The announcement came at an intimate soiree at the Conway residence, because in San Francisco, even philanthropy requires a cocktail party with a guest list that reads like a Fortune 500 fever dream. Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, Google CFO Ruth Porat, and — because this city never stops being wonderfully absurd — MC Hammer were all in attendance.

Let's be clear: people can spend their money however they want. That's the beauty of a free society. Ron Conway earned his fortune through smart investments, and if he wants to dedicate a garden to Nancy Pelosi at the Obama Center, that's his prerogative. We're not here to begrudge anyone their philanthropic gestures.

But there's something almost too on-the-nose about San Francisco's ruling class gathering in a Pacific Heights living room to bestow honors upon each other while the city they claim to champion grapples with a $800 million budget deficit, crumbling infrastructure, and streets that could use — quite literally — a bit more gardening.

The same donor networks that fund these legacy projects have spent decades backing the very policies that turned San Francisco into a cautionary tale of progressive governance. Homelessness spending that produces no results. A transit system hemorrhaging riders. Housing costs that have pushed working families to the Central Valley.

A garden is lovely. But you know what would really honor public service? Accountability for the billions spent with little to show for it. A genuine reckoning with why a city this wealthy, this educated, and this well-resourced can't seem to keep its own house in order.

Plant your garden, Madam Speaker. The rest of us will keep tending to the weeds.