Another excellent article, Mr. Eskenazi! An extra ration of grog to you, (and Mission Local) for using Dali’s “Persistence of Memory” as it relates to your article. Splice the main brace!

In reply to FundEthics.

Four people on the audit staff are enough to take up repeated offers from the controller’s office to provide staff or contractors to finish the job. How is this a budget problem?

In reply to Ozzie Rohm.

Report the attorney to the bar association. They’ve had to come to terms with their own lack of action in the face of some egregious complaints, so they should be doing a half decent job now.

Apologies. I misstated. Breed sought to cut the Ethics Department budget by 32% and reduce its staff by 40% “a stark departure.” https://sfethics.org/ethics/2023/06/statement-of-ethics-commission-chair-yvonne-lee-on-mayors-proposed-fiscal-year-2023-24-and-2024-25-commission-budget.html

………and never forget: during the last budget cycle at City Hall, London breed sought to cut the staff of the Ethics Commission by 42% and to eliminate over half of the positions……. of an already understaffed and underfunded, essential oversight body. All while expanding and fully funding her own bloated media, messaging and communications staff of +8 and counting. Taxpayer funded…….during a campaign year. London Breed has priorities and they are NOT every day San Franciscans. For perspective: previous mayors had a communications/messaging staff of 1 or 2……maximum 3.

In reply to FundEthics.

Spoken like a true technocrat. How about the commissioners role up their sleeves and stop the passive-aggressive posturing?

Finally, an article about the Ethics Commission! It’s absolutely a useless body that is more akin to a boondoggle than a real oversight body. Back in 2021, I filed a complaint with them about the Planning Department allowing developers’ attorneys to edit their documents. We found instances of a developer’s attorney having edited the ruling issued by the department as part of the change tracking in that document!
Six months later and not a peep from the Ethics Commission. So I contacted them about my complaint. They came back saying they had lost it and I should submit it again, which I did. Another six months went by and they finally came out with their verdict: They didn’t find anything unethical about a developer’s attorney editing the Planning Department’s decision!

Unfortunately, the Ethics Commission has been defunded, and has paid the price for its outstanding job vacancies.

As Ethics rules get more complicated, there isn’t enough funding to train employees and enforce existing rules.

Look at the staff page in the Internet Archive and you can see how many vacant positions they’ve had over the past few years:
https://sfethics.org/commission/staff
https://web.archive.org/web/20221122012722/https://sfethics.org/commission/staff

More than a few of Ethics’ open job reqs were taken off of the City jobs site at https://careers.sf.gov/ while their budget remained in limbo in early 2023.

The City needs a source of funding that is politics-proof for the vital job performed by the Ethics Commission. A dedicated source of funding for Ethics would be ideal, similar to the City Services Auditor budget which is written into the Charter as 0.2% of the City’s overall budget:
https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/san_francisco/latest/sf_charter/0-0-0-4284#JD_F1.113

What if the Charter required Ethics to be funded to the tune of 20% of the total of all expenditures in the year? Expenditure totals vary depending on election years between $4m and $44m, but the current FY funding of $7.6M clearly isn’t enough.

Ethics should also look into offering bounties for finding campaign finance violations. There are plenty of them, and crowdsourcing enforcement to gadflies who could take a cut might help with accountability and reducing the enforcement backlog.

Our City’s democracy is at stake.

Joe is a grad of the greatest University in the World,
the University of California at Berkeley. GO BEARS!
Keep up the good work, Joe.
———–MKM, class of 1973