SF Labor Unions, Community Groups Decry Budget Cuts at City Hall

More than 1,000 labor and community organizers flooded the steps of San Francisco’s City Hall on Wednesday to protest Mayor Daniel Lurie’s proposed budget, which city workers and activists have said insufficiently protects public services.

“This proposed budget completely misses the mark,” said Jennifer Friedenbach, the executive director of the city’s Coalition on Homelessness. “It’s really a politics-first budget that really deprioritizes the poorest and most vulnerable San Franciscans.”

The protest was described as “the biggest budget rally in about 20 years in San Francisco history” by Anya Worley-Ziegmann of the People’s Budget Coalition, a collective of nonprofits and activists that organized the rally.

Lurie proposed steep cuts to address the looming $782 million budget shortfall, as well as to bolster the city against the Trump administration’s threat to gut federal funding. That includes eliminating 1,400 city jobs — the vast majority of which currently sit vacant — and around $100 million in grants and other contracts.

While dozens of union members with SEIU Local 1021 and IFPTE Local 21 received layoff notices, not all city departments will see job cuts. Advocates noted that the proposal maintained funding for the city’s police, sheriff, fire, district attorney, public defender and emergency management.

“Some departments are getting increases, those are the SFPD and the sheriff’s office,” Worley-Ziegmann said. “Daniel Lurie has marked them out as essential services, completely ignoring the fact that people need to eat, people need housing, they do not need mass arrests and jails.”

Judy Sorros is a member of SEIU Local 1021 and has spent more than 19 years working for the city. But she was among those who received a layoff notice as a result of Lurie’s budget proposal, just weeks after she celebrated 20 years of the CityBuild program with the mayor and Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi.

“To the mayor: please, you celebrated us, please continue celebrating us by not cutting our program,” Sorros said. “In fact, we could probably use a little boost.”

Other organizers say the cuts could have “devastating” impacts on programs that address food and housing security, such as All My Usos, a nonprofit that provides community resources to San Francisco’s Pacific Islander community.

“You’re cutting the lifeline of many community members,” said Jessica Ponce, a program coordinator with All My Usos. “With these budget cuts, you’re cutting essential services and direct services, especially to families, and limiting their access to a better life.”

While Lurie’s proposed budget includes an additional $2.2 million to the Citywide Food Access Team, organizers say cuts elsewhere will trickle down and impact community-based organizations that partner with the city.

The budget also proposes a restructuring of funding from Proposition C, a ballot measure that voters passed in 2018 to fund housing and homelessness services. The existing language specifies which funding can be used where, leaving millions of dollars unspent.

Lurie’s proposal would reallocate that unused funding to plug holes elsewhere in the budget, sparking fierce opposition from homelessness advocacy groups for prioritizing adult shelter beds over housing for children and families. Friedenbach described the move as a way to create a “big slush fund.”

“For the most part, it would be moving [the money] from kids to grown-ups and from housing to shelter. That is something that we are vehemently opposed to,” she said. “We specifically structured Prop. C because we wanted to see efficient use of resources and that’s what the voters supported.”

Lurie’s office, however, describes the reallocation as a way to unlock funding that may otherwise never be used to address homelessness in the city. In his proposal, that amounts to $90 million over the next three years from the proposition’s revenue.

Rally organizers also pointed to an ongoing lawsuit filed by Airbnb against the city: the company is seeking $120 million from San Francisco, claiming they were forced to overpay taxes.

While California democrats have called on Lurie to take a stand against Airbnb and other companies seeking to claw back money on business taxes, Lurie has instead tried to play ball with big business, to lure their tax base back to San Francisco.

This hasn’t sat well with organizers, who accused Lurie’s proposal of capitulating to “the billionaires and well-connected corporations refusing to pay their fair taxes and suing the City for half of its projected deficit.”

Dozens of protesters filled a budget hearing later in the afternoon with chants and public comments opposing the cuts. The Board of Supervisors has until the end of the month to approve the budget and can request amendments in the meantime.