when you dig deep, [speaker not understood], the building they had before, the marked reality was it was going to be some increase. from my opinion, i think our budget committee's opinion, not to speak for my colleagues, but they did a very respectful job of being mindful of that and coming back with the recommendation. i will support t. if my colleagues have any questions, please come to committee and we can talk about it there as well. >> supervisor kim. and then followed by supervisor campos. >> i want to thank the budget committee for reducing the square footage and having that thoughtful conversation at committee. one other thing i'll bring up i didn't bring up in my original comments, i'm not clear they have [speaker not understood]. we have so many conference and committee rooms. it doesn't make sense we are paying more rent. so, at the first retirement board can meet in your office, they should meet somewhere else if they don't have the space to accommodate public comment and overflow and all the staff and all the members. we have so many rooms and i just feel like in the city, i

feel like we have a resistance to sharing. everyone shouldn't have their own large committee room space. i'm sorry, every department doesn't need that. so, i guess for me i want to press our departments to share and be more thoughtful because it's real dollars. and as real estate gets more expensive here in the city, you know, this is going to be a continuing conversation and dialogue. so, that's where, you know, my comments come from. >> supervisor kim, if i could comment, we have pursued over the years holding our retirement board meetings here at city hall. we have been told that there is not -- i mean, there's other folks who have booked the space. the retirement board has selected the second wednesday of every month to hold their regular meetings. generally those meetings would require a minimum of five hours. sometimes we have had board meeting that have lasted longer than that. i mean, we do recognize the importance of being able to televise them hopefully live. we've been working with supervisor avalos's office and

it appears that we might be able to schedule our regular retirement board meetings here at city hall where they'll be televised. again, it's the retirement board's decision as to when they hold the the meetings, but hopefully the retirement board would be amenable to sort of changing their regular meeting schedule to accommodate being able to hold them here. we also hold committee meetings, investment committee meetings again, it's not going to be solely for the use of the retirement board, but it would be space where we currently are either going to other departments or potentially and we don't do a lot of this, leasing other space to address groups of 60 to 100 folks when we're giving general information sessions. for example, a couple years ago there were layoff notices that were sent out to a number of folks and we had a big demand for very standardized counseling, but we found ourselves not being able to accommodate groups larger than 20, 25 in our current space. the new space, i'm hoping it's

not going to be layoffs, but those types of issues where there is an increase sort of sudden demand for the services would be able to hold sessions of general information, nature, for much larger groups. we are moving towards that. i believe that we're going to be able to accommodate our regular retirement board meetings to be held here, hopefully televised live and on the city website. >> supervisor avalos. oh, i'm sorry, my apologies. supervisor campos. >> thank you. i wanted to, first of all, thank the department for the information. i do have a question. is there a capital plan for this agency, for this department? >> we don't have a capital plan. >> and i understand that. i think whenever we have an issue, we try to be in committee. i know it's hard sometimes to

come because of scheduling. i do think supervisor kim raises a very important point and i don't know that it's a good idea for any department not to have a capital plan and to understand where the space needs of our given agency fit relative to other agencies. i do think that we need to, you know, be more strategic and we also need to make sure that we're not working in silos. and, so, i will be joining supervisor kim in the vote today. i do want to note that i think -- i want to thank supervisor wiener for raising the issue of divesting -- divestment in russia, but i do think that -- and i personally think there should be no investment whatsoever. but i think if any member of the public, which i think it would be many members of the public that would be interested

in that issue, they wouldn't otherwise know we're talking about that given how this agenda item is noticed. so, i think that we need to have a separate item specifically putting on the agenda that issue. otherwise i think we might create some brown act issues here. thank you. >> supervisor avalos, to clarify my response -- campos, excuse me. to clarify my original answer to your question, we did not, because of the dollar value of our capital plan, we are not required to submit it to the city and that's what i meant is we he don't submit one directly to the city because we don't have a capital expenditure large enough to bring forward. >> maybe if you aggregate all of the agencies and departments that not meet that threshold maybe together combine, they do. and, so, i think that's something to think about. >> supervisor avalos.

>> i will be supporting the item and i do appreciate retirement board coming back with an alternative plan using much less floor space. that can save us some money. i didn't get a chance to go visit, but i have been there before and i saw the conditions there before. i think when you do expand it will be important to provide that service. i just want to touch upon televising retirement board meeting. i think here at city hall would be the most cost-effective way of doing it and as a charter commission, the commission would have priority as well. that's the word from [speaker not understood] who works here in our building. hopefully that can be done starting next fiscal year. i think given the great interest we've shown here at the board, [speaker not understood] will be a good place for the retirement board to show its transparency and decision making in full public. thank you. >> supervisor, i appreciate your office's efforts like i

said, approached before and it might be considered we have priority over other types of commission. [speaker not understood] we look forward to having a space for our retirement committee meetings here. thank you. >> supervisor breed. >> thank you. i just wanted to clarity. in the resolution it said that you were increasing the number of people that you were serving by 38% and i was wondering has the staff increased? and in what time period have they increased in terms of the space? >> i don't have the numbers right in front of me, supervisor. but when we moved there it was with i think 199 and we had roughly 61 employees . and i think the last budget we were at 97. so, we have increased staff ~. i will say in one year it's been a relatively normal growth of staff except in the year '08 and '9. there was a decision made by --

at the time the department of technology dtis that they were no longer going to support a six-person development team under their budget and that they transferred those six fteses to our budget because they were critical to the development and support of the application of support we were using and increased investment staff by 4 based on a consultant's advice to change the structure [speaker not understood]. other than that one year there hasn't been growth of employees more than in the nature of 2 to 3 per year. there's been years where we've decreased the ftes, but there ha been growth of a seth also. >> expectation based on more than doubling square footage, is that also possibly growth in staff over the years? >> the retirement board currently, supervisor, is considering a change in focus. we're now over an $18 billion

fund. when we moved into the space in 1999 we were at 10 or 11 billion. with the complexity and diversity and the amount of money we're now investing, the retirement board is considering a significant increase in investment professional staff. and what we presented to the budget analyst and also to the budget committee it was west virginia a proposal to increase the investment staff by 5 and those folks by nature of the work that they do need not cubicles, but private offices to speak. so, this space will help us accommodate, again, what we foresee as the growth in a certain, you know, investment side of the house. there are no plans to do any kind of dramatic increases on the operational side of the house as we presented to the budget committee. >> okay, thank you. >> one more now, supervisor wiener. >> thank you. phil, given the space and

staffing and resource constraints or capacity of the retirement system, is it your policy not to respond to inquiries from the board of supervisors unless your board directs you to? >> supervisor wiener, i believe we communicated with your staff. i will have to check this in. that we had forwarded your second letter on to the retirement board and the board has not taken an official action to tell us, respond back to supervisor wiener, that we're not going to consider it, but they haven't set forward and said they would request this be placed on the calendar and direct staff to prepare an analysis of your request. >> [speaker not understood] unless and until something happens? >> i believe we communicated to your staff the process of any board member would need to request that this be calendared for us, staff, to be able to initiate the analysis required to calendar it for board consideration. >> okay. well, i think we'll just call a

hearing on the subject to take it out of the full board. we'll hold a hearing on that, including the process of responding to inquiries from members of the board of supervisors. >> colleagues, any further discussion or questions? okay, i think we're going to need a roll call vote. madam clerk. >> on item 14? supervisor yee? yee aye. supervisor avalos? avalos aye. supervisor breed? breed no. supervisor campos? campos no. supervisor chiu? chiu no. supervisor cohen? cohen aye. supervisor farrell? farrell aye. supervisor kim? kim no. supervisor mar? mar aye. supervisor tang? tang aye. supervisor wiener? wiener aye. there are 7 ayes, 4 no's. >> this resolution is adopted. [gavel]

>> colleague, with we call item 26. >> item 26 was considered by the government and audit oversight committee at a regular meeting on february, thursday 27th, and forwarded to a board as a committee report. it is a motion to set the 2014 budget plan for the legislative analyst. >> colleagues, can we take a roll call vote? >> yee aye. avalos aye. supervisor breed? breed aye. supervisor campos? campos aye. supervisor chiu? chiu aye. supervisor cohen? cohen aye. supervisor farrell? farrell aye. supervisor kim? kim aye. supervisor mar? mar aye. supervisor tang? tang aye. supervisor wiener? wiener aye. there are 11 ayes. >> this motion is approved. [gavel] >> and madam clerk, can we call item 27? >> item 27 was considered by the land use and economic development committee at a regular meeting on monday,

march 3rd, and forwarded to the board as a committee report. it's an ordinance to amend the environment code to restrict the sale or distribution on city property of drinking water and plastic bottles of 21 ounces or less, set city policy to increase the availability of drinking water in public areas and buy the use of city funds to purchase bottled water and making requisite findings. >> president chiu. >> thank you, mr. chair. colleagues, i very much want to thank you for your consideration of this item as well as members of the community that have worked with my office for the better parts of nine months to move this forward. we all know with climate change and the importance of combating climate change that san francisco, we've been leading the way in fighting for our environment and this is why i ask you to support this legislation, to reduce and discourage the use of single use single serving plastic water bottles in san francisco. the ordinance we have in front of us really does three things. it helps to restrict the sale or distribution of bottled

water on city property. it sets city policy to increase the availability of drinking water in public areas. and it generally bar the use of city funds to purchase bottled water. ~ bars folk who have asked why we are moving forward with this legislation ~ and i want it remind people that it was not long ago that our world was not addicted to plastic water bottles. it wasn't until the 1990s that the now $60 billion plastic bottle water industry experienced an enormous growth based on massive marketing and distribution campaigns. and before that for centuries, everyone managed to stay hydrated. in 1976 the average american drank 1.6 gallons of water a year. 30 years later that number increase today an average of 28 gallons per person. today americans buy more than half a billion bottles of water every week, which is enough to circle the globe twice, and americans drink more bottled water than any other nation.

in san francisco, [speaker not understood] alone collects 10 to 15 million single use plastic water bottles a year and this does president include bottles that go to distribution center and landfills. [speaker not understood] water bottles from san francisco and recycling stream in a land fill on a regular basis. it take a thousand years for a plastic water bottle to biodegrade. we know there are incredible enormous environmental costs of plastic water bottles. it takes 2000 times more energy to manufacture, transport, distribute, and discard and recycle plastic water bottles as it does to access tap water. i have in froth of me, colleague, really the two choices that we have. this is your typical plastic water bottle. the reason it is filled with about a quarter of it with oil is this is the amount of oil that it typically takes to make this bottle to manufacture t to transport it typically hundreds if not thousands of miles around the globe, to distribute it, and to discard or recycle

it. in contrast, people could just take a refillable water bottle and put it under a tap and fill it up with hetch hetchy water. in san francisco we're incredibly fortunate to have access to healthy hetch hetchy water. this is water that costs less than a third of a penny per gam on versus 1 to $4 per gallon in the single serving plastic water bottle. more importantly or just as importantly, the quality of this water is tested over 100,000 times a year with some of the highest quality tap water in the country. in fact today a few hours ago we had a taste test for folks to try to distinguish between hetch hetchy water and water that comes from plastic water bottles and there was no discernible difference. in recent years we've had city agencies who have partnered with the board of supervisors on a of efforts to partner with hetch hetchy water. we want to thank our legislation to require new buildings to install bottle filling stations. the legislation we have in froth of us today is another

first in the country's step in this area. whereas places like concord, massachusetts, 14 national parks and many universities across the country have instituted outright plastic water bottle bans, this is legislation that takes a much more targeted approach to reducing plastic water bottle waste produced on city property and in our city facilities. i want to take a moment and thank all of the folks who have worked with my office over the past nine months to really move this forward starting with the department of the environment, with the rec and park department, the mta, the puc, the department of public health, the port, and the real estate department. i also want to thank the think outside the bottle national campaign, the corporate accountability international organization who has for the better part of 10 years been advocating to this issue. i also want to thank the many small business advocates, event producers, off the grid large event organizers and management of large venueses for their work with my office on this, as well as s.f. travel.

we've had a lot of environmental organizationses from the sierra club to the surf riders foundation to the pacific institute who have worked with us on this legislation. want to also thank the city attorney's office, dave [speaker not understood] who initially gave me the idea to start thinking about this issue. and i want to conclude thanking my aide catherine [speaker not understood] who has worked hard to pull this together. colleagues, i hope you will join in moving san francisco forward as the first city in the country to phase out plastic water bottles on our public property and ask for your support. >> supervisor mar. >> thank you. i'd just like to first thank david chiu for his leadership, and also point out one thing that's really important. many of you may have received in the mail a mailer from the american beverage association yesterday. i think it went out to every single voter. and i would just say that the main opponents of this

groundbreaking historic piece of legislation is the american beverage association and people would ask, why is that? if you look at corporate accountability international's website, stop corporate abuse.org, they have great information about how coca cola owns dasani and i think it's about 5.8 billion liters of water globally and 253 liter in the u.s. [speaker not understood] and nestle, [speaker not understood], owns another pure life, the ridiculously named pure life purified water. and i'll just say that i took the corporate accountability department of the environment public utilities commission tap water challenge like president chiu did and i am very pleased to say that i won because i was able to taste the best water, which is our hetch hetchy tap water. i could taste some after taste

from the dasani and the other -- the third one. i'll just say i'm very proud our water in san francisco is the cleanest and that i'm hoping that from the think outside of the bottle campaign that's being led by environmental groups, it's not just corporate accountability international, but it's also the sierra club, our own department of the environment commissioners and staff and others that are moving us towards being a more sustainable city, towards our zero waste goals and really challenging as president chiu stated so eloquently today, san francisco and the u.s.'s addiction to plastic water bottles. so, i'm proud to support ask coauthor this legislation. i did also want to say i think a next step is the golden gate national recreation area and national park. and also in san francisco, working with the public utilities commission like president chiu and i have been to expand the number of drink tap stations and access to water, especially in lower income communities, we need to take the profit away from the american beverage association

as they try to mislead the public in our mailboxes and in campaigns that oppose historic measures like this. so, i'm very proud to support this and i applaud the environmental groups and president chiu for moving this forward today. i urge your support as well. >> supervisor yee. >> thank you. i want to thank the supervisor chiu and mar for bringing this ~ to our attention. when i first saw the initial writing on this, i was interested but wasn't enthusiastic. but because of all the concerns that people have raised for the author to address these concerns and amend the legislation, i am very enthusiastic about this. i tell people, i mean, one of the reasons people want to move to san francisco is because of our water. so, because of that i will be supportive of this legislation. >> supervisor breed. >> yes, thank you. i just had a couple of questions.

i think they're directed at supervisor chiu. so, what are the consequences for those folks who maybe i guess break the law in terms of bringing or distributing or selling bottled water on city property without, i guess, appropriate permission? >> so, let me first make it clear what this legislation does. if there are city properties where there is access to water, by october of this year we're saying that if you are a vendor or you're using that property, you can't sell single use plastic water bottle on those properties. if it turns out a facility doesn't have easy access to water, those events or those places you get actually three more years before you need to come into compliance with this. on top of that, depending on specific venue, for example food truck or if you're a nonprofit organization holding a massive event of over a

quarter million people, or in the moscone center, there are certain venueses where we know implementing this would be challenging. we add a little bit more time to that. so, the idea of this is to provide a renabv period of time for people to come into compliance with this. if it turns out that there is someone who knowingly violates the provisions of this ordinance as we have done with other legislation around plastic bags and styrofoam bans, we do have -- we do have some fees or penalties for that for the first violation it's up to $500. for a second violation within a 12-period month, it's $750. again, to let folks know we do take this seriously. it is important for us to do. we've had similar penalties in other kinds of legislation that we've had, and we just need that to put the signal out this is important. but by and large, we do expect and hope as has happened with the enforcement of our plastic bag ban as well as with

styrofoam containers that people understand this and move forward toward really helping us with the environment. >> and who does the enforcement? >> it would be the department of the environment. and as you probably know -- >> the same with the plastic bag ban. >> correct. and as you know, the department of the environment has been challenged in the past in being able to enforce. the fact of the matter is we don't have people that are patrolling on a regular basis and really being the environmental enforcers as you might think. but simply by having these laws on the books, it changes people's behavior. and many of the event producers and the vendors that we have spoken about, they had already been thinking about how to phase out plastic water bottles and this really helps to nudge that along. >> and i just want to say, i mean, i know it's not probably taken into consideration are maybe the for city-owned can cultural facilities that have limited access to water. for example, the african-american art can culture complex only has one water fountain on the first

floor and it has three floors and they don't have the resources to fund raise in order to put adequate water access throughout the building. and, so, because this is not necessarily clearly defined, i'm okay with that. and because i don't truly believe that there will be significant penalties to organizations like that, okay with moving forward with the organization. ~ i'm okay if we're going to talk about in the future enforcement or additional resources to the department of environment for enforcement, i'm going to be concerned with that because unless we're doing what we need to do as a city to make sure that we provide those services and we clearly define what that actually means, then i want us to be very careful about how, you know, we continue to regulate these very -- various organizationses throughout the city, especially nonprofits

with limited access to resources. and secondly, with these buildings that aren't even taken care of completely as a city, so, i just wanted to put that out there and i will be supporting this today and keeping a watchful eye for changes in the future that may impact these particular entities. so, thank you. >> president chiu? >> and if i could just respond to a couple of those points which are very well raised and i very much appreciate your support of this legislation. first, a large thrust of this legislation is to require city agency to do an inventory of our public properties to figure out where we need to do a better job of providing more access to our hetch hetchy system. and, so, that is part of what is required in this legislation for city agencies to look at all of our properties, both outdoor properties as well as indoor properties to determine this. there are also some waivers in this legislation that would allow an event sponsor or others, if it turns out that

strict application of this law would not be feasible, if there would be undue hardship or practical difficulties, or if there would be public health safety and welfare concerns, city departments would be allow today grant waivers. the situations you're talking about could be entirely possible for a waiver to happen if you've got large events at that facility and without access to water. the last thing i will say is the experience of our plastic bag ban was that without any enforcement at all, the percentage of plastic bags -- the change in behavior was documented at about an 80% rate. so, simply having laws on the books and doing public awareness and public education campaigns i think could dramatically cut down the waste that comes from these types of plastics. and then the last thing i'll just mention is there's nothing in this legislation that requires -- this legislation would still allow the private sale of plastic water bottles so you could go to any corner

store, you could go to a safeway, you could go to a drugstore, a walgreens and get as many plastic water bottles as you want. we're trying to take the next step as a city on our property, let's take the next step as has been done on 14 national parks, many college campuses he across the country. let's see if we can lead the way on public property and folks under this is doable then we can look at next steps. >> and i appreciate that, supervisor chiu. i think this is great legislation. i think san francisco always leads the way. but i also had in mind like, for example, the big events that happen, you know, in our community, arbor day will be at the [speaker not understood] community center examine there will be a bunch of people there cleaning up and we'll be passing out water bottles and it's city property. there are events that happen at these organizations where there were basketball tournaments. they're going to be selling bottled water as a fund-raiser. i'm not suggesting that we shouldn't move forward on this,

but i would hate to see these entities get penalized for -- i mean, and they have places where they don't necessarily have access to water. so, i'm really happy about the work that's going into looking at these facilities. i will tell you that puc has actually been doing that. a couple years ago they visited some of our facilities to determine how they could bring access to water fountains to those locations. and, so, in some instances we're already doing the work, but i'm very happy to see it defined, happy to see it defined as it relates to events in the legislation so i really appreciate your effort in trying to make this work and put this on the book. just another note about the plastic bag ban. since the money doesn't necessarily come to the city and it actually goes to the entity that's selling the bag, there's more of an incentive for them to actually charge the

10 cents. so, next steps could be something along that lines for us to help with this particular issue, but i think this is a great step and really appreciate your efforts and the fact that you listened to the community and made appropriate changes to address those issues and concerns. thank you. >> thank you. >> supervisor mar. >> yeah, i know president chiu and others acknowledged forward looking organizations like the california academy of sciences, and even the organizer at the outside lands concert that are in golden gate park in august, another planned entertainment for really showing leadership in supporting policies like this, but also showing that it can be done. i also wanted to say that not only with president chiu and [speaker not understood] leadership from their office, i wanted to say that world water day is coming up again. and three years ago i think there was an effort to show a great little film that helped to educate me and change the way i looked at plastic water bottles and my