The FBI is asking questions about London Breed, a supervisor seat, and a Bloomberg job — and that’s before we even get to the court ruling that has the DA calling this week "devastating." I’m Cassidy, and this is San Francisco Politics and Urbanism Daily. Today we’re tracking federal scrutiny landing at City Hall, a court threat to the DA’s enforcement push, and a genuinely wild subplot about who controls the tennis courts at Rossi Park. The Breed-Bloomberg story is the accountability reckoning this city has been dodging for years, and that Jenkins warning means the courts may be about to punt on the progress we actually earned. Plus, there’s a paper trail now on the Board of Ed algebra vote — a specific 2014 document — and the endorsement crossover is going to make some people very uncomfortable. Let’s get into it. From Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez, Han Li at SF Standard:
The FBI is looking into alleged corruption connected to former Mayor London Breed, The Standard has learned. Federal investigators have contacted at least two people regarding allegations that Breed traded a coveted Board of Supervisors seat in the hope of future employment from Michael Bloomberg, according to the people who received the calls.
The SF Standard and Mission Local broke this one together: the FBI has contacted at least two people about allegations that former Mayor London Breed appointed Stephen Sherrill to a District 2 supervisor seat while hoping Bloomberg would return the favor with a job. Breed says Bloomberg did call her to recommend Sherrill. She denies the corruption piece. District 2 residents didn’t get a supervisor — they got a chit in a career transaction. That’s not a personnel move, that’s corruption of the representative function itself. And this isn’t the Lurie era — this was already baked into the walls. So when we talk about commission reform and appointment accountability, this is the kind of mess it’s supposed to fix. The mandate for that reform looks a lot more urgent today, not less. From r/sanfrancisco (70 upvotes):
She’s never been indicted even though the rest of her cronies have been indicted & convicted and sentenced already. We’ll see what happens next.
Federal investigators calling witnesses changes the calculus. "We’ll see" is still true, but this isn’t nothing. r/sanfrancisco (24 upvotes), weighing in:
Might have been the intent, but much like Ed Lee there'll be the problem where she didn't end up with a Bloomberg job.
The "she didn’t even get the job" angle is darkly funny — the alleged quid without the quo. Though legally, the exchange doesn’t always have to be completed for it to count. From r/sanfrancisco (58 upvotes):
On the one hand, it wouldn’t surprise me. On the other hand, the FBI is led by an alkie
I’ll grant you this: the current FBI leadership is not exactly inspiring confidence. But federal contact with two separate witnesses isn’t a tweet — somebody is doing the work, whoever’s nominally in charge. This one's from Amed Post:
San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins has warned a recent court ruling will allow scores of career criminals to walk free — with “devastating” consequences for public safety across California. A decision from the California Supreme Court on April 30 found bail for accused criminals must be “attainable” and only those accused of violent crimes may be held in jail pending trial — a ruling with far-reaching consequences for prosecutors, Jenkins told The California Post in an interview.
DA Brooke Jenkins is calling a California Supreme Court ruling from April 30th "devastating." The court said bail has to be "attainable," and that pretrial detention is only on the table for violent crimes like murder or assault with bodily harm. So for Jenkins, somebody arrested over and over for drug dealing or theft, who’s blown off court orders, could walk out the same day. I’ve spent this whole week pointing to enforcement as the thing that actually moved SF’s crime numbers — and here comes the California Supreme Court in April to kneecap it. Jenkins isn’t being dramatic when she says "devastating." If you can’t hold a repeat offender on attainable bail, swift consequences — which she’s been explicit about as the mechanism — turn into a fiction. To be clear on what changed: under the old system, judges could set bail high enough to effectively detain someone. The new constitutional floor says the amount has to be actually reachable for the defendant — and for non-violent offenses, you can’t detain at all. That’s a structural limit on the DA’s office that no local election can override. And this lands straight on the Dorsey drug-free housing question we raised earlier this week. If the courts are blocking the detention lever for drug offenses, what enforcement mechanism is actually left to back that policy up? The housing piece doesn’t work without a credible consequence attached to it. Here's r/sanfrancisco (21 pts, 21 comments):
I find it interesting that three supporters of March 2024 Prop G (GrowSF, SF Republican Party, Ed Lee Club) also supported and continue to support the people responsible for the policy they oppose.
A Reddit post is doing some real document archaeology here — pulling the actual February 2014 Board of Ed vote record and cross-referencing who endorsed whom. The short version: several members who voted to push Algebra to ninth grade were later backed by the same political networks that campaigned against that exact policy in 2024. Matt Haney voted for the Algebra delay in 2014, then GrowSF endorsed him for state assembly — and the poster’s point is that GrowSF was also backing Prop G in 2024 to reverse that same policy. That’s not hypocrisy exactly, it’s messier: reform-aligned political networks endorsing people based on what they sound like today, with zero accountability for what they did to kids a decade ago. To be fair to GrowSF, they didn’t exist in 2014 — the post says that outright. But the Ed Lee Club backed Mendoza-McDonnell and Norton, then turned around and supported reversing the policy. It’s less a gotcha than a reminder that endorsement networks are transactional, not ideological. And that’s exactly the problem. If the same political infrastructure can endorse the people who delayed algebra and the ballot measure to fix it, without anybody asking hard questions in between, then "reform" is just a brand, not a commitment. The kids who got tracked out of calculus in the meantime don’t get a do-over. Timothy Karoff, writing in SFGATE:
The next five San Francisco Bay Ferry boats have official names, courtesy of a San Francisco Chronicle poll and more than 26,000 votes from readers. (The Chronicle and SFGATE are both owned by Hearst but have separate newsrooms.) On Thursday, San Francisco Bay Ferry’s board of directors unanimously approved five final names.
Lighter note to close on: the SF Bay Ferry board just unanimously named its next five vessels, and the Chronicle poll that picked them pulled more than 26,000 votes. You’ve got Doubtfire, Rosie, Say Hey, Sea-Wolf, and Farallon. Say Hey is a perfect ferry name. Willie Mays, San Francisco — that one writes itself. And these aren’t just any boats: they’ll be the first high-speed, battery-powered, zero-emission ferries in the country, arriving in 2027 and 2028. That’s actually a big deal. Three will hold 150 passengers, two will hold 400 — so this is real capacity, not just a PR stunt. Doubtfire is going to be everybody’s favorite just for the photo ops. r/sanfrancisco (1747 pts, 313 comments) writes:
There is a group of local players who have essentially staged a hostile takeover of the public, first-come-first-serve courts. They have been doing this for at least two years. They treat these public parks like their own personal country club.
Switching gears — this one’s hyper-local, but it hit seventeen hundred upvotes on the SF subreddit, so clearly it landed. A group called the Rossi Racquet Club has been holding down the first-come, first-served courts at Rossi Park every Saturday and Sunday, from eight a.m. to early afternoon, for at least two years. They built a website, they sell merch, they charge membership fees — for courts they don’t own. That’s not a club, that’s a squat with branding. And the rule twist is genuinely clever in a grimy way: the actual park rule says singles players have to join a doubles group if one shows up, and they’ve turned that into "we’re always playing doubles," so nobody new can ever join. The person posting this dealt with it for two years by just booking the reservable courts instead — and now Rec and Park changed the reservation system and the costs went up, so that workaround is gone. That’s the trigger. This isn’t just a Reddit complaint; it’s a public-access question for Rec and Park. A wealthy enclave capturing a public amenity in an Inner Richmond neighborhood park while working people get priced out of the backup option — I mean, if Rec and Park needed a cleaner case to enforce its own FCFS rules, here it is, complete with a dot-com and a merch store. If San Francisco politics has you watching statewide power shifts, try California Governor's Race — daily 2026 coverage of candidates, polling, debates, fundraising, and policy for voters who want more than horse-race takes. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts.
You’ll find links to every story we covered today in the show notes if you want to dig further into the ones that stuck with you. Thanks for listening — that’s San Francisco Politics and Urbanism Daily for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.