Transcripts For SFGTV BOS Full Board Of Supervisors 22817 20

SFGTV BOS Full Board Of Supervisors 22817 March 5, 2017

Franciscans. Him in terms of access issues people have been riding in our parks for decades but the plan does not say that these will be a problem and we will work with this potential plan in this process and with that we urge you reject the appeal and allow this plan to go forward. And thank you for staying so late. Thank you. Next speaker please. My name is nick wallace. I live in supervisor peskins district three. Im a patron of the San Francisco municipal golf course. Im here in support of the final eir for the program that will restore the Sharp Park Golf Course and the maintenance of this plan i would just like to make the comment that i have closely followed the sharp park controversy for over a decade including making comments in front of this body in 2009 when supervisor wanted to kill this course and in 2013 when supervisor David Alvarez wanted to kill this course and now them are still here but i still am so im just saying. Even though sharp park is within the plan as it should there is still an important issue here. We have a golf course operation at sharp park for 80 years. This has included a habitq of the california of the red legged frog and i urge the board to move forward and start the process to improve this habitat and manages habitat for the frogs and the snakes in sharp park and for the golfers. We have many San Francisco recreation and park employees that have have a right to do this and are great stewards for the park and for the frog and the snake. Lets move forward and get started with this plan. [timer dings] thank you. Next speaker please. Hello my name is shannon dawn. And on behalf of the Northern California Golf Association honorable supervisors, sharp park is a unique, highly significant golf course and historic resource. This preservation is of the highest priority for that mpg and the world golf. This provides a reasonably priced seaside recreation and a community outing for visitors of San Francisco. We reiterate our support for Sharp Park Golf Course and for San Franciscos Natural Resource program and for the eir. We request that your board deny the appeal an except the planning commissions final eir. I support sharp park and these are the homes of the places that i learn to play part. It represents Stanford University as a representative of the community and i know how important this is as a Community Gathering point and i can ask now that i have a few seconds left is to support all of you that have any young people in the room that love the game to bring them to the game, we would love to help them but support the eir, reject the appeal, and allow as much native supporrt as sharp park to receive. To sport wildlife in San Francisco based in terms of programming and in terms of what is here. I want to zoom out. I will zoom out and just acknowledge some of our fellow cities. We mentioned some of theseearlier. Chicago sports many. Arm they have a plan, a comparable plan. I will read with this says chicago supports many native ecosystems from prairies, savanna, and dunes to wood learns and supports many ecosystems for birds reptiles and 50 and and i am moving over to hong kong and their Nature Conservation policy includes activities that have adverse impacts onn their ecosystem and these would include threats to their ecosystem and finally i will discuss 2011 plan diversity which has certain goals of connecting people with nature and the city. I want to implore you to trust your city agencies here 10 years of planning i have known lisa and her stay after 15 years, i have worked in Resource Management myself for 20 years and excellent and leadership in the realm of thank you, next speaker please. Hello my name is bill wilson in august of this year will mark the 20th year of my arrival in San Francisco and almost my first volunteer opportunities were with the National Program in Mount Davidson. And, through sweat equity i have learned what this means in Mount Davidson because that natural actuary program had exist. So these people that talk about these telephone ethnic cleansers and i have yet to meet those people and i am not one of those people. And so, i would urge you to very respectfully urge you to reject respectfully urge you to reject the appealbecause lets be frank here because it has been 15 years and the oppositionhas not really come up with anything that needs to be changed at this late hour and i am not sure that even if you approve this appeal that it would in fact be one more round to go that you would be finished. I think today is the day to finish it. Thank you. Thank you. Are there any other members of the public who would like to speak in opposition . Im sorry maam, youre ready made a comment. You can only do it once. Are there any other members of the public there would like to make Public Comment . Again, the appeal, this is last call. Seeing none, Public Comment is now close. [gavel] okay so we will have a threeminute supervisor peskin is right here. A threeminute rebuttal. Thank you. So, there will be a rebuttal. There will be three minutes for the appellant. Please come forward. Good evening supervisors im d feldman i am the president of the San Francisco Natural Resources alliance. I want to thank you for your attention and your patients but particularly your attention. The city of San Francisco is 7. 7 miles of open hills. Are open space is limited. Where did we lose our way is a forward thinking cities. If we certify an eir that [inaudible] Global Warming, if we ignore impacts on air quality and erosion of groundwater if we ignore spending large psalms on destruction of land and destruction of wildlife rather than maintenance of those trees and regulations. If we use the arborist term of thinning this is actually deforestation. If we spend 5. 64 million per year to implement this planned to sell trees and use herbicides and close trails and close all play areas. If we require of you to get permission for recreation and park eir without having project level information. If we do a costbenefit analysis of Public Health versus using cheap herbicides. Please, send this eir back to planning. There is too much land at stake to have a controversy over whether this was done correctly. We dont want to have no choice but to live with the mistakes that we made for the next 20 years that planning should otherwise be able to correct and mitigate. In the remaining time, i will turn it over to my colleagues. The projector is not on. It is not on. Sfgov tv, please. It is on. First of all i would like to say what lisa wayne said that trees need to be removed because their aging, unhealthy, and dangerous and here is a map to mark the tree areas and they are being removed just to clear an area and they are not sic the onetoone replacement is supposed to be 1 to 1 replacement and they never address the axis we identified. They said if you go from these trails and these trails [timer dings] that thank you sir. Thank you very much. Thank you. And so with that, this hearing has been held and is now closed. [gavel] this matter is in the hands of the board of supervisors. And with that, i will call on supervisor peskin. Thank you mme. Chair andsupervisors and colleagues at first i want thank all of the members of the public for sticking it out for your passion of the park and i whether it is rather the plan was through the last decade i think there was maybe three or four general managers to go but dawn was there and i think that it speaks volumes to the quality of our citizens that everybody is so passionate about the parks, i have taken this. Seriously. I spent leery is lee all day sunday reading the Forest Alliance appeal reading the wildlife equity appeal on the responses from the Planning Department i did not claim that i read the entire eir but looking at specific things in there that were brought up in the appeals that reference the comments and responses and, i have to say that while i had some questions about piece mailing and alternatives as related to sharp park because the sharp park portion was not a Program Level eir but was a project level eir in so far as the general manager was able to Reach Agreement with that set of appellants and address their concerns as it relates to raising the height of the fairways which i think they had some colorful sql arguments as far as that appeal has been withdrawn and i do not think those issues are any longer before us. Forest Alliance Appeal and let me separate the difference between the issues of policy that are being analyzed that a programmatic level in the eir versus whether or not the eir was adequate in evaluating those impacts correctly. Inasmuch as i would like to find on their behalf i dont, i have not been able to find on their behalf and would respectfully, i know with disappointment to many of my friends, and i have to say i dont think there is any single issue that this body has gotten as many emails about,we didnt get this many emails about the and nass and the streetlights and nass and the streetlights on van nuys and i would respectively supervise or say that i think that we should table all items 61 and 62 and move item 60 and this is second and by supervisor farrell. Supervisor yee. Thank you mme. Chair and i just want to echo my colleagues that i have not seen so much passion as i have about this issue. And i want us thank lisa wayne for coming out she is always been so professional and certainly there are many elements of this program that we support and the issue of how we manage our trees in places like this are important and i certainly do not want to be the one that is going to support something where tree falls on somebody and someone gets hurt because we are negligent but for me there were some issues that were brought up today and, again, this is a tough issue and like so many issues that are like and support the issue with pesticides and whether using the same amount or less, i dont think this was adequately studied and i think that the attorney mentioned about the next issue to look at this more carefully in terms of whether or not we we use more and that bothers me a lot and because of that, i think i will be supporting the appeal. Thank you supervisor yee. Supervisor sheehy. Thank you mme. Chair and i also want to echo what my fellow supervisors have said. This is been such a passionate project and i cannot support this project i hope the dialogue as individual pieces of the plan are being implemented especially around the herbicide use that the community really looks at those impacts very carefully. I do have to say that i found the conversations with park and rec staff to be very compelling and i applaud them trying to approach this issue because i really had a lot of trepidation about this. I do want to keep in touch on this issue. I know that you are trying to do everything you can to mitigate and use the least amount of chemicals. I think one piece of that will be making sure that you do bring on adequate Natural Resource staff and not i think that it think that if you have bodies that can monitor these chemicals i think thats important to pursue. One part is very critical to me and im not sure what we do to go forward this but is off leash dog areas. 80 of these off leash dog areas could be impacted depending on how this how this Management Plan is implemented. I think for someone to suddenly be walking their dog at a place every day and every weekend to suddenly wake up one morning and its off leash and, you know, they cant let their dogs run their without some kind of process by where they are notified and an opportunity to have a dialogue with parks and rec about that would be very problematic for me. Again, i dont know that would require legislation but parks and rec would want to come up and maybe he lay the fears of some of the dog owners. I dont have a dog i have a cat but again, i completely understand their concerns and i am very, very empathetic. And that is not an issue for ceqa. Thank you supervisor sheehy. Supervisor farrell. Thank you mme. Chair and i do want to thank all the people whove come out here tonight. This is a very passionate issue and i do want to say as some of my colleagues have spoken as far as ceqa i dont see an issue here and one thing i want to mention is i grew up right next to the presidio and the presidio was chockfull of eucalyptus trees and given those trees useful life here in San Francisco first, i will admit, this was daunting. This was growth of trees in areas i was used to my entire life, literally, that i was running around as a kid and my wife and i went to plant some trees in the presidio next to the golf course and another 30 feet tall and i can tell my kids, we did that, we planted those in my kids love it. But again on a personal level. Again, much of my colleagues i echo on the eir itself and the appeal but for me this necessity of what were doing and planning for future and making sure that our parks are there and i want those perks to be there when my kids are my age and my grandkids also. And i want to echo the comments by saying we need to think of the future San Francisco in the future of our parks system and lastly we want to thank you for the all of the rec and parks staff and thank you for your hard work on this and again thank everyone for being here and thank you for your dialogue on this. Thank you supervisor farrell. Supervisor ronen. Thank you. I just want to go my colleagues and thank everyone for staying here so late this evening and thank you for your concern your care and your engagement. And i echo my colleagues that i worked in here with a lot of reservations tonight but along the questioning that supervisor sheehy was asking i do also want the answer to these questions but these were very unsatisfying answers and it wasnt a long line of questioning that you are answering. So moving forward, i am comforted by the fact that as you go about implementing this plan and engage in projects for all 32 natural areas that there will be supplemental environmental reviews for those 32 projects and if the public and the community feel that they are insufficient those appeals will come before the board of supervisors and we will be able to look project by projectwhether that tree removal and Pesticide Use will significantly impact the plan and our children in their schools and i just dont have that level of comfort with the eir. Im not willing to affirm the eir i think that everyone engaged in this project has put a lot of hard work and attention into this plan and i just think again everyone for coming in engaging in this process. Thank you supervisor ronen. Supervisor fewer. Thank you mme. Chair. I just uld like to say that last week i went to the fairways at sharp park and i went to the pond that you mentioned to me and then i read a lot and i spoke to a lot of people and, quite frankly, i one point i didnt even know what was true but after really thinking deeply about it, i think that i know what i believe the truths to be. Ive been married to an arborist for 20 years. And my husband is also an arborist and he has a degree in horticulture andwe have pruned many, many, many trees. And we also learned trees in our yard and he reminded me that the eucalyptus tree is a weak trait because it is a fastgrowing trait and we also have to remove eucalyptus trees also from properties that we have earned because of the possibility of them falling on buildings. Income i also know that it is hard to see a tree get chopped down and if i see a tree chopped with a cleaver i think my husband his heartbreaks a little. It is hard to see a tree cut and its hard to seea tree removed and i think that i want to protect trees but i can tell you that we have to preserve our forest and i have seen iv take over and i have seen trees fall and i know that we are full of eucalyptus trees and i also know that we have not managed our urban forest and it is time that we did. Because we are also responsible as and supervisor farrell said, people for years will be enjoying our parks and because this is a programmatic review we will have an additional opportunity to have another review. And, i think it comes down to sort of also who you believe in what you believe. I do believe that, you know, 18,000 trees being removed in 20 years is devastating but i also think it is not as devastating as to say 50,000 trees in one year and when i met with people they told me most of these trees are disease or most these trees are weak or most these trees are dangerous and i guess if it comes down to what you believe and i have to say that i believe that because ive had eucalyptus trees myself, and i also think that thesetrees that are in our urban forest take maintenance. And i have to say that i agree with supervisor peskin and his proposal but i do want to thank people for coming out educating me and i want to assure you that i thought long and hard about this and like i said, i married into a family of arborists and it is harbor us when we see trees cut down but then sometimes i think that in the Bigger Picture of our urban forest in San Francisco i think at some time, unfortunately we must. Thank you. Thank you supervisor fewer. Supervisor safai. Thank you mme. Supervisor and thank you colleagues. And thank everyone for coming out here today have to concur with supervisor peskin it is great to see the legislative process work to see people come to an agreement and resolve some of the issues on the tables i commend the rec aand park staff for the time you put into this. This is a 15 your processor more coming to a close and there is some irony when were talking about management and protection of endangered species that there would be the idea that we h

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