Phil Ting: An Interview With the San Francisco Mayoral Candidate

Phil Ting is the current Assessor-Recorder of the City and County of San Francisco, since being appointed to the position in 2005. He began his career as a real estate financial advisor, and later served as Executive Director of the Asian Law Caucus. Mr. Ting has degrees from UC Berkeley and Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. He lives in the Sunset District with his wife and two daughters.

The Epoch Times: What is the main reason why you wanted to run for mayor of San Francisco?

Phil Ting: I wanted to run for San Francisco mayor because I see the same people involved in city government, all the same people, about 300 people. … I am running for San Francisco mayor because I see the same people get involved in government. Most people who have families and have jobs, they don’t have the time to come down to City Hall and participate. And so, for me, we want to give them an opportunity to shape this campaign, participate in this campaign, but to really help us find solutions to the problems of San Francisco. Every candidate runs on the same issues. They run to deal with the homelessness issue, run to help education, run to fix Muni, and they run to plug the potholes. So how come with everybody running on the same platform we still have the same problems? We still have plenty of potholes, Muni is still slow, we have problems with our budgets, we have problems with our schools, and nothing seems to be fixed. I think the reason is that we are asking the wrong questions. We are looking at it exactly the same way every time. We need a fresh way of thinking and we need people who have not been part of the system to add their voices because they are the ones who are missing. They are the ones who see the homeless upon their doorsteps or in their streets; they are the ones who drive over the potholes; and they are the ones going to our schools. We really need to engage them and really get their input and get their ideas because they are the ones who are using government. So that is why we created “Reset San Francisco” which is user-generated government. It is an opportunity for people to crowd source and be part of a larger dialog. So we can really open that dialog up.

To me the most important issue are threefold:

1. We have to balance our budget both in the short term and the long term.

2. We need to make sure we create jobs. We are having the worst economy since the depression of 1920’s. We need to make sure that we are creating jobs to give people the opportunity to go back to work.

3. We have to do something about Muni. We can’t accept the fact that the buses come three out of four times. For some reason 75 percent of the time is ok for Muni, but if UPS or FedEx ran their business with packages getting there only three out of four times, they would be out of business. So right now we need to do something for all the Muni riders out there.

ET: What are the top two things you will do if you are elected as mayor? 

PT: Well, the number one job creators in San Francisco are small businesses. All the businesses up and down Grand Street, Clement, Irvine, Castro, 24th Ave, that’s where we get job creation, because if one business hires a person they made a huge jump in their success. We need to make sure we are helping small businesses as much as possible. We have a small business office right now—wonderful people. They have two people in their office. We need to pick people from around the city and encourage new staff to join that office so that they can help with those businesses. Right now if you are a small business you have to go to the Tax [Department]. You have to pull permits to build out your space. You have to go around to our department and make sure you are paying your taxes properly. There are so many companies that have to run around San Francisco city government just to get a business open. We need to make that easier for people. Because if you take six month longer that is a lot of lost money. I think the other thing is really working on recruiting companies. That is one of the reasons I started to go. We have now created a solar industry. We need to look at other ways to recruit companies to come here, really create a critical mass of companies. We already have a lot of visual media companies and have a lot of live five companies, and we can’t be happy with what we have there. We need to make sure we are the social media capital of the world, the social media company of the world. We are the lifestyle capital in California. We are the technology capital of the world.

ET: What do you think is the most important thing we need to do to attract companies to San Francisco?

PT: We need to make sure that if people expect to do business people have a great opportunity to do business. We know that if they can get to San Francisco they can get the companies going and they actually do quite well. So we need to make that time shorter, more efficient. We need to get out of people’s way so that those businesses can get off the ground faster. I think we also need to look at what industries we can encourage [to come here]. Because once we have core companies in a certain industry they will attract other companies from that industry. The biggest issue for us is solar. How do we recruit solar companies? So once we had a few solar companies like Suntech, and as we got installers off the ground, other solar companies followed, and it has been a huge success.

ET: In terms of the solar industry, do you think the government is targeting that correctly? Is there enough demand?

PT: Absolutely. What we saw with solar is we gave people a little incentive to put a solar system on their building whether they are a commercial office property owner or a home owner. We saw solar quadruple in San Francisco. We went from 500 solar building to 2,200 solar buildings. So we have seen a huge [increase] in only three years. To go fourfold in only three years is a pretty big jump. It took about 30 years to get that first 500.