And preceding orders, declarations and directives. Commissioners will attend the meeting during videoconference or by telephone if the meeting fails and participate into the meeting to the same extent as if they were physically present. Public comment will be available on each item. We are streaming the number at the top of the screen. Each speaker will be allowed three minutes to speak. Comments are opportunities or opportunities to speak are available by calling 4156550001 and entering access code 146047 0765. One connected, darla start three to be added to the cue. Best practices dial star three to be added to the cue. Speak slowly and clearly and turn down any other devices. Alternatively you may submit Public Comment by email to the Commission Affairs officer through email. If you submit Public Comment via email, it will be forwarded to the commissioners and will be included as part of the official file. I will now call the role. Everyone [roll call] we have a quorum. Great, next agenda item, please. The next item is item number two, president s welcome. This item is for discussion. Hello, everybody. To everyone who came out tonight to this meeting on the commission on the environment, let me begin by sharing the best practices for this meeting. I will ask all of the members of the commission to you to yourself to minimize background noise. You will have to remember to unmute yourself to comment when its your turn to do so. You can also signify that you want to speak. You can raise your hand or you can use little hand raise thing in the right to signify when you want to comment. There is staff in the background who will be managing the technological functions during the meeting so we can switch from live presentation to whoever is speaking at the moment. We will ask everyone to be patient as they make this adjustment. This will be our third Virtual Commission meeting. Im excited to see we are getting more efficient and comfortable. We have returned to our regular schedule and we have an Upcoming Committee on october 21st. Our last meeting in july was memorable and we received more than 20 Public Comments. I think we can all agree the comments we received were taken to heart and we incorporated them into the letter that we signed on behalf of the commission and sent to the board of supervisors. The initial issue of natural gas could not be more timely because not only is it a second largest generator of a mission, but a huge threat to public safety. That connection to Climate Change and human health was on full display display last week. Now that the Electricity Supply is approaching zero emissions, eliminating natural gas is the next step forward for San Francisco. I am confident the board of supervisors will move this forward. We are seeing the effects of Climate Change all around us and now its time to act. Is there any Public Comment . Lets open a Public Comment for this item. Great. We will now open for Public Comment. I am going to share my screen with the comment information. If you would like to make a Public Comment please dial the phone number and follow the instructions on the screen. If you are on hold in the queue, please wait until its your turn to speak and we will just pause for a few seconds now to give everyone time to call in case anyone would like to make a comment on this item. It looks like we have one collar with their hand raised. You will need to unmute them. Great. Or you can make me host. I will unmute the collar and start my timer. Your time starts now. My name is susan with the plant society. Im a San Francisco resident and i appreciate everything the department is doing to help make us more Carbon Neutral and more resilient. The department of environment spearheaded the San Francisco biodiversity resolution and im hoping that will turn into [indiscernible] and every part of the city of San Francisco will plant only local native plants to support the biodiversity. With all the emphasis on carbon, please keep in mind we have additional disasters going on. Not just Climate Change. Not just the pandemic, but also biodiversity losses. There are hundreds of thousands of dead birds in new mexico, colorado and texas due to smoke from wildfires pushing them out of their migratory patterns. They died because they starved to death. We can see them, but we need to see them [indiscernible] please continue to push the rest of San Francisco to plant local San Francisco native plants. That concludes my comments. Thank you. Thank you for your comments. I am seeing no other collars in the queue. We will now close Public Comment on this item. Okay. Thank you. Hearing no more callers, Public Comment is closed. Next agenda item, please . The next item is item three. Approval of the minutes of the 2020 commission on the environment meeting. The explanatory document is the 2020 draft minutes and this item is for discussion and action. Commissioners, does anyone have any discussion on the draft minutes . All right. Can i please hear a motion . Public comment, sorry. Can i have a motion to approve the minutes . I move to approve. Is there a second . I second. Is there any Public Comment . We will now open for Public Comment. I will put the comment instructions back on the screen. If youd like to make a Public Comment, press star three if you want to be added to the queue. Please wait until it is your turn to speak. We will pause briefly for anyone to join the queue. It appears nobody has raised their hand. Thank you. In that case, we will close Public Comment on this item. Okay. Seeing no more Public Comment, please call the role. Yes. [roll call] the motion passes. Next item, please. The next item on our agenda is item four, general Public Comment. Members of the comment on the public may address matters which are not on the agenda. With that, we will open once again for Public Comment. I will put the instructions back on the screen. Remember to press star three if you would like to be added to the queue. If you are already on hold, please wait until its your turn to speak. We will pause once more for anyone who like to call in. Nobody has joined the queue. Thank you. Thanks. Next item, please. The next item is item five. Presentation on the citys Economic Recovery Task force and the role for the environment in recovery environment. This item is for discussion. Would you like to introduce the item . Thank you. Tonight, or this time of year marks about six months of shelter in place due to the covid19 pandemic. I think we all remember that day in midmarch when the hammer dropped and the mayor decided that we would be the first city to institute a shelter in place. I dont think any of us had any idea how long it would be and we would be here six months later still with no specific end in sight. And we wanted to paint a bit of a picture for you on the commission in terms of the reality of the state of our economy and what some of the discussions have been around how we are going to both respond to the pandemic and put in place policies and programs that would help us recover from the pandemic. Right now, 54 of our storefronts have been closed. We have about 193,000 unemployment claims. When you think about it city of 800,000, 900,000 people, that is a big number. And, of course, no one on this call or this meeting knows what the future holds, but we as a commission and we as a department want to make sure that whatever that future is is not businesses usual. It is better than ever before. So when we are back to whatever normal is, we are looking through the lens of green and true sustainability. What we want to offer tonight are three views of San Francisco today and some of the voices that are at the table and thinking about how to mark that future, and then we will open it up to questions and a discussion among the commission to get your thinking about how we weave in environment sustainability, equity, as well as a resilience into these discussions. First you will hear from ted egan. He is the chief economist and the Controllers Office and he will give us the reality check on where we are. Then we will hear from heather green who works with [indiscernible] they did a pretty phenomenal effort with the Economic Recovery Task force. That task force was called for by the mayor and mayor and the board of supervisors, but was led by four remarkable people. That San Francisco assessor recorder, the treasurer treasurer, the president and c. E. O. Of the chamber of commerce, and the executive director of the San Francisco labor council. They are at the point now where there is a final report being produced that reflects some pretty heavy lifting and thinking and heather is going to let you know what is probably in that report, as well as what other aspects of the task force. Finally we will end with more shes executive director on the Business Council and Climate Change. Her members are the largest employers of San Francisco. You will get a perspective from the business community, from the larger city family, as well as the businesses working together on the task force, as well as a Controllers Office. We hope that by the end of those three presentations that you will have an idea of where we are and where we might go and then we will open it up for questions after all three speakers are finished. With that, i am so grateful that the three of these people, these incredible professionals said yes to being with us tonight and we will kick it off with ted egan from the Controllers Office. Take it away. Thank you, debbi. Good afternoon, commissioners. Im the chief economist and the Controllers Office. If youre not familiar with my role in the city, i run the office of Economic Analysis in the Controllers Office. We do legislative review of new legislation and we write economic reports on legislation before the board. We also help with the city understanding how the economy is doing and we make number of presentations like this across the city. Im happy to have this opportunity to present to you today. What i will do is share with you the current statistics on how the city is doing and also a perspective on where we are in this particular economic moment. This is not just a Public Health crisis. We are six months into the shutdown. We are also six months into an severe economic recession that will be with us after the Public Health emergency is over. It is also no ordinary recession because of covid. Its really the interaction between those things and the issues. I think they will shape the city s recovery and one of its major priorities coming out. Katie, if you can show the first slide. In april, when the Economic Statistics came out, it became clear that the United States had lost 10 years of job growth in one month. This is the San FranciscoMetro Division equivalent of that. You could see we lost 175,000 jobs between march of a march and april of this year. That was really businesses being forced to shut down, people being laid off in that time. Despite the fact that we are still in a deep recession, we have had several months of Economic Growth since then. Since i put the slide together, last friday we got the august appointment statistics and they should moderate growth, and we are now at around 62,000 jobs were covered in the San Mateo County area after losing 175,000 we are roughly a third of the way back. Clearly the recovery, while steady for months and months, is not nearly as fast in a drop and it will take us some time, even if we have no further economic interactions and no further recurrence of the virus. That requires additional shutdowns. And we are still looking at a long recovery. Next slide, please. It is not simply that we lost jobs in San Francisco and our unemployment right went quickly from around 3 to about 12 . But the nature of this recession in San Francisco is we want certain types of jobs. And in particular, jobs that affect lowwage workers in the city. This is a chart of the Economic Situation in the city before the covid crisis. It shows the employment growth right of different injury industries in San Francisco for the five years through 2019, and that is the horizontal axis. The vertical axis is the wage. You can see that the higher up industries, the higher Wage Industries, information, tech activity, financial services, this is the professional services. They were both the highest wages sectors, but also the Fastest Growing sectors. On the other hand, its investors like retail trade, combination and Food Services, because of Age Education and health. And the primary source of employment for lowwage workers. Even before the covid crisis, we had this unbalanced pattern of growth in the city in which there were far more Job Opportunities for high skilled workers and low skilled workers. If we move onto the next page, we can see the covid crisis has exacerbated this. On this chart, the horizontal axis as a percentage of jobs that was lost between february and july of this year. The vertical axis is the same. The high wage industry lost between five to 10 of their jobs. The tech sector lost up to 10 . Some of the median wages sectors are doing job are doing fine. Construction is basically where it was before. Where you really see the loss is in lowwage sectors like the accommodation and Food Services, arts and entertainment and recreation services, and other services which include a lot of neighborhood services. I would put retail trade too onto as a category. These are low Wage Industries infant San Francisco that have been hit the hardest after already having the weakest job recovery in the last five years. It has exacerbated it. Next slide, please. Here is an example of this from not efficient not official government data. It is showing the annual change of the reservations. They are showing it in San Francisco and four other west coast cities. You can see late february and early march. Things were slowing down and then by the 3rd week of march, different cities have recovered two different extents. Of these cities, San Franciscos Restaurant Industry is doing the worst, at least by the standards of having seated desks. And all of all the cities that we have a tract on this, [indiscernible] that is partly due to our continuing limitation of indoor restaurant dining. Next slide, please. Another data source that we are looking at is data from mastercard, which is tracking Small Businesses in particular that use mastercard to process transactions. They work on a business by business basis and they know who was doing transactions and who is not. This is a map showing the percentage of accounts that were not showing any transactions in the last couple of weeks of july unfortunately, we dont have updated data on this. Were trying to get this from a thirdparty source. Its showing you that when things were quite bad in the middle of july, exactly the extent of the shutdown, at least a temporary shutdown across the city. Heavily concentrated. Next slide. We would also like to talk about transportation because i think transportation and the willingness to use certain types of transportation is going to shape the recession and recovery in a way they never have. This is the information from the county. It shows the average freeway speed in San Francisco in rush hour. We have seen big changes in that since the shutdown. Before the shutdown, the average rushhour in the afternoon in San Francisco and highway speed was about 25 miles an hour. That quickly went up to about 60 after the shutdown. As econ really economy gradually reopens, the congestion comes back. By last week, it was only about 10 faster than it was the week of the shutdown. If you had the experience driving, you may sometimes ask yourself, what shutdowns do we still have . It does seem that autom