as accessible as a new building, but a smaller project actually has a smaller level of access required in the california building code. you might think that because you got a building permit that that means that everything is good and you are complying with the ada, but it is actually the difference in the building code because its is even if you have an existing building and have not done any improvements to that building, that you still have a continuing obligation to be going through your business and building and taking constructive steps to remove the barriers. the ada gives us some guidance on that.

readily achievable says it can be done quickly and easily without a whole lot of steps. feasible means that it may require a lot more money, a lot more alteration to get that done. under the ada, you need to be surveying your property and putting together both a short- term plan and a long-term plan. the short term plan is going to be the readily achievable solution. the long-term plan could take 20 years. i do not know. your business might not be making huge profits. you may need to be saving money for the long term. but it is your obligation to plan for the long term as well as the short term. the ada has a set of priorities that guide you on how you will be serving your property.

the ada says a certain party of getting in the front door, but you are logical, you want your customers to access your services. be that steps, be that ramps, if the door is not wide enough, if the landing is not level enough. priority two is actually travel. once you get into your business and start speculating the wits of your files. access to all of your services. [inaudible] rearranging furniture. that is something we would call readily achievable, if you move your table out of the way to allow a person with a wheelchair access to your space. restroom facilities only come into play after you have already

made the entrance accessible and you have trouble accessible. restaurants only have to be accessible if they are available to your customers and clients. and actually does not cover employee access to the restrooms. we have other priorities that come into play. [inaudible] you want that inspected to come out before you get a that letter. it is not only your obligation, but it is the right thing to do. you want to be disability accessible. you want more customers. the best way to do that is to start planning. when you are choosing, ideally,

your inspector would have a background in inspection, design, and construction. that means we have some excellent general contractors out there that could be excellent task inspectors or building inspectors as well. in order to get the legal benefits, the protections that are important, you want your inspection to be under that theory that is how you can get that 90-day [inaudible] as you start to interview your inspectors, i would ask them to a lot of questions. do not rely on just the resume. what you're really need to do is ask a series of probing questions.

you want to know what their area of expertise is, how many times -- you want to ask them if they have any references, and if you follow through on those references, you should call the people and have a heart to heart conversation. [inaudible] you also want to ask to see a copy of the tass report. some recommendations that i think are pretty basic. you want to make sure that the inspector is pulling a full building permits. it is being felt as how accessible it should have been in the past. it is the context.

you also want to make sure [inaudible] because we all are very visual people. you are going to be working on problems. you want to be able to see it. they should also be following the party's in the ada -- the priorities in the ada. your task report should also be giving you some constructive solutions. they should be tailoring it to your very specific circumstances. [inaudible]

also, you want to make sure that your task inspector has a relationship with an attorney. it could be beneficial to have that legal expertise readily at hand. the task inspector may have learned some useful information. it is also helpful if your task inspector knows the contractor because the contractor can provide you with a construction bid for what is going to take. so i want to leave you with some closing thoughts. one of them, as mentioned at the beginning -- be proactive. do not wait for the letter. get the inspection now. the second is keep really good records. [inaudible] they had actually been doing work over the years. they have been removing barriers. but because they were not

keeping good files documenting the reasons why they widened a door or replace the hardware or remodel the bathroom, tracking exactly how much money they spend, they do not get a whole lot of credit for the work they have done so far. but you also want to keep good records tissue products you will be taking on in the future. maybe you cannot remove that step this year or next year. maybe it will take you five years to get there. but you are providing yourself protection. >> good evening.

we have a loan fund for small business owners facing ada compliance issues. opportunity fund is a non-profit organization sponsored by [inaudible] to help small businesses that could not obtain a loan from their banks. we created a loan program for small businesses who are trying to become compliant. under this loan program, we can provide financing for small businesses up to $100,000. those are the small businesses who have been sued, and there are small businesses trying to preempt of a protect themselves against these issues. i will talk about the second rocket first. for the small businesses out

there that have been hearing about compliance issues and what to protect themselves and make the improvement and have inspections done, we are willing to work with you and willing to look at the plans that you have any inspections you have to enable you to have tenant improvement to become compliant. for those folks, we would recommend that you go and get a task report done and see whether the contractor can lay out the plan and complete the requirement and then come to us and show us your plan. [inaudible] and have had complaints against them because of compliance, we are also able to work with your

peer the fundamental requirement for those is that we need you to finish the lawsuit or settle the lawsuit before we can work with you in terms of providing financing. the reason for that is the conversations and these issues can go on for a long time, and we want to make sure that you fundamentally understand what you need to comply with and what are your obligations as part of the settlement of the lawsuit. obviously, it can cost a lot of money. we have provided financing before. it is a lot of money. so come and talk to the office of small business and make sure you have professionals and task inspectors and contractors lined

up so that we can be part of that conversation in terms of helping you maintain your business and helping to stay in business despite the fact that a lot of businesses are being regulated by now. if you have questions, my information is in the packet. we are more than happy to field any questions, but again, because there are different parts of this whole saga, we are all in different parts in terms of financing, but the loan program will be available. it will be available until the ada compliance issues are no longer there. >> thank you.

any questions? [inaudible] we do have legal expertise and individuals with our mayor's office of disability. if you do have any questions at all about things that you might have heard about or issues you are facing, it might be the opportunity to ask questions. any questions? >> thanks, supervisor. sorry for being late. i heard the gentleman say that the help for small business

maximum is $100,000. someone else mentioned a repayment plan. a sort of interest rate and so on and so on. business people show up here. a lot of restaurants and small businesses, and i am certain those members are very interested in this program. i myself have been faithful so long. that is why i am interested. hopefully i will be able to learn something and pass on to the people who need my assistance. if there's any way the supervisor would be able to generate a little more activity, maybe the location might not be perfect for the small orders to

attend, and hopefully, we have another similar occasion to notify all those people to attend. but thanks so much for being here. thank you. >> yes, so, the typical loan for small businesses, these compliance issues, the term depends on the loan amounts. the most we can do -- in terms of other qualifications, again, this is a loan program, loan fund. these are not grants. they are credits. we will look at the capacity to avoid loan payments and also the totality of the situation, taking into consideration whether there are legal fees or

remediation fees that need to be paid. but i will say that we want to be an alternative for folks that cannot obtain financing from a bank. this may be a combination of that. maybe they need to go to a bank and get something and we can fill the rest or if they get decline by a bank, we can come in and assist with financing. >> [inaudible] you can only do so much to get people here. that is why we are asking for help from not only our media partners, but those of you in the room. people do not often come to ask for assistance until they are hit with a lawsuit. until they receive a complaint letter or a threat of being sued, they do not take the issue very seriously. by that time, a lot of your

investments are gone. you will be exposed to lawyer's fees, exposed to having to make copier repairs immediately. these are all things that are very hard for small businesses to weather. what we are trying to promote today is the fact that you can protect yourself as a small business if you are private about it. it is a hard mentality to get people to think about, but that is what we're hoping people will accomplish. we know if you get inspections and that you really put together a plan, that over time, we might not be able to do it today, we might not be able to do it in one year, but if we can make changes over five years or 10 years, that really helps to improve accessibility issues. that is something that is really helpful going forward pierre the other issue that was mentioned is the fact that if you are a business that has received [inaudible] from a certified individual, you received a 90-day stint.

the things that would not be counted for peer you can help to remedy the problem and get help, so that your liability at the end of the day is a very small one, hopefully. we know we will be heard from from our experts on a legal side. a lot of them can really add up here this gentleman again had heard about a situation where someone had already racked up $40,000 with of legal fees. became an issue. we are not talking about what it costs to fix up which in itself would be excess of, but also the legal component. your word of mouth and the people you know will really help. and, of course, to our media folks, people will read your articles and understand that they can really do a lot to protect their businesses early on. >> i just want to add one comment about getting our

association involved. we put together a really great training. we have a panel available to you. it is only going to cost you $35 for a 30-minute conversation, and that might be the best $35 you have already spent to avoid something that will be happening in the future. that is just part of the collaborative process with supervisor chu's office, and i am very grateful to her. there is a panel of lawyers that have all attended training and know-how to represent businesses and give you some expert advice. >> when we were first looking at the issue and working with different systems, we realize that there was an issue with how you get loans to be able to make those improvements, how you get

expertise to help walk you through what you're supposed to respond to. one of the components we saw that was missing was that legal component. how do we find lawyers -- where can i find quick information -- it is not very typical that someone already automatically knows a lawyer who can help them, so they might not know who to reach out to. they really put together a huge effort to train their lawyers that they become experts in this topic. that is something that i think is really important. as julie manchin, there is a $35 consultation that is available -- as julie mentioned. >> any other questions? there are multiple languages available. vietnamese, tagalog, chinese.

just to let you can receive assistance from some very qualified individuals. >> any other questions? if not, thank you very much for coming. [applause]

when a resident of san francisco is looking for health care, you look in your neighborhood first. what is closest to you? if you come to a neighborhood health center or a clinic, you then have access it a system of care in the community health network. we are a system of care that was probably based on the family practice model, but it was really clear that there are special populations with special needs. the cole street clinic is a youth clinic in the heart of the haight ashbury and they target youth. tom woodell takes care of many of the central city residents and they have great expertise in providing services for many

of the homeless. potrero hill and southeast health centers are health centers in those particular communities that are family health centers, so they provide health care to patients across the age span. . >> many of our clients are working poor. they pay their taxes. they may run into a rough patch now and then and what we're able to provide is a bridge towards getting them back on their feet. the center averages about 14,000 visits a year in the health clinic alone. one of the areas that we specialize in is family medicine, but the additional focus of that is is to provide care to women and children. women find out they're pregnant, we talk to them about the importance of getting good prenatal care which takes many visits. we initially will see them for their full physical to determine their base line

health, and then enroll them in prenatal care which occurs over the next 9 months. group prenatal care is designed to give women the opportunity to bond during their pregnancy with other women that have similar due dates. our doctors here are family doctors. they are able to help these women deliver their babies at the hospital, at general hospital. we also have the wic program, which is a program that provides food vouchers for our families after they have their children, up to age 5 they are able to receive food vouchers to get milk and cereal for their children. >> it's for the city, not only our clinic, but the city. we have all our children in san francisco should have insurance now because if they are low income enough, they get medical. if they actually have a little more assets, a little more income, they can get happy family. we do have family who come

outside of our neighborhood to come on our clinic. one thing i learn from our clients, no matter how old they are, no matter how little english they know, they know how to get to chinatown, meaning they know how to get to our clinic. 85 percent of our staff is bilingual because we are serving many monolingual chinese patients. they can be child care providers so our clients can go out and work. >> we found more and more women of child bearing age come down with cancer and they have kids and the kids were having a horrible time and parents were having a horrible time. how do parents tell their kids they may not be here? what we do is provide a place and the material and support

and then they figure out their own truth, what it means to them. i see the behavior change in front of my eyes. maybe they have never been able to go out of boundaries, their lives have been so rigid to sort of expressing that makes tremendous changes. because we did what we did, it is now sort of a nationwide model. >> i think you would be surprised if you come to these clinics. many of them i think would be your neighbors if you knew that. often times we just don't discuss that. we treat husband and wife and they bring in their kids or we treat the grandparents and then the next generation. there are people who come in who need treatment for their heart disease or for their diabetes or their high blood pressure or their cholesterol or their hepatitis b. we actually provide group medical visits and group education classes and meeting

people who have similar chronic illnesses as you do really helps you understand that you are not alone in dealing with this. and it validates the experiences that you have and so you learn from each other. >> i think it's very important to try to be in tune with the needs of the community and a lot of our patients have -- a lot of our patients are actually immigrants who have a lot of competing priorities, family issues, child care issues, maybe not being able to find work or finding work and not being insured and health care sometimes isn't the top priority for them. we need to understand that so that we can help them take care of themselves physically and emotionally to deal with all these other things. they also have to be working through with people living longer and living with more chronic conditions i think we're going to see more patients coming through. >> starting next year, every

day 10,000 people will hit the age of 60 until 2020. . >> the needs of the patients that we see at kerr senior center often have to do with the consequences of long standing substance abuse and mental illness, linked to their chronic diseases. heart failure, hypertension, diabetes, cancer, stroke, those kinds of chronic illnesses. when you get them in your 30's and 40's and you have them into your aging process, you are not going to have a comfortable old age. you are also seeing in terms of epidemics, an increase in alzheimer's and it is going to increase as the population increases. there are quite a few seniors who have mental health problems but they are also, the majority

of seniors, who are hard-working, who had minimum wage jobs their whole lives, who paid social security. think about living on $889 a month in the city of san francisco needing to buy medication, one meal a day, hopefully, and health care. if we could provide health care early on we might prevent (inaudible) and people would be less likely to end up in the emergency room with a drastic outcome. we could actually provide prevention and health care to people who had no other way of getting health care, those without insurance, it might be more cost effecti