implemented before december 2023. we do also need to examine other risks to be -- examine, practice, and test other risks, as well, not just fuel dependency. as i indicated before, fuel resilience has been a very strong topic of conversation and focus for the city, and so it is the case that we have tested it on previous exercises, and we do need to focus on other recommendations, as well. recommendation 16 is not practical to be implemented. the fuel plan is intended to

serve as an internal working document for a group that posted guide on how fuel will be managed, who will collect the information regarding fuel levels at the time of an incident and that are operational factors. the fuel plan and other corresponding documents that outline the city resilience measures, we do plan on implementing that by december 202, but that disclosure of private information would not be advisable. okay. can you see me now? those are the three matters that we do not feel it necessarily feasible or advisable to agree, but we agree that we can and should continue to find ways to

address the under lying concerns in the recommendation. >> supervisor chan: if i may jump in, i really appreciate the presentation and also am really thankful to the civil grand jury's work on this. it really highlights the need for the [indiscernible] to move beyond fuel resilience, and i think the goal ultimately is what we all actually agree on, and i think that what the civil grand jury report has really highlighted, it's more like the current state of the city. like if the kbaster were to -- disaster were to happen today, like, what would be the impact

at this moment? so i think the question i really have for the administration and deputy city administrator johnston, since you're really representing everybody, i think also what the question is, you know, knowing that we're forming the fuel working group, knowing that there's the fuel working plan, which as it currently stands, we don't have one, and i think that's ultimately what the civil grand jury report is what i learned, and to understand that, you know, there's a lot of work that needs to be done, both as it currently exists, how do we develop fuel resilience as well as how do we move towards less of a dependence on fuel so that, again, in the case of

disaster, we can -- what will this group and this plan to also consider moving us away from fuel dependence? >> thank you for those questions. they're very important questions, and i agree there's much more work to be done and much more work that can be done, and i'm happy to outline some of those. we did include those in the response, but, you know, the fuel working group is going to have quite an undertaking, you know, over the next year, 1.5 years, and it has been a challenge to try and, you know,

consider investment in future technologies that don't exist yet and where we are pivoting to less dependence on fuel. if it would help, what i can do, at some point -- so the fuel working group's work plans will include hitting each and every one of the recommendations that we agree, and the remaining six recommendations toward fuel resiliency, supply chain dependency. we are moving towards purchasing the additional fuel truck tanker, so we are moving towards fortifying our supply

chain. when the fuel working plan is published, i'm happy to share that with you, and the fuel working group's plan. i don't like having meetings for meeting's sake or having conversations for conversation's sake. city administrator chu is very committed to this, so any sort of transparency that i can offer, i'm happy to provide. >> supervisor chan: that's great. that's great to hear. i think what we learned from

the continuity report as well as this specific grand jury report, really, there is a concern about timeline, commitment to timeline and commitment to implementation. i would love to, today, just to see some of the recommendations provided, the working group that will be implemented in the next 60 days or some plan that would be published in december 2022 or 2023. with that, i'm hoping that we could continue this hearing to the call of the chair, and that we could schedule a time for -- really, for you to come back

once the composition of the working group once the civil grand jury has reviewed and made recommendations. i would like to ask san francisco court to really part of that, as well as like to see both the state and federal agencies such as -- because within our jurisdiction, that they do as presidio, and really, it's basically the golden gate park or golden gate national recreation areas. i think they're partners in really talking about storage and where things can be located and in partnership to react and provide support during a disaster. so i am ready, chair preston, to also make some comments specific to the findings for a

response, but i defer to you and supervisor mandelman for additional commenting and questioning. >> chair preston: thank you, vice chair chan, and i think i'd like to go to public comment, if that's okay, before you go ahead and make your proposed amendments. and seeing no one else on the roster to comment, mr. clerk, let's open these two items up for public comment. >> clerk: for those who are watching our meeting on cable channel 26 or via streaming link or through sfgovtv.org or elsewhere, if you wish to speak on this item, dial in now.

dial 415-655-0001, enter 2484-263-4825. press pound twice, and then star, three to enter the queue to speak. just delaying for a minute so i can converse with the technology desk. mr. chair, we have no public comment on these items. >> chair preston: thank you. public comment on these items is now closed, and i'll turn it back over to vice chair chan. >> supervisor chan: thank you, chair preston. so i think with the presentation, deputy city administrator johnston's presentation has shown that there are various recommendations that the city is required to response, and we

can see fuel resiliency to develop in the case of an emergency. so we partially disagree with its find beings. and i also want to -- its findings. i want to say, we apparently partially disagree because we cannot partially agree. we agree we need more resources for this work, but as we all know, the board of supervisors, as the legislative branch of our city government, have no executive power in directing city departments and collectively, as a body, the board has limited role in the budget process compared to the mayoral administration. so i propose to amend the recommendation 3 as follows [indiscernible] including

improved fuel resilience, however, findings, agency sponsorship, and dedicating staff and budget fall outside the boards purview. recommendation 4 [indiscernible] as i mentioned earlier, in the middle of a climate crisis, we really need to prioritize reducing the city's dependency on fossil fuel, and i really think that the civil grand jury agree, as

well. i propose to amend the resolution to state, partially disagree with finding number four for reasons as follows. the covid pandemic has only prioritized the plan to provide fuel resilience by decreasing the city's dependence on fossil fuels. finding 18, [indiscernible] indicates that the city is not prioritizing fuel resilience to other aspects of lifeline resilience. in this case, we partially

disagree. while inclusion on the city's capital plans can be an indicator of the city's priorities, for infrastructure developments, improved fuel resilience can also be achieved by reducing the city's dependency on fossil fuels, as we have talked about earlier, so this effort is not necessarily being included on the capital plans. it is really our goal to move away, again, from fossil fuel dependence, so the resolution would be to partially disagree with finding 18 as follows. improved fuel resilience can also be achieved by reducing the city's dependency on fossil fuels, efforts which would not be included in the capital plan.

for finding 19, progress on fuel resilience has been impeded by lack of a dedicated reliable funding source. i think we all agree, including from the mayor's office and administration, without a dedicated investment of resources, including both staffing and funding, limited progress can't be made on any item, including fuel resilience. so i propose to amend the recommendation 19 as follows: without dedicated staffing and funding, no resilience progress can be made.

to be honest, this recommendation presents a lot of concerns. firstly, like board supervisors really have limited jurisdiction over the capital plan and what items are included. now in the larger context, the board of supervisors certainly has weighed in on the plant as well as potential uses, not only in that site but in district 10 in general. we have a long history in that city, even before my time as a legislative aid for district 10

supervisor sophie maxwell. with that said, we strongly believe that southeast treatment plant is highly unlikely at all an appropriate location, given the community's long fought efforts to remove these types of industrial and potential polluting uses from the district, like, the sewage plant and the power plant, most definitely the power plant, so we disagree with this recommendation. we also recognize that, as the city administrator's office and working group study alternate sites, which i hope to see them again and another report. i hope they would consider a accumulative environmental impact on the vulnerable communities when they make the plan, definitely in consideration of the underserved communities, like

the southeast sector of our city, we do agree with the mayor's consolidated response that this 'em aration requires further analysis. so i know it's going to be in six months, so we look forward to it. recommendation 17, i'm just going to read off in terms of the language that, you know, we

do not necessarily disagree with the recommendation, but again, the board of supervisors lacks jurisdiction over the project within the city's capital plan. so i propose to amend the resolution to state will not be implemented as it is not within the purview of the board of supervisors due to our lack of jurisdiction over projects within the city's capital plan. recommendation 18, we're almost there, colleagues. again, in the recommendation 18, we do agree that fuel resilience does not need funding in order to be adequately addressed. however, as indicated earlier, the board just lacks that direct jurisdiction as a legislative body over projects and within the city's capital plan. so i propose to amend the resolution to state will not be

implemented as it is not within the purview of the board supervisors due to our agency's lack of jurisdiction or funding mechanism within the city's capital plan. so here we are, and i'm ready to make a motion, and if i could get the chair back onto help us to move it. i would like to continue this hearing to the call of the chair so we can continue to follow up on the recommendations, and should we make two -- like, should we make, like, two separate motions? >> chair preston: sure. mr. clerk, call the roll on the motions. >> clerk: on the motion made by supervisor chan, that the hearing should be continued to the call of the chair -- [roll call]

>> clerk: mr. chair, there are three ayes on the motion. >> chair preston: thank you. and vice chair chan, would you like to make an amendment on the resolution? >> supervisor chan: yes. i would like to make a motion to amend the resolution as read into the record earlier. >> chair preston: thank you. roll call vote. >> clerk: on the motion to amend the resolution as read into the record -- [roll call] >> clerk: mr. chair, there are three ayes. >> chair preston: thank you. the motion passes, and vice chair chan, would you like to make a motion on the amended item? >> supervisor chan: yes. i would like to move to move move

-- to recommend the item as amended as a committee report. >> clerk: on the motion to recommend the item as amended as a committee report to be heard october 5, 2021 -- [roll call] >> clerk: mr. chair, there are three ayes once again. >> chair preston: thank you, mr. clerk. the motion passes, and thank you, supervisor chan, for all of your work on this report, and thank you, deputy city administrator johnston and thank you for the work by the grand jury. appreciate it, and let's go ahead, mr. clerk, and call items 8 and 9 together. >> clerk: agenda item number 8 is a hearing on the 2020-2021 civil gage jury report,

entitled, van ness avenue: what lies we weather. and item 9 is a resolution responding to the presiding judge of the superior court on the findings and recommendations contained in that report, and urging the mayor to cause the implementation of accepted findings and recommendations through your department heads and through the development of the annual budget. as always, members of the public who wish to make public comment on this item by call 415-655-0001, and entering meeting i.d. 2484-263-4825, then press pound twice and star, three if you wish to speak. and as before, this item will

be referred to the full board as a committee report for consideration on october 5. >> chair preston: thank you. and i'd like to thank supervisor mandelman for his deep dive into this report, and will turn the floor over to supervisor mandelman. >> supervisor mandelman: thank you, chair preston, and i want to begin my extending my thanks to the members of the civil grand jury. i especially want to thank the foreperson, who somehow found time to do work on these grand jury reports while saving all of us from covid as part of the city's emergency response, so extraordinarily lucky to have ellie shaffer in our city and fortunate to have the grand jury tackle a problem which has come to symbolize a problem

that the city once knew how -- some of the challenges around capital delivery, and i think it undermines confidence in city government, and of course in our ability to get good projects done, but really beyond that. so this is a very important grand jury report, but it is also complicated for our consideration in that conflict with the contractor's on going, and as i look at some of the responses that have been prepared by other departments -- and i look forward to hearing from them today -- and as i think about our engagement with the findings, recommendations, and the city's responses, it seems to me that we would benefit from considering this further, in closed session, if possible, as we think about how much we can talk about and should be talking about publicly.

i would like for us to truly be able to wrestle and grapple with what the grand jury has given to us, as well as the city, as well. i propose that we go forward with the hearing today, hear what the grand jury has recommended, and then i'm going to ask to continue this a week, and the city attorney to look and see if we can have a closed session on it, and that we continue to work in my office with the items that we need to grapple with, items that don't require any future legislation. i also have a hard stop time of

1:00, so i'm hoping we can get our presentations done before then. >> chair preston: thank you, supervisor mandelman. we are joined by a member of the civil grand jury, who will present on this item, and you have up to ten minutes, after which we will hear from m.t.a. >> great, thank you. i was having a little trouble with my audio before, so i am joining on two devices. i'm going to present from one device but speak from another, so let me know if there are any problems with that. one moment while i start presenting. can you see my screen? >> supervisor mandelman: we actually -- i cannot. >> clerk: it's on its way. it doesn't appear yet to push the first slide forward. >> okay.

let me try one more time. all right. looks like you can see it. as supervisor mandelman said, this was a very challenging report for the grand jury to grapple and understand along many of the complicates surrounding this, so i'll do my best to summarize is in ten minutes, which i don't think gives justice to the report. kind of an executive summary to this report, the van ness project, as mandelman [inaudible] in particular, we think a lot of the planning design processes fail to capture the scope of the project adequately, and this project was designed, starting in 2004, when voters passed the

proposition to fund it, all the way to 2016, when this project started. we think contracting processes failed to install accountability with the contractor and the ability of the city to hold its contractor accountable, and we think that on going management failed to monitor problems as they came up and really hold the contractor accountable. we think a lot of these opportunities happened before ground breaking, but we think a lot of these have been mitigated during this project. the m.t.a. says most of the problems were because there was unforeseen problems with the underground utilities, and we agree, but there were ways that

that could have been mitigated and dealt with beforehand. the current cost projected is $346 total? that has exhausted the contingency and gone over the original estimate by 23%, and the original estimate for construction was between october 2016 and october 2019, which it is now extending past 5.5 years, with early passenger transit scheduled to begin in early 2022. i think the key thing here is that a lot of setbacks were avoidable. they could have been mitigated very early on, and in particular, the potential impact was known to be high

risk, that it was only -- on the official risk register, it was only assigned a moderate risk, and no mitigation strategy besides contingency funds. we found multiple ways by which the underground utilities were not accurate, and just walking on the street seeing a manhole that was not a utility mapped could have mitigated some of the problems early on in the construction. the evaluation rubrick for this problem weighted cost too heavily, so what happened was the contractor who won the bid or won lower -- fewer technical expertise points, but they won the overall contract, and we found that that caused problems down the road.

we also found that the effectiveness of the cmgc contract was greatly reduced because the contractor was brought into the design process too late. we found that typically projects of this size, they need the contractor to come in early to help inform the design, and that did not happen in this project. and finally, you know, the removal of synergy, the underground contractor during the construction phase, caused a lot of the problems with the deteriorationship of the relationship between walsh and the city and some of the litigation that happened afterwards. in our recommendations, they're important. we think that capital project feasibility plans, and for this project in particular, there should be an itemized assessment with regards to the risks and costs with the specific measures that will be undertaken to mitigate those.

the feasibility study did not include some, and so that's one of these things that we really want to see happen. we [indiscernible] think -- that this is recommendation four here, that the board of supervisors should direct the city departments to adopt the policy that all projects on the main corridors include some sort of underground exploratory work, like potholing. a lot of these other recommendations that we have are around the cmgc management and the project management. we want to emphasize that, yes, the contractor does bear some

responsibility for not doing some of their responsibilities as established in the contract. for example, recommendation eight, we don't think that the contractor was prepared for construction. however, we want to emphasize with our report that the m.t.a. was the project owner of this project, and so even though the contractor does bear some responsibility, it was the m.t.a.s responsibility to hold them accountable and that just did not happen in many cases. and then, some other key recommendations here is we want to see -- we want to see, with public communications from the m.t.a., what actually happened to mitigate risks in certain circumstances, and this is recommendation 10 here, that we would like any disruption of services or right-of-way should

include project assessments to the risk when we have three years of project delays that weren't accounted for. we strongly, strongly recommend that the board of supervisors continue and implement recommendation 7 by removing the mandatory cost criterion. we think it's wrong to include the mandatory cost criterion here because that's when you want contractors with the most

experience. some of the department's responses are not compliant with the california penal code, so we would urge the board of supervisors if you choose one of these types of responses that you need to include a time frame in the response for it to be compliant. and then, i would like to emphasize again that, you know, the m.t.a. and contractor shares some responsibility for the delays, but the m.t.a. ultimately was responsible for holding the contractor accountable. we think the mantra of departments that do oversee construction should be the buck stops here, that the m.t.a. or whatever city department actually works to resolve those problems acknowledges ultimate responsibility for these problems, and we think some of the responses do not reflect that.

and finally, in particular, recommendation 11, which the mayor and m.t.a.s response says has been implemented, we were a little baffled by this response because there was a contract modification precisely over the pedestrian monitors that recommendation 11 speaks to, so it seems to me if pedestrian monitors were covered in the existing contract, then contract modification 12 would not be needed, so we'd like to see more specification for recommendation 11 here, because we don't think that's accurate. so that's kind of an overview of the findings and recommendations on this project. thank you very much. >> chair preston: thank you, and up next, we have tom mcguire, director of sfmta's streets division. mr. mcguire, the floor is

yours. >> good morning, supervisors, tom mcguire, director of streets for the sfmta, where among other things, i do oversee our capital projects and construction team, and thank you for -- thank you, kathleen, or whoever's running the slides. i'm going to give a quick overview of our response and more importantly some of the other going things that we're doing to improve project delivery at the sfmta, and obviously want to thank the civil grand jury. thank you for taking the time to talk about this, something that's really important to us. we know that we're not where we need to be. we know that there are some major capital projects in the city from which we have to draw some pretty hard and serious lessons. this hearing and this report is part of that learning, including the collaborative

response that we got from our fellow partners, public works and p.u.c. in responding to this. so we welcome the feedback, and even though -- in the written response you got from us, you'll see us agreeing and disagrees. you can't -- disagreeing. you can't say partially agree, but more broadly, our response is that the m.t.a. needs to build a culture of continuous improvement and learn about project delivery issues that we have, and ultimately, we are responsible for delays on the

project. next slide, please. so the l.r.t., this is a critical piece of infrastructure for the transit system. it's about improving speed and reliability for all along tens of thousands of customers along van ness. it's about improving street safety, especially for all pedestrians, but especially along van ness, and it's upgrading hundred-year-old infrastructure, some of which hangs above the road in the form of our muni overhead wires, some of which is deep below in the sewer and telecom utilities. next slide, please. so if you've been out on van ness, and i'm looking out of my office window at it right now, you'll know that