Mission Local is publishing campaign dispatches for each of the major contenders in the mayor’s race, alternating among candidates weekly until November. This week: Ahsha Safaí. Read earlier dispatches here.
The fog rolled in on the Upper Great Highway around noon on Tuesday, and dozens of cars drove down the oceanside road.
Two blocks east of the highway, some 15 business owners of the Outer Sunset Merchant Association met with major mayoral candidates at the Outerlands restaurant on Judah Street and 45th Avenue — and the Upper Great Highway’s potential closure is on the top of everyone’s mind.
A 2-mile stretch of the highway connecting San Francisco’s westside to Daly City and regions further down the Peninsula may be quite different after Election Day, if a ballot measure mandating its closure passes.
The issue has become hotly contested: Dueling rallies took place over the weekend featuring merchants and residents both for and against the measure.
On Tuesday, mayoral hopeful Ahsha Safaí showed up around 11 a.m. and delved right into the fray.
“When you have a seven-mile beach and you have Golden Gate Park and you have Lake Merced, we don’t need green initiatives out here,” said Matt Lopez, owner of Pitt’s Pub and White Cap bar, one of the more outspoken attendees at the meeting. “We need to be able to navigate our lives.”
“You are fixing problems that didn’t exist out here,” said another merchant. “And you are going to create problems with these mandates, with the closure.”
Others were less adamant about keeping the road open to cars, but worried that passing the ballot measure without a concrete plan for traffic and infrastructure improvement would backfire.
Those improvements — installing timed traffic lights on Lincoln Way, building more bathrooms, managing the diverged Great Highway traffic — were “bypassed” by putting the measure on the ballot, said Shane Curnyn, who goes to the beachside road with his daughter on weekends.
“My fear is that it’s just going to be a Wild West,” Curnyn said. “There’s going to be no police. There’s going to be no facilities for people to use. It’s just going to be a closed road without a plan for how the park is going to be built and maintained.”
Prop. K, which was put forward by District 4 Supervisor Joel Engardio and supported by Mayor London Breed, would permanently close the Great Highway between Lincoln Way and Sloat Boulevard so the city can turn it into an oceanfront park.
The measure has already seen some heavy spending: The family of Matt Boschetto, a District 7 candidate, has put in $67,000 to a committee opposing the measure; on Tuesday, the ex-Twitch CEO Emmett Shear put in $75,000 to support it.
If the measure passes, the Upper Great Highway won’t close until “all necessary approvals are obtained and permits granted” or by the end of 2025, when the current pilot program closing the roadway on weekends is set to expire.
When asked about his position on the ballot measure, Safaí was circumspect, talking about his work with former-Supervisor Katy Tang on the seawall and water treatment facility. But he ended his thoughts saying he is “for reimagining that space” and would “100 percent address the concerns.”
Outside of the room, Safaí did not hesitate to say “Yes on K.”
“I’ve been a supporter of that idea for three years now,” Safaí said. “We need to do something bold, and it’s an opportunity.”
Although some opponents of the ballot measure argued that building the oceanfront park might hurt businesses nearby, Safaí did not hear that argument on Tuesday, he said. “I just heard, ‘What is the overall plan if you are going to make a park? You better have community input and let us have a say in it.’”
In December 2022, Safaí was one of the nine supervisors voting for keeping the Great Highway car-free on holidays and weekends — a pandemic pilot program. But he took a different position on another major road closure in the city, voting against the closure of John F. Kennedy Drive in the Golden Gate Park earlier that year.
“I was 95 percent of the way there,” he said. “I wanted them to add some disabled parking right next to the Conservatory of Flowers. That was all I really wanted in the end. There was a proposal to do that, but ultimately it was all-or-nothing.”
In explaining his position on the Great Highway, Safaí also took the opportunity to segue into his city planner background — but later in the response the attendees seemed to lose interest. He got the room’s attention back when he started criticizing the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Authority’s project management.
“First thing I would do is to shift it over to the department that actually has that work, because [SFMTA] do not do a good job of it,” Safaí said. “They do a horrible job on the community outreach part. They kind of post a flier, say we had a meeting, and then they go with their decision anyway.”
The crowd nodded in agreement. “It even felt weirdly secretive,” one of the business owners said. “We are trying to ask questions, and they are like, ‘Why are you asking that question?’”
Many westside voters rely on cars to get around the city and road closures and loss of parking spaces has always been a big issue in the neighborhood. Safaí tapped into that undercurrent and endeared himself to the business owners in the room with his own experience living in the Excelsior.
When he first took office in 2017, Safaí said to the merchants, the city wanted to take away supervisors’ parking spots in front of City Hall. “I told the reporters, ‘Guys, I can’t do this job without a car and being a good dad,” he said, emphasizing how he needed to drop off his two kids, or show up at a burglarized storefront past midnight as a supervisor.
But road closure or not, it seemed that the Outer Sunset merchants just wanted to be heard when decisions were made about their neighborhood — be it parking space, the upzoning plan or MTA projects.
“Some guy sitting downtown saying, I imagine this for that neighborhood. That doesn’t really work for us,” said one business owner. “We live out here. You can’t imagine for our neighborhood. We should be part of the imagination team.”
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