commission on the environment. today is tuesday, january 28th. it is 5:10 p.m. first item on the agenda is roll call. commission president joshua arce? >> here. >> commission vice president [speaker not understood] is excused. commissioner ruth gravanis? >> here. >> commissioner [speaker not understood]? >> here. >> commissioner heather stephenson? >> here.

>> commissioner heather wall? >> here. >> [speaker not understood]? >> here. >> next item on the agenda is the approval of minutes of the november 12, 2013 commission on the environment special meeting retreat and december 3, 2013 rescheduled meeting. commissioners, in your packet you have november 12 and december 3rd draft minutes. this is a discussion and action item. ~ >> colleagues, unless there is any discussion, can i get a motion to approve the minutes? >> motion. >> so moved. >> seconded. >> . by commissioner wan [speaker not understood]. all those in favor say aye 2a aye. >> it is approved. >> [speaker not understood]. next item on the agenda -- >> there is [speaker not understood]. >> on the meeting minutes? >> [speaker not understood] public comment? >> very soon. >> that's the next item. >> my apologies for the confusion. >> okay. >> next item is public comment. members of the public may

address the commission on items not on today's agenda. >> all right. we have one card, and that is from rupa bose. thank you for giving me the opportunity to comment. and thank you for all that you do for the environment, in particular the reduction of pesticide [speaker not understood]. i'm here today representing the san francisco forest alliance and we'd like to make three comments. the first is on the natural areas pesticide use. natural areas has been using a great amount of herbicides by whatever measure n. 2013 it used more tier 1 herbicides than san francisco rec and park put together excluding the golf course which is a special case. also is treating [speaker not understood] golf course, not all the other golf courses. and that's a special case

because of the contract that harding is under. ~ i'm going to try and show you two graphs. 2011 to 2013 are derived from the original [speaker not understood] documents. we know the department of the environment has been working very hard to track pesticide use with its new database that was installed in 2010. we have spent a lot of hours trying to reconcile them and we found that the database still has significant data problems with months of missing data and we wanted to work with chris geiger and his team to improve the accuracy. but [speaker not understood] are the most accurate representation of herbicide use for the natural areas.

people are particularly sensitive about the use of toxic herbicides in natural areas which are wetlands and our gardens. people are shocked when they realize what's happening. we ask for no tier 1 or tier 2 pesticides to be used in natural areas. our second comment is about plant mixes in general. in tracking the use of herbicides in san francisco, we found that the original source documents show no way to identify [speaker not understood] mixes of chemicals. we're not talking about adjuvants, but [speaker not understood]. little results exist about synergistic effects. so, we ask all departments start to identify mixes and s.f. department of environment consider plants with special case and automatically tier 1. our third comment is about second generation [speaker not understood]. i don't know if you're aware, but another owl has been found

dead in the glenn canyon area. last year there was a great owl killed. this year it's [speaker not understood]. the neighbors got proxy results. those owls have died of rat poison eating rodents with second generation [speaker not understood]. we under the department of san francisco environment [speaker not understood] against the use of [speaker not understood]. the san francisco -- >> if you can give us a concluding statement. he yes, the san francisco forest alliance supports this campaign and would like to throw its weight behind it. ~ >> thank you very much. any other speakers? it's not necessary to do a card. you can please come up to the microphone. thank you, commissioners. my name is rufus watkins with midtown park apartments. in district 5. the reason why i'm here is that we need your help to -- with the mayor's office of housing as well as with our district 5

supervisor as well as the supervisors collectively to rescind the termination notice that we have. we are a sustainable community, midtown park apartments. and i have information here for you. so, we would like to see if you can help us rescind the termination notice from the mayor's office of housing. midtown park apartments is a diverse community. it's still the bastian of diversity in the mid and western addition. after the 1960s, redevelopment, a lot of people can attest what happened in the 1960s. so, now midtown apartment apartments is like the crown jewel of that and we are still -- and we are -- the reason why we want the mayor's office of housing to rescind the termination notice lease that's

coming up january 31st is to negotiate -- fruitful negotiations. at the moment we are having difficulties and our supervisor breed as well as we just got finished with the collective board to get their help. so, we are asking with -- if you can to help us to rescind the termination notice and to get back to fruitful negotiations and as a sustainable group, midtown park apartments. i wanted to say thank you for the opportunity. i have information here and, again, thank you. >> thank you. and if you give any materials to our commission secretary, monica, she can -- okay, thank you. >> any other members of the public wish to comment? seeing none, public comment is closed. [gavel] >> next item is outreach presentation on the tenant bicycle parking and existing commercial buildings ordinance. speakers today are [speaker not

understood], transportation coordinator. this is an informational presentation and discussion item. >> colleagues, as you know, commissioner king usually introduces our outreach presentations and he wanted folks to know that he wanted to be here, but he is at the moment taking care of his mother as he has been for two weeks and so he's with us in spirit tonight. and i know he'll be excited to hear this exciting outreach presentation. [speaker not understood]. >> thank you. again, my name is [speaker not understood]. i'm with the clean transportation program and s.f. senior coordinator on the team. i will be talking to you today about our most current outreach efforts with the tenant bicycle parking and existing commercial buildings ordinance. but before i get into our current activities i'd like to briefly provide some background on the ordinance results. it passed in march 2012 with the goal of encouraging bicycling to work by requiring

commercial property owners and managers to allow tenants to bring their bikes into their building or designated bike parking area. a development partnership with supervisor john avalos, the san francisco bike coalition and the building owners and managers association [speaker not understood], and assists in actually a couple goals. one is the city-wide goal of 20% of all trips by bicycles by 2020, and also as part of the larger city-wide goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 25% below 1990 levels by 2017. the ordinance applies to all owners and managers of controlling and existing commercial property to allow their tenants to either bring their bicycles into their leased space or into a designated parking area. this ordinance applies only to existing commercial property owners and managers and not

residential buildings. steps of compliance are simple. if the commercial property owner or manager doesn't have any limitations on how and where the tenants can bring and park their bikes in their building, then they are complying with the ordinance and they don't -- they do not need to have -- sorry. they don't need to do anything further with us. ~ to comply with the ordinance. if the commercial property owner, owners would like to prescribe access or designated route to either the bike parking location or another area, they will have to submit a bicycle access plan. a bicycle access plan is an easy online form and it asks the property and manager to describe the route to the stairs, elevator, or designated bike parking area that the tenant should take their bikes.

it also asks the property owner to tell us how they're going to communicate this access plan to the tenant. and once the form is submitted to us and the information is made clear to their tenants, the property owner/manager is complying with the ordinance and there is no further steps necessary for compliance. we're asking all the property owners and managers who wish to complete a bicycle access plan to do so by january 31st. commercial property owners and managers can also apply for an exception, but under two special circumstances. one is if their building's elevator is not available for bicycle access due to substantial safety risks or there is alternate covered off-street or indoor no cost bike parking available within 750 feet of the building. after we get the exception form from the building owner or manager, s.f. environment along

with sfmta and the building, the public building inspection will approve or deny the request. and again we're asking for all exception forms to be submitted by the end of this week. around january 31st deadline we've been conducting a number of outreach activities through a variety of channels and our message is intend today target not only the property owners and managers, but also tenants of buildings of businesses and employees. and, so, the outreach we conducted includes presenting at the annual building owners and managers code fair including the deadline and description of the ordinance in our newsletter which was sent to over 4500 subscribers in early january. [speaker not understood] on twitter. initial post was retweeted by boma as well as other tenant advocacy groups.

sfa has over 14,000 followers on our twitter count and for the ordinance purposes, this is a great way to reach tenants. businesses and individuals ~. we also created a similar post on sfa facebook. it has over 4400 likes on facebook and, again, it is a great way to reach individuals and let them know about this ordinance so that they can talk to their property managers. the ordinance and the compliance deadline is also featured on the home page of sfma home page. we sent [speaker not understood] guide to other partner agencies and associations. this is an example from boma log where they use some of our communications messages to promote the ordinance and also the deadline to their, to their memorandum we arex.

we've also reached out to other commercial property owner/managers, association including the international facility [speaker not understood] ~. and the professional property management association. [speaker not understood] also use our communications to reach out to their members who again are mainly tenants, their businesses and employees. lastly, we organize our website and created a vanity link, sf [speaker not understood].org/bike access. the page includes bicycle access form and exception form for easy completion. it also has an anonymous tenant complaint form and [speaker not understood] building owners and managers as well as tenants. for continuing outreach after

the 31st deadline, we are continuing to conduct additional and regular outreach to increase awareness of the ordinance and integrating it more fully with our business outreach and our commuter outreach. again, we will continue to work with our [speaker not understood] outreach team as well as our partner associations in getting the message out. with that, thank you for your time and i'm happy to answer any questions you might have. >> very well done. (applause) >> thanks. >> we have commissioner stephenson. >> could you just repeat for somebody that may be watching, if you work at an office or any kind of building that doesn't allow you to park your bike what they should do? >> they should -- they can use an anonymous tenant complaint form to tell us about -- >> where is that? >> that's on our website. there is a very clear link. there is a tenant link and the

tenant complaint form is embedded onto our website. >> sf environment.org/bike ac0s >> bike access. >> thank you. >> [speaker not understood]. >> do you track sort of engagement on the social media, tweets? do you ever promote them? >> promote tweets? >> promote facebook posts or kind of spend money to kind of raise the frequency [speaker not understood]? >> we have not paid for any kind of special posting on facebook. we work closely with our outreach team to retweet, tweet at different organizations to get the word out there and more

people seeing the posts. but in terms of any kind of formalized process, we have not conducted that yet. >> do you track sort of how many people see them? >> yes. for the link that was on the twitter post and the facebook post is unique so we can track how many people have opened the link or liked it or things of that nature. >> so, can you give us some idea of how many people clicked on the link? >> yeah, for twitter -- one second. facebook and twitter there's 65 clicks. most of those were from twitter. seems like the twitter poster got out a lot more and retweeted with our partner agencies. >> is that a good amount or is that not a good amount?

it's difficult to kind of in the abstract know how many clicks you expected or something like that. i feel people are mobilizing around their microphones and -- [laughter] >> [speaker not understood]. >> obviously we would like the number to be much, much higher. compared to other things we're doing it's not terrible, but if we want an impact we've got to drive those numbers up. to your original question, we've never paid for additional promotion for facebook or twitter. there are things we can do without putting money out and we should and will be doing those things. but, yeah, it's obviously -- we're in a starting point. we need to build those numbers. >> it seems like the department has a phenomenal field outreach program, if one can characterize it in those terms, which we spend money on and all that stuff. and, you know, i don't think that spending money on social media outreach would be sort of thought of as frivolous at all.

if it is, it's a totally valid way of -- >> we don't pay money for task book and twitter. we have spent money on placement of ads when we have campaigns. then we get much higher numbers. that would be one way to drive up our numbers is to do a more integrated outreach campaign and combine additional payments into that. we're always in the ironic situation where we have funding for certain parts of our programs and not for others. therefore, we don't have resources in some areas to really do as much outreach as we would like. but certainly we can work on trying to integrate general promotion for twitter and facebook that could then reverberate through all our campaignseses and all our efforts, not just this specific campaign. >> [speaker not understood] has

a point, too, maybe here. >> guillermo rodriguez. we do track and look at our social media campaigns. we certainly have facebook, tweets, all of these items we kind of look at what is best practices. we have been experimenting with paid promotions for some of our campaigns. so, for example, last week when we -- the department launched the zero waste textiles campaign, we actually did experiment by paying for an additional [speaker not understood] on facebook and twitter and we have been able to track the incremental proportion of how many more viewers we've been able to see the information that we put out on social media. and it's been very positive. just a couple of examples and,

again, using technology, over 300 clicks on facebook and over 290 likes on facebook, on that campaign for that extra added push, we also did a video which we've never really done on our campaign before. it's just a one-minute video on the campaign that saw a significant increase in boost. and more so from the media perspective, a lot of the web-based media reports on the campaign really just pushed our website as well as our video. so, we've been tracking it a lot more. we've been looking at the significant increase in uptick and we're still evaluating the effectiveness of the paid additional push from both facebook and twitter. and in some campaigns it makes sense given who our overall -- our subscribers are. in some campaigns we haven't tried it just yet.

>> does this city -- other departments must have this identical problem where they are trying to do outreach and, you know, there's regulations coming in which they want people to comply with. they want people who aren't complying with them to be kind of called out by other people. is there kind of any resources the city has to sort of health departments think through outreach on social media or otherwise or is it kind of every department on their own? >> two things. one, the resources the city has, they really are counterparts in other departments. we periodically come together on a once a month basis and share a lot of best practices with one another, specifically around social media doing actual grassroots outreach. and, again, trying to better leverage each other's activities. so that if we're out knocking on doors, we might be able to make sure that we're not on the same place as dpw or rec and park or planning department are

doing thing. so, we're sending -- sharing a lot of best practices with each other, sharing a lot of data with one another in terms of how many facebook friends do you have at rec and park? how many do we have? and also promoting -- >> [speaker not understood] friends. [laughter] >> you don't need to answer that question. >> but the answer is yes, there is a lot of collaboration, at least, among our counterparts in the other departments that work together to try to come up with better practices in order to reach a broader audience in san francisco. again, an example of our textile campaign within the first few days of that announcement and the heavy social media and the heavy push to our website. over 2000 visits within, you know, the announcement offsets a significant uptick. we have a monitor so we don't have crashes. we don't expect these kinds of

large volume of folks. again, very much designed to run our campaigns, our check-out [speaker not understood] campaign had probably one of the best uses of our website businesses downloading information [speaker not understood]. it is an overall aspect of our outreach and communications. >> great. i'm glad it's a focus and i hope you keep working on it so we can get more than 65 clicks. >> absolutely. again, for us it's been looking at individual campaigns and developing good standard practices that we can roll out to all of our program areas. >> thank you. >> any other comment from colleagues, discussion? any members of the public that want to talk about our outreach presentation? seeing none, thank you very much, christie. great. >> next item is improvement of

the department of commission on the environment's 2013 annual report. sponsoring speakers on this item are commissioner johanna walled and melanie nutter. >> commissioner called? >> yes. for the last couple of years the department and the commission have produced a single integrated annual report. each body, the department and the commission are required to file reports with the mayor's office on an annual basis explaining the benefits and the value added and all the good things that we do. so, i think this marks the third integrated report. the section on the commission

was abe lee coordinated by our commission secretary monica fish who is now an expert at putting this document together. it, its content represent item that were chosen by the various commissioners for inclusion in the document as well as a representation of many of the activities that we undertook, including in particular the passage of formal resolutions. and now i'll turn it over to melanie to talk about the much more extensive department report. >> thank you, commissioner wald. so, commissioners, as you've seen, you have this annual report from 2013 and because

it's quite detailed, i think it's probably best to see if commissioners have any specific questions about programs that are detailed in the annual report. but in this report you'll see the first full documentation of our biodiversity program and accomplishments. that's one highlight from this annual report. there is also quite a bit of information about adaptation and smart cities which is new to the annual report, as well as our americas cup accomplishments and eco districts. so, 2013 was a fantastic year for department of the environment and i did really want to thank some staff who helped to put this annual report together. donny, mark, and page were really great team members in making sure this was completed by tonight's commission meeting and ready for distribution to the larger sfb community. i'm happy to take any questions. 2013 was a great year for the departments. >> director nutter? commissioner gravanis. >> i just wanted to congratulate staff on their wo