Breed’s police crackdown on drugs and her embrace of density as a solution to the “housing crisis” (read “real estate crisis.”)
He, in fact, actually extended her density bonus for market rate housing into the western South of Market (and perhaps Bernal Heights) without having any conversation with the communities affected.
Of the last five mayoral transitions, Lurie’s has resulted in the lowest turnover of commissioners and department heads. Using Mission Local’s excellent data base, Lurie has appointed a total of nine commissioners (six new and three reappointments) of the some 1,200 seats available. He has appointed more folks to the Library Commission (three) than the Police Commission (two), an odd outcome given his “public safety” emphasis.
His one appointment to the SFMTA Board cast the deciding vote to end Muni service to Market Street in his first meeting. He has made no new appointments to the Planning, Health, or Human Services Commissions, which are at the center of his announced priority areas, sticking with the folks appointed by Breed.
His most remarkable appointments so far have been in the Health Department. He appointed Kunal Modi as his Health, Human and Family Services chief (a new position in the Mayor’s Office) and a few days later named Daniel Tsai as health director. Insiders report that Dr. Grant Colfax, the former director, had been interviewed by the new administration and led to believe he would stay in the job. Yet within hours of his interview, Colfax was told that the administration did not need him, and he was replaced by Tsai.
Modi and Tsai had an important thing in common: Both had worked at McKinsey, the controversial international consulting firm that in 2020 paid some $573 million to settle claims that it designed a program for Purdue, the manufacturer of Oxycontin, to “turbocharge Oxycontin sales” and to being “part of the machines that…destroyed lives,” according to California Attorney General Xavier Becerra.
That’s a decidedly odd and perhaps dangerous choice for Lurie to make for the largest, in terms of budget, department in the city and county and a department sure to be under stress once Trump cuts are fully realized.
While the mayor personally attends police round-ups at individual street corners, he has yet to have one neighborhood meeting with any of 300,000 or so resident directly affected by his upzoning proposal. He has failed to meet with small business owners and operators directly threatened by the proposal to hear their concerns and their proposed amendments to the plan.
Instead he has sent them to his new “chief of housing and economic development” Ned Segel. Segal, former Twitter CFO and old Town School mate of the mayor, shocked local merchants in their meeting to discuss the rezoning when he called for a repeal of the recently voter approved commercial vacancy tax and the limit on new formula retail chains on neighborhood commercial streets—instead of considering their concerns about the proposed displacement of small merchants called for in the up-zoning plan. He said, according to a merchant leader that attended the meeting, “why should we have a law that charges a fee on vacant businesses when they don’t cost the city any revenue,” showing his ignorance of the impact of long-term commercial vacancies on commercial streets.
Segel is also in charge of “re-vitalizing” downtown, and to help him Lurie has created the Partnership for San Francisco made up of 26 billion-dollar businesses including Breeds favorite go to money bags, investor Ron Conway. The co-chair, Ruth Porat of Google, may be preoccupied, as Google has just been hit with a second ruling that it is a monopoly and may be forced to “restructure its operations” as a result.
Besides pushing “small ball” events featuring one-off drinking events for the well-to-do (as opposed to the current use for the down and out), the committee hasn’t come up with much. Excluded from Lurie’s partnership, the Chamber of Commerce has re-surfaced yet another old chestnut, a sport arena at 5th and Mission.
The Lurie small-ball approach, making tiny steps and using the new San Francisco billionaire class as his ally, has split the business community with the old-line Chamber of Commerce deciding to go it alone.
But nothing more clearly emphasizes the danger of the Lurie small ball approach than his failure to address the need to re-organize and create a new consensus of support for public transit. Neither Segal nor his new chief for infrastructure, climate and mobility, Alicia John-Baptiste, have addressed the widespread community concern about the Muni “death spiral” nor, of course, has the mayor. But what Lurie has done has not created confidence that he or his administration have any real ideas on what to do to save Muni as a transit option for most San Franciscans.
He has appointed perhaps the best person for the job as director of transportation at SFMTA, Julie Kirschbaum. Kirschbaum is committed to public transit, knows Muni better than anyone else in SFMTA, and has a track record of working well with both Muni operators and community groups. The problem is that the mayor has no real policy about public transportation. He presented nothing in his campaign, and he has said little beyond platitudes since his election.
But he has taken two deeply concerning actions: supporting the cut in service to Market Street (his appointment to the SFMTA Board provided the decisive fourth vote in a 4-3 vote to cut service) and, after that cut, he allowed Waymo access to Market street. These cuts to service were made after some 46,000 Muni trips were added in 2024, bringing Muni to 75 percent of its pre-Covid ridership.
Cuts in service always result in loss of ridership. None the less, that is the choice Lurie made. Waymo costs about $12 a mile; Muni costs $2.75 ($1.35 for seniors, free for low income seniors, people with disabilities and youth under 18) for unlimited mileage. On its face it is hard to deny that the mayor’s position is that the “wrong” people ride Munk and the “right” people ride Waymo for his vision of the economic future of Market Street.
What the mayor has done is to say that a measure will be put on the ballot in 2026 (long after even deeper cuts will have been made to meet the 2025 budget deficit ) to fund Muni, and he has appointed a fund raising committee for that effort. What the measure is and what it will raise is unknown, and who is on the fundraising committee is also unknown. Chances the measure will include a sales tax measure, as both Senator Weiner and the SFMTA seem to prefer that to a meaningful increase in corporate taxes for Muni.
It is important for folks to keep in mind that we already use 0.5 percent of the existing sales tax to fund Muni. We voted to extend that to 2053 three years ago. It now raises about $100 million a year and will rise to about $240m by 2053, according to the Controller’s Office. Sales taxes disproportionally hit low- and fixed-income folks, the very ones that the Lurie cuts will keep off Market Street. We cannot fund Muni by raising fares and the sales tax. Remember, the wealthy and large corporations are going to get a big tax cut from Trump. We need to capture some of that windfall to pay for critical local services.
Finally, there is the issue of corruption, totally ignored in the mayor’s April 17th remarks. “Corruption” was arguably the center piece of the 2024 mayoral campaign.Lurie released a plan to address it in April, 2024, linking corruption to city contracting and time and again naming both Breed and former Mayor Mark Farrell of using their city insider positions to grant contacts and then have the contactors donate to their campaigns. He promised an “aggressive” anti-corruption campaign on day one of his administration through the creation of a centralized contract oversight system within the Mayor’s Office.
Perhaps Lurie and his advisors were concerned about what an Inspector General might say about his habit of appointing billionaire corporations, many with existing or possible conflicts to key advisory and policy bodies. After al,l both Google and McKinsey have had recent run-ins with other government regulators and perhaps the Lurie administration did not want that to happen on its watch.
There are three huge issues that the Lurie administration is simply ignoring and never even mentioned in the April 17th remarks: the looming budget crisis, ongoing and deepening income inequality, and the serious and fast approaching environmental constraints including fast approaching constraints on electrical energy in an economy dominated by AI.
Budget crisis
City employee unions have already called upon the mayor to tax the wealthy to avoid deep and destructive cuts in critical city services. Departments have already resisted the mayor by simply ignoring his budget advisory by submitting budgets that did not include 15 percent cuts, precipitating his absurd new policy that department personnel must refuse to talk to the press unless first going to the Mayor’s Office. And this is about only the City and County budget cuts. The mayor has yet to open his mouth about the massive cuts to be expected from the Federal Government to this deep blue, sanctuary city. The impacts of Medicare and Social Security cuts alone will imperial tens of thousands of San Franciscans. Cuts to public transit and housing subsidies will happen as sure as Trump winning another of his own golf tournaments.
Lurie has had no discussion about any of these cuts, has laid out no plan to ask Gavin Newsom, his wife’s good friend, for state assistance, and most assuredly he has not discussed any taxes on his millionaire and billionaire friends to avoid these certain devastating cuts in service. Trump will cut the taxes for the most wealthy, scores of whom live in San Francisco. Will Lurie (who himself will receive these federal tax cuts) promote a plan to raise taxes on those who get the federal tax breaks? We all wait in wonder.
Income Inequality
In 2024, among the 50 US cities with the greatest income inequality, only five have median incomes of more than $100,000: Berkley $104,716, Washington D.C. $101,722, Stamford, Conn, $100,708, Scottsdale, Az. 104,197, and San Francisco, $136,689. Of those 50 cities, only nine have a population of 100,000 or more and again San Francisco has, by far, the highest median income:
San Francisco $136,689
Boston $89,212
Atlanta $77,655
New York $76,607
LA $76,244
Chicago $71,673
Dallas $63,985
Philadelphia $57,537
Detroit $37,761
Income inequality is a continuing problem, made worse by a global trade system that favors (until Trump!) wealthy countries over poorer countries, and internally, by an economy centered on financial and technical industries that are centralized in major cities along the coasts (note that four of the top five in the above are coastal, and both tech and finance hubs) and require advanced education, an opportunity now in decline in the US.
This has resulted in the City of St. Francis having 20 percent of its population making an average income of $19,000 while the top 20 percent average $532,010.
It seems, as local and state governments cut services critically needed by low and fix income residents, and with a federal administration dominated by a executive branch of more billionaires than ever in history taking aim at social spending while planning a huge tax cut for the wealthy the situation at the national level, at least for the next four years, seems beyond bleak.
As our own local nationally celebrated economist has argued, income inequality can be addressed only with active government measures to counter balance the private market pressure to concentrate more and more wealth into fewer and fewer hands. Robert Reich’s argument is simple: “The more dependent politicians become on their financial favors, the greater is the willingness of such politicians and their appointees to reorganize the market to the benefit of these moneyed interests… Ultimately, the trend toward widening inequality in America, as elsewhere, can be reversed only if the vast majority, whose incomes have stagnated and whose wealth has failed to increase, join together to demand fundamental change.”
When a government is led by the wealthy, as is San Francisco’s, it’s all too easy for them to simply believe that helping the “market” helps everyone. As we see with the level in income inequality in San Francisco, that’s simply not true.
Take, for example, Lurie’s recent pronouncement that all city workers must spend at least four days a week in the office. This pronouncement ignores the fact that Breed, under COVID restrictions, cancelled leased office space used by city agencies as workers worked from home. There are now far too many workers to fit into the available space ,and new space must be leased to accommodate Lurie’s edict.
This is no doubt thought a wise move, since San Francisco has a huge inventory of office space. The problem is this is a subsidy of a very wealthy sector of the local economy and is being made at a time when the city can least afford new office leases.
Contrast this policy with the policy Lurie took with Muni service cuts. When a mere $7 million was needed to keep service at its present rate, a rate which has attracted new riders at a record clip, Lurie choose not to maintain the service by using part of the $100 million or so in Muni reserves. He would not consider using public money to maintain a public service—but had no problems with adopting a policy that would use public money to subsidize private market-rate office owners. A sobering choice.
Income inequality in supremely wealthy San Francisco can be addressed by using local political power to tax the wealthy to provide existing and new services that benefit the general population. So far Mayor Lurie doesn’t seem to understand that simple concept.
Environmental challenges and electric grid problems
The following maps are from the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, the lead regional agency addressing the issues of climate change and sea level rise. They appear in a December, 2024 report.
They are sobering and the implications need to be addressed by the Lurie administration.
The first map (2.4) shows that portion of the city threatened by sea level rise by mid-century. The second (2.5) locates critical infrastructure located in the threatened area. All of downtown and most of “tech” San Francisco may well be underwater by 2050 or so.
In that same area are the three electrical power stations in the city, its only public hospital, and a major water and sewage treatment facility. Has anyone other than Jean-Baptiste in the Lurie Administration taken a look at either of these maps or the wider issue of sea level rise and its implications for the future of downtown, Muni, electrical power generation, clean water and sewage disposal? Nothing in the mayors April 17th statement even mentions sea-level rise let alone a listing of possible actions.
But his message did tout the arrival of a new AI cloud computing business Databricks. The near mystical place AI businesses has in the imagination of the San Francisco business elite is stunning in general and for the mayor in particular, astounding. No questions about the broader social and economic impact of AI seems trouble our city’s business leaders, especially if the new business will lease office space.
But, then there is the troubling reality of AI that seems not to be mentioned in polite San Francisco business circles. Few business activities demand more electricity and water for cooling all of the high-level computers necessary for an AI based economy. And after all, San Francisco has all the electricity it needs, right? Because it had better have huge supplies if the needs of AI are to be met in San Francisco.
California now has, thanks to Gavin Newsom and his lap dog Public Utilities Commission, the most expensive electricity costs in the continental US. Moreover, climate change has produced a dramatic shift in rain and snow fall in California, lessening both over time. At a time San Francisco is courting an industry with huge electricity and water demands, both are increasing scarce both in the state and San Francisco.
In December 2024 Berkeley Labs published a paper, 2024 United States Data Center Energy Usage Report.
The paper states that AI has caused “U.S. data center energy use… to grow at an increasing rate …, representing 4.4 percent of total US electricity consumption” in 2023. AI uses extremely power-hungry computers which, in turn, demand ever increasing amounts of water to cool these systems. It is expected that by 2028 the total electricity demand created by these powerful systems will rise to “6.7 percent to 12.0 percent of total U.S. electricity consumption forecasted for 2028” a 65 percent to 212 percent increase in five years!
The demand for electricity for AI is so massive that Microsoft, headquartered in hydro-rich Seattle, sighed a 20-year deal last year to re-open the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant for its future AI power needs.
Can San Francisco meet that power demand, especially if all of its existing power plants are under water as suggested by BCDC? Is AI really an economic winner for San Francisco or California if it overpowers an out-of-date power grid unable to keep from shorting out and causing massive wildfires? Is AI anything other than a wet dream for developers and real estate brokers? What is Lurie’s plan to address the twin challenges of sea level rise and insufficient electrical power needed for the power hungry new economic savior of the city? It seems, if we are to belive the April 17th 100 days message, he has no plans.
In 2000, Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point popularized the concept of “broken windows” policing, a small-ball approach to crime fighting that claimed that if petty crimes are targeted, then major crime will diminish. The theory was grabbed by local gentrifiers here in San Francisco. Police were directed to go after street people and drunks. It didn’t work.
Will Lurie do better than Gladwell? Given what faces us all in the coming months and years, it seems highly unlikely that the mayor showing up at corner police rousts, or re-groaning street teams, will, in fact, materially alter the major challenges we face as a City.
Lurie needs to get serious. And so do we.
