Park watchdogs who created a Web site to get a faster City Hall response to graffiti, illegal dumping and overgrown weeds in San Francisco parks are taking their invention nationwide.

ParkScan, designed in 2003 by the nonprofit San Francisco Neighborhood Parks Council, allows users of the city's more than 200 parks to pinpoint problems on aerial park maps and upload photos straight to City Hall. E-reports are combined with San Francisco's 311.org 24-hour citizen report system, and forwarded to the Recreation and Park Department, which dispatches a work crew or gets the complaint to the correct city department.

"We just started working with ParkScan in May, and it's made things much more efficient," said Nancy Alfaro, director of 311.

About 100 ParkScan e-mails come in each month, reporting everything from fallen tree branches to broken playground equipment.

In May, Portland, Ore., paid the Neighborhood Parks Council $100,000 to design a ParkScan Web site. Portland saw similar activity and logged more than 100 reports in the first month.

"It's intriguing to tap into people who already are in the parks; New York was trying to do this with inspectors and spending a lot of money," said Eileen Argentina, services manager for the Portland Parks and Recreation Department.

Now Fresno, Phoenix, Washington and Ottawa, Ontario, are calling, said Isabel Wade, executive director of the Neighborhood Parks Council.

She and her co-workers are developing a ParkScan application for the iPhone due by the end of the year, so park users can send reports right from the park, instead of waiting to log onto a computer.

"Before we'd call in or write a letter, both of which generally were ignored," said Wade. "Sometimes city supervisors would get on the park department's case and even they wouldn't get a response."

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Evelyn & Walter Haas Foundation and the Recreation and Park Department gave a grant to the Neighborhood Parks Council to create and maintain ParkScan. The city of Portland received a grant from Sloan as well.

The system is designed to get real-time data to nudge City Hall to action, but it is also generating information that can be used to leverage funding for parks, gardeners and custodians, said Meredith Thomas, deputy director of the Neighborhood Parks Council.

Each year, ParkScan data goes into an annual report, broken down by supervisorial district.

In 2008, the largest complaint was graffiti, making up one-third of the 1,459 ParkScan messages. One in five calls fell into the "general" category requesting better signs, working water fountains, followed by e-mails about lawns and playgrounds, compliments, athletic fields and litter.

Nearly 70 percent of the issues raised were fixed, and the rest are pending or awaiting a response.

Park watchdogs can monitor the progress of their report on the ParkScan Web site.

"We monitor it too, and sometimes people will report things that are on a list to be fixed by the 2008 parks bond, so we'll shoot them an e-mail explaining that so they don't get frustrated," said Sunya Ojure, program coordinator of the Neighborhood Parks Council.

E-mail Meredith May at mmay@sfchronicle.com.

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This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

When construction crews next year begin rebuilding San Francisco's dilapidated Dolores Park Playground, it won't only be a victory for the hundreds of neighbors who raised some of the money and made design suggestions.

Park advocates and city officials say the collaboration between neighbors and the Recreation and Park Department signifies a new model they hope will help usher in more community-supported park projects across the city, particularly as the agency faces huge budget challenges.

After years of work by neighbors, the Rec and Park Commission today is expected to approve a contract between the city and Friends of Dolores Park Playground that will give the community group power over the playground's design and construction management. The city will build the project, and both the city and the nonprofit group will contribute to a long-term maintenance fund.

The city will use $1.75 million in bond funds to help prepare the flood-prone site for construction, and a $1.5 million grant from the Mercer Fund, secured last year by the neighborhood group, will be used to build the world-class playground, which is still being designed.

For groups such as Neighborhood Parks Council, a nonprofit advocacy group helping to manage the project's fiscal aspects, the partnership is a welcome change from years past, when neighbors complained that the department didn't want donations or volunteers. Rec and Park has accepted donations only on a case-by-case basis.

"The biggest challenge (in the past) is that there's nothing in writing that someone can follow on how to give a gift to the parks," said Meredith Thomas, deputy director of the Parks Council. "It tends to be different every time. We hope this will be a model for future projects - and we hope it raises the bar for all projects."

Jared Blumenfeld, who took over as interim general manager of the department last year, agreed. Blumenfeld said when he first met with the Dolores Park community organizers and donors, "it was pretty clear there were a lot of obstacles put in their way."

"They felt, rightly so, that simple questions took months to answer - everything seemed to be an issue," he said. "All the issues seemed fairly easy to resolve."

Blumenfeld, as well as Thomas and neighborhood leaders, praised the outcome, noting that both the city and the neighborhood now have a stake in the project.

Both sides also said the ongoing maintenance program will guarantee a source of money and keep the neighbors involved in setting playground priorities.

Many donors and volunteers previously complained that their generosity was wasted when new structures quickly fell into disrepair. Thomas said the maintenance program model could help other groups attract large donors - groups that may otherwise take their money to agencies that are seen as better at managing gifts.

The new playground is scheduled to be finished by 2011. Friends of Dolores Park Playground is still working with its members - 1,300 in all - to complete the design plans, which have already gone through several drafts.

"It feels so good now - we've always had the best goal possible for this park, and it didn't feel like everybody was on the same page," said Nancy Madynski, chair of the Friends of Dolores Park Playground steering committee. "Now it feels that way. The community and Rec and Park have so much to gain from that."

E-mail Marisa Lagos at mlagos@sfchronicle.com.

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This article appeared on page B - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

SAN FRANCISCO — Legendary parks advocate Isabel Wade lived most of her life across the street from one of San Francisco’s oldest parks before she ever actually went in it.

The house she grew up in was across from Buena Vista Park, the green, forested hills above the Haight district, but her parents forbade her from entering it as a child. As an adult, even after she received her Ph.D in environmental planning and established her career by creating the state’s urban forestry program under then-governor Jerry Brown, she was busy enough that she never really bothered to explore it.

That changed one day when found a flier on her door inviting her to check out the newly built trails through the park. Out of curiosity, the lifelong San Francisco resident attended the tour, as did a couple dozen of her neighbors.

The event wound up changing the course of her life. Wade helped create a neighborhood park group and then, more than a decade later, she founded the Neighborhood Parks Council, a small nonprofit organization that over the years grew into The City’s most powerful parks advocacy group.

Last week, after 13 years at the helm of the NPC and a lifetime of starting up environmental organizations and shaping urban environmental policy, Wade retired.

Wade got her real start in parks advocacy working under Jerry Brown and helping write urban forestry legislation — and then ensuring it was implemented by creating a nonprofit to oversee a pilot project in Oakland. That would be the first of five environmental groups she helped spearhead, including California ReLeaf, Friends of the Urban Forest and the National AIDS Memorial Grove project.

In 1996, she helped found the NPC, a coalition of smaller neighborhood parks organizations. The group was able to place a neighborhood parks bond on the ballot in 2000, the largest in 50 years.

Wade’s colleagues credit her with ushering in a change in how parks are seen by civic leaders.

“Before Neighborhood Parks Council, there just wasn’t a lot of discussion on the civic level about parks. It wasn’t seen as a priority,” said Meredith Thomas, who has replaced Wade as the organization’s executive director.

Wade’s reputation has spread far beyond San Francisco, said Karen Kidwell, executive director of nonprofit organization San Francisco Parks Trust.

Wade said she’s not sure her activist days are over but that she needs a break from the endless rounds of fundraising and organizing.

“I really am tired now, I just feel like I need a recharge,” she said. “But I don’t see myself just sitting around and doing nothing, either — especially considering the dire situation of the planet right now.”

kworth@sfexaminer.com