The mayor lured his security detail into engaging in this senseless altercation, all for political theatrics, your honor. The video shows very clearly that Mr. Phillips was not the aggressor in this case. He was shoved twice, at which point, he had to defend himself.
The three charter reform measures Lurie and Mandelman have proposed are 1) giving the mayor powers currently held by independent City Hall commissions, 2) making it harder to put ballot measures on San Francisco election ballots, and 3) making the City Administrator's term ten years instead of five years, and giving the Administrator more authority over contracts.
District 2's appointed supervisor, Stephen Sherrill, is sitting pretty going into the June 2 special election to keep his seat: He has fundraised more than twice his opponent. Sherrill, a former staffer to New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg appointed by outgoing Mayor London Breed, received $223,279 in contributions as of Dec. 31, according to the latest campaign finance filings.
Barring unforeseen lunacy, come November, you'll be voting on cars on the Great Highway - for the third time since 2022. Like PAY YOUR PROPERTY TAXES BY DECEMBER 10 AND APRIL 10!!! there are some things you can apparently mark in permanent pen on your calendar. At the statewide level, you'll be voting about kidney dialysis and, locally, you'll be voting on this.
The fight saw Fielder, elected in District 9 last year on a Democratic Socialist platform by a 19-percentage point margin, blast tech billionaires and call her detractors "technofascists." Tech investors from the city's moderate wing rallied anger about the supervisor on X, skewering her and calling the proposed legislation "Luddite." Now, with both sides claiming victory, city residents would be excused for not knowing what's exactly going on.
SF residents still don't know what happened on that phone call where Mayor Lurie talked Donald Trump out of sending federal troops into SF, and a panel of SF's Sunshine Ordinance Task Force says Lurie is breaking the law. It is almost certainly the greatest political win of SF Mayor Daniel Lurie's nearly one year in office that he with an assist from a couple billionaires somehow talked Donald Trump out of sending federal troops to SF in a mysterious phone call the night of October 22.
There has been much said about the Prop. C categories and the desire of some electeds to move money from housing to shelter. Their idea is typically explained that shelter is quicker to get up and running and less expensive. Neither are true. Housing First is an evidence-based model, has been massively researched and it works across the country. In SF, our supportive housing has a 97% success rate. Regardless of current political winds, nothing solves homelessness like a home. Obviously, building housing takes time and is expensive; however it does save money in both the long run and in the short term. It is worth the effort.
The day after Beya Alcaraz, Mayor Daniel Lurie's pick for District 4 supervisor, resigned from a post she had taken up just seven days earlier, political insiders in San Francisco were unified in their response: How could this happen? And, what happens now? Alcaraz, the only supervisor appointee in modern San Francisco history with zero political experience, was ousted hours after Mission Local found she admitted in writing to paying workers "under the table" and potentially dodging taxes, and just days after the San Francisco Standard found her former pet store was awash in dead animals and a rodent infestation.
The monolingual seniors depicted in the video, however, tell Mission Local that it's bogus. And they're mad. Over 60 percent of the Californians who voted in the state's Nov. 4 special election cast their ballots in favor of Prop. 50, a high-profile measure to gerrymander California's congressional map to add more seats for Democrats - a direct challenge to Trump's demand to gerrymander Democrats out of Congressional office in Republican-led states.
Jennifer Friedenbach, a homelessness advocate and nonprofit leader who was the main architect of the 2018 Proposition C to increase funding for homeless services, lost a vote on Monday to retain her seat at the table. Proposition C, dubbed "Our City, Our Home," created a new tax on businesses with more than $50 million in annual gross receipts to fund the city's homelessness services and housing programs.
"I'm going to lay out a hypothesis about why Trump's suddenly backing away from a crackdown in San Francisco (and possibly the rest of the Bay Area): 1) this place is organized, and 2) the wealthy, powerful people Trump listens to are especially vulnerable to organizing-driven-polarization. Two weeks ago, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff publicly mused that sending the National Guard to SF was a good idea. Now he's privately talking Trump out of it."
Sup. Jackie Fielder is asking the board to approve a resolution calling on the city treasurer to move forward to create a municipal green bank. The supes have already approved the concept, and Fielder has five cosponsors, so unless one member objects and demands that the proposal be sent to committee, this will pass. That would start the process of figuring out how to pay for what could become the country's first municipal bank.
State Senator Scott Wiener made his big splash Wednesday morning by announcing he was running for Nancy Pelosi's seat in Congress, though it would have been an even bigger splash if that news had not already leaked last week. Though on this very same Wednesday morning, the publication Politico also made a big splash, reporting that District 1 Supervisor Connie Chan could run for that seat too, and indicated that Chan might even be the preferred successor of Nancy Pelosi herself.
President Trump spoke again about San Francisco at a White House news conference today thanks a lot, Benioff! spuriously claiming that "government officials" urged him to "start looking at San Francisco" for a National Guard deployment. Ironically, he claimed that San Francisco was "one of our great cities, 10 years ago, 15 years ago," clearly unaware that the city was being run by Gavin Newsom 15 years ago. [KRON4]
