THEORY OF CHANGE
Why are we stuck with terrible choices in political candidates? Because we need more people with a basic level of political education.
Why can the field of sports produce amazing athletes like LeBron and Steph Curry but not politics? Perhaps because in there are millions of kids playing basketball, the best join great teams, enter university programs, and there is a triangle to that brings up the best that was made possible because of how wide the base was at the lower levels.
We need to widen the base of the triangle by creating a broader level of civic understanding across millions of people, and then we will have the LeBron James and Steph Currys of politics. This is the reasoning that led Michael Adams to teach the How SF Government Works course. I just finished the first class of cohort 3, and it was phenomenal. My classmate was Autumn Hope Looijen who is running for district supervisor for District 5 which includes the Tenderloin and much of the Haight area. I sent her the video I have of when I lived by the Tenderloin and someone I was walking with almost died from overdosing until I ran to find some medics and saved his life.
Here are my notes from that class today.
HIERARCHY OF LAW Federal - US Constitution
State - California Constitution
Local - San Francisco Charter
Is SF a city or a county? Both.
The 49 square miles of SF city and SF county are perfectly contiguous, and the government is one.
The federal government and state government are sovereign. There are things that the federal government cannot force the state government to do, although it can offer money for the state government to do something. A state constitution is sovereign.
Local governments and for example the SF charter is not self-sovereign. They can be forced by the higher levels to do anything. The SF charter only has power because the state says it does.
The Elected, The Appointed, and The Hired
ELECTED OFFICIALS
11 elected offices in SF:
-Mayor (executive branch, CEO, chief executive, currently London Breed, moderate Democrat)
-Board of Supervisors (legislative branch, composed of district supervisors? Who can vote for them? Currently progressive Democrats. Each supervisor has 4 legislative aides.)-Board of Education (pre-K to 12th)
-City College Board of Trustees (University)
-Treasurer (Banker for the city and chief investment officer and tax collectors)
-Assessor recorder (Assess property values and maintain records related to properties such as deeds)
-District Attorney (Criminal law generally, prosecutes on behalf of the city of SF
-Public Defender (Criminal law generally, defending those who can’t afford representation)
-City Attorney (Represents and defends the city of SF if the city is being sued. Often helps the Board of Supervisors draft laws.)
-Sheriff (Not responsible for managing the police. In charge of order in county jails, court houses, and other public buildings such as the general hospital.)-Superior Court Judges* (Presiding over both criminal and civil cases. If you broke an SF law such as speeding, you will see them. Mostly appointed by the governor, elections every 4 years, and are only on the ballot if someone runs against them which they mostly have not been)
APPROVERS (appointed, generally)
Commissions, composed of commissioners who oversee the departments, sets the policies for the departments to follow, and approves dept. budgets
Commissioners are all citizens who are not paid for being commissioners. They are meant to be citizen oversight. 4 year terms. Generally can only be removed “for cause” meaning if they broke a law. In other cities, such as NYC, there is sometimes less separation between commissions and departments. SF also has a lot more departments than many other cities.
There are 53 commissions overseeing 52 departments. Most everyone currently agrees there are too many commissions. Commissions and departments are part of the executive branch.
Examples:
-Police commission (7 commissioners with maybe 10ish additional staff, currently includes 0 actual police officers and this might be required, they can fire the chief of police, unlike pharmacy ward for example that includes requirements that members must include pharmacists. 4 appointed by the mayor with majority vote approval by the board of supervisors, 3 appointed by the board of supervisors and can’t be blocked by the mayor.)
-Planning commission (7 commissioners, same system for who appoints them as the police commission)
-Ethics commission (5 commissioners, 1 appointed by the board of supervisors, 1 from the mayor, 1 from the DA, 1 from the city attorney, 1 from the assessor recorder)
-Airport commission (5 commissioners)For most commonly talked about commissions, it works the same way with the split of 4 appointed by the mayor with approval of the board of supervisors and 3 appointed by the board of supervisors.
Are all commissions appointed in the same way? Are all dept heads appointed same way?
DOERS (Hired mostly, except for department heads who are appointed)
Departments, each with an department head usually with a 4 yr term once appointed
Around 50 departments
Department heads are generally appointed, oftentimes by the mayor, and sometimes chosen from 3 options that the commission curated. Can generally be removed by the mayor or at times by the commission. The department head hires the employees (or at least delegates permission/authority to hire.)
Examples:
-Police dept (chief of police, with thousands of employees involved)
-Planning dept (Director of Planning, deciding what housing gets built)-Ethics commission (Dept head, yes, the whole thing is called one commission, but it follows the format of 5 overseers and then the 15ish government employees who are the actual doers.)
-The airport (Director of Airports)
-Controller’s office (Controller, appointed by the mayor with approval from the board of supervisors. 10 yr terms. They are the city’s accountant. They produce the 300-400 page city budget.)
-City administrator (Oversees 25ish departments, appointed by the mayor subject to board of supervisor approval, 5 yr terms, office of contract administration procurement and contractors for the city, animal care, much more)
The 3 Functions of the SF Government
MONEY 2025 budget, if approved, 15.9B. Enterprise departments - 9B General fund - 6.9B
2024 discretionary budget around 2B, meaning the funds could be shifted around according to how the mayor decides, mostly composed of employee wages. Enterprise departments make revenue with their services and are meant to become self-sustaining over time such as the airport. The airport and ports are self-sustaining, while MTA only recovers around 8% of operating expenses through fares.
General fund includes programs such as food stamps BUILDING
2 docs: General Plan - Roadmap Planning Code - Implementation, statutory law made by the board of supervisors REVIEW
No formal, hard power.
2 entities:
-Citizens’ advisory committees
-Civil Grand Jury (essentially a minimum 10/hr per week year long research project with being given high level access across the city government. The city government must make responses to the suggestions in the report of the Civil Grand Jury, though they’re not required to follow the suggestions. A megaphone to highlight issues, and a pen to draft potential laws.)
INTERGOV (Intergovernmental dependencies)
Some examples…
Federal
-Supreme Court rulings
-Block grants (for example for education, healthcare, etc)
State
-Pre-emption (When state and local laws conflict, the state rules win. Ex: senate bill 423 saying cities must build more housing, which SF did not meet the required levels of approvals according to the state mandate, and so the state took away local permitting authority and made permitting more permissive.)
-Consolidation (SF city and county used to be separate until the state consolidated them)
Regional
-The Bay Area has 9 counties and 101 municipalities
-BART (Bay Area transportation system, the metro)
-ABAG
Association of Bay Area governments, elected representatives from various regional cities and councils such as the mayor of SF being a member, more of a review/coordination body in part because local governments often don’t want to give up authority to the region which could make the BART harder to plan, for example. Many regional concerns are hard to coordinate cuz ABAG doesn’t hold power, the individual counties and municipalities do.
PRIVATE/PARTY
Not officially part of the government, not mandated by law.
-DCCC
Democratic county central committee is the SF body within the National Democratic Party, board members of the DCCC are elected by registered Democrats. DCCC endorses candidates and will mail Democrats with who they think they should vote for. Also charters smaller democratic clubs. Recently, the majority progressive DCCC refused to charter a moderate club. In March, the DCCC became majority moderate democrats. Autumn: This historically moves the needle by 10%
-Neighborhood Associations
Mostly seniors in Mission Bay, not much youthful civic engagement yet. When Michael joined local association meetings as the one non-70 year old, he was invited to join the board, they discussed whether to fork and make their own association just for Mission Bay, the DA sent a legislative aide to talk with them to see what was going on because they are constituents, Michael got his email, later found a bug in the code of law where in one place it says 11 members of a committee and another place says 14 members, and emailed the aide who confirmed with the DA that this is a mistake who is now asking the Board of Supervisors to fix it.
CONCLUSION I look forward to considering how things work now, how we wish it worked, attempt to reform what exists, and to implement these learnings as we build systems from scratch in the communities and new city projects I am involved in. I hope by the end of this class to know who I would need to email in order to campaign to have more public restrooms built or porta potties to be crowdfunded in SF.
For info and to sign up for the class see here: https://www.writing.civlab.org/p/how-sf-government-works-civics-class
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