New York moderates, public/private partnerships drive Lurie's SF Recovery strategy
Unlike previous SF Mayors, who lined up with more extremist policies advocated by the far-left of the Democratic Party, Lurie prizes input from successful moderates and local business leaders. WSJ reports.
Both to ease budget deficits and to increase efficiency, Mr. Lurie says, “we’re leaning in on having private-public partnerships like the Downtown Development Corp., like the Partnership for San Francisco. We modeled these after groups in New York City that I admired from afar. I saw what the downtown development corporation did in lower Manhattan following Sept. 11.”
He also loves data and pledges to have “boots on the ground” to ensure stats can’t be fudged. He says “we’re not using AI the way we probably should be using it, but we’re looking into it.” In a break with previous administrations that were wary of the technology industry, Mr. Lurie regularly attends tech conferences and has opened dialogues with OpenAI, Salesforce, Anthropic and Databricks: “All of those companies want to be part of San Francisco’s return.”
Whereas Mr. Mamdani castigates billionaires, Mr. Lurie courts them. Everyone from Laurene Powell Jobs to Jony Ive is getting involved in partnerships Mr. Lurie and his head of economic development, Ned Segal (a former CFO of Twitter), are establishing. The Board of Supervisors just granted the mayor a waiver to help raise capital for these public-private partnerships.
Navigating the fractious board has always been a challenge for mayors, but in the recent election moderates became a majority of supervisors. In Mr. Lurie’s first weeks, he literally crossed to their side of City Hall. “Mayors don’t walk over to our side of the building,” staffers told him. He did. The results include an ordinance giving him emergency powers, including to fight fentanyl, that passed 10-1. Mr. Lurie’s proposed budget, which recently passed the board’s Budget Committee, will be a major test of this approach.
It is unusual to hear a Democrat declare, “The era of soaring city budgets and deteriorating street conditions is over.” While San Francisco mayors are required by law to submit a balanced budget, “we had a practice of spending one-time dollars on ongoing expenses and just hoping and hoping that the state and the feds would come to the rescue,” Mr. Lurie says.
With the state of California in a $12 billion deficit and the federal government bigger by two orders of magnitude, Mr. Lurie is clear that the practice will have to end. The budget that just passed committee sets aside $400 million in reserves in anticipation of state and federal cuts. A former nonprofit executive, Mr. Lurie proposed cutting nonprofit contracting by $185 million (the committee trimmed that to $171 million). “No one’s coming to save us, so San Francisco needs to save itself,” he says. “Some people think we can just keep spending dollars.”
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