By Steven T. Jones
San Francisco City Hall is packed with people waiting to testify about Mayor Gavin Newsom’s midyear budget cuts and the need for a special election in June for new revenue measures. The Board of Supervisors chamber is filled to capacity, with another few hundred people filling the overflow room in the North Light Court.
Usually, public testimony is taken at the committee level rather than at the full board, but Sup. Chris Daly, who gathered the mayor’s unilateral cuts into his own legislative package, opted to skip the committee and convene the full board as a Committee of the Whole to give the cuts a full public airing.
Labor leaders and community-based groups took the opportunity to turn out their supporters in the hundreds, many wearing the purple shirts of the public employee union SEIU Local 1021, with slogans that include, “Got Public Health?”
Testimony should last for hours. The supervisors should earn their pay today while Newsom does Paris. On the special election proposal, they’ll need eight votes today to move it forward to next week, when the board will discuss what specific measures to place on the ballot.