SF’s November 5 measure Prop D has raised more than $9 million in hopes of passing a law to slash the number of City Hall commissions in half, though some allege the money is largely just going to help pay the Mark Farrell for Mayor campaign’s bills.
The San Francisco ballot measure that has made perhaps the most news in the lead-up to next week’s election is Prop D, which proposes to slash the number of SF City Hall commissions from currently more than 130 to only 65. The idea of reducing the number of commissions has broad bipartisan support, and many at City Hall have already called for this.
Yet Prop D has brought enormous controversy. As of press time for this post, two separate political action committees (PACs) in support of Prop D have raised a combined $9.2 million. (PACs can take unlimited contributions, individual candidate contributions are capped at $500.) And there have been accusations for months that Prop D is just a source to clandestinely funnel money into the Mark Farrell for Mayor campaign, so much so that three former SF mayors have called for a criminal investigation into the Farrell campaign for such blatant use of PAC money by a mayoral campaign.
After all, take a look at the supposed Prop D mailers seen below, and ask yourself if these look more like Prop D ads, or Mark Farrell for Mayor ads.
But on the merits of it, Prop D would take the more than 130 City Hall commissions and reduce them by half. Prop D would retain commissions for Police, Fire, Recreation and Park, Municipal Transportation Agency, Public Utilities and Ethics, while it would definitely eliminate the commissions for Public Health, Library, Human Rights, Human Services, Arts, Environment, Small Business, and Juvenile Probation.
The text of Prop D adds that it would also “Establish a five-member task force that would recommend within nine months which commissions should be reauthorized or restructured or dissolved to stay within the 65-commission limit.”
How would this process take place and would there be public input? Not clear.
Honestly, sure, some of these commissions have little use. The Redistricting Task Force, for instance, only has meetings every ten years. There’s also a commission to oversee the Matt Haney-created Sanitation and Streets Department, a department which never really existed.
And notably, Prop D makes these commissions “advisory,” meaning they wouldn't actually decide anything. Department heads would make all decisions, and Prop D would also give the mayor the sole power to hire and fire department heads. In other words, Prop D significantly expands the power of the mayor’s office.
Though, as Joe Eskenazi reports in a Mission Local profile of Prop D and Mark Farrell backer Michael Moritz today, no one at City Hall including the mayor asked for Prop D, it was drafted independently by Moritz's political group and dropped on them, and many including former Mayor Art Agnos argue that the process of culling commisssions should be done in public, with public input.
And yet, original Prop D supporter Breed yanked her support of the measure in August, over her concerns that it was just a front for a piggy bank for Farrell and the billionaire-funded PAC Together SF Action. (You’ll recall Together SF Actionas the group behind the “That’s Fenatife” ads, and for falsely claiming the Civic Center farmers’ market was closing down because of drugs.)
SFist also broke the news earlier this month that the PAC called Mayor Mark Farrell for Yes on Prop D PAC was responsible for a set of anonymously placed anti-Daniel Lurie ads from a seemingly made-up commission called Citizens for Campaign Finance Transparency. So ironically, the PAC for a ballot measure to reduce San Francisco commissions is also busy inventing new commissions out of whole cloth, just to run advertisements claiming to be from that commision.
There is also a competing measure called Prop E to reduce commissions at a slower and more deliberate pace, authored by Supervisor Aaron Peskin. “My measure is commission reform done in the light of day with voter participation and voter input, as opposed to this ill-conceived meat-axe approach of TogetherSF and their non-expert political hacks,” Peskin told the Chronicle last week.
If both Prop D and Prop E pass, whichever one gets the most votes will become law.
But Prop D has a financial advantage of $9.2 million raised, compared to just about $40,000 raised for Prop E, plus the mountains of ads and mailers you see in this article. So odds sure seem strong that Prop D is likely to get more votes.
But a Chronicle poll last week showed Mark Farrell having dropped to fourth place in the mayor's race, behind Lurie, Breed and Peskin.
So if Farrell donors get Prop D passed, but in doing so ends up giving more power to one of Farrell’s political enemies in the mayor’s office, well, that would just be kind of hilarious.
Image: Joe Kukura, SFist
