commissioner o brien: is the aim to open it up to businesses? it s bumping it up, because some of our contracts, it was $100,000 before, and and the idea is that, especially for smaller businesses, it s a lot harder and more burdensome for them to undergo the whole contracting process so if you raise the threshold, you allow for more informal contracts and it helps the smaller firms to be more competitive. commissioner o brien: okay. it streamlines the process, as well. commissioner riley: can you explain the split order? the splitting? actually, what we re doing here is we re actually not doing any changes to the code as it relates to bid splitting. we re only reinforcing the fact that it s not allowed. so, you know, you might get cases so, currently, i believe that under current code, if it s commodities purchases under $10,000 will go to departments directly, it doesn t have to go through the city purchaser office. so you might see cases where you get contracts,
controller, et cetera. that s pretty much, in a nutshell, what both pieces of legislation would be achieving and it s not yet calendared for land use committee but it will be. thank you. any questions? i just want to make a comment that really appreciated your presentation to our policy and legislative committee, and we had a really good chance to look over everything and i think the changes are huge improvements, especially the one about the ownership requirements, to make it more realistic about how complex some businesses are in terms of who owns how many percent of the business. so i think you did a really good job on this. commissioner riley: i was playing catch-up a little bit. commissioner o brien. commissioner o brien: is the aim to open it up to businesses? it s bumping it up, because some of our contracts, it was $100,000 before, and and the idea is that, especially for smaller businesses, it s a lot harder and more burdensome for them to undergo the whole c
it s just to update the code to match our current process. it would also remove an outdated provision regarding the sealer of weights and measures, it would reinforce prohibitions against bid splitting, so that s something that s already not allowed, but this reinforces it in the code, and it also, in regards to prevailing wages, it consolidates and puts into the same section what the prevailing wage requirementsor so it s easier for everyone to see what the requirements are without changes to the language for what prevailing wage requirements are. and one of the more significant changes in chapter 21 actually is in regards to the calculation of sales tax, discounts for commodities. it is the policy of the city to provide local businesses sales tax discounts for commodities but the formula was complicated, based upon the grows receipts tax and payroll tax system so the city, we re applying a 1.25% price adjustment to commodities bids to businesses located within san francisco