SF Standard column: How a moderate elected official and a linchpin in Daniel Lurie's moderate coalition could lose his job over ... a traffic fight
https://sfstandard.com/opinion/2025/06/23/joel-engardio-survive-recall-supervisor/
Published Jun. 23, 2025 • 6:00am
The San Francisco Standard
Joel Engardio has a plaque over his desk: “What would Jimmy Carter do?”
It’s not the kind of question your typical poll-minded pol would ask. And that’s the point: The Sunset district’s supervisor isn’t, or at least doesn’t want to be, a politician who does only what is necessary to keep getting himself elected.
He told me about the plaque last fall, less than three weeks before voters elected Donald Trump and Daniel Lurie, when I asked him about a decidedly less momentous item on the upcoming ballot. I wanted to know if he was worried that his advocacy for a voter measure that would shutter a portion of the Great Highway, the notorious Proposition K, would ruin his political career.
“Sometimes you are faced with very difficult decisions, and it’s better to do the right thing versus the politically expedient thing,” he said.
That Engardio hadn’t been expedient is now abundantly clear.
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