honey. good evening. okay. i call this meeting to order. charles good evening. this is a meeting of the san francisco commission on the environment. the date is monday, august 26th. the time is 5:06 p.m. please note that the ringing and use of cell phones, pagers, and similar devices is prohibited. please be advised that the chair may order the removal from the meeting room of anyone using a phone or similar device. public comment will be available for each item on the agenda for comments on matters that are not on the agenda. there will be an opportunity for general public comment. participants who wish

to. who wish to comment will be asked to come forward one by one and speak clearly into the mic. each speaker will be allowed three minutes to speak. alternatively, members of the public may submit public comment by email to environment at sfgov. org. comments submitted via email will be forwarded to the commissioners, who will be included as part of the official file. please note that the broadcast on sfgtv will end at the conclusion of agenda item 11 b when the commission goes into closed session. broadcasting will not resume when the commission reenters open session. i will now call the roll. president juan. here vice president sullivan. here. commissioner, on. here commissioner bermejo. here commissioner hunter. here. commissioner. tompkins. here. commissioner yuan. here. president. juan, we have a quorum. next item, please. the

next item is item. the next item is the consent calendar for items two through four. number two is the president. president's welcome. this item is for discussion. number three is staff introductions. the speaker is tyrone zhou, the director. this item is for discussion. number four is the approval of minutes of the june 24th, 2024 commission on the environment meeting. the explanatory document is the june 24th, 2024 commission. the environment draft minutes. this item is for discussion and action. good evening. item two is the president's welcome. the commission on the environment acknowledges that we occupy the unceded ancestral homeland of ramaytush ohlone peoples, who are the original inhabitants of 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 as the indigenous protectors of this land, and in accordance with their traditional traditions, the ramaytush ohlone has never seed lost nor forgotten for their responsibilities as the caretakers of this place, as well as for all peoples who reside in their traditional territory. we recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland as uninvited guests. we affirm that sovereign rights as first peoples and wish to pay our respects to the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the ramaytush community. as environmentalists, we recognize that we must embrace indigenous knowledge in how we care for san francisco and all its people. commissioners department staff, members of the public, welcome. today's presentation docket includes staff introductions. update to fix lease san francisco municipal green building task force initiatives and edible food recovery and

food waste prevention efforts. we also have an agenda item for director jules performance appraisal. with that, let's get started. so the next item is item number three. director joe, would you like to introduce new staff to the environment department? testing feel like it's a karaoke session. all right, if i can ask everyone who's here, who's going to be introduced to. just come on up. just. we'll save a little bit of time. so, commissioners, we have done a tremendous amount of hiring over the past month, which is why you see so many people here. before i introduce everyone, i do want to give a huge shout out to someone we recognize at our all staff meeting, sana ahmad, who is our hr analyst, who really has just done a tremendous job getting all of these hires here and now we're going to introduce everyone. so first up, we have a

familiar face to san francisco environment. it's a rehire. brian reyes rejoins us as the senior circular economy coordinator on the climate team under cindy comerford. and he will be collaborating with james slattery on the construction and demolition ordinance. so if you want to come up. hello. thank you. a lot of, old faces and new faces. so glad to join the department again. thank you for having me. staff and. yeah. look forward to working with you all on circular economy. all right, next up, we have a transfer from the recreation and parks department. we have brian dewitt, who is joining us as our senior administrative analyst, brian. hi. glad to be here with the environment and, look forward to helping out and, working on the environment, not

just for me, but my kids and my nieces and nephews and, and spent a lot of time in scouts as a leader, taking kids out, teaching a lot of webelos. the principles of doug trace. so, and i was lucky enough to grow up in pennsylvania in a rural area. and brought that love of nature with me out here to california. thank you so much, next up, we have. oh the. speaker is very interesting. test, test. testing, testing. it's on. it's just a little sof. testing, testing. do you want to maybe give the other mic? well, i contacted. i have to try that

on that was not on. so be right here. okay go test all right. i guess next person on the mic will sing a duet with me, so we're going to welcome our new hires, first we have sue chang, who is joining us as a senior commercial toxics reduction coordinator. beth bodner, our commercial zero waste assistant coordinator. anna zimmerman, who's our construction and demolition associate. and three new environmental education associates, walter jones, raymond liu and a familiar face to sfa, who was once our california climate action corps fellow, carly chang. so in any any order. hello, my name is sue chang, and i'm the senior commercial toxics reduction coordinator. i'm really honored

and excited to be joining the san francisco department of the environment. i have over 30 years of experience in the environmental health field, specifically working on protecting the public from toxic chemicals and most recently, i was working at the center for environmental health, a national ngo based out of oakland, on getting toxic chemicals out of food packaging and foodware and getting, environmentally preferable reusables back into k through 12 schools. thanks. thanks hi, my name is walter jones. i'm joining the environmental education team as an education environmental education associate, i'm super excited to be here and to get the opportunity to engage youth across sfusd. hello everyone. my name is raymond liu. i'm going to be joining the environmental department as an education, environmental education

associate. i'm really excited to be able to go back into schools. i had a wonderful opportunity a couple of years ago to teach abroad as a teacher. so i'm kind of bringing a little bit of a international sense over here, i used to work in healthcare, so i'm doing a bit of a career change, but i'm really excited to jump back and work with kids and sfusd. hi everyone. my name is kali. i'm one of the three new environmental education associates. i was really fortunate last year to be a fellow on the commercial zero waste team at sfe, and i'm really excited to be hired on to this new team and bring my experience in zero waste and my educational background in wildlife and conservation biology to my new role. thank you. hello everyone! my name is beth bodner. i'm the new, zero

waste assistant coordinator on the commercial team, the majority of my professional experience has been in the public sector in corporate, social responsibility and operations. and a bit more recently, i worked in edible food recovery, which is what i'll focus on here. so i've kind of crept closer and closer to this world of environmental policy. really excited to be here. hi, my name is anna zimmern and i'm the zero waste associate for construction and demolition. i come from a background in customer service, waste management, landscape and construction and yeah, i've been into the environment most of my life and i feel really honored to be a part of this team. and yeah, just get to know more and learn more and meet everybody. great and we have one more new hire whom the commission knows is not here today. alice herr, who is our new commission secretary and policy affairs

manager, kind of got the title right. anyway, she will be here clerking this meeting next month, and so she'll be sitting in the seat that charles is sitting in, in addition to the new hires, we have several interns that were really excited to welcome, some usf fellows, perhaps, we have nicole wilmot, izzy shoals, and hogan kinder. and i don't think they're. oh, come on up. okay, there we go. oh no. is it working? okay, perfect. hi, i'm nicole wilmot. i'm a student at the university of san francisco, double majoring in international studies and spanish, i am here as i said before, with a fellows program at the through the mccarthy center at usf, and i'm just really excited to be here, learn and observe what kind of

goes on, especially during these meetings as well. so yes, thank you for the opportunity to be here and we have one more person who is joining us virtually. we have hui lee, who has been with us for over nine years. you've seen presentations from him. he has been promoted to our senior toxics reduction coordinator, filling the big shoes of maggie johnson, whom we recognize at the last commission meeting. but we all know he's up for the task. so, hui, if you want to say a few words virtually, sure. i hope that everyone can see me or hear me at least. so good evening commissioners. my name is hui and yes, as ty said, hopefully you know me by now. i've been at the department for just about nine years doing work mostly around household hazardous waste, and used oil. and so it is an absolute privilege and an honor to be selected as their senior residential toxics reduction program coordinator. i look

forward to continuing this great work me and my team has been doing, and i hope that in this new role, i'm able to keep that work going and hopefully take this program to the next level. thanks for having me. and that concludes our hires. if want to give a round of applause to all of our new folks. okay, i'm going to give give the kind of note you don't have to stick around for the entire meeting. so if you have somewhere you need to go, just feel free to, you know, quietly step outside if you'd like to stay. you're more than welcome to stay. and that concludes the new hires. thank you. it's exciting. welcome, everyone, the final item in the consent calendar are the minutes. so, commissioners, we have an action item for this. is there any discussion on changes to the draft minutes, do i hear a motion to approve the minutes? so moved. thank you. commissioner miho, second. second. thank you, commissioner tompkins. so we have a motion by

commissioner bermejo and a second by commissioner tompkins. hearing no further discussion. oh, sorry. go ahead. open up for public comment. yes, sure. are there any are there any members of the public who wish to speak on items two through four of the agenda? madam president, we have no speakers. all right. hearing no further public comment, my name is deirdre tanovic. i am on the environment department. pardon for deirdre. she's calling media services to deal with that. and she was not on mute, so no worries. she's, she's helping out from afar. so, thank you, deirdre, for that. and i have muted her. thank you. no worries. public comment is now closed. trials. please call the roll for item four. sure. thank you for that. president juan i, vice president sullivan

i commissioner john i commissioner bermejo i commissioner hunter i commissioner tompkins i commissioner yuan i. so the motion passes. next item please. next item is item five. general public comment. members of the public may address the commission on matters that are within the commission's jurisdiction and are not on today's agenda. and so to that end, are there any members of the public who wish to comment on this item? madam president, we have no speakers. great. public comment is now closed. next item please. next item is item six presentation and an update on the fixed lead program. the sponsor is lowell chew energy program manager. the speaker is ryan ramos, senior energy specialist. paul gray, environmental specialist karen yu, senior environmental health inspector, department of public health. this item is for discussion. good evening.

evening. this is a bit of a change. it is working. i just have to speak directly into it. good evening, commissioners and director drew. my name is lowell chew. i'm the energy program manager. and thank you for the opportunity to present a fixed sef this evening. i'm joined by my colleagues, paul and ryan, as well as my colleague from the department of public health, karen you to present an update on the fixed lid sef program. the fixed that sef program was born in 2019 after 20 years of hard fought lawsuit against lead paint manufacturers. today, the program is co implemented by sef environment and the department of public health, leveraging the unique talents of both agencies in designing and administering public facing programs. so it's my great honor that i asked my colleague ryan to open the presentation. so i'll pass it over to ryan. thank you. good evening, commissioners.

okay. my name is ryan ramos. i'm as lowell introduced. i'm a senior and environmental specialist with the environment department. i'm joined here with my colleagues, karen yuhas and paul gray. and we're here to give you an update on the fixed lead sef program. and i'm going to turn it over to karen. you hoped to provide an overview of the fixed lead program. thank you. good afternoon commissioners. my name is karen hope. and i'm a senior environmental health inspector with the environmental health branch of the health department in san francisco. and i have worked in the lead program for the last 33 years, since the inception of the lead program. and i'm very, very grateful that

the lead program can partner with your department in doing and implementing fixed lead sef. not only do paul and ryan bring proper management and construction skills for the project, they also bring the knowledge of how to use environmental, environmentally sound methods and materials to protect the environment while we're protecting the children from lead poisoning. so right now i would like to provide the background and context for the fixed lead sef program. so why is lead a concern? well, lead is a toxin for both children and adults, but children tend to get lead poisoning more often because they get the lead in their body more frequently because they like to stick non-food items in their mouths. so since lead does not have any use for lead whatsoever, every little bit of lead that goes into our body is considered a poison. and thus every little bit amount of it in our body we

are poisoned. and so lead affects neurological or neurological system. and so it affects the children's iq, their growth and as well as their behavior. and so when the lead is just a little bit in our bodies, there really isn't a medicinal treatment for lead poisoning. and so the only method for treating and preventing further lead poisoning is really to remove the lead problem. and there are many lead sources in our environment. but primarily in san francisco. that is found in our buildings. we have estimated that there are over 200,000 residential units in san francisco that probably contain lead based paint and lead in the soil. because these buildings were built before 1978, when lead paint were still in use an, basically there are two

approaches for reducing the amount of lead in a unit. and the first approach we call that interim control. and these are basically temporary measures to reduce the exposure of people to lead hazards. and these approaches include just repainting, specialized cleaning or establishing maintenance. operational programs, so then so then this is really temporary. that means the lead hazards can come back and they can be people can be exposed again. and the second method, the second strategy of eliminating lead is what we call abatement. and this is basically permanently eliminating the lead or lead hazards such as replacing the building elements with new ones. and the abatement approach is preferable because they're really getting rid of the lead. but it's also the more expensive

approach. and so fixed lead sf is not the first city program to do lead remediation work. from 2003 to 2013, the mayor's office of housing had hud grants for doing lead work. the work had provided very valuable information for shaping our work, so before fix, let sf develop this program. we interviewed the mayor's office of housing lead certified contractors, lead certified inspectors, property owners, tenants, as well as our own lead staff. one significant feedback we got from these dialogs is that and we incorporated, is that the city needs to reduce the speed at which the contractors who do the remediation are paid. for this reason, fixed lead sf had contracted with rebuilding together sf as an environmental as an administrator for our

program. the second items, the second piece of information we got from these dialogs that really helped us was how to target our program. first of all, we really have in spite of how much we think we have it really is limited, so it helps us to target our population and so from 30 years of blood lead data that we have in the 2020 census tract, fixed lead sf has determined that we're going to target first primary. now, later on, we may change in zip codes (941) 109-4112 and 94124, and the second piece of information that we have incorporated is how we're going to target the scope of work that we'll be engaging in, so fixed lead sf has decided to do abatement rather than interim control for the last 30

years. the property owners and the mayor's office of housing had primarily focused on interim controls. so with this, once in a lifetime funding opportunity, we will remove as much lead as from our residents as possible. fixed lead assets would do the abatement that is most expensive and dangerous for property owners to do on their own, and those are the windows and the friction points on doors and the soil. the property owners can easily and inexpensively take care of the other components, such as the baseboards in their home. so the applicants to these programs, they know, we tell them several times during this period of work that we will not leave their building lead free. that's really impossible. and they seem to be okay with that. and they acknowledge this reality that we have in san

francisco. so we began the program with seven pilot projects for about eight months, during which we learned about working with family care, child centers, how to manage the soil remediation, and the best methods for doing abatement and relocations. and so now we're in the midst of the program core phase itself. and right now, our applicants mainly come from people who call the health department asking and being concerned about lead in their homes. and we would tell them about fixed lead sf and also the health department. we sent out newsletters, biannual newsletters to about 1000 medical providers and child care services per year for child care services providers and from these we have recruited participants as well. and now, paul gray right will come share about the scope of work.

required good evening commissioners. my name is paul gray. i'm an environmental specialist at the environment department. all on site work conducted on the fixed sf projects needs to be done by state certified lead professionals, which include inspectors, project monitors, supervisors and their workers. we are a government program running projects in private homes using private contractors. i have a carpentry background and i'm a certified project monitor. i write the scopes of work and help manage the program projects. the supervisors are the contractors who conduct the actual abatement or interim controls, and they are truly a niche group to do the work that we require. with the special certifications required. functionally speaking, there are only about a dozen companies in our zone marin, san francisco

and san mateo counties that have the potential of doing the work we require. then we need to convince them to work with us. karen mentioned the difference between interim control and abatement. well, interim control is the standard operating procedure of most jobs done with our colleagues throughout the state. and currently outside our program in the city. we decided to do more abatement work, which results in a greater level of long term health protection. but increases the costs. as karen mentioned from the supervisors perspective, their end of the things since the costs per job for overhead does not change much based on the project scope size, we wanted to find the right balance of not too small or big to get the most hazard reduction with our program mone, i was asked to talk about project scoping, so in order to speed things along, i will talk about doors only and the complexities that go into the decisions. interim control for doors would be to make sure that

they close properly with no friction. then stabilize any peeling paint and make and give it a fresh coat of paint. if the paint is intact, you would do nothing at all. we don't do this in this program. abatement would include a complete removal of the door frame and trim b replacement of the door, and just the strip. the contact area of the frame, or c fitting the door and stripping the contact area of the door and frame. these are all different levels of lead paint removal. all abatement methods are an option based on specific circumstances on the project site. if we go with the complete removal, we also need to be aware of the potential disturbance of asbestos in the plaster or joint compound. this requires a couple of extra trips to the job site, along with any extra level of testing necessary of the substrates. then decisions can be made on the project scope. the property owners wishes need to be incorporated and

negotiated. perhaps they want to keep the original doors and hinges for architectural integrity. many doors are nonstandard sizes which would increase in cost replacement costs and affect my decision stripping paint. these days is safer for the workers, since methylene chloride was prohibited, but labor and material costs increased significantly due to the increased set time of modern strippers, cost of the current strippers and a 4 to 5 time increase in labor going after items that are intact, such as the doors throughout the unit that test positive, leads to a larger scope of work, and the number of rooms worked on, which increases job site logistics and the percentage of projects that need relocation. this has an entirely different bucket of jobsite complexity, and may add to the decisions made for my scope of work. i could go on with examples, but you can see

that not all jobs are the same, and all present unique challenges. and i'd like to add that while environmental issues are always on my mind when i make these decisions, reduction of lead hazards is my primary concern. thanks for your time. pass it back to ryan. thank you. paul. and to give you commissioners an update on the progress to date with the program, the collaboration with the department of public health and the environment department began in the fall of 2022. since then, we've received approximately 30 applications. and out of those 30 applications, we have completed 1212 projects. and in the presently, we have seven additional projects that are in different stages, one of which is presently under construction, two more which will be in construction within the next few weeks, and the remainder kind of going through the vetting process. so out of these projects, we include is included a home care facility, which reduced lead hazards to many,

many children. to date, the program has spent approximately $600,000 on the project work, which includes lead and asbestos testing. the actual removal of lead from the buildings, as well as tenant and owner relocation. turning it back to karen to discuss lessons learned related to these projects, so i would say the first thing i, i personally learned is, that, you know, talking to people who have had experience, community engagement is very important. i believe that we have been able to ramp up this project so quickly because we have learned from the people who have done this in the past. just as i had mentioned before, with the limited number of certified inspectors and i mean contractors, if we didn't, if we didn't reduce, we don't reduce the speed at which the city pays, then they would not work for us. so that's, that's that

was the primary thing we learne. and we really worked hard on getting that barrier eliminated. and the second thing is, i think i learned that this program really is going to help me in my normal work with the health department to continually improve it. normally i just do an inspection, write a notice violation, and expect the property owners and the tenants to abate and relocate. but this job really has shown me all the details and all the, the things that they have to go through in order to, to get the lead hazard remediated. and so that really helps me to appreciate what they do, what they have to go through. and i think it will help us, you know, improve our, the health department's lead program as well. and the last thing is we don't know what we don't know. and the program is always encountering new challenges, and we will always going to be needing to adapt to them. and that's pretty common with, with construction

projects, we're just going to have to sort out every challenge as they come up. so the last thing i wanted to discuss was the future plans for the program. so right now we have about we have two types of new plans that we have. one is enhancing and improving the outreach and the actual conducting of the lead hazard remediation projects. and the second is to utilize fixed lead to improve the outreach of the san francisco environment. so some of the planned enhancements include ramping up outreach, which which the department of public health is starting with engaging promotoras, which are community health workers, to improve the recruitment process and bring more projects into the program. in addition, the program is looking to find ways to address conditions in homes that may hinder mitigation efforts. for instance, there are homes that may require extensive renovation, such as ones with leaky roofs, cracked walls, etc.

and this prevents lead reduction activities from taking place. so the department is looking for funds that are available to help to help with these types of issues. since the lead funds are not allowed to be used in this case, the other area that we're planning on helping on with is using the fixed lead approach as an opportunity to advance other sfd goals. so the lead settlement funds, as i mentioned before, are limited to strictly, working on lead reduction. so we've looked for ways to secure funds under another department of public health grant under a healthy homes initiative, in order to allow us to catalog natural gas equipment in the homes, which could be water heaters, furnaces, cooktops and dryers, evaluate the condition of this equipment and then also take a look at the building constraints that may be present. this will help san francisco

environment characterize the building. the residential building stock, and then potentially offer them future current decarbonization programing. i want to thank you, commissioners, for your time, and we're available for questions. commissioner, anyone have questions? can i ask so you mentioned about 600,000 total for this project. so does it mean it's not time bound. but once you exhaust all the funds then the program ends. or how is it going to be like or is it still a pilot phase like so we are presently in what we're calling the core phase of the program. so we've spent 600,000 on the projects themselves. we have another. so we've set aside 14 million to cover projects and the administrative costs. so we are hoping to scale up the program in order to get our spend rate a little bit higher. it's been a bit of a challenge

getting the word out of the to the program and making sure we have sufficient number of contractors available to do the work, but we are doing our best efforts to increase program awareness and also have a bunch of contractors available. okay, so it's 40 million. that will go for a pretty long way. i guess. so presently, our contract with the administrator of rebuilding together is five years, with the option to extend. so at this we are i will readily admit, we are not at the spend rate we had hoped for, so we will be looking to increase that spend rate significantly over the next couple of years of the contract with the program administrator. i see. and do they have to be in certain type of like income cap in order to be qualified to this program, or is it open to any facility? we have considered the an income cap. presently we feel like the zip codes that we've selected tend to have the homes

with the highest lead and also coincide with homes that have typically lower income families. so as a part of our screening criteria, we certainly attempt to look at, the income of we don't specifically ask for the income, but the program, the projects that we prioritize are ones that have the equity component of lower income families, and there's no cost to the owner. it is no cost to the owner. if they have children, there's a little wrinkle in it. but if the property owner wants to complete a project in which there are no children in one, so say it's a multi-family building, they can we can treat the units with children at no cost. the units without children, we have a cost share. great. thank you. i definitely learned a lot. any other fellow commissioners have questions? one other question. so is the limiting factor right now the availability of contractors who

are able and willing to participate or. i would not say that's the limiting factor that in the future where we have a higher when we scale up, that could potentially be a limiting factor. but right now, i would say the limiting factor is having qualified enrollees. and that's why we're increasing our outreach using promotoras as well as other methods qualified leads, meaning people who have come forward and said, i'd like to have my home. yes. and they fit the profile of actually having a child having sufficient, lead in the homes. sometimes we do get applicants that have very minor, like maybe they just need to, like, repaint one window. we found that our contractors tend to want to have a minimum threshold of work in order to actually participate. and so that that presents a little bit of a tricky piece. we've considered other areas of potentially combining projects together in order to get a higher threshold, however, that

that has not come to we have not put one of those together yet. so another approach might be, if that's the limiting factor, to expand the number of zip codes down the line, that is certainly a tactic that we have in mind at this point. we don't feel, the need to do that, but we are certainly have that in our back pocket to move moving forward. yes, commissioner, is there a way to estimate how many total facilities or homes may need this kind of remediation or removal? aaron mentioned that there are 200,000 units that were built prior to 1978. and there's a high likelihood that the majority of those 200,000 have lead paint in them, we don't have an exact estimate of, say, homes that also have children that also have deteriorating conditions that require intervention, however,

we have specifically prioritized those three zip codes because based on health department data they've collected over the many decades of running lead programs, we feel like that is the highest concentration of homes, and we want to focus our efforts there for the time being. and i'm wondering if maybe, i don't know if this is possible, but when a home is sold, it has to go through a home inspection. if there's a way to maybe flag that and flag if there's children moving into a home, i don't know as a way to like prioritize those with children in the homes. right. that's a good suggestion. well, i'll take that into consideration, commissioner. what is the consideration for all of public housing just to have that mandated and work with, you know, administration in that in those spaces, just put them on a schedule? it seems like those units are the ones that are definitely in need and may not need to go through, you know, someone making a call or an addition or additional

outreach. right? so you're suggesting that, there should be some effort to look at public housing specifically and identify lead hazards there? yeah. i mean, the assumption is that there are definite facilities that you know, you know, pre prior what prior to 1978 would have been utilizing lead paint. so put those on a list immediately. and not worry about the outreach. go directly to those sources to get them scheduled. okay. that's and investigate you know inspect it investigate it or whatever, you know, approach you want to take to ensure that they meet the profile. right? so just to give you a little bit of context on our the projects that we have first have entered the program, they have been referrals from the department of public health,

that have received a notice of violation. so we are looking to address the ones that we are aware of with children that have a blood lead level above a certain threshold, but that is a good consideration to take a look at a new way to bring projects in and be in a more proactive manner rather than waiting for them to come to us. so we'll put some time and thinking into that, that approach, that would be great. and i don't know if there's a data analyst that works with you directly between health department and environment, but getting into their heads about approaches of how do you mine the data to again give you the leads for those that you need to put on the list. right. thank you. just one question to follow up on, commissioner tompkins regarding the public housing. can you use promotoras to do that kind of outreach and talk to folks, in public housing or

and also my second question was, what are the zip codes? i don't think i got the zip codes that you were focusing on. karen, can you remind me the zip codes? oh, do you want me to, well, first of all, i want to talk about the public housing, most of the public housing in san francisco have already been retrofitted, and so, yeah, and i also did some outreach in section eight housing, but we haven't had much success yet, so. but we will continue doing that. and the zip codes we're concentrating on are 94110, which is the mission area 94112. that's our mission. excelsior. and, yeah. and 94124, which is the bayview. okay. thank you. i have one more question. once you remediate, is there a period of time which you come back and have to remediate again? or once it's done, it's fully abated? i think that's

what we were talking about when we were talking about the difference between interim control and abatement. those are the two strategies of reducing lead. so the interim control, we didn't want to choose it because that's what you have to do. you have to go back because basically you're just if the paint is deteriorated, you just cover over it. and the next time you dig into it, you know, bump into it and it deteriorates, then you have to do it again. but the abatement method is where you take out the lead. you just strip it off or you replace the door altogether and with a new door without the lead in it. and so in that case, you don't have to. but because there's so many components in san francisco with lead, they will never be a time when a building would be let free at least. and some some are, because the homeowners have paid to have literally the whole thing rebuilt. unless you got out the building and do rebuild, there will be lead paint in the building, in the unit. is there an inventory of what's been interim remediated at this

point, i would say all the cases that we have ever worked with in terms of the health department cases and the mayor's office of housing, most of those have been interim because the abatement is very expensive. for example, we concentrate on taking out windows. paul can tell you, i don't know the windows are very expensive. and the fact that we can't use methylene chloride and, you know, probably why is because it's a carcinogen. we can't use that anymore. now they have to use other methods and other strippers as very much a lot of work, painstaking work. and so people don't do abatement because it's very painstaking and very expensive. thank you. well, sometimes we have to hear it once and twice. and third time, of course, this is quite complex, convoluted sometimes. yes. i think that's all the questions we have. thank you so much for your presentation.

thank you, commissioners, for the very insightful comments. appreciate your time as always. are there any members of the public who wish to comment on this item? madam president, we have no speakers. okay, public comment is now closed. next item please. the next item is item seven. presentation and update on municipal green building and decarbonization efforts. the sponsor, cindy comerford, the climate program manager. the speaker is nick kestner, senior building decarbonization coordinator, and elise mclane, building decarbonization associate. this item is for discussion. and good evening, commissioners, can you hear me? my name is cindy comerford. i'm the climate program manager and i'm here to introduce our next item, which is an update on the work of the municipal green

building task force, for those of you who don't know, our work on our municipal green building started about 20 years ago when we passed legislation that established the municipal green building code and the associated task force that goes with it, and the municipal green building code has played a really crucial role in letting the city lead by example to exemplify areas of building resilience and sustainability. so last year, last march, we came to the commission to present on an update of the municipal green building code, where we did a complete overhaul to align the code with our climate action plan and an important future initiatives, so over the last 20 years, we've seen some very notable leaders, head the task force. we had mark palmer and eden bruckman and now the municipal green building task force is being led by my

colleague nick kestner and is supported by elise mclean. so they're going to provide an update of the work on the municipal green building task force, and also talk about a very exciting decarbonization project that is, again, having the city lead by example. and i'm going to introduce nick. thank you. good evening commissioners. my name is nick kestner. good to be here again, i'm just going to briefly provide an overview of the work of the municipal green building task force before my colleague elise explains our municipal natural gas equipment inventory. and we spend most of the time answering your questions or questions around that topic. i've been the chair since last april, and i'm excited to be doing a lot of great work with representatives from the various departments around the city, and basically our work falls into three categories. we educate the

members of the task force about green building topics. we asked departments to share successes and discussions around green building with us on the task force. and then finally, we work on policy development, similar to the chapter seven updates that were done before i got here. in terms of ongoing education, you can see some of the topics we've looked at over the past year. these are not all of them, but the main ones. i do want to spend just a little bit of time talking about embodied carbon. as part of the last chapter seven update, we did include the requirement for embodied carbon checklist for projects greater than 10,000ft!. and so we decided that we would spend four meetings going through various aspects of reducing embodied carbon in the building environment. that means things like purchasing products that have a lower embodied carbon footprint, using wood materials like you can see in this project, i believe it's in soma, and just understanding also procurement and costs for

these materials that would replace things like concrete or steel. as i mentioned, the second big agenda item are department presentations. we've had a number of them throughout the throughout the last year, and it's always great to hear from colleagues to see what's going on in the various departments. and to just share ideas and experiences with new materials or new products or approaches. i will also remind you that any time a department wants to request a waiver from our green building requirements, for example, to use a different rating system, or because a particular project is too small in scope to really have sustainable requirements, make sense in the context that we apply them through leed, they will come to the committee and request or basically make the argument for why their particular project should receive a waiver. and if the committee agrees that that recommendation is passed on to tie for final signature, and then the third area where the task force is active is in developing new guidelines and policies for municipal building.

besides chapter seven, we had an opportunity to look at the biodiversity guidelines. this last year, my colleague peter came to and presented on kind of the goal of the biodiversity guidelines and asked participants and representatives from the departments to think about ways in which we could streamline those requirements and incorporate them into the day to day work of project managers. and then at the end of this presentation, i'll share with you an exciting new project we're doing to try to streamline our green building requirements for smaller projects. but before we get there, let me introduce my colleague elise mcclain, who will share with you her amazing work on the municipal natural gas equipment inventory. elise good evening. commissioners, so as nick mentioned, one exciting stride of progress for municipal green building was the completion of the municipal natural gas equipment inventory in 2023, which i'll share briefly about today. so as referenced earlier, chapter seven sets forth a variety of

requirements for our municipal buildings to ensure that we're pushing towards our green building and carbon neutrality goals. and one of these requirements was the municipal natural gas equipment inventory, which was outlined in action b024 of the climate action plan, as well as in section b, four of the municipal green building code. so over the course of 2023, the san francisco environment department conducted the inventory, ultimately inventorying 228 buildings across 22 departments. and this list of inventory buildings only includes those that were required within chapter seven. so this excludes port buildings, school district buildings, water treatment facilities, and of course, any buildings that did not depend on natural gas in the first place, and the work to inventory all of these buildings was thanks in large part to a couple dozen staff members across these departments who

worked really hard to collect all of this detailed equipment information and submitted it, submit it to the environment department. so the big picture goal of the inventory was to collect baseline data on gas equipment to support planning and really to allow us to accurately and effectively track our citywide progress towards electrification, so i'll just provide a few of the key metrics provided by the inventory today. but more detailed information can be found in the inventory report and also on data sf. so the inventory revealed that across these 228 buildings that were inventoried, there are over 1600 pieces of natural gas equipment in use. and over half of this equipment serves a function of space heating and then cooking and water heating equipment each make up about another 20% of the inventory,

while clothes drying and miscellaneous equipment make up the rest, so the inventory also provides valuable insight into the age disbursement of equipment, showing an average age of 13 years and a median age of six years for this equipment. and given that most of this equipment has an average lifespan of 20 years or less, it's evident that most of this equipment will reach the end of its useful life, or at least its projected life, before our 2040 carbon neutral deadline. so knowing that knowing these specific years that equipment items were installed will help departments to assess the predicted year of failure of these equipment items and therefore plan ahead for the electric replacement and any associated work that might come with that. such as electrical load increases. and finally, the inventory, of course, also reveals insight into where our gas equipment is concentrated.

so as we can see here, well over half of our gas equipment is used within just three departments the airport, recreation and parks and the municipal transportation agency. so knowing where this equipment is concentrated is really important when it comes to prioritizing electrification planning efforts and resources so that we can maximize the impact in terms of carbon emissions reductions. so now that this inventory has been completed, there are several next steps that are laid out to build upon this work. and the first of these next steps is for participating departments to continue updating their inventory as natural gas equipment is replaced with electric alternatives. so this allows for an effective way for us to really keep closely tracking citywide and departmental progress toward electrification, and allows this resource inventory to remain useful rather than just being a

stagnant measurement and lastly, the inventory has been propelling collaborative and larger scale planning between the department of public works, sf environment, the office of resiliency and capital planning and the sf public utilities commission. so these collaborating departments are working together to identify a pathway to implement phased electrification by strategically prioritizing electrification projects, updating the capital plan with projected, estimated or projected and estimated costs of electrification and finally centralizing and streamlining the project management of these electrification projects within the department of public works. so we are still in the early phases of this planning, but there's certainly a lot of great energy and motivation behind this work, so we'll be excited to share more updates in the future. and i'll pass it back to

nick just to round us out. thank you. elise and just to finish up on upcoming priorities. so finishing the decarbonization planning and then taking that planning back to the task force to start having conversations with individual departments is one of our main priorities right now, along with the ongoing education sessions and department presentations. and then the other piece that i alluded to earlier that's really important is making sure that our sustainability guidelines are streamlined for projects under 10,000ft!s, when i first started this job, i had informational interviews with a lot of the task force members and a lot of them independently brought up the fact that in smaller projects, their project managers are having to handle a lot more work because they have fewer consultants on board for those small projects. and so requiring them to turn in things like a lead checklist that isn't actually being required for certification, it adds a lot of

administrative burden. so what we've done in collaboration with the members in the task force is to figure out ways that we can stay true to our sustainability goals, but incorporate them into the gts six checklist that all projects need to submit, rather than requiring that extra level of paperwork. so actually, we have a meeting set up tomorrow to start finalizing what that would look like, but hopefully, by this time next year we will have a slightly updated chapter seven that will make it easier for us to comply with our sustainability goals. so with that, i think i'd like to finish today and offer some space for you to ask questions of any of the three of us. thanks for your attention. thank you for the information, fellow commissioner. anyone has any discussion or questions? items? yes, i have one, so nick, thanks for the presentation, which was great, i have an acquaintance who's an arborist who had heard from some contractors working with the city about the biodiversity requirements. and

this was a while ago. so it's not fresh in my memory, but the sense was that there had been a recent change and a requirement for very, very strict use of, of native plants to the point where it was the contractor felt it was it was kind of inappropriate to be 100% native. so has there been a recent change? and is there a is there that strict of a requirement for, for native plants when you're working with the city? i'm going to see if cindy has a better answer than this, but i will say that the biodiversity guidelines that i was talking about today are just for municipal buildings. so i'm not sure if, you know, if this project was for a municipal project or for i don't remember. yeah. cindy, do you have an update for. so the guidelines are just guidelines. so they're not mandatory requirements for native plants. they are suggestions on best practices around native plants for biodiversity. there also is a separate effort that you might know about around the street. trees to try to have more prioritization of native street

trees, but there still will be a whole menu of street trees available to different arborists. so hopefully we have not. there's not any misconception about what the guidelines are and what they're for, and we'll be happy to follow up with you. and we can speak to that individual. but there's nobody at sfd that looks at something and says, nope, nope, nope, nope. that's not happening. okay. thank you. not yet. thank you. i'm going to turn it back over to nick. good to clarify. thanks for the question. any other questions or discussions? i guess we can open up for public comments then. are there any members of the public who wish to comment on this ite? madam president, we have no speakers. okay, again, thank you for the presentation. let's go to the next item. the next item is item eight presentation and an update on progress of departments. food waste reduction initiatives. the sponsors, tyrone chew, the director. this item is for discussion. it's broken up into two parts. item a presentation on an update to the kitchen zero

sf grant program. the speaker is alexa kielty, senior residential zero waste coordinator. this item is for discussion and an item b presentation on the food waste reduction campaign. the speaker is shradha mehta. community partners engagement program manager. this item is for discussion. commissioners. we've had a few conversations regarding edible food recovery and food waste reduction at this meeting. i want to say that thanks to the hard work of the team you're hearing about and many others, san francisco and this department has been a model for the rest of the state as far as how our approach has been on food recovery and so today, we want to talk a little bit about some of those programs to give you an idea of what's been going on. the commission also heard that we received a calrecycle grant of $2.1 million. our original request was 1.3 million, if you recall. so that's how great a job our team is doing that they actually gave us more money to expand our programs in the city. and so

first to talk about kitchen zero sf, we have alexa kielty and then she'll be joined by shraddha afterwards. good evening commissioners. nice to see you all again. for those who don't know me, alexa kielty i'm the residential zero waste senior coordinator, and i'm going to give you some background on why we're focused on food. i'm sure many of you know, but food waste in particular. so the first part, i'm just going to give some background, which will also set up trevor's presentation on why we focus on food waste reduction in households. and then i'll talk about the results from our zero waste or our kitchen zero sf cal recycle grant. so many of you know, 38% of all of our food that's raised and grown in the u.s. is uneaten or unsold. a lot of that gets thrown in our landfills, which has a huge impact on the climate, because food in our landfills produces methane and all that. unneeded transportation, of course, has a climate impact, here's the

breakdown. the latest from refe, which is one of our partners, nonprofit partners, who tracks food waste, if you look on this graph, basically 17% of food waste in this country comes is left on the farm. so produce that doesn't meet spec, is left, the 35% is somewhere in the supply chain. so in the manufacturing and in the business community and then 48% is actually happening in the home. so that's a higher number than we previously thought. we thought it was more like a third. so it really sheds light on we need to focus on households, even though it's a really difficult area to connect with. we decided to with the household food waste campaign, work on produce. why? because 80% of our of the food that's getting wasted, 80% is perishable food. that makes sense, right? and of that, 35%

is produce, and produce isn't necessarily the biggest, climate reduction opportunity. but it's a great place to start. everybody eats produce, and we all can learn how to preserve it better in our homes. but today i'm basically focused on, our in our climate action plan under our responsible production and consumption section. that's what our pc is to we have a food section in. the last part of that is getting excess food to communities in need. so today i'm going to talk about the couple successful grants. we've had with cal recycle and the reason why we went down this path is, in 2016, governor brown passed sb 1383, which is a huge, short lived climate pollutant reduction bill. and there's a whole bunch of different components to it. but one of them is requiring food generators. that means businesses that have food to donate their food. and there's

two sections. there's tier one and tier two, but essentially tier one think grocery stores. tier two is more prepared food. so hotels and venues, but at this point, both of these sectors have to comply. and everyone thinks it's a no brainer to donate food. right. but the thing is, is there is significant cost to the business community to transport this food as well as to the food organizations that want that food. so who pays for all that transport? it's significant and it's a big lift. so that's basically why we applied to cal recycle. we said we need some funds to get these businesses into compliance with the law to assist them and basically help them form those partnerships and that partnership. what i mean is the business community working with food recovery orgs, we have to make that connection. so the first grant was for 500,000. second one was for 220, 12,000

212,000, and it primarily as i said, paid for the transport of the food from the generator, the grocery stores to the food recovery orgs. but it also paid for software. and i think i've talked to you all about this before, but, there's two businesses in san francisco that have food donation matching software, which is really innovative and fantastic because it allows food organizations, sorry, organizations feeding the community to decide whether or not they want to accept that food donation. and if they do, then it automatically dispatches a doordash delivery driver. or replay has also their own vans, and that delivery will happen in 30 minutes, which is super efficient. we wanted to make sure all the food recovery orgs, the tier one, tier two businesses knew about this opportunity. so we did outreach in three languages, and we sent the, we electronically as well

as mail and we also created a really easy online portal for orgs and businesses to apply with. not too many questions, because a lot of organizations are overwhelmed with the amount of steps they have to take to get support, that picture is one of our grant recipients. excelsior strong. they serve 500 spanish-speaking families in the excelsior and we worked with organizations to develop a fee for service model, which was sort of new to them. but what we wanted them to do is ask them, what is the cost per pickup for your organization to do this work? and they had to do some calculations around staff time, fuel costs, bridge tolls, and that was not something they had done before, but really important for their organization. and there was a full range of costs. some were $15 up to $300 because sometimes it's a pickup truck, going down

to pick up a few boxes and sometimes it's a box truck with somebody with a class b license and a pallet jack. and so there's quite a range of what we're talking about. and some of the outcomes we hope to do. 129,000 pounds of food over the last two years. and we did over 800,000 pounds. so we're pretty excited. that's a picture of nancy hernandez, a leader in the community from excelsior strong. making stuff happen on the ground. and to highlight these are the partnerships that were created, i'm going to highlight the big ones. so basically extra food and safeway extra food started picking up, surplus food from safeway. and they over the last two years, they did over 600 pounds of food. they didn't have a regularly established program until now, and they had it here and there. but this really solidified the ongoing partnership. and then we also

have white pony express, that's picking up from sf market, which, by the way, you're all invited to come on a tour if you'd like. hopefully got that invitation, so since the beginning of the grants, those two rounds of grants, we've done 3.5 million pounds and i'm going to fly through this section. so what are some of our learnings? because we don't want to just give money. we want to learn from from how to move forward, the prepared food is very complex, proper storage, packaging. everybody wants packaging. how do we make sure it's recyclable, that the allergens are labeled, that things aren't leaking, the partnerships require a lot of hand-holding. it was a huge amount of time for our staff, but it was it was well worth it. but it's not a natural link always for safeway or a hotel to find the right players in san francisco. and i think that's a great, niche for our staff, unexpected costs, the food

recovery organizations sometimes get a mountain of food that's not that's spoiled. sometimes and or they have to triage through artichokes that have gone bad, so they end up with quite a bit of food waste that they then have to either compos. so that's a huge expense on them. and they're doing creative things by donating some of that to community gardens so they can compost. but it's something we really need to address. a lot of the food orgs are required by law to track the number of foods they pounds of foods they receive, and it's a lot of administrative lift for them. they don't necessarily have the scales, they don't have the excel tracking, and there's a lot of constraints on local organizations for example, that's sf market. carolyn lazar, she has to move pallets and pallets worth of food in a very short period of time. and we've had to rely on, organizations outside the county. unfortunately to pick some of

that food up. so we're losing some of our, our food that could be kept local. so we're in this next round of funding we're really going to hope to address that, food recovery organizations do not want to charge the food generators. they might be against their mission, but the money has to come from somewhere. so that's a that's a big puzzle we're trying to solve here, a lot of our staff do feel like the generators should pay because it is a real cost, and so how how do we sustain the funding for these programs on an ongoing basis is the big question, we did try to offer food waste prevention technology, a lot of them declined because they were busy trying to comply with sb 1383. but to me, that's the future of food waste prevention. we don't want these numbers to go up, up, up, up, up. we want to reduce. that's where the real climate impact is. and as our director mentioned, we got another 2.1

million. we're super excited and we want to do more innovative practices going forward. so thank you for listening. and i will hand it to my colleague shraddha mehta. good evening, commissioners. i'm shraddha mehta. i'm the community partnerships and engagement program manager at the department. and alexis presentation was a great lead in to my presentation, which is about our food waste prevention campaign. as alexa mentioned, out of all the food that's wasted, 48% comes from households making household food waste prevention an important

strategy to achieve our climate action goals. and reducing food waste is a simple action that's accessible to the general public. there are many different opportunities for food waste reduction, so we first wanted to understand residents perceptions around food waste. before we started this campaign. so in 2021, we conducted some pre-campaign research and found that fresh produce and leftovers of home prepared foods are seen as the most common types of food waste. based on that, pre-campaign research, we decided to launch an education and awareness campaign to encourage sf residents to reduce food by preserving their fresh produce. since produce was also the largest category of wasted food, as we saw in alexis slides, our pre-campaign research also showed that wasting money is a strong

motivating factor for residents to reduce their food waste. so our creative strategy focused on delivering a campaign that highlighted the financial benefits of reducing food waste and emphasizing that wasting food is equivalent to wasting money. we aim to motivate and empower residents with practical, straightforward tips that made it easy to adopt habits to reduce food waste and in turn, save them money. our target audience were two different neighborhoods the excelsior and bayview hunters point neighborhoods, and we selected these neighborhoods because of the diversity in those communities, because of environmental justice considerations, and because of the large number of single family homes in those areas and the single family homes are usually the ones that produce larger amounts of waste. and so that was a one reason that we selected communities where we

could reach people in single family homes. although our campaign did reach other households as well. so our campaign started in february 2021 when we conducted our pre-campaign research. and like with many other things during the pandemic, the timeline for this campaign has been extended. and so the actual campaign period when it was live was april through june of 2024, and we completed our post campaign research earlier this month. our total campaign budget was $400,000. over the three year period, and that included the pre and post campaign research media buys on newspapers out of home displays, social media funding for community partners and small business partners, collateral and giveaways for residents, and the collateral and assets that we created. will

continue to be used as we move into different move into expand this campaign in the future with the focus on the two neighborhoods. the campaign was geo targeted, and it included three main components to reach our target audience. so i'll walk you through the three components of, of this. so the first was out of home, this included bus cards on muni busses. it included transit shelter advertisements in the two neighborhoods. so the transit shelters that we selected were in the two target neighborhoods. and while certain creative elements were focused on changing behavior through a negative reaction to rotting food and the money that's wasted, when you let your food rot, we recognized that we needed a separate creative for

our engagement with local businesses, of course, businesses that sell produce would not want an image of rotting food next to their business. and so our creative messaging for businesses focused on fresh produce and how saving food is equivalent to saving money. and this is an example of a poster that was placed outside of one of the stores that participated. our media partners did not have a way of getting messaging inside the local small businesses in the target neighborhoods, so sf staff reached out to grocery stores and produce markets in those neighborhoods and signed on 17 stores to put up our displays. and our marketing contractor was then able to compensate those small grocers for their participation in the campaign. these businesses also displayed shelf talkers or tip cards that went in front of produce so that

customers would get the appropriate tips and information at the point of sale. lastly participating small grocers received a few rolls of compostable bags printed with campaign messaging, and these compostable bags served a dual purpose in that they saved the business money on purchasing the bags and delivered our campaign message. providing these bags also supported businesses in complying with san francisco's pre checkout bag requirements. the last out-of-home component was that we put ads in shopping carts in two of the larger supermarkets in the neighborhoo, so one of them was safeway on mission street and the other was lucky's on third street. the next component is the online component. we kicked off our campaign with some online banner ads. we had a number of social media posts and these are

examples of our animated social media ads. there were also user generated style videos in english, cantonese and spanish. lastly, we had three campaign urls in english, chinese and spanish. and for this campaign we piloted having our chinese url with chinese characters rather than transliterating. the third element of our campaign was community engagement, and this extended our reach to enhance or enhance our ability to engage with residents and other community members. s.f. staff tabled and shared food waste reduction messaging with the community at a variety of events. we also partnered with three community based organizations and two action family connection centers and bayview senior services that

took our message to the communities they serve, and we train their cbo staff on the subject matter. prior to the outreach, one of the engagement activities was a bingo game that reinforced the learnings of our campaign with a reusable mug as a prize. other activities included a spinning wheel and a pledge card for interested members. there was also a children's activity so that we could engage the whole family. some of the giveaways included tip cards and magnetic clips so that residents could post their tips on their refrigerator to remind them as they were putting produce in their fridge. we also gave away reusable produce bags. and a fresh produce storage guide. our storage guide was so popular that the sf wind

newspaper ran it. the entire month of april, which wasn't a part of the agreement with them. so that was a bonus. so let's dive into some of the results of the campaign. similar to the pre survey in 2021, we conducted a randomized post survey and these surveys were conducted in english, spanish and cantonese. in the targeted neighborhoods. and 220 interviews were done. what we found is that 1 in 10 of the residents recalled seeing, hearing or reading about the campaign. in fact, unaided, some of the residents recall was so clear that they were able to almost describe the ads verbati, the compared to the 2021 baseline research, more residents said that they are likely to take additional steps to prevent food waste. more than 28,000 people visited sf's and

food waste website across the three languages, and the. the population of the two neighborhoods that we targeted is about 94,000 people. so that's a pretty high percentage. while we recognize that there could be people outside of those neighborhoods, also visiting the web pages. but what's exciting is that 4410 people typed in the urls manually, across all three languages. so that's a reflection of the offline impact of the campaign. 59% of those visitors visited the english page, 20% visited the spanish url, and 21% visited the chinese url, indicating a strong engagement with all three of the languages. and then for the online results, the total online impression delivery was nearly

3.8 million, meaning that there were 3.8 million single instances of the online advertisements being displayed, and this resulted in 31,000 clicks, which means the user took an additional action of clicking on the advertisement to find more information. and these online results were two times the benchmark for similar campaigns. we also got many positive comments on our social media posts. our user generated style videos had the best engagement rates across all the different ad types, so we also recently learned at a language access ordinance training that videos are an effective method of reaching populations with limited english proficiency. so this is something we would want to do more of in the future. our in-language ads were also very successful. avocado and bok choy were the strongest performing

creatives, and chinese eclipsed english with the highest click through rate. so as expected, it's critical to select produce that's relevant to the audiences and our cbo partners and our environment. now team engaged with diverse community members. they participated in 18 community events and engaged approximately 3000 residents through those events. so all engagement was conducted in four languages in english, spanish, cantonese and mandarin. and our mayor even picked up a few of our tips and tricks at a community event. there are a few key learnings that can be applied to future campaigns. the combination of online and offline media with on the ground engagement proved to be an effective strategy for this campaign, given the complementary strengths of each

of those, and by focusing on specific neighborhoods, we were able to geotarget our messaging and work with community partners who serve those. those communities. while while building the partnerships with local small businesses to participate in the campaign was a time consuming task, it was a good way for us to build relationships with those businesses and to support local businesses and reach residents at the point of sale. our traditional media channels, through our contractor, didn't have the agreements with those small businesses in the way that they did with larger grocery chains, chains. so it was necessary for our team to step in there. and the combination of culturally relevant images, videos and messaging with working with language media, in language media outlets and ethnic media proved to be an

effective strategy for reaching audiences with limited english proficiency. so we see this campaign as the first phase of this work. in the next phase, we hope to expand to other neighborhoods. we want to add other culturally relevant produce. we want to work with additional community partners who serve the neighborhoods that are targeted, and we want to provide grants to community based organizations for food waste prevention projects. lastly, we want to continue engaging small businesses in this work to participate in the next phase of our campaign. thank you so much. happy to answer any questions. well, commissioner, no question. but, really applaud this effort. the creative, deliverables and the

results that you've talked about, those are so promising. and we'd love to see you come back with another round of results from, you know, further engagement. so thank you so much. thank you commissioner. thank you. commissioner tompkins. commissioner hahn, i really appreciated the graphic design, actually, of the posters. who who did that in particular? i thought the rotten fruit and then the fresh fruit, particularly with grocery stores, was our contractor was most likely to, they're a contractor that we've worked with in the past. quite good, the question i have is actually the main question i had was next geographic areas you'd like to expand this campaign to. do you have a thought? sorry, i couldn't hear. oh, do you have additional geographic areas that you'd like to expand this campaign to? we haven't determined which neighborhoods will target next, we're going to have we just got the results from our contractor, the findings of our post campaign research. so we're going to have a debrief and talk about which

neighborhoods, but we'll use similar criteria of diverse communities, and because it's similar messaging, we want to make sure that there's a combination of single family households in those communities. perhaps environmental justice considerations and, use the creative from this campaign. so we want to make sure that it resonates with the next set of communities to thank you. thank you. just wondering if there's any plan to also expand the language? ads to like including vietnamese and also tagalog? yeah. so what we did was we used data from the office of civic engagement and immigrant affairs to look at the, limited english proficiency, proficiency rates in the neighborhoods we targeted. and so that's how we determine which languages. but we will do the same when we pick the next neighborhoods. and as appropriate, we will potentially

add languages as needed. great. thank you. yes, commissioner. just seems like i think i've heard other projects that made me think of this, but recology being a way to drive, you know, attention to the website, it just seems like a natural fit. if they just drivers had to post it with the website and just put it on people's green bins, and then when they roll it back in, they're like, oh, i should check out and food waste sf. org thank you for bringing that up. so recology actually put in their newsletter that goes out to their customers an article about food waste prevention with our url to help us get the word out. and they did say we have some anecdotal information that they said that they did receive a lot of calls on their customer service line about the campaign and people seeing the ads. thank you. that's a great thing. i just wanted to add. great job. this is a very, very eye opening because what you've done is really target what is working

and what is not working, especially in those neighborhoods, and really look forward to hearing about your small business campaign down the road, because that's just such a great education piece. and thank you so much for what you're doing for food production. very important information. thank you. thank you so much. just one thing on the data is there, the thought of how you can tie what you're doing and the prevention segment over to the recovery recovery segment and again, it was like working yourself out of a job, right? lowering the recovery down to the point that that means prevention is really highly effective. so it's yes, we we've alexa and i have been meeting about how to coordinate the two efforts. and that's yes, that's definitely something that we're, looking to do more of, to try to harmonize the two

efforts. but thank you. i also do want to comment that i went to a lot of community events an, sfd booth is always very popular and very engaging. so thank you for the great work. thank you. yeah. if there's no further discussion, i guess we'll open up for public comment. are there any members of the public who wish to comment on this item? madam president, we have no speakers. okay. hearing no further public comment is now closed. next item please. next item is item nine. the director's report speaker is tyrone ju. the director of the explanatory document is the director's report. this item is for discussion. commissioners several key updates that i'll just highlight here. the more detailed written report is within your agenda packet. one did want to update the commission that we are slightly delayed in our move. our official move into our floor at 1455 market. we anticipate being

able to move in by mid january. so that's the updated timeline for the project schedule, last commission meeting, we talked about the civil grand jury report and how our commission was mentioned in the civil grand jury report. we did introduce and agree to holding a hearing at the commission sometime in summer or fall 2025, specifically in collaboration with climate sf, to talk about flooding and sea level rise. so that will be coming forward next year, natural gas policies. we are continuing to evaluate, amendments to the all electric new construction ordinance and expanded requirements on major renovations. you received a presentation on that, a couple months ago. we're making progress. and so i'll just leave it there. and so hopefully we'll have good news to share in the near future. on the building decarbonization front, we successfully launched the climate equity hub and heat pump water heater, direct install program. and so this is for

income qualified residents. and we've had a tremendous amount of interest in the first two months so far, 23 residents have signed up for the program. we've completed five installations and all of those installations have been carried out by minority owned contractors and small businesses here in the city, an update that charles mentioned at your previous meeting. we will be completing the transition of one of the communications team and marketing and outreach over to charles shop on the policy and communications team. so this is to align kind of the messaging and the platforms we do on web graphic design and social media, align those efforts on one side and on the other side, also expand the work that strada has been leading on the community partnerships and engagement program team, again focused on partnerships, environmental education, volunteerism, racial equity and engagement. so that's going to be kind of the one cluster here.

and then the streamlined communications on the other end. and i think in the next meeting, maybe we'll have a new hire for our volunteer. and outreach efforts. so we're working through that hr process. so hopefully we'll be able to make that announcement soon, we did complete a city exchange trip with the city of dublin, ireland. and so charles sheehan, cindy comerford and lowell tew went on a delegation trip over to dublin, this was sponsored through the international urban and regional cooperation, which is out of the european union. so they learned a lot about what they're doing on sustainability and circularity. we're going to be hosting a team from dublin in october. and so when they come, we'll definitely invite, commissioners to come on and meet them, and then finally, just a couple press mentions. we've had a lot of milestones and a lot of press activity, we've talked about the, our city being the top city in the nation for, the us clean energy city award through the ac triple e,

we've highlighted our work around building decarbonization, green business programs and our curbside electric vehicle program. and i think our most recent article was a chronicle story on ev charging. so i invite you to check that out. and that concludes my report. thank you, director jue. any questions commissioners? okay, i hear no discussion, no further discussion. let's open up for public comment. are there any are there any members of the public who wish to comment on this item, madam president, we have no speakers. thank you. now, public comment is closed, next item, please. next item is item ten. new business future agenda items. the speakers, charles sheehan, chief policy and public affairs officer this item is for discussion. thank you. commissioners, our next meeting is monday, september 23rd, it's in this room. and we do have kind of a packed agenda.

starting with it's our annual, approval of the reduced risk pesticide list. and so we'll be covering all topics, ipm at that hearing, we will also hopefully have a presentation from the climate sf team on the hazards and climate resilience report, it's a draft report and they are soliciting feedback from a number of commissions, including this one. and we may at that meeting or future meeting bring to you our, you know, annual racial equity update as well as we are trying to, put some rules and regulations around our carbon fund that we may bring before you at that meeting, or a future meeting as well. so it is a packed agenda. and i will take any questions. questions all right. let's open up public comment. are there any members of the public who wish to

comment on this item, madam president, we have no more speakers. we have no speakers. thank you. public comment is now closed. next item please. the next item is. it's a special item. the next item is item 11. it's the performance evaluation of environment department executive director tyrone zhou. this item is for discussion and action, i'm going to go through it because it's a lengthy item. the first part is open session and part a is public comment. and then part b is vote on whether to go into closed session to evaluate the performance of executive director tyrone zhou, that items for discussion and possible action, then presuming the commission votes to go into closed session, there will be item c, which is a possible closed session to evaluate the performance of executive director tyrone zhou. the explanatory document is the performance review closed session material. this item is for discussion and possible action. and then, we will reconvene in open session. and

that is item d a vote on whether to disclose any or all discussions held in closed session. that item is also for discussion and possible action item. all right let's go with the item action a public comment. let's open up for public comment. are there any members of the public who wish to comment on this item? madam president, we have no speakers. all right. public comment is now closed. next up item please. the next sub item is item b. vote on whether to go into closed session to evaluate the performance of executive director tyrone zhou. is there any discussion on this item? if not, can i hear a motion to approve the commission? go into a closed session to evaluate the performance of executive director tyrone zhou on moves. thank you. any second. i'll second. great. we have a motion by commissioner and a second by vice president. commissioner sullivan. and then we have no

further discussion. we'll open up for public comment on this item. are there any members of the public who wish to speak on this item? madam president, we have no speakers. thank you. public comment is now closed, charles, please call the roll. president huan i, vice president sullivan i commissioner an i commissioner bermejo i commissioner. hunter i commissioner tompkins i commissioner yuan i so the motion passes and we are entering closed session.

you're watching san francisco rising with chris manners. special guest is david chu. hi i'm chris manners and you're watching san francisco rising the show that's about restarting rebuilding and re imagining our city. i guess today is david chiu, the city attorney for the city and county of san francisco , and he's here today to talk to us about the opioid crisis, reproductive rights and the non citizen voting program. mr chu, welcome to the show. thanks for having me on happy to talk about whatever you want me to talk about, so can we start by explaining the difference between the city attorney's office and the district attorney's office? i think it could be slightly confused. that is a very common fusion with members of the public so um, if you get arrested in san francisco by the san francisco police department, all criminal

matters are dealt with by the san francisco district attorney . we handle all civil matters on behalf of the city and county of san francisco. what that means is a number of things. we provide advice and counsel to all actors within city government from our mayor. every member of the board of supervisors to the 100 plus departments, commissions boards that represent the city and county of san francisco. we also defend the city against thousands of lawsuits. so if you slip and fall in front of city hall if there's a bus accident if there is an incident involving the san francisco police department, we defend those matters. we also bring lawsuits on behalf of the city and county of san francisco, where most famous for litigating and obtaining the constitutional right to marry for lgbtq couples have sued gun manufacturers, payday lenders, oil companies, you name it, who are undercutting the rights of san franciscans and the city and county of san francisco. so now

moving on to the opioid crisis. i understand you've had some success in court, um, dealing with manufacturers, distributors and pharmacies. could you elaborate a little bit on that for us, so the opioid industry and by that i refer to the legal industry that prescribes pain pills. um over years. uh, deceived americans and resulted in literally thousands upon thousands of deaths and tragedies that we see on our streets every day when it comes to the addictions that folks are experiencing. many of the addictions really stemmed from what happened over a decade plus period where the prescription pain industry marketed prescription pills in ways that were false. we were one of thousands of jurisdictions around america that brought a lawsuit against the opioid industry. but we've had a particular set of successes that others have not. ah we initially

brought a lawsuit a few years ago against every part of the opioid supply chain, and that included manufacturers, distributors and retailers, including pharmacies over the course of four plus years. a number of these corporate defendants settled with us. we've as of this moment brought in over $120 million of cash and services. to the city to help address the root causes of what we're talking about. but a few months ago, we had a really historic verdict against the pharmacy, walgreens and their role walgreens was responsible for literally over 100 million pills, flooding the streets of san francisco over a period of years where they flouted federal law that require them to track where they're pills were going to. they had a what? what we refer to as a phil phil phil. pharmacy culture where folks would bring in their prescriptions, and the

pharmacist would just fill them without checking why someone was coming in multiple times without checking why certain doctors were seen a 100 fold increase in the number of opioid prescriptions that they were prescribing. so we had a historic judgment against walgreens recently, but it's been a very intense lawsuit. and we know that will never bring back the lives that we have lost to opioid addictions. but it's critical for us that we get the resources that we need. maybe one other thing i'll mention because it's often confusion. a large percentage of folks who are addicted to street level drugs say heroin or fentanyl started their addictions. with painkillers, opioid medications that were prescribed through doctors provided through pharmacies and so literally the suffering that we're seeing on our streets was caused by the opioid industry over many, many years and has created the significant crisis that we are dealing with right now. right

right now moving on. i understand after the recent supreme court ruling, striking down robust as wade that you've put together an organization that's designed to help mm. provide free services to people who are both. seeking abortions and providing them can you tell us about the organization? sure so, um, before the dobbs decision came down, but after we learned about the leak from the supreme court about the draft that suggested the decision would be as bad as it has turned out to be, um, i reached out to leadership from the bar association of san francisco because we knew that if that decision came down there would be tens of thousands of patients around the country as well as providers whose legal situation would be in jeopardy. women doctors, nurses who could be subjected to lawsuits who could be arrested who could be prosecuted, particularly in red states? 26 states where rights are being rolled back or in the process or have already been

rolled back because of the dobbs decision. so we put out a call to lawyers all over the bay and frankly, all over the country, and as of this moment there have been over 70 law firms that have answered our call to be part of the legal alliance for reproductive rights who have committed to reviewing cases and providing pro bono assistance to patients and providers who are at legal risk. we also are looking at potential cases that these lawyers can bring against various states. in these areas that are looking to deprive women and patients and providers of their of their rights. um it is a very dark time in america, and i'm really proud that that barrier attorneys, the legal community care have stepped up to answer the call. it's very important that's great. so now the non citizen voting program that was passed by voters just for school boards has faced them court challenges recently, but it was in place for the most recent election that we've had.

how do you see that situation panning out? in fact, it's been in place for now. five school board elections. um so a little bit of background in our san francisco schools over one out of three kids. has a parent who is a non citizen who doesn't have a say in the election of the policy makers that dictate the future of our san francisco public schools, and so over a number of years, there has been a movement to allow immigrant parents to vote in school board elections. few things i'll mention about that is our country has a very long history when it comes to allowing immigrants to vote. from 17 76 for 100 and 50 years until after world war. one immigrants were allowed to vote in most states in our country on the theory that we want to assimilate immigrants in american democratic values and institutions, and it wasn't until an anti immigrant backlash in world war one that that sort of ended. but in recent years,

um cities across america have allowed this to happen. in fact, at this moment, believe there are over a dozen cities that have voted to allow non citizens to vote in a number of context. now, this is particularly important in our schools just given how challenge our schools are, and given that we know that when we engage more parents in her school system, regardless of their citizenship it helps to lift up our schools for all parents. and so in 2016 the voters of san francisco past about measure that allowed this to happen. unfortunately earlier this year, there were conservative organizations that came to san francisco to bring a lawsuit to try to overturn this , and i should also mention it is obviously the perspective of our office and our city that this is constitutional. nothing in the constitution prohibits non citizens from voting. and in fact, there's an explicit provision in the constitution that allows chartered cities like san francisco when it comes to school board elections to be able to dictate the time and

manner of those elections. and so, uh, we are involved in litigation on this issue. there was an initial ruling that was not good for us that essentially said at the trial court level. we shouldn't allow this. um we appealed it up to the appellate level. the appellate court made an initial decision to allow this past november election to proceed as it has for the last previous four elections. we're going to be in front of that court soon. stay tuned. we'll see what happens. it was good to hear that the city was able to reach a settlement with the center for medicare and medicaid services are meant laguna honda could still operate. how did you manage to reach that agreement? it was not an easy conversation . just a little bit of background. so laguna honda has been an incredibly important institution in san francisco for 150 years, taking care of our most vulnerable patients are frail, very elderly patients, many of whom are at end of life.

and a few years ago, there were some issues in that hospital. some violations of rules that we very much want to make sure don't get violated. there were folks that weren't using proper ppe, who are bringing cigarette lighters into the facility, who might have brought some contraband into the facilities. we have zero tolerance for that and have made that very clear. we self reported some of these violations to the federal authorities. and unfortunately from our perspective, they took the very disproportionate step of ordering the closure. the permanent closure of lugano, honda. problematic on a number of reasons. first and foremost, there are just no skilled nursing facility beds not just in california but around the country. after their order came down. we literally were putting 1000 calls a day to skilled nursing facilities around california and around the country and could find nowhere to move the 700 patients that we had had in the gonna honda but just as disturbingly as we were forced to start moving some of these patients, a number of them

died. there's a concept in medicine known as transfer trauma. when you move someone who is that frail and unfortunately, folks folks died and we were at a point where we were five weeks away from the deadline for the federal government. that they had provided to us to close the facility. so uh and we have been trying for months to get the federal government to reconsider their action, so i was compelled to bring a lawsuit on behalf of the city and county of san francisco and very pleased and appreciate that we were able to come to a settlement whereby transfers will be delayed at least until next year. we're going to have at least a year of funding. to keep the facility open, and hopefully we can get back up on our feet and ensure that no future violations occur because this is an institution that has to stay open for the good of these patients. quite right, quite right. so finally, congratulations on winning an important public power service dispute with pg and e. um why is

it important that the city's rights as a local power provider maintained well, so san francisco has been a local power provider for decades. we are fortunate to have access through our hedge hetchy hydroelectric system to provide electricity to a number of providers, particularly public recipients of that. and unfortunately, pg any has used its monopoly when it comes to private electricity to try to stop that, and to block that, and from our perspective, they violated federal law in adding literally tens of millions of dollars of expenses to san francisco and institutions that we're trying to ensure um, public power infrastructure. put years of delays on our ability to do this, and so we had to bring a number of appeals in the federal commission. ah we were successful in those appeals, and there was a decision recently that basically held the pg and e

could not use its monopoly to unfairly delay or add tens of millions of dollars of cost. to the city and county of san francisco, as we are trying to move forward with our vision of public power. clearly pgd has not been able to serve not just san francisco but northern california. well we all know that with the wildfires with its bankruptcies, with all the issues that they've had, we think there is a different model to move forward on and we are grateful to the court. and providing a ruling that allows us to move forward. well thank you so much for coming on the show. i really appreciate the time you've given us here today. i appreciate and thanks for your thanks for your questions. thank you. well that's it. for this episode, we'll be back with another one shortly for sf gov t v. i'm chris manners. thanks for watching. yeah. >> are you looking for a rewarding career and eager to acquire skills that can unlock new job opportunities? what if quou can receive

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♪♪ >> this is an exhibition across departments highlighting different artworks from our collection. gender is an important part of the dialogue. in many ways, this exhibition is contemporary. all of this artwork is from the 9th century and spans all the way to the 21st century. the exhibition is organized into seven different groupings or themes such as activities, symbolism, transformation and others. it's not by culture or time period, but different affinities

between the artwork. activities, for example, looks at the role of gender and how certain activities are placed as feminine or masculine. we have a print by uharo that looks at different activities that derisionly performed by men. it's looking at the theme of music. we have three women playing traditional japanese instruments that would otherwise be played by men at that time. we have pairings so that is looking within the context of gender in relationships. also with how people are questioning the whole idea of pairing in the first place. we have three from three different cultures, tibet, china and japan. this is sell vanity stot relevar

has been fluid in different time periods in cultures. sometimes being female in china but often male and evoking features associated with gender binaries and sometimes in between. it's a lovely way of tying all the themes together in this collection. gender and sexuality, speaking from my culture specifically, is something at that hasn't been recently widely discussed. this exhibition shows that it's gender and sexuality are actually have been considered and complicated by dialogue through the work of artists and thinking specifically, a sculpture we have of the hindu

deities because it's half pee male and half male. it turns into a different theme in a way and is a beautiful representation of how gender hasn't been seen as one thing or a binary. we see that it isn't a modest concept. in a way, i feel we have a lot of historical references and touch points throughout all the ages and in asian cultures. i believe san francisco has close to 40% asian. it's a huge representation here in the bay area. it's important that we awk abouk about this and open up the discussion around gender. what we've learned from organizing this exhibition at the museum is that gender has been something that has come up in all of these cultures through all the time periods as something that is important and relevant. especially here in the san francisco bay area we feel that it's relevant to the

conversations that people are having today. we hope that people can carry that outside of the museum into their daily lives. pen. daily lives. >> well to edge own little square we are a new culture "accelerating sf government performance - taking accountability and transparency to the next level." the artist and culture of chinatown. as an immigrant giveaway we tell the stories of chinatown the people that are here and the culture and history our presence and future through arts and culture. it is a 35 community. there is

so many to see come come in and buy certify increases and ongoing exhibitions here t t t t >> hello. i'm jaime gutierrez. san francisco is a marfbalist city full of diversity and culture. district 9 is a embodiment of diversity. the mission showcases latino culture with mural street vendors and cuisine. buno heights is aging hippies and young families. [indiscernible] most people know neighbors and value a sense of community. portola is mix of old native and new residents around the world. all these district 9 neighbho