an example of that would be parking enforcement. they had a significant increase in the amount of work they were doing as far as -- i think they started having sunday enforcement, parking enforce. : they needed more vehicles. >> and they'll be getting rid of -- >> we're working on making those electric right now. >> so, then, the vehicles that are reduced out of the fleet reduction, those were noncompliant vehicles? ~ most likely? what is it, they reach a certain stage of mileage and they're vehicles we wouldn't find on our compliant list, right? they're vehicles that we want to get out of the fleet anyway, right? [multiple voices] >> they're the oldest, yeah, the oldest vehicles. that wasn't our fault. the department decided which vehicles they were going to get rid of. they were generally the oldest thing they have. >> thanks. all right. is that the last slide?

>> yes, thank you. >> all right, thank you very much. comments from colleagues? commissioner wald. >> unless commissioner josefowitz wants to go first. >> thank you. >> i was overly enthusiastic. >> she's getting a little better than last year. >> it's been a learning process for everybody. all of the fleet -- everybody involved with the fleets -- this has been a learning process, to try and figure out how to get similar types of data and how to make it work. >> great. i think, you know, we still -- below a lot of our targets, i guess. but i mean, it's great improvement from where it was before. so, congratulations and keep up the good work. >> thank you. >> hope to continue moving it in that direction. >> thanks, commissioner. i just have one question. when it comes to fleet reduction and green vehicle

purchasing, i'm wondering if there's any departments that kind of rise to the top as shining stars and maybe some that are still kind of getting there. and don't worry, it's not like this is a public meeting. it's not recorded. nobody will know. it will be between us. i mean, is there a general sense -- everybody wants to comply obviously if you're going for a waiver. but is there anybody who is really just standing out as a department of the 9 or so that are -- >> obviously there's variation in there. the way they're approaching this, would have to say across the board there is a great deal of improvement and willingness to figure this out and to come to grips with the fact that they all need to have similar types of data collection systems of how their vehicles are used. and some of them are stepping up more willingly and aggressively. but all of them are moving forward.

>> maybe we could talk off line because i'm getting kind of interested in the subject matter, you know. i was really looking forward to this. and thanks to you guys for sharing this information. maybe we could even talk off line because maybe it would be nice to figure out if we can up lift the work of one of the departments, maybe even in the future commission meeting do a little ~ let's not tell anyone, a surprise award between vehicle trophy kind of thing to really highlight somebody's performance. >> i think that's a great idea and there are some departments that really do have good stories. >> okay, thanks. commissioner wald. >> thank you for that report. it was very encouraging, and i congratulate you very sincerely on the progress that you made. i had just two questions. the first is, is the list of green vehicles publicly available? in other words, is there a way to make people in san francisco

who might need to buy a new car or replace a car, if they could benefit from the work that you've done to identify green vehicles? >> i'm going to let bill answer that. >> we'd be happy to share it. the most limiting factor is what's on contract, but the city is already contracted with. i wear another hat called clean cities, daily clean cities, and we have access to a lot of data through the united states department of energy websites that we can share with the public to help them make those kind of decisions. >> we might want to think about doing something like that. not that we want to promote car use, but that we do want to ensure that when people buy cars, that they buy the best

cars that are available. that's an idea. and i did want to ask about the possibility of unintended consequences. with respect to your waiver requirement, and particularly the one that asks people to justify low mileage vehicles and whether or not that might have the perverse effect of getting people to use those low mileage vehicles more so that they can justify keeping them? >> i suppose that could happen. i think, you know, we're in a situation where we have to get information about the use of the vehicle and we're starting with an assumption that if a vehicle is putting on less than 3,000 miles a year, that it's

likely not to be needed. now, there are some departments that can come back and justify why they do need to have these vehicles that put low mileage on them. but we put it out there as a -- that triggers you having to explain to us why they couldn't be used for the reduction amount that are required for your fleet. bill, did you want to add anything? >> the 3,000 mile or low mileage under utilized vehicle rule has been in place many years. that's the city's fleet -- that's generally understood to be a requirement in the city's fleet. we just picked that up as our benchmark to identify low mileage vehicleses. and one of the things we learned as we went through this process is there's a huge divergence in the way our fleets are used. an example of wherefore sfpd, 3,000 miles a year is a vehicle that's pretty much never used. if you go to sfo, if they have

a vehicle that has 3,000 miles on it, they initiate an investigation because nobody drives that far out there. they still need the vehicles. you have a vehicle that's a pick-up truck that has tools in it. well, the guy goes from his shop where he needs the tools and he drives 2 or 3 miles a day, you can see that there's justifiable reason to have vehicles that have very low mileage on them, but just keep them forever. we don't get rid of vehicles until they have 100 to 150,000 miles-ish on them. but we're keeping a real close eye on that. and i can assure you that that thought has crossed my mind and we're learning how to, shall we say, keep a closer eye on the way vehicles are being used. one of the things we've done, too, one of the first time we've asked across the city family how are you using your vehicles. individual departments have been responsible in the past and i think we have identified reasons to look closely at the way city -- we've contributed

to that conversation. >> thank you very much. >> thanks, bob and bill. members of the public that would liketo comment on this item? seeing none, thank you, bob, thank you, bill. [gavel] >> and can we go to the next item? >> review and approval of resolution approving the department of the environment's integrated pest management 2014 reduced risk pesticide list for city properties. the guide to the reduced pesticide risk is a draft resolution. sponsors melanie nutter, speaker chris geiger and pest management program manager. this is a discussion and action item. >> director nutter. >> i passed out to you, i know this is an annual item so this is your time to [inaudible]. >> thanks. >> thank you, commissioners. and thank you, melanie. [laughter] >> i get to say that.

so, this is indeed an annual item and my intention tonight isn't so much to give you a complete survey of what our program does as to, number one, give you an update on pesticide use trends on city properties, which is something i was not able to do last year because we were having data problems with our database. now the database is usable finally. i'm very happy about that. and, so, i can give you some of those numbers. and also, of course, it's our annual chance to revise and improve what we call the reduced risk pesticide list. for the benefit of commissioner wan and others, who might not have heard my whole spiel last year, i'm give you the briefest description we do in the integrated pest management program. we have -- we've been around a long time, 1996 is when the

ordinance was passed, and it started with a complete ban on all pesticides. we soon realized it wasn't going to work for a whole long list of reasons. it evolved into what we see today, which is a list of pesticides that we've screened very heavily to make sure that they are the safest products available for the purpose and also that we really need them in the first place. and always -- and always, always, always and i think everyone in our program across the city agrees these are used as a last resort. pesticides are intended only as a last resort when other methods can't be used. i also have one of the star ibm coordinators with me tonight from the recreation parks department, kevin roland. and i can't sing his praises loudly enough, but he has been doing really wonderful things with rec and park. and he'll be available for

questions when we get to that or if you have any now. so, the goal really is to minimize environmental health risk from pests and pesticides. it's not just about reducing pesticides because there are problems we have to address out there in the city unfortunately, and these are tools sometimes that we need. the program itself really revolves around a stakeholder process, it involves all the city departments that use pesticides. we meet monthly. this is really the heart and soul of the program. and i think it's fair to say that there are hundreds of people, hundreds of city employees involved with landscape maintenance and building maintenance who are not just on board, but really passionate about this program. it's really a great sort of institutional culture, i think,

for the ipm program. what goes into the -- well, let's see. let me start off with the slide. hopefully the subtitles will have mercy on us and won't [speaker not understood] anything critical. so, what i'm showing right now is long-term pesticide use trends. and this is what you'll see is, even if you just squint your eyes, you'll see we made some big gains early on, and then it's leveled off. the red dotted line at the top is total pesticide use. and the solid red is herbicide. so, some people don't think of weeds as pests, but actually weeds are our number one pests and what we spend most of our time on here in the city. for a wide virginia right of reasons.

~ variety of reasons. [speaker not understood]. it's still very imperfect measure. and what i'd really -- i really hope to do in future is have something that more relates to the actual toxicity of the various chemicals that we're youthxing. there are some measures out there we might be able to apply some metrics we can apply. i just want to point out quickly, the blue line is insecticides that aren't used for public health. hiding that, i'm sorry you can't really see the detail of it. we've actually had a 99% reduction in insecticide use since the beginning of the program, nonpublic health insecticides. but you notice some bumps there and those bumps are golf tournaments. the other big driver in pesticide use in the city really is tournament golf. and this is kind of a separate issue on its own.

i think what we've concluded in the ipm program is you really can't have tournament golf without having a lot of pesticide use. and, so, it's a community decision as to whether we want to have these deals with golf tournaments. i know there are a lot of benefits as well from the tournaments themselves, but i have to sort of treat that as a separate category of pesticide use. and to their credit, the rec/park golf team has been very, very committed to finding every way we possibly can to reduce pesticide use at harding park golf course. the -- i think that -- i also should explain we don't put public health pesticides in here because that is something for moe mosquitox, for example, that we really can't control. ~ it's something that is driven by mosquito outbreaks, west nile virus outbreaks, various

public health issues, and also those are almost universally very low toxicity products. they are mike robial products that are in storm drains or hormones that are in tiny, tiny amounts ~. so, that's the rationale for not looking at that. these are the top 10 most used hazardous products in the city based on active ingredient, pounds of active ingredient. you'll see most of them are for golf courses. joining us now is [speaker not understood] which is an herbicide used for the really tough weeds, the woody, woody weeds that you would maybe need a backhoe to dig out or that you just himalayan back berry, cut down the stump and kill the

roots [speaker not understood]. the good news is since we i think in 2008 identified garalon as one of the products we wanted to find substitutes for, there has been some decrease in our usage of it. this is natural areas program from rec and park and they are the program responsible for keeping biodiversity in our parks, protecting endemic plant species. and they from time to time have to use pesticide in that process. the purple line is garlon which really started to be used back in the early 2000s and right about -- and it peaked in i think it's 2005 there. and it's been on the decrease since then which we're very happy about. i would respectfully disagree with the speaker earlier in that the natural areas program

usage, according to combined 2010 through 2012 data -- this is different i think than what she had analyzed, which is 2013 data, is actually the smallest portion of rec/park's use. it would be the blue slice on this pie. the green slice is other parks and facilities. the kind of orangish red -- sorry about that. the small orange slice is golden gate park and the big orange is golf. this is just for recreation and park. so, in general, i think -- i'm sorry, i missed one. i meant to discuss the little statistics at the bottom of this graph. we have overall at this point an 84% reduction in all pesticides since the beginning of the program. since 2000, which is when we really got our system best

organized, it's been at 62%. since 2007, which is five-year mark, it's been a 6% reduction. as you can see it's very bumpy, depending on climate, depending on budget, depending on all sorts of things. >> depending on golf as well? >> and depending on golf. so, we are trying to find other ways -- other ways to lower that which i'll talk about in a second. a few other things worthy of note. what we are moving towards instead of -- along with with trying to get rid of the bad stuff on the list of pesticides are more prevention -- i'm sorry, more emphasis on prevention. one of the big accomplishments this year was the roll out of our pest prevention by design guidelines, which is a comprehensive list of things,

ways to build pests out of buildings. we are also promoting bay friendly, bay friendly landscaping system which is along with puc, we're trying to promote these sort of general holistic approaches to landscape management. it's not just about pesticides, it's about planting the right plants so you don't get the pests. the right irrigation so you don't have the diseases, so forth. so, in the past year we've done a lot of trainings. we had another urban ipm conference we co-sponsored, the city of crest and parks conservancy and many thanks to them for helping out in that effort. based on the design training which is the first of its kind in san francisco, we had this past year, and every year we have a complete round of annual pesticide safety and ipm trainings for anyone who is remotely involved with pesticides. and, of course, our monthly meetings at the ipm technical

advisory committee which it's about 10 times a year is what it amounts to. i also wanted to mention we launched a project to turn the pest prevention by design guidelines into a lead pilot credit. so, this is what the u.s. green building council, we're using the same national committee that helped put this -- these guidelines together to try to turn it into something that's permanently enshined in leed. so, i'm crossing my fingers about that one. and as i mentioned, we completed, i put quotes around that. we completed the [speaker not understood] database. there are still some big improvements that need to happen, but we have the data now. and which we did not have last time. ~ i spoke to you. i think i'm going to skip that one for the moment. but just to talk about the list itself, this year we proceeded with our usual process on the list. the list is heavily managed --

what i have to tell everyone who asks is the list is not the program. we would not have the list if we didn't have this group of people meeting every month and talking about these things. and it requires extensive management. so, every year we go through it one by one, ask whether these products are really the safest available for the purpose. are they really necessary in the first place. and are they being used, and make changes accordingly. and you'll see we added 8 products this year, removed 12. there were language changes and a whole bunch of them. ~ in a whole bunch of them. and it's -- i always also have to say that the number of products on the list is not one of them -- not a metric for us. these are -- this is a tool box but the real metric is how much they end up using.

let's see. so, there are a lot of different ways that we -- in addition to the pest prevention by design guidelines, there are many, many other ways that we have been working every day to try to reduce pesticide use and kevin is really the expert on this. he actually did a really great project with cockroaches in the nursery which has been successful, kind of a multi-prong approach to getting the pest with the bare minimum of [speaker not understood] basically which is a low toxicity product. we do a lot of -- at harding park, i should mention even though we don't have anything to show for this yet, we are working closely on a -- with them on a new ipm plan and this is our way of trying to address a very difficult situation where during a tournament we

have exemptions flying at me from the tournament organizers. and i am not a golf expert and it is very difficult to us to judge how necessary these things are. so, if we have a better ipm plan in place that will help answer the questions before they're asked, i hope. i think that's all i have for you right now, except to -- i encourage you to ask any questions you may have and to take advantage of kevin's presence here today, some of the good stuff they're doing. >> thank you so much, chris. commissioner gravanis? >> well, i would be interested, if it's all right with the commission, to invite kevin roland come up and just briefly summarize rec and park's approach to ipm and give a couple of examples of the good work that you're doing. >> welcome. >> my name is kevin roland.

hello, commissioners. i would like to also thank you for the great work that the department of environment does. it's the inspiration for me to come to work for the city. i owned my own business for many years and wound up selling it to a national company. and after looking at the ipm ordinance and the good work that san francisco is doing and the model that it really is, not just around the country but in other places in the world for sustainable pest management, that was what inspired me to apply for the job. and i thought i'd really like to be part of this. i started working for the city with the bureau of urban forestry and then a fellow named ross montana talked me into it joining recreation and parks which is a challenging job, even for a person like myself with 25 years experience in pest management.

some of the programs that we have done, and i'm very proud of, recreation and parks, chris mentioned the conservatory of flowers where we had an invasion of cockroach species. we used a combination of natural enemies to the cockroach as well as some very low-impact insect sidual materials like boric acid and some [speaker not understood]. and that problem is controlled ~. once it was a very visible problem that actually was an encumbrance to renting the facility out for various things. same thing with -- i don't know if any of you got to enjoy the poinsettias at christmas [speaker not understood], that would be used on those flowers. time after time, rodent control, i'll go out and inspect a facility and it's

always about rodent proving the facility first, and trapping rather than using some sort of bait. we don't use any second generation rodent base on parks properties. i find that understanding the breeding cycles, these different organisms can help me control them by knowing when to place and utilize my efforts and expertise to reduce the populations before breeding season, for instance, so we're not having adults out there reproducing. but those are just a few things. like to use, for instance, in natural areas program, i have meetings with them. i am a pest control advisor and a licensed structural pest control operator as well as a qal which is a qualified applicator. so, i'll have meetings. sit down and talk, and my questions are always what are we doing first and they talk to

me about the hours of volunteer work that goes on in the natural areas programs. their own manual efforts, which i actually have seen. i go out and visit these sites, whether they be parks or natural areas properties. so, i would say that my commitment to reducing use of pesticide, is a, i would be one of the applicators. i would be more inclined to use less than more. there is no incentive whatsoever for someone making an application to want to use more of the material. more than what might be necessary. the only reason that we do use it is sometimes these areas are so difficult to get to manually to remove weeds, for instance,

in a restoration project where just the sheer size of it, it wouldn't make sense or we don't have the resources to manually do this. but we've tried goats in some cases to remove weeds. we're looking into something called hydro [speaker not understood], which is a machine that uses a have high pressure water to destroy weeds and the root systems. i have to way some things like my caution erosion. is this equipment able to get into these areas. there's a lot to think about, i deal with basically all of the kingdoms and biology as well as some of these pesticides and having to be knowledgeable on that and the interactions between these different organisms. and oftentimes we use that in control, for instance, coyotes and gophers. and that's what we encourage, to have these rafters and blue

herrons, this time of year, you see them out there hunting. this year in our annual pesticide safety training which is mandatory, the second part is sold out by our biodiversity. we've invited fish and game to come in and do training with the staff to answer questions and be aware of wildlife in the parks and their role. and the second part is the predator/prey relationship between raptors and rodents. i hope that hope fully gives you a good description of my role which is to reduce pesticide use where i can ~. it's the main thing i do. >> thank you very much. thank you for everything you do. all right, colleagues, questions? if there's no other discussion

from the commission, do we have any comments from the public on this item? yes, ms. bose. [speaker not understood]. >> and hooray for the goats. you don't have to do a card. that's okay. i would like to start by thanking chris and kevin for their work in trying to reduce pesticide use. i'm speaking now as an individual and not representing any of the organizations with which i'm affiliated. i've been following pesticide use now for several years and attending the meetings that chris holds in order to discuss the reduced risk pesticide list and i'd like to complement them on how open these buildings are and how willing they are to take feedback from the public. having said that, i still have two