City Hall Digest: A Tale of Two Corruption Scandals
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 and duty.
Even San Francisco’s HR is Corrupt Now?
San Franciscans are well-acquainted with corruption scandals. But at least the Public Works scandal, the Department of Building Inspection scandal, and the Leland Yee scandal were spread out over the course of a decade. This month alone saw two more.
First: Shouldn’t HR be the department keeping other people in line? Apparently not in City Hall, where Human Resources manager Stanley Ellicott was recently arrested and charged in connection to a bribery and corruption case that hit the San Francisco Community Challenge Grant Program last year.
The San Francisco District Attorney’s office charged Ellicott with aiding former Challenge Grant director Lanita Henriquez and consultant Dwayne Jones in their alleged municipal theft and kickback scheme. Ellicott reportedly bought thousands of dollars of electronics with money that was meant for earthquake relief supplies—then sold them for profit on eBay. If that wasn’t bad enough, Henriquez then recommended that San Francisco pay Ellicott $100,000 to reimburse him for the earthquake supplies he never purchased.
Ellicott’s arrest expands the scope of the existing corruption case in the Community Challenge Grant Program. Last August, the District Attorney filed charges against Dwayne Jones and Lanita Henriquez, alleging that Jones had funneled nearly $200,000 to Henriquez and her associates between 2016 and 2020. In return, Jones was awarded 23 city contracts worth approximately $1.4 million.
That’s all on top of the other corruption case that popped up in the last month: anti-crime nonprofit San Francisco SAFE was found to have misspent potentially hundreds of thousands of city dollars on luxury gifts, travel, and trips to Tahoe.
Must we repeat our own slogan again? Get it together, SF.
People Are Still Suffering On Our Streets, And There Is No Plan
Why Are Overdose Deaths Higher in SF Than the Rest of the US?
Last week, The New York Times published an investigation into San Francisco’s drug crisis, and it was pretty damning.
The Times compared the cultural and strategic differences between Portugal’s approach to drug addiction to San Francisco’s current methods. Portugal is widely recognized as a model for governments trying to solve a drug crisis—the country has seen overdose deaths and addiction plummet from record highs in the late 1990’s.
San Francisco has tried to emulate their strategy, but there are critical breakdowns between departments as people with substance use disorder try to recover, and elected officials and department heads are often at odds on how to tackle the drug crisis. As Nils Behnke, the former chief executive of St. Anthony’s Foundation said, “To get a strategy, you need an objective. That does not exist here.”
This is political negligence.
Why Did The City Let This Promising Mental Health Program Fail?
San Francisco isn’t just failing at solving the drug crisis. Last week, city officials announced the end of a conservatorship pilot program that was expected to help hundreds of people every year. In four years, the program helped just four people get treatment. The program’s failure can be traced back to the Board of Supervisors.
In 2019, San Francisco launched Housing Conservatorship, a pilot program narrowly tailored to make it easier to get people with the most severe mental illnesses into treatment and housing. Conservatorship is controversial in San Francisco, with some people objecting to mandated treatment for people who are frequently hospitalized for drug overdoses.
“By the time it got enacted by the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco, it had so many limitations on it, that it’s not surprising that it was not well utilized.””
But many legislators and public health experts support conservatorship as the last option to treat someone who can no longer care for themselves. The Housing Conservatorship program was designed based on research from public health professionals, and targeted to treat only people who are truly unable to care for themselves.
Despite that work, ideologues on the Board of Supervisors made major changes to the program before it was implemented. The eligibility restrictions and tracking requirements for health professionals that were added at the last minute were nearly impossible to meet, and doomed the program to failure.
Why Can’t SF Get It Together?
When San Francisco’s failures to solve the drug and mental health crisis are front and center in The New York Times, it affects people’s perception of the city. San Francisco’s reputation matters and yes, some of the headlines are overblown, but many are reporting dire and damning statistics. SF needs to get it together—our tax base funded by visitors, downtown businesses, and office workers depends on it.
The Election is One Month Away. Are You Ready?
San Francisco is officially one month away from the March 5 primary election. If you vote by mail, your mail-in ballot should have arrived by today. Given that our lawmakers love to legislate with ballot measures, every election has multiple state and local propositions filling the ballot. And you, the voter, get to spend a precious afternoon decoding all of them. That’s why TogetherSF Action developed the Get It Together, SF Voter Guide. This guide covers all the candidates and measures on your ballot—because election prep shouldn’t feel like SAT prep.
Where’s the Money Going This Election?
As election day approaches, campaigns are heating up and money is starting to fly out the door. Two local campaigns that take opposite approaches to public safety have attracted the vast majority of funding so far—check out the San Francisco’s breakdown of ballot funding:
Chart from January 27, 2024 San Francisco Chronicle Article “Donors are spending big on S.F.’s two police ballot measures. Here’s how much.”
Measure E, Mayor London Breed’s measure to modernize the police, has received much more support funding than any of the other local ballot measures. Measure E support has raised over 11 times as much money as opposition funding—a reminder that public safety is top of mind for many San Francisco voters this year. We’re recommending you vote yes on Measure E.
Measure B, or the “cop tax,” is the other public safety measure on the ballot—it’s received the second-most amount of money so far. Measure B sounds good at first—the measure says it will help the SFPD close its staffing gap, but it would tie staffing to new, unidentified taxes. That’s dangerous because those taxes may never materialize, leaving SFPD understaffed. San Francisco’s budget should fully account for public safety, which is why we’re recommending you vote no on Measure B.
STAFF RECOMMENDED ARTICLE OF THE WEEK
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STAFF RECOMMENDED ARTICLE OF THE WEEK •
Why You’ve Never Been In A Plane Crash
Kyra Dempsey | asteriskmag.com
“I like this article because it breaks down the problems with the way society views large problems. As the world gets more complex, systematic problems become harder to understand.
When things go catastrophically wrong, the default reaction is to blame a person. But disasters often happen because of failures in a system. Assigning blame to
a person doesn't do anything to prevent future problems—fixing the system does."
Read the article here.
Got Questions About the Next Election? We Have Answers.
Join us at one of our interactive Voter Guide events. Coming up, we have a panel discussion (plus afterparty!) on February 15 and a virtual Q+A with our CEO Kanishka Cheng on February 27.
Paid for by TogetherSF Action (tsfaction.org). Not authorized by any candidate or committee controlled by a candidate. Financial disclosures are available at sfethics.org.