San Francisco's Natural Areas Program: 27% of our parklands gets 1% of the budget

Endangered public lands are not just distant forests and mountains and deserts. If you live in San Francisco, they are probably within a 10-minute walk of your house - in the city's parks.

San Francisco is blessed with some of the most diverse remnant native habitats of any city in the country. Most are contained within 31 Significant Natural Resource Areas owned and managed by the city's Recreation and Park Department (RPD). These last vestiges of San Francisco's unique original plant and animal communities comprise 27% of the city's 4,000 acres of parklands.

Amazingly, though, the RPD's Natural Areas Program (NAP) receives less than 1% of the RPD's $150 million budget and has only 2% of the RPD's 299 gardeners.

A legislative-analyst report, commissioned by Supervisor Sean Elsbernd and released on July 2, quantifies how the RPD has short-changed and undervalued the NAP. This report compared the NAP with similar initiatives in other urban areas and found that the NAP receives dramatically less support than other programs - even though its Management Plan is a model that the rest of the country follows.

Despite its cripplingly small budget and staff, the NAP has been remarkably efficient and effective. It is hugely popular, last year drawing 14,000 volunteer hours - 1/3 of all volunteer hours in all of RPD's programs. In those select areas where NAP staff and volunteers work, the noxious invasive weeds are largely suppressed, and indigenous species are augmented as needed through judicious plantings. The rest of the NAP's realm is under constant threat for lack of personnel and resources.

Consider Mount Davidson, for example, where the Sierra Club's San Francisco Group joins NAP volunteers on the first Saturday of each month. The 10 acres of grasslands and coastal scrub contain about 120 species of native plants - some locally rare and threatened - but they are jeopardized by about 25 species of noxious weeds. The 30 acres of "forests" consist of non-native eucalyptus and cypress trees under which a few aggressive weeds (ivy, cape ivy, and blackberry) nearly smother the 35 or so native species that manage to hang on. Mount Davidson attracts over 200 species of migratory and residential birds, though suitable habitat is threatened by these weeds. Concerted work by staff and volunteers over the past seven years has stemmed the tide in five primary work areas, and enhanced hiking trails, but the vast majority of Mount Davidson's needs remain unaddressed - for lack of personnel.

The misallocation of resources is the work of RPD's upper management - general manager Yomi Agunbiade and the Recreation and Parks Commission - and ultimately Mayor Gavin Newsom, at whose pleasure they serve. It's hard to understand why these putatively progressive officials would jeopardize our public lands this way, particularly since protecting and preserving Significant Natural Resource Areas is hard-wired into the Open Space Element of the city's General Plan. Just as historic buildings are cherished and preserved, the city's remnant habitats are officially supposed to be protected.

The mismanagement includes the expropriation of nearly $20 million from the Open Space Fund to pay for the money-losing Harding Park golf course, along with another multi-million dollar raid from the Open Space Fund for a swimming pool. A budget-analyst report in 2006 established that the city must repay these funds with interest and penalties, but to date the RPD has used a variety of tricks to avoid restoring these badly needed funds to the programs for which they were intended.

With adequate staff and funding, the Natural Areas Program can succeed at protecting and preserving San Francisco's endangered habitats while providing unparalleled volunteer and educational opportunities for the city's residents.

WhatYouCanDo

Contact RPD general manager Yomi Agunbiade at yomi.agunbiade@sfgov.org and the Recreation and Parks Commission at margaret.mcarthur@sfgov.org

The mailing address for both is:

McLaren Lodge and Annex
501 Stanyan St.
San Francisco, CA 94117;

and Mayor Gavin Newsom at gavin.newsom@sfgov.org

City Hall, #200
Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place
San Francisco, CA 94102;

and your district supervisor. Tell them that the NAP is a top priority for you. Urge them to at least double the NAP staff and budget over the coming year and to rapidly repay borrowed Open Space Funds.

The legislative analyst's report is available at www.ci.sf.ca.us. In the search box at the top of the page, type in "061559", and click on the "Search" button.

Stan Kaufman