November 2024 General Election

This is a pretty straightforward bond for public school infrastructure in the state. California has a rather precarious funding structure for public schools because of 1978's Proposition 13 and the Gann Limit, which means that annual resource allocations are extremely volatile and depend primarily on the recency of real estate sales and their updated value appraisals, making bonds like this a necessary regular funding mechanism to ensure predictable funding, especially in years when the number of transactions are down and property values are not reassessed for tax purposes.

This is essentially the opposite of 2008's Proposition 8, and enshrines the right to marry regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, etc.

As wildfires become a nearly annual occurrence in the state, this bond will provide critical funding for necessary infrastructure to keep our communities safe from this growing threat.

State laws ensure that random asshats can jam up processes used by cities and counties to acquire affordable housing bonds. This law enables localities to set up these bonds as long as they have a 55% majority vote by the local electorate. Local housing bonds are good, and are generally more precise instruments than their state-wide alternatives.

Abolishes slavery. Slavery is bad.

This law does two things: it sets up a ramped state-wide minimum wage to $18 by 2026, and enables further increases based on inflation and cost of labor. Given that we're just coming off the backs of an inflationary macroeconomic environment, I won't begrudge anyone for voting no on this one, and I think that in general minimum wage laws are a good but limited policy lever for strengthening overall wages. Sectoral bargaining is better. That said, I personally will be voting "yes" on this one.

Costa-Hawkins is a loose, state-wide rent-control measure that caps increases at fixed percentages or inflation, and bans localities from instituting their own rent-control regimes unless they were already established before Costa-Hawkins. Prop 33 eliminates Costa-Hawkins, and enables local communities to enable their own rent control laws. Look, I'd love to get rid of Costa-Hawkins. It sucks. But the mechanism by which this law does this is pretty insane, and sets up literally zero limits on what localities can do in place of Costa-Hawkins. This comes at a time when cities all over the state are fighting back against the state government for enforcing much needed housing regulations. Prop 33 enables these notoriously anti-housing cities to effectively avoid much of the recent pro-housing legislation like AB2011 (CEQA reform), AB2097 (eliminating parking minimums next to transit centers), AB1551 (density bonus), and AB2234 (project timeline enforcement) by designing rent control schemes that make compliance with these laws impossible. Some cities have gone as far as to say this out loud. Most California cities have proven themselves to be untrustworthy when it comes to self-regulating their own housing production, and have fought tooth and nail to ensure that they can avoid state housing regulation. We need to get rid of Costa-Hawkins eventually, but we cannot do it at the expense of badly needed housing production in the state with the worst housing shortage in America. Vote No.

NGOs in California have often received very little oversight over the public money that they have been deputized to spend. This law is a step in the right direction and dictates that 98% of the public health money they receive actually needs to be spent on the sanctioned care and not other infrastructure. The ballot measure is opposed only by one of the most notoriously negligent NGOs in the state, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, which for some reason has dipped its toes into housing advocacy in the last decade. In general, anytime you see something endorsed by the AHF, you can pretty safely assume that you should oppose it.

This law establishes a permanent tax on managed care organizations (MCOs) to support Medi-Cal, California's Medicaid program that provides health coverage for low-income individuals. Major MCOs like Kaiser Permanente, Anthem Blue Cross, and Blue Shield deliver healthcare services through Medi-Cal.

Revenue from the tax will be used to cover Medi-Cal enrollment and administrative expenses immediately. In 2025 and 2026, the tax is expected to generate $2.7 billion for Medi-Cal and health workforce initiatives, with an additional $2 billion directed to the general fund to help offset Medi-Cal costs. Starting in 2027, the tax will also help subsidize drug prices, and replaces the existing, annual, highly political process of funding Medi-Cal. It holds the Governor's mansion to the terms of the original MCO tax.

This law essentially enables larger jail sentences for certain kinds of drug-related offenses by making them felonies instead of misdemeanors. While I am sympathetic to the desire to enforce basic order in public spaces (I live in San Francisco after all), we know from study after study that sentence length deterrence is not an effective mechanism to reduce crime. The basic theory is that when someone has decided to break the law, the difference between a 3 year and 5 year sentence has effectively zero effect on their decision. Each additional year of jail time establishes less and less deterrence, but has a linear impact on taxpayer spending, and an exponential negative impact on rehabilitation and recidivism. It's just not a good system. To effectively combat petty street crime (most of which actually isn't even covered by this law), cities need to actually invest in crime prevention, detectives, and performance management of their local police departments. This law does none of those.

Do not, under any circumstances, rank Aaron Peskin anywhere on your ballot. Overall this is not a great mayoral election. London Breed has been an OK but not great mayor, Lurie is kind of an unknown quantity, and the rest of these clowns are a serious downgrade from Breed. I won't really be happy with any of these outcomes.

This is quite similar to the state-wide Proposition 2, but is specific for San Francisco public schools, which typically face cost challenges of their own due to the high costs of the city.

San Francisco's public hospitals and public spaces could use the funding. We have extremely limited staff for street and sidewalk repair, and our public hospitals are in major need of renovation.

This ballot proposal creates an inspector general position in the controller's office. Such a position would be extremely redundant with the existing office of the City Attorney, the office of the District Attorney, the Sheriff's Office, and the Ethics Commission. Additionally, this new role does not bestow any new functional powers to the IG or any of the existing regulatory bodies, and adds at best an additional layer for coordination. You can vote for it if you want, but it doesn't really do anything significant and is mostly just blustering from Aaron Peskin. I personally will be voting no.

San Francisco's insane public commission system is home to more than a hundred different public commissions staffed by well over a thousand commissioners. Commissioners are not elected officials. They're appointed, often politically, and cannot be effectively managed by the mayor's office or even the board of supervisors. This ballot proposition fundamentally retools the public commission system, instates a hard limit of 65 commissions, and adds considerable accountability to the functioning of these bodies by making them easier to regulate. The mayor and the board of supervisors should be the ones doing this stuff (and they're subject to the best form of public accountability: elections!)

Proposition E is a competing measure to Proposition D, and like Proposition C was placed on the ballot by mayoral candidate Supervisor Aaron Peskin. Proposition E attempts to reform the public commission system, but does so instead by forming a "Task Force" to study the various commissions and present recommendations to the public. It is a feckless regulation that does absolutely nothing. The "task force" is accountable to nobody, and there is no legal mechanism that ensures that what, if any, recommendations it produces are actually implemented.

San Francisco is facing a well documented police staffing shortage, and this proposal is a novel if temporary way to expand staffing by enabling police officers to defer retirement in exchange for additional overtime pay. I do not expect this law to make a significant dent in the staffing shortage, or to fix the numerous problems with police performance in San Francisco, but it's better than nothing.

The existing low-income housing subsidies are not nearly enough, and this modest increase will provide more people with more access to housing in the city. Like Proposition F, I do not expect this law to make any serious improvements to housing subsidies or effectively combat the high costs of housing in San Francisco in general, but it's a relatively cheap fix that is better than doing nothing.

This brings the retirement age for San Francisco's firefighters back to 55, the age it was in 2012. Firefighters have difficult jobs with elevated health risks such as cancer, and we're not facing nearly the staffing shortage here as we are with the police.

Gives 911 dispatchers, who do incredible work, access to retirement benefits. In general we need far more of these people and we should make their jobs as attractive as we can make them. This law does other good things for nurses and other public health workers as well, but the retirement benefits for 911 dispatchers is why you should vote yes.

San Francisco currently houses six different youth related activity departments, in addition to the San Francisco Unified School District. Funding for these things is spread needlessly thin and has tons of extra cost built in because of the redundancy. This law unifies these systems into a single council, which should reduce costs, improve quality of service, and increase oversight.

Bans cars on the Great Highway. Cars are bad.

Look, I'm an Uber employee and cannot in good faith tell you that my explanation for this isn't at least partially self interested, but I will just say that gross receipt taxes in general are not a great funding system, and this nominal tax increase will barely put a dent in Muni's funding cliff. To properly fix Muni's funding problem, you need a massive investment like 2022's Proposition A which unfortunately did not pass. This measure seems pretty obviously motivated by populist rage at self-driving cars, and it will not actually lead to significant changes to ride-sharing consumption or Muni's budget crisis. It will make things cost more, though.

San Francisco's increased office vacancy means the existing focus on low payroll taxes doesn't really work for us anymore. This system expands the availability of gross receipts tax exemptions to a larger number of businesses (annual sales of $5M instead of the previous $2.1M) and ensures that companies with a high number of remote workers are still paying their share. This restructuring is a necessary and fair reflection of the realities of the city's current budget and the new post-covid environment in which we can no longer reliably count exclusively on massive downtown employers for revenue at scale.

This proposal is a novel way of forgiving student loans for first responders who work in the city and does so without an additional penny in extra public spending. EMTs, 911 dispatchers, and many others do critical work in our city, and we have critical staffing shortages for all of them. I don't think this law will actually do much in the way of addressing that shortage, but it's better than nothing and could help on the margin. It might also tell us whether such an approach could work at scale.

Enshrines the legal right to reproductive freedom in the city's health code. Reproductive freedom is good. The government telling you what to do with your body is bad.

Funds the construction of a new road that connects the Palo Alto Transit Center to El Camino Real. Public transit infrastructure is good. Making stations more useful is good.