If you thought it was bad when an SF City Hall director got fired over using city money to pay for a $10,000 Martha’s Vineyard house rental, wait ‘til you hear that she also got $19,000 of your tax dollars to send her kid to UCLA grad school.
It has not been a good day for former SF Mayor London Breed’s legacy. Early Thursday afternoon, we learned that a Breed-era City Hall department head was placed on leave for allegedly taking an unreported $10,000 under the table from a political action committee to whom she steered city contacts. Now, just hours later, City Attorney David Chiu has announced disciplinary actions because a different Breed-era City Hall department head got $19,000 in city money for her son’s UCLA grad school tuition, as the Chronicle reports.
The department head whose son got that tuition money was former Human Rights Commission executive director Sheryl Davis, who was notoriously fired in mid-September over using $10,000 in city money for a Martha’s Vineyard house rental. In this case, Chiu says that a scandal-tainted nonprofit that got $27 million in city grants, Collective Impact, gave $19,000 of that in scholarship money to Davis’s son, first-class airfare for Davis to promote her book and podcast, plus another $5,000 for Oakland soul singer Goapele to perform at Davis’s book launch party.
Oh, and Davis was Collective Impact’s executive director before taking the Human Rights Commission job.
“Collective Impact has received more than $27 million in City grants since 2021 to provide support to our City’s most vulnerable,” Chiu said in an official announcement. “Our communities deserve these resources, and we cannot allow public monies to be diverted for personal benefit and self-promotion. All City employees have a responsibility to ensure that public funding is used as intended to deliver high-quality public services.”
Right before Davis was fired, the SF Standard broke the news that Davis lived with Collective Impact executive director James Spingola. The two denied having any romantic relationship, but the Standard reported at the time that they were “both registered to vote at the same home address in spring 2021,” and that “the pair also currently co-own a 2008 Mini Cooper, which is registered to that same address.”
The Chronicle reached Spingola, who said that Davis’s son had simply applied for the nonprofit’s college financial assistance “like everyone else,” and received no preferential treatment.
Chiu has temporarily suspended Collective Impact from bidding on or receiving any city grants, and is moving to debar them from such for the next five years.
Image: Sheryl Evans Davis via Facebook
