(Originally published by San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu on June 5, 2025.)

(Partnership with Stanford RegLab results in legislation streamlining San Francisco’s numerous reporting requirements 

• San Francisco’s Municipal Codes and Resolutions run nearly 16 million words, making systematic reform daunting.
• San Francisco partnered with Stanford RegLab to use an AI tool to analyze statutes and identify provisions for potential reform.
• The tool identified all reports mandated in the Municipal Codes, and the City Attorney’s Office then consulted with City departments to determine which reports were obsolete, duplicative, or unnecessary.
• Based on this process, City Attorney Chiu introduced an ordinance to propose deleting or consolidating 174 costly public reports, representing 36% of amendable reporting requirements and enabling city staff to focus on what matters most, during an era of budget deficits.
• The AI tool and consultative process illustrates a replicable playbook for how to leverage technology responsibly to modernize code and regulations.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA (June 5, 2025) – San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu and Stanford RegLab today announced the introduction of legislation that will delete obsolete or unnecessary public reporting requirements. Eliminating these time consuming requirements will enable City staff to prioritize current pressing policy issues and to focus on delivering high quality services to San Franciscans.

“This collaboration is a great example of how governments can use AI to make impactful change,” said City Attorney David Chiu. “RegLab’s tool saved us countless hours of work. With the data it produced, we worked with City departments to analyze which reporting requirements were out of date, duplicative or unnecessary. Deleting obsolete requirements will free up staff time to focus on core service delivery, particularly during challenging budget times. We are grateful to Stanford RegLab for their ongoing partnership, and hope this project serves as a model for other governments.”

“We have asked civil servants to do more with less,” said Professor Daniel Ho, Director of the RegLab and Professor at Stanford. “And this approach enables them to focus more on what matters most. The partnership demonstrates a repeatable playbook for how to leverage rapid advances in AI to identify obsolete requirements, to cut down on procedural bloat, and modernize code and regulation.”

“For too long, City Hall has been weighed down by outdated and unnecessary code, slowing its ability to serve residents effectively,” said San Francisco Supervisor Bilal Mahmood. “This legislation will cut through that clutter, freeing up staff time so departments can focus on what matters most—serving San Franciscans. I commend City Attorney Chiu and his office for using technology as a force for good and leading thoughtful, collaborative conversations with departments to better support city workers.”

San Francisco’s Municipal Code, along with Resolutions by the Board of Supervisors, contains nearly 16 million words. In recent years, both City leaders and voters have made efforts to streamline the way City government functions. But systematically and routinely culling local codes for outdated provisions is challenging, time-consuming, and resource-intensive. The City Attorney’s Office partnered with Stanford RegLab to demonstrate how technology can assist and improve the efficiency of these important efforts. RegLab developed an AI tool, the Statutory Analysis Research Assistant (STARA), to enable large language models (LLMs) to conduct systematic statutory research.

To date, this partnership has focused on two areas of statutory reform. The first concentrated on enumerating all commissions and bodies listed in San Francisco’s local codes to assist the City in implementing Proposition E passed by San Francisco voters in November 2024. Proposition E required the formation of a Commission Streamlining Task Force with a mandate to make recommendations on ways to modify, eliminate, or combine City bodies and commissions to improve the administration of City government. This partnership and use of STARA helped cut down on the manual extensive legal research required to assist in developing a complete list of all the bodies subject to the work of the Commission Streamlining Task Force.

The second effort focused on identifying all instances where local laws require City Departments to create written reports. While these reports can be important to the public and policy makers, if not regularly reviewed for their effectiveness and ongoing utility, they can become burdensome to City staff and take resources away from staff’s ability to prioritize more pressing needs. At the federal level, the explosion of mandated reports has been described as a congressional “black hole,” with reports that can consume months of staff time, and only a subset actually informing policy, legislators, or the public.

STARA identified 528 such reports strewn across City codes. These reporting obligations are spread across many City Departments, but are concentrated in the Controller’s Office, the Office of the City Administrator, the Planning Department, the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development, and the Administrative Code. Reporting requirements have also accumulated significantly over time. In 2000, there were roughly 177 reporting requirements; by 2025, the number had more than doubled. The following figure shows the steep increase over time.

Using the list sourced by STARA, the City Attorney’s Office worked collaboratively with City Departments to identify amendable reporting requirements that are no longer done in practice, can be consolidated with another City Department reporting function such as submission of their budget or annual report, or are no longer serving a useful policy function or purpose. As a result of this work, City Attorney Chiu introduced an ordinance to delete or modify 36% of reporting requirements that could be changed. (488 of the 528 were amendable, as they were not in the City Charter, associated with a voter approved measure, recently removed, or already pending revision.)

140 reporting requirements (29%) are proposed for deletion for being obsolete, redundant, or superseded. For example, the Director of Public Works is required to produce a biennial report on “Fixed Pedestal Zones” for newspaper racks, but such newspaper racks have long fallen into disuse and all have been removed by the City as of this year. Additionally, the Administrative Code contains a more than 80-year-old provision requiring quarterly reports from the Redevelopment Agency, which already has more recently enacted state and local reporting obligations.

34 reporting requirements (7%) are proposed for modification to reduce the frequency to match with workload, consolidate multiple related reports, or align with other reporting processes City Departments already engage in.

The STARA AI system helped accelerate this code modernization and streamlining, but the overall consultative process also ensured that important requirements stayed in place. 64% of amendable reporting requirements are left untouched, as these reports are tied to important departmental functions such as financial spending and administration of General Obligation Bond funds, serve an ongoing policy purpose, were recently enacted, or already contain sunset dates.

The legislation introduced will next be considered by the City’s Board of Supervisors in the coming months.