A San Francisco commission unanimously voted Wednesday night to fire city official Kimberly Ellis, a progressive holdover from the previous administration, for what new Mayor Daniel Lurie called “unlawful activities.”
Ellis, the director of the San Francisco Department on the Status of Women, was the subject of a monthslong investigation by the city attorney’s office for secretly moonlighting for a political group and directing taxpayer money to groups run by her friends.
The seven-member oversight board, the San Francisco Commission on the Status of Women, voted to dismiss Ellis after Lurie, who does not have the direct authority to fire her, asked the panel to do so. Panel members are appointed by the mayor.
“By unanimous vote, the commission has voted to remove director Ellis for the benefit and the future success of the department,” Sophia Andary, the president of the commission, said in announcing the vote. The dismissal, she said, was effective immediately.
In a statement to the San Francisco Chronicle, Lurie thanked the commission for supporting him and “the important work of the department while ensuring San Franciscans know their government is working for them every day.”
“I have the highest expectations for city employees, and the city attorney’s investigation found that director Ellis committed a range of misconduct, unlawful activities and mismanagement of the department on the status of women,” he added.
Ellis, a progressive activist, was appointed by former Democratic Mayor London Breed in 2020 to lead a city agency created to give women equal representation in City Hall. At the time, Ellis was the executive director of Emerge California, a group that promotes women candidates. She also ran Southern Belle Strategies, a consulting firm.
Ellis often referred to herself as the “most powerful unelected person in California Democratic politics” and was known to combine political interests with her role as a city official.
While the full scope of the investigation into Ellis is unknown, the San Francisco Standard and the San Francisco Chronicle claimed that one of the allegations stems from a conference she hosted called Shift Happens.
In 2023, Ellis spent nearly $500,000 paying the African American Art & Culture Complex, a nonprofit, to host the first Shift Happens Women’s Policy Summit. At the event, Ellis interviewed then-Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) and invited Lee to make a pitch to the audience about her U.S. Senate campaign.
“I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: ‘Barbara Lee speaks for me,’” Ellis told the audience.
While city employees are allowed to support their candidate of choice, they are not allowed to use city resources to advocate one.
A few months later, Ellis started receiving paychecks from PowerPACPlus, which was supporting Lee. PowerPACPlus made $20,000 in payments to Ellis’s Southern Belle Strategies. City employees are required to get prior approval before moonlighting, but Ellis did not inform the Department of Human Resources of her side income. A year before Ellis started working for PowerPACPlus, she awarded a $128,000 city contract to the committee’s nonprofit affiliate, PowerPAC.org.The nonprofit was the fiscal sponsor for She the People, a female-centric political project founded by Aimee Allison, whom Ellis has described on social media as a “dear friend.”
Ellis hired She the People to produce video profiles on Breed, State Controller Malia Cohen, Supervisor Myrna Melgar, and City Administrator Carmen Chu. When there was pushback that She the People was given a no-contract bid, Ellis argued that her friend’s organization was the only one in San Francisco qualified to produce a high-quality media campaign. The videos came out in 2023 and over the course of the year only racked up a few dozen likes.
When it was time to host another Shift Happens summit, the cost to the city jumped by $200,000. The 2024 contract went to a new group called Ignite National, a group she had worked with in the past.
Documents showed that Ellis spent $150,000 to hire the group to run a voter registration campaign for her department. She had also worked with the group four years earlier. Ignite paid her consulting firm $10,000 or more for work. Documents obtained by the San Francisco Chronicle showed that Ellis got approval from her oversight commission to hire Ignite without soliciting bids. She once again convinced the commission that Ignite was the only company uniquely qualified to host the event.
“It is highly inappropriate,” Richard Painter, a University of Minnesota law professor and former chief White House ethics lawyer, said. “There is no way you should be giving out a city contract to someone and then taking a consulting gig from someone.”
One of the commission members who voted to hire Ignite, Anne Moses, founded Ignite in 2010. Moses reported in financial disclosure filings that she took home a salary of at least $100,000 a year from Ignite. She told local news outlets that she stopped working for Ignite in 2021 but that she continued to report earning income from them through 2023 in error.
There were also complaints that Ellis created a toxic work environment based on “intimidation and fear.”
Since 2020, the small city agency has seen 17 employees quit, 10 of whom were hired during Ellis’s tenure. There are currently only eight employees in the department.
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Ellis has maintained she has done nothing wrong. She filed a lawsuit against the city on April 1. In it she claims she was targeted and is the victim of retaliation after she reported concerns about sexual misconduct at a foster care program.
“Director Ellis was not forced out for poor performance or ethical misconduct,” her lawsuit claims. “She was forced out for telling the truth, for defending the vulnerable, and for refusing to quietly disappear. Her removal reflects not only unlawful retaliation but also a disturbing betrayal of the very values San Francisco claims to champion.”
