Supervisor Matt Dorsey kicked up a typically San Franciscan shitstorm last month by having the temerity to suggest that a landmark gay rights law has outlived its usefulness.
More to the point, argued the gay legislator, who is vice-chair of the Board of Supervisors’ budget committee, the 1996 Equal Benefits Ordinance is wasting taxpayers’ money.
This is an encouraging, if possibly quixotic, effort — and Dorsey may well fail, just as Rafael Mandelman, the board’s president, recently was smacked down for trying to eliminate a powerless advisory committee. But the proposal represents at least the hint that those tasked with running San Francisco are moving away from performative acts of virtue-signaling and focusing instead on commonsense reforms that benefit the city.
The question, to paraphrase legendary Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley: Is San Francisco ready for reform?
The answer is a resounding maybe.
It is altogether fitting that the vehicle for this conversation is an epic accomplishment for the LGBTQ+ community — and that Dorsey’s the person rethinking it. As a longtime spokesman for the city attorney’s office, he was a foot-soldier in the fight for same-sex marriage that came in the wake of San Francisco’s Equal Benefits law. That three-decade-old measure prevents companies that don’t offer domestic-partner benefits from bidding for city and county contracts.
The need for such a law changed in 2015, when the U.S. Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage. Since then, fewer companies offer domestic-partner benefits, the result being less competition for San Francisco’s business. Seeing this, Dorsey asked the board’s budget and legislative analyst to study the costs of denying contracts to companies that don’t comply with a now-obsolete mandate. He noted that even a 5% savings on city contracts — a reasonable starting point for opening bidding on projects that often get a single offer or none at all — might yield nearly $300 million for the city annually.
But predictably, his move — for now, simply a request for information that might lead to legislation — provoked howls of outrage, particularly from older LGBTQ+ leaders who fought for the bill. Representative was an essay in the Bay Area Reporter by former Supervisor Jeff Sheehy that asked: “Where’s our City Hall champion?”
In fact, Dorsey’s move is a kind of Nixon-to-China moment for San Francisco’s LGTBQ+ community. It very likely takes a champion of gay rights to say it’s time for a different fight; in this case, the battle to clean up the city’s out-of-control finances.
“I yield to no one in my commitment to LGBTQ equality and marriage rights,” Dorsey told me last week when we met in the cafe of the Equinox gym on Market Street, where he works out. “But it seems odd to me that after arguing that domestic partnerships weren’t good enough, that this was second-class citizenship and that gay and lesbian couples deserve the full rights and responsibilities of marriage, and then we get it, that now we’ve got to fight for domestic partnerships to the point that we exclude people who don’t offer them.”
The board being on recess, Dorsey was casually clad when we met, sporting a white baseball cap with a gold “V” for Vanderbilt, the Southern university that plans to open a San Francisco campus in a building in his South of Market district. The point of the ordinance he is targeting, Dorsey said, was not to boost domestic partnerships. It was to protect gay and lesbian couples in the absence of marriage equality.
“Domestic partnership just isn’t a gay issue anymore,” he said.
Dorsey himself got married this year. His husband is a Brazilian immigrant, and President Donald Trump’s cancellation of visas unnerved the couple, who haven’t yet made an announcement, exchanged rings, or gone on a honeymoon. In an op-ed explaining his legislative inquiry, Dorsey floated the concept of reinstating domestic-partner bidding restrictions if Trump were to threaten same-sex marriage.
“I get that there are people who don’t believe in marriage and would just be more comfortable with the civil situation, and I respect that,” he told me. “I’m not saying we should do away with domestic partnerships. What I am saying is, I don’t think it’s worth the premium we are imposing on taxpayers that we will forbid companies that don’t offer domestic partnerships from participating in public-sector procurement.”
Dorsey said he is unconcerned that his effort might hurt him politically: “The feedback I have gotten from people who are familiar with this is that I’m right and that it’s a fight worth taking.”
Still, he knows the facts won’t always carry the day, and it’s almost as if he sees this one proposal as an effort to nudge the public dialogue into areas that previously weren’t possible — a phenomenon policy nerds refer to as the Overton window. “I’m confident I’m going to win this argument,” he said. “But I may not win this fight. At the end of the day, if we’re going to make this progress, it can’t all be slam dunks.”
More sacred cows to kill
Dorsey isn’t the only elected official trying to score points for Team Efficiency. In June, City Attorney David Chiu, a former supervisor and state assembly member, introduced legislation to eliminate the laughably long list of duplicative reporting requirements imposed on city departments.
Working with a Stanford AI tool, Chiu identified 528 such reports, 36% of which he has flagged for modification or deletion. These include reports on sidewalk newspaper boxes (which largely don’t exist anymore) and late-book fines (which the library eliminated), as well as all kinds of reports nobody reads.
For example, the Planning Department recently admitted to overreporting the number of housing evictions by 1,600, or 40%, in its 2023 Housing Balance Report. “While corrected in the subsequent edition, no one seemed to have noticed this dramatically misreported yet critical figure,” department staff wrote in a report to the Planning Commission, which subsequently approved the Chiu legislation.
Chiu’s measure, which will go before a board committee next month, is a step in the right direction, as is Dorsey’s. They are both previews of the much larger process that will play out next year when Mayor Daniel Lurie’s office leads a comprehensive rewrite of the city charter. Lurie has been mum on Dorsey’s good-government proposal. That continues a pattern of the otherwise loquacious mayor keeping quiet on matters that would seem to be in the center of his policy target; supporting the moderate Supervisor Joel Engardio in his recall campaign and backing Mandelman’s contracting measure come to mind.
San Francisco’s governance pipes have decades of sludge that need to be cleaned out. Some of it is well-meaning but outdated. Some is intentionally inserted by lawmakers to ensure that nothing much changes. Making the mess go away will take real leadership. Lurie has shown an appetite for reform in areas like permitting and homelessness policy. Dorsey and Chiu are wonking out in the realm of competitive bidding and time-consuming reporting requirements.
To make the city work better, we’re going to need a lot more of this.