Transcripts For SFGTV Government Access Programming 20240713

Premarketing opportunity and could receive downtown payment assistance towards either a for sale market rate unit or a for sail affordable unit from from tida through the transitional housing rules and regulations. The replacement units to be provided under the housing rules and regulations are to be provided in the buildings developed by tida and the city within 100 affordable, otherwise 100 affordable buildings. Because the initial occupants, if someone is accepting a new rental unit and dont otherwise meet the income requirements for affordable unit, we cannot construct those units using affordable tax credits and some specifics for Affordable Housing, which means we need to come up with roughly an additional 300,000 in local resources to come up with that. But the units are deed restricted and come up upon turnover. The cost to replace the original unit considered the original the bedroom size to replace the original unit considered the original household and bedroom size and affordable income and program requirements. So the what were proposing now for post d. D. A. Residents who have moved to the island since 2011, the resolution you have before you today urges us to expand the relocation and transition benefits available for post d. D. A. Households. Again, just as background, under the transitional housing rules and regulations, currently, theyre provided only with advisory services, and leases have disclosed that the housing is interim and without relocation benefits. And at this time, we dont anticipate any of the existing housing needing to be vacated for the purposes of development within the next five years, and it being ten or more years before we need to ask people to permanently vacate units within the villages inventory without offering them replacement units. And the image in the lower right hand of the screen right now illustrates our existing residential neighborhood overlaid with the future Street Network of the development. So you can see on what is the eastern side of the existing residential neighborhood, that doesnt underlie future development site, but it underlies future open spaces. So as development requires the properties on the western or Southern Side of the diagram to be vacated, we should have vacancies on the north or eastern side of the neighborhood that we can relocate people into, and its not until the last phases of the Development Program that we would need to finish the process of vacating the Historical Navy housing. So in consultation with the City Attorneys Office and the Mayors Office of housing and Community Development and as proposed any resolution, any new benefit would be provided to a datedefined population. For example, residency established after 2011 but prior to january 2020. And this would mean inevitably, even if we dont do any future leasing of future units, that in the process of roommates moving out and roommates moving in, we will have people whose residency is established after that defined window and wont be established in the procedures we implement and propose to implement in the coming weeks. So what we are currently proposing is including all post d. D. A. Residents in the premarketing opportunities for market rate housing. This requires developer concurrence under the d. D. A. , but thats a concurrence that theyve indicated they would give. And it would prioritize income qualifying post d. D. A. Income residents in newly constructed units. So as each unit of Affordable Housing becomes available, we would go through the process of filling those, and any income qualifying pred. D. A. Hows holds could be placed into them followed by income qualifying post d. D. A. Residents before going to the to the mohcds larger preference framework for the filling of new affordable units. Were proposing that these benefits extended to post d. D. A. Residents be suborted to post d. D. A. Residents, meaning we would seek to place all income qualifying post d. D. A. Residents and then all post d. D. A. Residents. These could be made with tida board approval. Unlike the transitional housing rules and regulations, these changes would not extend the offer of in lieu payment benefits to post d. D. A. Residents and would not offer replacement units to post d. D. A. Residents unless they meet the income qualification requirements for Affordable Housing. And it also would not extend to commercial laeaseholders. We do have a small number of residential leases that are with entities for commercial housing and under the original thr rs, we would propose to leave that the same. So going forward, we plan our november meeting of the Treasure Island Development Authority board will be held on the island in the evening. We plan to have a discussion of those proposed changes at that meeting. Also as directed by the resolution, we will be developing an outreach plan. Weve been engaged with the predisposition and Development Agreement residents for the last 1. 5 years, preparing them for upcoming housing opportunities, and then bring these proposed changes for consideration to the tida board in december and then also expand our work with the developer in preparation for the initial premarketing windows which we expect to occur in 2020, and with that, ill take any questions you may have. Chair peskin supervisor haney . Supervisor haney i dont know if theres Public Comment do you want me to ask my questions now . Chair peskin let me see. Are there any members of the public who would like to testify on item number 10 . Seeing number, Public Comment is closed. [gavel]. Supervisor haney okay. I have a number of questions, and i appreciate your willingness to make sure we support these residents. So the first is about how we define this population. I see that residency established after 2011 but prior to january 2020, i have some concern about that because we are still potentially you know, somebody moves in i guess, are folks still moving in after january 2020, and would we get to a point where if somebody was still living there for seven or eight years and has no benefits . We we dont have any plans for the villages to continue entering into new leases. However, theres no restriction on someone adding a roommate, and so through the process of roommates moving in and out of units, we anticipate that there will be some future population that, through the process of being added to a an existing lease, could not qualify for these benefits in the future. Supervisor haney and so again, my concern would be there that somebody may be living there for you said ten years from now until theyre even asked to leave from the villages. So if someone moved in because of a roommate situation in january 2020 and then, they could be there for ten years and have no still no access to any sort of benefits at all. Potentially, yes. Supervisor haney okay. Well, thats something i haddy like to talk further about. You know, maybe some way of in the future setting a certain because i feel like like there will be a board i dont want to have to come back in 2020 for this new set of people that are there. For anyone whos whos living there for some amount of time, having some level of priority so that theyre not when the development actually starts so that theyre not left kind of hanging out to dry there is a lot of what my intention is here. The other the other couple pieces of this, so prioritize income qualifying. Can you qualify what income qualifying means and also what the prioritize means . We have a you know, it says explicitly that they wouldnt have a certificate of preference. Ive read that in one of the reports. So what exactly is the priority that they have, and over and above whom, and do we have a sense that theyll be actually able to access the housing . Yeah. So im trying to supervisor haney so the first is what does income qualifying mean . So it will depend upon the individual development. So this would also give people the opportunity to pursue inclusionary affordable unit does. So the typical affordable units is 80 to 120 of area Median Income. Most of the city developed units will be 40 to 60 of area Median Income although the Funding Sources utilized, could be as high as 80 of area Median Income. So i dont have the presize numbers, but i believe the precise numbers, but i believe the current numbers for a family of four, area Median Income is on the order of 120,000 a year. So a family earning 50 of area Median Income would be 60,000 roughly for a family of four. But again, family earning 120 of area Median Income, pursuing a unit, that could be as high as 140,000. Supervisor haney got it. Im just wondering, for example, in the villages, based on what the rent is now do we have a sense of kind of what percentage of the post d. D. A. Households would income qualify . We as i mentioned for the last 1. 5 years, weve been engaged in a lot of dialogue with our residents that have been there since prior to 201, and we have good information on population of their household incomes. I think theres reason to believe that our post d. D. A. Residents are from a similar demographic. If thats correct, then as much as 40 or more of current households would qualify for Affordable Housing. Supervisor haney got it. The other thing is around this so because of this, then, wed also have wed have to have a process to collect information from our part of our outreach process would be to engage people in the dialogue, educate them on what the requirements are and see if they potentially fit in the income brackets that could pursue these opportunities. Supervisor haney got it. So i have some questions about the no extension to in lieu benefits of post d. D. A. Residents. My understanding and im sort of thinking about what it would be like, you know, for a family or for a person or whoever whos been living on the island for potentially up to this. 18 yeapoint, 18 years maybe because they dont income qualify or arent able to get into one of the Housing Units because they dont win the lottery or what, that they would be asked to leave with no benefit given to them at all, that seems to be complete out of place in how we deal with people that are evicted through no fault of their own. If you are evicted because of an owner move in, in the city and county of San Francisco, you have some relocation benefits that are given to you. And essentially what we are doing here is an owner move in. Were saying theres some sort of other owner redevelopment use for this, and through no fault of their own, they are being evicted. Now i recognize that they signed leases at some point saying that they werent necessarily entitled to the benefits, but i do think that its worth considering that if somebodys post d. D. A. , and they still live where they are when their unit is being demolished and redeveloped, and they cant access housing on the island, that there should be some benefits provided to that household. So it may be some very small number. I recognize that pred. D. A. Households can take the inlieu benefit at any time. They sort of own that benefit. They dont have to wait for the and i understand why thats kind of a different benefit than you might provide post d. D. A. But if were evicting someone and theyre not able to access housing, and were demolishing their unit, generally, in best practices, and what weve extended to most everyone we can here in San Francisco and to have some relocation benefits for that person or family. Just on the subject of the inlieu benefit as it applies to the pred. D. A. Households, it was anticipated at the time that the transitional housing rules and regulations and actually incorporated into the transitional housing rules and regulations based on comment from existing residents that if it got to be in the range of seven to eight years post entitlement and households had not been offered a replacement unit yet, that we would originally, the inlieu payment was to be offered at the time households were asked to move and not available otherwise. But in the discussion and the preparation of the transitional housing rules and regulations, based on resident concerns that Development Might take some time to develop to occur, provisions were made to offer an early inlieu payment to households after some seven to eight years if they had not yet been offered a replacement unit. And so this last may, we opened that opportunity up to the the existing population. And i believe at this point, seven households have taken advantage of that opportunity. As far as the postd. D. A. Households, its something we could take under evaluation. The i think that wouldg id need to consult with the city, but i think it would be more of an amendment of the housing rules and regulations through the board because were extending a financial benefit, but we can continue that dialogue. Supervisor haney okay. Yeah, because i think in the same sense, whether whether an inlieu benefit payment makes sense for postd. D. A. Is one part of the question which may be a more extensive allocation, but for the postd. D. A. Folks who are actually qualified for our priority here, however we define it, at the point through which they are no fault evicted, the city should do just as we ask in an owner evict or anything else, provide some relocation to any person or household, regardless of their income. Now we have a little time to figure that out, ten years or something, but it does seem like something we have a responsibility to do. Did you answer the question about the priority . Yeah. Our transitional housing rules and regulations as they exist today create a contractual obligation for the Treasure Island Development Authority to offer replacement housing to the pred. D. A. Residents. So that obligation creates a priority. Its a priority that moves those pred. D. A. Units to the top of the list of those constructed on Treasure Island. So this proposal to the thr rs would apply to the contractual references supervisor haney the regular references that mohcd has. Great. Got it. Thank you. Chair peskin supervisor safai . Supervisor safai yeah. Just to follow up on a couple of questions that supervisor haney had. This does somewhat i dont want to overstate it, but it does somewhat trouble me, as well. If what im reading, supply transition benefits to households before the d. D. A. Was adopted in 2011. Were in 2019. Thats eight years. So how many residents and how many households are post 2011 . We have a total of 650 households on the island actually, its around 630. 250 of those are lowincome households. So of the remaining 350, 110 are exclusively pred. D. A. Supervisor safai of the 380. Of the 380. Supervisor safai so the 250 theyre all taken care of. Supervisor safai so of the 380, were talking about the remain remainder 380, its almost half. There are another 40 that are commercial leases, so theres about 140 that are currently postd. D. A. , 100 postd. D. A. Chair peskin and whats the time . Some of them could be yesterday . Well, some roommates i know that people have moved to the island as roommates within the past three months. Others could date to 2011, 2012. Supervisor safai and i think supervisor haney asked this. What income category do these folks fall into. You asked that, right, supervisor . Yeah. We havent done extensive engagement with these households yet, but if we assume they fall into the same relative graphics as our other d. D. A. Households, we expect roughly 40 would qualify for lowincome housing. Supervisor safai it seems you should make this a priority of this development. Yeah. And we would begin the same engagement supervisor safai is that what you asked for, supervisor haney . [inaudible] supervisor safai on the mic. Repeat what youre saying. So out of the 380 that are not affordable, 140, those are set. 40, take out 40t for commercia. And out of the remaining, 40 would income qualify. So my question was wouldnt we try to focus on helping those 40 . Supervisor haney yeah, and thats what the proposal is giving them a priority right under the d. D. A. So they would get access to housing. And we would begin we have a consultant thats supporting us in engaging with existing households, and we would propose to, upon adoption of these benefits, launch the same engagement efforts with that supervisor safai you used the word roommates is. Id be interested to see what the make is of these 140. Some of these might be family, extended family that moved in due to our housing crisis, so that might be good to know. Yes. We have all of those circumstances. Multigenerational housing, college units. Supervisor safai yeah. But if we can breakdown the 140, that would be good to know. Thank you, chair. Thank you, supervisor haney. Chair peskin would you like to send this forward to the full board . Supervisor haney please. Chair peskin so moved and we will do that with a full recommendation without objection, and we are adjourned. Better. San Francisco Department of environment is a place where climate hits the street. We know that we dont have all the answers. We need to support our local champions, our local community to find Creative Solutions and innovations that help us get to zero waste. Zero waste is sending nothing to landfill or incineration, using reuse and recovery and prevention as ways to achieve zero waste. The Grant Program is a Grant Program specifically for nonprofits in San Francisco to divert material from landfill. Its important to find the San Francisco Produce Market because theres a lot of edible food that can be diverted and they need positions to capture that food and focus on food recovery. San francisco Produce Market is a resource that connects farmers and their produce with businesses in the bay area. I think its a basic human right to have access to healthy foods, and all of this food here is available. Its a matter of creating the infrastructure, creating jobs, and the system whereby none of this goes to waste. Since the beginning of our program in july 2016 to date, weve donated over 1 Million Pounds of produce to our community partners, and thats resulted in over 900,000 meals to people in our community, which were very proud of. Carolyn at the San Francisco Produce Market texts with old produce thats available. The produce is always excellent. We get things like broccoli, brussels sprouts, bell peppers. Everything that we use is nice and fresh, so when our clients get it, they really enjoy it, and its important to me to feel good about what i do, and working in programs such as this really provides that for me. Its helping people. Thats what its really about, and i really enjoy that. The work at the Produce Market for me representing the intersection between environment and community, and when we are working at that intersection, when we are using our resources and our passion and our energy to heal the planet and feed the hello everyone. Welcome to the bayview bistro. It is just time to bring the Community Together by deliciou deliciousness. I am excited to be here today because nothing brings the Community Together like food. Having amazing food options for and by the people of this community is critical to the success, the longterm success and stability of the bayviewhunters point community. I am nima romney. This is a mobile cafe. We do soul food with a latin twist. I wanted to open a truck to son nor the soul food, my African Heritage as well as mylas continuas my latindescent. I have been at this for 15 years. I have been cooking all my life pretty much, you know. I like cooking ribs, chicken, links. My favorite is oysters on the grill. I am the owner. It all started with banana pudding, the mother of them all. Now what i do is take on traditional desserts and pair them with pudding so that is my ultimate goal of the business. Our goal with the bayview bristow is to bring in businesses so they can really use this as a launching off point to grow as a single business. We want to use this as the opportunity to support Business Owners of color and those who have contributed a lot to the community and are looking for opportunities to grow their business. These are the things that the San Francisco Public Utilities commission is doing. They are doing it because they feel they have a responsibility to san franciscans and to people in this community. I had a grandmother who lived in bayview. She never moved, never wavered. It was a house of security answer entity where we went for holidays. I was a part of bayview most of my life. I cant remember not being a part of bayview. I have been here for several years. This space used to be unoccupied. It was used as a dump. To repurpose it for Something Like this with the bistro to give an opportunity for the local vendors and food people to come out and showcase their work. That is a great way to give back to the community. This is a great example of a publicprivate community partnership. They have been supporting this including the San Francisco Public Utilities commission and Mayors Office of workforce department. Working with the joint Venture Partners we got resources for the space, that the businesses were able to thrive because of all of the opportunities on the way to this community. Bayview has changed. It is growing. A lot of things is different from when i was a kid. You have the t train. You have a lot of new business. I am looking forward to being a Business Owner in my neighborhood. I love my city. You know, i went to city college and fourth and mission in San Francisco under the chefs ria, marlene and betsy. They are proud of me. I dont want to leave them out of the journey. Everyone works hard. They are very supportive and passionate about what they do, and they all have one goal in mind for the bayview to survive. All right. It is time to eat, people. Hi, everybody. , people. Good morning and thank you for being here. Thank you to the foundation for hosting us and i am pleased to be joined here with a number of our leaders including my partner in these initiatives, supervisor mandelman as well as our new district attorney. And members of the task force. I just want to thank all the members of the task force who participated in this process. I think supervisor mandelman and i had a conversation when he and i talked about this task force and what he wanted to do with it , and he said specifically to me, i dont want to do a task force that does a report that just sits on the shelf and that is really what i am excited about. And implementing the task force this force this year, we have recommendations that we are not only working to implement, but we are going to see hopefully real results as a result of the amazing work that the task force has done. We know that in San Francisco we have a serious problem with meth use. In 2018, over 126 people died of a meth overdose and the number of Overdose Deaths from meth rose over 500 in the last 10 years. Meth use is a Public Health and a Public Safety issue in our city. We know that meth is not only providing Substance Use challenges in San Francisco, but we need to make sure that we have a citywide approach to address the combined challenges of Substance Use, Mental Illness , and homelessness in particular. And that is why, along with the department of department health, we announced a comprehensive plan for those who are most in need of Mental Healthcare and Substance Use treatment entitled urgent care s. F. With this, we include building a new system of care coordination, outreach, and lower barrier services, and Harm Reduction designed to meet the specific needs of the 4,000 people who we know our dual diagnosed. Several of the Meth Task Force recommendations are prioritized and urgent care s. F. In february this year, we combined this task force under the leadership of supervisor mandelman with three goals in mind. To decrease health risks for people under the influence of meth, to identify best practices for treatment and service options, and to reduce the negative medical and social impacts of matthews for all san franciscans. Over the past six months, the task force has met to understand the specific challenges that meth presents for our city and to develop recommendations that would help address this issue. And the report issued today details the findings as well as 17 recommendations. Several of the recommendations go handinhand with our goals around urgent care s. F. , which include creating a meth Sobering Center, strengthening our Mental Health and Substance Use crisis response, increasing the availability of safe indoor spaces such as dropin centers, shelters, and Navigation Centers , expanding Case Management and wraparound services, and expanding availability of treatment beds at multiple levels. Some of these recommendations, its meth Sobering Centers, are new efforts and we are working to implement those well several build upon the work that is already underway. By creating a trauma informed sobering sight for people who are under the influence of meth, we will have a place where people can go or can be taken td where staff will be responsibly trained to help them. In addition to creating a safe place for people to sober up, the center will be a place where we can connect those individuals to services. The department of Public Health is currently exploring locations for the center and our plan is to have at least one of these centers open within the next three to six months. We have already taken action on a few of the recommendations that were mentioned are earlier. In september we announced a partnership with Tipping Point community to open up another 14 hummingbird psychiatric west respite beds. We also announced a plan to expand the hours of the Behavioral Health access center, to increase the availability of safe indoor spaces and help those who need it get connected to care. We are also making progress on adding another 1,000 beds to our Behavioral Health treatment system. We have already funded 212 beds in the last year across the continuum of Harm Reduction treatment and recovery services. The issue of meth use also connects with our efforts on expanding conservatorship in San Francisco because the new conservatorship allows us to extend the benefit of care to treatment, to people with Mental Illness and Substance Use disorder. We know that among people with at least psychiatric hold halls, nearly nine in the 10 are users of meth. And as we work to implement a successful conservatorship program, it is important we understand the overlap between matthews and eligibility for conservatorship. We are making progress and we know that progress is not moving fast enough, but we need to be responsible in how we coordinate the right systems so it actually delivers the results we need to have an impact on what we see out on the streets every single day. It is one of the reasons why i hired the first ever Mental Health reform director this year to really analyse the system, to find out what the challenges are , and to work on solutions. Theres not one solution that is going to get us to a place where we need, but we see the problem, we understand the challenges, we understand the data. The data is going to help to inform the decisions that we make so that we can get real results. We are making progress and one of the recommendations of the task force was to strengthen our Mental Health and Substance Use crisis response. Under urgent care s. F. , we will add more Behavioral Health resources to accompany police oncall through our 311 system so that our Police Department is working handinhand with one of our Street Medicine Team workers so we can again provide people with care and get them into one of our Sobering Centers if necessary. We will take action on the recommendations to expand Case Management and wraparound services, specifically by reducing the patient to provide a ratio so that we can really get the kinds of results that we need, adding staff to handle the additional cases is also critical, and our next steps include taking action on these recommendations. My office will carefully review the other recommendations included in the report and determine which one will move forward and which ones will be incorporated into the work we are already doing with urgent care s. F. I want to thank the members of the task force for dedicating so many hours to this work, this very critical work. The report and set of recommendations will be extremely helpful as we move forward to address meth use that is hurting so many people in this city. I now have the pleasure to introduce the person who has really been leading on this charge, supervisor mandelman is the person who came to me about this issue early on to talk about the challenges that existed. He knows that i care about opening Safe Injection Sites and that has been a focus of my administration and i am really optimistic that we are closer than ever before to getting there, but he really highlighted the fact that we are seeing the number of folks who are dying on our streets with methamphetamine increasing significantly, and so he has been the leader on shining the light on this issue and i am hopeful that because of his leadership in this work, we can take these recommendations to the next level so we can see a difference and we can help save lives. Ladies and gentlemen, supervisor raphael mandelman. [applause] thank you, madame mayor. Thank you for your commitment and persistence in making the changes in the city that everyone agrees need to be made, and for your fortitude and making those changes that are necessary, but not everyone agrees need to be made. San francisco has a meth problem i think we all know it. We all see it on our streets, in our hospital emergency rooms, in our jails and too often in the growing list of san franciscans dying from overdoses. Among homeless san franciscans who have died on our streets, methamphetamine was the most commonly present substance showing up in 47 of deaths. Now this is not the first time San Francisco has engaged on the issue of meth and its impacts in our communities. It was nearly 15 years ago that then then mayor newsom and supervisor dusty convened the citys first Meth Task Force focused on its impacts in the queer community. I know there are some veterans of that effort here in the room, some of them were part of the task force. The task force, that task force didnt important work and helped lead innovations and modelled the response that our task force has studied and i think its really appropriate that we are here in this aids foundation building. Thank you for your work and thank you for giving us or a thomas and make, where is make . There he is. Laura is back there. Okay. They made such important contributions to the task force but have been doing amazing work on drug policy and helping folks out for many decades, a couple decades. I will stop before i get in any more trouble. [laughter] this task force and the report we released today is not really the beginning of a conversation, and its not certainly the end of the conversation. It cant be. I believe we have made important contributions to that conversation. Today, meth addiction is still very much a queer issue in San Francisco, but as me know, and as the report documents, it is also a Public Health crisis that threatens the safety and wellbeing of vulnerable residents across the city, in every community, and threatens those communities. The report contains 17 recommendations and we cant go into each and every one of them here. I want to highlight a couple of them in particular. The first recommendation is to create a trauma informed sobering sight with integrated Harm Reduction services for people who are under the influence of methamphetamine. Drug Sobering Centers were the task forces top recommendation. Across a spectrum of participants, whether law enforcement, service providers, people with lived experience, everyone agreed that we need places that are not psychiatric emergency services, that are not emergency rooms, and that are not jails for people who are meth intoxicated or in a meth induced psychosis. Safe space for them to be and it leaves the communities from which they came safer. This is something we must do and i am so grateful to our mayor, her team, and dr. Colfax for their commitment to making this happen on an expedited timeline. The second recommendation of the task force, which also, i believe it was the secondhighest recommended recommendation, was to strengthen the citys interdisciplinary Behavioral Health crisis response. I hear almost every day from constituents who are seeing folks in distress, folks in psychosis pretty much every day and they have no idea what to do , who to call, how to get a response. They call 311, it doesnt work. They feel nervous about calling the police, and so what the mayor recognizes and what has worked its way into urgent care s. F. And what will be moving forward are other responses so that san franciscans who are seeing neighbors and distress have a number they can call, and app they can dial, and they can get, in realtime, an appropriate response it isnt necessarily the police. If you need a police officer, the police need to be there, but ideally, it is not the police. So that is something that i think will change lives, both for folks who are in crisis, and for the communities in which those folks are living. Theres a third recommendation that is buried way down there. It is item number 17. It is actually really important and it is strength collaboration strengthen communities communication and collaboration among city agencies and providers. I want to highlight this because it is the reason that dr. Bland exists. I want to thank mayor breed for creating this position, for recognizing the need to look across city agencies, to look to our nonprofit partners, to bring folks together to get out of the silos and to have us working together towards common destinations and towards getting care to the people who need it. We can do this. I dont want to steal dr. Colfax s thunder because i think he may say some similar things and i will i will say again. We know we can do this because we have done it before. The San Francisco model of h. I. V. Care was innovated by a city that had been abandoned by the federal government to deal with really challenging Public Health crises here at the local level and although we were angry , and many of the folks here protested the federal governments inaction in the department of Public Health, and other city agencies, and in our nonprofit partners, we innovated and we created a San Francisco model of care that has now resulted in new h. I. V. Infections dropping below 200 for the first time. That is amazing. We will get to zero, but the fact we were able to do it there gives me hope we can do it here with our Behavioral Health services. And dr. Bland will get us there. Thank you, again, mayor breed for all of your work and all of these Behavioral Health issues. It cant be done in a day, but you have not rested a day since you have started. I am grateful for that. I want to thank my cochair, i want to thank the d. P. H. Staff who work so hard on running these all of the members to do such extraordinary work in your work lives and to go above and beyond every day but who gave us the wisdom, the expertise, the experience to come up with the report that i think really does make a useful contribution to the conversation. I am excited. Thank you. [applause] i also want to take the opportunity to thank and recognize a commander who is joining us from the Police Department, as well as Brent Andrews from p. R. C. Some Amazing Community partners. We have two more speakers and at this time, i would like to ask dr. Grant colfax, the director of the department of Public Health, to say a few words. Thank you. I think before i started, you announced i was going to be cochairing the task force. [laughter] i am really pleased. It is great to be here with so many colleagues and friends and having worked on this issue for several decades, i think this is an amazing day as we move forward with recommendations. The health department, with so many did was only partners in the room, we do big things. This is one of the next big things that we are going to do. I want to thank mayor breed for her leadership in this and my cochair supervisor mandelman, and all the members of the task force, and the Public Health team that really helped move this forward. And i think very importantly, the people who are living or in recovery with meth addiction because i think that their voices in the room, the courage they show to coming forward, ensuring what needs to be done in helping us come up with solutions is really, really key to us moving forward. Im committed to ensuring that the recommendations of this report are implemented. We did that with h. I. V. And we will do it with this. We can get this done. I also think it is important that while we think of meth as a substance addiction and having very concerning Health Consequences as a result of that , including overdose, we also have to frame this in the broader context of health and wellness. That has had effects on strokes, it has effects on cardiovascular health. We know the documentation on the h. I. V. So providing a broader contextualized approach to how we address people who are using meth, meet their needs, and people who are at risk is really key. This is an evident evidencebased community informed report that will save lives. I think sometimes when we issue these reports it is really important to remind ourselves of that. It will save lives as we implement. It will also improve the quality of life for all san franciscans where we are all affected by the meth epidemic and today were coming together to do something about it. I think i want one of the key things that stood out in the task force is that San Francisco is a city of compassion and we are driven by the conviction that all individuals deserve an opportunity to achieve their health and wellness goals. We courageously demonstrated leadership on so many friends. I said we would do big things from our approach h. I. V. To implementing healthy San Francisco, to implementing the Affordable Care act, our approach to hepatitis c, we can do this going forward. We know that lives are being lost to meth today and the People Struggle with this destructive substance half of them come voluntarily seeking help. They begin to provide summary and will free up valuable space and resources to treat more people in our citys emergency rooms. We can make changes to the system that will make a difference. We have operated a Sobering Center. We will build and what we have learned from that to implement this Sobering Center and others. We have heard stories of hope, learned about promising treatment and dug into the data that talks about the problem. We will continue to do the work. We need the community and all of you to improve San Francisco and take on this danger to our families, friends and neighbors. Together, we can and will make a difference. Thank you. Now a few words from mike from the San Francisco aids foundation. Thank you. Thank you very much. Im a little bit nervous. I will read my statement here. I want to comment. I agree San Francisco has been courageous. Im very passionate about the work we do at this project and we have been working with meth users for over 15 years. I am a member of the task force and i was a member of the last task force years ago and the director of the foundation. It was funded in 1997 by Michael Seaver and served by gay and trans men who have sex by men and some trans women who have Substance Use concerns, including challenges with the use of crystal meth. It was founded as one of the first programs and as a result of one of the first treatment on demand recommendations over 20 years ago. Our Program Allows participants to enter at all levels of Substance Use, misuse, and or dependence. For a first 10 years, the projects focused our work specifically on Substance Use services and treatment solely within the intersection of meth matthews and h. I. V. Transmission and infection. At its conception, we were seen as radically different than the care offered at most Substance Use counseling and treatment programs due to our Harm Reduction approach. Thanks in large part of the funding of the San Francisco department of health and the San Francisco aids foundation, many donors and other funders, we remain strong and have expanded our Substance Use Services Including our low barrier and free Harm Reduction Services Offered through our innovative Harm Reduction center on sixth street and in San Franciscos does San Francisco soma district and other locations in the castro. We recently started our program to offer our evidencebased continued seat management that serves meth users beyond services for gay, by, and trans populations to nongay identified meth and other stimulant users. As it is called out in the task force recommendations, the San Francisco aids foundation has been working to expand all easy access services. We have been expanding our program in partnership with our other Behavioral Health efforts and other treatment in support and support providers throughout the city. We offer low barrier Overdose Prevention and Substance Use counseling and support injection and noninjection drug users in the streets and other dropin services. I am proud of these recommendations. It they recognize what our vision has known all along. At the aids foundation, the Substance Use programs expect all methods to get help with meth concerns and other Substance Use concerns. We will continue to dig deep and innovate along with the city and other departments to effectively offer the type of low barrier and other support and Treatment Services and outreach recommended for enhancement and expansion