City Council Report Cards

What is this and why did we do it?

You’re holding in your virtual hands our report cards on Mayor Sam Liccardo and the 10 city council members. They offer our perspective of their performance on issues that matter to us, and the people we serve and organize. These are not campaign pieces and we are not telling you who you should vote for or against.

So why did we do this?

It’s hard to know what our elected officials are doing, and if they’re doing a good job. As far as we know, our report cards are the only source of long-term analysis of the entire council in one place. This information should be easy to find

What is included and why?

With one exception, we analyzed decisions made by the mayor and council members dating back to January 2017. We picked this timeframe because a majority of the council was in office then, and six years is enough time to identify trends and make assessments. The one exception is the Office of Immigrant Affairs, which was created after we asked for it during the 2014 mayoral campaign. 

Our analysis and grading is based on these issues: housing, immigration, economic justice and public spending, and policing. These are the key issues in the lives of the people we serve and organize.

All of them are complex topics but we give extra attention to housing. It is arguably the most important issue facing our community, and it is so multi-faceted it requires us to look at it from multiple angles.

Grading elected officials on what they’ve done to help renters or get affordable housing built is relatively straightforward; judging them on whether they’ve helped people living on the street is not. After considering several ways to approach this we arrived at one basic, fair and objective question: has this person actively offered space in their district to put tiny homes or other transitional shelters?

One more note on housing; You’ll notice that people who voted for a commercial linkage fee to build housing get a “neutral” rating and those who voted against it get a positive mark. That seems backwards, but the linkage fee the council adopted is weak, and they should have done more. The people who voted against it fought for a higher and more just fee.

Our grading system

In the second round of report cards we made some changes to our scoring system to be as fair as possible to all council members and the mayor.

In the first year, we gave every decision equal weight. This year, we’ve started recognizing that, while every vote is important, some have far more impact on people than others. 

This has created some changes in grades, mostly improving grades for people like Dev Davis and Pam Foley relative to last year.

The more obvious change is that everyone on the council received an F on community safety (with the exception of Raul Peralez, who received a D-). You can read our reasoning here, but, in short, the F grades reflect the complete lack of action on police accountability and community safety over the last year. We think this is a failure that merits the lowest possible grade.

You’ll notice cases where people have all positive ratings but have only earned a B or B+. We think getting an A should be hard. In some cases a B or B+ is the highest possible grade. Think of these as mid-term grades; all of the assignments aren’t in yet. We plan to update these regularly, and people who continue to support our community will eventually earn an A.