secretary avery: okay. the planning commission is back in session.

commissioners, we took item 8 out of order and we are going back to number seven, the public outreach and engagement improvement process. it is an informal presentation. force for >> good afternoon, commissioners. i'm claudia flores of commission stuff and i am joined by a member of our summer internship program to work on this public outreach engagement improvement process and has an expertise in public engagement and we are excited to be working with her. so today we want to talk about where we are the w the project. i am going to give a brief overview for the benefit of the public who may not know what's going on and what we found out through the interview and survey and the recommendations and high

level for a report of what goes into detail about the process will be and start to implement them and talk about the next steps and then open it up for xhes. so as far as overviews, so that this project came about through three main ways and you heard from my colleague earlier about another project and this planted the seed a little bit, too. and we saw through that process a need to look at communication and there was a communication working group. and that is very much about the outreach and the information we get to the public. and the other was we competed a lot of area plans and had a lot of public meetings and staff was wanting to take a step back and reflect on the process of public outreach and engagement and thirdly, we heard from community

organizations and commissioner olague to really look at how we do outreach and in particularly to low income communities and communities of color and going to certain meetings and why are they not participating and what's happening and we have paid special attention to that issue. and that was the origin. the elementser to goals of the project are three goal. the first one, we want to achieve more effective and broader engagement. we heard those from staff as well as the public that the local few tend to dominate the public process and how can we have more strategies and more effective ways to hear from more people and communicate to you. and to make others feel they can participate and not be intimidated by those that dominate the process. and the second is through the information we send out and the community processes we do, and how to let people know exactly what we do so they can feel this

that they are better informed and provide for streamlined comments and the third goal is to develop for collaborative and better working relationships with the public. we all want to have better working relationships and increase the trust both from staff and the community that they can actually participate. and so those are the three goals. and the project has three phases. we just are completing the assessment and that was the bulk of julie's time. and what are we doing and why are we doing it and what are the strooe strengths and weaknesses and also making recommendations from the assessment and that will be the report that will be available in the next week or two online and we will forward it to you. the second phase will be to actually start implement iing a creating guidelines that can be

adaptable and staff can used for each project and the public engagement process so we know when to do it and how to do it. and we start out with the institute for public engagement on board to develop the guidelines. the third phase will be to come up with a training program and start training for staff and a lot of desire for the mediation skills and in the summer we will have that first meeting and we are excited about that. and a quick word on definitions and it is important to have clarity on that. when we talk about outreach, a way to think about is information out. and how and when do we inform people about projects, events, changes, new code, and just information going one way and making contact with the commute

and engagement is how and when and what phases we involve the public and it will vary by project and whether it's a citywide project or a smaller project, but information out and actual participation. so i am going to turn it over to julie with some of the findings and these will be quick. >> very quickly before we jump into the recommendations, first, who did we talk to and who did we survey? with the survey, we did two surveys. one was community and we got a great response, about 230 respondents and we used all our contact lists as well as trying to get the word out in various ways hoping that people would forward it on and got a good rate of participation and

knowing that advance that the people online are the people responding the survey. 37% had heard about the department and what it does and maybe some of the projects and activities and 64% had also participated in any one of the department's activities or projects. and 16% had never heard of what the department does or participated and great that we got a little bit of those people to hear from. 70% were homeowners, 21% renters, 28% business owners, and 22% property owners to give a little overview of what answered the survey. we found that 98% live in san francisco and 67 work or study in pedestrian. we did community focus groups and we did a few in various communities with various populations and met with developers and merchants and community activists.

unfortunately, not with more than one, but with a couple of planning commissioners and historic preservation commissioners and we appreciate everyone's participation and that we got insight from people. on the staff side we also did a survey and got 99 respondents for the survey and so we break it down to the division of who responded and 31% from city wide from environmental. and the computing services oasis and the zoning, etc., that came up to 20%. and we also did two focus groups with staff from all divisions and got people together to talk about the issues and 14 individual interviews from across the divisions.

and the really great resources and so hold on. and very quickly i want to jump into an overview before jumping into the recommendations. as claudia mentioned t recommendation are a reflection of what we heard. that is where the bulk of the time will be but quickly we want to discuss the role of engagement. and we asked staff how to engage the public and that is the first column. and the yellow is the levels of public gaugement and start -- of public engagement and that is a big bulk of what the department does. you can see the spectrum of community engagement and from inform to consulting the public to empowering the public. and we find that current

practices really kind of go around and involve and collaborate and with not as much around the empowerment and less resource. and the next two are we asked the public and staff where do you feel public engagement should fall and just people's ideas on that and we found that with the staff and community, it's very similar. informing is more important and consulting or informing and collaborating is where the public should engage and not as much necessarily having the public lead or be in charge of implementing or leading or developing on their own. and various plans and projects. there is less of that. but there is a bit of an

increase on the latter engagement from the public response. we thought that was an interesting finding. a few things around outreach strategies. we asked the public a current strategy the department uses and how to prefer to be reached and found that number one was email. and this is an email survey, so keeping that in mind. another one on the list was presentations at their meeting. and meetings in the community whatever group they belong that, they like us to come to them and it was that personal touch and us coming to them and not them coming to us. and mailed notice was a current strategy that people like and like getting and however effective they are, it was up there on the list. we also found that the community

reported and why they haven't participated was number, one, they don't know about the meeting in advance. and another is how engaged is the public sand a meeting venue the only venue and what other venues are better at reaching people. a couple of interesting findings and these focus on additional strategist and people wasn't more online forums and ways to engage and interact online and be able to contribute or give public comment online or have a dialogue and in person meetings with a strong sendment towards smaller groups so whether that is a big break-out group to have a conversation or a smaller focus group that is in a more intimate setting with a specific population or at a meeting and a

standing meeting where you have more intimate setting and can delve into the issues and the desire for more survey and other ways to participate beyond public meetings as well. we did find that people appreciate and like public meetings and the format might be where we make changes. and public hearingsed a the sole way of getting involved, they really want that up front, early engagement as a supplement to the public hearing. and we also asked staff to tell us more about the existing resources around public outreach and involvement. and kwr quickly -- this is a lot of information, but you can see there is a good amount of staff time and we found a few areas people would like more support around web design and internet,

being able to maintain webpages, but beyond, that the staff that responded have been the resources got less and less quickly and the updated contact list, only 50% reported having updated contact lists and that is a big issue for the department. translation and interpretation guidelines and technology is also something lacking. and the last one, monitoring evaluation. and how are we doing that now and there's little of that going on and we are looking to start that. so very quickly we heard major challenges from all directions from community and public that were very insightful and have -- this goes way more in depth than what we are here, but number one was difficult to reach in certain populations. that is a given and something that is a challenge of how to do that. and that is exactly what this

addresses. and we al found from staff and community, the idea of not reaching that larger population and those involved are a vocal, small population and that dominates public process and how to broaden participation beyond still the voices are obviously still important, but how to hear from a propertier verdict. and the lack of updated mailing lists and lack of guidelines and organizational resources and lack of understanding from the public of how their input is used in the process. and that is a big question as well. very quickly, measuring success, we asked a number of questions around that. so for example, the perceptions of the department's perspective and the first col frum the staff survey and how effective the staff is in informing and engaging the public and the

second column is what the public thinks about the department's perspective and what the community thinks is the third one. and at least it is not all now effective, but shows there is room for improvement, but we are not doing horribly. also very quickly we asked the question around people that have been involved with the department and people's ability to understand a project after going to the meeting and most people were able to, which is great. from there the statistics go down and that they believe that the department follows through on involving the public is really important pieces of information that through the survey we really got more detail on through the spo responses.

back to the recommendations. did you want to quickly go over? >> we will jump into general recommendations and basically these are overarching and the report will break down each of the categories into more detailed recommendations to prioritize and start to say what is the low-hanging fruit and who should be priority. we will just jump right into them. >> under each of the bullets is five concrete things that needs to be done, but number one across the board from the department and the community was the need to update our contact databases and that is in a very urgent concern and to centralizing the contact information and thinking about the email database and branching into email notification and online ways of noticing as well.