A San Francisco political advocacy group that has spent millions to get two reform measures on the November ballot announced this week it was pulling one that would have given the city’s next mayor more powers.
TogetherSF Action claimed it could not gain traction on an initiative that would have given the mayor the sole authority to appoint and remove members of most of the city’s commissions as well as create deputy mayor positions and delegate responsibilities to them.
The group’s founder, Kanishka Cheng, said it decided to stop collecting signatures due to a “lack of clarity in voters’ minds” about who the city’s next mayor would be, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
The race for mayor has become incredibly competitive over the past couple of months, with Mayor London Breed facing stiff opposition. A poll commissioned by the Chronicle showed Breed, a Democrat, is at serious risk of losing her reelection race and that a majority of San Francisco voters hold a negative view of her.
Breed has failed to gain traction with voters who have complained the city hasn’t rebounded as quickly as others following the pandemic. Others have pointed to the persistent homelessness crisis and open-air drug use on city streets as to why they favor a leadership change. There has also been an exodus of businesses in San Francisco that claim the city is rife with crime and very little punishment.
Breed has recently pushed a number of tough-on-crime policies.
She’s also demanded accountability for welfare recipients. She ruffled feathers in February when she announced midcycle budget cuts as her administration gets ready to pass its budget in July. That has translated into pausing several programs, including a homeless center in the Tenderloin district, which had been funded in the previous budget but has not yet launched.
Two of her closest opponents, Daniel Lurie, the heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, and former interim Mayor Mark Farrell, a venture capitalist, have blasted Breed for a hollowed-out downtown and deteriorating conditions on the streets. While Laurie and Farrell are considered centrists by San Francisco standards, Breed’s newest opponent, Aaron Peskin, is not.
Peskin, the president of the Board of Supervisors, has cast himself as the progressive choice and has slammed centrist groups for being controlled by big-money assets.
Even though Cheng did not specifically say which way voters were swaying, political observers suggested Peskin may have been a motivating factor in dropping the proposal. Peskin has called TogetherSF Action’s reform proposals as “no way to do public policy or run a government.”
“What they have revealed is that this is an exercise for them to consolidate power for their intended candidate,” he told the San Francisco Standard. “It is actually quite frightening. The only thing I can take from this is that, apparently, I must be polling quite well.”
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David Latterman, a Bay Area political consultant, agreed.
“It’s either a legal issue, and we’re not privy to the details, or they saw something that Peskin has a real shot of winning, and they don’t want him to have that power,” Latterman said.
