Mayor Daniel Lurie has selected Jake Berliner, a City Hall outsider, to run the mayor’s new Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Berliner, a partner at consulting firm McKinsey and Company, faces a short deadline to master the intricacies and negotiations required to deliver the city’s updated financial projection by the end of this year, and a balanced budget by June 1, 2027.
Lurie on Thursday announced Berliner will lead OMB, which replaces the Mayor’s Budget Office. Berliner will replace Sophia Kittler, a City Hall insider who served as the mayor’s budget director, and was a rare holdover from Mayor London Breed’s administration. Lurie leaned heavily on Kittler earlier this year as he laid off city workers in an attempt to reduce spending and cut the city’s budget deficit.
Berliner will be forced to make similarly grim choices, as he collects information from more than 50 city departments by the end of February. Berliner is tasked with determining how departments fit in the city’s updated financial conditions and Lurie’s priorities as mayor. In an emailed statement, Lurie said Berliner’s “outsider’s perspective” will prove useful to “redesigning the budget process.”
Budget insiders questioned how Berliner will accomplish those goals before June without previous city budget experience.
“If you want to do things differently — restructure the team, ask departments to submit different types of information, look at funding things differently —it's hard to make all those changes when you constantly have this looming deadline to balance the budget,” said a former employee of the Mayor’s Budget Office who spoke on condition of anonymity because they’re not authorized to speak for the office.
“It would be hard to do that in this budget year,” the source added. The phrase “building a plane while flying it” comes to mind, the source said. “But the plane is like a rocket ship, and the guy who’s leading it hasn't built a rocket ship before. Maybe he’s built something else that’s not quite that.”
Lurie touted Berliner’s 13 years at McKinsey, where, the mayor said, he worked with education providers, state governments, and philanthropies to drive “complex financial and operational change.” Berliner is at least the third McKinsey partner to join Lurie’s administration in the last year and a half. Kunal Modi, the city’s chief of Health and Human Services, and Department of Public Health Director Dan Tsai also previously worked at the consulting company.
Berliner has also served on the Board of Trustees at Gateway, a public school in the city. Earlier in his career, Berliner worked for former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson and former US Senator Dianne Feinstein.
In the statement, Berliner said he’s excited to “help accelerate the incredible momentum and results” of Lurie’s administration. “Our city is at a critical moment: economic resurgence but with a budget deficit, unprecedented wealth creation but with an affordability crisis.”
The Mayor’s spokesperson Charles Lutvak suggested Gazetteer quote the following statement attributed to Berliner: "My goal is to deliver world-class services with the resources San Franciscans entrust to the city.” Attempts to reach Berliner at a number associated with him at McKinsey went to voicemail, and messages sent to him through LinkedIn were not answered by press time. (This story will be updated when we hear from Berliner.)
City Hall insiders couldn’t recall a budget director in the last two decades who didn’t come with some direct experience with the process. Anya Worley-Ziegmann, coordinator at the San Francisco People’s Budget Coalition, said years of experience are required to comprehend the city’s budget. Worley-Zeigmann led numerous protests to last year’s budget cuts, one of them outside Lurie’s City Hall door. According to Worley-Ziegmann, Berliner can’t possibly understand the budget before Lurie has to submit it in June.
“This is going to be unlike anything he’s ever faced before in his life,” Worley-Ziegmann said. “I can’t even imagine the runway if he starts learning now. He will still be a complete newbie by the time we get to budget.”
