26,000 a year and nobody can live on that in San Francisco. We cant truly lead independent lives until we have economic independence and meaningful jobs. I want to thank you, supervisor mar for scheduling this hearing today and also for starting this conversation about employing people with disabilities. And like you, i also want to thank jonathan lions for the legwork that he put into this effort to bring this issue to all of our attention. It was also exactly 1 year ago that you held this hearing. In your june 2014 hearing was a catalyst to reignite the conversation with the department of Human Resources. The department of Human Resources donna and ed and mickey and linda, they really deserve a lot of credit for all of the work that they have put into organizing this advisory committee. If you were to go through the reams of paper and email they have distributed they have been the glue that he would this together. I really want to thank them for that. I wanted to talk a little bit about the disability community. We have this saying nothing about us without us if you look at the makeup of the advisory committee. There is over 17 different advocacy organizations included and im not going to list them all but some of them. The arc sf, regional center, lighthouse for the blind, jbs, department of rehab, rams, and the San Francisco library which has really been one of our champions for rule 115 placement and so also have our academy of sciences been a real Success Story for hiring people. I know we are going to hear a lot from our community members. These are truly the experts, the organizations that have employment programs, the folks who really know how to hire people with disabilities and our conclusion, in our Committee Work has really been the city needs to use all the tools that it has at its disposal in rule 115 or access San Francisco is really one of those tools. Other tools include a better awareness and understanding of how reasonable accommodations need to be integrated into the entire employment process. As donna mentioned our primary efforts, our recommendations are really about outreach, recruitment, examinations, appointments and retention. Our committee came up with 30 recommendations. And we actually broke those up into shortterm things that we thought could be accomplished quickly as well as the longterm list. And donna, i think really focused on the larger list, but i wanted to focus really on the four issues. The first is that we designate a new position at Human Resources that is dedicated to hiring people with disabilities. I really appreciate the work that hr has done to working with this responsibility but having a Single Person responsible for this makes it a one stop shopping, allows for accountability and focus and the ability to really build that deep specialization. We look forward to working with the Human Resources as they structure this new position. The second recommends to focus on is hiring goals. Some of the testimony you heard is that we really dont know how many people are currently employed in the city and county of San Francisco who have disabilities and we dont know how many rule 115 placements there have been in the the last 30 years. By setting goals, its really, it gives us that opportunity to really establish a measurable outcome to these recommendations. I know that sometimes there are concerned when we see hiring goals listed as a concept but im sure we can navigate those goals. The third item is the survey to reach our goals. It gives us the opportunity to identify City Employees who might be interested in joining a group. The only way for us to measure success is to start with the baseline and the department has Human Resources i know shares some of the concerns to talk about confidentiality. I feel that our group can constructively address these concerns by making the survey completely volunteer and also anonymous and our office has offered to manage the survey to create a firewall so people dont feel their answers are connected to their job security. By identifying employees who are interested in joining Affinity Group to figure out how to make this process better. The last recommendation would be to continue the work of the committee and set up a mechanism to report back to members of the board of supervisors to seek your guidance and support for the next steps. I feel that we have really started this tidal wave, this tsunami of Community Activity with that list of longterm goals. I would argue that continuing to work with the committee might be the support of the recommendation that has come out because we need to act ifl change the culture and perceptions around hiring people with disability. We want people with disabilities to be viewed as an asset to an organization. I know with the people i work for in my office, we are over achievers and we try really hard and extremely loyal. Studies have shown that employees with disabilities are great employees and in my experience, they are the best. So we deserve a chance in the county and city of San Francisco. I have to say we are going to recess this meeting for a short period. Supervisor christensen will have to testify for the commission. Shell be right back. When we come back. Public comment will be opened and people will be allowed to speak. My apologies to everyone. Mr. Evans we are going to recess this meeting for thank you, everyone. The meeting is called back to order. Thank you to speedy Julie Christensen for getting back to us quickly. Now well open up for Public Comment and thank you very much to monica and Carla Johnson, director of the Mayors Office on disabilities. Now well open up for Public Comment and the first speaker is jonathan lions. Thank you very much for bringing awareness to this issue. Thank you, jonathan lions, president of the Democratic Club for people with disabilities. First of all to be totally clear i am a proud city and county employee speaking on my time. I wanted to bring sincere gratitude from our members because of the support from you supervisor mar and the entire board of supervisors have added back in this budget go around to fund a position to actually mobilize and really be the sphere head, the czar for getting support for people with disabilities. A lot has been touched on already and i wont rehash them because i dont have the time. Two of the biggest issues is we need to hire this position immediately. Not to take anything away from the work of the department of Human Resources. But this issue is big enough to warrant a full time position to really sphere head this issue. 8 out of 10 people with disabilities remain outside of the workforce and that warrants at least a full time position for a 30,000 workforce. We need data. The first day of Public Policy school they taught me, you cannot craft good Public Policy in the ab sence of data. I would encourage the city to step forward and find a way to compromise to get data to help us drive this process. In closing, i want to thank the board, i want to thank you in particular supervisor march as our members uniformly said you are the loudest and steady person we have in elected office. I want to thank you for all the work you have done and your colleagues and done an ed wong and special thanks to Carla Johnson for her leadership on this and i want to thank all of my colleagues on the advisory committee. Too many to mention today because i will inevitably forget one. I want to thank all of them for their tireless work. Many of them live day in and day out. I will go back to my job and that will have nothing to do with this. But these people have dedicated their lives to empowering people with disabilities. Thats really what our members believe. We believe in empowerment through employment and thats what we believe the city and board of supervisors will continue with moving forward. Thank you very much. Supervisor eric mar thank you and thank you to the fdr club as well iechl want to say for Public Comment we are going to limit speakers to 2 minutes, there is a softer buzzer that goes off. Some people need more than 2 minutes and Committee Members can ask that question at that time. I have already called a few names. Ann steiner, stephanie nichols, colleen stall eo, kerry goodwin. There is a number of speaker cards. People dont have to come up in that order. I have cards from ron from the department of Public Health and from the department alliance and denise from the mayors disability council. Anybody wishing to speak can come forward. People can just come forward when you can to speed up the testimony process. Thank you. Hi. Good afternoon. My name is ann steiner with the department for people with disabilities. I have been working in disability and employment almost all of my adult life. I have been a Service Provider and i have worked in Human Resources. I have been a trainer and consultant and working with specialized organizations. In 1981 and 82 i was working on a grant for the county of san mateo. Thanks to everybody. We are a great team, i will tell you. The grant was to start an optional alternative program for people with disabilities. In the after math of section 504 of the rehab act. Local government and State Government were required to have local committees of advocates that we have now that looked at the entity that we did for people with disabilities. For employment one of the things that San Francisco wanted to do. The advocates in San Francisco was they wanted to start their own version of a hiring program. Since i was coordinating that at the time i was asked in fact to come up and explain why the program was not special treatment. I see im already starting to see im running out of time. Can i ask you a question. The federal rehabilitation act section 504 required local committees to set up these programs. When did that mandate go away . They werent required to set up special programs. What they were required to do was within the input of the community evaluate everything that the entity did and come up with a self evaluation plan. Part of what came out of as a result of these committees was transition plan laying out architectural barriers needed to be removed. Various measures such as providing onsite sign Language Interpreters and we worked on a lot of those committees. For San Francisco, what was then rule 34 until the Charter Amendment that was one of the recommendations the community wanted at that point. During the 80s the San Francisco from my perspective was fairly active. You actually had a person in your Human Resources department, anita skondar who chaired a lot of projects and had a fairly good reputation for hiring people with disabilities. Unfortunately after the earthquake she didnt want to cross the bridge anymore and went to immediate Alameda County and sphere headed those programs. In my job placement i couldnt give anyone to give anyone of my tech students an internship. I would talk to people in hr here and it seemed like 115 was dead. It seemed like the competitive hiring process went no where. I had tons of candidates on your list who never got anywhere. For me to hear that you guys and you in particular supervisor mar was sphere heading this at some point again, i thought thank god we are not going to have to recreate 1982 and 2008 and to me the two most important things are the hiring of a point person and there is a lot of things i can talk about if you are interested. The ingredients that i would see and some of this is already mentioned but you want the point person who is a coordinator an have the responsibility to other nondisability related efforts and you want them to have the responsibility and you also want them to have the authority. That is my last point that i think is extremely important. Youve noticed, supervisor mar how things in local government tend to happen in a flurry and then kind of die off. Who knows exactly what is implemented or how successful those efforts were. Thank you, ms. Steiner. Next speaker, fiona. Fiona, Community Organizer at the independent resources center, San Francisco. Again, we wanted to echo the sentiments of my colleagues from the panel and Human Resources. To thank supervisor mar and the board of supervisors and the hr. We at independent Living Resource Center are in the business of getting people back to work. So we feel that one of the key aspects would be education to Community Based organizations so that we can that our consumers know about what Job Opportunities are available. Again like everyone else has said like jonathan and carla has echoed the importance of getting data so we have a good baseline for what we are measuring in terms of people who have disabilities. Again we also want to echo the sentiments of everybody that wants to continue the great work that our colleagues are doing on the panel. And we would like to thank the board of supervisors for their continued support on this very important issue. Thank you for organizing the september 25th and 26 disability unity festival and parade. Well get the information out. Thank you for being such a great organizer. Thank you. Thank you, next speaker . Thank you, supervisor mar. My name is Kate Williams and im with the center for the blind in San Francisco. I have been here 20 years of my life and i have always known that the city of San Francisco is the one innovator, the city that puts things on the map first and we follow through with them. Look at what we started here ten or 15 years ago that last month we were able to celebrate with. I think thats where we are now with our work with our disability communities. I think its one of the cities that leads the nation in how we work with our people in our workforce that are disabled. Its a real opportunity. Serving on this panel has been such a pleasure. I thank every single representative from your Service Supervisors from that committee came to that meeting and where we would talk about concepts and ideas and nothing would happen. I can tell under your leadership under your Hr Department with donna, ed, linda and with the Mayors Office on disability with carla and joanna, this has been different. We were able to look at issues and talk about concepts and then we came up with objectives and what i think is most important is we came up with actual action items. Whenever there are action items, there are going to be results. And i think those results are that in a few years from now we are going to look back at this time when we started our movement not to just create opportunities but for people with disabilities that we are able to appreciate their abilities and how they are going to be enriching the landscape of the work force in San Francisco. Just one more thing, please. I have to thank the generosity of jonathan lions for actually taking his personal time and getting out there and getting himself and sometimes others in front of your board of supervisors who are kind enough to listen to us and to pass the budget to have someone on your committee in the Hr Department. We are so very grateful for that. Thank you. Thank you, ms. Williams. Next speaker. Public speaker good afternoon supervisors, my name is Marty Goddard from the San Francisco public library. For rule 115 recruiting a Diverse Group in San Francisco is easy. For jobs that represent many racial and cultural groups are applicable. However we dont find many mriblts applicants with disabilities and im glad that San Francisco represents all kinds of diversity. I will say that San Francisco benefits where people are hired to share their experience. The sf Service Center always has one staff member with a disability. Having an employee who represents the Community Service has helped it to make it a Place Community members value and support. Right now a librarian and Technical Assistant who are deaf hired someone without finding a way and others through the hr process and many have k12 education and others have temperature ability for reading and math in their work and children come to project read. When we decided to hire a Community Outreach worker the man hired to do the work on a contract, he made it natural to have the job and the typical hr process was very difficult for him. Through rule 115 we brought a board a Successful Team member who really knows he understands him. Finally the library for the disabled our braillist who is an employee. There are a couple positions in the city. When our long time braillist retired there was no list of potential employees to survey for the vacant position. Through the rule 115 process we found a large pool of qualified applicants and the braillist we hired through this process is the valued member of the lgbt team. To conclude we have individuals that represent all the communities served by the library. Thank you very much for being here. Next speaker . My name is jose santa maria. Im actively looking for a job and i learned about the 115. One of the things i have experienced it seems there is a lack of knowledge about this rule within the city departments. I have not seen a job that has been designated as 115 on the Hr Department. The other thing is i dont know if there is any work thats been done in mainstreaming for instance of applying for the one rule 115. I had to go to hr to find out about it and then i was sent to the department of rehab and come back and give that certificate to hr. I dont see why hr couldnt do that themselves. The other thing if you could possibly not only make entry level positions as a rule 115. I think ms. Johnson touched about the average person with disabilities earns 20,000 or 26,000. We have added expenses as persons with disabilities and we need to have the at some point to work at a decent wages our able bodies. Thank you. Thank you, i know the task force is looking at the definition of severely disabled, but also the entry level versus expanding the different opportunities to those are some key issues that they are recommending to make hopefully changes and expand our policy. Thats one other thing about the certificate. Its certifies that i was severely disabled. Thank you for testifying. Next speaker . Public speaker hi. My name is stephanie. Im with the lighthouse for the blind. We are very lucky in San Francisco. We have a great city. Our employees should reflect that diversity. Rule 115 will enable the city to fillmore jobs quicker. Employees with disabilities tend to be extremely loyal to their employees. They tend to stay longer at a job. City jobs are career jobs. They offer competitive salaries. People with disabilities need to continue to advance entry level jobs are not appropriate for all of us. Some of us have skills that would but put this in us in management positions. This rule just looking at if you just, if this rule just applies to entry level jobs, its leaving out a huge part of the disabled workforce. All levels of government should be included. I would also like to thank the committee and also supervisor mar for continuing to look at all of this, but the employment of people with disabilities. I also am really glad that there is going to be someone in the Hr Department who will be watching out for our interest. I hope to see in the next year a lot more people with disabilities on this city payroll. Thank you. Thank you, next speaker. Ms. Goodwin . Public speaker hi, im Terry Goodwin with deaf buddies job program. I would like to say thank you, donna and ed for all of your work in facilitating the committee and supervisor mar for continuing to advocate for this key effort to increase jobs for people with disabilities in the city. I only have a few comments. I think the one thing that is really clear is that we need clear timelines for all the recommendations. We have a lot of recommendations. We need to get specific and move forward specifically related to the education piece. Educating the hiring managers about rule 115. I think we really need to make that connection. Also, im very excited that the position has been allocated. Thats terrific. I hope to have feedback related to that position particularly in light of the information weve gotten through best practices and what has worked for instance the Seattle Program has been very successful particularly with getting people with Developmental Disabilities hired with the Office Services position. Hopefully we can give some feedback towards the role of that position. Also as whats already been mentioned is making sure we establish placement goals so its really clear and that we can measure our success and last but not least one of the key things as i think we still need the mayor to do its challenge to the Department Head to keep the momentum going. And i also agree with all of the recommendations that have been made with carla and donna and jonathan as well. Thank you. Thank you. Scene