giving credibility to c-e-q-a and precautionary principles. this department did this with lennar and partial a at the san francisco shipyard as well as the recent approved wellness center [speaker not understood] in san francisco. all this was done without giving consideration to seniors, children, and more important, quality of life issues. and as i mentioned -- i didn't mention it before, but i'd like to say this process should be your process, not an individual supervisor. you need to look at everything that is going on and what has happened and compile it and it becomes city planning's process for all of us, not a wiener project -- process, not a kim process. let's get things done for the citizens of san francisco. thank you so very much and you all have a blessed day. >> thank you.

good afternoon, commissioners. eric brooks representing san francisco green party, the local grassroots organization, our city, and here as the coordinator of the c-e-q-a community improvement team. first of all, stand in strong support of supervisor kim's excellent legislation, very well thought out. partly the reason that we feel it's well thought out is we helped to think it out and there are now 41 organizations including labor, parks, you know, all across the spectrum, historic preservation, environmental groups, social justice groups that have all worked for the last few months to come up with this language that's now before you. and as you heard, in committee the direction that things are going is to harmonize the approach of supervisor wiener and our approach together to

the best extent we can. but definitely heading in the direction of the kim approach. and, so, we would urge you to support supervisor kim's legislation with the modifications that supervisor kim is willing to accept as far as comments from planning staff. but otherwise, we need to stand firm and send this forward with your approval. the key here is that in 2006 we opposed any changes. and in 2010 we opposed any changes to this process. because, quite frankly, with a little bit of hubris on our part, this is working well enough for us. let's just stop any changes from going forward and keep it the way it is. but since 2010 what we've seen is that it's not working for us either because the staff and the city attorney and the city, county clerk have to make up rules as they go along. so, we finally have come to the table and said, yes, we are willing to do this with the

developers, with project sponsors, with city sponsors. we agree now that it's time to make changes. and the key things that we are giving up are the ability to appeal a project multiple times . under kim's legislation now, it's essentially going to be once unless there is a major change in the project, after which as you heard, if there is a major modification, we'll be able to appeal the decision of the ero if the ero decides it's not a major food modification. so, we'll be able to have one bite at the apple, but not all these extensive appeals that happened in history. ~ and we're also very importantly accepting a clear deadline for negative declarations and other -- and exemptions. and those are big things. it would be better for us if we could appeal every single permit . but it would be better for the environment. but we're willing to accept that. in return, we need planning staff to accept that it's going to take some more work.

and i will guarantee you that my groups at least are willing to come forward and fight hard to get more funding to planning, if it can do this extra work. but we need to you support this and send it forward so that it can be considered alongside the wiener legislation and we can get the best [speaker not understood] project put together from both versions. >> thank you, mr. brooks. you can move this forward, if you would. my name is bernie sheer don. i'm with san francisco tomorrow, and we strongly urge your advisory approval of supervisor kim's proposal so that it necessarily must be ameliorated at the proper authority at the board of supervisors. let them stand beside themselves.

in improving notice of appeal, you lessen the apprehension of those who would make spurious and unnecessary appeal progress that is lessening the cost overall for the department's inclusion. secondly, it does sustain the necessary right of appeal and the need for appeal regards substantial evidence for impact in accord with the state's mandate for ceqa. some of these mandates have not been properly attended to by this commission or this staff. and this is a correction. especially with regard to cumulative impacts. thank you for your attention.

>> next speaker, please. good afternoon, commissioner. sue vaughan. i am with the sierra club, and i am here to recommend that you advise -- that you vote to send this piece of legislation on to the land use and economic development committee at the board of supervisors so that it can be heard side by side with supervisor wiener's legislation. we've been working on this for months, months and months and months. and it's finally gotten to a place where there's a lot of things in there that we are very excited about. and we understand that the planning department is very concerned about increased work load. but that's coming. san francisco is going to take on 150 to 200,000 more individuals between now and 20 40 and the work load is going to increase if that's actually going to happen. and i fully support expanded resources for the san francisco

planning department so that you can take care -- so you can deal with that expanded work load. and i'm also especially excited about the geographical notification part of supervisor kim's legislation, item number 13 is about my neighborhood. and i didn't know about it until i came here to this planning commission. i can't wait to be able to get an electronic notification about things that are going on in my neighborhood. so i don't have to go every week and look at the planning commission agenda. anyway, please do support this legislation. we've been working hard on it for months, and we're so excited that it's finally come to this place that it's before you and you can approve it. thank you. good afternoon, commissioners. peter cohen with community council organizations. we have submitted to you for your record just yesterday

recommendations and proposals that we gave to the board of supervisors a couple of weeks ago and i'll have a paper copy of that in a minute. want to use it for my notes here. i wanted to point out to you that the affordable housing community, if you will, the choo choo representatives has a range of perspectives. we're thinking about this as affordable housing developers. so, we have that particular perspective. but also we're involved in community development work, if you will, community kind of empowerment and involvement. so, we understand the community perspective on environmental review and the entitlements process as well. so, our approach is from those two lenses or two angles and it's important that we not just think about this through the septments process from a developer standpoint. it seems to us that the very low hanging fruit is now uncontested, that there needs to be some time frame to file an appeal, 30 days seems to be what everybody now agrees to. so, that was the primary need and that seems to be solved. we had also opined that changing to a more modern

system of notification may be fine electronically. this was discussed ad nauseam under the universal planning notification process which still director ram needs to be brought back to life. so, there's no, again, disagreement, but carefully considering that some folks still are not in the new technology era and if they need paper notification, that request, that opportunity should still be available. a number of the other more fine points that have been discussed and debated, we have in our recommendations taken a position or made some suggestions and they're slowly but surely being ironed out between the wiener and chu amendments and wiener and kim ordinance. i think you heard from your own staff that increasingly the two ordinances are starting to look less and less dissimilar or for that matter more and more similar. ~ chiu so pieces of the puzzle are coming together. and we're encouraged to see that those -- our suggestions are being incorporated in some harp or form. the final piece we put on the

table is what supervisor kim mentioned and we're glad to hear that she's working on fine tune thattion amendment, which is for affordable housing development, we have fairly few projects. ~ shape we have maybe a dozen projects that come through each year. there is that uncertain time period at the very p front end of submittal of an environmental evaluation when you simply don't know whether you're going to get your cat ex or you're going to have to do a negative declaration or for that matter what happens in affordable housing. and it's that period of time of uncertainty that locks up city funding and often leverage funding, tax credit cues that we would like to see hardened up. and our recommendation is to do that within a 60-day window. that is a starting point for conversation. but that initial determination, what is going to be your environmental review process is what we're asking for. we think it's a good amendment, good policy and would help us a lot. in closing, we suggest that you move this forward with positive tim recommendation to at least allow the ordinances to be considered together at the land use committee and kind of a nice little match up in the next committee meeting. thank you. >> thank you.

come on up, sir. i'll call a couple more names. howard wong. robert pull. and dick mull et. good afternoon, commissioners. my name is dick mull et, [speaker not understood] neighborhood association. potrero area is part of the eastern neighborhoods and we are being densified [speaker not understood]. like other neighborhood organizations, our concerns are crime and land use. those we are quite an active neighborhood organization, we meet once a month. and a lot of neighborhood organizations meet once a quarter. sometimes the executive committee is the one that meets and members don't meet very

often at all. so, that we're always pushing forward notification, notification, notification, and right to appeal. and if we don't get these things, these things get away from us. we're slow to react. we're a bunch of amateurs. developers are a bunch of high-powered professionals. they go at this a lot faster than we can and get away from us. so, that's why we want notification, notification, and right to appeal. we want to support supervisor kim's ordinance and we want you to look at it. we try to be as responsible as we can. the boosters were formed in 1926, so, we've been around for quite a while. and we've been ignored [speaker not understood] has been ignored until the eastern neighborhoods hit the fan, so to speak. so, i would like to support supervisor kim's ordinance.

thank you. >> thank you. good afternoon, howard wong. we want to commend supervisor kim for reaching out to as many people who wanted to participate in her process, and the over 40 organizations that helped guide her current legislation, which is still evolveinging. as several people mentioned, the two pieces of legislation are coming together. we'd like to see that the two legislations be moved together to allow them both to continue to evolve. in particular, many of us feel that the primary goal of an environmental review and public processes is not professional architects like myself,

commissioners, legislators, or official, but for the average citizen and for the disenfranchised and disadvantaged communities. at monday's land use committee, i was struck by some testimony from people in low-income housing projects, people in the bayview and hunters point said, mr. mill et said they're not professional people. they have a very great difficulty even learning or understanding about development projects. many people in low-income don't even have computers. there needs to be as much robust notification processes as possible. as an architect looking at critical path schedules as you have, you've seen that projects have many, many components. for most projects, c-e-q-a doesn't apply. c-e-q-a is a small part of projects. there are milestones that are very critical to projects. the city for decades has talked

about how do you make the total project process better? that's where the focus of city government should be at this point. the projects that often are held up are not -- are very particular milestones. there are planning codes, building codes, building permits, a-d-a reviews, fire and egress requirements. many things and projects have much more delay, much more impact on the project. the city needs to look at its total process for [inaudible] to facilitate them. thank you. hi, my name is [speaker not understood] brown and i'm here with power, people to wip employment rights and we're a community group in san francisco. and i'm here to support and to thank supervisor kim for bringing forward a really important alternative to

wiener's attempt to amend c-e-q-a. and i just want to speak from our experience as a community group. we organize low-income family and children with bayview hunters point and the mission. as some of you are familiar with, we were able to bring a successful challenge to the e-i-r that was put forward around the development of the hunters point shipyard in candlestick. that was an incredibly burdensome process. as a community organization, it was over 4,000 pages to read the e-i-r and we focused specifically a superfund site, contaminated superfund site and we had to deal with really trying to understand what was being analyzed to what extent human health was being impacted by the approval of a development on top of contaminated land and all the way through we were being accused, oh, you're just trying to delay the process. there was tremendous pressure from the high-powered developer that has all kinds of relationships inside city hall. but the reality was nothing was included in the e-i-r about the effort to do an early transfer of that land to the developer

before the clean-up process was complete. it was nowhere in those 4,000 pages and it was through the appeal process of the e-i-r that we were able to stop that transfer because it had not been adequately talked about. when you're talking about completing a circle process, clean up process by a developer and advocating the responsibility of the navy to do clean up, there is serious impact and risk at hand. we are still participating in the navy ongoing process that's going to go for many years where we actually really need to protect and look at how can we make sure this clean up is thorough. speaking from that experience, the level to which we need to be really adequately protecting our folks, i mean, right now san francisco, as others have mentioned, developers are looking to come in here and move as fast as they can. and the reality is that it was really important that we brought a challenge. it was really important that we had the opportunity to thoroughly do that and it was

really important that it was actually upheld and that a project would have not been adequately reviewed and contained risk was stopped. and many in the city didn't even realize that the e-i-r didn't contain information about how the developer would or would not be able to complete that early transfer and complete their clean up. so, i want to speak from that experience. there's a tremendous need for notification and there actually is a precedent around where we have approved the e-i-rs that actually were illegal and where judges had to intervene to ensure that we were doing a legal process. thank you. commissioners, [speaker not understood] local 2. part of my work with our union is to keep our members abreast of developments in a range of different industries, hotels,

restaurants, as well as affordable housing and other projects. for years i've been baffled, especially in this day and age, by the complexity of both the notification and the -- and the process of public input. you know, i have to go through a dozen pieces of mail from the planning department every day and yet still i manage to miss key determinations because right now to the best of my knowledge, it's impossible to tag projects by particular industry or by zoning or scale or what have you. you have to do it geographically. so, the proposals in term of public notification contained in supervisor kim's legislation are really quite welcome. you know, they build on what i think was a big advance and i want to commend you for it for putting data nightly up on the data s.f. sites. it's been a big improvement. this legislation only builds on

that big improvement and will make it that much easier for people to stay on top of and give timely input to projects they have an interest in. i want to take issue with some of the stuff, analysis about the added burden and the staffing requirements. you know, given that i have to go through a dozen pieces of mail every day, i don't want to, i've got to believe that putting a better system in place for public notification is actually going to save some time. in the public input process the requirement, for example, to do a mandatory scoping of e-i-rs just seems like common sense to me, you know. just as an example, hotels have a very particular character when it comes to being workplaces. and when there are scoping sessions, which sometimes there are for environmental impact

reports on hotel projects, we can come with you with some expertise about some of those very esoteric aspects, how the trash is taken out to the street and loading zones and things like that that don't ordinarily come to some planners' minds, but have a big impact on people's day-to-day work environments. so, i think it's going to save staff time and save money if that process is in place up front. you can get comments up front and not wait until late in the day comments and even the appeal process to correct omissions. that's just one example, but reflective of the thought that's gone in this legislation. and i want to urge you to approve this legislation. so, thank you. >> thank you. any additional public comment? speakers?

sue hester. i've been dealing with this since c-e-q-a existed. i'm going to go through all of the various drafts looking for a couple issues. one is the amendment of the section has got to be included in the legislation. the process should be that for the planning code plus. 90 days of review instead of 30 days and a mandatory workshop for major amendments. there is no requirement now -- any supervisor can draw any legislation and it would have 30 days' review. this, pardon me, sucks. secondly, the notice process for projects post c-e-q-a needs

a major change. and it's a upn peter cohen talked about it. the notice of projects is how i found out about things because the c-e-q-a notice only comes to the same people who get the project notice. on a conditional use it only goes to property owners and tic owners are excluded and tenants are excluded. and until the upn process, it got to be taken out of the planning department. if you're going to sit on it, it should be done outside of the department. there is no notice of projects to tenants and to tics, period, end of the story. especially [speaker not understood] are the hardest projects. area plan notices is an additional problem. i'm going to be looking for that because we have basically

said the eastern neighborhoods can tier off the e-i-r for the eastern neighborhoods and they don't have -- a lot of projects are eligible for cat ex's. there are projects that go through -- someone before the planning commission, i know we'll give you one. on valencia street, shadowing over park that has -- mission playground. went through three years in advance, rec/park, before it ever came to planning. and rec/park evaluated the configureerition of the park as different from the configuration that exists today. ~ and i don't get any notices of rec/park. and i was kind of surprised that they had made a determination on shadows on a

park facility long before it came to planning. i'm looking for a bunch of issues and a couple of them are major. and i get every notice. ~ and read every notice. good afternoon, commissioners. thank you for this hearing. i'm speaking in support of supervisor kim's legislation which i was part of drafting along with 41 other organizations. this is tes well born speaking on behalf of neighborhood council. i'd like to say some of the names of organizations that were represented in this extremely thorough redrafting based on the alioto-pier as a template. black right -- the black human rights leadership council, the golden gate park preservation alliance, the center for

biological diversity, the san francisco green party, cathedral hill neighbors, the eastern neighborhoods united front, save muni, san francisco architectural heritage, green action for health and environmental justice, north mission neighbors, telegraph hill dwellers, and seiu, [speaker not understood] valley improvement association. that gives you some idea of the breadth of the people that worked with supervisor kim in crafting this legislation and i urge you to move it forward. i would like to also support the idea of -- on some items it would be great if we could have more than 30 days. again, when you're working as you all know having another life, it's very difficult to fit in something very quickly. we want to make sure that projects get reviewed by the community. and we've seen that that review

by the community and input from supervisors can make them a lot better. planning certainly deserves more resources as it's needed. we look forward to that process of making sure getting the right mix there. more development is coming, at least it's being told we're going to have it whether we like it or not. hopefully we'll be able to work with the bay area council on that matter. but i urge you to move supervisor kim's legislation forward so that we can get the best of all of this and without any tricky stuff in it. thank you. commissioners, ron miguel. i told ann marie i wasn't going to talk, but i'm back in my activist mode. i can't help it. for a city that is absolutely for us to be obsessed with process, it's amazing that we

were unable to put a process in place when it came up in '06 and 2010, and i was please today hear one of the early speakers on this admit that and come forward to put a process in place now. this legislation is obviously in flux. i've been working mainly with supervisor wiener's office, many public meetings which nearly everyone in the room who has spoken today has been, both sides well represented. i urge you to move the matter on to the board of supervisors with the department's recommendations. the department has been wonderful in working with us. the amendments that board president chiu put in at monday's hearing started to bring things together. it's my feeling they will come closer together. as far as the web-based

notification system is concerned, i was one of the authors in 1997 for the grand jury that highly criticized the city's i-t system. we were guaranteed by the board of supervisors at that time that things would change unfortunately. in all these years it has barely moved for some city that is so dependent on i-t now for its economic recovery. it is absolutely amazing. but i know the department is working on that. it will be a boon to all of us. so, as i say, i hope you will move this forward with the department's recommendations. thank you. good afternoon, commissioners. rose hillson. i'm glad i have three minutes today instead of two. thank you so much.

i'd like to recommend supervisor kim's legislation for many of the reasons stated earlier, but mostly because of notification. and in line with this notification issue, i would recommend and request that the i-t support for this legislation be fully functional between both dbi and planning department so the public knows when something is approved to start the 30-day clock. currently at d-b-i, the project permit tracking system is still in its testing stage and they're going to have people come in and do hands on and that's not set for completion until august of 2013. so, that also needs to be considered. on the current planning website, you have something called the active permits in my neighborhood link and i was playing around with it for about a couple hours. and sometimes it works, k1 sometimes it doesn't. so, i want to make sure that the details that show up in