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San Francisco Privatizing Park Clubhouses
Laurel Hill Playground in San Francisco
The City of San Francisco is moving ahead with plans to lease at least 17 park and playground clubhouses to private concerns, according to a report in today's Wall Street Journal.
According the the Journal, three have already been leased.
These clubhouses, which have traditionally housed city-sponsored after-school programs and been available to the general public for events such as birthday parties, will now be given over to mostly nonprofit groups for their exclusive use, a move the Recreation and Park Department says is neccessary to close a $12.4 million budget gap.
Here's what we can look forward to seeing more of. From my perspective, the most important sentence in the WSJ article:
"In July, the city evicted a free parenting class by City College of San Francisco that had been held for 38 years in the Laurel Hill Playground clubhouse so it could be leased for $1,427 a month to Language in Action, a Spanish and Mandarin language immersion nonprofit preschool."
Aaron Glantz covers housing, real estate, development, and veterans issues for The Bay Citizen. Before joining TBC, Glantz spent seven years covering the war in Iraq and the treatment veterans receive when they come home. ...
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Nicole K.
Under Phil Ginsburg, General Manager of Rec & Parks, who Newsom appointed and who is a Newsom wanna-be, our parks have been traded for political favors to NOT EVEN the highest bidder. The scandal here is that these privatization deals made by Ginsburg don't even bring in more money, although he continually says Rec & Parks is broke. The new lease for the Stow Lake Boat House, which has yet to be approved by the Board of Sup. Budget & Finance Com., has 1 - 2 million dollars of hidden costs to the taxpayers in it! Yet Ginsburg drones on about all the great income producing deals he is making. Ginsburg is a slick lawyer with no recreation experience who was appointed to head our parks so Newsom's cronies/lobbyists/campaign donors could get more power and control over our parks. Disgusting that these changes do not produce revenue, are costing the taxpayers dearly and many of the changes will take services away from low income and elderly users. Shame on you Ginsburg.