You can take this job and shovel it.
Workers on San Francisco’s new poop patrol — the brainchild of Mayor London Breed and Public Works Director Mohammed Nuru to combat thousands of complaints of human feces in the street — make a whopping $71,760 per year. That number grows to $184,678 including mandated benefits, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Between Jan. 1 and Aug. 13, nearly 15,000 people called 311 to complain about the city’s poo-riddled sidewalks. Just last month, scores of residents complained about a 20-pound bag of human waste left on a street corner in the Tenderloin district.
The six-person poo patrol, consisting of one supervisor and five street-cleaners, celebrated with a soft launch last week. They’ll begin getting their hands dirty full time in September.
The cleaners will begin their rounds in the afternoon. Equipped with two steam-cleaning vehicles, they’ll patrol alleyways and other areas where poo is a known problem — which apparently is everywhere.
“I’ve had to deal with it myself in front of my home and it’s not a pleasant feeling. I want to change San Francisco for the better. I want to clean up the city,” Breed, who was elected in June, told ABC.
The city will spend around $750,000 on the team’s efforts in addition to another $1.05 million that will go toward the city’s Pit Stop program, which already installed 22 public toilets around the city.
The money will go toward building more toilets as well as extending hours at five other Pit Stops.
The city’s homeless problem is a major factor in the growing amount of waste on the sidewalks.
Since most public toilets are only open until the afternoon or evening, vagrants have nowhere to go when nature calls. The clean-up team is an attempt to curb this problem.