city of san francisco >> public utilities commission >> let's call this meeting to order 1:30. tuesday august 26, 2014. jasmine, please read the roll. city clerk: commissioner courtney, veet or, moran, torres, caen is expected shortly.

>> next item, to prove the minutes of august 12th #shgs , 2014. >> so moved. >> second. >> is there any public comment? seeing none. i will call for a vote. all in favor say, "aye". >> aye. >> opposed ? the motion carries. next item is general comment. if you are interested in speaking on items not on today's agenda, please fill out a card. first card i have here is from francisco decost a. >> good afternoon commissioners, jasmine and ms. hood. i see you are going to have a new secretary -- or back up.

that's good. i want to bring today attention of the commissioners a number of things. first and foremost we all know that we had an earthquake. of course we had this earthquake in napa, but what is happening now is the united states geological is survey, the maybe federal agency that invest a lot in earthquakes is pointing a finger in the direction of the hayward fault. so if you say the hayward fault, we should feel a little bit embarrassed because we were supposed to finish a project in that area in 2009 and it's already 2014. you know , attorney, you know me for a long time. we need to connect the dots.

we have some commissioners here who understand this but this hoodwinking should stop. so now they are appropriating more and more money and god alone knows when we'll finish that project. 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019. and then some of your employees who work for the public utilities commission have the audacity to speak and say don't speak to dr. spanola jackson or frances skoe decost a, if you want to speak to them, run it by us. oh yeah, the way some of these things are tackled is you

about -- buffoonery. you better produce. don't you ever say not to talk to the constituents of san francisco because we taxpayers pay our salary. just give us some respect. don't you ever think that we don't have constituents in san francisco bhor -- who are not engineers, who do a lot of reading, who have the best interest of the city and county of san francisco and also of our resources. don't you ever try to undermine them. commissioners, i will be speaking on other subjects, but this will do for now. thank you very much. >> thank you very much francisco for being here. the next card i have a mark weese. did i get that right? close enough? thanks for being here today. >> good afternoon,

commissioners, my name is mark weiss and i'm a writer and historian and blogger from palo alto california and i have a blog called plastic alto and i took an incredible tower of -- tour of this building. we had a very lively group and some ideas were generated. one thing that came up to plant the seed. 1769 marks the portola expedition of the spanish bho -- who started out in san diego and as a palo altoan. they saw palo alto and realized they were lost and went back to san diego. i don't have the exact timeframe but

it's consistent with the same thrust that found yerba buena and eventually mission dolores. with the 250 anniversary of this breakthrough of western civilization i think there should be a regional acknowledgment of these affairs. very specifically i look, i'm familiar with your agenda today in a drought and also closely following the regent -- recent earthquake, i think it would be interesting to write 2019 port los ola and uses of water and how it's changed from the 49ers era and spanish era and mission era and through modern times and our technological advances. i think it would be an interesting checkbook publishes parks

and libraries and streets and auchlt i think it might be interesting to have a resource or be fun maybe a little bit like the chinatown movie about the history of water use statewide, but i think it would be interesting for us, peninsula and san francisco centric people to have a history of water usage for 250 years. so i just thought i would mention that today in front of the commission. >> mark, thanks for being here and thanks for those comments. >> yes, commissioner torres? >>commissioner art torres: yes, it was juan and june ipero sister a -- sera. thank you for pointing that

out. >> thanks again. an clark. it's good to see you again. >> thank you. an clark. i'm here to tell you the good news that after wloot -- a lot of worry and concern and after a lot of work by all of you and everyone who pitched in we had a great summer. it wasn't without a few surprises. my week was the last week of the regular summer and it finished about week and a half ago. during that week we had thunder, we had lightning, we had power shortage, telephone shortages, we got very warm an we got very cold, and i was amazed at how much fun everyone still had at camp of all ages. again, i want to thank you for that

and let you know how much we appreciate all the hard work that went in to open the camp. finally we are going to have a gala on september 20th, to celebrate the 9th anniversariary of camp and to honor all the people who protected the camp during the yosemite rim fire. each week we had a whole program that was excellent for each of the weeks on the rim fire and what happened and what was the devastation and where we were now and it was something we never did before. we did this year and we hope to come back to a theme next year and have the same kind of presentation around the mountains that are there and that we love so much. so, again, thank you very much. we all had a good time, all my family made it, even my three-year-old and he's already told me that he is going back. thank you. >> thanks so much for all the

work that you do. it's a great effort from you and the volunteers. thank you very much. yolanda louis. >> thank you. we are not surprised that we are in a drought here this california and we need to protect our citizens and now we have a reminder with the earthquake that just happened. i wanted to remind everyone of the importance of looking at solutions for decentralised systems. we have the sewage from the surrounding cities. if that fail does not only impact the communities here but will impact those living in the area that this devastating catastrophic

event that may take place and i want to address this when i look at what i see the new improvement for a hundred-year-old system. i see the same things being done instead of taking advantage of technologies that are here. there is proprietary technology to remove the sludge. to revamp the sewage system it saved almost $500 million 500 000-0000 and also with the odor, they had to set aside additional money. in san francisco we don't want to see that happen, we want to use the latest technology to solve our problems. we can leverage a decentralized system. we can talk about for instance if you have different locations for school, one school may have been hit

by an earthquake and another school is not. if this school is up and running, the other schools can share that. if you keep going everything is going to be lumped which is too big to fail. if you have a system too big to fail, we are all going to suffer. we are asking you to take advantage of the technologies to show you that they have been up and running, the technology that these engineers that they have built for water and energy. we need to look at this in our community and i'm asking you to take a look at this because there are three major issue that can be resolved through technology that no one is addressing which is the sludge, odor and the additional smaller foot frint and the safety of the community. we want safety at the table an not hearing after the fact. we want to be involved in the planning stages and we have people in the community. we have two phd's on my team

alone that can provide you with information on these technologies and how they can be beneficial. not only to save the city money but protecting our citizens and the additional rate hikes that will be required because once you build the facility you are planning, it's going to cost a lot of money to keep it running. >> thank you again for being here. are there any other public comments on this item, item no. 4? seeing none, public comment is now closed. madam secretary, next item. >> cl eric clerk no. 5, communication. are there any public comments on the record? seeing none, public comment is closed.

earlier when i asked to represent a number of items with community work concerns related in part to green scapes, green jobs. i have asked for probably the past several months to have these items placed on the agenda and somehow and i don't know how, maybe it's me, it doesn't seem to be getting on the agenda. if i don't see those items getting on the agenda, i'm going to work with vice-president caen to see that it does. the committee is counting on us to vet these things out. donna, would you be kind enough to provide me a bullet point list of the items that i have requested under this line item, but also under the line item that comes immediately following the closed session. >> i will. >> thank you very much. commissioners, anything else?

are there any public comments on my comments? public comment is close. thank you francisco. >> commissioners, what if i share one thing in common and that is that we worked as union members and represented the community. what you have stated and what some of the employees do not seem to fathom is this: when we are talking about workforce development, we are talking about career jobs. you had a career job, i had a career job. the career jobs come benefits. when they play the youth with all this mickey mouse giving them opportunities for two or 3 months, no good training,

and even city build, you have to evaluate that, then what happens is you train somebody, but you train them at you about -- buffoonery. you can go in the army and go to various departments and train and choose what you want to be. that's what we need. the other thing is we have 29,000 city employees. for every constituent we have 900 employees. the population is 805,000. how many of those employees live in the city? so we have all these people who don't live in the city, who come here and their heart is not in the right place.

when we give the statistics that our unemployment is just 5 percent or 6 percent, that's not true. there are hot spots where there is unemployment as high as 50 percent. and we need to address that. so, i'm calling upon the unions, i'm calling upon the private sector that we need career jobs with benefits. that employees department heads are not paying attention to that. they listen to you, they promise you and then they tell you the hands are tied. summer time we can give 10,000 youth jobs. we did that as presidio but we also give career jobs. that's the time when we vested in something, we did real evaluation and took care to a

support system. our youth data support system. they need good jobs, they need career jobs. they don't need too much of the mickey mouse. amen. >>president vince courtney: thank you for your comments. i will piggy back. i think given the fact that we are funding a number of these opportunities, the time is now to explain the difference between a job opportunity between someone who is looking for work and job opportunity for a career. somebody having an opportunity to have health care, pension and to be able to afford to live here. what i'm looking for is a robust dialogue about how we steer people into those career pathways especially from communities that are under served and under represented. i haven't run into any opposition with any of the departments, really, it's about being sufficiently motivated to tee

up this conversation. francisco, thank you for those comments. if there is no other public comment, seeing none, it's closed. next item. cl eric clerk report of the general manager. >> good afternoon, mr. kelly is on elevation. -- vacation. we are going to start off with our summer youth employment program. >> julie for the employment of jenna fares. general -- a ffairs. in someway i really appreciate the dialogue between president courtney and the last comments for a cue up for this update and the public around how we've been really focused on investing in young people over the summer. before i start the presentation it's really important to clarify that our

youth employment summer program is one program of many that the puc has and we have a very intentional eye focused towards our opportunities and president courtney and i have discussed about those conversations but they do think the opportunities to provide employment over the summer provides an opportunity for young people where they are looking for paid employment and positive things to do over the summer and we have the opportunity to get them exposure to future careers at a variety of things at puc and important context issue areas whether it's around drought or renewable energy or $2 billion we are getting ready to invest in our sewer system. i'm going to start the presentation but just wanted to say there has been a lot of hard work over the last two 2

years to sure up our investment in young people to make sure it's not some frivolous pushing paper experience. we took over 100 youth to hetch hetchy this summer. so with that little announcement, again, today i'm excited to give you information on the work for summer employment opportunities for young people. i will try to do it fairly quickly and provide an overview of the strategy that we've undertook building off the success from last year and we did have goals that we were trying to achieve invested in youth this summer and the public and you commissioners attend that's going to highlight the work the young people did. so as many of you know the mayor last summer and again this summer

as part of his summer jobs plus initiative put forward the goal of this summer of the city employing 7,000 young people during summer months. again it really reflects the city's acknowledgment that it's a good thing for young people to have paid positive work experience during the months that they are off school. so this sfpuc was glad to help the mayor reach that goal that he articulated but also i think clearly recognize and understand that we have as an agency have a strong commitment to supporting people prior to the summer jobs youth initiative in that we really see in our own self interest to make these types of vechlts investments and have this type of programming and being able to educate young people on sfpuc services and provide skill building and opportunities for them and really

expose them to career exploration opportunities at the puc. for us we see these young people as the next generation as environmental stewards as they know we have a combined system. it matters what you put in your drain and down your toilet and that type of thing because they are the proctors of the system and we see them as the next generation of the rate payers. the second strategy was really focused on us being able to diversify puc pipeline by exposing them to job skills at the puc. you may know there are utilities throughout the country that are having conversations right now around the challenge or opportunities depending on how you look at it, at the puc alone in the next five 5 years over 40 percent of our workforce will

be eligible for retirement which makes sense when you think about it on the wastewater side that a lot of those employees came in around the clean water act. if you look across the country they are all talking chicago, washington d.c., around these issues of succession planning and they need to do that. for us as we think about how do we think about the 21st century worker and the puc investing in young people and getting them ready for this career is important inform us. additionally employment is going to help us to broaden our reach to the youth that we serve and they are families. this year we had more project based learning efforts and initiatives that were happening and through summer projects, and hopefully you will get a chance to see some of them in the events we are going to have. when you see these young people presenting these documentaries in many

creative ways to talk about the drought, conservation and they had projects where they talked about climate change. the fact that we have thousands of miles of pipe on the ground and it's this invisible system. the way they talk about it is different than the way our staff talk about it, they are talking to their families, presenting to the communities that they are participating with. finally we had a strategy that we are continuing to work to leverage the impact that we can have through partnership with non-profit sector and our consultants. whether it's the consultants agreeing to let young people to get mentored by them or shadow in the summer that already had leadership programs and they agree to tie their summer program to puc contents whether it's the drought or conservation etc. over the past two 2 years we've worked to in accrues the s -- increased the number of youth served and tie to

enhance awareness around puc and get the best thinking we can get from young people about how to community about what the puck -- puc is doing. this slide really is here to show you the type of impact that we are having and we did take a pause last year to see what was working and refine investments for the summer. prior to the youth information initiative last summer at bays line we were investing fl 275 people in 2012. in 2014 we were able to support 632 young people and this summer we'll have invested in over 1,000 young people. and we have this priority around the diversity of young people served. we piloted a project over the

summer focused on increase the youth that are part of the summer program at the puc. one pilot we had was called the project pull achievers built on the success the puc has invested in which is a youth internship program by kelly has been around for 19 years. we how to we could see if we can have diversity goals we had tied to that particular program. the pilot did a heavier recruitment and impacted neighborhoods and provided additional ways for youngster through that program mentor ship and leadership opportunities and training and as a result of that pilot we were able to double the african american project pool. 24 percent of the participants over the summer for that particular internship program we offered ended up being young

african american men. i want to thank him for working on that program and he works with the city and mayor's office helping us focus on diverse issues on the city. theo is right this and he's done amazing work with the summer youth. another way we have looked to expand the diversity was by expanding our partnerships with community based organizations. this is some of the most exciting work we are doing at the puc as part of our youth workforce efforts over the summer. last year we provided grants to community based organizations. this summer we were able to provide grants to 25 local community based organizations and they really do reflect neighborhoods that we have traditionally had harder time getting debriefed into and also helps us to be able to reach more numbers of young people. these are community based organizations that already

offer some leadership programs and as parted of them responding to our grants program they agreed and picked a learning project picked through the priorities of the puc projects. we worked with project enterprise to discuss what is some intellect to think through to identify what the project categories would be and when the request for proposals went out, it really focused on those categories. we were able to support 25 organizations and able to reach 500 young people just through that community based strategy. so we have been extremely enthusiastic about that. >>president vince courtney: what's the average amount? >> $25,000 and those would have come to you for approval prior to them going out. and then finally we had a

strong focus on puc issues and also had young people engage others. what we saw last year is youth engaging other youth rather than us working direct ly even though we feel young. we really try to expand on this strategy. this past summer, almost 600 young people toured our headquarters and southeast plant and those tours were led by young people. it's something we are going to continue to do throughout the school year and have young people lead those tours. over 100 youngster were able to tour hetch hetchy. as you remember we had the class from the high school that we are supporting open up the season of camp this year and first time we invested in that way of having a high school class exposed to that and all of those