john alex. >> thank you. yes, my name is john alex and i am the vice-chair of the pedestrian safety advisory committee and i hold seat no. 4, representing the needs of seniors and disability organizations. i come to you today to address several points. the first one is pedestrian safety. specifically for people with different abilities, because of age and designated disability and what the city has issued under the executive directive by mayor newsom it doesn't mention once the pedestrian safety needs of people with disabilities in describing the needs of curb ramps and

extending the meters, the timing of pedestrian signals. it omits anything about accessible pedestrian signals at all. it also emits red light cameras and the need for that contextural to that point, 12 years ago i sustained a traumatic brain injury because somebody ran a red light and countless studies that the mta has shows that the number goes done when there are red light runner cameras. so please specify in a cross-council committee the need for this report to further include -- the needs with people of disabilities in the context of pedestrian safety. the second point to share with you is representing five churches in the city of san

francisco, i have authored and for them to use a 53-point questionnaire on how these churches can specify how accessible they are to people with disabilities. it's a functional guiding device only, not a mandatory tool that is being shared with five churches here, and christian churches specifically in san francisco. the last point is to share with you, which you may already know, but the need to share with veterans' organizations, what exists is called the at network, a tool that exists between different independent living resources centers how assistive technology devices which is the legal term for wheelchair and walkers can be exchanged and sold between different agencies, non-profits in the city, to meet the needs of people who need a walker or

wheelchair or extended-reach device. so please continue on in your great work. i so appreciate the mayor's disability council. thank you. >> thank you. peter mendez. >> good afternoon. i just want to take a few seconds to introduce myself. my name is peter mendoza and new community organizer with the independent living of san francisco. look forward to working with all you on issues and community organizing throughout san francisco. if anyone wants to contact me, i don't have any business cards, but i just want to give out our phone number and my email. our phone number is

415-543-6222. it i will say that again. 415-543-6222 and my email is peter@iorc.org. that is peter. thank you very much for your time and i appreciate your service. >> thank you. is there any more public comment? is there anyone on the bridge line? >> no, madame chair. >> okay. seeing that there is no more public comment, we will move to 4, which is a report from the chair. good afternoon. i am co-chair wilson everyone. happy june, you guys. it's here, june, june, june. i want to say thank you for everyone being here today. i am glad you guys came out. thank you council members. i am glad to see everyone here

today and doing well. i would like to say today i am asking roland wong to be co-chair with me, if i am missing from the pulpit, he will co-chair from where he is to be accessible. thank you very much mr. roland wong and i would like to say thank you to everyone who sends invitations for us to go different places in the city. there are different events to go to and wonderful things to do and i can't get to all of them, but thank you for sending them. keep sending them and we'll get out there, other council members, too. i would like to say and remind everyone that we do welcome public comment, but we say if there is a lot of people here who wish to speak, if you could speak once and give 1-2 minutes and everyone a chance

to speak and then come back and speak again. we would appreciate that. also, i would like to say there was a real good event at the main library on mental health, as you know, this is our mental health month and we are celebrating mental health awareness. yes, yes, yes. we are doing that today, you guys. we have a multiple afternoon panel set up of wonderful speakers and even myself. so i hope you guys all stay around for that and enjoy meeting today. i do believe that is the end of my report. thank you everyone. next is item 5, information from the director of the mayor's office on disability. >> thank you coach chair

wilson and i'm carla johnson the interim director of the mayor's office on disability. and i wanted to start my director's report today with some very good news and some introductions. we have a new employee, michael alonzo, who is seated behind me and operating the bridge line and he started this week. is he is going to help us with a broad range of duties and when you call our office, he is probably going to be the first voice on the line that you here, and also easing into our client services and information and referrals. and he is a law school graduate, with the very strong civil rights background and also a strong background of working with tenants through the housing rights committee. so we want to welcome mike and very happy mike is now on our

team. it's my pleasure to welcome our new internal, iman, who will be helping people with speaker cards and whatever assistance they need. iman started this wednesday and will be a senior in high school come this fall. we have already been very impressed with her professionalism and we're just delighted to have her youthful perspective in the office. my first topic for my report is an update. you will recall at our last meeting that we heard from the accessible parking advisory committee, where we shared some of our recommendations about parking placard reform, which is what we heard our previous speaker mentioning. since our last mdc meet something of us on the committee have continued to derive some informational hearings and materials, informational briefings i should say, to policymakers like the board of supervisors.

and last week, some of us traveled to sacramento, where we spoke to the league of california cities for the transportation and public works committee. looking forward on monday, july 1st, we'll be making a presentation before the alameda county transportation commission's annual mobility workshop. this workshop will be held at the ed roberts campus and i will be sending out a notice to all council members, with the specifics soon. on july 11th, we will be addressing san francisco's long-term care coordinating council and towards the end of july, we're trying to schedule a transportation forum in coordination with the fdr democratic club. my second topic today is an announcement. i wanted to tell you about a visit that our office had this week to the grand opening for the community assessment service center, which is

operated by the adult probation department, with support from public health and human services. for a little bit of background about this project, about two years ago, governor brown responded to a federal court order about prison overcrowding. part of the problem was that the state had been unable to provide adequate health care to the inmates, and even more specifically, going back to 1990, there was a lawsuit filed on behalf of the inmates, regarding inadequate access to mental healthcare. this is a great concern to people with disabilities and it's an issue of civil rights. it's an issue where the preponderance of people incarcerated in our prisons tend to be from communities of color and tend to be people with learning disability mental

health disability and other health-related disabilities. brown's plan is called "realignment." and the intention is to transfer thousands of non-violent offenders from state prisons to county jails. what the san francisco sheriff's department and our adult probation office saw was this was an opportunity and it's an opportunity to transition eligible lower-level offenders, who are convicted things like drug possession or theft, and to transition them back into the community with supportive services to help them break the prison cycle. so the community assessment service center is part of that strategy. it's a one-stop shop, where former inmates can meet with their probation officer and they can enroll classs that teach them job and life skills and they can get connected to housing and health resources. this has been a project that

our office has been very passionate about supporting and we provided support from the very beginning. at the early stages we helped them find a suitable location that could be made fully accessible. we performed the quality control check and field inspection services to make sure that the tentative build-out would provide all the accessibility procedures and screened contracts reissued for the service providers to make sure that they had robust polices in place to properly serve people with disabilities and in the future will also be training the service providers to make sure there are reasonable accommodation and ada grievance procedures are in place. this has been another one of our multi-departmental efforts, and we're proud that we could make a contribution to this effort. last of all i wanted to make an announcement that the mayor's office on disability is currently planning our house

warming party, and it's going to be welcome everybody to our new offices at 1155 market street. we have chosen friday, july 26th as the date, and that is because this is the 23rd anniversary of the americans with disabilities act. you will be hearing more about this from us in the future, but i wanted to let you know about it now, so you could put it on your calendars and save the date. and we look forward to seeing you on july 26th and that concludes my director's report. >> thank you, miss johnson. and now we will move to item 6, an information item accessible planning for the 34th america's cup and update on the city's plans to make the 34th america's cup the most accessible international sailing event in the history,

including accessible paths of travel, transit, seating, and staging. adam. are you here? please come and introduce yourself. i don't want to mess your name up. i am not good with names so please tell everyone your name. >> good afternoon council members, adam van de water from office of economic and workforce development here in the city and county. i wanted to give you a quick update off and on the planning for the 34th america's cup, which kicks off on the 4th of july, just a few weeks from now. so i know a couple of you were able to see the preview races we had in august and october of last year and we really want to build on the successes of those events. the feedback we received was

generally positive with a few things to focus on and i want to highlight some of those today. the genesis of our planning for the 2013 event is to really build on those successes and to update it with the new information going into this. so the people plan and i have an updated copy that was just released this week that i can leave with staff is really based on five guiding principles. one is public safety. we need to make sure that we have a safest. two is resource efficiency, making sure that we use our buses and our staff and our city resources efficiently. environmentally sustainability, making sure that we have a green event. and i think the two most important to me are strategic adaptability and positive legacy. and by that i mean we need to be flexible, if we have a low crowd and a high crowd back-to-back, we need to make sure that we have adequate buses, adequate parking,

adequate police protection without overdoing it each day and look at the event as how can we leverage the few months of this temporary sailing event for long-term positive impact to san francisco? how do we pilot the projects and use this to put infrastructure in place that the city has long been contemplating? a few differences from 2012 to 2013, 2013 we were at the north waterfront and now we have two venues, the america's cup village and peers 27-29, where the new cruiseship terminal was built and where the finish line of the races will be, and where the primary food, beverage and hospitality location will be. we also have a new special events team at the mta, headed by lee, who is many years with the city in both the police

department and mta. this consolidates a lot of functions from security to transit planning to all sorts of safety and operational needs, getting in and out of special events like the america's cup, like hardly strictly bluegrass and it's a new way of doing this. so i can share her cell phone number with your staff, so if you have problems or concerns as the events unfold, she can take care of them in realtime and that has been happening already on this event. it's a very helpful new addition. in 2013 we have a much longer period of racing. in 2012, if you recall, in october, a very super peak day with not only the america's cup, but we had fleet week and the italian heritage parade and the home giant's game and castro street fair all in the same weekend and we don't anticipate near those kind of crowds this time, but we have a

sustained effort from july through middle of september. so fewer crowds, less of a logistical problem on one given weekend, but we need to be able to sustain that effort over time and have the staff and resources? we have also been able to put a number of key pieces of infrastructure into place, including the jefferson realm from johns to hyde, where we really made major improvements to the streetscape there and i hope you find those much more pedestrian and disability-friendly in that neighborhood. we're nearing completion of the fort mason marina green path, the bike and pedestrian path, which has not been well-striped and had a lot of obstructions in the path that have been removed. and it was a source of some of the complaints that we heard last year and there weren't that many, but we heard of bicyclists and wheelchair users

and golf carts and pedestrians all interacting in this area in a not very safe way. this is really going to help that by making dedicated lanes in the east and westbound directions and that is nearly complete. the brandon street wharf, a port project, which is going to be a good viewing location for two of the team bases taking the boats out of the water. similarly, the pier 43 promenade is an area where there is going to be -- they have taken down some of the pier and added a new public amenity. we have improved the crosswalk in front of the exploratorium on the embarcadero on green tv an area that was a very arched turn and speed could provide a dangerous path of travel for those crossing the street the

muni erline from the cal train station to fisherman's wharf. this was a pilot project during the event. this is an accessible historic streetcar and the mini platforms, along the embarcadero are often chained off and those chains will come down to access the historic streetcars in the summer and we have changed some of the signal timing and some of the streetcars themselves to make that happen. and also bike sharing, something that we have been talking for a long time. where you can check out a bicycle, like a library book for a half an hour, an hour or a day and return it to a different location and use it to get about town k. we have made some enhancements to the transit system, the e-line, the finish line that we just

discussed. and another one from the marina green area to market street and market to pier 27-29 shuttle to follow the f-line tracks, all accessible muni vehicles and adding the capacity where we need them most between the venues. we have also been working with our regional partners at golden gate transit, adding the number 4 bus service, which goes from the north bay to downtown and services some of our venues. the presidio, who took folk around crissy field, et cetera.

there are three meters spaces that will be for use for paratransit service, once you disembark from paratransit, it will be a smooth path of travel from the pier and all points in the venue. we have been doing site planning with our partners to make sure there is accessible travel between marina green for services and facilities, retail, food and beverage and just viewing. there are bleachers along marina green, which has a portion dedicated to accessibility and for partners at that site as well as ramps and guardrails as we learned through our last summer of

racing. we're doing some piloting of taxi stands and one conversation we're having with the operators of ferry buildings to have a better taxi stand at that location, and allowing easy drop-off in that highly used area. and then looking at other ways to prevent multi-modal conflicts, coordinating our bus lanes with our bike lanes with taxi stands and bus and shuttle locations to avoid conflicts between different modes of travel. pedestrian-bicycle side we have a new way finding system, which indicates distances to each venue from key modal hubs with times to walk from that location. we're going to pilot a temporary bike corridor along the embarcadero and along the

northern terminus of van ness through aquatic park and bike parking, so if you bicycle to events you can leave your bikes much like you do at at&t park for a giant's game and have somebody watch it and secure it. on transportation demand management, we're really trying to get the message out early, the best way to get to and from these events prior to people getting there and we have a series of maps and brochures that are actually due to be delivered today and we'll get that out to your staff, which indicates maps for enhanced transit routes, bike lanes, pedestrian paths. there is a dedicated site on 501 whether you are coming from caltrain, bart, muni or other modes how to get to those enhanced services to get to the venues . we have been making

some clipper improvements and there is a graphic on your screen of the new clipper card with the america's cup catamaran on it. we have developed parking site with the last-mile transit connections and training mta and america's cup event authorities and ambassadors to answer questions. as part of that training we have been doing sensitivity training and the mta is leading that charge, making sure that people are aware of varying needs as they need to cross a street or access a bus or get to any special needs that they might have. so we're getting close. i look forward to your questions. some of the lessons that we

have learned is really to engage our partners in advance, including everyone from local and regional to public and private and this has and a multi-disciplinary and multi-jurisdictional approach and will greatly inform the city's efforts to do other big events such as the america's cup. we have used the environmental review process to inform our transportation studies and are applying them to projects such as the warriors arena on piers 30-32 and some of the other developments south of marketa and we're using pilot projects to test effectiveness. some of the examples include talking about bus rapid transit along van ness and geary.

we're going to put a 47-limited bus in service that will serve that route and give us valuable data for mta, as an approach to bus rapid transit and there are examples of the solutions that we're looking to pilot during this event. we mention the mta's special events team and sustaining the positive legacy of some of these projects. so with that, i just wanted to give you a broad overview of some of the various things we're doing and wanted to see if you had specific questions for me, and if there is anything that i don't have direct knowledge of, i am happy to follow-up with some of the disability staff throughout the city that are working on the operational details. >> you have to bear with me, i have to remember to turn on the mic.

thank you very much. we're going to open it up for council member questions first, and then staff and then we'll go to the public. okay? thank you. so we open it up to the council. skip? >> i have a question. for you mr. van de water and actually i have two. thank you for your presentation. caltrain to the wharf, will it go all along the embarcadero to pier 39 or whatever the last one is? >> yes, it will. so currently there are historic streetcars that go from market to the north or from market to the south. so this will be the one that will actually combine the two. we have had calls for this from various constituencies for some time now. and this is our chance to pilot

it during the events. so mta has been putting into service some of the double-ended historic streetcars that can operate in both directions without a full-loop turnaround. >> now will those be running just during the event, during the america's cup event or will pilot hours be for other parts of the day or other times? >> it's currently scheduled to be piloted during the events. though, you know, as i mentioned with positive legacy, if there is a demand for that type of service, that can justify the expense of putting it into service, that is what we want to test going forward. so if there is a constituency that would look to use that longer term, we would look to meet that demand. >> my other question is with respect to the bike sharing, bike renting, bike sharing. when you said that people could rent a bike for half an our or an hour or whatever. where will those be located?

and will there be bikes that are mechanically altered for people with mobility problems to use the bicycles? mobility challenges -- will there be bicycles available to suit people with disabilities there? that is much better. >> excellent question. the bike-share is being managed by the mta, and there are several hundred bicycles planned for rollout in august of this summer. primarily centered around the financial district, downtown, and we have been encouraging a spur along the embarcadero along the north to accommodate the special events. so my knowledge there aren't mechanically altered bicycles as part of the rollout, but i am happy to check with the mta to confirm. i know there are different ways to meet bicycle needs and one is bike-share