tv [untitled] May 22, 2014 11:30am-12:01pm PDT
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neighborhood because i care about my community and it's nothing i do for a living. i'm asking supervisors tang and [speaker not understood] to consider that and not legislate this legislation move forward. the way it is written it is far too broad. >> thank you. next speaker, please. good morning, supervisors. henry kamilowitz, [speaker not understood] also the south of market business association. this is not an easy process to get through the different departments to get a permit issued. so, for someone today [speaker not understood] to go out and get a permit, you have to navigate through so many areas, you know, starting from planning to dpw to health to a whole mo rass to try to get a
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permit. that's why people come to dpi. they get lost in there trying to get from one place to another. so, it really -- what conceptual consultants is to be able to navigate, to get a permit quicker because they know who to go to see, what to say with their -- with the drawings, sometimes the drawings aren't correct. you have to go back and [speaker not understood], so forth. bottom line, though, bottom line, permit consult atctiontion ~ consultants are not lobbyists. they do not deal with elected officials nor appointed officials. so, i urge you to really reconsider the way the legislation is written right now. i also [speaker not understood] did not have too many meetings with stakeholders. one meeting with stakeholders, that was it. thank you. >> thank you. next speaker, please.
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good morning, supervisors. my name is peter [speaker not understood] and i'm a small property owners of san francisco. we have several hundred members that have limited english and are also quite intimidated going down to government offices. we help them get their permits. they often hire a friend or pay someone 100 or $200. i hope the new amendments, which i haven't read thoroughly, have narrowed this concern of ours. we want to definitely make sure that the process is speeded up and that bureaucracy doesn't get us all entangled in thing that delay the process. we want to help the mayor achieve his housing policy and his goals and you can't do that by laying on layers of bureaucracy. thank you. >> thank you. next speaker, please. good morning, i'm debby lerman with the san francisco
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human services network an association of about 80 health and human service nonprofits. when we first heard about this legislation we were deeply concerned about the potential chilling effect on our community-based nonprofits who engage regularly with elected and appointed official in the development of public policy through partnership and collaboration to improve our systems of care, our health care system, how we address homelessness and a broad range of other issue that affect our communities and the clients that we serve. this requirement to register as a lobbyist if you had five contacts would have had a tremendous chilling effect on that participation and i can speak from firsthand experience from many conversations with nonprofits, many of whom don't understand their rights to engage in public policy. many board of directors are averse to that participation. there are foundations that
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hesitate to fund organizations. if they were registered lobbyists, the irtion would increase scrutiny of those organizations. and that fear alone would discourage many nonprofits from participating in that very valuable public policy debate. we are engaged in the policy arena not for personal gain, but to advance our missions as leaders to provide voices for the most vulnerable populations in the city. and we are very thankful that president chiu's office has worked with us to allow for this exemption and allow that participation to continue. thank you. >> thank you. next speaker, please. next speaker, please. my name is bob belke and i'm a permit consultant. i'm opposed to legislation as it stands right now, and agree with the -- many of the comments made this morning, mr. paul, mr. buscovich, mr.
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carnilowitz and so on. i recommend you hold off taking action today on this legislation so that some of the permit consultants can take a further look at this legislation and maybe get some input. it's pretty severe and public consulting is not lobbying and i would recommend strongly that you hold off action today and give us another chance to look at this. thank you very much for your attention. >> thank you. are there any other members of the public who would like to speak at this time? seeing none, public comment is closed. [gavel] >> supervisor chiu, you want to clarify the situation around the permitting process, please? >> sure, absolutely. and first of all, i want to thank those of you from the permitting expediting world for taking part of this discussion. as you know this legislation has been around ifer a year and i have been looking for feedback on specific suggestions on what we could do it around this ~ and the challenge we have is on the one
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hand we know there is a lot of frustration with the process within departments and we have to or in many instances individuals need to hire permit expediters to get projects through faster compared to other projects which aren't moving quite as fast. but on the other hand we all know that there have been numerous allegations and investigations of whether there have been individuals who have inappropriately influenced the process and no one understands who is actually influencing the process. and from my perspective, the purpose of this legislation really actually is to legitimatize transparent permit expediting. let me be clear on several points. first of all, there is nothing in this legislation that says that this is not activity that should not happen. all we're saying is that we need some transparency about who is involved. and then we made major amendments in the last couple of months to address the concerns about overly onerous reporting requirements. so, rather than having a monthly requirement we now have a quarterly requirement and it used to be in the original version of the legislation that we required every contact with
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the city staffer involving the permit expediter to be disclosed and now all we're saying is you don't have to indicate every time you interact with the city staff, we just want to know what city staff you interacted with. so, from our perspective i think we really tried to reduce the reporting requirements here and i am open to other suggestions, but i do think that the idea that there being no oversight and no transparency in this area is just not one that i can support. so, again, i'm open to feedback and i'm hoping for feedback, but, you know, colleagues at this time i do hope that we can move this forward. what i'm happy to do, it had been my intent or my intent to move this forward to the full board at the next board meeting, but what i'd like to do, if we can, unless there are other changes to this, is to move it out to the full board a week from next tuesday to give us more opportunity to have more meetings with the permit expediting community to see if there are other ideas that we can do here.
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but again, given how many times, you know, we have been talking about this, this legislation has been in the works for a year. i do think we should move this through the process. >> thank you, president chiu. the issue around the permit is a new issue to me. i think i receive probably two e-mails recently regarding the particular issue. so, i wasn't completely aware that there was a lot of controversy as it related to this issue. and i do appreciate your willingness to work to try and get it resolved. i don't necessarily think that it's the intent of your legislation to impact this particular population in this particular way. so, i would like to be supportive of that and making the necessary changes to accommodate the request of some of the folks who made public comment here today. and i also had just a minor amendment. ~ i'd like to offer as well.
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mrs. mayo spoke earlier about this particular concern. it was an amendment i had planned to propose based on my own experience with nonprofit organizations because i do support the legislation overall. and the developer disclosure of nonprofit donations, and i don't want this to have a negative impact on nonprofit organizations who oftentimes truly rely on the support of contributions, but more importantly i do think it's important that businesses, the developers and other entities give to organizations especially when they are impacting a community. and that's just part of the process. not necessarily to solicit lobbying support for a particular project, but more importantly to demonstrate a commitment, whether it be contributions, whether it be volunteerism, whether it be hiring practices. we do it all the time in
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community benefits packages where we hold developers accountable to supporting a community. but i do understand your intention and city hall and the public deserve to know when a nonprofit supporting a development project has actually received a contribution from the developer. and frankly, we do know it is against the law for nonprofits to lobby as based on their requirements under 501(c) (3) status. but i have a few amendments that will really narrow the required disclosure consistent with supervisors chiu intention. right now nonprofits defined to be any 501(c) (3) organization that attempts to influence any city legislator or administrative action. so, i'm asking that we narrow it to require developers to disclose donations to nonprofits who have attempted to influence the city on that
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particular development project. and it will be up to the developer to determine if the nonprofit they donated to has done so. and i want to closely monitor this portion of the ordinance in the years ahead to make sure that it's not holding back donations, but more importantly accountability for what developers, really what i believe is inappropriate to contribute and then ask for some sort of lobbying support of a particular nonprofit agency in the first place. so, supervisor chiu, page 24 lines 6 through 9, i wanted to delete the existing 3.5 20 a4 and replace it with a section that i've provided you and supervisor chiu with and here's a copy for the clerk of the board. and i hope you both will accept these particular minor amendments today.
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>> so, having just looked at this, i think i'm okay with supporting the language. and essentially what it does specifically to the nonprofit community in case you are wondering what we are talking about, there was a provision in our legislation that essentially said if you're a nonprofit organization and you receive a contribution of more than $5,000 in the time period when there is an attempt to influence the -- a major environmental impact report, that that needs to be disclosed. and initially that concept was embedded in the definition of a nonprofit organization. supervisor breed is proposing that we narrow that so we make it very clear we actually take it out of the definition of a nonprofit organization and that we make it clear that if there has been a contribution and there has been an attempt to influence a city or county legislative administrative action with regards to a particular project, that is what we're trying to capture. so, it's not just the fact that you received a donation, but it
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is that you received the donation and you're trying to influence the process. i do think that that does capture the intent and the spirit of what we were trying to achieve and i'm happy to support that amendment. >> thank you. so, can we take that amendment without objection? without objection, that amendment passes. [gavel] >> and, supervisor chiu, you had some proposed amendments as well. >> yes. i mentioned earlier there are a couple of additional technical amendments that i wanted to include and i had read them before specifically around saying that the controller on page 15 line 2 may assist rather than shall assist on page 18 line 14 to include permit expediters under the other requirements around enforcement and penalties. and then on page 20 line 3 to state that for affordable housing agents that they are also exempted from the permitting expediting language that we're talking about. and then on page 21 of line 4 for section 5, adding a section
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3.415 penalties enforcement section to ensure that that is clear. and then i do think there was an attorney from pillsbury winthrop who had suggested a technical amendment at page 13 line 5 to change it from a reference to subsection a 10 to now subsection b 10. i think that is, that is clarifying language. so, those are technical and nonsubstantive and ask that we also include this as well. >> okay. can we take those amendments without objection. without objection those amendments passed. [gavel] >> okay. and on the final legislation, president chiu, were we asking that it be forwarded to the full board on june 3rd or june 10th? >> what i'd like to propose is rather than forwarding it out for june 3rd, which still gives us a week-and-a-half, we forward it out on june 10th to see if there are issues that can be sorted out. and i'm also happy, supervisor tang, if that particular 5 01 c-6 wants to have a conversation, happy to sort of understand that i do want to note that 5 01 c6 organizations
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include, and i'm looking on wikipedia right now, major chambers of commerce, securities industry association, national foodth ball league, home builders association, real estate board, i think many of those are entities that we would expect to file lobbying reports. but if they're small merchant associations, i want to think about how we can potentially exempt out those. i'm happy to have an additional conversation around that as well. so, i'd like to make a motion that we move this package out with full recommendation out to the board for june the 10th and then for memorandum abouterxthv of the permit expediter community, i know we had actually -- we had scheduled a meeting this morning with henry carnilowitz and others and that meeting didn't happen. more than happy to sit down with folks and if people want to go into our office right after this meeting and just give us -- give us your name and e-mail address, we'll schedule a meeting in the coming days to continue this conversation. >> again, thank you, supervisor chiu, for working with those individuals on the permitting issue. i'm sure there will be some
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future amendments and this item will be scheduled. we have it moved to go to the full board on june 10. is there a second? >> second. >> seconded. properly seconded, without objection, this item passes to the full board on june 10, thank you. [gavel] >> madam clerk, can you call item number 2? >> item number 2 is a hearing to review san francisco city government performance data and reports issued by the controller's office city performance group. >> good morning, supervisors. i'm peg stevenson. i'm the director of the performance side of the city services auditor and the controller's office. and we really appreciate your time today. we have a short presentation, about 10 minutes, where we want to talk to you about a couple of our performance reporting activities and we've been in conversation with supervisor breed's office about bringing some of the performance and data reporting work that our office does before you and getting the board's feedback.
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we realery interested in understanding and maximizing the utility of these activities to the public. ~ really there is a mandate in our charter appendix about public reporting. we've worked hard to build new transparency websites and move things onto the web. we do a lot of these activities but we're only highlighting two of them today. one where we call the government barometer which is a quarterly report and the other is a benchmarking activity that we do. [speaker not understood]. lesberg of our staff will show you what the government barometer is about and then joe lapka will talk about the mta benchmarking report. i know we talk fast. we have a presentation 5 minutes each. we very much appreciate your time on this and i think you'll be interested in the content. >> thank you. >> good morning, supervisors. and thank you for your time. so, the goal of the government barometer report is to report performance data on a quarterly basis in order to increase
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transparency, create dialogue, and build public confidence regarding the city's management of public business? our annual report publishes data for all city departments and contains over 1,000 performance measures. the government barometer is meant to provide a selection of key activity or performance measures in the major service areas that are listed here. and we use the cover page of each report to highlight contemporary issues of public interest and provide context on how current events might affect the performance measures for the respective quarter or might have an impact going forward. the quarter 1fr-2014 report features the local implementation of the affordable care act and its impact on the department of public health, health access program, [speaker not understood] healthy san francisco. you can see from the chart the number of participants is decreasing from july 2013 to august 2013. and the highlight page points
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out that following major provisions of the affordable care act which would come into effect in january 2014, persons eligible for medi-cal and covered california would no longer be eligible for healthy san francisco. and, so, in the cover page we pointed out that this decrease is anticipated to continue going forward. for quarter 2fy 2014 report we displayed a map of pedestrian injuries and fatalities and highlighted pedestrian safety initiatives going forward. and this is particularly relevant following the pedestrian fatalities that occurred at the new year. and we issued the quarter 3 fy 2014 report last week and the cover page highlights historically dry condition, water use by san francisco residents, and puc water conservation strategies. this chart shows that precipitation at hetch hetchy is at 50% of the average annual total. and the related performance
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measure, the puc trackses residential per capita water use, in quarter 3 san francisco's residential per capita water use was roughly 49 gallons per person per day. a figure that is one of the lowest in the state. and more over, the report highlighted further water conservation strategies that we can all take to help save more in the future. so, this is what the body of the report looks like and this is a snapshot of the performance measures in the health and human services service area. so, you can see that for each activity or performance measure the report publishes figures such as the current period average, the prior period average, and the percent change from period to period and year to year. and, so, showing trend information like this gives viewers contextual information for each measure. in addition to the static report, all monthly performance data is available on the
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government barometer website. as interactive charts and graphs that you can view and analyze dynamically. the data and charts are active by clicking on the associated major service area and you can see here a chart from the streets and public works service area. and on this chart you can see the volume of public graffiti reported which is the blue bars, and the percentage of public graffiti requests responded to within 48 hours, which is the orange line. and the real value of the website is that you can visualize activity measures as well as service delivery measures on the same chart. while this chart displays the data from july 2011 to march 2014, users can select a date range and the chart will adjust dynamically based on their selection. and this is a highlight from the public safety service area and this chart displays the number of violent and property crimes per 100,000 members of the population.
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so, some measures that display a trend in the current quarter are highlighted in the report with a brief explanatory sentence. so, for example, in quarter 3 we highlighted that the total number of serious violent crimes reported has decreased .4% since the previous quarter and by 7% since the same quarter of the previous year. ~ 9.4% you can also see that the chart shows that both serious violent crimes reported and serious property crimes reported increased in quarter 1, july 2014 through september 2014, and the police department reported that this was due to increased self-unrelated theft. finally to bring out one more highlight of customer service, this chart shows the average daily number of 311 contacts across all contact channels as well as the percentage of 311 calls answered by call takers within 60 seconds. and the department reports that the recent decrease in service levels due to increased handle
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time related to treasurer tax collector and homeless shelter reservation call. that's just a brief snapshot of the government barometer and now i'm going to turn it over to my colleague joe for mta benchmarking report. thank you. >> thank you, celeste. good morning, supervisors. [speaker not understood] the charter also directs us to compare the costs and performance of our services with other cities. we do this through a series of periodic benchmarking reports. to date we have produced six reports on the topics that are shown here in blue and today i'd like to highlight data from our latest report on public transportation. the purpose of this report was to compare the costs and performance of directly operated light rail bus and trolley bus service provided by mta with similar services in other metropolitan areas. in this case the peer group consisted of 10 cities in the
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charter based on passenger trips carried by various modes of transportation. i won't go into detail how we selected the peers, however you can see the bus and light rail service are the predominant modes of service in the peer group. in total we compared san francisco to its peers according to 20 different performance measures related to cost efficiency, cost-effectiveness and the other topics you see here. today i'd like to highlight just a few of these beginning with the number of group models per square mile, and service area. group group mile . the number of group miles per service area is used as a measure of service quality because it reflects the overall availability of transit service. this chart makes it clear that mta stands far apart from its peers in this regard. many other parts of the city would be inaccessible due to its hilly topography. at the same time a number of high group miles may indicate duplicative routing. in some cases that may be
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intentional such as bus lines and muni lines have regular and unlimited express service, but in other cases duplication can lead to inefficiency. continuing with the theme of availability and accessibility, our analysis also compared [speaker not understood] across the transit systems. this table shows the bus fares during peak periods of operation. the cities are sorted from lowest to highest according to the full fair. you can tell by the shading mta's fares are relatively low compared to other fares. light rail exhibited a similar pattern. so, with extensive coverage throughout the entire city and relatively low fares this should not be much of a surprise we have very high rider ship. the number of light rail boardlings per person in san francisco is nearly two and a third times the next highest city and bus boardings is 2-1/2 time the next highest city. it does appear, however, that our high rider ship comes at a
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price in terms of vehicle speed. in the top chart the average speed of light rail vehicles is plotted on the horizontal axis and the average speed is plotted on the vertical axis. you can see san francisco stands somewhat apart from its peers as our vehicles are slower on average for both modes. but there is an apparent reason for that. the lower chart charts the average speed for buses against bus boardings per revenue mile. it shows a high correlation between the two vehicles. intuitively this makes sense because each time a vehicle stops to board light rail passengers it experiences a delay. so, the more people that get on and off a bus the slower the bus tends to travel on average. this suggest to me that one of our challenges is to figure out how to elevate the level of the green marker in the bottom chart despite further increases in rider ship. >> quick question. that doesn't take into account accidents and other things -- [multiple voices] >> road conditions. it's people getting on and off.
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>> we want to be careful about being too aggressive of speeding of our buses. >> [speaker not understood]. >> thank you. >> the final measure i'm going to discuss today is revenue miles between vehicle failures which is often used as an indicator of delays that arise due to vehicle problems. it is divided into two categories. one that prevents a vehicle from completing a trip or starting a next trip because of safety concerns or actual movement of the vehicle is limited. the minor failure is also one that prevents a vehicle from completing its trips, but that is because agency policy dictates that the vehicle be taken out of service even if it is physically capable of moving. so, this last chart shows you the average number of miles traveled by each mode of transit between failures of either type, major minor. you can see that for buses to a certain extent but especially for light rail we have considerably more vehicle failures than our peer.
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~ major or minor it is common in the industry to look at the number of revenue miles between major failures only and bah we do that you can see that our performance increases substantially from 617 revenue miles to more than 2,500 miles between major failures. however the performance of ours also increases. in fact some of our peers like denver, houston, and san diego have extraordinarily high number of revenue miles in between major failures. these numbers are generally consistent with data from prior years so they do not appear to be reporting errors, but beyond that we're not exactly sure what is behind these numbers. it could be worthwhile to do a more in-depth investigation into how the agencies achieve these results and whether we can apply some of their practices here. so, that concludes our presentation. thank you for your time and we're happy to take any questions that you may have. >> thank you. supervisor tang. >> thank you so much for that information. i think it's really helpful. i actually just wanted to know
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from here on out how are you working with mta to kind of work on some of these issues i think, again, some of the information presented here is really enlightening. so, if you could share what kind of the next steps are, that would be great. >> sure. so, some of the information that we've presented in the report has been considered by them in development of a roll out of a mayor's transportation task force materials. we will also be presenting this report to the mta board on june 3rd. and i think from there we'll have to get their input into how we work with them to address some of these issues. >> thank you. >> thank you. >> we'll continue to work with supervisor breed's office on bringing this item back to your committee on a regular basis or at your convenience and we'd be interested to hear any content and we can continue to highlight the performance reporting we do and we very much want them to be useful to the public and to use the feedback is very much
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appreciated. >> thank you. the only feedback i have is if there is a way that we can do like community workshops, or for example, if there are neighborhood associations or merchants associationses and they have transportation community meetings, if there is a way that we can teach the public how to use this application, i think it's an incredible application. it's probably under utilized. very complex, but really fun once you're able to develop charts and see exactly, you know, how we're spending money or how our bus systems are running on time or whether or not 311 is working or whether or not, you know, we're abating graffiti. the fact we have this where the average, you know, person in san francisco could go to the controller's website, use this particular barometer and information and prepare these incredible charts, i'd like to maybe see more outreach to work with the public to figure out a way in which we can c
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