From Our City Hall Correspondent

Hatchet-wielding overpaid City hall bureaucrats have quietly devised a plan to cut the annual costs of street cleaning by depriving the West Side of San Francisco from weekly street cleaning from the current once a week program to twice a month street cleaning.

The eastern side of the city would continue to receive weekly street cleaning, sources say.

The new plan would primarily affect Districts 2, 4 and 11.

These areas would be cleaned only on the first and third weeks of the month, rather than weekly. The abbreviated street cleaning program is projected to launch in August. Adhesive stickers are in production that the Dept. of Parking and Traffic would stick on the current street signs giving city warnings to move your cars on a street-cleaning day. To be put up on the West Side of town only, the stickers will advise residents that street cleaning will now happen only twice a month in their area.

Only 20,000 stickers have been ordered, so it is clear that they are not designated for citywide signs.
The recommendation that the West Side of San Francisco be uncleanded twice a month came from a private consultant firm hired by the city, according to sources. The cost of the consulting contract has not been ascertained.

The Department of public works had offered to paste the stickers on the parking signs at roughly half the cost that the Department of Traffic will pay its workers, but the DPW lost out in a jurisdictional dispute. It would thus cost double the money to inform the West of Twin Peaks taxpayers that will get half the street cleaning services than the rest of the city.

There appears to be elements of class analysis and voter ballot box power in the independent consultant’s recommendation to leave the greater west side of town to clean up its on streets. The presumption appears to be that west side home owners are more tidy than east side renters, thus can manage better without the city’s traditional weekly street cleaning. The west side has far more individual homeowners and taxpayers who historically have carried the burnt of tax bonds regularly approved by the majority of renters on the city’s east side.
A call to the head of Department of Public Works for comment went unanswered yesterday afternoon.

This story will be updated.