Transcripts For SFGTV Building Inspection Commission 20240712

Thank you. So we have a quorum. And our next item is item 2. President s announcement. Good morning, everybody, welcome to the june 17th, 2020. I have some president s announcement and in add please forgive me for any miss spelling or miss pronouncing of words in advance. As i said, good morning and welcome to our remote Building Inspection Commission meeting for june 2020. I am president of the Building Inspection Commission and im joined today by all of our commissioner members along with interim director reardon and senior d. B. I. Staff. Welcome to all of you. As we continue to cope with this extraordinary circumstances caused by the covid19 pandemic, we are now in our First Quarter of on going building safety work and different ways from back in february of this year that we have to do this report. Were certainly still working on issues. I can Sate Department is doing an outstanding job of keeping customers and staff hearing to the publichealth protocols that have been put in place and fine tuned on a regular basis over the past three months. And even though protocols is section 60 remains closed to the public, the department is continuing to have new permit applications conducting on schedule jobs and inspections and to ensure code and construction according to the and taking code enforcements that in short, inaudible . I want to say thank you to all our hardworking, dedicated professionals for their terrific jobs theyre doing and have been doing and under the enormous stressed by caused by. If everybody can be put on mute. Were getting audio doubling. If you have it up on a different computer, maybe turn the volume down on it or the television if you are watching it. So it doesnt feedback into the line. Do you have another two computers on . I dont, no. Ok. I dont. So let me continue. In short, we are still fulfilling the commission and thank you to our dedicated professionals for the terrific jobs that they are doing and have been doing under enormous stressed caused by this virus. This is requiring reduced timeframe and under extremely difficult conditions and beer alweredeeply impressed with ou. At dbi customers know in addition to continuing to do everyday what is required to ensure the building safety for the citys more than 225,000 structures, we are also converting what has long been a physical paper of submission process for permits to Electronic Submission process. We began it before the pandemic which the pandemic has accelerated. There is understandably on going issues. The commission is looking forward to an update on how this conversation is coming along and a bit later in todays agenda. And i only ask that all our customers take a deep breath and try to be patient a bit longer as we implement these longterm changes. This is a monumental undertaking in the best of times, but even more so during a global pandemic. D bye and permit center staff are working really hard to make this work and we have taken a giant leap forward to a more streamline system that will ultimately provide more options for people to get their permits as they need it. Id like to recognize our director reardon for his efforts to keep stakeholders informed about the changes dbi processes ex serves. I know he has been taking part in a biweekly qa and sessions at these meetings. So thank you, very much, director, our interim director for that. The city, as you know, is beginning to reopen and of its segments of our former daily life while keeping say close eye on our resurgence of this deadly virus. We will keep you posted as changes occur and the department take steps that are designed to keep everyone safe and ensure that the building Safety Standards are maintained and enhanced. Thank you for attending our meeting today and please continue to participate in our public process. And im sad to announce that the department has lost a great employee. Jamie oleary, who recently passed away. Jamie started his career with the city in 2010 joined the dbi team as a building dispenser five years ago. He was a graduate of high school and loved carpentry and all things building related. He was a surfer and adored his family and friends and caring supporter of the homeless and his community. Those who worked with jamie knew him as a very caring person and a great coworker and he will always be willing to help. On behalf of the Building Inspection Commission, our deepest condolences to his family. He will be missed. Madam secretary, that concludes my presentation. Clerk thank you for the president s announcement. We will have Public Comment on the president s announcements i just needed to read something on the agenda. I apologize. This is our first remote hearing via video and teleconferencing. You can watch this meeting on sf cable channel 78 and at sfgovtv. Org and the Public Comment call in number is 14084189388 and the access code is 146062 or 280. Due to the covid19 Health Emergency and to protect commissioners, dbi staff and members of the public, the Building Inspection Commissions meeting room 416 is closed at city hall. Members of the public are to participate remotely. If you want to ensure your comments on any item or agenda received by the Building Inspection Commission and as a reference for next month, please send an email to sonia. Harris by 5 00 p. M. On the tuesday before the meeting. Or call 5586164. Again, this meeting is being held teleconference pursuant to the governors executive order in 2920 and the mayor proclamation declaring the existence of a local emergency. Now is there any Public Comment on the president s announcemen announcements . Madam, it appears that we have a person with Public Comment. May i have the host duties. Clerk yes. Caller. Caller, are you there . Your two minutes starts now. Clerk caller, unmute yourself if you are muted. I unmuted them. Clerk oh, ok. Theyve had their hand raised for a while. Maybe they stepped away. Caller, if you are there your time to give Public Comment is now. If you wish to speak to a different item, you may stay in the queue. Well give you about 10 seconds and then ill mute you and hopefully youll come back when you are ready to speak. It appears the caller is not by their phone. Im going to go ahead and mute him again. Thank you. So there was no Public Comment on the president s announcements. Our next item is general Public Comment. The bic will take Public Comment on matters within the Commission Jurisdiction that are not part of this agenda. Any comments . I would like to remind any callers listening, if you would like to speak to any item, please raise your hand so that item only and to raise your hand, you will press star 3. If you wish to speak to this item, press star 3. Let me see if this caller is this is the same caller from before and they didnt lower their hand but im going to unmute them for them. Caller, are you there . Caller. Ok it appears theres no Public Comment. Ill clear the queue. Clerk thank you. The next item is item 4, commissioners questions and matters. Inquiries to staff. At this time commissioners may make inkawartha re inquiry withd procedures which are of interest to the commission. Commissioners, if i may just proceedally, and we can probably carry this through to the rest of the commission, what im suggesting, unless someone else feels differently, we would hear any Public Comment, obviously the item that is at hand and then at the end of this, i would go around to individually and ask you if you had any comments. I would ask you to make those comments in that one stop so we can get it finished up and having not gone back and fourth. If theres no objection to that, i will enter that. So any comments Vice President moss . Nope. Commissioner alexandertut . Yes. I am were going to talk about the permit process later in the agenda, correct . Correct. Its on item 3, i believe. Perfect. So, i think the i would like to make sure there is a report from the staff. Id like to hear an update on the s. R. O. Program regarding the covid19 action and want to have that as a standing item. I would like to have that as a standing report throughout the pandemic. So if the staff could be so kind as to have the s. R. O. Covid19 response as a standing report, as long as we are in this global pandemic, i would say very much appreciate that and i want to thank them for their leadership on that. Are you able to hear me ok . Yes, we are. Wonderful. Thank you. I also would like to start a discussion within the department or really find out what discussion has been started and Department Around Racial Justice and equity. In that includes equity within our neighborhoods, equity and training within the staff, and im curious to learn i had brought this up when i was first sworn in. Especially around Language Access but i think given the time that were in, the importance of the issue that i would just really like to hear from the staff how theyve been implementing some of the recommendations that have been coming down to be staff raining around bias and hear from the staff not today in a later date about what is the Racial Equity lens of d. B. I. You commissioner alexandertut. Commissioner clinch, please. Nothing from me, thank you. Commissioner jackobo, please. Good morning, commissioners. Chair mccarthy. Actually, something similar to what commissioner alexandertut just said, the Planning Commission last week had a very thoughtful and wonderful resolution put fourth by two of their commissioners that are in planning on racial and social equity and i think that we would be missing a huge vote here if we did not take a look at what is happening in this country in terms of the conversation around race and Structural Racism that exists within the departments, within structures. And i love our folks at bid and i love ourselves but i dont think were immune to that. For us to truly live up to that, we have to begin to look at internally as to what were doing. Some of the Key Takeaways that i would like to point out and see in what direction we can travel are things like the Department Internal practices, making sure that theyre thoughtfully examined and amended to advance racial and social equity across our functions. Theres been a big push within planning as well that the department change hiring and promotion practices to correct the under representation of black people, Indigenous People and people of color across all Staffing Levels and those are just two things that i would kind of like to mention and start to frame the conversation around and to get a better understanding of what our demographics are in terms of people that are currently working at d. B. I. As well as Leadership Structure and so, i would like to kickoff that discussion and the final piece that id like to say is part of this resolution was also the commission saying, as a Planning Commission, as a entity, that they stand in solidarity with the civil unrest and the demands of justice of fellow san franciscans and communities across the nation and i think that we should affirm that black lives matter. I wanted to put that out there as a commission to talk to at some point. Commissioner tam. Im going to thank you. That is all my commissioners and i concur with all the comments and look forward to having a good, deeper discussion on that and to your point, a resolution maybe at the next meeting. Maybe we can Work Together on that but i absolutely concur with your comments. Thank you. Next item is 4b. At this time the commission may discussion and take action to set the date of a special meeting and determine those items that could be placed on the agenda of the next meeting and other future meetings of the Building Inspection Commission. Our next regular meeting is scheduled for july 15th. That concludes item 4a and b. Is there any Public Comment on items 4a and 4b . Yes, there seems to be a caller with their hand raised. May i please have the host duties. Hello caller, your two minutes starts now. Caller, are you muted. Can you please unmute your phone. Caller is not speaking. Thank you. Public comment is closed for that item. Next item is item 5. Discussion of possible action regarding proposed a administrative and ground mullion reports for Foundation Design of Tall Buildings. Gary, would you like to begin and i will share your slide . Gary, would you like to begin the presentation . Just one moment, please. Gary, you are on mute. Lets start and do your presentation. Thank you. Good. Thats good. Commissioners, thank you for the opportunity that we can make the presentation today for the administrative bulletin ab111 entitled for preparation of Geo Technical and earthquake ground motion reports of Foundation Design and construction of Tall Buildings. Im manager of the surface commission and we also have an expert in key owe technical and earthquake ground motion who is your technical engineer giving up this and we engineer and joining us in the presentation. Our presentation and i will be talking about the background of the ab and first part and we will have a summary of this ab in the second part and well talk about we have the council in coop and in operation of office of city administrator dbi, puc and office of Capital Planning to perform a steady in this the recommendation to put into requirements, policies and the sign of New Buildings and for assessment and retro fit of existing buildings. And post earthquake responses all time prove the earthquake resilience of building in our city. Tall building and this study of the various taller building that 200 and and the final and in january 2019 which contains 16 recommendations and one of them producing city taking action to develop ventilation to adjust plantation and Geo Technical issue of Tall Building, subsequently dbi in may of last year and a Geo Technical and put together a team of experts consisting of Geo Technical engineer and two engineers to work on this d bye. After they complete this task we submit and this special team has another nine engineers and two structure engineer. After they approve it, we submit that to d. B. I. Community and c. A. C. Thats the co Advisory Committee for approval. inaudible on last tuesday, june 9th and c. A. C. Approved it on june 10th. Now, here we are and we are sending this a. B. And seeking b. I. C. Approval. And i guess with that, my first point of inaudible and i will to continue on the second part. Thank you, everyone. I hope you can hear me ok. I am going to read from my notes and ill be more unhappy to answer any questions and during the q a. One of the recommendation of acc119 project was to create a Technical Administration and this would be a companion to ab83 and provide quite the technical aspect upon design and construction of Tall Buildings. While structural aspects of the design of Tall Buildings are very regulated and designed so far and and following any design set of guidelines. Ab111 covers this gap. Ab111 requires that the geotechnical member of design of the team or short edrt and engage early on and review the work done available by the geotechnical engineer records, describing plans to technical field investigation and testing programs. This includes number 5 and inaudible tests if you use and a number of design ground level. Also, the development of design ground motion and foundation in the studies are presented in this planned view and this review. The work plan is a road map. Its similar to places of design documents and its normally prepared by a Structural Engineer and reviewed by edrt members before a Structural Design is progressed. Atc111 provides guidelines for technical content of geotechnical reports and is presented in various sections. When developing this section, you will have condition and sighs micseismic of the bay ared to be considered. In the financial district of San Francisco, we have shallow ground power and soil over soft, compressive inaudible and dense, is below, and it is other inaudible . They say its a slightly compressive underlying for moderate loads but, it is competitive on the heavy loads associate of the Tall Buildings. Also, to add to the challenge, we have two very active faults within 12 kilometres of the financial district. Therefore, when developing these technical sections, we have to go beyond the California Building Code Department and taylor. Other technical sections are guidelines and are in non mandatory language. As gary mentioned, they have been Peer Reviewed by a number of highly experienced local geotechnical engineers as such, ab111 it can be the consensus documents and from major areas and major technical practice in the bay area. Finally, like other administration bulletins, its recommended that ab111 the update is regularly geotechnical practice evolves, and as new takes effect. I have been in communication with folks that are writing code for a asc722 that modifiers the ground motion and they already like to incorporate some of the changes in the addendum or updates of ab111. This is a living document and has to be updated. Im going to hand over presentation to richard. Im talking about the last topic for the implementation of the administrative order. They will post the bulletin and the dbi website and in our news letter. Dbi Communication Team will send announcements to the Structural Engineer association of california to the American Institute of architects and to the building owners and Managers Association et cetera. With the inhouse training to our Tall Building engineers and to ensure the completeness of this geotechnical investigation, design in one report. At present, there are six new Tall Buildings with foundation as super structure a done der has been submitted and reviewed by d. B. I. And there are a total of five new Tall Buildings which have the foundation as approved by d. B. I. And are under construction required them to submit a 10year settlement Monitoring Program to d bye before the issuance of this certificate of final completion. Due to the foundation systems, supported on tiles and inaudible . Among those five Tall Buildings, d bye has already have two Tall Buildings Monitoring Programs. So that is my presentations. Thank you, richard. Is there any Public Comment on this item . If anyone any queue wishes to leave public health. Please press star 3 to raise your hand. I will allow a few seconds to allow for that. Theres in Public Comment for this item. Thank you. Are there any commissioner comments . Commissioner moss. No comment. Commissioner alexandertut. No, thank you staff for all your work. Commissioner clinch. Yeah, this is a really, really good document. Im not a geotechnical engineer so some of the specifics are above me. Its really comprehensive and i think it will go a long way to make sure our Tall Buildings perform better and i want to thank them for putting it together. I will make the motion when the time comes. Commissioner jackobo. Thank you for your work. Its hard work, thank you. Commissioner tam. I want to thank you for the hard work. It was very extensive. Not that im an expert. My comments would be just to echo commissioner clinchs. This is really great work. This is a very, very important document and ab111 and it came out from a lot of concerns in our Tall Buildings we had years back. I think this is just a fantastic road map for the stakeholders. Just a few quick seconds. Forgive me, but one is stakeholders, while you were going through this process with ab111, were they involved in it and were they signing off on this . Gary, would you like to answer that question . No. The developers or other stakeholders, theyre not participating in development of this document. And with regard to wanting what is important about this document is that its can you explain to me at what point so if i am a stakeholder and i am Going Forward with a 240foot building, at what point am i engage in the ab111 to see from a design point of view . Am i waiting to the actual design sa proved by planning and then doing it from an engineering point. Im trying to get a clarification of that . No, actually, the decision was made to a geotechnical member of dbrt getting involved as early stages. Suppose the developer wants to feel the building taller than 240 feet so they go and hire a Geotechnical Team to develop a work plan. That work plan would define how theyre planning to do field investigation and geo analysis. At that time, then that work plan will be reviewed with the geotechnical member of edrt and they have it before they started the geotechnical investigation. During the development of the geotechnical recommendation, the team members would interact with the geotechnical engineers and before the final report is prepared, its good agreement and the department and developer. Thats very helpful. Just a quick question. Its a decision, for example, made from the edrt outcome that this would go to bedrock, for example. It appears all the way to bedrock. That cant be changed, is that correct . That cant being changed in the operate might be a concrete building and it changes to a Steel Building or vice versa. That means you go back and start all over again and it is exactly the building that was approved that has to be coming from the edrt, is that correct . Thats correct, yes. I have no more comments. Thank you for that update and i look forward to seeing that in front of us for approval. Id like to make a motion to approve. I dont think this is a possibility yes, it is an action item. Ok. Ill second. Ill second. Ok. All right. So we have a motion by commissioner clinch and a second by Vice President moss. Well do a roll call vote on the item. [ roll call vote ] the motion carries unanimously. The next item is item 6. Discussion and possible action regarding ordinance amending the administrative code to add a definition of tourist or trance yatransient use and set the term of tennen see for such use at less than seven days through december 31th, 2021 and starting on january 1st, 2022. At no less than 30 days to provide a period applicable to hotels regulated under the ordinance to provide a process by which the owners or operators of regulated hotels had request that the am ter tiesation period be long tore amend definitions of permanent residents from a person who occupies a room for 32 to 30 days in addition to other requirements. Good morning. Resident Hotel Guest Rooms are an important form of housing for the elderly, the low income people, the disabled and the city created the Residential Hotel conversion ordinance to protect and preserve Affordable Housing back in 1979. For decades, the h. C. O. Has been a key part of the citys master plan and other programs to preserve Affordable Housing in San Francisco. The ordinance prevents the demolition of residential Hotel Guest Rooms. And prohibits the residential rooms for tourist use and then in 2017, the board of supervisors passed amendments to the ordinance and the loop hotel and hotel landlords and let out residential rooms for seven days. And it changed it to 32 days and ordinance and an 110 vote at the board of supervisors that you dont see very often. I can remember years ago, the members of the community, Senior Adviser to the mayor i got yelled at because based on that summit Residential Hotels were advertising for tourists on internet and they were like running adds on hotel. Com, were losing Affordable Housing for San Francisco and and theyre right. We are losing that housing. Residential is defined as seven days and its a loophole big enough and it cant be done and it cant stop and residential to provide us for seven days. It reminds me of the Supreme Court saying that a Corporation First for free speech that Citizens United or some of those examples so basically, in order for the ordinance to be enforceable and to work and to protect housing, there was a lawsuit that some of these landlords and the finding the support. Andrea is part of our regular d. B. I. City attorney crew, shes part of a higher group of litigators that work on litigation for the city. So id like to turn it over to deputy City Attorney andrea ruiz. Are you there . Yes. Hello. Hi. Yes. Good morning, commissioners. We drafted this ordinance in order to provide the period because in the investigation the court of appeal held that the change of use between seven to 32 days that we had adopted in the 2017 ordinance constituted a change of use from tourist uses to tenants, landlord tenant users and that was improper to do just as an ordinance without any compensation or amortization. We drafted this ordinance in direct response to that holding and added an amortization period giving hotel owners who have invested in their uses as seven uses, hotel uses. Sometimes to recorporate their investments in order to transition to residential uses which is what we think was always the intent of the h. C. O. And if they feel that the amortization per is too short to come forward and request an extension. And that we have provided some criteria as to what an owner would have to allege for purposes of extending the am to amortization period and comes from case law and basic reasonable criteria in terms of what would an owner need to prove to establish that they need to recover some of the costs. So the total cost, for example, the length of time, as the investments have been in place, the disability for the investment for the new use, residential use and any other event factors. So, we think this provides a fair process and it directly responds to the current holding. Happy to answer any questions you may have. We can go to Public Comment. Madam asking, there are hands raised. Can you please pass me the host duty . Yes. Sorry, just one moment. If you are lining and would like to speak to this item, raise your hand by pressing star 3. Hi, caller. Your two minutes starts now. Caller, are you there . Caller hello. We can hear you. Your two minutes starts now. Caller yes, so my name is kiran and i am the manager of the Aldridge Hotel in San Francisco. Our business is renting rooms to guests by the week. We do not rent rooms we will not rent rooms by the month because it is not profitable. We will take those rooms off the market. You will be taking away our business. Many of our guest guests cannotd to pay rent by the month. Even if we did offer rooms by the m. The month they conditione rent. We can rent rooms by the week without requiring a deposit and full months rent up front because theres less risk in renting for a week. If someone is staying for a month, we would have to take a deposit in a full months rent and the risk of significant financial loss is too high. For many of our guests, its impossible to come up with a deposit and a months rent in advance. They dont have access to that kind of capital which is why theyre renting by the week. If you require minimum stays of 30 days, many of them will be unable to rent rooms and will be homeless. So i urge that you all please vote no for this ordinance and especially during these difficult times, not all tenants will have a deposit and full months rent up front to pay. I urge you guys to vote no. Thank you. Ok, ill take the next caller. Hell oh caller. Hi, caller, your two minutes starts right now. Yes, we can hear you. Caller hi, my name is i also operate a hotel and i would also like to say please vote no. It is impossible to continue to do business as many of our guests cannot afford to pay rent. Also, with that being said, for many of the guests its impossible to come up with the capital and they dont have that kind of money lying around, which is why were renting by the week. I cant come up with a deposit and its impossible for many of our guests and because that, most of our guest are homeless and so, i strongly suggest that we vote no. Thank you, caller. Hello, caller, are you there . We seem to have lost that caller. Ill go onto the next one. Hello, caller. Are you there . One second. Caller if you are there, can you please speak . You have two minutes. Caller i oversee the program at central city collaborative which is part of general and housing clinic. Weve heard before the units that the hotels are usually the most affordable units for extremely low income residents in the city and im here to speak on this item number 6. We lately, because of the pandemic, have heard from many small Tourist Hotels and also private owners basically asking if theres any programs or any city that can help them fill up the rooms which are empty right now because theyre not very certain when they will be able to operate their tourist units. Theres obviously Units Available to provide residential tenancy. For the record, i would like to say our residents who want to rent a unit in a private s. R. O. Hotels are looking for monthly and not for seven days. We also want to put it on the record that we are disappointed in how City Attorney office have handled this case to where part of the implementation of the ordinance has been delayed until january 2022. Is at this moment, and implementation of this and part of the ordinance as soon as possible. Hello, caller. Encourage you to vote no on this proposal and send it back for further review until all of these problems have been addressed. Thank you for your time and im happy to answer any questions that you might have. You have two minutes. Hi, my name is jay shaw and im the manager of the brames hotel at 89th street. Its a Family Business of ours and weve put our livelihood in the place and our business is renting rooms to guests by the week. Weve had numerous guests that have been staying with us for years at a time and that cant afford to pay rent by the month. They get behind paying rent by the week and i couldnt imagine what it would be like for them to pay rent by the month. Theyre good people. Its not designed to be an apartment, its a hotel. Id like to go ahead and put that on record and i appreciate everyones time. Thank you for listening to our comments. Hello. Hi, there, caller, you have two minutes. Hi, my name is vaney pa tell and my family has owned and operated s. R. O. Hotel for the past 40 years in San Francisco. Ive been following this the past three years and i still do not see a actual report or data that justify why changing this other than anecdotal information than we hear once in a while. I also hear that people advertised, which a lot of people didnt, how does a hotel advertise vacancy if it has it . And that these are hotel thats do it. There is no rule or law that says you couldnt do it. To have that be thrown back at the hoteliers was unjustified. I want to say that a lot of hotels work with many non profits over that years that work with vulnerable populations to say our hotels are not serving this population is also inaccurate and we would like to actually see what the report is on the housing situation and before we actually will move forward. I want to put this on the table that this effects mainly asian americanminority owned businesses. Indian american and chinese american. Ive never in my time in San Francisco seen something pushed so hard without having Community Engagement or stakeholder engagement. Weve been begging for this for years but the only way weve been able to sort of get to the table is by putting fourth a lawsuit, which is not the way i thought San Francisco worked. I thought we worked together on things. This is not how i envisioned this to happen. Two times the court has sided with the hotel owners. Once on the ceqa case and the second of the Appellant Court when they said this is a taking and so we hope that you would vote no on this and send it back and send a message that especially at this time, we need to be working together. Thank you. Hello, caller, are you there. Caller, if you are there, please unmute your phone. Ill take the next caller. Hello caller, are you there . Caller yes. You have two minutes. Caller can you hear me . Ok. Well, my name is mannish patel and im a Third Generation hotelier. I want to speak about these ordinances, its been 40 years, approximately, that we have been oppressed by our golf regulations placing the burden of public housing, mind you the key word is public housing, on private citizens and businesses. Especially minority businesses. Our hotel have been used as scape goats in the guys that are elect officials have been purporting for the past 40 years to protect the fallacy of housing the elderly, low income, and that is another fallacy. Its not low income, the extremely low income as one of the housing advocates had spoken me before and the elderly disabled. Are these buildings really a common able for the 88 issues for today. Are they there for the Senior Citizens that want to live in 10 by 10 or 10 by 12 rooms without cooking facilities or private bathrooms. Are you really trying to say that we want to keep this industry alive for them in this type of industry. In the past 40 years, how many constructions have gone on to house this actual population and how come theres still a problem 30 years later . Over the government regulations on our hotels, not our s. R. O. S, have caused this issue because no one has an incentive to build within San Francisco and by the way, theres a great amount of war chest. The d. B. I. Should make a plan to find a lands to build and have the non profits, organize themselves to manage those buildings. We should not be placed on the burden for this problem. You were talking someone made a everyone has a buy as caller, your time is up. Thank you for calling. Hello. Hi, there, you have two minutes. We can hear you. You have two minutes. Caller hello, my name is wesley britain and im a manager here in San Francisco. I was just calling because this place is one of the newer ones. It was a old building that was run down. The owners let it become dilapidate and so much money was put to bring it up to code. When you do more than 30 , everything is up to code so after doing that, now you are saying you can only make less money. Its not like this is a huge profit, its just we have monthlies and those monthlies that we have are vetted with background checks and security checks. Not only secretary people come up with thcan people come up win get one bedroom or one Room Department anyway. Those people are work to go put their taxes here in the city and its just not under able how you force these people who will not pass a background check and why would you not think i have the same rights . Thats the crazy part. Thats all i have to say. Thank you, very much. Hello. Hello. Hi, caller, you have two minutes. Ok. You know, i just wanted to pose a question quickly here. On what authority or expertise is the d. B. I. Being asked to weigh in not ot impact of the economic structure of me and my constituents businesses, for example, the ideology or amortization on these items . With that being said, i would like to ask that you guys say no. Thank you. Ok. Hello caller are you there . Ill go to the next caller. You have two minutes. Caller hi please turn down your tension or your computer because you are echoing. Caller i can hear you. I just wanted to bring light. I believe this ideology has been introduced by aaron peskin and i also want to point out i dont think he is trying to set these Affordable Housing units because he bought the development that would have brought in 8,000 units was 25 would have been affordable. And he blocked it because he was worried about traffic. So i do really urge the whole board to vote no on this. Just die Little Research of why this is happening here. Its going to take a lot of from Small Business owners. Hello caller. Yes. I am being requesting that i can finish my statement. Caller, im afraid we can only allow two minutes for the public to speak and you were given your two minutes. I want to put it on record it was not a full two minutes. Thank you. That appears to be the end of Public Comment for this item. Anyone wishes to speak, press star 3 right now. There are no further items, one just popped up. Do you want to take it . Or leave it . It popped up just as i cleared the hands. Lets take it, please, thank you. Thank you. Ill take it. Caller can you hear me . Yes, we can hear you. Caller my name is amid and im a Second Generation hotel in the Mission District and weve had a s. R. O. Hotel in the mission for more than 35 years and this ordinance is going to be really detrimental to both sides to the people renting the room as well as our livelihoods and being able to rent by the week and not doing any background checks or if you cannot rent at least by the week. Otherwise you are fundamentally changing the way we do business. You are making us landlords and you are making us an Apartment Building rather than a hotel which is what the sign says outside. I urge everyone to all the supervisors to vote no on this and it is for all the reasons that have already been expressed i dont want to waste anybodys time here, but i strongly urge supervisors to vote no. Thank you. Thats the end of the queue. Thank you. The president mccarthy, would you like to do a commissioner discussion. Why dont we start with Vice President moss, please. I have a few thoughts but i would like to defer to a few other commissioners. I know this is a complicated issue and its been going around for a long time. I do want to have the extensive conversation about it but i would like to hear from a couple of the other commissioners. Commissioner alexandertut, please. Yes, before i start my comments, i have a lot of questions and i know you wanted to go one at a time and how would you like us to proceed. If it works for you and obviously if it doesnt, i understand, but if it works for you, if you could try to put all your questions out there on a basis and we can get them answered that away and if you have some followup questions you can continue with that. Im willing to im an open book on that and i want to try that for us. Lets try and if its completely overwhelming, we can adjust because i dont want to just, you know, have my litany of questions and things get lost or confusing because of that. Ill start that way and then as its there let me help you out here. Do you have six questions . Four. Lets do two at a time. That sounds great. So, my general comment is that i am really confused by the comments, the Public Comment that didnt seem to reflect. Im going to base my comments, questions and opinions on the understanding of what is happening in the lawsuit, which is why we have this before us. So, the question is, the seven day versus the 30days, and what is the timeframe by which we get to 30 days. I just want to say when i was a tenant advocate that musical rooming is what we call it when people move in, get kicked out, get moved in, get kicked out, it is incredibly unstable to have to not know if you are allowed to stay in a unit. And the entire structure of the residential versus tourist units is to provide stability and create stability for residents. We have an enormous and when theres a constant cycle of people moving in and out of hotels in order to avoid them from achieving tenant rights, its a disservice to all of San Francisco. And so i am coming from the perspective of wanting to increase the da belt for the tenants anstability and wehave. Is is there a way to shorten this for hotels, particularly who have not made any recent investments. In order to improve their hotels and for hotel whos have not made investments in their residential units that do not require the amortization period and its any necessary. Third. I do agree with some of the comments theres some vagueness in how the d. I. C. Is to determine the suitable of investments for Residential Hotel use and how are we to consider other relevant factors to determine that the owner or operators reasonable return investments and i wonder if theres a process without holding up this is there a rules and regulations that clarifies this or does it all have to be done in this legislation that were considering today . Lets take those, the three questions there. So, who do you want to direct this at our City Attorney . I do, thank you. City attorney, please, if you are available. Hello. Hi. Can you hear me . Hi. The question about whether the amortization has appeared long or short is a policy decision for the city to make. Of course you could consider the board could consider longer or shorter amortization periods and drafting the ordinance we thought this was like a fair starting point for the conversation but a lot of it can be ironed out through the legislative process. And as for the criteria being vague, theres rules and regulations to make them more specific, as well as perhaps addressed a process by which you would consider this applications and maybe theres a need to submit information, maybe the information can be kept confidential. Maybe this is a process to request reconsideration, et cetera. So theres a lot that could be ironed out in the formal rules and regulations. The ordinance pro voids that framework to consider the issue. Thank you. Thats very helpful. I think that answers my next question, which is going to be how do we determine investments versus regular maintenance and regular upkeep or keeping things up and bringing a building up to code. So i think that answers that question and it can be dealt with in rules and regulations or a process down the line. My final question is, is this ordinance guarantee a full return on investments for Hotel Workers or for the hoteliers . Could you explain what you mean by that . Yeah, so, in my limited understanding of investments that part of an investment is a calculated guest we hope that we will get a good return but were not guaranteed that and im wondering, does this lock the city into guaranteeing a return on some kind of investment and dollar for dollar. Is it 100 close to return. Im confused about this idea of the city is setting up a structure to guarantee a return on an investment. Well, i think definitely you should consider what exactly is a reasonable return in investments. I think its a reasonable return not guaranteed highest possible return. And it would be helpful to rely on the expertise you may have inhouse or hire an expert consultant to help you navigate to what are the boundaries or what is reasonable. The ordinance just provides a framework to kind of kickoff that process. Thank you so much for your question. I have no further questions. I will come back to you because i know im going to generate a question and im going to need your help in a little bit. Please, dont feel like it. I have a question for our City Attorney. Did one of the callers made a point that he questions the legality of our hearing this and stating an action. Did you speak to that . Deputy City Attorney. The spick a organization that you also make an appeal for and in this event, we are confident that you have the authority to hear these appeals of what essentially would be an extension request. So, we are not concerned with your ability to hear the request for extension. Thank you. No other questions. Commission jackobo. Thank you, president. And thank you to commissioner alexandertut for the line of questioning. I think that was spot on to where i was in the last piece was going to ask, you know, its go ahead to know that the City Attorney understands we have the authority do do what were doing and its important to hear feedback and this is not ideal and and. Commission tam. I touched up on what considered it and i got answered so thank you. Commissioner moss, please. Im ok. You know what, just like i was hoping people smarter than me ask the right questions. Certainly, chair, im glad we have the authority to hear this but i defer to you. I mean, commissioners, im really struggling with this one. I thought the testimony was compelling and i really appreciate commissionerral alexandertut bringing it back to the there of what this legislation is all about. I do remember the debate and particularly in the tenderloin there was some housing got into some legal actions against some of these hotels back some years because they were mostly renting out to tourists and not renting to s. R. O. Clients as their rooms were supposed to be. So i do remember this and i knew there are a few people out there who have taken advantage of this and obviously there are a lot of the same in my industry, theres just a few people who take advantage of the rules and then it seems like everyone else has to pay the consequences when legislation comes down the line to correctly do that. So, my questions are simply this. One is, is there anybody who can answer that and it kept coming up from the stakeholders and i do get it as a Property Owner, is, are these tenants paying month are they past these kinpassingbackground checks . Are they required to have these background checks . Is there anybody out there who can talk to that a little bit for me so i can have a better understanding and all they able to pay for rent up front. I just want to talk about that. I can answer that. Chief housing inspectors, james and the city has a variety of programs guarantee renting for 30 days to thousands of tenants that do it this way. Through many of these same hotels, some which are on the call. These programs were started after the earthquake in 199. Theyve provided the way where the landlord is guaranteed the tenants are able to get stable housing and we see this all over town as it exists right now. So chief, so basically you dont see that about all the five or six from the s. R. O. And every one of them almost touched on that so from where your saying that this problem doesnt exist. In other words, they do have the ability to the subsidy programs the city kind of helped the people in need get them there, is that correct . It does, i mean, i thought that resinated with me so ok, all right. So you are saying that that is not the issue, correct . Sometimes a legal strategy is to put forward a certain type of landlord or Property Owner who makes a certain point whereas as an, reality the people renting out the tourist rooms are around union square and those are the people that are actually making the profits off it. So i understand the strategy of who a legal team puts forward and maybe thats part of their strategy. Can i put clarifying question that might get to maybe what president mccarthy is asking . Please, do. So, jamie, this is my recollection but help me. Are you saying that someone could have a 30 day rental but theres no mandate they pay it on the first of the month. They could have an arrangement where they are paying twice a month or a weekly basis, even though its a 30day rental. Thats right. So thats helpful. I think i raised my hand. May i say one thing real quick. If you must, please. I wanted to, right air said i didnt want to talk i did want to talk. I really do, as my day job mission housing, we own over 500 units of s. R. O. , the true individualroosingleroom occupd bathroom and kitchen. I heard a couple Public Commenters say that wasnt meant to be permanent housing and i reel want to stress that we have had thousands of people, hundreds if not thousands of people that have lived permanently in our s. R. O. S that thrived in all seemed to be able to survive. I would like to attest that though its not perfect and i would love for everyone to have their own onebedroom and one bathroom, the s. R. O. In San Francisco is absolutely capable of permanently housing our most vulnerable citizens. I really do just want to clarify that. Thank you. Is there anymore comments, particularly commissioner alexandertut . I really do understand this is an important topic for and you i dont want to no, let me ask a question about process. So, my understanding is that this goes before the board of supervisors and the board of supervisors then makes amendments, et cetera. We dont have the authority to make amendments, is that correct . Deputy City Attorney, you as is the Building Inspection Commission can recommend approval, recommend that the ordinance not be approved by the board or supervisors or recommend with some agreed upon considerations for amendments. Great. So, im interested in moving this. I am not interested in delaying this process. Its already going to be an amortization process and the organizations are saying is too long. I hope that we can move it. I am ready to move it. With some kind caveat that i hope the board of supervisors would take into consideration the concerns about the timing and with the knowledge theres a lot of that this needs to get worked and out and clarified in our rules and regulations process that will be separate. The am t that would actuay help the s. R. O. Or the property holder, is that correct . In depreciation. So they have the 30 days wouldnt go into effect until the end of 2021. And then every single hotel can come to us and say we want an extension. Thats why im hoping we can work in the future to have very clar rules and regulations that will complain what the process is and give a lot more clarity and for bic members as to what we mean by all these. Return on investment, et cetera. And thats the part where i am still a little bit fuzzy on. It can come to us and it depends on the scope of work that theyre going to do and so on and so on s that your understanding of it it . My understand asking i have all the same questions you do and that i mean the City Attorney can correct me if im wrong, we dont have to answer all those questions in in the legislation but that we can develop rules and regulations that will if its a two year process and we have two years to come up with rules and regulations by which we start to make those determinations. Deputy City Attorney. That is correct. You could use the dream time to develop your rules and regulations and also the board may extend the period and so you may have more or less time. It would be advisable to have the rules and regulations finalized with enough time to allow the owners to submit the requests by the deadline. I am really troubled about that and thats quite a lot there in the big equation. Why wouldnt we have that as a part of the document Going Forward. Its going to be coming back to us again and the unintended consequences, its just the part of the legislation that bothers me the most. I find it incomplete. No more comment on that. This is a discussion and possible action item. Is there a motion on the item . Were trying to do the right thing but are we really doing the right thing for all parties involved . There was a lot of statements made about this is a city of negotiating and working together and trying to resolve it. Its obvious low this legislation is going to happen but its equally as important that we have it fair and equitable for everybody. May i ask a followup question. My understanding is this this came from the judicial process, is that correct . Deputy City Attorney. Yes, that is correct. As a general matter, the cost of modification is discussed in the case law and was cited by the court in issuing its position. The details, though, were not in the decision by the court but if you lock at all those cases that were cited these are the types of factors the city considers. You could, the board could change them and could add could refine and could be more specific, all that have is left to the legislative process. I mean, do we have to can we not just vote to move this forward with the caveat that we dont believe enough details about the way that the amortization would not work have been taken out but knowing the actual adjudicating of the final rules doesnt happen at this body either . I believe this will be more than a little robust conversation as it passes through the various board of supervisors, commissioners. Its been a long time already. I do want to be equitable for everyone involved. I do believe that this is moving closer. I think we should support our most vulnerable more than anyone. And again, we have thousands of people on our street and this is coming from a lot of adjudicating already so i guess my question is, im comfortable moving this past the commission so we can i mean in my mind we can start the actual conversation of what the final law looks like in the board of supervisors, let me know. I know that other documents pass through to the board of supervisors not always having a yes or no recommendation. Im not trying to be wishy washy or whatever, but i do want to just say that it seems like the actual conversation about what the final document looks like isnt going to happen at this body. Please, let me know. Yes, this is deputy City Attorney rob calfla, you can recommend it to the extent we dont have specific amendment language you would make to the ordinance. It would be helpful to have a motion that discusses whether the policy, intent of the change in tenancy is recommended or approved by the Building Inspection Commission and then you could also pass on your concerns about the process needing more guidance in the future. I believe it is important to get the Building Inspection Commissions determinations to whether they recommend the change itself and express concerns about the process of appealing that. Ok, thank you. City attorney, rob, i know you have answered this question before, can you give us the timeline on this again . The timeline for this, the been inspection questionin is hg because of the code its enforced by the department of buildings inspection and after it is been heard and considered by the Building Inspection Commission, either recommended for approval, recommended for disapproval or just no recommendation and passed on. It will go to the committee, i believe its the Land Use Committee at the rules and the next stop is go to the board of supervisors. It was to the rules committee. I believe its going to andrea deputy City Attorney. Its going to the Land Use Committee but i may be wrong. It will be considered by committee and considered by the full board. Deputy City Attorney, you are able to participate but you are not able to pass along the recommendation from the entire Building Inspection Commission. You can pass along your concerns as a commission and you wouldnt be able to speak to the intire building section with the determination . Would you anticipate that the department then would have their recommendations through the commission at that point . At the land use to put into see if they would include it or not. Deputy City Attorney, do you mean for the process of extension requests or i believe that the leapt wil department we to present and discuss their concerns or hopes for the final evolution or how they would implement the ordinance at Land Use Committee but that the timing is such that i do not believe they will have rules or regulations proposed for how to carry out the extension application process by that time. That clarification. I will motion that we and to the board of supervisors but also with a caveat that we expect building inspection departments representatives to be included into present but on a whole, this body does support the spirit of the legislation and that we are protecting our most vulnerable communities. Is there a second for this motion . Second. Alexander. Commission alexander has given us a second. Do a roll call vote on the items. [ roll call vote ] the motion carries unanimously. Our next item is item 7. Discussion regarding electronic plan check and again, for our members of the public, at end of the presentation, we call for Public Comment. You have to call 408 4189388 and the access code is 146 0624280. Melissa, white house will be presenting. Thank you, ive unmuted. I need to share screen. Just one moment, please. Good afternoon, my name is Melissa Whitehouse thank you for having me here today. Im going to give you an update on electronic plan review. As many of you know, the city has moved forward implementing electronic plan review. I will give an update on that process today. Talk about adjustments needed and i know ill hand it over to christine to talk about next steps as well. So, ive been working for about a year and a half now on the over all permit project. A onestopshop where were moving everyone to 49 south van ness and as part of that project we took on the implementation of electronic plan review. Ive kind of like having googled for plans so instead of paper plans, having plans in the cloud where people could review them and they have a plan to implement for electronic plan ve view and we had planned on starting time notment this. We started working groups last october and planned on implementing it slowly overtime as we prepared for the move. In february, before covid hit, we just finished Training Staff and we started three open sessions in blue beam where we had three different projects that we were very early initial piloting on the process. So we had always planned it overtime because we were simultaneously preparing for a move, a new viewing system and many other changes and we didnt want to overwhelm staff and so, especially in particular i would say for over the counter permits we planned on really not getting to that for quite some time. And then, of course, covid19 hit. We were forced to close pretty abruptly and really had to make a decision about what to do moving forward and so, decided to move forward with electronic plan review on a much tighter plan review. We closed down on taking new things for two weeks, at the end of march, and started accepting things from customers on april 1st. However, i do want to say, you know, because we were in very, very early stages of implementation when covid19 hit, we had never taken a permit through the entire process endtoend. We had never issued a permit. We really hadnt developed procedures or work flow on how electronic plan review will work. We really were planning on learning from our pilot and figuring it out all along and kind of a justing as we went to implement. The month of april and then even into early may was about preparing for this implementation so Training Staff, setting up the procedures, the processes and the work flow for this new system and then we started collecting things about april 1st. We were collecting for several weeks before we were starting to work on them. We have developed a backlog so weve taken 4,000 total submissions. You know in this number, there are duplicates but over all its a large number of items and as far as permit issuance goes, really permit issuance started in may and that i can pirring up into june and i have a graphic on that in a couple of slides. I will say the majority of the permits being issued right now are no plans permits. So the focus on this project since weve been implementing between april 1th and and theyve taken 1,150 items thats where the staff has spending time going through all of these items and getting them moved through the work flow, moving them into sessions and really trying to get permits to issuance from initial implementation and submission. And as i mentioned [please stand by] the system is very slow. That is something that i was not anticipating. I wanted to talk about that. Here is just a graph i can showing the permits issued. The orange bar plus the black. The black is the concerning area. These are electronic permits. What i expected to see is starting the week of may 18, may 26 that black bar pick up to be larger percent every week pushing through the system. That is not what i am seeing. That is definitely an area of concern overall. What does this mean . What do we need to do . I will tell you that it is pretty there were some comments from the president to this effect. It is a lot for staff to deal with a health crisis. Iit is a lot for staff to implement new it systems when we are not in a health crisis. It is a lot when we are in a health crisis. Some are remote and it is really challenging. I want to appreciate how hard the staff have been working and how many late nights and weekends and blood and sweat and tears have gone into this to try to serve our customers when we are not allowed to physically have people in the building. What do we need to do now . The system from what i can see, and i would love to not report this to you, what i can see, it is challenging for this system to return to what it was preshelterinplace levels. There are a few reasons. The biggest, one, in the old world 90 plus permits were overthecounter. The customer was the owner of the paper and the plans. They held them and maneuvered them through the process. Now people can hit it and the city ends it and the ball is in our court. This is creating a massive increase in workload for support staff, in particular. I have noticed a lot of back and forth that used to happen in the building person to person. Now it is over phone calls and emails and a lot of missing information and things just creating a lot more work for support staff. Before when the customer was the owner of the plans from end to end. A really big challenge is the data and technology issues. This is a tool where the plans go and they get marked up. It is not the work flow. It is not the thing that staff sign off in. It is not the thing to move the permit from one step to the next. That is Case Management, permit tracking system. That is a dated system. It is really challenging to understand what is going on and get good data and track these permits from end to end, even though the actual one is happening. It is manual on the back end. It is not like in some other jurisdictions with the Case Management system a customer has a log in, can track process for themselves. The workload is more seamless how it moves from one step to the next. There is not one Silver Bullet to speed up the system. We have to look at many Different Solutions to move this project along in a faster clip. I wanted to show the work flow to explain what i am seeing. The purple box to the left the customer hits submit. There is a step where the permit center team staff triage, lobbying the projects, upload them and then forwarding to the staff. The Quality Assurance and routing happens. This is where the staff will Quality Control, set the routing, similar to the people world and send the project off. There will be a new project application in the permit tracking system. A lot of customers ask i hit submit and havent heard anything back. Why am i not seeing it . That is what is going on. There is initial between when you hit submit and it gets to the d. B. I. Staffer to upload it is the reason people arent seeing it right now. In the old world when customers owned the plans we didntd didne them in. Now we are getting a lot of things, there is a lag time between when they hit submit. It is frustration for customers. This is the step where it appears that things are working pretty well. I am hearing from plan reviewers, they are doing the current review sessions, commenting at the same time, customers are able to be invited in to see the comments. That is working well. It is the challenge, as i mentioned. The front and back end of the process. How much more cumbersome this process is on the support staff. Last is the payment and issuance portion where this is d. B. I. Worked on hard to get online payments since covid hit. That is exciting. That can take a couple days to happen. That is not instant. They are working through it. A permit check staff has to go through multiple steps on the front and back end to pick the permits up and down to get them through to the entire system. As we mentioned we need to review the process. We need to limit items not complete. We spent a lot of time in the beginning in the front end of the process why it was taking so long to get things into blue beam. Now we Pay Attention to the open sessions. How do we get them out. We have a large number of sessions and small number of things coming out. We need to Pay Attention to the workload, talk to staff, figure out the process improvements and make those along the way. We will cut down the administrative steps wherever we possibly can. Another thing we have been working on really d. B. I. , it division is the permit tracking system integrating with the city website. When i hit submit on the city website instead of it taking time for a staff to enter that information when they get to it to have it automatically go to the permit tracking system so customers can track from the beginning, this is something customers have been asking for to have a better sense what is going on with the permits. This is also better reporting with what is going on with the permits. Another thing we hear on resubmissions. Right now when and this is a change from the paper world. In the paper world when i have comments on my plans i can work directly with the plan reviewer. The way it is set up we have customers resubmit on the city website. I know that is creating a lag time for the plan reviewer to spend time understanding the project and they want to get the revisions from the customers as fast as they are ready it is something we are looking at and talking to. Blue beam has the capability and personality. There are concerns when will Quality Control happen . What will this mean for the overall work flow . This is an area that will speed up resubmissions. It is something to take a look at. On data and reporting. As i mentioned getting the Case Management system really to understand the field and how the departments are using them, understand the daughter in the blue jean and Case Management system to see the process from end to end in a complete way. It is challenging right now. There are multiple spreadsheets and steps. It can be daunting to understand where the permits are at in the overall process. That needs a bunch of work as we move the process and the system along. Overall, you know, we have a lot of challenges. A lot of hard work to implement this. It is about two and a half months of a massive change around Information Technology with hundreds of employees in the middle of a health crisis. I am proud how hard everyone has worked and how much we accomplished. I know that is not sufficient for what customers are used to and for the volume of permits in San Francisco for overthecounter permits. We continue to move this forward. We need to explore any and all options to make the process and get to a higher volume. We have the move coming at the end of next month. That is a big thing on our mind. We are thinking overall permits issued and organizing to Pay Attention to. With that i will hand it over to christine to talk about other ideas in next step. Thank you, melissa and thank you for all your hard work on this. I have a few slides. Everyone see that . Yes. Good morning, commissioners, i am assistant director of the department of building inspection. My presentation i am going to talk about the strategies we are pursuing to address the backlog of permit applications at d. B. I. First i want to affirm that we are committed to the electronic plan review system as longterm solution to streamline the permitting process. We believe there are many benefits in the longterm for our customers. Right now in the middle of the pandemic we have a permit backlog to address. As melissa explained. Dpi is working on all the permit applications we received before may 8th. Our focus really is on the applications we have received after may 8th to the present. As melissa said, a lot of the overthecounter permits without plans moved through the system. We focused on getting those through. The backlog is overthecounter permits with plans. I will talk about four strategies to speed those up. One of the key issues is a staffing issue. Because this is a customer driven process managed by our staff, we have each staff person has five times the workload for each permit application they process. One of our key strategies is how do we ease that burden from our staff or bring more staff in to help out . One of the things we have done is move the permit tech one staff, a classification to permit two on temporary basis to allow them to do more. They can process and issue Building Permits that they can do at the higher level. We are also in the process of backfilling open positions and we just hired two engineers who are starting in the next few weeks to help out with our staffing. We are looking attempt pore rarely reassigning staff from other divisions to pitch in on a short term basis to help with the curb side process i will talk about in a few minutes. Finally, we offered over time to our staff who are working on permits, and we have approximately 25 Staff Members who are working over time currently. We have been able to increase the number of permits we issue by people working on the weekends and extra hours. The second strategy. What other resources can we bring in from partners in other city departments to help us with this short term problem . The permit center staff, melissas staff, we are training them to do additional front end work. That again helps take the burden off our staff with all of the extra work. We have also partnered with the planning department. They have offer to devote staff to help with specific projects, particularly the accessory dwelling unit permits. I wont spend too much time on this. Melissa addressed the technology improvements. The i t staff is working hard on implementing the tracking System Integration to help streamline the process and ease some of that workload, and also looking at ways to enable more customer control over responsibility for moving permits through the sessions to ease some of the burden on the staff. Finally, the key strategy we are going to start offering some Curb Side Service for the overthecounter projects. We plan to launch this next week with a Pilot Project soft launch in the middle of the week and rollout on june 29th to include having a period of time in the mornings for folks who are looking for overthecounter permits without plans to drop in. They have to register ahead of time so we dont have a lot of people coming in for those. We have people coming in and trying to our goal will be to take them in the morning and if possible issue by the end of the day or the next day. Also Curb Side Service for overthecounter with plans, which would be by apappointment. We are applicating the experience where a customer would go from station to station to get plan review. We have permit center staff taking the role of the customer to help move the permits from station to station. We believe this will be a much faster process to get those to issuance. I am sure you have questions how this will work. We will hold a customer update on friday to explain how this will work. We will post updates on the website and send emails to the customers in the next few days so people understand how to sign up. The appointments when we call to offer appointments we start with those waiting the longest in the queue. Our goal is to make a substantial dent in the backlog before we move to the new building at the end of july. With that i will stop sharing. We will go to Public Comment. Interim director, are you weighing in on that as well . I want to say how proud i am of the staff and their effort, and all of the hard work they are putting into this. Melissa did mention a lot of effort has gone in on weekends and everyone pitching in. I am proud of everyone. We are in the middle of a pandemic. This is really heavy lifting. Grateful and to you as the commission, also, for your support. Madam secretary, open it up for Public Comment and i will go back to commissioners questions when Public Comment is finished. Thank you. We will open up to Public Comment now. I have unmuted the first caller. [roll call hello. I am david troop. I am a homeowner and 20 year resident of San Francisco. I am one of the probably many little individual projects, not a big developer that is caught in this mess. My project was submitted nearly a month ago and as far as i can tell it hasnt been even been looked at yet. I understand the enormity of the challenges the permit center faces, i want the commission to understand the impact that these delays have on individuals like myself. The problems this is going to creator me with cabinets showing up for Kitchen Remodel and no place to put them because we havent been age to start demo demolition and may not be able to for weeks and weeks. The problems this creates for contractors who have to let people go because they cant get the permits that allow them to work. Almost nothing that d. B. I. Can do is enough at this point. I hope you will consider the enormous impact this has on individuals like myself who cant afford to bear the cost of these delays from used to be a walkin and walk out with your permit a couple hours later to now months and months maybe. Thank you for your consideration of my views. I will take the next caller. You have two minutes. Caller commissioners, i am henry. 40 years. Thanks to our past director d. B. I. Was the best Building Department for permit issuance in the bay area. Since this. We recognize the capital of the world i dont understand why the applications cannot be issued a permit number and populate them simultaneously. The website claims remote but i find they are taking over one month. They should take no more than seven days. Many Design Professionals use groups. [ inaudible ] it reminds me after millions of dollars was discarded, what is lacking is transparency, not knowing. Also, where is the organizatio organizational chart for the permit center . The emails with no name, just initials. Technical questions where originally inquiries were sent. The whole process has turned into a nightmare. I look forward to a system second to none and permits issued in a matter of days. That is my comments and thank you very much. I know it is a tough period for us and i am sure we will get through it. I think we need to move. Thank you. Next caller. You have two minutes. Caller i am wendy. I work for central builders, a general contractor in San Francisco. I want to express sentiments. Before covid19 construction was already feeling some economic pressure. As a general contractor, we cant move forward with anything that we are doing right now. That puts the burden on the superintendents, laborers, subcontractors not knowing. I appreciate staff for all the work you are doing. I know this is not easy. There is a big goal where they are over burdened and we cant do our jobs. There is no in teen. The communication has not been what it could be. It is hard for me to tell the client i submitted your permit. I have no idea where it is right now as opposed to saying it is with this person to give themsh assurance. This has detrimental effects on contractors. I wish there was more thought into how to communicate the issues even on the teams. It is really not accessible to me. I would really like the commission to consider that. It is getting better. Thank you very much. Just know that we just want some better information to give to our clients. Next speaker, please. Please unmute your phone if you are there, caller. That is then of the list on the queue. I have a couple of items to read from people who submitted the Public Comment through email. These are just not the full Public Comment but summary. The first person is david troop. He ended up calling in. I wont read the comment. He submitted an email as well. Second is julie anna summer. Her copy has pulled overthecounter permits many years, no longer able to do so. Next was jason. He supports melissa and her team. He worked with d. B. I. As architect and contractor for 20 plus years. They should keep the same policies and procedures for overthecounter projects. Next person was mark. It doesnt offer support for apple operating systems. The electronic process is slow and unpredictable. The last person was erica. She asked several questions regarding establishing reasonable timeframes to review projects, a way to track permit submittal, moving documents versus pdf. Requesting supervisor comments for each department. Thank you, madam secretary. I will go through commissioners to see who would like to comment like before. Vice president , please. No comment. Thank you for the hard work. This is a heavy lift. I am proud what has gone down. I know we will make it a better process. It is a work in process. We are doing this for the first time in a lot of cases. Thank you. Commissioner alexander, please. Yes, i wanted to both thank the department. I know this is a heavy and quick lift and i want to recognize that. I also am really concerned about and confused about why i dont think this came up in Public Comment. But i did hear and receive a phone call from someone who said they had been waiting over a month to get a permit number. They couldnt even they were sure it wasnt lost in the system. That seems like at least something that should be able to be more timely. I am wondering if there is a way to at least have the initial touch of having a permit number so folks can know that it isnt lost in the system, if that can be addressed. I am very, very supportive of bringing in more staff and excited to hear that is in the works. Interim director you can answer or your supporting staff, as assistant director can answer it. I will direct it to you and you can answer it. Melissa, do you want to take this one, please. Sure. Is it possible for me to share the work site again when i talk about the process. Would i be able to do that again . Yes. Thank you so much. To answer your question. When someone hits submit on the city website it comes they get an email that says your submission has been received. Then until it gets to d. B. I. And the routing stage, that is when it gets manually entered into the permit tracking system by a staff member. The commenters it is not the system talks to each other. If you hit it it doesnt automatically go to the Case Management system. It has to be manually entered by staff. That is the delay. Staff have been focusing on the april 1 through may 8 entries. I believe at this point most of the items that have come in that time period have been entered. It is true things beyond that have probably not been entered in pps yet. I totally hear and understand that frustration. The main way we can figure out how to address that is by getting the integration between the permit tracking and the city website, which the it folks are actively working on. We have been hearing this for a few weeks now. Especially because the permit tracking system is older. It is very challenging to do that. It is not something that can happen instantaneously right now. It is very much on the radar that needs addressed. Thank you. Is that all your questions . Do we have any guide lines or prediction to tell the public this is our timeline for speeding up the process . I dont at this time. You mean the overall processor pts integration part . I guess my question is for the more quick fixes that were part of the presentation, particularly bringing more staff into the data entry staff at a faster pace, do we have any assessment how that will and when they will feel the change . In response to that, this is patrick. I think with the institution of the curb side dropoff and dedicating more resources to the effort to get the overthecounter with plans permits moving again, which was mentioned we will be piloting that Program Next Week and fully instituting it on the 29th, jun. I think that will be the time marker where people will especially see that the process is moving forward. I hope that answers your question. The can we anticipate when things will move quicker. Thank you. I was going to add to that, too, we have already the overtime work has started. We have already implemented some of the staff changes i talked about moving the permit tech 1 to permit tech 2 classification. A lot of the changes are already underway. Thank you, staff. Commissioner clinch, please. Yeah, it does seem like a perfect storm of things that came together with the building move and i understand if i recall correctly a reformatting of the permits and the covid and to pick up on the comments speakers made and a email talking about the mac. This process has been planned for a long time and they cancelled the mac support a couple months ago, d. B. I. Couldnt anticipate that. Blue beam is powerful. I hope they rectify that. Overall it is unfortunate for customers. It is a problem. As i hear everything there should be some acknowledgment d. B. I. Is not all to blame and they are making effort to fix the situation. I want to acknowledge those things. Thank you, commissioner. So i would like to thank the followings for their work on this. It is obviously a big lift to go from where we were to where we are in a short period of time. I definitely dont want that to go unnoticed. Like anything i it is not pictue perfect, but i am hopeful the comments we hear and the feedback we get will be taken into account to ensure that we are rectifying those things to make this the smoothest process possible for the customers to make sure these are getting done quickly to get business moving. Thank you for that. Thank you, commissioner. I also want to start by thanking patrick and melissa and the staff. You are dialing with something and you got piled on. With mr. Troop, the initial comment. I am assuming when he pulled something there was a homeowners permit that he was discussing and talking about. I have had some people reach out to me and question the how to pull the homeowners permit online. Is that possible . If they are not a contractor. I went through that from the contractors perspective you you have to enter the contractor number and submit for the permit. Is there a tab for the homeowner to do this . I assume there is because mr. Troop called in. Is there Something Like that . Anyone is able to a apply right now. Before the permit is issued you need to identify the contractor. You do have to have a contractor in place. There are some people that just want to go by the book. Now they have to get a contractor involved. I would want d. B. I. To answer that question. I think that is a permit issue question. In the past this is patrick. We have allowed the issuance of homeowners permits. In the interest of maintains that option for the customer, it will be definitely available to the homeowner as it was in the past. That will not change. If there is somebody doing work in their own house and they get a permit, that is something we will facilitate. Correct. From what i am understanding now they cant submit to do that online unless they have a contractor. Well, we can make an adjustment if that is the case. I will look into that more closely. Curb side would be something as well. In response, the curb side will absolutely replicate what we had before in paper, and it will put it back to precovid19 operation. I am concerned about the impact on the stakeholders here. I hear these questions. We have their interests at heart. This curb side dropoff and pickup will address some of the concerns here, if not all of the concerns in regards to replicating a very efficient process we had in place precovid. Thank you again. I know you are striving for service and thank you for the hard work. Thank you interim director and assistant director for the presentation today. You know, when it started coming apparent that we had major issues with the submittal, i want to commend the staff, particularly interim director who was inundated with phone calls as was i as part of the builders. It took a week or so to kind of reareally understand the gravitf what was ahead of us. Between the interim director and the staff, they jumped into crisis mode and came up with a game plan. It was a decision to go electronic to paper. It was a heavy decision. It was a strategy to make it, you know, the otc permits would be more accessible again. Bear in mind 95 of the workload is overthecounter. We felt pressure there. I do believe and in the next couple weeks there will be more situations. We would encourage the stakeholders to do what they did during the process and reach out to the interim director and the staff and email the commission so we can communicate to each other. It was apparent it was the same problem how do we get a process in place before back in place. That really is most of our business. I want to commend naomie who helped with interim director who helped establish a protocol. Everybody was on board doing the right thing. Melissa who not only is heading up the Economic Task recovery but also dealing with all of this. Hats off to you, melissa. I know what you saw the major problem you jumped on it and went to solve it. I do have a few direct questions to the director, if i could, please. These are questions sent to me by stakeholders. If you are at the end of the building and it is finished and you dont have the final but you are ready to occupy but you are waiting for an addendum for fire alarm which is, you know, necessary for the final final, your alarm is in place you might have to do extra work for the inspection. When you submit that, does that go to the front of is line or back in how do you propose to deal with that in that is the building finished that could go to the market for rental or selling or whatever. That is question one. In response to that, we understand that housing is very important. If something is submitted in relation to a permit at the end. It might be life safety or sprinklers, we would like to be communicated from the stakeholder to fast track if they see any delay in the review and issuance to make sure that we can sign off the building and have it. With the paper process, curb side that might not be such a concern. It gets a little deeper because we get into is it an addendum, new permit . Either way, that is the kind of thing we want to hear from the stakeholder in regards to anything that may be slow because we can fast track to facilitate the housing. Reach out to me directly. I am happy to work with staff on permits like that. We dont have i havent had a lot of communication in regards to exactly what you are describing. I have heard it from five or six customers and followed up to facilitate issuance of the permits. It might by a fire alarm check. Have you done anything to help that . There were a lot of those coming your way. What i have done is reached out to the permit center team and asked them to send those particular projects over to me. In the case of fire permits i reach out to our assistant fire marshal in this building, rich brown, he is very accommodating. We have managed to move several of those permits through that you are describing there. Finally, i have had a lot of complaints and seen it myself. This is before the covid, of course, how are we doing on the translation of english . A lot of stakeholders are challenged in the sense they dont have the english barrier is there for them or even the technical abilities to go online and file. How are we doing on that . How are we addressing there . First any Communications Going out to the public are translated into four languages. There is a translator on the website to facilitate that. Anyone that communicates directly with staff we have staff here who have bilingual abilities and can provide the service to the customer with staff on hand to translate. I want to add that the Application Form on the city website actually if you want i can share, but it is translatable into all of the official city languages. If you just hit the i can share my screen for a moment. Just one moment. Thank you. There is a translate button to translate to spanish or filipi filipino. It is fully translatable and accessible. If you are not technically challenged and yo you want to ce to curb side that you could file electronically, would you accommodate those people, staff . We are accommodating limited by appointment only situations where people come and can pick up a permit or drop off. It is on a very limited basis. We will be making further comments in regards to what we are proposing to have with the curb side next week, which will be far more extensive operation regards to paper projects. Finally, interim director. Like mr. Troop who filed in the system there, what advice do you give him . Would it be work for him to come back next week to refile or leave it in the system electronically or through the paper . What advice to people who have timed who might want to refile . I dont know if it is a can of wormings here. I want to hear your thoughts. Everything is a can of worms. What i suggest is that the he has a kitchen or bathroom remodel, he can get on the list of custom americans who can come in between 7 00 and 9 00 in the morning and we can approve those permits the very same day. If his permit has associated plans, we will reach out to customers to give them the opportunity to submit in paper in the order in which they were submitted. Again, going back to what christine mentioned. We will be allocating additional staff. We have over time. We are going to try to dig into this backlog and put a Major Department in it at least before we move top the new building. That is one more thing that we dont want to have on our hands is a backlog if we are moving to the new building. We want to attack this backlog and provide the opportunity for folks to get those permits as quickly as they can. That is the over the counter permits. Thank you. Christine and melissa, final word. Just want to say thank you for the opportunity to present to you. I appreciate your questions and your comments today. Thank you, melissa for your hard work on this. Thank you to the commissioners for your support as we try to fix these and address the backlog and fix these problems. As my son said in closing comments. Calm waters never met great sailors. We will come out good on this one. Madam secretary, we can close this. Thank you. Next item will be item 8 directors report. 8a update on d. B. I. s finances. Good afternoon, commissioners, Deputy Director. I will share my document. Before you is the may 2020 Financial Report including revenue and expenditures for 11 moss of fiscal year 1920. Here are highlights. Revenues. Our revenues have taken a drastic decline over the past three months. They have dropped considerably. The reason and i want to show you. I will share this with you. We always talk about Building Permits. We have over 40 different Revenue Sources. Building permits is a basic one. Building permits is first here. Ordinarily we are collecting about 1 million or more per month. Now monthly we are at 250,000 or so. Same for plan check revenues. Here plan checking revenues is the largest revenue source. As you can see we normally have 2 plus Million Dollars per month. Now in april we are at less than half a million. That is the major reason why we see the decline for three months. The good news is that prior to these three months that have to do with the pandemic, we were well on the way to exceed our budget because we were collecting really well. I will go back down and show you, for instance, you will see in december of 2019 we had collected 4. 3 million in plan check revenue, 4. 4 million. We have a drastic reduction because we were doing so well during the beginning of the fiscal year the reduction is better than it could have been. Basically we see about 5. 3 million deficit in charges for services. They are the basic fee revenues. Now on the other hand, in addition to doing better than expected in the First Six Months of the fiscal year we collected a huge settlement for City Attorney litigation revenues and you can see in the memo 2. 3 million over for interest. Because of all of those things what could have been a much larger deficit in revenues are only 3. 4 million. That is the good news. Once again, these, of course, are based on what we did for the last month of the fiscal year, june. We used the prior year month as the projected for that. That is how we come to those numbers. On the expenditure side we are going to project a huge savings. A major reason is because of salaries and fringes. Right in the middle of the pandemic we were in the middle of tests. Building inspector tests, hiring and that was put on hold because at one point we werent able to bring anybody in the building. The tests include a large amount of people sitting in a testing site on the weekends and that wasnt safe. Basically we have a huge salary savings. We have started actually rehiring. When we were actually during the pandemic we offered positions to several people then we put that on hold. I think earlier christine mentioned we brought on new engineers. They were engineers that originally we were ready to make an offer now we are able to bring people back and gearing up for hiring. We see savings in services in other departments. Those are work orders. This is a projection. We are making this based on what the departments billed through i want to say through the third quarter, which would be march. We are anticipating large savings in the City Attorney work order and other work force. That is where you see the 11. 8 million projected in savings to help us in many ways. Lets compare. That is in the current year. If you go to the second page of the memo. You will see the prior year comparison. That is the big reduction. We have collected 64 million this year through may 31st, 2020. Last year 74. 7 million. That is over 10 million decrease. Of course, it is because of our huge two major Revenue Sources Building Permit and plan checking. We are also seeing reductions in plumbing permit and electrical permit revenues, too. The Building Permit data, this is reflected in the revenue. You see the number of permits we have issued compared to last year decreased and the valuation which plays a large role in if two major revenues Building Permits and plan checking reduction of 29 . I am happy to answer any questions on this monthly report. If there are any questions on this i would give an update. I wanted to give the commissioners an update on proposed budget for next year which will start july 1. You are all aware of what the pandemic has done to the citys overall revenues and of course we have gone over what it has done to our revenues. We needed a new budget submittal to the Mayors Office on june 12th. Primarily for general Fund Departments to identify cuts for special revenue departments. We are 100 selfsupporting. We needed to look at revenues to make sure we had the correct revenues in. Revenues have to cover expenses. I highlighted a few big reductions in here. We have submitted now that we have revised. First a huge note it is difficult to make projections. We go by the last three months that shows a drop to a gradual increase. We are going to look at june, july, these are very preliminary. Every time we get more revenue information we will update it. For now we are proposing to drop revenues considerably. One thing you will see and i talked about this earlier. If you notice in the adopted budget 27 million in plan checking. We were doing well in february that we were bumping its up to 28. 5 million. You will see a bump up in the Building Permits, too. Now we are going back and based on what we collected now and what we anticipate will happen over the next were we are extremely conservative in dropping the revenues down. He this is where they are reducing. 15 million as opposed to 28. 5 million. 2 as opposed to 14. 6 million. The original submittal had 73. 7 million. Now we dropped down to 47. 3 million. We are hoping that this is the worstCase Scenario and that once we get issues more permits, better data, these numbers will go up somewhat. We want to make sure we are trying to be as conservative as possible. What this means is that when we submitted this budget we thought we would need 15 million in our fund balance to balance the budget now we need over 30 million to balance the budget now. That is something that concerns me in some ways. That isnt sustainable. Hopefully this is worstCase Scenario and we will bump these up and be able to see additional revenues, if not by next june 30, 2021 but the following year. If that isnt th the case then e have to adjust the way we spend. I know the commission and everyone is aware that we have surplus funds and fund balance, but our fund balance will not sustain us collecting 50, 47 million in new revenues with an over an 80 million budget. That is not sustainable in the longterm. We are looking at some things to do for next year. For instance, we are proposing we dont have that much travel. Travel and training reduced somewhat. We were going to purchase about 15 replacement vehicles. We have reduced that to half of that. Just for next year. There are other places that we can probably make some savings. I dont know if it will put a huge dent. The bulk of the expenses are salaries and work orders to other departments. If this becomes longterm we may have to start seriously looking at budget reductions. Now we have the fund balance to balance, we are going to look at revising these revenues if we can. Hopefully this is worse Case Scenario and we will look at expenditures. What i will do is in july i will come back to give Additional Information. Hopefully i will revise these up somewhat and also can give you Additional Information on some of the expenditures, too. I am happy to answer any questions right now. Thank you. Very sobering. Commissioners. Commissioner moss. Vice president moss had to leave. He is excused as of 1 00. He had a meeting. Commissioner alexander toot. I am sorry if i missed it. This is a report. We are not asked to confirm the numbers, is that correct . Are we asked to confirm the change . If you have any comments or questions for Deputy Director madison. Thank you for a very thorough report. I am hoping these are worse case and we get the revenue up. Thank you for your very thorough report. Commissioner clinch, please. No questions or comments. Thank you. No questions or comments. Thank you. You are welcome. Thank you, deputy. Next item is item 8b update on proposed or resently enacted state or local legislation. Good afternoon. I am the legislative affairs. A few up days. Fee waiver we newual was approved yesterday and we anticipated it will be signed this week. We heard about the hco ordinance. It is safe to skip that. Supervisor peskins proposed amendment to the planning code could change what constitutes demolition is continued to the call of the chair at land use. We havent heard much about that. Finally, you may have seen that the mayor announced a ballot measure to help Small Business by streamlining permitting. There are a few provisions to impact procedures and operations. For instance applications for storefront leasings allowed currently would have to be reviewed in 30days and can be done i in parallel like a. D. U. S. We havent had a chance to review the whole measure. I am happy to answer any questions. Public comment . For item 8 we do Public Comment at the end of all of the items. Commissioner alexander toot, please. That sounds great. I am glad that, you know, that sounds like something needed. Thank you for the leadership on that. Commissioner. No question or comment. Thank you. Commissioner. No question or comment. Thank you. Commissioner. I am good. Thank you. John, just on the legislation that the mayor is proposing for Small Businesses. I take it is a great program. I would have my concerns how it goes through the process. Update on that when you get your arms around it, we would appreciate it. Thank you so much. Next item is 8c. Update on Major Projects. This is an update on Major Projects relating to april to may of 2020. As you know, a lot of Construction Activity was severely curtailed in the month of april. A little uptick in Construction Costs associated with may construction. Construction was up. 47 in terms of cost to a number of almost 10 100 million. No change in dwelling units coming online from april to may. That is my report. Thank you interim director. No Public Comment . We have one more item. 8d. Update on code enforcement. I believe Deputy Director. Deputy director sweeney, are you on in. Yes, this is Deputy Director sweeney with the numbers for ma. The Building Inspections performed 3778. Complained received 608. Complaint response within 24 to 72 hours 592. Complaints with first violations sent 69. Complaints received without no nov336. Complaints with notice ofveylation 31. Second be notice 13. Code enforcement number of cases sent to directors hearing zero. Abatements zero, under advisement zero. Code inspections performed 202. No Litigation Committee and didnt send anything to the attorney this month. Available for any questions. Commissioners. Commissioner alexander toot. No, thank you. Commissioner clinch. No thank you. Commissioner jacob. No comments, thank you. Commissioner tem. No comment, thank you. Thank you. Next is there any Public Comment on the directors report item . There is no Public Comment at this time. If anyone listening wishes to leave comment press star three to raise your hand. There is no one in the queue for Public Comment. Thank you. The item is closed. We will go to the next item. Item 9. Review and approval of the minutes of the special meeting of january 29, 2020. Is there a motion to approve . Motion to approve. Second. Any Public Comment on the minutes . No Public Comment. Seeing none are all commissioners in favor . Aye. Any opposed . The minutes are approved. Our next item is item 10 review and approval of the minutes of the regular meeting of february 19, 2020. Is there a motion to approve . Motion to approve. Second. Who did the second . Kevin. Is there Public Comment on this item . Seeing none, are all commissioners in favor . Aye. The minutes are approved. We are about to adjourn shortly. Before we do i want to thank everyone for participating in the First Virtual meeting. It is a task but we made it. Thank all of the sfgovtv staff. Shawn phillips, charles and jack and also the d. B. I. Staff for it for patience with me. Allen, phil, bruce, and wilson. Thank you everyone. Is there a motion to adjourn . I will move, motion to adjourn. Thank you. Is there a second . Second. I am miguel bus bustos this d this is meeting for june 16, 2020. I welcome the members of the public streaming or listening via by phone and live and to the staff who have helped to make this meeting happen this afternoon. Following the guidelines set forth by the local state officials during this Health Emergency, the members of the commission are meeting remotely to ensure the safety of everyone, including the members