department provide clear and concise data? and finally, qualitative -- did the department services, as described in a report, actually meet the lao mandate? in reviewing the reports, we have found many gaps in consistency. protocols for the emergency and crisis specific to lep clients are very few. data tracking is all over the map. making it very difficult to ascertain the true need for services. in particular, department's report having lots of challenges regarding supervise oriole -- supervisorial data. most apartments lack clear quality issuance and protocols when it comes to bilingual staff training. although there are clear gaps, the majority of departments rate

themselves as meeting the lao requirements. finally, here's an example of how our tier 1 departments shape up. the top three departments -- elections come and human services agency, and department of public health -- ranked very high with our compliance criteria. the most improved departments have shown clear efforts and are on the right track. the department's in the "in development" colorado -- colorado -- column are meeting some requirements but need assistance. we had specific concerns with signeage around city hall. oewd says they did not provide services to the public, but we know they are providing services, so it may just be a

matter of their own reporting. finally, the compliance plan is mostly in progress, and they are also working with our office to meet the lao requirements and make improvements. so, supervisors, our recommendations are really centered around three major areas -- amendments to the lao. i would call these tweaks and clarifications. and compliance guidelines and centralized balance. the types of amendments we are talking about removing at the time line so that the period in which my office has to analyze data, chase down apartments, make sure everything is accurate and timely and helpful is not so compacted. we have really less than two months to collect data on all 26 departments, but relevant information in the report. there are some ambiguities in the law that we can easily

clara. guidances'. the department of justice is doing this for federal agencies, and i think that is one thing our office is planning to implement before september. that would be more specific guidelines and definitions so that there is whil a common understanding of the law so we can increase consistency in which departments report their data and comply with the law. finally, our recommendation of the centralizing resources and maximizing existing assets. we are talking about existing bilingual resources. we have a large number. 40% of the budget that is dedicated to the wind which services from city-wide goes to paying bilingual employees, yet, when there was a fire in chinatown for an emergency,

president chiu had to use his own staff to the interpretation, and city emergency services were unable to find qualified bilingual staff to do interpretation, and my staff went out there as well. we could really maximize the resources that we are already paying for in the city, the community, business is. we are looking at relationships with colleges that teach language training. there is a lot we can do there. also, cross training and city- wide standards, so we do not have 26 departments doing it their way. eliminate the burger king approach to implementing a law. also, some contributions to centralized funding that you might want to consider. we are not talking about more funding because nobody has any money. but i think just a tiny redistribution of resources so that you can sustain these services. and again, centralized language

services, which i will get into in a little more detail in a minute. i highly recommend a community needs assessment and increase participation, getting the community's voice here so we really hear what our residents need directly from them. this is just a snapshot of what we provide today from our small language services unit, which is headed by isis. we provide translation interpretation services primarily for emergency situations, and that is 24/7. in addition, as that provided services for the recent budget town halls and all of the redistricting meetings. it is hard to sit through that and interpret a lot of complex information with a very small staff. the picture you see there of two individuals is exactly half of the team.

we also provide technical assistance and city-wide training. we make the training mandatory. i think san francisco is the only jurisdiction that makes training language access mandatory. we often manage the city-wide telephonic language services contract currently held by language line. we provide templates and tools. we access a clearing house for the creative things that other departments to around language access, and we provide direct services to our residents. they walk in all the time. we have the laborers, undocumented individuals, seniors who are in crisis who walk into our office, so we provide resident assistants. just to summarize, we have the capability in our office to do a lot more for apartments, but we lack the band with -- bandwidth.

i hope you will consider it some solutions to that as your feedback from those departments. supervisor chiu: i want to thank you and say that i'm happy to consider additional amendments to the ordinance. maybe over the next few weeks, we can talk about what that could be. i would like to invite up someone who represents an organization that has been on the forefront of leading on these efforts. vincent, you and your staff have been great. i know you have a presentation about some of the observations you have made in the last couple of years since the ordinance passage. >> thank you, supervisor. first, let me start by wishing you a happy asian-pacific islander heritage month. i think it is a good time to tapis something of particular ad unique importance to the asian american and pacific islander community.

we have worked on language access issue " for over four decades, going back to the loud versus nichols supreme court case. we wanted to focus our remarks on some beans and some reactions for the supervisors to consider, as you hear from the various departments. first off, to give a little bit of a sense of what the human impact is for san francisco residents, this is something we know very well because, to be honest, like many community- based organizations, we receive the phone calls. we receive the visits. we receive the requests for assistance when people are not able to communicate with their government, so i want to ask our policy advocate to share a small sampling of some of the incidents that are reported to us, and we have removed the names from this presentation for confidentiality purposes.

>> i am the policy advocate at caa. i think most of this from our english speakers, it is easy for us to take for granted the ease with which we are able to move about the city, to ask for services, and to live our lives. we know our clients suffer from a lack of language access to city services on a daily basis. these are some of the most compelling stories we have heard in our office. we have one client told us about her experience at san francisco general hospital. she rushed to the emergency room with sharp abdominal pain. she is an elderly chinese woman and his limited english proficient. 45 hours she was a san francisco general hospital, she never once received language support. she was unable to communicate christendom's and could not tell them how severe hurricane was, and they administered treatment without her being able to ask questions about what treatment she was receiving here five hours later, she was discharged and had a detailed information about what had caused her pain

or what she should do next. in another hospital incident hospitalcaa -- in another incident, caa assisted a family with a 13-year-old son with a brain tumor. while he was recovering, he and his family would have eight to 10 hour periods with no language support. after multiple days, he resorted to drawing pictures for the nurses. he drew pictures to indicate that he was in pain, that he was hungry, that he was nauseated. his family was frustrating, and they never had consistent language support. we also have a number of clients who have had trouble with city employment services. some of our clients have tried to seek city services to get help applying for jobs, to write resumes, or to receive training. when they went to the closest neighborhood city agency, they were handed in take forms that were only in english, and no one on staff could speak chinese. they were so frustrated, they vowed never to seek help from the city again.

another employment we have is facing the decline we have is another single father in chinatown. -- another client we have is a single father in chinatown. the office could only speak to him in cantonese, and they only tried to speak to him in cantonese. no one in the office could follow-up in mandarin. he told us he waited months for someone from the city office to call him back in mandarin. he was unemployed for almost a year and unable to support his young son. these last stories i want to share are probably the most severe. one of our parent leaders told us about something she witnessed in the chinese restaurant. a waiter had accidentally spilled hot oil on a young boy's arm, and the parents quickly called 911. no one in the restaurant could speak english, and the boys family had to wait and unreasonable 20 minutes for a dispatcher to on the line, and this delayed the ambulance, and the parents had to watch as their son's arm was burning up.

our last line is it 50-year-old client of visitation valley. he was robbed and assaulted and tried chasing after the suspect, and he actually encountered a police officer, but he was unable to communicate with the officer to tell him what happened or let him know what direction the suspect was running. the suspect got away on foot, and the officer provided no language support at all. the victim sustained permanent nerve damage to his face due to the assault and has suffered facial this figuration that made it difficult for him to find a job. those are some of the stories. >> supervisors, an additional thing to keep in mind is that this issue is not just for some san francisco residents. 14% of the city lives in what are called linguistically isolated households. households where there is no one over the age of 14 who speaks english well. 44%, nearly half of the city's

residents, speak a language other than english at home, so it is a mistake to think about this as a special needs or special circumstance. this is the city. even for those who are fluent in english, i encourage you to think about this challenge in a different way -- at some basic level, we know that our schools, something i have heard all our supervisors talk about -- that our schools work best if we have involve parents and good teachers, but when half of the parents are unable to communicate with the schools, is it reasonable to expect them to be able to be involved? on issues of public safety, if your house is being broken into, would you what your neighbor to be able to communicate with police so that officers could come? so much of san francisco is driven by small businesses, and many of these are led by individuals who are english- language learners or limited english proficient. their ability to access the city permitting process and to receive technical assistance

would be improved if they had the language assistance, and that would be good for our city goes the economy as a whole. one last thing that i want to say on the importance of embracing language diversity is the city as the tourism industry. we know tourism is a fundamental part of san francisco's economy. yet, if you go to san francisco airports or many of the tourist destinations, if you look at many of our venues and vehicles for getting votes to tourist destinations, very few of them offer information in multiple languages. i think that is a big challenge for the city as it seeks to compete with alternate destinations. last, even as the city is launching public/private partnerships overseas in countries like china, we could do so much better by having a city that embraces language diversity to attract these businesses. the recommendations that the office of civic the basement and

immigrant affairs have but four are good. clean up amendments, compliance guidelines, and the centralization of some resources, but i think there is a fourth recommendation that i would urge you to consider. we know from our experience with government in general that very rarely can government do this work alone. we can have many carrots. we can have many sticks, but at the end of the day, the opportunities to find ways to engage community in addressing these problems. i think community engagement and community partnership with many of the organizations that have been doing this work through the direct services, through their advocacy, through their organizing is perhaps the most untapped resource that we have. if we are to do this, i think we could provide both more independent monitoring, stronger technical assistance, very specific focus efforts on very specific needs. for example, in the russian-

speaking community, and the tagalog speaking community. they are growing but maybe have not received the attention of language groups such as spanish and chinese. it would improve have -- how we think about language our reach. if we look at the success in a recent census -- san francisco was the only county in california his senses participation rate went up from 10 years ago, and in large part because we deployed multi- lingual community members to be able to encourage all community members, regardless of language ability, to participate in the senses, and that got more resources to the city and county. lastly, an approach that engages the community, i think we have both a citywide and also department-specific experiment. ways to innovate, to see what could be done at each differ department and across the city that could be scaled up. giving departments and having

the city overall lean into this issue -- in part because of the compliance issues and in part because of the rest, but also as a challenge to experiment, to be created, and to fully make sure that a government by the people, for the people, of the people really is communicating with its people. thank you very much. supervisor chiu: i want to thank you both. just a couple comments on what you said. first of all, we definitely appreciate your point about the need to engage the community better. as i look out on the audience today, i see a room that i think is much more diverse than what we often see here in city hall, and i want to thank and welcome all of you here and hope we are able to engage our more diverse communities more frequently. i also see that we have translators in the room, which is also somewhat rare here at city hall. under this ordinance, we are required to provide translation, and all of our open meetings should have them, but oftentimes, folks do not know that or do not avail themselves of that.

i think all of us certainly heard your horrifying stories you laid out, which i, frankly, had not heard before, and i want to ask the departments that can to present it occurred, if there were specific incidences that you read that may have involved your department, it could give us insight as to whether these were incidences' you knew about or if you did not know about it, i hope that you are able to investigate that. one other thing i want to notice that the language access ordinance was designed through its scheduled to really provide the board of supervisors with information during the budget process, and, as i have discussed with my budget committee colleagues, language access and our budget is going to be one thing we will be asking our departments to brief us on when you come in front of us during the annual budget process. i would like to ask you to think about that because i do think we have to find more efficiencies in how we provide these services, but we also may need to think about how we expand the

services. with that, again, thank you for your presentation. we have a number of departments with us today, and i know we have a lot of people in the room, so i would like to ask departments to make your presentations as we move forward. is jennifer here from oewd, or did she have to leave? ok, what we move to -- i'm not sure if i see tonya peterson from the san francisco zoo. ms. peterson. >> thank you, president. san francisco zoological society, the nonprofit that manages the san francisco zoo. we are pleased to comment and report on the language access ordinance. i will comment briefly on the zoo's emergency language assets, and as vice president of education, mr. fitting will, on

the broader efforts of the zoo to make it more accessible. due to our nonprofits that is, our plan has been in process and somewhat behind the other city agencies. with respect to emergencies, the society has installed an emergency public announcement system. in an emergency, an alarm sounds, and an announcement made in three languages. it informs the public there is an emergency, they should move to the closest building and wait for instructions from the emergency and zoo personnel. those announcements are made in english, spanish, and chinese. we have signs throughout the zoo in foreign visitors to call a hotline if they see any misconduct at an exhibit or anywhere else in the suit. the suns also are in three languages. lastly, in hiring an outside security firm, which shows a firm that highlighted its diversity and multiple language training. with that, i turned to mr. fitting for some of our broader efforts.

>> thank you. my interest, of course, is to make the san francisco zoo accessible to as many people as possible and connect with -- and our mission is to connect into the wild places, wild things. one of the ways we are doing that is through signage, and as we bring new suns forward, we are in bed in multiple languages in them. here's an example -- this is a new water charging station to encourage people to get away from plastic water bottles. we have partnered with the sec francisco water department and said francisco department of the environment. they brought this project to the zoo, and we now have a new sign in multiple languages saying why it is important to try to get away from the single use water bottle and recharge your permanent water bottle. here it is. i hope you will take advantage of it. we also employed multi language

people. we tried to encourage people to volunteer at the zoo and help us with the diverse community when they do come here and want to learn about the wild places, that we have the ability to communicate in as many languages as we possibly can. i also want to top about our community. we do have community events. i have our most recent one was pacific islander heritage day, and featuring that diverse community, and we had a special day for them to come to the san francisco zoo. we also do a newly a lunar new year for our asian communities to come and celebrate that really special time of year. we also have a latino heritage day at the san francisco zoo. we bring out lots of cultural community action and activities

to these particular days to really engage this, again, a diverse community. those are just some of the things that we are doing to help engage our diverse communities. >> with that, we conclude our report and look forward to any questions. >> i know in the initial report, you said you were in the process of providing and creating protocols and you had emergency protocols, but there were not specifics. is it safe to assume that these are all things you have been working on more recently since you provided that report? >> yes, and the agency, with limited resources and sort of being out of touch with city departments, we have had to rely on coordination with other departments. in hiring, we have had a lot of hiring freezes and layoffs the last few years. hiring these personnel with expertise has been somewhat

financially difficult, but i am pleased to say we are finishing our fiscal year with a surplus, so i think we will be in a better place to hire more of these individuals. >> what fraction of your staffers are bilingual? >> 75% of the security force is bilingual. primarily spanish and chinese, and we are looking at other languages as well. >> obviously, the zoo is an incredibly important station to our city, and i know kids of all backgrounds and parents and individuals of all backgrounds want to enjoy the resources you have, so i appreciate your efforts and look forward to continued progress. i want to ask of rob from city building management. >> thank you.

we have a few challenges at city hall in terms of providing a lot of the signing, mainly because of the historic nature of the building. one of the ways we're looking to address it and lacking a clear path way otherwise looking into sort of a touch that translation system we can put at the kiosk in city hall. rowan has been mocking something up, and you may have been provided with some materials that describe what he is trying to do with that. it is easier to try to turn the microphone over to him, our media services manager. >> thank you, supervisors. one of the challenges obviously is to try to meet the entire language of the ordinance, and to be able to translate into multiple languages. in the efforts to try to do that completely, we have looked into some technological options, and i just want to walk you through where we are in the planning

stages. what we have come up with is something that we have not seen anywhere else in looking around at digital signage around the country and around the world. in order to move forward, there are obviously other steps we have to do, including programming. i want to run you through it because it is something that might be able to work in many other locations as well. essentially, at city hall, we have some issues because of the landmark status of the building, a running conflict, and other uses in the building and he is very difficult. so what we are proposing and what we have come up with is to use touch panel computers at the entrances to city hall, and there would be a panel of eight or 10 individual computers, attached channels, and people could then walk up to one. each one would have the flag of the respective countries on it, so if you look at the overhead,

someone would be able to walk up, and if they are free and, they would see the korean flag, would be able to touch that, activate the panel, and there would be links to pre-translated static information such as building directories and other information about departments, and those would be provided in advance. they would be translated, and go as deep as the departments want to fund that transition. again, that is for static information. the difficulty is how to translate on the fly with information that changes on a daily basis. technically, what we want to do is to utilize the google auto- translate program and software, which is available, and the board of supervisors is utilizing some of this on their website to do this. what would that happen is the computer would be linked to sites that are updated daily, such as a daily schedule for

city hall. every day, staff would update and public meetings that are being held in city hall. from that way, everything beyond the initial link would be pre- programmed to open to specific language. the meetings for that day would be translated utilizing the software. the issue with doing this is the accuracy of the translations. you will get literal translations and not specific colloquial speech, i guess. land use might turn into a ground functions. these are things that have to be thought about. however, one will be able to get the gist, and will be able to

find the locations and get the majority of the information to get where one wants to build. this is a way to get around the need for staff to constantly translate on a daily basis. this is what we would like to proceed with, and we think it will get us very close to where we want to be. and as google also-translate gets more accurate, we think this will progress further over time. supervisor chiu: i have a number of questions about the topic. are you familiar with how the ethnic press covered this ordinance in 2009 when it was fast? are you aware of this? >> i have to say no. supervisor chiu: let me preface my follow-up -- my following comments with i know your consummate professor it -- professionals and i appreciate you are doing. in 2009, the city hall building was pointed to as one of the most flagrant and glaring examples of inaccessibility when it came to language. examples of inaccessibility when it came to language.