agenda item for today's land use committee. each agency has a different set of criteria that they're looking for and also different protocols for, you know, enacting certain enforcement measures, whether that's a notice of correction, a notice of violation, a notice of violation with a citation, levying fees, et cetera. so just in closing i want to ensure the committee members and the public that by moving out of the emergency temporary version of the program and getting this to a codified program, it really opens up all these steps of progressive discipline back to the program, which we can use. of course, it's appropriate to ensure we see the compliance we need, especially again around things like accessibility. so, with that thank you for letting us address those questions from last week and

monica and i and our team can take questions. >> thank you so much. i understand that supervisor peskin has a number of amendments and wants to propose some concerns about different issues. i also have some amendments with disability access and those issues. so perhaps supervisor peskin, what we can do is you -- why don't you go ahead first and talk about your amendments and then i will talk about mine and then we can talk more, take public comment and you know, when we come back from public comment, we can go through the amendments and see if we can make a case. supervisor preston. >> yeah, just as a point of order, i'm happy to defer to

after. i have some clarifying questions, so i'm wondering if before we get to committee members proposed amendments, if i should wait for after. >> i think you should ask questions of clarification before proposed amendments. go ahead. >> thank you so much. thank you for the presentation and for the detailed responses that you provided between the last hearing and this hearing to the issues that we raised, which were really -- it was nice to receive direct responses to all my questions. i had a few clarifying questions. you mentioned the amendments

that interfere with transit and bike lanes. i wanted to get clarity around the existing permits or once they get issued and later there is a plan two years later to a bus lane or how do they propose to navigate those when the shared space is active? >> sure, a great question supervisor preston. i would summarize it in three different categories. first is location is a bus zone that we know when it will come back at some point, three months, or six months down the line we may issue a permit. as part of the permit, it's clear. we expect whatever it is. activate the space why you can't for the three or six months,

whatever it is. the second category is a blanket assessment of anything within 12 months is in our inventory of projects. so similar to public works, would check the list for paving, if there is a streetscape plan, and similarly deny or approve under temporary conditions. then i guess the third category is what happens when you're effectively mirroring the right of way and project that comes to be in the future, those are tricky. these are renewed every year so there is an opportunity to reassess for those types of things and just general language in the permit about flexibility around conditions that may arise, maybe more like a bike project or bus lane project, but

that's the reality. it's staying in both of those things as they arrive. does that answer your question? >> i think so, i think -- in the ordinance, it does lay out that there isn't a sort of right gain or any kind of, i don't know, legally we talked about invested right and i think to be clear for the public. we had this issue on bus lines that are suspended now and we have shared spaces activated in those sites. just to be clear, i think for everyone, it's the shared intention, certainly mine and i think from everything i seen in the ordinance and from your comments that nothing about getting one of these permits in any way preempts the change later for a transit purpose or in the same provision, the capitol purpose and emergency prepare and the right to align and that kind of thing. i think we're on the same page

if i have that right, correct? great, good. then, the other question, i think it's probably for you. you talked about enforcement. we talked about the enforcement mechanism. i'm curious what your thoughts are around evolution of the program. in other words, are the rules properly being followed? do those rules need to change or evolve? i had an interesting conversation with a number of stakeholders who really kind of objected to the framing of permanent shared spaces program. you know, they pointed out that there is absolutely no reason once we see how this goes, right, that we can't be making changes to regulations or changes to this ordinance. i don't see anything in the ordinance that sort of looks at the structure. i'm curious that maybe i'm

missing some aspects of it. let's just fast forward a year, amended or not amended and certain -- and we have certain things wrong. like we are hearing from disability rights advocates and others that there are aspects to the program, not about compliance, we just got some of the stuff wrong and we need to change it. is there a formal advisory body, or what is the process by which those kinds of changes would be reexamined at a certain point, suggested changes made to the program. do you have something in mind? is there something in that or do we cross that bridge when we get there? >> this is an excellent question supervisor preston because this is all about change management, the moment we're in now in history and the way we're looking at our streets and sidewalks, how we manage them as places and provide opportunity for communities to engage.

how do we get out of the pandemic version of this program and into a future improved version of it. you know, this program, i thought about it over the last week, we are in a different phase of place making in san francisco. this is something we experimented with and tested and iterated over a decade. so, this is not the first time this particular ordinance has come before this board. it's being amended today. it was passed several years ago by your predecessors on the board. so, i don't see why, you know, overtime the city will continue in its self reflection and figuring out how to optimize this and turn it to, you know, finely tune it to the policy imperatives of the day, the operational needs, why that wouldn't happen in the future. i also wanted to underscore the importance of our departments having regulatory documents that

department heads and you know, those administering and delivering these permits can fine tune overtime. our parklet regulatory document, which is maintained by the department of public works, because they're the permitting agency for interventions in the curbside. we revised those regs at least half a dozen time in the last seven years. we learned what works better, we get more information as the population gets larger and we have more experience as a city with this experimentation. i think that's the most ready way supervisor to ensure we are staying optimal and we're really staying aligned and nimble. it's through the department issued regulatory documents. now of course some things do belong in code and legislation, positively affirming our commitment to accessibility and

other things, but i think the regs is where we get into those details about this bike lane, that bike lane, these conditions or that condition. final thought on your question, i don't know if there is a body, per se, although this planning, public works, entertainment commission, m.t.a., others have been running a version of this program for the last 10 years. i think that's where a lot of the expertise has lived and where a lot of the, you know, the change management is tracked and implemented. >> thank you. so, i think that one concept that i would like to put out there. i'll refrain from other comments because i know that my colleagues will be talking about their amendments. they will address some of the more specific issues that i raised in the prior hearing.

i did want us to think about whether we should have an advisory body and it wouldn't stop us from moving forward with the program. it would be just running parallel. i think there's been a good job of doing outreach to certain stakeholders and what we seen in the last couple of weeks are there are other stakeholders who felt more excluded from the process. i think it would be good to formalize some sort of process where this interagency core team and team of various stakeholders was part of an advisory body that by some point, perhaps end of 2022 or something, once we see this -- assuming this passes in some form, that somebody is looking at all the different

regs that are promulgated in the different agency from the perspective of neighbors, of disability rights advocates, of senior advocates, of transit advocates, of small business advocates, of the different departments. i think we can work out the details on who sits on that, but i think it will be really helpful and alleviate some of the concerns from folks who haven't felt as included in this kind of yearlong experiment in a lot of ways of things moving quickly by necessity. to view it as a recovery period where we get a program off the ground, but there is also a point in time where these stakeholders are maing suggestions on how the program will evolve. i want to put that program out there and thank you chair melgar, i look forward to

listening to the amendments. >> thank you supervisor preston. supervisor peskin? >> thank you madam chair. so much to say. let me cut to the quick and even though there have been unnecessary tension between my office and thank you again supervisor preston for shouting out the gentleman who has done the heavy lifting in our office, and by the way, we have attempted to collaborate with the mayor's office, which had really had a my way or the highway attitude, but the good news is and this is just submitted as part of the official file.

when the rubber hit the road, the responses from deputy mayor, and this is part of the official file, were okay. so let me just go down the list. again, i think that they're workable, they're sensible, this is an emerging an ever changing area of public policy and we need tweaks overtime. i think one of the biggest things that we can offer here as a small business community is a longer run way and moratorium on fees. to that end, we should extend the existing program, even further out than the december 31, 2021, which is not codified in the mayor's legislation to at least july 1st of 2022. the city should not be imposing certain fines and fees that will be prohibited for many small

businesses until at least 2023. we have been through hopefully a once in a lifetime dark period. we have a moral imperative to elevate disability access and i'm proposing language along those lines following discussions and the disability council to address those matters equitaby and sensibly and the city really needs to step up and share the responsibility to maintain the cleanliness of these structures in the public right of way. i'm talking about hazardous waste, which comes in any number of forms. the city needs to be clear about what those investments will mean relative to impacts on our current street sweeping and cleaning regimen. i think the city should be

assessing impacts to small businesses that have not been able to avail themselves of the benefit of shared spaces, either because they haven't had the capital to invest, or because their businesses like the laundromats and the hardware stores or grocery stores that are not well suited to the program actually rely on a vehicle access point. that is expressed by coal hardware and my local dry cleaner on grant avenue. some folks have seen the beginnings of a new orleans outdoors dining scene, i think we're moving in that direction.

i remember when they changed the law to allow the provision of sidewalk cables. the city really needs to go a step further and look past these boxes on the street. look at something that is more sustainable overtime and i'm talking about widening sidewalks, particularly at key sites. there are several in my district. 500 block of green, 1300 block of grant avenue. that was an idea that was reiterated by livable city and many other organizations. this is not an expensetive -- expensive one. the design of the spaces could be elevated overtime.

part of the conversation i had was that given there really is no emergency and possession is 9/10 of the law and no one is about to fall off the cliff, these design guidelines can be promulgated now. in the district that has the highest concentration of shared spaces anywhere in the city, which i'm very proud of, the russian hill neighbors and the north beach neighbors. neighborhood patterns and architecture.

we can evolve it with a light touch and direction. the only urgency we have now is allowing small businesses in our neighborhood the opportunity to recover from one of the most unique and darkest times in our history. i think we can integrate this program into our long-term vision for our city in the weeks ahead. if you think of the conversations we had over candidates that took many months and mr. power wanted us to be one and done in the committee hearing, i think we got it right on cannabis and i want to get it right on this. there are a number of issues i like to address head on, but one is the public access issue.

this really is not a zero sum game. language i circulated to you all and is available to the public, attempts to arrive at a compromise, despite the mayor's my way or the highway behavior. i think that we as the legislative branch of government have an imperative to balance the needs of businesses who are relying on shared spaces for recovery, but we also have to balance that with the other needs, the need for safety and cleanliness. businesses should not be provided broad discretion to exclude members of the public when they're not using them to conduct business. that right there is the compromise. i also don't think that an empty shell of a shared space is accessible to the public absent

some sort of arrangement. i don't think they should be boarded up during non-business hours. if you want to talk about shared spaces, this is the public realm. this is land owned by the people of the city and county of san francisco. some of this will reach some equilibrium overtime, by virtue of who seeks to use spaces for commercial use, who wants to go back indoors, versus those who are into maintaining a space for purely public access. a coffee shop is going to look differently than a retailer that wants to put out merchandise. once we all collect fees.

there are those fully open to the public. again, the compromise i'm trying to reach would allow small businesses to use them for commercial purposes during their hours of operation, and also ensure that they're publicly accessible. i saw the chart with the big planning in the middle and i respectfully submit that this does not belong in the realm of the planning department. i think this is actually one of the places where mr. power in his memo that is now part of the public record in my office disagree. it's really an important point. this colleague in my opinion

does not belong at the planning department. this is not a planning issue. i understand the respect that when he was a member of the planning department, started an earlier iteration of parklets, but this really belongs in the realm of public works, which has for a century, century really been the overseer of the public rights employee of the city and county of san francisco and possesses the history of custom toad -- custodians of the right of way. i asked whether they were proposing more staff. we know there is a huge backlog of conditional use authorization and major project permits and they were not proposing additional staff planning.

in addition to that, it creates redundancies in the process that will create delays, which will create enforcing standards, conflicting design standards, coordinating functions, and really as i said earlier, deprive planning of much needed staff to address their backlog of permits. so, for an administration that is so allegedly devout to streamlining, planning's role in this is redundant and my amendments provide that public works should provide the core goal and consult with planning where it makes it most sense. on the same note, i support the elimination of the undefined concept of coordinating agen ags set forth in the legislation, which was redundant of the agency and i support elimination of shared spaces agreements, which are entirely unnecessary

given that there are apartments with conditions, so there is no need for shared spaces agreements. and lastly because it came up earlier in this agenda when we were talking about repaving during item number one, which seems like 10 years ago. we must be entirely transparent that there will be tension between streetscape projects and shared spaces. we can't mitigate they by providing more awareness to businesses of impending projects and my amends, that i'm proposing today would require a study right out of the gate for how many of those and he spoke to this, have to go away simply because they do not comply with the vision zero and transit

first and our existing policy. it will be done a couple of weeks and we had the meeting a couple weeks ago and that became a few months. at any rate, we need to figure that out pronto. we need to mitigate that tension by providing a longer heads up and better notice to small businesses before the city tells them they need to rip something out. it's not like you can pick these things up and we repave your street. so they invested thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars in them. in closing, let me say this. i always supported shared spaces. i was out there about a year ago almost to the day procuring barricades from public works,

and the police department, and putting them out with small businesses in north beach, on the two blocks that i mentioned earlier, in front of the cafe tree on the 500 block of green, which trent text me yesterday. i'm proud to sign on as the co-sponsor with the sensible, reasonable amendments. as a long time champion of parking minimum policies, i think i was the supervisor along with chris, former commissioner melgar to reduce the number of on site parking spots in new residential developments, as well as reducing parking citywide. i believe that reinventing these

public spaces is great public policy. having said that, there was a bit to be desired in the mayor's first draft of this permanent legislation. our collective job as policymakers is to take feedback from the public and from under represented communities and craft policies that will address those concerns and make our streets better and more livable. i think the amendments that i circulated and am proposing today are a stab at improving this legislation that i would like to be listed as a co-sponsor on and i look forward to creating a permanent program that will transform our shared public landscape to truly shared spaces for better. i want to thank the north beach business association, these are

the folks in my corner of the world that i listen to and work with, north beach neighbors, san francisco locally owned merchant alliance, livable city, and the planning coalition and my staff, thank you supervisor peskin for acknowledging him and supervisor melgar, i look forward to and was trying to read the amendments that you just circulated and i think we are all rowing in the same direction. with that, thank you for your indulgence and i turn it back over to you madam chair. >> thank you so much supervisor peskin. i do -- i will say to begin with that i do like most of your amendments, not all. i do respectfully disagree with a couple and i hope we can have a robust conversation about them. [please stand by]