San Francisco's Sanitation and Streets Department lasted just one budget: $116.7 million

Vol. I, No. 27 · San Francisco — Friday, August 21, 2026 · Price: one fiscal year, no encore

BY CONSTANCE FEENEY, CITY HALL

San Francisco’s budget book carried a stand-alone Department of Sanitation and Streets for exactly one fiscal year: July 2022 through June 2023. It had its own budget code, SAS, and its own commission, and it has not appeared in a budget since.

The department did not fade out or get quietly renamed. San Francisco voters created it by ballot measure in November 2020. Two years later, before it had finished spending its first budget, voters killed it by a second ballot measure and handed its duties back to the department it came from. Between one Proposition B and the next, City Hall stood up an entire agency, gave it $116.7 million and a mandate, and then dissolved it. It is a clean, dated record of how quickly direct democracy can build a piece of government and then take it apart.

The creation measure passed on November 3, 2020, with 61.3 percent of the vote, 255,653 in favor against 161,178 opposed. It amended the City Charter to establish a Department of Sanitation and Streets, its own Sanitation and Streets Commission, and a separate Public Works Commission to oversee both agencies. The repeal measure passed on November 8, 2022, with 74.6 percent of the vote, 212,066 in favor against 72,349 opposed. Its ballot language eliminated the Department of Sanitation and Streets and returned its duties to the Department of Public Works, while explicitly keeping both commissions in place.

San Francisco’s adopted-budget file, which runs from fiscal 2010 through fiscal 2028, lists code SAS in exactly one year: 271 separate budget lines, all dated fiscal 2023. After the routine internal-transfer adjustments every department’s budget carries are netted out, the department’s adopted budget came to $116.7 million. That figure is what the city authorized the department to spend, not a confirmed record of what it actually paid out. Salaries alone were $62.3 million, 53 percent of the total; salaries and mandatory fringe benefits together were $90.5 million, 78 percent. The rest covered services performed by other city departments, materials, and a handful of small capital projects.

Public Works’ own budget shows where the money went. Its budget was $308.5 million in fiscal 2022, the year before the split fully reached the books. In fiscal 2023, while sanitation and streets ran on its own code, Public Works’ remaining budget was $298.0 million. In fiscal 2024, the first budget after the merger reversed, it jumped to $460.6 million. That one-year increase, $162.5 million, is larger than everything the standalone department had been budgeted in its only year. The adopted-budget file does not itemize which specific programs moved where, so this is a comparison of totals, not a traced transfer.

The ballot results and budget figures are both public record, confirmed directly tonight. Confidence is high that the department existed for exactly one budget. Confidence is lower on precisely which Public Works programs absorbed the money, since the file gives only totals, not a traced transfer.

The Sanitation and Streets Commission that the 2020 measure created is still listed as active. The department it was created to oversee is not.

One of the three is not a place at all. It is a bookkeeping category called Multiple Recipients, worth $3.6 billion. Strip that category and a statewide regulator out, and San Francisco’s own identifiable share drops to about $3.0 billion, roughly a third of the headline figure.

BY HAZEL WONG, NUMBERS DESK

The federal government’s own accounting says it committed $8.475 billion inside San Francisco County in the year that ended September 30, 2025. Find the address that money actually reached, and the single biggest line, $3.62 billion of it, has no address at all: it is booked to a category called Multiple Recipients.

That category is the federal spending system’s own catch-all, used when an award is shared across recipients too numerous to list individually. It swallows 42.8 percent of the money credited to San Francisco this year. A second large line, $1.86 billion, belongs to the California Public Utilities Commission. It is a state regulator with a San Francisco address, but its mandate covers the entire state. Set those two lines aside, and San Francisco’s identifiable, city-rooted share of the reported $8.475 billion comes to about $3.0 billion, a little over a third of the number that actually circulates in budget testimony and federal advocacy.

The $8.475 billion figure marks one year of increase inside a longer decline, and the true peak is not fiscal 2019. Federal obligations credited to San Francisco County ran $12.3 billion in fiscal 2019, then jumped to $16.4 billion in fiscal 2020, the year COVID-19 federal relief funding began flowing. They fell in every year after: $11.4 billion in fiscal 2021, $7.5 billion in fiscal 2022, $7.2 billion in fiscal 2023, $6.7 billion in fiscal 2024, then climbed 26 percent to this year’s $8.475 billion. Fiscal 2025 is 31 percent below the fiscal 2019 level and 48 percent below the fiscal 2020 peak. The one-year direction is up, and it is the one-year number the public sees first.

The rest of the $8.475 billion does reach identifiable San Francisco institutions. The University of California, San Francisco was credited with $791.1 million, the largest single named recipient. The San Francisco Housing Authority was credited with $541.1 million. The City and County of San Francisco itself appears under three separate federal registrations totaling $281.7 million. San Francisco State University was credited with $77.1 million, the city’s own Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing was credited with $48.5 million, and Pacific Gas and Electric was credited with $45.4 million for work performed in the county.

All of these figures use the government’s own “place of performance” field, the location where an award’s work is recorded as happening, which is not always a precise address. One $40.2 million award in the same file lists a recipient called Amanecer Puerto Rico LLC, a name with no obvious San Francisco connection. This desk could not confirm, before deadline, whether that entry reflects real work performed locally or a data-entry default. Either way, the top-line $8.475 billion treats it identically to a payment that plainly funded work inside the city.

Confidence is high on the totals themselves and on the concentration in the top few lines, all pulled directly from the federal spending database tonight. Confidence is lower on the exact size of San Francisco’s true share, since “city-rooted” is a judgment call about which recipients count, not a category the government defines. The $8.475 billion figure will keep circulating regardless. It is the number the federal government publishes first, and the one nobody has to explain.

SOURCES & RECEIPTS

1. DataSF, Adopted Budget (xdgd-c79v), queried August 21, 2026: department_code “SAS” appears in 271 rows, all fiscal_year 2023; zero rows in any other year of the FY2010–FY2028 file. 2. SFPL ballot propositions database (88s2-6ua9), queried August 21, 2026: November 3, 2020 Proposition B (“Department of Sanitation and Streets, Sanitation and Streets Commission, and Public Works Commission”), passed, 255,653 yes (61.3%) to 161,178 no; November 8, 2022 Proposition B (“Public Works Department and Commission, Sanitation and Streets Department and Commission”), passed, 212,066 yes (74.6%) to 72,349 no. 3. DataSF Adopted Budget (xdgd-c79v): SAS FY2023 spending net of Transfer Adjustment-Uses lines, $116,667,120 (salaries $62,308,032; mandatory fringe $28,208,463); Public Works (department_code DPW/predecessor codes) budget by fiscal year: FY2022 $308,515,641; FY2023 $298,015,111; FY2024 $460,562,380. Full queries and raw responses in receipts.json.

2. USAspending.gov API, spending_by_category/recipient, place of performance San Francisco County (FIPS 06075), fiscal year 2025 (October 1, 2024–September 30, 2025), queried August 21, 2026: Multiple Recipients $3,622,793,287 (42.8%); California Public Utilities Commission $1,859,140,007 (21.9%); University of California, San Francisco $791,145,596; San Francisco Housing Authority $541,064,587; City & County of San Francisco (three recipient registrations) $175,201,403 + $54,193,201 + $52,305,702 = $281,700,306; San Francisco State University $77,146,940; Department of Homelessness & Supportive Housing $48,546,214; Pacific Gas and Electric $45,359,781; Amanecer Puerto Rico LLC $40,168,001. Top three lines (Multiple Recipients, CPUC, UCSF) = 74.0% of the $8,475,344,162 total; excluding Multiple Recipients and CPUC leaves $2,993,410,869 (35.3%). 2. USAspending.gov API, spending_by_geography, place of performance San Francisco County, by federal fiscal year, queried August 21, 2026: FY2019 $12,325,256,821; FY2020 $16,381,130,833; FY2021 $11,396,177,095; FY2022 $7,455,109,252; FY2023 $7,182,827,186; FY2024 $6,704,839,323; FY2025 $8,475,344,162. FY2025 is 31.2% below FY2019 and 48.3% below the FY2020 peak. Full queries and raw responses in receipts.json.

The Frisconian · Published from forty-nine square miles surrounded by reality · @deaconsanti