>> thank you >> department of human resources i want to confirm we conducted the required meet and confer process with our unions. about five of our unions and the largest were the machinists and local 21 and after asking some questions and some of them actually weren't aware of the discriminatory practices of the federal tax code, but after some good discussion they indicated their complete support. so the meet and confer process was concluded. >> thank you. any questions? thank you very much. i hope that every meet and confer in future is that easy. >> me, too. >> i bet. and with that, we have the budget and legislative analyst's report. >> mr. chair, members of the committee, on page 4 of our report, we point out that the health services system estimated that 186 employees would be affected by this

proposed ordinance. wherein most employees receive a payment between $1400 and $1500 that depends on their medical and dental insurance polices. and the total estimated cost to the city is $660,492 including payments to employees of 57 5 682 and employer fica and medicare contributions. it is our understanding that there would be no additional administrative costs for administering this ordinance. we consider, because this proposed ordinance may result in new ongoing costs of the city as an estimated $660,492 per year, we consider approval of this ordinance to be a policy matter for the board. >> thank you. any other questions for our budget legislative analyst?

catherine, i don't know if there is anything that you want to talk about? i want to thank you for working on this legislation. if there was anything else you wanted to add? okay. so with that, [ inaudible ] >> mr. chairman, the financial impact of this legislation, if approved by the board of supervisors, signed by the mayor would need to be added to the budget next fiscal year. that would be done through the mayor's budget. and it would probably be budgeted in "general responsibility." and as we were prepared to disperse those dollars we would allocate those dollars to the appropriate departments that have the employees that were eligible for the benefit. >> thank you very much. colleagues, any other questions of staff? okay. seeing none, i would like to open up item no. 3 for public comment. if there are any members of the public who wish to comment on

item no 3, please come up and line up on the wall. mr. griffin? >> i'm on my break. chairman farrell, members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to speak before you today on item no. 36789 my name is larry griffin the vice president offpt local 21 and we would like to thank supervisor farrell for bringing this forward and supervisors campos, chiu and avalos. by compensating affected employees to offset their tax, we're sending a message that san francisco is committed to equal pay for equal work. we know the day is coming when all couples and families will be treated the same.

meanwhile we're pleased to see you taking this step forward. local 21 respectfully ask that the committee vote yes. thank you. >> thank you very much. next speaker, please. >> supervisors, good morning. my name is martha knudsen the co-chair of the lgbt democratic chair and joined by my profess co-chair and fell board member neilson. i want to thank supervisor farrell for authoring this legislation and voice support of the legislation on behalf of the entire board of the alice b. tokelis lgbt club. this is an important legislation until the federal government recognizes same-sex

couples and marriage equality. on a personal note as a city employee whose same-sex spouse was covered by my health benefits for the past nine years, i paid this for nine years. what that meant is my income was reported as -- my income a little bit over $300 every pay period was increased and it's not reported as null income and social security. or medicare or for the retirement board. so it's not actually reported. i am proud of my 27-year relationship with my spouse. and i have always presented it publicly, whether it was registering as a domestic partner or getting married in a civil ceremony. yet because i sought to insure her i was punished and forced to pay higher taxes than i

should v. we urge full support of this legislation it's gos forward to the board. thank you very much for doing this. >> thank you. >> thank you supervisor farrell for coming to our meeting and presenting to the pac. the pac made a recommendation to our general membership to support this legislation, and it was unanimously approved at our general membership meeting january 22nd. so i want to thank you very much and thank you supervisors campos, wiener and chue for your support. we're thankful to the alice b. toklas club, because this is very, very important. very, very important issue. for our club as well, you know

passing this legislation, closing loopholes telling the federal government the time is now, that we take steps to repeal doma and to close these kind of discriminatory loopholes in our tax system that is penalizing same-sex couples. so we hope that the committee will forward this onto the full board with a positive recommendation and we hope that the full board will also vote unanimously to send a very clear message. thank you. >> thank you, next speaker, please. >> budget bill, you love this item. you always will. we look at you and see the working passion that you make, but are you ever going to see your budget day? c'mon, bill. c'mon budget bill.

you got the wedding budget bell blues. you are going to at pay your dues. come on budget bill. you are still the same. the budget is still the same and you are going to sing and you are going have to pay the same. and your budget is still the same. and oh, budget man, you came and gave at work without taking -- and you are going to have more today. okay. >> thank you, mr. paulson, any other members of public wishing to speak on sing on item no. 3? seeing none, public comment is closed >> supervisor avalos.

>> thank you, supervisor, i would like to thanks for your sponsorship of this ordinance and would like to put myself down as a co-sponsor. i think it's important that we approve this now, because obviously, we do not have accounted for the true cost of employee benefits, employee salaries if we have discrimination that we need to amend. and so therefore, i believe it's important that we approve this today. and make a determination for future budgets as well, how we're going to be dealing with discrimination that comes from the federal level and we can ameliorate that here from our polices. >> thank you supervisor avalos >> supervisor mar. >> thank you for testifying and the hard work, supervisor farrell, please add me as well. >> thank you very much. and i likewise want to thank all the members who came to, especially the alice b. toklas

and harvey milk club. i want to thank caroline dodd, a long time hero of mine and the controller'ssoff and the mayor's budget staff and micki and martin from the department of human resources thanks for your support and my staff, for all their hard work and especially for veronica bell from google, who actually introduced the idea to me about a year and a half ago. so i want to thank everybody for their support. i do have a few clarifying technical amendments, and i passed those out earlier. i would like to make a motion to accept those amendments. >> second. >> we'll do that without opposite. [ gavel and forward this item with full recommendation to the full board of supervisors for our february 26th meeting, seconded and without opposition. [ gavel ] . thank you very much. >> i just want to confirm this

goes before the board on february 26th? >> yes. >> thank you very much. thank you to everyone who came out for the item. mr. clerk, could you call items 4 and 5 together. >> item 4, ordinance appropriating $304,412 to the san francisco department on the status of women and l4 45,588 to the district attorney office for fiscal year 2012-2013. >> item no. 5, ordinance amending ordinance no. 165-12 -- excuse me, ordinance amending ordinance no. 165-12 to reflect the addition of one position in the department of the status of women and 11 positions in the district attorney office. mr. chairman i have a request from media service that we take a quick recess to set up an audio presentation. >> no problem. [ gavel ]

>> good morning mr. chair and good morning committee members >> one sec, i would like to welcome everyone back to our february 6th, budget and finance meeting. and i want to recognize our district attorney, thank you for being here. >> supervisor, if i might make some opening comments? >> sure, president chiu. thank you, mr. chair and i want to thank members of public who have come out for this item. we have in front of us a supplemental appropriation for domestic violence services and for additional law enforcement staffing that i had proposed in december. i want to [tha-fpg/] a moment and thank our district attorney, mayor lee and all of who were with the board who have co-sponsored this measure. as think many of you know the late 2011 comprehensive report on family violence in san francisco shows that reports of domestic violence in san francisco has risen sharply in last few years. what the data shows is that the demand for city departments and

non-profits for domestic violence assistance has increased steadily while funding for such services has stayed flat or decreased. for example, and the one-year period documented in the report we saw the increase in calls to domestic violence hotlines and 29% in more beds needed at domestic violence shelters. 202% in the number of child support cases involving family violence and i know the district attorney will highlight that. over the past two years the district attorney's caseload as spiked 88% and related to that the number of trials at the district attorney offense has spiked by 350%. the supplemental that have i proposed is a $750,000 number. it involves four components with a significant focus on domestic violence victims. it includes additional staffing

for the district attorney's office with additional prosecutors, victim advocates and providers particularly legal services for domestic violence to assist with restraining orders, child custody and immigration cases. funding for a domestic violence awareness campaign, which is kicking off this month. related to the 1 billion rally we have coming up next week and restoration of a previously eliminated domestic violence policy analyst position, who had been the only city staff position focused on domestic violence. and the one last comment i want to say, obviously in 2012, we had a significant public discourse on domestic violence, but i would state despite the recent controversy everybody agrees we need to do more to increase our safety net, everyone from our mayor and district attorney to our sheriff and all you have our colleagues believe that we need to do more. so that being said, hopefully this will take

that a step forward and again, i want to thank everyone for participating in this and introduce our district attorney and i believe you have a presentation. >> thank you, so much, mr. president, for your leadership in this area. i am introducing this, as well as thank you to all of you who supported this and co-sponsored. good morning mr. chair and members of committee and good morning to everyone else. before i start my presentation. we're going to play for you a quick audio and it is an audio of a real 911 call in a domestic violence case and we purposely did not use one of our own because we did not want the compromise the integrity of any cases that we have handled, but this particular [#1*-/] call is a real one and one that is being used for training and i think it begins to illustrate the point i will make through this presentation:

>> 911 emergency. >> my mom and dad -- stop it! mommy! stop it. don't hit the baby! don't hit the baby! stop it! can you send the police, please? >> we'll be there in a minute. >> >> the reason why we started with this audio because i want to make sure that everyone in this room understands that often when we're talking about when we're talking about domestic violence is life-and-death. there are women that are being injured severely and occasionally women are dying. we're very fortunate that last year we did not have for the first anytime a decade we did not have a domestic violence

homicide in the city. however, i would like to point out while that is a cause for celebration, i want to make sure that we understand the full context of this and quite frankly the difference between aggravated assault and homoe homicides. when we're talking about dominguez hills it's important to recognize that everything that we say and do carries a message and that that message often has severe impacts in our community. i can tell you for instance recently we had a case involving an individual by the name of oliver, who decided during a domestic dispute, he was going to kill his girlfriended by setting her on fire. fortunately in this incident, fire services were there quicklily and our victim will fully recover, but shortly after this incident was publicized we got a couple of cases in our office where

victims are complaining that they have been threatened by the offend with doing similar things and setting them on fire. i would also like to say that we're going to talk about some of the highlights of our request here, but i want to make sure that everybody understands when we made this request, we dakota a very close look at our needs. we're not in the buying and selling used car business. i do not believe that i should make a request hoping to get something less than what i asked for. we made a realistic request. we asked for four attorneys, the budget analyst, somewhere arbitrarily recommended that we should get two. we add for three d.a. investigators and the recommendation from the budget analyst is two. we asked for three victim advocates, the budget analyst recommended that we got none, indicating that we also been plus in this budget year and

that any additional work could be done by community-based organizations that also have victim services support. i have to tell that you first of all we were not plus in this budget year. while we got some relief from the general fund, that general fund relief was simply to put us where we were before, because we had lost three positions from our victim services as a result of cutbacks in the state budget. we asked for one paralegal and the budget analyst agreed with us in this particular area. our advocates and the work that they do is not comparable to that done by our partners and non-profit organizations. they are very important functions, but they are very different functions. the work that we do in our office is directly related to legislative mandates such as probation for requesting victim compensation funds from the state. we also work with victim

relocation. we're working closely together as a team between victim services and attorneys who are handling the prosecution, often assisting in that process. that is a very different process than the one that our partners in the non-profit world do. the ones that our partners in the non-profit world is very important and frankly, we couldn't do our job without their support. but it's important to recognize that they are very different. here are some highlights about where we are in terms of our caseload. if you look in 2010, you look at the average number of cases that we're handled by the office, it was 143 and i'm talking about domestic violence cases, that is an 88% increase. next i would like to point out your attention to another area, where we can see the increase in our workload. you look at the number of trials that our office has been involved in and you can see in

2007 we had 27 trials, 2012 we had 49 trials, that is an 81% increase. and then coming down, you look at the trials, 16 and again 36. next we're looking at our pleas and settlement of cases and this is a really important area for you to take note of, because often the way that our workload is reflected has to do with how many case goes to trial, how many cases are being settled before trial? and you can see that between 2010 and 2012, there was a 23% reduction in total pleas. from 38 to 48 and misdemeanor pleas dropped from 133 to 121, and then prebasis pleas actually dropped from 230 to 173.

i wanted to give you a comp store gain, a benchmark how we compare with another district attorney office in the bay area that has similar workload and similar philosophy how to handle domestic violence cases. you can see san francisco is on the left as you are facing this report. you can see that we have a total of 4 felony attorneys, 3 misdemeanor attorneys for a total of 7 and by comparison santa clara as 7 and 4 for a total of 11. and then you can see the trials and you can see that our people are handling more trials than being handled by another office that is very similarly situated. while i want to caution it's important to do some comparisons with other district attorneys around the area, i think it's also important to recognize that we have often a

different context, than many other counties in the area do. so i think it's important to also look at our workload in relation to how we deal with other participants in our local theater here. here is some information concerning our witness support. you can see that we have 12 victim advocates. they are each handling about 444 cases per year. this is a very significant workload, and it's a workload thats has gone up 12%. you will see further down that 23% of the work of our victim advocates -- i'm sorry, that in the last three years our victim advocate's workload has increased significantly and it's up 19% over the last three years and 23% of that work is related to the domestic violence. an important thing to understand about the value of the work that the victim advocate do, especially in domestic violence, early

intervention to make sure not only are they getting the services that they need and a need to work with the victim, accompany the victim during hearings. accompany the victim during trials that they are going to be there for this kind of support. it's not uncommon for a victim especially coming to court to be intimidated by the offenders or the offender's family and it's not uncommon for the victim to sit in the courtroom and get the hard looks from the offender or someone related to the offender. part of work is to remain with victim, he or she, but generally a she that they are protected and that we're behind them. that pretty much concludes this part of my presentation. and i'm ready to answer any questions that you may have. i also have members of my staff

here from our victim services, as well as our chief financial officer in case that you have any specific questions concerning the requests or concerning anything else about this presentation. >> thank you, district attorney gascon. colleagues my questions? supervisor mar? >> i know the budget analyst will give their recommendations, but i wanted to ask if you could address a couple of their points. i think the budget analyst is saying that the case numbers have gone down, so if you could repeat that and there was a certain allocation -- i think it was $294,000 of general -- for the d.a.'s office where the budget analyst says there is a general fund revenue amount that was already given, but my understanding is that you have information that says that that is not correct. >> yes. you know, first of all, let's address the workload issue.

the budget analyst got information from the police department as to the number of cases that they have come to the police department. we're not sure why those numbers have gone down, because certainly ever other number surrounding domestic violence has gone up. we know that the calls territory shelters have gone up and calls to the hotlines have gone up and certainly we have seen the number of trials have gone up. i think it's important to understand that at the end of the day, what the district attorney -- what matters to the district attorney's office is not how many cases come to the police department, but how many cases we file on, how many cases are prosecuted? how many cases we're handling? and i think that is the measure that should be used here. when you look at that measure, as i showed earlier, we can see that there have been an increase, a significant increase across the board. whether we're talking about trials, we're looking at an 81% increase in trials.

domestic violence, we're looking at misdemeanor trials, we're looking at a total caseload. if you look at the caseload per month from 2010 to 2012, there has been an 88% increase. so while i understand that the police department provided numbers that indicate a reduction and we really do not know how that is occurring. we know that the police department has recently gone to a different records management system and there may be some issue about how the numbers have come up. the reality is at the end of the day, this is what counts. it is what matters to us. this is the number ever of cases that we're handling and that has not gone down, but gone up significantly. >> mr. district attorney. when the budget analyst says the number has decreased by 40% in the past five years between

2010 and 2012, are you saying that is not correct? >> i am saying that if you look at our workload and you look at the number of cases that are being handled on a monthly basis, 2010, and today, we have had an increase of 88%. part of that is there are less settlements and the public defender is insisting on taking more cases to trial. there is a backlog that starts to build ever month and that backlog is reflected here. we're going by the number of cases that we're handling, the number of cases that we're trying, the number of cases that we're settling. we're not using the number of cases that the police department says is coming in, because frankly at the end of the day, that doesn't impact the bottom line for us.

>> good afternoon everybody. supervisor mar, in the numbers that the budget analyst put in their report, the numbers are constant over the five years except for last year. there is a dramatic dip in the numbers for 2012. that we don't yet understand why. i think maybe you want to have a conversation with the police department about that, but it's not a five-year trend of a decline. it's a one-year drop in that number. we can't yet account for it and we have had a lot of cations between the budget analyst and the police department, but i think what the district attorney is saying that we have seen the opposite. it's just a one-year drop there. >> thank you. other questions that are related to the funding for the victim services? the problem is that at the same time we were requesting in addition to our victim services the state reduced the funding coming in. so the end result of this process is that we actually lost the funding from state for