When it comes to public accommodations, maybe San Francisco authorities should pick up the phone and call Barberton.

The tips from the Midwest could save them about a million dollars – and that's just the cost of installing a toilet, like the one San Francisco planned to install in one of its neighborhoods earlier this year for $1.7 million.

Barberton showed Monday that it can be done for a fraction of the cost on the West Coast when the City Council approved the addition of two restrooms in McCafferty Park, accounting for about 7.1 percent of the total estimated cost of San Francisco's only luxury restroom.

Of course, the City by the Bay's costs weren't just driven up by the restrooms themselves. It also included $60,000 for site improvements unrelated to sanitation, $125,000 for project and construction management, $2,000 for plantings, and $27,600 for unforeseen expenses—because when it comes to public restrooms, you can never be sure.

Barberton's structure will cost about $120,000, with the city providing water and sewer services, said Don Patterson, city parks director.

Limiting toilet supplies

The cost to San Francisco attracted widespread attention earlier this year, as media outlets around the world mercilessly ridiculed officials. Even Governor Gavin Newsom got involved, threatening to withhold state funding for the project.

In Barberton, however, when it comes to public restrooms, typical Midwestern frugality and common sense prevail.

Patterson said he wasn't sure why the cost of a toilet in the Golden State was so high.

“That's a good question,” Patterson said. “I don't know who they're dealing with out there.”

“I don’t want to badmouth them”: Director of Barberton Parks works to keep costs down

Patterson said the city strives to be frugal in its projects.

“The spending of government money is a very sensitive issue for me,” Patterson said. “It's taxpayers' money.”

More:Will the new group revitalize downtown? Main Street Barberton organizers talk about their mission

The parks director said the city is also planning restrooms for another park this year. He expects the Decker Park project to go before the City Council in April. He expects installation to occur about six months after City Council approval.

He refused to criticize San Francisco for its toilet farce.

“I don’t want to badmouth them,” he said.

More:6 reasons why you should subscribe to the Akron Beacon Journal

Leave a message for Alan Ashworth at 330-996-3859 or email him at ataashworth@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter at @newsalanbeaconj.

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On Sunday, people in San Francisco's Noe Valley neighborhood celebrated the opening of a public restroom that made headlines with its estimated cost of $1.7 million before it was eventually built for a much lower price.

About 100 people filled Noe Valley Town Square to celebrate a brand new bathroom that drew international ridicule in 2022 for the astronomical pricePublic outcry forced the city to flush the idea down the toilet.

“Noe Valley, let’s hear our ‘not $1.7 million bathroom,’” event organizer Leslie Crawford shouted to the cheering crowd.

The organizers wanted to have some fun at the celebration and incorporate everything related to the toilet – there was even a live jazz band that renamed itself “American Standard” for the day.

“We couldn't bring Toto here, so…” laughed Crawford. “When everyone's laughing at you, you have to take the power back and laugh at yourself.”

Crawford admitted that San Francisco deserved all the crap it got when the city first announced the estimated $1.7 million cost of building the toilet. People thought it was the perfect example of government waste.

“This is absurd because the pipes were already in the ground when they built it. [town square] out,” said Noe Valley resident Todd Siemers.

“I found it a little ridiculous myself, everyone thought that,” added local resident Linda Maes.

A private company finally donated a prefabricated bathroom. But the cost still came to $200,000. The city said union workers would have to connect water lines and build other infrastructure to prepare everything.

We asked the people who used it: “How did it go?”

“I'm excited that they have a bathroom now,” said resident Zach D'Angelo. “And I give it a 10 out of 10.”

“It's great, it's a relief,” laughed Maes. “And we can relieve ourselves when we need to. We don't have to go into a [nearby] Restaurant.”

“It was spacious and clean and wonderful,” Siemers said.

And Crawford is glad that, at least for a while, there will be no more toilet jokes about San Francisco.

“This is a great ending to our story,” Crawford said.

The city said the bathroom is about 50 square feet. It has a metal toilet and a changing table.

More from CBS News

And Lin

Da Lin is an award-winning journalist with KPIX 5 News. He joined KPIX 5 in 2012 but has been covering news in the Bay Area since 2007. Da grew up in Oakland and spent five years as a news reporter for three other television stations in Texas, Southern and Central California before returning to the Bay Area. He also spent five years as a reporter for KRON 4.

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Federal Home Loan Bank Of San Francisco

Photo of Jeremy Empol

Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco names Jeremy Empol, senior vice president, public affairs and industry outreach

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 17, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Jeremy Empol has joined the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco (FHLBank San Francisco) as senior vice president, public affairs and industry outreach. In this role, Empol will oversee FHLBank San Francisco’s government relations program, including representing the Bank’s interests with Congress, regulators, and financial industry stakeholders.

“We are excited to welcome Jeremy to this important role on our public affairs team,” said Anne Segrest McCulloch, executive vice president and chief legal officer at FHLBank San Francisco. “With his deep experience in the financial services industry and track record of building productive relationships with government and industry, he will be an effective advocate for the common interests of the bank and our over 325 member financial institutions.”

Empol was previously senior vice president of federal government affairs at the California and Nevada Credit Union Leagues, where he was the industry’s voice to congress and the administration for 16 years. Prior to his tenure with the Leagues, he served as a congressional aide to three members of Congress, was an aide to two members of the California State Legislature, and worked on a number of political campaigns. Mr. Empol holds a BA in Political Science from UC Davis and an MA in Government from Johns Hopkins University.

About Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco
The Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco is a member-driven cooperative helping local lenders in Arizona, California, and Nevada build strong communities, create opportunity, and change lives for the better. Our member financial institutions–commercial banks, credit unions, industrial loan companies, savings institutions, insurance companies, and community development financial institutions–rely on us to deliver prompt access to low-cost funding, risk management tools, and resources for affordable housing and community economic development. Together with our members and other partners, we are making the communities we serve more resilient and vibrant.

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A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/2c9a39a7-12bf-4ca0-8a48-066eda62c23f

CONTACT: Media Contact: Mary Long Senior Director, Marketing Communications longm@fhlbsf.com 415.616.2556

The post FHLBank San Francisco Names Jeremy Empol Senior Vice President for Public Affairs and Trade Outreach appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

By Katherine Ellison for Hothouse.
Broadcast version by Suzanne Potter for California News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

Twitchell Island, Sacramento County, California – Steve Deverel gazes out over a levee on the San Joaquin River to a buoy where half a dozen sea lions are barking. It’s a loud reminder that even here, 50 miles inland, some of California’s most productive farmland lies perilously close to the Pacific Ocean. At any moment, a weak spot in the more than 1,000 miles of earthen levees protecting islands in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta could unleash a salty deluge, threatening not just crops, but the drinking water for as many as 27 million Californians.

Deverel, a Davis-based hydrologist, refers to this threat as “The Big Gulp,” a breach that would suck in tens of billions of gallons of river water, drawing ocean water in its wake. All it would take is some heavy rain, a moderate earthquake, or even hard-working gophers tunneling through earthen barriers first built in the late 1800s.

It wouldn’t be the first time such a disaster happened.

On a sunny day in June 1972, a levee failed without warning or apparent cause near Andrus Island, about an hour’s drive from San Francisco. Water ran four feet deep over the farmland. Thirty-foot cruisers and houseboats smashed against the embankments. Hundreds of homeowners fled rising waters, with several people seriously injured. In 2004-on another calm, sunny day-it happened again. This time the water turned 12,000 acres of prime California farmland into a brackish lake, costing $100 million in damages.

Deverel now hopes to save the Delta by flooding it before the Pacific can. And he wants to pay for it with carbon credits.

“Carbon-farming” in the wetlands

Deverel, 70, has spent three decades trying to head off the Big Gulp. Climate change is his chance. His project, funded to date by California state agencies and the University of California, has so far inundated 1,700 acres of Delta farmland on Twitchell and nearby Sherman island, transforming them into marshes of cattails and tule reeds. Each year, new plants growing in these restored wetlands will suck carbon dioxide (CO₂)-the most abundant greenhouse gas-out of the atmosphere, storing it in strata of accumulating muck that will help buttress the dikes in danger of collapsing.

The project passed its first important milestone on October 27, 2020, when the American Carbon Registry issued credits for 52,000 tons of CO₂ removed by the experiment, which is still in its very early stage. That makes this the first wetland project (and only one so far) to generate verified carbon credits in the US, according to Steve Crooks, a Sausalito, California-based wetlands scientist and global expert in the field of “carbon-farming” from coastal wetlands.

The Delta project is also one of very few such efforts around the world, yet its promise is enormous.

Even as they cover just 9% of the Earth’s surface, wetlands are the largest natural carbon sink on land, sequestering an estimated 35% of the world’s carbon stored on land, more than all other biomes combined. Since a majority of wetlands are degraded or destroyed, environmental scientists see restoring them as a huge potential source of carbon credits as countries and corporations ramp up their commitments to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Rehabilitating the earth’s wetlands would provide myriad benefits in addition to carbon sequestration, possibly even more environmentally useful than carbon projects in forestry.

Yet managing these landscapes is a lot more complicated-and expensive-than simply flooding fields or replanting trees. Deverel believes the Delta project has revealed a path forward. The key is a rich, brown crumbly soil known as peat.

The promise of peat

A few thousand years after the end of the last Ice Age, the Delta was covered by a marshy, freshwater inland sea. Over millennia, layers of moss, mud, and vegetation accumulated to form peat. Under the right conditions, peatlands can store vast amounts of carbon. Marshes “sequester” or store CO₂ through photosynthesis as they grow, and the carbon stays trapped in the plants as they die and decompose underwater. Once drained, however, peat can be fabulous for growing crops, as farmers who came here after the Gold Rush soon discovered. The farmers, known as “swamplanders,” hired Chinese laborers to build the levees and drain the marshes, and planted rows and rows of corn and alfalfa, much later adding other crops, including wine grapes, walnut and almond trees, cotton, sugar beets, and blueberries.

More than a century would pass before scientists realized the farmers were harvesting their own ruin.

The problem is known as “subsidence,” a gentle word for a sinister situation. When peat dries, it oxidizes and evaporates, or is swept away by the wind, steadily robbing the Delta islands of about an inch in height each year. As they shrink in volume, the islands provide less and less of a buffer against the water pressure on the aging levees.

Subsidence explains why you can stand on a grassy field here, some 300 feet from the levees’ edge, and look up to watch ships passing on the river. Some parts of Twitchell and other Delta islands are now more than 20 feet below sea level. Subsidence, and the growing pressure on the levees, also explain why there’s more to the threat than the specter of water someday coursing over the levees. In some areas it’s already seeping under them, says Deverel. That’s forcing farmers to fortify old embankments while continually draining their land.

There’s also a broader threat. Soggy peatlands can be powerful carbon sinks. All that changes when the peat dries out. As peat oxidizes, it releases stored CO₂. In the Delta, this translates to an area of about 150,000 acres of soil turned into “this weird little chimney in the middle of the state that is just pumping out carbon dioxide,” says Campbell Ingram, executive director of the Delta Conservancy, a state agency that is collaborating with Deverel on the carbon-credits project.

Over more than 30 years of careful measurements, Deverel has found that each year, on average, each of those acres of dried-peat farmland emits roughly ten tons of CO₂, roughly equivalent to the annual emissions of 217,000 gas-powered cars.

Deverel, Ingram, and their colleagues see this as an opportunity.

Inundating the land, and allowing the ancient bulrushes and cattails to return-or potentially cultivating rice-would stop those emissions immediately, and even store carbon as new plants grow. Deverel and Ingram hope the process could start to reverse the subsidence by adding as much as two inches of soil a year as watery plants die and form new peat. “It’s slow, yes-it could take 150 years to get back to sea-level,” says Ingram. “But every added foot reduces the pressure on the levees.”

Restoring Delta wetlands would have many other benefits as well. Healthy wetlands help filter freshwater, offer habitat for wildlife, and provide a buffer for flood control-all services increasingly in demand as climate change brings more devastating droughts and rising sea levels. In this way, the Delta project could shift the carbon credits paradigm, using the credits not only to reduce or “mitigate” greenhouse gas emissions but to help adapt to the inevitable results of climate change in coming years.

“This project is still in its early stages but we’re very hopeful about what it implies for California’s sustainability,” says Michelle Passero, director of climate and nature-based solutions for The Nature Conservancy. The international non-profit, which owns an entire Delta island, has recently begun working with Deverel to greatly expand the scope of his plan, converting 4,000 acres from corn to rice and another 1,000 to restore wetlands habitat. Passero says they hope to generate carbon credits from the project within the next few years, providing income to pay for more restoration, and ideally creating a model for others to follow.

To do so, however, the Delta’s defenders still need to overcome three daunting obstacles: the science, the expense, and the politics of wetlands conversion.

The Devil’s in the data

In the first US attempt to farm carbon in US wetlands, the scientific calculations didn’t add up.

In December 2013, Tierra Resources, a small environmental restoration firm based in New Orleans, announced that the American Carbon Registry had approved its “revolutionary new tool:” a “first of its kind” methodology to restore degraded wetlands in the Gulf of Mexico.

Seven years later, however, the company quietly canceled its pilot project in a Louisiana swamp. The problem was “high uncertainty with the data,” wrote Tierra Resources CEO Sarah Mack in an email. The ACR requires periodic monitoring reports, meaning carbon farmers must continually prove they’re doing what they initially promised.

Mack, who later consulted on the California Delta project, praised Deverel and colleagues for what she described as their pioneering work. “They showed it can be done,” she said, “and that is going to encourage other scientists to follow them.”

As Mack acknowledged, the Delta project has had some key advantages over her own effort. For one thing, after three decades of studying and measuring emissions from the land, Deverel has more scientific certainty. But more important is the problem of methane, a greenhouse gas that is about 25 times more powerful than CO2.

All wetlands emit methane, as anaerobic soil microbes digest growing plants. But Mack’s wetlands in the Gulf of Mexico lacked the key ingredient of peat. In peat wetlands, inundating the land-and stopping up those weird little chimneys-has the potential to reduce so much CO2 that it would more than compensate for new methane emissions, according to Deverel.

Peat’s promise is already inspiring some mega-projects in swamp forests, bogs, and fens, many thousands of miles away from the Delta. In Indonesia, the Katingan Metaya Project claims it is generating 7.5 million carbon credits per year from peat-rich forests, avoiding emissions equal to those of France. In Scotland, a fast-fashion billionaire is working on a project to farm carbon from peatlands on his extensive landholdings. Closer to home, in North Carolina, scientists have investigated the potential for a carbon farm on 10,000 acres of previously drained pocosins, wetland bogs with woody shrubs and sandy peat soil.

The clock is ticking. As peatlands increasingly dry out, those “weird little chimneys” are popping up all over the planet, potentially creating a dangerous feedback loop for climate change. That makes it all the more important that the Delta defenders find answers to the economic and political challenges of wetlands restoration.

Show me the money

Wetlands restoration is expensive, and the Delta carbon project is no exception. Over the past 12 years, California state agencies have spent nearly $17 million restoring and managing wetlands in the project area, according to Bryan Brock, an engineer for the California Department of Water Resources (DWR). That bill would have been much larger had the land not already been owned by DWR. Another $1.5 million was spent on research-related expenses, including 10 eddy covariance stations, which can cost $50,000 each, to measure gas flows and temperature changes over the wetlands.

Now, the biggest hurdle is making the project financially sustainable. For all its expense, the project has yet to produce any revenue. Carbon credits issued so far have gone to the project landowner, DWR, which can’t sell the credits due to rules forbidding profits from publicly funded projects, as Brock explains.

To finance more wetlands restoration, the Delta team must do the political work of convincing thousands of farmers to convert at least some of their land from profitable crops to marshes or rice, and then keep them that way for a minimum of 40 years. Carbon prices have been rising, but at less than $10/ton for the voluntary market, are still far from enough to change a lot of minds.

“It’s a bit ridiculous,” is how Bruce Blodgett, executive director of the San Joaquin Farm Bureau Federation, characterizes the Delta carbon-farming proposal. “Are we supposed to buy our seeds with carbon credits?”

Blodgett worries the state will step in and force farmers to participate. He insists the Delta farmers are doing just fine dealing with subsidence by paying property taxes to fund work on the levees and, as long as the water keeps flowing, he doesn’t want to change. “We have one area in the entire state of California that we know we can still be farming 150 years from now,” he says, “and they want to plant tules there.”

Yet Mother Nature increasingly has put her finger on the scales. As sea levels rise, that salty water seeping under the levees is already threatening crops, while farmers must pay more to keep draining their land. The increasing threats from climate change may also eventually move governments to act more aggressively, which could raise the price of carbon credits and provide another inducement for the farmers. “If we get to $100 a ton, that solves the problem,” says Deverel.

In the meantime, he continues with his research and plans for the next phase of the project, on The Nature Conservancy land, continuing with the work that has now consumed more than half of his life. Progress so far has been small and slow, and maybe even a little nerve-wracking if you’re the sort who tends to doom-scroll climate news.

But Deverel isn’t one for doom-scrolling. “This is what I am called to do now,” he says. “I don’t need to worry about the entire stairway, just the next step.”

Katherine Ellison wrote this article for Hothouse.

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By Elizabeth McGowan for Energy News Network.
Broadcast version by Edwin J. Viera for Virginia News Connection reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

The hands-on solar panel lesson for rookies at Sankofa Community Orchard in mid-January might have been a bust if student Mary Lewis hadn’t shown up with her A-game — and her F-150 pickup truck.

When the team was short a power drill, Lewis scurried to her trusty toolbox. Then, for a tape measure. And yet again for exterior screws.

The 58-year-old’s preparedness proved integral to completing the installation of a six-panel array designed to power the water irrigation system at the urban agricultural venture on the city’s south side.

Lewis, owner of a home repair business, was one of 15 enrollees in a week-long class this month geared at diversifying the clean energy workforce. 

Richmond resident Richard Walker brainstormed the free solar training to ensure that Black residents and other marginalized communities aren’t left behind as renewable energy booms in Virginia. It’s a more recent offshoot of a nonprofit, Bridging the Gap, the 63-year-old founded more than a dozen years ago.

In June 2019, he debuted the training program as an environmental justice experiment in a church basement in majority-Black, rural Union Hill to counter Dominion Energy’s proposal to construct the Atlantic Coast Pipeline through Buckingham County.

“We’ve been remiss in educating folks about green energy in our neighborhoods,” Walker said about his early attempts to heal a rift over the gas pipeline in a community where his family has deep roots. “This is where people need to be exposed to these possibilities.”

He moved subsequent trainings to the state’s capital, where Walker has partnered with Richmond’s Office of Community Wealth Building and its Department of Parks, Recreation and Community Facilities.

Lewis, also a real estate agent and investor, is enthusiastic about sharing what she absorbs with her network of personal and business connections.

“This is something I believe in,” Lewis said. “Solar just seems like a natural next step.”

Lewis and her classmates spent most of the week of Jan. 10 hunkered down in a training room at the Annie Giles Community Resource Center near downtown Richmond sponging up photovoltaic fundamentals from newly minted instructor Duane Cunningham.

The intensive course covers the ABCs — arcs, breakers, and charge controllers — but also delves into the intricacies of components, sizing principles, mechanical design, performance analysis, and troubleshooting.

Last year, Walker hand-picked Cunningham because of the 46-year-old’s electrical engineering degree, IT-heavy background, and ability to translate technical gobbledygook into comprehensible concepts for laypeople. 

The California native settled in Hampton, Virginia, three years ago to begin work as a data center manager for a defense contractor affiliated with Langley Air Force Base.

Cunningham was receptive to Walker’s overture because overseas travel for the military through 2016 had exposed him to how countries as varied as Germany, Australia, and Kuwait were embracing renewable energy. The two met because Cunningham also volunteers for a separate, youth-oriented nonprofit in Buckingham County. 

Walker had recruited author and professional trainer Sean White, a Californian with decades of international experience, to teach the initial Solar 101 class in Union Hill. As well, White taught follow-up classes in November 2019 and last October.

Cunningham enrolled in the October class and absorbed every detail. To qualify to teach, he had to ace the gold standard exam offered by the North American Board of Certified Energy Practitioners. Passing it gives newcomers clout and access to jobs anywhere.

What troubles Walker is that of the 30-plus graduates in the first three sessions, Cunningham is the only graduate to even attempt the exam.

Enrollees have consistently been a cross-section of men and women ranging in age from their early 20s to late 50s. Some have college degrees and established careers, while others had struggled in the job market after being released from prison.

“That’s still part of the learning curve,” Walker said. “We don’t have a placement rate yet because the glitch is the folks we get in the training class don’t seem to have the confidence to take the test.”

‘I can see solar as a career path’

Cunningham is determined to alter that pattern. 

“I grew up in Compton, so it’s not foreign to me where they have come from,” Cunningham said about his early exposure to hardscrabble California. “I have family members who are incarcerated and friends who have lost their lives making bad decisions.”

Each day, he sandwiched pep talks between reviews that summarized lessons into bite-size nuggets and dissected sample exam questions.

“It all begins up here,” Cunningham said, tapping his temple. “They all have the ability to pass the test. I told them that if I’m going to give you 100% here, I need to know you gave yourself a chance.”

Student Reggie Davis is receptive to such an opportunity. He figures it’s kismet that the invitation to join Cunningham’s class arrived when he began noticing how rooftop solar was flourishing in his Richmond neighborhood.

For the last five months, the 53-year-old has honed his landscaping skills as part of the city’s workforce development program. It’s geared to help unemployed and formerly incarcerated residents transition to jobs.

“I’m grateful to be exposed to this,” said Davis, who buried his nose in his notes each evening as a refresher. “Now I don’t want to limit myself. I can see solar as a career path instead of just a job.”

He appreciated Cunningham’s willingness to apply solar lessons to real-life situations.

“Yes, we’re learning a lot, but once I got the verbiage down, it’s really not that hard,” he said. “Duane’s reviews made me more comfortable. He wanted this information to stick.”

Davis, raised in Florida, New York, Illinois, and Louisiana, landed in Richmond in the late 1980s to major in business at Virginia Union, a historically black university.

That degree — and a starting spot on the basketball team — never materialized as a “detour” dealing cocaine and other drugs turned into convictions that sent him to state prison for close to 12 years.

“I’m through with that life,” he said. Since his 2003 release, he worked at Hewlett-Packard for a decade before starting his own lawn care business.

Davis knows that despite the solar industry’s earnest efforts to attract more people of color, it’s rare to find Black men such as himself in that workforce.

He praised Walker for punching through those barriers.

“We need people like Richard to not only bring us into a new world,” he said about his classmates, “but to bring them, the solar developers, to our world.”

Cunningham had helped to install the first three panels at Sankofa last autumn. Davis piggybacked on that start by applying his new knowledge to add another trio of flush-mounted panels atop a shipping container and a shed.

The farm, situated on roughly two acres of parks and recreation land near Reedy Creek, is designed to address social and racial imbalances from the ground up, said Duron Chavis, food activist and executive director of The Happily Nature Day, a nonprofit.

Enormous colorful murals serve as backdrops for dozens of fruit trees, fruiting shrubs, vegetable plots, and a beekeeping operation. The harvests are destined for the community. Gardeners distribute 4-by-6 foot raised beds and soil so neighbors can grow their own food too.

Chavis’ goal is to be a model of climate change resiliency by incorporating low-impact systems to collect rainwater, manage stormwater runoff, and harvest energy from the sun. 

Carving a niche in central Virginia

Personal setbacks motivated Walker, a professional mental health counselor, to invent Bridging the Gap as a job conduit for Virginians wrestling with addiction, incarceration, and chronic homelessness.

After serving concurrent, two-year federal and state prison sentences for cocaine possession and fraud years ago, nobody would hire him. And he faced such rejection with a bachelor’s degree.  

Walker opted to fold green workforce development and environmental justice into his nonprofit’s mission after watching yet another Black community — his own — be saddled with the threat of polluting fossil fuel infrastructure.

He can trace at least five generations of his family back to Union Hill, where free Blacks and former slaves settled in Buckingham County after the Civil War. It’s about 70 miles west of Richmond.

In January 2020, a federal appeals court put the kibosh on a compressor station that had divided neighbors when Dominion sited it in Union Hill. About six months later, the utility giant pulled the plug on the entire questionable pipeline project that would have bisected Virginia for roughly 300 of its 600 miles. It would have pumped hydraulically fractured gas from West Virginia to North Carolina. 

While Walker’s solar training went dormant during the pandemic, he couldn’t bear for it to be a casualty of COVID-19. 

A large grant from the Mertz Gilmore Foundation allows him to issue $1,000 scholarships to each enrollee. More recently, he’s attracted smaller sums from sources in Alexandria and Charlottesville and is intent on pursuing federal dollars.

If the General Assembly approves an $80,000 appropriation allotted to the Virginia Community College System as part of the state budget by Del. Jeff Bourne, a Democrat from Richmond, Walker would have access to that money for more training. 

Longtime backers include the Virginia Environmental Justice Collaborative, Virginia Interfaith Power & Light, and programs under the University of Richmond umbrella.

“I want to carve my niche in central Virginia as the program that provides free training,” said Walker, aware that competitors charge enrollees. “If I can get full-time instructors, what I can do is limitless.” 

Hiring White was expensive but gave the class credibility. Now that Walker has permission from White to adopt and adapt his original class curriculum, he can save some money and promote home-grown talent. As well, he has added a unit on energy efficiency to keep the class fresh.

To dovetail with the eight to 10 classes he proposes offering annually in Richmond, he’s collaborating with Bridging the Gap colleagues to open a Green Jobs Workforce Center this spring in Buckingham County’s Dillwyn, near Union Hill. Its wheelhouse will be training in solar, plumbing, electrical wiring, fiber optics, and heating and air conditioning.

“Solar has taken flight, but related jobs haven’t been open to communities of color and low-income Virginians,” Walker said about addressing inequities. “Training can lead to decent-paying jobs in these fields.”

Lewis, the recent graduate with an established career, isn’t intrigued by “getting on people’s roofs to install solar panels,” but is toying with the idea of sales.

Her desire to explore solar’s intricacies in Walker’s class was piqued because she put a four-panel, 100-watt system on her garage roof several years ago. She’s thrilled by the drop in her electric bill and, now, has the know-how to expand. Next, she wants to install a ground-mount system to power her house in Chesterfield County, south of Richmond.

In class, the go-getter peppered Cunningham with questions from her front-row seat.

“It has been a super class because it’s gone so deep and I’m kind of sorry the week is coming to an end,” Lewis said. “I wish I would’ve known all this 15 years ago because I’d be reaping the benefits now.”

Lewis is accustomed to navigating around obstacles. For instance, 15 years ago when she owned a dump truck company, she accepted a dare from one of her drivers to earn a commercial driver’s license. She practiced and studied until she passed the test. 

That same tenacity is motivating her to sign up for the North American Board of Certified Energy Practitioners exam. Walker’s program covers the fee and students have 10 tries to pass the 85-question, multiple-choice exam.

When reached by phone the week after the class ended, Lewis was headed to a church to replace a bathroom urinal. She’s been diligent about studying, she said, and is scheduling a test appointment later this month.

“When I start something, I’m going to finish it,” Lewis said. “I’m just not a quitter.”

Elizabeth McGowan wrote this article for Energy News Network.

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By Sakshi Udavant for Next City.
Broadcast version by Edwin J. Viera for New York News Connection reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

Urban areas in US cities are estimated to lose an average of 36 million trees every year. This results in economic losses of up to $786 million and risks having an adverse impact on already worsening climate change.

The worse part? Many of these trees are considered “waste” and sent off to landfills. “More wood from cities goes into landfills than is harvested from US National Forests,” says J. Morgan Grove, a research forester at Baltimore Field Station, USDA Forest Service. “40% of this wood can be reused for furniture, flooring, outdoor play areas, mulch, compost, soil improvements, bioenergy and even carbon sources for growing mushrooms.”

That’s what “reforestation hubs” are doing: Saving urban trees from heading to landfills by finding new ways to repurpose the wood. These wooden products can be sold to fund further tree plantations. This cycle reduces urban wood waste, saves money, helps increase forest cover, and most importantly, keeps carbon out of the environment.

“If we recycled all the trees that came down in US cities each year, roughly 20 million tons of carbon could be kept out of the atmosphere, equivalent to taking over four million gas-powered cars off the road for a year,” says Ben Christensen, CEO and co-founder of Cambium Carbon, a New York-based startup working on reforesting America by creating the aforementioned wood repurposing-reforesting cycle.

Reforestation Hub, an initiative by The Nature Conservancy (a global environmental organization) and American Forests (a US-based forest conservation nonprofit), estimates up to 133 million acres of formerly forested lands in the United States could be reforested, absorbing 333 million metric tons of carbon per year, which is equivalent to keeping 72 million cars off the road. That’s why the organization calls it “a low-tech, scalable and proven solution to climate change.”

Creating a Circular Economy

Organizations like Cambium Carbon play a huge role in making this circular economy possible. For instance, Cambium Carbon works at three critical points: 1) saving the trees from ending up in landfills when they’re first cut down or have fallen, 2) collaborating with millers and sawyers who can use the “wasted” wood, and 3) working with architects, builders and furniture brands who provide the market to incentivize salvage. This way, fallen urban trees go from being a “landfill filler” to a valuable commodity that creates resources for increasing the declining forest cover in US cities.

The organization claims to have diverted more than 45 tons of wood from landfills, moving about 291,000 board feet of wood or roughly 489 tons of finished product. They’re now starting a new furniture line with Sabai Design, a sustainable furniture brand in Philadelphia, and planting new trees with the Sacramento Tree Foundation and the Baltimore Tree Trust. Their goal is to plant one billion new trees across the U.S. by 2030, the team mentioned in an interview with Next Pittsburgh.

Cambium Carbon is not alone. Other organizations like Cities4Forests and the Arbor Day Foundation are working with local officials to create the nation’s first reforestation hubs by 2022 through a TNC Natural Climate Change Solutions Accelerator Grant.

Is the Solution Worth the Costs?

While collecting fallen trees from urban spaces and using them to make locally-sold wooden products sounds like the perfect idea to reduce wastage and make supply chains more sustainable, all of this is easier said than done.

One drawback is that the barriers and costs of these alternative wood waste programs may outweigh the benefits, says Melissa McHale, associate professor of Urban Ecology and Sustainability, UBC Faculty of Forestry. “Many cities lack the space to store, sort and process the wood waste, and the cost of creating a space like this, in terms of dollars and time, is prohibitive,” says McHale, who also served on the leadership team for the United States Forest Service’s Denver Urban Field Station (USFS DUFS). “Many cities do not have the ability to maintain and remove all of their problem or dead trees and depend on private companies to do so. Private companies, especially the smaller businesses, often do not have the time and equipment needed to remove a tree whole and transport it wherever it needs to go.”

Fortunately, several organizations are stepping up with resources and ideas to make the wood repurposing process more efficient. For instance, Reforestation Hub maps out “relatively low-cost and feasible options to restore forests.” The web-based tool highlights several key areas for affordable reforestation like large open patches within forests, croplands with challenging soils and post-burn landscapes. It also offers handy access to reforestation resources like links to find a professional forester, find your state’s urban and community tree coordinator and access published articles on cost-effective tree planting.

Beyond helping the planet for years to come, initiatives like these also support local communities. Cambium Carbon has created a national network of local producers and national buyers to purchase locally salvaged, locally milled wood, which further funds local tree planting. For example, the communal tables in the entrepreneurship hubs on Towson University’s campus are made of wood that would have otherwise gone to waste. Similarly, the trellis in the Visit Baltimore HQ office was made using “waste” now repurposed into what the team calls “Carbon Smart Wood.”

“It’s a big opportunity to put people first and to have projects that are not just good for the planet but are really good for communities,” CEO Ben Christensen said in an interview with the Arbor Day Foundation. “[We’re] creating systems that are helping to address problems like lack of employment and helping to support economic recovery coming out of COVID.”

Cambium Carbon has employed 25 workers while also creating additional employment and partnership opportunities for several local carpenters and woodworkers through their sales and inventory management platform, Traece. Since the wood is sourced, repurposed and sold locally, workers in the region find more projects (like working on the Towson University tables) and resources (companies buying the new wooden products) to generate revenue that they wouldn’t have access to if the fallen trees just went to a landfill.

Sakshi Udavant wrote this article for Next City.

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New York has seen growth in offshore wind investments, which advocates hope will continue into the new year.

In 2022, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced a $500 million investment in offshore wind for cleaner energy, as part of a goal to develop 9,000 megawatts of offshore wind power by 2035.

Another step forward for the industry is redevelopment of the 73-acre South Brooklyn Marine Terminal for the staging of construction, operations and maintenance for several offshore wind projects.

Fred Zalcman, director of the New York Offshore Wind Alliance, described other highlights.

“We’ve seen significant developments on several fronts,” Zalcman outlined. “First, we are seeing the start of construction on New York’s first utility-scale offshore wind project, the South Fork Wind Farm, which will be 130 megawatts; serve over 70,000 people on Long Island.”

He added there have been real estate commitments to develop a National Offshore Wind Training Center, and agreements between developers and environmental groups to protect the endangered North Atlantic right whale during wind-project construction.

Given many offshore wind projects take a long time to develop, some work which began in 2022 will carry over into the new year. Zalcman noted the work should pick up, especially at certain ports, and there are some innovations he expects the state to give a closer look.

“The state is also looking now at the potential for offshore wind in the deeper ocean environment,” Zalcman pointed out. “These will be sites situated off the coast of New York, and potentially deploying new innovative technologies called ‘floating wind.’ “

While he’s eager to see the project develop in the new year, Zalcman expects to encounter growing pains as well. He mentioned supply-chain issues, inflation, and other economic challenges for the industry.

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Questions are being raised over the price tag of a public toilet in San Francisco.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the single toilet is costing the city $1.7 million. It will be located near 24th Street in Noe Valley’s main commercial corridor.

Supervisors said they got the funding from the state budget to build the restroom per requests of families in the area.

In a joint statement issued to the newspaper, the Park and Rec Department of Public Works said there are several reasons for the costs, including the cost to build in the city and the rising construction costs for materials.

“It’s crazy. It’s just sort of an artifact of everything going crazy in the city,” said former San Francisco resident, Michael Papanek. “How could it possibly be 1.7 million dollars?”

There was supposed to be an announcement by state and local public officials Wednesday, proclaiming their success in securing the funding from the state.

But they abruptly canceled it once word of the price tag got out.

Questions are being raised over the price tag of a public toilet in San Francisco.

“It sounds so fishy,” said Dalia Martinez, former San Francisco resident. “And given that they were gonna announce it today and they just bailed, it’s just, so suspicious.”

The only elected official who has responded to any of our questions about the project, and the price tag, is assembly member Matt Haney. He was able to get the $.17 million from Sacramento.

“I’ll defer questions about the cost for the bathroom to Rec and Park,” he said in a statement. “The cost also seemed shockingly high to me. They told me they couldn’t build it for less, so if I wanted a public bathroom there, that’s how much I had to deliver.”

NBC Bay Area reached out to Park and Rec for a breakdown of costs but have not heard back.

The restroom would be completed until 2025.

NBC Bay Area’s Sergio Quintana gives us a closer look at San Francisco’s plan to construct a $1.7 million bathroom.

The city already operates a whole bunch of free public restrooms, some of them even available 24 hours a day and fit within the 150-square-foot footprint at Noe Valley.

The cost to the city is nothing.

According to the San Francisco Department of Public Works, it has a deal with the company JC Decaux to provide the self-cleaning public potties for free in exchange for advertising revenue made from the units.

By the end of this year, brand new ones will be getting installed throughout San Francisco to replace the aging ones — all for free.

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Questions are being raised over the price tag of a public toilet in San Francisco.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the single toilet is costing the city $1.7 million. It will be located near 24th Street in Noe Valley’s main commercial corridor.

Supervisors said they got the funding from the state budget to build the restroom per requests of families in the area.

In a joint statement issued to the newspaper, the Park and Rec Department of Public Works said there are several reasons for the costs, including the cost to build in the city and the rising construction costs for materials.

“It’s crazy. It’s just sort of an artifact of everything going crazy in the city,” said former San Francisco resident, Michael Papanek. “How could it possibly be 1.7 million dollars?”

There was supposed to be an announcement by state and local public officials Wednesday, proclaiming their success in securing the funding from the state.

But they abruptly canceled it once word of the price tag got out.

Questions are being raised over the price tag of a public toilet in San Francisco.

“It sounds so fishy,” said Dalia Martinez, former San Francisco resident. “And given that they were gonna announce it today and they just bailed, it’s just, so suspicious.”

The only elected official who has responded to any of our questions about the project, and the price tag, is assembly member Matt Haney. He was able to get the $.17 million from Sacramento.

“I’ll defer questions about the cost for the bathroom to Rec and Park,” he said in a statement. “The cost also seemed shockingly high to me. They told me they couldn’t build it for less, so if I wanted a public bathroom there, that’s how much I had to deliver.”

NBC Bay Area reached out to Park and Rec for a breakdown of costs but have not heard back.

The restroom would be completed until 2025.

NBC Bay Area’s Sergio Quintana gives us a closer look at San Francisco’s plan to construct a $1.7 million bathroom.

The city already operates a whole bunch of free public restrooms, some of them even available 24 hours a day and fit within the 150-square-foot footprint at Noe Valley.

The cost to the city is nothing.

According to the San Francisco Department of Public Works, it has a deal with the company JC Decaux to provide the self-cleaning public potties for free in exchange for advertising revenue made from the units.

By the end of this year, brand new ones will be getting installed throughout San Francisco to replace the aging ones — all for free.

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SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) — San Francisco is a city of controversies and there is a new one brewing. This time over the estimated cost of a public restroom that will make your nose scrunch.

There is also a competition of sorts in America to earn the right to be in the hall of fame for public bathrooms. Bryant Park and Greeley Square Park, both in New York City, and Bancroft Park in Colorado, all of them shown here in full glory.

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San Francisco public toilets have never reached that claim to fame.

“We have not had any winners from San Francisco,” revealed Julia Messinger of Cintas Corporation, the large restroom supply company actually honors the best, brightest and most innovative public bathrooms.

“It’s not something that people talk about often, but I think everyone values ​​a clean and functioning bathroom,” she added.

Maybe San Francisco is not ready to give up yet. Why not? The plumbing already exists. The city has secured state funding to build a small, 150-square-foot public bathroom right in the heart of the Noe Valley neighborhood at a cost of $1.7 million.

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“Put it to better use. It’s ridiculous. $1.7 million for a stupid bathroom,” expressed Augusto Illidge, a San Francisco resident.

That’s the estimate given by the Department of Recreation and Parks because of all the permits, planning, union labor, etc. that would be involved.

City officials hope it won’t cost that much.

“They have an idea of ​​what it will be but I don’t think they have the formal final plans but now they will be in a position to be able to put that together,” said State Senator Scott Wiener.

MORE: SF considers taxing vacant apartments to help with housing crisis

Still, people here wanted to have a commode in place. By the way, commode comes from the French meaning suitable or convenient.

“You know it would be nice to have some facilities like that,” said George Matiasz, a resident of Noe Valley.

“Having public access rather than having to go into a restaurant and say can I use the bathroom, I think that’s what a neighborhood should have,” added Kay Taneyhill, also a resident of Noe Valley.

New York, for example, is considering legislation that would force the city to build public restrooms in every ZIP code.

“We don’t have nearly enough public restrooms in San Francisco,” said Wiener.

Like most things in San Francisco, big dreams start in small places at a high cost.

If you’re on the ABC7 News app, click here to watch live

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The latest construction project straining San Francisco’s city budget? A single-stall public restroom that’s expected to cost an eye-popping $1.7 million to build.

Last Wednesday, the San Francisco Chronicles reported that a new, 150-square-foot public restroom in central San Francisco’s Noe Valley was expected to cost $1.7 million by its completion in 2025. The story sparked outrage from local citizens other state officials alike who balked at the high price tag. While city officials have attempted to chalk up the price to high construction costs, the shockingly expensive budget estimate for one restroom shows the pitfalls of a city where construction is nigh impossible—and the local government is more than willing to overspend.

How did the $1.7 million figure get estimated? Well, according to San Francisco Assembly member Matt Haney (D–San Francisco), who secured the funding, he went with the figure that the Recreation and Parks Department gave him. “They told me $1.7 million, and I got $1.7 million,” Haney told the Chronicle. “I didn’t have the option of bringing home less of the bacon when it comes to building a toilet. A half a toilet or a toilet-maybe-someday is not much use to anyone.”

But why such a steep price tag on something as simple as a single-stall restroom—especially considering that the plaza on which the restroom will be built already has the necessary plumbing for a bathroom? A statement from the San Francisco Department of Recreation and Parks and the Department of Public Works argued the bathroom’s exorbitant price tag is driven by the high cost of construction in San Francisco—the highest in the world—as well as increases in construction costs due to inflation and supply chain issues.

“It’s important to note that public projects and their overall cost estimates don’t just reflect the price of erecting structures,” officials wrote in the statement. “They include planning, drawing, permits, reviews and public outreach.” Officials also stressed that their estimate is deliberately high in order to account “for the worst-case scenario due to the onerous demands and unpredictable costs levied by PG&E.”

Further, actually building the bathroom will involve a dizzying number of roadblocks, notably “community feedback,” to ensure that the bathroom’s “design is appropriate to its context in the urban environment.” After passing community patterns, the design will head to local officials for approval, as well as review under the California Environmental Quality Act. Only then can construction start.

While the city government is convinced that their $1.7-million figure is a reasonable, if deliberately high, estimate for a public restroom, other experts disagree. the San Francisco Chronicles spoke with Tom Hardiman, the executive director of the Modular Building Institute in Charlottesville, Virginia. When asked to guess San Francisco’s budget for the bathroom, he told the Chronicle, “I’m going to guess high, I think, and say $200,000.” When told the real cost, he replied “What are they making it out of—gold and fine Italian marble? It would be comical if it wasn’t so tragically flawed.”

While Hardiman told the Chronicle that a prefabricated bathroom would be much cheaper, San Francisco law might stand in the way of a much more sensitive option. Why? In 2019, the city supervisors reached a Project Labor Agreement, which required union labor for all “covered projects.” According to the ChronicleNoe Valley’s single-stall bathroom shouldn’t apply under this agreement “because it’s not worth $10 million and it didn’t come from bond funding.”

However, Haney seems to believe that the bathroom project is constrained by the agreement, thus ruling out cheaper, prefabricated options. the Chronicle reports that “he’d be open to modular bathrooms if they didn’t violate the Public Labor Agreement.” Unfortunately, even if this bathroom is exempt from the law, mistaken city officials are more than enough to effectively rule out this cheaper option made by non-union labor. Another fact making a prefabricated option less likely: The city of San Francisco is barred from doing business with 30 states, due to anti-abortion, anti-LGBT rights, or “voter suppression” laws.

Governor Gavin Newsom (D) has even waded into the controversy. “A single, small bathroom should not cost $1.7 million,” a Newsom spokesperson wrote in a statements to the Chronicle. “The state will hold funding until San Francisco delivers a plan to use this public money more efficiently. If they cannot, we will go back to the legislature to revoke this appropriation.” However, Newsom’s office hasn’t seemed to have had trouble approving such expensive projects before. According to the Chronicletwo other single-stall bathrooms were recently constructed in San Francisco, costing $1.6 and $1.7 million respectively.

The price tag for Noe Valley’s single-stall public restroom is outrageous. However, so is San Francisco’s needlessly complicated process for approving new construction—and its laws restricting who and where this construction can come from. It simply should not be this complicated to build a public bathroom—or just about anything, for that matter. San Francisco’s city government has a long and storied history of erecting bureaucratic roadblocks to new construction—from much-needed apartments buildings to a trash can. Blame for such a ludicrously expensive bathroom should thus primarily lay at the feet of an incompetent, regulation-happy city government.

A $1.7 million toilet is a uniquely San Franciscan tale. It’s a story of fiscal irresponsibility, yes, but also a story of government ineptitude—and it shows what can happen when bureaucracy and regulation clouds common sense.

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San Francisco politicians will gather at the Noe Valley Town Square Wednesday afternoon to congratulate themselves for securing state money for a long-desired toilet in the northeast corner of the charming plaza.

Another public toilet in a city with far too few of them is excellent. But the details of this particular dresser? They’re mind-boggling, maddening and encapsulating so much of what’s wrong with our city government.

The toilet — just one loo in 150 square feet of space — is projected to cost $1.7 million, about the same as a single-family home in this wildly overpriced city. And it won’t be ready for use until 2025.

Assemblymember Matt Haney (D-San Francisco) secured the $1.7 million from the state for the toilet after hearing “loud and clear” from the community that families needed a bathroom. The plumbing is already there, added when the plaza was constructed six years ago, but there was never money for the actual bathroom. Until Haney stepped in.

The former San Francisco supervisor said the Recreation and Parks Department told him the going rate for one public bathroom was $1.7 million so he secured the full amount, not questioning the pricetag.

“They told me $1.7 million, and I got $1.7 million,” Haney explained. “I didn’t have the option of bringing home less of the bacon when it comes to building a toilet. A half a toilet or a toilet-maybe-someday is not much use to anyone.”

True, but instead we have a toilet-maybe-in-more-than-two-years that could have paid to house a family instead. So why is a public bathroom so insanely expensive, and why does it take so long to build? A joint statement from Rec and Park and the Department of Public Works, which will work together to build this extravagant bathroom, pointed to several reasons.

For one thing, the cost to build anything in San Francisco is exorbitant. The city is the most expensive in the world to build in — even topping Tokyo, Hong Kong and New York City. We’re No. 1! Even for places to go no. 1.

Like everywhere, construction costs have risen 20% to 30% in the past couple of years due to global supply chain issues and the rising costs of fuel, labor and materials. But like always, there’s a certain preciousness to the process in San Francisco. (Just look at the years-long, ongoing quest to design and manufacture bespoke city trash cans.)

“It’s important to note that public projects and their overall cost estimates don’t just reflect the price of erecting structures,” the statement said. “They include planning, drawing, permits, reviews and public outreach.”

For a toilet? Apparently so.

An architect will draw plans for the bathroom that the city will share with the community for feedback. It will also head to the Arts Commission’s Civic Design Review committee comprised of two architects, a landscape architect and two other design professionals who, under city charter, “conduct a multi-phase review” of all city projects on public land — ranging from buildings to bathrooms to historic plaques, fences and lamps.

The web-page describing that process states the point is to ensure “that each project’s design is appropriate to its context in the urban environment, and that structures of the highest design quality reflect their civic stature.”

sorry kid I know you’ve got to go, but have you considered the context of the urban environment?

The project will then head to the Rec and Park Commission and to the Board of Supervisors. According to the city’s statement, it will also be subject to review under the California Environmental Quality Act. Then, the city will put the project up for bid.

“Once we start the project, we’ll have a clearer timeline, but we expect to be able to complete the project in 2025,” the statement read.

The city said the $1.7 million estimate “is extremely rough” and budgets “for the worst-case scenario due to the onerous demands and unpredictable costs levied by PG&E,” the possibility code requirements could change during the project and in case other unexpected circumstances come up

The city is in a legal battle with Pacific Gas and Electric Co. over the city’s claim that the utility has slowed projects and forced them to be more expensive unless they obtain electricity directly from the utility instead of the city’s Public Utilities Commission.

José Segue (center), San Francisco resident, occupies a table for himself and a friend at Noe Valley Town Square on Tuesday, October 18, 2022 in San Francisco, Calif. Noe Valley Town Square will be the site of the construction of a toilet stall that will cost $1.7 million and take more than two years to build.

Lea Suzuki / The Chronicle

The bathroom will be built by unions whose workers will “earn a living wage and benefits, including paid sick time, leave and training.”

“While this isn’t the cheapest way to build, it reflects San Francisco’s values,” the statement read.

I’m a union member myself, and of course the majority of our public projects should be union built. But does a $1.7 million single bathroom really reflect San Francisco’s values? I don’t think so.

The supervisors in 2019 approved a Project Labor Agreement between the city and unions that requires union labor for all “covered projects” — but this bathroom isn’t one of them because it’s not worth $10 million and it didn’t come from bond funding.

There are other, much cheaper options. I e-mailed Tom Hardiman, executive director of the Modular Building Institute in Charlottesville, Virginia, and asked him to guess what San Francisco was spending to build one toilet in 150 square feet of space.

“I’m going to guess high, I think, and say $200,000,” he wrote back.

I seemed to nearly give him a heart attack by telling him the actual figure in a subsequent phone call.

“This is to build one public restroom?” he asked incredibly. “What are they making it out of — gold and fine Italian marble? It would be comical if it wasn’t so tragically flawed.”

He then said he’d do some research and found a cheaper option within minutes. He said Chad Kaufman, CEO of Public Restroom Company, just delivered and installed seven modular bathrooms in Los Angeles for the same price San Francisco will spend to build one. These are not Porta Potties, but instead have concrete walls with stucco exteriors and nice fixtures with plumbing.

“There will be some onsite labor which absolutely can be union,” Hardiman said, pointing to crane operators, laborers and plumbers.

And, he said, they could be delivered in eight months.

Phil Ginsburg, director of the Recreation and Parks Department, said many park systems around the country use pre-fabricated restrooms, which are much cheaper — and he hopes San Francisco will become more politically open to them too. The department has occasionally used them in the past — including at the Redwood Grove playground in McLaren Park — and it’s unclear why one seems off the table for Noe Valley.

“Given how much the public values ​​and needs public restrooms, I would hope these could be more common features in our parks that don’t currently have restrooms,” he said. “Our parks continue to need investment and every dollar saved by installing one allows us to make additional improvements elsewhere in our parks.”

Rudy Gonzalez, secretary treasurer of the San Francisco Building and Construction Trades Council, said that the $1.7 million pricetag sounded just plain unbelievable and asked how the city came up with that figure.

Unions have pushed back on modular housing, and only a few projects in San Francisco have advanced despite being faster and cheaper to build. Gonzalez said he’d want to know more about the pre-fabricated bathrooms and whether workers on those projects would be paid prevailing wages.

Haney, a staunch labor supporter, said he’d be open to modular bathrooms if they didn’t violate the Public Labor Agreement.

He’ll be at Wednesday’s toilet celebration along with State Sen. Scott Wiener and Supervisor Rafael Mandelman. All three seemed to have their enthusiasm for the project somewhat flushed when told of the details. Wiener said it pointed to the city’s “self-inflicted wounds” that make every project take way too long.

Mandelman said he appreciates Haney’s efforts and is glad the plaza will eventually have a bathroom, but he said the price and timeline exemplify how the city’s project management process is broken.

“We seem to be all tied up in knots in a thousand different ways and I don’t know which of those knots is responsible for this particular example,” he said.

An example of one such knot emerged this week when the city’s Human Resources Department acknowledged it takes an average of 255 days to hire one city worker. But, in fairness, city departments are working to tackle the problem. Why haven’t San Francisco leaders addressed the high costs of public projects?

Todd David, a Noe Valley resident who pushed for the creation of the town square, said neighbors are delighted they’ll eventually have a toilet after pushing for one for many years. But he’s getting lots of questions about why it costs so much.

“The pricetag’s a shocking number,” he said. “Oh my god, this s—’s expensive.”

In this case, quite literally.

Heather Knight is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. Email: hknight@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @hknightsf

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SAN FRANCISCO – Former San Francisco City Hall public official Mohammed Nuru agreed in a plea agreement filed today to plead guilty to honest services wire fraud, announced Acting United States Attorney Stephanie M. Hinds, Federal Bureau of Investigation Special Agent in Charge Craig D. Fair, and Internal Revenue Service–Criminal Investigation Special Agent in Charge Mark H. Pearson.  

Today’s development follows the January 15, 2020, 79-page federal complaint filed against then San Francisco Department of Public Works (DPW) Director Mohammed Nuru charging him with public corruption and describing a long-running scheme involving multiple bribes and kickbacks during his tenure as DPW’s Director.  Nuru, 59, of San Francisco, served as DPW’s Director from 2011 until charges were brought against him in 2020.  Nuru was also charged in a second federal complaint filed on January 28, 2020, with lying to a federal agent in the course of the San Francisco City Hall corruption investigation.  Today, in anticipation of entering his plea agreement resolving his cases, Nuru was arraigned today on an information – a charging document – that charges him with his sweeping scheme to defraud the San Francisco public of its right to his honest services in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§ 1343 and 1346.

“Mohammed Nuru admits to a staggering amount of public corruption in his plea agreement,” said Acting United States Attorney Stephanie M. Hinds.  “For years, Nuru held a powerful and well-paid public leadership position at San Francisco City Hall, but instead of serving the public, Nuru served himself.  He took continuous bribes from the contractors, developers, and entities he regulated.  He now faces a prison sentence for enriching himself at the expense of the public as he sat in high office.  Federal authorities will investigate public corruption wherever it leads in San Francisco and throughout the district.”  

“Today’s announcement, while significant, is by no means the end of the FBI’s investigation into the corrupt conduct we have uncovered in San Francisco city government,”  said FBI Special Agent in Charge D. Fair.  “We will continue to hold accountable those who seek to personally benefit by corrupting the fair administration of public business and we will persist in our commitment to protect the integrity of the institutions that serve the people of San Francisco.”

“Our communities place great trust and responsibility in our public figures.  Mohammed Nuru ultimately betrayed this trust when he abused his power to defraud the City and County of San Francisco and its people,” said IRS Criminal Investigation Special Agent in Charge Mark H. Pearson.  “We will not tolerate public corruption and will hold perpetrators accountable for their actions.  Today’s guilty plea is a direct result of the hard work and dedication of IRS Criminal Investigation and our law enforcement partners towards obtaining justice.”

Nuru signed today’s plea agreement and the agreement has been filed with the United States District Court in preparation for Nuru’s upcoming appearance to enter his guilty plea orally.  As the plea agreement outlines, before Nuru was appointed Director of DPW in 2011 he became DPW’s Deputy Director of Operations in 2000.  The Deputy Director of Operations is DPW’s second most senior position, behind only the Director.  In 2014, Nuru was also appointed to the Board of the Transbay Joint Powers Authority (TJPA) and eventually served as its Chair.  As Deputy Director and eventually Director of DPW, and as Chair of the TJPA, Nuru exercised great influence over San Francisco (the City) business and policy, including public contracts, permits, and construction projects.  His power and influence extended beyond DPW’s jurisdiction to numerous other City departments and agencies, making him one of the most powerful public officials in the City.

Nuru admits in his plea agreement to a spectrum of public corruption involving bribery and kickbacks he received while in DPW leadership.  His admissions are summarized below:

Walter Wong:

In his plea agreement, Nuru admits he received a stream of bribes from Walter Wong.  Wong did business in the City through Walter Wong Construction, among other businesses. In exchange for Wong’s bribes, Nuru helped Wong secure City contracts.  Sometimes Nuru provided Wong with confidential insider City information on competitors’ bids or specifications.  At other times Nuru allowed Wong to structure the requirements for the City’s Request for Proposals (RFP) for projects ahead of time, to tailor their requirements to ensure that Wong’s company would be the most-qualified bidder.  Nuru also helped Wong expedite permit approvals.

Nuru admits in his plea agreement that his “corrupt relationship” with Wong began in approximately 2008 when Nuru was the Deputy Director for Operations at DPW.  Wong installed a gate for free at Nuru’s San Francisco home in exchange for future business with DPW and the City. Wong continued to perform construction services for free, or nearly free, at Nuru’s San Francisco home and later primarily at Nuru’s vacation ranch property in Colusa County. 

Nuru admits that, in exchange for Wong providing construction and other things of value, he exercised his official influence and took actions to benefit Wong.  In one example outlined in the plea agreement, Nuru used DPW’s emergency contract process, which did not require a public bidding process, to direct construction work to Walter Wong Construction on a navigation center located at 1515 South Van Ness Street and on the Jelani House (a housing shelter), resulting in City payments to Wong’s company during fiscal years 2017-2018 and 2019-2020.  In another example, Nuru used his position and official influence to direct DPW, the Market Street Association, and the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission to purchase Christmas lights from one of Wong’s businesses, regularly leading to tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of purchases.

Nuru further admits in his plea agreement that:

 o between approximately 2008 and January 2020, Wong provided in excess of $260,000 in labor and materials for work on Nuru’s San Francisco home and Colusa County ranch.
 o Wong paid for home furnishings for Nuru, including a chandelier, kitchen appliances, and furniture.
 o Wong paid for Nuru to travel to China multiple times and to South America on one occasion, which included reimbursing Nuru in cash for the cost of international flights.  Wong paid for Nuru and Sandra Zuniga, his girlfriend at the time, to accompany Nuru to South America and paid for their stay at the Ritz-Carlton in Santiago, Chile. 
 o On multiple occasions, Wong handed Nuru envelopes of cash, often as much as $5,000 at a time. 

Walter Wong was charged in June 2020 with conspiracy to defraud the public of its right to honest services and with conspiracy to engage in money laundering, both involving Nuru.  Wong entered a guilty plea and agreed to cooperate with the government’s San Francisco City Hall corruption investigation.

Multimillion-Dollar Mixed-Use Development:

Nuru admits he received free travel, gifts, and benefits, for working with Walter Wong to use Nuru’s official position to benefit a billionaire developer from China, referred to as DEVELOPER 1 in the plea agreement, who was developing a large multimillion-dollar mixed use project in San Francisco.  Wong, who worked as a consultant for DEVELOPER 1 on several of his large developments in the City, introduced Nuru to DEVELOPER 1.  Nuru met with Wong, another Department of Building Inspection official, DEVELOPER 1, and others over dinner on multiple occasions and discussed DEVELOPER 1’s projects.  Nuru never paid for the dinners.  Nuru admits that he also met with DEVELOPER 1 multiple times in China.  According to Nuru, DEVELOPER 1 owned multiple hotels in China, including five-star hotels.  Nuru received gifts from him, including free hotel stays. 

Nuru admits that, in exchange, he used his official position and influence to help DEVELOPER 1 obtain necessary approvals for his large, multimillion-dollar mixed-use project.  Nuru admits, among other things, that he told Sandra Zuniga that DEVELOPER 1 was upset because he had spent large amounts of money and had provided “a whole list of things” that Nuru said “we need to get done[.]”  Nuru admits that whenever DEVELOPER 1 or one of his employees notified him of an issue, Nuru directed one of his DPW managers to solve the problem and expedite the process.  Nuru also used his official influence with other City officials to solve problems encountered by DEVELOPER 1 that fell within the other City officials’ area of responsibility.

Recology:

Recology Inc. is a waste management company headquartered in San Francisco and the parent company of Sunset Scavenger Company, Golden Gate Disposal & Recycling Company, and Recology San Francisco (referred to as the “SF Recology Group” and, collectively with Recology Inc., as “Recology”).  Recology Inc. provided refuse collection and disposal services for residential and commercial customers in the City, as well as for the City itself, through the SF Recology Group.

As Director of DPW, Nuru presided over the process governing the rates Recology could charge in San Francisco.  Nuru recommended to the Rate Board whether to approve any rate increase for Recology.  Nuru also influenced “tipping fee” rates that Recology charged DPW when DPW dumped materials at a Recology facility, Sustainable Crushing.  Nuru could approve, deny, or affect operational changes that Recology wanted to make in San Francisco which, Nuru admits in his plea agreement, gave him the ability in his official capacity to affect Recology’s business. 

Nuru admits he accepted numerous valuable items from Recology and used his official position to help Recology’s business.  Among other things, Recology paid for soil to be delivered to Nuru’s ranch property in Colusa County, for expensive meals for Nuru, and for a two-night trip to New York on the City’s business in December 2017. 

Nuru admits that he also requested Recology to pay, and Recology did pay, hundreds of thousands of dollars to a San Francisco non-profit (Non-Profit A) in the form of donations for a cleaning program known as Giant Sweep.  Non-Profit A would then donate the payments to another non-profit that administered funds for the Giant Sweep program.  Nuru admitted he could then access the funds for a variety of other uses—including procuring goods and services for staff meals and appreciation events, volunteer programs, merchandise, community support, and events from specific vendors—in addition to their originally designated purpose for Giant Sweep.  From 2014 through the end of 2019, Recology donated approximately $150,000 per year for Giant Sweep, in $30,000 installments—for a total of approximately $750,000.

Nuru also admits he requested Recology hire his son.  Recology hired him and paid him, between 2015 and 2017, approximately $17,000.  Recology also funded a paid internship for Nuru’s son at a different non-profit organization and, between 2017 and 2018, paid approximately $23,600 to fund the paid internship.

Nuru admits he requested that Recology fund his DPW holiday parties.  Between 2016 and 2019, Recology paid approximately $60,000 for that purpose.  Recology made the payments through the Lefty O’Doul’s Foundation, a non-profit organization run by Nick Bovis. 

Two former Recology executives, Paul F. Giusti and John F. Porter, have been charged in this investigation.  Giusti was charged in November 2020, and Porter was charged in April 2021.  Both men were charged with bribery of Nuru and money laundering involving Nuru.  Giusti pleaded guilty in August 2021 to engaging in a conspiracy to bribe Nuru and is cooperating with the government’s San Francisco City Hall corruption investigation.  Porter’s charges remain pending.

The three subsidiaries of Recology, Inc. now have new leadership and have implemented enhanced corporate compliance programs to end any corrupt practices.  Recology resolved corporate charges brought against them through a deferred prosecution agreement with the government.  Pursuant to the agreement, the companies paid a $36 million fine, agreed to implement enhanced corporate compliance programs, and agreed to fully cooperate in the government’s San Francisco City Hall corruption investigation.

Nick Bovis:

Nuru admits in his plea agreement that he received multiple bribes from restaurateur Nick Bovis.  The bribes were in exchange for Nuru using his official acts and influence to assist, or to promise to assist, in public business opportunities with the City.  The bribes included free meals and entertainment for Nuru, his family, and associates at restaurants owned by Bovis and thousands of dollars in free appliances for Nuru’s ranch property.  Nuru also anticipated and expected tens of thousands of dollars in kickbacks from proceeds that Bovis would earn from the City concessions or contracts awarded due to Nuru’s official acts or influence to assist Bovis.

In one plea agreement example, Nuru admits he helped Bovis in a plan to win a bid for a restaurant lease at San Francisco International Airport (SFO).  Bovis expected to make money from the SFO concession, and Nuru expected Bovis would continue to provide bribes in exchange for Nuru’s help with the airport concession process and other public contracts.

In another example, Nuru admits he gave Bovis a price list of appliances that Nuru wanted for his ranch in or about 2018, a time when Bovis was seeking Nuru’s assistance with the SFO concession and other City business opportunities.  Bovis purchased the appliances and brought them to Nuru’s ranch.  Nuru accepted them as an exchange for his continued official acts and influence to help Bovis, and he did not pay for them.  The appliances were worth approximately $22,000.

Nick Bovis pleaded guilty in May 2020 to wire fraud and honest services wire fraud involving Nuru and agreed to cooperate in the government’s San Francisco City Hall corruption investigation. 

Florence Kong:

Nuru admits in his plea agreement that he accepted a gold Rolex watch from Bay Area businesswoman Florence Kong.  The watch was valued at approximately $36,550.  Nuru admits he used his official position to benefit Kong’s businesses and did so in exchange for the Rolex and for cash, free meals, and other items of value provided by Kong, including an iron fence that Kong installed at Nuru’s ranch.  In one example, Nuru states that he used his official position to direct business to SFR Recovery Inc., a recycling business that Kong owned. 

Florence Kong was charged and pleaded guilty to bribery of Nuru and to making false statements to FBI agents during the investigation.  She was sentenced in February 2021 to one year and one day in prison and ordered to pay a $95,000 fine.

Balmore Hernandez, William Gilmartin, & Alan Varela:

Nuru admits in his plea agreement that between 2013 and January 2020 he accepted a series of bribes and kickbacks from Balmore Hernandez, William Gilmartin, and Alan Varela in exchange for past and future official actions benefitting their City business ventures.  Nuru received free meals and entertainment, cash, and free labor and materials for his ranch – including a brand new tractor.  Nuru also expected to receive a portion of the proceeds  from anticipated City contracts awarded to them or their associates as a result of Nuru’s official acts or influence on their behalf.

In one example, Nuru admitted he helped Varela and Gilmartin’s joint venture win a DPW supply contract and a related lease with the Port of San Francisco (the “Port”) to operate an asphalt recycling plant and a concrete plant on the Port’s land.  In the early stages, Nuru helped the group prepare their proposal by providing them inside non-public information on the project.  The non-public information was delivered to Hernandez through emails or phone calls or through regular dinning meetings in San Mateo with Gilmartin and Hernandez.  Gilmartin paid approximately $20,000 for the dinners, with the parties agreeing that Nuru’s dinners were worth approximately $7,000.

Nuru admits that Gilmartin promised him $100,000 for his official assistance to pressure a large developer to select one of Gilmartin and Varela’s joint-venture partners for a large project in San Francisco.  The large developer complied with Nuru’s request because, as Nuru admits, the large developer needed DPW approvals for the project and for other large developments in the City.

Nuru admits that he received approximately $25,000 in cash from Hernandez and received approximately $250,000 in free labor and materials from Hernandez at Nuru’s ranch. 

Nuru also requested the group give him a tractor.  In February 2019, Alan Varela delivered a new tractor to the Nuru’s ranch, a benefit valued at approximately $20,000.

Balmore Hernandez was also charged in connection with this investigation.  He pleaded guilty to honest services wire fraud in October 2020 and agreed to cooperate in the government’s San Francisco City Hall corruption investigation. 

William Gilmartin was charged in connection with this investigation.  He pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit honest services wire fraud in May 2021 and agreed to cooperate in the government’s San Francisco City Hall corruption investigation.
Alan Varela was charged in connection with this investigation.  He pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit honest services wire fraud and was sentenced in September 2021 to two years in prison and ordered to pay a $127,000 fine. 

Sandra Zuniga Money Laundering:

Nuru admits that in or about 2010 he bought a 10-acre lot in Colusa County and developed it into his vacation ranch with free labor and materials provided by City contractors seeking favors from him. Nuru admits he also used the proceeds of his crimes to pay the mortgage.  To conceal and launder the source of the proceeds, Nuru states he funneled the money through Sandra Zuniga who made the monthly $1,000 mortgage payments out of her checking account. Nuru admits that from 2014 through August 2017, he typically gave Zuniga approximately $1,000 per month, generally in cash, and she deposited the money into her bank account.  She then made the $1,000 payment towards the mortgage.  In this way, Zuniga paid at least $42,000 of the mortgage.

Zuniga was charged and pleaded guilty in March 2021 to engaging in a conspiracy to launder money with Nuru.  She agreed to cooperate in the government’s San Francisco City Hall corruption investigation.

Other Bribes:

Nuru admits in his plea agreement that around 2018 he accepted a bribe of $20,000 in cash from a former government employee in exchange for Nuru using his position to help a particular person obtain an engineering job with the City. Nuru received the cash in three installments of $10,000, $5,000, and $5,000.  Ultimately, the individual failed to maintain employment with the City.

Nuru also admits he accepted cash bribes from a prominent developer in San Francisco.  The cash bribes usually consisted of a few thousand dollars.  The developer would later call Nuru when he had any problems with DPW-related approvals or other matters that Nuru could help resolve. 

In his plea agreement, Nuru admits guilt and agrees to plead guilty to one count of honest services wire fraud, in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§ 1343 and 1346.  If convicted of the count, he faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison and a fine of $250,000 or not more than the greater of twice the gross gain or twice the gross loss of the crime. 

The government indicates in the plea agreement its intent to ask for up to a 108 month (9 year) sentence for Nuru.  However, any sentence imposed by the court will follow only after the court’s consideration of the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and the federal statute governing the imposition of a sentence, 18 U.S.C. § 3553.

Today, in a procedural step towards orally entering his guilty plea, Nuru was arraigned and pleaded not guilty before United States Chief Magistrate Judge Joseph C. Spero to an information charging him with a count of honest services wire fraud in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§ 1343 and 1346. 

Nuru’s next appearance is currently set before United States District Judge Susan Illston on January 14, 2022, at which he is currently scheduled to formally enter his guilty plea pursuant to his plea agreement.  Nuru remains out of custody on bond.
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This case is part of a larger federal investigation targeting public corruption in the City and County of San Francisco.  To date, 12 individuals and three corporate entities have been charged, including two high-ranking San Francisco public officials, Nuru and Harlan Kelly.  Multiple city contractors and facilitators have been charged.  Allegations in the complaint filed against Harlan Kelly assert that he received thousands of dollars in airfare, meals, jewelry, and travel expenses, along with repair work on his house.   

The case is being prosecuted by the Corporate and Securities Fraud Section of the U.S. Attorney’s Office.  The case is being investigated by the FBI and IRS-Criminal Investigation. 

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