The continuing saga of the 36 year old HANC Recycling Center & Native Plant Nursery got a new installment recently. HANC staff learned of discussions held by the Recreation and Parks Department (RPD) to close this valuable neighborhood resource.

Members of San Francisco’s urban agriculture community were called into Mclaren Lodge to give input on a plan RPD was developing. The plan was to replace HANC with something called a “Garden Resource Center”. A site specific drawing was produced. RPD staff seemed to dismiss the concern raised by a community member that their proposal was highly duplicative of both the Garden for the Environment located nearby at 7th and Lawton and the Native Plant Nursery itself.

When notified of the discussions, I was struck by the irony of San Francisco’s Green Mayor, who is running for Lieutenant Governor on a platform of green jobs and promoting the green economy, attempting to shut down a recycling center that employs ten people in his own neighborhood. How is that for “thinking globally and acting locally”?

I wrote a press release describing this irony. The Chronicle ran a short piece in the “City Insider” the next day with a quote from the Mayor’s office confirming the story. HANC’s old friend C.W. Nevius got his licks in the following day.

Hundreds of postcards have been sent to the Mayor and the support of other elected officials is being sought. The Sierra Club, San Francisco Tomorrow and the Senior Action network have all endorsed HANC. A video petition is being circulated that shows off HANC’s diverse customer base, totally debunking Nevius’s lie that the Center is an “ATM for the homeless”. So powerful is the video that Nevius referred to it in his column (implying that it was staged). Come by the center, spend some time, see for yourself the amazing variety of people who use it and ask them why.

The press attention has leveraged negotiations. After nine months of asking, Phil Ginsberg finally met with HANC at Ross Mirkarimi’s office a couple of weeks ago. Also in attendance was a Mayor’s representative and staff from the Department of the Environment. The RPD’s position was that they were looking for the “highest and best use” of the site. They also contended that the recycling center materially contributed to the camping problem in the park.

Ignoring that the California Bottle Bill requires that recycling centers be located conveniently and that 5% of the City’s recycling happens at recycling centers and that the City is notoriously underserved by them, RPD and the Mayor’s staff person actually proposed what amounts to a cordon sanitare, with no recycling centers whatsoever surrounding the park. This scheme would have unintended consequences.

Black-market recycling centers already exist in the City, mostly at night and mostly in the underserved downtown area. They are mobile, unregulated operations that pay 50 cents on the dollar to those who don’t want to wait in line at a recycling center, wait for one to open or who may not have one nearby. This sort of activity would surely migrate into the area if you eliminated the State Certified recycling centers. The garbage company, Recology, reportedly has video of one of these black-market recycling centers in operation.

The charge that the HANC Recycling Center & Native Plant Nursery actually promotes camping in the park doesn’t bare the scrutiny of their own statistics. At the above-mentioned meeting RPD and the Mayor’s representative maintained that the park had about 200 campers depending on the season. The September 30th Examiner, however, reports that the Mayor’s office now puts the number of campers at 50 down from 300, owing to the success of Project Homeless Connect.

RPD and the Mayor want to close a self-sufficient, community-based service that receives no taxpayer funding and provides 10 green jobs that pay a living wage including health care and serves thousands of San Franciscans. They want to close a resource that has been diversifying into habitat restoration and urban agriculture long before it became popular.

All of this to seek to eliminate 50 campers in Golden Gate Park who have been in the park longer than the recycling center and most probably will still be there if Newsom succeeds in evicting the center.