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Politics
San Francisco

“Dump Dean” PAC mounts campaign to oust SF Supervisor Dean Preston

Group claims to have raised $300K and follows playbook of successful recall last year

From left: GrowSF co-founder Sachin Agarwal, San Francisco Supervisor Dean Preston, and GrowSF co-founder Steven Buss (Photo Illustration by Steven Dilakian for The Real Deal with Getty and GrowSF)
From left: GrowSF co-founder Sachin Agarwal, San Francisco Supervisor Dean Preston, and GrowSF co-founder Steven Buss (Photo Illustration by Steven Dilakian for The Real Deal with Getty and GrowSF)

A “Dump Dean” political action committee says it has raised a six-figure wad of cash to oust a San Francisco supervisor out of favor with developers.

GrowSF, a PAC aligned with political moderates, claims to have raised $300,000 from at least 300 donors to defeat democratic socialist Supervisor Dean Preston next year, the San Francisco Standard reported.

The uncorroborated claim follows an official fundraising disclosure this week that the anti-Preston group had more than $12,500 at the end of June. The committee raised nearly  $7,500 over two months last year.

The alleged cash infusion came after the PAC led by tech workers Steven Buss and Sachin Agarwal mounted an aggressive fundraising campaign last month modeled after last year’s successful recall of three San Francisco school board members.

Garry Tan, a staunch Preston critic and president of tech accelerator Y Combinator, announced on Threads that he donated $50,000.

Preston, a democratic socialist, represents the Haight, Hayes Valley and the Tenderloin. The former tenants-rights attorney elected in 2019 has support from far-left progressives who want to defund the police and build affordable housing over anything else.

Centrists have attacked him for being anti-housing, anti-police and anti-free market — even though Preston owns shares in four of the world’s largest corporations.

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GrowSF, founded last year, didn’t pick up steam until this month, when it unveiled a “30 Reasons to Dump Dean Preston” on a webpage modeled after SF Guardians, the group that led a recall of the three school board members last year.

“There’s a number of reasons that we think Dean is uniquely bad,” Buss told the Standard. “Chief among them is he is a huge opponent to building more housing.”

The Dump Dean PAC also cited Preston’s opposition to redistricting, which placed the Tenderloin in his district; his positions on public safety; and his support for the injunction against clearing homelessness encampments off the streets. 

Mayor London Breed, who defeated Preston in a 2016 race for the District 5 seat, recently put the supervisor on blast in a contentious public meeting focused on drug arrests.

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Preston credits his effort to protect low-income renters during the pandemic and restore Muni lines among his biggest accomplishments. In a feud mediated by a SFGate reporter, Preston slammed the GrowSF agenda.

“Steven Buss is anti-union, anti-tenant and anti-rent control,” Preston said. “His politics are so out of sync and out of touch.”

— Dana Bartholomew

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Dean PrestonSachin AgarwalSan FranciscoSteven Buss