Let’s Fund People, Not Pandas

When an embattled Mayor London Breed, stuck in the "San Francisco Doom Loop" media narrative a year before her re-election needed some good PR from her totally frivolous April '24 junket to China then, voila! Pandas!

Coming just months after the big PR flop of the massively over-hyped November '23 APEC conference that locked down Downtown for a week while London partied, she needed something new and now! Her Room 200 team had been throwing Downtown-revival spaghetti ideas at the wall all year, like a crazy $multi-billion soccer stadium, hoping something would symbolize a visionary can-do Mayor in the voters' eyes.

Despite the fact two other US zoos already have pandas on exhibit - and that our City's zoo is 6 miles from downtown near the county line - the Mayor hyped an imagined resulting Panda boost in tourism to support the City's economic revival. But then, we got the bill to pay: $70 million over the next 10 years. That's $7 million per year average, plus the one time $25 million cost to build a new zoo Panda habitat, heated one would hope, to insulate a bamboo forest species from chill City fogs.

But all that was then, and this is now. The election and London's PR agenda are over. Today our new Mayor Dan Lurie and the entire City are facing huge local budget cuts and federal programs' annihilation that we all realize will shut down vital community services of all kinds citywide. Whatever philanthropic donations, and certainly any City budget allocations, that might have gone toward a Panda sideshow at the zoo will be vital now just to feed, clothe, house, and provide basic medical care for San Franciscans. Sometimes you have to let unnecessary things go.

- John Elberling, Editor