Enforcement of San Francisco’s ethics laws is so lax that campaigns routinely violate the rules and figure nothing will happen. They’re usually right; when then-Sup Mark Farrell got elected in part after serious violations of campaign finance rules, Ethics settled a $190,000 case for $25,000.
The price of doing business, it seems.
So I wonder if it matters if we report on this stuff, since the voters don’t seem to care, and the city and the state aren’t going to do anything.
But sometimes it just gets so blatant ….
Take the mailer that arrived at my house today.
Remember: Candidates for supervisor are not allowed to take more than $500 from any donor. But donors can give unlimited amounts to ballot measure campaigns (thanks to the Supreme Court.)
So, candidates sometimes adopt or support ballot measures, to associate themselves with the policy, and they can bask, a little, in the overflow of campaign money.
But the campaigns for ballot measures are not supposed to share resources beyond a certain limit, and Farrell is already accused of pushing that line. He’s working with the Yes on D campaign, which seeks to eliminate a lot of city commissions, and sharing staff and office space.
From the Chron:
Again, if Farrell were using money from his ballot measure committee to subsidize his campaign for mayor, that would be illegal — and could result in a hefty fine from the San Francisco Ethics Commission of as much as three times the amount of funds proven to be mishandled. Farrell’s campaign adamantly denies this is happening and insists that the unique financial setup — in which Farrell’s ballot measure committee reimburses the mayoral committee for the value of resources used, such as staff time or office space — is legal and helps streamline administrative costs.
Now this.
The front of the mailer is, by any imaginable standard, 100 percent a “Farrell for Mayor” message. It has a picture of Farrell, and states: “As interim mayor, I targeted drug dealing and cleared all large tent encampments in just six months. But since then, our leaders have failed us.”
This is the same message, almost word for word, that’s on his campaign website:
As Mayor in 2018, Mayor Farrell cleared all large tent encampments in six months and will do it again.
Now you flip the mailer over, and it’s a Yes on D message—paid for by Tom Coates, a wealthy real estate investor and foe of rent control, and his wife Linda ($500,000), and hotel heir John Pritzker ($200,000.) That’s $700,000 from three donors, who have each given about 1,000 times more money to the campaign than they could legally give to Farrell for Mayor.
I’m not a campaign-finance lawyer, and there’s so much gray area here that I’m sure I could find people who say it’s legal and people who say it isn’t. But seriously: The reason the city imposed $500 contribution limits was an attempt to prevent exactly what’s happening right now: A billionaire takeover of San Francisco politics.
And since every candidate except Sup. Aaron Peskin, including Mayor London Breed, is getting money from billionaires, I see no reason why most of them will want this sleaze to stop.
Full disclosure: Both my son and my daughter work for the Aaron Peskin for Mayor campaign.
