Anya Worley-Ziegmann embraces JM Jaffe, CEO and executive director of Lyon-Martin Community Health Services, after learning that funding to many services providers was restored in the latest budget discussions at City Hall. Photos by Noah Arroyo.
Many of the painful cuts that Tenderloin service providers had been bracing for have been avoided.
After months of organizing and lobbying and demonstrating, workers and allies of many local nonprofits breathed a collective sigh of relief Thursday afternoon — then resolved to continue fighting against the few cuts that remained as part of City Hall’s budget.
“Since March we have won back damn near $100 million,” said Anya Worley-Ziegmann, coordinator for the People’s Budget Coalition, to a gathering of organizers from around the city, some of whom had just found out that cuts to their organizations were nullified. “Even if it’s not your win, this is a big, big collective win. … I am very proud and grateful for all of you.”
The budget, approved by the Board of Supervisors’ Budget and Appropriations Committee Thursday, reverses millions of dollars in anticipated funding reductions to job training, HIV prevention, economic development, and other programs.
That means that many vulnerable groups in the Tenderloin will continue to get help from the organizations that they have long turned to. Those groups include immigrants, refugees, the unhoused, people with substance use disorders, and seniors.
Several Tenderloin organizations are still facing cuts, however, and the neighborhood appears to have fared somewhat worse than others where major cuts were expected, like the Mission District. Funding to programs at Goodwill, the nonprofit PRC, the Transgender District, Episcopal Community Services, and the Northeast Federal Credit Union will still be reduced. Sunday Streets, an event that takes place throughout the city and closes roadways to car traffic to enable outdoor recreation, will no longer get city money. Hospitality House and its Sixth Street Self-Help Center will lose $250,000 in city support.
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The Michael Baxter youth clinic, which is housed inside Larkin Street Youth Services and offers mental health and medical care to young and often homeless people, had already secured a stay of execution until October. But the long-term future of its clinicians, who are employed by the city, is unclear.
There are also concerns with a tactic that helped produce the money to obviate the cuts: Some of the dollars came out of the annual revenue created by 2018’s Proposition C. That ballot measure levied a business tax designed to pay for programs and services that help people avoid becoming homeless or get housing if they already are. Coalition on Homelessness Executive Director Jennifer Friedenbach described the tactic as “pitting homeless people and nonprofits against each other,” because it would fund organizations’ longstanding expenses rather than helping people who are currently on the streets or at risk of ending up there. That also goes against voters’ mandate for how Prop. C money should be used, she said. The Board of Supervisors will address this specific expenditure in forthcoming legislation in the next few weeks, Friedenbach said.
Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness, talks to the crowd about the Proposition C funding that supervisors propose using to fill service providers’ budget gaps.
Thursday’s restorations were proposed after a review of the city’s spending plan by the Budget and Legislative Analyst, which identified tens of millions in savings across the vast array of line items. This allowed supervisors to begin proposing add-backs, or funding increases to city contracts beyond what was in Mayor Daniel Lurie’s June 1 citywide budget proposal.
This was the budget committee’s final hearing. Known as “add-back night,” normally it would be a frenzied series of negotiations that is infamous for stretching well past midnight. But this year, nearly the full list of identified cuts was restored by around 4:15 p.m.
The mood in the City Hall conference room, where nonprofit leaders and activists had gathered as a home base for their negotiating efforts, was ebullient for most of the afternoon.
With word getting around the hallways that the add-back process was coming to a close, People’s Budget Coalition members vowed to support the organizations that were still facing cuts. The city’s budgeting process may not be taking into account certain adjustments in the state’s budget, they noted, which might free up money. If it does, advocates said they will return to City Hall to help the groups vie for the funds.
“The community gets to decide how those savings are spent,” said one member of the People’s Budget Coalition. “Not just the mayor’s office.”
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Just before 6 p.m. on Thursday, the budget committee was ready to vote on the reallocations. They were joined by several supervisors who do not sit on the committee but had been at City Hall all day to advance the restorations their constituents were pushing for. A packed chamber of onlookers applauded the legislative staff that had done the legwork of finalizing the budget, and cheered when the vote was cast and the meeting adjourned.
“That’s the big win for me: that the board was fighting to restore things,” Worley-Ziegmann said.
I'm a journalist who has covered San Francisco and the Bay Area in writing, audio and video for about a decade; started and hosted a few podcasts; and co-founded News Relay Network, publisher of the Tenderloin Voice. Reach me at laura@tlvoice.org.
