we are looking at relationships with colleges that teach language training. there is a lot we can do there. also, cross training and city- wide standards, so we do not have 26 departments doing it their way. eliminate the burger king approach to implementing a law. also, some contributions to centralized funding that you might want to consider. we are not talking about more funding because nobody has any money. but i think just a tiny redistribution of resources so that you can sustain these services. and again, centralized language services, which i will get into in a little more detail in a minute. i highly recommend a community needs assessment and increase participation, getting the community's voice here so we really hear what our residents need directly from them. this is just a snapshot of what we provide today from our small

language services unit, which is headed by isis. we provide translation interpretation services primarily for emergency situations, and that is 24/7. in addition, as that provided services for the recent budget town halls and all of the redistricting meetings. it is hard to sit through that and interpret a lot of complex information with a very small staff. the picture you see there of two individuals is exactly half of the team. we also provide technical assistance and city-wide training. we make the training mandatory. i think san francisco is the only jurisdiction that makes training language access mandatory. we often manage the city-wide telephonic language services contract currently held by language line.

we provide templates and tools. we access a clearing house for the creative things that other departments to around language access, and we provide direct services to our residents. they walk in all the time. we have the laborers, undocumented individuals, seniors who are in crisis who walk into our office, so we provide resident assistants. just to summarize, we have the capability in our office to do a lot more for apartments, but we lack the band with -- bandwidth. i hope you will consider it some solutions to that as your feedback from those departments. supervisor chiu: i want to thank you and say that i'm happy to consider additional amendments to the ordinance. maybe over the next few weeks, we can talk about what that could be. i would like to invite up

someone who represents an organization that has been on the forefront of leading on these efforts. vincent, you and your staff have been great. i know you have a presentation about some of the observations you have made in the last couple of years since the ordinance passage. >> thank you, supervisor. first, let me start by wishing you a happy asian-pacific islander heritage month. i think it is a good time to tapis something of particular ad unique importance to the asian american and pacific islander community. we have worked on language access issue " for over four decades, going back to the loud versus nichols supreme court case. we wanted to focus our remarks on some beans and some reactions for the supervisors to consider, as you hear from the various departments. first off, to give a little bit

of a sense of what the human impact is for san francisco residents, this is something we know very well because, to be honest, like many community- based organizations, we receive the phone calls. we receive the visits. we receive the requests for assistance when people are not able to communicate with their government, so i want to ask our policy advocate to share a small sampling of some of the incidents that are reported to us, and we have removed the names from this presentation for confidentiality purposes. >> i am the policy advocate at caa. i think most of this from our english speakers, it is easy for us to take for granted the ease with which we are able to move about the city, to ask for services, and to live our lives. we know our clients suffer from

a lack of language access to city services on a daily basis. these are some of the most compelling stories we have heard in our office. we have one client told us about her experience at san francisco general hospital. she rushed to the emergency room with sharp abdominal pain. she is an elderly chinese woman and his limited english proficient. 45 hours she was a san francisco general hospital, she never once received language support. she was unable to communicate christendom's and could not tell them how severe hurricane was, and they administered treatment without her being able to ask questions about what treatment she was receiving here five hours later, she was discharged and had a detailed information about what had caused her pain or what she should do next. in another hospital incident hospitalcaa -- in another incident, caa assisted a family with a 13-year-old son with a brain tumor. while he was recovering, he and his family would have eight to 10 hour periods with no language support.

after multiple days, he resorted to drawing pictures for the nurses. he drew pictures to indicate that he was in pain, that he was hungry, that he was nauseated. his family was frustrating, and they never had consistent language support. we also have a number of clients who have had trouble with city employment services. some of our clients have tried to seek city services to get help applying for jobs, to write resumes, or to receive training. when they went to the closest neighborhood city agency, they were handed in take forms that were only in english, and no one on staff could speak chinese. they were so frustrated, they vowed never to seek help from the city again. another employment we have is facing the decline we have is another single father in chinatown. -- another client we have is a single father in chinatown. the office could only speak to him in cantonese, and they only tried to speak to him in cantonese. no one in the office could follow-up in mandarin. he told us he waited months for

someone from the city office to call him back in mandarin. he was unemployed for almost a year and unable to support his young son. these last stories i want to share are probably the most severe. one of our parent leaders told us about something she witnessed in the chinese restaurant. a waiter had accidentally spilled hot oil on a young boy's arm, and the parents quickly called 911. no one in the restaurant could speak english, and the boys family had to wait and unreasonable 20 minutes for a dispatcher to on the line, and this delayed the ambulance, and the parents had to watch as their son's arm was burning up. our last line is it 50-year-old client of visitation valley. he was robbed and assaulted and tried chasing after the suspect, and he actually encountered a police officer, but he was unable to communicate with the officer to tell him what happened or let him know what direction the suspect was running. the suspect got away on foot, and the officer provided no

language support at all. the victim sustained permanent nerve damage to his face due to the assault and has suffered facial this figuration that made it difficult for him to find a job. those are some of the stories. >> supervisors, an additional thing to keep in mind is that this issue is not just for some san francisco residents. 14% of the city lives in what are called linguistically isolated households. households where there is no one over the age of 14 who speaks english well. 44%, nearly half of the city's residents, speak a language other than english at home, so it is a mistake to think about this as a special needs or special circumstance. this is the city. even for those who are fluent in english, i encourage you to think about this challenge in a different way -- at some basic level, we know that our schools, something i have heard all our

supervisors talk about -- that our schools work best if we have involve parents and good teachers, but when half of the parents are unable to communicate with the schools, is it reasonable to expect them to be able to be involved? on issues of public safety, if your house is being broken into, would you what your neighbor to be able to communicate with police so that officers could come? so much of san francisco is driven by small businesses, and many of these are led by individuals who are english- language learners or limited english proficient. their ability to access the city permitting process and to receive technical assistance would be improved if they had the language assistance, and that would be good for our city goes the economy as a whole. one last thing that i want to say on the importance of embracing language diversity is the city as the tourism industry. we know tourism is a fundamental part of san francisco's economy. yet, if you go to san francisco

airports or many of the tourist destinations, if you look at many of our venues and vehicles for getting votes to tourist destinations, very few of them offer information in multiple languages. i think that is a big challenge for the city as it seeks to compete with alternate destinations. last, even as the city is launching public/private partnerships overseas in countries like china, we could do so much better by having a city that embraces language diversity to attract these businesses. the recommendations that the office of civic the basement and immigrant affairs have but four are good. clean up amendments, compliance guidelines, and the centralization of some resources, but i think there is a fourth recommendation that i would urge you to consider. we know from our experience with government in general that very rarely can government do this work alone.

we can have many carrots. we can have many sticks, but at the end of the day, the opportunities to find ways to engage community in addressing these problems. i think community engagement and community partnership with many of the organizations that have been doing this work through the direct services, through their advocacy, through their organizing is perhaps the most untapped resource that we have. if we are to do this, i think we could provide both more independent monitoring, stronger technical assistance, very specific focus efforts on very specific needs. for example, in the russian- speaking community, and the tagalog speaking community. they are growing but maybe have not received the attention of language groups such as spanish and chinese. it would improve have -- how we think about language our reach. if we look at the success in a recent census -- san francisco was the only county in

california his senses participation rate went up from 10 years ago, and in large part because we deployed multi- lingual community members to be able to encourage all community members, regardless of language ability, to participate in the senses, and that got more resources to the city and county. lastly, an approach that engages the community, i think we have both a citywide and also department-specific experiment. ways to innovate, to see what could be done at each differ department and across the city that could be scaled up. giving departments and having the city overall lean into this issue -- in part because of the compliance issues and in part because of the rest, but also as a challenge to experiment, to be created, and to fully make sure that a government by the people, for the people, of the people really is communicating with its people. thank you very much. supervisor chiu: i want to thank

you both. just a couple comments on what you said. first of all, we definitely appreciate your point about the need to engage the community better. as i look out on the audience today, i see a room that i think is much more diverse than what we often see here in city hall, and i want to thank and welcome all of you here and hope we are able to engage our more diverse communities more frequently. i also see that we have translators in the room, which is also somewhat rare here at city hall. under this ordinance, we are required to provide translation, and all of our open meetings should have them, but oftentimes, folks do not know that or do not avail themselves of that. i think all of us certainly heard your horrifying stories you laid out, which i, frankly, had not heard before, and i want to ask the departments that can to present it occurred, if there were specific incidences that you read that may have involved your department, it could give us insight as to whether these were incidences' you knew about or if you did not know about it,

i hope that you are able to investigate that. one other thing i want to notice that the language access ordinance was designed through its scheduled to really provide the board of supervisors with information during the budget process, and, as i have discussed with my budget committee colleagues, language access and our budget is going to be one thing we will be asking our departments to brief us on when you come in front of us during the annual budget process. i would like to ask you to think about that because i do think we have to find more efficiencies in how we provide these services, but we also may need to think about how we expand the services. with that, again, thank you for your presentation. we have a number of departments with us today, and i know we have a lot of people in the room, so i would like to ask departments to make your presentations as we move forward. is jennifer here from oewd, or did she have to leave?

ok, what we move to -- i'm not sure if i see tonya peterson from the san francisco zoo. ms. peterson. >> thank you, president. san francisco zoological society, the nonprofit that manages the san francisco zoo. we are pleased to comment and report on the language access ordinance. i will comment briefly on the zoo's emergency language assets, and as vice president of education, mr. fitting will, on the broader efforts of the zoo to make it more accessible. due to our nonprofits that is, our plan has been in process and somewhat behind the other city agencies. with respect to emergencies, the society has installed an emergency public announcement system. in an emergency, an alarm sounds, and an announcement made in three languages. it informs the public there is

an emergency, they should move to the closest building and wait for instructions from the emergency and zoo personnel. those announcements are made in english, spanish, and chinese. we have signs throughout the zoo in foreign visitors to call a hotline if they see any misconduct at an exhibit or anywhere else in the suit. the suns also are in three languages. lastly, in hiring an outside security firm, which shows a firm that highlighted its diversity and multiple language training. with that, i turned to mr. fitting for some of our broader efforts. >> thank you. my interest, of course, is to make the san francisco zoo accessible to as many people as possible and connect with -- and our mission is to connect into the wild places, wild things. one of the ways we are doing that is through signage, and as we bring new suns forward, we

are in bed in multiple languages in them. here's an example -- this is a new water charging station to encourage people to get away from plastic water bottles. we have partnered with the sec francisco water department and said francisco department of the environment. they brought this project to the zoo, and we now have a new sign in multiple languages saying why it is important to try to get away from the single use water bottle and recharge your permanent water bottle. here it is. i hope you will take advantage of it. we also employed multi language people. we tried to encourage people to volunteer at the zoo and help us with the diverse community when they do come here and want to learn about the wild places, that we have the ability to communicate in as many languages as we possibly can. i also want to top about our

community. we do have community events. i have our most recent one was pacific islander heritage day, and featuring that diverse community, and we had a special day for them to come to the san francisco zoo. we also do a newly a lunar new year for our asian communities to come and celebrate that really special time of year. we also have a latino heritage day at the san francisco zoo. we bring out lots of cultural community action and activities to these particular days to really engage this, again, a diverse community. those are just some of the things that we are doing to help engage our diverse communities. >> with that, we conclude our report and look forward to any questions. >> i know in the initial report,

you said you were in the process of providing and creating protocols and you had emergency protocols, but there were not specifics. is it safe to assume that these are all things you have been working on more recently since you provided that report? >> yes, and the agency, with limited resources and sort of being out of touch with city departments, we have had to rely on coordination with other departments. in hiring, we have had a lot of hiring freezes and layoffs the last few years. hiring these personnel with expertise has been somewhat financially difficult, but i am pleased to say we are finishing our fiscal year with a surplus, so i think we will be in a better place to hire more of these individuals. >> what fraction of your staffers are bilingual? >> 75% of the security force is bilingual.

primarily spanish and chinese, and we are looking at other languages as well. >> obviously, the zoo is an incredibly important station to our city, and i know kids of all backgrounds and parents and individuals of all backgrounds want to enjoy the resources you have, so i appreciate your efforts and look forward to continued progress. i want to ask of rob from city building management. >> thank you. we have a few challenges at city hall in terms of providing a lot of the signing, mainly because of the historic nature of the building. one of the ways we're looking to address it and lacking a clear path way otherwise looking into sort of a touch that translation

system we can put at the kiosk in city hall. rowan has been mocking something up, and you may have been provided with some materials that describe what he is trying to do with that. it is easier to try to turn the microphone over to him, our media services manager. >> thank you, supervisors. one of the challenges obviously is to try to meet the entire language of the ordinance, and to be able to translate into multiple languages. in the efforts to try to do that completely, we have looked into some technological options, and i just want to walk you through where we are in the planning stages. what we have come up with is something that we have not seen anywhere else in looking around at digital signage around the country and around the world. in order to move forward, there are obviously other steps we have to do, including programming. i want to run you through it

because it is something that might be able to work in many other locations as well. essentially, at city hall, we have some issues because of the landmark status of the building, a running conflict, and other uses in the building and he is very difficult. so what we are proposing and what we have come up with is to use touch panel computers at the entrances to city hall, and there would be a panel of eight or 10 individual computers, attached channels, and people could then walk up to one. each one would have the flag of the respective countries on it, so if you look at the overhead, someone would be able to walk up, and if they are free and, they would see the korean flag, would be able to touch that, activate the panel, and there would be links to pre-translated static information such as building directories and other information about departments, and those would be provided in advance. they would be translated, and go

as deep as the departments want to fund that transition. again, that is for static information. the difficulty is how to translate on the fly with information that changes on a daily basis. technically, what we want to do is to utilize the google auto- translate program and software, which is available, and the board of supervisors is utilizing some of this on their website to do this. what would that happen is the computer would be linked to sites that are updated daily, such as a daily schedule for city hall. every day, staff would update and public meetings that are being held in city hall. from that way, everything beyond the initial link would be pre- programmed to open to specific language.

the meetings for that day would be translated utilizing the software. the issue with doing this is the accuracy of the translations. you will get literal translations and not specific colloquial speech, i guess. land use might turn into a ground functions. these are things that have to be thought about. however, one will be able to get the gist, and will be able to find the locations and get the majority of the information to get where one wants to build. this is a way to get around the need for staff to constantly translate on a daily basis. this is what we would like to proceed with, and we think it will get us very close to where we want to be. and as google also-translate

gets more accurate, we think this will progress further over time. supervisor chiu: i have a number of questions about the topic. are you familiar with how the ethnic press covered this ordinance in 2009 when it was fast? are you aware of this? >> i have to say no. supervisor chiu: let me preface my follow-up -- my following comments with i know your consummate professor it -- professionals and i appreciate you are doing. in 2009, the city hall building was pointed to as one of the most flagrant and glaring examples of inaccessibility when it came to language. there were ethnic press reporters that walk around city hall, took pictures of the lack of accessibility of this building, and it is now 2012, and there has been no headway on this issue. i know you have thought about it. i definitely appreciate the creativity of thinking about how you use technology on this issue, but can you tell me why there has been no progress in getting close to four years?

>> online, from a technical standpoint, i was looking for a true solution to be able to do updates on the flight. i guess it is equally possible to be able to implement all the static documents, and if that is sufficient, i believe we can move on that very quickly, but the delay in large part was looking for how we deal with the request to be able to update on a daily basis. >> how is our bilingual staff when it comes to security and sheriff's apartment at the door? i think that is one aspect of how we address this. >> we actually are not -- we do not specifically supervise our deputies. however, the sheriff's department has been good about providing multilingual deputies and cadets, and i think you will find that over time, the numbers of multilingual cadets and deputies has increase. that is something we will be working with our new sheriff with as well. supervisor chiu: which i appreciate. i have seen very few deputies

that could, for example, speak cantonese, given the number of constituents in san francisco that need that help. it is a constant challenge. with regards to, i think, just the use of technology -- so the idea is to put these computer terminals at the entrances, but not in other parts of the city hall building? that ultimately, we would like to replace all of our building directories with these. ultimately. supervisor chiu: 1 historic preservation issues clash with historic issues, what is that about? it is hard to imagine that we cannot think about how to put the sign for a committee hearing in, say, two or three languages, at least the three major languages we know are spoken here in san francisco. >> yes, that is something we will be working on. supervisor chiu: what has the conversation been? has the historic preservation said no can do? this is actually the first i had heard. it has been a challenge we have been unable to move through. >> we have not really had many

conversations. we are continuing to move forward with this process here. supervisor chiu: i guess because this is new to me, no one from the historic preservation community has ever said language access is an issue and that we only want to have the language of english at city hall. has that been articulated by historic preservation officials? >> it has not. supervisor chiu: is this just speculation on your part that it is an issue? >> the issue with us is where we put the signs of, what it will look like. the issues we have are the nature of the building, you know, the materials of the building are not well-suited to just putting a number of signs of at all entrances, so we are trying to find a solution that is a single solution for multiple languages. using this electronic solution. supervisor chiu: i will say on the issue of global trends late,

i think we all are very familiar with its shortcomings. i think the fact that the land use committee might be translated to the ground functions committee leaves a lot to be desired. i know that the offices of the struggle with the question of how we do this, but if there are ways for us to think about how to have more accurate translations, i think that will be really important. where is your complaint procedure for taking in questions from members of the public cannot find their way around city hall? >> in all honesty, we have not had complaints on those issues directed to the city hall building management, so we do not have a process at this point for that. supervisor chiu: i think that is one of the challenges. when i walked around city hall, the number of folks who do not speak english to come up to me asking for help is huge. oftentimes, i am unable to help them, and i wonder wre