>> good afternoon ladies and gentlemen.

and welcome to the march 24th, 2014 meeting of the city and county of san francisco's small business commission. the meeting is called to order at 2:06 p.m. we'll conduct a roll call. >> commissioner adams? >> here. >> commissioner dooley? >> here. >> commissioner dwight? >> here. >> commissioner yee riley? >> here. >> commissioner white? >> we have one commissioner absent, commissioner ortiz-cartagena, bringing us to item 2 general public comment, public comment pore this item and all other public comment periods in the meeting is is will limited to 3 minutes perspeaker unless otherwise established by the presiding officer of the meeting. completion of a speaker card while optional will help ensure proper spelling of speaker's names in the meeting. please deliver the speaker cards to the commission secretary before approaching the lectern. >> any members of the public who wish to comment on any item not on today's agenda? seeing none, public comment is closed. next item, please.

>> item 3 approval of the february 24, 2014 regular meeting minutes. this is an action item. >> move to approve. >> second. >> all in favor? >> aye. >> next item. >> item 3 passs with 5 votes in favor, none opposed. item 4 approval of the march 5 2014 special meeting annual retreat minutes this. is an action item. >> thank you for getting these done. >> move to approve. >> second. >> all in favor? >> aye. >> item passes 5 votes in favor, none opposed. item 5, discussion and possible action to make recommendations to the board of supervisors on file no. 140122, planning and building codes, fee waiver program, small business month, may, 2014. this is a discussion and possible action item and we have with us ashley summers, legislative aide to supervisor katy tang to present the item. >> great. welcome. >> thank you very much and good afternoon, commissioners. so this will be our third year doing this program.

the small business month for permitted issues in may for awning replacements and pedestrian-level lighting and this is in recognition of small business month and to support businesses to improve their facade. in 2012 ten businesssapplied for the fee waiver and four businesss applied for signage. in 201,11 businesssapplied and we're encouraged by the steady numbers and with enough outreach we'll hope even more take advantage of the opportunity. to spread the word of the upcoming fee waiver our notice has informed the board of supervisors offices and coordinated with agencies. additionally we have translate on the other hand materials into three languages, english, spanish and chinese and our office personally will do

merchant works to reach out to businesses that could take advantage of this opportunity, particularly giving them enough advance notice to prepare for do this in may. the planning department is also recommending that the ordinance be changed to a permanent fee favor for small business month and so neuter we'll not need to pass annual legislation and hoping that this commission will be supportive change and the building inspection department was supportive that as well. last week we presented before the building inspection commission and they supported it unanimously and we ask for your support this year. >> thank you. any commissioner comments? commissioner yee riley? >> i know we have approved this three, four years now and do you have any information as far as how many merchants or businesses apply for this waiver in the past? >> this is the third year, so we have done it successfully two years and the numbers are pretty steady, 10 in the first year, 2012 and 11 last year.

in past we have kind of been catching and passing it a little bit late and now we hope we have a whole month to do outreach, that people have enough time to plan and the more the word gets out, people from last year remember it's happening and hopefully will do it this year as well. >> great, commissioner dwight? >> do you have to have your drawings done before you apply? >> i can find out for you. >> thank you. i believe it's "intent." that is a great program. any other commissioner comments? this is great and i'm glad that supervisor tang is starting this early last year, because the last couple of years we ever done it in april. >> right. >> i do know that the way small businesses are under attack right now, any little

fee waiver, anything helps. and it helps tremendously. so i really appreciate that you guys are bringing this forward and doing it early this year. i'm very happy that we're going to make this a permanent thing for the month of may; right? >> so we'll need to pass separate legislation amending the planning code and building code to do that. this will still be -- this will be for this year and we'll have to pursue something else to do a permanent fee waiver. >> so you don't have come every year and ask for it? >> right, just one more time. >> any other commissioner comments? >> you mentioned 10 or 11 in the past two years. the whole city? >> the whole city. so i think because still promoting the program and getting the word out there and not doing it in time to get people the time to plan. because you can't just do it all within a couple of weeks. you have to plan it in advance and apply. >> how many more businesss will take advantage of it --

>> yes. >> commissioner white? >> do you have anything from the office as far as a flierer to go out to merchant the associations? >> yes, the department's responsibilities around each permit and fee schedule from dbi and planning and that is all translated into chinese and spanish and i can send that over as well. >> perfect. >> any other comments? let's open it up to public comment. do we have any members of the public to make a comment on item no. 5? seeing none, public comment is closed. commissioners? >> i move we approve the fee waiver as presented. >> i second. >> you want to do a roll call? >> commissioner adams? >> yes. >> commissioner dooley? >> yes. >> commissioner dwight? >> yes. >> commissioner yee riley? >> yes. >> commissioner white?

>> yes. >> the item passes five votes in favor, none opposed. >> commissioners, i just want to make sure that clear in the motion that you just took that we also are able to indicate your support to make this permanent? >> yes. >> okay. we're going to switch items 7 and 6 for the moment. they are both with mta, but i have had a request to move item 6 to 7 and item 7 to 6. so christian. >> take us to item no. 7, presentation on the san francisco municipal transportation agency's draft 2015-2019 capital improvement plans or cip. we have a staff presentation from craig raphael, sfmta transportation planner. >> good afternoon commissioners. so we can only

operate one at a time. whichever one you prefer. good afternoon, commissioners, my name is craig raphael and i work in the capital finance section of the sfmta and i'm here with ariel mcginnis and we're here to present on our proposal for our fiscal year 2015-2019 capital improvement program. so today we're going to be giving an overview of what exactly our cip is, talking about what we're currently proposed for fiscal year 2015-2019, essentially beginning in july of this year to june 30th of 2018. talking about what the impacts and opportunities are for small businesses in the small business community; which is why we are here. we want to hear your input and then we'll have times for questions and feedback.

as you are aware, the sfmta operates a variety of multi-modal transportation services in the city and county of san francisco. on this slide we have a list of some examples of our capital asset portfolio. if you get around the city, you essentially -- you are either using or in some way using a transportation service that we provide. and as a result of the diversity of the different types of services that we have, it means that we have a wide variety of infrastructure that we need to maintain. so the purpose of our cip is to develop a fiscally-constrained 5-year project for the transportation system and essentially what we do is we look at all of the various revenue sources:we project that we're going to have over the next five years and then we

develop a strategic investment for how we would prioritize each of the projects that we plan to build. so essentially the cip is a great implementation tool for our strategic plan and the various other plans and strategies that we as a city are pursuing. it gives a realistic view in terms of what we believe we we able to fund, so it's preventing funding from being a barrier to project delivery and allows us to create realistic expectations and to build credibility with our crediting agencies our outside funders. within the cip we also try to maintain a 10% capital fund reserve, that allows us to be more flexible within our project delivery. so really the reason that we are here today is that we understand

that the investments of the mta have a big impact on the small business community. and we want to work towards being more responsive to those concerns. building off of a lot of great dialogue that has taken place over the last three months with our agency. after this presentation will you hear a presentation from deanna desedas about the evolution of our public outreach strategy and the various steps that we are taking to better engage our stakeholders, including this group. so one really important tool in terms of public outreach is our cip. and that it presents all of the capital projects that we are planning to build over the next five years. and so it gives the business community and other stakeholders advance notice and ways in which it's kind of like a head's up, in ways in which they can become more involved in the process. then as each of these major

projects move forward, there will be more specific outreach strategy ies around those projects, but the cip is kind of overview of the universe of what we're planning to build over the next five years. this slideshows in graphic form what i was talking about. the cip takes the policy priorities that we have as an agency, our five year strategic plan, our 20-year capital plan and the various strategies that we have issued for different modes. and translates those based on the available funding sources that we project we'll have, including sales tax and any competitive grants -- competitive grant funding that we think we might be able to get and translates that into a five-year program of projects that we anticipate building.

there are three kind of main focus areas for our five-year cip. the first is to maintain and build upon a $250 million per year state of good repair investment. essentially that is keeping all of our infrastructure that we operate in good working order. one of the main things that we're very proud of in our proposed cip is that over the next five years we'll be replacing our entire rubber-tire fleet. >> are you in the middle of that right now? i didn't mean to interrupt. because you see new buses out there everyday. >> we have a couple of new batches of buses coming in and we're currently working -- which is the next one? >> there is a next set of buses coming in right now and we replace them as they reach the end of their useful life,

as they hit 12 years and you will see rolling replacements. >> i like the new buses. they look sleek. >> exactly, they are all hybrid electric buses as well? >> oh, good. >> and have enhanced ada qualities as well. >> oh, good. sorry about that. >> no problem. another thing we're work on is replacing more frequently is our traffic signals, some of which are approaching 100 years of age. so what we're trying to do is get that down to a smaller, less lengthy replacement cycle. another major category that we're working on is funding for safe and complete streets. you have probably heard in the news about some recent injuries and fatalities in the transportation system in terms of people walking and biking and we're very serious about addressing those concerns and making the city a very safe place for people to walk and bike. we are anticipating increasing the funding levels in those

categories in our next program, which i will talk about in a couple of slides. another major focus area in the five-year cip is funding for critical travel time and reliability projects. these are projects that are a lost which are coming out of transit effectiveness project, which is a series of targeted improvements to specific muni routes, which aim to make travel on muni faster and more reliable. so this is our current proposal. we're estimating approximately $ 3.2 billion in revenue sources over the next five years. it's split at moment between local and federal sources, with a little bit of state funding in there as well. we have kind of divided it into these four categories: central subway, we have at the top as a stand-alone project

because it's a one-time large capital project. on the bottom we have the state of good repair category, which is maintaining our fleet, things like our overhead wires and tracks for light rail vehicles and our traffic signals, kind of what we were talking about earlier. the transit optimization and expansion category is that other bucket of the travel time reliabilities improvements and the streets, making improvements for people riding bicycles and walking. so this shows in greater detail the increases in these investments that we are projecting between our last cip, which we developed two years ago in fiscal year 2013 to the current cip. and you can see that there is pretty significant increases in each of the three bottom categories that i just alluded to.

i want to note that a lot of the increase is due to projected funding from the mayor's transportation task force initiatives; which is currently under consideration for the november ballot. there are two revenue measures, a general obligation bond and an increase in the vehicle license fee. we're not going to talk a lot about the transportation task force forward. i believe that members of the task force will be presenting at your next meeting, but we wanted to point out we have projected about $600 million in revenue coming from those sources, which is really critical revenue for us to make a lot of the capital improvements to make the system faster, safer and more reliable. >> i just wanted to add one thing. when you think about the revenue sources that make up our capital improvement program, most of the them are

restrictive for example with our buses we get money for replacing the bus when it reaches the end -- [ inaudible ] [ inaudible ] >> overarching strategies that we used to develop the cip. in the past we might have a project that would cost $100 million and we would give that full $100 million to that project, even though it may not

be entering construction for two or three years. now what we do, we fund projects to phase. so it allows us to use our resources much more effectively. another thing we're working on doing is being more accountable in our delivery. we have a suite of software systems that are going to give much greater availability to project managers in terms of monitoring their project's actual costs and that suite of software is something that we are funding in next cycle, as well as implementing different types of internal review processs to make us more accountable in our delivery. we're also continuing to work with our partners over at dpw in order to ensure that we are capturing opportunities to combine projects. for example, if dpw is going to pave a street, we then have a program called "follow the paving," where we look at to see if

there -- we would ask adding things, like pedestrian and bicycle improvements, along with that paving project in order to be more efficient. and finally, we are making a concerted effort to improve our public outreach and deanna will be talking specifically about that strategy. so just to give you a specific example of what will be included once our program is finalized. this is a sample from our bicycle program, which is a chart showing each of the projects that we are proposed and color-coded by phase in terms of when we anticipate delivering those specific improvements. so this is just a sample for now. we have actually published our book, you will have by capital

program these specific projects and a schedule of when we are anticipating that they will be completed. so it can be a really great planning tool or a way for you to raise concerns about specific projects. so over the next month, we are going to be finalizing our capital improvement program. we will be presenting it to our board of directors over the next few weeks. we are really here to continue the dialogue that has been accelerating between our agency and the commission in terms of how to really get you more involved and be a better partner. we have also recently brought a local government affairs manager on board, who will serve as a liaison which this group in the coming weeks and months. dillon young. and of course, always, 311 is

also a tool for any citizen, who wants to give feedback on specific projects. that is another way to make sure that specific concerns are raised to the agency. so thank you very much. we are happy to answer any questions. >> i just wanted to add something quickly. so craig showed you the sample of the gantt chart and we have maps as well so you have a visual representation of where these projects occur. we understand that titles don't necessarily give all the information that you need to know about which streets and intersections will be impacted and that is an improvement from the cip two years ago. >> great. any commissioner questions or comments?

>> your presentation, will you be forwarding it to us? it was hard to read. >> sorry about it. we'll be posting it on the website and i will send christian the link once it's live. >> thank you. >> let's take public comment on item no. 7. any members of the public wishing to make a comment on the sfmta draft cip? seeing none, public comment is closed. there is no action item. any other comments? >> through the president, i have one question >> okay. >> so any of the capital improvement projects, especially in our merchant corridor areas that might involve digging up the streets or revisions, will you have a place on the website that sort of says, you know, coming in 2014, these areas? just so that merchant groups have a place to go and refer back to or business organizations?

>> yes. we will be developing a tool on our website, for larger projects, i believe -- if it's a large project it will have a specific website devoted to that project, but we'll also be developing a tool for people to leave comments on specific projects. >> i know that the castro street widening we have one of those and it started last week and it's already being used for comments back and forth and it's actually working good. commissioner dooley? >> i wanted to say i really appreciate saying working on the outreach. i am from the north beach neighborhood and there were a lot of problems just in terms of the merchants and the neighbors understanding the scope of projects. so i think this will help alleviate that problem in the future.

>> any other comments? seeing none, thank you very much. >> thank you very much. >> thank you for having us. >> let's switch to then item no. 6. >> item 6 presentation on the san francisco municipal transportation agency's "public outreach and engagement strategy" also known as poets. we have a staff presentation by deanna desedas and this is a discussion and possible action item. >> welcome. >> good afternoon, commissioners. >> do you need help with our powerpoint? >> no, i think it's okay -- i'll put it into "slide" mode here. oh, he has a different one in here. i'm sorry, christian. thank you. well, why we're waiting for, that i just want

to do a acknowledgment for deanna, who we worked with small business week who coordinates all the advertisement on sfmta. >> thank you very much for that. >> we absolutely love. it every year it gets better and better. thank you for all regina's support as well. i'm deanna desedas, the marketing manager at the san francisco municipal transportation agency and today what i would like to do is give you an overview of what we like to call "poets." it's our public outreach and engagement strategy. it's the agency's approach to take a more -- to take a more standardized approach to how we conduct our out reach and engagement. i should tell you that currently the planning department has launched poets. they just launch. ed it, their public outreach and engagement

strategy and the puc and the port is actually looking to do the same. i will meet with the port to show them our strategy and the methodology that we applied and at the approach that we are taking. this is really exciting for me, because all of a sudden, i see agencies taking a coordinated effort and it doesn't matter whoever, we're all on the same page. it makes for a much more happier stakeholder or customer. this is just an overview for you where we are in the strategy. i am the lead, charged with launching the strategy. so i would be the person you would be looking for if you have any questions after this presentation. just to take a quick snapshot, the agency as craig mentioned earlier, oversees anything to do with ground transportation. it's not just the capitol

construction project that we here about, but it's many things. it's taxis parking and carshare, a lot of things that the agency oversees. the agenda that i'm going to cover with you today briefly first, i will talk about the current situation. what is the current situation with outreach today? next i will show you the five-step approach that we have taken in developing our public outreach and engagement strategy. i think it's important to show you the methodology that we applied because i'm a firm believer from research from the recommendations. and then we'll go into how we actually scope a project out for the level of outreach that is required? and also review the public outreach and engage objectives that we have arrived the. then i will wrap up showing you an example and i do say "example" of what i consider to be public notification standards. what this really come downs to what is the minimum for any project? so we're all on the same page and

where we're headed and what next steps are in the process? i love this slide because i think it says it all. all of the researchinging, all of the people we spoke to and interviewed internally and external, smack dab in the middle is frustration. stakeholder frustration. so it's no surprise that the current effort in outreach is frustratinged. these are the four key points that rose to the surface of all the complaints that we received. the first one is there are hundreds of projects across the agency and they are in different areas of progress. some are beginning. some are mid-stream and some are being completed and they impact thousands of people's lives across the city. there is no real standardize adprov