EFFORT TO CLEAN UP CITY HALL QUALIFIES FOR NOVEMBER BALLOT

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

July 29, 2026

Contact: press@cleanupcityhall.org

Broad coalition of labor, small business, and neighborhood leaders champion measures to take politics out of contracting, make city government accountable, and fix San Francisco's broken ballot system

SAN FRANCISCO — The San Francisco Department of Elections has announced that the three “Clean Up City Hall” measures have each qualified for the November 3, 2026, general election ballot. Following a random sampling verification of the signatures submitted for each measure, the Department of Elections determined that the measures have met the threshold required for ballot qualification under California election law

“For too long, politicians and city hall insiders have used the broken system they created as an excuse for their failure to deliver,” said Mayor Daniel Lurie. “The  system breeds corruption and wastes taxpayer dollars. San Franciscans are stepping up and demanding more accountability, better results and no excuses from their government. That’s exactly what we’re going to deliver in November.” 

“Voters are deeply frustrated by the parade of good projects, small businesses and contracts that get tangled up for months in a bureaucratic process that serves no one," said Supervisor Rafael Mandelman. "These reforms give city government the structure to actually do its job, and give voters a ballot they can make sense of. That's worth fixing, and I'm glad to support it."

In 2024, Mayor Lurie was elected by a wide margin on a promise to fix a broken system that works for insiders and special interests at the expense of San Franciscans. Passage of these three measures delivers on that mandate and turns the page on a failed status quo.

Together, the measures would modernize city contracting, make city government more accountable, and fix a broken ballot system. The Clean Up City Hall campaign is championing all three measures as part of a historic opportunity to make city government more accountable, deliver better results, and end the era of excuses and finger-pointing.

"San Francisco is globally renowned as an innovative and forward-thinking city, but for small business owners, crawling through the bureaucracy can be confusing and frustrating. It wastes time and taxpayer dollars, and we need to do better for those creating the pulse of the city and stop taking the wind out of their sails,” said Michelle Delaney, owner of 111 Minna Gallery and Red Door Coffee. “These reforms will help restore accountability and enable the city to move at the pace of the people it serves.”

The package of common sense reforms is backed by a diverse coalition, including the San Francisco Building Construction and Trades Council, LiUNA Local 261, Teamsters 665, Teamsters 350, Operating Engineers Local 3, the San Francisco Sheriffs Association, Police Officers Association, and Firefighters 798 — and is endorsed by Mayor Daniel Lurie, Supervisor Mandelman, Supervisor Sauter, Supervisor Dorsey, Supervisor Sherrill, Supervisor Mahmood, Supervisor Wong, and Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi and the SF Democratic Party, alongside a growing list of good governance leaders and small businesses.

The Clean Up City Hall package includes three parts: 

1) Modernize City Contracting

San Francisco's contracting system has become slow, fragmented, and overly politicized, driving up costs and delaying projects. The contracting reform measure would give the City Administrator sole authority over changes to the City's purchasing laws, with any rule changes taking effect unless rejected by the Mayor or a majority of the Board of Supervisors. The measure would also raise the dollar threshold for City contracts requiring Board approval to keep pace with the consumer price index — a threshold that hasn't been adjusted for inflation in nearly 40 years and adds weeks of delay to routine contracts.

"I've run my stores in Chinatown for over 28 years, and I've spent days going department to department just to get a permit — time I could have spent with my family or at my business. I've watched friends go through even worse, waiting for years because our city's bureaucracy is so complicated,” said Nancy Yu Law, Chinatown small business owner and President of Chinatown History and Culture Association. “Small business owners like us deserve a City Hall that works as hard as we do. These reforms will streamline that process and bring real accountability to how our city is run — that's why I'm standing with Mayor Lurie to support this effort." 

2) Make City Government Accountable

As written, the City's Charter locks in bureaucracy, weakens accountability, and protects the status quo. This measure would allow the Mayor to hire and remove most department heads he or she oversees, while retaining strong checks and balances. It would also let appointing authorities — the Mayor or the Board of Supervisors — remove the commissioners they appoint at will, and give the Mayor authority to reorganize department reporting structures, subject to rejection from the board. In addition, it would allow the Mayor to appoint Deputy Mayors to coordinate city departments, end the era of departments operating as independent fiefdoms, and ensure agencies are working toward shared goals. This would eliminate the conflicting guidance that residents and small businesses too often receive from multiple departments, while improving accountability, delivering measurable results, and providing consistent communication to all San Franciscans. 

3) Fix a Broken Ballot System
San Francisco has the loosest rules of any city in the state for getting initiatives on the ballot. The result: voters weighing in on more measures, many of them confusing and competing. In 2024 alone, San Franciscans faced 15 ballot measures — compared with just one in San Jose.

San Francisco is the only city that lets a minority of its governing body, or the mayor, unilaterally place a measure on the ballot, and it requires by far the lowest number of signatures to qualify. That incentivizes politicians and special interests to flood the ballot with poorly conceived, divisive, and often contradictory measures — forcing San Franciscans to fill out lengthy, confusing ballots that too often produce unintended consequences. 

This measure would bring San Francisco closer to the standards set in the rest of the state: raising the supervisor threshold from a minority to a simple majority, eliminating the mayor's unilateral authority, and increasing the signature threshold to a number still below, but closer to, the state standard. It would also let proponents withdraw their own measure after signatures are submitted, encouraging compromise and a way to pull flawed measures from the ballot.

At more than 500 pages, San Francisco's City Charter is the longest municipal charter of any major American city. Its tangle of rules drives up costs — producing absurd outcomes like the $1.7 million public toilet in Noe Valley — and makes it far too difficult to hold city officials accountable, even going so far as to interfere with the removal of officials who betray the public's trust.

To learn more about the effort to make San Francisco’s government more accountable, click HERE.

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