Sources tell The Voice that disgraced former San Francisco Public Utilities Commission General Manager, Harlan Kelly Jr., is out of prison and attended services at Third Baptist Church on Sunday, Dec. 27.
The church, once run by the flamboyant Rev. Amos C. Brown, is located at 1399 McAllister Street in San Francisco’s Western Addition, far from Kelly’s home on 11th Ave. in the Inner Sunset. Perhaps he was praying for the forgiveness of the San Franciscans he defrauded… just kidding. If Kelly was praying, it was for the courts to overturn his felony convictions.
It isn’t the first time The Voice has heard about a Kelly sighting — another source revealed he dined “with a former mayor” about a month ago. I assume that would be Willie Brown since Kelly and London Breed are estranged. Kelly is married to former San Francisco City Administrator Naomi Kelly; both are Willie Brown protégés, appointed to their positions by the late Mayor Ed Lee as a favor to Brown.
As if it’s not bad enough that Kelly thinks he deserves his pension, he is now represented by Steven Kalar, a court-appointed (a.k.a. taxpayer-funded) attorney, after Kelly testified “he could no longer afford criminal defense attorney Brian Getz,” who represented him in his original trial and submitted his appeal.
Last August, before a panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, Kalar returned to the argument Kelly’s team raised in an appeal lodged right after he was indicted. In a brief to the court, Kalar wrote:
In 2021, Kelly — a Black man — was indicted by a federal grand jury. Not a single Black person sat on this grand jury. This fact is not surprising, because the venire [jury pool] from which that grand jury was constituted suffered from dramatic underrepresentation of Black citizens.
That’s right, Kelly is pulling the race card. That, of course, has nothing to do with his indictment, or the real reason Kelly wants his conviction overturned: He wants his $22,000 monthly pension. Kelly’s annual salary was $472,737, and his wife, former city administrator Naomi Kelly (who stepped down after her husband’s arrest), earned $371,822 in salary and benefits. That’s a mind-blowing combined total of $844,559.
In July 2020, I wrote a column called “Friends with Community Benefits” for the Marina Times about corruption within the SFPUC related to a pay-to-play scheme called the Community Benefits Program, where joint venture boards, made up of firms bidding on large contracts, are “encouraged” to donate to favored nonprofits that benefit cronies in and around the SFPUC.
My eight-month investigation also revealed an illicit arrangement between Kelly and disgraced contractor and permit expediter Walter Wong. It’s no secret that Wong did favors for a lot of city bigshots, which included Kelly and his wife, Naomi Kelly.
Numerous workers inside the SFPUC told me not only did Wong do work for the power couple, but “Harlan bragged about it openly.” I discovered that the Kellys pulled three permits on their 11th Avenue home in San Francisco between 2011 and 2014.
The authorized agent on each of those permits was Best Design Construction. A 2010 court case, W. Wong Construction Co., Inc. v. Watt, mentions that Wong introduced the Watts to “Charles Ng of Best Design.” Wong even used Ng’s plans to apply for a building permit on their behalf.
The FBI raided Kelly’s home in November 2020. The U.S. Attorney’s Office charged him in an alleged long-running bribery scheme where Wong gifted home repair work to Kelly at a heavy discount, from installing iron handrails in his home to fixing water damage and even installing wine cellar shelving in his basement — a room sources tell me contained incriminating evidence along with wine.
“I owe you big time!!!” Kelly wrote to Wong after the 2013 installation of that locked cellar. Wong also treated Kelly’s family during a 2016 vacation in China, including a trip to a zoo, sightseeing tours, a meal between Wong and Kelly that cost over $600, and comped stays at five-star hotels. Kelly rewarded Wong on key projects he had control over.
In 2023, Kelly chose a jury trial, and after less than two days of deliberation, the jury convicted Kelly on six of eight counts. He was sentenced to four years in prison and ordered to pay a $10,000 fine. In addition to the prison term and the fine, U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg also imposed a three-year period of supervised release to begin after his prison term, which Kelly was ordered to begin on June 19, 2024.
During the sentencing, Judge Seeborg said that Kelly “betrayed the public trust and made a mockery of his oath to serve the community in his high public office.”
Kelly served his term at the federal correctional institution at Leavenworth, Kan., with his release set for July of 2026. The four-year sentence was light considering the amount of fraud and corruption Kelly perpetrated on SFPUC ratepayers, and it appears he only served about a year and a half of that light sentence.
Cheetos and Tequila
Kelly’s betrayal extended beyond his role as head of the SFPUC to his wife, Naomi. As I wrote in March 2020, he had a long-running romantic relationship with Juliet Ellis, the SFPUC chief strategy officer and assistant general manager of external affairs.
Kelly and Ellis took 44 trips together at a cost of over $130,482 between April 2013 and December 2018, an average of eight visits together per year with an average annual price tag of nearly $24,000, billed to SFPUC ratepayers.
On some of those trips, they brazenly (or foolishly) rented only one room, on others, adjoining rooms. There was a trip to Cancun, a room service bill for tequila and Cheetos, and an apparent affinity for the most expensive hotels. In emails, the SFPUC financial department asks for justification for some of the pair’s reimbursement requests, including why they repeatedly choose the most expensive accommodations.
In July 2020, three months after my article about their ratepayer-funded liaisons, federal officials obtained personnel files for the couple, along with complete records related to any trips they took, including expense reports and reimbursement records, dating back to 2005. The U.S. attorney’s office also ordered the agency to produce any commission audits from 2010 to the present related to those trips. In December 2020, Ellis resigned.
As Kelly once again rips off taxpayers, utilizing a court-appointed attorney while chilling in a six-bedroom, six-bathroom, 4,772 square foot house worth nearly $2.6 million after serving less than 40 percent of his prison term, City Attorney David Chiu has multiple reasons to deny Kelly’s pension.
Not only was he convicted by a jury on six of eight fraud counts, but his affair with a subordinate is also strictly forbidden under the City Charter. Kelly’s extramarital dalliance with Ellis went on for years, resulting in the misuse of SFPUC ratepayer funds for their trysts.
San Francisco is one of the most lenient cities in America when it comes to breaking the law — it’s time to stop coddling criminals, including the white-collar ones.