Another call to create an S.F. public advocate
San Francisco Supervisor Gordon Mar is introducing a proposal for the November ballot on Tuesday that would carve out a new city office dedicated solely to investigating and rooting out government corruption and the waste of taxpayer money.
Mar’s proposal, an amendment to the City Charter, would create the Office of the Public Advocate, an independently elected watchdog with broad authority to issue subpoenas, conduct investigations and introduce legislation — all in the service of ensuring accountability within city government.
Proponents of a similar measure tried to create a public advocate office in 2016, but the measure failed by fewer than five percentage points.
But the stillsmoldering public corruption scandal
touched off by the FBI’s arrest of former Public Works Director Mohammed Nuru created “the impetus for myself and other goodgovernment advocates to revisit the public advocate proposal,” Mar said.
“The latest scandal just highlights that we need structural reform to address casual corruption and paytoplay politics, and to make the city more accountable and transparent,” Mar said. “It shouldn’t take an FBI investigation by the Trump administration to root out local corruption.”
And while federal investigators have a much more farreaching set of tools for criminal probes — such as phone taps and confidential informants, which they employed while investigating Nuru — “if we had a public advocate, it wouldn’t have taken decades for Director Nuru’s wrongdoing to be addressed,” Mar argued.
Nuru has been charged with fraud in connection with several alleged schemes, the Justice Department alleges, to give associates preferential treatment on bids for city contracts and building projects.
Under Mar’s proposal, the city’s public advocate could be elected for up to two consecutive fouryear terms, but there would be no limit on nonconsecutive terms. Candidates would also have to have been licensed to practice law in all of the state’s courts for at least a decade.
Mar needs a total of at least six votes from his colleagues on the Board of Supervisors to put the measure on the November ballot. If it passes, the city would vote for its first public advocate in November 2022, barring an unforeseen special citywide election.
Mar would then have to convince voters that the city needs another office — with a minimum of four staff members — at a time when it is facing down an unprecedented budget deficit of up to $1.7 billion. In 2016, the City Controller’s Office estimated that a fourperson staff for the office would cost $600,000 to $800,000 annually.
Mar said the proposal was crafted with the city’s financial woes in mind. The public advocate’s work cutting down on waste and fraud would “help us save money over time,” he said.
There is also a question of how the public advocate’s work would harmonize with multiple agencies across city government tasked with investigating municipal corruption, fraud and waste. The City Attorney’s Office, Controller’s Office, the Ethics Commission and the District Attorney’s Office all have anticorruption divisions.
But unlike those agencies, Mar said the public advocate would have the benefit of focusing exclusively on government corruption and waste, rather than as one division within an office with a broader mandate.
“This will be the sole responsibility of the office — to investigate and eliminate corruption and the waste of taxpayer money and abuse of power,” Mar said. “Given the breadth and depth of casual corruption and paytoplay politics that continues to plague our city government, we need structural reform to address it.”
David Campos, a former supervisor and the main proponent of the failed 2016 effort, said a public advocate brings a proactive, not reactive, eye to city operations. When it comes to existing offices, “their job is to look backward at what happened. They’re not so focused on what’s happening today,” he said.
Mar said his office was still working out the details for how the public advocate’s responsibilities would complement — not duplicate — the work of existing offices.
With his public advocate proposal, Mar is also walking a fine line of calling for “structural reform” of existing city anticorruption efforts without indicting the work of agencies doing that work.
Supervisor Matt Haney’s call for an independent investigation into the Nuru allegations privately rankled officials in the City Attorney and Controller’s offices who are jointly conducting an internal investigation into city corruption, stemming from the Nuru allegations.
John Coté, a spokesman for the City Attorney’s Office, said the office would not take a position on Mar’s legislation.
“I would simply point out that our office’s track record of rooting out waste, fraud and corruption is unparalleled,” Coté said, before ticking off a list of the office’s accomplishments over the past few years, “often in partnership with the city controller.”
In the past two years, internal investigations have led to the ousters of former Health Director Barbara Garcia; the former director of the Department of Building Inspection, Tom Hui; and the former president of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, Vince Courtney.
“We have issued two dozen subpoenas in the Nuru investigation alone,” Coté said. “That investigation is thorough, comprehensive and ongoing.”
Mar said, “In no way is the public advocate proposal meant to imply that our existing city departments are not doing their jobs adequately.”