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"More than 19,000 of their so called employees receive $150,000 or more in their W4 each year."

Using your numbers just give the 19K City Employees making 150K a 13% "Emergency Payroll Deduction". At a minimum they'd save $370.5 Million a year and a bit more for those clearing $200K each.

Open payrolls lists these stats:

City and County of San Francisco, California Employee Salaries

The average employee salary for City and County of San Francisco, California in 2021 was $99,674. This is 48.6 percent higher than the national average for government employees and 48.4 percent higher than other counties. There are 97,471 employee records for City and County of San Francisco, California.

My math says that's a $9.7 Billion annual pay roll so a 10% cut across the the board would free up $971 Million annually. Since they seem to be very well paid they'd probably survive.

Worse case they could get a second job offering street-side maid services for the homeless.

From the article its hard to tell if "$728 million budget deficit, predicted for the next two fiscal years." is $364M/year or $728M/year either way with the 10% Across the board pay cut , to be more equitable of course - problem solved.

Think I'll just send the mayor my consulting bill. See what happens. ;-)

There are 97,471 employee records for City and County of San Francisco, California.

This is a misleading number. All city departments have a number of unfilled positions. The department heads and managers play a game where they request new positions for their groups, and leave them unfilled. There are cyclic boom and bust periods in the city. The mayor (whoever it is at the time) puts out a request to department heads to cut people in order to "balance the budget", usually 5 percent of staff. Department heads cut many of these unfilled positions. Mayor can then proclaim to the press that they cut staff. Then the managers begin work on requesting new positions. Result - numbers of employees grows and grows despite the workload not growing. Almost 3 times the number of employees as there were several decades ago.