is january 2013 and it affects all commercial leases under -- that are 7500 square feet or less. so i'm not going to run through these in great detail but our definitions of landlord and lease. it's pertaining to the notification requirements to title 3 the public accommodation and for properties 7500 square feet or less and we defined a small business tenant under the law as a business leasing 7500 square feet or less so the requirements are before entering into a lease is either the landlord either ens that the public restrooms and ground floor entrances and exits are accessible if readily achievable or provide a written notice to

any prospective tenant that it might not meet all standards and including restrooms and entrances and exits on the ground floor. before entering into a lease the obligation notice must be small business tenant and in it the major notifications to the tenants are that the leasee maybe held liable for disability access violations on the property and who is responsible for making any required disability access improvements. we noticed that wasn't always spelled out in leases. if the commercial landlord doesn't ensure that the covered features are accessible then again they shall also include additional statement in the obligation

notice of please note the property may not currently meet all applicable construction related accessible standards including standards for public restrooms ground floor entrances and exits so trying to put that up front to businesses so they're notified of what their potential liabilities maybe, and obligations maybe, and to encourage them to investigate it. that was just a sample of what a notice may look like. additional requirements are that they need to make sure that this document is signed. the lease states expressed terms -- i think i just -- who is making the improvements and who pays for them. and i think the last thing is number 7 of which we have and is in handouts up here is that the property owner is

to hand out a brochure which we have in seven different languages. it's kind of a trifold brochure explaining the laws, explaining some of the key areas, how the flow of the cass inspection works and some of the key areas and pitfalls that most businesses experience and not having their business be accessible. a couple of things that we have learned not just through the subsidized cass inspection but businesses that have done their own inspection is that sometimes the cass recommendations -- what we have heard from businesses when they have taken the cass report. now they're launching it and doing the improvements is how to navigate and interpret what is being reported in relationship to the city's requirements so if they engage with the city sometimes the city will say to

them no you can't do that recommendation, so not understanding why something was recommended but yet now the city is saying no you can't do that sidewalk encroachment. also intrptsing the work of what is readily achievable versus long-term improvements in relationship to the time frame of the lease. but i think so where we are now and working with commissioner lerner has been doing a good deal of work with the city with us is really taking a look at this sort of triad between the building department, our historic preservation and our bureau street use and mapping when it comes to entrances, so those three entities most of the time are engaged when you have to do access improvements that are beyond maybe a portable ramp,

so and sometimes it makes it very challenging for a business to be engaging with the three different entities so we started meeting so just to kind of outline for those that may not know that the building code has its building codes. historic preservation has its requirements so any business over 50 years old is deemed possibly historic so you just can't make any alterations to a front entrance. it may trigger review with the historic preservation and then of course if you're dealing with small spaces there maybe some to try to navigate doing the fully accessible entrance may need to consider some sidewalk encroachment but our bureau of street use and mapping they're

mandating to ensure that the public sidewalk is fully accessible as well, and so sidewalk encroachments can conflict with that mandate. so and then also we have found that not all cass inspectors are fully knowledgeable of what local building -- this whole 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 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 dointhe tenderloin. the taxi driver said, welcome to the land of broken dreams. she's a san franciscans. she came from business, not from mental health and she approached a woman on the street and she was crying and she said what's the problem and she said i will never be clean again. since then she's had one of the best programs that exist in the city. i know for a fact having worked for the city and county, if it had been a county agency which crossed so many areas, we'd still be talking about it. my belief, my hope is that in this community we have a grand

desire to do better particularly with the homeless situation with people who are mentally ill, with all of this. what would support law enforcement would be if they had more recourse. if there was in every community in the city, a place during the day where someone can walk in and sit down and without filling out a mountain of paperwork and just talk to someone. it would have an enormous benefit. it would be cheap, it could be well managed and incredibly effective. that kind of solution, i feel like on the side of where i come from which is the over here with we have to bill medi-cal and we are becoming more and more convoluted with all of our it systems. an emergency room dr. at san francisco general they have four or five different systems to put information in. how do we find information about a client? how do we track somebody if we don't have

a way to follow someone who has a mental illness, who is hiv positive and getting methadone and also on housing list and also trying to get their benefits and all of this? how do we do that? i don't know how the clients manage it. it's a test to the resilience of the people we serve. i would be happy to explore some of these areas where perhaps we can propose to the city, why don't we do some of these things that are fairly simple, fairly straight forward, but would have a huge impact and they don't require a lot of money. i don't know, that's a very long answer to your question. but the truth is that is one of the biggest problems is that if you are new to the system and in crisis and trying to get help, your resources are very limited. if you call suicide prevention and if

you are suicidal, they are going to call the police who then most people don't realize are going to come to your home and take you in handcuffs in the back of a police car to the hospital. most people are appalled and horrified by this, many are. that is the system and unfortunately we don't have an alternative to that. >> thank you. the situation just seems to get more and more complicated the more i listen to you. i just wanted to tell a short story talking about people who just want to be heard. i worked for an organization that has an open house once a week for drug users. my job was to go around with an ur sac survey that

i did but what i did i asked them questions and then listened to their stories. and everybody wants to be listened to. dpa organized during those years trying to eliminate those silos and trying to integrate more efficiently, has that helped? >> i'm a contractor for cds so i have to be tactful. i can only speak for myself and say that i feel that within dph, there is for the most part i think we are still struggling with this siloed system. the reorganization and some of it, there was a plan to have more of a transitions program

where we had one individual managing or helping care management for somebody who had multiple issues and i don't know where it is or why it got stalled. i can only speculate. what i would say is i'm not sure what the answer is, but i do know that's why i love the cit because nobody ran it. it wasn't run by hsa, by the police department, it wasn't run by anybody. we were all in it together. there was no entity like that in the city. that's the beauty of cit. i wish there was more. what we need is a container a framework where people like myself, like jenny, the mental health association, like michael who is gone now, if we can all get

together and say before the city makes anymore policy decisions about where this money is going to go, let's look at this and have this input. because sometimes we don't share too well together. we don't work too well together. it's an over stressed system and the problem is that often people are working in their own wheel and lose track. services wide, there is a lot we can do but more we can do to make it easier. >> thank you. tactful honesty. >> thank you. council member at that time -- kostanian has a question. >> thank you, we were facing issues not only from people offering

services but the community. they were totally floored that there was no place to go to and nobody to really hear our stories. i think instead of just floundering around, we really have to sit down and ask the community to step forward and be participants and not to be controlling. that's the same thing that patients feel, that they are controlled. you can't do that to human beings. >> that's true. i agree. >> so to step away from that, i would love to be a part of that. >> i'm hopeful. i feel the winds of change are blowing where they will take us, anyone knows but i agree. as a nurse, i think that was the problem that essentially what we are dealing is the history of when behavioral health was created years ago nobody had ever done it. all they did was

unbundle the state health services. we are still dealing with the effect of that because in the >> hi today we have a special edition of building san francisco, stay safe, what we are going to be talking about san francisco's earth quakes, what you can do before an earthquake in your home, to be ready and after an earthquake to make sure that you are comfortable staying at home, while the city recovers. ♪ >> the next episode of stay safe, we have alicia johnson from san francisco's department of emergency management. hi, alicia thanks to coming >> it is a pleasure to be here with you. >> i wonder if you could tell us what you think people can do