It was an Election Day bombshell no political insider saw coming.
A day before the city’s last voters cast their ballots in person, the San Francisco Ethics Commission announced that mayoral candidate Mark Farrell would pay the largest settlement in city history, $108,000, for campaign misdeeds.
Politicians, consultants, journalists, and concerned citizens were stunned that the commission did its job when it actually mattered.
The city’s elections watchdog was once notorious for finishing investigations years after anybody would care, said Joe Arellano, a spokesperson for Mayor London Breed’s reelection campaign. No one on the team thought Farrell would face consequences before the election.
“All of us were caught by surprise,” Arellano said.
The Standard spoke to Ethics Commission staff members, combed through data, and watched public meetings to sniff out the agency’s new recipe for success.
It amounts to more money and more staffers. Over the past several election cycles, the commission hired more enforcement staff to handle higher caseloads and smoothed communication with all parties to eliminate roadblocks, according to Director of Enforcement Olabisi Matthews, who leads the team tasked with digging into electoral wrongdoing.
Matthews was raised in Lagos, Nigeria, where government corruption is a fact of life. Police corruption is rampant enough in Nigeria to draw the attention of United Nations investigators.
Matthews later moved to San Francisco. When she saw an opening at the Ethics Commission, she found motivation in its mission.
“The excitement coming here was how there are laws and systems to hold people accountable,” Matthews said. “I can’t fix where I grew up, but this is home for me, and I can fix it for my children and the future.”
Public data show that the commission’s annual caseload has risen from about 25 to 50 since 2021. Despite the increase, the agency wrapped up investigations faster. By 2023, it eliminated a longstanding backlog.
It now takes three months to dismiss or open a case, Matthews said. Contrast that with the commission‘s fining Breed $22,000 in August 2021 for a range of issues that first emerged in early 2020 — more than a year from allegation to fine.
It took investment from the city to pick up the pace. In 2022, the mayor’s budget allowed the commission to double the number of investigators from three to six, costing the city $560,000 annually.
Two of the new investigators were attorneys. Before, a single investigator would take a case from start to finish, then file a case themselves. Now an investigator gathers evidence, and an attorney files the case.
Before attorneys joined the team, investigators were overly cautious, Matthews said. They gathered far more evidence than they needed, slowing the process.
“When you have attorneys on the team with that legal training, they have little hesitation to go toe-to-toe against opposing counsel,” Matthews said. “We’ve seen that.”
The work toward Farrell’s landmark settlement was copious. Enforcement staff subpoenaed Farrell’s team, then combed through more than 1,500 pages of evidence, testimony, and public documents. The commission alleged that Farrell double-dipped, taking $93,000 in contributions from a PAC in his name supporting Proposition D, a ballot measure to cut city commissions, and improperly giving them to his own campaign.
When Farrell’s settlement was announced, his allies publicly complained that the case was sped up. Farrell finished the mayoral race far behind three other major candidates.
Jim Ross, a consultant with experience in San Francisco elections, said the commission’s past sluggishness led some campaigns to strategically skirt the law. Consequences would come too late to change electoral outcomes.
“This is the first time the Ethics Commission, in a big campaign in a big race in big stakes, issued a fine and ruling that influenced an election,” Ross said. “It’s a shot across the bow to every San Francisco campaign moving forward.”
But funding to maintain the newly muscular commission isn’t a sure thing.
At a June budget hearing, Ethics Commission Executive Director Patrick Ford asked the Board of Supervisors to protect his department’s cash flow and let him upgrade certain investigator positions to ensure they would be held by qualified attorneys.
With an expanded staff, “we’ve been able to completely eliminate our backlog,” Ford said.
Supervisor Connie Chan, the budget chair, said at the budget hearing she believed in the commission’s importance but had to balance the needs of various city departments at a time of fiscal uncertainty.
“We’re going to make some really tough choices,” Chan said of the coming year. “I think that we’re facing an unprecedented budget deficit.”
The Ethics Commission kept its enforcement staff. But the positions weren’t upgraded. If one of the enforcement attorneys leaves, there’s no guarantee the next hire will have legal training.
Mayor-elect Daniel Lurie will navigate his first-ever city budget amid a projected $800 million deficit. Matthews hopes elected officials see what the city’s watchdogs can do when they have the necessary resources.
“I believe the public is asking for it,” Matthews said. “They’re asking for the Ethics Commission to do more. We want to do more. We’ve shown we can do more if given the opportunity.”