After almost 100 years, the State Compensation Insurance Fund is pulling 755 of its 830 jobs out of town, having determined that San Francisco is just too expensive - and its workforce too dumb - for the agency to continue doing most of its business here.

Workers called to a recent meeting at the Herbst Theatre were told that 293 jobs will move to Pleasanton, 422 to Vacaville and 40 to Sacramento, with 75 employees remaining in the city.

"It's part of a whole geographic strategy to reduce our footprint in high-cost areas like San Francisco," said agency spokeswoman Jennifer Vargen.

Vargen estimated that about half the workers now live either in the city, Daly City or the South Bay.

The fund, which handles workers' compensation, is a quasi-government agency - its workers are civil servants and it is overseen by a state-appointed board of directors. Its headquarters have been in San Francisco since 1913.

The move to cheaper climes is part of a statewide plan aimed at saving the fund $200 million over the next three years.

But the high cost of Bay Area living is only part of the problem, Vargen said. The agency also seems to have trouble attracting qualified workers here.

"We have to do a lot more testing to get qualified candidates," Vargen said.

For example, only half of the San Francisco applicants passed the most recent test to become workers' compensation claim adjusters - compared with the 90 percent pass rate in Eureka.

Just how the fund's hundreds of workers will get to their new assignments remains to be seen - BART goes to Pleasanton, but only the freeways run to Vacaville.

"Of course we'd prefer they stay," said Tony Winnicker, Mayor Gavin Newsom's spokesman. "But in this case it sounds like a bigger hit to their poor workers, with their brand-new, two-hour commute, than to the city's coffers."

Not everyone, however, will have to worry about moving out.

Under the fund's charter, the agency's headquarters have to be in San Francisco, so the top brass will stay put.

Considering that the fund's president, Tom Rowe, knocked back $630,000 this year in salary and other pay perks, hanging around in high-cost San Francisco shouldn't be too much of a hardship.

Job creation: How many bureaucrats does it take to create a job?

Well, if the "hire local" ordinance coming before the San Francisco Board of Supervisors this week is any indication - quite a few.

And they don't come cheap.

Under the proposed ordinance coming up for a final vote Tuesday, building contractors doing business with the city would have to hire as many as half their workers from within the city. Half the new hires will also have to come from the ranks of the "disadvantaged."

The goal is to see that 355 locals are trained for work through the hire-local program.

But, of course, any new program requires a bureaucracy to administer it. In the case of the local-hire program, that means the city bringing in a new:

-- $59,000-a-year junior analyst.

-- $80,000-a-year community development specialist.

-- $87,878-a-year accountant.

-- $88,660-a-year contract compliance officer.

-- And a $116,246-a-year contract compliance officer II.

Add in fringe benefits, paper, pencils and the like, and you're talking $1.3 million annually.

But wait, there's more.

To prove that the applicants are indeed San Francisco residents, the county clerk wants them to have an official city-issued ID - which, in turn, means hiring an additional two clerks at $50,000 and $65,546 a year, plus a $57,044-a-year legal process clerk.

Add in fringe benefits, work stations and the like, and you're talking another $923,000.

Total yearly administration cost: $2.2 million, or about $6,200 per job.

Now that's job creation.

Mayor to mayor: The phone lines have been buzzing between San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and Sen. Dianne Feinstein over the timing of his exit.

Newsom has been going back and forth over whether to assume his new job as lieutenant governor on Jan. 3 as scheduled - and allow the current left-leaning Board of Supervisors to pick his successor instead of the incoming, more moderate one.

Feinstein, herself a former mayor, wants the mods to make the call.

And while Newsom agrees, he has been wary of pulling off such a play, in part out of fear over how it would look down the line.

"He wants a little bit of cover statewide, and someone with the standing of Feinstein to say, 'Do it' - he gets the cover," said one source close to Newsom.

One topic that has not come up between the two is the idea of Newsom picking Feinstein's daughter, Superior Court Judge Katherine Feinstein, to replace District Attorney Kamala Harris, who will be leaving to become attorney general.

"He swears it hasn't come up once," the source said.

EXTRA! Catch our blog at www.sfgate.com/matierandross.