Departments that don’t draw from the city’s general fund are included in plans to tackle the massive general fund deficit. But why?
by JOE ESKENAZI JANUARY 27, 2025 (MissionLocal.org)
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San Francisco’s beleaguered parents of teens — is there any other kind? — received a strange and terrible message from the city on Thursday.
Applicants for Recreation and Parks Department summer jobs for young people were notified that they’d have to wait indefinitely to sign up for internships or counselor positions.
“We were supposed to release the application this week but, due to the city’s hiring freeze for city employees, we do not have a release date,” read the email. “At this time, the application is on hold.”
Great news, kids! You can go back to playing “Stardew Valley” on your phones.
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But not for long (sorry, kids): By Friday, Rec and Parks was hiring for summer camps and Camp Mather, after the positions were “unfrozen” by the mayor’s office following a review.
It is unlikely that anyone involved in Mayor Daniel Lurie’s citywide hiring freeze envisioned that it would block the city from hiring teens to populate San Francisco’s yearly reenactment of “Wet Hot American Summer” until the mayor’s office gave the official green light. But that happened. And you can expect more hiccups, because the citywide hiring freeze is neither citywide, nor a hiring freeze.
As for “citywide,” the exceptions are broad enough to drive a 1992 Ford Crown Victoria through.
Also, nomenclature aside, it’s not really a “freeze.” But here’s the thing: San Francisco “hiring freezes” never really are. As the parents of future camp counselors learned, it’s not so much about ceasing hiring altogether, but more about the mayor’s office asserting the need to gatekeep and explicitly approve individual hiring. Like “sour cream” or “Defund the Police,” it turns out that “hiring freeze” is not great branding.
The mayor’s move, conceptually, makes sense: The city’s economic health is precarious. It brings back memories of former Oakland Raider Jim Otto’s Burger King in Auburn, which displayed a diagram of his football injuries — which, like San Francisco’s fiscal maladies, were debilitating, myriad and legion. Some manner of hiring slowdown is surely warranted, and would’ve been issued by any San Francisco mayor.
But the devil is in the details. That’s why a move to curtail an $876 million general fund deficit resulted in parents getting emails about teen counselor jobs. But that is not all. Oh no, that is not all.
At the vast Public Utilities Commission, which brings water and power to this and other cities, and pipes away and treats your sewage, Mission Local has learned that the hiring freeze abruptly curtailed the filling of some 300 positions, a situation involving literally thousands of potential applicants. The hiring process for these scads of would-be PUC employees, many of whom have been navigating the slings and arrows of San Francisco’s arduous onboarding process for months already, was canceled in one fell swoop.
Unlike the parents who had to wait not quite 24 hours before applying to get their teens off “Stardew Valley” and out of the house, scenarios like those at the PUC and other non-summer-camp positions may not be resolved quickly, or well. This is not a great way for the city to impress potential hires, many of whom are highly specialized and could pick and choose to work for a less capricious employer.
San Francisco’s hiring process was already unnecessarily onerous and arbitrary, leading to the best candidates being poached while the city made them cool their heels, or bypassing applying here altogether. Regardless of the city’s needs or intentions, this added to that.
That’s unfortunate. In the abstract, it’s good and reasonable that the city’s newly elected mayor, in a fiscal crisis, is applying extra scrutiny before adding to the enormous workforce. In the concrete, however, an imperfectly planned or enacted “hiring freeze” can actually reinforce the city’s sclerotic and Kafkaesque inefficiencies.
In this area, unlike the budget, San Francisco is running a surplus.
Depending upon how closely you follow city government — or if you’re a part of it — you may have already noticed an incongruity here.
The $876 million gap is a general fund deficit. But the PUC — or, for that matter, the port, the airport, and others — are not general fund departments. They are, rather, enterprise departments. To varying degrees, they do not receive much, if any, money from the city’s general fund (the PUC and airport receive none; the airport actually pays into the general fund).
Enterprise departments generate their own money. The PUC pays for capital improvements via bonding and, of course, also receives your monthly payments. The airport charges the airlines landing fees, and also charges you $5 for a goddamn granola bar.
Yes, they hire a lot of people and those people earn money. But, crucially, any savings generated by slowing down or curtailing hiring at the airport or PUC will not do much, if anything, to reduce that yawning general-fund deficit.
So, staffers at the enterprise departments are confused. For all the problems San Francisco has, the toilets flush and the taps work. If revitalizing downtown and tourism is a goal of the new administration, and it is, why make trouble for the airport? For lack of a better word, our airport airports.
As applied, the hiring freeze has pulled the rug out from under these departments, nixed months of internal toil filling vacancies, and necessitated more work for human resources to try — to try — to sweet-talk affected job candidates into trusting the process. And for what?
Mission Local obtained the notes for Mayor Daniel Lurie’s Jan. 9 meeting with city department heads, breaking the news of the hiring freeze. In them, he explicitly stated that “this includes non-General Fund departments.” So, this was no boating accident. It was a deliberate decision.
But why? Why convolute the already convoluted hiring process for departments — departments that don’t factor into the general fund deficit the city is toiling to address? The answer appears to be tucked into those Jan. 9 notes, when Lurie tells department heads that the mayor’s office “will manage towards ensuring effective delivery of core government services.”
In other words: Every department should be prepared to show its work on how its hiring plans and expenditures translate into fulfilling its duties. This is, as noted above, about applying scrutiny, at the mayor’s insistence.
Well, fair enough. You could argue that this was executed in a manner that has led to unnecessary problems. You could further argue that the hiring specialists in specialized departments know more about specialized hiring in specialized departments than anyone in the mayor’s office. It’s not hard to find people throughout the city to tell you these things.
But the mayor is asserting himself here. He’s entitled to: He is, after all, the one we voted for.
Rest assured, smart people put in time and effort on this hiring-freeze plan. A hiring freeze of some sort was necessary. It’s hard to argue, however, that this was implemented optimally.
Yes, there were headlines generated by a broad and confident and sudden hiring freeze, and the gravitas of the city’s problems was emphasized. That’s important, but a more gradual and nuanced approach would have spared many of the unintended consequences that will add even more time to San Francisco’s already marathon hiring process and may well drive qualified candidates away from the city.
The mayor’s office is now calling for departments to submit justifications for future hires. Seems reasonable. But why did it have to do that and cancel all the employment candidates in the pipeline? Couldn’t it have asked for justifications for the in-process hires and weeded out any extraneous ones, instead of curtailing a months-long process affecting thousands of potential candidates — and, again, alienating the job-seekers who deigned to put up with us in the first place?
It’s likely the departments and the mayor’s office will, eventually, hammer out parameters for a hiring slowdown that make sense. But it’s unfortunate such a step would come post-facto.
And, looming over it all is that, by the time things are worked out, the city may find itself confronted by new, less appealing realities. Six months down the road, the situation San Francisco is facing could well make the present resemble a walk in the woods.
Hey, just in time for summer camp.
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JOE ESKENAZI
Managing Editor/Columnist. Joe was born in San Francisco, raised in the Bay Area, and attended U.C. Berkeley. He never left.
“Your humble narrator” was a writer and columnist for SF Weekly from 2007 to 2015, and a senior editor at San Francisco Magazine from 2015 to 2017. You may also have read his work in the Guardian (U.S. and U.K.); San Francisco Public Press; San Francisco Chronicle; San Francisco Examiner; Dallas Morning News; and elsewhere.
He resides in the Excelsior with his wife and three (!) kids, 4.3 miles from his birthplace and 5,474 from hers.
The Northern California branch of the Society of Professional Journalists named Eskenazi the 2019 Journalist of the Year.More by Joe Eskenazi
