Price Recall Financially Driven by Handful in Finance/Real Estate Community, Per Reports

Semi-annual campaign finance reports released last week reveal an unusual relationship between the two campaign finance committees currently raising funds for the recall of ALCO District Attorney Pamela Price—RBA/Supporters of Recall Pamela Price and Save Alameda for Everyone [SAFE]. The reports suggest the committees are run in conjunction from a central organization, bolstering a leaked campaign strategy document from SAFE which called RBA/Supporters its "affluent" donor arm.

The majority of the funds for the recall are being supplied by a small community of big spenders in the real estate, tech and financial sectors from peers of one of the founders of the original recall committee, Philip Dreyfuss[1], according to the reports. Dreyfuss was also a major contributor to the campaign to oust San Francisco's progressive DA, Chesa Boudin.

Astonishingly, according to the reports, Dreyfuss contributed one-third of the total recall funds raised in 2023, $390K. The total amount raised by both groups in 2023 was $1.168MM, and their combined expenditures by the end of the year were $1.67MM, including deferred payments. 497 forms that are required to be turned in whenever a committee contributes a large amount in proximity to an election show that RBA/Supporters has spent another $545K on SAFE since the start of 2024. That means that the total amount spent, including payments that are still due, could be by the time of this writing as much $2.2 MM [2].

Majority of Recall Funds are from RBA/Supporters Finance Committee

RBA/Supporters raised $760.5K and spent $783.9K in 2023, according to the semi-annual reports. Most of that spending—$693K—went to a direct purchase of signature gathering from PCI Consultants and other services on behalf of SAFE, like polling. The $693K counts as an in-kind contribution to SAFE and so was also reported as a part of SAFE’s haul of $1.1 MM for 2023. Thus, the RBA/Supporters' in-kind contribution represents about two-thirds of the $1.1 MM SAFE contributions reported raising in 2023. SAFE raised $407K on its own.

SAFE reports that it has actually spent about $1.6 MM on the recall in 2023—that includes the in-kind purchases from RBA/Supporters combined with an additional $567K listed as unpaid bills and $348K of its own cash spending. Given the dynamic between the two organizations, the unpaid bills may yet be paid by RBA/Supporters.

Some recall-focused spending by RBA/Supporters isn't counted as assistance to SAFE, including $29K for as yet unpaid bills to Annie Eagan, and other high-level political consultants. In SAFE's leaked strategy document, Eagan and the other consultants are listed as part of SAFE's "campaign team". Despite claims in the strategy document that Eagan is a SAFE consultant, payments to Eagan do not appear in SAFE's reporting as in-kind contributions from RBA/Supporters. Thought not all of the participation claimed in the strategy document has been confirmed, the appearance of bills to Eagan means that either RBA/Supporters is paying more of what should be SAFE's bills than what appears to be reported, or the two committees are run by the same organizational structure, using the same team of consultants under one strategy.

RBA/Supporters’ Should Have Reported in October Since Its Singular Focus Was the Recall Through Most of 2023

SAFE was co-founded by Carl Chan, Brenda Grisham and Dreyfuss last August. At the time, Dreyfuss was listed as a principal officer in the SAFE committee. But shortly after SAFE’s founding, Dreyfuss’ name disappeared from SAFE's list of officers and Dreyfuss started another finance committee dubbed Reviving the Bay Area [RBA]without any explanation from either group. Unlike SAFE, RBA was formed as a general purpose committee. Those kinds of committees lack quarterly requirements like SAFE has and that meant that RBA/Supporters contributors would remain unknown until January, well into the legal recall timeline, and with little over a month left until the signature-gathering deadline.

The untransparent finance activity that would appear designed to hide major funders of the recall caught the attention of "Protect the Win", the Price-linked campaign countering the recall. On December 7, an attorney for the campaign sent a letter to the Fair Political Practices Commission [FPPC], the California regulatory agency that oversees campaign financing, demanding an investigation of RBA/Supporters reporting practices. The letter alleged that the group is a committee primarily focused on the recall, but that it failed to report quarterly as it should have under California law.

RBA/Supporters reporting released this month bolsters the allegations. Not only was the recall a singular focus through the cut-off date for reporting at the end of September, the recall was the only focus for the committee for at least the first three months of its existence. RBA/Supporters' reports and Nevada campaign finance records show that RBA/Supporters contributed $25K for the nascent Las Vegas anti-ballpark ballot measure just two weeks before the semi-annual reporting period ended on December 18. By that date, RBA had spent over $600K on SAFE, according to RBA/Supporters 497 reports released during the period.

The timing of the Nevada contribution is also suggestive. The contribution came a little over a week after the FPPC letter. Around the same time, RBA/Supporters refiled its paperwork, now declaring itself a committee primarily focused on the Price recall [3].

RBA's trajectory as a recall-focused committee was already visible by the reporting cut-off date at the end of September. SAFE reported in its quarterly report in October that RBA/Supporters purchased $48K worth of polling services for SAFE.

Had RBA/Supporters filed in October, the reality that SAFE shares control of the recall campaign with deep-pocketed real estate and tech professionals would have made news months ago as the “grassroots” branded recall kicked off signature collection. By the cut-off at the end of September, Dreyfuss had already contributed $100K to RBA/Supporters. Along with only two other contributors, both in areas of real estate and tech investment, RBA/Supporters had already raised $140K, nearly as much as SAFE had in its own reporting for that period.

Dreyfuss Supplied One-Third of 2023 Recall Funding

Dreyfuss' contributions, in fact, make up a large proportion of RBA/Supporters funding in 2023. Dreyfus’ contribution of $390K alone represents more than half of RBA/Supporters’ contribution to SAFE, and represents one-third of the total raised in 2023 for the recall by both committees.

RBA/Supporters' Community of Real Estate and Finance Sector Principals are the Financial Drivers of the Recall

The Recall is financially driven by Dreyfuss' peers—a handful of Bay Area finance and tech sector investors, real estate investors and big landlords. Dreyfuss’ contribution alone represents about as much as the entire amount SAFE raised independently. Dreyfuss and the four next highest contributors to the recall effort, Scott Osler, Holland Partners, Ryan Sutton–Gee and Carl Bass by themselves make up about half of the funds raised for the recall reported in 2023. Combined with the other contributors to RBA/Supporters, the committee represents three quarters of the total raised in 2023.

A short list of the highest contributors, who’ve often made headlines of their own:

Byong Joo Yu, CEO of KP Asian Market, $10K: Yu recently made the news when tenants of a building he owns protested in front of his store claiming one of his rental properties has become unlivable, and that the landlord's ultimate goal in allowing the decline of the property was forcing tenants out.

Scott Osler, the CEO of Martin Group, $40K: Martin Group closed on deals for nearly $100MM in rental properties in Oakland last year.

TMG Partners, $9.5K

Isaac Abid/HP Investors, $25K: Abid runs RBA/Supporters along with Dreyfuss. Abid made headlines in 2022 when HP forced the closure of Luka's Tap Room after his company doubled the rent on the property.

Signature Development, $9.9K: Signature owns Brooklyn Basin.

John Protopappas, $5K: Protopappas had a significant role in the landlord-driven anti-eviction moratorium organizing in 2023, including backing a lawsuit that challenged the moratorium. Protopappas made the news in 2020 for attempting to evict tenants during Covid. That same year, Protopappas purchased a $6MM mansion in Piedmont.

Moses Libitzky, $10K: Libitzky owns major properties in Oakland, the greater bay area, and nationally and is the Senior Vice President of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Eileen Kwei Artisan Partners, 9,900:

Ellis Partners LLC, $10K: EP made news in 2019 when it purchased properties housing two of Oakland's last remaining LGBQT bars, raised rent and forced them to close.

Philip Dreyfuss, $390K: Dreyfuss is known for his previous support of the Chesa Boudin recall. Dreyfuss is a partner at Farallon Partners and also appears to be a real estate investor and landlord of various Oakland properties, through at least one LLC. Dreyfuss was listed as a principal in Three Steps Properties, LLC as recently as 2022.

The LLC owns at least four properties. Three Steps is also the landlord for the sites, according to the company's website. According to SF Yimby, Three Steps is also in process of developing another rental property at 469 40th st. The site was a previous rental property that was demolished after purchase by Three Steps, and has pulled permits to construct a new rental property on the site. The permits were initially denied because the project did not fulfill City of Oakland rules around at minimum replacing the number of units demolished.

SAFE's Haul

Though SAFE raised more in the last three months of 2023 than it did during its first reporting period in the third quarter of 2023, the org lacked the large scale donors of the kind that contributed to RBA/Supporters. In total SAFE raised $407K in 2023, but it has spent much more than that with the in-kind spending from RBA/Supporters and $567K in unpaid bills for services is factored in—it seems likely that unpaid bills will be paid by RBA/Supporters.

In its first report, SAFE received a large contribution of $49K from a single donor in tech finance, but the largest contribution in SAFE’s new report is $10k. Many of the contributions are from the real estate and financial sectors, but its difficult to tell what industries are most represented in the report as around 200 donors are listed as retired in the report. Some of the biggest contributors who’ve listed "retired", however, are also easily found to have links to the real estate and finance sectors.

Another significant set of donors are local justice system and district attorney lawyers—among them, Nancy O’Malley, and her predecessor who recommended her initially to the seat when he retired in mid-term, Tom Orloff. Both gave $5K each. The list includes at least one attorney who left office soon after Price won election—Erin Loback, a San Francisco resident, who gave $800. Loback was quoted in a recent article casting aspersions about Price's partner. [4].

[1]Dreyfuss founded Reviving the Bay Area [RBA] as principal officer, with Isaac Abid as Treasurer, but in mid-November, the two switched roles, according to reports submitted at that time. This article identifies the committee as RBA/Supporters to reflect the reality that Dreyfuss initiated the committee under the previous name, but was obligated by California law to change the name after shifting the designation to a committee primarily focused on the recall.

[2] SAFE listed a significant amount of unpaid bills in its spending that would offset the amount given to the committee by RBA/Supporters since the start of 2024 if it were used to pay those bills. For that reason, this publication did not assume as a given that the amount would be added to total expenditures for the recall.

[3] RBA had reclassified itself as BOTH a primarily focused committee and general purpose committee in November, but in mid-December finally admitted it's a primarily focused committee, likely to head off FPPC scrutiny coming from the letter of complaint. This is when RBA changed its name to Supporters of Recall Pamela Price to denote its focus on a recall, as required by law. Notably, however, the org did not turn in a late quarterly report.

[4] All of the sums used in this article come from self-reporting required by law which are subject to amendment in future reports.