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tv   [untitled]    April 25, 2015 11:00am-11:31am PDT

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added to have someone that lives the bay area, maybe not the city. i know when we do rl drills and -- recall drills and do them annually and we have robust procedures and not have everybody come back at one time but respond in a manageable way if you will, so a couple things. what i am hearing is proximity. although we cannot dictate where someone lives. it's against the law. we did make modifications to the schedule several years ago. i think about seven, eight years ago where employees could no longer necessarily string together a long period of time where they could have someone work with them and trade back with a trade. we still have that business practice but it is limited so that would in my mind encourage someone to live closer to maybe where they had been in previous years. i think the
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last time we checked we had 34% of the uniform work force live here in the city with a large percentage of the other living in the greater bay area -- the nine bay area counties and some live outside the limits but it's not as many -- more than i would like but not as many as you would think and on the recruitment piece i appreciate the question. last year we asked for a single function person in uniform just to deal with recruitment and there was a position funded and although i think the tide maybe turning and i find the value of having a person. they have a recruitment unit. we have a few people trying to piece things together
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>> >> and we're proud of being one of the most diverse departments in the country. and i think when the federal consent decree went away there was concern there would be back sliding and our numbers in terms of recruitment and retention has remained robust. we have 52% of the department is minority and women and we have a very representative work force. we want to continue that and we're in the process of working closely with the department of human resources particularly and a continuous testing process. the police department has been thrilled with their process. we are a little behind them not yet
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to see the full results of this. >> >> and hr is on board and diversity is a key and i am committed to it. >> i am just curious. maybe you already have this but the police department for instance seems like there's a logical pathway from high school to young adults for the cadet program and what is it? generations program or the summer program they have. i don't know if you have it or whether or not it can be created so there is more exposure to your department by young people. >> right. we don't have a cadet program and we talked to the department of human reebz about it. i think it's an
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opportunity to expose youth to what a career in fire service would look like and we are looking at but don't have a funding source and we have a reserve program and they do great works and show up and they have the light blue uniforms and do exterior existence for us. it's a diverse group of people and have to be over 21 for that and the black firefighters association does have a youth cadet program that is funded through their organization but supported by us in terms of resources and equipment and opportunities. >> >> >> and i know the chief --
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[inaudible] it would probably be in the same range but i can get that information for you. we haven't gotten to that level of detail. >> and whether we can get to the details and whether you're supportive of that. >> i am supportive of youth having an opportunity to learn about a career in the fire service and we can fast track if you like. >> i would love it and i believe in such a concept. >> one of the things which i can talk to chief suhr about is possibly their cadet program maybe having a module in which there might be an opportunity on orient to the fire service and the sheriff's department and something we thought of as well but we will come up with a few options for you.
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>> thank you. >> i just have one more slide. supervisor mar real quick and then get to your last slide. >> i am supportive of youth programs and local tracks to local hiring as much as possible and you mentioned 52% of women and people of color. what the percentage of women in the force and just generally of african-american, latino -- >> sure. i have that and 15% of women in the uniform work force and we're proud of that because you have phoenix and seattle might be close in double digits but you look at boston and new york and chicago and there's less than 1% in the uniform work force still so we're proud of that and then a quick run down of african-american males 8%, female 2%, hispanic males 14, 3%
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female asian and i have the other numbers listed. >> and the low from 2012 and down to 1300 firefighters jumping up probably 150 or up to the current at about 1500. do we have data on those new hires like what the demographics of the new hires have been in if we're making progress to diversify with more of a gender balance and even the ethic balance. that would be helpful to know and one other question that i asked ms. hicks about language access needs. are you hiring bilingual, multi-ling
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yell firefighters that serve populations in limited english speaking. >> yes. for the first time it's part of the criteria for applicants to have a secondary language. you should know that we have a number of -- i don't have it off the top of my head. we have spanish speaking and cantonese speaking individuals in the department and uniform members and some with tag log and russian speakers but primarily russian and chinese and cantonese. >> i know as we have our language access report we will have more of the reports that come forward through the office of immigrant affairs and civic engagement soon but i was going to make a point about chief suhr's chart about overtime and it looks like it's creeping up -- the costs are creeping up in the police department even though the number of officers has increased significantly. i am wondering if you have an you know date on the overtime -- >> update as your seeing the
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increased levels and i assume we will have less overtime but i don't see anything from the slides -- [inaudible] >> it's a great question. i believe we are having a reduction in the overtime and have mark address it further. >> good afternoon supervisor. to that point absolutely. the more personnel we're able to bring on board the lower our overtime would be. however there are other factors to consider. for example station four which opened for us and that is additional staffing commitment on a daily basis. >> (paused).
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>> we're teaming up with the red cross. this is a recent agreed to program with the red cross being able to provide smoke detectors to outreach to the citizens. they have the
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ability to go in and install them and have a home escape plan and we think it will save lives and looking forward to that partnership and continue the work which we did for 10 years with the burn foundation and we have members that don't get paid and volunteer and passionate about what they can do. they go into the schools provide safety education and provide it in spanish and cantonese and proud of that program and partnered with the unified school district. we have two programs related to kids that have asthma in hopes they don't miss school and have a better understanding of the disease and we have that and that has been positively received and our members are dedicated going on to continue the outreach and educate the public. that concludes my presentation. thank you. >> thank you very much. colleagues any questions for the chief before she steps down?
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okay. thank you very much. thank you for your presentation and for all the other fire department folks here. last but not certainly least we have our department of emergency management. thank you anne for waiting. >> good afternoon supervisors, chair farrell, members of the budget and finance committee. it's a pleasure to be here today . i am anne kronen berg executive director of department of emergency management. we have prepared a few very brief slides for you today in our presentation. you will see just four slides because -- >> wow. >> right, i thought being the last one to present it's something you would appreciate. we did take the what we were asked by -- or at least what we thought this hearing was about which was focusing specifically
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on response times and so i'm not talking about our whole department but just in that one area. >> we will appreciate that. thank you very much. you realize the shorter the slides the bigger the budget gets. >> awesome. i like that. >> just kidding. >> our mission is to lead the city in planning preparedness, communication and response and recovery for daily emergencies, large scale city wide events and major disasters. the department is the vital link in the emergency communication between the public and the first responders and key coordination to stakeholders and residents and visitors. functionally we're comprised of three operating divisions, the division of emergency communications and that's what we will be focusing on today, division of emergency services, and our administration division. in addition to that dem serves as the bay area fiscal agent
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for all homeland security grants that come into the bay area so we have our staff urban area security initiative here in my area. regarding the state of the city's public safety services. 911 center falls underneath our emergency communications and unlike the last three presenters i asked my deputy director in charge of 911 to go over the statistics there because it's rob and he's behinds and got a hand on the issues we're facing and develop a long-term solution to deal with them so i'm going to turn it over to rob. i thank anthony our budget analyst from the
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mayor's office and of course kate howard who has been supportive of us and our controller ben rosenfeld and i will turn it over. >> this slide shows the call volume but in the last four years we have seen what is now up to a month over month, about 40% increase in call volume. to go into that a little more detail the second slide tries to show the monthly call volume and this is adjusted for seasonal differences and differences in length of time so this is
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attempting to show consistent, so that's the individual bars and then there's a line that shows our service standard so as the call volume as increased one of our challenges is making sure that we are able to answer 911 calls in a timely manner and our service goal is to answer 90% of 911 calls in 10 seconds or less. we fell below that goal. we are now coming back towards it and one of the challenges is we've done that through use of a lot of overtime and i will be back shortly on a supplemental request for overtime, but we are also ramping up our hiring. we've done three classes. we seated three classes in the last a little over a year period and unfortunately it takes about nine months when a class is seated to actually when the hire is available for doing dispatch, so there's a little bit of a
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lag time so we will continue to use a fair amount of overtime in the meantime but this has been a challenge. another effect of this we have a second service standard and half of the call volume is non emergency police and non emergency wait times have increased significantly as we have shifted resources to make sure that we answer 911 calls in a timely fashion. that is rebounding but they're a lower priority than zeroing 911 calls. >> >> i wanted to briefly touch on -- >> sorry supervisor yee. >> yeah, thanks. the line that is under the red line that is going up and down what does that represent? >> yes. that you use the right hand percentages. that is our
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service goal, so that's the red line is at 90% which is our service goal and the blue line underneath that is our actual performance so we dip down to the current month we're about 84% answering 84% of 911 calls in 10 seconds or less. >> thank you. >> just a translation what we're at the goal the average wait is three and a half seconds. this month it's 5.2 seconds so on average that is not significant delay in reaching help. it does translate to nobody exists in the average who exist in peaks and valley so that's why we have our focus. just a few other things that i wanted to touch
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on -- >> mr. chairman. >> supervisor mar. >> i just wanted to ask rob who do you contribute the increase in the cal volume from 2010 to now and what called the huge increase over the five year period? >> i believe there are a couple of reasons going into that and i highlighted a few of them on this next slide. we are actually through the mayor's office we've had a couple of data experts volunteer their service at no cost to the department or the city to crunch some of our data and to help tease that out, but the work i did before the volunteers came on board. there are changes in phone use as people go from land lines to flip phones and smartphones you will notice on the smartphone it's easy to hit the emergency button and a lot of people's pockets hit that emergency contact button and
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are percentage of accidental dials have increased significantly. our policy for accidental dials even if you hear on the line somebody muffled sound -- we've all had an accidental dial i imagine we will call that person back, try to reach them. if there was any source of concern on the other line, if we heard any shouts or noise we will contact the carrier and try to go locate that person and take action but even if we don't have a reason for concern we will call them back and often go to voice mail and leave a major an -- message and that takes time and that is one factor. another factor is more repeated calls on lower priority incidents. as chief suhr testified earlier as the number of police officers hasn't kept
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up with issues it takes longer to respond to some priorities and low priorities where it's just taking a report and we have more people calling back asking is that police officer coming? it's been a while." we also have a -- this is something i am interested in what the data says. there might be a possible mitigation of calls from 311 and that was introduced in 2007 and effort to promote that and as time went on and people moved into the city we might have migration of people calling us instead of 311. >> sir, just a quick question for you. do you see the transition of more repeat calls, do you see that going from non emergency, non emergency to emergency calls? >> that's anecdotally what my staff tells me. i am trying to
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find ways of putting some numbers behind that and seeing what the trend is. >> okay. i have heard that from a number of residents in my district and it would be interesting to see that. >> yes. and a final effect is the change in city. we have seen population growth, day time population growth and other changes in what we address more calls related to traffic issues and things like that, so those are some of the big theories and i have some data on some of them but are really working to tease out the causes and whether we can expect those trends to continue, to plateau or drof off or what since it takes in addition to the normal budget and civil service timeline in hiring in any department we have
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a similar background process to the police department that adds time and we have the academy and on-the-job training so it takes a long time to make staff adjustments from when we decide we need to and better planning is good in that regard. a couple of things from the challenge of increase in staff we are trying to make most use of the staff that we have, reducing leave usage through a big focus on wellness. we were proud we were in the i think fifth or sixth of the 50 departments in the participation in the wellness survey of the city wide wellness campaign. we have been working with the local union and employees on making the most use of that as well as tightening some of the leave usage programs and we have seen a reduction in leave usage in the last couple of months and resulted in more staff to answer
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calls and a positive trend we hope to continue and increase in productivity over the work force over this same period. the challenges we've had not due to our work force being less productive at all and it's actually the reverse, and as i mentioned we have had three classes seated and we are working with the budget office on a long-term staffing plan and in the meantime we have been using a loft overtime to -- a lot of overtime to answer the calls in a timely fashion. quickly i will highlight a couple other areas of focus. we have been working with the fire department on technology and procedural changes to try to improve medical and fire dispatch. that's a big focus for us and that relates to the third thing, the bullet enhancing training for low frequency high impact events
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and the fire end of the fire department focuses on are low frequency high impact events and fires don't happen frequently but have a high impact and need to be trained for that and have an increased focus on that and we have a number of technology changes coming down. last may we replaced the main dispatch system and with that big change over that allows other systems to change over so we're going to look at replacing the ambulance mapping system and things like that. we're in the process of replacing our phone systems and that's funded thankfully by the state but happening over the next year and the [inaudible] change overand phone change over will prepare for technologies coming down and text to 9181 and accept pictures and videos that are in the industry referred to
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as next generation 911 enhancements. >> okay. thank you very much. colleagues any questions at this point? supervisor tang. >> thank you very much. i appreciate the quick presentation and so i know that because you're probably trying to keep it short i am wondering if off line you could send me data of general topics people are calling about in an emergency. some of the issues i i have been interested in working on and people are interested in calling 911 if they're victims of human trafficking and even though there's a national hot line they don't know where to call or am vs of domestic violence and there were efforts to code some of the calls to make sure they get adequate services and document how many are calling 911 for those things and again off line if you send me more of the high level issues people are calling about.
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>> absolutely. >> thank you. >> supervisor yee. >> thanks for the presentation and i had an opportunity to go visit the building i guess recently, and after visiting the building and seeing the operation i feel a lot better about our chances of getting through emergencies in san francisco so thank you very much. >> thank you supervisor. >> okay. colleagues also thanks to dm for being here for your presentation. i think it's critically important that we have you here as we think about public safety and integral part and 911 dispatchers are a critical part of the city and when we think about earthquakes and other disasters and thank you for being here and i look forward to the conversation. colleagues that is it for the presenters and departments today. thank you for being here for these. at this point we're
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going to open -- unless someone has a comment open it up for public comment and i have a number of speaker cards but i am pretty sure most of the people aren't here anymore so anyone that wants to speak on public comment please go ahead and line up on the far wall. everyone will have two minutes and that way we can take them one at a time and if you filled out a card it slb submitted so you're name is on record for being here. everyone will have two minutes. thank you. >> thank you. i am a member of the senior and disability action california alliance for retired americans and a supporter of the partisan defense committee. now you know it's a historical fact that any society that is corrupt and greedy requires more protection and security and certainly in a city which the disparity of wealth is greater than any other city in the country and knowing what we have in the city now
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running it and the tech industry. we have basically the gossip columnists like twitter and capped at $35 million and other tech moguls and talking billions and don't produce a damn thing for society. they want the police protection of the rich always want the police protection and meanwhile it's on the backs of the poor except we have the philanthropists that get breaks from the police force. i have been a political activist for 50 years and been in political protests in tokyo, cacutta, glaiveg koa, london, new york, baltimore, british colombia, los angeles and --
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[inaudible] has there ever been more police presence at a protest than this town. i also know that the police have quite a bit of money they spend on overtime for that and also on agent provokttories and spies. we know they're getting money to do this to whatress political protest in this country and especially this city and that's all this money is going to be spent on -- [inaudible] put it down in district 1 or in your district -- >> thank you sir. >> -- since the chamber of commerce gives you orders -- >> thank you sir. next speaker please. thank you. >> good late afternoon supervisors. my name is mr. ali and the homeless advocate to encourage you to consider your priorities on budget issues.