and also trying to hide if you will, it is truncated dorms, not wanting to put that and it's one that everybody likes to say something about because it's hard for a person in a walker to get over the truncated dorms but different for someone with a different disability so people complain about it all the time and try to leave it out and a lot of architects try to hide it. it's a warning. you don't want to hide the warning. you are not supposed to camouflage it and working with people on that and in the current building we're in it's very odd how they have done this step and using -- trying to use groves to make it instead of using lining that makes it very hard especially in the evening and night time with the type of construction. it's

a very -- looks neat but it's not very functional with a set of stairs and the fact they're using lines -- groves instead of the warning line it makes it very hard and yet a lot of architects still think that is okay. >> [inaudible] >> one of the -- this is commissioner dolim and the textbook and the examples that we all have in our career come up and i was trying to explain to a client with a strip mall and why they needed identification for the suites. we were arguing and no other way to see it and we're in a vacant suite. i can't afford this and i have to go to the bankruptcy judge and get money because the

property was in foreclosure and this isn't going to help anybody and right then the door was swung open and a lady that was blind and threw the door open and said "is this the hair salon and i am late and is this suite 204" and like i prompted that but unfortunately it was really a situation -- >> you were talking about the signage. >> we were talking about the tactile signage that would identify the suites in a long door to different suites and low and behold the argument ended with the client and the tactile sign showed up the next week. >> that's exactly what you have to do and your example came in the door so that was easy for you. i have given the example and they have some element that

is not accessible and door knobs. i say would you hire a veteran. of course i would hire a veteran. would you hire a veteran that had an ied that blew up and they need a lever hardware to access the suite. yes, i would hire that person. okay go get the levers and get rid of the door knobs and it's not just about that but hearing, vision anything that is not an element that was the way that i look perhaps or something you know, -- >> you frame it in a way that person might understand. >> and sometimes you have to be rather abrupt with it but it goes back to your civil right. would you hire a veteran? of course. would you hire a person in a wheelchair? no. you couldn't, really?

>> that's a different conversation. >> you would be in violation of the law then. you're good with that? yeah so there's a lot of that too so it's all about the visual. how do you get them to understand why the code is written that way. >> i find that in my role at sutter health so my job is to -- i basically see myself as the quarterback for disability compliance program so there's the policies and procedures but also the barrier removal, so i am kind of the quarterback for the team of planners and architects and everybody that's involved with building care sites or doing barrier removals and reporting on the progress there, and have two things that come up sometimes. either that wasn't called out in the survey, and yet we have to do it to meet code, but the other thing that we're working on there is it's

sort of -- you know, what i would like to see is have people think maybe not strictly to the code. some people are so focused well this wasn't specifically spelled out but the ada still requires to think about how a space is used and who is going to be using it and designing it in the way that people have equal access so i am wondering if anybody would talk about -- when you talked about doing outreach to architects and contractors and working with people that are the design end or building end do you ever have those conversations when there might be a gray area where the code isn't very specific about something but we know that people need to provide the access? >> that's when i ask people what was the intent of this and especially in existing or historical buildings what are

ways to get that at intent? because the code is built for new buildings so if you can get people to first of all take a deep breath and tap their problem solving genes and ask them to think about what do they really intend here? sometimes you can come out with other ways to get at the problem. >> that's exactly what we do in my work and i think the team is really good at thinking about how a space is being used or what the intent was so thank you. is there any other questions from the public? please identify yourself. >> my name is [inaudible]. i work for bart in transportation which is slightly different from building, and i to follow up on your question i believe most cities have disability community, mayor's commission on

disability. are you guys familiar? the building officials interact with the people with disability, mayor's commission on disability in your area? because some of the issues just like the question is that a lot of times the users actually in most cases can help you out, educate you. architects and people that are not familiar with the user needs in the environment, so an interaction and outreach to the community. do you ever suggest to the architects have you reviewed this with the disability community for example? if it's a big project that will impact a lot of users. >> this is gary lehman. in orvil sometimes we have some historic and older buildings and

they go in and do alterations and repairs, and so this is when e equivalent presentation is provided and northern california independent living service that i have a very close relation with as well as with my cass reviews that i have them assist me in review my review the process or what's being brought forward and provide their input what would be better used or better approach to them if they felt, so yes, i do use it and they have changed their name just recently but the northern california independent living services which is an advocacy group of different disabilities, not just one, and so i take advice from them and i also have

them review and approve along with my approval, so this is one approach that i use to overcome politics shall i say sometimes. >> it's a great question. randy good one. one of the many hats i wear i have been trying to guide a group in the city with our transition plan updating our transition plan which is a living document for a city showing that we are removing barriers and our self evaluation, and i have to explain that not only the importance of this and all of the facets of it. it's vast to our council groups who represent different disabilities and have

different agendas and again it's a task that often falls to a building official and it's an important facet of the community. i have learned a lot through the transition plan process and the different community members that we have dealt with. we still have a long ways to go, but yeah. >> i think we're about ready to wrap things up unless anyone has closing thoughts or impressions you would like to share. i will yield to angela executive director of the ccda. >> we at the commission truly am so pleased of each and every one of you share and enlighten

us today, and i know -- well, i hope that this will not be our last time together with all of you. this has been truly a tremendous effort to have this knowledge base together in one house. the energy is fascinating but i do know that it does not stop here as said over and over again. this is a living document and it's going to require our commission to be on top of it to help you to continue to do your work and aid you and if it's not maintained it's not an aid and that's our job to make sure the document is current. however however proud of it we want your feedback and our desire is after a while come back and respond and get an open forum discussion from your

jurisdictions and we look forward to hearing from you and we quite frankly. to hear any negative thoughts of things or opportunities. we believe that that's the best way to grow and learn from the document so whatever you have to share we look forward to the feedback and we hope as you stated that you have already done share with your colleagues. we like and that's why we ask those on the phone and listening to see that this is something that we want to hear back that it's not a negative thing. that we enjoy and look forward to hearing from you. our website was given to you earlier. ccda. c adot gov and a website and contact information and our email that you may email or contact us directly. we do want to pause. we notice that in our introductions and recognitions

commissioner dolim wanted to mention a couple of recognitions and we want to make sure we do that. >> thank you angela. i am afraid in handling the papers and thanking the members of the check let list sub-committee and i will omitted a name and edia o'neal and i failed to into that in the meeting and i know she may not be on the phone or here and i deeply apologize because -- and i am being prompted that -- nia mar vely was on the list but i may have skipped over her as well at the building standards commission so my deep and sincere apologies. at the end wrapping up my part and

representing the california commission on disability access. we are a small commission -- please, it sounds like a big name but we need feedback. we need participants. we welcome each one of you to get on the phone during the meetings or drop us a note but we would love participation from people on the phone, people in person, or getting in contact with one of the commissioners or angela and this input is very vital to help us be meaningful as a commission going forward and to help everybody in california attain this goal of accessibility for all so thank you very much for my time today. >> thank you. thank you. well, with that note we're going to transition this meeting to another important aspect and responsibility our job at the commission, educational tool we're providing for the building inspectors but we know our

consumers are needing and required to have some educational process assist them and this is something that we have been working on and developing, a questionnaire, what we call an informational tool that we would like to provide to our business community, and we want to do is actually share a little bit of that questionnaire so what we do now is transition the dais with a round of applause to our panel and again thank you all for participating. [applause] we would like to ask at this point and a special recognition to yomi and lead the panel discussion. [applause]

she is an awesome person and she does many brilliant things for the north bay area and we are thankful she came to lead the panel discussion. as we're bringing forward up to the dais we're asking that regina dick-endrizzi the executive director of the san francisco office of small business join us here on the dais as well as jesse torres deputy director of small business advocate for the governor's office of business and economic development, go-biz . as we transition we

recognize that to create this educational tool for our consumers we need to know what you're interested in, so we created a questionnaire and i'm just going to read a little bit as we transition because we want to know what type of financial incentives would be appealing to bring your business into compliance for california accessibility regulations? so we know and this is where we will begin in the discussion today because we have two -- what we call heavy hitters in this particular area of discussion, to answer those

questions. we also want to know have you used a cass within your business and if you have used a cass what were some of the challenges? if you haven't used a cass why not? couldn't you not find one? did you know about the services? so we're going to ask those questions in our informational tool. the part of if you have used a cass we would like to know exactly your level of using the report? there is an assumption once you get a cass report done it's over that you answered the question and know how to move forward but a possibility that some are not equipped to know what to do once they get the report so we want to know is there more information or instructions to assist you in using the report? and then we also have in our

questionnaire -- basically what are some of the things that you need? we have come up with some ideas. we need to hear from you as small businesses so we have this opportunity as we're setting aside as we go through the outreach opportunities across california and for small businesses and this informational tool is on the website as well as we're delivering to e-blast if you're on the list and we ask to you respond and we will follow up on the questionnaire and we want to know and we have done as you have seen a tremendous effort for the checklist for the final building inspectors but we know there is more to go in regards to the consumers to use to help them become compliant so again as we stated we know that typically -- we already heard that financial incentives would

be the possible answer for many small businesses so that's why we brought today two knowledgeable representatives that can share and beginning regina. she's going to present -- >> [inaudible] >> yeah, so regina will be sharing with you and then jesse torres from the governor's office will follow. >> so regina dick-endrizzi director of the office of small business and it's an honor to be before you today and thank you angela. i just realized today you weren't the director so i apologized that i didn't know that ahead of time and congratulations so i wanted to share with you programs that

our office and the city have put together out of first initiating with the response to businesses who were receiving lawsuits and not understanding why and how this was taking place, and then two as we have been really engaging in on this process really learning some interesting things about what we as city government can be doing to improve the process. so just very quickly in 2009 our office of small business and the northeast federal credit union which we will learn about later we conducted over 66 presentations including information on general workshops, campaigns by district and in specific languages. in 2011 we launched a comprehensive program to include loan assistance and legal assistance. in february 2011 we mailed out

over 3,000 mailers to restaurants in seven languages informing them of their obligations, and letting them know about the drive by lawsuits and then in january 2013 we trained our city economic development organizations to educate their clients. these are new businesses and working through all of our network and support structures to begin to educate businesses as they're opening their business what they need to give consideration to. january 2013 the city launched a small business assistance program and initially targeting five neighborhoods that assist business with access to assessments and grants to help them improve their business, so these are subsidized cass inspections. and november of 2014 the city launched

a portal and i would like to show you and one of the key questions asked how come businesses say they don't know about their obligations? and because we most focus on the building code but this is an area where the inspectors don't necessarily go through every single and update and inspect you on whether you're in current compliance as they do in other areas. and we also know there are businesses who by turn key businesses are very small and not doing any improvements, tenant improvements to the business that would even begin to engage the department of building inspection and we launched a online portal and

one of the keys -- we designed 10 steps in launching your business, and step eight is -- sorry, this is not as easy to navigate as i thought it would be. i'm so used to -- well, i'm very sorry that you're not going to be able to see this. i don't know how to scroll to the side here. does anybody know how to work this? so we have

identified step eight as ada compliance so we're letting every single business that goes to the portal that wants to start their business that they need to give consideration for access compliance, and this is a really important area of which to inform businesses that is something that is equally important giving consideration to when they're starting their business. i will note that the sba on their website they don't make any mention when doing site selection around access compliance. the one federal entity that engages probably with the most number of small businesses does not even make mention of that, so this is one area that we have really

learned. like where have been the barriers that businesses they don't know what their requirements are so what are the touch points we can reach them beyond the contractor and the department of building inspection? and then in january january 2015 we with the sb 1186 the dollar collected through the business administration we are able to expand the subsidized cass inspection city wide. so to date our loan program -- six businesses have accessed the loan program. 55 businesses

have utilized the legal services. we've had over 25 articles in different mediums. we try to focus on especially language specific media. four panel presentations and with the bar association and had many clients come to the office of small business and getting information about navigating and dealing with access compliance and 344 businesses have been assigned and/or have received assessment assistance or with a subsidized cass program. so in january 2011 the program that we launched and i handed out packets but if the audience is interested we provided some overview of the federal laws

and state laws that guide businesses on what their requirements are. we have -- what the cass program is and why it's important to do it. what to look for in a cass inspector when hiring one. a list of cass inspectors. making sure that businesses know their annual federal tax credits -- they're are annual federal tax credits they can utilize and do improvements mpt the loan program i talked about and six businesses have engaged in it. we worked with opportunity fund, a micro lender to set up a loan program and the bar association set up a program for consultant for $35 for 30 minutes so this just is a quick snapshot of that information that i have run through in it and we provided that information in multiple

languages. the small business assessment program -- so its first initial funding came from the mayor targeting five neighborhoods or five business districts in the city primarily where we had business owners where english was not the first language to start with that education and outreach. we contracted with a non-profit to manage and run the program to hire the cass inspectors because as a city government we're subject to sunshine laws and the contract between the cass or the cass report is designed to be confidential document between the business and the cass inspector so if we owned it it's no longer a confidential document so the non-profit that we contract with is the one that facilitates the connection with

the cass inspector. so northeast federal credit union is the non-profit we contracted with. again they're in the business community, and they of course definitely specialize in engaging with chinese owned small business owners but have done the workshop and outreach and door to door knocking to other businesses, and we have conducted workshops in spanish and vietnamese and that gal log. >> >> so how we engage with the -- how businesses get engaged with access to the subsidized cass inspections? again through the workshops, through direct contact with businesses, and now that it is a city wide program we're also working with our council of district merchants