Blueprint Brief: Week of 7/07/2025

SF Arts Commission Grants paid for…free rent and videos bashing SF?

You may have seen that the SF Arts Commission made just over $10M in grants from a hotel tax set-aside from Prop E, passed by 75% of voters in 2018. A set-aside is the equivalent of garnishing a particular revenue source for a dedicated cause. Prop E created a set-aside to fund local artists, non-profits, and cultural organizations.

This all sounds great, right? Well…we dug into the 151 recipients of grants from this most recent cycle, and found what can only be described as questionable allocations. One of many egregious examples: $30,000 to Toshio Meronek (also known as Sad Francisco on Instagram and TikTok). Meronek is known for videos that absolutely smear San Francisco and its leaders. For someone so critical of our city, he seems happy enough to be accepting free money from it. Meronek will be “using funds to support an audio podcast series and a live premier event” about Linda Evans, a known domestic terrorist - who, in his application, Meronek described as an “icon of the Left.” Yikes. Other recipients received grants for everything from covering their rent while they work on a novel to fund the creation of a feature-length dance piece exploring the intersection of the recipient’s Type 2 diabetes diagnosis and their relationship with food in the context of being Latinx.

Supporting the arts is critical. San Francisco should continue to foster its creative communities. But there’s zero measurement of how funds are being used once they leave the city’s coffers. Prop E will undoubtedly serve as a future example of why stricter oversight and measurement of set-aside dollars is a good thing.

Supervisor Mandelman wants more locked treatment beds for the mentally ill. The problem? Unions don’t.

Board of Supervisors Mandelman President Rafael Mandelman has been the most consistent on mental health and healthcare in City Hall: he strongly supports expanded conservatorship laws, and he has worked to hold city agencies accountable to producing more treatment beds as a part of the way to help the severely mentally ill. Now leveraging the bully pulpit of his powers as President of the Board of Supervisors, Mandelman is continuing the unenviable task of holding lagging departments’ feet to the fire. 

While we are moving funds through to deployment (and creating more beds), as we know, it takes a long time to build in San Francisco. And we aren’t talking about simply building more housing. We are talking about complicated buildings with specific needs - essentially, hospitals. It’s not easy to build the capacity we need to create - even when the state is the one footing the bill. Read more about the challenges around investing in more locked treatment beds on the Blueprint Blog…

The Parks Alliance is cooked. But we shouldn’t let it be a referendum on public-private partnerships.

The Parks Alliance, the once high-flying public-private partnership vehicle for our city’s philanthropists to fund greenspaces small and large across the city, imploded in spectacular fashion earlier this year. However, it’s critical that we don’t let the Parks Alliance serve as a proverbial albatross on our approach to public-private partnerships. Because these partnerships will be essential in the face of our massive budget deficit.

One of Mayor Lurie’s biggest advantages is that he hails from San Francisco’s philanthropist class. The depth of his rolodex (both in contacts and resources) is matched by few others who call our city home. In the face of the inevitable further budget cuts that will inflict more pain on an already perilous financial situation for San Francisco, now is the time to embrace our wealthiest residents - not ostracize them. We will need well-resourced philanthropists to fill the coffers of not just our cultural institutions, but also some of our most beloved public goods, too.

Mayor Lurie initially created the Downtown Development Corporation to serve as the philanthropic vehicle for our philanthropists to directly contribute to downtown recovery. And while the focus may have initially been downtown, we suspect the scope of this organization will expand as the full impact of Trump's bill (read: more cuts) becomes clearer.