Editor:
In a local election, access matters.
Voters rely on candidate forums to hear directly from the people asking for their vote. These events should be open, community-driven spaces where neighbors can listen, compare ideas and make informed decisions about the future of their district.
But what happens when those spaces aren’t as open as they appear?
On March 18, a District 4 candidate forum was held at Holy Name School and promoted as a public community event. Five candidates are running in this race. Four were invited to participate. I was not.
When we reached out to ask why, organizer Rob Aiavao told us that candidates needed to have raised $30,000 to participate and that my campaign had not yet reached $10,000.
However, all of the five candidates have only filed one campaign finance report so far. Based on that filing, just one candidate met the $30,000 threshold. Four of us – including the three candidates who were allowed to participate – did not. In fact, one participating candidate had raised just $6,151.
If most candidates did not meet the stated requirement, why were some included and others excluded?
I’ve participated in other forums and have several more scheduled. I’m actively engaging with voters across the district. But this particular forum highlights a broader issue: how money shapes who gets heard in San Francisco politics.
I am currently the only candidate in the race who supports keeping Sunset Dunes a full-time park. Excluding one candidate doesn’t just affect that individual. It affects the voters who deserve to hear the full range of perspectives on issues, not just for District 4, but for the city of San Francisco.
District 4 voters deserve to hear from all legitimate candidates, and not just the ones who have raised the most money. An honest forum is one that lets voters decide for themselves.
Jeremy Greco, candidate for District 4 supervisor.
Categories: letter to the editor
Richmond Review/Sunset Beacon 
The supporters to overturn Prop k are scared of dissenting voices. They know that any measure brought to a city wide vote to close Sunset Dunes would fail. But they can’t admit it out loud. The four candidates who support closing Sunset Dunes know it won’t close, but they can’t go against the road people because of fear. Jeremy is the only candidate who has the courage to speak the truth. Vote for Jeremy.
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Everyone runnning shoud be allowed the same platform. Differnet opinons are what make this Country what it is, you should never have been excluded.
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It’s worth stepping back from the framing of “exclusion” here. Jeremy Greco is actively publishing op-eds, participating in multiple forums, and running a public campaign. That is not a silenced voice. Being left out of one event with specific participation criteria is not exclusion from the public conversation. It’s a normal feature of campaign organizing, whether one agrees with the criteria or not. If there were concerns about that forum’s rules, that’s something to raise directly with the organizers.
Claims that dissenting views are being suppressed or that people are “afraid” of opposing perspectives don’t really match what’s happening on the ground. The debate over Sunset Dunes has been extremely public, widely covered, and repeatedly contested through elections, forums, letters, and published commentary. The issue isn’t whether voices exist, it’s how persuasive those arguments are to a district that has already voted on this issue.
There’s also a noticeable shift between Greco’s earlier writing and this latest piece. Previously, the message was that the issue is settled and it’s time to move forward. Now the emphasis is on being under-heard and excluded. Those two narratives sit in tension with each other.
And if the concern is meaningful input into major decisions, that cuts in more than one direction. Many District 4 residents felt during the rollout of Prop K under Joel Engardio that there was limited early engagement and insufficient community input before major changes to the Great Highway were implemented.
At the end of the day, voters aren’t dealing with a lack of voices; they’re weighing different approaches to representation, process, and accountability.
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It’s the same letter again. Still no actual qualifications.
And the Holy Names thing… if he was that upset, the obvious move would have been to deal with Holy Names directly. He did some of that, fine, but then he also wrote this dramatic op‑ed like he uncovered a scandal. It’s just one forum with a weird money threshold, not a democracy‑in‑crisis moment.
People can question the forum, sure. But voters also get to watch how a candidate handles a setback. Do they fix it quietly, or do they turn it into a whole “fairness and access” saga starring themselves?
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Wendy raises some fair points about the broader debate, but I think the core issue here is narrower than the framing suggests.
The letter isn’t claiming Jeremy has been silenced — he says explicitly that he’s participated in other forums and has more scheduled. The specific concern is about how the participation criteria were applied inconsistently. If the threshold was $30,000, and only one candidate met it, why were three others included while one was not? That’s a process question, not a grievance about being underheard.
On the supposed tension in messaging: pointing out a flawed process isn’t the same as saying the overall debate has been suppressed. Those can both be true at once — the Sunset Dunes conversation has been public and contested, and this particular forum still applied its rules unevenly.
Jason’s suggestion that the “obvious move” was to handle it privately misses something important: when a public forum excludes a candidate using criteria that weren’t consistently applied, making that public is exactly the right call. Voters benefit from knowing how these events are organized.
None of this is drama. It’s a straightforward question about fairness in a process that’s supposed to serve voters.
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It’s fair to question whether the forum applied its criteria consistently. But I think what people are reacting to is how this was handled.
This reads less like an effort to resolve a specific issue with the organizers and more like an escalation into a broader public narrative about access and fairness. Most candidates encounter setbacks during a campaign. What matters is HOW they respond.
So it’s not just about the forum. It’s also about whether a candidate’s instinct is to work through problems directly, or to turn them into something larger. That’s something voters are naturally going to take into account
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