>> the mayor's disability council meeting will now have introductions read by derek. we're not on yet? >> we're now. >> okay. >> good afternoon and welcome to the mayor's disability council this friday, june 20th, 2014 in room 400 of san francisco city hall. city hall is accessible to persons using wheelchair -- wheelchair access is provided at the grove, van nesand

mcallister. assistive listening devices are available you been and our meeting is open-captions and sign-language interpreted. our agendas are available in large-print and braille. please ask staff for any additional assistance. to prevent electronic interference with this room's sound system and to respect everyone's ability to focus on the presentations, please science all mobile phones and pdas. your cooperation is appreciated. we welcome the public's participation during "public comment." you may complete a speaker's card available in the front of the room or call our bridge line where a person will handle requests to speak at the appropriate time. the mayor's disability council councils are generally held on the third friday of the month. please call the mayor's office

on disability for further information or to request accommodations at 415-554-6789 or our tty at 415-554-6799. a reminder to all of our guests to speak slowly into the microphone to assist your interpreters and captioners. >> roll call. >> councilmember kostanian? >> present. >> councilmember star lara, absent. >> councilmember denise senhaux? >> present. >> councilmember harriet wong?

>> present. >> co-chair supanich. >> present. >> reading and approval of the agenda. item 3, public comment. items not on today's agenda, but within the jurisdiction of the mdc. each speaker is limited to three minutes. item 4, information item. report from co-chair zarda. item 5, information item, report from the director of the mayor's office on disability. item 6, information item, impacts of transportation network companies on the disability company in san francisco. transportation network companies such as uber, lyft and sidecar allow passengers to use an app to request a pickup in a privately-owned car. the tncs are regulated by the

california public utilities commission. the disability community has raised concerns that these new transportation services may not be accessible to people with disabilities. presentation by christiane hayashi, san francisco municipal transportation agency, deputy director for taxis and accessible services kate toran, san francisco municipal transportation agency agency, paratransit manager. there will be a break, the council will take a 10- minute break. item 7, information item, ada transition plan capital projects for fiscal year 2015 and fiscal year 2016. an annual update on requested capital funds to provide design and construction on the remainder of the city's ada transition plan projects. information on other ada transition plan projected that are currently in design and

construction, presentation by john paul scott deputy director for physical access, mayor's office on disability. public comment is welcome. item 8, information item. play area ada checklist. an overview of the play area ada check lift for new city playgrounds and recommended design policy. this policy will impact nearly 30 new accessible play areas scheduled for construction in parks and recreation centers over the next three years. presentation by john paul scott. deputy director for physical access, mayor's office on disability. public comment is welcome. item 9, public comment. items not on today's agenda, but within the jurisdiction of the mdc. each speaker is limited to three minutes. item 10, information item correspondence. item 11, discussion item. councilmember comments and announcements.

item 12, adjourn. >> thank you. next we have agenda item no. 3, public comment. i have bob. >> i'm bob planthold. i want to raise an issue that is something where you can more -- with impact raise questions. i learned this week that the paper forms provided by the california secretary of state for voter registration are not in accessible format. the white house for the blind staff told me that they get paper forms that are not in accessible form and i checked and they are not. it's not that they just don't make that -- i don't know whether there needs to be a specific individual request, but when the white house for the blind is issued paper forms

that maybe myself can fill out, but some of their clients and staff and board can't, some is inconsistent here. now the current secretary of state is termed-out. so i'm not sure who would be handling any requests, but i think the disability council could say what is going on here? that could help press whoever is the new secretary of state to better respond to this. thank you. >> thank you. i have no other slips. is there any other public comment, general public comment? thank you. next item is a report from co-chair zarda. >> thank you, co-chair supanich. at our last mayor's disability council in may we invited bart's chief marketing officer, aaron weinstein to do a presentation on the upcoming new fleet of train cars and discussion on accessibility options that were planned.

following this presentation we had a great show of public comment, as well as comment from the fellow councilmembers on issues that they all felt some needed to be addressed. following that meeting the council decided to write a formal letter to the bart board of directors for the upcoming meeting held this thursday and this letter would be done to thank you mr. weinstein for his presentation and suggest certain issues regarding for accessibility. taking in comment from each councilmember, co-chair supanich and i wrote a letter expressing our gratitude and issues that need to be resolved. this letter i will go ahead and read now. "june 9, 2014 to bart board of

directors, grace crunican bart general manager. the san francisco mayor's disability council would like to thank aaron weinstine for the presentation. this comprehensive presentation illustrated the benefits and challenges the redesign. the council would also like to commend bay area rapid transit by introducing elements such as illuminated signs, precorded stop announcements, color-designated seating for people with disabilities and dedicated spaces for wheelchairs and bicycles. based on comment and community feedback after the presentation, the mayor's disability council would strongly urge you to adrop the the following: request that an coordinator provide support and guidance when and where ada

compliance is necessary. ensure that realtime visual announcement audio. move the pole from the entryway another 8-10 inches so it's closer to the passenger seats on the right or move it to a passenger seat entirely and change the color of the priorities seating from green to the federal blue ada standard. we believe that by implementing these changes, bart will continue its practice of proactively addressing the accessibility needs of a wide variety of passengers with disableds. thank you in advance for your consideration, signed mdc co-chair chip supanich and co-chair derek zarda." this letter was presented and delivered to the bay area rapid

transit board of directors this past thursday and a public comment from a wide host of disability advocates and members of the public from the greater bay area and i'm pleased to say as a result of this effort and 5-2 vote, the bart board of directors have decided to move forward with doing testing on -- to order a test round of ten cars of various different accessibility features so that they may have more information in real-life practice of these implementations to further decide on what needs to be done. as also they have assigned a staff member as their designated ada coordinator. i am very pleased with this outcome, but we all know there is much more work ahead and on behalf of the council we would like to thank the participation of the mayor's office on disability and bart

accessibility task force and members of public and advocates who helped to make this possible. thank you. >> thank you, derek. next item is item no. 5, report from the director of the mayor's office on disability. by director johnson. >> thank you co-chair and good afternoon councilmembers carla johnson the director at the mayor's office on disability. i want to start my director's report by thank youing you for your advocacy around the bart car issue. i wrote a letter of my own on behalf of our office, but i think your letter very clearly describes all of the issues and does a very graceful job of not only thanking bart, but also challenging bart to make sure will be design is really one accessible for all. so my copy of my letter is in your correspondence, but we don't need to read mine outloud. i have three items that i would like to share today. an introduction to new staff.

a conversation and update about elevators, and then a report back from a recent hearing about employment with people with disabilities. we'll start with the staff, that is always the most fun. i'm delighted to introduce our student intern, anna, who is in the house, front and center. hanna is a student from washington high school, and she is also a member of the mayor's youth commission. she has been a wonderful addition to our office and you will get to learn this for yourself, because she has a piece she would like to share with you a little later in our presentation. secondly i would like to introduce donna atkins, who is sitting right to my left. her job title is programmatic access specialist and started work in our office just last monday and already hit the ground running, which isn't surprising given her background. she has worked previously at the pacific ada center, which

is kind of boot camp for ada coordinators in the bay area. she also worked at the children's council, and she is a board of supervisors' appointment to the golden gate regional center area board 5. you are going to be seeing a lot of donna in the coming months and years, we hope. so i wanted to welcome anna and donna, because it's wonderful to have you both on board. and i also wanted to announce that starting on this coming monday, june 23rd, we'll have our last new member start work. his my name is tom and he is a senior building inspector from the department of building inspection. he will be working in our architectural access program doing our quality control plan review and field inspections on our publicly-funded projects. and once he is on-board, we'll bring him to the meetings, so that you can be introduced formally. so elevators.

there has really been a lot of good activity surrounding elevator access and i want to give the mayor's disability council some of the really good credit about those conversations because the hearings you have devoted over the last two years and your housing resolution really helped to raise awareness about the critical role that an elevator access plays in keeping our existing accessible affordable housing functional. and as we have heard in testimony both here and in other places elevator access has been especially challenging in older buildings, including the housing authority properties. and also the single-room occupancy hotel rooms. and of course, what happens is when these older buildings go out of service, for maintenance and for repairs, then residents lose the ability to get in or

out of their homes, sometimes for hours, sometimes for days, sometimes for even longer. so i really want to acknowledge the amazing work that the council has done about this issue, but also our advocacy groups such as senior and disability action, the sro collaborative, housing rights committee, independent living resource center san francisco and others. because they have done surveys to really understand the scope of the problem, they have personalized their stories and advocated for hearings and also advocated for funding and because of this collective advocacy, i want to announce there is going to be a hearing on this coming monday, june 23rd, starting at 10:00 a.m. in room 416 here at city hall. it's a hearing before the land use and economic development committee and this hearing was sponsored by supervisor jane kim, who has district 6, where many of these problems occur.

and the supervisor has sponsored this hearing specifically about elevators and disability access in single-room occupancy hotels. there will be presented by the department of building inspection, the health department and our office. and the focus will be on disability access when elevators are out of service, the cost of repairs and replacement, and best practices for mitigation by property owners and building management. this is a very important hearing and both the council, and other disability advocates have clearly gotten the attention, i think, of our policimakers, both the board of supervisors and the mayor's office and i strongly encourage to continue that advocacy and to attend and to speak and i hope to see some of you there for a repetition that hearing again will be on monday, june

23rd, starting at 10:00 a.m. in room 416 here at san francisco city hall. and speaking of the mayor and the elevators, earlier this year, i had briefed the council to let you know the very good news that mayor lee was able to allocate $5.4 million in this budget cycle to upgrade and overhaul the elevators the san francisco housing authority properties, and the housing authority as you no doubt recall really provides affordable and accessible housing to a significant number of seniors and people with disabilities here in san francisco. years ago when the federal government stopped providing adequate funding for the housing authority, maintenance problems like elevators started escalating and the stories that we read in the chronicle over this sad state of affairs, showed the impact of these

elevators. i met with the housing authority and their elevator consultant and i'm happy to report that our office will perform the quality control and plan check and field services to make sure these upgrades are possible and what i learned in my meeting the city will use the $5.4 million that the mayor made available to renovate the elevators. >> we have no captioning. >> this is a call to our control room to let you know our captioning has stopped and asking you to make the technical adjustments to bring that back. and i will hold off just a moment to see if they are able to make that adjustment. your patience is appreciated.

>> is there anybody on the bridge line at all? okay. >> and we'll also go ahead and give a call in to our sfgovtv just to see if they can restore the captioning service. this is where we start playing the "jeopardy" song; right? [laughter ] okay, it looks like we're back so going back to elevators, elevators and housing authority properties. the city will be using the 5.4 million dollars that the mayor made available to renovate the elevators at five different housing authority sites, which will cover six buildings and 14

elevators total. and those locations are the clementine towers in south of market. pingong in china town. rosa parks, 430 turk and 1880 pine street in the western edition, for those who are familiar with those properties. and last of all, speaking of elevators our office is part of a single-room occupancy elevator work group that was convened by the department of building inspection and our continuing role will be to advocate for possible legislative changes to incentivize repairing and upgrading elevators in single-room occupancy hotels. so i will be keeping you posted on that progress. then with your patience, councilmembers, my next item is to talk about a supervisors' hearing. supervisor mar on june 5th sponsored a hearing to talk about the city of san

francisco's efforts to hire and to retain employees with disabilities. and this hearing was structured around a part of the city chart called "rule 115." and this rule allows the city to hire a person with a disability without going through the standard civil service process for testing and placement on an active list. this rule has been in place since the mid-1980s and it was necessary then just like it's necessary now, because depending on statistics that you listen to, people with disabilitis are only as one-third as likely to be employed as people who don't have disabilities. and our economic circumstances reflect that. so as is common with labor statistics, those numbers are just counting the people that are actively looking for a job and they are not counting the people who have actually given up all hope

of ever getting hired. so with rule 115, there are checks and balances built in. the potential hire needs to meet minimum qualifications for the job. they have to have a severe disability, and then they serve a one-year probation. and this rule also allows the city to move someone from one job classification to another, as a reasonable accommodation, so that that employee can continue to work, if they become disabled during their career with the city. so supervisor mar's hearing was a really great hearing. well a presentation from the department of human resources, who gave an overview of their process. i provided some context describing the underemployment of people with disabilities, i spoke about my personal experience with this rule and i also talked about my experience as an employer during recruitment to bring people on-board and my efforts to hire people with disabilities. we heard a lot of really eloquent advocates in the

community, including senior and disability action, the fdr democratic club, the ark department of rehab and tool works and what we heard from the department of human resources was a commitment to do more recruitment and outreach. and our office also offered to collaborate with dhr and provide training for hr staff and assist in their recruitment efforts. the members of the board and especially supervisor mar made a commitment to support a human resources budget request for a new staff member, who will be tasked with outreach to the disability community. so on that good note, that concludes my director's report. i want to wish everybody a lovely june pride and at this point i will turn the microphone over to heather kittle our ada intake coordinator to hear her report on our ada complaints and requests for accommodations.

>> good afternoon, council. last month our officer received 90 inquiries about 90% these inquiries were from the public and 10% were from city departments. we received two complaints, six curb ramp requests and three requests for accommodation. including an electric sign blocking a parking space and issues related to documentation requirements for an accommodation request the a family shelter. the requests for accommodations that we received were primarily involving requests for blue-zone parking spaces. there was one request for a blue-zone to be installed outside of the north beach public library and there was also a request for a blue-zone to be installed outside of a residential home for an individual's personal use. the blue-zone request was granted for the location outside of the north beach public library. however, the

request for an individual's personal use was not granted. sfmta evaluates blue zone requests using objective set of criteria for criteria to ensure the most efficient use of parking spaces. blue zones are not established for a specific individual at a specific location and instead they are located in areas with high public use that can serve large numbers of the public. these types of areas include dense commercial zones, public parks and playgrounds. this month we also conducted the last session of our ada coordinator academy training. our deputy director joanna fraguli and myself, we trained 14 ada coordinators about the ada grievance providure for

procedure for the city and county of san francisco and also information about the investigative process and analysis m steps and documentation of requirements for the grievance procedure. now i'm going to pass it over to our deputy director joanna fraguli to go into more detail about about the academy training and other future training opportunities. >> thank you, heather. good afternoon, councilmembers. i get to speak last in our group and i have fun topicks to talk about. so i want to give you a very brief overview of the four sessions, two hours each, ada coordinator's academy. it's a pilot project that started this year. and as we're beginning to staff-up and maximize our forces and hopefully our impacts, this is something that has been very well-received by our ada coordinators and has already been requested for next

year. so it's something that we hope will become an annual tradition. the first session introduced individuals to the role of an ada coordinator, gave a basic overview of the ada, and got everybody to know each other, to get to know each other. second session was focused all on effective communication, and ways to provide information and work with people who have sensory disabilities, cognitive or learning disabilities as well. the third section was about access and john paul scott our deputy director for physical access and carla johnson our director trained our ada coordinators on some basic building blocks and things to keep in mind, a very general overview -- we don't expect our ada coordinators to be

architects, but finally the last session was all about the procedures and how do we help through the grievance process, problem solve situations and prevent bigger issues and also develop new policies that are more welcoming and accessible and useful to people with disability and access to services. it's an exciting project and you will hear more about it as we do more work in the future. but at this point, i also wanted to share with you a little bit about our new intern anna, who you heard a little bit about in carla's introduction. anna comes to us through youth works, part of our office's commitment to mayor lee's commitment to employ youth. as one of our missions of

course is you heard the statistics about the employee of people with disabilities was to actually provide some work experience for youth with disabilities. so we worked with the youth works this time around and we specifically requested that they solicit, find and match our office with a high school student or youth with any type of disability, especially a non-visible disability. so anna came to our office about two weeks ago and has been quite a treat to work with her. you will hear more about her in a few minutes when she will introduce herself. but all i want to say is that she has infused our office with the youth and vigor and kind of inspiration that some of us old bureaucrats need sometimes. [laughter ] so i'm very happy to introduce her to you, and ho