San Francisco Mulls End to Red-State Boycott That Hurt Its Finances

Cars pass through the Golden Gate Bridge toll plaza in San Francisco. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors may soon pull its boycott on conservative red states after the move backfired and hurt the city’s finances as it begins to deal with budget shortfalls.

The 2016 ban on municipally funded travel and contracting failed to have any impact on those states’ policies and has caused the city’s contracting costs to jump by almost a fifth.

In 2017, eight U.S. states were on San Francisco’s blacklist. Since then, relations with least 30 conservative states which passed laws to restrict homosexual and transgender rights, abortion access, and enhance voting ballot security were affected by the city’s edict.

Both San Francisco and the Democrat-majority state government of California have imposed boycotts and travel bans on the majority of the states in the country over social justice policies regarding race and sexuality.

San Francisco passed an ordinance called Chapter 12X in 2016, in the wake of the Obergefell v. Hodges decision that blacklisted states with gay marriage restrictions; but the regulation was amended twice in 2019 and 2021 in order to add additional states that passed bills on abortion and ballot reform.

The ordinance was meant to pressure conservative states to change their laws by pulling investment from the city’s residents and businesses.

Red-State Boycott Fails

The bill, however, has apparently accomplished little, since most Republican legislators in those states could safely ignore San Francisco in the first place, causing the boycott to be negligible.

A Feb. 10th report from the office of City of San Francisco’s administrator Carmen Chu concluded that the ban on contracting with conservative-leaning states caused annual contracting costs rise to 10–20 percent, with only one state being removed from the blacklist.

“Since [Chapter] 12X became operative, the number of banned states has grown from eight states in 2017 to 30 in 2022. This increase suggests that the city’s threat of boycott may not serve as a compelling deterrent to states considering restrictive policies,” read the report.

It added that contractor costs alone could grow even higher if more states are added to the list.

For example, the Washington Examiner reported that the San Franciscan government found that it is no longer sustainable to spend $1.7 million on a single public toilet.

“While it is difficult to quantify the exact cost of 12X to the city, the budget and legislative analyst notes that a loss in competition is likely to increase the city’s contracting costs by 10–20 percent annually. These costs could continue to increase and compound overtime as the city’s potential contractor pool shrinks if the list of banned states grows.”

“This increase suggests that the city’s threat of boycott may not serve as a compelling deterrent to states considering restrictive policies,” the report said.

The report proposed five alternatives, such as entirely repealing the ordinance, or repealing the contracting ban, but keeping the travel ban in place.

Blacklist on Conservative States May Be Repealed by City

After the release of the report, the city board of supervisors began to debate the Chapter 12X repeal process, reported the San Francisco Chronicle.

Several members of the board introduced their own proposals to lessen the impact of the red-state boycott.

City Supervisor Ahsha Safaí introduced legislation at a committee hearing on Feb. 13 to exempt construction contracts from the ordinance, while her colleague, Supervisor Rafael Mandelmanm, told the San Francisco Chronicle that he would on introduce legislation to repeal the ordinance entirely.

“It’s an ineffective policy that complicates the business of San Francisco government and makes it very likely that we pay more than we should for goods and services,” Mandelman said.

A San Francisco board of supervisors committee finally approved a proposed repeal of the ordinance this week, which now heads to the full board for a vote. If the boycott is repealed, it could lead state Democrats to reconsider their own similar, ineffective ban on 23 red states.

The boycott got California Democrat governor Gavin Newsom into trouble last year, after he traveled to his in-laws’ ranch in Montana, one of the blacklisted states, according to Cal Matters, a nonpartisan news website.

Los Angeles, Seattle, and New York ,which have also enacted various similar sanctions on conservative states, have repealed most of those policies due to their ineffectiveness.