Her as well as anyone in the association. I take this responsibility very seriously of historic preservation. I restored the white oak floors in the house, i restored the plaster walls, i even restored some of the windows. Theres nothing i would do against that. But theres just a tremendous amount of nit picking and i think theres an abuse of the public process. But again i have reached out to brook and what she told me in emails was that her main concern was getting resolution with the appellant and the sponsor and when i met with irving at that time on june 2nd and he had brought the plans that he approved prior that were resubmitted and said these are the last plans i approved and what did you submit since then and we couldnt get the planning submital material because the original structural material on the project wasnt able to put the details in place that we needed. There was a recommendation to bring in an architect which we did and thats why i took an additional 6 months to get through the process. Theres no scheming or anything from our perspective but again i reached out to brook but again her view was that it was primarily her main concern was in reaching agreement with the appellant. Also our other neighbor who indicated concern for the open space. As part of the preapplication meeting one of the neighbors commented about the railings and were going to upgrade the railings to make them glass and use as light material as possible, not the plywood and decking, to make it as light as possible. So we did take it very seriously. Any rebuttal from mr. Sanchez . No . Okay, unless there are questions for him, commissioners, the matter is submitted. Based upon all the discussion that has occurred i would have thought there was a dr case, not a variance appeal. Nobody spoke to the variance. The question was whether one side was right or the other side is right, versus was this variance justified. I dont know whether i want to take that on because nobody seems to care, you know. The fact is both sides support a variance. The da supports a variance. Im not sure i support a variance. It wasnt brought up. Im not sure whats before us any more. I feel the deck has been vetted. May i say one last thing . Part of the issue is the notice that using dimensions. Five feet is the dimension with the deck at the top floor, third floor. Thats measured from a bay that sticks out. A foot and a half, yeah. And the floor below that second floor is going to be wider, its closer to 7 feet. Just to make sure everybody understood that. So although the appellant has pointed out that there was a flaw in the 311 notification, i think he has had adequate contact, more than adequate contact with the project sponsor and the fact that i almost feel this has been over vetted. I am in the opinion of denying the appeal and upholding the permit. No comment. Commissioners, just as a reminder, as commissioner fung stated, this is a variance and your task is to decide whether or not the 5 findings under planning code 305c have been met or not. You know im a hard case on variances. Yeah. But i do feel that one is a little bit different because if you look at the ones that are more specific to the property because these quite clearly are always very general, ive said that, i dont know, hundreds of time. But the one that strikes me is that a property right that is given to adjacent neighbors that you dont have and i think that strikes me quite heavily in this particular case. The one that doesnt strike me so generally is the last and most general one is the question of general plan. Filling in the rear yards i dont think is the general plans desire. So what are our choices again . If you want to deny the appeal and uphold the variance you need to state thats your intent and its because the 5 findings have been met and if you want to grant the appeal and overturn the variance then you need to state a reason why you do not believe the 5 findings have been met. I figure attorney wolf will say that better and more ak raitdly. You can modify the variance as well but then youd also have to find, state why you think the 5 criteria still met with the modification. I will make a stab at it. I will deny the appeal, approve the variance that the 5 criteria have been met. Okay, thank you. So from the Vice President then is a motion to deny the appeal and yul hold the variance on the basis that the 5 findings under planning code section 305c have been met. On that motion, commissioner fung, aye. Commissioner wilson, no. Commissioner swig, aye. Okay, with a vote of 31 and one absence, that motion carries and the variance is upheld. And there is no further business. We are adjourned. Thank you. meeting adjourned . Selfplanning works to preserve and enhance the city what kind hispanic the environment in a variety of ways overhead plans to fwied other departments to open space and land use an urban design and a variety of other matters related to the physical urban Environment Planning projects include implementing code change or designing plaza or parks projects can be broad as proipd on overhead neighborhood planning effort typically include public involvement depending on the subject a new lot or effect or be active in the final process lots of people are troubled by theyre moving loss of theyre of what we preserve to be theyre moving mid block or rear yard open space. One way to be involved attend a meeting to go it gives us and the neighbors to learn and participate dribble in future improvements meetings often take the form of open houses or focus groups or other stinks that allows you or your neighbors to provide feedback and ask questions the best way to insure youll be alerted the Community Meetings sign up for the notification on the website by signing up using youll receive the notifications of existing request the specific neighborhood or project type if youre language is a disability accomodation please call us 72 hours before the event over the events staff will receive the input and publish the results on the website the notifications bans feedback from the public for example, the feedback you provide may change how a street corridors looks at or the web policy the get started in planning for our neighborhood or learner more mr. The upcoming visit the plans and programs package of our we are talking about with our feedback and participation that is important to us not everyone takes this so be proud of taking ann lets get started. This meeting will come to order. This meeting is the government audit and Oversight Committee for september 17, 2015. To my right is vice chair Julie Christensen and president breed has appointed supervisor mar in her place. Could i have a motion to excuse president breed for the meeting. So moved. Without objection the motion passes. [gavel] supervisor mar will join us briefly. Hes in traffic right now. The Committee Clerk is erica major and the committee would like to recognize the staff from sfgtv who record each of our meetings and make the transcripts available to the public online. Madam clerk do you have any announcements . Please silent all cell phones and electronic devices. Completed speaker cards and copies of documents to be part of the file somebody submitted to the clerk. Items will be on the september 29 board of supervisors agenda anyplace otherwise stated. Okay. Can you please call item 1. Item 1 is a hearing to discuss the citys Response Plan in the event of a forest or brush fire within the city and county of San Francisco. Okay. So colleagues i have called this hearing today to discuss the Response Plan and the event of a urban forest or brush fire taking place in San Francisco. I want to make it real clear my intent here is to really listen, just to the Fire Department, and to Emergency Management department to really see if were really ready for this type of situation. I know theres been some confusion on this issue. People are thinking that this is about cutting down trees and its not, so i want to make it real clear to the audience and watching this on tv that this is about being ready for forest fires that can happen in the city. As you know San Francisco has many areas that consider many forests. There are places like telegraph hill. Russian hill, mt. Davidson. Golden gate park just throughout San Francisco you have these small areas of heavy vegetation, and i grew up in the russian hill area and i remember as a little kid on the backside of the home basically is a big huge area of everybodys backside in which there were no fences. It was basically vegetation back there and one day it caught fire, and about seven or eight homes got heavily damaged. This was in the 50s, and one of the things that i didnt when i was watching as a kid the firefighters i realized how difficult it was them to get in there to the back, climb up the hills and so forth and that left a mark on me in realizing that fighting that type of fire is really different from fighting a fire of a building, so and here we are. Were faced with a four year drought. Vegetation throughout San Francisco, throughout the bay area, throughout california is rather dry. Even San Francisco is blessed with what we call the natural air conditioning, the fog, it doesnt take that much, that many days like you have two weeks ago when the weather was very hot. A couple of days of hot weather, low humidity will just provide or give you the condition that can be very, very awful for fires, and today is not about lets hope there is going to be a fire. I hope there never be a urban fire like the Oakland Hills in the 90s or if anybody has been around long enough there was the Beverly Hills fire in the 70s. We dont want that to happen in San Francisco but the question today were trying to answer is if there is a fire that catches, whether its a brushes or trees or whatever, are we ready in San Francisco . So thats what were going to answer today. As you know we have seen the deftation just this week of the valley fire in napa, lake and sonoma counties with 61 probably growing. Its more than 61,000 acres of burned area with almost probably i would say 600 homes that got completely burned down. This is just really a reminder we must prepare in San Francisco. I hope this hearing will be fruitful in the discussion how our city departments and how our constituents can work with these departments to do their part to ensure that families and loved ones that safe and our city remains resilient, so first up i would like to call on chief hayeswhite to maybe have some opening remarks and call her staff to talk about this issue. Thank you. Good morning chair yee, supervisor christensen, joe an hayeswhite San FranciscoFire Department. I would like to applaud you supervisor yee and not only youre in my district but i dont recall in my time as chief we had a discussion in the legislative branch of government on this topic so its very timely as you referred there has been great devastation throughout our state throughout the last several months including the fact that we had 30 firefighters deployed. We just had 22 return last night from the butte fire and then we have remaining eight at the valley fire, and so everyone loves to come to San Francisco, but it is challenging from a firefighter perspective. I was a training director for four years and the bulk of training is in relg to structural fight fighting but we have things in the city as you mentioned and the Golden Gate Park and the presidio and a whole number of areas. Also under the freeways there is vegetation as well, so we pride ourselves on training. We have componentos wildlife Fire Fighting and we have groups able of the master mutual aid agreement with the state and we deploy our firefighters per that agreement throughout the state to help battle fires so what we prepared today is a presentation on our resources that we have, some of the training that we have, and then were certainly able to answer any questions for you. I am very appreciative and sensitive to the fact that we have beautiful open space here in San Francisco. As a mother of three boys weve enjoyed many of the parks and so forth although as fire chief i have children just to make sure there is a balance between vegetation as well as good solid urban Forestry Management to mitigate the fuel load as we would call it, and proper attention, and Forestry Management, so i would like now to introduce the deputy chief of operations, Mark Gonzales and give you an update on the vegetation fires in the city and followed by lieutenant mary shea from Fire Prevention and talk about the collaborative efforts with department of public works and recreation and Park Department and a Good Partnership existed and were going to continue to remind everyone including our partners at ucsf. We went through a process two years ago where they did significant training and creation of Defensible Space and were looking at those things as well with them so at the end of the presentation were happy to answer any questions. Good morning supervisor mar as well. Deputy chief gonzales. Good morning supervisor yee, supervisor christensen, supervisor mar. This is my presentation. Its on the urban wild land interface operations. Can you pull it up . Okay. Thank you. So the first slide is just showing from 201215 the types of calls weve had. The list of call types theyre including graphs, brush and vejingtation and vegetation and forest and including trees. This shows some of the specialized equipment we had for a while. Right now theyre stationed in the southeastern part of the city. As chair yee mentioned we have fog and even during the drought the rest of the city, the west and the northwest gets the fog. The best weather is in Hunters Point southeast so thats where its driest and one of the concerns is mclaren park sthe four minipumpers are in that area and we have front line stations in the city and a lot of those companies have been trained with immediate need and trained with wild land operations and the chief mentiond that we have over 200 firefighters that do that. The main prusmers able to access areas not accessible by the engines and carry water and equipped with smaller hoses so theyre maneuverable and get in and out quick. We use the minipumpers at special events and get in and out of crowds for trash fires or vegetation fires within the events. Some of the tools that are carried on the minipumpers and some of the engineers one is a pulaiivegy and its on one head and rigid handle of fiberglass. Its a versatile tool for fire breaks and dig soil and chop wood. Often time there is is a little fire up on bush or brush they can knock it out with this and just smoother it. Second specialized tool the mccloud. This combination of rig and tools used by firefighters to cut through things and declare loose surface material. The next slide we have five of these engines that we bought from the state for a pretty good price a few years ago. When we send a strike team out as we did to the butte fire this is the five engineer engines we sent out and it was assistant chief franklin and brought an assistant with him so theyre assigned by the state to the fire whether its structure defense or setting up a defensive line. A lot of the other equipment is wild land use and shovels and the things i mentioned before and wear different personal Protection Equipment so the turn outs and pants that we wear in the city are a lot heavier and these are lighter and there is still Fire Protection but you can imagine being in the heat all day long and going through a diagram yoga class and the training as the chief mentioned. Happens every year as part of our training. We adopted the state interface wildlife manual and be consistent with the state and we work with them on the operations. Could i ask a quick question . Yes, sir. In regards to the 200 firefighters thats been trained how many of them have actually gone taken part in these strike teams or had experience find fighting these fires . I dont have those stats in hand. I would say most of them. Definitely with the last few seasons weve had they have all gotten to experience it i would venture to say. I do know that 2025 years ago when we went out not as many were trained at all. We were city firefighters. We did some of the things if parks or guards got caught we sent them out but we didnt have the minipumpers and training. I am comfortable that all of the firefighters went through this need but as well as this component its 200 so theyre planned to go out on the strike teams and like if Oakland Hills happened again we would pick from the 10 engines we have trained in that specialty as well. Thank you. The next i skipped ahead too much. So the next slide is 2014 is just a grass and outside fire responses. You could see it better on the map here. I thought it show up better on the screen but its denoted by the red flag icons and dispatch called for multiple units is by the blue icons and you cant tell by the size of the map. I apologize by that. If theyre bigger we went to the same area more than once. The little red engines and you can barely see them off mic . Bought from the state. Theyre also in the southeastern part so whether we get called for the mutual aid deployments the process is the engines go to 19th and forsom and meet up with the Strike Team Leader and assistant and grab the equipment there and take off whether going north, south, east supervisor christensen. Can you bring the map up . When we see it closer its easytory read so understandably it seems like some of these are occurring under the edges of