Transcripts For SFGTV 20150131

For making people accountable in the department to fulfill the mandate of the law and it is difficult for people because of the way the city is set up to not catch massive housing fees trans yet and childcare fees because people say tenant improvement is not a conversion that is going to be a factor that will change the budget you cant not do valuations because evaluations and theres been massive cheating going on so its a current planning problem but its a current planning problem that effects the income to the city the assessments to the city and the money that should be paid to expand the housing and the transit in the city and Pay Attention to shadows as well but you have to do comply with law when people go to the ballot and put things on the ballot you cant say two hard two hard prop m and prop k are the law by the voters. Is there any additional Public Comment commissioner ronnie wasnt going to speak but john rams last comments rang a bell a few months ago when john was at the meeting of housing i pushed him on the idea that Small Projects and small i cant nearly call them developers were beinge. Held up because of the massive building thats going on in the city and so i would like to thank you, john for putting together and team that is handling Small Projects in an efficient manner those are the people that can ill afford to wait for two years for something to happen so thank you. At the. Next speaker. Hello, im judith again, i would comment that your the documents like the notice of preparation or the draft eir are posted electronically, however a lot of them have references to the underlying documents like the traffic study are the toxic study i guess as. Plan for the department that be useful for projects with strong public interests to scan the documents and may be make them available electronic there are electronic versions of most of the documents and matter of posting them its hard for a consumer of those documents to actually go to the Planning Department during Business Hours and pull the file they have critical information in terms of the you know how the eir was conducted so thank you. Is there any additional Public Comment okay Public Comment is closed commissioner moore. I want to thank the gentleman in our department to giving us us the reporting report its been give by him for a number of years it still leaves questions but i provided a structure of priorities where the waiting is and clear margin for us to support but also to interact with the Core Functions of the Department Im grateful for having that ability and like to suggest i suggested a few years ago and im concerned that the shortterm rental program because it is a new initiative would at least for a certain time require Additional Support in other words to be one hundred thousand percent effective given the great concerned by the city is entering into the program instead of starting slowly and making mistakes along the way id rather have a fully for the record if i had workforce sorry if this is a poor choice of works or words on indeed deliver the results by which the efficiency ultimately will be able to minimize staff i would strongly courage that the startup has slightly larger number of people available to support this program i think a lot of criticism will come from the public if this is not done properly and it is for that reason that i would strongly support a temporary further increase in the number of personnel in this category. Commissioner richards. I echo commissioner moores comments on the completeness and looking at the entirety of what going on in the department i very specific comments let you know i was a few minutes commissioner before i grew up and i have a couple of closing comments on the process that needs improvements i guess for mr. Jocelyn do you have project manager or so working on twentyfour hour 7. We have technical staff and specifically staff supporting the new efforts that john ram described the special projects team is that what youre referring to. There is so much input through our organization what i found and kind of become standard practices youve got people that look after processes fulltime versatile doing the work probably the people that accident the work got promoted we all do that some of the things i saw around the small promotions but this is really their job to maximize. Its an ongoing process were, of course fixing things and keith referred specifically to the opportunity that the Firm Provides us to deeply understand the efficiency and we went live this fall were starting to aggregate that data and talking internally how to best slice and dies and provided additional opportunity. I think my feedback would be in the have a very Large Organization of 75 people you might want to think about one person to manage the improvements versus having it part of other peoples jobs. We have done that to some degree we have a small group focusing on that. Thanks. Second question i think general comment on the overall assignment of the people aside from the comments on enforcement were lining up where you want to go we confirmed we want you to go thats good a number of couple questions the Zoning Administrator i guess the question do fines pay for the staff the 17 staff how where do the fines come from. They did fines one set the most successful for general advertising it this can be spent on the enforcement of general advertising and other penalties that go got Department Come back and support our positions but mr. Mar 10 can speak. Keith for the majority of the Code Enforcement staff working on the general Code Enforcement complaints and workload weve recover the cost of the staff through an overhead on what we charge for applications its a overhead function be, if you will. I remember 3, 4, 5 four or five years we were asking for 4 enforcement officers dedicated to the staff and i was the president of any Neighborhood Association it is hard to see 17 and a half thats the right thing to do but i echo commissioner moores concerns around the 3 additional staff for the shortterm rental program theres a learning curve you know a 10 thousand listing were going to have to go through here ill support a supplemental for the addition of the team to augment this if we dont do it the right way with the shortterm rental zero it was legal and people were doing it there wasnt a lot of enforcement and now we have actually a law in place we dont have this a volume it is filed by the comboofr behavior to legalize it or change one other quick question mr. Sanchez the percent of one hundred what were the complaints that are valid. The number of complaint that come in that represents a planning code i dont have the exact percentage it is quite high we often get complaint that are real violations and part of that is it that violation of the planning code or the building but a High Percentage theres not a lot of waste then great. A few more questions so the one time funding allocation of 3 million for the ftes for 2 1 2 years were bringing forward for the next years budget can you explain that is this something that was spent are we committed to the next 2 1 2 years how does that work. Keith Department Staff just to summarize in the current year the 20142015 e the board adapted 8 permanent positions over 2 1 2 years to continue to reduce the backlog of the applications we have staffed up i think if most not at all theres a total of 15 positions we have staffed up and that money will be spent over the course of the review. One other question i saw in one of the comments a 6 month lead time to get people up to speed once their hired and the department has vacancy do you have a policy around where you create a beverage you know you know your attrition rate is going to be hard so youre not behind the curve can you talk about what your philosophy is on that. Sure in general when we know persons are going to be leaving well start the h. R. Process to fill those positions as quickly as possible and theres a gap where the position a vacate for a number of months we assume that reduced the expenditure. Do you have to wait for a vacancy to put an application in i guess if youre attrition is 5 percent you keep a hiring machine going knowing that the attrition rate is going to continue. Tom Department Staff we have to follow the citys h. R. Rules if we know someone is going to retire through the citys process well submitted what they call an advance requisition if you leave tomorrow i dont know when our leaving ill file the position as far as the attrition the city has to have a vacancy audits h. R. Wont approve the acquisition. It creates a gap. It does. One other thing i guess i wanted to comment this was something ill think communicating back to president commissioner fong and commissioner president wu the performance is there i think in the veil of discretionary reform well approval the discretionary reform. Commissioner b. A. Can i make one comment were 4r507b9 the Performance Measures it depends on how you calculate that number it does, in fact, include our based on what the public says that number we would like to change that to murray the timeframe to getting the application to the staff. Thats a great idea. Two other comments from the Performance Measures is there my benchmarking been down compared to other cities what works for them. Keith Department Staff about three years ago we conducted sort of a more of on internal benchmark study we asked berkley and joes and their measurement we didnt get a whole lot of feedback we work closely with the Controllers Office and the Group Provides us with technical guidance and suggests we work on the ways to appropriately track our performance. One last closing comment ive asked a few developers if you wake up what would you want now were in the economy is there smlg something around the con absurdities they pay additional money to get their things begun faster they carry the risk and burden the financing potentially that kind of money will come back to the city to cover things but additional Affordable Housing or something that was the question i asked the developers do you have thoughts on that. Ill start keith with the Department Staff our current fee structure, if you will the current application fees doesnt have anything for connoisseurs so theres no expediting fees we have a few dedicated staff in the Environmental Division that work on public projects that is a position on the fiscal year budget so moving forward jump to the fronted of line, if you will no moving up to the front of cue. Theres two parts to that the answer the short query we essentially cant charge more than the time it takes to do the project the fees are based on average times so if it takes two years or one year having said that other departments allow for expedited reviews if over time is paid theres a whole slew of contracts with organized labor that limit our ability to do that we have quite limited ability to charge more for some projects thats not allowed. That question has come up a lot. Sure and unfortunately, were limited in our ability to do that. Very good job thank you. If i can make a comment commissioner richards we really wanted to try to expediting in terms of policy goals to expedite Affordable Housing projects and then public sites as you mentioned i think i would feel nervous in getting into a pay to play situation where developers have more money can get expected. Fair enough. Commissioner hillis. So kind of along the same lines we dont talk about the processing times from vendors or Small Projects applicant thats what i hear outside of the commission i think Small Projects team is great it doesnt look like were looking they look bleak from this performance measure id like to say you may want to say diverse you were measurement when they come to the commission we could be part of the problem we should continue the project sponsor explicit care until they actually gets approval or disapproval so were part of that potentially part of that problem too i guess why not allocate more resources if those numbers are as bad as they are. Thats a glazing number and whether or not it shows the increase primarily during the previous two fiscal years we have substantially increased the number of folks in planning and because of staff turnover a side note as the economy improves other jurisdictions are hiring now we have positions that are new and our attrition rate is over 10 percent that division it in the position of staffing up so based on the positions we feel were pretty full in that division were not go reflecting his group by filling a position we have and well be in better shape. Do you think those target are realistic i was going to you know 27 percent this year we need a third next year. Its a very good question one thing whether that target should be graduated so maybe 50 percent and up the next year to be realistic its hard to know with the types of projects keith mentioned the number of projects is not going up typically it requires more complex to review. The other thing the small budget teams is newly allotment half hired its functioning both addressing Small Projects immediately and taking projects out from the cue of the existing planners that are further freeing up their time its occurring in realtime as we speak were seeing a performance change that we can measure and as we fully buckle up that program we expect to see more and with the processes at this point we expect to be as have as full of roster as a percentage not a percentage as weve had at any time in the past. We need the resources we talk about the airbnb their which is great but when youre talking to people their biggest complaint nobody has looked at their file on a relatively small issue if we need resources we should put resources to it. Thats why were doubling grateful we had additional positions requested for the backlog from last years budget and the commission we were not ultimately forwarded to the board because of computing priorities so this year with the funding of the positions budgetary christmas came earlier because of the temporary nature of those positions we filled them immediately as opposed to the positions in this budget we wouldnt be pfeiffer up those positions those benefits will be coming much later. So hoping help is on the way. May i ask a followup question director ram you mentioned in the previous too cycles weve added permanent positions and this ongoing project team is an interesting innovation but the performance went down in the time you added the temporary staff today feel there you go more hope in the project team and adding the temporary staff seems like the natural solution but the metrics didnt go up. Part of project team is theyve been on board for 2 1 2 months part of it is the size and number of projects keeping it the same that the large projects take an awful lot of time we have to look at the small project and the team is a model for other parts of department specialized teams that specialize on only projects and staff was doing one thing for moreal standpoint was not great but we reinventing that we need to look at the performance awe paralyze the metrics so the metrics are being looked at correctly he appreciate those comments the numbers are not good we looked at them at face value. I hear a lot from developers small medium and large the complaint around the boogy think we do spend time talking about the best policies but the bread and butter of the department is getting those through. Just to add sarah jones we keep referring to the volume of applications were getty thought it might help to character one example typically 5 to 10 exemption applications per week this point were getting 5 to 10 per day and another piece of information we established a couple of smoul small environmental reviews and assigned out about 20 cases in our cue and got our cue down to 25 projects we now have 29 more we have not had a chance to input it is very hard to keep up would this type of volume. Commissioner johnson. Thank you very much first of all id like to thank commissioner richards and commissioner hillis and all the commissioners for bringing an expertise on this it is great to have a few minutes type of person looking at this stuff just one i have a quick couple of things i do want to add my 0. 02 on the expediteer connoisseur issue i agree with commissioner president wu the expediting should be a matter of policy of outside money but more to the point i think of we didnt care about that particular issue i dont think well realistically be able to expediting the service for a fee presuspends we have the capacity that exists and clearly we dont have any the backlog is crazy we organized staff for the Small Project Team won way to get projects throw in a reasonable timeframe and i dont think thats the case theres one or two vendors that can expedite their projects there are many project sponsors that will take advantage of the service from lots of perspectives its not an idea that makes sense timed for the Planning Department and i want to focus on a couple of higher level quality issues around the budget and plan the first one is the interagency coordination i was pleased to see called out some of the ftes for certain projects that are being aside but id like to understand what are the metrics around their work mraung how do we know those ftes are being successful only a dedicated body to go to meetings i dont see a lot in the work plan about the outcome so i want to ask director ram or anyone for a comment on that. To the best of my knowledge we dont have a specific performance measure. I guess the agency coordination. I dont know what the measure would be its not a quantify active i wouldnt want to measure it it would be off the charts i think one of the things the program i think theres a performance measure about the actual allocation of dollars and the timeframe we could think about that if you have a couple of ideas. I have. Couple that are not worth brainstorming but i want to bring it up and love to work on