Hello Glen Park neighbors! Welcome to the first in a series of monthly updates on the work my office is doing, and how you can get involved to make a difference on the issues you’re passionate about.
It’s been a busy month in the D8 office – the Board unanimously passed legislation I authored protecting housing services for longtime tenants and legislation allowing the City to track sexual orientation and gender identity data for City employees and applicants — along with a resolution urging social media companies to mitigate the harm caused by their products.
On October 13th I joined Mayor Breed at Manzoni on Diamond Street to celebrate the $50,000 grant given to the Glen Park Merchants Association as part of the Avenue Greenlight initiative. Avenue Greenlight provides merchants with funds to make improvements in neighborhood commercial corridors like Downtown Glen Park. These funds will be used to install new lighting and signage to make Glen Park safer and more welcoming to residents and visitors.
I continue to hear concerns from neighbors and small business owners in Glen Park about increasing property crime and public safety issues. My office has been investigating the use of electronic monitoring in San Francisco for several months and found some concerning statistics – one out of every three people on pretrial electronic monitoring in the City removes their ankle monitor or commits other crimes, often multiple times. The Mayor and I are working together to gather comprehensive data on the successes and failures of electronic monitoring and identify and implement reforms to strengthen this important public safety tool.
On a topic of particular frustration (disruption caused by roadwork), I have also called for a hearing on the processes by which the City notifies residents of infrastructure projects that will impede access to streets and sidewalks. This comes after my office heard from numerous residents of Castro Street who were completely cut off from their driveways for ten days at a time with no notice for a Public Utilities Commission sewer replacement project. It’s clear that better policies and procedures are necessary to ensure this doesn’t happen again, and I am committed to working with the responsible departments to implement new best practices.
If you have any questions for my office, or would like to learn how to get involved in organizing around any of these issues, send us an email at Mandelmanstaff@sfgov.org
Rafael Mandelman represents District 8, which includes Glen Park, on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.