San Francisco supervisors balk at 362-page city code rewrite
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San Francisco City Hall is illuminated during sunset on Sept. 11, 2025. Photo by Mariana Garcia.
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors on Tuesday postponed voting on a 362-page ordinance that would have made well over a hundred changes to the city code in one fell swoop after several supervisors — and Angela Calvillo, the typically discreet board clerk — raised concerns that the proposal was so broad, they did not even understand what was being changed.
“There is a deviation from the norm,” Calvillo said, during a committee meeting on June 18 to discuss the ordinance. “There is a detriment to the public when so many items are combined into such a document.”
The ordinance, which was proposed by Supervisor Rafael Mandelman but originated in the city attorney’s office, is an effort to clean up a city code that has over 16 million words, according to the city attorney’s office. The law would remove around 150 sections, many of which are redundant, and modify a few dozen others.
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But, Calvillo pointed, the “legislative digest” summarizing the proposed changes did not mention every change in the ordinance, and in some cases, Calvillo and a member of her staff had trouble identifying exactly what the ordinance was changing.
If someone of average intelligence could not map the changes onto the legislative text, Calvillo said, “perhaps part of the public would have a problem doing that as well.”
Supervisor Myrna Melgar on Tuesday said the changes were so sweeping, in fact, that she had to turn to artificial intelligence to help her understand them.
“I went home and I ran it through Claude,” said Melgar during the Tuesday board meeting in which the proposal was shelved.
Melgar agreed with the spirit of the law, she said. The vast majority of changes would remove cumbersome or outdated requirements, she added. But she had also identified some changes that deserve scrutiny.
“Do we still need to keep track of whether women are being paid the same as men?” Melgar said, as an example.
The ordinance is itself a product of AI research — the result of a collaboration between the city attorney’s office and the Regulation, Evaluation, and Governance Lab, or RegLab, at Stanford University. The research group used AI tools to identify and analyze redundancies, which were then manually reviewed by city attorney staff.
Generally, the proposed changes eliminate or reduce “reporting requirements,” when a department is required to produce a report or information of some kind.
Many of the reporting requirements baked into the city’s codes are obsolete, said Jen Kwart, the spokesperson for the city attorney’s office.
For instance, under city code, the director of public works is required to produce a report every other year about “pedestal zones” for newspaper racks. Those racks fell into disuse long ago, a spokesperson for the city attorney’s office said, and have all been removed by the city as of 2025.
In another instance, the code refers to library fines — many of which no longer exist now that the library has eliminated late fees.
Other reports are required at a cadence that the city attorney’s office deems too frequent.
“Many of those reports end up being read by no one,” said Board President Mandelman.
Aside from the administrative burden, Mandelman also pointed out that if staff do not produce the reports, no matter how unnecessary, they are technically violating the city’s code.
Mandelman, as the sponsor, proposed postponing the vote to July 14 and said the extra time would allow him to go through any concerns.
Melgar, for her part, welcomed the delay.
“I think that as the legislative branch, we have a responsibility to our public to make sure that they understand what we’re doing,” she added. “And I’m not sure that’s the case yet.”
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