City Hall Digest: TODCO on a Political Spending Spree, SFUSD Makes Another Payroll Mistake, and City Is Slow to Match the Homeless with Housing

City Hall Digest is TogetherSF Action’s weekly dispatch from San Francisco’s City Hall, broken into bite-sized pieces—because understanding local government is your fundamental right.

This Affordable Housing Nonprofit Has Been Using Its Stock Portfolio as Political Piggy Bank While Its Buildings Deteriorate

Nonprofits that receive money from the city have been under the microscope lately, and for good reason—some have been found to be corrupt and ineligible to spend city money because of bad recordkeeping. The heightened attention has led to calls for reform on how the city does business with nonprofits, which we fully support. 

In this vein, reporting from the San Francisco Standard last week showed that the affordable housing nonprofit TODCO, at the direction of its leader John Elberling, has been spending multiplicatively more money each year on political and lobbying campaigns—while spending less and less on building maintenance as tenants languish in squalor. Reports of rodent and insect infestations as well as drug use (though the buildings themselves are supposedly drug free) have been frequent. 

For example, TODCO spent half a million dollars in 2022 on a ballot measure that ended up being stricken from the ballot by a judge because it was so poorly written. And, the organization has increased its spending on lobbying government officials almost 100 times over since 2012—from $5,000 in 2012 to $473,000 in 2020-21. TODCO also spent just 45 percent of its annual revenue in 2020 on resident services, which is a 17 percent decrease from 2012. 

This is a textbook case of San Francisco dysfunction: a nonprofit takes from the city with one hand and slaps it across the face with the other.

It’s time for this to change. 

SFUSD’s Most Recent Accounting Error Will Scramble Employee’s Tax Bills 

In the face of plummeting interest in public schools, fiscal mismanagement, and hostile classroom environments, SFUSD officials should be doing everything they can to attract and retain talented teachers so that our students can succeed. But, a new error affecting teachers’ finances is further straining the district’s credibility when it comes to showing progress on these issues.

Just over a year after the first signs of trouble arose with the San Francisco Unified School District’s payment software, EmPower, teachers continue to suffer financially. The debacle has had many low points, including the fact the district has spent over $16 million on the software, teachers have had to deal with missing paychecks, excessively large paychecks, missing benefits, and incorrect tax deductions. 

While many of the problems with payments have been tamped down after the district spent millions more for continued tech support, a new wave of financial problems is arising that could affect thousands of employees. This time, the problem isn’t necessarily related to the EmPower software, but is equally jaw dropping—the district has admitted to having failed to file three quarters’ worth of wage reports to the State of California. 

This critical mistake could cost teachers thousands of dollars in unforeseen tax bills and will also delay when teachers can file their taxes. At the end of the day, it’s a costly accounting error by the district that does little to bolster confidence in leadership at a time when it matters most. 

Why Does It Take a Year to Match People Experiencing Homelessness to Available Housing?

In San Francisco, there’s an overly bureaucratic permitting process for everything, from trees to homes to sidewalks to small businesses. Permanent supportive housing is no exception. About 2,000 of the almost 8,000 homeless people in San Francisco have been approved to be moved into permanent supportive housing units. However, 912 of these permanent units are sitting empty, with 340 people having waited an entire year while living on the streets to enter a unit. Despite the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing having said they’re working on decreasing wait times, they’ve actually more than doubled over the last year—from 85 days to 150 days, or five months from being told a unit is free to being handed the keys. 

It’s a catastrophic and inexplicable failure that a thousand different gold medal-winning mental gymnastics routines can’t quite seem to justify. Particularly when we're spending $356 million on the permanent supportive housing program and are still failing to take care of our most vulnerable—because on a certain level, our city has simply said “this is fine.”

TogetherSF Action is making advocating for an end to the drug epidemic in San Francisco a top priority this year. Our first step? Flooding inboxes at City Hall. We need thousands of concerned San Franciscans to send letters to their leaders demanding they end open-air drug markets in 2023. Are you in?