Pink slips
Her job on the line, elections chief asks for yet more money, cans nearly half her staff

By Rachel Brahinsky

Just three weeks after revealing she had racked up $5.6 million in unapproved expenses to run the city's elections over the past year, San Francisco Election Department director Tammy Haygood asked the Board of Supervisors for another $200,000 last week. The board balked, and by the end of the week almost half of Haygood's staff had been issued pink slips.

It's just the latest snafu for Haygood, whose troubled reign over the Elections Department could soon be coming to a close. The Elections Commission, which supervises her, will consider this week whether to move ahead with a process that could result in her ouster.

Haygood told us she isn't worried about losing her job. Instead, she said, she's focused on bringing her agency up to par – a tall order for the Elections Department, which has long been accused of incompetence.

Last week's affair seems egregious even by the department's debased standards. First came Haygood's stunning $5.6 million request last month. Haygood said those costs – which included three top-dollar public relations consultants – were necessary to run a clean election. The supervisors agreed to give the department $3.1 million.

Then on April 8, Haygood returned. "The ink wasn't dry [on the appropriation] when she came in and said, 'I need another $200,000,' " Sup. Aaron Peskin, chair of the board's Finance Committee, told us.

Haygood told us the board shouldn't have been surprised. "They knew from the day we were budgeted that we were underfunded," she said.

But the board was loath to come up with the cash, and so last Friday as many as 11 staffers lost their jobs, Haygood confirmed. She estimated she still has about 13 employees.

Elections Commission chair Tom Schulz said he's still hoping to find additional money to bring back staffers. But that could be tough. "Even with these layoffs they're not going to be quite at budget at the end of the fiscal year," Peg Stevenson, the city's chief assistant controller, told us. "They could be a couple of tens of thousands short in the end."

The firings don't bode well for the department, which is struggling to implement the nation's first instant-runoff voting system. And they could also signal the end of Haygood's tenure there.

Haygood and her superiors on the Elections Commission have been at loggerheads since the commission was formed in January. Commissioners have said Haygood has refused to share public documents and basic information in a timely way. They've said she and her staff have stonewalled their efforts at establishing themselves as a new commission.

She told us that's not true and is looking into her legal options to deal with one commissioner whom she's accused of creating a hostile work environment.

But commissioners insist otherwise: "We've encountered a certain amount of resistance from the director," Schulz said. "We have to fight to get records. We have to fight to get department space. You'd think if you had a body that's supposed to direct policy for you that you'd be more accommodating."

E-mail Rachel Brahinsky at rachel@sfbg.com.