Last week, as activists debated symbolic resolutions about ceasefires abroad and supermarket closures at home, the Chronicle quietly reported on an explosive story: Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin had ousted Supervisor Matt Dorsey from the powerful Rules Committee, a barely disguised act of political warfare and professional betrayal. In Dorsey’s stead, Peskin appointed Supervisor Hillary Ronen to head up the three-member committee, which is responsible for vetting appointments to boards and commissions, deciding when proposed legislation will go before the full Board and — crucially, in an election year — reviewing and revising ballot measures and proposed charter amendments. 

The brazenness of Peskin’s maneuver shocked even Dorsey’s ideological rivals on the board. Supervisor Ahsha Safaí, who several months ago introduced a “poison pill” amendment which made funding for Dorsey’s minimum police staffing plan reliant on new taxes, told the Chronicle he had “never seen anyone removed from the chair before their two-year term is over” in his seven years in office. Supervisor Ronen, who is termed out this year and apparently has a “countdown on her phone of her days left in office,” didn’t even attempt to justify her appointment. “I am happy to play whatever leadership role President Peskin thinks I can be helpful with,” she told reporters with (one imagines) a dopey and distracted smile. 

On one level, the ousting is election year politics as usual. Peskin is sidelining Dorsey, a political moderate who favors items at odds with the “progressive” (read: pro-dysfunction) agenda — a strong police department, coercive treatment for fentanyl addicts, and homeless encampment sweeps. But close observers of city politics will see the darker dimension of the move. Last year, in an eleventh-hour bid for the board presidency, Peskin brokered a deal to appoint Dorsey to chair the Rules Committee in exchange for his vote. Dorsey, a (presumably naïve) newcomer to the Board, accepted. Now, emboldened by his power, Peskin has broken his side of the deal. As Lee Edwards put it on X, this is how the ratfucking gets done in SF.

CITY HALL

policy, power struggles, and more from the legislative and executive branch (and their sprawling army of unelected hall monitors)

• The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals voted 2-1 Thursday to uphold federal Magistrate Judge Donna Ryu’s December 2022 injunction restricting San Francisco’s ability to clear homeless encampments, though it asked Ryu to emphasize the injunction only applies to the “voluntarily homeless,” i.e. those who have “refused a specific offer of available shelter”. (Read the full decision here.)

• In a statement released the same day, Mayor Breed touted a 17% decrease in tents counted in the city between July (609 tents) and November (508 tents) and revealed that 64% of those offered shelter in the past year refused it.

• On Friday, following appeals from Governor Newsom, City Attorney David Chiu and other officials across the West Coast, the Supreme Court agreed to review a slate of 9th Circuit decisions limiting cities’ abilities to clear encampments. The court will hear arguments in April and issue its ruling in June.

• Mayor Breed nominated Greg Wagner to replace City Controller Ben Rosenfield, who unexpectedly announced his resignation in the fall. If confirmed by the Board of Supervisors, Wagner, who is currently chief operating officer of the Department of Public Health, will face the unenviable task of attempting to balance the city’s projected $800M+ budget deficit.

• Elsewhere, Breed introduced legislation which would allow the Department of Public Health to contract behavioral health services from third party vendors without a competitive bidding process, a change she claims will expedite treatment services for addicts. The legislation is co-sponsored by Supervisors Ronen and Mandelman. (NB: This is the same logic Breed et al. use to justify no-bid contracts for homeless nonprofits, which we discussed in a newsletter last month.)

• Airport commissioners voted to rename the international terminal at SFO after the late Senator Dianne Feinstein, who served as mayor of the city from 1978 to 1988.

• In the Standard, Josh Koehn reports that city employees may be considering going on strike this summer when their union contracts expire. SF’s last public employee strike was in 1976.

• The city will soon implement its “Empty Homes Tax,” which was pushed by Supervisor Preston and imposes a tax on homeowners whose properties are vacant for more than half the year, despite an ongoing lawsuit against the measure. 

• The SF Ethics Commission, which is responsible for ensuring candidates for public office conducted their campaigns in a legal, transparent manner, has only conducted three of its mandatory 16 audits of candidates who received public funds in the 2020 election, Joe Eskenazi reports in Mission Local. Oops.

MEMO SACRAMENTO

a brief, essential spotlight on the state of california

• Governor Newsom presented a nearly $300 billion budget for FY 2024-25 in Sacramento last week. The proposal seeks to close California’s projected $68 billion deficit by dipping into state reserves — an extreme measure Newsom had previously rejected — delaying pre-approved healthcare wage increases, and cutting over $1 billion in funding for various housing programs, among other reductions. 

• The budget also earmarks $374 million to combat California’s retail theft crisis, which Newsom claimed can be solved without reforming Prop 47, the law downgrading theft of merchandise worth less than $950 from a felony to a misdemeanor. Instead of looking to “reform” old laws, Newsom said, state legislators should create new ones raising penalties for professional retail and car thieves. 

• Meanwhile, after the governor vetoed a bill decriminalizing a handful of psychedelics last year, lawmakers in the State Assembly are planning to debate a bill which would legalize psychedelic-assisted therapy.

• CA Attorney General Rob Bonta warned districts across the state that requiring schools to inform parents if their child identifies as transgender is a violation of California’s constitution — an escalation in Bonta’s ongoing war with Chino Valley School Board President Sonja Shaw over parental rights. 

ROSE ALERT

notes from the bay area’s beloved class of local activists

• Speaking in City Hall after the passage of their symbolic ceasefire in Gaza resolution, Supervisors Preston and Ronen congratulated “community members” (and themselves) on “all that you have had to do, to take time off work, call in sick, just to stand up for human rights.” 

• On Twitter/X, SF DSA celebrated “our socialist-in-office D5 Supervisor @DeanPreston, who led the way for San Francisco to become the largest city in the country to pass a ceasefire resolution,” and promised a continued fight against “the machinery of capitalism and colonialism.”

• On the other hand — and in an unusual move — Mayor Breed issued a statement condemning the resolution. “I almost never comment or take action on nonbinding resolutions,” she wrote, but “the [ceasefire resolution] process at the Board only inflamed division and hurt.”

• Elsewhere, everyone’s favorite Chronicle columnist Soleil Ho wrote a lengthy op-ed on why the ceasefire resolution is not a “performative gesture” by a “city government that has its priorities out of whack.” (Strangely, the piece had the effect of convincing me of the exact opposite.) 

• Lampposts near Sabra’s Grill, one of the only kosher restaurants in the city, were covered with posters calling for a boycott of “Israeli Food & Zionist Businesses in SF.”

• Protesters calling for a ceasefire in Gaza shut down the Port of Oakland again on Saturday. “No business as usual while the US funds genocide in Gaza,” AROC, the city-funded nonprofit organizing the protest, wrote on Twitter/X. Meanwhile, port officials said the disruption impacted nearly 100,000 local jobs. 

• Elsewhere, Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao’s policy director Brandon Harami appears to have gotten his anon accounts mixed up in a Twitter spat with those critical of his boss.

MAN WITH MACHETE

crime and intrigue around the bay

• Assistant Federal Public Defender Jerrod Thompson demanded Senior District Judge William Alsup recuse himself from upcoming sentencing of illegal aliens caught dealing fentanyl in the Tenderloin, citing Alsup’s refusal to accept lenient plea agreements for the accused. 

• William Gilmartin III, vice president of ProVen Management, a civil engineering and construction firm, pleaded guilty to funneling over $100,000 in bribes to (now-jailed) Department of Public Works head Mohammed Nuru in a bid to secure a contract to build a recycling plant on Port of San Francisco land. 

• Prosecutors have charged a third man, 34-year-old Marquise Cooper, with murder in connection with last month’s fatal shooting of Oakland police officer Tuan Le.

• Elsewhere in Oakland, police are investigating an armed robbery in which three men robbed a person of $33,000 worth of Louis Vuitton products and then fled by car. 

• Elmer Rodriguez aka “Gordo,” leader of the Mission District’s faction of the MS-13 gang, was sentenced to life in prison by Chief District Judge Richard Seeborg last week after he was convicted of ordering several murders (including one in which one of his “associates” hacked a man to death “by inflicting dozens of deep wounds to his face and torso with a machete.”)

AROUND TOWN

stories from the neighborhood you should know about

• A new Stanford study reportedly attributed a 52% decline in crime in areas where nonprofit Urban Alchemy’s “community ambassadors” patrol, though the study has not yet been peer reviewed and its authors are still trying to “figure out the mechanism” driving the supposed reduction. (I’d put money on “displacement.”)

• On Twitter, Mayor Breed touted the success of SarangHello, the “first K-Pop shop in San Francisco,” which she claims has played a big role in boosting the economic recovery of Sunset/Parkside.

• Over 100,000 patients could lose access to UCSF health facilities if a contract between Anthem Blue Cross, an insurance provider, and UCSF is not renewed in March.

• A 27-year-old San Francisco resident was identified as a victim in a small airplane crash that occurred Sunday over Half Moon Bay.

• The University of California is now considering opening a new campus in Downtown San Francisco after Mayor Breed reached out to the UC Board of Regents last May. 

• San Francisco-based Twitch laid off over 500 workers — 35% of its workforce — last Wednesday, the latest in a series of layoffs at the firm. 

• BART will install new gates designed to deter fare evaders at eight stations: Civic Center, Powell Street, Montgomery Street, 24th Street, SFO, Fruitvale, Richmond and Antioch. The gates have already been installed at West Oakland. 

• Hundreds marched through Downtown San Francisco on Monday in the city’s annual march honoring the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. 

• Multi-story food emporium China Live will live to see another day, as owner George Chen reached an agreement with landlord Cypress Properties to avoid the restaurant’s eviction from its North Beach location.

• TikTok “food influencer” Keith Lee released two videos explaining why he abruptly cut his food tour of the Bay Area short. “I don’t believe the Bay is fit for tourists at the moment,” Lee said, “and I personally wasn’t a fan of a lot of places that we went to.”

• In an interview with Fox Business, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said “San Francisco is in far worse shape than New York.” Elsewhere, in an interview with Fortune, Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan said founders “have to be in San Francisco.” Which way Western man? (I’ll take San Francisco.)