>supervisor mar: so is there any maximum? i have the police in front of me. i guess there is the concern there would be too many segways. if it becomes too popular, there might be too many in the park. >> there is a maximum number of hours they are allowed to operate out there. there is also a maximum on the amount of space they have to store these segways in golden gate park. i think we are only looking at a maximum of one group being out at a time. supervisor mar: i was just going to mention to my colleagues, i will help to convene the meeting with the stake holders that spoke of today. i want to thank the san francisco electric tour company for coming out to educate us, as

well on the use of segways in other areas. through chair at avalos, i would like to continue this item to the call of the chair. i will do my best to convene meetings with stakeholders and at rec and parks, to address different concerns. that would be my request. supervisor avalos: we will do just that. thank you, supervisor mar. madam court, if you could please call item three. >> we also have the 11:30 special order. supervisor avalos: but i would like to do is continue item 3 to be heard on the 28th. i spoke with the city services auditor folks and they are ok with that.

we will have the hearing on illegal dumping and then go on to our 11:30 special item later. >> item 3. hearing on the controller's december 2010 government barometer issued on february 3, 2011, for an overview of the report and a summary of highlights and recent trends in the city's major service areas. supervisor avalos: colleagues, i would like to continue this item to the 28th, but we would need to have public comment. is there anyone from the public that would like to comment on this item? seeing none, public comment is closed. colleagues, can make continue this to the 28th? thank you. madam clerk, item four. this one we will hear.

then we will go on to item six, our 11:30 special. >> item 4. hearing on the status of the department of public works' plans to curb illegal dumping in the city, including but not limited to the scope of the problem, resources devoted to this effort, effective strategies used in other localities, and immediate goals and long term plans to reduce this activity. supervisor avalos: thank you, madam clerk. colleagues, this is a hearing that i called based on one of the top concerns coming to me from district 11 residents, that is illegal dumping. that happens in various hot spots. please as i see in the excelsior district, along russia street, commonly adjacent to parks, also in the omi neighborhood. hearing a lot about illegal

dumping, especially, dumping that goes on furniture that happens close to the time that tenants are moving out. i know it is also an issue that is a concern that many of us have from our around the city. there are different ways that illegal dumping may manifest itself, depending on the region of the city as well. i am here to speak about the issue and what the city is doing about it. we have been dpw director as well as other members of the city departments here. we also have risen from around the city as well that will be providing comment. i think we will have a little give-and-take on some of the concerns raised, what the response from the department

could be as well. >> thank you. good morning, members of the committee. ed riskin, director of public works. very grateful for the opportunity to talk about this issue. it is one that challenges the department, city, other city departments that we work in partnership with. this is a good opportunity to get you and the public up to date on what we're doing, what we are facing, and two things we would like to get out of this -- raise awareness of the issues and what people's responsibilities are, in regards to the issues behind illegal dumping. also to stimulate conversation on ideas and suggestions on how we can get ahead of this issue. i have a brief presentation that i will run through. we will be putting this

information on our website for the benefit of the public. we would welcome any questions then. in terms of the scale of the problem, we get about 17,000 reports of illegal dumping every year, which is a staggering number. if you convert that into the amount of material we are picking up a year, it is 20 million pounds of the legally- dumped material that we are finding in the public rights of way in san francisco. it is a mind-boggling number. we dedicate about $4 million of our budget to respond to those service requests. this is essentially general fund money. funds from the taxpayer that could be going to schools, parks, social safety net, we are spending picking up other people's garbage. i do nothing that is a good use of taxpayer money.

of course, the reason we do it is because the illegal dumping poses health and safety risks, environmental risks, so we have an obligation for the safety of the public to pick it up. supervisor avalos: has that $4 million allocation been steady, hasn't gone down, have we seen a significant change in the money that goes toward illegal dumping? >> what drives the amount of money is more or less demand for service. i will show you later what the demand is looking like. it has been increasing. unfortunately, our available staff to deal with it has been decreasing. one other point i wanted to raise, in terms of the demand, there is a bulky item collection

service, that is part of our agreement. however, we found that that is underutilized. that adds to our challenge. there are two main kinds of dumping, the way we characterize it. one is sidewalk dumping, which happens in two different forms. one is may be well intended, where people take household items, like mattresses, chairs, couches, put them on the sidewalk, sometimes attaching a sign that says free to it. maybe somebody will pick it up and it gets used. unfortunately, often times it doesn't get picked up by someone else, and the city is left to pick it up. many people believe that is the city's responsibility.

we recently engaged in a perception study about the commonness of the streets in san francisco. -- cleanliness of the streets in san francisco. most people surveyed believed that it was the responsibility of the city, but we know that it is the responsibility of the private individual. what also happens when people do that, once there is one thing out there, others tend to pile up. so the problem is exacerbated. the other thing that happens in the category of sidewalk dumping. we have found a number of people, despite moloch, do not have adequate garbage service. so when their garbage bills up in the house, they dump it on the sidewalk, sometimes adjacent to a city receptacle, sometimes

just on the sidewalk. anecdotally come as an outreach effort that we are doing called spruce up before sun up, we are identifying people in commercial areas. we have issued over 700 citations for people without adequate garbage service. that was in a limited portion of the city. so it is clear that is part of the problem as well. you can see in the charts, some of the distributions, our responses to overflowing city receptacles, which are often overfilling because people are putting a large household items in there because they do not have their own service. the other category of the illegal dumping is the more insidious kind. this is much more deliberate and illegal.

we have had some examples of this recently. this is often contractors or haulers taking large amounts of debris from a construction zone or otherwise and dumping it. we have had recent examples of this with hazardous materials, where we have had to contract with a certified as the provider to carry this away. -- hazmat provider to carry this away. we have had large bonds of up to 10 tons at a time, and we have seen a number of these in the past six months. this is a different side of the dumping story, but one that diverts a huge amount of our resources. to the point of the trend in the illegal dumping, what we are seeing, we are on a path to having more than 19,000 service requests. we have been averaging 17,000.

two years ago, less than 6000. the problem does seem to be getting worse. whether that is a factor of the economy and people less willing to pay to properly dispose of materials, or some other reason, demand for our service to address this is going up. at the same time, our resources, as i mentioned, are going down due to the budget cuts. as an example, the head count of people in our environmental services bureau, who does the bulk of the street cleaning in the city, as well as illegal dumping pickup, we have gone from over 400 people to just around 300. a 25% reduction in the people available to do this kind of work. it is a significant reduction we

are seeing, at the same time, the amount of dumping is increasing. 25% reduction in staff, 19% increase in illegal dumping. it really becomes problematic and averts a higher percentage of our resources. the next slide shows when and where it happens -- supervisor avalos: the difference between 2008, 2010, was that a general fund cut? >> yes, we are funded by a mix of general fund and gas tax. the gas tax had been treated as a general fund equivalent. those reductions are from the budget cuts that we have come to the budget and finance committee and have gotten. we have been able to stave off some of the decrease last year because we had jobs now people. while we were losing city staff, we had jobs now people that kept us going through

september. in terms of where and when, district 6, 9, 10, and 11, and five, i guess lead the pack. there is really no district that is immune from dumping. the chart on the bottom shows the beginning and end of the month is when it happens most, which corresponds with people leaving -- moving in and out. a pretty sick of the in amount of dumping around the city, concentrated south of market, and then east. this is just another look of dumping. sidewalk dumping measured in pounds. over the past year, many districts have over 1 million pounds of debris dumped onto the sidewalks. of the 20 million pound total, annually, it roughly breaks down

to one-third it is the very large stuff that we need a garbage truck to pick up. the other two-thirds are the smaller items that we use pickup trucks to cart away. in terms of how we are addressing this. as i mentioned, we have to devote a lot of resources to picking up the garbage. we cannot just leave it on the street. we have been stepping up enforcement efforts, where we are issuing citations to people for having inadequate garbage service, improperly disposing of materials, when we can identify the responsible party -- which is difficult. we have also been trying to focus on education. our community corridors program. spruce up by sun up campaign. we have been doing a lot of door-to-door out reached so that people are aware of their responsibilities to properly dispose of their waste.

supervisor avalos: i am just looking at these photos. how are these picked up? they're done manually? workers come and pick up the materials. rn day cruise -- are they crews of one, two, do you have issues of workers getting injured on the job? is that common? it seems there is some danger involved in doing this work. >> generally, the big garbage trucks, we have somebody from general labor, so it is a two- person operation. we train our folks on proper lifting techniques. if they are called to pick up illegal dumping, if they feel they cannot safely managed, our

protocol would be so that they get somebody to help them do it. we have some injuries in the department. back injuries are the most common. i do not have any numbers of how many relate to illegal dumping. there are definitely hazards involved with picking up the materials. some of the bigger materials can have broken glass, oil, other hazardous materials. we had to recently bring in a certified hazmat hauler to carry away from roofing that had asbestos in it. particularly, to deal with the large-scale illegal dumping, we are partnering with the police department, city attorney's office, da, others around the city to identify those responsible for it.

the city attorney a week or two ago announced civil action they are taking against two roofing companies whose waist, while we were able to track back to them, while in partnership with these agencies. we are working on that. it can be difficult to identify the people who are doing the dumping. it is something that we are hoping to identify and send a strong message that it is not ok to dump your stuff in san francisco. particularly people who are making a profit off of doing so. the other piece of our strategy is public awareness. a lot of the smaller scale and dumping, it is people meeting to do well, by putting that couch out for someone else to use, but i know where it is creating a problem for the city.

we launched a campaign called "don't leave it on the sidewalk." we do not have the funding to do a large campaign, but we are doing some social networking, working with other departments to get the message out. we are helping people to understand what their responsibilities are, the costs -- fiscally and physical -- to illegal dumping. we are reaching out to our reach -- outreach programs to make sure people understand their responsibility. jointly with recology, in our community cleaning events, we have operations in each supervisor district once a year, encouraging people to bring in anything that they want to dispose of. it is all appropriately separated into the waste

streams. if people are cleaning out their homes, it is an opportunity for them to do so properly. some additional aspects of our strategy. we came to the board to get authorization to apply for and accept grant from caltrans, which we were excited to get. we will be using that to address some chronic illegal dumping hot spots in the southeast portion of the city. we have been working with recology on their item collection, which is now called recycle my junk, making sure people have the garbage service they need to have. finally, some thoughts, ideas. these may not be all that well developed, but just some

thoughts on what we are doing beyond what we are currently doing. i welcome your thoughts and that of the public. one is to consider, when businesses are securing a business license, show that they have proof of garbage service. the law was changed in october 2010 to make that a requirement for commercial properties, as it had been for residential properties. the business license is one hope that the city has that make and sell more people to be more compliant. our recent efforts have shown that there are lots of people who are not complying with city law. this could be one way to do so. more outreach and awareness. i am hoping this hearing helps to do that. we are also working with the mayor on public-service announcements. perhaps as well with the board of supervisors, to help us leverage this low-budget

campaign we have. programs that the department of environment has undertaken, and to educate people, we want to continue those programs to expand and enhance. we also want to deal more directly on the preventive side of large-scale dumping. we do have the construction, and demolition debris ordinance, which has requirements for a waste management plan. we would like to explore strengthening some of those requirements. maybe requiring proof of proper disposal at the time of sign- off. otherwise, requiring submission of these receipts, so for the people who are held to this ordinance, we catch them at the beginning and end of the

process. another idea is something akin to a furniture fee. this would be akin to the bottle bill. whereby, if you buy a mattress, a couch, the types of materials we end up picking up at the end of their life, there would be a fee applied to the sale of those items that would go to the inevitable cleanup effort, but also going to education as well. of course, this would work well at a regional or state-wide level. we do not want to run furniture businesses out, but it would be a good way to bring this in the loop with these furniture purchases. finally, it is difficult to catch people dumping illegally. we have an outdated system of cameras out there, but we need modern, high resolution, movable

cameras. there may be some other technology available. all of that takes resources. that is really the end of the presentation. i am here, along with muhammed and larry, to answer any questions and to engage in conversation with the public. supervisor avalos: thank you, director riskin, for your presentation. this would be great. if you could share with us where we can find a presentation on our website, we can certainly get it out to members of the public through our e-mail blast. a couple of questions, talking with members of the district 11 council, talking about this hearing. there is a question people had

-- if we call 311 for items left on one side of the street corner, but then the cat a corner there are four items, does dpw require a separate call to pick up stuff on the opposite side of the street? staffing who does this work, do they take the initiative to pick of the items across the street as well? i imagine they do, but i wonder if there needs to be a separate order? >> our policy of the department is when our folks are out, they will address it if they can themselves. if not, they would directly call it into dispatch. we would not require the public to make another service request. if our folks have the capacity, they should address it at that time, or they would report it in. supervisor avalos: i had another

person who lives in the xl cher. she reported to me that she called 311, and she saw a van in the process of dumping. she was able to get its license plate, called 311, was patched into the police department, and they said, we probably would not be able to follow up on this because the van operator would say that he was caught in error and was not dumping. it is not something we can get involved in. i think she went to the general dispatch, not the end with station, which serves the excelsior. it certainly raises the issue that there is a need for this coordination between dpw and the police department's, when actually find a person doing it,

how are we going to follow up? the suspectthis patch person sat there are other things that take up much more of our time. it was something difficult for people in the public, who felt like they had recourse for this one issue of dumping -- and then down and they did not. we want to feel powerful in dealing with this issue. what can we do to fix that kind of coordination between our departments and 311? >> i think that is accurate in terms of what i have heard happening as well. the protocol at 311 is they would call over to the 911 non- emergency number. if you see it in progress, you would either call 911 or the other number, as they would immediately be able to dispatch somebody.

it is correct, given the limitations on police resources, it will be challenging for the police to respond and follow-up. i would miss only, without photographic evidence, is something that would be difficult to prosecute. those questions might be better for the police or d.a. to answer. in terms of coordination, something we have identified that we need to do better is stronger in gay men with the police department. we will be sitting down with the police. i got a similar complaint to the one that you just mentioned. it is an issue we need to address. there may be a better way to address it. maybe if they went to the district stations for example -- supervisor avalos: it makes sense to me if it goes to the district stations, if stations have someone who is a point person on responding to those issues.

taking those calls, in particular, would be helpful. it really makes a person calling and wonder whether it is helpful to do so. then it gets to the point where 311 is just there to come pick up the stuff and not do anything else, then we are just responding and reacting, and are not being proactive about how we can deal with the issue. >> certainly, we do not want to do anything that would discourage people from reporting illegal dumping that they see, particularly if it is in progress. we want to identify those who are doing it and you want to pursue civil actions and send a strong signal. there is certainly room for improvement. that will be our discussion with the police on how we can better do that. we will certainly take the we will certainly take the suggestions of having these