>> i call this meeting of the public works commission. today is friday december 1, 2023. the meeting began at 9:34 a.m.. please call the roll. >> good morning. please respond with here or present. lynne newhouse segal. >> present. >> lauren post. >> here. >> gerald turner. >> present. >> paul woolford. >> here. >> vice chair zoubi is present with five members present we do have quorum

for the public works commission. for members of the public who wish to make comment on an item outside of the hearing room today you would dial the number on the website and use the meeting id as listed. and pound, pound and press star three to raise your hand to be recognized. unless you're speaking under general public comment and limits to the comments on the item and the chair may ask you to limit the comment on the agenda item at hand. we ask public comment is made in a respectful and civil manner and no profanity. abuse or hate speech won't be tolerated and address the comments to the commissions as a whole and not to individual commissioners or

staff. the public can submit comments by writing at our website address. on behalf of the commission we extend our thanks to sfgtv building management and media services staff for helping this meeting possible. chair post. >> thank you. before calling the next item i would like to amend today's agenda to move on the regular calendar items eight and nine to the first order of business on the regular calendar. item 9 is our 2024 meeting calendar. i would like that to be first and then item 8 is the operations division street environmental services bureau overview. i would like that to be second so on the regular calendar we will continue with item 5, taylor street and the other items for the

commissioners. i am doing this because one of the commissioners have to leave early and get to those items as noted while he's still here. any objection to moving those items to the rapid calendar? thank you. the regular calendar will go like as cited. all right. thank you. we will move on to the next item which is my announcements. i do have a number of them today. but let's start off way think is the most obvious. secretary can you pull up the slides on the director of hiring. first of all i would like to aren't my long promised briefing to the public and the department on the public works commission's work over 10 months to recommend a slate of qualified candidates to the mayor for the position of permanent public works director. the commission is grateful for the public

and department's patience what seemed like a sluggish effort but i can assure you we worked quickly given the challenge of the task and the number of people involved in executing it and in the slide format we started in january. at that time director short thought she might want to return to the bureau of urban forestry and the mayor requested a search for the permanent director and director short participated in this effort along the way. berkeley search consultants was retained to lead the search and as you remember we approved the contract in the meetings here. they did excellent jobs for us and lead other searches and why the hr department recommended them am over the spring

burkely conducted a search and had hundreds much applications and unfortunately many didn't meet the minimum qualifications. the commission was hopefully to find someone that lead a public works department for a large city and have qualifications to lead our department. but thes were narrowed and berkeley had a number of qualifieded individuals for the commission to interview. next slide please. as the spring began the commission started to interview candidates. we were assisted by the chair of the sanitation and streets commission, by several doesn't heads that the mayor requested participate along with us and give us their thoughts and by the interim at that time director short. i'm pleased to say that the commission fulfilled its charter mandate and recommending a slated of three qualified candidates to the mayor for consideration. unfortunately then it

was summer and vacation schedules for us, for the mayor, for some of the other department heads and others moved to the fall and we have candidates drop out that is not a surprise to us and high cost of living and the area and taking on san francisco street conditions, the perception this is a politically charged environment here in san francisco and the difficulty of moving families across the country that anybody might say. nonetheless the mayor interviewed candidates but none of them hit the high bar that interim director short has set and so the mayor requested interim director short to reconsider her position, and by then of course ms. short headed department for another year and with

that perspective and experience accepted the position. the public works commission is delighted to welcome an outstanding leader with demonstrated capabilities and excellence. please join me in a round of applause for welcoming the new department head. [applause] >> we look forward to continuing our work with you and i am sure you will have a comment or two but before you i do am sure my colleagues on the commission will have a comment on this subject. anybody? congratulate carla or say anything? commissioner zoubi. >> yeah, it was a great day when i came i joined my colleagues to the grand opening of the nursery and it was like music to my ears when director short came out and introduced herself as

director short. it was great. i mean all of us working here since july of last year meeting after meeting getting such great reports about san francisco being ahead of a lot of cities in the united states and our goals and also volunteering -- at least me volunteering working with staff and the team and the love they show to director short and they're confident the moral support that support that director short gave to the public works family throughout the hardest time i think in the city of san francisco. i am very happy. i am very glad that the word

"interim" is gone and i want to congratulate you director short. thank you. thank you for accepting. >> commissioner woolford. >> so it's not lost on us the challenging times our city faces and in these times it's even more important we're in the surest and solid of hands and we are blessed with director short to be in the solid of hands. thank you carla. >> commissioner turner. >> i would like so impressed that the opening of the nursery but the thing that impressed me the most -- now, we were late, the governor was late, the mayor was late but it was funny the person that got the standing ovation was director short. i had never seen anything like that. i mean it was incredible. people were b lining and the governor was standing there by himself and i think it demonstrates a couple of things. one, thank you for taking on both the challenge and the opportunity. i think it demonstrates

how the department, how your team, how the executive team but most importantly this commission who took on a gigantic challenge. thank you chair post for doing something so monumental but the second thing the evasion i think it's reflective who you will be as a director and what the community needs for forward thinking and innovation and delivering for the public and grateful what we got to see that day was really i think the governor was also caught off guard to see how jubilant everyone was because we've done something i think want for today, tomorrow but for the future of san francisco. thank you director short. >> commissioner newhouse segal. >> thank you. i was thrilled to hear about your appointment, and it was very, very appropriate that your first public act -- you probably did others before that was the openings

of the nursery because you had so much to do with getting our $12 million from the federal government and conceiving of what to do with that space, so that was a perfect first act. i wish they made a bigger announcement at that point about your appointment, but now we can go forward and thank you for seeing us through these bumpy years of transition and let's go forward. thank you so much. >> director short. >> thank you all so much for those very kind words. as you noted chair post i had every intention of returning to the bureau of rurban forestry and intentional didn't throw my hat in the ring when the position was announced but i am humbled and honored to be asked to stay in the role and my change of heart

was really fueled by my colleagues. rachel knew i would cry. i was determined i would not. the incredible support they have shown for me during this time and they're incredible hard work, their dedication to the city. it makes me brought and inspires me so i want to thank you for your incredible support as well. many of you along the journey said you know "why aren't you in this candidate pool?" because i love trees and at this point go back to trees, but as a good friend reminded me the urban forestry program is part of the public works department and so i will get to fill that need in my heart in this role and now that the decision is made i am very excited to move forward. i am feeling

energetic and jubilant and grateful so thank you all so much. [applause] >> thank you. all right. last we must return to propro sic matters. there have been a number of news reports since the last meeting they wanted to mention. one is the city's effort to meet the department of community mandate that san francisco take actions to comply with state law. the mayor addressed this with a constraints ordinance for the board of supervisors to pass and streamline construction permitting and other functions that made it unreasonable difficult to build housing of all types in the city. director short do any of the actions of public works and other permitting functions and regarding the mayor a legislation? does it address functions of public works she is proposing be changed? and how can

public works be part of the solution to the city's housing development problem and not a part of what needs fixing? >> thank you chair post. the constraints reduction ordinance and the state law that being discussed as part of that actually doesn't have a huge impact on public works because it's focused on the entitlement phase and preentitlement phase. we participate in what is called the street design -- what is it? street design something team so we participate and that is part of the early phase of planning and we provide feedback to applicants to let them know what they're proposing is possible with a few tweaks or looks great or don't go with that plan because there are constraints so we will ensure we're

quickly providing that feedback as part of that process but that's the primary area we're impacted with this new legislation. there are however some additional requirements at the state that are really about providing clear and complete guidance to applicants in and streamlining coordination with other city agencies, and so we are picking up that mandel. our new housing coordinator nicholas king is working with the bureau of street and mapping. we implemented some processes to design to try to release site permits more quickly so we feel very much we're part of the housing delivery solution and we wanted to do what we can to improve our processes to help deliver housing >> great. thank you very much. . >> [off mic]. >> sure >> well i didn't mean to lean in here but i want to be clear and potentially down stream so in los

angeles mayor bass passed executive recollective one that streamlined all land use entitlement but it also produced 8,000 units in the pipeline which is great and i am wondering but as this happens how -- i think public works does have a greater role and we're already doing some coordination [inaudible] with other departments. is that correct director short? >> yes, our bureau of street mapping and streets is the single contacted for other agency review when it comes to right-of-way condition and for example if someone needs to build a new sidewalk as part of the development we need to weigh in and the colleagues at the public utilities commission, the municipal transportation agency and we're that entry point for the applicant. we route to the other agencies. we collect their feedback and return that back to the applicant so coordinating with those other city

agencies is a big part of what we currently do but are really looking to streamline. >> great. there were several news reports since our last meeting related to illegal street vending and the city's role in enforcing the laws. the unsafe conditions which our staff work in this area is of great concern to the commission and the public and we expect this situation to be resolved. thus i was surprised and dismayed and the public works employees worked about the working conditions and feared retaliation about this and director short can you comment on the statements and fear of retaliation and what the department is doing to address them and ensure that our workers no longer labor in dangerous situations and as part of this topic can you also let us know how the first days the

street vending system on mission street have gone? this is a new system and permanent vendors are moved into inside spaces to accommodate them and maybe it easier for public works inspectors to do their work. >> thank you chair post. yeah, i think in some ways i was also diss couraged to hear some of the employees were concerned about retaliation. certainly we have a lot of protections in place to fry to ensure ral taliation can never occur in the work place and we always want our employees to feel safe sharing their concerns. i had personally met with that group a couple of times. we heard feedback from them. we met with their union representation as well and as a result of that, and this was prior to the presentation to the board but they advised us they were still planning to talk to the board

about concerns. we did do an implementation with our health and safety team so we had them go out about the street inspectors doing this work to review how it was accident doesn't and to try to make any recommendations we could to. >> . >> improve the safety of the staff. their assessment was we took a lot of good steps and the only real recommendation was that the san francisco police department officers who are working with us should be closer with us while we're engaging in the work, so that's one thing we've really taken to heart, and we have been basically our teams will now meet at the station to sort of pick up their police officers before they begin the work so they're want out there doing you know engaging with folks without having that protection right there at their side. i think none of us really wanted to be responsible. we have

talked about here in the past. the state law that decriminalized street vending i think with many good intentions meant that police couldn't be responsible and because we issue permits for vending we're the logical department to take on the enforcement so it was not a program we were particularly enthusiastic about taking on but we will always do what is assigned to us and do our best with that. i do think that the first few days of the temporary ban on mission street has mostly gone very well. we have -- we have three teams of folks assigned out on mission street working side by side with sfpd officers and what we have found that the conditions are greatly improved when we're there as was the case before the temporary ban was imposed when we are

not there whether it's because you know we're out on a break or we're reconvening with the next shift conditions can change so we're staggering our breaks to ensure we don't have those gaps in coverage and i think the everyday has gotten better along the process. i do want to encourage everyone to support the permanent vendors who are now working in the marcado working inside because i think that is a concern and i want to emphasize that city working through the office of economic and workforce development has been trying to support the good actors because we don't want punish them and allow the bad actors to kind of profit from that so i think it's gone well. i think it's gotten better everyday as i said and we're learn as we go. we had great

support from our operations team so i am confident that we will continue to really hold the positive conditions for the commission going forward. >> thank you very much. i am heartened to hear that about mission street and we said public works is often left cleaning up the mess when other departments in the city are not doing their job and this is a prime example of that and thank you very much and thank you to the public works staff who works to keep our streets free from this vending. as i positive note this was reported there are new advertising kiosks as part of the pit stop program and meant to complement the toilets replacing the other facilities as well as generate venues to pay for the ungraded bathrooms. and i like the juxtaposition with the infrastructure of the seascape. for those that missed the story can you please brief the commission and the public on what is

planned? >> yes. thank you chair post. as you know the jc deco as a furniture company is contracted with the city to install 25 public toilets and as the funding mechanism for the toilets is also the right to install 114 multifunction kiosks so the first six have been installed and have another four in the building isy stage. they are 16 feet tall, stainless steel and replacing the previous kiosks so they're placed in the same locations as the previous ones. the kiosks include advertising and it's the advertising revenue that pays for the manufacturing, installation, maintenance and screening of the toilets. in addition to the advertising the kiosks have space for public art and messages and our communications team is developing a multifaceted campaign called real people real jobs that will highlight the workers

and the jobs they. do one aspect will have large photos on the kiosk platform. in addition we're working with this firm on an interactive function available on 10 kiosks and provide multilingual information and events, near by amenities and public service announcements for use by passers by and as we announced previously and you know the first toilet was installed a year ago at embarcadero plaza. there were 25 in total as i mentioned and like the kiosks they're in the same locations as the original toilets that of on the streets since the 1990's. we're expecting the firm to instalin over the next three years. >> thank you very much. i would like to call the attention of the commission and the public to the earthquake safety and emergency response bond report that was in the materials

for today's meeting this. is the regular meeting for the public works client agency as the beast are bonds as and spend on voter approved cal tap projects and a way for the commission to stay on top of these projects and we have contracts or otherwise received information and this includes up dates on the ingleside police station and the firefighter system and the 911 [inaudible] and the disaster response facility. i would like to thank all at the public works department who are involved and responsible for this very informative quarterly report. yesterday the new chair of the sanitation and streets commission kimberly hardwick shulman met with labor leaders in san francisco to introduce ourselves and talk about our commission and how we

can build bridges with the community. the meeting went very well and i will follow up with director short on and action items out of that. finally i would like to call attention to the digital newsletter hot off the press and on time as always. i imagine director short will cover all of the subjects in the report today but i will note the topics. the newsletter kicks off with a profile of the nursery and a time lapse video of the site prepared and developed which i encourage to you click o the news letter talks about the participation for the apex summit and the announcement of director short's appointment to the permanent leadership position and i might add i am very disappointed want to see more coverage of this news worthy item in the prises. it seems to me that director short's appointment is

something citizens of the city would want to know about and i patiently await a front page article in the san francisco chronicle, standard coverage in the standard and other mainstream media on this. they were of course critical of the commission in our process for finding a director but i have yet to see anything on the result so i look forward to that nice profile of our director in the mainstream media but you can find something about it in the department's newsletter today. public works also describes the consolidated mission street locations that director short was discussing and i would like to note that the article in the works is far superior to what i have read in the mainstream media. for those interested in a balanced and complete report on the items that were mentioned and this report i encourage you to read in the

works. [inaudible] high school volunteer effort with our department to clean up a neighborhood is profiled in the work and finally the [inaudible] love our city supervisorial district clean up day was mentioned. that concludes my announcements. are there any comments or questions from my colleagues or do any of you have announcements of your open today? all right. hearing none of -- >> one just brief one. i just wanted to comment really for the public's benefit in my prior life on the arts commission i was involved in the design and approval of the new jc deco toilet and advertising kiosks and for the sake of the city and county of san francisco they're going to be much more appropriate addition to the streetscape which we have now and a fantasy [inaudible]. these will be handsome. they're thoughtfully design and crisp and the advertising kiosks will not be

audits traction on the streetscape as i have seen and a welcome addition so it's a nice thing for all of us. >> agreed. second fuller please open this item to public comment. >> . >> chair post i do have a double of announcements. >> i beg your pardon. thank you. >> yes. i would also like to extend my congratulations to director short. congratulations. and to i have a double brief announcements. the commission mandatory training is live and all of the commissioners employee portal and needs to be completed by the end of december. i will continue to send out reminders for folk and offer assistance if anyone has problems accessing those important trainings. then i also wanted to call out a couple of the commission documents on the agenda. first the advance calendar has been updated to be clearer and provide

more information to both nears and the public and the restricted communications report found in item 2 includes clear descriptions and more information as was requested by the commission and this continues to be a work in progress to make the restricted communications report not just information about what contracts should not be discussed with contractors or potential contractors but a preview of gyms that will come to the commission and i would like to chair chair and the staff for improving these document and the then the last announcement i have is an update on the sanitation and streets commission. they last meet r met on november 20 and heard the measure report and the central operations performance measure report. their next meeting will be a joint meeting

with this commission on january 22, 2024 to hear the budget presentation, and finally also related to the sanitation and streets commission mayor breed has appointed a candidate [inaudible] to fill the vacancy left by the resignation earlier this year and her candidacy is likely to be heard by the board of supervisors rules in the on month and that concludes my announcements. >> thank you. if there's no questions or comments from the commission please open this item now to public comment. >> members of the public who wish to make three minutes of comment on item one, announcements by the chair, commission and secretary may line up near the door if you're here in the chamber. if you're calling in please

dial the number on the website and use the access code as cited. pound, pound and then press star three to raise your hand to speak and it looks like we have one member of the public wishing to speak on item one, the announcements. you will have three minutes to speak and i will provide you -- or there will be a chime when there is 30 seconds remaining. >> is this thing working? >> [off mic]. >> i will bring slides some time and we can do it that way. >> [off mic]. >> change in the agenda order so public comment is supposed to come after

the director's report. >> this is the comment on the report. >> yeah this is comment on the announcements. this is public comment on the first item on the agenda, the announcements. this is public comment on the announcements. >> [off mic]. >> okay. yeah. >> [off mic]. >> no, that's the next item, yeah. >> okay >> and you will have three minutes to speak. >> thank you. i will try to make two comments about the vending and the housing concerns. as you talked about , well first of all congratulations. welcome to had officially. really glad to have you here. it's good to work with you. the question of enforcement in regards who is tasked with these things. obviously a lot of things fall to public works f it doesn't fall to the public works then falls to the public. there are a lot of people that end up deputized to make decisions about public right-of-way and i

wanted to push back on that a little bit. i appreciate it's important to have this department do things which the public is allowed to carry out illegal blockages of the public right-of-way, or a concern this one a fence along 15th street at valencia. it's not ada compliant. it's there night and day for weeks see i understand we're putting more effort into blocking vendors but there's not accountability for private owners who are blocking the public right-of-way for all people. it's really important that we actually act on these things equally. across the street there's a apartment building the manager explicitly told me he would rather have fence and not people there and vendors. i pointed it out and they put the fences out on the weekends and impossible to report them with 311 and when you come back to work

during the week they're no longer there to be investigated. in regard to the housing question i know there is journalism with communications with government officials and help to put planters out in public and things like that. i know they're often considered planters but they're full of cinder blocks so we understand what these things are for. all of these are mobility concerns and setting aside we need more housing to get people off of the street these are mobility issues and people are doing this and abet housing architecture but purely from i mobility standpoint these things cannot be allowed to stand. i understand they're in the eer one assessment of things and have easier approval by the legislation by the board of supervisors. i request that the planters be removed entirely. it's very clear they're proportionately to block people's right-of-way and no

reason why a private urge owner should have that right to public space. thank you. >> thank you. and that's our last person in person wishing to speak on item one. we will now turn to the caller. of -- sfgtv is indicating we have one caller and you will have three minutes to speak and i will provide you with a 30 second notice when your time is expiring. >> can you hear me okay this morning? >> we can hear you. >> great. david pilpow and i assume we're on item one and sfgtv has a caption for item 2 so my comments here on the director search and the advance calendar so i echo the

commissioners' comments in support of rebel rec short. i have told her privately and i will say publically i am glad she's taken the job permanently. i think she will do a fine job as she has as interim director. i might suggest because of her long time interest in urban forestry she is given an opportunity maybe half a day or one day a month to spend just doing urban forestry work. i recall a number of years ago when mitch katz was director of public health that he spent half a day or one day a month seeing patients in a clinical setting as he was both a doctor and department head and perhaps she can have the opportunity to spend time on trees and out in the field and not just in offices and meetings. she would probably like that as we all want so just that thought.

i my also be interested in the number of total applicants and candidates that the commission reviewed for the director position. i'm not interested in names. never was and never would be interested in the names but i am interested in the count of how many applicants and how many candidates were interviewed by the commission perhaps recommended to the mayor. that might be helpful but i involve appreciate the story that chair post told and a couple of slides that explained that process, and finally on the advance calendar i appreciate the improvements made by secretary fuller and i hope that will continue to improve and perhaps would also capture the comments and requests made by commissioners that are noted in the

minutes, but perhaps capturing them as well in the advance calendar with a separate list of questions and the status -- >> 30 seconds. >> -- responses would be helpful. it's all i have on item one. thanks for listening. >> thank you caller. and that concludes public comment on item one. >> thank you. please call the next item on the agenda -- >> i requested -- >> i beg your pardon. >> so i am addressing the first speaker in public comment. first of all i was able to hear a lot of what you said even though you're wearing a mask but i would like to bring to everyone's attention there is no closed captioning for his portion so go we look at the minutes we should pay more attention to that because there was closed captioning for the last public comment that called in and not for yours

and you're wearing a a little catch up we have to do. (paused). >> and i really glad

that your expertise and experience with the department will help us do this. i have noticed it's very confusing to people in my neighborhood about what they should rely on public -- on the city for whether it's our department or whether it's mta, painting, no parking zones, renewing their white zones or red zones and saying "yeah i don't want people parking in front of my house and a bigger red space next to my driveway" and they will go point it and i'm not sure if just our department but education to the public what kind of -- i am also in touch with pedestrian organizations like walk sf. they're very concerned about how pedestrians

interact with automobiles on the street, and how bicycles interact with that, but we're so beyond that now with the way that people get around and how there's a lot more dogs these days than before the pandemic and a lot of them are on leashes and that causes problems on the sidewalk. just in my neighborhood last night a car was being towed and three skateboarders and a dog on a leash and i don't know exactly what it was but a car was accident towed. there were children out for a coon cert at a church. it was very active and very confusing. >> >> and yesterday my husband almost hit a skateboarder who avoided his car, my husband's car because he didn't want to hit a car and instead he went in front of my husband's car as

he was making a left turn and the skateboarder fell off the skate board, was want -- not hurt and my husband didn't hit him and we need more education and while you're working with other departments on this i think we need real announcements how interactions between our departments and then announcements of public education plan about how we all stay safe. thank you. >> yes commissioner zoubi. >> just a quick question. it's because of that. so caution on weekends? is there a certain process for violators of public works rules during the weekends? >> we actually work on the weekends.

we work all the time, and our street inspectors are now also working on the weekends, so you can call things in to 311. we will do our best to address them if they're not compliant with the code, and maybe if i may i will just stress that one of our primary functions is the coordination and regulation of the right-of-way, so i do think that the love our neighborhood permit process will give us a great opportunity to do a lot of education around what where people should be going for certain permits, and then what is allowed and what is not allowed because the intention behind allowing plant everies as part of the love our neighborhood permit is for beautification as i ineloquently put it at the board of supervisors planters planted with plants so that's the

intention. it's for beautification, bringing beauty and enjoy to the neighborhood, and we will do a lot of outreach as the portal is ready for the love our neighborhoods permit, and you know really trying to get the word out about what is allowed and what is not allowed but we do work on the weekends. thank you. >> commissioner turner. >> i just want to echo and really support really commissioner newhouse segal's point around i think the public awareness and now that we have i permanent director great to see you on local muse and talking about the love your neighborhood permits but also don't strike your own sidewalk. i think now that we have you in a permanent role i think also the community can have that confidence and important voice to be steered to what is right but also what is new because i think there is this evolution how the sidewalk and the street interact and i

think having that voice and your voice in particular to give people confidence that we have to work through it and right now it's very chaotic and messy but i think you made the right strides and the staff with the right policy to clarify some of the stuff and i want to echo your point and hope to see you on local news. >> thank you. all right. i think that now concludes item one and please call the next item. >> item 2 is the director's report and public works director carla short is here to present and this is an information 58 item. 58 good morning commissioners. carla short director of public works. >> . >> a little bit of an update on apec as you know we hosted the summit earlier this month. it was a huge event that brought to town

president biden and other world leader and journalists and 150 corporate ceos and thousands of participants and kicked off on the 11th and wrapped up a week later. the city had been preparing for a year and the ground work rampings up in the past couple of months. many of our teams were involved. our street and environmental sentences, street and u pair and project management, urban forestry and many others. this was a bag deal for san francisco putting the city on the global stage. there were some protests which were expected but overall everything went smoothly. as a city we put our best foot forward with replacing the doom loop narrative with the bloom loop and give a shout out to public works employees that stepped up. we had

crews on the groups to address issues and we were involved in some beautification projects. well the timing of the projects which were community backed and driven by apec and the benefits will last for years to come want our newsletter has a great story on this where you see the two rec rative crosswalk and one at stockton and washington in chinatown and clouds and the other at stockton and union streets in north beach that boost the colors of the the italian flag. they're great addition to the streetscape. a another project was the webster bridge that i talked about previously and now we're taking a deep dive to keep the momentum by the event going and continue the successful coordination with our sister state agencies to

addressed challenges. our employees had a lot of pride and build on that with input if staff what worked well and tapped into the lessons going forward. i met with dozens of street cleaners and -- i'm going to be meeting regularly with the front line staff with the work started by the deputy director. and you also noted chair post and many of you were there so thank you for joining us for our new street tree nursery opening on november 9. we were joined by governor newsom and mayor breed. the nursery is locateod fifth street between brian and harris son and a vacant 14,000-foot pursuits state free parcel that has enough space to grow thousand trees to be planted throughout

san francisco neighborhoods. it will be manageed by the puree has tree propagation and care and volunteering and educational programs related to urban forestry, environmental yesterday and climate protection. it brings green space and beautification to the south of market neighborhood which lacks free and open space and burdened by the freeway air pollution and other environmental justice pack pacific of the by having it so close we lower the cost of nurseries located in the bay area. the lose will help us eliminate so-called transplant shock which can happen when trees are grown elsewhere. the roots public works program and by the grant program friends of the urban forest and will provide jobs and other benefits for those in

the area. this will provide equitable access to and deliver benefits to the neighborhoods across san francisco. public works provided landscape architecture, construction management and landscape services to this project. there will be enough space for hundreds of young tree and the california buckeye and other trees known to thrive in san francisco's climate. the nursery will serve as a hub for the initiatives and work force training and provide space for workshops and educational programs focused on care and benefits of the urban forest. this is a fantastic designation to the public works portfolio. i'm also proud to announce that the san francisco health service system gave us their highest honor in their annual well being at work awards. public works was recognized for going above and beyond and a culture of

whether being in the work place through initiatives and the annual employee health fair, the heritage month celebrations, start of shift stretches and healthy snack offerings. we accepted the award this last wednesday in the main library and spotlights award for work place employee well being initiatives our deputy director who is here today and on a panel and did a wonderful job representing us at that ceremony. summer interns. we started accepting applications for our summer internship program for college students. the deadline to apply is january 15. applicantings can apply online. we're looking for students studying civil structural mechanical and electrical engineering, construction management, architecture, landscape architecture, surveying and information technology. we have a lot of information on our

website at our website. in addition to reaching out to various universities we reach out to more than two dozen professional organizations and school organizations. among them women in construction operations, latinos in science and engineering, the national society of black initials, american indian science and engineering society, the national association of gay and lesbian statutes and technical professionals and minority landscape architects, american society of landscape ark tenth business, national surveyors and latinx in architecture. we're finalizing the number we will be hiring and aiming for more than 50. interns are an important part of the portfolio. for one they represent the next generation of public works employees and may end up working for usar graduation. several of initials for example started with us 15, 20, 25

years ago as interns. another component of the program it allows more seasoned employees to learn from the college students that come to the department with fresh ideas. once next year's cohort is brought aboard i will share the number and work assignments. as you noted chair post we wrathed up love our neighborhood clean up in district two and joined by supervisor stefani and i will with end my report. thank you. >> thank you. any questions or comments from the commission? commissioner zoubi. >> yeah again and i would like to thank public works and the director short for those crosswalks. it's in north beach and i am getting a lot of great feedback and the type of feedback i didn't expect. people are telling me

cars are slowing down at that intersection and safer for pedestrians but again it's a great addition and i would like to thank you for that >> and we extend our congratulations to the department for earning that well being in the work place award. congratulations. great job. please open this -- excuse me, to public comment. >> members of the public who wish to make three minutes of comment on item two, the director's report, may line up against the wall for this one near the door if you're in the chamber. if you're calling in please call the number on the agenda. use the meeting number access code on the agenda. pound, pound and press star three to raise your hand to speak. we will take in person commenters first and i will work to make

sure that the closed captioning is still functioning for this. it's a little tricky. . >> i am commenting in regard to apec and congratulate you on the completion of the skate park. i know it was a tight deadline for what given the need to finish that in advance so congratulations on that. goes to show just how quickly things can get done for skate boards when there is attention focused on it especially cross departmental and a transfer from dpw to recreation and park and see that level of communication happening there one thing i want to note about that space though i do believe this is sort of regards to apec and temporary fences in the opening and still there during apec. it's great for sort of keeping people out of the space to watch out for the skateboarders but understand this a

recreational skate boarding space to jump and leave the ground and do acrobatic space and not a transportation space the failure to success ratio is rather large you may try a trick 10 times and got it none of the times and the board may run away. it's important that it's a public plaza and boards can do that and injurious to passer blys. i know there was expediency to this but not catch the boards long-term and the public may have negative perception was skate boards that are in the public right-of-way for recreational purposes and harder for progress of transportation skate boarding and you get negative perception of these things therefore i recommend an update to the design be a anderson to catch boards in a curb in that section and scalable feature and people

people's ankles get hit by a skit board. i filed a sunshine request and saw the documents and the records of the communication about that space. i continue was designed so it could be temporary and adjusted and all things like that so i think that would be really important especially as more and more public people are passing through the space and looking for good perception city and i think an adjustment to the design would support that effort. thank you. >> thank you. and sfgtv do we have any callers wishing to speak on this item? and they're indicating we don't have any callers on the director's report so that concludes public comment. >> thank you. commissioner turner. >> director short just to be clear union plaza kind of remark -- that's what i am going to call it. it added skating but it's intended to be a

multi-use space just to be clear that's why it's redesigned does accommodate skating but intended to do the farmers market and other things. is that correct? >> thank you. carla short. the farmers market actually has been shifted to fulton mall but yes it is meant to be a multi-use space and there are other types of activation in addition to the skating so there are some exercise areas. there are some tech paul courts, a sport i'm not familiar with, but it's installed there. there's also some square for checkers or chess and rec and park is doing a lot of activation to bring food carts back to the area so it's meant to be a multiuse space, not just skating. yeah.

>> i think the point though is a good one about run away skate boards. as you we know when we cross the plaza to mart street it's dangerous. i feel only when someone is skilled is when it will be addressed but regardless if we're going to allow skate boarding in the new design plaza yes we need curbs in and is it our jurisdiction or rec and park? either allow skate boarding and accommodate and everyone is safe or not and then no curbs. is that our jurisdiction or a rec and park matter? >> well, we have a share ised jurisdiction over union plaza. it's one of more complicated areas of the city, but we do have a mou with rec park for the activation because they really have jurisdiction over the activation of the plaza and then we have some jurisdiction

over the -- i guess the use of the plaza beyond activation. the skate park was designed for to bring scalers to the plaza, and i think that the temporary fencing which is up is helping to serve that role of both keeping passerbies by inadvertently wandering into where the skaters are active and do a little bit of the catching. simple we can bridge up the question about curbs. installation is not considered a permanent installation at this point so i think we could look at whether there are some temporary curb measures we might be able to put in or other types of barriers. i think it's a point well taken but right now the fences are playing that role. >> it sounds like it and you're right.. thanks for reminding me it's disdained for a temporary solution.

[inaudible]. commissioner woolford. >> yes, it's all temporary and the city had a plan to reimagine union plaza and the area in front of city hall and hopefully it will happen. in terms of the agenda i also have to depart at 1230 and we have on the agenda until then and i have business and anything that extend that that would affect quorum. i think you will have it anyway. >> [off mic]. >> okay. i wanted to share that. >> great thank you. i believe that concludes item 2. second fuller please call the next item. >> item three is general public comment which is for topics under the commission's mandate but not related to a specific item on today's agenda. members of the public who wish to make three minutes of general public comment may line up by the

door if present. if you're calling in please call on the number on the agenda and the meeting code on the agenda. pound, pound and then press star flee to raise your hand to be recognized. as a reminder general public comment is limited to total of 15 minutes for call commenters. can be continued to the end of the agenda if we exceed that limit and the time is now 10:38 a.m.. okay. so we will take our first in person commenter. if you would approach and you will have three minutes to speak and you will be provided with a chime when the time is about to expire. >> all right. [off mic]. >> all right.

hopefully that is visible. first time i came here was to talk about driveways. i am back to talk about it again. the first time director short you mentioned the drainage is maybe the reason they're designed the way they are. the next time i asked about follow up that same comment was mentioned again. i mentioned that i filed a sunshine request. the nature was searching for the word skate board and all public works communications for the last year and the amount of time i have been active in had space talking to you all. there is no record of conversation follow up on my comment. there is communication about the union plaza but as i asked about the follow up done about this specifically as far as i can there is none. if it happens verbally good to know but i would like to know what the public conversation about that. again we have many driveways that are not

to code. this is well over the 1 inch limit and as far as i can tell no enforcement. it's a 1 inch maximum. that is not r also not ada compliant but i talked to the -- what is his name, the compliance person and the driveways cannot be included in this but the question is around accessibility. what role does public works play in this? largely because we see things like this on delore ess and skate board infrastructure and skate boards are legally allowed to be in the roadway. public works my understanding has an obligation to be climate forward, thinking how to get people out of cars, thinking about alternative modes of transportation, alternatives to cars. if we're always going to say there's a reason we can't address this from the presifting

pre-existing dine dine and we will not get the low emission city and i would like to reopen that conversation about the driveways and personally engaged with the issue because it continues to be the case i bring it up and i don't get a response about it. thank you. >> thank you. and there are no other in person commenters, and looking to see if the -- we don't have any callers on this item so that does conclude public comment. >> thank you. commissioner newhouse segal. >> i just would like to point out the last public comment the closed captioning is not on again. >> i do apologize for that. there's a

little toggling that needs to happen. i will work to make sure that doesn't happen in the future >> all right. secretary fuller please call the next item on the agenda. >> item four is the consent calendar of routine matters. it including the draft minutes from the october 20, 2023 meeting of this commission and the draft minutes of the november 3, 2023 meeting of this commission. it includes one contract modification and three contract awards. there's note that corrections for clarity have been made in the november 3 meeting minutes in item one and 12. consent calendar items can be heard individually by request of the commissioners and the public in addition to the consent calendar and all resolutions contained is afternoon action item. before a motion is made i am happy to take corrections to the minutes and any

questions. >> i have no questions or comments on today's consent calendar. do any of my colleagues have questions or comment on the consent calendar? commissioner newhouse segal. >> i move that we approve the consent calendar. >> i will second that. if there's no discussion please open this item to public comment. >> members of the public who wish to make three minutes of comment on item four, the adoption of the consent calendar and all resolutions contained within it may line up by the door if present. if you're calling in please call the number on the agenda and use the access code on the agenda. pound, pound and then press star three to raise your hand to speak. >> okay. and looking in the room we don't have any person commenters on item, and sfgtv is

indicating that we do have one caller wishing to speak on the consent calendar. please unmute that caller and caller you will have three minutes to speak and we will provide you with a 30 second notice when that three minutes is about to expire. >> great. can you hear me okay? >> we can hear you. >> okay. it's david pilpow so i apologize but i have comments on all six consent calendar items, so under the rules i request they be each considered separately so i have adequate time to make my comments so please let me know when i can begin my comments for up to three minutes. >> ven that i have two commissioners with early departures today i'm going to request mr. pilpow that you make all of your comments at one time please and just try to be as

succinct as possible since i need to keep moving things along. >> that's fair. happy to work with you. item 4a, the first set of minutes the reference on page two on the roll call commissioners should be a capital "c." on the various bulleted lists for example on item one and item two i think it might be easier to read just for recordkeeping to either have a single bullet or not bullet items but just indicate chair post highlighted blah, blah, blah and reported ongoing to the board of supervisors meeting on disa, disa, do. item 2 the

director talked about da, disa, disa and the pedestrian bridge and various other things. i am just finding that the bullets are not as helpful as just a long sentence or paragraph capturing what was related. on item three i didn't find the -- no, it's not there. it's somewhere else. sorry. oh there was a sentence they think can be struck somewhere. i'm sorry. oh on item 4a -- no, i'm jumping around. it's two sets of minutes. it's confusing. on item three the first set the general public comment and ended at a certain time. i'm not sure that is relevant for the

meeting. i would suggest striking that. on item 7 there's reference to the -- one second. something about meetings in item 7 and i can't find it right this second. there is also reference to the closed session. there was no report out and i didn't have a chance to go back and see what the item was, but if the commission action in closed session resolved the matter then i think the matters should so reflect and if simply referred the matter to the board of supervisors with a recommendation or on the city attorney or miles per hour else i think the minutes should reflect that. >> . >> because there is no public report as the result of the

action was. there maybe a broader discussion how to report out closed section items to take up another time. that's it for 4a. on 4b there were various other issues. i think the minutes should be very clear where there's a contract award as opposed to a contract modification and making clear what the project title is, and that applies to various items on item 9 the street vending regulations. i think what is better characterized in the motion as not approving the street vending amendment to the public works code, but should say the commission approved amendments to the street

vending regulations via unanimous voice vote because you weren't amending the code but amending the regulations period. on item 11 there was some reference to continuance. that's right. chair post motioned to continue. i don't think there was actually a motion and vote. i think chair post continued the commission calendar adoption to the next meeting. i don't believe there was a motion or vote. that's on item 4b. on 4c the contract modification for the architectural services there's an email from cmd which promises a formal memo but that formal memo was not included in the packet as an attachment. yes, it says they will issue a formal memo

shortly in the september 21 email from finn [inaudible] but that formal memo was not included and i believe these contract mods that the resolution should conclude in the final result with the title amount and the completion date in this case -- one moment. in this case at the end of [inaudible] architecture -- for a total amount of $3 million and an anticipated completion date of march 21, 2027. for items -- that's it on 4c. for items 4b, e and f all three items are missing the scores and ranging, the cmd memos and the

presentations that are listed as attachments. they are sort of promised in the staff report as attachments one, two and four, but they're not included. i have notice particular issue with the contract awards. i think they're fine and the resolutions are fine as written, but those three listed attachments were not included as part of the agenda materials. those are maneants on the consent calendar. thank you very much for listening. >> thank you caller. and that our last caller on the consent calendar. >> all right. thank you very much. i would then like to hold the vote on the consent calendar and leave it up to deputy city attorney tom and secretary fuller to make any changes to the documents that the

caller recommended. i didn't think anything were material to want holding a vote today. they were a clean up items from what i could tell from listening. deputy city attorney tom what do you recommend? >> good morning commissioners. one item i would like to point out is that the caller is correct that the changes to the regulations that were approved, the vending, street vending regulations -- one word regulations versus the thank to the public works code. that was a correct observation. i would suggest as you make your motion to approve the consent agenda that you could include that as part of your motion. >> commissioner newhouse segal will you include that as part of your motion? >> yes, i can change my motion to include that change. >> thank you and i will second that amended motion. all

right. all in favor of adopting the consent calendar for discussion please say aye or yes. >> aye >> i believe the note is unanimously and the consent calendar is adopted. please call item number 9 on the agenda. >> yes. given the amendment to the agenda order item 9 is next which is the public works commission 2024 meeting calendar and i will present this calendar, and it is an action item. okay. so this past summer commissioners

requested i find options for a alternative to our current meeting times with a priority on monday meetings. after conferring with commissioners on their schedules, city hall building management, department and staff and other stakeholders we were able to identify the proposed meeting cadence of the second and fourth mondays of the month at 9:00 a.m. in city hall room 408. there are a handful of dates outside of this casance to accommodate holiday conflicts. i would like to note finding meeting space is never simple as we balance commissioner availability, room availability, and staffing concentrate and the priority of public access to meetings. this proposed calendar is the best option for balancing these option and i'm happy to take questions or comments on the proposed calendar of meetings. >> thank you. so to re-cap this is

changing the regular meetings from first and third fridays at 930 to the second and fourth mondays at 9:00 o'clock. this would also have us more regular rotation with the sanitation and streets commission which meets the third minute so the staff would have three machine meetings than once a month having a friday and monday morning they need to prepare for. as mentioned getting a hearing room is tough. the only other day was monday and for those nears that work full time monday works better for their schedules so i would like to move that we approve the meeting calendar for 2024. >> second. >> thank you. any questions or discussions on this before we open to public comment? please open this item to public comment. >> members of the public who wish to make three minutes of comment on item 9, the public works commission 2024

meeting calendar may line up against the wall for this from the door if present. if you're calling in dial the number on the agenda. and use the meeting access code on the agenda. pound, pound and then press star three to raise your hand to be recognized. okay. we don't have any members that approached in person. sfgtv is indicating we have one caller. sfgtv please go ahead and unmute that caller and caller you will have three minutes to speak on this develop. >> great. david pilpow again. so we discussed this now seems like a number of meetings. no day is ideal. we've tried fridays. the suggestion is try mondays. i am still holding out for tuesdays but i can

live with mondays moving to earlier i think is better so sure let's try a year of monday morning 9:00 a.m. except as indicated. i am in support and hope that a majority. commission today this morning right now approve this meeting scheduled finally. thanks for listening. >> thank you caller. that is our final caller on this item so that concludes public comment. >> thank you. all in favor of adopting the calendar of meetings for 2024 please say aye or yes. >> aye. >> all opposed? or abstentions? secretary fuller please take a roll call vote on that please. >> . >> okay. on the roll call vote

commissioner paul woolford. >> aye. >> commissioner -- vice chair zoubi. >> aye. >> chair post. >> aye. >> commissioner turner. >> aye. >> commissioner lynne newhouse segal. >> aye >> and with five votes in favor the motion passes. >> great. thank you very much. okay. the calendar of meetings will be posted to the commission's website and please called next item which is item 8. >> item 8 is the operations division street environmental services bureau overview and bureau

superintendent meek daniels will give the report. this is an informational item. >> good morning commissioners. i'm the superintendent over environmental services at public works. very nice to meet all of you. this one my first time seeing or talking to you so my pleasure to meet you. today i'm going to be talking about ses and giving you a little background. before we start i just want to let you know i'm a san francisco native, born here, raised here. very proud of being a san francisco native and i carry that on to my work as well. i would like to see the city shine 24/7. we do have some challenges but we're working on it and i am glad to be in this position to keep the city clean so thank you on that. first slide is our org chart. you can see where my department or section is located. i am working

under deputy director and under carla short. the next slide just gives a snapshot of my organization. we are 24 /sech. we have a day shift, a swing and night shift. our crews are very dedicated. they work hard and one of our challenges is folks really don't know what we do. we struggled with communicating with that but we will work hard to let the folks know. it's a challenging environment but the staff shows up and does a great job so we're a 24 hour operation. our budget is $115 million. our ftes is 351 and permanent employees and 293 that are hired and 58 vacancies currently. we're working on that. we have a new hr. they're very

aggressive and we deed pendulum shift on them to get us fully staffed as possible. we're looking being forward to that. the next slide is my bureau's organizational chart. you can see in the blue that's me. i have three assistants that work for me, very dedicated employees as well. they lead through different sections of our organization. mr. king bruce is at zones and swing shift as you can see. jonathan bang is special projects and graffiti and mark [inaudible] is over the mechanical sweeping dispatch and such. under that line we have 12-15 assistant superintendents two that support the superintendent and under that we have a another layer that support them. this is

our zone map. we call it our zone defense. mr. ken i bruce is over our zones. this particular zone map has been in existence for quite some time. received a question about why is it laid out the way it is and do we have any flexibility as far as changing it? i did a little research on that. it's been in existence for at least 25 years. i of course with the city for 25 years so this is the layout. i know still doing research and signs get it i will get it to you so you understand where it came from. mechanical street sweep suggest one of our largest operations. we provide that function obviously. it's a daily operation. we focus on a lot. major corridors. some streets require three days a

week but most are daily. as far as equipment for mechanical street sweeping we have 38 sweepers. we have four packers. we have four flusher trucks. those read ones that spray water on the curb to get the debris down to the catch basins. as far as labor we have about 48 driver and 11 support staff that support it is them. in addition to the equipment i mentioned we also have 12 pick ups running with the sweepers and we have front end loaders that help out with debris as well. litter patrol. these are the staff that works the sidewalks. they also have steamers that work with that crew and four broom supports and typically we have three superintendent ones managing the field staff. these read folks that actually pick up from

the sidewalks. you see the bags on the right side of the slide. as they collect debris we have pickup trucks that come a couple times of day and pick the bags up and take them to recology. power washing is one of our major functions or operations. we use power washers and we use steamers. as far as the units we have 14 working during the day. we have three working during the swing and nine at night. the staffing varies on the crew size and availability of equipment. emergency response. we supply staff as needed. during storm watch and winter time our sister agencies ask for help and have a lot of flooded intersection and such and when storm watch is in

effect our units can't work in the rain and they issue sand bags and work on the catch basisips on the corners for flow. it's a partnership with puc. they activate the storm mode and they notify us and we deploy staff to help them out. next slide is a graffiti public. we maintain all the city properties around town. we have 20 staff members working on the graffiti public. we have one supervisor. we two superintendent twos and 17 front line staff that helps our graffiti public. we also have a graffiti private. and we have opt in program. for the private we have inspectors. we vafour working in the field and two ad min

to support the private graffiti function. the opt in program is a new program. we have one supervisor and we have seven laborers working in the program. corridor program. the crews work on a range of commercial corridors. they pick up litter and do various other activities. one of the major activities they do is communicate with the business owners. we want to develop a positive rapport with them and know we're helping them out and one of the better programs that we have right now. the next slide is special projects. we support every event that takes place on our city streets. over the years we developed a play book and that play book includes every single city parade, event, whatever is happening.

we can flip to the page and we know what deployment of labor that we need because we have experience doing so, so we have weekly clean up events so special projects basically goes before, set it up and make sure it's beautiful. our director made a request about making sure that the nursery was set up properly so we went there before and take care of logistical things. every parade, apec we had had a play book just for that week or so. everyday was dictated in what report. labor, equipment, measure contacts, special projects handles all of that. they're very busy. we also respond to police requests for police barricades for protests and other activities that the police wants us to assist them with so we work real close with pd. always for

share centered and warriors and the activities there we provide police barricades and special projects as well. the next slide is hot spot teams. we work with the health department and try to place homeless folks in housing. we're trying to clear the encampments and we come in and clean. safety is our major priority. some of the locations can be very challenging so we have pd that accompany us whenever we go to an encampment want sometimes pd is called out and then in those cases we have our buddy system in place and if not effective based on the crowds my policy if you question anything pack up and go. the hot spot team works everyday and they're very

successful in helping h sac place homeless people. the next slide is our alley crew . this is a crew that we assembled basically to focus on alleys. a lot of are off pork street but we have others in the mission and all over town. we typically have pd with us for help, security wise. again if they have to leave we focus on our buddy system and if gets out of hand we have to pull up and leave. we did have a staff member working on the un plaza. they got assaulted by someone. he had to be taken away. emergency services -- i believe he's back to work now but it's an unfortunate situation so we need pd to be present. we know they have conflicting priorities but for us our employee safety is

number one. we talked about our night crew. they're out there every night and focus on major corridors like mission and market street and make sure when people excuse me to work it's looking and melling good. they also work at un plaza. we of very involved with the new skate park. we want to make sure it looks good when people come to the park. we have a 24 hour radio room. that's our central location for informed and communication. when field staff is going to the dump or taking a break or whatever they call in because we want to make sure we know where all of the employees are so this is a very, very busy communication center. we rely on them 24 hours a day. before questions i

just wanted to add that we do have goals. we do have slas. our performance group checks in with us on a regular basis to make sure we're neiling hose goals. we have the perform apse presentation to you and speak to them before so everything is okay and grate with the data presented because sometimes the data and actual work are different and we do that check in advance before the powerpoint and inform is submitted. a couple of other things. we fry to be as proactive as possible. we have the jones set up so we can have proactive evenly distributed work. over the last 25 years we evolved into that particular plan. it's working well for us now. we're open to any type of feedback and we can certainly discuss that. we are

proposing new routes for our sweeper for next year. we want to increase our effectiveness on the street. we want to improve our slas as well. when i started this position a couple of years ago i kidnapped a phrase "the maintenance of cleanliness is our problem" . we clean the street. we're there all the time 24 hours a day. we just can't maintain that's the problem we have. five minute after we leave it could be back to its original state so that's one of our major challenge and we're working on that everyday. sometimes there's a very daunting task with my staff it's difficult to keep the morale up because they want to finish a project but we can't because five minutes later it's back to where it was so it's a challenge keeping staff's morale up so we work real hard. we get

pizza, coffee, donuts and carla comes by and talks to the staff and keeps them up lifted. working in the environments that we work in is very difficult. i suggest maybe if the theories want to go another ride along to see what we do certainly open to that. jump in a sweeper and see what they deal with but thank you very much for having me here today. it's very nice meeting you and happy holidays. any questions? >> superintendent mcdaniels thank you for coming and look forward to see you again and i appreciate you addressing my questions in the remarks and i have a couple of things to say but i have commissioners that need to leave early and i hope you will indun me. do you have any comments before you had to leave? commissioner turner has to leave with i few minutes and would you indulge

me having him speak first. >> thank you very much. i am about to walk out in one machine. i want to this one truly the most difficult but most consequential work we do everyday as a public works department. given my work in homelessness i will take you up on that ride along because i do think there is this evolution. there is something happening and i think it's going to take the community both engagement and public awareness to get us to the idea of maintaining. i think you're 100% spot on the. we want to be better stewards of the the employees and civic service and you can't do it working under emergency mode and i want to congratulate you on that coining that phase but how do we engage the community and to meet us where we are and trying to do our job and we use the public and civic spaces but the streets are safe and sanitary and i

take my hats off and meet you where you are and get on that speecher. thank you chair post. >> sure. commissioner newhouse segal. >> i want to say good comments. thank you. i am was really looking forward to your report today and thank you so much superintendent mcdaniels. you started your report with a comment, the public doesn't know what we do" and i second that, and it's really hard to know, and i would like for us to be more creative and proactive about letting the approximately know what our work is when we're doing it, so one of them is -- i mean i don't even know. i see a lot of work going on and i

will stop people with yellow vest and are you with dpw? a lot of are private contractors and don't know who they work for to tell you the truth and their answers are not clear and agreement to stop their work and ask to speak to a supervisor or something. >> right. >> but is it possible that even that even our contractors could have a yellow vest that our dpw logo on it they're doing our work? maybe that effort has been made but it would be great to know that this one a dpw project that they're working on. the other thing one mayor we don't want to obstruct the right-of-way anymore it is for our work but to have signage that -- we have a lovely logo -- someplace that

obvious. i have asked about this before and i do look for it and i can't find it because i know it's always there, but in maybe take a look and let our crews know when they're setting up it should be both sides of a project. we don't want tob instruct the right-of-way anymore. i don't know what the answer is but when you started your presentation "let public doesn't know what we do." that is a huge part of a huge challenge for us. >> okay. >> also because of all the changes since 2016 and what was taken over. the other thing in the private graffiti section that you were discussing how are the property owners made aware that service is available? >> so we vapublic information officers that >> out and canvass different areas. on

our website they can call in and opted in for the new program. a lot have had folks decided to join us in being submitted to us and we committed to them so we're doing had graffiti abatement on private, so it's just a communication thing. we do blitzes all the time to try to notify people of what is going on. i can work with our communication and see if we can enhance that to make it better. >> also the same thing with leaves and clogged drains. i don't know why there's so many -- i guess our non native trees that people have planted here and now we have beautiful changing colors of foliage in san francisco, but we also have leaves that are feet high sometimes that obstruct curbs, not only drains, but so who is responsible? i live in an apartment so i don't deal

with that on my own property, but how do property owners know when it's their responsibility to be sweeping copious amounts of dried leaves or when it's our department's responsibility? >> funny that you mentioned that. this morning i saw property owners blowing the leaves in the street. our sweepers go by and pick those up i would say 95% of them. some stay on the corner by the catch basin and unfortunately they go in and poses a problem for puc. they regulate and control the catch basisips see i think we can work on that and have better conversations with the puc and work out a plan but the property owners they're trying to clear their sidewalk, right, and the easiest way is blow it in the guter and for us to come by and pick it

up so i guess communication with them again could help on that. >> so we're responsible for the sidewalk too ; right? >> it's a joint effort between the city and the property owner. it's a joint effort, yeah, so they're trying to clean their sidewalk and they don't want to pick it up so they blow it in the gutters and we swing by and pick it up with the sweepers. >> i imagine it's a problem for skateboarders too. >> they know our schedules better than we do so right before the sweep sera block aware and they're flowing the leaves in so we pick it up. >> thank you. well, you have a very challenging and very important job and because we're all here with you now and to support you i just hope that there will be more education to the public about what we do so the next time you report to a commission, to our commission, you don't have to say the public doesn't know what we do. >> right. we do have

a corridor program and on thursdays we have the whole year planned out where we're going to be and we bring all of the resources to that corridor so not only do you have street sweeping and flushing and the cleaning of the sidewalks. we clean out the tree basins. we scrape the polls to remove fliers and such and the people on the corridors know what we do but the balance. >> . >> thank you very much. your work is critical. >> thank you. thank you. >> commissioner zoubi. >> thank you for the report mr. mcdaniels and i tip my hat also because i see the crews working and maybe i am noticing it because i'm on the public works commission and when you buy a car you feel they're all the same. >> exactly. >> but i see them everyday day in and

day out in all parts of the city. great job. i have three questions. one is semi-answered but with the opt in program it's commercial or residential or both? >> director do you want to answer that one in. >> yeah. that one limited to commercial districts and some smaller, not just the larger and but neighborhood districts. >> so housing that get tagged they have to do it themselves? >> that's right. >> okay. got it. and my second question is about the play book. who has access to it, every team member? i ? >> i have it and staff has it as well. it's quite a thick binder so we can share it if you want to look at tit has

every regular activity or event in the city that we did in the past and use it as a tool so in planning we go to that particular event now we see how much labor is needed, how much equipment is needed and a lot of times the police barricades. we have a package of every event we do on a regular basis. it makes it easier for us and staff. they can go to the page and that's our planning piece for that, inventory. >> i live that idea. my next question. >> . >> are there certain flip chart books inside the trucks that would actually direct and help the team members of like -- oh i found -- they found barricades on the side thank you very much tree. is there like a flip book where you can who is in charge and how we can process this? >> so we have zone defense and each

zone is managed by a supervisor too so that's the main contact with any part of the city we reach out to that person. his staff is maintaining the cleanliness or trying to and notify us of hot spots or anything outside of our responsibility. say a catch basin is flooding that superintendent two in that district is roaming around the district managing the people and make sure that the city is clean in that district but he's also identifying hot spots that may belong to other department and pick up the radio and called radio room and this catch basin is over flowing. didn't puc to come deal with it so we have the city covered right now and it's working pretty good so that's our cadence or our schedule or process to cover the entire city. if a light is out, whatever it is that supervisor is on

it and calling it in to the radio room. >> great thank you. my last question and the next one is a question. i notice in your presentation you have the hot spot team. you have the alley crew, night crew, corridor program and sounds a little less permanent. ask you tell me more about the corridor program, how it works and is it like a short period of time or is it -- >> so the corridor program is set up where we're working in commercial corridors. we have a calendar for the entire year, right, and then we deploy crews every thursday 250 work on that particular corridor so the resident and the business owners know we're coming in advance. the board of supervisors are involved as well because they want to know how resources are being deployed and so they can reach out to their respective districts and let folks know

that we're coming. it's a deep clean. it's once a year on all of the commercial corridors. we have a calendar so we know what we have to do. >> so it's i different -- because i do see team members just walking around and sweeping streets so is that the same program because i see them everyday. >> right. we have what i described and have corridor workers working in a corridor on a regular basis so we have two different type of corridor programs. we call them corridors because they're corridors, multiple blocks. the one i described at first is the thursday deep cleaning corridor crew, and then we have teams running different corridors doing work on a daily basis and pick the trash

and in a bag and the picture with the orange bag and they come pick those up so we have two programs. >> all right. thank you. >> does you want to add? >> a little bit. the corridor program is part of work force development and work hand and hand with them and we hire corridor workers in the city for two-three years and we evaluate on time, work ethics, recommendation from the business owners, supervisors, and then we pull those people into our apprenticeship program, so it's all a part of our work force development. his section over sees the staff ands them and then our central operations they gather them based on information and how they're working in the field, and we put them in the apprenticeship programs if they qualify, so it's not permanent, but it's work force

development to pull people from lower neighborhood income, challenging areas where employment is difficult and we teach them job skills and also make them understand to take pride in our city that we live in so you're committed to five blocks. if i have five blocks -- excuse me, i'm a little sick and five blocks and both sides of the street and remove graffiti also and we can't be anywhere and the corridor workers with us toeclip the streets but also obtain work force development opportunities as well and sometimes these work force development size want only through our apprenticeship program but other agencies like the cbds throughout the city that would like to pull them into their program and a little up date. i heard you and i wanted to reiterate. >> great. i knew a little bit but i

wanted the public to hear what a great programs. last thing i am sitting with garyald in the right-of-way. ride along. >> we will get a different sweeper. >> thank you. >> director short did you have a comment? >> i was going to add a couple if i may so in response to commissioner newhouse segal's questions we have done a number of mailers in the past to property owners notifying them you know while we now are responsible for the large maintenance of trees property ownerships are still responsible to maintain the sidewalks in front of their properties and include cleaning up leaves. we have done mailers to people throughout the city. the puc always has a program adopt a drain. you can even name a drain if you adopt is it and that's another way we engage with the community to keep

catch basins clear so we try to reduce flooding. i also wanted to talk a little bit about our out reach regarding theom in graffiti program. we have done work with the office of small businesses, with the community benefits districts, and then with some of the merchant groups to get the word out about the opt in graffiti program and in fact after we met with the miss merchant group they did a huge amount outreach committee mission now has the highest subscription to the opt in program of any community. i should also clarify that residential properties along those commercial corridors are eligible so it's want limited to only commercial properties but it was in the legislation defined the commercial corridors that the program is limited to, but if someone lives in a residential building within those boundaries they're

eligible for theom in program and then i was also just going to note and superintendent mcdaniels did note that our crews also have radios to contacted the radio room so if they see something as they're doing their work and they're not sure whether it's whose responsibility it is or know it's ours but not their responsibility they can call if it in to the radio room and if they see a loose barricade they will call in the location and that's the other way the radio room is 24/7 as the superintendent needed and they help with dispatching crews and take the feedback and route to the other city agencies ear other crews within public works. >> may i? so how -- what would a merchant association reach out to get to a presentation at their meeting? . >> well, they can

certainly contact our plain web -- our main email address. we have as the superintendent noted we have out reach and enforcement folks who would routinely attend these kinds of meetings with merchant group and can provide lots of information about our responsibilities, property owner and business owner responsibility and answer questions and make those linkages so we're happy to do that. they could contact public works email address and then we can get them in touch with the right outreach and enforcement. >> thank you. >> commissioner woolford. >> mr. mcdaniels, commissioner turner said it well and often what you do is thankless and permanently as a commissioner and resident of san francisco i want to thank and you your team for the job you. do we're better safe for it. thank

you. >> commissioner newhouse segal. >> so following up on director short's comments and also on commissioner zoubi's comments it's recently not being a merchant. it's recently come to my attention that the merchant associations require membership and in some neighborhoods especially with a lot of changes of ownership of businesses since the pandemic, whatever, that in a lot of neighborhoods most of the merchants are not members of the merchant's associations, and i don't know what the responsibility of the merchant's associations to get all of these announcements to merchants in those areas is, but i don't think that we should rely on them unless we have a understanding it goes to all of them and i would suggest perhaps

the district supervisor of each get it and be asked to send it out to them to make sure that everybody is getting it because i think that our -- i have been going to some of the merchant associations meetings lately and in my neighborhood to see what they do and they're consciously and do a great job and especially new merchants don't know about it but even the older merchant and personal things or whatever they don't want to pay the dues so we don't want only people that pay dues get our notices. >> those were examples. we always work with the district supervisor's office as well and ask them to put new information in their newsletters. we also you know communications director gordon and her team we had a lot of media coverage about

the graffiti opt in program as well and looking for ways to get that imagine out through the general media as well so i didn't mean to suggest we were only working through the commercial districts but the mission merchants association really did a bump up our subscription to the. in program because they did a ton of out reach. they were concerned about conditions. i don't think they limited it to their members so that was just an example. thank you. >> thank you. >> can i make a comment to commissioner siegel? so i did want to say that our community engagement program is a big program, and we just recently hired a community and engagement outreach for each area, and they have been working side by side with the supervisors of the district and the clean corridor program that chris is talking about every thursday their job

prior to clean is walk the whole corridor, engage with every business owner whether you signed up or whatever and they are given pamphlet and i have them in my truck as well and we're work with the community and engage with the business owners not just cbds or merchant meetings but personallyizings and going to talk to them. with the graffiti when you get the notice the pd and inspectors educate you on the options, hardships, things of that nature so we're working on the communication through the pios and this corridor program is turning out to be a well program and our pios are vested in the neighborhood and the business owner and the residents so we communicate with the resident and the business owners. unfortunately only have one per zone so

when we have time to get to them or they call and complain we make sure it's a permanent experience and educate and give them the documents they need and educate and warn and not often just tag somebody, give them a ticket. we want to educate them and put them in the right direction and help them out so i.ed i -- i wanted to let you know we're building up the program and it's a great program and let you know we're not standing around and not know what too do. we're working really hard that we edidate everybody, commercial corridors, residents, business owners, somebody walking down the street. thank you. >> . >> thank you. could i clarify a few of the acronyms so nov, deputy director was referring to and a notice of violation so if someone complains about

graffiti on the program we will send the owner a notice and if they're eligible to opted in we include the inform with that notice so they know it is your responsibility but we have this opted in program and then the reference to perform ios is to the public information officers so they're doing the outreach with all various forms of businesses and residents. just wanted to explain the acronyms. >> . >> mr. zoubi. >> i promise. so who opts in, the landlord or the business owner? >> great question. that came up a lot early on in the program. so property owners need to opt in but with some cases the business lease makes them responsible for addressing graffiti. in many cases the commercial leases make the business responsibility and in those cases the business could opted in. >> thank you.

superintendent mcdaniel i didn't get my word in at the beginning and i will do it now. thank you for the presentation today and thank you to reference the questions i sent you in your verbal remark it is. no need to do further research on it and the zone question was ensuring that the entire city is served fairly and evenly and if it's a system what works for you that's good for me. i hope the public would always choose safety over a clean street. ideally we want both but i appreciate you outlining how our employees are kept safe in some of the work functions particularly surrounding alleys and homeless -- cleaning up homeless encampments that have been moved and thank you for keeping

the employees safe and i agree they will leave if they're not safe and that's the end of that discussion. i look forward to full staffing. you still have a lot to go and thanks for reporting out those statistics and i look forward to you getting the full staff that you need and i think we have all expressed the same frustration many times that public works gets blamed for problems that aren't necessarily its doing and i definitely share the frustration you could clean the street and five minutes later it looks like you weren't there. every opportunity i tell me friends and neighbors in san francisco if they complain about dirty streets and probably public works was cleaning that morning and five upon minutes later, fire hours or the next day and understandably it looks -- see i hope the public is appreciating that and not public works doing its job and a wack-a-mole situation

and look to that not be the case in the years ahead and thank you for keeping the staff morale boosting. i can imagine how hard it is and we all like to do something and appreciate it and move it and i understand why it's difficult and thank you for taking the measures to keep the staff engaged and as you said taking pride in the city. let's please open public comment on this item. >> members of the public who wish to make three minutes of comment on item 8, the operations division street environmental services bureau overview you may line up against the wall by the door if you're here in the chamber. if you're calling in please call the number on the agenda and use the meeting access code on the agenda. pound, pound and then press star three to raise your hand to be recognized. it looks like we have an in person

commenter. are you going to be displaying something on there? if we could have sfgtv show the document camera that would be very helpful. okay. you have three minutes to speak and you will be given a 30 second chime whether the time is about to expire. >> thank you. are the captions on? >> yes they are. >> thank you. soo forlet work you do. i really appreciate it. as a skate border i appreciate things moving out of the right-of-way. i will echo the point about not being clear what this deputy does. this one on mission street. >> . >> i understand the hot spot team cleans up after a sweep. i want to understand what the definition of success is here? because a sweep will happen and the barricades are placed and chained to this tree. these barricades have public works logos on them. this bear scad is not ada

compliant and run the length of the sidewalk and the building. of course i want people to be housed. i don't want the alternative that public space is closed down to the public. this split between what is maintained by the building owner and what is maintained by the public is a complete puzzle to me. i don't understand why at all building owners would be responsible for the maintenance of the public right-of-way. you see the same issue here. the building owner is going to paint it orange and that's all that is going to happen. it's not clear to me what -- why it be the case that anybody who holds a lease or owns the building is responsible for maintaining the public right-of-way. it's know reasonable. here's another set of planters and barricades and also have public works logos on them. these ones did and now they don't but my point here it is to me unconscionable they're left in the space. i want understand the

definition of success is and why they're a part of tool pit period. i don't want the right-of-way compromised just because we don't want anything to dirty the street. to the point about the catch basin this one a broader conversation. the drain is a conflict for the skate boards, right, and we have trouble maintaining the catch basins. i suggest you change the crowning of the road and the catch basin are the middle and the use issues are not in the space of drain train and having a difficult problem as it is. when it needs and the 1 inch lip doesn't solve the concern and i have seen in the mission it above the sidewalk and as climate changes we need new imaginative solutions and can't have the private citizens maintain the catch basins and i reimagine

the public space and have solutions to deal with the reading tide and rein tense rainfall, et cetera. thank you. >> thank you. and that is our last in person commenter. it appears we have one member of the package who called in to speak.. .. >> sfgtv please unmute the caller. >> david pilpow. i will be brief to echo what you said this is some of the hardest work in the city. it never ends. the shift ends you go home and come back and start over the next day and thank you so much to chris mc daniels and all of the dedicated staff, past, present and future for the work 24/7 seems like 24 -eight to keep the streets clean with the resources. i am sure i

will have more to say on this topic in the future publically or privately but to keep it brief and say thank you and i have other good news and i answer no issues on items five, six or seven so this it is for me today. enjoy your weekend. thank you for listennings. >> thank you caller and that concludes public comment on this item. >> thank you. again superintendent mcdaniels nice to meet you and look forward to seeing you again and the metrics in the department's overall metrics that you mentioned. thank you very much. let's take a break and reconvene at noon. how about that? >> actually chair i was just informed that there maybe a brief power outage so i suggest that we recess until 1205. >> okay. it should be resolved by then? >> it should be yes. >> so we have a nice

break. >> commissioner woolford had to move and better push through. >> we can if commissioners -- we don't have too have a break if people are happy. >> [off mic]. >> okay. then let's continue if nobody needs a break. >> [off mic]. >> yeah, the outage is going to happen supposedly right at noon. >> at noon. okay. good. thank you for calling that to my attention. >> [off mic]. >> so let's proceed with agenda item 5. >> now returning to the normal order of business item 5 is the safer taylor street contract modification and project manager flora law will present this modification and this one an action item. >> [off mic]. >> sorry. good morning commissioners. chair, vice chair. it's my first time so pleasant to meet you all. my name is

flora law a project manager with infrastructure, design and construction and i'm the project manager for safer taylor street. thank you. so i'm here today to request an approval for a contract modification to increase the contract construction duration by 210 days. i'm not requesting an increase on contingency for the contract amendment. the contract amount is $9 million as cited and the original contract duration is 720 calendar days. the contractor is esquivel grading and paving inc.. the reason why i am requesting the increase in duration is because

of unforeseen utility issues we encountered during construction and we will dive into that so the safer taylor street -- the safer taylor street project is located in district 5 in the heart of tenderloin district. it is on taylor street between turk and ellis streets. we also are upgrading signal at the geary boulevard intersection. and this project is a very critical component to the city's vision zero goal. between 2059 and 2020 there were 94 collision and three fatalities in that corridor alone and that one averaging one pedestrian or cyclists getting injured per month so we have collaborated with mta and with tenderloin community too

come up with a safer taylor street project in hopes to curb some of the fatalities. one of the improvements for the streetscape project is curb ramp upgrades, pick up and drop off are difficult in this area. there are a lot of sros housing developments and also businesses along this corridor. it is very high traffic area, so it's very difficult for any trucks or paratransit vehicles to stop to do pick ups and drop offs so mta had a plan to do a lane reduction in the area. it's going -- so we're allowed to have room for vehicle to move into the loading zones, and that creates a 5-foot buffer that allows loading, bought being

rye increase to traffic and we're also doing a lot of curb ramp upgrades in the area. some of in the area where in poor condition and some corners they don't have curb ramps so this project would corn struck curb ramps in all of the intersections we're working on. we're also doing sidewalk widening and bulb outs. as i mentioned there's a lot of fatalities in the area so we're widening the sidewalk and doing bulb outs to shorten the crossing distance. we're also doing traffic signal modifications, the traffic signal in the area needs a lot of maintenance, so we're upgrading that and we're also upgrading the lighting in the corridor since we're pushing the curb line out we're moving those traffic -- those

pedestrians -- those lightings out into the pedestrian zone to allow for more room on the sidewalk area. and we're moving on to decorative elements. this is ray street scape project as i mentioned earlier and there's a lot have had sros in the area. a lot of single occupancy residents are in the area and basically this corridor is their living room so we wanted to provide some furniture, some amenities, some plantings for them so they actually feel like home. we also partner with the tenderloin community benefit district so we're allowed to put the plant everies out in the street and they will be helping with the maintenance of that. >> >> and because we're widening the sidewalk area we're able to put in more trees in this

corridor. the reason why we're able to put in more tree size because in this corridor there's a lot of subsidewalk basement and we're not able to put planters, tree planters in the sidewalk basement so once we widen the street we have that extra room where we can plant trees in these areas. so a little bit of the project background. on january 31, 2022 we have provided a notice to proceed for 720 calendar days construction duration contract to esquivel grading and paving, and the construction started on april 22, 2022. due to utility coordination issues, unforeseen utility conflicts and basement -- coordination and

coordination supporting affordable housing developments the project schedule has been impacted. am and so like i said we have started construction in january 2022, 720 calendar days with the contingency of 72 calendar days. currently we're at 20% completion. we are identifying approximately seven month was delay due to unforeseen utility conflicts and coordination issues and the final completion date is october 2024. diving into the unforeseen utility conflicts there are several. we will go through them one by one of the first one we encountered and when we partnered with puc to do sewer

replacement. because the infrastructure for puc sewer is really old in that area so puc had joined the project wanting to replace the sewer lines that is in the middle of the streets. when the contractor started excavationes for the sewer replacement they found there's not enough room for their equipment to reach down to the sewer pipe because it's very congested corridor utilities are overlapping and so when they dig into it they're finding a lot of additional utilities that are placed above the sewer line make it difficult to replacement and once we figure that out we have gone back to the drawing table and worked with puc to figure out what to do. we've worked with the contractor to do additional potholing investigation

to see if there's any opportunities too do the replacement at different location but because this is a very congestedded corridor we're not able to find a different location for the sewer replacements and so puc opted for a sewer lining and mortaring which is kind of a more maintenance for the sewer lines that are in poor condition. basically repairing the inside of the sewer pipes so we're going to do that as part of the project from here on out. and because of that we have major delays because it does take the contractor some time to do the pot holing and then it take time for us to figure out what methods we wanted to go with and in coordination with the puc and then negotiation with the contractor and all of that had really impacted our project

schedule. and in addition to that we also hit the holiday moratorium last year doing the pot holing investigation so work had stopped a double of months between thanksgiving and new years and granted the contractor 45 days as part of the construction contingency based on our specification to accommodate for that stopping of work. and we also have some issues with high pressure fire hydrants relocation in the area because we're pushing the curb line out we needed to also move the fire hydrants out near the curb otherwise the fire trucks couldn't access them so when we're digging into the ground same thing is happening. we find a lot of, tillities in conflict and so we had to do a lot of potholing

and resign to accommodate that and to make matters worse a lot of these items for the high pressure fire hydrants are some of the items so we had to order parts and the contractor does the original ordering and we got the parts july last year but because of the redesign we have to reorder some of the parts and several of the parts are no longer fitting our design. we tried to ask puc if they had parts we could borrow but they don't and we had to reorder and that delayed the start of construction for this high pressure fire hydrant. next up this is an unforeseen conflict for catch basin. we have seven catch basins in the

project area that we need to replace. that's because we're bulbing out all of the intersection curb lines and redoing the ada and are doing the grading and need new catch baseips, and when we actually started the work -- >> i'm sorry to interrupt you but you may not have time for the slide before the power outrage so if you could maybe we will take a quick break here until five after 12 or whenever and you can continue with the narrative. i'm sorry to experiment you because interrupt you and i find it interesting and we will stop at . >> please continue. . >> so we left off the

our unforeseen conflict with the catch basins so we have seven on the project corridor and we were only able to put in two of the seven so five out of the seven catch basins were not able to put in the designed location, so what happens is that we go in there and we had found unforeseen utilities in the exact area where we were planning on putting the catch basins. we actually did potholes before and investigation where we do a little excavation sometimes about 2 inches, sometimes larger depending on what the utility infrastructure we're trying to put in is, and then we will look into that hole to see what we find, and based on those findings we would then adjust our designs to accommodate, and in this situation

here we dig potholes for all of the locations we were about to put in basins and there are utility conflicts in all of them and some are electric duck [inaudible] that are difficult to relocate on a short amount of notice and some of them could be sewer drainage, some are easier to work around, so for the locations where we were able to do a design that we can work around those conflicts we did that, and we were able to put in i believe a couple of more of those, but there's still a few that we're not able to juggle inside all of of the spaghetti of utilities we're working through, and so our engineers came up with a creative solution where we would put in more shallow catch basin and then we will have a little drainage culvert that connects back to the

existing catch basin where we drained water into. this is not a normal design, not a standard design,s so we had to work with puc to get their approval because that is their struck. there is a lot of back and forth because puc have concerns about maintenance in the future and so actually the issue had worked all the way up to director short and we got it resolved and puc was a good partnership and accepted the design so we're in the process of putting it together that change order and constructing the alternative catch basins. i think one of the questions that we always get is why these utility be unforeseen? why didn't we catch it during design in so during the design phase we will use a

utility face map that comprises of all the utility locations where we put together based on a lot of as builts we have gotten from the previous constructions so they're basically plans where utilities after they're installed the contractor would mark them on the plan to let us know where those utilities are, so we use those as builts as a the map and the tool we're using with the design and we know this is a very congested corridor and there's also questions why we didn't do the potholings earlier. there's a little bit of balancing balance of the potholing and construction. pothole suggest a very costly endeavor. you will have the whole crew out there digging into the grounded and sometimes you don't know if the project would come

to fruition so these holes maybe remain ing in the pavement for long periods of time and you know if we have multiple potholes that we need to do it could take up to weeks to do all of them. it could take half a million dollars to dig up all of the locations we wanted to see and that is very costly to the project where the project only cost $9 million. it may not make sense for us to do all of the exploration blanc and we ask do -- beforehand and we can do that with the excavating and the construction so energy in addition we have impacts to the schedule based on our coordination with the affordable housing community. there are i think two or three affordable

housing developments that are being in construction just in the project square and we're working with those housing developments to make sure we're not impacting their schedule as they're on a very tight schedule to get to occupancy. so we worked with the ritz hotel. they were doing a renovation for their sros so we have worked on our schedule to make sure they can go ahead of us and completing their sidewalk work before we go in and perform ours and 180 jones is one that poped up midconstruction. 180 jones is actually two blocks away from our constriction site, but they have an electric connection that they needed to make on the taylor street see we coordinated with them for their evacuation and installation to ensure

they did actually make that connection. and another issue that we would cover in this presentation is the subsalt basement and the license agreements are agreements that we make with the property owners to get a permit on their behalf to do construction in the area if there's basement and within the city's right-of-way. but because they are using them we have to have an agreement to access and work with them to construct in that space. so it was very difficult because, difficult to obtain all of the license agreements because these are larger buildings where they have attorneys representing the

owners, so there's a lot of back and forth -- excuse me -- working with the owners' represent and our city attorneys to get the license agreements and make sure the terms are suited for both parties and once we get that then we go in and work with dbi to get the permits for the construction and once that is done then we provide that permit to the contractor so they can do the work for the project. so for the basement agreements we were able to complete all of them so that's the good news, and the contractors have started sub[inaudible] basement work. unfortunately on the screen 118 taylor street is the where the hotel s i think during the pandemic they used it a sro.

they had an arson incident in their hallway which triggered the sprinkler system and flooded their basement so they're in the process of working with their insurance adjustors to get that fixed but in the meantime they have asked us to want work in that sub[inaudible] basement and we encountered additional issues such as finding some holes in the roof where there used to be an elevator shaft and they just filled it like plywood boards and we don't feel comfortable in putting our sidewalk on top so we actually need to work on our structural initials to come up with a design to mitigate that before we can finish off some of the sidewalk work. so that's concluding all of the issues. now

we're getting into the milestone dates. notice to proceed originally was january 31, and the groundbreaking is april 22 and those two dates have not changed. substantial completion originally was supposed to be april 2, 2024. we're requesting for it to be october 29, 2024 and for fine completion originally june 1, 2024 and our request is for december 28, 2024. so this is a refeet slide of the current project status. construction started january 2022. originna contract duration 720 days with 72 calendar days of contingency. approximately the project is complete at 26%. we have identified the delay of approximately seven months and the relationship is the

unforeseen utility conflicts we spoke about earlier and utility coordinations. current projected final completion is december 2024. and this is to reiterate asking for contract modification to increase the contingency for this type and the original contract is $9 million with 720 calendar days and that concludes my presentation. >> thank you very much. and thank you for provide go ahead all the detail for the reason for the delay. i think it's important for the public to understand why capital projects get delayed and count on them by a date as produced and if there's a delay the reason why and i feel you gave a good explanation. thank you. what are we

doing when the project is extended and to work with the resident and visitor andlet muni line and all disrupted by the line and going on longer now? >> flora law project manager. so we have been working with the non-profits in the corridor tenderloin community benefit district, also with glide which is the big church in that area that provides a lot of support to the community, and so we work with them to make sure that our construction is not impacting any of the events that they're promoting in that area, and we also let them know what our schedule is to make sure they're updated and we're also making sure that all of the access on the sidewalk through the egress are ada compliant, and if they find anything i'm

on their speed dial so they would give me a call and we would have the contractor address any issues right away. as to how we cover up temporarily the construction site when we're not at work we would plate up the area which is putting like a steel plate above where the excavated area is and make sure it's ada compliant and make sure people can access the area and for the curb ramp area we will put in temporary plywood ramps to make sure that it's still accessible. >> thank you. commissioner zoubi is it okay if commissioner woolford can comment because he has to leave. >> thank you for your presentation ms. law. a couple of questions i'm not sure i understand which blocks of taylor we're discuss something. >> it's between turk and ellis. >> oh i see it's

those two blockings. got it. all right. so before i go i would share that i would epidorse this. for those san franciscans that don't know taylor street as well it's one of the most san francisco streets beginning at market up through tenderloin from knob hill and north beach and fisherman's wharf and pier 45 and a example of every stripe of san francisco lives on that street and wonderful we're investing in this street in had particular neighborhood and thank you for the report and i share with my commissioners that i support it. >> thank you. commissioner newhouse segal. >> [off mic] comments that we should appreciate the tenderloin. thank you for reminding us of that. i'm a graduate of what used to be called hastings college of # law and worked there serf years after graduating and i spent time

in the area and you're right.. thanks for that so i did want to ask you. this must have been terribly frustrating and complicated and thank you for your work on this, so i had one specific question that you don't have to answer until you hear my next one and that is what are leaning rails and are they used all over the city and the purpose? maybe they will be used for other things so you don't have to answer that now and i have a new thing and what are leaning rails? use per bicycles or dogs or whatever? don't answer that now but hold that thought. >> actually i do want to answer that because there is actually something i wanted to add regarding the furniture. leaning rails they're seating basically temporary seating for people waiting in the area. liege i said there's a lot of pick ups and drop offs in the area and people can't stand for a long time can

lean on the leaning rails while they're waiting, so that's just a community feature to make sure everyone is accommodated. in addition to that we also work with the tenderloin transgender district to come up with the designs of the seating cubes. we have put their flag design on these cubes where we have seating and we're also painting the crosswalks a transgender flag color. >> [off mic]. >> yeah, because we wanted to make sure we're representing the district because of the comptons cafeteria [inaudible] is in the center of the corridor. >> my question about the seating rails goes beyond you. it's where are we putting them? are other departments doing that? where are they go? let's hold that. i did maybe i missed something on that.

we're only approving the extension of the contract. the consider amount with all of this has not changed? >> it has not. so the reason why it hasn't really changed because we're on holding pattern for a long time and as i mentioned we're only at 26% completion and right now we're looking at maybe a quarter of the contingency spent sorry we're looking like we're doing good financially so we're not asking for a contingency increase on the contract amount. >> . >> okay. thank you. >> commissioner zoubi. >> well thank you for your presentation and i know that right now we're just talking about extending the project so i'm not going to ask any questions about the design and the

purpose of the project. my question is that we -- it looks like i don't want to say a pattern but i don't have any other words to use. there's a pattern of guests mysterious utility stuff underground and that is mixed with basement and all that stuff. is there a reason why we don't do the potholing in the design? i know -- i mean maybe add the amount because you said it's expensive to add that into the projects going forward just to go and when we pass it on to the contractor that they know exactly what they're dealing with? is that being in the works? because it happens with general hospital and it happened with this project and i know on other projects that we just didn't know that pipe was there. >> right. and it's

definitely a consideration when we're starting the design of our project. we look into kind of balance between potholing and discovering the utility during construction. in the more congested corridor like better market street we actually go and do some transferring to find all the utilities within that roadway so it is a case by case basis. certain projects where we know the corridor is more congestedded we will do that potholing or trenching effort, and we will definitely take a deep look at it with the start of the project to make sure we can find a balance between the two. >> thank you. and my second question you did mention multiple times that there was congestion. that also affected the work. is this project the expansion of the sidewalk is that actually taking parking spaces or taking

lanes or both? >> so the mta had created a quick build project in the corridor in 2019 and for that quick build they actually did the lane reduction from three lanes into one lane, and some of the lanes turn into -- they would be loading zone for picking up and dropping off they mentioned and also for the trucks in the community serving the merchants. that created a space where people can safely get on and off and double parking was very rampant before the change anyway. that creates a space where we provide a buffer for safer pick up and drop off and part of this lane will actually turn into a turning lane as well because there's a lot of turning activities in the blocks here and for vision zero goal we know that a lot of the incidents happen in the turning

of the vehicles, and so we wanted to provide a safe space for vehicles to get into a turning lane and they can really assess what the situation is before they make that turn, so this is all part of that quick build project. we have the also put in some temporary bulbs out and constructing into real infrastructure so there's a lot of partnership with mta and turning quick build into a complete project. >> thank you. last question. expand the sidewalk and we wanted to look beautiful. we want to plant a tree. i guess we move a little bit further than the basement. what kind of agreement do we have with the building owner in case of roots of trees --

in the peter. i'm not talking about now but 1020 years how is the construction done? >> carla. >> . >> yeah. my favorite topic indeed. now that we're responsible for the trees in the public right-of-way we are also responsible for any damage to the sidewalk or to a basement as a result of the roots so one thing i will note that tree roots tend to be opportunistic so we look for strategies to help kind them to other places to go so when we create larger basins for example trees are likely to fill in the areas rather than get into someone's basement but the city would be responsible in that case. >> thank you. if there's no other questions or comments is there a motion to approve the

contract modifications for the safer taylor street project? >> so moved. >> all right. i will second that. please open the motion to public comment. >> members of the public who wish to make three minutes of comment on item 5, the safer taylor street project contract modification may line up against the wall from the door if you're here in the chamber. if you're calling in please call the number on the agenda. use the meeting number of everon the agenda. pound, pound and then press star three to be recognized. its like we have an in person commenter on this item. please go ahead. you have three minutes to speak and there's a chime when it's about to expire. >> first congratulations on this project. very cool to be seeing

sidewalks widened. it's a tremendous effort, great opportunity for the department of public works and mta to work together despite the unfortunate split between the departments as it is today. regarding trees especially since director short is so fond of them i wanted make a note as we widen the sidewalk it's important to consider where those tree baseips are placed. if they're placed at the edge of the sidewalk the opportunity to yield the right-of-way is basically nullified. same thing with the fire hydrants being relocated. i would recommend all tree basins end 3 feet if they're compromised two feet from the edge of the sidewalk. same thing with the fire hydrants. it's reallyigate to see space widened to accommodate congestion but if you place the utilities at the end and this basin is narrow of the blow out unless you can navigate to the other

side. seems like novel solutions need to be created for the catch basins as well. i would offer the extension of the project gives the opportunity to have discussions about setting precedent for the process of widening sidewalks and what that looks like. are we just keep inching the basins further and further away from the sidewalk or have a conversation about crowning in the street and relocate drainage to the center and same thing with trees and maintenance and all of this stuff definitely opportunity to have this discussion here and i would offer that this should be done in concert with this as there's good money being throne after this and we don't want to set bad precedents in the conversation because they're not accounted for. thank you. >> thank you for your comments and looking at the queue there are no other callers on this item

and no further in person commenters so that concludes public comment on this item. >> thank you. is this a joint project for sfmta or the -- [inaudible] director short said yes. great. thank you. all in favor of the motion to award the contract modification please say aye or yes. >> aye. >> i believe that's unanimous and it passes and we will look forward to an update a year from now on this project and perhaps one of our clients from sfmta could attend and tell us how they thought the project went. all right. secretary fuller please called next item on today's agenda? >> item 6 is the various locations pavement renovation number 64 and place place contract award. the street resurfacing project manager will present

this contract award and this is an action item. >> good afternoon commissioners. good afternoon director short. my name is name ramone and the project manager with the program at public works. we're here today to request approval to award the san francisco public works contract pave

renovation number 64 with the amount as cited. with a 61 instruction duration of 350 consecutive calendar days to [inaudible]. the main reason for these excuse of these contract is to contribute to the overall goal of maintaining the average conditions street score maintained by public works. will on this slide we show the typical paving operation of the contract. the picture on the left shows the placement of the material in the street by the machine and on the right a rolling machine compacting the asphalt. the scope of work include fixing the areas in the roadway, grinding and paving two inches asphalt and the

curb ramps n partnership with puc and as a result of i were agency coordination to create efficiency and less disruption to the public and transit we incorporate into the contract award from p uc. we have eight blocks of sewer main on this contract and the environmental determination for this contract is cat forecal exempt which means there is no potential impact on the environment. the location of paving work is shown on this slide. the work will be done in district four and seven. district 4 have the neighborhoods of central sunset, outer sunset, park side, outer park side and lake shore and in the other district we have these neighborhoods listed here. this slide basically shows the schedule of this paving contract.

horizontally we have the years and quarters and vertically we have the different phases. project. within each phase we have few descriptions of some important tasks for each phase. in blue represents quarters already completed and in gray with work to be completed in the future so for this project we're planning -- the planning phase was initiated in the first quarter of 2018 and lasted three and a half years before initiating the design phase in the third quarter of 2021. item was completed this phase in the second quarter of 2023. the contract was [inaudible] on may 24 of this year and bids were received on the 28th. now i will upon your approval today we expect to begin construction in

the first quarter of 2024 and complete in the fourth quarter of 2024. this slide shows the [inaudible] results and bidders compared to the engineer's estimate was 101%. the lowest bidder was applied after the bid discount. what precision engineering incorporated submitted the lowest bid and received 5% [inaudible] discount. in comparison [inaudible] receive a 10% discount and became the lowest responsive bidder. the contract monitoring division cmd from the office of the city administrator review and confirm and made a determination [inaudible] was the lowest responsive bidder. as mentioned previously in the slide puc join to this

contract. . uc will be contributing funding to the contract. public works is using road maintenance and rehabilitation account funds. >> >> and puc will be using -- let's see. puc is using the sewer repair money for this work. also each agency will be set aside 10% construction contingency using the same funding sources. to re-cap very quick we're here to request approval towards the san francisco public work contracts various location pavement renovation 64 and sewer replacement in the amount as cited to this company with a duration of 350 consecutive calendar days. this concludes my presentation and i am

available to answer any questions you may have. thanks for listening. >> thank you. nice to meet and you thanks for coming today and giving us this report. i don't have any questions or comments. commissioner zoubi. >> thank you for the presentation and for this one i have questions and it's not just an extension, so my first question it looks like so [inaudible] is going to do replacement of the sewers and the pavem the and fixing the streets? >> that's right and will answer subcontractors to help achieve this. >> of course. i mean i couldn't help but notice the design started in 2018 or the planning started in 2018? >> let me go back to -- yeah, planning basically we have a five year plan so

blocks is entered into a data base five years in advance so that basically help us to coordinate with the different utility companies including private and city utilities so for we placed block on the data base so everybody could see it, and basically see if there's any opportunity for them to join us or at least advice them we're coming in so they could finish the work prior to paving and that's the intention and paving is the icing on the cake of any block and make sure that all the, tillit work is completed before we pave and avoid a delay and fortunately we do coordination every the planning and design and construction phase. we never everyone who will come in and disrupt our construction activities so sometimes there's emergency repairs that need to

be done. sometimes there's new development with new hook ups to be done and they have to trench the area and sometimes have to pause and basically stand down and let them finish the work, but yeah back to your question yes. we plan it. we have a five year plan. we put the blocks listed out for about two to three years to see if there's opportunities and basically a planning effort is about three years and there after we move into the design phase and usually two years, two and a half years so before the project started from inception from the planning to break ground usually about five years into the planing. >> thank you. and for my second question is and this is because of a term i learned today. i'm going to try to use it as much as i can. potholing. >> yes. >> was there

potholing done in the plan offing and design stage or should we like what are the chances we're going to find a wire going there and mess up the project? >> the likelihood is basically unforeseen but typically for the paving contracts we typically grind the street two inches or we do base repair which is about 8 inches below ground so we don't really go deep so for paving week we never do pot holing. >> the sewer work. >> it's usually in the center of the road and most of the time the sewer is installed so there's no conflict in the center. however they may have conflicts on the laterals and fix the laterals and the ones that connect to the houses and those read cases you could run into unforeseen conditions and for that usually what my colleague flora

mentioned we have composited drawings and during the design phase and collect information from the different utilities and butt it in the composit drawing and use it as a tool to determine if there's any constructs with our work. typically you know for sewer work there isn't that many conflicts. we may run into electrical work or some water line that crosses but if that's the situation we deal with it. we basically would pay for the change order to do the work, the support work, but we don't typically pothole every single lateral because that's not really cost efficient. you may end up with what she was saying and paying $500,000 and might as well deal with the problem and pay $10,000 so it's a case by case

scenario so our [inaudible] better and simple than the streetscape jobs. the typical various location contracts with paving and sewer are relatively simple and it's a fast paced basically. >> all right. thank you. and value utilities i am assuming all of the companies were contacted and they're all good to go? >> yes. basically during the design phase public works has a procedure that everybody follows and that is sent notification to all the companies during the design phase. this notification is named notice of intent so this notification is sent to every utility and noticing them we're coming in. the letter the notification indicates when we're planning to start construction and what work is going to take place. we attach drawings as well so that the utilities is informed and knows about

what we're doing and if there's conflicts to reach out to us, and basically that's the process that we follow you know usually. >> last question. >> sure, go ahead. >> a lot of times i ask okay how come the estimate is always higher than the bid and in this case the bid came lower. now, did we figure out why and what happened? you know maybe we missed something and something was a little more expensive when we came up with the estimate or how did that -- [inaudible]. >> usually estimates are for paving jobs we have a data base that we clock every single bid that comes and we basically record every bid from the unit prices from contractors and we use that as a data base and we use that to determine our estimates, so we

basically go with the [inaudible] outside and we try our best -- again it's an estimate, so ultimately if the price of the contractor that determines the bottom line and usually the low bidder. >> yeah, no, but the question because -- have we found a place where they can save money. do we know where that is? >> yes, on the traffic signallic routing. basically they bid routing. >> >> and bid lower and have something to make it cheaper and it's just a bid so everybody have their secret how to bid it and they don't disclose any of that? >> great. thank you. you answered it so great. i am confident you're watching this. thank you. >> all right. if there's no more questions we will open

this item to public comment please. >> we will need a motion first chair. >> so moved. >> thank you. i will second. thank you. >> okay. members of the public who wish to make three minutes of comment on item 6, the various locations pavement renovation number sixty four and sewer replacement contract award but line up the wall further from the door in the chamber. if calling in please call the number on the agenda and use the access code on the agenda. pound, pound and then press star three to raise your hand. okay. and we have one members of the public looking to speak on this item. you will have three minutes to speak and this is a chime whether you have 30s remaining.

>> thank you. thank you for all your work. the quality of the repaving is excellent and really ecstatic about the stuff on south van ness, south of the freeway. that was a tomorrow pothole filled street and great to see that improved. i do want to poke on the question the metrics of who is chosen and if it's price or some indications of the quality of the work being done. that same street south van ness and ripped up and for maintenance work and paved over in poorer quality. it was absolutely spotless and now all of the new asphalt is pitting out and loose and i just don't understand if the same level of scrutiny is applied to the maintenance of the repairs in

addition to the sort of up of the mill repaving so thumbs up for the current repaving efforts but the maintenance needs to the same level of scrutiny and the same contractors are included in thatoir if the standards for those repairs might be adjusted so the roller be brought out and not patched and prodded? thank you. >> thank you for your comments. that's our only person in person and then if there's no callers in the queue for this item so that concludes public comment. >> thank you. if there's no further questions all in favor of approving this contract award please say aye or yes. >> aye. >> the vote is unanimous and secretary fuller will post the resolution to our website. thank you for your presentation and your patience waiting to come on later in the meeting. secretary fuller please called next item on the agenda. >> item 6 -- pardon

me item 7 is the various locations of pavement renovation and 66 and sewer replacement contract award. the project manager and active program manager will present this contract award and this an action item. >> good afternoon chair post, vice chair zoubi, commissioner newhouse segal, rec short and deputy city attorney tom. ed min lee project manager for the street resurfacing program. one correction is our department did appoint a new program manager so i have been relieved of the acting duty and

hopefully you will be able to meet the new program manager some time soon, so the presentation today is for the various locations pavement renovation number 66 and sewer replacement project. i would like to thank the commission in advance for your patience. most much our street are you surfacing projects are similar so you might find some of the materials in this repetitive so thank you. so today we're respecting to the commission to award the san francisco public works contract various locations pavement renovation number 66 and sewer replacement in the amount as cited with the construction duration of 523 consecutive calendar days. the contractor esquivel grading and paving. this project contracts to the overall goal of increasing the

overall condition of streets maintained by public works. in san francisco public works currently maintains approximately 12,900 street seg sents one contract that implements this goal's goal of maintaining of improving the overall condition of san francisco public works maintained streets in san francisco. this slide we show the project locations in a map form on the left as well as we list the locations on the right side. the project has scope of work in neighborhoods five and eight hayes valley, mission delores and burnal heights and pavement resurfacing on block and intersections and constructing curb ramps and sewer replacement which the public utilities commission has joined to our

contract. this slide shows the progress of our project schedule. on the left hand side we have the various key milestone phases of the project life and on the top we have the guerations so this planning of this project had started in 2018 in the first quarter for approximately three and a half years and ended in the second quarter of 2021 in and we transitioned to the design phase which lasted approximately two years, completed in the second quarter of 2023 and we advertise the the authority in -- advertise the contract in in this phase and hoppe to begin construction in the second quarter of 2024. this project was advertised august 142023 and

received bids by then and the average bid is as cited and the engineer's estimate was as cited. the% afternoon average bid of all six bidders to the initial's estimate was 90%. while pursuing engineering incorporated had the lowest bid as cited they were not the lowest responsive bidder. instead esquivel grading and paving inc. bid in the amount as cited received a bid discount of 10% as a small lbe and the lowest bidder. our contract monitoring from the city made the determination that esquivel grading and paving with the 10% lbe discount was the lowest

responsive bidder. here we break down the sponsoring agencies and the funding sources that we're using with san francisco public works using the ride maintenance and rehabilitation accounts for the amount as cited and our sf public utilities commission with sewer rehabilitation and repair is contracting the amount listed and will along with the additional 10% contingency. to re-cap we're respecting to the commission to award the various locations pavement renovation number 66 and place contract in the amount as cited with the construction duration of 523 consecutive calendar days to esquivel grading and paving incorporated. that

concludes my presentation and willing to take any questions if there are any. >> thank you. it's nice to see you again. i don't have any questions or comments. commissioner zoubi. >> one question only. where did they find the savings? >> there was a lower cost in the traffic control similar to what ramone was mentioning in the previous presentation and project as well as we saw had bid items from the sewer scope of work were significantly lower than what the engineers had estimated. >> [off mic] material they found materials cheaper? >> it was more some of the lump sum bid items to address potential hazardous materials that are unforeseen. >> thanks. >> so no further questions. i move that approve this contract. is there a second? >> second.

>> thank you. please open public comment on the motion. >> members of the public who wish to make three minutes of comment on item 7, the various locations pavement renovation number 66 and sewer replacement contract award may line up against the wall filthiest from the door if in the chair ber. if calling in please call the number on the agenda and use the meeting code as cited. pound, pound and press star three to raise your hand to be recognized. we have one commenter here in person. you will have three minutes to speak and you will get a 30 second notice. go ahead. >> thank you very much. i am sure this company did fantastic work. with that said going to their website there's no work sample on their website. simply

a didn't form. given this is a public 234678 meeting i would think this presentation would include a comparison of quality of the work and not just the prices of it. there's no way as a member of the package to know whether or not this organization is better or worse than the other and given all of the quotes are under budget if the better wouldn't have been better spent producing higher quality work. thank you. >> okay. thank you. and we don't have any callersish withing to speak on this item so that concludes public comment. >> thank you. if there's no other questions or comments all in favor of the motion to approve this contract please say aye or yes. >> aye. >> the vote is unanimous. thank you again mr. lee. we look forward to see you back a year from

now how the project is development i think it's nearing completion and it's halfway through and i know it depends on the winter we have this season and how it affects the schedule so thank you both very much. >> thank you commissioner. >> all right. we'll move on. please call the next item on the agenda which i believe is item number 10. >> item 10 is the new business initiated by commissioners. this is an opportunity for scenarios to suggest business for a future agenda and it is an informational item. >> thank you. does anyone have any requests for new business? >> [off mic]. >> yeah. >> [off mic]. >> it was brought to

my attention not everyone had a chance to vote on the prior item so we will take another vote on the motion. >> roll call or voice vote? >> i think a voice vote is sufficient. i think it's faster so all in paver of awarding the contract for number 66 pavement renovation and sewer replacement please say aye. >> aye. >> great. thank you. good. . >> [off mic]. >> please call the next item again. >> so item 10 is new business initiated by commissioners and it's an informal item. >> thank you. is there and new business anyone would like to initiate? all right. hearing

none i can't recall if we have public comment if we haven't said anything or we don't? >> we need to take public comment. >> okay. public comment on this item. >> members of the public who wants to comment on item 10 new business initiated by the commissioners may approach the lectern if you're present in the chamber. if you're calling in use the number from the agenda and use the access code cited. pound, pound and press star three. and we have one in person commenter. please go ahead. you will have three minutes to speak and get a 30 second chime. >> hello again. just a quick note here. i wanted to make the commission aware of potential legal concern, legal liability of the

department. found out recently that a 2008 update to the vehicle code stipulated that skate boards are actually allowed on the roadway and not the sidewalk. the code says 2008 sidewalk update for the term is non motorized user propelled vehicles. it's a code sort of classification that exists here in san francisco. the department of public works coordinated with the sfmta to put these spots down on dolores street because we're legally allowed to operate within the space of the road it's important for the commission to know this is possible fraught activity and constructing the roadway of people legally allowed to use the space. the first ones put down in the middle of the night and someone on a bike hit the dots and fell off and died.

they were increased because of dolores and there's a conversation between cop and kids and i don't want to have that conversation and that the department of public works and mta put the obstructions in the roadway. there was no discussion about the person that died. i believe they're illegal and the department is possible to be sued if they're not removed and should be new business. >> thank you. and looking into the queue there are no callers so that concludes public comment on new,. >> thank you. commissioner newhouse segal. >> [off mic] i just have a follow up on the last public comment. so this involves so many more

agencies than dpw, and please let us know what we can do and i am hoping you have always let all the other agencies and city government in general know that this is something that and more than city government i guess, also state, that this is a dangerous situation that has been created and it's not clear to the people who are usingure right-of-way what the rules are, so it's very, very important. thank you for bringing it up and i certainly would like to do my part but it's way beyond our agency. thank you. >> thank you commissioner. all right. if there's it i know we do not need a general public comment session. >> that's correct. >> then our next

meeting will be in two weeks on friday december 15 at 9:30 a.m. in this room and we are adjourned. thank you. [gavel] >> you don't know what will be

inside the canister until you open it. [♪♪♪] >> these are beautiful, historical drawings of san francisco. these drawings range from 1908 to 2010. [♪♪♪] [laughter] >> i build muscle. a lot of people don't know this, but we have a full team of architects that designed specific buildings and public safety. sometimes it is creating a brand-new building from the ground up. other times it is giving new life to one of our historic structures. [♪♪♪] >> i had to have some degree of artistic skill from a handcraft

point of view to become an architect at that time. it is an incredible amount of loss, in my opinion, to not draw by hand. that skill of having to manipulate a pencil or a pen to make line wait and to make the drawing we've. i have seen this development of technology and this huge transformation in the world his that you do leave some things behind that have beauty to them. [♪♪♪] >> now a day, technologies a completely different. we're not using paper, we are not using paint pencils, but we are using computers to model our buildings to produce drawings, it is different craftsmanship. >> in addition to the beautiful drawings, the person who was taking care of our file for almost 30 years was the one who organized those drawings and listed all of them in big binders with all the name of the

projects, and they were still using these which is amazing. >> 840. we are building an electronic archive of all the drawings for future use. the scanning project started back in march, 2018. we have scans about 36,000 sheets of paper and there's the remaining balance of 93,981. we can do about 100 sheets per day. hopefully by february 2020, it will be completed. >> we feel that our collection of historical drawings represents san francisco's a rich history. not only do we help make history , we also preserve it for the benefit of future generations.