and shannon gallagher. >>> commissioners, i'm arthur feinstein. i'm chair of the san francisco bay chapter of the sierra club and i'm following up with my friend sue vaughan carrying on her message to you, which is for you to disapprove this or reject this proposal as it now stands. you had quite a few letters from lawyers expressing concerns over this and most of them, if not all, have told you basically that there are parts of this that simply violate state statute. you've had your own lawyer say no, and the supervisor said no, it's not the case. but concerning how many lawyers have found those kind of conflicts, we ask that you step back and start another process of deliberation to make sure that this does not itself end up in court, which is what you're trying to achieve to begin with, a simplified process that doesn't have that. i do want to bring up the issue of why we have c-e-q-a in the first place, to try and remind everybody what the context is, because this is being framed as c-e-q-a is just a burden we have to get throughv so we can do

my name is shannon gallagher, and i received notice of this hearing today and this issue being aired through the newspaper. when i read that i had single handedly stopped the project at lafayette park using c-e-q-a, i actually aired my complaints when the city began construction as the park with no building permits. and i aired those complaints down the hall with the people who handle building permits. they really didn't have much to do with c-e-q-a at all. but it does raise the question about should a person be allowed to say something if they think something is wrong and what should the notice process be. and, in fact, c-e-q-a is not designed so that the state provides notice to people. it's specifically that the enforcement of c-e-q-a as well as the notification would be handled locally. and what we have here is an effort to change things such that it would be very hard on people to know what's happening. another issue that has come up several times is the raised level of proof to substantial evidence. i can say that with the short time frame and given the number of exemptions to