By Steven T. Jones

It's a seemingly low-key proposal that's flown under the radar of local journalists and politicos. But the new Budget and Finance Committee being created by San Francisco Board of Supervisors president Aaron Peskin has the potential to radically alter how this city sets its spending priorities.

Peskin has presented the change as a simple bureaucratic shift that would reunite a Budget Committee that meets for less than half the year with the year-round Finance and Audits Committee (the two panels were split a few years ago in an effort to better focus on the complex annual task of creating a city budget). Putting them back together and enlarging the new committee to five members during budget season would give it a better "institutional memory" to track reforms and efficiencies that supervisors demand of department heads during the budget process, as Peskin argued during a Rules Committee hearing Jan. 19. (The proposal was set to be heard by the full board Jan. 25 after press time, although it seemed to have majority support.)

But during an extended interview with the Bay Guardian, Peskin voiced a more ambitious agenda. He plans to have the committee begin holding budget hearings as soon as next month – and he cast the initiative as a transfer of power from the executive branch to the district-elected supervisors. It's about creating coequal branches of government.

"It always has to be the mayor proposes and the board disposes, right?" Peskin said. "The president of the United States says, 'Here, Congress, is my budget, and Congress says, 'You know, we don't need the F-18 bomber,' and they cut it out of the budget. What I said on Saturday [after being elected president] I really believe, which is we shouldn't just follow, we should lead in crafting the city's budget."

He said he sees the progressive board majority that swept into office in 2000 finally taking the lead role in setting city priorities and tapping the ideas and expertise of the public.

"My hope is this Finance and Budget Committee sits down in March and April and May, before there is any document that comes out of the Mayor's Office, and they say – pursuant to public hearings and input from the public – 'This is what we want to see in the budget. This is what the budget must contain,' " he said.

Peskin knows his plan is more easily said than done. For one thing, it involves organizing, because the crowds that show up to the board's budget hearings are usually reacting to bad news in the mayor's budget. And it involves a willingness to deliver that bad news themselves.

"It means us making the tough decisions that the mayor has to make," he said. "We have a limited amount of resources and an endless amount of need. And so that may mean that we propose unpopular cuts. But it means fundamentally that we are not reactive but proactive."

There's also a possibility for Sacramento-style budget standoffs and delays if the board and mayor don't see eye to eye, particularly if the board uses the opportunity to make progressive policy without the usual eight votes that are needed to override a mayoral veto. "This is an area where six is, by and large, the magic number," Peskin said.

"I'm not in any way afraid or hesitant to go to war if and when it's necessary," Peskin said, but he prefers the reasonable negotiations he believes are possible with the mayor.

"To the Mayor's Office's credit, they're saying, 'Tell us what you want because we'd rather not have that fight.' Whereas in the previous administration, they said, 'Fight, we love to fight,' " Peskin said. "These folks are more interested in winning rather than fighting. And I'll take them at their word until I can't take them at their word."

The Mayor's Office has so far been fairly receptive to Peskin's proposals. Mayoral spokesperson Peter Ragone told us, "What President Peskin is trying to do with the new committee structure makes a lot of sense." But when the idea was cast as an attempt by the board to set the budget priorities, Ragone replied, "It doesn't mean that one branch of government changes its traditional role."

How aggressively the new committee pushes Peskin's vision will likely determine whether there's a standoff, and that delicate dynamic has been reflected in the dilemma over whom to choose as chair, with sources telling us it was between Chris Daly and Tom Ammiano.

Daly won plaudits for chairing the 2003-04 Budget Committee, but as he told us, "I'm basically at war with the Mayor's Office, so Aaron needs to decide if that's a factor."

Ultimately, Peskin decided to go with Ammiano, someone with both an extensive knowledge of how the city works and a diplomatic temperament. The other chairs announced by Peskin as we went to press were Michela Alioto-Pier for the Rules Committee, Sophie Maxwell for the Land Use Committee, and Peskin for the new Government and Audits Committee.

Ammiano told us he's optimistic that the combination of front-end public input and the good relationship the board now has with the Mayor's Office (the best he's seen in his 10 years on the board) will allow the board to better assert its progressive priorities.

As for whether he's up for such a Herculean task, the board's elder statesman told us, "I'm young and have lots of energy."

Freshman supervisor Ross Mirkarimi also sees strong potential in the new focus on the budget.

"I've always been a critic of the way the board has been forced to react to the mayor's draft budget," Mirkarimi said. "The board has always been forced into this rubber-stamping mode, which is unfair to the city of San Francisco and the people."

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