“The public reports of financial mismanagement at the Parks Alliance are extremely troubling,” Chiu said in a statement. “Any contributions meant to benefit the public should be used for that purpose. We are working together with the Controller to assess compliance with our agreements and ensure transparency.”
The SF Standard also reported that four former top executives of the Parks Alliance received bonuses last year, even as their organization was racking up a prodigious deficit.
Fielder said the parks department was “not happy” about the proposed audit.”
“They took issue with some of the claims, but I stand by every single one of them, and I hope that they just cooperate with the audit,” she said, expressing confidence that more developments would surface around the Parks Alliance’s ties to the department.
Tamara Aparton, a parks spokesperson, said the department operates transparently, with oversight from its commission, the Controller’s Office and the Board of Supervisors.
“We welcome public inquiry and are happy to share all relevant information — much of which is already available through a simple legislative or public document search,” she told KQED in an email.
This isn’t the first time the Parks Alliance, which operates independently from the parks department but is closely linked to it, has been mired in controversy. In 2020, Mohammed Nuru, the city’s former chief of public works, funneled nearly $1 million in donations from various city contractors into a Parks Alliance account that he used as his personal slush fund. Two years later, Nuru was convicted of fraud and sentenced to seven years in federal prison.
In 2021, the Board of Supervisors issued a subpoena to obtain financial transactions between the Alliance and the parks department, after Supervisor Connie Chan raised concerns that the nonprofit’s donations were unduly influencing the department to invest in certain neighborhoods over others.
