After two big-bucks moderate political action committees spent nearly $10 million on failed attempts to elect Mark Farrell and pass Prop D, the groups Neighbors for a Better San Francisco and TogetherSF are licking their wounds and merging into one.
We’ve been following recent years’ political ascendance of very similarly named tech-money-funded moderate political pressure groups like Neighbors for a Better SF, TogetherSF, GrowSF, and Abundant SF. Now there is one less to follow. The Chronicle reports that the two wealthiest of these groups are merging, and Neighbors for a Better SF and TogetherSF will now operate as the same organization.
This comes in the wake of those two groups spending more than $10 million on getting Mark Farrell elected mayor and passing the City Hall reform measure Prop D in this past November’s elections, and they got dismal results for that money. (The campaign mailer they funded showing money flushing down a toilet was ironically appropriate.) Prop D lost by a whopping 13 points, Mark Farrell came in an embarrassing fourth place.
TogetherSF’s reputation was tarnished when their former ally Mayor London Breed pulled out of the debate they sponsored saying they were completely in the tank for Farrell, and there were allegations that TogetherSF was illegally colluding with the Farrell campaign. For their part, Neighbors for a Better SF drew a giant campaign ethics fine at the height of election season, and it did not help that their CEO Jay Cheng had some years-old sexual assault allegations surface.
TogetherSF, co-founded and primarily funded by SF Standard owner Michael Moritz, is the same group that plastered those “That's Fentalife” posters all over town, and falsely claimed a farmer’s market was closing because of drug dealers. Neighbors for a Better San Francisco is largely funded by Republican megadonor William Oberndorf, and was a driving financial force behind the Chesa Boudin and school board recalls.
There’s always been a sense that these two groups were working together, considering both are led by a husband-and-wife team. TogetherSF’s founder and CEO is Kanishka Cheng, who is married to Neighbors for a Better SF CEO Jay Cheng. And it seems both are very much on the outs with new mayor Daniel Lurie.
Lurie froze out Jay Cheng, likely because of his organization’s suspected collusion with Farrell campaign, and the SF Standard reported in November that the Lurie administration “will not work with Cheng or any group with which he collaborates.” TogetherSF appeared to be involved with anonymous attack ads against Lurie during the campaign, while Neighbors’ Oberndorf got into an apparent email spat with Lurie in October.
According to an email announcing the merger, Jay Cheng will apparently remain executive director of the combined groups, which will apparently still be called Neighbors for a Better SF.
“It’s a new era in the city right now, and this merged, unified organization helps us to be in a position to be a catalyst for all of that improvement and that important work we think is going to come in the coming years,” Cheng said in that email. “We’re really excited about it and we think we’re stronger together.”
That’s putting a brave face on it. Several of the organization’s biggest donors were not at all happy with the results these organizations achieved in the November elections.
“We spent, what, $20 million on a mayor problem that we didn’t have?” billionaire donor Chris Larsen told Mission Local a couple weeks back. “And we just squeaked through on the Board of Supervisors which, of course, is the heart of the problem … We should have focused on that 100 percent, should have been an eight-to-three board instead of a barely six-to-five.”
And apparently, there will be layoffs among staffers with this merger. Jay Cheng said to the Chronicle “we’re going to provide them support and severance.” The release adds that Kanishka Cheng will “play a pivotal role in facilitating a seamless transition,” but it doesn't say that she’s being retained. Mission Local speculates that the whole TogetherSF crew might be laid off.
The email announcement declares that “With a new Mayor and Board of Supervisors that are more aligned with our shared values, the organizations are joining forces.” This is clearly an attempt to play nice with the new Lurie administration, and get on its good side.
That could be a challenge! As Mission Local quoted one anonymous Lurie camp source as saying in late December, “We don’t owe them a goddamn thing.”
Image: Joe Kukura, SFist
