View the San Francisco for Sunday, August 11, 2024
Heidi Sieck, the founder of Vote Pro-Choice and a friend and supporter of Kamala Harris for more than 20 years, pictured in San Francisco on Wednesday, Aug. 7, 2024. , women in Bay Area political leadership who’ve been a part of her circle for more than 20 years say they are looking forward to the excitement and opportunity her campaign will bring.
“Obviously we had Hillary Clinton as our nominee before, but having an opportunity to see someone like Kamala — the first female who’s Black, who’s South Asian — I think is someone who brings a turning of the page in so many ways,” said Debbie Mesloh, a longtime friend of Harris who previously served as her communications director., first held elected office in San Francisco. She served two terms as The City’s district attorney before becoming California attorney general in 2011. Many women in local politics, including San Francisco Mayor London Breed and Oakland congressional candidate Lateefah Simon, have credited her with helping them get their start. “Kamala Harris has been an inspiration to many women in public service here in the Bay Area who have worked for her throughout the years, including me,” said Simon, a current member of the BART board of directors, in a statement to The Examiner. “To see her now become the Democratic nominee, it only validates what those of us who worked for her know — she’s an incredible leader who is willing to bring people who are left out of the conversation along with her. It’s inspired me to do the same for my community as I run for Congress.”BART board director Lateefah Simon speaks at a news conference for BART’s anti-sexual harassment Not One More Girl campaign at West Oakland BART station on Friday, April 2, 2021. Now, these women and others around the country are throwing their support behind Harris in more ways than one. Breed was one of many to offer Harris help in the days since she launched her presidential campaign. “ mostly trying to get a lot of financial support her way, helping to call delegates, supporters,” Breed told The Examiner. “I agreed to be a surrogate with some of the press stuff — whatever I can do.” Breed is running for reelection herself, but she said that the presidential election will have just as significant an impact on San Francisco as her own race. “Going from being in charge during a Trump administration as a mayor to being in charge when Biden and Harris became the leaders of this country — this city has benefited tremendously,” she said. “I don’t want that to cut off, because all the work that we do has a lot to do with having a great relationship with our federal partners.” Mayor London Breed at National Night Out at Boeddeker Park in the Tenderloin on Tuesday, Aug. 6, 2024. The mayor pointed to joint efforts coordinating the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, as well as assistance from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in The City’s ongoing opioid crisis, as examples of federal collaboration that she said she worries San Francisco stands to lose. While Breed said her focus is winning reelection, it’s unclear whether some of Harris’ peers and allies might wind up with federal appointments if she wins. But A’shanti Gholar, the president of Emerge, a San Francisco-based organization dedicated to recruiting and training Democratic women for public office, said it could be a possibility, especially for women who are already in the federal government. “I’ll point to Secretary Deb Haaland of the United States Department of the Interior — she is an Emerge woman from New Mexico,” Gholar said. “I definitely wouldn’t be surprised if we see Emerge alums continuing to serve in an administration under her.” Emerge was founded in San Francisco around the time Harris ran for district attorney, when it became clear to Harris and others that there wasn’t an adequate support structure in place for women running for public office at the time. “ co-founders looked around and realized that there wasn’t a great training program for women to go to to learn the ins and outs of running for office,” Gholar said. “It’s not surprising for us to see the original Emerge woman, as we like to call the vice president, at the top of the ticket.” Heidi Sieck, the founder of the national political-engagement platform Vote Pro-Choice, said she remembers first meeting Harris back then at a small party and being blown away. “I had never in my life, in 2002, heard anyone talk about foundational solutions to recidivism; economic opportunity; smart on crime, not tough on crime ... that kind of stuff,” she said. “I was just like, ‘Who is this woman?’” Sieck said she was hooked and began volunteering for Harris, once crashing her car while out running precincts for Harris during the runoff DA election and just continuing on foot, leaving her car by the side of the road. After Harris was elected, Sieck said, she gathered women together from various organizations such as the San Francisco Women’s Political Committee — of which Sieck was president of at the time — the National Women’s Political Caucus, and the San Francisco Commission on the Status of Women. “It was the first time that we’d all been in the room together,” Sieck said. “She planted herself in the middle of that room and sat there the entire day, and we did a straight-up, full-scale strategic planning process.” Sieck said the attendees emerged from the meeting with goals to address the gender imbalance in politics by supporting and empowering more women in leadership roles, and advocating for more education and economic independence as real women’s issues. Sieck said that women from within — and beyond — the Emerge network are looking for ways to support Harris. “It is my prediction that these are the women that are showing up for the calls, these are the women that will give money, these are the women that are going to knock on doors and phone bank and text bank,” she said. “I’m really just going to be raising money and telling stories — that’s what my self-appointed job is.” Emerge’s website says it has worked with 850 Democratic women in California — and about 200 are serving in elected office. Breed, one of those women, said she credits Harris for “encouraging” her — “aggressively” — to go into public office when Emerge was founded. “She shaped my career, because she was probably the one most instrumental in my actually believing that I could be an elected leader,” Breed said. “When I saw her become the district attorney and lead the way she did ... I was like, ‘Whoa, if someone like her can do it, then I can probably do it too.’”House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi speaking about Mayor Breed’s reproductive freedom ballot measure at Planned Parenthood in San Francisco on Monday, June 24, 2024. After nearly 40 years in elected office, House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi has found herself in a somewhat unusual place — without a formal leadership role, and largely in lockstep with The City’s progressives. In recent weeks, Pelosi has made a series of decisions and exercised her unrivaled political influence in ways that might convince even the deeper shades of San Francisco’s solid blue ready to drop $30 for heras running mate for Vice President Kamala Harris. She turned some heads when she endorsed Dean Preston — a member of Democratic Socialists of America — in his reelection bid for supervisor over his moderate Democratic challengers. “In the span of a couple weeks, Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi managed to help revive the Democratic Party with an entirely new presidential ticket, blast Netanyahu over a ceasefire, and also defend pro-tenant and pro-worker Sup. Dean Preston here at home in San Francisco,” Jackie Fielder, a progressive candidate for District 9 supervisor, wrote on X.Is she drifting to the left? Is she building bridges to help ensure her chosen successor is elected after she retires? Or, after ending a long tenure of leadership of House Democrats, is Pelosi finally just unburdened?“It’s not the stuff of headlines, but my understanding is that she often endorses incumbents she thinks are doing a good job, and I’m glad she sees me in that light,” Preston told The Examiner. Online, Pelosi’s endorsements were met with some bafflement. When Preston announced Pelosi’s support on his Instagram page, one commenter mused “not sure how I feel about her endorsement. Confusing,” while another told Preston “if you’re so thrilled about this, can you honestly call yourself a progressive or democratic socialist?”“I don’t think that Pelosi’s political behavior has shifted,” said Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin, who noted he failed to win Pelosi’s support in his first run for office in 2000 but earned it in 2004. “She has historically voted for incumbents on their reelections for as long as I’ve been around.” Pelosi’s camp denies the notion of a leftward shift. In interviews, she has attempted to minimize the role she played in the saga leading up to President Joe Biden’s decision to step down from the Democratic ticket, and she has maintained that she has a single purpose at the moment: making sure Democrats win on all levels. “Speaker Pelosi is not on a shift,” Pelosi spokesperson Ian Krager told The Examiner in a statement. “She’s on a mission.”It was fairly radical of her, for example, to demand Congress take action to address the AIDS crisis gripping San Francisco and the nation shortly after taking office in 1987. And, at times, the left has embraced Pelosi back — in 1996, for example, thePelosi has always had a rock-solid relationship with organized labor, according to Kim Tavaglione, executive director of the San Francisco Labor Council, an umbrella organization that represents more than 150 unions. If anything’s new, Tavaglione suggested, it’s Pelosi’s evolving role. After serving as either minority leader or the House speaker for 20 years, Pelosi handed the reins last year to New York Rep. Hakeem Jeffries. “Now she can really be the San Franciscan that she truly is without getting attacked every 10 seconds by the right,” Tavaglione said. While Tavaglione said she doesn’t view Pelosi as drifting to the left, she said she does view the longtime representative as being more willing to weigh in on issues, particularly on the local level. “It’s different when you’re leading all the members of Congress, and their striations of what a Democrat is, versus just representing your district,” Tavaglione said. “When you have to represent like a Joe Manchin-style Democrat — and you have a bloc of 50 of them — you kind of have to walk a fine line rather than lose them.” Supervisor Connie Chan, who is considered progressive by San Francisco’s political standards, was also endorsed by Pelosi. “Speaker Emerita Pelosi has stood up for San Francisco’s values time and again, pushing back against abuses of the Trump Administration, fighting for a fairer economy and working to protect our fundamental rights,” Julie Edwards, a campaign consultant for Chan, told The Examiner in a statement.Pelosi’s endorsement of Chan and Preston could also be viewed as a sign of her respect for incumbents, a position in which she has been in many times herself., who has not earned Pelosi’s backing as she fends off a strong reelection challenge from multiple candidates this November. Pelosi has, to this point, stayed out of the mayor’s race but delved into contests below it on the ballot. In addition to her penchant for backing incumbents, Peskin noted Pelosi’s alignment with labor in her local endorsements. “She was first elected in a close race against a progressive named Harry Britt a long time ago with the support of labor, and she has never forgotten that,” Peskin said. “Labor endorsed Dean Preston, and labor endorsed Connie Chan, and labor did not endorse London Breed.” With every position she takes, some wonder whether Pelosi is carefully constructing a political Rube Goldberg machine. It’s hard not to speculate, given her record.Mayor London Breed was one of dozens of officials with whom SPUR consulted for its recent report on ways to improve San Francisco’s city government A prominent Bay Area public-policy nonprofit has released a comprehensive report on how it would best reform San Francisco government, even as a number of charter amendments seeking to do just that are slated for the November ballot. Late last month, the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association published the results of a yearlong studyin which it identifies and attempts to remedy what it sees as the most glaring inefficiencies in The City’s government. SPUR researchers spoke to dozens of high-ranking city officials for the report, including Mayor London Breed, City Attorney David Chiu, San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency Director Jeffrey Tumlin and Supervisors Myrna Melgar and Rafael Mandelman.in 1996, a process SPUR was directly involved with — the first time it had done so in nearly 60 years. Nicole Neditch, governance and economy policy director at SPUR, said her team noticed current inefficiencies that were reminiscent of 1996, which is largely why the organization was motivated to come out with this report. “We found that, over time, the charter had been sort of diffused, and authority had been moved into other areas of The City,” Neditch said. “And I think we’re seeing the same thing that has happened then happen right now” “Since 1996, when this new charter was passed, we’ve implemented a lot of new boards and commissions,” she said. “We’ve dispersed authority to those boards and commissions, and now it’s not super clear who has the authority and what those clear lines of authority and accountability are anymore.” SPUR’s study detailed eight recommendations that it claims can “help The City and County of San Francisco’s government work better.” The recommendations most relevant to the upcoming 2024 election involved how SPUR found The City can improve accountability and better define roles at City Hall. They include changing the role of the Office of the City Administrator, merging redundant departments and reducing the number of commissions while better defining their purposes. The latter is at the heart of Cheng and Peskin’s dueling measures, which San Franciscans will vote on in three months. In crude terms, Cheng’s measure seeks to cut the number of city commissions from 130 to 65 and boost mayoral power. Peskin’s proposal also calls for cutting commissions, but it wants to first establish a new independent commission task force that, using public input, will recommend improvements to the current system before determining how many need to be slashed. “We do think that there should be a clear evaluation process and some criteria that we’re setting for how we’re evaluating all of the commissions,” Neditch said. “We should run all of those commissions through that lens, and we definitely think that 130 is too many. But how many is not super clear until we do that evaluation.“ Interestingly, representatives for both TogetherSF and Peskin's team claimed that the SPUR report backed up their own rival measures. Ed Harrington, an advisor on the report who also works on the campaign for Peskin’s ballot proposal, said Peskin’s measure is “almost modeled after the SPUR report.” “The SPUR report says set up a committee; he did,” Harrington said. “The SPUR report says there’s no particular cap you should make on this; he didn’t. It said that you should try to think about these things differently, governance and regulatory advisories. didn’t say one way or the other, but clearly he set up a committee that has the ability to go through and say, ‘Okay, what are these commissions for? And based on what kinds of commissions they are, how should we try to structure those?’” “He clearly has it where it says which commission should be kept, which should be abolished, which should be combined, which is exactly what SPUR is saying,” Harrington said. “So I kind of view his as almost implementing what SPUR suggested.” But in a statement to The Examiner, Cheng said she was also"encouraged" by SPUR's findings because they match closely with analysis from Claremont McKenna College's research institute, the Rose Institute of State and Local Government, which served as the basis for TogetherSF's proposal. "Both reports identify critical structural issues within San Francisco's government, particularly the lack of clear lines of authority and the diffusion of decision-making across various commissions," Cheng said."In addition to the Commission Impossible report by the Civil Grand Jury earlier this year, it is clear we need to reform and restructure of San Francisco’s commissions to deliver better results for all residents, businesses, and visitors." SPUR has yet to release its endorsements for San Francisco’s ballot, but Neditch acknowledged that Peskin and Cheng’s measures do have the same goal. “From a top-line perspective of just the intent, everybody’s aligned that there is a need to look at our commission system, evaluate it, and make some recommendations about how to reduce the number,” she said. “I would say that the differences in them is just how we get there.” Three of the report’s other recommendations reform the mayor’s ability to manage departments , restoring the ability to hire and fire department heads, and reorganizing the mayor’s office so there is a more manageable number of direct reports. Neditch said that the mayor’s office has 50 people directly reporting to The City’s chief executive, which is too many.Instead, the think tank posited that The City establish six deputy-mayor positions that would split up oversight. Finally, another pair of the report’s recommendations aim to improve the legislative process by first building an in-house legislative analyst’s office to support the Board of Supervisors, and then raising the bar for ordinances to make it onto the ballot. As it stands, a group needs to collect signatures from at least 2% of The City’s registered voters for an ordinance to qualify for the ballot. SPUR recommended increasing that threshold to 5%. Neditch made clear that the policy recommendations were SPUR’s alone, but the organization did attempt to thread a throughline across its interviewees and create a document that represents a commonality in the way others want to see The City reformed.“I think that there’s a lot of interest in having more dialogue about the findings and continuing these conversations,” Neditch said. “I think, generally, people are pretty aligned on the recommendations. And, it really comes down to, how do we move some of these recommendations forward?”The cool microclimate in the area where San Francisco Zoo is located makes it ideal for pandas, writes former City Administrator Bill Lee.Click and hold your mouse button on the page to select the area you wish to save or print. You can click and drag the clipping box to move it or click and drag in the bottom right corner to resize it. When you're happy with your selection, click the checkmark icon next to the clipping area to continue.This is the name that will be displayed next to your photo for comments, blog posts, and more. Choose wisely!Create a password that only you will remember. If you forget it, you'll be able to recover it using your email address.Forgot Password An email message containing instructions on how to reset your password has been sent to the email address listed on your account.
Trending
A gorgeous April afternoon in store across the Denver metro area 
‘Artemis Mission Cannot Lead To Interplanetary Wild West,’ Astronomer Warns 
Trump says US forces will ‘finish the job’ soon in first prime-time speech since starting Iran war 
Former Wisconsin football player, who left the sport amid mental health struggles, dead at 24 
Drew McIntyre Gives Honest Take About His Recent WWE Title Reign 
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders introduces bill that could keep the Padres in San Diego United States Latest News, United States Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Page A1View the San Francisco for Sunday, July 28, 2024
Read more »
Page A1View the San Francisco for Wednesday, July 31, 2024
Read more »
Page A1View the San Francisco for Thursday, August 1, 2024
Read more »
Page A1View the San Francisco for Sunday, August 4, 2024
Read more »
Page A1View the San Francisco for Wednesday, August 7, 2024
Read more »
Page A1View the San Francisco for Thursday, August 8, 2024
Read more »