>> good morning. this is the regular meeting of the government audit and oversight committee. this meeting will now come to order. supervisor london breed will be the chair of this meeting and to my right is supervisor tang the vice-chair and president david chiu.

the committee clerk is eric and i would like to thank sfgovtv, mr. jim smith, who will be facilitating sfgov on our behalf. madame clerk, do you have any newms. >> please make sure to science all electronic devices, completed speaker card and copies of any documents should be submitted to the clerk. items acted upon today will appear on the october 7th board of supervisors agenda unless otherwise stated. >> madame clerk we will have the individual civil grand jury reports. we will hold them individually and have public comment for each one. can you please call the first and second items? >> item no. 1 and 2 is hearing and resolution reidsponding to the presiding judge of superior court on the recently published civil gross margin report entight identify mayor's office of housing, under pressure and challenged to preserve

diversity." >> our honorable chairwoman of the civil gross margin will speak to us as an introduction to the work that they have all done over the course of the year . you were here two weeks ago presenting reports and continue to thank you for your service, because we know you are all volunteers and are completely dedicated and spent countless hours making this report possible. thank you. >> thank you. good morning. thank you for giving the grand jury the opportunity to speak about the reports in public. today you are going to hear the final three reports of our 2013-2014 and in those three reports we looked at the mayor's office on housing, san francisco jails and the city commission's websites. again, our recommendations, you will see has a theme of

"information access or transparency." and from the grand jury's perspective gaining citizen support and citizen engagement is to ensure a free flow of information. so let me run through the three reports very quickly just to set the context. we choose housing because providing a variety of housing opportunitis is critically important to ensuring a continuation of the economic and cultural diversity of the city. we looked at the mayor's aggressive pledge of 10,000 affordable units by 2020, and it was quickly evident that the keystone of that effort was going to be the mayor's office on housing. investigating the process of the housing office we interviewed representatives of those san francisco departments that have a hand in housing, including multiple interviews with leadership managers and staff personnel of the mayor's office on housing who were very

gracious with our increasing numbers of data requests, and asking of their time to talk things through. we also talked to the mayors of the office of community infrastructure and investment, which was formerly the redevelopment agency. and not only with the mayor's office on housing we talked with critical non-governmental stakeholders including both for-profit and non-profit developers, and leaders from advocacy organizations involved in affordable housing. and when it came to financial data we worked with the legislative and budget analyst with the budget reports and california tax allocation committee website. we used books and articles and the web to find current programs in the city and affordable housing programs in other jurisdictions. none of the jury claimed to be housing experts. so there are no policy recommendations. what we tried to do was understand and clarify the

city's approach to providing affordable housing in such a way that it was understandable to all. we made our recommendations based on what would help the public monitor and support the efforts that were being made and to hold the officials accountability for the trust fund that the citizen passed overwhelmingly. hans carter was the lead writer of this report and unfortunately family matters have interfered with him being here today, so make agy a critical member of the committee will present the report today. after the housing report you will hear about "jails." all civil grand juris are required to tour the jails, but not all the juries write a report. we visited the jails multiple times, as well as the jail-held

service facilitis at san francisco general, where we spoke to providers of medical and psychological services. we talked to members of sheriff's department and inmates and others involved in the jail. the jury decided to follow through with the report on issues that stood out as needing public attention. most especially the bond that the staffing of the jails are in because of state requirements for staffing, extended disability requirements necessity for significant overtime and circular relationships among those intel pentiums. mike will present this report that reflects the jury's concern and insights from those visits. third report is the survey of the city commissions' website. the jury saw the commissions as the bridge between citizen and city departments. often it is the commission that provides oversight to the departments and its citizens who sit on the commissions.

in the day of increasing reliance of the web for information, the jury looked at the website. you with hear about the difficulties of identifying how many city commissions there and on seeing what could easily be found on the website, including attendance records of the commission and representation. again mike skahill will present the jury's report. thank you again for the opportunity. appreciate your attention to all of this. and mike agy will start with the housing report. >> thank you. >> mr. agie, come on up. >> madame chair, supervisor tang, president chiu, thanks again for this opportunity to talk to you. our civil grand jury report, the mayor's office on housing, under pressure and challenge

to preserve diversity is directed at the mayor's office on housing or community development or what we'll be referring to as "moh cd." now civil juriors are not policy experts and we saw this document as an opportunity to put into plain english for the public how affordable housing policy and projects are made? that was part of it. but also an investigation to see that there was transparencyin access. to the relevant programs. the takeaway from our report is that diversity is vital to the sustainability of our city and we have to do more. and everyone agrees. we have to do more to address affordability for middle and lower income households especially those with children and other vulnerable stakeholders and now more than ever, we have to work much harder to achieve this because of some thicks that we identified in the report that we called a "perfect storm" of

certain challenges to affordable housing and that includes things to the closure of the redevelopment agency and the associates out of jurisdiction funding. the crisis of management in the housing authority that led to its reconstitution. incipient stewardship issues around the housing trust fund and while it has some special sources of demand are part of a global phenomenon. more people are moving to cities and all of these are placing enormous and simultaneous impacts on affordable housing production in san francisco. they are going to end up making moh cd the point agency for implementation. we find that the agency is generally well-run, but we want to remind them that they still have to prepare for specific challenges and critical is the financing and development of

projects, better monitoring about access to programs equal access to programs. also eligibility compliance, recertification of people in the programs. all of this is crucial for being able to intelligently debate options for future policy, particularly beyond the current administration and indeed the length of development process that we've seen, it necessitates our looking beyond 2020 right now. now having a measurable target is a good public policy and our report did take issue with some of feasibilities of the mayor's target of 30,000 units by 2020. but it needs to be said that our concerns were informed by our looking at past and current practice. and we know that these are some of the conditions that the administration wants to see changed. we know that san francisco has some special issues such as our history of regulations, supply

constraints, special sources of demand. but that doesn't change the fact that the current phenom phenomenon of increased demand and to implement will be similar to those done elsewhere. so those end i wanted to bring your attention to a new york times editorial entitled "yes, to housing in our backyards." it talks about the need to aggressive increase supply, about the need to induce the private sector to supply more of them. there is a great quote in the articled that says, "the rich can get richer, but the poor will get apartments." thanks for listening. and we can answer any questions you might have. >> great. thank you very much for your presentation. at this time, we're going to have a presentation from the

mayor's office on housing in response to this report. >> good morning supervisors. i bring up this copy not to be disrespectful, but because i am fighting a cold and trying to keep my voice. so we thank the civil grand jury for their efforts in taking a look at how the mayor's office on housing delivers affordable housing. we're going to go through our presentation and to look at some of the specific recommendations of the grand jury report. and how we are agreeing with those recommendations and how we're responding to those recommendations. so we agree -- excuse me -- i have a backup, just in case i can't make it through the

presentation. thank you. we agree that there is an incredible demand for affordable housing, and anybody who reads the paper, or looks for an apartment knows that. this slide talks about the fact that there are 42,000 new jobs in san francisco. i was at the business times breakfast the other day and the number 72,000 new jobs since the depth of the great recession and obviously, we haven't built 72,000 new units of affordable housing and that has contributed to the great demand, along with sort of the structural issues related to the demand for urban housing overall. obviously that results in much

higher rents. now exceeding $4,000 a month. and median home value or sales price value close to $1 million. those price levels affect all of us in san francisco, especially those of us who are not making the big bucks and who need a place to stay in san francisco. so the subtitle of the report "under pressure and challenged." is an accurate description of the challenge that we are facing right now. in response to this, you know the mayor in his state of the city created a 7-point plan to try to address this. this is part of the working group that has been going on as the grand jury alluded to. but it's about doing a variety

of things to address the affordability crisis that is going on. first and foremost, preventing evictions. making sure that residents who are living in affordable units are not evicted from those units. preserving affordable units. increasing the down payment assistance program to allow people to try to acquire their first home in the city, and doing that because the prices are increasing so much. revitalizing public housing. that is a tremendous resource to the city of san francisco in terms of serving extremely low-income people. and we need to continue our efforts to revitalize public housing, both through the hope sf programs like hunters view

and alice griffith , et cetera. it will extend the useful life of that housing and bring to that housing stock overall 500 million in rehabilitation, something that the federal government cannot do and is not prepared to do. we will continue to build more permanently affordable housing, whether it's a part of the redevelopment plans of the office of community investment and instrument, or part of parcels provided to us through land dedication and through public sites. >> mr. lee, we won't hold it against you if you use your

backup plan. [laughter ] >> okay, i will keep that in mind. we also need to expand the overall stock of housing. and that means both market-rate, as well as affordable housing. and that through this process the mayor has clearly directed city staff, city departments to talk about streamlining and that is why the report was directed primarily at the mayor's office on housing, but also in coordination of the work that the mayor's office on housing does with the department of building inspection, tom, the director of the department of building inspection is here, as well as your coordination with the planning department, and kate conner from the planning department is here. one of the first things that we want to say is that we agree with the grand jury report globally.

i think we are pleased at the grand jury notes that the mayor's office of housing and community development has a good reputation as being innovative and effective agency for developing affordable housing. that has always been our goal to be the best. and to leverage the resources that the voters and the mayor has given the departments to create affordable housing. the jury identified the 11 findings. many of which are being addressed and we have organized those findings into four broad categories. "over sight and policy review." "using technology" in part to be transparent. "maximizing diversity." and then "data-collection." so we'll group those so we can

talk about them succinctly. oversight and policy review: the recommendation 1 was that the board of supervisors should cop convene a hearing to review the time report from the mayor's office on housing task force and we'll work to schedule such a hearing by the end of the year. the recommendations are being finalized and by the end of the calendar year, we will ask for a hearing son that work. recommendation 2, articulate a strategy to improve the achievements of regional housing targets for middle-income housing. one of the sort of things that

identified are not only the mayor's office on housing, but the other housing departments in the bay area are sort of the regional housing goaling and clearly, if you look at our regional housing goals, the city has done a pretty good job at serve people at 80% median and below, very good job serving market-rate folks, but there has been a gap in the middle. one of the thing has there the mayor's housing working group has looked at best practices around the country, new york specifically to see what they are doing to reduce the -- to reduce the hole in that middle. so we can increase the resources going towards