A Lot Can Go Wrong in a San Francisco Mayoral Transition. I Would Know

Daniel Lurie ran a successful campaign for San Francisco mayor by leaning into his status as an outsider, going so far as to say of Mayor London Breed and his other opponents, “Look where all their experience has gotten us.”

But when Lurie takes the oath of office Wednesday afternoon, he will be the chief insider — inheriting responsibility for a city government with a $16 billion budget and sprawling bureaucracy with some 34,000 employees.

It means firing department heads who don’t align with your priorities — or inviting them to leave, hiring new ones, filling dozens of city commissions, meeting with new and old members of the Board of Supervisors and just plain getting to know the people who will be reporting to you.

In recent decades, transitions from one mayor to the next in San Francisco have happened following assassinations, the election of a mayor to higher office, the sudden death of a mayor and the removal of the acting mayor for someone else.

This transition is pretty orderly by comparison. But even routine transitions can be rocky.

In 1988, I worked for Art Agnos when he took over as mayor for Dianne Feinstein, who somewhat reluctantly left office due to term limits. Agnos and Feinstein were not allies or even friendly, and it showed in the transition.

“She really had a tough time with it,” Agnos said this week. “And she cleared out the office. All the furniture was gone when we got there.”

No desk. No conference table. Fortunately, Agnos kept some Feinstein staffers, like unpaid protocol chief Charlotte Mailliard-Swig, who helped Agnos find furniture.

For months, Feinstein and Agnos had a very public argument about the $180 million deficit he inherited from her. That was not helpful.

Lurie will have a place to sit in his new office, but almost immediately, he’ll face a massive city budget deficit of more than $800 million — and he’ll be working with the people in charge of his predecessor’s spending plan.

“They kept all of Mayor Breed’s budget staff, including her budget director,” said Sean Elsbernd, Breed’s chief of staff. “And I think it would have been a disaster to try to bring in someone new this fiscal year. Hiring, budgeting analysts — just through the regular process ain’t easy.”

That may well change once the new mayor submits his first city budget to the Board of Supervisors. But for now, that continuity will save time and minimize disruption.

Meanwhile, Lurie will certainly put his own imprint on the city government he leads. He’ll do that by his appointments, staff, public comments and visibility, and simply responding to inevitable crises.

But there’s an old expression in politics that “you campaign in poetry and govern in prose.” It suggests that running for office requires inspirational speeches and grand ideas that captivate voters, while actually running something requires less exciting qualities like practicality, compromise and accountability.

Candidates can make promises or policy plans — as Lurie did — without knowing the limitations they’ll face from pending litigation they don’t have knowledge of due to attorney/client privilege.

For example, Lurie said he wanted to increase the use of ankle monitors to keep tabs on people awaiting trial for drug-related charges. “I mean, that’s, in concept, a wonderful idea,” Elsbernd said. “But there is a whole load of litigation about those right now that are significantly hampering Sheriff [Paul] Miyamoto, who’s responsible for that. The mayor is not. The sheriff is. And the judges of the Superior Court are.”

New mayors can make all the plans they want, but as Agnos often said, “When you’re mayor, you don’t choose the issues. The issues choose you.”

An obvious example: earthquakes or some other natural disaster that strikes unexpectedly. Lurie’s transition chief, Sara Fenske Bahat, said they’ve been in touch with the Department of Emergency Management for weeks “to make sure that the team going in is connected to that team before tomorrow.”

Fenske Bahat was working under New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani when Michael Bloomberg took over. She says it’s important for change, which Lurie is promising, to be “in the spirit of the culture of this place, right? This is a place that embraces change. This is a place that embraces outsiders. That wants to innovate. This is a place that wants to be respected for the uniqueness of the city.”

Jeff Cretan, Mayor Breed’s press secretary, noted that the push for change should be balanced with continuity for the sake of the thousands of civil servants who will continue working with the city once Breed leaves.

“There will be pushes for new ideas,” Cretan said. “But the key thing is to make sure that the incoming administration understands all the things that are happening in the city … and so a lot of that [transition] work is making sure people are set up for that work to continue.”

Cretan said a lot of the transition is making sure Lurie is “aware of what he will be facing and what his team will be facing. But I don’t think it’s our job to be like, ‘This is how you need to do your job.’”

Being a relative outsider to city government comes with one big advantage.

“I don’t owe anybody anything,” Lurie told KQED. “And so, I walk into that office unencumbered.”

That’s a mixed bag.

It means he can balance the budget by touching sacred cows that, for example, city unions might not want to see cut. At the same time, Elsbernd said, there are downsides that come with that fresh set of eyes.

“The benefit of being inside the building,” he said, “it’s not only do you see around corners, but you see around corners … and you see where the land mines are because you’ve landed on those land mines of the past.”

And as former Mayor Agnos notes, the toughest issues will find you “like heat-seeking missiles.”

“If it’s bad news, everybody ducks, and it comes straight into the mayor’s office and Room 200 [the mayor’s office at City Hall] and hits you right between the eyes.”

Lurie may or may not enjoy a honeymoon in the coming months, but either way, he’ll soon be held accountable for all the issues he promised to fix, including homelessness, drug overdoses and revitalizing downtown. He’ll need all the luck and goodwill he can get.

Jan. 8: A previous version of this story misstated the year that Art Agnos took office as San Francisco mayor.