Hold Onto Your Wig - We've Got Work To Do

Hold Onto Your Wig - We've Got Work To Do
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The House of Leno

The House of Leno

Illustration / Ryan Pendleton

With the sudden passing of Mayor Ed Lee, 2018 just became a much more urgent and complicated year for San Francisco politics. It’s hard for me to imagine the loss that his wife and two daughters must be feeling at this time. I watched his daughters speak at the City Hall memorial and was struck by their composure. I couldn’t help but think that Mayor Lee may not have even wanted this job in the first place, and I can imagine his family was counting the days to have their husband and father back.

But here we are, and we all have some decisions to make. The next decade of this City’s history depends on us. This is my guide to the upcoming mayoral race, and I hope it helps us through the next several months. Let’s start with the basics…

Until June, San Francisco needs a caretaker mayor. No queen can wear two wigs at once. (Well, I have, but that’s a different story…)

With the November 2019 Mayoral election now bumped up to June 2018, one of the first tasks for the Board of Supervisors is deciding who should sit on the throne for the next six months.

When Mayor Lee passed away, Board President London Breed automatically became Acting Mayor and technically is still the District 5 Supervisor. Wearing both of these wigs, Supervisor Breed can veto her colleagues’ legislation. She will have sole authority over designing the City Budget and will be able to appoint whoever she wants including her friends to the Committees to make sure it passes. That’s a lot of power, and it sounds like a recipe for sour soup to me.

In my opinion - which is usually right – the City needs to appoint a “caretaker” mayor, someone who can run the entire show for the next six months without running for mayor themselves. That way there is no conflicts of interest, no fundraising from their friends while they steer major city policy. The deadline to file for Mayor is January 9 at 5pm, Supervisors can actually appoint someone after that deadline who is smart and fair, and whose decisions won’t be ruined by higher aspirations.

If Acting Mayor Breed finds 6 votes from the Supervisors to become Interim Mayor Breed on January 9, she will have a huge start heading into June 2018. She’ll also get to appoint the next District 5 Supervisor. That’s a lot of power! I mean: no queen should wear two wigs at once and hopefully that line will be the sound bite from this article that has everyone talking.

We deserve a caretaker mayor, and you should go ahead and email your Supervisor right now and let them know. Please make your voice heard here: The Action Network

The Mayoral Candidates: Leno, Kim and Breed, oh boy!

The playing field will be even going into the June election if we have a caretaker mayor. And the players are already coming out to play.

For me, there’s a clear top choice for Mayor, and that is my longtime friend and leader in San Francisco and California politics: Mark Leno. He has been involved in state and local politics for over 20 years. Two decades sounds like a hell of a lot of experience to be involved in City politics, and Mark has done a lot for our community. As Supervisor, he wrote the City’s first affordable housing law, which is still the basis for providing affordable housing in San Francisco. At the state level, he exempted affordable SRO housing from the dreaded Ellis Act and passed protections for victims of domestic violence to get out of leases with their abusers. He passed a bill to allow school districts to build affordable teacher housing. He got Governor Brown to sign a statewide $15 minimum wage into law.

But it’s Mark’s civil rights work for the trans community that really seals the deal for me. In 2017, the world woke up and starting listening to and electing trans leaders. Throughout his career, Mark has been a pioneer for trans anti-discrimination laws. He wrote the law protecting trans Californians from housing and employment discrimination. He wrote the law prohibiting government contracts with companies that discriminate against trans people. He wrote the FAIR Education Act to make sure that public schools highlight LGBTQ and other underrepresented groups in history and social studies.

I also have another friend in the race, and her name is Jane Kim. I love Jane. I campaigned for Jane during her 2016 run for the State Senate, and I still believe she would have been so great in Sacramento. Jane’s record in a short period of time is amazing: Free City College, the $15 city minimum wage, and getting tons of affordable housing built, to name just a few accomplishments.

I respect Jane’s decision to run. Like Mark, she’ll make sure that the debates center issues of equity and social justice. She’ll motivate a lot of energetic young advocates and potential future political leaders. And thanks to ranked-choice voting, you and I will still be able to vote for a second and third choice for Mayor.

As for London Breed, I think San Francisco needs a change of course in the Mayor’s Office. From what I hear the same people have been pulling strings up in that office for well over 20 years. London has only been in elected office for 4 years. It took me longer than that to learn how to contour. We need experience.

In 2018, let’s make City Hall the #HouseOfLeno.

By the time of my Pride Party during the last weekend in June – ahem, mark your calendars – we could be celebrating San Francisco’s first gay mayor. Across our own country and around the world, LGBTQ people are fighting hate, oppression, violence and death. That’s why I spent last year raising money for the LGBT Asylum Project. So to all of those people around the world still struggling against the odds, let us send a loud message: It’s good to be gay, and you can be anything you want to be. Even the Mayor of one of the most amazing cities in the world.

In 2018, I hope you can join me and help make San Francisco City Hall the #HouseOfLeno. I believe that Mark will carry a new direction. He will focus on ending street homelessness and addressing the opioid epidemic and mental health issues affecting our homeless neighbors. He will build the affordable housing we need to stop the displacement of low and moderate income San Franciscans. He will fight evictions by taking on greedy speculators, improve public transportation and our roads to alleviate congestion, and he will push for policies to hold corporations responsible for their impact on our city.

We need to stick together and care for each other. We need to cook, eat and make drinks for each other. We need to have each others backs like family and support each other. We’ve got work to do.

Please share and repost this and join the Facebook Group I've created in support of Mark Leno: HouseOfLeno

Juanita MORE! & Mark Leno

Juanita MORE! & Mark Leno

Photo by Gooch

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