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

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.

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.”