Matt Gonzalez isn’t just a former president of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors, he’s also been the Chief Attorney in San Francisco’s Public Defenders Office, and more recently he has defended construction contractors in disputes with the city in private practice.

In 2003 Gonzalez narrowly lost a mayoral race to Gavin Newsom.  Matt won 47% of the vote in that election despite being outspent 8 to 1 by Newsom’s campaign.  So Gonzalez has had an exceptional view of San Francisco’s politics, legal system, and its construction/development practices.

In this interview with California Insider, Gonzalez explains how city officials, like Mohammed Nuru, extort contractors trying to build in the city.   To put it simply, the city allows bids for construction projects to be ‘rebid’ by the city for any number of reasons, giving city officials leverage over the contractors, because at any time they can pull the construction project from them, and reissue the RFP to another developer.   Or they can impose delays on the project that can skyrocket the developer’s costs.

“There is, unfortunately, a culture that creates a situation where certain bad actors can exact money to enrich themselves at the expense of the public”.
– Matt Gonzalez

Gonzalez explains that if a city official is corrupt, they can use their power over a contractor’s project to lean on them for favors, like political contributions or donations to a certain nonprofit (as examples).  If the developer complains, in many cases, they may be punished for speaking out.  If they do not comply, their contract can simply be “rebid” and given to someone else.

Watch Full Interview Here:

Understanding how the city has a culture of corruption is important to understand why it might take +20 years to finish the construction on Van Ness Avenue, or why it took 12 years to lay 1.7 miles of track for the new Central Subway line, only to find out they laid the wrong track, and the project has been delayed indefinitely.

Gonzalez doesn’t mention these particular big city projects in his examples of corruption, (he mentions mostly the Nuru case and the SFO extension scandal along with other examples showing how far back this type of corruption goes) but one has to wonder if the problems he’s describing aren’t directly responsible for our current never-ending city construction projects.

To put our most recent central subway line debacle between Chinatown and SOMA in perspective, just look at past rail construction projects.  BART began construction in 1964, by 1974 BART was taking passengers from as far away as Concord, underneath the bay, underneath miles of Market Street in San Francisco.  That means they built over 70 miles of track, underground, aboveground, and underwater, in less time (10 years) tan it’s taken modern-day San Francisco to complete 1.7 miles of subway line (12 years), and that project still has no real end in sight.

I, for one, think we should listen to guys like Gonzalez, because something needs to change with how San Francisco does business.