In a remarkable victory for labor and community groups, the Mayor’s Office agreed Thursday to restore $28 million worth of cuts to key San Francisco services yesterday, allowing a key Board of Supes committee to approve a final budget.
The decision came after the Budget and Appropriations Committee, chaired by Sup. Connie Chan, held multiple meetings, including more than seven hours of public testimony demanding the restoration of the cuts.
Activists and other committee members widely praised Chan for holding the line with the mayor and demanding the restoration of many, although not all, of the brutal budget cuts.
From the People’s Budget Coalition:
This budget represents a remarkable victory for every single San Francisco resident,” said Anya Worley-Ziegman, Coalition Coordinator for the San Francisco People’s Budget Coalition. “And it shows that public pressure works. Showing up works. Organizing, going out into communities where people will see their lives impacted by cuts, where people feel like their government and their representatives aren’t listening to them, and giving people an outlet to make their voices heard can make real change. Thanks to the thousands of people, workers, unions, community and advocacy organizations, as well as the leadership of Budget Chair Connie Chan and supervisors who fought for their districts’ priorities, we have won back tens of millions of dollars for essential programs serving our city’s most vulnerable populations.
Some of the add-backs became possible because the Board of Supes Budget and Legislative Analyst found millions that were misappropriated, overpriced, or otherwise unnecessary. (Among other things, the cops asked for considerably more money for new vehicles than the vehicles actually cost.)
Dozens of nonprofits, employing thousands of people, will keep most or all their city contracts.
Chan made the process look easy this year, even in a very difficult budget season. Negotiations that often last late into the night were over by 6:20 pm, and by 6:30 the committee had voted unanimously to approve the budget. It still has to go to the full board, where approval is almost certain.
A lot of us left the Board Chambers wondering, as I do almost every year: Why do we have to go through this painful process? The mayor proposes massive cuts to popular and critical programs. Activists spend months organizing to save them. The BLA finds waste in the proposed budget, and the supes scramble to add back the cuts.
In the end, the cuts that the mayor proposed and that the supes managed to defeat amounted to a tiny fraction—less than three-tenths of one percent—of the $6.8 billion General Fund. In contrast, the police budget alone accounts for 13 percent of the General Fund. Cutting the cops by just 4 percent (and nobody can seriously argue that there’s not 4 percent waste in a $900 million police budget) would have covered every other service that the supes fought to protect.
This is a rich city. The idea that every year, preserving basic, essential services is a huge fight suggests that something is very wrong with the way San Francisco handles its budget.
From the People’s Budget Coalition:
There’s still work to do. Not all the cuts have been fully restored, and next year’s deficit is projected to be worse than this year’s. San Francisco has, particularly in this AI boom, extraordinary quantities of wealth and resources that many city leaders have so far refused to tap to fund essential public services. If our city is to carry forward in a way that lives up to our stated values, that’s a pattern that must change.
