have is shown it's far it's far less costly than the cost of emergency rooms if these homeless populations remain on the street and our program seems to be bearing that out so i am happy to answer any questions. thank you. >> thank you for your presentation. any questions from the committee? seeing none. >> good morning. the 6 contracts was 9.3 million expected to grow with the addition of these contracts. but this is an essential form of funding to be able to get

these programs going. on the table 4 page 19 we actually show the 15-year amount for each contract over the 15-year term the 6 contracts will be general fund costs and in the human services budget subject to board approval and note the variation in costs has more to do with the size of the project itself and the economies smaller housing development. we do recommend approval of these 6 resolutions these 6 agreements however we do based on our audit from 2012 at that time we found it was very hard for the board of supervisors to actually get good information on supportive housing. at that

point in time these agreements were not being brought forward to to the to the board they weren't subject to board approval. they are now providing verbal information to the board but also through these approvals of the local operating supportive agreements but our recommendation is to request the mayors office of housing to provide a written update and annual report to the board. thank you. >> all right thank you any questions for the budget's analysts office and i was wondering if the mayors office might want to speak of some of the recommendations in terms of annual reporting. i appreciate some of the changes you have already made as well. >> thank you supervisor.

sophie hayward. we're committed to providing an annual report annually from now on and we're proud of the program; we're happy to report on it. >> thank you very much. i want to thank you very much. with that a motion to forward out with a positive recommendation to the full board all right without objection thank you very much. and now we'd like to call up item number 8. >> madam chair we didn't take public comment. >> oh i'm sorry. we'd like to take public comment on items 2 through 7. >> without objection. vote has been rescinded. all right seeing none public comment is now closed. >> actually i'll make the motion to move these items forward. >> all right so there's been a

motion to forward out again items 2 through 7 to the full board without objection. thank you. item 8. >> language access ordinance compliance report to receive a status update. >> our sponsor is supervisor chiu. >> thank you madam chair and members of the public. i called today's hearing on our cities compliance with our language access laws which is required under our ordinance and also this hearing is in conjunction with the office of civic engagement and civic affairs. 40 percent of our residents were born in a place outside of the united states. we're a city that is proud and

has been continually committed to equal and full access to services and timely information regardless of whether or not english is one's first language. i passed legislation that officially refer to what we do in our city as language access by establishing language access ordinance and requiring departments to provide translation services as well as to establish an agency to monitor our cities compliance with that. departments are required to create annual plans to document the work that they do to establish training and employee development strategies and to make sure that we are fully complying. i also want to take a moment and mention that this year our city acknowledged the third official language of san francisco to

be tagalic after chinese and spanish given the growing populations that we have from our filipino community. we've asked 5-tier one departments to attend today's hearing and present their progress and compliance and we've established a number of city departments that have frontline interactions with the public to have higher standards on what they need to do to interact with diverse residents. i want to thank you for your participation in taking part in this hearing and part of the reason we do an annual report is to think as a city what should we be doing better. are there ways for us to interact with the community in ways to help further our goals around language access so with that this is to continue the

important collaboration with community on this. i want to invite up adrian and the roll out of what we've been waiting for for a long time here at city hall with that i'd like to ask miss pawn if you want to make that presentation. >> thank you good morning president chiu. adrian, pawn from the office of civic engagement and civic affairs it is for this opportunity and thank you for your leadership on this issue too. so our goals and mandates have been clear from the start in a city as president chiu mentioned we're over one in every 3 residents is immigrant and nearly one in five speaks a

language other than english at home it's clear why access is essentially to civic participation and engagement and we're just waiting for -- okay -- our slide here. so with such diversity in san francisco bay area, it's no surprise that there are more than 112 different languages spoken in this area. in january 2014 the planning department analyzed data from the american community survey and it was the 5-year population estimates and they did this at our request. 3 of the top 5 languages spoken in the city reached or exceeded the threshold that is that over 10 thousand residents who are limited english speaking that speak a specific language either chinese spanish or filipino have reached a

threshold there are over 340 thousand limited english proficient residents 42 percent of these residents are chinese speaking and of the chinese speakers 65 percent are lep and 44 percent of that population is lep and although the filipino numbers are a little smaller point 06 in the city 42 percent of the population that speaks tagalo is limited english speaking. in the 2014 report tier one departments reported their lep client interactions and it pretty much mirrors the numbers from the acs population estimates again 87 percent of the client served by tier one departments are chinese and spanish speaking with the majority 48 percent

chinese and point 02 percent speak tagalo there's a slight difference in the numbers reported by tier one departments having russian slightly higher at point 03 percent but that could be because of the services provided or the requests that are made. and as you know our leo is a very robust ordinance with tier 1, 26 main departments and tier 2 which are all the rest of the departments that service the public and in general all departments are supposed to comply with the ordinance and 26 departments have to submit an annual report over 18 data points every year which include data tracking budget policies and procedures in general and

other items. the leo compliance methodology is year round and it's an activity that's year round for ocf. in general want to share with you some trends. we have a hundred percent compliance by tier one in terms of report submittal and interest among departments to move this forward and also seen a good and noticeable difference in community advocates mainly due to language access networks they have quarterly meetings with invited departments and i want to share with you some of the findings of our report. the findings have been generally consistent for the past 3 years as you can see there are still a lot of

inconsistent cies and gaps. the quality of translation and interpretations are still inconsistent and the cost for conducting business in multiple languages is a burden for the departments. as you can see for the fiscal year 14-15 the proposed budget include on-site interpretation and bilingual pay make up the majority of the cost and i want to point out over 80 percent of of the $8.9 million budget reported here is comprised by 3 departments. and lastly this is a 3-year

comparison of the budget that has been submitted to us. again on-site interpretation has continued on an upward trajector y. >> supervisors in may 2014 the immigrant rights commission adopted rules and regulations that have met the threshold and there's 3 main steps to the process. determination of substantial number of thresholds by obtaining evidence from reliable data sources such as the american community survey or anything else that we can get our hands on that is being validated information and validate this

information having it analyzed by by the san francisco planning department and compare with previously published data studies. the step may include a baseline study if there is no information available or the margin of error places the threshold in question as in the case of filipino where there was a difference in the threshold and certification after we validate the data we issue written notification to all city departments as with the original amendment in 2009, 18 months to implement citywide. we're very pleased this year to to be able to certify filipino as a language.

now the margin of error is plus or minus 930 and this is the specific reason why ocea wanted to do a baseline study. and at that time the 2000 census provided a lot more detailed information there were a hundred questions on the long form and changed the process of collection collecting data in 2010 with only 10 short questions on the census form so it didn't give us any information and this is why we felt in order for city departments to properly provide language services to the filipino population the study was necessary. >> just to share with you

quickly the methodology for the study is 3 fold. we had interviews with the community and other experts. we also had a survey of city departments and community organizations and residents from april through may and we also had several focus group discussions primarily with bilingual and filipino staff in the city and we're still finalizing the study as we speak but would like to share with you some of the highlights that we've seen in writing the report. in response to the survey of all departments of tier 1 and 2, 65.5 percent, 69 currently have bilingual staff available to interpret or translate in

filipino and departments reported that the average time frame that it will require for them to translate vital documents are as follows -- 62 percent indicated a year and 17 percent indicated about 3 months. we also conducted a street level survey of over 75 city residents conducted with the assistance of our community ambassadors during april and may. 60 percent of the respondents reported that they prefer information in filipino and 28 percent indicated that they want both english and filipino and just 11 percent prefer just english. we also conducted a survey and we found that 60 percent of their clients served prefer to read

in filipino and 40 percent prefer both filipino and english and supervisors i might add that the surveys conducted the written surveys with information collected were distributed to over a hundred cbo's and city departments and end use ers so we tried to do the best we could in a 2-month period so since the language access oversight was assigned to ocea in 2009 i think we made a number of improvements and i have to say without our community partners none of this would happen they challenge and push us and we work together to hopefully better serve our residents in san francisco for whom english is not a first language but some of these improvements have range from everything to standardized reporting and a language summit

in which the community participates and our language access network who is here today and the advisory group meeting quarterly with the departments and identified the departments they want to meet with and do joint problem solving and this is a nationally recognized program and then of course thanks to your leadership the language access community grants program. then we have with us today our small but highly competent team of in-house language specialists who i'd like them to stand up. okay. so you can see we only have two full-time chinese specialists one doubles as the outreach and education media and production

coordinator and then we have one spanish person speaking person whose position is temporary we'd love to make her permanent and one filipino tagalo speaker who is also our research and a backup spanish interpreter. she's the unit leader and supervisor and our lao compliance officer and in addition to serving as our analyst and my right hand and everything else. then the community ambassador program assistant who is a full-time program assistant is the as-needed russian interpreter so we have the capability of specialists who do both interpretation and translation work and this is really rare because these are entirely different skill sets. the unit is overwhelmed i have to be

honest and including commissioners and community members and often requests for very complex translations that normally take months and cost thousands of dollars we're able to do this work at probably a fraction or not even a quarter of the cost to contract out and we could do more if we were adequately staffed and resourced we have the competency in the group and finally since 2010 we've conducted regular surveys of city departments we want to hear directly from departments particularly frontline users and this is what departments have been telling us for the past 4 years that the leo language requirements are not always clear so there could be tweaking done to that that a centralized unit would be highly desirable. while we

admin ister -- we negotiate the lowest cost and highest quality service departments would also like to see this done for document translation because that's also quite expensive lower the cost and increase the quality of the program that would really be advantageous for the city -- save us a lot of money. and the working group -- this year we did initiate round table discussions with our first group and public contact coordinators and these are useful so we plan to blend that with our language access working group so we'll have departments and community groups talking to each other all the time and finally departments asked for a clear process and policy and so some

departments are unclear on what level d h.r. tests at for instance document translation and complex interpretation required different standards and competency above the basic speaking ability which is what is currently tested for so something to consider and finally our recommendations -- we agree with what is being said by departments and community members we should eliminate the tiers and every department should comply with the language access ordinance. we recommend changing the reporting period to every 2 years because from year to year doesn't really show much difference and it's a large burden on city departments to have to collect all of that data and then we also recommend eliminating any redundant or irrelevant data requirements in the lao also using a single standard for determining

language thresholds right now the lao has two we think just 10 thousand speakers of a language is much simpler and clearer and we can validate that it's easy to get that information we do recommend that we determine this every 2 years rather than annually because again it doesn't change very much year to year and 4th and fifth ly we recommend providing adequate resources for language services across city departments and a centralized language services assistance unit for city department and see that would help to tear down the costs as well as make us more efficient and we'll be glad to answer any questions if you have any. . >> i want to thank you for all your work and putting this information together i have a number of questions and i think i'll ask one and go to the departments. first of all i think the recommendations that

you have are things that i could be open to although i do think i understand that we have redundant data requirements that we should eliminate. i think doing an inventory every year is important so that every department -- quick question i have -- have you been able to think about what an ideal budget would be to meet the needs that you see in the demand for these services across departments? they have some sense of what the demand is but it's difficult to articulate what the staffing might be to address that. >> we've done some baseline studying and you know benchmarking i know that the san francisco unified school district had 8 to 10 full-time

interpreters so that's their full-time job you know demand will vary you may have tremendous volume for spanish and chinese we know that and not as much for other languages but we think 8 to 10 full-time interpreters and translators who can also go out and conduct community outreach and education would be sufficient to handle citywide requests. currently we have requests that range from emergency public safety and crisis requests which we give always first priority to. we got one just a week ago that involved contracts and very complex information there's a drop down menu of one hundred different terms that we can't even understand in english so it would take someone full-time working on that a couple of

months so we think 8 to 10 people on a full-time basis is adequate based on the current volume that we're experiencing. >> okay thank you very much. we do have a number of departments the so-called tier one departments. i want to thank you for your work. >> it's it's our pleasure to be here i have officer stokes our coordinators. obviously we can speak to whoever needs our assistance is a top priority of the police department the nice thing is we're a department of orders so there is no negotiation if we say that that's an order then the officers shall comply and having been that department now

better than 3 decades there are certain things that just make sense and are the right thing to do and this is one of them so to that end our policy on language access service for limited english free language service and lep persons do not speak english as their primary language and have a limited ability to read write speak or understand english. language barriers between law enforcement can jeopardy eyes safety and prevent individuals it's critical to ask that this does not happen. nothing in this policy prohibits members from using other informational skills to gather information necessary to protect public safety identify the nature of

an issue brought to their attention or provide basic information in addition to this base policy over the last few years we also have updates and other things that we added to what was already a very robust policy. in june of 2012 we put out a department bulletin that prescribed how it works more in concert with the different provisions of the leo and updated in may of 14 so whenever we have a modification of policy it lasts for 2 years. we keep it current. it's basically an index of what language someone speaks i believe there's 19 languages on

the cards and the person literally points to the language and in september of 13 den initiated software that can readily allow them to identify officers that are certified in tagalic and vietnamese if vietnamese i think it's also important that we actually hit a huge milestone thankfully to the board of supervisors and our smartphones we are the only department in california maybe the united states with department issued smartphones and