[UPDATE: Let's see here, you can discover what some local celebrities think about this idea here at Manatease's YouTube Channel and, well, here's an uncredited single-panel comic on the subject discovered by LocalColorist, see comment.]

This was the scene the other day near Golden Gate Park’s Strybing Arboretum, aka San Francisco Botanical Garden. These protesters were politely picketing San Francisco’s semi-public, semi-photo-op Budget Town Hall at the County Fair Building when an elected official walked up and asked, “What kind of protest is this?”  

Indeed. These picketers, called the “Society people” by their opponents, support the idea of charging non-residents $7 to get into Strybing. Why? So there’s enough money around such that three Strybing-dedicated gardeners won’t get laid off during our Great Recession.

This gaggle of self-described “plant people” certainly are timely, as the Board of the Recreation and Park Department (RPD) will decide this auslander admission issue on Thursday, March 4th at City Hall. The question after that would be how the San Francisco Board of Supervisors will react.

Now, unlike last year, RPD isn’t having any big meetings to air out public concerns, probably because RPD knows how they would go – 250 San Franciscans would show up and the bulk of them would be strongly opposed to the charging of any fee to any one at any time. 

AFAIK, the 2010 plan is similar to the more recent of the two 2009 plans in that only people who reside outside of the City and County of San Francisco would be charged. The Big Question is how many nonresidents would show up to pony up some cash and how much the program would cost to implement. After this program is up and running, the Next Obvious Step would be to charge San Francisco residents as well. Would that next step come in a matter of weeks, months, or years? There are no promises from anyone on that score.

The Save the Botanical Garden people are saying that not charging $7 would amount to ”depriving community residents of a tranquil place to visit.” Does Strybing need to become a “world class arboretum” in order to remain a “tranquil place” to visit? It would be easy to argue with the Society on this point.

Now, let’s have a go at the official FAQ:

“Isn’t a non-resident fee the first step toward a fee for everyone?”

The answer is yes. Hells yes, obviously.

“Isn’t the fee taking the Botanical Garden a step closer to privatization?”

No. This is a red herring, from the Sierra Club, for one, I think.

“Won’t setting up the booths to collect the fee and bringing in new workers just cost more than you’ll collect? Won’t setting up the booths to collect the fee and bringing in new workers just cost more than you’ll collect?”

Almost certainly not. The older “Cadillac Plan” of spending vast sums on infrastructure to enable the charging of fees might have had that risk, but there’s no reason that a well-run program, particularly one that makes the use of volunteers, wouldn’t net at least a little money.

“Why doesn’t the SF Botanical Garden Society just do more?”

Good question. The Garden Society, and  they’re by no means alone on this, want to spend Other People’s Money on their pet projects. Some of them figure that Strybing needs 16 dedicated gardeners to become “world-class” and that they’ll never ever get the funding for that many from the City of San Francisco, recession or no recession. 

Here’s the thing – “saving the botanical garden” will have the effect of excluding hundreds of thousands of people from Strybing. If you are a “plant person” then this is a small price to pay. And actually, plant people might even prefer to keep out the riff-raff. So, charging admission is a double win – more plants and fewer people.

If you’re a people person, you might prefer the “Keep the Arboretum Free” point of view. I guarantee you that the average person motivated enough to attend the public meetings last year would strongly favor having fewer gardeners around if maintaining the current crew meant throwing up a pay wall by installing checkpoints Charlie.

We’ll see how it goes.

Now, was this a grass roots movement in front of the Budget Town Hall? You know, this group of Society people and the P.R. volk with their identical signs and their unsigned petitions

You Make The Call.