Vol. I, No. 21 · San Francisco — FRIDAY, AUGUST 7, 2026 · Price: one warning, first offense
BY CONSTANCE FEENEY, CITY HALL
Six lots on Brannan Street between Fifth and Sixth hold 182,641 square feet of warehouse, 9,800 square feet of office and 249 parking spaces. The Planning Department files them under one number and one name: case 2017-000663, “610-698 Brannan (aka Flower Mart).” On 17 January 2017 a developer asked the city for permission to knock all of it down.
What followed is the most heavily lobbied decision in San Francisco’s public record. Registered lobbyists have logged 515 separate contacts with city officials about that single file, reaching 60 named officials across five departments, and all 515 entries list the same thing under outcome sought: approval. The median file number in the same record draws five contacts, and only 31 files in sixteen years have drawn a hundred or more. The decision has still not been made. The parent case carries no decision, no decision date and no closing date, its status reads On Hold, and on 6 May this year three of its applications were opened again from scratch.
The trade on offer was legible from the first filing. Standing on the site: 182,641 square feet of production, distribution and repair space, 9,800 square feet of office, no retail, 249 parking spaces. Proposed in its place: 2,030,560 square feet of office, 115,000 square feet of production space, 104,420 square feet of retail, 800 parking spaces. The record’s own narrative description adds a 22,690 square foot child care facility, a 950 square foot community facility and 41,229 square feet of privately owned public open space, and gives its own slightly different totals for office, retail and parking; both sets are in the footnote. Net new homes, in either version: zero.
Three lobbyists did all of the asking. Daniel Frattin logged 326 of the contacts, Tuija Catalano 167, Chloe Angelis 22. Frattin is the second most active contact lobbyist in the whole file, with 3,151 disclosed contacts since 2014, and he is also the applicant of record on the Planning case itself, for Reuben, Junius & Rose. The client was Kilroy Realty Corporation, which under two spellings of its name accounts for 514 of the 515.
The names on the receiving end are mostly not the ones a reader would guess. The most contacted official on the file is Anne Taupier, logged 85 times across the Mayor’s Office and Economic and Workforce Development. Then Charles Sullivan of the City Attorney’s office, 54; Ken Rich of Economic and Workforce Development, 53; Ella Samonsky of Planning, 34; Joy Navarette, 26; Christopher Thomas, 24; Rich Sucre, 21; Betsy Dietrich of the City Attorney, 20. By department, Planning drew 208 contacts, Economic and Workforce Development 107, the City Attorney 101, the Mayor’s Office 51.
The Board of Supervisors, the body that would eventually have to vote, drew 47. Sitting members account for 22 of those: Jane Kim 14, Aaron Peskin 5, Matt Haney 2, Katy Tang 1. The rest went to aides. Four percent of the asking on the most-lobbied decision in the city went to anyone a voter can remove.
The asking also has an arc, and it ends early. Fifty-seven contacts in 2017, 160 in 2018, 259 in 2019, then 14 in 2020 and 22 in 2021. Nothing at all in 2022 or 2023. Three in 2024, the last of them on 26 November, and nothing since.
The file did produce decisions, four of them. The office allocation closed approved on 25 July 2019, the shadow study on 9 August 2019, the code amendment on 1 November 2019, and the large project authorization on 22 May 2024, six and a half years after it was opened. The development agreement, the instrument that would bind the city and the developer to one another, was opened on 25 June 2019 and has never closed. Nor has the subdivision map, opened five days before it. A further record on the case was cancelled outright on 22 January 2026. Then, on 6 May 2026, a second development agreement, a second subdivision map and a second code amendment were opened under the same case number, with no applicant recorded against any of them.
Set beside its neighbors in the ranking, the shape of the thing is easier to see. 655 Fourth Street drew 403 contacts and was approved on 22 January 2020 with 958 net homes; its file closed in December 2021. 2700 Sloat Boulevard drew 242 contacts for 712 homes and was withdrawn in May 2024, which is at least an answer. The Flower Mart case has out-drawn both and produced neither.
The read is narrow and this desk will not stretch it. Volume of lobbying does not predict a decision, and on the evidence of this file it does not predict a fast one either. Confidence is high on the counts, which were re-aggregated here from all 65,455 rows of the disclosure file and checked against the commission’s own totals. It is lower on the ranking, for a reason worth printing: file numbers in this record are typed by hand. Only 20,098 of the 65,455 contacts carry a real one at all, 39,466 carry none, and 5,891 carry a placeholder such as “N/A” or “Informational.” Kilroy alone has 255 contacts filed with no case number. So 515 is a floor, not a ceiling.
Meanwhile the six lots are recorded exactly as they were recorded in January 2017. Warehouse, a little office, a parking lot, and a case number now in its tenth year.
A year at 467 Bryant
San Francisco’s first speed cameras finished their first year in March. One of the fifty-six, facing east on Bryant Street, wrote 140,453 of the system’s 715,581 notices. Over eleven months the average speed of the drivers it caught never left a band three-quarters of a mile an hour wide.
BY INES CALLOWAY, TRANSIT DESK
The camera on the eastbound side of Bryant Street, outside number 467, has been watching the same short stretch of asphalt since 17 May 2025. The posted limit there is 25 miles an hour. In 318 days it has issued 140,453 warnings and citations, an average of 442 a day.
That is one camera out of fifty-six, and it accounts for 19.6 percent of every notice San Francisco’s automated speed enforcement program has issued in its first year. It accounts for 31.2 percent of the notices written for driving 21 or more miles an hour over the limit. The median camera in the system issued 7,694 notices over the same period; this one issued eighteen times that. And the figure that has not moved is the one the whole apparatus exists to move. Month by month since it switched on, the average speed of the drivers it catches has run 39.2, 39.0, 39.1, 39.2, 39.1, 39.1, 39.1, 39.0, 38.7, 38.5 and 38.5 miles an hour, against a limit of 25.
The program’s own calendar is worth having straight. Eighteen cameras went live in April 2025, 33 more in May and the last five in June. For four months they issued warnings only. The first citations appear in August 2025: 16,555 of them. Across the twelve months to 31 March the fifty-six cameras issued 550,961 warnings and 164,620 citations, 715,581 notices in all.
The Bryant camera’s own year runs like this. In its first fifteen days of May it wrote 943.9 notices a day. June, 247.1. July, 633.8. August, its first citation month, 409.2. Then a long settling: 377.9 in September, 336.7 in October, 322.8 in November, and a floor of 304.3 in December. Since the new year it has climbed again, to 346.8 in January, 561.1 in February and 627.2 in March, double the December floor. Its citations alone went from 4,087 in August to 10,832 in March.
The week has a shape too, and it is not the shape of a commute. The average Saturday at 467 Bryant brings 598.0 notices, the average Sunday 466.7 and the average Friday 509.7. The quietest day is Tuesday, at 347.2. Saturday runs 72 percent above it.
Severity sorts the same way. Of the Bryant camera’s notices, 108,485 were for 11 to 15 miles an hour over the limit, 25,350 for 16 to 20, and 6,639 for 21 or more. That last band is 4.73 percent of this camera’s notices against 2.97 percent citywide, and those 6,639 are 31.2 percent of every 21-plus notice the city wrote all year.
The camera is where the record says it should be. Its own coordinates put it 1.7 meters from a segment of Bryant Street in the city’s 2024 High Injury Network, the 5,917 street segments where the severe and fatal injuries of 2020 to 2024 concentrated. At the other end of the system, the westbound camera at 1156 Cesar Chavez has issued 527 notices in 205 days, 2.6 a day, and the two facing each other at 763 Guerrero have issued 1,684 and 1,379.
One caution, and it is load-bearing. The SFMTA states in the file’s own description that the data does not represent all speeding vehicles and should not be used to draw conclusions about speeding behavior: staffing, software updates and unreadable plates all decide whether a captured event becomes a notice. So the February and March climb is not evidence that more people are speeding, and the flat average describes the drivers who were caught, not the traffic as a whole.
What the file does support is narrower and still worth the sheet. On one block, over eleven months, a camera issued 140,453 notices, the output dipped and came back, and the sort of driver it catches did not change. Confidence high on the counts, moderate on the read. Whatever the city bought on Bryant Street, it has not yet bought a slower street.
SOURCES & RECEIPTS
1. DataSF Planning Department Records – Projects (qvu5-m3a2), record 2017-000663PRJ, pulled 2026-08-07. Project name “610-698 BRANNAN (aka Flower Mart)”; address 610 Brannan St; block 3778, lot 047; opened 2017-01-17; record status “On Hold”; no close date, no project decision, no project decision date; applicant Frattin, Daniel, of Reuben, Junius & Rose LLP; planner Joseph Sacchi. Existing: 182,641 sf industrial/PDR, 9,800 sf office, 0 sf retail, 249 parking spaces, 91,745 sf parking area. Proposed: 2,030,560 sf office, 115,000 sf PDR, 104,420 sf retail, 800 parking spaces, 458,523 sf parking area. Net dwelling units 0.0; proposed dwelling units 0. Demolition and new construction both checked. The record’s narrative description, same row, gives 2,061,380 sf office, 47,586 sf retail/restaurant, 22,690 sf child care, 950 sf community facility, 41,229 sf privately owned public open space, 506 off-street parking spaces, 9 freight loading spaces and 575 bicycle spaces, on six lots (Block 3778; Lots 1B, 2B, 4, 5, 47, 48) between 5th and 6th Streets in the proposed Central SoMa Plan Area. The paper prints both sets because the department does; neither is reconciled here. 2. SF Ethics Commission, Contact Lobbyist Activity – Contact of Public Official (5f5n-tdbf), full file of 65,455 rows pulled 2026-08-07, covering 2010-01-01 to 2026-07-29. File 2017-000663: 515 contacts, 3 lobbyists, 60 distinct official names, 7 raw department labels collapsing to 5 departments (Planning + City Planning; the two spellings of Economic and Workforce Development), first 2017-01-18, last 2024-11-26. Departments: Planning 208, Economic and Workforce Development 107, City Attorney 101, Mayor 51, Board of Supervisors 47, one blank. Board of Supervisors detail: Kim 14, Jacobo 13, Angulo 10, Peskin 5, Rivamonte Mesa 2, Haney 2, Tang 1. Clients: Kilroy Realty Corporation 347, Kilroy Corporation 167, Panoramic Interests 1. By year: 57, 160, 259, 14, 22, 0, 0, 3, 0, 0 for 2017 through 2026. Baseline across the whole file: 1,344 distinct real file numbers carrying 20,098 contacts, median 5, mean 14.95, 90th percentile 32, 99th percentile 185; 248 file numbers carry exactly one contact; 31 carry 100 or more. Lobbyist ranking: Sarjapur 4,200, Frattin 3,151, Knight 2,622, Tourk 1,679. 3. DataSF Planning Department Records – Non-Projects (y673-d69b), the twelve child records on case 2017-000663, pulled 2026-08-07. Closed – Approved: OFA 2019-07-25, SHD 2019-08-09, PCA 2019-11-01, ENX 2024-05-22 (opened 2017-11-14). Closed – Cancelled: MCM 2026-01-22. Under Review with no close date: DVA opened 2019-06-25, MAP opened 2019-06-20, OFA-02 opened 2021-04-20, PCA-02 opened 2026-05-06. Pending Review: DVA-02 and MAP-02, both opened 2026-05-06, applicant field empty. TDM under review, close date 2020-06-26. 4. Same two Planning datasets, pulled 2026-08-07: 2014-000203PRJ “655 04TH ST”, approved 2020-01-22, closed 2021-12-08, 958 net units, 403 lobbying contacts; 2021-012382PRJ “2700 Sloat Boulevard”, withdrawn 2024-05-22, 712 net units, 242 contacts. Four of the ten most-lobbied file numbers use the pre-2016 case format and return no record in this dataset. Full query URLs in receipts.json.
2. DataSF, SFMTA Automated Speed Enforcement Citations (d5uh-bk84), full file of 17,532 daily rows pulled 2026-08-07, covering 2025-04-01 to 2026-03-31 across 56 cameras. System first year: 550,961 warnings and 164,620 citations, 715,581 notices. Monthly warnings/citations: Apr 31,993/0; May 99,730/0; Jun 66,887/0; Jul 149,506/0; Aug 43,749/16,555; Sep 28,229/19,216; Oct 23,886/19,840; Nov 21,792/19,100; Dec 19,845/18,664; Jan 19,348/18,949; Feb 21,683/23,668; Mar 24,313/28,628. Cameras live: 18 in April, 51 by May, 56 by June. Posted speeds: 29 cameras at 25 mph, 18 at 30, 9 at 20. Site MTAF037, “EB 467 BRYANT ST”, Financial District/South Beach, District 6, posted 25: 318 daily rows from 2025-05-17, 91,464 warnings and 48,989 citations, 140,453 notices, 441.7 a day, 19.63% of all notices. Severity at this site 108,485 / 25,350 / 6,639; citywide 585,827 / 108,440 / 21,260. Median camera total 7,694, mean 12,778; ratio 18.3. Second busiest site MTAF053, SB 2066 Bayshore Blvd, 41,129. Quietest MTAF051, WB 1156 Cesar Chavez St, 527 notices in 205 rows; MTAF042 NB 763 Guerrero 1,684 and MTAF043 SB 763 Guerrero 1,379. 6. Same file, site MTAF037 by month: days present, notices per day, and the mean speed of those issued a notice weighted by notice count. May 2025, 15 days, 943.9, 39.23 mph; Jun 29, 247.1, 38.97; Jul 31, 633.8, 39.12; Aug 31, 409.2, 39.20; Sep 30, 377.9, 39.09; Oct 31, 336.7, 39.08; Nov 30, 322.8, 39.06; Dec 31, 304.3, 38.99; Jan 31, 346.8, 38.70; Feb 28, 561.1, 38.49; Mar 31, 627.2, 38.53. Period mean 38.93 mph; monthly range 38.49 to 39.23, a spread of 0.74 mph. Citations at this site 4,087 in August and 10,832 in March. By day of week, mean notices per day: Mon 369.3, Tue 347.2, Wed 391.7, Thu 407.1, Fri 509.7, Sat 598.0, Sun 466.7. 7. DataSF 2024 High Injury Network (enwt-3u8m), 5,917 segments, pulled 2026-08-07; the dataset describes them as the corridors with the highest concentration of severe and fatal injuries in 2020 to 2024. The camera point recorded in d5uh-bk84 (37.781895, −122.395090) lies 1.7 m from segment 3281000, Bryant St, measured against all 13,016 line pieces in the network. Distances for all 56 cameras were computed and are banked in desk/tips.jsonl, not printed, because any on-or-off count depends on a threshold this desk chose. 8. Quoted from the d5uh-bk84 dataset description, section A. Full query URLs for everything above in receipts.json.
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