Let's followup on my post today about the City Controller's Office providing me with proof that over the three most recent fiscal years, two nonprofits headed by Chief of Protocol Charlotte Shultz received $955,000 and I believe much of that went toward her annual lavish City Hall parties for her elite friends and diplomats. Must be nice for the 1 percenters to enjoy themselves on the taxpayers' dime via welfare to the SF Host Committee and the SF Special Events Committee.
Last summer, with passions boiling over the SF Pride board of directors bestowing and then rescinding a grand marshal honor on WikiLeaks heroine Chelsea Manning, I filed a public records request with the Grants for the Arts program for documents showing how much the queer nonprofit had received from 2010 through 2012. At that point, the City had not provided any funds to SF Pride for 2013.
(Courtesy of SF Pride.)
Over that three-year span, SF Pride received roughly $58,000 annually for a total of around $169,000.
For all the faults of the old board of directors at SF Pride even I, one of their most ardent critics, would say that paltry $58,000 each year was a wise investment by the City for an event that brings hundreds of thousands of people to town during June, and millions of profits for public and private coffers.
Now, I am also keeping tabs on the new board and while I have not seen their report to the City Controller responding to an audit, and the report is in the works and after it is submitted to the controller will be made available to the public, I say with much confidence in most of the current board and the newly hired executive director, City Hall should allocate more taxpayers funds to SF Pride.
(Charlotte Shultz, recipient of City welfare, seated at left. Credit: Catherine Bigelow, SF Chronicle.)
Why is the City skirting Prop F, which banned public funds paying for the activities of the Protocol Office, and directing robust six-figure grants to Shultz's two nonprofits that perform diplomatic services and organize soirees for her friends, and providing SF Pride with only relatively low five-figure funds to produce events that attract nearly a million people?
We need every queer who thinks the City should be giving more public dollars to SF Pride, and all businesses that benefit from Pride Month every June and the myriad functions organized to celebrate our liberation and activism, to lobby the mayor and Board of Supervisors. Our June parade and celebration bring in way more people and profits than Shultz's shindigs, and City allocations should reflect that reality.
Let the mayor and Supervisors cut the welfare Shultz's two nonprofits now received, adhere to the law created by Prop F, and she can rattle her gold plated begging bowl at her 1% friends to pay for their parties at our City Hall. The party subsidies she received would then be redirected to SF Pride.
A much better use and investment of City dollars.
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