Last month, we wrote about the strange and terrible spectacle of Mayor London Breed, a mere 2,232 days into her term, pivoting into “reform.”
Well, it’s a new month, and Breed has now been in office for 2,252 days. And, lo, last week she announced more “reform”: She did so via both pending legislation and an executive directive to address the veritable conga line of San Francisco nonprofit heads who’ve misspent city funds or have been out-and-out busted for alleged criminal wrongdoing … in those last 2,252 days. They join a platoon of city department heads and higher-ups who’ve also been drummed out of public life for corruption or busted by federal agents in an ongoing scourge of the city — also, yes, in those last 2,252 days.
The notion of a veteran incumbent discovering “reeee-form” years into office and in the 11th hour of a tough reelection campaign is, on its face, hilarious. It was, as we noted before, the subject of a laugh line in the 2000 Coen Brothers film “O Brother, Where Art Thou.”
Sadly, there was no sequel to “O Brother” (though there was a musical tour and a documentary of that). But Mayor Breed has seen fit to offer a sequel to last month’s foray into reeee-form. And this one reminds us of a different comedic analogy, one that involves more culpability for the person in charge.
Young people, we are told, enjoy the program “I Think You Should Leave,” with the comedian Tim Robinson. The show’s best-known sketch depicts the immediate aftermath of a Volkswagen Beetle resembling a giant hot dog crashing through the front window of a store. Panic and chaos ensue. And, in the midst of the melee, Robinson, dressed in a head-to-toe hot dog costume, exclaims “We’re all trying to find the guy who did this!”
So, that’s what Breed’s latest attempt at reeee-form feels like. To an extent, that’s what the last 2,252 days have felt like.
Being blamed for things is part of the job description of a mayor. But that doesn’t mean it’s always fair or smart.
To wit, can we reasonably blame Breed for the recent Union Square shooting of 49er Ricky Pearsall? In that case, a 17-year-old from far out of town decided to (allegedly) undertake an armed robbery in broad daylight in a part of the city that, even with recent reductions in police presence, is still far and away the most policed part of San Francisco. After gunshots rang out, officers who were only yards away ran to the scene almost immediately. The alleged shooter’s mindset will be revealed in the forthcoming legal battle, but he purportedly didn’t even think to wear closed-toed shoes, and was forced to run off barefoot.
No, this does not seem something that one could reasonably lay at the feet of the city’s chief executive. But that’s not the case with the plethora of city nonprofits that have been popped for inappropriate spending or even alleged criminality.
The mess that appears ready to boil over for Breed is the state of the Dreamkeeper Initiative. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, the mayor proposed that scores of millions of dollars be siphoned from the police and reallocated to San Francisco’s Black community. In truth, however, most of the money came from the city’s general fund, and the law-enforcement reallocation emanated not just from the police but also from the sheriff’s office, the DA, and juvenile probation. And all of them were subsequently backfilled from the general fund. This was, in part, the brainchild of Mayor Breed, and a move she touted as “a historic investment in the African American community.”
If the mayor is going to implement the rapid reallocation of serious amounts public money to nonprofits, it would behoove her to, at the very least, ensure that there were adequate safeguards, at the onset, on how this money was to be spent. But that doesn’t appear to be what happened. There has been a growing drumbeat of stories about Dreamkeeper money being spent on booze and cigars, or programs using San Francisco dollars for work in other cities.
Last week, Sheryl Davis, the head of the city’s Human Rights Commission and the overseer of the Dreamkeeper Initiative, abruptly called for the city controller to audit the program. In July, an extensive whistleblower complaint was leveled against Davis, alleging she freely spent the city’s funds on confabs and travel (including an event in Martha’s Vineyard). That complaint, too, is now in the hands of the city controller.
They’re all trying to find the guy who did this.
You don’t need to be a public finance professional to notice that nearly everything in Breed’s eight-point executive directive refers to an existing city rule. But we talked to a handful of them, and they all did.
Point number one, for God’s sake, is “Compliance with Controller’s Standards.” As in: Follow the existing rules. This is a bit like the cops coming out with a major directive: Don’t do crime.
Point number two calls for grant recipients to be given “written instructions” about the city’s expectations, and to comply with the controller’s standards. Point three says that, when making advance payments, you must — wait for it — follow the existing procedures. Another point calls for record retention, but we already have requirements to do that. There’s also a provision about having to enter those records into the system that exists for the purpose of entering records into it. In short: This ain’t exactly the Magna Carta.
Mayoral executive directives are not legally binding. But they can compel departments to work together to devise new ways of doing new things. But there is very little value in creating an executive directive that simply recapitulates the existing rules and states that these should be followed. Unless, of course, the value of writing the executive directive was to be able to say you wrote one.
The problem with San Francisco procurement and contracting, however, isn’t that there aren’t enough rules. The controller’s guide to accounting policies and procedures clocks in at a George R.R. Martin-like 958 pages; the table of contents alone stretches onto page 14.
“There are two reasons why corruption happens in contracting,” explains a frustrated longtime government hand. “One is: The rules are so convoluted that people don’t understand them. And, two, people try to work around them to get shit done.”
The mayor’s efforts here were not perceived as significant, serious or beneficial. Quite the opposite, in fact: “Adding more layers of bureaucracy to a process already mired in bureaucracy forces people to work around the bureaucracy. And that is what creates the corruption.”
The backing legislation for this “good government reform” effort will be introduced on Sept. 10. Perhaps it will be more substantive than the executive directive. It’s hard to imagine that won’t be the case. But the mayor’s sneak preview last week does not bode well.
The legislation says it will come down on recipients of city money who do not engage in the “competitive solicitation processes.” Sounds great! But wait, that was the mayor herself pushing to award residential service provider Positive Resource Center/Baker Place up to $800,000 “without engaging in the competitive solicitation process.”
The legislation will also, ostensibly, prevent contractors who receive city money from using that money to litigate against the city. Sounds great! But wait, the city has no way of knowing if the money a contractor is using to fund a lawsuit stems from the city or from its other sources of funding.
Contractors using city money to sue the city really isn’t a thing. Perhaps the city could focus on contractors using city money to pay for gift boxes and lavish events. That is a thing.
Once more, with feeling: You cannot legislate a solution to a problem that is fundamentally a management problem. It requires good management.
Maybe, one of these days, we’ll find the guy who did this.
Yes, you are free to post a comment but only if it neatly conforms to either one side or the other of our accepted political narrative binary. Complexity, nuance, actual observations of actual events happening in our city, state, and world, will be filtered out in the interest of “democracy.”
It’s on the ballot.
Who watches the watchers? Why, London Breed of course!
It’s turtle$ on down. You get the government you deserve.
Joe and H.R. particularly,
I was discussing this with Marc Salomon yesterday and told him that the mismanaged Non-Profits of SF’s Neo – somethingorother may have come directly from Willie Brown and the last iteration of a BOS elected on a City-Wide basis.
I can recall their having to add an extra bench outside Barbara Kauffman’s office and every seat filled with a thousand dollar suit when that was a nice suit.
They were there to help her butcher the Charter of the City and Country of San Francisco and I remember Mark Leno (real gentleman that one – but he also invented ‘Off-site Inclusionary Housing’) marveling at a Rules Committee session about how amazing it was how many changes Supervisor Kauffman was able to make in how the City was going to spend Its money til … til … ??
til Now because when Will fired the City laundry workers at SFGH and Laguna Honda he said that they reminded him of his old mother.
Of course, the Vendor who got the work was very grateful to Willie.
Much of the work, what was the phrase you heard hundreds of times …
“can be as well and more cheaply done by … ”
much of that work went to what are Today’s Non-Profits whose Boards all have their Letters of Resignation on file with whatever Moderate mayor is in office unlike the City employees they replaced.
Kauffman was working so fast because the Ammiano sponsored District Elections was about to sweep in with a bunch of Union Loving Commies like 28 year old Chris Daly.
On Arriba Juntos, a funny anecdote.
My dog and I pickup up trash on a route that includes circling the Armory and the closest I can get to the South Side of the place is the Arriba Juntos parking lot.
I got their manager or whatever pissed one morning because I asked a guy who was hosing the first couple of parking spaces closest to the Mission Street end of the lot and the building’s front door if I could borrow their hose to clean the huge daily scattering of feces piles and rivers of urine deposited in the alcove where their building met the Armory.
He gave me some attitude about it not being on their property and was therefore not their concern as was also the case with the huge gutter filling daily piles of food wrappings and empty beverage containers all of which Skippy and I had been picking up for free.
I mean, it is, after all his clients who were depositing their offal since Mayor Breed had the Public Toilet that used to be there around to the 14th Street side of the Armory where it is virtually unused.
Know what the guy from the Job Training Site does ?
He puts a guard at each end of the Parking Lot to keep me out !!
Sad, cause I so wanted to completely circle the Armory with our daily trash trot inside of an hour when Manny used to give me 3 or 4 people to go with me on Sundays just to make a dent in the garbage that was regularly dumped around the scaffolding that Breed’s Planning finally got removed just a few months ago.
Go Niners !!
h.
Joe,
Reading your work is a bit like trying to read “On The Road” without the benefit of being as drunk as Kerouac was when he wrote it.
Hey champ —
Go get a drink.
JE