Earlier this month San Francisco passed Proposition F — mandating drug screenings and treatment for certain people who receive cash assistance and other benefits from the city.
But there are still lots of questions about its enforcement, specifically with regards to training and staffing.
Alejandra Calderon is a social worker at the Human Services Agency, or HSA. She says they have a staffing crisis which will only be exacerbated by Prop F.
“We hear from the city that they're gonna be contracting out, but our issue is if we can’t fill almost 4,000 vacancies that are currently available, where is the city gonna find all these contractors?”
Calderon says that hiring contractors is usually more expensive than hiring staff, and SEIU-1021’s biggest demand is that the city fill the vacancies it already has. But the city’s hiring process is notoriously slow.
Calderon says SEIU-1021 has been asking the city to streamline it for a long time, but that hasn’t happened.
“It's almost a slap in the face for you to say you're gonna be contracting out, and doing all these things, when you can't fill vacancies, and you can't honor the current employees and the current workforce that you have.”
Enforcement of Proposition F is supposed to begin in January of 2025.
