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supervisor kim: we are just waiting for sfgov tv to get started. >> is good afternoon and welcome to the special rules committee. i'm joined today by supervisors and david campos and supervisor

farrell. are there any announcements? >> please make sure to turn off all sell funds and all electronic devices. all documents to be cleared up as part of the file should be submitted to the clerk. all actions on today's agenda will be on march 4. supervisor kim: could you call items #one and two together? >> ordinance amending the campaign in governmental conduct code and municipal election code to modify expenditure ceilings for the city is public financing program, and to amend at the date on which candidates must file the papers. item number two, a motion submitted to the voters of the rising the amendments of the

campaign and the government will conduct code and minutes elections code to add just expenditure ceilings in the public financing program in response to the supreme court ruling in paris on a free enterprise obverses bennett, just public financing deadlines and threshold and advance canon that filing deadlines that an election to be held on june 5, 2012. supervisor kim: the two items before us are largely is similar. one of them i introduced with supervisor campos and avalos. this was in response to an arizona court ruling, a case periled a trigger that allows for more public financing dollars ticket to a candidate in response to a third-party independent expenditures was now considered unconstitutional

under the first amendment freedom of speech. while many of us on the board disagree with a final ruling the supreme court had decided, it does impact the public financing program we have put together in this city and county of san francisco. i want to acknowledge that a supervisor farrell and supervisor elsbernd where the first to bring this to the attention of the board. i do want to make sure we spend some time working with community groups and those who work together to put together the first city public financing program and our ethics commission to put together something that was a little more comprehensive. the second item is an initiative ordinance to get the balance -- to the ballot on june of 2008. both measures are similar and i can go over the brief differences between the two, but in case we are not able to pass this through the board, because

this program is so important to many of my colleagues who want to ensure there is another mechanism that we can make these changes to the public financing program if we are not able to do it as an ordinance. briefly, i want to acknowledge that john is here from the ethics commission. since october, we have had this measure go through the ethics commission i believe twice. we were able to get a lot of good feedback from community advocates who have been working on public financing for many years and are ethics commissioners. i'm happy with what is coming before us today. some of the main changes we're seeing is that we are raising the qualification for any candidate running for board of supervisors from $5,000 to $10,000 in campaign contributions from at least 100 san francisco residents. we also want to raise the bar for incumbents so they have a higher bart to qualify so any

incumbent supervisor candidate will have to raise at least $15,000 from 150 city residents. candidates for mayor would be kept to the same bar, but in -- an incumbent mayor would be required to collect at least 75,000 from 750 residents. in terms of the availability of the funds, the city would it -- would disperse them to can't it's no earlier than 142 days before election. we heard many constituents who are concerned about canada to that taken public financing, particularly in the mayoral race because they felt they could not drop out once the full field of candidates were revealed. we want to ensure candidates did not stay in the race because they were publicly financed and would not have stayed on to take on city funds.

we changed it from february until one week after the filing deadline, which would insure and its filing with no abrupt of the candidates running and could make a decision at that point and want to continue to be eligible to be public financed candidates. for the november general election, this eligibility date would fall in mid june. there are an number of other changes made. one was that we would no longer be doing one to four matches. we have reduced that down to two. the last change we made was that candidates to run for the board of supervisors and mirror would be required to file nomination documents 146 days before elections. after some consideration, we

thought was important to move the filing date to june so there would be more certainty for candidates who were running and for any serious candidate, they should be able to declare at an earlier date and set a more concrete pool of candidates in terms of competition for the november race. i have no further comments. i want to allow supervisor campos to say some words and i would ask john from the ethics commission to say some words or answer questions from my colleagues. >> thank you very much, madame chair. i would like to begin by thanking you and your staff who have been working on this for quite some time and for bringing item one forward i'm proud to be a co-sponsor of that item and i would like to think hillary in my office to has been working with me on this for

quite some time and i want to thank all of the people who have been involved in these issues. thank you for your commitment to this issue and while i recognize there are differences of opinion on something like this in terms of some members of the board, i think we have been a model for how to the public financing and i think it is something we should be very proud of. i want to thank supervisors farrell and elsbernd. even though we have differences of opinion and how to do it, they're raising the issue was important as the chair of the committee indicated. one of the goals of the two proposals is to make sure that we do comply with that ruling

and the chair has done an excellent job outlining the reasons behind these proposals and with respect to the second proposal, which is something that could go to the ballot, i hope is there will not be a neat for that to happen and we will be able to collectively agree to something that achieves the various objectives that have been outlined and that there will not be a neat to move ford, but we want to make sure we have that option. as the chair of the committee indicated, there's a significant difference between item #2 and item number one and that is the issue of the soft cap. under version one, candidates can raise private money if a privately financed candidates or independent expenditure

committee spends above the spending cap. version two has a hard spending cap for publicly financed candidates and raises the cap higher. i do not feel too strongly about either approach. i included the hard cap in the version we introduced because i feel spending caps in these kinds of races can have a positive effect. if you look at the amount of money involved, having a cap serves a purpose, but i understand why supervisor kim has chosen a soft cap to level the playing field for all candidates in the event other candidates have more access to

larger sums of money, so i am supportive of either version and i think the general approach is very similar. i look forward to us having a resolution of these issues and in the days of the superpac at looking at what is happening at the federal level, we should be proud we have a system that levels the playing field and some -- and supplies everyone in san francisco, irrespective of their ability to raise money to be involved in local politics and i think that's a very good thing. the changes proposed in these two items are changes that go in conjunction with the other

proposal that goes with ranked joyce voting and provides a good government perspective approach to making sure we have as open and transparent a democratic process as possible, so i'm very proud of that work. i would like to thank all my colleagues and i look forward to the discussion. supervisor kim: if i could call up the ethics commission to make a few comments. >> good afternoon, supervisors. thank you for having me here. i'm the director of the ethics commission. a chair person can has outlined the net and bolts of the legislation and i would just like to say the first proposal has the full it backing of the

ethics commission. we sought and got quality public input into this. i think it was a good process to come out with a measure that faces the unpleasant realities of recent supreme court binding's which we do not care for but must live with but also preserves the integrity of the public finance system and it's a good one and i believed staff as an excellent job of administering. it we have realistically look at all of the numbers and the structure makes some housekeeping changes, but the important thing is we preserve the integrity of the program and it kept it attractive to candidates because without participation, it doesn't mean much. i will leave it for any questions that you have.

>> i know one of the issues we talked about was the actual number for the ceiling for the board of supervisors. i wonder if you could speak briefly to those numbers? >> the board of supervisors races, we have races going back to 2002. we have a lot of numbers to look at and be an proximate increase from a cycle to cycle, projecting that ford, what it is going to cost to run a viable supervisor program -- for the mayor, we only have one race which does not produce empirical evidence, but we took the empirical numbers from the board and tried to use at as an indicator of what does it cost to run a viable when mayor's race with the idea of public financing is trying to reduce

the overall money. what does it take to run and when and how can we keep that at a minimum while maintaining attractiveness to can't it? so based on what we passed -- what we know and transparent -- and applying this to the mayor's race. >>supervisor kim: i do think its important we keep this two viable candidates. one of the things was to allow can't its spending more time to talk to voters, engaging constituents as opposed to spending an immense amount of time fund-raising, which you already have to do, and i think that was an important part of this and we did not pick the highest ceiling we could have in terms of the amount of dollars but we were able to select a

number that was a reasonable average that will allow candidates to compete competitively without the fear of an immense amount of independent expenditure dollars flowing into the race, preventing them from winning potentially. i want to thank the ethics commissioners and the staff for working closely with us for the past five months. thank you. if there are no further questions, i will open up for public comment. we did not collect cards for this. please step up and we will give two minutes. >> a good afternoon. i have lived in san francisco for 60 years. i would like to speak out in support of both measures, but as usual, i have my concerns.

rather than having the previous speaker speaking on those two issues, i thought it was more legitimate to have mr. oliver speak on these two issues. unfortunately he is alone with the ethics commission and i would like to know why whistle- blowers' suddenly lose their jobs. second, one item that should be considered is a sign that residency statement by all candidates, especially by incumbents. let's put this way. that ethics commission has not given a written opinion as to a 2008 written complaint regarding eight residencies date controversy about a sitting supervisor. you tell me it takes that long to put that in motion? you read between the lines and figure out what is really going on.

second, there should be some sort of discussion about the mayor of writing a regular column for the examiner. in my opinion, that is too cozy a relationship and how can the examiner honestly criticized the mayor when he is on board as one of their regular columnist? the last thing i would like to question is when somebody has a large campaign debt and tries to go to functions to pay down the debt, and laid my book and in the books of many other people, that is simply influence peddling. call it whatever you want. thank you. supervisor kim: thank you. >> i'm not sure if two minutes is sufficient. i expected these items to be called separately. first of all, i think these two

ordnances both potentially violate the single subject rule because they mix the campaign finance programs with changes to the code with respect to the nomination. i believe that fairly strongly. i also think in terms of procedure, where the ethics commission takes a vote on a matter, they should communicate in writing to the board of supervisors with their vote is and not have that merely be reflected by a line in the city's attorneys digest of legislation. they should communicate formally to that and. -- to that end. i'm not concerned with the particulars, i tend to favor the soft cap at i would have eased slightly different numbers, but i think this goes a distance to fixing the thing and making it work. i can live with all that. i want to focus on the municipal election code and the potential

change any they want to follow- up on this, moving back the deadline date 58 days, almost two months to early june has the effect of commingling aspects of a june and november elections that do not exist. now the june election is done and put to bed, the best can't settle at least for with the november election. this moves the deadline so close as to require the department of elections to be verifying signature at the same time they are conducting the canvas. it is confusing to others and i think it is problematic and there are other ways to address these so-called zombie candidate issue and other ways to ensure the pool of candidates is to be done at that time when the public financing program starts. supervisor kim: can you talk about other ways to address the

zombi can't issue? -- these on the candidate issue? >> as it is now, having a the qualification for the public finance program, it could be in may, it could be in july or august, would have -- could also have a similar effect of being known who is in the pool and having a further commission meeting in the advent they terminate their candidacy to have the funds be surplus at that time and return them to the city with a hierarchy of payback and that would intend -- that would tend to discourage candidates who don't have a possibility of winning. on the change to the filing

deadline, it would affect not just candidates for mayor and board of supervisors, but the school board, the d.a., etc. under one version of the legislation, item one not what i believe take effect this year. it does not delay the implementation or effective date of that provision until 2013. we would not know, for example, the results of the dccc contest which would not be known until potentially after the filing deadline for certain offices. supervisor kim: thank you. >> thank you for giving me the time. >> thank you. i support both of these measures and hope you will pass them on to the full board of supervisors. particularly if you are able to

pass the major that went to the ethics commission. it is important for san francisco to continue its leadership in developing innovative campaign finance rules that help support a fundamental principle of our democracy, which is that voters should be represented by their elected representatives and it is worthwhile to remove or reduce the distractions and barriers that can prevent that from happening. unfortunately, the recent supreme court ruling has added to those distractions and barriers. it is also important to adjust the rules based on actual experience and make sure the rules are effective but not wasteful. deferring any payments of matching funds until all candidates have been nominated is a reasonable and effective way to let can't test the waters while preserving an option for them to withdraw from the contest. raising the qualifications will

still allow competition while avoiding candidates who are barely able to get a start. in addition to the review the ethics commission gave the first item, i think it is important to note their review by the comptroller found are no additional costs associated with these measures, so i hope he will approve them and help move san francisco forward. supervisor kim: thank you. >> a good afternoon. i live and work in san francisco and i would like to voice my support for both proposals before the committee today. i think both should be passed with a preference for the proposal coming from a non- partisan ethics commission. san francisco's public financing system is a strong system and the change in both proposals

would make the good system even better. these are common sense and straightforward changes that would make a number of improvements to various aspects of the system. it will bring the law into compliance with the recent supreme court ruling about triggers and increase the funds can't receive and will compensate for the supreme court changed and it's also good in its own right with the increase in expenditures. it will address these offbeat candidate issue we saw and the last mayor's race and it is worth noting budget analysts found there would be no fiscal impact to both measures, so it will have no additional costs. this is a when-when situation and there is something in it for everyone. i encourage you to pass these proposals and i encourage the board to pass the proposal

coming from the ethics commission. thank you. >> thank you. good afternoon. i am a resident of san francisco and a small business owner. i am here to speak in support of the ethics commission's proposal. the first thing to note is that it is coming from the ethics commission, a non-partisan body putting this forward as a proposal with no apparent vested interest. second, it sets a higher bar for serious candidates while still being reasonable in terms of the of mouth of money they have to raise before they are matched. third, it gives a chance for candidates who are not serious to get out without penalty. the most important point would

be that clearly, ranked choice of voting works better with fewer candidates. there's a good chance we will be keeping ranked choice of voting, so let's have at work as well as possible. i urge you to vote yes on this proposal and urge your colleagues to the same at the full board. thank you. >> i am here on behalf of california common cause. yesterday's cut we e-mail letter detailing our support of these commission measures, which i hope you have received. promoting and preserving public financing is a priority as allows candidates to focus on constituents and represents a safeguard against a special- interest takeover. the ethics commission proposal

will strengthen the public finance system and that this would be at no extra cost to taxpayers. positive changes include minimizing some of the candidates, complying with the supreme court ruling and providing more for candidates to compensate for this ruling. these measures are straightforward and respectful of public money and the ethics commission is a trustworthy and reliable source. i hope this will be a no- brainer. common cause urges you to support these proposals and reinforce this important democratic system. >> we did get your letter. thank you for that. >> good afternoon, supervisors. we are a national political