On the last day of the fiscal year, San Francisco's Archdiocese agrees to a settlement north of three hundred ninety million dollars — and bankruptcy may still be in play. This is San Francisco Politics and Urbanism Daily. Today: that settlement, what Newsom's final state budget is quietly counting on, and who's actually staffing Lurie's City Hall. Mark, a lot lands at once today. Everything closes out on June 30th. Almost like someone planned it. Let's start with the big number. One tap on follow, and we'll be back in your ears before you know it. This one's from Nbcbayarea:
The San Francisco Archdiocese has agreed to pay $395 million and implement a series of child protection and transparency reforms to settle hundreds of lawsuits brought by survivors who say they were sexually abused by clergy and other church employees as children. The agreement, announced Monday by attorney Jeff Anderson, would resolve more than 500 claims filed after California temporarily lifted the statute of limitations for childhood sexual abuse lawsuits and comes nearly three years after the Archdiocese sought bankruptcy protection.
Three hundred ninety-five million dollars for more than 500 survivors of clergy sexual abuse — attorney Jeff Anderson announced it Monday, and called it the largest per-survivor settlement ever in a Catholic diocesan bankruptcy. And here's the part people may miss — this comes nearly three years after the Archdiocese sought bankruptcy protection. It still doesn't end everything; survivors can keep pursuing claims against some of the Archdiocese's insurers. Three years of bankruptcy proceedings. This is the playbook — an institution looks at the volume of claims and reaches for Chapter 11, which freezes everything and caps what survivors can ever collect. So when Anderson says largest per-survivor settlement in a diocesan bankruptcy — read that carefully. That ceiling exists because of the bankruptcy structure in the first place. Quick Chapter 11 translation — it's the reorganization filing. Parishes keep operating, but a court controls the payout pool, and that pool is finite. Five hundred-plus people split it. More than 500 survivors. One of the largest single-archdiocese resolutions in the country — and it only happened because California briefly lifted the statute of limitations and forced the reckoning. The window did that. Not goodwill. Mike Ege at The Voice of San Francisco has the details. The Voice of San Francisco's weekly City Hall wrap dropped on the last day of the fiscal year — and the headline they lead with is procedural: call-in public comment is back. For anyone who tuned out during the pandemic phone-in fights, that's the remote testimony process the Board uses to let residents weigh in without coming to chambers in person. Right, and buried under that quiet headline — the housing deal process 'continues.' Continues. It's June 30th, Sarah. The fiscal year ends at midnight, and the housing piece is still being worked. And Jackie Fielder's excusal from the Board ran through June 30 — which is today — so she's back in chambers as all of this lands at once. The timing isn't subtle. Everything's landing on the same day. Budget, the housing deal, Fielder walking back in. If the deal's genuinely still in motion, then the Marina Safeway objection is still live — which means somebody's still looking for the exit ramp on state housing law. And call-in comment returning means whatever happens once it hits the Board floor, the public's back on the line for it. Which, given what's queued up this week, could make for a long phone tree. Here's what Hanna Zakharenko and J.D. Morris at the San Francisco Chronicle are reporting. Zakharenko and Morris at the Chronicle laid out the city's funded headcount for the coming fiscal year, and the topline is stark: roughly half of San Francisco's budget goes to people. Public works and transit alone: over ten thousand positions, with MTA at 5,169. And here's why this matters on the actual last day of the fiscal year — budgets are abstractions until you see who they're trying to put on payroll. Public Health, 7,690 positions. Police, 2,868. That org chart is the policy. Quick note for listeners new to this — funded positions aren't actual bodies in seats. They're slots the budget pays for. A department can carry vacancies, so the chart is the ceiling, not the headcount. Right, and that gap between funded and filled is where every 'we're investing in safety' press release goes to quietly die. 2,868 cop slots means nothing if a third sit empty. When a headline says jail bookings are up and calls it a 'persistent crime crisis,' how much of that is actually crime going up — versus, say, police doing more sweeps, or the same people cycling through the system over and over? It's a really important distinction, and honestly, bookings can reflect all of those things at once. A booking just means someone was processed into jail. By itself, it doesn't tell you whether underlying crime is rising. Take SFPD's targeted retail theft blitz operations in the South of Market neighborhood: between September and December of last year, those produced 104 arrests and misdemeanor citations. Per SFPD's own announcement, 23 of those were full bookings. So a spike in bookings there would be mostly an enforcement-priority issue, not proof that crime suddenly got worse. Then there's the repeat-cycling piece. Mission Local's reporting found that 40 percent of people booked into San Francisco's county jail at the start of 2025 were return visits — the same individuals cycling back in, many straight back to open-air drug markets on Sixth Street within hours of release. That means a chunk of the booking count is really about unmet treatment and housing needs, not new criminal activity. And set all of that against the actual crime trend: per SF Standard's reporting using SFPD data, total reported crimes in San Francisco fell more than 25 percent in 2025 — roughly 27,300 crimes, versus 36,600 the year before. Bookings can look busy while the reported-crime trendline is pointing sharply the other way. So if 40 percent of bookings are repeat returns, does that mean the jail is basically functioning as a revolving door that inflates the headline number without solving anything? That's essentially where the data points — and research from CUNY's Institute for State and Local Governance, tracking pretrial reform across multiple cities, found that reducing jail populations did not cause crime rates to rise. That cuts against the assumption that more bookings equals more safety. So alongside booking counts, residents should check SFPD's own reported-crime dashboards, the Sheriff's re-booking rate on DataSF, and federal prosecution numbers. Per San Francisco Chronicle reporting, federal drug cases in SF actually plummeted recently, which means some enforcement activity isn't showing up in local booking figures at all. CalMatters, with Yue Stella Yu:
Following weeks of negotiations, Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democratic legislative leaders on Monday approved a$352 billion budget for next year that raises some taxes, sets aside $6.4 billion for the year after and softens or delays billions of dollars in planned social service cuts.
Newsom's last budget, $352 billion, and the way it pencils out is partly betting on AI revenue that hasn't shown up yet. That's a balance sheet held together with a forecast. Per CalMatters — and remember, this is Newsom's final budget before a presidential run nobody's pretending isn't happening. He literally put out a pre-recorded video: 'we can have it all.' 'We can have it all.' The whole deal softens and delays billions in social service cuts — delays, not cancels — by leaning on projected AI money. That's the same paper balance-sheet move I've been hammering on locally all week. And here's the SF hook: the nonprofits packed into City Hall last Thursday defending their slice — a chunk of what they're defending is state pass-through dollars. If the AI revenue doesn't materialize, that's the money on the line. Same disease as the school budget no votes — numbers that add up on the page, but don't connect cleanly to what has to happen on the ground. In Sacramento, it's a phantom AI forecast steering the plan. If you're tracking the local choices shaping San Francisco, you might also like 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.
We've put links to every story from today's briefing in the show notes, so if something stuck with you, you can follow it back to the source. Thanks for listening — that's San Francisco Politics and Urbanism Daily for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.