The line for public comment wound around half the second floor of City Hall. Banners dropped from the third floor. Loud chants filled the rotunda as hundreds of people who provide essential services to the city came out in force to call on the supes not to accept tens of millions of dollars in cuts in the Lurie budget.
Monday was the final day of full public comment on the spending plan; the Budget and Appropriations Committee is slated to vote on it Wednesday/25.
In a press availability outside the board chambers, representatives of some of the dozens of organizations facing cuts described what will happen if the mayor’s plan goes through.
Among other things, the activists argue that the city should cut back on funding a new jail wing and make available some $300 million that Mayor Daniel Lurie is sequestering in case the city loses a lawsuit by Airbnb seeking a tax refund.
They also said that the mayor’s definition of “public safety” is too narrow: Cops and jails alone don’t keep the city safe when programs that prevent crime and build community are eliminated.
“This budget holds the criminal justice system harmless while balancing the budget on the backs of our people,” Anya Worley-Ziegmann of the People’s Budget Coalition said.
Claire Lau, deputy political director for the Chinese Progressive Association, described the lives of immigrant workers who worked seven days, sometimes as much as 20 hours a day, with no overtime or breaks, and workers who never got paid for the work they did.
Without the Workers Rights Community Collaborative to help them, she said, those people would have no ability to fight for their legal rights.
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That program will lose half its funding this year, and all of it next year. “We need the city to fight for immigrant families,” Lau said.
Jose Luis Pavon, a care manager at HOMEY, said that San Francisco “is one of the richest cities in the world, and people are going hungry. How is this possible?”
He said “we are not looking for a handout. We want our fair share.”
Public comment lasted more than seven hours. Budget Chair Connie Chan will spend the next two days trying to negotiate with the mayor to get a budget that a majority of the supes support, but it’s entirely possible some members will vote against the plan.
The hundreds of people who showed up will, Worley-Ziegmann said, remember, and a lot of them will vote in the future. Lots of people are very, very angry about this budget—and if the supes do what they have done in the past, and change a few little things here and there the approve it, the supes that side with Lurie will have to deal with that when the seek re-election or higher office and need support from labor and community groups.
The new billionaire group called Blueprint is making the approval of the Lurie budget a priority. That’s even more evidence that this is a billionaire’s budget.
Tuesday, the full board will have a chance to weigh in on a long-term solution to the budget crisis.
