Arcana of Public Life

In a dull, yellow-lit room of SF City Hall, wood-paneled, godfather clock carvings filigreed periodically into the wall, you can’t help but think about the pointlessness of public process. People and people and people and people talk for the preservation of life, then the preservation of money, then life. Two sides offering conflicting factual statements again and again.

Photo of Laguna Salada at Sharp Park by Matt Jalbert (mattjalbert.com), who donated the photo for the Bay Nature story that brought me into the metaphorically rotting bowels of SF City Hall to cover a San Francisco Board of Supervisors subcommittee meeting for a story on 417-acre Sharp Park, which, as a lowland, meeting the ocean for the Sanchez Creek watershed, is a rare-ish central California coastal lagoon wetland. That's significant because a federally-endangered snake, the San Francisco Garter Snake and its prey, a federally-threatened frog, the California Red-legged Frog, both live there. And what you don't see is the 18-hole golf course which winds in and around the ocean side of the park, the wetland side. This photo was likely taken from a fairway.

See the guy eating in the doorway in the background? He's Sean Elsbernd, one of three supervisors on the subcommittee, and he's against the ordinance to transfer Sharp Park's management from the SF Recreation and Parks Department to the National Park Service. The supervisor really supporting the ordinance, he wrote it, is John Avalos, and he's sitting down, but you can't see him because the standing dude is blocking him. Avalos and Elsbernd jabbed back and forth at the beginning of the meeting.


It's guys like this that help long public meetings. Guy laughing next to me heard on the video, which was shot from the overflow meeting room downstairs in City Hall, was the primary author on the 211-page ecological study on Sharp Park commissioned by two environmental groups and published earlier this year. Pretty interesting.



Guy just starting singing, clearly freestyling. Amazing.

What a beautiful building to hold such insanity.