by Lukas Illa
In December 2025, Mayor Daniel Lurie and Board of Supervisors President Rafael Mandelman called for the creation of a Charter Reform Working Group. As referenced in its name, the working group has been tasked to review the City’s 548-page charter and make recommendations to bring to the ballot in November 2026.
While labor and community organizations have sent delegates to the working group, the Mayor’s office has stacked the working group with representatives from several well-funded, conservative groups with ties to the real estate and tech industries. Among these organizations are Grow SF, a conservative astroturf organization; Abundant SF, which was founded by former policy staffers from London Breed’s administration; the Chamber of Commerce, a long-standing pro-business bully pulpit; the Crankstart Foundation, a charitable organization founded by a right-wing billionaire; and Partnership for SF, a group of Fortune 500 companies attempting to privatize City services.
But one group has been notably influential even before the working group’s founding: San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR), founded in 1959 as San Francisco Planning and Urban Renewal Association. The name change from ”renewal” to “research” in 1977 can be traced to SPUR’s devastating legacy of championing the urban renewal of the mid-to-late 20th century in San Francisco that caused thousands upon thousands of households of color being gentrified from the city. Today, SPUR serves as a policy think tank, making recommendations to city and state policy that largely reflects similar sentiments of pro-development and big business lobbies.
SPUR’s most recent set of policy proposals were released last November, teeing up recommendations that are eerily similar to the alterations being posited by the working group. These include stripping the commissions’ authority to nominate department heads and assigning it to the mayor, eliminating department heads from the charter and placing them in the more easily amendable Administrative Code, and raising the threshold of Supervisors needed to sign into place ballot initiatives from four to a simple majority, which would be subject to a mayor’s veto.
1995 Charter Reform Efforts
But the working group’s collaboration with SPUR is hardly the first battle over rewriting what is essentially San Francisco’s constitution. In 1995, after a long-fought battle to revise the City Charter, voters decisively passed Proposition E that (re)balanced the political scales between the Mayor’s office and the Board of Supervisors by empowering citizen-involved commissions to have greater control over departments, including by enabling the Board of Supervisors to appoint three members of the seven-member-bodies themselves.
At the time, the charter fight concerned the competing influence neighborhood associations and downtown interests had over city governance. The key players representing the downtown and pro-business lobby included the Chamber of Commerce and the Committee on Jobs. Both did not want to see mayoral power weakened and participatory democracy expanded, as the late 1980s saw citizen-led initiatives stymie the “Manhattanization” of San Francisco that the development lobby had so desperately hoped to continue in full force.
While Lurie’s working group hosts similar dynamics (i.e. debates about whether commissions limit efficiencies or protect the voice of the people), the most striking difference is the degree to which right-wing astroturf organizations have not only been involved but invited in to shape the recommendations. The Chamber continues to be a vocal participant in the reform efforts, but groups like Grow SF, and Abundant SF have become the most dominant voices in the room.
A final contradiction to the 1995 charter reform is the particular degree to which the Board feels empowered to cede its role as a legislative check to executive power. Even the most conservative Board members in 1995, like Barbara Kaufman, tried to wrestle power from the departments and grant it to the commissions, but now, with a new majority on the Board, the moderate and conservative bloc on the Board has felt little need to question the move to consolidate mayoral power over commissions, departments, and the Board itself.
Commission Streamlining
In a concurrent endeavor to amend the City’s commission structure, initiated by Proposition E passed in November 2024, the Commission Streamlining Task Force–stacked with mayoral allies–has recommended removing two dozen commissions from the City Charter and shifting them to the administrative code. Additionally, many vital commissions will be eliminated in their entirety, without any contingency plan for their work to be absorbed by other bodies, and those left will have their governance authority stripped and replaced with a paltry “advisory” status. These recommendations underscore the same thesis: to grant the Mayor more and more authority by stripping citizen-involved entities of any influence.
The Charter Reform Working Group and the Commission Streamlining Task Force are being billed as apolitical and good-faith attempts to amend bureaucratic hurdles to effective city governance. Non-corporate community groups contend that these efforts are an all-out attack on citizen-led democracy and a major power move by the tech-oligarchic-aligned political operatives to make it harder for community advocacy to influence San Francisco city policies, while crowning Mayor Lurie with more authority not afforded to any other modern Mayor of San Francisco.
The final Charter Reform Working Group meeting, open to the public, is on Wednesday, March 4 at 3 p.m. at City Hall in Room 201.
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Proposed changes to the City Charter
- Strip the authority from commissions to nominate department heads and give sole authority to the Mayor
- Allow the Mayor to hire Deputy Mayors
- Eliminate departments from the charter and place them in the more easily amendable Administrative Code
- Raise the threshold of the number of required signatures to place initiatives on the ballot from 2% to 5% of registered voters
- Raise the threshold of Supervisors needed to sign on to place initiatives on the ballot from four Supervisors to a majority of Supervisors, subject to mayoral veto
Source: SPUR policy brief, November 2025
