force participation rate and the disability community was on average, 20.3 percent. now if you are like me, that sounds really bad. and to compare that the labor rate for the non-disabled community for the same period was 68.9 percent. and so the last slide that i showed, indicated that there was actually a slight decline in the number of and in the unemployment rate in the disability community. but what this chart shows is a lion chart with the top line will show you the labor force participation rate and the bottom line shows the unemployment rate and the disability community, and it shows that there is actually a corresponding decline in the labor force, participation rate for the people with disabilities and compared to the unemployment rate in the same community. what does that mean? >> it is not mean that the unemployment rate is coming

down because people can disabilities are finding jobs. it means that the people with disabilities by and large are giving up. and that is the important thing to say that that is the discussion in which we are framing this, you know, that is really where we are when we frame this discussion. so most importantly, the big question that we are all asking here today, so what. employment for people with disabilities, and the employment, across the entire population is a reflection of one's identity. it is something that a lot of us take for granted and everybody has to get up and go to work in the morning, to actually kind of a drag. and well, one of the most, and when you meet somebody new, one of the first questions that you ask, is, what do you do for a living? well the answer to that question, is, i do nothing, how will people with disabilities ever be perceived as equals in

the society. and when we talk about having the people with disabilities in the employment sector, it is important to know that there are people and there are studies that show this, and the people with disabilities are more loyal and the private sector studies that indicate that the turnover rate of people with disabilities are actually 40 percentage points lower than the people without disabilities they are more productive, and they require less sick time and take less time off and they stay longer. and you know, it is something that makes not only good moral sense, but it makes good fiscal sense. they, as pointed out earlier by the supervisor chiu, roughly, and more than a third of people that are on income-based government assistance, identify as having a disability. and so, if we are able to help these folks transition to

gainful employment, not only do we run reduced, or the burden on the government to say, you know, to pay those benefits, but we also increase the tax base, no matter what side of the spectrum that you fall on, this is a good idea. >> all right so coming up next, some of the current challenges with rule 115, and most significantly, from our perspective and from our member's perspective and the other stuff that we have heard in the community is that it does limit to entry level positions and i know, that it was discussed earlier, i believe by the executive officer of the civil service commission that this is all refined, and you know, defined very specifically in the charter. and i know from my time working in the department of human resources you cannot, you cannot go against the super

powers, and that is something that, it is also important that you know, that this body, the board of supervisors, has the ability to put things on the ballot to change that. and if we are able to identify a specific package of reforms that need to be made to the charter then that is something that our organization will support wholeheartedly. but also, moving forward, i think that it is important to note that there has been such a... rule of 115 positions that have come through in the last ten years that there is no real formal process, as defined and pointed out by the department of rehabilitation, and you know, she, as a representative, of the state department, that is required to help people with disabilities find jobs, and was unfamiliar with how the rule should be or is applied to the city, and because, it simply is not. it is not happening. so, you know, we would advocate that there be a and we need to

institute a formal structure for how do we educate hiring managers out in the department and build a long lasting pipeline of qualified applicants that are ready to work that want to work for the city. jonathan i am going to have to ask you as quick ls as you can try to summarize and wrap up. >> sure. >> so, we have a couple of recommendations that have already been discussed. one is that we would advocate the formation of a position, house whatever. and this body will decide along with the mayor. and the two va disability coordinator, and was thinking that it should be somebody from the disability community and somebody familiar with the city process and somebody familiar with the disability with the disability community and how to get things done in the city and this person could be the person to build, a lot of those bridges that we and that i

discussed in the last slide and also to help the departments meet some hiring targets that they may or may not have met. and the next recommendation that we have is actually to have hiring targets in the city for the disability community. analogous to the rehabilitation act that the federal government recently instituted for all of the vendors and i would say that probably the federal government only instituted it for the vendors because doing it for all of the federal service would have applied in an act of congress and as we know those do not happen very much these days. but i know that it is something that has been controversial. and i have discussed this recommendation, with dhr staff, and the population 209 question was pointed out to me and so i try to do a little due diligence and i am not an attorney but i did go back and read the text of the proposition, and i also read

the text of charter of chapter 31 of the state charter. s and that out lows affirmative action. and it lists those and it does not actually specifically call out disability as a community that could not, or that where affirmative action is outlawed. so just lastly, very quickly, you know the city is discussed is at a turning point, you know the mayor's budget that was recently submitted to this body calls for hiring a 1400 new positions over the next two years, people with disabilities are ready willing and able to assume these positions and we are looking for a partnership, from this body and from the city staff, to move forward and to help give people with disabilities hired and to what are very equitable jobs in san francisco. thank you. >> thank you.

i see no questions, thank you so much for your leadership. and the presentation. >> the next speaker is kate williams, and julie mccarthy for light house for the blind. and we are starting our process to for the public comment is opened now. and we are asking people to try to limit their comments to two minutes. if you need additional time, i will ask a question or two to extend that time. but, so, miss williams. or miss mccarthy. >> i am with the light house for the blind, and i am managing the immersion plan and i am pleased to have the opportunity to speak to you from the community. and i have been thinking about this a lot and i found that the

reason it is, and the people with the disabilities are not unemployed because of their disability. they are unemployed because they don't have a job plan and simple. that is why they are unemployed. we can't look at our disability as keeping us from gainful employment. in fact, if i look at this room right now, the people from our community those who are here with disabilities and representing our community, we could fill this chamber with so many more people who would have the resume in hand and they would say that i want to work. and that is why we are here today. it is because the people with disabilities could be the most overly educated under employed people in your whole community. i am a senior citizen, and and i am blind and that is two strikes against me and i feel that i am the most fortunate person in the world, because i have a job.

it brings me great joy, to work with the people in our community, specifically i work with the blind. and i know that in working with them, we have had over 110 people go through our program. and we have had a 34 percent placement rate with those people and so you can't tell me that they are not ready for jobs, i think that some of the most coveted jobs are with the city when i ask the people, when we ask them where they want to work and it is going to be at the city. at the light house, we have developed i think an outstanding and remarkably close relationship with the hr department. and i can't thank donna enough for being always, open, and listening, and the reasons for wanting to have the people gain employment. and we have actually placed someone, with the city, through rule 115, and we would like to see that happen more frequently and just two recommendations from at least our community, is

that many of the people that work with us are not entry level, even though they may have a gap in their resume because they have taken time out to retrain with adaptive technology. and makes us capable in respond the entry level. and we like you to consider that it be opened more and more closely immulate the schedule. and we would like to see it moved more frequently. >> those are our two question requests but we do want to thank them for hiring three of the other people from the program and through 115. thank you. >> the next speaker is terry goodwin from the ark.

thank you very much supervisors and the ark san francisco has been placing people successfully in jobs for over 35 years. and we recently experienced a lot of success because of the tech boom, which is wonderful but it has been historically difficult in good times and bad and as was referenced before, the unemployment for the people with disabilities is high and i think that it is close to 70 percent of the people who really want to work or 80 percent. and so, we have not had much success with the rule 115. we have had one hire in 2001. and we actually have had a placement through the maria shriver initiative in 2007 with the city which is great, and we really want to react vait this and gets people hired and just to comment on the reason why the rule 115 did so well in the 80 and 90s, they had a very active role and they had a placement person that was marketing to the department

heads, and most of all, diane who was mayor at that time, really had a call to action with all of the department heads. and the other big reason was because there was a point person hired within the city, that sent the job postings out on a regular basis and was marketing internally and i think that those are the three key reasons and i did have the opportunity to participate on an advisory council, with the hr department, there were a lot of recommendations that came out of that. and to my knowledge, most of them were never implemented for whatever reason and i will not go through each one of those but what i will get to right now is the list of recommendations that the arc has. we would really like to see and other organizations have mentioned it as well and we would really like to see the reenergizing of some of those former recommendations and we would like to see the implementation of our plan to actually have regular opportunities for the cbos, to

meet with the hr and the managers and we would also really like to see internship opportunities for people in a wide range of positions with different departments, providing supported and employment. to help to build a bridge to successful job hires and we want to encourage the mayor, mayor lee to give a call to action around this effort. and let's see, the other piece that i would like to mention that we would like to encourage to this and maybe this advisory council, and this advisory group to readvise and get to look at the other successful programs and what i have to do with the one in seattle and they have an excellent program and supported employment, and coordinators that facilitates a lot of the hires with a lot of the vendors and i think that would be one to look at and there are other programs you know throughout the country that we can look at as well. thank you very much. and we look forward to more jobs, that is the main goal here.

>> thanks for the service on that past advisory panel and i can't locate any of the documents so if we could get that at some point. >> i can scan those and send those to you. it was more than just the rule 115, it was a full, three-page recommendation, and so i would be glad to do that. >> and thanks for your current day recommendations as well. >> thank you very much. >> the next speaker is lorens from the san francisco independent living resource center and she will be followed by jessica layman from the senior disability action. >> is jessy here? >> apparently jessy could not be here. so maybe, if jessica layman could come forward. and thanks to the senior disability action for being here as well.

thank you. >> good afternoon, supervisors thank you so much for holding this hearing. my name is jessica layman at senior disability action and we of course are concerned with the very low employment rates of people with disabilities and we have them regularly coming through the doors and the people with disabilities and seniors and a lot of overlap who are looking for jobs and anything and it is very, very difficult. and this is a civil rights issue as has been pointed out and also an issue for what is good for our city and we want the people with all sorts of perspectives working in our city and sharing their experiences. so, we are really glad that this issue is being considered. on the issue of tracking, for starters, the system piece is to know how many people with all kinds of disabilities we have working in the city, and we believe that it is not only allowed, but it is required of some federal contractors if that happened and we support the other suggestions that have been raised by the fdr

democratic club and others, and so thank you again supervisors for taking on the issue of employment and the people with disability and we look forward to working with them. >> thank you. i am going to call a couple of cards now and the people don't have to come forward in this order, just if your name is called, you could, so we have vera hail from the long term care coordinating council, sarah murphy, vandermay from the academy of sciences and david fasio, susan phifer and john alex lowl, anybody who name was mentioned you can come forward and i will call the other cards in a minute. and thank you miss hail for your long time work for seniors and people with disabilities as well. >> so, this is vera hail. >> yes. yes. >> thank you, for the introduction. i am a member of the long term

care coordinating council as well as a few other organizations that some of you know about and i am on a subcommittee that is working on making san francisco more age and disabled friendly city. and one of the things... we have approvals for the world health organization and one of the things that they are interested in is what we are going to do with the disabled because they say that nobody else has done that and has included that in their making the city disable friendly. and i hope that we will bring back in of the zeal that we had, in the beginning. we are looking at things like jobs and housing, and transportation for both seniors and people with disability. and so this, and i wanted to be here, to hear what was said in

the beginning. and we will be wanting to hear more as we go on about progress too. thank you. >> thank you, miss hail. >> next speaker. >> hi, my name is sarah murphy and i am the director of work languages and one service for people with disabilities. and i wanted to because i only have two minutes to talk, i wanted to thank san francisco for being a very progressive employer, for people with disabilities. but i also wanted to comment and focus my comments on people with intellectual disabilities or significant disabilities and i think that for those individuals more is needed than just an alternative hiring policy. what i would like to see established would be an internship program that would allow people to develop the qualifications needed as miss

simon had mentioned, the bar is high for public service jobs. i mean people are required to have minimum qualifications and for the disabilities to have access for training through public institutions and our post secondary institutions or, vocational training. internship programs have been instrumental in helping people to get good paying career oriented positions and in alameda as terry mentioned seattle has done a wonderful job with programs and more locally, the county has established a program that provides year long internships for individuals with interelectrical disabilities and what they have found is not only do the people gain the skills necessary to be competitive, it also creates an understanding and educates the

hiring managers on what the people with interelectrical disabilities can do. and so they have seen, tremendous out comes from this program and the people are getting jobs at 30 to 45,000 a year, within i think that they are now, within nine of the departments. s and so i would love to see something like that be established here, in san francisco. for the people with intellectual disabilities. >> i will follow up with you to get the contacts for the program. >> thank you. >> next speaker. >> my name is david, and good morning, supervisors i am a disability services consultant that is successfully facilitated the recruiting of the employees with disabilities through the federal government, to the rule 115 program at a time when less than 1 percent of the federal workforce was employed with the disability and which had been on the 20 percent decline on the 25 years

and yes, they do track it and it is my experience that in order for these programs to work a supervisor must willingly target the people with disability and you can see that on the jobs if you search by the appointment type and the appointments open to people with disabilities that does not happen very often, if ever, though. when these employees are perceived as a potential lawsuit and burden, language in this reasonable accommodation manual, such as never an employee consumes about the difficulty performing his or her job and links that for a medical condition and portrays it as a potential lawsuit and the language of this manual is very ligitus and defensive and i think that it can and will be refrained in a personal context that seeks to enable the productive workforce. rather than protecting ada violations cooperative understanding training should be provided to strength based thinking about what works and how to make it work better for

anyone. contributions for the common goals and how that each individual and each individual can do is all that matters. diversity training for on all of our differences. and the differences equal conflict, period. and no matter how much you learn about them. i am almost done. we implemented a job mentoring program through the air force to demonstrate that what the employees with disabilities can do with no obligation to hire and it was widely successful and i am a formal federal union rep and the disability for eoc judges and if you like to know more about the recommendations please be in touch with me. >> thank you. >> i am going to call a few more names, alice, beer man, richard rof man, and regina bancmer and vira honen and mark nulson and lauren mcdunna. >> may i use this microphone, a little lower down?

>> i am embarrassed because i am not disabled but i have been seeing what is going on and it disstubers me. >> she is from the fdr. >> i am the second of the fdr club, democratic club and i was asked to join the club to help them learn how to devote a registration and i fell in love with the club and i fell in love with the intelligence and the spirit and the passion of the people in the club. and i have become an advocate for them. it looks to me like disability hiring may be one of the last forms of discrimination we have tackled racial discrimination and we have tackled sexual orientation and we have not tackled disability hiring and those as have been stated before, those employees are loyal and hard working and they stay a long time and they are some of the most intelligent people. and i almost want to say as steven hawking were to apply for a job in san francisco today and had not been a

author, would be hired that is the brilliance that we are losing by not looking passed disabilities to hire people and we also passed a state wide bond measure to create more housing for veteran and we know that there is an enormous amount coming back from afghanistan with disabilities and in some cases if they had jobs, maybe they would not be homeless and maybe they would have more self-esteem and feel welcomed back to their country. i am going to, one more quote that jonathan just gave me that i really like. people with disabilities, may be the most qualified people we are not hiring. think about that. >> thank you. >> thank you, miss phifer thank you. >> next speaker? >> good morning, supervisors, my name is john alex, and i am the member of the fdr democratic club of san

francisco and i hold a seat at your will and mercy on the pedestrian safety advisory committee to represent the needs of seniors and people with the disabilities at the moments since 2010. i represent the needs of people with disabilities to seek employment and safety, and leason the different city agencies, that is a functional role that i see where we could have more employment for people with disabilities is or does the left-hand talking to the right-hand, in the city agencies. note, it is a department of public works that repaves the sidewalk and are they talking to sfmta of person who has a disability could be a liaison there. who has contextual realization of the need of how we could make the streets safer for people with disabilities.

there is other needs that needs to be addressed here in the building, the hope program. on housing. and the needs of social services for veterans. i have been a professional volunteer with the va medical center. and the pomroy recreation and rehab center. we have great resources such as been mentioned by the coordinator of several of the programs today that i encourage thed city to tap into and we are waiting for you. we are willing to come to you, and to the see hiring directors. thank you. >> next speaker >> good morning, everybody. >> this is alice beer man and i am from the senior, in disability action. and i am here to, and i am a little bit nervous in front of a lot of people even though i

can't see you, i am here to share a little bit of my personal story. as you can see, or you cannot see, i am a person with disability. and a lot of times, for a long time, when i was looking for jobs for year, and since the 90s. you know, i have gone, you know, through the first and second interview and quite a few times, i was the you know, the one out of two at the final choice. and i was really chosen, and a lot of times, it makes me wonder like, why that? and a couple of them was, you know, with the city, you know, and employee too. and so i just wanted to share that, you know, it is true that people, like us are struggling and i really appreciate that we considering it here right now, and thank you so much. >> thank you. >> and next speaker. >> good morning. >> good morning.

>> thank you supervisors, i am with the california academy of sciences over in district one. more importantly i am an advocate for people with disabilities and have been for a long time and recently joined the council and they have been partners to us as well and it is important for the people to think about, this is not charity, this is, you know, this is a good human thing and this is the only minority group that you can join at any given time and it is pretty mind glowing to think of it that way and i am proud to say that the academy of sciences supports this effort and we have already incorporated it into the normal and every day hiring practices. and we have just in the last year we have hired four employees with disabilities in partnership with the arc of san francisco. and in the fall we will begin a partnership with access sfusb and bring on two new interns with disabilities. you know the great thing about it is that we gain such skilled and highly qualified employees,

you know, as from a business perspective, but what was surprising to us is that you also gain so much in staff moral, the staff just sort of rally around this group of people and it is such a great experience for them, and you know, they are saying, you know, they are co-workers coming to work today with whatever challenges they may have and they are still there on time, and often, we find that these employees are usually the most even more dedicated in that kind of encourages the rest of the team to perform even higher. and so again, the academy very much supports this effort and thank you so much for your time for this discussion. >> could i just ask it is with access san francisco unified school district and it is youth internships of youth with disabilities? >> yes. it is youth, 18 to 22. and we will begin that in september. >> and given some of the other recommendations of starting other employment, internship type of programs in the city it will be useful for know how your success is with that. and i