“There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.”
— Danish theologian, philosopher, poet, and social critic Søren Kierkegaard
Before we get started, I’d like to send a little finger wag (as in the tsk-tsk kind) to San Francisco Chronicle reporters Rachel Swan, Sarah Ravani, and Megan Cassidy, who took my July 4 story on the Rob Bonta money trail, which you can find here at The Voice of San Francisco, for their Sept. 25 article. Not only does the text not credit me for breaking the story, they outright appropriated it, except for a little zhuzh (credit to the fabulous Carson Kressley who made that word famous on Queer Eye), like adding a quote from an aide here and there. It’s a sad statement on mainstream media that it took three reporters to get a three-month-old story from one independent journalist. …
For years I’ve been saying the feds should look into Young Community Developers (YCD), a favorite nonprofit of Harlan Kelly and Juliet Ellis and their pay-to-play community benefits scheme at the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission with deep ties to former executive directors Shamann Walton and his mentor, former executive director Dwayne Jones. I wrote in July 2020, “Not only was Dwayne Jones the executive director from 1998 to 2003, but Shamann Walton held the six-figure position from 2010 until he joined the Board of Supervisors in January 2019. During Walton’s tenure, AECOM-Parsons wrote $169,500 worth of checks to Young Community Developers. Of course, Walton was endorsed by Harlan Kelly (surely it can’t hurt to have a close friend in the District 10 supervisor’s seat where most of those community benefit dollars are doled out).” Since then, Kelly has gone to prison, Ellis was subpoenaed and stepped down, but remains unscathed (so far, or perhaps she’s talking), and Jones is facing 59 counts of fraud.
Last week I delved into another strange YCD tale, in which Walton used his close ties to mega-developer Lennar. As YCD executive director in 2014, just a few months before a trust indenture was issued for more than $20 million in bonds (and a $10 million “subsidy” from Lennar) for Pacific Pointe at the Shipyard, 60 permanently affordable family homes in Bayview-Hunters Point, Walton created an LLC called YCD MGP I, listing himself as the sole agent and signing the document as “President of Young Community Developers, which is the sole member and manager of YCD MGP I, LLC.” No one at City Hall blinked an eye when Walton and YCD got a no-bid deal as the managing general partner on the project (despite zero experience in the field).
Walton officiated Leattutufu’s lavish wedding to his aide and longtime associate Percy Burch. In his opening comments, he makes light of the fact they met at YCD while he was the executive director, and they were boss and subordinate.
It turns out YCD’s connections to the scandal-plagued Dream Keeper Initiative (DKI), cosponsored by Walton and Mayor London Breed, runs just as deep. When I first wrote about DKI in November 2023, I noted that YCD got an initial grant of nearly $4 million. Well, DKI also got a former YCD employee as the initiative’s director in Dr. Saidah Leatutufu-Burch. On June 19, 2021, Walton officiated the lavish wedding of Leattutufu to his aide and longtime associate Percy Burch at Willow Heights Mansion. In his opening comments (at the 6:18 minute mark in the video) Walton makes light of the fact they met at YCD while Walton was the executive director, and they were his employees. “Somebody was a subordinate, somebody was a boss,” Walton says about the couple, adding “they both swear up and down the relationship did not take place until one person was not at YCD anymore.” His intro elicited giggles from Walton, the audience, and the wedding party. I assume Leatutufu was the boss, because her now-husband moved on to a job in Walton’s office after he was elected District 10 supervisor.
In various bios, Leatutufu-Burch sometimes says she grew up in North Beach, while other times in public housing in the Bayview. Whatever the case, someone had big bucks for that wedding — according to Bridespedia, the basic cost for a wedding at Willow Heights Mansion is between $21,000 and $32,000 for up to 100 guests. In 2023, Leatutufu-Burch raked in $225,780 in salary and benefits, while her husband pulled in a total of $185,614. That doesn’t count the perks of the elaborate trips she probably took him on in her role as second-in-command at DKI.
On Sept. 13, Sheryl Davis, head of the Human Rights Commission, where she also ran DKI, resigned, but just two days prior, on Sept. 11, Davis and Burch presided over the Dreaming Forward “fireside chat” and reception at the luxury five-star Riggs Hotel in Washington, D.C. The event was hosted by the San Francisco Human Rights Commission, as was a seminar held from 11 a.m. to noon that same day called “Dreaming Forward: Investing in Black Culture to Advance Academic Excellence,” featuring Davis and Burch. The pair also attended events on Martha’s Vineyard this past August as well as in August 2023. …
One thing I learned covering elections for over a decade at the Marina Times newspaper is to never go all in on a candidate too early in the race. Case in point: so-called moderate darling Bilal Mahmood, whom various organizations have been promoting as a replacement for incumbent socialist supervisor Dean Preston in District 5 (my district for three decades), in some cases since 2020. After receiving endorsements from the San Francisco Democratic Party, Grow SF, Together SF Action, and SF YIMBY (all considered moderate groups looking to bring safety and sanity back to San Francisco), Mahmood did the politically unthinkable: He refused to endorse popular incumbent District Attorney Brooke Jenkins (despite her only competitor being a public defender turned deputy district attorney under Chesa Boudin’s regime whom Jenkins fired, along with a dozen others, when she took office).
Next, Mahmood came out against Proposition 36, overwhelmingly supported by Californians, with 71 percent saying they’ll vote yes. As Grow SF points out in their voter guide, “Prop 36 will increase penalties for repeat theft and certain drug offenses, like fentanyl dealing, by rolling back parts of Prop 47, which reduced penalties for the same crimes. This would allow prosecutors to hold repeat offenders accountable and disrupt the deadly fentanyl trade.” Grow SF has endorsed Yes on 36 — awkward, because their sole-endorsed candidate for District 5, Mahmood, is against it just like incumbent Preston. With redistricting, the supervisor for District 5 now represents the Tenderloin neighborhood, which sees the majority of the city’s fentanyl dealing and thousands of overdose deaths, so moderates are caught between a rock and a hard place, including San Francisco’s Democratic Party (which also sole endorsed Mahmood). Do they walk back their endorsements of Mahmood, add second and third choices to what ultimately is a ranked-choice race, or accept the fact they’ve chosen a progressive in moderates’ clothing? Sometimes the truth really does lie in the middle.
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Updated: 4:51 p.m., Sept. 26, 2024