San Francisco spends three times more per resident on street and sidewalk cleaning than Los Angeles, despite L.A. having three million more residents, according to a new city audit.

San Francisco has become notorious for its dirty streets - particularly for the ubiquity of feces - and has in recent years budgeted millions to deal with the problem, shoveling money into street and sidewalk cleaning programs.

But the city is budgeting significantly more money on these services, both per capita and per square mile, than a subset of surveyed peer cities reviewed in a recently released report by the San Francisco Budget and Legislative Analyst.

The report, which is a performance audit of the street cleaning by San Francisco Public Works, looks at how effectively and efficiently the department spends its money on street cleaning.

In comparing San Francisco to nine other cities surveyed, the report found that San Francisco budgeted nearly $47.8 million in fiscal year 2024 to 2025 - or about $59 per person - on street and sidewalk cleaning, compared to Los Angeles, where taxpayers pay just $19 per person for the same services.

San Francisco provides a similar number of services in-house, the report says, as other cities.

A different report, from the Controller’s office, found recently that the amount of feces, graffiti and illegal trash dumping on San Francisco sidewalks slightly increased over the past year.

The new report notes “inefficiencies in the day-to-day operations of street cleaning crews related to 311 service request prioritization and duplicative paperwork,” and that the department could “improve measures of the efficiency and effectiveness of its many street cleaning operations.”

DPW also reports on its sidewalk and street cleaning performance far less often than other cities, the report says, with nearly half of respondents reporting weekly, whereas San Francisco reports every other month.

DPW said in a letter to the BLA that its goal is “delivering clean streets and sidewalks to the public” and questioned the “usefulness” of the final report.

“While some findings and recommendations are constructive, the final report is too inaccurate - lacking in evidence, devoid of context, and woefully short on substance - to provide specific and actionable feedback that improves service delivery to the public,” the letter said.

The letter goes on to say the audit included “egregious and indeed reckless” comments, including claims that Public Works had inappropriately diverted funds.

Of its comparison to other cities, the department said the audit “uses flawed and non-equivalent service levels and services provided.” The letter also notes that there are “material contextual differences with cited cities, such as climate, population density and the city’s topography.”

DPW spokesperson Rachel Gordon pointed to “proactive programs we do in addition to responding to more than 12,000 service requests a month.” That includes manual block sweeping in neighborhood commercial corridors, courtesy graffiti abatement on private property in commercial corridors, illegal dumping runs targeting hotspots in the city’s southeast, encampment cleanups, specialized neighborhood cleanup teams that target locations with entrenched unwanted street-activity and other services, she said.

This article originally published at S.F. slams audit that finds it spends three times more per person on street cleaning than L.A..