Mayor’s multimillion-dollar bond now includes City Clinic

San Francisco Mayor London Breed’s proposed $360 million bond for improvements and various projects across The City now includes additional funding for a key public-health institution.

The San Francisco Department of Public Health’s City Clinic — San Francisco’s leading testing and treatment facility for sexually transmitted infections — was not included in Breed’s initial announcement , but it now stands to benefit from the additional $30 million that the city controller said in a memo obtained by The Examiner that the bond can include but did not initially.

Of the additional funds, $28 million would go to the century-old clinic to relocate from its current leased space inside a former fire station at 356 Seventh St. — which The City has described as “functionally obsolete ” — to a city-owned facility.

“Then with that, the mayor is able to include City Clinic as a project in the bond,” said Jeff Cretan, a Breed spokesperson, in an interview with The Examiner. “And there’s still a little bit of money leftover.”

Breed initially allotted $167 million of the bond for public-health infrastructure, identifying Zuckerberg San Francisco General, Laguna Honda Hospital and Chinatown Health Clinic as its benificiaries. City Clinic was absent, prompting a Thursday rally seeking to include it.

“All of the sexual health work that City Clinic does is essential,” said Laura Thomas of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation during a rally in support of the clinic on Thursday. “It’s an LGBTQ health necessity in The City everywhere.”

The clinic sees around 85 patients a day for various services, including treatment and testing for STIs like HIV. For many San Franciscans who lived through the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the clinic represented a lifeline.

“It’s an important part of our history,” said Vincent Crisostomo, the director of aging services with the SF AIDS Foundation. “The world has moved on. It’s like we kind of forgot the priorities of who the citizens are and what makes San Francisco what it is — it’s taking care of our people.”

Participants in Thursday’s rally said Breed’s inclusion of City Clinic was a step in the right direction. So did Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin, who is running against Breed in the November mayoral election .

“Growing the pie solves some of the problems the mayor impulsively created,” Peskin told The Examiner. “But it doesn’t solve everything.”

While a large chunk of funding will be going towards San Francisco General Hospital, Peskin said around $16.6 million is still needed for “critical repairs.”

Cretan told The Examiner that the mayor’s office is looking at other revenue streams to make up the gap and that the current amount is enough to cover “the large portion of what we need to do with” the hospital.

The bond will go before The City’s Capital Planning Committee on Monday in an 11:15 a.m. meeting. If approved, at least eight members of the Board of Supervisors would need to vote in favor of sending it to the November ballot.

“Public health infrastructure might not sound like the sexiest of things, but it is so necessary,” Thomas said.