Governance
We believe: The public sector can and should serve the collective good.
• Improve government’s capacity to provide services and address challenges effectively.
• Support voter engagement.
Our Goals
SPUR Report
Designed to Serve
San Francisco’s governance structure has evolved to distribute authority and maximize oversight. As a result, policies don’t always meet the needs of the people they intend to serve. SPUR outlines how San Francisco can choose to design a better system.
SPUR Voter Guide
The SPUR Voter Guide
The SPUR Voter Guide helps voters understand the issues they will face in the voting booth. We focus on outcomes, not ideology, providing objective analysis on which measures will deliver real solutions.
SPUR Report
Making Government Work
Many of the challenges Oakland faces are worsened by its unusual government structure, which makes it harder for the mayor and other officials to do their jobs well. SPUR explores how the city can adapt its governance structure to better serve Oaklanders.
Updates and Events
Election 2011: How Did SF’s Pension Problem Get This Bad?
News /
With two different pension-reform measures on the upcoming ballot, it’s no secret that pension reform will have a significant impact on the November election. But how did the city get to the point of having a problem of this magnitude? Clearly the recession has played a big part, but what about the many negotiated increases in benefits over the course of the last decade? While…
Hackathon! Coders and Civil Servants Unite to Fix SF
News /
A grown man napping on his laptop case. Daily visits from SF mayoral candidates. Keynote addresses from the Wigg Party, MIT's SENSEable Cities Lab, the Rebar Group, and the San Francisco Department of the Environment. Cold pizza after midnight. More than a hundred adults sitting around tables on the 5th floor of a Mid-Market office building on a Friday night. This is what ground zero of the…
Summer of Smart: Using Technology to Transform our Government
News /
Since President Obama launched his Open Government Directive in December 2009, tech-savvy urban thinkers have been asking, "How can technology improve government and empower communities?" Although the Open Government Initiative suffered a hit when its funding was cut from $35 million to $8 million, nonprofits around the country such as Code For America have continued bringing open government to the forefront of public discussion. This…
Will the City's Pension Proposal Really Solve the Pension Crisis?
News /
In the coming weeks, the SF Board of Supervisors Rules Committee will be hearing the "consensus" proposal for pension reform, which Mayor Ed Lee and a coalition of the city’s labor unions released May 24. The board has until July to make amendments and vote on the proposal. The proposal, which projects savings of $1 billion over ten years, would: Require that city employees pay…
Defining Good Government in the New Reality
Urbanist Article
Costs of City government are rising while revenues are stagnating. Meanwhile, our need for core services has not decreased. What began as a national recession may have triggered a rare moment of opportunity to deal with the causes of our structural deficit. So what is the way forward?
Obama Talks Infrastructure
News /
In a speech last week on infrastructure investment, President Obama recommitted his administration to a "fundamental overhaul" of the nation's infrastructure, following up on a previous Labor Day announcement that had excited smart growth advocates and set off speculation about the form such a "second stimulus" or "infrastructure bank" would take.