Hardly anyone seemed to be paying attention when the Board of Supes voted on Item 28 at Tuesday’s meeting. It was one of a long string of apparently uncontroversial items that initially passed on a unanimous vote without a roll call.
It all sounded good:
Resolution authorizing the Assessor-Recorder and the Deputy Assessors and Director of Policy and Government Affairs in the Assessor-Recorder’s Office to solicit donations from various private, nonprofit, philanthropic, and other entities to support 1) the urgent provision of legal services related to the creation and enforcement of immigration laws, regulations, and policies, including litigation and regulatory reform efforts at the local, state, and federal level and non-legal services and support for the City’s immigrant communities, 2) goods and services, including legal services, related to defending and supporting LGBTQ+ rights, 3) goods and services, including legal services, related to defending and supporting reproductive rights, 4) goods and services, including legal services, related to defending existing environmental protection laws and promoting environmental protection efforts, and 5) goods and services, including legal services, related to racial equity initiatives, all notwithstanding the Behested Payment Ordinance.
The supes have already given Mayor Daniel Lurie a sweeping waiver to solicit money from companies doing business with the city to fight the fentanyl crisis. The board has done the same for the city attorney and the city administrator.
Now: the assessor-recorder.
The measure passed, and the board moved on, and then a couple items later, Sup. Connie Chan asked to be recognized. She had, she said, made a mistake, and wanted to change her vote on that item.
This happens on occasion, and the supes normally do what they did this time. They rescinded the vote on Item 28, and took a new vote, and this time it was 9-1, with Chan the lone dissenter.
Chan, clearly, is not opposed to raising money to help immigrants (she is an immigrant, born in Hong Kong, who came to this country at 13). And she didn’t suggest that anyone in the Assessor-Recorder’s Office is corrupt.
But she made an important point:
There are countless big corporations and developers who are currently asking the assessor for tax reductions, claiming their property is worth less since the pandemic. We are talking hundreds of billions of dollars in total value, and tens of millions of dollars in potential city losses as assessment values are reduced (along with property taxes).
Is it a good idea, she asked, for the assessor to be asking these same people for donations, no matter how good the cause?
Lee Hepner, who as an aide to former Sup. Aaron Peskin helped write the Behested Payment Ordinance, doesn’t think so.
There’s a good reason the city limits the ability of elected officials and department heads to ask companies that do business with the city to give money to their favorite charities. It’s why Mohammed Nuru, the former director of public works, is in prison. It’s a situation that invites corruption.
“The law allows city officials to solicit donations from any company that doesn’t do business with the city,” Hepner told me. “That’s 99 percent of the corporations in the country.”
But if a city official is in a position to give favorable treatment to a business, and wants to ask that business for money, the law prevents it—except in very limited circumstances.
“The exceptions were intended to be very narrow,” Hepner said. The law states that the official must identify the interested party and make a finding as to why the donation is necessary. Here’s what it says:
Upon request by a City department, the Board of Supervisors may waive the requirements of this Section 3.620 by resolution, but may not waive it for itself. A proposed resolution that seeks a waiver shall summarize the purpose of the solicitation(s) and shall identify the type of interested parties or the specific interested parties, when the identity is known, to whom the solicitation(s) would be directed, and a statement as to why the department believes the parties are interested parties. The resolution must include a finding that the waiver would not create an appearance of impropriety and would be in the public interest.
The sweeping waivers that the supes have issued so far included little of that information. We don’t know who the mayor, or the city attorney, or the assessor, wants to approach for money. We don’t have any language that shows why there is no conflict of interest.
“If they don’t know who they are soliciting, why do they need these broad waivers?” Hepner asked. “It’s very reckless.”
The supes, under the Lurie Administration, are in a tough situation: If they don’t approve these waivers, which could lead to corruption, they can be portrayed as obstacles to fighting the fentanyl crisis, or Trump’s immigration crackdown. (Only Sup. Shamann Walton voted against the fentanyl waiver, saying that Lurie had offered no plan for the money.)
There’s a larger issue here: Philanthropy isn’t going to solve the city’s problems. It never has, and it never will.
A few donors may give some money for a few narrowly tailored programs that they can put their names on. But as we reported a couple of weeks ago:
One of the fundamental tenets of neoliberalism, and to a certain extent Trumpism, is that the best solution to social problems is philanthropy, not government. The concept: Let rich people get tax breaks by giving some of their money to good causes, instead of having the much-maligned politicians and “bureaucrats” take that money through taxes and allocate it through some semblance of a democratic process.
This was part of Lurie’s campaign: Instead of taxing the rich, we will ask them nicely to fund some things that the city needs. That likely won’t be affordable housing; it probably won’t be the mayor’s priority of hiring more cops, since a one-time donation doesn’t help the city budget much. A one-time donation doesn’t provide long-term mental health facilities.
As two business school professors writing in The New York Times say:
The public would also need to develop greater skepticism of the rich entrepreneurs who, with more cash than they could ever spend, donate portions of their wealth to favored causes. Lionized for their achievements and revered for their compassion, they bask in their status as society’s saviors. Meanwhile, the corporations they own extract wealth and externalize costs on a scale that dwarfs their largess. With one hand they generate supernormal profits by plundering society, and with the other they dole out a few crumbs to “save the world.” But they never will. The math simply doesn’t work.
The math doesn’t work. The sweeping exemptions from an anti-corruption law won’t work. They will just open the city to more potential corruption scandals.
And other than one story in the SF Examiner, nobody seems to be paying much attention.
