Ex-SF Fire Marshal Now Consulting on Sprinkler Rules He Wrote

Kenneth Cofflin helped write San Francisco’s high-rise sprinkler mandate. Now he’s getting paid to help the people it’s crushing navigate the rules he created.

The Chronicle reported Tuesday on the former SF Fire Marshal’s post-city career, and the timing is striking. Not long after the Board of Supervisors voted to push the sprinkler installation deadline back five years to 2032, it’s becoming clear that Cofflin, who drafted the 2022 fire code update requiring the installations, has launched a private consulting firm offering services to the very condo associations scrambling to comply.

His pitch, according to the Chronicle, is that he can help associations “anticipate objections early, right-size scope and secure faster approvals” and identify possible exemptions. In other words: the man who built the maze is now selling maps.

The fire code change Cofflin pushed through the fire commission and the Board of Supervisors requires sprinkler systems in every room of every unit in pre-1975 buildings of 12 stories or more that lack two interior stairwells separated by fire-rated walls. By the city’s own estimates, that affects roughly 9,800 units across 126 older high-rises, concentrated in Nob Hill, Russian Hill, Telegraph Hill, Pacific Heights, and the Marina.

Some condo associations have put the cost at $300,000 per unit, though actual figures vary building to building. Even at lower estimates, the financial exposure is severe.

Supervisor Stephen Sherrill, who pushed alongside Supervisor Danny Sauter to delay the original 2027 deadline, was direct with the Chronicle about what Cofflin’s consulting work looks like from where he’s sitting. “If it’s true that someone so involved in creating this expensive sprinkler mandate is trying to profit off it, well that’s just corruption,” Sherrill said.

The issue has been framed, often dismissively, as wealthy San Franciscans complaining about the cost of protecting their property. The reality on the ground is more complicated. Nicolas Tsuk, an architect who lives at The Hamilton on O’Farrell Street in the Tenderloin, told the Chronicle that most of his neighbors are “teachers and nurses and retirees on a fixed income” living in studio units. For many of them, their condo is their primary asset, purchased years or decades ago, and the sprinkler mandate has already depressed its resale value. A special assessment to fund the installation could be unaffordable to the people currently living there.

That context matters. The equity dimensions of this story get flattened whenever it’s reduced to rich people and HOA drama.

What doesn’t get flattened is the fundamental problem with a city official writing sweeping regulatory changes and then setting up shop to profit from the fallout. San Francisco has ethics rules governing how former officials can use their government experience in private practice. Whether Cofflin’s consulting work runs afoul of those rules is a question the city needs to answer publicly and soon. The fact that this arrangement is only now drawing scrutiny, years after the code change was adopted, is its own indictment of how casually these conflicts get overlooked when the subject matter feels technical enough to stay out of the headlines.

The Board of Supervisors extended the deadline, which gives some breathing room to the thousands of owners now sitting with depressed property values and uncertain assessments. But the delay doesn’t resolve anything structurally. The mandate still exists. The costs are still real. And a former city official with deep knowledge of the approval process and exemption criteria is apparently available to help, for a fee.

That’s a closed loop that benefits exactly one person clearly: Cofflin. Everyone else is either paying to comply or paying him to tell them whether they have to.

City Hall should move quickly on this. San Francisco’s credibility on housing and development is already strained. A scandal involving a former fire marshal monetizing his own regulatory handiwork won’t help. Neither will letting it drag out through slow-moving ethics reviews while 9,800 households wait to find out what their homes are actually worth.