Pass the tequila and the Cheetos
As I wrote in March 2020, Harlan Kelly stood by his beleaguered chief strategy officer and assistant general manager of external affairs, Juliet Ellis in 2014, despite pending investigations by the San Francisco district attorney, the city’s Ethics Commission, and the state Fair Political Practices Commission about her role in awarding a $200,000 no-bid contract to Green for All, a nonprofit where she served as a paid board member and additionally received $2,000 per month as the organization’s acting executive director.
Kelly said Ellis’s “critical expertise” trumped those pesky ethics issues — but dig a little deeper into that relationship (and some public records made available by an anonymous SFPUC source) and you’ll see Kelly and Ellis took a three-day trip to Chicago together shortly after those scathing reports. In fact, Kelly and Ellis took 44 trips together at a cost of over $130,482 between April 2013 and December 2018, an average of eight trips 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’s 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 on some of the pair’s requests for reimbursement, including why they continually choose the most expensive accommodations.
In July 2020, three months after my column 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, back to 2005. The U.S. attorney’s office, then led by David Anderson, also ordered the agency to produce any commission audits from 2010 to the present related to those trips. In December 2020, Ellis resigned, but unlike her SFPUC Community Benefits coconspirators Kelly and Dwayne Jones, she has thus far escaped unscathed, likely due to the fact Anderson stepped down from his post in 2021 (standard protocol with an administration change in Washington). Unfortunately, since Anderson’s departure, any further investigation into the Community Benefits scheme — including mastermind Ellis — has come to a standstill.
Still, City Attorney David Chiu has a clear path to deny Kelly’s pension — his affair with a subordinate is 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. I mean, think about Andy Byron, the CEO of Astronomer Inc., who was forced to resign following a viral video from a Coldplay concert where he was captured on the “kiss cam” embracing an employee. Between his convictions for fraud and CheetoGate, it’s time for Kelly to be Coldplayed.
