The grim reality of Mayor Daniel Lurie’s budget is beginning to set in as workers get layoff notices, program cuts begin to hit—and labor and community groups organize to fight back.
The mayor’s budget document is vague, at best, and sometimes incomprehensible. Nobody at this point has a complete list of all of the services that Lurie wants to eliminate. Some are direct layoffs of city workers, some are vacant positions that won’t be filled, and some are cuts or the elimination of grants to nonprofits.
But we are starting to get a picture, and it isn’t pretty.
For example, Claire Lau, deputy political director at the Chinese Progressive Association, told me that the Workers Rights Community Collaborative has lost half its funding for this year, and will lose all its city funding for the 2026-27 cycle. That’s the only organization in San Francisco that helps vulnerable workers, many of whom don’t speak English, fight wage theft and recover money from unscrupulous employers. We’re not talking a lot of money—$400,000—but it has a huge impact.
The Lurie budget puts lots of money in to hiring more cops, presumably to fight crime—but wage theft is also a crime, and this bit of law enforcement is going to go away.
For years, San Francisco CityBuild has helped vulnerable people, including those who have served time in prison, get training, apprenticeships, and eventually careers in the construction industry. Judy Sorro, who has worked with the agency for 19 years, told me that more than 1,000 people have turned their lives around through the program.
The Lurie Administration gave layoff notices to five of the 11 employees.
The Human Rights Commission, which has had serious problems with its leadership but has funded many critical community programs, will see its budget cut by almost 40 percent. Jude Diebold, an investigator with the agency’s Civil Rights Division and a union activist, told me that nobody knows at this point exactly which grants and programs will be cut.
“We suspect big cuts to grants and contracts but we don’t know which ones will be cut,” Diebold said.
The program that the Department of Building Inspection funded to involve community-based organizations in building code enforcement is largely gone, Juan Garcia with Chinatown Community Development Center, told a huge rally at City Hall today. That program is essential to people’s lives, he said:
Our program makes sure there’s culturally and language component outreach to people living in the worst conditions- these cuts will mean more seniors and families living with mold, with pests, in danger of collapsed roofs and building fires. While Mayor Lurie is focused on luxury condos and high-end commercial office buildings, there are people living in substandard housing conditions across the city who will suffer under these cuts.
HOPE-SF, a program to rebuild public housing, will lose money that goes for nurses and community health workers, rally participants said.
There is much, much more—but as the supes start hearings on the budget (and they only have five weeks), union leaders and community groups, and journalists, are still in the dark about the specific cuts. The budget document that I have is often incomprehensible and gives no indication of what services that the city provides today will be gone in the next budget.
At the rally, more than 2,000 people involved in community groups and labor made clear that the cuts and layoffs won’t happen without a fight.
Among other things, the speakers said that Airbnb, Uber, and Lyft are suing the city and demanding more than $300 million in back taxes. Lurie has put aside money in the budget to cover those costs—money that could fund many of the threatened services.
I’m not a lawyer, but this makes little sense to me. Why not fight the lawsuits, all the way to a jury trial? Why not let a San Francisco jury hear Airbnb try to convince them that it’s not really a company, just a platform?
A jury trial would be at least two or three years away, and with all the appeals, this could be a five-year process or more. Why prepare and set aside money to settle right now? Yeah, litigation is expensive, but we already have all these deputy city attorneys on staff, while Airbnb has to pay private counsel. And maybe the city would win.
At the very least, if the city wants to settle, it should be for less than the full amount. It seems to me this is just a preparation to cave to the tech companies—which is always a bad idea. Just today, perhaps sensing blood in the water, Microsoft joined in with its own tax suit, according to The Business Times.
Microsoft Corporation is suing San Francisco to recover nearly $14 million, after an audit by the city claimed the company underpaid what it owed from 2019 to 2021. The case comes just a few weeks after a judge ruled against Microsoft in a separate case related to its 2018 tax bill.
Dozens of activists flooded the Board of Supes chambers after the rally to tell the Budget and Appropriations Committee not to accept the mayor’s cuts.
After the testimony, the committee members gave us a sense of where they are standing. Only Sup. Shamann Walton made a clear statement that he’s not going along with the proposals. “This city is supposed to be a refuge when the federal government is attacking people left and right,” Walton said. “The attack on HOPE-SF is despicable, to take nurses and staff from public housing…To lay off employees when there are resources around is unnecessary.”
Walton was also the only one who even mentioned the idea that the city ought to look for new sources of revenue: “I remember when budgets asked us to work together on new revenue,” he said. “I am going to be working to preserve critical services.”
Budget Chair Connie Chan said that “Trump has put us in an impossible position.” That’s true—but she also said that “if San Francisco were to be in this space, so goes California and the nation.”
Board Chair Rafael Mandelman said “I hear the frustration with the mayor, but there is no way a budget was going to land that was a good budget.” Sup. Matt Dorsey said he was a former city employee, and that “we may have to lose positions, but not in a situation where someone has made a commitment to serving the city and we show them the door.”
That, of course, is exactly what is happening. Sorro told me that she and others were informed in a phone call that they would be laid off at the end of the summer.
“One of my colleagues, who has a young family, was in tears,” she said.
Sup. Joel Engardio made no policy pronouncement at all, except to say that he thought the Budget and Appropriations Committee was wonderful. UPDATE: Engardio told me, correctly, that he also said that it’s sometimes cheaper to hire city workers than outside contractors. I asked him if he would vote against layoffs; he replied that “investing in city workers is the lens I will use when looking at the city budget.”
This is just the start of what will be the most contentious budget debate in many years.
