What is it?

Prop A is a cleanup measure for San Francisco's boards and commissions. It consolidates duplicative commissions, shuts down outdated and unused commissions, and makes the rest easier for the Board of Supervisors to modify.

Fewer commissions

Prop A reduces the number of boards and commissions in the City Charter from 55 to 38, by moving 9 into the Municipal Code and eliminating or merging 8 others.

Boards and commissions with overlapping duties are merged into one.

Commissions that have sat idle for years are eliminated, like the Special Strike Committee, which a state labor board ruled can no longer legally convene. So are commissions that still meet but no longer serve a purpose, like the Sanitation and Streets Commission, which oversees a department that no longer exists.

The 9 commissions that move into the Municipal Code, like the Human Services Commission, keep operating as they do today, but the Board could later change or dissolve them by ordinance instead of by ballot measure.

Finally, it will run this same process every ten years, so that the Board can keep the number of commissions down and make sure they are still serving a useful purpose.

History

Prop A is the outcome of 2024's Prop E, which created the Commission Streamlining Task Force. The task force assembled the city's first full list of all commissions, studied their duties, outcomes, and impacts, and ultimately made a set of recommendations to the Board of Supervisors. The task force recommended many more changes than the Board of Supervisors ultimately adopted, but the Board voted to place their pared-down measure on the ballot.

The task force recommended shrinking the number of boards and commissions to 87 (plus 41 not in scope of their work) by eliminating 36 inactive bodies, merging 2 duplicative bodies, and eliminating 24 active bodies that were no longer needed. Ultimately, it would have shrunk the number or Chartered bodies from 55 to 24, and administrative code bodies from 76 to 63.

Read the full annotated legal text →

Why vote Yes?

Prop A is a common-sense solution to an obvious problem: City Hall has too much bureaucracy that slows everything down. Complex organizations with tens of thousands of employees need Directly Responsible Individuals who can be held accountable for failures. The ultimate Directly Responsible Individual is the Mayor, and voters decide if he or she has done a good job. But currently the Mayor lacks the power to hold individuals accountable in many departments because they are shielded by commissions that don't answer to the Mayor. What we get instead is diffusion of responsibility, chaos, and failure. Prop A fixes that.

A San Francisco Civil Grand Jury report counted 152 commissions cluttering City Hall. Every commission and unaccountable layer of bureaucracy blurs responsibility, so when something fails nobody is responsible and nothing is fixed. Two decades of well-intentioned but poorly executed ballot measures built this broken system, and it's time to fix it.

Prop A restores a functional chain of command so that individuals are clearly responsible for success or failure. Departments will answer to elected individuals, not unelected commissioners, so voters can actually hold them accountable. Every link in the chain of command will now end with you. Vote yes on Prop A.