just a follow-up question to that issue of police staffing at the airport. help me understand a bit if the t.s.a. has any sort of requirements with regards to our public safety staffing at airports and what we need to consider as we're having this conversation. >> well, we're required by the t.s.a. to maintain a security plan that security plan doesn't designate a specific number of officers. we also do every five years a security assessment. we bring in a firm, an internationally recognized firm to help with that security assessment and take a look at the appropriate level of staffing. so there's always a certain amount of gray area. we want to maintain response times. we want to have a swat team presence at the airport. but i can look around the airports around the nation and see that there are a fair amount of variations between the airports and the staffing levels. chairwoman chu: and then this might be a question either to the mayor's budget office or controller's office, whoever can answer it. but right now i believe that the police officers that are l

the factors that come into play are who can do it more cheaply and also staffing availability. we're going to have a crunch of availability of staff either a the sheriff's department or the police department, to perform their existing functions, which means we would have to hire new people to perform those functions, and there is the example of station transfers, and we had to hire new sheriffs to perform those functions. there is not really a cost savings, so there is a lot of push and pull on the math on whether or not those are actual budget savers, even in cases where they may be more cost- effective in a perfect world, so that is a great question, and there is a lot of analysis that has to go into figuring it out. supervisor mirkarimi: if i can swing this back, and i want to talk to mr. hennessy, retirement and academy classes, we have not had that discussion with the sheriff about the forecast for prospect on the issue of retirement and bringing in new deputy sheriffs. maybe we should get something for that, as well? >> supervisor, we had approximately 20 people leave the

part of the key thing for us is the level of staffing. the other thing i would point out in terms of the city contracts is that when people leave, and we have had a lot of people felt in the last couple of years retire and have been incentivize to retire because we have operations on the maintenance side for a number of city-wide contracts, for people with the appropriate security, they are free to go to the port or somewhere else and that process delays our hiring and filling positions and causes us to have to get the work done and do that over time. that is a quick summary of some of the issues that drive some of the overtime. president chiu: after our last hearing on overtime, given the threshold of 30% overtime trigger for our part of human- resources needs to sign off on this, i proposed we reduce that to 20% so that we know exactly how many folks are working at a higher level of overtime. do you have any idea of how many of your workers would fall into that category? >> i want to make sure i understand your question. in terms of cat

. >>> and it appears san francisco's crime lab continues to be short staffed. today's examiner reports the lab is currently staffed with just 4dna technicians, even though the police department promised to have the lab fully staffed with 11 workers to handle the big backlog. the city is currently in the process of hiring several more technicians. in the meantime it cost $150,000 every month to send criminal evidence to an outside lab. >>> the we'll take a closer look into the science that allowed the u.s. to find, bring down, and identify the 9/11 mastermind. that story coming up in our next newscast at . thanks for watching. have a great day.

just a follow-up question to that issue of police staffing at the airport. help me understand a bit if

we also heard about police staffing challenges in the city generally, which we all now. and come the pharmacy is expected to make $10 million in sales in its first year. additionally, the appellant was misinformed when she called asking after the permit and was told that this was the other permit. the time line is questionable. for that reason and the other reasons stated here tonight and in the other hearings that they did act in bad faith. this needed to done before the plumbing was done. all of the electric work listed here was done in a day. this doesn't sound credible to me. first the time line issues, the intentional undervaluing, and the other things that were mentioned here today make me conclude that the applicant act in bad faith. i would vote and overturned. >> i am simoleon inclined and we wanted to see that there is legal representation that would make a difference. there is time that the work is being done. the amount estimated and the start up a summary of 100,000 which is very close to what the amounts that were spent but also very very different from the

i wonder if you could talk about your personal thoughts as the head, whether the current staffing levels are adequate to do with what you are basically tasked with doing. i would love to hear that. >> thank you, supervisor. we started out as an agency and forcing one law with a staff of three. when the minimum wage ordinance was passed, there was no funding dedicated to its enforcement, and we rededicate -- another unit was merged into the olse that wasn't forcing the living wage and living hell ordinances, and we dedicated their resources -- that was in force in the living wage and living health ordinances. health care was passed, and no staff was provided. i believed it was last year that the board fought hard to get an additional staff person added for health care, and that was a hard struggle in the ad that process. it ended up that we were not able to fill it until we could show that we had raised an additional $100,000 in penalties to do so, which we have done now two years in a row, but we still have not fill that position. we also have a vacant position -- we have a very flak wor

more staffing is obviously an issue. the city attorney needs to step in more quickly and litigate more vigorously when things take a long time. something to have a conversation about is whether there should be a change in the process so that people can bring in private lawyers. if be city attorney does not have the resources to create a dedicated unit and devote more resources, that is something that should be discussed. >> i wanted to answer exactly that question. i agree with you that olse needs to consider additional resources. other folks can talk about what the city attorney's office has done. >> i do not even know if is a private attorney general action. they do not provide lawyers. the state can do it. i think it is excellent that the city attorney is skilled in this. we might want to have an option that if be worker chooses to instead have a private attorney represent him or her, that is an option. >> is that something that we could do locally? >> i would think so. i am not suggesting this. it might be worth disc

for the city to provide staffing support. we estimate that about 80% of these costs are america's cup related. 20% are related to the cruise terminal. the other federal agencies that would be reimbursed through this effort include the know and national fisheries, who are doing an endangered species act consultation. in addition to pulling the mark, construction by peers will play a role in processing the national environmental protection act. we are requesting that the port enter into this memorandum of agreement on behalf of the city. and that when the office of economic or workforce development gets appropriate authority, we either transfer the memorandum of agreement to wewd, or we transfer it to the air -- to their budget billing code. that is something that elaine has negotiated with cfo for owe d. off we are confident that we will not be paying these expenses on behalf of the america's cup. i think that i lost a couple of people in the process. kelly, whom i had mentioned before, is a superstar. we have a dream team for

the school fund also gets staffing. the city pays for staffing. the mayor did not offer us any money this time for summer school. we did not have a summer school last year. we are hoping to have a summer school this year. it will not be as big as we would like it to be. supervisor mirkarimi: i think that is an important step. on a utility level, that's what we're asking for. since we are bringing this back to the puc, help us figure this out a little bit. i will ask the puc at the end of the public comment. what is the break or the exemptions provided to other institutions that are provided to pay into the utility that we can use as a foundation for this case? >> i believe there are city departments that do not pay anything for electricity. that is just what i have heard. i do not know what other institutions get or do not get. we are just asking for this one year because this is the worst year. supervisor mirkarimi: i think the city should do everything it can to foster that relationship with city college, just like we have with the school distri

also, staffing impact. you see us at the shelters. we employ 25% of our staff are formerly homeless. we are employing formerly homeless at $12.13 an hour. we will lay off -- we will have to lay off some of our staff. again, these are the working poor, and we ask that they not be penalized by these cuts. finally, the neighborhood impact. again, i say that having the shelter opened, having a place for them to watch tv, to rest, to be with each other instead of being on the street is going to save on police calls, save on emergency calls, and in the long run, save money for the city. again, i plead that we consider these cuts and not make them on the backs of the homeless. thank you. >> good evening. my name is connie ford, and i happen to live in district 5, but many of the members that are represented by union works in soma. i am also vice-president of the labor council, and i just wanted to let you know if you do not already that many of the workers who provide the services that are continually on the chopping block here are represent

and therefore you might want to increase staffing someplace. sometimes you have the opportunity where traffic falls off someplace. a good example recently would have been cincinnati where a merger forced a move in traffic to other areas. so traffic in another city went up dramatically and traffic in cincinnati went down. it takes us a while to migrate the people back and forth. so specifically my understanding today and i can get you the absolute staffing numbers that we have. but we think we have a floor of around 28 and a ceiling of about 38. >> newark liberty is a complex airport due to high volume of flights, congestion, new york-new jersey air space. constrained runways. now, what have we got to do to provide the numbers that we need for newark when my understanding is that 75% of the trainees don't make it through the program? so when you have a dropout rate like that, oren incleet rate like that, what do we do to get newark up to date? >> yes, sir. i think i made an earlier observation that we had difficulty with the previous agreement w

staffing, overtime and set asides. why is it that certain departments, whether they're big or small, seem to manage their staffing and anticipate turnover in staff and house traping so they minimize the amount of overtime whereas other departments, fire, police, sheriff and m.t.a. in particular, seem to continue to use overtime even when they know that people are going to retire or trade out and they can anticipate those hiring and training needs? and the other concern was about with set asides. this is in particular to mayor lee and the supervisors. are you willing to consider a charter amendment for november, to look at our set asides, even though we've all voted for those things to cut back at least to some degree on all of those things like libraries, children's fund, city services auditor, there are a lot of funds that we've set aside which, as you talked about, reduce our budget flexibility in these difficult times. are you willing to take those issues on? thank you. >> i'm the mayor's budget director. as you kno

even with our staffing challenges, we have been able to maintain our park maintenance gore's right at about 90%. we think this number has probably leveled out. we do not see as getting much higher, given the staffing challenges we have had, but we are actually at a five-year all- time high. again, through the goodwill of san francisco voters and the support of this board and prior mayor's through the availability of state grant funds under proposition 84 and proposition 40, we continue to renovate our parks and facilities, so we actually have some upside and optimism with respect to our capital programs. we focused very hard this year on administrative efficiencies as part of our overall budget solution. we have reduced our workers' compensation expenses this year by $350,000. which is significant. we have an employee safety committee. we had a transitional work assignment program where we will leak -- really were quite hard -- really worked quite hard to get them back. we have reduced our overtime by over $150,000, and we had implemented a number of technology and customer service im

the challenge is staffing and having enough people as well as education. one of the programs that he we implemented was electronic devices. it used to be ipods. it's a target for criminal activity in terms of ipod. also work in terms of educational processes. it's nice to have those, put it in your pocket so no one has the urge to take it. there's also a lot more we can do. i am here too look for ideas to do it better. right now we have mtap. there's not a day that goes by that our people aren't reporting back they stopped a fight. we could do even more and also, i think there maybe an student to look at our bus operators. they have a responsibility to drive the bus. they are aware of issues brewing and they need to step up their involvement with student safety. there's a great deal more work to do. in the past 6 months, there as not been and incidents involving weapons. we feel like we are headed in the right direction. not just for our youth. but we have to look at it from a home land security aspect. while it may not appear to be amount of work going on

were having to adjust by reducing staffing. >>pam: the mayor said more than half the city's current budget deficit is because of the ever-increasing public pension and retirement benefits. he said the city council may explore a ballot measure asking voters to rein in those costs. in santa cruz, new regulations for medical marijuana dispensaries. those rules will limit where the dispensaries can be, though they do not limit how many can be in the county. this decision comes days after two men firebomb the healing association in santa cruz. >>kate: this is a view from some of the surveillance cameras outside of the pot club. one of the suspects using a hammer tried to break through the door. you can see he has all: the class and they're going to light that cocktail and throw it through into the lobby. you can see the flames coming up all of the shares in the lobby are on fire and right there you see another cocktail rolling through the front door. for going to go back inside you could see their lighting that cocktail. they're goi

that would lower staffing to levels in san jose seen in 1987. when only about 200,000 fir people lived in san jose. tonight the mayor worked to keep order in the meeting. >> be polite now. everyone is going to get a chance to speak. >> i stand here before you tonight to say i'm disappointed i voted for some of you. how can you start to build a stadium -- >> please don't interrupt the speakers. let them speak. >> the final vote on the budget will not be held until mid june. >>> get that disgusting word off those grades. that is the cry tonight for people in rancho cordova. they are furious that the n word is on display on dozens of tombstones. so furious that robert lyles says a surprising group is stepping forward offering their help. robert. >> well dana, you'll recall it was ten days ago that cbs 5 revealed that there were two dozen grave sites right here in the sacramento area that some describe as desecrated because each and every one of those graves carried a tombstone with the n word on top of them. we return here to rancho cordova tonight

we have made up for those staffing shortages by implementing additional patrol officers. >> reporter: also the department has half the amount of breathalyzers it normally would because they had to send 60 of the devices back to the manufacturer to get a glitch fixed because it could cause false readings. so tonight they'll be using the older breathalyzer models in the field. but they only have half as many about 30 of them. police say they will strategically distribute them to officers and say the field test device is just one of several tools they use to catch drunk drivers. reporting live this morning in downtown san jose, maureen naylor, ktvu channel 2 news. >>> if you do head out this evening to celebrate triple a is offering free rides to people who drink. a free tow to your home up to ten miles is open to everyone even if you're not a triple a member. now the free rides will be offered from 6:00 p.m. tonight until 6:00 a.m. tomorrow morning. you can call that number on your screen. it's 1-800-222-4357. or 800-aaa-help. you can tell the operator you need a tipsy tow. >>> a strike

at the end of january, hill management is staffed and in operation. the program is also looking at acquiring insurance services through an owner-controlled insurance program, and anticipates the procurement decision will be made upon receipt of the tunnel construction bid, scheduled for the end of this month. our largest contract, the tunnel contract, is currently out to bid. we have experienced significant interest in this contract from around the world and anticipate receiving competitive pricing at the end of this month. we will come to this body in early july, requesting approval to award the contract. our three station design contracts are at the 70% completion level, with 100% completion at the end of this year. the moscone station design has received design approval and union station and chinatown designs will be presented to the commission on may 16. the central subway system design has advanced beyond 65% completion, and has been leading the effort in developing the safety certifiable checklist, working in collaboration with the safety and se

but in is to be more staffing.e need to go back to the idea we are dealing with a criminal population the need to be dealt with accordingly. >> mark: the second time this we get attack happened. >> darya: to victims that were killed on tuesday night here is video the crime scene. we went out there on wednesday about this video appeared the victims are 30 year-old ramon of loss angeles, 29 year-old of san rosa one of them were found dead with a gunshot wound in a car parked and the other man was found shortly after that. friends and family of san carlos mayor are going to attend a memorial in his honor this afternoon he became mayor nov. died suddenly of heart attack on tuesday morning. his memorial is at the museum on skyway road in san carlos it is at 3:00 p.m. this afternoon and open to the public. >> mark: we will be back as a news continues after this break. the great highway in san francisco the bay to breakers finish line being set up. a live report operations coming up. >> darya: >> darya: bay to breakers is

. >>> san francisco's backlog police crime log is more short staffed than ever. it has been 10 months since the department vowed to hire more dna analysts to deal with the problem but the staffing is only a third of what the department said it would be. the city pays $150,000 a month for an outside lab to test criminal evidence. in at least two cases though, suspects committed crimes, while their dna awaited testing for other crimes. >>> california's high speed rail authority could mean big big changes to the route north of san jose. >> it would e lek industry fie the two cal train tracks -- e lek industry fie the two cal train tracks initially that would make high speed rail slower than originally planned but that problem would later be solved adding two more tracks. >>> a step forward, brian stow the sign of progress his family just reported. >> disaster to recovery the plan to bring new aid to neighbourhoods, devastated by deadly tornadoes. >> more pay check going toward parking. one bay area city's plan to hike its annual permit when sydnie and i come back ,,

. >> if we were to move in there, we wouldn't have to spend the money we raised for staffing. if we had to do it here, we wouldn't have the money for staffing. >> reporter: the american legion said it shouldn't have to fight to help veterans in a place built in their honor. as a member of the board of trustees, he is not sure it is a wise investment for the cash strapped city. >>> what is the customer base not being served now. if we can identify that and we think we can help, we're the first ones to step up to do that. until they can do that, everything costs money. >> reporter: for now effort to help returning vets is stalled in a battle over dollars and cents. tonight major general said this is not the end of the discussion despi despite the trustees' vote. the american legion can present more specifics about their plan. nbc bay area news. >>> senator diane feinstein will be at headquarters to view the photos of osama bin laden's body. we're learning how the al qaeda leader stayed ahead of u.s. intelligence while keeping in touch with his followers. it turns out e-mail was