UPS and FedEx get a lot of parking tickets. Millions of dollars a year in parking tickets. They both have accounts with the city, and pay the fines off in bulk.
The same happens all over the country in congested urban areas. For the delivery companies, it’s just the cost of doing business. San Francisco might as well say: Okay, for $1 million a year, in advance, you can park anywhere you want.
The drivers don’t care; they don’t pay the fees. The companies don’t care either; they just tack that on to what they charge their customers.
So: Neighbors for a Better San Francisco just got fined $54,000 for violating campaign finance laws in the Chesa Boudin recall. You think a group funded by billionaires, with almost unlimited resources, that spent almost $5 million on the recall, cares in the least?
You think Jay Cheng, its director, who suffered little consequences from his arrest on a rape charge, cares in the least? He’s not paying, any more than the UPS drivers are paying.
The billionaires got what they wanted, the recall of Boudin, and so it cost them an extra $50K. Just the cost of doing business.
In fact, the group agreed to the fine as part of a plea deal:
Neighbors for a Better San Francisco and its leader Jay Cheng have agreed to pay the five-figure sum to settle a case brought against them by investigators for the San Francisco Ethics Commission, according to a copy of the settlement released Monday. The investigation found that Neighbors and Cheng failed to disclose $100,833 in payments to a consulting firm that spearheaded media relations efforts for the recall campaign.
It also examined the more than $175,000 that a nonprofit linked to Neighbors paid now-District Attorney Brooke Jenkins to work as a consultant while she volunteered for the recall campaign, but did not sustain any wrongdoing related to her income.
This is why campaign-finance laws aren’t working. If you have a lot of money, there are no consequences.
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Under San Francisco’s Campaign and Governmental Conduct Code, anyone who intentionally violates local ethics laws
shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and upon conviction thereof shall be punished by a fine of not more than $5,000 for each violation or by imprisonment in the County jail for a period of not more than six months or by both such fine and imprisonment.
But as Jon Golinger, an expert on campaign finance laws and a former prosecutor, told me, “those criminal cases are very hard to prove, as they should be.” You have to demonstrate intent, which is tough.
There are, on the other hand, solutions the city could consider. “You could add some zeros to the fines,” Golinger said. At the very least, he said, the fine should equal or exceed the amount of money in question, which in this case was more than $100,000.
There’s another approach he suggested, too: Anyone who is guilty of a serious campaign-finance or disclosure violation could be put on the equivalent of probation, that is, The Ethics Commission would step up monitoring of all future activities by that group or individual.
Violators could also be banned from applying for or winning city contract or some permits.
Also: While it’s difficult for a prosecutor to get a search warrant unless there’s reason to believe a felony has been committed, the Office of the Inspector General, which a fall ballot measure would create, would have the power to issue subpoenas. That might help demonstrate how much of this was intentional—or done with no concern whatsoever for the laws, since the fine will just be a tiny price to pay for influencing and election.
Maybe someone else has another idea—but the reality is, like the parking tickets for UPS, what we are doing now isn’t working.
