Sunset Laws Could Make Tuesday’s Ballot Propositions Unnecessary

When San Franciscans vote on Propositions A through G as part of Tuesday’s statewide “Super Tuesday” primary election, we’ll permanently change our city’s constitution using unclear, ambiguous, confusing, and possibly even flat-out-wrong data and assumptions.

Consider the debate over Prop. B’s special tax to fund police staffing: Since we don’t know the source of this future tax nor the actual police staffing shortfall in future years, can we actually do a proper cost-benefit analysis?

Or Prop. C’s residential conversion incentives: Will these tax incentives, as the comptroller loosely estimates, generate more property tax revenue than what would be lost to transfer exemptions?

Or Prop. F’s new drug screening and treatment requirements for city welfare recipients:  Will adding more layers of red tape actually get people battling addiction into treatment or just cause many to opt out from city services altogether?

The truth is for many of these questions, we just don’t know. And if we’re wrong, we’re stuck with the consequences.

But here’s a bold idea: What if these new laws had expiration dates?

The idea of laws that expire has roots in classical antiquity when the Roman Republic passed ordinances with a time limit on special taxes or military service requirements.

During our country’s founding, Thomas Jefferson revisited the tradition suggesting that laws should naturally expire within two decades — specifically because old rules shouldn’t be forced on new generations.

“Factions get possession of the public councils. Bribery corrupts them,” wrote Jefferson to James Madison in 1789. “Personal interests lead them astray from the general interests of their constituents; and other impediments arise so as to prove to every practical man that a law of limited duration is much more manageable than one which needs a repeal.”

It wasn’t until the 1970s that newly-coined “sunset laws” grew in popularity to limit the expansion of state bureaucracy. Sunset advocates argued that state agencies had lost their way and should justify their existence every five to 10 years with the necessary votes to keep the agency in existence.

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, more than 35 states adopted sunset provisions, and 13% of all state agencies reviewed under sunset laws from 1976 to 1989 were terminated.

Could sunset laws have prevented the proliferation of San Francisco bureaucracy, resulting in 53 departments, 56 boards and commissions, and 74 more advisory bodies? How much time, money, and instances of corruption could we have saved or avoided over the past 25 years?

Unfortunately, the ultimate undoing of the national sunset movement resulted from the weight of politics itself: As lobbyists realized that a department’s renewal vote was a moment of maximum political pressure, highly politicized policy debates entered the conversation and eventually obscured the simple question of whether or not the department should exist.

These days, sunset laws primarily apply to federal tax proposals: When tax cuts are proposed by Congress, for instance, they usually include an expiration date that enables them to be included in the budget reconciliation process. This has the practical effect of bypassing Senate rules that would otherwise allow for unlimited debate and a required supermajority of 60 votes.

At the local level, if we believe that the weight of San Francisco’s old, ineffective, and outdated laws has limited our ability to make progress on key issues, why not ensure that new laws don’t contribute to unintended future problems?

At a recent panel discussion I hosted on solutions for The City’s ailing downtown, Office of Economic and Workforce Development Executive Director Sarah Dennis Phillips floated the idea that all new laws should expire within eight years unless renewed. City attorney David Chiu noted that this would match the length of a full term of a re-elected Board of Supervisors member.

I’d offer a two-tiered approach: For laws classified as bold and experimental, let’s re-evaluate them after a shorter four-year pilot project. For those with more proven data and outcomes, proposers could designate them for a full 8-year term.

The effect would be a radical shift in how we implement good governance in this town:  Not only would voters be able to vote on future propositions with greater confidence, but many categories of charter amendments would no longer be necessary because the outdated laws they were meant to replace would no longer exist.

If we do away with outdated or ineffective laws on San Francisco’s books, many of The City’s toughest problems and most corruptible processes would disappear from the horizon.

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