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.

>> the renovation of balboa park, the oldest in the city of san francisco, and now it is the newest part in the city of san francisco. through our partnership, and because of public investment from the two thousand eight

fund, we are celebrating a renewal and an awakening of this park. we have it safer, happier, more joyous. >> 3, 2, 1, [laughter] =--[applause] >> it is a great resource for families, to have fun in the city, recreation. >> this is an amazing park. we have not revitalized it without public and private investment. the critical piece of the process of this renovation was that it was all about the community. we reached out to everyone in this community. we love this park dearly and they all had thoughts and ideas and they wanted to bring their own creativity and their

personality to bear on the design. what you see is what the community wanted. these ideas all came from the residents of this community. as a result, there is a sense of ownership, pride and responsibility that goes along with what is going to be an exciting park. g to get ready for sfgtv to catch up with this meeting.

great. okay, we have agenda item, but before we get started i would like to welcome superviser chang. she is the vice chair, correct. >> this meeting will come to order, welcome my name is cohen and to my right is chang to the right is supervisor campos. and the crowd goes wild. thank you, thank you very much. >> madam clerk, i want to thank sfgtv and thank you for making us look beautiful and sounding smart. please silence all cell phones

and complete any speaker cards to be included as part of the file should be submitted to the committee clerk and each member will be allotted the same number of minutes to speak. the items will appear on the march 12, 2013 board meeting agenda unless otherwise stated. >> excellent. i'm so excited. okay, could you please call item one. >> item number one is a hearing controller office park maintenance report for fiscal year 2011 and 2012. and parks throughout the city. >> are there any opening remarks? seeing none let's begin. >> i am sorry, there is one, excuse me. >> good morning, everyone, so i just wanted to introduce hearing item that was previously introduced under supervisor chu it is a annual fee that was passed by voters in 2003.

we have here today general manager phil ginsberg to start off and litia from park as well. >> thank you, for introducing this. thank you for calling this hearing, this partnership that we have with the controller's office is really critical and invaluable to help us fulfill our mission, what you have before us is the clinical data, it relates to every single one of our 22 parks throughout the city, and this program has been continuing since 2005 and since what we have is a body of data where we can start to study trends and start to understand the changes in data and really understanding this and our director of operations and park superintendent and their staff is here today and may speak a little bit to deserve a

tremendous amount of credit to really use this information. we do, park evaluations quarterly, what we are talking about is the annual report for fiscal year 11-12, the managers are aware of their scores in all of their parks four times a year, where we see changes or dips, our park service managers are on it and we investigate why and we try to makeshift resources. as you know ours is a department that frankly struggles for the amount of resources that we have to take care of all of the land that we have and this document is a very and this program is a very important tool for us to help us allocate resources as wisely and strategickly as we can. we love it. it is really important and we are grateful to controller's

office for the guidance in establishing the program. let me talk very briefly about some of the highlights or at least my preliminary observations for this report for 11-12 and i will turn it over and then our staffs are going to do more of a deeper dive. this is a really good report. there are marginal score changes at different parts and what we see is that the scores are stable and they are fundamentally remaining for the my main nens which 85 percent, it is perceived to be a well maintained park and what you can see since 05-06 and particularly in the last few years is a general upward trend of the number of high, performing parks in the reduction of low performing parks and over all, which is most fundamentally important to us, a decrease in the disparty

between our highest scoring parks and our lowest scoring parks. this year, rements the smallest disparity between our highest scoring district and our lowest scoring district that we have ever had since the program began. and i think that is a reflection of this board of supervisors and the parks department and frankly the ethos of our park volunteers and stewards. that every neighborhood deserves a clean and safe park and we really do fundamentally strive to allocate resources in such a way where those parks whether they are old or they are in or have challenged or in a neighborhood with other challenges that actually contribute to a challenge in keeping the park clean. we are allocating resources or trying to allocate resources in such a way to overcome some of

those more structural or fundamental challenges from the way that our different parks respond. there is going to be always going to be some deviation in the data. you know, we go out four times a year on a given day and frankly we go out quarterly and it depends on what day the evaluators go out and they go out on a thursday and they might see something different than if they go out on a monday after a long weekend. if they go out after a period of rain, the scores might be different than if they go out after a prolonged period of sunshine. the controller actually in the way this works is the controller scores are 50 percent of the over all scores, and our scores are 50 percent but we go out four times and the controller visits each park once. >> there is going to be variation and what we are doing to work with the office is to understand is where it signals

a trend. you know, we have really good communication and we are constantly reviewing these scores. we would also say that we take this very seriously in our evaluators take it seriously, and so we are not padding our grades. our evaluators undergo training and every year we work with the controller to strengthen the standard by which we are evaluating which actually could result in lower scores sometimes. so over all this is a great program, i think that the highlights of this report for me are the level of consistency that we are tying to achieve which is the high, performing parks and the strifrngage of low performing and cleanliness and that is a trend upward with respect to the cleanliness of the parks and rest rooms in particular. but this is also a document that set a little bit of a road map for us and tell us where we

need to reinvying ate our focus and where we see drops we ask why and where we see disturbing trends we try to get to the about the bot tom of it. i think that what you have seen are three or four years of steady increases and there are a variety of reasons for that and i think that our park staff and our gardeners and our custodians are doing incredible work. i think that we have also been helped by the workforce program and we have partnered with the agency that have provided to help to keep the parks clean. i think that that has helped as has the first of its kind

guard gaer apprintice and i also think that our capitol program has had an impact. some of that does get reflected in the annual scores and the parks are able to address some of those structural maintenance issues that do get reflected in these quarterly evaluations but we still have a lot of work to do and even with the 2012 parks bond, we are only chiping away at the total amount of what is needed in our parks. as we are trending upward, given the resources that we do have, i think that we are performing at an exceptionally high level and that is a threshold that is tough to maintain and increase, giving the staffing resources that we do have. i think that this is a good news report and talk over to peg to talk more about the

program and i am happy to answer any questions after our presentation is done. >> you mean that was not the presentation? >> that was just a warm up. >> thank you, phil. >> thank you for that wonderful warm up. >> now, on with the program. >> actually, i'm going to turn it over to our staff to talk about the content and to introduce sarah swanbeck who is our lead in the controller's office. and so i won't go on. i also wanted to say, i'm steve enson from the controller's office and there is a good awareness of performance programs that are at work and municipalities around the country and i hope that we are honest about the city's strengths and weaknesses. we pride ourselves on that in the controller's office and one thing that you would want to be able to brag when you think that you have the best in class?

i think that we really do. and i think that some of the characteristics of it. when it was built, all of those years ago after prop c was passed it was proudly and deeply conducted in the rec park department, so that people from gardener to park supervisor were aware and helped to develop them. it was publicly consulted and it strikes the sweet spot between the technical and layperson's information. detailed enough so it is useful for the people who have to do the workday to day and not so detailed that the people that want to understand what is going on in the parks and get value out of it too and it is still said consistently and we have multiple years of data and train with the department every year so that we are sure that the controller's office and evaluators are seeing the same things and consistent leadership in the department and phil and denny and lidia

and the park supervisors do take the information seriously and get everybody else in the department as well. so, i really think that, you know, i look back at the smartness of the design, the call in prop c for a specific standard, if you have never looked at the standards, i recommend it, it makes you look at a park differently, it helps you look at how chipped is the paint? how well maintained in the playground equipment and there are puddles in the playing field, how much litter is too much litter? for myself, i have to say that every time that i go out i see something that i have not seen before and i lived here for 20 years, and before i went to inspect the park i have never been in half of those places. i would, if you have never had the chance to do that, have a walk around and it is really eye opening so that is all that i am going to say and i think that lidia and sarah will

present the content. push >> good morning. so you have hard copies, i don't know if you like one or others. i am just going to give kind of a larger overview of some of the findings in the report and turn it over to lidia who will talk about the details and recommendations that we made in our report and how the department is responding. >> so, so mentioned over all scores this year have been incredibly consistent, 8.4 percent was the average which is over that 85 percent flesh hold. as you mentioned we will see a leveling off of scores just given the fixed resources in the department, but over all, that 0.1 increase over the last

year is consistent. this is showing you the over all program and breaks it down by quarter, and so you are seeing this upward trend over all and importantly this shows the quarterly variation that happens in the seasonal variations in weather and use of parks in general. and this next chart is showing the distribution of park scores. and again, over time, so the red here is parks that are scoring less than 80 percent, the yellow is parks between 80 and 80 percent and the green is the parks over 90 percent, consistent relative to last year with the improvement with the parks scoring below 40 percent, relative to last year and so if you go back to the fiscal year ten, a slight decrease over those scores. these next two slides are just going to show you the district results so kind of like this map here because it gives a

pretty clear indicator of how the districts are doing relative to one another across the city. traditionally the parks in the south east section of the city do tend to score lower over time or at least they have over the beginning of the evaluations over this year, district ten and eleven have seen improvement and eleven has seen the over all improvement and that went up by 3.3 percentage point which was a really large jump and this second side is showing you district results and it is showing you over time which districts were the lowest scoring and which were the highest scoring, just to kind of give you a sense of the range in scores over time and as phil did mention earlier, i know that something interesting this year is this continuing narrowing of the scores. so, you know, fewer disparty in park scores across the districts. that is the last slide that i have for you i will turn it r