San Francisco officials hope to banish the “ask forgiveness, not permission” ethos that’s animated much of the tech industry’s relationship with city government in recent years.

Board of Supervisors President Norman Yee is expected to introduce legislation Tuesday to create the city’s first Office of Emerging Technology to regulate any new commercial innovations that intersect with the public realm.

Local officials have expressed frustration in recent years after scooter companies unleashed their electric vehicles on the streets, startups rolled out their delivery robots on sidewalks and a dockless bikeshare company made two-wheelers available — all without permission or prior notice.

The new office is envisioned as a one-stop shop for companies seeking approvals to launch their inventions on public streets or sidewalks. Currently, companies have to get permission from multiple city agencies before bringing an idea to fruition, which has sometimes led firms to treat city and state regulations as an afterthought.

The office will issue permits for companies with technologies that aren’t currently accounted for by city law. Officials expect to mostly review mobility inventions — scooters or delivery robots, for example — that use streets or sidewalks. As such, Yee’s legislation allows the director of Public Works to appoint the head of the office, since Public Works already handles sidewalk permits.

Companies like Uber, Airbnb, scooter operators and others have bruised their public reputations in the past after their tech-enabled business models caused long and bitter fights with public officials, who chastised them for an apparent indifference to local laws and infrastructure.

The new office, with a $250,000 budget to launch, will issue one-year pilot permits to companies that can demonstrate that their inventions are operating with the public’s safety, privacy and security in mind.

Technology, Yee said in a statement, should serve the public’s best interests, not the other way around.

“As a city, we must ensure that such technologies ultimately result in a net common good and that we evaluate the costs and benefits so that our residents, workers and visitors are not unwittingly made guinea pigs of new tech,” he said.

The office represents the culmination of a working group made up of dozens of government agencies, nonprofits and tech companies. Making the office a centralized “front door” for the city’s interactions with new technologies was the “No. 1 recommendation” to come out of the group, said City Administrator Naomi Kelly, whose office oversaw the group’s discussions.

Molly Turner, a lecturer at the Berkeley Haas School of Business and co-host of the Technopolis podcast about how technology is disrupting cities, said she saw an “impressive variety of stakeholders” at the working group sessions she attended.

“Cities need this kind of ‘regulatory sandbox’ to incentivize more collaboration from startups and to test different approaches,” Turner, who was the first policy director at Airbnb, said in an email. “But I fear that most startups will continue barreling ahead with little care for the city’s priorities; and that the city, with only $250,000 in funding, no staff, and many opportunities for bureaucratic hurdles, won’t deliver on this new promise.”

Turner’s courses focus on building startups that help cities. She said she will tell her students about the new office and urge them to make good use of it when they graduate and start their own companies.

Sf.citi, the tech industry’s lobbying group in San Francisco, is not opposing Yee’s measure. The group would work with the new office to “develop responsive and swift policies and regulations that support both innovation and our city’s residents,” Executive Director Jennifer Stojkovic said in a statement.

Richard Florida, a professor at the University of Toronto’s School of Cities, said the idea seems positive.

“Streamlining is great,” he said in an email. “San Francisco needs tougher regulations for these companies. And companies very much need to be regulated. Tech companies need to put the community front and center. They are losing the battle for public support and opinion.”

Others said that regulations, even if well intentioned, could be too heavy-handed, and might help entities that feel threatened by disruption to stall competitors.

“Technology has always been ahead of the law,” said Jeffrey Cole, CEO of the Center for the Digital Future at USC. “I worry about stifling innovation. On the whole, I find this scary. I believe in letting the tech flourish and only stop it when you have to.”

Dominic Fracassa and Carolyn Said are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: dfracassa@sfchronicle.com csaid@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @dominicfracassa @CSaid