San Francisco just received a grant of $1.8 million dollars that will go to helping clean up the streets in certain neighborhoods. The program, called the Community Corridor program, is already being used on Irving Street and with the new, extra money, will be expanded to the Haight, Western Addition and the Fillmore. The money goes to assigning a "block sweeper" for each section who goes around making lists of things that need to be cleaned and fixing them. There are similar programs in cities around the world.

Officials at the Department of Public Works are hoping that the success of the program will lead to the establishment of community benefit districts, a program that charges local business a little bit extra to hire people to clean up the area. You would think everyone would be madly in love with this idea, but you would be wrong. So far, debate has been rather contentious, not really in what the program does, but in how the process has gone forward. We do seem to love arguing about process, don't we? Maybe we should form some sort of "Process Committee" that does nothing but let people argue over process. Like that Monty Python skit, the "Arguement sketch" about a place where people could go just to argue.

Most people seem to be behind the idea so there's a good chance at some point this will all get up and running. And hopefully that happened to this this lady won't happen here.

Image from the San Francisco Pretrial Diversion Project, Inc. web site