head has made clear he continues to continue the unjust racist policies by hiring four new engineers, all of them are engineers. this was made in spite of my informing him of the problems for months ago. this distinction strongly applies he is racist. the percentage of engineers with th virtually 100% journeys. all manager royaial positions ae held by those with chinese of the city. as mr. sweeney has no background in plan review, i can only assume his appointment is for a parent's only and will allow that racism to continue. it appears mr. sweeney is the lipstick on this case. i expect to see the twin topics of white and two is responsible for the racial preference in hiring and promotion of civil service classifications would

then the apartment building inspections agenda is for the next building inspection meeting. be advised that if i reasonable request is not honored, it will intensify efforts to correct this very serious problem, but outside and inside the jurisdiction of this commission. i believe racism is not allowable from a moral and legal standpoint. i will not allow it. i will not allow racism without inserting michael efforts to combat it. as to the process is now just beginning. i will see you next month. >> any additional general public comment on items not on the agenda? >> good morning, commissioners. my name is robert davis. i would like to ask a few

questions and make sure they are discussed today. the second one is the open director hearings on the books since 1996 and the more than 750 orders of the abatement that are on the books since the year 2000. i mentioned those at previous meetings last month, and i believe the notice of the violations were brought to your attention last year in november. i would also like to point out one address in the bayview 81810 failed the h and oakview that te oakview that had a fire back on march 13. you can see all the notices. unfortunately for months later there was a fire. the people who lived on both

sides were forced out. approximately 30 people in total. thisince then there have been me notice of violations. and the fire damage is still there and still squatters in the neighborhood. i would like to bring that again to your attention. >> any additional general public comment? seeing none, item number four, a discussion regarding q-matic. with regard to have staff with any discussion and then public comment. >> good morning, commissioners, president mccarthy. i am here to speak about the q-

matic system to get your progress report of the current status. as you can see, there are many people, more so than normal. i believe most of them are here to address it. i will try to keep my comments somewhat brief so we can hear public comment. i have taken all of the written comments provided by the customers and read all of them to see what the stakeholders bank. there was 56 commons pertaining to this that are retrieved, and the comments that were filled out by people who used the system. 53 comments were against and favor some sort of change, whether it is to go back to the clipboard method, or to somehow reengineer the system to be more user-friendly. just three people were in support of q-matic in the current form.

four times sake i went through the 56 comments and a brief notes, figured out the gist of the complaints, and almost all of the comet center around it as a system at present, which is a very rigid system here did you come in through the door at 1660 on the first floor, and you stand in line to get a number to go to whatever service that we provide that you are requesting. we have a very complex system. i know this system is and other cities, but what i am told from other stakeholders, it is more like for their express windows. we have a policy if your plan check item is one hour or less, we try to put it over the counter.

having said that, we have opened up ourselves to a system that really does not address that. this system is basically in a building department where you may only have to go to one or two different stations. i do not think any of these other jurisdictions from my conversations with stakeholders and customers -- i do not believe planning is involved in it. you could go up to seven or eight different stations systems that are in place and q-matic says you have a number where you either stay at the first four or go up to the fifth floor. if it is a complicated job, you have to go to planning, building, it is commercial you have to go to fire. usually there is a bsm permit,

plus plumbing and electrical, and then you have to go pay for it. each line is cumbersome. there is no flexibility from what i could tell up until we have q-matic then. when we have the club board system of person would come in off the elevator and you would survey the room itself. he would determine by the room how long the wait would be. perhaps go to building and keep monitoring the fire line. that is how they navigate it. the system we have in place now does not allow you to do that. the system we have now, no one

knows where in the line they are. q-matic does not give us the ability to where you can sit down and look at a tv monitor to say there i am moving down the list. from the three weeks that i have been a plan check, from what i could see, it just becomes background noise. you keep hearing it now serving this and that. after 10 or 15 minutes, people seem to check out and they're missing their call, or the system kicks out their number. they might sit there for an hour or hour and a half. finally they go up to some station and take excuse me i have been waiting for a hour and a half. the person looks into this. i'm sorry. your number is not here. that is ok, i will give you another number and you consider and which again for an hour.

like i say, the lost systems are problem. i am getting reports from plan checkers that the numbers for smaller jobs are a little but off and not coming in. a lot of people are leaving the department without getting their permit. i just hear these people are doing work. we just heard on their were someone went and build a stair without the building permit. they did not build it correctly. by all means, we are engineers and plan checkers are still looking at the system try to tweak it. but they are like the little dutch boy in the dike, as soon as you figure out one week -- if you put more resources into taking the cash, in take seems to suffer. it is very cumbersome. the system is -- the system has

no built-in rigidity, and i think that is a problem. we of a lot of people here for public comment. i am available for questions. >> would it be ok if we hear from the public? the do>> can i just ask the quen to stop? -- to staff? >> we have these issues that come up. do we have someone from q- matic working with us? >> i've never seen anyone there. i have only been running plan check for three weeks. >> we have contacted them, but the system itself is more symbol like dmv.

in our case, no matter what we do, we still have lots of issues on how to get a number. they have different functions. the person holding the ticket will not be sequencing. in our case it is different because when you pull the ticket, the frustration is from the customer and the staff and how to. to g>> i am still wondering whye have no one from q-matic is involved in the process. take out the obvious question is it is not here because they're

paid in the job is done, correct? to go that is what i get out of it. at this stage what i want to do is open up to public comment. we will take the first speaker. i do not have cards, but i would remind everyone that we have a lot of speakers and to keep your comments not as repetitious. try to give as much new information as we need for the commissioners. we will keep it to 3 minutes. please stay within that. >> please everyone state your name for the record. >> thank you for your time to listen to me. i apologize that i was involved in the q-matq-matic in criticizt after the fact. the trick is what is going on with the system. this system is a solution to and not a problem. i do not understand -- [applause] >> i have to ask you to keep

your applause. take ou >> i have been asking myself why we of been going from a system of putting your name is down and everyone could be transparent to a system where we have lost transparency. i feel like a sheep being herded from station to station in the cereal plant check. this has nothing to do with building department where we can do parallel plan check. this system is not fed up to do us sign check. you contract for your work. if you were in a long line of building, you could go to fire and sign up. right now the system has increased my time of the building department by at least 40 percent signed. for people that are expediting

permits, and i do my own design because my wife is a structural engineer. the time to get a permit went from an hour to one hour 35 minutes. the plan checkers working really hard erse sitting there because they cannot get the person to come over because the name is not called. they are wasting a lot of time sitting. if someone could explain to me with the idea of it was, maybe i would have a better understanding, but it really is a solution to a problem that did not exist. the other system worked great. the only thing i could think of is the idea that this might tough spot people checking plan checkers. if that was the only reason to do this, there has to be other ways. this is a draconian solution to a non-problem. >> spencer gosh.

i seem to be the only employee using this on a daily basis. while i may frequently disagree with many of the people here, i think we are in agreement that this system is not working for any people. i am spending more time that i should be sitting there looking for a customer to take care of, even though the room may be full of people, there is no one in my queue. it seems like there is not enough there to tweak to make it work from my point of view. i go home and frustration every day for that extra effort i have to go to to deal with the committee by -- a dramatic and regular issuing of permits. i wonder -- i believe this implementation is symptomatic of some of the other problems at dbi. i do not know how it ever came about. it seems like we've given away a lot of money for not much in return. thank you.

>> high. the and berringer -- dna an berringer. i think we have spent an additional eight hours of time that probably would not have been happening. generally i completely agree that there was no problem there before. what i would like to do is meet with the other guys that i know here in come up with some issues that could get resolved, because the board and the sign in sheets were not the problem. if we came up with even 100 or 1000 items that we have problems with or issues with, the sign in sheets would not be on that list. thank you.

>> maybe we could line them up here yet to go my name is mark. i used the combaq-matic system e july. it is very frustrating. it has added to my time there. the underlying issue is what is the story for the property owners in san francisco? you are adding to their expense to make improvements to the property. my time has gone through the roof in terms of the time i spend there. i know that by the amount of time i pay to park in the garage and the number of hours i have to eat or bill my clients. you have made the building permit process much more expensive to the property owners of san francisco. secondly, if this system was something to gauge efficiency of the process there, i think you have made the process much more difficult and much more time- consuming, and much less efficient.

again, sitting there waiting for your number to be called, seeing dozens of people in the same position waiting to be called and everyone behind the counter trying to do plan check reading for those to come forward. there is a big gap of time that is neither efficient for the customer, for us time to get permits, and for those trying to process the permits. if the workload is increasing because the uptick in construction, the system will be detrimental to processing permit any more efficiently and faster. thank you. >> if you would line up here so we could be more efficient on getting people to the microphone quicker. neck speaker. -- next speaker. to go good morning. my name is mary fitzgerald. -- >> good morning. thank you for hearing our comments on the system.

i would like to commend debt staff to have beethe staff who n very patient. they have done a great job i think. it is taking longer. i cannot face a specific person about my problem or trade my place in line. to kill some time the past week while i have been waiting i did my zero little survey -- i did my own little survey that was very informal. the taurus is were i like the new system and think it is working out. the second trees if i think it is o.k. but these adjustments. the third was i do not like the new system. i got some comments on these, too. basically the people who did not like the system was 47%.

people thought it was okay but it did work was 35%. the people who like it or 18%. most of the staff did not like it. it was an anonymous survey. the people who like it, did not go to dbi very often. thank you for listening to our concerns today. >> my name is mr. adams. i am at dbi almost every day. i would like to address mr. walker's commission. my understanding is the reason it is not there is because the company went bankrupt. if that is wrong -- that is what i've been told by many people. i think the problems start of the front door. there is gridlock now as you walk in, which i think discourages people from walking in. there is a huge line now to get

a number four things before that you never had to get a no. 4. it is just gridlock everywhere. it used to take maybe three hours to get a permit for the entire day. now it takes twice as long or three times as long. everything is taking much longer. one other issue i would like to bring up is that the drone of the constant number call link is just enough to make someone go postal. people have said it is like dm v, but i have never heard that as a compliment. [laughter] >> next speaker, please. >> good morning. i am a lieutenant with the standards as the fire department. my assignment is at hand check.

we are the guest there. -- is at plan check. plan checkers. normally would be just too. -- would be just two. i have been there virtually every day working with the system. i just wanted everyone to know that every new system will have bugs, and this is no exception. i think we have gotten rid of a lot of them, which were really only because what we have left is still a system that is not working. that is after we got rid of a lot of the bugs. i understand there was going to be effort to change the program a little bit so we would have other options so it could be more flexible, but from what i understand of the system, flexibility is not high on

options list. we have to basically adapt to the system, which is more than inconvenience, but usually not productive. if i had to say what the productivity is now compared to before, i would say as far as the plan checkers are concerned for the fire department, we're doing twice the work for half the production that we used to have. that is the worst day. other days we but it probably pretty close to even. we have plan checkers that are working very hard most of the time they are at the counter. so they have the anxiety of what they're not they're still in the system. we field requests all the time to find out if the numbers are still there.

i dread that personally. i would jump in and fill in, but i stressed out when they asked me and cannot find their number because i do not like giving them that answer. more often than not it is a mistake on our part. but there is a fix for that. if i could get a few more minutes. and unfortunately that fix requires the plan check to get up and ask for the customer over to intake and try to get them another number, or you could say go back over there and get a number. most customers do not want to hear that because that means they have to wait in of long white again. sometimes that helps resolve getting another number quicker. there is a lot of wasted time,

mainly i think in addition to the other glitches because when you have a number that is out there the has been polled and not used, we still have to call it, because we do not know that never has been abandoned or it is one of 10 that someone pulled out, thinking that might help speed the process along. each member could take as long as three or four minutes to clear. that is three or four eminence'minutes. if you had 100 numbers that were polled and abandoned, that is 300 minutes. three or four minutes * 100 times several stations. you can see how there is built in wasted time because you do not want to ignore the numbers but keep calling them. unfortunately the drone of having them call over and over again.

there are so many legitimate reasons why they are not there. they only get three shots of getting their number call before they are recycled out of the system and then have to start all over. there are a lot of problems that i think we ever do work out, but still have a system that is not adaptable to our complicated needs. >> think you, inspector, for your comments. -- thank you. >> jerry brown. i have worked as a designer dbi of the past 25 years. i will make it simple, it isq q- matic that does not work. it is too many floors to overcome. you spend a lot more time than kind to find your number than doing fan check. i think we should go back to the clipboard system.

did you very much. -- thank you very much. >> good morning. we do architecture engineering services and the city and have been around for the past 30 years. we do over 100 products per year. we also have an expedited site. we are one-stop shop basically. the issue we have is when i send my stuff to the billing department, if you use to spend 200 hours, you are there for 200 days. the numbers keep coming up missing. i cannot absorb this cost. it is really hitting my company in the pocket. we have no other choice but to transfer this to the client, which clients will be unhappy as well. i think the intent of the program may be was to automate this billing department, but i

do not think this is the way to do it, and it is really hurting a lot of people. maybe we could go out there and pay parking tickets at the same time. it might help. thank you. >> good morning, commissioners. i am a licensed electrical engineer. i personally have had no good experience with q-matic. monday i had to go in and have a question, and i was waiting at the line for 20 minutes. as the pd sweeney pointed out, using a wood fire, you want to go there and get them to sign off, but yet to wait and go through the process. if anything, it has made it completely less efficient. the queue. >>ank you.

>> my name is set reth brookshi. if anything, i think the system has improved a little bit by little bit. rather than look of the specifics of what does not work, i would rather zoom out and look of the big picture and say square peg, round hole. i think the system is designed to herd cattle. no one is cattle. we're all professionals on both sides of the aisle. we have learned to work together, and sometimes that is difficult, sometimes easy. with the complexity to try to get us to move and move through the system following the robotic voice does not work. i think that while the clipboard may seem