Last week, San Francisco lawmakers voted almost unanimously to give new Mayor Daniel Lurie sweeping authority over a $1 billion-plus chunk of the city budget, part of his thinly-sketched plan to combat drug dealing, overdose deaths, and related crises.
What Lurie called a “fentanyl state of emergency” during last year’s campaign became his first legislative stake in the ground. The bill waives normal contracting rules to let his administration spend untold millions of dollars quickly on homelessness, mental health, and public safety services.
The bill has been a done deal for weeks. Soon after Lurie’s inauguration, six supervisors cosponsored it, clinching its passage early.
Last week’s vote, a 10-1 approval, was an even clearer signal that city politics continue to shift. Lurie’s victory in November was one example. During the campaign, SF progressives and mayoral rivals tried to paint him as “dangerous” and a wealthy dilettante. But one month into his term, nearly the entire city legislature, from moderates to Democratic Socialists, agreed he should have a much larger say in how SF spends money to combat drugs and homelessness.
The new law leaves a window open, however, for a broader use of the powers – contracts related to sheriff’s deputies (who staff SF’s jails), police, and other public safety staff. Supervisors will have a rather short window to review Lurie’s spending wishes, which – depending on what he wishes for – could test the current City Hall detente.
The new law could also give Lurie a chance to test the boundaries of his mandate from voters, who said public safety was a top priority – even as overdose deaths decline amid a general drop in crime.
“It’s a good thing if the data says crime is down, but if people feel unsafe, it’s a problem,” said former district attorney Chesa Boudin, who spoke to The Frisc before last week’s approval of Lurie’s bill. “Don’t think you know better just because you have the data. You’ve got to meet voters where they’re at.”
Still a grim toll
Even though there is no formal state of emergency – the city attorney ruled against London Breed when she tried declaring one three years ago – Lurie inserted it into the bill’s title. (“The Fentanyl State of Emergency Ordinance gives us the tools to treat this crisis with the urgency it demands,” he said in a statement last week.)
Drug overdose deaths dropped 22 percent in 2024 after hitting a peak of 810 in 2023. Even if that’s not a small-e emergency, last year’s 633 deaths are still a grim toll, and street conditions are dire enough to convince all but one of the board’s progressive members to give Lurie a chance. Connie Chan praised Lurie for accepting amendments from the budget committee, which she chairs: “I want to thank the mayor and his team working so collaboratively.”
Democratic Socialist Jackie Fielder also voted aye, praising the bill’s focus on treatment while pushing Lurie to take a holistic approach to drugs beyond incarceration. Fielder called the ordinance an “unprecedented transfer of power” but also said, “I am putting a great deal of faith in Mayor Lurie’s Administration … to carry out the will of the voters.”
Only D10 Sup. Shamann Walton voted against it. “I’ve been told this is a plan to get 1,500 [treatment] beds. Where? How? I have not seen a plan,” Walton said ahead of the vote.
Lurie’s proposal cites a goal of 1,500 new beds in six months but doesn’t spell out how to deliver them. Despite the bill’s high stakes and lack of detail, Tuesday’s debate and vote took less than 15 minutes.
The new law does provide some nuts and bolts. For example, the mayor’s office will be able to bypass bidding for big contracts, and supervisors will have a 45-day limit to review the deals. The mayor can also award leases without any review.
According to the measure, the contracts can cover a range of services, including public works, homelessness services, affordable housing, and “public safety” – which the bill defines to include “the recruitment, training, and retention of police officers, deputy sheriffs, and 911 operators.”
The police department has fewer officers than mandated in the city charter and is facing recruitment woes. The city is obligated to staff up the force. It remains to be seen if the Lurie administration will try to use the “emergency” contract rules to do so.
The universe of contracts that will be awarded or amended is not yet known.
the city’s Budget and Legislative Analyst report, on the spending that the mayor’s office could control under the new law
In some ways the measure overlaps with similar emergency no-bid contract powers that supervisors gave the mayor and homelessness department in 2019, leading to controversial practices during the pandemic. Those no-bid waivers were renewed last year.
But Lurie’s bill extends well beyond one department. The mayor’s office promises more details over the next few weeks how the use of emergency powers will shape up.
A recent report from the city’s Budget & Legislative Analyst couldn’t put a dollar figure on the cost of the plan – “the universe of contracts that will be awarded or amended is not yet known” — but projected that costs would likely rise from the $1 billion-plus the city presently spends on these services.
Talk about crime and drugs
In February 2024, a Chamber of Commerce poll found 69 percent of San Franciscans surveyed believed crime was getting worse. “If [SF voters] don’t think they’re seeing results fast enough, they’ll go another way,” says Sonoma State University political scientist Dave McCuan. “Chesa Boudin learned this the hard way, as did London Breed.”
On her way out the door, Breed touted numbers that show by some measures San Francisco is as safe as anyone can remember. SFPD data show crime levels in 2024 at a 23-year low, with a total of 35 murders – a homicide level not seen in more than 60 years.
City Hall’s language of crisis and emergency continues to echo the depiction of San Francisco that Americans see in social media and political campaigns, a San Francisco in which crime and filth have rendered the city nearly uninhabitable.
“When I tell people I’m from SF they say, ‘I’m sorry, I hear it’s terrible,” says Adam Savage, a city resident since the 1990s and now famous for his role on the hit show Mythbusters. Traveling the country, he tries to be an evangelist: “I have a speech insisting SF is not worse off than other cities, but I see in their eyes they just don’t believe it.”
(A 2023 Gallup poll found 52 percent of Americans think of San Francisco as a safe place, down from 70 percent in 2006. No surprise that the recent poll found a wide split between Democrats and Republicans. The 2006 poll did not.)
Savage blames much of the public sentiment on misinformation. Examples are easy to find. In October of last year, Elon Musk alleged that a crazed axe-wielding man tried to murder employees at X headquarters (formerly Twitter) and was allowed to escape. SFPD says that they can find no record of any such complaints. (X did not respond to requests for comment.)
The language isn’t just for outsiders’ consumption. When SF voters recalled Chesa Boudin in 2022, the recall campaign claimed crime rates were at “crisis levels.” A former public defender, Boudin narrowly won the 2019 DA race, calling out “racist mass incarceration” and pledging to “break the cycle of crime.”
Crime overall was down during his tenure, but burglaries and homicides were up – plus everything was muddled by pandemic fear and anxiety.
In last year’s March election, SF voters approved Breed’s package of pro-SFPD laws, such as more leeway to pursue suspects, and a requirement that welfare recipients submit to drug screening. In November, SF joined state voters in reinstating felony penalties for drug and low-level theft charges.
It’s not just California; Oregon voters last year rescinded their 2020 decision to decriminalize small amounts of some drugs. Liberal New York Times stalwart columnist Nick Kristof recently wrote that West Coast permissiveness is as much to blame as a conservative “tough on crime” mentality for the national overdose crisis.
Tempering toughness?
In Lurie’s victory speech, he tempered the law-and-order rhetoric, promising to be both “tough” and “compassionate” in the same sentence. But recent votes give local politicians a tailwind for toughness.
Sup. Matt Dorsey, himself in recovery for methamphetamine and alcohol addiction, said in December he wants “drug jails” and 100 daily arrests of dealers and users, especially along Sixth Street in his South of Market district. The cops just announced an outdoor “triage center” in a parking lot nearby.
And Lurie joined State Sen. Scott Wiener, who represents San Francisco, to reintroduce a state law to target illegal street vending in the city, especially in the Mission. “Criminal organizations are fueling retail theft and bringing violence and chaos,” Wiener said in a press release.
In the city’s geography, politics and crime weave strange patterns: the Mission and Tenderloin accounted for more than a third of the city’s violent and property crime last year. Those two neighborhoods are also part of SF’s historically most left-leaning districts.
In November, the Mission remained so. It handily approved Democratic Socialist of America member Fielder for supervisor and voted for Peskin in the mayoral race.
Voters in the Tenderloin stayed progressive, but barely. By a fraction of a percentage they favored incumbent and DSA member Dean Preston, who annually voted against the city budget to protest SFPD spending, over eventual winner Bilal Mahmood. (Mahmood, a supporter of Lurie’s fentanyl bill, won the full District 5 race over Preston 53 to 47 percent.) Breed was the first choice in a majority of the neighborhood’s precincts.
Those neighborhoods’ new supervisors are on different ends of SF’s Democratic spectrum. One is an enthusiastic supporter of Lurie’s signature bill, and one is more cautious. That they’re on the same side, for now, shows the city has reached a point where nearly all its representatives are leaning into some form of expanded authority.
Still, it’s no guarantee of voter approval. Aaron Peskin, Lurie’s most progressive mayoral rival, pledged in his first campaign video to hire more cops, all while blasting “extreme solutions.” Peskin came in a distant third.