Last week, more than 200 protesters stood outside San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie’s office chanting loudly, hand delivering postcards decrying how his budget cuts would hurt them and their communities. Leading the group was Anya Worley-Ziegmann, a 24-year-old coordinator for the San Francisco People’s Budget Coalition, a two-and-a-half-year old organization representing more than 150 non-profits, unions, and community groups, including organizations that are powerful in their own right: Chinatown Community Development Center, San Francisco Rising, Poder SF, and SOMCAN.
The protest was noisy and in-your-face, but disruption is only one of the tools Worley-Ziegmann uses in their campaigns to advocate for a more equitable city. In addition to demonstrating outside Lurie’s office, Worley-Ziegmann said, “We are also the voice that needs to get into City Hall, and get the work done.”
One way they get that work done is meeting with Sophia Kittler, who serves as Lurie’s budget director.
A rare holdover from the administration of London Breed, Kittler is in a position of influence, especially at the moment. She’s overseeing the mayor’s budget cuts of hundreds of millions of dollars, including layoffs of public health employees and closures of clinics for transient youth and the elderly. The cuts are expected to go deeper in coming weeks, as a June 1 deadline approaches for Lurie to send his budget to the Board of Supervisors.
Worley-Ziegmann said they met with Kittler at least four times — both in person and virtually — since Mayor Lurie was inaugurated. Kittler did not respond to requests for confirmation. Kate Poltrack, a spokesperson for Lurie, confirmed in a text that Kittler has met with PBC representatives on “multiple occasions.”
According to Worley-Ziegmann, Kittler has offered hints about forthcoming cuts and layoffs, or indicated where there might be some give. As Worley-Ziegmann described the relationship at PBC’s office in the South of Market neighborhood, it seemed the information they gleaned required some reading between the lines. Worley-Ziegmann described the conversations as “vibes.”
“What we have gotten is hints that more layoffs are coming,” they said. “There’s a lot of fear across the board.”
PBC is bracing for layoffs from at least five other agencies, including the San Francisco Human Rights Commission, the City’s Arts Commission, and the Human Services Agency. Poltrack, in another text, said the “budget isn’t done yet.”
This is the seventh budget Worley-Ziegmann has worked on. In 2020, Worley-Ziegmann was a freshman at Berkeley and serving as a budget intern for then-District 5 Supervisor Dean Preston, a volunteer position they held for three years.
Preston recalled Worley-Ziegmann showing up to work with a “suitcase” filled with budget documents. Worley-Ziegmann would bring a change of clothes for budget nights, the marathon sessions that can last into the early morning hours at City Hall when the budget is hashed out, Preston recalled.
“Anya is one of the most knowledgeable people in the city on the budget,” Preston told Gazetteer SF.
“The challenge with the budget is that it’s not just around advocacy, it’s not just what you’re pushing for,” he said. “You have to go beyond the numbers on the page, you have to probe each of these categories, and it can be very difficult to do.”
Preston, who lost his seat in 2024, remembers Kittler and Worley-Ziegmann interacting when Kittler served as Breed’s liaison with the Board of Supervisors. The former supervisor said he wouldn’t be surprised if Kittler was meeting with Worley-Ziegmann, but is skeptical that the mayor’s budget director would ever show her cards. “I doubt they’re disclosing anything they don’t want to disclose strategically,” Preston said, referring to Lurie’s budget office.
Worley-Ziegmann contends PBC is seeing some progress from its recent advocacy. Some organizations have told them that on June 1 they may even see some of Lurie’s cuts restored.
Worley-Ziegmann declined to name the organizations out of fear of jeopardizing any restored funding. On Wednesday, they were headed back to City Hall for a hearing on Lurie’s proposed cuts to Free City, the program that provides free tuition to the City College of San Francisco.
