Sitting as the jewel of the North Coast of California, San Francisco has for almost two centuries been a destination for travelers and the ambitious, but in the last twenty years, the situation has markedly changed and deteriorated such that there are now so many more here who are desperate, abandoned, addicted, and forsaken, as bad as any day on the Barbary Coast of 150 years ago. We San Franciscans and visitors are daily witnesses to the unacceptable, from children witnessing intravenous drug use, to incompetently executed construction projects that take decades rather than a year or two, to suffering the highest car-break in rate in the nation.
We therefore demand that the Mayor, the Board of Supervisors and other city departments:
- Quickly craft policies using evidence-based best practices* for daily life in urban planning, criminal justice, healthcare, education, transit, pension reform, housing, policing, and social work for all San Franciscans.
- Transition both the responsibilities and financial burden to the State of California to medically treat and aid the incompetent, and insist on restoring State Mental Health Hospitals to their pre-Governor Reagan budgets and capacities.
- Cease engaging in arguments and disputes that are not focused on the everyday life of San Franciscans, and rather shift attention to city’s day to day work such as filling potholes, funding pensions, having the public transportation run on time, collecting trash, catching criminals, and the other responsibilities of city government.
- Publish on a third-party website measurable goals and meaningful statistics granted under the “Sunshine Ordinance,” including meaningful benchmarks from comparable cities from number of gardeners, to the amount of traffic tickets for double parking, to the conviction time sentenced and then served for murder.
- Name names when gross incompetence results in the lessening of the quality of life, from property crime to failed criminal prosecutions to construction timeline delays: public employees must be accountable to the public, and have their reputations both on the line, and on-line.
- Improve public safety, especially for vulnerable residents - elderly, disabled and children - which must be measured with quantitative metrics and qualitative unbiased surveys, and again published on a third party website.
- Eliminate public, illegal drug use on city sidewalks, and in both public transit stations and vehicles. We insist that aiding the suffering is entirely different than enabling them.
- Conserve those unable or unwilling to govern themselves, who are utterly unable to participate as functional residents of a city.
- Abide by the the wise adage of “principles, not personalities.” San Francisco must govern itself under the law, rather than by the force of personality.
- Refuse the pressures of highly vocal, and willfully uninformed citizens, and insist on measurable, trackable progress for better lives for all San Franciscans.
