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The city of San Francisco has a human feces crisis. It's so bad that someone actually created a poop location map that gets updated when new loaves are left. During Mayor London Breed's campaign, she promised to clean up the city and hold department heads accountable.
She likes to take walks around the nastiest parts of town, sometimes with reporters, without giving the police or Public Works a heads-up to see if anything is getting done.
Breed told the San Francisco Chronicle:
“I don’t want the areas to be clean if it’s not clean on a regular basis. I want to see what everybody else is seeing."
When she sees a problem, like stray needles or a heap of dung, she'll text the department head responsible and tell them to get their act together.
The city's Public Works budget for street cleaning is $72.5 million-a-year. A $12 million chunk of that goes to cleaning up after homeless encampment messes.
Here's a breakdown of some of the annual costs:
- $2.8 million to wash down camps and get rid of biohazards
- $2.3 million for street steam cleaning
- $3.1 million for portable toilets
- $830,977 for the Poop Patrol to actively hunt down and remove human waste
If you're interested, members of the Poop Patrol make $71,760 a year. That goes up to $184,678 with benefits.
$184,678?! To clean up poop?!?!
The San Francisco Department of Public Health also has $700,000 put aside for a 10-member team to go out and pick up needles. They make $19-an-hour, and they even get their own minivan!
Doesn't sound all that bad, right? It's just a little bit of human poo...