Profiles in Power highlights public officials nationwide who are improving their communities through their dedication, enthusiasm, creativity and experience.
This week’s profile is Florence Simon, director of the Mayor’s Office of Innovation for the city and county of San Francisco.
My public career highlights and education:
I supported former U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg when he was running for president in 2020 on drafting his infrastructure policy and his policy for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. Additionally, there I helped to lead the implementation of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, working very closely with the White House, the U.S. Department of Transportation, state and local stakeholders, and other agencies to design and integrate emerging policy.
What I like best about public service:
I enjoy the opportunity to have an impact and to be working in a community of people who really care and who often present ideas about how to make government work and how to drive impact. As a political appointee, I’d really like to focus government mechanisms on how do we drive impact, how we do it, how do we do it faster and how do we do it for more people?
The best advice I’ve ever received:
“Context, context, context!” In a large government bureaucracy, your perspective will always be very different from everybody’s around you because everyone gets different sets of information at different times. Whether that’s the USDOT Secretary or the mayor, they all have very different perspectives. So being able to translate that work and try to get everyone on the same page is extremely important.
Current project or initiative I’m working on:
Many cities in America struggle with permitting and constructing housing and infrastructure, especially in a timely manner. In San Francisco, nine different departments utilize dozens of different technology systems resulting in things getting lost, lack of transferability and lack of visibility for how long processes should take. So, we are working on launching a centralized permitting technology within all of San Francisco, allowing for all departments to work together quickly and efficiently.
Number two would be some initiatives we are working on to help homeless individuals. We are evaluating pathways to increase access to people, improving data and technology and assisting first responders to effectively interact with homeless people. We are also discovering what types of technologies can help us figure out how we can make better investments and better decisions on homelessness.
Another major initiative we are figuring out is strengthening San Francisco’s police force as we have a gap of about 500 officers. My team has been working with the police department to find solutions that speed up background checks and hiring processes while attracting new talent pipelines to the police force.
One thing people may not know about me:
I love history, especially reading about Roman and Chinese dynasty history. Those histories share some similarities about leadership, good leaders, bad leaders, leaders who really screwed up and leaders who did a really good job. So, I think about my work in relation to these stories because the decisions that you make individually can have big and far-reaching consequences, and sometimes, it takes a lot of time to realize those. I think Leo Tolstoy talks about this interestingly in “War and Peace” — that with the decisions you make now, it’s hard to understand what the broader scope of those is.
