Law and Government

San Francisco is both a city and a county, and is the only one of California's 58 counties to possess that distinction. It is governed by a mayor, who runs the executive branch of the city, and a Board of Supervisors, which comprises the legislative branch. The eleven members of the Board are elected to represent eleven districts in the city; current elected members are listed in the table on the right.

While most cities in California are General Law Cities, San Francisco is one of a few Charter Cities, theoretically giving the city's voters additional control over governmental structures and allowing the city to exercise considerable control over some lands not located in the city such as those associated with San Francisco International Airport and the Hetch Hetchy water and power system.

A recent electoral innovation that was to be implemented for the November 2003 elections, but was not prepared in time, is the use of ranked preference voting, also known as instant runoff voting. In the Board of Supervisors race in November 2004, Instant Runoff Voting worked well, with many winners known on election night and all winners within a couple of days. Due to its implementation, there was no December runoff election. (Although the city offices are, by state law, non-partisan, there are still considerable political differences among candidates that may generally be identified as being aligned with various parties.)

One good place to read about San Francisco politics is at The Usual Suspects, at (http://www.SFUsualSuspects.com).

The current mayor is Gavin Newsom. The current President of the Board of Supervisors is Aaron Peskin.

The headquarters of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, the Supreme Court of California, and the First Appelate District of the California Courts of Appeal are in San Francisco.