I’m not sure what your Feb. 4 letter writer Jan Krajeski has against Friends of the Urban Forest, but please allow me to correct some gross inaccuracies in his letter to the editor (“Vested interest in Prop. A”): 1) Proposition A’s $4 million for tree planting and tree care in The City’s parks is designated for the Recreation and Park Department, not FUF. 2) FUF has no “exclusive rights” to street tree planting. We work with individual property owners to organize our volunteer-based neighborhood tree plantings, and have planted more than 42,000 street trees since 1981 in these opt-in plantings. If they don’t want a tree, we can’t force it on them.

Oh, and I’m a “him,” not a “her.”

Kelly Quirke

Executive Director

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Friends of the Urban Forest

San Francisco

Waste fee out of nowhere

Janice Sitton does an adequate job explaining the diversion rate as it relates to the weight and volume of The City’s waste stream (letters, Feb. 4). Unfortunately this has nothing to do with the Department of the Environment’s out-of-left-field proposal to impose an additional “fee” for nonrecycled waste.

No matter how much residents and businesses divert and/or recycle, there will always be residual waste that remains. This is why every San Francisco household and business is required by law to have ratepayer collection services. The rates charged for these services are determined by a very deliberative public process. The Department of the Environment’s proposal attempts to circumvent this process by masking a self-serving rate increase under the cloak of a “fee.” How this “fee” differs from one’s monthly garbage bill remains unanswered.

No one questions the positive externalities of reuse and recycling, but any proposal to increase the cost of collection service must be addressed in a public manner as it has been in the past.

Russel Morine

San Francisco

Tardy homicide response

Perhaps those TV crime dramas where the medical examiner, crime scene investigators and homicide detectives all show up before the blood stops oozing are not completely true to life. But if your report by Brent Begin is accurate (“Shooting is city’s eighth homicide of 2008,” Jan. 31), our San Francisco homicide detectives did not show up at a murder scene until the next day.

The shooting took place at 10:20 p.m. on Tuesday and the detectives “weren’t called ... until Wednesday morning.” Sure, the victim didn’t die right away, but did the SFPD have to wait half a day to figure out whose investigative turf the crime fell in? The report made it look like the TV drama of choice for our crime fighters is “Cold Case Files.” I’m probably overreacting. After all, the delay didn’t seem to bother Begin enough to ask about.

Barrett Giorgis

San Francisco

Don’t derail meeting purpose

The editorial of Jan. 26-27 (“Geary idea worst of the year”) attempts to derail the purpose of the Feb. 12 Better Neighborhood Plan community meeting. It is irresponsible because it lacks research and is insensitive to the residents and businesses of the Japantown and Fillmore neighborhoods.

To clarify to Examiner readers, the BNP is about more than transportation issues. The feedback from the BNP meetings has shown that redevelopment of the 1960s that created the Geary Boulevard expressway was a mistake that needs to be corrected. It divided a once historic and culturally rich ethnic neighborhood, and it created an unsafe pedestrian environment. It is expected that the coordination of the BNP and the Geary Bus Rapid Transit Study will result in a cost-effective way to address this oversight of redevelopment. Therefore, the editorial’s attempt to derail the purpose of the Feb. 12 Better Neighborhood Plan community meeting is unfortunate.

Darryl Abantao

Japantown Task Force

San Francisco

Condemnation of terrorism key

Nadine May (letters, Feb. 2-3) is correct that the demonstrators who shouted anti-Semitic slogans outside the Israeli Consulate do not represent all Muslims, but she is missing a very big point. Whereas Baruch Goldstein, who killed unarmed Arabs several years ago, was condemned by every significant Israeli and Jewish entity, most Arab and Islamic leaders endorse terrorism and anti-Semitic rhetoric. Palestinian television still extols the virtue of suicide bombings. The Saudi government along with the former Iraqi regime gave money to the families of the bombers and the Palestinian president eulogizes terrorists.

Does May think it is just a coincidence that the hotel bombing in Bali, the subway bombing in London, the train bombing in Madrid, as well as the twin towers attacks were perpetrated by Muslim extremists? Let’s hear from those Muslims who condemn these acts of murder.

Gil Stein

Santa Cruz