If you think there’s corruption at SF City Hall, you can now report it yourself and maybe start an investigation, thanks to SF’s first-ever Inspector General Alex Shepard who just started the new watchdog job this month.
There’s an unexpected leftover legacy of longtime SF Supervisor Aaron Peskin in SF City Hall. That would be the creation of a new San Francisco Inspector General position thanks to Peskin’s 2024 Prop C anti-corruption measure that voters passed, creating a new City Hall watchdog to "initiate and lead investigations regarding potential violations of laws or policies involving fraud, waste, or abuse."
Now more than a year after Prop C passed, SF finally hired that new Inspector General, Alex Shepard, who started the job on January 5. Shepard is a former Assistant United States Attorney who was one of the feds involved with prosecuting the Mohammed Nuru corruption and fraud case.
Though in a new sit-down interview with the Chronicle, Shepard notes she was not the case’s primary prosecutor.
“The Nuru case had already been charged. I came in later and did the sentencing,” Shepard tells the Chronicle. “It was me and a group of agents from FBI and IRS Criminal Investigations. We picked up what started out as some conversation on the wiretap on Nuru’s phone between him and Paul Giusti from Recology and we kind of ran with it from there. You interview a lot of people, you subpoena and review a lot of documents and we did all of that sort of methodically to build that case.”
There are no earth-shattering revelations in Shepard’s introductory Chronicle interview. Perhaps the most interesting thing about it is that she details a new Tip Line where people can report suspected SF City Hall fraud to her office.
Tipsters can confidentially report suspected City Hall abuse, fraud, or waste to [email protected], and Shepard's new Inspector General office can be reached at [email protected].
And interestingly, Shepard does not think San Francisco is a particularly corrupt city.
“San Francisco is very much like its peer large cities,” she says. “I don’t think it has any special corruption problem. San Francisco has a lot of money. And we, for example, do a lot of big capital construction projects. There were perhaps less robust controls and money to be made and so people took advantage of that.”
Nor does she think that all of the nonprofit scandals we saw under Mayor London Breed are in indictment on the nonprofits’ work.
“There are a small number of bad actors at nonprofits and a lot of great, hardworking, good actors at nonprofits who provide much-needed services to the city,” Shepard explains. “There have been recent investigations and resolutions involving nonprofits, that may just be where we are at the moment. If you pull back and look at this from a 50,000-foot view, I see as many, probably more private sector defendants being charged in these cases, and a handful of nonprofits.”
The big question on whether Alex Shepard will be an effective Inspector General is whether she will pursue the pet causes of Mayor Daniel Lurie (who hired her). And there’s certainly smoke there, if not fire, with the awarding of a contract to a company run by Lurie donors when other companies put in more affordable bids.
So it's too early to tell whether the new Inspector General will make any massive changes at San Francisco City Hall, but at least some adult has got their eye on the playground now.
Image: SF.gov
