fund, we cannot loan those monies out from the enterprise fund. the mayor's office is looking for other funding sources, maybe through the assessor's office or something to tax credit on the bill or something. >> bank you. is that specifically where our funding is to be spent within the department? -- thank you. >> yes, that is the first priority to spend it within the department. for your information since last month we have only gathered $80,000. we are actually supplementing our disaster coordination unit with d.bi.i. funds. construction is picking up, and we do not know what the next six months will bring.

so we're not getting it again. >> the quarter of a million for training, and that seems low. now that we have a new code. is that sufficient, 245,000? it seems very low to me. >> the travel and training budget is 324,000. basically what we did was we had everyone request all of the things they felt they needed. the issue on training really is being able to have a whether you have it on site or on site is making sure you have available time to be able to have the

people go to that. to the extent that this is low, i think everyone would like to be able to send more people to training, but the realities of being able to free people up from the current job to do that makes it such that we have to look carefully at what people want. i am sure the director has -- >> we have a proposal on my desk right now to train 40 people in the caps program for actually being the inspectors we need. that is coming out of this year's budget. this might seem low, but we still have money in this year's budget to do more training. so what this is is split up between two years of training

come and hopefully it will be sufficient to train everyone in what we want. it is not everything that everyone wanted, but it is close to being realistic. the>> the current year we had of plumbing trainer brought in. in terms of electrical, we got together with puc and did other departments involved, and they brought someone in to do training, and we took some of those training slots. what we're trying to do is look at bringing people here and making sure it is targeted to what exactly we need to know. you are right, it is -- there is an incremental difference. it is usually a more cost- effective to have them come in house. >> the a good thing is we're

talking about bringing q-matics back on. are the employees trained sufficiently to bring that back on? >> that is what we wanted to take a month to go back and retrain people. go back and retrain them and make sure that when we come around to march 5 that they are ready to go. so we do know that having a delay does put the skills behind the back of your head rather than in front. what we're trying to do is make sure they are ready. >> it sounds like the funds are there to implement the program, but are they there for the training? >> yes. the training comes from within. the people that have worked with the vendor for a couple of years

have developed a training program and do it ourselves. if there is any questions, of course we can bring in the vendor -- have they dopresident hechanova have they done anything regarding the stakeholders that come in and speak a different language like chinese, spanish? i see a lot of possible confusion. and have the address that at all? -- have they addressed that at all? >> we have people that speak burial -- various types of language that it bilingual pay. we have people available for bvarious languages.

as much as possible. we will look at, and make sure there is siphonage and stuff and other languages. w-- signage and stuff in other languages. president hechanova: good luck with that. that was originally designed to work on one floor. now we're talking about four or five floores. >> we're only doing it on the fifth floor and sixth floor. president hechanova: another question regarding -- i would like the public to understand. the city grants program is that

1.7 million. can you give us insight on where that goes? >> sure. i have a slide that i wanted to show that gave the distribution of the funding. give you a background on how we got to where we are. we could put out an r.s.p. at the end of the fiscal year, and because all of the contracts were up on did your first. in that we equalize of the services between entities, so that means the unit of service and what would be done would be equalized so people came back

and requested more money to do this service. president hechanova: what i am really getting at is who are these people and services? >> if you could put that up. i know it is hard to see. for the code enforcement are reach programs, we have just cause. chinatown cdc, tenderloin. san francisco department association and housing rights. that comes to form grid $16,000. and--- that comes to $416,000. dolares street is mission neighborhood center.

in they do the same thing as all the other collaborative, which is work in the s.r.o's that are there to try to work with the issues that affect us. so it is housing issues. >> they also, if i may, they have major our reach to the swedish-speaking communities where i think most of our our reach is really trying to take organizations that are ready to are reached in these communities that are not english-speaking. >> i understand that, but i was asking so the public would know where the money is going. she is doing a good job of explaining coverage as give her time purit, just give her some .

>> when we put the r.f.p. out what was required is you could provide the service, that you were able to link up with the community in that competent way, which means in the same language, understanding the various aspects of the group of people you were working in, that they would meet the units of service that they had to provide. that they're predominantly lived in the community and understood what was in the area. the languages that we have was spanish, cantonese, vietnamese -- what was the other? korean. so we put out a specific -- there is some russian.

so we put that out and said can you provide the services and meet the criteria? the people that came back, the areas that came back were dolores and chinatown families. that totaled 1.7 million. the reason that is in the design item is because the comptroller's office and the mayor's office to a cross- department look at these types of funding to the community. so it stands out like that, but that is what it is. >> who approves these contracts? >> the city attorney approves it and the mayor's office. the three signatures are the

dbi, contractor, executive director, whoever can obligate the department -- their entity in the city attorney's office. >> is there any role the commission can play in that in reviewing the contracts? >> no. maybe in the future? this might help solve the problem of educating the commission on what they do. >> this would be one of the administrative functions of the department where the commission does not have any sort of direct control under the charter. and you do through the budgeting process and through -- you can hold hearings and asked the staff about the status of things, but this is

administrative day-to-day decision making of the department. and the scope of service tht was established in rfp has been tightened up from what it was before. we have worked very closely to make sure on the programmatic side that it matched criteria that was being looked at. we cannot ask of the actual entities to do more work than the scope of work states. scope of work -- we said we would work with seniors, low income, and families coming and if an entity volunteers, we cannot provide more money or change the scope of service without an amendment to the contracts.

and the programmatic issues are looked at by the housing area, and they do audits and questionnaires and talk to the communities so that we make sure what is being said is being provided is actually being provided. an>> is there a reporting mechanism that shows the level of success rate based on what they proposed they were going to do, and is that on part of the rfp? >> in the rfp required there be a reporting mechanism that would say how they met the levels of service. that can be evaluated in numbers and quality of provision

of service. in i note there is an annual report. i believe there are quarterly reports. plus, i know at that most of the areas are visited at least once a month and there are meetings where everyone gets together and they talk about what they are doing. there is a lot of -- we have instituted over the past couple of years after we were requested to do so from the comptroller's office audits. we did institute more formal review and recording mechanisms. and >>commissioner mar: whurphyy do we have to go through this staff and so much time?

>> i do not need to answer for the department, but i know this program has been one of the celebrated programs by the rest of the city, because it works directly with the folks in our department that are responsible for code enforcement and acts to communicate with both the tenet community and the landlord community, so both are involved in helping us resolve issues and previously issues that were not resolved. it has been really successful that way. i really appreciate that we have added some accountability measures, which i appreciate the support for. and i know there are more in this rfp and there werthan ther. i was at a meeting of the board

of supervisors were the talk about our failures. all of us are concerned about why that is happening. those things we are not doing well on, i think this is one of those programs that can help us do better. i appreciate the focus and accountability and look to our partners to help as to better. >> commissioners? i have a question. >> have one question and a follow-up. and did i read it correctly we're adding six new inspectors to the inspection services? >> two to the building, to do we go to an electrical and two to plumbing?

>> yes. we're having an electrical and plumbing move up to the fifth floor so the review can be done there. we are more consistent with what is required by the code in state law, and then we are putting more people in the community and the various districts because we're seeing more activity, and we want to make sure we do not have a backlog. seniors are going out. there is a lot of activity. and we were just commenting about the number of people that come to the third floor as soon as they can get into the building at 8:00. we're seeing quite an uptick. plus, we know there are a lot of

high rise. high-rise inspections take time. you want to make sure you are not cutting the homeowner on sunset off verses the high-rise. >> ok. the reason why i asked that is if we're adding six inspectors, and i posed this question last time above the department services, if we are adding six inspections -- your answer is we are adding two new engineers and another. that mentions the three permanent people. does that seem like an in balancinbalance? it seems like maybe there should be more people and permit service as well. everything starts with a permit

services and the floor. -- and the fifth floor. >> by the time we end next year we will have 34 people up on the fifth floor. i appreciate, and i agree with you, thing starts on permit services and end with your t.c.o. or whatever, but one way to an allocation on disturbing more staff, first we based it on what the requests are by the various divisions who know their need for people, and it is not an even distribution that certain places did it. we are actually putting more on the fifth floor in terms of positions than was originally

requested by the division. and so we are trying to beef up, because so many things are coming over. we look at the statistics, and 93 percent signed of our permission's came through over the counter. -- of our permits came over through the counter. we're trying to make sure we have the right people who can do the right inspection. we have plumbing and electrical there who could do the inspections, meet the code, and instead of having them go somewhere else. >> that is still a little confusing to me. i am still not understanding how that may work. >> i am not even talking about plumbing and electrical, but if we are adding six to the inspections, you would think we would be adding at least equal

to services? if you look at the numbers now, there is a lot more inspectors than planned reviewers. two of the building inspectors are the ones we're adding, to would be on the fifth floor. permit services have a mix of people on the fifth floor. so we're actually putting more building inspectors on the fifth floor. we're putting engineers into the second floor and adding those. i think if you look at, and i cannot find it, but if you look at the distribution of the position of being added, more being added for use on the floor.

>> is there physical space for these additional bodies? >> so you were thinking the building inspector is being added or going out, but it sounds like they're also being added to the plan check process? to go right. and-- >> right. >> they do not cover just the fifth floor. i look at the numbers come and you would figure if a program application comes in, it will come to permit services first, and once they approve it, then it goes to inspections. i do not understand why we're adding more inspectors, and not enough of the front end. does that mean things will get clogged up at the front end? >> there is a considerable

number of new inspectors that are not in the field. they will be in permit services. and they have inspectors in the mix. some of which are on the fifth floor and some of which are on the second floor. we also have technical services. and i think the issue is maybe we think of inspectors as inspection services, and also that they work and permit services. >> at is the case and are telling me some of the inspectors and the inspection services area is working in plan check, could we identify how many so we get comfortable with how many are working plan check? >> well i can tell you -- i only

did the fifth floor. >> we gave you an organizational chart showing where the new positions were going. the reason being, what is happening in engineering right now, we have a lot of vacancies the need to fill, and we're filling them this year, and it will balance out. by the end of the fiscal year, we are allowed to replace positions that we about to replace. it will balance out, because most of the engineers, the projects that are coming into the fifth floor, some of them do not require that the engineer to be on the fifth floor. so there is a very mixed on the fifth floor, which right now there are more inspectors and engineers, but, who oversees the fifth floor, brings engineers into the over-the-counter process as needed, but most of

the engineers to the plan check on the second-floor. >> i understand that. but then we're pulling people from the second floor to the fifth floor, which means something is not getting done on the second floor. >> i understand commissioner lee's concern. fifth floor is the shining star for dbi. it has been incredibly successful since it was implemented that is what just minimal staff. they have been understaffed all the time. every indicator that i see, especially in san francisco, is construction is going to increase the level, which means the floor will have to deal with twice the amount of stakeholders.

so also what frank is worried about is the money is not in the budget. can we come back six months from now and say we need 10 more people on the fifth floor, and will we get them? four or if there is a different regime running the department -- or if there is a different regime running the department, will they say you approved of this? we do not want that to happen. >> we're looking at the inspection services in terms of new positions, 6.37. and permit services -- services we added 6.5. there are roughly even going to each of those divisions. i focused on the fifth floor because i thought that was the concern based on last time. there is an opportunity to do that during the fiscal year. and what you do is to a

supplemental. what we have to do is get the mayor's office concurrence by saying if we have additional revenues that will continue to come in, we can request positions, and there is probably a favorable view on the board of supervisors based on the fact that we would be not necessarily conservative, but we were being cautious and adding positions now, and we would want to go forward and add additional positions. that is always available. it is not easy, but it can be done. if we can get the concurrence of the mayor's office, it goes through quickly.

commissioner murphy: i like the word being cautious. i think we've been really cautious on the fifth floor. i've been talking about understaffed on the fifth floor. they said they get permits through over there. this is the time we should be talking about it, and we are talking about it. you guys have put this in the budget? if people. until someone starts telling me they have a turnaround of 30 minutes when i go up to cash my check, you are not going to hear me talking about it anymore, right now we're still hearing that. and is now the time to deal with it, not six months from now? we've been asking for cashier's for two years and have never been able to get them. plan checkers