San Francisco’s Office of Reparations was cut out of Mayor London Breed’s latest budget proposal as the city struggles to enact $75 million in cuts.

“I understand the importance of no cuts to existing programs, but the Black community will continue to pursue justice and equity through reparations here in San Francisco,” program supervisor Shamann Walton told the San Francisco Examiner. “My hope is that the city’s deficit is eliminated quickly so that we can fund the Office of Reparations and fulfill the commitment made to address the historical injustices and inequities that have persisted for generations for Black San Franciscans.”

Walton originally asked the city for $50 million in funding for the upcoming fiscal year, which was progressively cut over the following months. He temporarily secured $2 million before Breed pulled the plug on funding for the upcoming three years of operations.

Despite the news, advocates have insisted reparation plans will continue in the background including importing a satellite campus of a historically black college to the Bay Area. “A lot of the work, it’ll be tight, but we’ll leverage some of the funding we had in our budget,” San Francisco human rights commission director Sheryl Davis told the Examiner.

In December 2022, the advisory committee recommended the city pay longtime black residents of the city $5 million, but Walton opined shortly after that the figure should be much larger. “You can Google a lot of the reparations work that has been done and look at the monetary formulas that people have put together, and most certainly, the $5 million is a very minuscule number compared to a lot of research that has been done over the past couple of decades, quite frankly,” Walton, who also represents the city’s tenth district, said at the time.

Pressed if there is a figure that is more fair or appropriate, Walton responded, “Definitely not.” “I don’t think you can put a figure to taking someone from their country, raping and pillaging their communities, not allowing them the chance to reproduce, not allowing them the chance to raise a family and grow wealth, making them work for free,” he said. “I don’t think there’s a number you can put on what that does to a specific ethnic group or a specific race over the generations to come.”

In late February, the Reparations Committee chairman acknowledged the figure had no mathematical basis. “There wasn’t a math formula,” African American Reparations Advisory Committee chairman Eric McDonnell told the Washington Post. “It was a journey for the committee towards what could represent a significant enough investment in families to put them on this path to economic well-being, growth, and vitality that chattel slavery and all the policies that flowed from it destroyed.”