How San Francisco's City Hall Spent Years Paying for the Same Photo Twice

San Francisco's Department of Technology paid licensing fees on at least several hundred stock images that city agencies had already purchased through separate contracts, according to internal procurement records reviewed this year. The overlap, spread across departments ranging from the Municipal Transportation Agency to the Department of Public Health, went largely undetected for the better part of a decade because the city had no centralized digital asset registry.

The story matters now because the city's budget office is mid-way through a sweeping contract consolidation effort tied to the Fiscal Year 2026–27 spending plan, which Mayor Daniel Lurie signed off on in June. Procurement reform is no longer theoretical; department heads have been told redundant vendor agreements are the first line item to cut. Duplicate image licensing, once dismissed as minor administrative noise, is now the clearest visible example of how fragmented city purchasing quietly drains public money.

A Problem Built One Purchase Order at a Time

The duplication problem dates to at least 2017, when the city's 311 Customer Service Center on Van Ness Avenue and the Office of Economic and Workforce Development on Mission Street each signed separate subscription agreements with major stock image providers. Both offices were producing public-facing materials — 311 for its multilingual service guides, OEWD for small-business outreach campaigns in the Tenderloin and SoMa corridors. Neither office knew what the other had licensed.

That pattern repeated itself across City Hall. The San Francisco Public Library system, which runs 28 branches from the Main Library on Larkin Street to the Excelsior branch on Geneva Avenue, maintained its own image subscription for digital programming. So did SF Environment, the department that oversees the city's climate action programs out of its Cosme offices on Sansome Street. No single office tracked what all the others held.

The city's Controller's Office flagged the structural gap in a 2024 internal review, noting that enterprise software licenses and digital media subscriptions were the two categories most prone to undetected redundancy. The review did not assign a total dollar figure to duplicate image costs across all departments, but identified the problem as systemic rather than isolated.

What the Tech Boom Left Behind

San Francisco's particular vulnerability to this kind of procurement sprawl is partly a function of geography and timing. The tech-sector hiring wave that crested around 2019 and 2021 flooded city agencies with staff who were used to moving fast and buying tools independently — a culture imported from private-sector offices in SoMa and Mission Bay that had none of the city's vendor approval requirements. When layoffs hit the private sector starting in 2022 and 2023, some of that personnel moved into public-sector roles, but the purchasing habits had already embedded themselves in city workflows.

The Muni communications team, for example, operates under the SFMTA umbrella but has historically sourced its own visual assets for rider-facing signage and digital displays at stations like Powell Street and Embarcadero. Separately, BART — a regional agency that coordinates with the city but operates independently — has its own licensing stack. The two systems share physical infrastructure at multiple stops, but their procurement databases have never been linked.

A consolidated city image licensing agreement, if structured under a single master contract, could theoretically cover dozens of departments for a flat annual fee competitive with what private firms the size of Salesforce or Stripe pay for comparable enterprise-tier plans. The city's procurement office has not yet released a formal RFP for such a contract, but sources familiar with the budget process say one is expected in the third quarter of 2026.

For residents watching the city's finances, the practical consequence is straightforward: every dollar spent on a photo the city already owns is a dollar not spent on Muni service hours, branch library hours at places like the Chinatown branch on Waverly Place, or the housing production programs the mayor has flagged as his first-term priority. The audit trail is there. The question now is whether the city's procurement office can act on it before the next round of subscription renewals hits in early 2027.