San Francisco mayor promotes initiative giving him more authority over city agencies

By CBS Bay Area

San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie spent his Wednesday morning touting three ballot initiatives, all part of what he calls his mission to reform City Hall and remove some of the dysfunction.

“I ran for mayor with a clear message: The system needs to change to help everyday San Franciscans,” Lurie said.

The backdrop for that message is the city’s now-infamous million-dollar public toilet, a project in Noe Valley that once carried a $1.7 million price tag before being scaled back to about $200,000.

“It made international headlines as a symbol of everything that is broken, a simple project that ballooned in cost because of layers of bureaucracy,” Lurie said.

Lurie is aiming to cut through some of that bureaucracy with three proposals to change the city’s charter. One, he says, could save taxpayers money, such as in the case of the toilet project, by giving the city administrator more authority over city contracts.

Another would allow the mayor to hire and fire department heads and restructure city agencies.

The most controversial of the three would raise the threshold of signatures that citizens need to gather to qualify for the ballot, from at least 2 percent of registered voters to 8 percent.

Supporters say that would put San Francisco in line with other cities like Oakland, which has a 10 percent threshold. Kim Tavaglione with the San Francisco Labor Council is opposed to the idea.

“It means that average citizens will have to raise a lot of money to get those signatures,” Vagalione said.

She said raising the number of signatures required favors wealthy fundraisers and could make it harder for everyday people to get issues on the ballot.

Lurie and his supporters said the higher signature threshold is not about disenfranchising voters, but will help streamline what can often be a long and confusing ballot with sometimes dueling measures.

While Tavaglione said the Labor Council is still debating whether to support Lurie’s other two initiatives, the mayor said it’s about delivering results.

“I promised more accountability and better results without the excuses. That’s what San Franciscans voted for and that’s a promise I plan to keep,” Lurie said.

Supporters of the reforms, including business owners like Michelle Delaney, agree the current system is too slow and too complex.

“And you are spending hours and hours trying to get help and trying to make things work, especially when our city is coming back so fast, we have to keep up with it,” said Delaney, part owner of 111 Minna Gallery.

In addition to raising the signature requirement, Lurie’s proposal would remove the ability of San Francisco mayors to unilaterally place measures on the ballot. It would also strip the Board of Supervisors of its power to send measures to voters with support from just four of its 11 members. A board majority — six or more supervisors — could still vote to put measures on the ballot.