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.