care twice. >> supervisor safai: what's the cost to san francisco for this? >> in the mental health section of it, which we can bill the federal portion for the services, not the county portion. we don't get the county portion. we can bill the federal portion. however, for the substance use. nothing. we do not get paid by any sort of services when it's out of county. there's no other mechanism so we are using general fund. what we are doing e we trying to see if the person is really living here to have med cal to transfer. we helped transfer 25 of those individual med cal to our system. >> supervisor safai: this is where i think working with the department of homelessness in supportive housing coordinating on this particular point. it's not a large number of

individuals but i think was one of the intention of creation of that tent. if they are out county and coming to the county here, i think transferring their med cal for reimbursement for us is great. i think working with the homelessness on this point will be very important. >> obvious if it's an emergency service we'll provide it. what we've been trying to do is to have the person be sent back to the county. i'm working with our local county directors to make that happen. i recognize that many of these individuals are not -- you can't say -- we can't provide services, you're from petaluma and go back to petaluma. there'we have to think about hoe can work these situations. it is something we have to look

at. they are in the street. there are a number of peep. not a large number. i can leave it at that. >> supervisor safai: thank you. this is the thing i would end with before we transition to ms, director of jailhouse. these are two things this i like. i like a follow-up at least with this body, my office on pinpointing down the 2200 individuals and the strategy to reduce the cost overall. whether it's whole patient care and whether it's an expansion of services as we talked about in psych services. whatever the strategies may be, coordination with the tent of homelessness in support of housing. pin point those 2200 individuals

and plan and strategy to reduce the cost to the system, 52% of the overall cost of emergency care is significant. then secondarily, one small piece is the last part. these out of county individuals and working in collaboration with the tent of homelessness. the other recommendations were more intensive care staffing, filling the staffing. those will be the two things if we can, file this report in this body. i'm asking that you follow-up with us. we'll is a follow-up hearing on this. >> thank you. >> supervisor safai: if we can just transition to ms. lisa pratt. >> i apologize that i have to keep our committee on time. we have another very lengthy hearing after this one. i have one slide.

supervisors. i'm dr. lisa pratt i'm director of jailhouse. i appreciate the opportunity to dig deeper into thee complicated issues. the jail population represents nexus of homeless and mentally ill and other people as well. we're not here to talk about the other people. because it's so complicated, jail is a very regressive institution. our jail is a progressive city. what we do is different from what other cities and counties to. that's why it's important for dph to be part of the jail envisions. i wanted to point that out. the other thing about the jail report, unbelievable amount of work just if you think about an electronic health record and the

sheriff at that time, somehow connecting, that's what latoya made happen. it's the first time we had the opportunity to look at that stuff. the report represents people who self-report substance abuse. we operate in the jail the biggest detox facility i in the city. we look at the people who told us what they used. they may not require medical assistance support like cocaine or intoxication and withdrawal. this likely represents an over estimation because it's self-report of use and not a diagnosis of a substance abuse

disorder. part of that recovery involves support from the behavorial health staff and also medically assisted therapy which we provide in our jail and we have for decades and it is national model other jails are incorporating that in their treatment. we know there are big chunk of people who shouldn't be if the jail who are there because of these issues that are health issues. jails are places for people with mental illness and trauma. they often to not get better.

we're in supportive of these diversion efforts and other opportunities to treat people outside of the jail. people who are there get treatment and we can stratify and stabilize them with regards to who can can lead the jail and get treatment in another location that's more appropriate and who needs to stay in jail by virtue of their crime and disposition that the legal case, which is settled in the legal case. that's all i have to say. i'm happy to take any questions about what we to in the jail. >> supervisor safai: i want to ask one question. what percentage of the people that are in jail that are incarcerated that are getting public health, to you believe if they receive intensive healthcare would not be cycling in and out of the jail system?

>> this is the people if the jail and in general who do not believe they need treatment or are not willing to engage in treatment. if we talk about taking that out of the equation, if they got treatment, however they got it, i say a good 30 to 40 percent of people would have other opportunities around healing that would not result in this continuous cycle. >> supervisor safai: just one follow-up. what would be a strategy -- what could you do with the ten depart of public health? is that the same population of people? >> yes. these are the same people. they just land in jail sometimes. >> supervisor safai: only thing i will ask you for the time of

this committee, if you can give a recommendation for a follow-up and maybe the jail task force has worked on this stuff. you can give a recommendation if they were to receive treatment, would not be cycling in and out of jail, what will be the strategy? is it some of the things we talked about in terms of expanding, group homes, housing options or conservatorship, treatment. all those things, i would like you to continue to work with department of homelessness supportive housing and or department of public health to come back to this committee and give that recommendation. >> i love to do that. >> supervisor safai: thank you. i don't have any other questions at this time. we have a few speakers. i call those speakers.

please come up. it doesn't have to be in order. please come to the podium and speak. >> thank you everyone. it's wonderful to see five members of the board of supervisors listening to this hearing. thank you for doing it. thank you chair and supervisor kim. i know this was probably be the last public time i can say thank you to you for your leadership over the last eight years, free city college, which helped lot of people we're talking about right now.

secondly for making the jail a public health issue, a housing issue. you and several other supervisors have done that for the last term of your supervisor, you and then supervisor breed led the way and we really truly appreciate this day. i do. my main point for today other than to acknowledge that taxpayers for public safety works on incarceration. we appreciate that five years ago, three years ago you would have had this hearing, any audit that's related to housing or health would not have included that population. thank you. we really appreciate it. the main thing that i would say about this deep audit, is that we need to work at the

government level not only at the management and provider level to solve this problem. the governance level the department of public health needs to be in this process. they were not part of the audit. you need to pay attention to that. if you want a problem solved rather than have descriptions what should happen or is happening, you need the governance -- thank you. >> good afternoon. i'm community organizer with community housing partnership and coalition organization and community members dedicated to broadening access to treatment. i'm happy this report came out because it is a detailed look

the our city treatment and care system. this need to be a jumping point from which we not only feel the gaps in the health system and reimagine how that system operates. we are in a public health crisis. as shown in the report how this intersects with homelessness crisis. as was pointed out, lack of connection between psychiatric care and case management perpetuates this homelessness crisis. we to spend lot of money on emergency services and jails. when you don't have stable housing, people cycle into those jails and use those emergency services more. i think that's something we need to highlight in big way in light of this report. this housing is one of the main issues we need to worry about when talking about this vulnerable population. recommendation number seven, specifically points to how we need to increase support of housing for people living on the

streets since behavioral health disorders is a cause and result of homelessness. that's why we continue to implement propositions like proposition c and keep solutions to mental health and substance abuse treatment in the public consciousness. i look forward to having city hall work with the community on this issue because we need to have our community's voice be centred thank you. >> next speaker. >> i'm with community housing partnership. i spent this need we have for homelessness and mental health and substance abuse. i support it and that's about it.

>> i'm with citywide case management forensics program probations team. few things came up for me when we were hearing the audit and the responses. regarding the 2200 individuals that are currently costing the city 50% of the b.h.s. budget, probably 18 of them are on my case load. speaking from personal experience, it doesn't seem to be a housing issue or financial issue for me. it's a triage issue. my experience is that very hard to find a point person and be able to communicate with them to make sure that when i am 5150 someone or when one of the high users is going to p.e.s.

they are actually leaving the emergency room with a referral and not just like being dropped off or sleeping something off and then three hours later, no one gives me a phone call. i have no idea where they are discharged to. instead of me calling from 3:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. the next morning talking with the er and the nurse and the social worker and the attending psychiatrist that will be really great if at least one or two people are able to collaborate so that the person who's on the ground and is in providing i.c.m. to these people aren't spending 20 hours

of their day doing this. >> thank you ma'am. you can finish this sentence. , we can follow up with you. >> audit mentioned that 1% of inmates were identified to have severe mental illness. i wanted to challenge that because they were saying that 85% inmates had substance abuse issues, maybe not disorders. the correlation between those two, there's something that doesn't quite add up. >> supervisor safai: thank you. >> good afternoon i'm from healthway 360 one of the largest behavioral health providers. we appreciate the opportunity to contribute information to this report. i wanted to make a couple of

comments. the report as we talked about today, is filled with information about lack of resources, housing, coordination of care like the person before me spoke about and even when talking with the sf general folks to make sure what's needed to make conservatorship work. the answer was coordination of care, resources and housing for female -- people. i want to encourage everybody here to be thinking about what people need not strong arming people into services. for health 360 we serve about thousand people in our substance treatment program. 94% of the people who come into our residential treatment program sleep on the streets before they come into treatment. 45% of those people leave treatment without a place to go.

we're feeding people into our system who don't have resources, don't have a place to go, can't get better. you can't get better when you're sleeping on the streets. please just make sure that you're really respecting the resource needs and process as opposed to jumping towards taking people civil liberties away. thank you. >> good morning interviews. i'm denny smith. i'm here with javier treatment on demand council. i'm here someone who's used all the services that we're discussing today about six years ago i was placed on opioid medication by a kaiser physici physician. when i came back, i found myself homeless and jobless and kaiser

right before the aca enacted, discontinued my insurance care. i'm someone who's spent the last six years knowing what it's like to sleep on the streets and what it's like to sleep in the jail and what it's like to get your prescriptions refilled. my experience with the city services has been mostly one of intense gratitude. i'm really appreciative for everything san francisco does for people who need anything. i think things will run smoother if patients and clients were treated global entities not as cardiac patient or a drug rehab patient. they are treated as one person and if they were treated in an integrated system so that every

provider knew what that patient -- what other services that patient was using. like many people i think nonviolent choices should be decriminalized. i'm very appreciative of the services and i think they would be better if tone more collaboratively. thank you very much. >> thank you. >> i'm community organizer with community housing partnership. we're convening treatment on demand council. i appreciate the focus on mental health and the passion folks are giving it today. i want to remind everyone it's not about the homeowners experience with mental illness. it's about we are experiencing mental illness survives each

episode. let's not measure outcomes and how many dollars we're saving on few hundred people. not one of those hundreds people dies. what's missing is an opportunity. i myself have been homeless here in san francisco, that experience caused mental health to plummet. i did survive with intensive health. housing is a crucial piece that we really need to start with. now i got into housing and i work with people that are in support of housing, it breaks y heart when i find out this folks aren't able to access services and services aren't adequate enough for them and then they die. it affected me. yesterday i found out one of my neighbors who had a lot of mental health issues wasn't able

to access the resources and she passed away. >> we're also part of the treatment of demand council. when discussing the recommendations from the d.p.h. audit with my clients we agreed the recommendations are particularly relevant to incarcerated people. many are black and nonblack or poor and people who use drugs. recommendation one mentions that d.h.s. planning should address

barriers to service access. when discussing this with clients he shared with me, there shouldn't have to be a long process to get treatment. one program expected me to sit on a chair for seven hours to wait for a bed that might have been open the next day. another client stated, coming to jail shouldn't be the go to place to get treatment for mental health. recommendation three states d. -- i had clients in custody waiting around six months to access i.c.m. services. while discussing this recommendation with another client, she stated, number three and number one will give people a chance to get treatment when they wanted. especially most of us want treatment before coming to jail. unfortunately it's too frequent when currently incarcerated

clients are not released from jail because they are homeless. implementing recommendation seven as well as one and three will hopefully make the practice of keeping homeless people obsolete. thank you. >> supervisor safai: next speaker. >> thank you. donna mandel. i'm legislative policy analyst for the san francisco public defender. i thank supervisors for holding this hearing. thank you for the budget legislative analyst for your report and thank you to all the speakers. we haven't received the new report that came out yesterday. we like to see it. i recently attended several of the meetings on the jail task force working group. one of the thing we heard there there's 120-day wait for people

in jail to be transferred to a treatment facility. today we heard from this report that was released that 8 84% jal bookings have substance issue. i think it's clear here this we don't need the jail to be our behavioral health facility. we definitely don't need spend hundreds of millions of dollars to build new jail. we need that money on treatment and spent on supportive housing for people. >> supervisor kim: any other speakers like to speak on item

number four. public comment is now closed. closing comments from those who are attending? >> supervisor mandelman: thank you chair kim. i want to thank supervisor safai for requesting this report and calling for this hearing. i think it's incredibly useful and thinking number of challenges. i was struck this afternoon, both by the presenters and public commenters by how many true amazing people that we have. to answer a point, it's.

governance. it is also about management. it is about how these processes work at the street level for the case managers and the clients and trying to make something better. i'm also struck -- san franciscans expect us to deal with a very challenging population this we do not want to have in jail nor do we have to have in long term hospitalization. we are not managing that anywhere close to adequately now. i'm happy for the focus how users of multiple systems. i hope that work on thes. we need to make progress. we need to make great extremely changing progress on that challenge. i hope that folks if the

department will not hesitate ino let us know what you need from the city to get to better place. we're not in a good one now. >> supervisor kim: i want to make a few comments. i to want to thank department of public health and partners the jail and public defender office. we said it so many times in this chamber. we don't want our prisons and jails to be society solution to homelessness and mental health and so many other of our major challenges. it is the simplest solution to put people away that are challenging and that we don't know how to address. i think today's hearing was helpful. supervisor mandelman i

appreciate your post on social media about the work that you've been doing and how challenging it is to address these important issues that clearly our residents care so much about. i want to see it solved. i'm hopeful that revenue is part of the answer and also just more strategic thinking and data sharing. one thing that was frustrating to me, when i served on the school board we had trouble sharing data between juvenile justice and school districts. many of the privacy concerns are overblown. it's very bureaucrat ic. i get the concern. we have to solve these issues and if we know that small percentage of our users are costing the system 40 to 50 percent, we really have to just plow in there and get the different tents together to just work on if it's 100, 200, 300

patients all together. i want to emphasis the point made earlier. we talked about how to support the workers that to the work. i have long been really -- i have tremendous admiration for so many of the public health workers. i see how hea dedicated they ar. i see the impact this work has on them. we don't talk about it but substance abuse and mental health issues prop up for workers on the ground. they are struggling with the same issues that their clients are struggling with. sometimes because of the stress and trauma of the work that they are doing. if we don't take care of our workers tong this -- doing this work, we don't have any hope for solving this issue. i hope that the department think about this.

think we should provide the best healthcare. we should require to have mental health issues and therapy. that should be part of your job. you should be paid to have this kind of self-care session so you can do the most important work. i really hope that as revenue comes in, i'm hopeful about prop c that we really think about how to invest that on the services on the data share and the workers. i know this going to come up in the next hearing which is how we can incentivize folks that to this work. it can't just be salary. other people things people want to see is flexibility and benefits as well. we have to really think hard about how to get good people into this work. supervisor safai thank you so

much for calling this hearing. >> supervisor safai: lot of what supervisor mandelman and supervisor kim summarized today, i want to really appreciate and thank the budget legislative also office. this was not a normal audit. i knew what i was asking for it was going to be a significant amount of work. it took well over a year. i want to thank latoya and the b.l.a. for taking this on. i want to thank the tent of publi--department of public hea. it's been two years almost since i've been in office. this is very much purposeful. we wanted this hearing to inside with budget conversations. we wanted it to lead -- who knew we would have budget windfall.

that is where we are. i think it is a priority. ty really want to appreciate all the public health mental health providers that came out today from community-based organizations. one of the things that was highlighted in the report was how well they are doing with limited resources, what type of services they are providing to a significant amount of clients. i don't want that to be lost as well as our city staff. all the folks from sf general and down to the community-based level. i would like a follow-up report where we can really hone in on those 2200 patients where we can talk about out of county and where we can talk about how we're refining and providing those services. we're very often charged in this chamber of thinking about efficiencies and how we can better use resources. it's probably also about additional resources but it's about using our existing

resources. just simple step of coordinating with the department of homelessness to look at out of county patients getting some of that transfers. that helps with the reimbursement pross. that helps save taxpayers money if med cal is received here in san francisco. i would just say, i really appreciate the questions from my colleagues today. i also think help to shed light on a road map how to go forward in terms of providing and coordinating and expanding some of the mental health services in the city and county of san francisco. when you look at what we provide here in san francisco, it's a model for the rest of the nation. we're talking about how we can better refine those resources and deliver them to the patients. then thinking about mental health services if the jail as a subset of that and what that means going forward. i want to echo the comments of

my colleagues. i think that has been a phenomenal help. really helping to shift the conversation to how we can provide better services rather than through incarceration but through community strategies. thank you chair, thank you for the flexibility. i know this was a long hearing. it was two years in the making. it was 10-year audit. we still have a lot of work to do. i don't know whether or not to continue this item to the all of the chair or we ask for an additional hearing as a follow-up? >> supervisor kim: we can continue call to the chair or file. i think you're asking to continue this call of the chair. >> supervisor safai: if we can continue, then we'll have the follow-up information provided by those departments. >> supervisor kim: thank you to all the speakers who came today. i want to thank all the members of the public who came out.

thank you supervisor mandelman for coming to attend. at this time we'll take a motion to continue this item to the call of the chair. we can to that without objection. thank you very much. call the next item.thank you very much so much mr. clerk. we have another very lengthy hearing ahead of us. we quorum little bit before 2:0. we will do our best to keep this hearing on time. we have one last item after this

hearing. i may have to ask our presenters to wrap up. supervisor vallie brown is a sponsor of this hearing. i want to hand the floor to the sponsor. supervisor brown. >> supervisor brown: thank you chair kim. i want to thank everyone for being here today and joining me on this board for an important hearing concerning muny. >> supervisor kim: please take your conversations outside. this will be appreciated. >> supervisor brown: i like to thank my staff.

let me open by saying that i'm a big believer in public transit. as the number people crowding this planet continues to grow in a larger and larger percentage of those people choose to make their homes in cities including this one and as we face the reality of climate change it seems that san francisco best future is one where all san francisco is not only use public transportation but they have to be able to depend on it. it's not about being better than the rest. in my opinion, public trust is critical to making this happen. there's relationships between ridership and revenue and the growth of the public transit system all hinge on public trust. if we decide to take the bus and it comes on time, we get to where we're going on time, then we're more like to trust enough

to try it again. to take it and it's not where -- it doesn't get us to where we want on time, then the next time, we're not going to take it. we'll take something else. but, under ed reskin, we have made strides. but the budget and legislative analyst report makes it clear that muny continues to face a bleak and worsening staffing deficit. a fact that's unlikely to rectify in the short term.

according to the budget analyst, the current staffing deficit is 17% up from 10% in 2010. this represents hundreds of empty operator positions guaranteeing services and significantly increasing the likelihood the stressors in the system will result in widely experienced service. this past summer, muny suffered systemwide delay during plan two-month closure of the twin peaks tunnel. riders were stuck waiting for buses and trains, many of then so long, they were late. they gave up lyft or uber. when this happens, public trust in the system suffers dearly. today my aim is for the public to learn more about the causes about was dubbed the muny summer

melt down and what caused the delays, what lessons were learned. we need to ensure public trust in the system and to do so we need compelling answers. today we'll hear from san francisco mta budget analyst. i hope that today this testimony sheds light on the causes and failures that occurred earlier this year and provide further insight to sfmta and the board of supervisors about how to do better the next time the system is under stress. stress is inevitable and can make us stronger. in times of stress, good communication is critical. i like to invite director riskin

to make the presentation. >> i want to thank supervisor brown for calling for this hearing. throughout the presentation i hope we can talk about the hiring and retention how we attract more operators and retain them. also, i hope that through this discussion that we can talk about how sfmta make the customer experience really one of its central priorities. i think that with technology and all of the companies that are trying to offer different transit services to our residents now, our residents are getting more and more used to customer experience being the number one priority and are starting to choose other systems over ours. i think that the more this department focuses on prioritizing that experience, the more successful we'll be in

gaining ride ridership. thank you. >> thank you. chair kim, supervisor brown, supervisor peskin, i appreciate the opportunity to be here. i do have a brief presentation. i'll try to touch on the points that you raised and i want to start by really reemphasizing the comments that you both made to open. this is a city that has been really built around public transit and well functioning muny system. muny is integral to the way people get around san francisco. that's true whether people take muny or not. everybody in san francisco, every business, every visitor, every resident benefits from muny service. those who use it, because they have no other choice all the way to never set foot.

a muny vehicle. we understand and appreciate the importance of the role that muny plays in the quality of life in the economy of san francisco and for the people who live here. incidents like we had where the services not as it should have been, such as was for a period this summer, it's a good reminder of our need to do what we can to make the system more resilient so this can weather changes whether they are anticipated or not to retain the ridership and grow the ride ridership. while lot of the talk today because of the focus of the hearing is on staffing, there are many other elements of the service and you both referenced some of those in your opening remarks.

lot of investments that we've been making in the vehicles and infrastructure and it allow us to provide more service and contribute to the rider experience in a positive way. likewise, investments we're making in technology and communications are also trying to get that rider experience. which is absolutely important part. there are many other ways that people can get around now. many more ways than there were when i started this job. while some of those ways are actually working against our goals in terms of delivering muny service, we get people who have choices and that respect and confidence, supervisor brown you referenced that conference if the system by folks who are regular riders and less frequent riders. we understand that we need to earn that trust and confidence everyday. just to address some of the

context for this hearing and for much of this decade, we have been close to meeting our goals of service delivery. one of the core things of muny service is getting the service out on the street and in climate where we put out more service. supervisor brown mentioned, increase of service by 10% as well as some of the challenges highlighted ihighlighted in thet report. we've been able to increase service. we did after a couple of years, pretty good performance in terms of service delivery, dipping

below that charter goal, just a few times. we did experience notable decline this summer i know that our riders, including me who's a regular rider, very much experienced and felt -- i will note that the scale of the gra graph, that valley looks big. the scale of the graph starts 90%. on average we're still at the worst delivering more than 90% of our planned service. i to recognize that the missed runs that people experiencing during this time, the gaps in service, were very palpable to folks in various parts of the city. there's a number of different elements of service delivery. in the partly sunny when -- ini

first got here, one of the things i learned, the basic building blocks delivering service is having a vehicle and operator at the same time to deliver service. in the past we had some challenges on the vehicle side in terms of availability of vehicles both bus and rail in terps of delivering the service through the investments that we've made with the support of the board of supervisors approving new bus and rail are e contracts. other side of the equation is operator availability. it put it simply, there's two elements that contribute to the operator availability. one is our ability to continue to bring new operators in the door. over time, our existing operators retired, they get promoted up or leave for other reasons. i do think our overall retention

rate is pretty high for operators. people do come and go. we need steady stream coming in. we have to make sure that the operators that we have recruited, hired, trained and put into service are available for service. you saw in the budget and legislative analyst report that we have significant numbers of folks that we have recruited higher and trained that are not available for service. addressing it both from the input side, getting more people in the system but also focusing on making sure that those who are already in the system are available for work, are the two streams of work towards getting operators available for service. in terms of looking now in retrospect at what happened this summer, we had confluence of

different activities this contributed to the decline in service. they are very clear and suggest that we could have and should have better planned to mitigate the impacts of them. one of them as supervisor mentioned was a construction work in the twin peaks tunnel. this was not as we see optional work. this was necessary work to make sure it can be safe safe and reliable. it's work that we needed to do. it did require shutting down one of the most critical parts of the transit network for a couple of months using buses instead of trains to move hundreds of thousands of people everyday who use the twin peaks tunnel. that created a big strain on the resources that we have to deliver service on a normal day. we also at the same time had two other things happening. we had new technology coming

into the system. new vehicles, particularly the new light rail vehicles, the first in a generation of vehicles coming in. while all this new technology is great, it takes resources and time to familiarize and train our operators and staff on the use of those vehicles. that was a second strain. the third was a general signup. which is something that's an opportunity in our labor contract for operators to move around the system, to move from bus to rail or from diesel bus to a trolley bus. we have to train the operators on a different equipment they'll be operating. that was happening around the same time as well. then finally, i think that budget legislative analyst report speaks to this a bit, we are having increasing challenges in getting people into the job in the first place. the number of applicants this w-

that we are receiving is declining. percentage of those applicants who take the exam is declining. percentage of folks who take the exam and accept employment is declining. those three different steps, we're having a greater challenge getting folks into the agency. it's been declining overtime. first we were noticing it just for part time position now we're seeing it for full time position. >> supervisor brown: do you know the reason why? to you feel that you -- i read was the budget legislative analyst has talked about wages, especially for the first two years. they are not making enough money to live even near the city.

i'm just wondering -- i want to know what your response to that is. >> i think there's a range of factors. one is what i put up here on the slide is that there are much larger regional dynamics at play. you heard this in the last presentation as well in terms of the challenges with filling positions. we have a record low unemployment rate, which i think economist is essentially zero unemployment. anybody who wants a job can find a job. just the availability of folks to work is declining. certainly our housing production, as you know, has not kept up with job growth. we have been increasing staffing at the same time, other city agencies but more importantly the public and private sector has been increasing staffing. so there's more competition for

the same amount of people. with respect to operators we're seeing fewer young people get driver's license. we're seeing fewer people apply for public sector jobs. i think there are lot of different factors. i don't think that we have done the analysis in terms of talking to would-be applicants, applicantses who don't show up for the test. we haven't done analysis enough to understand what the actual factors are. i know that the b.l.a. made some supervisosuppositions. there's a lot of factors. we have been cog any constan --t that it's getting harder to

recruit people. we've been doing much more outreach including targeted outreach including outreach through social media to let more folks make sure folks are aware of the opportunities that we have and civil service protect and the benefits and all the amenities that come with a job such as transit operator. really looking forward to strengthen some of those things to. to focus on the job readiness. trying to work upstream if the pipeline to expand number of people to apply to become a

transit operator. challenges that we're having filling these positions, it's not limited to transit operator positions. there are maintenance, mechanic positions that we're having challenges with. we talked during the budget process about crossing guards. many other agencies within the city government as well as the school district are having trouble attracting people to come to work here. it's not unique to us because our services is unforgiving. with the existing workforce and retention, i mentioned this when i presented before the full board a few weeks ago, working hard in terms of working inside the agency to engage with our existing employees to understand what the issues that they have are and what their challenges are what we can do as an employer and agency to better

support them in doing their job. we survey our own employees every year. we take the results and make changes. many investments that we making in the facilities, making sure they have restrooms, looking at schedules. some of these comes through the employee survey. i meet with employees last year, i did a series of townhalls going to the operating divisions, hearing directly from muny operators.

with regard to outreach and communication, we did very good job. this is based on feedback we got back during and after -- the folks impacted by the change in service but not having trains.

>> supervisor brown: when did you start communicating with them? what >> the shutdown started around june 25th. as the first weekdays service was coming out. we were having a difficult time meeting that service. that's when we started communicating to folks that they might see gaps. >> supervisor brown: no one in your agency knew that was coming before then? >> we understood that we would have challenges in