by all of the housing providers, i mean not just the bmr's which are a very small set of affordable housing and not really affordable to folks that we are talking about, but public housing certainly the non-profit housing brian as you mentioned the affordable housing that has a for profit developer that manages it but also a lot of the city run houses is only accessed by some internal referral mechanism. so the department of public health has access to the housing programs and you can only be referred through the department of public health. so all of that is really an important part of the process, all the residential care, facilities that are really part of the whole fabric of housing. so just want

to stress that. >> thanks. >> i have a comment coming from the bridge line. >> hello. >> hi, this is jessica layman from senior and disability action. can you hear me? >> yes. >> wonderful. i'm sorry i couldn't be here with you but thank you for this important discussion on this important issue. i'm sorry. the issues that i wanted to raise was about training and on going assistance with using the data portal. i think making sure things are fully accessible is a really important step but even when they are as accessible as they can be we are going to have a lot of people who aren't familiar with computers and going online and people who don't speak the language at all and are going

to need some assistance. i'm trying to figure out where people can go and get assistance from either existing service providers and how will those service providers tv capacity to provide that one on one service needed and a conventions of possibilities and different places all over town where people go and get some of this assistance. part of that is having some conversation starting now about what does that look like and how to get it in place so people are ready to go to get the kind of help they need. i know there have been some good workshops and discussion about an application and how to make that really useful and i hope that would be a similar workshop in bringing together stakeholders to talk about how are we really making this usable for folks. thank you. >> thank you.

>> mam, would you like to make a public comment? >> my name is elizabeth griffin. about accessibility usage. you can go on the website and how accessible it is. accessible the apartments are. i mean to say this to the board what

you guys call accessible may not really be accessible. it takes somebody with a disability to come out and really see something that's accessible. so i encourage you guys to really have somebody that uses a wheelchair or somebody who is blind or maybe impaired to really test out your apartments before you really call it accessible because if you just go around saying

it's accessible without having somebody with a disability check it out, to me it is false advertisement and not accessible. that's not really ada compliant to me i really hope that these affordable units are really for with disabilities and not just for people who are low income, but people who have, people who are really disabled, and not just have a

low budget or whatever because a lot of times places for people with disabilities and you find all kind of people moving in and you have people in the units. so i would be very weary of that. thank you very much. >> thank you. >> any further public comment? we are going to take a 10-minute break. >> welcome back, everybody. we

are up to agenda item no. 7. we are going to hear from the aids legal referral panel. mr. bill hirsch. >> good afternoon, it's a pleasure to be here. i have had the pleasure and opportunity to work with the mayor's disability council and i appreciate the collaboration. i will be giving a brief presentation on the services that are provided by the aids legal referral panel. i will talk a little bit about the recent aids adopted housing plan and the one challenge we see for the housing for people living with hiv and aids. the aids legal referral panel is a small non-profit that provides legal services for people living with hiv and

aids. we serve seven counties. traditionally legal services programs are usually very limited in the kind of services that they can offer and sometimes they maybe specific to certain populations or to certain issues. arp has now ten staff attorneys who can handle a number of cases in-house mostly insurance and housing. i'm talk about housing in a moment. we also have a panel of over 700 attorneys who volunteer and can provide assistance in a much broader array of civil legal matters. so we have attorneys on our panel who can handle immigration and employment and credit and bankruptcy issues as well

as matters involving wills and powers of attorney. i will date myself. when i got out of law school in 1986 and i got trained by panels to do wills and that's what we were doing at that point in running the epidemic is running to hospitals for those who would die within a very short period of time. wills are probably about 85% of what we were doing back then, wills are now 10% of what we do i share that statistic because i think it speaks volumes about how the epidemic has changed over 30 years. our clients are coming to us much more for issues related to living with hiv than dying of aids. there is no issue where we see that more starkly than in the area of housing. and everybody knows that there is an affordable housing crisis for people with disabilities, for people

with very low incomes. it has been a crisis for many years and it is a crisis unprecedent in this history at this point in time. so the housing crisis really forced alrp to rethink how we provide services because we simply weren't able to find enough attorneys to handle all the housing cases that were coming our wait. so in 1998 we started to have attorneys in house to provide more in depth direction representation. we have stepped up our game recently in our collaboration with other service providers in town and we are providing full scope representation up to and including trial. so we are taking as an aggressive posture as we can with landlord attorneys

letting them know that if they are going to be evicting folks they are going to have to fight at the top of their game and we have already seen a dramatic improvement in the results that we are able to get for our clients. i think landlord attorneys assumed that tenant attorneys would not have the resources to go to trial and they are seeing that is not the case any longer. it is a bit of a game changer. at the same time the number of eviction are rising so dramatically that it is overwhelming for our small office and we still need more resources in order to handle the housing cases that come in our door. i can't say that we save someone's housing everyday, but we do save it every week and there is days where we save three people's housing in a day and i'm incredibly proud of the

work that our attorneys are doing. i think i have been around for each of the now four aids housing plans in the city. there was a time when the first aids housing plan was developed where it called for a great many more hospice beds to be created and even a new category residential care facility for the chronically ill was a licensure category. now there is only one hospice targeted for people with hiv and even that program does not serve exclusive people with hiv and many of the people who go into that program get tune ups and get more focused medical attention and are then able to leave the hospice which is a pretty remarkable transformation from where we

were even a few years ago. there is a huge unmet need for affordable housing, for people with hiv and aids. it is almost impossible for people living with the disease to manage their disease if they do not have stable affordable housing. and while many communities are impacted by the affordable housing crisis, for people with hiv and aids, they risk not only homelessness, but they risk losing access to all the services that have helped to keep them alive. we fight to help keep them in their housing. one good job of describing the need, it does not do a very good job unfortunately of identifying the resources needed to address that need. and unlike plans in the past where we've had some very specific targets that have been generated as a

result of the planning process i think this effort was much more focused on issues related to maintaining the residential care facilities that are at risk of losing funding through the program is looking at the aids housing list which is a very outdated program which needs updating and there was very little in terms of identifying new resources either for building new affordable housing or as i would argue equally important in preventing homelessness so keeping people in their current housing. it is unlikely that someone in a rent control unit is going to be hard to find something like their rent control unit. one issue that we see very quickly is an issue where many people lived with hiv and aids

have had private long-term disability insurance policies. those policies have given them a higher income than people received ssdi or ssi. those insurance policies will term out when they reach retirement age. it maybe 62 and 65, some 70. but many people, i will talk in a minute about how many, will see a very dramatic drop in their income such as they are no longer able to afford housing. where we want to put them in a program where there is housing subsidy where they will be able to remain in their current housing. what we don't want to see is people ignoring

this problem until more people come into our office with an eviction notice and there is nothing we can do to get them any assistance so they will be able to stay in their housing. when they lose those units they will be gone. the city has tried to get it's arms around how many folks are going to be impacted in this manner. it is a little tricky to get numbers around people living with long-term disability insurance policies. many of those folks have interfaced with the publically funded hiv health system in a more limited manner so we don't have a great deal of data. the city's most recent report estimates that there is anywhere between 4 hundred and 1200 folks who this may impact and it's going to roll out over the next several years. we are going to be working with the city no you to get more resources to

address these needs to prevent homelessness for these folks. this is a brief overview and the brief overview of the most recent aid hiv housing plan and issue around people with living with hiv who have these long-term disability insurance policies. i'm happy to answer any questions that folks might have and welcome your comments. >> thank you, bill. i have a comment to make and that is i want to thank you for coming today because you highlight two very important topics, the first is concept and health care. housing keeps people healthy and lives in order and keeps them stable in the community and improves outcomes. >> it's also a prevention

strategy. it's documented that people who are stably housed have lower viral loads and much less likely to transmit the virus. it's health care and prevention. >> thank you. and the other is these folks with long-term disability policies we are talking about people in their 60s. and it highlights the issue of long-term survivors of hiv and aids and with their hiv negative counter parts, we have seen cancers, liver disease because of the medicine they have been taken for 25 years to combat the virus and to make their bodies more suspect ceptible to disease. so it's important that they are plugged into the systems of care. thank you

very much. do i have necessity -- any questions from council members or comments? staff? carla. >> here come the tough questions. [ laughter ] >> no bill, there is no tough questions from me because your presentation was really very clear and concise. and it gave me a much better appreciation for the excellent work that you do that your staff attorneys and other 700 attorneys have helped out in a pinch. my question is to the side. i read in the paper today about some possible legislation that supervisor wiener wanted to advance about the experience that people in the lgbt community have when they move into some of the senior housing environment. i was wondering if alrp was part of the conversation that led to supervisor wiener'sen

tension to introduce this legislation. >> i wish we can take more credit for that effort. the department of aging and adult services works with the community to drop a -- develop a plan to address the needs of the aging and there was a number of groups to establish in that process one that looked at hiv and aid and needs of people who were lgbt and we participated in both of those work groups. it was through that effort that we were helpful in bringing forward the issue of people at risk of losing their long-term disability insurance policies. i don't think that we can take credit for the issue around the treatment that people will have experience and may experience in some of these skilled nursing

facilities and assisted living programs. i do think though, that there is an increase need for a conversation between folks from the hiv community, senior services community and the lgbt community. there is an organization in san francisco called open house which has been working to address the housing needs of the lgbt community as they age. there are some organizations from outside the city that have been coming into provide some technical assistance to help facilitate some training between, so there are some cross training between the hiv community and the senior provider community and i think there is a great opportunity for closer work in that area.

>> anything else? okay. thank you, bill. thank you very much. >> next we are going to have cochair elections. in accordance with the mayor's disability council bylaws article 3 section one, there shall be two cochairs to serve as council and elections by 3 months. the present election will be to elect the cochair to a position previously heard by cochair derek zarda who resigned in november. so, i will call for nominations. >> i will make a nomination. i will nominate denise senhaux. are there any other nominations. all right.

nominations are closed. do you accept the nomination? >> yes i do. i'm in shock. >> all right. great. nominations are closed and you should find a ballot in your packet. mark one name. >> do you want to make a statement? >> i guess so, i will make a quick statement and get on with business. i want to thank cochair supanich for his nomination and the support from the council. there has been amazing people and still continue to sit in the cochair and i will continue to do my best and serve the council and the community. i have a lot of support and knowledge from my council members and mayor's office on disability. so i look forward to this challenge and one of the last conversations i had with derek when i was considering to run for this position and i was having some

self doubt, he said go ahead and do it. you can do it. i think in his memory i'm going to go ahead and take this new challenge in this position. i will do my very best. thank you for your time. >> thank you. >> no flowers, no roses. now we will fill out our ballot and pass them to the clerk. there we go. shall we wait while all four ballots are counted? okay. we have a quorum. harriet if you would like to

vote, we are voting for a cochair now. we have one nomination for cochair, denise senhaux. you will find a ballot in your packet. just check off one name and hand it to donna.

>> through the chair i'm happy to announce that denise senhaux has been approved to be the next cochair of the mayor's disability council. [ applause ] >> thank you. >> okay, we are moving on to agenda item 9. the report from the director of the mayor's office on disability oovment thank you cochair supanich, cochair senhaux and council members. congratulations. i have to tell you about the celebration. you heard from bill hirsch. i'm going to tell you about the new ada website and the new conference staff attended and

last plans for derek zarda's memorial. regarding the ada celebration. july 26th the 26th anniversary of the signing of the ada and this civil rights act has transformed this situation and if not, try going to other places and see the barriers and with ramps and benches for council have really helped a nation to be more inclusive and given people with disability to live more independently. but we know that ada is more about just curb ramps but also for employment and accommodations

when appropriate and about the youth to learn and play together because that's really how our culture changes when we all know more about each other and get to enter act and get to communications and information and technology accessible. i think it's note worthy that this year was the anniversary of the march on selma and the 50th anniversary on the civil rights act because we are these are all connected. our office continues to work with the aids referral badge and the for the blind and the public authority to plan our big celebration here at city hall. we want you to save the date. it's going to be wednesday july 1st, from 11:30 to 1:30 in city hall.

we'll have entertainment. speeches, awards and proclamations and more. you will hear more about this in the coming months as we give you details. speaking of events i want to tell you about our fabulous website, ada bay area.org. nathan web, our mo d staff is the one who should get credit for this and it's updated on almost a daily basis. the website is the place where we'll be using a calendar to promote celebration events that are happening throughout the year and throughout the bay area. for example, we've already had a number of art event at the young museum and an upcoming event at the sylmar, one of the art commission neighborhood sites coming up

next week, is that right, joanna and our art list is on that website and the exhibit at the ed roberts campus. that event focuses on first person account of the 504 occupation of the federal building back in san francisco in 1977. the list all the supporters and on the political side we have the board of supervisors, we have the mayor, senator mark leno, assemblyman, tom yann oh and administrator and we have 20 different disability advocacy representation and also things as widespread as our local independent living