The same recall fever that Joel Engardio rode into office could still boot him out, as the recallers say they’re “on track” to make the ballot. But the recall’s main organizer just quit, and Engardio has big donations from local tech founders and CEOs.

We are now nine days away from the signature-gathering deadline for the Recall Supervisor Joel Engardio effort, a recall campaign motivated entirely by animus over Engardio’s efforts to make the Great Highway car-free. And we would not be the first to point out the irony that Engardio could be removed by a recall, after he won his seat by promoting his support of the recalls of DA Chesa Boudin and the three SF school board members.

Yet just nine days out from the deadline to gather 10,000 signatures, the Chronicle reports that the recall’s head organizer Vin Budhai has abruptly resigned from his position. The SF Standard has the scuttlebutt that Budhai stepped down because                                                                                                                                                                      “tensions arose recently over whether to ramp up spending in the final days of the signature-gathering campaign.” Indeed, the recall effort’s latest campaign filings with the SF Ethics Commission show that they’ve raised about $106,000, they’ve spent all of it, and still have tens of thousands of dollars in unpaid bills.

Engardio’s camp has made accusations of financial impropriety against the recall’s leadership, and it is true that the same leadership has been fined by the Ethics Commission for failing to report some of its fundraising in last November’s Prop K car-free Great Highway vote. But the recallers seem well within striking distance of getting those 10,000 signatures to qualify the recall for the ballot. And if they do, it would be the first time in San Francisco history that there was an off-year special election that was not citywide, but only in one supervisor's district.

Despite the fresh turmoil atop the recall campaign, they may have already quietly hit their signature goal. Main recall organizer Vin Budhai (who just resigned yesterday) said in a statement last month that the campaign was “on track and likely to exceed the required threshold” of 10,000 signatures. Wednesday’s SF Standard reports also noted that “organizers are expected to submit more than that to account for potentially invalid or duplicate signatures.”

And if they do, it would be an oddball off-year election, only in Engardio’s District 4, that would not even happen on a normal election day, but instead sometime around October 2025.

“Yes, a recall election would happen in 2025, and only in District 4,” SF Department of Elections custodian of records Matthew Selby told SFist. “There have been [San Francisco] elections that have taken place in one Assembly or Congressional District, but not in one Supervisorial District.”

The curious potential October election date comes up because the Department of Elections would have 30 days to validate the recall signatures. If 10,000 signatures are validated, the Department of Elections is then required to hold the recall election within 105 to 120 days. So no November election here.

But Engardio has quite the money machine going to fight the recall, already having raised about $400,000, for a 4-1 money advantage over his recall effort. But like the recall campaign, Engardio’s Stand With Joel, Fight the Recall campaign has spent mostly all that money according to their own campaign filings with the Ethics Department, with about $8,000 in still-unpaid bills.

Engardio’s largest anti-recall donation is a set of contributions totaling $125,000 from Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppleman. Stoppleman’s donations alone represent more than the entire recall effort has raised combined.

Engardio has also pulled a $100,000 contribution from Ripple Labs co-founder and centrist mega-donor Chris Larsen, perhaps best known for putting those surveillance cameras all over town. The Stand With Joel campaign has pulled an additional $50,000 contribution from Twilio co-founder John Wolthius, another $10,000 from Garry Tan, and interestingly, $25,000 from the SF Police Officers Association.

And here’s a blast from the past: Engardio has also received a $25,000 contribution from our old friend Ron Conway. What does Ron Conway care about this? He lives in Marin County now!

The recall campaign does not boast any such big names or big donations. Well, unless you count their $2,500 contribution from Donald Trump donor Dede Wilsey. (But if we’re calling out Trump donors in this mix, we should note that Chris Larsen’s Ripple Labs gave a $5 million contribution to the Trump inauguration, though it’s unclear whether Larsen had any say in that.)  

So how has the Stand With Joel campaign spent all this money? They’ve paid Sam Singer’s Singer Associates, Inc. about $27,300, which is frankly just a very normal thing for a San Francisco political campaign. And that’s not even much compared to the $78,974 Stand With Joel has paid a Seattle-based consulting firm called KMM Strategies.

But what jumps out here is that Stand With Joel has also paid $39,272 to the tech political group GrowSF. (The above graphic represents only a couple of these payments.) GrowSF is generally known for giving money to their preferred candidates, not taking money from them. These payments are generally described as being for “video ad production” and “digital advertisements.”

Here’s a still image from one of these video ads. Youtube has probably not served you these ads unless you live in District 4, and unfortunately, we cannot embed them. But you can see the whole library of these ads here. And is that GrowSF director Steven Buss Bacio standing right next to Engardio in the ad? It sure looks like him!

Some of these even display as “Sponsored by GrowSF.” Now in fairness, campaign filings show that GrowSF did not pocket all of this money, about $13,000 of the sum appears to have been paid out by GrowSF to an ad platform called Swayable, and to Google. Buss Bacio’s GrowSF bio says he once worked for Google.

But is there a conflict of interest in GrowSF putting out voter guides, and endorsing candidates that paid them nearly $40,000? Just something to take into account with the GrowSF voter guide.

As for the recallers, they’re still out gathering signatures for nine more days. But Stand With Joel allies have filed an Ethics Commission complaint against them for failing to report some $19,159 in expenses, or rather, only reporting these expenses in after-the-fact amendments filed several weeks after their originally legally required filings. These not-originally reported expenses included paid political consulting fees, venue rentals, and controversial signs and t-shirts that may have been homemade, or may have been produced by the recall campaign whose logo and colors they bear.

We should add that the just-resigned recall campaign organizer Vin Budhai was already fined $2,400 by the Ethics Commission for a similar charge in early April, for failing to register and report as a political action committee in the November election’s anti-Prop K campaign. The Ethics Commission ruled last month that “the public was deprived of transparency into when and how money was raised and spent by [Open the Great Highway] to influence the outcome of political contests in the City.”

Engardio campaign spokesperson Jason Galisatus said at the time, “The flagrancy with which the recallers seem to violate the law over and over is a slap in the face to the public and an affront to transparent and fair elections. Enough is enough.”

None of this may matter, as campaign violations are generally not litigated until well after the election is over. Engardio’s bigger problem may be the electoral math here. Consider a scenario where the recallers do get their 10,000 signatures by May 22.

The above map is not a perfect representation of Engardio’s District 4, but this screenshot from Chris Arvin’s Election Map SF is pretty geographically close to that. The green areas of District 4 voted for the car-free Great Highway, the purple areas voted against it. There is not a lot of green on that map! So the district certainly opposed Prop K overwhelmingly.

There are also some sideshow issues with the Great Highway debate, like a lawsuit to bring cars back to the highway, and District 1 Supervisor Connie Chan’s strange claim that she would bring the exact same ballot measure back to the voters if the Engardio recall qualifies for the ballot. It’s unclear if anything will ever come of these two alleged pursuits.

But it is clear that if the recallers do manage to get their 10,000 signatures in by next Thursday, Joel Engardio would be in serious danger of being recalled in an unprecedented, bizarro, off-year October election that would only be happening in one San Francisco district.

Related: Supervisor Joel Engardio Now Facing Recall Effort as Constituents Fume Over Great Highway Vote [SFist]

Image: Joel Engardio via Facebook