Supervisor Jackie Fielder is making a “good government” push and sponsoring three new pieces of legislation aimed at increasing government transparency and preventing corruption.
The proposals cover the Sunshine Task Force, bidding rules for government contracts, and behested payments.
“I want to hold the city accountable,” Fielder said. “It’s had its history with corruption or appearances of corruption and I believe in public integrity and following the rules.”
One proposal, which Fielder will introduce on Tuesday, would allow termed-out commissioners on the city’s Sunshine Ordinance Task Force to continue to serve if a replacement is not appointed by the Board of Supervisors within 60 days.
That task force oversees city officials’ compliance with transparency laws, like public-records requests, but has failed to meet since June because so many of its members have termed out that it cannot reach quorum. Members are appointed by the Board of Supervisors.
The task force is not always popular with politicians. In 2024, it found that former Mayor London Breed and City Attorney David Chiu had violated the law by deleting text messages related to official business.
Mayor Daniel Lurie was also recently castigated by the task force for failing to provide all records related to his Oct. 22, 2025 phone call with President Donald Trump. It was during that call that Lurie reportedly won a reprieve for the Bay Area, which faced the prospect of an immigration enforcement surge.
The task force, Fielder said, is “an advocate for the public to get the records that they’re seeking.”
Another proposal would require competitive bidding on software contracts where the software would have to be tailored to the city’s needs. At present, all software contracts are exempted from competitive bidding — a practice that came under scrutiny after the Lurie administration decided in October 2025 to award a $5.9 million contract to OpenGov to reform the city’s permitting system.
Another company, Clariti, was rated higher by city staffers and was projected to be cheaper. Moreover, OpenGov was founded by two people who have given tens of thousands to a nonprofit founded by Lurie.
But, a city report concluded that awarding the contract to OpenGov, which recently won a $33 million extension, did not violate city contracting rules. That’s because software contracts are not currently required to go through a competitive bidding process.
Fielder’s legislation would narrow that exemption so that it only applies to off-the-shelf software. Had it been in effect, the contract would have been required to go through a competitive bidding process where OpenGov may not have won.
There should be high standards, Fielder said, “because every public dollar is from our taxpayers.”
At least one of her colleagues doesn’t support the change. Board President Rafael Mandelman said he thinks it may actually make the city’s contracting process worse.
“We’re trying to avoid corruption on the one hand, but at the same time, we don’t want to so hamstring public procurement that we can’t get anything done,” Mandelman said. “The more complicated our procurement processes get, the less good we get for the public.”
Fielder’s third proposal would change city rules around behested payments, a practice in which a city official asks someone to donate money to a favored cause.
Behested payments have been used corruptly in the past. In the 2010s, Mohammed Nuru, then the director of Public Works, often instructed companies that had business with his department to make donations to an account at a local nonprofit that he controlled.
After Nuru’s arrest in 2020, the city put in new restrictions on behested payments. If a city official wants to ask for a donation from someone who has business with the city — maybe they lease a building from the city or have won a city contract — the official must get permission from the Board of Supervisors before making the request.
But the Lurie administration has frequently requested waivers from the Board of Supervisors for funding causes like homelessness and revitalizing downtown.
Fielder wants to tighten the rules. She said that when Lurie’s team appeared before her in November 2025 to renew a six-month waiver for “economic revitalization efforts,” they did not disclose how much money they had raised, and from whom.
“I thought that that was pretty preposterous,” Fielder said.
Her new legislation would require that officials who successfully solicit funds release a list of everyone they approached and how much they raised. The legislation also requires a cooling-off period of one year before another waiver is approved for the same fundraising area. It requires a supermajority (eight out of 11 votes) to pass.
It is not clear it will pass on a Lurie-aligned board. Mandelman, for his part, thinks the current system works. He said the waivers help city officials who might not even realize that someone has business with the city ensure they do not “run afoul of some of the particularities,” and he strongly opposes the cooling-off period.
“If the Board of Supervisors thinks the waiver is inappropriate, it can always say no. But I don’t know why we would want to, as a matter of course, prevent any waiver beyond six months,” Mandelman said, saying that oftentimes waivers are used to raise money for areas with ongoing need and that new needs may emerge.
He’s also ambivalent about increasing reporting requirements. He feels that state requirements are sufficient — they require disclosing any behested payments of over $5,000 that come from one source in a calendar year.
“More reporting and more stringency,” he said, “is probably not something that I support.”
