announcement, the emergency stop has been triggered, sounds forward and it sounds like a plan in place around communications with the driver. the presentation's very helpful. thanks. >> director torres. >> when will you be permanent? def >> she may not want the job after i'm done with it. well, take that as the compliment that it is and i appreciate you coming here and doing it. i know you're new to the role and know some things are things you're new in deal with. i think what qualifies me most to be the chair of this board is the fact i ride this thing every

day. it's no secret to anyone who rides it and i've been clear with you and director raskin the service has been spotty at best since the closure. you talked about the warriors. for me, as with everybody who rides it, it comes down to stories and for me it's two basketball games. i took my kids to the oracle arena and came back on bart just fine. got in the tunnel, it's late for small children or medium children as these two are and found ourselves at a delay at vanes for 45 minutes late at night. no communication no overahead announcement or what's going on and it's not telling us a driver coming the other way. i stop and show my badge and say what's going on, he doesn't

know. the situation was bad because you had a lot of passengers including high school students and younger coming home from the game stranded at the platform and for their parents who wanted to know what was going on, they had no information. so we failed those riders at two levels. similarly to mr. peterson's point, later in the week i'm going to watch my son's basketball game. shut you had be a 30 minute ride and turns into a 50 minute ride and again no announcement. again the service for the past six has been spotty. the communication around the service incidents have been worse. passengers are frustrated because they're not hearing what's going on. and they don't understand. what's frustrating to me a little bit is i understand you're dealing with aging equipment and systems and have been candid and trans parent about that and an appreciate that personally, but the system

functioned better eight months ago so we know it can be done. so i want the public to know the board gets it. we're not oblivious to it and we see it and get it. you've identified problems i've been hearing about for the 12 years i've been on this board. i talked about some of the solutions but i'd like to talk about accountability for those solutions. we spend a lot of time on the board talking about plans for things that are 20 years off in the future. sea rise, these beautiful thoroughfares we may or may not build and that's fine but what we want customers to know about

is about the present. we get an awful lot of phone calls and e-mails about the present. we hear about the bus service too but i'll start with the metro service. i'd like to request once a month through the director's report or an agenda item like this, we have a report back on how the issues are going and specifically, what i would like to hear is what were the major delays, as you very well put it the disruptive delays, the ones that really disrupt commuters' lives and what caused them and what we're doing to fix it. i will tell you if we keep hearing the same cause and proposed solution over and over again, that will be frustrating. the second thing, and i welcome your input on this is a metric. for me, for the metro service it seems we can chart the service

time so i propose that as a metric. you're the transit expert. if you think there's a better metric but we need something objective to report to the riding community about where we stand. and then finally, the west portal issue is one, the turnaround at embark dare yo -- embarcadero is another. i wouldn't be true if i didn't mention the notion of shuttle service to turn back platforms at embarcadero and west portal and have twin peaks tunnel. as i said to dr. raskin the experience during the twin peaks tunnel that was encouraging was the efficiency. we joked i'd be easy on you. i know you're new to the job and

know with the system and the metro system in particular but this is a serious situation. it's not working well. and if our mission is to get people out of the cares and into the system, the system needs to work well and when it's not working well they ned to hear and understand why it's not working well. to me, the difference between having in central command give up control for 15 or 20 seconds to let thousands of people in the tunnel know what's going on, that's a no-brainer. let the customers know what's going on and if we need to staff that differently in add advance of the radio change, do that. i don't want to go through all the solutions, you know them better than i do, but i have to say this, it's got to get better and i'd like accountability and we need to start with communicating life -- live time

in the tunnel hon -- on what's going on and what they can expect to do in an alternative situation. okay? >> yes. >> okay. thank you very much. >> can i add a point to that? >> please. >> once you're on the train it's a little too late. we want to signal them to people as they make their trip planning decisions and wonder what you think in terms of the apps on is there one you point people towards where to go for the best information and i noticed today as i was planning my trip over here the google maps does not link up to the real transit time with google and i wonder if you had thoughts to make sure the information you put out is

up-to-date and accurate. >> i think with the question you're stepping outside my areas of expertise. >> yeah, let me take that question. with regard to the apps and how that information flows, we are providing that information as open data that different apps pick up. what google seems to do is they pick up our schedule and more and more on the app if you have the latest version, you can see the prediction. so there's two different things. if you are looking at the schedule, it may or may not look as accurate as the predict but you have to have downloaded the latest to have predicted that and be tae attentive and there' private provider data where we're looking at other ways to

address that to see purely the data without getting a commercial offering so we're looking at how we offer that on our own websites to give better information. to the point of getting more communications while you're in the tunnel or from central control, that is a partnership between transit and communication to work on that and we need that information to come from the transit team and the communications teams officers provide that live on the system or through twitter five days a week, 16 hours a day. what we've not had the opportunity to have is weekend and late evenings on sometimes special events but we're making

some changes in our partnership to be able to staff that more comprehensive and i do believe that will help. we have communication staff embedded at the control systems working closely with julie's team to be able to get the updates better and faster. i think you're hearing some of them but we need from the late evening situation to have more robust and comprehensive coverage. >> anything else? thank you. tall order but if somebody up to it, it's you. as folks leave on this item, mr. peterson, good luck getting back to west portal. how many folks are here for item number 12. how many are here for item number 13? okay.

that makes it easy. why don't we go ahead item number 13 should be quicker, correct? >> yes. >> call item 13. i expect there's shy people who didn't identify they're here. >> and two contracts for specialized training service to moran consulting for specialized training in customer service and deescalation and management of implicit bias and coaching for supervisors and mangers for a contract with a term of five years and nobody's indicated an interest in addressing you from the public on this item. >> very good. >> mr. chair, i will be presenting this item so as roberta has said, we have these two contracts. these contracts are for

specialized training. in part a response to feedback from staff from across our organization about requests for more training in particular feedback from staff who worked directly with the public. the staff has let us know that they want more and better training and skilled -- skills and how to engage with the public particularly in difficult situation could compromise their personal safety. i want to mention that in particular 250a has been vocal about the need for training operators on xhrs service and also a requirement of the agency, and they've been vocal on training for vcos and other labor represents from stations an permits have expressed better training would support the ongoing interactions on a daily basis where sometimes they feel

unsafe. and unions and staff are both interested in a training toolbox. and while there is some training that is currently out there, this contract gives us the ability to build and develop comprehensive training to envision training that could be cost-cutting and wouldn't be siloed to their job classification and interested in training that would allow us to work very closely with the unions and employees to says their situations they're in. they're 24/7 type of jobs at different locations they're in. we're also looking at customized training development, training delivery, a coaching component which is very specifically requested in focus groups we did in 2017.

and include an evaluation component. the contracts are focussed on three things. they're focussed on customer service which include the things we've recently spoken about. deescalation and reducing physical interaction and potential assaults which are one of the most frequent cause of injury for our employees and we also have included an implicit bias component so if employees are being triggered or their customer's being triggered, there's an attentiveness to that situation. and we believe this as-needed will give us the capability to address these things. they're as-needed contracts that means they're task-order based and it doesn't necessarily mean that each of these contractors would get this l level of work.

it's a contract that goes up to that limit. >> do we have public comment? you said none. we'll close public comment on this item. director gordon. >> i think it's important work and excited we're doing including implicit bias and hope we test people. in the restaurant world we've gotten people to do this test and have some restaurants have signed up to do it with staff and they've seen the consequence in doing the implicit bias test and training and included a diversity of groups and even on the internal for customer service we should look at this overall as a larger agency-wide measure in how we interact with employees and each other. the only thing i saw i didn't

see in here that was missing was around dealing with and granted no one is going to come in as a mental health professional, but a lot of what we're seeing particularly with drug addiction are the mental health concerns. there are people who are angry because you're giving them a parking ticket but there's the next level of people at night using our system who may be having personal challenges. i see anyone with a medical expertise with the contracts but i would say if we can add that compone component in and see if the contractors can respond to that and think there's a greater need in all customer-facing roles and

better understand people compromised from mental health or drug addiction concerns. >> if i may respond, i think it's an important point and while the contracts don't address the mental health aspect, we are looking at our front-facing employees as being almost first-responders. there's been publication and works on work trauma so dealing with people who have dealing with trauma or having to work with traum tiefd -- traumatized people. we thought that was attractive to have in the contract. >> director brinkman. >> thank you for moving quickly on this. it's going to be so important and what we hear from public facing staff particularly the female operators and giving

them the tools to de-escalate will go a long way in keeping operators happy and healthy and in particular hire more female operators. i'm happy to make a motion to approve this and thrilled we're doing this. >> we have a motion. is there a second. >> one comment? >> please. >> to say happy to see this and the monitoring and performance measuring as the best practice to see that in the contract we'll evaluate how successful this was. two questions. what's the difference between the two contractors. one is significantly more expensive so if you can speak to that and are there other industry best practice where's this kind of intervention has been implemented in other cities. are there lessons to learn from or are we the pioneer in this area? >> in terms of the last question i'll mention that first. there are other cities who have done something similar i believe

it's septa in philadelphia who has worked with vendors more localized to the east coast who have done this work and to some degree we have modelleded this approach on their work. and though the vendors are different, we do believe we can leverage the learnings that are out in the space both from the trade industry as well as the work of at least septa. that's the one we know most about. in terms of cost, the two vendors which are the two responsive and responsible venders, the two that bid on the work, they're quite different. moran consulting is out of chicago and they focus specifically on customer service. they have more of a customer service training model. they've trained many types of employees including types like

our own and dtui focuses more on equity and diversity and here locally. and we believe the contracts close to the same size with different offerings we can cover the work we need. >> i note it's as you said spread contract so it's not as if we're agreeing to pay $3 million to two vendors but it's on a work-order basis. may i request as we go and decide to go as we decide to spend more on the vendors, we seek the input and feedback of the unions particularly because they're the ones requesting this? so since we're doing it for their benefit and retention, i want to make sure they're finding these programs and providers effective and if not, we can adjust within the contract? >> yes, we can. >> very good. so a motion and second. all in favor, please say aye.

opposed? that passes. thank you very much. acting director hsu we move on to item 12. >> clerk: presentation discussion regarding response acts of responsibilities and no members of the public have stated wanting to address the topic. >> i can't imagine why.

>> members of the board i'm mark blake a city attorney. >> nice to see you. >> good afternoon. my area of specialty is public finance and i'm one of three attorneys in the city attorney's office that work in this space and collectively we have about 100 years of experience with the municipal bonds and on every bond offering in the city we work as the city's in-house attorney with respect to d disclosure matters. what i'm going to do today is probably do a truncated presentation because the next bond offering isn't until 2020. so this training is just hit highlights and we'll revisit it

to a bond offering so you can bring some training together and apply it to the bond offering. be that as it may, this presentation will cover and maybe get a purchase agreement and maybe disclosure document and you'll act to approve those

documents. in some ways it's the most important document in the group will be an official statement like a prospectus. so you're the final arbiter whether it goes to market or not. because of certain circumstances with respect to failures with municipal bond offerings they imposed certain duties for offering documents. what they'll go through on this presentation not to make you security laws experts or anything but what's the law here, what's the context in which we're operating. what's the learnings associates and it's the municipal offerings. what's the official statement and what's it do and how do you

as board members discharge your duties? okay. the principle is there's no direct regulation by the securities and exchange commission. they enjoy broad securities an exempt from the comment period opposed to corporate securities. most you have to register with the securities and exchange commission and there's a review and comment period before you can access the capital market. municipal securities are not required to register and are exempt and there's a reason for that. one is if there's 55,000

municipal issuers and legal constraints and the second is the view is if the securities laws were enacted 33 and 34, munis were still viewed as safe instruments and the opportunity for fraud was just not there unlike your corporate counterparts. indeed, i think the failure rate for munis where investors actually lose capital is minuscule and the fact of the matter is if an investor was actually doing his or her due diligence the likelihood of a loss of capital would go to zero because you know when your local government has one taxpayer, one large taxpayer and that

taxpayer's failing if you're doing your diligence. but the sec indirectly regulates through brokers and dealers. so investment banks and now financial advisors so by imposing duties on those intermediaries they indirectly regulate municipal securities and they cannot under write them without a document and a commitment from the securities office to provide annual ongoing market data. i would say 20 years ago when municipal issuers issued bonds, there was no obligation to provide continual financial and operating data and so therefore if you were purchasing that security in the secondaries market there was no way for you to do other than to do your own

diligence and investigation to determine whether the financial health of the underlying issuer. and the other way the sec ri regulates the market is through the enforcement of the securities laws. so basically the sec views itself as the protector of the market ensuring that when you invest your capital, you get a fair rate of return for the risk you're taking. so they require issuers to basically make a full complete disclear -- disclosure of all material facts related to that offering. so some of the observations to train around staff and be sure

when a disclosure document comes for approval we have conducted on our part so one is that some of the securities enforcement actions have seen staff has not been trained so the professionals charged with preparing documents to come to market haven't been trained in terms of their requirements and in terms of their diligence obligations and in terms of ensuring that they have the most complete and accurate information prior to the time they go to market. secondarily, in other enforcement actions they've seen there's been no opportunity for different departments within an issuer to talk to each other. so in one circumstance i'm familiar w familiar with, the individuals would speak to department individually and there would never be an opportunity for cross-po

cross-pollination so one department could not make a observation on another department to get a more complete view of the issuer's project situation. and the lack of controls and procedures. the sec has commented favorably in recent speeches and enforcement actions an they're better served with internal controls and procedures and we have worked with all of our departments throughout the city to make sure each department has controls and procedures and the sfmta controls and procedures and we'll bring those to you by end of year for review and approval. in the sec has observed issuers have made misstatements or not

painted a complete picture because of political influence. that's to say what we try to tell staff is the official statement not a public relations document. and i believe investors quite frankly that investors are aware issuers have challenges, financial and individual challenges and they're more concerned frankly with the current of their money than a return on their money. i believe that's the municipal space that in part returns here are not significant. this is really a safety security market. we tell people, tell all your challenges and that you will be rewarded in the marketplace where you tell your challenges and then talk about how you're managing your challenges and that's the better spot to be in.

so one question is when did the securities laws attach. they attached in two instances and one is through primary offerings and secondarily when board members such as yourselves make comments on the sfmta's financial health. those are likely to reach the marketplace and may be tested against the provisions. what we attempt to do is when we're accessing the marketplace or alternatively, when there are turbulent times, we we encourage board members to exercise caution in making statements about the financial health of the sfmta or when we're coming to market to discourage

investment to say there's no risk, you should buy it. those statements will be tested against the anti-fraud provisions of the securities laws. and generally we're talking about material statements and the anti-fraud provisions make it unlawful to make a statement of a material fact or omission. in our context unlike corporate security where's there's strict liability they have to prove we made a neglect statement. so we bro vide the training and -- provide the training and have controls and procedures so if something did slip through in our process, we can at least defend ourselves that we had taken every precaution to ensure that we weren't neglect but

nonetheless, something slipped through. and one of the purposes here is simply to address the informationalized symmetry between what we know as the keeper of all financial information and data and what investors need to know before making an informed investment decision. so what is immaterial? it's a likelihood the omitted fact would have assumed significance in the deliberations of a reasonable investor. we're talking about important information, significant information and so there is some space for forward looking

statements which are projections but it's material information we're looking for. so who's the sec has gone after? they've gone after good afternoonal governmental bodies and so far to date government officials or sfo, director of -- cfo, director of finance have been sanctioned. i would say one of the trend lines of the sec has been to sanction professionals financially with no in dem -- indemnity by the governing body and third parties, underwriters, financial advisors, lawyers, etcetera have been all subject

to sanctions but no individual members of the board have been sanctioned by the sec. so again, guidance for board members, potential liability from misleading statements when we access the market in a primary offering and then official statements and then communications likely to reach investors and make annual filings of financial information and operating data to the financial marketplace and those statements on an annual basis will be tested again the

releases and some will not reb viewed before they go out. in some ways the seminole and only guidance we got from the sec arises from the orange county bankruptcy in 1994. in that case the county of orange approved a number of short-term financings and failed to disclose they were dependent on investments from their pool and when they pool failed and they had to declare bankruptcy, they were subject it sanction by the sec. without getting too far into what types of financial products they're investing in, it's simply that they were accessing the market and were dependent on the pharmaceutical of the investment pool and and failed to disclose how risky the investment pool was and the inability of repaying if the

pool were to fail. so what the sec states with respect to the orange county, is that while they had knowledge of their dependence on the investment pool they took no steps to ensure when they approved official statements to access the capital markets that that information was accurate and that information was disclosed and mainly how they took they know no steps is they were approved on the consent calendar and they viewed it as a routine matter and delegated to the then treasurer, tax collector, so in any event let's

move on. the bright line rule is if you have information you know is misleading and can't approve a document or may you recklessly disregard information and not take steps to ensure it's included in an official statement. what is acting recklessly, if you have knowledge of facts and taking appropriate steps and we're taking steps including reading the document. such steps could have included asking staff and so here's a diagram of the official statement. the principle audience for the statement is the investor. so when you review an official statement or read the text put your shoes of an investor, would i need the information it clear and accurate based on what i know.

is the sfmta an official statement. we will come to you with a team of professionals to bring that to market it's the official statement to the text and understanding of your operation and financial information has to come from the sfmta and not outside professionals. and i think the answer and the key here is that by telling your complete information you'll get rewarded in the financial marketplace by getting viewed as a credit that people can rely on disclosures. you can rely on disclosures made and the market will reward you for providing good information by which they can make an

investment. so here's also what we kind of trained staff on. and here's -- i'll give you the big takeaway we advise staff to take care and be critical and if they're not ready, if they're not comfortable basically say so. if something doesn't make sense, say so. before a document comes to you it would have gone through six or seven iterations with that kind of as the underpinning. so s when we prepare financial statements is the agency has 20/20 hindsight. if we make submissions looking back they'll say that that was material and then observation two is when we have a debate whether to disclose we look at

observation one as our guide post. so real quick, the sfmta has controls and procedures on the website when we renew them we can go through them and they're simply a set of internal controls to guide decision making in the absence of when those decisions have to be made. theyal kate the competitive bidding standard and retention of professional and that type of thing is spelled out in the control and procedures so we're not making it up ad hoc. the reason we're doing the train in some ways it's a prophylactic so if we make an error in the future we can say we trained up and did the best we could. how do you discharge your responsibilities? you could read the official statement and then you're going to ask but can't i rely on staff

and the answer is yes, you can rely on staff if it's reasonable and in good faith. if you see red flags in an office document and you don't make queries, it's not reasonable to rely on staff but on the other hand if you're aware that staff has retained experienced professionals and has controls and procedures and has gone through a robust and diligent process presenting that document you can rely on staff. okay. real quick, so then we'll just and we'll come back -- how do you go back? the questions you should ask on any information statement is when it's before you is what's the purpose of the transaction and are there any unique risk associated with the transaction. do we have the wherewithal to pay it back and am i comfortable that everything i know is presented in the document and do

i have an questions for staff that hasn't been addressed and i'm not comfortable. with that we'll end there and then promise to come back when you have an actual transaction in front of you and then we can tie some of these up. >> excellent. >> if you have any questions. >> i think all of us have had this training before except for director eaken and that completes our 2019 training on this which is great and if we have bond offering we'll ask you back to give a refresher. directors are there any questions? okay, seeing none we'll move on to the closed session? >> item 14, yes, the discussion to invoke future and client privilege and conduct a closed session. >> very good. i will ask for a five-minute biobreak for the board as i hear

rumbling as needed and before you do that, i will entertain a motion to go into closed session. >> all those in favor, please say aye. opposed? okay. we'll be back in five minutes and i'll ask directors to use

. >> the san francisco carbon

fund was started in 2009. it's basically legislation that was passed by the board of supervisors and the mayor's office for the city of san francisco. they passed legislation that said okay, 13% of the cost of the city air travel is going to go into a fund and we're going to use the money in that fund to do local projects that are going to mitigate and sequester greenhouse gas emission. the grants that we're giving, they're anywhere from 15,000 to, say, $80,000 for a two year grant. i'm shawn rosenmoss. i'm the development of community partnerships and carbon fund for the san francisco department of environment. we have an advisory committee that meets once or twice a year to talk about, okay, what are we going to fund?

because we want to look at things like equity and innovative projects. >> i heard about the carbon fund because i used to work for the department of environment. i'm a school education team. my name is marcus major. i'm a founding member of climate action now. we started in 2011. our main goal it to remove carbon in the public right-of-way on sidewalks to build educational gardens that teach people with climate change. >> if it's a greening grant, 75% of the grant has to go for greening. it has to go for planting trees, it has to go for greening up the pavement, because again, this is about permanent carbon savings. >> the dinosaur vegetable gardens was chosen because the

garden was covered in is afault since 1932. it was the seed funding for this whole project. the whole garden,ible was about 84,000 square feet, and our project, we removed 3,126 square feet of cement. >> we usually issue a greening rft every other year, and that's for projects that are going to dig up pavement, plant trees, community garden, school garden. >> we were awarded $43,000 for this project. the produce that's grown here is consumed all right at large by the school community. in this garden we're growing all kinds of organic vegetables from lettuce, and artichokes. we'll be planting apples and loquats, all kinds of great fruit and veggies. >> the first project was the

dipatch biodiesel producing facility. the reason for that is a lot of people in san francisco have diesel cars that they were operating on biodiesel, and they were having to go over to berkeley. we kind of the dog batch preferentials in the difference between diesel and biodiesel. one of the gardens i love is the pomeroy rec center. >> pomeroy has its roots back to 1952. my name is david, and i'm the chamber and ceo of the pomeroy rehabilitation and recreation center. we were a center for people with intellectual and development cal disabilities in san francisco san francisco. we also have a program for individuals that have acquired

brain injury or traumatic brain injury, and we also have one of the larger after school programs for children with special needs that serves the public school system. the sf carbon fund for us has been the launching pad for an entire program here at the pomeroy center. we received about $15,000. the money was really designed to help us improve our garden by buying plants and material and also some infrastructure like a drip system for plants. we have wine barrels that we repurposed to collect rain water. we actually had removed over 1,000 square feet of concrete so that we could expand the garden. this is where our participants, they come to learn about gardening. they learn about our work in the greenhouse.

we have plants that we actually harvest, and eggs from our chickens that we take up and use in cooking classes so that our participants learn as much as anybody else where food comes from. we have two kitchens here at the pomeroy center. one is more of a commercial kitchen and one is more setup like a home kitchen would be, and in the home kitchen, we do a lot of cooking classes, how to make lasagna, how to comsome eggs, so this grant that we received has tremendous value, not only for our center, for our participants, but the entire community. >> the thing about climate, climate overlaps with everything, and so when we start looking at how we're going to solve climate programs, we solve a lot of other problems, too. this is a radical project, and to be a part of it has been a real honor and a privilege to

work with those administrators with the sf carbon fund at the department of environment. >> san francisco carbon grant to -- for us, opened the door to a new -- a new world that we didn't really have before; that the result is this beautiful garden. >> when you look at the community gardens we planted in schools and in neighborhoods, how many thousands of people now have a fabulous place to walk around and feel safe going outside and are growing their own food. that's a huge impact, and we're just going to keep rolling that out and keep rolling that

. good evening, everyone. thank you for being here tonight for our very first commission meeting of the year. it's usually the beginning of the year in our january meeting, to do more administrative items like reviewing and approving the budget, reviewing and approving the annual report, and nominations. what a year it was. we had two more meetings than normal. one was to report on the strategic communities we