By Aldo Toledo, J.D. Morris Feb 6, 2025 (SFChronicle.com)
Mayor-elect Daniel Lurie attends his inauguration at the Civic Center in San Francisco on Jan. 8.Gabrielle Lurie/The Chronicle
Mayor Daniel Lurie’s inauguration fund brought in nearly $3 million from deep-pocketed donors to pay for the festivities, with donors hailing from major league sports, Silicon Valley, real estate, hospitality and other sectors.
Lurie’s transition team gave the Chronicle access to a 37-page report that listed donors and how much was spent on the transition and inauguration festivities. The list shows about 150 donors gave a total of $2.7 million to the fund.
The filings related to to inauguration and transition donors were due Friday to City Hall officials, but the full list of donors might have taken longer to become public. Lurie chose to share the list with the press early.
The largest individual contribution came from the San Francisco 49ers, which gave $150,000 to support Lurie’s inauguration. Lurie has close ties to the 49ers: The team’s CEO, Jed York, sits on the board of Tipping Point Community, the antipoverty nonprofit the mayor founded 20 years ago. The team plays at Levi’s Stadium, which is named after the iconic San Francisco denim company that was run for many years by Lurie’s late stepfather.
Other notable contributors include John Fisher, the businessman who owns the Sacramento Athletics, and his wife Laura, who together gave $100,000. John Fisher’s brothers, Gap director William Fisher and Gap chairman Robert Fisher, also each gave $100,000 with their spouses. The Fisher family has frequently donated to Tipping Point over the years, records show.
And the Fishers weren’t the only Tipping Point-affiliated donors to give heavily toward Lurie’s inauguration. Katherine August-deWilde, the former First Republic Bank president who sits on Tipping Point’s board, and her husband David gave $100,000, too.
Lurie also drew some big support from the tech industry. Emerson Collective, the organization founded by entrepreneur and philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs —Steve Jobs’ widow — kicked in $50,000. Angel investor Ron Conway also gave $50,000. Doordash and Instacart each contributed $25,000.
Political action committees affiliated with JPMorgan Chase and AT&T donated $25,000 each to the inaugural fund.
The new mayor’s inaugural festivities were also backed in part by organized labor. UA Local 38 Plumbers and the Teamsters Joint Council 7 both donated $25,000, while the Northern California Carpenters and the San Francisco Deputy Sheriffs’ Association contributed $30,000 each.
The report says the inauguration itself cost $2.06 million with about $1.3 million of that total spent on the public ceremony and City Hall Open House, $625,000 on the Chinatown Night Market, $95,000 for a supporter appreciation event, $15,000 for the interfaith ceremony at Temple Emanu-El and $5,000 for citywide service weekend.
The transition team spent another $750,000 on staff, consultants, contractors and miscellaneous costs associated with the mayoral transfer of power. Another $150,000 went to governance and administrative costs.
In total, the Lurie team spent more than $2.9 million on the transition and inauguration. Max Szabo, who was a consultant on Lurie’s campaign, told the Chronicle that there are “outstanding commitments” and that the $2.7 million raised is what has been collected thus far.
“I’m deeply grateful to my transition team for laying the groundwork for an administration rooted in accountability, service, and change,” Lurie said in a statement. “We learned a lot during the transition, and … I look forward to building on the work of my transition team to move San Francisco forward.”
The costs are much higher than what former Mayor London Breed spent on her inauguration in 2018. Breed’s staff scrambled to raise $500,000 to pay for her inauguration week festivities, which included a public ceremony and a “celebration of civic pride” party at the Fairmont Hotel.
Lurie’s inauguration was opulent: He took the oath of office on top of a large stage set up in front of the City Hall steps while surrounded by hundreds of supporters. The public was then invited inside City Hall for a public celebration before Lurie’s team invited people to Chinatown for a night market and concert by Bay Area electronic music artist Zhu.
The report estimates more than 25,000 people showed up to the Chinatown celebration and more than 3,000 attended Lurie’s City Hall inauguration.
Lurie’s team told the Chronicle that the mayor didn’t have to adhere to conflict-of-interest rules because he was not an elected official before he took office, but that his team decided to adhere to those rules anyway and proactively said no to donors who would have presented a conflict of interest. His team said he did that to provide transparency to residents.
Reach Aldo Toledo: Aldo.Toledo@sfchronicle.com, Reach J.D. Morris: jd.morris@sfchronicle.com
Feb 6, 2025
CITY HALL REPORTER
Adalberto “Aldo” Toledo is a city hall reporter with The San Francisco Chronicle covering the mayor and Board of Supervisors. He is a Venezuelan American from a family of longtime journalists.Before joining the Chronicle in 2023, he reported on Peninsula governments and breaking news for the San Jose Mercury News. He also has bylines in the Dallas Morning News, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Champaign, Illinois News-Gazette.Raised in Texas, he studied journalism with a print news focus at the University of North Texas Mayborn School of Journalism, where he worked as News Editor for the North Texas Daily student newspaper.
CITY HALL REPORTER
J.D. Morris covers San Francisco City Hall, focused on Mayor Daniel Lurie. He joined the Chronicle in 2018 to cover energy and spent three years writing mostly about PG&E and California wildfires.Before coming to the Chronicle, he reported on local government for the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, where he was among the journalists awarded a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of the 2017 North Bay wildfires.He was previously the casino industry reporter for the Las Vegas Sun. Raised in Monterey County and Bakersfield, he has a bachelor’s degree in rhetoric from UC Berkeley.
