SF leaders get down in depths to clean up grimy corner of...

Many San Franciscans wonder whether our political leaders truly see what we see: the filth, the garbage, the dirty needles, the drug use, the homeless people who sit at the same corner day after day clearly needing help.

Do the city’s top dogs really see this embarrassing underbelly of our glorious city, or are they safely tucked away behind their big wooden desks, able to ignore the muck as they’re whisked from one meeting to another in a private car?

Two politicians really do see it — very, very up close. Every Wednesday morning, Bevan Dufty, a former supervisor and current member of the BART board, and Supervisor Hillary Ronen pull on blue latex gloves and grab brooms and dustpans to clean the grossness that pervades the street-level plazas at BART’s 16th Street Mission Station.

It doesn’t seem to be a publicity stunt — if it is, they’re very good actors. They’ve been there like clockwork for weeks, and I watched them one morning as they got down in the depths.

“They hate me at BART, they really hate me. But I’ve got to do what I’ve got to do,” said Dufty, wearing a bright yellow sweatshirt with the hood pulled up to protect himself from the rain.

He got the idea to start these weekly cleanups a couple of months ago after getting complaints from BART passengers that the stations were in dire need of attention. He’s since written letters of complaint to BART bosses, recruited other city officials to join him on a one-off basis, and posted pictures of the mess on social media.

It’s probably annoying and embarrassing to BART brass — that’s a good thing. Some of the San Francisco stations have become de facto homeless shelters and shooting galleries for injection drug users. I walk through BART stations regularly and have recently seen piles of feces, dirty needles and piles of trash. God forbid you are in a wheelchair or have a baby stroller — the smell in the elevators is often unbearable.

Wielding a metal grabber and a trash can on that recent Wednesday morning, Dufty explained his quest as he picked up the detritus left from the night before. In just minutes, he’d collected quite a haul.

A Burger King cup. Scraps of paper. A plastic case for a syringe. Bottle caps. A red straw. A soiled white towel. Chicken bones. Cigarette butts. A peppermint candy. A business card from Cañada College. A used Band-Aid. (By the way, since when it is OK to just chuck your trash on the ground? Everybody needs to pitch in to return this city to health.)

“The brass doesn’t know how to handle me,” Dufty said. “If things are fine, I’ll stay out of their business. But if things are raggedy like they are here and they don’t make sense, I’m going to be in it. Don’t make ‘No’ the answer to every question and every thought.”

BART, of course, argues that ‘No’ is not the answer to every question and thought. Since Dufty began shining attention on the 16th Street station in September, the agency has assigned a janitor there eight hours a day, five days a week on a temporary basis. Nighttime janitors who are responsible for several stations also have it on their rotation. The agency also started power-washing the station every night.

BART’s budget includes funding for 150 janitors, 13 more than two years ago. Four new positions will focus mainly on two of the agency’s nastiest stations: Powell Street and Civic Center.

“The budget approved by the BART board in June highlights the district’s commitment to doing more to clean our stations,” Chris Filippi, a BART spokesman, said in a statement. “This is a quality-of-experience concern for many of our riders, and BART is committed to doing all it can to improve.”

Dufty and Ronen say BART has a long way to go. They want the new janitor at the station made permanent. They want weekend shifts added. They want a sign installed in the elevator telling people not to use it as a restroom.

They want the city’s new grant money from the state for the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion program, which gives low-level, nonviolent drug offenders services rather than jail time, to be targeted at the station. They want the city’s Homeless Outreach Team to spend more time there.

Ronen on that morning knelt down to talk to Alice, an elderly woman who’s been sitting with her huge piles of belongings outside the Burger King at the corner every day for months. She sleeps in its entryway at night in her red camping chair. Ronen left a message for Jeff Kositsky, director of the city’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, asking for help for the woman.

It appears Alice has been offered help but is wary of staying in shelters because she fears she’d have to give up all of her belongings. Kositsky did not return a request for comment for this column.

On Friday, Ronen sent a letter to the BART directors asking them to join her and Dufty in cleaning the station so they can get “a firsthand look at the conditions BART riders face each morning.”

“While I knew the general conditions of the plaza were bad, cleaning it myself has opened my eyes to the deeply unhealthy conditions at the plaza, conditions that are unacceptable for a major transit hub,” she wrote.

Ronen, who represents the Mission District at City Hall, said she’s been using the station for 15 years and knew the conditions were awful, but hadn’t realized just how awful until she started cleaning it on a regular basis.

“It’s an embarrassment,” she said. “Two weeks ago, it was unbelievable.”

Stop reading now if you’re eating your breakfast. Seriously.

“There was a pile of diarrhea on the tree over there in the planter box,” she said, pointing. “The smell of urine was just overwhelming and hit you as you walked into the plaza. There were used needles. Bevan swept a dead pigeon in the corner into the trash. There were piles of wet clothes all over the plaza, broken glass and bottles.”

As we talked, a man wearing filthy clothes and covered in dirt and sores approached, eating a pineapple through its hard, brown shell. He said he found it in the garbage can.

“Where are you sleeping?” Ronen asked him.

“Nowhere,” he replied before shrugging and walking off.

Despite all this, Dufty said the station has actually gotten a lot better since September. The company that owns the big advertising sign visible to riders on their way down the escalators cleaned the trash that had collected on the spikes intended to keep pigeons from sitting on it. The mailbox has been cleaned of graffiti and has a new, legible sign about mail collection hours.

“This is the best I’ve seen it,” Dufty said. “It’s getting better and better.”

One small corner of the city beginning to be addressed. So many more to go.

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Heather Knight appears Sundays and Tuesdays. Email: hknight@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @hknightsf