It is still early days, but the themes of Daniel Lurie’s mayoralty are beginning to come into focus — in a wholly encouraging way.
The conventional wisdom throughout his campaign was that Lurie, who had never held elective office, was untested, inexperienced, and more or less unprepared. The San Francisco chatterati viewed Lurie as particularly vulnerable in the rough-and-tumble world of local politics, what he himself described as a “knife fight in a phone booth” that is highly entertaining but deeply damaging.
And yet, in office a mere six weeks, Lurie has shown himself adept at two critical skills: earnestly cultivating relationships with politicians who might otherwise have been adversaries, and shrewdly consolidating power in a mayor’s office that many chin-strokers have felt for decades was too weak.
On the political front, it would be easy to deride Lurie for his camera-mugging walks around the city and cringey, Dad-core Instagram account — but for the early political wins he has racked up. It is telling that to forge a deal for his fentanyl legislation, he went to the office of Connie Chan, head of the budget committee of the Board of Supervisors, to work out the details. Think about that: The mayor didn’t summon the supe; he went to her. I’m told he has made a habit of dropping by unannounced at the offices of members of the board, which voted 10-1 in favor of his proposal.
As for how Lurie is accumulating power, his clever workarounds of laws put in place years ago show impressive creativity, particularly for a newcomer. His creation of four policy chiefs as “deputy-mayor-like” administrators, for example, was a slick maneuver that ignored a voter measure passed in the 1990s that prohibited deputy mayors. The effect is to reduce the number of people who report directly to Lurie and make City Hall more manageable. (His embrace of the skilled city administrator, Carmen Chu, as a “fifth policy advisor” was also wise, given that multiple city offices already report to her.)
Last week’s executive action to create a PermitSF task force to fix the city’s long-broken small-business permitting system is another sly consolidation of power. On its surface, it is yet another “initiative” that Lurie promised would bring together “key city agencies and staff, to develop, prioritize, and implement bold, systematic changes to our permitting process.” The order sets a 100-day goal to flesh out the details.
True, Lurie’s aspirations sound a lot like what other mayors tried before him. They even echo the promises of past mayoral candidates, like City Attorney David Chiu, who in his unsuccessful 2010 bid yearned for consolidation of the many city departments that regulate small businesses and bemoaned a “bureaucracy gone wild.”
Dig deeper, though, and it’s apparent that Lurie’s approach is a savvy effort to take ownership of the problem. To lead PermitSF, he named the head of San Francisco Planning, Rich Hillis, who will work at the direction of Lurie’s economic development chief, Ned Segal. Hillis is the very definition of a “City Hall insider” — candidate Lurie’s punching-bag derogation of the type of people he wanted to replace — having worked in and around city government since the 1990s. (Not coincidentally, Hillis worked alongside Staci Slaughter, Lurie’s chief of staff, when both were early in their careers under Mayor Frank Jordan.)
Tapping Hillis to address the city’s permitting challenges gives the planning chief effective authority over the scandal-plagued Department of Building Inspection. This puts Hillis in charge of both small-business permits and the housing and development authorizations that are the purview of the planning department. Lurie accomplished this without going to voters to reverse a long-ago measure that created DBI, though his directive holds open the option of doing so in the future.
The mayoral diktat gives PermitSF a year to “develop and recommend amendments to [the] City Charter to consider merging key permitting functions into a single department.” The mayor has until mid-2026 to propose voter measures that would change the charter, which is what it would take to unwind DBI entirely. If he can show progress in speeding up San Francisco’s snarled permitting system by then, the Board of Supervisors and voters will gladly go along with killing the oft-disgraced department.
Most impressively, Lurie’s subjugation of DBI came without statutory changes. Yes, Patrick O’Riordan, the well-regarded head of DBI, also is on the SFPermit task force, which is charged with a laundry list of administrative changes. But facts on the ground show that Planning is in control. Last week, a top DBI official, Neville Pereira, abruptly left his job, the department confirmed. At City Hall’s insistence, DBI also postponed a request for proposal it was preparing to replace its 25-year-old permit-tracking system. A DBI spokesman said the technology RFP is now being overseen by Hillis.
Of course, this is just a start. Simply rolling DBI into Planning, unofficially or otherwise, won’t unsnarl permitting in San Francisco. An amusing section of Lurie’s memorandum includes an incomplete list of other city agencies that issue permits or support those that do: Fire Department, Public Works, Public Utilities Commission, Public Health, Municipal Transportation Agency, Office of Cannabis, Entertainment Commission, Controller’s Office, Treasurer and Tax Collector, Office of Economic and Workforce Development, and Department of Technology.
Two of those agencies — the SFFD and Public Utilities Commission — are important and problematic permit issuers from the perspective of reform. Both serve legitimate public safety purposes — fire safety and maintaining water infrastructure, for instance — and both are skilled at protecting their turf. Another pair, Public Health and Public Works, touch small businesses, particularly restaurants, frequently. And other permit-issuers, like the completely ridiculous Office of Cannabis, are mandated by the state, which hobbles permit reform.
For now, Lurie is choosing to put off corralling those other agencies. Segal, the economic development pooh-bah, told me it wouldn’t make sense to reform all permitting issues at once. “So we decided to bite off the two areas” — housing and small business — “where there are the most obvious pain points.”
The mayor and his minions have plenty to lose if this reform turns out to be more huffing and puffing than action. After all, he ran on ridding the city of unnecessary bureaucracy and has made it one of his first problems to tackle. And while Lurie still hasn’t said what PermitSF will actually do to streamline permitting, his team is being clear on who’s in charge and when it expects to have answers.
Lurie has shown voters who backed him that, beginner’s luck or not, he might just have the political chops to do this job.