colleagues, before we go to the next item, we know we have melanie through friday as our director and david osman will become our acting director. but i think there was a little bit of a discussion about maybe the rest of the meeting for david to be our acting director to get us through some of these items. we kind of talked about be comfortable with that. melanie is sufficient with us through friday. if that's okay with melanie. so, before we formally do that, though, i said there were going to be a couple of surprises -- maybe one good one -- on the way over to the meeting, got a call that there was someone who wanted to send regards and send something nice to the commission. so, i bee-lined over to the mayor's office where there was something from our mayor for you, and it's framed. and it reads, that, proclamation that says, whereas the city and county of san francisco traditionally recognizes the achievements of notable individuals and the dedicated work of melanie nutter as executive director of the department of environment has represented san francisco values at their best and whereas mel

so, david osman is our acting director for this meeting, but melanie is still with us through the end of the week. we wanted to use this as an opportunity to bring the commission up to speed on the process of searching for our next director of the department. and for those that have been involved in the past search that led us to melanie and 3-1/2 great years of working with her, it's going to sound familiar because in many ways it's patterned after that process. it's also been -- we looked at a couple other processes particularly in regard to a search that commissioner wan was involved with with the juvenile probation commission when she was commissioner over there. and they went through a search. but what i wanted to kind of share is where we currently stand in terms of the process. and several commissioners really wanted to be active in having this conversation here to talk about what questions we want to ask in this process and what we think we're looking for as we go out there and try to find our next director to build upon the successes that melanie has delivered for the departm