When San Franciscans voted on two occasions to require the mayor to meet publicly with the Board of Supervisors to answer questions – most recently in November when voters approved a binding measure after Gavin Newsom ignored the preview measure – I don’t think they had in mind the sterile, staged process that the board is poised to approve today.
Sponsored by Sups. David Chiu and Eric Mar (an early endorser of Chiu for mayor) and rubber-stamped by the Chiu-stacked Rules Committee, the procedures are a far cry from England’s raucous question time, which supporters and critics have always compared the proposal to. And it seems to let board-appointed Mayor Ed Lee and his successor off very easy.
The rules call for the mayor to appear on the second regular board meeting of each month (meaning Lee’s first session will be five months after voters approved it) and for only supervisors from odd-numbered districts to be allowed to ask questions one month, followed by even-numbered supes the next.
Supervisors are then required to submit their questions in writing almost a week in advance – and even then a supermajority of eight supervisors can vote the question down, meaning the mayor won’t have to answer. Conversely, a supermajority can also approve questions after the deadline when they arise about pressing business.
That’s quite a neat and tidy little democratic exercise that the new powers-that-be at City Hall are trying to create.
UPDATE: Chris Daly, who authored the question time measure as a supervisor, told us that neither of its sponsors nor any Rules Committee members who asked him about the legislative intent of the measure or the language he wrote in it, which Daly said the board and the mayor are violating.
“The intent of the charter amendment was to increase the dialogue and discourse, but the rules seem to dampen the ability of that discourse to take the city somewhere,” Daly told us. He also said that the measure calls for the mayor to appear monthly before the board and it contained no provision suspending that requirement while the board and mayor spend months coming up with ground rules, so “the mayor has been in violation of the charter since then.”