Not for the first time, San Francisco governance has borrowed a line from the 1978 film “Animal House” — and no, it’s not “Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son.”
Rather, it’s “You fucked up! You trusted us!”
This is the strange and terrible conclusion one is left with after watching the Ethics Commission’s April 4 list of 479 city employees who were delinquent filers of the mandatory Statement of Economic Interests dwindle to just 158 by last week. It turned out that hundreds of so-called delinquents, largely from the Municipal Transportation Agency, Department of Public Health and San Francisco Unified School District, had actually simply left their city jobs.
Or, in at least one case, died.
But it gets worse: Mission Local’s Kelly Waldron wrote a script that cross-checked the 158 remaining names with a list, provided by the Department of Human Resources, of every person currently employed by the city. And it turned out that only around 30 of the so-called 158 delinquents show up as presently being on the city’s payroll.
Mission Local ran a story earlier this month essentially noting the existence of the Ethics Commission’s list and linking to its contents. And this induced much acrimony from the city departments whose hundreds of retired former employees were listed as ethical delinquents on a list compiled and published by a fellow branch of San Francisco government and published on a San Francisco government website.
One department spokesperson actually bemoaned that the Ethics Commission’s list was taken at “face value.” The Ethics Commission, we may remind you, is not a Nigerian prince asking for your routing number, nor one of those PR outfits that sends out emails about how San Francisco is the ninth-worst city in North America for stepping on chewing gum. It’s the department tasked with investigating and enforcing campaign-finance rules, and mediating ethical and conflict-of-interest situations involving the city’s many employees and commissioners.
And the acrimony appears to be at least partially misdirected: The Ethics Commission confirms that its list of delinquent filers is derived from the city’s NetFile system, “and departments are responsible for maintaining who is listed as a filer for their department within that system.”
For those of you keeping score at home, city departments are irate about coverage of erroneous information lifted directly from their own databases. In other words: You fucked up! You trusted us!
Of the 158 SF employees listed as delinquent filers, only around 30 show up as being SF employees
The vast majority are not on the payroll.
List of filers from the San Francisco Ethics Commission as of April 26, 2024. Payroll data from the Department of Human Resources.
Sarah Bernstein Jones was one of the scores of erstwhile MTA employees who was surprised to see herself on the delinquent list. Do you like car-free JFK Drive? Thank Jones, SFMTA’s former planning director. Jones left the SFMTA in November 2021 and is now working for Marin County; she had worked for the city since January 2006.
A planner by training, Jones has an idea: Rather than simply posting a list of ostensible delinquents on a website, embarrassing people who’ve done nothing wrong and then working out accuracy issues post-facto, why doesn’t Ethics ask the departments to obtain the necessary forms from their own lists of delinquent filers? This would put the onus back on the departments, and avoid the problematic situation of a public list of so-called delinquents being mostly folks who simply left city government (or died).
But that’s not what happens. Rather, Ethics just posts the list so anyone can read it, and then cleans up the mistakes. “We have found posting this list to be a valuable tool for identifying incorrect data,” writes a department spokesperson, “which we then work with departments to help clean up.”
Jones, for one, was not pleased to see herself on that list. There is a matter of potential reputational damage here. “What are they doing posting this, if they’re working with lists that are completely inaccurate?” she asks. It makes little sense to her to publish names like hers and then work out if they should have been published.
“It’s completely by chance I found my name,” she says. “It’s only because your article was published.”
But this appears to be how the city thinks the system should work. It warrants mentioning that in the movie “Animal House,” the dialog following “You fucked up! You trusted us!” is “Make the best of it.”
In San Francisco, this seems to be city policy.
Unlike Jones, Randy Collins wouldn’t be surprised to find his name on the delinquent filers list. The structural engineer knows he failed to file on time. He missed numerous email warnings and, not until he received a phone call did he turn in the requisite form. He was hundreds of days late.
What surprised Collins was to subsequently receive a stipulation from Ethics demanding an $1,800 fine — with the caveat that failure to submit to this demand would result in an investigation, and potentially far higher fines. Collins did reject the stipulation, which he likened to a mafia shakedown. Colleagues have since informed him that Ethics has been making calls to San Francisco International Airport, where his firm has contracts, and asking questions.
Collins faces far more dire possibilities than Jones and others erroneously included on these lists. He could be dinged for many thousands of dollars worth of fines and, likely even worse, face the career-hampering problem of being forced to admit that he has committed ethical violations.
The issue here, however — and the reason he’s digging in, as a matter of principle — is that he is a volunteer on a commission within the Department of Building Inspection called the Board of Examiners. And this body last met in February 2018.
Collins admits that he was delinquent in filling out forms meant to ferret out conflicts of interest — but there can’t be conflicts of interest when you’re serving on a body that hasn’t met in 75 months. He also admits that he missed the mandatory sexual harassment training — but, again, there has been no opportunity to say hello to a colleague, let alone harass them, since since early 2018.
“Dude, I’m a structural engineer. I am not Mohammed Nuru saying ‘You want to go to China on a two-week trip?’” says Collins. “If it’s a matter of saying I didn’t fill out the paperwork, fine. But an ethics violation? That’s something like taking money. Or peddling influence to get a contract. That’s an ethics violation. My whole career is about my integrity. My whole life is about my integrity.”
Collins’ plight is yet another example of a longstanding knock on the Ethics Commission: That it focuses with a monomaniacal fervor on technical violations by small-time operators while San Francisco is inundated with big-time corruption and flooded with money from a consortium of oligarchs.
“When I was on the commission, they were going after these small committees with volunteer treasurers,” recalls Paul Melbostad, who served on the Ethics Commission from 1995 to 2003. “These people had no chance of corrupting City Hall.”
When told of Collins’ situation, Bob Dockendorff, an Ethics Commissioner from 1996 to 2000, said “it sounds like a total waste of time and money to go after him.”
Mission Local dialed up more than half a dozen former Ethics Commissioners. None of them thought it made ethical or economic sense to conduct a long-running investigation into a volunteer who serves on a commission that does not meet.
Rather, in such situations, people like Collins should simply be dropped off the government body — save the time, save the money. The rules, as now written, don’t allow for this. They should be changed.
And then? Make the best of it.
I’m a progressive and want to support progressive policies but every time I read the daily dysfunction and incompetence at city hall (both moderate and progressive “sides”) I wonder how can we expect the citizens of SF to vote for these policies and trust the folks running our local gov’t to effectively deploy our tax dollars?
At this point I’d rather see the gov’t hand cash directly to those in need. Would probably be more effective/efficient.
Great piece, except for the gratuitous slap in the face to your fat readers in the first paragraph. Since that’s not the tenet that SF governance has adopted, why quote it at all? Some of us “go through life” fat, and that shouldn’t be painted as reprehensible, even in an off-hand reference.
This City and County has been employing people, their cousins, their side people forever. I always laugh when people say Chicago is corrupt as they haven’t seen anything. I am qualified and was thinking of applying for a job at the port but I passed. I can’t deal with glad handing at all.
Randy Collins shouldn’t get a pass here – meetings or no, he gets an opportunity to further is professional standing in his industry, e.g. in pursuit of a P.E. license.
As someone who was responsible for collecting and submitting these documents for a City department (filing officer) I was surprised by this. Covered employees have to submit an assuming office Form 700 upon hire, an annual report, and a leaving office report upon separation from the City. Departments also have to submit an updated list of covered employees to Ethics months before the annual reports are due. Also covered employees subject to the filing requirements are identified by job classification in an annual ordinance. No excuse for Ethics to misidentify the number failing to file by over 300 individuals.
Let’s hope those unemployed individuals are not still un payroll. Has anyone checked to find out?
“We have found posting this list to be a valuable tool for identifying incorrect data,” writes a department spokesperson. Wow: Because their defamation is of people without the resources, power or influence to be a threat to them, the department employees don’t feel any consequences.
Campers,
At one point Sunshine Ordinance Task Force had sent over 200 validated complaints to the Ethics Commission without Ethics accepting a single one.
Big money controls Ethics and they hate SOTF because it was Bruce Brugmann’s baby and still is.
Shout out to big Bruce and Hope Johnson, SOTF’s winner of Alex Clemens Ad Agency’s ‘Best Political Mind of Year’ and President of that group as was Brugmann.
In 2003 Ethics looked at that Year’s Mayoral Campaign in which the Newsom Forces and their combined PACs spent upwards of 10 Million Dollars to Matt Gonzalez’s dollar at a time and change (I watched them count it on a big table nights and it DID include donated change) …
Matt raised less than a Million.
Who did Ethics investigate ?
Matt, of course.
Old h. brown’s Jazz Club in St. Louis customer in the mid-70’s as an undergrad in the Mid-70’s, Randy Knox was Campaign Treasurer on paper but hottest blonde in town, Michelle Mongan did the books and Ethics fined them like a dime or something.
When I questioned Ethics boss, ‘Leroy’, I think …
when I asked him why he didn’t investigate the Newsom Campaign he said …
“Well, you gotta stop somewhere.”
And, ‘No’, I know what you’re thinking and I couldn’t find any connection to Jim Jones.
Go Niners !!
h.