going to open next. you really don't. [cheers and . eers and >> chairman: good morning. this is the rules committee. i am the chair of the committee aaron peskin joined by supervisor rafael mandelman and supervisor connie chan and our clerk is mr. victor young. do you have any announcements,

mr. clerk? >> clerk: the board recognizes that public access to city is service is essential in public participation in the following ways. public comment will be available on each item of the agenda on channel 26, 99 and sfgov is streaming the public call-in number across the screen. comments or opportunities to speak during public comment period via phone by calling (415) 655-0001. the meeting id is 24884868382 and then press pound and pound again. when connected, you will hear the meeting discussions and be muted and in listening mode only. when your item of interest comes up, dial star three to be added to the speaker line. speak clearly and slowly and turn down your television or radio. alternatively, you may submit public comment in the following ways, e-mail to the rules committee clerk at

victor.young@sfgov.org. if you submit public comment via e-mail, it will be forwarded to the supervisors and be included in part of the file. or you can also submit your public comment by mail. that completes my initial comments. >> chairman: thank you, mr. young. can you please read the first and only item on today's agenda. >> clerk: yes. item number one is to expand interested parties to compluns city officer employees, registered contract employees and to prohibit elected officials, department heads, commissioners, and designated employees from behested payments from interested parties. >> chairman: thank you, mr. young. colleagues, i know this item is familiar to you it is sponsored

by supervisor haney and cosponsored by mysel in the wake of the most an reason of which was in the middle of october and it is i have a number of which that has made this morning circulated to you and we'll also speak to a couple of additional amendments that have yet to be prepared because of the thanksgiving

holiday as to the amendments let me just speak to them publicly and you are in receipt of the first of these page three, i'd like to codify the exemption to quote attempt to influence for written and oral public comment. so that would mean that if a member of the public shows up to advocate for or against one way or another as to a piece of legislation, that would not make them an interested party for purposes of this behested payment legislation. as policy matter, we encourage members of the public to weigh in, so this exemption is designed to advance that principle. it actually is currently the interpretation by ethics, but

this makes it abundantly clear. next, page three, line 17 through 18. i'd like to exempt federal government or agencies from this party. it's not our intent to make it more difficult for city officials to request relief funds from state and federal agencies and that would make this clear. finally, on page six, i'd like to define indirect solicitation which is not defined to mean when a city officer or employee directly or otherwise urges another person to solicit a behested payments. so it would clearly define that, which would basically mean if i'm a commissioner and there are a number of contracts coming before my commission that if i tell an underling or

a friend to go solicit from those identifiable persons, those eight contracts or whatever. throughout our goal to provide specificity and clarity and to people who have concrete interest in legislative or contractual administrator administrators before this. to that end, i'm also going to have prepared additional amendments as i said that are not yet ready today that would exempt uncommon board members from the definition of parties. this is based on some comments that supervisor melgar made to me from the definition of interested parties. and also to make it clear that contracts that are not approved by the board of supervisors or

the mayor would not fall into the behested payments. that would be prohibited by a member of the board of supervisors or mayor which was always our intent, but we'll clarify that. with that, colleagues, i'm happy to hear your comments and open this up for public comment before adopting the amendments and continuing the item for one additional week. seeing no comments. let me hit the chat box, god only knows what's in that thing. supervisor chan. >> supervisor chan: thank you, chair peskin. i know you are in the process of preparing the language, so i do look forward of seeing the language itself. but also to provide an exemption for accept and expend

legislation. i guess i'm trying to understand better. does that mean that for an interested party, that donates through the city through accept and expend process. >> chairman: so the notion there is if a -- the action before the board, that the board takes is the approval of accept and expend. so in taking that action by accepting a donation from a third party, that would not prohibit a member of the board of supervisors from soliciting behested payments from a party that had made a distribution to the city that the board had to

vote on to accept. does that make any sense? because the board has had to take action. so i'm differentiating that in the board, approving a contract. so if we approve a contract with the xyz corporation, it would be prohibited that a member of the board of supervisors go to the xyz corporation to solicit a behested payment. but if the board approved and accept and expend from a third party, that in and of itself would not prohibit a member of the board of supervisors from from that party through accept and expend to be identified through a permit or contract. >> chairman: correct.

>> supervisor chan: to explain further is the public appeals exemption in the legislation for public appeal and that and along with it, it sort of striked out that, you know, for the nonprofits that we see donations at the supervisors are elected, right now, it requires them to require. but now that it will not require them to report because that assumption is with the public appeal exemption. we don't know if people are really donated at the behest of the supervisors, therefore they no longer need to report.

is that question clear. >> i don't exactly understand the question. >> supervisor chan: to the question is nonprofits will have to report at the behest of the elected. because of now the way it is, we literally spend the behest request for the interested party. so there's no reporting there because you're not even supposed to be doing it. there's no exemption for a public appeal. with that exemption for public appeal. for example if i show up to a mass e-mail or mass appeal,

like public appeal, say donate to a nonprofit and whatever that nonprofit receives really because of the to the public in general. is that correct? >> so it sounds like you're asking about the legal significance of striking the language having to do with public appeal. is that correct. >> supervisor chan: yes. so they no longer have to report it because the supervisor is asking on a social media posting. >> my recollection is that other things that are being to

do with public appeals that will answer your question. i don't know if supervisor peskin recalls the origin of striking that language. >> chairman: i would have to look -- i'm looking right now. the general thinking was public appeals are generally low dollar amount and when you send out something on social media. please contribute -- it's giving tuesday. they tend to be very small dollar thresholds and they wouldn't even rise to the level of what's a behested payment. i think that was the thinking that i can go back and look at section 035. >> i'm happy to do the same, supervisor chan, and get back

to you this week since this item may be continued. >> thank you. i think that may be the reason that just so we're clear for some of especially for nonprofits and perhaps also for my own clarification in the previous process of being on an honorary committee for nonprofit or event or things like that. i'm only asking for my own personal just making sure that i do understand about the reporting requirements. that's all. i'm not trying to change the language itself. >> chairman: yeah. and that's precisely why we're trying to nail down clarity in each and every one of these things and that's why it's taken so long and by the way, i do need to say i've traded calls with supervisor haney but not spoken to him including this morning, we traded calls, but at some point we'll catch

up. >> supervisor chan: thank you. and my assumption is according to page 9, line 22, that public appeals are already not required to be reported. i know that we're trying to be super thoughtful about all the language and so my assumption is that this process can continue and that's all. thank you so much. >> chairman: and i will get back to you with answers to those very good questions. >> supervisor chan: thank you, chair peskin. that's all i have. >> chairman: okay. i do not see supervisor mandelman's name on the screen, why don't we open this up to public comment, mr. clerk. >> clerk: yes. members of the public who wish to provide public comment on this item should call (415) 655-0001. the meeting i.d. is 24884868382 then press pound and pound

again. if you haven't done so, please press star three to line up to speak. please wait until the system indicates you have been unmuted and you may begin your comments. we currently have three listeners and three people in line to speak. can we have the first caller, please. >> caller: good morning supervisors. this is debbie lurman from the san francisco human services network. i spoke previously about our concerns had some unforeseen consequences. we thank you for the amendments that address some of our concerns. we also appreciate supervisor peskin's attempt to uncompensated board members who have no economic interest in the contract and are likely to

be motivated by corruptive influence. the city's database of nonprofit board members currently has over 600 nonprofits with contracts and the database with affiliates and subcontractors and board members contains over 33,000 entries. so this would be an implementation nightmare to include those folks. we do still have one concern with the legislation which is that it has an extremely broad definition of interested party which includes grass roots advocates and nonprofit volunteer board members. what happened is it includes anybody who attempts to influence legislative action. so the public official may not even know that somebody is attempting to influence, for example, if they attend a rally or send a tweet to their

followers or sign a petition. so by expanding this so broadly, we get lots of people who make no sense in the context of behested payments and it will again be impossible to track. so we hope we can continue some conversations about expanding the exceptions to include advocates who have no financial or personal connection to a matter when they do things like sign the petition. thank you for considering that and thank you again for these current set of amendments. >> chairman: thank you. next speaker, please. >> caller: linda chapman. again, i want to urge the board of supervisors, have the city attorney or the controller or both consult the federal guidelines and then consider following that model. when i worked for the army, they said it was the largest

corporation in the world and other corporations followed the example. even more so, the federal government, we didn't have these kinds of problems. you know, it's very shocking because the city charter of is san francisco was designed in order to avoid corruption as you know and yet all of these practices have crept in. they couldn't happen in the federal government because there were rules. you didn't have to get into all of these things like can i do this or that or whatever. you couldn't. you know, if you were a federal civil servant, manager, not manager, decider, not decider, you did not use your position. you did not solicit money in the office for your favorite charity. you are not prevented from soliciting money for your favorite charity outside of work. you didn't use your position to do it. it should be the same here. there was a way in which the federal government supported numerous charities. they had something like let's call it the community chest, it

wasn't called that and a number of local charities were considered for giving tuesday, if you want to call it that or for the campaign, the federal campaign to raise money for charities and you can either donate to all of them on the list or you can donate select ones. you know, i would assume also that if it was something like let's say supervisor haney's and peskin wanted to say the tndc is having its pool tossed, things like that can be allowed. as i've said before, planning commissioners asking developers to give to nonprofits before they would make their decision and then they would make their decision on that. >> clerk: time has elapsed. >> chairman: thank you, ms. chapman. next speaker, please.

>> caller: can you hear me now? >> chairman: please proceed. >> caller: good morning. david pilpel. several comments on this. i think it's important to make this workable. i think ethics is absolutely critical here with regulations, forms, and examples. whether you write it into the legislation or not, you may want to think about notice to various actors such as a notice to members of a nonprofit board if there's -- if they're prohibited from conduct for six months or whatever so that they are on notice that their certain conduct is prohibited, perhaps requiring training for those actors. certainly, you could require training or enhanced training for city department heads, members of boards and commission, city employees, on

specific suggestions on page one, line 16, i believe 'and' should come back in before the deleting portion. let's see what else. on page 3, line 15, i think that should be indented on the reference to interested party. on page 6, line 7, you just had a brief discussion about public appeal. i'm not sure if public appeal is defined in here. you may want to add that on page 4 starting online 19. when i think of the term public appeal, i think of ceqa appeals and c.u. appeals to the board of supervisors. it's not intuitive to me that public appeal is an appeal to the public by the member of

supervisors. do these amendments also apply to the san francisco community college district. >> clerk: your time has elapsed. >> caller: thanks. >> chairman: are there any other members of the public for this item number one. >> clerk: i believe that was our last public commenter. >> chairman: okay. public comment is closed and i would like to formally move the aforementioned amendments and continue this item as amended one week on that two-part motion, a roll call, please. >> clerk: yes, on the motion to amend the ordinance and continue the matter to december the 6th, [roll call]

the motion passes without objection. >> chairman: we are adjourned.

san francisco is surrounded on three sides by water, the fire boat station is intergal to maritime rescue and preparedness, not only for san francisco, but for all of the bay area. [sirens] >> fire station 35 was built in 1915. so it is over 100 years old. and helped it, we're going to build fire boat station 35. >> so the finished capital planning committee, i think about three years ago, issued a guidance that all city facilities must exist on sea level rise. >> the station 35,

construction cost is approximately $30 million. and the schedule was complicated because of what you call a float. it is being fabricated in china, and will be brought to treasure island, where the building site efficient will be constructed on top of it, and then brought to pier 22 and a half for installation. >> we're looking at late 2020 for final completion of the fire boat float. the historic firehouse will remain on the embarcadero, and we will still respond out of the historic firehouse with our fire engine, and respond to medical calls and other incidences in the district. >> this totally has to incorporate between three to six feet of sea level rise over the next 100 years. that's what the city's

guidance is requiring. it is built on the float, that can move up and down as the water level rises, and sits on four fixed guide piles. so if the seas go up, it can move up and down with that. >> it does have a full range of travel, from low tide to high tide of about 16 feet. so that allows for current tidal movements and sea lisle rises in the coming decades. >> the fire boat station float will also incorporate a ramp for ambulance deployment and access. >> the access ramp is rigidly connected to the land side, with more of a pivot or hinge connection, and then it is sliding over the top of the float. in that way the ramp can flex up and down like a hinge, and also allow for a slight few inches of lateral motion of the

float. both the access ramps, which there is two, and the utility's only flexible connection connecting from the float to the back of the building. so electrical power, water, sewage, it all has flexible connection to the boat. >> high boat station number 35 will provide mooring for three fire boats and one rescue boat. >> currently we're staffed with seven members per day, but the fire department would like to establish a new dedicated marine unit that would be able to respond to multiple incidences. looking into the future, we have not only at&t park, where we have a lot of kayakers, but we have a lot of developments in the southeast side, including the stadium, and we want to have the ability to respond to any marine or maritime incident along these new developments. >> there are very few

designs for people sleeping on the water. we're looking at cruiseships, which are larger structures, several times the size of harbor station 35, but they're the only good reference point. we look to the cruiseship industry who has kind of an index for how much acceleration they were accommodate. >> it is very unique. i don't know that any other fire station built on the water is in the united states. >> the fire boat is a regional asset that can be used for water rescue, but we also do environmental cleanup. we have special rigging that we carry that will contain oil spills until an environmental unit can come out. this is a job for us, but it is also a way of life and a lifestyle. we're proud to serve our community. and we're willing to help people in any way we can.