This article is from Power Play, a twice-weekly newsletter rounding up the latest City Hall and local politics gossip. To sign up, visit The Standard’s newsletter page.

Well, the day has finally arrived — with the state billionaire tax finally becoming a reality, California’s tallest fence-sitter has finally laid out his position.

“I don’t support it.” 

That’s the official stance state Sen. Scott Wiener told Power Play in a wide-ranging interview Friday.

While on the campaign trail, Wiener has voiced his concerns, CalMatters previously noted Wiener “sidestepped (opens in new tab)” questions about supporting the billionaire tax, and Politico noted Wiener would only stake his claim once the measure qualified for the ballot. While it isn’t quite there yet, the 1.5 million signatures gathered guarantee a path.

The lightning-rod measure would levy a one-time 5% tax on the net worth of California’s bevy of billionaires to shore up federal healthcare cuts. Some of those well-heeled Californians include Google cofounder Sergey Brin, who came out against it (opens in new tab), and Uber cofounder Travis Kalanick, who left the state over it.

SEIU-UHW, the healthcare union backing the measure, argue (opens in new tab) that taxing the state’s roughly 200 billionaires will stave off the closure of hospitals, nursing homes, and community health centers.

Wiener said he’s backed progressive tax measures before (among them U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s ultramillionaire tax plan (opens in new tab)), but doesn’t think that levying a one-time tax with a quick sunset doesn’t sound like the “best approach.”

“California already has an unstable boom-bust tax system because of the devaluation of property taxes and reliance increasingly on income taxes on wealthy residents,” Wiener said. “I completely respect why they’re pursuing this. I don’t know that this is the best approach.”

Wiener’s rivals, former AOC chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti and Supervisor Connie Chan, voiced support for the billionaire tax as far back as their first congressional forum, in January.

“We cannot take back Congress by cozying up to billionaires,” Chan said at the time.

In his interview with Power Play, Wiener said he was concerned that outsized spending by opponents to take down the billionaire tax will imperil bond measures to fund transit and any other tax measures on the ballot. 

“I really worry that this billionaire tax has drawn so much national money to attack government that it could drag everything down,” he said. — Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez

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TALK NEXT TIME: The relationship between Pacific Gas & Electric and Wiener has long been chilly, to say the least. The state senator recently authored a “breakup bill” that sought to hand over management of the investor-owned utility to cities. PG&E leadership, unsurprisingly, hated the idea. 

In a suddenly-postponed Monday event (opens in new tab). PG&E CEO Patti Poppe and Wiener were supposed to be seated together to talk about “Affordability, Outages and the ‘Breakup Bill.’” The organizers at the Commonwealth Club cited a last-minute scheduling conflict and are looking for a new date.

The utility received significant heat for the city’s December blackouts, which left 130,000 residents without power during a holiday weekend. City officials have pressed the California Public Utilities Commission to investigate the outage, claiming the state regulator is dragging its feet on an inquiry. 

The December blackout also led Wiener to introduce SB 875, which Power Play wrote about earlier this month after it failed to pass the state senate committee on energy, utilities, and communications. The legislation would have made it easier for cities to break away from PG&E, but faced major opposition from the state’s utility companies. The utility union, IBEW Local 1245, also fought hard against the bill. The labor group’s chief advocate, Hunter Stern, has used fighting words against Wiener: “He has repeatedly attacked the utility. He doesn’t know anything about electricity,” Stern told The Standard in March.

Floating in the background are the gubernatorial race and affordability issues. Billionaire investor Tom Steyer, who has jumped in the polls since former Rep. Eric Swalwell’s campaign implosion, has promised to treat the utility companies with a heavy hand, vowing to reduce electricity rates by 25% as Californians struggle to pay their increasingly expensive bills. PG&E has responded in kind with a $10 million anti-Steyer PAC. — Gabe Greschler

MAKING FRIENDS: A right-leaning D.C. think tank is trying to build new relationships in deep-blue San Francisco.

The American Enterprise Institute — a mainstream conservative group, though not aligned with MAGA Trumpism — is partnering with Neighbors for a Better San Francisco (currently in crisis mode) to host a policy solutions summit (opens in new tab) on Wednesday in downtown San Francisco.

The event will feature prominent local officials — all Democrats, natch — including Mayor Daniel Lurie’s policy chief, Ned Segal, supervisors Rafael Mandelman and Matt Dorsey, school district Superintendent Maria Su, and District Attorney Brooke Jenkins.

“I’ve known and loved San Francisco all my life,” AEI president Robert Doar said. “San Francisco has had its ups and downs, but I think it’s on the rise now.”

Doar emphasized the critical role of local governance, as he previously served as the commissioner of the New York City Human Resources Administration under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

A rightward drift among local Asian American voters has particularly caught AEI’s attention. In 2024, the city’s Asian voters showed increased support for the GOP and President Donald Trump. AEI has hired a Chinese-speaking outreach coordinator to promote the summit.

“Think tanks like AEI may not have worked hard enough to reach communities like the Asian American community,” Doar said. “Let’s do a better job connecting our ideas and our scholars with that community.”

But local Democrats may dismiss those efforts, given how unlikely a Republican wave is to emerge in this liberal city. The last time San Francisco elected a Republican mayor was in 1959 (opens in new tab). — Han Li

NOT IN-KLEINED TO AGREE: You may have felt a great disturbance in the YIMBY Force, Thursday, as if a million voices suddenly cried out “supply and demand!” in terror, and were silenced (opens in new tab). 

At least, that’s how this Power Play reporter imagines the cheerleaders of the “build, build, build” movement reacted when its star, New York Times columnist (opens in new tab) Ezra Klein, said on his podcast, “there has been a decade of housing bills being passed in California. Dozens and dozens of bills, including many that were framed to me as transformative, just weren’t.”

Much of the podcast episode (opens in new tab) derided the outcomes of their own movement, titled after their book, “Abundance (opens in new tab),” as having failed to materialize. And to top it off, the episode invokes Wiener by name, twice. 

So in our Friday interview with California’s YIMBY-in-chief, Wiener, we asked his reaction to Klein’s gloomy assessment. Not unexpectedly, he pushed back.

“He’s looking at broad numbers,” Wiener argued. Instead, Wiener is proud that the housing laws he passed (opens in new tab) led to the creation of tens of thousands of affordable homes statewide. The state has failed to produce housing for years, he said. “It took us 50 years to dig into this. And it’s not the case that all of these laws were in the books ten years ago.”

That got us thinking. It was actually more than 10 years ago when Wiener began arguing for more housing supply from his seat on the Board of Supervisors. That includes this full-throated Medium post against the Mission Moratorium (opens in new tab), where he said “market-produced housing is essential to getting the job done” to stabilize rental prices. 

So, we asked — when will the myriad laws he’s passed in those intervening years push the city’s housing prices down? And when can voters begin holding you accountable for your promises that the blindingly obvious economic law of supply and demand will fix the crisis? 

“I am incredibly flattered and grateful that you attribute power to the one out of 120 legislators to just change the world overnight,” he said. “In terms of how I and my colleagues and the governor should be held (accountable), I don’t know what the exact timetable is, but I think we should be making steady progress.”

Well, that clears that up. — J.F.R.