SAN FRANCISCO – Companies who bribed former San Francisco Public Works director Mohammed Nuru are barred from doing business with the city, City Attorney David Chiu announced Tuesday. 

The debarment prohibits Alan Valera and William Gilmartin — president and vice president of civil engineering and construction firm ProVen Management Inc. — from receiving city contracts. The two previously pled guilty to conspiracy to commit honest services wire fraud.  

Valera has been sentenced to two years in federal prison, and Gilmartin has yet to receive his sentence.

According to an investigation by the FBI, ProVen provided Nuru expensive dinners and farming supplies for his ranch to win more public contracts. The company was vying to operate an asphalt plant on land owned by the Port of San Francisco, Chiu said. 

The San Francisco City Hall Public Works scandal surrounding Nuru’s actions led to numerous convictions.

The executives were two among others who attempted to bypass the city’s competitive contracting process, as revealed by a federal investigation. Nuru pleaded guilty to fraud in 2021 and is serving a seven-year prison sentence.

Other companies allegedly affiliated with the Nuru scandal that have also been debarred include Baylands Soil Processing LLC, Comsa Emte USA Inc., Egbert Enterprises LLC, and Proven Comsa JV. 

Chiu has also initiated debarment proceedings and suspension orders against Azul Works Inc. and its vice president, Balmore Hernandez, Nick James Bovis of SMTM Technology LLC, and Florence Kong and her companies SFR Recovery Inc. And Kwan Wo Ironworks Inc.

The city also secured a settlement worth $1.7 million that prohibits Wing Lok “Walter” Wong and his companies W. Wong Construction Co., Inc., Green Source Trading LLC, and Alternate Choice LLC from doing business with San Francisco for the next five years.

“Anyone who attempts to compromise our public contracting process will face consequences,” said Chiu. “The City Attorney’s Office remains committed to rooting out corruption wherever it exists and maintaining the integrity of our city government.” 

Debarment is traditionally a lengthy process, though Chiu utilized 2020 legislation that suspends bad acting contractors from city funding immediately. Varela, Gilmartin and their company was previously suspended in 2021 prior to the debarment.  

The debarment order secured Tuesday will be in place until March 2026 — five years after ProVen was suspended from working with the city.

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Feb 15, 4:15 pm: San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin dropped felony property charges filed against a woman Tuesday after decrying San Francisco police’s alleged practice of using DNA from rape victims during searches for criminal suspects.

“It is my commitment going forward to never use DNA obtained in this unlawful way,” Boudin said during a briefing. “Our conversations with the leadership at SFPD Crime Lab suggest that this is a routine practice not only in San Francisco but at other crime labs across the state.”

A spokesperson for Boudin’s office declined to comment further on the particulars of the case to SFGATE in an effort to protect the woman’s privacy.

But as the revelation continues to make national headlines, San Francisco Supervisor Hillary Ronen and California state Sen. Scott Wiener are calling for state and city bans on the practice.

Feb 14, 4:45 pm: The San Francisco District Attorney’s Office has come forward with allegations that the San Francisco Police Department used a woman’s DNA previously obtained from a rape kit to arrest her for a property crime.

San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin announced the bombshell during a Monday press conference, as first reported by The San Francisco Chronicle. (SFGATE and The Chronicle are both owned by Hearst but operate independently of each other.)

Boudin alleges that he was informed of this police practice last week, The Chronicle reports.

If true, Boudin said, the revelation would further discourage survivors of rape and sexual assault in San Francisco from coming forward. SFPD has faced scrutiny in the past related to its mishandling of sexual assault cases. A 2014 KGO investigation found hundreds of untested rape kits spanning nearly a decade, and in 2019, a woman petitioned the US Supreme Court to take up a case against the Police Department for its mishandling of her rape.

“I am disturbed that victims who have the courage to undergo an invasive examination to help identify their perpetrators are being treated like criminals rather than supported as crime victims,” ​​Boudin said in a statement to SFGATE. “We should encourage survivors to come forward — not collect evidence to use against them in the future. This practice treats victims like evidence, not human beings. This is legally and ethically wrong. My office is demanding that this practice end immediately, and is Encourage local and state legislators to introduce legislation to end this practice in California. We remain committed to doing everything in our power to support survivors of sexual violence.”

San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott declined to confirm the allegations in a statement, saying that “our existing DNA collection policies have been legally vetted and conform with state and national forensic standards.”

“We must never create disincentives for crime victims to cooperate with police, and if it’s true that DNA collected from a rape or sexual assault victim has been used by SFPD to identify and apprehend that person as a suspect in another crime, I’m committed to ending the practice,” he said in a statement.

The allegation is likely to intensify ongoing tensions between San Francisco police and the DA’s Office. Earlier this month, Scott announced that the Police Department would no longer cooperate with Boudin’s office to independently investigate police misconduct after alleging that the office violated the memorandum by withholding information. A DA’s Office spokesperson denied the claims.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta, San Francisco Mayor London Breed and San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu announced earlier Monday that they would intervene to ensure an agreement between the two offices.

Bay City News Service contributed to this report.

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The woman at the center of a San Francisco police scandal after investigators used evidence from her sexual assault exam to link her to an unrelated property crime is planning to sue the Police Department, saying the incident made her feel like she was “reliving” her trauma all over again.

The woman in an interview with The Chronicle said she was first contacted by the police a few months ago, after neighbors called the police to her home for a loud fight she was having with her boyfriend. The police soon left but then came back with a warrant for her arrest.

She didn’t realize at the time that she had been tied to a recent property crime from a rape exam that she had given in 2016. She was kept in custody until last month, when her attorney told her that her charges were being dropped because of how police linked her to the crime.

The woman said she should have been happy to be released but stayed at home depressed for days.

“When you feel like you have nobody to talk to about it, it’s a lonely feeling,” she said. “I’m still adjusting how I feel.”

The woman felt that police failed to protect her privacy, and didn’t treat her like “a citizen.”

“I kind of absorb pain,” she said, wiping tears from her eyes. “It was just kind of like, ‘Why is this happening to me?’ And just making me feel really bad.”

The Chronicle granted the woman anonymity for this story and does not typically identify victims of sexual assault.

While the woman said she used to feel comfortable at least confiding in police, she has long felt they were unable to protect her.

Her belief stems from trauma in the woman’s childhood, when her mother was killed by her boyfriend.

The woman said she and her sister were being sexually abused by their mother’s boyfriend and that someone from her school reported it to the police. The girl and her siblings were taken out of the home, which prompted the boyfriend to confront her mother about the allegations.

“And he murdered her,” the woman said.

The officer who investigated the sex abuse came to the funeral, she said, and apologized for not protecting the girl and her mother, “which is what I asked for,” she said. “I asked to be protected and for my family to be protected.”

Even at a young age, she said, she learned that sometimes going to the police wasn’t in her best interest.

After the recent incident with her rape-kit DNA, the woman said, “Basically I’m reliving stuff all over again.”

Adante Pointer, an Oakland civil rights attorney representing the woman, called the practice “Orwellian” and has filed a notice of a claim, a precursor to a lawsuit.

“We hope that the practice of weaponizing victims’ DNA against them is ended,” Pointer said. “We also want to ensure that this practice doesn’t ensnare anyone else.”

The woman’s interview comes nearly a month after District Attorney Chesa Boudin revealed that the Police Department’s crime lab stored DNA from rape victims infinitely in a database. The database, Boudin said, was regularly searched to identify suspects in crimes.

At the time, Boudin said his office was aware of one person who was arrested as a result of this practice but did not disclose other details about the woman, other than to say she was arrested for a property crime. Boudin dropped the case against her, saying that her constitutional rights were likely violated.

The revelation prompted a national outcry, particularly from sexual assault victims advocates, who said the practice would have a chilling effect on reporting the crimes to law enforcement.

The San Francisco Police Department is conducting an audit to determine how many other victims could have been identified or arrested through this practice. Police Chief Bill Scott said he supports legislation that would end the practice in San Francisco and elsewhere and that the department has already implemented an interim policy change.

“We must never create a disincentive for sexual assault survivors — or any crime victim — to cooperate with police,” Scott said in a recent statement.

However, some say that the current policy change doesn’t go far enough and would still allow victim profiles to remain in a database that’s searched by crime lab employees.

Policy documents reviewed by The Chronicle detailed how the crime lab operates what’s known as “quality assurance” database, which held DNA profiles from several categories of individuals — including rape victims — and was routinely tested against suspect DNA found at later crime scenes.

The quality assurance database has two components. One includes “every single source and … evidence profile analyzed since tracking began in 2015,” which could include DNA profiles from rape suspects, sexual assault victims, child victims, consensual sex partners of rape victims or other people unrelated to a crime whose DNA may be found at a crime scene.

DNA evidence from victims or other non-suspects is collected and stored in order to separate it from that of the suspected offender.

The second component is an elimination database that holds DNA samples from lab staff members, visitors and police officers, to test for DNA contamination.

According to internal emails reviewed by The Chronicle, the Police Department’s new policy does not remove victims’ DNA profiles from the searchable database. Instead, it states that if DNA from a victim’s rape kit matched DNA found at another crime scene, analysts would not be allowed to share this information with anyone outside the crime lab.

State Sen. Scott Wiener and San Francisco Supervisor Hillary Ronen are both seeking legislation to ban the practice.

Ronen’s measure would require police to dispose of the DNA samples within 60 days and prohibit police searches against the database within the 60 days. It would also require police to purge all victim DNA profiles by June 1.

In an interview, Ronen said she had considered scrapping the proposal after hearing that the Police Department had already ended the practice. However, she said, self-policing doesn’t go far enough.

“Clearly, we can’t trust the judgment of the very people who engaged in this practice for years as far as we know,” Ronen said. “The fact that the (new) policy … still allows the crime lab to store victim data and potentially search against it is just unacceptable.”

Megan Cassidy (she/her) is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: megan.cassidy@sfchronicle.com, Twitter: @meganrcassidy

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QUINCY, Plumas County (CBS SF) – Blown fuses on a Pacific gas and power line are being investigated for a possible cause of the Dixie Fire in Butte and Plumas counties, which quickly grew to more than 30,000 acres overnight Combination of “fuel, topography and weather”.

Meanwhile, new evacuations were underway in several rural communities as the fire progressed in the rugged terrain near the Bucks Lake Wilderness Area.

During the Cal Fire’s Sunday night briefing, the fire spanned 18,702 acres. By Monday morning, the fire zone had grown to 30,074 acres.

Dixie fire: Cal Fire Incident Report, evacuation information, road closures

PG&E said a utility repairman discovered fuse damage on a power line on July 13 after the company’s outage system indicated that the Cresta Dam on Highway 70 in Feather River Canyon was losing power.

“The responding PG&E troublemaker was remotely observing what he thought was a blown fuse on the PG&E Bucks Creek 1101 12kV Overhead Distribution Circuit uphill from his location,” the utility said in a report of an electrical incident at California Public Utilities Commission.

Dixie fire: PG&E Dixie Fire Incident Report

“Due to the demanding terrain and the road works that led to the bridge being closed, he was only able to reach the mast with the safety device around 1640 o’clock. There he saw two out of three fuses blown and a healthy green tree leaning into the Bucks Creek 1101 12 kV conductor that was still intact and hanging on the mast. “

“He also observed a fire on the ground near the tree trunk. The interferer manually removed the third fuse and reported the fire. His supervisor called 9-1-1 and the 9-1-1 operator replied that they know the fire and are responding. Air support from Cal Fire arrived on site around 5:30 pm and began to drop fire retardants and water. “

In a statement on KPIX 5, PG&E said it had filed a report with state regulators about the incident.

“Yesterday, PG&E filed an Electric Incident Report (EIR) with the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) regarding the Dixie Fire in Butte and Plumas Counties. The information provided by PG&E is preliminary and the Company has presented this report with great caution in light of the collection of PG&E facilities from CAL FIRE in connection with its investigation. PG&E is cooperating with the CAL FIRE investigation. “

PG&E equipment has been blamed for a number of major forest fires in the state over the years, and it wasn’t the first time the utility has been investigated as a source of a forest fire in the area. Cal Fire found that the 2018 campfire that killed 85 people and destroyed the town of Paradise was caused by PG&E electrical transmission lines in the Pulga area.

Firefighters use the Union Pacific Fire Train to protect the railroad tracks and prevent the Dixie Fire from spreading in the Plumas National Forest. California Fire says about 14% of the area is contained, but access is limited as it burns in a remote area. pic.twitter.com/ZGydRdBtW6

– CGTN America (@cgtnamerica) July 19, 2021

Speaking at the briefing, Tony Brownell, the commander of the Cal Fire incident, said the firefighters faced a major challenge in fighting the northeastern area of ​​the massive fire.

“Today was a very active day by the fire,” he said. “There are three things that really affect a fire: fuel, topography, and weather. All three came into effect today when the fire became very active on two different sides of the fire. “

Brownell said the crews were trying to create a “catcher’s glove” out of lines of fire to keep the fire from moving north. Cal Fire also focused on not letting the fire advance towards Concow and Magalia, two towns in Butte County that were hit by the deadly 2018 bonfire.

The fire was fueled by winds and embers that were kicked up in a massive pyrocumulus cloud that rose thousands of feet above the fire.

“It got very active here, this is where you saw the column of smoke from the valley,” Brownell said, pointing to the eastern part of the fire on the map. “All the overheated air rises in the atmosphere … So it got over the Feather River down to (over) Tobin.”

The embers lit point fires in the dry scrub and in the trees, which accelerated the spread of the fire. The advancing fire forced officers to close Highway 70.

“It (big column of embers) is very common, especially in recent years, because our fuels are so dry from the drought, they kill insects, everything is absorbent. So if a spark falls into the unburned brush, it will most likely start a fire, ”Brownell said.

#DixieFire Update 7:00 p.m. 07/18/2021 Video https://t.co/MiYcqE3id9

– Vanessa Wilson (@NessaBurdette) July 19, 2021

The fire was contained to 15 percent on Sunday night, 1,918 firefighters fought the fire that threatened 810 buildings.

New evacuation orders were issued on Sunday evening for the Jonesville and Philbrook areas of Butte County and High Lakes, and for homes on the Butte / Plumas County line east of Twain, Meadow Valley and Bucks Lake.

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