A Digital Journal - San Francisco Public Works
In the Works
March 2025
In just one day, Public Works urban forestry crews and nearly 200 community volunteers of all ages made it their mission to plant 110 new street trees in the heart of the City – an ambitious operation that creates consequential environmental benefits and beautifies San Francisco not just today but for future generations.
FEATURE STORIES
Arbor Day 2025: Growing community, planting success
Streets in the Tenderloin, South of Market and Western addition now are a bit greener and more inviting thanks to a one-day planting blitz on Arbor Day that grew San Francisco’s urban forest by 110 trees.
Real People. Real Work.
This month, Public Works launched its new “Real People. Real Work.” campaign to showcase the breadth and depth of the department’s work through the lens of the men and women who perform the work year-round.
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Public Works Crews Bolt into Action
Public Works crews have been working along roughly eight blocks of Valencia Street to remove a bike lane from a previous pilot program and make way for a new design.
Public Works arborist crews show young volunteers how to finish off the tree basins after the saplings are planted.
Arbor Day 2025
Growing community, planting success
Leavenworth. Larkin. Van Ness. Turk. Golden Gate. McAllister. Fulton. Fell. Lafayette. Hickory. Oak. Howard. Eddy. Polk. Hayes. Lily. Each of these San Francisco streets now is a bit greener and more inviting thanks to a one-day planting blitz on Arbor Day that grew San Francisco’s urban forest by 110 trees.
Freeing a young tree from its growing container sometimes involves foot work to loosen the impacted roots.
These new trees don’t just beautify our neighborhoods; they also are an essential component of the City’s ecosystem and provide magnificent environmental and social benefits. While Arbor Day is a once-a-year event where we join together to celebrate trees, our job is to care for them every day – with skill, doggedness and pride.
Volunteers put 110 new trees in the ground, from the South of Market to the Western Addition.
As stewards of San Francisco’s 125,000-plus street trees, Public Works not only maintains the urban forest, we also look for opportunities to expand it. Arbor Day traditionally is our biggest planting day of the year. We hosted the Arbor Day 2025 event on March 8.
A bird’s-eye view of the Arbor Day event kickoff ceremony.
Nearly 200 community volunteers worked alongside our Bureau of Urban Forestry crews to plant trees in the Tenderloin, South of Market and Western Addition neighborhoods. Mayor Daniel Lurie grabbed a shovel and put a Japanese zelkova in the ground on the 600 block of McAllister Street. Supervisors Bilal Mahmood and Matt Dorsey planted trees, too.
Mayor Daniel Lurie plants a tree on McAllister Street.
In all, we planted 15 different species, among them Persian ironwoods, zelkovas, bay laurels, trident maples and golden rains.
This young tree gets outfitted with a stake to keep it steady.
Alice Chen, who turned 5 years old last October, got to plant her first tree on Arbor Day.
Her job? Stomping on the dirt surrounding the just-planted sapling.
“Like this. See?” she said, pounding one foot, then the other, back and forth, back and forth, to compact the dirt to keep the young tree steady in its new home.
This budding civic volunteer takes part in the Arbor Day action.
Throughout the morning, community volunteers and Public Works staff worked together in small groups, planting and staking one tree at a time. Their efforts followed a lot of prep work that occurred in the weeks and days before – from scoping out potential planting sites to readying the tree basins.
Hello new street tree! Thanks for joining San Francisco’s urban forest!
It’s work our Bureau of Urban Forestry staff does on a daily basis, but for Arbor Day, with more than 100 trees taking root, the scope of the job balloons. Now, with the trees in the ground, we will water them regularly for the next three years until they’re well established.
A Public Works arborist stands high on a ladder to pound in a wooden brace around a just-planted street tree
Our annual Arbor Day event goes beyond expanding the urban forest. We also host a community fair – held this year on the grounds of Civic Center Secondary School and drawing hundreds of people – where folks of all ages can have fun.
The sky-high bucket truck rides our arborists offer are always a crowd favorite.
Riding a bucket truck high into the sky is a top attraction at the annual Public Works Arbor Day Fair.
So is building wooden planter boxes with our carpenters and then planting them with herbs.
Public Works’ carpenters help fair-goers build wooden planter boxes, which they then can plant with fresh herbs.
Visitors got a chance to check out information booths to learn about pollinators, water conservation, birds, drought-tolerant plants and other topics focused on environmental stewardship.
Representatives from community organizations and City departments are on hand at the fair to promote environmentally friendly programs.
And there even was a small herd of grazing goats on hand, snacking on hay as they waited for a friendly pat on the head by passersby.
A small herd of grazing goats join the Arbor Day festivities.
Next month’s Neighborhood Beautification Day on Saturday, April 5. Join San Francisco Public Works for a day of greening and neighborhood pride in District 1 (Anza Vista, Richmond, and more).
There will be 7-10 worksites where volunteers will garden, mulch, pick up litter, or abate graffiti. The projects and tasks will be different, depending on the site and community group's requests.
PUBLIC WORKS
BY THE NUM83R5
YEAR TO DATE
1,931
POTHOLES
FILLED
1,151
TREES
PRUNED
136
CURB RAMPS
CONSTRUCTED
89
BLOCKS RESURFACED
2,559
TONS OF DEBRIS COLLECTED
A digital version of a Real People. Real Work. campaign poster at Drumm and Market streets features carpenter Sheldon Gustafson.
They get their hands dirty to clean our streets. They pave roads and build libraries, police stations, firehouses and reimagined streetscapes. They deftly handle power tools to fix public buildings, wield paint brushes to vanquish graffiti and climb high into the sky to care for trees.
They are San Francisco Public Works employees who strive every day to keep the City clean, safe, resilient, beautiful and accessible for all.
This month, Public Works launched its new “Real People. Real Work.” campaign to showcase the breadth and depth of the department’s work through the lens of the men and women who perform the work year-round.
A collage of portraits of the eight Public Works employees featured in the department's new Real People. Real Work. campaign.
Top row, left to right: Patty Solis – Architect; Sheldon Gustafson – Carpenter; Leonard Doss – Graffiti Buster; Danielle Chan – Landscape Architect
Bottom row, left to right: Janey Chan – Structural Engineer; Fabiola Vega – Asphalt Crew Truck Driver; Brittany Brandon – Hot Spots Cleaning Crew Supervisor; Nili Niu – Arborist
The campaign spotlights eight employees who are representative of the department’s expansive portfolio. Through their stories and journeys, we learn about Public Works’ services, projects and programs and how they fit into the City’s policy goals to, for example, activate public spaces, combat climate change and bolster resiliency.
The multimedia campaign, created in-house by our communications team, includes engaging videos, compelling podcasts and short write-ups where the employees tell their stories.
A digital version of a Real People. Real Work. campaign poster at Sutter and Market streets features architect Patty Solis.
Anchoring the package are visually striking portraits that capture each employee embedded in their work environments with an essential tool of their trade. In one image, a determined graffiti-buster, covered in paint, wields his paint roller after wiping out a tag. In another, a landscape architect cradles the blueprint for a colorful Chinatown streetscape she designed. The images reveal the pride and confidence they have in their work serving the people of San Francisco.
Anchoring the package are visually striking portraits that capture each employee embedded in their work environments with an essential tool of their trade. In one image, a determined graffiti-buster, covered in paint, wields his paint roller after wiping out a tag. In another, a landscape architect cradles the blueprint for a colorful Chinatown streetscape she designed. The images reveal the pride and confidence they have in their work serving the people of San Francisco.
A print version of a Real People. Real Work. campaign poster at Howard and Third streets features asphalt crew truck driver Fabiola Vega.
As part of the campaign, more than four dozen 12-foot-high posters – both print and digital versions – are displayed on JCDecaux sidewalk kiosks, largely in the downtown neighborhoods.
Passersby can scan QR codes on the posters to explore the campaign website – sfpublicworks.org/realpeople – where the multimedia package for each featured employee is housed. Their stories also will be highlighted on Public Works’ social media platforms, including Instagram, Bluesky, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Threads and SoundCloud.
A print version of a Real People. Real Work. campaign poster in front of The Embarcadero YMCA across from Pier 14 features landscape architect Danielle Chan.
The Real People. Real Work. campaign comes to life as San Francisco Public Works celebrates its 125th anniversary – a major milestone in the ever-evolving city.
“Public Works is a robust City department – one of the largest and oldest in San Francisco – and we touch every curb, block and neighborhood with the work we carry out every day,” said Public Works Director Carla Short. “But while many elements of our day-to-day operations are very visible to the public eye, we wanted to give San Francisco residents and visitors a better sense of the range of services we provide, tasks we complete and duties we shoulder. And, importantly, we wanted to put a face to these devoted public servants and tell their stories.”
A print version of a Real People. Real Work. campaign poster in front of the Ferry Building at The Embarcadero features Hot Spots Cleaning Crew Supervisor Brittany Brandon.
For the Real People. Real Work. campaign, Public Works chose to highlight a broad spectrum of workers, across various divisions and fields:
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Brittany Brandon – Hot Spots Cleaning Crew Supervisor
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Danielle Chan – Landscape Architect
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Janey Chan – Structural Engineer
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Leonard Doss – Graffiti Buster
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Sheldon Gustafson – Carpenter
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Nili Niu – Arborist
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Patty Solis – Architect
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Fabiola Vega – Asphalt Crew Truck Driver
We hope you check out their stories and take a deeper dive into the work we do at Public Works every single day.
Cement Shop Supervisor Craig White and Assistant Engineer Nilofar Dhapa (foreground) walk along the construction site at Valencia Street.
Public Works Crews
Bolt into Action
Like a drill from a dentist’s office whirring to life, a sharp screech pierced the mild spring air on Valencia Street on a recent March morning.
Clad in hard hats and heavy boots, Public Works crews from the department’s Cement Shop trained core drill machines with diamond teeth onto the asphalt, extracting bolts – between six and eight inches long – that were lodged along the middle lane of the bustling corridor.
The work – along roughly eight blocks of Valencia Street, from 15th Street to 23rd Street – is part of a rejiggering of the street’s bike lane. A pilot program to situate the bicycle lane in the middle of the corridor has come to an end and Public Works crews were tapped by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency to return the street to its previous form before a new bike lane configuration is installed.
Public Works crews use a backhoe to remove rubber curbs and metal bolts along Valencia Street.
That means crews have to remove protective bollards and rubber curbs. They also have to take out the metal bolts that anchor those bike lane features to the roadway. And then they have to fill the resulting holes with grout. At roughly 1,200 holes per block, patching them all back up is no small task.
“It’s pretty intense,” Craig White, a Public Works supervisor with the Cement Shop, said with a chuckle.
Each step in the highly choreographed workflow is of importance. Block by block, it unfolds something like this:
Using a backhoe, crews first pull the rubber curbs out of the roadway. They do so taking great care to simultaneously strip as many bolts out of the ground as possible. Every bolt that is extracted using the heavy machinery is one less bolt that crews need to core out by hand later on. And the hit rate has been pretty good so far.
The metal bolts that anchor the bike lane features to the street sometimes get stuck and have to be removed with large drills.
Crews, on average, have had to extract about 40 to 50 bolts per block using the large drills, White said.
“Sometimes more, depending on how easily they come out,” he said. “Which is good. Fifty out of 1,200 – I’ll take.”
Once the bollards and curbs that lined the bike lane are removed, crews mark the holes that still have bolts stuck in them. Then, once those remaining bolts are extracted, the team cleans the holes and surrounding area using pressurized air.
Water keeps the drill bit cool by reducing friction, allowing the bit to last longer and cut more smoothly.
After the grout is mixed in a bucket, the workers fill the holes with the gray liquid. Once every hole is taken care of and the grout has set, Bureau of Building and Street Repair crews are tasked with grinding the top layer of the street – about an inch and a half to two inches – and putting a fresh layer of asphalt down.
Meticulously filling the holes with grout is important so that water can’t seep through to the base layer, potentially leading to erosion that can cause potholes.
Crews have to fill each of the holes created during the bolt removal process with grout
To finish the work, SFMTA Sign Shop crews will put traffic striping along the road. Instead of a center bike lane, pathways for cyclists eventually will be placed between parked cars and the sidewalk along that stretch of Valencia Street.
The work along the busy commercial corridor is not without its challenges, but crews have handled them well so far, said Assistant Engineer Nilofar Dhapa, who helped oversee the project for Public Works.
“This is a very unique project,” she said, adding that it’s not something Public Works crews usually do on a daily basis. “I think we’re all in a new territory at this point.”
Dhapa oversees the project’s schedule, budget and coordination for Public Works. Engineers in Public Works’ Streets and Highways section helped design the paving drawings that are being used by Bureau of Building and Street Repair crews.
The project, which was started in February, is expected to be completed by May.