Vol. I, No. 22 · San Francisco — MONDAY, AUGUST 10, 2026 · Price: six cents the folio
BY MAXINE DOLAN, CITY DESK
On the sixteenth of March, 1915, San Francisco held a citywide election to settle whether the copyists in the Recorder’s office should be paid seven cents a page instead of six. Forty-eight thousand six hundred and seventy-nine people voted on the question. Two out of three said no.
It was Proposition 28, one of thirty-six measures on that single ballot, and it was a charter amendment, because a copyist’s piece rate is where the charter lived. For most of a century San Francisco ran itself that way. The city’s founding document doubled as its payroll book and its staffing plan, and moving one line inside it took an election. The San Francisco Public Library’s ballot database now holds 1,998 measures put to this city since 1907, and 1,212 of them, 61 percent, are charter amendments. That ballot is gone. In the 1910s, 155 of 178 measures were charter amendments. In the 2010s, 34 of 119. The pay of a city clerk is now an item on somebody’s desk. One vote in November 1995 is most of the reason.
The March 1915 ballot is worth reading through, because it shows what the arrangement felt like from the voting booth. The twenty-two jail guards in the Sheriff’s office asked to go from $600 a year to $900 and were refused, 15,273 to 34,140. The hydrantmen and the firemen on the fire boats asked for $1,200 to become $1,440 and were refused by better than three to one. What did pass that day was Proposition 36, which held that any charter amendment raising a municipal salary could not take effect until the end of the fiscal year, and not before the State Legislature in Sacramento ratified it. A raise for a San Francisco stenographer was a matter for two governments and one electorate.
The tone was not always neutral. The Library’s own summary of a November 1910 measure to shorten the working day at City Hall reads, in full: Provides leisure for tax eaters by reducing city office hours. It failed, 8,662 to 28,014.
San Francisco tried three times to get out of it. In March 1931 the city approved a proposed new charter, 59,084 to 45,741, and kept the habit anyway; the replacement was still the place where salaries and job titles were written. In November 1969 a new charter was put up and beaten badly, 64,598 to 108,387. In 1978 the voters asked for a charter revision commission and got one. Then on the seventh of November, 1995, Proposition E asked a single question, Shall the City adopt a new Charter?, and passed 106,900 to 77,341.
Compare the twenty years on either side of that vote. From 1976 through 1995, San Franciscans were handed 490 measures, 269 of them charter amendments. From 1996 through 2015 they were handed 301, of which 112 were charter amendments. The ballot as a whole shrank by 39 percent. The charter amendment shrank by 58. Screen the 1,212 amendments for the words salary, wage, pension or compensation and 253 come back; 240 of those were voted before 1996 and 13 after.
What is left has also grown likelier to pass. In the 1910s, 43 percent of decided measures carried. In the 2010s, 66 percent did. A shorter ballot on which most things win is a ballot of questions that were settled somewhere else first, plus the bonds and taxes that require a public vote by law. That is a defensible way to run a city of this size. It is also a different relationship, and nobody announced the change.
Confidence is high on the counts and moderate on the cause. This is a library’s index rather than the Registrar’s canvass, it stops in March 2024, and the slide had started before Proposition E: charter amendments fell from 139 in the 1980s to 85 in the 1990s. The 1990s brought term limits and the return of district elections as well as a new charter, and any of them could carry part of the load. What the file will support is the direction and the size.
Seven cents a page was, in 1915, a question for 48,679 people. It is now a question for a personnel analyst.
The Argument Came First, the Permit Came Later
San Francisco’s pandemic parklets drew 912 complaints to the Fire Department beginning in September 2020. The city’s parklet permit file does not record a single Shared Spaces approval until May 2022.
BY MEL ADLER, COMMERCE DESK
Something in the roadway at 1501 Polk Street was reported to the San Francisco Fire Department seventeen times in twenty-two months. Three of the complaints arrived within thirty seconds of one another on a September morning in 2021. Six came in on one day in May 2022, and four more on one day that December.
They are filed under a heading the department did not have before September 2020: shared spaces. There are 912 of them now, and they are the earliest continuous municipal record of the thing that happened to San Francisco’s parking lanes in the pandemic. Dining rooms went into the street faster than any permit counter could follow, and Public Works’s parklet file, which is where those structures are supposed to be written down, records no Shared Spaces approval at all in 2020 or 2021. The first one is dated May 13, 2022. By the close of 2021 the Fire Department had taken 410 complaints about structures the permit record had not yet met.
The complaints were mostly not about fire. Ninety-eight of the 912 ended in a violation, 10.7 percent, against 30.6 percent across the whole 77,958-row file. Counting everything the department either corrected or cited, shared spaces found something 24.6 percent of the time and the file as a whole finds something 73.6 percent of the time. Two hundred and forty-four were closed as duplicates, more than a quarter of the category, against 2.1 percent file-wide. A structure was being reported, and reported again.
The department also reached for a disposition it almost never uses. In twenty-one years the Fire Safety Complaints file closes 265 complaints as deferred. Two hundred and thirty-four of those 265, better than seven in eight, are shared-spaces complaints, and 117 of them landed in 2022 alone. Deferral is what a department does with a question that is not really its own.
Geographically the argument tracked the restaurants: Mission 161, North Beach 83, Haight Ashbury 70, Castro and Upper Market 62, then Hayes Valley, the Marina and Chinatown at 61 apiece. It was a loud two years and then it stopped. Complaints fell to 101 in 2023 and 45 last year.
None of this reads as a scandal, and the read is narrow. The emergency program ran on authority that was not a Public Works parklet permit, and the permanent program began issuing those permits in 2022; the files disagree because the rules changed under them, and neither file says so. The practical warning is for anyone who counts. San Francisco has 2,430 parklet permits on record, 445 of them from the original program that ran from 2011 through 2019 and opened with a thirty-three-foot bamboo deck outside a coffee house at 1300 Fulton Street in February 2011. Another 1,606 carry the Shared Spaces language, and none predates May 2022. Count parklets from the permit file and you will date the boom to 2024 and miss it by four years.
At 1501 Polk the complaints stop in December 2022. Three parklet permits were filed for that stretch of the street. None carries an approval date, two are marked closed and one void, and all three expire on the same day: March 31, 2023.
SOURCES & RECEIPTS
1. SF Public Library, Historical Ballot Propositions (DataSF 88s2-6ua9), pulled 2026-08-10; March 16, 1915 ballot, 36 measures. Prop 28, copyists, six to seven cents per folio, capped at $125 a month: failed 16,223–32,456 (48,679 votes cast). Prop 26, 22 jail guards, $600 to $900: failed 15,273–34,140. Prop 29, hydrantmen and fire-boat firemen, $1,200 to $1,440: failed 11,618–37,937. Prop 36, salary amendments deferred to fiscal year end and subject to State Legislature ratification: passed 26,879–20,269. 2. Same file: 1,998 rows, 1907 to March 2024; Kind = Charter Amendment on 1,212 (60.7%). 3. Same file, aggregated by decade: 1910s 178 measures / 155 amendments / 43.3% pass rate among decided; 1980s 240 / 139 / 64.7%; 1990s 198 / 85 / 68.4%; 2010s 119 / 34 / 65.5%. 4. Same file, November 15, 1910, Prop 25, “Reducing City Office Hours”: failed 8,662–28,014. Description quoted as the Library publishes it. 5. Same file: March 1931 Prop 1 passed 59,084–45,741; Nov. 1969 Prop E failed 64,598–108,387; Nov. 1978 Prop X (charter revision commission) passed 100,107–78,247; Nov. 7, 1995 Prop E passed 106,900–77,341, 58.0%. 6. Same file, counted over matched windows: 1976–1995, 490 measures and 269 amendments; 1996–2015, 301 and 112. 7. Same file, keyword screen of amendment titles and descriptions for salary, wage, pension or compensation: 253 hits, 240 before 1996. A word screen, not a legal classification. Queries and full digests in receipts.json.
2. SFFD Fire Safety Complaints (DataSF 2wsq-7wmv), pulled 2026-08-10; 77,958 complaints received 2005-01-03 to 2026-08-07. Address “1501 - 1519 Polk St”, complaint type shared spaces: 17 complaints on nine timestamps, 2021-02-01 (2), 2021-09-28 (3), 2021-10-21, 2021-11-19, 2022-05-11 (6), 2022-12-12 (4). 9. Same file, complaint item type 92, shared spaces: 912 complaints, 2020-09-01 to 2026-06-22; by year 86, 324, 291, 101, 50, 45, 15. 10. SF Public Works Street-Use Permits (DataSF b6tj-gt35), pulled 2026-08-10; permit_type Parklet with Shared Spaces language in permit_purpose: 1,606 records, earliest approved_date 2022-05-13 (21PKT-00095, 3401 California St), latest 2026-08-06; by approval year 2022 46, 2023 185, 2024 583, 2025 532, 2026 180, undated 80. 11. 2wsq-7wmv: shared-spaces dispositions — duplicate 244, deferred 234, no merit 153, condition corrected 126, violation issued 98, referred 51, blank 6. File-wide: violation issued 23,849 of 77,958 (30.6%), duplicate 1,618 (2.1%), corrected-or-cited 57,340 (73.6%). 12. Same file, disposition = deferred: 265 in total, 234 of them shared spaces (88.3%); shared-spaces deferrals by year 2020 18, 2021 68, 2022 117, 2023 20, 2024 3, 2025 8. 13. Same file, shared spaces by neighborhood district. 14. b6tj-gt35: 2,430 Parklet permits, 445 approved before 2020, earliest 11PKT-0001 approved 2011-02-08 to Cafe Abir. 15. Same file, Parklet permits at 1515 and 1519 Polk St: 21PKT-00054 closed, 22PKT-00135 closed, 22PKT-00148 void; no approved_date on any; permit_end_date 2023-03-31 on all three. Queries and full digests in receipts.json.
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