As Mayor Daniel Lurie prepares to submit next year’s budget proposal, advocates are expressing concern that deep cuts could devastate immigrant and working-class communities across the city.
Late Tuesday morning, representatives from dozens of nonprofits, unions and advocacy groups marched through City Hall and delivered more than 1,500 letters to Lurie’s office. The letters, written during town hall meetings organized across the city over the past few weeks, had messages from residents who depend on many of the city-funded social services that are now facing deep cuts.
“We’re at a breaking point where organizations are going to close this year if they get if these cuts go through,” said Anya Worley-Ziegmann, coordinator of the People’s Budget Coalition. “There are things that I have seen in the past that have been red lines, like ‘we’re not going to cut this program.’ And those red lines do not exist anymore.”
San Francisco is facing a budget shortfall of $634 million over the next two years, a deficit that has been aggravated by a number of cuts to federally funded supportive services like healthcare, food access and housing support. In response, the mayor has instructed city departments to make significant cuts across programs and services.
Though the mayor’s proposed budget will not be made public until June 1, and the budget won’t be approved until July, members of the People’s Budget Coalition have started documenting some of the planned cuts that have already been made public through announcements, contract terminations, public records requests and pressure from district supervisors.
Among the most impacted sectors would be public health, housing and community development programs. The city is also planning cuts to harm reduction, homeless prevention and outreach programs that connect people to supportive resources.
“The first people who are going to suffer are immigrant communities,” said Laura Valdez, the Executive Director of Mission Action. “They’re already suffering the consequences of all the policies happening at the federal level, so we need this city to truly approve a budget that is fair for the people, for the San Francisco community, for working people.”
Gabriel Medina, Executive Director of La Raza Community Resource Center (LRCRC), which supports San Franciscans through their immigration processes, said the current cuts affect the nonprofit “more than we’ve ever been affected.” The nonprofit’s programs to provide financial assistance to those in crisis, connect families to school and shelter services and provide case management to people with immigration services are all facing cuts, he said.
“The city should [support] the connective tissue for how all these services work together,” Medina said. “If someone needs housing they usually need other services as well. They usually need job assistance, they usually need other things.”
Megan Wayland Escobar, interim Director with the California Domestic Workers Coalition (CDWC), said that the proposed cuts would fully eliminate their program that supports domestic workers asserting their rights in the workplace, many of whom are immigrants.
“We’re talking about workers who are extremely vulnerable to exploitation, especially during this political moment,” she said. “So we need to stand up. We need to put our resources where our values are in the city.”
In remarks to the press made early Tuesday morning, Lurie said the city would stay focused on delivering “core services”, noting that, without cuts, the city’s deficit could grow to a billion dollars in four years.
“We have to make painful choices,” Lurie said. “It’s not something that I’m happy about, but I want to set our city up on firm financial footing. I want to think long term about the city. We are seeing our recovery come back. It’s fragile though. And I want everyone to understand that. And we’re at the whim of federal and state dollars and we are not expecting to get much support.”
The coalition, meanwhile, points to Proposition D, also known as the Overpaid CEO Tax, as a way to offset the budget deficit that the city is experiencing. The measure, which will be on the June 2 ballot, would increase taxes on corporations making more than $5 million in annual city revenue when a CEO earns at least 100 times more than the company’s median worker.
“We can make cuts or we can raise revenue,” Worley-Ziegmann said. “We would like to go to the voters first before we make all of these really damaging and detrimental cuts.“
Lurie, however, opposes Proposition D, arguing it would affect the city’s economic recovery and push businesses away.
Some advocates counter that the cuts could aggravate a reality that is already economically unstable for many working class and immigrant communities.
“We’re looking at the price of gas, the high prices of BART and buses, the price of food, and I’m worried many of our families will lose their homes,” Valdez said. “And it’s not just the impact to benefits, social services (and public health). We’re going to lose jobs. The nonprofit sector employs a lot of people in our communities.”