Daniel Lurie proposes rejiggering San Francisco mayor’s office

San Francisco Mayor-elect Daniel Lurie is proposing to overhaul the mayor’s office and bring in several “policy chiefs” to serve as his deputies, a bid to “enhance effectiveness and accountability” over the city’s sprawling 56-agency bureaucracy.

The move partly harkens back to a system that San Francisco had until the early 1990s in which “deputy mayors” supervised city departments. San Francisco voters did away with the system by passing Proposition H in 1991, a move largely fueled by anger about the high pay of deputy mayors at the time. 

Since then, the mayor has leaned heavily on a single position to corral the city’s department heads: the chief of staff.

Currently, all department heads report to the mayor through the chief of staff. The proposed changes would add four more chiefs overseeing public safety, housing and economic development, public health, and “infrastructure, climate, and mobility.”

Those four chiefs would report directly to the mayor, sidestepping the chief of staff, and administer city agencies — with the public safety chief overseeing the police and sheriff’s departments, for example, and the public health chief overseeing the health and homelessness departments.

Each chief, Lurie said in a statement, would “provide strategic alignment” over their collection of city agencies and work as “a partner to department heads.” The “portfolio of agencies” under each policy chief would represent “between $2 and $6 billion in public spending.” 

“The changes we’re making at the top will help break down barriers to effective governance that impact every San Franciscan,” said Lurie in his announcement.

Ed Harrington, the city’s controller from 1991 to 2008, supports the change and said it would make the mayor’s office “more robust,” particularly when coordinating across departments. The idea that the mayor and chief of staff can “have 56 direct reports and manage them well,” he said, is “absurd.”

Ben Rosenfield, another ex-city controller who earlier joined Lurie’s transition team, pointed to San Francisco’s status as a city-county, saying the arrangement “comes with a lot of good” but also “a remarkable amount of complexity.” 

“For the last 20 years, we have organized those 50-plus departments in a very specific way: They are direct reports to the mayor, and they work day to day through a chief of staff,” Rosenfield said. “How can you have 50 direct reports and do more than manage the very top?”

Lurie, Rosenfield added, had “a number of specific goals and projects” to launch upon assuming office on Jan. 8, “but fundamental to all of those is, ‘How do you want to organize your office?’” 

The specific responsibilities of Lurie’s new policy chiefs were unclear, and Lurie’s team did not yet say which departments each would oversee.

That is perhaps because Prop. H as passed in November 1991 has explicit prohibitions against “employing on behalf of the Mayor any employee … whose duties include supervising any City department.” The language in Lurie’s announcement seems to sidestep that restriction, stating that each policy chief will be a “partner” to department heads.