San Francisco Voter Guide, Nov 2026

About

For a few years now I’ve been writing an informal voter guide for some friends. It started as a byproduct of my own decision process: I need to figure out how to vote, and I may as well tell you. I’m now publishing it for anyone who finds it helpful.

Before we get started, a bit about me and my political views, so you can get a sense of whether and where you might agree with me:

• I’m a software engineer who once minored in political science, and have lived in SF for 10 years now; see more about me.
• I’m a registered Democrat. In general I consider myself very progressive, but care more than many progressives about good government, realistic economics, and general competence. In practice in SF this puts me somewhere in the middle between the “moderates” and the “progressives”, and I tend to agree with urbanists and YIMBYs on housing and related issues.
• I’m not a fan of the number of propositions we get in California. I sometimes joke about the “anti-proposition voter guide”, which is not real, but if it were it would oppose everything that could possibly be done legislatively. I don’t always follow that theory, but I tend to hew a bit closer to it than most of the voter guides out there.
• I’m very excited about democracy and about the fact that you and I might not agree on absolutely everything. In this voter guide, I’ll try to tell you what I actually think, whether I’m quite certain or not really sure yet. I don’t do “no endorsement”: I have to decide what to put on my ballot, even if it’s a weak leaning, and so do you. (I basically never leave a line blank.) When it’s a weaker opinion, I’ll also usually try to tell you why you might choose differently.
• For reference, all my voter guides are available here.
• Needless to say, these are my own views and not those of anybody else. (While we’re at it: I used large language models for some research, editing, and formatting of this guide, but checked their sources for all facts, and all the words were written with my own ten fingers.)

I may still edit this guide up until election day (and will try to leave a changelog if I do). If you think I’ve missed something important in some race, or have any questions, let me know via the links in the header!

Summary

Federal & state candidates:

• Governor: Becerra
• Lieutenant Governor: Ma
• Secretary of State: Weber
• Controller: Cohen
• Treasurer: Kounalakis
• Attorney General: Bonta
• Insurance Commissioner: Allen
• Board of Equalization Member D2: Pimentel
• US House D11: Wiener
• CA Assembly D17: Haney
• Superintendent of Public Instruction: Barrera
• Judges: Yes to all

CA propositions:

• Prop 1 (housing bond): Yes
• Prop 2 (increase rainy day fund): Yes
• Prop 3 (tax for education): Yes
• Prop 4 (allow public campaign financing): Yes
• Prop 5 (recall vacancies): Yes
• Prop 37 (second-mortgage bond): No
• Prop 38 (immunology bond): No
• Prop 39 (voter ID): No
• Prop 40 (one-time wealth tax): No
• Prop 41 (state tax limits): No
• Prop 42 (no wealth tax): No
• Prop 43 (local tax prop threshold): No
• Prop 44 (community clinic overhead): No
• Prop 45 (CEQA deadlines): No

SF candidates:

• Assessor-Recorder: Torres
• Public Defender: Raju
• Board of Education (3 seats): Fisher, Hazelton, Kim
• Community College Board (4-year term; 3 seats): Ball, Lee, Tam
• Community College Board (2-year term; 1 seat): Ferguson

SF & regional propositions:

• Regional Measure RTM (transit tax): Yes
• Prop A (commissions & more): Yes
• Prop B (public bank): No
• Prop C (housing trust fund): Yes
• Prop D (ballot prop qualification): Yes
• Prop E (city administrator authority): Yes
• Prop F (department heads): Yes
• Prop G (Sunset Dunes, again): No
• Prop H (Muni parcel tax): Yes
• Prop I (transfer tax set-aside): No
• Prop J (transfer tax in foreclosure): Yes

New this year: a print version! Give them to your friends.

The Standard’s voter guide includes a good list of other endorsements, so I haven’t bothered to make my own grid this year.

Federal & state candidates

• Governor: Becerra

Here we are, one of my least favorite Dems won the primary. Hilton is, to be fair, seemingly not as bad as a lot of Republicans these days (he seems to have managed to limit himself to one major episode of trans-bashing this election season so far, how restrained), but Becerra still seems far better on most of the important issues like “maybe we need money to fund a government” and “doing zero episodes of trans-bashing”. Ah well.

• Lieutenant Governor: Ma

Ok, now we’ve got some good old-fashioned Republican nonsense! Romero has taken on such important issues as The Odyssey and Aunt Jemima, per the Chronicle. Ma was not my first choice, but seems fine.

• Secretary of State: Weber

We love Shirley Weber (see previously), and not just because she sends me my birthday present (the California Voter Information Guide) every other year. No change from June.

• Controller: Cohen

Another one unchanged from the primary; I will vote for “boring establishment Democrat” over “let’s do a California DOGE” any day.

• Treasurer: Kounalakis

I still think Kounalakis would be fine; Jennifer Hawks somehow manages to have even fewer qualifications than Kounalakis did when she ran for Lieutenant Governor 8 years ago.

• Attorney General: Bonta

We still like Bonta, and I certainly don’t think I want a Republican AG in 2026 (or ever).

• Insurance Commissioner: Allen

The only statewide race with two Dems this year; Allen was my close second choice (he knows the insurance industry, has legislative experience, and represented the Palisades), and Kim was my least favorite by far (this isn’t a job that’s about going to battle with insurers, in a state where more and more homes can’t get insurance at all).

• Board of Equalization Member D2: Pimentel

Does John Pimentel actually want to abolish the Board of Equalization, or did he just say that to the Chronicle to get their endorsement? He does say the Board of Equalization is not working, so I’ll take that as good enough; it’s not like it matters who we elect here.

• US House D11: Wiener

Basically, I don’t think anything has changed since the primary here. Wiener is one of the best legislators in the business. AI regulation is suddenly a big issue (and I do think it will only get bigger), and it’s a highly technical area where one of the few laws we have already passed was his. It’s a clear choice.

• CA Assembly D17: Haney

Haney was the only candidate in the primary, but a write-in opponent with 468 votes is on the ballot now! Amusing, but I can’t find much information about him and see no reason to consider him further.

• Superintendent of Public Instruction: Barrera

Once again, my favorite candidate from the primary, Barrera, with relevant experience and good policy positions, is up against someone famous for anti-trans activism; easy choice.

• Judges: Yes to all

I am a political junkie who spends time researching the Muni budget and even the exact number of commissions modified by a proposition for this voter guide. I have no idea how I’m supposed to know which judges to vote for. They aren’t even really allowed to tell us what they think due to ethics rules.

There don’t seem to be problems with any of the two California Supreme Court and eleven appeals court justices on the ballot; the Chronicle suggests we retain them all (complete with a long explanation of why it’s a silly system); and I didn’t find anyone to the left of Ronald Reagan who suggests otherwise. Great, sure, me too!

CA propositions

• Prop 1 (housing bond): Yes

Sure, we like a housing bond. It’s not that big a dent in the amount of housing we need (it would fund 40,000 subsidized rental units, approximately the amount of affordable housing we’re supposed to build by 2031 in San Francisco) but it’s also a small cost relative to the state budget. (Putting money into subsidized loans is not ideal in supply-constrained housing markets, but most of the money here is to actually build housing.)

• Prop 2 (increase rainy day fund): Yes

Why does California have a limit on how much we can save for next year? It would be better if we had a less volatile tax system, but there’s no such thing as a free lunch, except when the free lunch is “I guess we could save more”. Will we actually? Maybe not, but I don’t see why it hurts to allow it.

(And yes, this works around the Gann limit. Good. We should get rid of the Gann limit.)

• Prop 3 (tax for education): Yes

California has the highest top bracket in the country; this prop would make it permanent rather than expiring in 2031. This seems fine; state taxes typically just aren’t that progressive. (For example, the difference in marginal tax rate for a single filer between $100k and $1M is 15 percentage points at the federal level and 4 in California.) A tax without a set-aside would be better, but so it goes; it’s not like our schools are in great danger of being overfunded.

• Prop 4 (allow public campaign financing): Yes

Why do we need a prop to simply repeal the ban on public financing of campaigns? California, what a state. Anyway, the anti-proposition voter guide endorses a rare yes on this one: we can simply let the legislature (and municipalities) decide.

On the merits of public financing, I’m not totally sure how practical it is when the amount spent on many races is so high and we have limited ability legally to cap independent expenditures. (Probably: it’s good for small races and irrelevant for big ones.) But I’m happy for more cities, and even the state, to experiment here; at worst no one takes the public financing (just as this year and most recent years, neither candidate for Governor accepted the expenditure limits to get their argument in the state voter guide) and it doesn’t do much. And the amounts we’re talking about are actually quite cheap in the scheme of things.

Incidentally, this prop doesn’t even apply to charter cities like San Francisco, which already has a public financing program. (To the above point, its expenditure limit adjusts to match opponents’ spending; the maximum public financing is enough to matter significantly to supervisor races, but much less so for mayor. It’s an interesting system!)

• Prop 5 (recall vacancies): Yes

I go back and forth on recalls; on the one hand they often seem like a distraction, but on the other hand it’s not clear impeachment works with today’s levels of polarization, and you do need some way to remove bad officials.

Anyway, this prop would mean instead of the two-question recall where we fill the seat in the same election, we’d mostly use ordinary succession procedures, such as replacing the governor with the lieutenant governor (in some cases followed by a special election), appointment for other executive offices, or special elections for legislative ones. Arguably this gives the voters less choice? But the two-question format has been messy; those who were around in 2021 may recall the 46-candidate ballot with no clear Democratic leader. If the goal of recall is to handle malfeasance more so than support the electorate changing their minds about policy, a bit less choice in the replacement may be fine.

I’m not sure we really needed to make this change (it doesn’t make recalls harder to do!) but now that we’re here, sure, let’s do it.

• Prop 37 (second-mortgage bond): No

This prop actually does two things:

• It authorizes a “second mortgage” program where people buying new-construction houses could get an additional loan for up to 17% of the home value (bringing their down payment from 20% to 3%). This wouldn’t be subsidized; it would be funded by bonds, which would be repaid by the loan payments.
• Currently California’s liability rules make condos very expensive to build; this prop would adjust them. (More here; the law to fix this didn’t pass.)

On the additional mortgages, I have trouble seeing how this will make that much of a difference; the homeowner still has to pay the loan back! And the loans would likely be higher-interest since they’re riskier; it’s not clear to me that the state’s involvement is adding much here as similar products are available privately. Proponents note it won’t use tax dollars, which is true: but it’s hard to get something for nothing! Maybe it would help a little; maybe it would actually lead to more foreclosures by making it easier for people to buy houses they still can’t fundamentally afford. Regardless, we will need to do the harder work of actually making housing cheaper.

The liability change is more technical; all the housing groups say it’s a real issue and the fix seems plausible. But this seems like exactly the kind of thing we shouldn’t be doing at the ballot box: it will no doubt need some minor adjustment in a few years when developers find a loophole that shifts the liability too far back. (It’s amendable by 60% of the legislature, which isn’t so bad, but still.)

Both changes could be done legislatively. These are fine things for the legislature to try, alongside all the other housing policy afoot, but I don’t think implementing them at the ballot box is a good idea, and neither seems so critical that we can’t wait for another try from the legislature.

• Prop 38 (immunology bond): No

Should the state of California fund some more immunology research? I don’t really know. I don’t see a problem with it. But should we fund it through the bond authorized by this prop? Definitely not.

First of all, you might notice that half the bond funds go to a specific research institute meeting some oddly specific criteria like bylaws requiring multiple senior UC representatives on its board. If you’ve been around these parts before, you might know what that means: there’s only one such organization, which is in this case called the California Institute for Immunology & Immunotherapy. The Chronicle says they’re not serious people, but regardless, why are we legislating that a specific nonprofit should get $4.2 billion?

And for that matter, why are we legislating a grant program and funding it with a bond? Do we expect that immunology will be solved by precisely $8.4 billion? If we want to spend $500 million a year (the cost of repaying the bonds) on immunology research, we can just fund grants directly out of the general fund, and skip this whole dance entirely.

There’s even more nonsense described in the Chron’s editorial, if you want to go grab some popcorn and read it, but that was enough for me to say no.

• Prop 39 (voter ID): No

There’s not really a good reason to do voter ID; actual rates of voter fraud continue to be very low. The best reason I can see is to make people feel like elections are more secure (even if they are already), but the research shows that doesn’t even work.

As voter ID laws go, this one is mostly not too bad (e.g. it provides for a free voter ID card), except for one big problem: vote by mail. Right now, California automatically mails ballots to every voter, which is very convenient! In recent elections around 90% of voters have voted by mail. This prop would mean that voters have to tell the state which ID they will use to verify their ballot (and then put the last four digits of its number on the ballot). If you don’t do that, no voting by mail! That seems pretty bad; vote no.

• Prop 40 (one-time wealth tax): No
• Prop 41 (state tax limits): No
• Prop 42 (no wealth tax): No

I’m sorry, but Prop 40 is just such a bad tax.

If you haven’t heard the extremely loud screams of your local billionaires, this is the infamous wealth tax: a one-time tax of 5% on billionaires’ wealth.

I want to be open to this. We could surely use some more money. Billionaires could surely afford to pay more. Wealth taxes, eh, have some problems, I think it might be better to solve the problems with income taxes (buy-borrow-die, and such) than to try to tax wealth directly, but I can see arguments that they’re good, actually. But this prop is just such bad tax design in a state where we’ve already got so many cursed taxes.

The biggest problem is: this is a one-time tax. California’s revenue is already volatile due to how much of it is from taxes on high earners; a wealth tax would already be worse, but a one-time wealth tax, what are we doing here? Also, to add insult to injury, it’s got a set-aside, mostly for healthcare. I don’t dispute we might want to spend more on healthcare but if we’re going to create such spiky revenue we should at least be setting it aside for the next recession, or funding long-term infrastructure investment, or something!

Then there are a bunch of silly tax design details:

• A billionaire who made most of their money outside of California, then moved here is mostly out of luck; there’s only a very limited exception for such changed residency.
• The phase-in is pretty steep; dollars from $1B to $1.1B are taxed at a marginal rate of 55%, then 5% beyond that; at least the marginal rate is never over 100%.
• It’s still unclear whether super-voting shares could in some cases be taxed as their fraction of control rather than their economic ownership. That seems like a big question to leave open?¹

And then there is of course the question of whether this causes billionaires to leave the state and pay less income tax. In theory it’s a one-time tax, and the residency check is back-dated to the start of 2026 so if they wanted to leave they already did. So this is a bit awkward but the actual impact is unclear.

Other than the one-time-ness, none of these problems are the end of the world.² But I think there is also a deeper issue here: while I support progressive taxation I don’t support the increasingly popular idea that all the money we need should come from billionaires. Ordinary people should have a stake in the government too! (This is partly why the weird phase-in bugs me; it’s clearly so that proponents can say “no really it only taxes billionaires”, which I think is actually bad.) And incidentally, not only the largest teachers union, but also the California Medical Association, whose members would in principle see the upside of the tax, opposes the prop.

So, I’m sorry, but I just don’t think this is a good idea. Let’s tax the rich, maybe even with a wealth tax, but let’s be normal about it, and try to do good policy, please.

Finally, with all that said, Props 41 and 42 are basically just to block Prop 40. Prop 42 is somewhat narrowly “ban taxes like Prop 40”, whereas 41 would have additional negative effects. Either way, don’t encourage dueling props; vote no.

• Prop 43 (local tax prop threshold): No

The way it is now:

• new or increased special taxes proposed by local governments must go to the voters and win two-thirds of the votes
• new or increased special taxes proposed by the voters (i.e. gathering signatures) need only a majority

(“Special” taxes are those where revenue goes to a specific purpose.)

To be fair, this is a loophole in Prop 13. We should solve it by repealing Prop 13. Instead, this prop would close the loophole, making it much harder to pass such taxes.

San Francisco has quite a few such taxes! Many are silly tax design, but it turns out we need more revenue than is possible under Prop 13. This seems likely to get worse rather than better over time unless Prop 13 is reformed. I would prefer to reform Prop 13! For now, let’s keep the loophole.

I do generally prefer taxes where the funds are unrestricted. But sometimes that just doesn’t make sense (see Prop H below; and note that the city’s general-fund contribution to Muni is actually fixed in the Charter). If someday we finally fix Prop 13, sure, we can make special taxes harder, but until such time, I don’t find this a convincing reason to vote yes.

Incidentally, this was put on the ballot as a compromise to avoid a stronger prop from the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, which would additionally have retroactively invalidated such taxes, limited transfer taxes, and invalidated existing ones in charter cities (including SF). Personally, I kinda think the legislature shouldn’t negotiate with (tax) terrorists; Wiener was the only no vote in the state senate and I applaud him.

• Prop 44 (community clinic overhead): No

Is it a good idea to require certain clinics to spend at least 90% of their revenue on “program services”? Maybe? Nonprofit administrative overhead is a complicated thing and I have complicated opinions on it, to be honest.

But what we shouldn’t do, as I have said time and again, is regulate the operations of healthcare providers at the ballot box. (And yes, it’s our very same friends at the SEIU.) If it’s a good idea, the legislature can pass a law.

(Incidentally, this seems to be pretty bad regulation too. Not only does it impose a financial penalty on clinics that don’t comply (with as little as 6 months until the first applicable fiscal year), but it also allows any patient to sue such a clinic for breach of charitable trust. And the 90% threshold seems to have been made-up; the current average is 80%. While I’m sure some clinics may be wasting (mostly federal?) taxpayer money, expecting the majority to change practices significantly in 6 months seems a bit much. Unlike Prop 40, this bad policy affects community nonprofits, not just billionaires.)

• Prop 45 (CEQA deadlines): No

First, let some values of mine be known:

• We should protect the environment.
• We should build enough housing for everyone to live in.

If push came to shove, I would probably put housing above the environment, but luckily for us, this prop would have limited effect on either.

On the first matter, bear with me for a rant about the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), which this prop would modify. Here’s the thing: CEQA doesn’t really protect environmental quality! It protects a particular process, by which developers of certain types of projects have to publish a statement of their environmental impacts, and then anybody can sue if they missed one.³ It doesn’t say what the project can’t do! It just says you have to do a bunch of paperwork, and agencies have to review it, which can take years. (It goes a bit beyond the federal version, NEPA, in saying that at least you have to try to mitigate the impacts; and it’s broader in that it applies to any project requiring a discretionary permit, not just government-funded ones.)

On the second matter, though: we already have some exceptions to CEQA for infill housing. Which is great! Building a new building in the middle of SF is quite simply good for the environment. But that’s already done.

This prop would add exceptions for a bunch more types of development, including non-infill housing, clean energy, police stations, and highways. (High-speed rail is specifically excluded from its exceptions.) The specific changes are a mix of good changes and some that are a bit more questionable, such as:

• Agencies would have deadlines to review applications, and would have to ask for all the details they need upfront: great!
• Reviews could only consider one alternative proposed by the developer, rather than several proposed by the agency: interesting idea, but seems a bit much. (Can the alternative be “do the same thing, but paint it red instead of blue”?)

If anything I would say we should remove the paperwork instead of just hastening it; as written this will end up costing local governments quite a lot to keep up with the deadlines. And we should probably focus the exceptions more specifically on things that have environmental benefit (like infill housing does).

If this were a law, I’d say, good enough, we should try to do better, but we can always tweak it. But it doesn’t need to be on the ballot, and putting it there makes it harder to modify when we find someplace where the exception is a bit too large (highways, I’m looking at you). So I’m sad to say, I don’t think this is a good idea. We should absolutely reform CEQA, probably more aggressively than this, but not by way of the ballot.

SF candidates

• Assessor-Recorder: Torres

Incumbent is the only candidate, haven’t heard any problems, sure why not.

• Public Defender: Raju

Same deal: incumbent is unopposed, there seems to be some issue with his office being understaffed and some debate over whether he handled it correctly, but not much to decide here.

• Board of Education (3 seats): Fisher, Hazelton, Kim

We have 8 candidates, and 3 seats.

First, the endorsements. There are two slates: GrowSF and friends are backing Brown Garibay, Kim, and Tung; while the unions and left groups are backing Cheung, Hazelton, and Tello; and Fisher and Lee are in neither slate. Fisher and Kim are incumbents. SF Parents Action endorsed Brown Garibay, Kim, and Fisher.

The school board is definitely not doing great yet, but things seem to be somewhat looking up, and I’m inclined to bias a bit towards continuity. But also both incumbents seem pretty good beyond that. Kim seems to be respected across the spectrum; he quickly became board president. Fisher meanwhile has clearly learned a lot across the board’s many areas of work in her four years; I especially appreciated her honesty on some of the trickier issues and I’m inclined to re-elect her as well.

Of the rest, I found Cheung, Lee, and Tello to have the weakest answers in the Parents Action questionnaire and the LWV forum. The remaining three all seemed good; it seems to me like Hazelton would add the most diversity of experience and views of the three (which I think is valuable on the less-political school board, relative to, say, the supervisors), so I’m voting for him. Tung has more financial experience and might be a good choice if that’s the biggest concern for you (and it’s clearly a big one). Brown Garibay seems fine too, but didn’t really stand out.

• Community College Board (4-year term; 3 seats): Ball, Lee, Tam
• Community College Board (2-year term; 1 seat): Ferguson

This one is slightly simpler than the school board, in that there are basically just two slates: Ball, Lace, and Tam are endorsed by GrowSF and friends as well as three of the current trustees; while McFadden, LaCroix, and Lee are endorsed by the unions and left groups. (There are two other candidates, but neither had a candidate website or endorsements I could find.)

Unfortunately this race seems a bit under-covered. The only questionnaire I could find that the six major candidates filled out is from the SF Dems. (The left candidates didn’t fill out the GrowSF questionnaire, as usual, but strangely also missed the one from the League of Conservation Voters.)

Anyway, given that little to go on, Tam and Ball had the most detailed answers to the questionnaire. Lee and Lace were next best; given the board is already more moderate-leaning I would lean towards a bit of diversity of opinion and thus towards Lee, but either seems fine.

We also have an election to fill Alan Wong’s seat for the rest of his term. Ruth Ferguson is already the appointee, seemed fine in 2024, and is also the only candidate; easy.

SF & regional propositions

• Regional Measure RTM (transit tax): Yes

I would like to still have a transit system next year, so please vote yes!

More seriously: the core problem here is that the post-COVID transit funding gap still hasn’t been permanently filled. Specifically:

• Before COVID, BART had one of the highest farebox recovery ratios of US transit agencies; over 70% of operating costs were paid by fares. This is often considered good! But it means there’s more to lose when ridership goes down.
• Today, BART ridership is still well under 60% of pre-COVID numbers.
• With a bit of multiplication: 30% of BART’s funding is gone.

Similar considerations apply to Caltrain, and to some extent to Muni, although see more on Muni below.

This giant funding hole has been patched in one-off ways so far: federal emergency funding in 2020 through 2022; and a smaller pot of state funding in 2023, now being phased out. At this point it doesn’t look like Bay Area commuting patterns will fully return to pre-COVID levels anytime soon, so it’s time for longer-term funding.

Thus: a new sales tax, proposed in the 5 counties served by BART. Each county’s revenue is spent on that county’s transit systems.⁴ (It needs a majority in the region collectively to pass.) There are a bunch of accountability measures bundled in.

And yes, the predictions from all the agencies about what will happen if we don’t pass this tax are apocalyptic (no BART after 9pm and no Caltrain on weekends, for starters). Transit systems have high fixed costs, so a deficit is hard to fill; and the consequent service reductions can make things even worse by reducing ridership further. Let’s hope it passes.

• Prop A (commissions & more): Yes

It’s time to get rid of some commissions!!! This is the most exciting thing that’s happened to the Ben Kraft Voter Guide since its inception, and you better believe I’m voting yes.

As you may know, I was talking about how San Francisco has too many commissions before it was cool. Two years ago, we got two dueling props to create a commission to clean up old commissions. The weaker one passed, which means the commission doesn’t automatically have the power to implement its recommendations. Those that could be implemented by ordinary law already were, removing 43 commissions.

This prop covers the parts that have to go to the voters:

• Removes (entirely or by merger) 7 commissions established by the voters.⁵
• Moves 11 commissions from the charter into ordinary laws.⁶
• Authorizes the Board of Supervisors to remove 2 more voter-established commissions.
• Relaxes the membership requirements for several more commissions.
• Renames several commissions, I guess for more consistency in the meanings of “Commission”, “Advisory Council”, and so on.
• Cleans up other random procedures that are in the charter, or moves them to laws.

I would like us to do more, but this is still an improvement! In 2024 I wrote:

This would probably do more than nothing? My guess is what happens here is [the] commission roughly follows the recommendations of the Civil Grand Jury report, which recommended eliminating 15 active commissions and 20 inactive ones, and maybe finds a few more, [and] that some of those recommendations don’t become law leaving us with somewhere around 100 commissions. I certainly expect it would abolish/consolidate only the “silly” commissions, and take a light touch to anything else.

I would say this is slightly more than I predicted, although not a lot. (And to be fair the commission tried to remove a few more that the Supervisors decided to keep.) Regardless, it’s an improvement I am happy to take.

The prop does make one commission permanent, or rather periodic: we’ll have a commission to eliminate commissions automatically every 10 years. I’m sorry to say I have great confidence we’ll need it.

Finally, before we bid these commissions adieu, a few more fun ones:

• It’s good we’re eliminating the Special Strike Committee, which apparently cannot legally meet per a state labor board. Fear not, for the Employee Relations Board is retained, just no longer in the charter.
• I’m pleased to have predicted that two advisory groups to the Disability and Aging Services Commission could be combined, but apparently was wrong about which two? The Dignity Fund Oversight and Advisory Committee and the Advisory Council to the Disability and Aging Services Commission are combined, but as far as I can tell the Age & Disability Friendly SF Implementation Workgroup persists.
• The prop allows the Board of Supervisors to change the name of any department, board, commission, or other unit of government. To those who enjoyed Prop B, November 2019, I’m (not) sorry.

Bye!

• Prop B (public bank): No

Prop B is one of those “authorize the city to do X if it gets Y funding and Z approval” ones. So before we get into the actual question of a public bank, let’s talk about the path to get to one:

• First, the city will need to find funding including initial capital. The prop was originally going to include a business tax, but that part got nixed. The total funding needed, per the controller, is a few hundred million dollars over 8 years.
• Next, the city would establish a “municipal finance corporation”, which would make loans from that capital.
• Then, after at least 3 years, the MFC could apply to become a bank, with state approval.

We already have a problem: the authorizing state law has a 7-year window to apply to be a public bank, which as far as I can tell expires on January 1, 2029, less than 3 years from now. So we are already off track! Of course the legislature could extend the window, but these are not great portents for an institution requiring attentive management.

Ok, so is a public bank a good idea? Well, it depends on what the goals are, and concerningly there are a few too many different theories about what such an institution would do:

• Maybe it would let the city gain leverage in deploying affordable housing funds?
• Maybe it would make money and that could go towards good things in the city?
• Maybe it would do equity better, like offering no-fee accounts to underbanked individuals?
• Maybe it would mean divestment from bad stuff like fossil fuels?

The problem is, you can’t win ’em all. These are all great things, but if it were possible to make lots of money by doing all these things, commercial banks would do them!

So my fear with a public bank is that we end up pouring a bunch of money in over time, and we get some good things, but we can never tell how much money went to which good things, or whether we could simply have done those things more cheaply without operating a bank. (For example, we could make affordable housing grants to developers, who can take out a loan to do the actual construction. Or we could subsidize a commercial bank’s no-fee accounts for city residents.) I haven’t seen an economically sensible argument that a public bank is the best way.

There’s also very little precedent here. Proponents cite the state-operated Bank of North Dakota, which indeed makes money. But it’s not clear that it is trying to do what this public bank would be: it’s certainly not divesting from fossil fuels, and it’s not even clear that it particularly helps small businesses. If we were trying to do a public bank with the same purpose, we could talk about that, but it’s not much evidence for what we’re trying to do here.

In short, we have enough problems in San Francisco governance, I’m not sure “managing a bank” needs to be one of them.

Incidentally, I wanted to figure out whether we need this to be in the city charter. Unfortunately I think the answer is more or less yes: at a minimum, the public bank appears to need a carve-out from SF’s sunshine law (the state one would apply instead, and give the right exceptions for a bank). And I’m not actually sure I agree with SPUR that it’s too much governance structure in the charter: it’s basically just the oversight mechanisms and certainly not the bank operations.

• Prop C (housing trust fund): Yes

Reading this prop alone, I wasn’t sure if it was actually a good idea. We should fund affordable housing, yes, but do we need to put it in the charter?

But it turns out it’s a political compromise with affordable housing nonprofits: in exchange for lowering the percentage of each housing project that have to be affordable (which should make it possible to build more housing total), we need new funding for affordable housing, which is this prop. This compromise does make sense: instead of a hidden tax on all housing, which means often we don’t build enough market-rate housing and also don’t get affordable housing with it, we can decouple the two. We should allow tons of market-rate housing and also fund affordable housing! I’d prefer it be done in the budget, but that’s not how we do it, so this seems okay. (And seemingly almost everyone is for it; if SF affordable housing advocates and YIMBYs can agree on something, I’ll allow even an unnecessary ballot prop.)

• Prop D (ballot prop qualification): Yes

It’s time to make useless ballot props more difficult to propose!!! This is the most exciting thing that’s happened to the Ben Kraft Voter Guide since Prop A above and you better believe I’m voting yes.

You might think, gosh, what about useful ballot props? (Alas, I do agree those exist.) But here’s the neat thing: those are mostly unaffected. (Maybe it would be good to affect them a bit, but one thing at a time.)

Specifically, there are basically two types of ballot props: charter amendments and regular laws.⁷ Charter amendments have to go to the voters; regular laws mostly don’t. There are also two sets of ways to get props on the ballot, by elected officials, or by gathering signatures. Both make it significantly easier to get a regular law on the ballot than a charter amendment.

The problem is, charter amendments are annoying but necessary: the normal legislative process can’t just do them. Props that pass regular laws are usually entirely unnecessary: the supervisors could just pass them like normal. So, while we probably shouldn’t make them harder than charter amendments to propose, they probably shouldn’t be so much easier either.

For getting props on the ballot by elected officials:

• A charter amendment needs a majority of the Board of Supervisors (unchanged).
• A regular law currently needs either 4 of 11 supervisors, or the mayor alone. Now it would also require a majority of supervisors (with no special path for the mayor).

For signatures:

• A charter amendment needs 10% of registered voters.
• A regular law currently needs 2% of registered voters; now it would need 8%.
• Calling a special election currently needs about 7.5%⁸, and would now need 10%. (These are expensive, it should probably be even higher.)

This seems pretty great; it’s still possible to put things on the ballot without the supervisors if needed (indeed D met the 10% threshold), but we will hopefully get a lot less “we failed to pass a law, let’s send it to the voters because we can” nonsense. For changes that a majority of supervisors genuinely feel should be sent to the voters, they should consider doing their jobs, but they can also send us the prop.

A fun extra tidbit: this also allows the proponent of a signature prop to withdraw it up to 102 days before the election. For those who remember the last few times we’ve had measures pulled, yeah it would be perfectly fine by me to make that easier.

• Prop E (city administrator authority): Yes

This is a fairly technical prop: the main change is to make city procurement processes more standardized, and more directly controlled by the City Administrator, who would also have their term doubled to 10 years. There is always a tradeoff here between efficiency of delivering services and oversight to avoid waste; but at a certain point inefficiency is waste. Some parts are clear improvements, like indexing to inflation the threshold at which contracts must be approved by the supervisors. Others are more complex: it’s probably true in practice that the supervisors tend to add unnecessary complexity to procurement, but I’m not sure I like that they would be unable to propose changes at all.

Overall these days I tend to lean towards the idea that we have overcomplicated things. Also, these changes are mostly following SPUR’s recommendations, which I tend to trust. It’s hard to directly analyze all the changes without a detailed understanding of city procurement, but SPUR are the people who have taken the time to build that understanding, so I will be following them here!

• Prop F (department heads): Yes

Don’t lose hope; we’re almost done with charter reform for this cycle. This is perhaps the most controversial change: it would give the mayor more direct power over most city departments.

This includes transferring responsibilities, hiring deputy mayors, hiring and firing department heads, and firing appointed commissioners (available to the supervisors and other appointers as well). There are exceptions for departments you might expect, like elections, police accountability, the ethics commission, and some of the more quasi-independent organizations like the airport and the art museums.

As I’ve written time and again, I don’t think a nest of overlapping commissions makes for good government: rather than adding accountability, they make it so hard to tell whose job it was to fix something that we need conspiracy-theory-style diagrams to explain it. I feel the same way about city departments: do you know who the head of SF’s Department of Emergency Management is, and who’s supposed to be overseeing them? Neither do I, nor do I really want to. It seems like an important department, but we elected someone to run the city, and it would be nice if we could allow, and expect, them to do so.

As I wrote in that 2022 tirade:

Let’s try something new: when things don’t work, we blame the mayor. Maybe the supervisors too, but in SF, the mayor has most of the power. No new commissions. No new oversight boards. […] If something is wrong, we blame the mayor. If somebody is corrupt, the mayor appointed them, and the mayor had better deal with it. If not, we can vote her out.

Prop F will make that a good bit easier. While we’re at it, it would also keep silly administrative changes, like splitting and then re-merging departments, off our ballot. It’s also based on recommendations from SPUR. We love to see it!

• Prop G (Sunset Dunes, again): No

Why are we here again? We voted to turn the Great Highway into Sunset Dunes park in 2024; the park is great, the sky did not fall, but the Outer Sunset has not forgiven us, and there’s a prop to try to undo it. Vote no both on the merits, and to discourage this behavior. (Maybe consider this as you decide on Prop D?)

• Prop H (Muni parcel tax): Yes

Ok, we’re back with more transit funding. If you didn’t already read about the regional measure above, go read that.

Now: you might wonder, if the problem is lost fare revenue since the pandemic, why does Muni need so much more funding when its ridership recovery has been stronger than BART’s, and fares were never as big a portion of funding? Well, maybe you didn’t wonder that, but I did, so I went and compared the budgets between FY19 and FY25 (and yes, this is one of the places where I used large language models for research).

I found a number of different answers that do in fact add up to a giant hole in the budget, in decreasing order of size:

• Parking: a lot of Muni’s funding comes from parking meters, garages, permits, and fines. These are way down since pre-pandemic too. Muni also gets funding from a tax on private parking, which is similarly down. These add up to almost $100M.
• Even with Muni’s better recovery, ridership is still down, and even more so for the cable cars, for over $60M of loss.
• Salaries are up a bit more than inflation.
• Muni fares have gone up, but less than inflation.
• Yes, increased fare evasion is another small chunk.

None of those factors are proportionally as big as BART’s loss of fare revenue, but they really add up.

Anyway, thus, a tax. This is a “parcel tax”, but in this case that means it’s mostly a (slightly progressive) tax on the square footage of property, so large commercial buildings will pay hundreds of thousands of dollars while single-family homes under 3,000 square feet will pay just $129 (unless they’re owner-occupied by a senior, in which case they pay nothing). Honestly: great way to sneak around Prop 13, kudos to the drafters.

As above, Muni will lose a ton of service unless both taxes pass (and will barely exist if neither does). And again, there’s some new required audit stuff. Anyway, let’s keep having transit in San Francisco, seems like a good idea to me.

(You might also ask, didn’t we vote on a tax to fund Muni 2 years ago? We did, and it even got a majority, but was overridden by a dueling prop. This tax is also much bigger; if RTM and H both pass that should actually be enough to balance Muni’s budget, whereas the previous tax would just have been a small dent.)

• Prop I (transfer tax set-aside): No

In the words of the controller, “[this] tax would represent the City’s 24th voter-mandated funding requirement that limits the City’s budget flexibility”. Why are we still doing this? If the city, through its elected representatives, wants to spend money on affordable housing, great, we can do that. We already have a large general fund deficit looming, we don’t need a ballot prop to demand that a particular $120M gets spent on housing.

(Oh right: what does the prop do? The transfer tax has been around for a while; its top tiers were increased in 2016, again in 2020, and modified in 2024 as well as potentially by Prop J; alas we are early to the quadrennial tradition of modifying it further. It taxes real estate sales, especially those over $5M. This prop sets aside half of it for several buckets of affordable housing funding, and makes some other tiny tweaks.)

• Prop J (transfer tax in foreclosure): Yes

We have a tax on real estate sales here in San Francisco. (You might have heard about it as recently as the previous item on your ballot.) But apparently it mostly doesn’t apply to properties in foreclosure. This prop makes it fully apply in foreclosure, excluding small residential buildings.

This sounds like a good idea? It seems like bad incentives that this specific transfer doesn’t count. I’m not totally certain of this; one could imagine it would result in some foreclosures being doubly taxed. But everybody left of the SF Apartment Association (the landlords’ lobby) is for it, including SPUR who seem to have mildly thought about this issue, so I’m not too worried.