the actual parameters. supervisor cohen: perfect. throughout the conversations, the bay view has some serious needs and i don't want it to be seen as a detriment, burgeoning neighbor of like dog patch and to some degree, mission bay, who our neighbors that can benefit from research it -- resources we are pouring into third street. the entire southeastern part of the city will be healthy and strong. >> that the perfect segue into the concept of invest in neighborhoods which is the city working in a comprehensive way and the initiative has a proposed $1.5 billion over two

years. two staffers would be working with these commercial corridors and that funding and umbrella offers the opportunity to work together to identify those corridors that have this kind of comprehensive been put by the city family and for district 10, the continuity up and down the corridor is extremely important. you do not want to feel like there are starts and stops of city focus because by not having that continuity, you lose a lot of really important work being done. supervisor kim: i know i brought this up earlier but i was hoping you could clarify a little bit. it seems like to departments are

asking for positions in very similar lines of work. there was of a request from the city administrator for a community development specialist to support that market and bradstreet projects and here we are seeing request for funding for the central market and third street -- may be through the invest in neighborhoods, it would be funded, but if you could tell me how you distinguish these positions because we don't want to pay for services when we're trying to find savings for our schools or the cost of doing businesses for nonprofits as we prioritize the budget. if you could explain the thinking behind at and how you imagine the coordination work would happen a month the department. pedestrian safety is another issue. has been challenging working with several departments on one issue.

how be hoping to work through that? >> with regards to how the invest in neighborhoods initiative is staffed, earlier this year, the city administrator and i convened a working group which is now meeting on a regular basis which has representatives from a number of departments. the mayor's office of housing, others are coming together initially to talk about what tools we should put in that tool kit for the work we want to do with paper had to be able to address these comprehensively. as the neighborhoods are put into effect, this would be put into effect like pedestrian safety, who should be doing what in a particular neighborhood, what has to do with enforcement, what has to do with infrastructure, what has to do with painting and taking on those issues in a way this city

family is aware of based on the working group structure. i don't think there is duplication. we are proposing enhancements across different departments. i believe the position in the city administrator's office are a position under the neighborhood empowerment network and i think it to get some streetscape beautification and corridor ambassadors, we want to be able to enhance as part of investing in neighborhoods since we are planning on doubling the number of neighborhoods we're working in. bringing the rest of the city family in other parts of 25 their breath, the positions requested in the department would be specifically talking to businesses around business needs and would act as liaison to corridor managers and be

involved in setting of the vacancy tracking program and trying to attract businesses and working as something as a concierge with businesses in these corridors that are having any issues related to the city. they would not be doing the accord or work or streetscape improvement work. supervisor kim: potentially the streetscape -- i understand a distinguishable group of staffing would focus on street scaping by your house would deal with the sought improvements? >> yes. we have been managing the passat improvement through the redevelopment agency. has been general fund it and it's a program we work directly with businesses on making sure

-- it has been our department that has overseen with redevelopment money that has overseen the work of that because we work so closely with merchants and we would continue to do that. supervisor chu: thank you. i think many of us are very supportive of the invest in the neighborhoods of goals and objectives. i think for areas that do not typically receive support, it is very exciting to see that this would roll out to outlying areas as well, whether it is a supervisor avalos' district or mine. i am wondering if, as a follow up, you might be able to share more affirmation on this new invest in the neighborhoods perspective? we have bits and pieces, but i want to make sure we're not doing the same thing we did before. i think when we last talked about the revolving loan funds

and about how many different programs we have in all different departments that there were so many programs, so want to make sure we're not just saying that we are discontinuing all these different things again, and somebody will have to coordinate. there has to be something that is more collaborative and integrated than that kind of set up. i want to understand that better. >> i think we will be coming back to you next week. i am happy to bring to you, in a very comprehensive way, what is we think we are bringing to these neighborhoods that is extraordinarily concrete in terms of how we have developed this toolkit after weeks and months of talking to lover ee with our sister departments about how we think this is going to rollout. supervisor chu: great. supervisor avalos: i want to make sure -- i am going to be looking to see how the

neighborhood commercial corridors are benefiting from invest in that neighborhood spirit we have not really seen the kind of investment in our neighborhoods that happened in other places in san francisco were a lot of neighborhood dollars come in and are focused on in those areas. i think we need to compensate for the lack of investment that happened elsewhere, from other sources with city dollars. i want to see if there's some way we can see those types of improvements in the neighborhoods like mine. >> you will see the list of proposed neighborhoods. we will start working with the

mine august and september. the last position we are requesting is a high level deputy director to sort of oversee all of the neighborhood economic development. when you think about it, there are so many initiatives either being enhanced or proposed. when you think about the bayview in central market is being stand-alone initiatives that are for the first time within the city family exclusively because of no longer having the redevelopment agency, the job squad outreach, coordination with the office of small business, monitoring loans at sf shines. would you want to do is get commercial corridors healthy enough that they can consider the ability to create the community benefit district which provides a permanent level of private sector funding to do a lot of the work the city is doing. that combine with the investor in the neighborhoods initiative is a huge expansion of our work. the mayor believes we need a high level deputy director to work directly with the supervisors and with the outside

stakeholders and to really kind of own this portfolio. that is also before you for your consideration. supervisor chu: thank you very much paired with regards to the budget analyst recommendations, can you provide an update as to your status with agreement or disagreement? >> we are not yet in agreement. we anticipate being in agreement by next week. we have not been able to provide -- provide the budget analyst with details on any small business loan program, and we will be providing that in detail today, as well as some of the other outstanding issues. supervisor chu: thank you. why don't we go to the budget analyst report. >> our recommended reductions total dollars3393,379 in 2012- 2013, and21 $231,379 are ongoing savings. it would still allow an increase of1$3,204,736 or a 40.6%

increase in the 2012-2013 budget. there's also a policy recommendation of dollars1 -- a $one in 2012-2013. one. -- it would still allow an increase of $11.9 million or 37.5% in the 2012-2013 budget. in addition, we recommend closing the prior year in and -- on the expanded general fund incumbrances, totaling $122. together, dollars1,333,501 settings for the general fund in $12.2012-2013. of that amount, the entire amount our ongoing savings.

we're still working with the department, and we will report back to you next week. supervisor chu: thank you very much. if there are no other questions, i would like to move on to the next department. any questions? ok, see what -- so to what to the office of workforce and economic development. we look forward to seeing you next week with answers to some of those issues, including the neighborhood marketplace and is the bottom. colleagues, i would like to call one department out of order. we have a request from someone who has to leave the less to the assessor. >> i have been applied with the civil service commission.

our tax roll continues to grow. . supervisor chu: we are looking to our presentation. you have one for the overhead? >> yes, it is here, but the overhead has not been turned on. i am talking about page two right now. we have had some of the growth of property taxes in our assessment roll from $70 billion to $155 billion. we anticipate continuing to have a slight, very modest growth, but relative to every other county in the state, we are actually doing pretty well, considering that many counties, especially those hardest hit by a property value reductions, are actually seeing decreases on their property tax rolls. we have seen a slight uptick, and we think we will be summer

around $155 billion for this coming year. very quickly, the additional revenue that comes in are called supplementals, is give revenues. we brought in a little over $100 billion of the additional revenue which goes into our property tax rolls. what has been critical in our staff being able to bring in processes assessment is we had two additional teams of seven staff each working on our assessment appeals. we have had over 6000 appeals come in each year the last couple of years. that has been critical to have time limited staff to work on the appeals, which we hope will start to dissipate in the next two years. transfer taxes have actually done extremely well this year, so the market is starting to rebound as you all have started to feel.

we raised the transfer tax rate from 2008 and 2010, and we are benefiting now at an all-time high, about $186 million, and we're actually over $200 million in transfer taxes. we have been able to bring in about $16.5 million in under- reported and unrecorded documents, and that was thanks to a loophole that we close our in the 2008 transfer tax law, as well as us being a little bit more aggressive in making sure the people are actually accurately reporting the values of real estate as they come into an office. this gives you an idea of the assessment appeals. we had a huge spike from 2007- 2008 to the 2009-2010 year, and it has hovered on in that range. we think that will significantly drop in the next couple years.

we think that that will really help alleviate all of -- a lot of the stress on our staff. that is why we only ask for time-limited staff previous year. and we will be able to not bring those people back because the appeals or kroger's -- go drastically down. supervisor chu: with regards to the outstanding cases, it has. up to a very high level. typically, the city has experienced some more like 1000 or 2,000 or so of those cases. for the city, do we create a reserve generally for a situation where we have outstanding appeals pending? >> yes, the controller's office has set aside about a $40 million reserve in the past. i think it was increased going into this year. monique could probably speak much better about appeared we work very closely with the office to identify what is in

the pipeline, what we think might be the approximate -- a very general reductions in value, but there's always a set- aside, in particular for the commercial property. supervisor chu: for c theontr -- for the controller's office, can you speak to what we generally do for appeals cases overall? >> members, monique from the controller's office. we do set aside reserves based on appeals. we look at what the latest appeals of bent and we project those amounts -- and appeals have been and we project those amounts we estimate. supervisor chu: it is sort of like holding something in reserve, basically. money has been allocated for expenditure, and if we end up tapping into it, we have to cut back -- >> we actually reduce our revenue estimate based on that. supervisor chu: supervisor kim?

supervisor kim: thank you. by the way, congratulations on getting down from 16,000 to 10,000 buying your backlog. there have been a series of e- mails from residents complaining about the length of time that it is taking for these assessments. i am wondering if you can address that? >> absolutely. your district in particular along with supervisor avalos and supervisor cohen's districts were there are a number of short sales in foreclosure is occurring, it will take longer. traditionally, it would be processed in rare between three to five months. by purchased a home that was on the market, in general the gets processed rather quickly. unfortunately, foreclosures and short sales, because it is not always market pricing, we have had to set them aside and put him in it with everything else.

because of that, it might even take upwards of two years or 18 months to do those. so, obviously, we definitely get calls from your staff and tried to walk them thru with the status is for different ones. but for residential ones, it is primarily due to the fact that their short sales or foreclosures. what we have to do is determine the market value, and we cannot take only sales price by itself, so we have to look at comparable properties and do an analysis that is similar to how we do much larger properties. that is why it takes so much time. supervisor kim: because you have been able to dramatically reduce this number from 16,000 to 10,000 in the past year, do you think that will continue with that additional staffing? >> yeah, the goal is to be caught up in six months. really, we are about, probably by the time we closed the fiscal year at the end of this month,

probably be close to the 20 months. the idea is by june of next year to be almost at six months or to be pretty close to six months. supervisor kim: thank you. >> in previous years, there have been questions regarding metrics and performance standards. sorry for these small overhead. but this gives you an idea how we track each appraiser. it gives you a sense of their production and how much work has been done. this is a snapshot with not a lot of the numbers filled in. it just gives you a sense of what has been produced on a weekly basis. and i look out on this with the managers in my office as well as the individual supervisors for those units. so we're tracking of the change in ownership, new construction, the condominiums, the assessment appeals cases, reductions, so we're doing this to a very fine level. we also weight them.

people with larger properties will get a little more weighted value. we have a pretty decent and on how much production is going through on almost every staff level. this gives you an idea of our general fund budget. we were actually able to get a pretty significant increase in budget because of significant workload and money we have been able to bring in. we have seen a slight reduction this year, and that is probably due to the fact that we have money set aside for assessment appeals litigation that we do not feel we needed to keep holding onto, so part of that was given back during our budget process. last, another was a question regarding staffing and workload. you can see that our staffing has gone from a point where we had about 112 permanent staff to now 130 permanent staff. the bulk of the staffing increase last year occurred for

24 time-limited staff. in this one line is just the assessment appeals shirts. even though we have had a slight increase in staffing, the assessment appeals have sort of gone way off the charts. so that is really that time- limited group of staff of 24 is really there to help us and that significant workload. we tried to map it with new construction, but we do not have as much good historical data for that, which is why we use assessment appeals as a proxy. and it then, last, there was a question regarding language access. that has been a major thing for me personally in our office. we have worked very closely with adrienne and her team to provide language services. we have language clients in our office, the two phone lines were a taxpayer and our staff to talk with a taxpayer between. we have russian, chinese speaking step in our office.

currently, if people request letters of assessed evaluation in spanish or chinese, we do that. we have had a couple hundred requests in that. we have gone requests in the past for cantonese, spanish, vietnamese, cambodian, russian, and caribbean, and their services we have been able to accommodate and work with folks. happy to stop there. we're in discussions with the budget analysts. we're not in complete agreement yet, but i anticipate we will be by this time last -- next week. supervisor chu: thank you. with regards to your expectations for the department going forward, in terms of the number of appeals, you still have a large number of outstanding appeals, but the expectation is that is going to come down, correct? >> correct. we have a two-year lag. so we're working on appeals from two years ago. so over the next two years, we will see a pretty significant drop in appeals.

talking to realtors and people in the industry, it is clear that the market has started to significantly rebound. we believe that two years from now, we probably will not be needing those 24 time-limited staff. if circumstances change, obviously we would bring that back before this body. but that is what we anticipate. supervisor chu: we have recently seen through the controller's office's report that transfer tax and spend at a very high level. in terms of your workload with regards to transfers, what do we expect from that. it sounds like they expect that the transfer tax level will not sustain itself. it is sort of at a high level and probably will not continue for several years. >> that is probably true. i mean, we have not figured out where the new kind of sweet spot

is with the 2008-2010 increase. in the past few years, you would probably say $80 million would have been given as the median market in the past. with the new increases, it is kind of hard for, at least to me, to say -- perhaps the controller's office will have better estimates, but in terms of property taxes, as appeals come down, our assessments or go up. so we will get more work on the assessment side, but i think we're much better prepared to handle that work than many of the assessment appeals which actually can be quite time intensive and take quite a bit of time on the staff. supervisor chu: i know that the department has been working on a number of initiatives in conjunction with the treasurer's office. can you speak a little bit to that and where you are? >> we're very proud of the i.t.

work. we have gone through the process. it has been wonderful. we actually came out as a top- rated project. we have been working on upgrading our assessment system, but we also have a number of other individual initiatives. we're going to be in e announcing-recordings -- we're going to be announcing e- recording and going paperless beard we will have an open portal for people to submit documents online, which i think is very exciting. we're trying to become much more user-friendly by putting a lot more of our documentation online. we have a youtube video that is used as a training video for filling out forms in our office. those are many of the initiatives that we're looking to push forward, and we're very excited that every time we checked back in, we get a very positive response. supervisor chu: is there a general time line when some of these items might be implemented? >> the major issue for us moving

forward is how we upgrade our assessment system, which is actually rather old and still in cobalt. no other major county in california has successfully upgraded their system. the one county we're looking at collaborating with more closely is orange county. a member of our staff took a trip down there last week to see if we could utilize what they have learned over the last couple of years, so we look at have been much closer collaboration with orange county to upgrade our property tax system. supervisor chu: thank you. supervisor kim? supervisor kim: i was also happy to hear that we were finally able to put in place some of the work you have been doing to update the technology and that it has been coming through savings from over the past several years. because it is a large dollar amount. it is great to see the planning come into place this year. my questions were similar to what we have been asking other departments, which is -- first,

professional services. how much does your department currently spent on professional services? what services do usually contract out for? >> we spend very, very little. my guess is probably less than 5%. the only kind of services to contract out for is we have a software vendor license. trying to think what other services to contract out. >> kimberly -- chief administrative officer. predominately it is i.t. so we contract out for our software vendor for it the easy access system. we also contract out for our recorder system called adpak. those of the two major services contracts. supervisor kim: my next question is in particular for our homeowners. what percentage of your staff is a bilingual or spinks another language besides english, and how you provide language

services when you need them -- or speak another language? >> we have a significant number of staff who are bilingual. primarily spanish thus speaking or mandarin and cantonese- speaking. we also translated lot of our information. part of our website assigned janice -- trainees or spanish. we have letters the got to taxpayers in spanish and chinese. and we can also use that phone to help with immediate, on the spot translations. supervisor kim: i saw that. you think what you have existing on staff meets the needs of your office? >> one challenging thing is, you know, stuff are sometimes reticent about not reticent to help, but they do not necessarily get compensated for it. we have been encouraging more staff to get certified to t