Let’s talk about extreme fire danger.
The Pacific Palisades Fire in Los Angeles, January 2025.
AP Photo/Ethan Swope
unlimited Pacific Ocean water
Los Angeles’ drinking water
Let’s think about unlimited water supply.
Firefighters using Los Angeles’ drinking water on a Palisades Fire site, 2025. Photo: New York Sun
The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission doesn’t want you to know this about water:
San Francisco has a high-capacity seawater system that can put out any fire.
The Pacific Ocean at Ocean Beach, San Francisco.
Now let’s ask Mayor Daniel Lurie:
Why are you telling San Francisco that our drinking-water system will protect us during a fire disaster?
Santa Rosa, Lahaina, Malibu, and Pacific Palisades can tell you:
It won’t.
A life-sized concrete statue of a person, headless and with no feet, lying in the rubble of a burned-out Los Angeles neighborhood.
AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes
How do we fix a broken ESER bond?
Vote NO On Prop A
And make sure San Francisco has Equal Fire Protection for All.
Since 2010, San Francisco voters have approved three Earthquake Safety Emergency Response (ESER) bonds for a total of $1.4 billion in city debt.
Each time, city officials used language that led voters to believe that the City would expand San Francisco’s high-capacity firefighting seawater network (Auxiliary Water Supply System, in service since 1913) to cover all of San Francisco.
Today—16 years and $312.5 million later—City Hall still has no comprehensive plan to safeguard San Francisco’s 15 unprotected neighborhoods.
And the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission—an agency known for its fraud and corruption—has never proposed any kind of safety plan that holds up to firefighting facts, historical evidence, or public testimony from 66 former San Francisco fire chiefs and firefighters.
Does this sound like “We got you covered, San Francisco”?
The Marina District on fire in the aftermath of the Loma Prieta earthquake, October 17, 1989. Assistant Fire Chief Frank Blackburn (1933–2025) is credited with saving the city of San Francisco with a firefighting seawater system that he personally designed and deployed. Photo: Contra Costa Times/Bob Pepping
Why vote NO On Prop A?
Proposition A authorizes $535 million in new city debt that property owners will repay in tax increases over the next few decades. ($3.40 per $100,000 assessed value annually at first, then at a higher peak later in the repayment cycle.)
Landlords can pass 50% of the tax increase to tenants in rent-controlled units.
Per the City Controller, taxpayers will pay an additional $933 million.
Muni gets 40% ($200 million) of this bond to renovate the Potrero Bus Yard.
When Mayor Lurie and the City talk about San Francisco’s “Potable Emergency Firefighting Water System”, they mean our drinking-water system. Drinking-water systems are what failed San Francisco in 1906, Santa Rosa in 2017, Lahaina in 2023, and Los Angeles in 2025.
A broken PUC.
The civic group ConnectedSF recommends that this 2026 ESER bond be “pulled and rewritten with a sole focus on a fully built-out” emergency firefighting water system.
And that water system needs to be San Francisco’s Auxiliary Water Supply System (AWSS). Built specifically to address the failure of our drinking-water system during the 1906 earthquake and fires, AWSS is a high-capacity water system that uses unlimited seawater to fight fires.
AWSS has been under the Public Utilities Commission’s grossly unsafe and incompetent management since 2010—the year they began using these ESER bond requests as a funding tool.
Vote NO on loading San Franciscans with even more debt while leaving us unprotected.
Vote NO on manipulating voters’ good faith to get more money for Muni.
Send this highly misleading and irresponsible bond back to the drawing board.
San Francisco, April 18, 1906. A Chinese girl stands in the middle of Clay Street above Dupont (now Grant Avenue), watching the post-earthquake fires and smoke advancing toward Chinatown. Photo: Chinese Historical Society of America, Library of Congress/Arnold Genthe