A controversial charter amendment requiring the city of San Francisco to hire a minimum number of full-duty police officers was postponed a week due to a rule that delays votes when last-minute changes are made.

However, at Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting, the amendment’s original sponsor, Supervisor Matt Dorsey, described a new tactic.

“As you may be aware, the substantive core of that plan was amended over my objections,” Dorsey said.

On Monday, Supervisor Ahsha Safai added language that would require a police staffing fund to be paid through a new tax.

The mayor’s office said, “The Mayor agrees with the supervisor that we need to support police staffing, but no longer supports the amendment as it’s currently proposed.”

Dorsey has withdrawn support for the measure entirely and will propose a new draft at next week’s meeting.

A 5-year plan to boost police staffing

The original charter amendment established a minimum Police Department staffing number at 1,700 the first year with a goal of increasing staffing to 2,074 by 2029. The cost would have been $16.8 million the first year and varying amounts the following four years and would come from the city’s general operating budget.

At Tuesday’s meeting, Dorsey said a colleague reminded him that general operating requests do not need to be in a ballot measure, “because the mayor and also this Board of Supervisors on any given Tuesday could enact them.”

He said he will be submitting a request to the controller and city attorney that proposes to two things.

“One, to create a police full staffing fund capable of receiving revenues for the explicit purposes identified in the original proposal, and two, a re-appropriation of $8.4 million in the current fiscal year budget to support more competitive police recruiting,” he said.

Dorsey said that was half of the $16 million requested in the proposed charter amendment, representing half of the current fiscal year. He will introduce a new draft ordinance at next week’s board meeting.

“I think San Franciscans are well-served by a vigorous debate over whether and how to accomplish police full staffing expeditiously,” Dorsey said. “And I plan to submit a similar measure in the future to discuss funding recruitment for next fiscal year.”

Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.