Rules Committee amends and advances charter proposal to create homelessness oversight commission; continues item for further edits

The Rules Committee on Monday adopted amendments to a proposed charter amendment that would create a homelessness oversight commission to oversee the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing (HSH) and continued the item for additional edits.

Sponsor Supervisor Safaie told the committee that HSH will have "almost a $700,000,000 budget" next fiscal year and argued the city needs a chartered body to provide regular transparency, oversight and auditing of its work. He proposed technical and substantive changes distributed to members, including explicit authority for the city controller to audit homeless services as part of the city services auditor's responsibilities and a requirement that one mayoral appointee have experience in budgeting, finance and auditing.

The amendment prompted extensive public comment. Jordan Davis, a tenant and advocate, said she supports oversight but opposed the measure unless it was amended to eliminate a mayoral appointment majority and to add a permanent supportive housing tenant seat, saying voters and people with lived experience must be centered. Multiple callers, including representatives of advocacy groups and neighborhood bodies, urged removing a merchant/neighborhood seat and creating appointments that include tenants with lived experience.

Deputy Director Emily Cohen of the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing told the committee a single commission could streamline reporting and provide the public with one place for oversight, but she urged the committee to avoid prescribing overly narrow subpopulation seats and to guard against conflicts of interest by commissioners who receive city funding.

Committee deliberations focused on appointment structure, whether mayoral appointments should be a majority, whether commissioners should serve "at the pleasure" of the appointing authority or fixed terms removable only for cause, and what role existing advisory bodies — such as the Local Homeless Coordinating Board and the shelter monitoring committee — should retain. Chair Aaron Peskin and others raised concern about preserving independent functions (for example, shelter monitoring) and the committee discussed a 60-day approval deadline for mayoral appointees, modeled on other charter commissions.

The committee approved Supervisor Safaie’s amendments by roll call with Supervisor Mandelmann recorded as dissenting. Members then voted to excise language that would have required the commission to appoint members of the existing shelter monitoring committee and to have that committee advise the new commission; the committee agreed to handle conforming ordinance edits later. The panel then voted to continue the charter amendment "as twice amended" to the call of the chair to allow additional drafting and review.

Next steps: the item was continued with the expectation that sponsors will circulate conforming edits and that the committee will hear the revised language again before any final vote to place the charter amendment on the November ballot.