navigating the building codes, the bureau street use and mapping and historic preservation. if a -- often businesses hire by price and so they might not know they're hiring somebody who isn't fully aware of san francisco's unique city agency requirements, and so we have seen -- not always but from time to time there are reports where recommendations are being done that will not absolutely be doable in san francisco because the cass inspector hasn't consulted with the city agency before making their recommendation. so here's just a quick sample. this is a dining space, 400 square feet. total space -- the dining space is 400 square feet. the total space is 581 so the department of building inspection provided

-- the department of building inspection has equivalent standards that have been approved so the business architect or the business -- there was a suggestion of doing that the equivalent accommodation but triggered historic preservation review and historic preservation because it changed the angle of the door wouldn't approve that so gean some recommendations were going out and going into doing the sidewalk encroachments and of course that provided challenges for that business to be dealing with our bureau of street use and mapping. so just kind of a quick look is that from changing from the angled door -- i don't know if most people can see it and i can't point to it but it changed to from the corner of the building to parallel so

there would be a power door and the landing is on the inside so you could do the power door and go up and landing on the inside. but again historic preservation that proposed conflicts because it changed the architectural -- the historical nature of the front entrance, so i think moving forward one of the things that we definitely need to ensure in our subsidized cass inspection that we mandate that all of the inspectors who are non-profit consult with -- have to consult with all three agencies before they finalize their cass inspection report. we're very fortunate through all this discussion and sort of finding out about some of the difficulties businesses are having triaging the different agencies our historic preservation department is developing guidelines to minimize time and review so that either contractors, architects

and/or the business can look at what some of the guidelines that they require as looking at building solutions and of course cass inspectors can use this as well and the office of small business is advocated for a city entity that has expertise and authority to assist businesses, landlords and cass inspectors to navigate to get to conclusion when the city's determinations are in in conflict with each other and there has to be someone to bring all together and develop a resolution and the access appeals commission could be one entity that could possibly doo do that so with that i think i will be happy to take any questions and i don't know if you would like me to move back up on the dais and you can see that.

. >> >> thank you for the presentation and we know in california we have been a leader with access and training and again while we have reached out to you on a number of occasions and help us to pass this information on and to help because there's so many other -- well everyone in the state of california in terms of jurisdictions are receiving the funding to do these type of work we know not everyone has been as proactive and developing the extensive program like you have and we're appreciative and we want to get the word out so everyone else can take advantage and learned from what you put together so we thank you for that and we look forward to more communications in that area. >> thank you and i just want to say that i find it a great partnership and also to have

the commission as well and the website and information has continued to grow and utilized the information and it's a great partnership and i look forward to continue tg. >> i just applaud the efforts. thank you very much and i see a lot of bounty that you have accomplished here. it's fabulous. one question of the novelty of bringing in and focus the consumer or the business person with you to say well look streets or building or whoever the different departments -- historical to say you have conflicting requirements. come on let's get together here. i

think it's fabulous and i can't tell you the number of frustrations i have had in my career with different conditions where maybe the sidewalks 9% cross slope but i'm only a little segment of the block and if i fix mine there's got to be a transition to meet the neighbors, and nobody willing to take that to the rest of the city to say can't we organize on this so i just applaud that effort. thank you. >> next we have jesse torres to share just give a little background on jesse in case -- he's maybe on the shy side of telling his background personally but jesse was a pointed deputy director of small business advocate in the governor's office of business and economic development this

april but previously jesse served as the regional director at the los angeles small business development center working in the long beach city college branch and from 2011 to 2015 and he was also director of alumni relations at pep dine university so we has been working in various locations and out there a long time so we're fortunate again to have him join us from los angeles to share at the dais. >> thank you. it's a pleasure and honor to be here and i think i want to start by absolutely also sharing my own opinion that i think the city of san francisco is leading when it comes to disability access and helping small business owners. i have never seen anything as comprehensive as this and i have done lots of work with small business owners in los angeles and served as a chair to our council and for me being in

charge of centers where a lot of the assistance we provide to small business owners is giving information and check list and what they need to do before setting up shout and the work is mind blowing right now. >> >> i wanted to start with a story and i was late to the session and i apologize for missing the majority of the hearing and my flight was delayed getting out of lax with delta and was on a lighter flight and i ended up sitting down a blind person and i didn't realize it until i almost hit her dog with my computer and having the frustrations of a traveler trying to find a place to sit when the airport terminal is packed or getting away to

round and carrier which i don't use and i'm a southwest guy and i thought about her experience and what it's like for her and entertainment and she didn't have entertainment, book to read and that was pointent to me and on the delta side and the care the staff did to take care of her and we're about to land and trained. the business owner thought what they need to do with this community and they figured out there is an advantage of working with this community and have leveraged that so a lot of things going into this meeting today, but so i'm here. i represent the governor's office of business and economic development. in my role i serve a couple different hats. one is to the be advocate of small business owners. it's my job to find out what are your

areas of pain. where are you finding success? how can we elevate best practices across the state and like programs here in san francisco? in addition we operate a number of programs. we have a grant program where we give funding support to the small business development network to increase the capacity to do consulting and access to capital and we oversee a program in california through my shop and in addition the go-biz office has a number of programs and working with international trade work permitting. and if anyone is interested i can share it by email but the objective today is to listen and see where there are opportunities for us to increase transparency and

information. like i said i used to run a network and saw 4,000 small business owners every year and the common issue we saw with our business owners was just they wanted to do good work. they had a hard time figuring out how do they proceed and for me it's always about providing information, providing transparency and providing access to people that can help whether it's a cass inspector or an consultant. there is a tremendous need for people on the ground to provide technical assistance which is the worse word for [inaudible] individual consulting and that 101 kind of guidance so please note that for the state of california we are deeply invested in our small business community. we want to know what we can do on the state level to help small business

thrive and succeed and to me this information needs to to be shared so they can understand what some of the best practices are so that's all. >> well, we have created on this time agenda that we shared to learn more about what small businesses interested in and looking for and we have to open up the phone lines for any questions or comments as well as in the audience to share any ideas and thoughts that they may have. we have a number of our commissioners that have joined us and we will be hearing from them shortly, but we definitely look forward to any comments or thoughts from those on the phone. do we have any calls at this time that would like to make any points or i see our commissioner is standing. >> thank you both for being

here today. a question i have is one of the challenges with small businesses is a threat of a lawsuit, and that's real, but i think the difficulty is how do you get small businesses to proactively take steps to solve the problem instead of saying [inaudible] because of all the lawsuits? >> absolutely. >> well, i think first government has to not make businesses fearful of engaging with them for existing businesses, so i mean one of the things that i hear from businesses is that they're afraid to engage with department of building inspection because then there maybe other things that they come in that maybe layered on that are not related to making the access improvements, but will be required of them, so they're

just -- what is going to be the end amount of money that i have to spend? so i know with our department of building inspection it's been one of the discussions we had that when businesses come into to do improvements that are accessibility related that the department will stay focused on the accessibility related improvements, and what is required. again i think one of the things that in beginning to discuss as we start having discussion with businesses i think it took me two years to really understand the nuisance between dbi, historic preservation and the bureau street use and mapping because when businesses talk about city government they talk about us as one entity and not different agencies so it took me a while to understand that there were things that we were making

challenging for businesses to achieve compliance when there was interest on their part, and so i think there is -- and then there is still as much in the first panel talked about there is still a lot of the myth of the grand fathering, and/or you know i got my initial permits. they were signed off. there is -- you know, architects or contractors that really encourage businesses to go and with if they're doing -- either going with hardship waivers or not really encouraging businesses to maybe do a little more if they're doing tenant improvements under the evaluation threshold so they're looking to some of the folks to provide guidance because they're

seen more of as an expert than the small business but for existing businesses there is a little bit of the -- there is a little bit of the head in the sand. there is a little bit of -- there's a little bit of -- especially with the trances and when you -- entrances and when you have some amount of substantial improvements to make there is a little frustration that the property owner hasn't taken the responsibility to make the improvements and could do so in between leases and if you have a five year lease and it's a $60,000 improvement where is -- i can't -- i can't afford to do that, so i don't know. it's a mixed bag. it's not all one or the other. i think for businesses where english isn't your first language it's difficult to understand all

these nuisances in english, and as i said it took me two years to really figure out the whole thing between dbi, bureau street use and mapping and historic preservation and if english isn't your first language how much more difficult is it to understand what is required. >> i agree with the comments and the only thing i would add is what i have seen is that there's a need to determine where information can be best disseminated. just one example i was very surprised i had a meeting with the l.a. county library system and they asked us and i wasn't sure how we would connect and to my shock they said we have so many small business owners that come into the branches that we had to create economic development positions within the branches and they have thousands of

small business owners coming because there is concern if they go to a city agency or a federal agency they might get dinged or there's that fear whereas the library is a trusted place. oftentimes it figuring out how to best disseminate the information and key to small business owners and shift the mind-set. another thing is again i point to the role of the technical assistance provider and whatever that form takes but there is a role for individuals or programs that exist outside of the government agency kind of role that can act as an intermediary. i have seen first hand that a business owner will share things, confine things with the sbc consultant that they won't share with the

local representation and they often play that connecting role so i personally think there is that role there if technical assistance providers are trained about how do you share information about checklists and educate people about codes they can serve in that capacity and they can be a very effective tool to shift the mind-set for the business owner as well. >> i think the concern that the commission has is one of the things that both of you have touched about is dissemination, the big challenge. many of us have talked about the chambers but we recognize that if they're small businesses they might not be part of a chamber. are you finding that the business districts -- you mentioned something i never heard about thinking about dissemination of the libraries but other opportunities is what we're concerned about is because the

reality is that many of the litigations are occurring within small shops who are truly not having english as their first language and as well as how did we reach them with education because they're the ones that need this information up front before they go into the court system. can you talk about more types of outreach that you're conducting for small businesses? >> i will take a stab. i think it's definitely a challenge working with the small business community that every region, every place has its own variety of partners and focal points of information, and often i feel that one of my core jobs is figuring out across the state where are the bright lights? where can you best find avenues to find the information? for some communities it's neither

sbdc or the technical assistance provider or the agency it's the church. it's the faith based institution. it's the community center or the local park, and it takes time and effort to determine where are the best places to go to and a lot of what my team does is try to figure out the networks -- how to build that network connectivity so when a great program is introduced we're not just adding to the website and we have our own california business core we're launching and -- [inaudible] from the san francisco portal but beyond that how do we find the people to get the information out so it's very complicated. >> very similar approach. and i think especially with our assessment program our subsidized assessment or

subsidized cass program we have targeted media that these communities specifically listen to, read, watch, so doing radio interviews, print media articles, things of that sort. we do -- i mean we partner with our chamber but we also partner with the council of district merchants and partner with our business organizations because we want to make sure that it's not just ground floor businesses that are giving consideration to their accessibility requirements, but it also businesses that are in professional services, businesses that maybe accessing the second floor in our neighborhood commercial districts where they're old buildings where an elevator can't be put in but what can

they do to achieve as much access compliance as they possibly can? >> regina you had mentioned that you have a wait list of 74 for the loan program so there is clearly a need for the services. i am curious to know the types of diversity and types of clients or small businesses that have taken advantage? do you have any statistics on that? >> i wasn't able to get that from the non-profit provider, so the 74 businesses that are waiting are waiting -- are on the wait list for subsidized cass inspection and as i said initially when the program first launched we were targeting doing outreach in the chinese business community so business districts that had a high number of

chinese owned businesses, latino owned businesses, and we began doing workshops and outreach to businesses in the tenderloin where there is a lot of vietnamese and tag log business owners so that's some of the primary business communities before we were able to go city wide with the additional money so i am happy to follow up and get you those statistics. >> we know that is a particular area of interest to our commission to find out more about the desire for financial support, and if the loan process is a stronger appeal versus the tax incentive? it's one of the things that was mentioned kind

of just openly that in the one session that if i can't afford it up front i can't wait for it in a tax credit so those are things that we're looking at and would like to develop some more discussion on, and so i know jesse you have a number of programs. i know the regional i think we were having one of our region directors here to share. don't know if he actually made it in that would talk about some of the actual financial incentives that besides the cass program that if you have any knowledge base that you want to share about some of those off hand that would be great. >> just quickly i want to mention the next round of california [inaudible] tax credits, the information about that program should be coming up soon. i believe june 30 is the

date. that is $200 million in tax credits available for california based companies. i don't have many details at this point because the next round is just going to be introduced but i recommend going to the website and you will have california competes page and you will learn more about how the program is structured. is this is essentially a set aside for small businesses and give my contact information out and please contact the website or me directly. >> to add so we did -- we have a partnership with opportunity fund which say micro lender and i think we're a bit disappointed that businesses have not taken up the opportunity to engage with the loan but what we have heard from businesses that haven't done so is because the loan -- the interest rate is at

8%, so i think if we're able to provide even if it's a loan at a lower -- a loan but at a lower interest rate then we might have more businesses engaging in the request for financial assistance to do not just readily achievable but more substantial improvements. >> very good. this particular topic specifically one of our committees is interested in exploring and bringing in more experts in the financial areas to explore what can we do to help businesses because if it is -- we recognize that one, some of it is attitude and information of understanding that they need to do things that is readily achievable. one of the brochures is an illustration of things that are simple and

doesn't cost much at all and achievable and on the low end medium size so there are things that we know with the attitude of changing and they can do things on their own is a possibility so we appreciate that information, but also financially finding ways for them too. did you have another -- okay. >> quickly. there are loan programs offered through the u.s. small business administration and business owners can go directly to a lender of choice and learn about the programs. every major lending institution has sba loan officers or they go it to their website and find out about specific programs in the district area. >> very good. for those of you participated earlier in our session there was an example

from a business inspector that required a business within the tourist area to make themselves accessible and because he said -- she gave the example that they were resistant initially but wrote letters back to him they were so glad they were because the candy shop became more accessible it became a known and actually advertised that this is an accessible building and that's when they became more prosperous because they were known to be accessible, and actually even on the panel when the discussion was brought up one of the panelists said "let me know because i need to know" and just in that little conversation it prompted more people -- persons they want to use that. i want to go to that facility. and that's what this is about. we have one of our commissioners on the floor and would like to

have her come to the floor and share. >> good afternoon. i one of -- i am one of the commissioners and we sat on a panel for the business association and known in san francisco as the chew and changes to the administrative code regarding landlord tenant relationships around access and i am curious because you mentioned the fact that small businesses tend to feel unjust they're obligated to make capital improvements and they have a five year lease and the owner owns the building. i am wondering if you can describe the changes that the chew code required and whether you seen it has made any difference in anyway, whether it's the relationships between landlords and tenants or improving access or just educating tenants about what the