SF Supervisors Order Subpoenas for Ex-Leaders of Defunct Parks Nonprofit

San Francisco supervisors are subpoenaing the former leaders of the San Francisco Parks Alliance, days after the prominent nonprofit abruptly shut down amid allegations of gross financial mismanagement.

At a hearing on Thursday, Supervisors Shamann Walton and Jackie Fielder called on three former top officials to testify about why the organization misspent millions of dollars in donor funds.

The Parks Alliance acted as the fundraising arm of the city’s open spaces. The group’s former leaders, including Robert Ogilvie, the organization’s CEO until just days ago, his predecessor, Drew Becher, and former treasurer, Rick Hutchinson, will be required to appear before the committee under penalty of perjury, and could be held in contempt if they refuse to comply.

Walton lambasted the organization for its fiscal mismanagement and lack of transparency, which has left dozens of partner organizations scrambling for funding alternatives.

“The harm to neighborhood groups across San Francisco cannot be overstated,” said Walton, a member of the Government Audit & Oversight Committee. “Many of these groups are volunteer-run. They did nothing wrong. Their funds were held in a trust, and now those funds may be gone.”

The organization’s implosion comes as its leaders last month admitted to misspending at least $3.8 million in restricted funds in order to cover its operating costs, prompting the city to launch civil and criminal investigations of the group and the mayor to suspend its city funding.

For more than 50 years, the Parks Alliance was a critical player in supporting San Francisco’s many open-space projects and serving as a fiscal sponsor for more than 80 community organizations across the city that don’t have their own tax-exempt status and use the nonprofit as a bank to hold and distribute their funds.

“We do not know the Parks Alliance’s full assets at this time, but we do know they owe the city and many nonprofits a lot of money,” Walton said. “We are here to demand answers. This is about public trust, accountability and the real consequences of failed oversight.”

In a leaked email last month sent to a Parks Alliance donor and obtained by the San Francisco Chronicle, the Alliance’s board chair, Louise Mozingo, admitted to improperly spending those restricted funds and likened the organization’s financial situation to “a dumpster fire.”

In the email, Mozingo said the board was preparing for the possibility of shutting down the organization and had already contacted a firm specializing in “nonprofit liquidation.” She also acknowledged that the board was “very conscious” that doing so would “substantially hurt many small businesses and organizations that will realize a significant loss, causing real hardship in already uncertain times,” according to the Chronicle.

The Parks Alliance did not respond to KQED’s request for comment.

The downfall of the Alliance, which Supervisor Jackie Fielder described to KQED as “a magnet and a who’s who in the city for very powerful people,” follows a series of scandals involving multiple city-funded nonprofits accused of misusing city funds or unfairly awarding grants based on personal connections. Last year, the executive director of the now-defunct nonprofit SF SAFE was arrested for allegedly stealing and misusing more than $700,000 in public funds and donations.

At Thursday’s hearing, Fielder also directed the city’s Budget and Legislative Analyst to audit the city’s Recreation and Parks Department, which has worked closely with the Alliance on various open-space projects. The audit, she said, should include a review of the department’s current projects and its financial ties to the nonprofit.

“With all of the mistrust in city government from San Franciscans, I think it’s all the more important for the Recreation and Parks Department to undertake this audit as questions surround their affiliated nonprofits,” Fielder told KQED.

Dozens of representatives of groups impacted by the Alliance’s closure also spoke at Thursday’s hearing, urging supervisors to hold the defunct nonprofit’s leaders accountable and “solve this mess.”

“There are a lot of community projects in every single district of the city, and each of the supervisors here knows well how important these projects are to the fabric of the neighborhood,” said Rosaura Valle, who helps lead the Detroit Steps Project in the city’s Sunnyside neighborhood, an initiative funded largely by small donations from local residents. ​​”Volunteers commit their own personal time, skills and passion to projects that benefit the community and the city at no cost to the city. And now we’re stripped of our assets.”

Ildiko Polony, the executive director of conservation group Sutro Stewards, one of the few fiscally sponsored groups that had paid employees, said her entire staff, who the Alliance technically employed, received layoff notices on Monday.

“Now I’m in a position of scrambling, trying to figure out what to do,” she said.

After reports of the Parks Alliance’s financial mismanagement began emerging in late April, Polony formed a coalition of fiscally sponsored groups, in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to keep the Alliance afloat. Now its members, who held a press event on the steps of City Hall ahead of Thursday’s hearing, are calling on the city to make them whole.

The coalition estimates that close to $2 million of its donations were depleted by the Alliance, and is now demanding city leaders compensate the groups, so they can reimburse their vendors, rehire staff and continue projects. It also calls on the city to maintain the function of Alliance’s fiscal sponsorship program.

“[It] has allowed for community partners, for neighbors to get together to make the change that they want to see happen in their neighborhoods,” Polony said. “There is little that is as empowering to a community than being able to come together and envision together what you wanna see happen in your community and then work to make that happen.

“So the fiscal sponsorship program that SFPA provided, that function needs to continue.”