Dennis Herrera to retire after 25 years at San Francisco City Hall
Dennis Herrera will leave City Hall in December after shaping San Francisco’s same-sex marriage fight, sanctuary-city litigation and the city’s water and power utility.
Dennis Herrera is set to leave San Francisco government in December, closing out about 25 years at City Hall and ending one of the city’s most influential runs through law, politics and public works. He spent almost 20 years as city attorney before Mayor London Breed nominated him in 2021 to run the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, and he said retirement felt like the right time to start a new chapter in life.
Herrera’s most visible legacy came in the marriage-equality fight that began in 2004, when then-Mayor Gavin Newsom issued same-sex marriage licenses in defiance of state law. Herrera defended the city, then filed suit arguing California’s marriage laws violated the state constitution. That case reached the California Supreme Court, whose 2008 ruling legalized same-sex marriage in California, only for voters to pass Proposition 8 months later and ban it again. Herrera’s office fought that measure through the United States Supreme Court, which helped clear the way for marriage equality nationwide in 2013. San Francisco said it was the first government to bring a challenge against marriage laws that discriminated against same-sex couples, and the city kept issuing licenses for a month in 2004, during which 4,000 same-sex couples married in San Francisco.
His office later took on a different set of fights under President Donald Trump, suing over efforts to withhold federal funding from sanctuary cities, rules that would have discouraged immigrant families from seeking food, housing and health care help, and conscience regulations that would have allowed doctors to refuse care, including abortion-related treatment. Those cases put Herrera at the center of disputes over immigration, civil rights and access to services that still shape how San Francisco governs itself.
At the Public Utilities Commission, Herrera inherited a troubled agency after Harlan Kelly stepped down amid federal bribery charges. The utility supplies retail drinking water, wastewater and power to San Francisco and wholesale water to three other Bay Area counties, giving the general manager direct influence over what residents pay and whether the city can keep its systems working as climate risks grow. The agency says Herrera represented it before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, brought litigation to protect the city’s combined sewer and stormwater system from sea-level rise, helped defeat an effort to drain Hetch Hetchy Reservoir and worked on PG&E-related litigation.
Herrera will be 64 when he steps down, with pensionable income around $472,000. David Chiu now leads the city attorney’s office he once ran, and Herrera’s departure will leave both the legal and utility sides of City Hall facing the same unresolved pressures: housing, immigration, climate resilience, infrastructure and the city’s control over essential services.
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