'Sanctuary city' picks up trash for Federal government shutdown over border wall

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/01/04/sanctuary-city-picks-up-tr.html

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The Wall is stupid. The government shutdown is stupid. But if supporters of a sanctuary city get credit for picking up the slack, they also get the blame for turning the place into a dump the last couple of weeks. The Presidio isn’t exactly overrun with Republicans.

I knew, even before clicking the link, that the sanctuary city in question would be SF.

Uh… that’s pretty presumptive there, considering how many out-of-town/state/country tourists the Bay Area in general gets on any given day. (Some of the culprits are locals, Im sure; but certainly not all or even most.)

Until I moved out this way, I had no idea how many people from all over the world visit here constantly.

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From the article:
The Presidio Trust is funded by a different fiscal authority than those affected by the government shutdown, according to the GGNRA, and will remain open, including the Presidio Visitor Center. The Presidio Trust is picking up garbage and providing restroom services at Crissy Field in coordination with the National Park Service.

I imagine the city had to negotiate with the labor union to extend sanitation services. It’s not like they can just say, “Hey, go out there and do it!”

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I do not believe anyone forgets that San Francisco is currently famous for street-side human excrement, and seriously draconian approaches to “helping” the homeless.

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What the fuck is wrong with people that they leave their trash lying around like this in the first place?

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I live near Yosemite and overheard from a tourist, “I don’t live here”

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I hope they locked Yellowstone down like the crown jewel of the continent it is.

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Those dam progressives, what will they do next?

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The jewel analogy is very apt. National Parks are tiny and precious, but ultimately useless in the face of the ever-expanding destruction of the natural environment that we are causing. They are increasingly small islands of nature in a man-made world. Biodiversity is collapsing and we are in the middle of a mass-extinction event.

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They could lock down the major road entrances. But the park is far too porous for it to be feasible to keep everyone out - it’s not as if the whole thing has the Great Wall of Trump surrounding it.

The porosity of the National Parks was a major problem a few shutdowns ago - hikers were in the backcountry of a number of National Parks without having got the word that they were suddenly trespassing. (I believe that some were arrested, but charges were dropped since they were legal when they went in, and were already leaving when they were caught.)

In the same shutdown, they announced that the entire Appalachian Trail was ‘closed’ - which immediately got pushback from various other landowners. While the the NPS supervises the Trail, it owns only about 40% of the corridor, and the rest runs over a patchwork of public and private land - and the NPS has no constitutional authority to demand that a state, or a private landowner, exclude visitors.

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I believe that the current interpretation of the law would require Federal law enforcement to attempt to block the City of San Francisco from doing this. It’s not illegal to volunteer for the government, but 31 USC 1342 makes it illegal for the government to accept voluntary services when shut down.

I understand that someone’s attempting to advance the case that all civil aviation should be grounded during the shutdown, because TSA inspectors are not responding to an emergency placing life or property in immediate jeopardy, and that the grounding of civil aviation would likewise not present an immediate hazard to life and property. It would get really interesting if a judge agrees - and equally interesting to see what interpretation of the law a judge uses to _dis_agree.

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