Report slams San Francisco Mayor on staff salaries

The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

San Francisco city departments responsible for serving homeless people and making the city's buses and trains run on time spend more than $1 million a year - money from their own budgets - to pay the salaries of Mayor Gavin Newsom's staff members, according to a blistering city report scheduled to be released next week.

The report said the salaries of 11 staff members in Newsom's office are being paid for by various city agencies, including the cash-strapped Municipal Transportation Agency and the Human Services Agency, which manages the city's homeless and social service programs.

In one example cited, the Human Services Agency is paying $95,000 a year in salary and benefits for one of Newsom's press aides, according to the report by Board of Supervisors Budget Analyst Harvey Rose.

The document also implies that Newsom's administration has been violating city law by paying the mayor's point man on transportation $203,814 a year - nearly $32,000 more than the law allows. San Francisco's Charter requires mayoral staffers' salaries to be capped at 70 percent of the mayor's salary, which amounts to $172,000.

Newsom's spending and hiring practices have been the subject of numerous news reports. His opponents in City Hall have criticized the mayor for hiring a team of new staff members at the start of his second term while calling for drastic budget cuts in city departments, imposing a hiring freeze and eliminating vacant positions as the city braces for a $233 million budget deficit next year.

In an apparent preemptive strike against the report, Newsom called reporters into his City Hall office Friday, railed against the study's findings for nearly an hour and authorized his spokesman to provide a draft copy to reporters.

Newsom Chief of Staff Phil Ginsburg, who typically remains behind the scenes and rarely speaks on the record with reporters, was on hand for the meeting and called the budget analyst's report "bull-."

"Can you spell that?" Newsom interrupted. "Is it two l's? You can quote him on that."

Great moments in Blue America.