SF Mayor London Breed just un-endorsed the Prop D ballot measure to trim the number of commissions at City Hall, amidst continuing allegations that rival Mark Farrell is just using the Prop D contributions to finance his own mayor’s race.

Your November 2024 election ballot is going to be way too long, which is fairly typical for San Francisco elections. Among the ballot measures is Prop D, which would trim the number of City Hall commissions in half, and give the mayor more hiring and firing capability for city department heads. This sounds like the kind of thing Mayor London Breed would support, in fact, she did support it a couple months back.

But things have changed. The Chronicle broke a story about two weeks back noting that mayoral candidate Mark Farrell appears to be curiously commingling his campaign finances with the massive contributions coming in toward Prop D. And as seen below, Prop D and a similar measure Prop E are pulling in far more donations than all of the other November ballot propositions combined. (About $1 million of the overall $5 million raised comes from SF Standard financier Michael Moritz.)

Image: SF Ethics Commission

Seeing that Prop D may just be a slush fund for Farrell, Breed has pulled her support from Prop D, the Examiner reports. She told the Examiner that the “charter reform measure has become tainted and is just a vehicle to help Mark Farrell funnel unlimited amounts of contributions to his campaign.”

Farrell is not missing the opportunity to call this a “flip flop.”

“Mayor Breed’s flip flop and betrayal of Prop D shows that she is putting herself and her interests before what is best for our City,” he told the Examiner. “The point of Prop D is to reform City Hall so that our government works better for everyone and is better positioned to tackle the issues plaguing our city.”

This is all politics-nerd drama, but interesting politics-nerd drama at that. And the drama will also be interesting this week at the now-more-moderate SF Democratic County Committee (DCCC) meeting at which they will vote on whether to endorse Prop D. The moderate money machine is certainly unanimously behind Prop D, but the DCCC gave Breed their sole endorsement last month, so we’ll see how this shakes out.  

Related: Breed Bounces Back Big-Time With Sizable Lead In New Mayoral Race Poll [SFist]

Image: @LondonBreed via Twitter