POSITIONS AND GOALS
If this is your first time visiting my website I want you to know that my plan is to expand and update it on an ongoing and regular basis.
In other words, it’s a work in progress.
But to allow you to glean a general and quick overview of what my positions are on a number of issues facing the city, below is a short summary of those positions.
The list is neither complete nor comprehensive (is that redundant?). But it will give you an idea of what I’m about, and will hopefully get you excited about helping me take our city in a different and better direction.
LAW AND ORDER
Of course this subject is top of mind for nearly all of our citizens. And of course it is front and center for any of the serious contenders to replace our current mayor.
Given this, how will I be different than the current mayor or any of the other contenders?
I’ll be expanding on this subject in the coming days and weeks, but just to get you started, I offer this – I will tell you that I am willing to be the “bad guy”, as it were. My simple and transparent plan is to provide solid public backing and political cover to the police chief, the district attorney, and even the board of supervisors (!) so that they will not have to fear that they will be made scapegoats for vigorously enforcing the laws.
My goal is to create an environment and atmosphere here in the city where the law abiding taxpaying citizens feel comfortable and relaxed as they go about their everyday lives. And tourists, as well. And conventioneers. And just your average citizen of the greater Bay Area who might want to come to The City to have dinner or shop or enjoy our parks or play pickleball or, well, whatever.
I think we can agree that there is much work to be done in this area.
SUPPORT FOR FAMILIES
Sadly, we all know that San Francisco has the lowest population of kids, as a percentage, of any major American city. As a family man myself, this saddens me.
In addition, life for the families with children in this town is often sub-optimal.
Can we improve on this? I think we can.
Besides the obvious issues of crime and general public safety, the two main family-related issues I intend to tackle are –
- availability and cost of daycare
- quality of our public schools
In a town that has the affluence surging through it that this one does, with the highly educated, diverse, and sophisticated population that we have, to me it’s just a crime that that our public school system is not one of the very best in the United States.
Now I know that the mayor is not in charge of the public schools. But the current school management system in this town is not getting the job done. So I plan to use the position of leadership that the mayorship provides to help the city find a better way forward for SF schools.
As for daycare, my wife and I have had the experience of struggling to find, and afford, good quality daycare. So we know just what that’s like.
I will also say that we are big believers in the idea of daycare. We feel our kids gained mightily from their years of daycare experience. We are daycare fans, which means that this will be an area of particular interest for me.
DBI AND OTHER PERMITTING PROCESSES
The problems and frustrations with the permitting processes and people that I read and hear about resonate with me, for multiple reasons.
For one thing, I’ve pulled building permits in more than one big city in my lifetime. So I have some experience in this area.
For another thing, I have recent experience with the San Francisco DBI myself. And I can report that it was definitely, at best, a very mixed experience. I’d say it was 30% good-to-quite-good, 20% average-to-meh, and 50% annoying and frustrating and time consuming and unnecessarily inconvenient and costly.
In my recent case, it was inconvenient and costly for me when an obviously inexperienced and unworldly plan intake person required me to rectify things that didn’t really need rectifying in the first place. I was also required to make multiple trips to DBI to fix things that one guy said were fine and dandy only for the guy who replaced him while he was away on leave to later say that the same things were not fine and dandy. Grrrrr.
So I’ll have a fair bit to say on this topic also.
SIX HUNDRED NON-PROFITS??! 1.7 BILLION DOLLARS – EVERY YEAR??!
Recently a retired long-time city employee described his view of the city’s situation with non-profit organizations to me (paraphrased slightly):
“It’s a brilliant system, really – if you’re a city politician who’s actual, quiet goal is just to continue to be a city politician.
Hundreds of non-profit organizations, headed by hundreds of CEO’s, who pay themselves six-figure salaries, operate essentially unsupervised, and who then make hundreds of campaign contributions to the mayor and the board of supervisors to help make sure the money from the city taxpayers keeps on flowing in. A most excellent feedback loop for the politicians.”
Is his analysis a little too cynical? Maybe. But then again, maybe not?
There’s no question that the city needs public-private partnerships that include responsible and accountable non-profit organizations. But certainly not 600 of them.
And the auditing of their work? Do we need to contract with a even more non-profits to audit the performance of the 600 we already have?
I will be taking a needle to the big balloon that is this system, and letting the air out of it. Slowly. Not chaotically. But I will most definitely bring some order into this chaos.
$14,600,000,000 A YEAR?
I just did a quick online search. Our city budget of roughly $14.6 billion is more than the total GDP of Laos*. Or Rwanda. Or The Bahamas. Or like 60 other sovereign countries in the world.
All I can say to this is – wow. This is beyond nutty. How did it come to pass that San Francisco collects and spends roughly 50% more money per citizen than New York City, and nearly 100% more per citizen than Seattle, the number two and three spenders in the US, respectively.
*Source = IMF data shown on Wikipedia. Note that my scholarship efforts on this were minimal, and are subject to being off a bit. But you get the idea I’m trying to communicate.
HOUSING
This is of course a major topic, and I will have a lot to say on it over time. But for now, in this quick summary of my positions, I will state that I am not a YIMBY. Let’s go ahead and get that on the table up front.
But it’s fair to say that I’m not a total NIMBY, either. Although if I’m honest you might say I do slightly lean that way. At least in certain places, and for certain reasons.
What I like to think of myself as is a MIMBYALA.
I’ll let you chew on that for a while. 🙂