View the San Francisco for Wednesday, October 23, 2024
, at least according to travel website TimeOut, but it’s also one of The City’s most hotly contested political battlegrounds this election cycle — and o, funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars into a race for supervisor they see as pivotal to determining the ideological balance of the board beginning next year.Supervisor Connie Chan speaking during the announcement of a new Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Performance Center at 65-67 Langton St. in San Francisco on Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2024.
The moderate-leaning group’s own political-action committee has chipped in more than $200,000 in support of Philhour’s election bid. Meanwhile, though, progressives are mounting a fierce defense, with a number of their PACs spending many hundreds of thousands of dollars as well. Out on the campaign trail, Chan has been portraying Philhour — who formerly served as a senior advisor to Mayor London Breed — as a City Hall insider who will cozy up to corporate interests once in office.
“You’ve got two candidates who are well known,” he said. “Is it going to be a referendum on the incumbent? Very possible. Do voters want change?”Sizing up the political terrain Moderate political groups have thrown their support behind Philhour, but the biggest spender of all, according to publicly available data, is a labor-backed PAC supporting Chan — “Fix Our City SF,” which is made up of a number of progressive-leaning unions. That one PAC alone has spent more than $600,000 in the race as of press time to boost Chan and attack her opponent.
“We need leaders that are going to understand the importance of public safety and how that impacts every aspect of our lives,” Philhour said. But Philhour, who favors policies that boost market-rate housing development, says that building affordable housing alone will never bring in the quantity of new homes that the district desperately needs to solve its affordability crisis.Chan also pushed back against the claim that her leadership has been driven by ideology. Over her time in office, she contends, her focus has been on finding practical solutions to the challenges faced by residents.
So far, San Francisco ethics officials have released no public information about the complaints and levied no fines against the campaigns, according to a review of recent ethics penalties. — including boards, advisory councils, committees and task forces — and preempting attempts to regrow the commission system down the road. The measure would also increase mayoral powerKanishka Cheng: “We knew we had to set some sort of cap to force actions to be taken and to force some actual streamlining to happen.”
TogetherSF Action calls Prop. E a “decoy” measure that would not necessarily lead to change and would inappropriately give unelected task force members the power to introduce ordinances concerning some commissions that would take effect unless rejected by a supermajority of eight supervisors. “I can understand the need for efficiency in government, but to me, this seems to be stifling the opportunity for the public to be heard,” said Leifer, who works in marketing at AT&T and has been on the advisory council since 2018.
TogetherSF Action gave The Examiner a list of 25 commissions it said would be removed and another identifying 22 that would be kept in the City Charter, which is essentially The City’s constitution. The group also provided a list of 26 commissions it estimated would be kept to meet state or federal requirements.
“We do think that a lot of the things that are currently done by multiple commissions can be consolidated into a smaller number,” Miller said. The San Francisco civil grand jury suggested a much less drastic remedy. It spent most of a year studying The City’s commissions — it said 115 were active, and more than half were advisory — and in June issued a report finding San Francisco had more commissions than areas with similarly structured governments and should get rid of 15 of them. The 1,200 systemwide seats were “burdensome” to fill, it said.
John Monson, a co-chair of the report’s investigating committee, said in an interview that The City did have a disproportionate number of commissions, but he personally thought Prop. D’s “artificial limit” of 65 was not a good idea. Prop. D supporters cite San Francisco’s five commissions focused on homelessness as evidence of bloat.
Nicole Neditch is governance and economic policy director at the urban affairs think tank SPUR, which recently opposed Prop. D.
“No one can provide an explanation for why we need twice as many commissions as many other cities, or what function they have, or how our city improves or is made better by this,” she said. “Ultimately, we have a system where I think most people are going to tell you that everything they’re doing is really important, and that may or may not be true.”The seven-member Health Commission would be lined out of the charter.
A raft of new voter polls released Monday show an inscrutably close race between incumbent Mayor London Breed, Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin, former interim Mayor Mark Farrell, and Daniel Lurie, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune and antipoverty nonprofit founder. Although his performance in locking down No. 1 has improved in recent weeks, Peskin’s own poll also shows that he suffers from poor favorability ratings, with 41% of respondents saying they view him unfavorably and 34% viewing him favorably.
In addition to the approval ratings dropping in the Chronicle survey, an increasing share of respondents in the Public Policy Polling survey are rating Farrell poorly. But despite a clear drop in his standing since this summer, polls show him being firmly in the mix.
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