(clapping) >> thank you so much for being here and i think that wrapz it up we can go to our groups. thank you so much. we can go to our >> good afternoon and welcome to the october 28, 2013 meeting of the san francisco /kphaul business commission. the

meeting is called to order at 2:03 pm. we'll conduct a roll call attendance. commissioner adams, dooley, white. >> here. >> ortiz-cartagena. >> here. >> riley. >> white. >> here. >> we have two commissioners absent but we do have a quorum. item two, general public comment. anybody here that would like to make a comment pertaining to any items that are not on today's agenda. seeing none, public comment is closing. next item, item three, approval of october 17, meeting min utes. >> motion to move minutes. i move. >> all in favor. >> i. >> any opposed. next item.

item four presentation and discussion on board of supervisors file number 130781, special finance taxing law. we have with us >> thank you for having us here today. i welcome the opportunity to talk to you about the mandatory soft story retro fit program. the ordinance that you see before you, what i wanted to do was explain about what we're working on here that will be at the board right now. to give you some context i think some of you may be familiar with the requirements of the soft story ordinance, but to give you an idea of what the requirements entail, it's looking at the building stocks that we saw significant damage in after the loma earth quake. we've noticed an issue for

years and have been trying to deal with this in a comprehensive way that the conducive to the property owners and small businesses that are in them. we think this affects roughly 6,000 businesses that have been -- 6,000 buildings that have been noticed and about half would be required to retro fit. about 7,000 local employees. we've seen from other devastating earthquakes around the world that these small businesses are is most venerable businesses and if they're damaged by earthquakes they'd likely go out of business and not return. that would change the character of san francisco so we want to help that but supporting these buildings. the ordinances before you is talking about special financing option so one of the things mayor lee deserves cred sit for is that he wasn't comfortable

putting forward these ordinances unless we had financing options available for these owners. we had a voter approved general obligation bond for 350 million dollars and only about 60 million of that are used. we know people have a hard time applying for public financing options but it's important to know they're there. we started talking to banks about two years ago and they have all agreed to be flexible, help owners refi and pull out money or a second based loan, an equity loan, a construction loan. we have the big banks, the small opportunity lenders and the small banks and we want to work with all of them.

for those of you not looked into this, there's a clear track record of tieing retro fits to sustain ability. and the replacement resources needed to build a new building. this is a way to use that economisting green finance program to be able to issue a public financing to these buildings which is paid back over property taxes over 20 years. it's another option we have for property ordinary owners trying to comply with the ordinance. >> i want to say as one of those bankers that got involved with the program i think it's great. i do know last week, wednesday,

the san francisco association of realtors down at fort mason talking about this so your outreach was great because the turnout there with all the building owners and all the stakeholders was tremendous so i just want to congratulate you on your outreach in this program and working with all the other banks 'cause all the banks were there, everybody was represented and it was a very good event so i want to say i really appreciate your outreach on this program. it is for important. for better or worse we live in a n seismic active city. i want to thank you for all your efforts over this /pa*sz past year. >> thank you commissioner. >> i believe you all have a postcard in front of you. obviously it's a marketing

challenge to get all the details of an ordinance into a 3 by 5 card there. it has a link to our website which is www.sfcaps.org. >> do we have public comment on item number four? seeing none, public comment is closed. any other commissioner comments? this is great. i really appreciate you coming and talking about this. like i said, it is very important and congratulations on that event last week at fort mason. that was a great turnout. >> yeah, to have 1000 property owners in a room was great. we have an open door downstairs in the earthquake

implementation program so if you have any questions or want to do any additional outreach to the small business owners we're happy to do that. >> just a quick question. any of our small businesses that are in the commercial spaces in the building then if they have questions about how this is going to be financed that we should encourage them to encourage their landlord to contact you? is that the correct means? >> sure, or the department of building inspection but we're happy to be the resource as well. we want to give them the maximum amount of time so the people subject to the /orbd /tphapbs have anywhere from five to seven years to comply. anything with a ground floor commercial space has the full seven years so we wanted to make sure that everyone was aware of that as well. >> thank you patrick. >> thank you very much. >> next item please. >> that brings us to item

number five, presentation and discussion on the job squad survey findings and delivery of services. >> before you start i want to do just a brief introduction. commissioners, as you know the job squad is part of our invest in neighborhood program and that which is directed by mr. torres. our job squad folks work within our 25 neighborhood commercial districts, but extend themselves out to other areas where needed and manish and francis will tell you about that. manish and francis have been spending an extensive amount of time in our neighborhood commercial corridors going door

to door to businesses and did a brief review of their survey analysis to the small business leaders at the meeting with the mayor and thought this would be a good opportunity for them to inform you of their findings that they have done in their surveys 'cause they've covered a lot of miles in conducting this and so just as we hear from other business organizations, i felt it was very important for you to hear the feedback that they have collected in doing their door to door outreach to our businesses and neighborhood commercial corridors. with that i'll turn it over to manish and francis. >> thank you for having us here today. my name is manish goyal and this is francis chan and together we make up the job squad and we wanted to provide you -- before we get to our

findings -- a briefover overview of our program, what we do and what we've done since january. it's our hope at end of the presentation we can get some feedback from you and develop a partnership with the commission. just a brief background on the job squad. this is part of the mayor's 17 point jobs plan, along with the invest in neighborhoods initiative, which is really a commitment by the mayor to help out the small business community. we serve as a resource to the neighborhood small businesses by providing assistance that brings our resources to the merchants. we try our best to cut red tape by providing businesses with a navigation tool through the city rules and regulations and we work with our departments to

help businesses access programs that have really valuable resources and services. we try to provide a level of assistance to the businesses that ultimately can help them create jobs. as this program matures we will look at our program again to see what works and what doesn't work and really try to hone in on the products out there that help out the small businesses. from the beginning we thought it was vital to work closely with the office of small business and in short the mayor designed this program to be the extending arm of the sbac to rely on the technical expertise of staff to help us in our day-to-day activities. we work closely with sbac on many projects ranging from the west portal fire last october to outreach for the americans with disabilities act

compliance for the small businesses to working with individual merchants that may have some issues that they need to address dealing with city rules and regulations. we're a baseline service for the invest in neighborhoods program and the services we provide are uniform for those 25 corridors, but we're also citywide so we do our best to help out every corridor. there's two of us and the city's very big so we're doing our best to reach out to ever commercial district. the partnership we have with invest in neighborhoods helps us out a lot. that's something we'll mention in our findings in a few minutes. direct assistance for us begins with outreach and we started our outreach for the corridors to introduce businesses for

our services. the goal of our outreach is to educate and inform businesses about the resources available to them. then we also want to help the businesses by guiding them through the available services that they have from city departments and to provide them with someone on the ground who can take the concerns back to city hall. we want to see these businesses succeed and we want to do a better job of providing the assistance earlier and addressing the issues sooner. direct assistance to us means being attentive to businesses from the mundane to removing a garbage can in front of their business to addressing quality of life businesses to parking issues, which is obviously a big one. for those problems we're working with city departments to raise those concerns and

develop solutions. as i mentioned helping businesses comply with american's disability act is really important to us because of the impacts it has on the business and we're actively working with sbac and invest in neighborhoods. i want to bring francis to talk about our efforts. >> [inaudible] and to reduce the risks in facing [inaudible] to begin with impact district outreach [inaudible] door to door with it public education through [inaudible] and provide the technical assistance and enroll them in [inaudible]. we have /aeu assisted over 100

businesses in china town and we can't to work with merchants in district six and nine within this year. >> one of the other things we do for the invest in neighborhoods program is track vacancies in those corridors to help promote those marketing vacancies through store front, assess.com and monitor long term vacancies. each quarter we compare a report and compare against the current condition. before we started with this program the office of economic and work force development worked with sbac to respond to ocean avenue fire. after that fire they requested job squad to take over that

function. when we started the west portal fire happened and so through that incident we're learning lessons and working with sbac and department of emergency management to develop protocols and what we can do before and after the fire. we're working on citywide projects that will provide tools for small businesses. we're working with the office of small business and the office of civic invasion to develop a tool that can help businesses know what's happening on their block before something happens so if the structure project, mta projects, things like that, we want to let them know what's going on for a disruption occurs. this new too will allow businesses to get more information before an event occurs. just really quick we're working with several different departments and entities. the office of small

business, mayor's office, municipal transportation agency, planning, film commission and a few other departments as well to kind of really understand what the landscape of notifications are. every permit that's out there and every notification that's out there is really different by departments and their outreach approaches are very /stkeufrpbt as different as well. right now the mayor heard from his small business leaders as a recent round table and they were expressing /tpr-s ing frustration with the city to work on these projects so the mayor gets frustration and is looking at all avenues to approach this. now we're securing a vendor, going through the procurement process, but we /wabt want to come back to the commission once we have a tool in

development to take concerns and address those as we develop this tool. when invest neighborhoods started it collected parcel and business information for all its corridors and we believe we can continue to use this information and expand upon it to assist us all in tracking the vacancies but creating a database to help us understand the needs of the individual business. over time i wanted francis to speak briefly on that as well. >> after completing our first round door to door outreach in invest in neighborhood corridors, all 25 [inaudible] database in april 2013 so first we will create a [inaudible] included business contact information and also with the nature of the surface and in july we enhance it with further details like establish a contact person's name, the language spoken and also their

involvement. this database is helpful not only for us but also for the city departments to deploy an effective and efficient outreach. we are expanding the outreach on to up to date knowledge for the city to learn about [inaudible] vacancies and to develop long term strategies for business corridors. for potential business owners it helps them find ideal locations with different advantages like a preestablished kitchen or things that reduce their [inaudible] costs and also shortens their evaluation time to open the business.

>> so really quickly we're going to mention our outreach approach. it was close to businesses are. what we decided to do was work in tandem with the invest in neighborhoods staff to let the businesses know along the corridor that we can help them with their individual business needs, but then also try to address the larger corridor concerns. large part of the impacts on business operation happen based on what's happening on the street. so we did this and i think we are finding that it's useful because a lot of times there's a sense that the city's not doing enough to address homelessness, address crime, address those larger issues and so we have a point of contact

and reference to work with, you know, on those larger issues. one of the things we also want to do is make sure we reach out to all communities so with the work of francis we're starting to reach out to the monolingual communities. >> [inaudible] enables us to work with pretty much most of the communities i think in the cross cultural situation. [inaudible] extends connection and establish network between merchants in the city. according to census 2010 chinese is one of the fastest growing population citywide. [inaudible] language barriers and cultural bias [inaudible] guiding merchants to [inaudible] for example before the super bowl 2015, we team up

for [inaudible] middle mission. we establish the emergency action plan we conduct door do door with over 315 english, spanish and chinese speaking merchants to date. we educate on how to [inaudible] now we partner with the [inaudible] doe, mong, et cetera, to [inaudible] outreach quarters. through [inaudible] which are respectful and responsive to the cultural needs of all small businesses. >> the goal of our outreach is to build those relationships and trust with the small businesses to be effecttive we need to have a better working

relationship so we understand what's really on the happening to the businesses on the ground and what they're facing on a daily basis. this is very important to us and that's part of our outreach strategy. we will go out to the neighborhood businesses in the same 25 districts as many times as it takes to develop those connection points and once we have those connection points merchants are willing to talk to us a bit more about some concerns and challenges they have. so the findings i'm presenting now are a culmination of what we've learned after talking to a lot of businesses, not only in the best neighborhoods, corridors, but also not invested neighborhoods and corridors. it was a little surprising to see what the challenges they wanted to talk about are, but in a sense it makes a lot of sense. their overall concerns had to

do with the health of the corridor and what's happening on the street because they felt that was the biggest challenge in their day-to-day operations. they want to address homelessness and corresponding quality of life issues. the reinstitution of a beat cop along the corridor, which means pedestrian safety and the safety of clients that are visiting the neighborhood. improvements to cleanliness along the corridor, city assistance to improve marketing of the corridor and improve accessibility in enhancing the visitor experience, which includes modifying parking policies. when asked about individual concerns the top were rising commercial rent, compliance with the government regulations and permitting merchant safety and possible opportunities and

incentives provided by the city. we believe these findings are valuable and we're developing strategy to better track these over time. we want to expand this to as many commercial districts as possible just to make sure that this is a consistent that we're hearing, but from the findings we have so far, we believe these are the sentiments of merchants citywide. here's what we can learn from these findings. merchants want a clean and safe environment, they want means to drive foot traffic to the corridor, a better marketing strategy geared to the corridor. /pher cants want relief from stresses based upon their daily business operations. ever increasing government

regulations, possibility of crime and rent increases that can be overwhelming at times. we need to come with commissions like these, present them to policymakers. this keeps with our mission to work with others based on our field experiences and we believe these findings can assist in all our efforts to direct resources where needed and improve conditions for the merchant. so the job squad will do whatever it takes to help out the small business community and we're always really available to talk to departments about ideas and options that they may have and we'll continue to work with regina and the office of small business and invest in neighborhoods to advocate for more tools for small businesses. developing creative strategies and

solutions. when there's a benefit to the businesses these are things we want to continue to do and advocate for. we've enjoyed working with osb so far. we'll continue working with them to make sure we're sending the right messages to the businesses that there are resources available to them. we look forward to working with this commission as well to look at partnerships that we can have to develop solutions and help out the merchants. we thank the commission for letting us talk today and if there's any questions or comments we'd be happy to take them. >> commissioner dooley. >> i wanted to thank you guys for coming and thank you for doing outreach in north beach. we really appreciate it. what is is rollout you know beyond the districts that you have mentioned do you have a timeframe for that. >> right now it's pretty in

flux because aside from the 25 corridors that's another 35 that we can easily target. throughout our work we've gone to different neighborhoods as well. i am helping merchants out on valencia street, mission bay, rincon hill and south beach. the reason for these are multiprong. sometimes there's issues that are arising in neighborhoods where a merchant may say we need some help from the city. in other aspects such as with what francis is doing is with the ada compliance so we're trying to take the same messages and same services we're offering to invest in neighborhoods and roll that out to all commercial districts, but i think we need to work with office of small business and also invest neighborhoods to find a consistent approach.

i think the commission has ideas as well on where it would be a good target point moving forward. i think we'd definitely appreciate that. >> commissioner riley. >> yes. hi, welcome and thank you. this questions for francis 'cause i know -- thank you for handling the language barrier in the clement street area. but the language part is pretty complicated in the chinese community because of the different dialects so do you find that challenging and -- >> i think that's my professional background 'cause i have a multidegree in chinese languages and also i come from hong kong so i'm hopefully fluent in cantonese and mandarin. i think besides the language how you present yourself is going to be a very cria