The report focused on "only" the 86 bodies required by the city's charter or administrative codes. Interestingly, just 68 of these bothered to respond to a survey. With that in mind, the budget analyst's cost estimates are on the conservative side: Administering to the city's commissions required 56,000 hours of city employees' time. Talk may be cheap — but tasking staffers to write down everything commission members say, or answer their legal and procedural questions, is not. Overall estimated yearly costs for the city's committees are just shy of $6.5 million.
The secretaries devoted to many commissions, meanwhile, are earning serious money — the MTA board secretary is compensated $192,000 in salary and benefits (secretaries' median total compensation is $127,000). Members of 40 commissions are entitled to city-funded health care — an only-in-San Francisco perk. Oddly, this privilege is haphazardly extended to members of the Police Commission (weekly meetings), the Golden Gate Park Concourse Authority (hasn't met since November 2010 with no next meeting scheduled), and the Fine Arts Museum Board of Trustees (do philanthropists such as Dede Wilsey require city health care?). There is no systemic reason health care is offered to these various commission members — but, in this town, who could expect one?
Fred Noland
Fred Noland
Pandering to off-leash dog activists? There’s a committee
for that.
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It's discrepancies like these that Kim hopes to iron out. The total of $6.5 million, she notes, "is not a huge dollar amount." But what are we getting for those millions? It's difficult to say. The analyst's report reveals that more than 40 percent of responding commissions aren't meeting as often as they're required to. Many boards don't seem to be taking attendance, either. Determining a committee's usefulness could be gleaned by reading its annual report. Scores of these bodies are required to submit such reports to both the mayor and the clerk of the board — but neither keeps track of who is required to do so, let alone who does. The clerk of the board's office suggested this information could be gathered by scouring the communications memos at the end of every meeting agenda. In 2010, per those memos, of the dozens and dozens of departments, committees, and commissions required to submit reports, only 17 did so. There are, of course, no repercussions for failing to submit the reports no one is keeping track of. After all, no one appears to be reading the reports that quite possibly no one is bothering to write.
If the city so desired, it could actually monitor what the committees are doing, whether they're performing productive work, and if they're fulfilling their mandated requirements. Sunset clauses could be required for any new task forces, and commissioners who don't attend meetings could be eased out. All of this supposes that the system isn't already serving its intended purpose. At $6.5 million a year, committees remain a cost-effective way for politicians to reward supporters, appease activists, and do it all without being held accountable as decisionmakers. The supervisors care so much about commission attendance that Julius Turman — who missed more than half of the Human Rights Commission's meetings in 2010 — was recently awarded a promotion to the politically plum Police Commission.
Kim says she plans to look into whether we have more commissions than we really need. Good luck with that. "Need" means different things to different people.
For the city's powers that be, the cost of redundancy and inefficiency is marginal, and more than balanced by the political amenities it buys. But costs must be paid. Just not by our government.
The burdens are borne by the property owners or businesspeople who must spend years and fortunes shepherding even minor plans through half a dozen or more city committees, with a setback at any stage curtailing the process. The price is paid by transit-dependent San Franciscans who are waiting for buses or trains that aren't coming. If the MTA board wasn't a mayoral rubber stamp, perhaps the money it allowed to be siphoned off by other departments would have been invested in improving service or repairing vehicles and infrastructure. It's hard to put a dollar figure on human misery, but Muni is undoubtedly running a surplus of it.
The costs are paid by the groups of "concerned citizens," some of whom even sit on citizens' advisory committees and attend hundreds of public meetings hashing out projects for neighborhoods. Following years of this "community input," the plans are stonewalled, jettisoned, or morphed beyond recognition because of internecine conflicts among the city's balkanized, fiefdom-building departments. After more than a decade, the Market Octavia Plan for sane, transit-friendly development of the neighborhood is still just a plan. A five-year process to add bike lanes to eastern Cesar Chavez was nixed just days before the paint was scheduled to hit the pavement after trucking companies lobbied the port and the mayor. These bitter marathons of so-called public input drive many reasonable people out of civic involvement. The field is then left to the self-interested, those with axes to grind, and, of course, the professional activists.
The price is paid by the families unable to suffer the city's bureaucratic slings and arrows. Young parents are fleeing San Francisco. As a result, it's a mild shock in this city to see an actual baby — and not a small dog — in a baby carriage.
