In place to fast track that, thats something id like to look at. Yes, supervisor, thats a complaint we do have often from the Supervisors Office and applicants. We do have a program called cb three peat. If you do meet certain criteria, with you expedite your petition. Not all uses meet that petition. If youre massage use, formula retail, we dont expedite those. It is a limited program, but we have had success with it. We are looking for ways to speed that up, especially for smaller businesses. Okay. Any other further questions, comments . I think theres a lot of work were going to have to do internally on this issue. At this point, im going to turn it over to Public Comment. If not, if i dont call your name, just come on up. Anyone who wants to come up and speak, please come to the podium. Good afternoon, supervisor, first of all, id like to say congratulations to supervisor tifani for being appointed to district 2. I think you can do a fabulous job, and thank you for being there. Its actually pronounced stephanie. Supervisor stephanie. And second, thank you to oewd for doing such an excellent job on the report of the status of Retail Business in San Francisco. As we all know, the for the longest time, Small Businesses really relied on pot traffic, and were feeding coming foot traffic, and were feeding coming off the Online Retail sales. Foot traffic has dropped off, so the thing is how do you bring foot traffic back in. One of the things is if you have vacant storefronts, they create blight. Not only that, but you dont get the foot traffic you normally would have if you didnt have these blighted places. I was fortunate to be out with may mayor lee the friday before he passed away at the excess i dont remember. He said look at these beautiful storefront windows. They were all decorated. He said couldnt we do that with all of the storefronts, couldnt we work with oewd to get artwork in them, put displays in them, and i really think that would help. I just want to say the businesses that have been surviving are because theyve had to be creative, but having events, and by having pop ups. Thank you very much. Next speaker, please. Good evening. I represent the castro Business District which streechs along Market Street from octavia to castro and then to 19th is a thriving and creative Residential District and we are open for business. Despite some of the pressures afflicting neighborhoods across the city, were struggling with a 17 to 18 vacancy rate. Over the past five years weve addressed many problems facing or neighborhood and commercial district. The problem is we need a stick to deal with these few owners who are absent and nonresponsive. They are wreaking havoc on our business landscape. They each have multiple longterm storefronts. Its shifted from mom and pop storefronts that have deep roots in the community to Corporate Investors who arent connected to our community. Theyre often abbott other than to collect rents and seek the highest return on their investments. The evna strongly supports more comprehensive and aggressive vacancy fees and penalties. Thank you. Thank you very much. Next speaker, please. Good afternoon, chair tang, supervisors. My name is karen flood. Im the executive director of the Union Square Business improvement district, and we look forward to working collaboratively with you on this very important issue. Union square bid does provide Important Services to the area, many of which were mentioned earlier in terms of what a management district does. We enhance our public realm to create reasons for public to come downtown and shop. So i really want to thank supervisors, fewer, yee and ronen to bring this issue to our attention. Its a really important discussion that were having today, and thank you to oewd and dbi for the study that weve all done. We create a vibrant Hospitality Industry downtown. Tens of thousands of well paying jobs, and retail managers take pride in their storefront as do Property Owners, and we want to maintain the area. Overall the state of union square is strong. We maintain a 5 to 10 range, although there are pockets as supervisor fewer mentioned earlier, maybe some on the northern side have more vacancies than the southern part of the district. There are many reasons why stores were vacant as were also mentioned today, and weve seen that uptick. Right now, we have some of the Bigger Department stores in union square. Now we need smaller core plates. We look forward to working with you on this important issue, and look forward to you being part of the discussion. Thank you for your time. Thank you. Next speaker, please. Eileen bokin, president to speak her on my behalf. In this presentation, two implications stood out, could management policies may need to be revisits, and land use policies may need to be modified. This suggests that oewd is promoting current and proposed mta and Planning Department policies, some of which are controversial. Regarding the mta, the Small Business commission has weighed in on the Mission Street project. From the dais, commissioner doolye referred to its an autocratic. The same could be said of the mtas terastreet project. Two merchants have gone out of business closer dry cleaning and hunters thread, such as marchellos restaurant have seen a significant dropoff in business. Has this report been vetted before the Small Business commission or the San Francisco council of district merchants associations . My understanding based on today, eithneither has. So this hearing may have been premature. The process could have really started at the council, gone to the Small Business commission and then followed by the board of supervisors. Thank you. Next speaker please. Good afternoon, supervisors. J. D. Workman representing the San Francisco chamber of commerce. I also want to thank you for having this hearing today. We at the chamber and me in particular have been working on this issue for many, many years, and im very interested to see that its coming up again because im aware of the vacancy rates in our neighborhood commercial district, so i feel that the numbers that were given today dont just really capture the crisis that were in when it comes to filling our retail spaces in our neighborhood and keeping them in our retail commercial corridors. And some of those vacancies, they last for months and years, so im not sure that it really captures that. I think that what we havent really heard a lot of today is how timeconsuming and expensive it is to actually get a retail permit in San Francisco, and i fore formula retail, but for other retailers, as well, and i think there is such a degree of uncertainty with it when you dont even know at the end of the day after months or maybe a year of going through the process whether youre even going to be able to go into that space, that it its very discouraging for potential retailers to come into our neighborhood commercial corridors, so i hope that were going to be taking a look at expediting the process to increase the certainty and enable retailers to be able to get in as quickly as possible. Also, i think flexiblity is key, and i heard a lot of that today. And i i think its with the changing conditions of retail in the city and in the country, i think its very important that a diversity of uses be able to go into ground floor commercial spaces, including professional services. And one of your colleagues, supervisor peskin has been promoting legislation that would restrict that. We would really encourage diversity. Thank you very much. Next speaker, please. Good afternoon, supervisors. My name is deidre vonne rock. I am the president of the rest portal rock merchants association. While im proud that we have the lowest vacancy, that is not how it appears on an objective view. In west portal, absentee land lowers who have no interest in the block of a huge problem. For example, we had a discussion in anchoring a project on the west tunnel because they were still collecting rent on a formula retailer. We had a radio shack that sat vacant for years because the owner wanted another radio shack. Finally, verizon showed some interest in it, but its been meyered in planning for well over a year. Just recently, one of the owners of the four buildings where three of our businesses recently has been devastated has been unresponsive, delaying the Recovery Efforts of all the other businesses. The Merchant Association is often asked about the status of the vacancies and what can be done, and our answer is nothing. Not until there is anymore enforcement or accountablity as to the vacancies. We support more stringent rules on vacancies and enforcement, and we would welcome a change in zoning for ground floor retail zoning subject to community input. Thank you. Thank you. Good afternoon. My name is steven cornell. I owned a Retail Business for 40 years in San Francisco. Im here also as a legislative representative of Council District merchants. Nothing can do good for businesses but more money. More businesses more business means the business thrives, it employs more people. More people means that they can buy from their neighbors. More business in, more sales is what does it for business. How can the city help . Well, the city and county of San Francisco is the largest employer in San Francisco. It has almost four times more than the largest private employer, yet when the city has to buy a light bulb up here, theyre going to go to know where mississippi if its one penny cheaper to get it from them. Why arent they buying it from San Francisco. You put the money back into San Francisco businesses, we can thrive. The city does this all the time with their largest purchase, employees. They have a policy of getting prevailing wages, the highest and best wages because San Francisco costs more, and we have very good employees. Well, San Francisco costs more for businesses, and we should also get higher prices for the people that sell here in the city. I think thats a way to help this whole problem. Thank you. My name is hans hansen. Im president of starburg commercial real estate. We actively do retail deals in the neighborhood. We do not represent retailers, and id like to tell two stories about the reality of doing business in San Francisco. One is a bakery that we represented in south of market. It was 1800 square feet. It was his first operation. He budgeted 250,000 for the improvements to the space, another 160,000 for his equipment, and 10 or 25,000 towards his permitting fees, and etcetera soft costs. To date, nine months later, he is now at 750,000 total cost and just opened his doors. The landlord did work with him on holding back rent, but this was a process to get to the cup that took well over nine months. Second story is 3146 Mission Street, the old kragens auto store. We leased that out to a Company Called eagle rider thats been on eighting and bryant street. This was a site that was 19,000 square feet that was auto use previously. It was a chevrolet dealership. We leased out 19,000 feet. They were formula retail because they were 13 stores nationally, and they ended up taking 13 months, losing their tenant. It was their subtenant, and now you have a vacancy of 6,000 square feet that has to start the process all over again. Good afternoon, supervisors. Cory smith on behalf of the San FranciscoHousing Action coalition. I also want to welcome supervisor stephanie to the chamber, as well. Obviously, theres a lot of good ideas floating around. One of the best things we can do for businesses is work to provide more customers for the businesses. I live in a haightashbury neighborhood, and there is just a stretch of single story retail. Its not shocking to me that as a neighborhood purchaser, i dont actually spend a lot of time up and down there because there are a lot of vacant stores. The other thing that this conversation reminds me of is from the old ceo of netscape. He says when it comes to decision making, we should look at data, but if all we have is opinions, were going to go with mine, and this is one of the situations where the city has provided really, really good data. If i could get the overhead, please. So this is all sort of sfmta data. Projector . Nope. Well, its a couple of data points coming from sfmta. The first one is the majority of people actually get to commercial corridors by transit, by foot or by bike. Its a lot more popular than cars. The data also shows that for the people that do take different transportation methods to the actual commercial corridors themselves, people spend more money if they are walking or biking or taking transit. Theres two data points here, both for the comMission Street corridor, for the polk street corridor, as well. So again, in the collaborative, holistic approach that we need to take to solve this problem, one of the simple things we can do is just put more customers in the neighborhood and that will help the businesses. Thank you. Good afternoon. Im leslie lenhart, union Street Association executive director, and i thank you very much for the opportunity to share my thoughts with you this afternoon. I agree with most of everything i have heard already from the previous speakers. I would like to just talk about union street, which i know so well. Ive had my business there for almost 40 years, and ive seen many, many changes. Union street is always in transition. However in last ten years, its been very challenging, and the reason is multiple. First of all, we do have the high rents, and that is unfortunate an attitude of greed from certain people. They will not rent out until they get a certain amount, and that is very unfortunate, very unfortunate. Oftentimes, also, we found out that we have offshore owners of these buildings, and theyre hard to contact and theyre unresponsive, so that goes without saying and it is a problem. We also have to remember that we have an adt situations in all of the old buildings. That is a problem, too, that doesnt go away, and nor should it, but it does add expense to making a possible business come into the district. Id like to say that the tourists, they shop, they shop. Theyre here, they love it. They shop. And we need more tourists. We need to get rid of this ridiculous its not unfounded, that we but we have a very unsafe city, a very violent city, and people are staying away. They are, i talk to a lot of european people in the past. They loved San Francisco. It was wonderful. They came from all over, and now they are hesitant to do that. So the city really has to look at that. We need to make it safer. We need more police on the streets, and we need to do something about that. Im very unhappy about this uncomfortable feeling that im getting from when im talking to people coming into my gallery, so those are areas thank you. Thank you very much. Next speaker, please. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, looking at City Government channel, which i had a lot to do to create. Im oh, excuse me, madam. Welcome to the city hall, new supervisor. You call it city hall, i call it silly hall. Maybe you can help change that around. But right now, ladies and gentlemen, im not just here to impress, but to impress on the city and county, the city by the bay, where everybody thinks okay, ive got some news breaks today, doink, cause were here talking about oewd, seems like everybodys scared of me because they spent all the money thats supposed to come to the fillmore. You guys are talking about all the wonderful work that oewd is doing, but youre going to hear it from me, my community of what we think, and we know the deal of what they came into our community, spent millions for fail efforts, misguided leadership, and the most egregious thing that im not going to tolerate is undermining my community. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, im the fillmore corridor ambassador. Right now, im going to try to bring my community together. Weve got to have unity in my community. Theres no more black community, although this is black history month. They gave it to us, the shortest month. We still got short changed. My name is ace, im on the case. Ive got some news reels that i want to show to you in room 200. My name is ace and im on the case. Im mad that i had to go through it to get to it. Back by popular demand, ace on the case, all in your face, and im going to be in this place. Thank you very much. Next speaker, please. Good afternoon. Sue hester here. Im so glad youre having this discussion, because we need to have a discussion. We need to have and expand. Theres a lot of things about neighborhood commercial districts and other neighborhoods that have commercial on them. When the absentee landlords keep a place vacant for a long time, theres a real lighting issue and safety issue as well as a muni issue. Theyre all involved. People that walk down the streets, especially women, older women like myself that may have a cane, they dont have lighting on the sidewalk, feel very uncertain walking. So i dont think theres enough attention paid to requiring lighting on the exterior of a building so that the pedestrian walkway is lit, whether or not theres a store in there or not, it should be the landlords responsibility, not the tenant, because a tenant moves all the time. Secondarily, the muni is only as strong as the retail district. People feel uncertain walking down streets, to a maununi sto as well, if the street is dark. If we sh