SF's Board of Supervisors printed over 350,000 pages last year

Name: Sandra Lee Fewer District: 1 (Richmond) Pages printed in FY2018: 47,691 Cost: $3,016.42 Sandra Lee Fewer Name: Sandra Lee Fewer District: 1 (Richmond) Pages printed in FY2018: 47,691 Cost: $3,016.42 Sandra Lee Fewer Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle Buy photo Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 15 Caption Close SF's Board of Supervisors printed over 350,000 pages last year 1 / 15 Back to Gallery

Paper on the ground. Paper scattered on desks. Paper with coffee stains and paper with inscrutable scribbles. At your local elected official's office, chances are, there's going to be paper everywhere.

The job consumes a lot of paper. There are agendas running hundreds of pages, countless subcommittees producing reports, bureaucratic agencies analyzing the legal viability of a four-unit housing project. In city halls all over California, the office printer gets a good workout.

One must look no further than our own backyard of San Francisco, where the Board of Supervisors printed north of 350,000 pages in the 2018 fiscal year, stretching from July 1, 2017, to June 30, 2018. That's right — 350,000 pages in one year, costing a little over $30,000 in taxpayer money.

SFGATE filed a public records request last month and unearthed the aforementioned numbers. A little background: the supervisors split the cost of leasing a Ricoh printer, which runs each supervisor $1837.52 each, per year. On top of that, each supervisor pays $0.0065 a page for black-and-white printing and $0.055 a page for color copies.

Take Supervisor Sandra Lee Fewer, who represents the Richmond District. Fewer's office led all offices in both total pages and total cost incurred. In the 2018 fiscal year, Fewer's office printed nearly 48,000 pages at a cost of $3016.42 to the city, including her split of the lease. (Only $12 more than District 2, Fewer is quick to point out.)

The supervisor spoke with SFGATE this week to explain her high printing costs. She said that her office hosts frequent community meetings on tsunami safety or Outside Lands or the Autumn Moon festival with attendance running into the hundreds. Many of her constituents also speak Russian and Chinese, requiring printing in a number of different languages. Ninety-five percent of her printing costs, she estimates, come from materials for these community meetings.

"I'd say we don't abuse our printing costs; I think our printing is instrumental to getting information out to our constituents," Fewer told SFGATE. "I think if you called other offices, they probably don't go out as much as we do and translate things into multiple languages and hold as many community meetings."

Fewer thinks the unique geographical design of her district — the Richmond is naturally bordered by Golden Gate Park, the ocean and the Presidio — means a community more engaged on the same issues than the average supervisorial district.

Supervisor Norman Yee, on the other hand, can point to his health for the 44,475 pages printed last fiscal year.

"Our office prints Board and Committee agendas, briefing packets and reports, flyers for community events our office is hosting, and emails for constituent issues with a longer history for reference," Jarlene Chow, an aide to Yee, wrote in an email to SFGATE. "Given [Supervisor] Yee's eyesight, it is easier for him to read it on paper, than on the computer."

Let's return to District 2, which, as promised to Supervisor Fewer, SFGATE would investigate. Yes, the legislators representing the Marina finished just $12 behind Supervisor Fewer last year, but that belies the truth of affairs.

Mark Farrell, who served for the first seven months of the fiscal year, left to serve as interim mayor in February. (You may remember this controversy.) Catherine Stefani took his place for the final five months and proceeded to blow every other supervisor out of the water on a rate basis. Stefani racked up $1458.50 in just five months; extrapolated to a full year, that means over $3,500 in printer costs, far outpacing Fewer's $3016.24.

(For a comprehensive list of each supervisor's printing records, check out the slideshow above.)

SFGATE spoke with Stefani's aide, Wyatt Donnelly-Landolt, about Stefani's outsized printing costs. Donnelly-Landolt explained that the Stefani office is particularly research-heavy; on any given day, he might be printing an MTA 10-year-plan, or a Public Works report running hundreds of pages, or a dispatch from a civil grand jury. Lots of policy writing means lots of printing.

He also chalks up the high costs, partially, to the transition from Farrell to Stefani.

"When Supervisor Stefani took office, she wanted to get caught up on all the issues," Donnelly-Landolt said. "We were printing a lot of reports, trying to get all our records set, transferring things from Supervisor Farrell to her."

SFGATE asked Donnelly-Landolt whether he saw a way to reduce printing costs, or whether the hundreds of thousands of pages produced by the Board every year was simply part of the job.

"I think there's definitely a lot of printing that does need to be done," Donnelly-Landolt says. "You need documents in front of you at board meetings, and these documents can be hundreds of pages, and going through them electronically can be challenging."