Arntz

The voters of the City and County of San Francisco imposed term limits on their board of supervisors in 1990 by putting this language into the city charter: “No person elected or appointed as a Supervisor may serve as such for more than two successive four-year terms. Any person appointed to the office of Supervisor to complete in excess of two years of a four-year term shall be deemed, for the purpose of this section, to have served one full term.” (S.F. Charter, § 2.101 (section 2.101).) The practice of counting service of less than four years as a full term is known as “rounding up,” and it is central to this dispute.

There have been four elections since 1990 where the voters of San Francisco considered Charter initiatives affecting the composition and election of the board of supervisors, and in none of them was there any hint that term limits would be relaxed. Nevertheless, the San Francisco Superior Court concluded that when an appointed supervisor has served three years of a predecessor’s four-year term — two of them after having stood at the polls and been elected in his or her own right — that period of service is not rounded up and does not count as one of the…