San Francisco spent nearly $60 per person, or $1 million per square mile, on its street cleaning efforts in the past year, not including overhead costs.
That’s significantly more than its peer cities, such as Los Angeles and San Jose, a city audit released Wednesday found.
In fiscal year 2024-25, the city budgeted nearly $47.8 million for street cleaning, or $1 million per square mile. By comparison, Los Angeles budgeted $74.7 million. That’s $19.54 per capita, or $159,205 per square mile.
Despite the increased investment in street cleaning, the city has seen a slight increase in feces, dumping and graffiti, according to a separate report released by the controller’s office last week.
That report notes “34 percent of evaluated routes have at least one instance of feces.”
And, though San Francisco has increased its spending on street cleaning by 63 percent in the past six fiscal years, the Department of Public Works doesn’t spend all the money in its budget, leaving millions of dollars on the table, the audit shows.
For the money Public Works does spend, the department fails to track or report spending “in a meaningful way,” states the report, prepared by the Budget and Legislative Analyst.
“The Department’s current budgeting practices do not allow for nimble responses to common and reasonable requests for information related to street-cleaning services, which is essential to ensuring transparency and accountability,” the report continues.
Public works has underspent on average by 11 percent each year, according to the report.
In fiscal year 2023-2024, $15.2 million was left unspent. More than $11 million was used for purposes other than street cleaning, the report says.
Those include funds earmarked for enforcement against illegal street vending (nearly $4 million), support for the Asia Pacific Economic Conference in 2024 (a little under $1 million), and emergency winter storm response ($1.6 million).
Public works strongly disputed the findings. In a response included in the audit, Carla Short, the director of the Department of Public Works, called the budget finding “egregious” and “reckless.”
Of the $15.2 million unspent, Short wrote, $4.1 million is money that has already been committed to future contracts, but not yet spent. These funds are reserved and not actually “available balance” to spend.
In addition, due to the city’s budget crisis, all departments were directed by former Mayor London Breed and Mayor Daniel Lurie to hold back on spending mid-year, she wrote. Other funds were placed on reserve, held to offset general fund shortfall, or applied to other emergencies.
“We cannot spend money that we are not allowed to, nor are we permitted to unilaterally reappropriate or divert funds,” Short wrote.
In what it called a “rare step,” the Budget and Legislative Analyst disputed the letter and stood by its findings that Public Works underspent its street-cleaning funds. The Budget and Legislative Analyst also blamed Public Works for delays and lack of cooperation in responding to the audit.
The audit also found:
- Limited performance monitoring and reporting, with increasingly vague goals and milestones since 2015.
- DPW could improve its efficiency and effectiveness of its operations by updating its operational plans at least annually and conducting more evaluations of outcomes.
- The city’s mechanical street sweeping is not evaluated regularly to determine best route scheduling, frequency and labor needs. Current monitoring is not sufficient to identify problems with its operations.
Many other comparable cities surveyed by the audit report on street and sidewalk cleaning performance more often than San Francisco does. Nearly half of respondents report weekly, while San Francisco reports every other month.
The audit also found that the city’s “unreliable” bike-lane sweeping is dangerous for cyclists, due to hazardous debris left in bike lanes. Bike-lane sweeping requires a specialized, compact sweeper, but these sweepers have proven costly and unreliable.
Additionally, illegally parked cars block sweepers from reaching curbs, leading to “hundreds of miles of unswept street” each year.
The city’s approach to illegal dumping is also hamstrung by ineffective tracking, inconsistent enforcement and lack of written internal procedures, the report states.
Public works relies on 311 data to quantify the scale of illegal dumping, but the system does not explicitly track these incidents, making it difficult to accurately assess location and frequency.
In addition, illegal dumping enforcement is weak, the report says. Citations have been declining since 2020, and the department has not actively pursued unpaid citations for the past 10 years. Some $3 million fines have gone uncollected due to lack of a formal collection process.
The city has two surveillance pilot programs, announced back in 2019 and in 2023 to support enforcement, but these have registered “minimal progress.” The 2023 program to deploy 10 license-plate reader cameras to hotspots has not assigned or trained staff to review the footage, as of mid-2025.
Lastly, the city’s Pit Stop program, which started in 2014 and aims to provide clean public bathrooms, has “dramatically” reduced in size since 2020. No city department has determined the number of Pit Stop facilities that should be maintained, the report says.
“S.F. spends twice as much per person”
This could be applied to just about every governmental and non-profit function in this town.
It’s one of the many in a cascade of issues stemming from the city not getting people off the streets and enforcing laws around public drug sales and use. Living around 16th and Mission you see roving groups of drug users somehow manage to leave a mountain of trash every single place they stop, and pull out the contents of every single trash can they walk by. It’s a sisyphean battle around here that we’re losing because we’re not enforcing upstream laws that should be preventing this. Throwing good money after bad babysitting and cleaning up after a small number of people destroying the quality of life in SF.
If the Mission didn’t have street cleaning I can’t imagine what a dump it would look like. Given we have no trash cans, the street is the trash can for everyone. We could Fielder would try to get us trash cans like Sauter has done but her focus is in other places.
You seriously believe the average hoodlum slumming it on the sidewalk would actually get up and use a trash can?
I don’t think the average hoodlum slumming it on the sidewalk is why Folsom/Harrison have chip bags or Modelo cans loitered. The hoodlums might on the other hand be why we have feces everywhere.
non profits are given monies, those ambassadors have brooms, power washers and pickup trucks. From 2018, there must have been a 10 to 15 percent raise. And this city is dirty.
LA is worse – and it’s spread out. Calculating benefit by per capita or total miles of streets is kind of ridiculous if you think about it as they aren’t comparing efficacy. The metrics of ‘evaluated routes’ is opaque – evaluate all routes if you’re going to give a meaningful percentage, otherwise it is defacto cherry picking. I can understand why the DPW disputed this particular presentation of the findings when the budget comparisons aren’t apples:apples either. It’s useful to make comparisons but drawing conclusions from disparate criteria is not 1:1 simple.
Public works and 311 has been broken for many years now, even with new leadersh post Naru. Didn’t the voters approve another oversight committee? Time to replace Short, she took her shot and fell short.
Do you have any actual data to back up your (usual bombthrowing) statements purporting to be facts?
I agree that over 10 years for example the spending must have been ~
$0+$0+$0+$0+$0+$0+$0+$0+$0+$60 / 10 = $6
So where is the rest? The $540 in average per person over 9 years?
Thesis: The average person in San Francisco cares less about cleanliness than the average person everywhere else. People here have less respect for public and private property than the vast majority of Americans
Guessing polls would bear this out….
Americans.
I think this has a lot to do with the extreme wealth inequality in our city. The people who litter don’t feel they owe anything to “the rich”.
The people who litter most are suffering from severe mental illness and drug addictions that make any kind of class warfare an unlikely motivation really. In my neighborhood it’s punk teenagers in pajama bottoms from the local high school who don’t give a damn and weren’t raised to do the right thing when nobody is looking, casually discarding candy wrappers while they vape. (I wish I were kidding.)
It’s important that people delay half the payment to the hauler that they hire until after he brings them the receipt from the dump.
If the hauler is paid the full amount upfront, this^^^ is what happens:
the hauler will dump the debris on public streets in order to avoid paying the dump fees.
Bad comparison. LA has many streets with no or few pedestrians to make them dirty. S.F. has lots of people on every street across the city.
It would be nice to see DPW street cleaning expenditures broken down to a higher degree of granularity, supe district, neighborhood, etc.
As well as the additional Community Benefit District assessment (in the form of additional city property taxes – not optional) to pay for the cleaning I thought my taxes paid for…and we still get what we get (or not).
Street cleaning in S.F. is not meant to keep the streets clean. It’s a means to extract ticket revenue from people. During Ed Lee’s stint as mayor, street cleaning in certain neighborhoods was reduced in frequency as a means to save money. It was determined that the areas were clean enough that less frequent cleaning was needed. However, when ticket revenue declined to a point where it outpaced the cost savings, the previous cleaning schedule was reinstated and the revenues went back to “normal”.
Any data to back the claim that revenues declined and that’s why they went back to “normal” regime?
My block is still swept only twice a month rather than weekly, so I’m not sure what you’re saying is accurate. If the city wanted to make more money from tickets, they would have reverted my street and many others back to weekly sweeping.
A good part of the reason for street cleaning is not to have clean streets at all. It is to collect revenues from parked cars that forget to be moved on street cleaning days.
On my block I only ever see the little DPT carts during street cleaning hours when there are easy pickings for dishing out tickets. It is probably the easiest money that DPT can make.
It also ensures that cars get moved once or twice a week, even if there is no alternative parking during cleaning hours, and so people park on the sidewalk until the cleaning truck goes thru.
“A good part of the reason for street cleaning is not to have clean streets at all. It is to collect revenues from parked cars that forget to be moved on street cleaning days.”
Nope, it’s actually called street sweeping because they actually sweep the streets.
Pete,
I got to talking with a really efficient driver for one of those sweepers and they’ve seen me and my dog around cleaning every morning for last few years and are friendly and helpful xcept for the ones who are lazy bums and you get that everywhere.
I stopped him to ask about why the drivers sometimes leave more trash than they pick up and he showed me photos of such a situation and said as I’ve heard other operators say that the problem is that some of the drivers aren’t bothering to look behind themselves and (surprise to me) that they can back up and do a block or whatever over.
They just have poor work ethics.
Don’t know about you but I’ve never seen one of those things go in reverse and he also got out and operated the controls to show me how they raised and lowered the brushes and added water if it was warranted.
Like pretty much everything, the secret is caring and making someone care if they have no pride or a poor work ethic.
The old Scavenger trash guys used to march in parades and do formations and stuff with their big aluminum barrels to great applause.
Those guys are some serious and well coordinated athletes and, like Cable Car bell ringers, they deserve contests and awards.
Don’t get me started on the guys who do what I do daily which is walk a bunch of blocks and pick up Everything.
I’ve rigged up a unit equipped to address any problem I meet and it’s just a salvaged laundry hamper on cheap and basic luggage dolly and cut-off plastic juice containers inside on bottom to hold a spray bottle and 2 jars of kitty litter and spare bags and it works great.
City bosses saw it and tried to copy it for their paid street people and gave them a little office trash can with full sized dustpans with handles and brooms too.
No steel brushes for clearing dried feces or deodorizer or pruning tool and the like and I have one who follows me and pretends he did my work which is annoying and then scrapes Lost Cat and music posters off poles and I think those things add flavor and authenticity.
go Niners !!
h.
Mohamad Nuru is gone but the corruption stays because, well, it’s San Francisco. LA is a big city and as such it has its own corruption and mismanagement problems but the scale of corruption in this ten million people metropolis is child play compared to SF.
I see and appreciate the folks that are cleaning the sidewalks, but in SOMA the sidewalks are still constantly filthy. Constantly very filthy. If funds are limited stop or reduce cleaning to areas like Pacific Heights and Sea Cliff. There’s the matter of fairness, and the downtown neighborhoods are shafted.
This is in my wheelhouse,
I’m a registered Volunteer trash picker who put together my own rig from trash I found along my route including a medium sized plastic laundry basket mounted on a wobbly little luggage dolly with bungee cords and 3 compartments inside on bottom made from half gallon Safeway juice containers with tops cut off and containing 2 jars of kitty litter and a spray bottle of Liquid sunshine and sheers and deodorizer>
Every day but vacation and surgery my dog, Skippy and I have cleaned up down to the cigarette butt, every square inch from all 4 corners of intersection of 14th street and Guerrero on east to 14th street and Mission west corners plus both sides of Julian behind Armory and Valencia’s west side from 14th Street to Brosnan where I used to run into the Mayor taking his kids to school and I carry a chopped off broom and kitty litter and industrial spray from DPW and scrapers and cut carboard cards for dustpan and broom for crap and long handled steel brush for scraping and jar of heavy deodorant from half gallon container I found.
It took around 2 hours from 8-10am when we started this route just over 2 years ago and this morning it took 4 1/2 hours to get it perfect.
I keep threatening to limit our time to 3 hours cause my dog and I have different things to do but haven’t been able to quit.
The City ?
Volunteer proposal before Mayor since before his election …
Make up some really beautiful Million Dollar Trash Lottery Tickets.
I mean Special.
Boy Scout type instructions on Heimlich Manuever to Fentanyl poisoning.
AD space for businesses on one side of Playing Card Series.
SF History as another 52 card set.
Morse Code on one side of a durable ticket and Phonetic Alphabet on other.
He was just ‘Daniel’ then and came up to my place to look at the prototype tickets I’d made up with emergency depictions and even took some home.
Not a whisper since.
Idea is for churches and schools and regular outlets like liquor stores and community places like Manny’s to get cards and give a ticket for one hour’s work.
That includes 3rd graders who walk streets en masse under my 14th Street triple bay.
On July 4th of each year you have a drawing on the stairs of City Hall and someone wins a tax-free Million dollars.
Second place is the closer cause it has 100 winners of tax-free ten grand each.
Entire project costs just under 5 million and after the drawing the press will be all over the City’s Million dollar winner and the 100 who got a quick ten grand will be praising Mayor Lurie for such a creative only-in-SF contest.
As a candidate, Daniel Lurie really liked the idea.
As Mayor he has forgotten I even exist.
Tho, he drives by me working a couple of times a week as he cruises his own targeted clean-up area that includes my own.
go Niners !!
h.
Again, a city run by politicians and crack heads. When the cheap skate Republicans ran the city back in the 60’s and ealry 70’s, it was run effectually because all Republicans care about is the bottom line, where Democrats spend other people’s money,{Tax payers} like “Drunk sailors on leave.”