stakeholder meetings to make sure that we get the most robust program possible, and the work that local power that we finally got the sfpuc commission after years of fighting for it, the work that local power is doing on combining the local build-out with the shell contract is showing that we can get thousands of jobs per year for the next several years beginning in the program, get hundreds of megawatts of local renewable and efficiency installed in that program and also be able to say that it's 100% green just like pg and e's going to try to do but with the added benefit has the current numbers that it's showing that we can have all the green energy at competitive prices at pg and e rates, so if we get

this right and make sure that build-out is done properly, we can kick pg and e's fiekt, but there have been some drawbacks since the end of september when ed herrington left, we've had a breakdown in communication at our stakeholder meetings and we're not accomplishing [inaudible]. >> thank you. thank you very much. any members of the public who would like to comment? >> john rizzo at the sierra club, welcome, commissioner breed, just looked up on twitter where someone just tweeted that clean power sf supports the keystone excel pipeline, so you know, we should have a clean power sf twitter account as well as a facebook page to counter that. there are some concerns that

kind of feed into this campaign that's going on, and the proposed maximum rate, we think it's too high, it's unnecessarily high. it would lock out a number of san francisco residents from being able to afford it. we think that lower rates are possible for some of the things that eric was just talking about, the puc consultants have shown that using local build-out, you can get lower rates which would allow more san franciscans to participate in clean energy and also get a wider base. thank you. >> thank you very much. any other member of the public who would like to comment? and anyone else, you can please line up in the center aisle, thank you. >> ben david, sierra club, san

francisco has a wonderful opportunity to create a cc a that brings lots of big benefits to the city and its residents including lots of jobs, to get this done, we need puc staff and their consultant to work very closely together, but now they've been having difficulties doing that, you know, one critical area is the rate premium compared to pg and e's for the first year while the program is getting started up. the premium people end up paying will have a big effect

on how many people stay in the program and the suck -- success of the program. there are times when a third party that needs to step in and help two other parties resolve their differences and prevent a bad situation. i feel this is one of those times, lafco needs to take an active role however they can to help them get together and make it happen. >> thank you. any other members of the public who would like to comment, and seeing none come forward, i will close public comment. thank you, everyone, for your comments from the public and thank you for the presentation from the public utility commission and our lafco staff. i think it's important to

really emphasize, you know, long-term, we're looking at creating our own renewable energy generation system and currently we have to operate in the current system which includes people who are maybe on the fossil fuel side and the renewable side like shell is and that's the reality we face right now, something similar that i'm looking at this last year, there are municipal quality around the city, we want to make sure we're not dealing with some of the banks with a bad track record with foreclosures, we're operating in the same system that doesn't really, you know, offer a lot of choices. well, ultimately, we're creating our own choice that is going to be based on fully renewable power and to get there, we have to get through the current system, so we are experiencing what i believe are

real growing pains, but i know we can get there if we work closely together. i want to thank you for your efforts. okay. let go on to our next item, please. >> item number 4, status update on the study on how jurisdictions fill vacancies to elected offices between election cycles. >> jason fried, lafco staff, at the last meeting, you instructed to start this study of figuring out how when elected positions become vacant mid cycle how we fill those. we have since then brought on an intern research intern from usf, spencer who's sitting there with us today, we're at the stage right now, the goal just to give you a very quick brief overview of what we're looking at doing is we're looking at various different

types of systems because there's no place like san francisco, which is a city and county in california and that has an independently elected mayor, what we're doing is breaking this study down to multiple categories to try to find similar things with san francisco, so we're looking at other locations that have large populations that are about the city and county, other places in the country, there are places like arlington, virginia, colorado, we're looking how they replace their positions in the county there. we're also going to be looking at the top 10 cities across the nation to see -- that have independently elected mayors to see how they replace position ins the top 10 cities, we're going to look in california, the law dictates how most places do the replacements unless you're a chartered city like san francisco, you can have a different set of rules

so we're going to look at all of those locations as well, and determine what is everyone else's practices and present that in a report. my hope is we'll have a draft available for the march meeting so people can think about what it is, i don't have much more detail than that because we haven't had a chance to analyze all the data that's been collected so far. >> i think what's good to look at is how long positions stay vacant, right now in the city, we have kind of an assessor post that has been vacant i believe since early december and now we're approaching march, that's three months, that position not being filled and we've had all the 800 thousand people, people that are probably eligible to serve are probably 250 thousand people in san francisco and not one of them has been chosen yet to replace either be in the assessor's office or to replace

the district 4 supervisor, that's taking a lot time and hopefully we'll have a a decision made soon, i'm curious other places around california, is there a time frame or a certain length of time they should have that decision made by. >> we have been collecting that type of data, if a seat is vacant for a certain amount of time, there are places they have in the rules, someone gets to choose a seat, if it's left vacant for a certain amount of time, it goes through a different process for reporting, we're planning on including that in the notes. >> glad to hear that. er >> supervisor campos? >> thank you, mr. chair. i appreciate the question and that's the thing that i was thinking about, it would be interesting to see what other jurisdictions do, do they have a requirement that a vacancy be filled by a certain time. in the vatican, you're going to

have a conclave happen 10 or 15 days after the vacancy is done, i don't know if a concave is required here, you do avoid a situation where you have a vacancy longer than you should. >> i'll make sure it is the highlight of the report that we will make sure to pull that section out a little bit and talk about that a little bit more. >> i'm sorry, it's the catholic in me that had to say it. >> any other thoughts on that? >> okay. >> thank you. >> thank you for your presentation, this item, we can open up for public comment. >> good afternoon, again, eric brooks, san francisco green party and local grass roots organization in our city, i do too many of these, so at any rate, it's really good to see the lafco taking this up. i'm not a fan and i don't think -- i'm not going to explicitly speak for them but i think most

of the folks in the green party are not a fan of this strong executive that's able to just appoint people that leave offices like the board of supervisors or the assessor. i see no reason whatsoever that whenever someone leaves a position in our city government that we can't immediately call a near term special election to replace that person by a vote of the people, that's the way we should be replacing people on the board of supervisors and to other elected positions. and just to kind of also dove tail on what some of you already said, we also have this situation and this whole assessor thing where, you know, god bless and i mean, i find him to be a little more positive than his predecessor from the start point of a progressive, but mayor lee did do this thing that the board of supervisors are going to squeak

through and serve for ten years instead of the normal 8, we shouldn't have little games like that going on in our democracy, we need people that are serving our community to be appointed by the democracy, by the people of san francisco who should be going to the polls and rank choice elections to make these decisions, not the executive branch of the city. thanks. >> thank you, any other member of the public who would like to comment? and seeing none, we'll close public comment. just from the one comment that came through, i'm also reminded of when we had a vacancy for the mayor's office, there was no real public discussion with any of the candidates that they didn't come before the board of supervisors to say they were interested in becoming the interim mayor, in fact, when we came to the first vote on

january 4th of 2011, the first vote for the interim mayor, the person who being selected wasn't even in the country and hadn't told anyone he was interested in being mayor and i couldn't stomach a vote at that time, so it seems like though a lot of different processes we need to look at, having some transparency of how we're doing the voting is needed and having some formal presentation, some formal discussion with the candidates that are coming before us, there could be a decision left to the mayor's side, but anyone else coming forward that could get appointed or fill a vacancy should have some public expression of their interest as well, just my thoughts. okay. commissioner breed? >> yeah, i just wanted to know, mr. brooks brought up a good point about a special election

and i just would like to know and when researching in your report, if you could maybe look at whether or not there are special elections that are done to fill some of these vacancies as well, and that would be really helpful information to have. >> yeah, we will report on whatever information we find. this is based on some of the information we've gotten so far, we've put it into a big broad basic, there are basically two type and is a high dried of the two types, some places appoint, some call for a special election and some allow for some kind of hybrid where there could be an appointment or some kind of special election, that's when time comes into play, we've noticed that there are some places if there are some time left before an election, the seat could remain vacant, in the report, we'll have a spreadsheet that has every location we've looked at, what it says in the city charter or the government code or how it's

located of how it works, we will have all that information and there will be some sort of report on top of that that gives the basic explanation of what's written in that chart. >> commissioner mar? >> and mr. fried, are you including the community college board as well? >> anything that the general public elects, and we know what is elected here in san francisco, when we're looking at other places, some of them have health districts so we're trying to figure out, does it make sense and maybe this is a good question for the commission, how far down the list of offices are we looking, school board, college board, board of supervisors, what is it, five city offices, or do we want to go farther down with some place that elects a health department person or something like that, we need to figure out how far done we go, and that will probably determine what's available online because mostly all of our research is going to be online, we're not

looking to go and start talking to every single county of department of elections, and if we can get enough information from that, that's what our report will be based on. >> okay, thank you. no other comments from the commission, so we can go on to our next item. >> item number 5, executive officer's report. >> no report. >> jason fried, lafco staff, i wanted to bring up a couple of brief things, we're going to be doing a joint meeting on monday the 25th, we would have meet the friday before that and after talking with chair avalos, we determined that it doesn't make sense to meet on a friday and the following monday so we're going to cancel that friday meeting, there will be a couple of quick item that is we will need to do after the joint meeting, one of which after march [inaudible] to be in line before the city finishes its

budget so they can know how much money they need to have in the budget for us or not have in the budget for us, we will have to have a discussion abthat and i'm assuming we will have a little bit of a discussion about the draft report as well. thank you. >> okay, thank you. >> we can open up the director's report for public comment. and seeing no one come forward, we'll close public comment. and clerk, our next item, please. >> item number 6, public comment. >> this is an opportunity to talk about anything related to lafco and our work, and seeing no one come forward for this public comment, we will close public comment, and do we have any other items before us. >> item number 7, future agenda items. >> future agenda items, colleagues? okay, public comment on future agenda items? okay, we'll close public comment, and our last item? >> adjournment. >> colleagues, we're adjourned. thank you very much.