we already have the slope protection act and we require further reveal and detail resign -- design review as required. >> and the industry as a whole, how are they responding to these extra measures that we are taking, particularly in tall buildings? for example, is a lot of projects -- are they going to bed rock or are they taking a look at different -- what is it doing to the industry? have we had many projects lately that falls under these new criteria even though they are not necessarily implemented yet, legally? >> actually, we are still implementing the old one. that was already updated two years ago by a minor change with a peer review.

>> we were paid by the director of the city. we have more control of the third-party review. >> ok. all right. >> and when we are further -- to geotech engineers require a new tall building -- >> president mccarthy: right. >> we encourage people to drive the pile all the way to the bed rock. >> it is important if they choose not to, this is the procedure that is in place. >> yes. >> this is already the procedure in place. we have information sheet in the interim before this is effective >> ok. good. >> with those extra geotechnical requirements and they're already we are already enforcing most of it this will make it more formal

and more pressure on the developer to design for better buildings. >> ok. director? >> good morning. i am the director director of department building inspections. your questions asked about how we compare to other cities, of course, in california, l.a. and asked, in parallel, i had a meeting with the california building official. every monday we have a phone conversation and a conference call with experts. and also we are closely in contact -- regarding the developers that looked at this, they wanted us to come with this kind -- everybody looks at the same thing.

they look at the information seat without this approval, yet. we asked them to anchor all the way to the bed rock. you asked how many buildings we do. before salesforce, only one or two buildings go all the way to the bed rock. the fillmore goes down. we have better criteria regarding the geotechnical expertise in the panel. and also we ask people to get the settlement. the ten year settlement after the c.f.c. the developer is welcome to do that because they want to see what kind of settlement to prove the building is good. they say they are down to the bed rock. that is what they want to say to

make their building more safe. the public wants us to do these kind of things. and then to answer your question , we learned from l.a. and l.a. learned from us, we are all in parallel. i think we are going better now with the code and then we improve on it. >> all right. thank you. i appreciate all your hard work on this. >> i know director, when we have these conversations in the past, looking out to other cities as the last question referenced, has always been a key interest that i have held and i know we had some issues of going internationally on the pacific rim to cities like take it -- tokyo. yet we have, beyond l.a., other west coast cities like seattle that are in a tall building boom

as well. we had significant outreach to seattle and portland where their building boom with tall buildings is progressing. >> also, i want to mention, i also remember the icc for the major jurisdiction for all the subcommittees. we are not only working locally in california but we are also working nationwide. i don't have the privilege to go to japan or new zealand. if you can send me, i can go there to learn. [laughter] >> we are all signing up right now. >> may be we can see the manufacturing and those sights. we have questions and we want to learn how they do it. we are always comes -- constantly learning. we also are joining with other jurisdictions nationwide to make sure we are not all blind.

>> ok. >> one other question, are you satisfied that the post- construction issues of monitoring are being adequately addressed in the current documents? where a building's performance over time doesn't always meet expectations? are protocols for monitoring post- construction, beyond just the complaint driven processes that we currently had had? sorry, commissioner.

we are talking about, overall, about the housing. we will monitor it. we are concentrating on the 240 feet of the high-rises. that is why we want to have the continued monitoring for settlement for ten years. why ten years? because all these condominiums and all those buildings -- also we have department monitoring watching the safety annually and also our inspector will be sent there to inspect. of course, we will be going on a complaint driven staff every time. it is difficult. but we are having a five-year

program to make sure they have the inspector for the safety part. >> a final question, most of what i read is really directing itself, especially to the places where, you know, this structural soil issues are of great concern the landfill areas. when you look at the map of where we have most of our high-rises, they are really concentrated in unstable land. but we also have some very major construction plans in areas that are not unstable lands like the hub. can you speak briefly to the extent to which we are geared up to deal with those, as well? >> the soil interaction is not

-- for the soil, that is a special soil, like we mentioned. if it is not anchored all the way to the bed rock then we will have two geotechnical experts look at it. if we are not satisfied we can ask another party to look at it too. that is why we want to pay more attention on the geotechnical part and then we want to improve on that. >> i understand the profound concerns where we are building on unstable soil. i guess what i am asking about his areas like the hub that are not known unstable soil. are you comfortable that we have enough oversight in the building of 400-600-foot towers in those

areas? >> i feel this is a common one. it is not really our city. you go to new york or other places with similar situations. we have enough a geotechnical review to make sure the soil is ok and all the way to the bed rock or not all the way to the bed rock. i think we feel comfortable with those. >> thank you for your presentation here. >> is there any public comment on item six? seeing none, item seven is update on s.f. permit and project tracking systems.

>> good morning commissioners. i am the project manager overseeing this project. i just have some guests who are present if you have some questions. we've got some people present in case you have any questions. so i have a brief update, like i normally present every month. if you are interested, we also have a couple of very brief demonstration videos as to how the application works and looks today. if you are interested when i'm done with the presentation, i will ask if you want to see what that might look like. so status, what we have done over the course of the last month as we have completed and

to end demonstration sessions. in these sessions, we have had the vendor show us all the key processes that look like i'm permitting to complaints, to records management functions. to code enforcement and housing. we have had two weeks of it many hours a day, often two rooms going on in parallel of observing exactly how the application is working and how it behaves today. they were completed and those have been very successful and very positive. i briefly mentioned this last month but we did engage the vendor to dramatically increase the amount of training before going live. training is very important. our contract initially only had 15 days and now we are looking at that and what we are going through as we think we will need more training. we increase those 15 days to 36 days and we are working to work

on exactly which course and when and what days does take place. that was a pretty dramatic boost in the amount of training prior to going live. lots and lots and lots of statistics on this project. since our last report, well over 200 issues and that's very positive. and i closed out we mean the vendor fixed them and people in d.b.i. have gone back in and retested them and have confirmed that they can be closed out. a full life cycle that we have closed a lot. there is another close to 300 items available to retest and we are working on testing those as we get them. and we will also expect the bulk of those to be close once we enter a formal user acceptance test. because that is where we are at and that is what has gone on over the last few weeks what is

going on is a lot of testing. lots of resolution and retesting we reported, over the last couple of months a lot of attention on fees and we are still validating fees and they are much better off than they were a few weeks ago. the ongoing process working end to end that i talked about is ongoing. and of course, there is also a lot of attention being paid to reports. we had issues with those earlier that cycle is almost completed as well. that is a set of activities we have undergone. so what is coming up? we have gotten passed to the end to end session. that next big activity is the user acceptance test. we worked with the vendor and worked on a series of criteria as to how many of the effects must be available to retest

prior to starting you a tea. we are close. we are back to get there over the course of the next week and a half and that is our goal. if we meet the goals we will start testing. if the application is not ready to test, we will start testing. that is consistent with the approach we have been talking about the last couple of months. we will not proceed until we are ready. and we are working on one milestone at a time. right now we are working on getting ready to test. so that is our approach. we are milestone focused and delivery focused. if we get there, we will start testing. dates will be shared only after we complete a very healthy set of user acceptance tests. it is very important that testing goes home -- goes well before we start sharing dates.

the biggies are closing out the defects and working on the next couple of rounds of user acceptance tests. we have at least two on the books. and training. if all the dates are met, we will start the training. if all the goals are met, we will start the training. the big news here is on the lower right-hand corner. we believed would be able to wrap this up prior to year end and the current plans, giving the significant amount of things we had to work on and retest, it is not going to end before the end of year. that is the big nose -- big news we are supporting today. we want to assure you that progress is being made to. we working to go and work with the vendor. these issues are being locked and tackled and closed out. we are proceeding, i believe, with due diligence and making sure that what we have is usable

and the go live can be as smooth as it can be. that is the big update. we will not make end of year. i do want to assure you things are moving forward and moving forward pretty well. do you have any questions on that? >> commissioner walker, police. >> sorry. thank you sean. i also want to thank you for meeting with me and going into the very specific details we went into the other day. i. i appreciate that you reached out when we realized that -- having made you commit to the end of the year under duress, we realized that it may not happen by the end of the year. i totally understand it. there's a lot of moving parts to this. what i will say, just for the other commissioners, there are

some major obstacles are prevented even going to the process and to end. and now the team is able to go through the whole process and in that process, are locating bugs that need to be worked out. that is a positive step that they are able to go through the whole process of issuing a permit and to the fees are populating the right areas. even if there are slight bugs, the position of being able to weed out these small bugs is really a huge step forward from where we were last month. i think that since about hearing the details of the process, it is really important to not focus on dates. i know that that was the director's intention all along and the process in this really

important project is actually moving forward. thank you for keeping us up to speed on this, for sure. i don't know if you all have any questions for them, but i feel really confident we are moving forward. one of the things i would like to mention, which i did the other day about the training is i know that a lot of this, it is not just about a new system, it is about a new process for us. implementing some of our reengineering of our permit process that has been talked about for a decade and one of the responsibilities that is going to each and every employee is getting the data at the depth that we have never had it before on properties and locating in a single location. that is a lot of responsibility that we are putting on our employees.

as we train, i think we need to reset the expectation around that. it will take longer. there is a lot more information that we want to put in one place it is carrying forward a commitment to transparency, not just for our own process, before the public to be able to access. having it all accumulated in one place. it is really an added part of the job for each and every employee that wasn't there before. certainly not as concentrated. so i'm confident that we will be doing that as we do the training and i really thank you for moving this forward, sean, and for the commitment from the entire department. hours and i.t. for moving this forward. >> do you want to see our videos

>> go ahead. >> i think it has been a journey for us. we appreciate the minefield you are working with. i'm not very tacky at all. i understand one thing about it. you really don't know until you know and until you push that button you can sit there and make a list and thank you have it all covered and then something else pops up. i understand the complexity of what is trying to be done here. i like the fact that you are not giving us a go live date today. i really think it's important that we understand the expectations here and we set our expectations and understand how important and how big this is of a job that it has been for you. i look forward to getting their. hopefully that is sooner than later.

i see no more comments from the commission. is the public comment on this? >> my name is jerry. the delay in the excel implementation is understandable to the vast scope of work involved. my only concern is that the implementation team has adequate resources to complete the project in the next six months. often, when a large project nears completion, problems become visible. i believe commissioner mccarthy raised this point. we need to be sure that the resources exist to address all the problems that are emerging late in the process. thank you. >> thank you for your comments.

>> it is our video. there is a video. >> i thought you were -- my apologies. >> no, do you want to keep it up >> police. >> where is the popcorn? >> bring the popcorn. the first video is a solar permit process that will start online through the public portal an and emphasis on the public portal. and the second one is a building request. starting off the public portal and wrapping up inside. we did edit these for time to try and keep them down to three minutes. we will try and follow these as best as we can. >> i want to thank you for indulging us in this. we recognize there is urgency to get this completed as well. we are quite proud of what we have done and we realize it has been a black box for you. we thought this was an excellent opportunity to show you little snaps of some of the things that

are occurring in the system and available to you. sean said we will start with -- >> both of these demos assume that the contractors are already set up and he has his account and everything and what he is doing is proceeding with the solar permit. it is not visible up on the screen. is there something we have to do this is the contractor registering and talking about where the property is in capturing property details and entering information about the solar project. each field is completed and

while it seems very simple, is driving a whole host of things behind it including assessment of fees and things like that. >> here is some of the panel details being entered. >> what is happening here is previously you had to e-mail and the documents and now you are prompted during the online process to submit your plans. >> is this searchable in a detailed description? can you search for solar projects. >> oh, yes,. >> absolutely. >> this is still the online submission portion and he is reviewing everything. here are the fees. he would go and make his payment and proceed. now we are looking at the end sides. this is the person working its. someone working the plan, back -- plan check side of the house. you see the mechanical e. review

, it is the guys who take a look at the solar panels. he would go on in and take a look at it and review the information that was submitted. and again in a very simple scenario. we call it the happy path. >> it is a quick path. >> yes, it is a quick path. >> quick approval. >> the other thing we will go through pretty quickly here is an inspection. we've gone all the way through the submittal we've gone all the way through the plan check and now we are working on scheduling an inspection and this is kind of what those screens look like behind-the-scenes in a rapid motion. >> cool. >> this is scheduling an inspection, right here.

>> this is a result of the inspection. they might do it in the fields. >> but we will have pads when -- at some point and they will able -- they will be able to do that. >> that is it. the significance here of what we have gone through throughout the last couple of weeks in the end to end sessions is that this really is the first time, in multiple years of this project where we have seen that operate in that fashion where we can do an intake. where we can capture all the attributes that are needed to. where we can issue a permit, produce apartments that make sense and is readable and includes the information that we need on the permit. we can schedule an inspection and close it out. his a bear in mind this is the first time we are seeing all of

this come together and it is literally within the last couple of weeks. it does represent a significant step forward to. lots of details. every once in a while someone tells us, and ordinance passed three years ago and we need to put something else on that report now because may be the report was started four years ago. but now we are finally getting to the point where the people within the building of d.b.i. can see things proceed in this fashion. this is the first time we have seen this. so i just wanted to relay the importance of that. the second one, very similar. this is a three are. this is a records management request. a similar thing we will start. if someone does an online request for a three r. report back and we will see some sample reporting along the way. >> this is a great example of a new efficiency in the system. this was a completely manual process.

this has all been automated within the system. >> there is a lot going on here. we couldn't automate one part and that is the people crawling over boxes of all documents. that part is not automated. again, we are assuming the contractor is already set up and he is going on through and he is identifying information like the property in question. he is identifying who the applicant is on the recipients because often they are different parties. a lot of complexity here in things that are going on here. you will see that we are working on the property information here this is where we are identifying the applicant who is asking for it and who the recipient is. this assumes the person has already put his contact

information into the system. here the user can review his submission online and hit continue. he will be prompted to go pay a fee. we are not covering all the fees in this demonstration. you would have to go pay for it. and it comes on into the system. there is a little letter of what -- up brief acknowledgement letter. now we are looking at the back office functions where people will look at it and make sure it makes sense. sometimes you find out the guy has a commercial building and he applied for a three are. there are processes we have to go through to make sure that the property is valid on the request is valid and everything is paid up properly. that is what they're doing in the back office. they are taking a peek at this. the next step on the part that darrell was talking about that is automated, the parts that can be automated ids we are wrapping up the intake and we will -- at

that point, we can review the permit history that we have existing today and to display its. that is what the three r. is all about. this is the worksheet that shows the permit history and that is what you can see. that is the worksheet that popped up. >> go ahead. >> this is where all of the research is aggregated. they can then select from these which ones they want to include on the reports but there is no photocopying. all of the records they select are associated with that records so they have a complete record of everything they have included >> that is the completed report. now what goes on behind the scenes is not necessarily

captured here. it is all the research they have to do. is this complete? was or something done where there were adjacent properties and somebody wrote at 16 b. and we are at 16 a cleat they do a ton of research to make sure the list is complete. depending on if the work was done prior to 1980 they have to go hunting through boxes and hunt down the information and to manually add that. this only shows you what is captured. >> so if they find something that isn't captured, do they add it to the database? then it becomes digitized. >> they are able to add it to the report. >> as you saw the three art reports generated, that gets -- if the applicant wanted and e-mailed it to them they can automatically e-mail it out. those documents are automatically attached to the record. >> so next time someone brings it up -- >> so if someone requests the

report, same address, people aren't starting from scratch they pull that off and they can see all the permit history that was, at the time done and they simply have to augment that going forward. it will be a real timesaver for them. it is one of those examples of something that is -- it is a good thing but it does require change management and understanding. >> exactly. >> thank you for the demonstrations. it is something we can all look forward to. i do have two questions. regarding the uploading of the plans to the system, have you tested it to see how much volume it could hold on the speed of the uploading? because plans can be very big. >> yes.

uploads do work and one thing i want to caution is we are not implementing any form of electronic plan check but basically this is replacing what they do by e-mail today. they were able to upload it. the exact thing happens today with existing infrastructure. the only difference it is through e-mail instead of up to -- uploaded. >> the occult -- the electronic plan check will come later. >> are we going to -- is the permit systems going to be handling -- do they have to respond to the same system? will they be done separately like they do now through e-mails and letters? >> it is largely done the way it is done now. everything is visible online. if we had to ask the applicant to change some plan pages, this process is what happens today. >> it will be documented and it

will not be -- >> you should be able to see that or request went out and that is what we are waiting on right now. >> since we have embarked on this whole thing, one of the most major changes has been demands on data security and backups and redundancies. i know you have addressed in the past many of the redundancies that are built into this but could you specifically speak to any modifications or changes you have seen necessary? >> the data security, this will be hosted at a site and there are processes that they must go through. there is a number of audits. there is an i.s.o. audit that they must complete and adhere to and send documentation and proof

that the audit was conducted by a third party and compliance was confirmed. and there is a number of audits that they are subjected to to ensure that the data is secure and the data transmissions are encrypted appropriately and not visible to the outsiders. they have submitted and provided that information. it is very good. these are industry standard audits and do, in fact, have proven compliance. thank you. >> we don't store any credit card information or any of the transaction that happens and we passed that to your city third-party payment providers to do the actual transactions for payments. we don't run the risk of having this data available.

>> thank you. >> thank you, for the presentation. i want to stress that this is a gargantuan list that has been going on for a while and i think it is important to make sure that all of the bugs are worked out and not focused on a specific date. it would be horrible to roll this out after all this work and have it not work. i want to thank you for what you are doing. i am wondering about, forgive me if this has been discussed earlier, in terms of staff training that you have spoken a lot about, are there other plans for training the public? when that is rolled out to, where there be days where you'll be training at d.b.i. for contractors? >> there is a full outreach plan that is pending at the ready upon completion of a good rounded test but there is a lot of outreach planned and there has been a lot of forethought

into exactly how that will unfold. we need to get to the point where we are confident those dates are legit by the time we start publishing things and putting them in journals and reaching out to all the organizations. once we put that out there, the dates are stuck. so we do have a plan. it has been worked on in detail. it is on hold until we believe we are ready to proceed. >> commissioner walker has another question. >> to that point, the commissioner should be invited again. i have been one to one of one training which was very helpful in understanding. and even though we were not able to move through everything, it really does give you a hands on so hopefully we all can go in and give her a run when it is time. >> definitely. >> not all at the same time three at once, right?

>> i think that does it. thank you once again for your continuous dedication to getting this finished. >> thank you, very much. >> item eight. director's report. >> good morning, commissioners. before you is the september 2018 financial report. it provides first-quarter information on revenues and expenditures. that is july, to september. revenues are at $60 million or

$1.2 million more than the same time last year. that is primarily because of about a 600,000-dollar settlement that we received from a mitigation case. that is where the bulk of that comes from. on the expenditure side we are roughly the same. about $11 million. right now we have a projection that are at budget simply because it is so early in the fiscal year. if you look at the first page of the memo, you see services of other departments on a 16 million. it is really hard to make any projections because these aren't real expenditures yet. we are waiting until we have more expenditures. in the first quarter we normally set up eos and start working on ordering things pick may be by six months we will make more accurate predictions. i'm happy to answer any questions. >> thank you. >> and then one other comment, last month i stated that we provide a separate report. it has taken a little bit longer

citywide. we did go to a new financial management system. i hope to have that year in our report from the next fiscal year , next month. thank you. >> good morning. i am a legislative and public affairs manager. i will hit a few highlights from the documents that we sent along to you this morning. as you probably know, there is a government accounting and oversight. that has started about the same time and restarted today. they are still on the first item and dealing with contractor safety. that was tied to the accident in the west portal tunnels that you probably already about. but the last item on the agenda is the standard building standards.

the assistant director and i will be going down to participate in this. we understand that supervisor peskin is actually going to have the city administrator and some of the participants in the recent tall building study make a presentation to the committee and answer some questions. we are also there to answer questions. the director has already established an internal implementation team that is cochaired by the deputy director and senior engineer. that they have already had a couple of meetings and begun to look through the various recommendations and timing from the tall bidding -- tall building study. we will provide you with more details on that as we have them. in addition to that, we do have supervisor tang dealing with

expediting solar approval. the department of environment asked us to withdraw the finalization of that in order to add to battery storage and ev charging. the idea is to have an omnibus bill that will cover all three of those areas. we are working with the department of environment and with supervisor tang's office to make that happen. it will probably happen between now and the end of this year. that other item that you approved here a couple of months ago where we establish a formal process for reviewing legislation that comes from the board of supervisors has now passed. it will take formal effect as of the 19th of november. as a mention to you before, this is a process that we do right now there, it only codifies and

puts it into an ordinance that had been missing. the -- with that, i would say, the one other item that rules the committee today is supervisor ronan has recently introduced ordinance to give the building official and the fire marshal additional authority if a building owner has two or more outstanding notices of violation they could require such things as upgrades of sprinkler systems or fire alarm systems. i will be going through that hearing at 1:00 today, even though i expect that there won't be much questioning around that and that there is uniform support on the board for it. with that, i will be happy to take any questions.

>> thank you for the update. i have been seeing there is an initiative from the mayor's office to add a position to help expedite housing development. i want to talk about that a little bit. >> i can't talk about it because i don't know much about it. >> i am just curious what we are doing around that. >> to answer your question, we have a meeting with the mayor and the department head and then we come up with recommendations to have somebody oversee all of the department to smooth out the process for all the housing projects. then we will create a position. they are still changing the name

they are thinking about the name but i send you the e-mail copy this morning. actually, yesterday, i think i sent you and president mccarthy the funding source from our department and the department of public works. we agree to help this is overseeing all the housing project because of lots of issues. they have their own interpretation. >> so it will be included in our next budget as an additional position or something. >> right away, because they need to hide to the person they are. they already announced that person. >> but we will put wider funding >> that's good. >> but they need to work out with the city attorney and

budget office. i sent the e-mail. i said it was ok with me. we need to work it out with this city attorney office. >> perfect. i wanted to make sure everybody -- great. thank you. >> thank you. >> update on major projects. >> the major project is roughly a little bit increase and we also add the number of units into the summary. and any other question you have. >> seeing none. >> also, i want to take this opportunity to remind the commissioners here, we have a departmentwide meeting next wednesday. you are more welcome to join us and we will pass all the information to all staff. >> is that at eight? >> next wednesday. >> at what time? >> 8:30 am.

>> said the 24th? >> coffee is provided. >> we should schedule the commissioners to stand in different areas. >> item eight b. is enforcement. >> good morning, commissioners. i'm the chief building inspector this is an update on code enforcement for the month of september. 396 cases complaints were received. of those, 375 were responded to within 24 hours. that is a 95% response right. of those complaints, there were 27. complaints with first notice of violation was 50. and complaints that were received unabated without an nop

for that period was 156. and abated complaints with no n.o.v., the number was 278. additionally, i have some numbers for you on vacant and abandoned buildings and vacant commercial storefronts. for the week of october fifth 2018, a total of 326 vacant abandoned buildings were on the list. and a total of 507 vacant commercial storefronts were on the list. >> wonderful. >> thank you. i was not expecting that update on the storefronts there. when you say the storefronts are vacant, are they vacant because there's no for least signs in front of them?

is there a reason why they are vacant? >> the chief inspector is here and he will but you better equipped to answer that question >> i was actually going to ask for an update on that. i did not know -- how far into your survey have you done now? that is hugely labour-intensive to get that information. >> good morning. most of these cases are on the list because we are triggered by complaints. the reason they're saying they're staying on the list is because they are partially compliance to the ordinance. they are either being leased but we are having problems where the persons are saying, we are putting it on the market but three months down the line it is still being shown as a lease. we still have to keep it on the list for vacant storefronts.

>> so in some retail it is hard to lease right now for a lot of reasons. we will not get into that right now. we are just trying to figure out how do you know a bad player to a good player, how are you defining that? >> at this point, what we are doing is if they come up to us and say that we will apply and we will put it on the list, sometimes we update the case and the reason this number is big because a lot of these cases are a yearly thing. where it goes through the list and next year it is up on the list again. because they paid their fees and they are still open for a whole year. i think there is only a few cases where we have one owner having multiple open spaces or open storefronts or vacant

storefronts. and now we are working on it and figure out whether it is a good thing to send it to a hearing and preparing those cases for a hearing. it is kind of difficult when they come in and they partially comply with the ordinance. and now ok you have to hold onto our case. >> i was going to call and have an update on that. who would be giving it? would it be dvi or housing? >> d.b.i. >> ok. so i want to have a conversation about planning to understand how we define these vacant storefronts. i'm getting mixed information on how we get there and i know there is some strong opinions about some of the retail uses and that will never be able to be filled for one reason or another because of the zoning issues and so on. we will have another conversation about that. i was not expecting an update on that but it is great you're

putting that in front of us as well. would that be done on a monthly basis as well? >> yes. great. >> commissioner moss? >> in terms of the public reporting vacant storefronts, i do believe that is an asset that so far has not been tapped as much as we can. i know your office only has so much manpower. is a possibility that the department could issue some type of e-mail that -- and explainer of how to tell if something is vacant and how to report it that can be e-mailed out? like if you are on the city's e-mail list? i am asking how to get to neighborhood groups. i can think of a couple of citywide groups that i think would be happy to participate. i believe it was supervisor if fewer who had a weekend where

they went out and did that. certainly with the elections coming up everything -- everyone is busy. i do think eyes on the streets is something we can tap. i guess i am wondering if this has been contemplated. >> we have something on our website to file a complaint for vacant buildings and we know that d.b.i. and inspection services are proactive and providing us properties when they go out into the field. but we do have that on our website. >> right. i am wondering how often, or if ever we are telling the public that it is on the website. [laughter] >> good morning. i'm a communications director for d.b.i. i wanted to respond to your question, commissioner. it is something that we are developing right now. the website is definitely something that we have had online. i do think, is more focus and -- this has been since beginning of

this year, more focus has been on vacant storefronts with supervisor fewer, supervisor ye, there is also some legislation that is looking into possibly providing stricter adherence to the registration requirements for vacant storefronts. we will be doing a number of outreach and marketing efforts on that. whether it is notifying businesses along the corridors. we are trying to figure out with invest the neighborhoods also in how to best do outreach. we unfortunately don't have e-mails as you are saying. it is something that they have to sign up with us and that we use for that purpose only and then also we only have property information. there is about 26,000 of them. >> yes. thank you. >> thank you.

>> clearly the vacant storefront is a huge problem and the 500 looks like a big number but it is probably a fraction of what is really out there. these are just the ones we know about and have cited. they have been either noticed by your inspectors support when they're out there or they have received complaints, so we have this tremendous problem and i know we are trying to address it in a variety of ways. while i applaud any efforts to do things like temporary uses and quicker permitting of that, do you have any sense of how big the problem really is? apart from the 500 we have actually cited, even if it is anecdotal, are we looking at a magnitude of three, four, five,

you know, what is your personal sense of how big this is? >> to be honest, it is difficult like you said, we have different cases and different ordinances that we have to deal with. this is one of the ordinances that actually has multiple inspectors. we want to be proactive. you have to have inspectors go out there every single day, every single time to walk the streets and march. and then the next week i will guarantee it will go off the list and then you go back the next street. you see what i am saying? it is difficult for us to take -- make an assessment and say this is an initiative that we need to recruit every single time. for us, like i said, the best thing we have done is we have different inspectors and signed for it -- assigned for this. he will get more help. for right now, he is the only one that is following up and all of these issues.

>> a second question, regarding the 326 other vacant and abandoned buildings, do you have any finer grain on that as to how many of them are single-family homes or two or three family versus commercial? >> 326 are residential buildings and then 507 are vacant commercial buildings. >> so the commercial is retail storefronts in and any commercial industrial? >> yes. >> thank you for that. >> i might add one more thing. i think that this is a good point. this is a very fluid situation. these businesses are coming online and going off-line all the time and coming up to the holidays, we may see some more retail spaces being used.

the effort is every week. it is changing. it is ongoing. it is fairly a big task. >> totally. >> thank you. >> is there any public comment on the director's report? item nine is approval of the minutes of the regular meeting of september 19th, 2018. >> moved to approve. >> second. >> there is a motion and a second. is there any public comment on the minutes? are all commissioners in favor? >> aye. >> any opposed? the minutes are approved. item ten is adjournment. >> madam secretary, before we adjourn, i would like to close our meeting in honor of sean mcnulty who is a very seasons chief of the building inspector for the city for many, many years. he joined the department in 1983 and he retired in some time and three.

he was brave enough to come back in 2007 to help out for a year or so and bring his expertise. and his relationships back to the department to help. he was very well respected by the file. he treated everyone with such great respect. somebody pointed out to me it was like as if you are family the way he mentored you. i would like to close out, if i made this meeting in honor of sean and our condolences to his family. >> thank you. >> i join in that. thank you. >> we are now adjourned. it is 11:34 am. [♪]