>> sanitation and streets commission. today is none day july 15, 2024 and it is 1003 a.m. secretary fuller, please call the roll. >> good morning. please respond with, here, or present. commissioner anderson is present. commissioner eusope is present. vice chair harrison is present. chair hartwig-schulman is present and christopher simi has a planned absence. with four membersprint we have quorum for sanitation and streets commission. public comment is taken for all informational and action items on today's ajepdaism to comment in

person please line up against the wall futhest from the door. members wishing to comment on a item outside the hearing room you may do so by joining the webinar on page 2 of the agenda. to be recognized, select the raise your hand icon in the webinar. you may also comment outside the chamber by dialing 1-415-655-0001 and id, 26625457850 # # again. to raise your hand to speak, press star 3 and the telephone log in information is also available on pages 1 and 2 of today's agenda. commenters may speak for up to three minutes per item and you will receive a 30 second notice when your speaking time is about to expire.

in the event we have many commenters on an item, the chair may reduce the public comment time to less then 3 minutes per person. unless speaking under general public comment, please note you must limit comments to the topic of the item discussed. if commenters do not stay on topic the chair may interrupt and ask to limit comments to the item at hand. we ask public comment be made in a civil respectful manner and refrain from the use of profanity. abusive or hate speech will not be tolerated. please address your remarks to the commission as a whole, not individual commissioners or staff. and the public is always welcome to submit comments in writing via e-mail address of sas.commission@sfgov.org. or by mail to 49 south van ness suite 1600, san francisco california,

94103. behalf of the commission, i like to extened our thanks to the sfgovtv media serving for helping staff this meeting. chair hartwig-schulman. >> alright. we have our first reading of the land acknowledgment. quite excited for this. it has been a while putting it together. so, the san francisco sanitation and streets commission we acknowledge that we are on the unceded ancestral homeland of the ramaytush ohlone who are the original inhabitants of the san francisco peninsula. as the indigenous stewards of this land and in accordance with their traditions, the ramaytush ohlone have never ceded, lost nor forgotten their responsibilities as the caretakers of this place, as well as for all peoples who reside in their traditional territory. as guests, we recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland. we wish to pay our respects by acknowledging the ancestors and relatives of the ramaytush community and by affirming their sovereign rights as first peoples.

the san francisco sanitation and streets commission acknowledges that we are on the unceded ancestral homeland of the ramaytush ohlone, the original inhabitants of what is now the san francisco peninsula. we recognize that the ramaytush ohlone understand the interconnectedness of all things and have maintained harmony with nature for millennia. we honor the ramaytush ohlone peoples for their enduring commitment to mother earth. and as part of san francisco public works, we affirm our responsibility in maintaining our public spaces as stewards of the public right of way by cleaning and greening throughout the city in collaboration with our communities, so as to respect the land on which we now reside. indigenous peoples from many nations make their home in this region

today. we commit to prioritizing policies and programs to equitably benefit marginalized members of the community, including american indians, while also striving for environmental sustainability. so, i guess we have an announcement. we have a new commissioner, shawn anderson. welcome to the team. >> thank you so much. excited to be here at the first meeting. >> awesome. and that concludes my announcements. mr. fullerx do you have any announcements? >> i have one very brief announcement, one is there are a number of operations related workforce development agreements that are planned for next week's public works commission meeting. those will be posted later this week and available to this commission for review and i encourage any questions you all may have that we can relay those chair post. i want to extend congratulation to new commissioner anderson as well-on joining the commission as well as commissioner simi for the birth of a new child and as well as commissioner eusope for her restaurant being recognized with a michelin star this past week.

congratulations. huge news. [applause] and then, the only other announcement i have is our 2025 calendar will begin drafting in the next couple weeks, so please look out for e-mails from me looking for your availability for next year as we draft our meeting schedule for 2025. and that concludes my reports. >> awesome. thank you mr. fuller. please call the first item. [gavel] >> item 1 is general public comment, which is for topics under the commission mandate but not related to a specific item on today's agenda. members of the public who wish to make three minutes of general public comment in person may line up against the wall furthest from the door and if you are commenting from outside the chamber, please press the raise your

hand button in the webinar or press star 3 on your phone to be recognized. and it appears we do not have inperson commenters and sfgovtv is letting me know we do not have callers interested in speaking for general public comment either. so that concludes public comment. >> that concludes general pub lic comment. please call the next item. >> item 2 is communications and the director's report. director carla short is here to present and this is an informational item. >> good morning commissioners. welcome commissioner anderson. carla short, director public works.

much happened since our last meeting. we had city wide pride celebration, annual ocean beach sand removal, our monthly neighborhood beautification day and we have a exciting announcement i'll share in a moment. so, pride recap, we had a wonderful and hugely successful pride month and the operation division as well as engineers. our key in making this happen. this theme was sowing the seats of love. from the pride celebration and after work mixer and an amazing my queer work besty. it was engaging events and projects for staff during june. many thanks to great lgbtq ia plus committee for spearheading all of it. the month festivities culminating in a

huge weekend long pride celebration including a parade down market street that featured our public aworks contingent we showed up in bigger numbers then ever before and personally happy to be part of it. afterward our street cleaning team, more then 50 strong for the specialized operation got to work. we also had staff attendeding to our department operations center or doc, making sure the event went off without a hitch and many thanks to staff at the city emergency operation center. last month kicked off the sand rolocation activity at ocean beach. over the course of a few weeks the crews redistributed approximately 30 thousand cubic yards of sand. that is enough to fill more 9 olympic size swimming pools thmpt aim

is reduce sand build up on the great highway during windy weather. we started june 17 and wrap said up by the end of the month. the operation staff used frunlt end loaders back hos and heavy equipment to reduce the height and width of sand dunes and move sand away from the road and towards the ocean. efforts shown in past years to delay the natural progression of sand incursion on the great highway. sporadic closures of the great highway due to the build up of wind blown sand on the roadway normally occur every year during wintser and spring, however in recent years sand build up worsened due to climate change drought and sustained high winds. sand accumulation on the great highway makes dif cut and hazardous for vehicles and bicycles to navigate. every year we have a small window to perform this work, it must be timed to make sure crews do not disturb the

western snowy-a small shower bird spreckted under the u.s. endangered specious act. done in coordination with the golden gate. so i want to give a big thank you to everyone involved in this operation. and just in case you missed this important data in the most recentnies letter, i want to highlight some of the amazing work we have done over the first half of 2024. and i'll take a moment before i do to plug our monthly news letter which is available on our website and a beautiful digital journal that highlights the work we accomplished over the month. through a strong concerted department wide effort over the last 6 months we filled 6100 potholes rkss pruned 3600 trees, constructed 98 new ada compliant

curbramps applied surface sealing streets to 160 blocks of roadway and picked up 9494 tons of debris from city streets. these staggering numbers are something we can all be proud of and are the result of a lot of teamwork, planning and determination. i can't wait to report on what we accomplish in the second half of this year. alright, the big ruveal. i'm not sure how american government agencies can say they have their own video game, but count us officially among them. with help from our communication team, we created our very own internet based video game to capture the spirit of maintaining cleaning and greening san francisco streets and sidewalks. it is called, neat street and lives on our website. neat street units civic pride and arcade style gaming to promote the value caring for neighborhoods while having fun. public works are always on the

look-out for new creative ways to engage the community and teach about the mission to take care of san francisco. from filling potholes and removing graffiti to building benches and pinstalling trash cans, kids and kids at heart learn about some of the crucial work public works does 24/7 to maintain, clean and beautify san francisco. i want to give a special shout out to jewelman fam from communication team who partners with san francisco based lower case productions to bring the game to life. it is really fun, i am terrible at it, but encourage you to try. and, a couple of announcement of retirements, particularly for our operation staff. we had the opportunity to wish two long-time staff members fair well as they head to retirement. chris mack daniels the super intendant of bureau street service and long career with public works and

public utility commission retired a weeks ago. happy to report our assistent super-intendant jonathan vang is acting. additionally, matt--former superintendant of bureau street and sewer repair and later bureau street and building repair retired after a successful career at public works. mora wayne, is acting superintendant. we have a deep bench of leadership and so with the loss of two strong leaders our operation bureaus as robust and responsive as ever. next up our annual report, if you haven't seen it it yet it is beautiful in print and online. our annual report for the fiscal year 22-23 is out. the report spotlights our core services and our out of the ordinary work from the response of dedicated and

determined front line crews during the historic winter stores to pothole filling and repaving and many thanks to theresa fong from communication team putting it together so beautiful. when i compare the annual report to some of the more monday annual reports i see, it is really elevated, beautiful work. very proud that. and lastly, our neighborhood beautification day. our last month neighborhood beautification day event was focused on the neighborhoods of district 11, the excelsior, ingle side, crocker amzane and ocean view among others. we had volunteers to join us. our next event is july 20. we will clean and green in the marina, pacific heights, [indiscernible] presidio heights and other district 2 neighborhoods and we hope you can join us. and with that, that's my report.

thank you. >> alright. well, thank you. it is amazing to see how quickly market street gets back to normal after the parade. you guys do such a great job with that, so yeah, thank you for all that. does anyone have any questions for the director? i think we are grood. hearing no further questions, mr. fuller recollect please open public comment on this item. >> members of the public who wish to make three minutes of comment in person on item 2, communications and director's report, may line up against the wall furthest from the door. if you're commenting outside the chamber, please press the raise your hand button in the webinar or star 3 on

your phone to be recognized. and we do not have any in person commenters, and we do not have callers own the phone either. >> please call the next item. >> item 3 is the minutes from the may 20, 2024 meeting and this is an action item. before any motion is made, i'm happy to take questions or corrections to those minutes. >> are there any questions to the minutes from the commission? don't look like it. do i have a motion to adopt the minutes from may 20, 2024. can i hear a second?

>> second. >> alright. we will-given that motion, we will now hear public comment. secretary fuller, please open public comment. >> members of the public who wish to make three minutes of comment in person on the motion to adopt the minutes from may 20, 2024 meeting may line up against the wall furthest from the door and commenting outside the chamber, press the raise your hand button in the webinar or star 3 on your phone to be recognized. we do not have in person commenters and sfgovtv let me know there are no callers on the line interested in speaking on this, so that concludes public comment. >> alright. all in favor of adopting the minutes from may 20, 2024 say yes. >> yes. >> anyone opposed, no.

motion passes. secretary fuller, will post the adopted minutes from may 20, 2024 to the commission website. please call the next item. >> item 4 is the bureau of urban forestry performance measure report and acting super intendant nicolas crawford is here to present the report. this is a informational item. >> good morning. nicolas crawford, acting superintendant bureau urban forestry. we are a operation group so our crews are at the cesar chavez yard and happy to share updates on how we are doing by the numbers and feel free to interrupt if you have questions as we go along. so, this first slide is something we have been tracking over the years since the creation of our program, so street

tree sf is voter funded and approved program that pays for street tree maintenance and it started july 1, 2017 and this pie graph morphed over the years. it went from entirely gray to more and more blue and our goal is to complete pruning of all street trees in san francisco and then be able to restart that cycle and continue to improve our process and our service frequency. to give a sense where we are at now, we completed over 90 thousand trees which puts over 72 percent and that leaves us 27.6 percent to go. i will comment that, there is normally a wedge here. our light blue active wedge and we don't have that now, because we are in between our contract with our contractors. our last contract ended in early march

and our next one is going out to bid. we expect in the next couple weeks folks will be able to bid on that. we'll get new contracts rolling in and think the timeline is about 4 months from now. this has been difficult for us because we lean on our contractors a lot to get work done. we have crews-i will share in the next slides. but, we are in betweeb those contracts and could really benefit from that support. lessen learned for us to see just how long it takes to get that going and when we started really early, it has to be evening earlier the next time around. so, this walks through-i think i should explain what this-what is happening on this slide. left to right is over the years by fiscal year and then going top

down, the top row shows our pruning work, the middle row shows trees removed and the bottom row is stump griding. i'll start with the top one. for our pruning in fiscal year 2020, we did 11.464 trees. that was a combination that green sliver of internal work and then that larger chunk of contractor work and over the years you can see during covid especially we took a hit. a lot of crew were reassigned doing other things to help during the pandemic and we recovered over time doing more and more, but our maintenance work during the pandemic was effected, especially with the tree pruning. we continued with emergency maintenance removals for safety reasons, but you can see we have been able to pick up

speed again once things stabilized. last year was a strong year with internal work and in contractor work and this year we suffered because we lost several months of contractor work since march. so, our internal crew to talk through that, we've made priority of hiring within the bureau to start out with gardener hiring which happened last year and this year we focused on arborist highering. we have one starting-one more coming this saturday or next and there is another vacancy to fill and we'll be in good shape with our arborists, but that's been a long time coming. i expect to see the benefits that on-boarding paying off in this next fiscal year. to go down the line to our removals, you can see early in our program, we had tons of tree removals that we had to do.

we avoid removing trees whenever possible. it sets back thin goal of growing the tree canopy but if there is a safety issue or the trees died, it is a action we have to take, and there is quite a bit of differed tree removal work stacking up when we took over tree maintenance responsibility. i understand if you had a tree that was dying in front of your house and it would have cost you thousands of dollars, wait till the city takes over and does it as part of the program. at the beginning you can see we had a lot on our plate with removals, but that's dropped over the years. i will say, it spiked last year with a 1004 removed by our internal crew and that is driven by the march storms of last year. march 2023.

the numbers, got me thinking because we had one day during that march storm where we hauled 125 tons of green waste and trying to wrap my head around how much that is and that is all most a million bananas of green waste hauled in a single day. i don't think we hauled bananas, but leaves and branches. it took a long time to recover from that and effected the maintenance work. in the last year and a half, 2 years we have been doing a lot of work. it was distracted by a lot of storm work and we don't mind. we respond to that and here to do that, but if we had a choice we would rather be doing pruning work and moving forward on that, pruning all the trees. if it is the storm, we'll do it. and then you can see in the

last fiscal year, all most nunthing from our contractors. there isn't a number there by our contractors for removals, and that's because we found the tree removals with contractors are more complicated, takes longer. it is easier to do that with our crew in general, but we just gave them huge batches of prune ronl contracts and found that was a more effective way to do it. so, when our contractors remove trees, they are also required to grind the stump as part that, unless it is a storm response, but as a function that, we've been able to keep up with stump grinding as they go along, but internal work and storm work has--you just go from one tree to the next and keep moving during a storm, so there is quite a few stumps you will see along

the sidewalk and in the last fiscal year we put together a package for contractors to deal with and the crew made a point to focus on that so you see stump griding over the years is quite and spiking this past year. we feel we had the breathing room to focus on that. okay, shifting gears to talk about tree planting. very proud of our progress from 2017 to this past year. we definitely have grown our tree planting work, and this is a combination of what we've done with internal crews and grant partner, friends of urban forest especially, but the-there is more to the story too. we are also issuing permits for tree planting and i think that is a good thing to include in here. we put that in our annual

reports, but i would like to display that going forward. but, you can see that over the last several years we are really capped around a thousand trees and broke through that this past year and in our talks with friends of urban forest, they thing that they could repeat another banner year, but to grow beyond that, they reached capacity limits, which i respect and as a result for us to get past this and planting more trees, we have to look at growing internal capacity and work with contractors for planting, which is something we pilot and it was very successful and we like to do more that. >> question. >> yes. >> does this include trees that like are replacements? >> yes. >> okay. >> good question. >> not all just fresh, they are

replacements and new locations? >> that's right. >> okay cool, just making sure. >> it could be planting a vacant site where it has been years and might not know what happened years ago or why that site is vacant, or could have been vandalized and then hadn't had a chance to establish and gets replaced right away, or it could be a totally new site or shifted basin where there is a conflict and we moved it over. that is all included in here. i think that tracking that is a challenging thing to figure out what went wrong. sometimes when we show up it is just a pile of branches and unless someone comes out and says there is a car accident or i saw what happen ed here, it is hard to make sense of what happened, but we would like to gather more that and be able to report.

even on a limited basis. >> i mean, it is great. 1700 trees, like, that's awesome. whether they are replacements or not. i was just kind of curious if we knew what the break-down was. >> that is one of our big questions too, are we moving the needle. how does this all net out? do we have more trees in the year then when we started it and without doing a complete census, which is pretty expensive, how can we use our daily data to tell we are moving. >> yeah. thank you. >> so, again, this is our internal crew just focused on this slide and it has been very stable in terms of what we can do. i'm proud of their ability to stay on track or get quickly back on

track after storms, but they are getting a lot done with staffing limitations which i think this coming year is the big question for them. we hired more arborists, do we show that we are able to get more work done with that and certainly the burden is on us to demonstrate that. alright, shifting gears for tree inspections. another group in urban forestry. we got arborists we talked about and talk about the tree inspectors. this team is-they have multiple duties. one of the roles is to go out in the field and inspect trees. we do that proactively for our maintenance work. we respond to service requests where someone might ask us to prune a tree, or address some kind of issue and we go

out and take a look at it and provide feed back. sometimes could just be sorted out on a phone call where we take tons of calls and e-mails and try to call back same day or the next day. that has been a great resource for the public, but inspection is still a core part that. as the nature of the work shifted doing more permit and inspection review, the time is getting balanced across a number different demands and we still want to keep up with that inspection level and we are looking at ways to speed that up. there is tools that could help us with a check-list type inspection that would be a lot more user frndly for our team, so we are exploring that.

this graph really to me represents an incredible volume of work getting done, thousands of inspections and also something for us to reflect on. how can we skill up further and make our team able to work with the best technology. this gives a sense of the fire hose coming at us in terms of in-bound requests over the years and you can see how a lot is driven by storms, where last year the arborist part of the graph spikes and that is something that is welcome for us. we want to get those reports of trees down and damage so we can mobilize and respond to it. there is also a whole mix of things. it could be trash in the

median, it could be tall grass or weeds that somebody is pointing out they want us to deal with, and we as the in-bound request in a lot of ways. we might not mobilize a crew immediately for each request, but we can see there is a proponderance of 311 calls. it takes a while to mobilize on medians to close traffic lanes but 311 is the eyes and ears throughout the city and make aware of the issues we can respond to. this is a in-bound request on the next slide you see by comparison what we completed. so, we mark those in-bound request as duplicates and might merge them

or redirect them to the appropriate agency. sometime s if we get something that looks like our responsibility, but really someone else's jurisdiction we will forward it to them. within our team we get a tremendous amount done and the life line partf the graph is landscape crew, so that's a lot of median open space type of requests. felt it can be mowing or median maintenance. green waste pickups which we get frequently. we'll respond to that, close those out. i think a lot of credit going to our team and leadership over the last couple years to amplify that to the light blue has grown all most by a thousand per year, so the team is really stepped up with the service

request closures and landscape. our arborist too, it is a function of storm work for that. we want to stay on task with our plan maintenance work, but responsive to 311 request too. >> question for that as well. does it show which-how many or diverted for other departments because it was theirs? the last slide showalize the ones you received, it doesn't mean they necessarily are for you, correct? >> right. or might not be something that we want to take action on immediately. it could be a request to prune a tree and when we go out there and look at it, it's-the tree is 99 percent perfect shape. your point is taken and understand it is nice to do this, but we really got to focus on- >> priorities. >> only the worse things that require pulling a crew to do it,

otherwise we want to stay on the planned maintenance t. is discussion with the person and wreel polk explain to them, i bet that is annoying and see how you are looking out the window and seeing that every day, but the way i see it, i would hate to drive past a worse hazard to get to a smaller hazard. we really have to focus on the stuff that's the high safety priority. >> makes sense. thank you. >> okay, and another group of our bureau is the cement shop and their work is a mix of client work for mca or other departments. we do have a crew dedicated to water boxes, like the meter boxes, installing

and repairing the sidewalk area and the christy box that incapsulates those, and then what's illustrated here is tree related sidewalk repair work, so we have a crew that is dedicated to this funded through tree maintenance, and they've done an incredible amount of work to fix the damage caused by our own street trees. the data is spikes and drops off and goes up again. when we close out the tree related service orders we did them in a batch and unfortunately they reflect when we close them and not when we did the work so there is a huge spike in 2020 when we were catching up on open service orders that had been completed already, so that 99 thousand square feet

had been done over previous years as well as just clustered there. an unfortunate art iificate of the data. the fall ollowing years it falled up. you see the last 2 years it has been climbing so this reflects our crew, getting more done last year and this year especially but being more consistent with how they track and close the service orders, so if they do it in real-time it shows up when it should be and we are capturing the work and telling the fuller story. it is incredible. it is 2 acres of sidewalk in the last fiscal year, and all of it is technical, complicated around a

tree with root pruning and quite a bit of intervention to get this work done. credit to them. and then, the other sidewalk repair-sorry, cement shop crew does curb repair. similar problem in 2020, huge spike from closing out old service orders which is good we needed to do it but it skews the data. you can see over the last several years it has been very stable. the same supervisor who has the same methodology and is tracking that very well. similar here. a ton of linear feet of-[indiscernible] 3 year average here, so that tells our curb repair story.

before i stop talking there is a bunch of stuff here. our leadership is here, so it is really not one person at all, it is about 120 people working every day and i'm happy to represent us and talk about it and take questions, but glad we could share what we are doing and happy to answer any questions. >> hi. thank you so much for sharing the information. i have several questions. >> you had great questions last time. >> i'm always want to understand. first of all, how do you choose your subcontractors? is there a specific criteria? do you usually wait for the bids and then go for the one you have familiarity working with? can you share with us? >> sure.

so, we create a pool of contractors and there is quite a bit of selection to make sure they are qualified to be able to be in the pool, but when we dispatch the work, we create a contract service order, cso and then the companies in this pre-selected pool submit their pricing for that cso and the allows them to compete against each other and we select out that pool the lowest bid, so that gives a balance of both the knowledge the qualified companies we are working with, but we are getting a competitive price for each one of the cso. there is other ones-different types of contracts that could be a line item only, and that line item price

gets set earlier in the process and then it is just about issuing the work to those folks and they charge based on how many they complete. if it's the tree planting and establishment it is a line item price, but the tree pruning is something they would bid on competitively. and then i think director short may have some additional information. >> yeah. so, good job summarizing nicolas. for most of our contracts, we have to go through competitive bid process and so for example, if it is a line item bid, then we do the competitive bid process at the front end of the contract, so we say, here's the work scope, here are the different line items, give us your best price and all the contractors who want to bid do that and we have to go with the

lowest bid. for the pools of contractors, they are pre-qualified so have to meet certain criteria. we do a essentially a mini-competitive bid for the pre-qualified contractors. i also want to note we have done a number of micro lbe set aside contracts so that is where we limit the pool to local business enterprises. part of what we committed when we took over the street trees, we didn't want the smaller tree companies to struggle to compete so they compete against each other, not the bigger tree companies and that way we insure we are try ing to support the local business enterprises. >> how do you supervise them? do you check on the check list to see if the results are there?

>> yes. i think we have a benefit of sometimes thousands of eyes and ears watching out the window as work is getting done, so 311 is very quick if folks call and alert if somebody is working too early in the morning or if they don't appear to have safe work site set up, so we get that instant feedback, even if someone on our team isn't present. ined in advance of it, we organize our work into key maps. we give them a key map of trees, which is a grid that might be 400 to 900 trees, and we give them the list of trees to be pruned and then they go out and do it and we verify that work has

been completed. we want to make sure that when we mark that complete and we pay them for the work that we can verify it has been done. that's our chance before we pay them to have leverage and say, hey, you missed this set of trees over here. sorry, there were cars parked there and we'll go back and do that. we also found that a year or more later when we found issues down the road, because we have these pools and long-running relationships with them, they are incentivized to make it right. it isn't like they are just coming in and bouncing out of town, these are companies that have a local presence and want to make sure that they are doing it properly. even in some of the bigger contracts they have a requirement to work

with somebody locally, a smaller business. it has been interesting seeing how they work together and they will say, it is a really small area with big trees in tight spaces and you got a small crew that can work through that over a couple weeks. we'll assign that to you and then the larger contractor crews will tackle some of the bigger right of ways. it has been good. >> yeah. >> in general we had a good relationship and when we find issues, we've gotten good support hauling out and saying this is what it should look like and we'll make it right, so that has been our experience. >> it should be. i like this collective working together. my second question is about the roots maintenance of the large trees. i have gone on a little tour

trying to show some of the streets that have roots coming surfacing and it is a bit dangerous and i wanted to understand, do you work with the street pavement pothole team together to maintain this or to eliminate this, so the street is safe to drive on? >> not just the sidewalk, but the roadway. >> the roadway. the sidewalk is damaged and still there and nothing has been done and i have gone on a tour several months ago and everything is still the same, so i wanted to understand you all are in the same agency. are you working together? i personally had sent a report about it , what has been the outcome. how do you work together about this, because that was part of the presentation, so i just want

hch- -- >> for other decisions i want to differ to the director, but i can--yeah. if there is anything else i'm jump on after. >> sure. so, the way generally the way that we work with the paving crews, if they see damage that seems to be related to trees, they will typically ask to come and take a look to make sure we can safely remove the damage without either needing to remove the tree or causing the tree to decline. if we can't do that, then we have to go through a process of basically planning for the tree removal before they do the necessary roadway work, but typically it is brought to our attention from the paving crews or the paving contractors who are going to be doing that pavement repair. we can do another presentation on how we prioritize pavement repairs around the city, because we have a pretty robust system for making the

priorities but we try to make sure they are working with buff so we don't end come through and pave the road and a tree falls on the newly paved road because they cut the roots. in terms of--we have a very significant back-log of sidewalk repairs. we took over responsibility for all the street trees in one day, july 1, 2017 they suddenly all became ours so we are inherited over 30 thousand locations of damaged sidewalk, many of which were property owner responsibility but the city took over and got that responsibility. we developed i think a really defensible process for prioritizing those repairs, which includes looking at hospitals, senior centers, bus stops, schools and neighborhood

commercial districts and then overlaying where we know there is damage with those areas. really to try to have those be our proxy for vulnerable populations and pedestrian volume, just lots of pedestrians. what happens is, we created what we call a heat map that said, these parts of the city have the highest number of damaged locations and overlay with one or more of those factors. and we have done a very good job addressing the reddest areas in the heat map. what that wont capture though is even badly damaged sidewalk on a less frequently used street, so those are always going to be lower--if only one or two sites, it is lower on the heat map, but we basically completed all the highest priority for sidewalk repairs and now working our way through all those other sites.

and so, there are sites that are going to sit for a longer period of time, particularly if they have less pedestrian traffic. if we get a call and it is badly damaged and someone alerts us for example, well, it isn't a hospital, but you know, there are a lot of seniors in this building, then we will try to prioritize that and i want to recognize salina here with us today who has to juggle dozens of requests that come in every day to try to figure out how can we be the most efficient with resources and eliminate trip hazards and she has been doing a great job with her team on that. it is more then we have the resources for every year. >> so, the sidewalk roots also depending on the heat map? >> yeah. one thing the primary reason why the cement shop exists within the bureau urban forestry is to make sure

we are not damaging our trees when we fix the sidewalk. so, they do a lot of work not tree related. as nicolas said they install curb ramps and have contracts with sfmta and work order with public utility commission so we are the city's cement shop in a way, but it's housed within the bureau urban forestry because we want to make sure when we fix sidewalks around trees we have the arborists available to advice on which roots we can safely cut that we are expanding the basins around the trees to make sure the trees stay healthy and create the safe sidewalk around it. >> has been a very long time, so curious why it is still has been the same condition, because it is just going to get worse. the reason why i feel like part is not heavily pedestrian walked because it isn't a pavement, safe pavement for if any of us to walk.

that was the other aspect, so i want to understand why it is taking a bit of time. >> happy to check out the street and location. there could be unaccepted streets or there could be weird property lines, so a lot of stuff we end do case by case to figure out who is responsible for it and follow up accordingly. >> forgot what--how often do you inspect the areas that need root maintenance or tree maintenance and all these things, how often do you do that? >> yes. well you are asking a good question, because this is something we are trying to get a handle on, what are we capable of doing in terms of inspection and the frequency. over the course of our program, we've been learning a lot in the

first cycle and we've initiated a goal-setting process for ourselves to figure out what's a reasonable goal for each part of the bureau. some questions of how many trees can we prune or how many locations can we visit, those are easier for us to quantify, but the inspection number has been a harder one. what's a good number of inspections? what's a safe level that, and for us i want us to be both responsive to reports that come in of hazards. we should be out there same day to inspect hazards and often our crew will roll up with a truck within a half hour of the call coming in, but then

the other question of if it is a standing tree and in pretty good shape, how much resources do we need to devote to inspecting that and what's the frequency that we should be there. that is still something we are trying to define. i think that even where we are at today, we have good data on where we are at with sidewalk damage. we know about a lot of these locations. it is about not so much reinspecting, it is still damaged so got to get there, but on the action side of it and getting the crew out there to fix it or send the contractor. we have been quick with make safe. we go out and put asphalt to correct the sidewalk uplift. it is just temporary, but it can go a long way to reducing the risk

of more trips and falls in the same way that we have a contractor for slicing sidewalks. if it is a small uplift, they can slice and smooth and down. we can buy years out of the sidewalk and much less expensive then demo and replacing it. the other component of inspecting we are considering is, the dialogue with our contractors who are another extension of our bureau, but when the slicing contractor goes out, they give great photos and notes saying this is what we fixed, this is too big, can't fix this, you need to send someone to put a asphalt patch down or schedule for full repair and same with the tree contractors. they are doing maintenance work, we say prune all the trees in the key map and dont worry about removals and they still send photos, saying are

you sure about the trees and think it needs to be removed. it amplifies the ears. these are experts in the field giving feedback. not all that is captured in terms of the inspections performed, so i think that's part of the story that is worth telling and how to quantify that and share that with you. >> i think it is important to share information because it just allows everybody to understand the details work behind the scenes. my last question, do you have a report of data that the public can see which area of the city that need more or less of these maintenance? is that somewhere we can see, because you know, 7 by 7 mile square

foot, which area we putting more effort, which less, because i just want to understand distributed equitably in all areas or not. >> yes. i like coming here giving updates and also at the urban forestry council, i'm on that council and each year i give a update to them about our program. one is about pruning and once about tree planting priorities, and they are very different conversations, because with maintenance we are talking about the areas that already have trees, and that changes what we have to do there. it is all about maintenance and how do we address these existing trees and then when we talk about planting i am talking about the rest of the city that needs trees and we have been focusing on planting and low canopy areas with high environmental justice burdens. there could be a lot of

pollution from freeways cutting through the same neighborhoods, so we are trying to look what the place with the most value for planting a tree in the same way we try to determine the most important tree to prune next. where is the high traffic, high need location? both doing it to be responsive from a liability standpoint, but also equity of getting to everybody, but doing it in a prioritization that makes sense and when it comes to tree planting equity, those areas we have a lot more trees to plant in to bring that city wide equity level up and those presentations we have been giving there, but we are also interacting with our sf environment colleagues

and part of bio diversity working groups, but your question of how does the public find out about this? >> is it accessible? >> it is through the annual reporting and we take a lot of questions, but we have been talking internally about how if we can have more information on our website for folks to be able to answer questions on their own and not require 20 minute phone call, you get all that yourself at 2 a.m. and be able to get what you need. that is what we want to provide more of and it has been a effort now that we have a public information-running out of water. [laughter] i should keep this briefer in the future. but, our public information

officer is funded through this street tree program and that's been incredibly valuable for us, but our recent conversation has been not about putting out fires and getting the word out about what our program is and more shifting into how we can have a website with more information and people can answer those type of questions. we put up a planting strategy document so people can see where we are prioritizing our goals for tree planting couple years ago and want to keep updating that. i think that that's a small step in a direction we like to go and have more resources available publicly like that. >> i think it is critical so everybody that in the community in that neighborhood can also just help

beautify their neighborhoods, right? equitably and fairly. if that is successful, that would be amazing. that was it. >> i can't resist adding 2 points. i want to make a moment to highlight we received a few grants recently, so credit to our team who applied for these grants, but they were focused on increases tree canopy in the disadvantage communities so those grant dollars will be focusing improving equity of tree canopy coverage in the city. the other thing that buff does a lot of is, goes to community meetings, so at the request of any community group or the district supervisor, we will always happily have folks attend and done a lot of great partnership with neighborhood groups interested in trees and tree planting and we have gone to the community meetings and

talked about replacement trees versus new trees and how that works and in fact we are hosting a meeting next monday at our street tree nursery to talk with the east cut community about how they can maximize tree planting in their district. so, we are definitely working improving our public facing information on the website, but it is a group that is very active with attendeding live attending community groups and sharing the word that way as well. >> great. i just want to commend you and your team. i was driving on ellis and hyde. i saw damage on a sidewalk on a monday, but wednesday it was fixed. i was like, that is amazing. so thank you. >> greetings commissioners. i just wanted to put a little information out there for you. the cement shop when they receive a

request for liability, someone got hurt or something that nature, the cement shop will analyze the entire block, so if you got one tree where it is trip and fall, they will look at both sides of the street and immediately call inspectors to work with us and we do the repair for the entire block. we try to be proactive when incidents like that happen. we try to be proactive, but again, we have so many sidewalk repairs throughout the city, we are not able to react immediately. i know it is unfortunately when you say i put in request, i hear you, but there are so many requests across the city and since we are doing based on geographically and the communities, it is hard for us, but when we do receive a request and it is high priority we will inspect and make a decision on the moment but it combined effort. it isn't like cement receive a

request, it goes to inspection it and then they go to the site and evaluate the site and once they evaluate the site, then the cement shop gets a service request to come out and repair. so,ic it is kind of multiple ways it is coming in. >> i understand the steps and stuff, but this is pretty heavily damaged. the reason people are probably not using that as a active sidewalk or street is because how dangerous it is. for me--i had two flat tires on that street. so, if i am experiencing it, i'm assuming-just assuming others as well, and we can just talk off-line about this. >> just want to let you know we have areas a foot high, so a tire is minimal. this is a area that is not traveled and

it is extremely terrible throughout the city. that's why we base it geographically and we will go out and make it safe. that's why i expressed to nicolas to make sure you know we go out and make it safe to eliminate the tripping hazard until we can get a inspector out there. >> happy to go back again. >> absolutely. you should come ride with the tree and cement crews. >> i love riding with the crews. >> thank you. >> thank you. >> did you have a question? you are good? >> i have a quick question. i think on the line of questioning it is helpful in the future just to have like some timeline of the life cycle from a report to completion. that is what we are looking to see rather then these annual percentage. it looks mostly annual basis things are completed but within the year it is hard to see if it was done 11 months later or done like within the

first 30 days so i think for clarity, having that in future reports would be very helpful. >> i think to tackle that we could look at comparing the request receive date and completion date. can chat with our performance team, because i think that data is there, but it isn't something we reported. >> i have a up couple questions. this might be more for director short. do different departments like kind of communicate to each other, like say you are pruning a tree and you notice a garbage can is over-flowing, does that crew pick up the trash? do they just report it to the other department that hey, this can is over-flowing, or how does all that work? >> that's a great question.

thank you. so, the short answer is we encourage our crews to report issues they see when out in the field. particularly if they are our issues to handle, but another division of public works. they don't generally-a tree crew would not be picking up litter from around a trash can. i would hope that if they were working next to it they might sweep that up. i hope that is true. >> i have done that. >> okay. our star pupil here. but we do encourage them to call in issues as they see them, and i think it could be--i had discussion with a community members recently who was like, this guy is right here and not picking up the litter and i'm like, yes, because his job is steaming, so he doesn't have the equipment or

the space to pick up the litter, but he should be calling that in. we need to make sure they are doing that and we do see that people do that. we look at service requests and can see, so and so called in for example, a damage sidewalk in their district street cleaner might call that in into us, so we know it is happening. probably not at the scale we like and need to continue to put the message out but we do try to do and we want crews to alert if they see something hazardous. certainly we have crews doing that. i will say in defense that it may not be they are willfully ignoring it, but when they have an assignment, particularly tree crews, i had them say, i'm looking up, not really looking down so much, so if someone doesn't report it, it may not be because they're seeing something and ignoring it, it may be they are focused on the job at hand and not seeing it. >> that totally makes sense.

just kind of wondering if there was a way to make a requirement that like, before you drive away when you are done with your assignment look around the block and make sure there is nothing that needs to be addressed. >> yeah, that is a a really good suggestion. we have a new as part of the cleanliness standards, particularly with the street cleaners we are asking them to look at the block so we can highlight for them, if you see something else, be sure to note that as well. great suggestion. >> i think that would be helpful to all the departments, rights? you are a street cleaner and you see a tree needs to be pruned or branches are falling down or something you report that and it will get addressed maybe a little bit quicker. yeah. my last question is, have we planted any trees from the nursery yet? >> happy to take it.

so, we have stopped bringing tree deliveries to our yard at cesar chavez, which is giving more breathing room, because that was taking up quite a bit of space. we are now taking deliveries at the nursery and the nursery manager is enjoying that responsibility and lovingly taking care of them and watering them faithfully so they are not frying at a parking lot over the weekend. if we are getting planting stock out-growing the container, the nursery manager and workforce development staff have been sizing up to larger containers, so it is turning into a active nursery which is what we are working towards so that is exciting. there is right now this is the case at the moment and will be for a

while where a lot of our stuff getting planted is still coming from the outside and then getting planted that pathway, but we have this small cohort of little baby trees that have gotten sized up to 15 gallons and we will see those root fill in and be able to get planted, so sort of in the spirit of your first question, we have more and more collaboration between teams coming together. there were-someone might say i like to see us plant this specing more and we can order more that and then our inspectors when they are suggesting planting site, they have to include the specious when they send that service order in, and we are now checking to say, what do we have? what is a good one and would that be suitable for this site?

it getting integrated into our work flow and i definitely excited to see that. i think that may are been the question previously? last time you asked to know what trees got planted from the nursery? that is something i suggested to the team and they were like, already thinking that. we think that should be a field we track so we can measure. >> yeah. alright. so, none have been planted yet, these are still like too small? still growing. >> it is mixed and we are planting out of the nursery, so i can ask about specific trees, but i think what would be fun to celebrate is when the 5 gallon trees are big enough they could be planted as 15 and that is a fun little celebration to plant. >> alright. thank you. do you guys have any other

questions? alright. >> thank you. >> thank you. >> thank you very much. i love hearing about trees, so-- [laughter] alright. so, hearing no further questions, mr. fuller please open public comment on this item. >> members of the public who wish to make three minutes of comment on item 4, the bureau of urban forestry performance measure report, you may line up against wall from the door. commenting outside the chamber, press the raise your hand but in the webinar or star 3 on the phone to be recognized. and we do not have any members of the public who have come forward on this item and we do not have any callers who expressed interest on it either, so that concludes public comment. >> alright. secretary fuller, please call

the next item. >> item 5, the racial equity action plan update and beth rubinstein is here to present the report and it is informational item. >> good morning commissioners. great to be here again. beth rubinstein, the deputy director of policy and communication and part of our racial equity team. good morning to our new commissioner. happy to meet you. it was exciting to be here when you did the land acknowledgment for the first time. i had no idea and congratulations on that. i find it personally really moving because we are-the public are the stewards of the public right of way so i feel it has particular meaning to us. the land acknowledgment is for us. it is for us to sort of ground

ourselves in our values so i appreciated the starting the meeting that way. >> thank you for your help with it. >> sure. just to remind you sort of where the racial equity initiative sits in the organization, we are under the policy and communication team. what is really important about our work is that it is department wide, so half our time is operations and half at 49 south van ness, but we work in deep collaboration with our deputy director durden behind me as well as the performance team under bruce robertson as the deputy director of finance and administration and we are staffing and lifting up their work and bringing racial equity lens to it. we don't work in isolation by any means. we actually work with the

deputy director of opration on her initiative and how it can move forward the racial equity plan. this is our racial equity working group and actually you can see me on the top left and also have a number other members. half here today. alexander on the left head of performance team. nicky just left but she was here. she is part of bureau urban forestry team, two racial equity specialists that are behind me. they are on the top. the other key person from our operation team is guillermo, top left and also on the operations racial equity team is john sway, bottom left and he was very much part of getting the

nursery off and writing the grants and getting the money so we work collaboratively. very excitingly, as you probably remember, [indiscernible] they have been on board 6 or 7 months and they are full time racial equity specialist and divide time between ops and 49. the rest of us and guillermo is full time of racial equity projects. the rest of us work-we have or core responsibilities. for our new commission, in 2021 we came out with department wide racial equity action plan based on really deep research in the department both qualitative and quantitative and interviewed a quarter of the department. the plan is internally focused about work place. from all those interviews and all that

demographic data we came up with 5 priorities, which are around the hammer graphic. phase 2, which we haven't been tasked to do yet, but we are working on already and will come up in the end is externally focused about service delivery and community collaboration. commissioner, your question to nicolas crawford how the public knows about this information? it is very much part of phase 2. how we communicate to the public and when director short talked about our community meetings that is very much part of phase 2. just to remind you, we started this work because we believe the department it was important and started 5 years and also started because there was legislation that was pased at the board and signed by the mayor that said the departments were responsible for doing a racial equity plan and also reporting on it annually. so, this preezentation is based

on the progress report that we submitted in may 2024. two months ago, and it is--we have a city wide office racial equity that sets the template. they are both our supporters and they are our accountability patners. they tell us what we need to do and help us get there. the way this is laid out is sort of the way they laid it out. all departments across the city are working in the same way. i have to say when i reach back out to the city wide office racial equity and say how did our progress go we got positive feedback, so that is testament to our team and i think how closely we work with everyone. i want to say, it may seem obvious are, you are not getting this kind of work done unless it is collaborative, but a lot other departments it is

very siloed for all sorts of reasons. some of the most difficult things we do is figure how to work together. the way the office of racial equity asked us to structure our progress report this year was to look at these 6 questions and then to apply those 6 questions to our 5 priorities and list one or two action items we were taking. not everything we are doing, not giving you the whole thing, so looking at these questions. and actually, for our new commissioner, our racial equity action plan is online and there is a paper version and i dont know if mr. fuller has given to that to you, but 180 pages long and filled with data you can also access online. easier in paper i think. that's coming towards you. get rid of this.

so, i will go quickly through this slide, because it is just-- [indiscernible] whatever. okay. thank you. so, those are the 5 priorities and so, what- again, the office of racial equity wants us to ground in the disparity and why it is priority. this is just really repeating the research we did. in terms of create clear pathways, the disparity we focused on is there uneven access and information about promotional opportunities and planning for career pathway. this came up a lot in our discussions with operations and i'll tell how we

are doing it. rethinking disciplinary processes-when i say disciplinary prosnot just talking about the legal process, but how to supervisors and staff deal with difficult situations and how do they hold staff accountable? we heard about uneven application of disciplinary actions and uneven understanding what disciplinary processes were and also real need for de-escalation technique and how do we deal with problems before they come big? the need to empower front line workers because people on the ground and folks at operation, they want process improvement and department direction and some cases they do and some cases they don't. broaden diversity at all staff is really key. we have a racially diverse department but if you look closely, there is a lot

of job segregation and our management level is about 50 percent white, so our management and professional classes need a better represent our demographics and then finally, assisting and training our managers to support all staff. we know there is implicit bias and micro aggressions, how do we nucher inclusion and belonging where all staff can have equal access to information and promotional opportunities? that's giving a sense of like, what we are looking at and why. this is what we are doing. sorry about that pop up. this is--these are the two questions we are addressing what are the steps we did and what did we learn? these are projects wree are working on. under create career pathways for operation just speaking about operations, one thing we worked hard on and guillermo has been focused

on this is how do we be sure our front line staff get information about promotional opportunities and we-he's been doing this in a multimodal way having better bulletin boards. none of this is rocket science but having capacity, staff capacity to do it so grateful guillermo is on board. bulletin boards . he has been working with teams at scs and other divisions to have morning huddles where the supervisors --there is information. one thing we have done in the last year is a big communication survey for operation folks. we had a robust response and time and time again they told us, we want to get information from our supervisor and from our peers. we dont to get it online or get in the text, we want to get it person

to person. so, those morning huddles are important. also under career pathways, we are working with deputy director durden and her vision of a one on one coaching project that a lot of times thinking about your career pathway. folks dont know what is possible. they dont know where they want to go. they may come in public works as a general labor with high school graduation and may not know about a arborist or civil engineer. we are working with her and guillermo to get information about what people need and setting up computer training, how to get city job training and one on one coaching. we are working on that project. in terms of rethink disciplinary processes, this is a big nut to crack to deal with and it is

multidirection. one is that with our new hr team, which is around for about a year or so, we begun to have very high level conversation about how we deal with this. they want to promote coaching with managers. i think we generally agree but it is working out like the specifics of how things are done. also how we get information to folks about what are disciplinary processes? what do you do when there is a problem and how to be clearer about processes. and also working with our university who i sure you know about which is our training division so what trainings are possible? we had trainings on courageous conversations like how we support managers. under empower front line workers, a huge project that taking the lead on and [indiscernible] very strong second, operation racial equity working

group. one thing very important is that the department is very close, operations has its own culture and own needs. that is why you guys exist. we really wanted to build leadership around racial equity and taking action at operation so been working for the last 3 or 4 maybe 3, 4 months gathering front line staff, 10 or 12 people that meet every 2 weeks, developing leadership and they are brt to start work wg deputy director durden in terms of the action items of what they want to work on at operations to make it a culture that supports everyone's career path and all these priorities with the idea this work isn't just top down. i think we all agree, it is good to be strategic at the top, but also

need the [indiscernible] also of the folks front line who know what is going on. the racial equity working group is just getting strong and in the next year you'll see sort of the projects coming to fruition. the other thing is our team are working with hr to-again, always looking at communication. we worked with hr to give a pocket guide how to deal with the employee portal. there is a digital divide we are working really hard to solve and it comes with computer classes and the talk it guides and better communication with hr. it is also a multiple languages. we definitely have folks mono lingual so we want to be sure that i think there is 9916, we want be sure they have access.

i mentioned the training how to gret a city job and access to promotional opportunities. in the last category to assist and train manager support all staff. there is a--since governor newsom was mayor newsom, there is a requirement that all supervisors in the city take a 24 hour plus class on how to be a supervisor. how to be a good supervisor. for the last 10 years public works has done their own and device their own supervisor academy, four eight our days and in the last year been piloting a racial equity model so how do you supervisor for racial equity and come with a mindset there is awareness being anti-racist and micro aggression and implicit bias and favoritism and how to work against that. at this point we probably trained maybe a over hundred people in the

mixed operations, 49 south van ness classes. what are the outcomes? obvious, but just again this is the template from office racial equity. we want more staff to apply for promotional opportunities. one thing that is really interesting is we begin to get data on promotional-who gets promotions and we can disaggregate by race. one thing we came up in the executive team was like, can we figure out, is it a problem that people are not making it past exams or not making past interviews? maybe they are not applying and really excited to share that in talking to the office of racial equity about 2 weeks ago we heard about a new hr analytics that dhr has that actually breaks that down. all the different steps during

the hiring process and it can be disaggregated by race so about to get the formally request, so look at the data and there is a couple people per department that can look at it and we will be able to see why aren't people moving up the ladder? where are they getting stuck, because that is what we want to be targeted in our approach. my guess is people are not--there are not enough people applying for promotional opportunity. may be a exam situation and may not be prepared for the testing so how to make them more prepared. the other thing i want to--we have gotten the folks who have been attending operations racial equity working group, the people participants have given us rave reviews about that space to be able to talk about issues and not to sort of strategies

how to enact change. another thing really exciting we just recently brought on a new racial equity consultant called liberation consulting working directly with our team on the racial equity working group and they are really coming i say a train to trainers. they are building our capacity of staff to do even better. what we are looking forward? this is the office of racial equity asked about. what are we planning doing in the next year? obviously we'll continue working with deputy director durden and one on one coaches and what are all the ways we can help folks with contrary pathways? had could be group training and one on one coaching so we'll role those programs out. the other program the piloting

and mentoring program starting a month or so ago we started a mentoring program at 49 south van ness with about 36 people, about 18 pairs of mentors and meantees and liberation consulting is helping us there with content as well, and going really well. it is a pilot and so we are planning on doing that at operations hopefully in the fall or early winter. something like that. the mentoring program, there is a lot of great data around mentoring programs about how it does a number of things. it helps build relationships between staff and build a better culture of inclusion and belonging. we are also using this opportunity that all the mentors and meantees get racial equity training so they all get -kind of in the racial equity module at supervisor academy and there is a lot of data that shows mentoring

programs help folks of color move up the career ladder. really excited about that. disciplinary process we hope to go from high level conversation to mid-level let's implement projects. the operation racial equity working group will have their own projects that will be implemented at all different kinds of levels. i mentioned the dhr analytics for broadening diversity and then we'll continue that racial equity module at supervisor academy. further disseminating that. last slide, other really important projects for 24/25, the text got small but one project that is very important is the work we are doing with performance team. mentioned at the beginning where we sit, we work closely with deputy director durden and with the

performance team and the work they are doing that we keyed in is strategic plan, employee survey and action items. that is very related to what our ops working group are doing. they are looking at action groups out of employee plan and bringing racial equity lens to that and working on that. nobody is working in isolation and then the third thing is like, process improvement work that performance team heads up. in terms of the strategic plan, the performance team brought our team in several months ago before the strategic plan is being rolled out to do a analysis of the plan and to also sort of talk about how a strategic plan will be implemented. we brought a racial equity tool and the racial equity tool is a series of questions and here are some basic

questions which seem kind of obvious, but when you start to unpack the answers, you really get at so, what are we not thinking about, what are we over-emphasizing and under-emphasizing. the other program is language access program. by legislation the city has a language access ordinance that both is internal and external in terms of how we work with the public. all documents need to be in english, chinese, spanish, tagalog-spanish. did i say spanish? and so, the language-so looking in the language access project, we are-we have been doing it i say the last several years been doing it but at the moment we can make it much more robust. coming out of covid and moving

into 49 south van ness. the other piece is part of phase 2. the outwardly working police. -piece. the last item has come up when director short talked about the buff contractors and local business enterprise. that is huge piece of phase 2 supporting local businesses, which are often local business owners of color, and so in may-like as part of this project is in may we had what we called contractor connections, which was a event of about 90 people we hosted at it southeast community center that helped connect local business enterprises with city departments. sort of, what are upcoming projects, so our public works team--we had a table all the departments had tables and we

had about 40-50 representatives from local businesses enterprises that are contractors of some sort. there could have been tree contractors, street cleaning or whatever and we dpot a really good response. the lbe felt seen and supportive and i am working with deputy director [indiscernible] to think about the next program which is probably in october. there are probably 2 or 3 a year. how do we best support the lbe and how to connect them with the general contractors? that's it. questions? >> you guys have any questions? >> i do. i just have a question. i'm just going to ask. you don't have to answer. still, i just want context and information. >> okay. >> so, with this all the racial equity things, is union involved with a lot of this decision making or helping

kind of? get suggestions to the table? >> that's a really great question and i don't have a very good answer, but i will tell you--so, there is city wide work and there is department work, and the office of racial equity is definitely-they are moving forward with city wide work while also helping departments, so city wide office racial equity works with dhr, human resources and they are the ones that work with the unions and have gone through negotiations with the new union contracts, so in a big way,b it is the office of racial equity. in a smaller way which is really important around unions is our apprenticeship programs which i don't know if you want to speak to.

working with the unions for public works, it has to do with apprenticeship programs which are really important in terms of our work for our values about how important workforce development is, so i know we work closely with the unions for that, but i can't speak to it. >> we do work with unions on workforce development as far as racial equity and get their buy in on a lot of things as well, so as far as the workforce development, definitely union has a say what is going on and fair with the unions. we listen. we agree to disagree. we run things by the union as well, but i think more so we are working on our issues internally as far as racial equity. we need to work from the top down to really understand we do have issues we

need to address. that's what this program beth has been working on has been doing and think she has done a phenomenal job. still have some work. we do have more work to do, but i hope that helps answer your question. now we are working with 261 and the plumbers. >> local 261 is labor international. >> correct. 261 is general labors. the plumbers, can't say the number. >> [indiscernible] >> yes. 38. as we gradually open back up the apprenticeship, we work hand in hand with each of the unions directly and we sit down face to face and work through these workforce development issues and our apprenticeship program is stepping up now, so soon to have other

apprentices coming through our programs. >> the apprenticeship programs are a collaboration between us and the unions. they can't do it without us, we cant do it without them. >> my next question is, the strategic plan and where is the budget coming from for this various project? is it through still the same general fund type of stuff or allocation-separate allocation? >> in terms of implementing the strategic plan? >> yeah. >> you will hear more from alexandria when she presents. my experience is the work is threaded through all core responsibilities. it isn't a add-on.

defining street paving and there is a strategic goal that has to do-that touches street paving. i will be involved imp lming that so it is part of the core work so doesn't need extra budget. i don't know if you want to add to that. >> supervisor academy. >> that is a part of our university--the university has staff and our internally we do the training and the folks that attended, it is part of their over head hours so each of us have at least 10 hours of training that we are required to do for performance plans, no matter what you do you have at least 10 hours you can coach through professional development. supervisor academy is 24 hours so more then the 10, but you code that to overhead. i believe, director short? >> yeah. so, yes.

the training hours are generally built into our existing operating budget. we do occasionally ask for additional resources if we wanted to for example get a specific-in the past we've had a request for certain types of computer classes and we have been allocated a budget to pay for those computer classes that are externally provided. we do working with our university, they beginning every fiscal year present their request for their budget and if there is additional resources needed, we will see if we can accommodate or request from the mayor office but we do support staff when we can to do training in-house or if there are external trainings they want to attend and sometimes it is over-head and sometimes general. >> these things are bringing in

consult ing firm? >> sorry? >> this include bringing in consulting firm sph >> the consulting firm would have been a line item. we did submit specific requests to hire our two new dedicated racial equity staff members and to support that consulting. >> that was new budget and just to be honest and put in context, we started the initiative 5 years ago and it was a group of 12 of us doing it on the edges of our core responsibilities. we all had other work, and starting about 4 and a half years ago started advocating for racial equity consultant and staffing. in the city there is important processes so it took a while to do the convincing and advocating and find the budget and go through the hiring process and rfp, so kind of a wonderful embarrassment of riching and really

good timing we got new staff 7 months ago and the consiltant which ask perfect timing because the-the idea with the consultant is that they drop in and leave, they set up for long-term success and so it was additional budget request that has been developed over several years. >> thank you. >> anyone else have any questions? no. i would just like to say thank you, because i know this is hard work. san francisco is such a melting pot of different people and everything and trying to make everyone feel included and supported is not an easy feat, so good job for you guys. like, yeah. thank you. this isn't easy. >> yeah.

i-we have succeeded yet. i dont think everybody feels included and belongs, but i think- >> it is ongoing. >> i feel what we are proud of is we have been having conversations out-loud and naming things in the way that were not named 4 years ago and i think everyone agrees so that we come to the strategic plan, when we say like, are we thinking of the bayview enough and do we have representatives from the bayview, are we talking to folks in chinatown? when we say those things we don't get push-back. it isn't like no one says why are you asking these questions, it is like it is becoming normalized to talk about race and to talk about the issues, so in that way i feel we have gotten far, we have a lot of work to do. >> yeah. continue the great work, because it is needed and it will just boost morale and everything t. is really important

what you guys are doing, so thank you. >> thank you so much. >> thank you for your time. >> okay. let's see. if there is no further discussion--do we need to ask-- for public comment? >> we will need to take public comment, yes. >> so, can you please open up to public comment? >> members of the public who wish to make three minutes of comment in person on item 5, the racial equity action plan update, may line up against the wall from the door and outside the chamber, press raise your hand button in the webinar or star 3 on your phone to be recognized. we do not have any members of the public in person and sfgovtv indicated we do not have callers who want

to speak so that is all our public comment. >> alright. so, there is no further discussion from the commission. secretary fuller, please call the next item. >> item 6, new business initiated by commissioners. this is a opportunity for commissioners to make announcements and raise topics to be added to future commission agendas and it informational item. >> is there any new business? alright. hearing no further new business, mr. fuller, please open public comment on this item. >> members of the public who wish to comment on item 6, new business may line up against the wall. if you commenting outside the chamber, please press the raise your hand button in the webinar or star 3 on your phone to be recognized.

and both in person and over the phone we do not have any members of the public wishing to comment at this time. >> alright. so, hearing no further discussion, secretary fuller, please call the next item. >> okay. item 7 is sanitation street performance evaluation in closed session. this is information item and no action will be taken. to enter closed session, the commission will need a motion to then hear public comment on that motion and then to vote on it. >> alright. do i hear a motion for this commission to enter closed session regarding the secretary performance? >> so move. >> do i hear a second? >> second. >> secretary fuller, please open public comment on this item. >> who seconded that?

thank you. members of the public who wish to comment on the motion to enter closed session may line up against the wall furthest from the door and commenting from outside the chamber you press raise your hand button in the webinar or star 3 on your phone to be recognized. we do not have any in person commenters and we do not have anyone in the queue for the phone either. that concludes public comment. >> alright. hearing no further debate or anything, all in favor of entering closed session say yes. >> yes. >> all opposed say no. and the motion passes. time entering closed session is 1157 a.m. >> okay. commissioners, we'll just have a couple minutes of transition while i take us out of the public broadcast and

close up the front doors. might be a good opportunity if anyone needs to run to the wash room or [meeting reconvened] >> we have no announcement. secretary fuller, please open public comment on this item. >> members of the public who wish to comment on the announcement following closed session may line up against the wall futhest from the door. if commenting from outside the chamber, press raise your hand button in the webinar or star 3 on your phone to be recognized. we do not have any in-person or over the phone public commenters. >> alright. do i hear a motion to not disclose discussion during closed session? >> so moved. >> do i hear a second?

>> second. >> secretary fuller, please open public comment. >> members of the public who wish to comment on the motion not to disclose discussion during closed session may line against the wall and if you are commenting from outside the chamber, press raise your hand button in the webinar or star 3 on your phone to be recognized. we have no in-person and we have no callers wishing to speak on this item. this motion. >> alright. is there any debate on this motion? nope. hearing no further debate, all in favor say aye. >> aye. >> all opposed, say no. there is no noes. the motion passes. secretary fuller, please call the next item. >> item 10, general public comment continued from item 1 if

necessary and it is not necessary since we did not exceed 15 minutes of general public comment. >> alright. so, mr. secretary, is there furter business? >> there is no further business on the agenda. >> alright. this commission will meet-hearing no objection, and adjourn this meeting. you know when our next meeting is? i dont remember. >> it will be september 15 i believe. >> september 15 is our next meeting. so, alright. hearing no objections, i adjourn this meeting. september 16. i adjourn this meeting at 1219 p.m. [gavel] [meeting adjourned]

>> [music] what's this for? i will have nile firefighter friends bring me a bench to explain the cool things. joy want to see. >> this is cool marbles up here. a, appliance and hose and this is a y >> why? >> why is it called a y, that's a great question this . is a y.

you see it looks like a y. we use it for yellow in the fight we use it to take 2 different hoses from one hose. that way in a big building like a high rise, and we have a large piece of hose connect here, we are able to take two more hoses in different directions to help put a fire out in a floor that is well above the street level. >> okay. >> fire engines carry 4 firefighters and firefighter paramedics. firefighters should not be considered strangers. firefighters are your friends. >> uh-huh. >> you are in need of help you need to make sure it is okay to go up to the firefighter. firefighters utilize many of the tools we discuss in the a fire engine. such as a fire extinguisher >> what's that for. >> they can be used to put out fires the size.

a waste basket and squirts water. >> oh , >> that is cool. >> yea! >> we have other tools a chain saw. they help us get through the many obstacles we encounter while we are trialing to put out a fire or save somebody's life. >> nice >> that is cool if you see a firefighter like this in a fire the firefighters are friends and this firefighter will save your life. it is okay to go to the firefighter. >> hum. good to know. [music] ♪♪

francisco historic preservation commission regular meeting this afternoon at 12:30 pm., wednesday, june 5, 2024.) >> historic preservation commission regular meeting this afternoon at 12:30 pm., wednesday, june 5, 2024. >> members of the public we ask i line up on screen side of the room limited to 3 minutes per speaker and when forgotten the responsibilities as the caretakers of this place, as well as for all peoples who reside in their traditional territory. indicating your time is up and now take the next person best practices clearly and slowly and complete include your name for the record and members of the public the commission again tolerate any disruptions. >> president matsuda here. >> vice president nageswaran here. >> commissioner baldauf here. >> commissioner foley present. >> commissioner campbelle