back to the san francisco historic preservation commission meeting for wednesday march 18,

2015, >> i would like to remind members of the audience to silence any mobile devices that may sound off during these proceedings. >> i would like to take roll. commissioner hasz, hyland, wolfram, john's, commissioner matsuda and commissioner pearlman. we expect commissioner johnck to be absent. >> public comment. public >> tomorrow we are conducting in the tenderloin, we are focusing on two national registered districts

than the nationally located district for broader outreach to communities where neighborhoods are eligible. meeting will be held tomorrow from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. many it will be a workshop format where property owners can come to ask question and we focused a pretty large notification to property owners.

>> depending on the workshop, we will keep you up to date. >> item 2. requesting of staff to report back on a matter. >> i have nothing to report. however i want to mention to you that the planning commission is very interested in the resolution on your agenda today and we will be sharing that with them once it's passed. there may be an opportunity to hear from that to the planning commission at a future date to discuss the details of the resolution. the one item i did want to share with you is part of the staff report and you are probably aware the advisory council or historic preservation is meeting in san francisco and they are taken their organization on the road and

not meeting in dc but having their meeting here. right now on angel island they are hosting a listening session. the primary focus for this meeting is about social and cultural heritage. we just had our social and cultural heritage asset meeting this afternoon. i will try get as much information from that listening session as i can. there may be meetings. i have an opportunity to participate and i will report back to you if anything comes out of that committee. they will be presenting their reports at that meeting tomorrow morning. that concludes my comments unless you have any questions. >> mr. frye, i have one question, announcement. i was coming home

late last night from the hockey game and one of the facades on pine came down. they that had whole area cordoned off. >> no, there's a high speed chase. so it had nothing to do with the building. this brings up the question. do we make them rebuild it? >> that's a good question. there are ceqa implications and policy implications to figure out what is the best course of action. i will say that somewhat related now that we have a compliance staff member, we are talking with the zoning administrator about certain policies on whether or not to require somebody to build

something if it's been demolished or neglected and some of those policies will be coming to you this year hopefully by the summer and maybe at that time is a good opportunity to discuss situations like you are bringing up. i know, was it the columns at the san francisco center, there was a lawsuit >> no. the front part of the building. >> when we have that discussion can you bring some of the information because some of the analysis done was very good. i read it about 10 years ago. that would be good to rereview as part of that discussion. >> commissioners that will

place us under commission matters. announcements. >> no announcements. consideration of adoption? >> seeing none, any member of the public wish to comment. seeing none. >> move to adopt. >> second. >> on that motion to adopt the minutes for march 4, 2015. commissioner hyland, yes, commissioner john's commissioner matsuda, commissioner pearlman, commissioner wolfram and commissioner president hasz. that passes unanimously 6-0 and puts you on item 5. election of officers, in correspondence with the rules and regulations of the san francisco historic preservation commission the president and vice-president of the commission shall be elected at the first regular meeting

of the historic preservation commission held after the d. a. first day of january each year. >> i elect mr. wolfram to be commissioner and commissioner hyland to be vice-president. >> second. >> commissioners, there is a motion and second to elect commissioner wolfram president and commissioner hyland vice-president. on that motion, commissioner hyland, yes, commissioner john's, yes, commissioner pearlman, commissioner wolfram and former commissioner hasz, that is so moved and passes. [ laughter ] >> i will present president andrew wolfram. [ applause ] >> congratulations, commissioners. >> we will rearrange the

seating. >> we may, [ laughter ] . >> congratulations to your work and assistance. >> thank you, i set some goals for those two years.2 years. >> i really appreciate your vote of confidence. i really enjoy my tenure. thank you. >> commissioners, item 6. questions? >> i unfortunately wasn't able to be at the last commission meeting. but i did want to recognize that at the history expo at the old mint, the last

of february and first of march, the planning department historic preservation commission had a booth. i noticed there was a map there where people can pinpoint things they were interested in. i saw there was a respectable crowd outside of the booth talking to the people who were manning it and i thought it was extremely nice. >> thank you. commissioner hyland? >> i had two things. one for those who may or may not know this, i had the opportunity to go to washington d.c., that's where i was last hearing and we were doing legislative day for the american institute of architects and we had the opportunity to meet nancy pelosi's aids. mostly what i wanted to bring up today is advocate for three legislations and one of them

was the continuance of the historic preservation tax credits. what you may or may not know is that nationally we are going through a whole tax reform that's being pushed by ryan out of wisconsin. anyway, but today is a deadline and unfortunately it's too late for our commission to do anything, but senator loom nar, i'm sorry, congressman and turner from ohio have introduced legislation that would make the federal historic preservation tax credit permanent that would take it outside of the tax reform and they at the close of businesses the last day to actually reach out to our legislators. so i just wanted to bring that up if people can reach out before

5:00 eastern. >> what's the legislation? hr what? >> i can forward that e-mail. yes. >> okay. that was one thing. the second thing is we met the cultural heritage assets committee met earlier today and had an update for you. >> christina from the small business office and was passed on march 10th. it's waiting for the mayor's office. it's the legacy business registry legislation. it did pass and waiting for the mayor's signature. the original legislation had tax

included. it has been removed. the idea is that as the legislation gets further and the small business commission, as it's being put into the purview of the small business commission there to bring back recommendations by -- september 30th of how this registry is going to be branded marketed. currently the tax incentives or any other kind of incentive that our committee is hoping to create as goals coming out of our effort is currently not in the legislation. they also changed the definition of a legacy would be and they changed that and added backen that it would be a business nominated by the mayor, board of supervisors or small business commission. that's

another little tweak to the legislation. if it's a business that's been in existence for 30 years with no break more than 2 years, then it will be eligible. it will be tools to -- to be nominated. we did have a good meeting. we had charted out our next 6 months. so for april, may and june we are going to have further presentations to our committee. in july we are going to try to pull those together and identify what the goals of our committee will be. in july and august try to create, right to reach out to more of the community neighborhood meetings. we are working with legal and with jonas about how we can attend the community

hearings without while we are still adhering to the sunshine ordinance requirement. >> commissioner hyland, if i may i actually conferred with our city attorney on that subject matter and she's actually here and prepared to respond to that. >> hi, victoria wong. city attorney's office. i think the legal requirements will depend on the exact format of the way in which the members of the committee wish to participate in the community meetings and whether these meetings are taking the place of regular hearings or you are there to just listen. so we can discuss the specifics of what you may have in mind or what the different possibilities are and what the public notice and other requirements would be based on those different scenarios. >> so lastly, i don't know where our

advanced calendar in the agenda, i see it's scheduled for april 1st. so we may need to reschedule the next hca meeting for the third, wednesday of the month. >> do we have an agenda item on april 1st? >> it's the 20th. >> two items on the agenda. >> okay. commissioner hasz? >> so just to going back a little bit i want to thank tim frye publically for my time as president and the amount of time tim put in to helping me reach these goals and putting up with my philosophy on stuff and why i would come to ideas and etc. any ways, tim, thank you very much. i appreciate all of your time. thank you. >> commissioners, if there is nothing further we can move on to your

regular calendar. you have one item agendaized item 7 for 2014-001501 crv, the presentation -- preservation alternatives policy. >> before i turn it to the planning with environmental division, i wanted to recap what we have addressed since our last hearing. there is a revised version in front of you that is different and it's a clean copy and slightly different than what was in the packet and we have some copies for the public. the only change between the two documents is the second paragraph of the preservation alternatives section. and the language is essentially the same, but the city attorney has

helped us reword a few things just to make it clear. so then that is there for your review. from the last hearing a few things that we addressed or we feel like we've addressed from the hpc and public comments is one. the preservation alliance to request cultural landscapes and i believe we were all copied on an e-mail that the alliance believe we have addressed their comments successfully. we've also included san francisco architectural heritages comments within the revisions while not word for word, we think we have addressed the substance of their comments but heritage is here and they can let us know if we have thought fully addressed what they believe should be included. and then finally the commissioners had a variety of

comments as small edits that we have all incorporated but primarily there was a broad discussion about facade retention. we left the meeting with an understanding that the commission wants to have a discussion about facade retention more as a design discussion, but will schedule that for a future date. at this time though as part of the resolution, there seems to be an interest in moving that facade retention discussion minimizing it and including it in the partial tournament. lisa is here to walk you through the resolution and any of the details that you think warrant discussion. but i'm also available for questions. thanks. >> good afternoon, congratulations to the new president and vice-president of the commission. i'm lisa gibson

with the planning department. my walk through of the changes are very brief because there are not too many to describe. starting with no. 1 under preservation alternatives. this is where we first addressed the changes reflecting the cultural landscapes, the preservation alternatives, the second line there, says that it would, if the project results in significant impacts on historical resource, it previously said structures. this is where we change the resource to be more broad. there are other locations where we did similar change in the second paragraph under preservation alternatives. the parenthetical where we changed from a building to a resource and further on there are several other locations where it went from structures to resource. also under item no. 1, preservation alternatives, we added some

emphasis that alternatives don't need to meet every problem objective. this is a request. you can see the second sentence there that indicates alternatives under ceqa do not need to meet all projects. the second item preservation alternative we already discussed one of the changes going from structure to resource. the second paragraph is new, a new paragraph as tim indicated is something that we've added to shift the focus from a broader discussion of facade retention to more abbreviated retention to assigned consideration. it says in cases of the resource evaluated the structure as one partial of the eir should include the facade and incorporate set backs to

allow for an understanding of the overall height and masses of resource. it may not allow for the resource conveyance if signature and -- significant, would not be a partial alternative. we hope that captures the interest of the commission and we would be interested in your thoughts on that. moving on to item 4, there are some changes here that reflect the comments on the level of information provided to describe and illustrate preservation alternatives. so, under item four we added the description should be detailed and for all preservation alternatives should be detailed and the last few lines under item 4 we explained the plans need to be legible to clarify that and

the sections need to sufficiently be at a level to adequately depict the scope of the alternatives. we also under item 5, express that the explanation of the preservation alternatives development should be detailed. we've limited the previous item no. 6 which is facade retention and we've numbered everything else accordingly. those are the changes and i'm happy to answer any questions that you may have. >> commissioners, questions? >> i think you read the wrong one. >> thank you. >> i couldn't follow. >> that is why there was discussion in the room. i do apologize for that. so let me correct that the revised paragraph under partial preservation alternatives item 2 is as follows. i apologies for the confusion. as

many historic may eliminator reduce for ceqa purposes. therefore it is not a partial preservation alternative. however depending on a particular project and in combination with other features, retaining a facade facing the public right-of-way for allowing to the understanding of the historic massing of feature for a useful partial alt ernative in cases by case draft by eir. that concludes my presentation. >> commissioners questions? >> just one minor question. when we are dealing with a landscape, we don't have language that talks about the introduction -- destruction of

a landscape. i don't know how critical because every project is on a case by case basis. i don't know that i ever read any eir about the changes in a landscape for a park. i don't know that it's critical that we add anything here. but given the fact that we've taken out about structures i don't know if there should be another word or two in that paragraph to handle that. >> any other questions before we go to public comment. ( any member of the public please come forward. >> hello, as mr. frye mentioned with did comments at the last hearing we had a few recommendations and we are happy to see that this has been

incorporated into this subversion and we are in support of this version of the legislation. we feel this will be very fortunate -- important and useful moving forward. is there any additional public comment? seeing none, public comment is closed.. back to the commission. are there comments, questions? >> i think they did a good job in summarizing what we were involved in in the kind of rambling discussion. >> do i have a motion? >> i have a question on assuming we keep the second paragraph of item 2. in the revised assuming we keep that in the resolution, do we also want to

agendaize and make the next step. we were talking about having a design discussion or policy about facade retention. is that something that should be in discussion and brought to the full? >> if i might ask ms. smith because sf heritage is hosting a symposium on this. if that's scheduled, who is coming because maybe we sort of send representative to that and start with that? >> ms. smith, could you speak to that? >> san francisco heritage. afc -- as of now it's a policy white paper. we have not scheduled a meeting. it's mainly our ideas are we have an issues committee at the policy committee that meets, brain storms and

produces policies, papers and recommendations on policies. >> i misunderstood. i thought it was more of a public outreach. >> thank you. don't go. >> commissioner john's? >> do you know what your schedule is for doing that white paper? >> i don't have a specific timeline yet but it's our top issue at the moment. so probably within the next month. >> well, when you get a better idea, could you tell us because that might be of interest to some or all of the commissioners as part of this other discussion that we are planning on having? >> yes. definitely. >> thank you. >> you're welcome. >> commissioner pearlman? >> my comment about the language in here, is there any interest in adding a few words that in many cases

retention of a historic facade alone would it be, i just, again with landscapes, i don't know what the right words would be. >> are you saying it's a feature or something? >> yeah. i actually like the language in the paragraph above where it said, in the middle of the paragraph, that would preserve as many of the features that convey a historic significance. that takes it out of the discussion. >> i thought the issue is the facade retention may not be, you know that, and therefore we are saying that in a buildings case we have the opportunity or the preparer of the eir that is opportunity to discuss with staff on a case by case bases. >> what if we added in many cases of the resource facade alone, so it implies the rule is more broadness. >> that would do it for me.

>> yeah. >> did you hear that? >> yeah. just a couple of words that i think would do it. >> lisa gibson. i would like to say that the intent here was that we had a first paragraph that was more again addressing partial preservation alternatives and we have in there language would apply generically to any impacted resource. so landscapes would be in that broader umbrella. it could be considered. the second paragraph is intended to address when it is the resource it's is a structure. and in the previous language, we i think were more specific to that that we clarified that in the structure, the second paragraph is