the superintendent was deficient. as far as the arguments of the people with half leashed dog or recreation, i think it epitomizes the view of the testimony of the representative from the audubon society that said it might or might not have been killed by the doghous, it t or might not have teeth marks on it. that is a good reason >> thank you. one quick thing i wanted to know. this has been an amazing turnout. our plan -- the second part of this hearing has been about the resolution of commercial dog-walkers. after this meeting we wanted to go back and approach this subject. we probably have another half-hour to an hour of this

aspect of the hearing, so i don't think we're going to have time to do that today because we're going to lose a quorum. so what we'll do is finish all the public comment on ggnra. if there's anyone here -- we'll continue the remainder of the hearing and have public comment at a subsequent hearing on that. if there's anyone here today who wants to talk about regulation of commercial dog-walkers, please do so. but we will have the actual hearing on that later, and you'll have another opportunity, if you so choose. but i don't want to make people have to come back, and we'll be happy to hear any input on that. so our next speaker. >> i'm bob, and i came to suggest that this hearing is premature. and any action -- positive action, is also premature, because the outreach to

departments is incomplete. it has been neglectful. it is biased. you take a look at the list of city agencies to whom this was referred. who was left out? the mayor's office on disability. why is that relevant? nobody here from any of the city departments, from any of the advocacy groups, nobody mentioned the problems for guide dogs. and there is information in the public record that gtnra has, a file from 2005, a letter that i'm going to quote from. a significant challenge is off-leash dogs. 80% of the graduates had guide dogs interfered with by off-leash dogs. 42% have had their guide dogs attacked by off-leash dogs. we recommend that our graduates avoid any place where off-leash dogs are known to roam.

it may create areas where our grads will be excluded from entering. they sought a seat on the committee several years ago to discuss whether off-leash areas are appropriate at all. the point simply is there's inadequate consultation. people are left out of this. you need to think about better communication, better input. since 19 9 laws have changed. the a.d.a.'s in effect. we didn't hear how that's applicable to protecting a 40,000 or $50,000 investment. when a guide dog's injured, the human person also is immobilized. that's a problem you're not addressing. you're just blankets accepting that dogs are pets. dogs are comforting. but ignoring service dogs for the blind. >> thank you very much. next speaker. >> hello, supervisors, good

evening. supervisor connie and supervisor wiener. thank you so much for this hearing and for this resolution. i would like to address what superintendent dean calls the compliance-based management that supervisor wiener addressed earlier in his comments. the compliance-based management is really in reality the poison pill of their preferred alternative. i'm -- i hear from superintendent dean that they're going to use a third party to handle this. i'm very concerned about who this third party will be. you know, are they going to have surveillance cameras? are they going to have volunteers? is it going to be staff? i'm concerned about the fairness of it and i don't trust that it will be fair. regardless of which alternative will be chosen, claims of non-compliance, whether real or not, will result in automatic

changes that dogs will be banned everywhere in the ggnra. we dog guardians are contributing citizens of the united states. we are now the outlaws. the national park service should be ashamed of even proposing such a scheme. as bad as the ggnra's preferred alternative is, the poison pill makes it totally unacceptable. and i think the city has every right to send a resolution restricting what the gmp gnra can do. -- ggnra can do. and i ask you please to not let this happen. thank you so much. >> thank you. next speaker. >> i need to -- >> take your time. we can have other speakers go first. >> all i need to know is how i make a -- that's fine. >> hi, my name is jill, and i want to thank you for the hearing. pass the resolution and allow us our 1%, please. thank you.

>> thank you. >> wow. [applause] [laughter] >> how do i make this a full screen is what i'm trying to figure out. >> >> i.t. will take care of that. and i apologize for -- >> ok. >> there you go. >> ok. this is a slight show that andrea played a little while ago. but i wanted to point out several things. my name is lisa, by the way, and i've been organizing a lot of this. because i used to work for the national park service and i think that they're lying and i think they're pie wased. i'm sad about it, -- biased, and i'm sad about it. i want to show you a bunch of slides that are about joy. we are the people who are using the parks. who do they want to reserve it for? so kids. kids are afraid of dogs.

here we are. people of color are afraid of dogs. this is what -- this is just sunday. this is sunday. any day we could have seen this. this is a family. people need places for their kids and their dogs. this is an elderly person, ok, on sunday afternoon, ok, with a cain. i keep hearing people are afraid of dogs, people with disabilities, blah, blah, blah, i think it's a lie. and that's one of the things that i want you to pay attention to. this is a small dog group, it's a community that comes out. i don't know if it's monthly or weekly. this is all of them. these are the people who are using. who are we saving the speech for if not this public? this is a group of kids from a school. you're probably not allowed to touch this dog because i work in schools, but they probably fought for the prime position next to that dog. she says she's been walking in the ggnra for 890 years. she's obviously more than --

for 80 years. she's obviously more than 80 years old. a person with a dog. look at the expression of joy. this is mirror beach. this isn't just san francisco, this is also mon terra, mirror beach, this is a regional problem. he says i've been coming here for 40 years and never seen a problem. this is angela walker, the pro dog-walker, with her out-of-control dogs. another set of dangerous dogs right here. this woman is getting active exercise, ok? child playing with her dog. watch this. ok? i don't know which beach that is. another -- a kid with their dog. this is what it's like. this is crissy field at the inlett. this inlet is full of kids and dogs every sunny day. elderly people. i want to point out this one. this is -- what happened to my two minutes? oh, my god. [laughter] >> thank you very much. >> thank you.

>> hi. >> hi. >> my name is courtney. i own a dog training and dog-walking business in san francisco and i also sit on the board of friends of animal care and control here. i'm extremely concerned about the impact the ggnra plan could have on local dogs and their owners. as a trainer i can't overstate the importance of appropriate off-leash exercise for dogs to prevent behavior problems. restricting dogs to fenced areas will create more problems. they are more likely to

to be able to take a real walk. >> thank you for coming. next speaker. .wr >> i'm a burnel heights resident. i live in david campos' district and i walk his dog. he's very fit. he's been going out with me since he was a puppy. winston and i and about five or six of our canine friends go to various san francisco parks. i have never seen an empty

park. i usually walk between 8:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. they came right after the dog walkers started taking the dogs home. to ever find an empty park in san francisco at 5:00, the dog owners start coming home from work and then they take their dogs out. it's often very crowded there. if i go to a small park, some of the enclosed dog play areas are no larger than the size of this room or possibly twice as big of this room. once you have two dog walkers you're fine. but if the third or fourth dog walker comes in, as they will, it is chaos. there are fights, there are problems, there are parking issues. all sorts of problems develop. another park that i like to use is mclaren park. it's fabulous. it is the largest off-leash dog area in san francisco city, this area. there has been a proposed takeover of some of the only dog leash area in that park by

the fress bee golf club and they are trying to overlay their golf club frisbee course on the off-leash dog area. they also have a poison pill in their rules about it, that if there is conflict, dogs will have to leave the area. put a dog and a frisbee together, that could be a conflict. another poison pill. and they have not yet gotten permission, though i have seen them already start to level some of the land, put up posts, drop concrete and it is not permitted yet and they've started. thank you. >> thank you. >> hello, my name is fracesca. as we all know, the beach is a narrow strip of lands. when you look to the rest there's the whole rest of the world. when you look at the east you look at the homes of 800,000 people crammed into 49 square miles. yet we heard today in the first

presentation that relative to national park policy, there's no real difference between yosemite and playland at the beach. if the presence of 800,000 people next to a beach is of no consequence, then i'm not surprised that we have a problem. my major use of the golden gate recreational area is to run our dog at fort funston. before we had a dog, we had a small child who is now grown up and we used to go to the beach. and my son would get sticks with his friends and run up and down the dunes swinging his swords and yelling and hooting and hollering and having a generally good time. i know now that that was probably more damaging to the habitat than anything my dog would ever do. but if we're not going to leash the children and we're not going to leash the dogs, then probably a better solution is to identify the critical habitats and fence them off and

then slay the beasts or the children. thank you. >> thank you. >> thank you for having this hearing today and in case i marked my card wrong, i'm a little jet-lagged, i am for the resolution. i am the proud owner, owned by a 12-year-old black lab named otis who is an in incredibly good shape for an older dog. the reason he is in the good health that he is in is because he goes out with a dog-walking group, positive tails, three times a week to fort funston and often goes to either crissey or fort funston with me on the weekends. let's not pretent that the dog parks in san francisco are equivalent to the experience you have taking your dog to kris z- field or fort funston. they are not. some of the san francisco parks are great. some of them are glorified dog runs. they smell bad. they're small. these are not appropriate ways to -- for me to get exercise

and for my dog to get exercise. i'm very concerned about the 75% compliance, as are many people. i see it as the equivalent to, you know, if 10 people run a red light, then you close up the intersection and tell everybody to walk. i think we need better enforcement for people who are violating than we currently have. i think there are ways to make the status quo work with better enforcement, better sensing for these protected areas, clearer signage and education. one of the other concerns that i have that i wanted to mention is that part of the fort funston plan has us getting our dogs down to the beach on leash. i would like and i would challenge anyone in the ggnra to take an enthusiastic water dog who's anxious to get to the beach and try to get down that steep slope with them on leash.

i believe that's all i have to say. also, in support of the dog walkers. there are plenty of professional dog walker groups out there who will be impacted as small businesses if this goes through. thank you. >> hi. my name is susan adams and i'm a resident of san francisco as well as a native. and i've been taking my dog for over 30 years to fort funston for our exercise. and i have to say that i have not experienced one serious problem in all those 30 years. and you would think that in all that time i would have seen -- except i was around the time a man stabbed a dog. i didn't think that was the dog's fault, that was a human problem. it seems to me in listening to all the environmental organizations that came forward this afternoon, it seems incredibly disingenuous to me

that they would single out dogs as the sole or the primary cause of disturbance of the environment without considering human events, like fleet week, when hundreds of people go to chrissy fields and trample the habitat without any restriction or guidance from ggnra. or what about the turkey trot, where 1,500 people ran down ocean beach right through that area, and that was encourage bid ggnra. and then, what about -- how does this work? turn it over? ggnra themselves thousand dollars over a section of ocean beach in 2007 that was the plover habitat area. that's why they are not

residing at ocean beach anymore, because they did it in order to prevent erosion. this is all online, there are pictures, and i'll probably email you some more. thank you. >> thank you. next speaker. >> hi. my name is robin buckley. i'm a fourth-generation native san francisco ann. my parents still live out on 39th avenue, where i grew up. being out by the beach, i used to go to fort funston as a child to play army with some of the neighbor kids. this was when it was still a military installation. but you could go out around the edges. now i go out there on the weekends and i can hardly walk through -- i mean, there's so many people out there walking their dogs. we need more space, not less space. this was supposed to be -- when the city gave the property to

the ggnra, it was with the stipulation that it would remain -- we'd be able to use this property as we have traditionally. traditionally i have used it to walk, but primarily to walk dogs. i've had several dogs over the years and i hate using dog parks. i walk around in a circle, because the dog park isn't very big. so you just ends up going around in a circle on a path. i would much rather have an experience walking along the beach. i don't necessarily -- right now we go down to the legal end of the beach down by sloat. there's an area less than a block long. when it's high tide, you can't even walk there, and that's what they've given us. they've given us this little tiny area to walk in, and i'm disgusted. thank you. >> thank you very much. next speaker. >> hi, i'm john keating.

thank you, supervisors. i've been following the ggnra issues for about a decade now, since i arrived at the coastal bluffs, to find that the park service has closed the only real good disabled access trail in the bay area without any concern or contact with the public beforehand and subsequently watched as they closed down the only large sand dune that children could play on in the bay area, while completely ignoring the last public comment you received on that. i want to thank the ggnra, superintendent dean, howard leaf itch, smith, and whoever is behind us in this process for being here. i want to thank them for their public service, and i think this is the highest public service, when you listen to the public and in a public hearing. i think that goes to the central issue of what's going

on here. and make no mistake about it. the change in process by the ggnra fundamentally changes the way it deals with the people and with the city. what they have done -- well, let me first say, i agree with many of the comments about the technical deficiencies of the process, when there is an analysis presented for impact review. it ought to be scientifically sound and not read as an advocacy piece, rather than an impartial presentation, and there is that risk in this process that's been identified by the courts before as a process with the park service, which is to railroad through such changes. going to this current process, what is fundamentally different that impacts the city and the people is a change from the mandate in gold to listen to the public's interest, concerns, desires -- [chime]

>> thank you. >> -- change to do a back-room technical analysis. >> thank you very much. next speaker. >> hello, supervisors. my name is reuben gars and i'm a union organizer. how are you doing? thank you very much for having this hearing. i want to echo the previous speaker. this is a hearing that the ggnra didn't want to have. they didn't want to face the public who are upset about what they are doing. that's why they created kind of like an easy for them process. when you go and you talk to one of them, they don't care what you say. nobody is listening to you. there's no record. there's a record of this and i think that's the way that you conduct their business. anyway, we're talking about 1% of the total ggnra. and i'm a lifelong environmentalist. believe me. i used to be part of the sierra clubs, where we used to take san francisco kids to the beach. believe it or not, a lot of our kids in the mission, they never

make it to the beach or to fort funston. we used to take kids from there to the beach or to yosemite or whatever. i also have a letter here from over 50 businesses that are related to dog ownership, and they are protesting. they are protesting the ggnra policy that they're trying to impose. i went to the draft that they have. i was trying to find the evidence of some situations, and i just couldn't do it. so i truly believe that this is a process that they have developed to really weigh this out, where in five years or seven years we won't be able to go to fort funston or one of these places. so i urge you to introduce these resolutions as a way to bring them back to the negotiations table. this is a city. i'm -- i really feel sorry about them. they probably used to work at yosemite or one of those beautiful parks and then they got transferred to the city. now they're running a park with

over 1.5 million people next to them. and it's very hard to adjust to that, and i understand that. but they have to understand that this is a recreation area. this is an area where they have to bargain we have to understand each other. thank you very much. [applause] >> thank you very much. >> good afternoon, supervisors. thank you very much for introducing this resolution and for having this hearing. it's the only opportunity to be able to be heard. my name is bruce wold from president of dog pack here in san francisco. and i just want to say, supervisor wiener, your opening question to the ggnra is about whether this has been done anywhere else in the country with regards to dogs just lends itself to me to be that it's one big huge experiment. that we don't know what the outcome is going to be. we don't know how enforcement is going to go. we already know, even from the environmental group's own admission, there hasn't been very good enforcement as it is. with the current areas that are protected. i also want to say that i did

-- i am a person with l disability. i'm also a person with a disability advocate. along with my colleague, bob, who spoke earlier, i do want to say that i did contact him disability organizations, one of which is disability rights advocates who has now a lawsuit, which is possibly going class action against the ggnra for ineffectively making the ggnra -- all of the ggnra accessible to people with disabilities. and this has been an ongoing case since 2008. also, nobody had mentioned with regards to the science what's happening at drake's bay, and i think that needs to also be part of the discussion here. ggnra butts up against the city and county of san francisco which you know you don't have control or jurisdiction over since the transfer, and essentially it would leave san francisco landlocked without any access or control over the

future of its coastline. i'm a person with disabilities as i mentioned. i have a service dog that i adopted from the spca. he's 14 years old now. why? because he's able to have those large open spanses to be able to run and to be 14 years old and to be almost a 90-pound german shepherd is quite a feat. so i support the resolution. thank you very much. >> my name is jose maldonado. i'm a young athlete. and i think dog off-leashing parks help people exercise more, stay healthy, and i think we need more parks like this. i don't know what the business purpose is of this, things that we don't know, but seriously people enjoy so much, as well as my girlfriend, family, friends, people that we meet and dogs that we interact with. so i think this is a very

beautiful thing to have. please do not take it away. >> hello. my name is dina kate. i'm here as a dog lover -iron/advocate. i want to say how we have a family dog who's 13 years old, and as long as i can remember we've always taken her to ocean beach and fort funston. some of the greatest times that me and my friends and family have had, especially after your stress with school and work, you don't want to go to a little tiny city park that's going to be overcrowded. you want to have a nice beautiful area with mountains and beaches and very friendly dogs. i haven't -- i walk there several times a week, three or four times a week, and i never see dogs doing anything except

playing with each other. you know, ok, we can -- they say that we can have the dogs on leash, but everybody knows that dogs cannot have the same exercise on leash as off leash. and obviously there are many capable of running as fast as their dog. obviously for many reasons, physical condition, age, disability, whatever the issue may be. but that doesn't mean that their dog shouldn't have the right to be healthy and get socialized with other dogs. i fostered over 25 dogs with rocky top rescue and each one of those dogs i have taken to fort funston. so i oppose the plan. >> thank you very much. hi. >> i know it's been a long day for everybody, so i'll try and keep this short. my name is alison. i am a dog walker and trainer in the city of san francisco

for the past 13 years. i also own a pet store in the westport area. there's a couple of points that i don't think people have made enough. i'm at fort funston every day, and i pick up a couple of big bags on the beach. this isn't left by my dogs. cigarette butts that are left by human beings. i've also rescued several sea birds that have been caught by nets and hooks. there's no regulations for them. i have rushed several sea birds down to the humane society that have been caught in those lines. when you take the dogs out of an area, for instance, john mclaren, and i walk there, too, on the weekends it's not safe. i tell my clients don't go if the dog walkers aren't there because there's tons of gang violence. when you don't have dogs in an area, you won't have a bunch of gang vial silence and people that are possibly up to no good. taking the dogs out of fort funston is goingop