San Francisco voters in a single supervisorial district will decide Tuesday whether to remove Joel Engardio after he helped place a two-mile stretch of the city’s Pacific Coast highway on the ballot to be turned into a permanent car-free park.
The recall centers on the closure of the Great Highway, a four-lane oceanfront road that was shut to cars during the coronavirus pandemic and became a popular space for walkers, runners and cyclists. Engardio and four other supervisors moved a measure to make the closure permanent; the citywide measure, known as Measure K, passed overall but lost in Engardio’s Sunset District, where some residents say the change has worsened traffic, safety and quality-of-life conditions.
Supporters of the recall collected about 10,500 valid signatures to qualify the measure for the ballot and have framed their effort as a response to what they call a broken promise. They say Engardio agreed to a compromise keeping the highway open to cars on weekdays and reserved as a park on weekends, but later backed the permanent closure. Volunteers campaigning for the recall have emphasized grassroots appeals and criticized large donations backing the anti-recall effort.
Engardio and his backers say that the supervisor was transparent about his preference for converting the road into a public park and only accepted the compromise when it faced a competing ballot measure that would have fully reopened the highway for vehicle traffic. "This recall is really about the future of our city," Engardio told The Associated Press, adding, "Do we want to be a city that just preserves itself in amber and goes back in time? Or do we want to be a city that innovates, thinks ahead, is forward-looking and welcomes new people?"
The campaign financing map illustrates the stakes and division in the contest. The anti-recall campaign has raised more than $800,000, buoyed by roughly $375,000 in contributions from tech entrepreneurs including Yelp co-founder Jeremy Stoppelman and Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen. The pro-recall effort has raised about $250,000, according to campaign disclosures cited by supporters of the recall.
Residents interviewed in the Sunset District described a neighborhood fractured over the change. Some praised the new public space, dubbed Sunset Dunes, where joggers, parents with strollers and cyclists use a median of blowing sand and succulents. Others said daily life has become more difficult and congested, and they fault Engardio for abandoning the earlier compromise.
"We don’t have the levers to pull in democracy like these guys," volunteer Heather Davies said of wealthy political donors. "They can flood the market with social media, and we can’t afford to do that." By contrast, neighborhood resident Alex Wong, a father of two, defended Engardio for supporting family-friendly policies including housing and school improvements, saying the recall over a road closure alone was insufficient cause for removal.
Engardio, a moderate Democrat who defeated an incumbent in 2022, represents roughly one-tenth of a city of about 800,000 residents. He previously supported recalls of progressive officials, including three members of the San Francisco Unified School District board and District Attorney Chesa Boudin in 2022. That history has underscored for some observers that the current recall is not simply about the highway.
Political scientists and local observers say the election is part of a broader pattern of volatile local politics in San Francisco. The recall would be the third successful recall election in four years if voters remove Engardio, continuing a trend of electorates challenging progressive officeholders on issues from public safety to education to land use.
Mayor Daniel Lurie is preparing to push a controversial housing plan to build denser, taller buildings and add tens of thousands of units — a proposal that Engardio supports and that faces strong opposition in the Sunset District. Jason McDaniel, a political science professor at San Francisco State University, said the spate of recalls is sending a message to city officials: lawmakers may become less willing to take politically difficult stands that could provoke backlash in their districts.
The recall vote will test whether a neighborhood's immediate concerns about traffic and daily life outweigh broader citywide support for open coastal public space and whether concentrated outside funding can counter neighborhood-level activism. The outcome is likely to inform how other San Francisco officials approach contentious decisions on housing, transportation and public space in the months ahead.