Candidate for
Mayor; City of San Francisco

For nearly 30 years, Tom Ammiano has been a trailblazer in San Francisco's public life -- a champion of working families and neighborhoods, a pioneering advocate for the rights of gays and lesbians, and a courageously independent political leader.

Ammiano grew up in a working-class Italian neighborhood in Montclair, New Jersey, the son of a cabdriver and a cafeteria worker. He moved to San Francisco in the late 1960s and worked with disabled children at the Recreational Center for the Handicapped. After earning a masters' degree in special education and teaching English in South Vietnam, he returned to San Francisco and worked in the city's public schools teaching children with learning disabilities.

In 1975, he cofounded the Gay Teachers Caucus to push the school district to include sexual orientation in its nondiscrimination policy. When he came out on the front page of the San Francisco Examiner, he became the city's first openly gay teacher and focused attention on the struggles of gay and lesbian teachers.

Ammiano's activism made him a leading light in the city's gay rights movement in the 1980s -- and helped him win election to the Board of Education in 1990. Four years later, he won a seat on the Board of Supervisors, where he has served ever since. In 1998 he was the top vote-getter citywide, earning a seat as board president.

In 1999, an extraordinary grassroots campaign drafted Ammiano into the mayor's race. Nearly 50,000 people wrote his name on their ballots, catapulting him into a runoff with incumbent Willie Brown and setting the stage for the overthrow of the Brown Machine in the following year's supervisorial elections. In January 2000, Ammiano's colleagues on the board unanimously voted to keep him in the president's seat.

As an activist, school board member, and supervisor, his accomplishments include:

• Helping lead the campaign to return to district elections for supervisors;
• Leading the effort to expand the Moscone convention center and attract more conventions to the city, an effort which will yield a direct financial return for the city in the millions.
• Fighting to establish the Children's Fund in San Francisco that now provides over $20 annually for education programs.
• Drafting the city's pioneering domestic-partner benefits law for gay and straight couples
• Helping lead the effort to establish the Education Facilities Fund that is providing $140 million to build new classrooms in San Francisco.