Supervisor Jake McGoldrick: Cleaning Our Commercial Corridors

A Clean Streets Agenda
Neighborhood Commercial Districts, like our Clement Street, serve residents and visitors alike, fostering self-sufficiency by bringing small businesses, income and jobs to the Richmond District.
It is crucial that we all remain vigilant in ensuring that these districts remain attractive for both customers and surrounding property owners. Recently, I mentioned in this column that I secured funding to purchase and use small "Green Machine" street cleaners to provide more frequent street cleaning along Clement Street. These Green Machines will allow us to clean Clement two-to-four times per week.
In addition, I have been working with SF Department of Public Works (DPW) Deputy Director Mohammed Nuru to ensure that District 1's shopping strips get enhanced services to help them remain "clean, green and graffiti-free," the goal of DPW's new Clean Patrol program. It's not just an in-house program at DPW; the Clean Patrol represents the best of public-private collaboration, with the City working with property owners to find solutions that will last.
At my request, Clement Street is one of the locales that DPW has targeted as a pilot for this new effort, whose goals are to address specific neighborhood retail district needs and to provide additional cleaning services, enhance the physical appearance of retail corridors and create a self-sufficient, sustainable improvement model.
Here's how it works. For the pilot program, a team of two to three professionals will be initially assigned exclusively to Clement Street for regularly scheduled enhanced services and physical improvements not otherwise provided by the Department of Public Works. As always, DPW will provide basic services, including sweeping the streets, enforcing the litter laws and educating property owners and merchants about their Charter responsibility for keeping sidewalks clean and litter free.
Enhanced services may include sidewalk steam cleaning and gum removal; graffiti removal; tree well maintenance; and emergency clean-up. Physical improvements may include neighborhood banners; decorative trash containers; street furniture, planters and ornamental lighting; merchant directories; and newspaper and bicycle racks.
The Clean Patrol has been funded as a pilot program but it will not be funded by the City for the long-term. Our goal is to get the program started on Clement and a couple of other neighborhoods, with the City enlisting property owners and merchants as Clean Patrol partners. Once surrounding property owners and merchants see the results of the program, our hope is that they will step up to keep the program going.
At the conclusion of the pilot program, each neighborhood business district will have a self-sufficient organization and will fund, through member contribution, an ongoing program of enhanced services and physical improvements. The idea is that, for program self-sufficiency, property owners and merchants would pay for the program by contributing to a designated neighborhood services fund an amount proportional to the size of their property.
I am excited about the Clean Patrol program and its potential for greater clean-up and lasting improvement for Clement Street merchants and property owners. That means keeping residents shopping in our neighborhood and attracting new customers.
Similar programs are doing exceptionally well in some of the major urban centers in the United States that are plagued by grime, trash, graffiti and illegal dumping. A meeting will be scheduled within a few months to introduce Richmond merchants, property owners and neighbors to the Clean Patrol, to answer questions and set a starting date.
Richard Allman will coordinate the new Clean Patrol program. Allman has spent many years learning San Francisco's neighborhoods and developing the highly successful Tenderloin Sidewalk Improvement Program, so he is thoroughly experienced and familiar with the issues described above. Allman can be reached at 695-2003.
Please also feel free to contact my office about this or any other issue at (415) 554-7410.
Jake McGoldrick is a San Francisco supervisor representing District 1.