August 20, 2020. Budget and Appropriations Committee. Good morning. This is the august 20, 2020 rescheduled budget and Appropriations Committee meeting. I am joined by supervisors walton, mandelman and president yee. I would like to thank sfgovtv for broadcasting this meeting. Do you have announcements . Due to the covid19 health emergency, the Committee Room are closed. Members will participate in a meeting remotely. This is taken pursuant to the local, state and federal orders and directives. Committee members may participate to the same extent as if physically present. Put lick comment shall occur at the recessed meeting august 24 at 10 00 a. M. You may send it in the following ways. Email to the budget and finance committee clerk, and it will be forwarded to the supervisors and included as part of the official file. Thank you, good morning. We are reconvening our meeting from yesterday. This weeks hearings are focused on changes and reductions that the Budget Committee would like to make to department budgets. A few things i want to know. There is no trailing legislation today. Reminder to new members. The hearings are noticed separately. This is all one meeting. We are taking up the following day at 10 00 a. M. One meeting for wednesday, thursday and friday. No Public Comment this week on the budget, which is items one and two. All Public Comment will be heard on monday, august 24th at 10 00 a. M. There. Is no other business on monday except for the comments. The budget and Appropriations Committee will recess at 12 30 or 1 00 p. M. For lunch. Yesterday we finished every department. I imagine today may go longer. There may be policy recommendations that are being brought forth by committee members. Remainder, if there are departments that require examination, it is possible to bring those back on friday afternoon. This is the week we should try to finalize our cuts to the budget. It will be held in the order listed. I want to recognize we need to accommodate scheduling conflicts and call departments out of order. Thanks in advance for your flexibility. Today are the following departments superior court, public defender, District Attorney, treasure and Tax Collector, economic and work force development. City planning, department of police accountability. Sheriff and fire and Police Department. Again, i want to before we start our process today, i want to take a moment to thank the city workers of San Francisco. I also want to recognize that the process of the budget regulations is set up to be a somewhat adversarial process. The mayor has the budget and the board of supervisors looks for inefficiencies that we can actually take and repurpose that money for the priorities of the board. This process sets us up in an adversarial situation, but i want to recognize that that by no means means that we do not appreciate and do not respect the work of the Department Heads that are fighting very hard for the budget to serve constituents the best way they can. I want to say to them that i know you represent the city workers and your departments and we could have not gotten through this pandemic and we will get through this economic crisis with help of city workers. On behalf of the whole committee here i want to thank you for your service to our city and recognize that although the situation and this process is adversarial. We understand we are fighting for your budget. You believe that is what is needed to serve the public the best way you know how. Thank you very much in advance. With that lets get started. Madam clerk read items one and two. 1. Budget and appropriations ordinance for estimate expenditures for department of the city july 31, 2020 for the fiscal years ending june 30, 2021 and june 30, 22. Item the annual salary ordinance enumerating positions in the annual budget and appropriations ordinance. First we have the superior court today. Good morning, chair and supervisors. I want to thank you for the work you are doing to balance this difficult budgettier, and thank you to the Budget Office. I am happy to report the court is in agreement with the budget and legislative analyst. These recommendations. The Controllers Office please note the attention and the recommendations for this defendant. Thank you for joining us today. Next is the department of housing. Good morning. President yee and chair and supervisors, thank you for having us today. We want to thank you for all of the work with the departments during this season and chair fewer thank you for acknowledging the hard work across the city. The same goes to you and your teams. After so significant conversations and discussion we are in agreement with the recommends of the bla. Any comments or questions from colleagues . Seeing none. Yes, president yee. Supervisor mandelman. My apologies, go ahead. Thank you, chair fewer. I think it is worth noting this is a significant expansion on the prior years budget doubling next year and then the stepping down to something 150 million more. At least 150 million more than we are spending in the second year. I applaud the additional investments in this plan to house unhoused people and get folks in the housing units. The budget does not reflect a plan for dealing more effectively with the streets. I believe we should move to save fleets. We requested the 150 million which the board of supervisors will not be able to meet, but i think we continue to not address or articulate in the budget a plan for insuring we do not have to leave people camping in residential neighborhoods. That is among the foremost challenges facing the city. It is frustrating this budget did not deal with that problem. I am very grateful and happy about the additional investment and i think it will change peoples lives and makes San Francisco a model in many ways of compassionate responses to homelessness. We continue to fail to address the needs of neighborhoods where people are camping. Thank you, supervisor mandelman. We have learned what a valuable resource sleep can be during the pandemic. I echo your sentiments. As i said in the last hearing. We are working hard to bring the cost of these sites down in collaboration with our partners. We hope with the amount of money we will be able to do more than planned. We are working on that on a daily basis. One thing to note. What helps the streets is combination of services, meeting people where they are. Having shelters is helpful. We have folks who dont want to go to save sleep and want to go to shelter. The controller has joined us. Safe sleep is not fema reimbursable. There is limited funding for things related to streets as the citizens voted on a very housing focused initiative to underscore what you are saying about how important that is. This is a financial question, not a belief, values or programmatic question for hsc and the mayors Budget Office. I understand and encourage investment in this area. I would caution that it not be at the cost of all of these other resources. Our advance planning with supervisor walton let us know we need the array of services in balance to move people through the system and end homelessness. I agree with you, supervisor mandelman. I am adding context why it is limited in this proposed budget and look forward to bring costs down and if more funds are available we will jump on it. President yee. Thank you, chair fewer. It is great that the budget is going to grow pretty substantially the first year and a little bit in the second year, based on last years budget. This should be to provide Additional Services and to address the homeless issues. I just have two concerns. One, it is pretty substantial in terms of how you have to rampup and Everything Else. Sometimes when i see that type of growth i wonder if it is implementable or not. I think it is really fair to say even before the year is up to come back to the board and give us a report to see how we are doing. If, you know, i would say at least six months later come back to see how you are doing with the spending plan. If indeed you are finding that this in certain things maybe reshuffle to address the issues supervisor mandelman has pointed out. That is one thing. Commit to that, that would be great. The other thing is do you have a plan b budget . This is so dependent on this passing. I hope it will. It will provide the resources that are so needed for not only this group of people that we are trying to help but also for further education. What happens if that if we are not successful in that particular ballot measure . Thank you, president yee. Yes, to your point amp substantial rampup. This is in the bones of dna and hsa when created by may or lee before things were organized and planned, we were up and running and off to th to the races. Your caution and concern is warranted. I interpret it as support. I am not sure if that is how you intended it. We all want to succeed here. The question is this possible . A lot has to do with staffing. In our last time together we talked about an inspired team. Hsh for the first time has an hr team that is full. We have a mayors Budget Office that unlocked some positions and support from dhr. We need help today to not slowdown. I will be very honest about that. The help is not here yet. All systems are go across the city from the Mayors Office to dhr to the team to get that help to us. Every day is a fight to make sure we have staffing that we need. For all of you in the city who have come to help hsh, thank you. We love having you and we hope you will continue to come work with us. To your question around bottleneck and reshuffling. We are available to be called upon to provide updates. This is a significant increase. I will clarify the percentage increase or have Deputy Director whitley do that. It is a little more subtle than the bla report allows time or space for. If we have bottlenecks i would love to let the board know and the mayor is aware and helping us to push through the bottlenecks. Great idea. Plan b budget. The controller is on as well. As we have presented and i think it is important to talk about this in a public forum, thank you, president yee, that we am i the only one seeing that . I will keep going unless chair fewer would like me to pause. Somebodys email. Madam clerk, can you assist us, please . Yes, i am looking for this matter. Please continue. Thank you. Thank you. I think when we began this how do we unlock all of the money, the recovery geo bond which you are experts in and project home key which we applied for. With the Controllers Office what do we do if those things dont unlock. As we shared with you ahead of the budget process, we would do less. Much, much less particularly housing. The budget is balanced without prop c in year one. The home less recovery in the totally which is what supervisor mandelman is referencing in terms of broad expansion to permanent housing wont move forward in the same way. Plan p is do less. There plan b is do less. Prop c, fema, home key. Everybody in San Francisco should be not just keeping fingers crossed but advocating with our local national government, State Government connections to draw down as many resources as we possibly can. The other opportunity is that philanthropy is a partner here. They have come to make the Recovery Plan work. If something didnt come through they will never make up the scale or consistency but could help with additional debt. I hope that answers your questions, president yee. Again. Bla. Budget legislative analyst office. I want to respond to your comments about putting the funds on hold. I do want to point out that we have two reserve recommendations in our report. These are on page 5 and 6 of our report. Number 9, department of homelessness and housing. 117,000 almost 20f did tds or temporary positions. We recommend placing these on reserve. The department is pr proposing november of this year. These will be ongoing. We recommend Staff Support to be provided and that the department should come back to request authority for these positions rather than temporary salary. Second reserve recommendation we have is recommendation that is number 10. Two year ongoing recommendation. In the first year it is 2,867,839,291. On budget and finance committee these are all to be funded through prop c pending receipt of funds. Ongoing second budget year amount. [ inaudible ] i wanted to call a little bit of attention to that. We recommend putting those prop c funds on reserve. Thank you. This is helpful. Actually i think is dependent on that happening. Thank you. Any more comments or questions from colleagues . Chair fewer. If i could note that president yee asked about bottlenecks. The Citizens Initiative and so the prop c Committee Formed and staffed by the Controllers Office will govern the use of these funds. The intention is to have citizens in control but also to prevent bottlenecks. I am concerned if we need to come back to the board of supervisors certainly we would like to come back and provide updates. If we have to come back before we send money we spend money, we will not make the timeline. I would refer to the committee if that is something they are seeking in terms of Board Governance over the committee. My understanding that is not the intention of prop c. I will defer to those who worked so hard on c. Okay. Thank you very much. I have a couple comments or questions for the bla. First, i understand there were 19 currentvay ca current seven t starting. They are asking an additional 36 and they recommend attrition and reductions for the timeline for these positions. These proposed savings are only for 13 of the 55 positions currently vacant. For the bla. Why limited to a handful of current be new positions . Were there additional recommendations made to the department . I would need to confirm with the analyst for the exact number. I do believe there were additional recommendations. There is a back and forthwith all of the departments we work with to come to an agreement that would be appropriate recommendation for the budget and Appropriations Committee that does represent less than we initially looked at. It could mean that we could have the department join us again for further conversation about this, is that correct . You could give us the additional recommendation you gave to the department, share with us those recommendations . Yes, we could provide Additional Information about the initial recommendation. Thank you. Chair fewer we are prepared to share the conversations we had with the bla on this topic if that would be helpful. In our conversations with the department, i wanted to say what exactly are the proposed 36 new positions . When do you anticipate completing the hiring process for them. Deputy director can give the details from the Department Perspective and relay the details for the bla, of course, referring to anything bla related. We heard you loud and clear, chair fewer, about belt tightening. This bla report represents a further cut and belt tightening for hsh. Specifically in areas of general funds taking any savings and repurposing it so that we can protect existing contracts and services. It slows down significant numbers of positions to allow for savings. It really focuses on both the maintenance of existing services and the expansion. I think those offer discrepancy which i will ask the Deputy Director to step into around the f. T. E. Good morning. Department Deputy Director of admins anadministration and fin. We absorbed several general fund positions. In addition through working with the bla we are taking 1. 4 million cut in our salaries based on what was proposed in the mayors budget. 660,000 of that is quite a lot of money for such a Small Department is attrition savings. Chair fewer, although there arent reductions in actual f. T. E. S. We have to slow down or limit our hiring to stay with . That attrition level. In addition there were a calculated f. T. E. Of 31 temperature positions that is a calculation based on temp positions. Some was for covid, 15 positions were for Covid Response to backfill those staff deployed. We have many, many staff in the field and at the ccc. Then there are additional amount on reserve pending prop c in case prop c is unlocked that we could start backfilling and hiring tenp positions as we go through the long city recruitment process. There are not 31 new people joining us. The bla cut those temporary covid positions by half. We have only enough money to backfill some of the most critical positions for those that are deployed. Staff will have to take on more and more and more work. We are literally at our breaking point from a staffing capacity position. This is, in my opinion, all that the department can both absorb responsibly and Going Forward with this aggressive Covid Response, moving existing funds out the door. If c unlocked to build capacity to implement c. As you heard in the bla audit, when we dont hire, money dent move as fast, not enough program monitoring. That takes staff. We are grateful for the bla partnership and that they worked with us to hear concerns and gave us something to manage. It is a 1. 4 million reduction over the mayors salary proposal. Thank you. I dont have to hire in this timeline. There could be more savings considering that your department has had a long reputation of not being able to hire and having a lot of vacancies. I am wondering if we could get more cost savings where in we have a budget that could more accurately reflect your hiring timeline. I see supervisor mandelman in the queue. Thank you, chair fewer. I share that desire to match up how muc