Within minutes on Wednesday morning, San Francisco got a new mayor — and a new plan for an emergency declaration intended to combat the fentanyl scourge that has killed thousands of people in the city over the past five years and has turned some neighborhoods into sidewalk drug markets.
Daniel Lurie, a Democrat, was sworn into office outside the gold-domed City Hall and began to detail his campaign promises about fighting the city’s drug crisis, which has claimed more lives in the city since 2020 than have Covid-19, car crashes and homicides combined. Mr. Lurie said that he had told his police and sheriff’s departments to redirect their personnel — moving from a temporary, sporadic effort to break up drug markets to a permanent, 24/7 operation.
He vowed that by this spring, police officers would have somewhere new to take people picked up for using drugs or for acting erratically in public — not just a jail or a hospital emergency room. A crisis center in the Tenderloin neighborhood will be staffed with health workers who can guide those who need treatment.
“Widespread drug dealing, public drug use and constantly seeing people in crisis has robbed us of our sense of decency and security,” Mr. Lurie said from an outdoor stage under sunny blue skies. “I refuse to believe that this is who we are.”
His declaration of a fentanyl emergency, which he promised after winning the hotly contested mayor’s race in November, consists of a package of ordinances that will speed its way to the Board of Supervisors, akin to a City Council, on Tuesday for what is expected to be swift approval.
The declaration would streamline the hiring of new city workers and the building of homeless and drug treatment facilities. A new ordinance will also allow the city to accept private donations to help fund Mr. Lurie’s promised 1,500 new shelter beds within six months.
Mr. Lurie, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune and the founder of an antipoverty nonprofit, said that fixing the city’s drug problems would be the only way to ensure that San Francisco itself makes a full recovery. Doing so, he argued, would be central to luring back office workers to downtown, tourists to hotels and small business owners to vacant shops.
“Recovery is possible, but it needs to be more than a possibility in San Francisco,” he said. “It must be our mission.”
Many of the proposals are familiar, and the packed crowd at the inauguration was full of former mayors and other city officials who were unable to make similar ideas a reality. Not in a city with a police department that city leaders say needs hundreds more officers; with a notorious bureaucracy that bogs down many city projects; and with lowered tax revenue that translates to a budget deficit approaching $1 billion over the next two years.
And then there is Mr. Lurie’s total lack of experience in government. The job of mayor is his first elected position.
Still, there was an aura of hope, as a who’s who of San Francisco filled the plaza. Paul Pelosi walked slowly to his seat with the help of a purple cane, more than two years after being bludgeoned with a hammer by an intruder looking for his wife, Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker.
California’s first lady, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, was there, too, though her husband, Gov. Gavin Newsom, could not attend because of the wildfires ravaging Los Angeles.
Mr. Lurie, who will accept only a $1 annual salary, owns a $15.5 million vacation home in Malibu, a beach town west of Los Angeles that suffered extensive damage in the fires. When he was asked Wednesday morning whether his home was still standing, a consultant whisked him away. His wife, Becca Prowda, an aide to Governor Newsom, said the couple did not yet know the home’s fate.
Mr. Lurie’s mother, the billionaire Mimi Haas, who donated $1 million to her son’s campaign and knocked on voters’ doors on his behalf, said she was “very excited” and confident he would turn the city around. She married the late Peter Haas, Levi’s longtime chief executive, when Mr. Lurie was a child.
Golden State Warriors Coach Steve Kerr addressed the crowd, comparing Mr. Lurie to a coach who can succeed only with the help of top-notch players.
“We have been through an awful lot in recent years, and our city has taken some hits, but we are bouncing back,” Mr. Kerr told the crowd. “Just like the Warriors, we have to bring our individual talents to the table with the idea of making the whole better.”
If Mr. Lurie is the coach, it is not clear who will be City Hall’s Steph Curry. Mr. Lurie has so far hired mostly outsiders from the business world to help him run the mayor’s office. On Wednesday, he said that in terms of department heads, “you all will see a lot of change.”
