By Josh Koehn : sfstandard – excerpt
In an embarrassing blunder, a moderate political group in San Francisco withdrew a ballot measure intended to cut bureaucracy at City Hall just two weeks after it announced the ordinance in a press conference.
TogetherSF Action confirmed to The Standard on Monday that it was pulling one of two proposed ballot measures to reform the city charter because, contrary to the group’s goal of empowering the mayor to make more decisions, it would actually hand more authority to the Board of Supervisors…
The group decided to scrap the measure before a Tuesday deadline after huddling with officials in the Mayor’s Office last week. TogetherSF Action plans to revise it and submit a new version to the Department of Elections…(more)
Who does not know that “Eliminating certain commissions would kick oversight responsibilities over to the Board of Supervisors”?
This is a bit more than a blunder. It shows a lack of understanding about how the government functions by the people trying to reform it. It is, as Mandelman said, a bit more complicated than it may appear. What is even more perplexing is why is this mayor is involved in changing mayoral powers for all future mayors. Perhaps some of our intrepid leaders became too fond of the executive powers they had under the emergency declarations during the pandemic.
If anyone wants to look at a department controlled by Mayoral appointees with authoritarian powers they should look at the SFMTA. If you like the way the SFMTA operates you may want to extend those powers to other government entities. And remove the line item veto from their budgets as well.