Even little kids know to be upstanders, not bystanders, when it comes to bullying. To call it out when they see it. To tell a teacher or parent who can help. To not just look the other way.
Sadly, a City Hall full of highly paid adults charged with leading our supposedly compassionate, bighearted city stood quietly by as Supervisor Aaron Peskin bullied staff, lobbed baseless accusations in public meetings and made profane, inappropriate remarks off and on for the past 21 years.
Peskin announced Thursday he’s seeking treatment for an alcohol problem and apologized “for the tenor that I have struck in my public relationships.” That’s a good first step, and I wish him well on his road to recovery.
But it doesn’t wipe clean the nasty culture he helped create at City Hall since first being elected in 2000, and it certainly doesn’t absolve his colleagues who’ve also bullied people — or those who’ve watched and said nothing as it happened.
Mayor London Breed, who’s been known to yell at staff herself, didn’t call out the berating behavior until Wednesday when she told her department heads they could get out of presenting information at the Board of Supervisors if they feared bullying.
Among the 11 board members, a few have bullied people and the rest have watched it happen and not uttered a peep.
The Chronicle could find no formal, written complaints about Peskin’s behavior for at least the past decade. Supervisor Matt Haney said he’d verbally shared concerns about Peskin’s drinking and behavior with board President Shamann Walton and Angela Calvillo, clerk of the board, but it’s unclear whether either of them did much about it. Walton could have removed Peskin from meetings under the board rules for “disorderly, contemptuous or insolent behavior,” but didn’t.
No supervisor other than Haney is known to have spoken up, and hardly any would talk publicly to the Chronicle, even after Peskin acknowledged his alcohol problem and troublesome behavior.
Supervisor Hillary Ronen said she’d been uncomfortable with Peskin’s behavior in meetings, but hadn’t known what to do about it. After Chronicle reporters kept calling her and other city officials over the past couple of weeks about his behavior, she said she phoned Peskin herself on Wednesday, encouraging him to seek treatment.
“I confronted him directly, and I told him how his behavior at the board was affecting me and our colleagues,” she said. “You forced us to get past our discomfort. I had no choice anymore.”
Kudos to Ronen, but such directness should have happened a long time ago.
Supervisor Rafael Mandelman said he, too, has been uncomfortable watching Peskin and a few other colleagues whom he declined to name “treating staff as if they are incompetent and beneath contempt.” But he said his colleagues answer to the voters, not to him, so he did nothing.
Yet the supervisors and the mayor didn’t seem to feel that way when calling for school board member Alison Collins to resign over anti-Asian tweets even though she, too, answers to the voters. Mandelman explained he thinks Peskin’s mark on the city has been positive overall while Collins’ has been “negative in a way that is unique.” But people aren’t supposed to consider whether bullies are also sometimes kind and productive when deciding whether to call out their bullying.
Numerous City Hall staff have been berated as they’ve tried to present data and information about their work to the supervisors. Holding city staff accountable amid multiple city crises? Totally appropriate. Humiliating them, making them cry and leaving them visibly shaken? Not appropriate.
These are board meetings, not courtroom cross-examinations from “A Few Good Men.”
And it hasn’t occurred just in public meetings. Numerous city staff have said they’ve received hostile, late-night calls from Peskin. And he acknowledged to The Chronicle that on a phone call with other supervisors and their aides last year, he grew angry in a discussion about the gross receipts tax and said, “This will have to be one of those times where I take my d— out, and the mayor takes her d— out, and let’s see whose is bigger.”
Debbie Raphael, director of the Department of the Environment, knows the hostility well. In a March board meeting, Peskin baselessly accused her of malfeasance in front of the full board, later apologizing. Raphael said Friday that many of her staff members, too, fear presenting to the board.
“I honestly can only counsel them to take deep breaths and do the best that they can,” she said, adding it’s frustrating to spend time navigating bad behavior instead of talking about pressing issues like managing climate change.
“The last thing I want to be focused on is disrespectful behavior and the inability to treat each other with dignity,” she said.
Jeffrey Tumlin, director of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, said the questioning by elected officials in San Francisco is uniquely mean.
“In every other city where I’ve worked, I would always put the project manager or subject matter expert forward to present their work to the city council,” he said. “San Francisco is the only city where staff are reluctant to present their own work for fear of bullying.”
He said he often presents their work for them, meaning they lose out on an opportunity for career development. That happens more often with women than with men, he said, which is ironic in our progressive city.
“I have had to deal with staff people in tears after having presented. I have had to deal with staff people who were ready to quit their jobs because of the way they had been treated,” Tumlin said. “I’ve lost some extremely talented women of color from the SFMTA in part because of the cruel culture in city government that goes overlooked.”
Despite a national reckoning on race, gender and inclusion, why have city officials not ensured women and especially women of color get treated respectfully?
Mary Ellen Carroll, director of the Department of Emergency Management, said one of her top goals is mentoring young women and helping them obtain leadership positions in city government, but many have told her the toxic atmosphere turns them off to a career in public service.
“What happens is we say, ‘Oh, we have to work with people. We don’t want to stir the pot,’” she said of keeping quiet in the face of bullying. “But if we don’t call it out, and that’s all of us, we’re complicit. As leaders, we shouldn’t tolerate it.”
A supervisor said it well last year during a July discussion about whether to create a public advocate position to foster good government and call out wrongdoing. The supervisor said it wasn’t needed because all elected officials should be playing that role.
“This is our job,” he said. “We are the people who can set the tone from the top.”
That supervisor was Aaron Peskin, and he was right. If only his colleagues had listened.
San Francisco Chronicle columnist Heather Knight appears Sundays and Wednesdays. Email: hknight@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @hknightsf
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June 12, 2021 at 06:03PM
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City Hall silence: Why did so many stay quiet about Supervisor Aaron Peskin's behavior? - San Francisco Chronicle
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