Monitoring the City's Management of its Lands
12 February 2008 - 08:53, Tinman said
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The most enjoyable aspects of advocating for the remnant natural areas in our Public Commons are the biological activities — weeding, planting, and the like. However, the most important activities are probably the political — working to make sure that the City’s various landholding entities make good on their commitments to preserve and protect the irreplaceable public assets under their stewardship.
Last summer, volunteers played some small part in bringing attention to the problems in Golden Gate Park including the Oak Woodlands. The Mayor mandated a flurry of activity; he pulled RPD and SFPD staff into new work details at GGP including middle-of-the-night sweeps, and he restricted the newly-funded 12 Park Patrol officers to beats within GGP.
While the initial results of all this looked good in GGP, it quickly became apparent that these efforts were like squeezing on one part of a balloon animal; the problems merely migrated to other parks. In retrospect, this was hardly surprising.
What is a bit more surprising, though, are our findings now that even with the intense focus on GGP including the exclusive attentions of the Park Patrol, we’re still seeing significant problems in GGP as well as creaky-at-best responses from the City.
Obviously we don’t minimize the challenges here; resources are always more limited than optimal and priorities must be set. However, we also don’t believe that the current state of affairs is anywhere near optimal — so we’ll continue to monitor and report what we see here.
On a similar but much more agreeable vein, we’re tracking the upcoming SFPUC pipeline and tank retrofit on Mt Davidson. Here public input succeeded in rerouting the initial plan to avert major damage to one of the most significant parts of the Mt D Significant Natural Resource Area. On paper, the revised plan looks good, but what will happen when the contractors move in remains to be seen. We will be on the scene watching and reporting, however.
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