By Thomas K. Pendergast

Investigating the financial implosion of the San Francisco Parks Alliance has a lot of people pointing fingers and laying blame, yet so far the Board of Supervisors’ Government Audit and Oversight Committee inquiries have only raised more questions.

The Parks Alliance is like a bank for community groups to park and manage their money. However, money that was supposed to be restricted to funding their various projects was instead being used to cover operating expenses.

The San Francisco City Attorney’s Office is also conducting a separate investigation.

The supervisors’ committee called three former Parks Alliance leaders to testify under oath before them: Ex-CEO Drew Becher, his successor Robert Ogilvie and former Treasurer Rick Hutchinson.

Noticeably absent from the hearing was the man who got a lot of attention from those who did show: former Chief Financial Officer Justin Probert.

Probert was not at the hearing and attempts to contact him for this article have been unsuccessful. His employment with the Parks Alliance was terminated in February of 2024.

Becher said that prior to May 2024, he had no idea that funds restricted for various projects were being used to cover operating expenses.

“I relied on our financial team and in particular, our CFO, to prepare financial reports for review,” Becher told the committee. “I had no reason to doubt their accuracy once I received them.

“I did not have access to the bank account information until mid-2024 and I also did not have access to our financial and accounting system. So I would have no way to know how restricted funds were being used. It was the finance department’s job to manage and disburse those funds.”

Since he had been CEO, Becher said, several audits were done but none of them reported that restricted funds were being used for operating expenses.

Concern was raised about Probert’s “management style,” Becher said, but nothing suggesting that the organization was in such bad financial shape.

After ending Probert’s employment, Becher testified, they got a good look at their finances and that’s when alarm bells started going off.

“Every day we were uncovering new issues and reporting errors,” Becher said. “One of the things that we learned, to our dismay, was our former CFO had never logged into our financial software system. He set up an account and a password, but after that never logged in again.

“On April 17, 2024, a financial report was presented to the board’s finance committee, with corrected second-quarter financials. My recollection is that our position went from a negative $270,000 to a negative $2.1 million during that time.

“The books were a mess and the CFO who was supposed to be in charge was MIA (missing in action).”

In May 2024, they started contacting large donors to explain the situation and seek help in raising more money “to dig us out of the hole we found ourselves in.”

Former Treasurer Rick Hutchinson said the Parks Alliance Board of Directors had a lot of discussions on the impact on fundraising to keep them solvent.

“We had great fear, which proved to be correct, that if funders and donors realized the depth of issues that we were still uncovering that they would dry up all fundraising activities, and that’s exactly what happened.”

In late June, Becher and other Parks Alliance leaders met with Recreation and Park Department’s General Manager Phil Ginsburg and Rec. and Park staff to update them on the emerging financial issues.

Walton pressed Becher further on his responsibility as the CEO of the Parks Alliance (a position he held for six years until resigning last February), asking him if the CFO reported to him, which Becher confirmed was the case.

“So how could this happen for so many years and you not have any idea what was going on if you’re a good CEO?” Walton asked. “When did you start using restricted funds as an entity?”

“I do not know,” Becher responded. “I was not the CFO. I had a department that we’d built up for that, managed that process. I did not have any idea that we were using restricted funds for operating for the parks and services.”

“You expect this board to believe that this was on the CFO; that you had no responsibility and what the CFO was doing at this time?” Walton asked.

Becher said this was all handled by the finance department.

“I’m perplexed that anybody would be able to be in the CEO position for as long as you were and have no knowledge of what was going on with that organization fiscally,” Walton responded. “It is extremely hard to believe – as a matter of fact I don’t believe for one minute – that you were not aware of what the CFO was doing in that entire, at least six-year span, of how resources went out the door that were not on a specific line item set to go to where the funding should have been directed.”

District 2 Supervisor Stephen Sherrill asked about them notifying key donors, and when were they planning on notifying smaller donors like the 80 community groups with projects in the works.

“The plan was to work with our key donors, notify them, making sure that they heard from us first; they didn’t hear from other folks about our financial issues so we could tell that story,” Becher responded. “Move to City and other closer partners and then the plan was to, once we knew we had a viable path forward based on our plans, we were going to talk to the community groups.”

“Did any donations from community groups or donated on behalf of community groups come in after June, 2024?” Sherrill asked. “I’m seeing some nods here. And would they be considered ‘key donors’ too or are they too small to be worth the conversation?”

“It would be ones that would donate directly to the Parks Alliance because that’s where I needed to have the conversation with those donors that supported the Parks Alliance directly, not necessarily a fiscal sponsored group of the Parks Alliance,” Becher said.

“My point here is that their money is gone and we didn’t bother to tell them that it was maybe going to be gone and we had a huge problem and you still accepted the money on their behalf,” Sherrill said. “That’s the problem.

“At what point did you think that it might be a good idea to tell the people who are donating money to support their park, who are not billionaires and millionaires, that are represented in this audience today, that they might want to think twice before giving you money?”

“I saw that revenue was not coming in the way that I needed it to come in and therefore, in late January of 2025, early February 2025, I made the hard decision to put a plan together to cut a million more dollars out of the organization,” Becher said. “I felt it was viable that the organization could survive if I cut a million more dollars out.”

“It sounds like maybe there was no decision that was ever made to use these restricted funds for unrestricted purposes; and just some CFO just started doing it,” Sherrill said. “But at what point was it clear that your projections for revenue weren’t going to get met and maybe you should just stop shifting money from place to place? This just seems like a bit of a Ponzi scheme,”