San Francisco Mayor London Breed's emergency declaration for the Tenderloin District has helped the city cut through the red tape and quickly hire dozens of behavioral health care workers.
The mayor declared the state of emergency in December in response to the high rate of overdose deaths and open drug dealing throughout the Tenderloin.
Since that time, San Francisco has hired 100 clinicians, pharmacists, and other behavioral health workers as a result of the declaration, expediting a process that usually takes months, the mayor's office announced on Tuesday.
"We identified 200 positions of behavioral health workers that need to be hired to help us with this work to improve our mental health system. We already hired 100 and we’re on track to hire that 200 within 90 days," Jeff Cretan, the mayor's communications director, told KCBS Radio.
The city's current hiring process takes approximately six months to complete, however due to the mayor's order, that process was expedited to under three, officials said.
"This allowed us to move much quicker in filling these positions," Supervisor Matt Haney, who represents the neighborhood, told KCBS Radio. "These folks will be out on the streets, they'll be able to save lives, they'll be able to get people inside and they desperately need it."
"This is a positive thing that’s going to happen in our city and we need to continue to ramp up," he added.
Both Cretan and Haney expressed hope that the expedited hiring process can serve as a model and help officials speed up the way jobs are filled in all city departments.
"We have a really severe staffing shortage across many different departments due to hiring limitations with COVID so this work will not only help the people of the Tenderloin but will help the city improve its practices so we can get city services moving quickly again as we emerge from the pandemic," Haney explained.
The mayor's declaration has been heavily scrutinized largely due to fears it would increase police presence in the district, which critics argued is the wrong way to address the neighborhood's issues. However, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, some supervisors who were worried about the increased police presence still supported the action because they said it would help reform the city’s healthcare system.
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