10 years by building a lot of stuff for a clean power program. the things that looked like, the thing that looked like it was most lacking in the report is that it emphasized building large solar and wind and hydro projects and things like that, but really seemed to deemphasize a lot the idea of small solar and behind the meter efficiency throughout businesses and residences throughout the city and clean energy is headed in that direction. we're not just trying to get clean energy, we're trying to get decentralized energy that's owned by the city and owned by the customers. even though that other stuff is low hanging fruit that's cost effective, we need this to be more balanced and do a lot of --. >> thank you. next speaker

please. >> hello, commissioners, my name is ed holtzman, i'm representing 360 san francisco today. i'm excited to see the report, i looked over the executive summary last night and i think that in general like we're pretty happy that a lot of our comments seem to have made it into the document. i guess the two things that i would flag, just having read the first 25 pages, and i'll send some comments to mr. fried, i mean they are small like sloppy error type stuff, but the more substantive thing was at some point it says a more detailed analysis will be required and it kind of lists the things that will need to be scoped for that more detailed analysis and i think they did a good job of that. i would just want the lafco to, you know, take the lead in thinking about where that more

detailed analysis would happen, like who would conduct it and when and how that might occur. certainly we have heard from critics that, you know, advocates are presenting a draft of a plan or a draft of a draft of a plan and we want this to be as close to a plan as we can and i think that it's great and it provides the next steps that we would need to drill down even farther and i just want to make sure we do that. the only other thing that i would mention is it does kind of in a throw-away comment seem to suggest introducing -- it suggests a light green and dark green approach like marin and sonoma have but it suggests introducing the light green in a later phase of the program, but we need to opt folks into something that's cheaper than pg&e or else terrible things will happen as national president has shown, so the light green that is

cheaper and greener needs to be available from the very beginning. thank you. >> good afternoon, bruce will, ashbury neighborhood council. i would like to add a little more excitement that they suggest that because it can be handled in house at the puc that we could roll out even more than what was originally planned for instead of a 20 to 30 percent rollout that it could be even more. and i think that's exciting to try and bring in as much of san francisco as possible into the program as quickly as possible. thank you. >> thank you. any other member of the public would like to comment? seeing none we will close public comments and this is an information item so no action on this so let's go on to our

next agenda item. >> item no. 4, study on the implementation and opportunities for undergrounding of wires in san francisco. >> this is part 2 of a discussion we started at the last lafco meeting about undergrounding utilities and i believe we have a report of progress mostly wanted to get scope of work for the study coming forward. mr. fried. >> jason fried, lafco staff again. in your packet you will have a one and a quarter page, one and a half page that i drew up that goes over the big picture of what we drew up. if that is acceptable to you, more than happy to continue that work. if there's something that we're missing, something that you want to see changed, today would be a good day to give me those instructions so i'm not doing work on an area that doesn't need work. just to give you a high level view of what we're looking at, trying to figure out from a big picture

perspective how much are the costs, we know how much it is on average per mile but it's the whole kit and caboodle, doing everything at once. the question is

can we break parts up, can we break sections up, as there's legislation going through the board of supervisors right now on the undergrounding of fiber and doing a dig once type philosophy, what impact would a dig once type of philosophy have also on the undergrounding of not just fiber but also other utility, the electricity and telephone and all the other wires that are on the poles as well and trying to determine is there a cheaper way maybe that we can do it than just doing it on our own, digging the streets up multiple times which i know is something no one would want to see in the city. if you can dig once, figure out how we can do that together, finding out what the price points are. there's a lot of information that's been out there and done during various points in time, some of it is a little outdated now. so i would try to update the information , make sure we have all the correct number sz as of today or as of this period of time to make sure we are looking at it all hoeflistically and not comparing apples and oranges because we're comparing numbers from other time frames and finally find out what others have done, dealt with undergrounding, are there better practices out there and if there are figuring out, the biggest question of them all is what are the better option for funding and what hurdles lie in the way of those options. can we change the franchise fee, as someone who's worked on the cca program for some time, changing the franchise fee is not something that's really within the power of the board of supervisors these days. it was done in the 1930's and the city attorney's office says it's an agreement in perpetuity so we don't have control over it. but maybe pg&e voluntarily agrees to renegotiate or maybe something at the state level that can be done, look at those

types of things so we can figure out what needs to be done. the current timeline i have in front of you has me coming back in my december meeting which will be our next meeting since november-december of the holidays we combine our two meetings, coming back to you with a basic report, verbal report and then depending on a joint meeting with the puc and how much time it takes me to get the final draft of the internex report done, coming back either in january or in february with a written report as a draft, which can then be put out to public comment for a couple months i think would be a good time frame, let everyone have a look at it, come back to you with a final report that could then be presented to the board of supervisors and the city and county of san francisco so they can do what the project says although once again that time frame is very much based on how much time i have not working on cca to do this work. so that time frame could slip a little bit if things on

cca really get heated up. if something really heated comes out of the internex report and we get the puc energized on doing that, it might take me a little longer because i have to focus on the puc to make sure they are doing things correctly there. >> have you shared this with supervisor tang >> yes, i gave her a copy to make sure i was getting what she was looking for out of her request and she seemed very happy with what we were doing. yesterday i had a meeting with her and the san francisco coalition to underground utilities to have further discussions, they were the ones who kind of brought this idea to her to get their feedback as we. i know we have a representative today from that group who will speak on behalf of that group. they are excited to have things moving forward again. no one seemed to complain at least in the meeting to me

about what that looked like. from that spers tech tif i think we are on the right track but i need to get everyone's opinion if that's what you want or something in addition. we do plan on looking at both fiber and the utilities, not really mentioned in the work plan, i realized later that that was not mentioned but i wanted to make sure it was mentioned that we look at both the fiber and the other utilities at the same time. >> do we know of any place around the state of california since the time the report came out in around 2007 any place in california that has actually moved forward on an undergrounding process that we can use as an example for ideas what we can do here? >> san diego has been doing a lot of that type of work, i'm sure there's other places but i know san diego is the one the 07 task force report points to and the coalition we met with yesterday is also looking at

what they've been doing down there and how they have been able to do it. they have some cheaper price points, really looking at the numbers, i'm going to try to delve into it and maybe determine if san diego is cheaper why is it cheaper, is there something they aren't counting in theirs that we aren't counting in ours, outside of it's more expensive in san francisco that you would expect a little bit of a break difference here versus san diego. >> i'm also looking at stuff at the local level but also the cpuc as well so i hope you are able to touch upon those issues. >> that is part of my plan. most of our stumbling blocks, there's been a lot of work that's been done by legislative budget analyst's office and some other folks and as i've been walking around to some of the other supervisors' offices asking them questions about it they have given me some of their reports that's been done

on their behalf. it looks like a lot of the hurdles are outside san francisco government's control, it's more pg&e and state level stuff that would need to be done. i will do my best to identify where there are problems because of that, trying to identify here's the problem, here's a thing that needs to be fixed somewhere else, if it's something that needs to be fixed here i will identify that as well, saying here is something san francisco can fix itself. >> are there other municipality that is might be in the same predicament that we might be in in san francisco that could be joined in an *r a leveraged effort, i think that's something to look at, if there's opportunities we might have to go to scale or something with other places around the bay area that are looking underground. >> i'll add that to my notes to see if there's other places and seeing if there's other people we can partner with should changes need to be made. one of the biggest ones would

be a franchise, san francisco is the only one that's in the boat they are in. most of the others have created franchises that need to be changed. but san francisco's was done so long ago that option was never put into it. i'm not sure yet and i'll talk with the undergrounding folks see if they know of other folks we can partner with that would help us if we have something that needs to be changed. >> i would hope so because in perpetuity is a long time. commissioner crews. >> thank you. so i was very interested in our last meeting and supervisor haynes' request that we look into undergrounding. part of that was really around addressing the digital divide. so i was interested when i saw a wall street journal article recently that had to do with kansas

city's digital divide so i want to read really briefly something that i provided to colleagues and to the public. when google launched its fast internet service in kansas city in 2012, the web giant said it wanted to spread broad band widely and close the dipblg cal divide but a study submitted to the wall street journal suggests the company is far from completing the goal. in 6 kansas city neighborhoods found in only 10 percent of the residents subscribe to google's fiber service. by contrast, 42 percent of the residents surveyed in nearby higher and middle neighborhoods signed on to google fiber. so i think really what i'm getting at here is i just want to be cautious that we don't use lafco staff to look at something that could be potentially not reaching a goal that staff really got at as to, you know, the purpose

and spirit behind why we would support undergrounding. supervisor tang requested we look into long-term master plan, alternative funding sources, establishing city policies and implementation of the program. and so, you know, in pre-viewing mr. fried's work plan today to collect data that's already available, to update older documents where new information exists and include any new research that reveals options that may not have been thought of yet, i want to just be cautious that we're not getting into a wide scope that we are looking at what's already been done, that we want to look at areas where other city

agencies, what the time mighting for limiting scope. and i think that undergrounding project may be different, you know, using lafco staff, for instance, when we looked at (inaudible) or how elected officials are elected during, you know, if between election cycles or something like that where we're not touching on something that the board of supervisors or even other city agencies are doing so we're filling a gap for research that's not done any other place. so given the time sensitivity and priority of clean power sf and being available to do other research where

other agencies are not called in, i would just request the support from colleagues to direct staff to limit scope and i'm not sure if we should adjust the timeline, but i would like to make sure we limit the scope to, you know, a certain number of hours or also limit the scope of work so that we're not getting into doing other agencies' work. and i'm not sure, i'll ask you, mr. freed, for comments on that and maybe the scope is limited enough as you've set it out but i just want to make sure that we're setting priorities. >> sure. as far as limiting work, i mean, you will direct me as to what you want to limit me to. i don't think that the scope of work that i've laid out is actually all that broad. there's a heck of a lot more that could be done on this. one of the things i do want to do is because there are different agencies and different people

looking at stuff trying to pull all that together so it's in one basic catalog of information instead of a little bit here and a little bit there. one of the things lafco is notorious for doing is doing work that other departments aren't doing, i'm not saying the departments aren't necessarily doing their jobs in this particular case because i haven't done the research into it, but one of the things we can do is help bring it together. i don't see myself spending a whole lot of time on this. i don't necessarily know if i would want to limit myself based on number of hours worked, my first priority as i've said is cca so this will be when there's gaps like right now for the next couple of weeks everyone else is going to be looking at the cca report so i could work on it then. but once the comments come in i will be looking at it to make sure the comments are addressed

and the ones that weren't, why we're not addressing them. i am sensitive to the cc apt and this is more of a filling in based on the request of this body with some other work but making sure cca is my priority which is in i'm only giving the next meeting as to what i will actually guarantee to report on and not guaranteing anything further out than that. i don't know if that answers all of your question or not. >> it does, but also i think, you know, i understand that we are

doing, next, the work of, you know, the puc has not done on cca what i would just be concerned about is i know that legislation that supervisor david chiu recently passed on first reading in the board of supervisors on tuesday had to do with dig once. so has some work already been done or, you know, is it too late to -- well, it's not too late -- to make amendments on the second reading than to piggyback for supervisor tang to partner with supervisor chiu's office. >> i think what supervisor chiu is

doing are two completely different things. the undergrounding of utilities, fiber is a separate issue. we can have the discussion on the fiber side of what we're looking at, but the nonfiber side, that is all done by pg&e, they control that process and the city doesn't actually do that work. we ask them questions, i know the citizens have some questions about what's going on with undergrounding and what the costs really are and no one's dug deep into it and lafco has that ability to dig deep into the pg&e numbers of what's going on and trying to make sure that the numbers that say it costs x number of dollars to do is really the cost for san francisco to do the process. the dig once was my personal thought process if there's ways to save money by digging once we could piggyback on what supervisor -- that would be done at the board level. all i would do is come back and say, yes, there are costs that can be saved by digging once. if we combined let's say sf puc's sewer and water, if it saves us money what my report at that point would say we should have the city and pg&e should partner together and that's where the report ends. it doesn't get into any more detail than that, saying these two should be partnered because there's clearly a cost savings for both sides

to do that. i at that -- i end at that point and it's up to the city and pg&e to go forward from that point. >> i will yield the floor. >> i'm really excited about this, i was just in the sunset talking to folks about undergrounding last

night. one of the things we talked about were community business districts and the ability for community business districts to help in the funding of undergrounding so i know that sometimes we look at finance options through bonding and a number of other vehicles and taxes and so on and so forth, but i definitely would appreciate it if time permits to explore the possibility of contributions from community business districts because that's a tax and you are familiar with how those things are formed and whether or not those districts have the ability to commit funding toward something of this nature or using it as leverage in order to finance it in order to pay down the debt and how that kind of works would be helpful if time permits based on your timeline or if it's something we should probably look at after the report is completed. i don't know, but i just wanted to throw that out there because i think it's a real viable option. >> the quick response, there is an option, a way right now through the cpuc where an individual block or group of blocks can combine together and pay for the undergrounding themselves if they so desire. and so a business district you could potentially create one of those types of districts over a business district and then those businesses would pay for the undergrounding within their area. now, if they wanted to go out and help pay for something that was just outside that thing and we could also find ways i'm sure we can incorporate looking into how that potentially works, that shouldn't be much more than is currently in the system. >> commissioner mar. >> i wanted to thank you for the scope that you provided. i think it's very limited and i think it feels

like it fits within our broader goals. i have some similar concerns as commissioner crews that it doesn't pull anything away from our primary goal of clean power sf and cca work. i also share commissioner crews' i think focus and hope that it's really looking at how vulnerable communities could benefit from undergrounding as opposed to just affluent home owners in key areas that wanted to maximize their property values by not having the wires above them. so my hope is that there is some focus on equity that if we're going to spend the huge amount of money to underground that it's going to infrastructure and other means that really help vulnerable seniors, low income people and working families and not just affluent home owners. and i'm just being as blunt as i can about where i see some of

the advocacy around undergrounding coming from, but my hope, like commissioner crews and others, is really looking at how we not get fooled by google or big telecom companies that claim to want to close the digital divide but we need to look carefully if that's exactly what they're doing and then looking at the wall street journal online article that commissioner crews gave us, it really does look like from the surveys of the 6 low income neighborhoods in kansas city, it's ironic we're against kansas city in this world series game coming up tonight, but it's clear the six low income neighborhoods they looked at that there's very little participation because of the $300 activation fee. there's only a tiny fraction compared to the higher income neighborhoods in kansas city. so i think commission crews shared what is a good

insight about being careful when it's the telecom companies or google saying they want us to help close this digital divide. i'm grateful to the members of this lafco committee, i think they are committed to bringing more into our neighborhoods and it's a pleasure to serve with them on this body. >> commissioner lindo >> follow-up on commissioner mar, i think he has some great points. i'd like if possible for you to take a look and let us know if this is even within the realm of the scope -- to identify what limitations the city can put on this underground space. you said it's not necessarily the city who would be doing this but it would be perhaps pg&e and if there is any legislation, if there's perhaps around the country that limits how and what is

used underground and what i'm getting to is, one of the issues here is there's a $300 activation here or there's a $75 a month fee for high speed inder net that many of these low income communities cannot afford. if we want to see true equity can the sure assure there is true equity through the process of this undergrounding. >> you brought up an interesting question and point around the article that commissioner crews gave around earlier today. if the general public is interested it's over there -- stand over there so you can get a copy of it if you so desire. it deals with an area that i had not intended touching on, which is an actual business of how do you actually hook the people up? what we were looking at, at least what my understanding was, we were looking at this report purely from a how do we get the stuff done underground, what occurs after you hook everything up, that's a completely different

business model, that to me was going to be a completely different issue that i was not going to be touching in this report. you might remember when we talked about this at the last meeting i had brought up the concept perhaps that there would be a phase ii to this concept of we do the undergrounding, figure out what it takes to get the undergrounding where it needs to be and if there was interest and desire from this body i could pick up potentially the next step which would be how do you create a business model per se of getting the internet actually into physical people's homes and getting them hooked up. that was not part of what i was looking at because based on last meeting's discussion it seemed the group did not want me to go that way. if there is a change in heart on that i do need to know because that would be a much different work plan and i would have to put some serious thought into whether i personally have the skill set to create a business model for the city. i think that would require an

outside consultant coming in and that would require a budget that i do not have at this time. >> i think less than a business model but what legal effects can we have in this space underground. is there authority from the board or the puc to affect how businesses can utilize these public spaces. >> i get what you are saying. like what limitations does the city right now control, could the city stop someone from putting something underground if they so desire to. is that what you're looking for? >> or they say you can't use it unless certain requirements are met such as having 20 percent used by low income communities, whatever it may be that the board decides but is there authority to do that? is there precedent? >> that right now i would consider outside what i was looking at but you today will decide what i am looking at. if you decide you want me to, i will

include that in the work. we were only looking at how to put things under the ground, not what happens after they are undergrounded. >> commissioner crews. >> thank you. i just wanted to clarify that i wasn't saying to look at the high speed as the only goal or even to incorporate that as (inaudible) looking at, i don't know, feasibility if that makes sense, but what i was saying was i think we approved the undergrounding research based on our interests in closing the digital divide and so when i saw information about closing the digital divide in another city it just alerted me to, you know, think about the spirit in which we were looking at undergrounding. that's all i have to say on that.

>> i would like to -- part of the looking at undergrounding and trying to figure out how we expand the undergrounding to low income communities, part of what the costs are in that stuff. part of it is figuring out where do we have it and what does it cost. how do we get the basic fiber out to the neighborhood but once connecting it out to the basic homes and what the costs are, that was not something i was intending to do. more the basic undergrounding, what they call off the street to those things and how do we connect to the house would be something done separately later. my current game plan but feel free to add that in if you so desire, i will add it into my work plan. >> thank you, commissioner lindo >> i think i like your plan and if we can focus on what you provided