San Francisco leaders have been arguing all summer over whether transparency is friction or fuel. Is the paperwork the city produces about itself preventing city officials from doing their jobs, or is it what gets things done?
On July 21, the Board of Supervisors passed an ordinance eliminating the requirement that staff produce a variety of routine progress reports and consolidated quarterly measurements of building inspection, health, fire and planning violations into annual roundups.
Proponents say these moves would increase efficiency and help city officials focus on their work. Critics counter that routine record-keeping helps residents find out what their government is doing.
For some city residents, such public engagement isn’t a hypothetical. Three days before the ordinance’s preliminary approval from the supervisors, about 30 people gathered in a Miraloma Park clubhouse on the premise that providing constituents with sufficient information can improve city life. They spent the afternoon imagining San Francisco in 2046.
Scenarios included a fungus killing trees, a solid-waste stream dwindling to zero and neighborhoods needing to repurpose old fire hydrants. Little did they know that under the city’s reform just days later, the inspectors would have to produce less-frequent updates on public firefighting infrastructure, which could make planning such exercises harder.
In the City Hall reform, some 140 reports will be eliminated, about one-third of the regular documentation specifically mandated in the city’s legal code. Seven of the 11 supervisors approved the bill on first reading on July 14 and again when they officially adopted it on July 21.
Board President Rafael Mandelman said the reform would boost the morale of city staff burdened by unnecessary writing assignments that often go unread by the public. The change made the code easier to read by removing mention of reports only required once, those tied to city departments that no longer exist and redundant language.
But the ordinance went further, also reducing the overall frequency and number of reports departments must generate.
Debating deep cleaning
Those who opposed the ordinance acknowledged that modernizing local laws can improve efficiency, but risks overcorrecting by trimming too much.
“Our code has become convoluted, and it requires regular cleanup of obsolete sections, redundancies or sections that are no longer useful,” said District 7 Supervisor Myrna Melgar, who voted no. “However, there are implications for these streamlining and reduction of reporting requirements that go beyond just cleaning up the code.”
The lack of public involvement has also sparked criticism. “I think it’s great that the city attorney, city departments and Board of Supervisors — and everyone but the public — had a chance to weigh in on this dense document, which affects everyone,” said District 10 Supervisor Shamann Walton, also an opponent, at the July 14 meeting.
“These reporting requirements are in place for a reason,” he added. “This really should have been separated and taken up after recess, with a public process.”
Walton said the extensive nature of the changes in the 360-page proposal made it hard for average residents to grasp their consequences.
The bill’s massive length drew pushback from city staffers, most vocally Board Clerk Angela Calvillo. At a June 18 Government Audit and Oversight Committee meeting, she said she would respond to the move by referring overly complex legislation to the City Attorney’s office to break it into “bite-sized ordinances” that the community can comprehend.
Calvillo pointed out that the City Charter makes her the official keeper of records, required to ensure “every single item is ready for board action.” She added that it was impossible to review and accurately summarize last month’s dense legislative proposal in just two days.
When a functionary like a city clerk says a public policy’s structure prevents her from doing her job, prompting her to erect a new administrative hurdle, leaders take notice. Mandelman responded that it was the job of elected officials to earn the public’s trust and make these kinds of calls.
Future focus
The participants at the July 11 Civic Summons 2046 gathering were engaged in a form of deliberative democracy, a process in which political decision-making is decentralized, with residents participating in robust and informed discussion and debate.
Organizers of this session used an editable timeline, an artistic gallery of items from the future and narratives that included hypothetical working relationships that could help to mitigate climate change.
“These activities are meant to put us in this immersive experience of imagining a different space to engage with our neighbors and other residents of the city to talk about problems,” said Suzie McMurtry, a fellow with the Future of Us Festival, the organizer of the event. She added that collaborative meetings, where people can express ideas freely, lead to richer civic engagement, “rather than just a neighborhood meeting, public comment at a board of supervisors meeting, or something where the timing is very limited.”
The eight-day festival beginning July 4 arrived at a moment when San Francisco residents were increasingly squeezed by economic and political realities: the AI boom driving up the cost of housing, an erratic Trump administration and economic insecurity due to war and inflation. However discouraging these macro forces may seem, organizers said focusing on the future can be empowering.
Organizers characterized the event as a civic assembly, a kind of deliberative-democracy exercise that, in its ideal form, draws randomly from the population and receives expert testimony and due consideration from public officials.
McMurtry said one of her goals was to change the narrative around civic assemblies.
“The No. 1 experience I hope people will take away from this event,” she said, “is to take this understanding of having to go to jury duty, for example, and having a little bit more of a more positive imagination about our civic duties.”