Daniel Lurie’s budget-by-fire
Does he squander goodwill with necessary cuts? Or kick the can down the road with accounting trickery? Either way, budget season may end in tears.
Editor-at-large, The San Francisco Standard
Published May 29, 2025 • 7:33am
After nearly five months of executive-directive promulgating, collaborative legislating, elaborate policymaking, and all-around good-vibe generating, Daniel Lurie arrives Friday at the most important day of his young mayoralty: the budget reaping.
For his first budget for the city and county of San Francisco — the current one is just shy of $16 billion — Lurie may be forced to spend his considerable political capital by pissing off a number of important constituencies. Either that, or he’ll thread the needle of pleasing as many people as possible. A tough job, sure. It’s the one he asked for.
That the budget will be balanced is not a subject of suspense — the city charter requires it. It’s how it gets balanced that matters. Past mayors have used all manner of accounting gimmicks to make the massive municipal ledger pencil out: liberal borrowing from reserve accounts, rosy assumptions about revenues yet to come, pushing out spending to future years, and so on.
Lurie has promised repeatedly he’ll avoid these cosmetic fixes that delay, rather than eliminate, a day of reckoning. Yet despite a passel of reports this week about services he is not chopping — cops, firefighters, DAs, public defenders — Lurie’s team has been mum about where he’ll slash.
As of early Wednesday, even well-connected city department pooh-bahs and elected officials told me they were still in the dark about the mayor’s budget determinations. Several hours later, The Standard reported there will be layoffs, perhaps around 150 in total. But the mayor will look to slim down city rolls not by cutting large numbers of people but by eliminating vacant positions. The whacking of nonexistent people could be in the neighborhood of 1,000 jobs, my colleagues reported.
Lurie is about to enter the lion’s den.
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