Call the first item. Yes. Please silence all cell phones and electronic copies. Copies that are part of the file will be submitted to the clerk and items will be on the september 13 board of supervisors agenda unless otherwise stated. Item 1 is opposing the commissions proposed equity metrics that are to be used in developing Equity Analysis and recreation and Park Services resources and Capital Expenditures in. Thank you. This was brought to us by supervisor avalos and Phil Ginsburg and the public are here today and with that supervisor avalos the floor is years. Thank you chair peskin and everyone for being here. This is a hearing that i called last july or early august when i heard the equity metricses for the recreation and Park Department as a result of prop b were to be heard and voted at the parks commission. I felt that there had not been significant or sufficient amount of public input into the metrics and since that time i did meet with general manager Phil Ginsburg and Taylor Emerson with the public as well separately to talk about the metrics and what i found overall i really appreciated that the department had gone through a very thorough process, but not complete i believe, thorough process looking at how they could set a framework for later decisions that we made in the Operations Plan and in the capital plan for the recreation and Parks Department all in confluence with prop b that was on the ballot in june, and that to me was very important there was that process, but i think since a lot of the members of the public didnt feel comfortable and have sufficient input into that i wanted to make sure that could happen. For me it was important i wasnt i really saw that prop b, the set aside for the rec and Park Department was going to pass when it was first introduced there were Seven Members of the board of supervisors that were cosponsors so i saw it was a done deal but i also worked with other departments in San Francisco to make sure as departments are making decisions that they dont tend to make decisions about resources based on where there already is a lot of resources, and if i have seen anything in my eight years on the board of supervisors in San Francisco where there is a lot of wealth that tends to attract other wealth and resources to come in and for me to set up its important that the city creates a lens, an equity lens to make sure that neighborhoods that dont have the wealth and dont have a tremendous amount of resources are able to pull down greater resources for the services that they need. If you look at the parks reports that came out from the Controllers Office in the past few years a couple of districts often are on the shorter end of the stick. Although their numbers are not terrible but the shorter side of the stick compared to other parts of San Francisco and to me that shows were making significant progress in serving neighborhoods that are low income and these services theyre low income there are other resources and other diverse activities that people can take a part in parks are an essential service, sort of a town square we have of the neighborhoods and Washington Park and north beach and surrounding that park is are incredible amount of Cultural Resources that dont exist in other parts in San Francisco and district 11 and the excelsior but were trying to build that Going Forward so for me having the equity framework is essential so we have real mechanisms within the department how the departments will make decisions to help to give greater leverage to neighborhoods that dont get the kind of wealth and resources that wealthy neighborhoods do get, and so i know we have Phil Ginsburg who is here to talk about the equity metricses and Taylor Emerson is presenting and did a lot of work on this. For me i wanted to make sure the public is part of this discussion. I would like to find out from mr. Ginsburg when the Parks Department will be approving these metrics. I believe they just need to be submitted to the board of supervisors, but i want to make sure there is more Public Engagement and if after the presentation today theres still a lot of questions that the public have i would like to think about continuing this item to the call of the chair to have another discussion or to have a meeting in my office with some of the Key Stakeholders in the city to talk more about these metrics and to get a common understanding of them as well so with they will pass it on to mr. Ginsburg to come forward and start the presentation. General manager ginsburg and i would like to acknowledge vice chair norman yee has joined us. Thank you supervisors. I want to set a little context before we dive into the equity lens and that is the passage of proposition d. Prior to june and certainly for the first almost seven almost eight years of my time as general manager our parks i think have existed in an era of what i would call preserious financial insecurity, resource insecurity, and we have done okay on the capital side and had a couple of bonds but our park system has struggled as the economy struggled really having another resources to fulfill our mission and prop d was an important time for parks and offered an opportunity to sort of stabilize park funding and allow us some time and space in breath to stop reacting to maybe the financial crisis of the day, and think about our parks in over a longer cycle and to do more planning and los i want to start off by really thank you for the part in the conversation and for pushing us on both planning and on this really, really important concept of equity. Equity is a topic which exists in urban park systems, exists in cities all across the country, but yet at least in our experience i think were all grappling to understand how to measure it and what it means and how to respond to issues of equity, and you know you made sure this was a focus for us Going Forward and its one we embrace and frankly really excited about. Its also one i would like to see could be a model that other departments start to take on. The mta has done it along their work along capital and operations and its really great process they went through. It took two years to do but this is a great important that has citywide impact and a strong model for us. We will take you through the beginning of the journey here and talk about the lens as you put it and apt and its a lens for us to make some to offer some transparency, some sunshine how we deliver services in what neighborhoods. Before i begin i want to thank taylor and eric of my team for some really serious and rigorous analytical work and research to get us to where we are today and i want to thank the Parks Community and parks advocates generally. I see Rachel Norton here from the parks and lands and for pushing us to be the best Parks Department i think we can be so lets talk a little bit about this lens, and how we hope to apply it. It starts with the actual charter language which we have which asks us to develop a set of equity metrics to establish a baseline of existing services and resources in low income neighborhoods and disadvantaged communities compared to those Resources Available to the city as a whole and literally maybe the day after the proposition passed we began thinking how we were going to do this so we have been at this sort of internally from an analytical standpoint for quite some time. I want to emphasize this is an evolvingity riffive conversation. There is no perfect answer. You dont immediately land on the perfect formula and metric. Demographics change in cities over time but what it does is create for us a journey, an annual journey that is frankly going to be repeated for certainly the life of the Charter Amendment and probably well beyond that. I think you and i joked i will be 78 when i dont know if i will be here but i will be 78 when the charter section expires and so we are really at the beginning of this which is upon developing some metrics. The charter measure asks us to incorporate the metrics into our Strategic Plan which is our highest Level Planning document to give that document an equity lens and then to take those metrics and actually drill down deeper into the capital and Operations Plan which influence the annual budget so thats the journey and we will do that every year and rinse and repeat. Were going to keep doing that,. So each year you get to perfect . Yeah. This isity rative. I am turn it over to tater based on the census data. Middecade. And that will alter the data a bit andit rative over time and we will talk how we constructed the lens and how were apply tg. Comd afternoon supervisors. I am from the recreation and Parks Department. So the work plan set forth for us was first to define disadvantaged communities, and then to measure inside those communities the delivery of Recreation Park Services and resources against the delivery of those services and same services and resources citywide, so we set about looking for benchmark agencies across the country, any other Park Departments doing Something Like this, and lead right back home to california and in fact San Francisco, the most progressive policy making body ever, and we found from Governor Brown a open data set that did exactly this. It defined disadvantaged communities by census tract. Its called the cal enentireo screen and it evaluates disadvantaged it defines disadvantaged communities by census tract and compares them across the state of california. This was designated for the agency to do as part of the states cap and trade program, and other jurisdictions are already beginning to use this data. Its been updated twice and yesterday it was on a webinar about version 3. 0 which will come out next year with the updated American Community surveys as of 2015 then. Keep going. Keep going . Youre going to talk [inaudible] [off mic] okay. What they did was they set they defined a set of whats called populations kaishts that in culmination of our when added together defined disadvantaged. They measured each of these characteristics, age, because youth and seniors are more vulnerable populations, rates of asthma. Linguistic and rates of isolation and this is relevant in San Francisco and the definition is no one in the house over 12 speaks english well so that definitely affects your access to public services, poverty and unemployment rates so they took government sources of data, and enriched what was there with the census and used the 2010 census as a starting point and enriched it twice as i mentioned. Each of the indicators is weighted the same so 1 7 for each of these in the formula and when layered upon each other define disadvantaged so in this map right here its hard to see but the darkest purple is the highest incidents. The highest number of residents that meet this threshold. Let me state back. I forgot to stay an important thing. The state enviroscreen compares to each census track to others in the state but we extracted it and compared to just other San Francisco tracts so it meets the spirit of the charter and compare disadvantage as the city as a whole. We went down to the highest 20 , so the most the highest rate of incidents of the population characteristics compared to the city as a whole and then redesignated those census tracts as equity zones instead of disadvantaged communities, so this map shows a lot right here. It shows in the darkest area the census tracts where residents meet that definition as well as a five minute buffer, a five minute walk around those areas. This is a standard tool for measuring park access. It was used in the trust for public lands annual evaluation of urban parks and the rows and for some residents being on the edge of this imaginary line, this imaginary equity zone and a park right across the street might be closer or have the metric theyre looking for and acknowledges were a small city and walking to a park outside the zone and once we did this and the disadvantaged communities and the parks that served them we had the parks name of those in the service area. Of course no one can read this. I apologize. I am sure the document is online but there are 81 parks here that are in service of residents that could be defined as low income and disadvantaged communities, otherwise known as residents of these equity zones. 81 parks out of 220. Just to pause you because i am looking at the list which i have a copy of and theres parks and theres parks and theres rec centers and theres many parks and open spaces. Yes. And you know if i want to give some input i think it would be important as another layer in looking at the equity zone is what is the function of these parks . What are the activities in these parks . How do they differ or can you categorize them in certain ways within the list that give it you know some sense of type of intervention the parks might need in order to if theyre actually found to have some deficiencies what types of interventions are in these parks compared to other parks and operations and not just in terms of seeing a big list like this. Like we get to the next iteration that is a good way to break this down and easier for the public to even grasp like how this is going to look at their Neighborhood Park. I think it would be easier on the list supervisor to say rec center, large parks, small parks, miniparks. There are ways to categorize it. This is a macro look of the data and the look at open space areas that we manage. Just to reiterate that if you do that then i think the public has a greater understanding or concept how these equity metrics might apply to their Neighborhood Park based on their understanding and the activities in the parks. I think it would be easy to subgroup or categorize the size or type of property and the parks in the equity zones and i dont think its hard to do. We included all kinds of recreation so i wanted to include all of them and Community Gardens and miniparks and john mclaren is one on the list and its interesting to break it down by type. Okay. So weve down the lines to disadvanced communities. We defined the Properties Within the geographic areas that provide recreation and Park Services and resources and then we set about looking at both our mission, what is it that you know what is the recreation and Park Department . What is important and drives us . And what information speaks to that . Of course we have the great gis information and the surveys with the controller every year and evaluate the cleanliness of the bathrooms and the trash can to the quality of the plantings and trees, the integrity of playground equipment. Theyre scores. Work orders and the internal Management System for calling up painters, plumbers, carpenters and to fix things and we have the budget and great information on permits and programs and the way to register online for programs and where mobile rec goes and the data and what had integrity and use it in the mission. Geographic access, recreation for everyone, clean and well maintained parks is the mantra and investment. Those are the types of things we could measure to try to get at this very qualitative term of equity. This is even harder to read. This is where we are. This is our first application of looking at the data we had and trying to standardize ways of measuring it within the equity zone and for the city as a whole. Just as a reminder you want us to hold off asking questions until after you present . Its up to you. Go right ahead. I am just looking at this piece of it right now, and some of the questions i have are on this page. One of the metrics i dont know how you measure it, but i think supervisor avalos sort of alluded to depending what kind of how do you count the hours . Is it the park being open versus a playground or a rec center that has staff . So i am just curious would it make any sense maybe one of the metrics that we look at is how many recreational directors or rec staff per thousand people, whatever per something, because you could have a park thats open and nobody there and thats a different type of Service Versus those directors that actually plan for activities and so forth. I think those are really two different things. Thats one question. You could answer it. Let me try to steak a stab at that. I think youre hinting at two different concepts supervisor. One is sort of survey data about who is in your parks, how often theyre there . The parks have standard hours. The landscape, the physical spaces are open with some exceptions from i believe 5 00 a. M. To 12 00 p. M. We did the park hours legislation time back so there is uniformity in terms of the hours that the parks are open. Who is there . There are parks well used and dense and others that are not. Were thinking through some strategies how to do more surveys and figure out who is in the parks and for what reasons. We participated in a National Study by rand and Parks Alliance and we have five, six, seve