>> good morning and welcome to the october 17 meeting of the government audit and over sight committee. my name is jane kim and i'm joined by aaron peskin and supervisor valerie brown. we are also joined by norman yee who is the sponsor of item one. our clerk is john carroll, and i do want to thank the staff at sfgov tv for staffing today's meeting. mr. clerk, do you have any announcements? >>clerk: yes. [agenda item read]

>> supervisor kim: thank you so much. mr. clerk, can you please call item one. >>clerk: agenda item one is a hearing on the city's process for vetting safety records. >> supervisor kim: thank you very much. and i know we have members of public works, public utilities commission, and the san francisco m.t.a. supervisor yee is the sponsor of this hearing, and so i will turn it over to him. >> thank you, chair kim. colleagues, today, i'm holding this hearing on a citywide approach to construction safety in light of the tragic death of a worker in august, during the twin peaks tunnel construction project.

the company that we had contracted with wasn't question, and i think what happened was the media brought this to our attention, that they discovered that the contractor had checked no in their application when asked, in the past ten years, has the potential bidder, or if a joint venture partnership, has any member of the partnership been cited or any willful or serious safety violations by cal-osha, and the company checked no. so what happened? what does it mean? did they really have no citations? but in 2015, osha had upheld a serious and willful violation of this company. this case is still under litigation, so we are not able to publicly discuss it today. today is not about focusing on a

particular company. what it triggered for me was, well, how do our departments actually handle these questions about safety, and is there any consistency in terms of how we ask, and what is it that -- how do we rate these companies that are actually making their bids, and when do we consider them disqualified? and so these are the questions that our city agencies would like -- i would like to see them answered today, if possible, how to vet these type of situations. and the city does not categorize injuries by construction or -- which is probably something we should look into.

the issue that i'm bringing up today is not a new issue. it's something that others have been concerned about. in april 2017, the controller's report, they were asked to do a report. stated that in the fiscal year 2013-14, the city's worker comp was $2.80 for each $100 of payroll. important to note that this is not construction specific because the city doesn't categorize it. so again, we have to know what we're talking about, are these construction jobs or not? the purpose is not today to point fingers again, it's just really to look at how we contract with the companies. my attempt is to identify where our gaps and how we as a city can do better to ensure we are

probably vetting contractor safety records and ensure the safety of the workers and the public on construction sites. in april 2017, the controller's office issued a report called the city would benefit from more proactive approach to construction safety management. once again, just from the title, you can see that my colleagues were concerned about this issue already. in this report, there were eight recommendations, one of which was to create a citywide construction safety committee. the report evaluated the six -- chapter six departments with construction contract authority. this includes the airport commission, the department of public works, court commission, rec and park commission, san

francisco municipal transportation agency, and the san francisco public utilities commission. today we're going to be hearing from three departments that operate in the public right-of-way, streets and sidewalks to present on the status of these recommendations. today's hearing is meant to allow members of the citywide construction safety committee to share what they have been doing to improve citywide safety management. remaining gaps that are still in need to be addressed, and for this committee and public to provide input in the process. today's goal is to improve safety, this really is bottom line for our workers. i'm going to thank ahead of time the departments for being here today to present. now i would invite the public works city engineer, john

thomas, thank you, mr. thomas, to present first. and then, it's going to be followed by ray callaba by construction and sfpuc, and then, it will be the director of capital improvement and construction for sfmta okay. mr. thomas. >> good morning, chair kim and members of the committee. first, thank you to supervisor yee for calling this hearing. i want to start by saying that safety is the number one priority of all the departments that you'll hear from this morning. we take this very seriously, and i think there are really two facets that we can consider as we work on these projects. first is during the selection process, but as you'll hear in the ensuing slides, we have

somewhat limited control during that process, and then during the construction of the work itself, where we do very carefully monitor and enforce the requirements of our contracts. so by way of background, we currently have 200 active construction contracts totaling a value of about $1.8 billion. project types are wide and varied. i know the focus of this is in the public right-of-way. but we do projects for city departments throughout the city of san francisco and even beyond, so fire stations, police stations, health centers, zuckerberg general hospital, moscone, and second street, p e polk. many of those are combined with work from our sister agencies, p.u.c. and m.t.a., so you have a

comprehensive look at the type of work that we perform. as you know, procurement is governed by chapter six of the admin code as well as state and federal law. we can't exclude licensed, bonded and insured contractors. for some specific types of work, we may state that a contractor must have completed work of a certain nature and complexity, and a certain type of work, so that is often a criteria we will attach to a selection process. and then, contractor debarment. that is somewhat rare. there are very limited cases where debarment has been seen, really, in san francisco. and then, we have alternative delivery methods. so many of you have heard best

value, construction manager, or c.m. at risk, within those, we have safety as a selection criteria, but the majority of those are low fixed base contracts, so the lowest responsive and responsible bidder is awarded the contract. the contractor must be determined to be responsible, but the bar is very high to reject a bidder and requires due process, which would include hearings. our contracts themselves confine the responsibility for safety is solely the contractor's, so we make sure that they submit a safety plan, that we review that, make sure it is complete, and we make sure the contractor adher adheres to that plan during the construction process. contractors must comply with

cal-osha. that protects workers. it does not apply to the public or safety damage. sorry. let me just -- i apologize. i just wanted to note, the last bullet, by contract, the contractor must comply with all state and federal safety standards, so you must call 811, call before you dig, safe and accessibility paths of travel must be maintained at all times, and hazardus materials handling, just to make a few. the contractor must comply with additional requirements,

designated qualified safety project representative. contractors are to submit a resume, showing what their experience is. they are approved and then have oversight of that particular contract or that particular contractor may have with the city and county of san francisco. prepare and submit project specific are safety plans and code of safety practices, conduct and document daily safety inspections, report and investigate all incidents, identify causes and take corrective actions and submit a corrective action report before submitting an area incident. that's an important bullet point. over the last several years, we have enforced this rigorously. whenever we encounter a safety incident on our projects. the work is paused. we need to make sure the contractor is aware of what occurred, why it occurred, and whether or not there is mitigation measures that can be put in place immediately to make sure that that safety incident does not reoccur throughout the

progress of the remainder of the job. and then, provide all records and allow public works participation whenever requested. public works provides initial and regular safety training for public works over sight staff, including our inspectors, our resident engineers and construction managers. we have weekly on lite training with g.s.a., we send out e-mails, c.m. safety tips, and e letters. including kroos with safety related contracts -- contract requirements. we document all safety related incidents that happen on project. that is a way for us to track jnd joust what an osha violation will tell you.

so any incidents that happened on our sites will documents, we track them. we have been comparing them to hours work to see whether we're seeing any trends, either positively or negatively on our projects. we watch for and other day any of those by work trends and my contractors. we authorize that stop work authority when necessary. so as we move forward, we are building a culture of continuous learning and improvement. we are working on improvements to our specifications. one of the things that was alluded to earlier is how consistently the city departments are working with together. we have carefully reviewed the other departments' specifications and are more closely aligning ours with their to see make sure we are all covering the same things. we continue to show lessons learned in best practices with our sister agencies, and we use the alternative delivery methods

when most applicable. are we have also established a citywide safety committee, and i've already mentioned the p.u.c. specifications. so that concludes my presentation. >> supervisor yee: i -- i'm going to be asking you a lot of questions because you're the first one up and it's probably the same questions i could have asked anybody. in regards to -- there's several things in your presentation that i have question about. the training for your staff, for instance, what kind of training do they actually receive? is it similar to the ten-hour training that many states uses from the cal-osha training manual? it's a ten-hour training. >> that is one part of what we do, yes.

there are additional training opportunities that are given to our staff, as well. >> and i don't know if you can answer this, but are other departments -- do they do the same training? >> i can't answer that. i believe they do, but i cannot answer that. >> i guess when the other two presenters come up, they can answer that question. >> supervisor yee: in regards to documenting issues with ongoing work of the contractors, when there's some -- when there are issues, how do you use that documentation? >> so initially, the contractor is notified immediately of whatever incident was noted. they're given a correction notice, and they need to respond to that immediately. depending on severity, there could be a pause in the work while they address what the causes were and how they might

mitigate that going forward. the tracking aspect of it, as i said before, is an attempt to determine whether there are trends citywide specific to a contractor or specific to a contract. so we can idolize that data to explain to a contractor why an issue is perhaps more serious that be it looks on the surface because there might be a history with contractor x where we have seep path of travel issues or improve traffic control or other unsafe practices. and when we see a series of these things, it could be an indicator of a bigger safety, so we make sure the contractor is brought in, sat down, and talk about how we can address that going forward. >> supervisor yee: is this something you can use for future potential contracts if, for instance, you see a pattern, and it doesn't really stop or they haven't done any corrective actions?

do you use that information to say, you know something? we can't be giving this particular company a contract -- a new contract. >> at this point, no, it is not used as part of the selection process. >> supervisor yee: and then -- okay. that's something to think about. the other thing is if you have this documentation, do you -- would the other departments have access to this information? >> so far, no. we have only been doing this now for probably the past 2.5 years in terms of tracking the data amongst all of our projects. we have discussed it at the safety committee meetings, but we have not yet compiled it to be shared. again, something that we would consider and discuss at the committee, but it has not resolved yet. >> supervisor yee: and then, in regards to the committee that we're talking about, this

contract safety committee, i guess, construction safety committee, that -- how long has that been going on, and how many times has that -- has this committee met? >> it's a fairly recent -- i might defer to nicholas on this, but a fairly recent committee that's been formed, so it's met a few times. i'm not sure of the total number. >> supervisor yee: and then, for the general audience, we're talking about a recommendation that came out of the audit to create this committee. i'm sorry, what's your name again? >> nicholas king, public works. >> supervisor yee: thank you, nicholas. can you answer the question, and who's actually part of this committee? >> so taking a step back, it's 2018 now. in 2017, the city serviced oughtititor published a report

that indicated -- auditor published a record that indicated a formation of the committee, so that's what this body came out of but that's not to say that we haven't been collaborating prior to that. these are really big departments, and they have lots of different components. they have contract administration components and internal employee health and safety. you know, john works on projects that are horizontal. we have projects that are vertical, so all of those different groups come together for different purposes under ann an umbrella, so you might have last seen us in 2016 at the board, where a group of representatives from each department came to you and asked for some changes to the administrative code. that's all to say we're just

trying to formalize a lot of things that we already do and standardize and share information. >> supervisor yee: i appreciate that, but there was a real specific question here, which is, you know, since april 2017, 1.5 years ago, how many times has this committee met? the answer to your question is -- is that there's lots of subcommittees under this meeting, so for the purpose of changing the administrative code, that's a separate body that's met, i would say, at least a dozen times. then, there's a group of people who might consider best practices for cmgc delivery methods, where public works and p.u.c. have met probably, you know, half a dozen times about improvement. so i wouldn't think of it as one -- it's not like there's one person from each department who is an expert in all things department. there's lots of different tasks

that we try to do to try to tailor what we're trying to get at in our solicitation process to see get the least risky contractor for a particular job. does that make sense? >> supervisor yee: okay. i'll get back to you. thank you. before we move onto the next speaker, are there questions? >> supervisor peskin: so mr. kim, can you just elucidate the six departments, m.t.a., p.u.c., airport, port -- >> r.p.d., did you say r.p.d.? >> i didn't say r.p.d., and don't you, mr. thomas, do a lot of rec and parks work? >> we do, yes. >> supervisor peskin: and don't you do a lot of the p.u.c.'s work? >> we do their below grade work, where their larger projects like they do, sewer treatment plants,

etc., they perform or perform with consultants. >> supervisor peskin: and across the six, is there any uniformity in the way bids are solicited? >> to my knowledge, yes, they're very similar process. >> supervisor peskin: and similar bid specs and similar bid structures? >> as i mentioned, the bids have variations. particularly, there have been differences in selection criteria and safety that we're trying to align more closely now. over the last several years, we've been working with to align with p.u.c. in particular that has one of the best specs we think for that. >> supervisor peskin: and the membership in the citywide safety committee is one from each department -- mr. king, good to see you. long time no see. >> so let me give you examples of different groups underneath the umbrella of one committee.

so taking a step back, there's six of us, right, and we do really different work. the port does a lot of work in the water, and the skills that they require are really different than what r.p.d. is looking for in a park. and m.t.a. has to deal with a lot of federal regulation. p.u.c. has to deal with a lot of regulation involved endangered species. that's not something that we have to worry about, that our trucks are driving over a frog that's endangered. that's something that comes up, literally, when we talk to p.u.c. in answer to your question, there's a core set of standards we try to use in practices, but they have to be flexible enough to meet the needs of each department and pass at each particular job. and it's risk. that's what we are -- the needle we're trying to thread, so for

subcommittees under a safety committee, we have a group of people who work on just employee health and safety, so each department has staff that cares about public works -- or public works at our end, our particular employees. so we share practices with other departments that's also related to the audit that came out in 2017 that recommended more collaboration between departments, but that's just employee safety, and i think today we're just talking about contractors. so a second area would be construction site safety, what are the practices that we're using where we can have shared knowledge and better practices? m.t.a. and public works and p.u.c. might abbe interested in having better rules with the

bir barricades that go in the street around a construction project. that's not something the airport is worried about during their construction projects. three, during legislation, we all in our departments keep a constant list of whether or not the administrative code is serving us in delivering projects and giving us the flexibility we need to evaluate safety, so we've come back to you twice in the last three years with particular changes to the administrative code. that's a separate list. the people on that is different than the people on the health and safety committee. four, we're always trying to figure out how to do a better job of using prequalification processes or minimum qualification processes for all of our contracts. it's really hard to set the line and say this is the level performance we want without setting it too high or too low.

and one thing that hasn't come up yet is that we're making all of these rules, and they're -- the rules are the rules year in and year out, but there's lots of fluctuation in the market. so right now, contractors have a lot of opportunity. there's lots of work in the north bay from all of the fire damage, there's tons of construction for private clients. we, in terms of delivering projects to the public, have to think about that. they're not necessarily right now a lot of bidders who want to work on a park or a building. >> supervisor yee: can i just kind of refocus a little bit here? what i'm after in this hearing is to look at contracts and look specifically on construction sites. so my question is going to be very narrow in a sense. i think -- i appreciate that you

could describe all the things that you're doing, but do you have a subcommittee that's looking at how we can have consistent contracts and how we can have consistent evaluation in terms of a potential contractor's safety record? this is what this focus -- i'd like to stick to, so do you have an answer to that? >> sure. i'll just finish up the subcommittee thing, just to make sure i answer supervisor peskin's question. we communicate with multiple contractors throughout the year so if we have a safety issue that we see that's worth bringing up to a room full of 60 contractors, we'll bring it up. and then last, we try to do a good job of coordinating our responses to over sight bodies like the board or the city services auditor and working together. in terms of your most recent question and the questions you

asked to john thomas about tracking, i can't recall how many of the four of you were here in the summer of 2016, but i know that you supported a change to the ad straf code in the summer of 2016 that did a few things. one, it permitted the use of a new type of contract, which is -- which is best value, which allows consideration in a more flexible way of safety records. and two, it established bay -- or it told us to go out and establish a database of pro forma tracking for all of our construction jobs, so we are working on that. and the whole point of that is to, one, do a better job of tracking information. in preparation for this hearing, you guys have asked a lot of questions, and to get those answers requires calling six different people and figuring out who those people were in the

first place. there's not a one stop place for it all, so that's part of what we're working on. and the second is tracking issues that are serious enough -- whether it's safety on or something, so we can use them in future determinations. when we get bids from contractors, we're asking whether or not they are responsible, and a lot of that does relate to safety. but in order to answer that question in a way that is fair to contractors and efficient, we have to have a good record, and that's what we're working on right now. it's been a couple of years since you mandated it, and that's a whole separate topic that we can get into if you want. >> supervisor yee: let me -- supervisor peskin, do you have any other questions because i want to bring mr. king back up

later. thank you for now, and why don't we go ahead and move to our next presentation. you can pronounce it for me, your name. >> yes. >> first of all, good morning, chair kim, and supervisors. i'm a construction manager with the san francisco public utilities commission infrastructure division, and i'm here today to present the p.u.c.'s portion of the presentation on contractor safety. i'll just quickly go over the agenda of the presentation.

i'll go over the p.u.c.'s qualification program, and report on the sfpuc's safety program results from our recent water system improvement program, and then, i'll conclude by summarizing our path forward for our current and -- current and future construction contracts and collaboration with the other city departments. so as part of the sfpuc's prequalification process, contractors are required to complete a candidate control information form which requests information regarding a firm's organization, financial capacity, professional responsibility, as well as questions regarding a firm's history of safety practices and

our current specs include a question of osha violations, and this is to gauge a firm's experience in a specific category of expertise and experience references. our prequalification program was originally developed in support of our water system improvement program, and we currently have 15 prequalification categories for four times of projects involving waste water projects, local water projects, regional water projects and solar photo voltaic projects and we're currently refreshing these lists as well as creating new categories for our up coming sewer system improvement program and hetchy capital improvements program.

so in addition to the prequalification process, the p.u.c. has also implemented best safety practices during construction by adopting our overall construction safety approach in 2007 as part of the water system improvement program. the approach including, among other things, the development of contract specific safety specifications requiring health and safety plans from contractors, construction managers, and consultants working in the field. we also required job hazard analysis for specific portions of work on certain jobs, and the assignment of full-time safety managers out in the field. we're also continuing to train our program c.m. safety staff as valuable resources, and we continuously provide safety training for our construction spectors and c.m. staff to increase their level of

knowledge. so since the safety program has been in place, we've seen tangible results, which we'll see in the following slides, and we're expecting similar results across all our sfpuc projects. this graph -- the slide illustrates the number of hours worked over time between january 2010 and july 2018. since 2010, the sfpuc logged in over 9.5 million hours worked on our water restoration program. using the same graph and overlaying this slide, it shows how the 9.5 mil york million worker hours were -- million worker hours were laid out.

so since worker hours vary over time, we can also look at the results of our safety program in terms of comparison to the national injury, and you'll see in the loss time rates of the construction industry. our worker injury recordable injury rate normalized around two worker hours -- two incidents per-200,000 worker hours which is lower than the national average of four. and simile, the sfpuc's recordable -- i'm sorry, lost time rate, which is shown in

red, has also steadily declined and is also below the industry rate. so looking forward, the p.u.c. is currently updating its prequalification questionnaire and enhancing those safety questions in coordination with the other city departments. we also plan to increase our question regarding closed osha violations to include several questions on our questionnaire for osha violations as well as e.m.r. we also plan to utilize our website to stream line application review and documentation process for such applications. we will also continue to carry or sfpuc safety approach to our upcoming sewer system improvement program and hetchy capital improvements program. and we're going to continue to

coordination in collaboration with the other city departments on the citywide effort on construction safety. >> supervisor yee: so this is your completion of your presentation? >> yes. >> supervisor yee: okay. you mentioned e.m.r., and number one, what is it, and for people that don't know what it stands for. and how do you use it? what rating -- where is it that you deem a contractor not very safe in terms of the number? and do you know if the other departments are consistently using e.m.r. at the same rating? >> well, e.m.r. stands for the experience modification rate, and it's used by the -- by osha

to evaluate safety standards in the workplace. so typically, the national standard's about one. of course, a lower e.m.r. rating lower than one is better. higher than one is -- is one is worse. to my knowledge, i'm not aware of how the other city departments use the e.m.r. rating. we're currently within discussions within the p.u.c. to evaluate and establish a consistent portion of our questionnaire in order to make sure that we quantify favorable rating versus an unfavorable rating and -- for our future evaluation. >> supervisor yee: do you know if this e.m.r. rating is predependable? >> based on what i know, the e.m.r. rating is -- base odd what i understand, it's -- it's

a way to normalize large firms as well as smaller firms in terms of their safety rating. obviously, if you have several incidents that are used to evaluate the rate, it would quantify your number quite a bit much more consistently than if it were a smaller best of my memory wi memory -- smaller firm that would drastically change what the rating is. i think over time, the rating would establish itself as more consistent. in the short-term, depending on the size of the company, believe that it may vary. >> supervisor yee: okay. thank you very much. any questions from my colleagues? okay. i might bring you back up, but can we move onto the next

presenter? zbl good morning, share kim and supervisors. i'm the director of capital program and construction with sfmta. thank you for the opportunity to speak today, and you're also -- thank you for your interest and in your involvement in helping to improve citywide contractor safety evaluation. safety is the highest importance

in sfmta. there are two parts that we identify that we should pay attention to, and it can help improve our current practices. the first one is the contract safety history and performance evaluation, and the second is the contractor safety plan that is tailored to contractor safety history and identified project risk. as you may be aware, we receive direction from the mayor office that require all contractor safety performance to be evaluated before awarding the contract. since then, we have reviewed other public agency evaluation criteria, we have reviewed caltrans, public works, sfpuc,

port, and airport. in general, in the construction industry, there's two criteria that is being used for evaluation. the first one is the experience modification rating, e.m.r. rating, and also osha violation for willful, serious, serious and willful or repeat violation of osha regulation. after reviewing all the different criteria from different agencies, sfmta come up with a proposal for all future evaluation. on several recent and up coming project exceeding $1 million contract value, sfmta has and will require winning bidders to

meet the following contractor safety criteria: first, the experience modification rating, e.m.r., is to be 1.0 or less. 1.0 is the national average for the e.m.r. rating. the second criteria is not more than three osha violations for willful, serious, serious and willful or repeat violation of osha regulation in the past five years. five violations in past five years are allowed for larger contractors. the second part that i mention about improving safety is contractor safety enforcement and compliance. currently, for sfmta project, contractor's safety practices that is required include contractor safety representative that are responsible for safety

plan implementation training and monitoring, safety training for job personnel, safety meeting for job and health analysis, and contractor is required to submit site specific work plan for m.t.a. review and approval. to improve better enforcement and compliance in the future, additional requirement that we are considering include review contractor and cal-osha form 300-a reports of injuries and illness for past three years to identify patterns of safety issues, requiring contractor to address in a site specific work plabs issues that m.t.a. had identified in its review of perform contractor form 300-a, and also perform item inspection to confirm contractor compliance with the project, sswp.

this time is starting point to strengthen the agency policy on contractor safety. we will work with other city agencies to derive a citywide standardized evaluation and enforcement criteria. again, safety is our highest priority, and we look forward working with you in the future for -- to develop the standardized criteria. this conclude my presentation. >> supervisor yee: thank you. i'm just curious, i understand it's the main contractor that provides the bid and -- but i also understand that most -- when -- when they actually get the bid, the contract, and they perform the work, they -- a lot

of times, they do as little as 25% of the work, meaning, they subcontract out a lot of the work. so how -- is there any mechanism that you provide to check or -- how do we control that in terms of the -- what do they use? they subcontract to a provider that maybe has a really lousy record in terms of safety contract issues. >> currently, our term is the general contractor is responsible for the safety of the project site, including the safety of the subcontractor. yes, you are correct that a general contractor could be taking 20% off the contract value where 80% of the contract

is performed by general subcontractor. however, under contract, general contractor is still responsible and is the single designated party that is responsible for the job site safety. >> supervisor yee: that's one thing to be responsible, and one might say sure, i'll be responsible. at the end of the day, they'll probably use some subcontractor that's the lowest bidder for them. and can't -- is there any way to require -- maybe this is a city attorney's question, but is there any way to require the subcontractor meets these same standards of safety that you're requiring of the general contractor, which is, in your case, you know, how many incidents with cal-osha and also the e.m.r. being below one?

>> it's a very good suggestion. we are working with city attorney in evaluating the criteria, whether or not we will evaluate the same criteria for the subcontractor. surnl, our starting point is to evaluate the general contractor as the general contractor is the main person responsible for the contract, and through the citywide effort of standardizing the process, we will definitely look into evaluating subcontractor safety performance, as well. >> can i ask this directly of the deputy city attorney givner? >> mr. givner: her. depu -- sure. department city attorney jon givner. i don't think there's a legal provision on that approach, but yes, we're working with the departments to evaluate the options. >> supervisor yee: thank you. any questions from my colleagues?

if none, i'm going to go ahead and go to public comments, and i have one card here, charlie lavre, and then if there's any other comments, please lineup. >> all these hesitations, blueprint, blueprint standard boilerplate demonstration. the issue here is to account for the employee that dies on the job site because of poor performance working at the west portal station. you got all these prequalifications examples and routines that you're supposed to go through. if you did all these procedures, how did the death of an employee take place on the premises of the city and county of san francisco with this contract. both of your demonstrations claim that you have all those checks and balances to make sure

a situation like that doesn't take place, and it turns out this contractor had a history of numerous violations and serious accidents on the job and shouldn't have been awarded that contract on the first place. talking about your liability, first of all, the city is liable because you can't screen that contract, okay? you didn't screen that history of that contractor. that's all negligence. a good attorney could come up and blame the city when the truth of the matter it's called contributory negligence because the city contributes to the problem by letting that contractor get that job when they shouldn't have had it with the type of history that they had. now you talk about prequalifications procedures in order to make sure that you've got a true and correct person that's qualified to handle the job, and you didn't. so you contributed to that problem along with the person

who's actually working and cause the death of that employee. as a result, that employee lost his life, and his family's got to suffer, so that's your checks and balances. and all this presentation is off point. i believe this hearing was called because of that death, and about the contractor who's working -- [inaudible] >> supervisor yee: thank you very much. >> good morning, mayor, chair kim, supervisor brown, supervisor peskin. my name is charlie lavri. i'm a chairman with the operator's union. we represent almost 40,000 members across four states. we are the largest construction local in the u.s. i want to start by thanking supervisor yee for bringing this

forward today. we really appreciate that you're focusing on workplace safety, and we want to let you know that we share that concern and that our member safety and their going home safely to their friends and families every evening is our priority. we believe that the best way forward here is to establish a working group of industry professionals and experts, including contractors and unions like the operating engineers with the expertise on the ground to develop a uniform r.f.p. safety questionnaire for all city departments. and we want to let you know that representatives of local three are ready to make themselves available to work toward that goal, so thank you for your time this morning. >> supervisor yee: thank you,

and thank you for your p willingness. thank you. >> supervisor yee: thank you. >> supervisors. if it please, i'd like to submit a letter. i would concur with charlie that safety is a collaborative effort between the city, the contractors, stakeholders, to make sure that employees are safe, the contractors are working efficiently, and so forth. i think there's a slippery slope when it comes to evaluating contractors from e.m.r. with all respect to the department heads, osha does not create e.m.r. e.m.r. is created by the industry -- the insurance industry. the insurance industry determines what rate it's going to pay you based on the last three years of your performance. point in order, those that create an accident today can have a e.m.r. less than one. that will not be reflected for

three more years, so there's a fallacy that this is a good e.m.r. i've provided ten talking points why e.m.r. is a failed way to determine safety. we look forward to working with the board and committee to determine a method that is good for safety. someone can kill somebody on a job, and the e.m.r. will not move. you can sprain and amnkle and have your e.m.r. go up by 50%. and that may be use today discriminate them for future job opportunities because of an

e-m-r that is not in line with city proet cal that may be established in the future. thank you. >> supervisor yee: thank you. any other public comments? if not, why don't we close public comments now. okay. so of the three departments represented, one of the questions that i didn't ask was in terms of whether you get an application, you ask the question, did you actually vet the -- the answers, the one that says of course not, we're always safe. what are you -- in the case of the sfmta contract with shimmick, they answered no, we don't have any violations. did you actually checkup on the

records? >> so when contractors submit the documents, they are submitting under penalty of perjury. that all the information provided are factual. so in the evaluation criteria, if i may, so one of the questions, which is question 19, the question reads, in the past ten years has the potential bidder or its venture partnership, has any members of the partnership has been cited for any serious or willful safety violation by cal-osha?

the question is for serious and willful, and the answer is no. so we did do a check afterwards, and we confirmed that they do not, perosha website, for all closed cases involving shimmick, they do not have serious and willful violation perosha website. >> supervisor yee: okay. thank you. can i bring up mr. king. >> supervisor peskin: can i just follow up on one question? >> supervisor yee: oh, sure. >> supervisor peskin: if i can just follow up on the question that supervisor yee was asking, the way the question is written, i think, is problematical insofar as it can take years to close out a case, and there are appeal procedures where you could have a serious and willful incident but if the company in

this case, shimmick, is appealing that, it's not a closed case, and those can last fore years. so the real question is, i understand you're not guilty until you've been convicted, but still, as you're trying to asset safety issues, it would be much more helpful to say list any and all incidents, and are they being investigated or appealed so that you have that level of information because they're telling you the truth. it is not a closed case because it's ae on appeal because someb else died. but if you could elicit that information, you'd be better off. it should be uniform across all department. i'm not just picking on the m.t.a., this should be uniform across all of the documents. >> i appreciate what you just

say to show that the level of difficulty on evaluating open cases. we did have a lengthy discussion within our division and also with the help of city attorney to go through the different criteria on how we evaluate and how to evaluate osha citation on-line, as well. it is very challenging and difficult to review open cases and -- because a lot of times, we don't have enough information, and contractor will be -- will not be willing to provide that information because it's -- it could be on litigation at the moment if it is an open case. what we had adopted in our proposed process is that we require the contractor to submit an annual cal-osha form 300-a. what the form