The more than 30-year-old Ella Hill Hutch Community Center in the Western Addition may close permanently, as City Attorney David Chiu is vowing to cut off its parent nonprofit from receiving any more city grants after an alleged bribery scandal.

Of the many nonprofit spending scandals of the London Breed era, one that stands out is that of the SF Human Rights Commission, a City Hall commission whose former director Sheryl Davis was accused of lavishly spending on a $10,000 Martha’s Vineyard cottage rental paid for with your tax dollars, and with some fishy “split the invoice” accounting methods seemingly designed to hide that spending from oversight review.

Davis hastily resigned when that story broke, but that did not stop the flow of more revelations involving Davis and a nonprofit called Collective Impact. Local reporters found that Davis was living with that nonprofit’s executive director James Spingola, and they owned a car together, though she directed $6 million to that nonprofit during her tenure. More alarmingly, Collective Impact gave Davis’s son a $19,000 UCLA scholarship with that money, plus first-class airfare for Davis to promote her book and podcast, and another $5,000 for Oakland soul singer Goapele to perform at Davis’s book launch party.

SF City Attorney David Chiu canceled all of Collective Impact’s city contracts with the city in December, and moved to debar them from receiving any city contracts for the next five years. Those debarment hearings are set to begin this Monday.

Now today the Chronicle reports that Collective Impact says it will shut down permanently without those city funds, or in the words of their legal filing, the nonprofit “anticipates a complete shutdown of its programs by October” if stripped of city money. That would mean the closure of the Western Addition’s thirty-plus-year-old Ella Hill Hutch Community Center, and the discontinuation of the nonprofit’s summer and afterschool programs, healthy food assistance programs, and other programs that help people pay their bills.

“The disproportionate effect of poverty will once again come to Western Addition,” Collective Impact attorneys said in their legal filings opposing the debarment. “Put plainly, without Collective Impact, the community will suffer in ways that the city is simply not prepared to handle.”

Collective Impact received $27 million in city grants between 2021 and 2024, or about $8 million a year. Months after these scandals broke, City Attorney Chiu says the nonprofit still should not be trusted with public money.

“Collective Impact received city grant funding to provide services to vulnerable San Francisco kids, not to be a personal PR firm and travel agency for Dr. Davis,” Chiu said in a Tuesday statement to the Chronicle. His legal filings added, “Whether Collective Impact’s payments benefitting Davis are characterized as illegal gifts, kickbacks, or bribes, Spingola knew that he was living with Davis, never disclosed their relationship and continued to direct City funds for Davis’ benefit.”

Davis still has not spoken to the press since the day she resigned. Though the Collective Impact director Spingola did.

“How do you bribe somebody?” he said when the Chronicle reached him. “I don’t know what bribing is.”

You can judge for yourself whether that sounds innocent or guilty. But it seems the obvious play here would have been for Spingola to resign as Collective Impact director, and present some sort of “new page” or “fresh face” to convince the city to keep funding them. That didn’t happen, and now the future of the nonprofit is highly in doubt.

Related: SF’s 10 Wildest Nonprofit Spending Scandals of the Last Five Years, Ranked [SFist]

Image: Porsche C via Yelp