[roll call] >> just as a house keeping matter, unfortunately, i will have to leave today at 3:45 due to a conflicting appointment that i have at -- later in the afternoon, but i will turn the gavel over to my esteemed colleague, vice chair kopp, and he will chair the remaining meeting. with that, i'll go to item 2,

public comment on matters appearing or not appearing on the agenda. >> is it on? my name is louanne bassen, and i am a first time candidate. i'm running for supervisor in district four. so i've been dealing with the thick commissithe ethics commission and the fair commission since earlier this year. during this time, i have been very grateful for the front office staff at the ethics commission, particularly johnny hosey. he has been invaluable in helping me with all of my questions, and believe me, i have had so many questions. and the way i would contact johnny generally was via e-mail

because it gave me a way to track a question, and i would often send a question very late at night or early in the morning. and like i said, i was gratifying that johnny was steering me in my direction, so i really want to commend johnny and any other front office staff that i dealt with over the last few months. so i'm here today because i was just dismayed to see item five on your agenda, which purports to stream line, and make more transparent the process to issue informal advice, and i'm going to speak to only informal advice because i haven't requested any formal advice. so the proposal includes

providing incredible amounts of information just to get a simple answer, and i think that item five is really, really not well thought out and is not going to be helpful to first-time candidates like me. in fact, it really appears to be designed to hinder, interfere, and be extremely burdensome on a candidate, whether first time or otherwise, but particularly for a first time, with no prior experience. is that my three minutes? >> no. >> no? okay. thank you. for example, if i were to e-mail johnny under this new regulation, i would have to provide johnny with my name, my e-mail name, my e-mail address,

my home address, etc., etc., and it just goes on with all the facts. when i e-mail johnny, and i ask him, johnny, what's the deadline for electronic filing, is it midnight or is it 5:00 p.m., i don't need to put all that extra information in. and for those of you who don't know, i'll just say again, my name is louanne bassen, and i just want a writ of mandate from the superior court against the ethics commission and your executive director. so please take my comments under serious consideration, and remember there are going to be other first time candidates, and they need the help of people like johnny. they don't need to be burdened with regulations, which is what item five is. thank you. >> chair chiu: thank you. any other public comment? >> item number three, the draft

minutes from the sept 13, 2018 regular meeting. >> vice chair kopp: move approval. >> second. >> all in favor? [voting] >> opposed? the motion carries unanimously to approve the minutes. thank you. any public comment on the minutes? no public comment. >> chair chiu: agenda item number four, possible comment and action on items and review, possible recommendations. >> good afternoon, commissioners. i'm pat ford, senior policy analyst. the report that you see before you, attached as agenda item number four represents staff's efforts over the past four months to perform a comprehensive review of the public financing program, and

for those who are not familiar with this program, this is the city's program to provide public funds to candidates who are running for mayor or board of supervisors in san francisco if they demonstrate that they've met the program eligibility requirements and once they've qualified, they become eligible to receive funds pursuant to a particular funding formula. back in june, i presented to you for about an hour, talking about how this program works, and since then, i've been engaged with many stiff stakeholders, including candidates, treasurers, interested persons, staff in other jurisdictions that administer public financing programs, experts on public financing at nationally recognized nonprofit organizations, and lots of different folks who've wanted to provide comment. so this report is essentially a

summary of what i heard and what i found by talking to these people, and it lists things that could be made to improve. what i'm recommending to you in this report is that you approach it in two tiers. tier one being what i would call changes to the current system, and you can see that in section two. keeping the current system of public financing, what could you do to fairly quickly make it easier for candidates to qualify under the current requirement. when i say "easier," i mean making it more stream lined for them to prove that they've qualified. that would include a number of ad trayvon changes on our end, which i don't detail too much in here, but i'm glad to talk to you about that. also clarify some regulations,

make it clear to candidates, how they demonstrate eligibility to our offices. section three then gives you kind of some broad strokes about what would a more indepth and more actually changing the program look like? so if you were to determine that you wanted to actually start to look at changing of rules of who can qualify to be in the program, and what could they get, what kind of financing could they get once they qualify? section three gives you an idea of what i heard from interested persons about how that could be done, changing the thresholds, the matching ratios, things like that. the reason i decided to structure it in two tiers like

this, there are certain changes that i think you can make fairly quickly. i think the changes that i'm recommending in section two gener generally are straightforward. i sent surveys to find out what people's experiences had been and i tried to tailor this program to what their concerns were, keeping the same level scrutiny to make sure we're only awarding funds when warrants. but making it easier, because we don't want to dissuade people from running, and this is designed to let people be a part of the program. i think it's best if i turn it

over to chair chiu and ask if the commission has any questions. >> chair chiu: -- [inaudible] >> great. so for context, back in june, the commission approved a policy prioritization plan, which is the format that i recommended you use to reassess on a quarterly basis how you want to devote policies resources. right now there's one of me. hopefully, very soon, there will be two in our division, but what policy priorities does the commission want the policy division to focus on? in june, you decided the top three priorities would be in

order, this project, reviewing and providing recommendations to potentially reform public financing system. number two, looking at the campaign finance reform ordinance regulations, bringing those into alignment with changes in cfro, making other changes that would clarify and correct some mistakes that actually exist in regulation, etc. and then, number three researching and essentially providing recommendations about on-line political communications, where committees or other individuals are paying money to promote political messages through social media or e-mail or other on-line forms of communication. so those are the top three. this represents that first project, the public financing project. this is the first deliverable on that project, so basically, showing what went on during the summer, so what was the process of review? we had two interested persons meetings. one on july 31 and one on august

1 that were held at 25 vanness where our offices are. we had a good turn out, i would say 25 on each one, candidates, treasurers, and i include some of them feedback here. and as i previously mentioned, there were questionnaires that i sent out through e-mail. i got calls, people wanted to talk about this. i also reached out to lots of different agencies, especially talked in depth with folks in los angeles, seattle, and new york. they have programs that are well established, well administered. they appear to be highly effective, high rates of participation. so i talked to folks there about how they prove issues, having proof of residency, basically, what is the format for candidates to electronically

submit their qualifying requests, and just generally what are their practices, just more on the administrative sides to see if we could find more efficiencies that they've discovered. so this is a way to try to encapsulate by all of that. i tried to fold them all together under these different topics, under the recommendation. so under each recommendation, i list basically what the finding is, something that i discovered through this process, so i -- maybe i'll look at one in particular just to show you an example. so -- find one here, shorter here. so if you look at page nine, agenda item four, it's an example here, individual expenditure ceiling, i give an explanation here about what it is. this is just kind of an overview, brief introduction about what is the independent

expenditure ceiling, then i give some findings, so a combination of data analysis, looking at the data that we generate and look at on open sf, so i analyze some of the data about individual expenditure ceilings, give some of the feedback that i heard from candidates and treasurers about it, and then i give some findings, based on what i discovered by reviewing the data, talking to people that had experiences with the program, what are my recommendations about how you could change the individual expenditure ceiling in order to address these issues? that's the general format of this, and i think that gives a little intro how we reach this point. so moving forward, i have these recommendations here, so i do think that this is the proper course, at this time, to adopt these recommendations, obviously, subject to your discussion, and then to skip

ahead a little bit, but when we get to item seven, which is the policy generalization plan, i am recommending that you maintain public financing -- this public financing review as the number one policy priority. the reason is i'm hoping that you will, in fact, adopt these recommendations, and then keeping the public financing review will allow me to do the work necessary to implement these. so a lot of these are regulations, we'll need to draft them. we'll need to work with the city attorney's office to draft them. we probably need to have public meetings, you're familiar with the process. likewise with ordinance, i am recommending some limits legislative changes. those similar process would need to be directed on that front. >> chair chiu: so on that process point, so your changes include regulatory changes as well as legislative.

regulatory ones, we would be hosting an interested persons meetings to get feedback from the public, as well, but it would -- what is the process to get those approved and what would be a timeline, and the differences between that and the legislative recommendations from a -- a gating and approval standpoint. >> right. so actually, page 17 plays them out, which regulatory changes i've recommended and which legislative changes i've recommended so you can see the different sets. to your question, chair chiu, the general process with regulations, the commission adopts them, and then, they go to the board of supervisors not for approval, but potentially the board of supervisors can object to them. they have 60 days to do so. if they take no action after 60 days then the regulations are basically final at that point. so that's the process with regulations. so if you were to approve, let's

just say, at your next meeting, a set of draft regulations, finally approve that from the commission, we would transmit that to the board of supervisors. board of supervisors has 60 days. if nothing happens at the end of the 60 days, they're done. with ordinance language, it's different. the commission by itself does not have the power to change cfro. the commission is needed to change cfro, once you have approved by a fourth fifths majority ordinance language then there's two possible routes. one is it goes to the board of supervisors, and as the legislative body, they would need to vote that up by an 8/11ths majority. that body would have to recommend to the full board that they passed this legislative

package -- i don't know if the last ordinance that we sent in is a good indication of how long it took. it took a long while to go through that process, and it took many months to have legislation finally become operative. i would guess this one would go faster just because it's so much more limited in scope, but because we're working with the board of supervisors, it's hard to say. it could take a while. obviously would take longer than with regulations. >> chair chiu: the alternate tiff wou tive would be to put it on the ballot, but the next vote isn't until -- to be able to put it on the ballot is november 2019. >> 2019. you're looking at probably early

2020 for those changes to become operative to the ballot route. >> chair chiu: so thank you, pat. i just wanted to thank you, one, for this yeoman's work out of your staff of, you know, you, putting this together and engaging in it the stakeholder reach out and soliciting feedback from multiple parties across. i think that's really helpful to your analysis and gives me confidence that it's not just what the ethics commission staff thinks, but it's also incorporating the views and the input from those who are most immediately affected by the regulations and the experience that they have in the process, so i think that's really valuable, and i look forward to hearing from the public and continuing dialogue with them. and so with that, i would invite my fellow commissioners to ask some questions.

my own initial sense is i would be in support of adopting the recommendations that you put forward here, but i do want to give the full commission to opportunity to ask you questions and also to hear from the public. >> commissioner renne: educate me a little bit. the idea of this public financing was to sort of take money out of politics, right? so that there would be a limit -- a candidate were to limit the amount he or she would spend in their campaign. is that right? >> originally, that was one of the purposes of the program to limit campaign spending, but it does seem odd at first blush to limit spending by giving candidates more money. i would push back and say in

today's age, the purpose is to limit overall spending. this program was created in year 2000, and since then, expenditures have become a much bigger factor even in local elections. candidates often have a hard time getting arthur message out when you have a large volume of independent expenditures, so this program doesn't exist to try and level the playing field, that's not the on point, but it does exist to give candidates the ability to run an effective campaign. it seeks to identify candidates who have a certain level of grassroots support in the community. they have to demonstrate that they've received a certain amount of qualifying contributions by san francisco residents. then and provides them with what the framers of the program has determined to be the level of monetary support to run a

competitive campaign. >> commissioner renne: what i don't understand is in order to get public finance, a candidate has to say that he or she is prepared to keep his expenses within a certain limit, is that right? >> yes, candidates have to agree to the -- >> commissioner renne: so as i read what i see is a candidate who's got a lot of money just keeps rising, raising the amount of ceiling. in other words, it's meaningless, isn't it? if you're a leading candidate, and you're raising a lot of money, you can raise your expenditures, and that raises the other people's level of expenditures. >> correct. >> commissioner renne: there's no -- there's no limit that says if you're -- there's no boundary

so that the candidate who says i want public finances has to live with it. is that right? >> yeah, i would agree with the core of that statement, yes. and the reason is that under the current program, the individual expenditure ceilings of publicly financed candidates is movable. program has a mechanism by which staff must adjust upward the i.e.c.'s, the individual expenditure ceilings of publicly financed candidates, and we have to do that based on a formula that i discuss in here that takes into account fund raising by an opponent, independent expenditures in favor of that opponent, and independent expenditures in opposition to the candidate in question. and you're absolutely correct that the experience with this feature of the program has been that i.e.c.'s oftentimes get raised astronomically.

i included a graph on item four that showed the recent race, the mayoral race this summer, and you can see the i.e.c.'s of the three publicly financed mayoral candidates. and in the paragraph before that graph, i talk about home those i.e.c.'s of the candidates were raised. they were raised for one candidate to 147% of the initial i.e.c., for another candidate, 229%, and for a third candidate, 242%, so it more than doubled. and what's even more telling, i believe, is that if you look at the bottom of this page, of page ten, those three candidates were able to spend, each of them, above 98% of their funds, meaning that this restriction on candidate spending did not work. it did not restrict their spending. they were able to spend essentially all of the money that they raised because the limit kept going up.

>> chair chiu: so pat, you had previously mentioned seattle and new york and l.a. what is their experience in terms of having independent expenditure ceiling. are there candidates also blowing through all of them and spending 99, 98-plus percent of the funds that they have raised? >> i would say by and large in other jurisdictions, yes. the answer is yes, but the other jurisdictions use a different model. they use the model that i recommend we adopt, which is instead of incrementally raising the i.e.c.'s of the candidates, when it comes time for the race to happen, that the i.e.c. for the candidate be permanently lifted. you can see what the effect is. the current effect is no different. the candidate -- as soon as they get one race, they're going to get a lot of raises. they're going to spend all of their money, any way. the other jurisdictions find this to be the case.

candidates i.e., c's are going to be lifted. you could -- you could ask whether or not perhaps the i.e.c.'s are too low. maybe they're not being adjusted with inflation. perhaps they should be set higher so they don't get broken. that could be a separate reform, is to change the i.e.c. levels, but the method, i think should be changed independently, because if candidates are going to spend all their money, any way, there's no point in dragging them through the minutiae of this program. for those of you that follow the press releases that come out of

our office, you know that we do this almost every day, we adjust the i.e.c.'s of the candidates every day as we approach the election. i think it's really do you objecteous what the value is to keeping spending down when we adjust it. i think it would be much more efficient for the candidates and from an administration perspective for staff to use what is definitely the more universal model, which is to lift the i.e.c. one time, one and done. >> vice chair kopp: what press releases? >> so our office releases a press release -- >> vice chair kopp: you mean, the ones we get from the director? >> chair chiu: yes. >> i think that's right. i think they probably come from under

under lee ann. >> commissioner renne: in these other jurisdictions, what's the penalty for exceeding the limit? >> i'm not sure. >> commissioner renne: they've agreed to take public financing, and they take public financing, you have to -- what do you do with the money in excess? >> what do they do with the -- i'm sorry? >> commissioner renne: in other words, the expenditures, once they bust the ceiling on expenditures that they promise to abide by, what's the implication or what happens? >> typically, it's a nonparticipating candidate or participants of third party committees that blows up the expenditure caps. usually it's not a publicly financed candidate spending in excess of their limit. what i mean to say it's not the case that violations are causing

the expenditure ceilings to be lifted. it's activity. it's not the case that there's rampant i.e.c. violations in these other jurisdictions to my knowledge. >> commissioner renne: in other words, you're saying where the excess is umm canning is from independent expenditure committees or third party committees. >> correct or from a candidate who's not participating in the program. you could have a candidate who is not participating and is spending very high levels. that would also then razor permanently lift the i.e.c.'s of the participating candidates. >> vice chair kopp: promoting ineligibility in the future, which is what supervisor safai advocates, and that's discussed later in your report.

>> chair chiu: commissioner lee? >> commissioner lee: thank you, madam chair. i just have a follow up question. for the jurisdictions who have removed the caps, have they seen the i.e.c.'s increase or have they stablized? you mentioned several jurisdictions, new york, l-.a., and seattle. >> no. they have a system where once it's broken, it's just permanently lifted in that race, but they still start with a limit. >> commissioner lee: right. so after they lifted that cap later on, have they seen the i.e.c.'s stablize or have they seen that spike up? >> do you mean after they lift the limits, do they see an increase in spending, but, like,

in independent expenditures? i'm not sure because independent expenditures is not limited by the i.e.c. it in no way restricts the expenditures of third party committees, so i would not think that the presence or absence of an i.e.c. by a candidate would not affect spending by independent groups. that would be my guess. >> chair chiu: okay. pat. i have a question for you. on pages 12 and 13 of your memo, you talk about the -- the using candidate expenditures to calculate total supportive funds and that would help make the calculations simpler and more comprehensive to candidates, and then, on the very top -- first full paragraph of page 13, you talk about the primary drawback and that a candidate could have

a large sum held in reserve but hasn't spent those sums yet, but then, will have that war chest for the last few weeks before election day. do we have any data about when candidates spend money just so we can see the curve of distribution? do they spend 80% of it before the last two weeks or do they spend, you know, 20 -- 80% of it in the last week before the election, just to give us a sense of what impact would that have if the ceilings are lifted, for example, and then there's a candidate, from a strategic standpoint, 20%, and then unleashed this barrage at the very end and could dominate the air waves and slate mailers? what kind of impact could that give if we made the change? >> do we have the raw data?

yes. i have not performed an analysis of this data to the level of providing the kind of information that you're talking about. i definitely could. that is something we could figure out, we could make a graph similar to what you see on page ten just showing expenditures, and that might give you an idea of where candidates do the bulk of their spending. it could also give you an idea of what kind of lag could potentially be caused in the i.e.c. raising. i would have to say, if i had to guess, it's not tremendous, the potential lag. i would guess that candidates would make the expenditures, and we would see it on their threshold reports, where they're discussing in increments of 10,000 for supervisorial candidates, and 50 for mayoral. we'd still see it, but we'd have

to see the activity and adjust it, so there would be a 24 to 48 hour lag. i would guess if we were to plat candidate expenditures, we would not see any more than 10%. i would guess that probably the most they could cram into 24 or 48 hours would be ten to 20%. candidates usually tend to spread it out a little more. >> chair chiu: if that is present at a higher level, it would be a change that we would do, and that that -- just understanding the flow of money over time before the election date i think would be helpful to understand what impact if any a change in the regulation might have, especially, for example in a mayoral race when we're

talking between the candidates over $2 million each. >> yeah. i'd be glad to provide that. >> chair chiu: thank you. commissioner kopp? >> vice chair kopp: okay. there's a lot of time and effort in this report, all of which leads mr. marstellar to reinforce my 40-year notion that public financing is unfair to taxpayers and doesn't do what it was cracked up to do, namely, limit the amount of spending in the face of a u.s. supreme court case which in 1974 held that a spending limit in a political campaign is unconstitutional, is

violative of the first amendment. and as i may have observed at a prior meeting last year, dan walders, the columnist who knows more about politics in the cities, counties, and state of california than any other human being observed that no study has ever shown that public financing reduces campaign spending. i have a question, first, of a fact, which is what do we spend on public financing in an average election year? how many millions? >> i don't have that figure offhand. >> miss pelham probably has it. i know.

>> well, there's a cap. the fund is capped at 7.5 million. >> vice chair kopp: what do we have in our account for public financing. >> the fund was established by public voters. it's a fund of $2.75 perresident in the city, and each year, if the cap is not -- if the total amount of the fund is not at that $7 million maximum, the city is required, through the general fund, to put in funds to bring it up to that level. >> vice chair kopp: and what is it now? >> on january 2, it was $7.034 million. >> vice chair kopp: yeah. $7 million plus dollars to get nothing but make campaign managers a little bit wealthier

than they are. and only charter cities in california are allows to do this because we stopped the unconstitutional action of the governor and legislature two years ago to let general law cities do it. a all right. i'm prepared to accept most of these recommendations. i mean, it's a red tape system by nature, and anything which reduces the red tape should be enacted. can we do so at this meeting? >> no, i cannot finally approve these because we don't have language. what i'm asking is that you approve the concepts and allow me the time to prepare the language with the city attorney. >> vice chair kopp: all right. well, i would like you to

prepare the regulations and the ordinance amendments, which are required to implement your recommendations with maybe a couple of exceptions. commissioner chiu referred to page 13. i want to discuss that. the going to this expenditure method, do you have any information on whether that was resulted in any other jurisdictions would spend taxpayer funds on political campaigns as to the delaying of an expenditure so you can catch an opponent unaware in the last

week or ten days of a campaign. >> i'm not aware of any specific instances of that happening. i could definitely reach out to colleagues in those jurisdictions and ask them if they are. >> vice chair kopp: i think you should do that because again, i'm willing to accept your recommendation of changing to an expenditure method, and of course, human nature would dictate that candidate a would wait until the last four, five, or ten days to spend. then, there's a discussion on page 15 of mr. safai's

recommendation based on violations, which is a pretty good form of penalty. have you had any communication in the last week or so after you formulated and reduced this to print with his office? >> yes. >> vice chair kopp: okay. anybody from his office here? no. okay. >> i spoke with kathrin meyer from his office, and she said she could not attend, and she said they're interested in -- >> vice chair kopp: well, i know she's interested because her office provided comments. we're on our own, in terms of whether it should be for five years, whether it should apply to offices other than public elected offices of the city and county of san francisco and

other subjects like that. >> i don't want to speak for her, but i do believe she plans to review these and provide answers. >> vice chair kopp: well, she better do it because otherwise, i've got to make a decision, so do my colleagues, based upon what you have provided, and it's a clear description of what is at stake, and what should be done. and if it isn't already clear, i want you to know that i think ineligibility is an appropriate penalty, and five years seems to be the norm, and five years would satisfy me rather than lifetime ineligibility.

there's one other question i ha have. on page seven, under that regulation change, which is discussed, what do you mean in the next-to-last paragraph, last line, staff would at least review the substance of the request? amplify that, if you would, mr. ford. >> right. so this is speaking to a current practice of when a candidate has submitted a qualifying request but has not yet submitted a statement of participation, indicating that the candidate

wants to participate in the public financing program. it has been staff's practice to review the substance of that qualifying request, meaning to review the list of contributions that the candidate provides, and to determine whether or not the candidate has provided 10,000 or 50,000, depending on which office they're running for, of qualified contribution. staff has reviewed that under those circumstances, but even if they iend that the threshold has been met has not recommended to the director that she approve it because the candidate has not turned in the statement of participation. i'm recommend this had practice be discontinued. why? because i think that has given the candidate -- at least one candidate that the false impression that that was outstanding. and that candidate later was ineligible for participation in the program because she had not turned in the statement of participation even though her qualifying request under this practice had been reviewed. >> vice chair kopp: all right.

so this practice of evaluating the substance of the request would end. that's -- it sounds like a beneficial change. okay. thank you, madam chair. >> chair chiu: any other -- commissioner ambrose? >> commissioner ambrose: thank you. one quick question, going back to public financing and the criteria that -- for satisfying the documentation for residency, you reference an address verification system. that's a new acronym for me. can you tell me what that is? >> so the address verification system, a-v-s for short, is an electronic system that credit card companies use to run a really quick fraud detection check.

basically what they do -- so think of when you use your credit card on-line. you enter your name, and you enter your billing address, and then, you type in your credit card information, and you click submit. what this system does is it checks the address that you just provided on that website where you're making a purchase against the address that you provided to your bank for that credit card or debit card, and it confirms that they match. it's intended to detect situations where someone has taken your card, your address isn't printed on your card, so in theory, they don't know your address, and they're trying to fraudulently use your card without knowing your address. this system is supposed to flag it and deny the charge. that's the purpose of the a.v.s. system. the way we use the a.v.s. system is when a client goes onto, say, act blue, goes on the candidate's page, types in their name, their billing address, and their credit card number. if that billing address is a san

francisco residence, and the a.v.s. indicates that yes, in fact, that is the address that the person gave their bank for the credit card, our office will consider that to be proof of residency in the city. so in other words, if i go in, and i type in 123 geary, and then, i make a contribution, and then, let's say i'm an ethics commission auditor, i look at it, i see pat ford, 123 geary, this a.v.s. will have a yes next to it, which means the system has checked and that is the address that the contributor has listed, 123 geary. i check that on property records, i see that is a san francisco residence, that person is a resident for purposes of the program. >> commissioner ambrose: and this information comes to you from a.v.s. or act blue or where do you get the report that shows that's good night run through that system? >> it's contained in the credit card vendor report, so this is something that committees,

candidates have to submit to their office when they are trying to demonstrate eligibility for the program. they have to show two things with each contribution, roughly. they have to show that a, the contribution was made. so they have to go -- the instrument, be it a check or a vendor report from a credit card processing company showing that the credit card was run, and b, they have to show residency. we see these vendor reports a lot where they're showing they show a vendor contribution by showing a vendor report that the credit card company sends to us. the candidate tells that to act blue, send a credit report from this day showing all of our contributions. that a.v.s. information is included on that vendor report, so that's part of why we accept it because it has that indicator of authenticity because it comes from the company. >> commissioner ambrose: okay. great. thank you for my education.

i'm not sure everybody else didn't already know that. and then, the other thing that i want to talk about is your recommendation for -- on appeals, and i understand why you want to add a standard of review that's more clearly articulated that would guide the commission in carrying out the charter requirement that we provide an appeal hearing. i'm not certain, though, that that is the appropriate standard of review. i had, very early in my career, the privilege of representing the planning commission, and a lot of times, there are important public interests in what that commission would do, and people would have the opportunity to go to court and file a petition for a writ to

have the decision of the commission reviewed. and it was very important to have the appeal hearing at the board of permit appeals to further flush out the disagreement if it was that contentious or confusing or ambiguous an issue. and i recognize that for legislation, an arbitrary and capricious level would be better, but i think if we have an appeal or don't have an appeal, somebody still has the right to go to court and seek judicial review. i would like the commission standard of review to be the same as the court standard of review. and i would also like to give the public the opportunity to come forward and say not just

that someone was arbitrary and capricious, but they made a mistake on the part of the staff, and let's fix it and move on. i want you to check that before you bring back the regulations. and i also think we need to talk about not filing appeals when somebody has not filed in light of the decision that came down last week. again, if we can correct something at the administrative level and save the city from a legal action and save the courts from hearing things that we could resolve here at the commission, as long as -- you know, i'm willing to provide that -- that if we can move things through more quickly and give people more opportunity to participate at the local

government level before we get to court, so i'd like to look at that, as well. those are my comments. thank you. >> chair chiu: thank you. any other comments? okay. call for public comment. >> hi. my name is louanne bassen again. mr. ford, i found your presentation extremely interesting. i only wish that i had been invited to participate in the meetings because i would have had a lot to say about the process. i will just give you a few examples, but first, i want to remind the ethics commission, not the commissioners sitting up there, but the lower level ethics commission, that they are public servants, here to help the public, and that includes every citizen of san francisco. and in regard to that, i would

like to remind them that under the campaign and governmental conduct code, section 1.100, their purpose is to enable candidates, and especially first-time candidates like me, to help me to run a campaign against an incumbent. now, district four doesn't technically have an incumbent, but jessica ho might as well be because high school he katey tang's current legislative assistant, and she's katey tang's shadow, and she's functioning as an incumbent, and there are seven other challengers in that race, including me. and i was really looking forward to having the assistance of the

ethics commission in my campaign, and as i indicated earlier, front office staff, especially johnny hosey, was very helpful to me. unfortunately i cannot say that about his boss. so i want to remind the ethics commission that they need to follow their policies to ensure that all individuals and interest groups have a fair opportunity to participate in the elective and governmental processes, to reduce the advantage of incumbents, and to encourage competition in elective office, and that means me. now, i will turn to some of the things that i experienced with the ethics commission. i was challenged because i entered accounting as occupation. i was told that was not right,

it had to be accountant. well, accountant is a person, and the ethics commission's own form says type of job. i was made to change it. what nit-picking i example, a dd of mine contributes $500, very generous. he works for the department of veterans affairs. have you heard of it? they have a big office on clements street. i was told that the department of the veteran's affairs was not recognized as an employer. i had to go on their webpage and copy a long-term. everybody's heard of the department of the veteran's affairs, but the ethics commission refused to

acknowledge it. these are examples what i had to go through. this is what resulted in me filing a writ. mr. ford, you have a standard of arbitrary and capricious proposed. let me tell you, it was easy to prove what i had to to the judge, becausely because of your executive director. he granted my case, and he directed your director, miss pelham, and to make a final determination, because she refused to make a final determination, she denied me the right to file an actual court case and appeal in spreerkt by giving me only a courtesy notice and clearly stating this is not a final determination. she tried to tie my hands so i had only one recourse, and that was to go directly to superior court and the appellate court and file a writ of mandate,

which the judge granted. and my documents were reviewed seven weeks later. this has prejudiced my campaign. i expect my check for $10,000 by today, miss pelham. i have waited long enough for my campaign financing. >> vice chair kopp: wait a moment. >> chair chiu: you've exceeded your public comment time. >> vice chair kopp: you've exceeded your public comment time, and i'm moving an additional three minutes for you. >> thank you. i sincerely appreciate that, judge kopp. i agree with you, judge kopp, on your comments. it is approximain my mind, a ve compelled speech. i don't want my tax money being given to frankly, my opponents, my tax money is being used by my

opponents in this race to fight me. i don't want to support these candidates. if i do, i will write a check and make a contribution, but this is violating my taxpayer's rights. and i think personally, the whole system should be abolished. and whether i become supervisor or not, i just might make this the life mission for the rest of my life because i have been so wronged by this entire system. now, let me move onto miss ambrose's question about a.v.s., fascinating subject. absolutely arcane, address verification system. in all innocence, my friend made me a website, and she decided to use paypal to accept the monetary contributions electronically. on august 29, i had a meeting

with an auditor named manisha, who told me, i have never heard of a candidate using paypal. i was floored, what do you mean? paypal? everybody uses paypal. he said we won't accept it. well, guess what? the state fair political practices commission does, so why is that? why doesn't san francisco accept it? we had a half-hour conversation on the phone with somebody from paypal, and he told us that they do contact the banks when somebody makes a credit card purchase. he said the banks don't care about the address. sometimes they acknowledge the -- the verification's correct, and sometimes they don't, he says because the bottom line is all they want is their money. manisha told me, well, we can't be certain that somebody wasn't holding a gun to their head and making them type in their credit

card information. i said, are you crazy? how -- maybe somebody was holding a gun to someone writing a check. this is crazy. so my final comment is my experience dealing with the ethics commission and what miss pelham did to me personally gives a new meaning to koska-esque. i'm looking forward to working with you on these issues. commissioner renne, i know you have some commenting pending, and i've documented everything that's happened to me. most of it's been included in the responses to the writs. thank you. >> chair chiu: thank you. >> good afternoon, commissioners. i see a few