Finally, some details on the mayor’s budget (we can only hope)

The supes will learn, we hope, more specifics on the mayor’s budget cuts this week as the Budget and Appropriations Committee begins what will be a long series of hearings on the individual departments’ budget proposals.

The supes can’t directly add money to the mayor’s budget, although they can cut. Typically, the Budget and Legislative Analyst finds millions in cuts that the supes can then negotiate with the mayor to fund as “add backs.”

This time around, there won’t be as much in the way of obvious cuts; much of that was typically positions that were funded but not filled, and most of those are now gone.

So it’s going to be a matter of priorities: What will the supes say is overfunded, and how much of that money can they shift to other priorities?

And what, exactly, is going to be cut?

On Wednesday/11, the committee will start with these agencies:

Assessor/Recorder, Treasurer and Tax Collector, Technology Department, Board of Appeals, City Administrator, Health Service System, Civil Service Commission, Human Resources, Department of Elections, Department of General City Responsibility Controller, Human Services Agency, Building Inspection, Planning Department, Ethics Commission, Public Works, Board of Supervisors

Thursday/12

Asian Arts Museum, Fine Arts Museum, Academy of Sciences, Arts Commission, War Memorial, Child Support Services, Early Childhood, Recreation and Park, Homelessness and Supportive Housing, Public Health, Mayor’s Office/Housing and Community Development, Human Rights Commission/Status of Women, Department on Children, Youth, and Their Families, Office of Economic and Workforce Development.

Friday/13 is when some of the most controversial proposals will come before the panel:

City Attorney, Office of the Superior Court, Environment Department, Law Library, Public Library, Retirement System, Rent Board, Emergency Management, Juvenile Probation, Adult Probation, Public Defender, Fire Department, Sheriff’s Department, Police Accountability, Department of Inspector General, District Attorney, Police Department.

The whole operation that Mayor Daniel Lurie calls “public safety,” but is really just the cops and prosecutors, will be up for discussion. Police, sheriffs, the DA and the public defender are the only offices that were not ordered to take 15 percent budget cuts (and the PD is only on that list because it’s not possible to arrest thousands more people without public defenders to represent them; the whole court system would shut down).

Also: Lurie has said he will fund the new Office of the Inspector General, which has funding mandates in the charter, but nobody has been hired yet.

The interesting question: Will anyone on the committee, or later the full board, challenge the increased money for the cops? Will anyone point out that, while the number of officers on the streets is at a low point, so it crime—and if we linked the number of cops to the crime rate (either by saying the cops on the street prevent crime, which is at the very least debatable, of by saying we need more cops to respond to existing crime), hiring hundreds more sworn officers might not make financial or public policy sense.

There’s also the question of police overtime, which has been out of control—every year. It’s as if the department brass know they can spend as much as they want, blow through the budget, and come back to the supes for a supplemental allocation, and get it every time.

And, of course, the conditions in the county jail, which are not impacted by the number of deputies on duty but by how many people (many with substance use and mental-health issues) are locked up by the mayor’s war on crime.

Those hearings start at 10am.

Sup. Shamann Walton will ask Lurie about his shelter policy at Question Time Tuesday/10, setting off a complex debate that stretches across the city.

Lurie wants to shift money from permanent affordable housing into more short-term shelters, basically moving people off the streets (and out of sight) without a clear plan for long-term solutions. But Walton has been pushing back, particularly around an expanded shelter in District 10.

At the same time, Sup. Bilal Mahmood has introduced a bill that would require the city to open at least one homeless shelter in every district by next year. The measure also bans any new facilities within 1,000 feet of an existing one.

That would mean much of the Tenderloin, which he represents, would be off limits, and so would parts of the Haight. Former Sup. Dean Preston posted on Bluesky:

YIMBY Supervisor has introduced legislation to block new homeless shelters across his district. Mahmood’s ordinance would ban new shelters, outpatient clinics, residential care and treatment facilities, and transitional housing across D5, including much of Hayes Valley, NOPA, and Haight Ashbury … His ordinance does two things: (1) calls for shelter, behavioral health facility, transitional housing in each district (good), and (2) bans new shelters, behavioral health facilities, and transitional housing across D5 & many other parts of the city (bad). Why do you think it was written like this?

A politically diverse group of supes—Matt Dorsey, Jackie Fielder, Myrna Melgar, Danny Sauter, and Walton—all support the Mahmood bill.

And of course, there’s the larger issue that Lurie has not budgeted the Prop. I money that’s supposed to go for affordable housing, and is instead pushing for more temporary shelters, which most advocates for the unhoused community agree is not a real solution.

That discussion begins right at the start of the board meeting, at 2pm.

The full board will also consider extending by another six months the mayor’s authority to ask rich people for money for anything he can describe as aiding “the economic revitalization of San Francisco.”

The vote will come just as the supes are issuing subpoenas to the leaders of the SF Parks Alliance, which played a key role in the corruption scandal that led to the law banning “behested payments,” which the mayor now wants in effect repealed.

The Police Commission will elect new leaders Wednesday/11—and it’s a critical time for the seven-member panel (although only six are currently seated; there’s a vacancy). The commission, under its next president, will lead the search for a new police chief now that Bill Scott has resigned to take a job in LA.

The mayor appoints four of the commission members, and the supes appoint three.

The current president, Cindy Elias, was appointed by the supes, and won the top job after Commissioner Max Carter-Oberstone, a mayoral appointee, broke ranks and voted for her. That was the beginning of an effort by former Mayor London Breed and later Lurie to kick Carter-Oberstone off the panel.

Now the mayor’s appointees have a 4-2 majority, so it’s likely one of them will be the next president—which was part of what Lurie wanted when he ousted Carter-Oberstone. If, as expected, a mayoral ally becomes the next commission president, Lurie will have a lot more say in who becomes the next chief.

In theory, the commission does a national search and selects three finalists, and the mayor hires one of them. In practice, if the mayor controls the commission, he controls the list.