A crushing budget deficit has forced San Francisco Mayor London Breed to eliminate the budget of the Office of Reparations, which was considering lavish payouts to long-term black residents of the city, though it never practiced or allowed slavery.
The city’s budget deficit exploded to $780 million earlier this year, amid San Francisco’s struggle to recover from strict coronavirus closures and restrictions. An exodus of work-from-home residents and taxpayers, coupled with a rise in crime, outdoor drug abuse, and homelessness, also chased away retail businesses.
Despite these challenges, as Breitbart News reported, San Francisco leaders were considering reparations for long-term black residents, and were floating sums in the range of $5 million, though these were not based on any precise mathematical calculations.
Now, however, Mayor Breed has cut the program. The San Francisco Examiner reported:
San Francisco’s first-ever Office of Reparations is among the programs gutted by Mayor London Breed’s budget cuts.
Funding for the office, which was set to launch this year, was erased as part of Breed’s $75 million cuts to the The City budget in preparation for a major deficit in 2024.
Though it’s just one of several planned programs that will no longer be funded, the Office of Reparations is noteworthy because its establishment came after a widely followed, yearslong process that ended in accepting a reparations plan.
Activists are nevertheless vowing to press ahead.
Mayor Breed’s reversal on reparations is not the first time that San Francisco’s progressive promises have been forced to yield to reality.
Last year, she increased funding for police, after first saying she would defund the police to the tune of $120 million. Earlier this year, San Francisco repealed a travel and contracting ban on conservative states, after officials revealed it was costing the city money without any impact on social policies in Republican-governed jurisdictions.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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