Creative Commons/Joe Hall

Updated April 4, 2011 at 4:36 p.m. with comments from Supervisor John Avalos

The new $7 fee to get into the botanical garden in Golden Gate Park has become an unwanted sign to some San Franciscans that public parks are turning into private business.

Now, the city’s independent budget analyst has concluded that the fee is not great business: it didn’t bring in enough money this year, it costs a lot to collect and projections for future revenue are “highly optimistic.” 

The report comes as San Francisco supervisors start the process of deciding whether to keep or junk the fee. Debate will begin at a Budget and Finance Committee meeting Wednesday.

Facing budget cuts, the Recreation and Parks Department adopted the fee to pay for gardeners who attend to the 55-acre botanical garden. Only out-of-towners are charged $7; city dwellers must show a San Francisco ID to get in for free.

But so far, tourists have not been lining up to pay — and the cost of collecting the fee has been high.

Phil Ginsburg, the head of the parks department, at first said that the fee would bring in $650,000 in its first year, 2010-2011. When The Bay Citizen requested the gate receipts and found that the botanical garden was only collecting about half as much as it anticipated, Ginsburg lowered the projection to $400,000. Now, following additional prodding from Harvey Rose, the budget analyst, Ginsburg further reduced to the projection to $356,000, the report says.

The budget analyst called the $542,000 projection for next year “highly optimistic.”

Rec and Park spokesman Elton Pon said the department is "confident" it will get the $542,000 with more marketing and a full year (the fee is running for 11 months in its first year).

To make up for the lower-than-expected revenue, the San Francisco Botanical Garden Society has agreed to eat $104,000 of the costs related to collecting the fee for the first year. Those include the salaries of the ticket takers and the cost of building the ticket booths at either end of the garden.

For this year, collecting the $356,000 will cost $210,000, meaning that it costs 59 cents to collect each $1.

Pon said that the costs of collecting the fee are no higher than at the Japanese Tea Garden, which charges admission to residents and nonresidents alike. 

Those in support of charging to see the trees, such as Supervisor Carmen Chu, who heads the Budget and Finance Committee, say that even if the admission fee is not bringing in the big bucks, it’s still better than nothing, considering the parks department's budget shortfalls. In a recent interview with The Bay Citizen, Chu suggested that the garden should experiment with lower prices to see if tourists would be more willing to pay them.

Supervisor John Avalos, who is proposing to pay for the gardeners out of funds from San Francisco’s new real estate transfer tax, said the report shows that the fee isn't a good deal.

"It seems clear that attendance is way down and the nonresident fee is not a cost-effective way of bringing in revenue," Avalos said. "If the San Francisco Giants spent 59 cents on the dollar for every ticket sold, they'd probably have to put Timmie, Mattie and Willie out on waiver." 

Avalos has also said that the fee discourages San Franciscans who don't have ID and people from neighboring towns from enjoying the garden.