From what I knew about Jackie Fielder before her resounding election this month as supervisor for the Mission, I expected a bomb-thrower.
What I found instead last week over coffee (for me) and matcha latte (for her) was a 30-year-old pol more eager to talk about street-level constituent service than progressive tropes like defunding the cops or DEI training in schools.
Fielder has a reputation as a brainy ideologue who’s a card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America. Many in San Francisco’s political scene expect her to pick up the firebrand mantle of Aaron Peskin, who was her defeated first choice for mayor, and fellow DSA supervisor Dean Preston, who was also vanquished at the ballot box by San Francisco’s monied moderates.
But that’s not the Fielder I met. The great hope for San Francisco’s progressives — and with Peskin and Preston out of the picture, she is exactly that — Fielder spent more time discussing street maintenance, how to encourage cops to walk the beat, and cooperation with Mayor-elect Daniel Lurie than mouthing left-wing talking points.
Corny as this may sound, the encounter left me hopeful that the city’s new crop of elected officials really do mean to embark on a journey of collegiality and cooperation, rather than partisan bickering.
“I think San Franciscans have been wanting leadership that can, quote–unquote, get things done,” she told me as we sheltered from the atmospheric river in a Mission cafe. She said her campaign knocked on every available door in District 9 at least three times, and “after thousands of conversations with constituents,” she learned that “people want potholes filled. They want repavements done on time. They want extra trash cans that were, for some reason, taken away. It’s this bread-and-butter politics that I think gets lost. That was really a fresh perspective for me to hear. If we’re not addressing those rudimentary expectations of city services, [voters] deserve an explanation as to why.”
In other words, I came in expecting a disciple of Bernie Sanders. But she’s got a lot of Alfonse “Senator Pothole” D’Amato in her, too.
In contrast with her progressive forebears on the Board of Supervisors, who fought bitterly with outgoing Mayor London Breed as well as her business-friendly predecessors, Fielder has demonstrated a desire to collaborate with Lurie. He is the only mayoral candidate other than Peskin who shook her hand during the campaign, she said — a gesture of respect so meaningful to her that she publicly voted for him as her second choice.
“We’re both in this position of being new to city government,” she said of the mayor-elect. “We’re very much aligned on leaving the bitter, incendiary politics behind, to show San Franciscans that they can still trust city government.”
Fielder and Lurie met again last week, and she shared her priorities, which include protecting undocumented immigrants from President-elect Donald Trump’s mass deportation plans. Lurie has said, vaguely, that he’ll have the backs of the immigrant community, and Fielder said he promised to talk to his team about her concerns. “They will be bothered by me constantly about this issue, until I get an answer about how exactly they intend to make it clear that this city stands at least by due process,” she said. “I’ll be bugging them for the next however long.”
For his part, Lurie shared Fielder’s positive vibes. “It’s a new day in San Francisco,” he told me, a bit giddily, by phone a few hours later. “I was really heartened and excited by what her priorities were. I want to put this narrative to rest that everything has to be a knife fight in a phone booth. It doesn’t have to be that way every single day. That’s not what the people want.”
A hugfest in a phone booth
Fielder said she discussed other priorities with Lurie, including the need to stop gun violence near 16th and Mission streets. She also wants to beef up the presence of cops in the Mission, particularly by urging them to get out of their squad cars.
“Time and time again, I heard from constituents that they want to see officers on foot patrol, rather than just driving around in their cars,” she said. This is an about-face for Fielder, who only four years ago ran a surprisingly strong race against state Sen. Scott Wiener as a vocal proponent of defunding the police.
The supervisor-to-be hardly has gone soft on the cops. She slams police brass for expending resources to stop Dolores Park Hill skate bombers, for instance. She also criticized the department for paying cops overtime to staff parades and motorcades. But today she is mostly talking about reform rather than ending policing.
“I’m for funding the entire public safety system as a whole,” she said. “No matter what my or any other politician’s views on funding or defunding police are, the profession of policing has to change if it wants to see new members. In general, this using the heuristic of police funding for a way to gauge our progress in public safety is clearly not working.” (Fielder earned a bachelor’s degree in public policy and a master’s in sociology in four years at Stanford. She calls herself a “policy nerd” and often talks like one.)
In spite of the moderate-lite positions she’s adopted, Fielder remains a staunch progressive. She name-checked a laundry list of garden-variety left-wing positions, including condemnation of the “genocide in Palestine” and the need to listen to voters “who are tired of corporate money dictating national priorities like minimum wage.” She also calls for “basic worker protections and investments in education, housing, healthcare, homelessness, and renters’ rights.”
At the same time, Fielder made observations that sound strikingly like Lurie’s criticism of the city. She said she has friends who have waited six months for interviews for city jobs — an oft-heard complaint. She also is frustrated by small-bore “humanitarian issues,” like the uneven approach to installing water filtration systems at public schools. “This is really my first experience with the bureaucracy that everyone is talking about,” she said. “It’s really unacceptable.”
And regarding the city’s challenged budget — in particular its expected $800 million deficit — Fielder promised to bring fresh eyes, no matter her political leanings. “I keep hearing about zero-based budgeting, starting from what we actually need and going up,” she said. “That’s something to consider. Now we take whatever departments had last year and say, ‘Cut X percent.’ That’s kind of the simplistic way.”
When I comment that zero-based budgeting is a favorite tactic of private-equity firms that slash costs at companies they acquire, she is unfazed. “Yeah, that basically means justifying your expenses. I think that goes for every single department.”
As that answer demonstrated, Fielder may not be a typical Democratic Socialist, and therefore I suspect she will be difficult to pin down as a supervisor. Breezing through her background — raised by a single mom in Long Beach, student activism in college, advocate for environmental justice, ambitious public service at a tender age — she mentioned to me that she was in a sorority, Alpha Phi, at Stanford.
I expressed surprise, as the Greek system is stereotypically seen as a playpen for rich kids. But she told me she “very publicly quit because I was pretty disillusioned with the exclusivity.” I read later in the Stanford Daily that prior to quitting, she’d organized a Greek Life Diversity Coalition that aimed to make sorority rush a “more more comfortable and accessible event for people from underrepresented socioeconomic and ethnic communities.” That sounded more like the Fielder I was expecting.
It’s easy, of course, to portray oneself as a conciliatory, flexible actor before City Hall’s traditional tribalism takes hold. That’s equally true for Lurie, who took his share of arrows in the campaign but hasn’t yet engaged in tit-for-tat combat when jobs and cherished programs are on the line.
For now, Fielder and Lurie say they want to govern amicably, focusing on shared interests rather than ideological differences. I say, for once, let’s wish them well at that.