The political education of Daniel Lurie began in earnest last week, with the messy demise of the 200-hour supervisor, Beya Alcaraz.
This is a painful moment for the mayor, who is still getting used to the rough-and-tumble aspects of the job he repeatedly says he loves. (He said so again Friday.) His pain undoubtedly pales in comparison to that of Alcaraz, a young woman who was rapidly swept up in and then spat out by the city’s nasty political culture.
Like any teachable moment, Lurie has an opportunity to learn from this fiasco. He forthrightly suggested as much last week. “It’s not the first time that I’ve made a mistake,” he told reporters Friday. “It will not be the last time I make a mistake, but I always am going to get better and stronger.”
The mayor declined to give any details about why the vetting of Alcaraz was so sloppy, who did (and didn’t) do their homework, and so on. Nevertheless, his willingness to accept blame came off as the true sentiments of a fundamentally decent person whose character is one of the reasons voters elected him a year ago.
Make no mistake, though, the mayor’s own-goal over Alcaraz marks a potential turning point for him. Still deservedly popular, and riding high off of his nimble handling of Donald Trump’s threatened federal invasion last month, Lurie has multiple tests on the near-term horizon. If he flunks any of them, his political fortunes could fall further.
First off, he needs to quickly try again to name a supervisor for District 4, and I have some suggestions for him below on how to think about the challenge. Then, he must assure passage of his hot-button housing rezoning plan and build support for two ballot measures to save the region’s mass-transit systems.
In December, his budget office will fire the first salvo in what promises to be a bruising battle over the city’s finances. And in trying to achieve all this and more, the mayor will confront an emboldened progressive opposition that is marshalling its anti-business forces on everything from (opens in new tab)passing new taxes (opens in new tab) to banning autonomous vehicles.
It would be a lot for any politician, let alone one who has now displayed his inexperience for all to see.
What comes next
It’s true that better vetting would have turned up a few disqualifying facts about Alcaraz. She wasn’t the shopkeeper she claimed to be. She had bragged to the new owner of her pet store that she hadn’t properly paid taxes. Her hastily-crafted origin story referenced her struggles to build a storage shed for her store in the face of the city’s permitting dysfunction.
But as The Standard reported Saturday, such a shed never existed. It was, at best, an embellishment, and, at worst, a total fabrication by Alcaraz. A few phone calls or a site visit by the mayor’s team would have raised multiple red flags. (The Standard detailed on Monday how the mayor plans to change his vetting process, including by requiring outreach to community leaders.)
But even these embarrassing facts might have been survivable if Alcaraz were qualified for the job in the first place. On the contrary, her total lack of preparation, which I detailed last week, was not a secret to Lurie. “This neighborhood deserves to be represented by one of its own, grounded in people, not politics,” the mayor said at Alcaraz’s swearing-in ceremony, as if political or government experience were less important than owning a letterman jacket from St. Ignatius.
As one member of the Board of Supervisors told me before Alcaraz resigned: “It’s as if he thinks anyone can do this job.”
This leads us to the question of what comes next.
To state the obvious, Lurie is in a pickle. The word around City Hall is that the mayor had a tough time finding someone to take the D4 job. You can see why: A successful candidate needed to be a Sunset resident who would not only support Lurie’s rezoning plan, which is unpopular in the low-density western part of the city, but who also didn’t publicly support the Great Highway-closing Prop K. (Alcaraz was suspiciously cagey about how she voted on the latter.)
What would seem to make the most sense at this point would be to find a nearly or already retired city official with a spotless service record and deep knowledge of the city and put them in the role as a caretaker for seven months — then have that person bow out of the election in June to fill out recalled former Supervisor Joel Engardio’s term.
That person would be expected to vote for rezoning, assuring the mayor a victory there, and also support a ballot measure to re-open the Great Highway — which faces dubious prospects with a citywide electorate that voted to close it and increasingly loves the Sunset Dunes park that sits on the shuttered roadway.
A problem with a senior-level, non-retired city employee is that they’d likely take a pay cut to be a supervisor, from around $300,000 a year to $175,000. And such a move would negatively affect the calculation of their pension. Unretiring a retired official is possible but complicated; Interim Police Chief Paul Yep has faced this conundrum.
More problematic still is that appointing a caretaker with no plans to run for the seat would mean the mayor would be giving up the prospect of electing a long-term ally to the board — an opportunity that may have passed anyway.
There’s an irony in all this for Lurie. When Engardio was fighting for his political survival earlier this year, Lurie stayed above the fray. Engardio didn’t support the mayor’s election — no notable elected official did — and Lurie didn’t support Prop. K, Engardio’s unforgivable sin with Sunset voters. So the mayor kept mum on Engardio, essentially hanging him out to dry.
Still, Lurie could have worked behind the scenes and used his bully pulpit publicly to discourage the recall from ever qualifying for the ballot, arguing that it wasn’t what was best for the city. That would have allowed more time for Engardio to heal the wounds in his district and show residents the value of its new park.
Now the mayor is desperately seeking a knowledgeable public servant who agrees with him on issues like housing, public safety, schools, and small businesses, someone who will be a rock-solid vote for him on the Board of Supervisors, not because they owed him ever-dying loyalty for plucking them from obscurity like Alcaraz would have, but because they simply agreed with him on policy issues.
Someone like Joel Engardio.
That’s a tough lesson to learn.