hello my name is quinn sanderson and i own video wave of knowing valley thirtysomething. video store that we've had for about seven years and. i am under lawsuit now so trees all up by the end of may i don't have any money to pay the people so did my best to comply and was approached by them january of two thousand and eleven for the first time and hit the ground running calling everybody talking to regina getting cast inspection going to workshops this incredibly complicated architects across the country don't agree on what the right solutions are for each space and no two experts that i talk to and it's quite a few agreed on what the solution should be for my space so i think this department is actually in the position to make the most dramatic change on this just by putting any kind of. regulatory regulatory structure in place at any stage of this anywhere in this issue because no volunteer effort in the past over the last ten

years has no volunteer effort that happened in two thousand and four for instance has helped any business that's gone in since then volunteer efforts aren't going to do anything because it has to be official so i see this. this department as being responsible for businesses mistakenly thinking they're compliant from past grandfathering and from approvals that have gone on that have not addressed specifically that those approvals aren't going to affect state and federal compliance and i think that. that it would be great if we if people could if the business could be officially notified that that that that is the case that approvals they've had in the past and ongoing from here on approvals that are going in that are specifically addressed as this is a city or county code and you may need to check into state or federal or be referred

to some resource on that level i think that would make a huge difference this city all the businesses adapt to the weird spaces in the city and so these people can just do this till kingdom come and the way it is now that these unlicensed uncertified people working for these litigants are going to reshape the city instead of the city being in charge of it that's what's going on and so when the businesses come to this department for approval on their stop because the city doesn't do that and so i think that's the best place is the parliament can look out for areas where there are these this is not going to be approved we are not going to level hills we're not going to you know the hardest the most difficult things let's draw a line there and say these things can't happen we aren't going to raise chinatown you know so put some. block you know some lines in place there in the places that

are easiest to do and then work with the businesses to provide a plan we can work with let us go figure out what needs to be in our spaces and bring it to you for approval like a permit issued process you know and. and then just let us go back and forth so we have something to look at and something to work around and some kind of plan in place that we can say hey we're working on it this thing is going to take like for instance i got a portable ramp i have tested to finish your comment you seem if you could close your comments ok. so anyway i'd be happy to talk to people afterwards but there has to be regulatory process around this and i asked the official. thank you for your comments. good morning commissioners' my name is michael levitt i'm an architect in san francisco and i actually came here to discuss item eight which is regarding.

section twelve zero five of the building code and i've got a prior commitment i respectfully request. being able to address a public comment to this issue if that's possible. would you like to accomplish this or it's entirely up to the commission but we'd have to go through some procedural steps to allow this to occur. the procedural steps that time consuming is that well you what you would do is you would. continue the current matter you'd call the next matter open it up for public comment continue that and then return to this one sorry michael but no because it would just be too much so. but we appreciate you coming down and taking the target thank you for the consideration i'll leave my comments with the most of the reason we can get them into the record ok great people like you thank you michel. next speaker

you understand ok i see none there. is there any further commissioner coming i believe we should have some commission of yeah go ahead i think that. some of this is really frustrating for everybody because i think that. as director de mentioned i mean our department is. responsible for building permits for renovation or new construction in. but we are also responsible for applying the code. in this situation i do think it to it's a matter of educating in and letting the public know proactively and i think that on this issue maybe we could work with the mayor's office on

disability and. we have an access appeals which which works within our department to put together a outreach program to the business community in conjunction with the with the small business commission. it is a problem that is sort of growing and affecting our business community and i think that it might be a good idea to really have an outreach program designed specifically around that maybe we could get mr bill strawman. the mayor of mayor's office on disability to really proactively put a outreach program together and. i think it would help just to have businesses know what's happening. a little bit more that's what i'm hearing from the public and. it's an important program making our business is accessible to everybody i think

all of us support that but if businesses don't know what that means it puts them in a unfair position of having to constantly respond to these kind of litigation so. maybe we could do that just a thought. so a commissioner. we're going to have an order here to talk to so i just want to thank the. business owners to come up i think this is a very difficult position. i still feel that. maybe we should discuss with other city departments what locally we could do even to lay out. a neighborhood assessment you know with like. you about how some of this. you know compliance would affect our public right away and you know some of the comments that were race previously like

you know we are not going to or not as far as i know race chinatown or. you know white. you know all the side hogs and the alleyways were some businesses are located so things like that just to you know what is you know can be done and what is the responsibility of the. businesses i think another issue that we have to deal with is the education stuff because we do do education even around tenants because we go into buildings and we educate tenants. who are you know who don't own the buildings and are not doing construction and have no plans to do construction we educate tenants on code violations in building so i think in one hurt if we coordinate with the city i don't think you know maybe the department can't financially take this on totally but i think it is incumbent

on the city to do more mass of education for small businesses and i think the other thing we should discuss with small business commission is i know a lot of times commissions go through existing bodies so we go through like the chamber of commerce or you know the older and more established business associations but unfortunately a lot of smaller bits. this especially a lot of ethnic business they don't belong to down associations they don't belong to the chamber so we have to you know maybe work with the city to improve our outreach there too so you know whatever we could do in that way i think just a part of it would like to do with other city departments commission only yes thank you besides outreach i think our department could also should or possibly act as a resource center or for people that need help i'm not saying that we provide the service but we could provide maybe

a list cast inspectors independent of the building inspection department and say look you can consult these professionals about your deeds and what you've made need to do or if someone needs a reference for other things maybe an interpretation of a da law to maybe we have some lawyers or some agencies that can help these are private businesses with those on those things that we can just refer them to those type of people for help. one other or another group of people that are one other group of. group let's say that i think we need to reach out to our property owners i don't know how many of the speakers today are own their own buildings but if you make any changes you're going to need the cooperation of the property owners as well and i think property owners are also liable to do a d.n.a. so i think our outreach if we're going to do it should extend to the property owners of these small businesses. so i have had

a couple questions i wanted this because had an interesting. point which was. at procter question for the city attorney for me which is does does the city have authority legally to overlay a regulatory infrastructure you know when there is a federal law and you know that is that possible and my other question is does the city have the authority to tell property owners what to put in their lease so could somebody on the board of supervisors sponsor something requiring property owners at the time of lease up to have the equivalent of an e.p.a. pamphlet but like any e.t.a. say you know these are the things you have to watch out for. the time element from the city journeys office they answer to your first question is no the city has no authority to. regulate or in really interpret

federal laws. your second question i don't know if i have a ready answer for you i have not. seen any laws where the city imposes requirements on landlords to include specific terms in their leases i know that we do have requirements that when property is actually sold that there are certain disclosures that are made as part of the sale but i'm not sure about a lease. and so i had another question for staff if i may which is you know we're not the only city with an old building stock in highly densely populated areas and thriving commercial so i'm wondering if we've done any research on what boston new york does l.a. how did they deal with this issue they all have the same problem of old

buildings narrow stairways steps lots of people coming in. right i don't know that we have done any research to that effect it's mostly. the building department is kind of based on on the california laws which are based on national laws every city has their own laws and that but they can't restrict federal laws because they can restrict federal laws more restrictive but they can't relax federal laws so i don't know that any city purge say would attempt to regulate federal law but we can check into it and see what what is happening in it wasn't about regulation per se but just more of a policy have they dealt with it. we'd have to check into

that. commissioners and. how about this if we do a little next steps or speak on this issue could we. officially asked the department to sit out. other cities. and ask them what do they do regarding this issue how do they handle it and maybe we can get an idea of what some of our sister cities are doing boston is a good example i don't know of any other new york i mean. and i'm going to take a few there and that's the kind of question i know other cities have are dealing with this right now. so what what i guess the question is how are they approached how are they what's their game plan and dealing with it but obviously the other thing is. you know we are a city you know what are billions here a lot of our buildings have been around here for a long long time you know and i think there has to be this moving of the goalpost

the educational aspect of it the realities of implementing this it was really serious about doing the right thing and all these need to businesses need to know and how we're we stand on the issues it's a big question and it's very difficult question but at least that next step commissioner said would be to kind of take position our start the dialogue to start taking positions and maybe generate some sort of answers where we all feel comfortable that if somebody genuinely makes the effort is that the end and i think what from dermot's point of view they don't ever really know if they're compliant and i think that's a very difficult thing and the other aspect of it which the commissioner brought up was you know if you don't have property owners cooperate with the businesses. it's probably very difficult leases might be open to three years it might take next month or dollars to do this you know it's a no win situation here for the business they might by investing all this money you

know are they going to have leases again and so on so it's very complex that i respect that so the idea for me to idea this morning was to talk about this that we don't have all the answers but i'd like it to stay on our radar and show the community that we understand the pain that you're going through trying to deal with these issues and open up the department to be more of if if you do need answers that you can contact us and we are doing our best to resolve that. we do have a technical services staff that is available you know from eight to five and do answer questions on this daily so we do have that of already available. and i really appreciated the issues the sort of the participation of the city attorney's office in this process and maybe maybe as a first step noticing when we're doing eighty a permit. really letting people know that there's more to the story in whatever way we can legally that they have to go you know. look to

a higher authority than us. because there is there is this belief as we permit activity building activity out there around access that as we're signing off on our requirements that they're fine and that's the part that is getting people into trouble i think so. it's interesting because it does put this federal versus state versus local i mean it's not it's somewhat similar to the the cannabis clubs that are being raided we're giving the the permit ing we're giving the authority for them to do it here and authorizing them and then the feds are coming in and busting them so it's sort of a i think that it would be great to have the city attorney be a little more proactive in at least educating the public as to what is happening so they're not surprised that businesses that think that they're operating legally or you know under under

a dorothy of licensing or permit ing all of a sudden aren't so it's a trying to educate about the different layers and making it clear to people what's what is very important and we may be able to do that as far as educating before we . even as we try and make the the laws more effective in working together we can certainly put together a notice similar to what the small business association has already put together that we worked on for the past year and to hand that out with every tenant improvement that we do do because we do checked for the california regulations on any tenant improvement that we plan check. sorry commissioner so yeah i would like to keep this issue on the radar but one even if we maybe we could do something even if we define it as within the narrow constructs of like

code for example if somebody wanted to put in a ram and rather than you know a permanent ramp is a possible to look at or get some advice maybe from a advisory committee about our temporary ramps could they be authorized this is this means cold you know this this is a strong enough ramp that if somebody comes in and if you fold out this ramp even though it's temporary. that is it meets the requirement things like that or the door is you know even though you have a wide enough doorway rather than one automatic door do two doors that you can open but that is still wide enough for someone to roll in does that meet the requirement you know things like that that would make it a little bit more cost effective for some smaller calmly asked question just you know scenario yeah those things with that suffice so things like that would be very

helpful i think we can have our our access specialist put together something like that definitely. ok and so so next step then would be just just as a matter of would this be kind of a code advisory issue to school in front of them are no no this would be something that we do in-house here this is in this would be an in-house process so we could put so we would have control over that flyer so we could get some in pushed to. from the from the community stakeholders who are interested in this issue being that. been resolved as best can be they could give us some input on that right we could probably do it through the public advisory committee the pac meetings ok all right. and just maybe let the people know ben here representing the business community know when that's going to be on the agenda right we can certainly do that

ok. all right well thank you for coming out this morning and we really appreciate your time obviously it's just a start to this conversation here but we are committed to try and you know bring as much resolution to this and trying to get that bit closer to to where these goalposts keeps moving you on this issue here as best as we can so thank you for coming up. next. we're going to item number eight discussion and possible action regarding our proposal to delete the exception to section twelve zero five point one of the san francisco building code requiring exterior glaze openings and natural light and capitol rooms welling's and congregate residences. if it's going to take public comment first on this. if you would like to yeah i think we could take public comment or is there somebody from the department going to. know you were the one that's on there on the agenda

so i think. we're going to call for public comment i don't number eight if it's ok with the commissioners then and then we can address the questions afterwards ok thank you for speaker please. commissioners or do staff want to give a background before we take public comment. i don't believe we have anybody here from staff to get the background so. is that correct director no i don't have anyone now i didn't know what you ok i put it on the agenda. for the record john o'connor our beer. section called the five point one was that it is san francisco building code in two thousand and ten commit effect in two thousand and eleven as it was adapted prior to that the california building code allowed for secondary light in an air in. bedrooms in if you want to go back and

and others some of the commission commissioners here it was part of the. the rezoning as in much of the city let's take a day rezoning for eastern neighborhoods the underpinning of those zoning for least in neighborhoods was unlimited density. for projects that are in full projects and can only fit only light from the front in the back of a building and they have a requirement for forty percent to bedrooms in some cases ten percent tree bedroom units. they need to borrow light from the room next door to prove to meet the code of the forty percent two bedrooms. this section of the code makes sense for cisco more restrictive than the state code because the two thousand and ten california building code does allow for light an air artificial light an air to be borrowed from the room next door. i believe there it will greatly

affect projects moving forward it's far as density goes and if we have an issue on the we have another agenda item afterwards which is the green building bit. you know for in to the high density housing we need the ability to be able to borrow life from the room next door to create bedrooms. and i would ask you to eliminate this from the san francisco building code and go back to the california building codes i don't believe that this was vetted true and you saw any public hearing when it was added it was that it would probably one hundred fifty other amendments back in two thousand and eleven and i don't believe there was any public comment on that that i know of maybe it probably did go to quote advisory. not most people were not aware of it so i would ask you to eliminate this from the san francisco building code and go back to california building codes. are kind of

just. somebody who was very involved in d.c. or hurt their neighborhood you were. when you when you found out about this this was from your from where your your position was that this was kind of counter counter to what you were trying to achieve down there is that right when this came to our attention it was a project that had been approved on the two thousand and seven california building code and went back for a pre-application meeting to change the two thousand and ten california building code. got approved a pre-application meet. submitted and went to pick up their permit and was not allowed to pick up the permit permit because the court had changed the section of the san francisco quota changed at that stage their project was ninety percent finished and. appealed to the board of examiners who repelled that project. and referred it back to say to the court advisory committee to eliminate it from san francisco building code and refer back and refer

back to the california building code so that was how it came to our attention at that time. you know you never had a conversation a stakeholders with about this no we were never aware of this being adapted in an amendment in the san francisco building codes ok thank you thank you tom what's next because. you know my name my name is john galt and i'm a project manager in the mid-market area and work with a couple ownership groups right there and this issue has come up because we'd like to the ownership group is like to invest it like to invest in a couple of the properties right there. and bring a residential used to a couple buildings and these are old buildings that have the exact problem that we're talking about with windows in the front and windows windows and back and this particular issue is cost prohibitive and a stone in

a basically it's what stone all these projects have been able to go forward on it so. that's what that's where i stand on this and if they if they were if this was deleted which is what i'm here here supporting today and these two projects to go forward i just want your issue bedrooms yeah exactly on into one you get that you can hear the issue is the issue is you know the with the light well requirements that come from this and i've talked to a couple structural engineers in regards to this and bringing the light down from for me to the roof or of course i'm not allowed to do the lot line windows because you know the buildings are right in the right there are close to each other and so essentially changing that in the building itself condemning it can you can handle the ventilation and we can do that we can do everything else that's required as far as fire and safety you know and important stuff except for the the natural light requirement ok thank you for coming and speak up please.

hi and i'm just kind of reiterating what he wanted to say but i work for the owners of a building it's about sixty thousand square feet mid-market we've been attempting to put the residential accessory use on the building for a while now and this is really the only standpoint the building is fire see sprinklered completely seismically upgraded and proper ventilation and everything it's just the natural light that really makes it not economically feasible for us to do it and i also have been talking to structural engineers for a while now and it just costs go up astronomically when you start adding in having to deal with these requirements of the naturally thank you. commission. i also am in support of the deletion of the section of the code.

for the design professionals in the industry it becomes a creativity issue when you have properties with limited frontage is were made up of twenty five foot fifty foot lot usually sandwiched in side by side light near becomes a valuable commodity and in order to achieve our goals of more housing and more family housing and if assist becomes and how do we create more bedrooms and this is always been in the code this is always been something that's been there and been practiced without this you have to rely more upon light wells will have size restrictions and complicated exiting and egress restrictions the most frustrating thing about this component is the process in which this change went about there was no notification to the industry no notification to those projects sponsors that had plans in the.