How Voter Owned Elections Saves Money

The cost of Voter Owned Elections is capped at $2.75 per San Francisco resident per year. That's approximately $1.00 for every $3000 the city spends, or .03% of the budget. While most of the waste caused by the current system is not possible to quantify, we have identified specific examples of the pay-to-play system resulting in at least $70 million in waste, in the space of only a few years -- far more than the cost of Voter Owned Elections. In addition, under the current system politicians spend an inordinate amount of time raising money. This is time they could be spending doing the hard work that the city needs. This also costs the city unquantifiable amounts of money.


Specific examples of waste as a result of the pay-to-play system:

View articles documenting the following examples
  • Forest City Enterprises, $27 million: In 1999, while Forest City Enterprises was angling for a lucrative development deal, 13 company executives donated $500 each to the former mayor's re-election campaign, the most they were allowed to give under the city's campaign-finance law. Then Forest City pumped $50,000 in unregulated "soft money" into a political action committee that was electioneering for the mayor. Public records show the company also donated $10,000 to help fund his 1999 Summit for Women, a civic event that provided the mayor a showcase during the campaign. A year later, with the mayor re-elected, Forest City's plan to develop the old Emporium department store into a downtown hotel and shopping complex featuring Bloomingdale's got its own financial boost: a $27 million subsidy from the mayor-appointed Redevelopment Agency board.

  • Don Fisher, $18 million: San Francisco's biggest soft money donor is Donald Fisher, chairman of the Gap clothing stores. He, his company and an investment firm with which he is associated pumped $371,000 into committees backing by the former mayor and his candidates. Fisher is a big player in city and state politics, but his company also does business at City Hall. In 1997, it won a Redevelopment Agency deal to acquire land at a discount -- estimated at up to $18 million -- to build a new headquarters on the waterfront.

  • Tutor-Saliba, at least $30 million: The City Attorney filed suit against airport contractor, and a contributor to the former mayor, Tutor-Saliba, for at least $30 million in fraudulent billing. According to Herrera's 56-page legal complaint, the Los Angeles County-based firm, submitted "false and inflated pay applications to Airport," cooked its books "to hide its grossly inflated and fraudulent profits," and ran roughshod over the city's affirmative action system, which sets aside public works contracts for minority- and women-owned businesses..." Whisteblower and city employee Kevin Williams filed suit claiming that the Airport Commission and director, and members of the Human Rights Commission, all bodies which are controlled by the mayor, were complicit in the fraud.

  • Treasure Island Enterprises, $1 million: Not long after San Francisco acquired Treasure Island, a development firm called Treasure Island Enterprises pitched the city on a deal to build and run a 400-slip marina on the decommissioned U.S. Navy base. The problem was that two other companies also submitted bids, and, according to a city budget analyst, their proposals would pay the city $1 million more than the Treasure Island Enterprises proposal over the life of the lease. But Treasure Island Enterprises had something the other bidders lacked: "juice" with the former mayor. The company's founder was Darius Anderson, a fund-raiser in the former mayor's 1995 mayoral campaign. In February 1999, the Treasure Island Development Authority, whose members are appointed by the mayor, awarded the marina rights to Treasure Island Enterprises.

  • Tim Tronson, $850,000: According to prosecutors, Tronson masterminded a complex scheme to steal $850,000 from the San Francisco Unified School District while working for the district as a $1,000-a-day facilities consultant in 1999 and 2000. Before modeling an orange county jail jumpsuit, Tronson gravitated toward the powerful. School district insiders say he was tight with then superintendent Waldemar "Bill" Rojas, and public records show Tronson and his indicted cronies funneled more than $43,000 directly to the former mayor's 1999 reelection campaign and to soft-money political action committees backing him.
View articles documenting the previous examples
  One of the problems with the current privately financed political system is that it results in the waste of huge sums of public money. This happens for several reasons:

·Campaign contributors are granted legislative and administrative favors which structure city law around the short-term financial well-being of private interests rather the financial well-being of the public.

·Politicians, in order to remain in office, are forced to spend large amounts of time raising money to finance their campaigns. This distracts them from the important work that the city needs, which ends up resulting in inefficiencies that costs the city money.

·Corruption and theft in public contracting go unpunished, and sometime even aided, because of campaign donations to authorities who are supposed to be regulating city contracts.