Memo 2: San Francisco Government

A 175-year-old institution with 35,000+ employees, a tangle of 50+ divisions, and layers and layers of complexity, rules, and cruft legislated by a body that barely understands how work gets done.

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The gap between the talent and prosperity of San Franciscans and the outcomes of our local government cannot be explained by thinking that “people who work in government are bad at their jobs.” While some people who work in government are bad at their jobs and frustratingly difficult to fire, most are capable, competent, well-intentioned, and rational actors trying to work in an insane system that they did not design.

The hardest-working leaders in the San Francisco Government work longer hours at a higher intensity than the hardest-working CEOs and VCs I have met. And they get zero RSUs or carry.

So what is going on?

San Francisco Government is a large, tangled organization with 35,000+ employees, 50+ divisions, and 100+ years of highly contested processes, rules, and cruft. There are layers and layers of complexity legislated by a body that barely understands how work in government gets done. Billion-dollar decisions happen in a fraught, highly contested political environment where the only constants are organized minority factions who are very good at perpetuating their interests via political spending, lobbying, and embedding in government process.

And if there is blame to be assigned, it is best directed at the culture, norms, and attitudes rampant in how we have collectively governed our city over the past decades. A few examples:

• Petty score-settling and personal power too often trump collaboration to solve our city’s problems

• “That’s just the way we do things here” and inexcusable incuriosity of how other cities solve their problems.

• Perpetuating the mundane tools of incumbent power: complexity, opaqueness, stifling bureaucracy, hearings at commissions on commissions debated at hearings

• The idea that ‘citizen voice through public hearings is democratically responsive when it’s demonstrably not

How does the bureaucracy work? Often, it doesn't.

A Supervisor will have a few legislative aides and a Chief of Staff. Supposedly, that team will help you pull the right levers in the San Francisco Government to get the outcomes you campaigned on. But the idea that a tiny legislative staff is equipped on their own to pull the levers that govern San Francisco is a farce. 

Let’s begin to get our heads around the complexity of governing San Francisco.

Here is a directionally accurate list of all of the agencies in local, state, and federal government that must coordinate for our city to have an effective response to the Fentanyl epidemic:

Each has its own leaders, mandates, budgets, processes, and rules. A single broken link in the chain can render the entire effort ineffectual. In corporations, the CEO has a magic wand to direct all of their teams centrally. That’s not at all how it works in Government.

Some examples

For example, implementing 5250 holds, a 14-day involuntary psychiatric detention, requires joint action of the San Francisco Department of Public Health, the San Francisco Police Department, the San Francisco Fire Department, and Designated Psychiatric Facilities. The bottleneck in the system today is the beds at psychiatric facilities; we have a total of 187. It will be difficult to increase this state capacity in a year where San Francisco has a $1B budget deficit.

So how will an underpaid, fresh-eyed legislative staffer understand this complex system, map out what needs to happen, and then marshall the political power necessary to drive these government agencies towards an outcome? On their own, they cannot. 

And this is just for a single issue. A Supervisor or a Mayor made a half dozen or more promises to voters.

Another quick example while we’re at it: Last session, the California Legislature proposed 5,558 laws; of those, 2,536 were passed by both chambers, Newsom vetoed 183, ‘procedural factors’ delayed or killed another 1,463, and 890 were written into law. Many of those 890 new laws affect the San Francisco Government. It’s madness.

Great Government in San Francisco

San Francisco International Airport (SFO) is a great airport that keeps improving. It may surprise you that SFO is an agency of the San Francisco Government. The Airport Commission, appointed by the Mayor, hires and fires the agency director on the approval of the Board of Supervisors.

What if all of the San Francisco Government had been improving at the rate of SFO over the past 20 years as our city budget has grown from $4B to $16B? That’s what we the citizens of San Francisco have been leaving on the table. 

San Francisco should be ‘Denmark of the United States’

There is no reason that San Francisco Government should not be the best municipal government in the United States. San Francisco’s GDP is the size of Denmark’s; San Francisco should be ‘the Denmark of the United States.’

Our municipal government is full of very hard-working, intelligent leaders who have spent years navigating a bureaucracy to deliver a tangible change to San Franciscans. Over the past years, they have gotten their work product—administrative changes and/or legislation—through all of the process gates and waited patiently for the political stars out of their control to align. 

And right now, many are freaking out, wondering if this new, well-intentioned change from newly elected moderates will derail the critical work of the city in the coming days of budget negotiations, department staffing decisions, and a general reset of priorities. Those transitioning to power must be empathetic, curious, and diligent right now, or they may accidentally wreck years of progress.

And instead of being overwhelmed by the complexity of governing, we are much better served being curious as to why outlier agencies of the San Francisco Government—SFO and Rec & Park—are today achieving a vision not dissimilar to ‘the Denmark of the U.S.’

• What exactly is going on over there? How did they do it? 

• Can we replicate their success elsewhere in government?

• What would cause them to regress? How do we protect them?

These are all great questions that all of us who love San Francisco should spend more time asking and digging on. These are the questions an institutionalist asks. They are questions of governing, distinct from the questions of advocacy.

Campaigns are marketing and sales. Governing is the product.