Growing the Volunteer Base
15 February 2008 - 17:10, Tinman said
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I just received a call from someone who lives near Billy Goat Hill, a tiny Significant Natural Resource Area in the Diamond Heights neighborhood. She is concerned about a development project that is well on its way through the Planning Department because of its potential effects on the park. Unfortunately, the “Friends of Billy Goat Hill” — the volunteer group for the park — exists on paper but has been inactive for a number of years. Worse, because the Natural Areas Program is so abysmally funded and staffed (it is responsible for 27% of Rec&Park’s lands but has only 2% of its staff positions and 1% of its budget), the Natural Areas Program staff person who is nominally in charge of the site can only get there once or twice a year.
In the grand scheme of things, Billy Goat Hill is one of the less valuable remnant habitats in the RPD system because it has been thoroughly abused over the recent decades. Most of it is heavily infested with invasive weeds (the radish problem is particularly noisome), and heavy traffic (people and pets) have badly eroded the hills. However, one particularly steep slope still has a rich assembly of native plant species.
Still, this site illustrates a fundamental problem in the preservation and protection of our Public Commons. The RPD upper management’s penurious funding of the Natural Areas Program — coupled with union rules that limit to 15 the number of volunteers that a single staff person can supervise — means that the Natural Areas Program staff simply cannot be all the places that people want them to be. The Program cannot utilize all the volunteers who want to help. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy when volunteers get turned away and thereby are prevented from expanding the constituency that can demand better funding of the Program. Neighbors around sites like Billy Goat Hill end up with more weeds and degraded parklands—accelerated by RPD budget decisions.
It’s almost as if the RPD’s upper management wants the Natural Areas Program to fail. Perhaps they do.
The solution is quite simple: the Natural Areas Program needs funding and staffing at least ten times its current levels. Only then will the neighbors around sites like Billy Goat Hill get the results that they’re hoping for from the City.
Or perhaps we need new people heading up the RPD.
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