Daniel Lurie's power quartet
Editor-at-large
The San Francisco Standard
Published Jan. 07, 2025 • 9:00am
Daniel Lurie has promised that accountability will be the watchword of his mayoral administration. Yet, like so many of the promises candidates make — especially first-time politicians making the ultimate grass-is-greener pitch to voters — he hasn’t articulated exactly how he’ll hold himself to account.
For the time being, I’ve worked out a shorthand way of judging whether Lurie is on the right track: If he’s doing things differently than they’ve been done before, that’s a positive sign.
In that regard, his approach to running City Hall is a step in the right direction. As of Tuesday morning, one day before he takes office, the mayor-elect has solidified his team of four policy chiefs who will advise him on a bureaucracy that is more unwieldy than a small city needs it to be.
The last two of these picks fell into place in the last two days, just in time for Wednesday’s inauguration. They are Kunal Modi, a management consultant, whose remit covers departments related to “health, homelessness, and family services,” and Alicia John-Baptiste, CEO of the civic-affairs think tank SPUR and previously a longtime city employee, whose areas are “infrastructure, climate, and mobility.”
Together with economic development and housing chief Ned Segal, an investment banker who became CFO of Twitter, and Paul Yep, a former San Francisco Police Department captain, who’ll oversee public safety, the four promise to be an experiment in soft power in City Hall.
The question: Can an accomplished foursome with varied career experiences but no statutory responsibility over the departments they will attempt to coordinate make a city run more efficiently?
Continue here.