Lurie’s Charter Reset Is a Masterclass

One toilet. $1.7 million. Twelve departments. That’s what San Francisco’s city charter looks like in the real world, not in a policy brief. A single public toilet in Noe Valley required layers of approvals, multiple waivers, and fragmented oversight to produce a delayed, overpriced bathroom. Not because government is inherently incompetent. Because SF’s charter was engineered, piece by piece, to make it this way.

Mayor Daniel Lurie is now proposing to rewrite the blueprints. It’s the city’s first comprehensive charter reform in 30 years, and if it works, it changes everything.

The Charter Nobody Can Read

San Francisco’s city charter is nearly 540 pages, making it the longest city charter in the country. It’s been amended more than 100 times since its last comprehensive overhaul in 1995. The SF Chronicle’s editorial board called SF’s accumulated laws “a hoarder’s house of clutter.” That’s not metaphor. That’s a description of a document that no ordinary person can parse, which is exactly the point.

Lurie put it plainly: the charter “only works for the people who know how to manipulate it, not everyday San Franciscans.” Think of it like a codebase that’s been patched 100 times without refactoring. At some point you have to rewrite from scratch, not layer on another workaround. The debt compounds until the system collapses under its own weight.

Lurie’s reform package attacks this in three concrete ways.

SF Had 15 Ballot Measures. Oakland Had 3. San Jose Had 1.

When you make it easy to outsource your job to voters, politicians do exactly that.

SF Chronicle coverage of the ballot simplification proposal confirms what Lurie’s video lays out: right now, only 4 of 11 supervisors are needed to put a measure on the ballot. Lurie’s reform raises that to a majority. It also eliminates the mayor’s own unilateral ability to place measures on the ballot, because Lurie believes the mayor should follow the same rules as everyone else. The 2024 voter packet was 15 ballot measures deep, a wall of contradictory and often poorly written law that San Franciscans had to decipher on their own. That’s not democracy. That’s elected officials billing their work to voters.

Some Labor unions are expected to oppose this reform. That tells you something. The proliferation of ballot measures is how they exert power outside normal legislative channels. Cleaning up the ballot calendar limits that leverage. It also forces officials to do their actual jobs.

Who Really Runs San Francisco

San Francisco has more than 150 commissions with 1,200+ commissioners, and those bodies collectively cost $34 million a year to operate. Twenty-one of them are borderline inactive. Many can’t even reach quorum.

This is not an accident. GrowSF’s analysis documented what happened step by step. Under Willie Brown’s first term as mayor, the mayor controlled 19 city departments and the Board of Supervisors controlled 3. Under London Breed, those numbers had flipped: mayor 12, Board 16. That’s not drift. That’s political engineering.

Aaron Peskin is the person most responsible for this mess. He was first elected to the Board in 2000 and spent the next two decades engineering a quiet transfer of executive power away from the mayor and into unelected commissions controlled by the Board. Lowering the threshold to block mayoral appointees from a two-thirds supermajority to a simple majority. Stripping control of the Planning Commission, the Police Commission, Public Works, and the MTA from the mayor’s office, one charter amendment at a time. Notably, during the years he was out of office from 2009 to 2016, these attacks stopped. The moment he returned in 2017, they resumed.

The departments the mayor still controls, Fire, Health, Libraries, Recreation and Parks, are broadly regarded as the city’s better-run agencies. The ones controlled by the Board, Police, Planning, MTA, Public Works, have been mired in dysfunction for years. The pattern is not a coincidence.

Lurie’s reform fixes this directly: the mayor would gain the ability to hire and remove department heads and reorganize departments when government isn’t working. Unelected commissioners would become accountable to the leaders who appoint them. Checks and balances preserved, but the accountability chain restored.

I’ve said it before: defund the commissions and just have normal city employees who actually do their jobs. Commissions and nonprofits are cement SF’s waste and incompetence. They’re squandering the $14B annual budget. Lurie’s proposal doesn’t go quite that far, but it’s the first serious structural move in the right direction in three decades.

Lurie Is Already Winning

Here’s what matters: this isn’t just a proposal from a politician who’s new to the job. Lurie already passed a unanimous contracting reform bill in September 2025. He launched PermitSF in February 2025, consolidating SF’s 30 different permitting software systems into one, enrolling 8,000+ businesses, waiving $4.5 million in permit fees, and shaving up to 10 days off the building permit process.

The charter reform package is the big one. It is slated to go to SF voters in November 2026.

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Blake Byers

@byersblake

This may seem like some small detail, but you are witnessing a masterclass. I was born in SF and I’ve never been more optimistic that SF can be run for everyone that lives here and not the corrupt few.

Mar 6, 2026

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Blake Byers was born in SF. He spent a decade as a partner at GV, scaling the fund from $50 million to $2.5 billion. He co-founded NewLimit with Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong. He’s not a casual cheerleader. When he says he’s never been more optimistic that SF can be run for everyone who lives here and not the corrupt few, that’s a calibrated statement from someone who’s watched this city closely for a long time.

The charter reform package goes to SF voters in November 2026. Vote yes. And in the meantime, watch what happens when a mayor is finally allowed to run a city. The point of elections is accountability. Lurie is proving it works.