information he needs to complete the safety. what is needed about these tablets as they will have a g.p.s. on it so we know where they're at. you do get confused driving along, especially the inner sunset. recall that to the be made a triangle. >> thanks for writing along with us today. i enjoyed showing you what we do and i urge you to pay attention to the signs and move your car and don't litter. with all >> today is friday march 8 and it is 10 o'clock. secretary, can we-good morning, can we please have the roll? >> good morning. please respond with here, or

present. azalina eusope, here. harrison is present. hartwig-schulman is absent. commissioner simi is present. with three members present, we have quorum for the sanitation and streets commission. public comment is taken for all informational and action items on today's agenda. to comment in person, we ask you please line up against the wall furthest from the door, the audience right, when public comment is called. for members of the public wishing to comment on items from outside the hearing room, you may do so by joining the webinar via the link shown on page 2 of today's agenda. and to be recognized, please select the raise your hand icon

in the webinar. you may also comment outside from the chamber by dialing, 1-415-655-0001 and using the meeting id of 26620992831, #, # and to raise your hand to be recognized please press * 3. the telephone log in information is also available on pages 1 and 2 of today's agenda. commenters may speak for up to three minutes per item and you'll receive a 30 second notice when your speaking time is about to expire. in the event we have many commenters the chair may reduce public comment to less then 3 minute per person. please note you must limit comments to the topic of the

agenda item discussed. if commenters do not stay on topic, the chair may interrupt and ask to limit your comments to the item at hand. we ask public comment be made in a civil respectful manner and you refrain from the use of profanity. abusive or hate speech will not be tolerated. please address your remarks to the commission as a whole, not individual commissioners or staff. and the public is always welcome to submit comments in writing via e-mail at sas.commission@sfgov.org or by mail to 49 south van ness suite 1600, san francisco california 94103. on behalf of the commission, i like to extend our thank tuesday the staff of sfgotv for putting on this meeting and one procedural matter to remind the commission, since we do have

the of only three commissioners present today, if there is a need to take a break at any time, please let the chair know that we can have a recess since if anyone leaves the room, we will lose quorum for the meeting. mr. chair. >> thank you. i assume you all had a opportunity to look at our agenda. does anyone have a wish to amend the order of the agenda? seeing none--hearing no further request, i have a couple announcements, which i don't have. so, that concludes my announcements. mr. fuller, do you have announcements? >> i only have one announcement and that is that, the form 700 ethics filing is due april 2 and commissioners should

receive a couple e-mail reminders about that. it is a very important filing for every commissioner to complete. i know commissioner eusope as a new commissioner does not need to meet that deadline, but all other commissioners do. please let me know if you have any trouble accessing that system or if there is any questions that myself or other staff can help answer in completing that very important filing. that's the only announce ment i have. >> okay, thank you. can you please call the first item? >> item 1 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 in person may line up against the wall furthest from the door and if you are commenting from outside the chamber, please press the raise your hand button in the webinar, or press

star 3 on your phone to be recognized if you called in. looking in the room, it does not appear that any in person commenters have come forward. and sfgovtv is indicating we do not have callers who expressed interest on speaking on general public comment either, so that concludes general public comment. >> okay. that concludes the general public comment. please call the next item. >> item 2 is communications and director's report. director of public works, charla short is here to present and this is a informational item. >> good morning commissioners. i hope all is well with you.

for the record i'm carla short public works director and i have a couple topics to touch on this morning. commissioners, happy to report we met last month deadline to present the budget plan to the mayor office. i want to give a thanks to budget team. they did a outstanding job crafting a proposal that minimizes impacts on core services and preserves jobs. the mayor will make a final decision on what to include in her city wide budget plan, which must be sent to the board of supervisors by june 1. i do not envy the mayor w. a projected deficit of $800 million. my staff and i will continue to work closely with her budget team and with the controller and board of supervisors throughout the budget process. lunar new year, public works

crews were out in force in china town throughout the month of february for deep cleaning and beautification operation during the lunar new year holiday season. this time of year draws big crowds to the historic neighborhood for array of shopping eating and cultural festivity. the year of the dragon work began pre-dawn and deep 92 to the night. steam cleaning, wiping out graffiti to ready the historic neighborhood for the busiest holiday season of the year. also ran more specialized operations, including power wash the iconic dragon grate at bush street and grant avenue, scrubbing the broadway tunnel and touching up paint on the dragon lamp post along grant avenue. the street repair team conducted a proactive pothole sweep to ready the roads for the chinese new year parade which followed a 1.3 mile route

at second and market street, snaked around union square and chinatown and wrapped up at carney street. the parade is one of the largest cleanup event operations of the year and call frz a highly coriographed effort. the crews more then 3 dozen strong used push brooms, grabers rakes shovels leaf blowers mechanical sweepers and flusher trucksism the morning after the parade the streets looked graitd. i attended the parade and got to see crews in action. the operation fsh well executed. kudos to the team for a job well done. next up arbor day, i want to remind everyone our annual arbor day tree planting work day and family fun fair will take place tomorrow. in the tenderloin nopa and hayes valley. the bureau of urban forestry crews with help of more then

150 volunteers getting close to 200 as of this morning will plant 100 new street trees in district 5 neighborhood. the kick off event and fair held at new traditions elementary school, 2050 hayes street. the fest iivities are under way at 9 a.m. and the fair runs until 1 p.m. we will have bucket truck rides, plantder box planting face painting and a small heard of grazing goats. arbor day is my favorite day of the year and i hope you can join us. the third street bridge, last march the third street bridge historic bridge sustained significant damage during a storm when three barges came lose from tethers and slammed forcing the closure of the east side sidewalk. while the drawbridge remained operational, the sidewalk remained closed. happy to report that our trade workers painter carpenter and

sheet metal works have been on the job to complete the needed repairs in time fwr the giant home opener april 5 and they should be out with a craen as we speak today, the first crane bringing in the new steel for us today. yesterday i attended mayor breed annual state of the city address, which she delivered at pier 27. there was one portion that resinated with me especially those who work for city government and been putting in a lot of effort to keep san francisco moving forward. she said, i'm tired of the people who talk about san francisco as if our troubles are inevitable and successes a fluke. our successes are not a flute nor fleeting, thaiare the product of years of hard work, collaboration, investment, creativity and perseverance. the output of thousands of people in government and out

who believe in service not cynicism. commissionerss, i see that every day as public works. staff is putting thin hard work and committed to keeping san francisco moving in the right direction. whether fixing a bridge, cleaning up after a civic celebration, planting trees or paving the streets, our team s work as making a difference. we believe in the city and we are proud of the city. lastly, i'm thrilled to announce [indiscernible] served as acting public works director january 2020 to august 2021 has come back to the department in the new position of deputy director of strategic initiatives. he started his job on monday and jumped right in. his portfolio is wide ranging, man jsing special projects, working on organizational improvements and efficiency insuring compliance with small business enterprise in federal contracting and much more. he's part of the executive team

and very excited to have him back at public works and i like to invite up to the podium to introduce himself. >> good morning commissioners. i'm joining you, i was working with commissioner simi at bart, so we were old friends there. just to give you a brief background or brief history of my background as director short mentioned, i was previously acting director of public works, and before that i spent nearly 15 years here in the city in various departments. i was-city purchaser at one

point and oversaw the contracts for puc and before that work at human right commission and over the course of my time at the city there was something about working at the public works department and streets and sanitation that is special. i enjoyed every minute of my time at bart there was something that was drawing me back to be here and i feel blessed and honored and have this opportunity and i look forward to working with you all. thank you. >> thank you very much and welcome. >> thanks. >> thank you. with that, happy to take any questions from the commission. >> any questions for the general director's report? >> not questions, so much but wanted to say, while departier

from bart was devastated, glad you have come somewhere where you can make san francisco a better place, so congratulations on the hire. >> any further discussion from the commission regarding the director's report? hearing none, we'll move on. no further discussion, secretary fuller, please call the next item. >> mr. chair, we'll need to take public comment first on the director's report. members of the public who wish to make three minutes of comment in person on item 2, the director's report may line up against the wall furthest from the door on your right. commenting outside the chamber, please pres the raise your hand button in the webinar or * 3 if you called in. we'll take in person

commenters first. we do not in person speakers on this item and let me check with sfgotv, there are no callers outside the hearing room on this item either. can we have the next item, please? >> item 3 is the consent calendar, including the draft minutes from the november 20, 2023 meeting of the commission and draft minutes from the january 22, 2024 joint meeting with the public works commission. this is a action item and commissioners staff or member

of the public may request a item on the consent calendar be heard individually, but before any motion is made, i'm happy to take any questions or corrections to either of the minutes. >> where there questions from the commission? hearing none-hf-move to the next item. >> commissioner, we'll need a motion and vote on this. motion public comment. >> motion to accept the minutes of-- >> i'll make a motion. >> second? >> second. >> thank you. i have a motion and a second to accept the minutes. approve the minutes. >> members of the public who wish to make three minutes of comment on item 3, the consent calendar and motion to adopt each item within it may line up

against the wall furthest from it the door. if you comment outside the chamber, please press the raise your hand button or * 3 on your phone to be recognized. we have no in-person commenters and we do not have any callers either, so that concludes public comment on this item. >> okay. do i hear a motion to adopt the consent calendar? and all items contained in it? >> i'll make that motion. >> second? >> second. >> i have a motion and second to approve or adopt the consent calendar. all in favor? >> aye. >> motion passed. >> item 4 is the bureau of

urban forestry performance measure report. bureau manager nicolas crawford is here to present the report and this is a informational item. >> good morning. should i move up? good morning, nicolas crawford bureau urban forsty and initially this was going to be a month or two ago and i couldn't make it to that, so i had designated two of our leaders to give the presentation and excited to introduce you to those folks and we rescheduled to a day they couldn't but i could be here so i want to bring them to future meetings and introduce to more othf urban forestry team. so, our urban forestry program

is within operations and we are excited to share updates on how things are going, some challenges that we are facing, and happy to take questions as we go along or at the end, whatever you prefer. so, this is a synapsis of our progress on pruning all the trees in san francisco. all the street trees we are responsible for through the streettreesf and our work started with the worst first. the trees that needed the most help, had the most conflicts with traffic and pedestrians and we have been fanning out to the rest of the city to some of the trees that were in better shape at the start of the program and it has been all most 7 years since this started and we are moving into the out-skirts of the city that we haven't hit yet and some of the

trees have grown quite a bit since the start of the program. there is definitely a sense of urgency here. in total we pruned 70 percent so that is the completed, plus that active wedge there, so actually today marks the end of one of our big contracts and the contractors got to the end of today and finished pruning all the trees that we assigned to them and that leaves just under 30 percent of the city to prune. at this point, we are taking stock of this, what does this mean? it has talken us longer then initially projected. i think 5 years seemed overly optimistic in hindsight and thought we would be done certainly by 7 years and now we have more trees to prune, but we know these are the less severe cases. fewer removals, more quick pruning types of stops, but we

are still considering how much longer this is going to take us. but, i think a big part of it was we created infrastructure for a brand new program that never existed before. we hired staff, purchased equipment, created a framework for issuing contracts and now that we have that and we tested it, we put it through a pandemic, we think that we sorted out quite a bit of optimization so that as we go forward we can accelbrate progress on our work. so, this slide is-got a lot of information jammed into it, so i will disassemble and talk through each part. from left to right we go through the fiscal years, 2020 to today, and then the top row is for pruning. our maintenance pruning. the middle row is for tree removal, which would include

what we consider maintenance removal. the tree died or reached a point we can't stabilize with pruning. it is falling apart on itself or something like that. and then the bottom--removals also include storm work, so if we show up and half the tree is collapsed and the other half is unstable, we'll remove that too. and then that bottom row is stump grinding, so when we do removals with contractors, we package the stumps along with that, but there is still a lot of outlying stump we might encounter and we are issuing those to contractors and doing those internally as separate mobilization. so, you can see some of the trends here. during the pandemic, it was really contractor heavy in the 2020 column, and that was a

function of our staff being short-handed and reassigned to do a lot of disaster service work throughout the city with a lot of pandemic response things, and our contractors we gave them the directive. we are not sure if it is safe to work and these are times when we didn't even know if working on the sidewalk was safe for people to do. we told them only do safety related removals, so you can see there is a spike in removals. we made a lot of progress on the maintenance removals that we were go ing to do anyway, but consolidated them in 2020. a lot less of the pruning work. and then, in 2021, that recovers quite a bit where we went back to pruning. that year fortunately we didn't have that bad a storm season, so removal numbers dropped quite a bit, which we always want to see. but our pruning numbers still

hadn't recovered, and that was a function of us pulling back on a lot of contracts. we were given direction that we might be losing 5 or $6 million of funding for our streettreesf program. fortunately the worst case projections didn't materialize, but we still have to scale back our spending. and then, we were able to still get as much maintenance work done with the funding we had. the priority is hold on to our staff. we held off on buying equipment, but that would have long-term impacts for the following years unfortunately. 2022, some growth in our pruning work and then we had the really bad october storms in that fiscal year, which lead to a uptick in removals and then last year, 2023, that was

a really good growth year getting a lot more pruning done. we are catching our stride and had been able to hire a few folks through emergency mechanisms. arborists to prune trees and do the removal work, but there is ton of storms last year, both the new year storm and the march storms and we think it was over 900 trees possibly as many as a thousand trees related to that, so i think we were not able to do as many of the maintenance removals and most that was really storm related work, and some of our contractor work is starting to scale back as well, because these are 5 year contracts and we had to initiate new contracts, which have been pretty time consuming, and also the canceling of contracts restarted that clock during

covid, so we are getting caught up on that finally this fiscal year. i think our projections for pruning, we will look into that, because i think there is quite a bit of missing internal pruning work there, because i get the weekly reports and i know we are beating last year, so we should be seeing some improvements there. these graphs are helpful to us to say, are you closing out your work, are you documenting things and do you have a stack of paperwork you need to enter in? we appreciate this accountability, so i'll be going back to the team on making sure we are documenting all that. one take away on the slide, you see the 4 year moving average, we didn't include the current year or do projections, but you can see that 4 year average of

removals hovers around 1300 trees, so with that in mind we can switch over to looking at the number of trees planted each fiscal year, and the 4 year average there is just over a thousand. we have that gap. we are losing trees faster then we are planting them, and it was worse before between 2017-2020. we lost quite a few staff working on tree planting, and we are focusing just on the maintenance with the smaller crew we had. and then that's come back. we got more folks doing that. also, our grant partners we challenged them to plant more trees, and we saw really great success two years ago, but then last year we are starting to feel this under-current of deferrals where there is a lot more push-back about tree planting, so years ago, like 10

years ago, friend of urban forest would do the planting events and 50 people would come out and plant every tray tree on the block, there was a lot of energy, and those neighborhoods have been planted out. there is a lot more of the city to plant. i don't have a tree and don't want to sweep up the leaves. i like how might house looks without a tree and can't imagine it with a tree, it has taken more outreach and that takes longer. you have to build that trust and cultivate understanding with the residents. so, we are investing more in that outreach, because we are realizing that is the only way for us to progress on our goals. for maintenance, this is pruning internally by our staff and you can see that we were at

our lowest previously during the pandemic when we had limited staffing and those folks got reassigned to supporting a lot of disaster service work during the pandemic, and then we recovered and our pruning right around 4300 plus trees a year with our crew. we have fairly small team. 18 arborists and they got a lot on their hands, but the good news is we have two who started with us last month and we have six more queued up in pre-employment, so we are going to see a 30, 40 percent increase in our team and we are excite td about what we can deliver with that additional staffing. i will switch gears and talk about our inspection group. the urban forestry inspectors are the face of our program.

they pick up the phone and answer the e-mails. folks have a lot of questions. that is one thing about trees. people care so much about it. everyone has questions or concerns and we want to field that and get back to them. so, when we get a inspection request, the inspectors are triaging that on their tablets. they are out doing work in the field and while they are out there they can look up requests that are in the area so they can plake the most of a trip, and in 2020, 2021 while they were out doing inspections they were finishing or closing out more inspections then they received, so that was really tackling the back-log of requests we had. and then in 2022, it started to go the other way. we started building a back-log and a trend there, during shelter in place people were at

home, hunkering down, understandably, but then as restrictions starting lifting and folks go outside and see, this tree is too big or i think something is wrong with tree or see a broken branch, so it is good to have that attention called to issues so we can be aware that. we also were really short-staffed so when we wanted six we had sometimes two or three inspectors due to attrition and folks coming in and out. that definitely had a impact on our ability to respond and complete those inspections. we didn't want it to be a bottleneck where we were making sure to pre-inspect every tree before it went to a contractor or internal crews and we realized that we were just going to slow down our progress and goals, so we were moving forward with packages saying if we prune it, we'll send out to the contractors and go along with them and inspect as they

are working and thren do a inspection at the end before we pay for the work. that's worked better. it helped us move along when we were short-staffed, but the good news is, we have six inspectors now. we have been able to hire back in the last year, been fantastic and another inspector startingane in a month or two and writing a justification for possibly a 8 inspector who would be assigned to federal grant funding we were awarded through the inflation reduction act. with that, there is a momentum with inspection to be able to get more done and be even more responsive. so, this illustrates the in-bound requests we get for the most part from 311, but we also get some stuff from our colleagues where they see something and report it to us.

the bulk of these bar graphs are tree related, so it is the bottom light blue band. you can see it spiked last year with the storms. we do a lot to deduplicate things, sometimes it is challenging where one tree falls over, we go out and respond to it and another tree at the same address breaks a limb and we say, we were just there a couple hours ago. it is a new one. it has been helpful with 311 app because it includes photos. usually folks submit with a photo, and we can see this is different request, or if someone is really irritated with us and they are submitting a request every single day for a tree that they think needs to be pruned, we can see okay, the same tree as yesterday. we can say it doesn't meet our criteria for urgent pruning. thanks for submitting it, but

we won't dispatch a crew unless it meets our criteria. 311 has been incredibly valuable to be eyes and ears for us to let us know about severe things that we need to dispatch a crew for, and some of those other bands like the landscape and pest control, those could be trash in the median that we are responsible for or greenwaste in a parking space we need to go scoop up, and then you can see that as a average over the last 4 years, we get about 8500 per year, so huge volume coming in. just keeping that 8500 number in mind, we'll go to the completed number. we are completing four year average about 4600, so not everything that comes to us that we agree with meets our

priority or criteria, but certainly a lot of it does, so if it is urgent we are there within a hour or two. if it with wait until the next day, we'll package it up with a couple other locations in the area and knock those out together, and then if is something that can wait until our plan maintenance when we will do the entire median or prune the whole neighborhood, get all those trees pruned in the neighborhood, we'll let folks know it is queued up, it is coming, thanks for your patience. you can see these trends cycle along with big storm years that drives a lot of these swings between year to year. i will switch gears totally and talk about our cument shop. cement is within the bureau of urban forestry and there is a lot of integration between us, because i love trees, but trees

also damage a lot of sidewalks, so there's quite a bit of tree related sidewalk repair we do, and by having us work together we can be looking out for the trees, but also repairing the sidewalk. so, this is a illustration of the surface area that we are repairing, and the first year, 2020 is an anomaly, because during the pandemic we used that opportunity to close out previous years work that hadn't been finalized and marked as complete in our software, and it looks like we did just a insane amount of work during 2020 but it reflects many years, multiple years and perhaps 3 or 4 years being closed out all in one year, and it was good to do that. we wanted to close that out, but unfortunately the way the report is pulled, it just shows

as one year, instead of showing when the work was performed. it is good we documented it was done. unfourchinately it skews the graph. on average we are doing about 30 thousand square feet so just under a acre of sidewalk repaired city wide. so, there is another data dynamic in here between 21 and 22 lower compared to 23 and projected for this year being much much higher. what happened was, we were working with our performance team and looking at different ways to peer into our data base and pull out what was getting done and we discovered there were settings they could adjust in the report and that's when they realized there is quite a bit more work getting done that wasn't captured in the report.

these reports are helpful for us to say that doesn't look right, i know we did more that. we can pull up are you capturing this location and having that dialogue is helpful because it keeps us accountable and helps us go back to our teams and say, are you getting this stuff documented? yeah, yeah. or i looked in the report and everyone else stuff is there and yours is missing and we can see what went wrong. is it being misentered? we do these internally regularly so when we come to you it is something that we are routinely talking about and reviewing. one other thing you can see in this trend when i go from this slide to the next one is that, 2022 had a dip, so we have the opportunity to adjust the work-load between the crews and cement shop. sometimes they do more of one time of thing and another

depending on the funding and need. weem we'll go to 2022 on the next slide and there is is a surge in 2022 as it swung towards more curb repair. this is measured in linear feet versus square feet as we go along the face of the curb. same in 2020, tons of prior year closed out so put that in the books and factor that out for the average. you can see here we got more consistent data trends here and there's just up and can down as that curb repair crew sometimes did more sidewalk repair and less curb repair and vice versa. so, there is a key role here. we are maintaining city infrastructure, and repairing tree related sidewalk damage and curb damage caused by trees. but also, some client work and

things like that. so, if you want i can go back to any other slides, but i appreciate the opportunity to give this update and be happy to answer any questions. >> thank you very much for your work. this is excellent. any of the commission have questions for this item? >> thank you for the presentation. i just want to understand some of the questions i have. so, thank you director short about tomorrow day. very exciting to see you there. my question is regarding that. how do you identify which neighborhood that needs trees to be planted and how do you go about that and do you get the community involved in it when you decide about that and can

we get to that first? >> sure. just one question as far as like, as long as it relates to performance, it is okay as a discussion topic. so, for us, we have done a analysis based on the canopy coverage of the city, so there is pretty good data set for that,b which you can get from both our tree database, inventory of trees, but also satellight imagery is powerful for where the canopy is, and we overlay that with the environmental justice impact with pollution and both heat and air quality, but also the pollution driven by traffic usually. you can see those corridors near freeways being impacted

with pollution. so, by overlaying those layers together, we found that there's census tracts that have the biggest impact. if we plant one tree it would have the maximum impact and then we want to drive that and plant out those areas first, which is why tomorrow we are planting in the tenderloin, which is really difficult to plant. every time we try to do plantings there, we run into all kinds of obstuicals, but it is worth the effort because 4 out of 5 census tracts in the city at our highest ranking for low canopy and high environmental justice burden, they are in tenderloin, and we made a priority this year for arbor day to plant there, but over the last couple years we planted in soma at the previous arbor day and before that in

bayview and couple years before that we did a ton of planting in d11, so you can see us moving through the city and low canopy areas with a lot of environmental justice burdens, and it could be really challenging to plant there. i think sometimes it is easier to fit a tree between two other trees where there might have been a tree previously and somebody has got a open space ready for it, but in these other parts of the city that never had trees before it takes more work cutting new basins and the sidewalk and building that outreach and letting folks know that we do have a program for maintenance, so we'll be responsible for pruning those trees forever. we'll commit to watering them to establish them, so that's been our model for planting and

i think that as we go we'll saturate parts of the city and then as those areas have trees and somewhere else will be the next highest priority. >> can i continue? so, some neighborhood or communities that have some resistance about planting trees, because it is extra, work, do you incentivize-i remember my children preschool 20 years back they do a thing a dollar a tree, so you take a tree home, you adopt it and you grow it and you get incentivized and i thought that was great idea and at that time my children was having a lot of fun doing that. is that something that you think of some of these neighborhoods, because planting trees is great for some neighborhoods. is there any kind of incentive? other then maintenance.

>> the maintenance is such a big thing for folks, because sometimes other cities will do initiatives like you'll get a hundred dollar credit if you plant a tree, but you are then responsible for the maintenance and most cities and for us we are able to come in with a incredible offer of maintenance in perpetuity and that could save you like 10s of thousands of dollars over a decade, so that helps address some of the anxiety about tree planting, but there's still trust we have to build with folks, because there has been plenty times where the city let folks down with commitments and i think that we feel that burden to follow through on our commitments and make sure that we do always say what we are going to do and i think if you can look around and see we

planted a tree and it's thriving, or if it got vandalized we came and replaced it, and vandalized it two more times and kept replacing it, the stubbornness from us. if we have vantalized tree in front of your house for a year, i understand if you lose trust with us and are not want a tree or see that for a neighbor, so we feel that responsibility. >> are you measuring when those challenges happening and how to respond to that? >> yeah, that was one of the requests from city leadership in the past, and we've got inspections that we are able to select what the issue was if it was vandalism or if there is a car accident that hit a tree,

something like that, and i think that that's been helpful to understand some of the causes, but at the same time, i think we just need to turn around and put in a replacement tree regardless of what happened, and do both essentially. respond, but also track what the issues are, and i think that that's been a lessen learned recently for us. really amped that up. >> i just have last question, because i have a whole list. i will stop at the last question. i just want to understand, most of your work is most of the work is done by contractor, not the department, correct? from the chart in the graph. >> for the maintenance- >> and pruning. >> yes, we had to rely on contractors at the outset of our program, and our internal

infrastructure takes longer to buy the equipment, higher the staff, and grow that team internally. we've grown quite a bit, so we made a lot of progress, but there is more growth we have to do. we have a org chart on paper what will look like when we're there, but it has been incremental progress to work towards that and in the mean time our contractors have been that quick action and have been able to help us mobilize and make a big impact. we want to have a balance. i think we will always have a place for contractors to be able to say we need your support on this, we got some priorities or there is a storm and we can respond to 500 locations in a day ourselves, but if there's 1500 calls, we will need help to get to all of them faster.

so, there is a balance. i did mention this, our tree watering relies heavily on grant patners so we have internal tree watering and go out weekly and water trees, but we have grant partners who provide workforce development training, so there's supervisor with a par ticipant riding along, provide job skills training as they water trees and learn about tree cares, so it is a great opportunity for folks to enter the industry and get training and also provide a critical service for us with establishing trees. >> thank you. >> one thing i didn't mention is we have our street tree nursery now, it is a exciting inflow of trees for arbor day tomorrow, i tried ordering certain specious that were

unavailable and thought make sure we have our own supply of these specious, because some might not be suitable for northern california generally, so the nurseries will say, not worth growing 500 of these if we don't have a customer for it, but if we have our own nursery growing trees providing trees that will meet our needs we are excited about that. we have the nursery, next week we start building out the irrigation and we'll have that tree growth pipeline, so we'll be growing them and planting sthem and caring for them and have all that from end to end. >> thank you. >> very good. any other questions? >> i'm glad you brought up the nursery. i it would be interesting over

time as you grow thengs in the nursery and put them on the street how they do, because i feel a big part of the nursery was grow them right next to the freway, they are probably going to be pretty tough. tough childhood, so it is interesting to see-i donts know if you can track it that way, but if they thrive more so then other trees, i think that is really interesting. >> great idea. i think we should track was this tree planted sourced from our nursery or not. good idea. >> long timeframe. so, just quickly i want to confirm, i was looking at-you mentioned on site 4 that we've removed more trees then we planted over the last years, but i think-just looking at your projection. it seems we are in this fiscal

year it looks like we might net positive on trees, maybe significantly. we removed about 325 is and we might-we planted 838, so do we think-i get in the past we had to go through so much. we had a bunch of storms and storms this year also, but do you think that we'll be positive the next few years? is that a back-log of removal we got out of the way? just interested how we will get ahead of it here? >> i think the storms are the wild card we are just responding, but if we can increase planting levels consistently, if we always plant more, no matter what happens with the storms we'll start to close that gap, but it is really boiled down to a funding issue with the planting, because we are grateful we have this

incredible support with the tree maintenance, but the funding has been hit or miss. the past year we los of lot of city funding because of other pressure on the budget competing for that funding and we are incredibly grateful for the state funding with the cnra grant and the federal money. we got the largest ira grant in the state for urban forestry. i think that we can continue to search for other funding sources to keep plugging in the gap there, but to your question too, we piloted having contractors plant established trees. they did one contractor did 400 trees that they planted and now watering weekly and that worked out well and we want to scale that up. our contract team was two

people and then the last year one person who saddled with a lot of responsibilities and now we are making that a little more robust. we got two people back at it and it is great to see some new contracts getting initiated, but i think going to be combo of internal crews planting trees. we set goals and are want to see 30 trees a week planted internally, contractors coming in with not just packages of 400, but a thousand or more at a time i think is what we need to actually close or make progress on our tree planting goals. >> if i can add one comment to that. i think one of the reasons why we are looking for avenues to have support from contractors is because our funding for tree planting is inconsistent, so the ira grant gives us money we can count on for the next 5

years, so in that we will be probably also hiring additional in-house staff do that work, but the challenges with planting is, we might get an allocation from the capital planning group one year, but then if that gets reduced the next year we can't hire city staff only to lay them off a year later, so we have been looking for ways to have-frankly it has been challenging to get contractors who can plant at the scale we need for a reasonable price. hopefully we had good success with this contract recently and if we can do that, then we can move the needle on catching up with planting. i do think that ultimately if we had dedicated funding for tree planting like we were able to achieve for tree maintenance, then we would look at building the in-house crew more significantly to handle some that planting. >> it is great having our director be the bureau urban

forestry superintendent emeritus. >> any further questions for this item? alright. mr. fuller, can you please call public comment? >> members of the public who wish to make three minutes of comment in person on item 4, the bureau urban forestry performance measures report, may line up on the right side of the room away from the door. if you are commenting from outside the chamber, please press the raise your hand button in the webinar or * 3 on your phone to be recognized. looks like you are the only person in line, so come on up, mr. carnes i believe. you will have three minutes to speak and i'll provide you with a 30 second notice when your time is about to expire.

if you don't mind just introducing yourself as well. >> sure. my name is lance carnes. i lived in the city 25 years, and i have been involved with urban forestry for the last four years. i obtained copies of the tree database 2 or 3 times a year and try to learn about the forest. unfortunately my career was in computer science and i studied a lot of data bases from different places over the years and i know we are not supposed to be negative, but our tree data base is the worst i have ever seen. you really can't get any data from it. it is incomplete. anyway, so i would recommend first of all surveying our city trees. we have 125 thousand city trees.

that was last count a few years ago. there's a-mr. crawford who just spoke used to work for a tree company called, davie tree company, and they have probably several thousand cities throughout the united states. they have something called, tree keeper database, so comes in, makes a complete survey, enters everything into a database and it is publicly visible. right now i have to go out and ask for a copy of the database, which is over 1 and a half gigabites and it is nice if i can bring up my web browser and just say, what happened to this tree and according to the davie tree company, davie tree keeper database, i believe you can just go out and look at any tree and any city. los angeles has a tree keeper that also tracks their parks

trees, so that's-they did a great job four years ago and hired davie. i would like to see our city revise its database, so that we can learn something from it. i think it will cost something, but going forward we'll have a good handle on our tree canopy. right now, what i've seen, we don't have a good handle. that's thend the end of my comments. thank you. >> thank you very much for your comments. okay. that's our only in-person commenter on this item and it appears we do not have any callers from folks outside the room. we have no further public

comment. >> next item. >> yes. item 5 is the racial equity action plan update and deputy director policy community communication beth rubin stein will present the report and it is a informational item. >> good morning commissioners. nice to be here.

i welcome to the new commissioner who i haven't met. i'm beth rubinstein and as mr. fuller said, the deputy director of policy and communications and also the lead of our racial equity initiative. this is our racial equity working group, so i'm part of this team of 12 people and i want to call out everybody, but the breath and depth of knowledge of this team is actually really important and leading our 1600 person department in terms of our racial equity work. so, in the top row next to me, guillermo [indiscernible] are our core racial equity full time team members who devote their core work the racial equity work. the others, the other 8 people are from across our division

[indiscernible] three people from ops and the racial equity work is on the edge of their core work. for the most part we have been together about 4 and a half years working on the work and we work collectively and we wrote the racial equity action plan in 2021 is and if you haven't seen the racial equity action plan, we'll get you a copy of it. i'm here to give a update and before i dive in, i wanted to note that the racial equity initiative has key collaborations that make our work possible and insure racial equity thinking is embedded in the department. we don't work in a siloed way. we are woven through many departmental initiatives and we work closely with these following groups to insure coordination and collectivism. stop level in the clover leaf, the deputies themselves and executive teams have

initiatives we partner on. in idc and bdc there is focus on college and high school internships. operations we work closely with our ddo, durden around front line working support, which i'll tell you more about. very much aligned with her vision and how we can help implement. because we have people as i noted people on the ground that can help make things happen. we work really closely with the university. one of our working group members is in the university because trainings are really key in terms of racial equity work. we also work closely with performance and planning and alexander the head of the team is on the racial equity working group in the room as well. i think most of the working group is online watching, so they are here with us. we work closely with them around strategic planning, employee survey to be sure racial equity thinking is

threaded through. of course, we work really closely with hr and very excited that we do have this-not so new anymore, but a year old public works focused hr team. i want to ground us with demographics before we dive into the work. as you probably remember from our last presentation in the racial equity working group, our work is guided by qualitative and quantitative data. both the voices of our staff and also our workplace demographic information. recently thanks to the performance and planning team we updated the data from our plan, which was fiscal year 2021 and now we have the data from fiscal year 23-24. we also just so we know compare the data to city wide data which i'll show you in a moment. to highlight a couple things, the graph on the right is

departmental wide racial demographics, and it shows we are a very racially diverse department where no one racial ethnic group is predominant. the graph on left is looking at bureau of operations. i want to note that, these designations are all self-identified in the dhr data and some people actually dont see themselves in this data, but it is the best we can do right now. if you can compare the operations data with the department as a whole, you see a different picture. especially when you look at street environmental service, which is our largest bureau in the entire department. it is all most a third of our staff. at ses, majority of staff are black and latinx that comprise about 60 percent.

in addition, as we'll see, at operations we also have some of the lowest payer jobs, including the corridor work rs and general laborers. because that, when you look at this chart, which has been updated now, this looks at average hourly rate of public works staff by race, so across the department. it really speaks to the despairty among us. one thing missing in the graph and i apologize for that, is average hourly rate at public works is $57 a hour. seeing that you can see that average hourly rate is $67 a hour. $10 more then average and for instance average hourly rate for a black person is about $47 per hour so $10 less. i'm lifting up the black staff because the despairty is among the greatest.

do want to note and you'll see that this disparty is city wide. we are in company with the rest of the city departments. what are there root causes of the despairties? there are many out of the control of this department. they are historical legal inequities that go back a hundred years and made access to financial wealth education and healthcare inequitable. there are more recent laws like red lining. there is history of job segregation that has to do with discrimination and access to education and we are seeing the results that. i think what is like looking at this chart is to me and to colleagues is a gut punch but important to look at and talk about because we can work to change it. one important way to address it is help staff have access to

higher paying jobs. as you see later on, many projects, particularly address this issue and focus supporting staff and promotional opportunities. this is just a chart that looks at management versus non management positions and reference d in the top right, nccp first manager class was just a comparison between fiscal year 2021 on top and apologize they look different and fiscal year 23-24. i think what i want to highlight is that though, white employees are about 20 some percent--sorry, 24 percent-looks 23-24 data. white staff at public works are 20 some percent and 40 percent in the manager classification and likewise, there is a

growing despairty between percentage of black staff and black staff who are managers and this speaks to the job segregation, lack of promotional opportunities and of course impacts the average hourly wage. we believe that our goal at public works should be proportional representation of staff at the manager level and that is snng we are working on and we believe it is really important for a number of reasons. one is that, diversity of viewpoints makes our department stronger. greater racial diversity promoats to promotional opportunities for all and more financial stability. not going to develop dwell on this, but i want you to have this in the packet, this is dhr data and speak tuesday s to the fact city wide data reflects our particular situation. so, what are we doing about it now that we are grounding it?

you have seen this graphic before. it represents the 5 priorities of our racial equity action plan. not going into each one at all, but just to name them-this came out of the qualitative and quantitative data. we want to focus creating contrary pathways, rethink disciplinary processes empower front line workers. this is particularly important at ops. broaden diversity of staff all level jz bureaus and we need and want to support and train our managers. doing that we want to push back on historic and ongoing job segregation so we need to help staff with their career path and supporting managers is we need to train and support managers to do the best for their staff. so, we also-that bottom thing about creating a cultural organizational culture of inclusion and belonging is key

because not ont do we have to hire folks but we need to create a culture that support each member ability to thrive and reach their potential. for instance in the architecture sector, black architects are under represented. we know that statistically, but at public works we can work hard to connect and recruit black architects to apply for our positions and create a environment that is healthy and supportive so they want to stay. what are we doing? i got one slide on department wide initiatives that impact operations and i got another slide that is just on operations. really important this year in 2023, we got three amazing staff members. as you probably remember, guillermo started in this position as leadership and racial equity manager at operations in february. after serving in the department for over 20 years, so he comes with a wealth of knowledge.

and then in december we hired our two new racial equity specialists who i showed you at the beginning and they are focused on ops and 49 south van sness ness and bring a wealth of knowledge and just jumped right in. so, we actually now have capacity so for instance, when we talked to our deputy director durden and she says i want to do these things, i'm like, we got staff to make it happen. so, some of the projects we are working on now we are kicking off a mentor program and we-the program isn't just generally meantering, but has a racial equity lens so we talk about bias, micro aggressions, how we facilitate for all voices, and we really look at this as a pilot for something that we can implement at operations at a later time.

we are also embedding racial equity thinking into key supervisors training. in supervisor essentials and supervisor academy which operation folks go to, we talk about facilitating and decision making with the racial equity lens and graduates of the academy come out with holding each other accountable because we build supervisor academy cohorts to talk about these issues. i have been with my colleagues teaching the racial equity module as part of supervisor academy and the acadsomy is a amazing experience across the department but it is half operation staff and half 49 south van ness staff. in 2023, hr initiated requiring a racial equity question on every job interview panel so we supported hr developing

questions for entry level positions and management positions as well as scoring guidelines and we have been training hiring managers why these questions are important. a lot of-especially entry level, a lot of questions are really about how do you-tell us about a experience where you worked with some sort of diversity of people or people different from yourselves and how did you deal with conflict and different communication styles? we are asking really important questions what we call soft skills but they are so important as hard skills like how you work with people. and then let's see, in order to support broader recruitment and particularly around black indigenous people of color, we developed a recruitment resource matric that look at 12 high paying jobs that have low racial diversity and gives list of resources.

things like architects of color, society, black engineers of cal poly, things like that where we can do target ed outreach. and last summer we piloted a high school internship program at bureau architec ture and landscape architecture and apprenticeship programs are also really important and looking into how to better support that. at operations, we have a number of really important initiatives and i say like the north star of it is creating an operation racial equity working group that is just comprised offront line workers. this is a chance for a group of front line workers to get together, build leadership skills, and be kind of the communication liaison. we have done recruiting and

have 28 people interested in being part of this working group and have already engaged their supervisors and have a lot of support from deputy director durden, and this group will be the focus group of identifying projects, helping us implement projects at operations. let's see, couple major things we are working are career pathway support so looking at the type-we are looking at visually mapping out career pathways, we are looking what is career one on one career coaching look like, computer support and we just last week we offered i say we as in operations, with the racial equity working group offered computer classes of operations and had over 80 people sign up. there is definitely a digital divide between operation staff. a lot of the op staff don't have or use public works e-mails and don't have time in the day, so one thing we are

trying to do is bridge the digital divide so we are doing really on the ground training. there is computer classes that were really successful. the other thing that deputy director durden has asked to work with her on is, reaching out to front line workers and getting feedback on the managers and the issue that are effecting them the most. we are helping her implement that survey to further our knowledge of what the needs are. the other thing we are working on is improved communications. one thing we heard loud and clear in our research racial equity action plan was that operations staff feel like they don't have access to information. they feel they don't know what is up and that is definitely a way of keeping people out. we are looking at sort of, how do we improve the communication? we started a year and a half ago having a communication survey asking folks how you want to get your information .

we heard loud and clear they wanted majority folks wanted to get it one on one or in person with their manager and their peers. so, we developed morning huddles that expand the safety tail-gates so there is more time for managers, supervisors sups 1 and 2 to talk about upcoming job possibilities and getting feedback on the work. we enhanced our new employee orientation for ops, and we are also working on enhancing our facilities at ops to be able to have really informative bulletin boards around promotional opportunities. so, just what is upcoming, we definitely with this new staff we want to set some real smart goals that are measurable using our new data. one big area we heard a lot about in the research for action plan is around disciplinary actions and also

just like not disciplinary in the legal sense but the broad range of how you de-escalate difficult situations and staff and managers said we need more attention to that and we haven't been able to focus on that, so that is something we want to do. part is communication. what are the rules? there is definitely a feeling in the research that discipline was used inconsistently. we want to deepen coordination with the hr team.

we are working with colleagues to see how they make decision . planning department fairly recently issued a environmental justice aspect to the general plan and so just being sure that we are connected to city wide resources. we are also looking with performance team looking at how our service responses are coordinated with 311 and also other information, so making sure we have equitable responses across the city. i think that's it. yep. open to any questions. >> okay. commissioners, is there any questions for this item?

>> kind of a clarifying question i think. i was confused on slide 6, when you break out the management and non management positions. >> that is 6. >> i think the coloring question. it looks like it is like just for representation of black employees, it looks like it-maybe there is a color blindness issue here, but it goes from a green to--it looks like the colors are different and i want to clarify that- >> it is that aqua blue color. my screen it is about the same, but i don't know how it printed up with you. for instance, in 2020-2021, 16 percent of the mccp or

management class was black and then for 23-24, 17 percent. >> that is what i was trying to sort out. thank you. >> like, city wide and in public works there has been improvement in terms of larger groups of people of color in the management class between 21--between fiscal year 20-23 and we dont can know why. it could be about retirement, it could be covid. i don't know exactly how to answer those differences. when you look at demographic data what i see best practice you have to look at a larger range, 5 and 10 years. we have to keep measuring it. because if there is a slip we want to see that too. >> commissioner eusope.

>> how you measuring this? you talk about you have a group of all these great people working together, so then you talk about your core work and how you measuring this core work, because the demographic of fiscal--still does not really show a equitable group of people coming in. do you vet them? i just want to understand because i don't have information to go with. >> we talk a lot about how we measure success and there is different ways. one way we measure success now is the number of participants in our program. the fact we offer--for instance, because that we had a computer program class last week for op staff and 80 people show up we know that is the interest and making impact. obiously we need to follow-up with them and see how they are

using those tools, so that is one way we measure. we look at how many op staff go through supervisor academy and how are they using the skills they learned? it is around keeping numbers and doing pre and post surveys. we want to start the next steps in terms of setting smart goals, we want to start setting demographic goals. within 5 years we want to see that proportional relationship between staff and management in terms of racial diversity. those are longer term goals to see the demographic shift, because as i said, when we look at-for instance, seattle is a sister city using the racial equity lens and they are 5 years ahead of us and they found they don't see a shift for like 5, 8 years, but we can start tracking it, so we are working with hr to track

numbers around-even like-can we measure applicants pool? are we getting a broader racial diversity in the applicant pool for our jobs. so that's something we can look at and set goals for. >> do most of the team members once you promote them stay longer and not move away or change jobs or--do you measure that? >> yeah. we are definitely-in the action plan we measure promotions and so that is also something we want to measure. when we start our career passing program in the next month or two, we want to track those folks and see what happens and again, it might be a general laborer who is thinking and saying i want to be an assistant superintendent and we'll help them figure what you need to get there. you might need a certificate or

more education. so it is medium and long range planning. one way to measure is how much they stay if gauged. have we been offering the resources they need to keep working on that career path. >> thank you. >> director short. >> thank you. i just wanted to add and we'll likely be bringing this to you as a item in the future, but we are working on refreshing our strategic plan for the department and our first goal is about valuing our people and looking at these items in terms of how we help our staff with identifying what their career paths may be and not making assumptions that because you may be a gardener that you necessarily want to be a gardener supervisor or manager.

maybe you want to be a landscape architect and what would that look like. we want to look at-we want to introduce our team to lots of different careers within the department. we want to keep them as much as we can, but introduce them to other career jz if there is interest we can help see whether, here are the skills you need. here are ways to try to get the skills over time and all that we are looking at these measurable goals, so we can really track how we are doing. >> i just don't know the age. the manager positions, see it would be great once they get promotions and all the training they are able to fill the spot as people are leaving and retiring so you don't have to keep doing all these new hires. that was just part of my question. >> yeah. >> any other questions? seeing none, can we have public

comment? >> thank you. >> thank you. members of the public who wish to make three minutes of comment on in-person on item 5, the racial equity action plan update may line up against the wall furthest from it the door. if you like to comment from outside the chamber, press the raise your hand button in the webinar or * 3 on your phone to be recognized. it looks like we do not have in-person commenters and we also do not have any commenters from outside the room, so that concludes public comment. >> okay. secretary fuller, can we have the next item, please? >> item 6 is sanitation and streets commission rules of order amendment and i'll be

doing the presentation and it is a action item. if sfgov tv could bring up the clerk pc? thank you very much. this amendment was prompted last fall when it was found the rules of order, which were adopted in august 2022 when the commission was barely a month old, those rules of order contained outdated language that has been outdated by proposition b, 2022. it also includes language that is unnecessarily restrictive to the commission's ability to plan for itself and language that is out of step with current commission practices

and specifically in article 1, section 2 it amends the authority to reflect-amends the authority to reflect that proposition b reversed the separation of the san francisco public works operations division into its own department and affirms the commission's man date to overso the operation division, so clarifies that. article 2, section 1 amends the appointment and duties of osers to provide the commission greater flexibility in scheduling the election of officers and deletess outdated language that discusses the initial term of officers when the commission first formed. then article 3, section 3, it is similarly amends regular meetings of the commission to provide the commission greater flexibility in scheduling the calendar adoption and deletes outdated language that discusses the initial term of

the commission when it was first form. this amendment deletes the time and day of the month when the commission meets so you all have the flexibility in the future to adopt a new meeting cadence, say we want to move thursdays at 4 p.m., we can adopt a new calendar without needing to amend the rules of order when we do that. and just as a reminder all regular meeting times are posted well in advance of meet ings. the last change as part of this amendment would be to article 3, section 6, and that amends the order of business to reflect the current agenda ordering and language, so just keeping up with our current practices. and notice of this hearing of potential amendment to the commission's rules of order was posted february 27, 2024, which

empowers the commission to approve this amendment if they feel supportive of it, kwr happy to take questions on this proposed amendment as well as suggestions for a future amendment that the commission might want to consider. >> does the commission have any questions on this item? commissioner simi. >> i was going to make a motion to approve it. is that what we do? >> i think we have public comment first. >> we'll take a motion and then public comment. >> alright. there is motion. do i have a second? >> second. >> moved and seconded. mr. secretary. >> given the motion, members of the public who wish to make three minutes of comment in person on the motion to approve

the amendment to the commission's rules of order may line up against the wall furthest from the door. if you are commenting outside the chamber, please press the raise your hand button in the webinar, or press * 3 on your phone to be recognized. it appears we do not have in person callers on this item. and sfgovtv is indicating we don't have callers either, so that concludes public comment. >> alright. is there any further debate on this item? seeing none, then i'll entertain a motion to approval. >> we do have the motion. >> that's right. sorry. let's take a vote. all in favor of approving this motion, item? >> aye. >> we have a hundred percent.

>> great. item 7 is new business initiated by commissioners. this is a opportunity for commissioners to make announcements and raise topics to be added to future commission agendas and this is a informational item. >> there is no new business for the commissioners. i would like to raise, anybody wants to say something? no further questions. mr. fuller, please open to public comment. >> okay. members of the public who wish to make three minutes of comment in person on new business may line up against the wall furthest from the door. if you are commenting outside the chamber, press the raise your hand button in the webinar, or press * 3 on your phone to be recognized.

and we do not have in person commenters, and sfgovtv is indicating we don't have callers from outside the room so that concludes public comment. >> okay. is there any further discussion of the commission? hearing none, there is secretary please call the next item. >> the final item is general public comment continued if necessary from item 1 and since we didn't exceed the 15 minute limit on general public comment, this item is not necessary. >> secretary, is there any further business? >> there is no further business on this agenda. >> alright. the commission will meet again on april 15, 2024.

hearing no objections i adjourned this meeting. [meeting adjourned] when i shoot chinatown, i shoot the architecture that people not just events, i shoot what's going on in daily life

and everything changes. murals, graffiti, store opening. store closing. the bakery. i shoot anything and everything in chinatown. i shoot daily life. i'm a crazy animal. i'm shooting for fun. that's what i love. >> i'm frank jane. i'm a community photographer for the last i think about 20 years. i joined the chinese historical society. it was a way i could practice my society and i can give the

community memories. i've been practicing and get to know everybody and everybody knew me pretty much documenting the history i don't just shoot events. i'm telling a story in whatever photos that i post on facebook, it's just like being there from front to end, i do a good job and i take hundreds and hundreds of photos. and i was specializing in chinese american history. i want to cover what's happening in chinatown. what's happening in my community. i shoot a lot of government officials. i probably have thousands of photos of mayor lee and all the dignitaries. but they treat me like one of the family members because they see me all the time. they appreciate me. even the local cops, the

firemen, you know, i feel at home. i was born in chinese hospital 1954. we grew up dirt poor. our family was lucky to grew up. when i was in junior high, i had a degree in hotel management restaurant. i was working in the restaurant business for probably about 15 years. i started when i was 12 years old. when i got married, my wife had an import business. i figured, the restaurant business, i got tired of it. i said come work for the family business. i said, okay. it's going to be interesting and so interesting i lasted for 30 years. i'm married i have one daughter. she's a registered nurse.

she lives in los angeles now. and two grandsons. we have fun. i got into photography when i was in junior high and high school. shooting cameras. the black and white days, i was able to process my own film. i wasn't really that good because you know color film and processing was expensive and i kind of left it alone for about 30 years. i was doing product photography for advertising. and kind of got back into it. everybody said, oh, digital photography, the year 2000. it was a ghost town in chinatown. i figured it's time to shoot chinatown store front nobody. everybody on grand avenue.

there was not a soul out walking around chinatown. a new asia restaurant, it used to be the biggest restaurant in chinatown. it can hold about a 1,000 people and i had been shooting events there for many years. it turned into a supermarket. and i got in. i shot the supermarket. you know, and its transformation. even the owner of the restaurant the restaurant, it's 50 years old. i said, yeah. it looks awful. history. because i'm shooting history. and it's impressive because it's history because you can't repeat. it's gone it's gone. >> you stick with her, she'll

teach you everything. >> cellphone photography, that's going to be the generation. i think cellphones in the next two, three years, the big cameras are obsolete already. mirrorless camera is going to take over market and the cellphone is going to be better. but nobody's going to archive it. nobody's going to keep good history. everybody's going to take snapshots, but nobody's going to catalog. they don't care. >> i want to see you. >> it's not a keepsake. there's no memories behind it. everybody's sticking in the cloud. they lose it, who cares. but, you know, i care. >> last september of 2020, i

had a minor stroke, and my daughter caught it on zoom. i was having a zoom call for my grand kids. and my daughter and my these little kids said, hey, you sound strange. yeah. i said i'm not able to speak properly. they said what happened. my wife was taking a nap and my daughter, she called home and said he's having a stroke. get him to the hospital. five minutes later, you know, the ambulance came and took me away and i was at i.c.u. for four days. i have hundreds of messages wishing me get well soon. everybody wished that i'm okay

and back to normal. you know, i was up and kicking two weeks after my hospital stay. it was a wake-up call. i needed to get my life in order and try to organize things especially organize my photos. >> probably took two million photos in the last 20 years. i want to donate to an organization that's going to use it. i'm just doing it from the heart. i enjoy doing it to give back to the community. that's the most important. give back to the community. >> it's a lot for the community. >> i was a born hustler. i'm too busy to slow down. i love what i'm doing. i love to be busy. i go nuts when i'm not doing

anything. i'm 67 this year. i figured 70 i'm ready to retire. i'm wishing to train a couple for photographers to take over my place. the younger generation, they have a passion, to document the history because it's going to be forgotten in ten years, 20 years, maybe i will be forgotten when i'm gone in a couple years but i want to be remembered for my work and, you know, photographs will be a

remembrance. i'm frank jane. i'm a community photographer. this is my story. >> when you're not looking, frank's there. he'll snap that and then he'll send me an e-mail or two and they're always the best. >> these are all my p >> you're watching quick bite, the show that has san francisco. ♪♪ ♪♪

♪♪ >> we're here at one of the many food centric districts of san francisco, the 18th street corridor which locals have affectionately dubbed the castro. a cross between castro and gastronomic. the bakery, pizza, and dolores park cafe, there is no end in sight for the mouth watering food options here. adding to the culinary delights is the family of business he which includes skylight creamery, skylight and the 18 raisin. >> skylight market has been here since 1940. it's been in the family since 1964. his father and uncle bought the market and ran it through sam taking it over in 1998. at that point sam revamped the

market. he installed a kitchen in the center of the market and really made it a place where chefs look forward to come. he created community through food. so, we designed our community as having three parts we like to draw as a triangle where it's comprised of our producers that make the food, our staff, those who sell it, and our guests who come and buy and eat the food. and we really feel that we wouldn't exist if it weren't for all three of those components who really support each other. and that's kind of what we work towards every day. >> valley creamery was opened in 2006. the two pastry chefs who started it, chris hoover and walker who is sam's wife, supplied all the pastries and bakeries for the market. they found a space on the block

to do that and the ice cream kind of came as an afterthought. they realized the desire for ice cream and we now have lines around the corner. so, that's been a huge success. in 2008, sam started 18 reasons, which is our community and event space where we do five events a week all around the idea of bringling people closer to where the food comes from and closer to each other in that process. >> 18 reasons was started almost four years ago as an educational arm of their work. and we would have dinners and a few classes and we understood there what momentum that people wanted this type of engagement and education in a way that allowed for a more in-depth conversation. we grew and now we offer -- i think we had nine, we have a series where adults learned home cooking and we did a teacher training workshop where

san francisco unified public school teachers came and learned to use cooking for the core standards. we range all over the place. we really want everyone to feel like they can be included in the conversation. a lot of organizations i think which say we're going to teach cooking or we're going to teach gardening, or we're going to get in the policy side of the food from conversation. we say all of that is connected and we want to provide a place that feels really community oriented where you can be interested in multiple of those things or one of those things and have an entree point to meet people. we want to build community and we're using food as a means to that end. >> we have a wonderful organization to be involved with obviously coming from buy right where really everyone is treated very much like family. coming into 18 reasons which even more community focused is such a treat. we have these events in the evening and we really try and bring people together. people come in in groups, meet friends that they didn't even know they had before. our whole set up is focused on

communal table. you can sit across from someone and start a conversation. we're excited about that. >> i never worked in catering or food service before. it's been really fun learning about where things are coming from, where things are served from. >> it is getting really popular. she's a wonderful teacher and i think it is a perfect match for us. it is not about home cooking. it's really about how to facilitate your ease in the kitchen so you can just cook. >> i have always loved eating food. for me, i love that it brings me into contact with so many wonderful people. ultimately all of my work that i do intersects at the place where food and community is. classes or cooking dinner for someone or writing about food. it always come down to empowering people and giving them a wonderful experience. empower their want to be around

people and all the values and reasons the commitment, community and places, we're offering a whole spectrum of offerings and other really wide range of places to show that good food is not only for wealthy people and they are super committed to accessibility and to giving people a glimpse of the beauty that really is available to all of us that sometimes we forget in our day to day running around. >> we have such a philosophical mission around bringing people together around food. it's so natural for me to come here. >> we want them to walk away feeling like they have the tools to make change in their lives. whether that change is voting on an issue in a way that they will really confident about, or that change is how to understand why it is important to support our small farmers.

each class has a different purpose, but what we hope is that when people leave here they understand how to achieve that goal and feel that they have the resources necessary to do that. >> are you inspired? maybe you want to learn how to have a patch in your backyard or cook better with fresh ingredients . or grab a quick bite with organic goodies. find out more about 18 reasons by going to 18 reasons.org and learn about buy right market and creamery by going to buy right market.com. and don't forget to check out our blog for more info on many of our episodes at sf quick bites.com. until next time, may the fork be with you. ♪♪ ♪♪ >> so chocolaty. mm. ♪♪ >> oh, this is awesome.

oh, sorry. i thought we were done rolling. ♪♪ [music] >> san francisco is known as yerba buena, good herb after a mint that used to grow here. at this time there were 3 settlements one was mission delores. one the presidio and one was yerba buena which was urban center. there were 800 people in 1848 it was small. a lot of historic buildings were here including pony express headquarters. wells fargo.

hudson bay trading company and famous early settlers one of whom william leaderdorph who lived blocks from here a successful business person. african-american decent and the first million airin california. >> wilwoman was the founders of san francisco. here during the gold rush came in the early 1840s. he spent time stake himself as a merchant seaman and a business person. his father and brother in new orleans. we know him for san francisco's history. establishing himself here arnold 18 twoochl he did one of many things the first to do in yerba buena. was not california yet and was not fully san francisco yet. >> because he was an american citizen but spoke spanish he was

able to during the time when america was taking over california from mexico, there was annexations that happened and conflict emerging and war, of course. he was part of the peek deliberations and am bas doorship to create the state of california a vice council to mexico. mexico granted him citizenship. he loaned the government of san francisco money. to funds some of the war efforts to establish the city itself and the state, of course. he established the first hotel here the person people turned to often to receive dignitaries or hold large gatherings established the first public school here and helped start the public school system. he piloted the first steam ship on the bay. a big event for san francisco

and depict instead state seal the ship was the sitk a. there is a small 4 block long length of street, owned much of that runs essentially where the transamerica building is to it ends at california. i walk today before am a cute side street. at this point t is the center what was all his property. he was the person entrusted to be the city's first treasurer. that is i big deal of itself to have that legacy part of an african-american the city's first banker. he was not only a forefather of the establishment of san francisco and california as a state but a leader in industry. he had a direct hahn in so many things that we look at in san francisco. part of our dna. you know you don't hear his anymore in the context of those.

representation matters. you need to uplift this so people know him but people like him like me. like you. like anyone who looks like him to be, i can do this, too. to have the city's first banker and a street in the middle of financial district. that alone is powerful. [music]

>> good afternoon and welcome to the march 12, 2024 meeting of the san francisco board of supervisors. madam clerk, please call the roll. >> thank you mr. president. chan, present. dorsey, present. engardio, present. mandelman, not present. melgar, present. peskin, present. preston, present. ronan, not present. safai, present. stefani,