Phil Ginsburg had worked for the city of San Francisco for six years when he was offered a career-changing opportunity. It didn’t start well.
Days after he took up the role of Mayor Gavin Newsom’s chief of staff in 2006, news broke that Newsom was having an affair with his friend’s wife. It would only get crazier from there, Ginsburg recalled to me over lunch last week.
“A tiger attack, an oil spill, a reelection, two budget crises …” He could go on.
But surviving the whirlwind of the Newsom years would prepare Ginsburg for his next job, the one that would actually cement his legacy. As general manager of the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department, he’d go on to see plenty more drama from his baronial perch at McLaren Lodge, the department’s 129-year-old headquarters at the foot of Golden Gate Park.
Over salmon bowls at an Asian-fusion restaurant on Clement Street, Ginsburg and I talked about the highs and lows of his 16 years atop the city’s parks. He had announced the day before that at year’s end he’ll step down from the job he held under five mayors. He’s leaving to be president of Resources Legacy Fund, a Sacramento-based nonprofit that handed out $85 million in conservation grants last year.
Ginsburg, 58, wore several city hats before working directly for Newsom. He was a labor lawyer in the city attorney’s office and ran the Department of Human Resources. After a little less than two years as Newsom’s right hand, he called it quits and briefly became a stay-at-home dad. That lasted until he applied to become head of Rec and Park in 2009.
“They didn’t pick me because I had expertise in horticulture or recreational programming,” he said, “but because their labor relations were a mess, and because they knew I love kids, nature, and sports.”
Given the depth of his knowledge of where the bodies are buried inside San Francisco government, I asked Ginsburg what he would do to make it operate better. Pretend you’re a benevolent dictator, I said — how would you overhaul the city?
He offered a proposal with zero chances of happening soon: creating a hybrid Board of Supervisors, with some members elected by citywide vote and some voted in by district. Such a fix, he believes, would allow at least some representatives to focus on what’s best for the city as a whole, as opposed to just their neighborhoods.
He also advocated for civil-service reform, which he’d worked on earlier in his career. This effort, which might actually be addressed next year, would alter rules that make it difficult to prune the city’s workforce. An example is the practice of “bumping,” which allows longer-tenured employees who have lost their positions to take the job of a shorter-tenured worker elsewhere in the bureaucracy. “It’s the dumbest, most arcane process that you can lay somebody off at Rec and Park and they can end up bouncing somebody at the Port,” he said.
Ginsburg also pines for a more harmonious environment in city government. “We should all really refocus on being civil and kind to one another,” he said, specifically praising Mayor Daniel Lurie for lowering the partisan temperature and calling out a frequent nemesis, former Supervisor Aaron Peskin, for raising it.
Then we moved on to the topic he was most keen to discuss: his achievements running the city’s parks. Surprisingly, given that Ginsburg oversaw some $1.5 billion in capital projects during his tenure, he emphasized the “recreation,” not the “parks,” side of the department. In particular, he highlighted the Teen Outdoor Experience program, which each summer brings kids in the juvenile probation system to Camp Mather, the city’s campground near Yosemite.
“These are kids that wouldn’t flinch upon hearing a gunshot, but you put them outside under the stars, and you watch them become, literally before your eyes, kids again,” he marveled.
He’s also proud of a pandemic-era program that he helped stand up to bring children into his department’s recreation centers when schools were shuttered.
“The school board members at the time wouldn’t allow us to call what we were doing ‘community learning hubs,’ so they were officially called ‘community hubs,’” he said. The kids “were still plugging into their online classes, but we were feeding them and making sure that they were getting some exercise. We were keeping them safe and healthy.”
Of his department’s biggest accomplishments, he cites some controversial projects and some beloved ones. These include Sunset Dunes, the creation of which ignited a firestorm that still hasn’t abated; JFK Promenade, the result of a bitter fight to close JFK Drive in Golden Gate Park; the Beach Chalet soccer fields, beloved by soccer families and hated by preservationist groups; and Francisco Park, the enchanting Russian Hill greenspace that opened on a formerly derelict site in 2022.
But the project that he is “absolutely 100% most proud of” is India Basin Waterfront Park, the $225 million re-envisioning of the southern shoreline. It checks all of Ginsburg’s boxes because it involved $75 million in private donations, a hallmark of his reign, and serves a section of the city, the Bayview-Hunters Point, that had been a dumping ground for too long.
Neighbors didn’t trust that anything good would come of the development. The key, he said, was explaining how the park would help the neighborhood and listening to local concerns. “We would normally do three community meetings when we design a park project,” he said. “We might have done a hundred there.”
Ginsburg is obviously distressed that his departure coincides with the scandal at the nonprofit San Francisco Parks Alliance, given its relationship with Rec and Park. Calling that debacle the “biggest disappointment in my career,” he said he alerted city officials when he learned the depth of the problem, which involved Parks Alliance staff allegedly spending restricted funds on unauthorized uses.
“I’m furious with them,” he said. “I’m furious with their staff. I’m furious with their board members who just slipped into the shadows. They really let our park system, including all of the community groups that sweat for it, down.”
Being head of a city’s parks brings plenty of criticism, and Ginsburg is a frequent target as an ally of the urbanist contingent in civic affairs. He zips around town on an e-bike, revels in a car-free JFK Drive, and unabashedly supports Sunset Dunes. He said, though, that he is not a car-hating idealogue. “We have three cars, including a truck, which I’m really proud of. I live on the west side. And I hate traffic as much as anybody.”
As a way of explaining the flak he takes, Ginsburg inevitably invokes the TV show “Parks and Recreation.” He identifies with the Leslie Knope character played by Amy Poehler. “She says, ‘I never hear people yelling at me. They’re just loving their parks loudly,’” he said, before warming up to what felt like a valedictory statement about his long tenure.
“I have tremendous respect for folks that may not see the world the same way that I do or who apply different values to their open space. That’s what makes the job so beautiful. There’s 800,000 of us. Each one of us is uniquely applying our own life experience and our own value system to how open space should be managed, and it is important to acknowledge that, to listen to it, and to try to achieve balance, so that our parks are for everyone.”
The departing parks chief and I sat over lunch for so long that we were the last customers in the restaurant. I asked him the secret of his longevity. “You’ve got to have thick skin,” he said. “That doesn’t mean nothing bothers me.”
He said he sleeps well at night, knowing two things: “I know that I left it all on the field. I gave my career everything I have. And I know that the job of a civil servant is to leave the thing you’re stewarding — in my case, parks — better than when you found it.”
The city will miss Ginsburg, but the feeling will be mutual.