It's been just over a month since Mayor Daniel Lurie was sworn into office. Some LGBTQ residents received a progress report when two individuals tasked with making San Francisco's government more effective discussed how their efforts are going thus far at a meeting of the Alice B. Toklas LGBTQ Democratic Club.
Gay Board of Supervisors President Rafael Mandelman, who as District 8 supervisor represents the Castro LGBTQ neighborhood on the board, was joined by Aly Bonde, policy adviser to Lurie, at DECANTsf at 1168 Folsom Street, itself a queer-owned business. The February 10 panel – "Re-imagining San Francisco government" – was moderated by Nicole Neditch, the governance and economic policy director for SPUR.
Mandelman became the board president the same day Lurie was sworn in as mayor on January 8. The most senior member of the board, elected the same day as former mayor London Breed in 2018, he and Bonde agreed a new wind of cooperation is blowing through City Hall.
"A solid minority, if not a majority, of the Board of Supervisors was not interested in helping her administration," Mandelman said of the relationship between the Breed administration and the prior board. "It was kind of mutual. ... There was this low regard between the mayor and the Board of Supervisors."
(Breed herself was a former moderate supervisor and had to work with a progressive dominate board. Last November's election, however, saw several new supervisors elected, most with more moderate political leanings.)
In contrast, Lurie, who had never held public office before winning the mayor's race, avoided political conflicts and was able to get to City Hall without bad blood between him and the people he needs to help implement his agenda.
"Daniel Lurie got himself elected and came in without owing anyone anything in particular," Mandelman said.
Bonde agreed that City Hall seems different from what she was expecting.
"I have not experienced the 'knife fight in the phone booth' everyone says second floor is," Bonde said, referring to the floor where the offices for the mayor and Board of Supervisors are located. "I'm not naive that won't necessarily happen, but I feel we're in this moment (where) we have big forces outside of San Francisco that are very concerning, and this moment in time and the vibe inside the city and inside City Hall is we just want things to work and go forward and jointly work together on things. I think this is a moment in time; we should lean into that."
Those forces outside San Francisco include Republican President Donald Trump and his administration. But liberals like Mandelman are committed to fighting the president's agenda in a different way than during Trump's first term in the White House.
"We will resist where we need to, but San Francisco is not going to lead the Resistance," he said, referring to the political movement that protested Trump's first term.
"It's not a task we are remotely capable of taking on," he said, adding that though the city will focus on saving "what we can of the American republic," this will be done "with other cities, states, and city attorneys."
If Democrats want power, Mandelman said, they have to win voters.
"The agenda we do need to have – and people are sick of hearing me say this – but the most important thing for a blue city like San Francisco to do is show such a place can be effectively governed, and that there is not an inherent tension or, if there is, we are going to resolve it in advancing the values that define this place and delivering the basics."
Those basics?
"Safety, cleanliness, and an economic climate in which people try to pursue their dreams," Mandelman said.
Matt Donohue, a bisexual man and attorney who is Alice's policy committee co-chair, said at the event that, "The person in the White House is a huge problem. There will be a lot of opportunities to engage, to discuss resistance to the assault he is imposing on our trans community, to the assault he is imposing on our immigrant community ... to the assault he is imposing on our mental health every single day."
But nonetheless, "Good government in San Francisco is important to combatting the Trump administration, and the things they are doing," Donohue continued.
Delivering basics
The leaders of America's big cities are anxious to address structural issues like crime and housing – and perhaps no city has taken the brunt of criticism in recent years more than San Francisco. Mandelman agreed with New York Times commentator Ezra Klein that "liberalism does tend to grind down the achieving of the underlying functions," in Mandelman's words, because procedures meant to make government and society better end up backfiring to hobble institutions.
"One of the reasons we have this blue city, blue state problem is that if you're an ambitious politician, ambitious not only for yourself but for your agenda to make the world better ... you wouldn't have come into it thinking 'what can I get rid of?'" Mandelman explained.
"One has to make their mark in solving all of these problems, and that all involves a law, a change, a new requirement," he added.
As requirements stack up, the gears of government get slower. But cutting red tape isn't so easy, he said, because that involves "abandoning something important to someone at some point, and still might be important to them, might be important to some group."
As an example of this predicament, Mandelman discussed the 2023 repeal of Chapter 12X of the city's administrative code, which prohibited city employees from traveling to, or doing business in, states that had anti-LGBTQ laws. The chapter was later expanded to cover states with anti-abortion laws and those that abridged voting rights.
Initially "people felt pretty good," about it, Mandelman said. But, by the time of its repeal, the city's Chapter 12X policy had grown to cover some 30 states, which critics had lambasted as being too costly and ineffective in bringing about any progressive changes in those states.
"If I was an African American lesbian entrepreneur owning a furniture factory in North Carolina, and I wanted to sell my union-made furniture to San Francisco, I couldn't do it," Mandelman explained. "It also meant our bidding pool was reduced. We were certainly paying a markup because we had a much smaller pool. So I was able to get the studies done and repeal that, but it took a long time."
Two years to be exact, Mandelman said, which portends badly for future bureaucratic reforms.
"We need to do that at scale over and over," he said, giving another example about repealing a 2019 law that has not yet been enforced regarding frontage requirements for local businesses.
While "I don't think we want to eliminate everything," the city needs to be "somewhere between where we are now and a system that has no social priorities," Mandelman said.
Asked if she could tackle a single issue in the bureaucracy, Bonde said she'd tackle "the morass of permitting."
"I think the dysfunction there is one of the main things, aside from the condition of our streets, that hurts the public's faith in government," she said.
Nonetheless, the Lurie administration so far has had the city's fentanyl crisis as its No. 1 priority. As the Bay Area Reporter reported last week, the board granted Lurie emergency powers to address the fentanyl crisis, including expedited hiring, firing, and treatment and shelter capacities.
Bonde thanked Mandelman for his help on the fentanyl ordinance.
"It was a great collaborative process," Bonde said. "We know we're going to be judged by the situation on the streets in the next year, so the board was willing to say, 'yeah, go for it.'"
Mandelman said that there might be reforms to city departments for San Franciscans to vote on in 2026 – but he was clear that it would be the result of a collaborative process, distinguishing it from Proposition D, a 2024 measure to cut city commissions that failed.
"Have the people who don't agree with each other fight it out a little bit and see what we can come up with to find a better way of structuring government," Mandelman suggested.
But dealing with wrangling city departments isn't just a statutory matter, Bonde said.
"Getting these departments on the same page – most of that, honestly, is social-emotional work in some cases," Bonde said. "Why doesn't MTA [San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency] talk to HSH [Homelessness and Supportive Housing]? What is so hard about that?"
Asked what her measure of success will be, Bonde said, "That we've chosen the hard fix that fixes it for good rather than choosing the easy fix that makes people feel good."
As for Mandelman, he answered, "That we got it to a better state than we found it."
"I'm a passionate incrementalist," he said. "I think the world gets better a little bit at a time."
Correction, Feb. 12, 2025: Bonde's last name was spelled incorrectly in the original version of this report. We regret the error.
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