On the campaign trail, Daniel Lurie vowed to vanquish City Hall corruption, promising to fully fund the city’s governance watchdog, the Ethics Commission.
Now, as mayor, Lurie just blew a gaping hole in the department’s budget, sparking an outcry from its leader.
“We need to spend money on the front end, before they become big problems,” said Patrick Ford, executive director of the Ethics Commission. “In that sense, an investment in ethics is a cost saver in the long run. Our department is tiny. And it is money well spent.”
The cuts may include axing the roles of four staffers in the 28-person department who identify loopholes in ethics rules and train city officials on the law. They are crucial to curbing corruption before it takes hold, Ford said.
In his proposed budget, released Friday, Lurie called for belt-tightening across city departments as part of an effort to close a $782 million budget shortfall. The Public Health Department, Office of Economic and Workforce Development, and Public Works, among others, are earmarked for budget cuts. Public safety agencies — the San Francisco Police Department, Sheriff’s Department, district attorney’s office, and public defender’s office — were mostly preserved.
Lurie’s budget requires approval by the Board of Supervisors; the deadline for reaching a deal is July 1. Supervisor Jackie Fielder said a robust Ethics Commission is key as Lurie steps up reliance on wealthy donors to fund city efforts around homelessness and the drug crisis.
“This drastic budget reduction to the commission severely undermines the city’s ability to investigate misconduct, enforce transparency, and hold public officials accountable,” Fielder said in a statement. “As the city increasingly turns to wealthy individuals and foundations to fill budget gaps, the need for robust oversight and accountability has never been more urgent.”
The Ethics Commission’s workforce expanded from 21 to 28 in the wake of a major scandal in 2020, in which former Public Works director Mohammed Nuru was found guilty of taking bribes from contractors, including a Rolex watch and a tractor.
More department heads were implicated as the scandal unfolded, leading then-Mayor London Breed to hire more Ethics Commission staffers to train officials in good governance — and to catch them when they ran afoul of the law.
In 2023, she tried to cut the commission’s budget, a move Lurie called out last year on the campaign trail.
“While the current mayor attempted to defund the Ethics Commission, I commit to fully funding it,” Lurie said in August.
Soon after, Lurie’s campaign sent out a press release defining “fully funding” — essentially arguing that he meant he would fund certain divisions within the Ethics Commission, not the department as a whole.
“Mayor Lurie committed to fully funding the Ethics Commission by ensuring that the Enforcement and Audit Divisions had the staff and resources necessary to conduct investigations and audits,” the mayor’s spokesperson, Charles Lutvak, said Monday, citing the August press release. “Even facing an historic $800 million budget deficit, that’s exactly what this budget does.”
The four positions Lurie has proposed to eliminate — three of which are layoffs — are especially impactful considering the Ethics Commission’s tiny size relative to other city agencies, Ford argues. An analysis of staffing levels from the mayor’s proposed budget shows that the Ethics Commission may face a 14% cut to its workforce budget.
That’s the fourth-largest cut out of 53 city departments; by comparison, Recreation and Parks, which is budgeted for nearly 1,000 workers, faces a 0.3% cut to its staffing budget. Not all proposed reductions are to salaries and workers; some city departments may see steep reductions in grants and contracts.
One Ethics Commission position flagged for elimination is a policy analyst, who updates the city’s ethics laws and researches Board of Supervisors legislation in an effort to tighten the rules. Two other positions, senior program administrators, educate the roughly 6,000 city staffers who have to comply with financial disclosure requirements.
“If we don’t have the staff to create trainings and answer questions, you’re going to see people not fully understanding how to follow ethics rules, which can, over time, snowball into the kinds of major issues we’ve seen in recent years,” Ford said.
Lurie’s budget includes other funding that can tackle bad governance, including an inspector general, a position created via ballot measure last year that is tasked with rooting out government fraud.
When a Standard reporter asked Lurie about Ethics Commission cuts during a press conference Friday, the mayor deferred to his staff but added that he is “fully focused on ethics with this budget.”