Skip to main content

tv   Government Access Programming  SFGTV  March 12, 2019 5:00pm-6:01pm PDT

5:00 pm
colleagues, i hope that you will join me support of this resolution and the open to all campaign so that san francisco can send a message of acceptance and inclusion and safety to the rest of the country. >> president yee: supervisor fewer. >> supervisor fewer: please add me as a co hea-sponsor. thank you. >> president yee: okay. the house has changed, supervisors just left the room. can i take this item, same house, same call? without any objection, this item passes unanimously. madam clerk, let's go back to item 25 which is scheduled pursuant to motion number m m-19-015 approved - approve arkd
5:01 pm
on january 29th, 2019. >> clerk: item 25 is closed session for the board of supervisors to convene today with the mayor's office and the department of human resources with labor negotiations with labor unions representing city employees. >> president yee: colleagues, public comment has been taken for item 25 during general public comment. so we will now convene in closed session. members of the public, we ask that you exit the chamber and to lock the doors behind them. we will reopen the chamber once we finish with the closed session and the public will be allowed to re-enter. okay?
5:02 pm
5:03 pm
5:04 pm
5:05 pm
5:06 pm
5:07 pm
5:08 pm
5:09 pm
5:10 pm
5:11 pm
5:12 pm
5:13 pm
5:14 pm
5:15 pm
5:16 pm
5:17 pm
5:18 pm
5:19 pm
5:20 pm
5:21 pm
5:22 pm
5:23 pm
5:24 pm
5:25 pm
5:26 pm
5:27 pm
5:28 pm
5:29 pm
5:30 pm
5:31 pm
5:32 pm
5:33 pm
5:34 pm
5:35 pm
5:36 pm
5:37 pm
5:38 pm
5:39 pm
5:40 pm
5:41 pm
>> we are now back in open session. may i have a motion that the board finds that it is in the best interest of the public that the board elect not to disclose the closed session deliberations. the motion moved by supervisor brown and seconded by supervisor fewer. >> we need a roll call. please.
5:42 pm
[ roll call ] >> there are nine ayes. we will not discuss our closed session deliberations. madam clerk, please read the memoriam. >> for the record, mr. president, no actions were taken during the closed session. >> today's meeting will be adjourned in memory on behalf of supervisor brown for the late 64-year-old senior male who being homeless, was found passed away at corner of heys.
5:43 pm
on behalf of supervisor mainly y and for supervisor mandelman angus jay white and supervisor prespeskin cath lynn. >> that is the end of our agenda. is there any other further business before us today? >> that concludes our business for today. >> thank you, we are adjourned.
5:44 pm
>> i lived in the mission neighborhood for seven years and before that the excel see your district. 20 years a resident of the city and county of san francisco.
5:45 pm
i am the executive director of a local art space nonprofit that showcases work that relate to the latino community and i have been in this building for seven years and some of my neighbors have been here 30 year. we were notified from the landlord he was going to sell the building. when we realized it was happening it was no longer a thought for the landlord and i sort of had a moment of panic. i heard about the small sites program through my work with the mission economic agency and at met with folks from the mayor's housing program because they wanted to utilize the program. we are dealing with families with different needs and
5:46 pm
capacities. conversations were had early in the morning because that is the only time that all the tenants were in the building and finally when we realized that meda did have the resources to buy the building we went on a letter writing campaign to the landlord and said to him we understand you want to sell your building, we understand what you are asking for and you are entitled to it, it's your land, but please work with us. what i love about ber nell height it represents the diversity that made me fall in love with san francisco. we have a lot of mom and pop shops and you can get all your resources within walking distance. my favorite air area of my homes my little small patio where i
5:47 pm
can start my morning and have my coffee an is a sweet spot for me and i >> growing up in san francisco has been way safer than growing up other places we we have that bubble, and it's still that bubble that it's okay to be whatever you want to.
5:48 pm
you can let your free flag fry he -- fly here. as an adult with autism, i'm here to challenge people's idea of what autism is. my journey is not everyone's journey because every autistic child is different, but there's hope. my background has heavy roots in the bay area. i was born in san diego and adopted out to san francisco when i was about 17 years old. i bounced around a little bit here in high school, but i've always been here in the bay. we are an inclusive preschool, which means that we cater to
5:49 pm
emp. we don't turn anyone away. we take every child regardless of race, creed, religious or ability. the most common thing i hear in my adult life is oh, you don't seem like you have autism. you seem so normal. yeah. that's 26 years of really, really, really hard work and i think thises that i still do. i was one of the first open adoptions for an lgbt couple. they split up when i was about four. one of them is partnered, and one of them is not, and then my biological mother, who is also a lesbian. very queer family. growing up in the 90's with a queer family was odd, i had the bubble to protect me, and here, i felt safe. i was bullied relatively infrequently. but i never really felt isolated or alone. i have known for virtually my
5:50 pm
entire life i was not suspended, but kindly asked to not ever bring it up again in first grade, my desire to have a sex change. the school that i went to really had no idea how to handle one. one of my parents is a little bit gender nonconforming, so they know what it's about, but my parents wanted my life to be safe. when i have all the neurological issues to manage, that was just one more to add to it. i was a weird kid. i had my core group of, like, very tight, like, three friends. when we look at autism, we characterize it by, like, lack of eye contact, what i do now is when i'm looking away from the camera, it's for my own comfort. faces are confusing. it's a lack of mirror neurons in your brain working properly to allow you to experience
5:51 pm
empathy, to realize where somebody is coming from, or to realize that body language means that. at its core, autism is a social disorder, it's a neurological disorder that people are born with, and it's a big, big spectrum. it wasn't until i was a teenager that i heard autism in relation to myself, and i rejected it. i was very loud, i took up a lot of space, and it was because mostly taking up space let everybody else know where i existed in the world. i didn't like to talk to people really, and then, when i did, i overshared. i was very difficult to be around. but the friends that i have are very close. i click with our atypical kiddos than other people do. in experience, i remember when i was five years old and not
5:52 pm
wanting people to touch me because it hurt. i remember throwing chairs because i could not regulate my own emotions, and it did not mean that i was a bad kid, it meant that i couldn't cope. i grew up in a family of behavioral psychologists, and i got development cal -- developmental psychology from all sides. i recognize that my experience is just a very small picture of that, and not everybody's in a position to have a family that's as supportive, but there's also a community that's incredible helpful and wonderful and open and there for you in your moments of need. it was like two or three years of conversations before i was like you know what? i'm just going to do this, and i went out and got my prescription for hormones and started transitioning medically, even though i had already been living as a male. i have a two-year-old. the person who i'm now married
5:53 pm
to is my husband for about two years, and then started gaining weight and wasn't sure, so i we went and talked with the doctor at my clinic, and he said well, testosterone is basically birth control, so there's no way you can be pregnant. i found out i was pregnant at 6.5 months. my whole mission is to kind of normalize adults like me. i think i've finally found my calling in early intervention, which is here, kind of what we do. i think the access to irrelevant care for parents is intentionally confusing. when i did the procespective search for autism for my own child, it was confusing. we have a place where children can be children, but it's very
5:54 pm
confusing. i always out myself as an adult with autism. i think it's helpful when you know where can your child go. how i'm choosing to help is to give children that would normally not be allowed to have children in the same respect, kids that have three times as much work to do as their peers or kids who do odd things, like, beach therapy. how do -- speech therapy. how do you explain that to the rest of their class? i want that to be a normal experience. i was working on a certificate and kind of getting think early childhood credits brefore i started working here, and we did a section on transgender inclusion, inclusion, which is a big issue here in san francisco because we attract lots of queer families, and the teacher approached me and said i don't really feel comfortable or qualified to talk about this from, like, a cisgendered
5:55 pm
straight person's perspective, would you mind talking a little bit with your own experience, and i'm like absolutely. so i'm now one of the guest speakers in that particular class at city college. i love growing up here. i love what san francisco represents. the idea of leaving has never occurred to me. but it's a place that i need to fight for to bring it back to what it used to be, to allow all of those little kids that come from really unsafe environments to move somewhere safe. what i've done with my life is work to make all of those situations better, to bring a little bit of light to all those kind of issues that we're still having, hoping to expand into a little bit more of a resource center, and this resource center would be more those new parents who have gotten that diagnosis, and we want to be this one centralized place that allows parents to breathe for a second. i would love to empower from the bottom up, from the kid level, and from the top down, from the teacher level.
5:56 pm
so many things that i would love to do that are all about changing people's minds about certain chunts, like the transgender community or the autistic community. i would like my daughter to know there's no wrong way to go through life. everybody experiences pain and grief and sadness, and that all of those things are temporary.
5:57 pm
>> the teams really, really went above and beyond and is continuing to do that today. this past year, the san francisco public utilities commission water quality division started receiving many more requests to test for lead in the public school system here in san francisco as a result of legislation that had passed from the state requiring all of the public schools to do lead testing. and so as a result, the public utilities commission and the water quality team in particular was asked to meet with the san francisco unified school district to begin to prioritize which schools to test to meet that state mandate. >> the team that tests, we're a full service environmental laboratory, and we take care of
5:58 pm
both the needs of the water quality division and the waste water enter price. and on the water quality enterprise, we have to also have drinking water that meets all federal and state quality regulations. and lead in schools, we're playing a problem in remediating this problem of lead in schools. >> our role here in communications is being able to take the data that we have that we know is protective of public health and safety and transmit it, give it to the public in a way they understand we are really doing our jobs well and making sure that they are safe always. >> the public learned very quickly all the accurate facts and all the critical information that they needed to know, and it's up to these individuals and their agencies and their commitment to the city. >> i enjoy the work because i can help people, and i can help the utilities to provide a better water quality, make sure
5:59 pm
that people feel that drinking hetch hetchy water is actually a pride. >> hats off to the water quality team because between them working on late nights, working on the weekends when the schools are closed, and working as a partner in the school district for the times they found a higher lead sample, they worked through to address that, so the team went above and beyond and is continuing to do that today.
6:00 pm
>> president yee: good morning, welcome to the march 12, 2019 meeting. madam clerk, please call roll. [roll taken]