Neighbors of the Haight Ashbury express their concerns over the way Rec and Park is slandering the recycling center, the people who use it, and basing an eviction on that slander. Perception is reality and people don’t trust this Park leadership to to do the right thing. It’s very disturbing they don’t care to even acknowledge the concerns of citizens regarding this issue-or discuss them in a community building way.
City agencies have promised this land, 780 Frederick Street, to a few private citizens and made a deal to deliver it despite the holes it will create in state mandated CRV recycling. There are also serious efforts to silence anyone who brings information that demonstrates the relationship our recycling center has to the recycling needs of the area as mandated by state law.
Should our highly paid City officials really be making deals with a few people and ignoring the laws that govern the state? Should they be assuring these people that, despite the hole it will create in recycling and the hundreds of thousands it will cost in fees for stores, they plan to give them what they want? I think our city officials owe their time and attention to all citizens and all state laws. Certainly, they should not be consciously ignoring the impacts and costs this closure will have. And, certainly, they should not be distracting the narrative with false and unproven claims about homeless people.
A huge part of the homeless population in this city are Veterans. Substitute Veteran for homeless next time you read or hear slanderous comments about our recycling center and see how that makes you feel.
#StopKezarEviction
#HaveAHeart
Rec & Park’s campaign to evict the HANC Recycling Center is contradicts without even a thin veil the avowed goals of the City. The City & RPD encourage community efforts to create community-serving resources. Kezar Gardens Recycling et al are just such a resource, developed over 33 years. Now the City and RPD are planning on spending public dollars to evict the recycling center and destroy the 51 community garden plots.
This is abuse of community resources.
Ginsburg who is skilled at seeking ways to divide groups and communities against each other, has linked up with a few people who openly hate seeing low income and especially homeless folks gathering recyclables and redeeming them at Kezar Gardens. They refuse to acknowledge that the majority of recyclables are delivered in vehicles, not by homeless folks. But so what if some homeless and folks living on the margins redeem cans and bottles? Good for them, good for all of us.
Some leaders of Haight Ashbury Improvement Association (improving for whom?), Cole Valley Improvement Association (again improving for whom?) and the Inner sunset Park Neighbors (who I believe would gate the Inner Sunset if they could figure a way to do it, and require ID checks and income checks for entry) strongly oppose the recycling center, and according to their email exchanges I’ve read, it is all about the “homeless”. For your general information, a few of these very same leaders back in the 1980′s fiercely opposed the replacement of the derelict shuttered Polytechnic High with the beautiful Parkview Commons affordable housing complex, because, “it would bring riff-raff into the neighborhood”. This is still largely the view of a number of these same leaders toward recycling and who now have the ear of City officials.
The City and RPD plan to spend a minimum of $250,000 of public dollars to destroy the current garden plots to replace them with garden plots. This is a mis-use of public money and a abuse of authority.
Some argue that curbside recycling is sufficient. It is good, but not sufficient. And RECOLOGY does not offer a redemption opportunity because they make the money.
State law requires redemption centers in defined zones around supermarkets. HANC Recycling is just such a redemption center. If there is no such center in the zone, the stores will have to offer redemption or pay a fine. As we hear it, Whole Foods will pay the fine, leaving the small corner stores to have to redeem and store recyclables. Not practical or possible.
During every election season San Francisco City officials love to talk of helping small businesses – just love it, like corporate investors talk of creating jobs, like if we give them money they will create jobs here, NOT – but after the election, City officials just don’t give a shit about the burden they are willing to shift to the smallest businesses to carry out another attack on a successful neighborhood serving community resource created by the dreaded progressives. State law be damned. Besides the law created a loop hole for large businesses.
So The City’s position is an abuse of community resources, a mis-use of tax dollars, and a denial of income opportunity for low income and folks on the margins. Lee and Ginsburg: Save the Gentry, Screw the Poor and corner store!
Denis Mosgofian
native San Franciscan
Well said!