Over the course of decades, the governance structure of the City and County of San Francisco has evolved to distribute authority and maximize oversight. As a consequence, policies can’t always be effectively implemented and don’t always meet the needs of the people they were intended to serve. A new report by SPUR calls for a redesign of the city’s governance structure that prioritizes leadership, empowerment, and accountability. Designed to Serve: Resetting the city’s governance structure to better meet the needs of San Franciscans lays out eight recommendations to increase the mayor’s ability to manage departments, create clear lines of authority and accountability that everyone understands, and support effective policymaking by improving legislative processes. We spoke with Nicole Neditch, SPUR’s Governance and Economy Policy Director, to learn what the governance structure is now and how a more streamlined structure could improve quality of life for San Franciscans.
Remind us of some of the ways that government can affect San Franciscans’ everyday life.
Operational and policy decisions by the mayor and the Board of Supervisors affect community health, safety, and economic outcomes for everyone who calls San Francisco home. Recent transformations — such as technology advances, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the reduction of office workers downtown — along with long-standing issues, such as the lack of affordable housing and homelessness, have tested the city’s adaptive capacity. The lack of clear, coordinated action to address big challenges has led to the perception that the city government isn’t responding quickly enough to meet the needs of the people it serves.
Tell us more about that perception.
The latest City Survey, in April 2023, shows that San Francisco residents’ satisfaction with government has decreased. But we don’t have to rely on the survey to assess residents’ experience with government. We can look to the city’s capacity to deliver quality services, which is predicated on — among other things — its capacity to hire people, coordinate the work of departments, purchase goods and services, and assess outcomes. By these measures, the current governance structure is not set up to effectively deliver services.
Simplifying the governance structure would allow San Francisco to allocate resources more equitably and deliver better services as well as begin to address other issues that create barriers to effective government, including contracting, hiring, customer service, and performance management.
Just how big and complex is the government of the City and County of San Francisco?
It’s bigger than many state governments, with more than 34,000 employees and an annual budget of more than $15 billion, and it’s California’s only merged city and county government, running city functions such as parks, libraries, and fire and police departments as well as county functions such as public health, social services, and jails.
San Francisco is governed by a charter that centralizes city management under a mayor and legislative functions under a board of supervisors. Although the public believes that the mayor serves as the city’s chief executive, the reality is that dozens of charter amendments have diffused management and decision-making across the city’s sprawling network of boards and commissions. The result is a lack of clarity on roles and responsibilities and a blurring of lines of authority and accountability, leading to policies that don’t always translate to effective services.
Your research suggests that San Francisco’s government is hamstrung when it comes to vision alignment and strategic planning. How would you characterize its challenges?
I’d say San Francisco’s government is better set up to deal with day-to-day priorities and less set up to tackle issues that are complex and that involve strategies that span multiple departments.
For example, the charter limits the mayor’s ability to manage a large and diverse set of direct reports, which undermines the mayor’s capacity to pursue a cohesive strategy and policy agenda. Likewise, achieving shared goals is difficult with diffused reporting structures and conflicting mandates. The vast number of departments with sometimes overlapping or even conflicting visions or guidance can make it incredibly difficult for people to navigate services. The City Administrator’s Office and the city’s many boards and commissions also lack clearly defined roles and grapple with overlapping authority.
Meanwhile, the legislative process lacks the proper structure to ensure that policy can be effectively implemented. Insufficient policy analysis, tight timelines, and low bars for ballot initiatives have limited the board’s ability to pass effective policy. Departmental staff can struggle to operationalize and thoughtfully implement constantly changing rules and laws.
And finally, governmental entities are difficult to remove — even when they no longer serve the city’s greater good or the cost to maintain them exceeds their benefit.
What do the report’s eight recommendations aim to do?
The recommendations focus on giving the executive and legislative branches the tools and authority to carry out their respective functions and on modifying the organizational structure of government to better support service delivery.
Your first set of recommendations speaks to the mayor’s ability to manage departments effectively. What’s the problem you are solving for here?
Right now, the mayor has 43 direct reports but complete authority to appoint just four department heads. Delegating authority to deputy mayors would streamline San Francisco’s overall reporting structure and would provide a clear chain of command and accountability. While the structure should be up to the mayor, SPUR envisions deputy mayors for six policy areas: public health/social services; public safety; arts, culture, and recreation; economic development/land use; transportation, streets, and utilities; and internal services.
You also make recommendations to create clear lines of authority and accountability. What are the main challenges you see in this area?
To better address complex citywide challenges, the City Administrator’s Office (CAO) should be empowered to serve as the city’s chief operating officer, departments should be restructured and merged to eliminate overlapping functions and mandates, and commissions should be pared down and better defined. The CAO should have the authority to convene departments, set direction, and manage performance to address concerns such as capital planning and climate resilience. It should also be empowered to make citywide decisions when departments cannot agree on approach. As for departmental mergers, we offer some questions and criteria for housing similar functions under one organizational roof.
Commissions should be examined for their effectiveness. Do they support better policymaking and government service delivery. Do they expand the chief executive’s management capacity? The city should develop a process to clarify the purpose of San Francisco’s commissions, reduce their overall number, streamline the appointment process, and set dates to fold commissions once they have served their purpose.
You close with recommendations to improve legislative processes. What specific issues are you addressing here?
The legislative process lacks the proper structure to ensure that policy can be effectively implemented. We recommend building an in-house Legislative Analyst’s Office to support the Board of Supervisors and raising the bar to put ballot measures before voters.
Providing in-house legislative analyst capacity could illuminate policy trade-offs and improve the effectiveness of legislation. We envision a new office staffed with nonpolitical public policy experts who work directly for the Board of Supervisors and who recommend legislative fixes and practice changes. They could further support the board by advising on and providing consistent oversight of critical city concerns, thereby reducing the need for so many commissions, boards, and advisory bodies.
Our last recommendation reflects our belief that ballot measures should require the collaboration of executive and legislative branches before they are sent to voters to decide. Increased internal collaboration would create outcomes intended for long-term general benefit — not short-term wins — and would ensure that voters aren’t given the responsibility to decide on complicated technical matters when policymakers can’t agree. Similarly, to increase community alignment on items that appear on the ballot, we would raise San Francisco’s very low bar for qualifying non-charter ballot initiatives by signature.