With Proposition G on the Nov. 3 ballot, San Francisco's own campaign-finance dashboard tells a story neither side in the Upper Great Highway fight is advertising: the tech dollars are overwhelmingly on the side of keeping cars out — and they are burying the pro-car campaign.

Prop G would return weekday car traffic to the two-mile coastal stretch that voters turned into Sunset Dunes park in 2024. The contest is being framed as grassroots neighbors against a well-connected park lobby — and as a race that outside tech wealth might tip. San Francisco Ethics Commission filings show which side that wealth is actually funding, and it is not the drivers.

According to the San Francisco Ethics Commission's campaign-finance dashboard (external source, opens in a new tab) for the November election, committees in the Prop G contest had together raised about $880,969 and spent $761,999 as of the commission's Aug. 21 update. Almost all of it belongs to one side. The pro-park committee — registered with the city under a No on G banner and backed by the nonprofit Friends of Sunset Dunes — reported $735,413 in expenditures, making it one of the five biggest-spending ballot-measure committees in the entire city this cycle, alongside the multimillion-dollar campaigns over Muni funding and the mayor's government-reform package.

That leaves the pro-car side — the Great Highway for Everyone committee behind Prop G — with a thin slice of the money: on the order of $145,000 of the combined total, by The Dissent's reading of the filings. Put plainly, the campaign to bring cars back is being outspent by something close to five to one.

The source of that money cuts against the "neighbors versus tech" framing entirely. The Ethics Commission's itemized contributor records (external source, opens in a new tab) show a lineup of technology names among the park campaign's biggest backers. The largest single entry — $375,000 — is attributed to Jeremy Stoppelman, the name of Yelp's co-founder and chief executive and a longtime public champion of the coastal park. The records also list Twitch co-founder Emmett Shear ($75,000), Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko ($50,000), OpenAI co-founder Wojciech Zaremba ($35,000) and Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger ($20,000). The park nonprofit itself routed in another $25,000, and a group called Kid Safe SF gave $18,750.

Money is not destiny here. Prop K, which closed the road in 2024, won citywide but lost in the Sunset precincts nearest the beach, and Prop G is a bid to relitigate exactly that divide. The measure cleared a legal challenge when a judge refused to strike it from the ballot (external source, opens in a new tab), and it carries endorsements from new District 4 Supervisor Alan Wong and other Westside figures who blame the closure for pushing commuter traffic onto residential blocks.

Both camps pitch the fight as principle over dollars. Lux, who runs the No on G effort, told Mission Local (external source, opens in a new tab) the measure would waste public money to trade a working park for a failed road, citing the city controller's estimate that reopening would run about $9.8 million upfront and up to $1.9 million a year. Pippenger, who manages Great Highway for Everyone, told the same outlet that most of that spending buys pedestrian safety, not asphalt, and is worth it to protect families.

What the disclosures add is the part the speeches skip: the campaign warning voters that reopening mainly helps a handful of drivers shave a couple of minutes off a commute is itself the far richer operation, and much of its treasury traces to the same tech fortunes that park critics like to cast as the heavies. With more than two months of reporting periods still to come before Nov. 3, the pro-car side's route to a win runs straight through a roughly five-to-one money gap — the figure its opponents would rather stay off the yard signs.