SF reparations office on hold due to budget cuts
ArchiveSan Francisco’s first-ever Office of Reparations is among the programs gutted by Mayor London Breed’s budget cuts.
Funding for the office, which was set to launch this year, was erased as part of Breed’s $75 million cuts to the The City budget in preparation for a major deficit in 2024.
Though it’s just one of several planned programs that will no longer be funded, the Office of Reparations is noteworthy because its establishment came after a widely followed, yearslong process that ended in accepting a reparations plan.
The decision to pull back funding comes after Supervisor Shamann Walton fought to secure money in the budget for the office earlier this year.
Though he called the cuts “disheartening” in a statement to The Examiner, Walton didn’t dispute the mayor’s logic behind the reductions as The City faces a prolonged economic reckoning.
“I understand the importance of no cuts to existing programs, but the Black community will continue to pursue justice and equity through reparations here in San Francisco,” Walton said. “My hope is that the city’s deficit is eliminated quickly so that we can fund the Office of Reparations and fulfill the commitment made to address the historical injustices and inequities that have persisted for generations for Black San Franciscans.”
Sheryl Davis, executive director of the San Francisco Human Rights Commission, told The Examiner that despite the cuts to the office of reparations, The City continues to work on several of the reparations plan’s recommendations.
Those efforts include locating a satellite campus of one of the nation’s historically Black colleges and universities in San Francisco and collaborating with The City’s economic development staffers to utilize vacant storefronts.
“A lot of the work, it’ll be tight but we’ll leverage some of the funding we had in our budget,” Davis said.
The Office of Reparations was viewed as a key step in implementing the reparations plan, which was drafted by the African American Reparations Advisory Committee and accepted by the Board of Supervisors earlier this year. The $2 million would be used to hire staff who would begin to form and fund programs enumerated in the plan.
The plan recommended a sweeping suite of reparations and programs, such as support for Black-led housing cooperatives and Black entrepreneurs.
City leaders expressed a commitment to reparations in concept but have yet to forge a practical path to carry them out.
Walton initially requested $50 million be set aside in this year’s budget for the creation of an Office of Reparations, then narrowed that request to $10 million and ultimately secured $2 million.
Now, the $2 million is gone not only from this year’s budget, but in each of the next two years, as well.
“It’s a loss, but every department in the city is making hard decisions,” Davis said.
These are the types of choices we need to start making to ensure the current and long-term financial sustainability of our city,” Breed wrote in a letter to department heads explaining the cuts last week.
Though it was readily accepted by the Board of Supervisors, the plan outlined by the advisory committee received some pushback, particularly from conservatives in San Francisco and nationally.
The most controversial aspect of the plan was the $5 million cash payments it proposed to be paid to each eligible Black resident. However, the plan also contained a broad array of reparations that did not involve cash payments.
Breed had never actually committed to establishing the Office of Reparations, even after Walton won funding for it in the budget. Breed has repeatedly held that reparations are an issue not to be tackled on the local level.
The City’s budget deficit is expected to exceed $1 billion by 2027, prompting Breed to deliver mid-year budget cuts in what she called a “down payment” to help lessen the blow in future years.
