gues have any other questions. if not i will move on to the controller's office and we made strides and now the report will tell us about some of the challenges when people are receiving services in person. >> thank you. good morning supervisors. my name is ryan hunter from the city performance unit of the controller office with our team and we have been working with the business portal team to map the process of opening a restaurant in san francisco so i will tell you about what we have been doing and what we found, what we're recommending. so this slide -- could we get the powerpoint? thank you. this slide has the journey map that the business portal team put together. really what we have been working on is trying to get into that infin itd loop and untangle that. could we see what is going on in and find ways to

make it simpler? so we went through the process of opening a restaurant, find all of the permit processes relevant for a new owner so we mapped 22 restaurant processes across san francisco departments and three state and federal departments. to supplement the work we interviewed local business owners, different department staff and talked to the acceleration team in new york city. we looked at permitting data from the treasurer and tax collector and a survey from business owners to ask them about the obstacles in the process. this is a look at the different departments that we worked with and mapped and the different areas so for each department we produced a map of that permitting process so this is a sample of one of those here and we really had a specific focus on what does this look like from the customer's perspective and what are the

steps in the process for the customer and the back end processes that support that? so in this process you see the top row is always the customer and this particular one it's a lot of touch points for the customer. when we did that for all 22 of the processes we were able to put them together into an overall permit process map of opening a restaurant and this was able to show us what do you need to do first? what are the permits you need to get before another permit? what's necessary to open your doors versus what can be done later? so what did we learn from all of our mapping? we made eight recommendations and two large groups. the first is about collaboration between departments so what we found was that often in a single department's internal process was relatively efficient and made sense, but those processes often crossed departments and there's not always good

structure or good incentive for those departments to work together, and often customer is bounce friday one department to another with. >> >> little communication in between so the first set of recommendations is what can we do to help businesses work better together and departments work better together and i will highlight a few of these. turn around time is key and when we asked departments how long does it take to get this permit or that permit it was usually a difficult question to answer and the first step in shortening the time span is having the information available and knowing how are we doing now and creating the structures to look at that and look at the turn around time. the second recommendation that we looked at was about how do we combine different permit processes together? we found that there

were often groups of permits that shared some characteristics and we could bundle together, so for example often any person who is registering a new business usually also needs to register for business personal property assessment with the assessor's office and often a fictitious name with the office and we looked at bundling those together and i will skip to number 5 which is about one stop shop and co-locating permits. we found there were so many different physical locations that one restaurant owner would need to visit to open a visit and second and townsend and mission and city hall or fox plaza and a lot of running around and exacerbated if the process is not clear and applicants don't know where to go next and an option was

explore co-locating the permitting departments moving towards the one stop shop that several people have talked about. the second group of recommendations are about kind of a focus on the applicant so we found that the best departments thought about their role as not only being about enforcing compliance of the process but about helping the applicants as customers, so we identified a number of permits that could be submitted online and sort of prioritized those. in general we found that if a permit was able to be submitted by mail that it could be submitted online and we produced a list of likely candidates for that and we also found that it was often difficult to pay for permits. there were a number of departments that require something like a cashier's check or multiple payments for a single permit and when you multiply that across 22

departments it's onerous so we recommended that departments look at ways to streamline payments and have fewer payments for a single permit and to accept things like credit cards to make that payment process easier so i will leave it there but we are available for questions. >> thank you very much. and next i would like to bring up regina from the office of small business. >> so thank you supervisor tang -- excuse me, chair farrell, supervisor tang and supervisor mar. so with this information that the controller's office has done

through analyzing the permits with the business portal team we took a look at that information and thought all right what could we do with it and what's the best way to help our businesses move through that process? so with director rufo convening different departments, the office of building inspection and department of public health and creating the small business accelerator team was formed and so i'm going to talk a bit about that as well. in the 2015-16 budget -- thank you supervisor tang for your leadership in establishing and creating the team. this will launch in the fall of 2015. we will be creating a client service manager that will be a part --

that would be the core component of the team and the team just to be clear will be comprised of representative simonson -- liaisons and working with the different departments to either resolve or get questions on how to facilitate a particular business need. as presented to you there are roughly 230 restaurants that go through the permitting process each year and the majority of these businesses are going to open one restaurant, maybe two restaurants within their lifetime, and so it's not within their interest to become experts in the permitting process. their core capacity is opening a restaurant, making food, delivering food and providing an excellent customer experience for their customers. the

client service manager will own the business experience working with the different departments so starting with evaluating the business needs, taking a look at what will be the zoning requirements. will they need a conditional use? will there need to be a change of use? what is the current space they're going into? will they need to did a complete build out? what is required for engaging with the office of building inspection? so they're reviewing the past permit applications with the individual business owner and working with the particular departments. they will be coordinating the services and helping to schedule inspections. by involving and having a case manager throughout the process the business owner will have an experienced partner. what we do find at the office of small business that most businesses and our small

businesses really don't understand or know how to speak the language that we -- the city government language, so what does a conditional use process mean? what does a change of use process mean? so and what does the application process mean and why do i need to have -- you know when i file with the department of public health for my permit to operate that it needs to be routed through zoning, so interpreting all of that for the business owner is important and of course that will be one of the elements to help streamline the process in addition to taking a look at where we can improve the processes. the small business case manager will be co-located at the office of building inspection at 1660 mission street and while this is a position that is part of oewd

what we do know is that not all businesses either touch point with the office of economic and workforce development and the invested neighborhood or with our office, the office of small business through the business assistance center, but the one key touch point they have to touch is the office of building inspection when they go to open their business so it's very important to have this position co-located at the bpd bpd to ensure that -- office of building inspection and every restaurant that opens is able to engage with the client service manager. this will also ensure that we have the client service manager will have the opportunity to then have the access to all the key departments that are located at the dbi on the fifth floor which include the planning department, the public utilities

department, dpw, fire, and -- dpw and the fire, so that way the client service manager will be able to engage with those departments if there's questions or needs or things not clear can do that on behalf of the client. this will ensure that applications move swiftly so that the client service manager if something is bottlenecked will be able to engage with the department in a much more readily achievable fashion, and thus will save time and money for the business, but it will also -- we will begin to learn ways in which we can facilitate the process and the permitting which will also save us time and money as well. so we are working with a case management model so the permitting departments will designate a staff lead to sit

on the business accelerator team. we will be including other -- all the departments that are involved in the permitting process to assist us with this. the client service manager is charged with convening the departments and leads and guiding the restaurants through the entire process so the client service manager will have some authority to convene the departments and work with them and resolve issues, and they will be providing updates to the senior staff of the departments, the department heads, so that we can take this opportunity to learn our best practices and see where we can make improvements. the client service manager will also engage with the office of economic and workforce development, the office of small business, it is job squad and the small business development center.

>> >> and touch point places that businesses engage with city agencies that are non regulatory city agencies but work closely with the golden gate student a restaurant association and we have the different groups working with us and mission economic development center and make sure that those entities know that we have a client service manager for those engaging in the restaurant and food industry. there will be the single point of contact that will help provide increased accountability. the client service manager will start tracking the time that it takes -- the actual time it takes for a business to open in the different scenarios so from a full service high end restaurant to a very small take out service as an example. and i think the

one important thing that will -- the timing of this that is taking place with the team coming on board in preparation for the one stop shop that is being developed at mission and south van ness we will have real live experience how the permit process in real time is routed and what we can do to improve the customer experience and one stop permitting experience prior to opening what we call the project [inaudible] or the one stop location at mission and south van ness. i do want to thank all the departments that have been involved. as supervisor tang as talked about it. also the director that it's really with the departments engaged with the permitting process, working with the controller's office and working

with jane kong and recognizing that this is a good means of helping our restaurants get open, so i too want to thank the department heads and especially todd r ruffo and the other members who were really instrumental in forming the concept of the business accelerator team and determining the need that we need to have a case manager, so thank you. >> thank you very much to everyone for their presentations. and i'm actually going to do things differently because i know we have folks in the audience that would like to speak so before i launch into questions or comments i would like to see through the chair if we can open public comment. i know we have many businesses couldn't be here and they're busy running their shops and we have someone in the audience

that runs a business in the neighborhood so i would like to therefore open up public comment first so i have a few speaker cards and come up if you like. [calling speaker names] any microphone is fine. >> hi. my name is lauren crab. i own andy coffee town roasters in the sunset and katie's office asked me to talk about the experience with the planning department. we got the lease on our location in november of 2013 and it took us until -- oh no november 2012 and took us until march of 2014 to open. that is a year and a half of our lives building it out.

a large portion of that was spent in the infinity loop of death i think it was called, and it was extremely frustrating and specifically going between the different departments, kind we felt bombarded by one of the inspections after we had a preliminary inspection and then another guy came out and made us rebuild a bunch of stuff and it was a frustrating time and it's very good to hear that you guys are working to make it a little bit easier for people like myself, and yeah the online portal looks awesome. i'm kind of jealous that wasn't around when i was building out and i think that having the person at the planning department to help you -- help guide small business owners through the process is going to really help so i hope

you continue to prioritize the projects and work on some some more. thank you. >> thank you very much for coming out. next speaker please. >> hi. samantha higgins, golden gate restaurant association. i want to thank the team and the controller's office and supervisor tang for the leadership and everyone else that worked on it. i want to address the difficultly in the permitting process for restaurants as it's one of the most complicated processes to map out and understand and especially for small business owners as so many restaurants are. i wanted to mention the number of calls and questions we get on a daily basis from restaurants or people trying to open restaurants and particularly owners from other jurisdictions that are confused about the san francisco process and emphasize how important it is and streamlining the process would be for an industry as a whole. just looking through the

report i want to suggest beginning with some of the easier things to tackle especially switching more applications to be done online and combining locations and i know we're working towards. linking critical permits to other permits would make a difference and referring applicants to the planning department in the beginning of the process and i want to talk about the inspections and it could be difficult for businesses. one of the challenges which was brought up there is typically not one inspector assigned so restaurants or businesses will get different inspectors that tell them different things and can be confusing and lead to delays so if we could do that i think that would be helpful for restaurants is thank you everybody for the work on this and i look forward to continuing. >> thank you. next speaker please. >> supervisors jim lazarus san francisco chamber of commerce. thank you supervisor tang for

your leadership on the issue and the departments involved. long over due. even looking at the portal and go online and look at the portal you wonder whether you take the next step to try to open a restaurant. it's a daunting list of permits, applications and approvals that you have to go through depending on what your business model is and where it's located. as i said this is long over due. if i look at los angeles, they have a restaurant and hospitality portal. they call it an express program in the city of los angeles. it's a multi-agency management network that does exactly what we're talking about doing here, and i think portals are great. the internet is great but having a real person through the small business commission staff and other departments working with dbi having one-on-one meetings and really helping assist the applicant through this very

difficult process and it will never get that smooth and easy. in this city you won't get down to one internet page where you're able to click on buttons and send in the credit card check and get the permits. it's not going to happen that way and having real people help real applicants is ultimately the way it will succeed and we appreciate the efforts and we will work with you to make it a success. thank you. >> thank you. next speaker please. >> good afternoon supervisors. supervisor tang thank you for doing this work. it's greatly appreciated. [inaudible] and merchantace association in the mission district and invest in neighborhoods. we have been working with the merchants for the last 17 years on the corridor. some of the biggest issues we heard from the merchants is affordability of the permits and affordability of

space and the permit process to open up a business and the process afterwards of maintaining the business around the permits so we do appreciate this work. we seen a lot of proves over the years the. -- improvements over the years. i think what is key is definitely having an individual that is able to guide the process with a lot of these folks. one of the things that we dealt with is the language barrier which is huge and also the high-tech and low tech. i think we need to have that balance of both so i think this person will be able to do that. i think -- you know, the portal it's awesome and the team is well balanced and i think we need to move in that direction making sure that we cover a lot of different communities and abilities around tech. i think it's important. the one stop shop i think it's very good also. it's been a task for

folks to get around for the different permits. also creating a to do list by restaurant type because there are different types of restaurant and fast food, self service, bars and full restaurants and identify the type of restaurant you want to open and then a list of tasks that you have to do in order to be get them all done because a lot of people don't realize there are so many different types and not aware of one thing they missed and penalizeed in the future so creating that list would be great, and also what we have seen in the past with some they combine the permits on to one statement. if you're allowed to have an option of opting in or opting out and some people would rather pay across the years and others at one time so looking at also. we appreciate the work that you're doing and look forward to the conversation. thank you. >> thank you very much. are

there any other members of the public who wish to comment on this hearing? okay. seeing none through the chair if we could close public comment. >> public is closed. [gavel] >> thank you very much to everyone that came out and like i mentioned we heard stories throughout the work as well, so one of the things that the controllary office made a recommendation through the report is improve turn around time. departments must measure time and targets to drive change and monitor performance so i don't know if there is something to be answered by the controller's office or the other departments here but i want to know which departments -- how many of the city departments are having this as a measurement? because i think it's important to gauge from a customer experience standpoint how much time it takes for people to go through the process? in the report it says on average someone i think went through a process and took four

months but we see cases someone went through and waited two years to do a full build out. >> yeah, we didn't find that i recall and my team can speak to this maybe any departments that could readily produce that information. there were some places where you could discern part of it by digging deep through the data but it wasn't a top line item for any of the departments that we spoke with. >> okay. and second question is based on one of the recommendations as well is to link the low awareness permits and have them packaged together with the critical to open permits so applicants can apply for them simultaneously. there was an example pointed out about the treasure's office the new business registration with the assessor's new business registration as well as the clerk if i --

fictitious registration and i am wondering if departments are open to how we might collaborate and package the permits together? >> i am from the office of the treasurer and we are looking in great interest how we can package all of the items into the business registration. one of the challenges with working with the assessor's office the businesses have to do a form called a 571l which is catchy and for ensecured property taxes and that form is state mandated and we're not allowed to change it so we're working with the way that we share data with them so they can get notified of businesses that open that will need to fill out this form and transfer the relevant information over to them so it's a bit easier and then we're doing some advocacy with the state to see if we can carve

out our own 571l or at least add the business account number to make it easier for businesses. >> great. thank you for informing us of some of the efforts and in particular about the weights and measures and including that as part of the health inspection process. i don't know if anyone is here that can answer that. >> good afternoon. richard lee acting director of environmental health. weights and measures is part of our unit but i want to point one thing out is that the registration is not required before a restaurant opens, so just like also for the certified food manager training that is not required so those things can actually happen after a restaurant is open and it's not going to be needed before it's opened. in terms of the inspections -- in terms of the food inspectors doing the weight and measures inspections that's not going to be actually allowed because there is a requirement

that you have to be certified to do those weights and measure inspections so we have weights and weights inspectors certified to do that. our food inspectors are not certified to do that but again it will not delay the approval of permits. >> okay. is there any way potentially they could -- i understand one doesn't have to be done before opening a shop -- i guess a store most likely but the other one, the actual health inspection you need before opening and is there a way to package the inspection -- even if they're two different people and have them occur at the same time or create additional efficiencies in that way. >> we will have to look into it. we would have linkage between the weight and measures and others to make sure it's done but we have to look into that. >> okay thank you. one other

recommendations had to do with referring customers to the planning department at the beginning of the process so i wanted to find out -- i don't know if it's through the planning department or someone else that encounters customers first. currently what is going on, maybe why aren't people referred to planning first? how is that happening? i know in some cases customers know to go to planning first but i wanted a better understanding of that. >> i could make a brief comment about that and if any other department wants to chime in. what is behind this recommendation is that there are plenty of places that the process can be slowed down or become expensive the planning in particular if you're trying to start a business in an area not properly zoned there is not much often that you can do about it and sometimes business owners experience th