Issue 296                           Will you want to live in San Francisco  -  tomorrow?                          April 2004
 
The London Biodiversity Strategy: Connecting with nature in a capital city. Over the past twenty years, an innovative program for nature conservation has been developed and implemented in London, reports David Goode, former Head of Environment, Greater London Authority.
 
The purpose of the London Biodiversity Strategy is to protect and enhance London’s natural areas, retain habitat for their species, and to make it possible for Londoners to have greater contact with nature in their everyday lives. The program has involved many different players, including official agencies and voluntary bodies, supported by a groundswell of public opinion. Together they have generated a new consciousness and a very effective program of action.  New approaches with a strong social dimension, that may at first have seemed a radical departure from traditional nature con-servation, have now been adopted as an integral part of city management. The overall program has now been formalized by the Mayor of London in his statutory Biodiversity Strategy for the capital.
 
It is remarkable that London, like San Francisco still has so many sites that offer original habitat for creatures and have escaped development and depredation.  San Francisco still has most of its hilltops and some very large tracts such as Golden Gate Park and McLaren Park that offer a variety of activities in the midst of substantial remnant habitat.  We have the Natural Areas Program, of Recreation and Parks Department, and bands of sturdy volunteers, to thank for the care and feeding of these natural areas.
 
At its heart of London’s program is the social dimension, the objective being to enable all who
live or work in London to have greater contact with nature in their own locality. Fundamental to the
whole approach is the conservation of London’s important wildlife habitats, resulting in over 1,500 sites being scheduled for protection. These represent about one fifth of the area of Greater London! The system also enables districts that are deficient in accessible wildlife sites to be identified. Furthermore, there are parts of London where new wildlife habitats must be created to enable people to maintain daily links with nature.  This includes ecological enhancement of public parks and open spaces, or creation of entirely new wildlife habitats for public enjoyment and environmental education.  
 
Most importantly, it also includes design for biodiversity within the fabric of the built environment.    “Mainstreaming” biodiversity as an element of urban design is crucial as London moves into a renewed phase of growth and development.  Encouraging facilities and programs for environmental education for all sectors of society is also a goal, plus enlisting a wide range of organizations and individuals to work together. Now, the London Biodiversity Partnership is moving on to the next step, Specific Action Plans.
 
San Francisco’s First “Landmark” Trees
 In approving the Landmark Designation of the Music Concourse in Golden Gate Park, the Landmarks Preservation Board listed the pollarded trees in the bowl and this cypress near the African Hall as contributory features.  

A Blue Greenway
Neighborhood Parks Council (NPC) seeks to create a “green” corridor for activity and discovery along the Southeast shore of San Francisco.  A trail which connects the existing parks from McCovey Park to Candlestick Point State Recreation Area, will fulfill San Francisco’s Southeastern portion of the larger, Association of Bay Area Government (ABAG)-sponsored Bay Trail project. The trail will provide a much-needed alternative transportation opportunity that is easily accessible for exercise, recreation and enjoyment of art and open space in the City’s park-poor Southeastern Corridor.

In December, 2004, the Neighborhood Parks Council and SPUR hosted a half-day Citizen Planning Institute (CPI) that brought the major stake-holders together to discuss possibilities for the Bay Trail, open space, and recreation opportunity, Walter Hood, principal of Hood Design and a designer of the Oakland Waterfront, led the discussion and presented successful waterfront models.  Work groups were formed to ponder programming and access, design concepts, and environmental clean-up issues.  Following the conference, waterfront tours were requested to maintain project momentum and allow participants to become familiar with the entire Southern waterfront.  Kayak and bicycle tours were organized and led by experienced guides familiar with the area.  A follow-up CPI is currently scheduled for June 3, 2005, that will coincide with the U.N. World Environment Day festivities.   For more information about the Blue Greenway initiative, please contact Jeff Condit at (415) 621-3260.

 
CABLE CARS: MUNI OR DISNEYLAND?
It’s unfortunate that some regard the cable cars only as an amusement ride for tourists and not an integral part of MUNI. A cable car ride should have the same fares and  transfers as the rest of the MUNI system, as once they did.  Instead, fares are $3.00!  Anyone with a fast pass can ride without paying a surcharge and one might be surprised at how many residents do use the cable cars for normal transportation, in spite of the discouragements thrown at them.  But the cable cars carry far fewer passengers today than they used to.  Why?  The reason is fewer trips being operated despite the same number of cars on the street and the rip-off fare.

The City Charter once had a sentence in it saying the fare on the cable cars shall not exceed the fare charged on other vehicles used in Municipal Railway local service.   This was removed in 1981 under false pretenses.  The villains who lobbied for the Charter change said the extra money was needed for the system rebuilding.  Not true; the money for the system rebuilding was already in place.  Its hard to believe but not one cent of city money went into the cable  car system rebuilding of 1982-84.  The local match for the federal and state money was raised entirely from the private sector.  If one looks for them, one sees that many of the cable cars wear plaques acknowledging the gifts by companies that donated $100,000 or more to the rebuilding.
When this mode of transportation was a work-a-day vehicle for all San Franciscans, they were called "cable street cars", not the present "street cars" and "cable cars".   A letter to the Chronicle some time ago quoted an Englishman who said, "I do not like the cable cars.  You have taken what is a practical means of transportation in a hilly city like San
Francisco and turned it into an amusement park ride".  Was he right?  Norm Rolfe observes that when the cable car haters failed in their efforts to abandon the system completely, their fallback position was to operate a few cars for the tourists and charge a premium fare.
 
Mt. Davidson Hike
APRIL 10, SUNDAY, 10 am
Mt. Davidson (San Francisco County)

Mt. Davidson's wildflower prairie, huckleberry scrub, and eucalyptus jungle offer a diverse (and sometimes bizarre) array of plant life. Native irises will be seen emerging from California fescue (Festuca californica), leather-leaf ferns (Polypodium scouleri) growing on cypress limbs two stories high, and wild strawberries (Fragaria chiloensis) intermingling with goldfields (Lasthenia californica).  Meet at the bus turnaround on Myra and Dalewood. Bring water, sturdy shoes, and layered clothing . For more information, contact Tom Annese at 415-297-1413 or tom.annese@sfgov.org ).

 
City Seeking 'Best and Brightest' for Planning Director?

Few jobs in City government require the knowledge, skill and political acumen as that of Planning Director.  Involved with many of the most important decisions about development in San Francisco, the position of Planning Director requires someone who can negotiate both the fine print of code and the rough-and-tumble world of land use battles. The position also cries out for the type of visionary thinker who could dramatically alter a city like ours for the better.  Meanwhile, former Planning Director Dean Macris has been asked to stay on as acting head through 2005.After candidates are identified, it is the job of the Planning Commission to choose three semi-final candidates for Director, and then send their choices to the Mayor for his final decision. These days, a search for such an important position requires a professional recruiter to search for the best candidates. At the very least, the job opening should be posted in as many places as possible, casting the widest net for the best in the field.

According to some, Newsom refuses to allocate funds for either the Planning Department or the Department of Human Services to hire a recruiter.  So far, the job opening has only been posted on three websites, one of them the City's.  The postings appeared for only a few weeks before being pulled.  Whatever happened to the Mayor’s promise to bring the "best and the brightest" to leadership in the city?  A non-profit transit advocacy group, Transportation for a Livable City (TLC), has been posting the job opening on a variety of national and international planning-related websites that post jobs for free, including the Progressive Planners Network and the International Society of City and Regional Planners.  TLC has even identified sites that aren't free and are asking their membership to donate towards the cost of posting the Planning Director job.  As laudable as TLC's efforts are, it seems ludicrous that Newsom doesn’t do more.

One of the primary political battlegrounds in the city remains land use.  With slow-growth advocates clashing with developers, non-profit housing corp-orations fighting for city funding, the Redevelop-ment Agency setting up new Redevelopment Areas in order to skirt Planning, and a continuing lack of affordable housing, it is imperative that the City have a permanent Planning Director soon.

 
SPEAK and the Landmarks Board save a civic treasure
 Two years ago, a neighborhood group in the Sunset named SPEAK feared that the Music Concourse in Golden Gate Park would suffer gravely when the sheer scope of three major construction projects began there: the new deYoung, the Concourse Garages and the new Academy of Sciences.  They hired from their own treasury an historical consultant who researched the architectural and historic import of the Concourse and set about gaining City Landmark status for this historic public gathering space.  
 SPEAK foresaw that four subterranean pedestrian tunnels, which protected citizens on foot from those on wheels speeding over the heavily trafficked roads around the rim of the Concourse, were the most threatened features of the Concourse.  But no one could have foretold the sheer devastation that accompanied the rebuilding of the deYoung Museum, the construction of two parking garages and the demolition of the Academy of Sciences.  If you have been there lately, the site is a mess, the public statuary is rudely stored behind chain-link fencing, three of four pedestrian tunnels were ground to dust, trees have been wantonly cut and everything that was “in the way” has been removed from the area around the Concourse bowl.
 When the case was finally heard at the Landmarks Preservation Board (LPAB), it  was complex and detailed: how could you landmark something that was in the process of being demolished?  Could you landmark a tree?  How about a whole grid of pollarded trees that have formed a canopy above generations of Sunday concert goers?  What would become of the benches and the bollards left over from the 1894 Pacific Exposition?  Somehow the LPAB sorted it out under the brilliant leadership of President Tim Kelley and Board member Bridget Maley and saw to it that the main features of this grand public space would be classified “contributory features” and come under the protection of the LPAB’s “Certificate of Appropriateness” process which allows public review when important changes are considered.  
 
Too bad the Landmark was not in effect before the tunnels were demolished!  But just as we have seen when the bulldozers wiped out 65 feet of the historic Emporium building some months ago, there is hardly any contract supervision and no on-site inspection anyway when something is in the way of a giant backhoe or bulldozer.  For more information, see www.sfpix.com .

 
Restoration of Yosemite’s  Hetch Hetchy Valley?
 
Late last year, the Sacramento Bee newspaper published numerous feature articles and editorials supporting the restoration of Hetch Hetchy, as a result of an engineering study at the University of California, Davis.  According to a Bee editorial, this study "shows that San Francisco and its neighboring counties could get adequate water from three other reservoirs on the Tuolumne River instead of Hetch Hetchy."  After the Bee series and the UC Davis study, Environmental Defense, a highly respected policy research organ-ization, issued its comprehensive report, "Paradise Regained: Solutions for Restoring Yosemite's Hetch Hetchy Valley."  Soon thereafter, Governor Schwarzen-egger announced that his administration would conduct a Hetch Hetchy restoration study.
 
Mayor Gavin Newsom has not yet revealed his views on the matter.   Supporters of restoration believe that a reasonable, "win-win" solution is available to assure San Francisco the continue to have a reliable high-quality water supply and electricity.  Please see www.hetchhetchy.org

 “If you have been to Yosemite or to Hetch Hetchy, please let the mayor know how much you enjoy these wonderful places and what a wonderful gift San Francisco could give to the American people by restoring Hetch Hetchy Valley,” one of our stalwart readers writes.  “As for myself, I intend to tell him that, since my "discovery" of Yosemite Valley around 1960, I haunted the Valley for several years thereafter, but the increasing crowds and motor traffic severely detracted from the experience, so I discontinued visits around the mid-'70s.  In effect, Yosemite Valley has been taken away from me.  We need Hetch Hetchy to dilute the Yosemite crowding.”

 With respect to the traffic, National Park Service  Policy has evolved considerably in the last couple of decades, and in Hetch Hetchy, they have the opport-unity to plan it right from the beginning, even to exclude private cars.  In Yosemite, entrenched interests successfully resist change, but there are no entrenched interests to overcome in Hetch Hetchy, and there is definitely a changed view of development in national parks. If you have developed a strong point of view, write to:   Mayor Gavin Newsom, City Hall Room 200, San Francisco, CA 94102, or send an e-mail to gavin.newsom@sfgov.org

 
SAVE THE DATE,WEDNESDAY,MAY 18
for San Francisco Tomorrow’s Annual Dinner . This year we are honoring longtime historic preservationist GeeGee Platt, Golden Gate Park champion Chris Duderstadt and Van Ness Avenue watchdog Charley Marsteller.  Details to come.

Bayview Hill Hike
APRIL 9, SATURDAY, 10 am to Noon
Bayview Hill (San Francisco County)
Leaders: Jon Campo & Margo Bors
Cosponsored by SF Recreation & Park Department
Natural Areas Program

Enjoy an inspiring walk through the wildflower-studded grasslands of San Francisco's best-kept secret, Bayview Hill. Sheltered from summer fog, this hilltop offers spectacular views, grand wildflower displays, and beautiful rock outcrops. Meet at the end of Key Avenue, two blocks east of Third Street. For more information, contact Jon at 415-753-7267 or Margo 415-824-0471 / mcbors@comcast.net )