In San Francisco, checking out a book from the Main Library, attending a Symphony concert or going to City Hall for a marriage license can mean confronting some of the most egregious examples of the city’s drug and homelessness problems.

For years, Civic Center has been a grim showcase for the city’s worsening heroin and methamphetamine epidemic. And given that the area is a major transit hub, thousands of people each day stream past a startling amount of open-air injection-drug use, veering around the used needles and other detritus, including human waste, that often accompanies it.

To address what’s become an acute public health and quality-of-life problem, San Francisco officials have quietly embarked on an unprecedented effort to coordinate the actions and combine the resources of several city departments to clean up Civic Center for the long term.

“You could see an increase in drug use just walking to the (Civic Center) BART station — people just shooting up, with needles coming out of their stomachs, their arms, everywhere,” said City Administrator Naomi Kelly, whose office is overseeing the coordinated cleanup initiative.

“Whether you’re a city worker or work for a company in the neighborhood, or you’re just coming to do business here at the seat of government, this needs to be a safe zone,” she said.

The urgency to clean up the area, Kelly said, was ramped up because Civic Center is home to a swelling number of families, and there are institutions, like the Asian Art Museum and the Main Library, that offer a range of programs for children. Two playgrounds are being built in Civic Center Plaza, and 800 multifamily apartment units are going up in the surrounding neighborhoods.

The project also coincides with the city’s Civic Center Public Realm Plan, which seeks to improve the area to make it a more hospitable public gathering space.

In addition to the administrator’s office, the project, dubbed the Civic Center Health and Cleanliness Pilot Program, is composed of four city departments: Public Works, Public Health and the police and fire departments.

They are focusing on an area of about 100 city blocks bounded by stretches of Golden Gate Avenue and Gough, Mission, 14th, Folsom and Sixth streets.

The program got under way slowly in June by offering services to addicts and others living on the streets. Soon afterward, the city began posting notices designating small sections of Civic Center as public health nuisances and advising those in the area to clear out before police and cleaning crews swooped in. So far, the city has posted eight such abatement orders in various locations.

Each department is expected to play to its respective strengths, with Public Works cleaning streets; the police cracking down on drug dealing, robberies and assaults; Public Health administering medical care and working to steer addicts and homeless people toward city programs; and the Fire Department providing emergency medical response.

But rather than simply sticking to those traditional job descriptions, the program relies on structured and near-constant communication as a way to efficiently focus agencies’ efforts.

Now, Kelly said, “the left and the right hand knows what the other is doing in real time so that we can all adjust together.”

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In practice, that might mean a Public Works employee calls the health department to report seeing someone incapacitated in the street. Or, during the course of making an arrest, the police might call Public Works to identify a location littered with needles and debris. Providing one another with real-time information, Kelly added, also helps the agencies provide services more quickly.

“A lot of people know a lot of things, but when we’re actually working together, then there’s better cohesion, better coordination, and there’s obviously better results,” Public Works Director Mohammed Nuru said. “If we see quality-of-life concerns, if someone is laying over or if we see someone shooting up, we engage the other agencies.”

Public Works has collected roughly 6,500 needles and about 54,610 pounds of trash from the area since the cleanup began. Combined with a bolstered police presence intended to discourage drug dealers from frequenting the area, officials say they’re beginning to see results.

“When they see the officers out there, most people are going to think twice before they engage in that type of (criminal) activity, so that’s why the presence is so important,” said Police Chief Bill Scott.

To keep the lines of communication open, representatives from each department meet every weekday morning to update one another and compare notes and statistics about what their staffs have been seeing on the streets, how many needles and pounds of trash have been picked up, what arrests have been made, and how the weather might affect cleanup efforts.

The department heads meet weekly and, accompanied by a police escort, tour portions of the targeted area, stopping to talk to people in search of ideas on how to improve conditions.

James Jackson, who lives in a men’s shelter at Fifth and Bryant streets, talked at length with Scott during a recent walkabout. He urged the city to create more activities and communal spaces to keep people engaged and off the streets during the day.

“Just open the door for me, and I’ll be there,” Jackson said.

While a health department nurse darted over to help a woman suffering from an eye infection, health department Director Barbara Garcia said she wants “to see what’s going on in the street. That lets me know what the reality is about what my staff is doing and should be doing.”

The city is collecting data to measure the effects on the Civic Center and the surrounding area, said Kelly, the city administrator.

There’s no timeline to end the pilot program. If it’s successful, Kelly hopes it will become a model for cooperation among city departments as San Francisco works to clean and secure its streets.

“That’s definitely a goal,” Kelly said. “What we don’t want to do is just push everyone out of Civic Center into a different neighborhood. We want a citywide approach where we’re dealing with the core issues and not just moving folks from one place to another.”

Dominic Fracassa is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: dfracassa@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @dominicfracassa