In One Year and Out the Other

It’s a New Year and you can count the herculean resolutions of all San Franciscans from Mayor-Elect Daniel Lurie to your humble but not always pleasing scribe. Remember that a New Year’s resolution is something that goes in one year and out the other!

We could begin the school year by emphasizing ROTC and occupational trade courses to San Francisco high schools which have abandoned them. ROTC constitutes a pre-enlistment advantage for those who graduate high school and enlist in the Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines or Coast Guard, all of which currently are understaffed as we confront Russia, China and other unfriendly nations.

Vocational education in this technology age represents a required learning process for high school students who don’t need college with its attendant costs. Machinery and tools also are relevant to industrial and agricultural livelihoods. I recall my birthplace, Syracuse, N.Y. One of the six public high schools in a city with 210,000 residents was Vocational High School, many of whose students even went to college after graduating.

We begin 2025 with a new mayor and seven new supervisors, plus a deficit of more than $800 million looming in the 2025-2026 budget. As of July 2024, our City Hall saviors on the second floor constituting the Board of Supervisors received $170,430 annually and their four legislative assistants drew $145,236 without any civil service exam needed. For once, however, they’ve joined in their tax money clamor by San Mateo County’s five-member Board of Supervisors which sets its own salary and is now seeking $195,782 plus benefits. As longtime readers know, until 1996, San Francisco voters, who pay the second floor City Hall intellectuals, had to approve by a majority vote any salary increase. In 1981, the salary was (and had been since 1962!) $9,324 annually. As board president, I asked Budget Analyst Harvey Rose to calculate the cost-of-living increase since 1962 and secured passage of an ordinance for voter approval to increase our salary accordingly. The voters approved the increase for the “Mighty Eleven” who serve residents, not the other way around. For our current heroes, it’s “Katie, Bar The Door.”

The current starting 11 are successors to those earlier stalwarts who made San Francisco a “sanctuary city,” meaning our police and other civil service city employees must protect illegal immigrants (about 38,000 in number). City employees cannot report illegal aliens to federal authorities whose responsibility it is to evict such lawbreakers from the USA. They’re not “undocumented” aliens, as the media takes pride in identifying them. They’ve broken our laws.

In some U.S. cities, illegal aliens are a favored class. Chicago gives them housing entitlements and provides apartments for them and lets them work “under the table.” Guess who suffers the most – it’s Chicago’s black citizens. I await President-Elect Donald Trump’s assurance his administration will expel America’s millions of illegal invaders. Let’s see if he’s all talk like his predecessors. Let’s see what a new mayor and seven new supervisors will do about abolishing S.F.’s “Sanctuary City” status.

Even with illegal aliens, San Francisco’s population declined by about 2,000 in 2024. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s vaunted home-building crusade has fallen short. As a putative 2028 presidential candidate, he’s been unable to deliver on that promise. Meanwhile, Park Merced’s empty apartments invite placement of homeless people. Stonestown hasn’t begun building any of the 325 or so apartments for which it secured Planning Department permits nearly four years ago and the Irish Cultural Center and its proposed Sloat Boulevard neighbor with a planned 50 stories of rental housing are still “in the barn.” (Those 50 stories have since been reduce to 35.) Why? It’s the market and a declining number of San Francisco residents.

I have some 2025 resolutions to fulfill, including abolition of ranked-choice voting, district elections of supervisors (which little Menlo Park had crammed down residents’ throats in 2017), and stopping “deputy mayors” by calling them “policy directors” at Room 200 in City Hall. Regarding district supervisorial elections, the Palo Alto Daily Post editor labels Menlo Park, “The city where democracy is dying.”

In the spirit of a new year, I bring readers the wisdom of Great Britain’s former prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, to wit: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”

Quentin Kopp is a former San Francisco supervisor, state senator, SF Ethics Commission member, president of the California High Speed Rail Authority governing board and retired Superior Court judge.