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September 3, 2026

Part 1:  Billionaires Are Rewriting San Francisco’s Rulebooks

“Clean Up City Hall” Déjà vu — Props A, D, E, and F — Are 2024’s Rejected Prop D, Rebranded and Repackaged

The Four Charter Amendments Packaged Together Add Up to
Exactly What “Prop D” Tried and Failed to Do in 2024.
They’ve Just Been “Repackaged” by Billionaire Oligarchs!

One Question: For Whom Are the Billionaire Boys Club “Fixing” Things?
Us? Or, Themselves?

“Clean Up City Hall” Shows Why We Need “Unitary Executive” Limits!

by Patrick Monette-Shaw

Mayor Daniel Lurie’s political operation has a new talking point: His three “Clean Up City Hall,” charter amendments — Propositions D, E, and F — aren’t three separate measures.  They’re a “package.”  And in the same breath, Lurie’s team is now folding in Proposition A, the Board of Supervisors’ own charter amendment, as if it belongs to that package too.

It doesn’t, exactly — Prop A came out of the Commission Streamlining Task Force, a body the Board created only because voters rejected 2024’s Proposition D.  But treat Props A, D, E, and F as a set, look at what each one actually does, and the “package” framing starts to make an uncomfortable kind of sense.  Not because City Hall coordinated all four from day one, but because all four land in the same place: Less citizen oversight, more discretion concentrated in the Mayor’s office, and fewer questions voters get to ask before it happens.

For reader’s convenience, a one-page flyer presents a high-level summary of what each of the four Charter Amendment ballot measures in the Mayor’s “Clean Up City Hall” package actually do, and who they benefit vs. who they harm.
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Please see the separate companion article in this issue of the Westside Observer about Proposition D, “Fix Our Broken Ballot Measures Process.”

This article walks through the other three — A, E, and F — one at a time, because each deserves its own scrutiny.  But read them back-to-back and a pattern emerges that no single measure fully reveals on its own.

“Prop A”:  The Streamlining Task Force’s Power Grab, Take Two

Don’t let the sleepy label fool you.  Proposition A is pitched as routine “department, board, commission, and advisory body” housekeeping — clean-up language, dusty cross-references, a task force that meets every ten years.  That’s the sales pitch.  It is not the product.

Prop A is the direct descendant of 2024’s billionaire-funded Proposition D — the measure 207,604 San Franciscans voted down because it handed the Mayor sweeping new control over City departments and gutted citizen oversight.  Voters rejected Prop D and instead passed Prop E that year, creating the Commission Streamlining Task Force with an explicit mandate to protect — not dismantle — citizen-based oversight of City Hall.

Somewhere between that mandate and this ballot, the mission flipped.  Mission Local’s Xueer Lu put it best:  “The Task Force was supposed to rein in the Mayor’s power.  Instead, it recommended the opposite.”  The Streamlining Task Force’s own chair, SPUR Board Member Ed Harrington, admitted the changes are “pretty similar to what Prop D would have done.”

Prop A is what that flip looks like once it’s been laundered into charter language and handed to voters dressed up as “modernization.”  The Task Force’s own chair admitted the changes are “pretty similar to what Prop D would have done.”  Voters already said no to this once; Prop A is the same power transfer, filed for a different election cycle in a comprehensive “package.”

Here are ten reasons progressives — and anyone who still believes in participatory government — should vote No on Prop A:

1.  It’s Prop D’s sequel, not Prop E’s delivery.  The same power transfer voters rejected in 2024, filed under a new number.

2.  It strips “for cause” removal and hands the Mayor “at will” power.  Commissioners who could once only be removed for cause — a real check against a Mayor purging anyone who asks inconvenient questions — shift to at-will removal.  That turns every watchdog commission into a body that serves at the Mayor’s pleasure, not the public’s.

3.  It guts commissions’ power over department heads.  Boards and commissions that once nominated a short list of finalists are reduced to merely “consultative” roles that the Mayor can ignore.  .  The Mayor hires and fires; commissions watch.

4.  It loosens who gets to sit on these bodies.  Mandatory, seat-specific qualifications — like requiring a labor seat be filled by someone with actual labor experience — get downgraded to merely “desirable.”  That’s how you open the door to patronage-job loyalists instead of people with the expertise a seat was created to represent.

5.  It moves oversight bodies out of the Charter and into the fine print.  Once a commission moves from the Charter into the Municipal Code, the Board can alter or eliminate it by Ordinance — no more asking voters.  Nine bodies get this treatment under Prop A.

6.  The Sunshine Ordinance Task Force shows exactly where this road leads.  We don’t have to speculate.  Ordinance #99-26 — an offshoot of this same Streamlining process — imposed a new 60-day holdover limit and used it to strip nine members off the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force (SOTF) overnight.  The Task Force lost its quorum.  For roughly two months, San Francisco’s open-government watchdog, created by voter initiative in 1996, could not meet, hear complaints, or refer violations to the Ethics Commission — while it had an open referral involving Mayor Lurie’s own office involving a Sunshine complaint the Task Force had referred to the Ethics Commission for enforcement.  Prop A is more of the same machinery, expanded and made permanent.

The SOTF remains shuttered as of September 7, in part because the Mayor was referred to Ethics for potentially willful withholding of public records.

7.  Initiative ordinances get rewritten without a vote.  Prop A directs the Board to amend voter-approved initiative ordinances — including membership criteria for the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force itself — by Board vote alone.  Voters passed these protections directly at the ballot box specifically so City Hall couldn’t quietly edit them later.  Prop A quietly edits them later.

8.  It bakes the power grab in for the long haul.  The Commission Streamlining Task Force must reconvene every ten years, with the Budget and Legislative Analyst report and City Attorney-drafted implementing amendment stripped out.  Fewer guardrails, on a permanent cycle.

9.  The Commission Streamlining Task Force that built this was stacked from the start.  At least four of five seats on the Commission Streamlining were held by long-time City employees who answer, directly or indirectly, to the Mayor.  Not one community-based seat.  Over 200 written public comments opposed the direction the CSTF was taking during its year-long deliberations — nearly all of which were ignored.

10.  “Efficiency” is the oldest excuse in the book.  San Francisco’s 112 policy bodies cost roughly $33.9 million a year — two-tenths of one percent of a $15.9 billion City budget.  This was never really about saving money.  Ask Brian Browne, who spent eight years watching the SFPUC’s own Revenue Bond Oversight Committee — created by voters in Prop P — get “absorbed” into the very agency it was supposed to police, its functions buried inside a bureau that holds no public meetings.  That’s the future Prop A sets up for commission after commission: Not eliminated in one dramatic vote, but quietly folded into the departments they were created to oversee.  That was SPUR’s design, all along!

Every one of these changes is defensible in isolation as a line-item efficiency.  Stacked together, they add up to exactly what Prop D tried and failed to do in 2024: Concentrate power in the Mayor’s office, hollow out citizen oversight, and take decisions away from voters. 

The Sunshine Ordinance Task Force shutdown isn’t a cautionary tale about some future risk — it’s a two-month demonstration of what this playbook does the moment it’s given the chance.

And Prop A doesn’t operate alone.  While the Streamlining Task Force was quietly rewriting the rules for who sits on San Francisco’s watchdog bodies and how easily the Mayor can remove them, Mayor Lurie’s own signature initiative petition drive was gathering signatures for three companion measures — Prop D, Prop E, and Prop F — that go after the same target from other directions: Not who sits on the commissions, but how much authority those commissions, and the Board of Supervisors, get to exercise over contracting and department management in the first place.

“Prop E”:   Handing the City Administrator the Keys to City Contracting

When this measure was first conceived, it was called the “Modernizing City Contracting” Initiative Act.  The expansion of the City Administrator’s job duties got tacked on during development of the Charter Amendment — which is itself a small tell about how these measures get built: Start narrow, expand scope, rename for messaging, and land on the ballot as something broader than what voters were first told they’d be considering.

The official Department of Elections “Title and Summary” for Prop E — “Extending the City Administrator’s Duties and Changing City Contracting” — lays out four major changes, plus a fifth buried in the Legal Text that ties Prop E directly to Prop F.

Exclusive ordinance authority over procurement.  Prop E would grant the City Administrator exclusive authority to propose ordinances to the Board governing most aspects of procurement.  Those ordinances would pass automatically unless the Board or the Mayor rejects them within 60 days — and neither the Board nor, apparently, the Mayor would be allowed to amend them in any way.  That’s not streamlining.  That’s handing one unelected official effectively unbridled power to write the rules governing how the City spends public money, with the Board’s only tool being an up-or-down veto on a clock.

Contract thresholds move sharply upward.  The dollar amount at which the Board of Supervisors must approve a contract or lease would jump substantially.  For revenue-generating contracts and leases, the threshold rises from $1 million to $4.5 million.  For expenditure contracts, it rises from $10 million to $25 million.  Amendments that cumulatively increase a contract or lease by 50% or more over the amount last approved by the Board would still require Board sign-off — but everything under these new, much higher ceilings would move through City Hall with no elected body reviewing it at all.  Call it efficiency if you like.  It is also, by definition, less oversight of how public contracts are awarded, and less accountability to the public paying for them.

A five-year term becomes a ten-year term.  Prop E would double the City Administrator’s term of office, from five years to ten.  That stands in sharp contrast to the eight-year term limits that already apply to the Mayor and every member of the Board of Supervisors — meaning San Francisco’s chief procurement and contracting officer could hold the job longer, uninterrupted, than any elected official who’s supposed to be checking that office’s work.

A quiet hiring-and-firing carve-out.  Buried in the legal text rather than the summary, Prop E gives the City Administrator authority to appoint and remove the department heads of seven City departments under the Administrator’s oversight — subject to Mayoral approval — including Animal Care and Control, the Chief Medical Examiner, the Department of Technology, and the Real Estate Division.  That looks like the one meaningful exception Mayor Lurie is willing to carve out from the sweeping hire-and-fire authority he’s asking voters to hand him directly under Prop F.  Everywhere else in City government, Prop F wants that power in the Mayor’s hands alone.

Taken together, Prop E moves money, authority, and hiring power away from elected oversight and toward a single long-tenured executive position — a pattern that becomes impossible to miss once you see what Prop F is asking for at the same time.

It’s also worth asking what problem Prop E is actually solving.  The pitch is efficiency: Fewer contracts sitting in front of the Board, faster procurement, less red tape.  But efficiency and accountability aren’t opposites that have to be traded off against each other — they’re both achievable, and San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors already has processes for expediting routine contracts.  What Prop E does instead is redraw the line between “routine” and “requires elected sign-off” so far in one direction that a $20 million expenditure contract — real money, by any measure — would move through City Hall without a single vote from anyone the public elected.  Multiply that across the volume of contracting the City does in a given year, and the practical effect isn’t a handful of edge cases slipping through.  It’s a structural shift in who gets to say yes or no to how San Francisco spends its money.

“Prop F”:   Deputy Mayors, Department Purges, and Bloomberg Envy

The Department of Elections’ own “Title and Summary” for Prop F — titled “Changes to Executive Branch Management,” after an earlier version was framed as “Strengthening Executive Branch Accountability” (another rebrand for messaging purposes that quietly disappeared) — spells out the stakes in its “The Way It Is Now” section: 

“The Mayor has authority to transfer functions and reorganize executive branch departments created by ordinance, subject to rejection by the Board of Supervisors.  The Mayor may not transfer functions or reorganize department powers and duties established in the City’s Charter.  Those functions, powers, and duties may be changed only by an amendment to the Charter approved by the voters.  The Mayor may not hire deputy mayors who supervise most departments created in the Charter.  When a department operates under a board or commission established in the Charter, the Mayor typically must select a department head from a list of candidates recommended by the board or commission.  For most of those departments, the board or commission may fire the department head but the Mayor may not.  The Mayor, Board of Supervisors, and other elected officials have authority to appoint certain members to the boards and commissions established in the Charter.  In most cases, an appointed member may only be suspended or removed for cause, after a process to determine that the member engaged in official misconduct or committed a felony involving moral turpitude.” 

Here’s “The Proposal” that would replace all of that: 

“The proposed measure would allow the Mayor to reorganize executive branch departments that exist under the Charter, with certain exceptions.  The Mayor could transfer powers and duties set forth in the Charter, consolidate one or more departments together under a single department head, and assign the oversight of transferred functions to a different commission.  The Mayor could not reorganize the functions assigned to 15 named City Departments, including the City Administrator, City Controller, Airport, Ethics Commission, Municipal Transportation Agency, Port Authority, Public Utilities Commission, and others, or departments headed by other elected officials.  The duties of the Department of Police Accountability could not be transferred to the Police Department, nor could the duties of the Sheriff’s Inspector General be transferred to the Sheriff. 

The proposed measure would allow the Mayor to hire deputy mayors. 

The proposed measure would expand the Mayor’s authority to hire certain department heads without board or commission involvement, and would authorize the Mayor to fire most department heads without board or commission involvement. 

The proposed measure would authorize appointing authorities to remove their appointees to most boards and commissions without cause.  The following boards and commissions would not be impacted by this change: Board of Appeals, Civil Service Commission, and Ethics Commission.”

Read the fine print on that first sentence of “The Proposal” carefully: 15 named departments are protected.  That leaves another 38 City departments the Mayor could reorganize, combine, or effectively eliminate at his discretion — including the Department of Public Health, the Department of Disability and Aging Services, and the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, along with other departments less favored by SPUR and the billionaires bankrolling this whole effort.  They’d be ripe game for a Mayor with reorganization authority and no commission standing in the way. 

It’s worth remembering that in November 2024, the original Proposition D — bankrolled by billionaire Michael Moritz — had its sights set squarely on eliminating the Health Commission that oversees the Department of Public Health.  Prop F gets there via a different route, but it’s the same destination.

Deputy Mayors:  Keeping Up with the Bloomberg’s

The deputy mayor provision deserves its own scrutiny, because it’s where Mayor Lurie’s ambitions look less like San Francisco governance and more like an attempt to import a management style from a city eight times larger.

Mayor Lurie appears to want to “keep up with the Joneses” — or more precisely, with his billionaire friend, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose administration was built around a large staff of powerful deputy mayors overseeing City agencies.  But the comparison collapses the moment you put the two cities side by side.  New York’s city budget for 2026-2027 runs $127.8 billion, inclusive of certain expense prepayments.  San Francisco’s budget for the same period is $16.9 billion — less than an eighth the size.  New York has 8,584,629 residents; San Francisco has 826,079, roughly a tenth as many.  New York covers 300.46 square miles; San Francisco covers 49.  A governance structure built for a metropolis of eight-and-a-half million people spread across 300 square miles is not an obvious fit for a city of 826,000 people packed into 49 square miles.

San Francisco has, in fact, already tried the deputy mayor model — and voters shut it down.  In 1991, San Francisco voters passed Proposition H, a charter amendment banning deputy mayors and capping mayoral staff salaries at 70% of the Mayor’s own pay.  The ban was fueled by anger over the salaries of seven deputy mayors under then-Mayor Art Agnos, each earning $94,000 or more at the time.  We’ve gotten along without deputy mayors for 35 years.  Why do we need them now, given that precedent — because Mayor Lurie is backed by billionaires who prefer a different model?

The current cost of Lurie’s workaround is already instructive.  An analysis of the salaries of Mayor Lurie’s four new “Policy Chiefs” — hired to oversee existing City department heads — reveals those four positions cost San Franciscans an additional $1.7 million annually in direct pay, but that’s just a fraction of the real cost, which more likely reaches at least $2.3 million once support staff and overhead are counted.  And if Prop F lets Lurie convert those “Policy Chiefs” into full “Deputy Mayors,” it will cost substantially more, because each Policy Chief would need an Assistant Policy Chief and an unknown number of additional direct-report staff to justify an expanded title and mandate.

Here’s the part that should trouble every taxpayer regardless of where they land on Prop F:  A recent public records request found that neither the Mayor’s Office nor San Francisco’s centralized Department of Human Resources has on file actual, written job descriptions for the Mayor’s four Policy Chiefs.  Every person who has ever held a job has had a written job description to guide performance throughout the year and inform pay decisions at review time.  That Lurie’s Policy Chiefs — each earning an average of $349,000 including fringe benefits — have no written job descriptions on file anywhere in City government is unfathomable.

It’s also eerily consistent with a pattern running through this entire “Clean Up City Hall” package.  Recall that Prop A removes the requirement for City boards and commissions to produce an annual statement of their activities and accomplishments — depriving both the Board of Supervisors and the public of a yearly accounting of commission performance.  The Commission Streamlining Task Force’s answer, when this was raised, was that supervisors and the public could simply read each board and commission’s meeting minutes throughout the year to piece it together themselves.  Poppycock. 

That’s not accountability; it’s a scavenger hunt substituted for a report card — and it’s the same instinct, dressed differently, that leaves four quarter-million-dollar City Hall “Policy Chief” positions with no written description of what they’re accountable for at all.  For all we know, if “past is prologue” Lurie may have no intention of ever authoring public record job descriptions for  eventual “Deputy Mayors,” either.  Would that leave citizens with a similar scavenger hunt of having to comb through meeting minutes to gauge the performance of Deputy Mayors, too?

The Bottom Line

That should feel familiar, because it is.  San Franciscans already rejected this basic bargain once, decisively.  The then-Proposition D failed in 2024 by a 14.4-point spread — San Franciscans voted 56.7% to 43.3% against it.  Voters didn’t buy the strong-mayor pitch when it was called Prop D, and we demanded a more nuanced approach to City Hall reform, instead.
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Repackaging that same failed “grand bargain” across four separate ballot measures two years later, under friendlier names like “streamlining” and “modernizing,” doesn’t change what’s actually being asked for.  Maybe they think splitting them into four separate Charter Amendments instead of one will entice voters into passing at least one.  But it’s clear, we must reject — again — all four!

It’s worth stepping back to see the scale of what’s driving this.  Billionaire spending on ballot measures aimed at revamping San Francisco’s local democracy has reached $18 billion and growing between the 2024 and 2026 election cycles — a figure that illustrates just how much trouble our local democracy is in.  Nothing about that spending pattern suggests the people funding it intend to stop trying to buy a “Mayor as King” form of government.  The only thing that has stopped them so far is defeat at the ballot box.  Giving in now, after winning that fight in 2024, would be unforgivable.

“Clean Up City Hall” is, in the end, a walking advertisement for why there should be limits on unitary executive power in San Francisco government.  None of these three measures asks voters a straightforward question like “should the Mayor have more power?”  Each one arrives wrapped in the vocabulary of good government — streamlining, modernizing, strengthening accountability — because that vocabulary polls better than the underlying ask. 

Strip the branding away and what’s left in Prop A, Prop D, Prop E, and Prop F is the same basic transaction San Franciscans already turned down once: Less say for the public, less friction for City Hall, and more discretion concentrated in one office.  Read the fine print on Props A, D, E, and F, and vote No on all four.

Voting for any of them would be unforgivable.  It’s your civic duty to just say no!  

Monette-Shaw is a columnist for San Francisco’s Westside Observer newspaper, a member of the ACLU, and a “Democracy Watchdog” member of the California First Amendment Coalition (FAC).  He operates stopLHHdownsize.com.  Contact him at monette-shaw@westsideobserver.com. 

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