It was all a bit odd from the start. 

Encouraged by friends and family members to apply for a major City Hall job, Isabella “Beya” Alcaraz strode up to Mayor Daniel Lurie in September at a night market in the Sunset. Her pitch: Appoint me as supervisor of District 4. She gave him her digits and asked him to call her about the role. 

The audacious move impressed the mayor. According to City Hall insiders, it came as Lurie and his team were struggling to find a candidate to fill the empty seat left by Supervisor Joel Engardio, who was recalled this fall in a voter mutiny over the closure of the Great Highway. The mayor’s office had been excited about some candidates, but for one reason or another, they all faded. One firefighter considered for the role questioned how it would affect his pension; another candidate thought her kids were too young for her to take on the job. Lurie had dwindling options and the clock was ticking down on what would be the most consequential political appointment of his first year in office.

Enter Alcaraz. The charismatic 29-year-old art and music teacher, and former owner of a pet store, was a complete unknown in San Francisco political circles when the mayor crowned her Nov. 6. A Sunset resident with a native’s purported knowledge of the district, Alcaraz was also a beloved small business owner, Lurie said with pride. 

But it was Alcaraz’s business background as the former owner of The Animal Connection on Irving Street that would be her undoing.

The full extent of her track record as a shop owner wasn’t known until reporters from The Standard and other publications began asking questions. The Standard reported Monday that the store had not only struggled financially for years but was left in a state of squalor for the new owner, Julia Baran. It was her concerns about Alcaraz’s conduct and character that broke open a dam of questions about the new supervisor.

A week and a day after she’d been sworn in, Alcaraz abruptly resigned as supervisor Thursday evening.

“The proper analogy is sending out someone with wounds in shark-infested waters without a cage,” said Supervisor Myrna Melgar, whose west-side district borders District 4. “I’m sad. I’m sad for everybody.”

The stunning downfall of Alcaraz, who spent roughly 200 hours as supervisor, shines a harsh spotlight on Lurie, who had promised to bring professionalism and top-tier personalities to City Hall — people who wouldn’t cause the kind of scandals that plagued his predecessor, London Breed. 

The moment marks a potential turning point in the public perception of Lurie, whose nearly yearlong tenure has been marked by fanfare over a political vibe-shift, a downturn in crime, a revival of downtown, and a skillful deflection of incoming crises, like President Donald Trump’s scuttled push to bring federal troops to the city last month.

This account of the events surrounding Alcaraz’s rapid rise and fall is based on more than a dozen interviews with City Hall officials and insiders, many of whom were not authorized to speak on the record.

In a statement made after her resignation, Alcaraz said by text message that she was sorry for “breaking the trust that was placed in me” and regretted the conditions in which she left her pet shop. “We deserve someone who understands what this district needs to heal, not just a politician trying to climb the ladder,” she said.

The question of who vetted Alcaraz and how the process was conducted remained mostly unanswered in the hours after Alcaraz stepped down. 

But within the small cohort of people with direct knowledge of the vetting process, fingers were pointing in a variety of directions Friday. Some put the blame on mayoral advisors like communications director Han Zou, who is said to have overseen the larger candidate selection process. Zou did not respond to a request for comment.

Others searched for blame outside the mayor’s inner circle, suggesting that the culprit was moderate political group GrowSF, which conducts polling and is supportive of Lurie’s agenda. According to sources, GrowSF did come up with a list of candidates to be considered for the appointment, but Alcaraz was not on it. GrowSF was not involved in vetting her, the sources said. 

At a press conference Friday, Lurie declined to answer questions about how the vetting process worked, who was involved, or where it went wrong.

“I’m not gonna get into what happened in the past,” he said. “We are going to thoroughly review our vetting process, and we will get better.”

On the surface, Alcaraz’s experience as a small business owner appeared to be in lockstep with the mayor’s agenda. Her business survived the pandemic. She’d also purportedly struggled with the headache-inducing bureaucracy faced by many business owners. Lurie has said addressing this is a top priority of his administration.

Chief among Alcaraz’s complaints was her claim that she spent $1,000 and waited six months for approval to secure a shed for trash cans at her Sunset store. The anecdote was included in press materials issued by the mayor’s office and in her short-lived city biography, and many media outlets cited it.

But even that story of the shed seems to have been stretched by Alcaraz.

In truth, there is no shed. City records obtained by The Standard show no permits for such a structure at either The Animal Connection’s Irving Street location or the store’s old spot at Judah Street. The store’s current owner, Baran, confirmed there’s no shed on the property. Instead, according to a statement issued Thursday, before her resignation, Alcaraz had merely looked into building a shed for trash cans. The cost and time involved caused her to abandon the project.

Beyond the problems overlooked by the Mayor’s Office, Alcaraz’s fall from grace was expedited by damning videos and text messages uncovered by The Standard and Mission Local. 

On Monday, The Standard published an investigation into The Animal Connection, which was left to the new owner strewn with hundreds of dead mice and trash. Financial documents showed the business lost tens of thousands of dollars between 2020 and 2023. On Thursday evening, Mission Local published (opens in new tab) messages in which Alcaraz told Baran she had paid employees at The Animal Connection “under the table” and misreported expenditures to avoid paying taxes. 

Alcaraz, in her post-resignation text, said she “poured” her soul into her business.

“It was dirty, and chaotic, and exhausting, because that’s what pet stores are,” she said. “Like most business owners in the Sunset, I struggled to make ends meet. But for six years, I did my best to keep things running at a very difficult time, for the animals, for my employees, and for the neighbors that relied on us. I regret the conditions it was left in, and am saddened to see the store’s reputation tarnished.”  

By Thursday evening, there were signs that Alcaraz’s time at the Board of Supervisors, which comes with an annual salary of around $175,000, was fast coming to an end.

Her attendance at a meeting of the Chinese American Democratic Club, which would have been one of her first public appearances, was abruptly canceled. Attendees of the event at the Internet Archive on Funston Avenue were stunned. “Why did she not show up?” yelled one. Around the same time, Lurie canceled a routine press conference for Friday morning. 

News of the resignation, which broke late Thursday, astonished community members.

The Chinese American Democratic Club released a sharply worded statement hours later. “While we had kept an open mind about the Mayor’s appointment and invited the new appointee to work with us, we were shocked to learn that the reason she did not appear at our meeting as planned this evening was because she had resigned,” it read. “We hope the mayor will take this moment to truly listen to the community.” 

Former Board President Aaron Peskin, who often criticizes Lurie’s policies, said it wasn’t surprising that the mayor found it challenging to land a qualified candidate. The District 4 supervisor will have to be loyal to the mayor, including on his controversial rezoning plan, while also balancing the needs of the district on issues like the Great Highway. 

“They create the conditions by which they could only find [Alcaraz],” Peskin said. 

Allies of the mayor are pushing back on the criticism.

“It’s a hard spot to fill,” said Board President Rafael Mandelman. “I don’t think this is about the Lurie administration.” 

But even the complexity of the seat’s politics was not enough to save Alcaraz, who put pen to paper Thursday night in a 23-word resignation letter addressed to the clerk of the Board of Supervisors. Lurie was copied on the note.

It read, in part: “Thank you for the opportunity to serve the Sunset.”