Cash-Strapped San Francisco Creates Reparations Fund but Doesn’t Know How To Pay for It

San Francisco’s mayor has signed an ordinance creating a reparations fund for black residents while admitting the cash-strapped city does not have any money to fund it.The city’s board of supervisors voted 11-0 to establish the fund, though no dollar figure was attached. Mayor Daniel Lurie said he signed the legislation to recognize years of effort by an advisory committee and others to create the fund.“I was elected to drive San Francisco’s recovery, and that’s what I’m focused on every day,” Mr. Lurie said in a statement to The New York Sun. “We are not allocating money to this fund — with a historic $1 billion budget deficit, we are going to spend our money on making the city safer and cleaner.” He told the Daily Mail he is hopeful that outside donors will provide private funding.“It’s gonna take some time,” acknowledged the bill’s sponsor, supervisor Shamann Walton. “We’ve got to build a pot and then, of course, come up with the right criteria in terms of how we’re going to prioritize what recommendations we address first. But this is a major first step,” Mr. Walton told KGO-TV.In 2023, an advisory committee proposed a $5 million payment to every eligible black adult in the city. That sum, which was not included in the final ordinance, sparked outrage after the Hoover Institution pegged the cost at nearly $600,000 per taxpaying household.The city’s African American Reparations Advisory Committee said at the time it was not obliged to figure out how to pay for the program. “If the judge ruled in our favor, the judge would not turn to us and say, ‘Help them figure out how to make this work’,” the committee chairman, Eric McDonnell, said.Committee members said $5 million was a reasonable amount to begin repairing the damage caused by slavery, even though California was admitted to the Union in 1850 as a free state and never legally allowed slavery. The committee said black residents also suffered from urban renewal projects between the 1950s and early 1970s that pushed them out of their communities.The current plan does not put a figure on the proposed payments or a total price tag.Mr. Lurie is already attempting to cut the city budget by $400 million because of the budget shortfall.The Reason Foundation puts San Francisco at the top of its list of debtor local governments, with its liability topping $37 billion, or around $43,000 per resident.A former mayor, London Breed, vetoed legislation to create a reparations office in 2024. Instead, she pressed forward with a smaller program funded with $120 million diverted from the police and sheriff’s office budgets.That program — dubbed the Dream Keeper Initiative — became embroiled with claims of corruption. One scandal involved the director of the city’s human rights commission using Dream Keeper funds to pay for luxury travel. A nonprofit run by a man she shared a home with received contracts totaling as much as 10.4 million from the program, according to the Voice.A patchwork of reparations plans are underway across the country.The Chicago suburb of Evanston became the first American city to fund reparations. The $20 million program was designed to hand out $25,000 payments to black residents.It stopped making payments after it ran into funding problems because a marijuana tax didn’t raise as much money as anticipated. It also is being sued because only black residents were allowed to apply for payments.Boston, Chicago, Detroit, and St. Paul are in various stages of studying or implementing their own reparations programs. California and New York are considering reparations at the state level.At the federal level, despite potentially costing trillions of dollars and having little or no chance of passing in the current Republican-led Congress, far-left Democrats have rolled out their own efforts to promote legislation requiring American taxpayers to pay reparations for the country’s legacy of slavery.This article has been updated to include comments to The Sun from Mr. Lurie.

Cash-Strapped San Francisco Creates Reparations Fund but Doesn’t Know How To Pay for It

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