Mayor Breed Signs Balanced Budget To Fund Key City Priorities To Move San Francisco Forward

San Francisco, CA - Mayor London N. Breed signed San Francisco's new budget following final approval by the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday. The annual $15.9 billion for FY 2024-25 and $15.5 billion for FY 2025-26 continues to prioritize and deliver investments for San Francisco's residents, workers and visitors, while closing a significant deficit consecutively.

A difficult economic environment has persisted in San Francisco, yet the City has managed these challenges while continuing to put forth and advance policies and investments that are yielding significant progress. Despite complicated fiscal uncertainties, the Mayor's budget has continued to meet core goals of:

• Advancing economic revitalization efforts
• Creating a safer and more just city
• Supporting workers and families with landmark policies
• Helping people move off the street and into shelter, housing and treatment

This budget builds on the work underway every day in San Francisco thanks to a dedicated City workforce and closes a $789 million two-year deficit.

"This budget reflects our work to prioritize the City services our residents count on while laying the groundwork to remain an economically resilient and vibrant City," said Mayor Breed. "While hard decisions had to be made in light of a significant budget deficit, I am proud of our work over the last several months to build a San Francisco that confronts our most serious health and public safety challenges, supports workers and families, and delivers on very much needed housing. I want to thank the Board of Supervisors, including Chair Connie Chan, and my Budget Office for working collaboratively on this process to deliver a final, balanced budget for our City."

Key Investments in the New Budget:

Public Safety

San Francisco is seeing its lowest crime rates in a decade after significant investments and expanded coordination to improve public safety. The budget expands investments in public safety departments that include:

• Increasing staffing in law enforcement
• Deploying newly approved technologies and tools to modernize the City's public safety resources
• Maintaining the City's multi-agency drug market enforcement effort
• Continuing to build on alternatives to traditional policing to support public safety

Broadening Economic Revitalization Across the City

The Mayor's budget will drive economic revitalization by investing an additional $15 million in strategies laid out in the Roadmap to San Francisco's Future plan. These include funding for public safety, activations, and to fill storefront vacancies in the Union Square and Yerba Buena neighborhoods, where the City's hospitality, entertainment, arts and culture, retail and tourism (HEART) industries are centered.

The Mayor's enhanced economic recovery investments also include the following new initiatives across Downtown and citywide including funding to:

• Fill vacancies Downtown and citywide through Storefront Opportunity Grants for small businesses and a new cohort of pop-ups as part of the Vacant to Vibrant program
• Help businesses open quicker by providing assistance with the permitting process through new business permit specialists at the Permit Center and a new leasing specialist to help match business with available commercial spaces
• Increase funding for public space events and programming throughout Downtown

These are in addition to funding to maintain investments in neighborhood corridors through key programs like First Year Free, which waives City fees for new businesses, and continued and expanded Public Works cleaning crews to keep sidewalks, public spaces, and private properties clean.

These investments represent a continued focus on the Mayor's 30 by 30 initiative to bring 30,000 residents and students Downtown by 2030 and investing in new strategies to attract people and business to Union Square and Yerba Buena as key visitor destinations.

Helping People add Families Off the Street

San Francisco has invested in residents experiencing homelessness by expanding shelter and housing, increasing outreach, and investing in prevention programs to stop people from becoming homeless in the first place. By expanding housing slots by 50% and shelter beds by 66% since 2018, San Francisco's street homeless population is at its lowest level in 10 years.

The Mayor's budget maintains funding for these expansions and continues to add new shelter and housing under the City's Home by the Bay 5-year strategic plan to address homelessness, while continuing to invest in:

• Street outreach and prevention programs to keep people from falling into homelessness, including fully funding Tenants Right to Counsel.
• The City's encampment teams that are on pace this year to conduct significantly more encampment operations than previous years.

These improvements in reducing the number of people living on the streets are balanced by a significant increase in homeless families, including those who are coming to San Francisco without access to housing. To cut the family shelter waitlist and bring families indoors, the Budget funds the Mayor's Safer Families initiative, which adds new emergency hotel shelter and rapid rehousing slots for homeless families.

Delivering Treatment and Reducing Overdoses

San Francisco continues to expand outreach and treatment in the face of elevated overdose rates. The Mayor's budget continues funding of these programs, including substance use initiatives focused on treatment and recovery. This includes:

• $45 million of opioid settlement funding for existing and expanded high-impact services
• Expansion for 24/7 access to Buprenorphine treatment through telehealth and shelter program
• Post-overdose follow-ups with Buprenorphine treatment

Continue to support "night navigators" who do outreach at night in the Tenderloin to help people into treatment.

Expanding Support for Early Care and Education for Families

San Francisco continues to build on its groundbreaking initiatives to support childcare and early education efforts. Mayor Breed's budget continues to fund programs aimed at recruiting and retaining early educators and improving childcare facilities. As part of these investments, in the last five years, San Francisco has doubled the number of children receiving early care and education subsidies annually.

To build on that, the Mayor's budget:

• Expands eligibility for an estimated 5,700 families to receive early learning childcare vouchers to include more middle-income families: those earning 150% of the Area Median Income (AMI), which is $224,800 per year for a family of four
• Pilots an after-hour care support model that extends childcare facility hours in the evenings and on weekends, benefitting parents with late or irregular shifts, including frontline workers

Investing in the City's Workforce

The greatest investment in the Mayor's budget is in the City's workforce of over 30,000 employees. This budget funds newly negotiated Memorandums of Understanding (MOUs) with the City's over 30 miscellaneous unions, such as:

• All new agreements provide a wage increase of at least 13 percent over three years
• Funds additional specific contract provisions across different unions, including the guarantee that every City worker will earn a minimum of $25 per hour

These increased investments accompany an overall decrease in the City's workforce vacancy rate, down to 8.4% in May 2024 from 11.6% in July 2023.

Maintaining Rainy Day Reserves

Despite the tough decisions made to close the deficit, the Mayor is maintaining over $860 million in reserves, including nearly $390 million in the City's Economic Stabilization Reserves (sometimes referred to as "Rainy Day" reserves) and another $470 million in other General Fund reserves.

Good Government: Hiring, Contracting and Accountability

In Mayor Breed's previous budgets, she created the Government Operations Recovery initiative, which have led to a 50% increase in applicants for vacant City positions, more than 25% increase in hires made, 25% decrease in time to fill vacant positions, and nearly 30% decrease in the vacancy rate.

This Budget continues that work and also expands the scope of the Controller's Nonprofit Monitoring and Capacity Building program, which will roll out new policies for performance, oversight, reporting, and monitoring for non-profit contracts in the coming year.

Closing the Deficit

The Mayor's budget closed a massive deficit by reducing expenses, increasing uses from alternative revenue sources, and eliminating outstanding balances in non-critical or completed projects. Cuts were made by holding non-critical positions vacant across departments, limiting the addition of new positions to core services, reducing contract spending, including in grant-making portfolios across multiple departments, and funding new capital and IT projects at reduced levels from recommended Capital and IT Plan amounts.

The Mayor's full budget may be found on this page. Additional information on the budget is available at sf.gov/budget.

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