# San Francisco Charter Reform Three amendments to the San Francisco city charter will be on the **November 3, 2026** ballot as **Props D, E and F**. Mayor [[Daniel Lurie]] wrote them with Board of Supervisors President Rafael Mandelman. Together they would give the mayor's office more power over city departments and contracting than it has had in decades, and make it much harder for anyone else to put a measure on the ballot. The campaign's working names were "Fixing Our Broken Ballot Process," "Modernizing City Contracting," and "Strengthening Executive Branch Accountability." > [!warning] Two Prop Ds in one year > San Francisco voted on a *different* Prop D on June 2, 2026, the labor-backed "Overpaid CEO" tax, which failed. See [[San Francisco Overpaid CEO Tax]]. The November Prop D is the ballot-process measure described below. ## What each measure does | Prop | Official title | What it changes | |------|----------------|-----------------| | **D** | Changes to Ballot Measure Process | Raises the signature requirement for citizen initiatives to **8% of registered voters**, which SPUR and GrowSF put at roughly 10,600 → 42,500 signatures. The Board would need **6 supervisors, up from 4**, to place a measure on the ballot. The mayor would **lose the power to place one alone**. Proponents could withdraw a measure before the election. | | **E** | City Administrator's Authority and Changes to City Contracting | Moves authority over purchasing and contracting rules to the City Administrator and lengthens that office's term from **5 to 10 years**. Opponents say it also raises the size of contract that needs Board approval from $10M to $25M *(that figure comes from opponents' summaries)*. | | **F** | Changes to Executive Branch Management | The mayor could **hire and fire most department heads directly**, remove commissioners at will, and **reorganize departments without voter approval** (24 departments are named in coverage). It also creates **deputy mayor** positions. | ## How it got on the ballot - **March 2026.** Lurie and Mandelman announce the package. Mandelman also has a separate measure to streamline commissions, Prop A. - **Spring 2026.** The campaign takes the citizen-petition route rather than having the Board place the measures, spending about **$4.5 million on paid signature gathering**. - **July 23, 2026.** All three qualify. About 51,000–53,000 valid signatures were needed for each, and sources describe roughly 80,000 as either submitted or certified. The petition route is the core of the argument against the package. A campaign with millions of dollars for paid circulators cleared the current threshold with room to spare, and it would clear an 8% threshold too. Prop D raises the cost of the same tool for groups without that money. *(This is the vault's analysis; opponents make the same argument.)* ## The money The committee was first named "Clean Up City Hall, Mayor Lurie's Ballot Measure Committee" and is now **"Mayor Lurie's Yes on D, E & F Committee"** (FPPC ID 1489257). It reported **$11,508,095.78 raised and $7,005,631.51 spent** through October 1, 2026, according to the SF Ethics Commission. It had $8.6M in mid-July. | Donor | Amount (SF Ethics, through Oct 1) | Notes | |-------|-----------------------------------|-------| | [[Michael Moritz]] | $2,593,096 | Sequoia; former [[TogetherSF]] chair. Reported as $2M in July | | [[Chris Larsen]] | $1,487,500 | Ripple co-founder | | Lyna Lam | $1,000,000 | Larsen's wife | | [[John Pritzker]] | $1,000,000 | Hotelier, Geolo Capital | | [[Emerson Collective]] | $550,000 | [[Laurene Powell Jobs]] | | [[John Doerr]] | $500,000 | Kleiner Perkins | | John Wolthuis | $500,000 | | | Dagmar Dolby | $500,000 | | | Michael Seibel | $450,000 | | | Matthew Paige; Anthony Salewski | $250,000 each | Real estate; Genstar Capital *(Mission Local, July; single-source)* | **Opposition money is about 1% of that.** "Fair Ballot Access," which Mission Local calls "Fair Access, No on D," is led by Daniel Anderson and Ajai Nicole Duncan. It had raised **$110,700** by late September, $80,000 of it from the affordable-housing developer TODCO. ## Who's on which side - **For:** Lurie, Mandelman, SPUR, [[GrowSF]], and the San Francisco Chronicle editorial board (Yes on D). SFist reports [[Nancy Pelosi]] and a Board majority in support *(single-source)*. - **Against:** [[Democratic Socialists of America]] (SF chapter, all three, from Sept 1), the Telegraph Hill Dwellers, the Fair Ballot Access committee, and a Street Sheet op-ed urging No on A, D, E and F. Kim Tavaglione, executive director of the SF Labor Council, criticized the signature threshold for "boxing out" groups without resources. No formal Labor Council position was found. - **Polling:** none found as of October 4, 2026. ## Why it matters in this KB **1. Billionaire money writing the rules for later elections.** This vault has tracked money buying outcomes such as the [[Chesa Boudin Recall]]. This package is different: it changes the rules that later fights are held under. In a Sept 28, 2026 column, Mission Local's Joe Eskenazi compared the concentration of wealth behind current city politics to the [[Gilded Age]]. He also noted that unlike then, no organized opposition movement exists. **2. The same donors as the 2024 race, now backing the winner.** In 2024 Moritz's [[TogetherSF]] spent about $9.5M on an earlier governance measure (also called Prop D) and $5.4M on Mark Farrell for mayor, and lost both. In 2026 the same money is behind the candidate who beat Farrell. See [[Daniel Lurie]] for how the donor class adopted him after the election. **3. The other three measures on the November ballot.** The same ballot carries Prop H, a Lurie-led parcel tax for Muni operations, and the statewide [[California Billionaires Tax]] (Prop 40), which Lurie opposes. ## See Also - [[Daniel Lurie]] · [[San Francisco Overpaid CEO Tax]] · [[San Francisco Federal Surge Reversal]] - [[Michael Moritz]] · [[Chris Larsen]] · [[John Pritzker]] · [[Emerson Collective]] - [[GrowSF]] · [[TogetherSF]] · [[Neighbors for a Better San Francisco]]