Fillmore residents push back on community center lease plan

Fillmore residents forced City Hall to retreat from a 13-month lease plan that would have put Ella Hill Hutch Community Center under Booker T. Washington Community Service Center, a move they said sidelined the neighborhood at the very moment its children’s programs were at stake. After the pushback, the city backed off the deal and said San Francisco Recreation and Parks would temporarily run the site while community stakeholders help choose a longer-term operator.

The proposal would have leased the center for $1 while the city paid the operator to keep summer programming going for about 150 children and teens. It was meant to prevent a gap in services at the 30-year-old Fillmore hub, which provides youth services, healthy food assistance, and summer and afterschool programs for neighborhood children. But residents said the process moved ahead with too little input from people most affected by the decision.

That frustration carried extra weight in the Fillmore, where Ella Hill Hutch is more than a building. The center is named for Ella Hill Hutch, the first African American woman elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, who served from 1977 to 1981 after working for the International Longshore & Warehouse Union and helping start the local CORE chapter in 1960. In a neighborhood shaped by redevelopment harms from decades ago, the loss of the area’s only Safeway, and long-running complaints about neglect, the question of who controls a community center goes to the heart of cultural continuity and trust.

The city’s scramble also reflected the fallout from the Dream Keeper scandal. Collective Impact had run programs at Ella Hill Hutch for more than a decade before vacating the site after longtime executive director James Spingola was arrested in March on felony charges tied to the case. Sheryl Davis, the former head of the San Francisco Human Rights Commission and the Dream Keeper Initiative, faces 17 felony counts, including misappropriation of public funds, while a city audit found that $4.6 million of $6.3 million in HRC noncontract payments were ineligible or likely ineligible and that Davis directed at least $75,000 toward personal branding, ventures and non-City programs. The city attorney had already suspended Collective Impact and started debarment proceedings after the nonprofit received more than $27 million in city grants since 2021.

For Fillmore leaders, including Reverend Doctor Amos C. Brown, the reversal was about more than one lease. It tested whether City Hall would listen before making decisions that shape who gets to run a neighborhood anchor and whose needs come first.