A Little Pearl of Financial Irresponsibility -- Privatization at Work in the Library

This is one of those little controversies that I consider a sort of a pearl. There is not enough money at stake for there to be outrage and public scandal, and yet almost every principle of good government and public value has been subverted to serve the interest of transferring public assets to private benefit.

On May 1, 2006, the City Operations and Neighborhood Services Committee of the Board of Supervisors acted on a budget item by "retroactively" accepting a gift from the Friends & Foundation of $23,400 for an editor for a publication called At the San Francisco Public Library.

The first questions that spring to mind are: Why retroactively? and Why now?

During public comment I tried to point out to the Committee that the item should be going before the Budget and Finance Committee. If it went before the Budget committee there would be a report by the Budget Analyst Harvey Rose and the hidden costs might be explored. The supervisors as individuals have repeatedly voiced the policy that items should not be approved retroactively and items with a potential budget impact should go before the Budget Committee and scrutinized for budget impact as part of that committee's mandate.

This was the proverbial deja vu all over again. This is identical to a proposal that did go to the Budget Committee in 2002 when the Friends & Foundation gave the library $29,259 for At the San Francisco Public Library. At that time Harvey Rose recommended against the proposal stating:

"The Budget Analyst questions the policy of creating two new positions at this time to perform on-going activities, which would only be funded by this subject gift for seven months. The Budget Analyst also notes that it is likely that the Public Library will request that these two positions continue to be funded in their FY 2003-2004 budget with Public Library funds."

In other words, this so-called "gift" was just a device to transfer funding of a publication that is primarily a marketing tool for the Friends & Foundation and make the public taxpayer pay the expenditures. But that is always the public private partnership. The private partner raises funds. The public partner picks up the tab.

At the hearing neither anyone from the City Librarian's office, the Commission office or even the Friends & Foundation was there to answer questions. They sent a second tier administrator to claim that none of this was true. The committee members asked some rhetorical questions but when a member of the public, Peter Garfield, rose to answer they quickly preempted that by insisting that the administrator repeat the answers she had already given.

It is clear why this went before the City Operations and Neighborhood Services Committee. The members of the committee are McGoldrick, Dufty and Ma. Dufty and Ma are the two supervisors who got an extra $672,000 and $500,000 for the bond programs in their districts. Of course, Fiona Ma got a chance to say, "I don't get it." Well of course Supervisor does not get it. This is the worst example of forum shopping imaginable. If this had gone back to the Budget and Finance Committee, the prior experience would have been on the table and there might have been actual fact checking from the Budget Analyst, which is after all why the Supervisors are paying him.

So the final issue is a practical one. This happened in May (retroactively). June is budget season. Does anyone know how to find this position in the budget? The Public Library will not respond to document requests at all, and will not make their Financial Officer available for questions – both of which are highly illegal. The Controller on the other hand claims that it does not have that level of detail, has no paper records and will part with computer records only after almost heroic resistance. There was a time in the early days of my career as an activist when you could eventually find your way into the Controller's system and actually view paper printouts if you had the patience. Those days are over, as apparently are the days of public accountability.

So what do we have? This is an almost perfect example of the public paying for a private perk and no one doing their job to prevent it from happening. This is why privatization always works. This is what their money buys them.

SaveOurLibraries.com

James Chaffee chaffeej [at] pacbell.net