Lee is the first Chinese American mayor in San Francisco's history, as well as the first Asian American elected to the office. Before being appointed mayor, he was City Administrator.
Prior to his employment with the City and County of San Francisco, Mayor Lee was the Managing Attorney for the San Francisco Asian Law Caucus, for which he worked from 1979 to 1989.[8] From 1989 to 1991, Lee worked as a Whistleblower Ordinance Investigator and the Deputy Director of Employment Relations in San Francisco. Lee later worked as the director of the Human Rights Commission from 1991 to 1996. Afterwards, Lee became director of the City Purchasing Department in 1996 until his appointment to City Administrator in 2000.
As City Administrator, Mayor Lee spearheaded government efficiency measures and reforms that reduced the size and cost of government, from reducing the vehicle fleet to consolidating departments and back office functions to save tax dollars. He implemented the City’s move to cleaner vehicles and an infrastructure to support electric vehicles and green City government. Mayor Lee also developed and oversaw implementation of the City’s first ever Ten Year Capital Plan to guide our capital priorities and infrastructure investment.
On March 20, 2012, Mayor Ed Lee gave then elected Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi a 24-hour ultimatum to resign from his post as sheriff following allegations of domestic abuse. On January 13, 2012, Mirkarimi had been charged with domestic violence battery, child endangerment, and dissuading a witness in connection with a New Year's Eve altercation he had with his wife. While jury selection was underway, Mirkarimi entered into a plea agreement with the district attorney, pleading guilty to one count of misdemeanor false imprisonment. When Mirkarimi refused to resign, the Mayor suspended him and appointed a temporary replacement, Vicki Hennessy. City Attorney Dennis Herrera crafted the formal complaint and sent it to the city's Ethics Commission and Board of Supervisors who accepted it and then investigated Mirkarimi under misconduct charges as required by the city Charter.
In 2010, Mayor Lee was appointed to a second term as City Administrator by Mayor Newsom and his appointment was confirmed unanimously by the Board of Supervisors. As City Administrator, Mayor Lee spearheaded government efficiency measures and reforms that reduced the size and cost of government, from reducing the vehicle fleet to consolidating departments and back office functions to save tax dollars. He implemented the City’s move to cleaner vehicles and an infrastructure to support electric vehicles and green City government. Mayor Lee also developed and oversaw implementation of the City’s first ever Ten Year Capital Plan to guide our capital priorities and infrastructure investment.
Working with the Department of Emergency Management, Mayor Lee has overseen the City’s disaster recovery and response planning efforts, bringing every department together to coordinate response and recovery for the next major earthquake or emergency. With the Fire Chief, Mayor Lee led efforts to work with PG&E to assess the City’s gas and electric infrastructure and ensure its safety and reliability. For the 2010 U.S. Census, Mayor Lee organized the outreach efforts to ensure our City continues to make progress on inclusion and cultural competency.
Mayor Lee first began working for the City and County of San Francisco in 1989 as the Investigator for the City’s first Whistle Blower Ordinance and has since served as the Executive Director of the Human Rights Commission, Director of City Purchasing, and Director of the Department of Public Works before he was first appointed as City Administrator in 2005.
Prior to his employment with the City and County of San Francisco, Mayor Lee was the Managing Attorney for the San Francisco Asian Law Caucus, for which he worked from 1979 to 1989. Mayor Lee was born in Seattle, Washington. He graduated Summa Cum Laude from Bowdoin College in 1974 and from Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California, Berkeley, in 1978. Mayor Lee is married to his wife Anita and is the father of two daughters Brianna and Tania.
On August 16, the Commission ruled by 4 to 1 that Mirkarimi committed official misconduct by falsely imprisoning his wife. Six of the charges brought by the mayor matched the District Attorney's George Gascón original criminal charges. Five of those were overruled and not sustained, including the charge that Mirkarimi dissuaded witnesses and that he abused the power of his office. On October 9, 2012, four of the eleven San Francisco District Supervisors voted to not support Mayor Lee's removal of Mirkarimi as Sheriff. The Mayor would have needed the votes of nine Board members to remove Mirkarimi.
Lee was re-elected in 2015 with 56 percent of the vote; his closest challenger received 14 percent of the vote.
Lee was born in 1952 in the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Seattle, Washington. His parents immigrated to the United States from Toishan, Guangdong Province, China in the 1930s. Lee's father, Gok Suey Lee, fought in World War II, and worked as a cook managing a restaurant in Seattle. He died when Lee was 15. His mother was a seamstress and waitress. Lee has five siblings. He graduated Summa Cum Laude from Bowdoin College in Maine in 1974, completed a year overseas as a Watson Fellow, and then graduated from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law in 1978. He married his wife, Anita, in 1980. He has two daughters, Tania and Brianna.
He graduated Summa Cum Laude from Bowdoin College in 1974 and from Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California, Berkeley, in 1978.In April 2011, Mayor Lee was awarded the inaugural Coro Community Catalyst award for "his longtime commitment to bringing together varied special interests and agendas to address the greater needs of the community".
San Francisco
San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the cultural, commercial, and financial center of Northern California and the only consolidated city-county in California. San Francisco encompasses a land area of about 46.9 square miles (121 km2) on the northern end of the San Francisco Peninsula, which makes it the smallest county in the state. It has a density of about 18,451 people per square mile (7,124 people per km2), making it the most densely settled large city (population greater than 200,000) in the state of California and the second-most densely populated major city in the United States after New York City. San Francisco is the fourth-most populous city in California, after Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Jose, and the 13th-most populous city in the United States—with a Census-estimated 2015 population of 864,816. The city and its surrounding areas are known as the San Francisco Bay Area, and are a part of the larger OMB-designated San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland combined statistical area, the fifth most populous in the nation with an estimated population of 8.7 million.
San Francisco (Spanish for Saint Francis) was founded on June 29, 1776, when colonists from Spain established Presidio of San Francisco at the Golden Gate and Mission San Francisco de Asís named for St. Francis of Assisi a few miles away. The California Gold Rush of 1849 brought rapid growth, making it the largest city on the West Coast at the time. San Francisco became a consolidated city-county in 1856. After three-quarters of the city was destroyed by the 1906 earthquake and fire, San Francisco was quickly rebuilt, hosting the Panama-Pacific International Exposition nine years later. In World War II, San Francisco was the port of embarkation for service members shipping out to the Pacific Theater. After the war, the confluence of returning servicemen, massive immigration, liberalizing attitudes, along with the rise of the "hippie" counterculture, the Sexual Revolution, the Peace Movement growing from opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War, and other factors led to the Summer of Love and the gay rights movement, cementing San Francisco as a center of liberal activism in the United States. Politically, the city votes strongly along liberal Democratic Party lines.
A popular tourist destination,San Francisco is known for its cool summers, fog, steep rolling hills, eclectic mix of architecture, and landmarks, including the Golden Gate Bridge, cable cars, the former Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary, Fisherman's Wharf, and its Chinatown district. San Francisco is also the headquarters of five major banking institutions and various other companies such as Levi Strauss & Co., Gap Inc., Salesforce.com, Dropbox, Reddit, Square, Inc., Dolby, Airbnb, Weebly, Pacific Gas and Electric Company, Yelp, Pinterest, Twitter, Uber, Lyft, Mozilla, Wikimedia Foundation, and Craigslist. It has several nicknames, including "The City by the Bay", "Fog City", "San Fran", and "Frisco", as well as older ones like "The City that Knows How", "Baghdad by the Bay", "The Paris of the West", or simply "The City".As of 2015, San Francisco was ranked high on world livability rankings.
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