SLUG, Democrats' Election Frauders, Rewarded with City Contract

Public housing vote drive criticized
$50,000 contract given to group linked with Willie Brown

Ilene Lelchuk, Chronicle Staff Writer
Thursday, August 29, 2002



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The San Francisco Housing Authority, which is reeling from federal budget cuts, is paying $50,000 for a get-out-the-vote drive in public housing that is raising questions among city and state officials.

The Housing Authority awarded a contract to the A. Philip Randolph Institute, a labor-backed civil rights and voter education group, to register public housing and other low-income residents to vote in the most politically apathetic and predominantly minority neighborhoods in southeast San Francisco.

The contract is drawing criticism partly because of the A. Philip Randolph Institute's allegedly close ties with Mayor Willie Brown and its controversial past practices that include dangling presents and parties to people who went to the polls.

The Housing Authority's expense also raised eyebrows because the agency has been lamenting dwindling funds for growing security and repair costs at its aging developments.

The contract approved by the Housing Authority Commission last week pays the A. Philip Randolph Institute $35,000 to hire about 14 workers -- including seven public housing residents -- to register residents and get the new voters to the polls on Nov. 5.

The institute will earn up to $15,000 more, depending on how many residents register and how many actually vote. The nonprofit group will receive $10 per registration and another $10 if that new voter makes it to the poll, under the contract. In turn, the institute will pay its workers $3 per registered voter.

They will concentrate on public housing residents and Section 8 voucher recipients in Bayview-Hunters Point, Potrero Hill and Visitacion Valley.

The A. Philip Randolph Institute expects to register 2,000 people and deliver 1,500 to the polls, according to the plan.

Housing Authority Director Gregg Fortner defended spending $50,000 out of his $200 million budget on the campaign.

"The fact is over the past three years the HUD budget has been cut, in some cases up to 23 percent," Fortner said. "This Housing Authority lost $3 million in the past three years for security and capital costs. For people to change that, they need to go out and vote and make sure their agenda is being protected."

Fortner said he is following a 1996 HUD national directive that housing authorities promote voter registration. Fortner acknowledged that HUD initially questioned the use of federal funds for the registration drive, so he sent the agency its own 6-year-old memo.

HUD spokesman Larry Bush said agency officials are reviewing the matter.

A recent Housing Authority study found that 4,700 of the 6,000 public housing residents who are of voting age were not registered to vote, Fortner said. More than 7,000 of the 10,000 Section 8 rental voucher recipients who are of voting age were not registered.

"We need some special consideration to that population," said Housing Authority Commission President Sululagi Palega, "because of their history, because of the way they feel left out or unsafe."

This is the Housing Authority's second and largest paid voter registration drive. It paid the institute $15,000 in January for a campaign that registered 800 people, although the institute has worked with public housing residents since 1994 in an unpaid role.

Locally, housing authorities in Santa Clara and Alameda counties don't have organized programs. The City of Los Angeles Housing Authority, one of the largest in the nation, collaborates with a voter education group but doesn't pay it.

The San Francisco contract raises questions from a broad range of critics.

Supervisor Aaron Peskin and Kim Alexander, head of the California Voter Foundation, based in Sacramento, said any contract with a pay-per-vote financial incentive invites potential fraud. A spokesman for Secretary of State Bill Jones said investigators have tracked most election fraud cases back to workers who falsified a voter registration card or signatures on a petition so they could get paid.

Peskin, who authored a law prohibiting anyone from compensating a voter with anything from cash to chicken dinners for casting a ballot, said he worries that the Housing Authority contract might lead to such problems.

"Technically, this isn't a violation of the law that I passed, but it comes darn close to violating the spirit," Peskin said.

Fortner said the institute will be paid only for legitimate registrations and votes verified by the city elections department.

Institute President James Bryant added that his workers will not be paid for any invalid registrations.

"I challenge any of the persons opposing this to come work with us to see if this is credible," said Bryant, who has planned his first event to turn out potential unregistered voters -- a basketball tournament at Hunters Point West on Sept. 7.

Other critics are worried about the institute's track record.

Before the 1999 mayoral election, more than 100 registration forms collected by the institute were handed over to the district attorney's office because a number of people were registered more than once or listed at addresses where they did not live. Criminal charges were filed against an independent contractor of the institute for filing fraudulent voter registrations with the San Francisco Elections Department in 1999. She was later convicted and sentenced to three years probation and 400 hours of community service. .

At the same time, the institute was identified in an election strategy document compiled by prominent supporters of Mayor Brown as the group which Brown backers should work closely with to get him re-elected. The mayor's deputy press aide took a leave from his job to work with the institute.

"You have abysmal voter turnout in Housing Authority projects, but I don't think throwing money at one particular organization that is politically favored by the current administration is any way to solve that," said political consultant Doug Comstock.

Bryant countered that the institute is adamantly independent and nonpartisan. It's a national organization founded in 1965 around the Voting Rights Act that removed barriers preventing blacks from voting.

"We don't ask you to support a particular candidate. We ask you to support yourselves," Bryant said.

Brown's spokesman, P.J. Johnston, also said the longtime civil rights institute does not work for the mayor.

"It's a little insulting for elitist, so-called progressive whites to suggest that because an organization has its roots in the African American community that it is somehow beholden to one African American politician," Johnston said.

E-mail Ilene Lelchuk at ilelchuk [at] sfchronicle.com.



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You will note that KPMG as the City Consultants picked Forrest Cities, that was overturned by the paid professional demonstrators representing the community, Charlie Walker, Slug representatives under the direction of Nuru etc. Lynette Sweet as the Chair of the Redevelopment Commission rescinded the vote for Forrest Cities the recommendation of KPMG we the tax payers paid for through our taxes and gave it to Lenar. Also follow the trail of Nuru at the PAC (Project Area Committee for the redevelopment Agency what was written is small potatoes to where this will lead.

Southeast Neighborhood Jobs Initiative Roundtable Steering Committee
Chair Executive Director, S.L.U.G Mohammed Nuru
Administrative Manager, Angelo King
True Hope Church, Rev. Arelious Walker
Providence Baptist Church, Rev. Calvin Jones
Executive Director Whitney Young, Careth Reid
Executive Director YCD, Dwayne Jones
Executive Director T.U.R.F. (SF.Housing Authority) Kim Mitchell
Planning Commission, Linda Richardson
Executive Director Bayview Opera House, Shelley Bradford-Bell
Redevelopment Agency, Willie B. Kennedy

Alice Trinkl, News Director
Bill Gordon (415) 476-2557

bgordon [at] pubaff.ucsf.edu


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

February 16, 2001

NEW JOB TRAINING, BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES FOR SOUTHEAST NEIGHBORHOODS
MADE POSSIBLE THROUGH GRANT TO UCSF/COMMUNITY PARTNERSHIP


A new grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to UCSF will support expansion of
job training programs and opportunities for business owners in several San
Francisco neighborhoods near the Mission Bay campus through a partnership of
the University of California, San Francisco and the Southeast Neighborhood Jobs
Initiative Roundtable.

The $100,000 grant comes after lengthy discussions among UCSF, the Roundtable
and Rockefeller about how to support economic opportunity in the Bayview
Hunter's Point, Visitation Valley and Potrero Hill neighborhoods.
Irene Agnos, UCSF assistant vice chancellor for university relations, will
administer the grant as principal investigator.

"Large institutions inevitably serve as powerful influences in the
neighborhoods in which they are located. UCSF is committed to directing this
influence as a positive social force through a partnership with the people,
neighborhoods, and businesses the campus touches every day. Through the
support of this grant, this effort can build a strong university and community
partnership," said Agnos.

The Southeast Neighborhood Jobs Initiative Roundtable, a Rockefeller-funded
economic development program serving the city's southeast sector, and the
campus began discussions shortly after UCSF began planning a major new research
and teaching site in the Mission Bay development. Over the next 20 years, UCSF
Mission Bay is expected to grow to include 20 buildings and 9,000 faculty,
staff and students, creating new opportunities to work with organizations in
neighborhoods in close proximity to the campus - Potrero Hill, Bayview Hunter's
Point, and Visitation Valley.

The goal of the UCSF/Roundtable partnership is "creating a place that works."
"With the support of the Rockefeller Foundation, the partnership of UCSF and
the Roundtable can deliver jobs and support to the campus and new opportunity
and hope to the community. We can create a place that works for the campus and
the community because they will be one place," said Roundtable chair Mohammed
Nuru.

Programs that will benefit in particular from the grant include the following:
Expansion of UCSF's Community Outreach Internship Program - Since 1996, the
UCSF Temporary Employment Program has worked with Florence Crittenton Services
welfare-to-work program to provide unemployed single mothers with career
opportunities at UCSF through training and mentoring.

The Rockefeller Foundation grant will permit the program to expand the number
of available internships and the types of jobs for which interns are trained.
Currently the program focuses on clerical positions but eventually hopes to
offer internships in other skilled positions, such as laboratory technicians.
The San Francisco Department of Human Services also has agreed to become a
partner in the program by funding 10 intern positions in the current fiscal
year. UCSF plans to expand to 20 interns next year and apply to the City's
Private Industry Council for additional funding.

About 90 percent of those who enroll in the internship program graduate and
half of the graduates hold full-time administrative jobs at UCSF.

Creation of new relationships with other community-based agencies -UCSF
initially began working with Florence Crittenton Services, located in the
Western Addition, because of its proximity to the campus's Mount Zion site.
The grant will support efforts to establish similar relationships with
community-based agencies in the southeast sector of the city to assist UCSF in
identifying internship candidates and preparing them with job readiness skills.

Assistance for local businesses seeking UCSF contracts and orders -The grant
will assist the campus in establishing formal mechanisms to ensure more
university contracts and purchases go to businesses located in the
neighborhoods surrounding UCSF Mission Bay.

UCSF spends $250 million annually on goods and services, including almost $50
million in low value purchases where UCSF departments are not restricted in
their selection of vendors.

The UCSF Materials Management office and the Business Affirmative Action
Program will be involved in efforts to increase the amount of business the
campus does with local businesses, including providing workshops organized by
merchants associations, the Roundtable, and UCSF geared to helping vendors
obtain certification to do business with the campus, surveying current
purchasing practices to identify opportunities for local businesses, and
organizing events to bring vendors and purchasers together.

Coordination of community partnerships by a UCSF staff member -The timing of
the grant is significant as the campus recently created the new position of
Community Partnerships Coordinator within Community and Governmental Relations.
Lisa Gray, who has extensive experience working with community groups, recently
joined UCSF in that position. She worked most recently as director of training
and grants contracts administrator for Young Community Developers, an
employment and training program in the Bayview neighborhood.

Other partnerships between UCSF and community groups include the following:

The Community Construction Workforce Program -UCSF works with a variety of
community based groups to train workers in the construction trades and help
place them at UCSF construction sites. Young Community Developers is the lead
agency for the first laboratory building at the UCSF Mission Bay campus, now
under construction.

HealthTech Gateway to Health Careers -Founded by UCSF medical residents at
San Francisco General Hospital Medical Center, this program provides unemployed
and low-income adults in the Visitation Valley neighborhood with training in
the health technology field, career counseling, and job placement.

He transformed a tiny San Francisco gardening co-op into a national model for urban job-training programs. Then he emerged as City Hall's point man in a high-profile war on grime and graffiti.

But almost from the day in 2000 when he became an executive in the city Department of Public Works, there were complaints about how Mohammed Nuru, the dynamic protégé of then-Mayor Willie Brown, conducted the public's business.

Nuru has emerged as a central figure in a City Hall scandal involving alleged voting improprieties in the December runoff election won by Mayor Gavin Newsom. But according to public records and interviews, Nuru has been the subject of repeated complaints about alleged mishandling of taxpayers' funds.

Some staffers complained that Nuru, paid $150,867 a year, bent civil service rules to replace city workers with trainees from the San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners, or SLUG, the nonprofit he formerly ran.

Critics said that while he was a city official he pushed to extend SLUG's $1 million-per-year city grant for street-cleaning, and he allowed the nonprofit to charge the city thousands for unusual expenses: $75,000 for a double-wide trailer, $25,000 for overalls and baseball caps, $1,400 in consulting fees to a member of the SLUG board.

Once, Nuru allegedly ordered a DPW crew -- at a cost to the public of $40,000 -- to clean up a debris-strewn vacant lot near his home in Bayview- Hunters Point. Recently he was involved in requesting $70,000 in city funds to landscape another vacant lot in his neighborhood, city records show.

Some veteran DPW bureaucrats filed formal complaints, saying that when they objected to carrying out Nuru's orders, they were demoted or transferred.

Their complaints were made to the city attorney, then-District Attorney Terence Hallinan, and Public Works Director Ed Lee, among others, records show. The city never formally responded to the allegations, and no agency gave any indication it was interested in investigating, the complainants said.

The city attorney does not talk about investigations it is pursuing, said Chief Deputy City Attorney Lori Giorgi, but it takes "allegations of public corruption very seriously."

In January, nine former SLUG workers told the city Human Rights Commission that Nuru pressured them to electioneer and vote for Newsom for mayor. Nuru says he did nothing wrong, but now he is the target of a secretary of state probe of alleged election fraud, and the workers who complained in the past say the city attorney has started contacting them.

Complainants say that from the day he arrived at DPW, Nuru made clear he had been installed by the mayor to shake up a bureaucracy that Brown regarded as unresponsive, hidebound and racist. Because Nuru was the mayor's protégé, they contend, nobody wanted to take him on.

"Everybody was scared of Willie Brown," said former DPW maintenance manager Mel Humphreys, who said he was demoted and forced to retire because he objected to what he described as Nuru's use of city workers for private projects. "Nobody wanted to do anything about it."

Barbara Meskunas, president of the Coalition for San Francisco Neighborhoods and a critic of Brown , says Nuru's trajectory as a city official shows how business was done at Brown's City Hall.

"The guy thought it was still business as usual," she said of Nuru. Others, though, describe Nuru as a can-do administrator who makes the city a better place.

Nuru is "incredibly effective,'' said Isabel Wade of the Neighborhood Parks Council. "I know that he has lots of enemies at the city government level because he kicks butt and they don't like it."

Nuru and DPW Director Lee declined to be interviewed for this story.

Nuru was born in England

Nuru, 41, was born in Bristol, England, son of a British mother and a Nigerian father. As he once testified in an employment lawsuit, he was raised on a farm near Lagos, then came to the United States to study landscape architecture at Kansas State University. He graduated in 1987.

Over the next four years, Nuru said, he helped supervise big construction projects in Sacramento, Seattle, suburban Washington, D.C., and Saudi Arabia.

In 1991, he moved to San Francisco to work as No. 2 executive at SLUG, then a tiny nonprofit that maintained a network of community gardens. He had big dreams: At SLUG, he hoped he could use his love of gardening to somehow aid minority youth in Bayview-Hunters Point.

"I believe I have a green thumb," he testified. "And I also have a passion for training young people and getting people into the workforce ... getting them into jobs, welfare-to-work programs, young people who sold drugs . .. trying to teach them to become productive citizens."

Nuru took charge in 1994, and SLUG was transformed.

By the time he left in 2000, he told the grass-roots.org Web site, SLUG's budget had grown 16-fold, to more than $2 million per year. It had a full- time staff of 30. Its workers -- many of them at-risk youth -- tended 40 urban gardens and a 4-acre organic farm in Bernal Heights.

SLUG's young workers were moving "from learning to weed to learning to read," Nuru said in a newsletter. Eventually, every SLUG graduate would be expected to go to college, he said.

At the heart of SLUG's expansion was Nuru's skill at winning grants. From 1992 to 2000, public records show that SLUG obtained more than $7 million in grants from the city.

The biggest came in 1998, when the Department of Public Works agreed to pay SLUG slightly more than $1 million per year for an ambitious welfare-to- work program in which employees work four days a week cleaning streets and spend a fifth day receiving job training.

SLUG won Nuru many friends in the Bayview, and the organization was praised by environmental groups.

"Working on the farm is planting seeds of hope among the garden interns themselves," Landscape Architecture magazine said in a 1996 article. "In effect, (they are) using the connection with the earth and the plant kingdom as a means of turning lives away from crime and despair."

Other plaudits came from the U.S. Department of Energy, which listed SLUG as a success story on its "smart communities" Web site; and from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which made Nuru the keynote speaker at its National Community Involvement Conference in 2000.

Nuru was an inspiring advocate for SLUG, said Tom Branca, who met him in the mid-1990s on the board of an East Bay clone of SLUG called EBUG. Nuru was "dictatorial but a nice guy ... able to pull whatever strings were necessary to get the job done," said Branca, chair of the department of Landscape Horticulture at Oakland's Merritt College.

Branca recalled a "really moving" speech that Nuru once gave at the American Community Gardening Association's convention in Toronto, in which he described how SLUG was turning around the lives of youngsters. "Mohammed's presentation almost brought people to tears," he said.

SLUG also drew Nuru into San Francisco politics. At a SLUG event in the Bayview, Nuru met then-Assemblyman Willie Brown. In 1995, a year before he obtained U.S. citizenship, Nuru volunteered in Brown's successful campaign to unseat then-Mayor Frank Jordan, he testified.

Two years later, Nuru told his staff, he helped deliver the Bayview on Brown's controversial measure to help build a new stadium for the 49ers. The measure eked out a narrow, 1,500-vote victory, but the stadium has not been built.

Nuru also volunteered for Brown's re-election campaign in 1999, he testified. In that election, The Chronicle reported, three former SLUG employees say Nuru told them their jobs depended on Brown's re-election and required them to walk precincts, attend rallies and work phones for Brown's campaign while they were supposed to be cleaning streets.

In 2000, Brown hired Nuru to the No. 2 job at Department of Public Works, the 1,500-employee agency responsible for maintaining streets, sewers, public buildings and trees. Nuru was nominally the top aide to director Ed Lee. But employees believed the real power was Nuru, who boasted of his ties to the mayor and sometimes met with Brown without Lee.

In a city that was increasingly blighted and dirty, Nuru emerged as the mayor's go-to guy on an ambitious cleanup campaign.

To address growing concern over litter, graffiti and filth, Nuru instituted a "district by district neighborhood beautification and cleanup schedule."

He mounted Operation Scrub Down, which sent street cleaning crews into "hot spots," where grime was bad or where complaints were intense. Homeless people complained that their belongings were being trashed by Nuru's cleanup crews, but the sweeps were popular with merchants and homeowners.

Nuru took a tough line at DPW, telling his staff that Brown had put him there to shake things up. As one former manager, John Cone, later testified in an employment lawsuit, Nuru quoted Brown as calling DPW's management "a bunch of racists that were discriminating and holding people back." Nuru vowed to "get rid of those white managers," Cone said.

Some DPW staffers complained that the new boss ignored city rules for the proper use of public resources.

In December 2000, Nuru ordered a DPW crew to use city tree-toppers to hang Christmas decorations for merchants along Third Street in the Bayview, former maintenance manager Humphreys told the Civil Service Commission.

Humphreys said he resisted, contending that DPW wasn't supposed to do work for private businesses or individuals. He said Nuru blew up and accused him of "not liking his people.'' The project was scrapped.

In an interview, Humphreys contended that in his early days at DPW, Nuru also ordered city workers to clean up a privately owned, debris-strewn vacant lot near Nuru's home north of Candlestick Park. Humphreys put the cost of the cleanup at $40,000, and said it violated policies on the use of public resources at DPW.

Last fall, DPW asked the mayor's Office of Community Development for $70, 000 to clean up a debris-strewn, city-owned lot four doors from Nuru's home. City records show Nuru as the original DPW contact on the request.

Shirley Moore of the Candlestick Point Bayview Heights Community Group said the project was worthwhile and long overdue. She said her group got no special treatment from Nuru. She called him a good public servant who was being victimized by the allegations of election improprieties.

"Nobody can hold a torch to what he's done for the city," she said.

Concerns about SLUG grant

Critics have expressed concerns that Nuru oversees a large city grant to SLUG, the nonprofit to which they say he still has ties.

"You don't normally hire the executive director of an agency that your department is responsible for funding and overseeing, and put them in charge of the agency and the funding," said Paul Boden of the Coalition on Homelessness, who clashed with Nuru over Operation Scrubdown.

In 2002, when SLUG's street-cleaning contract expired, Nuru helped it win a one-year, $1 million extension, records show. Last month, SLUG won a new four-year, $4.8 million DPW grant.

After joining DPW, Nuru kept close ties to other nonprofits that do business with the city. He is on the board of the Clean City Coalition and the Strybing Arboretum Society, both of which have obtained DPW grants. Closer still are his ties to the San Francisco Community Restoring Urban Environments, or SF-CRUE. Nuru incorporated this nonprofit, state records show, using his DPW office as its address.

After The Chronicle inquired about SF-CRUE, DPW Director Lee sent Nuru an e-mail Feb. 9 saying he had learned that DPW was using city funds to form and raise funds for a nonprofit. Lee ordered Nuru to stop it and said city workers must pay back any money received for work on the project.

Public records show that in 2001, Nuru became locked in a contentious internal dispute over city payments to SLUG.

To get paid on its $1 million-per-year street-cleaning contract, SLUG had to submit receipts to the city. But the city official who oversaw the grant, John Cone, began rejecting repayment requests.

As Cone later testified, SLUG wanted the city to pay consulting fees of $250 per hour to a retired DPW official who once oversaw the SLUG contract. Cone rejected the $5,863 invoice.

Cone said he balked at a $25,000 bill for SLUG uniforms, including bib overalls and baseball caps. Cory Calandra, Nuru's replacement at SLUG, wrote in a letter that uniforms were needed because SLUG crews "must live up to the reputation of San Francisco as a world class city."

Cone testified that the contract didn't permit the payment.

"I thought it was a misappropriation,'' he testified.

Cone said he also questioned $12,500 in SLUG gas card charges, saying: "You couldn't tell if they were filling up their own cars or somebody else's."

City records reflect other unusual billings by SLUG in 2001 and 2002, including $500 for toys from Toys 'R' Us, and $1,400 for one month of "weekly group meetings" with consultant Martha Henderson, who also was a member of SLUG's board of directors.

One wrangle focused on a $65,000 bill for a double-wide trailer. As Cone described the transaction, SLUG billed the city for the trailer, saying it would be used as a classroom to train SLUG workers "to get ready for the workforce" when their jobs at the nonprofit ended.

Instead, Cone said, the trailer was set up on DPW grounds, where city workers spent perhaps $10,000 to refurbish it. After that it was used as a training facility by the DPW.

Cone said Nuru had personally approved the expenditure. Cone protested it as a misappropriation of city funds: "What they did was they manipulated the (contract) money so it could be purchased and used for DPW."

In his testimony, Cone said he came under increasing pressure from Nuru to pay the contested SLUG bills.

Their conflict played out during a time of financial distress at SLUG. By the summer of 2002 SLUG couldn't always meet its payroll or pay its bills, and for a time it had been financially unable to tend community gardens, SLUG's director wrote to the city. Cone, in testimony, said he believed Nuru was pushing him to approve the SLUG expenditures because of the cash flow problem at the nonprofit.

Finally, Cone said, Nuru replaced him with another official who signed off on the disputed payments. Cone testified about Nuru last June in a deposition in connection with an employment lawsuit that DPW worker Anthony Baeza had filed against the city. The city attorney was an adversary, defending against the lawsuit and challenging the testimony. After Cone testified, an assistant city attorney objected that his testimony was irrelevant, but did not address his contentions.

Cone died of cancer Feb. 5. In an interview before his death, he said the city showed little interest in his allegations about Nuru until after reports of suspected voting irregularities. After that, they began calling.

Cone said then that he hoped the new mayor would address the matter.

"I have pancreatic cancer," he said. "I've had a good run, but I'm finished. I have no hatred for Mr. Nuru, but I do want to see DPW get back on track, and I'd like to see the taxpayers get what they're paying for."

E-mail the writers at lwilliams [at] sfchronicle.com and mfainaru-wada [at] sfchronicle.com