this to get up? >> we wanted to get a system that's scaleable for all city buildings and not just city hall so this particular system that we selected, it's being used as a server for sfgov tv rolled out initially in city hall. let's say puc wants to utilize the same system they can tag on to what we've been building the departments will be able to get access to their own content update the content themselves do not rely on real estate or relying on a central department to manage their information they will have the capability to update and post their own information. >> when is the implementation

-- is it chinese or spanish -- what's the date for that? >> approximately 6 months from now approximately. >> as you know every time we've talked about this -- 4 years ago i hate to bring that up but that's been the approximate reality around this conversation so -- >> let me provide some additional information we're on schedule right now we're building the english version and as you can see we have the physical hardware in place and so the next step is building out the template that's going to be used by the various departments and getting the information from the various department but i think really it's going to be dependent on the information or how quickly we can get the information and it's going to be in place probably within the next 30-day

and see this mock up demo we were able to build this fairly quickly with the information gathered in-house so i'm confident within the 6 months period we will be able to deliver on the five language that we identify. >> you said then 3 months -- when -- >> in 3 months this will be rolled out in the english version at the 4 locations in city hall so our plan is to roll out a new language every 30-days you know i think you know that is a conservative schedule because we're going to be asking departments to provide us with the translated information as we're working with the english version so as we're rolling out the english version we're going to be going to the departments to get the translated information to populate this system.

>> spanish or chinese you expect to be the first? >> the chinese, spanish, order, filipino then russian. >> so okay what i'd like to suggest it would be great if we could roll out that first language say september -- if you just as we rolled out the paper kiosk a couple of years ago when we roll out the chinese kiosk kiosk we can do that with a little bit of public relations outreach so that the community knows about this and i'd love to work with miss pawn's office and your office to do that and then in october if we're doing spanish we'd like to do that again with the spanish media so that we have a rhythm in a couple of months on how we're letting the public know about this. >> okay great thanks.

>> appreciate your work on this and look forward to finally seeing this happen i know this has been a 4-year conversation. >> looking forward to working with you to make this happen and director pawn's group as well. >> great thank you. >> our next department is the department of public health. and appreciate you being here. >> president chiu and supervisors i'm here for director garcia and for public health language access is a big issue partly because of how sensitive health is as well as the outcome when people don't speak the language or don't understand the language, it could be potentially harmful in terms of the health outcome so i think dph has looked at

language aspect as a key component of what they do and as of for last year spent close to $5.6 million on language access and out of that 5.6, 3.6 was in translation services. we currently have about 1000 bilingual staff and even though we actually have more than that because there are people who do not receive bilingual pay who are actually bilingual and provide bilingual services and 44 thousand have limited are limited english speaking individuals of which 63 percent are spanish followed by chinese and canton ese the expansion of

vmi we began to implement in 2010 and we had problems with fiber connection that i am happy to report that we have made significant progress most of the sites currently have fiber connection and san francisco general most of the primary care and specialty clinics now have vmi and one clinic is online at laguna honda also now have vmi and the new hospital being built every in patient unit will have the ability for any level of

interpreter service and we cover the languages more importantly we have access to one hundred additional languages for clients. we've made significant progress also in that at the moment we can actually translate materials between 7 and 14 days which is quite a record that we're very proud of. the interesting thing is even though we're talking about language it's one of the areas also that we're getting lots of demands around braille so that's an area that we're trying to work on and trying to develop expertise around braille and getting access to translation services for braille and something not spoken to is san francisco is getting older so we're getting requests for -- fonts we've

also made a -- every clinic has signage and we're able to provide it and another thing is actually have the units in the department of public health totally responsible for language assets and cultural competency unit and responsible for getting requests translation and making sure people trained around cultural competency and the quality control to make sure that the languages are accurate because many people who translate some of them are actually not in their own languages so it's important that you have quality control so you can understand what's being spoken so that's something else that we're doing in dph and if you have more

questions, this is zachary and they are both from the department and darlene is responsible for our language assets programming and does a lot of work and zachary is from h.r. >> our public health and healthcare institutions are some of the most frontline services do you have a sense of how often does someone come in and are there issues such that the system just doesn't work or do you feel right now it's seamless? >> i think i will say it's very seamless that's one of the things that we believe that the best way to provide language access is actually having staff in staff to provide it and we make every effort that in every

clinic whether san francisco general or community based clinics we have that capability. if we don't have the capability we have an interpreter service that's actually run by the san francisco general automatic transfer seem less transfer the patient themselves probably won't know that and then the dmi i don't know if you have seen the vmi the video medical interpretation but also we have -- >> i know i hear information from members of the community about challenges they have and i wondered is there some way for a complaint based system to get feedback after the fact there are san franciscans who

feel like the language needs weren't met but that's probably a longer term conversation that we need to have with other departments. >> last year we actually had 10 complaints and 10 of the complaints were resolved. >> what were the nature of those complaints? >> timeliness and initially had to do with the translation itself which is why darlene -- the goal of that training is not only the language itself but sometimes body language can tell something different and mean something different to the patient so we're working around that and making sure the training is consistent and because again when you are doing translation there's a lot of concern about the person you

have in the room and so we have to figure out ways of making that patient comfortable. that's also a source of complaint because some people might not want another person in the room so we have to go through the process of explaining why that person is in the room and also some people might come and actually want a family member and we have sensitive topics that we actually don't want the family member to be part of the encounter. >> again appreciate your work. >> thank you. >> and with that unless there are any other departments here to present -- recreation and park? yes come on up. wasn't sure if you were going to be here. >> good afternoon supervisors. i'm the recreation business manager for the recreation and parks department i'd like to say a couple of things i'm very

excited about the kiosk and vmi i've never heard of that so i'm going to look into that when i get back to the office so recreation and parks part of our mission is to provide healthy recreational opportunities for people in san francisco for everybody in san francisco as well as parks so essentially every single employee that works for our department provides direct service to the public. we have over a thousand employees ranging from program coordinators and soccer coaches to garden ers and park patrol officers so we are all day every day interacting with the public in various ways. currently this year our budget for translation and

interpretation was set at $40,000 of which so far we spent close to 30 thousand compared to last year at 15 thousand so doubled the amount of language translation services we provided. >> was that deliberate that you started to translate more materials? >> yes. one of the largest barriers that i think we've had a great leap in is providing scholarship applications so we now have the scholarship application available in chinese spanish russian and vietnamese and tagal will be coming towards the end of the summer now that that's on board there so along with the

application for scholarship we're also providing some written e-mail communication we've been translating to be able to communicate with our scholarship clients to remind them to renew or remind them that they are signed up for a particular program so we've done a lot of work in trying to stay connected on that in that respect. we also have been providing information on major family events in multiple languages so we started translating some of the promotional materials particularly when we had a recreational center opening obviously the materials were translated as well as palago recreation center so we also

provide multiple languages on our documentation for community meeting notices as well as providing interpretation if necessary for the community meetings so we've obviously had an increased interaction over the last year with our lep individuals and what we'd like to do in the future is work towards providing more translation and obviously i'm not in charge of the language access for the department, but i do manage a large part of our population that we serve so i think i don't have what our written policy is as far as language translation and interpretation is concerned and i'd like to work with our public information office to make sure that we have

something that's robust and really covers all the aspects of recreation and parks and i think we'd also like to one way way we can do that, too, is to expand, create a standard language on our written materials that offers and informs the public that we have the ability to have interpretation and translating materials so that people can request that. the other thing that i would like to move towards is actually promoting the importance of translated materials to field staff and share with them our ability for interpretation. so right now we have a few recreation centers who have facilitate coordinators contacted us saying i really need access for my community and i think it's really reaching out to the 25

or 26 recreation centers making sure all the staff there are aware that it exists and that they can use it and we currently track our language line usage and at that point we would be able to track by community center so we'd have a much better idea from rec center to rec center and park to park. >> you say there's no department policy around this. >> i'm not sure if there's not a departmental policy i just haven't see it. >> so i'd like to ask if you can work with ocea and obviously there's an enormous demand on families for your services thank you. >> thank you very much. >> colleagues what i'd love to

do at this moment is to move to public comment. i have a number of public comment cards: and if anyone else wants to speak in public comment if you would like to line up on this side and if there are translation needs available we actually have staff here today who can help. >> i would like to introduce myself i live in the visitacion

valley. >> i'm happy to receive this letter letting me know i can attend this meeting today. >> speaking chinese. . >> translator -- this english is in english. >> this is very difficult for us to read this english letter. >> speaking chinese. . >> translator: i am 77 years old i am a long time resident in the visitacion valley so i'm so concerned of things in my neighborhood. >> speaking chinese.

>> translator: i have so many friends it's really important to provide bilingual services to our residents. >> speaking chinese. >> translate or: besides this letter i think this kind of meeting should be provided in different languages. >> speaking in chinese. >> translator: so that we know what's going on in these meetings and we can express ourselves freely in this meeting. >> speaking in chinese. >> translator: not only for this meeting but -- and the

meetings in the future. that's it thank you very much. >> thank you very much. i think that exactly points out the need for what we're doing here. next speaker. >> speaking in chinese. >> translator: good morning. >> speaking in chinese. >> translator: i'm so happy to get this letter but it's really bad i don't read english so i don't know what it is talking about so i ask the people about it. >> speaking in chinese. >> translator: and somebody told me that this letter is about information for the meeting today. >> speaking in chinese.

>> translator: i thought the meeting today was about the low income apartment but i found out i'm wrong. >> speaking in chinese. >> translator: so i think the letter should be provided in chinese so that i that i can go to the right place. thank you very much. >> next speaker. >> speaking in chinese. >> translator: good morning everyone. my name is [inaudible]. >> i move to the united states from china. >> speaking in chinese.

>> translator: i am a u.s. citizen. i would like to contribute to my society more. >> speaking in chinese. >> translator: because of my limited english sometimes i would like to do more but i couldn't. >> speaking in chinese. >> translator: i know so many residents in the city have shared the same problem with me. they would like to contribute more to the society but they couldn't because of the language barrier. >> speaking in chinese. >> translator: i would like to recommend our city to provide more bilingual service in the future.

>> speaking in chinese. >> translator: so that more people can get involved in the society and help the society. thank you so much. >> speaking in chinese. >> translator: good morning supervisors. >> speaking in chinese. >> translator: in san francisco we have so many new immigrants. >> speaking in chinese. >> translator: we work so hard to learn english but at the same time we have to work so that we can support our family. >> speaking in chinese. >> translator: i concerned our

society is very much regarding the school our family issues but in terms of the language, because we can't speak very well so we can not contribute to this issue very much. >> speaking in chinese. >> translator: the interpreter just clarifying the issue that i just mentioned -- regarding

this morning i attended a meeting but i don't understand the contents so i really cannot understand the content very well so i don't think i can contribute. >> speaking in chinese. >> translator: i hope our city can do a little bit better in this area to provide more bilingual service so we can contribute and listen from the city thank you very much. >> one thing i just want to mention to all of the folks who just came is with our meetings here there are requests that can be made for language interpreters before the meeting so if anyone wants to have a

language interpreter before the meeting please contact the board of supervisors and we can help get an interpreter before the meeting starts. >> speaking in chinese. >> translator: thank you the information is about written translation for the letters brochures to our residents. >> absolutely and this is why we're having this hearing so we can figure out how to expand the services appropriately. >> speaking in chinese.

>> translator: good afternoon supervisors i'm multilingual and spokes man of the visitacion valley alliance two terms to the immigrant rights commission and i'm also happy that tagala is recently added to the ordinance. i ask why several members that you have just heard didn't offer their input. they show me this notice which is only in english. how could it be when you have a community that is looking forward to the projects

of the last 15 years and everything is only done in english back and front there's no way they could so i know that they can call in but they could understand the content of this notice how can they call in? it just doesn't make sense. >> speaking of a resident in my community the demographics in visitacion valley is about 60 percent asian pacific islanders and therefore the city must make better efforts to outreach the residents in their appropriate language in different ways other than online one way is to have the ambassadors program to have direct access to our residents and community groups most of all please make sure that all these plans are done with the communities and not planed