The Cleveland reports have sparked a minor feeding frenzy among San Francisco media, with reporters besieging the Housing Authority for information on its operations.
Recent news reports have sparked controversy over a contract the agency has with a private security firm that provides guards to patrol housing projects. Also, HUD recently confirmed that it decided not to award the agency a typically routine drug-fighting grant because it did not approve of Brown's plans to turn most of the money over to Together, United, Recommitted, Forever (TURF). Brown has championed TURF, a youth patrol of former gang members, despite questions about whether some TURF members may still be engaging in criminal activity.
Looming over all of the agency's other travails have been persistent general murmurs that federal investigators are looking into drug dealing by some Housing Authority employees. SF Weekly's investigation is the first to specifically identify known felons on the agency payroll, including some who are targets of the federal investigation.
The agency's continual turmoil, in fact, helps explain why numerous convicted drug dealers and felons wound up on the agency's payroll.
The Housing Authority has hundreds of apartments dearly in need of repair. Instead of bidding out all the work to private contractors, the Housing Authority received HUD's permission to simply hire its own massive force of in-house painters, laborers, and repairmen.
Beginning in 1997, the Housing Authority became a mammoth jobs program, hiring more than 600 new employees and paying them with federal money to begin fixing up dilapidated housing units.
SF Weekly obtained a list of the agency's payroll three months ago, and began sifting through the hundreds of names, looking for employees with criminal convictions and past felony convictions.
The agency, however, steadfastly refused to release the dates of birth of its workers, which would have allowed a relatively quick comparison of the payroll to criminal court files.
Accusing SF Weekly of having "nefarious" intentions, Housing Authority lawyer Joel Blackman refused to comply with a request under state Open Records laws to release employee dates of birth.
Several lawyers consulted by SF Weekly, including Terry Frank of the California First Amendment Coalition, agreed that state law required that the information be made available. Blackman, however, told SF Weekly it would have to obtain a court order before he would release the data.
"We have over a thousand employees here, and I'm sure they're mostly ordinary people," Blackman said. Although some of the agency's workers "might have a few skeletons in their closets," Blackman said releasing too much information on employees would be an invasion of their privacy.
Philip Dawdy contributed to this report.
Published:In our July 22 cover story "Project Employment," SF Weekly incorrectly reported that former San Francisco Housing Authority employee Donald Watts was arrested on drug and gun charges in 1997 after a raid on his mother's apartment. Watts was arrested at his own apartment, not his mother's.
