[ inaudible ] holy mercy should be the one path of the divine rescue for oneself. one must have strong belief in true principles. our rescue for the pezervation -- [ inaudible ] so definitely it leads to forever peace of [ inaudible ] for the world. [ inaudible ] political leaders can promote leadership for the coming generations. [ inaudible ] our people would be well educated, and the world would become a big society of public

good. with true equality, civil justice, and one love and kindness to save the world, we can make success of the mission of merry an extension unto the world. we must expand the quick teachings of the true principles [ inaudible ] people can then enjoy a peaceful life of true perfection and true happiness of a strong and peaceful nation. thank you. >> supervisor peskin: thank you. is there any additional public comment? seeing none, public comment is closed, and the transportation authority commission is adjourned.

>> all right. good afternoon, everyone. welcome to the san francisco public utilities commission

meeting. today is tuesday, march 13th. madam secretary, call to order, please. roll call. [ roll call. ] >> commissioner caen is excused today, and we have quorum. >> approval of the minutes from february 27, 2018. can we have a motion. >> i'll move it. >> second. >> commissioner kwon: any discussion? any public comment? okay. all in favor? opposed? number four is general public comment. members of the public may address the commission on matters that are within the commission's jurisdiction and are not on today's agenda. do we have any public comment? okay. item number five, communications.

any discussion? any public comment? moving right along, item number six, other commission business. anything? any public comment? okay. now, we have the report of the general manager, item seven. >> so the first item is an update of cleanpowersf. is barbara hale here? okay. hey, barbara. come up. so let's put that on hold. the second item is waste water enterprise capital improvement program quarterly update, karen cubic. >> good afternoon,

commissioners. karen cubic. president of the waste water quarterly presentation. i also wanted to point out to you on april 24th, we will have the first sfip rebait planning of phase one projects, so that'll be kind of an exciting meeting for myself and my team. so i'm just going to highlight a few of the new red dot that that have occurred, and those were rescheduled for more than six months or a cost increase of more than 10%. the first is seismic reliability improvements. it's delayed for 21 months because that project is dependant on the retrofit work that's going to be occurring on the north side of the southeast plant and on the head works project, so they're contiguous. they're a start to finish type project. we have a delay on west side transportation delay project and that's something we took to

value engineering to get the scope back down to budget, so we have an 18 month delay to impact those projects and specs. we have a delay on marin street kansas improvements. that's where we are trying to route it through the bmw lot, but we could not reach an agreement with the owner, so now we are trying to utilize the dpw property, and that has an increase of $9.7 million, as well. we didn't want to move forward with an eminent domain. vanness, which i'm sure you have seen, due to utility conflicts and some contractual issues. geary, which is an interdepartmental job that has water and sewer in it. that's an mta public works job, and we are actually going to be

publ pulling the utilities out, but that'll be driven by the waterworks. taraval, it's a really tight street. we're looking at relocating utilities away from the tracks, so we want to do that upfront work now and pothole, see where utilities are so we can do a better job of designing that. our folsom area stormwater project that's on page 40 has been extended by seven months to maximize consultant outreach for the tunnel engineering design that rfp has just gone out on the street. with that, i think you'll see me a little later when we get to the regular calendar in a very exciting biosolids item today. thank you. >> commissioner kwon: do we have any public comment on this item? >> i'm trying to stall.

>> sorry. >> commissioner kwon: all right. next item is cleanpowersf update, barbara hale. >> thank you very much. sorry i'm a little late today. barbara hale, assistant general manager for power. today's presentation will cover enrollment and service to customers, regulatory activities. on the enrollment, we're currently serving about 81,000 sites. our opt out percentage was 3.2%, same tias the last time reported. the super green upgrade rate continues to exceed, and it's about 4.1% of our customers. as we look ahead, our next small enrollment will be in april. we'll add about 230 accounts,

44% of whom have asked to be on our super green program, so that's great. our next large enrollment then is the next piece of this report. on february 13th, you reviewed our risk management and financial feasiblity work, and you affirmed that the conditions necessary to procure energy supply needed to expand the program have been met. your approve -- you also approved modifications to our supply management policy and our reserves policy, so full speed ahead. we're preparing to execute power supply contracts to support this large enrollment, and... [ microphone feedback ] >> -- we'll continue. excuse me. and we're planning to execute the jp morgan credit facility

agreement over the next couple weeks. so full speed ahead. that enrollment will occur in july, and we're looking forward to the outreach that will begin with our customers to support that. on the rate planning front, we're also planning for a rate action. april 10th, we'll bring that to you. that would be effective july 1st. what we're proposing would change our rates to customers in the green program so that they will see bills about 2% below what pg&e will charge them. so you will remember that when we first launched thiss progra, we set the rated at 2.5%. we set the rates so that bills would be.25% lower than pg&e bills, and so now we're looking at 2% lower than pg&e's bills, so we're really excited about that. and we think that'll poise us

well for enrolling customers in july. we're also going to be suspending the termination fee -- proposing to suspend the termination fee until after the program enrollment period is complete. that'll just make it cleaner and easier in our customer interactions for folks who say no thanks or who write in and say, no thanks. we don't want to be charging a fermnation f termination fee associated with that enrollment period. so we will bring those changes to you at the april 10th meeting for your consideration. just wanted to give you a heads up on that. and then on regulatory issues, we've been busy at the california public utilities commission. we did refile requesting the commission rehear their resolution on the timeline -- the modifications to the timeline for when cca's can

expand or -- their service territories or launch a new program. you'll remember that in december, staff issued a resolution we thought was horrible. we participated in the proceeding there. commissioner vietor participated in some activities, raising awareness on the negative impacts on kcc of that resolution. we ultimately got a better outcome, but we are still concerned about the fact that the california puc made some major changes to the community choice program that it oversees without following its -- its standard due process approach. so we are -- we did file a motion for rehearing of that decision just to -- to get them back on track to address their major changes in policy through

regular ordinary rulemaking process. we also filed a joint protest with the other cca's of pg&e's request to modify its bill collection practices. this affects us because under state statute, cca customers receive their bills from the investor-owned utilities. recall that when you're a cleanpowersf customer, you got a pg&e bill. they bill you for all the services they provide, and they include a page that is the billing for the services cleanpowersf provides. so when they modify their bill collection practices, it affects our ability to collect from our kpucustomers for that portion of service that they're billing on our behalf. so we'll be filing today a protest on the changes that they are proposing there. and then finally, the power

charge and difference adjustment rulemaking continues. we continue to participate with the other cal cca members, operating cca's in the state to develop our testimony in that case, and the testimony is due in april. so we're just running as fast as we can to keep up with all those regulatory activities while we enroll new customers and plan for that enrollment. with that, i'm happy to take any questions you may have. thank you. >> commissioner kwon: commissioners, any questions? >> can you just remi of our ne

annual employee engagement survey. as part of the 2020 strategic plan stakeholder and community interest goal, the sfpuc is striving to improve internal communications through collaboration and the strengthening of our common identity as an organization. conducting regular employee engagement surveys and utilizing data that is derived from feedback will allow the puc to strategize and strengthen areas that need to be strengthened. it creates a consulture of management that fosters and welcomes feedback. the past efforts, there have been some past efforts to measure satisfaction or climate and this project is the next evolution of those efforts.

we wanted to make sure that we're measuring the right things from our employees, especially of those that have the highest impact on our operations, so we decided to measure employee engagement, and the presentation to follow will talk a little bit more why we chose this aspect for employee engagement survey. we also wanted to ensure that we're using the right tools and technology that facilitate the survey process so our actions can be focused on taking actions based on our results. our planning process team has been engaged on this process due to their survey expertise. we are using the best practices in

in doing this, it's really something to see, and we want to get your feedback and employees are giving the feedback. they're the ones with boots on the ground, and they're the ones with ideas, and by taking action on these results, we create that trust and close that feed back loop, so you know, just creates that culture, and hopefully we'll be having multiple listening points in the future.

and that just leads us to making data driven decisions, which is the gold standard every business wants to make da data driven decisions, and it's no different when it comes to our people. so melissa is going to talk about why we chose to engage in this effort. >> okay. so the big question is what is engagement, why are we measuring it this way instead of past surveys measuring satisfaction and climate. there are three main areas of engagement. the first being deep immersion in your work. so what that means is the employee who's engaged is really focused in what they're doing. they're cognitively engaged. they find their work really meaningful, and surveys that are looking at job satisfaction, this is kind of what they're getting at, but that's not it. there's a second and third piece to engagement. that second piece being positive feelings about the orientation. so if you're engaged, you're

happy to work at the puc, you're recommending the puc to your friends, you're writing positive reviews on glass dodo and that's really what we want. just because someone is satisfied in their job and maybe they're satisfied with their orientation, that doesn't always translate into behavioral outcomes, which is really what we're interested in: how does this translate into their work, and so engagement has that third piece that's getting at behavior. someone who's engaged is putting their maximum effort towards their work. they're putting in that discretionary effort, going above and beyond what's expected of them. they're going to help other people, even if that's not required. and you know, this really is what we want to look for in engaged workforce. and so we can see these out comes of engagement at three different levels: at the

individual or work level, at the team level, and then, ultimately, at the organizational puc level. and a lot of research has been done on engagement, and we know that is correlated with a lot of business outcomes, and here are yust a few. higher retention. lower abbo lower -- lower absenteeism. this is really important for the puc, higher level of safety. when someone is really paying attention to what they're doing, they're focused and they're concerned about the well-being of their co-workers, they're making sure to be safe. customer satisfaction, you know, our employees are the ones that are interacting with their customers, so if they're engaged up, leading to higher customer satisfaction. and then, finally, higher

revenue. so those are some of the reasons why you measure engagement, but what does it actually look like to measure engagement. what's popping up on the screen are some examples of things that contribute to whether an employee are engaged or not. career group and development, communication and resources, future outlook is interesting: do people have a positive future outlook on the future of the organization? their individual needs, whether they're being met or not, their management effectiveness, team dynamics, and trust in leadership. and i wanted to show some examples of these drivers and how we might measure that. and calling it a driver just might indicate that these buckets are several different ways to drive engagement in employees that leads to whether they are engaged or not. so here's some example items that you might ask an employee that they agree with these statements and to what extent. so for career growth and empty have, my job allows me to

utilize my strengths. communication resources, when sfpuc makes changes, i understand why. sf outlook, i understand how i fit into the future plans. individual needs: the benefits offered here meet my and my family's needs, which a lot of time, when we talk about that, we think compensation is the only way, and as you can see, this is only one small piece. manager effectiveness. my manager regularly gives me constructive feedback. team dynamics. people that i work with treat me with respect. obviously that's important to whether you enjoy your job or not. employers value employees as the most important resource, but people need to know that and be aware of that, and perception is key here. so we're getting our perceptions, and we need to know whether employees perceive these things. and so the second piece to

measuring engagement is looking at the engagement outcomes. like i mentioned earlier, engagement is present at three levels? so for example, at the work level, you know, are people motivated and inspired by their work. are they immersed in their work? at the team level, do they feel accepted by their team? are they committed to their team goals? are they putting in that discretionary effort that i mentioned earlier? and finally, at the organizational level, are they advocating for the organization? do they feel pride working here, and ultimately, do they intend to stay here? you know, these are all really important outcomes that we want to see in our workforce. and so you know, with measuring these outcomes, we can see the levels across the organization. we can see which groups are highly engaged, and which groups might need a little bit of help. we're also looking at the

drivers of engagement. we need to look at what is leading people to be engaged so that we know what levers to pull, what interventions to design to make sure that the entire workforce iss engaged. and we're using the words drivers and outcomes, but when you're looking at business metrics, these may be a little more familiar. they're just leading and lagging indicators, and so like with these metrics, we need to measure both sides of the equation so we can see the full picture and make an impact. >> so this all sounds great. why doesn't everyone do it all the time? well, it turns out it's actually very hard and so we're going to go through some of the common challenges in the first part, just designing, analyzing and deploying a survey. with the traditional method, it's actually very hard to measure accurately what you're trying to measure, and these concepts sound pretty simple. if you think job satisfaction, well, let's ask people if they're satisfied, but there

are actually whole fields and industries that are devoted to measuring this scientifically as cindy mentioned earlier. it's also very difficult to deploy. if you just think about sending to every employee across the organization on, the administrative overhead and work that that entails when you're sending reminders to people toic at that the survey, keeping track of who reports to whom and who should see which results. it's very hard to manage, and by the time you do all that and you get your results, it's a very lengthy manual process to end up with pretty simplistic answers, but that's not really telling you what the story means. we just see numbers. we don't know what that means, and by the time you're done analyzing it, it's months later, your data is already obsolete. so that's why we thought it was very important to get the right tools for this project. we will really want to do this the right way, and we're

actually procuring something for the quantum workplace. there's actually very sophisticated tools that we can use. and that's why we chose quantum workplace. it's hard to measure what you want to measure. these tools are based on research and are valid and reliable, and all that means in survey design is that it's measuring what you want it to measure, and it's going to do that consistently every time. in terms of deployment, there's a lot of automatetion of the processes. we don't have to manually input information, including employees and who should see what results. another important thing is if the survey's coming from a third party and branded as that third party, people actually trust the confidentiality of the survey more than if it was coming from the puc, and we might say we're keeping it confidential, and we might do so, but they might not trust

that if it's coming from us. that's an added bonus of sending it through a third party. and we're not waiting for months for the high level analysis. we can slice and dice quickly all through the organization to quickly see what's going on. and with that, we have a couple of examples of the dashboard. this one in particular, you can see the numbers of engaged people across the organization, as well as an item-level analysis of all the different survey or engagement drivers. in this example, there's a heat map of sentiment across the organization, and you can see how people are feeling in different groups along those different drivers. >> so jennie just went over the challenges to just deemployipl survey, but that doesn't mean we're just making changes. there are actually more results, taking action on the survey results, so i'm going to

get into that a little bit. the first thing is insights. we don't just want to do simple averages, frequencies. we want to do complex statistical analyze, correlations, those things, to really understand what the data means. so for example, quantum workplace does benchmarking with over 8,000 different companies that we're working with, so when we look at our engagement numbers, you know, it's hard to tell what that means. but we can benchmark with other companies that are like us and see how do we compare to the industry. and you know, through research, we know the drivers of engagement, but what are the drivers specifically at the puc because we probably have particular ones that are more important to our employees, and so with quantum workplace, we can also run those analyses, and so this is just an example of what those results might

look like. so even if we get those deep insights, we want to make sure we are taking action on them, and so quantum workplace has a couple of features that allow for robust action planning. after the survey has closed, managers can look at their team's results, and with a click of a button, they can download a slide deck that they can present to their team, and they can take action on their specific results. not only that, but quantum workplace also has a lot of out of the box recommendations so that if, you know, there's a particular issue in the team, they have recommendations on how to address that. so with all of those tools, we just really want to empower the managers, give them the power that they need to take action on these results. once they decide on what commitment or action they want to take, they can track that within the system here. but it's not enough just to plan to take action, right? we want them to actually do the

action, and so accountablity is another challenge that we often face. and with quantum workplace, you can track, as a manager, i can see all the action plans from my supervisors under me. i can track them to see if they are meeting their deadlines, and if they're not, with the click of a button, i can give them a little friendly nudge, a little reminder that they still need to take action on that. and even if we do take action on the survey, it means nothing to our employees unless they see that, unless they see the results. and again, quantum workplace allows us tools to see visible results. after each employee takes their survey, they immediately get an individual personalized report. we truly believe that everyone plays a part in engagement. it's not just the leaders

pushing it top down, but as an individual, there are things that i can do, as well. so for example, if through my survey, i mention that i don't see career opportunities, my individual report might recommend that i have a conversation with my manager about my career growth opportunities here. and then, quantum workplace also offers a lot of communication tools that we can communicate the results across organization and communicate how we're taking action on those. and finally, even after we have successfully analyzed our results, planned to take actions, and have taken actions and communicated that, it's difficult and challenging to do this again year after year and make sure it's continuous. you know, staff leave and they might take that survey knowledge with them, and sometimes the surveys may change? and so with quantum workplace,

it's really easy to run an annual survey over and over again. the results stay within the system. everything is connected? and if we want to run other surveys, as well, for example, exit surveys, that will all be connected in the system. and we can look at -- excuse me -- if people are engaged here, and whether that is aligned with our exit survey results. >> so we just wanted to share some of the project details, including the timeline and next steps. we started in november . those efforts were before our team was brought onto this project, but we started when we came on, and we engaged this that research process to see what we wanted to measure. as you see, we landed on engagement, but also what sophisticated tools can help us get there and get there right

away, and we landed on quantum workplace. i also want to say faster than the slides were put out, a week or so ago, the office of contract administration actually approved the p.o., so we're getting the signatures and almost there. quantum workplace have already reached out. all the partnerships are in place with quantum workplace, which is great. we really want their expertise in best practices, and we're going to start the survey customization phase? they have a survey. it's important to stick as closely as we can to stick closely to that core engagement survey. if we deviate too much, we will lose the benchmarking opportunities. it's really important for us to have that right now, especially with this the first time deploying this survey. however, we do have the ability to add onto that, and there's been a lot of talk about being

able to ask our employees about our sfpuc values. there's some values orientation questions we can ask, do you believe in that value, do they hear their managers talking about it? i think that's really going to be important to know about other projects. so we're trying to start that as soon as we can? they have templates to help us, and we also want to start communicating early to our employees and managers, because this is something unlike they've ever seen. we want to make sure we get that change aspect right so everyone knows what to expect and what's going to happen in this project. we have the awesome ability to merge the sfic data. this is also important for that confidentiality piece. any time in a survey, if you're asking people about identifying information, it could be age, gender, what group do you work in, they start thinking, maybe

this isn't actually confidential. so instead of asking that, we already have that information through the hris data, we can just ask about engagement, and they won't feel threatened and worry that the survey is not confidential. we're hoping to deploy early may. recently talking to quantum workplace, they're floating the idea of may 7th? and the analysis happens really fast, so the survey will probably be open for a couple weeks. still some details to knock out, and then, they do -- even though we have instant results, they do a high level analysis that takes a couple weeks to present the executive team and anyone else in the room there to see those initial org level results, and we want to start working on that internal results communication plan, and this is exactly in the process where we would be letting the employees know what we found in the entire organization. remember, employees, if --

managers, if they have somebody they can report to, they can start giving feedback to their employees. we can track who's actually carrying out their commitments and send them reminders. to get to that may employment date we actually worked backwards to the deployment stage because the most important thing we do in this project is what we do based on the results. so we don't want to run too far into the performance appraisal period in july. this data can perform everyone's performance planning going into the next fiscal year, which i think is going to make that a much more valuable process. >> i'm going to go over the lod logistics a little bit. so workforce planning, like cindy mentioned, we're bringing to the table our survey

expertise. we developed a project plan, and then, we also need to develop the implementation plan, which is really a big change management effort. this is entirely new to the puc using this kind of software tool for surveys, and so this will be a really important piece. we are also working with our external affairs team. they will be helping to engage our leaders, making sure that they're involved, not just informed but are participating in the process? communications will be a big part of this, as well. we want to make sure it's a huge campaign, really, to get our employees excited to take the survey. our hr analytics team along with i.t. is helping to bring our data together and integrate it with the quantum workplace software, and then they'll providing any technical support. and then our final piece is our executive team, our leaders. we need them to drive parp

participation, let employees know that we encourage them to take this survey. we want to here what they have to say. they will also be the ones to take action and hold their supervisors and managers to take action, as well, holding them accountable. and so how will we measure success of this project? what comes to mind first is probably level of engagement as a kpi? but actually, we decided not to use this as our kpi. we don't want to set a goal for engagement, and if we don't meet that, people might be worried. they might feel discouraged or punished, and they might not want to do it again next year, and that's the worst thing that could happen because this is the first year that we're doing this, and so we just want to really set a baseline for the years to come. and so what we really want to reward is participation.

we're aiming to have a 70% response rate for the survey, so 70% of our employees taking the survey. it sounds like a lot, but actually, quantum workplace does th does -- says that for an organization employee size, this is right. the second measure that we want to use for our kpi is not just whether our employees are participating in the process, but are our supervisors participating? are they making commitment or action plans, and if we're holding our employees to a 70% standards, our supervisors and manager should manage managers should be held to a higher standard. we're looking at 80% of our managers making a commitment after the survey. and we're going to work with quantum workplace to make sure that this makes sense for us. and then finally, you know, it's great if they plan to take amount, but what are we really looking for?

we want them to actually take action, and so we also want to measure how many of our supervisors are following through on those commitments. and we're looking, again, for 80%, but that's still tentative. we're going to be working with quantum workplace to make sure that's feasible. >> that was a lot of details about engagement and the project, but again, i want to bring it back to the big picture and the future we're shooting towards, and to get to that future, this is only one project, and i feel it's the beginning and the start that's going to help us get there. what we really want at the end of the day are engaged employees who give their maximum effort. and that's a two-way street. we're obviously going to benefit as an organization, but engaged employees are really happy about their jobs. and even if someone offers them a higher salary, they have reasons to stay where they are and enjoy what they're doing.

we're trying to build a culture of management that welcomes feedback. and we might be at a point right now where people are kind of scared of feedback but just not knowing what's happening doesn't mean it's not happening and, we hope that if we do this the right way and everyone sees how valuable it was to give the feedback and take action, and everyone sees the increases results over time, then we will start to think about feedback and think of other ways to get that. and hopefully that makes us a more dynamic and agile organization. an annual survey is not giving us the most up to date data, and hopefully, this is the first step in learning how to get organizations to do a more often survey. by that point, managers will be used to the feedback, and

employees will be used to giving it. and this gives us a strategic ability to capitalize on our known strengths and address our weaknesses. it's about that data driven decision making, and we know for sure that we're working on the right things at the right time. and ultimately, we hope amongst employees that the puc is known as a great place to work where their input is you will have aed, because they've seen when their input was given, action was taken, and they can help improve everyone's luck just by given opinion. maybe we'll have to drive hard to get employee participation, but it'll be part of employees and organizations in the future. thank you very much. if you have questions, i've put the links up on screen just as a reminder what we've talked about, but thanks for having us. >> i have a couple of questions. commissioners. i have a bunch of questions, but really, the package team is complete. it's the whole banana.

i want to remind you, the puc with all of those people, it's sort of a drop list. you're the mayor of this situation, and you're trying to get the pulse list. i would like to know what is the glassdoor rate for the puc, and then, you can tell me offline, and then, did i hear you weren't doing engagement surveys right now. >> of course, as you know all these efforts are very hard to administer. luckily, we have pretty recent data on those engagement scores, but we heard about quantum workplace in hr's effort to find a new tool to do exit surveys where this administrative survey goes away. we could even start to predict things like turnover based on our engagement scores, which we're excited about. in terms of glassdoor score. we checked recently. it's about 3.9.

that went up from the last time we did a report a couple years ago from 3.2, so that's very encouraging. and it'll also be interesting to do an analysis to see how the glassdoor scores correlate with our engagement scores. because a lot of people like to say glassdoor, oh, that's disgruntled employees. it's not representative. well, we'll see if it's representative. >> commissioner kwon: something that i want to touch on, i think you stressed is continuity is really important. staff participation is really important. i think it takes secure leadership to welcome feedback about yourself. i used to work at a company where we did this every single quarter -- bless you -- and it can be brutal sometimes, but if we're secure enough, assuming that our staff doesn't want to run us out of town on a rail,

we will welcome their feedback. i call it all the time, scratching the itch. i walk the grounds -- gesundheit -- and talk to the staff, but for the staff, other things may be important. communication is the key. will this tie into performance management at some point. i know you talked about kpi's and waiting a time. how about that tie into my waiting review if i oversaw a bunch of utility staff. >> it's a little bit alongside efforts. quantum workplace has some features that we're not going to be able to utilize right away because it has some other data sets that we can't pull from easily. so in order to modernize all elements of hr and management, then one day we need to have a performance database, and

through quantity tum workplace, we can see howen gaugement is correlated with performance. of course that means you need to be measuring performance accurately and storing the state a. that's where we hope to be in the future, but if we're talking about, let's say, how this integrated into manager's performance, the way we see it, there's the assumption that if you're a manager, you're already doing talent management and you're already trying to get your employees' feedback, and so we hope this isn't seen as additional work that has to be done, but really, it's the tools and technology to do the work you're already doing as a manager, with more data, more sophisticated tools -- sophisticated tools, i don't know what we have, but, like, this is completely a game changer. so we hope it saves time and we can have more directed efforts? and i think there's a lot of organizations -- well i know this -- that have started incorporating engagement scores into how we're holding managers

accountable. but again it's any time you're thinking about that and it sounds kind of scary, that's an indicator for us that we're not ready for that, and we don't want anybody to be scared in this change management effort, and we're excited about it. we've been to conferences where administration has included survey scores into a manager's performance. >> i would hope that you would move into that in a given period of time. commissioners, any other questions? that was very good. thank you. do we have any public comment on the item? none? okay. we are moving onto the consent calendar. >> item nine is the consent calendar. all item listed here under constitute a consent calendar are considered to be routine by

the san francisco public utilities commission and will be acted on by a sing the vote of tvote -- single vote of the commission. there will be no discussion about a specific event unless the item is requested to be removed from the consent calendar and it will be considered as a separate item. >> commissioner kwon: is there any request to remove an item from the consent calendar? i see there's a request to remove item 9-c and discuss it separately from the others. do i have a motion? second? >> that's for 9-a and 9-b, correct? >> yes. 9-a and 9-b. okay. any public comments? all in favor? opposed? next item, please. >> we need to hear for 9-c.

>> oh, that's right. mr. pillpal. welcome. >> david pillpal. just a minor environment cal concern on 9-c, on page two, the description of environmental review of this action, the city of san francisco is making an action that the sewer is exempt from ceqa. that may well be the case, but the action before you today is to authorize the license, and there's no discussion here of whether that license approval is itself subject to ceqa. i'm not sure that it is, but i think that language should be in here because it's actually your action. further, i'm not sure, based on my prior research, that another agency's exemption determination under ceqa can be used by a different agency. there is a -- certainly a

responsible agency relationship in ceqa for eir's and negative declarations, but i don't believe that that also carries forward for exemptions. but in any event, the action before you is on the license approval and not the underlying sewer's replacement that the city of south san francisco would be performing in the right-of-way under the license. i think that will make sense to some ceqa people, and it may be lost on the rest of the room. thanks. >> okay. can we have irena come up and address that question? >> commissioners, good to see you. it's been a long time. irena torrey, manager of the bureau of environmental management. we routinely depend on other agencies' ceqa determinations

when the project is in their jurisdiction. even though we're taking an action, this is the ceqa procedure we prepare responsible agency findings based on the findings of the jurisdiction. so this is routinely done for projects that are possibly on our right-of-way, where we have an action, a responsible action, and we do not prepare separate ceqa documents for these actions. so this has been going on for a long time. if you have any questions, i can answer. and probably, general counsel could confirm. >> commissioner kwon: okay. thank you. >> does general counsel concur? you know, i'm not 100% sure i

understand the question. i think it had to do with the license, actually, was the licensed public actually subject to ceqa review and exemption? is that the basis of the question? >> the license allow -- under the license, the city of south san francisco will perform certain work, and the work that's being done, the city of south terrific has do-- san fro has done the work, and rosanna, do you have anything else to add? >> commissioners, rosanna russell, real estate director. we have over 700 licenses and leases in my division. all of them go through at least three city attorney reviews. one, a real estate attorney, and then one to two typically review before we go to the commission. this is a discretionary action, but it's been vetted about

1,000 times over, and while we appreciate the public's comments, we rely on irena's group. she's just top notch, and if she tells us we can rely on these findings, and we can rely on the city attorney's findings, who am i to disagree? >> so i still don't understand. so we approve the license once the ceqa review has been done by a sister agency. correct? >> just so i understand what the process is and what we're actually running on today. >> okay. so every discretionary action requires ceqa, as you know. and the first discretionary action will produce a document or a statement that it's not a project under ceqa, many of

which we have, as well at the puc. so the first -- this was south san francisco. the first discretionary action was taken by them, and they prepared a categorical exemption. now, there's no need for us to prepare another document. ceqa allows for the second discretionary action to rely on the ceqa document. we do this all the time for many, many licenses. otherwise, we wouldn't have time to prepare eir's and our mitigated negative declarations, because we'd be busy preparing documents for every license, and there's no need for it. it's been done. it's already part of the law. it's being approved, adopted, and it's part of the law.

>> great. thank you. >> thank you. >> commissioner kwon: all right. ready for the next item? >> we have to vote on it. >> oh, we have a motion? >> yeah. >> commissioner kwon: second? >> second. >> commissioner kwon: okay. all in favor? opposed? >> commissioner kwon: passes. next item, please. >> item ten, authorize the general manager to negotiate and execute an agreement with the lawrence berkeley national laboratory for an amount not to exceed 250,000 to be funded by the city departments with a duration of three years. >> good afternoon, commissioners. i'm the project manager for this work. could i please have the slides.

sorry about that. so again, i'm an arosen, and i'm the project manager for this work, and i'll be providing a brief introduction. first of all, i'd like to know the objective of this work is to provide us with another point or data tool if you will, in the san francisco puc related to climate change. i wanted to let you know that kristina patrickola with lawrence berkeley national

laboratory is here today if you have questions after my presentation. first, i'd like to quickly review work that has already been undertaken and has been a precursor to this work. as you know, the commission adopted a level of service goal for the sewer system improvement program to modify the system to adopt to climate change. in order to address this goal, the waste water enterprise produced key climate change related documents or tools, for example the sea level rise inundation mapping that became the backbone for san francisco's guide in incorporating sea level rise into capital planning, and it was initially adopted in september 2014. at the completion of this work, mayor ed lee convened an interdepartment agency task force to develop san francisco's sea level rise action plan which was finalized in march 2016. the report calls for standardized citywide vulnerability analysis.

the resulanalysis is ongoing, results are expected this fall. in addition to the sea level rise action plan outlined -- sorry. in addition the sea level rise action plan identifies actions or next steps which is what brings us here today. we are collaborating with sfo, the board of san francisco to fund work with lawrence berkeley national laboratory to develop climate motion denied ellig situations to help us better understand the effect of climate change. in addition, we are collaborating with the office of resilience and recovery to fund a separate task order with sylvestrum climate associates who will help us translate the lbnl model into a tool set that can he wi that we can utilize in terms of decision making. currently we have a good understandif