San Francisco Blog

Earlier this week, we wrote about a law meant to ferret out campaign finance corruption voted into existence by the Board of Supervisors and affirmed by Mayor Gavin Newsom -- that neither the Supes nor Newsom have ever bothered to make even a minimal effort to follow. Capping everything off, the city's Ethics Commission has opted to not enforce the law.

Here, in a nutshell, is how we put it before:

In 2006, the Ethics Commission's staff devised an ordinance calling for elected officials who vote upon city contracts of $50,000 or greater to report this within five days to the commission; this rule was meant to spot any "pay for play" where those awarded contracts would, in turn, donate to the elected officials making those decisions. The Board of Supervisors approved the ordinance by a 10-0 vote; six of those Supes are still on the board. Then, last year, Mayor Gavin Newsom placed Measure H on the ballot. This initiative, which essentially affirmed and expanded the ordinance, was overwhelmingly approved.

During our research for that story, we e-mailed Angela Calvillo, the clerk of the Board of Supervisors, and asked her whose responsibility it was to make the filings this law calls for. She sent us a copy of Ethics Commissioner John St. Croix' Dec. 31 letter informing elected officials to not bother making filings as the commission would no longer be enforcing that law. She did not reply to a subsequent e-mail querying who should have been making those filings between 2006 and 2008 -- and wasn't (not that any pressure was being applied by the Ethics Commission).

Following our article, however, Calvillo wrote us again: