Should S.F. supervisors be allowed to solicit more funds, as a treat?

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If new legislation from Supervisor Rafael Mandelman passes this winter, San Francisco supervisors may once again have a tool for raising more money: Asking for it.

Mandelman’s ordinance would allow supervisors to ask for “behested payments” — donations from people or organizations that have contracts with the city — if they obtain permission from the other supervisors.

City supervisors say the current rules are overly restrictive and hamper their ability to do their jobs. 

In 2021, for example, Ingleside Presbyterian, a church that provides food and programs for children and elders, needed to renovate its kitchen. One part of that renovation — putting in a flue — required a crane that would have been prohibitively expensive to rent. 

The church is in Supervisor Myrna Melgar’s district, and she happened to know that her neighbor worked for Swinerton, a large construction company that owned multiple cranes. At Melgar’s behest, Swinerton loaned the crane to the church, and the flue was placed. 

But that exchange could be illegal today, if Swinerton had a contract that the Board voted on. Since voters passed Proposition E in 2022, supervisors have been prohibited from soliciting funds from those with city ties for even innocuous-seeming causes, like parks. 

The concern behind Prop. E, and other reforms to behested payments, was corruption.

Mohammed Nuru, the former director of Public Works, often asked companies that had business with his department for donations. For instance, from 2014 to 2019, he had the waste company Recology make donations to an account at a local nonprofit, the Parks Alliance, that Nuru controlled. 

Nuru, who helped to set garbage rates that impact Recology’s bottom line, then used the donations for parties for his staff. 

In addition to Nuru, who is now serving a seven-year sentence for fraud, other city officials have also been implicated in corruption scandals involving behested payments. 

In 2015, then-Supervisor Mark Farrell solicited donations from housing-development firms to the Parks Alliance so schoolyards could be opened to children on the weekends. Shortly after, Farrell worked to carve out one of the developers from a piece of legislation. 

The pattern of people lobbying Farrell and subsequently making donations to the Parks Alliance occurred several more times from 2015 to 2016. (Farrell has said that none of the behested payments came with any strings attached, telling the San Francisco Chronicle that he has “always voted my conscience.”) 

Following these scandals, the Board of Supervisors passed legislation to require that the mayor’s office and city departments obtain a waiver from the Board of Supervisors for such payments. Supervisors, meanwhile, were barred from soliciting behested payments altogether by Prop. E.

“I think that the behested-payment ordinance, the way that it was written and implemented, makes my work less effective and me much less productive as a supervisor,” Melgar said. 

Melgar recently wanted to ask a family in her district for a donation to a memorial for the family killed by a minivan driver near the West Portal Library. But that family leases a building to the city. 

Mandelman’s new ordinance would not roll things back to the way they were before 2022. Instead of just being required to disclose behested payments, supervisors would have to obtain a waiver from their colleagues on the Board. 

Having to publicly ask the other 10 members of the board for permission to solicit a donation will make supervisors accountable, Mandelman’s office said.

“It’s still a public review. It’s still 11 supervisors. It’s still at the board. Any member of the public can comment on it,” Mandelman’s legislative aide, Melanie Matthewson, said. 

But Lee Hepner, a former staffer for ex-Supervisor Aaron Peskin and senior legal counsel at the American Economic Liberties Project, is skeptical that the board will be able to provide accountability for itself. 

“You’re counting on supervisors to hold each other to a high standard when they have so many other issues that are a source of conflict and negotiation,” he said, arguing that the Board’s long agendas could easily lead to waivers flying under the radar. 

“It is mind-boggling that the Board of Supervisors would seek to put corruption back on the table,” added Hepner, who was involved in writing Prop. E. “I find it very troubling that, just five years on, the city is forgetting the lessons we learned from a decade of scandal.”

Because Prop. E was a ballot initiative, changing it will require more support than usual. Mandelman’s legislation will need to be voted in by two-thirds of the board and approved by the Ethics Commission. 

“Staff does not believe this change would severely undermine the overall rule, since the waiver requirements that the commission advocated for in the past would remain in place,” Ethics Commission Policy and Legislative Affairs Manager Michael Canning said at an Oct. 10 hearing on the legislation. 

Mandelman said that he was partially motivated to introduce this legislation now by the tough budget cycle this summer, where the city reduced funding to nonprofits by $160 million. 

While the mayor’s office and other city departments obtained a behested-payment waiver so they could raise money for services that were set to be cut in the budget, like those related to immigration, LGBTQ+ rights, environmental protection, reproductive rights and racial equity, supervisors are not able to help with that fundraising. 

“It is not great to be taking us, other elected officials, appointed officials, off the field in this moment when we are finding our public resources so constrained,” Mandelman said at the Oct. 16 Government Audit and Oversight Committee hearing about extending that behested-payment waiver for another six months. 

At the hearing, Supervisor Jackie Fielder, who chairs that committee, expressed skepticism. 

“I don’t think any department heads or elected officials should be in the business of soliciting contributions from interested parties at all,” Fielder said, calling them risky and emphasizing that the appearance of a conflict of interest can lead to a loss of public trust. 

As she sees it, existing allowances — which include making public appeals and soliciting donations from people or institutions that don’t do business with the city — are enough. 

Mandelman pushed back on that. Since supervisors vote on so many items, the current system is “filled with traps for the unwary” supervisor who may inadvertently cross a legal line, he argued. 

“You are always at risk of not knowing some of the connections for board membership, or some corporate relationship, or something that nobody really has in mind but is there,” Mandelman said.

“I think it is incumbent upon elected officials to do their own due diligence,” Fielder responded. “Agree to disagree.”