by Supervisor Aaron Peskin
PRESIDENT PESKIN’S BIG BALLOT BREAKDOWN
This November, for the first time in San Francisco history, we will elect a mayor at the same time that we elect a President of the United States, after voters adopted a consolidated election schedule. I hope that you will all vote for my childhood classmate, Kamala Harris, for President.
As for the rest of the ballot, here’s my breakdown of the measures you need to know about.
PROP A – Overdue School Facilities Bond – Reluctant YES. Allows $790,000,000 in general obligation bonds for facilities, technology, and other capital upgrades in the SFUSD, including the renovation of one large high school, as well as targeted investments in critical restroom repairs and $225 million for a new centralized Student Nutrition Services food hub. I am heartbroken and very frustrated by the poor management of the school district, which has deteriorated before our eyes, forcing teachers to quit after unacceptable payroll fiascoes and other incompetent mismanagement by the Superintendent. And while I’m not happy that SFUSD is threatening to close schools in the same breath it is authorizing two new schools to be built, this bond is an important investment that, one hopes, new leadership will be able to implement to give our kids and teachers safe spaces to learn and teach.
PROP B – Health, Homelessness, & Improvement Bond – YES. Allows $390 million in general obligation bonds for a variety of capital projects, most importantly, funding for critical public health projects like an expanded psych emergency services ward at SF General Hospital, mandated improvements at Laguna Honda Hospital in order to keep our hard-fought re-accreditation, rebuilding of City Clinic (the largest source of HIV-AIDS prevention services in the City), and, special to our district, the rebuild of a seismically-safe Chinatown/North Beach Public Health Center above the Broadway Tunnel on Mason Street. While I did not sign onto the Mayor’s original proposal because she replaced critical health facilities with funding for high-profile beautification improvements, after weeks of negotiating with her, I was able to get the funding for the hospitals and clinics back in—and agreed to sign as the co-author. I therefore now commend Prop B to you without reservation.
PROP C – Combat Corruption with Office of the Inspector General – YES! I have spent my entire career in public service combatting corruption and exposing waste and fraud, including spearheading the effort to force Recology to refund $120 million of overcharges back to ratepayers in the wake of Mohammed Nuru’s arrest. The string of unending corruption scandals in City Hall spurred me to research implementing the national gold standard that other cities have instituted to root out corruption: an Office of the Inspector General, with the power of subpoena and search warrant and ability to investigate third party contractors. As our former City Controller Ed Harrington has noted: “The City must stop waiting for the FBI and DOJ to come in and clean up our local messes. As soon as we smell smoke, we should be investigating, and the days of forever-delayed fiscal audits must end.” An Inspector General would not be an elected position but have an elevated and clear mandate within the Controller’s office to carry out the specific work of identifying fraud and waste—not waiting for the federal government to do it.
PROP D – Destructive, Divisive, and Deceptive – NO! Billionaire technocrat Sir Michael Moritz paid more than $1 million for professional signature gatherers to get this deceptive 58-page ballot measure on with his SuperPAC, TogetherSF Action. The measure was written behind closed doors by TogetherSF and arbitrarily eliminates 83% of all city commissions, including the Library Commission, the Arts Commission and the Health Commission, to name a few—saying this will “fix” SF. It consolidates the remaining appointing, hiring, and firing power within the Mayor’s Office and rolls back any checks and balances to or oversight of the Executive Branch and its Departments, including those embroiled in corruption scandal after scandal. To date, TogetherSF SuperPAC has spent more than $7 million funding this ill-advised ballot initiative, which has been used to prop up Moritz’s chosen mayoral candidate, Mark Farrell, as a part of his efforts to “grow and sustain a community of dissatisfaction” as revealed by a Mission Local investigation of leaked internal TogetherSF memos. San Francisco has challenges, but it’s ludicrous to blame the Arts Commission or Health Commission. If we want to improve city government, there is a right way to enact reforms that doesn’t eliminate public participation—which is why I’ve put an alternative, Prop E, on the ballot to do just that.
PROP E – Efficient and Effective Government for Reform Done Right – YES! I have been clear that there are many reasonable efficiencies and reforms that should be pursued through an inclusive, expert-informed, public process, rather than by a partisan political operation in a back room. Unfortunately, TogetherSF and its billionaire funder, Sir Michael Moritz, decided to take a meat axe to the City Charter without consulting anyone, least of all experts. I have proposed an alternative, after actually consulting respected experts like our former City Controller Ed Harrington, who has signed on as the Principal Officer of the Yes on Proposition E, Real Reform campaign. Prop E creates a five-member blue ribbon panel (City Controller, City Attorney, City Administrator, a good government expert appointed by the Mayor, a public sector labor union rep appointed by the Board of Supervisors President) to work with the Budget & Legislative Analyst and identify ways to make city commissions more efficient and effective, including but not limited to: consolidating duplicative functions, eliminating outdated functions, etc. The goal is to make these critical oversight and citizen engagement bodies work BETTER—not arbitrarily burn the whole system down. If Prop E gets more votes than Prop D, it will prevail, so I hope you will join the hundreds of endorsers (including the League of Women Voters, the Labor Council, the Council of District Merchants Associations, and the Coalition of San Francisco Neighborhoods, to name a few) that have stood up against the monied interests of TogetherSF to say the city is not for sale.
PROP F – Retain Needed Cops While We Work on Recruitment – YES! It is true that we are down about 400 police officers from previous years, and with a national trend of fewer young adults wanting to become officers, we must get more creative in our police recruitment efforts. We now have the highest entry-level wages in the entire Bay Area, which we need to couple with my plan to implement a Schools to Officers Pathway with SF State University and other local post-secondary educational institutions, providing forgivable college loans to beef up our recruitment and retention. Meanwhile, I co-authored Prop F, which is a temporary five-year measure that will allow us to retain some 50 veteran officers on the force for less than we’re paying in overtime now.
PROP G – Make Affordable Housing Affordable to Working Families & Seniors – YES! I authored this measure in partnership with numerous senior advocacy, affordable-housing, and faith-based organizations to “set aside” and dedicate $8 million annually to subsidize rents for extremely low-income (ELI) seniors, working families, and adults with disabilities who don’t make enough income to qualify for affordable housing—all without raising taxes. The State has mandated we build 14,000 units of ELI housing over the next eight years but hasn’t allocated the funding to subsidize those units. This is a much better use of our financial resources than having to spend more money when people become homeless.
Prop K – Unnecessary Non-Park & Highway Closure that Circumvents Impacted Neighborhood – No. I have gone on an extensive listening tour and researched this seemingly well-intentioned measure and have decided to vote “No” based on several factors: 1) the environmental impacts of incentivizing more foot traffic and group gatherings on fragile ecosystems like the snowy plover habitat without any mitigations; 2) the total lack of planning to mitigate rerouting of traffic into residential neighborhoods; 3) the fact that this doesn’t actually create or fund a park. I know what it takes to create parks; this is what I’ve done much of my adult life at the Trust for Public Land and the American Land Conservancy, and this measure overstates what it will actually do; and 4) the fact that this just didn’t need to be on the ballot and has created serious division within the neighborhoods adjacent to the Great Highway. My position on Prop K does not preclude my support for a park or a street closure in the future. (I was a champion for bringing down the Embarcadero Freeway to open up the waterfront to the public and to turn the Central Freeway into Patricia’s Green, but we did it WITH impacted communities and studied the ways to mitigate negative impacts and planned for the best results.) With all due respect to Supervisor Joel Engardio who put this on the ballot, this would be as if I put an unresearched proposal on the ballot to close down the Embarcadero to traffic and let the entire City vote on what would most directly impact South Beach, Barbary Coast, North Beach, and Telegraph Hill neighborhoods. There is a better way, and it’s working WITH communities.
Prop L – Tax Waymos and Ubers to Fund Muni – Yes. It’s no secret that Muni needs an incredible amount of investment to continue to provide service to the hundreds of thousands of San Franciscans and visitors who rely on it. This community-authored measure is well-written and increases the tax that I originally levied on ride-shares to help fund Muni transit (the great equalizer!), which is essential to our post-pandemic recovery here in San Francisco.
Prop M – Business Tax Reform to Stabilize SF and Give Small Businesses Relief – Yes. I helped author this complicated overhaul of our tax code to provide critical relief to small businesses while stabilizing the taxes paid by our top job providers to keep them in SF. It provides a $5 million tax break for 2,700 small businesses and lowered rates for grocery stores (like the ones that I helped attract to North Beach and North Point) and right-sizes the City’s business tax with necessary technical adjustments.
Prop 5 – Allow Affordable Housing and Infrastructure Funding to Be Approved with a 55%+1 vote – Yes. This will make it easier to pass bonds for affordable housing and critical infrastructure in San Francisco and throughout the State of California.
Prop 33 – Repeal Costa Hawkins (and Allow Us to Expand Rent Control) – YES. This simply repeals the Costa Hawkins Act to allow local jurisdictions to determine whether to adopt rent control and to what extent. Here in San Francisco, I have authored legislation to expand rent control immediately to the 40% of tenants (about 100,000) who do not currently have the benefits and protections of rent control because of when their homes were built. (Costa Hawkins only applies to buildings built before 1979.) Rent control stabilizes communities and ensures that we keep our neighborhoods intact and our neighbors housed. Yes on 33 ensures fairness for all tenants, not a two-tiered system where some have rights and others don’t.
There’s a lot more on the ballot, but these are some highlights I’ve been working on and wanted to share with you all. Don’t forget to vote—There’s so much at stake!
See you in the neighborhood (and at the polls!),
Aaron
