>> good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the san francisco board of supervisors budget and finance committee meeting for wednesday, april 10ing, 2013. i am joined by supervisor london breed, supervisor john

avalos as well as supervisor scott wiener. all members of the committee. i would like to thank the members of sfgtv who are filming this meeting. greg bergman and nona melkonian as well as the clerk of the committee, mr. victor young. mr. clerk, do we have any announcements? >> yes, please turnoff all cell phones and electronic devices. [speaker not understood]. items acted upon today will appear on the april 16, 2013 board of supervisors agenda unless otherwise stated. >> okay, mr. clerk. can you please call item number 1? >> item number 1, ordinance appropriating $3,749,644 in the sheriff's department, including $3,458,970 from general re serve and $290,674 from state disability claim reimbursement in the amount of $1,197,779 for workers' compensation expense, $3,195,726 for overtime expenditures, and $538,690 for reduction of revenues; including revenue de-appropriation of $538,690 for reduction of state revenues and expenditure de-appropriation of $1,182,551 for permanent salaries and materials and supplies in order to support the sheriff's department projected expenditures; as required per ordinance no. 194-11, this ordinance requires a two-thirds vote of all members of the board of supervisors for approval for $3,195,726 of this request.

>> okay, thank you very much, mr. clerk. ~ expenditures. we have the supervisor and chair to present on the supplement. [speaker not understood]. >> good afternoon, budget and finance committee. it is an honor to be here before you. as sheriff, i want to introduce to you our senior exec members of our command staff. i'd first like to introduce to you my under sheriff. maya assistant sheriff paul miamoto, my chief of staff cathy gorwood. you will hear from our cfo

[speaker not understood], and we are also accompanied by the leadership of our rank and file union, the deputy sheriff's association as well. they normally do not dress like that. so, we are here before you on a supplemental and we appreciate the ongoing conversations that we have had with a number of our partner departments and agencies that helped us arrive at this place. first i would like to acknowledge the mayor's office, both melissa howard and kate howard for their collaboration with our office over the last few months in particular in making sure that we were all on the same page, and our office greatly appreciates that great level of collegiality. i would also like to thank the controller's office for their assistance, as i have called on

them in my time as sheriff as well as the budget analyst office, ms. deborah newman and, of course, harvey. i also want to thank ms. peggy sugar man who can help us related to workers' comp issues that me and the cfo will go into shortly. generally speaking, the sheriff's department is moving right in well because we have been under staffed for some years. we see the cumulative effect, which is not unfamiliar to the board of supervisors or to the sheriff's department, where we have come before the board, budget and finance committee, out of the last 10 years -- five out of the last 10 years for supplementals because of our heavy reliance on overtime. in our ministration, i declare that we had will do everything we possibly can to make sure that our overtime is well manage, yet made available so

that it satisfies i think the most critical needs of our department so that the department is not handicapped in any way that the public or city government would expect. ~ there are areas of interest that are evolving with changes in our local criminal justice system. i think that you would be interested in knowing. one is we are one of the few counties in the state of california that is experiencing under crowding in our jails. to date our jail population is 1,5 47. for the last year it has been hovering between 1500 and 1600. last weekend we actually saw it tip over 1600, something we hadn't seen in some many months. day to day we watch those numbers, obviously with a great amount of acute interest to see if there is any shift in trends. while our capacity is 2400, we're very sensitive in making sure that all inmates, both in

general population and in specialized population, gets the attention that is due so we all do our part in making sure that they're less likely to become inmates again in our county jail system or implicated in the criminal justice system statewide. there is one area of concern that we'll go into, and that is where we're seeing low population and under crowding, people that are mentally ill and those with psychiatric needs is not corresponding with the lower jail population. we're beginning to see blip of upwards of 20% per year of people with acute or significant mental illness that is now causing a fair amount of service delivery, exacerbated service delivery in a -- attending to those with psychiatric needs in the jail system. i do not want the city government nor the taxpayers to feel at risk because of lower jail population means that all populations within the criminal

justice system are similarly being attended to. we are, but there are areas of concern that we'll go into that i think are going to warrant future, i think future discussion and not too distant future, i hope, by this board of supervisors. i'd like to bring up our cfo, brima harter. bri is my first hiree and considering the sheriff's department has been without a cfo in over a year, it has allowed us in quick fashion to work to attend to some areas that in my opinion were woefully in need of some correction and reform. one of the reasons why i think we're working so well with the mayor's office, controller and budget analyst, we're up front about areas that i think require some issues that need to be i think better managed over time, which is not

unfamiliar to any public safety department. workers' comp and leave. these are areas that i think structurally speaking require i think more of a hands-on approach by multiple agencies and we welcome that input. i'm going to turn it over to our cfo and periodically i'll weigh in. thank you. >> chairman, members of the board of supervisors, my name is bree mahorter, cfo of the sheriff's department and i'm here to discuss with you the supplemental request. first let's go through the details of the expenditure. there are three main things driving our over expenditure. the first is a revenue shortfall of approximately 500,000, a workers' comp over expenditure of 1.1 million, and an overtime expenditure of 3.2 million.

the revenue shortfall -- i'll speak to the revenue shortfall. the revenue shortfall is due primarily to funds that did not come from the state because prisoners that were intended to be transferred here to san francisco for the last 60 days of their incarceration were not remanded by the state. and in addition, we have fewer prisoners that are illegal aliens residing in our jails fewer than budgeted. for workers' comp, our workers' comp budget is provided by the department of human resources and this year we exceeded our budget because we had a number of large claims hit in this fiscal year and one large claim of approximately $500,000. lastly, we have our $3.2 million overtime expenditure which i'll go into in greater detail. in terms of overtime, we have a number of structural problems that are driving our overtime. the first is the combination of retirements and resignations

and leads that leave a hole in staffing that is very difficult for us to fill with new hires. as you can see in the retirements and resignations line, in february 11-12 we had 27 sworn fte retire which is approximately 3.1% of our workforce. and as you can see in the following line, we had no hires of sworn staff that same year. in the following year this current fiscal year, we hired 16 staff laterally, which is obviously 10 fewer, approximately 10 fewer than we had lost the previous fiscal year. and these lateral hires were hired in the second half of the year, so, we spent essentially 18 months at a very low level of staffing. also, our leaves -- and these are all federal, state, and city-mandated leaves -- we had last fiscal year approximately 40 fte per month on leave or 5% of our force, and 51 fte on average this year or 6% of our

force. these vacancies are exacerbated by the fact that our hiring process is very lengthy. even for a lateral academy trained transfer, it takes six months to recruit and even once they join the city family, it's two more months before they can begin working in our system. and for new recruits, that timeline is even longer. it takes 12 months to hire a new recruit and it's 8 additional months once they're in the door to get them trained. so, what that means is even if we were to do a large number of hires on july 1st of the following fiscal year, we'll get a large number of positions the 1st of july the following fiscal year. it will be a full 20 months into the following fiscal year before we would begin to feel the effects of having that staff in our system. so, those are the sort of structural drivers of our overtime expenditure. but we also want to highlight two trends. the first is special population housing.

the sheriff has -- the department has sort of two broad categories of prisoners. the first of that category is general population. those are prisoners about which we have no specific concern. the second set we call special population and that means that they need to be housed in a particular housing arrangement due to their special needs, and that could be either mental or physical illness. it could be a gang affiliation such as norteno or [speaker not understood], or participation in our rehabilitation programs. as you can see 13% of our population is in special housing which as we'll discuss in great dear tail later, makes it very difficult for us to consolidate prisoners and therefore consolidate our staffing. in addition, we have 12.7% of our population in administrative segregation housing, which means that they have behavioral problems that necessitate that they be housed either alone in a single cell or at most with one other person.

and we'll look at the impact of what that means for our staffing a little bit later. secondly, a large amount of our staffing is driven by the need for the care for mentally ill. 11% of our population is in psychiatric housing and 33% of our population received psychiatric care. and just to give you kind of a bear metric point against which you can measure, according to jail psych services, only 4% of the population in alameda county is receiving psychiatric care. so, as you can see, we have a significantly more needy population in terms of mental illness in san francisco. ~ and lastly, this fiscal year we provided more overtime in terms of mutual aid than we have in previous years, and that's been driven by the occupied protests, our wonderful success of the giants, fleet week, and the success of the 49ers in their football season. so, returning to the topic of the mentally ill, as you can see, the hours of psychiatric

care being provided in our system has risen dramatically over the last four years. and when you compare that with a jail population that remains largely static, what that means is our prisoners are increasingly mentally ill. and the impacts that that has on staffing comes at three levels. one, mentally ill patients often have to be placed in safety cells and it takes staff time both to place people in those cells and then it takes additional time to monitor prisoner sayetv while in those cells. anyone in a safety cell has to be rounded on two times every 30 minutes which in comparison to rounds for the general population is only one time every 30 minutes. so, it takes double the amount of staffing to monitor a safety cell as it does a regular cell. also mentally ill prisoners have special needs in terms of movement. they require more deputies in terms of the fact that they might need to be restrained or it might need to be a one on

one deputy to guard them while they're being moved and they may require more movement because they're attending more psychiatric sessions or more out of cell programming and receiving more medical resources. and last, mentally ill patients often have hospital runs which are often done on overtime because they may harm themselves or others. so, one thing i'd like to talk about next is the classification factor. every prisoner that enters our jail goes through a process called classification. and what that means is they go through an in-depth interview with our classification staff to determine what their special needs are and, therefore, where they should be housed. and that classification, according to industry standards, is what keeps our prisoners safe and what keeps our staff safe. so, our ability to keep prisoners who belong together together and keep prisoners who do not belong together away from each other is what keeps our system safe. so, if you look at our total beds, we have 1,988 beds.

40 of those beds are not available because they are for intake, meaning this is kind of the depot where all prisoners go before they're spread out to their permanent housing in the system. in addition, we have three areas that are closed, d post 11 and block k which take 56, 64 and 54 beds out of the system respectively. and this classification factor was identified by the controller's office in the recent needs assessment for the new jail. it says, we need to keep about 8% of our beds open so that we can handle the fluctuation that is necessitated by our significant classification needs. so, if you take those numbers of beds and compare that with our average population, you can see that in fact we only had 65 available beds. so, that means that irregardless of the type of prisoner that comes in the door, if we have 66 prisoners additional to what we have today, we would actually have to open a new facility.

and in terms -- i want to talk a little bit more about special housing. as i mentioned before, special housing is the term we use to put prisoners in housing with prisoners that match their classification characteristics. so, what this table shows you is on the far left, you'll see the podx that are in county jail number 5. there are 8 pods and each of those pods have two sides. an a side and a b side. if you look at the bottom of the table, you'll see that the a's in pods 5 through 8 are -- i'm sorry, pods 6 through 8 are devoted to nortenos and the b side for pods 6 through 8 are devoted to sorenos and that's because those populations have to remain separated. ~ so, if you go over another column, you'll see each pod has 48 bed. the next column to the right shows the number of occupied beds. so, i think as our prisoner

population has fallen, the idea is that the kind of cunning misconception is we should be able to consolidate prisoners and therefore consolidate staffing. but if you look at this chart, you can see that that's a lot more challenging than it seems at its face. for example, if you look at pod 8b, you'll see that 48 beds, 35 are filled which leaves you with 13 vacant beds. so, you say to yourself, okay, why don't we spread these 35 sorenos out among the system. but if you move the 35 prisoners in 8b to 7b and 6b, you'll still have about 10 prisoners that need to be put in housing. and as you can see, none of the remaining beds are appropriate to take in those 10 prisoners. for example, if you look at the 3a, it looks like there's 21 beds vacant in 3a. however, those beds are reser