San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie is pushing for broad emergency powers to tackle the city's most pressing issues, potentially bypassing traditional oversight and accelerating his response. This move comes with significant responsibility and the potential for both success and failure.
San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie is poised to bear singular responsibility for The City’s battle against its most intractable problems. He’ll confront homelessness, addiction and mental health, as unshackled as any mayor in recent history has been. It’s a massive burden, and a political liability.
Lurie is well on his way to convincing the Board of Supervisors to hand him significant power, with relatively little oversight, as he attempts to rapidly expand temporary shelter beds, hire more police officers and behavioral health professionals, and open new behavioral health beds. His proposed “fentanyl state of emergency” ordinance cleared its first major hurdle at a Budget and Finance Committee meeting last week. “What we are doing is not working, and we all know it,” Lurie said at a rally held to drum up support for the proposal. The ordinance would grant his administration great flexibility to sign leases as it sees fit and forgo competitive bidding processes. For many contracts up to $25 million, the Board of Supervisors will have to vote within 45 days, after which the “shot clock” will expire and the administration will be able to move forward regardless of supervisors’ feelings. Lurie’s legislation also allows his administration to reach out to the private sector with an open hand and ask for cash to help fund its ambitious undertakings. Thus, as a package, the ordinance should give Lurie broad capacity to address The City’s most pressing crises. It’s also a great responsibility, and if things go south there will be no one left for the administration to blame but itself. “I think Mayor Lurie is going in with eyes open, understanding that critics will harshly judge failure while ignoring success. But he also knows what needs to be done,” said Steven Bacio, a director of GrowSF, a moderate political group that launched a petition in support of Lurie’s proposal. It wouldn’t be the first time a mayor has used emergency powers, in some form, to take on the scourge of drugs and homelessness, but Lurie’s leash is long. Most recently, Mayor London Breed declared a Tenderloin State of Emergency that allowed her to quickly stand up the Tenderloin Center; that emergency was confined to one neighborhood, however, and the Tenderloin Center was closed about a year later. For the Board of Supervisors, handing Lurie the reins places the burden for solving San Francisco’s problems on him and his departments, preempting accusations that legislators are obstructionists. As individual members, if street conditions don’t improve they, essentially, can return to their constituents and say “don’t look at me — I’ve given the mayor everything for which he asked.” And it will be Lurie, not supervisors, who needs to convince a neighborhood to welcome a new shelter or behavioral health facility in its backyard. The potential pitfalls are numerous. The rules that the Board of Supervisors and Lurie are waiving exist for a reason. Failing to competitively bid projects generally leads to higher costs, the Board of Supervisors’ budget and legislative analyst noted during the committee hearing last week while generally striking a tone of “No, seriously, I need you all to understand this” as he reviewed the proposal. Ex // Top Stories Amid message of unity, discord on immigration persists in SF DA, public defender remain at odds over deportations of accused drug dealers AI industry assessing aftershocks of DeepSeek earthquake Wall Street investors sold tech-stock shares after the Chinese AI company’s app topped the charts but its ultimate impact still unclear Review remote work policies, Lurie tells department heads The SF mayor wants city departments to ensure work-from-home policies aren’t sacrificing city services. Niholas Menard, the analyst, noted that the Board of Supervisors’ approval of contracts is rarely a significant hold-up if and when an administration wants to ink a new contract; but by agreeing to the 45-day shot clock, it’s depriving itself of the right to ask basic questions about, say, a proposed shelter — such as where will it be located, the cost, and whether it will be effective. And doing away with competitive bidding can be a recipe for “waste, fraud and abuse,” Menard said. “Even at the height of the pandemic, FEMA required The City to do competitive solicitations,” Menard said, adding that they are a “gold standard for controlling costs and preventing a political process influencing a contract award.” As departments rush to sign leases and ink deals with service providers to confront this emergency, Lurie’s going to be responsible for ensuring every cent spent is done so on the up-and-up. “We’re doing something special,” Supervisor Matt Dorsey, the legislation’s first co-sponsor, said at the committee meeting Wednesday
HOMELESSNESS ADDICTION MENTALHEALTH EMERGENCY POWERS MAYOR BOARD OF SUPERVISORS COMPETITIVE BIDDING SAN FRANCISCO
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