District 8 Supervisor Rafael Mandelman is now a heartbeat away from being mayor, as he was just elected President of the SF Board of Supervisors, and somehow extinguished an expected challenge from Supervisor Myrna Melgar.
We interrupt today’s pomp over the inauguration of Mayor Daniel Lurie with news of what potentially loomed as Lurie’s biggest pain in the ass on his new job. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors was scheduled to elect the new Board President at a special 3 pm meeting Wednesday. And the SF Board of Supervisors President is not only second-in-line should anything happen to Lurie (and serves as temporary Mayor whenever Lurie leaves the country), but is also the second most powerful position in town because they make board committee assignments, and manage the board’s weekly agenda.
And if the new board president is a Lurie opponent, they would have plenty of leeway to antagonize Lurie.
Check out how packed the meeting was! That’s because all the supervisors brought their families since it was Inauguration Day for the new members. But there had been an expected fight between District 8 Supervisor Rafael Mandelman and District 7 Supervisor Myrna Melgar for the president's seat. Melgar told Mission Local in November that she intended to run for the position, telling that site she could “talk to everyone, and negotiate more than anyone.”
Somehow, that didn’t work out. Mandelman was unanimously elected as the new Board of Supervisors President. And Melgar — for reasons we may never know — was not nominated, and did not even submit her own name.
Mandelman was nominated by fellow moderate and London Breed loyalist, Supervisor Matt Dorsey. Dorsey called Mandelman “a principled, passionate, and occasionally ponderous, only sometimes-weepy champion for priorities that are close to his heart, and also very close to mine.” This was completely expected.
What happened next was unexpected. Progressive-wing firebrand Supervisor Connie Chan surprised viewers by throwing her support behind Mandelman too, and no one else nominated anyone. So Mandelman won unanimously and unopposed, and clearly the progressives had settled on some sort of backroom deal.
Mission Local has one theory as to what happened. That site reports that Supervisors “Jackie Fielder and Shamann Walton had apparently indicated that they intended to vote for Walton as a bloc of two, indefinitely.” So maybe Melgar realized that was two progressive votes she could not get, and gave up on the whole thing.
But Fielder and Walton voted for Mandelman immediately, without this “as a bloc of two, indefinitely” business. So there’s got to be more to this story.
Two years ago nearly to the day, then-Supervisor Aaron Peskin cleverly managed to win the presidency while claiming he had no interest in running. Mandelman may have just shown some of the same parliamentary chess-match maneuvering of his predecessor as president, Aaron Peskin.
Images: SFGovTV
