SF politics

SF politics

In short: Yes, you can count on another Great Highway ballot measure in 2026. All of San Francisco has the next several months to practice their bad Al Pacino "Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in" impressions. Will this ballot measure win? No. Not even the people who will be ardently backing it expect it to win. So why do it?

Fiona Hinze can see it coming when she spins around the streets of San Francisco: An indicator showing that her wheelchair battery is running out of juice. Hinze is always with someone when she's out with her power chair. When the battery dies, she switches on the manual mode, takes the chair out of gear, and asks her companion to push her chair - which weighs a couple hundred pounds, plus her body weight - to her car.

Members of the Board of Supervisors are calling for action and accountability after Mission Local reported that women held in a San Francisco jail were allegedly forced to undress in front of each other while sheriff's deputies watched and filmed them with their body-worn cameras. Late Thursday afternoon, 17 women filed a claim with the city saying that deputies violated multiple laws and policies in May when they strip searched them en masse while male deputies were present.

What is a People Mover? People movers are neither moving walkways nor Tesla Tunnels. Instead, people movers refer to trains often used to shuttle passengers around airports. However, San Diego's APM would travel beyond the airport to connect to Trolley Lines at Santa Fe Depot and serve Civic Center (below) or the Convention Center. The APM would emulate Vancouver's Skytrain, whose 22.6-mile Expo Line serves urban neighborhoods far from any airport.

Ali Sutton, Tipping Point's chief program officer, warned that the situation could deteriorate further depending on federal policy changes after the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, formally known as HR 1. "We are expecting some of the deepest cuts to our social safety net in our history," Sutton said. "Given those substantial cuts, we anticipate these numbers will only worsen over the next few years."

Delivery platform DoorDash bought a warehouse at 16th and Folsom to test delivery drones, but the Teamsters challenged their permit on zoning grounds. Now the drones will fly, after the SF Board of Appeals shot down the Teamsters' appeal. Delivery-based tech companies like Amazon have dreamt of using robots to deliver their goods for the better part of ten years.

Mayor Daniel Lurie's District 4 appointee, Beya Alcaraz, was the only San Francisco supervisor appointee in at least 30 years to enter the job with zero experience in either politics or government, a Mission Local analysis found. Alcaraz abruptly resigned from her post on Thursday night after controversy. Hours earlier, Mission Local published text messages in which Alcaraz said she paid her former pet store workers "under the table," skimped on taxes, and underreported income.

He recently wrote to SFMTA officials and Supervisor Myrna Melgar, arguing that they need to shift Vision Zero policy away from reacting to deadly crashes, and instead focus on streets and intersections where speeding and other forms of reckless driving are common. In other words, instead of depending on the high-injury network-a reactive system based on an accounting of deaths and serious injuries- take a proactive and systemic approach to making streets safe.

A vacant city-owned warehouse is going to become the drunk tank for people on drugs, as arresting people and trying to sober them up is Mayor Lurie's latest attempt to cut down on drug use on San Francisco streets. Now ten months in office, SF Mayor Daniel Lurie has tried a number of strategies to combat San Francisco's fentanyl scourge.

Breed confirmed to Politico Friday that she is discussing a possible run with allies, including mentor Willie Brown, thus answering the question of what could be next for the ambitious former mayor. "I called a couple of people just to see what their thoughts were," Breed tells the site. "My text messages and phone have been ringing off the hook from a lot of people in San Francisco. It's important that San Franciscans have options. I want to explore whether I could potentially be one of those options."

The San Francisco Ethics Commission has now formally accused former Human Rights Commission Executive Director Sheryl Davis of a range of ethics violations that may also amount to illegal acts involving improper gifts and conflicts of interest. Embattled former city commissioner Sheryl Davis, whom former Mayor London Breed also tapped to lead her Dream Keeper Initiative, has been slapped with a 31-page charging document from the city's Ethics Commission.

In an eight-to-five vote on Monday (3 November), the San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC) voted to disassemble Armand Vaillancourt's namesake fountain. Two days prior, the San Francisco Chronicle that San Francisco Recreation and Park Department (RPD) officials stated the fountain posed an "an immediate and serious hazard" and would propose dismantling the monumental fountain and storing it for up to three years, at a cost of $4.4m.

Imagine freeways along Lady Bird Lake in Austin, through Georgetown in Washington, along the beach in Santa Monica, through the French Quarter in New Orleans, or bisecting Cambridge between Harvard and MIT. Freeway builders had their sights set on all these places. They would've had their way, too, if not for the meddling protesters who foiled their schemes. The freeway revolt of the 1960s and '70s changed the course of American history, saving some of the nation's oldest and most-beautiful neighborhoods.

A man claimed to have a subpoena for OpenAI CEO Sam Altman after vaulting onto the stage at the beginning of Altman's highly-publicized conversation with Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr and Manny Yekutiel on Monday. Within moments of Kerr and Altman joining Yekutiel on stage at the Sydney Goldstein Theatre in downtown San Francisco, the man left his second-row seat and bolted onto the stage.

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.

"This measure would hinder the city's comeback by making rides more expensive and hurting drivers," said CJ Macklin, director of communications at Lyft. "This would be particularly devastating for low-income communities who struggle to even access the Muni system and depend on ride-share to get around. It's the wrong move for San Francisco."

After a month-long firestorm that a hit-and-run suspect accused of killing two women while driving on meth could get a diversion program instead of facing trial, an SF Superior Court judge just ruled the case will indeed go to trial. One issue that largely fueled the 2022 recall of SF DA Chesa Boudin was the infamous case of Troy McAlister, who was accused of killing 27-year-old Hanako Abe and 60-year-old Elizabeth Platt in a New Year's Eve 2020 hit-and-run crash.

"I have serious concerns about the tactics and tactical judgment used [by] Officer Samayoa in this incident,"

I spoke with Alameda County Sheriff Yesenia Sanchez, who confirmed through her communications with ICE that Border Patrol operations are cancelled for the greater Bay Area - which includes Oakland - at this time.

There will never be enough taxes to make up for what the Mercury News says will be a $223 million federal cut. The county politicians have done nothing to reduce expenditures, and they've been negligent in not telling us the truth. It's obscene that County Executive James Williams would have asked for more in Measure A had there not been legal limits.