Let's be clear about something: paying cops and firefighters is not optional. These are the people who keep the city functioning at a basic, civilizational level. Public safety is arguably the first obligation of any municipal government — before the PR campaigns, before the consultant contracts, before the ambitious pilot programs that quietly die after burning through eight figures.

The problem isn't that San Francisco is spending money on police and fire. The problem is that San Francisco has so thoroughly mismanaged its finances that essential services now feel like luxury purchases. A city with a $14 billion annual budget — larger than the budgets of most U.S. states — shouldn't be sweating over contracts to retain first responders. And yet here we are.

The real question City Hall should be answering: where did the rest of the money go? San Francisco spends more per capita than nearly any city in America and somehow still can't balance the books while keeping streets safe and fires extinguished. The budget deficit didn't appear overnight. It's the compounding result of years of bloated bureaucracy, duplicative departments, and a political culture that treats fiscal restraint as a personal insult.

Instead of wringing hands over the cost of essential personnel, supervisors should be taking a chainsaw to the non-essential line items that got us into this mess. Every dollar spent on overhead and administrative bloat is a dollar that could be going to the officers and firefighters the city desperately needs to retain.

A $734 million deficit isn't a budget problem. It's a governance problem. And until voters start demanding actual accountability for how their tax dollars are spent, expect the hole to keep getting deeper.