Issued by the San Francisco department of Public Health and the emergency orders of the governor and the mayor concerning social distancing and lifting the restrictions on teleconference, this meeting is being held Via Teleconference and being streamed by sfg tv. For those watching the live stream, be aware theres a brief time lag between the live meeting and what is being shown online. On behalf of the commission, id like to extend our thanks to sfgovtv, Media Services and Building Management staff for their assistance in putting on this meeting. For members of the public wishing to comment on an item from outside the hearing room, you would dial 4156550001. And your meeting access code is 24844066366. Followed by pound and then pound again. And to raise your hand to speak, press star three. Please note that you must limit your comments to the topic on the agenda item being discussed unless youre speaking under the general Public Comment section. And to remind you, if you do not stay on topic, the chair may interrupt and limit your comment to the agenda item. We ask that Public Comment be made in a civil and respectful manner and that you refrain from the use of profanity. Please address your remarks to the commission as a whole, not to individual commissioners or staff. Chair post . Thank you. Before calling the next item, are there any request from the commission to amend the order of todays agenda . Hearing no request, well move on to my announcement as chair. I do have two. One regards, last weeks passing of proposition b. And i will ask director schwartz to address what the effect that the proposition will have on the departments operations and on the pw or commission, the Public Works Commission and the sanitation streets commission. Realizing director short that election was barely a week ago, i would fully expect you to expound on the effects at our next meet. I would request you do that for us. Second, as we get to the end of the year, and we will be voting on next years meeting calendar for the commission, ive asked secretary fuller to pull each of us and to take a look at our personal calendars and at his request, when you hear from him to give him any meeting dates you anticipate you will not be able to attend in 2023 and the january through june period. I know i have some travel plans coming up and there are a couple of meetings im going to be asking to be rescheduled. When secretary fuller contacts you, if you look at your calendar for the next First Six Months of next year, i hope we can we reschedule a couple of months so we can attend. What well do Going Forward, every november and may, secretary fuller will poll us for the sixmonth period, january to june in november, july, december and may and ask us to give any dates we anticipate not being available for so he has a lot of notice to reschedule any meetings that will affect the public and the department and not being able to attend. Look for an email from secretary fuller that concludes my announcements. And our preliminary business. [gavel] we move on to item no. One, secretary fuller, please call that item. Item one is general Public Comment, members of the public may address the commission s on topics that are within the subject matter of the commission s but are not part of this agenda. Comments specific to an item on the agenda may be heard when that item is considered. Members of the public may address the commission for up to three minutes. General Public Comment may be continued to the end of the agenda if speakers exceed 15 minutes of general Public Comment. At this time. Members of the public who wish to make three minutes of general Public Comment may line up against the wall furthest from the door here in the Commission Hearing room. If youre present. If youre calling in, please dial 456550001. 41565050001. And access code, 2484406636 of. Pound and pound again and press star three to raise your hand to speak. Looking in the hearing room, it does not appear we have any members of the public present who wish to speak. And sfgovtv is indicating to me that we do not have any members in the queue wishing to speak. We have no Public Comment on, general Public Comment. Thank you. We will move on to item no. Two. Mr. Fuller, please call that item. Item two is the directors report. Interim director carla short is here to present the report. This is an informational item. Good morning, commissioners, carla short, interim director, San Francisco public works. Well, as chair post mentioned and im sure youre aware, proposition b was approved last week by voters. Its a ballot measure that returns our Operations Division back to public works and becomes can you please move your mic closer to your face . Yes. Ill move my face. Thats way better. Thank you. It restores, returns our oppositions division to the department of public works and it becomes effective on january 1, 2023. So, while the ballots are still being counted, we are we have increased a little bit and were over 74 at this point. So, im fairly confident this will be certified. Proposition b was placed on the ballot by the board of supervisors as a Charter Amendment and it basically undoes portions of the previous ballot measure which was also prop b. That was adopted two years ago to split the department in two with the creation of a new sanitation and Streets Department. The split did officially occur as you all know, on october 1st of this year but because of the new ballot measure, we put portions of implementation on hold pending the out come of last week easy weeks election. Were moving forward with one Department Led by one director. Like the first prop bt keeps the department under commission oversight. There will be two commissions. Yours and the sanitation and streets commission. However, because the sfa commission will not be overseeing a separate department, its duties were limited to Holding Hearings and reviewing data and setting policies for sanitation standard and protocol and the maintenance of the public rightofway. Your commission, the Public Works Commission will oversee all other aspects of the department of public works. In terms of how the two commissions want to interact with each other, thats something the city charter is silent on which will give members of both commissions an opportunity to discuss how and if i want to formalize your interactions. Staff can kick start the conversation with ideas for conversation at a future meeting. And City Attorneys for the two commissions will be involved to ensure that any arrangement complies with the city charter and the brown act so we actually have lined up a meeting between the two chairs and then we will continue to advance those conversations about how these two commissions will interact. A few other items that i should note. City Attorneys Office is working on drafting an implementation ordinance to reflect the repeal of the sanitation and Streets Department and other changes under the new prop a, the legislation must be submitted by the public works director to the board by june 30th of this 2023. The commission is not taking action on this. It is the responsibility as assigned to the director. I also want to point out that a lot of work went into preparing for the split and i want to emphasize that work is not going to be wasted. We analyzed every division, bureau and position. We took stock of our services and programs. We inventories our assets and gained understanding the many interactions of our work across the organizations. This process also gave us the opportunity to really hear the concerns and ideas of our workers. I think that was really fundamental. And were going to take all of this knowledge and were going to really focus the next few months on how we improve our internal coordination so we move into the future as a more effective and efficient operation, so it really was a very good exercise to undergo and i think the department will be stronger afterwards. And finally, as a department, i think its important to acknowledge that weve been through a lot over the past two and a half years starting with the arrest of our former director and the lengthy corruption probe that was followed by the covid pandemic which is still with us and these two ballot measures deciding the faith of San Francisco public works. These challenges have been real. But at the same time our employee whos are incredible, skilled, dedicated and truly resilient have not wavered in getting the job done, cleaning our streets, designing buildings in public spaces and planting trees and giving tech support for permits and tracking data, working with volunteers, advancing or Racial Equity initiative, developing budgets, ushering through contracts and managing Construction Contracts and producing podcast and more. Thats a glimpse of the work we do at public works. So the bottom line is public works will move forward as one department with a common purpose to serve the people of San Francisco. I also was asked by chair post to explain a little bit about asneeded contracts and how their vetting is different from other contracts and why we use them. Generally, we try to have asneeded contracts so we can have flexibility to bring in specialist or skill sets or actually as an extension of our staff. For example, project controls, we issue Contract Service orders against that for asneeded Contract Service orders to help us with project controls. Or if we need flexibility where were doing the work, ill use an example of our tree printing contracts and we have asneeded contracts we can issue Contract Service orders so if our crews are short staffed or busy working on more technical sites, we can issue Contract Service orders to contractors on an as needed basis. So, i wouldnt say that or we wouldnt characterize it as a higher level of scrutiny for those contracts but they have more controls around the contracting and procurement of asneeded services. And i want to give a shoutout to our contracts attorney, taylor who helped me with these distinctions, so for an asneeded construction contract, they are more controlled in some of the following ways the duration, so they are limited to five years total. And no new work can be issued after four years, so you can issue Contract Service orders up to the fourth year and they have that last year to complete work but you cant issue additional work n. Addition, the original contract amount can be for any amount but they cannot be modified more than 150 of the total contract amount. The size of the work or projects, asneeded threshold is, well, they cant exceed the threshold amount which is currently 1 million. And then work is always competitively priced either at the time of bid so general as needed contractors how through the quote process at the time of contract issuance. We have multiple contractor whos are qualified under that contractors who are qualified under that master agreement and when we issue a contract, we issue up to three and they bid at the time of the service order. The department is also required to issue quarterly records to the board of supervisors on the departments use of asneeded contracts. And please note that while this reporting is a requirement, im not sure how often we complete that reporting so thats something were going to look into. For asneeded professional Service Contracts, all of those same limitations apply except for single project as needed agreement. If you have a single project for professional services project, no duration apply. This contract is more similar to contract but limited to one identified project. So, hopefully that addresses chair post questions about asneeded contracts. They do provide some flexibility to us. We like to have them in place before we need them, hence the name asneeded and we dont get caught in a lengthy procurement process whether we have that need. Chair post also asked me to discuss why 50 of public works manager was in acting positions and not permanent roles. So, i will give you some reasons for that but i do want to start by saying that we are not higher than other large departments, according to the Controllers Office. This came up during budget and the controller noted its not uncommon for large departments. However, there are some reasons why we currently have a higher number of positions and i expect those will go down soon. Fundamentally, this happens when we promote and we promote internally and end up with this domino effect, so you know, if albert co becoming city engineer, then his position becomes vacant and then when his position is vacant, ideally, someone is given that acting assignment and their position becomes vacant so we have this domino effect. The reasons that we havent actually filled these roles yet are several. During the pandemic, there was a freeze on hiring except for health care hiring to allow all of the city Human Resources to focus on hiring Health Care Workers so we built up a backlog during that time. We couldnt fill them as they came up. As you know, until this fiscal year, our Human Resources services were provided by the City Administrators Office. They had limited resources and so, we had to prioritize filling positions within the department and we chose to prioritize frontline workers rather than managers. So we focused on hiring general laborers, Truck Drivers and frontline engineers and architects over hiring managers because we have the ability to assign acting roles for those managers. Now, that were developing our own hr staff and we have very recently focused on hiring the hirers and im pleased to say i met three new hr employees who started today and a fourth who i didnt meet yet who started yet. We quickly progressed had hiring up our hr staff. That means we can now start focusing on filling these positions. So, our new hr director, karen hill has promised that were going to see a real impact before end of the this fiscal year. Hopefully, well address some of those concerns. On a related note, i think now that we have some clear guidance on how were moving forward as a department, i hope that we are may see a little attrition and see people interested in coming to proactively interested in coming to work for public works and someone reached out to thursday and said i was waiting to see what was happening and now that we now the path forward, im interested in transferring to public works. Im hopefully well stabilize now and we can focus on getting these positions filled and with that, that is my directors report. Thank you. Thank you very much. And of course, thank you for addressing my questions. I appreciate that. Just a couple of follow ups and thank you for explaining the asneeded contracts since well hear a lot about those. I thought we can get the basics down the first go. And regarding prop b and the effect, what i would like to request is City Attorney brief both of our commissions on what our changing roles will be. This is at the request of the city administrative officer. And i think its a good request and so if City Attorney could brief each of our commissions and to one of your points, director short, how much needs to be formalized, if something needs to be in writing above and above the legislation, that would be helpful Going Forward so we know so Everybody Knows what to do. Thank you for discussing managers and acting roles. One final question and i dont want to belabor it. One final question, when people are affecting, does it affect their competition and benefits and responsibilities and authority when in acting role . Yes. All of the above. When they are in an acting role, the memoranda of understanding dictate what increase percentage they can receive, but they do receive an increase in compensation. It doesnt affect their benefits, other than that increase in compensation will impact their retirement benefits. In terms of responsibilities, in acting roles, they are filling that role, so their responsibilities increase and in some cases, their authority will increase because we expect them to be in that assignment and filling the responsibilities and duties of that role. Thank you. I just ive worked with several managers in dpw who have been in acting roles many years and it seems to me they get promoted or shown the door but i hope, anyway, so thank you for clarifying that. My last question, unrelated to your comments, where should we as commissioners direct public complaints and questions we get for dpw . Now, of course, theres a commission, were going to start hearing from our neighbors when they are unhappy about this or that. And id like to be able to direct the public to a person where they can get a result since short of me getting a broom and getting out on the street, they are not going to get a result from me, so how do you recommend that we all handle questions and complaints we get from our friends and neighbors in the city . Thank you, chair post. Thats a great question. We always want people to call or use the app to register with their concerns for 311. That creates a tracking number that allows us to understand what happened, if anything doesnt get resolved to the persons satisfaction