the city of san francisco sfgtv meeting of the san francisco building inspection commission occurring february 20, 2013, will begin shortly.

>> good morning, today is wednesday, february, 20th, 2013, this is a regular meeting of the building inspection commission. i would like to remind everyone for turn off all electronic devices. the first item on the agenda is roll call. >> president mccarthy? >> here. >> vice president mar? >> here fl >> commissioner clinch? >> here. >> commissioner lee. >> here. >> commissioner melgar. >> here. >> commissioner walker? >> here. >> and commissioner mccray is excused and we have a quorum and the next item is president's announcement. good morning, everybody and thank you all for being here on this morning and i have

president's announcements. thanks for the staff who are staffing this year's chinese festival will be held on february 23rd and 24th, including joe chan and danny low and maria lee, from the plan review services. and tony who is supervising the fifth floor and then quan from

building inspection. special thanks for commissioner mar who will be volunteering at the volunteer, it is not a kissing booth. >> congratulations to the story was actually about the planning hiring and staff to catch up on the growing project's backlog but the examiner knows that this handsome inspector when they see him, the image from the story published two years ago and got the front page cover and well done, even though you work for dbi thanks

for calvan e and vanbon. >> for the enforcement efforts on 308 turk street this is getting a lot of headline, it is a multiunit where the owner has a long neglected building, and supervisor kim issued a press release applauding the effort to bring this building into code compliance and urging the city attorney to litigate this especially egregious case, and thanks to everyone involved in that and to the supervisor. special thanks to tom hewy for providing the mayor with an update on the actions to extend the permits and to give the customers more time to complete projects that have been stalled by the economic recession. the acting director updated the mayor at the end of january at his request on these matters and including the board of supervisors and the approval of

the dbi new permit extension on february fifth that madam secretary, and also, actually there is one other thing, so actually i might as well update you, we are doing well with the search firm and i will have update you and we hope that it will be going along with the director and along with ted and that it is going well and going in the right direction and so we have put together the kind of qualities of kind of a director that we are looking for and we are going to enfold them into the search firm for them to go out and look. so, if there are any questions or anything that anybody has on that, and they can contact me on that as well. that is all my announcements. on to the next item. >> is there any public on the

announcements? >> seeing, none, item three, general public comment, the bic will take public comment on the matters within the commission's jurisdiction that are not part of this agenda. >> good morning, my name is robert davis and i live in the bay view and i would like to begin by thanking the staff, inspector, sorry, acting director tom, hewy, and the rest of the staff for the demolition order and the knocking down of the orderses on third and long time coming, and it looks great and i know that it was long and hard, but, we really appreciate that. and we would like to get an update on the open notices of violation and the open director's hearings and there are 6,000 novs and it looks like someone went through and closed off the ones before the year of 2000. and i have no idea how that happened. i would like to make a comment on the open director's hearing

and attending the director's hearing and a group of 15 people clouding myself went down to speak at a director's hearing about 900, and we were told at the last minute that the building owner had just decided to postpone it and we were not notified and there is no notification process for people who want to show up be heard and we would like to get a little bit of information about that building and there is a long, sort of complicated of the notices of violation and the neglect of the building. it is a historic building, it is on the shore line and i would like somebody to look into that please. and then i would like to get a little support from the building commission about a special economic zone and part that have zone and what i need your support on, is rating the dbi fees, not the permits but just the permit fees for an area of third street between evanand williams.

and i did try to get an idea of what that would cost the dbi in lost revenue, and i was unable to but we are working on that and i would like to get a little support. thank you. >> thank you, next speaker? >> is there any other general public comment? >> seeing none, item four, this is a possible action to appoint commissioners to serve on the litigation subcommittee. >> commissioners, if i may, i would like to kind of make this as straight as possible. i have served on the commissioner walker served on it and commissioner clinch. if there is no objection, we kind of would like to stay on the litigation committee and i would put a motion forward that we stay with the same committee if there is no objections.

>> no objections, so i move that we keep the same members on the litigation committee. >> thank you. >> is there a second? >> second. >> okay. >> is there any public comment on this motion? >> okay, take the roll, please? >> okay, are all commissioners in favor? >> aye. >> any opposed? >> the motion carries and the current commissioners serving will remain on the litigation subcommittee. item number five, discussion and possible action to appoint commissioners to serve on the nominations subcommittee. >> thank you, madam, secretary. once again, if there is no objection i would like to keep the same appointments on this commission. >> is there a motion? >> i move to maintain the same membership in the nomination

committee. >> second. >> is there any public comment on this item? >> seeing none, are all commission ers in favor? >> aye. >> any opposed? >> this carries also to keep all of the current members of the nominations subcommit ti. >> item six update on code enforcement out reach program and single room occupancy collaborativives priorities for out reach. >> commissioner walker would like to make a comment. >> thank you, president for including this agenda item. i requested an update from our housing division, rose mary and also the program and sro collaborativives this is a partnership, a very successful partnership that our department has engaged in for the past over a decade, i believe.

and we have several community groups who help our department and our inspecters both in the housing and the building division deal with issues in some of the most vulnerable buildings both in the apartment houses and the sros in our city. the goal is to actually bring these units up to code so that they are habitable and so that people can have a nice place to live and call their homes. we have a really substantial history of bringing a lot of these violations that we, all of us, hear about. either in our meetings or in the litigation meeting of challenges conditions for

people to live in. and i think that we owe a thank you to the organization to go out and assist our housing division in building inspection division in making sure that these things are brought up to code. we asked them to come and talk about the priorities. i know that we maintain a commitment to this program, and i wanted to make sure that all of the commissioners are aware of the good work that is happening out there. so thank you for come and we look forward to the presentation. >> thank you commissioners and i am going to keep my comments short because we need to hear from our contractors. and you know to quote someone from a while ago it takes a community and collaboration, we have aging housing stock and a vulnerable population and to keep, safe san tarry and functional housing. this program has been absolutely crucial and the efforts and the information

that is communicated between the groups out there and this department and other city agencies, and thank you for the opportunity to give us the snapshot of what is happening right now, the biggest news is seniors and people with disabilities in residential hotels to grab our legislation was just before you. and thank you for your support of this. it was i will tell you there were great facial expressions at the board here that this commission is waving the fees on that and so we thank you for your generosity on that. but the one thing that i want to talk about is to be able to do this collaboration, and you are going to be seeing some information and i am going to let jamie introduce everybody here in a moment. but just on the grab the situation to be able to deal with identifying the conditions in the rooms and to be able to get more information profile these better so that it ties in with the information that we are giving from the collaborativives and in working

with the mayor's office of disability. because we have to work together with other agencies as well. so i just want to show you a survey that we came up with, to be able to identify what is going on in the residential hotels, with respect to what are the bathrooms looking like? this is because of reports that we were getting from the collaborativive and from everyone else telling us about this. so we basically have come up with a survey where my housing inspecters are going out there and looking and actually doing a diagram of the type of situations and a bathroom toilet room and a shower tub combination and etc., and then identifying the characteristics and so when that information manual comes that we promised you and it was suggested by our vendors that the mayor's office of disability would be able to have actual good information. so this is just one of many things that we are doing that is part of the collaboration.

part of the monthly meetings that we have with the vendors and the daily interaction that we have with them and the inspector has. it absolutely makes me so happy when i see one of the inspecters get their heads together with any one of the vendor and they are talking and collaborating and the true spirit of what this program was actually meant to do and so with that i am going to stop and introduce jamie and all of the people here so they can tell you more about what they have been doing. >> thank you and good morning, commissioners, the code enforcement out reach program was created in 1996 by the building inspection commission. in order to bring our housing services to san francisco ans living in substan ard living conditions. over the last 17 years, this program has you ever covered the worst, more horrifying substandard conditions found in the city for this period of time. and it has worked together with

housing inspection services to abait and alleviate those conditions for the tenant whose live there, regardless of race, age, status, or language barriers. provides extensive translation services for these critical issues and filed the complaints on those who are fareful of retaliation. it is one of the few in the city that encourages the tenants and landlords to work together in a cooperative manner. i want to show you one example here. this is the case, on turk which was featured on the 6:00 news. >> one of san francisco's roughest neighborhoods are speaking out tonight about the conditions in their apartment building, we talked with the building's owner after getting

an ugly look at what it inside. >> 50 people live in this tender loin apartment building, this broken window provides only a glimpse into a building so run down, tenants are saying enough is enough. >> tenants in the apartments and pay $1200 a month. it is challenge, next door the pipes that drips so much the counter is rotting and smoke alarms, what smoke alarms? >> and then there is the mold, take a look at this. it seems to be everywhere. and if you think his is bad take a look at his neighbor's bathroom. they had no heat until two weeks ago and one tenant with a newborn baby... (inaudible) it is kind of scary sometimes. we have people that come in the middle of the night and do drugs in the hallway.

>> the ongoing problems here are why the tenants protested. in front of the restaurant that the landlord's family owns. >> they spoke with the landlord about the plight. and the tenants called you a slum lord, what is the reaction? >> i think that they want to call and i can also understand their frustration really. >> they installed security cameras to keep people coming in and sleeping in the halls. >> as for the other problem. >> i can't put in $50,000 in the property like tomorrow, because it is bad. >> and also bad, i feel so bad and angry, because they don't take care of... >> we called the city of building inspections and issued some 200 citations for code violations in the past two years and it is now in the hands of the city attorney's office.

>> tenants in one of san francisco's roughest... >> so, that was the case that was not covered by our out reach program. and there are collaborativives who are also here today who were created ten years ago by the board of supervisors and they are partially modeled by the code out reach program and the board led by miano put forth the program in response of the many fires and it was part of the department of public health, but the board determined that this department should take over the program two years ago. the rooms are very small and the tenants must share the toilet and showers including senior and familiwise young children. priorities include conversions infestation and continued enforcement and grab bar legislation implementation. they are difficult to live in and difficult to manage. they have skom a long way in

the time that i have been working on them and thanks to the collaboratives they remain a important resource for the city. the board of supervisors recently recognized our department and our division for another case that was uncovered by our programs, 245 levenworth where 423 habitbility violations were corrected due to our actions. and i am going to pass this around. so we have the representatives where we have time to hear from a few of them. one of the executive directors here, sarah? sarah is the director of the housing rights committee, they have been one of the initial and have been there from the beginning. >> thank you, commissioners and thank you for hearing this item. the program we believe is an extremely important component of the work we do and the work that the city funds generally

speaking. so, the basic way that the model works, is that tenants will contact us with building repair issues that they have not been able to resolve once they have taken the first steps of you know, contacting their landlord and perhaps, even writing letters, etc. and we are able then to sort of help them navigate through the system and get in contact with dbi when we need to. and then, as jamie mentioned work with the land lords as well. we contact the apartment association in some cases and have them sort of work on the other end speaking to the landlord complying with codes and all of that. and we have had great success. the other thing that it allows us to do is a little bit of a more of a case management model. some of our counseling that we do it is really where we are only able to sort of do an in and out and advise them a little bit and send them on the way and with this, we are able to do follow up calls and we send out post cards saying has

your issue been resolved and we will track the cases thoroughly. if the people are not getting anywhere, we are able to escalate through the dbi system if we need to or keep helping them work with the landlord. i think that it provides a great service not just to the community and the tenants but to your department frankly. we are trying to do a lot of the groundwork so that these cases don't necessarily get to you. we are trying to sort of do what we can do just through the community work and it is also helpful that the tenants kind of come to us as you will hear from other groups, were based in various communities and various neighborhoods. and so rather than feeling like they have to go to sometimes what people considered intimidating, you know, city commission or department, where they are right in the communities, we have different languages that we are able to accommodate and we are really accessible and a free service.

so, i think that it is, we have been since the beginning and how many years has it been jamie? >> 17. it makes me feel old. we have been doing this a very long time and you know, unfortunately we still do keep seeing the cases there is clearly a need and i think that a continuing need and perhaps increasing as the market, you know, continues to escalate and again, we are able to do so much in the community just to resolve these issues so that they... your inspecters could spend a lot more time on the essential cases that they need to do more work with. so thank you very much. >> thank you. >> just quickly, as a clarification for those in the audience or watching on television. the reason why this program is so important that really demonstrate is that is an apartment building and so we

generally do not go into the dwelling units unless there is a complaint by a occupant. it is different than a hotel, we have been in the common areas but the picture that you saw of the conditions that were in the units themselves and in the bathrooms, etc. and in which we were some what hesitant to talk to us or maybe there was a language barrier and here, our groups are actually were absolutely were crucial to organizing these individuals and getting that information to us and this frequently happens where we will have a situation like this in an apartment building or even in an srl in which the organization will occur so the inspector will know that this is going to happen, and they will allow enough time for each individual to let them in and show them the conditions. which would not happen without this program. we might not see what is behind those closed doors, especially in an apartment buildings or

residential hotels or other residential uses where people are afraid or don't understand what their rights are. so that is why it is a great illustration of where this program is right now. thank you. >> good morning, commissioners, my name is page, i am a counselor, housing rights counselor and we are based in the commission district and also have an office in oakland. >> so they help us to manage the cases better and insure the case resolution since the workers working with the clients are connected to the inspectors as the only one with bilingual managers, we increase the capacity to work with more spanish speaking tenants and we make sure that they access services that they may not have otherwise, for fear