Transcripts For SFGTV 20240622

Web emmy nominee and this includes second phase features so these are in the works. Were looking at using software as a platform for forms that are submittable. Were using individual users and check lists and data storage and delivery and prefill are some of the other capabilities. Portal maintenance is important. We want to make sure its not another government website left alone and unattended and a year from now or two its obsolete so we update the content when legislation changes or important due dates to remind owners about fees that are due. We constantly create new content, new starter kits and adding information about the Business Registration going online and information about gross receipt taxes et cetera and we audit and fix links on the site and security updates and training manual of what we do to update the portal and i have been saying that technology shouldnt be the only thing that drives change. We also need to look at the process itself which is why in the last six months we had a great collaborative effort with the Controllers Office to map out the restaurant permit process and why did we choose restaurants . San francisco has the most in the nation and 30 million in sales tax for the city. It creates 19,000 local jobs and 230 restaurants register each year and they face up to 24 individual permits and deal with many different state and federal and city departments and lets fix the process and add in the technology to make it even more efficient. Next steps. Portal streamlining once we did the mapping will move over into different sectors and implement all processes into a unified plan and recommend streamlining measurements between and within departments. We would also like to plan for the future integration of online and off line processes with the physical Onestop Center as supervisor tang mentioned earlier. With technology were working with the Tax Collector, the Assessors Office, county clerk to create a new functionality and integrate all of the forms with electronic and digital subjects as well as Electronic Payments and make recommendations to integrate city data bases. The portal maintenance continues and we hope to operationalize this maintenance and some of the projects that the team is consulting on is the mayors housing prortal and with other commissions in the city and working with the creation of the public strategy. Our ultimate goal is give san franciscans a single experience across city departments thereby making the government more responsive to citizens and bring government to the people by creating an exemplary service. The possibilitys are endless and as we put up the slide of the supporters i would like to acknowledge the Mayors Office and department of technology and other all the other departments for the collaborative effort. Thank you for the effort. If you dont know jane worked in the office of Small Business and did a great job fusing working with the businesses that came through for help and assistance and bringing that to a wonderful online portal. If you havent taken a look at it i recommend it and its amazing and i couldnt believe it when i saw it and it was produced by government and i dont know if colleagues have any other questions. If not i will move on to the Controllers Office and we made strides and now the report will tell us about some of the challenges when people are receiving services in person. Thank you. Good morning supervisors. My name is ryan hunter from the city performance unit of the Controller Office with our team and we have been working with the business portal team to map the process of opening a restaurant in San Francisco so i will tell you about what we have been doing and what we found, what were recommending. So this slide could we get the powerpoint . Thank you. This slide has the journey map that the business portal team put together. Really what we have been working on is trying to get into that infin itd loop and untangle that. Could we see what is going on in and find ways to make it simpler . So we went through the process of opening a restaurant, find all of the permit processes relevant for a new owner so we mapped 22 restaurant processes across San Francisco departments and three state and federal departments. To supplement the work we interviewed local Business Owners, Different Department staff and talked to the Acceleration Team in new york city. We looked at permitting data from the treasurer and Tax Collector and a survey from Business Owners to ask them about the obstacles in the process. This is a look at the Different Departments that we worked with and mapped and the different areas so for each department we produced a map of that permitting process so this is a sample of one of those here and we really had a specific focus on what does this look like from the customers perspective and what are the steps in the process for the customer and the back end processes that support that . So in this process you see the top row is always the customer and this particular one its a lot of touch points for the customer. When we did that for all 22 of the processes we were able to put them together into an overall permit process map of opening a restaurant and this was able to show us what do you need to do first . What are the permits you need to get before another permit . Whats necessary to open your doors versus what can be done later . So what did we learn from all of our mapping . We made eight recommendations and two large groups. The first is about collaboration between departments so what we found was that often in a single departments internal process was relatively efficient and made sense, but those processes often crossed departments and theres not always good structure or good incentive for those departments to work together, and often customer is bounce friday one department to another with. Little communication in between so the first set of recommendations is what can we do to help businesses work Better Together and departments work Better Together and i will highlight a few of these. Turn around time is key and when we asked departments how long does it take to get this permit or that permit it was usually a difficult question to answer and the first tep in shortening the time span is having the Information Available and knowing how are we doing now and creating the structures to look at that and look at the turn around time. The second recommendation that we looked at was about how do we combine different permit processes together . We found that there were often groups of permits that shared some characteristics and we could bundle together, so for example often any person who is registering a new business usually also needs to register for business personal Property Assessment with the Assessors Office and often a fictitious name with the office and we looked at bundling those together and i will skip to number 5 which is about one stop shop and colocating permits. We found there were so many different physical locations that one Restaurant Owner would need to visit to open a visit and second and townsend and mission and city hall or fox plaza and a lot of running around and exacerbated if the process is not clear and applicants dont know where to go next and an option was explore colocating the permitting departments moving towards the one stop shop that several people have talked about. The second group of recommendations are about kind of a focus on the applicant so we found that the best departments thought about their role as not only being about enforcing compliance of the process but about helping the applicants as customers, so we identified a number of permits that could be submitted online and sort of prioritized those. In general we found that if a permit was able to be submitted by mail that it could be submitted online and we produced a list of likely candidates for that and we also found that it was often difficult to pay for permits. There were a number of departments that require Something Like a cashiers check or multiple payments for a single permit and when you multiply that across 22 departments its onerous so we recommended that departments look at ways to streamline payments and have fewer payments for a single permit and to accept things like credit cards to make that payment process easier so i will leave it there but we are available for questions. Thank you very much. And next i would like to bring up regina from the office of Small Business. So thank you supervisor tang excuse me, chair farrell, supervisor tang and supervisor mar. So with this information that the Controllers Office has done through analyzing the permits with the business portal team we took a look at that information and thought all right what could we do with it and whats the best way to help our businesses move through that process . So with director rufo convening Different Departments, the office of building inspection and department of Public Health and creating the Small Business Accelerator Team was formed and so im going to talk a bit about that as well. In the 201516 budget thank you supervisor tang for your leadership in establishing and creating the team. This will launch in the fall of 2015. We will be creating a Client Service manager that will be a part that would be the core component of the team and the team just to be clear will be comprised of representative simonson liaisons and working with the Different Departments to either resolve or get questions on how to facilitate a particular business need. As presented to you there are roughly 230 restaurants that go through the permitting process each year and the majority of these businesses are going to open one restaurant, maybe two restaurants within their lifetime, and so its not within their interest to become experts in the permitting process. Their core capacity is opening a restaurant, making food, delivering food and providing an excellent Customer Experience for their customers. The Client Service manager will own the business experience working with the Different Departments so starting with evaluating the business needs, taking a look at what will be the zoning requirements. Will they need a conditional use . Will there need to be a change of use . What is the Current Space theyre going into . Will they need to did a complete build out . What is required for engaging with the office of building inspection . So theyre reviewing the past permit applications with the individual Business Owner and working with the particular departments. They will be coordinating the services and helping to schedule inspections. By involving and having a case manager throughout the process the Business Owner will have an experienced partner. What we do find at the office of Small Business that most businesses and our Small Businesses really dont understand or know how to speak the language that we the City Government language, so what does a conditional use process mean . What does a change of use process mean . So and what does the application process mean and why do i need to have you know when i file with the department of Public Health for my permit to operate that it needs to be routed through zoning, so interpreting all of that for the Business Owner is important and of course that will be one of the elements to help streamline the process in addition to taking a look at where we can improve the processes. The Small Business case manager will be colocated at the office of building inspection at 1660 Mission Street and while this is a position that is part of oewd what we do know is that not all businesses either touch point with the office of economic and Workforce Development and the invested neighborhood or with our office, the office of Small Business through the Business Assistance center, but the one key touch point they have to touch is the office of building inspection when they go to open their business so its very important to have this position colocated at the bpd bpd to ensure that office of building inspection and every restaurant that opens is able to engage with the Client Service manager. This will also ensure that we have the Client Service manager will have the opportunity to then have the access to all the key departments that are located at the dbi on the fifth floor which include the Planning Department, the Public Utilities department, dpw, fire, and dpw and the fire, so that way the Client Service manager will be able to engage with those departments if theres questions or needs or things not clear can do that on behalf of the client. This will ensure that applications move swiftly so that the Client Service manager if something is bottlenecked will be able to engage with the department in a much more readily achievable fashion, and thus will save time and money for the business, but it will also we will begin to learn ways in which we can facilitate the process and the permitting which will also save us time and money as well. So we are working with a Case Management model so the permitting departments will designate a staff lead to sit on the Business Accelerator team. We will be including other all the departments that are involved in the permitting process to assist us with this. The Client Service manager is charged with convening the departments and leads and guiding the restaurants through the entire process so the Client Service manager will have some authority to convene the departments and work with them and resolve issues, and they will be providing updates to the senior staff of the departments, the Department Heads, so that we can take this opportunity to learn our best practices and see where we can make improvements. The Client Service manager will also engage with the office of economic and Workforce Development, the office of Small Business, it is job squad and the Small Business Development Center. And touch point places that businesses engage with city agencies that are non regulatory city agencies but work closely with the golden gate student a Restaurant Association and we have the different groups working with us and Mission Economic Development Center and make sure that those entities know that we have a Client Service manager for those engaging in the restaurant and food industry. There will be the single point of contact that will help provide increased accountability. The Client Service manager will start tracking the time that it takes the actual time it takes for a business to open in the different scenarios so from a full service high end restaurant to a very small take out service as an example. And i think the one important thing that will the timing of this that is taking place with the team coming on board in preparation for the one stop shop that is being developed at mission and south van ness we will have real live experience how the permit process in real time is routed and what we can do to improve the Customer Experience and one stop permitting experience prior to opening what we call the project [inaudible] or the one stop location at mission and south van ness. I do want to thank all the departments that have been involved. As supervisor tang as talked about it. Also the director that its really with the departments engaged with the permitting process, working with the Controllers Office and working with jane kong and recognizing that this is a good means of helping our restaurants get open, so i too want to thank the Department Heads and especially todd r ruffo and the other members who were really instrumental in forming the concept of the Business Accelerator team and determining the need that we need to have a case manager, so thank you. Thank you very much to everyone for their presentations. And im actually going to do things differently because i know we have folks in the audience that would like to speak so before i launch into questions or comments i would like to see through the chair if we can open Public Comment. I know we have many businesses couldnt be here and theyre busy running their shops and we have someone in the audience that runs a business in the neighborhood so i would like to therefore open up Public Comment first so i have a few speaker cards and come up if you like. [calling speaker names] any microphone is fine. Hi. My name is lauren crab. I own andy coffee town roasters in the sunset and katies office asked me to talk about the experience with the Planning Department. We got the lease on our location in november of 2013 and it took us until oh no november 2012 and took us until march of 2014 to open. That is a year and a half of our lives building it out. A large portion of that was spent in the Infinity Loop of death i think it was called, and it was extremely frustrating and specifically going between the Different Departments, kind we felt bombarded by one of the inspections after we had a preliminary inspection and then another guy came out and made us rebuild a bunch of stuff and it was a frustrating time and its very good to hear that you guys are working to make it a little bit easier for people like myself, and yeah the online portal looks awesome. Im kind of jealous that wasnt around when i was building out and i think that having the person at the Planning Department to help you help guide Small Business owners through the process is going to really help so i hope you continue to prioritize the projects and work on some some more. Thank you. Thank you very much for coming out. Next speaker please. Hi. Samantha higgins, golden gate Restaurant Association. I want to thank the team and the Controllers Office and supervisor tang for the leadership and everyone else that worked on it. I want to address the difficultly in the permitting process for restaurants as its one of the most complicated processes to map out and understand and especially for Small Business owners as so many restaurants are. I wanted to mention the number of calls and questions we get on a daily basis from restaurants or people trying to open restaurants and particularly owners from other jurisdictions that are confused about the San Francisco process and emphasize how important it is and streamlining the process would be for an industry as a whole. Just looking through the report i want to suggest beginning with some of the easier things to tackle especially switching more applications to be done online and combining locations and i know were working towards. Linking critical permits to other permits would make a difference and referring applicants to the Planning Department in the beginning of the process and i want to talk about the inspections and it could be difficult for businesses. One of the challenges which was brought up there is typically not one inspector assigned so restaurants or businesses will get different inspectors that tell them Different Things and can be confusing and lead to delays so if we could do that i think that would be helpful for restaurants is thank you everybody for the work on this and i look forward to continuing. Thank you. Next speaker please. Supervisors jim lazarus San Francisco chamber of commerce. Thank you supervisor tang for your leadership on the issue and the departments involved. Long over due. Even looking at the portal and go online and look at the portal you wonder whether you take the next step to try to open a restaurant. Its a daunting list of permits, applications and approvals that you have to go through depending on what your Business Model is and where its located. As i said this is long over due. If i look at los angeles, they have a restaurant and hospitality portal. They call it an express program in the city of los angeles. Its a multiagency Management Network that does exactly what were talking about doing here, and i think portals are great. The internet is great but having a real person through the Small Business Commission Staff and other departments working with dbi having oneonone meetings and really helping assist the applicant through this very difficult process and it will never get that smooth and easy. In this city you wont get down to one internet page where youre able to click on buttons and send in the credit card check and get the permits. Its not going to happen that way and having real people help real applicants is ultimately the way it will succeed and we appreciate the efforts and we will work with you to make it a success. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker please. Good afternoon supervisors. Supervisor tang thank you for doing this work. Its greatly appreciated. [inaudible] and merchantace association in the Mission District and invest in neighborhoods. We have been working with the merchants for the last 17 years on the corridor. Some of the biggest issues we heard from the merchants is affordability of the permits and affordability of space and the permit process to open up a business and the process afterwards of maintaining the business around the permits so we do appreciate this work. We seen a lot of proves over the years the. Improvements over the years. I think what is key is definitely having an individual that is able to guide the process with a lot of these folks. One of the things that we dealt with is the language barrier which is huge and also the hightech and low tech. I think we need to have that balance of both so i think this person will be able to do that. I think you know, the portal its awesome and the team is well balanced and i think we need to move in that direction making sure that we cover a lot of different communities and abilities around tech. I think its important. The one stop shop i think its very good also. Its been a task for folks to get around for the different permits. Also creating a to do list by restaurant type because there are different types of restaurant and fast food, self service, bars and full restaurants and identify the type of restaurant you want to open and then a list of tasks that you have to do in order to be get them all done because a lot of people dont realize there are so many different types and not aware of one thing they missed and penalizeed in the future so creating that list would be great, and also what we have seen in the past with some they combine the permits on to one statement. If youre allowed to have an option of opting in or opting out and some people would rather pay across the years and others at one time so looking at also. We appreciate the work that youre doing and look forward to the conversation. Thank you. Thank you very much. Are there any other members of the public who wish to comment on this hearing . Okay. Seeing none through the chair if we could close Public Comment. Public is closed. [gavel] thank you very much to everyone that came out and like i mentioned we heard stories throughout the work as well, so one of the things that the controllary office made a recommendation through the report is improve turn around time. Departments must measure time and targets to drive change and monitor performance so i dont know if there is something to be answered by the controller