a lot of homeowners were often muni drivers. muni as a range of the economy is really important. at the same time, we really support this initiative. that we need to curb the expenditures. it is a huge opportunity creating part-time jobs. we can be creating job opportunities for folks. in this economy, it is really helpful. it meets the demand of greater efficiency and helps expand the strength of the union. we really encourage that there be collaboration moving forward. thank you. supervisor campos: thank you very much. is there any member of the public that would like to speak on this item? seeing none, public comment is closed. i want to thank the mta for their presentation and for their honest assessment. i think that it is one of the things that is quite refreshing

and welcoming when it comes to director reskin. he has not been afraid to the knowledge where there is need for improvement and recognizes that the only way you will improve as if you recognize that you have problems that you can do better. it is important what we said in public comment, the issue of overtime, from my perspective, is more of a management issue. it requires that we were collectively not only within management but with labor partners. the workers will be there, they will do the work that they are asked to do. it is a question of how that work is allocated and how that money is managed. i know that twu has been a good partner and will continue to be a good partner. we will look forward to the collaboration. it is a resolution before the committee. i wonder if we could have a motion to move forward with

recommendations and we will introduce a hearing in the future so we can come back to this item in the very near future to see how muni is performing. motion, without objection. if we can take a short break, we will be right back. supervisor campos: we're back. madam car, can you call item no. 4? >> hearing on the budget and legislative analyst's performance audits. supervisor campos: great, thank you. if we can call upon the office of the budget and legislative analyst for the presentation. thank you for your patience and waiting. >> good afternoon, chair campos

and president chiu. we have a very brief presentation. it has been a long morning, so we will go over the highlights of the audit and we will be available for questions and responses that you would like from us. i want to introduce the audit team. harrison and smith, they're representatives. we selected this topic -- it was approved by the motion of the board. the consultation of the comptroller's office in the office of human resources. some of the issues -- the audit supports the concept that workers should be compensated for taking on special duties. the audit is not questioning if these types of pay are

appropriate. the audit did not look at the rate to see if it was appropriate. we specifically looked at how the department's implemented be paid. -- the pay. there was supervisory differentials -- presentation. and we looked at the departments that had the highest use of the pay as well as doing a survey of the city departments. our recommendations, we estimated would save $1.4 million annually. the board approved $300,000 of those savings during this year's budget review. there are 33 different mlu's covering these types of pay. it covers 52 different departments, not surprising that there are a lot of inconsistencies and imipractices -- impractices in application

implementation. lead worker pay is when a worker gets compensated for supporting a supervisor. there is a large geographic area for other reasons. if you look at the cost, $3 million annually. the public health has the largest cost. a lot of this is for nurse pay. the lead pay provisions and mlu's the charge nurse provision must specifically defines the responsibilities. the other departments are mta, public works -- they account for most of the costs city-wide. the city does not have policies for how the lead worker is applied. the mlu's are not specific

enough to serve as guidelines on how to implement the pay category. other than the charge, the second highest category is for the -- it is $1.3 million annually. the with the language in the mlu's state it, you get lead worker pay retailing, estimating, ordering materials. or you take the lead over another employee. how this gets interpreted, it varies by department. some department, any time there are two workers in the same classification, even if they are not necessarily performing in a specific duty, -- any specific duty, we saw this and several provisionin several provisions,s

inconsistent. on the other hand, her redesigning, sketching, etc. even if there was no lead responsibility for one employee, they would get the lead pay. they were not supervising anybody, but they were given lead for assigning these duties. the same language was often in the job description so it looked more like core responsibilities of the position. so just generally, departments did not consistently have good definitions of what the responsibilities would be, how it should be assigned. these findings, recommendations were about $450,000 annually in

savings and the board has approved $300,000 of the $450,000. stand by pay is a larger cost to the city. the definition we have here is the one the department of human resources used, paid to employees when they are off duty and expected to respond to emergency incidents and be available for immediate emergency service. this is not how it is used in most instances in the city. stand by pay costs are $10 million in city wide. police had the highest costs for court procedures. these costs have come down by more than $1 million in the last several years. there have been mlu changes and scheduling changes. the cost to have come down somewhat, but the cost is still $10 million in city wide. -- the costs have come down

somewhat, but the cost is still $10 million city-wide. we found a standby was really hard to define -- in an emergency. during the course of the audit, they said this was not appropriate and eliminated stand by for this group. we found others, the local 21 mlu says specifically i.t. staff can be assigned stand by for communications and i.t. system.s you ds. uv i.t. stand by. -- you do need i.t. stand by. we got information on what some of the calls were for, fixing a

blackberry -- of the things that did not need to happen during off-hours. president chiu: how does that work? >> of lot of that is done remotely. [inaudible] >> different departments handled it differently. there are desk staff on an ardent of schedule and take the calls. -- on an alternative schedule and take the calls. stand by is provided to anyone answering questions at that time including help desk employees and senior engineers. they are able to fix many of these incrementally. the standby pay is for non-work hours. 168 hours a week, a 40-hour employee would get 128 hours of

standby. president chiu: wow. thank you. >> there were engineers making more than $30,000 a year just in standby pay. >> oh, i'll go back. >> one of the of the things is the type of classification departments that tried and manage the stand by because of budget reductions. we found that it was assigned in cases where it really wasn't needed. we looked at call-in, they never had been called in. there were questions where the city distribution division assigned two standby crews. we got maybe one standby crew was sufficient. there are two types of standby.

you can get 10% of your pay if you carry cellphone and a pager or 25% if you stand by your land line. most people don't stand by their land line. there was a group paid 25% because they were not given pagers and cell phones. president chiu: this is the department of technology? supervisor campos: you can't make this up. >> the other was the issue of high paid people on standby. there was confusion about the role of managers vs. the stand by staff. there were i.t. people making more than $30,000 a year, other categories of that. if you have standby for emergency services, you need someone to be the nuts and bolts. you're not looking at a high- level staff, you are doing planning and policy-making. the other thing was the

department of public health. they would be a manager on standby and not get standby pay because there was not a management agreement. the next would be a night manager, said there was confusion about who should be providing coverage. supervisor campos: going back to the issue of managers getting standby pay, and the report is now it's that there was a principal engineer making $128,000 that was getting standby pay on top of that. do you know what that individual is getting paid for? >> i would have to go back. there were a couple that you love? -- knew of? >> some of these people have highly specialized skills and not the higher ranks of the employees and local 21 as opposed to the managers. one of the questions here, cu ould an m.e.a. manager --

some of them have highly specialized skills that might be needed. the question is, how many people should we assign and over what period? supervisor campos: as a general rule, is a practice that managers don't get standby time? >> that is where the confusion was. they don't allow managers to get paid stand by. if it extends beyond the work day, if they have to come anin, they get some kind of administrative lead and compensation. at what point would you want a manager that is taking high level responsibility or you need someone who is not a management or not a principal engineer doing strategic planning for the it.i.t. systems to fix the probm

right then. i think that is what needed to reevaluated. managers do not in and of themselves serve stand by excepted the department of public health -- except in the department of public health. it was more that they really needed to clarify what the level of responsibility was. supervisor campos: thank you. >> there were a couple of interesting and very specialized situations. one owas with the mta. there is a 24 hour operation and within that is a unit to that response to light rail derailment. the people assigned to this emergency is within the transit division, individuals working on transit division responsibilities.

[inaudible] it is volunteer and they haven't determined what they need is. there are people that worked the evening shift and of the work the night shift. there are 17 people, and they get stand by for the hours that they are not regularly scheduled for their work. even the transit is scheduled around the clock. -- even though transit is scheduled around the clock. when we drafted over a brief period, we estimated over $30,000 for the emergency response units and they responded to less than 100 hours of incidents. some of the incidents did not require a response from the emergency response units.

our recommendation was to eliminate the stand by and revise the concept that they have this emergency response unit. assign them to the three shifts of round-the-clock and pay them a premium rather than stand by and it would result in significant savings and keep the service level of. up. with dph, the nursing supervisors get a 7% differential instead of having 24-hour responsibility for their units. these are clinical units. a lot of nurse managers and nursing supervisors are assigned to this, more than we thought was necessary. at san francisco general, the nurse receiving 7% pay, the supervisor was receiving it, there was a pyramid on the way down that was cascading -- we

thought it was more than necessary. the other concern, people were receiving the 7% differential for managing outpatient unit and things that are not 24-hour operations. it was an alternative that would be getting the extended-hour pay instead, but everybody was getting the higher pay. it is an extensive form of pay.a acting assignments, pretty straightforward. if they need to fill it, they will pay the 5% differential. we did not see many issues here other than when there were long- term assignments. employees could be under- compensated and the salaries of the position they were filling could be much higher than they were actually being paid for. the city was getting salary savings but the worker was not getting their full benefit. the acting assignment pay -- it

is integrated into the pay scale, so there was not a way for us to get the cost. supervisor differential pay, this is almost an institutional problem. it's a 5% differential -- if your pay range is not at least 5% higher, tehe pay raise that y raise of your subordinate class, you get a differential. supervisors are in different mlu's and the subordinate class. the transition line supervisor gets paid less than the transmission workers that they supervise. these are structural problems that need to be fixed in the mlu's. another one where we have a

disagreement with hr on this, the mccp. two managers of tehe same classification, one can be assigned to supervise the other and get paid a differential for doing that. we only saw one instance of that, but we did not like it. in part in iraq, one supervisor was getting a differential for supervising the other. we think it is inappropriate that the job description for the manager class, we thought it was inconsistent -- park and rec that was it, briefly. supervisor campos: thank you for the members of your staff for the great work that they did on the spot it. -- on this audit.

why don't i open it up to the departments that are here to respond to some of the findings? hear from the mta again -- again, i want to thank the department representatives that were waiting patiently during the hearing. ms. johnson, good to see you again. >> yes, it has been awhile. [laughter] once again, deborah johnson here to respond to the performance audit. when you look at the slide, what's to say that the agency took the recommendations and we actually responded to them in a very positive light. lee looked to eliminate redundancies and we put controls in place to improve the standby pay practices.

most recently, last month, i disseminated memoranda saying that anybody requesting standby pay, there will have to be a formal process that comes through the division director of sfmta so there is a global understanding of who is requesting that. and we can see if, in fact, that will be allowable. so far, we have had a significant reduction in standby pay. moving forward, some of the things that we have done if you look i.t. unit, we expanded business hours to get away from the standby pay aspect. we did on-call support during non-peak hours. which you referenced earlier talking about the department of technology, we did elimination of standby pay provision standarid provision -- we're don

internal audit of the sand by assignments, elimination of standby for positions. when we lifted the emergency response unit, there were 17 people on standby. i can't remember the exact number, but we are in the process of notifying those individuals. i am certain age is under test at this juncture. moving forward-- i am certain it is under 10 at this junc ture. we are going to audit to stand by hours every other pay period. as you can see, stand by durations beginning in fiscal year 2013, we are requesting for continued authorization that will be required at the beginning of each fiscal year. some people have been on standby

pay and they continued on and on. we will ensure that we streamline that as well. one important factor to bring out, when we look at the audit and reviewed it, we needed to shore up the policies. most high-level positions were eliminated resulting in reductionist and by pay for the whole agency. -- reductionsin standb in stan for the agency. it was eliminated across the board and that is where we got that reduction at 25%. going forward, we will continue to audit our policies and with the performance audit and the recommendation that we were able to further reduce the agency's standby pay by 25% in that area, too.

you concede a bar graph that shows how we decreased to that in reference to the cost savings we shored up. thank you for the opportunity to come before you and explain to you what we have done. supervisor campos: thank you for addressing this and the many changes that have already been made. is there anyone here from the department of public health? thank you again for waiting and for patienyour patience. >> good afternoon, i am the human resources director for the department of public health. the droctor asked the management team to the stand by peer review and we have set a goal for ourselves to reduce stand by days from 3.2 million to 2.4 million. we were able to reduce it by

$850,000. we also found other opportunities for reduction and we are doing quarterly -- it looks like we should be able to reduce a standby pay by another $200,000 for this fiscal year. supervisor campos: is there anything that the audit recommends that you disagree with? >> of the area that we discussed is the ability to reduce the standby pay and on-call premium that nurses and supervisors are receiving. staffing at those hospitals, we used to have that staff on every shift. the determination was made that it would be more cost-effective to only have one manager in each unit can be available at should incidents are rise in their units -- the department moved to this staffing model to increase our

efficiencies. we were able, looking at information in the audit -- we did eliminate the 24/74 managers, and restricted it to the lower premium for other managers. i think at this time, we are still looking to see whether we can make other efficiencies. we have created a fairly detailed log, so that we are able to track or the managers are being called, what the incidents are. often, it is patient care. a regulatory body has come to the hospital. there is a sentinel event that needs to be investigated. i think that would give us better data on further reductions in that area. chairperson campos: thank you. is there anyone here from dpw? how about human resources? i want to thank mr. grant for his patients, for waiting, and thank you for being here. >> martin grant, department of

human resources, employee relations division. the budget analyst audit had relatively few recommendations for department of human resources. one involved the definition of lead pay, an issue we visited with our labor partners. we try to ensure we are getting value for all our premiums. this has been sticky, because it has gone back so far in history. of course, we are in a collective bargaining environment in which we cannot dictate the terms of a contract. we will be proposing, in the next round, the new definitions for lead pay, which will hopefully set numbers as to minimum numbers of employees you have to supervise or direct, before you are eligible for the benefit, and to make sure we are not paying people for doing

what is already required as a minimum of their job duties. that is one. when the dust settles, we will know if we have changes, and what those changes are. we will produce guidelines for our department so we have uniformity across the department. we will also be issuing some guidelines in the stand by rome -- realm about duties which are primarily administrative in nature, which is already existing language. one of the things the audit showed is that departments are not defining consistently -- different departments are using different definitions of what is primarily administrative in nature. we will offer some guidance to departments. chairperson campos: right now, are there guidelines that govern lead pay or standby pay?