Acting San Francisco Mayor Breed Announces Run For Mayor
SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) -- Acting Mayor of San Francisco and President of the Board of Supervisors London Breed announced Friday that she will join the growing group of candidates running for the office in a special election this June.
Breed made the announcement via her Twitter account shortly before noon.
Breed was automatically appointed as the city's acting mayor in the hours after San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee's death from a heart attack on December 12.
Breed went earned an undergraduate degree at UC Davis and a master's degree at the University of San Francisco.
"She has been an employee of the city and county of San Francisco," former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown said after Lee's passing. "She has run a community-based organization -- the Western Addition Community Center. She's served on various boards and commissions -- redevelopment and fire. And she was elected against an incumbent [former District 5 supervisor Christina Olague in 2012]."
Using a platform of building and protecting affordable housing, increasing public safety, improving environmental health, and modernizing public transportation, Breed was re-elected on Nov. 8, 2016.
She was unanimously re-elected to another two-year term as Board President on January 9 by her fellow supervisors.
Generally associated with the board's "moderate" political faction, Breed grew up in a public housing complex in San Francisco within the district that she now represents.
That background is one she shared with Lee, who grew up in public housing in Seattle.
"He asked my top three priorities and I said public housing, public housing, public housing," Breed said at a news conference at City Hall after Lee's death. "As someone who grew up there and spent most of my life there, we bonded over that."
Breed will continue to hold both positions unless the Board of Supervisors votes to appoint someone else as interim mayor. The board has been on recess, but will hold its first meeting of the new year on Tuesday -- which just happens to be the filing deadline for candidates for the June election.
"I want the board -- my colleagues -- to do what they think is best," said Breed Friday. "I've had these conversations with members of the board. Many are torn on what they want to do. So it's really going to be up to my colleagues to make that decision."
Breed joins SF Supervisor Jane Kim, former state Senator Marc Leno and former San Francisco Supervisor Angela Alioto as notable candidates in the bid to replace the late mayor.
City Attorney Dennis Herrera has pulled papers to run while Assemblyman David Chiu is also rumored to be considering a run. Whoever wins the June 5 special election will serve for the remainder of Lee's term through January 2020.
In addition to the mayoral special election, the District 8 seat held by Supervisor Jeff Sheehy will also be on the June 5 ballot. Sheehy, a longtime HIV and AIDS activist and the city's first openly HIV positive supervisor, was appointed by Lee in January following the election of former Supervisor Scott Weiner to a state Senate seat.
His biggest opponent so far is urban development attorney Rafael Mandelman.
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