Behind the late-night budget deal

The supes reached a deal, of sorts, late Wednesday night with Mayor Daniel Lurie, and both the process and the outcome speak to major structural problems with the way the city is funded.

First: The deal gives organized labor its top priority, which is—at least for now—a halt to the layoffs of front-line city workers. Some workers, managers and attorneys, are still going to get pink slips, and some will retire or find other jobs rather than face the instability that they are facing.

But workers represented by local unions will not be laid off involuntarily—as long as the mayor sticks to the deal. “We gave him enough funding for all the front-line positions,” Budget Chair Connie Chan told me.

Under the current City Charter, the mayor doesn’t have to spend money that the supes allocate in the way they allocate it.

When it comes to nonprofits that deliver essential services, the picture is a lot more bleak: The supes managed to save $26 million in funding for programs, but that’s a fraction of the $180 million in cuts over the next two years.

“This budget is still balanced on the backs of the poor and working class,” People’s Budget Coalition director Anya Worley-Ziegmann told me.

The coalition is still trying to figure out where the cuts will hit hardest, Worley-Ziegmann said.

The police, the district attorney, and the sheriff will get all the money they need to lock more people up in an overcrowded jail, while programs that prevent crime will vanish.

The committee members all did what they tend to do in times like this: They said they hate the budget, but it’s the best deal available. “Tonight’s agreement is not something we can celebrate,” Chan said at the 2 am meeting. “Under the circumstances there are no good options.” Board President Rafael Mandelman said that “I don’t think this is a budget that any of us like.”

Among the most contentious issues at the final hearing: The mayor wants to take money that the voters allocated in 2018 for housing and use it instead for temporary shelters. That’s part of his overall plan to get the unhoused off the streets and out of sight, even if it means evicting them from RVs, sweeping them from tents, arresting them, and forcing them into jail or congregate shelters.

Part of the budget package included legislation that would override the 2018 vote and allow the mayor to reallocate some of the Prop. C money. Under current law, any changes in what the voters approved require a two-thirds vote of the supes.

So in essence the mayor wants the board to give up its Charter-mandated authority over even this tiny piece of the budget.

Sup. Shamann Walton said he couldn’t support that. “It’s the intent and the will of the voters,” he said.

Sup. Jackie Fielder was even more adamant: “I’m disappointed that this is even up for negotiation,” she said. “The level of austerity in these cuts is painful … now this mayor wants you to give up the last thing we have, which is the will of the voters. Why even have a Board of Supervisors if we are just going to rubber-stamp the mayor’s budget?

“The big deal is democracy can be negotiated away at 1 am while most people in San Francisco are asleep.”

For the most part, the Board of Supes has been voting 9-2 for Lurie’s priorities. If nobody else opposes this deal, that pattern may hold true again.

Chan noted that the budget is “not everything the mayor wants.” That’s clearly true—but because of the City Charter limitations, the budget is most of what he wants.

By law, the supes can’t add to the mayor’s budget; they can only cut. But most years, the Budget and Legislative Analyst finds millions of dollars in savings in areas the Mayor’s Office didn’t see, and then the supes negotiate to spend that money on their own priorities.

This year, it was particularly difficult because Lurie is new to the job, and so are most of his senior staff. They’ve never been through this process, and they resisted the idea of add-backs.

Lurie, I am told, didn’t understand that add-backs aren’t one-time solutions; they’re re-allocations of money from his original proposal to what the supes suggest. If he hadn’t backed down from layoffs and refused to fund some add-backs, he would not have had a majority vote for his budget.

Now, it appears he has enough support to pass one of the most brutal austerity budgets in modern history.

Almost everyone involved in this process outside of the Mayor’s Office has long agreed it has to change.

In San Francisco, the mayor has almost total control.

This is why I laugh when I read on Twitter people saying that New York will face horrible problems under Mayor Zohran Mamdani because progressives ran San Francisco and it became a crime-ridden nightmare.

Progressives haven’t controlled the Mayor’s Office in more than 30 years. A progressive majority on the Board of Supes had only limited power.

At some point, the voters are going to need to reform the City Charter, and the state Legislature is going to have to give cities the ability to raise progressive taxes, or we’re going to see a real nightmare: Cities that can do little beyond locking people up while the crises on the streets get worse and worse.

That’s the real lesson from the budget deal.