Firefighters are demanding the city’s most lavish perks — and politicians are carrying their water

It is silly season on steroids at San Francisco’s City Hall, what with the annual budgeting process colliding with election-year shenanigans. 

Sometimes, elections have a positive effect on governance. Witness the noticeably increased sense of urgency these past months by Mayor London Breed, who is scrambling to change the doom-loop narrative that threatens her job. 

But politicians currying favor with voters — particularly powerful groups like labor unions — often provoke the opposite effect: bad-faith policy meant to score political points in the moment that will lead to costly ramifications in the future. 

Nowhere is this clearer than in the explosive battle that is playing out over a cash grab by San Francisco’s already lavishly-paid firefighters. The firefighters — through their influential union, Local 798 — recruited two termed-out members of the Board of Supervisors, Catherine Stefani and Asha Safaí, to carry their water buckets in the form of an expensive ballot measure this fall that would garnish their pension benefits.

Stefani is cruising to a seat in the California Assembly, and Safaí is staging a long-shot bid for mayor. Tardily on their side is another mayoral aspirant whose supervisory time is up, Board President Aaron Peskin. Standing against them in the name of fiscal responsibility is a solidly progressive supervisor, Hillary Ronen, who also is leaving the board but, unlike the others, isn’t running for another office. She has been talking so sensibly that I found myself wishing she were sticking around. 

Ronen, in her role as chair of the board’s Rules Committee, used a parliamentary procedure last week to bottle up another benefits sweetener for a politically important workforce — San Francisco cops — so that it couldn’t reach the ballot. This led Peskin to pull an even more extraordinary maneuver to get the full board to vote on the bump in benefits, prompting Ronen to resign her committee role and break publicly with the progressive leader.

As Ronen told me: “Our job is to vet proposals, make them better and [dismiss] them when we believe they’re purely for political purposes and don’t accomplish any real goals.” 

“I couldn’t believe it when I saw what my colleagues were introducing,” she went on. “I was just like, wow … you couldn’t care less about the fiscal health of the city.” 

Amen to that. Did I mention Ronen is getting out of politics?

The battles over the firefighter and cop pensions are a snapshot of everything that’s wrong with how the city runs itself: a legislative regime beholden to special interests and the officials who coddle them; a system that asks voters to adjudicate complex matters that elected representatives ought to handle themselves; and an apparatus vulnerable to the wily ways of lawmakers who rig the legislative process like Vegas bookies.

Though cops, nurses and 911 operators are all asking voters to dole out “new multimillion-dollar pension benefits like they were Tic Tacs,” in the witty phrasing of the San Francisco Chronicle editorial board, it is the firefighters’ proposal that merits special scrutiny. Unlike cops, everyone loves firefighters, who don’t particularly need help recruiting or retaining their corps. That they chose a moment when the city faces a nearly $800 million budget deficit to improve their lot shows their moxie and their mettle. 

In April, the firefighters presented Stefani with legislative language, which she agreed to sponsor. It contained three main provisions. 

All told, the city Controller’s Office estimated that the proposal would cost $10.2 million in its first year, ballooning to $21.2 million per year by 2040.

To get their way, the firefighters hit on a shrewd tactic: They framed the pension proposal as a way to protect their ranks from the ill effects of cancer. This included citing scary statistics, as well as sending out campaign-style mailers — watch for them in your mailbox if the measure makes it to the ballot — and ads on Muni shelters and other locales. The banners cleverly make no mention of the ballot initiative. But they hardly need to. If voters begin to associate firefighting with an increased risk of cancer, they’ll be more likely to approve any asks these public servants make of them.

There’s no question that firefighters have higher risks of cancer, something researchers have known for years. What’s less known is that, according to city-compiled data, San Francisco’s firefighters are already the highest-paid in the Bay Area. They also work the fewest hours. A 2023 survey of 13 Bay Area jurisdictions recorded an average annual firefighter salary of $127,654, compared with $136,656 for San Francisco personnel. The average workweek for a San Francisco firefighter was 48.7 hours, versus a peer workweek of 55.7 hours.

Firefighters object to the two-tiered system that sees different groups retiring at different ages. But this is exactly what the decade-plus-old reform was intended to do. When the current cohort of older firefighters — the one with the older, better deal — retires, there will be only one tier for everyone.

When I asked Floyd Rollins, president of Local 798, why he thought it was appropriate to undo the carefully crafted agreement of yesteryear, he essentially told me that times had changed. “The purpose of the reform was to help the retirement system,” he said. 

In other words, that was then. This is now.

Unfortunately for the firefighters, Ronen became outraged by the pension spiking. In committee, she gutted the proposal, leaving only the decrease in retirement age, on the commonsense theory that older firefighters face greater cancer risk. 

“I think it wasn’t the most responsible thing to bring these measures forward this year, especially for supervisors who are exiting the arena and putting this budget strain on the rest of the city,” she said in a hearing — a direct potshot at Safaí, who was in the room, and Stefani, who was not. “There is no policy rationale for making firefighters an exception” to pension rules for all city employees, she said. (The leaner measure is now expected to cost $3.7 million in its first year and increase after that.)

Safaí said in the hearing that he resented Ronen’s comments, while simultaneously parroting the firefighter’s assertions. 

For her part, Stefani told me she had been prepared all along to give up on the formula changes so long as the retirement-age provision remained. “I understand that we have to be responsible in how we spend the taxpayer’s money,” she said. 

OK, then.

The proposal will likely get to the ballot, especially because Peskin now is behind it. This is a reversal; when I spoke to him in June, he laughed off the idea. 

“You don’t see my name on that legislation,” he told me at the time. But by the middle of July, he had mystifyingly added his name to the ballot proposition, and he gave it his full-throated support at a mayoral debate hosted by the firefighters union on Thursday. Peskin didn’t respond to my numerous requests to explain his change of heart.

Ronen, however, had thoughts about her longtime progressive ally. “I’m really disappointed in him more than anything,” she said of Peskin. “These candidates all feel like the same at this point. I was really supporting Peskin because I thought he would be different. But this is the same old, same old political games to push the same old agendas that I’ve seen in the past.”

Ronen reiterated that she will be done with politics when her term ends. “I have a really hard time with dishonesty, when people are just lying about the reasons that they’re doing things,” she told me. “When you see it from the inside, when you see how the sausage is made, it just drives me nuts.”

It should drive the rest of us nuts too.