Save District Elections!

[Well, I knew this was coming. Phil Bronstein over at the Chronicle reports that two of San Francisco's monied finest are floating a balloon about repealing the current district-based system the city/county has used to elect its legislative body, the Board of Supervisors, since 2000. Where you stand on district elections pretty much says everything about how you feel about local politics.]

[First, some background. California is divided into fifty-eight counties. Every county (from Los Angeles, with almost ten million people, to Alpine, with under 1,300) is governed by a five-member Board of Supervisors. In rural parts of the state, counties are the only local government; however, in more urban and suburban areas, there are usually incorporated cities and towns whose governments take over much of the county's services within their particular city limits. For example, the City of Oakland is within the County of Alameda, and while the county government has some say over what happens within Oakland's city limits, much is devolved to Oakland's mayor and city council.]

[San Francisco, being entirely urban in character and comparatively compact in shape, opted long ago to consolidate its county and city governments into the City and County of San Francisco. It has a county sheriff and a police chief, for example, and a mayor and a Board of Supervisors, of which the mayor isn't a member. The Board has eleven supes, which has always struck me as a fair number: most incorporated cities in California have city councils of five members, and as I said, all counties have five supervisors as well. Since San Francisco's Board acts as both, combining those numbers and then adding one more avoid a tie has always made sense to me.]

[OK, so districts. Every county in California elects its boards of supervisors by dividing itself into five districts of roughly equal size. Every city over a certain population size does the same. So districts per se aren't weird or unusual: electing the legislative arm of San Francisco's government on an at-large basis would be a glaring exception to the rule in California.]

[So why? Well, unsurprisingly, it's about money. Only well-funded candidates can do the kind of citywide campaiging necessary to get elected at large. That's the way we elect our mayor, and it's no coincidence that the winner of the mayoral election is almost always backed by serious money - a moderate Republican in moderate Democrat's clothing. In times when San Francisco has elected the Board of Supervisors in this way, the Board has tended to be a rubber stamp for the mayor. When it hasn't, it tends rebel against him or her. This makes those who thrive under the status quo, such as Dede Wilsey and Michela Alioto-Pier, very annoyed.]

[District elections are also tied in many people's minds to the assassination in 1978 of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk by ex-Supervisor Dan White. See, both Milk and White were elected as a result of a previous try at district elections, and both immediately established recods as active, independent legislators. As the world knows, White resigned from the Board, begged Moscone to reinstate him, and when Moscone refused, sneaked into City Hall and killed the Mayor and Milk. (Yes, I'm old enough to remember then-Supervisor Dianne Feinstein appearing on TV and making that announcement, the one she shows again every time she runs for senator.)]

[In the wake of the killings, San Francisco went back to at-large elections, and the Board of Supervisors pretty much went to sleep. (There was always one vocal, disloyal Opposition member, usually Angela Alioto or Tom Ammiano.) Mayor Feinstein and her successors pretty much had their way until 1999 when, fed up with Mayor Willie Brown's perceived cronyism and imperial style, San Francisco's usually fractured and bickering Left managed to pull together and get the voters to reinstate district elections. The next year, much of the last rubber-stamp Board was turned out and a majority hostile to Brown got voted in.]

[That's when the fun started. Far from being a unified "progressive" voting bloc, the supervisors fell back to the endless, noisy bickering and personal attacks that probably always characterize San Francisco politics. The only thing most of them could agree upon, it seemed, was their dislike for Brown and his successor, Gavin Newsom. Newsom's surprising same-sex marriage allowance in 2004 only signalled a temporary truce. (It did have the effect of cementing support for Newsom among most of the city's LGBT population, a not insignficant group.)]

[Much of this bickering has centered around one particular supervisor, my former rep, Chris Daly. I had the pleasure of voting for Daly twice when I lived in District 6, even though I disliked and still dislike his tone. Daly is a fiery hothead who regularly accuses Newsom of being a cokehead and toy of the ric,h and Alioto-Pier various things I'm too gentlemanly to repeat. Daly is also one of the most successful supervisors at getting to what he sees as his district's needs. I think that in many San Franciscans' imaginations, though, Daly represents a sort of leftist Dan White: someone who can't be counted on not to stroll into City Hall one day and fill Newsom and Alito-Pier full of bullets.]

[It's exactly this sort of fear that the moderate Democrats who'd dearly love to quietly, corruptly run this city (and often do) plan to exploit when they try to repeal district elections again in the next couple of years. They will say that San Francisco is "too small" for districts. (I don't get it: how can almost 800,000 people be described as "small"?) The whispering campaign has already begun. Next, someone will write Newsom a speech with not too many polysyllabic words that he'll deliver before a carefully chosen audience. I see this being on the ballot as soon as June 2009. And as out of local politics as I've been since leaving law school and my internship at the City Attorney's office (a lot of this stuff was the subject of my Law Review commentary, remember, but I've since drifted to other concerns), this is the one local cause I've always said I'd work on if - when - it came up. And here we go.]

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