Judge narrows restitution for disgraced San Francisco inspector

SAN FRANCISCO (CN) — Bernie Curran, a former senior building inspector for the city of San Francisco, will only need to pay restitution for the three years when his criminal conduct took place, a federal judge said on Thursday.

Curran was sentenced to 12 months and one day in prison in July for accepting improper payments in exchange for issuing building permits. He starts his prison sentence tomorrow.

Curran admitted to accepting payments from Rodrigo Santos, former president of the San Francisco Building Inspection Commission who worked with clients seeking permits and building inspections. Curran and Santos arranged for Santos’ clients to funnel money into a San Francisco non-profit youth and adult athletic organization that Curran supported and coached.

Senior U.S. District Judge Susan Illston, a Bill Clinton appointee, asked prosecutor Casey Boome to narrow the restitution period to a three-year period when Curran’s payments from Santos took place, from March 2017 through April 2020. The alternative would be to charge Curran restitution for the cost of auditing all compromised inspections — a figure that city officials have put at more than $1 million.

“What I’d like to be able to do is come up with a fair number," Illston said.

Limiting the restitution would lower Curran’s restitution to $550,000 from over $1 million, Boome said.

Curran’s attorney, Philip Kearney, said that even $550,000 was too high and recommended a $100,000 figure for Curran’s restitution. He called that lower figure a “very wholesome number for someone who says they never did something wrong concerning inspections.”

Kearney noted that Curran is penniless; he lost his job and pension because of his criminal activity.

Illston said that case law requires her to not take Curran’s financial ability to pay the restitution into account when issuing a decision.

Boome originally asked for Curran to pay over a million dollars in restitution to the Department for Building Inspections for his crimes, which he said put the public at risk and cast doubt on the building permitting process in San Francisco. DBI initiated an expensive audit to review any buildings that Curran permitted, Boome said.

The audit identified 5,445 properties that were compromised by Santos and Curran. Boome said that DBI has spent over 4,000 hours reviewing the properties — an exceedingly expensive affair. Based on the number of properties that DBI must still audit, the agency estimates the cost of the audit to be over $1.3 million.

Illston balked at that number — saying that although Curran’s conduct was wrong, there was no harm done in actuality. No buildings were found to be unsafe or suffered catastrophic failures. 

Kearney, meanwhile, cast doubt on the accuracy of the numbers of DBI’s audit.

“We think the basis for the audit itself is flawed,” he said. “I just don’t trust the numbers, quite frankly.”

Kearney argued that Curran never admitted to or pleaded guilty to corruption charges, and that Curran “believes he never sold or authored a permit that wasn’t legitimate.”

“DBI was looking for corruption that we don’t think existed in the first place,” Kearney said.

Ilston pushed back on this argument. “The city felt it necessary to audit the properties to make sure the properties were correctly dealt with, because that was cast into doubt by the conduct of Curran," she said. "I don’t view that as 'looking for corruption.'"

Still, Illston did say she believed that DBI’s inspection discovered that Curran’s conduct was not as harmful as originally feared.

It "could have been a lot worse,” Illston said.

Illston asked Boome to get the numbers for the three-year period when Curran was accused of criminal conduct and said she would make a determination based on that.

“Get me all the figures, the current figures, for just the properties during the appropriate time frame,” she said. 

Boome said it would take until next week to get the numbers. He stressed there are future costs related to the audit as well.

Illston said that the court would not order any future restitution since no safety issues have been found at any of Curran’s properties.