Tourists Must Now Pay To Enter S.F. Botanical Garden. Are Locals to Follow?

By Joe Eskenazi Wed., May 26 2010 at 12:01 AM

Categories: Government

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Mila Zinkova

...But you can still look at the pictures for free

The city of San Francisco, it seems, has stumbled upon a remarkable new way to generate cash. It will make people pay money for something they didn't really want in the first place.

By a lopsided 8-3 vote, the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday approved a plan in which out-of-towners will soon be forced to cough up $7 before entering the city's Botanical Garden.

Card-carrying city residents, meanwhile, can still get in free of charge. Ardent -- and now disappointed -- foes of this fee, however, point a finger at the Japanese Tea Garden. There, too, fees were first charged only to tourists. That lasted a year or so before fees were imposed upon everyone else. And now, while you may find someone with a 415 area code cell in his or her pocket there every so often, it's one of the city's tour bus must-sees; a great place to meet folks wearing shorts and t-shirts "because it's California" and shivering in the cold.

"San Francisco isn't for San Franciscans anymore," said artist and AIDS Memoral Grove founder Nancy McNally, a member of Keep the Arboretum Free. Strybing Arboretum "was one of the places grandmothers could take their grandchildren and know they wouldn't be knocked over by dogs or step in shit; it was a safe place."

Strybing is very much that. It's a great spot. But it's not $7 worth of great. And that's what we were alluding to at the start of this article.

Right now, folks are content to relax among beautiful, exotic flowers. But garden-goers will supposedly expect bigger things when money is demanded. Botanical garden honchos propose to provide amenities people didn't get when there was no entry fee. But, then, these may not be things people even want. They just wanted a peaceful garden (free of dog shit).

A big, expensive extravaganza is something the Recreation and Park Department wants, however. Rec and Park has often expressed a desire to make Strybing into something "world class." And that doesn't come cheap. Letter-writers have been directed to wheedle Sen. Dianne Feinstein for $5 million toward a $13.1 million Botanical Garden project in which the marigolds are actually made of pure gold. Just kidding there. But not about the letter:

Garden letter to DiFi.doc

Whether the numbers bandied about by the city justifying this fee are the sort of thing you ostensibly won't step in at the garden remains to be seen. At one point, it was claimed the city would benefit to the tune of around $700,000. Now, Rec and Park is apparently predicting a quarter of a million dollars will be earned. And yet, foes of the fee claim that the city didn't really cut its projected visitor numbers, even as it raised its hypothetical fees. How many flesh-and-blood tourists plan on beating a path to the garden's door to shell out seven bucks will determine if this is, indeed, the San Francisco specialty: A money-saving move that loses money.

Finally, while garden attendance numbers could be a surprise, the outcome of this vote shouldn't have been. SEIU members, promoting the fee as a job-saving measure, showed up in force -- which may explain why supes like John Avalos, David Campos, and Chris Daly voted for the fee but Bevan Dufty did not (Ross Mirkarimi and Eric Mar were the other "no" votes).

Meanwhile, San Francisco Botanical Gardens shelled out $10,000 a month to lobbyist Sam Lauter to make its case to the supes. That expenditure surely bore fruit.

Follow us on Twitter at @TheSnitchSF and @SFWeekly

Photos | Mila Zinkova, Berkbotanist

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