>> okay, shall we try again? thank you for waiting,

everyone. good afternoon. >> do we have captioning? there's captioning over there, not over there. control room, we do not have captioning on the screen closest to the sign language interpreter. testing to see if we have captioning.

hi, we're testing now to see which captioning is working. shall we start over again? good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the mayor's disability council. denise, would you please read the welcome? >> i'm almost afraid. try again. let me turn on the mic, i'm on. welcome, everyone and thank you for the third time for waiting. we're going it kind of give you highlights of

our accessibility policy here at city hall so bear with me as i go through some of the information. city hall is accessible to persons using wheelchairs and other disabilities. the polk street carlton b. goodlett entrance is accessible via a ramp and wheelchair lift. assistive listening devices are available and the meeting will be sign language and captioned. agendas are available in large print and braille. in order to accommodate people with severe allergies, environmental illnesses, multiple chemical disabilities please refrain from wearing skepblted products to mdc meetings or to the mayor's office on disabilities. this includes perfume, scented lotions, hair sprays. thank you for helping provide the

meetings are fully accessible for people with disabilities. for people with disabilities or others who cannot attend the meetings in person, welcome to view our broadcast which is open captioned on sfgtv channel 26. you can also call the bridge line atary code 415-554-9632. thank you and again welcome to the meeting. >> thank you. roll call. (roll called). >> next we'll have reading and approval of the agenda.

mayor's disability council friday, october 19, 2012. 1, introduction, welcome and roll call. 2, action item, reading and approval of the agenda. 3, public comment. items not on today's agenda but within the jurisdiction of the mdc each speaker is limited to 3 minutes. information item, 4, report from the chair. information item, 5, report from the director of the mayor's office on disability. 6, information item from the department of aging and adult services, the san francisco transitional care program. item 7, information item, an overview of the san francisco department of public health supportive housing programs. break at 2.30. 8, information item, report from the physical access committee. 9, information item, report from the disability disaster

preparedness committee. 10, the november election, access to information, polling places and voting machines. 11, information item, sfmta multi modal accessibility advisory committee update. 12, public comment items not on today's agenda but within the jurisdiction of the mdc 13, information item, correspondence. 14, discussion item, council member comments and announcements. 15, adjourn. >> thank you, ken. item no. 3, public comment. items not on today's agenda but within the jurisdiction of the mdc each speaker is limited to 3 minutes. the first person i have is walter. would you come

up, please. >> there it goes. good afternoon, mayor's disability council. just wapted -- wanted to let you know that hovaround takes me where i want to go, where will it send me next? and i was hoping that adele was going to be here because i was on her show and it was great and it was great to call adele, ring per bell, ding, ding, ding aling alink, you can ring adele, ring her bell, ring ading, make your city swell,

disability make it well. i did want to say it's got a disability morning after if we can hold on through the city night. we have a chance to find the city sunshine, let's keep on looking for the light. it's not too late, not while we're living, let's take a chance out and try, it's not too late that we should be giving, let's put our hands out and pray. we'll won't be searching any more, won't be

searching any more for better. end. wheels in the sky keep on turning, you're gonna be bike riding with disability tomorrow. wheels in the sky keep on turning i know you're gonna be learning disability with wheels tomorrow. see you in next meeting, see you when disability is great. will i see you with disability better and i don't hope we have to wait. and stayed in bed all morning with disability just to pass

the time. i want better now and there can be no denying. city is changing or maybe it just stopped trying. but it's not too late you really try and try to make it. >> okay, thank you, walter. the next item is no. 4, information item. oh, i'm sorry, carla. >> do we have rachel hyatt from san francisco county transportation? did she turn in a speaker card? >> no. >> is rachel hyatt from the san francisco transportation authority here? i guess not.

okay, we'll go on and wait for her to come this and we'll get to her when she gets here. okay, item information, report from the chair. today is friday, october 19th. i hope everyone participated in the shake out yesterday. and if not, it's a good reminder that everyone should have a kit ready for just in case of emergency in case you have it evacuate your house, you should have an emergency kit ready under your bed or in a closet or somewhere so you can do that. and anyone else have anything to say on the shake out? did anyone participate? did you want to say something? >> at our agency we had i think over 100 individual persons there that had

participated in the shake out or evacuation location was yerba buena gardens and we set up a camp and it went very smoothly. it worked very well. >> oh, great. all right. moving on to item no. 4 -- 5, i'm sorry. report from the director. carla. >> yes, thank you, chair james. great minds think alike. it's october, the election is coming up soon, the giants are still in the ballgame and so that's a good time to talk about disasters. i wanted to build on what you started in the conversation to let the council know that our office also observed shake out activities yesterday. just as a quick reminder, it was 23 years ago this last week that we had the loma prieta earthquake which of course started during the world series

event, and california has been using the october opportunity as a way to promote earthquake preparedness pretty much ever since. so what the mayor's order on disability did yesterday was have a staff meeting and talked about our role in the city's emergency preparedness care and focused on the mass care and emergency operations in the city. then at 10.18 i blew the whistle and we all did a duck, cover and whoeld on. the exercise was good because as we pulled out our merchandise supplies of course we found a few flashlights that the batteries weren't good any more, there were some missing hard hats and safety vests and such. it's always a reminder to refresh your supplies so we appreciated that. what we also did, though, was we used the shake out opportunity as a way to

activate our statement of understanding program. and we had a scenario where there was no email that was available, there were no phone lines that were available, so the only communications that we had at our disposal were our cell phones to send text messages. so we sent out text messages to all 12 of our partner agencies in the community and asked our partners to respond and to let us know if they had any resources that they could offer to the city to help the city support people with disabilities in the shelter operations. and i'm really very proud to say that that activation was a success because out of those 12 sou partners, 11 of our partners responded so we were very pleased with that outcome. we also went to the department of emergency management emergency operations center as well where sf card was running an

activation with other members of the community. so that concludes my great shake out report. i wanted to give some information to the council about some legislation that was introduced this week before the board of supervisors. this is legislation that was sponsored by supervisor mar, but it was also co-sponsored by a number of other supervisors, including supervisor campos, olague and chiu. it's legislation that is very near and dear to heart. it would be requiring the installation of grab bars in existing single room occupancy hotel bathrooms. these are older buildings in the city that of course are such an incredible important affordable housing stock. and the background for how

supervisor mar introduced this legislation, there were a series of hearings held here at city hall over the last 18 months or so, showing a spotlight on the issues that people with disabilities and seniors face living in single room occupancy hotels. this was very much grass roots activism on the part of the sro collaborative, the mission sro collaborative, senior action network who of course now has merged with planning for elders and is senior and disability action. and these community groups really did the job of making the case that there are so many people in the city that are aging in place and older buildings and that there is a great need to have basic safety features to allow people to live with safety and with dignity and independence in the community in accordance with our civil rights, you know, as

what's affirmed under the olmstead decision to support people living in the community. so this legislation that was introduced i think is a very important step towards supporting people here and you can expect to be hearing more about it over the next two months and i would encourage everybody to come to the hearings as the legislation is actually discussed in committee and at the board and to voice your support. another piece of that legislation, too, would mandate the installation of telephone jacks in the units because of course communication sometimes is that life and death link to emergency services. i also wanted to bring to the attention of the council a new committee that will start meeting next week. it's called the accessible parking policy advisory committee. this is sponsored by the municipal

transportation authority. the first meeting will be on tuesday, october 23, at 2:00 pm at 1 south van ness. the public is welcome. what the committee plans to do is review existing state and local walls that govern placards in blue zones and make recommendations for either new policies or laws. some of the numbers that are behind this ert are that san francisco has 29,200 metered on street parking spaces and 53,500 disabled parking placards. now, a parking placard, of course, allows you to park in a blue zone but many people who use placards also use them to park on the street and they can legally park in a green zone or at a metered spot without feeding the meter. but there is a problem that has

been at least broadcast in the media of late. so if we set placards aside for a moment, i think everybody who's tried to park in san francisco knows it's really hard to find a spot. we're all in competition. and this is one of the reasons why our city supports having public transit and other modes of transportation like walking or biking. but for people who have a mobility disability, some of those other options aren't necessarily there for them. a car might be really their best transportation option. we might live in neighborhoods that aren't served well by transit. we might have difficulty waiting for transit. and we also economically might not be able to afford some of the other transit options like taxis as a good example. what we see is that there are perceptions out there that there are people who are

abusing placards and i'm sure there are some people who are abusing placards. doesn't make much sense it me because the fines are pretty high. they are up to just about a thousand dollars now and there's also the penalty of having to forfeit your placard if you are not using it properly. we do have enforcement mechanisms and i believe we need to use those enforcement mechanisms when there's placard abuse. my worry is when people with disabilities are demonized because people don't necessarily understand all disabilities and especially when the casual observer sees someone who has an invisible disability and they don't understand that a person with a respiratory or a heart condition may be fully ambulatory but they still have limitations on how far they can walk. so placards serve people with both obvious mobility disabilities as well as people

with invisible disabilities. so there has to be a balance. we want parking to be available for the people who need it and this committee will be tasked with making recommendations to try and increase the turnover of spaces and to also have a city-wide policy on where and when we install blue zones. i will be on the committee and i am also really pleased to know that roland wong, our council member, will also be on the committee. there are others including bob planthold, christine rupke and as i mentioned earlier, the meetings will be open to the public. again , the first meeting, as a reminder, october 23 from 2:00 until 4:00 at 1 south van ness on the 6th floor. there's a web site, that address is

http://sfpark.org/howitworksacce ssibleparkingpolicy i want to encourage member s of the public if they have stories of what they want to see use our office as a central distribution point and to send us your comments and we'll make sure the information gets sent up. last of all i wanted to give the council an update on the mayor's office on disability move and just confirm that we do have a new home. it will be 1155 market street on the first floor. we signed the lease, or our land lord signed the lease, and it's a good location with great proximity to transportation. space planning is in progress and we expect to

be in our new home in may or june of 2013. with that, i would like to turn things over to heather kittle from our office and ask her to give us a brief report on the types of complaints that our office has heard in the last month. >> good afternoon, council, this past month our office received a total of 122 inquiries. about 90 percent of these inquiries were from the public and the remainder were from city departments. 55 percent of the inquiries involved housing and homeless issues such as people looking for affordable housing, or people wanting to file a reasonable accommodation request in private housing. we also received reports of environmental health issues such as bedbug infestations and these reports were made by individuals who lived in public

as well as private housing. about 40 percent of our contacts wanted to get information about service and support animals. clients wanted information about their rights to have one and wanted to learn how they could register their animal as a service or support animal. we also received calls from business owners, landlords, as well as the general public to get information about their rights when it came to service and support animals who were behaving inappropriately in public places. the remainder of the inquiries involved questions about education and employment accommodations. people also called our office to dispute their disability placard citation and they were referred out appropriately. as far as ada complaints go, we received more ada complaints this past month than we usually do. it totaled in the amount of 18 complaints. we received no requests for accommodations

and only one curb ramp request, however. the majority of the complaints involved the department of public works and the san francisco municipal transportation authority. there were reports of sidewalks needing to be repaired and the lack of a clear path of travel in construction zones. there were also reports of muni employees not modifying their employees to accommodate individuals who use service or support animals on public transportation. finally, received complaints about city departments and contractors who do not modify their policy to permit people who use other power driven mobility devices to use their device in the facility and joanna will discuss one of the trends that we noticed this month in further detail and the policies related to that. >> thank you, heather. good afternoon, council members. last month i gave you a fairly thorough unta