Tag: Ballot Measures

  • LPSF Ballot Recommendations

    LPSF Ballot Recommendations

    The Libertarian Party of San Francisco makes the following recommendations for the November 5, 2024 general election:
     

    BALLOT MEASURES
     

    Proposition A – NO.

    The Libertarian Party of San Francisco is the official ballot opponent of Proposition A. You can read our opposing arguments in your Voter Information Pamphlet or online at https://www.sf.gov/information/proposition-schools-improvement-and-safety-bond. This $790 million bond measure to fund a grab bag of San Francisco Unified School District spending priorities would have a total estimated price tag of $1.3 billion. That alone is a good reason to vote oppose Proposition A – it’s like running up credit card debt. You end up way overpaying for stuff. And they’re already overpaying, spending around $26,000 per year for each of the declining number of students enrolled in SFUSD schools. Not that all this money is actually making it to the classroom. The superintendent is paid over $300,000 a year. Other districts are spending far less and getting better educational results. To say nothing of independent schools and homeschooling – options that roughly one of every three school-age kids in San Francisco are availing themselves of, despite the fact that their families have to finance them on top of the money they’re already paying in taxes to subsidize sub-par government schools. Get your fiscal house in order first, SFUSD. Show us you can stand and deliver, before hitting taxpayers up for more cash!

     

    Proposition B – NO.

    Another bond measure, this one for $390 million. More to address the homeless crisis, as if throwing more money at homelessness is going to change anything. The “homeless industrial complex”, as it has been dubbed, will soak up that money as it soaks up the over $1 billion a year that San Francisco’s city government already spends to supposedly help people without a roof over their heads. And it would also fund other things government shouldn’t be involved with in the first place, like health care – specifically more money for SF General Hospital (which you shouldn’t refer to with the Facebook billionaire’s name, by the way, because doing so just encourages people with money to flush more of it down the toilet of government in exchange for a vanity or PR payout, when that cash could be put to better use elsewhere).

     

    Proposition C – NO.

    We were initially inclined to take no position on Proposition C, or possibly even see it as worth supporting. Having an “inspector general” in the Controller’s office tasked with investigating corruption sounds nice in theory. There never seems to be a shortage of it at City Hall. But we are always wary about expanding government. There’s also never any guarantee that increasing the size, scope, power, or money spent on a department or agency will be used the way you want or expect it to be used. The Briones Society argues against Prop. C as unnecessary on the grounds that all the powers it would invest in the inspector general are already possessed by other officials. But we’re not entirely sure of that. A troubling section in the legal text of the measure (which can be found online at https://www.sf.gov/sites/default/files/2024-08/legal%20text.pdf) describes the additional powers and responsibilities which the Controller’s Office would gain, as follows: “Further, the Controller may subpoena witnesses, administer oaths, and compel the production of books, papers, testimony, and other evidence with respect to matters affecting the conduct of any department or office of the City and County. The preceding sentence authorizes the Controller to compel testimony or production from any person or entity including but not limited to City and County officers and employees; persons or entities that have or are seeking a contract, grant, lease, loan, or other agreement with the City and County, and their employees or officers: applicants for or recipients of permits, licenses, land use entitlements, tax incentives, benefits, or services from the City and County, and their employees or officers; and registered City lobbyists. The Controller and employees of the Controller, including the Inspector General, may seek and execute search warrants to the extent permitted by State law.” Wording that apparently limits these new powers of subpoena, search, and seizure, is contained in the first sentence, the part that reads, “with respect to matters affecting the conduct of any department or office of the City and County”. But this language reminds us of the infamous “general welfare” and “interstate commerce” clauses in the U.S. Constitution. What does it mean, after all, to affect the conduct of a city government department? If for example, you are the recipient of a permit to do work on your home, does that give the Controller’s Office the legal power to come and search your home for evidence that you’re failing to comply with the conditions of the permit, unless state law specifically prohibits them from doing so? After all, the matter of what work is being done on your home can logically be said to affect a department’s conduct – if it’s the “wrong” kind in their eyes, the Planning Department may issue you a fine or require it to be removed. Or say there’s a city ordinance providing some kind of tax exemption to businesses with fewer than a certain number of employees – if your business reports that they have fewer than the required number of employees and claims the exemption, does this give the Controller’s office the right to come into your office and demand you produce papers proving that individuals they see or suspect of working for you are really independent contractors and not employees? Granting or not granting a tax exemption to a particular business would again be a matter of conduct. Think about how many other government agencies already have statutory mandates to investigate you or intrude into your life in different ways, and how their mandates have in many cases expanded over time in ways the agency’s creators’ likely did not envision. Controller Greg Wagner says in the Controller’s Statement on Prop. C in the Voter Information Pamphlet, that the measure would have only a “moderate impact” on the cost of government (maybe around $1 million per year). However given that his office would be granted additional powers and employees, he has a pretty blatant conflict of interest, and may be incentivized to downplay the possible or likely costs.

     

    Proposition D – NO.

    The city government has a lot of commissions, and this measure would cut their number in half. But commissions aren’t the real problem. Most of them have little power, and most commissioners get minimal pay and benefits if any, often just a stipend of a few hundred dollars a year (according to the Controller, the city paid a total of $350,000 for the stipends and health benefits of 180 commissioners in 2023. They don’t have armies of paid, unionized bureaucrats working under them. And they are more likely than city departments to be staffed by ordinary civilians rather than government careerists. According to the San Francisco Examiner says opponents characterize Prop. D as “the largest transfer of power and authority from the people of San Francisco to the staff of San Francisco since adoption of the 1932 city charter.” Proposition D would also remove oversight of the San Francisco Police Department from the Police Commission, giving the sole power to set rules for police officer conduct to the police chief. Policing is too important to be left to the police, and we’ve seen how poorly the tend to perform when it comes to policing their own. Chiefs tend to be authoritarian-minded officials who side with other officers against civil liberties and the public. The various commissions don’t always play a positive role, but sometimes they do, and they help ensure that independent amateur voices keeping the professional bureaucracy in check can be heard.

     

    Proposition E – YES.

    Proposition E is a rival measure put on the ballot in response to Proposition D. On its own, this proposal to simply establish a temporary five-member panel to look at streamlining the city’s commissions wouldn’t particularly excite us. But it’s not a stand-alone measure. The important thing to understand about Prop. E is that if it gets more votes than Prop. D, it will block the harmful provisions of that measure from taking effect. This is the real reason to vote for it. While it doesn’t guarantee the cut in the number of commissions that Prop. D does, Prop. E would enable any cuts to occur in a manner that avoids putting even more power in the hands of the mayor and weakening independent oversight of the police and other executive branch departments, as Prop. D does.

     

    Proposition F – NO.

    Contrary to what members of the “City family” (aka the governing class) and their strange bedfellow right-wing “tough on crime” allies would have you believe, San Francisco is not under-policed. The city has more police officers per capita than Paris did under the hated regime of Louis XIV right before the French Revolution (see https://lpsf.org/articles/2017-10-31-guarding-le-r%C3%A9gime-moderne). The argument that the SFPD has a “shortage” of cops is based on not meeting their goal of having 2,074 officers. But that was always an arbitrary number not based on any real data. The fact is that city is misallocating its police resources, including by having officers focus on things that should not be crimes, like drugs, prostitution, and other non-violent actions that don’t violate anyone’s rights. The new captain of the Bayview station recently revealed that he has two officers assigned full time to policing illegally parked recreational vehicles (in other words, hassling and ticketing the homeless, since most of the RVs parked on city streets are occupied by people who lack other housing). Many other officers can be seen engaged in various forms of public relations such as staffing booths at street fairs, providing excessive motorcades to visiting politicians, etc. The argument that they are overworked is belied by the fact that many officers voluntarily moonlight as private security for local businesses and events under the city’s “10B” program – a role that used to be more frequently filled by members of the independent, non-taxpayer-funded San Francisco Patrol Specials, until that organization was gutted by the SFPD, which saw it as unwelcome competition. Prop. F would allow longtime officers over age 50 to double-dip, getting the pension payments to which they would be entitled on retirement in addition to their salaries, in exchange for continuing to work. One SFPD officer already receives total compensation in pay and benefits of over $800,000 a year (see https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2024/san-francisco-employee-pay/). Dozens of other “emergency” personnel draw over $500,000 a year. If this measure passes, the number of officers in the “half a million dollars a year club” would expand significantly.

     

    Proposition G – NO.

    This measure would establish additional rent subsidies ostensibly reserved for some of the city’s poorest residents, to the tune of $8.25 million a year – or more – through 2046. But it’s not as simple or honest as just providing more money for housing on the basis of true need. Prop. G would exclude some of the extremely poor on the basis of age, family status, or disability status. And if you imagine thousands of elderly or disabled persons or families living homeless on the streets of San Francisco receiving “school choice” type vouchers that would at least let them “vote with their feet” and rent from whatever landlords are willing to offer the best deal, not a chance. As the ballot summary puts it, the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development would administer the fund “by disbursing money to the owners of certain new and existing affordable housing developments”. In other words, this would be a giveaway to favored operators of already-subsidized housing (in today’s housing jargon, “affordable” no longer means “low cost”, but instead serves as a euphemism for “taxpayer-subsidized”). The ballot summary goes on to say that these payments “would subsidize the difference between the amount these tenants can afford and the rents the owner would otherwise charge”. Except as any economist would tell you, owners won’t necessarily charge the same rents otherwise. Just as government tuition subsidies have driven up the cost of higher education in recent decades – encouraging schools to charge more because they know students will be able to tap into taxpayers’ money to pay – the government rent subsidies that Prop. G would write into the city charter will put upward pressure on rents. Meanwhile, subsidized units in housing complexes owned by the government or transferred to management by non-profit groups under long-term leases have long been rife with problems. “Part of the reason why the Housing Authority no longer manages the properties themselves was because of a history of mismanagement of properties all over the city,” said one member of the Board of Supervisors quoted in a Mission Local article (https://missionlocal.org/2024/05/sf-management-tight-lipped-housing-scams-potrero-hill/). That article also details how a manager at one company put in charge of such a housing complex on Potrero Hill was allowing squatters to illegally occupy vacant units and charging them rent. Other news stories detail a laundry list of abuses by those overseeing housing on the government’s behalf, including failure to make needed repairs, harassment, and restricting when tenants can have visitors, even demanding those visitors show “valid ID”.

     

    Proposition H – NO.

    The Libertarian Party of San Francisco is the official ballot opponent of Proposition H. You can read our opposing arguments in your Voter Information Pamphlet or online at https://www.sf.gov/information/proposition-h-retirement-benefits-firefighters. Firefighters want to be exempted from the same pension rules as other city government employees. These rules were put in place in 2011 by voters trying to keep the pension system from spiraling into bankruptcy. That year’s Proposition C was actually the weaker of the pension reform measures on the ballot – a stronger competing measure put on the ballot by the late Public Defender Jeff Adachi, one of the city’s few honest and admirable pols. Unfortunately his better alternative failed to get the nod after most of the local establishment opposed it. But Prop. C did at least make some modest changes to rein in the fiscal bleeding caused by unsustainable payouts to retirees. Overturning this mild reform sensibly voted in by nearly 70% of San Francisco voters over a decade ago in order to benefit a few privileged city government employees would be a mistake.

     

    Proposition I – NO.

    The Libertarian Party of San Francisco is the official ballot opponent of Proposition I. You can read our opposing arguments in your Voter Information Pamphlet or online at https://www.sf.gov/information/proposition-i-retirement-benefits-nurses-and-911-operators. We don’t think it’s fair to force members of the public to subsidize the retirement of others who are making more money than they are when it’s well known that most people don’t even have enough money set aside for their own retirements. Yet that’s what Proposition I would do. It would increase spending certain city government employees like per diem registered nurses (starting pay $200,000/year – https://careers.sf.gov/role/?id=3743990004718816) and 911 operators (starting pay $106,000/year – https://www.sf.gov/work-san-francisco-911) boost their pensions beyond the generous compensation that retirees are already slated to receive.

     

    Proposition J – NO.

    The Ballot Simplification Committee really dropped the ball on this one. Their ballot description states that a “yes” vote on Proposition J means “you want to amend the Charter to create an Our Children, Our Families Initiative to ensure that related funds are used effectively.” As if this was just about using tax money “effectively” – something nobody is against! – and not the big school spending increase that it actually is. According to the Controller’s statement, Prop. J would have “a significant impact on the cost of government of up to $35 million in FY 2024-25 and increasing up to $83 million in FY 2037-38”, by reallocating money that would otherwise be available to the general fund. And does the San Francisco Unified School District need this additional money? It has around 48,000 students, 8,000 employees, and a $1.3 billion budget. That translates to one employee for every six students, at a per student cost of over $27,000 per year. And yet somehow the district is deeply in debt and threatened with a state takeover. The SFUSD just appointed a new superintendent, Maria Su, a career bureaucrat who was formerly executive director of the San Francisco Department of Children, Youth, and their Families (no representation for their friends, pets, or deceased relatives?). Her predecessor Matt Wayne may have gotten the boot for having the temerity to make the sensible suggestion that with falling enrollment, the district needs to save money on overhead by closing some of its schools and consolidating, rather than maintaining skeleton staffs for smaller number of students spread among the same number of campuses. Don’t feel sorry for him though – he’s getting a “severence package” worth over half a million dollars. Su’s base salary will be $320,000 a year, just $5000 per year less than Wayne’s. Hopefully the decrease means they’re feeling the pressure not to just keep boosting administrator salaries, but in reality, especially given the school closures and enrollment numbers, a cut of just over 1% isn’t going to cut it either. The average school superintendent salary in California, according to ZipRecruiter.com, is $102,000 (https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/School-Superintendent-Salary–in-California). Meanwhile, the promised oversight to ensure any additional school funding would be used effectively is a joke. Along with city government employees, the new initiative that Prop. J would establish would be staffed by employees of the very same SFUSD receiving money via the intiative. No conflict of interest there!

     

    Proposition K – NO.

    This measure is nothing but red meat for people who hate cars – not even a solution, but a non-plan in search of a problem. Proposition K would overturn an existing compromise under which the Great Highway, the road that runs parallel to Ocean Beach along the city’s western edge, is open during the week but closed on weekends for pedestrian use, by closing the highway permanently and turning it into a park. However there are no actual plans or funding for such a park. Nor is there any obvious need for one, with Ocean Beach immediately to one side of the highway already being parkland, and Golden Gate Park, the city’s largest, on the other side. Paths for bicycles and pedestrians already run adjacent to the road, not to mention the pleasanter option to walk on the beach itself. The closure would divert a significant amout of auto traffic into nearby residential neighborhoods, forcing drivers to go out of their way and waste more time and fuel, as well as limiting beach access for the physically impaired and potentially delaying emergency rescues. None of this makes any sense, unless the real goal of Prop. K is to build condos, not a park, on the land, as some have speculated. But while San Francisco urgently needs more housing, and it makes sense for a lot of that housing to be built in the low-density western half of the city, a dishonest ballot measure closing a much-loved and needed road that’s an integral part of San Francisco’s famous 49-mile scenic drive advertised to visitors is in order to make room for a government developed mega-project is not the way to make it happen.

     

    Proposition L – NO.

    Members of the Board of Supervisors don’t think your cost of living is high enough. They want to ensure that (unless you’re one of the privileged elite) you only have the means to use city government transit, enroll your kids in low-quality government schools, etc. At least that is the conclusion one might draw from the effort by seven board members (Chan, Melgar, Preston, Dorsey, Engardio, Ronen, and Safai), to raise the cost of using a ride share service like Uber or Lyft by imposing a $ . Like the SFUSD (see argument against Prop. J), Muni is deeply in debt. According to Prop. L opponents, the transit agency owes $214 million. But they point out (see https://www.sf.gov/sites/default/files/2024-08/prop_l_-_official_opp_redacted.pdf) that the measure provides no details about how the new money would be spent, nor does it contain any of the citizen oversight protections (toothless as they may be) usually found in similar measures. Meanwhile, Jeffrey Tumlin, head of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA), the department that runs Muni, is getting a salary of over $367,000 a year, with a total compensation package of over $465,000 (see https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/2021/san-francisco/jeffrey-p-tumlin/). Sound familiar? It should. It’s yet another example of the Government Greed that fuels what is basically the same story ever year – a never-ending push to take more money from the public, and the reason behind our opposition once again) to the vast majority of the measures on this year’s San Francisco general election ballot. Tumlin, by the way, is also spearheading a boneheaded plan to ban making all right turns at a red light in the city. This on top of championing unwanted street closures, and restricted lanes. Perhaps he thinks that if he makes driving in the city unpleasant and expensive enough, more people will take the bus, helping bail out his mismanaged Muni. Let’s not reward this failure to serve the public.

    Proposition M – NO.

    This is a complicated reshuffling of how the city government taxes businesses. While it’s less than obvious from a simple reading of its text what the results of Proposition M would be, again the Controller’s ballot statement on the expected fiscal impact of the measure (https://www.sf.gov/sites/default/files/2024-08/Prop%20M%20-%20Business%20Taxes%20-%20CON%20VIP%20Letter%20-%20Signed.pdf) is revealing. Controller Greg Wagner states that the measure would, after a slight delay, “generate additional revenue” (read: by lowering the revenues of the businesses that would be taxed, resulting in higher prices and lower wages) to the tune of an estimated $50 million per year. While he expects the changes would mean the city getting less revenue for the first few years, Wagner says that by 2028-2029, it would mean government taking in an estimated $50 million extra per year. With an annual budget of around $15 billion, bigger than those of many entire U.S. states, local government does not need to be taking yet more money out of the productive, voluntary sector of the economy. All Prop. M will do is increase perceptions of the city as a hostile climate in which to do business, and exacerbate the already notable trend of companies abandoning San Francisco, costing jobs and hurting the local economy.

     

    Proposition N – NO.

    If it’s unfair to force members of the public to subsidize the retirements of people who get paid more than they do, when they already cannot adequately fund their own retirements (see our argument against Prop. I), it’s just as unfair to force people to subsidize advanced education for those better-paid others, when they have not gone to college themselves. Proposition N would reimburse “eligible employees” up to $25,000 for student loans or professional-related education or training expenses. It would be one thing if an employer was requiring employees to get some kind of training, for them to cover the expense. But the education expenses in this case are voluntary. Employees are already financially incentivized to get such education or training so they can advance in their careers and earn even more money. That’s not something the general public needs to be paying for. Proponents may point to the fact that Prop. N only sets up a city fund, without requiring government to actually put any money into that fund, which they claim could receive private donations. But this explanation doesn’t pass the smell test. Either these giveaways to members of the “City Family” will end up being paid for with taxpayer money, or the fund will become another vehicle for special interest groups to make surreptitious donations in order to curry favor with political insiders. After all, there’s nothing stopping private donors from simply donating directly to the employees themselves now, without Prop. N.

     

    Proposition O – YES.

    While this is a mostly symbolic expression of support for abortion rights, which are not directly threatened in San Francisco, it could help protect the civil liberties of people from other states, and would set another positive precedent of refusing to cooperate in the enforcement of bad laws. Its fiscal cost would be minimal. Specifically, Proposition O would limit San Francisco city employees from cooperating with officials from places where abortion is criminalized, prohibiting information being released to them about people coming here to have abortions. In the wake of reproductive choice protections being eliminated by the U.S. Supreme Court overturning its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, a wave of state-level restrictions have made it a crime to terminate your pregnancy in many parts of the U.S. Even before the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson SCOTUS decision unleashed a new assault on reproductive freedom, it was difficult to get an abortion in many states due to existing restrictions and shortages of providers. In 2020, an estimated 81,000 people crossed state lines to obtain abortions; that number more than doubled to 173,000 by 2023 (see https://theconversation.com/crossing-state-lines-to-get-an-abortion-is-a-new-legal-minefield-with-courts-to-decide-if-theres-a-right-to-travel-238167). Now anti-choice activists are trying to close this loophole by passing new laws restricting the ability of people to travel out of state for an abortion or helping others to do so. The governments of Idaho and Tennessee have passed so called “abortion trafficking” laws to this effect, although they are currently held up in court, and several other state governments are weighing similar legislation. In response, other jurisdictions have been passing “shield laws” protecting the rights of women seeking to terminate their pregnancies, or others helping them do so. Proposition O would establish this type of protection for San Francisco at the local level.

     

    CANDIDATES

    There are unfortunately no Libertarian candidates on the ballot in San Francisco this year besides our presidential and vice-presidential ticket of Chase Oliver and Mike ter Maat. Since California adopted the “Top Two” election law in 2012, most alternative party and independent candidates have been prevented from appearing on general election ballots in partisan races, which has reduced the interest in seeking these offices. We wholeheartedly endorse Chase and Mike, and recommend a vote for the following non-Libertarian local candidates who seem to us the best or among the best in their respective races.

    DISTRICT ATTORNEY – Ryan Khojasteh
    BOARD OF EDUCATION – Ann Hsu, Min Chang
    MAYOR – Keith Freedman

    Due to a lack of local volunteers, we did not conduct a full screening and interview process for all the races on the ballot. If you’re a San Francisco Libertarian reading this, we encourage you to get involved next cycle and ensure we have enough activists working together to give this the attention it deserves.

  • LPSF Ballot Recommendations – March 5, 2024 Election

    LPSF Ballot Recommendations – March 5, 2024 Election

    Proposition A (“Affordable” Housing Bonds) – NO  

    Here we go again. Another election, another tax increase in the form of borrowing money that taxpayers will be expected to repay – the least fiscally responsible way to fund stuff, since you have to pay a lot of interest on top of the actual amount you borrow. In this case, Controller Ben Rosenfield reports that the “best estimate” of the cost of borrowing $300 million by selling bonds would be “approximately $544.5 million”. Once again, proponents are playing dishonest word games to pretend that the bond measure is cost-free, claiming in their ballot argument that Prop. A “does not increase property tax rates”, even though the costs are right there in the controller’s statement, which notes that the cost for someone with a house valued at $700,000 would be approximately $55 a year.  

     

    Proposition B (Police Staffing) – NO

    It’s shameful how quickly some politicians have abandoned the calls for police reform they took up in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd in 2020, and have now gone back to carrying water for the powerful law enforcement lobby. One side in this fight wants to hire more cops immediately out of the existing budget at the expense of other programs and services, while they other side wants to use the supposed need for more cops as an excuse to raise taxes. The reality is they are both wrong. San Francisco does not need more police. The city already has more law enforcement personnel, per capita, than Paris did under the hated regime of Louis the XIV before the French Revolution. Contrary to what fearmongers want you to believe, violent crime in the city is significantly lower than it was in past decades. But it’s higher than it would be if the politicians would stop criminalizing people for trying to protect themselves, and respect our individual right to keep and bear arms as guaranteed by the Second Amendment.

     

    Proposition C (Real estate transfer tax exemption) – YES

    Just about any tax reduction is good news, and the need to revitalize the downtown neighborhood by allowing vacant office buildings to be repurposed is severe enough that it’s gotten the mayor and some of the supervisors to rein in government greed for a change. While it wouldn’t Prop. C also has the admirable feature of allowing the Board of Supervisors to further reduce the transfer tax (but not raise it!) in the future, without special voter approval.

     

    Proposition D (Ethics) – NO POSITION

    When it comes to ethics measures on the ballot, we’re often reminded of the metaphor about rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. This one will pass – they always do. Everyone claims they’re against corruption, at least until they get caught engaging in it. Yet the perennial problem of self-dealing doesn’t go away, because these measures never address the fundamental issue – government has too much power, which draws money and lobbying from those trying to get politicians and bureaucrats to use that power, and the stolen taxpayer money at their disposal, to benefit them and their interests, the way a big steaming pile of cow manure draws flies. While Proposition D might do some good on the margins by closing off a few avenues for city officials to enrich themselves at the public’s expense, it does nothing to rein in State power. As long as the excessive power over the economy and people’s lives is there, money will continue flowing into politics the way water flows downhill, routing around whatever obstacles are placed in its path. We also wonder what politically correct DEI type indoctrination may be bundled into the “ethics training” the measure would require city officials to undergo, although on the bright side, every hour they spend sitting around listening to lectures on ethics is an hour less to spend potentially engaged in other more harmful activities such as writing up new laws and regulations violating other people’s rights.

     

    Proposition E (increased police powers) – NO
    The way the ballot description for this measure opens is really misleading: “Shall the city allow the Police Department to hold community meetings before the Police Commission can change policing policies…?” What’s wrong with having more public input, right? But Prop. E’s presentation is deceptive, because whether or not there are community meetings about proposed changes in SFPD policies is not what’s at the heart of this measure. What it’s really about is expanding police powers at the expense of civil liberties. Adding more surveillance cameras, drones, and other intrusive new technologies to monitor and spy on the public, including at political protests. Letting police engage in high-speed car chases of suspects even if it endangers pedestrians and other members of the public (as such chases often do), etc. If you understand that we already live in too much of a police state, and that going further down this road will ultimately make all of us LESS, not more safe – as we hope Libertarians do – opposing this measure is a no-brainer.

     

    Proposition F (Making people get drug tested to receive welfare) – NO
    As long as the right to choose what you put into your own body is being wrongfully criminalized, a measure like Prop. F that adds new government policies further stigmatizing the use of banned substances is a step in the wrong direction. Government welfare is bad enough to begin with – it relies on stolen tax money and typically fosters a culture of dependency on government among recipients, often with rules that create perverse incentives for people not to work (e.g. paying them less if they get jobs). But when it starts to involve attempted social engineering by the State, it takes on a more sinister character. You may like the idea of incentivizing people to stop abusing drugs, but once the precedent of government discriminating against people whose lifestyles those in power don’t approve of is established, will you like it when you find yourself ineligible for various things your taxes have paid for because something you do is deemed to no longer be “politically correct”? Like, say, being denied health care benefits if you have “too much” screen time? If tax-funded welfare has a legitimate purpose it is a humanitarian one, not turning the state into a de facto church that punishes you for various perceived “sins”.

     

    Proposition G (8th grade algebra) – NO POSITION

    Libertarians generally favor the separation of School and State, and would like to see government get out of the education business altogether. So tinkering with the details of the curriculum in government-run schools doesn’t greatly excite us. Prop. G isn’t even a binding measure, but would simply put voters on record asking the school district to overturn its decision to stop offering algebra to 8th grade students (a subject it now offers only to those in high school, which proponents say harms those seeking to pursue a college prepratory focus on STEM (Science Technology, Engineering, and Math) that includes higher math classes in subjects like calculus. Our opinions about the value of algebra vary, but we generally support students and families having more educational choices. On the other hand, the most meaningful and positive educational choice they could make is getting their kids out of government schools. To the extent these schools fail to adopt reforms that ameliorate parental concerns and prompt more families to exit the SF Unified School District, this could be a positive outcome. Yet we’re reluctant to embrace this kind of cynical strategy of hoping things get worse in the short run.

  • Vote Tuesday November 8, 2022!

    Vote Tuesday November 8, 2022!

    LPSF Ballot Recommendations – Nov. 8, 2022 Election

    BALLOT MEASURES

    PROP. A (Retiree COLA Adjustment) – NO

    Proposition A is about taking more money from the public to give to former and current government employees. Naturally the whole local political establishment is in favor of it. The San Francisco Chronicle, which also supports it, says that 70% of those who would benefit from cost-of-living adjustments (former city employees who retired before 1996) are getting pensions of less than $50,000 a year (https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/editorials/article/Endorsement-Prop-A-retire-17444963.php). But pensions are not full-time working salaries, nor should they be; they do not include Social Security or other income that retirees often have. Especially when employees retire early, as was presumably the case for many of those who would benefit from Prop. A, since they are still alive and drawing pay over 26 years later, it is unreasonable to expect taxpayers to pay them as much every year for the rest of their lives as they made when they were actually working as public servants. More troublingly, the measure would remove current caps on pay and benefits for persons hired as executive directors after January 1, 2023. Controller Ben Rosenfield estimates that if Prop. A passes, it will cost taxpayers approximately $8 million annually for the next ten years. We find it hard to believe that many former city government employees are as hard up financially as many of the people living in San Francisco (including the homeless, unemployed, other seniors on fixed incomes, etc.) who are taxed to pay for “our” bloated local bureaucracy. But if some former city government employees are truly suffering in poverty, we think it would be more appropriate to pass legislation increasing their share at the expense of some of the overpaid individuals who are or were holding top city jobs, such as former police chief Heather Fong who took home a $264,000 a year pension after she retired in 2009.

     

    PROP. B (Public Works Reconfiguring) – YES

    It feels good to say “We told you so.” In 2020, following a high-profile corruption scandal involving Department of Public Works head (and former boyfriend of mayor London Breed) Mohammed Nuru taking bribes, voters were presented with (and passed) another Proposition B. It was a charter amendment that took control of street cleaning and maintenance away from the DPW (as if only that agency, and not the whole culture of city government, was the problem) and turning it over to a newly created Department of Sanitation and Streets. The LPSF opposed the 2020 legislation as an unnecessary addition of yet another city department, and now, just two years later, the powers that be have also belatedly realized that it was a half-baked plan. This year’s measure – also on the ballot as Proposition B, and supported by three of the same supervisors who gave us the ill-advised 2020 proposition of the same letter! – will eliminate the newly-created department and transfer its duties back to DPW. Needless to say, we’re happy at the prospect that (for once!) a new branch of the bureaucracy may go away relatively quickly. “Simply hiring more bureaucrats accomplishes nothing but wasting money and ultimately requiring higher taxes,” write supervisors Peskin, Preston, Ronen, along with four new co-sponsors. Truer words are rarely spoken at City Hall! Now if only they would remember that sentence and take it to heart…

     

    PROP. C (Homeless Oversight Commission) – NO

    Proposition C sounds good in theory – more oversight and auditing of city government spending on programs and services supposedly helping the homeless. This spending, spread out across the Department of Homelessness and Supporting Housing, the Department of Public Health, the Department of Public Works, and various other government bodies, clearly needs oversight. According to the mayor herself, we (meaning they, the people who run San Francisco’s municipal government) are spending $1 billion a year to address homelessness. But what are officials like the Mayor and Board of Supervisors there for if not to exercise this kind of due diligence? The Controller should already be auditing city government spending, and the politicians cutting waste and redundancy accordingly. None of this requires creating yet another redundant body, the Homelessness Oversight Commission, as this measure would do. Prop. C would also, according to the ballot statement by Controller Ben Rosenfield, increase government spending by around $350,000 a year in salaries and operating costs. Ironically, this proposition is nevertheless supported by the entire Board of Supervisors – including the same seven who correctly observed (in support of Prop. B) that “Simply hiring more bureaucrats accomplishes nothing but wasting money and ultimately requiring higher taxes.”

     

    PROP. D (Affordable Housing) – YES

    As is often the case with ballot measures, Proposition D is one of a pair of competing proposals on the same topic that voters are being asked to decide on this election. In this case, Prop. D is the real reform measure. It would, at least to some minor extent, ease regulations and make it easier to build housing in San Francisco. It has the support of YIMBY and pro-building groups like the Housing Action Coalition and GrowSF, and was put on the ballot by citizen initiative. Opponents write in one of their ballot arguments that Prop. D will make it “more difficult for residents to be a part of the decision-making process on how their communities change and grow”, which is code for saying that NIMBY neighbors will have less ability to throw monkeywrenches into projects by delaying them with endless public hearings and study requirements. That’s a good thing!

     

    PROP. E (Poison Pill Anti-Housing Measure) – NO

    Proposition E was put on the ballot by seven members of the Board of Supervisors in an effort to stop Prop. D. (Whichever of the two measures receives fewer votes would have no legal effect, even if it passes.) As opponents argue, Prop. E “allows the Board to continue to kill housing by holding up projects they don’t like,” and “is filled with poison pill provisions that will prevent new housing construction.” Allowing more infill housing to be built in urban areas like San Francisco isn’t important just for addressing homelessness and upholding property rights, but also for the environment. As the Greenbelt Alliance and Urban Environmentalist groups write in opposing Prop. E, “Recent studies have shown that stopping new housing in cities like San Francisco is one of the most environmentally destructive things a city like ours can do”, because it pushes more people out to the suburbs, leading to more open space paved over and people having to drive longer commutes.

     

    PROP. F (Library Preservation Fund) – NO

    Who doesn’t like a good library? Libraries are among the favorite government handouts of people who dislike many other forms of government welfare. But there is no reason they should be operated at taxpayer expense, as one libertarian library fan explains here – https://steemit.com/libertarian/@amthomasiv/a-libertarians-view-on-public-libraries. The first ones in America weren’t. Perhaps the earliest public library was started by a private group that included Ben Franklin. Later, business leader Andrew Carnegie, once the richest man in the world, donated a good part of his fortune to establishing hundreds of libraries across the country. At a time when books were scarce and many more people lacked the money to buy them, libraries filled a vital gap. Today, virtually everyone has a world of learning at their fingertips in the form of the Internet, and government libraries have expanded their role from repositories of books to become more like community centers where you can take classes, use computers, borrow music and movies, and more. People tend to think of librarians as the good guys, and certainly some are, but that’s not always so. The San Francisco public library has repeatedly attempted to get authorization to spy on the library-using public by putting RFID chips in their books and other materials (see https://sfrichmondreview.com/2018/06/01/commentary-peter-warfield/). So what’s this all got to do with Prop. F? Simply that it is a measure which would freeze in millions of dollars of local library funding, at the involuntary expense of taxpayers, for the next quarter century. So if this isn’t a time to discuss and think about the fundamental nature of public libraries in San Francisco, when is? Right now, local government-owned libraries are coercively funded to the tune of about $83 million annually from property taxes (paid by renters in the form of higher rents as well as by property owners), plus a “baseline” payment from City Hall of about $113 million a year, for a total yearly budget of around $196 million, according to the controller’s statement on Prop. F, which would basically continue similar payments, subject to adjustments, for the next 25 years. Dividing that $196 million figure by the number of SF residents (around 842,754 at the start of 2022, according to the Census Bureau), we arrive at a total cost of $232.57 per person per year. Did you receive $232 worth of benefit from government libraries over the past year? Are there perhaps other things toward which you might put $232 to better use in the coming year, some of them even educational? Housing, health care, travel, college courses, a faster Internet connection? We don’t want to decide for you, we just believe as Libertarians that it should be your choice. In the absence of government libraries, the voluntary sector would likely provide similar services for those wishing to pay for them directly. Meanwhile, everyone else would have more resources to allocate to other cherished priorities. Please think twice before voting to lock the next generation into a coercive arrangement of paying for services they may not want, need, or use.

     

    PROP. G (SFUSD Grants) – NO

    For anyone worried that without government funding of local libraries (Prop. F) we’d all be as dumb and uncultured as bricks, there would still be the San Francisco Unified School District, which gets around five times as much stolen tax money. According to the budget information on the SFUSD’s website (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1W0OkykyISk9wYf6o5lCKf6VypYaALumy/view), the district had a budget last year of $1,170,608,638, of which (according to the controller’s statement on Prop. G) around $101 million came from the city government. (Prop. G would augment this amount by an additional $11 million to $60 million a year from the city government.) With these funds, the SFUSD is tasked with educating approximately 50,000 students (enrollment last October stood at 50,566 according to the info at https://www.sfusd.edu/about-sfusd/facts-about-sfusd-glance). Like City College (see comments on Prop. O), the city government’s badly mismanaged K-12 schools have been shedding students, resulting in the recall of three school board members by fed-up voters earlier this year. Anyway, let’s do the same basic exercise we did with the SF Public Library system. Dividing the SFUSD’s $1.17 billion annual budget by 50,566 students gives us a dollar amount of $23,150 per student per year. Now imagine that for every school-age child or teen in your household, you had over $23,000 a year to spend on their education. You could just about afford to send them to one of the city’s best independent (“private”) schools, among which tuition averages $25,034 a year, according to PrivateSchoolReview.com (https://www.privateschoolreview.com/california/san-francisco), even without the help of any scholarships or financial assistance with tuition, which are often available. Independent schools in San Francisco already educate over half as many San Francisco students (26,437 according to the website) as the city’s government schools, and a growing number of families choose this option. And that’s not even counting those who choose to homeschool their scholars. Given that independently schooled and homeschooled kids routinely outperform government-schooled kids on measures of academic achievement (see e.g. ), wouldn’t it make more sense to take the extra $11 million to $60 million a year that Prop. G would lavish on the deficit-ridden SFUSD, and instead give it directly to families to allocate as they choose?

     

    PROP. H (Even Year Elections) – NO

    Proposition H would require the San Francisco city government to hold elections only in even-numbered years. Seven members of the Board of Supervisors put this measure on the ballot not for any inherent need for it – four members opposed the unnecessary legislation – but because they expect it to benefit them politically. Presidential elections, which are always held in even-numbered years, typically draw higher turnout, including by many people who otherwise pay relatively little attention to politics. Some politicians think that they and the measures they support are more likely to win voter approval when there are more low-information voters going to the polls. This effect could be compounded by the fact that local issues and campaigns would tend to get drowned out in the media and public consciousness by the amount of coverage and attention devoted to national politics in the days and months leading up to an election. In shifting elections to even-numbered years, Prop. H would also extend the time in office of various incumbents by a year beyond the terms to which they were elected. We hope voters reject this cynical and self-serving bid by the local political establishment.

     

    PROP. I (JFK Drive & Great Highway) – YES

    Disputes over how public streets are used isn’t a top libertarian issue. Unlike government regulations on the use of private property, there is no direct aggression involved in voters deciding how to use the commons. Local government will continue to monopolize San Francisco streets no matter how residents vote on propositions I and J, the two competing measures over when, if ever, to allow automobile traffic on the Great Highway by Ocean Beach, and John F. Kennedy Drive in Golden Gate Park. Whether one prefers the convenience of being able to get from point A to point B more rapidly and the aesthetic pleasures of a scenic drive, or the safety enhancement and aesthetic pleasures of pedestrian malls free of motor vehicles, is a subjective matter. Yet there is a disturbing pattern of local officials trying to impose more and more restrictions on and impediments to driving in the city that echoes many other areas of public policy in which government attempts to control our lives by imposing controls on activities that don’t involve aggression. In general, we would rather see people share the commons in a manner determined by community norms rather than State decrees, with individuals who cause accidents held responsible for them, than the system of preemptive laws, fines, and punishments that exists now. Given that the traffic lanes in question are surrounded by more attractive options for pedestrians and cyclists – the beach, the park, and bicycle lanes – and would appear to get little foot traffic on weekdays, taking away the means for people to directly access these areas via autos seems unnecessary.

     

    PROP. J (JFK Drive) – NO

    Proposition J would make permanent the Board of Supervisors’ closure of portions of John F. Kennedy Drive and certain other connector streets in Golden Gate Park. Aside from the reasons mentioned in our reasons for supporting its opposing measure Prop. I, one of the things we don’t like about Prop. J is that it doesn’t uniformly ban motor vehicle traffic. While it would close JFK Drive and certain “other street segments” to private vehicles, various government motor vehicles would be exempted. That doesn’t sound like equal protection under the law. Another dubious point is that it would create additional one-way streets. One-way streets are confusing to many drivers (in some cases leading to citations that gouge family and individual budgets), often cause unnecessary extra emissions as motorists seeking to go counter to the allowed direction of traffic have to drive further to avoid them, and contribute to speeding.

     

    PROP. K, a bungled attempt to tax Amazon.com, was removed from the ballot after a judge allowed backers to pull the measure when they discovered it might not do what they wanted it to do (see https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/S-F-activists-wanted-to-tax-Amazon-They-could-17412852.php).

     

    PROP. L (Transportation Sales Tax) – NO

    All coercive taxation is theft and a form of slavery, but not every type of tax operates in the same way. Some taxes are more readily avoidable, because they apply to only certain types of actions or property and don’t affect most people, whereas others are essentially impossible to avoid if you want to lead anything like a normal or typical existence in society. Those in power, at one time and another, have levied taxes on almost every aspect of human existence. Given their range of options, it must seem somewhat strange to anyone who believes that the Democratic Party represents the interests of the financially poorer members of society, that Democrats keep proposing sales taxes. It’s well understood that sales taxes are a form of taxation which falls hardest on the poor. It’s not a taking that affects only the wealthy, only people who engage in certain clearly optional activities, or only people who own certain categories of assets – everybody buys stuff. Yet once again the 11 members of the Board of Supervisors – all Dems – unanimously voted to fund their transportation priorities by making everyone pay more whenever they buy products ranging from clothing to phone chargers to over-the-counter medication.

    <!–break–>

    PROP. M (Residential Vacancy Tax) – NO

    Proposition M would open a new front in local government’s war on economic freedom by imposing, for the first time in San Francisco, a tax on vacant residential units. Proponents naturally justify the measure by citing the “housing crisis” – ignoring that the shortage of affordable places to live was caused by anti-housing policies. Adding yet another tax will of course serve as a further disincentive to creating more residential housing in the city. Because it will be difficult and somewhat subjective to tell when a unit is “vacant”, Prop. M is an invitation to selective enforcement and the kind of corruption that inevitably comes with it. As opponents note, it will also turn neighbors into snitches monitoring each other’s whereabouts. They also point out that “any condo owner in a building with 3+ units will be subject to punitive fines should your home have to be unoccupied for 183+ days a year for any reason – if you are hospitalized, traveling for work, staying with your partner, or caring for family members”. As with Prop. J’s exemption of government vehicles from the proposed ban of motor vehicles on certain streets, Prop. M contains a blatant double standard. The legal text of the measure explicitly states that, “The City, the State of California, and any county, municipal corporation, district, or other political subdivision of the State shall be exempt from the Empty Homes Tax, except where any constitutional or statutory immunity from taxation is waived or is not applicable.” It’s likely that no one even knows how much government-owned property that could be used for housing exists in San Francisco. The 2012-2013 San Francisco Civil Grand Jury cited a Budget and Legislative Analyst’s report which found that “The City lacks centralized oversight and controls over its properties.” This notwithstanding the Surplus City Property Ordinance of 2002, which requires that “all departments and agencies provide an inventory of properties under their jurisdiction to the Director of Property and the City Administrator and identify properties they declare surplus or underutilized.” The Civil Grand Jury’s report (online at https://civilgrandjury.sfgov.org/2012_2013/Optimizing_Use_of_Publicly-Owned_Real_Estate_5-29-13-3.pdf) stated that “the citizens of San Francisco deserve more transparency with respect to publicly-owned real estate,” and we agree. City Hall should audit its own empty property before trying to police and tax that belonging to other people.

     

    PROP. N (Golden Gate Parking to Rec & Park) – NO

    Proposition N would have the Recreation and Park Commisson (which overseas the Recreation and Parks Department including Golden Gate Park generally) take over management of the parking garage under the park’s Music Concourse from the non-profit group that currently runs it (the privately-constructed garage was built on public land without the use of taxpayer funds). Reading between the lines of Prop. N, it appears that the goal of backers is to enable the city government to raise overall parking rates in the garage while extending special discounts to members of politically favored groups including seniors, the disabled, and people from “low income households” and “equity priority neighborhoods”. It was put on the ballot by mayor London Breed, who appoints members of the Recreation and Parks Commission that would gain control of the garage under the measure. Most crucially bad, Prop. N would allow taxpayer money to be spent on the facility, which it apparently cannot be under current rules.

     

    PROP. O (City College Parcel Tax) – NO

    Possibly the least excusable measure on this year’s local ballot, Proposition O would (according to city Controller Ben Rosenfield) “increase the cost of government by approximately $6 million on a one-time basis and $3 million on an ongoing, annual basis.” All this to bail out an institution, City College of San Francisco, which has been poorly run and shedding students, from its own financial mismanagement. As opponents (including even progressive Supervisor Aaron Peskin!) note, “In the past 20 years, we’ve approved nearly $1.3 billion in bonds for the school’s facilities and allocated money from the City’s General Fund to make City College classes tuition free. In the past eight years, City College has had NINE chancellors, a never-ending series of budget nightmares, and came very close to losing its accreditation. This is the third parcel tax proposed for City College in the past 10 years. The one we’re currently paying doesn’t expire until 2032!” The two Community College Board candidates that the LPSF is supporting, Jill Yee and Marie Hurabiell, wrote an excellent op-ed piece opposing Prop. O that goes into more detail. You can check it out at https://www.marinatimes.com/vote-no-on-measure-o.

     

    CANDIDATES

    The Libertarian Party of California’s bylaws prohibit the LPSF from formally endorsing non-Libertarian candidates, but at the local level we have traditionally recommended votes for some non-Libertarians when there is no Libertarian candidate in a race and one or more of the contenders seem significantly better (or worse) than their rivals. Even this is controversial however, and this year we found only three candidates we deemed worthy of a recommendation.

     

    Community College Board – Jill Yee and Marie Hurabiell

    In our comments on Prop. O, the City College parcel tax, we mentioned the terrific op-ed piece that these two candidates wrote against the measure, and believe they are good choices for those who want to limit the damage that City College does to San Franciscans’ pocketbooks. Jill Yee came and spoke at our October meeting, and she impressed us as a voice for fiscal responsibility who also happens to have a very long City College resumé and is on paper perhaps the most conventionally qualified candidate for the office. After attending CCSF as a student whose immigrant parents believed in the importance of education, she later returned to teach as a professor at the school for 25 years, as well as chairing its Behavioral Sciences Department. Hurabiell, who Yee endorses, pulls no punches in her candidate statement, accusing “unqualified” incumbents of having “rubber-stamped years of malfunction” and “bowing to insider interests”. Her background includes work in voluntary sector educational institutions.

     

    District Attorney – John Hamasaki

    One of four candidates seeking the office of DA, John Hamasaki is a criminal defense attorney who has a history of standing up for police accountability as a member of the Police Commission. Brooke Jenkins, the incumbent district attorney appointed by mayor London Breed after the former DA supported by the LPSF, Chesa Boudin, was recalled in June has been terrible on the issue of holding the government’s armed law enforcers accountable. Breed was initially suppportive of police reform in the wake of the George Floyd protests in 2020, but since then has essentially caved in the face of pressures coming from the opposite direction, and her choice for DA reflects this unfortunate shift. Jenkins wasted no time in undoing many of the criminal justice reforms the DA’s office had been building, firing all the attorneys in the office who had worked on cases involving the prosecution of misbehaving police officers, and ramping up the “War on Drugs” again by making a point of touting efforts to prosecute drug sales. Yet for all her “tough on crime” posturing, and the end of a presumed though unacknowledged “work stoppage” by members of the SFPD during Boudin’s tenure who were unhappy with his reform agenda, crime, the former DA noted in October that the SFPD reported higher rates of both violent crime and property crime over the same period the previous year (see https://twitter.com/chesaboudin/status/1577317131858808832). The U.S. has one of the world’s highest incarceration rates, and just locking up more people at taxpayer expense – reportedly $ per prisoner per year in California – as much as some loud voices in the community seem to be clamoring for this, is clearly not the answer, especially in the case of victimless “crimes” which should not be illegal to begin with. The SF district attorney’s office under Boudin was moving toward more of a restorative justice approach focused on making victims whole, which is more in line with the restitution approach advocated in the Libertarian Party’s platform (https://www.lp.org/platform). Hamasaki has worked with crime victims and was himself a victim of violence, and if elected is expected to continue the work of building alternatives to incarceration.

     

    * * *

     

    In the Board of Education contest, while we did not explicitly take a position on any of the candidates, the LPSF did support the successful February 2022 recall of three prior school board members including Gabriela Lopez, who is now seeking to win back a seat on the board.

     

    In several previous races the LPSF has recommended voting for John Dennis, a Ron Paul supporter who is running again this year as a Republican against congresswoman Nancy Pelosi. However he seems to have become more conventionally conservative and moved away from libertarianism on issues like immigration and policing, and there were no calls to support him this cycle. (This is certainly not intending to say anything positive about Pelosi, a statist politician who has refused to debate her opponents since she was first elected to Congress way back in the 1980s!)

     

    * * *

     

     

  • March 3, 2020 Ballot Recommendations

                Longtime freedom-oriented observers of politics in the City by the Bay won’t be greatly surprised that exactly none of the local measures on the March 3 ballot are worth supporting. The Libertarian Party of San Francisco recommends voting NO on all five. Here’s some brief thoughts on why:

     

    Proposition A – $845 million City College “Job Training, Repair and Earthquake Safety” bond

    According to a faculty union representing teachers at City College, spending on administration has grown to comprise 10% of the school’s personnel costs, up from 7% just five years ago.

    An October bulletin published by the union describes how students, teachers and community members recently had to “push back on exorbitant raises” for top administrators, “including a proposal to compensate Associate Vice Chancellors at $275K/yr.” Meanwhile, City College enrollment is down from 90,000 in 2011-2012 to 65,000 today, according to a piece by Marc Joffe of the Reason Foundation. “With so many San Franciscans living on the streets, investing in educational infrastructure seems to be an especially odd priority,” he writes. We agree. Vote NO on Prop. A.

    Proposition B – $628.5 million “Earthquake Safety and Emergency Response” bond

    Another massive tax-and-spend measure in the name of “safety”. San Franciscans have already voted time and again to appropriate money for earthquake preparedness and emergency services. Just last year voters adopted a $425 million bond measure billed as protecting the city from flooding and earthquakes. As with all bond spending, this measure is wasteful – the controller estimates that borrowing $628.5 million will end up costing taxpayers over $1 billion by the time the principal is repaid with interest to the companies financing the bonds. A nice deal for Wall Street financiers perhaps, but not so great for overtaxed residents including tenants, who could see up to half the cost of the measure passed along to them in the form of higher rents.

    Proposition C – Retiree Benefits for Former SF Housing Authority Employees

    The Housing Authority is a local agency, but has been funded by the federal government. Now some former SFHA employees are being hired by the city government. This measure would make them eligible for city government retirement benefits based not just on their time as municipal employees, but also based on the years they spent drawing federal government paychecks. This sounds like a recipe for double-dipping, and most government employees are already over-compensated compared to people doing similar work in the voluntary sector. Increasing government employee compensation also means stealing more money from the taxpayers to pay for it. We say Vote NO.

    Proposition D – Vacancy Tax

    This measure would tax owners of commercial storefront property for allowing it to sit vacant, incentivizing landlords to rush to fill leases quickly rather than taking the time to consult with community members and groups and seek out tenants who are a good match for their neighborhoods. The usually statist editors of the Bay Area Reporter newspaper correctly point out that retail vacancies are growing nationally “as a result of the convenience of online shopping, competitive prices, and speedy delivery”, and that “the challenges of doing business in San Francisco” , among them “bureaucratic red tape and a protracted permitting process, onerous taxes, scarcity of workers” make the problem even worse here. They note that instead of “doing the hard work of cutting the red tape that frustrates and discourages businesses from operating in our neighborhoods,” the Board of Supervisors “punted and placed Prop. D on the ballot.” We agree – please vote NO.

    Proposition E – Limits on Office Development

    This measure would limit the amount of office space that can be built in San Francisco unless the city government meets its goals for the development of “affordable” housing. More housing is urgently needed, but development of new office space should not be held hostage to this need. Creating laws like this based on guesses about what future needs will be is a bad idea. Limiting creation of office space will also pave the way for politicians to hand out special exemptions based on political favoritism and corruption. One such loophole already built into the measure would allow new office space development in exchange for affordable housing being built off-site, but would require such off-site housing to be located “within an economically disadvantaged community”. In other words, new housing for poor people would have to be located in places where poor people already live, further reinforcing the de facto segregation of the city into poor and wealthy areas, as driven by past government policies like redlining, rather than allowing market development to happen organically. Vote NO on Prop. E.

    Aside from voting to oppose the ballot measures, the LPSF also voted to support three candidates in this election:

    Starchild for State Assembly (write-in)

    Such is the lack of democracy in this largely one-party town that incumbent Assembly member David Chiu was the only candidate to fill for his District 17 seat that comprises the eastern half of San Francisco, leaving an opening for a write-in candidate to run in the primary and automatically appear on the November ballot without having to feed the State by paying a filing fee of hundreds of dollars. LPSF chair Starchild decided this was too good an opportunity to pass up, and decided to collect the signatures needed to be that candidate. The erotic service provider and freedom activist says the core of his campaign message will be the idea of a consent-based society in which government does not tell people what to do with their own bodies and resources, and you can live your life as you choose so long as it does not involve initiating force or fraud against others. “Consent is not just about sex, it matters in every aspect of our lives,” Starchild asserts. He also pledges to champion the rights of homeless people, immigrants, sex workers, independent and homeschool families, the kink and poly communities, people in the cannabis and psychedelic communities, and others who have been marginalized and harmed by the statist quo, while cutting the 6-figure salaries and lavish benefits of those in government who are profiting off the backs of the poor and the victims of government taxes and fees.

    Maria Evangelista for Superior Court Judge

    Like newly elected district attorney Chesa Boudin, Maria Evangelista is a public defender who has worked at the award-winning SF Public Defender’s Office built by the late Jeff Adachi. Her opponent, by contrast, is a former prosecutor. In a criminal justice system that has given the U.S. what is widely reported to be the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world, we need more judges whose background is in trying to keep people out of jail, rather than trying to lock them up. Evangelista’s parents emigrated from Mexico to work as farm workers and took refuge here in San Francisco as undocumented migrants, and her mother collected recycling to help make ends meet, so she has first-hand experience of being poor and on the wrong side of the authorities, if not the law (the Feds actually have no constitutional authority to criminalize or regulate who migrates to the U.S., only the process of becoming a citizen). “Every day I see how our courts have failed to meaningfully address homelessness, car break-ins, and violence”, she writes. “Everyday I see how the courts are disproportionately arresting and imprisoning people of color. We are stuck in a cycle of catch, imprison and release.” It is notoriously difficult to find solid information on the policy positions of candidates for judge, but from her background we believe Maria Evangelista is likely to be the more pro-freedom candidate in this race, and recommend Libertarians support her for Seat 1 on the Superior Court.

    John Dennis for Congress

    There was some dispute in our ranks as to whether we should be recommending a vote for a Republican in a partisan race, but John Dennis has a history of engagement with the freedom movement dating back to Ron Paul’s first campaign for president back in 2007, when he walked the streets alongside many of us canvassing for the libertarian Republican and lifetime Libertarian Party member. A plurality of our committee felt that history, and his positions aside from some regrettable stances on immigration and homelessness, make him a more pro-freedom choice than establishment incumbent Nancy Pelosi or any of her other challengers. John is against overseas wars and in favor of cutting Pentagon as well as other government spending, auditing the Federal Reserve, a return to sound money, and reining in warrantless spying on Americans by the federal government. While we cannot endorse candidates of other parties, we recommend a vote for John Dennis for Congress in District 12 as the best choice in a race without a Libertarian candidate.

    *       *       *