San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie is pushing to oust a progressive holdover from the previous administration after allegations arose that she secretly worked a side job for a political group and steered city money towards friends.
Kimberly Ellis, the director of the San Francisco Department on the Status of Women, was put on leave in March and is scheduled to face a vote Wednesday night that could result in her dismissal, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. The progressive activist was appointed by former Democratic Mayor London Breed in 2020 to lead a city agency created to give women equal representation in City Hall.
Ellis reports to the San Francisco Commission on the Status of Women, a seven-member panel appointed by the mayor. Lurie has recommended she be removed, but lacks the direct authority to do it himself.
When Ellis was hired by Breed, she was the executive director of Emerge California, a group whose goal is to promote women candidates. She also ran Southern Belle Strategies, a consulting firm.
She has referred to herself as the “most powerful unelected person in California Democratic politics” and has often mixed political interests with her role as a city official.
While the full scope of the investigation into Ellis is unknown, the San Francisco Standard and the San Francisco Chronicle claimed that one of the allegations stems from a conference she hosted called Shift Happens.
In 2023, Ellis spent nearly $500,000 paying the African American Art & Culture Complex, a nonprofit, to host the first Shift Happens Women’s Policy Summit. At the event, Ellis interviewed then-Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) and invited Lee to make a pitch to the audience about her U.S. Senate campaign.
“I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: ‘Barbara Lee speaks for me,’” Ellis told the audience.
While city employees are allowed to support their candidate of choice, they are not allowed to use city resources to advocate one.
A few months later, Ellis started receiving paychecks from PowerPACPlus, which was supporting Lee. PowerPACPlus made $20,000 in payments to Southern Belle Strategies.
City employees are required to get prior approval before moonlighting, but Ellis did not inform the Department of Human Resources of her side income.
Making things murkier, a year before Ellis started working for PowerPACPlus, she awarded a $128,000 city contract to the committee’s nonprofit affiliate, PowerPAC.org.
The nonprofit was the fiscal sponsor for She the People, a female-centric political project founded by Aimee Allison, whom Ellis has described on social media as a “dear friend.”
Ellis hired She the People to produce video profiles on Breed, State Controller Malia Cohen, Supervisor Myrna Melgar, and City Administrator Carmen Chu. When there was pushback that She the People was given a no-contract bid, Ellis argued that her friend’s organization was the only one in San Francisco qualified to produce a high-quality media campaign. The videos came out in 2023 and over the course of the year only racked up a few dozen likes.
When it was time to host another Shift Happens summit, the cost to the city jumped by $200,000, hitting the $700,000 mark. The 2024 contract went to a new group called Ignite National.
A deeper dive shows that Ellis spent $150,000 to hire the group to run a voter registration campaign for her department. She had also worked with the group four years earlier. Ignite paid her consulting firm $10,000 or more for work. Documents obtained by the San Francisco Chronicle showed that Ellis got approval from her oversight commission to hire Ignite without soliciting bids. She once again convinced the commission that Ignite was the only company uniquely qualified to host the event.
One of the commission members who voted to hire Ignite, Anne Moses, founded Ignite in 2010. Moses reported in financial disclosure filings that she took home a salary of at least $100,000 a year from Ignite. She told local news outlets that she stopped working for Ignite in 2021 but that she continued to report earning income from them through 2023 in error.
There were also complaints that Ellis created a work culture based on “intimidation and fear” that has been marked by high turnover. Since 2020, the small city agency has seen 17 employees quit, 10 of whom were hired during Ellis’s tenure. There are currently only eight employees in the department.
Ellis has maintained she has done nothing wrong. She filed a lawsuit against the city on April 1. In it she claims she was targeted and is the victim of retaliation after she reported concerns about sexual misconduct at a foster care program.
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Calls to Lurie and Ellis for comment were not returned.