SPEAKER EMERITA PELOSI BACKS MAYOR LURIE’S HISTORIC EFFORT TO CLEAN UP CITY HALL

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

June 23, 2026

Contact: press@cleanupcityhall.org

Broad coalition backs November measures to modernize contracting, make city government accountable, and fix San Francisco’s broken ballot system

SAN FRANCISCO — Today, the Clean Up City Hall campaign announced the support of Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi.  The Speaker Emerita voted to endorse all three measures at last night’s San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee (SF DCCC) meeting, along with Lt Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, Senator Scott Wiener and Assemblymembers Matt Haney and Catherine Stefani.  At the meeting, the Democratic Party voted overwhelmingly to back Mayor Lurie’s three Clean Up City Hall measures, making historic changes that will ensure city government is more accountable, delivers better results, and end the city’s longstanding era of excuses and finger-pointing.

“For too long, city hall insiders have used the broken system they created as an excuse for their failure to deliver,” said Mayor Daniel Lurie. “I’m grateful to Speaker Pelosi and the Democratic Party for joining our growing coalition, and for their strong support of our effort to make city government accountable to the people.” 

Speaker Pelosi and the SF DCCC join a diverse coalition backing the three reform measures, 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, 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.

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 80% fewer signatures than the state average. 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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