Transcripts For SFGTV Government Access Programming 20171125

We had a fourdoor chrysler large formula retail on geary street and they came and wanted a starbucks but in that case, you bought the starbucks at the starbucks. Its a little different. Its a car dealer selling starbucks. This is a food this is a Grocery Store selling sushi. The one thing i was concerned about here is that they dont take theyre not taking sales area away from a store which is already smaller than the typical large scale whole foods. So, 400 square feet, if that would have come out of the sales area, i would have been concerned. If it is coming out of the sales area and theyre selling shirts. But its coming out of the sales area and selling food that theyre selling anyway. Its just odd to me. I guess thats the Zoning Administrator interpretation of the c. U. Thats correct. Because it is prepared there. You can correct me if im wrong, but i believe we discussed this specifically with the Zoning Administrator. Ok. Commissioner johnson . I cant believe this is still happening. Im enraged. Move to approve. Second. Thank you, commissioners. There is a motion that has been seconded to approve this matter with conditions on that motion. Commissioner fong. [roll call] so move. Thats pas unanimously 70. Never get that time back. It places us on item 16 for the mayors executive directive on housing informational presentation. Commissioner,ly kick this off with a few comments. First im not sure you are aware that jacob bentliff has moved into a new position and he will be coordinating the efforts on preparing this plan. He was working on the inclusionary. Did great work there. But moved over to this work to help us coordinate efforts on responding to the mayors executive directive. As you know, the directive was issued in late september and gives us until december 1 to prepare a plan or at least a draft of a plan to as to how we will respond to it. Its only a few weeks. It is not a lot of time. So, we are having a hearing today to talk to you about how we propose to respond. What jacob will present today are highlevel hot concepts and our initial kind of policy direction, if you will, on many of the issues that we are dealing with. I will say that weve had ive had three conversation brown bag conversations with staff. Ive been talking to people outside of the department. Ive been talking to other stiefms about our processes, getting a range of input on how we do our work and how we could improve our work and that will continue. I also think it is important to remember that while we have to present something by december 1, this is an ongoing process. And, you know, december 1 isnt the end of the process. Frankly, it is the beginning and this will be a document that changes can over time. But our goal is to streamline the work and to respond to the drexive and move forward. With that, ill let jacob carry on. Thank you, john. Commissioners, good afternoon. Thank you for this opportunity to join you on a nice, rainy november thursday to talk about what we are doing as john said, in response to the mayors executive directive, which came out at the end of september. And ill get a little bit more in a moment into what that directive includes. But before moving into all of that, i wanted to briefly touch on why. Why are we even talking about the housing supply, Housing Production targets, how does that fit into the Bigger Picture . Just a few stats that jumped out that help illustrate the picture. Basically since the recession up until 2014 when our production picked up, we added about 140,000 new jobs. But only 15,000 new Housing Units. So you can see that were out of balance just on that represent right there. Another fun stat is going back to 1980, which i guess is almost 40 years ago. Kind of crazy. Weve increased the number of residents by 20 , but only increased the number of Housing Units by 17 . Whats happening there . We have people moving into existing units obviously and that is where were starting to look at displacement. Were not keeping up. That is a longterm underproduction relative to demand based on the amount of People Living in San Francisco. Another thing, almost everybody in San Francisco lives in a housing unit built before 2005. Only 2 of our households are living in newer buildings that were built since 2005. It is a really small piece. We need to grow that piece of the pie to have more room for folks coming in. And finally one thing i found really interesting that we dug into a little bit in our inclusionary work was that basically, since 1990, weve added about 31,000 market rate units. So, the number of highincome households has grown by 76,000 over that time per. So, 76,000 is a lot bigger than 31,000. What that means that even if all of those 31,000 units were occupied by highincome households who can presumably afford to pay the rents and buy those units you have 146,000 households living in displacement. No two people can live in the same unit at the same time unless theyre part of the same household. I hope this frames why the planninging department is taking this seriously and we understand why adding more supply isnt by any means the only solution. But it is a big part of the solution. We dont have much control over the demand in the market. But a lot of demand over the supply of housing. What does this execktive directive actually say . A few things. First of all, it sets some deadlines for our approval of projects. Those are dependent on the level of Environmental Review that goes along with that project. So t shortest when there is a project not seemed a promise under ceqa, six months. Were supposed to have it ready to go from the Planning Department in six months. At the longest for a complex e. I. R. , 22 months. In no case is it supposed to take us more than two years to have a project go through the Planning Department. Then, of course, what happens after us . Well, post entitlement. Its approved. This directive sets a oneyear timeframe for getting things constructed or rather getting their construction documents a. That entilement. Time period. Some Accountability Measures are very hard to read on that yellow. I apologize. One thing is that the hearings for projects should be scheduled automatically on these timeframes. If we get something in the door and it is a sixmonth project, put it on your calendars. Another thing is that a senior manager from all the other departments ill mention in a moment should be appointed to manage the process. And findly the directive requires quarterly reporting. Id like to talk a little bit more about how we enjoy planning on coming to the Planning Commission on a quarterly basis so we can update you on what were doing. Finally, were supposed to develop some kind of process Improvement Plan by december 1 of this year. Im afraid. So, that doesnt that is going to keep me pretty busy. But that is for the Planning Department and the building inspections. We will be giving that plan out from the Directors Office to the mayor on december 1. By april 1, were supposed to work with not only d. B. I. , but public works, the fire department, rec park, Mayors Office and disabilities. All these departments that have a hand in permitting projects, depending on what is going on in that project. They are supposed to develop a consolidated plan for how we get to that oneyear post entitlement on december 1. So how do we go about doing such a thing . Weve done some brown bags. Ive been on a listening tour through the department. A lot of learning what folks are doing, what people feel like. Where were not getting the most value out of the time that we do spend. And so one thing that has run very loud and clear for me has made me think of this line quite a bit to prioritize my own self which is anything worth doing is worth doing well. Some of us think why am i doing this right now. Should i be doing this . If the answer is no, you should stop. If the answer is yes, you should do it really well. Because why are you doing it. Ive always lived by these words and this keeps coming back to me as i hear from our staff that come to work every day because they actually really care about the results. They want to be in this profession. They want to have the best city that we can have for the people who live here and for everyone else that that affects and it is not a question of challenging the value of the work that we do, it is a question of asking ourselves how do we do it the best way that we can. How do we make sure that what were doing is really the most value to get to the goals that we all want to sigh. Want to see. That is our overarching attitude toward this entire exercise. Talk a little bit about our work so far. These are this is a bar chart that represents the total value of projects that weve been working on over the past 10 years through the end of last year. It has been going up since the recession. By quite a bit. So this is really hopefully just to illustrate that our workload has continued to increase. Its leveling. At this point, it is leveling out. But it is actually still quite a bit higher than it was the last market peak in 2007. So, you know, were not hanging out, twiddling our thumbs. We keep ourselves pretty busy and the market keeps us pretty busy as well. One thing while this is up, i wanted to mention. As you know, this is when things come in the door for us. That whatever project is on that bar chart. That is not necessarily the year that it leaves our hands. Things can take quite a long time. We were looking at the agenda here. Today, only about six out of the 30 items on your case number has that starts with 2017, meaning this calendar year. Meaning 80 of the granted theyre not all entitlements have been taking more than a year for them to get to the Planning Commission today. The only things that is supposed to take more than a year is something with an Environmental Impact report. To help frame the magnitude of the work that we need to do to have new processes, to make things go faster and get our job done better, i hope that helps illustrate it. I also looked at our current pipeline and kind of reflects that. Basically out of our current pipeline of Residential Projects that arent aproved yet, about half of them have a case number that is in the last two years and about half of them are longer than that. So were meeting that twoyear timeframe, which is the timeframe for something with an e. I. R. Under this directive in half the cases. We have our work cut out for them. Were trying to do a toptobottom look at the way that we do business at the Planning Department. So, how are we thinking about this . As i said, you are goal here is to recognize the value, where there is value to do it as well as we possibly can. Some sort of categories or buckets have emerged and i just want to go over those. This is how we will be structuring this plan that well deliver at the end of this month. So, first and foremost, our actual application process. I mean, duh. This is the foundation of the entire process. What do people have to give us and when. How do we let the public know about that information . That all comes down to our actual application process. Right now, one thing were looking at in particular is our preliminary project assessment application, seeing if we can reduce that timeframe, get the best value out of that and look at consolidating the many different types of Development Applications we have into one Development Application so we can staff it better, track it better, have better coordination and critically set these timeframes for the project, even if it has a c. E. U. And other entitlement action as well. We need to set the timeframe for the project as a whole and give the public the information of what that timeframe is and intermediate targets along the way so we can know if were on track not. Well spend a lot of energy looking at our application process so youll be seeing ago lot of that in the plan. Ive been talking to folks in all of our divisions about how we do that. If we dont get that right, we wont be on stable footing for any of the rest of this. I want to talk about some things that are relatively routine. We do approve a lot over the counter at the planning information center. Our staff approves all kinds of things all day long. But there is probably more where we generally have a pretty good sense of whats ok and what is not ok. What we can live with and what we cant live with based on our experience that we could probably have more things not coming upstairs toen mraeers. To planners. When that happens, it goes back to our queue. That consent motion was filed in november of last year and assigned to sharon or maybe her predecessor in march of the next year. As you saw in the chart earlier, were busy. So, we do our best to get through it as soon as we can. But that is a backlog right there. If things like that need to come to a planner, that planner is working on the big stuff where we need that analysis and care from a professional. We want to look at how we can do that better. Environmental and design review, critical. We vonl one San Francisco. Once you build something, it is built. It makes a lot of sense why we spend so much time on energy and design review. Again, we often know what mitigations are successful in terms of Environmental Issues that arrive through the ceqa process and we know what kind of design treatments were comfortable with. We can look at the pat pattern of discussions that happen in this room and look at it at the staff level and can we put those things on paper in a clearer way so it doesnt have to involve discretion and scheduling something for two weeks out because you get peoples outlook calendars to align when we know the answer in many cases. Can we free up those results spending time doing the analysis on the thing where is we do need to take a closer look. Same thing goes for hearings here at the Planning Commission but the Historic Preservation commission, our various i cant understand hearings. Theres rec park or departments of public health. How can we make sure that were focusing that time on the projects where a judgment call is really needed in this public setting as opposed to times when we maybe able to get there 9 0 of the time at the administrative level. This is where we have the opportunity to discuss with the public what it is that were doing and grapple with the big issues. How do we get the best bang for the buck out of things that come to a hearing and versus things that do not. And how do we make sure that things come here when theyre ready so you dont recalendar something three months out because of how busy your cal is. The planning code itself, obviously this is our road map. These are the rules of the road. The clowererer it is, the better the results will be. Even simple thing like definitions. Its somewhat fundamentalle that. Can we clean up things like that. Can we get process that has become out of date because we have new procedures for dealing with that usual ewe in the planning code out of the planning code, some planners are not writing that document anymore when theyre already doing Something Else that takes care of that issue. We want to look at how that is structured. Finally, a lot of the behind the scenes stuff, you know, our admin and technology, it is 2017 and there is a lot less paper we can handle. Were working on electronic document review and working on people having appointments to submit plans electronically. And look at the way we use the internet to reach people in the most effective way that we can. Very brief overview, but i hope it gives you the high lights of how were talking about this with staff and how were categorizing and looking for the details to emerge. In closing, so, yeah, then what do we do about all this, right . What is the implementation here . Well, the executive directive is in effect as of september. But obviously we havent yet changed our procedures in a way that would help us to achieve those timeframes. The first thing, i think on the list, is going to be adjusting our application procedures so that we can get all projects that are coming in the door on these timeframes and know that weve changed the way that were going to handle them internally in a way that will make it realistic to meet that goal. There is going to be a lot of things in this plan that well try to do immediately. At kind of the staff level, the internal level. Some things that people are really, really down in the weeds. But it is going to need to evolve over time. So to kind of help us keep track of that, making this a living plan and making it where on some regular basis, we are reporting either planning to the Mayors Office, here at the commission, from planning staff, what did we just do in the last few months . How is it working to the extend that we know what is on our list right now, what are some of things you heard about what weve changed. We want to keep the conversation going because you have to keep asking yourself are you doing things the right way. It is not just like a thing well do and walk away and move on with our lives. I have three buckets you may be asking yourselfs, are you just going to go do this or is there a process for the process for the process . Of course theres process. Thats what we do, right . It depends on what it is were talking about. If it is something where it is a commission policy, which is i dont think a large part of that universe, obviously well be here and talking to you. You will be making a resolution and talk about changing that policy. If there are departmental policies like application procedures, for example, we have documents like director bullet the incident and information on our website, the information in ourself information packets themselves that we can simply do and that is going toable the Public Record for how people understand what were doing and we can use our directors reports here at the Grocery Store<\/a> selling sushi. The one thing i was concerned about here is that they dont take theyre not taking sales area away from a store which is already smaller than the typical large scale whole foods. So, 400 square feet, if that would have come out of the sales area, i would have been concerned. If it is coming out of the sales area and theyre selling shirts. But its coming out of the sales area and selling food that theyre selling anyway. Its just odd to me. I guess thats the Zoning Administrator<\/a> interpretation of the c. U. Thats correct. Because it is prepared there. You can correct me if im wrong, but i believe we discussed this specifically with the Zoning Administrator<\/a>. Ok. Commissioner johnson . I cant believe this is still happening. Im enraged. Move to approve. Second. Thank you, commissioners. There is a motion that has been seconded to approve this matter with conditions on that motion. Commissioner fong. [roll call] so move. Thats pas unanimously 70. Never get that time back. It places us on item 16 for the mayors executive directive on housing informational presentation. Commissioner,ly kick this off with a few comments. First im not sure you are aware that jacob bentliff has moved into a new position and he will be coordinating the efforts on preparing this plan. He was working on the inclusionary. Did great work there. But moved over to this work to help us coordinate efforts on responding to the mayors executive directive. As you know, the directive was issued in late september and gives us until december 1 to prepare a plan or at least a draft of a plan to as to how we will respond to it. Its only a few weeks. It is not a lot of time. So, we are having a hearing today to talk to you about how we propose to respond. What jacob will present today are highlevel hot concepts and our initial kind of policy direction, if you will, on many of the issues that we are dealing with. I will say that weve had ive had three conversation brown bag conversations with staff. Ive been talking to people outside of the department. Ive been talking to other stiefms about our processes, getting a range of input on how we do our work and how we could improve our work and that will continue. I also think it is important to remember that while we have to present something by december 1, this is an ongoing process. And, you know, december 1 isnt the end of the process. Frankly, it is the beginning and this will be a document that changes can over time. But our goal is to streamline the work and to respond to the drexive and move forward. With that, ill let jacob carry on. Thank you, john. Commissioners, good afternoon. Thank you for this opportunity to join you on a nice, rainy november thursday to talk about what we are doing as john said, in response to the mayors executive directive, which came out at the end of september. And ill get a little bit more in a moment into what that directive includes. But before moving into all of that, i wanted to briefly touch on why. Why are we even talking about the housing supply, Housing Production<\/a> targets, how does that fit into the Bigger Picture<\/a> . Just a few stats that jumped out that help illustrate the picture. Basically since the recession up until 2014 when our production picked up, we added about 140,000 new jobs. But only 15,000 new Housing Units<\/a>. So you can see that were out of balance just on that represent right there. Another fun stat is going back to 1980, which i guess is almost 40 years ago. Kind of crazy. Weve increased the number of residents by 20 , but only increased the number of Housing Units<\/a> by 17 . Whats happening there . We have people moving into existing units obviously and that is where were starting to look at displacement. Were not keeping up. That is a longterm underproduction relative to demand based on the amount of People Living<\/a> in San Francisco<\/a>. Another thing, almost everybody in San Francisco<\/a> lives in a housing unit built before 2005. Only 2 of our households are living in newer buildings that were built since 2005. It is a really small piece. We need to grow that piece of the pie to have more room for folks coming in. And finally one thing i found really interesting that we dug into a little bit in our inclusionary work was that basically, since 1990, weve added about 31,000 market rate units. So, the number of highincome households has grown by 76,000 over that time per. So, 76,000 is a lot bigger than 31,000. What that means that even if all of those 31,000 units were occupied by highincome households who can presumably afford to pay the rents and buy those units you have 146,000 households living in displacement. No two people can live in the same unit at the same time unless theyre part of the same household. I hope this frames why the planninging department is taking this seriously and we understand why adding more supply isnt by any means the only solution. But it is a big part of the solution. We dont have much control over the demand in the market. But a lot of demand over the supply of housing. What does this execktive directive actually say . A few things. First of all, it sets some deadlines for our approval of projects. Those are dependent on the level of Environmental Review<\/a> that goes along with that project. So t shortest when there is a project not seemed a promise under ceqa, six months. Were supposed to have it ready to go from the Planning Department<\/a> in six months. At the longest for a complex e. I. R. , 22 months. In no case is it supposed to take us more than two years to have a project go through the Planning Department<\/a>. Then, of course, what happens after us . Well, post entitlement. Its approved. This directive sets a oneyear timeframe for getting things constructed or rather getting their construction documents a. That entilement. Time period. Some Accountability Measures<\/a> are very hard to read on that yellow. I apologize. One thing is that the hearings for projects should be scheduled automatically on these timeframes. If we get something in the door and it is a sixmonth project, put it on your calendars. Another thing is that a senior manager from all the other departments ill mention in a moment should be appointed to manage the process. And findly the directive requires quarterly reporting. Id like to talk a little bit more about how we enjoy planning on coming to the Planning Commission<\/a> on a quarterly basis so we can update you on what were doing. Finally, were supposed to develop some kind of process Improvement Plan<\/a> by december 1 of this year. Im afraid. So, that doesnt that is going to keep me pretty busy. But that is for the Planning Department<\/a> and the building inspections. We will be giving that plan out from the Directors Office<\/a> to the mayor on december 1. By april 1, were supposed to work with not only d. B. I. , but public works, the fire department, rec park, Mayors Office<\/a> and disabilities. All these departments that have a hand in permitting projects, depending on what is going on in that project. They are supposed to develop a consolidated plan for how we get to that oneyear post entitlement on december 1. So how do we go about doing such a thing . Weve done some brown bags. Ive been on a listening tour through the department. A lot of learning what folks are doing, what people feel like. Where were not getting the most value out of the time that we do spend. And so one thing that has run very loud and clear for me has made me think of this line quite a bit to prioritize my own self which is anything worth doing is worth doing well. Some of us think why am i doing this right now. Should i be doing this . If the answer is no, you should stop. If the answer is yes, you should do it really well. Because why are you doing it. Ive always lived by these words and this keeps coming back to me as i hear from our staff that come to work every day because they actually really care about the results. They want to be in this profession. They want to have the best city that we can have for the people who live here and for everyone else that that affects and it is not a question of challenging the value of the work that we do, it is a question of asking ourselves how do we do it the best way that we can. How do we make sure that what were doing is really the most value to get to the goals that we all want to sigh. Want to see. That is our overarching attitude toward this entire exercise. Talk a little bit about our work so far. These are this is a bar chart that represents the total value of projects that weve been working on over the past 10 years through the end of last year. It has been going up since the recession. By quite a bit. So this is really hopefully just to illustrate that our workload has continued to increase. Its leveling. At this point, it is leveling out. But it is actually still quite a bit higher than it was the last market peak in 2007. So, you know, were not hanging out, twiddling our thumbs. We keep ourselves pretty busy and the market keeps us pretty busy as well. One thing while this is up, i wanted to mention. As you know, this is when things come in the door for us. That whatever project is on that bar chart. That is not necessarily the year that it leaves our hands. Things can take quite a long time. We were looking at the agenda here. Today, only about six out of the 30 items on your case number has that starts with 2017, meaning this calendar year. Meaning 80 of the granted theyre not all entitlements have been taking more than a year for them to get to the Planning Commission<\/a> today. The only things that is supposed to take more than a year is something with an Environmental Impact<\/a> report. To help frame the magnitude of the work that we need to do to have new processes, to make things go faster and get our job done better, i hope that helps illustrate it. I also looked at our current pipeline and kind of reflects that. Basically out of our current pipeline of Residential Projects<\/a> that arent aproved yet, about half of them have a case number that is in the last two years and about half of them are longer than that. So were meeting that twoyear timeframe, which is the timeframe for something with an e. I. R. Under this directive in half the cases. We have our work cut out for them. Were trying to do a toptobottom look at the way that we do business at the Planning Department<\/a>. So, how are we thinking about this . As i said, you are goal here is to recognize the value, where there is value to do it as well as we possibly can. Some sort of categories or buckets have emerged and i just want to go over those. This is how we will be structuring this plan that well deliver at the end of this month. So, first and foremost, our actual application process. I mean, duh. This is the foundation of the entire process. What do people have to give us and when. How do we let the public know about that information . That all comes down to our actual application process. Right now, one thing were looking at in particular is our preliminary project assessment application, seeing if we can reduce that timeframe, get the best value out of that and look at consolidating the many different types of Development Applications<\/a> we have into one Development Application<\/a> so we can staff it better, track it better, have better coordination and critically set these timeframes for the project, even if it has a c. E. U. And other entitlement action as well. We need to set the timeframe for the project as a whole and give the public the information of what that timeframe is and intermediate targets along the way so we can know if were on track not. Well spend a lot of energy looking at our application process so youll be seeing ago lot of that in the plan. Ive been talking to folks in all of our divisions about how we do that. If we dont get that right, we wont be on stable footing for any of the rest of this. I want to talk about some things that are relatively routine. We do approve a lot over the counter at the planning information center. Our staff approves all kinds of things all day long. But there is probably more where we generally have a pretty good sense of whats ok and what is not ok. What we can live with and what we cant live with based on our experience that we could probably have more things not coming upstairs toen mraeers. To planners. When that happens, it goes back to our queue. That consent motion was filed in november of last year and assigned to sharon or maybe her predecessor in march of the next year. As you saw in the chart earlier, were busy. So, we do our best to get through it as soon as we can. But that is a backlog right there. If things like that need to come to a planner, that planner is working on the big stuff where we need that analysis and care from a professional. We want to look at how we can do that better. Environmental and design review, critical. We vonl one San Francisco<\/a>. Once you build something, it is built. It makes a lot of sense why we spend so much time on energy and design review. Again, we often know what mitigations are successful in terms of Environmental Issues<\/a> that arrive through the ceqa process and we know what kind of design treatments were comfortable with. We can look at the pat pattern of discussions that happen in this room and look at it at the staff level and can we put those things on paper in a clearer way so it doesnt have to involve discretion and scheduling something for two weeks out because you get peoples outlook calendars to align when we know the answer in many cases. Can we free up those results spending time doing the analysis on the thing where is we do need to take a closer look. Same thing goes for hearings here at the Planning Commission<\/a> but the Historic Preservation<\/a> commission, our various i cant understand hearings. Theres rec park or departments of public health. How can we make sure that were focusing that time on the projects where a judgment call is really needed in this public setting as opposed to times when we maybe able to get there 9 0 of the time at the administrative level. This is where we have the opportunity to discuss with the public what it is that were doing and grapple with the big issues. How do we get the best bang for the buck out of things that come to a hearing and versus things that do not. And how do we make sure that things come here when theyre ready so you dont recalendar something three months out because of how busy your cal is. The planning code itself, obviously this is our road map. These are the rules of the road. The clowererer it is, the better the results will be. Even simple thing like definitions. Its somewhat fundamentalle that. Can we clean up things like that. Can we get process that has become out of date because we have new procedures for dealing with that usual ewe in the planning code out of the planning code, some planners are not writing that document anymore when theyre already doing Something Else<\/a> that takes care of that issue. We want to look at how that is structured. Finally, a lot of the behind the scenes stuff, you know, our admin and technology, it is 2017 and there is a lot less paper we can handle. Were working on electronic document review and working on people having appointments to submit plans electronically. And look at the way we use the internet to reach people in the most effective way that we can. Very brief overview, but i hope it gives you the high lights of how were talking about this with staff and how were categorizing and looking for the details to emerge. In closing, so, yeah, then what do we do about all this, right . What is the implementation here . Well, the executive directive is in effect as of september. But obviously we havent yet changed our procedures in a way that would help us to achieve those timeframes. The first thing, i think on the list, is going to be adjusting our application procedures so that we can get all projects that are coming in the door on these timeframes and know that weve changed the way that were going to handle them internally in a way that will make it realistic to meet that goal. There is going to be a lot of things in this plan that well try to do immediately. At kind of the staff level, the internal level. Some things that people are really, really down in the weeds. But it is going to need to evolve over time. So to kind of help us keep track of that, making this a living plan and making it where on some regular basis, we are reporting either planning to the Mayors Office<\/a>, here at the commission, from planning staff, what did we just do in the last few months . How is it working to the extend that we know what is on our list right now, what are some of things you heard about what weve changed. We want to keep the conversation going because you have to keep asking yourself are you doing things the right way. It is not just like a thing well do and walk away and move on with our lives. I have three buckets you may be asking yourselfs, are you just going to go do this or is there a process for the process for the process . Of course theres process. Thats what we do, right . It depends on what it is were talking about. If it is something where it is a commission policy, which is i dont think a large part of that universe, obviously well be here and talking to you. You will be making a resolution and talk about changing that policy. If there are departmental policies like application procedures, for example, we have documents like director bullet the incident and information on our website, the information in ourself information packets themselves that we can simply do and that is going toable the Public Record<\/a> for how people understand what were doing and we can use our directors reports here at the Planning Commission<\/a> and other ways it goes on our website. Those are things that we can do internally and well be publishing those as we get put together. Finally, certain things involve changing the planning code, so whether it is initiated here or at the board of supervisors, it will be coming back here. So, nothing is going to happen tomorrow. We have plenty of opportunities to talk about the various specifics depending on the level of change that is being contemplated. I wanted to give you a little bit of a flavor for that. And also i want to just thank our Planning Department<\/a> staff, my colleagues. This is just a list of a few of the people who have been very instrumental to helping. You guys have a really talented high Caliber Group<\/a> of people work on the city. And it haable a real privilege to work with everybody to see what weve all learned checkively. With that, i think we have Public Comment<\/a> and i look forward to discussing with you all further. Great. Thank you. We have a couple of speak cards. If others would like to speak, please line up on the screen side of the room. You can speak in any order. Good afternoon, commissioners. And everyone else. My name is christopher roche. As a firm, ill note that we work on both affordable multifamily projects and smaller Single Family<\/a> or, you know, one to threeunit promises that are part of the Family Housing<\/a> here in the city. Im speaking today as a private citizen and group as a member of concerned architects called the Design Advocacy Group<\/a> San Francisco<\/a>. Im also an active member of the niasf, although my comments dont reflect their position or views. Please note that the members have met to discuss and align our opinion on both the mayors executive director that were discussing today as well as the residential expansion threshhold which has been mentioned and is calendared for later in december. Ahem. Regarding the mayors directive, we agree with and fully support the mayor in his efforts to expedite production of more housing city that is affordable to more San Francisco<\/a>ans by accelerating the approval process through the planning domestic. Therefore we want to support the Planning Department<\/a> in these efforts and as Design Professionals<\/a> that work closely with Planning Department<\/a> staff every day, we believe we are uniquely positioned to help find creative and effective ways to help lighten their loads so that they can focus on their efforts on the higher goals that the mayor has mandated. And were really here today to speak specifically to an item that jacob brought up in their plan, which is things that should be routine. And over the counter. I think most of us in the Design Community<\/a> have long recognized that the current Planning Department<\/a> process is too long, too divisive and two graphic with many projects. Its continually bogged down with items that are routine. They are items that should not be up to discretion. Therefore we offer the following suggestions and examples of some of the items, and just some, that should be more routine or make the process more predictable and take the load off of planning staff. One of suggestions is under the cat gour of intel, and which used to be over the counter. We want to ask for a wider reach insel items without neighborhood notification. They could include insel under decks, adding garages and all rooms under within the r. E. T. Threshholds. Rebuilding existing features 100 . Not just 50 . Section 181 of the planning code indicates you can rebuild an existing feature without notification up to 50 . Over 50 , you immediate to notify the neighbors. Rear additions that are one or two stories high with one or fivefoot setbacks either side. These are all items that could be approved over the counter. The second item were asking for is that we ask the Planning Commission<\/a> to rewrite the definition of gross Square Footage<\/a> so that basements and garage spaces are not counted as growth Square Footage<\/a> this. Will allow people to capture equity within the foot print of their buildings as a right, without having to go through the neighborhood notification or lengthy planning process. This will serve to incentivize homeowners to perform a full seismic upgrade of their foundations, which is often prohibitively expensive and incredibly disruptive. By off setting these costs with the value that theyre able to capture through adding or improving space below grade that has no direct impact to the neighborhood context, it serves the general Public Interest<\/a> and the citys goal of maintaining a resilient Housing Stock<\/a> for the multitude of aginging residences to undergo the seismic upgrades and only and the only way it is going to happen at a significant scale and within reasonable timeline is to subsidize the cost through the value capture. The outcome will be a winwin for both homeowners and the city. Im karen pacon. Karen pacon architecture and design. To continue with her point about gross Square Footage<\/a>, the current definition of gross Square Footage<\/a> will capture many minor projects that would be done within the building envelope and send them to the commission. This would be triggered by most parking and roomdown projects on sloped lots that are compelling, minor and major excavations to include legal head height. Excluding these will help the commission avoid hearing projects that propose the addition of parking and a single room within an existing building foot print. And also help planning avoid triggering many months, if not years of process and huge fees for such simple projects that do not change scale, mapping or the relative affordability of existing homes. Our goal, as members of the San Francisco<\/a> chapter of the a. I. A. And concerned architects promoting progressive urbanism and design is to support, collaborate with and serve as a resource for a strong planning domestic. We look to them for their expertise and leadership. Leadership which is often bogged down in the review of mundane issues that impact the broader neighborhood, that really dont impact the broader neighborhood or the city at large. Freeing the department from these small, what should be as of right issues, will in fact not only unclog the pipeline for review, but lead it to more thoughtful and substantial review of larger issues that affect our city and in which the department should be taking a leadership position on. The signatories to this statement that the three of us have just read include neil schwartz, a. I. A. , schwartz and architecture. David gast, a. I. A. , gast architects. Michael robbins, a. I. A. , studio robbins cortina. Jennifer jones, aiasf executive director. Michelle krebull, lundberg design. Ross levy, a. I. A. , levy art and architecture. Lou agorziak. Karen pacon, myself, member of the a. I. A. Jim zack, a. I. A. Mada abernathy. Joshua aidlan, aidlan darling design. Christopher roche, who you just met, a. I. A. , studio vera. And there are more names, but ive run out of time. There are 35 all together who have signed this letter. Thank you. [please stand by] its really valuable in terms of gaining efficiency. What did staff think about our org chart . What is it that we are doing together. I bet were doing things better, faster, more efficiently than doing trainings of people or retrainings or doing things or asking this person rather than that person. I didnt hear about how to get people prepared for Technology Improvements<\/a> or how to train them. There is some technology that helps people and some that gets in the way. And people have opinions about that and those are valuable. Im wondering if you could talk a little bit about the people part. I think your points are very well taken, commissioner. We dont talk much about that side of the work of the department. We have a fulltime professional training coordinator in the department that coordinates all kinds of training for the department. We can have her come and maybe it would be useful. Im not sure you have met her. Staff has had a number of issues. Weve had a number of formal and informal conversations and they brought up issues around the lack of Human Resource<\/a> aspect of the work. It crosses a line. Some of the suggestions have been. Can we stop on piddly administrative stuff that gets in our way. There are a lot of systems that tend to take time that are not about doing our actual work. I will put that out there. I think people are all aware of that. And then there are a lot of things that are that also get in our way that are kind of more soft stuff. The supervisory stuff. And weve been talking about some of the issues and im happy to share them as we go forward. But your point is well taken. My fear is that is just it adds stress. So you put in a sixmonth deadline, but you dont train people or empower them or still have a supervisory structure that doesnt work. It puts more staff stress and i fear that. Public service do gods work, i think. Theres an entitlement out there saying, you do it. Youre getting paid. And thats not the case. I appreciate you saying this. This is a staff thats really dedicated. They really are. And i think its important for us to say that. And i think its also important to say that some staff had a challenging time when they read this directive because they felt like it was putting pressure on them and pointing fingers on them as being the bad guys. And i can understand that. I also think that we all have the same goal here of trying to trying not only to produce more housing, but in a more efficient way. I perceive this and what i said to staff, i think this is an opportunity for us to think differently about how we do our work. We dont, frankly, get this opportunity very often. I think it is incumbent upon all of us that we are given this opportunity to look at it differently and see how we can do our work better. Our goal here, and jacob can say more about this, is to engage all the staff in this process in getting them engaged in how we do our work differently. And i guess i would add to that, yes, lots of ideas and they come up, but there are the things a lot of this is not about moral and staff time and the extent that we have our planning staff doing planning work, grappling with the real issues, using our creativity and feeling like you are bogged down by doing something that maybe its not the best way to do it or wrote or out of date. Im hearing that moral feeling. A lot of the stuff that were doing is not about that aspect of it, but by making it so were not sweating the small stuff as much and leaving more room for planners to do planning, you will have better planning. Commissioner richards . Commissioner richards so i met with dan over a couple of sour beers. We spent a couple of hours talking about it. I have certification and some quality things from my past and my professional life, functional deployment and i used to work at h. P. And we would go into organizations and finance and they would hire performing teams. A lot of the stuff here im looking at the eyes and even though were not talking about something granular, now that i have something on paper and i heard your presentation, i want to comment on it. The first thing is, i completely support revocation hearings. I dont think that the fact that we can speed up everything and get it out the door and it reminds me for when i used to work for kodak and people would run in and say, i have to develop this right now. And then you see its christmas pictures. Why did it take you that long to develop this but you need it now . Those are the jokes we used to have. One of the questions we used to ask at h. P. How do we know where we want to go when we dont know where were really at. And after hearing the presentation, that really hits me. And the reason is not because any of this is bad, but i think when i looked at the page here under process improvements, product entitlements. I started to say, a, is what we want to do, b, how we want to do. And c, how we want to do. D, what we want to do and its a mish mash of thoughts, all good thoughts. Theres an organization of 300 people. Some people do the work. Some support i. T. Function, they support everybody. So one of the things that we always came up with when we went into organizations was, people assume that if you work 40 hours a week you work 40 hours a week. Its really not the case because people have vacations. People have bio breaks. They read general emails, and","publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"archive.org","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","width":"800","height":"600","url":"\/\/ia800807.us.archive.org\/19\/items\/SFGTV_20171125_060000_Government_Access_Programming\/SFGTV_20171125_060000_Government_Access_Programming.thumbs\/SFGTV_20171125_060000_Government_Access_Programming_000001.jpg"}},"autauthor":{"@type":"Organization"},"author":{"sameAs":"archive.org","name":"archive.org"}}],"coverageEndTime":"20240630T12:35:10+00:00"}