Transcripts For SFGTV BOS Replay Special Govt Audits And Ove

Any other Public Comment . Seeing none Public Comment is now closed. Do you have any other questions . Id like to just wrap up. We just wanted to respond to the other two presentations and recommendation 4 which was the people soft system we appreciate the plan to develop the skills inventory capability of this system and the recommendation however of the civil grand jury was meant to allow Skill Development throughout any it employees not necessarily tied to the position current ly held by the employee and its a fast changing one and within the city and county of San Francisco so if the employee initiates on their own getting more training and stuff we want to have a way for them to have it logged into the people soft system. And also for the d h. R. Presentation, again, the civil grand jury appreciates the efforts in trying new faster methods for creating it eligibility lists and we hope the same methods can be used for other it positions and i also attended the coit meeting presentation and it created a lot of excitement among the departments and offices represented at the meeting. We only hope that these expectations can be fulfilled and d h. R. Has great plans and executing those plans will be hard work and wed like to see coit ask to see periodic updates at their meetings and potential future grand jurors that it warrants further investigation so thank you. Thank you very much for your work. And just as we wrap up this report again, i want to express my sincere appreciation to each and every member of the civil grand jury the time the effort the hours that you put into not only researching interviewing preparing these reports i know takes up a significant amount of your lives and so i just want you to know on behalf of the board of supervisors we truly appreciate this work and hope that some of the recommendations that have been made can be implemented so were a better more efficient city and were in the process i know of moving forward with making some of those recommendations and hopefully through legislation or other means were able to do that and thank you again and appreciate your work on the civil grand jury. Thank you very much well said. So im gonna make the recommendation. The recommendation for number 3. The recommendation number 3 has been implemented the department of Technology Sent a User Satisfaction survey to all clients and recommendation number 4 will not be implemented for reasons as follows the board of supervisors does not have authority to implement this recommendation and the board requests the department of technology and department of Human Resources to provide a report to the board with their progress by the end of the calendar year and then for recommendation number 5, it has been implemented. The department of Human Resources presented the results of its expedited hiring in october 2015 okay so i would like to have a motion to forward this item as recommended to the full board. So moved. Okay. Any objection . Seeing none then motion passes. Thank you very much once again. Madam clerk please call item number 4. The gas line breaks related to the citys construction on haight street and the California Public Utilities Commission and pg e. Okay at this time this is a hearing thats been called by supervisor breed so im turning it over to her. Thank you. Thank you colleagues and thank you everyone for being here today we have a lot of folks here and i know we have a lot of questions we want answered so ill be as quick as possible. Last year the city began a multimillion dollar Infrastructure Project to install water mains and replace sewers and ghilotti brothers won the main contract and the crews ruptured gas lines and we also experienced two sinkholes in the same area and five gas line breaks and two sinkholes and im so thankful and frankly surprised that no one was seriously hurt but ill tell you this the failures disruptived the Haight Ashbury community and the street was completely closed for hours at a time and stores were forced to close disrupting their business and the smell of leaking gas overpowered entire blocks and on one occasion someone told everyone to evacuate and on another occasion a foreman was dangled head first into a manhole and we have pictures which i think well show on the overhead projector if they are available on the laptop. Thank you. Some of this would almost be comical if it wasnt so dangerous and irresponsible the community and i have had enough. In september i asked the department of public works to suspend all work on the project and a few weeks later i had a press conference with leaders from the Haight Ashbury Merchants Association and the pan handle Neighborhood Association and many of those leaders are here today and thank you for being here and i look forward to hearing your presentations. Public works requested the prime contract ghilotti to remove the subcontractor synergy. Excuse me. Synergy appealed and it went to an administrative hearing before an independent hearing officer and ghilotti supported synergy and synergy blamed pg e and the hearing officers finally issued his decision on monday upholding our position that synergys safety violations are inexcusable and im happy to report synergy has been removed and public works are actively look for a new subcontractors but regardless, before any work resumes, the community and i have a lot of questions that need to be answered. What happened here . Why did these dangerous failures happen over and over again . Who is responsible for keeping track of where gas lines are and ensuring they are not hit and what is ghilotti and synergys Safety Record and how did they win these bids and with repeated past safety violations not able to continue working in our neighborhood and synergy came in one Million Dollars before other bidders and now were left holding the bag. Do we need legislative changes to move away from criteria that takes safety into consideration . What are the Lessons Learned and what else do we need to do to prevent Something Like this from ever happening again. I dont want to see any work resume in the haight street until we are sure our neighborhood can be safe and we deserve safety and accountability from our government and the companies that the government hires and companies that repeated ly jeopardize Public Safety should not be working on our streets and ive asked the San Francisco Public Utilities commission and pg e and ghilotti and synergy to be here today. I have a lot of specific questions for each entity and weve passed out copies of those questions near the microphone if anyone is interested. First id like to start hearing from the merchants and neighbors whose lives were impacted by the project. I want to start with the president of the Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council james ford. All right. Excuse me. Chairman yee and president breed and supervisor peski n. It was quite insulting by many residents and must be corrected before the projects continue. First off i want to thank the Merchant Association for being the eyes and ears on this project and i also want to thank pro sf and the other neighborhood groups that supported us on this matter and without their support its unlikely it would have received the attention we needed for this hearing to happen and thanks to president breed and calling this hearing. The total disregard for Public Safety and the local businesses on this project has been a disgrace and i think it should be noted that the gentleman who spoke earlier on topic 2 i think highlights why were here today. It seems that theres not enough oversight on much of these matters and as you can see here theres 3 sinkholes by some of the residents calculations and the infrastructure is aging and should be replace d in a responsible manner. Some are old and some are sealed off and the knowledge of what lines are live and where they are located is seriously lacking and i know if i had done this on my personal residence it would not have passed inspection. I have six items and the dates that we calculated gas lines and i recognize number 2 wasnt related to the project but many of us in the neighborhood felt it was similar and i have kind of our initial reactions as to what happened. On baker street thats cool it wasnt on haight and august they did it again and september darn thats not good. Coming into october maybe we should get something going and by october 8th it was lets shut this down this is not acceptable. Now, we do while it is nice to hear that synergy has been fired we feel this is something thats beyond just the subcontractor errors and they were used as partially a scapegoat. Wed like to know the following if i can get the next slide going here excuse me. There we go. What happened . A summary of what actually excuse me here. A summary of what happened. We have no statement early on and no statement has been made by the director of dpw and is it unusual for there to be repeated failures of the same type in the same project in such a short period of time . Does this happen all the time during these projects . Did either have a history of such errors on the job done in the past much like synergy and if so, why were they hired and what are the responsibilities of pg e to convey information on gas lines and who in the city coordinated with pg e and we ask a couple of questions what is to be done. What were the Lessons Learned from this gross failure and how are they to be applied to future projects and what procedures are to be changed in the contracting and construction process and breed we know you are working on that and appreciate that. What procedures with pg e are to be improved and when will the neighborhood groups receive an official letter explaining what happened and why and this would demonstrate accountability thats been lacking in our eyes and with the attitude of moving forward at all costs often leaves many of us behind. The residents of San Francisco deserve better we used to be the city that knows how and i believe weve become the city that moves forward with no regard to its current residents and thank you for your time and i appreciate the hearing. Thank you for your presentation and now we will have the Haight Ashbury Merchants Association representative come up and present. Supervisor peskin supervisor yee and president breed thank you for holding this hearing and the Haight Ashbury neighborhood commercial corridor is de marked here in this map. The Haight Ashbury merchants representation represents over a hundred merchants and they all occurred on one block of the commercial corridor which is indicated with the smaller box. The construction was started in april 2015 and was halted in october 2015. Originally the timeline that we had been given was two weeks. Whether it was two weeks or four weeks whatever it was supposed to be, it clearly went into months following delays after each gas leak required a halt to the work investigations all of this created extreem disruption. The city needs to take a look at what absolutely needs improvement before we continue and the project im actually going to start referring to it as the muni forward project making extensive changes to haight street and covers the entire corridor of the Haight Ashbury commercial corridor and will impact not just 30 merchants but impact over 140 merchants and for us to get this right is so necessary. Theres a high level of anxiety among the merchants about the Economic Impact and that they not be disastrous to their business. We felt we were getting good communication and transparency and awareness around the scope of the work that would be done. There were notices provided and meetings held and articles that detailed the work that was coming. However, once the projects started, only 2days only 2 days after the work started was when the first gas leak occurred and it was chaos. It was shelter in place and evacuate and there was no clear understanding about who needed to respond. We found out later it was going to be pg e responding and pg e had to do its investigation and there was complete disruption to that block beyond just parking restrictions and Traffic Controls. It was completely shut down and the businesses were shut down that day. We requested a meeting with the city project managers dpw as well as the contractors and before we even had a chance to sit down and meet with them, a week later there was a gigantic sinkhole which opened up in the intersection of haight and masonic that seemed to be related to the work being done. The project stopped and started through the next several months and we experienced in total on this one block five gas leaks. Believe it or not there was improved response to each gas leak in the amount of time that each business was closed reduced because they started to prepare anticipating future gas leaks and there were additionally another sinkhole which opened up on october 22 and james pointed out there was another sinkhole blocked further down on 1600 block of haight street and again this work is not complete and weve completely lost confidence that it will be done in an effective way. Im gonna focus on what im talking about specifically to the merchants concerns and obviously real residents concerns and most of those buildings are multiuse and businesses on the first floor and residents and neighbors that are above they have legitimate concerns as well but specifically speaking on behalf of the merchants, its key that you understand business closures and disruption that may last 2 or 3 or 4 weeks usually can be suffered by a business but once we get into months that can sometimes be catastrophic for a business and a business doesnt have in their business agreement any rent relief for disruption to their business and you can sometimes reduce Staffing Levels to try to weather financial downturns but extended periods of disruption this creates an extreme amount of disruption. One of the businesses had an extreme sewer backup that resulted from this work and its not like somebody is coming up from the contract or or from the city or helping them fix what they need to get fixed. Theres absolutely no assistance in these situations for the businesses that are being the most impacted. Some businesses have reported loss of revenue up to 20 percent and even up to fifty percent. So to conclude, here are the summary ideas that this merchants idea has come up with for what the city needs to do to earn back our trust before we move forward with the construction work. There has to be some level of accountability here. There were systematic breakdowns at many steps along the way. The timeline accountability and the schedule slipping from weeks to months and the work still not being completed i hate to say for to go out for a year for one block is completely unacceptable and building in timeline accountability so that the businesses and communities being impacted i feel should be built into the project scope of these projects. Additionally, we called for meetings and asked for people to help answer questions about what was happening and who was in charge. We got a lot of finger pointing and not a lot of anyone standing up and saying this is whats happening. There was blame places on pg e for their lack of updated maps and concerns about ghilotti brothers the prime contractor not providing sufficient oversight and concern that the subcontractor was being callous and using heavy mechanized equipment to rupture gas lines one after the other and it became comical it was just ridiculous. Finally i have to say that the city obviously had a role here. The city hired this contractor and subcontractor and unclear to us that the city explained to us why their hands why tied to not fix what was happening. Was it the inability of the city because of the contract or an unwillingness of the people that had the legal ability to stop the work and were they just unwilling and why . In the future, especially since we have this significant project thats coming forward with the muni forward project which is currently scheduled to start in 2017 which makes no sense to me because its the Fiftieth Anniversary of the summer of love and why would we disrupt during this historic moment. There has to be at a minimum basic city approach to mitigating Business Impacts for this neighborhood commercial corridor. At a minimum there should be on all projects around the city open for business signage travelling from project to project that basically gives people the message that these businesses even though theres lots of cones and things dug up that the businesses are open and thats a basic thing that can be done for any project whether short or long one. If a project is expected to last 3 to 6 months, i would look for the city to earmark specific dollars for neighborhood promotion or improvements to help mitigate some of the Financial Impact being made as a result of this future case a transit related project. If the project is expected to last more than 6 months, i would like the city to actually start considering adding a Business Interruption assistance fund. Ive read about other cities doing this and la has done this and a couple of other cities and when theres a big project like a light rail project or the San Francisco muni forward project is an example, you can expect 6 months or more disruption will have such a catastrophic impact on mom and pop businesses and you need to plan for that otherwise you are simply saying to us tough luck and you h