Skip to main content

tv   [untitled]    May 22, 2011 4:30am-5:00am PDT

4:30 am
supervisor. as this goes around the jobs piece, what a 40% cut does to jobs, it would be really pertinent. supervisor kim: thank you. i think it's also important to note as people are talking about the 40% cut going from a $5 million budget to a $3 million budget, in ackuality what we're seeing is -- actuality is a $2.4 million pot of money next year in fact the usage has been $3.8 million. i think that's something need to keep in mind as we think about what that impact might look like. so thank you for your comment. >> there will be some spent in the next few weeks. supervisor chu: next speaker. >> good afternoon, supervisors. my name is jeremiah dean. bay chapter of the sierra club. i want to thank all the wonderful people who came out to our rally in support of
4:31 am
solar, in support of funding this program. all of the different solar companies, environmentalists, community members, i just want to thank everyone. i really think this program is beneficial in so many ways, and we want to see the full funding restored. the number that's getting kicked around -- and i'd like to echo and respond to supervisor wiener's question, the first two years they actually ran out of money for the program. it just so happens this year there's abbs and flows in the economy and we -- ebbs and flows in the economy and hopefully we'll see it next year with a $6.3 million budget that that will run out of funding. i'm very hopeful for this program. i brought along with me over 400 postcards that sierra club members and members, supporters of sierra club have signed to the mayor and in support of go
4:32 am
solar and i'd like to take a second to read a couple i picked out. don't let the p.c. cut 40%. solar technology works even in the fog. let's continue this program, lead by example. i really like this one, september, 2010, i received rebates from california state and go solar s.f. many of my friends are now interested in going solar. do not stop them by reducing funding for go solar s.f. thank you. supervisor chu: thank you very much. are there any other members of the public who wish to comment on the enterprise department budget? my time's up. for rent board, airport, environment, p.u.c.?
4:33 am
seeing none, public comment is closed. ok. we got a number of items before us, colleagues. i know we have actually two sets of recommendations that have been before us, both the department of environment as well as the public utilities. i'm wondering if we can take action on the department of environment recommendations. from my understanding, the budget analyst recommendations are something that the department of environment is in agreement with. can we do that without objection? supervisor kim. supervisor kim: i missed a question i written down for the department of environment. sorry. i missed it in my notes. my question is just around the retrofit california for buildings that consume high energy such as multi-family buildings which i think is a great program. i was wondering how the outreach happens to make sure it's equityible in terms of being distributed around the city. >> so we have a couple different programs going on right now. we have the home performance
4:34 am
retrofit program and we also have a green home program. the green home assessment program, we actually worked with five different community organizations, still working with them, to hire folks to go out and do the green home assessments in communities throughout san francisco. so many of them are community organizations that already have reach in different neighborhoods like the bayview western addition. community organizations. one of them is -- actually, let me get the list. do you have the list? i can get the list for you. there's five different -- rebuild together is one of them. apri is another one. i'll have to get the other three. supervisor kim: also. out of curiosity, do we look at s.r.o. buildings as well? >> we have looked at them. we have basically what we've done is given a couple different grants to
4:35 am
organizations that work in s.r.o.'s to hire folks that live in the s.r.o.'s to do work. mostly on recycling. we haven't done as much on energy efficiency but that's something we can definitely build out. supervisor kim: yeah, i'd love to talk to you about that in the future. >> great. supervisor kim: thank you. supervisor chu: thank you very much. so we do have the recommendations before us. i'm wondering if there's any other discussions before we take that mokes on the department of environment. no. i'm wondering if we can take the budget analysts' recommendations for the department of environment. we'll do that, without objection. and now there are some questions that is still outstanding and then of course the recommendation to dispense with. why don't we go to questions first. supervisor mirkairmi. supervisor mirkarimi: mr. harington, if we can circle back with you. >> supervisor. supervisor mirkarimi: the whole go solar program, i may have
4:36 am
been out during the public safety committee for the few moments you started on this, but if we could back to the math of the dollars that roll over unspent into next year, this year to next year, go over with me quickly what the budget looks like that is unspent in moneys that would roll over for the next year, year and a half, however. >> certainly, supervisor. the budget has been $5 million a year for three years so it's been $15 million altogether. we've spent -- actually, we've request -- had request for $13.3 million, and then there's about $300,000 administrative costs over the three years. and that's on one of your slides. we've actually paid out $11 million so there's $2.3 million that's been requested. those jobs are still ongoing that haven't been paid yet and that leaves about $1.4 million when we did the slide in the last couple of days, it's
4:37 am
dropped to $1.3 million. in discussion with supervisor wiener we talked if it dropped between now and the end of june, why don't you call it $1.2 million. that would mean is it would roll over, you add $3 million to. you would have $2.4 available this year. if you spend all the money that's been requested, which doesn't always happen. usually it falls off. you would be spending about $3.8 million this year. it would be increasing the amount you would have available to spend the $4.2 million for next year. so as supervisor chu said, the discussion of layoffs or other things is ironic. we would end up with more money next year than spent this year. supervisor mirkarimi: a two-year budget cycle, this satisfies the budget discussion for 2011-2012. what happens in 2012-2013? we project that it just terminates by then if all moneys are used? >> no. the projection for energy
4:38 am
efficiency for the city, right now that would drop to $2 million. solar would drop to $2 million and any municipal projects would go to $2 million. again, we're looking at over the 10 years and we're running out of money. you also missed at the current projections, it stops functioning in about three years because we will run out of money. these programs would slow over time. supervisor mirkarimi: so the ask here is, just so that we're clear, the proponents want to continue to see it. and i am one of those people, but i'm trying to understand the economics. is it a difference of us allocating, what is it, $7 -- $.7 million, $700,000. >> if you think this is the
4:39 am
only program in the p.u. crumplet you should continue -- p.u.c. you should continue funding at full rates, yes. you would be cutting every other program in the p.u.c., including taking care of our power plants, including our transmission, include anything for work on city facilities, and this would be the one program you would leave whole while every other program in the city is being cut, yes. that would be what it would take. supervisor mirkarimi: can you make that statement any more powerful than that? [laughter] supervisor mirkarimi: ok. it gives me something to think about. can we switch topics a little bit on the city college? >> sure. supervisor mirkarimi: i think rightfully the president of the community college board of trustees is making a good case. he's basing it on other agreements we have with other institutions. we have been charityible with other institutions in the past. i'd like to know how we can
4:40 am
help them despite the fact that the p.u.c. is also struggling to figure out their budget quandaries too. so while we're all together, why don't we figure out what's possible here? >> sure, supervisor. i completely value what city college does. i'm appalled of the cuts at the state level. the school district is relatively speaking better off and they will not let me say that but basically they went to the voters a few years back and went -- ended up with access to the city's rainy day reserve and also a work-aside to the arts, music in schools, the slams program. they are getting more of the benefits because the voters voted on that and said to do that. love to see if city college wants to kind of bring forward that kind of thing but i realize even if they did that that's a longer term discussion. the problem that we have, we have several different interactions with the community college district. one of the larger ones that mr.
4:41 am
rizzo, or president rizzo, brought up was the southeast community. ms. jackson referred it was put there for the waste water treatment plant. there is real concern in the community that really be a job training educational place. and so one of the programs that particularly mrs ellis has been spearheading, we've had a number of meetings with the vice chancellor of the community college district, the plan -- and we're still talking to the community to see if that's what they want -- but the plan is for us to take a much larger role to have a robust selection of classes there for the community college district to also bring sheriff hennessey's programs into that program. to have a contractor assistance center there so that contractors local in the city, especially small ones that are trying to get into business with the city, can come there and we can help them learn to grow and act as contractors and then turn around and say, here's some job training
4:42 am
programs we can take care of. we have three acres of greenhouses. those acres of greenhouses right next to that facility are not really producing the kind of local jobs we want and so we talked to the mayor's office to really bring in additional kind of work with the community college district and those greenhouses to create jobs and training at opportunities there. so on that part we are reducing the amount of money we've been charging city college because we're spreading the cost to other people and we're picking up a bigger chance of that and we're really reinvigorating that center. that's one of the partnerships we have. there's also a small amount of money that we charged city college for parking and rent on their book school. the p.u.c. art commission adopted the change to swap properties so we wouldn't be charging them any more. i believe the mayor's office has finally brought that forward as part of the change that relates to muni and everybody else. if they charge we won't charge for anything else because we
4:43 am
swap properties. so that really leaves us with the power -- the power purchases. the numbers that you will see if you look at the $2 million number often used by the community college district versus the $885,000 or so that we use, the difference is gas. we buy gas for city departments through the state general services agency and we simply pass that through to the community college. or any other -- any other -- independent school district, police stations. that's not power that we're generating so we don't really view that as a city subsidy or not. we just happen to be the billing agent. we could in another month and a half get out of that arrangement. it wouldn't cost any more or less. so to think that the city charges them is an odd view to the world. it's a state charge that we happen to do the billing for. in fact, i think it would be easier for us to say, you pay the bill. it isn't our issue. that gets you down to the
4:44 am
$885,000. and frankly i think the real issue there is even though i love the community college district i'm not sure that i could make the case that our rec park department or muni or somebody else should be paying a higher rate than the community college district. i also think that it would be great if this is the worst year. i have very little faith that this is the worst year. i think if this happens it's probably continues to happen, and right now we're saying that if we don't actually raise the rates we're charging because we're heavily subsidizing the general fund and the schools, we're going to kill the golden goose and none of these programs will exist in five years. supervisor mirkarimi: so with the question on the gas, from the aggregate amount that city college would pay into for their utilities, separate out then for me what that relief
4:45 am
looks like. >> i don't have their numbers. supervisor mirkarimi: ok. >> i don't have the schedule. i believe it's about $2 million. supervisor mirkarimi: right. >> p.u.c. charges for electricity and gas or about $1.4 million. supervisor mirkarimi: right. >> that would mean the remaining amount of $5 million -- i mean, $500,000 or $600,000 would be gas. if you take that down it would be down to $1.4 million. that $2 million also includes not paying for elections that you typically charge the school district and community college to pay for elections. they would ask the general fund to pay for elections. but we are the biggest single number on the page. supervisor mirkarimi: do you envision a rate increase then for government -- >> yes. supervisor mirkarimi: agencies? when is the rate increase going into effect? >> you know, we are trying to figure out a way to do
4:46 am
something where we can work on it together. we haven't come to that. that's why you haven't seen a rate increase, but we are saying that by 2014 we will have to severely curtail all the programs of the p.u.c. unless we can get a rate increase. right now we are subsidizing the general fund for about $25 million a year. if you you really are conservation-minded, we should be charging the people the full cost of power which would encourage them to reduce their power needs. it would encourage energy efficiency and encourage conservation. if anything we should be charging the cost to deliver the power and then trying to give that money back in energy efficiency programs for departments. so that -- i'm saying this really is the cost of this, let's charge you that and let's give you grants to change your behavior and change how you do business. right now having a subsidy is a really nontransparent way of transferring $20 million to the general fund without any real power or conservation or sustainability benefit.
4:47 am
supervisor mirkarimi: no. i think you tap on an excellent point. but i'm not sure. has there been an assessment of the efficiency of our institutions like city college, for example, that teaches us how much are they doing in order to meet the question of conservation efficiency? >> we have done a variety of audits. there's being audits at city college, is that what i'm hearing? [inaudible] >> we've done hundreds of audits. i don't think there's any place in the city that's maxed out on energy efficiency. supervisor mirkarimi: sure, ok. i just want to speak to any inherent point that we don't want to subsidize that practice for bad habits. if they're doing their part, and this is a remainder of what their part should be in trying to increase conservation, how much remains of the cost to them and what's before us is, do we help, can we help
4:48 am
alleviate that? you're right. any one institution is being wasteful and they haven't done their part -- >> i would not accuse city college of being wasteful. supervisor mirkarimi: i get it. i just want to bring us down to try to figure out where we are in this case. well, i think that's helpful. i think we'll go ahead and ponder our approach and what this discussion in just a little bit. i might come back to you. thank you. supervisor chu: thank you, supervisor. supervisor kim. supervisor kim: to keep on that line of conversation of promoting energy efficiency, especially amongst our city departments, city college. i actually would be more interested in seeing us do work force development and energy efficiency in our buildings, particularly with our ratepayers but a it would help our ratepayers reduce their cost, it would help our general fund and p.u.c.'s budget as well. i get that solar may not be the most efficient use of our dollars in terms of creating
4:49 am
jobs in green-collar work force. i'm wondering, since this upcoming year in essence the program will be somewhat whole. if we could work on developing programs that would actually route folks into energy efficiency and working with our ratepayers -- >> we'd love to do that. that's such a good use of money and that's a long-term training opportunity also. supervisor kim: great. thank you. supervisor chu: thank you, supervisor kim. supervisor chiu. supervisor chiu: a couple questions to follow-up on involving city college. at the southeast campus you obviously have a lot of activities there related to your department's work. how did you come up with the $228,000 for that lease price? >> i have no idea. historically, the building was really almost taken over by city college.
4:50 am
in fact, when we started working with different agencies, they thought city college owned the building and it was their building. i think historically the p.u.c. said, it's your building, you should pay for the upkeep on the building. it's been the last year saying, no, it's not. it's the p.u.c.'s building and we should be making a difference in the community and so we've been taking on a whole different view of what that rate and what the rent and who should pay for security and who should pay for all that. historic cost was really probably the cost of maintenance on the building but i don't know because we're not trying to keep to that. supervisor chiu: ok. and then back to the issue of go solar. we were just handed a document from the office of economic and work force development, it was a status report april 5, 2011, and according to this document, oewd did state that the go solar program had led to 72 green-collar jobs. i'm not sure the other statistic as has been discussed is floating around.
4:51 am
i know oewd is not here for this discussion which is unfortunate but i'd like them to respond as soon as they're able to on where that figure might have come from and if they could just again verify their position that this is their understanding of how many jobs were created. so that is a standing request. >> i think to clarify, i believe what they're saying and what we've been saying is that 72 low-income disadvantaged worker jobs, not total jobs. supervisor chiu: right. ok. thank you. supervisor chu: thank you, supervisor chiu. supervisor kim. supervisor kim: i had one more question written down that i forgot to ask. so, there was 13 jobs that were created this fiscal year. and 72 crealted over the last three years -- created over the last three years but out of that only 23 is still employed. i wonder why this is such a huge dropoff and what happened to the roughly 50 jobs created or individuals that were
4:52 am
trained. >> you may want to ask some of the installers here. in some cases they were doing some jobs in the housing authority project, for example, and they hired local people for that job. at the end of that job they laid them off. so it would be the kind of thing where -- in fairness, with a lot of crafts jobs, they are not 12 months a year. they tend to be seasonal. and people do come and go. it's also a training job. so i would bet you would have a number of people that had fairly short-term relationships but, again -- supervisor kim: right. i have concerns about investing in job training programs for jobs that really don't last more than a year or couple months because of instability. i'm just curious if there was a huge dropoff because of the lack of interest doing the work, they were no longer interested in pursuing it or is it this type of industry. supervisor chu: thank you,
4:53 am
supervisor kim, for your office. we'll ask for the office of work force development to follow up on that point. so, colleagues, we have a number of items before us. there are recommendations from the budget analyst with regard to p.c.u.'s budget. my understanding of it, the department is mostly in agreement with all of these items but i do want to reiterate that there were some amendments to the initial draft of the budget analyst report and let me make sure that people are clear what they are. the budget analyst is withdrawing several recommendations on page 18, $100,000 worth of equipment purchase is withdrawn. other withdralls include on page 9, training of 9,000 and 15,000. membership fees of $10,000. there is the item on page 11. instead of reducing the power for resale at -- by $1.5 million, it's $22450u7bd. and finally, on air travel, they're increasing the recommendation from $3,500 to $4,500. i believe that these are fairly
4:54 am
noncontroversial. the department is in agreement with these changes as well. supervisor mirkarimi: i'd motion to accept the budget analyst's recommendation. supervisor chu: ok. a motion with those amendments to it. without objection. ok. those are the actions before us. supervisor chiu. supervisor chiu: i do see the head of oewd here and i know we've this question ongoing for the last hour and a half of the total number of jobs that were created versus the number of jobs created for economically disadvantaged individuals and i know that has relevance to some of the things we're thinking about so if you have a perspective on that. >> sure, supervisors. jennifer from office of economic and work force development. the numbers we keep around employment on different industry sectors we do so for purposes related to understanding how sectors are growing. we get those numbers some from labor market data, some of it
4:55 am
we get from industry trade groups. some of it we get from the office of economic analysis, ted, and some of it we get from anecdotal, information we gather ourself. the clean tech industry is something that's very important to our economy. it's something of a -- it's very much a growing industry and one that's hard to get your hands around what you're talking about when you say clean tech. solar growth has been something that's been of interest to us. it's been an interest, i think, the city at large around policy measures regarding the growth of renewable energy in the industry. our numbers with regard to employment on solar come from anecdotal information that originally came from consultants who surveyed the solar universe of solar companies some years ago that we kept a list as those companies have grown and as other companies emerged in san francisco and we know roughly how many employees they have
4:56 am
based upon our ongoing conversations with them and we aggregated that recently to that 400 employee number. we have no idea whether or not those employees are residents of san francisco or not. we don't know if they're disadvantaged or not. i want to make clear, we have never asked or don't know the extent to which that number is connected to the go solar program. the go solar program to our mind has been a very important program as it relates to expanding solar in the city but it has not been a program that our office has tracked or engaged with with regards to job creation, job retention or really as an economic development engine. supervisor chiu: thank you. supervisor chu: thank you, supervisor chiu. supervisor mirkairmi.
4:57 am
supervisor mirkarimi: thank you. actually, back to mr. harington, please. i think for the exercise that's before us today is action where we're processing p.c.u.'s budget or not or forwarding it. i wonder if we need to make any motions to speak to the discussion or any agreement on the go solar program. the $3.3 million i guess that would be carried over, that's static. i'm sorry. $1.2 million. >> we're assuming that would be available on june 30. supervisor mirkarimi: that would be static $1.2 million and the other $3 million, how many remains? so we're looking at a combination of $4.5 million almost or $4.2 million. >> the other thing that happens every week is we get cancellations so the number available could grow by june 30. every week we get new requests
4:58 am
and new cancellations. supervisor mirkarimi: and your budget is back up before us in the two-year cycle before us anyway. >> absolutely. supervisor mirkarimi: so any modifications to that at least can be made whole if we see some reversal in taking advantage of this program and other reasons that i think still are displayed as to why we may want to keep this program intact. >> supervisor, not only that, if we are successful with c.c.a. we would have customers to provide this service to. supervisor mirkarimi: that's what i was thinking. you're absolutely reading my mind on this. i think that helps justify our segue into the greater call of us being 100% renewable whatever the aim is. so i agree with that. c.c.a. would be the right channel and also not be pg&e administered. it would be city and county administered which makes me more positive of where this program will be going. >> and it would be our
4:59 am
customers that would actually benefit. supervisor mirkarimi: i want to make sure, we don't need to indicate a separate motion because what we're doing is affirming the process of the $1.2 million carryover and then the $3 million that is latched to next year. >> that's right, supervisor. it's a problematic project. it carry overs. supervisor mirkarimi: ok. and then the question on the community college, this is a tough one, but the grounds of where there may be some room to help assist, and we get it should be even steven for all institutions who are obligated to pay. we get that. but in this regard, city college is not -- they're asking for assistance on something i dismiss, so wlab the question on the lease -- what about the question on the lease of the southeast? it's an exowe tension