San Francisco mayoral candidate Mark Farrell agrees to historic campaign ethics fine
On the eve of Election Day, one of the candidates in the crowded race for San Francisco mayor was just hit with a record ethics fine.
Former interim mayor Mark Farrell has agreed to a six-figure settlement after he was accused on eight counts of violating the city's $500 campaign contribution limit. The fine involves a separate committee Farrell set up to support Prop D.
According to the complaint, money from the Prop D campaign was essentially used to support Farrell's bid for mayor instead.
The settlement includes an over $108,000 penalty and is set to be considered by the Ethics Commission at its upcoming meeting on Friday, Nov. 8.
"If approved, this case represents the largest penalty issued in the history of the San Francisco Ethics Commission," said the commission's Enforcement Director, Olabisi Matthews. "This record penalty reflects the serious harm that was done to the public's right to have timely and accurate information about how campaigns are funded in San Francisco."
Farrell issued a statement that read in part, "We agreed to a settlement for an accounting error that we corrected and publicly disclosed months ago, and over a disagreement about staff time allocation during the campaign, which led us to terminate our prior legal counsel for this matter. As the person responsible for both campaigns, I take full ownership of these issues."
Almost a month ago, Willie Brown and two other former mayors of San Francisco, along with six additional former city officials, filed a request for a criminal investigation into candidate for mayor Mark Farrell, citing campaign finance violations.
The letter, addressed to California Attorney General Rob Bonta and San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins, claims Farrell "appears to be willfully violating election law," by "laundering significant sums of money through an unrestricted ballot measure committee to cover costs incurred by his campaign for mayor to circumvent the $500 per person limit on contributions."