Enough politics and virtue signaling - it’s time to get rid of inactive commissions.

San Francisco has always prided itself on being a city of civic participation. That’s the theory behind our commission system—commissions are supposed to open the doors of government to everyday citizens, give them a seat at the table, and provide oversight over powerful city departments. But here’s the irony: the more commissions we create, the murkier accountability has become. Instead of clarity, we get confusion about who’s actually in charge—our elected officials, or the unelected commissioners who oversee department heads.

Our predecessor organization, TogetherSF, commissioned a 2023 report from the good government think tank, the Rose Institute, that highlighted many of the commission system’s problems. The report found that the City’s sprawling system of ~130 commissions and ~1,200 commission positions was a drain on City staff resources. Moreover, since many commissions have the power to select and remove City department heads, there was confusion over who was actually in charge in government. 

The SPUR report from 2024 further reinforced the Rose Report’s findings: in San Francisco, mayoral authority over department heads ranges from complete to surprisingly limited. When responsibility is split between the Mayor, the Board of Supervisors, and commissions, no one knows who’s actually steering the ship. That leads to blurred accountability, paralyzed departments, and sluggish hiring processes when we most need strong leadership. Former Planning Director John Rahaim even admitted he was never sure if his boss was the Mayor or the Planning Commission. That’s no way to run a city. By contrast, in peer cities New York City and Boston, mayors can hire and fire department heads directly. That’s clean and efficient.

The case for commission reform is already overwhelming. A 2024 Civil Grand Jury report found San Francisco has far more commissions than peer cities—about 1.5X as many overall and roughly 5X on a per‑capita basis—and almost one in five commission meetings was canceled in 2023. The Jury also flagged the obvious: politics too often overwhelms qualifications in appointments, and there’s no standardized way to evaluate whether commissions are actually delivering value. That’s not “good government”; that’s inertia.

In San Francisco, we’ve given unelected commissioners veto points over everything from what gets built to approving contracts. Even more convoluted is that appointments to commissions are sometimes split between the Mayor and the Board; the former’s appointees require approval; appointments from the latter side do not. Layer in politics, and the result is a muddle that benefits insiders while leaving residents stuck with, in many instances, a stale cast of political insiders making slow decisions, engaging in finger-pointing, and paralyzing departments because of too much power to obstruct the day-to-day operations of city government.

And to make matters worse - there are plenty of examples of commissioners behaving badly and commissions creating bottlenecks in government, let alone flat out obstructing business as usual.

Take the Department of Public Works (DPW): after Mohammed Nuru resigned in disgrace in 2020, the department went three years without a permanent head—not because no one wanted the job, but because the Public Works Commission, which controlled the process, moved painfully slow. Even when the commission presented former Mayor London Breed with candidates in 2021, by the time the Mayor was ready to hire, those candidates ended up withdrawing.  Meanwhile, San Francisco residents were left with interim leadership for one of the largest departments in the city in the wake of one of the biggest scandals in city government. Ultimately, former Mayor Breed defaulted to appointing DPW’s interim head, Carla Short, as the permanent head in 2023 (which really begs the question, what was the point of having the Public Works Commission lead the job search?).

Or look at the Police Department, where the chief serves at the pleasure of both the Mayor and the Police Commission. Either one can fire the chief independently. That means at moments of tension—like during Mayor Breed’s tenure—the police chief risks being caught between two bosses with competing agendas. How can any leader make strong, decisive calls when their job security hangs on which side they upset the least?

Meanwhile, commissioners themselves are unaccountable to voters and difficult to remove even when they cross ethical lines. Former Port Commissioner Mel Murphy clung to his seat for three months after Mayor Ed Lee asked him to resign amid scandal. Planning Commissioner Kathrin Moore, still serving nearly two decades after Aaron Peskin appointed her, has been embroiled in ethics controversies of her own. The removal process is so burdensome that, in practice, bad actors can dig in their heels until political pressure makes their exit inevitable. That’s not accountability—it’s inertia.

We see this same bureaucratic inertia playing out again as the work of the Prop E Taskforce move from diligence to decision-making; Supervisor Shamann Walton is shielding his favorite commission, the  Sheriff’s Department Oversight Board. For context, this commission is tasked with overseeing the Office of the Sheriff’s Inspector General, a department whose head position  has sat unfilled since January 10. This commission has routinely struggled to even meet quorum. To bring this point home: at one meeting in February 2024, then-Inspector General Terry Wiley literally presented to a room of empty chairs because the committee simply couldn’t make quorum. The only plausible defense of this committee is one based on virtue signaling rather than actually being interested in government effectiveness. 

The bottom line is this: our commissions, created in the name of oversight and participation, have in many cases morphed into barriers to accountability, and refuges for bad actors. They make it harder to know who’s responsible for the performance of city government, and harder still to remove the people who abuse the trust placed in them. Reform is overdue—not because civilian oversight is bad, but because oversight without accountability isn’t oversight at all.

‍Scotty Jacobs is the Director of Blueprint for a Better San Francisco, a project of Neighbors for a Better San Francisco. A fourth-generation resident of San Francisco, Scotty became involved in local politics after seeing how radical ideology was leading the city he loves down a damaging and dangerous path. As the leader of Blueprint, Scotty works with a community of nearly one-in-eight San Franciscans all focused on pragmatism and results in City Hall. For more from Scotty, follow him on Instagram at @scottyjacobs.