The Libertarian Party of San Francisco makes the following recommendations for the November 5, 2024 general election:
BALLOT MEASURES
Proposition A – NO.
The Libertarian Party of San Francisco is the official ballot opponent of Proposition A. You can read our opposing arguments in your Voter Information Pamphlet or online at https://www.sf.gov/information/proposition-schools-improvement-and-safety-bond. This $790 million bond measure to fund a grab bag of San Francisco Unified School District spending priorities would have a total estimated price tag of $1.3 billion. That alone is a good reason to vote oppose Proposition A – it’s like running up credit card debt. You end up way overpaying for stuff. And they’re already overpaying, spending around $26,000 per year for each of the declining number of students enrolled in SFUSD schools. Not that all this money is actually making it to the classroom. The superintendent is paid over $300,000 a year. Other districts are spending far less and getting better educational results. To say nothing of independent schools and homeschooling – options that roughly one of every three school-age kids in San Francisco are availing themselves of, despite the fact that their families have to finance them on top of the money they’re already paying in taxes to subsidize sub-par government schools. Get your fiscal house in order first, SFUSD. Show us you can stand and deliver, before hitting taxpayers up for more cash!
Proposition B – NO.
Another bond measure, this one for $390 million. More to address the homeless crisis, as if throwing more money at homelessness is going to change anything. The “homeless industrial complex”, as it has been dubbed, will soak up that money as it soaks up the over $1 billion a year that San Francisco’s city government already spends to supposedly help people without a roof over their heads. And it would also fund other things government shouldn’t be involved with in the first place, like health care – specifically more money for SF General Hospital (which you shouldn’t refer to with the Facebook billionaire’s name, by the way, because doing so just encourages people with money to flush more of it down the toilet of government in exchange for a vanity or PR payout, when that cash could be put to better use elsewhere).
Proposition C – NO.
We were initially inclined to take no position on Proposition C, or possibly even see it as worth supporting. Having an “inspector general” in the Controller’s office tasked with investigating corruption sounds nice in theory. There never seems to be a shortage of it at City Hall. But we are always wary about expanding government. There’s also never any guarantee that increasing the size, scope, power, or money spent on a department or agency will be used the way you want or expect it to be used. The Briones Society argues against Prop. C as unnecessary on the grounds that all the powers it would invest in the inspector general are already possessed by other officials. But we’re not entirely sure of that. A troubling section in the legal text of the measure (which can be found online at https://www.sf.gov/sites/default/files/2024-08/legal%20text.pdf) describes the additional powers and responsibilities which the Controller’s Office would gain, as follows: “Further, the Controller may subpoena witnesses, administer oaths, and compel the production of books, papers, testimony, and other evidence with respect to matters affecting the conduct of any department or office of the City and County. The preceding sentence authorizes the Controller to compel testimony or production from any person or entity including but not limited to City and County officers and employees; persons or entities that have or are seeking a contract, grant, lease, loan, or other agreement with the City and County, and their employees or officers: applicants for or recipients of permits, licenses, land use entitlements, tax incentives, benefits, or services from the City and County, and their employees or officers; and registered City lobbyists. The Controller and employees of the Controller, including the Inspector General, may seek and execute search warrants to the extent permitted by State law.” Wording that apparently limits these new powers of subpoena, search, and seizure, is contained in the first sentence, the part that reads, "with respect to matters affecting the conduct of any department or office of the City and County”. But this language reminds us of the infamous “general welfare” and “interstate commerce” clauses in the U.S. Constitution. What does it mean, after all, to affect the conduct of a city government department? If for example, you are the recipient of a permit to do work on your home, does that give the Controller’s Office the legal power to come and search your home for evidence that you’re failing to comply with the conditions of the permit, unless state law specifically prohibits them from doing so? After all, the matter of what work is being done on your home can logically be said to affect a department's conduct – if it’s the “wrong” kind in their eyes, the Planning Department may issue you a fine or require it to be removed. Or say there’s a city ordinance providing some kind of tax exemption to businesses with fewer than a certain number of employees – if your business reports that they have fewer than the required number of employees and claims the exemption, does this give the Controller’s office the right to come into your office and demand you produce papers proving that individuals they see or suspect of working for you are really independent contractors and not employees? Granting or not granting a tax exemption to a particular business would again be a matter of conduct. Think about how many other government agencies already have statutory mandates to investigate you or intrude into your life in different ways, and how their mandates have in many cases expanded over time in ways the agency’s creators’ likely did not envision. Controller Greg Wagner says in the Controller’s Statement on Prop. C in the Voter Information Pamphlet, that the measure would have only a “moderate impact” on the cost of government (maybe around $1 million per year). However given that his office would be granted additional powers and employees, he has a pretty blatant conflict of interest, and may be incentivized to downplay the possible or likely costs.
Proposition D – NO.
The city government has a lot of commissions, and this measure would cut their number in half. But commissions aren’t the real problem. Most of them have little power, and most commissioners get minimal pay and benefits if any, often just a stipend of a few hundred dollars a year (according to the Controller, the city paid a total of $350,000 for the stipends and health benefits of 180 commissioners in 2023. They don’t have armies of paid, unionized bureaucrats working under them. And they are more likely than city departments to be staffed by ordinary civilians rather than government careerists. According to the San Francisco Examiner says opponents characterize Prop. D as “the largest transfer of power and authority from the people of San Francisco to the staff of San Francisco since adoption of the 1932 city charter.” Proposition D would also remove oversight of the San Francisco Police Department from the Police Commission, giving the sole power to set rules for police officer conduct to the police chief. Policing is too important to be left to the police, and we’ve seen how poorly the tend to perform when it comes to policing their own. Chiefs tend to be authoritarian-minded officials who side with other officers against civil liberties and the public. The various commissions don’t always play a positive role, but sometimes they do, and they help ensure that independent amateur voices keeping the professional bureaucracy in check can be heard.
Proposition E – YES.
Proposition E is a rival measure put on the ballot in response to Proposition D. On its own, this proposal to simply establish a temporary five-member panel to look at streamlining the city’s commissions wouldn’t particularly excite us. But it’s not a stand-alone measure. The important thing to understand about Prop. E is that if it gets more votes than Prop. D, it will block the harmful provisions of that measure from taking effect. This is the real reason to vote for it. While it doesn’t guarantee the cut in the number of commissions that Prop. D does, Prop. E would enable any cuts to occur in a manner that avoids putting even more power in the hands of the mayor and weakening independent oversight of the police and other executive branch departments, as Prop. D does.
Proposition F – NO.
Contrary to what members of the “City family” (aka the governing class) and their strange bedfellow right-wing “tough on crime” allies would have you believe, San Francisco is not under-policed. The city has more police officers per capita than Paris did under the hated regime of Louis XIV right before the French Revolution (see https://lpsf.org/articles/2017-10-31-guarding-le-r%C3%A9gime-moderne). The argument that the SFPD has a “shortage” of cops is based on not meeting their goal of having 2,074 officers. But that was always an arbitrary number not based on any real data. The fact is that city is misallocating its police resources, including by having officers focus on things that should not be crimes, like drugs, prostitution, and other non-violent actions that don’t violate anyone’s rights. The new captain of the Bayview station recently revealed that he has two officers assigned full time to policing illegally parked recreational vehicles (in other words, hassling and ticketing the homeless, since most of the RVs parked on city streets are occupied by people who lack other housing). Many other officers can be seen engaged in various forms of public relations such as staffing booths at street fairs, providing excessive motorcades to visiting politicians, etc. The argument that they are overworked is belied by the fact that many officers voluntarily moonlight as private security for local businesses and events under the city’s “10B” program – a role that used to be more frequently filled by members of the independent, non-taxpayer-funded San Francisco Patrol Specials, until that organization was gutted by the SFPD, which saw it as unwelcome competition. Prop. F would allow longtime officers over age 50 to double-dip, getting the pension payments to which they would be entitled on retirement in addition to their salaries, in exchange for continuing to work. One SFPD officer already receives total compensation in pay and benefits of over $800,000 a year (see https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2024/san-francisco-employee-pay/). Dozens of other “emergency” personnel draw over $500,000 a year. If this measure passes, the number of officers in the “half a million dollars a year club” would expand significantly.
Proposition G – NO.
This measure would establish additional rent subsidies ostensibly reserved for some of the city’s poorest residents, to the tune of $8.25 million a year – or more – through 2046. But it’s not as simple or honest as just providing more money for housing on the basis of true need. Prop. G would exclude some of the extremely poor on the basis of age, family status, or disability status. And if you imagine thousands of elderly or disabled persons or families living homeless on the streets of San Francisco receiving “school choice” type vouchers that would at least let them “vote with their feet” and rent from whatever landlords are willing to offer the best deal, not a chance. As the ballot summary puts it, the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development would administer the fund “by disbursing money to the owners of certain new and existing affordable housing developments”. In other words, this would be a giveaway to favored operators of already-subsidized housing (in today’s housing jargon, “affordable” no longer means “low cost”, but instead serves as a euphemism for “taxpayer-subsidized”). The ballot summary goes on to say that these payments “would subsidize the difference between the amount these tenants can afford and the rents the owner would otherwise charge”. Except as any economist would tell you, owners won’t necessarily charge the same rents otherwise. Just as government tuition subsidies have driven up the cost of higher education in recent decades – encouraging schools to charge more because they know students will be able to tap into taxpayers’ money to pay – the government rent subsidies that Prop. G would write into the city charter will put upward pressure on rents. Meanwhile, subsidized units in housing complexes owned by the government or transferred to management by non-profit groups under long-term leases have long been rife with problems. “Part of the reason why the Housing Authority no longer manages the properties themselves was because of a history of mismanagement of properties all over the city,” said one member of the Board of Supervisors quoted in a Mission Local article (https://missionlocal.org/2024/05/sf-management-tight-lipped-housing-scams-potrero-hill/). That article also details how a manager at one company put in charge of such a housing complex on Potrero Hill was allowing squatters to illegally occupy vacant units and charging them rent. Other news stories detail a laundry list of abuses by those overseeing housing on the government’s behalf, including failure to make needed repairs, harassment, and restricting when tenants can have visitors, even demanding those visitors show “valid ID”.
Proposition H – NO.
The Libertarian Party of San Francisco is the official ballot opponent of Proposition H. You can read our opposing arguments in your Voter Information Pamphlet or online at https://www.sf.gov/information/proposition-h-retirement-benefits-firefighters. Firefighters want to be exempted from the same pension rules as other city government employees. These rules were put in place in 2011 by voters trying to keep the pension system from spiraling into bankruptcy. That year’s Proposition C was actually the weaker of the pension reform measures on the ballot – a stronger competing measure put on the ballot by the late Public Defender Jeff Adachi, one of the city’s few honest and admirable pols. Unfortunately his better alternative failed to get the nod after most of the local establishment opposed it. But Prop. C did at least make some modest changes to rein in the fiscal bleeding caused by unsustainable payouts to retirees. Overturning this mild reform sensibly voted in by nearly 70% of San Francisco voters over a decade ago in order to benefit a few privileged city government employees would be a mistake.
Proposition I – NO.
The Libertarian Party of San Francisco is the official ballot opponent of Proposition I. You can read our opposing arguments in your Voter Information Pamphlet or online at https://www.sf.gov/information/proposition-i-retirement-benefits-nurses-and-911-operators. We don’t think it’s fair to force members of the public to subsidize the retirement of others who are making more money than they are when it’s well known that most people don’t even have enough money set aside for their own retirements. Yet that’s what Proposition I would do. It would increase spending certain city government employees like per diem registered nurses (starting pay $200,000/year – https://careers.sf.gov/role/?id=3743990004718816) and 911 operators (starting pay $106,000/year – https://www.sf.gov/work-san-francisco-911) boost their pensions beyond the generous compensation that retirees are already slated to receive.
Proposition J – NO.
The Ballot Simplification Committee really dropped the ball on this one. Their ballot description states that a “yes” vote on Proposition J means “you want to amend the Charter to create an Our Children, Our Families Initiative to ensure that related funds are used effectively.” As if this was just about using tax money “effectively” – something nobody is against! – and not the big school spending increase that it actually is. According to the Controller’s statement, Prop. J would have “a significant impact on the cost of government of up to $35 million in FY 2024-25 and increasing up to $83 million in FY 2037-38”, by reallocating money that would otherwise be available to the general fund. And does the San Francisco Unified School District need this additional money? It has around 48,000 students, 8,000 employees, and a $1.3 billion budget. That translates to one employee for every six students, at a per student cost of over $27,000 per year. And yet somehow the district is deeply in debt and threatened with a state takeover. The SFUSD just appointed a new superintendent, Maria Su, a career bureaucrat who was formerly executive director of the San Francisco Department of Children, Youth, and their Families (no representation for their friends, pets, or deceased relatives?). Her predecessor Matt Wayne may have gotten the boot for having the temerity to make the sensible suggestion that with falling enrollment, the district needs to save money on overhead by closing some of its schools and consolidating, rather than maintaining skeleton staffs for smaller number of students spread among the same number of campuses. Don’t feel sorry for him though – he’s getting a “severence package” worth over half a million dollars. Su’s base salary will be $320,000 a year, just $5000 per year less than Wayne’s. Hopefully the decrease means they’re feeling the pressure not to just keep boosting administrator salaries, but in reality, especially given the school closures and enrollment numbers, a cut of just over 1% isn’t going to cut it either. The average school superintendent salary in California, according to ZipRecruiter.com, is $102,000 (https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/School-Superintendent-Salary--in-California). Meanwhile, the promised oversight to ensure any additional school funding would be used effectively is a joke. Along with city government employees, the new initiative that Prop. J would establish would be staffed by employees of the very same SFUSD receiving money via the intiative. No conflict of interest there!
Proposition K – NO.
This measure is nothing but red meat for people who hate cars – not even a solution, but a non-plan in search of a problem. Proposition K would overturn an existing compromise under which the Great Highway, the road that runs parallel to Ocean Beach along the city’s western edge, is open during the week but closed on weekends for pedestrian use, by closing the highway permanently and turning it into a park. However there are no actual plans or funding for such a park. Nor is there any obvious need for one, with Ocean Beach immediately to one side of the highway already being parkland, and Golden Gate Park, the city’s largest, on the other side. Paths for bicycles and pedestrians already run adjacent to the road, not to mention the pleasanter option to walk on the beach itself. The closure would divert a significant amout of auto traffic into nearby residential neighborhoods, forcing drivers to go out of their way and waste more time and fuel, as well as limiting beach access for the physically impaired and potentially delaying emergency rescues. None of this makes any sense, unless the real goal of Prop. K is to build condos, not a park, on the land, as some have speculated. But while San Francisco urgently needs more housing, and it makes sense for a lot of that housing to be built in the low-density western half of the city, a dishonest ballot measure closing a much-loved and needed road that’s an integral part of San Francisco’s famous 49-mile scenic drive advertised to visitors is in order to make room for a government developed mega-project is not the way to make it happen.
Proposition L – NO.
Members of the Board of Supervisors don’t think your cost of living is high enough. They want to ensure that (unless you’re one of the privileged elite) you only have the means to use city government transit, enroll your kids in low-quality government schools, etc. At least that is the conclusion one might draw from the effort by seven board members (Chan, Melgar, Preston, Dorsey, Engardio, Ronen, and Safai), to raise the cost of using a ride share service like Uber or Lyft by imposing a $ . Like the SFUSD (see argument against Prop. J), Muni is deeply in debt. According to Prop. L opponents, the transit agency owes $214 million. But they point out (see https://www.sf.gov/sites/default/files/2024-08/prop_l_-_official_opp_redacted.pdf) that the measure provides no details about how the new money would be spent, nor does it contain any of the citizen oversight protections (toothless as they may be) usually found in similar measures. Meanwhile, Jeffrey Tumlin, head of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA), the department that runs Muni, is getting a salary of over $367,000 a year, with a total compensation package of over $465,000 (see https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/2021/san-francisco/jeffrey-p-tumlin/). Sound familiar? It should. It’s yet another example of the Government Greed that fuels what is basically the same story ever year – a never-ending push to take more money from the public, and the reason behind our opposition once again) to the vast majority of the measures on this year’s San Francisco general election ballot. Tumlin, by the way, is also spearheading a boneheaded plan to ban making all right turns at a red light in the city. This on top of championing unwanted street closures, and restricted lanes. Perhaps he thinks that if he makes driving in the city unpleasant and expensive enough, more people will take the bus, helping bail out his mismanaged Muni. Let’s not reward this failure to serve the public.
Proposition M – NO.
This is a complicated reshuffling of how the city government taxes businesses. While it’s less than obvious from a simple reading of its text what the results of Proposition M would be, again the Controller’s ballot statement on the expected fiscal impact of the measure (https://www.sf.gov/sites/default/files/2024-08/Prop%20M%20-%20Business%20Taxes%20-%20CON%20VIP%20Letter%20-%20Signed.pdf) is revealing. Controller Greg Wagner states that the measure would, after a slight delay, “generate additional revenue” (read: by lowering the revenues of the businesses that would be taxed, resulting in higher prices and lower wages) to the tune of an estimated $50 million per year. While he expects the changes would mean the city getting less revenue for the first few years, Wagner says that by 2028-2029, it would mean government taking in an estimated $50 million extra per year. With an annual budget of around $15 billion, bigger than those of many entire U.S. states, local government does not need to be taking yet more money out of the productive, voluntary sector of the economy. All Prop. M will do is increase perceptions of the city as a hostile climate in which to do business, and exacerbate the already notable trend of companies abandoning San Francisco, costing jobs and hurting the local economy.
Proposition N – NO.
If it’s unfair to force members of the public to subsidize the retirements of people who get paid more than they do, when they already cannot adequately fund their own retirements (see our argument against Prop. I), it’s just as unfair to force people to subsidize advanced education for those better-paid others, when they have not gone to college themselves. Proposition N would reimburse “eligible employees” up to $25,000 for student loans or professional-related education or training expenses. It would be one thing if an employer was requiring employees to get some kind of training, for them to cover the expense. But the education expenses in this case are voluntary. Employees are already financially incentivized to get such education or training so they can advance in their careers and earn even more money. That’s not something the general public needs to be paying for. Proponents may point to the fact that Prop. N only sets up a city fund, without requiring government to actually put any money into that fund, which they claim could receive private donations. But this explanation doesn’t pass the smell test. Either these giveaways to members of the “City Family” will end up being paid for with taxpayer money, or the fund will become another vehicle for special interest groups to make surreptitious donations in order to curry favor with political insiders. After all, there’s nothing stopping private donors from simply donating directly to the employees themselves now, without Prop. N.
Proposition O – YES.
While this is a mostly symbolic expression of support for abortion rights, which are not directly threatened in San Francisco, it could help protect the civil liberties of people from other states, and would set another positive precedent of refusing to cooperate in the enforcement of bad laws. Its fiscal cost would be minimal. Specifically, Proposition O would limit San Francisco city employees from cooperating with officials from places where abortion is criminalized, prohibiting information being released to them about people coming here to have abortions. In the wake of reproductive choice protections being eliminated by the U.S. Supreme Court overturning its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, a wave of state-level restrictions have made it a crime to terminate your pregnancy in many parts of the U.S. Even before the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson SCOTUS decision unleashed a new assault on reproductive freedom, it was difficult to get an abortion in many states due to existing restrictions and shortages of providers. In 2020, an estimated 81,000 people crossed state lines to obtain abortions; that number more than doubled to 173,000 by 2023 (see https://theconversation.com/crossing-state-lines-to-get-an-abortion-is-a-new-legal-minefield-with-courts-to-decide-if-theres-a-right-to-travel-238167). Now anti-choice activists are trying to close this loophole by passing new laws restricting the ability of people to travel out of state for an abortion or helping others to do so. The governments of Idaho and Tennessee have passed so called “abortion trafficking” laws to this effect, although they are currently held up in court, and several other state governments are weighing similar legislation. In response, other jurisdictions have been passing “shield laws” protecting the rights of women seeking to terminate their pregnancies, or others helping them do so. Proposition O would establish this type of protection for San Francisco at the local level.
CANDIDATES
There are unfortunately no Libertarian candidates on the ballot in San Francisco this year besides our presidential and vice-presidential ticket of Chase Oliver and Mike ter Maat. Since California adopted the "Top Two" election law in 2012, most alternative party and independent candidates have been prevented from appearing on general election ballots in partisan races, which has reduced the interest in seeking these offices. We wholeheartedly endorse Chase and Mike, and recommend a vote for the following non-Libertarian local candidates who seem to us the best or among the best in their respective races.
DISTRICT ATTORNEY – Ryan Khojasteh
BOARD OF EDUCATION – Ann Hsu, Min Chang
MAYOR – Keith Freedman
Due to a lack of local volunteers, we did not conduct a full screening and interview process for all the races on the ballot. If you're a San Francisco Libertarian reading this, we encourage you to get involved next cycle and ensure we have enough activists working together to give this the attention it deserves.
