Sorry about that.

Good morning.

The meeting will come to order.

Welcome to the June 18, 2026 meeting of the budget and appropriation committee.

I am Supervisor Connie Chan, Chair of the Committee.

I'm joined by Vice Chair, Supervisor Matt Dorsey, and members, Supervisor Denny Sauter, Shaman Watton, and shortly, President Ravel Mendelman.

Our clerk is Brent Halipa.

I want to thank Suze Etnals for broadcasting this meeting from SECOF TV.

Mr.

Clerk, do you have any announcement?

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Just a friendly reminder to those in attendance to please make sure to silence all cell phones and electronic devices to prevent interruptions to our proceedings.

Should you have any documents to be included as part of the files, they should be submitted to myself, the clerk, members of the public, may submit public comment in writing in either of the following ways.

Emailing them to myself, the budget and appropriations committee clerk at BRENT.jsf G O V.org.

If you submit public comment via email, it will be forwarded to the supervisors and also included as part of the official file.

You may also send your written comments via U.S.

Postal Service to our office in City Hall at 1 Dr.

Carlton Vegilid Place, Room 244, San Francisco, California, 94102.

And uh a revised agenda for today's meeting was posted after adjourning yesterday's meeting, annotating the committee's actions.

Items on today's agenda that have satisfied public comment, been acted on and processed, has completed business of this committee are item numbers four through seventeen and nineteen through twenty-two.

Items one through three, eighteen, twenty-three, and twenty-four are still open for consideration by this committee.

And madam chair, that completes my announcements.

Thank you, Mr.

Clerk.

And uh before we get started, I want to explain to the public how today's meeting will proceed.

Uh, first of all, last week we questioned the city departments about the um the contents of their budget proposal.

We um listened to the presentation.

Yesterday we dispensed with most of the budget trailing legislation.

Um, today and next Monday, the departments are actually returning to address the budget and legislative analysts proposed reductions and recommendations that are both fiscal recommendation as well as policy recommendations.

The departments that are scheduled to appear today and Monday are listed on the agenda.

However, if a department, any departments agrees to the budget and legislative analysts proposed reductions, they have not um they will not um they have not been required to return, and they were unlikely to return.

The budget and legislative analysts will announce those departments shortly.

We will not have general public comments today.

Instead, general public comments that addresses any or all departments budget will be heard on Wednesday, June 24th, starting at 10 a.m.

in these in this chamber.

And so uh again, just wanted to reiterate no public comments today.

Public comments day um will be on Wednesday, June 24th, starting at 10 a.m.

We will, unlike uh previously, we will have um unless unlike previous years, we will have uh another day on Monday.

Um that is specifically again for department that um will have to return if they're not in agreement with the budget and legislative analyst reduction.

So with that, Mr.

Clerk, please call items one through three.

Actually, before I do that, madam uh madam chair, uh just out of precaution.

If anybody's in these chambers and are uh in are actually here for the government audit and oversight committee, they are across the hall, just in case.

But other than that, uh item numbers one through three are items as it relates to this committee's consideration of the mayor's proposed budget for the departments of the city and county for fiscal years 2026 to 2027 and 2027 to 2028, and item number one is our hearing to consider the mayor's proposed budget.

Item number two is the proposed budget and appropriation ordinance, appropriating all estimated receipts and all estimated expenditures for departments of the city and county as of May 30th, 2026.

And item number three is the proposed annual salary ordinance, enumerating positions in the AAO for the fiscal years ending June 30th, 2027 and June 30th, 2028.

Continuing creating or establishing these positions, enumerating and including therein all positions created by the charter state law for which compensations are paid from city and county funds and appropriated in the AEO, authorizing appointments or continuation of appointments of there too, specifying and fixing the compensations and work schedules thereof and authorizing appointments to temporary positions and fixing compensations.

Madam Chair.

Thank you, Mr.

Clerk.

And with that, Mr.

Goncher, from budget and legislative analysts, please announce that departments that have agreed to the budget and legislative analysts proposed reductions.

Good morning, Chair Chan.

Members of the committee, Dan Gonscher with the Budget Legislative Analysts Office.

The departments that uh we understand have we have full agreement with include the following the City Attorney's Office, the Superior Court, the Assessor Recorder, the Asian Arts Museum, the Fine Arts Museum, the Arts Commission, the War Memorial, the Agency for Human Rights, General City Responsibility, the Controller's Office, the Department of Technology, the Human Resources Department, Juvenile Probation, and the Board of Supervisors.

Thank you.

And colleagues, these are the departments with the proposed reduction from the budget and legislative analysts that we will be accepting today.

And so, with that though, I from what I do understand, and I do want to acknowledge our Mr.

Trusher is here, but if and I just want to make sure that I understand and that we have reached an agreement with the treasure and tax collector's office.

The committee will accept all the budget and legislative analysts fiscal recommendation one through four, but we are rejecting, we are rejecting all the policy recommendations, which are five through eight.

Yes, thank you, Chair Chan.

That is our request.

Thank you, and thank you so much for being here.

And we also I also want to acknowledge that we have received the letter from you and your team, and that we really appreciate.

So thank you so much.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Um colleagues, I also wanted to um announce that we have reached an agreement with the department of election.

The committee will accept the recommendation one and two, and we'll be placing the amount uh for uh recommendation three on reserve, which is a um director 0951 director position, and that is going to be placed on reserve, anticipating that um either department election will be hiring for that position, which has been vacant for I think almost a decade now, uh, or that dollar amount on reserve should that should they not be able to hire for that position, they can actually use it for the voter information pamphlet uh funding that we discussed yesterday for roughly about $330,000 that they may end up needing to use.

Um, and so with that, I am also going to say we're gonna go to the first um department with business before us today is the office of the city administrator.

Um, if I may, is it okay if I could go through yes, the budget and legislative analyst recommendations on this department, and then we'll go to the department for response.

Thank you, madam chair.

Um, our recommendations for the city administrators' office are summarized on page 69 of our report.

They total 2,239,754 in fiscal year 26-27.

The details of those recommendations start on page 70 of our report, starting with the fiscal recommendations, and I will walk through what my understanding is of where we have agreement, um, and then um speak to specifically the recommendations where I think we have disagreement.

If there are any where I'm mistaken, I'm happy to speak to any of the others.

So I believe we have agreement on one and two on page 70 of our report.

Uh we have disagreement on ADM 3 on page 71 of our report.

This is for professional and specialized services under um city administrator.

Uh so we are recommending that the board reduce the budget increase for the Digital Services Unified Data Platform to bringing it back down to what the department requested level is for this account for an expanded scope in the budget year.

If you were to take this recommendation, it would still allow for a $573,000 increase in funding for the project.

And we noted that as of May 31st, there was an available balance of over 472,000 or nearly half of its original appropriation, and the department's likely to carry this forward or at least a portion of it into the budget year.

The next recommendation where we have disagreement is ADM 4 on page 71 of our report.

Here we're recommending that you deny one full-time equivalent 1043 IS Engineer Senior, created through an upward substitution from an off-budget 1822 administrative analyst position that was assigned to the limited term government accountability project.

So this is an older project that was created, I believe, to help the city recover from the pandemic.

These positions, our understanding was they were never intended to be subsumed into department budgets.

Note that there's been rapid growth in digital services positions over the last couple of years.

It was 52 FTEs in last year that went up from 52 to 55 in the current year, and is proposed to go up to 61 in the proposed budget.

Yet there are currently eight vacancies, including four positions in the same classification and two that the department is holding open for attrition.

We do believe we have uh agreement on ADM 5 on page 71 of our report regarding debt service.

So I will speak to ADM 6 on page 71, which is a vacant 1824 principal administrative analyst.

It's been vacant since January.

Um we do note in our recommendation that the department has a robust analytical capacity.

They maintain 88 full-time equivalent positions in the 1820 classification series, of which approximately 13 are vacant, including seven in this classification, the 1824.

The next disagreement is ADM 7 on page 72.

This is a vacant 0923 manager 2.

It's been vacant for almost two years.

The positions in the real estate division in the property management unit again, it's been vacant for since August of 2024.

We note in our recommendation that the property management unit has 12 uh FTEs in the manager classification.

And as we do from several of these vacant manager positions, we note the growth in manager positions over the last five years far outstripping growth in non-management positions, and that the Board of Supervisors passed a motion earlier this year identifying vacant manager positions as a budget priority.

I would that was motion M26-25.

The next disagreement I'll speak to is ADM 8, also on page 72.

We're recommending that you deny an upward substitution of one 1840 junior management assistant to that is proposed to upgrade to 5502 project manager one due to inadequate justification for that upward substitution.

The department is establishing a new position and new function within the real estate division's property management function.

Department reports it's not a new role, but a realignment of existing resources, and that attrition savings would be adjusted to make the upward substitution cost neutral.

But again, going back to this unit having already 12 manager positions, and the board stated priority on vacant manager positions.

And finally, on fiscal recommendations, ADM 9 on page 73 of our report.

This is under the convention facilities management.

We note that the department's revised projections for the convention facilities management fund for the current year anticipates a drawdown of fund balance of only 6.7 million rather than the 14.3 million of drawdown that was budgeted.

There was a revenues came in much higher than expected when uh the current year budget was passed.

So basically, the department was going to use the Moscone Special Revenue Operating Fund Balance in the current year, but again, the revenues came in much higher than expected.

They didn't need to use that fund balance.

What we're recommending is that they use that fund balance in the budget year to reduce the proposed general fund subsidy.

And this is money that the Moscone fund does not need.

So that's fiscal recommendations.

I will run through real quick the policy record starting on page 74 of our report.

ADM 10 is a vacant manager 7 that's been vacant since February of last year, so about a year and a half.

ADM 11 is uh and that is under the Treasury Island Development Authority.

ADM 11 is a manager 5, that's in the 311 call center.

It's been vacant since last month.

Um so our policy recommendations total 366,135 dollars in the first budget year.

And we are and that is my understanding of where we have disagreements with city administrators' office.

I'm available for any questions you might have.

Thank you.

Thank you very much to the budget analysts for your work.

Uh we are confirming that we are in agreement with ADM 1, 2, and 5.

Uh unfortunately, we respectfully remain in disagreement with the balance.

Similar to the controller's office, the Department of Human Resources, the City Administrator has a span of control over some of the key backbone core city services that every single department needs or interacts with.

Coming out of the pandemic, as we've had many conversations before, I've challenged my team to refocus and reprioritize our work on citywide initiatives that help the entire city to perform better.

And you've seen us put this into action over the last few years in many ways.

We've pursued internal reorganizations to create better oversight, filling gaps in our central capacity where we need it.

We've consistently moved divisions to homes outside of the city administrator where there is better mission alignment and resources, grants for the arts, mayor's office on disability, the permit center, as well as the transgender initiative department.

And we've also made some pretty significant trade-offs to resource and pay attention to the bread and butter citywide pain points that we have, like improving contracting, creating a central view of how we manage our fleet, something as simple as that, but also being proactive on our real estate strategy, which you recently saw with our 1455 move.

As I mentioned, with the exception of a small increase in investment in the technology sector component, where we are investing in the city's data platform, not the city administrators' data platform.

We're simply asking to keep our existing core operating resources, and in context, our team has already given over 40 million dollars in savings over the next two years to help balance the city's budget.

I want to speak to the areas where we do have disagreement, and I apologize for going to lumping different items together because they are related to different divisions together.

And so uh let me just speak to number one uh the area around resourcing and repositioning real estate.

This is ADM 7 and ADM 8.

I think as many of you know, real estate is one of our leanest departments, probably citywide when it comes to managerial positions.

We have a 4% ratio of managers to line staff there.

That's far, far lower than many, many other departments and divisions across the city, with 300 employees, over 300 employees, 77 buildings to maintain, 220 leases, and 50 active space planning requests across city departments to manage.

The way that we do that primarily is that our executive director has to figure out how to triage her own time.

The director that is meant to also manage the city operations for 77 buildings has to figure out how to carve out and be a project manager for each one of these complicated deals that we have to enact.

So, speaking to ADM7, which is a campus manager, this is a position that the BLA is recommending you cut.

We are very strongly not supportive of this.

This is not a new position, so I want to be clear: this is not an additional new resource that we're asking for.

This is a position that was approved by this board of supervisors last year.

We very quickly turn around to try to hire into this position.

But through a number of fits and starts with hiring freezes and different challenges, we hadn't been able to move this position forward.

We did already, in fact, create a PCS list as of March of this year.

And when the hiring freeze lifted in June of this year, we were able to schedule interviews.

And so we have actually interviews slated for this position come next week, June 22nd.

This individual would have 15 total reports, but more importantly, they would have to have the responsibility of managing 40 building buildings, over one million square feet of space, many of them 24-7 operations like police stations, like our 10-11 Turk Center, which is our emergency management center, and community centers like 66 Raymond and many, many more across the city.

As you know, our city's real estate assets across the city are not in terribly great shape.

We've underinvested as a city in many of these facilities, and it is not an unusual situation to have pipe burst and emergency repairs and issues at any one of these facilities on any given day 24-7.

This is not a position that we would recommend reducing.

We would not have the capacity to manage those resources effectively.

This is a substitution for us.

This is also not a totally new position.

So I also want to be clear: this is not us adding an additional position.

We took an existing resource that we had within our office, we substituted it to create what we believe is a huge gap in our city's real estate operations.

This is not a manager position.

We also made sure that this position was cost neutral to the budget, and frankly, it was the only way in which we were able to get the mayor's office to agree to allow us to make this change.

Our office for real estate is primarily structured with a vast majority of our staff in building maintenance and operations.

Think of our building engineers, our janitors, and others.

We only have roughly six transaction agents who do leasing and selling and market scans for us, one IT person, a few folks who are helping with accounting and the books.

But aside from that, we have nobody who is able to be serving on a day-to-day basis to lead projects that are complicated and to be point on making sure that those projects move forward.

Major efforts that we see in front of us that would have no resourcing to properly watch and to manage and to push forward, which takes effort, include exiting the hall of justice and all the complications associated with that.

It's not just about moving departments to new lease spaces, it's coordinating with the construction of the courts.

It is decoupling the utilities that currently exist within our existing hall of justice to make sure we can continue to power the jails next door, and then it includes developing a long-term disposition plan for the site that we're emptying.

In addition to that, we have other work that we have to do in real estate, including taking a look at log cabin ranch for the juvenile probation department that is currently paying something like $500,000 every year to main security over a space that they're not utilizing.

In that respect, we have much work to do with neighboring counties with deed restrictions and uses with water rights, among other things, to try to figure out what is the correct solution there.

Woodside cottages, right in our backyard, right next to our juvenile hall center has been standing vacant for quite some time.

They also have utilities that need to be capped before we can transfer that property among many, many other projects, including the vacation of One South Dennis once we exit that facility.

So just to say that this is a significant need and a significant gap that we currently have in our real estate department, and we believe having one additional person, really just a substitution of an existing position to do this work is a good start, but frankly, it may not even be enough.

But we believe that this is a good start to make sure that we start heading in a strategic direction with real estate.

Similarly, ADM 6 is not related to real estate, but it is related to my central initiatives in our office.

Again, ADM 6, it is not a new position, and it is not a manager.

It is a project lead that has just recently become vacant as of January.

Similarly, we have a number of, we had a lot of pauses to hiring processes as we were bringing our budget to a close with the mayor's office.

This is a position that we would absolutely need to fill to address many of the citywide needs and gaps that we currently have.

As you know, we've worked with closely with many of you.

We have to oftentimes pick up projects that are initiated that are citywide that have no other homes.

And I think that we are well positioned to do that.

We have a very great citywide view, and of course, have a great track record of bringing people together.

We worked with this team and these resources on the implementation.

If you can recall on the public works Prop B ballot measure in 2020, the subsequent Prop B ballot measure for public works in 2022.

We've helped to develop conflict of interest policies and best practices for across the city.

We had to staff the public process for Prop D, which was highly resource intensive.

And we also use it to augment capacity where we don't have it.

For example, really trying to figure out what a technology solution will be for the county clerk's vital records.

Looking into the future, this is the same team that is working to figure out how it is that we're going to expand language access for the Vietnamese language, given that it is going to be a certified language coming up and that we don't have additional resources for it across the city, in addition to taking a look at how the city is administering things like infrastructure financing districts that don't have a natural home currently within our existing structures.

So this is really a position that is meant to try to cover the gaps where we need to do discovery and to create solutions for areas where the city has operating gaps.

Speaking to ADM 3 and 4, this is, if I can change pace to technology.

Technology, as you know, we spoke a little bit about it in our last hearing.

I won't say too much about it, except to say that this is relating to our citywide data platform.

As you know, we have many, many departments, lots of operating systems, and each of those systems holds a host of valuable data within it.

Whether it's our payment information, contracting data in our financial system, performance data and public safety, or our human services, all of that data typically is locked up for those operating departments and sometimes not even very well accessed by those departments to try to do their work.

We have really worked hard to try to figure out how we help to pull that data easier, how we help to combine that data, match that data, and make sure that that data gets to the people that it needs to get to.

But in order to do that, we have to make pretty significant investments in an infrastructure that can support that.

And that means building a safe place for that data to be pulled to, a place where that data can be put to work.

If I can give an example of what that is like, we all live in our own homes, and that is where our data lives, the homes of different systems across the city.

But we come to work in order to be productive and have our work and be put to use.

And similarly, we want to pull our data from all of those systems into a work productivity space, our platform, so that we can actually be more productive with our information.

But again, you need resources to do this to protect it, to build a platform to make sure that it's secure, to engineer what operations needs, to make sure we're designing predictive analytics to test our models, to make sure we're collecting the right data, that we have the right data governance.

We have over 70 departments with hundreds of data sets that we are not unlocking, and across the city, we have six people to do it.

Six people to do all the technical interfaces, the work with departments to unlock that information.

It is not nearly enough with what we expect from our city.

And so the resources that you see combined between three and four, add an additional four people.

Four people to do the work of 70 plus departments in addition to existing, maintaining our existing system.

Moving on to ADM 11, this is for 311.

This is the manager who oversees the technology technology function within 311.

Again, this is not a new position, and in fact, has been a core position since 311 was first created and critical to our adaptation to emerging needs for customers throughout the last few decades.

This was a position that became vacant recently because of a retirement as of May.

And so we fully intend to backfill that position.

This individual has 12 total reports, five who are direct.

What they do is that they oversee the technology side of 311, managing our CRM system, which houses 2,000 documents and information where our call takers search for answers to answer any possible question the public might ask them of all of our city's functions.

They manage the telephony upgrades, the virtual desktops that allow our workers to work remotely, connection to the field worker application, in addition to managing our mobile application.

By the way, our mobile application is working very diligently to make sure that we have photo submissions to ease the way for reporting and also rolling out Vietnamese language as it becomes an official language that we will need to translate.

Mobile app usage has increased 40% to almost 5,000 requests that we field from the public in any given year through the mobile space.

Our web increase traffic is 125% and our calls actually are steady compared to where we are year to year.

Okay.

Moving on to ADM 10.

This is the deputy director at Treasure Island.

This is also not a new position, and it is also not a general funded position.

We have just recently hired the TIDA director.

You met her, Sheila Jivan, she just started on June 8th.

We believe it is best practice to allow the director to hire her deputy director, and so we have held off on making a decision on that deputy director until she's come on board and she's actively looking through those interviews and through those resumes.

This person has four direct reports, but the weight of the responsibilities are pretty significant in terms of moving the development forward on Treasure Island.

This person is responsible for the planner who oversees the horizontal development, basically the people who accept the infrastructure for the city.

So once the developer builds our utilities on our roads, we make sure it's up to our specifications before we accept it so that we don't have additional liabilities.

They're responsible for coordinating all the vertical development on Treasure Island, including all the housing projects that we currently have going forward.

In addition to making sure that we fill any gaps that we haven't yet fleshed out, for example, the additional conversion of space from the Navy to San Francisco, the job course site that is in the middle of the island that have has yet to be determined what will the functions be, additional remediation work on the island, among other things.

So it is a pretty significant position to not have someone oversee.

Finally, on the last one, we disagree with ADM 9.

ADM 9 speaks to the Moscone fund balance.

As you know, Moscone is one of our core core loss leader functions within the city.

We run convention centers, and we oftentimes, as you see in many other jurisdictions, lose money on our convention center in order to bring visitors into the city.

And this has a huge, huge effect on San Francisco as we know.

The tourism industry brings in roughly $9.9 billion in visitor spending as of 2026.

It supports over 6,000 local jobs both in our facility and around the city and generates 655 million in tax annual tax revenue annually.

We actually use our fund balance to pay for it.

Currently, we have over 30 million dollars in identified needs at the facility.

And I will just say we have had some pretty significant failures at Muscone where we've had to quickly turn around our capital dollars to fix it.

For example, we had a loss of electricity during a major convention and had to work to not only restore electricity but then make sure that it was tied to the generators so that there could be powering, not tying it to the generator originally was a cost-cutting measure that the city had made a decision on many, many years ago when we first built it.

We also recently had an issue where over a thousand students came to take a test for SATs, but the power or the internet went out, and we have been busily making sure that we're creating more robust internet connectivity so that we don't ever see that kind of a failure again.

These are kinds of things that really have a reputational impact on us if we don't make sure those things happen, not to mention the impact on our tourism industry.

We also know that we have many, many of our competitors who are currently making significant investments in their convention centers to stay competitive.

For example, there are 13 convention centers that recently completed are actively working on or plan to start major renovations in the next few years, representing over 14 billion dollars of investment across the country, and some in our competitive markets like Los Angeles, like Austin.

So we do need to make sure we continue to be a competitive entity, including making sure we have the high performance technology people want, the immersive audio visuals that we need to make sure we have sustainability features to lower our costs, and then to make sure that we have integration into our urban entertainment districts, which many folks want now.

In terms of the actual capital projects that we have identified, again, I mentioned we have over three million dollars worth of capital projects that we intend to work through.

Uh they are things like rebuilding our freight elevator in the north-south Muscone Center, something that was built back in the 1980s.

It includes replacing the end of life generators within our facilities worth 300 three million dollars, making sure that we're fixing in the West.

By the way, West Tower, the Musconi West was built uh 23 years ago and has not had a major significant upgrade since that time.

They have original fans and drives that are facing corrosion that we need to fix at the Moscone North and South.

We have three million dollars in roofing needs that we need to fix because our solar panels are creating complications on the roof.

We have access switches that need to be fixed at our north and south because they're hitting the end of life soon.

Escalator at Muscone West that needs to be replaced, another eight million dollar project, air handlers that are at end of life where our coils are failing, and firewalls are also in need of replacement.

So we have more than enough need for that fund balance.

That is ultimately a policy call, but taking that funding away makes it such that we won't be able to accomplish some of these capital projects that we know we need in that facility.

So with that, we're available for any questions, and my directors are here as well to answer any questions you might have.

Thank you, City administrator Chu.

Vice Chair Dorsey.

Thank you, Chair Chan.

And I will say that I am um persuaded by uh many of your, I mean, most of the um objections.

There's a few that I want I want to highlight because they're important to me, just uh or or my district or both.

Um, on three and four pertaining to the unified data platform.

Um, I will just say that I I have been in city government long enough to experience the uh the myriad frustrations that come with siloed data.

Um, in many ways, being a city that has historically been an early adopter technology now bedoubles us because we're often dealing with legacy systems in different departments that have done different things, and there really aren't departments that can overcome those silos besides yours.

Um, and I most of my career I was in one department, the city attorney's office, and I think like the controller's office.

There are a handful of departments that sort of see work across the entire city, and yours is uniquely positioned to do this.

I think this is really an important uh investment, and it's money well spent.

So on three and four, I I agree.

And I think this is getting to a unified data platform is important, and I don't know if it would be um worthwhile to even have sort of a presentation or explanation of it of what that is and and why it's important.

Separate from that, I would say on seven and eight about the citywide campus manager and property manager.

I am I know that the knock on the city sometimes is that we don't do a great job of maintaining our real estate assets, and this has been something that um is a priority for me as a supervisor to make sure that we are being strategic with our real estate assets.

I think this is especially important to the mid-market portion of my district, but also district five, um, I think district three, you know, there's there's portions of the city that really depend on having a strategic use of our real estate assets, and one of them that I'm very excited about, obviously, was the one of the larger real estate transactions that has taken place at 1455 Market Street.

I think this is the kind of investment with the city's real estate assets that can be a game changer for the neighborhood and and re-invigorate a neighborhood that really has suffered, I think disproportionately during COVID.

Um you'll hear from I I certainly hear from many of my neighbors and residents in mid-market that they blame the city for things like shelter-in-place hotels that really diminished the neighborhood and left it a kind of hollowed out uh shell of what it was before COVID.

Um so I think having that kind of uh support is important.

Um item number nine.

Um I will say on the making sure that we're we are our convention center and facilities are well supported, is to me money well spent.

Not just because Moscone is in my district, but I also, you know, during my time in the police department, I was on a lot of calls about seeing how competitive it was when we had Las Vegas was eating our lunch, you know, with the convention businesses that we were losing, and the good news is I think we're coming back, but we have work to do on that.

Um, and I would like to think that as a city, we're we know that uh what it's like to be losing some of those some of that competition.

I think we're starting to win it, so I want to make sure that um we're doing everything to support that, and then obviously on the one that um is going to be very important to me is uh number 10 for the the Treasure Island Development Authority.

Um Treasure Island is one of the most ambitious housing development um projects in our city's history.

Right now it is, I believe we're working on 8,000 new homes, 27% affordable, but we're also considering expanding that to more than I think it's I think it will actually make it even bigger than Hunter's Point.

It would be 10,800 new homes.

So this would that would, you know, as if we were to move forward with that, um, this is something that is really important to the city.

We did a lot of work to make sure that we you know reimagine the development agreement so that we didn't put a single hammer down and everything.

This is so important.

Um, and I will say this has been 30 years in the making, and now is not the time to underfund TIDA.

Um so I am very persuaded by that.

Um I don't have any questions.

I just wanted to sort of add my thoughts on this.

So thanks for your presentation.

Thank you, supervisor.

Supervisor Sauter.

Thank you, Chair.

Um, and I have a number that I'd like to speak to as well.

Uh, but first uh a question on uh four, number four.

Um, I guess two questions here.

The the first, if you can share how um how you got to converting the limited role into into this uh sorry, converting a limited role into the full-time budgeted role.

That's the first piece.

And then the second, we heard about the growth in digital services.

Um, if you can speak to what sort of roles those are, um and and what's accounting for that growth.

Sure, we can do that.

Um just to just a note that when the BLA is speaking to the growth that they're seeing in that, it's actually a fund that includes both digital services but also data SF.

And so just to be clear, the positions that are and the recommendations that are included in here are pertaining to data SFs.

I think there's a bit of rolling up the growth for both of those those functions, which are really very separate functions.

Uh data SF, Somia is here who can speak to the work that is there.

Um, but uh I will say that digital services work is primarily taking a look at our kind of our online interface, and so both our website, but also making sure that we are maintaining pretty significant systems like our dahlia system for housing, among other things.

And so their work is primarily around how it is that we're creating those internet functions and internet interfaces between our customers.

Data SF is strictly about how we're actually pulling of data from those different systems into a unified data platform to enable us to utilize it.

So perhaps I can have Someia come up and speak a little bit more about uh the work that is there at Data SF.

And just to speak specifically on ADM4, uh we had a different position, knowing that this was a vital position to be able to pull forward.

We took a look at a position that we had existing in our budget, and we repurposed it for this usage.

Hi, I'm Salmia Colera.

I'm the chief data officer for the city of San Francisco, and I manage Data SF.

Thank you for all the questions.

As far as what this team does, we actually keep the city's platform running with secure governed data for about 20 plus departments.

We also set data, uh citywide data policies done how to protect how this data is actually handled.

Our platform, we actually are doing this for the entire city, actually building security and governance, not only policy, but also the technical implementation.

A lot of the roles that do this work are actually engineers, and really what I want to highlight is we are trying to build this capacity within the city rather than you know relying on other services, et cetera.

We're actually building this in-house.

So this is why we are continuing to do this and want to continue to grow this team.

We have a six person team right now that actually manages the platform, the open data portal, where we provide data to the public.

Um in addition, we also help uh do a lot of uh specific work and initiatives like breaking the cycle, which is to actually help build data models so street teams can um reach uh street teams reach uh high emergency patients sooner, so we can actually solve that.

And second, we also are very deeply involved in other initiatives like to reduce high impact traffic collisions.

So, again, all of this Data SF connects data that is used to sit um in separate department silos into one governed place.

All of this done is done with a very small team of engineers today, and what we're asking for is support to continue to grow that team further with the technical piece in the city.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I think that makes complete sense the growth in that department given uh how often we we use the data and given the way the world is going.

So thank you.

I just wanted to hear that uh explained.

Um, and um separate from that, I wanted to just briefly um, you know, share support on item number six.

Um, you know, I've come to see that whenever we're facing a complex problem, we turn to the um city administrator, uh, often we do, um, whether it's proppy or commission with commission streamlining charter reform.

Um, so I think this is a really, really important role.

Also, want to speak in support on seven and eight.

Um, I I think the uh city administrator articulated um a vision which I share, which is that with real estate, we need to be more strategic, we need to be more proactive.

Um, and you know, uh at the moment uh I'm currently working with the BLA on an audit of our underutilized land in San Francisco, and I think this um this sort of orientation around being more proactive with our land and real estate um is hand in hand with that.

So um certainly we'll be supporting those.

Thanks.

Thank you, supervisor.

President Amendment.

You're a little sniffly today.

Sorry.

Uh um I want to uh well start by thanking our city administrator uh just for the um extraordinary work that you and your team do each and every day.

But I have especially um over this last year as we've talked about things like charter reform and uh stream, you know, uh commission streamlining, you know.

You've been carrying a uh heavy load.

Uh you know, one of the ideas that that has come up in charter reform, and I think you know, whether charter reform passes or not is something that I think the city should move toward, and that I think the administration is committed to moving forward for toward uh is the idea of using the city administrators' office to the extent we can to reduce the siloization of our various departments where we have something like 17 Salesforce contracts and, you know, uh just a level of kind of duplication and inconsistency and non-coordination across departments that does not make sense that our constituents' experience that people who are trying to get services out of the city and county of San Francisco experience.

And I think a number of us feel like there's potential for the city administrators' office to address address that, but it won't work if you don't have the resources to do that work.

You probably don't have the resources to do that work in the way that is, you know, we're thinking about uh right now.

In fact, there's gonna need to be not this year, but uh going forward, some serious thought about how to beef up the city administrator's office to exercise that coordination function.

Um for anyone who has been frustrated with capital project delivery in the city and county of San Francisco, be it Van SBRT, um Central Subway.

Sorry, it wasn't it wasn't on your watch.

Um the Better Market Streets project, which who knows where the hell that is.

Um, you know, that is another aspect where potentially um, you know, there's there's a coordinating function, uh, development of expertise that that could benefit the city, you know, not next year, but over the years going forward.

So all of which is to say I'm a little worried about the under-resourcing of your departments that's in the of your department that's in the mayor's budget in the second year.

I am concerned about you being asked to make further cuts that have been unspecified and um could leave you in a position where you're not actually able to do the things that we're all expecting you to do.

Um I am concerned about areas where I I am concerned that the BLA's recommendations would undermine your capacity to fulfill the vision that I have for you and that I think the mayor's office has for you.

And I guess at this point, that is specifically uh recommendations three and four, very much recommendation six, recommendations seven and eight.

And I'm a little lost, oh, seven, eight, and nine, and then I'm a little lost on 10 and 11.

Can you run through one more time because I'm just confused?

Yes.

What's happening with 10 and 11?

Yes, yes.

Uh recommendation 10 is a deputy director position at Treasure Island.

Uh it is a position that is not general funded.

We declined to move that position forward until we hire the director, and now that we have, we want to move that position forward.

This person oversees four individuals, and that those individuals have various functions, including overseeing the acceptance of horizontal infrastructure, which is pretty important to be able to move development forward, uh, coordinating all of the vertical uh development, which includes like housing and other things that are going up in the space, in addition to reconciling many many other issues that we have.

So we still have a lot of unfinished business when it comes to taking a look at maybe lands that haven't been transferred yet, haven't been remediated yet, the job course sites that end up is in the middle of the island, among other things.

Okay.

And then sorry, uh, ADM 11 is the 311 uh manager that oversees the technology function of the operations, and so uh this has been a position that has been part of the 311 budget since its inception, and its main uh charge is to take to make sure that the technology that supports the 311 call center and all of that function continues.

And so that means maintaining the CRM, the customer relations management system that we have that has over 2,000 different various documents from different departments about every single possible thing that they do so that our agents can answer any call that comes through.

It includes upgrading our telephony, it includes our mobile app, includes connecting our field worker applications to 311 and making sure those resolutions come through and making upgrades to our systems as we need to run operations.

Okay, all right.

Well, those both sound important, and at this moment, I don't think I would be comfortable moving forward with those either.

So thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

And Supervisor Walton.

Thank you, Chair Chan, and thank you so much, City Administrator Chu.

Uh one, always appreciate how thorough and thoughtful uh your explanations are and the work that you do in the department.

I didn't plan on having a major policy discussion um at this meeting, but I will say I agree with a lot of what President Mandelman said, with the exception of the fact that lack of coordination among city departments, issues and concerns that cause disagreement between city departments, fall in the mayor's lap.

The mayor is the executive of the city, and if departments are not coordinating, I find that the problem of the person who is in charge of the city.

With that said, I do understand that the city administrator does have a large role in addressing a lot of work that happens across various city departments.

But I also know that we are in a budget crisis, and everyone has been asked to step up and put some skin in the game, and it is not easy for all of our city departments.

So my comments are not necessarily directed at the city administrators' office, but I do think that we need to remember that several city departments are gonna have vacancies and have explanations as to why they've had them in some cases.

Some of these vacancies have been in place for years or at least several months.

Because everybody has been asked to put some skin in the game, and everybody, of course, is not happy about the reductions, proposed reductions or some of the things that they're being asked to do.

Um and so that makes our decisions harder because I do agree with my colleagues that city administrator plays a big role in making sure that we can operate as a city here.

But I also know that we have several departments that are gonna have the same concerns, and by all accounts, we have major budget issues here in San Francisco.

So I just I want to say that for the tone of every city department, that this is not a good budget year, and we're not happy and excited about any of the reductions that are being proposed for any department, um, but also knowing that everyone has been asked to play a role in and supporting us and getting a balanced budget and making sure that we can handle take care of the services that are needed in in communities across the city.

Thank you, Chair Chan.

Thank you, Supervisor.

Thank you, Supervisor Walton.

Where's the applause coming?

We do have a standing uh rule in the chamber that prohibits uh audible uh forms of expression, either in support or opposition.

So if you like something you hear, hands up.

If you don't like something in here, thumbs down.

But uh you are uh interfering with our conversations if we have to pause for applause breaks.

Thank you much.

City administrator Chu, I just wanted to confirm again what are the agreements that you have come with with budget legislative analysts.

It is one, two, and five.

One, two, and five.

Understood.

Um, and uh, I wanted to again put in context, and I always kind of say this for the last three fiscal years.

City administrator Chu, you always come the first city departments that come, and I would say that is somewhat set the tone for the remaining of what these conversations, well.

While I, as you always know that I have great respect for you and the work that not only that you do, but really the entire team.

I concur with the sentiments of my colleagues uh actually collectively here.

I think we have great respect for the work that you do.

Um, but if I may, I want to take this opportunity to just kind of walk all of us through.

It's also the reason why I am so pleased that this is my last budget.

Uh that we're respecting stepping down um in August, as I have not been, as if I have not been reminding everybody enough to sort of like set the reason why we do what we do in this space.

And if I may, I'm gonna do this in a way that please be patient with me.

I'm gonna walk all of us through in this process of why we do what we do here.

So, first and foremost, that we had the last week's city departments hearing.

Everybody came and actually provided a context of what their city department's budget is about, and then out of which that we actually have an independent uh unit, which is the budget legislative analysts to go through department by department to really help us to further understand the reduction.

And there's two categories.

One is a fiscal recommendation or fiscal reduction, and then the other one is a policy uh reduction and policy recommendation.

It is for this body to consider those both recommendations in a very specific category with the understanding that um in the category of policy recommendation, um, and typically again, reduction.

It's almost rare that I was like, you gotta fund this.

And to say, if this is a policy direction that this body supports uh in terms of the mayor and the city department, then we should reject the recommendation for the budget and legislative analyst and affirm uh what the mayor and the city department has proposed.

And when it comes to the fiscal recommendations, and again, typically is actually a reduction.

And with that, for members of the public, some background.

I miss my announcement in the beginning.

Please sell us all cell phones and electronic devices.

Thank you much.

Thank you, Mr.

Clark.

And when it comes to the fiscal recommendation, and typically the reduction is really what the budget and legislative analyst independently is recommending, and say is is the time to spend this money and how much should we spend and what does that actually look like?

City departments should absolutely in the second week come back and say, budget committee, this is what we really need.

They gotta make their argument, they gotta make their um you know proposal why they are we why we should reject these.

Now, again, I will say this that um these are the moment to with the understanding that when we accept, well, when we reject the recommendations, physical or policy um reduction from the budget and legislative analyst, and um which uh what I'm about to to ask again is sort of like the summary of the dollar amount that we're in discussion to give all of us a context of the kind of conversation that we're having.

The mayor has proposed almost a um actually a 17 billion dollars of budget, out of which uh almost eight million dollars, eight oh, I wish it's only eight million.

Uh eight billion dollars and more is really what we call enterprise agency, which we already had this discussion in May.

Typically, we don't really touch those because uh, you know, as a PUC it's like ratepayer, it is roughly about you know six to seven billion dollars that is general funds that this body will have those conversations in a sense where um you know what we should do, how we should shift allocation, but out of which majority again it's actually what we call a baseline.

For example, public uh education uh enhancement uh enrichment funds we have to spend, you know, because they're set aside.

So it will usually roughly about two through three billion dollars is what really this body can actually have a conversation about, but even then we also know, for example, the fire departments and the fire and police departments more than 85% of it is actually personnel.

You're not gonna cut them.

And so then what do we do with the remaining?

So here we are, the city administrator Chu, what she has presented to is the her vision under her leadership, what the city administrators' office require to run an efficient department, and with all due respect to also to the budget and legislative analysts saying here's the things that you may not need at this moment.

Could you please walk us through budget legislative analyst, Mr.

Goncher, walk us through the total of fiscal recommendation of dollar amount that you're recommending for saving, and then also prospectively for policy recommendation?

Thank you, madam chair.

Uh, just overall um our fiscal recommendations for the department.

Now the department's proposed budget is just shy of 600 million dollars in the first year out of almost six hundred million dollars.

Our fiscal recommendations are 2.2 million, and then we also have a current year um existing surplus that we recommended of just shy of 2 million, uh, which I believe the department agrees with with that current year savings total general fund would be $4 million dollars in fiscal and policy would be three hundred and sixty-six thousand.

And that's uh for both fiscal years?

Just for the first year for the second year.

Um, we have one point about 1.5 million in fiscal and three hundred and eighty five thousand in policy.

And could you actually walk us through a little bit what is your particular recommendation on seven for the facility?

Yes.

So what we're saying is um that the department was planning to use that seven and a half million in the current year.

It's in the fund balance.

It's still gonna sit in the fund balance moving forward unless the board takes action.

The reason why they didn't use that.

And my apologies to interrupt you.

What is a fund balance?

Fund balance is um monies that have been uh budgeted but not spent, and so that over the course of the year the department pulls down, draws down that fund balance, but oftentimes at the end of the year there aren't there are monies left over that were budgeted, and depending on the fund, those monies can be just carried forward, so it just keeps piling up unless it's moved.

But why would you then, you know, clearly then it seems like City Administrator Chu has dedicated that money um an envision of how that was spent, so why would you actually put it on as a recommendation?

Well, we believe that they have existing fund balance without the seven and a half million to cover all of the costs in the budget.

How much is that?

Sorry to put you on the spot.

Was it the 14.5 million?

Uh yeah, it was 14.3 million budgeted in the current year.

Um, sorry, we can get that for you in a moment.

Thank you.

Sorry, um, and so uh and so I think that this is a conversation about um and you know, as we have heard about different cuts that the mayor has proposed, we in fact on Tuesday has a B.

Linson hearing, um, that is from the Department of Public Health.

I'm I'm taking a step back if I may.

I'm taking a step back about the holistically looking at the budget as a whole at this moment, and is that we also had a Belinson hearing on um last Tuesday that is a proposed almost 20 million dollars uh of cuts of medical services.

Um clearly we there are many demand demands uh and needs uh throughout the city um entire budget.

It's a very difficult time.

Hats off to Director Sophia Kittler for balancing this budget.

I don't know how you did it, but you did it.

I appreciate you.

Um, but here is now we need to continue to make some tough choices because it is not done.

To make sure that um all the things that we have committed, colleagues, uh outside of this chamber to many different advocates and different many community groups and organizations, and say we want to support you, we want to fund you.

Um this is what tough choices actually look like.

Um the tough choices is um, yes, we have seven million dollars of facility needs um that or actually more, um, and and to say that these are potential saving, and should we go forward with it or that there's other needs that we need.

Um sorry, Mr.

Gonscher.

Thank you, madam chair.

It's our understanding um that the Moscone fund would have a um unused balance of about 24 million going into next year.

But just with some sidebar discussions, the controls office, I don't want to speak for the controls office, but that's my understanding.

I'm sorry, and so maybe this is a uh question.

What does that mean for 24 million for one fiscal year?

That is unused, and yet you're recommending 7.5 million.

So then there would be um I think 17 million remaining if you take the seven and a half or sixteen and a half million remaining if you take the seven and a half out.

So what would technically what we're looking at right now with your recommendation is that if we were to take the seven point five million dollars out of this, that the city administrators still have a remaining of rough roughly about seventeen million dollars um per fiscal year for the entire Musconi.

I think maybe that's moving forward for the two years.

For the two so it's about so the $7.5 million dollars is the recommendation for the two fiscal years.

Yeah, and it's just recommending you take it out now, they won't have it moving forward into the two budget years.

Understood.

And then, but then they will still have remaining about 17 roughly 17 million dollars for the next two fiscal years.

Great thank you President Amendelman I just wanted to offer the city administrator the opportunity to why do you need this money?

Yeah thank you and I think the the budget analysts for their work I think as as I understand it the seven and a half million dollars comes from the amount of revenues that exceeded our expectation in the current year.

And so that was reported in the nine month report is my understanding of it.

In our current year we utilize some level of fund balance as we often do to augment operations to uh to make sure that we don't have as much fund balance or must as much general fund that is put into the budget.

And in the upcoming budget we are also assuming we're gonna draw down a significant amount of fund balance to pay for regular operations and so that is all factored in as we were thinking about our budget of because we already knew that revenue number back in our nine month mark so we have already factored that in our intended use for the fund balance is capital.

It is a super heavy capital investment to maintain Muscone North and South and West is a facility that was built in 2003 for 23 years hasn't had any major upgrades we know that it's a facility that needs pretty significant changes and upgrades as it relates to our escalator that you all have no doubtly gone up and is a huge escalator that is towards its end of life and needs repair and fixing in addition to other upgrades that happen in that building we have identified roughly 30 million dollars in additional need our fund balance doesn't cover that and those things are things that will help us to stay competitive and frankly to stay open and so there are things like a freight elevator that is really important to move uh different displays up and down our facility fans that help to cool the facility as our conventioners are in it a roof that helps to protect the building as a whole including our solar system that helps to power our facility switches for the internet that are pretty critical to how we run our different operations many of our convention activities are pretty highly intensive when it comes to internet electronics audio visual and so on and so this is the intended uses and we do have a list of that.

And and I do want to place Devos advocates here too for city administrator too actually Muscone Center also does not uh take any of the public bond dollars so there's no like public bond dollars and help maintain the space and uh it has not been renovated.

Yeah the the Muscone North and South were renovated in 2019 I want to say and that was the expansion center right so that was a pretty significant upgrade.

However there are still many kind of like component parts that we did not fix during that renovation West is the one that is really old and is the big facility we do not take general fund dollars when it comes to capital investments right now.

And and the fact that like Muscone Center truly is and has been uh one of the key strategy for the entire city to for um economic revitalization um it clearly our hotel workers our um hospitality workers and many many other workers actually that's really where their job uh comes in and that's including our security uh so many actually work uh work opportunities uh for workers uh throughout a city I am only seemly doing this as a demonstration of like how difficult it is like we absolutely should think about how does how do we support uh Muscone Center to understand that first of all it does not count on public bond dollars there's no capital um public dollars for capital improvements this is really the only source that the city administrator can really draw on to maintain and renovate um this the space and and that when we we do that we will create work opportunities and truly important um economic revitalization.

But I also want to concur with Supervisor Walton had just said that it is a very difficult budgetary time um you know, many city departments are taking a lot of cuts.

There are many needs and demands are coming our ways in the next two days um thank you so much, City Administrator Chu, who actually also has been a budget committee chair before uh and on the board, and actually understand what I'm trying to say here with the understanding that this is as Supervisor Walton has demonstrated.

It's not about City Administrator Chu, your ability and your leadership, but or your departments, but really as a city as a whole.

Thank you so much for your help to help us demonstrate this for the public and everybody to get on the same page about why we're going through this process.

No, I appreciate your the hard work and position that you are all in for the decisions you have to make, and we do believe that these are investments that are worth making to make sure that San Francisco stays competitive.

We do lose convention business uh all the time to other places that offer better deals, lower costs.

So we want to make sure that we offer the premium experience that people expect so they come here to San Francisco, and we know we're still not there yet.

We're still at 60% occupancy of our hotels compared to where we were before pandemic at over 80%.

So still a lot of room to move, and I think we need to stay as competitive as we can in this major driver for the city.

And so I do thank you and are always happy to be your guinea pig in conversation.

Thank you.

I so appreciate you.

Thank you so much for saying that out loud for us, or for me at least.

Um, and I I do want to concur with um also my colleague sentiment too.

Um, specifically about 311 and Treasure Island position.

I think those are critical, uh, inclusive also the Civic Center Plaza.

Um again, you know, we had this is the second year in a row that we have a conversation.

I think last year we just support the restoration of it and rejecting the BLA report uh or BLA recommendation.

So I I just again like I I think that colleagues, this is an ongoing conversation.

If I may uh conclude for this um part, that uh let's if let's continue the conversation.

Sounds great.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Um with that, we're going to have uh ethics commission.

And then we'll start with um I correct that we have ethics commission here.

Sorry, controller, yes.

Thank you, uh Chair Chan.

I just wanted to clarify for our record keeping uh were we deferring decisions on all of the recommendations for uh city administrator's office for the moment.

Um if I may say yes for now, and then maybe later at the end of this meeting, we can come into more conclusion or perhaps on Monday.

Great.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Do we have ethics commission here?

If we don't, I'm going to go to go to the Department of Public Works because if the ethics commission did not show up today, my assumption is they are in agreement with the budget and legislative analyst uh recommendations.

But should they decide to show up at the end of this, I will absolutely entertain.

So run fast.

Thank you.

Good morning, Chair Chan and members of the committee.

Carla Short, Public Works Director.

Thank you for the opportunity to respond to the proposed cuts to our department.

And uh before you start though, would you like um uh would you like that the the department of um sorry the budget and legislative analysts who uh uh go through what you have in agreement and then maybe then he they can talk about what you have not agree upon and then you can sort of rebuttal or response?

Sure, okay.

Thank you.

Thank you, madam chair.

Uh, summary of our recommendations for the Department of Public Works is on page 98 of our report.

Our fiscal recommendations total 4,262,629 dollars in fiscal year 26-27.

Um we have uh we recommend closing out unexpended encumbrances as well of $47,865 dollars, and then we have policy recommendations recommendations of one million two hundred twenty-four thousand four hundred thirty-one dollars in fiscal year twenty six-27.

In the second budget year, our fiscal recommendations total $4,131,293.

And we have a policy recommendations for the second budget year totaling $1,288,882.

The details of our recommendations start on page 99 of our report.

And I will walk through starting with at the top and with our understanding of where we agree and don't agree.

If I mistakenly say we agree and we don't agree, I will happily discuss any of those.

Thank you.

Okay, so the first one is DPW 1 on page 99 of our report.

This is a vacant manager 7 position in the finance and administrative division.

It's been vacant for four years since May of 2022.

Um, and it is in again the finance and administration division.

Um we earlier spoke about the growth of management versus non-management positions, and that vacant manager positions are an articulated budget priority by the Board of Supervisors through motion M26-25.

DPW2, I believe we also have disagreement.

That's a 1070 IS project director.

Uh we recommend deleting it.

Um it's vacant in again in the finance and administration division.

Uh, it's been vacant for about a year and a half since December of 2024.

Overall, the department maintains six full-time equivalent uh positions in this classification, of which two are vacant.

Um I believe we have agreement on DPW three, which is the purchase of pickup trucks.

I believe we have agreement on DPW 4 on page 100 of our report, which is uh graffiti uh abatement um pilot project that we found the department can draw upon carry forward funds to support future increases in costs, it's a one-time reduction.

We also believe that we have agreement on DPW 5.

Um DPW 6.

This is real DPW 6 and 7 are related to each other.

Um this is in the operations division.

Uh so DPW 6, we're recommending that the board delete two 7514 general labor positions in street environmental services that have been vacant for several years, one has been vacant since March of 2019, the other since February of 2023.

Um the department maintains 168 and a half full-time equivalent general labor positions in the general fund, of which there are currently 44 vacancies, a vacancy rate of 26% department wide.

Um relatedly, the DPW 7 is a 7215 general labor supervisor.

It's been vacant since April.

Um we understand that the department um obviously is disagrees with our recommendation on this.

Um yesterday we took a more longer historical look back at the vacancy rates for general laborers going back nine years to 2018, and saw that the department consistently has a high vacancy rate for this classification.

In all nine years we looked at it, the vacancy rate is above 15%, and that is continuing to the present day.

Moving on to DPW 8 on page 101 of our report.

That is we recommend deleting a vacant manager six position.

It's been vacant since October of 9 on page 1022, so nearly four years.

We noted that there is a very large capital and our infusion of general fund dollars for street resurfacing in fiscal year 26-27 and 27-28, but both being one time.

Increasing from about 67 million in the current year to about 97 million in the fiscal year 26-27 proposed budget.

And given the tight financial condition with the the budget deficit, the ongoing budget deficit that the city has, it it does seem like it's a bit much to be adding into the street resurfacing this year.

Um I believe we have agreement on DBW 10, but okay, Carla's good nodding.

Yes, okay.

Um 10 and 11, I believe we have agreement with N12 and 13.

And that's it for fiscal recommendations.

Policy recommendations start on page 104 of our report.

DBW 14 is a vacant manager 7 position.

It's been vacant since November of 2021.

It's in the street environmental services division.

This is um this position does actually oversee a large group and it is part of a reorganization.

Um DPW 15 is a vacant manager 4 position.

It's been vacant for about six months.

Um it oversees the department's in-house paving program.

DPW 16 on page 105 of our report, uh is a manager, a vacant manager one position that uh is in the urban forestry division.

It's been vacant for about six months.

And DPW 17 is a vacant manager 7 position in the human resources division, and is our understanding that this became vacant a couple months ago.

This is the department's HR director, which um perhaps the incumbent uh I think retired um, and that's there.

And that concludes our policy recommendations.

Um we do believe that the department you know agrees with the close-out recommendation of encumbrances of about 47,865, as well as our recommendations for current year savings from current year surpluses totaling $2,453,075.

Thank you.

Available for any questions you may have.

Thank you.

And I would love to uh to get my colleagues like a bit more engaged on on yours specifically.

Could you actually highlight the numbers of disagreements first, and that we all can then start tracking, and then we go back to go one by one of your disagreement if that's okay.

So we let's start with the fiscal um disagreement.

Sure.

Um so on the fiscal recommendations, we disagree with DPW1 and DPW two, DPW 6 and DPW 7.

DPW 8 and DPW 9.

And that, those are the fiscal recommendations we disagree with.

And then our uh and could you also then quickly just walk us through what are the policy recommendations that you disagree with?

Yes, thank you, Chair Chan.

The policy recommendations we disagree with are DPW 14, DPW 15, DPW 16, and DPW 17.

Thank you.

And so colleagues, um, if I may just kind of um this is what I would typically think about, and um, if I may to just kind of do this again, not to experiment on you a little bit, but there are other types of city departments will come through.

But um I think this is a typically the conversation that went in this agreement as such, um, and to kind of the way that I would approach this is to thank you for the ones that you're already in agreements, and we can actually see that there are close outs of like dollar amounts, inclusive of what we just what budget and legislative analysts have indicated, um, which is like $47,000 dollars and roughly $2 million dollars that we're already in the agreement, those are the costs safe, the general fund cost saving that now we have to generate it through the collaboration from the Department of Public Works.

So just pin that thoughts, and of course, there are other ones that already in agreement.

And so in colleagues, typically the way that I would look at it is that you know when there are ones that are in disagreement, and as you can see, it's really when it comes down to it clearly, especially for the fiscal recommendation.

I'm now looking at the total savings.

I'm looking at the total savings dollar amount, and that they also give us a good understanding because the then it typically also will break down to whether it's actually a general fund cost saving or is it a non-general fund cost saving?

And just as a reminder for all of us, and please anybody jump in and correct me if I'm wrong.

For we're we only will have the authority should there be um general fund saving.

We it's only we will only have the authority to reallocate any general fund savings.

For the non-general fund savings, we do not have the authority to reallocate.

However, I still believe that it is our responsibility to think about call saving.

That really is go back to the pot, well, to the to the budget and allowing us to have further discussion, thinking about potentially reserved or some other ways to allowing the mayor to spend it in some other ways in other agencies to spend it some other way that is when necessary.

So again, I just wanted to walk us through my approach and thinking about it as a budget uh committee chair, thinking about like how do we then go about at this conversation in the most intellectually honest way possible, and then to also understand that at times, you know, while I lean always towards the budget and legislative analyst uh recommendations, and I think this is a moment we hear out the city departments making their argument of why we should reject that.

Um, and because sometimes only the people who manage the city departments know best and what is necessary.

So the floor is yours, Director Short.

Thank you again, Chair Chan, and good morning again, committee members.

Uh Carla Short, Public Works Director.

Thank you for the opportunity to respond to these proposed cuts.

Uh, I do want to thank our budget team led by our CFO Bruce Robertson, as well as the BLA and our analyst Christine Martin for the collaboration throughout the process.

As you noted, Chair Chan, we have reached agreement on a number of items.

Um there are several that we would like to discuss, as they have huge implications on direct service delivery related to street cleaning, program coordination, and project delivery.

So before discussing the specific recommendations, I did just want to start with what public works has already done.

Over the past two budget cycles, Public Works has reorganized the department, reduced management positions, expanded spans of control, lowered overhead costs, and eliminated programs to help address the city's structural deficit.

The mayor's proposed budget already includes 24 FTE reductions.

As a result, the discussion today is not about whether public works has contributed to solving the budget challenge.

We have the question before the committee is whether the additional recommended reductions can be achieved without materially impacting core services that residents rely on every day.

Again, public works worked collaboratively with BLA staff throughout the review process and agrees with the recommendations totaling approximately 4.7 million.

I do want to emphasize in past years, our total has been approximately a million.

So we've already far exceeded previous years' total recommendations.

Sorry to interrupt the 4.7 million is two fiscal years.

Yes, yes.

The remaining recommendations affect positions and investments that directly support service delivery, infrastructure maintenance, and modernization efforts.

Specifically, we do not support the recommended reductions to street paving program investments, street cleaning operations, and critical operation and technical positions.

Again, one of the themes that the BLA of the BLA recommendations is reducing management positions.

As we've noted, Public Works has already taken significant steps to streamline management and maximize resources dedicated to frontline services.

This is bananas.

Today, managers.

We would appreciate individual because silence your devices, thank you.

Or take it outside.

One of the two.

Thank you much.

Please go ahead.

Okay.

So one of the themes in the overall recommendations is reducing management positions.

Public Works has already taken significant steps to streamline management and maximize resources dedicated to frontline services.

Today, managers represent only 3.5% of our workforce.

This is down from 5.4% of our workforce.

Well, there may have been some general growth in the city in terms of management, that has not been the case at public works.

More than 96% of public works employees are directly supporting our service delivery, maintaining infrastructure, delivering capital projects, conducting inspections, or providing technical support necessary to keep city operations running.

Over the last two budget cycles, Public Works has eliminated seven management positions and converted seven additional management positions into technical classifications where work was more appropriately aligned with engineering, architecture, accounting, and project delivery functions.

As a result, the positions that remain are not layers of administration.

They are operational leaders responsible for overseeing large service delivery programs, managing public safety risks, supervising technical staff, and ensuring accountability for significant public investments.

Additional reductions to these positions would have a disproportionate impact on the department's ability to deliver services and infrastructure projects that San Franciscans rely on every day.

Alright, with that overview, I will dive into the individual recommendations.

DBW 1 and 2.

Having already reduced management positions and converted others to technical classifications, these remaining recommendations include positions that support modernization, process improvement, and permitting reform initiatives.

The innovation manager leads process improvement, technology implementation, operational efficiency initiatives, and customer service improvements related to capital project delivery.

Eliminating this position would reduce the department's capacity to advance efficiency, modernization, and customer service improvement initiatives.

I do want to note that while some of the positions may have appeared vacant for a long time, we underwent a major reorganization in December of 2024, and we took positions that had been vacant for a long time, some of which we eliminated, others of which we repurposed.

And so from our perspective, they have not been vacant a long time.

So I just wanted to note that.

All right, and then in terms of the 1070 position, this is really the permit SF project manager.

Public works has 62 permits that need to get into a modernized permitting system.

These range from construction permits to modernizing our tables and chairs registration process.

We need to have the technical expertise to implement this new permitting reform and get into a new permitting software that will allow us to provide better service more quickly to the public.

I will note that our current permitting system is in you talked about legacy technologies, Supervisor Dorsey.

Our current permitting system is breaking down on the daily.

So we really need to have the technical expertise to get this system up and running.

Okay, DPW 6 and 7, these are street cleaning positions proposed to be cut.

I do want to note while we have had vacancies in our general laborer positions, we have spent every single dollar of street cleaning funding.

When we are unable to hire the laborer positions because we have exhausted the list and we're waiting for a new citywide exam process, we hire TEMP 9916s.

This is a entry level position.

There are block sweepers, they are then identified to go into any number of our apprenticeship programs.

So it's really an entry level position that's designed to get people into long-term city employment if they perform successfully.

So while there have been vacancies in our general labor classifications, as I said, we have spent every penny of our street cleaning dollars, and we strongly oppose this recommendation.

Similarly, DPW 7 is our general labor supervisor position.

I feel like it's just like a soundtrack to my life here.

This is a general labor supervisor position.

We are waiting for a new list, but the last citywide list has been exhausted.

As soon as we have a list to hire from, we would like to hire this position.

It's hold for a minute.

Sure.

Are we are we doing this as a way to interrupt a meeting?

I'm not too sure.

Or if I could ask the individual to take it outside and figure it out, then you can come back.

Are we good?

Apologies, Director Short through the chair.

Thank you.

So I'll just reiterate for DPW 7.

This is a general labor supervisor position.

I want to emphasize this is a working supervisor position.

They are out in the field every day checking on their crews, working alongside their crews.

The reason this position hasn't been filled is because we are awaiting a new citywide hiring list.

Again, we spend all the street clearing street cleaning resources available to us, and if we're not able to fill these positions, then we turn to our temporary positions as a way to ensure the work is getting done.

DBW 8, this is a position that was actively being recruited, and interviews were completed before the hiring freeze paused the process.

We have a candidate selected.

Following our reorganization, again, when we undertook a major reorganization in December of 2024, we added a significant number of staff to this position.

So there are approximately 33 staff and six direct reports.

This position oversees staff responsible for illegal dumping outreach and enforcement, construction outreach for our major construction projects, constituent services, government relations, our neighborhood beautification programs, as well as public communications.

Eliminating this position would significantly reduce our ability to engage communities, respond to constituent concerns, and support neighborhood quality of life initiatives.

DPW9, our street resurfacing program, I'm delighted to hear that the BLA agrees that our roads are in good condition with a pavement condition index score of 75.

However, however, we would like to continue to increase the quality of our roads.

As I think I've told all of you here, and I will just like to reiterate to repair a road that is in good condition, it costs about $50,000 per block.

To rebuild a road that is in poor condition, it costs upwards of $600,000 per block.

So every additional block that we can bring into good condition allows us to maintain that block for 10 times less expensive, that was a weird way to say it, much more cost effectively than when we have to rebuild these blocks.

And I do want to note that the allocation from the proposed allocation from capital planning just brings this program up to the level that we need to maintain our score of 75.

My apologies, Director Short.

Thank you.

Any further reduction to the proposed budget undermines the progress towards our shared objective of stabilizing the current pavement condition index.

I'm sorry to this, but if I hear any more devices, I will recess this meeting until we clear this out.

I know.

But it's not happening right now.

Please go ahead.

Thank you.

So moving into the that concludes our um rebuttals to the proposed fiscal cuts.

Moving into the proposed policy decisions, um DPW 14 is the superintendent of street and environmental services.

This is the um the head of our street cleaning operation.

Um the while the uh BLA's notes indicate that this position has been vacant since November of 2021.

I want to strongly emphasize that in fact it had been filled with an exempt position for um for three years and then that individual uh retired and we have someone acting in this position currently.

So loss of this position would, in fact, result in the loss of the job, not to mention um that this is probably our single most public-facing role that we play for the city.

It is the topic I speak to all of you about the most in my job.

We could not have achieved the significant improvements that we've made over the past several years without the person who's been acting in this job and frankly knocking it out of the park.

We we cannot lose this position without facing very real impacts to our ability to keep the streets as clean as we can.

So we strongly oppose um acceptance of this recommendation.

Policy recommendation uh DPW 15.

This uh is our paving program manager for um our uh internal paving crews.

We pave approximately 120 blocks annually with our in-house crews and respond to more than 11,000 potholes annually.

Um, all of that work helps support our pavement condition index.

The vacancy only occurred in December of 2025.

Uh the recruitment was paused by the hiring freeze, and um eliminating this leadership while reducing paving funding compounds the impact on service delivery.

This position is responsible for a section of more than 60 employees.

And um, if we lost this position, not only would it affect our paving operations and our ability to deliver 120 blocks and over 11,000 potholes, but we also perform work for other city departments, installing speed humps on behalf of the SFMTA, installing um protected bike lanes on behalf of the SFMTA, and the elimination of this position would put that work at risk as well.

Policy please go ahead, continue.

Policy DPW 16.

If you don't have three years, uh we can continue.

The individual is out of order.

Policy DPW sixteen is our urban forester position.

And it's currently that the individuals out of order.

We allowed the public.

I mean, again, you want us to go on recess and to do this, but let's actually finish this for the last present represent like presentation, and then we'll go.

Kindly sit down.

Public comment is reported to the public on Wednesday.

San Francisco government television.

My apologies.

Uh, Director Short, you were on um your slides for recommendations uh that you are rejecting for uh for policy recommendation uh fifteen.

Thank you, Chair Chan, Carla Short, Director of Public Works.

Um, just quickly, DBW fifteen is our internal paving program manager.

This uh position oversees a p paving operation with sixty-four employees.

They have four direct reports.

They lead our internal street resurfacing program.

They're responsible for for paving a hundred and twenty blocks and over 11,000 potholes annually.

This all supports our pavement preservation and reduces future maintenance costs.

This vacancy only occurred in December of twenty twenty twenty five, and the recruitment was paused by the hiring freeze.

We strongly believe that eliminating this leadership while reducing paving funding would only compound our service delivery.

Policy recommendation DPW 16 is our urban forester position.

This oversees uh 11-person tree inspection team, all direct reports.

They oversee inspection and management of over 125,000 street trees, evaluating hazardous trees and public safety risks.

They administer our 12 million dollar inflation reduction act, urban and community forestry grant.

Eliminating this position would increase public safety risks, delay permit processing, and jeopardize the city's ability to deliver federally funded urban forestry investments.

And policy recommendation DBW 17 is our employment services and talent acquisition director.

This employee retired in April.

This is the position that's responsible for managing our hiring and recruitment operations for a department of approximately 1900 positions and oversees a team of 18 human resources professionals.

We've heard a lot today about our vacancy rates.

We need an HR person to be able to fill those vacant positions.

Again, this has only been vacant for 45 days when the employee retired.

We also strongly oppose the uh proposed elimination of this position.

I want to just emphasize supervisors that with the exception of the paving program and the three street cleaning positions, none of these other recommendations are general fund funded.

So from our perspective, it does not allow you to reallocate uh any resources for other programs.

And I understand, Chair Chan, your point about um, you know, the general health of the city's budget, but we feel very, very strongly that these positions are crucial to performing our work.

As I said, we already are one of the leanest departments when it comes to management.

Over 97% of our staff are frontline workers.

We cannot take another hit to management positions.

I thank you for your time and happy to answer any questions.

Thank you.

And um, Madam Chair, thank you.

Um just want to respond to one point about the general fund, non-general fund.

Well, a couple points.

One, um, we don't limit our review just to the general fund, although the general fund provides the board and the mayor with the most discretion of where to appropriate.

Second, um, these positions were our and a lot of these cuts are in the overhead fund, which draws from both general fund and non-general fund.

So there is a trickle down uh effect of savings to the general fund if the overhead costs are lowered.

Understood, President Uman.

Um thank you, Chair Chan.

And I apologize, but is there some do is there a breakdown of what I mean?

It probably is help helpful to know how much of the fund of the savings from these positions would at some level accrue to the general fund that the board could consider reallocating through that.

I don't think it's just in general in the next, you know, as this as we go forward.

I mean, unless through the chair, thank you, President Manelman for that question.

The general fund non-general for breakdown is incorporated into the summary tables in our recommendation list.

Yeah, I I could note that.

Um, and sorry, that we did send um at your request, President Mandaman.

I think your staff requested the recommendation spreadsheets, which has a breakdown that doesn't show up in our report because it won't fit on the page.

Um, but we could follow up with your office and with the question.

Okay, so just I mean, sorry I'm a moron, but um, oh, there we well.

So there's a check.

Actually, can someone help me?

Let's take DPW1.

This is just catching grandpa mandelman up and how to read a chart.

Oh, good.

Um, so we have a 0942 manager six, manager seven.

That's one position.

And then uh it goes from two hundred and seventy-seven thousand nine hundred and forty-four dollars to zero, and so the savings there are two hundred and seventy-seven thousand nine hundred and forty four.

Which recommendation?

Sorry, this is GPW one is the first just one, okay.

So may I uh through the chair uh Christine Martin with the budget and legislative analysts office.

Yeah, um, just to clarify uh we did not check that as general fund because it is in the overhead fund, um and we didn't do the allocation on this particular recommendations sheet.

Uh that said, I would defer to DPW what that general fund non general fund split is, but to the extent um that there's savings, it would reduce you know costs in their uh rates that they charge on their work orders.

I don't know, we need to go back and forth.

Uh all of it, although the director has something to say.

I just think if the response of the BLA is you should consider these cuts and potentially it is a benefit to the general fund, it would be good to know like I mean, how do we think about we we somehow a number appears or it doesn't appear in our, you know, in a week and a half and the or a week about with regard to the like money that's available for reallocation.

And I'm just curious if I yeah.

I mean I think if I may um the way that I would read it is like first of all on page 99 um of the recommendations for the uh uh DPW recommendation one, the total saving for the first fiscal year is 366, and one hundred and thirty-five dollars.

And then the second year, the total saving is three hundred and eighty-five thousand one hundred and sixty two dollars because it's not just for the salary, but also for the French benefits.

And then if we go all the way back to um all the way to the page um one oh three, and then there's actually a total um recommendation reduction, and then there's the one time.

It means that just the one time, and then you actually see the two categories of general fund and non-general fund.

And uh that's the ongoing uh the non-general fund saving is more than a million dollars or one point, yeah.

And then and then you see the second year.

And and that's I I that's how I normally read them in terms of like total recommendation reduction uh for the fiscal reduction, and that then referencing back to the summary page.

But I I do know what you meant um President Mandelman, that it's not then breakdown in a category, like the the recommendation by recommendation, like which one, how do we parse out the total um reduction um into the general and non-general by recommendation?

But maybe I'm wrong.

I mean, I I think that is an addition of all of the items that have GF checked, and the director is saying most of these things we're arguing about do not have GF checked.

And the BLA is saying, well, you still should care about them because you get general fund dollars back from the things that are not checked, which is news to me.

If I may, thank you, President Mandelman.

The um general fund component of our overhead is approximately 20%.

20%.

It also goes fluctuates a little bit.

I will also note that in different positions.

We've significantly brought down our overhead rates, and just a reminder that every time we add uh employees, that further brings down our general fund rates.

So for example, cutting the three street cleaning positions would actually could increase our our over sorry overhead rates, not general fund rates.

So it's really about 73,000 in savings uh to the general fund if you were to cut this position.

Talking about one.

DPW1 using your example.

Got it.

Got it.

Thank you.

Um, and then I guess I have a broad broad question observation and then maybe specific questions.

And I see my colleagues queuing up, so I'll try to be quick.

But the broad observation is we're multiple years now into cuts.

And so it should be the one would expect the cutting is going to get harder and harder, and that the impacts of moving forward with additional cuts beyond what are what are recommended by the mayor are going to be more and more serious if we if we pursue them.

But I think we all still have the obligation of making sure that you know these uh of kicking the tires on you know any potential uh savings.

Uh for both one and two, these seem pretty important to well, and particularly two.

I mean, we have the the mayor is trying to fix permitting in San Francisco.

Public works, sorry, is one of the major pain points around permitting, getting projects moving forward in a timely way.

And I assume DPW1 is kind of, you know, also in that category of trying to get your department functioning in a in the way that our public expects.

So those, if you want better permitting, you kind of need one and two, but you could fund one and two and not get better permitting.

That's the challenge for this for this committee.

Um, so I guess you know, in terms of conversations that may go forward after today, like are we really sure this is gonna get filled in the time you know, uh in the on the timeline that we think, and and you know, sort of explaining to the members of the committee, you know, how this actually gets to the to the outcomes that I know I think we all want, which is you know, permitting happening in a less painful way for the people who are trying to build housing or do the other things that we want done.

You can respond to that, you don't have to.

Generally, I think I agree with um your assessment, President Manelman.

You know, I I would just note that we have been already making huge strides in terms of becoming less of a pain point on permitting, which we began even before the mayor's permit SF initiative, but we have fully embraced that.

So I think to really be able to maximize those efficiencies, we do feel that we need these positions in order to do that.

With regard to seven, I mean it seems uh hard to be doing anything that would undermine public works' ability to deliver clean streets in this time and moment in San Francisco.

That's among the basic frontline core services that I think we're trying to protect.

But there is, and I know you talked about this, but I didn't quite catch it again.

Grandpa Mandelman might be missing some things, but this is a position, but in an environment where there's all these vacancies.

So why does this position need to continue to exist when you have all of these vacancies?

Because we need the funding associated with this position to pay for the people we're hiring on a temporary and interim basis while we work to fill these positions permanently.

So we use every last penny of our street cleaning budget, and when we cannot fill a labor position because it for other street cleaning, we use it for other street cleaning.

We use it to cover our getting less street cleaning.

That's right, um.

Community engagement.

Want to say more about why that is completely essential to fund in this in this moment?

Sure.

I mean, soup supervisor, we get a lot of um calls from all of your offices about challenges that the community has.

Um this position oversees our outreach and enforcement team.

They're the so-called trash detectives.

They are the ones who go out and help address illegal dumping um around the city.

They also oversee our neighborhood beautification days.

Most of you have joined us at these events, and you see we get hundreds of volunteers who are going out and cleaning up your communities for the day.

So, how has this been working since October 2022?

So we have a we have a person in the job who previously only oversaw a much smaller team of people.

So as a part of our reorganization, we increased the span of control significantly.

And so we have to we have to have an appropriate manager level for that or a personal position.

Essentially already doing the job.

Yes.

They are acting in the position.

Okay.

Can I add one other thing?

Yeah.

That position oversees our construction outreach team, which is one of the most important functions that we have in terms of communicating with impacted uh communities when we have a major construction program.

And in fact, we we need more of that, not less of that.

That's what we hear.

And so, you know, this is the person that troubleshoots if the community is saying we didn't get accurate information or we didn't know this was happening.

This manager is hands-on solving those problems to make sure that we're really effectively communicate communicating with impacted businesses and neighborhoods.

Okay.

With regard to nine, it's a large amount that the mayor has made available for street resurfacing.

I support that.

I think that's actually really important.

I think the fact that our you know scores at this point are pretty good are the result of a number of years of actually by hook or by crook finding funds to invest in street paving uh to get those scores up.

And I am concerned that the sources of funds that we have been using historically for street repaving are mostly not available.

Right.

And so that is why the mayor had to make this large chunk of funds available.

And you know, that's a I guess question for the committee going forward is like does that two million dollars matter?

But I don't think we should be seeing the funds that have been made available for street paving, you know, as a piggy bank, because I do think that is a thing that is pretty core to what our public expects.

So thank you, President Manelman.

If I can also chime in, you know, we've systematically invested in our road network over the last 15 years, which has allowed our pavement condition index score to rise from the low 60s to where it is now at 75.

And um, so if we lose even a couple of years of consistent funding, there's a precipitous drop in that PCI score as more roads fall into that poor condition, and then they become 10 or more times more expensive to bring into good condition.

Okay.

Um and none of the none of the policy recommendations result in direct general fund savings.

So to get savings out of the policy recommendations, you have to add them all up, multiply them by 20%, and that's your total.

That's right.

So it's like 200,000, maybe a little bit more.

Um, and those some of those are managerial positions that you think are pretty.

I mean, you strongly opposed 14, I understand.

President Mandelman, that was the job I had when we first met when you were on the board of appeals, and I was the city's urban forester.

So I really oppose that one.

Save the trees.

My district loves the trees.

Also loves having the trees trimmed appropriate, pruned appropriately.

That's right.

Um potholes and paving again, pretty basic in terms of what our public expects.

Talk to us about tree inspection.

I mean, that goes to like my frequent requests for, you know, can you take another look at this tree that's invading somebody's house?

And this is the person that takes that other look.

So if one of our inspectors makes a determination and people aren't sure it's the right determination, the urban forester goes out with their expertise and makes the final decision for that team.

Okay.

And who how long has 17 been vacant?

Uh 45 days.

Oh, just a very short period of time.

Yes, the incumbent just or the incumbent recently retired.

Okay, and that is basically your director of HR.

It's a director of hiring.

So we also have a labor relations team and we have an HR director that oversees all of HR, but this is the person who's responsible for all the employee services and talent acquisition.

Yeah.

And just out of curiosity for the BLA, how would hiring work if there's not someone to oversee hiring?

Uh through the chair, uh President Mandelman.

Uh, these are listed as policy recommendations based on uh the direction of uh looking at manager positions as a policy project.

Find all the manager positions, make some recommendations, we'll figure out whether we think that's wise or not.

If we believe the manager position uh should be considered a fiscal policy recommendation, it would be in the fiscal policy area.

All right, I understand.

All right, well, um I trust our chair to continue to pound you and try to extract every dollar that we can reasonably extract, and I think we're getting kind of close to like the point where it's it's gonna be hard.

I I agree with President Monoman.

There's no doubt before I call on Vice Chair Dorsey.

I mean, even Carl, uh Director Short and I uh were just talking about last year we were just back and forth about whether whether Department of Public Works need additional trucks like that, we were already getting to that space.

Um, I think that we're we're we're coming to that space again, if not worse.

Uh Vice Chair Dorsey.

Thank you, Chair Chan.

I want to walk through a few.

It's gonna be just one and two, eight, nine, and fourteen.

But on one and two, this is these are investments I'm taking it um to improve efficiencies, which I understand that there's benefits to people who seek permits.

Is there a case to make um that by improving efficiencies we're also achieving cost savings for the department?

Ultimately, is this money well spent that's gonna pay for itself in some way?

Well, certainly I think we uh for the city's goals as a whole in terms of housing delivery and making permitting faster and easier for people.

Absolutely.

But our our um innovation manager to your point, um, Supervisor Dorsey is really looking at ways that we can do our jobs more effectively.

We have a number of initiatives already ongoing in the department, um, lean six sigma processes where we have the people doing the work really look at their pain points and try to cut out waste.

So I think it's a point well made that if we can achieve those efficiencies, then we would achieve some cost savings in the long run.

On um DPW 8, um, this is the manager six position.

I will say this this was one policy and communication director.

This would before I was a supervisor, I might have this is one I might have thought of been suspicious about, but now that I'm a supervisor and experiencing in hearing from small businesses and residents about issues that they're having in my district, it's the Folsom and Howard Streetscape.

And what I've come to realize is that there really is value what it means to a business when we put construction equipment in a container in front of Extreme Pizza, which is what one example that happened.

It was just this needed to be resolved, and this was really costing this business money.

It was we were blocking, you know, the visibility of it.

And there's we're we're as an office experiencing a lot of this, and I know I do we do ask a lot of you to make sure that we're managing that as well as we can.

It's disruptive and it's part of life, and I I will defend the we have to run a city here, and sometimes it's gonna be disruptive when we're trying to make improvements, but being able to be responsive is something that I'm sensitive to.

Is that am I thinking about that the right way?

And I don't know if Folsom and Howard is a particularly relevant one, but I'd love to ask your you do to expand on that.

Yeah, thank you, Supervisor Dorsey for that question.

And you and I talked about um how could we take the lessons learned from Fulsom Streetscape?

Of course, it's a it's a major um infrastructure project, so as you note, it will be disruptive, but how can we take some of the lessons learned from those um areas where we could have done better in terms of either the coordination with the businesses, communication with the businesses, and so the person acting in this role is actually having those lessons learned conversations with the team, identifying I committed to you that we were gonna have really strong construction outreach team on Howard Street so that we can ensure that we don't repeat the mistakes that we've made in the past.

But someone needs to oversee that team and have the view to do the lessons learned, identified what you know, the employees feel like they're doing their best, and in many cases they're doing well, but they could be doing better.

If you don't have a manager challenging those employees, asking them how can we do better, looking at the overall program, how where did we fall short, where did we succeed, and then how can we take those lessons learned forward?

We just simply won't be able to apply those lessons learned.

Um DPW 9, this is the street resurfacing program.

I mean, I'm definitely sympathetic to the fact that this is an expenditure that would account for you know a tenth of what we would ultimately spend if we let it fall into continued disrepair.

Occasionally I will reach out to your department as you know on things that were disrepair that in my view, maybe this is just because you know, having spent much of my career in the city attorney's office.

Some of the disrepair rises to the level of dangerous conditions.

And I'm wondering is the 10x that you know the how much more it is to not do.

Is that you know, is law are liabilities factored into that, or is is liabilities on top of that?

That's a great point.

Um, Supervisor Dorsey.

Liability would be on top of that.

So that is pure cost to repair versus reconstruct or to maintain versus reconstruct.

Okay, and I will just say that this is one I spend a lot of time on bicycles, you know, the bike share in my district, and I often take photos of things that I just think this is gonna be.

If somebody doesn't see this, it's gonna be a traumatic brain injury or something.

Like this, there's some stuff out there that can happen that I I do think is high priority as a bicyclist, and we want people to get out of their cars and ride bikes and all of that.

So I'm sympathetic to it.

Um I think I don't know, is there any thought otherwise?

I think you you made a great point that I failed to make, which is this our street recycling program doesn't just serve um buses and cars, it it is multimodal.

So all the folks who are out on bicycles, pedestrians, crossing crosswalks, any mode of transportation is improved by the improved conditions of the road.

So I think that's a very important point that I failed to make.

So thank you.

Okay.

And then finally, on 14, I wanted to just ask it's you referenced on successful recruitments.

Can you explain that?

What's sure?

Well, often people say to me, wow, you have one of the toughest jobs in the city, and I say, actually, our street cleaning superintendent has the toughest job in the city.

This is a job that is requires almost 24-7 work.

It certainly requires after hours response regularly, overseeing a huge team of people, over 650 employees, um, almost 800 if you consider all of those temporary employees I mentioned.

And it's really hard to get the right person for the job.

So we've had recruitments where the people who are applying for this job have no significant operational experience.

Um it's not it's not an easy job to do, and therefore it's not easy to find the right person to do it.

We we do have someone acting in the job who's doing a fantastic job.

Um, but and we had his predecessor also did a great job, but but retired.

So that's why it shows vacant from 2021.

But his predecessor was in the job for three years from 2021 until whatever the math is, 2024.

And then we've had the employee acting in this role.

But we have had multiple recruitments where the candidates meet the minimum qualifications for a manager level on paper, but they do not have the operational experience that it takes to manage field workers running a 24 7 operation that includes responsibilities for addressing homeless encampments and ensuring that we're properly bagging and tagging any um items that were left behind were under a settlement with uh lawsuit.

These are it you need the right combination of operational experience, someone who can motivate um field crews as well as someone who has that level of attention to detail to make sure that we are not violating the city's settlement agreement.

Um it's not an easy position to fill.

Okay, okay, thanks.

Supervisor Soder.

Thank you, Chair.

Um I think I'm very much in agreement with you, Director, on uh the vast majority of these personnel uh positions and decisions.

The only one I want to ask you a little bit more about is number one, the innovation role.

Is that filled currently?

And can you just tell us more about that role?

Sure.

That that is a vacant position currently.

Um as I mentioned, when we um uh when we undertook our reorganization, um, well, prior to our reorganization, we developed our new strategic plan.

And one of uh our goals in our new strategic plan is to um both gain efficiencies and also ensure that we are delivering the best quality services.

And so we have a number of different um programs to try to either gain efficiencies or um improve quality of service, and so this manager position would oversee those project managers who are helping us with our organizational effectiveness.

Um, and so we really we have we have so many different things going at the same time that we need to be sure that we are um really gaining those efficiencies and not tapping into the same staff all the time to do this work.

That manager really needs to oversee the the multiple different efforts that we have ongoing and make sure that they are in fact resulting in efficiencies.

Otherwise, we're spinning our wheels.

Um so it is a vacant position, but that was the intent behind it.

Okay, thank you.

I think you know, the illegal dumping, uh trees, uh street cleaning, I mean, these are the things that I hear from constituents most, so uh we've I think absolutely got to go to bat for those positions.

Um that being said, I do have some concerns uh around um just the the hiring pace.

Um can you can you tell me a little bit more just for my education?

When you say you're waiting to be awarded a new citywide hiring list, what does that mean?

So um when you're hiring for a permanent civil service position, you have to have an exam, and then you have to adopt a list of qualified candidates, and then you can begin to hire from that list of qualified candidates.

And so um there are certain lists that the department can develop through our own HR, if we have a good strong HR hiring manager to support that effort.

But then there are other um positions where the either the Department of Human Resources or another city department um adopts a citywide list.

And in some cases, we also adopt a citywide list.

If multiple departments are gonna hire the same classification, then it's a citywide list.

And those processes take time because multiple city departments are involved, and so if we exhaust the list and we don't have another citywide list ready to go, we have to wait for that new citywide list to be developed.

So a lot of this is in essence out of your control, and it you know, maybe there's improvements you need to make, particularly if it's HR higher, but there's also improvements that need to be made with your partnership with the city.

That's right.

Okay.

Um then I think the the positions or the recommendations on six and seven, um, you're saying that they're actually filled um in a temporary sense.

And it seems like maybe that's the case for a lot of the the vacancies in it.

Is there a way to look at this?

You know, the the street within the street cleaning or within the general labor position, maybe a vacancy of 26%, but what would the vacancy rate more more truly be if you if you excluded temporary positions?

Does that make sense?

If you look at it that way, like how many of these are truly vacant versus they're filled just under a different classification?

I understand your question, Supervisor Sauter, thank you for that.

I don't know if we have that.

I do know that as I said, we we spend every last penny in our labor um allocation for street cleaning.

And it may be a little bit tricky to quantify because when we hire in temporary positions, there is a higher level of turnover in those positions.

So I don't know if that's something we can easily try to get for you, but we can certainly try to get for you.

Go ahead, Mr.

Robinson.

Uh Supervisor Chris Robertson, CFO at Public Works.

I think the one thing we can try to pull those numbers, but I think the one thing we do, and the nature of these recommendations are losing the position authority but keeping the cash.

So I think the budget and legislative analyst realizes that we are struggling to fill some of the positions because we're exhausting the list.

We have more vacancies than we do candidates.

So what we are doing is being creative and thinking of some ingenuity to fill the positions using temp salaries.

So again, controllers office BLA can say we spend all the dollars, but we just we would have to do a little analysis that I think we can do to show what the impact would be.

So the nature of the recommendation really on six and seven is to keep the money but lose the position authority.

And obviously, I think our preference would be knowing that they've been vacant for quite a while, is to try to have long-term PCS employees in those positions that can gain the years of experience in cleaning the city.

Thank you.

I would like to add Christine Martin uh with the BLA.

Um, we did do that analysis.

Uh so for the general laborer positions, when you consider temporary employees uh kind of backfilling, uh the average number of vacancies has been approximately 35 and a rate of 18.5 percent over nine years.

So what this recommendation does is keeps the department intact in terms of funding, but it reduces essentially that uh uh flexibility uh and brings it it starts to bring it down uh because when you talk about position control, you want to balance position control with flexibility, right?

And right now, what we're basically saying is it's tipping a little bit too much towards flexibility.

So we're we're bringing it down uh while holding the department uh harmless for lack of a better way to say it.

Thank you.

I mean, 18% is better than 25, but still too high, and I think something we need to work on.

Um, on number nine with the expansion in street repaving, um, I think it's absolutely important.

In particular, I'm excited about my understanding is there's a lot of this funding actually goes towards curb cuts.

Is that accurate?

Yes, this would this our paving program also delivers accessibility upgrades throughout any of the quarters that they pave.

I mean that being said, it is a significant expansion, and so going, you know, a 30 million dollar expansion to cut that down to 28 instead still seems reasonable.

Um but I wonder, you know, I think the president shared that they're um maybe the source of funds are not available that would typically be relied upon for this.

Can you explain that?

Yeah, so we've seen um state and federal dollars have dropped.

So although we were at 67 million this year and it looks like 30 million increase, we've been at roughly 80 million in prior years, and we know that we need to be at 80 million escalating for costs to maintain the PCI score of 75.

So this is actually just backfilling a gap that's been created from some of those other funding sources like state and federal funds.

Okay, thank you.

That's helpful.

Um, and the last item, um, I know there was an agreement reached on item three, um, but with your blessing, I actually uh would suggest that we reopen that.

Um the reason being is that those particular uh vehicles and equipment um that were recommended to be reduced, I think that's fine.

But in the last couple of weeks, it's my understanding that there's been uh awareness that for the power washing vehicles that there's actually a exemption for those vehicles from the California carb requirements.

Um this is an area that I think we we need more of these power washing vehicles.

Um I think we had at one point thought that we were not able to get those because of this requirement.

Um, but these these uh utility vehicles would actually be exempt.

Um so given that uh it's my understanding that a new power washing truck would be approximately 260,000.

We might be able to accept a partial cut on item three and still retain that 260 to steer towards that power washing vehicle.

So uh madam chair, I don't know if you're entertaining motions today on this or if we might want to take that up next week, but that would be my intent.

I think we should.

I think that what I'm gonna do today, which is um uh again, colleagues.

I think um oftentimes, if I may, my apologies and my apologies to Supervisor Walton.

Um I know he's on the roster right now.

I I would say this uh and again uh it this is uh approach that we all can deploy in a different way.

Um, and as we have demonstrated with the city administrator choose conversation, we say let's continue that conversation and to figure out and have some of these um conversation ongoing and to continue to Monday.

I think that uh there's also another way to do this.

Another way to do this, it's a little bit painful, but I don't mind it.

Um it's that like we actually then what we should do is go by one recommendation to another and to have everybody to kind of um articulate whether we support or reject the budget and legislative recommendation, and then out of which then we will then reach consensus one by one, um, and then we will then collectively know um how this is gonna um like the actual specific reduction that we will conclude in real time, and then just to know the reason why I typically say let's continue the conversation, is that colleagues, I also know that um there are many demands that you all have to face as you're walking down the hall, people was like, please support us on this, and you know what they're saying to you, and when you say yes, it means that you have to find uh funding to offset and fund them uh and some of these programs that are facing cuts.

So um I personally would like to uh I my approach oftentimes is to like to see all the math, and then we decide uh what we do with certain items, um, but I'm also happy uh to lay this out at this moment and have I know President Mandelman is like, are you sure about this?

Well, I am I am actually very sure about this because again, this is an exercise of making sure um that this body actually knows um how to do this.

Um I have my approach because I I think that um I'm very fortunate.

I have 20 something years in city government, both as a legislative A and now as a supervisor.

I have uh a good fortune of being able to do this budget in this process on all sorts of different ways under all sorts of different leadership.

I have institutional knowledge and memory of how this should be done and can be done.

Um, and I I think that a lot of times I take it for granted.

Um, and I make a lot of assumption, colleagues, that you would actually share the same institutional memory and and knowledge and being able to understand some of these approach and be able to strategically think it through.

Um, but I I recognize that the fact that is we should just lay it all out sometimes and and have it um have the discussion and see how this is should be done, and then should there be consequences, then there are gonna be consequences.

Um sorry, I I I'm just you know, I'm and and so as we are continuing to discussion, um, I I want to call on Supervisor Walton first, um, if I may, to continue the discussion and and to be able to bring us back a little bit about whether we're gonna make the motion on a specific item or not.

Um Supervisor Walton.

Thank you, Chair Chan.

I I just wanted to kind of say some of what you just discussed with everyone in terms of as we make these decisions, these resources get reinvested to actually solve some of the other problems and address some of the services that we all uh think are important to the city.

Um I don't know, Director Short, were you here for my comments with the city administrator?

Yes.

So I won't repeat myself.

Okay, except for just saying that this is obviously um hard for all of us as we are in a budget crisis and going after vacancies um is not just an attack on the department of public works.

Let me just say that.

Thank you, Chair Chan.

Thank you, Supervisor Walton and President Mendelman.

Uh thank you, Chair Chan.

And there may come a point where you know, um, I mean, the dynamic here is and and each year is uh the the BLA is trying to find funds for the board of supervisors to reallocate to our priorities, and that gets harder and harder to do as we get deeper and deeper into the era of cuts.

And um, like I think maybe all of us or at least several of us, I am uncomfortable with a lot of with some of the cuts that have been recommended by the BLA.

And if you know push comes to shove, I'm not gonna support all of them.

Um I also do think that there is value in the process of allowing the chair a bit of um space to, you know, push and make sure that we're getting kind of um, you know, just just pushing on each of the areas where we might be skittish and or where the departments really feel like they can't um you know they're not gonna be able to deliver in the way that we will expect and that our constituents will uh will expect expect.

So I I mean I it may come to a point um where there's disagreement on this board about how aggressive or on this committee about how aggressive we want to be in terms of um shifting funds from mayoral priorities to board priorities.

Um I kind of don't feel like we're exactly there yet.

Uh so I would be inclined not to be, you know, taking votes um, you know, this week, although that next week, if it comes to it, um it may be that some of us are of the perspective that more money should, you know, we that there are different priorities, and um so there may be votes next week.

I wouldn't be I would be inclined not to do that today.

Um I would say, I mean, to to Supervisor Sauter's reopening of a settlement issue.

I, you know, I I'm inclined to at least reopen that as an issue and evaluate whether that is, you know, some there should be a partial restoration of that item, but I think again that can be taken up if there's disagreement on the committee, we can hash it out next, you know, next week, although there's not like a ton of time.

But um, but I think you know, Monday or you know, if there are disagreements on the committee, there's time to there's time to work them out, and meanwhile, I do think that, you know, the the I am very appreciative of the work that the chair and her staff do to um kind of figure out what the BLA is recommending, what are the departments saying, and where is their you know uh where do we want to keep pushing and and making sure that we're really getting every bit of savings that that we can for board priorities.

Thank you and Supervisor Walton.

Thank you, Chair Chan.

And I just want to say that I am already uncomfortable with the reductions that the departments were forced to make um with the directions that they were given months ago, um, and being uncomfortable, also understanding that these tough calls had to be made, and there may have to be some more tough calls that get made as we go through this budget process.

But I do think if we get to a point where this body has to vote on whether or not we agree with what this committee is trying to do, um I think that it says a lot about this board and this body because never in my seven years on this committee have we had to do that.

So um I think that would be a little bit embarrassing if we can't work with our committee chair to come up with an agreement um around this budget without having to sit here and vote line by line, but that's just how I feel.

Thank you.

Um I mean, I'm suggesting it only because I I I want to say it is within the authority of this committee, um, however way we approach it, and um uh if I may, uh this is uh colleagues, this is the way I approach this budget, um, and it's and also uh through my direction that I gave uh to budget and legislative analysts in terms of like overall seeing, um, it's uh it's a cumulative um reports coming from the budget and legislative analysts, cumulative uh discussion that we have to really um not during the budget time, uh that the budget uh process, but outside of the budget process that during the fiscal year, you know, be it through contract, uh grant agreement um and all sorts of spending that we have those discussions, now we come to the conclusion to say what is it that the city can afford to live without during a budget deficit time, and it's actually the most difficult conversation, no matter how much the budget deficits, but let alone the fact that let alone the fact that we had we are having a 643 million dollars of um deficits that we have to tackle for the next two fiscal years, and it is no small feat, and and therefore at times to come down to say, well, you know, we're now debating potentially, say, for example, you know, a position um position uh recommendation for department of public works, eight that is three hundred and forty four thousand and six hundred and twenty-three dollars of annual saving, uh, and that's also ongoing, and that is a vacation uh management's position that's been vacant uh for four years.

And I'm just giving an example.

Please don't panic.

Um, and and and so and and so it seems seemingly it's irrelevant to think about how do we balance uh a six hundred and forty three million dollars, but cumulatively um bit by bit it does matter.

And so I I just kind of wanted us to think about a big picture.

I am fine uh uh as I want to make sure that everyone should know that it is I concur.

I concur with you know uh street paving is a priority, it's absolutely important.

In fact, I also concur with Supervisor Walton's, and I think really this entire committee's sentiment is that it was already hard.

Like it's not like we support the cuts that the mayor has proposed either.

Um that's inclusive to Department of Public Works.

Um, and because if I may say, you know, I'm looking at this is how I'm also looking at it too, is that I'm looking at the Department of Public Works uh budget overall, and then along with the budget and legislative analysts recommendation, but also the mayor's cut and the mayor's cuts that it's inclusive of um what we just discussed yesterday, proposition J.

And that's for the material testing uh contract.

And so we saw that we may want to restore those positions.

Um so if I may right now, I'm gonna put this as an example on the floor.

Um, if I could either ask uh Director Short or Director Kittler to help us understand, should we say we reject Proposition J um contract from yesterday and say that we want Department of Public Works to restore those um uh FTEs that we cut to offset, how much money would that be?

How much was the cost?

Sounds good, Mr.

Robinson.

Go ahead, Bruce.

Uh good afternoon, Superfires Bruce Robertson, CFO for public works.

Um, the 10 positions that are deleted in the mayor's budget proposal for the materials testing lab, nine of which are filled.

The funding for those positions comes from capital projects.

So I have my folder there that I didn't grab when I when I stood up.

Approximately one million dollars in savings for those projects is allocated as identified by the controller's office, is allocated to be a for a hundred and sixteen projects ranging from public works, PUC, MTA, REC PARC, and in fact PUC, Public Works, and REC Park are the three largest contributors to the materials testing lab.

So, in terms of cost, there would be really two items.

The lab itself saw a 25% rental increase, and that is about $45,000 per fiscal year that's pro that's pending your approval today.

There is an additional item of about a quarter million dollars for some upgrades for the fog room in the testing lab that would probably need to have to happen in the second year.

So, in terms of actually finding funding for those positions, zero, because they're funded by capital projects.

What would need to be added, and this would come from we've talked a little bit about our overhead budget, it would be included in the overhead budget, would be an additional increase of about 45,000 dollars, of which that increase approximately 20% general fund.

And if there are some other reductions, which we've agreed to with the BOA, we can probably absorb that with no additional adback funds needed.

The $250,000 for the fog room, I would need to just see where the cost cuts where the recommendations by this committee may or may not land and where we've agreed upon with the BOA.

So I guess a very long-winded answer to say the additional requirements that would need to be found by this committee would be nominal.

And and so thank you.

So for example, that it's easy problems to solve.

Like if we were to reject a contract yesterday, like right off the back, we could then, you know, because why Department of Public Works has actually allocated funding for the contract.

So if we were to reject a contract outright, that money is still going to be in within the Department of Public Works, and then you can use that very same funding to rehire the staff.

Uh supervisor, if I may, probably not, because the funding for the lab comes from capital projects, and a majority of it comes from either bond proceeds or PUC revenue bonds.

So that restricted use would only be there for, it would have to be used for capital project purposes because of the restricted nature of the funding sources for the lab.

Yeah, but Mr.

Robinson, then you did not answer my question.

Then how do we then restore?

If we wanted to restore those FTEs, where's that money gonna come from?

So those are considered off-budget positions.

So if you look in the budget, there is no dollar amount associated with those positions.

Their funding comes from delivery of capital projects.

So what happens is we get capital projects money, whether it's from the ECER bond program.

Sorry to interrupt.

I get what you're saying.

If this body, if this body wants to restore those positions, where would that money come from?

You don't have that money.

So what the where the money would come from is if I look at the analysis on the proposition J done by the controller's office, and the higher low, it's about a million dollars.

So what would happen is by not approving the proposition J, the savings from contracting out would not be realized in those capital projects.

So that's where it would be.

So a project, if a project cost ten dollars and two dollars of it was the material testing lab, and by approving and going forward with the prob J, it's a dollar, that ten dollar project would go from ten dollars to nine dollars.

You would not realize the savings on capital projects.

That's where the money would come from.

So it really it's it's I'm no I'm not I can tell by the reactions, I'm not explaining it, but it's all on the capital project from clients and/or public works funding.

Director Kittler.

Thank you, Sophia Hitler for the mayor's office.

Um I don't get it.

What's I think a different way, and hopefully not incorrectly.

The general funds cost directly to restoring these positions, is zero dollars.

Where the cost shows up is that it will be more expensive for us to deliver capital projects, which, as you know, are very expensive for us to deliver.

Um, and so we had kind of been banking those savings in things like um our bond project, and so we'll make those, it will mean that our bonds dollars don't go as far, for example.

The other place where there is a cost is things that we decided not to fund in this budget because of the Prop J, so that that is the fog room and the rent increase.

And those two we cannot put on the construction cost on the capital delivery cost.

And so that that would be a general fund cost that we do need to backfill.

Am I explaining myself?

Yes.

Okay, great.

And therefore, we have to somehow, this body, if we were to reject, yes, thank you.

If we were to reject yesterday's Prop J contract by this body, and we want because the goal is somehow we restore those FTEs, even though it's not a direct coalition, at some point this body will still have to figure out roughly about quarter million, $250,000 to backfill that cost to offset and and so what I'm trying to, thank you.

I know it's a really wrong about way because that this is why people feel like the budget is complicated and it's difficult, and that like every year that we have made it seem easy that we just somehow magically come up with some funding and that it we we just be able to have app like so-called app backs and re-reshifting like some of the funding and not recognizing that the cuts have to come from somewhere to offset um the funding of those positions.

So if I may, I'm just gonna zoom in to within the Department of Public Works.

I'm not talking about sort of robbing Peter to pay Paul, like you know, approach, which some budget committee chairs do often, and I myself included at times, but in this moment, let's just look at the Department of Public Works and only Department of Public Works.

So, colleagues, it means that if we reject the prop J from yesterday, that contract, and say, hey, public works, we want you to restore those positions at some point that here you have to have to make sure that there are two at least 250,000 of general funds that we can put back in to Department of Public Works to be able to to fulfill the obligation that we are committing.

And my somebody please validate me across this aisle.

I see nodding.

Um is the reason why it is a painful conversation.

It is a reason why, like going line by line, but director short, clearly you have different opinions on this.

Well, I thank you for the opportunity to chime in, Chair Chan.

I think uh we've already agreed to 4.7 million dollars in savings.

So I would encourage you to take the 250,000 and happily accept the restoration of our colleagues and that fog room from the 4.7 million that we've I that we've agreed on.

And I think that is a choice.

I am not saying that that's not a choice that I am going to recommend our colleagues to make.

I am only simply walking through this really painful process of like, well, colleagues, if you think if we think that we're taking $4.7 million dollars of cost saving already from Department of Public Works, therefore, we do not need to take it anymore because we're gonna, but but I'm just articulating again the offsets of what that actually means, and and that is 250,000 to change, you know.

Um it and there are gonna be more of those discussions.

Like this is just a starting point.

And um, but if I may also put another out there to just be transparent, because I know that there's requests out there standing right now, is that there's like I think four of five requests for 99 um 76, which is the entry level positions.

16, 99, 99, 16, 99, 16.

There are entry-level positions for specifically for those who were formerly incarcerated under the jurisdiction of the deputy uh under the sheriff's department, and that it seems like there's an inclination of how can we make sure that these four or five 9916s can be uh part of the uh DPW budget, and which I think roughly about $300,000 as well.

Again, I know this on somebody's list, it's not on mine, but I know it's on somebody's list.

I'm gonna put it out there.

And again, I I want to urge all of us uh to evaluate um what is what are your priorities and uh what your thinkings are, but I also want to clarify so so we'll come to those conversations.

I do want to clarify one thing about the role of budget and legislative analysts, and that's for all of us to think about because that's how I think about the budget and legislative analysts.

I do not view the budget, it's the responsibility of the budget and legislative analysts to somehow like hackle the city departments to give us as much money as we could so then the board can spend however way we want.

That's not really how I view um the budget and legislative analyst.

The way that I view budget legislative analysts' job is that in their best like opinion, what is in the best interest, fiscal interest of the city and how we can run the city in the most efficient way.

Um sometimes we can, and it's the reason why I believe sometimes we can be in disagreement with the budget and legislative analyst.

Um, and that you know, I I don't think they're doing our bidding.

We can disagree with the budget and legislative analyst.

So I I just want to clarify how I also feel about the budget and legislative analysts too.

That not just to me, I'm always even though I lean towards them, it's because they're objectivity, it's because I I believe they're they're impartial, um, and they're bipartisan, so to speak.

If we're partisan in any way, um, I guess we do, you know, in terms of the legislative branch and the executive branch.

Um, I am really on my soapbox, which is rare, but it's just because I want to make sure that I am being transparent in the way that I approach it.

I want to make sure that colleagues, as you approach this budget, um, you can ask any questions you want, you can approach any way you want.

There is no limit, uh, in my opinion, but there certainly is my institutional memory and knowledge of how to best approach it.

And my my I want to recommend, and I I want to open the floor for conversation for this committee, is that is the reason why I constantly say let's continue these conversations, because maybe there's still a second half of the um city departments that's gonna come before us.

We are still waiting for the second half of the um budget and legislative analyst report.

Could you let us know when you will come out with that report?

Sometime today before midnight.

And and do you mind uh going through just quickly?

I think what are the city departments actually still for the public, like what are the still departments that we still have to evaluate.

My apologies, I put you on the spot like that.

Yes, so um the reports that'll be coming out tonight include uh the mayor's office, the office of economic and warforce development, the department, uh human services agency, the department of early childhood, the department of children, youth and their families, the department of homelessness and supportive housing, the department of public health, the uh recreation and park department, police, fire, emergency management, sheriff's office, department of sheriff accountability, the department of police accountability, the public defender, district attorney, and adult probation and academy of sciences.

Thank you.

And colleagues, I I from my experience, I want to share with you is that knowing um the second round typically, as you can actually imagine is what we call the big six, which is police, fire, sheriffs, um, and some of these inclusive of that, is that like these are the city departments are very difficult because um more than 85% of that city department's operation is really personnel.

This is not a lot of room for us to kind of think about uh potential reduction.

So again, I just wanted to walk us through uh so with that I want to open up for discussion how we would like to approach next.

Supervisor Walton.

Thank you, Chair Chair.

Well, I know.

I think.

We all have voiced our opinions already.

I think Supervisor President Mendelman and I, if I'm not mistaken, don't want to do that right now.

And I think Supervisor Soder recommended maybe doing it right now.

But we I think we had a discussion about it already.

Supervisor Sauter.

Thank you.

I'm happy to defer to the chair, and thank you for thank you for all the information and explanation.

And uh but I'm happy to defer the process to you.

Thank you.

But I think this is important.

Like I still think that it is important to articulate, like what are our priorities.

I'm not saying we should not express that at all.

And okay, so it sounds like we will not be going fine line by line so that we don't have to put you through.

Um, but it sounds to me that there is actually express like interests and prioritizations, and I think that we heard it loud and clear, and then I think those are important for the Department of Public Here, uh, Department of Public Works to know and and for me to know, and for all of us to note, and including for the controller as well as the budget legislative analyst.

Because at some point, colleagues, the technical parts about it is the controller will actually have to understand line by line, um, what are we rejecting and what are we accepting?

So, similarly of what we have read um on Wednesday, uh on is it yesterday, or I forgot, that we went through line by line of which one we accept for the enterprise agency, you know, the numbers of it.

We will do actually we have to do all of it.

Um, and there will be a sheet for all of you to evaluate, and that at which point you can decide and say, hey, Chair Chan, this is what I have said I want to reject, and so there's still conversation that we can actually have.

I just want to say we can do that.

Present amendment.

Yeah, and I'm sure your office has already clarified all of this, and I'm just behind behind on the curve.

But so Monday we do this exercise with the remaining departments.

Yeah.

Um Tuesday is board.

Yes.

Wednesday is public comment day.

Right.

And Thursday, to the extent that there are remaining areas, we may be bringing departments back.

We are also gonna spend the day.

Thinking, you know, it we will have a clearer view of what what's left, how much money has uh has been saved, and um, and that's the day where we might be voting on things.

That's right.

And then I think that on that day, then we can actually have like if necessary, we then can have a line-by-line debate too, if if necessary.

So it's not said and done.

Um, so that's why I think that both Supervisor Walton and President Mendelman are saying that we can continue to have these conversations.

So, with that said, I know that's uh Director Kittler has a technical adjustment for us, which is um specific.

And so, sorry, Director Kittler, if you can actually quickly also walk us through what the technical adjustments meant for the budget.

Absolutely.

Um, Sophia Kittler for the mayor's budget office.

This is our second round of technical amendments, and um so as you can imagine when we are trying to balance a billion dollar deficit, um, we move a lot of money around into very specific codes, and we make errors um where you know we we will go back and say we added revenue but not expenditure, we added expenditure and not revenue, or we put it in the wrong category.

Um so this is our next round of these.

Um you can see the codes on pages three and four of the packet.

Um, I will read through the letter and then talk about a couple highlights that I really want to point out that are kind of closer to policy decisions.

Um technical adjustments include uh correcting non-personnel expense services expenditures at the Department of Public Health, correcting expenditures in the fire department and the Department of Public Works, aligning revenues and expenditures at the MTA, Public Utilities Commission, Department of Environment, Sheriff's Department, and Mayor's Office of Housing and Community Development, aligning revenues and expenditures for city baselines at the Municipal Transportation agency, public library, Public Library, department of Public Works, Human Services agency, the Department of Early Childhood, the Department of Children, Youth and Their Families, the Mayor's Office of Housing and Community Development, due to decreased revenue due to a reduction in excess ERAF revenue in fiscal twenty-eight.

Um, correcting codes at the Department of Public Health, correcting and updating positions in human resources department and the Department of Public Health, and then aligning expenditures to match federal revenues for the Department of Public Health.

So there are in all of those words two things that I really want to highlight for you.

In the budget, we had proposed funding new turnout quotes for the fire department over two years.

And we are at the suggestion, kind of in partnership with Chair Chan, moving the assumption of when we will buy all of those into the first year.

And so rather so that is requires both moving money forward on fund balance where we do have some flexibility on the years, and then moving the expenditure forward so that grows the fire department budget in year one and reduces it in year two.

The other thing and is in the first round of technical adjustments, we found an error in how we had uh budgeted the MCO reserve and had moved in year two, we had moved that to offset some loss as excess ERAF funds.

We have about 25 to 30 million dollars in reduced excess ERAF revenue from the state budget.

So we are using that error in MCO funds to offset the loss of um excess ERAF funds.

And so one thing that that does is because our revenues come down and our general fund revenues come down, that um unfortunately means that our baselines assumptions also come down.

But because we have gone through um a great deal of work with departments and with his body and with the public on thinking about where we want to allocate baseline allocations.

Um we are backfilling using um our tech adjust reserve, backfilling the dollars that used to be baseline tagged and keeping the spending levels the same in those departments, so that we do not need to at this point go through and cut um a number of departments back down to their baselines without a good process on how we would decide what those cuts are.

Um so we are now overfunding a number of baselines relative to our expected ADR in year two because of the reduced excess EVAS revenue, and so we are backfilling that with regular general fund.

Um I'm happy to answer any.

Oh, so this set of technical adjustments will increase the proposed fiscal 27 budget by 494,288, and will decrease the fiscal twenty-eight budget by six million five thousand eighty-three, five hundred and eighty-three thousand five hundred and eighty dollars in fiscal twenty-eight, and results in a cost of three million six hundred and eighty-seven thousand eight hundred and sixty dollars in fiscal twenty-seven and a savings of one million six hundred and fifty-four thousand four hundred and seventy-nine in fiscal twenty-eight.

Um, and over the two years, the net impact will be a general fund cost of two million thirty-three thousand three hundred and eighty-one dollars.

Um, I'm available for any questions, either in the chambers or outside.

Thank you, Supervisor Walton.

Thank you, Chair Chan, and thank you so much to our budget director.

I just wanted to correct something that I think you say managing or trying to address a billion dollar deficit is a handful, but we do not have a billion dollar deficit here.

Not any longer, you are correct.

Thank you for that.

Next year or the this year's budget cycle.

But we did cite we started this budget cycle back in December with a near billion dollar expected deficit.

So it is.

And we've all done amazing work to make sure that that's the same thing.

Thank you for your partnership.

I appreciate it.

Thank you.

And uh just to in summary, though, and uh uh to confirm, it does mean that the budget technically now has grown by two roughly two million dollars.

Yes.

Thank you.

Um, thank you.

And so with that, Mr.

Clark, do you have any announcements for us?

Uh Madam Chair, if uh if it is our intention to uh to close the meeting today, then uh we are.

I will need a motion that the undecided items um left on our agenda, which is one through three or items one through three, eighteen, and twenty-three and twenty-four, be carried to our June twenty second meeting, and that uh this meeting be recessed until then.

So move.

And on that motion by Chair Chan, seconded by Vice Chair Dorsey, Vice Chair Dorsey.

Dorsey, I member Sauter, Sauter, aye, Member Walton, Walton, aye, member Chan.

Oh, sorry, um Member Mandelman.

Mendelman, aye, Chair Chan.

Aye.

Chan, I we have five eyes.

The motion passes.

And Mr.

Clerk, do we have any on the business before us today?

Uh Madam Chair concludes your business.

The meeting's adjourned.

Oh, sorry, no, not adjourned.

Recessed.

Sorry.

Resent that.

The meeting is in recess.

Thank you.

We will return on Monday.