taxes Archives — Page 23 of 43 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Class of 2010: Mark Farrell

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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December 8, 2010

steve@sfbg.com

Mark Farrell is a 36-year-old venture capitalist and political newcomer who will represent the wealthy neighborhoods of District 2 (Pacific Heights, Sea Cliff, and the Marina) after narrowly beating Janet Reilly, whose extensive political endorsements ranged from the Guardian and local Democratic Party Chair Aaron Peskin to U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinsein and Mayor Gavin Newsom.

Challenging the city’s political power structure is why Farrell said he ran for office, playing up his outsider status and investment banking experience. He told visitors to his campaign website, “I am running for the Board of Supervisors to bring common sense back to City Hall” and railed against “career politicians who run for office again and again.”

In an interview with the Guardian, Farrell said he was motivated to make his first foray into politics by the dysfunction he has heard about at City Hall. “I’ve been frustrated with City Hall over the last few years, from the personal antics to the policies that have come out,” Farrell told us. “I humbly believe I have something different to bring to the table.”

Farrell calls himself a fiscal conservative who believes “our city government has gotten too large and we need to look at that,” a task he thinks he’s well-suited for given his background in finance. Yet when asked what government functions he would eliminate or cut deeply to help close a projected $700 million budget deficit over the next two years, Farrell said he can’t offer any specifics yet, saying only, “We need to make tough decisions.”

Would Farrell be open to new taxes or other revenue-side budget solutions? He told us that he won’t completely reject the idea of new taxes, but that he generally opposes them. “I don’t believe in raising taxes. We can’t raise enough revenue to get out of this problem,” Farrell said. “We need to learn to live within our means.”

Although he opposed Prop. B in this election, Farrell said public employee pension reform needs to be a part of the city’s budget solution, as well as scaling back how much the city gives to nonprofit groups, which provide many of the social services the city supports.

Farrell was born and raised in San Francisco — except for his college years, he’s spent his whole life in D2, where his parents still live — and has been friends with Sup. Sean Elsbernd since high school. Politically, Farrell also identifies with Elsbernd and fellow fiscally conservative Sups. Carmen Chu and Michela Alioto-Pier (who endorsed Farrell to replace her in D2), but he says that he doesn’t want to be politically pigeon-holed.

“I’m very much my own person and I look forward to working with everyone,” Farrell said. Indeed, part of Farrell’s frustration with City Hall politics has been the divisive relationship between the progressives and moderates, which he sees as a hindrance to finding “common sense solutions.”

“The progressive and moderate labels have been relatively destructive to San Francisco,” Farrell said. “We need to get beyond that to focus on issues.”

Yet people’s political values and worldview determine what issues they care about and the solutions they favor. For example, progressives decry the dearth of affordable being built for San Franciscans and cite city studies showing that deficit will get worse as developers build ever-more market rate housing (see “Dollars or sense?” Sept. 28), particularly in a city that is two-thirds renters.

Farrell said he supports rent control (saying he was unfairly attacked during the campaign as anti renter) and sees the dwindling rental stock and lack of new affordable units being constructed as problems, but he doesn’t have a solution to those problems. In fact, Farrell supports allowing more condo conversions, which would make the problem worse, telling us, “I believe home ownership is something we should promote.”

He was also vague about how he will approach land use issues and how tough he’ll be with developers in having them meet city design guidelines and provide affordable housing and other community benefits, saying only, “We need to have sustainable development in the city.”

Yet the issues that do animate Farrell are those typically focused on by conservative D2 voters. Farrell lists his top priorities as seeing to his district’s needs, promoting private sector job creation (“I think a lot of lip service has been paid to it, but not a lot of action by City Hall,” he said), public safety, and quality-of-life issues (he supported Prop. L, the sit-lie ordinance, calling it “very reasonable”). Generally Farrell sees San Francisco as a city in he midst of a serious fiscal crisis, “and I want to create a San Francisco that is secure for the future over the long haul.”

The end of Obama’s presidency?

Zelda Bronstein

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December 7, 2010

6

The tax-cut deal with the Republicans is almost unfathomable. It’s the most dramatic sign of President Obama’s failure as a leader, his refusal to stand up for the platform he ran on — and it could mark the end of his presidency. I mean, he’ll still be in office for two more years — but now that he’s rolled over and given the Republicans everything they want, he has no moral or political authority left, no national constituency to back him up and he might as well be a lame duck. He’s certainly finished as far as most of the progressive movement is concerned. Kos:

This shouldn’t be worrisome to the White House because these people won’t vote for him in 2012. They probably will. But will they give money and knock on doors and make phone calls and drag their social circle to the polls? Nope. They didn’t in 2010. And at this rate, they sure as hell won’t in 2012.

Already, some Obama supporters are starting to ask whether we all should have backed Hillary Clinton.

So far, Nancy Pelosi is standing up to the “compromise,” which essentially gives the Republicans everything they want. And the House can still call the GOP bluff: Refuse to reauthorize tax cuts for the rich — and force the Republicans to vote to raise taxes on the middle class and deny unemployment benefits to a few million Americans. That’s the only way to salvage the situation.

The Dec. 7 press conference was terribly disappointing. Obama said, in effect, that he — the president of the United States — is powerless against a Republican minority in the Senate. “I have been unable to budge them,” he announced. He’s decided to negotiate with terrorists, to let a few right-wingers hold him and the millions of unemployed Americans hostage. The polls are on his side, the public sentiment is on his side — and he’s acting as if he’s being forced to negotiate from weakness.

The real-time Washington Post poll shows that 66 percent think Obama made a bad deal.

The big problem here is that Obama looks shaken, doesn’t look tough, is on the defensive. A very sad moment.

Can the U.S. be great again?

Zelda Bronstein

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December 5, 2010

13

I know I’m getting a little obsessed with the NY Times and it’s sometimes amazing, sometimes utterly clueless analysis of what’s happening with tax policy and the American economy. But I had to comment on Matt Bai’s piece in the Sunday Times about the debt-reduction commission, also known as the cat-food commission. Bai’s thesis is that American’s don’t want to hear that they are going to have to sacrifice something because it runs against our national grain, our desire to be ever bigger and stronger and number one in the world:

What makes this case for sacrifice so much harder to embrace, perhaps, is that it goes to our national psyche, threatening our self-image as a land with limitless potential. While past generations have readily sacrificed for national greatness, debt reduction — at least in the gloomy way its advocates argue for it — feels like a call to sacrifice in the name of our national decline.

And, of course, like every writer who takes on this topic, he harkens back to the Good Old Days when America seemed to be on top of the world:

For much of the Industrial Age, and especially between World War II and the oil crises of the 1970s, this was, in fact, reality. Wages and profits rose, the social safety net and the nation’s military reach both expanded, and government lived largely within its means. College education, suburban lawns, good pensions and blissful security all became part of the pact with the middle class, as much a part of the constellation of entitlements as Medicare and Medicaid.

He says, of course, in the end, that by tighening its fiscal belt, America can pave the way for more greatness:

In fact, policy experts argue that steps along the lines of the commission’s recommendations could actually modernize outdated systems — making the country more competitive as a result — without profoundly affecting the American experience. A simpler, updated tax code for businesses might help spur entrepreneurship, while a hard line on inefficient spending (farm subsidies come to mind) might free up government to invest more in new technologies and infrastructure. A streamlined military of the kind championed by Robert Gates, the defense secretary, would probably be better prepared for the challenges ahead than a military burdened by the costs of obsolete weapons systems and bases left over from the cold war.

But he totally misses a key point: Between World War II and the 1970s (actually, until the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980) the American economy was driven in part by a stable middle class, created in part by trade unions but also — to a great degree — by a tax system built on socioeconomic equality. Rich people paid taxes in the good old days — in fact, the highest income earners paid around 60 percent or more of their income in taxes. and that money allowed the nation to build highways and watger systems and offer public education to all and to create the entitlements that kept old people out of dire poverty.

And because the public sector — the government — was largely able to live within its means, and offered quality public services, people were willing to pay taxes and not blame public employees for everything and demand that Santa Claus bring them goodies for free.

Yes, this country can be great again. It’s richer than ever. But as long as that wealth is so tightly controlled by such a small elite, we’re going to continue to slide down until we become another banana republic. There’s really no way around it.

Amazing data: How taxes used to be

Zelda Bronstein

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December 3, 2010

3

The New York Times has a truly amazing graphic presentation of how the rich used to pay taxes. Check out the image here. The data comes from old IRS filings, made public through the National Archives. They show, for example, that in 1941 — PRIOR to the WWII tax hikes — Eugene Grace, the president of Betehem Steel and one of the highest paid Americans, earned $522,637 (the equivalent of about $7.5 million today), had an adjusted gross income of $336,953 — and paid 66 percent of it, or $114,902, in federal income taxes. Thomas Watson, the president of IBM, paid 69 percent of his AGI in taxes.

Back then, the top marginal tax rate was 81 percent.

And guess what? Those folks were still very rich, still worked hard, still built big companies and created the most poweful economy in the world.

In fact, I could argue that it was precisely BECAUSE OF those high marginal rates that America grew so prosperous in what are now seen as the good old days.

Tax breaks we can’t afford

Zelda Bronstein

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December 3, 2010

18

The big front-page headline on today’s Examiner: “Workers we can’t afford.” It’s a classic story of the Ex genre, a look at how much labor costs are increasing and eating a hole in the city budget. But what gets me is thal it’s not just the Ex; the Chron takes this line, too, and so do news outlets all over the state (and all over the country). The problem is always labor.

You never see a big headline telling the other side of the story: “Tax breaks we can’t afford.”

The thing is, tax cuts and tax breaks are expenses, just like labor costs. The impact the budget in the same way. And at least city workers DO something; a lot of the tax cuts don’t.

I was watching the City Channel last night (yes, Mr. Mayor, I was one of the “ten people” you joked about who were actually watching) and Newsom was giving a speech out at Mission Bay, welcoming a new biotech outfit to the city. And he went on and on about how his administration has attracted all these companies by giving them tax breaks.

He said that, unlike South San Francisco, this city “taxes jobs.” (That’s just silly; we have a payroll tax because you have to have some form of business tax, and the state won’t let us tax corporate income, and a gross receipts tax also has problems, and a payroll tax is at least an approximation of the size of a company. If we taxed gross receipts instead he’d complain that we were “taxing success.”)

And then when he was done with his prattle, the guy from UC who sets up the Mission Bay incubator space for biotech businesses spoke, and talked about all the reasons busineses want to move into the area, mainly the direct connection with UC researchers and experts in business development and the quality of the workforce. He didn’t say a word about taxes.

Because taxes, particularly the very modest payroll tax the city charges, are such a minor factor in business location decisions that tax breaks like Newsom’s don’t do much good in attracting employers. But they do cost the city money.

And those are expenses — yes, expenses — that we can’t afford.

Editor’s notes

Andrew Lam

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November 30, 2010

2

Tredmond@sfbg.com

The New York Times, the old established voice of the liberal media elite, ran a piece on Sunday looking for answers to the nation’s persistent economic crisis. Reporter David Segal interviewed prominent economists on the left and right — the likes of John H. Cochrane at the University of Chicago, James K. Galbraith at the University of Texas, even Gar Alperowitz at the University of Maryland, who’s kind of (God help us) a socialist.

The right-wingers talked about the need to cut government, the left-wingers talked about community co-ops and green technology, and all sides agreed that the situation was dire and would probably get worse. But nobody even mentioned wealth inequality.

It’s kind of mind-boggling. It’s as if the entire subject is off the table, taboo, something that doesn’t get discussed in the company of polite economists. And that’s just crazy.

Look: the 400 richest Americans today have combined assets of about $1.5 trillion. Raise that number to 5,000 and you can about double the total wealth. This is a very rich country; our prospects aren’t bleak at all. With a bit of enlightened public policy, we could profoundly improve the economic situation in just a few months.

I have no PhD. I barely escaped Wesleyan University with an economics degree in 1980, squeaking out a D in my last class by promising the (very conservative) professor that if he failed me, I’d be back next year. But it doesn’t take econometric wizardry to add up the figures. They go like this: A one-time 20 percent wealth tax on the 5,000 richest Americans — including many people who have pledged to give away half their wealth anyway — would generate about $600 billion. Nobody would miss any meals; no families would lose their homes, or even their second or third homes, or their personal jets. Expand the pool a little and you could easily reach $1 trillion.

With that money, you could immediately create 7 million jobs (at an average of $50,000 a year) and fund them for three years. That would cut the unemployment rate in half. What would those people do? Plenty. They could rebuild the country’s roads and highways and bridges, and build high-speed rail systems, and work in health care clinics, and teach art and music and writing, and clean up environmental messes … there’s loads of work in this country. And even with a modest estimate of the economic multiplier, those 7 million public sector jobs would create another 3 million private sector jobs, and all of a sudden, the country’s booming again. And a lot of those people who were hired by the government could now transition to private business. (And those very rich people would do well in the boom, as they always do, and might even make most of their money back.)

Raise taxes on the top 5 percent of the nation’s wage earners and corporations and you would generate enough money to keep the program going until the private economy could pick up the slack. Then eliminate the Social Security tax on the first $25,000 of income and expand it to cover all income up to $250,000 and suddenly — a huge incentive for small businesses to hire new workers and a stable retirement system for the next two generations.

It’s not that hard. It’s not a socialist revolution. Nobody really gets hurt, and a lot of people benefit. I mean, it seems to me that it ought to be part of the discussion. Maybe that’s why I was such a lousy economics student.

DREAM on

Andrew Lam

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November 30, 2010

2

sarah@sfbg.com

Spurred by congressional Democratic leaders’ promises to hold a vote on the DREAM (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors) Act before the end of Congress’ lame-duck session this month, immigrant and civil rights advocates are pushing for the passage of bipartisan legislation that would give undocumented youth a shot at citizenship if they go to college or serve in the military for two years.

On Nov. 29 in San Francisco, several undocumented young people joined members of the Bay Area Coalition for Immigration Reform outside Mission High School — where as much as 20 percent of the student population may be undocumented, according to principal Eric Guthertz — to explain why it makes sense to give youth who grew up in the United States a shot at legal status.

“We are not asking you to give us a green card,” Anna, a student from Guatemala, said at the event. “All we want is a chance to succeed and give back to this country. We live here, we pay taxes, we’re smart, we go to college, but afterward we can’t work and give back.”

Mario, a 22-year-old gay student who was born in Peru to a Chinese father and Peruvian mother, graduated from UC Berkeley with a civil engineering degree. He explained that because of his lack of documentation, he can’t get a job to pay his bills or save up to pursue a master’s degree, and fears being deported to a homophobic country.

“It would be a waste of talent because I’ve learned California-specific engineering rules and the U.S. building code,” Mario said. “Sometimes I wake up from a nightmare about being detained. I came out here, but in Peru, I’d probably be back in the closet.

Joining Anna and Mario was Shing Ma “Steve” Li, a nursing student at City College, who was released Nov. 19 after two months in federal detention, shortly before he was to be deported to Peru. San Francisco Democrat Sen. Dianne Feinstein introduced legislation to halt his removal, saying it would be “unjust” to deport Li before a DREAM Act vote takes place.

Li, who speaks Cantonese, English, French, and Spanish, grew up reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and dreams of opening a clinic to serve low-income San Franciscans. But recently, federal immigration authorities flew him 800 miles to a jail in Arizona, all because his parents brought him here when he was 12 and he lacks documentation.

“We were handcuffed and shackled to our seats, and I wondered what would happen if the plane went down,” Li recalled.

Li believes the main barriers to the legislation’s passage is lack of accurate information. “People need to know the facts, see the people, and hear their stories,” Li said. “Then they’ll know it is a human rights issue.”

Guthertz said that as principal of Mission High, every year he sees undocumented youth who have great grades and lots of advanced placement classes “hit the wall” of their status. “Over and over, I’ve seen the heartbreaking effect of their situation,” Guthertz said. “The DREAM Act is yet another avenue to help these students.”

Eric Quezada, executive director of Dolores Street Community Services, noted that congressional leaders did not agree to the DREAM Act vote “out of the goodness of their heart — it’s because of the hard work of immigrant advocates.”

Quezada said the push to force a DREAM Act vote in Congress this year began when undocumented youth staged a sit-in in Sen. John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) office in May. “And the vote of Latinos saved the Senate from a Republican takeover on Nov. 2,” he said.

“But we understand this window is closing,” Quezada added, referring to the reality that Republicans will take control of the House in January. “So we’re not taking one vote for granted. And this is the first step. If we are able to pass the DREAM Act, it will be a downpayment for comprehensive immigration reform.”

Sup. John Avalos says the DREAM Act recognizes the contribution immigrants make to the community, and to the creation of economic opportunities for everybody. “Immigrants here support themselves and their families across the water, so it makes sense that we make proper investments and support,” Avalos said. “Education is one way to make the world a more stable place.”

Sup. David Campos, who came to the U.S. from Guatemala as an undocumented teenager, sees the DREAM Act as a piece of commonsense legislation.

“It’s so modest,” Campos said. “Even those who are against comprehensive immigration reform should be for something that recognizes that young people, who came here not by choice but because of their parents’ issues, should be given a chance to give back.”

Campos said his father was able to gain legal status for his whole family because of his employment, but that many undocumented youth aren’t so lucky.

“We open the doors to our public schools, we invest in their education, and then, when they are ready to give back to us, we say, ‘No, we don’t want you here,'” Campos said. “The best and brightest, the risk-takers, come here. As a country, we cannot go forward unless we realize that this influx of creativity and entrepreneurship made this country what it is.”

Editor’s notes

Andrew Lam

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November 30, 2010

0

Tredmond@sfbg.com

The pollsters like to call it the Santa Claus effect, and we’ve seen it over and over in surveys of California voters in the past few months. I think of it more as some sort of deep political pathology, a schizophrenia combined with delusions that underlies the state’s inability to get anything done.

Here’s what the data shows:

California voters don’t want cuts to higher education; in fact, they want to see more money spent on the University of California system, the California State University system, and local community colleges. They don’t want cuts to K-12 education either. Nor do they want to shut down state parks, release prisoners early, close public hospitals, stop building high-speed rail, reduce state support of local government … or do anything else that would save a significant amount of money.

And they don’t want tax increases.

If you ask people how they think the state should balance the budget, they talk about cutting waste — even though the current Republican governor admits there’s not that much waste left to cut.

I could spend hours talking about how we got here, how decades of corruption and bad governmental priorities soured people so much on the public sector that they don’t believe the state can be trusted to spend their money properly. But part of the issue is that the news media (which love to find a little waste here and there to trumpet) are very bad at presenting the choices.

Nobody in Sacramento’s going to do anything serious about the budget until Jerry Brown takes office; that’s just how it is. So this psycho-financial nightmare is going to fall in his lap — and I wonder sometimes if he ought to force us all to make the choices we want to avoid.

Maybe Brown ought to call a special election in February or March and put two — and exactly two — measures before the voters. Both would balance the state budget. One would do it almost entirely with cuts, and those cuts would be clearly defined: public schools would shut down all over the state. Class size would rise to 40 or more kids. UC would close half its campuses and admit half the number of qualified students it does today. At least 100,000 prisoners would be released as several prison are mothballed. The entire state park system would be shuttered. And that’s just the start. Consumer protection agencies would be abolished, public health devastated — there wouldn’t be a single thing that Californians take for granted that would survive.

Because that’s what a cuts-only, no borrowing budget would look like.

The other proposition would save those services by closing tax loopholes that benefit big business and raising income taxes on the wealthiest people in the state. Brown would have to travel up and down the state and make it clear: these are the choices we face. You can’t solve a $20 billion budget crisis without either tearing the state apart or raising taxes.

No more ducking. No more pretending. No more looking around for Santa Claus. Make the choice, folks: accept new taxes on a small percentage of the population, or give up on the state.

It’s a scary thought, but it may have to come to that.

Why selling state buildings is so dumb

Zelda Bronstein

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November 29, 2010

18

To stem the massive hemorrhaging in the budget, the state of California has authorized the sale of 24 state-owned office buildings across the state to private investors. The state would then rent back the office space.

It’s a classic case of short-term thinking: In the end, the state will end up paying more money in rent than it will gain from the sales. The nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office reported in April that over the next 30 years, the lease payments will likely cost $5 billion more than if the property had stayed in the state’s possession.

But it would provide an immediate injection of $1.2 billion into the state’s general fund.

But there’s an interesting twist that hasn’t been reported on: The state buildings are currently exempt from local property taxes. Once they’re in private hands, county assessors can put them on the tax rolls.

And the way the deal is structured, the state — that is, the taxpayers — will be subsidizing the private owners to cover the local property tax bills. In effect, the deal means that the state will be shifting more money from its general fund to local government — a good thing for counties, but not a terribly good deal for Sacramento.

According to Eric Lamoureux, spokesperson for the Department of General Services, if the local cities decide to tax the new owners, the rent state agencies pay would increase to make up the difference. The private owners would pay nothing.
“The [cost of the tax] is built into lease terms. Ultimately, the state would be paying that.” Lamoureux said.

And while San Francisco City Attorney’s office is still unsure of the exact terms of the sale-lease back agreement, they plan on looking out for the city’s best interests.

“The city attorney is going to be extremely diligent with the recorder-assessor to collect all the taxes that are owed,” Matt Dorsey, press spokesperson for City Attorney Dennis Herrera, told us. And by collecting property tax, the local city governments would get a nice boost in revenue.

The sale to California First LLC, a partnership between Hines Interests and Antarctica Capital, has already been met with opposition including a lawsuit and an injunction trying to prevent the deal.

The screwy rules for mayoral succession

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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November 23, 2010

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EDITORIAL The clerk of the Board of Supervisors, at the request of Board President David Chiu, has released a proposal for the selection process for a new mayor, and it’s about as complicated and confusing as everyone expected. That’s in part the result of the vagueness of the City Charter, which simply specifies that a vacancy in the office of mayor shall be filled by a San Francisco registered voter chosen by a majority of the supervisors but offers no procedural clues on how to get there. And the Political Reform Act sets very strict limits on conflicts of interest for elected officials in California; a supervisor, for example, can’t vote for himself or herself or do anything to promote his or her candidacy for an office that comes with a pay raise.

In the end, the proposal leaves limited room for public input — and makes it very difficult for any sitting supervisor, particularly one of the progressives, to wind up winning the job.

The way the rules are laid out, the board would accept nominations — but any sitting supervisor who accepted the nomination would have to leave the room at once, cease all communication with his or her colleagues, and play no role in further deliberations or voting. Since it’s entirely possible that several supervisors — and possibly several progressives — could be nominated, the process would cripple the final outcome since the only ones allowed to vote would be the remaining board members whose names aren’t in the mix.

That skews the outcome heavily toward one of two options: the supervisors appoint someone who isn’t on the board — or Chiu winds up as both acting mayor and board president because nobody else can muster six votes. The only other option: The progressives all stick together, line up in advance behind a candidate who’s currently on the board, and find one more vote for that person.

The whole thing is so screwy that the supervisors ought to make some changes before they adopt it and try, to the extent that it’s legal, to inject some sanity into the process.

For example: Instead of opening the nominations, collecting a long list of names, sending all of the sitting supervisors on that list out of the room and then voting, the board could take the names one at a time. A supervisor gets nominated, leaves the room, and the votes are tallied; if he or she has fewer than six, the process starts again. (The problem: who goes first — because the first person eliminated can’t be nominated again. To be fair, there would have to be some sort of random drawing of which supervisor could make the first nomination — which alone might add too much random chance to the outcome.)

Then there’s the question of when this all takes place. If the process starts now and an interim mayor is chosen, the board will have to reconfirm that person Jan. 4 when Gavin Newsom actually resigns to take over as lieutenant governor. There’s a chance something could go wrong in the meantime and the board would have to change its vote, and there’s a chance that state law would prevent a supervisor who won from acting in any way to influence the final vote. But those are better risks than the option of leaving everything to the last day. And if the board decides that it can’t or shouldn’t act until Jan. 4, special meetings ought to be calendared for Jan. 5, 6, and 7 to give the current board more than one day to make the final decision.

And before anything happens, the board needs to schedule at lest one open hearing to get input from the public on the qualifications for the next mayor and on potential candidates.

The bottom line: any candidate who wants to get progressive support needs to be willing to do more than sign legislation and manage the city. He or she needs to be willing to use political capital and the mayor’s bully pulpit to make the case for progressive change — on taxes, services, the budget, and an overall civic vision. And the six board members on the left need to stick together, or that won’t happen.

Editorial: The screwy process for selecting a mayor

Zelda Bronstein

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November 23, 2010

19

The clerk of the Board of Supervisors, at the request of Board President David Chiu, has released a proposal for the selection process for a new mayor, and it’s about as complicated and confusing as everyone expected. That’s in part the result of the vagueness of the City Charter, which simply specifies that a vacancy in the office of mayor shall be filled by a San Francisco registered voter chosen by a majority of the supervisors but offers no procedural clues on how to get there. And the Political Reform Act sets very strict limits on conflicts of interest for elected officials in California; a supervisor, for example, can’t vote for himself or herself or do anything to promote his or her candidacy for an office that comes with a pay raise.