City for Sale: The Transformation of San Francisco

11. City Hall

227 11 City Hall The Board of Supervisors and District Elections As has been demonstrated on many occasions, the city’s governing Board of Supervisors gave virtually reflexive approval to the various steps in the Yerba Buena project whenever required. More generally, the board reflected its members’ economic and social ties to downtown interests, through their business dealings, campaign finances, social relationships, and class alliances. Starting in 1900, the eleven-person board was elected on a citywide, or “at-large,” basis, a system requiring in recent years enormous financial support to mount election campaigns—as much as $250,000 to run successfully for an office that until the early 1980s paid an annual salary of $9,600, a sum virtually guaranteeing that everyone in the position except the wealthy must hold another job. (In November 1982, voters approved a charter amendment raising the salary to $23,924, and a June 1998 voter-approved charter amendment raised it to $37,585.) In addition, supervisors who are attorneys, insurance brokers, real estate operators, and the like can derive substantial business benefits from the position, a part-time one. Beyond campaign financing issues, the at-large system reduces the possibility that smaller, identifiable population groups and areas of the city will be directly represented in the governing process. As early as 1970, neighborhood activists in San Francisco and others striving to reduce the influence of downtown business saw the need for changing the method of electing supervisors. Creating districts and allowing the residents of each to elect a candidate who lived in the same district would increase the probability of being represented by supervisors with 228 / Chapter 11 closer ties to the neighborhoods and their problems, reducing as well the dominance of downtown power and money. The key movers of this plan organized as Citizens for Representative Government (CRG), a small, hard-working group of activists with strong roots in the Haight-Ashbury district. In 1970 and 1971, they held community meetings around the city to discuss their ideas and created an elevendistrict city map. In August 1972, they presented their plan to the supervisors , who responded by placing on the November ballot a complex, unwieldy advisory measure that presented voters with five alternative plans for restructuring the board election. Not surprisingly, with so many options, none received an overwhelming mandate; but two-thirds of the voters did favor a change from the at-large system, and among the alternatives, CRG’s eleven-district plan received the most votes. Encouraged, CRG placed its plan on the November 1973 city election ballot through an initiative. In a low turnout vote, however, the measure lost, two to one. Analyzing the loss, CRG saw the need to move out more widely into the community in order to expand their activist base and relate the district election plan to more substantive neighborhood concerns. In 1974, they began an elaborate organizing and educational process, which led to the formation in August 1975 of the San Francisco Community Congress, a series of district-based and citywide meetings. The congress galvanized reform energies around a wide range of substantive reforms and carried out the sensitive task of drawing the district boundaries, both to facilitate the organizing process and to discourage an at-large board from doing it. Nine issue conventions were held around the city (on health, women, housing, jobs and economic development, governmental changes, criminal justice, environment, the arts, and energy). These culminated in a citywide convention, attended by nearly a thousand people, at which “A Community Program for Change in San Francisco” was adopted. The movement for structural change was closely tied to the mayoral change of that year, as (winning) candidate George Moscone actively supported this reform. CRG then midwifed creation of a broader grouping, San Franciscans for District Elections (SFDE), a coalition of nearly four dozen neighborhood and citywide groups. They decided to wait until November 1976 before placing an initiative on the ballot again, reasoning that turnout would be higher in a presidential election year and that high turnouts generally favor progressive measures; they would also thereby avoid repeating the 1973 situation, when five incumbent supervisors used their reelection campaigns as a platform against district elections. (Supervisorial elections were later changed City Hall / 229 from odd-numbered to even-numbered years in 1980, via a voter-approved change in the City Charter.) An important additional factor in...