with a contract with language line. anyone can see the sign that the offer which services are available and 100 different languages. we hired interpreters when we need to to provide translation services for those that need it to. >supervisor chu: on that last point about interpreters available at board meetings, i wanted to clarify, is the translation service one direction or is it two directions? especially for permit appeals cases, is important members of the public there can understand what your members are saying but also be able to communicate their own thoughts to individuals. i'm wondering, it is their translation for when people make public comment to your board and also providing translation for what you're board is saying to members of the public?

>> it is two directional. primarily, the interpreters we hire are parties to the appeal. usually, we do not know who will come to public comment, but they will usually bring someone. either a community organizer will be in there, or a friend, or family member, to help them transit. what -- translate. if we knew that there would be a need for translation services, we could provide it. certainly, in a two-way manner. supervisor chu: and that would require devices for individuals to hear? >> we have tried that. certainly, we would be willing to try again. we have some technical difficulties. i remember one time we used it, we had 1 people on the son of a room had the speaker speaking to them live. we can do what we need to do so that people and the hero have

time for translation. if they need to wait for the translation, they are accustomed to doing that. supervisor chu: i would love to follow up with you on this point in particular. we would be for the permit appeals board and there were language issues about that. people knew that there was going to pay a large group of folks there who would be limited english speakers. i want to make sure we are ensuring a fair process because it is the permit appeals board, and that makes sense for us to do. >> that concludes my presentation. happy to answer any questions. supervisor chu: this is one of the first time that we have a budget analyst report. we thought it was important to ride a quick analysis of the department's budget. this is the first part of a two- year budget. what to set a good time to make sure that all departments are covered. >> madam chair, members of the committee, the department's budget actually only increases by only $9,000 in the first year

and then another $14,000 the next year. we do not have any recommended reductions for you on this proposed budget. supervisor chu: thank you for the presentation. moving on. rent board. >> chair, supervisors, the executive director of the rent board. i'm sure it'll come to no surprise to you that we concur with the recommendations of the budget analyst, because there were none. in response to the question that you posed to us, this is the first year of the rent board's two-year budget. so we will be seeing you at this time next year.

the major expenses for 2012, 13, 14, we expect to remain the same. our proposed budget for 12-13 is approximately $6 million, an increase of 0.8% from this fiscal year. that is due to mandated celebrate increases and -- salary increases and fringe benefits. the balance for the following year is 6.2, an increase of 0.65%. the major source of revenue for the rent board is the rental unit feet, which appears on the landlord's property tax bill. a landlord gets billed for the feet and then they can collect half of the fee from the tenant. the fee has been, for the past four years -- and we anticipate will remain -- $29 for apartment units, $14.50 for residential hotel units from the tenant. the fee is calculated every year

by the comptroller's office, based on the final budget that you approve for us. that is - any carried forward funds. so that reduces the amount of budget and these to be reduced by the feet. we have some carryover funds that we anticipate from the current fiscal year. that is usually generated because there are mandatory rounding up to the next full dollar if the comptroller figures out that we need $28.29 to fund our budget, it gets rounded up to $29. that gives us a bit of surplus that we carry forward, along with any collection that exceed the delicacy rates factored in. and we have some expense savings. in this current year, we did not expect all of our city attorney budget. we never know in advance how many people are going to sue us. it is pretty difficult to calculate, but there will be carried forward funds again this year that will reduce the amount of the rental unit feet, because of the slight increase, we

would've had to increase the fee. i also provided additional information in response to supervisor chu's request regarding departmental staffing levels and workload statistics for all of the units at the rent board over the past few years. if you look at the submission that i provided you, we have an organizational chart that is an attachment, and it shows that we currently have 28.5 fte's. in 2008-2009, we reduced our number of administrative law attorney judge staff. they were reduced from 10 to 9.5. we currently have one until -- unfilled alaj position. we will look at our workload

issues and see if we will work that position. currently we have an unfilled clerical position. because our petition is a ticking at the rate of 28% over last year, we do have a pending requisitions to fill the position. at the top of page two, we have a chart showing the total number of petitions filed that the rent board for the last five years. you can see there was a temporary downturn in fiscal year 2009, 10, but in the current fiscal year 11-12, we are seeing an increase of 25% over last year. this was predictable. we are very recession impact and, as are the previous department that you just heard from. in order for these to make sense to you, there is boring concept to have to explain. my apologies. utility pass through petitions. at the rent board in 2004, our

commission required that landlords had to file petitions if they wanted to impose a pg&e pass through. we have heard several landlords were not doing it correctly. these petitions usually did that go to hearing unless the staff found something that were in them, but they did need to have decisions issued by the administrative law judge staff. our alj staff was spending a tremendous amount of time and resources figure out these utility pass-throughs for basically de minimus announced. in 2009, people felt that people brought to the board's attention that people have been trained. this was a successful effort and landlords were really mostly doing this calculation correctly. there was an amendment to our rules and regulations in 2009 that said landlords to not have to file petitions except for

every five years. that is why when you looked at this chart, you see the great out part for utility pass through petitions, which have been going down tremendously because there are no longer required except for every five years, whereas the regular partitions -- petitions have been going up, this year over last year, after a downturn in 09-0. the fact that our alj's are not cranking out these petitions, that has allowed us to dip into a large backlog that we had accumulated over the years. all of our regular non-utility commissions -- petition to go to hear before administrative law judge. as you can see at the top of page 3, the amount of time that it takes for individuals who filed petitions to get hearings has been reduced dramatically.

whereas it used to take 119 days, it is now and down to 63 days in this current fiscal year, which is almost a 100% improvement. basically, four months, which i was embarrassed about, is down to two months. we are basically providing much more timely, better service to the public for the same rental unit feet. nobel during that 2009 dipped in the workload, we ordered our alj to other city departments. we have a workload with the department of public works, litter and graffiti hearings, fine ordinance hearings for the planning department, department

of human services, we have done hearings for olse regarding minimum wage, prevailing wage. we received full recovery of the salaries and fringe benefits for our alj's conducting those hearings, so basically no tenants or landlords are paying for the services to other city departments. the city attorney is happy with it because they are highly skilled and will supervise. we also only do that when the workload permits. we will be taking an ongoing look at that as our petition filings have increased 25% this year over last year. we also have performance measures for the other units. in the administrative law judge, as you can see on the next chart, because the backlog is reduced and they are no longer doing these upt decisions brady to take them 28 days, we're down

to 13. after the hearing it used to take several days to get a decision issued. now it only takes about a month. at all levels of the process, timeliness has been greatly increased. another mentor we produce for performance measures is how long it takes for our clerical staff to produce reports of alleged wrongful eviction. that is important because evictions are so time sensitive. that has improved from 1.5 days, down to 1.2 days. i do not think they can do a much faster than that. additionally, our counseling staff, on the next page you will see the counter visits and counseling calls they get, from my staff that interacts with the public, basically in conjunction with the increase in petitions, the department is experiencing a similar increase in the number

of people who are calling and visiting the office for counseling. as to major department initiatives, we are enforcement agency, as you know. we enforce the rent apartments and rules and regulations. we are pretty static. we do not have tremendous, new initiatives to bring to you. basically, boring is good at the report. no new positions that we are requesting. as to summer youth, we are highly supportive of the mayor's effort to create summer jobs and opportunities. we have applied to the youth works program for summer interns. we will mentor that student to make sure they have an appreciation for public-service, good training, and at the bottom line, and they will learn about their rights as a tenant in san francisco. we will also ask the student to give us an evaluation at the end of their internship to see how we can improve.

it will be approaching it with fresh eyes. language access. the rent board has always been a tier 1 department for obvious reasons. we are very interested in making our services available to all members of the public. there is a chart here on page 5 that shows our documents in 06- 07, almost 600 transmitted documents. in 10-11, almost 400. it is very important to us, one of our performance measures. over 160 pages of an permission in chinese and spanish. we have staff with language skills. we made a special condition from our last higher that the applicant -- counselor be cantonese speaking. two of our clerical staff speaks vietnamese, mandarin, and cantonese. when there is not a staff member available with the necessary language skills, we also

contract with language line, and all of our staff are trained on how to get interpreters in over 170 different languages. we provide interpreters for any language when a party requires such assistance. we also have not reached agreements with six nonprofits to provide broader not reach and multi legal pot reached to organizations around the city. we are obviously committed to fulfilling the requirements of the lao, making sure that all limited english proficient members can fully access our services. supervisor chu: 400 documents translated sounds like an awful lot of documents. do we really have that many materials produced? is it simply that you have one document translated into multiple languages. >> no, almost every document at

the rent board has been translated. this measure will not keep going up. we have pretty much translated everything. we even have some material available in hindi. the desk clerks speak those languages, and does not do much help if they do not understand what it says. that one is in seven languages. supervisor chu: to reconcile some of the numbers i see, you showed two charts. another showed the number of non-utility pass through petitions over a period of time. on page three, you show the number of petitions filed scheduled for hearing and mediation. those numbers do not necessarily match. the question is, are we experiencing a continual backlog, or is it that some of the cases do not require hearing and mediation? >> utility pastor did not get

scheduled for mediation. it required a decision but did not go to hearing. >supervisor chu: even if i look at the total non-upt numbers, only 868 were scheduled for hearing and mediation on your next chart. so there is a gap, even if i take out the utility pass through items. >> i'm sorry, we are looking at the chart on the top of page 3 and 2. supervisor chu: looking at fiscal year 2006-2007, 1041 non- utility pass through petitions. in terms of the chart on page three, you only scheduled hearing and mediation for a time in 68 of them. i'm wondering if that means you are growing a backlog of cases that were not heard, or simply that they were either dropped, what happened? >> some cases are withdrawn

prior to hearing, some are settled. and we did have a backlog going in. supervisor chu: what about now? >> we have burned through the backlog. alj's are not busy writing utility pastor decisions. that is why our timeliness in terms of scheduling hearings and getting decisions out has income -- increased tremendously, even though they are all doing the same number of decisions. supervisor chu: given your increase in caseload, it drops for a period of time, but it appears to be coming back up. we do not want to be in the situation again were you do not create a large backlog -- where you create a large backlog. i know you talk about the potential alj position being filled. are there any strategies or ideas to bring in retired alj's to help with caseload? >> the excellent question.

in october, if you look at this trend -- it is difficult to forecast -- but we can evaluate that. we do not believe we will have the backlog situation created again because we are not doing the upt's, which was a burden on our staff. we can maintain this caseload with the current staff we have. if these numbers keep going in this direction, i believe we'll will have to fill the vacant position. i agree, i do not want to go back to the bad old days. supervisor chu: in terms of work orders for other departments, when you have alj's with capacity, you are giving them to other departments to help with capacity. do you expect that to continue? >> it depends on the numbers. we have always made it clear to other departments, our caseload comes first. this is only as a workload permits. supervisor chu: thank you. let's go to >> the budget

analysts greater than greater than on this recommendation -- let's go to the budget analyst report. >> we have no additional recommendations on this. in both cases, those increases are largely salary increases and fringe benefits. we did not feel there was anything that we could recommend to you to cut. supervisor chu: thank you for the presentation and for thoroughly addressing the issues i had about staffing and caseload. i appreciate the information. colleagues, if we have no other questions, can we entertain a motion to continue on items one, too, and 3 until tomorrow? ok, we have a motion to continue the items here we will take public comment tomorrow. do we have any other items today? >> that completes the agenda. supervisor chu: thank you.

we are adjourned.

>> there are kids and families ever were. it is really an extraordinary playground. it has got a little something for everyone. it is aesthetically billion. it is completely accessible. you can see how excited people are for this playground. it is very special. >> on opening day in the brand- new helen diller playground at north park, children can be seen swinging, gliding, swinging, exploring, digging, hanging, jumping, and even

making drumming sounds. this major renovation was possible with the generous donation of more than $1.5 million from the mercer fund in honor of san francisco bay area philanthropist helen diller. together with the clean and safe neighborhood parks fund and the city's general fund. >> 4. 3. 2. 1. [applause] >> the playground is broken into three general areas. one for the preschool set, another for older children, and a sand area designed for kids of all ages. unlike the old playground, the new one is accessible to people with disabilities. this brand-new playground has several unique and exciting features. two slides, including one 45- foot super slide with an elevation change of nearly 30 feet. climbing ropes and walls, including one made of granite.

88 suspension bridge. recycling, traditional swing, plus a therapeutics win for children with disabilities, and even a sand garden with chines and drums. >> it is a visionary $3.5 million world class playground in the heart of san francisco. this is just really a big, community win and a celebration for us all. >> to learn more about the helen diller playground in dolores park, go to sfrecpark.org.