Transcripts For SFGTV BOS Budget FinanceBudget Appropriations Committee 20240712

It is friday august 14th this is the appropriations and budget meeting im sandra fure. Fewer. Thank you for sf gov tv for broadcasting. Do have an announcement. In accordance with governor newsoms executive order no. N3320 declaring a state of emergency regarding the covid19 outbreak and mayor london n. Breeds proclamation declaring a local emergency issued on february 25, 2020, including the guidance for gatherings issued by the San Francisco department of Public Health officer, aggressive directives were issued to reduce the spread of covid19. On march 17, 2020, the board of supervisors authorized their board and Committee Meetings to convene remotely Via Microsoft teams and will allow remote Public Comment via teleconference. Visit the sfgovtv website at www. Sfgovtv. Org to stream the live meetings, or to watch meetings on demand. Members of the public are encouraged to participate remotely via detailed instructions on participating via you can call 14156550001 again 14156550001 meeting i. D. 1460343108. Again, 1460343108 then press pound. To will be muted and in listening mode only. When the item of interest dial star 3 to be added to the speaker line and call from a quiet location and speak clearly or slowly and turn down your television or radio and you can also email to the finance Committee Clerk at to linda. Wong sfgov. Org; all part of the essential file. And interpretations are available for those who need services during the Public Comment period and now a summary of the announcement. [speaking spanish] [speaking spanish] [speaking foreign language] thank you very much. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the third day of this weeks departments budget hearing. Weve had a couple long days and i think today will also be long so thanks in advance for your patience and flexibility. The Budget Appropriations Committee will recess at approximately 12 30 or 1 00 for a 30minute lunch. Im asking departments to be concise in their presentations and have allotted five minutes per department with a couple exemptions. After each brief highlevel presentation the committee will have the ability to ask questions an engage in discussion but no decisions will be made this week well hear from departments in order listed and we sometimes need to be flexible and call departments out of order. Thanks in add convenience for your flexibility. We have 13 departments to get through today. Ill be moving us along during the process. I ask my colleagues keep their questions directed to a budget conversation as most will come back next week and well be able to ask more questions. Today were hearing likely in the following order. City administrator, technology, public works, superior court, department of police accountability, Sheriffs Department, Fire Department, department of emergency management, Police Department, supervisor, juvenile probase probation and public defender and well take comments at the end of the discussion. So rather at the end of the evening and a want you to know that occasionally during this conversation we will have training legislation well have to vote on however, that is not the time for Public Comment on departmental budgets. That will happen at the end of the hearing at the end of the evening, with that lets get start. Madame clerk, please call item 1 and 2 together. Budget and appropriation ordinance appropriating all estimated receipts and all estimated expenditures for departments of the city and county of San Francisco as of july 31, 2020, for the fys ending june 30, 2021, and june item 2 annual salary ordinance enumerating positions in the annual budget and appropriation ordinance for the fys ending june 30, 2021, and june 30, 2022, continuing, creating, or establishing these positions; members of the public who wish to comment should call 14156550001 meeting i. D. 1460343108 and press pound twice and waited until the system s you have been unmuted. Commissioner thank you very much. At this time madame clerk please call item 3 and 4. Item 3 ordinance authorizing the execution and delivery of certificates of participation, in one or more series from time to time, evidencing and representing an aggregate Principal Amount of not to exceed 97,500,000 certificates to prepay certain certificates of participation that financed and refinanced various Capital Improvement projects. Item 4, ordinance deappropriating 4,636,200 of series 2010a refunding certificates of participation prior reserve funds and appropriating 102,136,200 of refunding certificates of participation series 2020r1 including deappropriated funds and 97,500,000 of one or more series of refunding certificates of participation proceeds for fy20202021. Members of the public who wish to provide Public Comment on these items should call 14156550001 meeting i. D. 1460343108 then press pound twice. If you have not already done so, please dial star 3 to speak to indicate you have raised your hand and wait until youve been unmuted and may begin your comment. We ebb courage to you call in and dial in and speak. Commissioner thank you very much. Im going to make a motion to continue items 3 and 4 until wednesday 8 19 so well hear a discussion at that time. We had so many departments to go through we thought itd be best to have them next week. With that, madame clerk open up Public Comment for items 3 and 4. Are there callers in the queue . We have one in queue. Commissioner thank you very much. The caller hung up so right now there are no more callers in the queue. Commissioner thank you very much. Public comment ine item 3 and 4 is now closed. Id like to make a motion to continue both items to the meeting of august 19. Could i please have a second. Second. Commissioner thank you. Roll call vote, please. Clerk on the motion to continue item 3 and 4 to the august 19 budget and Appropriations Committee meeting. [roll call] theres ayes, supervisor ronen not present. Supervisor fewer. Commissioner aye. Lets start with the City Administrators Office. We have kenneth and the floor is yours. Good morning, chair fewer and members. Im the deputy city administrator. Ill be providing the presentation for the department. And on the and the high level presentation with the department presenting city administrators and ill focus on 25 departments and programs. The city administrators have departments across the city such as the office of Contract Administration and others as well as programs serving members of the public with Community Ambassadors, county clerk, office of medical examiner and animal control. I want to take this opportunity on behalf to thank the employees who have gone above and beyond during this time to make sure we can continue providing services and more importantly i want to recognize the amazing contributions to respond to the covid19 pandemic. And programs that have the command center and homeless shelter and Convention Center our staff will help procure and manage health and coordinating and city administrator employees and programs have housed the Covid Command Center at the Convention Center. Our staff has led the ccc logistic section to help procure and manage personal protection and for all city departments and Different Community organizations. Weve coordinated donations and managed facilities and led to the development of dashboards reporting integration working in close collaboration with the department of Public Health and coordinating with department of Public Health and Human Resources and coordinating the Response Teams to improve shelter in place compliance. Our Digital Service team has done a number of Amazing Things including reduce blocks to access and updates to sfgov. Tv who has received hundreds of thousands of new logones logons and how residents can access services. Our staff has helped through programs with shelter in place hotels and the Mayors Office of disability has been working consulting with our departments and the ccc on ensuring vulnerable populations continue to have access to service. 311 has responded to requests whether how to get testing, services for residents and Housing Needs as departments have turned to them more and more as a resource for helping make sure residents know about their services. We have help cleaning services and supported private sector businesses as they continue planning for reopening safely in the current pandemic. Our employees have truly stepped up during this time and i want to express our appreciation on behalf of the city. Next i want to address one of the items requested as part of the presentations how budget reflects our efforts to advance Racial Equity and disparities for communities in our most vulnerable residents. 29 of the city administrator budget is for a broad array of Services Including public facilities through Mayors Office and disability and Training Programs through the office transgender initiatives. Helping minority and womenowned businesses and other Small Business businesses as well as equal benefits through contract monitoring division. Providing immigrant and language businesses through the office of Civic Engagement and affairs and Community Engagement through the Community Ambassadors program. Working to issue equity permits through the office of cannabis. And Worker Protections through local ordnances such as Health Care Security and others and providing grants throughout our various neighborhoods through the Community Challenge grant. Working together with the boards for justice and providing animal care and sheltering for our most vulnerable residents. Responding to information requests and social service through 311 and awarding grants to diverse local artists through grants for the arts and giving voice to communities through citizen advisory committees. Now id like to turn to an overview of our budget with a comparison of year to year funding in changes and a summary of reductions made. The top portion of this slide shows the total budget in fte for public works and well be presenting after this presentation. The lower half of this slide showed a breakout of the city administrator and 25 programs and departments make up adm. Our budget is expected to increase by 58 million for fiscal year 2021 and ill note on this slide our fte count for going into the city administrators budget has changes that we made and additional changes which reflect the end of onetime changes for Capital Projects. We decreased Services Mostly did i a decrease in the operating agreement given the cause on Convention Activities at Mosconi Center and offset by an increase of 6. 1 million and we have increased need of driving and fuel costs. And funding of 2 million and the other significant portion and the drop in revenue is reflected with a decrease in grants and finally we decreased mosconi Maintenance Center for the coming year resulting in a 2 million savings. That was a brief overview of our budget wanting to keep in the time limit and a brief overview of changes and happy to answer any questions you have. Commissioner thank you very much. Mr. Bubowski. Any questions for the deputy city administrator . Raise your hand if you have any i have just a couple questions. I notice that you have 148 vacancies. And could you please just expand on that and i wanted to know do you have any hires any positions youre currently hiring for that are in the hiring process that have not yet been hired . That is correct chair fewer. 200 have been filled since the report was provided to the committee. Approximately 48 are held have a can for attrition services. And 70 are in some stage of hiring. We noted that there are significant number of positions where we are going through as part of the hiring process a singleservice examine process so in the meantime because theyre critical positions such as stationary engineers or similar positions we hire them with temporary employees were allowed to do pending the completion of the Civil Service someone and a portion of those vacancies are filled with individuals at this point not excuse me, i lost you for a minute. Of the 148 vacancies how many are filled with temporary positions . 28 currently. Commissioner and youre keeping 48 vacant for attrition and the rest are in the hiring process but not yet been hired but your budgeting for them, is that correct . Correct. Commissioner okay. Thank you very much. I also wanted to give a comment and wanted to appreciate your slide on your equity and vulnerable populations. I think what we are looking for in the conversation is really about a Racial Equity lens. I notice on your support for vulnerable populations we can understand that and i think what we are looking for is teasing out the Racial Equity within your budget and external facing. What i notice is that you did not supply us anything with an internalfacing plan around Racial Equity or a look at Racial Equity to examine within your department. And so i just want to say that i know that the report the plan is not due until the end of the year. Youre such a Large Department a lot of it of course is external facing but because you are in such a Large Department with so many employees we are asking departments to actually look intro spectively at your internal operations around promotions, around hiring and opportunities, around Work Environment and were trying to look at it through a Racial Equity lens. Many times were looking at equity were not looking at Racial Equity and i think the importance of this is we are now trying to focus more on a Racial Equity lens. I just wanted to make that comment. I know that i know your plan is not due until the end of the year but i am assuming youre work very closely with the office of Racial Equity to get guidance on this. Is that correct, mr. Bubowski . The slides presented were trying to be reflective of what appeared to be a broader view talking about vulnerable populations. We are actively working with Human Rights Commission and internally in our organization on the Racial Equity plan. Im one of the Department Equity leaders and convened just the other day discussing that. As you noted, a big part of this first year and the development is focussed on the intro inspection and what were doing around hiring and doing around making sure that employees have promotional opportunities and how are we supporting it through training and making sure our hiring process and promotion processes are all equitable and provide fair opportunities for a broad lens and recognizing are we reflective of the communities we are serve. Were doing that work now and actively working on our plan. Commissioner thank you. Thats refreshing to hear. Were also looking at the departments we spoke to the other day and the day before, the opportunity for selfreflection that things we have not thought about before, i think how the status quo is not serving to be racially equitable. Digging deeper about selfreflection in our own department i think it is what weve heard from other administrators is that it is really broadening their view about what they can do within their own departments how they handle complaints, what are they hearing, also, just is it an inclusive workplace and also looking at promotionals, looking at opportunities, looking at who they hire, what are the barriers to hiring. Thank you very much. I see president yee has a question or comment. President yee. Commissioner thank you. Just some budget questions. Can you could have explained it already but looking at the bigger numbers that changed, one in terms of the revenue side, the inappropriated fund balance. Is this money been left over from previous budgets or something where did the money come from . President yee tell me if youre referring to a particular document so i answer correctly. Page 118. Inappropriates fund unappropriated fund balance. And increased by 21 million. Commissioner yes. That is largely driven by and year over year different revenue amounts come in there and what we had to do given the significant decline in revenue over the next year in particular and going in the second year a continuing decline. Had to appropriate all the fund balance the rainy day balance in order to be able to keep those facilities at base level of operations until they can continue to have conventions back. Hate what it represents is fund balance in the Convention Facilities the other part is in our 1 million of our mail budget for onetime purchases such as equipment and other things in that particular program. And without having to hit the general fund we used Prior Year Fund balance commissioner so this explains the decrease in general funds by 32 million . Its related to other changes and gets more to the items i was talking about on the reduction slide. Those two lines are separate. The line would have been worse if we hadnt of used the appropriate fund balance would have been a much bigger problem. Remind commissioner remind me in terms of the reduction from general funds which is about a third i guess, what the big ticket items that got reduced. Is that related to the expenditure in the programmatic projects . A number of those items were part of what was listed on the Budget Reduction slide. Where we increased attrition by 5. 4 million and 2. 4 of that was general fund. Not personnel services, contracts those would have been impacted. Materials and supplies. Portions of our budget with general fund. And its a mix of Different Things we did in order our budget is so complicated we dont always control with capital and debt its hard to make one line correlate with another line. Commissioner you can see the problem with me looking at this. I cant really tell. Then in terms of the next year again is that related to capital . It jumps up 7 million. It assumes we started having other revenue for other programs and can begin supporting those programs again theres also in there new insurance costs and increases in lease costs and other operating costs. Maybe next week when you come back please can you break it down so we can better understand were focussing on general funds. Wed be show the increase and decrease. Commissioner that would be helpful to understand the last question on the expenditure side and programmatic projects went down almost all 32 million. What are these projects the programmat programmatic projects. The fourth item on the left. Im joined by my colleague adam and asking what falls in that line. Adam, do you know what represents the increase . Commissioner it represents more than 30 of your reduction of expenditure. The Convention Facilities is a big part of it but well be happy to get back to you and explain that line as well. Okay. Im not just picking on you but this is the easiest for know look at. One of the parts relates to Capital Projects that end and a big part of that line is primarily made up of onetime costs. So as the board approved last year there was a significant amount of furniture fixtures and equipment and since that was a onetime cost reflected as a decrease. You have another line item that says capital. The project budget for 49 south vaness and 1800 employees. Its the furniture, the computer equipment moving costs. There were projects [technical difficulties] [ [aud audio digitizing] commissioner some put it under supplies for some reason. Thats why its a little confusing. This was a project budget versus its not like a 200,000 Improvement Project so it was handled differently. We work with controls office and how its reflected in our budget. Into controller, thank you very much. I can describe briefly if its helpful but complicated but consistent across departments id be happy to followup with you, president yee on the rules of what gets budgeted into different buckets related to equipment. Commissioner just for me to look at thats why im asking the questions where these things what it means its helpful. Thank you very much. Commissioner there were transfers to these departments budget. Was there a controversy of those . Lease expenditures . He thats what i have commissioner thats what i have in my notes but youre coming back next week and we can do research and talk about it then. Any other comments or questions from our City Administrator Department . Supervisor watson. Commissioner i do have one question on i believe slide 5, you talked about providing immigrant and Language Service for the office of immigrant affairs and my question is how much money do you provide for the Language Services and interpretation . And along with that while you look were still not doing a good job making sure all the web sides have appropriate translation and making sure translation is available for all of our communities for various events and meetings and wonder how much were investing to reach that goal. I think itd be best if i can provide the budget for Overall Office of city engagement and affairs but that includes both supporting the commission and Community Ambassadors and a variety of other functions. Currently the city on the census. I want to make sure i provide ac ras response in how much is focuses on Translation Services because that say separate thing looking at the specific staff for Translation Services as well as the Language Line contract we have. We can followup with your office and provide you with that specific number unless somebody has that separate breakout at this point. I appreciate that because thats important. Commissioner i agree. Would you be so kind as to have that information next week for the full committee. Yes. Commissioner thank you. Weve seen that as critical for our work in the covid19 response. Commissioner supervisor yee. One more question weve been trying to get the Justice Project and it seemed it wasnt that along ago and i want to make sure not only your budget is reflected of whats needed to make it happen and the other departments whats the allocation from your department to ensure theyre successful implementation of the Justice Project and a reminder to the public the project is to align as much as possible the needed sharing function between all the different Law Enforcement and public defender and offices in the court system so we know whats happening with individual in the system and the Current System didnt allow for many years and was mostly unsuccessful and theyre stepping into instead of trying to put more money into reinventing that system instead of starting all over from scratch. I hope it wont end up like 10 years from now when supervisor peskin runs for the fifth or sixth time, well have the same discussion. I think its important because well have fallen through the cracks in terms of what happened to them in fact its important we put resources behind them and get it in the community. Can you tell me what you have in the budget for that . The city administrator does serve as the chair for Justice Council and the staff and budget for justice is within the department of technology. The question is probably better addressed when the director comes up next in her presentation. Commissioner thats a nice punt. Commissioner any more questions or comments from any colleagues and the clerk is assisting me with telling me if you would like to speak. Thank you very much, city administrator. Next up is office of technology. Good morning, supervisor fewer and committee members. Im linda jurell and serve as the director of department of technology and ill be happy to answer your question about the Justice Program but first id like to start with our budget presentation and a thank you to the mbo, mayors Budget Office, for supporting d. T. s new cfo through the budget process and a thank you to chelsea, john and linda for this excellent virtual meeting. Not easy to do herding cats and they do a terrific job. As i get started id like to recognize the Technology Staff and tech teams who have done an amazing job of telecommuting and Training Staff during the crisis, delivering new services and data, connecting shelters and clinics and providing Innovative Solutions with our Industry Partners at a time when technology is an essential service. Like other Technology Teams the team has maintained Current Operations and system performance. Weve completed supported high demand for new systems, support, virtual meetings, etcetera. I also want to thank the clerk and board of supervisors and city staff and residents who are quickly learning and adjusting to use tech tools to communicate and collaborate during Public Meetings such as this. Ill review the d. T. Budget. Everyone in the department has taken important action and engineered Creative Solutions to significantly reduce Technology Expenditures in the city we have identified cost avoidance and reduced cost by 277 27. 7 million. You have to ask how weve done that. Next slide. Weve been focussed on looking at a number of things. What technology is no longer used, how can we reduce and cut legacy system costs. How can we consolidate to drive cost efficiencies and effectiveness, deliver Enterprise Services to achieve economies of scale. Save threw our supply chain and look at optimizing our services. So first we looked at how we could pool our resources achieve these economies of scale through our enterprise agreements. These are large contracts that come to the board of supervisors often for approval, microsoft, cisco, sales force, adobe, at t and our storage provider and achieving the enterprise contracts and negotiating on volume discounts we have achieved 10. 9 cost avoidance in 2021 and a threeyear savings of 20 million. Weve looked at technologies that could be turned off. Where are unused technologies. Reducing cellular service, unused tell co, services and savings in fy2021 year and 4 million over three years. Also savings from rightsizing. Lets make sure were using what we have purchased and making sure our licenses are aligned with use so we have removed work orders that were not being used. We looked at Microsoft Licensing and were able to reduce by 5. 4 and 5 million over three. What i think im most excited about is how the Technology Partners, how our Technology Partners have stepped forward to help us during this covid crisis. We contacted our large provider and said what can you do to help us as we move forward our budget and economy needs relief sales force and adobe and tri dent reduced costs by capping or lowering costs, giving us additional license, etcetera, we appreciate the work theyve been doing to help us mof forward and save on our budgets. You have asked about our Budget Reductions. So i wanted to talk in general. We did reduce our administrative costs. We have delayed purchases for some security tool sets. We added new business systems. We have consulting and professional services and were trying to accelerate our move from the call center and that will reduce capacity and attrition savings. South were reduced by 7. 4 million. Our budget overview, we had a base of 128 million and had contractual increases for hardware, software and capacity demand by the city departments. We had our reductions. We had a technical adjustment that reduced cost and we also have Capital Investment added and a special project so our budget last year was 140 million and this budget year will be 131 million. As a quick overview, this is how the costs are allocated in the department of technology the gray area shows 50 of the budget is hardware and Software Costs and of that expense 37 million or over half is passthrough. So we procure things and then charge the departments back. I think thats important to note. These are not costs just supporting the mission of the department of technology but also cost are the department costs for materials. This is also how were saving costs as well. How does that look to head count and lines of business. This shows the lines of business and service. We have 220 staff in this last budget year well be going to 222. An increase of two. Then 225. We have 41 open position. Were not at this time eliminating positions. Were holding unfilled for attrition 23 positions and have 18 hires in progress. I will say and im sure youll ask about increase in position. This is a structural change. We had nine position positions held last year and so this is filling the nine and taking people on temporary positions and turning them permanent. I appreciate our new cfo ap the mayors Budget Office recognizing we have positions in our budget that needed structural repair and thats what these are. The change in 2021 is moving people from project positions into operations because they are supporting the new network and the consolidation and expansion of the city network is going to be a larger job in the future. Next slide. You also asked about how our budget reflects our efforts to advance Racial Equity and address disparities for communities. Id like to give you two examples. The first is around workforce equity. Im pleased to report 68 of the d. T. Workforce are people of color. Were exceeding our industrial peers significantly with our equity and hiring and diversity. We have excellent staff and i think its a credit to gsahr and the work our team does to hire a diverse workforce. Since were an internal service fund how can we help our community . We partnered with the Equity Program and School District and monkey brain and s. F. Housing authority to close the digital dived with Internet Service and this is delivering Internet Service to our Affordable Housing and Public Housing locatio locations. Over the fast pavt past two and a half years we provided services to sites and homes and departments and were having a cost of 600 per unit and not only have we continues to accelerate but we have connected covid shelters and test sites to 545 bed sites. Community rooms with wifi and now we are supporting the Student Learning Community Hubs with and our sites with minimal installation work and in this covid situation we need to be save with staff as well as residents. And we have costs around the aAffordable Housing sites with populations. Sorry about the sirens. And we have installed services so were glad to be able to provide this and i think its a tremendous benefit to our communities. Commissioner any questions or comments . President yee and supervisor walton and lets take president yee first. Thank you, chair fewer. You promise to talk about the Justice Project. What i was doing when we first started and i was pulling up other presentations i could share with you. I think id rather talk to you about it. Where we are with justices is so exciting. We are just making such terrific progress. Youre going to be very pleased. Remember our focus. Our focus is retiring cable 3 on the main frame. Its important we time this when superior court goes live with c track. They must be in sync or well have a problem delivering data to all of our justice agencies. Its requiring conversion of reports, conversion of data migration of integration. Application restructuring. Changing the flow of information between the agencies. And we are well on our way. I think were probably around 70 complete on reports. Were working on the integrations right now. We are in a terrific position. We are also starting something thats very important and its not technology. Its about agreements and building and having memorandums of understanding between the departments on how theyll share data, what they will share, how it will be secured. Were working with the City Attorney to come up with the standard template and contract between the departments on data sharing. Everyones very excited about that. And we are also working on charter documents. One for the governance board and also for the advisory committees that are made up of the subject Matter Experts in [technical difficulties] wifi is interesting. When we talk about wifi we dont necessarily call it an equitable service. So i think we need to be careful thinking wifi is the answer. I can tell you that when we were looking at fiber for the entire city, that and we were working with a Public Private Partnership Approach on that we reached a point where there were a number of teams that talked to the city and bid on our project and those costs came in everywhere from 1. 7 billion to 2. 3 billion to wire the entire city. Thats what it would take. As you know, technology changes. There are always new opportunities. But when we talk about equity, what we Start Talking about is Fiber Service and whats so very interesting about this subject is i am passionate and committees and dedicated to reaching as many as Public Housing units as we can but i will tell you in the last week ive received Public Comments about how even in other parts, forest hill and other parts of our city, they do not have adequate Internet Service or its very expensive. In excess of 100 a month. You see fiber across the city as a concept to reach our under served populations and to lower the costs to the general population. Commissioner thank you, supervisor mandelman. Commissioner thank you, chair fewer. To followup on that it seems theres a middle ground and theres been conversations over decades now about universal access to the internet. A couple different proposals around that or thoughts around that and private partners. And now theres this more manageable idea of fiber to housing. But i guess to followup on supervisor waltons question, it would be interesting to know what it would cost to make the fiber to housing promise real not universal fiber to everywhere but if we got it to subsidized Housing Units and shelter and let with that and how far away are we from that . And does it doesnt sound like something to be fund from this years budget but it would be interesting to hear what the number is. Im imagining its less than 1. 7 billion. Thats our deficit or whatever the multiple billion dollar for fiber where ever. What would it mean to do fiber to equity . Fiber to these locations . So im an engineer youre going to get an engineered answer. Heres our challenge. In many locations the wiring and inside wiring is insufficient. So many of these sites need to be redeveloped or the cost is very high because we have to go in and have to redo the wiring. Theres a cost factor there. We would need to go do a survey of how many would require inside wiring. If you do say we have approximately 40,000 and completed 45,000 times 600 in general 20 million plus or minus 20 . Got an idea. Commissioner chair fewer. Lets get it done. Commissioner write the check right now. Ill share that as could be text. Commissioner and its the kind of thing for making that the framework, fiber to housing benefits the goal of fiber everywhere but in the way we want to do it moving first to the people who need it most. Absolutely. We do have a limited scope next year and i want to set that considering the budget restraints. Commissioner no other questions i think you answered mine and thank you for being efficient and always looking for efficiencies in your department and for the city and county of San Francisco. A simple savings from turning off your unused tech, millions is so crazy. Thank you for doing that. Next we have up im going switch because i have a time constraint and i think the superior court needs to be heard by 12 00 p. M. Right after that i will hear public works but i would like now to call the superior court. Hello. Here we are with michael ewen if you can walk us through this quickly, great and welcome. Thank you, chair and supervisors. Thank you for taking me a little bit out of order so i can attend state meetings this afternoon. Im going share with you my presentation now and well jump right in. So supervisors, as you know, the superior court is overwhelmingly fund the state. But we do have two programs funded by the city and county. The first of those two programs is the civil grand jury. It is the jurys responsibility is a county arent. Jury. We have a total of 200,000 to run this. The other program the city funds is the indid i indigent defense administration, or ida. The most basic or valued principle is all persons are innocent until Proven Guilty and the accused are entitled to representation according to the of 6th amendment and the california penal code. I was here to ask request for a crisis in the ida panel of attorneys. We had attorneys leaving for higher rates and they are our main competitors because the u. S. Federal court for our circuit is located in the city. As youll see on the slide for 10 years between 2009 and 2018 our rates were lower and last year we increased our appropriation over two years to allow us to over two years gradually increase the ida rates to be more competitive. As a result we increase the results in 2020 and were on track this year. The important thing to note is the rates are still around 3 to 27 lower than the federal rates but what the increased have allowed us to do is narrow the compensation gap. Weve been able to reduce attrition and attract new attorneys because of this were not seeing what we saw as recent as 18 months ago. What was happening then is having courtrooms without conflict counsel present because we didnt have enough attorneys on the panel and defends who did not have counsel we had to scramble in the hallways to find an attorney to take the case. We no longer have to do that. We have competent counsel reporting to our courtrooms every day to assign to those who do not have representation. You see a year over year comparison. For the fiscal year that just ended we received a total of 9. 6 million. This is proposed to increase by 800,000. All going to indigent defense and its going to remain at that amount for 2122. All this except for the 200,000 is earmarked for indigent defense there were know reductions made to ensure the program can sufficiently defend the accused and reductions would only be possible if work load decreases, which is something outside the courts control. Commissioner got it. Finally, i want to close by stressing indigent defense serves all communities in San Francisco. Its our policy at the court if you dont have a public defender appointed and cant take the case an attorney from ida is appointed. We dont put you through a means space test or anything all we look at is if you have an attorney and if you dont we appoint one and ensures anyone from any community has representation when he or she is accused of crime and its a constitutional and legal right and ensures our most vulnerable have adequate representations. Thank you, supervisors and im happy to take any questions. Commissioner any questions . Seeing none i have one about the civil grand jury and the Racial Equity makeup of the people who participate in the civil grand jury. I want to say i think weve interviewed many and the majority are white. I wanted to know what were doing to diversify racially the participants of the civil grand jury maybe one or two sentences. Supervisor, thats an excellent question and its a struggle. Weve been struggling for quite some time not just to get Racial Equity on the civil grand jury but to get applicants at all. Its something well continue to work hard on. Weve appointed a special Judges Committee internally to look at that very issue because not only do we need to get more applicants we want to make sure that the jury is reflective of the composition of San Francisco. Commissioner thank you very much. Anything else . Seeing none, thank you for your work. Next is the department of Public Health. Not Public Health, public works. We have with us aloric di granfinrid. I think you brought a team with you also. Thank you, chair fewer. Ill try to share my screen. Commissioner make it large. Good morning chair fewer and president yee and supervisor mandelman. Im the acting director here at San Francisco public works. I want to echo some comments you heard from other colleagues as well just wanting to thank you as employees for the amazing work done in the past year and focussing on the Extraordinary Events in the last six months. With the onset of covid19 it forced us to jump in with both feet and a lot of things we wouldnt normally be doing ranging from things like working to establish sites that involve all the groups within public works. It involves the operations yard and our engineers and architects to do some of those things and set up Testing Centers across the city. Weve been working more recently on the recovery as well doing things like helping set up and do Ongoing Operations and shared spaces program. And this is all while were still doing our normal day to day work which has been things like wrapping up in the construction of the 49 and south vaness building. Doing quick build projects with the department in the mta to name a few. Again, i want to say thank you to the employees of public works and the board of supervisors and Mayors Office for all their support for the past year. In todays presentation were focussed on the main questions asked of us, the first slide shows you as a budget in comparison. On the bottom row highlighted in the lighter blue it goes and gets at one of the questions raised earlier by president yee where were trying to break out the Funding Sources that come from the general fund. In total for fiscal year 02 we had a total 20 we had a total budget of 387 million including the operating and Capital Funds of which though 116 million came from general fund sources. Going into fiscal year 2021 were seeing a drop in our budget. Were seeing a 33 billion mill the bulk from the reduction from the general fund. The main groups that received our general fund funding are groups like street use and mapping and building of bureau repair and street and Environmental Services. Were also seeing a reduction in the infrastructure and design and Construction Bureau in large part thats driven by reductions we needed to make because of the Capital Budget impacts we saw. Thats going impact our paving program and curb Grant Programs and others. Ill be providing more detail on these numbers but this gifs gives you as an overview of the total budget here and for public works. We also wanted to provide you with an overview as a budget comparison of the fte count we had a public works. Before i was talking on the previous slide about the Funding Sources in large part that treat use and mapping and Environmental Services as i was noting before those are mostly noted through the general fund. If you look at the two columns the on budget fund and total funded for those and in the street use and mapping and street and Environmental Services for fiscal year 20 and the larger number for street Environmental Services and the 346. 3 million how that number is about the same in both columns. That shows that there are not as many project funds as normal in those areas. The challenge were facing is going into as a budget year is where were seeing a substantial reductions in the general fund. What could we do to maintain our level of services and this is something ill hopefully be able to address with you later, chair fewer, the impact from an equity standpoint. We made a conscious effort to try and keep those in the head count numbers as balanced as we could even though were facing difficult budgetary pressures and ill go more into why that was so important to us. We are seeing increases year over year when you look at fiscal year 21 over 20 specifically focussing on the urban forestry area. Thats driven in large part of reduced attrition and that equals and thats driven by an increase in the admin support in operational divisions as referenced above. And what are the impacts we as a department provide to the city and residents in the businesses of the city. This slide just focuses mostly on the impacts to the operating budget. As i mentioned before, there was as a 33 million reduction to our overall budget for fiscal year 21. And so what we had to do is we had to work hard with the Mayors Office to try and minimize the impant impact on the operating budget. The one area that saw a substantial increase or reduction was in the Tree Maintenance Fund. It will be down 3. 7 million as, 17 , year over year. What that means work wise is therell be well be able to maintain less year over year and it means therell be 1500 less sidewalk repairs well be able to make. These were difficult choices we had to make. And this will make more sense as we go in the presentation. We had to make choices regarding to equipment were using for street cleaning and inspection. We had to reduce the amount of equipment that well be buying for the upcoming fiscal year. We reduced that budget by 1. 2 million. Well have to hope we dont have breakdowns in that equipment because that could ultimately reduce the level of services but were hoping well be able too keep the equipment we have operational and running for the next fiscal year. The one thing i wanted to talk about is we did make a good use of onetime uses of the fund balance specifically looking at the gas tax and road funds. We were able to make a onetime adjustment of 2 million that was going to have an impact on us being able to continue and maintain our level of services were providing regarding street cleaning. At the same time i want to emphasize theres limits and we wont be able to clean alleyways and will have to find different ways to do that in public works. Same thing could be said with the use of refuse rates as well where we have limitations there. Were able to offer you some of onetime adjustments to support our street use and Mapping Group equal to 1. 2 million. These are the general funds that support. Well see large cuts across the board. Well see a reduction of 80 translating to 19 million. Compen we look at the when we look at the curb Grant Program the cuts will also continue into the next year. Ill go into detail in the next slide and this will provide the impact these cuts will mean. Looking at the cuts were having to make to street and resurfacing program, thats an 80 cuts were having to make year over year. That does translate to a reduction of 24. 2 million. That means we wont be able to pave approximately 250 blocks and to give an idea of what we normally pay in the fiscal year 19 we were able to pay for 440 blocks and this impacts the pci score and the drivability score for the streets here in San Francisco. However, we are hopeful that the bond measure will pass in november and we think if it does well be able to increase the amount of paving we do in the coming fiscal years. Thats something i did want to point out we are assuming as of right now there are no funds for that. Were also going to have to make as a was saying before, well have to make some cuts regarding the curb Grant Program. Well be doing 120 fewer curbs in the comes fiscal year thats a 10 to 15 reduction of what we would normally do. We have as an obligation for federal and state laws to do that work so its not that we wont be doing it whatsoever, were just going to have to defer that work and i can go on and on about the various cuts well be doing and the structural programs reducing those by 3. 2 million. There are infrastructure across the city that needs immediate work. It impacts the districts specifically. Supervisor mandelmans castro industry stairs and supervisor walton with the Southern Heights and avenue wall and stairs and i can go on and on about those projects as well. But i can tell you well certainly do all the work we can and the crews will be focussed and we think well have to try to do things over the next fiscal years is to work smarter and more efficiencily with the funds we do efficiently we do have and this isnt something were pushing off to residents but theres programs in public work we were hoping to work on the optimization of our yard on hold too. Were having to make cuts everywhere and not just limit those cuts to the services we provide and the services and residents of San Francisco and in the last bullet well put on hold projects that would have an impact on us as well. The one thing i do want to highlight which i know in the previous slides was bad news but i take pride in the advancement of issues of equity. You asked about equity and i asked the board to put a pin in one of the conversations we were talking about earlier when we looked at the street Environmental Services. That is a group funded mostly by the general fund. And for us to make budgetary targets an area that would have been ripe to try and reduce in the head count there and make our targets, however, its a conscious decision to try and maintain Staffing Levels within that area. The main reason being is that those jobs that are there within the street as Environmental Services, those are in large part jobs that come from the operations yard and positions that are the entrylevel positions for the lowerwage workers within public works. Public works is a Diverse Department and were also diverse with race and gender and we have a large percentage of employees of color that work within as a unit. We wanted to make sure we did not have an unfair impact to workers in the unit. We did a lot of things regarding the gas tax and others to try and preserve those units so we wouldnt have to have a large number of layover and they provide a lot of the services to some of the areas in the city we need it most. Those the groups youll see front and center the most often whether in the tenderloin, mission, bay view, street cleaning and working in encampments and things like that. Im also proud of the fact that in the budget its been a tight and tough budget cycle but we were able to continue the expansion as a pit stop program. This is a program that goes along way in ensuring all the San Francisco residence housed and unhoused have residents, housed and unhoused have access to basic services. This is important to us. Also things were doing internally as public works family and to equity in the last several months weve been active in trying to have conversations about equity and racism. We did a pod series in the last several months talking about racial justice. Weve had 14 different speakers talking about what it means to them and their families. These are very difficult conversati conversations to have. This is something i can commit to in public works is going to be having these conversations though. Not just because as an edict whether it be federal law, state law or local law but because its the right thing to do. And supervisor fewer i was glad to hear you say we cant just be happy with the status quo as to where things are as it relates to racial justice. I can assure you that public works is a proud supporter of that and as well be doing more of that in the future. With that i will conclude my presentation. Commissioner thank you very much, director. Any any comments or questions for the director of public works. Yes, president yee. Commissioner thank you, director. I think you said you made some or there wont be tree maintenance efforts any moe. Any more . I did i didnt want to say there wont be tree maintenance but less. From the tree maintenance standpoint well be unfortunately having to reduce the number of trees wield be able to maintain approximately 4,000 less trees. Thats approximately 25 . I dont know if this is the same program the bort supported a few years back when we passed prop w or v, the same money to help pay the City College Free tuition. Part of the discussion at the time and its been a while but there was money left over to support the street tree maintenance takeover from the i guess, in the past on the sidewalk it would be mostly the owners responsibility but the idea was wdp would take over the sidewalk trees. Is this impacting that . Yes. Why would there be cuts to that . We thought there was going to be some funding available from that particular tax measure. Yes, youre right. That was related in proposition e is what that was related to. When there were reductions in the revenue stream that impacted the discretionary funds and contributions to that program. So when that happened that, unfortunately, reduced our funds there. Briefly, the budget does fund the street Tree Maintenance Fund at the voter required level as mentioned. So there is funding in the budget for that purpose however, that baseline, like other baselines is to overall Revenue Growth occurring in the general fund and given declines that, baseline is declined. Commissioner by 25 . Not by that level but im certainly to pull it up and send it to you. Commissioner what is this particular activity . Im showing a 17 reduction in the budget for that. What i was referring to is the number of trees. 25 less trees but the funds isnt necessarily 25 . Commissioner oh. That doesnt make sense to me but okay. I can address it. Commissioner for some reason i thought the maintenance of the trees and sidewalk have hazard funding or funding to maintain as the controller explained it somewhat. To clarify the numbers, president yee, the baseline level for the prior year was 21. 7 million and declined to 18 million in the year ahead given changes in overall discretionary renew. Theres a reduction of 3. 7 million. Commissioner thats about 10 , 15 . So the number of reduction doesnt match the number of trees. Ill take this offline. The number doesnt make sense to me. When you have reduction in funding to do the work by a certain amount put the reduction in the actual work was twice as much as the reduction in funding. It doesnt have logical sense to me. I can provide you more information on that, president yee, but its about a 17 reduction in funding and just approximately a 25 reduction in tree maintenance. It comes down to pruning activities and things like that we can do as available funds in a given year. I can provide you more information on that though certainly. Commissioner sure. Let me move on. Commissioner thank you, president yee. Thank you very much. Supervisor mandelman. Thank you, chair fewer and director. You may have said this and i may have missed it but i just want to have a little bit more information of some of these changes particularly around treat Environmental Services and General Administration. Trea Environmental Services and General Administration. EnvironMental Services and General Administration. EnvironMental Services and General Administration. EnvironMental Services and General Administration. EnvironMental Services and General Administration. S Environmental Services and General Administration. T Environmental Services and General Administration. R Environmental Services and General Administration. E Environmental Services and General Administration. Stree end General Administration. T enviro and General Administration. Theres an increase in fiscal year 20 to 21 and what is that . One second. That increase, supervisor is really the 15. 4 million for the street as Environmental Services is our commitment to end the pit stop program. As the emergency and restroom and hand washing stations. Commissioner thats the cost of pit stop and hand washing. In large part, yes. Commissioner and you think it goes down the next year presumably because were out of our covid pandemic and have come up with some other way of managing our street . I would hope so, yes. For now the large part the increase in the year over year in the 15. 4 million is associated with the operation of the pit stop program. General administration that was hiring around the tree program . No, the General Administration the increase of 3. 1 million is more of a technical adjustment associated with the year over year recov s recovers recoveries. Ill turn it over for that. We have an indirect cost plan. The cost of our Administrative Services are spread across all of our bureaus. If we dont spend, we then have to increase spending from fund balance to draw our fund balance done so really what youre seeing is a technical adjustment of under expenditure. Say that superduper slowly. Do the kindergarten version. Our budget is confusing. What happens is when we budget for an amount we do not spend, we then end up with fund balance and were obligated to draw it down in the subsequent year in order to stay in compliance with federal and state regulation. So what youre seeing is an increase in our use of fund balance so we can draw that fund balance down. Thats all in the category of General Administration. Then what does the fund balance gets spent on . On what it always gets spent on. So our General Administration is a support function budget, planning, directors office, communications, accounting, information technology, support functions for the department overall. Commissioner so how do you create 3 million more in win year than the prior year. You dont, you have to draw down surplus. Its technical. It used to be what you would see is take it as a negative expense in the old accounting system. So you wouldnt see the increases. But now instead you see an increased use of revenue, our fund balance, that has to be counter balanced with an increase in expense. Commissioner okay. Im going to keep learning about this. Im happy to provide a little more written explanation. Commissioner maybe a zoom tuetorial. Commissioner before next week. Commissioner a couple more quick ones. So 4,000 fewer trees. What that do to the overall time line. My recollection is weve been hearing on the tree program was just starting and it was a fiveyear venture in trying to catch up with all the work that needed to be done and if you go on tree s. F. You can get a sense when theyll get to your block. What does 4,000 fewer mean if the time line and does it mean it will turn into a sixyear project or longer . How long will it take to do the first pass . Do we know . I dont think we know yet. Ill go back to my colleague in the bureau of urban forestry. Its unfortunate this series of events is happening. We were starting to make really good momentum around the tree program but were going to have to go back and reset the time lines here. And the last thing is it would be helpful so we saw the cuts in things like street resurfacing, curb ramps, but a lot of that would get counterbalanced by the bound. It may be interesting to have a page where we can see the cuts in general fund but how much of that might be counter balanced by things done through the bond. I guess i would request that page. Okay. Supervisor do you have any questions . Yes, i do. Thank you, supervisor fewer. Im only going to say your first name because i dont want to butcher your last name. What administrative needs for your department are supported by the city administrator and is there overlap . Theres not much overlap, supervisor walton. But as admin is supported in the City Administrators Office are mostly in the areas of Human Resources and as a safety and Training Programs. Now, at the same time though we do still have our own Training Programs but the general ones are provided in the citys administrators office. Commissioner and why is over ahead allocations increasing by 8 million . Thats a technical change in the budgeting. It results and is mostly as a paid time off for employees. And that is something that came about as an audit done in the last few years. One recommendation that came of that audit was we should pay for budget and time off differently. Thats what youre seeing there [please stand by]. The Emergency Operations center in a support role. It is not like we had to add in the costs of those as employees, we shifted those resources to support other programs here in the city. Is that reflected in the 2021 budget . Yes. Basically, it is the same head count. There is no reduction in the number of employees every yearoveryear in the budget for the upcoming fiscal year that supports that. We are hoping within the next month or so to start up some of those Community Programs. For example, at the end of august we will be launching our event. So we are going to begin those programs. Why are operating positions increasing so significantly . That is really due to my presentation finding ways to maintain the count. Really what we are doing within the street cleaning and street mapping, we are shifting employees from funded from the general fund to funded through other and special revenue sources. The gas tax fund and others. How many vacant positions do you have right now . Right now we have approximately 300, 39 vacant. Of those we have submitted on behalf of 273 active and request to fill and then we have 66 or so that arent filled. Those positions that are vacant are related to the project funds. Say that last part again. The bulk of the positions that we have and the 300 and the 39 positions and half of those are related to project funded positions. Positions supporting the Capital Projects. Right. Okay. Got it. That leaves your Salary Increase by about 18 million. Why is that . So this Salary Increase of 18 million relates back to your earlier question about overhead allocations. It related in a large part to as accounting changes made t made o account for paid time off. Why is the federal projection increasing . I want to make sure the bathrooms and hand washing stations and everything for covid19 response, is that not eligible for federal reimbursement . At. At this point we are not sure. We do anticipate the costs are going to be as reimbursable and we are working with the Mayors Office to make sure that happens. As recovery of those costs involve managed centrally. Got it. Okay. I dont want to take away chair fewers questions. I will let her ask that one. What is included in the proposed expenditure and appropriate revenue designated . Is that the Carry Forward and overhead as existing Funds Associated with our Bureau Design and construction, Bureau Building and design. Sorry. Our division for building and design and construction, Bureau Building repair and street and Environmental Services from the fiscal 21 budget. What we are trying to do is to o account for as under recovery and overhead. What about the larger increase in city Grant Program. What does that being count for . That is a pit stop program. We issue grants. Currently to others and it is a grant that we have put out to bid. What is the funding within your bun did it . For asoc we dont necessarily i am trying to think how to describe it. We dont necessarily transfer funds to asoc. We commit resources to asoc. I am trying to find the information for you. There are a handful of individuals that we provide asoc on a daily basis, including managing the program. We dedicate crews within the Public Works Department to support asoc seven days each week. Do you calculate the cost of that at all . Yes. I can get that back to you, supervisor, i do have as presentation we just did last week. I have a breakdown of the number of employees that we dedicate to asoc. I can provide that breakdown to you. Two more questions. What are the implications of the 61 cut in street cleaning and inspection equipment . Is that less corridor cleaning in the neighborhoods . Well, we are hoping that the equipment keeps running. If there are some problems, that could mean we do have a missed route because as the sweeper isnt running or if the steam cleaner isnt working on a given day, we may have to reschedule things like that. Knock on wood that we will not have those problems. That is really in the risk of us not being able to buy the new equipment that we had in the budget originally. Statement, supervisor, i will tell you when we had to make a choice between buying the equipment and saving as employees we always opt to saving a position. With the work we are doing to cover to response, there is no possibility to purchase equipment with federal resources to get reimbursed . That is a question i may have to defer to the ma mayors offid Controllers Office. Supplies, you may be able to recover, but buying equipment, i am assuming that we cant. I can take a shot at that question. Related to fema, as i understand it, fema will permit us to acquire equipment and cover the costs as federal sourced. For example, if you buy a piece of equipment that is entirely depleted in one year, then you can fully claim that cost if it goes on for a year. A truck with useful life of 10 years you can only claim the first year depreciation. The remainder would have to be paid for from other sources. Are there programs using general fund money for that that could possibly be charged to another fund . There are some Fund Balances in some of our restricted funds. We have done everything we can to draw down on those funds to cover operational costs that are eligible for those funds. That is where in the previous slides in my presentation i briefly mentioned that, for example, we could not do some of the cleaning of the alleyways and cabinets with the funds. We are as aware in some funds and doing everything that we can. Last question, and thank you so much forbearing with me everyone. As you know, we just past the legislation at the board of supervisors to allow your staff to cite violators. We work with your department on development of this. Have you anticipated any of the enforcement in your proposed budget this year to work on a plan to catch these and stop the bad actors . Contractors from out of town. Is there any resources dedicated to make sure we can address this through new legislation . I dont believe that we have earmarked any new positions to help address illegal dumping, but i am optimistic we can possibly use other current funding and staffing to do it. We are right now partnering with ecology and others to get a campaign to address this. We are right now i had a conversation with members on the subject in the last few weeks. Certainly we will work with you and supervisor walton to address it within your district and across the city. Thank you. I am not suggesting we need to hire a new position. More so to focus on strategy to make this work. Thank you so much. Thank you very much, supervisors and thank you, director. I have further questions. I will hold my questions because you are coming back to see us next wednesday. We have the office of the department of accountability that needs heard before 12 30 p. M. I will thank you for coming out today. I will be having questions to follow up with you about your vacancies and your hires. Now the department of police accountability. Mr. Henderson, the floor is yours. Thank you. Thank you, chair fewer. I had to run to the bathroom so i am ready for you guys. Thank you, chair fewer and supervisors. I apologize i am not quite at 100 today, which is okay. My team should be on the call with me and they are much smarter than i am. Thank you in advance to them. Obviously, i am paul henderson, executive director of police accountability. You told me not to talk for more than five minutes. Me not being at 100 is good for everyone. The next slide. What i am going to try to do is not just read from the slides. You guys have that information. I hate people to read me information that i already have. The reason i included this stuff is because as that agency has transitioned including the name change, some of the things that are new is the definitive mission and vision. For familiarity, the work from the Agency Includes doing independent investigations, policy and audit. The reason that i highlight those things specifically is because while there are just over 200 oversight agencies in the country, not as many of them do independent investigations, which i think is the cornerstone of the independence for this work. It is important to have that here in San Francisco. It is used as a model for the work we do and a lot of other jurisdictions. In terms of the vision of the work that we are trying to do, again, i am not going to read the information that you already have in front of you. One of the things we try to focus on is having datadriven results. That is the key to race neutral outcomes for Law Enforcement accountability and outcomes. This information is here. You can review it on your own. I have proposed it. Get to the meat of it. Next slide. Comparison of the mayors proposed budget. I know many of you have examined in depth the mayors proposed budget. This is basically a three year analysis. It is the last budget and the next two years. The slide has all of our numbers in there summarized for the review for you to see where we are in terms of our spending as compares to cuts that we were asked to make. If we could switch to the next proposed budget. Thank you very much. It is here. You can see we were generally like most departments we were asked to have a breakdown by division. That didnt make sense for our department. As you can see about 85 of our spending is budget sa, salary ad benefits. We thought it would be better to approach this to see where the money is spent independently of personnel. The thing i point out is nonpersonnel services are the investigation costs. Again, this ties back to the independent investigation from the oversight agencies do their work by relying on the reports given by the Law Enforcement agency. We dont do that here. We conduct our own investigations. Part of the costs of what you see here are experts we use to prosecute our cases to present our cases both to the chief and to the Police Commission. Another thing to point out in the numbers. Our materials and supplies we kept flat for over five years. It is amazing given the work we have been doing. We try to be conscious about our spending for the work that we do. A lot of work as increasing is manpower and personnel. I wanted to point that out. I dont have much more here. The numbers speak for themselves in terms of cost. We dont really have divisions other than personnel costs. I want to try to focus the meat of our conversations on reductionses. We can switch to the next slide, please. D. P. A. Was successful in meeting the mayor and the Budget Office request to meet reductions in full. We mostly how we did that was addressing not trying to cut existing staff. We froze our openings and we stopped selling our vacancy positions through attrition. We did it that way because we wanted to both Impact Services to the community and to try to preserve as much of the staff as we could buy taking this approach. We feel like we have successfully been able to do that in what we presented. We wanted to talk a little bit about what some of those impacts are given where we are now and the work we are doing. You can see here toward the bottom where we talk about the impacts. First of all, the complaints have gone up. If you look at the trend and we included the chart. In the lower right hand corner is the number of investigations we have done. You can see those numbers increased from 2017 when i first came to the agency when we were at 500. Now we are at 800 independent investigations taking place annually. Second three is that my time . Go ahead. Secondly, the investigations and i want to point this out. This is important. Have increased tremendously in complexity. They are more complex than ever because we aggressively committed to resolve through independent investigation a lot of the high profile misconduct cases, including officerinvolved shootings. In many cases that now involve bodyworn camerbodyworn camerad independent videos. This is an additional layer that was not present in many of the investigations in the pastna have increased our workload. Some of the other things that have added layers of complexity to the work but good for the general public are Language Access improvements we made with the agency so nonenglish speakers or who prefer other languages are able to work with our offices in ways that were leadershilimited in the past. Thirdly, a lot of the increases we are seeing are because of the aggressive outreach targeting disenfranchised communities. Our caseloads increased during the time period we talked about by over 53 from where the agency was in the past. I will say, also, that part of that increase pushes against the recommendation from the Controllers Office. Recommended caseload for investigators. We want to try to have the Controllers Office do a new assessment to evaluate an adequate number for investigators and staff to handle. That is in the future. To address that we are aware of those numbers moving up and increasing in terms of workload. Some of our top impacts, and these are the things we are working on right now in the agency that i presume folks would have questions about but just to talk about some of the higher profile work that is being done at the agency. First one is the sheriffs work. You can see it is outlined here. An agency is working closely with Supervisors Office to address the needs and gaps in the work done with the Sheriffs Office with oversight. One of the things we added was letter of agreement that is just coming out now. You will receive more information over the next few weeks with the Sheriffs Office that both increased accountability and added Greater Transparency to that work. Again, we did that increase based on the input from the Supervisors Office without getting any more funding. Just to articulate what those specifics are, we have the new letter of understanding will increase use of force that causes actual that will internal use of weapon or control device including tasers. It will include investigations for sexual misconduct, expanded investigation into pattern and practice of retaliation, harassment and bias, and it will now include reckless disregard for behaviors for health and safety. Also, in the new letter of understanding coming out you will see an expanded focus on the conducting of audit that was not in place before as well as a consultation and presentation of policy recommendations. The final thing is the creation of an annual report. There can be transparency to the work and summation what that work is. The other issue that we have in terms of work going on right now is the 1421. Let me start off by talking about the release of public records related to Police Misconduct for those unfamiliar. We were given an allocation from the Mayors Office to develop the portal. That was not workable. We could not get the partners at the table to agree on a process to make the portal manageable. That money was given back to the Mayors Office. In doing so we developed our own portal. We saved hundreds of thousands of dollars this way. It was estimated 500,000. The administrative cost for the portal using it had an administrative cost of 87. We are excited that portal, and i believe that is live now, as of this week to track and review some of the not all of the 1421 work done by this agency specifically. To highlight that, 26 cases have been completed so far. That number seems small, that is a reflection of over 20,000 pages of documents released apmade public including seven officerinvolved shootings and 19 cases great bodily injury. Every agency in every department in the city is doing that work independently and on their own. I will say as reflection of how aggressively we are taking that work, a lot of the press and conversations about 1421 are coming from releases from this department. We will continue to do that work. What i would like to flag is that there are new bills in the pipeline spending right now, state bill 776, that will add new categories of personnel files to be disclosed if that bill passes including all use of the force, not just those resulting in great bodily juror death. That is not in 1421. Wrongful arrest and searches and allegations that have been sustained apunsustain and unsustained complaints. We would have to redo with the completed documents new searches. We are starting all over and other agencies, i presume, have similar challenges that we do. Our records go back to the 1980s. Many documents have not been transcribed. That evidence is still on audio tapes, cassette tapes to be listened to and transcribed to be turned over. We presume that this work is going to expand in new ways. I will point out in the 1421 work we have done, even getting that workout the door was delayed in getting the support staff as negotiated with the budget team. We only got a staff of four as compared to the department, Police Department has more than double the staff given to 1421. That work will continue. It is important the us, and we anticipate that work is going to expand shortly or whenever this bill passes. We will continue doing the work we are doing. In terms of the audit, and again this is chartermandated work that was done. We had asked in the past for onetime funding to support this work. Those positions still are not permanent, but the work has not gone away. One of the things we are doing is expanding that work into some of the equity stuff we are going to talk about as well. The mayor has talked about expanding some of the use of the audit to work as the corner stone to provide the evidence for the evidencebased outcomes for the work expanding. I will talk about that when we talk about equity. We are looking forward to the dedicated funds from the police savings, and we are committed to working with the Mayors Office with regards to the budget moving forward in the future. Talking about the equity which is another really important moment for the agency. I want to talk about policy stuff because i think it is important what we have done with policy a as it relates to equit. 5. 17 for biasfree policing. That is something that we think is really important. We just recently passed that d. G. O. It is one of the most forwardthanking policies in the nation. I am not aware of any other jurisdiction that has a bias policy like this that also includes a bias by proxy in the department as part of their restrictive practices. I am talking about equity addressing race specifically and race outcomes and race disparities. That is in our policy approach as well as the limited English Proficiency work and Language Access working group work, all coming from the policy division here at d. P. A. Where we led the working groups to ensure equity of services, including recently adopted deaf and hardofhearing d. G. O. 5. 23. I will get to the hiring in a moment when i close it out, but the investigations themselves, which i said are independent, have a focus on the officerinvolved shootings and use of force. Those are where the most race outcomes are concentrated and that is why the independent investigations are doing so much work that they do. Audit division, as i said earlier, is up and running. Race equity study is built into that audit. We are also developing both a bias and pattern and practice evaluation. I want to talk about the pattern and practice evaluation. That work is typically done at the federal level and not done in this administration. The Trump Administration has cut back the department of d. O. J. Civil Rights Division to less than half what it was from the previous administration. I am proud of the work being done and taken up at a local level to expose specific challenges for Law Enforcement that includes pattern and practice. A lot of that comes from the Audit Division and the work presented from the audit team at d. P. A. In terms of outreach populated with the work focused on community groups, outside community groups, or to see the presence of d. P. A. And learn and understand how to access this organization and its services. I will say one of the things i think is important about the outreach work we are doing. It wasnt until all of last year fall of last year our information about how to file a complaint and get to an access d. P. A. Was made available in all of languages and all precincts. That mandate has been on the books for decades. It was not done. Now people will have information in a number of locations throughout the city how to access the agency and how to file a complaint easily through our office. The program that we have is a critical bridge we have expanded the staff there to focus on Restorative Justice and bridge some of the communicate between specifically communities of color and Law Enforcement so people are talking back and forthwith each other independently of the investigations that are being done and the sustained cases the office is doing. In terms of Internship Program. It is important right now that we both collaborated with ofa and without side agencies to make sure that we did a virtual experience internship. We think that is really important and creates a pipeline for especially young people and students. We targeted not just the Younger Generation but also included College Students and law school studentses as well to make sure they had experience doing this work. It helps hiring not just for d. P. A. But for the overall city. I will point out in terms of hiring by the end of 2019, we had 46 employees, and almost half of those hires were from protected classes. 67 female. 27 of the hires were africanamerican. 13 were latino. 7 were asian. I am tieing it to the Internship Program because i think that is really important. I am excited to talk about the equity component in some of the work. Independent of that and not included on the sides are the race and Equity Partners the work d. P. A. Does outside. In addition to participating in all of the programs with hrc and office of equity we participate in the mega black agency work and black africanamerican leaders both are which are outside groups focusing on the equity component as well. I am excited this is a key part of all presentations and i am proud of the work d. P. A. Has done as well. Thank you. If there are comments, i have a few questions to ask first. Director, i am wondering, have you seen public no quarterly reports for all of 2020. There is no 2019 annual report and we are in the middle of august. Why hasnt this been produced . The quarterly reports are monthduced at the produced at the commission and our website as well. I think they are on our website as well. We present at the Police Commission and they are publicly available. The annual report is finished, printed, calendared for the september 9th presentation at the Police Commission. That was delayed with covid. It was done earlier in the springtime, which is when you normally expect it. It was delayed with staffing. That is great. Why does it take so long to investigate cases and issue discipline . I want to mention we publish the monthly statistical reports as well posted on the website and that is presented at the Police Commission, too, in case you want to dive deeper beyond the quarterly reports. Your question why does it take so long to investigate cases . Yes. Because cases are complex and in part because we have had traditional delayed in the past, i will say those delays have been improving. In the past as represent bely as 2017, up to 20 to 30 of cases were dismissed because untimely concluded. There is a 3304 restriction on investigating Law Enforcement agencies that gives you up to a year to complete an investigation. That was not happening. I will say since taking over the agency we have not dismissed any cases that have fallen outside of the timeline for a conclusion of the case to zero. Just to answer your question, i want to give you context. I am very concerned about losing cases out of jurisdiction because of untimely delays especially when they were the most complex and involved the officerinvolved shooting. That has not happened since day one when i took over the agency. Part of the difficulty are the hoops we have to jump through back and forth to get the basic evidence like bodyworn cameras. San francisco is the only city in the state with over tight to go back and forth and no direct access to bodyworn cameras that causes untimely delay when you are talking about cases that say 20 or 30 officers are involved at one specific incident. It is a big indianapolis inc. That is the department and then turned over after review to our agency to conduct our investigation and this is before we talk about the cost associated with doing our access, more cameras and storing the information in triply what or qua quad. That is one of the biggest delays that we have. I see you have 11 vacancies. Are these vacant or do you have any hires pending right now that are not hired yet . I dont know of any vacancies. We have no pending hires, zero. Great. I understand that you hired a new chief of staff and i thought you had a chief of staff. Do you have two chief of staffs . I will answer in two seconds. Our vacancies are the cuts. Those were the cuts. I have two chiefs and the work is spread amongst them. Sharon woo has been doing a lot of work. All of the work i was talking about with the lou has been under her focus doing a lot of that work there. You have two chief of staffs . There are two chiefs, yes. Actually on your website there are no 2020 quarterly reports on your website. The last monthly report is february. You mentioned earlier the 2020 quarterly reports are on the website. The website shows no 2020 quarterly reports. Also, i wanted to know. How often are you doing mediation . How many resources are sent home . I know that mediation is outside of your mandate. It is separate from your office. They take it to resolve from outside public discipline structure not within your mandate. How many cases do you have mediation . How many cases are resolved through mediation . You are coming back to us next week and i am happy to have that discussion with you next week when we come back. Great. Thank you. Do you want me to tell you next week about mediation . Yes. How many resources are spent on mediation outside of your mandate . How many cases are resolved through mediation rather than through the regular discipline structure . I think that you mentioned you have a ton of cases. How many cases have been resolved . I would say how many cases do you typically bring to each Police Commission meeting . Then i will leave it to my colleagues for questions. Any other questions, colleagues . Yes, supervisor walton. Thank you, chair fewer and director henderson. A couple questions. One, when you specify department Mental Services from 9 to 11 why is that referring to interdepartMental Services . Those are work orders. Minor increases due to software and include upgrades to support remote working. Thank you for m. O. U. With the Sheriffs Department which will be in november when the oversight passes. This is in place to make sure we still have some type of independent oversight over the department. We have been in several conversations with your office and the Police Commission about the fact that d. P. A. Needs to focus on investigations of the Police Department, you are stretched thin. The sheriff needs his own oversight to avoid costs of lawsuits and the cost of exaggerated cost of over time and increased transparency. For our records, how many complaints has the sheriff sent to you since the m. O. U. Agreement was reached . The original one or new one . Both actually. Sure. I dont have an answer today. We can get it for next week. I would love to know that. There were 46 complaints last 36 complaints last year. The lou was signed last week. To your point which doesnt challenge the things you were saying. One of the things we thought would be most helpful in engaging the Sheriffs Department with the new m. O. U. Was to make sure we utilize as much expertise as possible in the agency to expand concerns that we had talked about in the past. That is why we wanted to make sure it wasnt a recreation of the will having done the work knowing what needed to happen and hearing the concerns and things you talked about to address as much of i have a question. In San Francisco you are uniquely challenged to getting access to bodyworn cameras. Can you explain that . Base w because we dont haven umbrella approach as a city that manages bodyworn cameras and dissemination of information this ties to 1421 approaches. San francisco is the only county that does it this way that the Oversight Agency doesnt have direct access to the Body Worn Camera system. No other county in this state does it this way or restricts the agency from having access to the bodyworn cameras. We have to make a request and wait and get whatever is redacted from the department before we get the evidence that we need. Why do we do it that way . Well, i am not pleased with it. I have challenged that as something i am continuing to work on. We have asked for direct access. The department will not provide direct access to bodyworn camera. They believe there could be restrictions to prevent them from doing that. I dont know how that justifies when every other county does it the exact same way. It is a frustrating challenge that we have been working against. I have a more basic question about how San Francisco is doing on discipline and what the constraints on that are. We can continue this conversation at the next hearing or future date. I will ask the Police Department later. Important work to be done about hiring and thanks supervisor walton and the chief and the District Attorney around the work that we arent hiring cops with a bad record elsewhere. There is the problem in Police Departments across the land of, you know, how do get rid of the police who are bad cops. That is notoriously challenging again in Police Departments across the land. I am interested inning from your perspective as the person responsible for this. Are we getting rid of the bad cops . Getting rid off . The problem we have by not having an expanded definition or expanded role that captures work that is done by agencies like ours that is under mined when an individual elects to either resign or leave and shows up again in san mateo or oakland at another agency or shows up as a deputy or with Highway Patrol or i ce agent that needs a expanded definition to tag, eliminate or remove based on sustained cases from our own jurisdiction and or state level post certification to evaluate and tag or flag bad behaviors that you cant transferyour position somewhere else. You cant be a Law Enforcement officer and those are the state solutions we are working on. You raised an important issue. This is some of the work i am participating in on behalf of this agency both at state level and or National Level with the justice and policing act pending now with two different sides from the democratic and republican party. I think i briefed all of you on what some of those approaches are. Then the Governors Office is looking at some of these poststandards t to evaluate and create a standard evaluation minimum conduct standard. So that when people are violated they dont just popup or obscure their work by leaving before there is a conclusion or after a conclusion and show up in another agency. That work is being done now. You are speaking to a new poll that has bun a frustration to a number of years and is not unique to San Francisco. I would love to have more conversations with all of you. Any further comments . I would be interested in the things you just said. The legislative government. There are Higher Standards for you to get a haircut and go to another county than there are beauty technicians than to carry a gun and exercise legal force. That is one of the challenges. I am happy to sit down and talk to you about what those opportunities look like at local, state level. I know you are on a time constraint. I think director some of the information we requested you will bring back. How many cases have you filed with the police chief and the commission over the last two years . You can give us those numbers, that would be great. We will see you again, i think, next thursday, i think. We thank you for your time. Thank you, guys. So, colleagues we can hear the Sheriffs Department now. It is 1 00. Would you like to break for lunch. The rundown for the afternoon, sheriff, Police Department, adult probation, juvenile probation, public defender and District Attorney. I want you to get energized. We will recess now until 1 30 p. M. When we will come back and the Sheriffs Department will come present for us and then the Fire Department. I will see you all then. Thanthank you very much. [please stand by] we are now back in session after our recess of lunch. This is friday august 14th. We are having a technical difficulty. Its a systemwide difficulty. We hope to get it fixed. In the meantime, were proceeding with audioonly. And so, because of that, i would ask madam clerk to please call the roll. Clerk yes, madam chair. [roll call] there is a quorum. Supervisor ronen is attending another Committee Meeting and she will join us as soon as that meeting adjourn. Now, we are picking up again with our departmental hearings and we have San Francisco sheriff joining us with and we will hear the San Francisco Office Budget presentation fiscal year 20202021 and 20212022. Sheriff, the floor is yours. Thank you, chair fewer and good afternoon, everyone present here. I know weve been technically charged which the Sheriff Office is familiar with through the years and weve managed to work through it and as you have evidence through, you worked through it as well. So thank you. I just want to take i know we dont have the slides but if you can follow along, those of you that have it in front of you, ill try my best to reference the slides as we go along so you know what were talking about and ill try to be brief as possible. I do want to mention that you know, moving forward, as we all know, being a part of the criminalJustice System and working with community stakeholders, and working with all of you, were trying to complete our mission in a manner that maintains trust and confidence of the people of all of San Francisco an san francise challenges times with the covid pandemic and the budget. Our priorities still are in line with our mission as a Sheriffs Office here in San Francisco. Our priorities continue to be criminal Justice Reforms, transparency and accountability i. Operational efficiency and valuing not just our employees but the community as well. We worked to eliminate changes and comments and items and the diversion project and over half of our justice involved population is out of custody and not incarcerated. We also work to support this continuation of pre earnment cash bail systems and in regards to transparency and accountability, i do want to mention something i believe before the first break there was a reference to body cameras in light of the dpa Budget Review and director henderson had mentioned something about access ability to. The body camera system were working on for accountability and what we do and how we do things and ill go into detail in a few minutes. And in terms operational efficiency, were look to go replace our geo Management System to be more flexible and provide more Responsive Data specific in the concerns of those working with us on Justice Reforms. Were looking to upgrade our westbounwebportal for user expee expanded and thats in district recognition of how we changed some the things we do for the justiceinvolved population. Having people with accessibility to more web based platforms for ser obviouses, for programs, education, reestablishing connectivity to the community its very important to us. And we do want to make sure that we continue that with the ask that we have in our budget. Last week, too, as we go through the slides, well look how were going to invest in value and our employees in the community and our diversity is something that was highlighted recently in one of our other hearings and we wish to continue that success. Were also working on making sure that our staff that we do have, continues training focused on crisis intervention, direct supervision and creating inclusive environments because we have more confined challenges in our Justice System with covid19. Moving on to slide number three now which gives you a budget summary of what were looking at and its charted out without going into detail the budget amount include general fund amounts for salary, fringe, professional services, communitybased organizations, materials and supplies and services of other departments and over all, our office is fully met the mayors budget directive of the reductions requested and weve also cut further into our base budget in order to add priorities that were not included in the base and i will reference those in the next slide, slide number four. In regards to our budget summary, for fiscal year 2021, versus from our base budget, you can see there in the chart it row reflects what weve had decreases in and reduction this is and over all, as i mentioned, weve met the mayors budget directive of a 10 reduction in addition to that, we reduced our base operating budget and 3. 1 million in doing so were trying to accommodate 1. 5 million for criminal Justice Reforms which is the pretrial things that i referenced at the beginning and working towards making sure that that is a process which is supported in light of the humphrey decisions. We have an additional 700,000 that goes towards the body cameras and racial and identity profiling act consideration thats i mentioned. We have another 700,000 for the jail Management System improvements, which was a priority for the reenvision of the jail workgroup a few years ago. Our scheduling system is also a part of those accommodations. What we have decreases in, in professional services, are reflective of lower costs negotiated by staff for our first in the nation free phone call contract for in cars rated persons and also lower costs negotiated by our staff for services associated with serving and monitoring out of custody individuals and we encloud a cost predicted for tablets which i referenced as part of our plan to make sure people have connectivity while in this covid world that we have. Also, there are some small increases in materials and supplies that account for our body camera expansion and personal protective equipment which is also required in todays covid world. There is one of the first references can i give you now in regards to our closure of county jail 4, a decrease in other department services. Were locking to close obviously you know were looking to close county jail 4 before november 1st and some of the savings will be reduced rent costs. I do want to point out specifically as we move forward, you know, i referenced the jail replacement project and some of the Data Limitations that were highlighted by the reenvision workgroup, and that is very important for us to address in this budget and we can identify and collect and analyze impacts of many of the recommendations and how theyre effecting our jail population and our justice. Expanding role of Justice Information to support this Data Collection to allow us to inform our improvement and coordinate efforts across multiple jurisdictions with our justice partners is very important to us, we dont want to be the criminal Justice Agency that keeps taking time to get information for people who want to have it available. We can make informed decision and move forward. Especially in a time when we have to make these adjustments more quickly and with less contemplation. I also want to make sure that w. I didnt reference the slide but im on slide five right now that says budget snapshot and fully met target reductions. I want to mention this because weve done everything asked of us and weve moved forward with a lot of Different Things in regards to being able to do more with less. Weve increased our attrition savings to reflect the hiring slow down. As you can see from this slide, we have a deferral of non critical system and Capital Improvements and as reference at the beginning, we looked for these reductions to base operating budgets still to be able to prioritize our needs and they were row fleck tive in the beginning of this presentation. I do have a few more slides here and i know that theres an interest in time because of the delays. Ill just touch briefly on moving to slide number six, i believe it is. This is for criminal Justice Reforms. I wanted to highlight our decadelong partnership between the Sheriffs Office and pretrial diversion. This is something that historically, since its inception, weve been a part of and pioneering our partnership and moving it forward through many years and making sure our custody population, those who are just as involved that we want to keep out of jail, have increased from 40 to 65 of total justice involved over the years and this is due in a large part to our work with pretrial diversion and the many things that we have done to move that forward through the years. Moving on to slide number seven and eight, just to reference both in the same context, i mentioned we had moved towards and as recently been announced and in partnership with the financial Justice Project from the Treasury Office and of you today, the work weve done to get to the point where we can offer free phone calls did not come without challenges. We have been working towards this incrementally for years and i want to recognize the work not just of this Current Administration for the Sheriffs Office but the work of prior administrations who have worked to reduce the cost overtime to get to us the point where we can get to free phone calls, to be beneficial tom everyone involved especially those who come from the under served communities that are in our custody and care. Lastly, i want to talk a little bit about how we are invest north and valuing our employees and our Community Members as we move forward. While we talk about training, and we talk about how we want individuals involved in Public Safety and Law Enforcement to be professionally and highly trained the charge for us is our staffing and the hours that are required for us to go to training and i believe in this slide, im referencing slide number nine, this slide reflects the Sheriff Office commitment to training and making sure we get training done that goes above and beyond mandated training. We have annual training were required to adhere to for our staff and we move that to include specific topics such as what i referenced crisis intervention, direct supervision for custody populations because we want to make sure that we have an environment which is safe, which is responsive to the needs of the people who are incarcerated and that challenge to move our staff away from just thinking in terms of an us versus them becoming more inclusive the key to that is training. Weve moved forward on that irrespective of funding and wove been able toll accomplish amount of that working with less and now we asked that this continues to be supported so we can continue that work. In addition to that, we have since ive come into office, weve created our safe program which is our Sheriff Alliance for equity. This is in line with im referencing slide number 10 now and im referencing our program because what we have is a commitment that consists of two components, an internal focus group and a Community Alliance group which will ultimately support a culture, a workplace and an environment accessible to not just current and future employees and regardless of their background or identity and also because we have a unique montreal as the Sheriff Office and in that we have the responsibility for people in our custody and care and we want to make sure this is not last in our safe program that they become a part of they are a part of that Workplace Environment and the inclusivity that we talk about isnt just about employee but its also about how we interact with this unique community as well. So, we reflect, we already reflect a community we serve and we hope with the support of this budget, our continued priority will be met and the additional photographic us and priority in line with the office of Racial Equity and our Racial Equity action plan, which com ports with that of all other city agencies, which hope we will continue with our budget. With that being said, if anybody has any questions, id like to reserve that time for a specific question on our presentations. Thank you, very much. Supervisors, are there any questions or comments . Just speak up. Im going to go for roll call of supervisor walton. Thank you so much, chair fewer and thank you so much for the presentation. I do have a few questions. The first one is how many have you made so far since i didnt result of your inaudible . I dont have those statistics with me right now. Ive made personal referrals with requesting investigations. One thing i want to note about what were working on right now is that under my administration, were not going to just have me making decisions on what cases go to dpa and we have asked that they accept complaints from the public and community so that it doesnt have to go through our Sheriff Office in order to enhance transparency. Also, we put in some requirements for certain types of cases to go to them regardless of my decision as the sheriff. I can get those numbers back to you to be responsive to your question and as soon as i get them from my investigations team. Thank you, and how many referrals are investigated this last year by your office . For the last year i can put all that information for you i believe. It was around 120 cases but i want to verify that to make sure. Whats your current investigation process when someone who is incarcerated files a complaint . In cards to incarceration, well, for those that are just as involved in our population, we have two tier process. We have the ability to lodge a complaint in anyway. They can contact our internal affairs unit directly and they can contact our criminal Investigations Unit directly an how do they do that . Phone call . Yes. There is phone access and the grovance process. For individuals so we have fifth complaint process built into our system mandated by title 15 and that process sends complaints up the chain. If theres a complaint against a staff them, that is flagged for investigation and with our expanded loa with dpa it will be sent to them so it was very important and im glad you brought that up, supervisor, that we made sure that theres a mechanism for that to be expanded and our new loa will make contact to contact dpa directly instead of going through the Sheriffs Office. Currently everything goes through us for complaints. Whats the cost associated with investigating complaints from an incarcerated individual or a familia Family Member . Theres no cost passed onto the Family Member right now. Our investigations. When we conduct the investigations they go through our investigative unit. If its of a criminal nature, we have a criminal Investigation Unit that also investigates crimes and if its potentially a crime committed by a staff member or employee, if its a misconduct or misbehave year type of situation or anything involving lack of adherence to our policies and procedures, that becomes an internal Affairs Investigation and some of those are the types of cases that we have forwarded to dpa in the past and well continue to do so. How would a cost change when the part of the reason im asking that is because, according to the budget annalist, it cost about 20 million to conduct investigations and there were complaints from your office so was that savings captured in the presentation . Its not in this presentation here but i would say that you know, our rounded number for any sort of investigative cost for our intern a internal affairs us 1. 5 million and for the caseload it carries. So thats why im familiar with it as our past budget. Im not familiar with the 20 million. Ill have to refer to that . Is that in the bla report you mentioned . Are you talking about operations of the jail itself . Right. Yes, its about 20 to 23 million depending on how many people are there. Right now thats how the question was worded. In regards to the operations of the jail, we already have accounted for the reduction in our budget for that and that has been a part of our reduction for the Mayors Office so that we can get to that 10 . In terms of your nonprofit contracts, when you get a chance, because im not going to ask you to do it now, can you give us a list of your nonprofit contracts and lists of the amounts that you have for each one . Well, pro trial and community work, those groups . Yes. West side. And they are off the top of my head, supervisor. Correct. I can find out a full list so you have a comprehensive list of our contracts. Along that line, do you think that these Community Programs belong with the Law Enforcement entry . Absolutely. In fact, i was just at an Award Ceremony right now today before i came on to this conservation core partnered with us over the summer for our eco jobs program and we brought youth from the community in and our staff, its not about trying to forward an agenda, it was our staffs side by side with the students working crew and its a Farming Program and so its agricultural based and its different than perspectives provided by other programs. Its an offshoot of what we used to do which was a longstanding program that we had with the garden project and catherine sneed, to provide areas for youth to interact with us and its a part of the things that we do which are not Law Enforcement related which really brings people together and gives them the perspective that were people and were not just uniforms and thats why i feel its important and its something we still support and something that we open to continue to support. Now we have heard about some of the programs being under not only just your tempt bu departmt adult probation when folks advocate against things you believe is the way things should go that theyve been reduced or cut and some cases defunded. Those are the reasons why im asking those questions because we want to make sure that folks who are there to do a job, creates a opportunity and a platform for people to change and work better with Law Enforcement are not silenced from doing the advocacy that they need to do. Absolutely. We understand that completely. Thats the whole reason we want to continue partnerships with Community Based organizations to make sure they have that inner activities and that collaboration with us instead of what you are referencing. Being able to advocate separate its something we allow for because we want to perspective to be a part of our decisionmaking process in the things that we do so when they bring that to the table here and we work together, it makes it a better effort towards people understand what is is going on. Now weve seen lots of newspaper articles and of course weve seen a lot on the news and on tv such as gladiators fights and in custody deaths that have occurred in our jails, what in this budget is a reflection of how you are addressing those issues or concerns and incidents to make sure they dont happen again. Um, you mentioned the gladiators so that was from a few administrations ago and im glad you brought that up because it reemphasizes our bodyworn cram program and theyre very important w that fight incident occurred where the allegations came up i was actually working in the department and i was allowed for creating and implementing our Pilot Program which started body cameras in the jails. We had body cameras people in the jails and since then, theres been a growth on that and its been a little behind on making sure we catch up with equipping our tav with body cams raz and thats what is in our budget now. In regards to more reseptember things irecent in thepaper withe and we hope to address that not just the reductions realized with the closing of county jail 4, which also is in furtherance of of reform agenda to have less jails and to work towards making sure people have alternatives and have other paths. Weve been benefiting from that because were able to reduce our overtime by making sure we restack areas that have required overtime as a result of that closure. Those are the two areas where i think weve addressed things which have been in the paper most recently and in regards to our operations. Do we address this significant amount of overtime for the Sheriffs Department because this is changed . Can you identify it or because of the recent articles . This was part of our process already to restaff and make sure we can take some of the staff from the drawdown at county jail four and put them in positions we we wont incur overtime. The overtime is just born of the fact that we are short staffed and as evidence by a bla report from last year on our Staffing Levels. We havent been able to there was not a csa audit i believe from 2019 and we havent been able to bounce back from that yet. We havent been able to keep up with the attrition and the fact we werent staffed up for a number of years and as we move forward, obviously, as evidence by our recent hiring committee, in front of gao or hiring be joke it will be challenges to filet challenge for us and the Police Department because of the feeling towards the community of our profession. That overtime is extremely excessive. I mean, 19 of the 20 biggest overtime pay folks are in the Sheriffs Department. How many vacant positions do you have . How many vacant positions do we have . I want to say anywhere from 100. Chris bennett is telling me. I think were at about 830 right now and we should be at 950 so it making a little over us non. Is that across the board . Im sorry. To differentiate, supervisor, thats sworn. Thats actually what we need to have for sworn. [please stand by]. Looking to the budget to make sure they have enough staffing to make it happen. Have you done that . Or do you feel like you are saddled with it. Thank you. I would love to say it is not adequate. We do more with less. We are fortunate in the last budget cycle to have additions to the staff which have been very supportive of our Justice Reform project and collection of data. We have had professional staff added to our budget who have been very helpful in getting things done in a more efficient manner. We are looking to improve technology to do that further. For personnel it is for the Technology Upgrades that we would need to support the personnel that we received in the last budget cycle. How many are there . We have someone added to the it staff and chief of technology added. With the chief Technology People and the one personnel analyst that works for both safety and for the technology issues, i think that we are having that addition from three. So you feel like the whatt is your assessment of the progress at this time . Justice project itself . Yes. We are moving better than we have in the past. I am pledging my best, president. I think that we have moved forward more significantly than what i experienced in the past. That is a true statement. We are working better and more collaboratively. We have technology challenges. Recently i had a challenge. We are trying to improve access in jail. They are metal and concrete and hard to get wired for wifi. That is our challenge. We are working with the Justice Project to allow expanded video visitation and accessibility for people. That is the part which we didnt evewe didnteven vision last ye. The project itself and the things we hope to accomplish have been moving forward. I am encouraged by what we have done so far. We have been able to move forward on things. Thank you. Any other questions for the sheriff . Supervisor mandelman . Not at this time. Sheriff, the only thing i am going to ask you. Westoned charging for phone calls. How is that implementation going . That is more recent data that i am familiar with. In reviewing some things, we have a slight spike 33 the first day of implementation. It is around 30 or so, chair fewer. We have been able to handle with no problem. It is encouraging. We have been able to implement without an over load of the system. It will happen to microsoft with the team. We are able to do things and allow the increase with accessibility given the current situational allows us to control the phones a little more to make sure everybody has access to the phones. I think it is working out well. We have room to grow in terms of making sure there is more access for people and not impact the system significantly. Thank you very much. I am sorry to cut you off. I want to add that it has been wonderful because we have been approached by other jurisdictions in regard to an interest in implementing the same type of program. We have the boots on the ground staff talking to other staff at other places as far as new york who are interested in what we are doing here. That is great news. That is great. I couldnt help but notice your supplies and materials have increased even though your population has decreased. Can you talk more about that . I think part of it, if you are referencing the chart, part of it has to do with the slight increases we have had due to the covid challenges. We have had to do things differently. We had an increase in ppe supplies and things to make sure we continue to keep people safe. There may be reopening of things, we still have to operate in a covid protected environment which led to challenges for us. I also believe if i can look back for reference, slide no. 4, under the increase for trials an for materials and supplies. Is that what you are referencing . I see out of the general fund that it is 5 million for 2021. The mayor proposed 1 million. 6. 23 million for 2122, 6 million. There is an increase. I wonder because your population has been shrinking dramatically. I will address that. During the budget process we handed it over to the mayor and Controllers Office. There were technical adjustments made. There was a need to balance out our work order with other departments. One quick way to do it was to balance out the numbers by adding additional funds into materials and supplies during technical adjustments that is going to be moved out of there. Okay. How much technical adjustments to move out, do you know . On the order of 600,000, i believe. Seeing no more questions, thank you for joining us and being patient. Next is our Fire Department. Chief nicholson. Greetings. I am present. Good afternoon, chair fewer. At the chiefs presentation that chelsea sent to you. Supervisor. Thank you, chair fewer. Supervisor yee. I am looking for it. Supervisor mandelman. I am also looking. Chelsea, can you send that right now to them . I got it. Great. Supervisor yee, let us know when you have it. Supervisor yee, is it all right to start first . Yes. Chief nicholson, please start. Thank you, chair fewer. Again, president yee, supervisor and chief of department nicholson, Fire Department. I also with me the Deputy Director of finance and planning and ems chief in charge of ems6 in the paramedicine if you have any further questions. Thank you for the opportunity to present. We clearly understand the challenges with the pandemic related to the citys financial situation and our departments need to ensure we can meet our operational demands and Response Time parameters. If you go to the slide, should be the next slide with the piechart. Fire Department Budget overview. This is a high level overview of the budget. You can see the vast majority is dedicated to providing Front Line Emergency Fire Suppression and Emergency Services to the folks in San Francisco. This is to the dedicate dedicats on a daily basis. If you look at the chart we are predominantly funded by the general fund but make use of other sources of funding such as the airport and the port to support our operations. We also know that they have their own challenges. As you can see, our overall expenditure budget decrease is about 11. 5 million as compared to last year, and i will talk about that in a little bit. Let me mention in the piechart at the top. That is an enterprise section of our department. As you can imagine there is a big drop in fees there. There is an increase in work as it relates to slow streets and shared spaces. We have to look through an equity lens in terms of whether, you know, we have put someplace in the tenderloin and in terms of equity that is the highest call volume, densist part of the city, large vulnerable population and busiest corridor in the country for fire and ems. We want to get to people. That is a little piece about fire prevention. If you go to the next slide, this talks about our total f. T. E. S. Similar to the total expenditures, a large number are dedicated to the front line operations. We anticipate decrease in the next fiscal year due to changes in hiring that i will highlight in a bit. Right now we are at 1677 f. T. E. S. Fire Department Budget reducti reduction. Again, this shows brief overview every deductions, but the department does have a number of daily staffing requirements. Some through legislation, prop f, as you know, some through m. O. U. Agreements and some through Response Time mandates. We have limited budget terry flexibility outside of those requirements. We have prioritized preserving the Front Line Emergency services in spite of the economic situation. I did not want to impact our front line operations with this budget, and we can do that with the budget in front of you. Our call volume continues to rise. We will see that in a little bit, and while these cuts dont directly impact our capability of providing front line services, they do get into the infrastructure that is crucial in supporting those Emergency Services. Some of those like street replacement that we were going to renew this year really helped us to start to make progress on not having our vehicle in the shop so much and being able to use our front line vehicles because some of them are very, very old. In terms of that equipment, you know, those upgrades are going to be on hold for a bit. We are going to do our very best. We also made strides with highering initiatives and equipment plans, but we are still behind on so much of our infrastructure, stations and station conditions. To closeout last fiscal year on the top left is what we gave back at the end of the year. You can see it is mostly facilities and fleet, capital and equipment, and in the upcoming two year budget some of those equipment and capital cuts continue in addition to delaying the ht firefighter academy. Next slide. We will talk about equity and vulnerable populations. I came into this position one year ago. When i came in i saw and began to address certain inequities within the department. I brought an officer into my Administration Last year to address some of the issues of Racial Equity of being in place. That person was working on the initiative and is now our operational equity officer. We have a Racial Equity Action Committee that is all systems go right now and working hard on several different initiatives. What i can say is we do have this initiative, this partnership with San Francisco unified School District at Mission High School only right now, and we teach fire and ems classes to kids that want to sign up for them. They can get College Credit at city college. We would like to expand this throughout different parts of the city because it is really giving kids a taste of what they could do, what they could be. One of the things i also saw when i came in was in terms of equity within the department, in terms of promotional opportunity, and what i mean by that is you could have, you know, people taking outside classes, outside fire classes, outside of the Fire Department all of the time to better themselves. If you had a Single Person they could go to sacramento for five days and take a class. A single parent is not able to do that. What i want to do and what we are working on is bringing certain training in the department. Anybody who wants to promote has access to this training. It is a fair playing field. That is one of the things. We are starting with a leadership training coming up in the next couple months, and we are going to go from there. It is going to take a while to build it up. I know we can do it. Another thing i was looking at and supervisor walton is very familiar with this. Thank you for your leadership and support on this, supervisor walton. When i came in last year i met with director davis of hrc and i met with supervisor walton regarding what is called ems core. It is a program that is in the east bay, in la. It has been very successful. It is a program that is a Wraparound Program for at risk inner city kids. It takes them and gives them trauma counseling, life coach, stipend, assistance with literacy, math, and also gives them an e. M. T. Course. By the end they get to take the National Registry e. M. T. Test and over 83 of these kids pass the test. That is higher than the general population in the country. We actually have some of these young men in our department today. They are our present but also our future. Really good kids, and they just needed an opportunity. The problem that we had with ems core when i was working with director davis to fund it for this fall. We know what happened with covid so we have not been able to fund it yet. That is something that is very near and dear to me. It is something we could start pretty much in the fall. We just need the funding. I believe this would be a pipeline for the department. Let me point out, also, in terms of equity and race in our department. Our ems side of the department, ambulances. We have 200 people in that ems division only 14 are africanamerican. Clearly we are not doing something right. We need to go upstream and let folks know this is a possibility for them and support them all in working through this. Then there is also a lack of equity that i have seen in terms of hiring practices on the suppression side, on the fireside as well. There is a National Testing network ntn the folks have to take to even apply to the Fire Department. It is a national test. It is not local. We could have somebody from georgia on the list or somebody from texas or what have you. What we have seen it has an adverse impact on women and on black and africanamericans. We need to really take a good hard look at that and see if we can mako changes. When i came in i came in during the consent decree. There were fewer requirements than there are now, and we still got a ton of great people. I think actually having to get an e. M. T. License before you come to the Fire Department can be a burden for some folks. I have talked to some of the folks who have been in for 20 or 25 years. Many of them have said i never would have been able to get in the Fire Department if i had to have the e. M. T. License. I was working three jobs. That is something we really need to look at. As well as the california physical agility test and peoples access to that. Those are some of the things for recruitment. Once in, i am looking at smaller recruit classes to improve outcomes, more hands on and the like. We are not going to have a recruit class on the fireside for a little while. I am not talking about changes standards. We have high standards for a reason. We need to take a hard look at current practices. That is what we are doing right now while we are not hiring anybody. Next slide. Equity and vulnerable populations. Our call volume is on the left. It has grown in the last six years. Even this year when we had a big drop in the number of people in San Francisco in march, we still managed to run just about as many calls as we had last year. Basically, we provide service to everyone. Doesnt matter who you are, how poor or rich you are, smelly, whatever you are, it doesnt matter. We serve everyone. What i can tell you the chart on the right shows the makeup of individuals from the insurance perspective. That is to say 88 of the patients we treat fall into a vulnerable population of being elderly or low income. Only 11. 73 of folks have private insurance. Also, our statistics show that 35 to 40 of our medical calls are persons with unknown address. Many of these people use 911 and the hospital er as primary care service and as social services as well. It is neither efficient nor effective, and those needs and demappeds for service demands for service have increased significantly in recent years. With that changing environment, we adjust and adapt. That is something we do well. How we have adapted is the next slide. Ems6. I believe most of you know what that is. It is a Community Paramedic team that works with our frequent high call volume users, people that call numerous times and use up a lot of resources and dont get what they need. Ems6 is really successful in addressing our most vulnerable. Thank you to the Budget Committee for expanding that program for us with some funds last year. We have been able to do more but they are so good at what they do it is almost to their detriment. During covid everyone wanted a piece of them. Our ems6 folks staffed our testing sites and those with alcohol disorders which was wildly successful. The article was in the paper. They worked on getting people housed. In the upcoming budget, we were allocated 2 million to be part of the citys Crisis Response team, which is a joint effort with the department of Public Health. It would be a Community Paramedic with an advanced Healthcare Practitioner and peer support person who is either in recovery or has been homeless or the like and is trained to be a support person. That is the team to go out on the streets and address the behavioral and Mental Health issues that we are all too used to, unfortunately. As i said, 2 million in each year and it is the Crisis Response team is ems6 in terms of what they do. Right now we target people who are those high call volume users. This will allow us to target other folks. We will work with 311 and 911 to change how the calls come in. Instead of going to the police, many can come to the Crisis Response team. Next slide has some great photos on it or not so great. Just to point out in july we had six alarms. That has not happened in decades. I am proud of our members and how they worked in really challenging circumstances. As i said, ems6 is stretched thin, but it is our job and duty to take care of this city and the citizens. I am standing here having a good hair day. That is a bummer. I am here with the budget that i have. I have to ensure we can meet our operational demand. With that i thank you for your time and i would be happy to answer any questions or have mark or simon do the same. Thank you very much, chief. Any comments or questions for the chief . Supervisor mandelman . I do have a question. Hello, chief. Hello, supervisor. I wish i could see you. It is good to hear you. Back at you. I am excited about this expansion of the em6 but i have questions. My recollection is we did a significant in the em6 last year, right . We added six people to that team, yes. That was do you remember the amount of that . I dont. I can get it for you. Six people is not that much less than 2 million. I am thinking it is likely similar increase last year. Mark will comment on how many people we are looking at. Can you let the supervisor know how many people we are looking at for the Crisis Response team . Yes, for this we are looking at an additional f. T. E. s with corresponding backfill for vacancies and relief. Were you able to fully use the funding for the Crisis Response team that was put in last year. Yes. A year ago or year and a half ago, the way it was used the list of the highest users of 9 9911 and that is who they were 911. It is who they were trying to target. Photograprafael is on the list. I am going to see what is going on before we send out everybody else. Is that how it operated over the last year as well up to the complete reorientation of everything around the pandemic . Yes and no. Simon can speak to this in a moment. Yes, we always. This was a Pilot Program that was to address our most frequent users. If ems6 is on the street and see an issue, we have a duty to act. That is what we do. Simon can talk your ear off all day about it. That is pretty much what we did before covid. I was struck by the ability of the ems6. Are they captains . Those were paramedic rescue captains. To see, you know, out of the swirling chaos on some streets which person actually needed an intervention greater than others. That was very impressive to me. I am trying to understand about how big of a bite we are taking out of the proposal for 2 million expansion in your budget. Whether it is four, five six, you know how that will is that a small or large impact in the response . We already have a whole lot of different kinds of street Crisis Response from ems6 to mobile crisis. How will the world be different, how will San Francisco be different a year from now for having this additional level of Crisis Response . What is the goal we are aiming at . Well, hang on and let me just say. Ems6 is wildly successful and more so than other programs. That is why everybody wants a piece of it. Like ho how is that success measured by success in fewer 911 calls from participants, right . Yes and action disturbances. Simon that is a question for supervisor mandelman. Thank you for the question. You may have to ask the question again to make sure i read it completely. With the money allocated to us last year we added five fulltime f. T. E. S and ended up training 11 people to fill in on vacation relief. We did manage to get the training in a nick of time. In midmarch the pandemic was taking off. We have put almost everybody to work because of the pandemic. In addition to the core mission of working with frequent 911 users, which we continue to do well, we have them streaminged up with the Health Department with screening and testing for covid in the community. We have done shelterinplace and isolation and quarantine with the intent of keeping people out of the er unnecessarily. If there is someone with some minor symptoms that shelterinplace you would go do evaluation and make a determination if they needed to go to er or not and limit the spread of the virus. As the chief said, we have been costaffing the Sylvan Center and shelterinplace site for folks with severe alcohol use disorder with fantastic results. We managed a testing site in the tenderloin. We are doing recovery for the city. When someone had covid 19 or is under investigation, unfortunately, sometimes people dont want to go into core teend they are a spreader of the virus not only in the public bututtizing thbutut areutiliziny services. We have been working to locate those people and using our communication skills to coax them to going into isolation and quarantine. We are working with the Skilled Nursing facility or boarding care that has a shortage of staffing due to coronavirus. 80 loss of staffing for an assisted Living Center with 100 residents. Ems are first in and the leader and responsible for the first 12 houhours so that we can make sue that we are trying to prevent a large scale mci to bump our Emergency Rooms with patients. We want to treat residents in place, make sure they are safe and arrange for replacement staffing after 12 hours. A captain is on loan to the hsoc unit and Incident Commander for the resolution operations throughout the city. He is doing a great job. All of the personnel that we are thankful to you and the supervisors that gave us the money have been put to good use and we are doing a great job. This comes to street Crisis Response. What we see how things are different now and this is data from the San Francisco Police Department crisis intervention team. In 2019 there were 21,000 calls for service for people that the police calls were 800, 801, 5150, 2100 calls for service the Police Responded to. 800 is for a mentality disturbed person who is suicidal. They may need placed on involuntary rehold. We are looking to enlane both calls so Law Enforcement does not have to be the primary of a behavioral crisis. There is no other agency or team except for the police. To get to 21,000 calls i it is going to take more than what is projected in the budget. We dont want you to be misled to think we are going to go through all of these calls the Police Department is on. Hopefully we with get there eventually as we expansion. Data driven expansion. We want to prove we are doing a good job engaging these folks so the police dont have to but successfully connecting them to care. Part of this, one of the great reasons why we are teaming up with the department of Public Health. We want this as the entry point to coordinated care. Not a revolving door. We dont show up about somebody that seems to be under stress shouting, naked, we dont want to show up and leave them. We want to get them to the next destination. We are going to do this with the Health Department so they dont fall through the cracks. Logistically, there are three people on each team . Yes. Are they in ray red truck . Our pension we will get seven passenger hav vans with wheelchr ramps. Transportation is the biggest bear youbarrier to get people i. We have a Community Paramedic, Behavioral Health commission and pure support specialist. We they that will cover the basis. It is modeled on the model from eugene, oregon. That model does not have the pure support specialist. Our team will. We feel that we will be first of all, the Community Paramedic is a Public Safety civil servant. We will be age to make it the decision. Does somebody really have a medical emergency . Lets get them to a place to help them. This is a winning model. How big of a chunk . The Police Department has 1800 staff. This team is going to have 18 or so. How many of 21,000 calls do you think you might be able to pick up in the next year . With my math, i thought that if we had 6, 12 hour units for every 24 hour period seven days a week 20,000 calls. This is projecting to have two does hour units two 12 hour units then up to four 12 hour units in 24 hours seven days a week. Hopefully we will be able to demonstrate proof of concept and we can get as the years go by, year two or three, we get extra units out there to handle the entire volume of calls. He is smart. Are you done . I think so. I am excited about this program. Supervisor ronen and i have been looking at it on the Public Health side, and trying to figure out exactly how much coverage is going to be provided with what is anticipated. It sound goes like at least what the mayor is proposing is not 24 hour coverage. To be continued. Supervisor walton. We have six departments left. Chief, thank you so much. I want to say i am totally appreciative of our firefighters. I cant say how amazing our firefighters are. I have a question. We know about the work for disaster preparation. When is the last time you have received more resources or do they have enough resources . How does that work . Nert has gotten a cut in resources this year because of covid. They have not been able to do any classes, which are hands on. Mark, can you answer that . Absolutely. Nert is made of one coordinator position and some over time which is used for class training. Most of the hours are off hours, after hours. The department has not received a significant increase in the budget. We have tried to make use of other funding as well. They have received grants and state funding to improve resources. Through the city budget we have maintained a stable level over the years. We continue to try to increase firefighting opportunities in our schools, opportunity for the Fire Department. We are talking about opportunities to train. Think about either being on zoom or when we get back to some sense o ofsense of normalcy. It is important to be prepared for disaster. We were looking at doing ne rt for every high school student. It is on our list. Challenging times right now. We just had a pretty long hearing week before last or last week that included conversation of diversity in hiring in the Fire Department. We have seen recently some discrimination lawsuit filed against the department. There are discussions of ways to discuss the lack of diversity. Where in the budget is the diversity of the Fire Department to deal with the perceived discrimination. We have initiatives. What resources in the budget address these concerns and concerns ever of the rerootmentf diverse population. We are not looking pat hiring for the next two years. What i have the team doing now is Racial Equity officer and Action Committee really taking a deep dive many, many of the issues and others that you just brought up. What i want from them is recommendations moving forward of what we need to do. Those Racial Equity Action Committee folks do get paid for their time when they are not on 24 hour or what have you. Those are our current resources for this. If we were hiring this year, it would be a different story. Right now we need to pause and figure out what we are doing next because we have seen how these tests and requirements are not equitable. What are we going to do about it is the question i have posed. I know we are not doing hiring. Is there an increase in diversity in the ranks and promotions. That is more equitable. Promotion and i spoke a little bit to it. In terms of promotional opportunities, again, what we have seen people do in the past is go outside of the Fire Department to take state fire marshall classes or classes that can make them a better firefighter, employees, manager, now the single parent cant take whereas the Single Person can take the classes. We are working to build those classes up within the department. We do have resources going to that from the budget i am not sure if it is last year or this years budget. We are starting with leadership training in the department. The folks that get that class will train the rest of the department. I am ensuring we have really good diverse qualified people doing that training. Then we are going to bring other classes in to the department for people to take so everybody can take them. Chair fewer, i will wait for the next conversation. Thank you, supervisor walton. The chief is coming back next week. We will have less departments that will be going through. Supervisor yee then supervisor safai joined us on the phone. Supervisor yee starts then supervisor safai. Thank you. Thank you, chair fewer. I dont have a question. I want to compliment chief nicholson for her work. I think she has so many questions my colleagues are asking. She has some things in that direction. I always thought to diversify the Fire Department and the Police Department that you have to take people from San Francisco to show an interest in a pathway, and i thought you need to start young. The program that you mentioned or the presentation that didnt get funded is something that chair fewer that we should really look at to support anyway we can in that process. It is crucial that we get different people to be interested. We have people in the Fire Department and Police Department flying in and working and then flying back to las vegas. It doesnt support the community sense for our first responders. Anybody as busy as you are, you are one of the department persons i should notify. Thank you. Supervisor safai. Thank you, chair. This is very unorthodox. I cant see, i cant follow along. I know you are having technical difficulties. I appreciate you working me in. I got to hear some of the chiefs presentation. I heard the question asked by supervisor walton. I want to say to the chief thank you for your time and effort. I know this is difficult circumstances to be chief in this city. It sounds to me like from what i understand this equity officer is a new position, is that correct . Yes. I brought last year i wanted an officer to come from the field to work on projects just like this. I get it. My simple question is this a new position . It is, yes, we never had this before. This is a new position. What i heard in the hearing we had the other day that we did and i appreciate you participating in that. One of the things that was really telling to me was the strike in contrast between your department and the police and Sheriffs Department and what they are doing. What i heard represented from all of the groups were that they wanted a real commitment from this department to invest in diversity and recruitment. It sounds like you have created a position for equity officer. Is this equity officer going to work with your recruitment position and unit . Is it going to be a coordinated effort to really dive into diversity and recruitment . What i heard the other day was that division did not feel like it was getting the investment and support within the department. A lot of that preceded you. I want to preface this by saying i know you have only been there a short amount of time. This is the hand you are dealt with. I wanted to see what the plan is overall because we cant use the excuse of saying we are in economic crisis when we deal with a dramatic issue of the numbers of diversity going down consistently in your department. I want to hear an articulated plan how you will make this a stronger area of your department. Thank you, supervisor safai. This year, as you know, funds are tight. In this budget i needed to ensure that we can meet our operational demand. That was number one. We havent added any further positions. I would like to. If the chief was on, he could speak to the cord nation of the recruitment officer and the Racial Equity Action Committee and equity officer himself. Are you on . I am here, thank you. Iin response to your comments, the plan that the equity officer and the team working with is developing a process where under that umbrella, what resources do we need for the plan. We are just trying to make that plan happen not only with recruitment but Leadership Development and complete team of 20 people working on these aspects of the program. They are working for that. Okay. Thank you. Chief, i understand this is again we are in a recession and i know there is a lot of different competing interests. I understand there will be a followup meeting next week. Did the committee ask you to go back to look for areas in the current budget you could make an investment to diversity and recruitment, would you be able to do that . We can certainly have a look, supervisor. We can certainly have a look. What i did and i appreciate you saying that. What i did after our hearing, we dove in on the numbers. The largest fear that i have is that we are going to go into the economic recession, we are going into a hard budget time. If we are not investing in this division, if we are not having this you have a new position for equity now which is a good thing. Not accornot coordinatessed effn the department will get less and less diverse. I think promotions are an important part of the conversation. Recruitment is also through diversity lens. I would certainly really appreciate you giving it another opportunity to go back and look at your budget to see how we can continue this conversation next week. Thank you, supervisor safai. Thank you for your hard work. As supervisor president yes said. You go above and beyond to keep us informed and notified, and i appreciate all of your hard work. Thank you, my pleasure. Supervisor fewer wants to say thank you for your hard work and to your team and all firefighters in the city and county of San Francisco. Thank you for joining us today. I know we will see you back next week with more questions. Colleagues, i have been asked that we would need to recess in order to fix this glitch. Can you please give us instructions, madam clerk. Chair fewer. Yes, for the invitees on the list there should be a new meeting for the budget and Appropriations Committee on your teams calendar. We should jump to that meeting. As far as we are concerned here, we should recess for five minutes while we all join that other meeting. For those on Public Comment, stay on the line, you are not affected. We should be able to transition easily from there. We will reconvene from recess. You are asking us to get off this teams meeting to join a new one. We will reconvene at 3 35 at the new teams meeting. Thank you