SF Supervisors Issue Subpoena Into Records Between Parks Nonprofit and City, After Report Finds Lack of Transparency

San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors issued a subpoena Thursday to obtain financial records between a parks-supporting nonprofit, the San Francisco Parks Alliance, and the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department.

While the Parks Alliance raises money to build park infrastructure across the city in a private-public partnership, it’s usually primarily interested in one type of green — planting trees, for instance. But the board says more transparency is necessary to ensure another type of green — money — isn’t changing hands improperly.

Just who has influence in renovating parks, and where, is a chief concern, said Supervisor Connie Chan, the lawmaker who requested the subpoena during a hearing of the board’s Government Audit and Oversight Committee.

While no formal accusations have been made, Chan’s subpoena comes in the wake of an ever-unfolding corruption scandal that has ensnared four city department heads since early 2020.

Chan said she was worried the influence of money could determine exactly who gets to have parks built in the city, and where, citing equitable access as a key priority.

“This is a city of riches,” she said during Thursday’s committee hearing. “We receive so much donations and so much money to renovate and improve our parks, and we can see those results. And yet there is lack of equity, lack of access for those who cannot pay.

“In this case, are we now setting ourselves up for a two-tier parks system for those who can pay to play, literally, and for those who cannot afford access to our public space?”

Also, notably, this is the first-ever use of a new subpoena power the board crafted for itself in 2020, in a law written by Supervisor Aaron Peskin. Previously, the board needed a majority to issue a subpoena, but since March 2020, the three-supervisor Government Audit and Oversight Committee has the power to issue its own.

A Recreation and Parks Department spokesperson told the supervisors that the agency follows all codes and laws. And Parks Alliance Board Chair Liz Farrell said, “I want to also just to be clear on the record, and say that the Parks Alliance has not been accused or found to be involved in any wrongdoing as part of the investigation into the government corruption.”

But the supervisors were concerned that the public simply doesn’t have enough information from the Parks Alliance to verify that fact on their own.

A report issued just this month from the San Francisco Budget and Legislative Analyst, an arm of the city tasked with researching questions posed by the Board of Supervisors, took a look at the Parks Alliance’s financial relationship with SF Rec and Parks.

The lack of transparency in those finances leaves the possibility of a pay-to-play culture to flourish in the shadows, the supervisors said Thursday.

“Adequate controls against the possibility of corruption and financial transparency were found lacking in our review of key agreements between the two organizations from recent years,” the report reads.

The report’s authors came away with more questions than answers.

Every year, millions of dollars flow into the San Francisco Parks Alliance. The money is used to renovate the city’s treasured green spaces large and small — for example, erecting a towering Ferris wheel in Golden Gate Park and laying down AstroTurf at Merced Heights Playground.

The Parks Alliance serves a unique role in this, raising money for some projects and selecting contractors, a role often served by government agencies. But that leaves some of their methodologies in the dark, the Budget and Legislative Analyst’s report found.

What are the names of their anonymous donors? How are the contractors who build out our green spaces chosen? How does the group use city funding it’s granted? When the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department pitches in its own money, are they getting the most bang for their buck?

The lack of transparency may also allow the Parks Alliance to circumvent good government practices developed by the city, the Budget and Legislative Analyst wrote, including compliance with prevailing wage requirements for contractors and competitive bidding to find lower costs.

For a Richmond neighborhood playground, for instance, the $3 million budget was completely opaque, said Fred Brousseau, from the Budget and Legislative Analyst’s office.

“What we found is that the [memorandum of understanding] had a high-level preliminary budget but no detail as to what the costs were going to be for the design contractor, for example, that was being paid for by the Parks Alliance,” he told the supervisors at Thursday’s hearing. “We also found that there was no requirement for how the contractor was selected in this case.”

While the city’s Recreation and Park Commission approved a use permit in December 2019 between the Parks Alliance and SF Rec and Parks for Golden Gate Park’s 150th celebration, “there wasn’t a draft agreement at that time,” Brousseau said, “or an agreement that we felt should have been put into place.”

No budget was presented to the commission providing the details of what would be spent before the agreement got commission approval, Brousseau said.

And what about the Ferris wheel in Golden Gate Park? While it’s gotten a lot of love for its glowing lights at night, the contract to build it wasn’t issued competitively, Brousseau said. That’s a standard practice governments use to ensure they get the best deal.

“We have issue with the way the vendor was selected. It was a sole-source selection, there’s no competitive bidding by the department,” Brousseau said.

A memorandum of understanding between the city and the Parks Alliance lays down some requirements for how they operate, and was retooled to strengthen some reporting requirements in 2020 in the wake of the citywide corruption scandal, but the Budget and Legislative Analyst still recommended it be strengthened.

This isn’t the first time the Parks Alliance has found itself under the microscope.

The San Francisco City Controller’s Office found, in a September 2020 report, that the San Francisco Parks Alliance took roughly $1 million in donations from a number of city contractors that were under investigation by the City Attorney’s Office for funneling money to the Public Works Department for lavish parties.

That was at the behest of former Public Works Director Mohammed Nuru, who was arrested by the FBI in 2020 on corruption charges.

Former City Attorney Dennis Herrera first issued subpoenas investigating the Parks Alliance in early 2020,  also in connection with the ongoing corruption scandal.

It also isn’t the first time the Parks Alliance and Supervisor Chan have clashed in public. The Parks Alliance wrote a letter to Chan earlier this year threatening to pull $2 million in funding for a Richmond District playground in response to her statements about their alleged wrongdoing. During the Thursday hearing, Farrell from the Parks Alliance said they have already apologized for that spat.

Near the end of the hearing, Chan said the driving force behind her line of questioning was to ensure that anyone, regardless of the amount of money they can donate to a nonprofit, gets their say in how parks across San Francisco are shaped.

“San Francisco ranks No. 1 in its park investments in the nation, dollars per capita,” Chan said. “When it comes to equity in our public parks, San Francisco doesn’t even rank top ten. That’s the problem we are talking about here.”