San Francisco Mayor-elect Daniel Lurie has plans to switch things up a bit in the mayor's office, reverting to a system that voters in the city did away with almost 30 years ago.
Daniel Lurie and his transition team announced plans Wednesday to create four new "policy chief" positions that answer directly to him in the Mayor's Office, dividing oversight responsibility of the city's many departments and commissions among them.
The four new positions, which will function like deputy mayors, will be Chief of Housing and Economic Development; Chief of Infrastructure, Climate and Mobility; Chief of Public Health andWellbeing; and Chief of Public Safety. The new chiefs will be assigned departments, with Chief of Public Safety overseeing the police, fire, and sheriff's departments, and the housing chief overseeing the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, along with the Department of Economic and Workforce Development, for instance.
"The current way of doing business at City Hall is outdated, ineffective, and lacks focus on outcomes," says Lurie in a statement. "I am restructuring the office of the mayor so that your government is coordinated and accountable in delivering clean and safe streets, tackling the fentanyl crisis, rapidly building housing and ensuring a full economic recovery."
He adds, "The changes we’re making at the top will help break down barriers to effective governance that impact every San Franciscan."
For the last three decades, much of the responsibility Lurie will be dividing among four people fell on just one person, the mayor's chief of staff. In this new structure, the power of that role appears will be significantly diminished, though the chief of staff will oversee the director of communications and the director of public affairs.
Lurie's announcement also notes that no current org chart exists for the Mayor's Office with which to compare his new org chart.
Advising Lurie on the transition is former City Controller Ben Rosenfield, who may be in line for a role in the new administration.
"Reorganizing the mayor’s office to have a flatter structure ensures greater accountability through a more manageable operation that will enable the city to better coordinate," Rosenfield said in a statement. "Our status as a City and a County makes San Francisco uniquely situated to solve our drug and mental health crisis — as city leaders have direct authority over policy and spending for both public safety and public health. The current structure gets in the way of departments working together. I’m confident these common sense changes will make a big difference for San Franciscans."
San Francisco used to employ deputy mayors, as Mission Local notes following Lurie's announcement. But voters ended the practice with Proposition H in 1991, largely because the deputy mayors were seen as ineffective and overpaid.
Moving back to that system, Lurie may have to answer for the wisdom of adding back these no-doubt well-paid roles amid a budget crisis.
Rosenfield clearly supports the idea.
"For the last 20 years, we have organized [the city's] 50-plus departments in a very specific way: They are direct reports to the mayor, and they work day to day through a chief of staff," Rosenfield tells Mission Local. "How can you have 50 direct reports and do more than manage the very top?"
Lurie's announcement suggests that he is taking the recommendation of SPUR (San Francisco Planning and Urban Research), which had the division of responsibility in the mayor's office as one of its policy recommendations in an August report.
As Nicole Neditch, SPUR’s Governance and Economy Policy Director, previously explained, San Francisco currently has 34,000 employees, which is more than many state governments. And there is plenty of room for merging departments and restructuring how the city works, to avoid duplication and waste.
"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," Neditch says. "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."
SPUR further supports the streamlining of city commissions, which is something that voters approved with Prop E — the Board of Supervisors' response to Prop D, which failed, and which would have unilaterally slashed the number of commissions in half.
In a statement accompanying Lurie's announcement SPUR's Preisdent and CEO Alicia John-Baptiste says of the policy chief proposal, "This new structure will help break down the silos and bridge across the complexity that has held San Francisco back."
Previously: Daniel Lurie Names OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to His Mayoral Transition Team
Photo: Patrick Perkins
