>> good morning and welcome to the february 3rd, 2022, regular meeting of the government audit and oversight committee. i'm supervisor dean preston joined by supervisor mandelman and vice chair chan will be joining us later in the meeting. the committee clerk is john carroll and we want to say thank you to sfgov tv for staffing the meeting. do we have announcements? >> clerk: the minutes will reflect committee members are participating through video

conference to the same extent they were physically present in the board's committee room. the board recognizes public access is essential and invites public participation in the following ways. first, public comment will be available on each item on the agenda. cable channel 26 and sfgov tv are streaming the public call in number at this time. each speaker is allowed up to two minutes to speak. the opportunity to speak will be via phone by dialling 415-655-0001 and the meeting id for today is 2480 575 0296. after you have entered the id, press the pound symbol twice to be connected to the meeting. your phone line will be muted but you can listen in. when your item comes up on the agenda, dial star 3 to be added

to the speaker line. best practices, call from a quiet location, speak clearly and slowly and turn down your television and radio and streaming device to access today's proceedings. also you can submit in writing. you can do so by e-mailing your comments to me, the government audit oversight, john.carroll@sfgov.gov. or you can send to the clerk's office in writing. all this contact information is printed on the front page of any of the committee agendas, you can consult it there if i go over it too quickly.

i'll repeat the access instructions before we go to public input items. >> supervisor preston: thank you mr. clerk. and we are going to at the request of the sponsor of item 1, we are going to hear that after item 2. mr. clerk, if you could please call item 2 out of order. >> clerk: item 2, a hearing on the 2019-2020 civil grand jury report entitled a recycling reality check, what actually happens to things we put in our blue recycling bins. members of the public who wish to provide public comment on this hearing should call 415-655-0001. enter the meeting id of 2480 575 0296.

press pound twice and then star 3 to be entered into the queue to speak. you will hear a system prompt that your hand has been raised and then wait to hear you are unmuted and then you can start your comments. mr. chair. >> supervisor preston: thank you mr. clerk. we will first be hearing from supervisor mar's office. i believe we have edward wright, legislative aide for supervisor mar here to present on the item. welcome and the floor is yours. >> thank you chair preston. i appreciate you making time to hear this item. i'm here to offer brief context before turning it over to the department of environment. when it was last before the committee, we were not able to give final responses and we are able to do that today. our office has prepared a motion updating the responses that we have distributed by e-mail to

you all as committee members and we ask you to consider this motion but first, we have the department of the environment here to share specifics on how the three recommendations to the board of supervisors from the civil board have been implemented. >> supervisor preston: thank you mr. wright. welcome. the floor is yours, up to 10 minutes. >> great. let me take a moment to share my screen. thank you supervisors, i'm from the department of the environment and i'm here to share how we implemented the grand jury's recycling education and outreach recommendations. there we go. before i launch into that, i want to say that i'm very proud

that san francisco is leading by example and we're leading the nation in recycling and composting and we're very proud of that. in 2020, the civil -- after examining our program, the civil grand jury commended us on our success, which was amazing. we can attribute this much to our robust community outreach and engagement program. the outreach team provides school education, goes door to door visiting residences and has communication tools like sfrecycles.org and you can make a custom sign for your home or place of business. but there's always room to improve. the civil grand jury asked us to expand the public messaging. they specifically asked us to share with the public where materials go after collection and processing, specifically on

our respective websites. and on the mobile app. they also asked us to provide information on what doesn't belong in the blue bin, primarily to decrease contamination and improve the quality of our recycling stream overall. the department of the environment agreed to implement the recommendations of the jury by july 1, 2021, and update this information every six months. here you can see an example of how the department -- i'll move a little bit so you can see. here you can see how the department implemented recommendation number one. the pie chart shows the total composition of recycling stream and broken up by material types and where it ends up after processed. this information is also available on our website in spanish and chinese and then

embedded translation on their website. for recommendation number two, asked to integrate the same information, where recyclables go after processing on their app. you can see they have added a link on their website. if you visit the website, you would see very much the same thing, the pie chart showing where the materials go. finally, recommendation number three was to share with people what doesn't belong in the blue bin, to decrease contamination overall and clean up the recycling chain. here's an example of showing commonly misplaced materials. we chose to focus on the most common materials, a simpler message to the public and very problematic, you can see items like surprisingly garden hoses

are often ending up in the recycling stream and single use plastic bags and cell phones, batteries, etc cetera. that's just a few things. the department also has this information on their website. and again, this is in multiple languages. some more information if you would like to dig in deeper to the new recycling resources, here's some information and the url's where you can visit the pages. you could also download the app if you are interested to learn more. that's the end of my presentation. thank you so much and i'm open to questions. >> supervisor preston: thank you, i appreciate the department's work on this. i don't know if mr. wright, if you had additional comments or questions?

or supervisor mandelman? if not, seeing shaking heads, i will -- let's open up public comment on this item mr. clerk. >> clerk: thank you. we're checking to see if we have callers in queue to provide public comment on item 2, called out of order. for those watching on cable channel 26 or online or elsewhere, if you wish to speak on the item, call in by dialling 415-655-0001. then enter the meeting id of 2480 575 0296. then press the pound symbol twice to reach us. and then star 3 to enter into the queue to speak. we're delaying for a moment to see if we have callers. >> there are no callers on the

line. >> clerk: thank you. we have no callers. >> supervisor preston: thank you. with no callers on the item, public comment is now closed. i want to reiterate my thanks to supervisor mar and you mr. wright for the follow-through on these. we deal with the civil grand jury recommendations in this committee and did so under supervisor mar's leadership previously and including this item and it is important to follow through on these. so appreciate all your work. based on the information that we have received and i think consistent with what mr. wright has circulated to members, i would like to first move that we prepare a motion responding to the civil grand jury's request to provide a status update with the following responses. i'm going to read those into the

record. as to recommendation number one, the following response, r1 has been implemented as follows. reclolgy and the department of environment launched new web pages for the blue bins available in english, spanish and chinese languages. r2, update of mobile application on july 1st, 2021, to provide information summarizing the recent disposition of blue bin material, key trends identified by graphic elements and as to r3, has been implemented as follows...

launching new web pages addressing what not to put in the blue bin on july 1st, 2021, and continue to provide multi lingual virtual and in person outreach and education about proper separation of waste, compost and recyclables. so, i will first pause and make sure no concerns from clerk, colleagues or bla on those. seeing none, let's call the roll on the preparation of the motion. >> clerk: on the motion for status update on the recommendations in this report, vice chair chan is absent. member mandelman? >> supervisor mandelman: aye. >> supervisor preston: aye.

thank you mr. clerk. i would like to make a motion that we recommend the motion, so prepared to the board of supervisors. >> clerk: on the motion offered by chair preston, that the motion be recommended to the board of supervisors. >> supervisor mandelman: aye. >> clerk: mandelman, aye. chair preston? >> supervisor preston: aye. >> clerk: there are two ayes noting that chan is still absent. >> supervisor preston: thank you mr. clerk and thank you for your work on this, the motion passes and we'll call the first item on the agenda. item 1. >> clerk: agenda item 1 is a hearing to report on hiring time frames, vacancies and ongoing staffing issues for the operation division of public works and how it affects their ability to respond to calls for service. members of the public who wish to provide public comment on this hearing should call

415-655-0001. today's meeting id is 2480 575 0296. press pound twice and then star 3 to enter the queue to speak. the system prompt will indicate you have raised your hand. wait until the system indicates you have been unmuted and then you can start your comments. mr. chair. >> supervisor preston: thank you mr. clerk. and supervisor safai is the sponsor of this item and appreciate him bringing this before us. before we hear his opening remarks, i want to welcome the various representatives who are present from department of public works, office of city administrator and city resources department and representative of labor local 261. any presenters have up to 10 minutes each. i'll turn it over to supervisor

safai, the floor is yours. >> clerk: i do note supervisor safai is connected to the call. >> supervisor preston: are you present and muted or not yet supervisor safai? i'm receiving word that supervisor safai is not able to join us until 10:30. we are going to go ahead and accommodate that. so with apologies to the public

and our presenters, we will go ahead and recess for approximately 10 minutes and be back at >> supervisor preston: welcome back and thank you for your patience. mr. clerk, let's go ahead and call the first item again. >> clerk: item 1 is a hearing to report on hiring timelines and staffing issues for operation division of public works and how it affects their ability to respond to calls of service. members of the public who wish to provide public comment should call 415-655-0001 and enter the meeting id, 2480 575 0296. press the pound symbol twice and then the star key followed by

number 3 to enter to speak. please wait until the system indicates you are unmuted and then you can start your comments. mr. chair. >> supervisor preston: thank you mr. clerk. and as i mentioned before, supervisor safai is the sponsor of this item. i want to thank him for bringing this forward and looking forward to the presentations here. before he gives opening remarks, i want to welcome the various representatives present from department of public works, office of city administrator, city resources department and local 261. thank you for being here and a reminder that any presenters have up to 10 minutes and i will turn it over to supervisor safai for opening remarks and to introduce the presenters on this item.

>> supervisor safai: there's a larger ongoing conversation about vacancies in the city but we're going to keep it to public works today. the first day we announced two years ago when we announced the first case of covid in our city we were having a similar hearing regarding nursing shortages, number of nurses we had in our system, the amount of time, amount of vacancies, the amount of time it took to hire those nurses.

it took about nine months for a nurse to be hired, nine times out of 10 usually they have taken another job. similarly, fast forward to today, there's a lot of conversation about the reorganization of public works. we went through a ballot initiative, i was one of the sponsors of that initiative, i believe it is moving in the right direction. one of the things we have heard from the operations division and department overall, they have a significant number of vacancies. i wanted to bring us back here today to talk about how many vacancies were in public works with a special emphasis on the operations division to examine their ability and how it impacts their ability to respond to calls for service and how it impacts the issues that public works addresses that many of our districts, all of our districts

face when it comes to street cleanliness, illegal dumping, all of the things that public works street tree maintenance, repair, all the things we call on that help our residents know that we're responding but also that we are ensuring we have clean, well kept neighborhoods and that is really important. i know the staff at department of public works, leadership take a lot of pride. the front line workers take a lot of pride. if there's so many vacancies and then the amount of time it takes to fill those vacancies, we're going to have this consistent problem over and over again. not to mention with covid, the amount of people that are out, the amount of people's positions that have been impacted, all of this led me to call for this hearing today. as our city continues to

recover, as we zero in on this focus of wanting to make our city shine and be a more clean and more pride in general for our city, i thought it was important to bring the department of public works here today, we'll also have labor local 261, want to hear if there are any ideas out there. one thing i will tell you and it did end well with the nurse's situation, we have been able to and i think we have talked about this chair preston and others, the time now is less than 90 days to hire a nurse in our

system. we can't use bureaucracy to get in the way of delivering services to our city. i think that's the problem. with that, i'm going to turn it over to bruce robertson, deputy director of financial management from public works. actually we have interim director with us. great. so director short, i'll hand it over to you first to present. we have asked everyone to keep it around seven minutes or so. thank you interim director short

for joining us today. >> i will be brief and hand it to my colleagues. i want to say thank you for calling the hearing and highlighting the importance of hiring at public works. as you know, many of our employees have been working in the field throughout the pandemic, cleaning streets, setting up covid facilities and ensuring that the city has continued to function. they have been doing an incredible job under very difficult circumstances, particularly street cleaning crews who get called to clean the same location over and over again. when i'm out with the field crews, i see what a transformational impact they can have when they respond to address a request for service. supervisor safai, as you noted, i discussed the need to assist our efforts during one of our clean corridor events and i'm glad to say we have made good progress and you'll hear that from my colleagues. but we are continuing to work on

hiring additional staff. i want to note in addition to need to hire laborers, we have many other important vacant positions we need to work on hiring across the board. you noted the need to hire arborists for the pruning program but even our colleagues are underresourced to address the city's needs for hiring. in addition to improving the outcomes and responding to requests for service, getting the additional staff will help reduce the pressure on our current existing staff, who are incredibly hard working. i want to recognize their efforts. many of them have had to work extra shifts and under more pressure than ever with limited resources. i want to thank everyone here today for your leadership in trying to help address this challenge. unfortunately, public works has one of the highest vacancy rates in the city.

this is nothing new. part of that is driven by our need to have project-based funded positions. we need flexibility to hire based on the scope of work. so, we have some positions that are intentionally left vacant to allow for that flexibility. for example, if we receive additional paving program money, then those positions are already existing and we can staff up to address that project based need. another example that we have seen during covid, the need to staff up on steam fitters because there was an increased need for h-vac systems. we appreciate shining the light on the vacancy rates and trying to make progress in filling those critical positions. but i want to sort of paint the picture that it may be -- the

rate is maybe a little bit higher by design, so we have the flexibility when we have a temporary funded project and we need to have that position available. with that, i'll hand it over to my colleagues, bruce robertson from public works, deputy director for finance and administration. >> we'll try to remain within the 7-10 minute time frame.

you have seen this before, just want to reiterate the large nature of public works and complexity of public works.

here's our full time equivalency budget. as you can see, almost 1700 employees budgeted with a slight change in our budget from previous year into the current year. we're still finalizing our budgets for fiscal year 23. in particular, third from the bottom, street environmental services has about 350 fte, which a large majority of those are general laborers which we'll discuss in detail. really wanted to spend a moment on this slide to talk about some of the unique aspects of hiring at public works. there really are unique aspects that make public works a little different. one is the sheer complexity. public works has over 177 different job classifications represented by 21 different labor unions. that is a lot. we do all appointment types.

we do permanent, temporary, seasonal, a large number of project appointments that the director was talking about. we have a high number of project-based positions because we have so many projects on the position and so much project work that varies year to year. our vacancies in many ways are tied to the nature of the work. we have over 200 engineers for instance and many of those, we don't have funding to fill those positions because the client work is not there. during the parks and rec bond, we needed more landscape architects. we also use a lot of temporary

funding to support projects. one of the examples that the director mentioned, the commercial corridor program. the 9916 classification in the budget is only funded through temporary salaries. you see a lot of use of temporary salaries for the filling of those positions because they're not budgeted with a specific budget and annual salary limit. there's only funding in the annual appropriation. that makes public works a little unique as well. and finally, a quick snapshot of where the vacancies are. this is a little dated at this point. we have done some hiring but you can get a sense here of overall vacancy rate is. it is usually around 30-32%. you can see as of december, it was a little higher at 35.1%. we did run a report earlier this week in preparation for this

hearing. that number is just under 30%. i believe 29.8 to be exact. we have made some strides in terms of reducing the overall backlog, including hiring of general laborers, truck drivers and other positions out there on the front line. that's a very quick background and overview. i'll turn it over to the city administrator's office. >> good morning supervisors. so second half of the presentation, i'll speak to first kind of going over the new appointments and employee exits and kind of the trend set we saw and have seen over the last few years and what we hope to address and discuss more about what our future facing, what it is going to look like. similar to many colleagues throughout the city in fy-20/21,

we saw a decline in employee exits and we hope it has bottomed out in fy-21 and starting to hire up. i anticipate we'll continue to see employee exits sort of follow that trend and increase overtime as well. next slide please. as the hearing is focusing on operations, we wanted to take a moment and relay -- take a look at the key positions related to and support the street cleaning. our truck drivers, general laborers and as bruce mentioned, the public service aides. we wanted to show for you all kind of the staffing levels that we've had for the last several fiscal years and where we are right now. and then there are a number of key measures here and things i just wanted to highlight for

you. i think as bruce mentioned, we did hire 19 permanent laborers in january of 2022. we have -- that was considered our first cohort of general laborers. we have a second and probably third and fourth cohorts of general laborers we are currently working on in addition to the permanent general laborers we are hiring, we are hiring as-needed exempt laborers. we have 15 of those and we are actively recruiting for 40 corridor workers right now. there's a lot -- we are focusing a lot of efforts on filling these critical roles. next slide please. here are some pictures of our amazing employees at work. next slide.

so, i have a few slides really on the hiring impacts on public works. the first slide i don't think is is unique to public works but something important to spend a few minutes talking through. covid-19 had an extraordinary impact on us all. what we saw within our department is that really at the beginning of the pandemic, there was pretty much a freeze to hiring in the city because of budget concerns. we were talking about and were concerned about layoffs at that time, positions were not being approved. we were not being asked to fill the majority of our positions. the exception to that, the street cleaning positions and other critical essential workers. as you saw in the numbers overtime, that is an area where we did continue to focus efforts and push to hire as much as we could. that being said, hiring delays were and still exist. many of our hr processes are in

person and paper based and very quickly, hr teams had to convert things digitally. there were delays because of pre-employment processing happens in person. our fingerprinting and medical appointments were and are administered by department of human resources and dph who were very busy during this time. and then finally, i'll talk about the vaccination policy, implementation has continued to have an impact on public works, so it is all of our departments in particular, the operations yard and as well as our return to work place efforts. next slide please. >> supervisor safai: that was the seven minute presentation bell i should mention. >> supervisor preston: three more minutes is fine, thank you. >> this is the second to last slide. recruitment and retention

issues. earlier mentioned, this work is challenging and difficult work. i think in addition, there are staff concerns around the future of public works related to prop implementation and increased scrutiny over the department's work, hiring system changes created some additional work and delays on our side in filling positions and then a shift in the labor market, due to covid-19. and then our final slide, which i think is where i'm hoping we can spend more time on today during the hearing. i appreciate you bringing this up earlier supervisor safai, thinking about strategies. we have public works has graciously funded additional staff working to fill. we have been working and trying to do as much work as i can with my team to schedule and work on processes, concurrently, thus reducing time to hire.

i have reached out to my colleagues at dph and i appreciate you mentioning the nurse hiring. i wanted to make sure any lessons learned on that end, we could possibly implement on the public works side, we would consider those. i am continuing to have those conversations with hr at dph and department of human resources. and then there are some new kind of ideas and things we are looking to around how do we have alternative testing approaches for civil service hires and then potentially just thinking through how we can get the high priority recruitments through in terms of approvals to move to fill. and with that, that concludes our slide deck and we are available to answer any questions. thank you very much. >> supervisor preston: thank you and supervisor safai before the

next presenter, i want to welcome our vice chair supervisor chan to the hearing today. >> supervisor safai: thank you. one of the things that jumped out at me that is pretty shocking is that you have about 500 plus positions in your department that are vacant but over 300 plus of them are in the operations division. that's over 60% of your vacancies in operations. and so, we feel the most heat -- we field the most calls and pressure for everyone involved in public works around operations as it relates to the conditions of our streets and

city in general. and when we're operating at a 300 plus shortage of staff in that area, it is no wonder that i hear things like we're spread very thin, we can't respond to all calls as quickly as we want to. so one of the real key questions and this was not answered in the presentation, what is the average time it takes to hire staff in your department? this whole hearing was spurred from being out in the streets with your operations division and hearing from them they had over 70 positions in one specific area that were vacant and they had been waiting for a considerable amount of time to hire those positions. i think the first basic question is what is the average amount of time? we use the example of the nurses. they were starting out at nine months to hire. the reality is what i hear from talking to people that have gone through the process, it usually takes about a year.

and at the end of the day, by the time you come back to someone after a year, a lot of times they have gone on to another job. they have had to take another job and then you're left with a pool of candidates that are predominantly internal so you are just shuffling the deck. i really want to hear what is the average time it takes to hire and two, what are some of the -- i heard at the end some of the strategies to change that process and then three, i would like to hear either you or the interim director respond to the impact of having 60 plus percent of vacancies in the operation division. that is significant to the delivery of service in our city. >> i might respond back to the timed hire question supervisor safai. i think we have focused on the

laborers and this is information that i'm willing and happy to share. with our civil service laborers, that process that brought us the eligible list we are hiring off of took about nine months to put together. this, again, was during covid times and we had to reschedule in person examination due to safety concerns. that presented a two month delay in our process. we have established safety protocols and we -- i can't foresee the future in terms of new variations of covid-19, but i do believe that was kind of -- i don't think it's out of the ordinary in terms of time it takes to put together a large city wide exam. we have an people who have to go through the lists.

the process is long. now the process goes much quicker. so we can canvas the list and start doing the pre-employment work, which kind of greatly diminishes the time to hire. i think it very much depends -- the other ways and means and strategies we used to fill the position, we hire exempt to fill positions and make sure operational needs are taken care of. exempt hires can move quickly. those can move quickly and with the caveat that individual case by case may take longer depending on conviction history, program or other issues. we can -- i think we can build through and provide more details on other classifications as that might be helpful. >> supervisor safai: so you're saying about nine months. that's a significant amount of time. second thing is, really like you to respond to nine months to get

the civil service and then three months to get in. that is about a year. >> for recruitment, yes. >> supervisor safai: that is pretty unbelievable based on where we are in the city right now. secondly, want to talk about how 60 plus percent of the vacancies are in the operations division and how it impacts service in the city. we approach the nursing situation as somewhat of an emergency because we were coming into covid and because it is dealing with crisis in our city. i wouldn't say that the cleanliness of our street is crisis or emergency level, but it is significant in terms of how we have talked about this over years. i want to say, i know the men and women of public works are doing everything they can to make our city shine and do the

best job they can. i love the photos you showed with them out in the street. i see them all the time. they're doing the best they can. but if they're operating constantly short staffed, how are they going to address the real issues in the city. i mean, in my office, in our district, we have constantly gone out two or three times a week to alert and inform and work in partnership with public works and a lot of times, we just keep hearing we don't have enough staff to respond to these levels of concern. what can you do now -- does it mean you might need to get human resources involved to give you additional support? over 300 plus vacancies in operation is significant. >> if i may supervisor -- i would like to caveat my comment around the time to hire in terms of establishing the permanent eligible list.

for city wide eligible -- our goal is always to have an available eligible list to hire off of knowing it takes time and significant time to put through an eligible list, our goal is always to start the process to create a new eligible list so there's not a gap so departments always have an eligible list to hire off of. there might be a break in when the eligible lists are available, because the timeline is there, we try to start the process early so there's one expired and we have a new one to hire off of. >> supervisor safai: the other thing i want to ask you, 30% vacancy within a department seems phenomenal. i mean, when we were talking about the nurses, when we started the conversation, it was around 11%.

we have gotten that down to 4%. 30%, again, it is eye-opening. i don't understand how you can functionally operate a major department that is one of probably the most crucial departments in the city with 30% vacancy. it makes no sense to me. i don't understand how we're even functioning right now quite frankly. isn't that -- shouldn't that send up tremendous red flags in the hr department and within the city? shouldn't we be doing a massive effort to get the number down below 15 or 10%? it doesn't seem like that is a functional number for a major city like san francisco. >> supervisor, if i could chime in again and sort of explain -- that percentage is very high, but, again, there are a number

of positions that are designed to be vacant -- until something is -- >> supervisor safai: i got that, project based. if we took the project based positions out, what is the number? it is still above 20%. maybe even above 25%. i wouldn't imagine that 10% of your positions are project-based funding. i don't know. that would be good information to have. it still seems to me if you take those out, you have a tremendous amount of vacancies in the city for a significant department that we all rely -- it is literally, it is the backbone of how our city operates. i had no idea coming in today, this would be the number we would be presented with and i'm shocked to be honest with you. now i understand why you're under so much stress and the workers are under so much stress, there's not enough staff to support the work that needs to be done. but the positions are there and

i understand the funding and availability is there, so something is impeding our ability to get these positions filled and operate this division and this department in a functional manner. how many positions out of the 30% are project-based? >> i would have to defer -- bruce, do you have the number? >> i'm doing quick analysis as we are talking. i don't have the number at my fingertips. i can provide it right after this meeting -- >> supervisor safai: you have been deputy director of operations, you have seen the different aspects of public works. how does it impact your ability to actually operate this important department and have 30% of your workforce vacant?

>> it's a challenge. that's why we're having the hearing. we are under enormous pressure. it is important to recognize that our staff are working very hard. we need to recognize that there are new challenges that have made things more difficult during covid, which includes some of the increased presence on the street of folks who otherwise may have been in a congregate shelter setting for example. i think we are even more -- under even more difficult circumstances than we have been and it is important to recognize, the laborers exam was delayed at least twice that i know of because they do a practical exam.

general laborers have a very tough job and they have to be able to lift 50 pounds, they demonstrate their abilities through practical exams. because of covid, that was delayed several times. so -- >> supervisor safai: not to interrupt but it seems to me as though deputy director robertson's presentation, he showed a snapshot overtime and pre-dated covid and still -- it was even higher. it got to 35% under covid. now you have pressed since we had the conversations over the last two months, you have moved but still, it is still hovering around -- this is a consistent number. so this is not -- the only thing related to covid i saw in the numbers, the numbers went up because of what you're describing. but functionally, it seems this has been a consistent short fall within this department. i would just say this, if our

fire department was operating at 30% shortfall or police department or mta or any of the other -- literally, the city would fall apart. to say money and positions are there but they're not filled, and then to see there's additional requests for nonprofits and other groups out there doing different things the kind of help supplement some of the things being asked for, it is actually pretty shocking and i understand now better than i ever have why this department is under so much pressure. we need to come up with a strategy to get that number down significantly. and it needs the be all hands on deck effort. i just -- i'm pretty shocked here today.

director, would -- did you have something else you wanted to say? >> i think bruce wanted to chime in. >> supervisor safai: okay, before i have him chime in, has there been -- this is one of the things we did with the nursing situation, public health has its own hr, the main human resource department supplemented and gave support and made it a high priority to hire nurses. have you had additional support from the department of human resources to do hiring? >> i think we've had continual conversations with the department of human resources about ways and ideas to help expedite hiring. one of the more recent conversations was around their support and some of the city wide examinations. we -- our department or my staff administered the city-wide

exam for the laborers. it's a huge list and takes our efforts away and we have to prioritize from other hires. to the extent we can have support in examination work and other efforts in terms of scheduling, that does help. in terms of innovative ideas and things to that nature along the lines of what happened at dph, i've had consistent conversations around how we do expedite hiring, hiring in a day where a candidate comes in and we can process them on site. that is something we would like to pilot with the 9916s to help expedite and move some of the positions as quickly as possible. i am in constant dialogue with the department of human resources and they have been extraordinarily helpful to us. i think we can always improve on what we're doing and what we continue to discuss with them. >> supervisor safai: thank you.

did you want to say something? >> yeah, i was able to crunch some numbers real quick. overall, based on the report -- as of this morning, i see 257 vacant positions operations bureau. of which, 45% of those are project-funded. 116 of those are vacant. i can provide you all of the information. that 257 number is 33.8% of all operations positions. so certainly, completely agree with you, higher than we would like. the one caveat i would want to highlight, during the presentation, we mentioned all of our temporary hiring and commercial corridor program. we currently have 77, 9916s on payroll as of friday last week. those hires are not included in any of the numbers that we're

talking about here. so -- why i want to highlight those, those are additional bodies on the street and more importantly, time it takes away to fill the positions from hiring managers and operation and city administrator hr and dhr. i want to make sure we don't lose sight of the positions. while not included in the numbers, those are bodies on the street doing critical work to keep the city clean. >> supervisor preston: i see vice chair chan -- go ahead

vice chair chan. >> supervisor chan: thank you and supervisor safai, i appreciate you bringing this to our attention. i agree with you, i wasn't aware of the type -- the lack that we're experiencing. it is alarming and i always think that throughout our city, there's always understaffing, short-staffing or a lack of hiring that we see every where. as i have been told by the city administrator, the great resignation across the city departments is real during pandemic, but then again, today's presentation helps to understand this goes back to 2017 before even the pandemic that we're experiencing this. i have a brief question and my apologies for jumping on late, maybe this was discussed during the presentation. but could you help me understand a little bit about the working

relationship and partnership of a possible apprenticeship program that would help us to build a pipeline, a pathway of hiring that is a bit more efficient and really help develop a pool of candidates that really can help us. i agree, if you're just shoveling people from units to units, we tend to burn some of the folks and it could be challenging to retain them. it really doesn't solve your problem for the long-term to provide local services that people in san francisco deserve, especially when you do have funding available to you. i understand that today is not like we're lacking of the funding, it's more like how do we build the pipeline. could you help me better understand if that exists and how we could improve on that if it exists. >> sure. thank you supervisor chan and thank you for bringing up an

important program we are eager to reimplement. we have several apprenticeship programs throughout the public works department. but there are a few that are part of -- partnership with the laborers union, including our gardener apprenticeship and arbourer program. as you noted, we feel those are really great opportunities to create a pipeline of candidates. i'll just take a moment to talk about one of the biggest challenges we've had and we have a very high vacancy rate in the arbourer unit, for that program, we have available funding through the street tree sf program but we don't have candidates. every time we have done an exam, there's a small number of people who actually complete and pass the exam and demonstrate practical ability and then we

have three city departments competing for the same candidates and we have only managed to hire three or four individuals at a time. if we were to -- i want to note that we -- with the support from the dhr apprenticeship coordinator and working with local 261, we are hopeful to relaunch those programs. there was a desire to restructure how basically the oversight committees were working for us. we're eager to get that back up and running. we do see that we need a strong pipeline of qualified candidates for all of these positions. that is a really high priority and we would love to get that moving again. i think everybody is working together to try to advance that. but it is clearly a need we have. >> supervisor chan: thank you. if i may, i want to -- i know you are trying the best and as

fast as you can. but what is the timeline? i wanted to drill down a bit more of a commitment in terms of timeline. >> well, i think, you know, there are several parties involved. i can't commit to a timeline unilaterally. if i could, i would put a very advanced and aggressive timeline together. but there's work that has been done and continues to need to be done to ensure we're doing this well and that we're correcting some of the challenges we've had in the past to make sure it is a successful program. >> supervisor mandelman: this is troubling and thank you for the

hearing and giving us the opportunity to hear about the hiring challenges and staffing challenges at public works. it doesn't feel to me like public works. this is extraordinary and a problem clearly for the city, it doesn't feel like public works is completely isolated in this. we have seen it at dph and other departments. i guess i'm wondering and maybe this is -- i'm not sure this is a question anyone can answer.

it just seems -- it seems like you're going to be playing catch-up. from the moment you are actually adequately staffed up, you'll be falling behind. it is just going to be always playing this game of catch-up and then the pandemic or bad budget year or something happens and you're never caught up. or am i misinterpreting. >> i think you are bringing up something that is very -- there are many conversations right now. i think many departments are seeing backlogs in hiring, right? people stopped hiring and then the flood gates opened and we're behind and really behind. every single position is a priority to fill. i know a number of discussions are happening across the board around the hiring process in the city, civil servants and dhr are

key parties in these discussions. my world is very much like you described, the moment a position hits and there's a vacancy, there are a thousand steps we have to take. and should there be a better way to hire faster? i sure hope there is. and i think it is right and i've had this discussion, our system wasn't built to be fast, it was built to be merit-based meant to be fair to give applicants an opportunity on multiple occasions to show they meet qualifications and they're interested and those elements take time. should it take this much time? i welcome any conversations we could have to help expedite. but the closest i get in my space, trying to do things in tandem because that alone can help. i see it is from my point, going around the edges and really not getting to the core. i think of what i have been

hearing. i know we have dhr here and this is a conversation that is really based upon our merit system and policies and civil service commission. so, you know -- >> supervisor mandelman: i would encourage the city administrator's office and hr and mayor's office to look at these bigger questions as they apply to public works and as they apply to other departments. this is just no way to run the city. and it is impacting the quality of life of our residents and businesses and it is impacting -- it is impacting the quality of life of the workers who are there doing the really challenging work and not having the support they need. i really hope this can be -- it is a priority for supervisor safai and all of us, i know it's

a priority and we have to breakthrough and figure this out. the other question i have -- how does the imminent establishment of a new department of streets and sanitation fit into this conversation. how is this hiring working going forward over the next year as we stand up these two new departments? >> supervisor safai: is that directed to director short or anyone who wants to answer? >> supervisor mandelman: anyone who thinks they have an answer but someone needs the come up with an answer because it seems to be happening. >> i'll give a brief response and maybe bruce wants to chime in as well.

i think certainly we are planning for -- we're not hitting pause on anything while we're marching towards the establishment of the new department and we -- as you know, there are shared administrative services envisioned for the establishment of the new department. we're basically proceeding with those positions that will be in the new department. we're still focused on hiring as well as the positions that will remain within public works and using that shared administrative services function to ensure that we are keeping the ball moving well, while the departments are splitting up. that's the brief answer. and bruce -- just supervisor mandelman, as you know, we are -- we have a lot to try to think through as we get towards that date, but we are absolutely planning out with the help of the city administrator's office,

what are the key decision points, what do we need to do to advance this, so we have as seamless transition as possible and the whole team is working on that. bruce, if you wanted to add -- >> thank you. through the chair, supervisor mandelman, as you know, february 3rd we have just under three weeks to finalize the budget and director short is correct, hr is considered shared services, part of the administration budget that will apply services for streets and sanitation and public works. right now what we're doing working with the city administrator's office is identifying all of the hr requirements for the split both in terms of making sure streets and sanitation, public works and city administrator's office are fully supported with the hr needs. once we submit the budget, we can certainly provide background and specifications in terms of what we're thinking. but right now, i don't have an answer in terms of what it is

going to look like. it is still very much under development as we prepare our budget submittal. >> supervisor preston: thank you. supervisor safai. >> supervisor safai: i wanted to add, thank you supervisor chan for asking that question. the next presentation is from labor local 261. then to add on to the last piece, prop b specifically talks about the creation of back office and administrative support. i think that will in many ways help move the ball a bit. it will add additional staffing and additional support that will be super focused. one of the things i heard, the laborers, that position process, that hiring is cumbersome and

takes a lot of time and draws away from other areas she has to work on. now having a focused human resources department for department of public works could help move the ball forward. i would like to move to the next presenter. we have laborers local 261 to present some ideas and give insight from their perspective. theresa, are you there? >> i am. hi. good morning supervisors. we do not have a powerpoint presentation. we didn't have the data and we just received it today. but we assume because it was operation, it was primarily local 261 and other building trade affiliates with the vacant positions. so, i'm the public business representative. long ago, the american

federation of labor became a power in the country and generally was able to uphold a high standard of living for workers organized in its unions. our city charter and recognition of the union assigned responsibilities to various trade unions in town and those union officials elected by the leaders speak and negotiate on behalf of the workers with various employers. often times the union leaders advocate not just for their own membership but unorganized workers and in this instant community workforce neither exploited nor left behind. the laborers see that all impacted by the high vacancy rates and classifications should be collaborated with by whatever means necessary in order to achieve labor peace, sustainable skilled and trained workforce and ensure the important work the department is responsible

for is completed on budget and on time for the citizens we all serve. the building trade unions in san francisco have for over 125 years provided skilled and trained workings through agreements to over a thousand different employers to build the hospitals, schools, buildings and infrastructure our communities depend on and use daily. until the 1970s, the san francisco construction and building trades council affiliates were providing through the union hiring halls. providing lifetime liveable wages to support workers and their families. speaking for my union, local 261 has been in the city and county for over 100 years and boasts a strong localized diverse

membership. prior to this election of the district council, a business man for local 261 and under him who serves on local 261 executive board, the union worked for years with the city leadership at their request to launch multiple first of its kind state of california certified career pathway programming to meet community workforce objectives. back in 2004, dozens of community workforce leaders were dissatisfied with the fact they were ineligible to work on industry projects, specifically the third street light rail taking place in their own communities. young worker from the southeast were being told they lacked the skill sets and minimum qualifications to perform tasks necessary to gain employment on the projects. in response, they organized with abu leading the way and approached mayor newsom with the

dilemma. promoting local hire in city built concepts already offered specifically. they recognized that such an effort would meet the needs of community workforce, department, unions by scaling up local individuals for sustainable careers in public and private sectors in our industry. he had curriculum and certified department of public works labor apprenticeship program in 2004. abu well respected community workforce leader was the official advisor for the program pursuant to the agreement with the city and assigned to the union. this was a hugely complicated time consuming and extraordinary effort in attempting to create a hybrid of the highly successful apprenticeship programs in the public sector.

it is an understatement to say there were growing pains with public works, with learning for the first time in the early 2000s learning what the programming was. the committee not management would be responsible for onboarding, certification, disciplinary procedures and compliance with state procedures, etc cetera. public works had the tendency to be loose with the role of supervision and oversight. they sought opportunities in the private sector. furthermore, the department was challenged with providing verifiable work experience and on the job training components were concerned. (please stand by...)

>> so thank you, supervisors, for calling this hearing, and thank you always for hearing

from us. >> thank you. supervisor safai, do you have questions or issues that you want to address before public comment? >> supervisor safai: yes, i do. >> okay. >> supervisor safai: so thank you, theresa, for joining us today. one of the things that i heard was building a merit-based workforce and coming at us with some new ideas today. we talked a little bit about the potential for coming in today for some new ideas, collaborative ways that would result in quicker hiring, and a dispatch agreement.

can you tell me about that? >> so a dispatch agreement is something that we execute with our signatory contractors. when they're getting ready to build a stadium, build a bridge, whatever the case may be, they know they can call down to the --

>> supervisor safai: these are two people that we worked with

on the hiring and expedited process, so i know you don't have any specific presentation, but one of the things that i have, it seems to me that kind of a merit based, there's a list system also, but -- [indiscernible] that this was nine months to create a list --

>> -- to find strategies to reduce the time it takes to hire. that is one of our department's top goals, and so we are constantly looking at the rule, the civil service rules that exist, and so we'll get with our civil service commission for ways that we can truncate

some of the rules that have been in place for many decades, and so i'll pass it off to anna to talk about it. >> good morning, supervisors. first and foremost, we just want to start off that the permanent civil service appointments are governed through the civil service commission rules, so there are a lot of steps, and they dictate some timelines throughout the process, as well. and what chanda described for you is under civil service. we've started discussions, we've had discussions in the past. for this last general laborers exam, i can tell you that i was there when we kind of -- the

exam was scheduled, and it was told -- we were told to shutdown city, for people from coming in, and that's caused the recent delays, but -- but, you know, there are methods like what we do with our end. we are discussing potential continuous testing, so there is always an eligible list available, and because there is a practical exam to demonstrate their skills and abilities, we are talking about scheduling them periodically, whether it's every three months, etc., etc., to add people onto the list so there's always somebody available, even for their exempt position, so there's a pool that they can canvas. there are other ways, as well. like chanda mentioned earlier, starting the exam early, before

the first list dies, so that there is always an eligible list. nursing, we did continuous testing, and it's a little bit easier for nurses to hire nurses often eligible because the state tests for them for their essential functions just to become a nurse by getting an r.n. license. with general laborers, for example, like d.p.w. stated earlier, we need to know that they can lift 50 pounds -- >> supervisor safai: no, i got that, and we have public comments. >> okay. >> supervisor safai: but just one of the things that -- and we don't need to go into too much detail, but yes, i understand you have your civil service process, but many labor

unions have negotiated memorandum of understanding and civil service process, and i understand there's a significant number of steps. we don't need to get into that. those same steps exist for nurses. we were able to take a nine-month average process and condense it down to 90 days or less, so it seems to me you can still follow a lot of those steps. a lot of those steps are required. we're not asking to do anyone about that, and i don't think we're getting into a conversation about civil service reform, but one of the things that heard about the union is they're interested in having a conversation around a dispatch agreement. sounds like that would require a negotiated memorandum of understanding between the department and the human resources department. you can respond to that, or anna, you can respond to that, but i know that different

representative labor groups have memorandums of understanding, and that affects the process. can you respond to that? >> so while there's the dispatch or whatever that the union has, the civil service rules are specific on the process being open and competitive process to all. so we would need to engage with civil service, obviously, to be able to even consider permanent appointments through a designation by the union. normally, i mean, what we can do, i'm just thinking off the top of my head, we post the announcement and, you know, contact the unions and have their members apply or whatever, but because of the civil service rules requiring an open-ended process, we can't

use that contract to hire employees permanently using that method. >> supervisor safai: and go ahead. >> thank you. today is the first time we're seeing that proposal dispatch, so we can take that back and review it further and compare it against our existing processes and get back to you. >> supervisor safai: okay. great. what i think is we might be headed toward a conversation of a similar model that we did to put together a working group with representatives. i know that they work with

representative labor, they work with management, they work with trades, so i think that a model exists, and we should further that conversation because the idea of taking a year to fill a position for such an important department that is already spread thin, whose members are doing tremendous work out on the street but just don't have the actual support that they need, i think it impacts all of us. if you can hang around, we'll come back after public comment, and maybe we can ask a few questions. chair, if you want to go to public comment, we can come back, unless anyone has any questions. >> supervisor preston: thank you so much, supervisor safai. mr. clerk, let's go ahead and check to see if there is any public comment. >> clerk: thank you, mr. chair.

kalina is checking to see if we have any callers in the queue. for those watching on cable channel 78 or 26 or streaming on-line, calling 415-655-0001, then enter the meeting i.d. 2485-575-0296. then press pound and pound again, and press star, three to enter the queue. we have three hands raised to speak. kalina, could you connect us to the first of those callers. >> hello? >> clerk: please begin. >> hello. my name is sean [indiscernible]

and i am speaking to the d.p.w. and supervisors of san francisco. question i have is right now, i'm involved with local 9916, and i've been waiting onto get on the 7514 program, general labor, for quite sometime. i heard that this program was defunct. during this time, i'm waiting to undergo a physical or some type of testing. but until then, what opportunities do i have within the 9916 platform? with no disrespect to caller short -- i just read about her

yesterday being the new director for 994, d.p.w. it doesn't take any skill to push a broom. it doesn't take any experience to clean the streets. so what opportunities do you have after you've been there for a year? what city opportunities can we have also to advance into d.p.w.? i'm a skilled tradesman. i work for local 510 down at the moscone center as a trade show installer, but when covid hit, my whole job was defunct. so in order for me to keep my family going, in order to have some type of income, i've had to let that job go and come over here, and i don't earn

even a third of the money that i was making at my other job, so it's real hard to support my family. >> clerk: thank you, mr. smith, for sharing your comments with our committee. i'm sorry to cut you off. speakers are restricted to two minutes for their comments, but thank you for your discussion. could we get the next caller, please. >> so supervisors, there are five people hearing this meeting, and there were three people waiting to talk, and you give us two minutes. this is -- this meeting, this entire meeting is b.s., and i'll tell you why. first and foremost, we have over 33,000 city employees. during the pandemic, we had a shortage of nurses, and as much as we tried to protest outside the mayor's office, y'all wouldn't help the nurses until

you realized that it took nine months to hire the nurses, but there was a way out because you could hire per diem nurses and travel nurses. i know because i give thousands of people vaccinations, unlike you supervisors. so what you are doing is you are bringing these people, mostly women, mostly women. the mayor's hiring mostly women, and they want to run the city, and they're totally screwing it up. you can do nothing about it until you totally revamp the civil service system. willie brown, when he first became the mayor, he hired 2,000 so-called administrative assistants, he himself, okay? so why can't y'all. he did himself, so why can't y'all? you can't because you're inept.

you don't want to do anything. you want to have these long meetings that don't go anywhere. thank you very much. >> clerk: thank you, mr. da costa, for your comments. next caller, please. >> it's strange that we would allow the department to hire positions for salaries of $200,000 when the majority of voters approved prop b and they're in the process of breaking the department up. lastly, why is the acting director who's not qualified for the role making this decision before a full time director is announced? i hope the committee can address these decisions, and thank you for everything you do. >> clerk: thank you for sharing

your comments with the committee. can we get the next caller, please. >> can you hear me okay? >> clerk: please begin. >> great, and a 30-second warning, please. david pillpel. there are some d.p.w.-specific hiring issues here, but i think some are about h.r. and projects citywide. speaking of citywide, i just looked in the a.a.o. and the a.s.o. the a.a.o. has 32,000 f.t.e., and the a.s.o. has 39,000 positions. not all are funded, and some are attrition, it is assumed. the f.t.e. number has always been inflated and does not represent the actual department need because of attrition factors. some issues involve covid, peoplesoft and f.s.p., classification issues, and the

hiring process, which has been changed several times over the years and is now on-line and less paper based, for example. grants and projects fund positions -- fund those positions differently than what were a.a.a. positions in the a.s.o. and may skew the position vacancies. there are a number of grant, particularly project funded positions that appear to be vacant so the departments have flexibility in hiring, and if you look at [indiscernible] -- thanks. if you look at b.d.c. and i.d.c., i suspect they might have a different number of vacancies than might exist. i would have a broader hearing with d.h.r. to talk about the hiring process citywide. and finally, a good question here is the amount of turnover in d.p.w. laborer-type classes,

7514s and others, and how to manage that and other entry level. thanks very much. >> clerk: thank you for sharing your comments with the committee. do we have any further callers in the queue? >> operator: there are no more callers. >> clerk: mr. chair, i hear that there are no further callers. >> supervisor preston: thank you, mr. chair. with no further callers, public comment on this item is now closed, and i will turn it back over to supervisor safai for any closing thoughts or questions before we wrap up. >> supervisor safai: thank you, chair. is -- i really appreciate everyone presenting today and their forthrightness in getting us the information so that we can have a real honest conversation. today's not about finger pointing, today's just about looking at the facts and how it impacts our city. we started these conversations out in the field, as you heard interim director short say,

while we were meeting to talk about some of issues out in the streets. it became about vacant positions, but now to hear that there is something functionally dysfunctional in the department, a consistent shortfall of 30%, it just doesn't seem fair to this department. maybe in a biased manner, i worked there, and i have so much love for all the members there, but i have to say i don't feel like this department is being treated fairly. this is such a significant department. so much requests go to this

department. so many expectations are put on this department, so many demands are put on this department, and to operate at 30% or more vacancy, it's just not sustainable, it's not functional. so what i'm going to do, and i appreciate representative labor coming as well as h.r., both in the city administrator and our main department, human resources, i'm going to be putting together a working group to tackle this issue, very similar to the way we did with the nurses. we're going to look at the hiring process, we're going to look at the time that it takes. we're going to explore this idea that was presented today that we need to know more about in terms of a dispatch agreement. seems as though what was done at the san francisco housing authority could be a model of being replicated, particularly when it comes to those that are under the classification of apprenticeships, so definitely, definitely appreciate this hearing today. thank you, colleagues, for all of your additional questions,

but this is very similar to the way we tackled our nursing, very similar to the way we tackled our budget shortfalls. this is not about additional money necessarily, it's about improving the process and ensuring we can fill those positions in a timely manner and partnership with both the h.r. department, representative labor, and the department itself, and we'll ask them to come to the table. maybe, chair, we can continue this to the call of the chair, and maybe we can come back in three or four months and see what progress we've been able to make and to present to this

body. that would be my request. >> supervisor preston: thank you, supervisor safai. let me just say, my questions have been asked by my colleagues and by supervisor safai, so i don't have additional questions to ask, but i share the frustrations of my colleagues of having a 30% vacancy rate in such an essential department, and to elevate the strain that it puts on everyone in the department, all laborers that are trying to respond to the same level of demands on services, with 30% of the positions funded but unfilled. it's absolutely a crisis, and i appreciate you elevating this and look forward to working with you, and certainly happy to have this back in committee, as you suggest, when the time

is right, to see what kind of progress has been made, so thank you for your leadership on this, supervisor safai, and i would like to move to continue this to the call of the chair. mr. clerk? >> clerk: on the motion offered by chair preston that this hearing be continued to the call of the chair -- [roll call] >> clerk: mr. chair, there are two ayes, noting that member mandelman is absent. >> chair preston: thank you, mr. clerk. thank you, everyone, for your presentations and work. mr. clerk, any further business before the committee? >> clerk: noting that the items were called out of order and that agenda item number 2 has already been handled, there is no further business before the committee. >> chair preston: thank you, mr. clerk. we are adjourned.

all right. hello everyone. thank you so much for joining me. i'm san francisco mayor london breed and i'm joined today with our police chief bill scott to talk about the crime statistics in san francisco. and i just want to back up and put things into perspective. first of all, it's been a challenging year. we say that over and over again, but we also understand the challenges everyone is living with whether it's people who've lost their jobs and homes. kids that who aren't in school. those that struggle with mental health challenges and a number of other issues. sadly, in san francisco, we have seen certain crime statistics increase, but we've seen others decrease.

and the chief will get into those more specifically. now, despite dealing with this pandemic and seeing a number of people especially with the omicron variant out sick, we've seen that happen not just with people in san francisco, but many of our city workers including those from our police and fire department. the public safety arm of san francisco. and i just want to take this opportunity to really thank our police officers, many of them have had to do overtime because we've had hundreds of officers out as a result of omicron and others have had to step up to take their place. we know that there are a number of challenges that we see and we know that people are anxious to see improvements in the tenderloin community with the emergency declaration, but the fact is we have a number of employees that are out. others have stepped up to take their place and we want to ensure that not only are we

doing what we need to do in the tenderloin community to keep that community safe, we also need to make sure that we're keeping everyone in the entire city safe. we know that that is such a priority for so many san franciscans. and as a leader of this city, it is a priority for me. nothing is more important than to make sure that people who live in this city, people who work in this city, people who visit san francisco feel safe as they walk down the streets. and the fact is that does require police officers. it does require folks who are part of our public safety network. it does require us working together. and to be clear, it does not mean that we ignore the reforms that we need to do here in san francisco with our police department. it does not mean that we ignore all the work we're doing to provide an alternative response to policing. those things go hand in hand with also keeping people safe

so that they don't become victims of violent crime. so i want at this time to really just talk about what has been our plan moving forward. our plan moving forward, of course, is definitely contingent upon us providing those various services with our street crisis response team, our ambassadors, our escorts for our seniors. so many great programs in san francisco with a lot of nonprofit agencies that are working hand in hand with us to deliver for san franciscos who are most impacted by crime. yesterday, i was in chinatown, we were talking about the statistics and the hate crimes that have increased by 567% in the a.p.i. community specifically and our need to enhance our support is what we're doing because that is critically important to the safety of that community and to making sure that people

understand that we don't tolerate this and we will do everything we can to make sure that justice is served for the victims of these violent attacks. and part of that is making sure that we have a robust police department. a department that has officers who can not only walk the beat, but those that can investigate crime. those that can deal with a number of the challenges and victim services and support all the things that we need in order to make sure that not only are people kept safe and we prevent those crimes from happening in the first place, but once they happen that there is a process to bring those who commit those violent acts to hold them accountable. and that's what this is all about. the department over the past couple of years since 2019 has seen a reduction in the number of police officers by about 20%. and so where our operating with the staffing that we have and meeting the needs all over san

francisco, but we clearly need more. just recently, we received a letter from the controller's office of san francisco that says if we don't move forward with the supplemental that i introduced for $22.5 million to help with the cost associated with the police and fire department, services will be impacted because they won't be able to allow us to spend above our means. so what does that mean? that means that the controller's office will come in and make certain decisions for us. that means that the police academy classes which are already struggling with recruitment for our police department won't happen. that means no more back filling of officers. no more getting police officers on the streets in the numbers that we need in order to ensure safety. that's what it means. it means our fire department will be affected. $7.9 million for the police.

$14.6 million i believe for the fire department to address what we know is again the overtime related to the additional services needed from people being out sick and also the shortage in staffing of people who have retired or left the department for various reasons. this is not asking for more. this is asking for the basics, what everyone expects in the city as it relates to public safety. that's what this is about and i'm hoping that the member officer the board of supervisors see it that way. this is about what people expect. when there's a shooting in the bayview hunter's point community which has occurred on far too many occasions, the expectation is that the police will show up. when there's a stabbing or a

shooting or assault in the tenderloin community, that community expects that the police will show up and they will get justice. when there is crime of any occurrence, whether it's a burglary when someone is breaking into someone's home while they're there. can you imagine experiencing that and not having the police show up right away when you call 911. that should never happen in a major city like san francisco. there should be an expectation if something happens and you're in need of medical treatment, the paramedics will come. when you're in need of support from law enforcement because you've been assaulted or robbed or anything has occurred, the police should be expected to show up. so this additional resource we need is about maintaining that level of service and we know we need more, but in the meantime, as our city has really suffered during this pandemic, not just the challenges of mental

illness and addiction and homelessness and all of the things that we continue to address, but crime. and crime has to be addressed in a number of ways. there is not a one-size-fits-all, but there is a real need to make sure that we don't completely deplete our police department and then still expect justice and service and support when sadly we become the victim. we can do better and my hope is that we will do better. my hope is that the board will approve this supplemental and the police department will be able to continue the great work that they have done for san francisco especially during this pandemic. so, with that, i'd like to introduce our police chief bill scott to talk specifically about the statistics from last year. >> police chief scott: thank you, mayor breed. and good morning everybody.

we're going to have graphics on the screen so you can follow along. and before i start with the statistics, let me start and put this into context. statistics are what's reported to us. and we all understand that sometimes what translates on the statistics may not be your experience. aside from homicide, i think traditionally in policing, crimes go unreported. homicide is probably the purest statistic we have because it's really hard not to have a homicide reported or murder reported. short of everything else, we know there are crimes that we don't get because they're not reported from shootings to reports, to burglaries, you name it. some crimes don't get reported and i want to put that into some context because when we talk about our statistics, we're talking about what's reported to us and we understand that for some

people, that may not be their experience. that might not be what they're seeing. the victim may not have reported it or things in particular from their world view might not be consistent with what we put up. this is merely what we report and i think it's important that we understand and put into context what statistics are. as mayor breed said, we know there's a lot of work that we need to do. we also know that there is a lot of good work that's been done. so we're going to talk about both. we're going to talk about the challenges and we're going to talk about the things where we've seen some progress and some improvement. and being that i led off talking about homicide are the purist statistic that we have. i'm going to start off with our homicide and each one of these graphs that you see are, you'll see the last several years of statistics. so you can put into context what the trends are. violent crimes will start here and we'll put into context what

the trends are over time because it paints a clearer picture when you look at crime statistics over a period of time. we have 56 homicide this past year in 2021. and when you look at this graph, this graphic, the last time we had homicides was 2017. we saw a decline for three years and then starting in 2019, we started to see an increase in homicides, and sadly, this is not just a san francisco trend, this is a national trend and this is something that is truly concerning to all of us. many of our investigations have led us to facts that indicate that many of our cases are connected with some of the surroundings cities in the bay area and so we've been doing a lot of work with those jurisdictions and those police departments both on the law enforcement side and on the social services side to try to turn this trend around.

56 homicides for san francisco is a big deal and it's something we're committed to turning around and before i end my discussion, i'm going to talk a little bit about some of the strategies that we've put in place to do just that. i also want to say that in our effort to bring these cases to resolution, we solved our clearance rate for homicides this past year was 77%. so almost eight and ten of our cases we solved and that's been consistent over the last several years and that rate is really far above the state average and the national average and so that's something we're pleased with. not to say we can't do better. we want to solve every case, but sadly for the families and the victims, we don't solve every case, but we'll definitely work as hard as we can to do just that. those cases can be solved and those investigators can't do the work if we don't have

what's in place. we have to have the staffing to do that. we also have to have community support and there are too many people to thank in terms of many members in our community. but we'll keep pushing forward and we want to turn that 56 to a much lower number. a couple years ago, i think it was the mayor's first year in office or second year in office, we were at 41 homicides for the year. that is as low as we've been since the early 1960s. we want to do better than that. gun violence contributed to the majority of our homicides and the next graphic, you'll see our gun violence victims for 2021. there were a total of 222. that's the highest we've been since 2016. and you look at the friends. it really follows the homicide trends where you see a dip. 2018 to 2019 and then it starts to do back up.

now, we don't really know the role that the global pandemic plays in this. there's a lot of theories out there. there's a lot of anecdotal crime is high because of all reasons connected to covid and all that may be true, but we really don't have the evidence to point that out. this category of crime is going up and we need to turn it around. in terms of gun violence, we are working with several community groups and also with our mayor's office and her public safety folks in her office to bring strategies to the table. we've brought strategies to the table that don't only rely on us being able to solve the case, but also really addressing the people who are most at risk and i'm talking about the people who are at most risk of either shooting somebody or being shot. and what we have done over the last two years is a lot of research to drill down on who those people are and reach out to them and their families to

try to get them some help. in the cases where we can't get them help and they commit a crime, investigate those cases thoroughly and vigorously and bring them to justice. and that balance is how we will move forward in addressing gun violence. it's been successful so far. last year we started in a hole with gun violence. it's our intention to cause that to continue as much as we can and so far this year it's early, very early. so i'm not going to put too much weight in this but we're on a much better note than this time last year. next category. rapes. as you can see in the graphic, we had 204 rapes reported last year which is a little bit below where we were in 2020.

we saw a significant decrease between 2019 and 2020. so that's going in the right direction. sexual assaults are right up there with homicides as far as the seriousness, the impact on the victims and their families, something that we take very seriously and hopefully we can continue to see that number go in the right direction. next category of violent crime or robberies. so robberies, i want to put this into a little bit of context with the mayor's comments about how important staffing is. robberies are one of those crime categories where officers on the street really make a difference. we saw this in parts of the city such as the tenderloin mid year when we upped our deployment in the tenderloin. we saw pretty significant double digit percentage wise dropping robberies. we ended the year with 2, 242 robberies which is a slight decrease this year about 200

robberies left. we still have a lot to do with robberies. but the reason it's so important to put officers in these areas where we know these robberies are occurring, the majority of these robberies are street crimes. people are going to and from whatever it is they're.co in the daily activities alike. when officers are present and this is proven time and time again, we tend to have less of those events when officers are present. that's why foot patrols and foot beats and bike officers and presence and engagement is so important in terms of reducing robberies. so that is our strategy moving forward. we know it works. we know it can work. we need the people to do it and we're committed to just that. part of our analysis when we identify where robberies are occurring, usually, the drill is we identify the hot spot. and the best case scenario, the officers are there to begin with to prevent the robberies from happening, but if we can't do that, then we usually adjust

our deployment and we put officers in those areas and we see crime go down and that happens time and time again. so officers matter. we need to have them out in the field and as we see, we've made some progress and robberies and we hope to continue that. next category is assaults, and aggravated assaults. now i want to explain to you all that shootings are included in this category. we break out shootings because shootings are so important and such a big issue for our city. we break that out. but these numbers that you see and aggravated assault and shootings are inclusive in these numbers. so we had an increase. as you see, it increased with a couple hundred, 200 aggravated assaults. 81 is the number for 2021. this is another set of crimes where at least the public ones where deployment matters.

it matters a lot. some aggravated assaults happen inside peoples' homes and businesses and we can't always get to those and try to prevent them. but the ones that happen in the public, it's really important to have officers present and deployed and visible in those communities where these are occurring. these assaults include as i said, gun related violence, but they also include bodily weapons. they include knives. they include other weapons, sticks, bottles. that's inclusive of all of our assaults. it went up from 2020 to 2021. it's something that we had to turn around. very serious crimes and policing matters in that. and on the investigative side, we have to do more in our investigations to solve more of these cases. so now we're going to go to property crime. burglaries are the first category that i'll talk about. 2020 and this was the year of the global pandemic. we saw a significant jump in

burglaries and as much as we try to figure out whether the pandemic was partially responsible, there are some of those statistics in 2020 that are pandemic related. we had a rash of burglaries and lootings during june, late may of 2020 relate today all the civil unrest across the country. so that contributed to it, but it went beyond that. many of our san franciscans had their houses and their garages broken into, businesses broken into, and we saw an uptick. the first half of this year, it was a significant uptick. so we adjusted our deployment. we put officers where these incidents were happening including putting our plain clothed officers, deploying them at night. surveilling people who we believe to be involved in those burglaries. we made some key arrests. we were tracking the prolific burglars and we were able to

make arrests on many of them. and we started to see about mid year, about may, we started to see those numbers decline and they declined throughout the year. so we ended the year on a positive note with burglaries. but we're not out of the woods on burglaries. as you can see, we're far higher than 2019 and the previous year. so we still have a lot of work to do and we still have a lot of people to hold accountable for what we're doing. what we find with the burglary suspects is many of them are repeat offenders and prolific. those are the ones we have concentrated on. those people, those individuals. we've had some success. some of our most prolific once we got them in custody, we saw drops in certain neighborhoods where we believe they were active and this goes beyond the city and county of san francisco. so those are strategies that we'll continue to deploy with our burglaries and we believe if we do that, they will continue to go in the right direction. so we ended the year on a good note, but we still have a lot

of work to do. next category is larceny. and this is the whole gamut. so this will include architect. and packaged thefts and all. so as you can see, when you compare 2021 to 2020, it was a significant increase in thefts. and it's pretty much across the board. but when you look at this over the last five years, we were on a steady decline. 2020 was an aberration. but then we go to 2021 and we get an increase in 2020. so we look at this over time. not as much out of whack as if you put an asteric by what we believe was the impact of covid with our decrease in 2020, but we were able to make some headway on a lot of these categories.

retail theft. we've had the mayor and i some announcements this summer about how we were addressing retail theft. we did see a difference and some of those locations that were getting hit the hardest when we made those adjustments and those included we doubled the size of our retail theft, our investigation unit. we added personnel to better coordinate our ten beat appointment which is our uniformed officers that get hired by retailers and the coordination between those off duty officers and on duty officers is as good as it's ever been so that has helped because that has led to better coordination and better coverage the other category that's been stubborn in our city is the car break-in issues. mid year, the mayor made an announcement about our tourism deployment. in our city, we were talking

about the areas in our city where people come here and they want to see it. they have to see those areas. and then they come here and get victimized. and we're finding discarded luggage all over the city. we started what we termed our tourism deployment and much of that was done in overtime. and the areas that we concentrated on, we saw significant decreases. so that deployment although we had to make some adjustments. that deployment is still happening we also want to make sure the people that live here day in and day out so there's a lot of work to be done there. we did see some turn arounds with our car break-ins and we'll continue to turn this picture around. looking at the long term. you can see the trends over from 2017 to 2019 was a

decrease and then 2020, that significant decrease and then arrives in 2021. so we want to turn that around and not be above where we were last year in terms of the overall larceny picture. and we think some of the strategies that i mentioned will help, but it also helps to hold people accountable and bring them to justice when they do those types of crimes. auto thefts is the next category. and we have a little bit of a longer view in amount of thefts and as you see, you see it will be up in a second. you see a decline from 2015 to 2019 basically then 2020, there was a significant increase. that was somewhat of a trend that we saw in other cities as well. we do track other cities to see if what we experience here is something that's just in san francisco. this is something bigger. auto thefts, many cities experience increases. and we saw significant increase in 2020 and then it levelled off a little bit in 2021 and we

saw actually just a very slight decrease. so auto thefts is a big issue. we recover a lot of the cars that get stolen. unfortunately, we don't solve as many of the cases as we would like to. so that's an area that we have to continue to work on and there are some technology trends that we're seeing that we have to delve in more in terms of the thieves who are still in cars or kind of a step ahead of the game with technology. so not anything they can go into detail now on, but it's something that as we had analyzed these problems and we really understand kind of why these increases are happening, we definitely will share that with the public. so statistically as the mayor said and i will reiterate, there are ups and downs. there are areas where we've had some good progress and there

are areas like homicides where we have to turn things around. it takes people to do it. we want to do the job the way the city expects us to do it. so while all this is happening, we're pushing forward with all of our that helps us. and as you all always hear me say, we're not a perfect police department. we have our issues and problems, but when we identify what those problems are, we're going to, work to fix them and make them better and as we move through 2022, we're going to do everything we can from a public safety and policing perspective to give the residents of our city the safest city we can help them have. so, with that, we'll open it up

for questions and if you all don't mind, we're going to take questions for the mayor first and then i can take any policing questions and then anything in detail we can talk about off line. we have our team here, we can talk about details off line. so thank you. >> christian. >> where have you seen successes from the tenderloin emergency plant. are you already starting to see some successes in that area? are they pushing the problem around? also are you still hoping to graduate more, we talked about more police recruits in the future to increase the number of officers? >> what do you mean by successes? >> are you seeing fewer reported crimes in that area.

maybe that's something more so for the chief. >> yeah. i'll just say that i've gotten information for a number of stories of people that we've been able to help even on day one with someone who wanted to go into treatment and needed a t.b. shot and we were able to do that and get them into a behavioral health bed before we were able to transition them into a location where they are getting help and turning their lives around. we have a number of stories like that. . i wouldn't say we have hundreds of stories like that. we'll probably be able to provide that as time goes on. this is not a problem in the tenderloin that was created overnight. the tenderloin has had so many challenges for many years and we saw during this pandemic, things have gotten so much worse even though we've added a number of resources to help

support with mental illness and substance use disorder with our street crisis response team, with our street wellness team, with our street overdose entities that were created to be an alternative response to policing so that when folks are experiencing crisis which does not in some cases require a police response, those have been extremely successful and i think we can get you the data later about the number of calls that they've responded to and how many people we've been able to help as a result of that and as this tenderloin deployment plan moves forward, we definitely need more time before we can provide statistics or specific information about the number of people that we've helped. but we are hopeful. i was there yesterday, i'm probably obsessed with going to the tenderloin every day to see what's going on down there and it has its good days and bad days and i do appreciate the

fact that it appears that this linkage center has been extremely helpful and what we're hoping after we finish hopefully with this surge of covid that we'll see more officers out on the streets in the tenderloin community to help support the various agencies and programs that we have to help people. >> mayor, on the tenderloin linkage center, the chronicle has been reporting the drug use. what is the policy on drug use there? >> well, we don't have a policy as it relates to this linkage center other than meeting people where they are. the goal is to allow people who suffer from addiction to come into this center, to no questions asked to get food, to maybe get a shower. to get support, to get services, but we're not forcing anyone to do anything. and at the end of the day, you

know, this is a place where there's no judgment where this isn't a one size fits all solution and i wouldn't suggest that something like drug use is allowed, but it's happening all over the city sadly. it's happening all over the tenderloin and regardless of this linkage center or any place else, we can't control who does or does not do or do not use drugs at any given location. our whole point of why we set up this linkage center is to meet people where they are and to try and get them the help and support they need. at this time, we are hopeful that they feel safe, they feel comfortable. they feel they can trust this location so when they are ready to get help, they have a number of people who are part of this nonprofit 360 that will instantly, immediately help deliver them to treatment detox

support or whatever it is that they need. >> is the street effort part of a larger effort to get people off the sidewalk. how far along we are and what has to happen next and staffing with police. what should people expect to see as far as what comes next? >> well, it's not just staffing with police. it's the department of public health. as i said, a number of city employees and nonprofit employees would typically be the people that we would rely on to work in these establishments, to work in the tenderloin, they've been out too in some cases with omicron and my hope is that people see a difference and they feel a difference as you walk down market street, the sidewalks are clean. as you walk in parts of the neighborhood and the tenderloin, you can actually

get past the sidewalk and not see feces or step in feces or anything of that nature. my goal is to make it a walkable, livable, safe, and clean city and that involves making sure that people who unfortunately have taken over in some cases, many of the sidewalks and areas of the tenderloin that that doesn't continue. and that those people who are suffering with addiction are -- we're able to make sure they're not overdosing out on the sidewalk somewhere or that we're discovering them weeks after they've passed away in their tent. like we're trying to avoid losing lives as well and so this kind of controlled environment is a way to, again, no questions asked. come on in. we're not here to judge. we're here to help you and we want people to feel comfortable

coming into this space. it's getting people off the sidewalks, it's cleaning up the tenderloin. it's addressing crime and the violence that occurs which unfortunately, i mean, you see the statistics and, you know, it's gotten increasingly violent in the tenderloin. the stabbings and the shootings on a regular basis. so we are trying to get a handle on that as well. and so we want people to see and feel a difference and we're hopeful in the coming months as we continue to try and address this, it will be a noticeable difference and people will not, you know, be so focused on, well, what's going on at the linkage center, we don't think it's right. well, you know what, i don't think it's right to see it out on the street and walk near needles and feces either. this is a solution that we are hopeful will lead to real change and will really lead to less crime and also less overdose deaths in san

francisco. >> one followup honor crime statistics in general. there's a lot of discussion about crime is up, crime is down. when you step back big picture, roughly crime is high in the city. do you think something is lost in the sort of discussion of crime? >> well, i'll just tell you this. i know we talk about statistics as a way to communicate what we know is actually happening based on the information because we know also there are a lot of people who won't report it. it's i'm sure in many cases, it's more than that. statistics really don't matter when you're a victim. and i think at the end of the day, i am hearing more stories from more people about situations that they experienced that they are really blown away. and let's just take it back a little bit. people who i grew up with in public housing who were like,

london, this is too much. this is just the situations people are dealing with in the city and i think at the end of the day, regardless of the statistics, when it happens to you and you used to feel comfortable and safe walking around san francisco and all of a sudden, you're randomly attacked and you're traumatized and you can't even walk your kids to school, that's a problem. so from my perspective, this city has to do more and when these crimes are committed, when that line is crossed, we have no choice but to make sure that we follow through with investigations, that we arrest the possible suspects. you know, when i was growing up, there were sometimes people who were arrested for crimes they never committed. but in san francisco and all the work we've done over the years around police reform and changes, the likelihood when we make an arrest is likely the person that we arrest. so they need to be held accountable and justice for the victims of these crimes need to

occur just like justice for people who might have challenges with the criminal justice system in order to deal with public safety. it's not either or, it's all of it. we look at the statistics, but when it happens to you, who cares about statistics. we need to make sure that the people of the city are safe. and that it does include amplifies and it is what it is. all right. thank you. >> police chief scott: okay. any other questions? great. yes, ma'am. >> this question's regarding the sfo shooting last week. >> police chief scott: first of all, we're going to have a town hall.

we'll announce today, probably today or tomorrow as we always do on these types events. let me just put the context of how these things work. this particular incident, the state attorney general's office is the lead investigative agency for the criminal investigation. so the officers whether they're legal or not. when we have a shooting no matter who investigates it, the scene is basically frozen. it's frozen this will the people who are responsible and have jurisdiction to recover that evidence, to examine it can get to it. that takes time. and in any situation whether it's this one on friday or whether it's any other case that we've ever had, you don't have confirmation on what you have immediately because the scene is frozen.

in other words, if there's a gun on the ground, nobody's going to touch it and examine it for usually hours. so the notion that what we knew when we knew it, all that comes out in the town hall, but it's -- i've seen some stories written that are questioning this department's integrity and it's transparency on this and it's really misplaced because anybody that's ever that understands this work knows that it's not even our investigation to begin with. we don't get to touch the evidence, we don't get to examine it. that didn't happen for hours by the time the state investigators showed up. san mateo had responsibility for awhile until the state made the declaration they would take the investigation. so it's really kind of a -- it's really misplaced and it's sad to be honest with you. the way that narrative has been

put out is really sad. any other questions? >> chief, there's been a focus on the police staffing and the need to beef up the numbers in the force. so when you look at the increase in certain categories and how crime has been up in certain areas, how much of it is done to a lack of officers? would you expect to see similar numbers if you weren't working against the 20% reduction in police officers? >> police chief scott: let me make sure i understand your question. >> i just wonder in the category where we have seen an increase was significant around theft or whatever it may be and the fact that you're down numbers both in the overall numbers of police officers and also because of covid, how much of a link do you put there? do you think that you would see an improvement if you just had more officers to work with? >> police chief scott: in some categories, yeah, we believe definitely because as i stated,

robberies and crimes that happen in public spaces, those are the ones where you can really impact with robust deployment. and some of those, like thefts and car break-ins and it really takes officers being out in the field and being visible in addition to the backside, the investigative side and all that's been impacted by both our staffing shortages and this latest surge of covid. so, yeah, i think and this is anecdotal at best, but i do think it makes a difference. okay. all right. thank you all.

>> it did take a village. i was really lucky when i was 14 years old to get an internship. the difference that it made for me is i had a job, but there were other people who didn't have a job, who, unfortunately, needed money. and they were shown to commit illegal acts to get money. that is what i want to prevent. [♪♪♪] today we are here to officially kick off the first class of opportunities for all. [applause]. >> opportunities for all is a program that mayor breed launched in october of 2018. it really was a vision of mayor breed to get to all of the young people in san francisco, but with an intention to focus on young people that have typically

not being able to access opportunities such as internships or work-based learning opportunities. >> money should never be a barrier to your ability to succeed in life and that is what this program is about. >> there's always these conversations about young people not being prepared and not having experience for work and if they don't get an opportunity to work, then they cannot gain the experience that they need. this is really about investing in the future talent pool and getting them the experience that they need. >> it is good for everyone because down the road we will need future mechanics, future pilots, future bankers, future whatever they may be in any industry. this is the pipe on we need to work with. we need to start developing talent, getting people excited about careers, opening up those pathways and frankly giving opportunities out there that would normally not be presented. [♪♪♪] >> the way that it is organized is there are different points of entry and different ways of

engagement for the young person and potential employers. young people can work in cohorts or in groups and that's really for people that have maybe never had job experience or who are still trying to figure out what they want to do and they can explore. and in the same way, it is open for employers to say, you know what, i don't think we are ready to host an intern year-round are all summer, but that they can open up their doors and do site visits or tours or panels or conversations. and then it runs all the way up to the opportunity for young people to have long-term employment, and work on a project and be part of the employee base. >> something new, to get new experience and meet people and then you are getting paid for it you are getting paid for doing that. it is really cool. >> i starting next week, i will be a freshman. [cheers and applause] two of the things i appreciate about this program was the

amazing mentorship in the job experience that i had. i am grateful for this opportunity. thank you. >> something i learned at airbnb is how to network and how important it is to network because it is not only what you know, but also who you know to get far in life. >> during this program, i learned basic coding languages, had a had to identify the main components and how to network on a corporate level. it is also helping me accumulate my skills all be going towards my college tuition where i will pursue a major in computer science. >> for myself, being that i am an actual residential realtor, it was great. if anybody wants to buy a house, let me know. whenever. [applause] it is good. i got you. it was really cool to see the commercial side and think about the process of developing property and different things that i can explore.

opportunities for all was a great opportunity for all. >> we were aiming to have 1,000 young people register and we had over 2,000 people register and we were able to place about between 50 and did. we are still getting the final numbers of that. >> over several weeks, we were able to have students participate in investment banking they were able to work with our team, or technology team, our engineering 20 we also gave them lessons around the industry, around financial literacy. >> there are 32,000 young people ages 16 and 24 living in san francisco. and imagine if we can create an opera skin it just opportunity for all program for every young person that lives in public housing, affordable housing, low income communities. it is all up to you to make that happen. >> we have had really great response from employers and they have been talking about it with other employers, so we have had

a lot of interest for next year to have people sign on. we are starting to figure out how to stay connected to those young people and to get prepared to make sure we can get all 2400 or so that registered. we want to give them placement and what it looks like if they get more. >> let's be honest, there is always a shortage of good talent in any industry, and so this is a real great career path. >> for potential sponsors who might be interested in supporting opportunities for all , there is an opportunity to make a difference in our city. this is a really thriving, booming economy, but not for everyone. this is a way to make sure that everyone gets to benefit from the great place that san francisco is and that we are building pathways for folks to be able to stay here and that they feel like they will belong. >> just do it. sign up for it. [♪♪♪]

>> it was an outdoor stadium for track and field, motorcycle and auto and rugby and cricket located in golden gate park, home to professional football, lacross and soccer. adjacent to the indoor arena. built in the 1920s. the san francisco park commission accepted a $100,000 gift from the estate to build a memorial in honor of pioneers in the area. the city and county of san francisco contributed an

additional $200,000 and the stadium was built in a year. in the 1930s it was home to several colleges such as usf, santa clara and st. mary's for competition and sporting. in 1946 it became home to the san francisco 49ers where they played nearly 25 years. the stayed de yam sat 60,000 fans. many caught game the rooftops and houses. the niners played the last game against the dallas cowboys january 3, 1971 before moving to candlestick park. the stadium hosted other events before demolition in 1989. it suffered damages from the earthquake. it was reconstructed to seat 10,000 fans with an all weather track, soccer field and scoreboards. it hosts many northern california football championship

games. local high schools sacred heart and mission high school used the field for home games. the rivalry football games are sometimes played here. today it is a huge free standing element, similar to the original featuring tall pink columns at the entrance. the field is surrounded by the track and used by high school and college football and soccer. it is open for public use as it is open for public use as >> first of all, thank you for coming to celebrate this incredible milestone. i am really excited that she

accepted. because i know what you often times may see is the fights between kim and i. what you don't know is about the friendship and the amount of love and respect i truly have for her and her work ethic from the moment i met her actively engaged in labor in a way that brought the conversation to a different level around women and minorities and their role in leadership and labor. it is good to see more women step up and in fact, it is 125 year history not one woman has ever led the san francisco labor council and kim is doing that, which is absolutely extraordinary. [applause] and you are the first executive director of the labor council to serve on this work

force investment board because i didn't want to appoint the others. just kidding. but in fact, you know, this is so important. when i think about growing up in the western addition and the fights that we used to have to be included in the placements and job opportunities that exist in the city, i feel like we have come a long way but we still have a long way to go to make the real connections between people in many of the communities that many of you represent but himself the same people who want these opportunities, the new jobs that come to san francisco. not just the work related to construction and engineering but as you know there are even shortage of nurses. the work you have done with nuhw was extraordinary onever the years. how that played a role to make sure there is a real connection

between people and the opportunities, through organized labor to make sure they get their fair share, the appropriate pay and benefits and the ability to take care of themselves and their families. you have been doing this work for a really long time. i know that you are going to bring a really strong voice to this body. in the process you are going to make a lot of folks upset what it is you have to say, but i wouldn't have wanted it any other way because some things need to be upset. some things need challenged. in fact, i am not afraid of a challenge and not afraid of the conversations that need to be had to get to a better place that is what we want. we want a better place so people have better lives. you have dedicated your lives to public service. organized labor but public service because of the people

that you know you represent. the people that you know are counting on autophytes for them and make the right decisions that are going to have an impact onnary families and livelihood. regardless of disagreements at the end of the day the underlying message i know that is most important to much of you and i know is important to kill is the fact that we want to fight for better lives for the people we represent. that is why you are going to be serving on this board, and i appreciate and honor that you accepted this opportunity. i am looking forward to seeing something change for the better for workers throughout san francisco. with that let's debt you sworn in. (applause). >> i will put on my mask. covid is running rampant and we are close to each other.

place raise your right hand and repeat. i say your name do solemnly swear that i will support and defend the constitution of the united states and the constitution of the state of california against all enemies foreign and domestic that i bear true faith and allegiance to the same. that i take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion and that i will well and faithfully discharge the duties upon which i am about to enter and during such time as i serve

as a member of the work force investment san francisco board for the city and county of san francisco. congratulations. [applause] >> here is a little city seal pen with my signature. i give this to all people i swear in to serve. ladies and gentlemen, the latest person for the board tackling work force in san francisco and making real change. [applause] >> thank you, mayor breed, for

taking time-out of your schedule to do this. thank you to the leaders of labor here today, especially my board members, susan, mike, charlie, debra, and my good friend karen. i want to thank you for taking time for the swearing in. it means a lot to me because i have always been really challenged by the fact there rvs and have notes in the work force, and i really want to fight overcoming making sure that everyone becomes a very. everyone has an opportunity to get a job and a wealthy job and to join a union if they so choose. that is my mantra since i was little. it is my mantra to this day. i will fight to make sure. that is what the labor council

is about making sure there are opportunities for people and career ladders. that has always been what i have been about. i want to make sure that happens. we have seen companies take advantage of people especially during strikes when they go into poor neighborhoods to try to recruit scabs. we knead to emphasize recruiting people to getting into them into construction and janitors and construction trades and up the ladder and nursing, healthcare. these are all opportunities they should all have. we want to make sure that the san franciscans that we all know and love have that opportunity and that is my goal for this. i really intend to implement a labor caucus to make sure that we are doing what we need to do to give every san franciscan the opportunity be to participate

from our economic recovery from covid and overall economic recovery as we get on with opening up the city and making sure that people come to san francisco. those the obstacles before us. i hope we overcome them altogether as we move along. thank you. [applause].

>> what we're trying to approach is bringing more diversity to our food. it's not just the old european style food. we are seeing a lot of influences, and all of this is because of our students. all we ask is make it flavorful. [♪♪♪]

>> we are the first two-year culinary hospitality school in the united states. the first year was 1936, and it was started by two graduates from cornell. i'm a graduate of this program, and very proud of that. so students can expect to learn under the three degrees. culinary arts management degree, food service management degree, and hotel management degree. we're not a cooking school. even though we're not teaching you how to cook, we're teaching you how to manage, how to supervise employees, how to manage a hotel, and plus you're getting an associate of science degree. >> my name is vince, and i'm a faculty member of the hospitality arts and culinary

school here in san francisco. this is my 11th year. the program is very, very rich in what this industry demands. cooking, health, safety, and sanitation issues are included in it. it's quite a complete program to prepare them for what's happening out in the real world. >> the first time i heard about this program, i was working in a restaurant, and the sous chef had graduated from this program. he was very young to be a sous chef, and i want to be like him, basically, in the future. this program, it's awesome. >> it's another world when you're here. it's another world. you get to be who you are, a

person get to be who they are. you get to explore different things, and then, you get to explore and they encourage you to bring your background to the kitchen, too. >> i've been in the program for about a year. two-year program, and i'm about halfway through. before, i was studying behavioral genetics and dance. i had few injuries, and i couldn't pursue the things that i needed to to dance, so i pursued my other passion, cooking. when i stopped dance, i was deprived of my creative outlet, and cooking has been that for me, specifically pastry. >> the good thing is we have students everywhere from places like the ritz to -- >> we have kids from every area. >> facebook and google.

>> kids from everywhere. >> they are all over the bay area, and they're thriving. >> my name is jeff, and i'm a coowner of nopa restaurant, nopalito restaurant in san francisco. i attended city college of san francisco, the culinary arts program, where it was called hotel and restaurant back then in the early 90's. nopalito on broderick street, it's based on no specific region in mexico. all our masa is hand made. we cook our own corn in house. everything is pretty much hand made on a daily basis, so day and night, we're making hand made tortillas, carnitas,

salsas. a lot of love put into this. [♪♪♪] >> used to be very easy to define casual dining, fine dining, quick service. now, it's shades of gray, and we're trying to define that experience through that spectrum of service. fine dining calls into white table cloths. the cafeteria is large production kitchen, understanding vast production kitchens, the googles and the facebooks of the world that have those types of kitchens. and the ideas that change every year, again, it's the notion and the venue. >> one of the things i love about vince is one of our outlets is a concept restaurant, and he changes the concept every year to show students how to do a startup restaurant. it's been a pizzeria, a taco

bar. it's been a mediterranean bar, it's been a noodle bar. people choose ccsf over other hospitality programs because the industry recognizes that we instill the work ethic. we, again, serve breakfast, lunch, and dinner. other culinary hospitality programs may open two days a week for breakfast service. we're open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner five days a week. >> the menu's always interesting. they change it every semester, maybe more. there's always a good variety of foods. the preparation is always beautiful. the students are really sincere, and they work so hard here, and they're so proud of their work. >> i've had people coming in to

town, and i, like, bring them here for a special treat, so it's more, like, not so much every day, but as often as i can for a special treat. >> when i have my interns in their final semester of the program go out in the industry, 80 to 90% of the students get hired in the industry, well above the industry average in the culinary program. >> we do have internals continually coming into our restaurants from city college of san francisco, and most of the time that people doing internships with us realize this is what they want to do for a living. we hired many interns into employees from our restaurants.

my partner is also a graduate of city college. >> so my goal is actually to travel and try to do some pastry in maybe italy or france, along those lines. i actually have developed a few connections through this program in italy, which i am excited to support. >> i'm thinking about going to go work on a cruise ship for about two, three year so i can save some money and then hopefully venture out on my own. >> yeah, i want to go back to china. i want to bring something that i learned here, the french cooking, the western system, back to china. >> so we want them to have a full toolkit. we're trying to make them ready for the world out there.

>> good afternoon. this meeting will come to order. welcome to the january 10th 2022 -- january 31st regular meeting of the land use and transportation committee board of supervisors. i am chair of the committee, joined by vice chair supervisor jean preston and supervisor erin peskin. the committee clerk today is erica major. i would also like to acknowledge the good folks at san francisco government t.v. for staffing this meeting. do you have any announcements? >> thank you. the minutes will be happening through videoconference to the same extent as if they were physically present. the board recognizes that public

assets to city services is essential and invite public participation. public comment will be available on each item on the agenda. san francisco government t.v. are streaming the public caller number across the screen. each speaker will be allowed to minutes to speak. comments are opportunities to speak. these are available via phone by calling the number on your screen. if you are interested in making public comment, please dial star three to be added to the speaker line when the item is called. when connected you will hear the meeting discussion but you will be meet -- muted and in listening mode only.

when your item comes up, you will just need to press starve three. press it once and you will be added to the queue. best practices are to call from a quiet location, speak quietly and slowly and turned on your television or radio. you may submit public comment in the following ways. you can e-mail myself and my e-mail address is... if you submit public comment via e-mail it will be forwarded to the supervisors and made part of the official file. comments may also be sent via the postal service. items acted upon today are expected to appear on the board of supervisors' agenda, unless otherwise stated. >> thank you so much, madame

clerk. will you please call item number 1? >> item one is motion adopting findings pursuant to the california environmental quality act otherwise known as ceqa. the guidelines improving -- including mitigation measures and adopting a mitigation monitoring or reporting program. members of the public who wish to provide public comment on this item should call the number on the screen. press pound and pound again. if you have not don't so already, you can press starve three to line up to speak for item number 1. >> thank you very much. this is in items that are being fostered by supervisor -- president walton, but he is not here today. we have chief janine nicholson from the fire department and

staff for public work. i think he is here from public works. we also have several staff on standby to answer any questions that we may have. with that, welcome chief nicholson. >> i don't have chief nicholson here. >> is anyone here from the fire department? or perhaps we can bring up brian dolph from public works first. [ indiscernible ] i was asked to provide a few opening remarks. would this be appropriate? >> i am a regulatory specialist with regulatory affairs with public works. >> supervisor tang: thank you.

>> supervisor tang: so the reason this project has come about is that it is expiring with the fire department's training facility on treasure island. this is a problem and it opens up the opportunity of consolidating the various training facilities that the fire department has. there is one south of market as well. the fire department had identified a parcel in the far southeast of the city on the coast. the owner of the parcel, however had a very short timeline for selling. they wanted some information about the beginning of this year and whether this city could be purchased. you cannot actually make a commitment to purchase without them taking care of it first. we basically did a rush job on

getting the mitigation out in six months, which is humiliating. it is a third of what it usually takes. we have a lot of pulling together of public works and planning staff and good consultants to thank for that. what we have now is the document and the findings before you, which has asked that you review the document and if you deem appropriate adopt the findings before approving the project. do you have any questions? >> thank you. supervisor peskin has a question. >> i do. i think this is probably for council. i have read the s. -- the ff md

and the findings that are before us in this item and looked at all of the things that are less than substantial and can be mitigated. i'm fine with all of that good work. my question is, it is very rare that the board adopts these findings. they are generally adopted by planning. we usually adopt them when we do -- when we take an action, we incorporate and find a new the findings that have previously been found by the planning commission. the planning commission did improve -- approve the final mitigated negative declaration. why is this here? is it because of the acquisition action? why is this a standalone? i am curious. i am cool.

>> me too. >> i have the exact same question. so i spoke with a number of other people. there is nothing in chapter 31 that prohibits this. i think this is just convenience. the idea is to keep all of the cake pieces moving. it is more typical as you stated to have the adoption happen at the same time as the project approval. the board will be taking the project approval for this project and this is the body that does need to adopt this. there's nothing in chapter 31 that says you can't adopt it. separated from the project approval either.

>> i was wondering, i was trying to figure out. i found a brilliant lawyer through the chair is the reason for this, we wanted this to be the first action to trigger the appeal, but i don't think that works. the appeal period runs for the adoption. it's not like someone has to take an action that starts in appeal period. you are correct. it is not start the cloth sooner. it is about taking care of this because you can.

it is changing the order. and if other folks start doing this, i'm not sure. go ahead. >> good afternoon, chair and supervisors. i'm the director of real estate. thank you for giving me the opportunity to respond and speak to the item in your question. the city attorney is absolutely correct. we are taking this item to the board for environmental review and approval as a practical matter. first off, i would like to say that this project will be coming to you for your consideration of the full board in march. as you may or may not know or recall, we have a purchase option to acquire this property that runs out at the end of

may. one of the reasons we acquired the purging's option is only to give you time, but also give us time to pursue the port property, which is adjacent and part of the project. the state legislation that is needed for the port acquisition has lagged a little bit. and having the board approve these findings, we believe would be helpful and moving state legislation along. there is somewhat of a synergy in showing the state legislature that the city is committed to this project and to the property, and does put a little bit of pressure on them to do their part to move forward with the acquisition of the port property because we need both the private property and the port property in order to move forward with the project. we are egging your indulgence to put the cart a little bit before the horse by a couple of months

for the environmental, but the project approval will soon be coming to the board for that's -- for its consideration. i add the environmental review does not bind the hand of the board when you consider the project as a whole. >> thank you. that makes more sense. supervisor peskin? >> when i raised my hand, i just said what i was going to say or ask, which is the adoption of the findings does not tie the board's hand. that is fine. >> thank you. i want to note that chief nicholson is here. welcome. i see you there and you're standing up desk. >> thank you for being late. i was in back-to-back meetings. i know you guys have no idea what that is like. anyways, i really appreciate the

opportunity to speak and this is such a critical project for us. we are in dire need of this facility. i really want to thank the director for doing everything he possibly can for getting the state to move on this, as well as keeping you apprised of it. we need to be out of treasure island in 2025-2026 the latest. we really need to ensure that all the pieces are in place to get it moving forward. thank you very much for your consideration. >> thank you so much, chief. okay. if there are no other comments or questions from colleagues, madame clerk, let's take public comment on this item. >> thank you. we are checking to see how many callers we have in the queue.

if you have not done so already, please add -- please press start three to be added to the cue. for those on hold, continue to wait until the system indicates you have been on muted. we have matthew supporting as today and we have six listeners. >> no speakers, madame chair. >> okay. thank you. with that, public comment is closed. colleagues, does anyone want to make a motion to send this out with a positive recommendation?

>> thank you, congratulations. that motion passes. >> i appreciate your time and attention to this matter. >> thank you. please call item number 2. >> it is an ordinance to create the housing innovation program to develop, finance and support additional housing opportunities for low income and moderate income residents including loans and technical assistance for certain low income and moderate income property owners to access dwelling units or other new units on their property. members of the public who wish to provide public comment should call the number on the screen. the meeting id today is... press pound and pound again. if you have not done so already, please press start three.

>> thank you so much. colleagues, i introduce this legislation with supervisor marr to help provide parameters to the $10 million in funding that was approved by this board during the previous budget cycle. the intent of these dollars was to invest in ideas for housing that are currently not being financed. particularly for residents and geographic areas that have not been traditional. this legislation establishes a general program, but provides funding guidelines and eligible uses to help inform the project -- the process. the funding is intended to be managed by an outside entity like a community development

financial institution or studio five are nonprofit organization, but it is fuelled in this time -- this type of work and has connection to historically disenfranchised communities, which is what we are trying to reach. we have been making some progress in building up our affordable housing stock in san francisco, the portfolio that the city manages to the mayor's office of housing and community development is limited. i also want to think my colleague -- thank my colleagues for the work they have been doing with the proper i committee and the work that they are trying to put together to elicit ideas and innovation for the broader community in san francisco to build social housing. this particular pot of money is not for social housing. it is mostly geared towards house rent and cash for

homeowners. the problem we were trying to solve for is to include all of the displacement and gentrification that is happening in lakeview, ingleside, sunset, areas where there has traditionally been low income homeowners, folks who are aging who have more house than they need but have very few options. they want to stay in the community where they are involved and they love. the status quo right now is not going to cut it for our neighborhoods. we keep hearing concerns over a few laws that are coming out right now, which really gives the advantage of the value being created to folks who have the capital to invest in capturing that value. it is often not homeowners who

are on fixed income or seniors or people who don't have access to the banking institution they have limited options to age in plates and their assets would usually be lost to the community or their family, black and brown communities that have been completely devastated by government's action, redlining, and what we saw happening during the foreclosure crisis, the problems that we have have not really targeted those communities, nor did they support building generational wealth in the communities by allowing units to be passed down. and the equity that has been built up over the time who moved here from the south through the

1950s about a home in the bayview or lakeview, and don't have the option to pass it on to the heirs, the easiest thing is to move up. we are trying to address those constituents. and the next couple months, this committee will be deliberating on a number of proposals, allowing for plex is in san francisco and my hope is that with this program, we can start piloting some proofs of concept. that we can see what works on the financing side, which is not the zoning side, which is a whole different issue. my hope is that we can come up with a good project, abe would -- a good pilot project that we can move forward on. in summary, what this program could find -- fund are the following things. the first is grants to the organization to create marketing and educational material about homeownership.

there could be construction design prototypes that could be approved for smaller scale buildings and offer zero interest, zero payment loans for an low income and moderate income homeowners to construct 80 use and other units on their homes on their property with the built -- goal of supporting multigenerational living and aging in place. down payment assistance loans to low and moderate income tenants. for the acquisition of a licensed childcare provider. this is folks who would be buying a resident -- resident as

a first-time homeowner and have a home-based daycare there as well. that is a double bottom line of adding childcare slots and also providing the homeownership opportunity to a largely female low income workforce. and last, but not least, co-op conversions for existing land trusts buildings that are converting from rental occupied co-ops to owner occupied co-ops. it would be not for the acquisition of the building, but for the share loans of each individual owner occupant. so to be eligible, the properties must be owner occupied. the folks who are worried about landlords or property owners, they are not eligible for this fund. and in exchange for these loans,

and the loans are not subsidies or grants, the loans will be deed restricted and must be under rent control if they are creating new units. we have put a considerable amount of thought in establishing these general guidelines, and i think that they can be strengthened if we select the correct provider who has experience with this population and trust. i want to add that earlier, about an hour ago we received a letter from the coalition of tenant groups who were worried about some of the provisions in this legislation and we are asking for a continuance. i do have some nonsubstantive amendments to clarify some of the provisions and they must be repaid. even though there

nonsubstantive, i will support a continuance of the items we can have a chance to meet with the tenant groups and get their feedback and make sure that the legislation reflects our intent, which is to support low income homeowners and folks who want low income homeownership and not providing any avenues for displacement of tenants. in fact,, what our legislation intends to do is to add tenant provisions or rent control to the adu under the state way -- the state program that aren't under rent control right now. with that, i will -- supervisor peskin, did you have a question before i bring up the mayor's office of housing to do the presentation? >> may be we can ask them now, but they might have some answers to some of it.

we did want to nitpick on page 5 and appreciate, and this is something the board has been doing for a number of years. properties where there are certain types of evictions that would not be eligible, but i want to suggest that the language could be a little bit tighter because the way it is written is that within five years prior to property owners' application, the property owner has not engaged in one of those types of evictions.

i think it should be the property hasn't had those types of evictions. we want to discourage a buyer from buying a property with that history from then applying. >> if you could just hold those and ask in the presentation. i would be happy to take all of the suggestions of the committee. that is what the process is for. we did sing quite a bit on the -- think quite a bit on that issue. if we would indulge me, if we could go to the mayor's office of housing, we have sheila here. welcome. you could remember sheila from her planning department days. now at the mayor's office of housing. who has a presentation on this? >> wonderful. good afternoon. let me pull up the presentation

right now. what i want to do with the presentation is give you an overview of our understanding of the program and how it alliance with some existing programs and other opportunities that are out there. this is, as you described, the housing program has a four has for problematic areas. the second is around providing loans to low-income owners to construct the a.d.u. the third is down payment assistance for low income residents and the fourth is around loans to low-income owners to build limited equity co-ops. now i will jump to our programs and i will bring them back together and talk about what is in the housing innovation program and where there is some alignment there. broadly speaking, they provide programs in three areas.

community development, homeownership and new construction. and mostly what this program do would do is fit into the second bucket with homeowners, which currently we have programs for lending. bmr ownership, bmr rentals. there is a dream keeper initiative, which we want to highlight and we also do monitoring and compliance around that. since i mentioned the dream keeper's, and i want to emphasize this, there's a lot of potential alignment and synergy. the dream keeper initiative is investing a hundred $20 million over the next two years in san francisco black and african-american communities. it is seeking to increase opportunities for black communities through programs a focus on education, economic mobility, homeownership, and health and well-being. it is currently providing half a million dollars in down payment assistance and loans. every -- offering wealth building grants and working closely with communities to help

achieve these goals. and just to provide a snapshot, they did talk about how mohcd's portfolio is where the programs and housing opportunities are. these are, as you can see, concentrated in central and eastern san francisco. they are affordable opportunities on the western side of the city. these are our state and federal funded systems. same concentration pattern where we have housing opportunities really concentrate in the central and eastern parts. our pipeline does show that there are new projects coming out on the western side of the city, which is great, but clearly not as much as we see in other parts of the city. i want to provide a snapshot on the demographics. i hope you can see this. this is our bmr ownership in the

past year by race and ethnicity. the darker blue's current owners, and then the lighter blue is low and moderate income san francisco residents. you can see where there is proportionality between the number of folks in the population groups. in this large data bar is where we have so many bmr folks that have been in residences long before we started collecting data. we don't have data on those. this is what we want to highlight. there is a huge discrepancy between black bmr owners and our population of black," and income -- low and moderate income residents in san francisco. that is specifically what the dream keeper's' initiative is focused on. here is another one where we will be talking about the down payment assistance. we want to highlight the assistance loan program. you can see that there is some alignment here. it does look better for the

black population in terms of those who are purchased. mohcd partners with homeownership s.f. which acts as a one-stop shop to provide education, technical assistance and research to homebuyers, homeowners, renters, and educators. and in partnership it was attended by a thousand people.

it has been virtual for the past two years and we hope to bring it back to in person soon. the dream keeper's initiative is focused on education for african-american san franciscans to make the gap in serving the population. in 2018 with three for -- african-american households participating in homeownership programs, and with the dream keepers there are 250 black households working towards homeownership. dream keepers and mohcd are working together with home ownership s.f. to provide capacity building to housing counciling agencies focused on implicit bias training and building competency. in the area prototype design, they can simplify the production of new units. the planning department does have a detailed handbook that covers partial and sole garage conversions as well as backyard a.d.u. and the state has useful handbooks as well. for the backyard a.d.u., the private market is offering a range of modular a.d.u. options. we need companies to offers -- offer permitting processes as

well. there maybe interesting examples for the program to build off of. in the program area two, which would be loans for low and moderate owners to add the a.d.u., there are no public programs that provide this. this would be a brand-new thing for the program to offer. in the third programmatic area, it is down payment assistance loans for low and moderate income tenants, we do have a few examples. they have a suite of down payment assistance loan programs including those open to any applicants and programs targeting specific populations. the dream keepers are focusing on african-american homebuyers and we are also supporting educators and first responders and homeowners purchasing bmr units. all of these programs are designed for the purchase of homes or condos. they are not meant for the co-op. and for homebuyers who offered childcare, the regulation is

designed for the designated childcare unit that could be applicable. that is currently for rentals, but it could be an interesting model. in the fourth category of loans for low and moderate income tenants to form equity cooperatives, the san francisco community land trust currently operates similar equity co-ops where they held -- told found leases and there's the operation of the properties. that could be a model for this as well. lastly we want to offer a preliminary timeline of what issuing an r.f.p. is to have an organization operates these funds. and r.f.p. go out this spring. the notice of funding would be later this spring which we review in the summer and hopefully have a program launch in august or september. and with me here today is maria benjamin who is the director of

homeownership and bmr programs. we are here to answer any questions you may have. thank you. >> thank you so much, sheila. annika, do you have a presentation as well or are you here to answer questions? >> just answer questions. >> thank you so much. welcome and thank you for being with us. sorry about that. thank you for taking the time. i want to check, is supervisor mar here? >> i do not see him. >> okay. he told me he would come but he must have been delayed. thank you so much. with that, thank you, colleagues for considering this. i am excited to be supporting some new ideas. some are in alignment with the mirror's office of housing.

it already has existing programs. some of it is totally new. i am excited to start this conversation for how we can innovate and serve populations that have traditionally not been served in the existing programs that we have i heard from black and latino families constantly how the program compliance issues just didn't work for the hopes and dreams of families who have felt excluded by our system and how it keeps homeownership and wealth putting opportunities from some. thank you so much.

i will turn it over to you before we take public comment. and we can do some of edmonson do whatever we need to do. supervisor peskin, did you have any further questions or issues before we go to public comment. >> i did. what do you do about bankruptcies. >> we don't. the mirror's office of housing has existing policies around that. >> all of the affordable housing covenants got wiped out by the bankruptcy and we had to buy back the affordable housing covenants. that wasn't real good. what did we learn from that?

>> this is a deed of trust. the properties are not restricted. the loans are supposed to be paid back. this is a very similar model. i know that she let put it in the same category, but there are two very different models. the bmr program is a deed restriction on the property that puts an income cap while the down payment is a stuck in loan after the mortgage that is meant to be paid back. it doesn't falter the property. with a bankruptcy, you know, which is actually pretty rare for down payment assistance program, and perhaps miss benjamin can talk about it, i would imagine it would follow the same. >> good afternoon, supervisors.

i'm happy to talk about it. it is very rare. we are absolutely right. it is very rare that a bmr homeowner goes into foreclosure. and even during these tenuous times we are in right now, it is very rare. we do have systems in place to assist them prior to losing the problem that didn't exist before. >> as to my earlier comment, totally open to whatever we all land on, but it shouldn't run with the property owner. it should run with the property as to whether or not it is a so-called dirty property with a

bad eviction history on it. as i said at the beginning, this is all good stuff. the one thing i am concerned about is this notion that the co-op units or units that are subject to rent control could be turned into ownership stock and i want to tread carefully there. that maybe why the displacement coalition asked for a continuance. i don't know. i have the same letter that we all have, but definitely there -- it is worth policy exploration there. those are my comments. >> that was not our intention. we are happy to work with the

tenant's coalition and clarify what our intentions are. as for your first point, the thing about the five-year look back, these loans are income taxes. they are for people who are house rich and cash poor. it is extremely unlikely to purchase a single-family home in san francisco. and it would qualify for this pot of money. so even if we made it back 10 years -- i understand your point. we don't want to open this up to folks who would buy a property and then take advantage of the funding to give even more value. that was not our intent.

thank you. supervisor preston, did you have any comment or feedback? go ahead, please. >> thank you. thank you for bringing this forward. i think we are all looking at ways that we can address the affordability it needs of folks in san francisco. i appreciate all efforts to move that conversation forward. supervisor peskin's committee earlier today was speaking

earlier on that. maybe starting with the chair, i think it is a two-part question. i look at the slides presented about the program. there's nothing there about the $74 million that are in the stability fund and potentially more revenue in future. i wanted to ask mohcd about that. but more broadly to look at the relationship between the two. maybe that is because it is discrete and separate. as i read through, there is a number of types of housing that you are trying to create through this. some seem separate and distinct and some seem to overlap with what may be considered by the house of civilian oversight.

>> if i could go first, if that is okay, i think there is a little bit of overlap in what i understand is prop i. most -- by the definition of social housing, that the proper by folks are using housing that is owned by nonprofit and the government. that is the working definition.

this type of investment that we're talking about today is all privately owned. it is geared towards low-income homeowners. and if we are adding units, those units will be rent-controlled or they wouldn't have been before. going from single-family homes to two units. that is the bulk of this is for privately owned property. and where there is an overlap,

they get loans to buy their share owns. the land trust raise all this money to secure the property when it comes to them creating the ownership co-op in each individual unit that will have to come up with $10,000. that is what this money would be for. it is for the shared cost. eventually it will end up in the financing and the building to help the co-op. it is complementary. it is not an overlap or substituting in any way. i turned it over to sheila.

the housing innovation program is focused on those who already owned their homes but don't have the financial ability to leverage the equity, which then puts them in a position currently where they have to cash out in order to get anything. this is looking for ways to stay and build additional housing stocks simultaneously. where this other pot of money will be publicly owned housing. >> i don't know if you wanted to go to supervisor more. >> if that is okay, supervisor preston. >> thank you. i'm sorry i'm a little late. i hope i am not too late. i really wanted to thank you for all of your work on the housing immigration program. this really aligns with a lot of the work that i have been doing

through the sunset forward community-based planning process in district four and also with our a.d.u. pilot program in district four that we have worked on with the planning department. i think this is an example of how we can do our low-density neighborhoods in san francisco. it is not a problem. so many have tried to frame it, but our lower density residential neighborhoods, there is a tremendous amount of opportunity to expand housing in our neighborhoods and through new approaches, and particularly to create affordable housing for families and moderate income households. so having innovation programs is going to provide a really important new framework for us to expand affordable family housing in our low-density residential neighborhoods, and

even to stabilize a lot of the low-density residents -- residential neighborhoods that are predominantly working class communities of color, like many of them are and to help preserve their neighborhoods by preserving homeowners to build equity and expand their homes i am looking forward to working with you, caramilk are and the planning department. we have also been working with the planning department and aging income is one of our community partners. we have been working with them on a.d.u. -- creating affordable a.d.u. housing. >> thank you so much. if it is okay if we don't have more questions or comments, colleagues, go ahead, supervisor peskin.

we can go to public comment. >> just a housekeeping issue, which is it will be part of the file. it is great if we actually see these when we read them over the weekend or i will go on the internet. i generally only look at my board packet on the internet and i can absorb the powerpoint and ask questions rather than have to absorb it here. >> if we could -- if you could e-mail that to us, or the rest of the colleagues because it has some really good data on the investment of the mayor's office of housing. it is something i haven't seen before. thank you so much. with that, colleagues, there's a couple of amendments that i have on page 5, section d. i wanted to clarify that now it reads as long as the borrower is not in default, repayment shall

be deferred until the earlier of five years after the first certificate of occupancy is issued for the new unit or seven years after the deed of trust for the loan is recorded on the home. on the residence or a new unit. and also undersea, line 11, if the new unit is sold separately or in conjunction with the sale of the residence prior to the maturity date, instead of the end of the five-year term. so thank you so much. like i said, i will support a continuance of this until last -- until next week to allow us to meet with the tenant advocate and get it all straight. and with that, madame clerk, let's go to public comment. >> to the chair, i believe it supervisor preston put it in on the roster. >> go ahead, supervisor preston. i didn't see you. >> thank you. i just wanted to continue and

thank you for your comments. on the relationship, and i appreciate the comments on the relationship between the innovation fund and the housing stability fund, i think there are some things that, i can see there are things in here that are clearly different. there'll working with a low income homeowner to build and i'd -- and a.d.u. and that kind of thing, clearly i think they are outside. we can agree there outside the scope. but there is quite a bit, like the acquisition, the land trust model, things like that that to do, at least from my read, on the -- unleased -- at least -- unless they aren't intended to be, that are things that the stability fund oversight board has identified that we have provided the funding for, and as far as i can tell, it is the definition here too. if we were talking about a situation where we were

adequately resourcing all of these things, it would kind of be a nonissue. we may have talked about that this is more is better in some sense in terms of both and in terms of doing that. may be i want to inject the political reality a little bit into the conversation, which is that, you know, in the last budget cycle, the housing stability fund was funded despite proper bypassing. this was funded at $10 million when we have not yet moved forward in an ordinance and i think, my hope is that we are working towards a time where both of these endeavours, with the ordinance, you know, amended in whatever ways emerge during the continuance, but we are hoping both of those things -- it is concerning to me, especially with the infrastructure that exists on the oversight board, if it is an area that the oversight board is

looking to fund, where does that leave this? one of the questions i did have about this is in the decision-making. they set up a body of stakeholders and it is a very public process. people can call in and see what the recommendations are. here i am not clear what the innovation fund -- like if this passes and then the funds are there, what do you envision as the process for figuring out what gets the use of the funds? what gets funded and how can stakeholders weigh in on that? >> thank you, supervisor preston. this is not the proper i fund. it is a very different process. i think that we had envisioned that it would be a very similar operation of the fund as was the

nonprofit displacement fund where one that had existing relationships and know-how in lending would be able to create an r.f.p. and put out a set of qualifications that people would answer to their mission driven by definition. they support low income people. they are nimbler. it just happens more quickly than it does through the mayor's office of housing. let me address the issue of the

overlap with the community land trust. because the mayor's office of housing currently is supporting the acquisition of properties of by the land trust through the small sights program, which now, hopefully, will have more. i do know that it is a need. it is an urgent need that they have and i am hoping that it will also help support the mayor's office of housing knowing how to operationalize that and support the land trust in making that happen. it hasn't quite happened yet and i'm hoping that it will. >> thank you. and i think following up on some

of the comments that i was making before, and may be planting the seed. it is unfortunate when we have legislation pending. the committee can't sit down with each other and brainstorm on these things. i will do that here in public hearing, but i want to propose -- i don't know if it would be a friendly -- i don't want to propose the amendment, but the concept to you, which is linking this to funding of the housing stability fund we have a problem, also a disagreement between the board and the administration around funding for the housing stability fund. i think i will just tell you,

from one supervisor's perspective that my level of enthusiasm for a new fund, when we are not funding the one that is there, it certainly impacts that. i would love to send a message and figure out how we sent a message as a board that these things will go in tandem and that the fund will come -- become operational or move forward when we are also using the funds as intended on the housing stability fund. there is considerable override. but there are also areas that this innovation fund gets that that are different from some of the others. i would love to see both being funded moving forward in tandem. [please standby for captioner switch]

. >> i hoping that you will support this. i think there isn't a small area of compliment under limited

equity co-ops. it is very small in proportion to the entirety of the program area of the fund. it is actually very different to have a homeowner occupied home and social housing that is owned by nonprofit or government entity. they have very different models. for whatever it is worth in my district 7 it is two-thirds homeowner occupied. many neighborhoods that are low income one of the last african-american home ownership that is what we were trying to address, and obviously we are not restricting to just district 7 and 4. my hunch is that is where it is used the most because this is the most of this type of housing, community in district 4, 7,