September 2019 In the Works Community Newsletter

CALENDAR

• 10/4-6 - Hardly Strictly Bluegrass - This free family-friendly event features live music on multiple stages
• 10/6 - Castro Street Fair - This free family-friendly event features live music, dance and carnival games. 11 a.m. - 6 p.m. around Castro and 18th streets
• 10/6 - 1st Sundays Block Party - This family-friendly event features games, an open-air craft market, street soccer pick-up games and more. 11 a.m. - 3 p.m. - Fulton and Larkin streets
• 10/6-14 - Fleet Week - Check out the air show, parade of ships and other community events centered along San Francisco's central and northern waterfront
• 10/19 - Community Clean Team - San Francisco Public Works' longest-running and largest volunteer program keeps San Francisco beautiful through landscaping and gardening projects, graffiti removal and litter cleanup in our neighborhoods. 9 a.m. - 12 p.m. - Lafayette Elementary School (4545 Anza St).
• 10/20 - Sunday Streets - Sunday Streets closes out a season of open streets with a return to the Excelsior’s main corridor. Enjoy a car-free Mission Street, filled with exhibits, live music activities and open space. 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. - Mission Street from Silver to Geneva

THANK YOU

• Hi there. I am a lifeguard with the National Park Service at Ocean Beach. I just wanted to extend my praise to the new Pit Stop public restroom the City has installed in the parking lot at Ocean Beach, along with the hardworking people who keep it running. It has been working phenomenally for beach-goers and the guys that work there are keeping it all so tight and clean. I hope you have been getting more positive reinforcement for this project. Thank you for taking care of the public like this. Take care, Josh S. 

• Dear Bureau of Urban Forestry - Your team did a beautiful job trimming the tree at 271 Missouri St. I've seen their great work on other blocks and I'm very grateful ours made it onto their schedule. Thank you very much. Sincerely, Sharon T.

PUBLIC WORKS TV

• Episode 0060 - Battle for the Bay 2019
  Battle for the Bay, a competition involving the mayors of three Bay Area cities - San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose -  to protect and clean the waterfront through increased volunteerism, concluded with record numbers of volunteers, trash picked up and beautification projects completed.

• Episode 0059 - American Public Works Association Conference 2019
  A San Francisco Public Works team headed to the annual American Public Works Association conference in Seattle to share information about some of our organization’s most innovative initiatives. Check it out.

ARTICLES

• Nifty Makeover for Inner Sunset Streetscape - Earlier this month, we celebrated the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Inner Sunset Streetscape Improvements and Muni Forward Project, a partnership among San Francisco Public Works, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency and San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. The Sept. 18 ceremony, led by Mayor London Breed, celebrated the City’s dedication to make the Inner Sunset safer and more transit-friendly. The neighborhood serves as a gateway to Golden Gate Park with many cafes, restaurants and shops that also serve the UCSF Parnassus campus community. The project is part of the SFMTA’s Muni Forward Project and San Francisco Public Works’ streetscape program. Muni Forward is a citywide effort to improve transit service across San Francisco. The streetscape program is an effort to reimagine street design to improve safety for people who walk and bike, while beautifying neighborhood commercial and mixed-use corridors through landscaping, street furniture and gateway elements, such as signs and murals. The street safety improvements advance the City’s Vision Zero initiative, which calls for eliminating traffic-related fatalities by 2024. The Inner Sunset project runs along Irving Street between Arguello Boulevard and 19th Avenue, and nearby stretches of Ninth and 10th avenues. The improvements include 95 new curb ramps to increase accessibility, four transit bulb-outs to make transit boarding safer and more efficient, two pedestrian bulb-outs to shorten crossing distances, traffic signal upgrades that give priority to transit over cars, and increased distance between N-Judah stops to enhance efficiency. Additionally, crews repaved the entire stretch with more than 5,000 tons of new asphalt to create a smoother roadway for all users. Additional upgrades include new street trees, drought-tolerant plantings, and added sidewalk seating to serve residents and visitors. The project also includes fiber optic conduit installation, which will help create a network of high-speed internet across the City; and the replacement of aging sewer and water utility lines with larger, modern pipelines to provide more reliable service and minimize disruptions. Another upside: The project strengthens the City’s Emergency Firefighting Water System by upsizing 4,000 linear feet of pipeline to increase the capacity for high-pressure water needed during major fires.  The City also installed 12 high-pressure fire hydrants that are connected to high-capacity cisterns, tanks and reservoirs throughout the commercial corridor. Public Works provided construction management, design and engineering services for the $21.3 million project. The project was partially funded by the $248 million Road Repair and Street Safety Bond, which was approved by San Francisco voters in 2011. Mitchell Engineering was the general contractor. This has been a great collaboration among City organizations, elected leaders and community partners to deliver key safety improvements and beautification elements that will benefit everyone who visits the Inner Sunset neighborhood. 

• Fire Station No. 8: A Welcome Renewal – An eye-catching makeover is taking place right now at Fire Station No. 8 located in the South of Market. And the skilled painters from Public Works are hard at work on the meticulous refresh. Three seasoned painters from our Bureau of Building Repair were assigned to the job at 36 Bluxome St. in mid-August after completion of a renovation of the Depression-era station’s courtyard. The firefighters’ adjacent neighbor, the tech firm Pinterest, helped fund the transformation of the courtyard, which is nestled next to its offices. The outdoor space now boasts a newly added koi pond, barbecue, canopy, lighting and picnic table. Next up for a redo: a new exterior paint job to not only give the tired-looking station a polished new look, but also to address a long-standing problem of water intrusion. The side and back walls got a sharp-looking gray-and-black paint job, while the front of the station will match the historic color scheme – Seattle red, with black trim on the fluted columns and windows, with Sheffield gold accents. The updated appearance will really pop out. In addition, the historic carriage lights that adorn the front of the station are being refurbished. The work is set to wrap up in October. The Station 8 upgrades, which include other mechanical and structural improvements, are funded by the City’s voter-approved Earthquake Safety and Emergency Response Bond program that provides funding to improve and expand San Francisco’s first-responder facilities.  Learn more about the ESER Bond program at www.sfearthquakesafety.org.

• Civic Pride - In just the first three months of 2019 alone, more than 57,000 pounds of trash were picked up from San Francisco’s freeway on-ramps and off-ramps. This staggering achievement to fight the blight is the result of Public Works’ nascent collaboration with Civic, a local nonprofit focused on workforce development, and Caltrans, which oversees the maintenance of all freeways in the state. Every week, Civic’s team of workers rotates through a cleaning schedule that includes 22 freeway on and off ramps throughout seven neighborhoods in the City, including the Mission and South of Market. Each day, upwards of 100 garbage bags are filled with debris ranging from broken car parts and random shoes to fast-food wrappers and the ubiquitous cigarette butts. They also have picked up hundreds of discarded needles. Navigating these busy ramps can be dangerous work for the cleaning crews, so Caltrans has trained Civic’s team on safe work practices around traffic and the proper handling of hazardous waste. Caltrans also has provided cleaning supplies and traffic control. Public Works’ collaboration with Civic has stretched the program’s impact far beyond neighborhood beautification by layering it with workforce development and civic engagement. The nonprofit’s core mission is to help those finishing long prison sentences in a community setting instead of behind bars to address and overcome the barriers to employment that they face upon returning to society. A key component: Give people a job that not only starts them on a path toward financial stability but also contributes to the public good.  Helping keep San Francisco clean helps us fulfill that mission. “It feels really good to do this kind of work that helps the community,” said Fred Guzman, who has been with the crew since the program began in January. “This program really has been making a difference.” The freeway on-ramp and off-ramp program, managed by Public Works, is a beautiful example of how the nonprofit sector along with government agencies can come together to positively impact both San Francisco’s built environment and its human community. Public Works looks forward to continuing this partnership, just as much as we look forward to continuing to keep the freeway ramps safe and clean.

• Partnering Success – Spirits ran high as the songs “We Are the Champions,” “Don’t Stop Believing” and “Chariots of Fire” filled the room. On Sept. 26, three San Francisco Public Works project teams truly felt like champions as their victory theme songs played at the second annual Citywide San Francisco Collaborative Partnering ceremony at the Marines’ Memorial Club downtown.  The event, which commemorated 14 projects from six City departments, celebrated the successes of infrastructure and building teams that used facilitated collaborative partnering as a foundation to map out mutual goals, better communicate and resolve issues with the contractors who deliver our construction projects.  The Polk Streetscape Project and San Francisco Fire Station No. 5 in the Western Addition were awarded silver trophies; and the Masonic Avenue Streetscape Improvement Project took home a bronze at a ceremony that featured more than 220 guests and a lineup of speakers. They included City Administrator Naomi Kelly, Rick Mayfield of the International Partnering Institute, and event emcees Mohammed Nuru, director of San Francisco Public Works, and Scott Anderson, president of Pankow Builders. Collectively, the 14 award-winning project teams estimated they saved the City more than $56 million through partnering’s issue resolution and outside-the-box thinking, which helped reduce costs and time delays.   “Partnering is about safety, teamwork and delivering projects that are claim-free and on time and on budget,” said Nuru, who also is the co-chair of the San Francisco Collaborative Partnering Steering Committee, comprised of City department heads and leaders from construction, architecture and engineering firms. For Public Works, the department’s winning projects also represent extensive community outreach and involvement, a dedication to designing beautiful and safer streetscapes for all users, and a commitment to constructing seismically sound buildings that can withstand natural disasters and bolster the work of our first responders. For more information on the City of San Francisco’s Collaborative Partnering program, go to www.sfpartnering.com.

• Battle for the Bay: San Francisco Roared! - More than 3,000 volunteers came out strong to represent #TeamSF in Battle for the Bay, a competition involving the mayors of three Bay Area cities to protect and clean the waterfront through increased volunteerism. The Sept. 21 event concluded with record numbers of volunteers, trash picked up and beautification projects completed. San Francisco hosted worksites from Yosemite Slough in the City’s southeast to Ocean Beach on San Francisco’s western edge. San Francisco’s volunteers picked up more than 70,000 pounds of trash from 20 locations spanning 46 miles of coastline from Ocean Beach to Hunters Point. They also worked on habitat restoration, removed graffiti, planted trees and painted a delightful marine-themed mural that spans more than 1,000 feet near Candlestick Point. In addition, in the weeks leading up the big event, Public Works partnered with Caltrans to remove several abandoned boats from the Bay, and the two agencies teamed up with Recology to haul away many more tons of trash and debris along highways and coastal areas. Battle for the Bay began as a friendly contest between San Francisco Mayor London Breed and Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf who wanted to see which city could bring out the most volunteers and pick up the most trash on the annual Coastal Cleanup Day. San José Mayor Sam Liccardo later entered his city into the competition. Their collective goal: increase volunteer turnout for Coastal Cleanup Day, raise awareness about the problem of marine debris and to promote programs to prevent littering and illegal dumping. They delivered on all three fronts. The competition resulted in:
  Number of volunteers
  San Francisco: 3,011
  Oakland: 2,170
  San José: 1,311
  
  Amount of trash picked up
  San Francisco: 70,163 pounds
  Oakland: 109,460 pounds
  San José: 36,414 pounds
  
  Number of Miles of Coastline Cleaned (estimated)
  San Francisco: 46 miles
  Oakland: 11 miles
  San José: 23.95 miles
  
  The most unusual object found - A statue of the Hindu god, Vishnu, found along the banks of Middle Harbor Shoreline Park in Oakland.
  
  “The Battle for the Bay was a huge success with thousands of volunteers throughout the Bay Area cleaning up our neighborhoods and coastal areas,” said Mayor Breed. “I am thrilled that San Francisco turned out the most volunteers. But we know this wasn’t just about one day. All year round, we are engaging our residents, linking people up with opportunities to help keep our City clean, and investing in a clean and green City. I thank Mayor Schaaf, Mayor Liccardo and all of our partners – and a special thank you to all of the volunteers!”The tri-city event drew major support from sponsors, including Recology, Alaska Airlines, Waste Management of Alameda County, Argent Materials, California Waste Solutions, Andes Construction, DeSilva Gates Construction donating on behalf of Cypress Mandela, Ray’s Electric, Clear Channel, Webcor, the Emerald Fund, the Warriors, and Black and Veatch. Event partners included the California Coastal Commission, Oakland Parks and Recreation Foundation, San Francisco Public Works, Oakland Public Works, San José Public Works, San Francisco Recreation and Park Department, Port of San Francisco, Caltrans, Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, the National Park Service, the Presidio Trust, Santa Clara Valley Water, Creek Connections Action Group and California State Parks. The challenge, dubbed Battle for the Bay, was in honor of the 30th anniversary of the 1989 “Battle of the Bay” Major League Baseball World Series between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland A’s. It also marked the 20th anniversary of a similar cleaning and greening competition between then-San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown and then-Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown. As for the highly touted wager among mayors, an unprecedented three-way win was declared. To promote volunteering, community service, and sportsmanship, the mayors all agreed to perform a day of service in visiting cities while wearing the hometown’s sports gear. Date and locations to be determined.

• What floats our boat? Cleaning up the bay! - An abandoned boat, bobbing for more than a year just off Highway 101 south of Candlestick Point, caught our attention as we scoured the shoreline for Coastal Cleanup Day work projects. Yes, we pick up tons of everyday litter – used coffee cups, empty beer bottles, cigarette butts, old tires and tattered clothing. But a boat? Sure. Why not? Let’s do it. Our Operations crews actually got to work pulling the boat from water on Sept. 19, two days before the annual Coastal Cleanup Day volunteer event even took place. This was a big job that required professional crews and truck drivers. They used a crane, chains and a lot of ingenuity to pull the boat from the water, hoist it onto a flatbed before it completely fell apart and transport it safely to the nearby dump. The whole operation took a few hours and the help of Caltrans and the California Highway Patrol since much of the work was happening adjacent to the freeway. The boat wasn’t that big, maybe just 25 feet or so long with a cabin and back deck, but it was heavy - very heavy - filled with Bay mud. A large hole on the side offered a perfect entry for nature. The total weight once the boat made it onto the scale at the dump – and after much of the sludge ran out - was 9,500 pounds. That’s just shy of 5 tons. A few days earlier, Public Works crews hauled another abandoned boat out of the Bay, this one at Yosemite Slough. This operation was a little easier, with that boat weighing just 700 pounds. And while neither boat could be counted toward the total tonnage during the Battle for the Bay competition on Coastal Cleanup Day when San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose were vying to see which city could remove the most trash from the waterways and nearby neighborhoods, we still got a lot of satisfaction knowing that our revered Bay ended up a little more pristine.