Political Junkie

Mabel Teng's been around in local politics for almost 15 years, first as a trustee of City College, then as a supervisor for District 7. While she started out as a progressive, she later grew more conservative, then ran for board president and lost to Ammiano. She then lost her supervisor seat to Tony Hall in 2000, in the attempted voter-cleanout of the Willie Brown cronies. Teng, though, came roaring back to life in 2002 when she was elected the City assessor-recorder, defeating Willie Brown's protege Doris Ward, who had lost the city millions of dollars and became the subject of an FBI probe. And who could forget Teng's hilarious (scroll down in the link) Punk-ing of the Bay Guardian in that election cycle when she told their board that every single vote she had previously cast in favor of Willie Brown was wrong and that she had been "caught up in a web" of machine power at the time? Ha! Anyways, in the last year, Teng has been most prominent in the news as the city official who signed all the same-sex marriage certificates, since all marriage licenses are required to go through the City Recorder's Office, and who has vowed to do everything she can to make those marriages legal.

So what's up with the nepotism? So the San Francisco Civil Service Commission has started an investigation into the hiring practices in the assessor-recorder's offices. Apparently Teng hired her nephew and 16 of her political supporters for the office while simultaneously firing 19 other workers. Of all Teng's new hires, about half contributed in some way to her campaign. City law prohibits the hiring of relatives by politicians, and also prohibits the hiring of your backers as a reward for their support. Others claim that Teng is also illegally reducing property assessment values (which lowers your tax burden) for her supporters as well, and violating a host of union and civil service hiring regulations by hiring people with no assessing experience for the office. Fired employees also claim that Teng managed to classify her friends' positions as "temporary exempt," so they didn't have to take civil service exams. "This is government at its worst," says one woman, who was fired but was permitted to stay on in a temporary capacity as a document filer.

Teng claims she had no involvement in any of the hiring decisions, and left those matters to one of her deputy assessors. Teng also claimed that she had no idea she wasn't allowed to hire relatives and said she'd look into that too. Her nephew, she says, took a pay cut to work for her, and now earns around $40K assessing boats. The salaries of her pals who now work in the office range from around $37,000 to $123,000, in positions such as assistant assessor, director of public relations, and deputy assessor-recorder.

The investigation will present a preliminary report 30 days from now, and issue a final report 30 days after that.