Rebuild trust in building inspectors
Last year, a federal grand jury indicted Rodrigo Santos, a San Franciscobased structural engineer, on charges of bank fraud, aggravated identity theft and obstruction of justice. Among the evidence were checks he’d directed clients to write to “DBI” — the Department of Building Inspection — which he then altered to say “RoDBIgo Santos.”
In all, he funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars into his personal account.
The Santos scandal was only one piece in a string of corruption charges to hit San Francisco in recent years. And the Department of Building Inspection has been at the center of more than its share of them. Bernard Curran, a former senior inspector for the department, faces charges of perjury and conflict of interest from the San Francisco District Attorney’s office, and federal fraud and bribery charges.
In the wake of these scandals come long overdue efforts for reform.
With Proposition B, San Francisco voters have the opportunity in the June 7 election to support restructuring the Department of Building Inspection’s oversight commission. It’s a first step toward improving accountability in a department tasked with a gargantuan role: overseeing the construction, plumbing, electrical and mechanical codes for hundreds of thousands of buildings across San Francisco.
This reform is sorely needed, and we endorse a yes vote on the measure.
Unlike other large departments in the city, the director of the Department of Building Inspection is not supervised, hired or fired by the mayor. Instead, oversight of this role lands solely in the hands of the commission. But therein lies conflict; currently, the majority of the seven commission seats are filled by people in building-related trades. The mayor appoints four positions, and the president of the Board of Supervisors appoints three. One must be a structural engineer (a role once filled by Santos in the early 2000s), another a licensed architect and so on. It is up to that commission — whose members often actively seek permits from the department to do their day jobs — to hire, fire and supervise the director.
Proposition B would shake up that structure. First, it would place the hiring and firing of the department’s director under the mayor’s jurisdiction, not the commission’s, making it consistent with other city departments. Second, it would strip dedicated industry seats from the commission and replace them with those with general technical qualifications.
Nominations for those seats would then have to go through the Board of Supervisors’ Rules Committee, just like nominations for the San Francisco Planning Commission or the board of directors for the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency.
The nomination process can be a fraught one. In recent years we’ve witnessed political and personal vendettas among members of the Board of Supervisors affect nominations of qualified candidates to oversight bodies. But nominations at least allow for public comment and would create consistency in how city department commissioners are selected.
Prop. B is not a magic wand that will end all potential forms of corruption in the department. However, it does make thoughtful changes to its oversight structure to provide better governance, in line with other city departments.