internet to reach people in the most effective way that we can. very brief overview, but i hope it gives you the high lights of how we're talking about this with staff and how we're categorizing and looking for the details to emerge. in closing, so, yeah, then what do we do about all this, right? what is the implementation here? well, the executive directive is in effect as of september. but obviously we haven't yet changed our procedures in a way that would help us to achieve those timeframes. the first thing, i think on the list, is going to be adjusting our application procedures so that we can get all projects that are coming in the door on these timeframes and know that we've changed the way that we're going to handle them internally in a way that will make it realistic to meet that goal. there is going to be a lot of things in this plan that we'll try to do immediately. at kind of the staff level, the internal level. some things that people are really, really down in the weeds.

but it is going to need to evolve over time. so to kind of help us keep track of that, making this a living plan and making it where on some regular basis, we are reporting either planning to the mayor's office, here at the commission, from planning staff, what did we just do in the last few months? how is it working to the extend that we know what is on our list right now, what are some of things you heard about what we've changed. we want to keep the conversation going because you have to keep asking yourself are you doing things the right way. it is not just like a thing we'll do and walk away and move on with our lives. i have three buckets -- you may be asking yourselfs, are you just going to go do this or is there a process for the process for the process? of course there's process. that's what we do, right? it depends on what it is we're talking about. if it is something where it is a commission policy, which is i don't think a large part of that universe, obviously we'll be here and talking to you. you will be making a resolution and talk about changing that policy.

if there are departmental policies like application procedures, for example, we have documents like director bullet the incident and information on our website, the information in ourself information packets themselves that we can simply do and that is going toable the public record for how people understand what we're doing and we can use our director's reports here at the planning commission and other ways it goes on our website. those are things that we can do internally and we'll be publishing those as we get put together. finally, certain things involve changing the planning code, so whether it is initiated here or at the board of supervisors, it will be coming back here. so, nothing is going to happen tomorrow. we have plenty of opportunities to talk about the various specifics depending on the level of change that is being contemplated. i wanted to give you a little bit of a flavor for that.

and also i want to just thank our planning department staff, my colleagues. this is just a list of a few of the people who have been very instrumental to helping. you guys have a really talented high caliber group of people work on the city. and it haable a real privilege to work with everybody to see what we've all learned checkively. with that, i think we have public comment and i look forward to discussing with you all further. >> great. thank you. we have a couple of speak cards. if others would like to speak, please line up on the screen side of the room. you can speak in any order. >> good afternoon, commissioners. and everyone else.

my name is christopher roche. as a firm, i'll note that we work on both affordable multifamily projects and smaller single family or, you know, one to three-unit promises that are part of the family housing here in the city. i'm speaking today as a private citizen and group as a member of concerned architects called the design advocacy group san francisco. i'm also an active member of the niasf, although my comments don't reflect their position or views. please note that the members have met to discuss and align our opinion on both the mayor's executive director that we're discussing today as well as the residential expansion threshhold which has been mentioned and is calendared for later in december. ahem. regarding the mayor's directive, we agree with and fully support the mayor in his efforts to expedite production of more housing city that is

affordable to more san franciscoans by accelerating the approval process through the planning domestic. therefore we want to support the planning department in these efforts and as design professionals that work closely with planning department staff every day, we believe we are uniquely positioned to help find creative and effective ways to help lighten their loads so that they can focus on their efforts on the higher goals that the mayor has mandated. and we're really here today to speak specifically to an item that jacob brought up in their plan, which is things that should be routine. and over the counter. i think most of us in the design community have long recognized that the current planning department process is too long, too divisive and two graphic with many projects. it's continually bogged down with items that are routine.

they are items that should not be up to discretion. therefore we offer the following suggestions and examples of some of the items, and just some, that should be more routine or make the process more predictable and take the load off of planning staff. >> one of suggestions is under the cat gour of intel, and which used to be over the counter. we want to ask for a wider reach insel items without neighborhood notification. they could include insel under decks, adding garages and all rooms under within the r.e.t. threshholds. rebuilding existing features 100%.

not just 50%. section 181 of the planning code indicates you can rebuild an existing feature without notification up to 50%. over 50%, you immediate to notify the neighbors. rear additions that are one or two stories high with one or five-foot setbacks either side. these are all items that could be approved over the counter. the second item we're asking for is that we ask the planning commission to rewrite the definition of gross square footage so that basements and garage spaces are not counted as growth square footage this. will allow people to capture equity within the foot print of their buildings as a right, without having to go through the neighborhood notification or lengthy planning process. this will serve to incentivize homeowners to perform a full seismic upgrade of their

foundations, which is often prohibitively expensive and incredibly disruptive. by off setting these costs with the value that they're able to capture through adding or improving space below grade that has no direct impact to the neighborhood context, it serves the general public interest and the city's goal of maintaining a resilient housing stock for the multitude of aginging residences to undergo the seismic upgrades and only -- and the only way it is going to happen at a significant scale and within reasonable timeline is to subsidize the cost through the value capture. the outcome will be a win-win for both homeowners and the city. >> i'm karen pacon. karen pacon architecture and design. to continue with her point about gross square footage, the current definition of gross square footage will capture

many minor projects that would be done within the building envelope and send them to the commission. this would be triggered by most parking and room-down projects on sloped lots that are compelling, minor and major excavations to include legal head height. excluding these will help the commission avoid hearing projects that propose the addition of parking and a single room within an existing building foot print. and also help planning avoid triggering many months, if not years of process and huge fees for such simple projects that do not change scale, mapping or the relative affordability of existing homes. our goal, as members of the san francisco chapter of the a.i.a. and concerned architects promoting progressive urbanism and design is to support,

collaborate with and serve as a resource for a strong planning domestic. we look to them for their expertise and leadership. leadership which is often bogged down in the review of mundane issues that impact the broader neighborhood, that really don't impact the broader neighborhood or the city at large. freeing the department from these small, what should be as of right issues, will in fact not only unclog the pipeline for review, but lead it to more thoughtful and substantial review of larger issues that affect our city and in which the department should be taking a leadership position on. the signatories to this statement that the three of us have just read include neil schwartz, a.i.a., schwartz and architecture. david gast, a.i.a., gast architects. michael robbins, a.i.a., studio robbins cortina.

jennifer jones, aia-sf executive director. michelle krebull, lundberg design. ross levy, a.i.a., levy art and architecture. lou agorziak. karen pacon, myself, member of the a.i.a. jim zack, a.i.a. mada abernathy. joshua aidlan, aidlan darling design. christopher roche, who you just met, a.i.a., studio vera. and there are more names, but i've run out of time. there are 35 all together who have signed this letter. thank you. [please stand by]

it's really valuable in terms of gaining efficiency. what did staff think about our org chart? what is it that we are doing together. i bet we're doing things better,

faster, more efficiently than doing trainings of people or retrainings or doing things or asking this person rather than that person. i didn't hear about how to get people prepared for technology improvements or how to train them. there is some technology that helps people and some that gets in the way. and people have opinions about that and those are valuable. i'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about the people part. >> i think your points are very well taken, commissioner. we don't talk much about that side of the work of the department. we have a full-time professional training coordinator in the department that coordinates all kinds of training for the department. we can have her come and maybe it would be useful. i'm not sure you have met her. staff has had a number of

issues. we've had a number of formal and informal conversations and they brought up issues around the lack of human resource aspect of the work. it crosses a line. some of the suggestions have been. can we stop on piddly administrative stuff that gets in our way. there are a lot of systems that tend to take time that are not about doing our actual work. i will put that out there. i think people are all aware of that. and then there are a lot of things that are -- that also get in our way that are kind of more -- soft stuff. the supervisory stuff. and we've been talking about some of the issues and i'm happy to share them as we go forward. but your point is well taken. >> my fear is that -- is just it adds stress.

so you put in a six-month deadline, but you don't train people or empower them or still have a supervisory structure that doesn't work. it puts more staff stress and i fear that. public service do god's work, i think. there's an entitlement out there saying, you do it. you're getting paid. and that's not the case. >> i appreciate you saying this. this is a staff that's really dedicated. they really are. and i think it's important for us to say that. and i think it's also important to say that some staff had a challenging time when they read this directive because they felt like it was putting pressure on them and pointing fingers on them as being the bad guys. and i can understand that. i also think that we all have the same goal here of trying to

-- trying not only to produce more housing, but in a more efficient way. i perceive this and what i said to staff, i think this is an opportunity for us to think differently about how we do our work. we don't, frankly, get this opportunity very often. i think it is incumbent upon all of us that we are given this opportunity to look at it differently and see how we can do our work better. our goal here, and jacob can say more about this, is to engage all the staff in this process in getting them engaged in how we do our work differently. >> and i guess i would add to that, yes, lots of ideas and they come up, but there are the things a lot of this is not

about moral and staff time and the extent that we have our planning staff doing planning work, grappling with the real issues, using our creativity and feeling like you are bogged down by doing something that maybe it's not the best way to do it or wrote or out of date. i'm hearing that moral feeling. a lot of the stuff that we're doing is not about that aspect of it, but by making it so we're not sweating the small stuff as much and leaving more room for planners to do planning, you will have better planning. >> commissioner richards? >> commissioner richards: so i met with dan over a couple of sour beers. we spent a couple of hours talking about it.

i have certification and some quality things from my past and my professional life, functional deployment and i used to work at h.p. and we would go into organizations and finance and they would hire performing teams. a lot of the stuff here i'm looking at the eyes and even though we're not talking about something granular, now that i have something on paper and i heard your presentation, i want to comment on it. the first thing is, i completely support revocation hearings. i don't think that -- the fact that we can speed up everything and get it out the door and it reminds me for when i used to work for kodak and people would run in and say, i have to develop this right now. and then you see it's christmas pictures. why did it take you that long to develop this but you need it now? those are the jokes we used to have. one of the questions we used to

ask at h.p. how do we know where we want to go when we don't know where we're really at. and after hearing the presentation, that really hits me. and the reason is not because any of this is bad, but i think when i looked at the page here under process improvements, product entitlements. i started to say, a, is what we want to do, b, how we want to do. and c, how we want to do. d, what we want to do and it's a mish mash of thoughts, all good thoughts. there's an organization of 300 people. some people do the work. some support i.t. function, they support everybody. so one of the things that we always came up with when we went into organizations was, people assume that if you work 40 hours

a week you work 40 hours a week. it's really not the case because people have vacations. people have bio breaks. they read general emails, and you come down to -- 60% of the hours were direct work and 40% weren't. so if you think you have 2,080 hours per person, it's not. it's roughly half of that. is your staffing correct? if they still can't do it in a humanly possible way, it's still not going to get done. so staffing and workload are important. that has tos figured out once you pare this back.

what is somebody capable of doing the right way? and then ability in education. there are people that may not have the ability to do the functions we want them to do or they need more training. one of the things about training is, just because you give it, doesn't mean they get it. i was involved in organizations and studies where we train 10 people. give them a test and 8 people understood it, 1 thought it was different and the other was different, and the error rates was the 1 and the 1. you have to understand that it sunk in. the environmental. blah, blah, blah. the whole process and understand what the organizational structure is. one of the big ones i hear is coverage. so and so is on vacation for two

weeks, it's a complicated project, so coverage is an issue that i hear about a lot. because it's -- everybody is so specialize ofiz iized on what w. process, what do we do and how do we do it? we talked about demo calcs and we had a 40% error rate. so these are the questions that you come up with, especially on complicated things. is there a mentor who people should be able to go to who knows about this. and we have to understand on these different things that you have institutional knowledge. if you don't write things down and so and so leaves the department and they were the expert, you will have a big gap. cycle times. i hear a lot about cycle times. i call a developer. developer sends this in.

so you have these cycle times. it seems like you are in a loop until you get off the merry-go-round and are standing on the ground. i think there's a lot there. error rates. what are we trying to do? how much is an error? what is an error? an error is something that you knock somebody over the head with it and to get improvement. in your process, what are we trying to measure? how much of that is in and out-of-bounds. how much of this could be automated. i went on the small business portal and i started up because i started my only little business. blip, blip. five screens. pay your fee. put my credit card in, established business. is this san francisco? i expected to have to come down to city hall and wait in line and fill it all out and tell them i was wrong. so there has to be some level of automation as well. and i think once we understand

what we do, mapping it out, how many people do it, and the lens of what they spend, what is the percent of effort and what is the benefit? if you rate the process, it's what you want to say, probably not worth doing. why am i doing this. those are the ones that you cross off the list right away. i think that there's -- we have a goal. how are we setting ourselves up to get to this goal? i think to everybody's point, this isn't a stress-inducing exercise where we have to get there in six months and jam this peg in this hole and peg in this hole. what is the plan to get to, the ability to do the 6, 9, 12, 22 month thing. what changes do we need to make.

and what are the changes that we're seeing and learning and how does that reiterate and make more changes. they will be discovering things along the way that will generate more questions and more changes. it will get you to your goal and will have a roadmap. you can get people to buy in when they see that you have a plan, rather than punching in the dark. we'll go hit e.i.r.s. we'll hit d.r.s. how much of the time do people spend on it, 50%? if it's 50%, hell, yeah, we need to march off and change d.r.s. once we start making things efficient, if some person over here does a job and they don't have as much to do, could we put them over here? it's a plan person. i don't know how all of this works, but you can improve things to the point where one group is efficient and one group is struggling and you cannot repatriate those employees to help out.

a lot of good stuff here. i would love to sit down with you folks on a lot of the stuff that i said, but you have a big deadline here. you have talented staff. everybody wants to do well, but with some deep thought on how you get there, i think we can do it. >> thanks. commissioner moore? >> commissioner moore: thank you. this should be a slightly longer, more thoughtful discussion. we're cramming this in to help you on december 1. i hope that between today and december 1, we can have another discussion, including those comments made by the a.i.a. i believe we're all trying to weigh in. it touches each of us and in a certain way, we feel a certain amount of responsibility. as commissioners, i know we feel the responsibility to do right for the government. i took reading of this directive positively, but also troubled by

the extent of taking 40 years and coming to the intersection of potential policy failure and challenge the process. what is happening and what is numerically being accounted for is not the result of the last two, three, four years of the planning department and 40 years of doing things differently. we need to step back and take the responsibility we can. use the tools and skilsz that are honed into problem solving of today and move forward without being burdened by too much expectation, which we may not be able to deliver and perform by december 1, but lets engage in processes that are more efficient and more co comeparable to each other. eight departments need to speak to each other and interact.

the city of san francisco is different than any other cities in california. it's that of more collaborative thinking. san francisco departments has worked as more individual departments, which is called silo thinking. i'm not using that word, but it's a well-known criticism of the way that the city has worked in the past. it's particularly a critical intersection, where we as commissioners, and i will be honest about this, where we find each other in a situation where we together discover omissions or things that were skipping ahead because of the information flow between the two departments was not where it should be. and we've struggled with the interstate of technology and

that went back to square one. it's part of history, but also an overlay by people when development and pressure comes to a point of where it is now. are we realizing there are things that are inkocongress -- incongruent and caused delays. and, and, and. that said, i want to focus on the positive point of the message of the message and that's for the departments to work together. and i want to use examples from other cities in california, where there is in the initial intake a one-stop shopping, so to speak, where people from different departments or representatives sit in the meeting when a project comes in and comment on certain issues that will be part of their

judgment or ultimately along the line part of how a project moves forward. this is just like i'm being very vague, but i think that the director and staff knows what i'm talking about. it could be broader technical input informing each other about what is coming down the line. and there are certain projects where it's more important and others for different departments coming into play, etc., etc. for example, we had a -- just recently, we had a d.r., which came back five or six times, near a gas line and fire department and water and this and that and everything. and if that would have been discussed day one on, we wouldn't have had months and months and months of this project cycling back and forth. i'm making a characture. you nope -- know what project it is. sometimes it sets a baseline as

to how the project is set up. i think i'm seeing enough here. i would like to find other avenues and there are other avenues of how we constructively can support the department's work and be faster and i will leave it at that. >> thank you. commissioner johnson? >> commissioner johnson: thank you. i think to have something more holistically for more of the work that we see, which is why there are so many delays after things get out of planning, we would need to see the strategies that would require what the director talks about, which is dedicated staff to doing this. right now, you look at the fire department as an example, who they may have comments on str t streets or things like that and they don't have a person whose job is to do this. they struggle to staff the inter

agency groups and make sure that they're doing things in a timely fashion, because it's not their mission. they're the fire department. they fight fires. i think some of that collaboration that they're speaking of will hopefully come as a strategy from the other agencies. beyond that, when you give up to the policy level, like what do our codes look like, which is where this flows from, i continue to agree in pushing for more collaboration from the top. >> the plan is really a plan for how to move forward. it's not a, this is how we're changing our life and moving on. there will be a number of things in the plan that will require a lot of follow-up, commission policies, things that you will be hearing about. the second thing i mentioned,

the new building, which is under construction, will have a physical one-stop shop for all departments involved in the permitting process. there are like 100 stations in that place on the second floor, second floor of that building is something like 37,000 square feet. it's a huge, one-stop shop for all city departments, which will be extremely helpful. and that doesn't do everything that you talked about, because we have to make it work. the fact that we're all in one place will really help. and i can't help but comment on the notion that it's been many decades. as several people have said, it's not likely going to be our recommendation that we change things so they don't come to commission. i don't think we propose that, but d.r.s go back to the '50s. the mechanism of discretionary review goes back to the '50s,

when it was the only way to come to commission. so it preindicates seqa, 309, and all the other processes that you do. d.r. was the way of getting to commission at one point. so it really -- it goes back 70 years. so it's, i think -- while it's very important for some folks to come to commission, we will not be proposing that they can no longer come to you, but per other commissioners' comments, it's worth looking at how we do it. how with -- we do the d.r. process. >> any other comments? thank you. i agree with the director. it's not just a plan you implement. it's an ongoing process. i think the city having worked there and in process-oriented departments, you cannot just develop a plan and implement.

it's constantly ongoing as processes change. so i'm glad we're looking at it and not necessarily a defensive posture. we're part of the issues, too, and we can look at how we do things better and it's been 2 hours and 15 minutes and all we've really approved is a sushi bar at whole foods. so there's probably room to make approvements also and we're happy to be part of that. thank you and we look forward to more discussion. >> commissioners, that will place us at 17. 2009-159, ika, oak plaza. impact fee waiver for 1554 market street. >> good afternoon, commissioners. the case before you today is a proposal by build inc., sponsor of the residential project, to

enter into an in-kind agreement to provide a public plaza in exchange for a fee waiver in the amount of $2,180,093. the project was heard and approved by the commission on june 15, 2017. the decision before you today is the approval of the fee waiver. further detailed design refinement and maintenance and programming obligations will be done with public works. in essence, the in improvements would create a plaza at oak and venice. the proposed plaza would improve an improved oak street, designed to be shared bill cars, pedestrians and bicycles. improvements to the north side of oak street. six new landscaped planters or

trees. four new streetlights. four new publicly owned market retail kiosks. and electric power to support performances on oak plaza. the in-kind fee waiver would only cover improvements on north oak street sidewalks and roadway. the sponsor would not receive in-kind credit for any of the improvements, existing sidewalks, and any portion of the sidewalk that's part of the requirements of the residential buildings. the sponsor intends to program the plaza with arts and music events. the four retail kiosks will help to further activate the space. in addition, a retail space at the ground floor of one oak building would open out on to the plaza. the site is located within the hub and is within the area