>> i don't have changes but i would like to have it recognize that we have language in here in three places at least that says revisions submitted at hearings are discouraged. president olague: good for that. and that is in every one of the cases and then the other one is the staff on policy or major project informational presentation at the commission is supposed to get precipitated power points one week in advance. >> we'll bring it with us every week. >> if we don't get it, we will still hear the case? >> and it says december cession and if we want -- it says

discretion and so we could say that but make it not so arbitrary. >> there is one interesting thing that happened today at 11:25 a rather potentially important set of comments came in regarding 55 laguna and the person presented here and so when that comes in, the presentation itself does not give enough to understand. and to send it the week before, i would have time to read it and think about it. >> and the public needs to be encouraged to submit public commentary early on. and which you either agree with or not. that is not the point. and somebody wants to make a contribution, but out of respect of time we need to have it in order to be thoughtful about it.

commissioner borden: i know the rules are on the website, yes? so maybe we can to have the middle issue stuff on the website. and if they want to thoughtfully consider the comments and to give them enough time. president olague: or staff should discuss with project sponsor also. and it should be part of the routine of what they do. and the project sponsor should be up front given the list of the rules. they are? well, then there's -- >> and to submit things late is one problem or in a day or two in advance. and commissioner moore is raising is often for memberses of the public who come in very, very late, not project sponsor concerns. president olague: i know what you are saying. secretary avery: and let me just recap this. not only do members of the

public, but our staff does this. and we get things today. so they have had changes and everybody on both sides of the coin are in violation of your rules. so what do we do? president olague: just encourage and i think that -- commissioner miguel: i think we encourage because we also encourage people to talk about d.r.'s and talking about other things and to negotiate and as we know, sometimes that comes down to right outside the door. so absolutes are a problem and we're encouraging it in another sense. >> we know the language within the rules and up to you to enforce it. and i know because of the whole

nature of negotiation, it is hard to enforce something when you are encouraging negotiation and that might happen just prior to us calling the item. it is really up to you do you keep it and change it and do you want, and how do we better address making sure all sides adhere? >> that is a loaded question. and encourage that it happens but i am not sure we can ever enforce it. i don't think it will happen. i couldn't support something that would be so rigid because these things of cur. >> i think it is enough that it is in your rules and i am not sure what else you can do beyond that. >> i would like to open it up for public comment.

>> sue hester, and i submitted revision and none of them are reflected in the discussion. the issue is the current procedure is the staff ignores complicated case and don't follow it and you get staff report two weeks in advance extremely rarely and a staff report allows people that are having problems to read it and respond it to and when they get available on a thursday and become available to the public on friday afternoon and how do you think anyone is going to submit anything that you can absorb in that period? and i would ask that you shift a lot of things into complicated cases and that the staff be told that if you don't have the staff report, it is off calendar if it's due two weeks in advance. that would be a therapeutic way of getting enforcement.

large projects in the eastern neighborhood should all be defined as complicated cases. all the projects with multiple exceptions should be defined as large cases. so the original exceptions were supposed to be minor in the olden, olden days of the downtown plan and now we have projects that are like 500 units with 10 exceptions. and then they come and they are an understands case. and no one enforces the rule for two weeks in advance and there is also a planning code rule for 309 and 309.1 and that says 10 days in advance. that is not hon in order. rincon hill cases have the 10-day and i come here and be a crank saying this and i proposed ap amendment and it didn't get reflected and i got this last

week and i am saying you're never going to change the practice that makes informed public comment possible. because people cannot get the final divisions from the developer on friday afternoon and have a hearing on thursday and get you the material in advance. it doesn't function. i ask that you redefine complicated cases to be just about the project that has an e.i.r. and a negative declaration or a tiered project which is all of the eastern neighborhoods that you get that come through as categorical exemption even though they may be 100 units. like 1501 which was then taken off calendar and 2121 which was continued. and none of these cases come to you for the staff report more than seven days in advance. and that is dysfunctional.

and if you really respect public input, you have to have reports in sufficient time to allow the public to give you informed comment so that we're not all scattering around trying to read stuff at 4:00 on a friday afternoon and finally up on the website. so i ask you to redefine complicated cases and enforce the rule and staff be told if you can't get your stuff done, it's off the calendar. thank you. president olague: thank you. i see no additional members of the public in the audience, so therefore, public comment is closed. any other additional commissi commissioner comments? >> like to have everything stay

with the rules. >> if i may, ms. hester keeps bringing up the issue and staff has because the rules don't define what a complicated case is, it is basically been our determination to figure out something that is big enough to have two weeks in advance. and we do that early with the i.r. documents and other large documents of that sort, but i guess i would leave it to you to tell us if you are getting your documentation far enough in advance. commissioner moore: not always, i would say. i think it's a mix and match. it is partially because of of a push on the calendar and accelerate things without following the same identical rule each time. i am not opposed to taking some closer definition of what a large case is. but i am not quite sure it is as

extensive as ms. hester is describing. i am prepared to leave that open and add it with an asterisk of what is the meaning of complicated case and spend a little bit more time thinking about instead of just reacting. i would -- commissioner miguel: it is not defined in the rules. which is all right with me. president olague: we have a conversation about that here. commissioner moore: we might want to discuss that a little bit further. secretary avery: commissioners, i have a feeling that i am probably the only one who is here with the discussion of the creation of complicated cases standards, etc., and the commission had a discussion on what constituted the complicated case. they did not ever put that in their rules and basically it was on the size of the document that came through and the size of the project that was being proposed. and again, it was never ep caps

lated in the -- it was never encapsulated in the rules and regulations and you don't have a definition. and if no one was here, it would be hearsay if i came up with the paper from the hearings and it is hearsay from me on what they believe their definition of complicated cases were. so i think it would be timely for you to have that discussion. president olague: great. perfect. we'll calendar it. >> but we're going to go ahead and adopt these. commissioner miguel: i would move we adopt with the changes we have discussed, which i think secretary has duly noted. >> second. >> thank you. commissioners, would you like me to restate this? or are we -- go over them all? president olague: no. >> commissioners, the motion on the floor is to adopt the rules and regulations as they have been discussed and changed today.

[roll call taken] >> thank you, commissioners. that motion has been approved unanimously. commissioners, you are now at general public comment. at this time, members of the public may address you on items to the public that fall within the jurisdiction of the commission. each member of the public may address you for up to 3 minutes, keeping in mind they may not address you on any item that appears on this calendar. i have no speaker cards. olague is there any general public comment? seeing none, general -- secretary avery: before you close the public comment, i know i am a commission secretary to you and i just want to thank all of you for your kind cards and expressions during the past month. president olague: we missed you and are glad to see you back. with that being said, our meeting is adjourned. thank you.

>> there has been an acknowledgement of the special places around san francisco bay. well, there is something sort of innate in human beings, i think, that tend to recognize a good spot when you see it, a spot that takes your breath away. this is one of them. >> an icon of the new deal. >> we stood here a week ago and we heard all of these dignitaries talk about the

symbol that coit tower is for san francisco. it's interesting for those of us in the pioneer park project is trying to make the point that not only the tower, not only this man-built edifice here is a symbol of the city but also the green space on which it sits and the hill to which is rests. to understand them, you have to understand the topography of san francisco. early days of the city, the city grows up in what is the financial district on the edge of chinatown. everything they rely on for existence is the golden gate. it's of massive importance to the people what comes in and out of san francisco bay. they can't see it where they are. they get the idea to build a giant wooden structure. the years that it was up here, it gave the name telegraph hill. it survived although the structure is long gone. come to the 1870's and the city has growed up remarkably.

it's fueled with money from the nevada silver mines and the gold rush. it's trying to be the paris of the west. now the beach is the suburbs, the we will their people lived on the bottom and the poorest people lived on the top because it was very hard getting to the top of telegraph hill. it was mostly lean-to sharks and bits of pieces of houses up here in the beginning. and a group of 20 businessmen decided that it would be better if the top of the hill remained for the public. so they put their money down and they bought four lots at the top of the hill and they gave them to the city. lily hitchcock coit died without leaving a specific use for her bequest. she left a third of her estate for the beautify indication of the city. arthur brown, noted architect in the city, wanted for a while to build a tower. he had become very interested in persian towers. it was the 1930's.

it was all about machinery and sort of this amazing architecture, very powerful architecture. he convinced the rec park commission that building a tower in her memory would be the thing to do with her money. >> it was going to be a wonderful observation place because it was one of the highest hills in the city anywhere and that that was the whole reason why it was built that high and had the elevator access immediately from the beginning as part of its features. >> my fear's studio was just down the street steps. we were in a very small apartment and that was our backyard. when they were preparing the site for the coit tower, there was always a lot of harping and griping about how awful progress was and why they would choose this beautiful pristine area to do them in was a big

question. as soon as the coit tower was getting finished and someone put in the idea that it should be used for art, then, all of a sudden, he was excited about the coit tower. it became almost like a daily destination for him to enjoy the atmosphere no matter what the politics, that wasn't the point. as long as they fit in and did their work and did their own creative expression, that was all that was required. they turned in their drawings. the drawings were accepted. if they snuck something in, well, there weren't going to be any stoolies around. they made such careful little diagrams of every possible little thing about it as though

that was just so important and that they were just the big frog. and, actually, no one ever felt that way about them and they weren't considered something like that. in later life when people would approach me and say, well, what did you know about it? we were with him almost every day and his children, we grew up together and we didn't think of him as a commie and also the same with the other. he was just a family man doing normal things. no one thought anything of what he was doing. some of them were much more highly trained. it shows, in my estimation, in the murals. this was one of the masterpieces. families at home was a lot more

close to the life that i can remember that we lived. murals on the upper floors like the children playing on the swings and i think the little deer in the forest where you could come and see them in the woods and the sports that were always available, i think it did express the best part of our lives. things that weren't costing money to do, you would go to a picnic on the beach or you would do something in the woods. my favorite of all is in the staircase. it's almost a miracle masterpiece how he could manage to not only fit everyone, of course, a lot of them i recognized from my childhood -- it's how he juxtaposed and managed to kind of climb up that stairway on either side very much like you are walking

down a street. it was incredible to do that and to me, that is what depicted the life of the times in san francisco. i even like the ones that show the industrial areas, the once with the workers showing them in the cannery and i can remember going in there and seeing these women with the caps, with the nets shuffling these cans through. my parents had a ranch in santa rosa and we went there all summer. i could see these people leaning over and checking. it looked exactly like the beautiful things about the ranch. i think he was pretty much in the never look back philosophy about the coit. i don't think he ever went to visit again after we moved from telegraph hill, which was only

five or six years later. i don't think he ever had to see it when the initials are scratched into everything and people had literally destroyed the lower half of everything. >> well, in my view, the tower had been pretty much neglected from the 1930's up until the 1980's. it wasn't until then that really enough people began to be alarmed about the condition of the murals, the tower was leaking. some of the murals suffered wear damage. we really began to organize getting funding through the arts commission and various other sources to restore the murals. they don't have that connection or thread or maintain that connection to your history and your past, what do you have? that's one of the major elements of what makes quality of life in san francisco so incredible.

when people ask me, and they ask me all the time, how do you get to coit tower, i say you walk. that's the best way to experience the gradual elevation coming up above the hustle and bustle of the city and finding this sort of oasis, if you will, at the top of the hill. when i walk through this park, i look at these brick walls and this lawn, i look at the railings around the murals. i look at the restoration and i think, yeah, i had something to do with that. learning the lessons, thank you, landmarks meet landmarks. the current situation at pioneer park and coit tower is really based in public and private partnership. it was the citizens who came together to buy the land to keep it from being developed.

it was lily hitchcock coit to give money to the city to beautify the city she loved of the park project worked to develop this south side and still that's the basis of our future project to address the north side.

>> good morning. today is july 20, 2011. this is the regular meeting of the building inspection committee. the first item on the agenda is roll-call. [roll call] we have a quorum. the next item on the agenda is president's announcement. >> good morning. for those in the chamber, welcome to the monthly meeting of the building commission.

i would also like to mention some of what dbi has accomplished in the past few months, especially the newly established boys scheduling system, where customers can call the number and schedule those inspections. both dbi and staff, and volunteers, handed out brochures and answered questions during the chinese februarynew n february, and during cinco de mayo. this new system will help facilitate a lot of questions and provide a higher level of service to the scity.