The Weekly Digest (September 7, 2025)

Written By Bill Jackson

Salutation

“It took me 17 years to get three thousand hits in baseball. I got there in one afternoon on the golf course.” — Hank Aaron

Happy Sunday, Brionies! We’re back from our August recess. You may have noticed some changes around here, and over the next few months we’ll be rolling out more and more new features. As usual, though, here’s what you need to know about local politics this week and beyond:

Temperature check

Crime in SF is down

Selected Date Range

Selected Date Range, Prior Year

Republicans in SF are up

Department of spurious correlations

The most important thing you can do this week

The most important thing you can do this week is the most important thing you can do every week. First, click here to confirm that you are registered to vote and that your voter registration info is correct. In particular, confirm that you are registered with the correct party! If you’re not registered at all, register online here. If your info is not correct, update your registration online here. Second, ask just one friend whom you know is dissatisfied with the decades of one-party rule in San Francisco to register (or re-register) as a Republican, using the links above as appropriate. You don’t need to register dozens of people! If everyone reading this digest registers just one new Republican each week (or even each month) we’ll have thousands more voters pulling San Francisco back to the center by the end of the year.

Happenings around town

Briones Society events

  • Monthly Happy Hour — Thursday, September 11, 530-730pm, location provided after RSVP

    • Gather to make new friends, chat about policy and politics, and share good cheer.

  • Briones 101 — Thursday, September 18, 5-530pm, online

    • What is the Briones Society? What is our mission and what are our core principles? And where the heck does the name “Briones” come from? Join us for a half-hour Zoom meeting to learn the answers to these questions and more.

  • Briones Conversations: Under the Hood at San Francisco Unified — Tuesday, September 23, 6-8pm, location provided after RSVP

    • Join SFUSD School Board Member Supryia Ray and Briones co-founder Bill Jackson for a candid discussion on the district’s ethnic studies debate, budget and payroll crises, and approach to charter schools. What will it take for SFUSD to deliver on the promise of quality education?

  • Briones Conversations: Taming the Bloated San Francisco Budget — Wednesday, October 15, 530-730pm, location provided after RSVP

    • San Francisco’s $15.9 billion budget has grown more than 67 percent on an inflation-adjusted basis over the past 15 years while the city’s population has barely budged. Join budget expert David Mace and other guests for a discussion about how conservatives and moderates can build a coalition to rein in spending and restore fiscal discipline.

  • Briones Conversations: Frank Lavin, author of Inside the Reagan White House (rescheduled) — Thursday, November 20, 6-8pm, location provided after RSVP

    • Join us for a discussion with Frank Lavin, former Hoover Institution fellow, naval officer, diplomat, and White House political director, about his new book, Inside the Reagan White House: A Front-Row Seat to Presidential Leadership with Lessons for Today.

Other events

Good enough for government work

Rules Committee (regular meeting) — Monday, September 8, 10am (agenda here)

  • Notably absent from the agenda is discussion of who will be appointed (or reappointed) to the Homelessness Oversight Commission. Last week, it was reported that Christin Evans, the trustafarian extraordinaire behind 2018’s disastrous Proposition C (which drove a number of employers to relocate out of San Francisco), is unlikely to retain her seat on the Commission. Of course, it was absurd that Evans ever held that seat to begin with, given the material conflict of interest raised by having one of the primary backers of a piece of legislation sit on the body charged with — among other things — assessing that legislation’s efficacy.

  • Moderates are instead backing Thomas Rocca, a real estate developer whose nomination to Evan’s seat appears to have the support of Supervisors Rafael Mandelman and Stephen Sherrill.

Board of Supervisors (regular meeting) — Tuesday, September 9, 2pm (agenda here)

  • Spend enough time reading board meeting agendas and one thing you’ll notice (if you haven’t fallen asleep by the second paragraph) is that the City of San Francisco is involved in a lot of litigation. Like, A LOT. All the time.

  • In court, San Francisco is represented by the City Attorney, David Chiu (dun dun). So, we got to wondering: How’s Chiu doing? One way to evaluate his performance is to tally up how much money the City pays versus how much it receives as a result of all this litigation. Of course, many factors will impact the balances beyond Chiu’s performance. But given his penchant for grandstanding and political theater, it’s worth looking at some data to assess whether our City Attorney should be spending more time representing his only client and less time setting up a future run for higher office. And since we’ve just started a new fiscal year (for San Francisco City and County, these run from July 1 through June 30) we thought, “What better time to start this tally than now?”

  • So, without further ado:

    • Since July 1, 2025, San Francisco has:

      • Paid $6,830,196 in settlement of claims; and

      • Received $0 in settlement of claims.

    • This Tuesday, the Supervisors will consider an additional:

      • $3,466,000 in payments; and

      • (Hold the phone!) $19,860,000 in receipts.

  • The biggest settlement payment stems from the lawsuit brought against the City by the Coalition on Homelessness. The biggest settlement receipt stems from a lawsuit the City filed against AT&T for under-remittance of access line taxes.

Action items

  • There are only a few days left in the campaign to recall District 4 Supervisor Joel Engardio. To contribute or volunteer, visit www.recallengardio2025.com.

  • We’ll have more to say about Governor Newsom’s gerrymandering scheme (aka Proposition 50) next week, but for now we encourage you to visit www.votenoprop50.org to learn more.

Musical interlude

The last time California had a Bay Area-bred prima donna with national political ambitions in the Governor’s Mansion, punk rockers still had the guts to make music like this.

What we’re reading

San Francisco is safer. Thank Republicans.

  • In his latest piece for City Journal, Briones Society president Jay Donde charts the improved public safety environment in San Francisco: “Crime is down 27 percent year-over-year, with petty theft, shoplifting, and other forms of larceny nearly halved from their historical peak. Overdose deaths are down, too, and the number of tent encampments has plummeted 85 percent since the pandemic’s early days.”

  • Who do we have to thank for this turnaround? Republicans, argues Donde. Now “sensible Democratic leaders have an opportunity to reach out and strike a grand bargain with the GOP to freeze out the far Left for a generation. Whether they’ll have the courage to do so remains to be seen.”

City officials may raise campaign donor limit

  • Readers of this Digest not suffering from temporary amnesia distinctly remember progressives arguing for the past three decades that there’s too much money in politics and — 1st Amendment rights be damned — campaign contributions should be limited. All this despite the fact that, as Senator Mitch McConnell would regularly point out, Americans spend more on yogurt every year than on politics.

  • Well, it turns out that, at least for San Francisco’s far Left, the only guiding principle appears to be “the law should favor our candidates.” After multiple election cycles in which local progs have been outraised, outspent, and ultimately outrun, some City Hall officials are now changing their tune about money in politics, and are considering doubling San Francisco’s campaign contribution limit from $500 to $1,000. Without a hint of irony, San Francisco Democratic Party Vice Chair Emma Hare is claiming that this change will “give the little guy a fighting chance.” Because, of course, we all know scores of working-class, small-dollar donors who desperately wish they could spend that extra $500 they have just lying around on a politician’s vanity campaign rather than, y’know, their PG&E bill.

  • We look forward to Democratic leaders’ forthcoming op-eds telling voters, “Actually, maybe don’t fill out your ballot, after all,” paired with various fact-checker websites claiming that this was always the Left’s position.

Commit a crime, get a gift card

  • For over a year, the San Francisco Housing Authority has attempted, without success, to evict dozens of squatters living illegally in a Potrero Hill housing complex slated for demolition. Now the Housing Authority is trying out a new tactic: “Resident Tania Guevara, an immigrant who has been living with her 13-year-old son in a Potrero apartment since May 2023, said attorneys for the housing authority sent her a letter in July offering a $5,000 Airbnb gift card in exchange for vacating her home. ‘They said the amount would become lower every day,’ she said, adding that she rejected the gift certificate and cash.”

  • Call us crazy, but an alternative approach might prove more effective. Squatting is a misdemeanor in San Francisco punishable by up to one year in jail. Perhaps just enforce the law?

  • Zooming out a bit, squatting is actually quite a nightmare of a problem for homeowners San Francisco — particularly because of the many protections that the City offers to… checks notes… people who literally steal other people’s homes and refuse to leave. Of course, it doesn’t have to be this way. The American Legislative Exchange Council has model legislation that would end this madness and that is more or less ready to be adapted into a ballot initiative by local property owner groups like SPOSFI (hint hint).

Nerd alert

Recent academic studies of interest

Quick hits

This week in San Francisco history

On September 7, 1939, Cyril McNear tragically became the first person to die in a car accident on the Golden Gate Bridge. The bridge had been open to automobile traffic for more than a year before this first fatality.

The great American library

This week, we’re recommending Born Fighting, by former US Senator Jim Webb. The book recounts “the epic story of the Scots-Irish, a people whose lives and worldview were dictated by resistance, conflict, and struggle, and who, in turn, profoundly influenced the social, political, and cultural landscape of America from its beginnings through the present day… Their cultural identity reflected acute individualism, dislike of aristocracy and a military tradition, and, over time, the Scots-Irish defined the attitudes and values of the military, of working class America, and even of the peculiarly populist form of American democracy itself.”

We’ve got jokes

A man applying for a job meets with a recruiter who asks, “Where do you get off asking for such a high salary? For one thing, you’ve got zero experience in this field. And for another, this job isn’t even that hard!” The man replies, “True, but think of it this way: the job is much harder when you don’t know what you’re doing.”

Palate cleanser

“I lived on the Farallons for a summer. Ask me anything.”

Bill Jackson
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The Weekly Digest (August 3, 2025)