View the San Francisco for Wednesday, November 27, 2024
Art King, Rescue Captain for the San Francisco Fire Department at the San Francisco 911 emergency call center on Monday, Dec. 19, 2022.But feelings aside, just how effective is city government, and is it meeting its own goals? The City Controller’s Office asks these questions every year and assembles a plethora of data to grade city departments.
On Thursday, the Controller’s Office released its Annual Performance Results report, which features data from the fiscal year from July 2023 through June 2024. The goal is to not only provide San Franciscans with a snapshot of government performance, but to help departments make decisions based on real data. “Good data informs good policy,” Controller Greg Wagner said in a statement. “We aim to provide something that’s a useful snapshot of our city’s service delivery performance — something to supplement the narratives that don’t always capture a complete picture of complicated issues. Departments can hopefully see at a glance what’s working well and where there’s more work to be done.” The library system lent out about 14 million materials, which includes electronic and physical items, in the last fiscal year. That’s beyond the quantity in any other year in the last decade, and a pronounced recovery from a COVID-19 pandemic drop-off. The library system took steps during the pandemic to make electronic materials easier to access. It’s also seeing a rise in physical-media distribution, which was up 12% last year, which is partly attributed to a change in policy that allowed patrons to renew physical materials for up to five times instead of three. The circulation increase comes despite the fact that the number of physical people entering a physical library remains less than two-thirds of what it was prior to the pandemic, though even that figure continues to rise every year since COVID-safety restrictions were lifted.The average daily jail population in San Francisco rose by 34% from fiscal year 2023 to 2024, and its jails were at 86% of their rated capacity.to launch a coordinated crackdown on low- and high-level drug dealing in and around the Tenderloin and Civic Center, where open-air drug markets had become commonplace. The jail population also began to rise after a pandemic-induced dropoff. Prior to 2020, the number of people in jail was above what it is now — 1,322 in fiscal year 2019, compared to the 1,099 on average for the last year — although capacity was higher at the time.Just 76% of 911 calls were responded to within 15 seconds in fiscal year 2024. This was the fourth consecutive year in which response times worsened, according to the controller’s data. As recently as 2020, 94% of 911 calls were answered within 15 seconds. City data for the current fiscal year shows a moderate improvement within the last few months, with 82% of 911 calls answered within 15 seconds in September. San Francisco dispatchers not matched that monthly average response time in more than two years. The controller’s report attributes worsening performance to a shortage in staffing exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, but it notes causes for hope. The Department of Emergency Management told the controller’s office that it has hired a recruiter and shortened its hiring process by 20%. Its last two 911 Dispatch Academy classes were its largest since prior to the pandemic and officials expect staffing to improve throughout the next fiscal year. Despite the dispatcher shortage, emergency responders were able to dramatically improve their response times to “A” emergencies — the most extreme situations — by nearly a full minute, from 6.9 minutes last year to 6 minutes this year. That’s significantly under the target of 8 minutes.One factor in the improvement may be The City’s drastic escalation in its distribution of naloxone, a drug that can reverse overdoses. Though it still fell short of its target for the year, the Department of Public Health reported giving out 157,528 doses of naloxone in fiscal year 2024, more than twice what it did just two years prior.. The venue — which is also a restaurant, bar and bookstore — has become a go-to destination for book talks, conferences, concerts and galas. Of course, most famously, Manny’s is a political fundraising machine, hosting the likes of Mayor London Breed, House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, Gov. Gavin Newsom, first lady Jill Biden and, this year, Vice President Kamala Harris while she was still campaigning for President Joe Biden’s now-defunct reelection bid. This year Yekutiel also put on a live San Francisco mayoral debate and a pair of simultaneous presidential-debate watch parties. Despite all the attention his space — and, by extension, he — receives, Yekutiel is reticent to take credit for being the force behind its success and goals. “I don’t want it to feel like ‘this is a place for Manny, and what Manny believes in, and what Manny cares about,’” he told The Examiner in 2021. “I want people who work in civic, political, nonprofit and social justice to feel ownership over this space.” The venue’s constant energy reflects Yekutiel’s nonstop social life. As The Examiner wrote, his weekends are filled with dancing at clubs such as Powerhouse and Casements, sharing a bottle of rosé or a joint with friends at Dolores Park, or taking himself out to a movie at Alamo Drafthouse. But don’t let his appreciation of a good time cover up his distinguished professional résumé and diligent work ethic. He’s worked at the White House Office of Public Engagement during the Obama administration, as chief of staff at— an immigration-focused political-advocacy group — and served as deputy finance director of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Yekutiel evenand how I spend my time,” he told The Nob Hill Gazette in 2022. “That’s probably my best quality: my urgency to live fully and purposefully.”“I love how open-hearted we are,” Yekutiel told the Gazette. “This is the best city in America to be a queer person, in my opinion, between the amazing art, culture, music and community. I love being gay in San Francisco.”, The Examiner has set out to recognize the people who define The City. As our city is being reborn, there have been a few remarkable contributions by people who refuse to succumb to the lazy narrative of doom loops and ,instead, in truly San Francisco style, choose to see the opportunity and will a new future into existence. This is one of the 12 San Franciscans you, our readers, selected whose innovative work and leadership have left an indelible mark on our city and inspire us all to be better San Franciscans.View of downtown San Francisco from the rooftop terrace of 100 Van Ness apartment building in San Francisco on Wednesday, Jan. 17, 2024. Chris Fraley was 26 when he returned from vacation in 1995 to find a memo on his desk with two paragraphs of fresh New York state law authorizing an incentive program for spurring conversion of offices to homes in lower Manhattan, which in the early 1990s had widespread office vacancies.into nearly 13,000 homes — and he said he believes something similar could happen today in downtown San Francisco, which currently has a historic office-Chris Fraley, chief investment officer for Forge Development Partners, played a lead role in establishing a tax relief program that has been credited with spurring the conversion of offices into nearly 13,000 housing units.Fraley is now the chief investment officer for Forge Development Partners, which is the exceptional company in San Francisco because it is in the construction-design phase of a project to convert theFraley said he looks at the tiny number of homes downtown — on both sides of Market Street — and sees huge potential for more residences given the plentiful public transportation options, the many restaurants, luxury retail and other attractions. “San Francisco has just unbelievable potential in its downtown, because it has such a strong foundation already,” he said. “Now is a real opportunity to create a vibrant, mixed-use 24-hour neighborhood.” The honey that attracted all those New York property owners was a combination of time-limited abatements on existing taxes and exemptions on increased values following office-to-residence conversions. Recent studies have shown that the cost of conversions is generally too high to justify the investment without incentives. San Francisco will have the opportunity next year to pursue its own tax-break initiative inspired by the New York program as a result of a new state law going into effect on Jan. 1. “It’s funny when I hear people say, ‘Can conversions work?’” said Fraley, who went back to Yale School of Management to get an M.B.A. after a couple of years laying the groundwork for the New York program. “I mean, 12 million square feet of office space was converted in lower Manhattan. The statistics are pretty staggering.” Fraley said the development activity in New York City led to far higher property-tax revenues once the tax grace periods ran out. “It was probably one of the best investments in the city’s assessed value, or tax rolls, that had ever been made,” he said.View of the Transamerica Pyramid and the Financial District from the rooftop of the International Hotel in Chinatown, San Francisco on Tuesday, May 21, 2024. Sean Campion, director of housing and economic development studies for the Citizens Budget Commission, a nonprofit think tank that did a study of the lower Manhattan conversion program, said that initiative was “unquestionably a success in terms of actually spurring office to residential conversions” and changing a single-use area into a mixed-use neighborhood. In addition to tax relief, changing regulations to make it easier to do conversions was critically important, he said. The financial incentives provided were probably more generous than needed at the tail end of the program, after which conversions continued with no tax breaks, Campion said. Overall, however, he said the net payoff to New York appeared to have been positive. More recently, Mayor Eric Adams’ administration has been seeking regulatory changes to make it easier to do office to residential conversions in more types of buildings and wider swaths of the city, Campion said. This year, New York state also passed a tax-relief program for conversion projects that include affordable housing. San Francisco officials have sought to entice conversion activity in part by amending some development rules for converting offices to other uses. In the case of 785 Market St., Fraley said, the building was particularly well-suited to a conversion because it has relatively small floor plates, along with plentiful light access and working windows, and and it is eligible for historic building tax benefits. Mayor London Breed and other city officials were also extraordinarily helpful, he said. San Francisco still has a long way to go to counter its reputation as hostile to developers, an image that makes it hard to raise investment capital for projects in The City, Fraley said. “There’s this mentality that it’s just all about greedy developers squeezing the profit out of buildings,” Fraley said. “The City has to work with the development community to pull us out of this, out of the doldrums here.” Breed last year introduced an exemption from the transfer tax on the first sale of buildings that have been converted from office to residential use. Voters passed the measure in the March election. The applications for conversions did not pour in, however, and Fraley said he thinks more financial incentives might be the key — particularly tax relief to owners investing in conversions who see their bills rise when they make property improvements. “There’s actually a massive disincentive to invest into buildings,” Fraley said. “That’s what the program in New York addressed, and that’s, in my opinion, why it was so successful.”California State Assembly Member Phil Ting speaking at a reelection campaign rally for Supervisor Connie Chan at Argonne Playground in San Francisco on Saturday, March 16, 2024.One potentially significant change on the horizon is California Assembly Bill 2488, a new law tailored specifically for San Francisco by Assemblymember Phil Ting. Sponsored by the Bay Area Council, the law will enable city officials to establish a downtown revitalization and economic-recovery financing district in which developers of conversion projects before the end of 2032 could qualify to get a portion of their property taxes returned to them annually for 30 years. The law requires projects that get tax revenue to pay prevailing wages and comply with labor standards as adopted by the Board of Supervisors. Louis Mirante, vice president of public policy at the Bay Area Council, said the legislation was “definitely inspired” by New York city’s previously successful program, and it is “a powerful tool,” one he said he hopes the incoming mayor and Board of Supervisors use, though they could choose not to do so. Giving property owners tax breaks on increases in the property values incentivizes investment that can stop property values from deteriorating, which hurts city finances, said Mirante, citing reports of downtown office buildings selling for far less than in the past.Still, the process for setting up such a financing district will likely take a year or more to set in motion, Ting predicted. “AB 2488 is a long-term strategy — it’s definitely not a short-term fix,” said Ting, who said he expected that older, smaller buildings would be the ones targeted for conversions, with many newer buildings unsuitable for conversion for various reasons, such as lack of bathrooms and plumbing.Ting’s office has said office and retail conversions could create as many as 14,000 additional homes in San Francisco. The City must add 82,000 new homes by 2031 as part of its state-mandated housing goals.American iconography — as seen in “A God Blessed Land ” — can be seen in some of Amy Sherald’s works currently on display at SFMOMA.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.
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