We have quite a few scooplets in this week’s Three-bat, with plenty happening around Gotham by the Bay and beyond, including another no-bid contract going to the S.F. Bike Coalition amid calls for director to step; a new poll in the hotly contested mayor’s race showing incumbent London Breed behind former mayor Mark Farrell — and District 11 supervisor Ahsha Safaí losing to “someone else.” But first, the FBI raid on the Oakland Hills home of Mayor Sheng Thao may be causing sleepless nights for California Attorney General Rob Bonta and his assemblywoman wife, Mia. Meanwhile, despite a mass shooting at a Juneteenth celebration near Lake Merritt, the mayor remains missing in action.
Following the Lake Merritt mass shooting, Oakland’s embattled mayor remained M.I.A. for five days, before appearing at an impromptu press conference that not even her attorney, Anthony Brass, was aware of until he heard it from the media (hours later, he withdrew as Thao’s counsel). In her short appearance, Thao alternately cried, yelled, spouted conspiracy theories, and defiantly refused to step down. She said a recall trying to oust her was funded by “billionaires from San Francisco and Piedmont who are hell bent on running me out of office” and claimed the FBI wouldn’t have raided her home if she weren’t “poor.” She stopped short of pulling the race card, but she definitely hinted at it. Ironically, after I broke the story of SFPUC head Harlan Kelly partaking in construction work by disgraced expeditor Walter Wong, the FBI raided the Sunset District home Kelly shares with his children and his wife, former San Francisco city administrator Naomi Kelly. Both are Black, and between the two of them were making nearly a million bucks a year, so Thao’s “poor and racially motivated” tin hat theory is just that.
Thao also scream-cried about why the FBI didn’t have a “conversation with her” before raiding her home (likely because they had compelling evidence, or a judge wouldn’t have signed off on the early morning raid) and pondered how the media knew to be at her home when the raid occurred (because neighbors called them, which is how cameras are rolling at most high-profile FBI raids, from former Subway restaurant spokesman Jared Fogle to music mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs).
While the FBI raids on the home of Oakland’s mayor, the offices of California Waste Solutions, and the homes of California Waste Solutions’ owners Andy Duong and his parents, David and Linda Duong, came as a shock to the public, they likely have many local and state officials losing sleep. Why? Because Andy Duong’s Instagram account is resplendent with selfies of him and some of the biggest names in California politics, including Gov. Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta. While many of the photos (like the one with Newsom) appear to be taken at events, the ones of Bonta and his wife, District 18 Assemblywoman Mia Bonta, are far more personal — in fact, Duong, in the role of “public relations agent” for the family business, jetted off to the Philippines with Attorney General Bonta (whom Duong calls “his brother” in one particularly cringy image of him huddled with the Bontas in a limousine). Besides Warriors games, trips to exotic lands, and limo rides, there are thousands more reasons for the Bontas to be smiling: Duong’s father, David, donated $18,200 to Rob Bonta and $4,900 to Mia Bonta. Andy Duong donated more than $6,100 to Rob Bonta and $4,900 to Mia Bonta.
In 2019, the Oakland Public Ethics Commission launched an investigation into allegations that the Duong family illegally laundered campaign contributions to multiple politicians through “straw donors” — those who make campaign contributions and are secretly reimbursed by someone else who is barred from making that same contribution. The report named four councilmembers who accepted some of the purportedly laundered money: Sheng Thao, Rebecca Kaplan, Larry Reid, and Dan Kalb. If Duong’s Instagram is any indication, the Duong family figured their well-funded friends in high places would keep them safe. Duong certainly had no problem flaunting his special relationship with the Bontas. According to media reports, Duong’s political friends also shoveled special treatment to the family business and, it seems, Top Cop Bonta looked the other way.
All of this made the Duong family rich, brazen, and brash. Nowhere is that more evident than in a photo Duong posted long after he knew about the Ethics Commission investigation, on Oct. 23, 2023, of him reposing on a creamy leather sectional, boats bobbing in the harbor behind him, and captioned, “Another Day Another Yacht.”
San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) awarded a nearly $1.5 million three-year, no-bid contract to director Jeffrey Tumlin’s favorite lobbyists the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition for their “Education Fund,” with renewal options totaling two additional years. Tracey Lin, SFMTA’s travel choices manager, said after the contracting team reached out to “about 180 contacts and other organizations,” the Bicycle Coalition was the only nonprofit that submitted a proposal for the funds. “So only one bidder, so only one awardee?” Board Vice Chair Stephanie Cajina asked. “It’s a red flag.” Ya think? Not to mention the San Francisco Ethics Commission fined former S.F. Bicycle Coalition Advocacy Director Janice Li (now president of BART’s board of directors), and former Executive Director Brian Wiedenmeier for being unregistered lobbyists.
Tumlin has been under fire since he took the director’s seat in 2019 with zero experience, and I mean zero: He had never managed a transit system, overseen a major transit project, or managed any public agency. In 2013, he was removed as a transportation consultant for the city of Santa Monica after officials said he made comments online “that Santa Monica politics had been dominated by NIMBYs who used traffic fear as their primary tool for stopping development.” That didn’t stop San Francisco Mayor London Breed from bringing him onboard, boasting Tumlin was “exactly the type of forward-thinking, results-oriented leader that the SFMTA needs.” (According to inside sources, Tumlin was nowhere near the top of her list, but none of the transit directors in a countrywide search were interested in the job.)
Tumlin told the Chronicle’s Phil Matier, ‘My job is to stand up and make the hard decisions, and I’ll be blunt with you: That is why I negotiated a severance package that will make it painful to fire me.’
A petition calling for Tumlin to resign has gathered over 1,300 signatures, citing mismanagement of the Valencia Center Bike Lane, the Geary Boulevard Bus Rapid Transit Lane, a proposed “traffic calming” measure in West Portal, the major disruption on Taraval Street, and other projects. “As residents and businesses of San Francisco, we deserve a transportation agency that prioritizes transparency, accountability, and effective governance. Jeff Tumlin’s continued failed leadership has eroded public trust and confidence in SFMTA’s ability to fulfill its mandate of providing safe, reliable, and sustainable transportation solutions for all,” the petition reads. But unless Breed (or, should Breed lose in November, the next mayor) cans Tumlin, he has no intention of stepping down. “My job is to stand up and make the hard decisions, and I’ll be blunt with you: That is why I negotiated a severance package that will make it painful to fire me,” Tumlin told the San Francisco Chronicle’s Phil Matier when he was hired, and, as Matier pointed out, if there is a parting of the ways, Tumlin’s contract calls for a full year of severance totaling $342,483.
On the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, now horrendously renamed X by owner Elon Musk (who is also known for horrendously naming his many children), a user posted a picture of a shiny new Coleman tent sprawled across a San Francisco sidewalk, forcing pedestrians into the street. Because of an impending lawsuit, tents aren’t being removed. Actually, that’s just an excuse. Tents aren’t being removed because Breed and her handpicked City Attorney David Chiu appear unwilling to cite ADA violations as a perfectly legal reason for removal as they do in other cities. The user also wondered how a homeless person afforded a top-brand tent that can cost anywhere from $125 to $750.
Well, it all comes back to that lawsuit, filed by the Coalition on Homelessness (COH), which contends that the city shouldn’t be allowed to remove tents if the people sleeping in them have nowhere else to go. While the case winds through the courts, COH Executive Director Jennifer Friedenbach continues lying about her organization “not providing tents to the homeless” when their social media posts say otherwise. On April 11, 2022, COH proudly displayed a picture of boxes stacked to the ceiling, stating, “More of the tents have arrived @comebystjames. We ordered 39 2-person tents and 39 3-person tents! Distribution to come soon.” After Friedenbach repeated that COH didn’t distribute tents to the city’s mostly out-of-town drug tourists during a Sept. 2023 debate at Manny’s with community advocate Adam Mesnick, critics also pointed to their regular tent drives. You may know Mesnick, who goes by @bettersoma on X, for making some of the best sandwiches in town at his South of Market shop Deli Board, where he regularly feeds the homeless and offers them respite from the streets while criticizing city leaders and activists for calling what clearly is a drug crisis a “housing issue.”
My predictions on how likely it is that termed-out District 11 Supervisor Ahsha Safaí will be San Francisco’s next mayor have become something of a running joke with my X followers. Late last year, Safaí, along with District 10 Supervisor Shamann Walton and labor organizers, whined about $300 million over five years to fully staff the police department and suggested “a tax” should pay for it. In my November 2023 Gotham by the Bay newsletter, I said Safaí’s attempted poison pill amendment, combined with his floppy-floppy, wishy-washy voting record, reduced his odds of becoming mayor from 6 percent to 3 percent. Well, it turns out I was pretty close. A poll released last week by the Mark Farrell for Mayor campaign shows Safaí at 4 percent, behind “someone else” at 5 percent and “undecided” at 11 percent. Other candidates fare much better: Farrell leads all candidates at 23 percent with Breed at 21 percent, Levi’s heir and Tipping Point founder Daniel Lurie at 20 percent, and termed-out District 3 Supervisor Aaron Peskin at 17 percent. All jokes aside, if Safaí is polling behind “someone else,” it’s probably time for him to drop out of the race.
A new independent poll released this week — the first of the election season — shows Farrell’s lead is consistent with the poll commissioned by the Farrell campaign, which both found him “in the lead and winning the election if held today.” Farrell receives 20 percent of the first-choice vote, Breed 19 percent, and Lurie 17 percent. In a final ranked-choice voting simulation, Farrell leads Breed 55 percent to 45 percent. Three in five voters view Breed unfavorably, two in five view Peskin unfavorably, and 61 percent say the city is on the wrong track.
Our #XoftheWeek goes to recovery advocate (and VOSF contributor) Tom Wolf, who posted that he met with the U.S. attorney for Northern California and got the truth about San Francisco’s fentanyl crisis. A formerly homeless addict himself, Wolf has dedicated his life to helping others find the path he did to turn their lives around. So, what did the U.S. attorney have to say about drugs in the city? “700+ organized drug dealers; 100 kilos of fentanyl seized, local and state statutes protect organized drug dealers who are here illegally; federal statutes don’t offer those same protections.” Wolf also hints at even harsher federal crackdowns in the near future: “It’s clear we need more federal involvement in breaking down the Honduran/Cartel backed drug dealing ring operating in San Francisco. Believe it or not, the Feds have made a dent, and I was made privy to what’s coming next. Trust me when I tell you, it’s going to make a big difference. There’s still hope for San Francisco.”
Until next week
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