City Backs Off Deal to Operate Fillmore Community Center After Major Pushback

A lease was prepared to transfer operational control of the Ella Hill Hutch Community Center in the Fillmore to Booker T. Washington Community Service Center, supported by the mayor and multiple city supervisors. The center is a 30-year-old hub providing youth services, healthy food assistance, and summer and afterschool programs. The nonprofit already holds multiple city contracts. The proposal follows a prior scandal involving Sheryl Davis and James Spingola, who were charged with alleged felonies including self-dealing and misuse of nonprofit funds, and Spingola had led a nonprofit that operated the center under a city contract. Community rifts have grown alongside long-standing redevelopment grievances, including the planned demolition of the neighborhood’s only Safeway and redevelopment into mostly market-rate housing.

"A lease was ready to be signed last week with a respected local nonprofit to oversee management and programing at Ella Hill Hutch Community Center in the Fillmore, with the mayor and multiple city supervisors in support. That nonprofit is Booker T. Washington Community Service Center, which is based nearby in Lower Pac Heights, and which already has multiple contracts with the city."

"Ella Hill Hutch Community Center is a 30-year-old community hub that provides youth services, healthy food assistance programs, and summer and afterschool programs for neighborhood children. Last year it became a casualty of a scandal involving the former leader of the city's Dream Keeper initiative, Sheryl Davis, and her romantic partner/housemate James Spingola, who were both criminally charged in March for a raft of alleged felonies including self-dealing and the personal use of nonprofit funds."

"The fallout from the scandal appears to have created rifts in the Fillmore neighborhood, which has historically been a center of Black cultural life for San Francisco, and has accumulated a growing set of grievances over the city's inhumane redevelopment efforts five and six decades ago, the trauma of which has been compounded in recent years by benign neglect. The most recent grievance: the closure of the neighborhood's only supermarket, a Safeway that was built with redevelopment funds over 40 years back, and which is now slated for demolition and another redevelopment as mostly market-rate housing."

"Some drama erupted this past week over a deal, seemingly backed by a broad swath of city leaders, to hand over operational control of a beloved Fillmore neighborhood community center to a nonprofit without seeking community consensus. The Chronicle reported last week on pushback from community leaders over the management contract for Ella Hill Hutch Community Center."

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