this really been this transportation priority and the fact that the board had already set forth a policy say we believe a $2 increase is not only feasible, it's necessary -- i understand there are a lot of different competing needs, but the reality is we are three years into an expenditure plan that we don't have money for, and we don't know where that money is going to come from. i want to acknowledge and the supervisor acknowledges that this is only a drop in the bucket. i see commissioner richards nodding his head, but what we would generate is only a drop in the bucket, but this's really kind of the mandate that we gave the task force is hey, there's not this one silver bullet that's going to be able to solve all of these problems. we need to work together with city staff with our corporate shake holders with our business and office and developer stakeholders and really cobble together a package of both

policy recommendations and potentially revenue measures on the ballot. so i think the final -- the final thing that i would say -- and i know some of you have -- may have seen some of the coverage lately in the biz times around just the insane value, the red hot office market that we all know, we've all known that our office meets with office owners and commercial property owners regularly. we don't need the biz times to tell us the going rate is $100 persquare foot. we all have known for many years that a lot of these office projects, large class a buildings are fully leased before they're even on-line, before they're even done being constructed. so really some of these vacancy assumptions that i think were originally made are not -- we respectfully disagree with them at this point in time and

really just stress that we think this is feasible. we think this is just one thing that we can do to demonstrate to our residents and our constituents that we're really serious about moving forward with funding for infrastructure and transportation funding citywide. so thank you for your consideration. >> president hillis: great. thank you miss angulo. >> the department definitely supports the intent to impose a tsf on these large projects. however we are concerned with existing levels of project feasibility in the central soma plan area because one the vast majority of the projects impacted by this increase would be in central soma and two a staff analysis shows that existing feasibility is already waning and increasing the tsf would increase the situation. the department recommends exploring measures to avoid agoing project feasibility including exempting the tram soma plan area from the increased tsf or adjusting

community fees in the central soma area. another option would be to wait until the required update to the tsf plan occurs. this would provide a much more robust analysis on existing tsf rates. this concludes my presentation. we're available for questions. thanks. >> president hillis: okay. we'll open this up for public comment. any public comment on this item? >> todd david on behalf of the san francisco housing action coalition. so obviously we are super supportive of transit, and we need a whole bunch of transit. i just think as a policy, i just think we head down a dangerous road when we start doing fees without economic feasibility studies, so that's the only thing from a policy point of view. i think i would like to see any time we're looking at fees or housing on anything, that we just know what the -- what the potential result will be. there might be no problems with this fee at all, which that would be great. we need the money for transit. if it may push us things into

being economically infeasible, i just think it's a policy conversation that we need to have, and we need to have all the data to have that conversation. that's it. >> president hillis: all right. thank you. any additional public comment? seeing none, we'll close public comment. commissioners? commissioner richards? >> commissioner richards: so i guess mr. sanchez, so the -- i was trying to find my tsf packet from way back when, and i couldn't. i still have it somewhere, it's just buried somewhere. as i recall, office impact on transportation was around $79, pdr was about 29, and i think residential was 27. these are numbers off the top of my head, but as i look at the percentage of recapture based on the impact, this is one of the lowest recaptures we have, was set in 1904 in the

$79. it's, as a percent, low. so we have, you know, the affordable housing is -- the nexus says it's between 35 and 40, and we're charging between 18 and 22. when i lineup all the impacts and lineup all the fees to mitigate the impacts, this to m

wertheim, he said we're trying to push the envelope on the

edge, and it was around 67 to 70%. okay. my personal opinion is we sold central soma as a transit-rich regional job center, right? and as such, we're inducing demand for transportation in the place that we said we wanted to have transportation to build all these tall buildings, and the millions of square feet of office and 8200 housing units, etcetera. so we're adding existing burden on the transportation that we claim we need to have. so for us to short change that, i think is bad planning. the whole purpose why i voted for central soma, we were going to get what we said we were going to get. and i think if we short change the amount of money going into the transportation which is the lynch pin of central soma to me. that's why we put it where we did, then what are we doing, honestly? so i'll take the numbers as

corrected that you're around 67 to 70% or whatever. that's in line with what the general fees are, so i don't think that that's outrageous, you know, specifically on that. the other thing is public comment, it was crickets. where is all these people that have these big developments getting up and saying, i can't do this. i'm at a loss -- i don't think i've even gotten an e-mail from anybody on this. really. so i'm just at a loss. i support the $5 fee, period. >> president hillis: commissioner melgar? >> vice president melgar: you just took my words. i would support the $5 fee, but that's not what we're doing today, so -- >> commissioner richards: what do you mean? it's $5. >> vice president melgar: didn't you just say $2. >> president hillis: for central soma. >> vice president melgar: oh,

for central soma. >> president hillis: yeah. can you just explain that one more time, miss angulo. i'm sure people showed up at the board of supervisors committee meeting? >> yeah, they did. somebody just texted me and said, hey, is pc still? i want to give public comment. i said you should have done this before salesforce tower went up. yeah, we had obviously the transportation task force members showed up who represented not just neighborhood associations from district seven, district one, district four, all the out lying neighborhoods, but the bicycle coalition, walk sf, the transit justice coalition, the sierra club. i think we are hearing from people every single day that what the city has done to plan for, you know, our growth, is completely not

should that be somehow considered? but these moves do not include 100,000 square foot in one piece, they're aggregates of different numbers but concentrate in a pick district? >> i'm sorry. could you -- the question is why aren't we configuring -- [inaudible] >> commissioner moore: yeah, why did you set the limited 99,999 square feet of very large buildings? they -- [inaudible] >> -- there's a fee rate for those types of projects, and that's what the supervisor is

proposing. >> president hillis: i think to your point, too, commissioner moore, that's also retail conversions that might -- [inaudible] >> i'm so sorry, commissioner. i missed the question. was it at pdr? >> commissioner moore: no, why did you set the limit at 99,999 square feet? >> i think that was an attempt to try to recognize who the biggest -- where the biggest impacts were coming from. you know, we certainly are open to other suggestions, and if folks want to take the square footage down to capture more of that impact, but it seems that the feasibility, you know, for the largest projects was -- was very evident, and so you know, we started there. open -- open to feedback and suggestions. >> commissioner moore: perhaps

at this realm, we can take what's in front of us, but perhaps, president hillis, we can take this up -- >> president hillis: yes. i know the board of supervisors is taking this up as a retail conversion and what will happen. >> commissioner moore: okay. >> president hillis: okay. is there a motion to recommend approval? >> vice president melgar: i move that we recommend approval. >> president hillis: second to what supervisor peskin has proposed. >> clerk: that's the staff recommendation. >> president hillis: and i think there already have been modifications to -- that supervisor peskin has made towards the staff recommendation. we're just supporting the revised peskin proposal. >> sure. you support the $2 fee increase in central soma and the $5 increase citywide. >> president hillis: correct. >> clerk: very good, commissioners. and just to be clear, the action is to actually approve with modifications. you actually have the authority

to approve planning code amendments. >> president hillis: yeah. >> clerk: so on that motion to approve this planning code amendment with modifications -- [roll call] >> clerk: so moved, commissioners. that motion passes unanimously, 6-0. commissioners, that'll place us on item 11. [agenda item read] >> good afternoon, commissioners. jacob bintliff, planning department staff. pleased for this opportunity to be with you to provide an update on our ongoing efforts to implement the department's process improvement plan that was issued in december of 2017.

we've actually got really a couple of different -- [inaudible] >> we've actually got a couple of different items that we'll be covering in this presentation. the first portion of the presentation is an update on several measures of our process improvement plans that are underway or have been recently implemented. the second part of the presentation is an informational presentation on the mayor's part of the process that's been introduced that you'll have next week for an approval hearing. i'd like you to speak to the ordinance which we'll come back to in this presentation. >> good afternoon, commissioners, sarah dennis phillips. last year, mayor lee committed to put the city on a path to support the delivery of 5,000 units of new and rehabilitated housing for the foreseeable future. we've accomplished that in recent years. i think we're facing a challenge moving forward, but

we're stepping up to the challenge. mayor lee issue does an executive directive with 1702 that basically instructed city departments and city staff to be a part of the housing solution, and the planning department took that instruction to heart. they came back almost immediately with a list of strategies, they took their knowledge of how the process works to come up with ways to make it better. they looked at how much staff time was spent on what, they came up with a list of process improvements to free up that staff time and the commission time which i think is important for you guys so you can all focus on your energy where it is needed most, which is approval housing. mayor farrell understanding the city cannot control the building of housing, but we can unrestrict it. these are smart, common sense improvements that will make noticing as consistent as possible, that will make minor changes ad stiff, that

consolidate redundant hearings and eliminate mandatory hearings for 100% affordable housing projects. a key issue for the mayor and he ask planning what they brought it forward to him, as we bring forward the process, we don't reduce meaningful community input. i believe what you have in front of you meets that test. we think the consistency measures that are started with this legislation will help more people get involved in our community and the process. we're going to be expanding multilingual notification to all forms of notice, something we don't have today. we're going to be placing all of our notices on-line in addition to the mailed and posted notices that we have today. we're going to make them consistent. it makes it a lot more legible. mayor farrell's aware you're going to hear for more time to consider this legislation. i think that's valid. we hear that all the time every

time there's a small piece of change before the planning commission. if we can't approve these kind of rudimentary things relatively quickly, we can't approve housing quickly as well. thank you for hearing our thoughts and we look forward to moving on the legislation. [inaudible] >> if i could get the slides, thank you. so as sarah just mentioned to reiterate again, the executive director in september really laid out in september having some deadlines in approval of the project. the expectation is from the time there's a description of

the project to entitlement, that should range from six months to 22 months, depend being on the level of environmental review involved. [inaudible] >> having regular quarterly updates for the mayor kazz office and to the planning commission. finally, there was the requirement for the process improvement plan itself, which we issued in december. and continued improvements in these five areas which i've discussed with you before. i'd like to walk-through these kind of five different topic areas and talk about a few things. first of all regarding intake application and review which is the starting place, one thing that we implemented in april is

to stream line the preliminary project assessment process. that's the p.p.a. process. this is for projects to get early information before they've submitted an complication. we've now got that on not a 60 day response time rather than 90 day response time that we had previously. the document itself has been stream lined to safe significant staff time and also the document has been tailored to provide a lot more specific to project sponsors about exactly what it is we expect to see when we get a full development application. in addition and related to that, we will be looking at a consolidated application process to become effective in june. i'll be discussing in a little bit more detail later in this presentation. we've added quite a few applications. some of them are simple applications, to be accepted on-line, and we'll be adding moreover the coming months. in addition we'll be discussing with you today the mayor's ordinance proposals and also i'd just like to emphasize the

department is trying to embrace more of a project coordinator approach. and related to routine permits and approvals, we had a number of proposals there. we have changed the hours for our preservation technical specialists. those shifts were kind of split up throughout the day. now they've been consolidated. the feedback has been very positive. we've been able to see most everyone who's coming in who needs to see a preservation planner at the counter the same day they come in. this saves a lot of trouble and time especially for small business owners or homeneowner. that was a very small change that saved a bunch of time already to get the preservation work done in a timely fashion. in addition to that, we are working on developing some more advanced over the counter approvals where we can actually have folks schedule with us in advance perhaps two weeks out,

provide the basic information so we can review it and come in and essentially have an over the counter from planning to move it onto dbi so significantly reduce the time from a matter of months to a number of weeks. we' we're piloting all that with the adu, and then, when we can learn from that hopefully will be able to applied to other projects. regarding adu's, i should mention also that our process improvement plan did call for a number of legislative improvements to provide more flexibility to improve accessory dwelling units. supervisor tang has introduced an ordinance in march that would make several of those changes in addition to several other proposals regarding adu's, so that ordinance will be before you as a separate matter on june 7th, just so you have that flagged. regarding environmental review and design review, we have a number of improvements we've already undertaken. we've put our categorical

exemption check list in our permit tracking system. that sounds so boring, but it's actually very, very exciting for staff and people who come into the planning information counter. it eliminates a bunch of paper moving around the office and lets things happen automatically in our document tracking system. that's been a big win for staff. we've adopted the urban design guidelines, obviously with a lot of help from the commission and from many others. we will also be looking at the ability to have some sort of a preliminary historic resource evaluation offered to individuals who want to get the planning department's take on whether or not there's likely to be a resource present, perhaps even before an application has come in, this was a concern that was raised since we have now changed our p.p.a. process, i'll be going through that in a moment. this is to give the ability for folks to understand whether or not there's likely to be a resource before they've even done an environmental application. we're looking at what's phasible in that area and look forward to bringing you see more information over the

summer or after that. in addition there was a number of proposals to codify a number of proposals. we're looking forward to putting together legislative package late orin the fall regarding those items, and then there's quite a few things that environmental planning is already doing internally, change their procedures from the way that they work with the many consultants who are involved in environmental review, change the types of documents that need to be provided to different stages internally to really just recommend line the environmental review process internally without changing any of the analysis that we're performing. the four category was related to the planning code itself and commission policies. one item that's already been passed with the -- that was actually sponsored by supervisor peskin was to discontinue the issuance of costa hawkins waiver letters for all of our inclusionary housing projects. that saved a massive amount of

staff time that didn't need to happen after a recent change in state law. we suggested that we should expand our ability to permit and review large downtown residential projects and affordable projects. that's in this ordinance that we'll be discussing later on in this presentation. i also want to mention that we did call out in the plan the need that was determined by staff to review the way that we actually staff the discretionary review cases that come to the commission. so we'll be rolling out these new procedures in june. what this will involve is that the discretionary review hearings themselves would be scheduled within a target time frame of ten to 12 weeks after the discretionary review application has been filed. that's a difference from now where there's a lot of back and forth about when it gets scheduled. we'll also have our -- our rdat manager, will be handling all of the d.r. cases before you, so you'll be dealing with a single point of contact as you go through the discretionary review cases. our hope is internally that's

going to free up a lot of work from our planners so they can continue working on active projects that are under their review but also provide for a much stronger feedback loop about what the expectations are for various projects. finally, in the area of administration and technology, we're making lots of improvements on a daily basis. one of them is we've implemented an in-house tool to allow us to generate all of the addresses that are needed for our neighborhood notification. previous the city had been reliant on third party providers to provide these addresses. that information had to be conveyed to the project planner on a certain time frame who then got it to preproduction services to print out the labels to send out the mailing and so on and so forth. now we have that tool for our intake and support staff to do at a 150 foot radius, boom, these are the mailing addresses. using the same assessor's

database that had been used for parcel addresses so that we can mail the tenants and occupants. we compared the result from the system with what was coming in from the third parties over the years, and the results were similar if not improved. we look forward to launching an impact fee calculator tool, so we're calculating the impact fees consistently for all projects and hopefully rolling that out in the summer, as well. we're continuing or we're soon going to be launching electronic document review to bring in more building plans on-line, rather than in paper, and the department of building

inspections will be joining us in the seller permit tracking system sometime in the fall, as well. i'm going to touch on two of the elements i mentioned, the preliminary project assessment, p.p.a. process, and the consolidated development application process that we're rolling out. touch on those and then i'll take a pause here for us to discuss some of these matters before we move into the mayor's ordinance. so first as i mentioned the preliminary project assessment, we now have a much more focused document that focuses on the specific items that project sponsors want to know about staff's analysis of their project before they give us a development application. hopefully this will weed out a lot of confusion and back and forth when we actually get applications coming in. the response time is a 60 day response time from staff. critically, we will not and we are not now allowing sponsors to file an environmental review application prior to having gone through the p.p.a.

i should say for only for projects where a p.p.a. is required that is listed on the slide. the purpose of separating the environmental project is again to provide project sponsors before we start the planning process so we don't have something going off on one track and then months later, years later, we take it up now with another planner in another part of the department. that all became effective at the beginning of april and we'll be getting out some of the first response letters at the beginning of june under that new process. finally, as i mentioned, the consolidated development application. so we have a lot of applications. you can scroll through them on our website, and they can all come in at different times for different projects. so on on times if you're trying to find information about a project, the planner might tell you go look at the c.u. record because that one came in in april as opposed to looking at the downtown exemption.

no, it's best to look at the e.e. that's really going to be the most accurate. really difficult issues in terms of providing good clear data to the public and to you on the commission as well. so what we're hoping to rather than have that, have basically a cover sheet application. we're going to call it a project application, all the basic information, who is ae applying for it, what is the zoning, what is the project description. critically, that document would have one set of land use data tables for the project. there would not be multiple sets of data, and that would be much more easily kept up to date throughout the planning process. this was also -- the system by folding in the environmental review process into this consolidated project application will also promote much closer coordination between current planning staff who's implementing the planning code and environmental staff who's implementing ceqa state law. finally what this process will allow us to do also is institutionalize these target hearing time frames, these target approval time frames

that i mentioned at the beginning of this presentation. so the six months or nine months or 12 months in which we're expected to have a project approved according to the executive directive. what we'll do is once through this project application process we get to a stable project description for the project, we will then automatically schedule a date on sort of the advanced -- advanced calendar fore the commission six months, nine months or 12 months out so that we have that there, and then, everyone will be able to work backward from that date, get the other hearings that might be needed to happen in advance of that and have a much closer feedback loop between environmental planning, the sponsor, the public and the current planner. so we're in the midst of rolling that out, and i would like to pause here for a moment just to kind of take any general or clarifying questions on this portion of the presentation. obviously, we can come back to any of this at any time, as well. thank you. >> president hillis: yes, and i would just recommend that we

be brief here so we can take public comments but go ahead if you have any clarifying questions at this point. >> just a clarifying question that seemed appropriate now. in regards to safety, built out safety of our buildings, is there going to be any sort of check box or anywhere on the application stating a building is going to be built to the local building code or not? >> well, that's all going to happen once the actual application comes in and there's associated building permit, so dbi goes through all the relevant building codes and goes through that. we do reference in the p.p.a. all the citywide requirements that projects are expected to comply with, including you will likely be a permit from the building department. so it's all included in there, but there's not a great degree of detail in the p.p.a. >> in regards to modular housing which is state approved and not san francisco aof proed, i don't think it should be installed anywhere in this

city whatever, and i especially don't think we should be streamlining the approval of that type of how's whatsoevusi whatsoever, even if it's for homeless people. 100% affordable housing, the substandard of dwelling units should not be tolerated or accepted whatsoever and especially not stream lined. >> thank you. >> president hillis: commissioner moore? >> commissioner moore: following up on commissioner koppel's comment, i do believe we need industry and labor introduction to the subject matter, and i think it would be augmented into but at this moment, since we do not know anything about the details about what's being discussed here, i think i would not put that as a challenge to the attempt of streamlining. i think that's an overlay and a later addition or subtraction of what we do and how we do it, because it needs detail, which

we don't have. >> president hillis: okay. so i don't see any other clarifying questions, so let's -- i'm sure we will have more questions after public comment. >> all right. thank you, commissioners. so moving onto the proposed ordinance, just again, a little bit more background. so like i said, we did put out the process and approve the plan to the mayor's office. on march 5, the department issued a memo to mayor farrell, outlining several the items that required planning code amendments in order to be implemented. the mayor picked up on a few of those items and that was included in the ordinance on april 24. just also a note for both commissioners and the members of the public. that's why we have the executive summary dated last week and also the supplemental memo memorandum. supplemental has the most up to date ordinance attached to it. finally, yesterday, we were at

the historic preservation commission where we discussed the same ordinance, as well. they unanimously approved the ordinance for consideration of the board of supervisors. so what's contained in the ordinance? there's really three sections of this ordinance. the first of them deals with our ability to review 100% affordable housing projects and also large residential projects downtown in r-c 3 districts. we do have planning code section 315, the purpose of which is to allow us to approve administratively 100% affordable housing projects without needing a c.u. or any other type of discretionary action from the commission. however, not all projects can make use of that program because they're only entitled to use certain sections from the planning code that may be available based on where they

are. okay so you're in the eastern neighborhood, you can use what's contained in the eastern neighborhoods list, and so on and so forth. this ordinance would allow those projects to be approved with these same types of exceptions you could get through a planned unit development or a p.u.d. the p.u.d. cannot have an increase in height and it cannot offer an increase in density of the project. those are really the bright lines that contain in that process. the affordable housing -- well, i have talk about the affordable housing bonus project. we also have the 100% affordable housing bonus program. that program you can't use 315 right now because you're getting further bonuses. the proposal here is to create a new code section, 315.1 that

would be an administrative approval process as well. what that would do is replace the section 328 design review hearing that happens at the planning commission fore those projects with the adtrition review process that references the applicable design guidelines for those projects. so the purpose of this is to allow us to have administrative approval for both of those types of projects. finallied or-nance would allow us to approve these projects without discretionary review of just these 100% affordable housing projects provide the commission delegates that authority to staff. such a delegation is included in the proposal that you'll see next week. second piece of this is regarding large downtown projects, section 309 governs how we can review these projects that are in the downtown c 3 zoning districts. basically all of these tend to need a variance from the open

usage space. what this would do is really quite a simple change to section 309. the review of the planning commission would be unchanged. all the thresholds, written terms of size whether a project can be reviewed administratively or or not would not be changed. we would add two sections that would be for usable open space and dwelling size requirements. the second section, as we went through our process improvement plan, we looked at everything that we do and tried to find ideas from staff about where were the opportunities that we could look at things that take us away from looking at new housing in san francisco. what we found is the current process is really unnecessarily complicated. there are over 30 different

forms of notification, all kind of mix and match, 31 flavors, whatever you want to call it. that leads to a lot of opportunity for really minor errors that can still delay a project by several months. you know your calendar is really full, and if there is an error it can delay a project for several months. as we were looking at this, we realized that we're generating quite a bit of paper related to that mailing. just the 311 and 312 notifications themselves produced three tons of paper in 2017 that got mailed out. we mail out those large envelopes with 11 by 17 plan sets, and it generates quite a bit of paper. in addition we realized some other things that emerged over the years. the multiple language translation requirements were not applicable to every form of notice. tenants are not required to receive notice in many cases like for many of your hearings, and also none of this information is on the internet. finally, when projects are required to have notification

that's a building permit, a project that, you know could otherwise be approved by the planning code but it's required by section 311 or 312 to have notification, it means it goes into our permit review backlog, and you're looking at a several month delay for us to be able to get to that project, get that project through the process. this is just a chart that we use internally to keep track of what all these requirements are, just to demonstrate the many different options of notification requirements that might be applicable depending on what's going on. and with regards to the proposal itself, the proposal is really to take those many different requirements, consolidate them into a uniform set of notification requirements for all types of notice. those types of notice would be mailed notice, posted notice, posters that actually go up at the project site and on-line notice. for all of them, it would be a 20 day notification period. for the mailed notice, it would be a 1 r50 foot mailing notice from the project site for all

types of mailed notice, and for the on-line notice, what would be included would be a digital copy of the posted notice which has quite a bit of information, and also a link to the plan sets themselves, formatted to print on 11 by 17 paper, rather than mailing those 11 by 17 plan sets out. paper copies are always available at the planning department, and there would be instructions on the mailed notice as well as to how to obtain paper copies. in addition, the code would really get rid of a lot of the specific form requirements that are in there right now, and simplify it. at an absolutely minimum, the notice could be no smaller than a mailed postcard. the exact dimensions of those would be determined did i the zoning administrator and the planning department. in addition as i mentioned the multiple language translation requirements would be included on all forms of notice. i should mention just a couple of other things about the

notification proposal. with the posted notice there would be a new requirement that the poster appear every 25 feet of linear street frontage. it was pointed out at the historic preservation commission by president wolfram that that could be a little bit tricky or difficult or excessive to meet for perhaps excessive large street frontages. he mentioned the ferry building, and he pointed out that it might be advisable to look at ways to give us more flexibility when a particular site or structure is not appropriate to have the posters go on there in a kind of one size fits all way, so that's certainly something to discuss. in addition after the ordinance -- after the recommendations from the department were passed along for the ordinance, we learned of state laws that actually do require newspaper notification in certain cases and actually do require 300 foot mailing in certain cases for c.u.'s and variances. the newspaper is for

legislative actions and certain types of rezonings. the department's recommendations remains we should approve this ordinance so the code would set the standard requirements, minimum requirements, and any time that state law dictates otherwise, we obviously follow what the state law is, and that would just sort of float on top of this local requirement. if and when that would change, the planning code would be consistent with these operative requirements. the exact way in which we implemented state requirements we do apply would be determined by the zoning administrator. that was actually one of the things that was added in the reintroduced version of the ordinance. in addition to that, there is a special operative date for all of these amendments related to neighborhood notification. so the rest of the ordinance that i've discussed and will be discussing would come into effect 30 days after legislation is signed should it be passed by the board of supervisors. the notification requirements would not come into effect

until january 1 of 2019. the purpose of this is to give the planning department and zoning administrator to figure out time to implement all -- the time to implement all of these are. this is to give us time to actually work everything out. there are certain investments that go along with that internally, you know, getting the website together to have all the links to the plan sets and so on that just don't make sense for us to undertake until the plans allow us to do it. the final thing to mention about the notification requirements that came to my attention from my colleague just the other day is that this would also have the additional benefit of exempting child care facilities from notifications in all cases. this was something that the board passed in 2017 specifically to exempt notification requirements in

residential districts for all child care facilities and also in all nc neighborhood commercial districts that were subject to 312. the intention of that ordinance was to exempt from all 312 notification, however, it did not -- the way the ordinance was written, it's still required for us to do 312 notification in mixed use neighborhoods like the eastern neighborhoods in certain circumstances. the way that the new section 333 uniform requirements would be set out and the way that 311 has been amended would make it clear that child services are not under that. up to now i've been discussing procedures, and as i mentioned, nothing would be changing in terms of when notification is actually required. all the public hearings of zoning administrator and this commission and the historic preservation commission still require the same kind of note, all building permits and changes of use would still

require notice. there would be one change to that, and this arose from talking to staff about what are the things that we spend a lot of time on that would be served in a better way? this is a type of limited expansion into the rear yard -- or rather a rear addition that can be in the rear yard if it's a zoning district that has a 45% rear yard. this is governed by a part of the code you would 136 c-25 which is actually not a star wars robot but actually a part of the planning code. what it does, it's actually quite specific and there's a very small diagram that's actually in the planning code that shows what it allows. it allows for an expansion from the rear of the existing building of no more than 12 feet in depth. if it's a one story addition, it can be no higher than 10 feet which is the same size permitted for a deck orfence that can be approved over the counter and also is below the

site line. and that would amount to about 300 gross square feet of additional floor area in the structure for a typical 25 foot lot. it also allows for a two floor addition, provided that the existing structure is at least two floors. that addition is limited so that it has to have a 5 foot set back on either side of the addition, and it can't be any higher than the floor of the third floor, that the highest point of the second floor, in other words. in no circumstances can these additions go into the last 15 feet of the lot or the last 25% of lot area, whichever is greater. i should also mention that these requirements are completely in line with the residential design guidelines. this type of work would be permitted if we saw the project, when we do, and we look at the residential design guidelines, we say okay that fits, and these are routinely approved. very small number of these end up coming to the commission. however, because of the notification requirement, we cannot approve them same day. so instead of having this approved same day, goes into

the cue. a planner ends up spending several hours working on it over the course of several weeks, and the project can be delayed by three or four months. we estimate this takes up about two full-time equivalent of staff time just for this scope of work coming into the department as well. again, this is the kind of thing that seems relatively small scale but it adds up at the department. the reason we were at the historic preservation commission were for the amendments to article 10 and 11 of the planning code. so the preservation staff at the department as we are developing our plan pointed out that there are a lot of very small scopes of work like the automatic door operator push buttons for ada compliance or making the ada landing actually level to comply with ada or putting up business signs or awnings that are consistent with our guidelines. there's a lot of these things that have already been delegated by the hpc to staff.

however because they still have to be appealable to hpc, they cannot be approved over the counter same day by a preservation planner, they have to go into the cue. these amendments would simply exempt the following scopes of work from a certificate of appropriateness if it's an article ten structure or from a minor permit to alter. again these are the ada buttons and landings, and the historic landmark plaques themselves, which currently even though they are paid for by the city to someone who has gotten their building landmarked, actually, you have to come in and get a building permit with us and you have to wait several months to get that. so all of these things, the historic preservation, they adopted this unanimously and thought all of these thipgss would help preservation planners focus on preservation

work. our preservation team imt is itted that about a third of all the permits that they see upstairs are for those specific scopes of work. that concludes the presentation. i'm sure you have questions, and we look forward to discussing this more with you. >> president hillis: thank you, mr. bintliff. so we'll open this up for public comment. i've got a number of speaker cards. anyone who would like to speak, please do so. >> good evening. that's a postcard. those can get lost in the mail. if that's going to be how people are going to get notified about anything, i worry. plus it's a limited amount of space you can put on there. this is the 311 form. i think you need to send that

to immediate neighbors. they need to get the plans. i don't know anyone who can download, print out 11 by 17 plans. i can't. i can only bprint out 8.15 by 11. i think you need to consider that when you make these changes. personally, i like this envelope. you have a whole bunch of envelopes. i like this one because it looks like a check. people will open it because they think there's money inside, and they'll read the notice and they'll know what's going on. i did want to focus on the 311 issue. i did send you something over the weekend. here's more, and i put something on the other side. i think this is a good chance to -- to -- to -- to -- to do something positive, and that would be to sort of expand what happens between the preapp and when the 311 notice goes out. get the neighbors involved, get the planner involved, get the project sponsor involved. there's a huge gap of time between the preapp notice which

does come in an envelope like this but doesn't say planning department, it says the project sponsor. get the neighbors to be involved so they know what's going on. if you want to prevent or decrease the number of problems that happen afterwards. why is this important for the neighborhood, for the 311? i think that's where most of the development is going to be. you can't build down in hunters point because it's radio active. you've got the south of market plan where you don't have enough housing there for the workers, and all the tech companies want to move up here, so it's all going to be in the neighborhood. so you need to make sure, please, that neighbors are aware of what's going on in their neighborhood. currently, you do not send out the plans for if you have a c.u., if there's demolition, and new project, so no one knows what the new plans are. according to the code, that's

consider considered duplicative already. you cannot print out 11 by 17 plans, and i also think you should use this opportunity to make the plans better, to make sure that the adjacent neighbors, the adjacent properties are clearly delineated and people understand. and one more thing about the 136, most projects that i've seen in noe valley, they have -- they do the expansions of the yard, and they do the pop out. so does that mean you're not going to put the pop out if you give any kind of notice about that major expansion into the yard, the pop out will just be approved separate? it's not clear to me about that. there's more and i guess we'll talk about it next week or whatever. thank you. >> president hillis: thank you. yep. next speaker. >> i'll be using the overhead.

eileen boken with speak here on my own behalf. i am strongly urging the commission to continue this item for at least four weeks. the proposed legislation dpsh-the proposed legislation does not reflect the delineation of section 309 and has no reference to cap b buildings. this proposed legislation is based in part on an executive order from last year. this executive order failed to acknowledge the fact that tens of thousands of units are already in the pipeline that are not being built because of capacity issues in the construction trades. these capacity issues have only been exacerbated by the north bay fires. i would urge the commission to take this back into

consideration. also, on the overhead, at the bottom of the department's notice of planning department requirement number one, there are these words, which is "please provide the requested information within 30 days. the application will be sent back to the department of building inspection for cancellation if we do not receive the requested information in this time." this policy apparently is not actually enforced. this would be a major step in expediting proposed projects. and finally, based on the testimony from the mayor's office of housing and economic development, common sense and good government terms are over used and should be eliminated as we athey are highly subject. thank you. >> president hillis: thank you. next speaker, please.

>> good afternoon, commissioners. my name is mary, and i'm concerned about the proposed process changes. there is a reason that we have these notification protocols. the public has the right to know what is being erected in their neighborhoods. that's been the policy and the philosophy of the city of san francisco for decades. to shorten the period of time during which the public can act is a direct blow to this right. now it will under constant bombardment by various buy right schemes, we cannot afford to give up more. as for issuing over the counter permits for pop outs, this is another disastrous move that will encourage serial permitting. we're fighting illegal demolitions that are the direct result of serial permitting.

of all time, this is the worst time to introduce a change like this. thank you for your time. >> president hillis: thank you. next speaker, please. >> good afternoon. mary liza here, speaking for myself. i'm just wondering why we're entertaining the idea of less notice at a time when, obviously, particularly the idea of mailing notices 20 days in advance. so is this 20 days going to be from the time when we receive the notice or from the mail date because as we know, the mail's getting really slow, so it's getting really hard to assume it's going to get there very fast. then there's this idea instead of 300 feet, we're going to go down to 150 feet, so we're having less notice so less people and a more difficult fashion, and it just seems as

if the public has less information at what's -- all of these changes. and then i'm wondering about the idea of posting these 11 by 17 posters every 25 feet? what are you going to post them on? are you going to post them on people's trees, their houses? it just seems like kind of an odd kind of idea to go about it that way. and then, in terms of the no notice, on -- on the pop outs or the rear additions, it seems particularly difficult for neighbors next door whose foundations might actually be affected because sometimes that happens depending on the kind of land you're on, you know, what kind of encroachment you might have next to how closure to your neighbor's foundations and that sort of thing. so it just seems as though this

needs to be thought out a little bit more than it has been because it seems like all kinds of problems could come about if this is just sepd the way it is currently being presented to us. thank you. >> president hillis: thank you. next speaker, please. >> i'm james park, and i live out in the sunset, and i just saw this for the first time a day or two ago. and i am in favor of any kind of efficiency and effectiveness of any process. in fact more in favor than some people would like to think. but what worries me is that the effect it will have on me of somebody building a bump out next to me in my house is it will be an effective 20 foot fence blocking my sun in the back yard that i worked all my life to build and to sit in finally and now i'm going to

end up in the ice cold winter in the summer of san francisco without the sun. i think we have an ordinance or something that says that no back yard fence should be greater than 6 feet. there's a reason for that. you want some sun to come in, but you don't want your neighbor to be overlooking your activities in your back yard. that's a nice thing. we have nice big back yards in nis big blocks where people live, but these back yards are not big, they're postage stamps. they're being reduced and reduced and reduced, and without any knowledge, i'll wake up and find somebody building a 20 foot fence next to my back yard and killing my plants, depriving me of the enjoyment of my back yard. i'd like to have a little bit more time to consider this about what effect this has on me personally and perhaps extend that to what it has on other people. so please, don't rush through this and run through this particular piece while you're