Report finds parks vacant of gardeners
By: Beth Winegarner
Examiner Staff Writer
February 4, 2009
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| Mark Hotchkiss walks through Laguna Page Mini Park with his dogs on Tuesday. (Cindy Chew/The Examiner) |
SAN FRANCISCO — Fewer than half the gardeners who water and cultivate The City’s parks were found to be at their assigned areas, according to spot checks done by The City between January and June 2008.
Inspectors visited dozens of local parks and checked maintenance schedules, discovering that many gardeners assigned to those areas were missing in action, according to a City Controller’s Office report issued Tuesday.
Between January and March 2008, gardeners complied with their work schedules 40 percent of the time. That increased to 54 percent between April and June.
The unpredictable schedules of gardeners have been a sticking point among park volunteers for years. They often offer to fill in when a paid staffer is unavailable, according to Isabel Wade, director of the Neighborhood Parks Council.
“You should have some idea whether you’re going to see a gardener at a certain time of day, or a certain day of the week,” she said. “Because we’re stretched so thin, the accountability of the [gardeners] we do have has to be 99 percent.”
Short staffing is the reason gardener schedules are so erratic, according to Lisa Seitz Gruwell, spokeswoman for the Recreation and Park Department. It currently has 231 gardeners on its payroll, 225 short of the full staff it needs, she said.
“We don’t have any leeway to cover a shift when someone is out sick or has to go to a mandatory training session or an emergency in another park,” Seitz Gruwell said. “We agree with everything the controller says, but we’re not designed to be able to meet the expectation of 100 percent compliance.”
Rec and Park should take steps to improve its track record by making better use of the information gathered by inspections like the city controller’s, and develop a better reporting system to track staff, according to City Controller Ben Rosenfeld.
One idea Interim General Manager Jared Blumenfeld has suggested is installing global-positioning units on gardeners’ trucks, which would be monitored from a central computer, Seitz Gruwell said.
The report — which says San Francisco parks are better than ever, overall — comes at a time when Rec and Park faces $8.8 million in budget cuts. Blumenfeld anticipates that the financial crunch will result in layoffs, but has not determined how many, or who, would lose their jobs.
“The cuts will be targeted to try and keep us on our current track, in terms of doing more with less,” he said.
Rating The City’s parks
A recent city controller’s report showed that San Francisco parks are in great shape overall.
District with highest-rated parks: Mission/Bernal Heights/Portola, 9
District with lowest-rated parks: Bayview-Hunters Point/Visitacion Valley, 10
Top-rated parks
Collis P. Huntington Park, District 3
Richmond Recreation Center, District 1
Fay Park, District 3
Midtown Terrace Playground, District 7
Hyde/Vallejo Mini Park, District 3
Lowest-rated parks
Cayuga/Lamartine Mini Park, District 11
Sgt. John Macauley Park, District 6
John McLaren Park, District 10
Park Presidio Boulevard, District 1
Palou/Phelps Park, District 10
Most improved
29th/Diamond Open Space, District 8
Saturn Street Steps, District 5
Page/Laguna Mini Park, District 8
Source: City Controller’s Office
