Recycling center looks DOA

by JIM MEKO

[Update: “With recycling centers dwindling in SF, one operator plans to bring the people to his business,” September 19, 2014, San Francisco Examiner]

Is this the last we’re going to hear about the recycling center at 10th and Harrison Street?

The available sign went back up yesterday. Ors Csaszar from Our Planet Recycling has cleared the lot over the last few weeks and it looks like he’s taking his bottles and cans and going away. 

The controversial proposal set up a confrontation between multiple agencies of city government — including District 6 Supervisor Jane Kim’s office — and angry neighbors at a raucous community meeting in late June facilitated by Sunny Angulo, Kim’s legislative aide who later scolded the neighbors, “Given the inability for the larger group to conduct the meeting in a respectful fashion, it is the best use of the office’s time to work with a couple of people at this point.”

I provided a reality check in the midst of the controversy by pointing out that the zoning for the parking lot site looked like a mistake. The heavily trafficked intersection of 10th and Harrison Streets was a bad location for a light industrial use, as the SALI zoning required, and it probably should have been included in the Dore Alley Residential Enclave District (RED) which ends only two doors away.

There’s not much this owner can do under the existing zoning, I argued, so Supervisor Kim should consider rezoning the property to allow the owner to do something useful with the lot. (She didn’t even require a community meeting one block away when the entertainment industry asked her to strip away a buffer zone protecting the Kissling RED for a new nightclub). But they were hellbent on a recycling center at this location so my insubordination apparently got me banned from Kim’s office.

Last time we reported on Csaszar, he was trying to argue at the Board of Appeals that he should be allowed to proceed without having to notify the neighbors because his enterprise did not precisely match the definition of recycling center that’s included in the Planning Code. Ors got that one wrong. If it doesn’t match the definition of any of about a hundred permitted uses, it’s just not allowed, leading Zoning Administrator Scott San Sanchez to ask, “Well, just what are you?!”

I guess the answer is, gone.

(This article originally appeared on August 28 but was updated with the San Francisco Examiner that’s linked at the top of this post).