In February 2012 Supervisors David Chiu, Jane Kim, Scott Wiener, Mark Farrell, David Campos, Malia Cohen, and Christina Olague sponsored an ordinance establishing a pilot program to explore a right to civil counsel program in San Francisco. The ordinance passed. Here is the report from the pilot program.
SF Right to Civil Counsel is partially funded through the ordinary city budget process.
Short summary of the Right to Civil Counsel pilot program report:
Rough Conclusion
About $2.12M worth of pro-bono legal services were provided during the study time period, assuming hours provided were worth $250/hr. The report is perhaps implying that this was an approximation of providing a "right to civil counsel," and that if the city in future guaranteed and paid for a similar service level, then it would fulfill the 2012 SF ordinance 45-12 declaration of such a right.
A lot of caveats
That rough conclusion is only suggested by the report. It isn't clear in the report, or possibly in general, what service level constitutes "right to civil counsel." It appears that, already, all eviction notices contain referral information to EDC (Eviction Defense Collaborative, the central clearinghouse), and over 50% of notice recipients contact EDC and get some degree of legally-informed advising (but not necessarily full representation by an attorney).
Basically there's a triage process: in the period the report describes, October 2012 to November 2013, 3,581 eviction notices were served in SF. About half of those defendants contacted EDC. 692 of them received "limited-scope" attorney advisings and 117 received "full-scope" legal representations via the SF Bar Association's JDC program. Since this was done in a pro-bono arrangement, this scope may reflect just the amount of available pro-bono resource available, and not reach what might be considered full provision of adequate counsel.
It's not clear if the contemplated scenario is that SF would begin paying for service at the level provided pro-bono in this study -- vs just ramping up and permanently funding a coordinating mechanism for pro-bono work, such as the one run during the pilot.
It is unclear what portion of total need was met by JDC program, vs was referred to or otherwise served by legal staff of other organizations that also provide such help, such as Causa Justa (report mentions 8-10 other such orgs).
Finally, the level of SF's funding to EDC, JDC, and the pilot is not disclosed in the study, so it isn't clear what would be cost to continue status quo or make permanent the pilot program.
