Transcripts For SFGTV BOS Government Audits And Oversight Committee 20240712

Good morning. The meeting will come to order. Welcome to the thursday october 15th meeting. Im supervisor gordon mar. Im joined by vice chair aaron peskin and matt haney. Mr. Clerk, you have any announcements . Clerk i do mr. Chair. In order to protect the public, Board Members and employees during the covid19 health emergency, board of supervisors legislative chamber and Committee Room is cltsed. Committee members will attend the meeting through Video Conference and are participating in this meeting as if they are present in the chamber. Youll have opportunity to speak and provide comments by phone by dialing 4156550001. When connected you will hear the meeting discussion. When item of interest comes up dial star 3 to be added to the speaker line. Please wait until the system indicates you have been unmuted and you can begin your comments. Best practices is to call from quiet location, speak clearly and turn down your radio or streaming device. Alternatively, you may submit Public Comment in the following ways you may email me im john carroll. If you submit Public Comment by email, i will include it part of legislative file. You can also submit your commentary in writing through the post and direct your letter to our office in city hall. The address there is one dr. Carlton b. Goodlett place. Finally mr. Chair, items acted upon will appear on the board of supervisors agenda october 27, 2020 unless otherwise stated. Supervisor mar thank you so much mr. Clerk. Please call item number one. Clerk reenactingment of emergency ordinance to temporarily require private employers with 500 or more employees to provide Public Health emergency leave during the Public Health emergency related to covid19. Members of the public who wish to provide Public Comment on this ordinance should call the Public Comment number now. That number is 4156550001. Im in receipt of an memo. Supervisor mar thank you. There are no changes being considered today. I will be brief. Colleagues this will extend for further 60 days, Public Health emergency which provides an additional two weeks of fully paid leave to hundreds of thousands of San Francisco workers. I urge your support today to maintain this crucial policy as more businesses reopen and workers go back to work. Why dont we go to Public Comment on this item. Are there any callers on the line . Clerk operations checking to if we have callers in the queue. For those who already connected, please press star followed by three to be added to the queue if you wish to speak. For those already on hold, please wait for your prompt to begin. That prompt will say, your line has been unmuted. I have one caller. Mr. Chair, that completes the queue. Supervisor mar thank you so much mr. Clerk and operations. Public comment is closed. I like to recommend this item to the Committee Report october 20th meeting board of supervisors meeting. Please call the roll. Clerk motionoffe [roll call vote] three ayes. Supervisor mar thank you. Mr. Clerk, please call items two and three together. Clerk agenda item number two hearing on the state of africanamerican employment and economic mobility in the city and the office of economic and Workforce Development citywide workforce prames and their impact on africanamerican employment. Number three is a resolution affirming board of supervisors commitment to advancing Racial Equity and affirming the city and county of San Francisco to addressing existing inequities in policies and services. Now is the time to call in if you want to get in line to speak on this item. Please wait until the system indicate that you have been unmute the and you may begin your comments. Supervisor mar thank you. I want to first thank supervisor walton for your leadership on these items. And other important issues around equity and justice. I want to apologize for the long delay in getting this hearing scheduled. Im really looking forward to really important discussion today about equity and justice for africanamericans in our city. Thanks again supervisor walton. The floor is yours. Supervisor walton thank you so much chair mar. As you know, rest of my colleagues know and everyone in the city knows, we are in a challenging time with covid19. We understand that some of this takes a little bit more time and appreciate the committee allowing us to have this hearing today. Thank you supervisor peskin and supervisor haney as well as all of you know, this is a continuation of hearings. For years, we have continued to learn about Workplace Discrimination on behalf of San Francisco department of Human Resources and some of our citys larger departments. There has been documented instances of racial bias in hiring of black people and people of color, promotions for black employees and a disproportionate number of black employees in disciplinary action. On june 15, 2018 supervisor kim introduced a hearing on africanamerican workforce hiring, retention, promotional opportunity and Data Tracking on Workplace Discrimination complaints at the city and county of San Francisco. And requested department of Human Resources, City Attorney office, city administrator and other applicable departments to report. On september 19th, the government held a public hearing to hear the public major. The mayor issued directives been on october 30, 2018, supervisor cohen scheduled board of supervisors to sit as a committee of the whole on november 2018. To hold a public hearing on the very same matter. The city set up the office of Racial Equity. Theres so many areas we need to address. We have seen an increase outcry of mistreatment of black employees that work for the city and county of San Francisco. If we are to achieve true equity and change the systemic racism that has existed for years, we must move forward with bold change that ensures that Workplace Discrimination is eradicated and all races and ethnicities have the opportunity for growth and to be treated with dignity. When i was first elected, i agreed to carry this item forward. As a black man, i understand firsthand, the racial structures our employees under. It is clear not many of the hiring decision are made by people that look like me. I understand the systemic issues that black workers face, i have witnessed it firsthand and i have heard testimony after testimony how black employees are let go. How africanamericans are made temporary and then let go, how americans are not passing probations and how africanamericans employees are discriminated against. I heard testimony about the ongoing injustices and the unfair treatment that they feel as a black employee. This is not okay in San Francisco. It is not right for us to grown. I have met with several groups. I have met with labor and i have met with black employees and black employee groups and other groups representing other people of color with departmental staff and other city staff and other impacted populations. It is clear that discrimination occurs in the workplace. Sometimes blatant and sometimes subtle. How do we celebrate the best of all of us and celebrate diversity. We must hold ourselves accountable to the change that need to happen to make all workers in San Francisco feel valued, appreciated with the hope that they have the opportunity to move up in our city and be allowed to work without having to deal with discrimination. Mayor breed gave an executive order in september 2018 with the following mandates to the department of Human Resources. One, the department of Human Resources will hire two full time Staff Members to focus on diversity recruitment, who will serve as a centralized resource to all city departments to support diversity recruitment and ensure outreach efforts are coordinated. Two, d. H. R. Will expand harassment prevention and Cultural Communications training to includely more City Employees. Three, all city departments will begin reporting instances of disciplinary action to d. H. R. So problem areas can quickly be identified. Today we are here to hear about the progress or lack of, these directives. And to discuss the next action steps for making and changes needed in the San Francisco department of Human Resources. We will be hearing from the San Francisco department of Human Resources and several large city departments. First, well be hearing from the first of its kind, city office of Racial Equity under the Human Rights Commission. It is clear that we need to have open communication and a safe place to have this dialogue. If we are to move forward, we must create a culture of trust and learn what steps we can take to implement changes that will improve the experiences for black employees and employees of color. To do this, we first must knowledge our failures and commit to improving how we create a working environment that is more inclusive and what we have done. I like to thank labor employee groups that continue to all out institutional racism and mistreatment, thank our Human Resources department. I like to thank those employees who have been brave enough to come forward so we can address these issue of inequity and create a better Work Environment. We are now going to hear from the Human Rights Commission and office of Racial Equity. Thank you so much supervisor walton and to the g. A. O. Committee chair mar, supervisor peskin and supervisor haney. This is important to me on so many levels both the role of the Human Rights Commission but also as a black woman in the city. I have experienced levels what i perceive as antiblackness from my peers and colleagues and folks that work with me and dont always feel theres a recourse to address that. I appreciate this process and time. I will try to be mindful of time and move quickly. As supervisor walton mentioned, mayor breed issued directives in 2019 and those directives led to the development of a diversity equity and Inclusion Task force. The Human Rights Commission was asked to help facilitate those conversations with the idea that folks would come in and share ideas and concerns and consolidate their feedback. We failed to gather consensus on next steps. What i will highlight is the role that hrsc held. That first meeting was focused on the pieces that supervisor walton just shared around the directives from mayor breed. Recruitment, training, reporting and communications. The meeting was convened. Folks were invited it supposed to be a blend communitybased organization, labor, City Employees, really Diverse Group of folks to talk about a comprehensive strategy. Comprehensive means we have to address the hiring process. We need to think about how people come in city unemployment and better understand the barriers and challenges from perspective of fomen folks tryio get in. The meeting supposed to end in june. A lot of this has been advanced through the office of Racial Equity, director finley will share that as well as the new d. E. I. Director for director Human Resources. We shared or created a community to share what we heard as part of that process. As i shared before, we could get to total agreement. This is the document that captured what we heard in terms of the six requests the plan was to develop a more thorough document that could highlight some strategies, research and evidencebased practices and to validate the comments that we heard from the stakeholders. The stakeholders then did additional work on that. This is that document where they added more info and some updates to that. We are still working through that process and i believe d. H. R. Shared a memo or as a response to kind of closeout of this effort. We continued meetings from march to october. It was my understanding that much of the work that was being done through this was going to be pushed to two diversity committees that were happening and part of the labor m. O. U. S. This was a large group with lot of different voices and views. We werent able to make much headway. We probably got too in the weeds on very specific issues and concerns of individuals and not really focused on systematic or system change. That if there are future efforts, i know d. H. R. Going with different strategies, folks be allowed to have those larger things to influence and to get information for that. In closing, where the Human Rights Commission is, how we are working to advance system change and response to the mayors directive. With regard to recruiting with regard to the first two demands from the stakeholders that were participating, the e. E. O. Report, that is something specifically directly with department of Human Resources. I do believe that department of Human Resources and office of Racial Equity are collaborating to advance and move the pieces forward. With regards to recruitment, the Human Rights Commission is working working closely with the department of health to advance pipelines of opportunities, in collaboration with communitybased organizations. We are leveraging the allocation of funds that supervisor walton and mayor breed and the ultimately the board of supervisors approved top support the black community. With regard to training and comprehensive strategy, office of Racial Equity is leading internal training. Human Rights Commission is working with Community Stakeholders to develop strategies to address bias and think about what those tools and components are and to bill on that in collaboration with the office of Racial Equity. With regard to communication and a working group, again office of Racial Equity and d. H. R. Will share more about the work they are doing. Other the last few months in support of the allocation of funds for the black community, the Human Rights Commission posted mor hosted more than 0 meetings and gotten lot of feedback around what it looks like in terms of communication and strategy, im hearing a lot from City Employees. That is a separate working group. But that is something well build out there. Also request for a Community Council which we will leverage funds to support Community Members to support that engagement. Lastly with regards to directive three, which was reporting and demand for with regard to the migration report, lot of the work that were doing has been in partnership hope s. F. As well as other stakeholders to understand the impact, whos been displaced, who moved out the city and why. Theres a case study that we have been working on specifically looked at one family, multiple generations and understanding the impact with migration not just on their economic but their economic mobility. That is how the h. R. C. Is continuing to work to advance these efforts and can in a future meeting give more deal and information how were working towards the mayors directive. I will stop there and thank you so much for your time and i look forward to continuing to advance the work. Thank you so much director davis for this. Thank you so much for having me chair mar and to supervisor peskin and haney. We have been talking about this for several years. Today i hope is the next step in progress. I want to thank director davis and also pushing issues every single day through our work. As supervisor walton discussed, we have been talking about this since 2017. Weve had number of hearings and organizing on behalf of city workers and labor and other advocates to bring these issues to light. We have a number of framing documents, director davis went over executive order 1802, which is a key document framing the next steps how to get at this issue at the root. I wanted to uplift the legislation, in addition to our d. H. R. Audit report which was released on march 2020 and Racial Equity framework which started with phase one which is our internal approach. All of these documents provides framing and evidencebased approaches with regards to this issue. If we want to tackle racism in our workforce and better understand the need to forward, these are a great start. All of us and those of us watching and at home, and black workers here in San Francisco, in this time racial reckoning, that nationally and in california and here in San Francisco in times of deep warning and grief, its compounding. Im hoping that we are turning the ship towards progress in collaboration with all the departments, labor, workers and community and the board and leadership. We were talking about these issues. We heard a lot in regards to interpersonal racism. I want to make sure were thinking about this from a larger level. Im talking about racism in between individuals. Sometimes we get stuck there. I want to broaden our conversation. Make sure were talking about this from institutional perspective. Were taking the approach that we are unpacking and looking at practices that continue to perpetuate Racial Equity in San Francisco. How we are part of a system we live in a society that produces racist outcomes. We have to grow as a group. In order to do whats necessary, we need to target systemic racism. This is how Mount Olympus mue institutions Work Together. We see this in our workforce and unequal access opportunities and different policy outcomes and data by race and gender. This is cumulative. This is pervasive and its durable. Its going to take work from every institution, every individual across all boundaries in order to make the change that we want to see. If were thinking about Systems Approach to this problem, when talk about outcomes when it comes to africanamerican workforce, here are some key issues. Folks are clustered in certain classifications or certain job roles. It leads to lack of economic mobility. What can happen on the backend to see people within the city. Weve heard discussion around Workplace Environment and folks not feeling safe. This is compounding in one outcome that we dont talk about. If i dont have access to economic mobility at work, when i retire from the city, i will lead with the same access and that makes this difficult. Those are racialized outcome. These are compounding, it takes all of us looking at the system as a whole. This is not about just one person, this is about how institution works. One example of disparity, there are many others, in our d. H. R. Workforce, we discussed wages by race. Where we see city and county, white employees have a higher average salary across all three categories. Black employees are the lowest paid. Also among the lowest c. E. S. This is one example of large systemic equality thats mental and put forth more structural systemic solutions. Supervisor mar just going back to the last slide, those are exclusive positions. The permanent Civil Service, does that include m. E. A. I will double check that in the report. I will be happy to share the report with you. I think we can all agree that our system needs to produce better outcomes. I want to talk about what that looks like. If were talking about going bigger and Holding Us Accountable and create a better culture of dignity and respect. That can be anything from antiracist or explicit bias training and expanded opportunity for folks learn to be better managers and better supervisors. Were making sure folks have resources to the the Racial Equity work. We need to uplift accountability so that all departments and leadership should uphold transparent policy. I want to prioritize justice over just treating everyone the same. Not everyone has equal opportunity. We do live in a racist society, therefore, we need to acknowledge those Racial Disparities and conversation should be towards equity. Its about justice. Thats how we can change on a systemic level. How can we get there . Lot of discussions are happening. Key parts i want to call out are Racial Equity action plan. Due to office of Racial Equity mandate that work is due on december 21, 2020. We have been working hard to ensure we also believe that our city wide workforce coming up with policies. Theres only so much one department can do. Additionally, we need to make sure that labor is at the table. Also accountability with data and monitoring behavior. Key ways in which we have been doing the work. About a month ago, we lost our citywide equity working group. This is work being led by myself and my colleagues. We need to we are focusing on these different topic areas. Weve been doing this work over the past several weeks. We will be creating a road map to equity report. We will be working with labor to talk about their ideas. Theres been a really possess pe and helpful conversation. Lastly, really uplift our work with our Racial Equity evaluation. Making sure those plans do put forth recommendations and strategies to support our black workforce. We will be working with department of resource. We will also be working on additional training opportunities for our Department Leadership and revving up new diversity training. Also working with d. H. R. On departmental workforce and graphic data, which is the phase two. Lots of things that hit at structures and multiple voices at the table. I like to end Racial Equity is everyones job. Even though im in this role, and im proud and really excited to be working with director davis and my h. R. C. College, this work cannot happen without everyone participating. Im looking forward to this hearing. Im hoping we can take the system approach forward. Thank you so much. Supervisor mar i do have a few questions for h. R. C. And office of Racial Equity. I want to see if my colleagues had any questions for director davis or director finley . Supervisor mar i dont have a question, i want to thank director davis and director finley for all your extremely important and strategic work that youve been doing on these issues for years. I know things intensified this year. Really appreciate you share, the history of all of this work and all the progress thats been made this year. Thank you so much. Supervisor walton supervisor haney, you have any questions . Supervisor haney i have a few. Thank you again for the presentation. You touched little bit on this, but, im curious to know, how [indiscernible] thank you. I missed latter end of your question. How collaborative departments have been with office of Racial Equity plan. This year, were billing a movement for Racial Justice across the city. Some of the departments were doing that work. But has been really a flash point particularly after the murders of Breonna Taylor and george floyd. Starting in the past year, we start convening all departments. Right now we have about 137 Racial Equity leaders identified across all city departments. We have held four convenings with robust participation from the department. Weve been able to meet with the departments to talk with them about their Racial Equity plan. We provide Technical Assistance office hours every week. I think folks, they are anxious and a little overwhelmed. I think there is a good faith effort that im encouraged by to get this work done to commit the people to do it. I think folks are just hungry and they need more resources. Not everyone process for Racial Equity is going to be the same. Were trying to make sure that were leading people where we are and also if folks are dragging their feet little bit, its been pretty interesting process. Im encouraged. Supervisor walton i wanted to ask to every Single Department that presents today, have they admitted to institutional racism, discrimination and inequities that exist in their department . From the ones that i have talked to directly . Yes. Director davis did you Say Something . I wanted to clarify, you specifically about d. H. R. Or all the departments . Supervisor walton im including all the departments and d. H. R. I will say from the work that ive been doing, much like in society, some folks freely and easily come to that space and other folks are kind of like what do you mean. I think the work of office of Racial Equity and the instruction of that legislation has made a difference where folks want to have the conversation and deal with it. I think it becomes really easy to use in the same way we use markers to explain and move forward. In the same way, people do that to justify why they dont want to talk about race. They are like, oh well, the boot straps, if they wanted it bad enough or if they had bad attitude, not only systemic piece of that where its rooted and grounded. Both on professional and personal level, its been really hard to have people hone that and recognize it. Supervisor walton i understand how hard it is. Thats why im asking the question, because we wont be able to adequately address the issues that exist if folks are not admitting that theres a problem to address. Agreed. We dont want to use words like, diversity, equity, inclusion but not say things they are antiracist or looking at how can you target antiblack racism and how can we this isnt, i think folks want to sit in a place where everyone can feel equal and that were talking about equality kind of way. Thats what this is. When youre talking about history, when youre talking about disparity, it can be uncomfortable. We want to continue to push forth that conversation no matter how uncomfortable it is. In that discomfort, you will have growth. I appreciate you, supervisor walton for calling that out. Supervisor walton my last question, do you feel h. R. C. And office of Racial Equity has the resources and support is needed to be able to execute the work . I want to make sure that obviously, as we listen to recommendations, we know that the things that we have to work on that resources and support are there for us to really move the needle. I will say from the h. R. C. Perspective, i think we have to think longterm plan. I would just say, the allocation of funding, support the black community, will be leveraged in some way. We heard from community about developing pipelines and increasing accountability and the request that we create a position to help with some of this. We dont want to necessarily again create the very thing that were fighting. Well hire someone to help advance this work, they come on and never progress into a p. C. S. Position that locks them into economic, not just mobility but sustainability. We have to be intentional as we come out and begin the economic recovery that we dont lose the position that we created to address the oexpression that weve known how for centuries. We have the ability to leverage some existing funds the next fiscal year, to be able to advance this work and build it up and do the reporting. Beyond that two years, its going to be back on the board. Supervisor walton thank you both, not just for your presentations today but just for all the great work weve been doing together around equity. Your leadership, director davis and director finley, have been important for everything and fight to achieve equity. I want to thank you for everything as we stay committed to this work. Just if i could, i have to say its been a pleasure over the last month, giving all the conversations that have happened and the way we have been engaged. I want to thank you for your leadership and to the entire committee and board of supervisors. Im grateful for how you have showed up and how you engaged and been respectful. Im grateful for all the work that all a are doing. Im not as favorable about the politics side as i am about the community. I enjoyed the ability to work with u all. Thank you for your leadership. Supervisor walton at this time, i want to say congratulations to carroll issen for being selected for department of Human Resources. Again, i wanted to say congratulations and thank you for being here this morning and the floor is yours. Thank you supervisors. Chair mar and members of the committee and im pleased to be here to speak with you this morning. As you know, this is my first week as the acting Human Resources director. I cant think of a more urgent topic to be in front of this committee about in my first week. Ive run in place to try to understand all the work that d. H. R. Has been doing. And taking a quick look at the work weve done so far and what lies ahead. I do want to just say at the outset, it is my strongly held view which is in our city laws, all employees deserve the right and opportunity to thrive in their careers and work free of toxicity of bias, discrimination and harassment and other forms of obnoxious environments that we experience from time to time. I think its due every employee and every applicant, it is the essence of a productive focus workforce that we provide to the community of San Francisco. I do believe we have an urgent need to address and mitigate and correct racial equities that exist within our City Employee family from recruitment, workforce and accountability. I will be addressing those today. We do have a Progress Report to give you with respect to the mayors executive directive. Im excited about number of the things im able to report to you. You will see, it will be obvious to you when you hear about the areas work thats needed. I dont think this is something that is just a topic for the city. I think its the topic. Its going to have to built into everything that we do. [please stand by] these four areas were laid out in the mayors executive order. In each of these areas, and i want to talk about it all four of them. Lets talk about training first. From the d. H. R. Perspective, we really have to try to change the tenor, introduce new conversations among our workforce. We have a very large workforce, were the second largest elm employer in San Francisco. We have a myriad of workplaces. Our businesses are very diverse, so we do not have one size fits all here. We do have some underlying principles that we are trying to promote throughout the city. First of all, our implicit bias training, which is up and running. We managed to roll this out to a third of the citys workforce. We are looking at how we expand this training and target it. Its a one day training. We gotten a lot of great feedback about it. I believe all members of the board taken it. The office of Racial Equity has expressed interest in looking at the curriculum there and in the other areas and were happy to do it. Were looking forward to continuing our partnership with them to do that. A number of these ones that follow, i want to hone in on the 24plus management thats our supervisory training that every new and attending supervisor attends. We put the implicit bias work we done directly into that training. We talked about discipline in that training as well. So that is work that is going to be continuing. The fairness and hiring is now a required course for anybody that sits on a hiring panel, so thats new. The communicating across cultures came explicitly out of issues that arose within the Workplace Culture of laguna hospital, so we worked with d. P. H. To develop that curriculum and have been administering it. Were excited about expanding our training, working with the office of transgender initiatives and we hope to get that up and running this year. Okay, next slide please. These are the reports that we have been generating. We work closely with our city departments to make sure that the data is being entered correctly. Its been a major effort. The first report, one report was ordered by the mayors executive order. We then have additional reports ordered by your legislation, creating the office of Racial Equity. We post all of these documents and we work on them as a continuous work in progress to try to validate everything and make sure all the data gets into the report and is reported correctly. We have an ongoing work process with our city departments to do that. Thats all available for anybody who wants to look at it on our website. Now, here is the topic of discipline, which of course has been a major subject of discussion over your past hearings. In the mayors executive order, they were asked to develop a checklist for use by city departments. We put a lot of effort into that. I personally was involved with it. We completed that assignment this year, we have distributed it to all of our departments, we worked with them to make sure theyre following that checklist. What you see here now is all this is based on data that all city departments have entered into the system. What you see, i want to draw your attention to the 457 number in the totals at the bottom. Thats the number of disciplinary actions and corrective actions taken against City Employees who are Civil Service. This does not include m. T. A. , who will report on their own disciplinary data after me. So, lets jump to the next slide. While the percentage of corrective action taken against black employees has dropped, it is nevertheless clearly disproportionate to the total population of black employees in the city. So clearly the checklist was not sufficient. Im planning now to move on to the next issue contained within the executive order, which is to develop and apply a supplemental review of all proposed discipline. This will be a major undertaking for d. H. R. Im committed to doing it. Obviously we need to move the needle a lot further than it has moved here. Next slide please. A quick question. With the timeline on these, thats something that [inaudible] the timeline on developing the supplemental review of proposed discipline . Im going to take that up immediately. So, i expect to have something out to the department within the next 30 days. Do you have a sense of what that supplemental review will look like . Do you still have to develop that . I have to develop it, but i can tell you generally the challenge i have by the way. We have routine meetings with the six largest city departments with the h. R. Directors and others. We had this discussion within the last couple of weeks. They know this is coming. The challenge is that from the d. H. R. Perspective, we do not we do not see any discipline until it gets to us. The appointing officer and typically it would get to us in the form of a grievance filed by a union and that grievance does not get resolved at the departments desk and ends up at the employer relations division. So we really dont see this discipline until it gets all the way down the road, so were going to have to develop a reporting system for departments that notify us as theyre considering that formally notify us if theyre considering Performance Improvement plans and any level of corrective action against employees and set up some type of a review board to look at all those corrective actions. It will be a major undertaking, but im committed to making it happen. Okay. Moving on. This is the work that everybody at d. H. R. Is involved in and is excited about. Were very grateful to have been given some research to be able to spend effort on this. The Diversity Recruitment Team is a small, but mighty team that has figured out their targets and how theyre going to work, what they want to achieve. They have been working closely with our partners in o. R. E. And also with the Mayors Office of economic and Workforce Development. Weve attended multiple outreach events. We have convened and overseen regular stakeholder meetings within the community and city departments. Again, it is my view that for this to be successful, this has to be very targeted at specific occupational families to up our diversity quotient to make sure that were really doing everything we can to do targeted outreach and recruitment and city employment, the adage that city employment is hard to break into and its hard to lose. Cities are valuing, lifelong opportunities and i for one have appreciated and i would like to see lots of other people to be able to take advantage of it and to make sure that in all of our occupations from executives throughout the whole city that we really promote opportunity, diversity access, and so fort d and we do everything we can to do it. Thank you to the recruitment team. I look forward to working with you. Next slide please. Can i ask a quick question . How many people are in your Diversity Recruitment Team . Two full time and one thats working with them. Were hoping to keep that at least at three. Its working within our office of Workforce Development that is also responsible for all the training. You heard quite a bit about all these programs already. This is ongoing work that were doing, so new initiatives. Im a strong believer of the hiring modernization process. Our tools are antiquated. We do not have good systems to count, track, and analyze, assess and hiring modernization is really going to help us when we get through that project. Its probably a year between a year to a year and a half off. Its a modern platform where we can engage with people that are interested in city employment and apply for our jobs. It will allow us to have better access to see where those people are and what areas we need work. Our ace program has expanded. We have a number of initiatives in collaboration with various city agencies. The e. M. T. Program is one, and the seiu Work Training program is a resurrection of a program from the 80s and 90s which was about helping lvns become registered nurses. We put some resources into that coming out of 2019 negotiations. It took a little while to get off the ground. We were interrupted by the decoration of local emergency. It really, it will allow City Employees who want to take advantage of it, at least some, to move up from paraprofessional to professional work. Well be working with seiu on this. So you can read the rest, we did, as you know, this year very proud of the work we did with the San Francisco Housing Authority to help those employees become employees of the city, the ones who have taken advantage of that are doing extremely well. Were very pleased with that effort. You can see the list here. Our apprenticeship sf, i want to call this out, this is ongoing. Really the heart and soul of this program, margo has taken a job with the m. T. A. , but we are absolutely committed to building on this work, creating a linkage in both the commitments that the trades have made to the city in their Labor Agreements, as well as the commitments made in the citywide project Labor Agreement to do everything we can to extend the opportunity to get good paying jobs and permanent jobs in the trades, both within the city and elsewhere. Lets move on. As director davis said, coming out of the task force from the mayors executive order, we have agreed with sciu and local 21 to the creation of two joint Labor Management committees. Again, the work was slower to get off the ground than any of us would have liked. The seiu committee is now finally up and running. We have the cochairs appointed. I am the cochair for the city and we will be working with local 21 as well. We hope in those committees we will really be able to have both, you know, discussions continuing about the work and what were doing and developing pragmatic approaches to address the issues that are laid out by director with the office of Racial Equity. We have supervisor walton, you asked the question whether dhr and the other department has acknowledge racism within our own departments. We have launched a number of initiatives among our small by mighty department. Most recently were involved in the Michigan Public Policy institute 21 day learning challenge. Were on day three. We have active groups within our department that meets peed periodically. We read, watch videos, hear from leaders and we talk among ourselves about our own experiences and how it applies to our daytoday lives and our work. Were very encouraged by that and like it a lot. Director julia ma will be working with the other departments to see if anyone else is interested based on the feedback we get from our own staff. Were doing a number of other things but i wanted to make sure you knew about that. Finally, you have heard the name jacqueline joseph, she has trained us in the few months we known her to call her j. J. V. She just grabbed hold of the projects that are developed and are running with them. We are really pleased that we have now what we consider to be a great group of equity leaders. We will be working closely with that group. We identified a number of topics. I am familiar with these topics and i hear a lot about them in my negotiations and with the department and throughout the city. Were going to take these issues out into a larger audience to see what we can do to address them. J. J. V. Has been directly involved with the director to lead those conversations and well be doing everything i can to support that and implement recommendations that come out of them. I also want you to, to point out to you before i end this presentation that one of the initiatives that were excited about is the development of a pure Mediation Program. Many of the issues that come into d. H. R. Really amount to employees who have not been able to Work Together well and have not created an environment at work where everybody can thrive. Were hoping Early Intervention can help with that and the best people to do that are employees peers. Were going to support this Mediation Program in every way we can. We hope to get it off the ground in the next calendar year. We completed a train the trainer six day program. Our newly trained trainers will bring the concepts to a larger group. Well start with 100 employees and go from there. Finally, the director mentioned this. Were preparing to do a citywide climate survey. We dont have a target date for that yet, but we will be reporting back to the board as we get ready for that. In summary, i just wanted to say that im also echoing the comments made by supervisor walton. Im grateful for the employees and organizations and labor partners that stepped up, raised these hard questions and im looking forward to working with all of you. Thank you. Thank you so much for your report. I know that you are definitely been working with us here in the city for a while. So we appreciate your continued work on addressing these disparities that continue to exist. I do have a couple of questions, one you did answer. As i look at the list of ongoing programs and we also see clusters of folks, certain job roles and classifications, i didnt hear about the plan to change [inaudible] well, i have no specific plan at this speaking. I will say that from my own experience supervisor and ive been in and around city employment since 1984. Even in my own time, antidotally, i have witnessed shifts within major professional groupings where we have less black employees than we ever did and i would like to address that and to see i think it really starts with making recruits first of all, doing targeted recruitment and once we get employees into the system and as you know, there are many obstacles to becoming a City Employee, not the least of which is the affordability of the bay area. Once we managed to break through and recruit people, to make sure that the environment that they are working in are supportive, encouraging, help them develop their careers, provide the tools to do that. I did work at the San Francisco Public Utilities commission from 2003 to 2012. Under the leadership of now general manager harlan kelly, i witnessed and participated in targeted recruitment that was done in that agency with professional associations and so forth and we hope to learn from him and learn from other examples around the city where we can do that. Weve seen whole professions that have either lost completely or really shrunk in terms of their number of black employees that participated in those professions. I like to really understand both the route causes and get to work on doing the hard work one by one, the recruiting, getting people into the system. I believe we have great leadership in the city and under mayor breed, i believe were going to get the support to do that. Well, im glad you mentioned some of the work that you did. [indiscernible low volume] to have an opportunity to grow their skill set, which is something i didnt necessarily see mentioned. [indiscernible low volume] i dont know that i have that slide. I think we generally mirror the rest of the city, but i will certainly provide that information to your office supervisor. I would love that and the percentage of black employees that you also have in management, specifically to dhr. Yes. Absolutely. And then i looked at some training and i appreciate all the work you do on this to provide opportunities for folks on training. I do know that successful workforce programs have a few elements. Obviously the training element, the opportunity for folks to learn in their job and the resource element so that folks, once they finish training, they can achieve success and of course they provided a vantage for those folks left out. I dont see how your Program Priority tideses two strategies that will increase Advancement Opportunities for black employees. I dont see how it provides an advantage for them and how it makes sure that what once they come out of these programs, there is actual opportunity there. I know there are laws from prioritizing by race and hopefully that changes with the november election when we repeal 209, but there are also ways and different strategies to prioritize specific populations and workforce programs. We do it all the time in San Francisco, whether by zip code, by income, there are ways to make sure were providing opportunities and pathways for the population. So if we set up a workforce and were prioritizing the population, we have to give the population an advantage to connect to those jobs because we know when theres competition and things [indiscernible low volume] to keep people out. What strategies will you provide to prioritize the population in the workforce program. Well, im here i have no specific prescription for you today supervisor. Im here in part to learn. I do know that we you know, in my earlier work, we work closely with the high schools. So i think we do have a number of jobs, major occupational families throughout the city that require High School Dipl a diplomas and before my time in the city, years ago, people started working for the city, sometimes before they turn 20 years old. I would like for us to have a robust recruitment of San Francisco high school graduates, particularly from specific zip codes based on income. I think thats work that we could be doing. Its typically left to office of Workforce Development and i would like to see the city get directly involve in that. We can start there. When were talking about jobs that require advance degrees and licenses often, i think its a really different kind of question. I think work with professional associations is essential, but probably more importantly, working with our local educational institutions to create that direct pipeline, if you go through a Nursing Program in San Francisco state. Were going to have a job for you when you come out of the other side and so forth. Obviously its not something that d. H. R. Can do alone. All of these have Union Representatives that i know are deeply committed to these issues. Im hoping through these partnerships we can develop some new approaches and for what its worth, im very much a believer of yes, we can come up with a citywide program, but in the end, the work of the one by one and finding people and bringing them in is where were going to see our needle move. My hope is definitely that we work on that prescription quickly. There has been Foundation Laid in terms of resolution at the board of education that provide opportunities for pathways, specifically for city jobs. Supervisor haney has been supportive of that. Those opportunities exist. We build and move quickly. We know what the issues are and i think to your point, the work of oewd has provided an opportunity for communities and now we have to put those strategies together to do this internationally and of course with community labor, and manageme management. Those are all the questions i have for now because i know my colleagues may have some. So i will [inaudible] supervisor haney, do you have a question . Yes, thank you director. One of the things that i was wondering is how youre thinking of goals of what has been presented. It seems like we have good early stage interventions of programs put in place. Are you setting goals, for example, on the slide related to the grossly disproportionate rates of discipline of black employees . How are you actually in a more targeted track way looking at how were making progress around some of these sort of broader big picture polls . Can you try to restrait . Restate . Im sorry supervisor. Are you saying next year or in two years we want to be at a certain level when it comes to equity and disproportionality or in hiring . Well for myself personally, i want to see that equity erased within the next year. I want to make sure that every disciplinary action that is reported is thoroughly justified and the rules are being applied even handedly across the city. I will say in looking at this data, i find that number of 400 and whatever that number was, 400 and some odd corrective actions across the city, its exceedingly a low number for a population of over 20,000 permanent civil servants. Either that tells me its a freeforall and everybody is operating on their own conscious, which works out sometimes but not all the time or, you know, the amount of discipline were applying is different from the start. The other thing that bothers me in looking at this data is when you look at the types of discipline, it is overwhelmingly white males that are subject to major discipline, a. K. A. Termination. So what that tells me is this disproportionate discipline against black employees can be punitive, can be a gotcha type of thing that dont arise to that level of discipline, but other employees get away with doing the same thing. I think that everybody at work deserves a fair, even handed place to work. I dont think the answer is that we do nothing to create accountability within our workforce, but certainly we dont do it. We should not be doing it, just targeting one group or whether its intentional or de facto. So i have to figure out how to do high level review before discipline is administered. Im also going to talk closely with the departments and meet with them routinely now on how accountability is created in our workplaces. There are some concepts out there that i would like to explore that have been used in other settings, in hospitals, and so forth. Its called just discipline. I also know that the American Academy of arbitrators has now launched a major project about looking at how to dismantle racial inequities in discipline. Im going to look at the work thats already out there as i begin to form approaches with dealing with these questions. So i dont want to mislead anybody to let you know that i have an answer today. I dont. What i have is the commitment to really digging into the topic and doing everything i can to address it. I appreciate that. Obviously the topic of this hearing and i appreciate the leadership of supervisor walton and all of the workers that have come forward. Its specifically on the issue of antiblackness within our system of employment and the way that has caused disparities and disproportionalities around black employees specifically. Would you and supervisor walton touched on this. Are there policies of yours that would be explicitly race conscious in a way to address this very specific problem that we have with black employees being treated differently and having different sets of opportuni opportunities . Particularly you talked about the discipline, would you consider reviewing all the discipline between black employees and looking for these implicit bias . We need more targeted action as it relates specifically to how black employees are experiencing their time in our city at a variety of levels. Is it specifically to address the issues that black employees are experiencing. Okay, so lets try to break this down. First of all, the comments made by supervisor walton, absolutely do create some limitations from a citywide Personnel Development perspective. We are constrained by law, by statu statute. I do think that we can do some specific targeting. I think the Racial Equity work plans will address this both from d. H. R. And from other city agencies. I think we can look at, you know, looking at every single disciplinary action is one way to go and make sure they meet the basic standards of the seven tests of just cause, but what concerns me is what we dont see in this data is what actually is happening out there. We see, you know, clearly a tilt towards some punitive actions and low level punitive action, but we dont see those equally applied or handedly applied because i cannot believe when i look at this in my own conscious, that somehow our African American, our black employees commit more violation of rules and others. I think its universal and it happens all the time. I think supervisors can deal with their stabs unevenly perhaps. Agen agencies, you know, the less we have of that, the more professionaled the work becomes, the more desperate the work becomes. We dont have those disciplinary matrices. You do x, y happens and so forth. Its not a topic i spent a lot of time on, but im going to start now. I know there have been a lot of scholarships in this area and i want to root what we do, and it has been tried and developed elsewhere, that can have some outcome of success. Its not just that to our black employees, you are going to be treated in an even handed manner. You will be given the respect and the dignity you deserve at work. It also holds all of our workforce accountable for doing their jobs and for performing them well and for living up to the standards, to the high standards that we set for city employment because i do believe that it is a privilege to be a City Employee. I think everyday, all of us have to earn that in our actions and our behaviors. Thank you, just last question. We also clearly have an issue in promotion and i see a drop off in terms of diversity and opportunity as you go to the higher levels of classification. Do you i didnt see a whole lot about that in what you presented. Is there something you are planning to do, i know its your first week, but thinking about this issue of promotion and i guess if its related to a pension. I would say the single thing thats done this year is the fairness in hiring work thats been done now in order to sit on an Interview Panel, you would have to go through a specific chon common training. I think thats important. Our supervisors are asked to sit on panels. Theyre making employment decisions. Theyre taking score. They dont all come to it from the same place. Its a big city. We hire a lot of people. You know, one of the instincts is you know, were seeing desperate outcomes. Lets apply some more rules. The more rules we apply, and i seen this over the years, were going to have it pop out in another direction. So i really think that somehow we have to get into the hearts and minds of the people that are making the decisions, get them to really see that having a robust Diverse Workforce, to have more black employees, to where we have, you know, all one race or one ethnicity that its important to take the steps to diversify that workforce. I seen it happen in multiple occupations in the city and probablingly starting from a good place. When you look at accounting, we have large groups of you know, many of our folks in the accounting profession is filipino. Theres a reason for that. Going back to the 70s when the big Accounting Firms in down town would not hire any filipinos, San Francisco became the employer of major occupational group. Now, you know, maybe thats an area where we have to look at making sure that were doing everything we can to keep the diversity of that group robust and make sure that it hasnt turned into a new exclues exclues their process. Its not the only occupation. Nursing has followed a similar path. We used to have many more African American nurses in our system. As we do, im saying this antidotally. Our data is pretty weak. We havent had good data that goes back before 2012 when the peoples soft system was brought in. Im speaking antidotally as one who was a Union Representative going back to the 80s and the workforces i see now than what i seen then. There have been changes. They parallel the same changes that happened throughout the whole community. So it will take a distinct targeted effort. We wont be able to change it by doing the same thing and pretend were going to get a different outcome. I appreciate all that and i know you have a lot of experience that you will bring to this and im grateful for it. Just one of the things that im looking at that i think needs more intentional work around is the promotion, you know, so when you have a planner one, you have a certain level of diversity and then by the time you get to planner three and higher levels, it drops off significantly. So i recognize that some of that varies across different departments, and how people are promoted and supported in those promotions is closely connected to the other issues. Its just something that i believe in the future would be great to see progress around and intentional planning around. In the Planning Department where i was the Union Representative in the 90s, it was not true then. So these are intentional acts that in order to turn a ship, decisions, intentional acts will have to be made when the opportunities arise. We do have a merit system and everybody has an opportunity to compete for those jobs. We owe it to everyone that we will be a more productive workforce to bring in all points of view and promote our diversity and to counteract any real or de facto discrimination that has result in a change in demographics in our workforce. Great, supervisor peskin. Thank you chair mar. There are various sides of this coin and certainly the disparity and discipline is one of them. I would like to drill down a little bit on the recruitment, retention, advancement, under the Workforce Development function, which when we think of Workforce Development, we think about it largely on the private side, which is a functioning City Government where we try to help folks get jobs, we train, what have you, and to a lesser degree, we think of it in terms of recruitment and Workforce Development in the citys works. That has historically been up until the mid 2000s when the supervisor took a crack at this. A very silo function in our government, it was at the Human Service agencies, in various departments, and i think one thing and maybe its outside of the confines of this hearing or subject for an additional hearing or well hear from oewd later. There was an attempt to consolidate that. We hired a person to see that consolidated function who was then Rhonda Simmons and there was a lot of turf battles between departments. Really to my mind, it never reached its potential. I dont know if you have any thoughts about that. I realize thats not fully within the scope of d. H. R. , but to the extent that, i mean we want to combat this Going Forward. The recruitment and Workforce Development function is the most important thing to fixing this in the future Going Forward. Well, i agree with that last statement, absolutely. If you look at the city workforce, its not up here in the data but were all getting old. Youre looking at one of them. There is going to be a next generation of workers that is going to run this city and become our next generation of leaders. I think its our duty to go out and find them. Many city agencies that you say are involve in this effort, addressing the issues around poverty, you know, h. S. A. , the work they do, all the way up to engaging in professional soci y societies and so forth. So there were a lot of turf wars. Every department has varying resources and interests to these issues. I agree with you supervisor peskin. In my mind, the job of the director is to work with the departments to see where the next generation of work is coming from. The idea that we wake up in 20 years and the complex has changed and we dont have professional occupations where you hit a point and thats it. Its all white after that or its all one race. We promote the integration through the system. That would be the goal. I think it happens as were finding people throughout the city and were helping promote their careers. The next thing is i dont think we do a lot in structure and systemic outside of our Training Programs that is really individually helping employees figure out their career paths within the city. People do it for themselves. Not everybody has the same access to information or to resources. Maybe you didnt get the boss that cares or maybe youre not in the department that wants to lose the resources and share. So its pretty diverse out there. I know probably everyone in this call has done a certain amount of network. Someone works for you, you see the talent, you help them get to their next step. Thats not to say its a targeted program and we have to work on those things. So i dont know if that helps. Yeah, i appreciate those observations, but i think thats an important part of the systemic change that we have to make, to really sharpen that function whether its working with educational institutions, whether its working with trade school institutions, whatever it is. I mean if we have massive shortages of certain types of workers in San Francisco and no shortage of people who are going to high school and college and can fill those positions. Thats what we learned in the working group. We cant retain people for our subway. I mean we cant hire enough of them. There are all sorts of opportunities out there that include huge amounts of advancement potential. Were going to be coming into a very complex job market as we come out of the local emergency in the next year and a half. College graduates and career interrupted, i want to take full advantage of that. Over the last period of time, the city was having a very difficult time competing with the tech industry. I think thats going to change. I think city employment may become something that appeals to people again and i want to take full advantage of that. You know, with the targeted work on making sure that Racial Justice, Racial Equity, diversity is promoted, i do believe you know, i was a student at the university of michigan and the decision happened after i left and the argument there was the diversity of the campus enhanced the Educational Opportunities for everyone. I think thats axiom applies to the city that we dont do our best work when we exclude works, whether intentionally or de fac facto. Thank you. Thank you supervisor peskin. I did want to thank you for your updates and engaging in this discussion with us, with the committee on steps were taking to address inequities for African American employees. I did have a question well, i appreciate the comprehensive approach, you know, that d. H. R. Is taking on these issues and following the mayors executive directive. I had a question more specifically around recruitment and the updates you shared around recruitment. You said that the Diversity Recruitment Team and perhaps the working group have analyzed city classification to identify which ones where that diversity is la lacking or particularly has been lost at the higher classifications. I was wondering if you can speak to priority classifications or departments that have been identified through that analysis where targeted efforts are either underway or in development to increase African American hiring. So i dont have that information at my fingertips supervisor. Another week, i would. Im looking forwards to having my first meeting with that group. I know they done the analysis. They looked at some of the occupations. I can take a guess at them because i know the city well but i know the group, you know, theyre very active. They developed the tool kit. Theyre rolling that out to the departments now for the targeted recruitment and theyre going to be assisting the departments in these key occupational groupings and the professional groupings and so forth. We can get that information together and provide it to your office as early as next week. Great, i appreciate that. Hopefully we will hear more evening sp specifics in the departmental conversation. Thank you supervisor mar. I know we have a long hearing and lot of presentations so i would ask the director one thing, if we could get data on how many African American dont have probations compared to other ethnicity and the typical racial make up and ethnic make up of hiring panel and i will come back to additional questions later. I know we have a lot of folks ready. I believe youre going to call up the department at this point . I am. The department of Public Health will be presenting next. Again, thank you very much for this opportunity. Thank you. Good afternoon supervisors, chair mar, Committee Members peskin, haney, and walton. Thank you for leading this very important effort. I would like to thank our colleagues at dhr for their leadership and support of this really vital work. We do have a slide presentation just to go over some high points and i believe that will be coming on shortly. Im not sure, this looks like somebodys email. I apologize. Here we go. I just wanted to very specifically respond to supervisor waltons question on acknowledging the systemic and institutional racism that we know pervades so much of society and unfortunately that includes our health systems, our healthcare systems, our Public Health systems and certainly it includes the history in the department of Public Health. So very much acknowledge that, that we need to address it, that this is a priority. Just with regards to inequities in general in health, it is our mission to address health and equity and ensure the most Vulnerable People in our community and we cannot do that without addressing equity in our own department. Weve been building an equity infrastructure in the past two years. This has allowed us to progress on equity initiatives despite and perhaps especially in the wake of ongoing disruptions caused by the pandemic. I will add that dr. Bennett and mr. Brown are present today during this hearing. Addressing equity within the department is necessary and will remain a priority moving forward. Lets go to the next slide so i can highlight some of those things that build on what has already been a mention on the prior presentation. So, with regards to Racial Health inequities, they are persistent in our city. They have been persistent for decades and highlighting the fact that black African American and Pacific Islanders have the worse outcomes in many areas of health and just highlighting that Life Expectancy gap of greater than 10 years in these populations. We see those Health Disparities are aligned with unfortunate workforce disparities in our department. Staff demographics differ widely from those of the patients that we serve. Staff demographics are despaired at management levels, as mentioned by d. H. R. , a systemic issue across the city, but certainly the Health Department has an issue there. Staff of color, report experiences of unequal treatment and data on corrective actions and disciplinary actions are just proportionate. As you saw in the presentation by d. H. R. , d. P. H. Has the lowest rate of corrective action compared to other departments at 0. 79 , but those corrective actions are disproportionately distributed among African American and latino employees. So we must continue to do the work to address this unequal treatment to minimize the impact. Next slide. So, in response to the mayors directive, weve been working with d. H. R. To record and address disciplinary actions in those unequal data that i mentioned and weve been working on initiatives to advance equity and invest in our workforce. Some examples include our Employment Engagement surveys where we conduct regular employee surveys, the gate that measure staff inclusion, and perceptions of racial bias in the workplace. We recently hired a workforce equity manager, who will be starting later this month and the primary role of this manager will be to work with h. R. To design and implement a policy and standard that increase equity and support a Workplace Culture of inclusion and antiracism. We are continuing mandated bias training, ensuring online discussion forms and developing new Online Training and webinars on antiracism and Community Engagement. Online training will be released this month and webinars will be starting in the new year. We have a number of active Equity Councils and identified equity lead staff who have part of this work. Their supervisors require to have them have protected time to work on equity, so this is not do your full time job and then have equity as an add on. So we have ensured that staff who work on this are given protective time to focus on this. They hope that internal meetings on equity leads, staff across all of our major sites, including San Francisco high school, and laguna and equity teams and leads and we can go into that in more detail if the board so desires. We also have a recruitment pipeline were developing along with a pipeline that director davis mentioned to really strengthen our work to increase the diversity and to be more intentional about supporting a skill set development and training so we have a Diverse Workforce Going Forward to meet our key needs. Just an example of this, were again, the field is particularly behind and we need to focus in the area of behavioral health. Next slide. So Going Forward with regards to our Racial Equity absent plan, which parallels the d. H. R. Approach around training, reporting, recruitment and communication, we are hiring new h. R. Positions and our budget to focus on this work. Were removing as much as possible unnecessary employment barriers where the Civil Service rules allow us to do so. For instance, for identifying specific job qualifications and determining if those can be exchanged for life experiences, and were really focusing on developing more diverse applicant pools, utilizing better testing selection tools to increase diversity in those pools. Then were looking at professional development, ensuring there are opportunities for d. P. H. Staff and looking at ways to ensure assignments are provided to staff in an equitable fashion so when there is a permanent promotion opportunity, there is an inequitable situation where certain staff have been given opportunities to work in a temporary assignment that is reflective of that permanent assignment, that we are very intentional about how people are given equitable opportunities across the department to advance. Then with regards to our me mediator program, were helping to resolve conflicts at the lowest possible level and that will be rolled out to assist our staff and our teams to ensure that people are able to resolve conflicts where people to focus again on the systemic and institutional issues that we know continue to drive these inequities. These pieces are all key important parts of our work and will be included in our Racial Equity absent plan, which will be released at the end of december of this year. Next slide. So dph is the largest city department. Much of the work highlighted will take time to shift the institutional factors we know drives the patterns that we unfortunately now see today. I firmly am committed to making sure this happens and we do this across the team of over 7,000 staff. We are making progress. We need to continue to go faster and i think if anything, the covid19 pandemic is only highlighted the urgencies that we continue to change. So i will stop there and take questions from the board as needed. Thank you. Thank you very much. I have a couple of questions. How many black people in your Leadership Team . I will be able to provide you with that number, i dont have that number in my head, but i can provide that shortly after this hearing. Just your Leadership Team . Dr. Colfaxs Leadership Team. Not the entire team. I will i can count them i will count my Leadership Team and i can provide that number during this hearing supervisor. I apologize i dont have that quantitative number in my head, but i can provide that to you within a few minutes. And then what is the percentage of black people in the total department . We had you saw that presentation from g. H. R. And i believe from our employees and Michael Brown correct me, but i believe we have 11 of our employees are black African Americans, approximately. And how many of those are in management . Director brown, do you have that information . That break down is not available at this point, but we can get that information to you. That information im sorry dr. Colfax, i dont think d. H. R. Provided that slide in the break down. That was left out of their presentation. That was the first iteration of their presentation. I apologize supervisor walton. We can get that information to you. I think it is around 11 , but how many are managers, i dont know. Thank you, i would love to see that data and that information. We did call in d. H. R. And the department separately so we can have some of these departmental data as well. Were looking forward to receiving that. I believe my colleagues have a couple of questions. I dont have any questions, supervisor peskin or haney, do you have any questions . No. Thank you so much. Supervisor walton, just to we have five members of the t. P. H. Executive team who identify as black, African American. And how many total . There are 14 people on the executive team. Thank you. What department do we have next . The Public Utilities commission will be presenting next. Thank you. Could you please allow me to share the powerpoint. Yeah, were on it. Hang on just a moment. Thank you sir. Thank you john. Good afternoon supervisors. Im harlan kel lyly and im hond to be here today as this topic is the utmost importance to me. I wanted to start off by acknowledging that our department has a lot of work to be done to have the p. U. C. To be a diverse and equitable workforce. I appreciate the presentation and the data that d. H. R. Provided during carols presentation and i recognize that the p. U. C. Actions contribute to this data. While im proud of agency work today, the p. U. C. Executive team and our commissioners recognize that there is still work to be done. We must continue to reflect on our shortcomings and take intentional actions in a timely manner to ensure Racial Equity is prioritized to achieve sustainable change. Earlier this year i collaborated with our p. U. C. Commissioners to pass a resolution on Racial Equity. In this resolution, the p. U. C. Commission directed me to dedicate resources towards ending institutional and stru Structural Racism within the p. U. C. And full participation of black Indigenous People of color to achieve fair, just, and equitable outcomes. Also, to answer your question supervisor walton is that we accepted the fact and recognize that we, you know, we actually were part of the systemic racism so that was part of the resolution. I want to complete this vision of what our workforce is and should be. With over 200 employees, we have been implementing programs to set our employees up for success. When discipline happens, we want to make sure that there is no or not inequitable outcomes so were focusing on how to make our staff and managers successful in the longterm. I wanted to give some examples of what were doing. The first one, which i feel is really important is we have a competency model. That is something that were doing as agency wide. This shows how individuals can be successful in their jobs and it really helps our employees to succeed in their current roles. The competency model also supports our work groups to work more co cohesively and support our employees to grow and know whats required in these promotive opportunities. The next thing that were going to roll out is the leadership development, where supervisors and managers are a key piece to the success of our employees. Our supervisors go through a mandatory five day new supervisor training and this year were launching a Senior Leadership program with peer group coraching and one on one coaching. We plan to provide this Program Throughout the aagency management and all supervisory levels. New employee support. The critical time of employees is when the employees first begin in their new role and thats why were developing a framework and training to support managers in new staff during their probationary period. This framework and training will help the supervisors and managers to set clear expectations and goals and have them check in with their new employees to guide them for success during their initiate month in their new role. The Racial Equity action plan, were committed to developing our plan in coordination with the citys Racial Equity plan is underway throughout our agency. In the next slide, ill show you some of the great work weve done to develop clear, inclusive and sustainable pipeline recruiting programs and will reduce employment barriers and ensure that our focus population becomes success. P. U. C. Employees. Next slide. So first and foremost, the p. U. C. Tried to create programs to focus on the needs and barriers that face our most impacted communities. We intentionally focus on the disappropriated disproportionate impact experienced by our black, indigenous, people of color. We focus our efforts on women, especially women of color who experience disproportionate impacts, as well as impacts of child rearing on their Career Opportunities. We acknowledge the impacts of the p. U. C. Operations have on our long material residents and focus on them. We focus on people suffering from housing insecurity and that the impacts have on their Career Opportunities. Finally we focus on newer diversity people and individuals with learning and thinking differences who suffer from disproportionate unemployment, over 70 during the precovid19 economy when San Francisco otherwise experienced historically low unemployment. The p. U. C. Is able to build the programs and address these disproportionate managements through strong partnerships. We utilize these partnerships to build a pipeline for p. U. C. Employment. The p. U. C. Also completes billions of dollars of critical capitol project work from upgrading our treatment plan in the bay view to electrical infrastructure. The p. U. C. Serves as an economic driver in our service area. We believe that this is our responsibility to ensure that people working on these large projects reflect the greatest diversity of the city while acknowledging that the p. U. C. Operation has a disproportionately impactful on black communities of district 10. As such, our partners have both internally and externally, raci racially equity focused. With the union trades to create Career Opportunities and construction when offering living wage and benefits with o. E. W. D. And city build to train indentured communities into the unions and the construction industries. With service providers, nonprofit partners, and Community Based organizations that can provide stabilizing services to help with housing, security, or housing insecurity or outreach to longterm residents or job coaching resources that are specific and in line with the need of the population they serve. With the private employers with the p. U. C. Contracts with legal requirements in their contracts to hire from the local community through first source or local hire. Finally we dedicate it to a kindergarten to career strategy, a transformational approach that link Environmental Education with career awareness for youngest learners to young adults seeking careers at the p. U. C. And also in utility sector. This is a partnership with the unified school district. Next slide. I would like to provide a brief overview of the programs. This is a program i started over 25 years ago ago where we have a partnership with unified school district. We served over 2,000 youth over those 25 years. This year is the first year we did a virtual one where we had 25 students, so were still trying to connect with the communities. The next one is a construction career program, an Orientation Program serving the bay view residents to get residents in construction careers, allowing them to experience all 26 trades. Over 90 of the years participants have gone to additional construction training and have picked up work at the p. U. C. On the p. U. C. Projects. The next one is women electrifying the world. This is a partnership to educate interested women about the electrical trade, encouraging the applications for apprenticeships. Initially we scheduled one event but due to the overwhelming demand, we opened up another second event to accommodate 50 diverse women. For our child care initiative, we partnershiped with the office of early child care and the Childrens Council to find child care providers willing to extend their hours for construction workers that often start work early in the morning. Then for our newer diversity pilot program, we partnered with the San Francisco state department of rehabilitation and golden gate Region Center to find young adults on the autism spectrum and support them through their internship as extended interviews for job in Technical Industries such as engineering and construction. The photo on the slide showcases some of the brilliant individuals. City work program is a partnership with p. U. C. And the p. U. C. Firm part anymores and y. C. D. The goal of these programs is to increase the number of women and under represented people of color in public and private sector related to the utility field. Since 2012, nearly 100 students have participated in city work internships. Finally through our project learning Partnership Grant [inaudible] if you can hold just a moment. Were getting a lot of interference from your microphone at this time. Do you want to turn off outgoing video from your camera and see if that calm it is Network Traffic and maybe well get better audio from you . Can you hear me now . We can hear you but it still sounds very distorted. Is this better. Yes, a lot better if you can keep it like that. I dont know where i was, i will continue where i left off. Im proud of the work that the department has done. Were committed to doing more and im happy to answer any of your questions or take a deeper dive in any one of the programs that we have mentioned or talk about, you know, our data. I have justine who is here, also one thing i want to comment on is that we have developed our created a position that is the office of equity and innovation officer that reports directly to me and i have appoi appointed masood as we search for a permanent position. Were trying to meet the december 31st deadline. Im available to answer any questions. Thank you so much general manager. I do have basically the same questions i did ask dr. Colfax. You said there were 2,200 employees across seven counties. What is the percentage of black employees . About 9 . And how many of those 9 are in management position . I dont know if i know the number in management, but i know there are 2 out of 9 that report directly to me. So if you can get us the data on the number of black people in management across the department. Yeah, i think its i just got it. I think its 6 in management. 6 . Yeah. Thank you. Any additional question from colleagues . I dont see anyone on the roster. Thank you some general manager kelly. Who is the next one . Were going to call on jeff from municipal transportation agency. Thank you. If i can share my screen. Meanwhile, ill get started. A special thank you to supervisor walton and to directors davis for inviting us today and for driving this important work. We have a lot of work to dismantle systemic racism and in order to first do that work, we need to understand it. That means collecting data fearlessly and presenting it transparently. We need to be honest with ourselves in order to do this important work. So our Racial Equity action plan that we are currently working on begins with a position of fearless analysis of the data and looking at all the ways in which there are different outcomes by race, including in our h. R. World, recruitment, hiring, promotions, leadership, respect, and of course discipline. We are doing a lot of Data Analytics work and all of those catted gocategories, my presentation is only about our work in discipline. Let me share my screen now. Not that one, sorry. One moment. We are seeing your slides. This is the purple one, excellent. Is it full screen now . Yes, sir. So as i mentioned, were doing an analysis of our data. We are also starting the work of helping to figure out the ways in which we are offering Different Levels of discipline for the same offense and where those outcomes vary by race. Were providing better guidance to our managers and supervisors, specifically our line managers that issue most of the discipline and providing peer to peer coaching for them in order to help them understand how we must treat our workforce equitably. And we have training around expectant workplace around all the managers and explicit training for all our supervisors and managers. So i want to show you a snapshot of the significant data dashboards that our team has developed and also the ways in which were trying to break down our discipline data, not just by race, but also by division and cause in the agency so we can understand the underlying factors. One of the unique aspects is the vast majority, in fact 97 of the discipline within our agency occurs within the transit team. Theyre very specific reasons for this. In transit, we are subject to specific regulatory requirements from the california Public Utilities commission that requires discipline for infractions there of and were responsible for the charter in terms of attendance and service delivery. So the majority of the disciplinary actions are not only in transit, but are also in response to specific regulatory requirements. So 97 of our discipline is in transit and of that, the vast imagi majority are specific to transit operators. Were collecting data across all these operators and im going to focus on the transit operator data because thats where we have most of the issues. So here we are breaking down our transit operators by demographics on the bottom. 24 of our transit operators are black men, 16 are black women, and tot of 7 of our transit operators are white. The rest of our agency is people of color. You can also see the bars up above. You need to advance the slide. Did it not advance . Let me try sharing again. Sometimes it gets stuck. Is it advancing now . I noticed we cant click on the next slide on our own. Is it advancing now . Yeah. Okay, good. So, as you can see, our the discipline data, there are some significant differences by race. While black men represent 24 of our operators, they represent 32 of the people receiving discipline. Black women, their discipline rate is about the same and you can see the other races shown here. Then i want to specify this is for safety related actions where there is somewhat less opportunity for bias in the assignment of discipline, there is ample opportunity for bias in the conditions that lead to safety incident. This is important to us so we can start getting to underlying causes and find ways of fixing those. This is the data for nonsafety related actions, being on time, attendance, and it includes discipline that is a result of passenger or customer complaints. So there is less opportunity for bias. So you can see differential outcomes where black men, which represents 24 of our operators are receiving 26 of the discipline, but where the very interesting figure is the black female operators, 16 of the operators getting 20 of the nonsafety related discipline. So to what degree is the differential rate of discipline around attendance not necessarily related to bias by our managers at sfmta but related to the fact that our Regional Housing policies significantly disadvantage black women in terms of their ability to find housing where there is a reliable commute and black women have a rate of having to be responsible for child care and childrens transportation. Thats work that remains to be done and work were quite interested in doing to make sure were solving the actual underlying systemic racism at its root, rather than at the surface level. Like i said, were going to continue to look in detail at the intersectionality for all this data and also know that were going to need to get some antidotal information to understand causality. Were continuing to work on our Racial Equity action plan that will incorporate not only all of this information, but information across our other categories as well. Were particularly concerned about the rate of promotion for our black and people of color workforce and how that rate differs across departments within our agency. Were also doing a lot of work in order to make sure that discipline is applied consistently in order to reduce what we have seen antidotally is a more severe discipline for our black workforce than our nonblack workforce. That will also require some additional training were Getting Started on. Were in the process of hiring an omnibus person to help with mediation, training, and resolving our own internal problems and of course continuing our efforts at training. With that, im happy to take questions. Thank you so much director. I do have a few questions, some are going to be related to also promotions. The first question, you talked about the proportionality of discipline for black women. I didnt hear the numbers versus other races. So what is that comparison . Okay, so here is so for a nonsafety related action where we have the specific issue with our black women workforce, they represent 16 of our operators, 20 of operator discipline, and if you want, i can give you the percentage of black women in the agency as a whole. I would definitely love to have that information. Also, what is the rate of promotion for black people versus other ethnicity across the department . Thats information i do not have, but i have asked for that. A Detailed Analysis of the median time between promotions by race and gender and Division Within the agency. One thing we see is our black workforce is promoted more rapidly in some divisions than others. Most likely the Transit Division is doing a better job, a perfect job. We have more significantly problems in other divisions in the agency. We will come back to you with that information. And whats been the hold up on Racial Equity . And it has been largely the fact that our own internal h. R. Is only at 50 staffing. Also, weve had some challenge with scheduling our Interview Panel because we wanted to make sure we have an allstar interview page to make sure we hire the best person. How many people on your Leadership Team . So i have a total of 16 people on our executive team and of those three are African Americans. So its about 16 or 19 . Black people represent 28 of the agency as a whole. There is a gap there. And how many of those 28 are in management . Let me see, i do not have that number right now. Ill have to get back to you on that. Thank you, i think that i also want to see comparatively because i had the conversation earlier with d. H. R. And we talked about the clusters and some of your data exhibits the clusters of certain job roles and classifications where we see more black people. What are your plans to change that phenomena . I am saying that because certain clusters exist, there is an exclusion to certain opportunities for black employees and employees of color. Absolutely. So thanks to the work of heroes like curtis green in the 1970s, who was an African American general manager at muni, our muni workforce is extraordinarily diverse and has a strong group of black leadership. Other divisions, much less so. So our Racial Equity action plan starts with the recruitment process. We are working to identify all of the ways in which we make it very difficult for people to enter the agency. Thats where we have excellent apprenticeship programs. Our demographics more closely represent the demographics of the city as a whole. Where its lacking, our demographics are significantly under represent black folks. The other thing were looking at is revising our minimum qualifications in order to make sure that once we get people in the door, we have a path for promoting people based on their skill, not just their college degree. Thank you and my last statement because as you know, our office works a lot with m. T. A. You know, i appreciate your entire team, your entire staff. I love to one day meet onsome o these black people on your Leadership Team. We would love for you to do so or offer a tour of our facility, which is mostly in your district and have some of our strongest management who are people of color. Thank you director. I do not see any questions from colleagues. Let the record show chair mar that i am now placing supervisor peskin on v. A. M. With that said, director, please let us know the airport is next. Okay. Good morning all. Good to be with you. Im the airport director. I will start my screen share here. Okay, all right. Can you confirm you can see my screen . Yes, we can see it. We can see it, but its not full screen. There you go. Thank you. Thanks so much. Just thank you supervisor walton for your tremendous leadership in this area. Chair mar, thank you for the opportunity. Board members, thank you for being here today and talk about what the airport is doing in terms of Racial Equity. We appreciated over the years our partnership with director davis and most recently with director simly and our appreciative of the working relationship and the partnership and looking for opportunities to continue to drive inclusion and equity at s. F. O. Its clear that we have work to do. When you look at the numbers, its just undisputable that we have under representation of black employees in our occupational group, managers, technicians, craft roles and overrepresentation in the disciplinary actions. We saw a trend in 1819 that was very discouraging around the proportion of disciplines of black employees to the proportion of black employees at s. F. O. And so we implemented strategies and mitigation measures and in particular that intervention with supervisory training and we saw good results, which ill talk about as well. At the international airport, im proud of s. F. O. s commitment to developing the programs that meet the needs of our Diverse Workforce. Its to provide an exceptional airport and we want to reflect that to serving all of our communities, international a and internal and external and the diversity they represent. With these goals, we understand and acknowledge that there is a disproportionate impact that we see in our discipline data that i mentioned, with respect to people of color. African American Employees specifically, so ill talk about some of those strategies that we implemented but clearly there is more work to do. So lets talk about our Racial Equity and diversity and the transformation that we know is important and we in 2017, we were the first to create an office of diversity equity and inclusion as a city department. This office has created numerous opportunities for employees learning and engagement with that focus on our Diverse Workforce. Were really proud most recently of our courageous conversations program. Thats about bringing in dynamic leaders that would share their experiences of advancing equity and inclusion. Some of those past speakers have been congresswoman jackie spear, San Francisco treasurer, assessor carmen chu, and linda creighton. These events have inspired dialog and encouraged Community Engagement and learning. Another, i think really Important Initiative was our share, listen, and learn approach. This was this year we started this. This was about providing that safe environment for employees to get together and share their own stories and their backgro d backgrounds and the difficulties they experienced and have a respectful conversation to learn from one another. Were held regular panel discussions. We did one with the former supervisor malia cohen. This was about disrupting racial inequities and ways to work towards systemic change. We developed a diversity video last year. I believe we distributed that to the board and this is now part of our orientation for our new employees. So they can understand the importance we place on diversity in our work place and that value as our organization from day one of their work at s. F. O. It features 28 of our airport employees who share in a very vulnerable way their own challenges and that its a wonderful video. We issued an airport directive on diversity, respect, and inclusion to communicate to our team, our commitment to creating an exclusive Work Environment for all of our employees. Our Employee Resources Group are voluntary employee led groups and these provide that network of support for our employees with shared interest or common life experiences. We conduct our annual or every two years, our Employee Satisfaction survey. This is about ensuring that were meeting our commitments that we make around the culture of our organization and im accountable and my senior team is accountable that this is embedded in all levels of the organization. We achieved 100 completion for implicit bias training, which is 356 employees and fairness in hiring training. All senior and manager staff in our implicit bias training, which is a total of 63 employees. We also understand that hiring a diverse staff and ensuring the standards are applied equally are critical when were taking a number of measures to ensure this. We share Job Opportunities with schools to diversify our applicant pools. We offer robust programs for trainees, apprenticeships and fellows and we expanded our internship opportunities to 344, including a focus last year on the mayors opportunity for all programs. We did offer a virtual opportunity for all internship this past summer. We encourage and support professional developments with the airports Tuition Reimbursement program and mentorship programs and were learning a lot about the mentorship programs and what our employees expect. They want people that look like them and had their challenges in life and have achieved success. So expanding that program is also a priority. Our s. F. O. Academy offer as wide variety of Training Programs. We offer employee resource fairs with panel discussions, presentations on the Civil Service hiring process, and information booths so employees can learn about jobs at s. F. O. And the various divisions. We track reviews regularly. Disciplinary decisions are centralized and include all levels of management, up and including myself, airport director, as well as the other chief level Leadership Team. We participate in the citywide Racial Equity working group and were working with the citys office of Racial Equity to develop the Racial Equity plan, which will be ready at the end of the year and incorporated into the work were doing around our five year equity plan. Its made up of a Cross Section of airport employees and they will help build this plan. So, in conclusion, weve been focused on years, on building a culture of inclusion, a culture of respect. Thats the Foundation Upon which we feel we built a successful organization. We continue to make strides in the area of equity and fairness. We understand we need to do more. Were taking steps specifically to address Racial Equity, mainly by looking at existing systems policies and our programs and practices through that equity lens and seeing where improvements can be made. Were looking forward to partnering with d. H. R. s office of Racial Equity. As a Major Economic engine in the region, s. F. O. Provides a breath of diverse employment and Business Opportunities and s. F. O. Is uniquely positioned to provide a solid point of entry for workers of all skill levels and opportunity for Career Advancement and economic mobility. With that, i would be glad to answer any questions. Thank you so much director. I do have a few questions for you. I definitely appreciate the fact that you are the First Department to have your office of Racial Equity. Can you give us some positive outcomes that have been achieved from that office . Yeah, i think most notably is around the discipline. We saw that 36 person number of discipline of black employees and lot of it was around attendance and understanding what is expected. So we developed programs around setting expectations, training the supervisors, and looking for Early Warning signs of attendance and being direct with that employee around our expectations. So it happened from 1819 to 1920, we brought that number from 36 and cut it in half to 18 . And is that trend going downward at this point . I dont have the latest numbers. I would be glad to provide that to you supervisor. You also talked about i didnt see anything about employee discipline and promotional data, disaggravated by race and gender. Do you have that information . We dont have the promotional data. We will put that together. Thank you and how many people on your Leadership Team . I have six chief level positions, one of those is African American. I also have a management team, a Senior Management team of 13, and there is one individual. How many black people in your department as a whole . 7. 6 of our employees are black. The number were an organization of 1,600, so that would be 120, somewhere in there. And whats the percentage of management . 6 per. 2 that we categorize management. Thank you so much director. I dont see any questions from my colleagues. Appreciate you. Okay, thank you. Thank you all. We have two more departments to present, Administrative Services is next and then Human Services agency and that will conclude our presentation. Thank you so much director. Do we have our representative from i believe elric is presenting. Yes, im sorry. Ill be presenting for public works and not necessarily admin services. I just want to be clear. I will share the presentation from my screen. Okay, i just want the say thank you supervisor walton and members of the committee. This is the topic that is very personal to me and is important to everyone here at public works. This is a topic that we discussed briefly as a few months ago when we did at our budget presentation. This is the mission here at public works and we also began talking at the Racial Equity as a part of it. This is something that we cant have separate. This is something that director had mentioned earlier about Racial Equity is something that everybody is responsible for. Thats really the role at public works has been taking with it. With that said, this is something we have looked at from both equity as it impacts our workforce and as employees and we also looked at it in the way that we as an agency provide our services to the broader community. First, i want to focus on the ways public works has been focusing on it inside our group. One thing we did this year, as you all know, we had a very difficult budget cycle. At the same time, we wanted to make sure that we didnt cut into programs or services that would have a discuproportionate impact on our employee base. This is something that supervisor walton talked about earlier here at public works, we have a large cluster of african americ americ americans within every bureau. To be specific, in the streets as environmental service, they have a Large Population of people that are African American. So we wanted to make sure that as we, as an agency, were going about trying to hit our budget targets, that we werent making large cuts in that area that would have disproportioned impacts on the African American employees here at public works. We also done things like our working group, talking about equity, and the other departments talked about gerr and the training that is something we are going to continue. In the spring, i think as a general manager, with the news that came out about Breonna Taylor and george floyd and going back to individuals lice oscar grant, these are things that really caused a lot of stress to the employees here at public works and we have committed to having these difficult conversations. We generally like to avoid stress and to avoid conflict, but i think for us as a city and department, to be specific, to really get at and route out racism, we need to have those difficult conversations. During the course of the spring, we set up a series of podcasts across the department where we had 14 different people from difficult bureaus with experiences that talked about their own experiences with racism. Really, we hope to use that as a platform as it gets better. As far as also trying to find ways to increase and improve upon and the hiring and promotional opportunities here at public works. You know, one thing that ill address later for you, supervisor walton, were always trying to find ways to get more people into professional job classifications and engineers and things like that. Its really hard to get more African Americans into those positions if you dont get more African Americans into an engineering field in college. That means you have to start with the program in High School Just to build that pipeline. So thats one of the things that were trying to do to find ways to build that pipeline. So then, later, you know, fast forward five or ten years later, you have that pool of candidates to draw from. So that is something that we are actively trying to do and through things like supporting the private pool program and other programs here at public works. The other thing i want to talk about very briefly is as we know, we here at public works are not the experts on this. We are going to be working with, as a consultant, and to help us to develop and refine the action plan. Again, before i talk about these are the things were doing to address racism in the city, were also trying to look at equity in the way that we as a department can provide our services. So we want to make sure that were not necessarily always responding to and providing services only based on the 311 call. We know that the facts have shown us that not all as communities use that service the same way. We want to make sure were providing the Services Based on need to ensure there is equity. We know that not everyone will use certain tools the same way. We are doing things with the support of the supervisors, supervisor haney and others, making sure were providing things like the Pit Stop Program to making sure that all of our communities are provided with the basic services that are needed. We also have our community in consultation with our partners with fowd which as a job program. So these are some of the things that we as a department are doing to try to provide equity both inside our department and more broadly across the city. With that said, i will open it up to questions. Thank you so much director. Thank you so much. One thing i dont know if i heard mentioned on your mart is that d. P. W. Has institutional racism and discriminal mischief nation that exists in the department. I cant say that i have in my time here, eight to nine months, i have not had a case where i had to review it and go to h. R. And say this is racism and i acted on it. At the same time, im not going to be so nigh naive to say there hasnt been incidents. [captioning will resume momentarily. ] that could also be considered for management whether they could be considered as our project managers and our street one and twos which are in the operation side of things we could work and provide you the details of the breakdown. Thank you so much. I dont see any other questions from colleagues, so appreciate you and we will move on. Thank you. Okay. Can you hear me . Okay. Thanks for the nod. Supervisors, director of the Human Services agency. Im going to echo my colleagues in thanking you for your leadership on this. Very important issue and very important in the Human Services agency. I have my hr director with me. I will turn over to my colleague to give you more information. Just start with our values at h. S. A. Clearly were committed to a culture of inclusion where we celebrate our differences, where everyone has what they need to thrive, gender, race, sexual orientation, et cetera. To your question, supervisor walton, as part of our driving statement, we are advancing equality. We are admitting and residing in the Human Services agency we do have systemic racism and places of bias that affect how we operate as an agency and certainly Employment Conditions for our employees. I really firmly believe that demonstrating these believes and believing these values have to start in an agency, especially one such as h. S. A. That has this many employees. I as a director am committed to acknowledging racial inequities and addressing them as well as addressing systemic and institutional racism. This is from every level, me from executive director to my executive director colleague s. Im dedicated to committing importantly resources and time to change the way we operate to create for opportunities for equity and inclusion. A key part for my director and executive team is to listen and to learn. Weve been meeting with our manager and h. R. Director monthly to discuss racial updates on our initiatives. We will be and have been reviewing reports on a regular basis to make sure we make progress on our metrics. Ive had a number of town halls, both prepandemic and post. The post have been virtual and attended very well. Ive been meeting with members of the Human Services agency chapter Leadership Team to hear their concerns around Racial Equity as well as other concerns. Supervisor walton, i know you know this well because weve been partners for a long time. We are comprised of three departments, close to 2,300 department departments. The Service Reach of our agency is huge. We serve over 260,000 unique persons each year, whether through someone receiving m medical or calfresh or any of our other benefit and service programs. So its important to sort of understand the context of the folks we serve and to look up the ethnicities and the makeup of those we serve and really reflecting those we serve, we are looking at 14. 95 of the clients we serve are black. The vast not a majority, but a large majority is asianpacific, islander, or filipino. Our workforce, and im going to answer your questions that you asked my department and colleagues through this slide. This is an overall view of h. S. A. s employees by ethnicity. The three bars represent the yellow represents the city overall. The green bar is h. S. A. Staff and the blue being h. S. A. Clients. You can see looking at the black employees, as a touch under 15 which reflects or mirrors what our clientele are, which is about 15 , also close to the citywide, which is also close to 15 . What i dont have on the slide, and i apologize, but im going to address management and Different Levels of the organization. As i said, about 2,300 employs, we have 490 employees considered supervisors, which means they supervise other employees. Of the 491 supervisors, 15 are blacks, which mirrors the total number of employees overall. When you go up to the manager ranks, we have 95 managers at h. S. A. And these are the 0900 class and thats where theres a shrinkage. We have 11 of managers at the Human Services agency are black. Then when you go further to my executive team and this is considered my key deputy or Department Head colleagues that sit around my table once a week to meet and discuss all issues h. S. A. There is eight and one of the eight is africanamerican. Another metric we look at is wage. So just to look at the overall salary of employees is 92,000 and the average of the africanAmerican Employees is about 1,200 less in salary. You asked about hiring and promotion. In fiscal year 201920, 19 of the total hires were black and the same fiscal year, 18 of the employees promoted were black. Sorry if i ripped through that too quickly, supervisors, i can go back. This is our work and then ill turn it over to our a. E. B. Manager. In 2004 we were granted to permit in the Government Alliance Racial Equity. The purpose was to participate in the program and to figure out where the shortcomings are and somewhat we need to address. We needed to look at word. Where youre looking at a shortcoming or more of a need to address was internal. This is based on feedback from our black and brown staff around concerns of belonging, having a voice, and promotional opportunities. The racial composition of our staff at all levels needs to mirror and reflect the population that we represent and this does fall short once you get through the manager and the executive leadership. As part of this gare, we held lots of focus groups at all levels, reviewed a lot of the h. R. Data, and we prepared a detailed report, a Racial Equity action plan with concrete action plans for hiring, recruitment, Organizational Culture and the like. We have created the deib office in 2020. This was a recommendation from the gare participants. We created a roadmap for all of our classifications. What are the competencies to compete in that and get promoted. Then we gave the findings and recommendations to the commissions and oversight boards. We have worked at starting and ongoing, changing our core values, one of which i showed earlier, drafting a resolution which we showed to our boards and commissions, expanding where we posted jobs, revising our job announcements. Over the next several years were committed to implementing all of the recommendations in the report. We engaged staff as part of that process. We made sure that everyone has voice in that agency. Everyone feels that he or she belongs. I mentioned the Racial Equity town hall we had prior to the pandemic in person, where the director sat on a panel with myself and my Department Head colleagues. I have been meeting with scisu chapter leadership, as i said. As part of our gare report, we researched the disparity and looked at our data to give us insight where are we falling short from a Racial Equity lens. Since then we created a team that reports on this data to keep us accountable and transparent. We partnered with all our sister agencies to share ideas and figure out meaningful ways to advance Racial Equity. The critical piece and i showed him the data but im going to repeat it again is to address the increased diversity in our management ranks. We focused on promoting from within. Im a big believer of promoting from within. Mentorship programs. Standardizing acting assignment opportunities. Thats a really good way to increase diversity is to put an individual in an acting assignment, an acting role, less pressure to perform and really to learn from colleagues, and then targeted recruitment in diversity communities are some of our strategies. In terms of our deib office we created in 2020, we will be hiring three more analysts and one senior analysts. Its important to note these are not new positions. We didnt add any f. T. E. S to our budget, but this is moving vacant positions over to our new office to support the work. In terms of collaboration, you cant do this alone as an agency. We have to partner with h. R. C. And o. R. E. And d. H. R. And all the other departments, because there are so many hands in trying to achieve what were trying to achieve. Our h. R. Staff, because of their Critical Role in hiring and retention have played a big part in this. We are partnering with o. R. E. To promote training for all of our sta staff. I, of course, as the director continue to encourage and allocate resources and mandate that resources go to courage encourage not only encourage but to provide opportunities to go deeper on implicit bias and other issues that are so critical to addressing this issue. Just to provide you, supervisors, a little bit more detail on our Racial Equity action plan, what we call phase one, ill turn it over to asa king, the director of the e. I. B. Office. They will walk through the plan and then well stop for questions. Thank you, director and supervisors and members of this committee. As was previously stated, we know we cant go it alone. So we have been partnering with our colleagues and taking leadership from o. R. E. And h. R. C. And d. H. R. As well, as we begin work in 2020 while completing our Racial Equity action plan by the end of the year. Some of the work weve already done through gare through a multiyear process was understanding the areas that we need to be doing work. Now that we have that knowledge and we have engaged with employees, we are taking the seven areas that o. R. E. Have identified as key priorities and phase one of the Racial Equity action plan to make those concrete and to continue to talk to our Racial Equity leaders and to understand what we need to do within our agency. To that end, our h. R. Professionals have been participating in the citywide o. R. E. Work group in each of the key areas and bringing that knowledge and information back to our department. Additionally, we have been participating consistently throughout the year in the d. H. R. Diversity hiring work group because obviously that is very important for us as well. We also, myself and other Racial Equity leaders have been participating in the monthly meeting. As weve been doing this work in the key areas of hiring and recruitment, weve noticed that we need to do more active recruitment. Our strategy has been slowup to this point and access has mostly been done through word of mouth and private networks. We want to make it more active in the community to make our jobs known. We want to reflect the commitment in our core values to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and also making the language for accessible so that people can have greater access and demystify the hiring process in the city. We also value retaining and promoting from within. To that end, we are making more transparent our acting assignment process and streamlined because we understand through our research and our data, these acting assignments are promoting opportunities that give our black and people of color employees an opportunity to showcase their skills and an opportunity to have a promoting opportunity that gives them greater access when the Fulltime Position and promoted opportunity becomes available. As weve been talking about, our discipline and separation data, we understand that we have to create alternatives to discipline that are not punitive in nature to get to the area of disproportionatity. We have been following the citys lead and will be participating in the Mediation Program that d. H. R. Is developing. Additionally, we are having our h. R. Staff learn more about Restorative Justice as an alternative to discipline and continue to monitor our discipline data disaggregated by race on a regular basis. And as it pertains to our leadership, we are fortunate that we have within our highest levels of our chart a commitment to Racial Equity that we want to continue at the managerial and supervisor level to continue the training and to understand that it is everyones accessibility and it starts at the top of the organization. These are the other key areas were going to focus on in our action plan as well. The mobility of our staff. We have an Organizational Team that provides opportunities on a monthly basis to all staff for coaching and mentorship and continued learning and well make those opportunities available through the organization through professional development. Were working on our culture, creating more opportunities for inclusion and providing feedback to our management as well. As was previously statement, our work through the Government Alliance on race and equity was presented to all of our boards and commission. We will continue to ensure that we keep our governing bodies aabreast and ensure they reflect our agencies for values as it pertains to combining antiblack racism and systemic racism throughout the organization and promote the work that were doing and continue to expand it. With that, i will turn it over to director ward. Im just closing that we understand and i understand as an agency that this is not just a finite timelimited project. This is really a long or lifelong or agencylong journey. Clearly we have a long way to go. But im pleased with our progress so far and thing we really have a good path forward. Ill conclude and am here for your questions. Thank you so much, director. I appreciate the presentation. I do have a few questions. First one just for my clarity, out of the 2,300 employees. What are your thoughts as to why the disproportionate amounts of representation exists at the higher levels, particularly knowing that you do believe in promoting from within and we see better numbers at lower levels of management . You know, there are a myriad of reasons, supervisor. What weve tried to do is look upstream and not just focus on the Interview Panel, the bias and Interview Panel which is probably part of the reason. Whats going on in the examination process, all managers in the city have to pass whats called a management battery exam. They have to score a certain level to be hired as a manager. I wanted a candidate who was a top candidate to be hired for a highlevel position in my agency who did not pass the exam. She came to me, a very talented manager in our agency. She said she doesnt do well in multiplechoice, computertype tests and shes better verbally. I worked with her a long time and i understand that. This is another barrier weve put up through a normal Civil Servicetype exam. Maybe we have to think about different ways to administer or to assess someones capability to be a highlevel manager. Maybe theres an option to do a computer multiple choice or you can do it in person or a written essay. I dont think that we reach far enough into systems that are training and education persons of closure to be managers. For example, advanced degrees. Are we working with Community Colleges or u. S. F. Or berkeley and saying what do careers in government look like . What are people doing to prepare themselves for this . Its a myriad of explanations, supervisor. I wish i had the answer because it could solve some of the problems. Even if you look at the applicant pools, we dont have the diversity in the applicant pool, so where are we advertising to and reaching out to. Does that exam apply to all departments . I think so. Its a citywide from the 0900 class exam that everyone has to take to pass to be hired. I saw Something Interesting in the presentation by esa king that said inclusive language in a Job Description. Whats an example if that . If you dont have it right now, obviously you can get that information. I think esa can help on that. We noticed in our Job Descriptions, there is oftentimes city jargon, h. R. Jargon and words that sometimes people dont quite understand. Myself, ive known at the city noticing the different classifications. For example, the difference between p. C. S. And permanent exempt versus temporary exempt and the different categories. So we have a lot of jargon in there. Really, if youre not within the city, you dont necessarily understand as an applicant coming from the outside additionally, the minimum qualifications. Oftentimes applicants from outside the city dont understand if they dont make it very apparent when they fill out that application exactly what they need to state in there to show that they do meet the minimum qualifications. Thats already a minimum barrier. So for us, we want to make that plainer and simpler for people to understand. Were still investigating ways of doing that. I know h. R. Has information with videos that they do and were also looking at partnering with those in the community to offer workshops and to explain that language and to go through it. When youre a person of color you dont necessarily see yourself reflected in the commitment to diversity in that Job Description as we do have, that the inclusion of the Work Environment youre about to enter would allow you to be your authentic self, oftentimes were creating a barrier to the type of staff we want to recruit. We think of those things in terms of how we present ourselves to potential job applicants. Im glad esa mentioned the minimum qualifications. There is the process where you fill out the application and list what you did in prior jobs and what your qualifications are. I had three jobs recent where we had jobs announced and there were friends or acquaintances or professional associations with people of color where ive encouraged them to apply and they fact applied and i knew they were qualified and they got screened out. There are applications where they are looking at the application and checking boxes that they check this. If a personnel analyst doesnt understand what the job function was in the persons experience, he or she or they may be xd out even before the application comes to my view. So that needs to be looked. No, thats 100 true. I obviously had a different job with the city years ago and applied to a management position. I got a response saying i didnt even have a college degree. It was on my resume. Looking at resumes and who is checking the boxes, there are a lot of errors involved. Human error and a lot of nuance. And a lot of bias. Absolutely. You brought up analyzing disaggregate data by race and the Racial Equity plan and you talked about the salaries. What is the current gap in the salaries . The average h. S. A. Salary is 92,248. The black average salary is 91,062. So its about 1,200. It reflects that we have fewer black employees at higher levels so its going to drop their average down. Thank you, director. Supervisor haney. For those exams that are required, how do you all decide what exams are required . Does d. H. R. Do that themselves . Is it in our statute . Have you considered doing an analysis to determine whether some of those different requirements, formal requirements, are actually causing some of the disparities that were seeing . We can take a look at that, supervis supervisor. We do administer a standard examination battery to a preexam to anyone applying to a certain rank in the city. In order to make it through that rank and make it to the next round, you have to pass this basic management battery. We could look at that exam and see if it is causing some heartache or disparate impact of the variety that is being discussed. Yeah, it would be good to look at if folks that are otherwise qualified and wanting and going to be being taken out because of that examination and some of those exams themselves have various biases and problems with them. Do we even feel like this is showing a valuable indicator. It might be worth evaluating the usefulness of the exams. Okay. Thank you, supervisor haney. I dont have any more questions for you. Supervisor mar, if you dont have any questions, were at a time when the public has waited patiently and they want to give their input. It is time for Public Comments. Supervisor walton, d. H. R. And the department of Public Health have statistics on the number of black managers in each of the respective departments if you want that before going to Public Comment. We werent able to answer that earlier. Unless there is a rush and people are leaving, i would like to open this up for public information. Well write it down and send it to you and to the whole committee. Thank you so much, supervisor walton and director eisen, for facilitating this extremely important and enlightening discussion with the presentation. Why dont we go to Public Comment right now. Mr. Clerk, are there can we take Public Comment. Im sure there are lots of callers on the line. Clerk mr. Coo, please let us know if there are any callers ready. For those on hold, please wait until you hear a prompt. For those of you watching online or on tv or through the Live Streaming link you may find elsewhere, you can call in through the instructions you find on your screen. That would be dialling 14156550001 and entering the i. D. Number 1467941298 and then press pound and pound again to request to speak. Mr. Coo, could you connect us to our first speaker, please. Can you hear me . Yes, we can. [indiscernible] office of Racial Equity. It was very enlightening. A number of things i want to mention, but i want to talk most recently of the Civil Service exam. We know that exams across the instituti institutions have a long history of bias. We want to encourage you to assess those exams for bias. We would like to see an assessment that is [indiscernible] correctly paid are administering that as well. We are looking for any reinvestigation process and i just really wanted to encourage you to get this right. Our city is not a city without diversity and inclusion and we want to cut off the antiblack racism that is hindering these promotions. We need you to get this right because it makes us lose our legitimacy on these issues. We have to get it right. I wanted to thank you for sharing this information. Thank you. Thank you very much for your call and your comment. Could we have the next caller, please. Im a field representative. I represent the rank and file d. P. O. Investigators in other departments. While todays presentation didnt delve into this much, i am here to put forth our members frustration and dismay at the internal working conditions, structures, and practices in their department. Our members come to work with a commitment to justice, equity, and antiracism. They want to address the systemic inequities that are far too prevalent in workplaces. Our members support more transparency and consistency around the processes for City Employees. We echo the calls in this moment that as cases are being considered for reinvestigation that our members advocate for transparent and consistent thresholds across all departments so everyone understands what is being reinvestigated and how the city is opening cases against others. Right now this is not happening. We need to ensure the most thorough and impartial investigations possible are taking place. Thank you for your time. Thank you for your comment. Could we have the next caller, please. Good afternoon, supervisors. Thank you so much, supervisors, im representing the ant antiblackness fighting group today [indiscernible] more than 10,000 employed were stated to have been trained up to this point. The city became aware of the pervasive issue that antiblack racism and discrimination and harassment more than two years ago and not much has changed. So do we think things will change . I think 20,000 employees have been changed. The data that was presented by d. H. R. Today was in cases misleading. AfricanAmerican Employees are put in positions they can be released at any moment. If that information was presented by d. H. R. , you would see a higher trend of africanamericans released from those positions, higher than the white employees in those positions. I would like director iveson to consider she was the director of Employee Relations for more than three years and could have identified a program for triage for disciplinary practices at that time. So we were made aware of these issues two years ago. Why was such a program not implemented at that time . I also want to combat really quickly the notion that we have to change Job Descriptions, minimum qualifications, et cetera, to locate for more clerk thank you for your call and your comments. Hello, caller. Caller, you are now live to the government audit and oversight committee. Okay. If you have access, you can either add it in comments. I dont know if you can do it correctly clerk mr. Coo, perhaps we could come back around to this caller. I am in support of the black alliance and coalition against antiblackness in the reference to the e. E. O. Process. I work with [indiscernible] transportation operations specialist. I am also in the military. I have written three e. Might have o. Complaints based on military veteran status. There was no further investigation due to insufficient evidence. No one was held accountable. Some examples of discrimination and harassment i have faced because of my military service is denied time off. I also had [indiscernible] to tell my military training, although the nonmilitary employees on delayed vacation and sick leave were never asked to do that. I was also denied military leave while on convalescence for leave. I was being charged with awol, in which my superiors drafted a notice of intent to terminate me from my position. I can go on and on about several examples. When i was charged with awol, i was quickly put up for termination within a matter of two weeks. Disciplinary actions are being handed out far more than to other races. Clerk the speakers time is concluded. Thank you for the comments. Could we get the next caller, please. Is there a caller on the line . Can you hear me . I am calling representing the white people working against racism affinity group. I want to associate myself to the comments of dante king and i want to also mention that any independent investigation that occurred should be outside of the city jurisdiction. Also any independent e. E. O. Investigation should include, but not be limited to the investigation to responses to employee complaints, settlement terms, and whether such settlements were correctly paid and administered without fraud and that clear and transparent e. E. O. Investigation policies and practices should be in place across all departments, including thresholds that are open for all to see, for any reinvestigation thats implemented. And i want to mention that as a white woman, i am concerned and very distracted to hear that black woman represent 80 of all discipline across our agency, but only 40 of woman in the agency. That is unacceptable and i urge rapid and immediate action be taken to address it. Thank you. Clerk thank you for your comments. Could we have the next caller, please. Hi, im a member of local 21. I was on the Mayors Task Force. I just want to thank sheryl davis for reporting out on the Mayors Task Force and our demands. Im glad that youre going to be working with labor and continuing our work. As i heard all of these presentations, and thank you so much, they were very informative, the bottom line is hiring, discipline, promotion and support starts with managers. So when you look at the members of management in these positions, we know that the hiring is mostly white. When we think about and continue these e. E. O. Complaints, especially those that dont meet the e. E. O. Threshold, training should be different. There are so many stories of employees who were forced to continue to work in an environment because their claims did not reach the e. E. O. Threshold. Training is definitely required, not just the implicit bias training. Supervisors and managers for black and brown employees need to have Racial Equity core competencies. We need to make sure there is independent investigation outside of e. E. O. Thank you so much. Clerk thank you for your comments. Could we have the next caller, please. [indiscernible] good afternoon, im with public works. I want to thank all the speakers for all the presentations. A member of local 21 and a member of the black employee alliance. Im speaking as a black woman from a different perspective. The work here is very important because there is a Mental Health component that is really not being factored in the way that black women are seen. I have been with the city for seven years and i have expressed concerns for about three years and nothing has come out of it. It is not just me, it is black women who have been devalued, demoted, disenfranchised, and the list goes on and on. I would to plead to everyone, understand that these are human beings that have emotions, that have families, that are mothers, community leaders, and the impact of the oppression and the suffering at work just has an impact to the community and their families as well. So i just wanted to speak to that, that there is a Mental Health component that moves people and they forget about it. There is no accountability to the people that perpetrate the hatred. There has to be a high level of accountability so that people are treated as human beings and respected for what we bring to the table and to be valued for who we are. Thank you. Clerk thank you very much for your comments. Could we get the next caller, please. I am a member of local 21. I was wrongfully terminated last week and it all happened because i went to e. E. O. For expressing frustration and anger after being targeted by management. I was punitively selected for an assignment to drive testing patients to a testing centers. I was selected for this after a disagreement. Apparently the acting city and county engineer was not aware or did not care that blacks are disproportionately affected like this. I was threatened with punishment if i did not accept the next assignment, even though i gave the form exempting me because i am a part of a vulnerable population. I spoke to my e. E. O. Rep and discussed that case. Later the same day i was hit with a cease and desist order, placed on paid leave, and removed from employment. E. E. O. Commentary played a major role in my dismissal, due to their bias on my words of frustration. The e. E. O. Rep called me the first week of october to let me know that his supervisor was let go and they were going to clerk speaker, your time is up. Thank you very much for your comments. Could we have the next caller, please. I am a member of the black employees alliance. Im disappointed with the d. H. R. Director dancing around the topic of racism, even though their laundry has been aired in public. Im hoping to an Inspector General would be appointed to investigate d. H. R. And the e. E. O. System and look at autonomy in the pay equity s eq discipline suspension, terminations, and medical releases of black and brown employees throughout the city, in addition to opening past e. E. O. Cases without findings. Clerk could you connect us to the next caller, please. Can you hear me . Yes, we can. Please begin. Caller, are you still there . Can you hear me . Yes, we can. Please begin. Hello okay. I want to thank all of the board of supervisors. This continues to be one of the most important issues we face. San francisco has been at the forefront of pushing the barriers and the discrimination specifically with black employees. The statistics show that we are more harmed than any other group and the lowest paid. What we also know is we have already raised these issues and were able through our activities were able to push to have the office of race and equity established. So what we want to see now is a change and see all the departments come together to address the real realities. We know that sick times, vacation time, attendance, and the policies are used in a punitive way. There are reports required at laguna honda where there is expected abuse. This policy is being used at laguna honda to penalize employees even when they have done nothing. This needs to be looked into clerk thank you for your comments. I am an sciu member. I want to thank the supervisors. I want to thank all of you for having this hearing which is important with the city. I just want to basically follow up and make some comments on what the director was saying as far as the exam process and Everything Else pertaining to. One thing i want the supervisors to Pay Attention to, depending on which classification and department you are, theres not always a set example or question. I know specifically for my classification or in my department that management actually goes and actually comes up with the question. Depending on what type of specialty it is, management is the one thats asked to come up with the testing. That is a problem when management is creating a test and the majority of management is not diverse. Management represented the majority of employees. They are the lowest paid members. D. H. R. Had a big hand for keeping us down before the pandemic. We are not even at the level of most People Living in San Francisco. We were denied promotion. We had to come to the board of supervisors to try to get the promotions that were actually already promised to us