force is perceived by its members and how it's perceived by the public. i have masters and ph.d. training in rhetorical theory and one of the things that i'm trained to do is to help with public relations and public image issues. i think that in addition to clarifying maybe some of the ordinance, putting more stuff up on line, i think that maybe the task force would benefit from a public relations campaign of sorts. that's something i could probably help with. >> okay, thank you. >> thanks. >> let's see. next up is lee anthony hepner. >> hello. >> good afternoon. my name is lee hepner ~. thanks for the opportunity to speak before you today. i am a civil rights litigation

attorney. i'm a community organizer with the harvey milk democratic club. as an attorney much of my practice focuses on freedom of expression and in many instances my clients have benefited from use of the california public records act, use of the brown act as well. which mandates open public hearings. in my experience on the harvey milk club, i participated in public comments before the board of supervisors and various committees. i've also provided forums for public comment. i have myself admittedly grappled with occasional member complaints about incidental failure to post agenda in advance of a meeting and i'm very familiar with dealing with and addressing complaints. to put on my advocacy hat just a second, i think the importance of open government is twofold. on the one hand citizens have more trust in the government when they know what that government is doing.

it is as simple as knowing how many potholes local government fill in a year. i believe truly showing in the past harvard business school study, fundamental trust happens when people see efforts made by government entities. the other element of openness in government that i think is very important is enabling citizen access to government. it's a fundamental tenet of democracy, creating a forum for citizens to have their voices heard, encouraging people to be more involved in their communities and empower citizens to better their own spheres of influence. in both instances, local government benefits and the people of san francisco benefit. and i think the task force should be a win/win on all levels. advocacy and ideology aside, the challenge becomes how do we achieve the basic goals of the task force and i think the answer lies in, one, making sure that procedure is

efficient. and on the other hand, making sure the communication is effective. on the note of efficient procedure, i think the first thing to do is make sure that the complaint being made is dignified. as an attorney, i have a lot of experience cutting through a lot of superfluous fact and getting merits of a claim. i think that could be an asset in this context. and at targeting the complaint, needs to be addressed and that lead me to the second portion of the effective procedure, which is making it easier for respondents to respond to the complaint. it should be easy for the respondent to resolve the problem at hand and i think that reducing challenges for respondents will be a fundamental improvement in the next term of the sunshine ordinance task force. if it means the bylaws, i think that's a conversation i would like to be a part of.

i would be an asset to the rules committee and that's something that i would like to continue with. on the other hand, good effective communication is another skill that i hope to bring to the table. i believe i am a mediator at heart and i know very well too often poor communication gets in the way of process and bogs down otherwise simple issues and matters that need not be raised at the time. i think the possibility of mediating disputes prior to bringing them before the task force is really important and necessary. and to the extent that i can bring my skills to the table as a attorney and try and dispose of basic issues like jurisdiction prior to the task force meeting, i would like to, i would like to do so. i would also be very excited to work in conjunction with the city attorney on their analysis and, and be able to ask questions, pointing to ambiguities and analysis. lastly, and i think very importantly, i'm excited to work with the other members of

the task force, many who i've met, many who are up for reappointment. i've had a number of great conversations and i'm ready to be as productive as possible at achieving the goals of the task force while minimizing the frustration that can result from unnecessary bureaucracy. in sum, i think i bring things to the table. i think i bring a fundamental belief in open government as a means of building trust in government. i believe that i bring a pragmatic approach to analyzing and mediating complaints towards effective resolution. and i think that i bring a desire and willingness to make sure that the task force functions as effectively as possible. thank you so much for your time. i'd be happy to respond to any questions you might have. >> okay. supervisor tang? >> i think you answered my general questions about what you would like to achieve if you were appointed. so, thank you. >> thank you. >> thank you.

next person is louise fischer. >> hello, supervisors. yee and tang ~. well, i'm louise fischer. i am a current active chair of the sunshine ordinance and i've served as the vice-chair for two years. so, yeah, go ahead and hit me with all the questions at the end. i'm ready for you. [speaker not understood] with chair grant several mooedings. i know how the sausages are made, so to speak. also prepared a presentation that the chair pretty much went over most of it so i'll try to go in a different direction. i am really proud of some of the accomplishments we made on the task force. at the end of the day or more appropriately, the end of the evening or the night, our role is to get the complainants the information that they're entitled to, that they're asking for. people -- it's like a co-op. people come to us for two reasons. if people want something, these

people have to give it. or they disagree and we're there to make sure that at the end of the day that the people get the information that they're entitled to and that they ask for if there is a violation they're supposed to get that information. you know, it's interesting. my dad called me this morning and asked me two questions about the task force. one which he he thought was more important, do they pay for your parking? i [speaker not understood]. and two, they asked me, what is your purpose? and i just keep drilling that home. my key focus when i'm looking at complainants is did you get what -- did you get what you asked for? did you get what you're entitled to? if they're coming back around again to either compliance and amendments or education outreach or if they're coming back to the full task force, it's like a broken record. many people behind me can say, first question i always ask is, did you get what you asked for? did you get what we said you're supposed to have? if not, i ask the respondent, why not?

[speaker not understood] our jurisdiction is pretty narrow. it's open government. it's transparency. but did you get what you were asked for? i'm going to anticipate your first question, supervisor tang, and talk about the city attorney's role. again, it's crucial. i'm not an attorney. the ones on tv [speaker not understood], i think that role is crucial and one of the first things that this board did two years ago, we started was we reversed the rules for these [speaker not understood], the 6-vote rule. you know [speaker not understood]. it sounds good on paper. in the back of my mind, that's pretty good. but at the end -- bottom line it was a violation of city charter. to me it seemed sort of ironic that here we have the sunshine ordinance. in charge of all of these rules and yet you were violating a rule. whether i agreed with it or not, [speaker not understood], i absolutely would not violate

that charter [speaker not understood]. so, let's see. all of these thing you heard from kit. we missed several meetings, that's problems we had. we only had 9 out of 11 members. i'm not going to go through our statistics again. but i want to mention the good news that many of our complaints [speaker not understood] many of the complaints are solved by the administrator and don't even come to us in front of the task force. and if i can anticipate your next question, though are some of the things that i would like to focus on if i were to be reappointed. so, i'll go ahead and say now, the biggest issue is volume and backlog. the way the complaints come, the reason i came to this task force was to give people that don't have a voice, to give them a chance to have a voice. and [speaker not understood] at the end of the day, i want people to get what they're entitled to. and i would never, ever want to deprive anybody of the due process that they're entitled to under the task force.

however, when i look at certain complaints and just keep coming over and over, i'll back to the 35, 28, 24, we have to be more efficient with those. we've got to combine those. there is a way and we can do that to make -- we can combine complaints against the same respondent. unless they're distinctly different. we have 7 or 8 complaints against the same respondent and they're all in the same realm, bring them all in at once. let's get these done. maybe let's even have our administrator look into this a little more further in some of the successions he's made. so, i think that would make it a lot more efficient. and the other issue on that, if we've got three people giving multiple many complaints, i worry about the people that really only have one complaint and pushed all the way to the back of the line. and i'm not saying that there is any difference in anybody's complaint, but i want to get as many people through there as possible.

and if we've got 7 or 8 complaints from the same respondent that are similar, let's bunch them all up so we can get to that other person who has that complaint that he he or she needs to be heard and many of those are [speaker not understood]. planning commission, [speaker not understood] planning commission has to make decisions. i'm just pulling that out of the air because that's generally one that's time sensitive. okay, you got that. what else have i got? so, what i would like to see is for changes to the bylaws, things that we started to talk about, things that victor, our administrator helped us with. i'd like our administrator to be able to apply and enforce regulations, get much more involved in the mediation. i really think mediation should be our first solution. we really need to focus on that more. and, you know, let's look at possibly setting limits on how many times the same complaint can be heard over and over and over. again, i'm not an attorney, but i've spoken to a few attorneys

about this. that doesn't work in other courts. i'm not sure why it's happening in ours. again, i'm not -- i don't want to deprive anybody of their right to be heard, but let's get this more efficient. the ordinance itself, it's 20 years old. it would be a sophomore in college right now if it were a nephew or something. a lot has changed in 20 years. i have a cell phone because [speaker not understood]. we didn't have the -- i'm an engineer by trade so we didn't have the wide area network dsl that we have now. we have to start using the technology. get everything up, get as much online as possible. and maybe even mitigate the need for a lot of these cases to come up. something else that bothers me that we're not doing, as i mention this, we all have cell phones now -- >> please. wrap up, please. >> we all have cell phones. maybe some people come in and they sat here for four hours, let's say, okay, you're fourth,

you're fifth on the item. we're going to text you when it's your turn. maybe you can't go home but you can go to a coffee shop, you can go out in the hall, you can talk to people. that's pretty much all i've got. did i answer any questions or -- i really tried to. >> i think you did. thank you very much. next person, chris hyland. >> supervisors, thank you for your hearing today. i know how these meetings go, and i appreciate your stamina, so, i will keep this very short and sweet. i'd like to thank chair grant for her service. it was great working with her. i particularly like to thank richard nee, i'd like to thank our professor emeritus. i think he served for 12 or 14

years on this task force and he really was, along with allyson washburn, our core institutional knowledge. i'll be honest, the first term was pretty rough those first few months at the task force and many of the advocates behind us called us out on it quite rightly. they told us we need to under what we're doing. it takes awhile to get with the flow of the pageantry procedures and roberts rules of order. it's not easy. so, i think it's important to maintain a continuance of some institutional knowledge. so, i hope you will reelect some of us for reelection. and i'd certainly like to thank richard for passing all of that knowledge on to us and hopefully we can carry that torch forward in successive terms. i would like to say i was

instrumental in voicing our need at the task force to have the extra meetings. i believe it was my idea, i may have shared it with someone else, but i pushed that pretty hard about a year ago and we started to do that and it certainly helped in the backlog. another thing that's important is attendance. i believe i have good, if not the best attendance record for the last two years. and when we don't have the requisite people there, it's -- justice is not served. it's hard to get votes people need to get things to move forward. to anticipate your question about what i'd like to see different, the technology committee was somewhat dormant this term and i'd like to reinvigorate that if reelected. one of the things i'd like to do, we started a little bit to work with the administrator,

with victor, making the website a little more friendly. i'd like to have a section that has, if you like, a day in the life of the sunshine task force. a member of the public can go and see how things work. how do you put together a complaint? what should you expect, what should you present? what [speaker not understood] 5-minute presentation? what to expect from the other side, how does the city attorney play into it. other cases you can go to. we ask to have our meetings televised. [speaker not understood]. at least if you can provide a small snapshot through our website of how this would work and have a page for members of the public and also for city departments so they can see and learn from, you know, the shortcomings of other departments and maybe keep this institutional knowledge on the website and have everyone benefit from it, it would definitely help our efficiency as a body.

so, i guess my main tenet today is really institutional knowledge. keep it going, keep educated, and open up the window portal into our website to show people how to put together effective complaint and the steps they should expect and likewise the city departments to also have a kind of a primer as to what they should expect if called before us and how to present and how to -- what steps to expect next, what does their education outreach committee meet -- what different steps along the way that can make everything more efficient for everybody. so, thank you for your time. i appreciate your vote for reelection and i'd like to continue serving this great city [speaker not understood]. thank you. >> okay. >> any questions? >> great. again, just for all the reappoint ease, wanted to ask your thoughts about operating within the parameters of the sunshine task force in terms of

your role in conjunction with the city attorney and confines of operating within the city charter. >> absolutely, the city attorney was invaluable. like said before, he or she does provide us with [speaker not understood] in the cases. and he we would like to continue to have a city attorney. we would like maybe a slightly bigger budget so that they could sit with us for the last hour. usually 9 o'clock is when they're cut off. so, it's not something we can push forward. we'd certainly appreciate it. and as mentioned also, it would also be quite helpful to have them in our committees. given a choice, yes, in the full task force, if that's all we can budget [speaker not understood], if there is a -- maybe an up and coming junior attorney that could use some more exposure, we would love to have them on the committee because we have similar issues come up and we could use that guidance there as well. that would be my thoughts on that. >> okay, thank you.

>> thank you very much, supervisors. >> next person, bruce wolfe. >> good afternoon, chair yee, supervisor tang. appreciate your time. my name is bruce wolfe. i served on the sunshine ordinance task force from 2005, summer of 2005 to 2012. and over the past two years i have listened to a number of the meetings as they were recorded and made available to the public online. in all those seven years, the work that i've done has been, from what i've been told, very well done, honest, unbiased and

impeccable. my contributions for me were always honest and caring and with civic volunteers. i enjoy serving my community. i know not many people are able to do that for various reasons, but i try to make my time to contribute what i can. and those ears do speak for themselves. as you know, i'm no stranger to many hearing rooms and to offices here at city hall. and it's probably not necessary at this juncture for me to do a full introduction of myself. you do have my full resume and cv in front of you. we all care about transparency at sunshine, for it to be about truth and justice and integrity. and with your appointment and

approval, the public and staff will have the same bounds and unbiased service offered in all those previous years, including to many people who are new that are coming up and to those asking for reappointment. but as i promised you twice before, i will not mess with certain procedures that may be controversial. what i will do is if i find anomalies or questions that are not being answered or that have no answer, i will certainly address them within the proper structure within the sunshine ordinance task force. [speaker not understood]. one more review. that is probably the mistake i made a couple of years ago. it may -- the issue may not have been without merit, but maybe the approach on how it what implemented was. you have my word on this.

there are a number of areas, as you've been asking, supervisor tang, about what can be done to help streamline or make better or make more effective and the sunshine task force. one, i'd like to say regarding the city attorney, deputy city attorney that sits with the task force is that i really appreciate that they keep an ethical wall. that is really important because, frankly, like the ethics commission, the sunshine task force has that same aspect and jurisdiction to be a watchdog, to be looking at everything that happens within the city. and i do think it's important -- when i first came on the task force there were the deputy city attorney did sit on almost all the committees. all the ones like compliance

and amendments and rules and the ones that actually needed the help during those times. i do think that new appointees who are not familiar with the sunshine ordinance, that they take a certain amount of training before actually serving so that there be a period of time, that could be a number of weeks, a couple of months or what have you, but like everybody else in the city who must go through the -- kind of the exam of understanding what sunshine ordinance is, i think it's important even more for the task force members to understand what the process is and what they're there to be doing. and many time over the years i found certain appointees not being familiar enough and that learning curve being too high for them to under the legalities of what we're dealing with. some of it is common sense and many of us who are astute to that are able to make presentations that are

comprehensive enough to be understood, especially to the general public. but i think it's really important that the members themselves have a little more focused training. i think that's really important. as far as too many complaints are concerned, in my own personal experience, i found that the work that i do, we files requests all the time. i haven't had too many problems and i know for a fact that based upon some studies that were done a number of years ago that of all the sunshine requests that are made in the city, it's a very small percentage, it actually make it as complaints to the sunshine task force or that are actually made as complaints to the sunshine task force. i'm not using that as any kind of excuse. there is, you know, we all have work to do and it's a lot of time that we spend on these things. but i do think that the concept of allowing the administrator to try and expedite -- not necessarily mediate, but

expedite what they can in a complaint is important. this is something that i requested of the administrator prior to the current one when we had no administrator prior to that for a long time. there was no administrator. so, none of this was happening. so, that was really an important factor that we reinstitute that because if i'm having a simple problem i could walk in and talk to the administrator, they could pick up the phone and say, hey, so and so is here. they seem to need this or that, can you help? and it's not a big legal matter and it happens, that helps save us a lot of time. jurisdiction is always determined at the beginning of every hearing. it has to be or else we would be flanked with way too much stuff. so, and it's important because the deputy city attorney

provides ample advice as to whether each case is in writing before the meeting, whether each case is within the jurisdiction of the task force. so, we do that due diligence. every task force does do it. so, i want you to know that for sure. time factors, why do meetings take so long? i think mentioning for mr. hyland and some others about maybe altering how things work. it's hard. we're trying to accommodate the public at a time when they can show up. at the same time, staff is -- it's beyond -- the day is over for staff. so, it makes it very, very difficult. and i think this has to be some real discussion about how that should work. i don't necessarily have any real ideas except maybe to start the day out a little earlier and find out which complaints can show up earlier. that may be a way to do it. i do agree that sometimes you have to have special meetings

to take up the slack, especially if you're behind. there may be times where you can combine some cases, but i also think that having somebody to help expedite and be very active about it will probably solve a lot of those problems. the tech committee is my final comment on this. the tech committee was something that was created during my time on the task force. i what the tech guru for the task force at the time. i brought in a number of experts over the years to speak to the task force and help educate them about certain things, like meta data in pdfs, how they are scanned and whatnot. i have had a lot of ideas and served -- not served, but attended many of the committee nit meetings around getting as much of the information, public

information online as possible. that will solve -- if it's done correctly, that will solve a ton of complaints because the information that people are looking for that they may not be getting will be readily available for them without any human interaction. and that's really kind of the way it should work. so, in closing, i feel that my number of years, my experience, my level of institutional history, my understanding of parliamentary procedure and some alternatives like roberta's rules of order which helps to expand on better discussion. i think i could lend a hand. plus i'm a person with a disability. and i know there isn't an applicant today who has registered themselves as with a disability. and i know that the person that currently serves as the -- as the person with disability has

not reapplied. and i think it's really important that we -- as i testified before the mayor's disability council, that it's important that especially for people with, with abilities that require a little more attention, that we make sure that there are not vacancies and that people -- if there are people that have applied that are ready and willing to fill the spot, that we should not let other people continue to serve when they choose not to. i'm doing this because there isn't anybody and i think it's important and i have the skills and the knowledge and the understanding. and i do understand your concerns about me and my history in this, but frankly that particular one point does not overshadow all the other good work i brought and the contributions have brought to

the sunshine task force. so, i'll stop there. thank you. >> thank you. >> thank you. >> next up. looks like todd david. >> good afternoon, commissioners yee and tang. my name is todd david and i am reapplying to be on the sunshine ordinance task force. i want to start by kind of reiterating a couple things that member hyland said. i don't think there is anyone more disappointed that chair grant is not continuing on as i am. it's really been a pleasure working with chair grant and i'm really going to miss her. i think she's been really great and also -- i also want to say member nee has been an amazing guide and his institutional knowledge and memory for the task force has been just phenomenal. i can't say i'm always in agreement with him, but i find his knowledge a