The Board of Supervisors voted 7-4 to pass an ordinance that makes sweeping changes to the city’s municipal codes on Tuesday, despite objections that the 362-page ordinance is too broad to be covered by a single vote and concerns over changing some important reporting requirements including those around surveillance.
The ordinance, sponsored by Board President Rafael Mandelman, originated at the City Attorney’s office, whose staff partnered with a lab at Stanford University to use AI to identify redundancies in the city’s codes.
Supervisors Myrna Melgar, Connie Chan, Jackie Fielder and Shamann Walton voted against the legislation.
A previous vote, on June 30, was postponed by Mandelman for two weeks after several supervisors — and Angela Calvillo, the board clerk, who seldom weighs in on legislative discussion — raised concerns that the proposal was so broad, they could not make sense of all the changes being made.
Calvillo described the ordinance as a “deviation from the norm” and Supervisor Melgar said she relied on AI, Anthropic’s Claude, to understand the changes being addressed in the ordinance.
Many of the proposed changes reduce or remove requirements that mandate reports about certain aspects of city government.
Supervisor Fielder raised concerns about how the ordinance changed the frequency of the city’s audit of its use of surveillance technology from every year to every five years.
“I think the frequency of this report is crucial to honoring civil liberties and the intent of our city’s strong surveillance technology policy,” said Fielder.
Supervisor Walton echoed Fielder’s comments. “These reporting requirements are in place for a reason,” said Walton, who added that the ordinance should have been broken down into smaller pieces of legislation.
Melgar agreed with the substance of the changes, she told the Board, but took issue with the process of combining so many of them together. “There are policy implications for streamlining and getting rid of reports — that I think are policy decisions,” said Melgar.
“I don’t think that the process was sufficient to encompass the entire breadth of what’s happening here,” Melgar added.
Before the meeting, Melgar said she would look into introducing trailing legislation, which allows supervisors to follow-up with changes to existing legislation, at a later stage, to address concerns that weren’t addressed through amendments to the ordinance before it went up to a vote.
The amendments that were made in the last two weeks include restoring reporting requirements that provide information to the Department of the Status on Women (among those requirements: the police department and district attorney’s office have to share domestic violence data.)
The recent amendments also restore reporting requirements on sexual harassment, and for reports on the number of small businesses served by case managers at the city’s Office of Small Business.
At the meeting, Mandelman suggested that work remains to be done to streamline the city’s codes. “I hope this is not the end,” he said. “Because I do think our code needs much more pruning.”