By Patrick Monette-Shaw

July 13, 2008

Budget and Finance Committee
The Honorable Jake McGoldrick, Chair
The Honorable Ross Mirkarimi
The Honorable Chris Daly
The Honorable Sean Elsbernd
The Honorable Carmen Chu
San Francisco Board of Supervisors
City Hall
1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place
San Francisco, CA  94102

In a report just released by San Francisco’s Civil Grand Jury, “Accountability in San Francisco Government,” a footnote reveals that Supervisor Tom Ammiano noted in October 2007 that “There doesn’t really seem to have been anyone in charge of the store.”

As a candidate to replace termed-out Assemblyman Mark Leno, Ammiano’s admission is startling, given that voters have been paying Ammiano’s City Supervisor salary for over 12 years, expecting he is partly responsible for being in charge of the store and paying attention to the City’s finances.

Since Gavin Newsom took office as Mayor in 2004, fully one-third of the increase in the City’s budget from $5.1 billion to $6.5 billion can be traced directly to the $543.9 million increase paid to City employees earning more than $100,000 annually, while City Supervisors have turned a blind eye toward minding the store and keeping an eye on the cash register.

Last March, the San Francisco Daily (now known as the Daily Post) broke a story that 8,180 City employees who are paid more than $100,000 annually are costing San Francisco over $1 billion, or more than half of the total $2.3 billion the City budgets for wages and salaries.

In 2003, I placed a public records request for salaries greater than $90,000, which salaries Supervisor Ammiano claimed at the time were a huge problem.  Now four years later, salaries over $100,000 are an even greater problem, given the three-quarters of a billion dollar increase, and the increase of 5,262 employees now earning six-figure incomes.

Back in 2003, Supervisor Ammiano (bless the bleeding heart on his sleeve) made great noise about the number of City employees earning more than $90,000 annually, although he made no substantive effort to do anything about reducing their drain on the City’s budget at the time.  All eleven members of the Board of Supervisors are now reported on the City’s salary database available on the Internet to be earning $98,660, at a combined cost to taxpayers of $1.08 million annually, without including their fringe benefits valued at 30 percent of base salary.

Now four years after Ammiano’s initial concern but gross inaction, we have nearly three times more City employees earning more than $100,000.  His bleeding heart concern was not translated into meaningful action.  Ammiano and the Board of Supervisors have done next to nothing to reduce this wasteful spending, or to take serious aim at reducing the amount of City fat, each time you have passed annual salary ordinance’s and the City’s budgets, as if you weren’t in a position to have been minding the store.

For his part, sitting Supervisor Sean Elsbernd authored Board of Supervisors Resolution 474-07 in August 2007 that is documented in a second Civil Grand Jury report released in June 2008, “Fits and Starts: The Response of San Francisco Government to Past Civil Grand Jury Recommendations.”  Elsbernd’s Resolution 474-07 “resolved” that the Board of Supervisors should review the status of Civil Grand Jury recommendations as part of annual budget processes, and stipulated that the Budget and Finance Committee on which he sits should hold hearings on the Mayor’s and Controller’s implementation of Grand Jury recommendations.  None of this has happened, as Supervisor must surely know, and the full Board of Supervisors is about to adopt the Fiscal Year 2008–2009 budget in the absence of such oversight.

The attached testimony provides you with an analysis of where “low-hanging fruit” management fat might be trimmed.  To that end, you should delay considering passing the City budget for Fiscal Year 2008– 2009 until such time as the Budget and Finance Committee gets serious about cutting the low-hanging fruit management fat from next year’s City budget, since Supervisors Peskin and Ammiano, and Mayor Newsom, have done precious little to reduce the low-hanging fruit themselves, as documented in the attached testimony.

Patrick Monette-Shaw