SUPERVISOR DALY’S THREATENED CUTS

Public Safety

• New police officers ($3 million cut): Cuts 50 new police officers or one academy class of officers. This cut comes at a time when we are trying to increase the number of police officers in the community. Academy classes that begin at the start of the fiscal year cost about $3M, because they account for salaries for the entire fiscal year. (MORE INFO? MIKE YUEN 554-6125)

• Shotspotter system ($400,000 cut): Zeroes-out funding for Shotspotter system to pinpoint shootings. This system allows police to instantly locate gunshots to more quickly respond to violence and protect the community. It has proven successful in 17 cities where gun violence has decreased where shotspotters are installed. (MORE INFO? MIKE YUEN 554-6125)

Small Business and Merchants

• Small Business Assistance Center ($606,000 cut): Slashes entire funding for the long-awaited Small Business Assistance Center, which would be the first-ever place in City Hall that local small businesses could use to gain assistance starting or maintaining a local business. (MORE INFO? JENNIFER MATZ 554-6511)

• Corridors program ($2.1 million cut): Funding to expand the Community Corridors Cleanup program, which has been the City’s partnership with local merchants to clean 100 blocks along merchant corridors on a daily basis and expand this program to 100 new blocks in local neighborhoods. This would wipe out funding for 100 new blocks for this program. (MORE INFO? AHSHA SAFAI 554-6110)

• Community Benefit Districts ($375,000): Cuts important funding for these proven public-private partnerships: Cuts $250,000 in grants for existing CBDs to make capital fixes, and to develop new CBDs. It also cuts $125,000 to add Hallidie Plaza (below ground in front of Powell Street BART) to existing Union Square CBD. (MORE INFO? RICH HILLIS 554-4082)

Affordable Housing

• HOPE SF ($5 million cut): All funding for “HOPE SF,” a historic, first-in-the-nation investment to rebuild public housing developments where our community’s poorest residents live. The $5 million in funds would help us borrow $95 million in a revenue bond, which would allow us to begin to completely redevelop the eight most distressed public housing sites in San Francisco. In addition to the HOPE SF funds to rebuild housing, $4 million will be spent to address current maintenance issues in public housing. (MORE INFO? DOUG SHOEMAKER, 701-5509)

Streets and Neighborhoods

• Sidewalk safety and repair ($2.88 million cut): This cut would effectively kill the sidewalk safety repair program, which improves sidewalks in front of city buildings and requires private landowners to make repairs on their sidewalks). (MORE INFO? GREG WAGNER 554-6486)

• Potholes ($1.68 million): This would zero-out the entire pothole budget, which would mean there is NO money to refill potholes for an entire year and would involve layoffs at DPW. (MORE INFO? GREG WAGNER 554-6486)

• Street resurfacing ($6.35 million): This cut represents that General Fund portion of the street repaving budget. The non General Fund portion of the street repaving budget is approximately $30 million. The $6 million that Daly proposes to cut would allow the City for the first time to fully fund this coming years portion of street repaving needs. (MORE INFO? GREG WAGNER 554-6486)

• Tree planting ($2.52M cut): Would stop all new street tree planting in city neighborhoods, even as the City works to advance a Local Climate Action Plan. This cut is the entire street tree budget. We would still be able to do the rec and park reforestation, about 2000 trees, but all in parks. This would also kill the Friends of Urban Forest grant. This would also zero out the City’s $162,000 budget with Friends of the Urban Forest (MORE INFO? GREG WAGNER 554-6486)

• Park Rangers for Golden Gate Park ($1 million cut): Would cut 12 new park rangers for Golden Gate Park despite a grassroots neighborhood effort to increase attention to our city’s most popular local park. This cut comes at a time when users report the need for increased attention to the Golden Gate Park. (MORE INFO? GREG WAGNER 554-6486)

• 311 Center ($713,000 cut): All new funding for customer service improvements for the City’s 311 Center. This funding would have ensured that the popular new city hotline has enough staff to answer the phones without lengthy wait-times. $350,000 was going to more operators at peak call times so 80% of calls could be answered in 60 seconds, $175,000 was going to staff for accuracy and follow-up, and the rest was going to public outreach to make residents aware of the service and make small tech improvements to the center (MORE INFO? BEN ROSENFIELD 554-6266)

• Community Justice Center ($700,000 cut): All funding in our budget for the Community Justice Center, which will focus on quality-of-life crimes like drug dealing, public urination and defecation—and move troubled people into services they desperately need. (MORE INFO? JULIAN POTTER 554-5220)

• Post-Employee Benefit Reserve ($500,000 cut): Begin a fund to deal with the City’s long-term pension liability from retiring employees. This liability will hit every City in California and will total billions of dollars. Beginning to address this long-term problem now is essential. (MORE INFO? MIKE YUEN 554-6125)

• General Fund Reserve ($5 million cut): This cut brings our General Fund Reserve down to $20 million dollars, a very small portion of the overall budget that exist to protect against economic downturns. Removing funds from the Reserve threatens our fiscal standing with companies that lend us key. (MORE INFO? MIKE YUEN 554-6125)

Supervisor Daly proposes to use $37M of cuts for the following programs:  

• AIDS/HIV Ryan White CARE funding ($4 million in funding): The Federal government has proposed to cut over $8.1M in Ryan White funds from last year, a $31% cut from the year before. In response, Mayor Newsom back-filled $4.1M of this cut in his proposed budget (focusing on housing subsidies for people with HIV/AIDS). Mayor is also working with Supervisor Dufty to restore the remaining cuts through the Board’s budget process.

The Mayor went to DC the first week of June to lobby against the Ryan White cuts—meeting with the Bush administration and Speaker Pelosi— and may achieve a decrease in the federal funding cut in the coming weeks. In the meantime, he is working with Supervisors Dufty and Ammiano to insure that the City or Federal governments totally backfill the losses in HIV/AIDS funding. (MORE INFO: CARMEN CHU 554-6945)

• Psych Beds at SF General ($1 million in funding): Daly proposes to reverse the Mayor’s budget proposal to fund 12 beds for mentally unstable individuals at a community-based non-profit provider rather than SF General Hospital. In a nutshell, our proposal creates a community-based alternative of care for mentally ill patients. The proposal tries to prevent hospitalization which can be destabilizing for someone who is mentally ill. The Health Department believes that it can provide better care at lower cost for certain mentally ill patients in these settings than in the hospital.

This change is supported as a best practice among health care providers and senior groups that want care based less in institutions and more in the community. The true fiscal cost of this change that Daly is trying to reverse is actually less than $200,000. (MORE INFO: CARMEN CHU 554-6945)

• Affordable Housing ($31.5M in funding): Daly proposes to put the lions-share of his proposed budget cuts back into affordable rental housing—although he has provided few details of how this money would be spent. Daly seeks to fully fund his supplemental spending measure that the Board passed in May that our office did not fund—because it was a last minute supplemental in the last fiscal year that would have increased our budget deficit heading into this fiscal year. (MORE INFO? DOUG SHOEMAKER, 701-5509)

The Mayor has included $217 million in his proposed budget for the creation of affordable housing. This includes the HOPE SF proposal above which would redevelop public housing developments in the city (and also address maintenance issues), as well as working with community housing providers to create new senior, family and supportive housing. Budget investments include.

• $68.8 million to develop new affordable family, senior and homeless housing serving households at or below 60% area median income.
• $63 million for development of new, affordable homeownership units targeted to serving households below 100% and 80% of area median income.
• $7.25 million for downpayment assistance for first-time homebuyers earning below 100% of AMI.

The Mayors Budget investment—all told will create approximately 3,000 units of affordable housing, while Supervisor Daly’s supplemental creates approximately 200 new units of housing. Our budget creates:

• 450 affordable rental units,
• allow for 400 new homeownership opportunities,
• 800-900 new units of public housing through HOPE SF
• and over 1,000 affordable and market rate units through HOPE SF