or ask more questions? commissioner walker. >> i think that the conditions of these buildings is -- makes these uninhabitable even though people are living in them. and the issues of uncommitted electric heaters, those type of things, make it a real risk for fire. so, i would like to make a motion to uphold the department's recommendation, the abatement, and maybe allow for 30 days to take out permits and resolve these issues. >> i second that motion.

>> so, i just want to clarify what commissioner walker said. so, could you flesh out -- you're basically saying that you find that -- the v. laytions that the department has issued on these properties are habitability issues, and make the buildings unsafe to occupy, even though they are occupied. and the potential risk for fire, the mold that we see, and the evident presented all are health risks for the people living in them. therefore, i believe that it is imperative for us to support the department's action of abatement and -- and allow for the maximum, i would, of 30 days to take out the permits and cure these notices of violation. *

>> okay. so, if i could just clarify, then, you're moving to uphold the order of abatement? >> yes. uphold the order of abatement. allowing 30 days to complete the work based on your finding that the evidence as presented by dbi supports the director's order of abatement as i issued it? >> yes. that's correct. >> can i ask a point of information, if i may? is the motion that -- to issue a 30-day order of abatement? >> yes. >> and is that for agenda items 1 through 5? >> 1 through 5. >> okay, thank you. >> thank you. >> call a vote, sonya. >> is there any public comment on the item? >> none.

>> seeing none, call the roll call. on the motion -- >> do you have a second? >> commissioner mel gar seconded it. president clench? >> yes. >> vice president mel gar? >> yes. >> commissioner lee? >> yes, i believe 30 days is fair because the type of violations left are not long and large items. we should be able to take care of it in 30* days, so, yes. >> commissioner mar? >> yes. >> commissioner mccarthy? >> yes. >> commissioner mccray? >> yes. >> commissioner walker? >> yes. >> the motion carries and the order of abatement is upheld. *

>> item d, general public comment. is there any general public comment on regarding the abatement appeals board? >> seeing none. >> seeing none, item e, adjournment. is there a motion to adjourn? >> motion to adjourn. >> second. >> we are now adjourned at 9:55 a.m. we'll take about a ten-minute recess and reconvene as the building inspection commission..

>> (roll call). we have a quorum and the next item on the agenda is president's announcements. >> thank you, madam secretary. obviously welcome everyone here today, the last meeting before the end of the year. we will wish everybody happy holidays. so what we have is acting director tom huey participated in a media briefing at the site of the hacker pool house with the director of recreation and

parks, phil ginsburg. dbi acting director huey signed an emergency order early letter this month when a fire caused sufficient structural damage to make the building an imminent public safety hazard. demolition is currently underway. bill pointed out to me a very interesting article in the front of the san francisco chronicle today is good to give you history on that. the fire department and one of the equipment manufacturers have donated new carbon monoxide detections and smoke detectors which dbi will give away to the public during our outreach event. we are delighted to give away these devices and assurance compliance with state law requiring their installation both in single family homes,

and that's effective january 1, 2013, and multi family homes also. also we are having a modest get together, everybody should come, children and family members are welcome, it will be held tomorrow, december 20, after pm and take part in the joy and festivities. >> is there any public comment on the president's announcements? seeing none, item 3, general public comment. the bic will take public comment on matters within the commission's jurisdiction that are not part of this agenda. >> form, commissioners, henry

--. >> i just need to read it for the record here. member s of the public may address the commission on items not appearing on the agenda for a period of time not to exceed 3 minutes. speakers shall address their remarks to the commission as a whole and not to individual commissioners or department personnel. thank you. okay, henry. >> thank you, commissioner, president mccarthy, sorry. i am a member of san francisco for responsible growth and wanted to report to you under the leadership of acting director tom huey, deputy director and tony greco, i want to say thanks, happy holidays and we'll see you next year. >> happy holidays.

>> good morning, commissioners, i will read a prepared statement. my name is spencer gash, i have been a building inspector for this department for 22 years. i have also been a resident of san francisco for 32 years. i would first like to request persons with an interest in this department and its malfunction to come to these building inspection meetings. they are on this commission is responsible for the oversight of that department. to verify that i would like to cite two sections from pop position g, the commission shall organize, reorganize and manage the department. from section 3.698-1, the department of building inspection should be under the management of a building inspection commission consisting of 7 members. your willful refusal to provide that oversight has resulted in the situation i will describe.

other agencies aiding and abeting this commission's willful refusal to oversee, the policy of your political appointees is obviously to keep the department as dysfunctional as possible. this is evidenced by, among other things, by no written directives have been issued for 5-plus years. there are no written policies and procedures in effect. training has been abandoned except in legally hazard area situations, ie the capps program. there is rampant racism. permanent applicants, property owners, business owners and employees. politically favored employees are given positions with less

oversight and authority so they can do personal tasks while working for the city. while the situation requires a lack of morality on the part of the employees i also believe this constitutes veting of who is suitable for promotion. those less favored are given poor job assignments, closely watched, unjustly disciplined and otherwise harassed while also required to do the work of the goof-offs. as hards department's customers in addition to fleecing them of as frp money as possible, evidenced by the department's use of an unauthorized permit routing procedure to see the application everywhere possible to see if some additional fees can't be tacked on to the permit costs. the fees collected are not kept and spent by this department but by the administer of finance with director hue's approval. of course the more money the mayor

gets the more likely he is to keep the appointees around. this department leaves little money for the department to function although --. >> thank you. >> i'm going to finish the sentence. >> you are off, you are not allowed -- your 3 minutes is up, sir. thank you very much. >> handsomely compensated political appointees to keep the lid on the stew pot --. >> next speaker. >> is there any additional public comment? seeing none, item 4, updates and status on capses recommendations. >> good morning, commissioners, my name is

patrick odelaney, director of san francisco safety for san francisco, tasked with picking up the capss recommendations. thank you for the invitation to come speak this morning, i am excited to have the building inspection commission partner with us and be involved with what from our history has been a driving force to make this happen. we are excited to announce we are going to be introducing legislation in early 2013. this soft story ordinance is going to be for wood framed buildings, within that subset of buildings there's probably about 4500 buildings that meet that criteria. of those 4500 buildings we assume that about 2800 to 2900 would be soft stories and would be required to do a mandatory soft story

retrofit. what's nice to this as opposed to when the soft story task force finished up their work a few years ago, there were a lot of unknowns. the largest one i heard a few years ago was how are people going to pay for this? we have met with several private lenders and we have been developing finance products to make sure that people subject to this ordinance have a means to pay for it and have an access to financing. it's really been a neat experience to reconvene some of the players that were involved earlier. there's no longer a soft story task force but what we have now is an earthquake safety working group which president mccarthy is going to cochair with me. now we can get into the meat of the implementation. the policy work done to create this

ordinance was due to a lot of efforts by community leaders, and world leaders in earthquake safety. we have a very good product moving forward and my goal as director is to make sure the legislation city hall passes is given to the building inspection in a form they can implement it. often in the past what was waisted without their input it's a piece of legislation they can't use. i want to be sure this is useful and it runs smoothly through its implementation process and sets the stage for our 30 year work plan. last month we sent out a notice to every private school in san francisco, not accusing them of anything, not saying you are in an unsafe building, saying you are not required to meet safety standards, let's have a

conversation. i'm pleased to inform you we have had several come forward and we continue to outreach them and we look forward to working with them. again, those are just two examples of our 30 year work plan. most of you have seen the 30 year work plan, i brought a few extra copies in case any of you haven't seen it. i only have 3 copies, if more are needd i have more in my office and i'll be happy to provide them to anyone. it takes the task force recommendations and puts them in a timeline. priorities can change but now it's a nice plan and implementation has started well. several of these tasks are well underway and it's nice to see some progress made and to see some support not only from the city administrator but also from the mayor and it's our goal to make sure all san franciscoans are safe and sheltered in place after a

multi seismic event. >> commissioner ?oo ?a i'm so glad you guys are this far along, that's really great. i had a couple questions. >> sure. >> is that work plan available online? >> absolutely, it's under the city administrator's work site. right now it's a very simple work site, right now the only thing there is this and the report. >> in pdf >> yes. >> one of the things we learned after katrina, unfortunately, is that natural disasters affect poor people in a much more acute way because they don't have the resources to deal with this kind of stuff. i'm wondering as you are launching this effort what specifically your department's working, you know, how your

collaboratively involving nonprofit organizations and organizations that serve the poor, both the housing side for the nonprofit lending, but also just facilities. have you done work with the mayor's office of community development and housing or how is that working out? >> sure. i can talk to a couple of those points. as far as financing goes, this was a big deal. when the soft story task force got together, how is a nonprofit operator that can hardly pay its operating costs --. >> for profits as well, right? >> sure, but focusing on nonprofits for a second. while the details haven't been ironed out, we have been in discussions about providing low interest loans which is going to be further discussed at a finance summit we're going to be holding with the mayor in january. that will not only

have nonprofit lenders but credit lenders and other lenders interested in being part of this. i was very touched, these are small loans in the grand scheme of things and honestly they are not going to make a lot of money but overwhelmingly they said we are part of san francisco and we want to be part of this. personally i was very touched and i am excited to get this meeting together. we have been working with ram part, they know that we want to approach this the right way, protect tenants and understand that the best thing we can do is make sure the 59,000 san franciscoans that live in these soft story buildings are able to shelter in place after an earthquake. between meeting with them and other various tenant groups we have got our head around these issues and i

think we're addressing them accurately. >> commissioner walker. >> great to hear that you are moving these things forward. you talked about the early 2013 introduction of a soft story program. is it a mandatory program and when in 2013. >> early in 2013, the specific date is not known yet because it's up to the board of supervisors that will be introducing it. ordinance is being prepared, reviewed by the city attorney right now, we hope to have those comments completed very shortly. it is a mandatory system with a 4 tier system. we don't want to flood dbi with all these permits all at once. we want to be sure that people have time to implement this. it would have a mandatory year-long praus inspection process. if property owners are not subject to this there's

an easy opt-out, it's not going to cost them a lot of money to demonstrate they don't have to comply. obviously we want a check and balance in there so nefarious owners don't skate by. the advantage of doing that, on soft story spaces you have either commercial spaces or parking on the first floor so this work can be done without displacing tenants. >> is there a discussion about helping commercial entities that might be displaced, that was one. things that came up. >> absolutely and that was a consideration. given my past experience working with commercial tenants, the types of seismic upgrades we're talking about can be limited, theoretically you can keep the

space open. ideally our goal is not to displace any of these 10 amounts. these spaces have the equivalent of 7,000 employees. >> you said it's a year long evaluation. what is the end goal if a mandatory program is in existence, we hope to have them all upgraded by --. >> 2020. the idea would be that within that year evaluation you would be able to determine which of the 4 tiers you would fit in and from there you would be on a timeline associated with that ranging all the way up to 2020. >> i agree with commissioner melgar's concern about the low income community, especially our tenant community, a lot of whom are in these buildings. i would suggest that you might outreach to our code enforcement outreach program who are in constant contact with the tenant community in these type of building and i think there are some members of those organizations here.

>> great. we've already tried to do a tremendous amount of outreach to that community and if there's any other players involved in san francisco that you think we should be in touch with, i'll be happy to talk to you offline, do that list and do that outreach. >> thank you, and thank you for putting this forward. many of us were involved in the capss discussions over the years and the more you know, the more you realize how urgently this is needed. >> thank you. to that point, one of the things i'm excited about is i'm involved with not only the capss project and the bpr project, i've seen things go through the city where you end up with a very nice-looking report like this and it sits on the desk and gathers dust. with the support of the building inspection commission i'm happy to address any concerns you feel we may not be meeting or not addressing and have that conversation any time. >> commissioner lee. >> thank you. i want to

express my appreciation that you are doing the outreach and talking to the schools and getting them to understand that they may have to have a retrofit project in the future, because i can understand that some of these projects would end up costing a lot of money and there would be a lot of planning before the school actually starts construction to retrofit. but my question was actually along with commissioner melgar and commissioner walker were talking about. i was wondering about the cost of displacing tenants and businesses. you mentioned loans available to property owners. could the loans take into account the cost of displacing 10 -- tenants and businesses. >> that's a very good question. we haven't brought that up to the lenders, a lot of these are going to be equity-based loans but i think it's an important option

because for landlords that can be a tremendous expense. >> first of all my comments, we're extremely lucky that you took this job because it's going to be -- and you're young enough to stay at it and we've met a couple times on the issue and you have kind of brought me up to speed and i think you are the right guy for the right job at the right time and we're lucky to have you and also kind of a shout out to lawrence for his work over the years and putting this together. he's kind of handing it off to you now and i know he's in the background watching, still involved, so he's been a tremendous, a lot of us have a lot of respect for him for all the work he's done to bring it to this point to hand it off to you so you can hand it off to the next level. obviously in january we'll know more. most of the people that i talked to that own properties, get it. i think it's just an educational thing.

once they understand they will understand going forward it really works. it's pay it now or pay later, we got to deal with it. it's the price we pay for living in such a wonderful part of the world. good luck with everything and micah, is he here, too? is he working with you? these two can be found at any time downstairs in the chambers, the dungeon offices of city hall. so please i encourage anybody to drop in, i'm sorry, commissioner walker has more questions. >> i just have one question. one of the things we found works also, especially maybe looking at some of the other -- beyond soft story is disclosures, which help. it's something that if people know what's going on with the building generally it encourages the owner to fix it up a little bit more. is that something you have talked about? >> it's incorporated in the 30

year work plan. the problem is right now the real estate community doesn't really have a tangible disclosure that explains structural deficiencies. you hear about pml's and things like that where people buy these properties. the soft story condition doesn't really appear. there's a few dogs in the race as far as developing a rating system that actually works and we're meeting with those players that are developing it and really seeing it's a difficult thing to develop something that can be used universally, but it is a task on our program and that's something i'm excited to see not only on larger commercial buildings but also small one and two family dwellings. right now it's not in our purview to mandate anything for one of these buildings but to develop something so a person buying a property really understands what's going on, that was a big part of capss to

develop something so seismic fitness is valued. also to touch on a big thing you to lawrence cornfield. i appreciate you bringing that up, president mccarthy. lawrence, all of you know him, was really a champion of the capss project, even when capss didn't have funding, i'm thoroughly convinced he funded it out of pocket for a few years. there's so many people involved in that process we could thank i could stay up here for 20 minutes .d but if we didn't have the 10-plus years of hard work of people trying to develop this plan, i wouldn't be sitting here today. it's really those people that have done all the heavy lifting and now it's my turn to step in, but they are still around and they are still continuing to help because everyone is very passionate about this. as much as we joke about this

being an apolitical situation, i really believe it is. this is something for all san franciscoans. >> the tracking system, you make sure you are plugged into that. >> i'm a frequent user of it, i will definitely be paying attention to that. >> thank you for your presentation here today. >> i'll leave these up here. >> i've got one copy. madam secretary. >> is there any public comment on item 4? seeing none, item no. 5, discussion and possible action regarding a proposed revised ordinance, file no. 121018, amending the san francisco housing code by amending section 206 to add section 1002 to the list of retroactive provisions; no. 2, amending