begin. >> okay. >> >> good morning, today is wednesday, june 19th, 2014, this is the regular meeting of the building inspection commission. i would like to remind everyone to please turn off all electronic devices. the first item on the agenda is roll call. vice president mar? >> here. >> commissioner lee? >> here. >> commissioner mccray? >> present. >> commissioner walker? >> here. >> and president mccarthy, and commissioner clinch are excused. and commissioner melgar is expected. we have a quorum. and the next item is item 2, president's announcements. >> before we get to the president's announcements i was wondering if i could ask my fellow commissioners if they

would, propose a slight change in the agenda items. and i know that supervisor tang is here and wants to speak on item number seven and i was wondering if we could move that item up right after general public comment? so, we could accommodate her schedule? so could i have a motion to change that agenda item on that? >> so moved. >> second. >> okay. >> all commissioners in favor? >> aye. >> okay. >> thank you. >> okay. so, i will go right into the president's announcements. first of all, we would like to compliment and thank director huey who provided help for all of the tenants appearing on the radio station or actually tv station channel 26, the chinese journal that was aired on june

15th to explain some of the dbi's processes, and permit reviews. and especially, the newly passed board ordinance, and enabling owners to voluntarily legalize their illegal inlaw apartments. and so, he urged viewers who own soft story buildings also to comply with the school reforms under the new soft story ordinance, so since the september deadline are quickly approaching and so i wanted to thank director huey for that and we also wanted to thank robert chung who hosted a dbi table on the housing expo this year, which was held on january, i am sorry, june 14th, from 11 to 3 at saint mary's cathedral, almost 1,000 people

attended and many asking questions about again, the legalization of those un-law units and recommend the retrofit program and so those are important things that our staff has done. and we also, received a special thanks to dbi senior housing inspector allen davidson for his recent cooperation in having a reporter from the central city extra ride along with him, which is a tender loin newspaper ride along with him on some of his inspections of sro hotels. the important news article that has not come out yet. and we also are going to discuss more active financial manager of gale revels, and details on the budget before the board of supervisors which takes place tomorrow, regarding that dbi budget and so that is

going to happen tomorrow. and one final reminder, dbi is going to host another free public workshop on monday, august 11th from 3:00 to 5:00, at the auditor um in the main library, and again on the mandatory soft story retrofit program and the owners who have not submitted they are invited to participate again and see if those again, they are quickly approaching, it is a september 15th, deadline, for submission of the forms and i believe that there are 3,000 or 3,500 owners who are on the list, that are required to submit those forms. and so that deadline is quickly approaching. and i think that kind of ends the formal part of my report. but, i am also happy to be able

to announce and i just wanted to include it in this section and is that we finally went through selecting the employee of the month for the last quarter of 2013. which we are a little behind on doing, which kind of put those four employees up for an employee of the year, for 2013 and we also, the committee also met and we wanted to announce the employee of the quarter, for that the 2014, and so, i would like to do that now. if that is okay? so. let's see. so, let's start with the employee of the quarter of the last quarter of 2013.

which we are very happy to announce, is the internal financial director gale revels and she was chosen as the employee of the quarter, 2013 and i want to thank her work for the department and especially on behalf of this commission because i know that she has to come before... [ applause ] >> every single month and she has made, i know, the reports the financial reports, much more understandable to this commission than what we have been used to in the past. so i wanted to thank her for that and i think that is well deserved. nomination and election. and to end the 2013 year, we have four employees that were chosen for all of the quarters

of 2013, and so, for the employee of the year, we have to, the committee had to go through those four nominees and we decided that gale deserved to be, and also to be the 2015 employee of the year and i wanted to give her another congratulations for that honor. and finally, for the employee of the quarter, 2014, which we just went through, we wanted to award that award to a member of the housing inspection crew. and i know that i am going to forget the last name, but it is mr. tony lupe? >> lepe. >> and so i wanted to

congratulate tony on behalf of the, you know, his division and also the department and thank him for the work that he has done. >> and director huey and thank you for this acknowledgment and i enjoy the work that i do as a housing inspector at dbi assisting property owner to provide safe housing for all san francisco citizens. i appreciate the opportunity to be here today. >> okay. so any way i have some paper, i have to hand out. so i will be happy to come by and do that and i wanted again, if you want to come up also and say anything? [ applause ] >> thank you. >> i just wanted to say thank you. i have nothing to worry because, i am not prepared to say anything, and i appreciate the acknowledgment.

thank you. >> [ applause ] . >> we want to come up and get your recognition award? >> so all of these prizes have been vetted by the city attorney's office and so nothing is worth much of anything but we wanted to thank the employees any way. and some of these certificates will be framed. and so gale, here is your recognition for, i think, for the employee. and you get two, because the employee of the quarter as well as employee of the year. >> thank you. >> and mr. lepe, and here is your award for the employee of the quarter, for this year. first line. >> and actually, we have a couple of other things which again have we are lucky to get from some of the other city

departments those two the advocacy of our director and so there are a couple of other things such as, you know, free passes to the hall of flowers and a couple of events that are coming up in the city, which, again, we would like to give you as part of this book. >> thank you. >> thank you. >> so, thank you. i just also wanted to thank all of the divisions who nominated people, and again, it is always hard for us to choose people, but we wanted to encourage the fellow employees to nominate their colleagues from the different divisions and i want to say that all of the people that took the time to write up their, and the work in the colleague to nominate people as well. thank you. >> and a photo.

>> okay. >> thanks. >> thank you very much. >> okay. thank you. >> thank you. >> we are done with the president's announcements. >> yes, we are done. >> is there any public comment on president's announcements? >> seeing none, item three, general public comment. the bic will take public comment on matters within the commission's jurisdiction that are not part of this agenda. and there is no general public comment. and then we are moving to agenda on to 7,; is that correct??

>> yes. >> item 7,discussion and possible action regarding a proposed ordinance (file #140284) amending the building code to establish a procedure for maintaining and registering vacant or abandoned commercial storefronts, including imposition of a registration fee. >> good morning. >> good morning, director huey and commissioners my name is supervisor katie tang and i am happy to be here to speak about the legislation regarding commercial vacant or abandoned storefront registry. and so as you know we currently in our city already have a vacant and abandoned building ordinance for mostly capturing residential homes. over time we have noticed that actually we have not been able to capture a lot of the vacant commercial storefronts, which has been a little bit problematic and so for example, back in 2013, with the creation

of jobs through the workforce development they started doing the manual counts and sending people out to the neighborhood corridors which we have 25 of, and start to collect this information and i believe that in those 25 corridors they found that there are about 180 vacancies, commercial, and only about 7 of them landed on the dbi registry, and so, as you can see, this is something that we believe has been a little bit problematic and one of the problems is that there are often times commercial storefronts on the ground floor and residential buildings on top and if there are if the residential units are occupied then that entire building is not classified as vacant and so if, this new commercial component of the program, we really are modeling it off of what the existing program is, and in terms of the fees, the notice of violations that will be going out, and also building in the times of the compliance and it can be very difficult

for, especially in some neighborhoods like the outer sunset district for the property owners to find the tenant to take over, and so we don't want to punish those property owners that may have difficulties in finding tenants and so we do get the leeway for the property owners if they are demonstrating good faith, that they are actively making an effort to find tenants and so for example, if they have hired an agent, and they have listed their place on cra*ig's list, or whatever it is, we want to be sure that they are demonstrating a good faith effort and we also want to account for if the property owner is already in lease negotiations or if tenant has to go through the city's permitting process, as you know it can take good a bit of time if you can have to get a permit or whatever it is, and we account for that and make sure that the registration fee does not kick in, if any of those things are happening and so you know, just a little bit of survey on the outer sunset

district for example, in our district, alone maybe, several months ago, we counted about 40 vacancies and half of those, about are on teravel street alone and so we know that there are some issues and filling some of the vacancies out in some of the neighborhoods and what we really hope is do is to have the opposite effect and we hope not to have to charge these property owners and we actually hope that by capturing more of this data and more accurately, we are able to better populate our storefront sf data base and right now, it does not fully reflect what is out there and we hope that by fully capturing all of the storefront sf that we can better connect the people who want to start the small businesses or real estate agents and whoever it is and the brokers who are seeking to find the spaces for the businesses and some of the additional things are going to be requiring on top of what currently exists for the vacant and the abandoned buildings is

that we are requesting the property owner to list what the previous use was and so that may make it easier for a small business going in to say, so this is a formal restaurant and so i know that i don't need to get a conditional use permit for that and we also want to know the square footage and the data base does not include that information and we think that it is helpful because we think that is a top question that we always get asked and we also want to disclose if there have been ada improvements made and because over the last several, i would say decade, there are a lot of issues that have come up about ada access and so, that is kind of in a nutshell, some of the highlights of what this problem will be doing, again, we really hope that really it is just a sharing of more accurate information, and more widespread so that we can better connect some of our small businesses that want to open up and in our various neighborhoods throughout the entire city and so with that, i am happy to answer any questions that you might have on this program. >> okay. supervisor melgar?

>> i am sorry, commissioner melgar? >> good morning, thank you so much. i think that this is a fabulous idea. and i am wondering, i could not really tell from the legislation which city department will be overseeing the population of the data base and you know, keeping up the data is clean. >> sure, and i neglected to actually acknowledge the people that helped, especially the department of building inspection and we had meetings with the office of small business and oewd and the community partners whether it is the apartment associate and the small owners and they allpro vieded helpful feedback and so dbi right now currently manages a registry, for the als

put forward programs that were in tandem and so you had to stick in a carrot and i believe that the best way to keep the buildings from being vacant is to make it more expensive to be vacant than to rent, i mean that just seems to be the

nature of it and that is one of the reasons why we want to have a stick in this effort. it does not help the neighborhood, and it does not help the surrounding businesses and it does not really help anybody to have a vacant storefront and so it would be great to have a really proactive and not just a survey, but a proactive effort, especially in the areas like the bay view and hunter's point where the businesses might not be enclined to go out there and there should be incentives from a different program to encourage the people to look at those areas, to bring some of the economic benefit of the activity in the city out there. also, i love the idea of posting all of the previous use, and the previous any sort of improvements and it would also be interesting to know the previous rental costs because a lot of what i see, in the areas, is that, that stores remain open because they have

escalated the rents, and a lot of times, it is to encourage other types of activity, and the people who would, maybe, the tech companies would come in and take a storefront, which may be a conflict of use and hard to know. but i just, i feel like, a lot of the area in the mid market, a lot of those storefronts, were really on the market at prices store owners could not pay. and so, i don't know and i know that it gets into the complicated issues, but, i think that when we make it less attractive to keep the things vacant, you know, especially as the people have elevated prices for what is normal in the area and it makes it difficult and it counters those problems. so, those are the two things that i would comment on. >> and thank you, especially that reminded me that really, it is and this is one piece that i am going before the commission on, of course there is a lot of other efforts that we are really trying to work on to make it easier for example,

to open up a small business and so the permitting process and especially we are trying to figure out the better ways to stream line that and make it more efficient and more predictable for the small businesses and often times the people have to pay rent for six months before they even start earning anything for their business. and so that is something that we are very actively working on as well and we do understand that takes a lot of funding and resource to do that and so it will take time and the other component is obviously our investment into the surrounding neighborhood in the first place and so our office is always in the past, really been spear heading a lot of efforts for preventing graffiti and all of those things going hand in hand and we will continue so that the people women want to come and open up a store here in the outer sunset or the bay view or wherever else and so i think that especially with the creation of the invest in the neighborhoods initiative and that has also been heavily

focusing on the business attraction and retention in the neighborhoods. and so really i would like to see all of those problems really work together. >> okay. >> the question, of the surrounding neighborhoods, what happens with the fee? >> i guess that i can let director huey answer that. so, i do understand that a portion of the fee goes toward, well there is administrative cost to maintaining the data base and there are some inspections that may be involved and so for example, there are requirements that you maintain your site so there are not any trespassers and vandalism there and i know that a portion of that has to go to that as well. >> and actually, the fee, and maybe it will be linked to a more high and more people will do this work? >> is it possible along that line, is it possible to use some of the fee for like a street improvement, or are we able to do that within our

enterprise configuration as a department? >> >> what we need to ask is are we using enough funds to do that? >> >> the city attorney, burn, and i am sorry, the question was whether the fee can be used for which purposes? >> the fees on the vacant buildings, can they be used for business improvements along the area, like the street? where they exist? >> are we allowed to do that with dbi fees? or is that more of a planning function? >> generally, fees for a specific program can only be fed back into the program. so we would have to look at whatever specific proposals you are thinking of to see if those would fit within the definition of administering and paying for the cost of administering this program. >> okay. >> it is very fact-specific. >> yes, i get that. >> okay. >> and i will try to just a

couple of general comments, also. first, i know that there was a little bit of concern in this legislation, first of all it was a welcome legislation because we have heard this before from the community folks and we are glad supervisor that you are taking it up because you were probably hearing the same thing from your constituents and so our concerns are two things, one is the enforcement of the change. and it would fall largely on this, and so that means that we are kind of the stick part, if you will, of commissioner walker's part, and not just the counter part and so we were concerned about the counter part and that was open as well because where you were concerned about in terms of enforcement is that it would be unevenly applied in the city and so with that, for example, i am glad that you mentioned the outer sunset, and in the areas.

and i would feel the same, in those neighborhoods like the third street, and i would feel that we would want more carrots out there than sticks because we are the stick, you know? because we will be sending our inspectors out there to issue the novs and things like that and we don't want perception from the public that we are harder on one neighborhood than we are on another. because, the economic situation of that neighborhood is harder than in some other we wanted to make sure that there will be, both of those things, happening at the same time. and i think that the other part in terms of our staff and there are already light ordinances in place and i know that hearing from the public that there are often not enforced and again, it is not just on the building department to enforce those ordinance and it also falls on dpw and some of it falls on health and so, but again, because we have inspectors out

in the field, and it always comes back to us, that you guys should go out there because health is not sending anybody out there or dpw is not going out there. and so that, again, is just a concern of mine. and i was wondering if in drafting this legislation, did your staff go before our advisory committee and get the feedback on how the implementation is? >> yes. >> that is really an important part of the legislation for us. >> yes. and all of those concerns we definitely heard along the way in this process, where we did go and the office did go before the various committees. before we reached the full commission here. and so, we certainly hear you about the enforcement and that is why we tried to model off what already exists and so, for example, we will know that probably in the first year we are going to spend a lot of time doing out reach and making sure that the people are aware of this kind of regulation, and we, again, we think that because the dbi already has,

and you are already maintaining a registry and we are trying to close this loophole where the commercial storefronts are being missed and so there may be inspecters already going out there and it is also based on complaints and so if the community members drive by and for example if i am driving by and i see a vacant storefront, i can report that into dbi and not have an inspector go out there to do the count and so in that respect i think that that addresses the enforcement side of things. and we are not creating a whole entirely new program. the other thing is that i know that it is very kill to write legislatively the incentives and know that we are working on it and we have for several years and even in my former capacity and with the creation of the invest in the neighborhoods initiative which covers the entire city, and i think that is really important and they know the importance of the storefront and making sure that we have accurate data so that they can do a better job of figuring out how to repair the small businesses with our different neighborhood and needs. and what is missing from a

community. and so, again, i know that is hard to put into legislation, but, those efforts are going on and we will be pushing those to continue. >> thank you. >> and maybe, just, i am and i love this. and i actually think that it is really great and what i like about it, is mostly that is seeks for build the infrastructure that we don't currently have that can be used in other places and so i live close to the corridor and i worked in

just gives the property owner an incentive to move forward and i see that it will not be an abandoned storefront if the property owner contracts out with the real estate agent and that is a state forward and provides incentive for the property owner to move forward to get the space leased. >> okay. >> commissioner walker? >> director huey, have you assessed what the financial consequence will be on us ie,

increase the staffing, etc.? >> yeah, i expect maybe an increase at least one inspector and maybe one clerk. >> okay. sure. >> okay >> cool. >> okay. >> all right. >> and there are no further questions, thank you for your consideration of this. >> thank you. >> thank you. >> and is there a motion on it? >> do we need public comment? >> public comment? >> good morning commissioners kowitz and i am the president of the council of district merchants association and i think that it is excellent and the problem that we have for small businesses is that there is not enough traffic, but particularly we have a lot of storefronts that are vacant and a lot of these are vacant is that the owners don't care and they just get the vacant so that the big bucks to come in, this will give them a