Transcripts For SFGTV Mayor Breed On Proposed City Budget Fo

Supplies, and work orders of other city services, such as department of Human Resources, Controllers Office services, and rent. We have six f. T. E. S with the Directors Office vacant since march of this year, and we have an open grant funded position that youre not seeing in this chart, just vacated last week that were working on filling quickly. We, like all City Departments were instructed to propose a 10 reduction. We proposed initial reductions amounting to 959,000 annually, and this was an across the board proposed reduction of almost 12 to our communitybased grant fees. Realizing the impact of these grant fees to the vulnerable populations and the populations these serve, the Mayors Office asked us to submit some lower alternative reduction scenarios. The Mayors Service accepted our approximately 7 reduction, which would come from the departments genderbased balance intervention program. Understanding that all of our grantees work serves vulnerable and underserved communities, these were extremely difficult decisions to make. After much consideration, we came up with a 10 across the board reduction to our prevention and education and intervention and Advocacy Service categories and four targets Program Reductions ranging between 16 to 23 annually. It is important to note that programs that are funded at 60,000 annually, our base funding to be is successful to run a program, were not successful to any programs. Supervisor ronen carol, im sorry. Could you just repeat that, what was the last department that got cut across the board . Prevention and education were amplifying and further integrating a Racial Equity lens in all areas of our work, including recruitment and harrington, grant making and policies and projects. We have two Staff Members working on this internally. We are fastering connections with our City Partners and our communitybased organizations to create greater personal safety and improve housing and economic security. We welcome greater collaboration with the board of supervisors and other agencies in this work. And finally, we are strengthening our support of our Partner Agencies and survivors of genderbased violence. This is our core. The department provides a lifeline for those that are severely affected by covid19 and family violence. The risk of genderbased violence is intensified with natural disasters and economic crises. Survivors are more isolated and vulnerable, and Service Providers are operating under new constraints and scarce resources. We will continue to elevate the needs of women and girls, our Partner Agencies as we move towards recovery. Thank you, chair fewer, for the opportunity to present our departments budget. I apologize for the glitch in my slide deck, and im happy to answer any questions that you may have. Supervisor fewer sure, no problem. So thank you four your presentation. I notice that you have sort of an increase in your materials and supply budget, and im wondering and why is that . Youre a relatively Small Department. You only have six employees, so i see this in your materials and supplies budget, it just makes me question why . Certainly. So we are all working in a remote 100 remote environment, and we did not have the infrastructure to do that . And then, we want to make it for fellows that come through our program, that equipment and technology, as well. Supervisor fewer how many fellows do you have . One has started just last week, and we have one beginning september beginning of september, and we are recruiting for two additional Public Policy fellows. Supervisor fewer okay. So i want to thank you oh, i see supervisor walton in the queue, so im going to let supervisor walton ask his questions first. Supervisor walton so how do these programs and cuts impact women in Domestic Violence shelters, and how does this affect your Sexual Exploitation work . Well, the Sexual Exploitation work is a little bit separate. Thats a state funded grant function, so theres no impacts to that, per se. The impacts to the community, anecdotally, ive heard theres a. 25 reduction of clients that will be receiving services for that program. It means that women would be on the street and homeless through another housing program. In the intervention prevention programs, it means that afterschool programs might not be able to provide curriculum on healthy relationships and promote Healthy Learning in a school environment, but there are challenges with all of these. Supervisor walton thank you. Supervisor fewer oh, yes, president yee. President yee i actually dont have a question, its a comment. I just glanced through the budget real quickly, and i noticed that the average salary for your staff there compared to average salaries of other departments and so forth, youre basically almost par with library, and its, like, okay, what is this, you know . It seems like the department and offices that are dominant women are being paid lower than all of these other departments. Thats just a comment. It just strikes me that its way lower than a lot of departments. Supervisor fewer okay. I also oh, supervisor ronen. Supervisor ronen thank you so much. Its more of a comment than a question. I am very concerned about the cuts to the Service Providers during this time that the violence the Domestic Violence and and interpersonal violence while everyone is stuck with a lot of stress in their homes. And i know that the services you provide grants to is probably understaffed and underfunded, so this is an area that im very much interested in hoping we can find enough cuts in the budget to add some of these back because it you know, everything is tough at this time, but particularly interpersonal and Domestic Violence in this moment is something that i think about and worry about all the time, so i just wanted to make that comment and let you know that im acutely aware of the cuts, although not as horrible as we as they could have been, that that that that were seeing across the board on intervention advocacy, oh, now is not the time, so i just wanted my Committee Members to know that, that thats a priority for me. Thanks. Thank you, supervisor. Supervisor fewer never a good time to cut that, quite frankly. Miss sacco, i just want to ask you about your Racial Equity work, external facing and internal department and even the woman that you serve, career opportunities, but also just looking internally about Racial Equity and the i know that its not the plan isnt due until the end of the year, but could you give me a snapshot around what your office is doing about this is time for some introspection and what youre doing about that. Its true that the majority of our work has been outward facing, looking at gender and race and socioeconomic backgrounds and socioeconomics. But looking internally, and this is what the department has prioritized and focused on. We have changed our hiring and recruitment process. Were standardized all of our questions, our interview questions. We have a panel where three people are now involved in this, and i think im sorry. It will be a priority it is a priority for us. Supervisor fewer sure. You dont have a very large budget, but one thing i have brought up before with director merase is what we dont hear from the commission on the status of women is what is the status of women in San Francisco. I think that i dont ive been on the board almost four years, but i havent seen a report on how are women faring in San Francisco not only by race but just health wise, economically. How are they doing in tech . I really dont know. I dont know how women are faring in this sort of horrible housing crisis, i dont know so ive never seen a really comprehensive report about this is the status of women in San Francisco on these economics, employment, health, these kinds of things. Ive never received a report on that at all. I just want to put a bug in your ear that i think its actually really only one of three women on this board, and i am the only woman of color on this board, i think its even more important that were looking at equity on gender. I think supervisor ronen can concur with me, being one of only three women on this board, there are inequities, but we dont see a comprehensive report about the status of women. But more importantly, before the board of supervisors, i dont see legislation to close this gap. I think in order to have legislation that actually addresses these gaps, actually even around in the private sector, we actually so we can actually do some legislation or we can actually help to close these gaps. But through the department on the status of women, i havent seen anything like that, and i havent seen any policy changes for women citywide. I think its been generated as a response to maybe some of the federal things that have come down that we have done some legislation, but quite frankly, not internally with our own City Department. So just as were looking ad our own office of Racial Equity, i think the commission on the status of women should also be seeing an opportunity with the board of supervisors to actually create legislation to actually not only protect women but to broaden the opportunity for women so we have more of an equal playing field. So i just wanted to say that comment. I want to thank you for joining us today, and i think i join my colleagues by saying i think that these cuts at this time are the cuts are never good for your Department Around Domestic Violence and violence against women, but in particular at this time, really, really harmful, so you know were going to do our best. Thank you. I really appreciate it. Supervisor fewer thank you. Thank you. Supervisor fewer colleagues, i have a request from the assessor that she is on a timeline and would like to skip so were going to skip over ethics for just one minute, and were going to go to our assessorrecorder. Assessor chu, you have the floor. Im going to go and start with sharing screen. So im going to walk you through our budget. In terms of major accomplishments, as everybody knows, we have all had to pivot in terms of our operations pretty quickly from an all onsite to telecommuting, where 98 of our current staff hours are being done remotely. I just want to give a real big hats off to my team who have been working hard to make sure we can continue to accomplish the work of my office. Theyve been able to continue to contribute to the citys overall financial health, which i think helps to speak to our ability to deal with some of the challenges that we face. Overall, from a role to role perspective, weve been able to close the role at roughly almost 300 billion in total assessment value. This is true not only for growth in terms of our real estate portfolio but also in terms of businesses. That is going to change especially with covid19 and what we expect to happen with a lot of businesses that are struggling to get through this time. Transfer tax, we saw a relatively strong tax year despite a covid scenario. However, part of the reasoning is we did make it through three fourths of the year before we had a shelter in place order come through, and then most recently in the last few months or so, weve actually seen pretty strong taxes in transfer tax and transactions. So there, we have about 300 million which did come in which did exceed the beginning budget amount. We also continue to run or transfer tax audit program, which is continue to collect underreported revenue. The Program Overall has found about 46 million in underreported transfer taxes, which i think all makes a difference in terms of the citys operation. A few big things in terms of our system. Its heavy, heavy investment in terms of time in our office to make sure that we have the technology to get through the next stage of our operations. You probably saw in the last week, we actually went live with our recorder system. Thats a big deal. These are all the transactions the marriage licenses, the deeds that system went live on monday successfully on time and on budget, and i want to thank my teamt team for that. The Tax Collector and treasury went successfully live in july. We are slated to go live with our first phase in january of this coming year, and thats going to be a continued hunl focus for our organization. In terms of budget in the coming year, youll see that the current year approved budget was roughly 42 million. Thats dropping to 39 million in the coming year and then 34 million the year after. Our budget does reflect reductions in f. T. E. , and youll see there roughly a nineposition reduction. You asked for information in terms of where those cuts are coming from by department, so you see here that information. Primarily the reduction in terms of funding are coming from our funding divisions, our business personal property division, our administrative division, which reflected hrit, finance, public affairs, and also our finance system. Something to note, we work very hard with our partners at the Tax Collectors office and Controllers Office to take a look at our Property Taxation system by doing multiple things like holding vacancies hope and looking at every single thing, we collectively returned almost 6 million of project funding from our Property Assessment taxation system to the general fund to assist with the challenges that we are all seeing. In terms of how our baseline reductions or what the baseline reduction target was for our organization, i think as everybody knows, the baseline reduction was a 10 target which represented about 2 million for us, and 3. 5 million the year after. It was incredibly difficult to meet this target without having to impact people. The reason is, as youve heard from organizations, 85 of our budget is personnel budget. The rest is things that are very, very fixed. Things like contractual costs for our system, existing leases that you cant change or get out of, etc. So again, very difficult to meet these targets without impacting people. Were happy to have more conversation around that as we go. And then, i think on top of that, we do not have currently layoffs anticipated in our budget, but we do have reductions in temp salaries and have had to reduce temp workers in our in our offices operations in order to get on our tomeet target. Salaries and fringe went down by 1. 1 million. We reduced the Property Assessment system project by 1. 9, and youre probably saying how does that connect back to the roughly 6 million that i spoke with earlier . The big balance of it is actually happening in year two. On top of that, weve also decreased training, travel, etc. , as much as we could. There was an increase in citywide indirect cost payment that we had to absorb in our budget this year, so again, youll see the details laid out here. I want to spend a little bit more time on this because i think its important for folks to know about what the tradeoffs are in these budget conversations. The biggest area of focus for me is the risk associated with the running of our big i. T. Projects. I think you ask any department who has had to do a system replacement or has had to do any of that work, it is incredibly hard work to do. It is very draining on staff, and it is often fraught with a lot of things that you have to closely watch or monitor so that you dont run oregon youre able to mitigate the unexpected challenges that come forward with technology changes. Thats going to continue to be a huge risk for our department because its not a simple matter. Were talking about decades of data and information, completely taking a look at our businesses processes to make sure its operating in the best way possible, and all of that takes time, energy, and effort. With the reduction in our budget, people, we just have fewer people to do things. With the reduction in costs, as well, we have taken away flexibility from our organizations. Were going to be drawing upon our existing operating individuals or folks from our operations to do double duty and work on project tasks, as well. So this is going to be a huge risk. I want to flag that for you because i think this budget in general is not all roses. I want to highlight that our i. T. Project risk is a big one here. It also means in terms of our budget that we are not going to meet our state audit requirements. Currently, the state requires that we do 300 or so audites. But especially with our reduction in help, we may not hit this that year. This year, we believe were going to see a huge spike in assessments come through. Our assessment appeals went from about 1,500 to over 6,000 in a year very quickly. This is going to be a huge impact on our organization. It will also be an impact on your organization because the assessment appeals board is in your organization, and we need to collaborate closely with those folks. Being able to defend the assessment values is going to be very important in the coming year to protect the things that we think should be part of operating in San Francisco. There are big measures in the statewide ballot that would affect our operations and potentially revenue for the city. We have not anticipated any of those additional costs right now because it would be premature to do so, and so a big one is, of course, proposition 15, which is what people call the split roll, which would take commercial properties and assess them for frequently. The second is proposition 19, what people call the realtors measure, which affects property that