Sorry. Here. Commissioner neumann, here. Commissioner williams, here. Commissioner sommer is excused and we have a quorum. Next we have the land acknowledgment. The Building Inspection Commission we acknowledge that we are on the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramaytush Ohlone who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco peninsula. As the indigenous stewards of this land and in accordance with their traditions, the Ramaytush Ohlone have never ceded, lost nor forgotten their responsibilities as the caretakers of this place, as well as for all peoples who reside in their traditional territory. As guests, we recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland. We wish to pay our respects by acknowledging the ancestors and relatives of the ramaytush community and by affirming their sovereign rights as first peoples. Thank you. Next, members of the public who may be listening, the call in number is 4156550001. The access code is 26623406799893. To raise your hand press star 3 and for the Webex Webinar password is 0515. Should i do opening remarks . Sorry . Should i do opening remarks . Yes. Next is item 2, president s opening remarks. Good morning everybody. I will keep my remarks short, but i want to congratulate the director and the staff leadership on a very successful all hands meeting that took place this month and thank you for the invitation. It is always a joy to be able to be with the entire staff of dbi and i appreciated the format and information and the celebration of the great work our staff does so thank you very much for that and congratulations. Today we are going to be focusing on legislation and Important Role we have as the body that recommends legislation to the board of supervisors, and i wanted to take a point of personal privilege just to say, this is mostly if you see me acting odd, i dont want to be misinterpreted. My fath er in law passed away friday so if i seem different then i usually do, i just want to give you that context. It may notyeah. That is probably what is going on. Thank you and without firth r ado, well go to Public Comment. Thank you. Is there any Public Comment on the president s opening remarks . Seeing none, item 3, general Public Comment. Take Public Comment on the jurisdiction not part of this agenda. Handouts and then im go toog use the computer. Good morning. Jerry dratler [indiscernible] one dollar administrative Building Permits. The permits are over the counter. Dbi issued approximately 4700 of these permits in 2022 and 2023. Dbi is fully louded hourly cast for inspectors and plan checkers exceeds 400 an hour. If dbi were to charge 500 for each administrative permit dbi revenue would increase from 4742 to 2. 4 million. This increase could fund 50 percent of the annual grants for the sro collaborative program. Approximately 1500 or 32 percent of the admin permits were issued to final other Building Permits, so what i have seen, say there is another Building Permit, the original permit and they dont have a special inspection, and what happens then is, somebody goes and gets a admin permit and gets it finaled because they couldnt final the original permit. This practice is rife with abuse and should be more tightly controlled. I will review two examples hold on one second. Having a little technical difficulty here. So, my first example is inspector donnelly, finaled 6 expired permits at his home with two one dollar admin permits. What makes these permits really unique, there are four of them are santos, former bic president andcurrently residing in federal prison. This shouldnt happen. John pollard was add d to the dbi expanded Compliance Control Program last month along with Herald Howell his Structural Engineering at his Structural Engineering company. Well, guess what . In 2023, dbi issued 11 one dollar permits to john pollard to final other permits. Now, you can see 26 parnassus avenue is one of the 20 pollard permits on the ecc tracking list. So, in conclusion, next stepsbic has two choices. Work with dbi Senior Management to establish controls over the issuance of one dollar admin permits or ignore the problem. Im interested observing which option the bic chooses. Thank you. Thank you. Is there additional Public Comment . I have handouts. Okay. Dbi has a hostile and toxic work environment. Three building inspectors out of 30 committed suicide in 5 years and all three complained about projects they were pressureed by management to sign off on non code compliant projects please limitbe careful with your comments. Okay. Go ahead. Okay. The first person was named in my deposition, Dennis Richard online, Mission Local. 571 myra way assigned to referenced the article in the chronicle dated june 25, 2021 by jk denene, titled whistle blower report details how one employerreferenced the complaint number by the district inspector, 20016964 01. Called in the office along with [indiscernible] and excoriated by these three mangens. I complained to oreardon prior to his suicide before and unresponded emails and asked to stop going after berrios. The response to me was after finished going after bariose im going after you next. I dont seed the suicide is fully investigated. I received no response in the emails. I had a similar scenario a rearden called me into his office with two others, Senior Inspectors. Audio recording i told them i would be recording this and that meeting it was a cut and fill condition where it was supposed tothe foundation was supposed to be on non compacted soil and put on top of disturbed soil. The Senior Inspector went out the next business day to sign off the foundation. Reference 3418, 26th street Senior Inspector oreardon accepts a letter from santos for lack of required building inspection. 533 was a cut and fill condition. This creates a potential lawsuit for the city if the building goes down the hill. The second inspector committed suicide was named on this project. Assigned to this project and he complained to me about this as well as illegal demolition. The third person called hours to say goodbye before he successfully committed his second attempt at suicide. I dont feel dbi adheres to rule to prepresent suicide. I have spoken to bic before about suicide. What action will bic take. Please insure the Compliance Officer receives a copy of the documents i provided. Thank you. Any additional Public Comment in person or remotely . Seeing none, item 4, discussion and possible action regarding board of supervisor ordinance file 240297. Amending the Building Code to extend the deadlines for existing buildings with a place of public accommodation to comply with the requirement to have all primary entries and paths of travel into the building accessible to persons with disabilities or to receive a city determination of equivalent facilitation, technical infeasibility, or unreasonable hardship; to extend the period for granting extensions from those deadlines; and to extend the time for the department of Building Inspections report to the board of supervisors regarding the Disability Access improvement program. I think we have a presentation. Good morning commissioners. Patrick hanen here today to ask that youto make a recommendation of approval of this item. The board of supervisor s. The Accessible Business Entrance Program established in 2016. The deadlines extended in 2021 too allow for a additional compliance. This legislation would further extend the deadlines for the submission of check list by thend of this year, december 31, the file application for the Building Permit by the end of the year and required the Building Permit by september 29, 2025. Throughout the program we had three compliance deadlines. The first is submit the check list and second apply for the Building Permit to address the items identified and third, complete the required work and this extends the deadline frz all three of those requirements. There are 23. 504 buildings in the program. The program has been tremendously successful. A 70 percent compliance rate, 16. 505 buildings have come into compliance since the program began. That is a lot. There are still however 30 percent of the building non compliant, just under 7 thousand buildings. To be clear, 2800 of those or more then 2800 they submitted the check list and now need to obtain the Building Permit and complete the work. There are 4128 folks who havent responded at all. There are 571 indicated they have a technical infeasibility and 417 a unreasonable hardship, so there are situations where the person can apply and say hey, either because of the way my building is laid out or my own condition, we cant make these changes and under that circumstance they apply for a equivalency that provides for the Service Required to make the building accessible, but may not be the full upgrade that the Building Code would immediately prescribe. We have a web page with a online forum and sent 10 rounds of letters and postcards in all 4 lajs wjs. The first mail sg 10 thousand folks and the last, 6900 indicating the compliance progress bethe program. We published a op ed and held [indiscernible] arts alliance. Events in chinatown and merchants walks with support and coordination with office of Small Business. The program is presented at the Small Business commission. The code advisory has heard this item and met may 8, 2024 andue man ms. Ly recommendthe public works and office of Small Business to make sure people know about the new deadlines and about the program in general. The legislation pass the first thing well do is get a letter out letting people know the deadlines are extended and remind of compliance duty. Ill turn it over to speak more about the legislation. Hello commissioners. My name is calvin ho, legislative aid for supervisor mandelman. We received outreach from Small Business owners with various issues with the program so we have been working with office of Small Business, dbi, dpw and mayor office on disability to try to figure out ways we can amend the program. This gives us more time to work with these departments and also our Small Business partners and Disability Community in order to find a way forward that works for all of us. Any questions for us . Sorry. Patrick, thank you so much for the update. That is exciting, 70 percent compliance, which is i think pretty good. Im fully in support of moving extending the deadline. I just want to kind of add to our Advisory Committee that, Public Outreach is super important to get these last rounds in, and i think what is happening is, even myself, i have been working on this for years. I have been giving out wrong information from time to time. Just recently i found out there were exemptions for hardships. We never knew that a lot of these Property Owners were going to pass on to a Small Business owner, which is just not realistic. Are there workarounds and happens to be there are workarounds and i didnt know that. I want to make sure and really encourage the outreach on this to the last of this 30 percent. Kind of have a feeling i know where those 30 percents are at and i appreciate all of this and been a long time, looking forward to the entire city coming into compliance in entry pp ways so thank you and really encourage the outreach part and that could be also on the Small Business commission as well. Thank you and thank you mr. Ho. Thank you for the feedback commissioner. One reason we do support extending the deadline is we dont want to move into enforcement. The Public Outreach is the critical piece to make sure the people are aware of their responsibility, aware of the deadline s and given the opportunity to respond. Appreciate your observation about perhaps needing to emphasize the technical infeasibility and Financial Hardship option if people feel that is a situation they find themselves in. We want to make sure they are able to exercise that direction. I may be alone on this but this type of legislation is difficult for me to come to terms with, because there is a reason why the original legislation was passed to make buildings accessible. So, well extend the deadlines because i suspect there are disputes between the owners. The Small Business owners are asked to bear the burden of the expense that and there is a dispute maybe a legal dispute, but what i havent heard addressed and why i have a problem with it, what about the people with disabilities who dont have access to these buildings . I dont see anything in the legislation that does anything to address the reason behind the legislation. It seems they are just going to be left out without accessibility to these buildings again. The department has done everything itappears the department has done everything it can to get these buildings in compliance. There is not more withthe outreach can continue, but there is a hope that this time it will be more effective. It may well be, but thats still going to delay in accessibility for people with disabilities in San Francisco, so if there is any way to address that, i like to hear it and thats just my concern with this is, they seem to be the losers in this. You are absolutely right. I want to remind, 70 percent of the building in the program have come into compliance, so it has been a successful program. The second thing i want to note is between the time the legislation was passed in 2016, and when the first deadline extension occurred, we experienced covid and we had a number of Small Businesses shut down and a lot of businesses particularly buildings part of the program they were hit hard so we want to be mindful that interruption that occurred and ongoing economic recovery that happens. You are also rights, at some point we will have to move into enforcement. What we saw [indiscernible] the final group of people, it was enforcement that gets them over the line and bring them into compliance. And i think we have done good with outreach. 10 postcard, four different languages at consistent cadence is good outreach. We track the impact of the outreach is we able to tick down every time we do another round of letters we are seeing compliance occur, and so i think that is why we feel the extension of the deadline is responsible and continue to bring people into compliance without coming down so harshly if we have to move into enforcement. That being said, the program isnt going away. The legislation is focused extended the deadlines because we share your goal to make sure people can disabilities a able to access businesses the same way ablebodied individuals are able to. The 30 percent left, none is exempt from a ada lawsuit . Any particular person with a disability or accessibility issue wanted to enter any of the buildings in the 30 percent category, they can file a discriminatory or ada lawsuit against that building, correct . It is important the program is just for the business entrance. Whereas, the american with disability act is the entire business. This is to get people in the building is the focus of the program to make sure entrances are accessibility. We dont view it as a way of making sure people are in compliance with ada. That is the federal government does that, while our role with this is to make sure they are in compliance with that accessible business entrance element. Of the 3,000 buildings, that are remaining, if they havent made changes and those changes were found to be notwant in compliance with ada they are vulnerable for legal action. I want to note, of those 6 thousand, 7 thousand properties, 2800 submitted the check list so they know what they need to do, it is a question do i have money to do this now and in a place to do it. Giving them more time hopefully will give the folks to come into compliance, but this isnt a shield from ada and think we should be clear, while it makes those entrances accessibility compliance standards, the business itself still has to comply with ada. Thank you. You answered a lot of questions. I want to echo commissioner williams statement. I appreciate the thoughtfulness and are consideration for Small Businesses to make sure they have enough time and they can financially manage this at this time, especially coming out of the pandemic as mentioned, and there is a real consideration to make for the Disability Community to make sure there is going to be some level of enforcement at some time to make sure they can access these businesses instead of continued delay. Interested to seeyou said your office is looking into finding solutions in the interim during the extension so nrt intered to see what that looks like but caution continue