>> good morning, everyone and if i may have your attention. good morning, and welcome to the thursday, april 17th, 2014 meeting of the board of supervisors, neighborhood services and safety committee, my name is david campos and i am the chair of the committee and we are joined today by the committee members and supervisor norman yee and supervisor eric mar and is excused so if we can have a motion to ex-excuse supervisor mar, and a motion by supervisor yee, without objection. and the clerk of the committee is derek evans and we want to

the following members of sfgtv for helping to cover the meeting today, mr. clerk, do we have any announcements? >> thank you, mr. chair, please be sure to silence all cell phones and electronic devices and completed speaker cards to be included in the file and should be submitted to the clerk and the items acted on upon should appear on the board of supervisors agenda unless otherwise stated. >> this is an item that is introduced by supervisor weiner and i am proud to be a co-sponsor, before i turn it over to supervisor weiner so that he can make his remarks and i will make mine after he does, i want to begin by simply thanking... >> sorry mr. chair, but we need to call the item. >> call item one. >> hearing to formally accept the recommendations of the lgbt aging task force for the board of supervisors and consist of final recommendations and include action plans for implementations of recommendation and time lines

and estimated cost and potential funding sources and additional information to implementation. >> once again, this is an item that is introduced by supervisor weiner myself and before i turn it over to supervisor weiner, i just want to make sure that i make the brief points and i am happy to make the perhaps after supervisor weiner does and i just want to thank the members of the task force for the service, and i know that it has been a lot of work, a lot of energy, and that has gone into this task force and each and every one of you has very busy schedule, so, on behalf of san francisco, the city, and as a member of the lgbt community i am just really grateful to each of you for all of the work that you put in and i especially want today to begin the meeting by recognizing to individuals who started as members of this task force who dedicated a

great deal, not only to this subject, but to the community as a whole and who are not with us any longer, and that is jazzy kol ins and stewart smith and they are here in spirit and we want to thank them for the service. and so with that i will turn it over to supervisor weiner. >> i thank you, mr. chairman and i also want to acknowledge stew and jazzy who were incredibly committed to the work of the task force and so many other issues of importance in the community and i know that they are greatly missed by all of us and they are in spirit here today. as we talk about the wonderful work of the task force, and i remember that it was almost two years ago that supervisor campos and i were aprofpd by bill and others saying that would you help that we would really start meaningful addressing this growing issue

in our community. and that is how do we make sure that we are addressing the needs of our growing lgbt senior population and supervisor campos and i immediately agreed to work on that, with bill and the others. and then supervisor alagi joined us and we sponsored the legislation that created this task force and i have to say that i have been to so impressed by the work that the task force did, people have been, and we really, i think that empaneled a very diverse set of task force members and people from a lot of different backgrounds. and different subject matter and expertise, and the different political views. and the different demographics and a very diverse task force and sometimes in san francisco,

we, you know, you wonder, with so much diversity are people going to be able to work together effectively and this task force, really, i just think worked beautifully, together and the people i think engage in very respectful and thoughtful dialogue, and i have to say that the report is incredibly impressive, and i think that it is going to be helpful for all of us, as we move forward, and we know, that we have a significant need to address the very unique needs of our lgbt senior population. and for a long time, particularly among gay men, because of the hiv aids, epidemic, we did not have as many seniors as we all wanted to have and now with the advances in terms of healthcare and people being able to live longer, we have a more and more

diverse group of lgbt seniors, and it is growing and it is going to continue to grow, and while lgbt seniors of course, share some of the same challenges and needs as all seniors, we all know that there are some very unique needs, which are spelled out quite articulately in this report. and so, one thing that i said to the task force, when it was impaneled, please, don't send us a report with, you know, 75 or 100 recommendations, so that it is not manageable and it all just sits on a shelf and nothing happens, please prioritize and boil things down and the report really does that nicely. and as i know, we have been public about it already. supervisor campos and i are already working on legislation to move forward with several of the recommendations of the task force. and i know that we spoke and we really wanted to make sure that we quickly moved two items

forward so that we may be clear that we are all very, very serious about moving these recommendations, we also know that some of the recommendations, particularly, around housing also feed into the larger housing discussions and work, happening here in city hall, on some of that is short term work and a lot of it is long term work in terms of stabilizing our housing situation. and so again, i just want to thank the task force for its work and i look forward to today's hearing and to continuing to work together afterwards. >> thank you. supervisor yee? >> thank you, share campos. and just as i realized, i'm the lake comer, in this issue. and but i wanted to say that i recognize that not only this subset of the senior population, but the entire senior population i want to see more focus on it especially when i look at my own district where we are probably going to have one of the oldest

districts, and yet, we have very few services out there and when it comes to housing, i note that the uniqueness of everybody's need and in terms and in regards to the seniors in the lgbt population and it is very unique and so i will be very glad to support legislation that supervisor weiner and supervisor campos will be forwarded. >> thank you supervisor yee. and as i noted before i am proud to join supervisor weiner today in holding this hearing. the san francisco lgbt aging policy task force and this report, truly a product of a community effort. to raise the profile of issues effecting lgbt seniors in san francisco. and i also want to acknowledge the work that former supervisor kristine and the three of us and the lgbt caucus of the board at the time that created this task force in october of 2012, the task force is final

report, aging at the golden gate, and quite frankly has far surpassed my expectations and it bring to light the critical issues that are facing san francisco's aging lgbt community. and the efforts by the task force are truly admirable, before the task force what is established, the lgbt community in san francisco, had really not made it a priority to advocate for seniors, and quite frankly, speaking about aging in the lgbt community can be a difficult thing to do. we recognize that we must make strides to provide for and protect our lgbt seniors and i am proud that because of the recommendations that are laid out by the task force, we will be introducing legislation to specifically address a number of issues. and more precisely, we will be working to immediately adopt the following recommendations around the data collection, around the cultural competency, and we are also working to

draft an lgbt long term care facility residence bill of rights. and that will begin to address the issues of discrimination in long term facilities that has been identified. and i am also in my office, beginning the discussions with housing advocates, and like others i will specifically talk about how do we draft housing policy that is specifically addresses the needs of lgbt seniors. and we are facing an affordable crisis. and within that crisis, there are specific and additional challenges that lgbt seniors face. and so, with that in mind, i would like to ask the chair of the task force bill ambrum to please come up and again, mr. chair, thank you very much, for your leadership. and you know, you have your work cut out, any time that you have a large group of lgbt community members coming

together on something as complicated as this issue. and so, a job well done. >> thank you very much, supervisors. and for those of my colleagues here, who served on the task force and came to the meetings everyone has heard me talk quite enough at this point. so i am just going to say a few brief remarks and then turn it over to the other people who wanted to speak today. first of all, our thanks on behalf of the task force, i want to thank supervisors weiner, campos, former supervisor olague and cohen was a co-sponsor and so i want to thank her too. and i also want to thank the city departments that we worked with, and who have all been incredibly supportive of our work including dos and i would like to single out sheren, and tom nolan and diana jensen for their amazing wonderful work for the task force.

and also, teresa sparks and the staff at the human rights commission, and most notably terina and snay were again, instrumental in us getting our work done. also, in the city attorney's office, sherry kaiser was great and julie has been added to our teams and we are appreciative of it as well and i would like to thank all of the members of the task force and it really was not as difficult as the introductory remarks might have suggested. and i think that maybe it was really cohesive and brought together by a sincere desire to make this situation better for seniors and for those of us who are seniors, now, or will become seniors soon. or you have been becoming seniors off in the distant future, there. and there is a reason for

everyone in our community to rally behind these ideas. and i think that the task force, proved that, it can be done. and this is data driven and we want this to be a subnative report and we appreciate that you pointed that out. they are all critical in their own way, and yes, some of them are more important than others. and in terms of the number of people, and it might effect. and or the amount of money that it might cost, but our view is

that each and every one of these recommendations is going to help a significant number of seniors and a significant way. and so with that, i would just like to thank you all for having this hearing for accepting our recommendations, and i look forward to hearing what my colleagues in the public have to say as well. thank you very much. >> great. >> thank you very much. and we also want to acknowledge a couple of people in the audience, and i know that tom nolan who has also been doing a great deal of work staffing the task forces here. and of course, we are always honored to have the executive director of the human rights commission teresa sparks and so with that i am going to read a number of speaker cards, and you each have three minutes, to speak. and so, if i call your name if you could please come up and if you don't mind lining up on your right or our left.

ray are you dofl, ashley, len jordan, and michael costa, adelman. kevin fox. >> don't be shy. >> no. definitely not shy. at this point. but i do have a few notes because my eyes are not what they used to be. good morning, my name is ray rudolf and i have been a resident of san francisco for 38 years and i have done my share of volunteer work along the way but in 2010 i joined the lbgt advisory committee to the human rights commission and i first thing that i asked to see was the 2003 report that they did on seniors. and i noticed that there are about 80 recommendations and none of them were acted upon and so, i put forth the idea of having a senior workforce.

so, the advisory committee voted on it and for two years, i did chair that committee and we put on the city wide panels and the focus at that point was about dialogue and getting the information out there and we put on the panel at the common wealth club on maximizing the voices in the political process and we put on a panel on aging, and agism and adultment and enter generational connections and out of that task force, bill ambron joined the group in the second year, and he came up with this idea for the aging policy task force. and so, we kind of pushed this forward. we met with both supervisor campos weiner and olague at the time and we moved this forward. and this became a very, very important, important thing that do in the community. but due to health reasons, i am

a long term hiv survivor and due to the fact that new land lords took over my rent controlled building where i lived for 25 years. i had to step down from the aging policy task force and i had to cut back on my work. so all of us here need to have this report. not only accepted, but really acted upon. i'm a perfect example of that. and now, i am worried about, and just about to turn 64 in a few weeks and i am worried about my housing and we just need to make this really, really happen now and not sit on the bench. so that is all that i have to say and i wanted to say that i really appreciate you can receptive to this from the beginning and helping us to move this idea forward and it has really taken form and so thank you very much and i expect good things to come out of this report. >> we all do. >> thank you, next speaker. >> and i will read a couple more names.

>> michael breskin and tommy eka and robert maskinsky. >> i am lynn jordan and i have lived in san francisco for 47 years and currently residing in supervisor yee's district. and i have spent 44 years focused on as a founding member of metropolitan community church of san francisco and sovy been participating in the full span of all of the lgbt history since 1967 and i continue to recognize the importance especially as i age of continuing to be finding ways to be active, engaged and supportive in the full spectrum of the definitions that are becoming my community, and my families of choice and many of who have lost to aids, and the inner personal relationships that i have established, my aging is increasing and it will require that i try to maintain my independence, and while i recognize my growing need for inner depent ans for the various services needed in this

task force report. for over two years, i have been a volunteer for the open houses and the caring program and i bring with me as a journey of living into the now age 70 to the life affirming and life celebrating of lgbt senior community members who are often living in their invisibility of aloneness, vonnerbility and isolation. our senior lgbt community members too often speak with a voice that is only unheard in the silence of their isolation and as the remaining circle of friends has declined or disappeared and becoming decreasingly alienated from their once familiar surroundings and being a senior community members and not only an invitation to listen but it is being opened and non-judge mental, window into what they choose to share about their life experiences what they hold close and protected and including all of the trauma and all of the physical and mental

health concerns, we needed a place of common interest, and build the connections that far off out weigh any of our differences that we might have. and we may be the caring, the intervention and the emotional support that could be the difference in the quality of life challenges and obstacles that our senior members are now confronting whether it is as limiting as climbing up the stairs and intimidating task of accessing and having transportation to healthcare providers and addressing an interruption in benefits or requiring the assistance of legal referral in a housing crisis or end of life decisions we are both a bridge and resipateer of this training. thank you. >> thank you very much. >> next speaker. >> good morning, i'm ashley mccumber and the executive director of meals of wheels on san francisco and a great opportunity to be a task force member and also a resident of the castro and i want to first

of all start off with a few thank yous. i want to thank the first two speakers and i think that it was perfect that these two people have been leading on issues and committing their time and issues are leading this discussion in the open comment and we have a lot to learn from the efforts and we need to listen to what they have to say and i want to thank the supervisors who sponsored this task force in particulari want to thank my supervisors weiner for supporting my efforts to be a part of this task force and thank you for allowing me the opportunities to serve and i want to thank bill and the rest of my task force members for really helping me be a better person in my job. and helping me to learn, every day through their knowledge, and through their efforts. and there are a couple of things that i would like to kind of reiterate that may have been said all right, i do think that it is important that we give equal weight to all of the recommendations in the task force and it is easy to pick the ones that are hot and movable right now, but they are all equally important and i particularly want to under

score the need to collect data. and data will drive policy, and data will drive how we allocate resource and we will tell us where the gaps are and also, in absolutely linked to cultural competence and humility, and we cannot collect the data if we don't know how to do it so those two things need to flow to the top and the other thing that i would encourage you to do is to move beyond the obvious solution and first of all we need to recognize and support the agencies in the field and supporting this work before anyone else thought of supporting it. but we also need to go deeper than that and make sure that the union yus place wheres we put the funding and support also happen. i think that we also need to have a sense of urgency. people like me who are stone wall are going to knock the doors down and are going to demand what we need from the service delivery system in the city but there are a lot of people still who are not comfortable with that and they are needing the services now and so i think that this is not a tomorrow issue and it is a today issue. and we need to move

particularly on more marginalized populations and i also think that i would encourage you as an out come of this task force to create a mechanism of the follow up for the recommendations and that we have active follow up on these things and frankly we hold you accountable make sure that they happen. and lastly, i would not be doing my job if i didn't tell you that we need to make sure that we are also funding basic services across the city like food, and nutrition and support services and senior centers because without those things we can't go up deeper, and to some of the issues that we recommend and so thank you for your time. >> thank you, i am going to read a couple more names, danielle and donna but any member of the public that would like to speak, come on up. next speaker? >> good morning, my name is michael costa i am a health policy analyst and an economist to the health economists and i had the pleasure of serving on the task force and i want to

thank supervisors weiner and campos and former supervisor olague for your vision in putting this together because it would not have happened unless you would have done that, i also want to thank bill in particular on the task force and i very much appreciated my colleagues but bill put this together and pulled it together in an effective way and we would not have had the report that we had without his guidance. and so, one of the things that we quickly realizes is that there are many issues facing our community and we tried to do things and stagger them a little bit and some of the recommendations that we made are what we could call the low hanging fruit and expanding access to existing services by leveraging an examining program in dos does not require much money and easily doable and could reach out to a lot of people and where it began to get more difficult is when we got into the housing issues because that is for aging lgbt is for everyone else in the

city, and the 800 pound gorilla, and i looked at what other cities have done and there are two existing lgbt houses up and running and one in philadelphia and one in los angeles and they both got up and running through a series of rather innovative and complex financing that involve private or public sector city and state money. and so i would encourage that as you think about addressing some of these housing issues, you really look widely, for funding sources. and so you really think of it as a potential public private partnership and something that the state would get involved in. and finally there is an underlying theme in all of our recommendations that it is something that all of us on the task force became aware of as we gathered data. and that is, a lot of us who are aging now, the boomer generation, and we really wanted to stay in our own homes. and as long as possible. and out of the home, that our

parents might be in now, and it is a generational thing, i think. and so, a lot of our recommendations actually attempted to begin to instead of look at how you do that, how do you allow people to be or live in the community as long as possible? and i think that is going to be an ongoing dialogue and i would encourage the board to think about a formation of a group of people, who begin to look at that issue. and how do we keep people in the community as long as possible and thank you. >> thank you very much. >> mr. costa, next speaker. >> good morning, supervisors. i'm dr. edelman a former task force member and a co-founder of the open house and the co-founder to the private practice in the city and i want to thank all of my colleagues for all of the hard work that went into the task force

recommendations, and special shout out to dos. for all of their support, and we could not have done the work that we did with the task force could not have done the work that we did without their support. i want to talk to you this morning about a crisis. that the city and the lgbt community is facing together. and it is in demencika, do not let your response to this crisis be lost in the urgent and important recommendations for housing security and affordability and other much needed services. by 2020, the total population of older adults in san francisco living with alzheimer's disease will be 26,774 older adults. and another ten,000 people will be living with some other form of dementia. using the city's 12 percent estimate of the lgbt senior population it can be extrapolated that by 2020 over

4,000 lgbt older adults over the age of 65 will be challenged by some form of als hiemer dementia. heterosexual rely on family members to secure medical information and access service and to provide support, but research has shown that elder adults that are twice as likely to be single and live along as heterosexual and less likely to have adult children that support them. they rely on family of choice for support but the families of choice are not friends similar in age who may have relocated passed away or in need of services themselves. this difficult as it is, there are chronic illnesses that a person can manage at home on their own such as asthma. the older adults with alzheimer's who are without benefits of the formal support system are vulnerable to receiving little or no care to assist them to remain in their homes, if you don't have a

place and a plan and some understanding of the disease in its progression, it is too easy to become isolated and forced from your home. it has been well documented that seniors are less likely to access long term services and discrimination keeps the seniors with depen shall in the care giverers from coming out, it is imperative that the board of supervisors address this crisis, now. and the city needs to fund an educational program, resource tools and a community awareness campaign to assist the lgbt community in meeting this crisis. and the task force recommendations are an urgent call to action. unlike the aids epidemic, we see this crisis coming, there is time. but we must act now. >> thank you, doctor, next speaker? >> thank you, for this time, i'm just going to wing it, i'm on the receiving end of these

organizations, and that are in place to help people, seniors of the lgbt community. and i have been in california in the bay area since i was about three and a half weeks old. and i have moved into san francisco in 1969. and at a volunteer job at let it slip that i was having a very bad living situation and someone there give me a referral to open house. and fortunately through that, it was, i have adequate housing. and i felt that after all of this time, what am i going to do, just sit in the apartment and live with my dog, and not do anything. and i was grateful that the same time that i was aggravated, because so many people need housing, and so many people have been waiting on waiting lists for years and