Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One on Wednesday evening as he flew back to the White House from California, President Trump, disturbed at the environmental degradation of San Francisco, warned that the Environmental Protection Agency will be “putting out a notice” of violations in San Francisco.
Trump stated, “It’s a terrible situation that’s in Los Angeles and in San Francisco. And we’re going to be giving San Francisco — they’re in total violation — we’re going to be giving them a notice very soon,” adding, “They have to clean it up. We can’t have our cities going to hell,” according to The Daily Mail, which noted, “… tens of thousands of hypodermic needles are collected every month from the streets of San Francisco. In August 2018 alone the city’s Public Health Department’s needle recovery program retrieved 164,264 needles through a disposal program and street cleanups.”
Speaking to The New York Times Wednesday evening, San Francisco Mayor London Breed fired back, “To be clear, San Francisco has a combined sewer system, one of the best and most effective in the country, that ensures that all debris that flow into storm drains are filtered out at the city’s wastewater treatment plants. No debris flow out into the bay or the ocean.” She sniped, “In San Francisco we are focused on advancing solutions to meet the challenges on our streets, not throwing off ridiculous assertions as we board an airplane to leave the state.”
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) chimed in that Trump was “right that homelessness is a big problem in California. But how he explains the situation is wrong and raises significant concerns that his so-called solutions will only make matters worse.”
But House minority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) countered, “When he’s talking about homelessness and solving that problem, and affordability, that goes across party lines. Drive around — every community, even in Bakersfield — homelessness is the No. 1 issue.”
On Wednesday, President Trump tweeted, “The Trump Administration is revoking California’s Federal Waiver on emissions in order to produce far less expensive cars for the consumer, while at the same time making the cars substantially SAFER. This will lead to more production because of this pricing and safety advantage, and also due to the fact that older, highly polluting cars, will be replaced by new, extremely environmentally friendly cars.”
Prior to that, on Tuesday Trump tweeted, “We have people living in our … best highways, our best streets, our best entrances to buildings … where people in those buildings pay tremendous taxes, where they went to those locations because of the prestige. In many cases, they came from other countries and they moved to Los Angeles or they moved to San Francisco because of the prestige of the city, and all of a sudden they have tents. Hundreds and hundreds of tents and people living at the entrance to their office building. And they want to leave. And the people of San Francisco are fed up, and the people of Los Angeles are fed up.”
Fox News reported last April, “A new map pinpointing the locations where human feces are reported to have been found in the California city since 2011 shows San Francisco has a staggering problem with the stinky stuff. Nearly every city block has had a poop sighting in recent years as the city grapples with homelessness, according to data compiled by Open The Books.”
In May, The San Francisco Chronicle reported that the city had spent more than $70 million cleaning feces and drug paraphernalia from streets and sidewalks this fiscal year, but it didn’t suffice to make San Francisco’s streets safe for pedestrians.