On Wednesday, Sept. 3, 2025, District 4 Supervisor Joel Engardio was found in violation of San Francisco’s open government rules for failing to provide a complete record of his official calendar. The Sunshine Ordinance Task Force referred the matter to the Ethics Commission, which will investigate whether the violation was willful.
The omission of a meeting with Lucas Lux, a Great Highway Park advocate, and Todd David, the political director of the urbanist group Abundant SF, was allegedly due to human error during a calendar migration.
Lux and David were fierce proponents for Proposition K, a ballot measure endorsed by Engardio that permanently closed a two-mile stretch of Upper Great Highway, angering his constituents and prompting a recall campaign, which gathered enough signatures to prompt a Sept. 16 recall election. Supporters of the recall election had alleged that the Sunset District supervisor was “deliberately trying to cover up” a meeting that took place in May 2024.
What Engardio doesn’t seem to understand, however, is that the recall isn’t about closing a road; it’s about betrayal.
Engardio has called the allegations “conspiracy theories,” attacking the recall campaign on social media with meme-laden videos of the “Olde Man Yells at Cloud” scene from The Simpsons and Engardio holding up a sort of “Wanted” poster with faces of the recall team — his constituents, mind you — plastered across it.
The supervisor, who wasn’t present for the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force hearing, deferred to campaign spokesperson Joe Arellano (who also spends his days on social media childishly attacking Sunset residents in favor of Engardio’s ouster), who told the San Francisco Chronicle the omission of the May meeting was human error.
“People make mistakes,” Arrellano said. “Joel is door-knocking and talking to hundreds of voters every week, and they care about the work he’s doing to help the Sunset, not clerical errors.”
Jonathan Goldberg, chief of staff for Engardio, testified at an August Sunshine Task Force meeting that the omission was “a mistake made by an intern who was moving Engardio’s official calendar from Microsoft Word to Google Docs. Task force members expressed skepticism about how one meeting could have been deleted in error from a calendar of 344 meetings, and rightfully so.
In fact, a little more than a year ago, I asked an attorney friend to do a public records request for Engardio’s calendar.
Why didn’t I do it myself? Earlier that month, I had received the runaround from Hank Heckel, the legal compliance officer for the mayor’s office, regarding a Sept. 4, 2024, public records request for communications about the Great Highway involving then Mayor Breed, Lux, and the members of Abundant SF.
What Heckel provided was 11 pages of completely redacted emails that appeared to have been altered with a Sharpie (you can view the files here). The one thing that wasn’t redacted was the first entry, dated June 18, 2024, where Tom Paulino, then liaison to the Board of Supervisors, asks Breed’s policy director Andres Power, “Just want to confirm — do you plan to sign this on directly at elections, or are we introducing it at the BOS [Board of Supervisors] for that path?” to which Power responds, “We are not introducing. Joel is handling.”
On Sept. 22, 2024, my attorney friend sent an official records request to Engardio’s team, which at the time included Chief of Staff Tita Bell, Simon Timony, and Jonathan Goldberg (Engardio’s current chief of staff), that stated, “I am seeking copies of Supervisor Engardio’s calendar from March 1, 2024, to September 15, 2024. I request that those records be produced in native format.” On Oct. 3, 2024, Bell wrote back and copied the Engardio staff group email, “Attached is a copy of the public records responsive to your request, which our office received on September 23, 2024.”
I had forgotten about the request until the controversy swirled and members of Engardio’s team, including Goldberg, began accusing “an intern” of “accidentally” deleting one meeting from a calendar of 344 meetings, so I dug through my files and found Engardio’s calendar.
What struck me was not only the absurdity of one meeting having been deleted, but also that the current chief of staff, Goldberg, was copied on both the request and the response, which included the calendar. (Timony and Bell both left Engardio’s office toward the end of 2024.)
I pulled up Engardio’s 188-page calendar in Adobe Acrobat, and there it was: on Tuesday, May 28, Engardio had a meeting at City Hall with Paulino, Lucas Lux, and Todd David. The entry includes two meetings with the trio running back-to-back from 10:30 a.m. to noon, where the issues discussed were “Night Markets and fee waiver ordinance” and “Great Highway Park.”
Why is this a big deal? Because it shows at the very least an attempt to deceive the public about Engardio’s involvement in shutting down the Upper Great Highway permanently to cars, and more important, that he wanted to hide the meeting with Lux and David because it shows the well-monied political set had more influence over him than his own constituents.
Abundant SF founder and tech executive Zack Rosen said the idea of forming the group crystallized after his wife, Robin Pam, led the Proposition J fight to keep John F. Kennedy Drive car-free. The organization is made up of a network of San Francisco “tech families” that initially intended to spend up to $5 million a year to “radically rewrite the script on housing, transportation, education, and public spaces in the city.”
They consider State Senator Scott Wiener to be their “North Star.” Bringing on David as Abundant SF’s political director was a natural fit, as he is a longtime friend and colleague of Wiener, having served as his political director during Wiener’s 2016 campaign.
A June 2025 survey conducted by EMC Research and commissioned by Neighbors for a Better San Francisco doesn’t bode well for Engardio’s future: Of 300 likely District 4 voters, 55 percent said they supported recalling Engardio from office, while 41 percent of respondents opposed the recall, and 4 percent were undecided. If he is recalled, Engardio has only himself to blame.
When I had coffee with Engardio last December, I asked him why he hadn’t met with constituents about closing the Upper Great Highway. He told me that he did, at a meeting held at the home of Lux, to which I responded, “That was a room full of pro-Prop. K folks.” Engardio looked off in the distance, almost as if that hadn’t dawned on him, then turned back to me and said, “Can this meeting be off the record?”
That caught me off guard because Engardio had requested our get-together, but I honored the request. Nothing he said during the rest of our time together indicated any regret for his decision to back Proposition K — something he’s been clear about in the past and sticks to until this day.
What Engardio doesn’t seem to understand, however, is that the recall isn’t about closing a road; it’s about betrayal.
Proposition K passed with 54.7 percent, but most who voted “yes” live far away from Ocean Beach. In Engardio’s own district, 63.7 percent voted no on K. If Engardio is recalled, it will be because the only people who can vote in the election feel like he threw them under the highway for a bunch of rich, carpetbagger tech executives wanting to ride their $10,000 bicycles on that highway twice a year when it’s sunny. In the words of another wealthy businessman, Ziad K. Abdelnour, “Trust is earned, respect is given, and loyalty is demonstrated. Betrayal of any one of those is to lose all three.”