>> good afternoon. welcome to the small business commission. monday, july 23, 2012 meeting. the time is now 2:07 p.m. and the meeting is being called to order. first item is roll call.

i'd like to remind everybody to please turn off your cell phones or put them we appreciate all the work that sf governor tv and city hall and management do for us. roll call. commissioner adams? >> here. commis commissioner dooley? >> here? >> admissioner ortiz-cartagena? >> here. >> commissioner white? >> here. commissioner reilly? >> hereby. we have all commissioners here. general comment. this allows members of the public to comment generally. president adams: do we have anyone from the public wishing to make a comment on anything

that is nod on today's agenda? seeing none, public comment is closed. next item? >> commissioner, we're at number three, approval of the june 25, 2012 meeting minutes. explanatory documents -- draft june 25, 2012 meeting minutes. president adams: do we have a motion to approve the minutes? >> i move. >> second. president adams: all in favor? >> aye. president adams: next item, please? >> commissioners, that motion passes 5-0. commissioners, you're on the regular calendar. items four and five will be continued until the conclusion of item number eight, in which case they'll be called together. would you like to call item number six? president adams: please. >> presentation by george smith

of child support services. president adams: welcome. >> and this is a discussion. president adams: great. can you hear me? good afternoon. my -- -- my name is george smith. at this point community outreach is coordinator for the department of public services. with me today is are two other coordinators. and they're going to help me if i run into trouble. and thank you for joining us today. i want to thank regina and tracy for working with us and inviting us to come and present today. weaver very excited on the possibility of pairing with the office of small business commission staff, which is san francisco primary child support

services. our goal is to really improve our partnership with small businesses throughout san francisco. i wanted to give a little overview of our department and i want to invite both peter and katherine to help me. and so, let's start. so we mentioned the san francisco department of child support services. we establish paternity and enforce monetary support orders. once those things are established, we off case management services and also offer alternative solutions to parents having difficulty paying child support. we have employment services. now with the department of child support services. we can help with establishing

debt reduction opportunities for our clients and other solutions stretching from inconciliatory parents finding work here in san francisco. we provide outreach services. any customers or businesses of san francisco that would like to know a lot more about child support services. just give us a call. we'll go out and do presentations. we're also in the county jail every week. one of the great services that we do in the jails is parents who are incarcerated in jail and can't pay child support, we often will zero out any payments that they owe until they're released from jail to help them not accumulate so much debt with child support. our rereferral process -- there are three ways you can open up a child support case. any parent can go into any of

our offs in the state and open up a child support case absolutely free. they can go online and open up that case free, or if any child ends up in foster care in any type of public assistance, usually the count or government will open off case for child support that reimburses any financial support the child is receiving through the government. our case load overview gives you some statistics about child support here in san francisco. last year we collected here in san francisco a little over $25 million. 83% went directly to families, the rest going to reimburse -- a here in the county -- yeah. >> we have just over 14,000 cases on our san francisco county case load and just for the month of june 2012, we

received payments on about 5,000 cases just from income withholding, which are garnishment orders to -- served to employees for their employers to withhold that money. we really wanted to reach out to the small business community and work on engaging and educating them about the child support program because we realize that many small business owners or sole priorityors are also customers of child support and our office has had some experience with that community with them not understanding how it works. and we've had examples of the business-child support co-mingling their assets and when child support fees come up, it damages their business.

now they can't make payroll or things like that. so we really want to prevent future things like that from happening. working with the small business community and customer, educating them about child support, answering the questions they have that are specific to that small business community. we realize that for many residents within san francisco, the small business is maybe the only employer option they have because a small business may be more willing to give those reentering the community second chances. for those who have been unemployed for a long period of time due to whatever reasons that may have contributed to that unemployment. and we acknowledge and understand that for the outsider, be it small business owner, small business employee, or really anyone outside of the child support program navigating this system can be very confusing. under the lot that we ask of our

employers when we are enforcing against employees and it can be difficult for them to understand all the rules, the laws, and regulations behind staying compliant with us. income withholding order. how do they enforce medical support orders. what do they tell their staff, what are the limitations and the amount they can afford and things like that. we wanted to they can this opportunity to partner with small business and educate that community so that we can be a better neighbor to our small business employers out there. so next step with this collaboration we've been working with regina through the office of small business. so the next steps are going to be for us to meet with the business organizations so that we can begin educating the small business community about child support and from there we really hope to start participating in

small business week, which we understand is held the third week in may and that there are opportunities to do workshops and presentations. to start there and from there we want to host a small business employer's forum that we will put on through our agency but invite members of small business to come in so we can more address the concerns that the small business owner has regarding child support. you want to talk about august? >> we had originally scheduled our first forum august 28 but after working with regina and seeing how complex it is to outreach to a number of small business organizations, we decided to put that off until we can do better outreach with the small businesses and neighborhood organizations in the city and so we're maybe going to look at -- >> sometime next year.

>> yeah, sometime next year. >> after small business week and after weaver worked more with the small business community. president adams: so only one micrned on unfortunately. so when you're both speaking at the same time, maybe share the same mike. i can alternate to an extent but -- >> that's ok. >> so you did hear that last piece? so we're very excited about being here, about the opportunity of working with you. as you know, we sometimes serve the same customers. like freida said, sometimes our small business owners are our customers also. we like to make sure that we provide better assets for folks to come in and learn about child support, understand child support and really benefit from our director. karen roy, customer service is

one of her top priorities. good customer service for our customers is one of our top priorities and that's one of the reasons we're here today and we really appreciate the opportunity to speak with you today. >> do we have any questions first? >> president adams: commissioner white? commissioner white: what are some of the issues that you guys come across on the small business side. i'm hearing you want to make sure that small businesses comply. what have been some of the direct issues? >> for some of the small business owners, they're the employer, the employee, the payroll, h.r., account can't -- cat ant, everything. they're wearing a lot of hats so when they get these massive amounts of paperwork in the mail from us it's a lot and they're wondering how do i deal with this? how do i deal with this order

that you're sending, where do i send these payments and what if i or my employee can't afford this. they would have specialists or sterts -- experts on staff that handle other things. the small business owner has fewer employees and so is likelihood that their employees have a child support situation. they may not come into contact with it as frequently as a larger employer so they're just not as familiar with it. it can be a lot. for anyone. employers big and small. understanding how to comply with orders and who to call when you have questions and what to do when things aren't adding up and making sense. the small business employer has access to fewer resources. so we want to extend ourselves to give them one-on-one attention with that so they understand better going into the

future. commissioner white: ok. >> any other questions? president adams: well, i think that -- it's great to you're doing the outreach and i like the idea that during small business week when we do the workshops, i think you should have a booth there and definitely be there for outreach. i would suggest contacting the different merchant organizations in the stiff. you just said it the best. a lot of these people are everything. they're the h.r., the -- and i've seen those come through before. and you have to fill it all out. garnishment and it's got to be by the book. i would talk to agina and get the list of all the different merchant organizations and send something out to their president. but it's a great idea. >> thank you. >> thank you. thank you for that. that's all we have. thank you. president president -- president adams: thank you very

much. >> commissioners, as they noted, regina is working closely with them and this is something the office will be involved with over the next couple of months and into next year, especially as small business week approaches. president adams: great. touch. next item? >> commissioners, item seven. presentation, discussion, and possible action on the license 123 project currently under development. presentation and demonstration by jane gong, office of small business. again, this is a discussion item and it was agendized as a possible action item should commissioners have any action. president adams: great. welcome, ms. gong. >> good afternoon, commissioners. president adams: the other one. she got on that one? >> yes. >> check. [laughter] it's quite different seeing you guys in this setting rather than our usual meetings.

thank you so much for being here on a monday afternoon at 2:00 p.m. let me pull up my presentation quickly. excuse me. can you hear now? now, unfortunately -- here we

go. ok. so thank you very much. i'm going to be speaking to you regarding our business one-stop project. and let me go through a little bit of the background of this project. as you know, san francisco's licensing and permitting process is quite daunting for small businesses and large businesses. in 2011 we had over 2,500 small business constituents come through the office of small businesses assassins center and out of that number we had over 81% who were in the pre-start-up or the start-up phase and what they usually have questions about is, i'm starting a

janitorial business. what or -- the licensing and permitting requirements? i'm starting a restaurant. what do i need to fill out? starting a food truck. as you can see, these questions come to us on another a daily basis and we've been serving just that population that actually comes into our office. so the objective here is let's develop something that can keep things simple. so it's the old kis rule. jay nash selected a product called license 123 and this is by a company called dock stock. that i go through various city, state, and federal government websites and they aggregate all the forms that are floating on the internet into one place. if you just have a list of the

forms it doesn't make sense. so in order to make things easier for small business owners, we are working with this company as well as other city departments to organize all these forms into a way thatted make sense for small business owners. so if i'm starting that fooled truck business, i'm going to be able to go into this program, use it for free, because the city is paying for it, and i'm going to be able to pull up all the forms that i need. and really we started out with a very small budget, so this program isn't going to solve all the problems. we're not streamlining permits. we're not changing or proposing any legislation. what we're trying is -- doing is trying to start with a small piece and we're trying to make as big an impact as possible with our limited budget. i'm going to try to log in and show you what this thing is

like. so what you'll see is actually a branded product. you're not going to see license 123's logo or their company name. what you'll see is the look and feel of this page will look just like the sfgov.com website. what the person can do is select

their industry first, and i'm going to start with an easy example. so you'll see that there are various industries here but it doesn't cover everything, so as time goes on we will be adding to some of these categories. so let's try something simple like personal services. and i'll scroll down. and let's say i'm going to start an accounting service and this actually is something that i see a lot at the office of small businesses assistance counter, a lot of folks that might be out of work who use the work for larger firms, whether it's accounting or legal services or any type of consulting, they are coming to us in large quantities and they want to know how do i start my own firm? so this would be a good example to start. i've selected accounting

services and i will click on fee licenses. so on this page, the user will enter their name. so for our purposes, i will just enter "test information." and the advantage of this is it is also capturing the user's information as they come to our site. and they can indicate whether they're a new or existing business. and select estimated revenue if they choose to.

those fields are optional. i'm going to click on "get licenses." so for accounting services, what they'll do is they'll show you the estimated fees so what that $295 indicates is the $25 and business registration and a $270 fee through the state. you have to register your accounting corporation with the state of california. so users can go through, and i'll show you the state's accounting form. they can click on this and $270 for two years -- and they can click on the form. and it will load, slowly but surely. there we go. so the user at this point could go ahead and print the form

rather than going to different departments, different agencies. sometimes they're located in sacramento so they can actually gather these forms in one place. i'm going to jump back to my presentation and show you another example. where we'll go through it a little quicker. again, if we were to go back to the page, we would select our industry type and in my example, i'm selected the food and drink industry and i've selected the ever so popular food truck business. and again, you'll go through this page and enter your information. and on this page you'll see that there are a lot more requirements. so not only are we talking about city requirements from different departments, as much as the tax collector's office, d.p.w., the health department, and planning department, but we're also talking about the state's requirements