By Calvin Welch and Christin Evans, HANC Board
This month's general membership meeting will focus on the unprecedented series of unilateral actions taken by Mayor Breed during the longest period of "emergency powers" in recent San Francisco history. Specifically, three of Mayor Breed’s recent actions will be discussed by our invited panel: the declaration of a SECOND emergency (and emergency declaration within an existing declared emergency) regarding executive actions to be taken in the Tenderloin to "address the drug crisis"; the proposed charter amendments for the November, 2022 ballot to transform children services and funding by placing them all under the Mayor (see BoS file 211284) and finally, to redefine "affordable housing" to be up to 140% of Median Income ($2850 a month rent) and make its development as a "matter of right" with no public hearings (BoS file 211289).
Our panel will include three particularly experienced and knowledgeable participants: Jennifer Friedenbach, Executive Director of the Coalition on Homelessness will discuss the Tenderloin State of Emergency; Margaret Brodkin, Director of Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth for 26 years and former Director of the Department of Children, Youth and Their Families and leader of the campaign that created the San Francisco Children's Fund will discuss the Mayor's children's charter amendment ; Joseph Smooke, coordinator of Racial Equity in Planning (REP) a citywide housing coalition (of which HANC is a member) and former Executive Director of Bernal Heights Neighborhood Center, former Program Director for the Housing Rights Committee and a past aide to two San Francisco Supervisors, will discuss Breed's "affordable" housing measure.
The City Charter requires the votes of six Supervisors to place a Mayor's charter amendment on the ballot and the usual practice is to have six co-sponsors as they are introduced. Not Mayor Breed. She had two co-sponsors on the children's measure and a single sponsor on the "affordable housing" measure. Not surprisingly neither got out of committee. The children's amendment was massively amended and will be heard later and the affordable housing measure was tabled in committee. But also, as she has done in the past, Mayor Breed has threatened the Board with a petition drive to place the measures if they do not adopt her versions unchanged.
What is remarkable about these moves is that they are so common under this Mayor. In case after case, she has sprung policies and actions on the Board of Supervisors and the people of the City without even trying to gain support of groups or communities directly affected by them.
Here in our neighborhood she has unilaterally overridden an 18 month long community planning process and extended by over a year the development of critically needed affordable housing development at 730 Stanyan, stopped a scheduled opening of a service center at the site and allowed it to sit vacant for over four years. She has failed to host one community meeting in the neighborhood, her former Supervisor District, on the site.
It's not as if she was elected Mayor with a huge majority in the contested June 2018 special election for Mayor. Indeed, Breed won the race by a slimmer margin than any Mayor in the modern history of San Francisco- a mere 2,500 votes. In fact she won only 37% of the election day votes and a mere 27% of the RCV first place votes (Leno won 68% of the transferred RCV votes for Mayor) becoming the first "non majority" Mayor since run-off elections were established in 1975. Ironically, the 2,700 RCV votes she got from Ellen Zhou, who ran vicious racists ads against her, was her margin of " victory "(oh, the magic of Ranked Choice Voting!).
She and her allies have repeatedly attacked the institution of the Board of Supervisors and individual Supervisors, all of whom won majority votes in their districts. She is now backing the recall of Board of Education members allowing her to appoint their replacements and her allies are all over the recall election of the District Attorney, again allowing her to appoint his replacement should he be recalled.
While folks are right to be concerned over the potential "loss of democracy" at the national level, some attention needs to be paid to the threat to popular government here in San Francisco. We have operated under a "state of emergency" for over two years, and the chief executive has declared a second. There can be little doubt that government by "Zoom" gives all the advantage to executive power and when it is used to enhance that executive power, to increase it in reference to the legislature or the people it is time to be concerned.
So join us at 7 pm Thursday, February 10th, for a discussion of the state of the health of democracy here in the City of St. Francis.