Good Morning, San Francisco

Clear skies, 55 degrees, and a wind so faint — 2 mph — that the fog forgot to show up for once. Enjoy the visibility while it lasts, because today's biggest story is all about people who'd very much prefer you didn't see what they're building.

California Forever Hired the People Who Built CEQA to Help It Escape CEQA

Here's a sentence that should make you laugh and wince at the same time: the tech-billionaire group trying to build a city from scratch in Solano County has retained two of the most recognizable Democratic architects of California's landmark environmental law — to help them dismantle it. California Forever, which quietly bought 62,000 acres before getting unmasked in 2023, is now lobbying Sacramento for legislation that would short-circuit environmental review, cap legal challenges at 270 days, and let a neighboring city annex the land outright. That last part is the tell: annexation bypasses the same Solano voters who forced the group to yank its ballot measure in 2024.

Now, let's be honest about something. CEQA is a monster. It's the law that lets a single anonymous plaintiff freeze a housing project for years, the bureaucratic crowbar that's helped make California nearly impossible to build in. If you've read this briefing more than twice, you know we'd happily light a match to most of it. A new city, real housing, an actual tax base — that's the kind of ambition this region has been too sclerotic to pull off in a generation.

But there's a difference between reforming a bad law for everyone and buying yourself a private exemption from it. California Forever isn't asking Sacramento to make building easier for the family that wants to add a duplex in Vallejo. It's dangling a defense contractor as an "anchor tenant" — a contractor whose largest backer also happens to invest in California Forever — to grease a carve-out written for one company, on one parcel, around one inconvenient electorate. That's not deregulation. That's regulatory capture with better landscaping.

The principle is simple and it cuts both ways: if a rule is too dumb to apply to a billionaire, it's too dumb to apply to you. Fix CEQA for the whole state and we'll bring the champagne. Build a backroom escape hatch that only the well-connected can afford to walk through, and you've just proven the system works exactly as designed — for the people who can buy their way around it.

The Rundown

City Hall & Politics

The SF budget wrapped before sundown Thursday — the supervisors finished their annual fight at 6:30 p.m. instead of the traditional all-nighter, clawing back $28.5 million in cuts to nonprofits, seniors, and students. Sounds like good governance, and the speed is genuinely nice. But Board President Rafael Mandelman buried the real news inside the victory lap: finding $28.5 million in a $16.9 billion budget now requires "ingenuity." Years of austerity have hollowed out the discretionary money. When the city can't shake loose two-tenths of a percent without heroics, that's not a balanced budget — it's a warning light.

Meanwhile, Buffy Wicks' transfer-tax gambit collapsed spectacularly. Her AB 736 was supposed to cap transfer taxes statewide and bribe the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association into pulling its November ballot measure. Instead it united progressives against her, and Jarvis is keeping its measure on the ballot anyway. So SF now faces two bad outcomes on the tax it's leaned on to fund housing. The lesson, as ever: backroom deals struck to preempt the voters tend to blow up in the dealmaker's face.

Public Safety

A new Civil Grand Jury report says Glen Canyon Park isn't actually low-risk for wildfire — despite CAL FIRE's foggy-city rating. The 66-acre greenspace is packed with aging Blue Gum eucalyptus, 80% of them rated "poor condition" back in 2012, and the canyon has exactly two fire hydrants. A decade of inaction after the Palisades fire proved vegetation, not weather, decides outcomes. This is the unglamorous core-government work that should come before the city funds another commission.

Over in Contra Costa, officials want to fight a dengue-capable mosquito with bacteria — flooding Antioch with sterile males after the invasive Aedes aegypti turned up for the fifth time since 2022. Sounds sci-fi, but it's already deployed down south, and after four years of standard methods failing, "weird but proven" beats "familiar but useless."

And a grim one: a Cartoon Art Museum curator was fired after a Berkeley arrest on 20 counts of invasion of privacy, accused of secretly filming party guests — including children — in his bathroom. The museum cut ties fast, which is the only correct move.

Tech & Startups

A new lawsuit claims Walmart, 7-Eleven, and BP used AI to fix California gas prices, plugging into the same UK pricing platform (Kalibrate) to hit margin targets in near-real time. The theory: when competitors all feed one algorithm, the output is indistinguishable from collusion — no phone call required. Notably, none of the defendants has denied it yet. Bay Area drivers paying the nation's highest pump prices have suspected something for years. "The robot did it" shouldn't be a legal shield.

Culture & Food

The SF Dyke March rolled through the Mission Saturday, filling Dolores Park with pole lessons and community — though its decades-old "Dykes Only" section may not return next year. And at Arepas Latin Cuisine on the SF side, earthquake-relief donations are stacked seven feet high for Venezuela, where the toll has climbed past 900 dead. The drive closes Monday, June 30; after that, organizers say cash is more useful than goods. Mutual aid moving faster than any agency — worth a few dollars before the deadline.

One myth to retire: California's Great America is not closing this year. Bay Area social media has written the obituary for months, but it's running weekends through Labor Day in its 50th season, and the real curtain almost certainly won't fall until after 2027. Go ride the coasters; skip the funeral.

One More Thing

The Sharks spent their final draft pick — 201st overall, the round where you're basically drafting vibes — on a 7-foot-1, 275-pound 18-year-old from Moldova, the first NHLer ever drafted from the country and four full inches taller than Zdeno Chara. Is it a reach? Absolutely. But if you're going to gamble that late, gamble big — and you can't teach 85 inches.