Natural areas need management plan

San Francisco's Recreation and Parks Department needs a management plan for protecting its natural areas. If the plan suffers further delays, the city's whole Natural Areas Program could become vulnerable to those who would like to shut it down.

Every city should preserve natural areas for its residents, especially schoolchildren and those unable to afford to leave the city, but this is especially important for San Francisco, located in the heart of the California Floristic Province, one the world's hotspots of biological diversity (along with regions such as Madagascar and Costa Rica).

The city, however, has been struggling for years to produce its Significant Natural Resources Areas Management Plan. The plan's third revision, a document thicker than the Manhattan telephone book, has been available since February 2006. The first draft was published in June 2002, and the four years in between have been filled with public discussion, with hundreds of people testifying at hearings and thousands of written comments.

Opponents of certain aspects of the plan are still calling for delays, but the time is really here for the plan to undergo environmental review so that it can be adopted and implemented. (Environmental review does still include opportunities for more public input.) We fear that some of these opponents are really trying to kill the program altogether.

On July 26 the Recreation and Park Commission met to deliberate whether to send the plan out for environmental review. About 150 people requested to speak at the meeting. Speakers were limited to one minute each. Two-thirds spoke in strong support of the plan and requested that it be moved at once, in its entirety, to environmental review. The other third objected to one of three aspects of the plan: relocating colonies of feral cats, restrictions on trails, and removing eucalyptus trees. The meeting was stopped after three hours due to the number of people who had not yet gotten to speak. It was continued to August 21.

The Natural Areas Program is widely recognized in the city and Bay Area for its hands-on work in nature sites with volunteers. This year the program won the prestigious Acts of Caring Award from the National Association of Counties for its work with volunteers.

WhatYouCanDo

Call Mayor Gavin Newsom at (415)554-6141. Tell him to expedite the environmental review of the Natural Areas Program.

A full copy of the plan and peer-reviewer comments can be seen at www.parks.sfgov.org/site/recpark_index.asp?id=1896

Pinky Kushner, conservation chair, San Francisco Group