SF Political Moderate Group Gets Hefty Fine for Boudin Recall Campaign Finance Violations

A big-spending political action committee (PAC) known as Neighbors for a Better San Francisco has been described by Mission Local as the “800-pound gorilla of SF politics,” in an analysis this past April that found the group had poured about $9 million into moderate SF political campaigns since 2020. (Though as we’ve reported, Neighbors for a Better San Francisco is actually based in San Rafael.) That total makes them by far the largest political donor in town, and notably, they put up more than half of the money that went into the Recall Chesa Boudin campaign. They also famously paid now-DA Brooke Jankins at least $150,000 for work she described at the time as “volunteer” work for the recall campaign.

We are now learning that they actually paid Jenkins $175,770 for that “volunteer” work. And we learn this as the Chronicle reports that the SF Ethics Commission is set to fine Neighbors for a Better San Francisco about $54,000 for failing to disclose payments made to a PR firm called Riff City Strategies, who were effectively coordinating Jenkins’s public interviews where she trashed Boudin in the press after quitting her job at his office.

The Chronicle’s July 2022 Heather Knight profile of Jenkins, which launched Jenkins’s political career, figures large in the Ethics Commission’s investigation. The full Ethics Commission ruling notes that Riff City Strategies and Neighbors for a Better SF “in part arranged these interviews,” “drafted talking points for Jenkins,” and “conducted interview prep sessions with Jenkins.” So in retrospect, it sure seems like the Chronicle and many in the local media got played like a banjo at the Bluegrass Festival when doing these Jenkins interviews coordinated by a paid PR firm.

And Riff City Strategies was certainly paid well. The firm did an odd mix of recall campaign political work and promotional work for SF cannabis dispensaries. And in the Recall Boudin campaign, the Ethics Commission document says Riff City was paid $7,000 a month prior to October 2021, which was jacked up to $15,000 a month, and eventually to $20,000 a month. The total amount of payments that were not properly reported added up to just over $100,000.




https://sfist.com/2024/08/06/sf-political-moderate-group-gets-hefty-fine-for-boudin-recall-campaign-finance-violations/