For anyone keeping score at home (and honestly, who could keep up?), the list of scandals that dogged Breed's tenure at City Hall is genuinely staggering. We're talking about a mayor who accepted gifts from a city contractor under FBI investigation. Who steered pandemic relief funds in questionable directions. Who presided over a Department of Public Works so riddled with corruption that its director ended up pleading guilty to federal charges. Who navigated a web of personal relationships that intersected uncomfortably with official city business at nearly every turn.

And that's the stuff from before the comprehensive timelines were even compiled. As one SF resident pointed out, the known scandal list doesn't even include her controversial appointment of Stephen Sherrill — suggesting the full accounting of Breed-era problems is still being written in real time.

Here's what should bother fiscal conservatives and good-government types alike: none of this happened in a vacuum. Every one of these scandals represents a failure of accountability — the kind of institutional rot that festers when one-party rule goes unchallenged and voters treat local elections as an afterthought. San Francisco's Board of Supervisors, its ethics commission, its local media — all of these institutions had opportunities to apply pressure, and too often they didn't.

To be fair, voters eventually did what voters do when they've had enough: they showed Breed the door. Mayor Daniel Lurie now occupies Room 200, and early signals suggest a different approach to governance. But the lesson from the Breed era isn't just "elect better people." It's that concentrated power without genuine oversight will always trend toward abuse — regardless of party, regardless of ideology.

San Francisco deserves leaders who treat public trust like it actually means something. The Breed timeline is a reminder of what happens when they don't.