Vol. I, No. 32 · San Francisco — Wednesday, September 2, 2026 · Price: one logged contact

BY CONSTANCE FEENEY, CITY HALL

Melinda Sarjapur is a real estate attorney at Reuben, Junius & Rose, one of San Francisco’s busiest land-use law firms. For more than a decade her name has shown up on more disclosed conversations with city officials than anyone else’s.

Since 2015, Sarjapur has logged 4,200 contacts with San Francisco officials under the city’s lobbying-disclosure law. That is more than 1,000 ahead of the next-busiest lobbyist, and 6.4 percent of every such contact any lobbyist in the city has filed since public disclosure began in 2010. Every one of her contacts falls under the same subject heading, Planning and Building Permits, and none falls under any other. That much concentrated access to the desk that decides what gets built matters beyond her own career: it is a standing line to Planning staff that most applicants never get.

She was still that busy in 2021, when her filings alone made up close to a quarter of the citywide total. Since then her count has fallen to a trickle. Just 26 were logged through the middle of 2026, even as the city’s overall lobbying total climbed back to normal.

Her clients ranged from major developers to private homeowners. Tishman Speyer was her largest account: $65,407 in fees across 384 recorded payments, and 783 separate contacts with city officials on the company’s behalf. A client logged only as “Abuyaghi, Roger and Mike” paid $24,815 across 145 separate contacts, for reasons the filings do not specify.

Most of her contacts went to Planning Department staff, not elected officials. The department appears twice in the record, under the names “City Planning” and “Planning,” accounting for 2,107 and 1,165 contacts respectively. Three staffers absorbed more of her attention than anyone else: Linda Ajello Hoagland, with 220 logged contacts; Rich Sucre, with 202; and Christopher May, with 111.

Sarjapur is still a partner at the firm, and her byline still runs on its legal updates. The most recent, from July 2, 2025, analyzes a change in state housing law, not a city permit fight. Her logged contacts with city officials, meanwhile, have all but stopped. The likeliest reading is a shift in her role, from case-by-case Planning Department filings to the kind of policy writing a state legislature reads. This desk could not confirm that directly with the firm. Call it a medium-confidence account built from a public paper trail, not an on-record explanation.