The Facts

City Administrator Carmen Chu has wasted no time using the new authority voters have granted her via Proposition E. Under her proposed new rules, City employees would be barred from giving favored vendors inside information, splitting contracts to avoid competitive bidding, or privately communicating with bidders, reports Dustin Gardiner at The San Francisco Standard. The rules would cover the city's $6 billion in annual contracts.

Proposition E, approved by 63% of voters in the November 3 election, gives the city administrator sole authority to introduce most contracting legislation, subject to rejection by the mayor or supervisors.

The Context

Proposition E targeted a fragmented contracting system, scattered across more than 100 sections of city code, with many contracts taking six to twelve months to complete. Prop E put Chu in charge of setting citywide standards to simplify purchasing and ensure fair competition.

Chu's proposed ban on insider assistance sounds inspired by the Mohammed Nuru corruption case. The former Public Works Director supplied favored contractors with early bid-document drafts and nonpublic information to help them pursue an asphalt-recycling plant deal. The proposed rules would expressly prohibit that kind of "assistance." Whether they would have stopped it is unknowable: the bribery scheme already violated federal law, after all!

Supervisors or the mayor can reject the proposed changes for 60 days after introduction. If they don't, it is automatically approved.

The GrowSF Take

We love to see it! The quick turnaround between granting new authority and implementing fixes ought to inspire confidence in voters. We endorsed Proposition E because centralizing rulemaking under one accountable office should make corruption harder to do and easier to detect.