Good morning.

This meeting will come to order.

Welcome to the September 18th, 2025 regular meeting of the Government Audit and Oversight Committee of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

I'm Supervisor Fielder, Chair of the Committee, joined by Vice Chair Janie Sauter and Supervisor Steven Sherrill.

The committee clerk is Monique Creighton, and our thanks to Eugene Labania of SFGov TV for staffing this meeting.

Madam Clerk, do you have any announcements?

Yes.

Public comment will be taken on each item on this agenda.

When your item of interest comes up and public comment is called, please line up to speak on your right.

Alternatively, you may submit public comment in writing in either of the following ways.

Email them to the government audit and oversight committee clerk at M O N I Q U E.

C-R-A-Y-T-O-N at S F, G-O-V.org.

If you can 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 offices City Hall, Number one, Dr.

Carlton B.

Goodlit Place, Room 244, San Francisco, California 94102.

If you have documents you would like to be included as part of the file, please submit them to me before the end of the meeting.

Please make sure to silence all cell phones and electronic devices to prevent any interruptions to day's proceedings.

Finally, items acted upon today are expected to appear on the board of supervisors' agenda of September 30th, 2025, unless otherwise stated.

Thank you, Madam Clerk.

And today we have a big day as we'll be hearing presentations from the civil grand jury on three reports that they spent the last year authoring.

The civil grand jury is made up of 19 members who serve for one year and investigate the operations of the various officers, departments, and agencies of the government of San Francisco.

Suffice it to say they serve a very important function to improve how San Francisco government functions, and their work serves to build trust between the residents of San Francisco and their city government.

I want to thank the members of the jury for all of your hard work over the past year, putting these reports together and for engaging in our civil process to make sure our city functions a little bit better.

I also want to thank the staff of our city departments for the work responding to the findings and the recommendations by the civil grand jury, and also, of course, to all the city staffers here today, including Director Sophia Kittler for putting together the presentations and responses on behalf of the city.

Madam Clerk, please call items one and two.

Yes, item number one is a hearing on the 2024-2025 civil grand jury report entitled Failed Vision, Revamping the Road Map to Safer Streets.

And item number two is a resolution responding to the presiding judge of the Superior Court on the findings and recommendations contained the 2024-2025 civil grand jury report entitled Failed Vision, Revamping the Road Map to Safer Streets, and urging the mayor to cause the implementation of accepted findings and recommendations through his department heads and through the development of the annual budget.

Thank you, Madam Clerk.

And Miss Kate Bloomberg will be presenting the report on behalf of the civil grand jury.

Sophia Kittler, budget director for the mayor will be presenting on behalf of the mayor's office and city departments.

I also want to thank Nick Minard from the budget and legislative analysts office, who will be available for questions for all three hearings today.

And before I hand this off to Vice Chair Sauter, I would like to invite four-person Michael Carboy to introduce the grand jury and to give some opening remarks about the process.

Four-person Carboy, please go ahead.

Thank you, Chair Fielder.

Supervisor Sauter, Supervisor Sherrill, thank you very much for convening the government audit and oversight committee hearings for the 24-25 San Francisco Civil Grand Jury reports.

My name is Michael Carboy.

It was my honor to serve the jury as a four-person.

Today, my colleagues on the jury will be presenting three reports.

The first, Ms.

Kate Bloomberg will present failed vision, addressing the city's failed vision zero program because of inadequate police enforcement of traffic regulation, piecemeal traffic engineering efforts and insufficient public education.

Second, Mr.

Nick Weininger will present capacity to serve, addressing the city's failure to adequately to ensure adequate management skill sets are in place within nonprofits.

The city depends upon for the delivery of essential city services.

And third, Mr.

Cameron Parker will present techs in the city.

Addressing the city's challenges in embracing and effectively using new technologies, especially artificial intelligence or AI, as I may refer to it.

Our jury completed these three reports and our other work items with a full complement of 19 jurors in service, 10 women and nine men with broad and rich points of view.

Our efforts focused on the entirety of San Francisco, but our jurors hailed from 10 of the 11 supervisorial districts.

District 8 was the most heavily represented based on residents, followed by district 4, then districts 2, 3, 5, and 7.

Only District 11 was not represented.

We had a great jury.

We were fortunate to have terrific talent, including technology executives, government employees, attorneys, medical care professionals, engineers, nonprofit, public policy professionals, and business leaders.

We were as politically diverse as one could imagine, yet, politics stayed outside of our work.

As you know, our reports present findings and offer recommendations to improve the city's operations.

We arrived at these after approximately 15,192 work hours, or the equivalent of seven and a half full-time employees.

We met with over 100 city workers, elected officials, and subject matter experts.

We are grateful to each of them for their wisdom, time, and candor.

Last year, I flagged for the GAO the fact that the city denied 75% of the jury's findings.

Our findings are the very fruit of the investigatory interviews conducted across the city.

They reflect the reality on the ground of the issues we are investigating.

It was deeply concerning that the city leaders did not agree.

Much more fortunately this year, the city has agreed with just short of two thirds of our findings.

And of the disagreements, most pertain to minor technical details and not a broad brush rejection of facts.

We are appreciative and optimistic that this administration has drawn a contrast from prior administrations and is embracing the fruits of the civil grand jury's work for a better city.

Failed vision reports on the city's failure to meet its own goals to reduce the death in serious industry in motor vehicle accidents.

Our investigation revealed that the San Francisco Police Department systematically failed to adequately enforce traffic regulation with ticketing down 95% since 2014.

This is more than a statistic.

It means broken bones, hospital experiences, and loved ones in caskets.

This issue resonates deeply with the voters of the city and deserves your fullest attention.

Traffic engineering can be improved, and traffic safety education increased, but the police department's inadequate enforcement has created lawlessness on the roads.

I urge you to ensure that every officer has the resources they need to uphold their sworn oath to enforce the law.

You will hear the capacity to serve report reveal the city's heavy reliance on nonprofits to deliver certain services, the often inadequate management and financial skill sets within these organizations, and the city's need to ensure adequate skill building so that contracts deliver the best bang for the taxpayer buck, fee from free from financial mismanagement and scandal.

Techs in the city report considers the city's roadmap for identifying and implementing applications for AI.

The city's talent, enthusiasm, and eagerness to modernize and explore new technology is stymied by impractical and burdensome technology, governance, confusing procurement processes, and a false sense that there is a low risk in taking a slow approach.

The jury found COIT or the Commission on Information Technology to be ineffective and not up to the task and recommends eliminating it and replacing it with a fit for purpose entity with adequate authority expertise and scope.

Thank you very much for the time today for these important hearings.

I'd like to turn the podium over to Ms.

Bloomberg.

Thank you, Michael.

Okay, great.

Um thank you all.

Let's see.

How do I move this forward?

No.

Do you want to thank you, Mr.

Carboard.

I just quickly want to got it.

I just clearly want to note that I'm gonna hand this over to uh Vice Chair Sauter, who will be managing this part of the hearing.

Okay, thank you so much.

Thank you, Chair Fielder.

Ms.

Bloomberg, as you get your slides ready.

Um I wanna invite you up, and I want to thank Mr.

Carbboy for that introduction.

I know we're all looking forward to the digging to all the reports.

Um, I'll be working with you and the rest of the team here to guide you through this first one.

Um this is certainly something that there's a lot of interest in because of how um how little progress we've made, which you know because you've been digging into this, and um this is something that we need to fix, we need to make improvements on.

Um I know you'll share these numbers, but the numbers are stark.

Um, you know, the fact that last year we had more deaths on our streets from traffic violence than we had from homicides.

The fact that we ended our 10 years of vision zero and we ended with the most deaths of any of those 10 years.

Um, so there's a lot of course correcting that I believe needs to happen, and I'm looking forward to seeing your suggestions, your findings.

Um with that, I'll turn it over to you to get us started.

Great.

Well, thank you so much.

I'm I'm really uh my presentation is really planning to sort of respond to the responses, so I'm not actually digging into the details of the report, so everybody's gonna have to read the report themselves.

Uh but we did try to make it short uh and readable and and comprehensible.

Um, but I just wanted to start off with a a huge thank you.

Um we our our team uh spoke with about 35 or more uh city employees and uh multiple agencies, citywide departments, and they're really all we were so impressed with how hard they're working and how hard they're trying.

So it is a hard problem.

Um I don't want to diminish that.

Um I also wanted to thank the Board of Supervisors Public Safety and Neighborhood Services Committee for continuing to bring attention to enforcement, and that's been really helpful and was helpful.

Uh, those hearings had been really helpful to our report.

I'd like to thank Supervisor Salter's office for providing follow-up on this on this topic, and I really appreciate that.

And then I wanted to also thank all of the Board of Supervisors for passing the Street Safety Act, which really adopted a lot of of the recommendations from this report.

So that's that's really great.

Thank you all.

Um, yeah.

Oh, there it goes.

Okay, thank you.

Great.

Um, we we had we got some great updates uh from the city agencies uh in response to this report.

Um the the first recommendation was about enforcement and the idea that each uh officer should target 10 to 20 percent of their day on enforcement was included in that update.

That's a that's a great step forward, and I'm gonna talk a little bit more about enforcement afterwards.

Uh the move to proactive traffic calming instead of uh you know letting the squeakiest wheel win win the race, which is often sort of the the people with the most resources.

Uh I think proactive traffic calming can can make a much more equitable um difference in our city uh and also uh move things forward in a you know bring traffic calming into the vision zero process, which it was really not a part of before.

The hardened daylighting plan um that is I think is really important.

I'm also gonna talk a little bit more about daylighting just to sort of um put a pin on that one.

Um, the a larger streets outreach team focused on community relationships.

Again, that is so critical uh to moving things forward.

I'm also gonna talk a little bit more about our outreach.

I think those those three the enforcement daylighting and outreach are really critical.

Um the fact that there is a traffic safety request uh through 311.org uh is really an important update.

I think there's still more that needs to be done.

A lot of us use the app instead of the uh instead of the website.

It's not available on the app.

Uh there's there's been no um, you know, media announcements about that.

I think getting that word out is gonna be really important.

And the idea of having a street safety dashboard that brings all of these pieces together and lets the city see how we're doing on safer streets, not just on deaths and serious injuries, but on the things that make us stressed as we're walking or biking or using our or driving, speeding, and people not yielding to pedestrians, etc.

So those are all great updates from the agencies.

They need to own that traffic violence, traffic injuries, and deaths are part of their core mission.

So that's something that we'd like to see a little bit better response on.

There was a sort of lukewarm response on recommendation 2.1, which was about equipment and software for traffic enforcement and also collision reporting.

And it's miserable.

I mean, people don't use the e-citation because it takes them twice as long than writing a paper ticket.

Those paper tickets go off, they have to be handwritten.

It's just this terrible process that could be so much better.

And so I, you know, they said, well, we're looking into it, but but I really think that that's something that could make the process of enforcement a lot better, and also our process of of making sure that it gets done better.

Area-based street safety, the the sort of the explanation they gave is, hey, look, we did this bike bike and roll plan.

We do a high injury network, those are important, important pieces.

But we need to also look at the interventions in an area, you know, and and the bike and roll plan is not about interventions, it's about a plan, how people are gonna get places.

Um they don't talk about how what that's actually gonna look like.

So I do think that it's a complicated piece.

I don't I don't think we did it justice in the report, but I definitely think that the SFMTA could maybe do better there.

Um education campaigns, uh, that was kind of like, yeah, we know this is important.

If we have budget, we'll do it.

I think it's important not just in in educating people, but also creating buy-in, making sure that all of the city is if feels this ownership of this issue, that we're all in this together.

And I think that that's something that is often undervalued about education and why it's so important.

Um, and then finally, recommendation 5.3.

Um, the SF police department does great driver training every year.

They do look at that, but they don't really look at enforcement and traffic violence and traffic um collisions and and injuries.

And so I think that that, you know, they said they were working with WAC SF, that's great.

I just want to make sure that they really make that a core piece of their training, and that's important.

Okay.

Uh three more slides.

One on enforcement.

There's great news.

The traffic company has already, as up till June, which is up on the website, uh, exceeded their total citation numbers in 2025 from what they had in 2024.

So that means that, you know, if they continue on track, they're gonna have twice as more than twice as many citations.

That's a great improvement.

Uh the enforcement is about 30% higher than 2024 levels.

Um, of course, there was a drop-off in the second half of 2024, so we've got to keep on top of it.

But that's still 60% lower than 2019 and 85% lower than 2015.

So there's still, you know, 30% higher of a relatively small number.

It's great, it's directionally good, but there's still more to be done.

Not to say that we need to get back to 2015 levels.

Maybe they're doing it smarter.

I don't want to say you have to get to this level, but we should be clear that this is still a lot lower than it was.

On daylighting, I think it's important to just make clear that, you know, why daylighting's important.

It removing parking increases the visibility of pedestrians and that reduces collisions.

A lot of people think like, oh, well, daylighting, you need enforcement because otherwise people are gonna park in this spot and it'll reduce, it'll eliminate that benefit.

That's true, but the the benefit of reducing that those spots also effectively widens the roadway.

And that can increase the speed of drivers through those intersections, thereby increasing collisions and collision severity.

So, really, we need to harden the daylighting.

We need to find ways to reduce speeds through those intersections while also maintaining visibility.

And so I think that's why the hardening is so critical.

So things like this turncoming, um, putting putting in uh hard surfaces to make sure that cars see this as a narrow, narrow path and and slow down as a result.

And finally, outreach.

Um the the response on outreach was good, but then there was this thing like, oh, well, we're going to give updates to the board of supervisors.

I think you guys are all in your communities.

You understand how San Francisco is such a crazy place.

Um, every district has different geographies, has different uses, has different needs, and you guys are all there and you see it.

And so I really hope that the supervisors are not just passively receiving information, but are really really engaged in in this outreach, and that you can provide inputs about who the community leaders are, what are the hot spots, what are the key concerns, what are the connectivity issues.

Um, and I just want to say, while it may seem to SFMTA that more outreach will increase the work, I think there is a real hope that by building these enduring relationships in the community, SFMTA will increase trust and reduce the project times.

So that's that was our hope.

Um, and that's that's all I have today.

I really appreciate all of your time and and uh all of the government agencies for taking this on.

Thank you.

Thank you, Miss Bloomberg.

Um that's really important work, and I'm glad to hear there's already some progress, and I appreciate you pointing out areas we need to go further in.

I'll have some questions and my colleagues might too in a moment.

I wanted to um first invite um Sophia Kittler from the mayor's office.

Uh I know that she's provided written responses to all of the items today and um has a brief presentation to start us off.

Um, all right.

Good morning.

Um Supervisor Shotter, Chair Fielder, thank uh Supervisor Cheryl, thank you so much for having us today.

Very briefly before I get into this very brief presentation.

Um, I just wanted to really thank the civil grand jury for taking on a really um I think really important set of um policy issues this year, and and I know how hard it is to um comprehensively analyze a policy and then come to a sense of consensus with a number of um with with such a broad base of people, and so I really want to recognize that work and in particular thank um Foreman Carboy for his uh tremendous leadership over the last two years.

Um I also would really like to thank Lisette at the civil grand jury for her great coordination work.

Um, my staff, Tabitha Romero, Charles Klammer, and particularly Louisa Coy for her um going toe-to-toe with departments and really kind of bringing everyone together.

And then finally, department staff at the Department of Technology, City Administrator, the Police Department, controller's office, the MTA, and in particular Claire Stone, who is my um brainwave on this.

Um, so very quickly, I have a very short presentation, one slide for each of the um hearings, uh, where we kind of talk about the general vision and then um uh we are happy to get into any particular finding or recommendation that you have questions about.

Um, there are people uh Captain Shields from the police department as well as Carl Nasita are here from PD, and then we have representation from SFMTA and the controller's office as well.

Um, so first of all, um pedestrian safety and and traffic safety are incredibly important to this mayor.

Um, and one thing we just kind of wanted to start out with is a concern that we had.

While we didn't really disagree with any of the specific points on these, um, generally we felt that the orientation of this of this report was around the the kind of older model of the three E's, education, engineering, and um enforcement.

And MTA and SFPD have and and the whole city have really moved to kind of a an advanced safe systems approach, which has been kind of more nationally recognized in the past decade, um, thinking about safe streets, safe people, safe vehicles and data systems, and and and how we build that as as an entire system rather than the individual actions of any particular person.

Um, and so I just wanted to recognize that up front.

That is how we are approaching this work.

That is how um MTA and the mayor have been thinking and talking about how we move this forward.

Um, and so kind of use that as a lens for for how we approach these.

Um so we agreed with the majority of these findings.

First, um, that SFPD has deprioritized traffic safety enforcement and enforcement levels have dropped.

That is patently true.

Um we have had, as everyone knows, a uh tremendous officer shortage.

It always requires policy trade-offs and prioritization.

Um, reasonable people can disagree on where this things should be prioritized.

The simple fact of the matter is we need more enforcement, we need more officers.

Um, and through rebuilding the ranks, um we are working to bring both our officers, so therefore our staffing and therefore our enforcement up.

Um we have also revived, we are revising our 2025 traffic enforcement plan to strengthen those expectations and hold ourselves more accountable.

Um, secondly, outdated technology hampers enforcement and collision reporting.

We absolutely agree.

Um, the traffic division has uh been working with very outdated technology, and and I think Captain Shields can can really give you a great illustration of that.

Um, again, we will the mayor's budget office and PDU will work um to review the enforcement tools and modernization modernizing that software through the normal budget process.

Um, you know, our normal kind of quibbles with recommendations.

We we do not believe an audit is necessary.

Um that is our work, and we will do it and kind of work with the board of supervisors on what the policy implications of that are.

Um a couple things that we partially disagreed with.

Um we believe that that SFMTA does conduct a proactive area-based planning and does not narrowly scope interventions.

I think we we really kind of wanted to, we have taken a data-driven approach.

We are trying to be proactive instead of just kind of responsive to where a lot of the data has been, um, and we are going to continue to roll that out.

Um SFMTA does deliver sustained neighborhood focused outreach.

We can always do better.

Um, and to to um Ms.

Bloomberg's point, I think we very much look to uh the Board of Supervisors for that partnership and and kind of looking to you to help us figure out where we should be talking, who we should be talking to, and how we can build that trust and outreach.

Um, and then finally, we absolutely agree education drives safer behavior.

Um the MTA is developing a citywide street safety education campaign.

It is scheduled for launch in 2026.

Um I am available for questions on any of the mayor's responses, and then the departments are here to talk about anything in particular.

Thank you so much.

Thank you, Miss Kitler.

I would love to invite Ms.

Bloomberg back up for a few questions, and then we'll go back to PD and MTA.

Again, thank you for this work.

And I should have recognized earlier I see some students in the audience, so I'm glad everyone's listening and learning too.

Thanks for being here today.

I wanted to um this I think we're gonna talk about it quite a bit today, but I I my office has been digging into the software and the printers and the paper and the tickets, and I'm just I kind of have a headache from reading it all.

Um would you would you try to summarize what you learned from digging into this?

Yeah, basically there is a system called e-citations that the officers are kind of encouraged to use.

Um, but a lot of them don't use them at all use it at all because it's quicker for them to write a paper ticket because the printers don't they they won't uh sync up to the phones that they're working on, and it's just a it's just a mess.

And you know, you look at the world that we live in right now, you know, you you understand that technology can be a mess, but it can also be a great benefit and it can make things easier.

And we're at this, we're in this situation.

Uh also collision reporting, they they have this fillable PDF, and then there it doesn't have any error notices, it doesn't have anything like that.

It's really terrible to use.

So there's just these awful pieces of technology uh that, you know, um I think it it really hampers the the ability and the and the sort of like interest in in an officer taking on that role.

And so, and then also when you end up with all of your paper citations, then that's why you end up with this this PDF at the police department because somebody hand tallies all of that, and then it goes to the courthouse, and then they're sending it out from the courthouse to try and get it re put into the computer, and it's just a mess.

You know, it's just such a waste of resources and time.

Maybe, you know, um, it's a way for each officer to reduce their time in a way, but it doesn't necessarily make it better for everybody.

So um, yeah, so the printers often don't work and they can't print out a ticket.

You know, we've there's there are solutions to this.

Um, and they'll probably take a little bit of of work to figure out, but I think it's important to move forward.

So, yeah.

Um, this might be a dumb question, but I'm gonna ask anybody.

No dumb questions.

Uh if we have a uh digital system called e-citations, why does it need to link to a printer?

Why do we need to do that?

Well, to give, I mean, uh a good question.

I mean, couldn't you just send it by the by the phone?

Yeah, exactly.

I agree with you.

I mean, that that was something that occurred to me.

Um, why do we need a printer to have a printed copy?

Most people probably would prefer to have it as a text on to their phone or an email or something like that.

Um, I I don't know why, but that's that was that's the protocol.

And so I think it's worth it's worth looking into, but I think it should it should be also solvable to have a printer if somebody does want it to be able to print up that that citation.

So, yeah.

Is there a member of the police department who might have a little more insight into that?

Apparently not.

Really?

I think we'll we can move on.

Okay.

I will say generally, um, there are a lot of state regulations around um how and where we distribute any sort of things.

We did we have to hand out paper as a as a matter of accessibility in most cases.

I don't know about this case specifically, but it is generally um it is in many places required that we hand paper tickets for trap, you know, fair enforcement parking meters.

I imagine this is similar.

And I would also say that a lot of the things that we did touch upon in the report could be improved through better state legislation.

So that's so enforcement, a lot of the enforcement issues definitely.

Um you touched on the suggestion of education campaign.

Mm-hmm.

Um do you have any specifics on how you think that might be effective or if you were to design that, what you would like to see?

Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, we uh it's important to to educate people, but also, you know, about specific activities like how they how they, you know, drive or bike or whatever.

Um, but it's also important to to make clear um what what is dangerous, and and I think that um the city actually did a great job.

There were some great education campaigns sort of early on, and then they fell off.

And I think that um, you know, there was there was one about, you know, it could be your grandmother in the crosswalk, it could be, you know, uh your your son in the crosswalk.

Uh there um it it's important for people to understand how speed kills and how important that is.

So I think there's a lot of information about you know what could you do better, but it's also kind of a an uh I, you know, I think a lot of people we talked to was like, you know, everybody is behaving lawlessly in the city, you know, pedestrians, bikes, cars, and there's nobody's telling them to do better.

So I I think that actually just the fact of an education campaign could actually sort of create some buy-in and like get people sort of engaged in a way um that's important.

The other thing that that has happened in the past in the city that I think is effective was um and and is happening to some degree now with the with the um the the enforcement um the automated enforcement, that there's there's sort of campaigns about that, um, and that's an that's an opportunity to say, why are we doing this?

You know, why is this important?

It's important because speed kills.

Speed is the most important piece of this puzzle.

Um and slowing us all down with cars are it's so much easier to go fast than it used to be.

You know, you used to have to put your foot on the pedal and it would make a big noise, and you'd have to like you know you were going fast.

And I think now it's really hard to know.

And so a lot of people aren't really they don't they don't know they aren't understanding what's going on and how they're they're part of their piece of the puzzle.

So I think I think that, you know, using the buses as as billboards is great.

Um, and you know, radio uh all sorts of I don't know how to do an education campaign, but I I do think that um and the flags in the city, these are all great pieces uh of a of the puzzle, and I do think you know, education is one of those things that if it's not sustained, it falls off pretty quickly.

Um so thinking of it as not just a single campaign, but as a as an ongoing piece, um, I think is really critical.

So, thank you so much for the presentation.

I understand that the jury found that the primary reason for the drop in citations is that police leadership does not prioritize traffic enforcement and does not hold officers accountable for performing what has historically been a part of their job, and clearly that is changed as noted at the top of the presentation in this year, it seems.

Um beyond citations data, what other data or research did the jury conduct that supports a lack of prioritization by the SFPD?

For example, did you have access to the amount of time that an officer spends on average on traffic enforcement?

We we don't have that kind of a detailed data, no.

We conducted interviews, we reviewed uh the um hearings by the public safety committee.

Uh so we we we talked to a lot of people, we can't tell you who, uh, and um that was you know our takeaway.

So do we have do we have data on how much time an officer spends?

No, not really.

Um, but uh we did talk to some of the enforcement officers who felt like they were at the top, and even, you know, of enforcement activities, and even they were not spending a huge amount of time on it.

Um, and it it definitely seemed from from their perspective that that this is this was kind of that that was our takeaway from the interviews.

So yeah.

Thank you.

And then according to the Swedish vision zero policy, system design should be considered the main cause of traffic fatalities and traffic accidents that lead to injuries and fatalities should not be considered fully the responsibility of the individual road user.

And I understand that the jury also finds that traffic fatalities should be treated as systems design failures and prevented through systemic fixes, right?

And and that you all found that as enforcement fell off over the last decade, it ended up that SMTA was shouldering the burden for uh vision zero and feeling the weight of that responsibility.

In the jury's opinion, did you find that the failures to meet our vision zero goals can be explained by SFPD not adequately prioritizing their responsibility to inform traffic?

No, I would say the systems approach that that we heard of.

We we decided not to use that because we wanted to keep the report somewhat short, and we also wanted to focus on what the city can do.

And there's a lot that you know the national government could do that the state government could do that the city could, and we really focused on you know, sort of the city's approach.

Um could we could we meet the vision zero goals with 2015 levels of enforcement and the current levels of of SFMTA interventions?

I doubt it.

I doubt we would we would get to zero.

Um would we be in better shape?

I I believe so, yes.

Um we did look at uh research that had been done that that showed that a dramatic drop off in in enforcement really does have a big impact in not only in collision numbers, but also collision severity, because if people feel they can speed with impunity, they're going really fast.

And that's what really kills people.

Um we saw a bunch of horrific accidents last year uh with that speed was really the the huge driver there.

So I do I think we would, you know, do I think that getting to zero is achievable by city actions alone consistently?

Maybe not, probably not.

Could we do a lot better?

Yes, we could.

We would need vision zero for California and the United States.

Yeah, I mean, I think I I mean we're not getting it from the United States right now, um, but yes, I think we we definitely need uh more buy-in at all levels, and you know, we need to do more with the the vehicles themselves.

Um, and uh yeah, so thank you so much, those are my questions.

Mm-hmm.

Just one more real quick.

Did you um on that last point?

I think you know something that is lost in this is that uh over the past 10 years, although I think there has been some progress made on calming our streets, we have from from an infrastructure point of view, we also are going up against this fact that over the past 10 years drivers have become a lot more distracted with phones, the fact that vehicles are a lot larger, a lot heavier.

Um I think I've seen numbers that you know compared to 10 years ago, the average vehicle is 30% larger, 30% heavier, that only gets worse as EVs, which are heavier vehicles continue.

Did you I think a lot of that those standards again and responses have to come from state and federal, but did you find any research or in your conversations about other municipalities, other cities responding to that aspect um in terms of there, please there have been some great responses in Europe.

Um there have been some of the cities in Europe have um, for example, had differential parking prices depending on the size of the vehicle.

You basically have to use some sort of proxy, you know, and size is an easier proxy than than weight, um, but or power uh usually, but yeah, the vehicles are more powerful, they're they're heavier and and they're bigger, and all of those bring their own complications uh to the process.

So um sometimes so the the some of the low emission zones, uh Paris has different parking prices for based on vehicle size, and when you think about it, they're taking up more space in the city, that makes some sense as well.

So uh there are taxes specific to vehicles uh in some cities um and some states and and countries.

So there's definitely ways to do it.

I would say I haven't seen a whole lot in the US.

Um, I mean, I think yeah, that that that has been effectively deployed.

Um, but but I would look to Europe for that.

Thank you.

If there are no other questions, I want to thank you again for all your work on this and want to invite the San Francisco Police Department up to answer some questions, please.

Hi, good morning.

Uh to answer your early question, it's uh California vehicle code to the e-site um paper tickets.

Is California vehicled 40518?

And it states that a person shall appear in person must be on paper.

So the the ticket can be electronically transmitted, but the notice to appear or the promissory notice to do something regarding the citation has to be um on paper.

Thank you.

Um is that just to jump right in on that, is that that notice to appear, is that also given at the same time as the ticket or is that sent in the mail later?

So um when a person signs a citation, it's a promissory to do one of three things.

It's to pay the pay it notice to go to court or to um um fight it, go to traffic school and fight it.

And maybe, just staying on the topic, um, can you share a little bit about any current efforts or upcoming efforts to improve the the technology around how you're doing citations to try and you know improve um this uh not ideal situation that we're hearing about.

Sure.

First, and I first want to thank the grand jury.

I do appreciate all of this because my biggest uh frustration, I've been in the police department for 25 years, and my joke has always been we live 45 to 50 minutes in good traffic from the epicenter of all of technology.

And our department is very antiquated in all of our technology.

So thank you for bringing that to the forefront.

Finally, we have a champion to to help us move forward in this.

Um so techno our traffic division, I'm completely separate from our IT division.

And we've been trying to work with IT completely different.

It's kind of like having two different stores talk to each other.

So we have uh requests for them, but the the people that you would probably want to answer those questions were the ones that your office reached out to.

Um the director is James Shields, um, and he could give a better um better um idea of of what is moving forward.

We have put in requests that we have a better um citation writing system that includes admonishments.

So a lot of the numbers that you see that are posted are only citations, it's not the admonishments.

So going back to the basically making hash marks on a PDF.

So traffic enforcement is to change people's behavior.

That's what that is our main goal.

So we have safer streets and we have less or zero deaths on the streets because of traffic.

We can't do that.

But we can say we need you to do traffic enforcement.

Part of the enforcement is admonishments.

And part of the failure of the system is that the technology doesn't talk to each other.

So an officer giving an admonishment, changing someone's behavior doesn't get recorded.

They have to bring that back to the station, and then like a paper site, we have to say how many admonishments they did in the day.

So the number that you see could be more because the officers are out there doing traffic stops, but they're doing giving an admonishment in lieu of a ticket.

So moving forward with the technology, our request is that we can combine the systems both with e-site and benchmark.

Benchmark is a statewide um mandatory um the profiling of, you know, it they want to see if an officer is profiling, so there's certain questions they ask.

So that is part of the time-consuming um data entry after a ticket's done.

So if an officer is writing, let's say 10 tickets, it's gonna be another hour to an hour and a half for them to sit down in front of a computer inputting the same information for the state system.

So our request is that we have e-sight talk to benchmark that we can merge the information.

So it's just gonna be a tap of a button, the person gets the the citation, whether it's on a ticket, whether it's uh electronically submitted, but everything talks to each other and then talks to the courts as well.

So those are our requests, those are what we want.

Um, and that is the technology technology division and and whatever vendors that are working with.

That one I have zero say.

I'm I would love to have a say, and I have zero say in in who the vendors will be or or um moving forward with how they'll they'll build that technology.

Um I should also mention that we're gonna have a chance to to dig into this a lot further next week.

Our public safety neighborhood services committee, we have uh another hearing on traffic enforcement.

Um our board president Raphael Mandelman has called for a number of those.

I think that hearing has been open since 2022, and and this is maybe the fourth or fifth hearing next week, so there'll be a lot of uh time for further questions then.

Um can you tell me a little bit about you know, uh just the the structure here?

I I know there's a traffic company in SFPD, and then there's of course you know, other uh officers who are driving around that are doing footbeats.

Um, you know, approximately what percentage of your traffic citations are coming out of the the traffic uh uh division.

Um what is that look like?

Sure.

Um if I can look at it's actually on this slide, I guess.

We can I don't know.

Let's see here.

Um that uh the red um part of those bars is the traffic company citations, and the blue is all stations.

Um and so the the um obviously the the stations, the foot, the beat officers are the uh the idea in the past was that they were doing more of the enforcement as a percentage.

And the top line is the green is all the staff, the the police staff not separating out the traffic company.

Thank you.

I thought I had a different uh different slide as well, but I I didn't bring it.

Um currently the traffic uh division writes the majority of the tickets, which is the majority of the enforcement.

Um our main goal is traffic enforcement, trash crash investigations, and uh dignitary and funeral escorts.

Um so our people are out there um doing traffic enforcement, and just last month we were up about 21%.

We do the majority, the district stations because they're so short in personnel, um, they used to have a traffic car um years years ago, and every station eliminated that traffic car um to do just traffic enforcement as well.

We're trying to bring that back.

Uh we have what's called the solo response team, and they are an on-call basis.

They are officers that are assigned at stations or or different assignments, and um they can go to their station and be the traffic car for that station, or if we're in need of a traffic operation, a wave or a directed enforcement, then we will detail them to our department and and do that with them.

So the traffic do you know when that program, the traffic car program was eliminated?

I'm sorry, traffic cars when they were eliminated.

Oh I want to say pre-COVID, like around COVID, maybe maybe COVID pre-COVID.

One car per station that was just dedicated to traffic.

At least at minimum, yeah.

Yes, sir.

What do you what do you attribute uh the increase in citations this year on?

I mean, are you spending more time on it?

Are you being more intentional?

Has staffing increased?

Why why is it up?

So I joined, I was promoted and joined in 2023 in about September.

And that was my first meeting in front of the Board of Supervisors with then Commander Nicole Jones and uh Supervisor Mandelman.

Um, and it was our priority.

Nicole uh Commander Jones, now DC Jones, and I sat down and said, This is our priority.

This is our shop, this is traffic enforcement.

Um, the Board of Supervisors, they are asking for more enforcement.

So we are going to have more enforcement.

So I turned to our officers and said, you know, I looked at their performance and I started doing performance reviews saying part of your job is traffic enforcement, we need to see more proactive.

Um we incorporated nationwide uh models, the wave model and directed enforcement, um, where instead of sending an officer out to a location um every single day at the same time where people get used to it, you split the times up, you it's kind of a surprise.

So they don't know when it's gonna be there.

So people's behaviors change.

Uh we reached out to every district captain and asked them what are their problem spots to go to their community meetings and ask their members where are people complaining?

Where are the traffic issues?

And we would do directed enforcement with their so we we took our people out to those places and and did traffic enforcement, and then our our traffic numbers uh went up.

And you you mentioned that you're you're not allowed to set quotas for you know how many citations to give.

Um what can you do?

And you know, how how do you um how do you kind of enforce this?

In performance reviews.

So part of their job is traffic enforcement.

Our goal is to change people's behavior while they're driving.

So that's when a person an officer would have the choice to say this violation is so egregious, you I mean, there's a you're getting a citation, or maybe the person just depending on the circumstances, um, that might they might say you have an advisement, you know, please be careful, watch the signs.

Um for example, Market Street right now.

Um it's very confusing with the signage.

We have a lot of people from out of the city and out of the state who visit, and they are truly lost on the street, and they're they're confused, they're lost.

So, you know, officers saying what I'd rather give them an advisement.

As long as they are doing a traffic enforcement and changing that person's behavior to have them drive better, um, that is a win.

And so that's part of the traffic performance that we can that we can base the um the information or base the base the inform that we can gather information from.

Do you have an estimate of the advisements, warnings versus citations?

I would say it's maybe about 20%.

Um, 20% of 20% of the citations.

So if there's gonna be a hundred citations, maybe 20% of that would be advisements.

Colleagues, any questions?

Sorry, I've missed your name and title.

Oh, Captain Pete Shields.

Captain Pete Shields, thank you so much for being here and answering our questions.

Um so I want to go back to the citations.

Um the report in the jury found that enforcement decreases the severity of injuries and fatalities.

Um, and so when citations are increased, there are less injuries and fatalities, and the converse is true.

And I know you mentioned earlier about admonishments.

Um so I just want to understand, you know, looking at the 10 years since Vision Zero was implemented, um, number of citations dropped by 95% from more than 120,000 in 2014 to a little over 4,000 in 2022, before recently creeping back up in uh 2024 to 15,000 and a half.

I think it's in figure four of the report if we can pull that up.

So are you saying that if we saw a graph that includes the admonishments, we would see similar levels of citations and admonishments combined in 2014 as in 2024?

Would we see the same numbers?

Would we yeah, would we see, you know, a more level?

No, I don't believe so.

Um I I think the numbers would be higher, but due to staffing, for example, we had about 100, maybe 80 to 100, uh, what they call four boys motorcycle officers back in 2014, and I have 20 right now.

So staffing levels are severely um affected.

Um before in 2014, an officer could write a lot of fix it tickets, expired registration, tinted windows, something hanging from the rear view mirror.

Um state law prohibits that now.

We can't go after those.

Those were a lot of what they call like the low-hanging fruit, you know, they write a fix it ticket and they would get a stat.

So those numbers were very high.

Um, most likely because officers did not have to go to court, people weren't gonna contest it, they're just gonna fix it.

So they're very easy citations to write back then.

Now we don't have that.

We have to have a moving violation that we see someone run a red light, go through stop sign, um, uh, something to that to that effect.

So I think the number would be a little bit higher, but I don't think you we would see an equal apples to apples um relationship with including the admonishments.

Thank you.

I think that's important because if we are talking about admonishments also contributing to changing people's behavior, if if the only explanation is staffing, um, we would also see a drop in the earlier years before 2020, before staffing fell off.

Um in figure four, it shows staffing falling off after 2020, but citations were already declining.

Um, and I might I imagine admonishments were also in there, but as you're saying, they're not they're not coming up with the difference, right?

It's not like citations are going down, therefore, SP is actually doing admonishments more to make up for that enforcement gap.

Yeah, that no.

Okay, thank you.

And I do want to just clarify the um the stops regarding the tinted windows and the hanging things, fixtures from the Reaver Mirrors was um subject of a lot of controversy because of the the racialized biases.

Um I I'm not I just want to understand um why the drop-off and enforcement on that is related at all to the drop-off of enforcing moving violations.

So back when I was much younger, young much police officer, on patrol, we were required to have at least two moving violations or two violations because the law was not in effect then.

So every officer would come in with at least two citations.

Okay, this was 2014 and prior.

Um so if you're busy in your day, and you it's like, oh, I can get a really quick, I can get a really quick ticket.

I can get, I see something hanging, I can get a quick ticket.

Um, I can get a quick ticket.

Um with staffing dropping with that law in place.

Um, also for me, I didn't never wanted to come to the I'm giving my personal.

I never want to go to traffic court.

I didn't want to, I I don't like overtime, I didn't need it.

I, you know, once I'm done with work, I want to go home.

Um a fix-it ticket, you won't have to go to traffic court.

So if you have if we're required to write a ticket, I'm gonna write a fix it ticket.

I don't have to go to traffic court.

Um, since all the laws changed, since the department policy has changed, since um all of that's changed.

Um those all dropped off.

So there was a huge drop in in tickets in that way.

COVID hits, we were told do not have any contact with anyone.

So then we raised, we had new officers coming in, and they were being told do not talk to anybody.

So now we're we're we're encouraging, we're enforcing uh no contact.

And so then getting getting that behavior changed, moving forward, having them actually, you know, you need to go out and make contact with people, you need to advise ticket, um, do something um for this because we're out of that era, we're moving forward.

So it's just a series of changes, events that happened, everything dropped off, and we are working hard to get it back up.

Um with the admonishments, I'm not saying it's going to replace the numbers back to 2014, but it will show an increase and getting credit and be able being able to quantify um changing people's behavior, I think would be important to show that um, you know, we are bringing those numbers up, we are bringing enforcement up, and you know, together with education um with MTA with with the with um redesigning streets, I think all of that would be very proactive.

That's very helpful.

Thank you.

Um do you agree with the civil jury's finding that to help rebuild a culture of traffic enforcement, SFP would have to take ownership of street safety, including reporting regularly and at the highest level on the violations issued for traffic fatalities and severe injuries.

So if I'm hearing that correctly, is that you so basically like the presentations to Supervisor Mandelman, we do that uh quarterly.

Um, we have a meeting with him next week.

So reporting that.

Um I believe that, and I love the recommendation that it comes from the mayor and the chief, and the messaging gets pushed down.

Um Captain Pete Shields at traffic, I don't have power.

Like I can't, you know, I can't go out and tell an officer at mission station you have to go out and do this.

So having having the support of um the mayor and the chief and having the report from the grand jury and having the support from the supervisor saying this is the priority of San Francisco, we want safer streets, ingraining that into officers, and graining that into their everyday work, I think would be hugely important.

Um, and I yeah, I have I have I do agree with that.

I do agree that reporting back and saying this is what we've done, this is what we can do better.

Um yes, we need, you know, for example, our motorcycles at at traffic, they're they're 2013.

They don't even make parts for them anymore.

We're it's almost like duct tape and and luck that they're staying together.

We we just we are writing grants to get new equipment, um, but increased technology, better equipment, um, LIDAR, getting LIDAR on each one of the bikes.

Um, we have the the training, the officers are trained to do the operations.

We just need the staffing, and we need the equipment.

Um, and you know, we're we're ready, we're ready to work, we're ready to to make the streets safer.

Um, whenever I give we have our directed enforcement or wave program, we have a big calendar, and our officers go out there and they're, you know, you can listen to them on the radio, and they're they're out there um doing enforcement.

So um this is an exciting time.

Thank you.

And then lastly, um, I know deterrence is is a huge part of enforcement, and while staffing levels are not what the department wants it to be, is it at all possible to place those vehicles in high injury corridors, even if they're not staffed the whole day?

So it kind of works.

That does kind of work.

So they do that by the airport, right?

They have the the police car right at the exit, so it's enforced through cameras, and so people's initial reaction is to slow down.

But if you see that car every single day, you get used to it, right?

Um this one we came up with the waves.

We use the nationwide model of the waves program, so it's alternate, so we could use a car, use officers, um, use our SRT people out there.

Um, and kind of like the surprise method.

I also think it's important.

Um, we've been working um with the sign, um, the sign with the with the city, the signage people.

Um, we wanted to put the fines, minimum five fine 500.

I think when people see what the punishment would be, the fines, the money talks.

And um I've I was in Europe and and driving, and it says here's your fine, you know, and you automatically just go, oh, you know, the cameras are on you, and you want to change your behavior, and that's what we want to do here is change people's behavior.

So um I do think that there is um there's potential for a lot of growth, and we're ready to jump on board and be part of it.

Thank you so much, Captain.

I appreciate Candor and your dedication.

Um, thanks for answering my questions.

Colleagues, if there's no other questions, um Captain Shield, thank you.

And I would like to invite SFMTA up.

Um, believe we have you all Ramos to share um.

Do you have uh any um presentation or responses or if we jump right into questions?

Thank you, uh Vice Chair Sauter, uh Joel Ramos with the SFMTA local government affairs manager.

Uh I have the distinct privilege of having uh Shannon Haik with me, our livable streets program manager, and I think she'd be a whole lot more adept at answering these questions than I will, so if you don't mind, I'd like to invite her to step up and respond.

Hi, Shannon Hake.

I oversee our street safety work at SFMTA.

Um, we are very appreciative of the civil grand jury report um and have really taken the recommendations to heart.

Uh in the past few months since the civil grand jury report was issued.

Uh, we've really doubled down on some of our proven safety treatments on our streets, um, stepping into that automated enforcement role with our speed safety cameras.

We issued over 300,000 warning tickets uh over the summer months, and we are seeing vehicles really slow down in the first month of uh issuing citations, which we switched over to on August 5th.

We've only issued about 20,000.

Um, so we're really seeing a significant decline in speeds, um, and we are collecting more data on our streets now.

Uh so we're really excited about uh about seeing some of that behavior change.

Uh we're also working on daylighting, we uh day lit about 2,000 intersections near uh near schools this summer, um, and that really makes school intersections a lot safer for the smallest San Franciscans uh walking to school.

We've been reducing speed limits, approving new quick build projects.

Um we are uh installing some left-turn safety treatments, which um in a lot of my work uh there's never such a thing as like entirely 100% compliance, um, but we're seeing 99% uh safe turn speeds when we install some of these treatments.

Um, and that is really on top of all of the work that we're doing kind of behind the scenes.

Um that's retiming traffic signals, that is um working on things like pedestrian head starts so that uh so that people crossing the street uh have a have a chance to start walking before uh vehicles get a green light, uh putting in rapid flashing beacons to make unsignalized uh crossings a little bit more safe.

And all of that, all of those, all of that work is actually on top of how we're recommitting to Vision Zero.

We've been meeting with uh other city agencies, including the police department, the fire department, parks and rec, uh the Department of Public Works, uh the school district, on really recommitting to uh to Vision Zero and to our street safety work and recognizing that it's a shared responsibility.

Uh and uh Supervisor Melgar's uh Safe Streets Act has really helped uh lay the foundation for that.

Um so we we have been hard at work uh and we are um we're planning on bringing a revised Vision Zero policy to the SFMTA board by the end of this year.

Uh but I'm happy to answer any questions uh that you have about um how we redesign our streets.

Thank you for the overview and um I'm happy to hear updates on all of your work.

I think there's a lot of um promising work that you're doing, and and um yet I want more and I want uh I want it faster.

Um, you know, a few a few questions to get us started.

Um can you share a little bit about you know I saw in the in the civil grand jury's um comments and recommendations kind of this shift um to area-based safety plans um interventions, and I know you've done that maybe through this this lens of community-based transportation plans for different neighborhoods.

How do those work?

How are you thinking about those, and what is the future of that program?

Yeah, so that really uh that varies from kind of the typical work that we do where we look at a problem corridor and we say this corridor has has too many injuries or or there's something going on here, we need to we need to change it, and instead really looks at an entire neighborhood.

Um we've done the Bayview Community Based Transportation Plan, the Western Edition Community Based Transportation Plan, a number of other uh neighborhood plans, and those really bring together all sorts of different treatments, not just focusing on speed or not just focusing on safe crossings, but bringing all of the tools we have to a neighborhood.

Um, and we've been trying to strengthen that work and trying to revise how we work with communities, really like keep that ongoing engagement happening in a way that is not just we're here to talk to you about this project, but instead really building those relationships with the community.

Um you touched on daylighting.

Can we go back to that?

I would love to hear it's my understanding you've got all of the um all of the schools done a lot of the high injury corridors and intersections.

What comes next and what do we need to truly be in compliance with state law next?

So next comes the rest of the city, and we're planning out that process right now.

Uh so we have a plan to daylight every intersection in the city uh with our red paint, and we're also looking at uh the hardening recommendations that were outlined in the silver injury report and figuring out a way that communities can use that reclaimed public space for things like bike corrals or for um for parklets and things of that nature.

Um so we are right now really focused on just bringing red paint out to every uh intersection in the city.

Uh you're right that we first started with the high injury network, then we moved on to schools.

Um, and now we're looking at really the entire rest of the city.

And that also includes going back to those previous intersections and lengthening them because our daylighting standards have changed over time.

Uh when we first started daylighting the high injury network, it was 10 feet, now it's 20 feet, and that is also bringing us into compliance with state law.

I'm glad to hear of that, and I'm encouraged to hear that.

I think um, you know, uh anecdotally, I've certainly observed um what Ms.

Bloomberg spoke of about, you know, they're actually you think of only good things come from daylighting, but then they actually they open up um the intersection and have unintended consequences of of um maybe increasing speed.

Also, also a lot of people using that to cut corners now.

Um so I would encourage you to do as much hardening as possible.

I also going back to like the toolkit, it feels like certainly compared to Europe, but but even here in the Bay Area, like our tools for what we do, sometimes to me at least feel a little bit more limited.

It seems like we don't really kind of get into the into using things like planters, things like um, you know, small roundabouts.

I mean, you go to Berkeley and you see that everywhere to calm streets, um, but we don't do that, and it seems like maybe an opportunity to go further.

Um, in any case, um, I would love to hear a little bit about the future or the progress of resetting the neighborhood traffic calming program.

Um, I think that's been frankly a really big disappointment to see that that um saw so many delays.

We're trying to get a um a speed bump in front of an elementary school that was approved and awarded in 2022 still.

Um, and I've been told it might come next year.

Um, and we don't have a process now for people to request neighborhood traffic coming in their neighborhood.

Um so what comes next?

How do we get that back?

Yeah, we're shifting uh right now we have put the application-based program on hold while we're shifting to a proactive program.

So the first part in that is uh building everything that we committed to building, so that uh that speed hump in front of that elementary school.

Um so that's our first step, and then we want to start tying traffic calming into a proactive approach.

So going uh street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood, when we're doing other work in a neighborhood and we identify that uh speed is an issue on certain streets, including traffic calming as some of the tools that we bring uh to that neighborhood, rather than requiring neighbors to identify the need and request um traffic calming from us.

It also um I think as Ms.

Bloomberg mentioned, uh it it's uh distinctly inequitable uh when we're asking residents to identify an issue and um those with the resources uh to come to the government and ask for this treatment.

Um, and we want to bring the treatments where they're needed the most without having to be alerted uh to them by the community.

Do you have any sense of when that new approach will be ready?

Oh, do you know?

By the end of this year?

But it could be the end of next year.

Yeah, I think it might be the end of next year in 2026.

And then it seems like automated speed enforcement has been such a success, and you know, I'm eager for more.

Um we have three in our district, and and they're um, you know, they're already proving to be really, really effective.

I know we're under limitations from the state.

Do you remember off the top of your head when that pilot might be able to expand?

Yeah, we've uh so uh you're right.

Uh we got 33 cameras through that uh program, uh AB 645 that allowed us and five other California cities to install automated speed enforcement.

Um our cameras are up and running and changing behavior, as you've mentioned.

Uh we there is no uh no immediate plan for being able to expand that.

Of the six cities that were authorized to participate in the pilot program, we're the only one uh with cameras up and running now.

Um there is a lot of lead up that requires uh the use of this technology, but we're hopeful that once other cities get their cameras up and running, if they see similar results to what we're seeing, um we anticipate that the state might want to act on this uh earlier than the end of the five-year pilot period and perhaps allow that that to be used in cities across California.

Okay.

One more question.

Um I think there was this idea from some of your responses and from uh some of the civil grand jury, this idea of a dedicated outreach person per supervisors district um to really help you know identify some of these problem areas.

Give a response to that to that suggestion.

Thank you for the question, Vice Chair Soder.

We have expanded our street outreach team within the communications outreach and engagement team.

And so I think of people like Bobby Lee, for example, and we've got uh Via Trice uh uh who's also working very closely with uh with the Spanish speaking community.

Um but we're doing our best to expand the the communications as much as possible.

Um we are full believers in working closely with the community and making sure that we get it right.

It's part of the reason why so frequently I'm on the phone with you and uh your colleagues and making sure that staff has um what we are presenting um uh accurate and uh are reflecting what the community's needs are.

Um it is a value that we are we're absolutely beholden to and we are working uh as best we can to expand it.

And one of the most recent actions was um yeah, expanding the street outreach capacity.

Um in the past, we were trying to uh to do what was called individual um community liaisons, and that was just like regular other staffers who was doing other work, and then they would volunteer to go to other community meetings regularly to be a part of that.

So we're looking at expanding that model again.

That was pre-COVID and before we were in the sort of fiscal crisis that we were in, but um we're committed to the value, and where there's uh will, there will be a way to follow up on that.

Thank you.

And one quick follow-up on capacity.

Um, you know, a lot of what we're talking about is is the data and is the outreach and identifying areas, but then once all that is done, of course, you know, those go to to orders of the sign shop or they go to your engineering teams to actually go out and and place things in the road or make those physical modifications.

Is that a bottleneck or where where is it where are staffing levels, um, you know, backlogs of things with those departments right now?

Um, because I I it feels like that's not talked about enough.

Yeah, the uh the sign shop and the um and the paint shop are working harder and we're asking more of them uh than they were built for, frankly.

Um I've been doing this kind of work for the last 20 years in this city, and the city has transformed dramatically, just like in the last 10 years from the way that we had previously.

And so um they are working all hours, all hands on deck all the time, and um they're doing as best as they can, but they were I hate to say it, but they were sort of built and designed for a different city.

And so we are evolving and they are doing phenomenal work um in keeping up with demands as best as possible when projects like Valencia Street come up or like the changing around all the streets that we're seeing in the SOMA, for example, or recently they just passed a project in the tender tender line on Larkin Street for a quick bill project there.

Um, so there's a whole lot more demand being placed on them, and um, on top of that, our streets are being activated a whole lot more.

We're getting, you know, a lot more um street events that are happening now.

Um so they really are being pushed um like at capacity, but um it is uh it is our goal to deliver these projects as quickly as possible.

Um, and we I'm committed, my team as the local government affairs team is committed to making sure that the progress is transparent, and when we do get inquiries, we get back to the folks as quickly as possible to make sure that they're aware of where these projects are that they're anticipating.

Thank you.

Questions for my colleagues.

Thank you.

Um thank you for the presentation and answering our questions.

Um the jury found that MTA's traffic calming division is is reactive by design, and it seems that MTA is gonna roll out something different that is more proactive and equitable.

Um, and I do think that that's very important as the jury found that the past traffic calming strategy favored wealthier neighborhoods.

So I just I just want to get on the record clearly, in the spirit of equity and proactivity, is MTA's new traffic calming strategy going to take into account collision frequency, percentages of older residents, children, people with disabilities, and racial and socio-economic indicators.

Absolutely.

Yeah, these are things that are most important to us, and um looking at our work through an equity lens, we are absolutely committed to that approach.

Thank you so much.

Thank you, Supervisor.

Okay.

Thank you, you all.

Okay.

I again want to appreciate all the work and responses here today.

I want to um remind folks that the at the public safety neighborhood services committee next week.

There'll be a hearing on uh traffic enforcement.

So there'll be a continuation uh of this conversation and much work ahead of us.

Um, as part of this process, and you'll hear this for all three items today.

Uh the board must provide our response through a resolution.

Um so I have drafted that resolution.

Copies have been distributed to the committee this morning, and I will um read this into record, and then after that we'll ask um the chair to open it for public comment.

So if you'll uh bear with me here as we go through this to read into the record, I would be making a motion um directing the clerk to prepare a response to the superior court.

I will go through the proposed responses before we go to public comment.

So regarding finding number one, which reads that SFPD fails to adequately enforce traffic laws, SFPD staffing and operation choices reflect a lack of focus of traffic on traffic safety and enforcement.

The resultant plunge in enforcement activities has led to increased risks to all road users.

I am proposing that we direct the clerk to respond with the following.

Resolve that the Board of Supervisors reports to the presiding judge of the Superior Court that they agree with finding number F1.

Regarding finding four, which reads the sustained community focused outreach is lacking public buy-ins, is crucial to making timely improvements for street safety to support implementation of citywide proactive street safety plans.

SFMTA needs more sustained data-driven and neighborhood-based public outreach and communication.

I am proposing that we direct the clerk to respond with the following.

Resolved that the Board of Supervisors reports to the presiding judge of the Superior Court that they partially disagree with finding number F4 for the reasons following.

Regarding recommendation 1.4, which reads by June 30th, 2026, the public safety and neighborhood services committee of the Board of Supervisors should continue to hold regular hearings on traffic enforcement to attract implementation of the plan from recommendation 1.1.

I'm proposing that we direct the clerk to respond with the following resolve that the Board of Supervisors reports that recommendation number R 1.4 has been implemented as per board file number 220 and 961.

Regarding recommendation 4.1, which reads by March 31st, 2026, SFMTA should assign a point of contact for outreach within each supervisorial district, allowing SFMTA to work more closely with members of the Board of Supervisors and to build and maintain relationships with key stakeholders in the community on all roadways and transit issues.

I am proposing that we direct the clerk to respond with the following that the Board of Supervisors reports that recommendation number R 4.1 will not be implemented because it is not warranted or reasonable as the Board of Supervisors lacks jurisdiction to direct the SFMTA to take such action.

So thanks for letting me read all that.

And with that, um, Chair Fielder, if you might open it to public comment.

All right.

Um Madam Clerk, can we open public comment?

Yes, members of the public who wish to speak on this item should line up now along the side by the windows.

All speakers will have one minute.

My name's Bart Fisher.

I live in Diamond Heights.

Um I just wanted to, it's anecdotal, but I just wanted to let you know that the police enforcement is not just theoretical, it actually happens.

I was at um the intersection at uh Bosworth and uh and Elk and Congo earlier this year, and uh the I was crossing Bosworth over to the uh Congo side, and the light turned and I wanted to thank the SFMPA for the delayed um for the delayed uh uh letting uh giving us more time so um to cross the um the crosswalk turned uh white pedestrian crossing and I went to step in the road and I looked and a car blew through going Bosworth on Bosworth right through the red light in front of me.

And had I not been paying attention, I would have been probably hit and killed.

Um what was interesting about this is this is not uncommon.

I walk a lot in the city, but what was in common about this is there was a police car officer sitting at Congo in line at the line, and he I I saw him and he looked at me, and um Thank you for your comments.

I expected him to go through the chair, sir.

Thank you.

And it thank you for your comments.

I'm happy to hear you after.

Thank you.

Next speaker, please.

Good morning.

My name is Ian Nobisel, and I speak on behalf of myself and of Connect F's members who want our city to be both safe and functional.

We are very grateful for the grand jury's work in exposing the failures of Vision Zero, and we agree with the civil grand jury report that state law enforcement plays a crucial role, enforcements to eliminate fatalities and reduce collisions in our street.

This means that extra police resources must not be added, not diverted so that staffing levels are not diminished, and officers are unfairly blamed.

We also agree that there must be a stronger emphasis on education and compliance for drivers, pedestrians, cyclists.

We need we need to take responsibility for safety.

Street redesign has spectacularly failed, as is demonstrated with the 2014 and 2024 Vision Zero numbers showing 115% increase in traffic fatalities instead of this disastrous street designs that worsened congestion and fatalities.

Thank you for your comments.

Thank you.

Next speaker, please.

So this is my recent publication.

It's called Morning Star.

It has a pretty good layout of San Francisco's um uh field analysis that I've been able to determine.

Long story short is if you want to affect the mind, you can induce the body.

There's two ways to control behavior.

You can impact the mind or you can impact the body.

But some of the product offerings in San Francisco are detrimental to the population.

And if you also want to impact behavior, you also have to come up from a level of governance to make sure that people are not being induced towards recklessness.

But I invite you to read this book.

It is made global.

So I think it would help bring attention to the city.

Uh and how to improve its city structures and public offerings and enforcement or lack thereof.

Thank you for your comments.

Next speaker, please.

Um, all right.

Uh good morning, supervisors Fielder Sauder and Cheryl.

Uh my name is Fiona Yim and I'm with Walk San Francisco.

We advocate on behalf of everyone who walks in our city.

I want to thank the civil grand jury for taking on an issue that affects everyone in our city every day.

Traffic safety.

Traffic crashes kill around 40 people and severely injure more than 500 people each year in San Francisco.

Every 15 hours on average, someone is transported to SF General for being seriously injured in a traffic crash.

Successful vision zero cities addressed street city.

Oh, sorry, street design, speeding and uh driver behavior in a range of ways to ensure safe mobility for all, and it works.

Um, as a civil grant jury report states, while the city looks ahead to the vision future vision zero.

Now is not the time to say we failed and back down, but to learn from our mistakes and make a real commitment to safer streets.

We're so grateful to all of you for supporting the Street Safety Act passed earlier this week.

This is how Vision Zero becomes a success story.

Um we're excited about the okay, thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for the commenters.

And um, we're limiting public comment to one minute today in the interest of time.

However, my staff member Fang Han will be available to receive your comments that have not been heard publicly and to take note and we'll distribute that to the offices as well.

And with that, public comment is now closed.

Sorry, yeah.

Do we have any additional public speakers?

That concludes public comment.

Thank you.

Seeing no other public commenters, public comment is now closed.

Yes, Chair, I would move to amend item two as presented earlier.

And on the motion to amend, Vice Chair Sauter.

I Vice Chair Sauter, aye.

Member Sheryl?

Member Sheryl, aye, Chair Filder, aye.

Chair Fielder, I have three ayes.

Thank you.

The motion passes.

I now move to send item two to the full board with the recommendation.

Yes, and on that motion to forward the item to the full board, the amended item to the full board with a positive recommendation.

Vice Chair Sauter.

Aye.

Vice Chair Sauter, aye.

Member Sheryl.

Member Sheryl, aye.

Chair Filder, aye.

Chair Filder, I have three ayes.

Thank you.

The motion passes.

And on the matter of item number one, I would uh make a motion to move to file item number one, please.

Yes, and on the motion to file item one.

Vice Chair Sauter.

Aye.

Vice Chair Sauter, aye.

Member Sherl?

Member Sheryl, aye.

Chair Filder?

Aye.

Chair Filter, I have three ayes.

Thank you.

The motion passes.

All right.

And now we will hear and move on to.

Madam Clerk, please call items three and four together.

Yes, item number three is a hearing on the 2024-2025 civil grand jury report entitled Capacity to Serve Setting Social Services Nonprofits Up for Success.

Item number four is a board response, excuse me, a resolution responding to the presiding judge of the Superior Court on the findings and recommendations contained in the 2024-2025 civil grand jury report entitled Capacity to Serve, Setting Social Services Nonprofits Up for Success, and urging the mayor to cause the implementation of accepted findings and recommendations through his department heads and through the development of the annual budget.

Thank you, Madam Clerk.

And today, Mr.

Nick Weininger will present this report on behalf of the civil grand jury.

And again, Director Kittler will be presenting on behalf of the mayor's office and city departments.

Supervisor Cheryl will be leading this hearing on this item today.

So, Supervisor Cheryl, please go ahead.

Thank you, Chair Fielder.

Um, I want to start by welcoming and thanking uh Nicholas Weininger.

Am I pronouncing your name correctly?

Weininger.

Yes, that's right.

Great, thank you.

Um, who served on the civil grand jury and is here to present on behalf of those who worked on this.

Um, you know, as this report noted, the city is increasingly relied on nonprofits to deliver really critical social services over the past 20 years, and um we now spend almost five billion dollars on these programs, which is a more than 3x increase from 20 uh 2003, and and amounts to about half the increase in our city budget over that period.

Um of the social service spending about 20% of that money over a billion dollars is spent through contracts with nonprofit community-based organizations, and that's a share that is also increased disproportionately um over recent years, as as your report notes.

And so, you know, what's clear really is that we need these community-based organizations at a base level, and quite frankly, we need them to successfully perform um their contracted obligations.

Um yet, you know, I think we're we're really facing two significant issues here that your report highlighted, and I I appreciate that.

One is our contracting and procurement system is is overcomplicated and it's burdensome, and it makes many uh nonprofits frankly reluctant to work with the city, and and for those that are willing to work with the city, it's causes some massive funding delays.

Um, and second, you know, in the event that a nonprofit does not comply with as a contractual obligations, our oversight systems here in the city um and this is systems at large, um, are probably not agile and adept enough right now to escalate to ensure effective spending of our funds.

And so, you know, I think many of us found this report to be illuminating.

I personally didn't find it to be shocking, but it's really clear that more needs to be done for greater transparency and really building that public trust to ensure that we're delivering the services that our neediest and most vulnerable communities need.

So with that, sir, we're very eager to hear what the civil grand jury has to say on this matter.

So thank you, and uh please go ahead.

Absolutely, thank you, Supervisor Sherrill, for that uh excellent uh summary and detailed engagement with our report.

Thank you, supervisors, for all the attention you're paying to this matter.

Uh SFGov TV, I'm I'm sharing slides on the public PC, if we can get those uh slides up.

Great.

Um, so this topic may seem to be a little bit in the weeds, it's about you know procurement and management skills.

I wanted to start by saying a little bit about why this is such an important topic that we chose to devote the time and energy to make a report out of it.

So, first of all, if you are an ordinary San Franciscan who follows the local news, you will see a steady stream of news stories year after year, alleging that you know this or that nonprofit organization that received grant money from the city has misspent it in some you know particularly you know outrageous way that prompts investigations and audits and the like.

And that's a public trust issue.

I really loved Supervisor Fielder's point at the beginning of this hearing that the civil grand jury can function to help improve public trust uh between our citizens and our government.

Uh, and hopefully, you know, trying to investigate how we make sure we do this stuff with integrity and how we do this stuff with effectiveness and efficiency as well, can build that trust.

Secondly, both the financial and the substantive stakes are quite high, as Supervisor Sherrill noted, this is more than a billion dollars a year in grant money that we're talking about, and the kinds of people that it serves are some of our most vulnerable residents.

We're talking about unhoused people, we're talking about folks struggling with mental illness, uh, young children who need uh child care services they might not otherwise be able to afford.

Right?

These are crucial services from an equity perspective and a city uh life perspective.

So when we looked into this, I'll just give a very, very quick summary of where we found the issues.

Um, first of all, we talked about uh management capacity.

We consistently found that these grantee organizations have a great deal of trouble attracting and retaining folks with the right skills to effectively manage all this grant money.

It's you know, it's not a small or trivial thing to make sure that millions or tens of millions of dollars are well spent.

You need the right people to do it.

You know, when we look at case studies of where there was mismanagement, that lack of people often showed up as a root cause.

Uh overcomplicated procurement.

Um, this is an issue that is not just about uh social services grants.

Uh I would uh encourage folks to read the Spur report that came out uh in April that talks about how this manifests in city government procurement generally.

Um but certainly we found that the folks we talked to said this is a huge issue for getting grant money to the right people in a timely manner to address real needs.

Um we found also that city staff aren't always equipped well enough to navigate this process, and that's partly because the process is so complicated, it's hard to equip them well to do it.

So that relates to the prior finding.

And then, as you said, uh Supervisor Cheryl, there is an agility issue with when our extensive monitoring and audits find an issue.

Uh, how do we translate that in a timely manner into corrective action?

Since this is a legislatively focused audience, I want to dive into this process complexity issue because I think there's a particular dynamic that's worth calling out.

So, what we found when we looked at the city's regulations, uh, especially uh chapter 21 of the administrative code, is that there is this default process for procuring a grant or a contract from the city that requires a great number of bidding and evaluation and review steps.

There's a lot of veto points, there's a lot of potential sources of burden and delay.

And that there have been several, you know, times when this has caused known problems with getting grants for critical social services out in a timely manner.

And the response to this historically has been to create ordinances that make a carve out that say if you are granting funds for this particular class of services, then you may skip these this step, that step, the other step in the course of the process.

And you know, this is a well-intentioned thing, often you know driven by uh great urgency to address real emergencies on our streets.

But what we found in our investigation is that this has an unintended consequence, that the complexity of the legal rules then that all these carve-outs create itself becomes a source of burden and delay, right?

If you are somebody trying to get one of these grants out, and you're not sure whether it qualifies under the 21G exemption or the 21A exemption, right?

You have to spend time understanding that, you may have to spend time asking the city attorney for their opinion, right?

All of that actually, you know, can make it harder, uh, to do routine, you know, grant making as part of this process.

And what that indicates to us is that there's an unmet need here for thinking more from first principles about how do you do efficient procurement with integrity, with effectiveness, but how do you minimize veto points?

How do you minimize steps of burden and delay across the board rather than for a specific case?

And oh, do we not have the the vision?

Uh the last slide from uh I don't look around for Michael here.

Um I had a slide on several of the recommendations for which we asked uh the board of supervisors to respond to, uh, but I'll just talk to that slide very briefly.

Um, you know, again, one of them is about, you know, we we urge the board to enact an ordinance which rethinks this from first principles, which rethinks it generally.

Uh, and we know the devil is in the details there.

We suggested a few possible uh things to try and modify, but but ultimately, you know, the the principle is rather than creating more special purpose carve-outs, do general purpose reform.

Um, and then you know, I think the other really important uh recommendation we had to respond off the top of my head is something like 4.2, which is around getting accountability on how long it takes when you identify a mismanagement issue to actually get to that correction, right?

Because you need to know how long it takes in order to know you know what could you do to make it faster, what do you want to do about this?

And our our hope and belief is that if you have greater accountability, ultimately that leads to greater public trust in the process, and ultimately more importantly, perhaps, it leads to better quality of service provision, uh, better quality of life for all city residents, but especially for these most vulnerable residents.

So that's my presentation.

That's what I've got, and I'm happy to take questions.

And thank you once again for all the attention and uh thought you've given to this.

Um, well, thank you very much.

Um it is also my understanding that the Office of the Mayor and the Office of the Controller are here to answer questions.

Um we may ask you back up for additional questions.

Do any of my colleagues have questions for Mr.

Weininger?

I'm sorry.

Great.

So we may ask you some questions later, but um now um could the representative of the office of the mayor please speak to the department responses uh to the report findings and recommendations.

Good morning again, supervisors.

Um, Sophia Kittler, Mayor's budget office.

Um I really want to thank, I'm sorry I did not properly note your name at the beginning for the presenter for really framing up that issue, I think, really nicely, and and if I may be candid, I think um more accurately than it felt like in the matrix.

Um we cannot understate the complexity of these systems.

Um, and I think walking through exactly how difficult navigating these procurement and granting systems are gets to the root of this challenge.

Um, we agree wholeheartedly that it is complex and confusing, that it takes a long time, that we can and should do more to help both our nonprofit partners and our city staff working on these procurement processes.

We have a lot of this work underway already.

We are looking at streamlining funding and contracting.

We are trying to, we are trying to take a big kind of bottoms-up approach rather than kind of like a you know cutting around the edges approach.

Uh the controller's office is preparing a procurement guide for the next year to kind of help staff through these things.

Uh this was not in the presentation.

I'm responding specifically to what was in the matrix.

Um, we felt that there was an not an accusation, but an implication that our staff was not skilled enough.

And and we really wanted to push back on that part line in particular.

We think our staff is very skilled, and for exactly the reasons that you outlined, it is incredibly challenging to understand how to work through these processes, no matter how long you've been here, no matter how good you are at your job.

Um, and so again, we need to invest more in not only in training, but in making the systems make sense for our employees, for our partners and for our residents.

Um, and then finally, I'll speak briefly to the monitoring question.

Um, I think that we our monitoring system is designed to believe that our nonprofit partners are doing the work of the city.

Um, it has structures in place to catch bad behavior, but when it is simply a question of how do you navigate our complex systems, um, do you have the staff on hand and are we giving you enough resourcing to pay that staff to keep up with our systems changes when we have, for example, a different technological system across six different each of six different departments trying with each with their own set of rules.

Um I I think our monitoring system actually does quite well and we can and should strengthen it.

Um the city is taking steps to to strengthen those risk assessment tools to try and catch the truly bad actors sooner and separate, but we want to separate that out from things where we are we are relying on community who really are rooted in social services and delivering to our city's most vulnerable residents and not smacking them over the head with rules because um because they are social service staff at heart and don't have the resources to really invest in, for example, great technology or a great CFO.

Um I would defer to Laura Marshall from the controller's office who is much much more versed in all of this and can talk through all of these pieces, but in general, um I just really wanted to thank the civil grand jury for their really thoughtful presentation, um, emphasize that this is a priority for the mayor to understand how to make government make sense and particularly how to work through these contracting and granting issues to make sure that we are catching bad actors, but really supporting um a system that that helps all of our partners and our employees work better.

Thank you.

Great.

Thank you, Director Kittler.

Um, I think it's as you mentioned, somewhat interesting that this grand jury report comes at a time when we have a mayor who's been especially public on this subject.

So I know it's a focus of the administration.

Um so we're gonna provide um some responses through resolution drafted here today, uh, but in the meantime, I do have some uh some questions about a few of the recommendations um to the board.

Um I'd like to start with recommendation 2.3 that the city should enact an ordinance specifying procurement policy improvements that apply generally to social services, grant making, streamlining processes, clarifying and reducing the reviewers, et cetera.

Um Director Kittler, do you um mind talking about the mayor's office's response to this recommendation?

Um, and specifically what ordinance you're referencing in the mayor's office response, and and also maybe if there are any additional operational directives that may be coming from your office, from the city's attorney office really focused on some of these efficiency reforms.

That is a great question.

Um give me a moment.

I might need to come back to you on that.

Um, better for the city administrative system.

That might be better for the city administrator if there's a representative.

Absolutely, I don't see, but I will text them immediately.

Okay, why don't we skip ahead?

Thank you.

Um, okay, um, budgeting and staffing plan for insurance.

Oh gosh, I'm I'm really getting you twice here, aren't I?

Uh, budgeting and staffing plan for ensuring procurement efficiency.

Um, could you could you just explain the reasoning um on your response uh to this question and just talk a little bit about current staff levels for procurement, right?

So we have um we have been staffing up through the Office of Contract Administration and the GovOps teams, which is an interdepartmental collaboration to figure out how to really kind of take a grassroots approach to what are our systems, how do we take this first principles building up like what do we need to do?

Kind of a pardon the term, like a zero base of what procurement should look like.

We are finding that a lot of these things do require um ballot initiatives to change.

Um, but what we have done is is invest in the Office of Contract and Administration and invest in govern in the GovOps team to make sure that we have adequate resourcing.

We are also working through at the department level, kind of at the granting department level, making sure we're doing a systematic review of making sure that each um department that has a grant portfolio has the appropriate accounting staff, has the appropriate grants compliance staff, that they are in touch with the controller's office on the updated controller's guidance.

Um, I mean, I think an example is this year in the budget we had proposed um some new positions at the Human Rights Commission because we found that they had a number of community development specialists vacant community development specialist positions, which are really kind of program and community people that do great work in determining kind of what sorts of programs we have, but are not from a job class perspective, putting aside the individual doing the work, not um allowed or equipped to do kind of grant compliance work.

Um so we are looking at where grants live, making sure that the departments who have grants have the staff to manage them.

And if we don't have the resources to add the staff to do the appropriately, we move the grants somewhere else.

Um and so that's kind of how we've been taking it.

Is it tops down and bottoms-up approach?

Well, I I appreciate you highlighting that because you talked a little bit before about the skill level of the staff, and I think you you correctly highlighted the fact that we have to make that the staff does have really high skill levels, we just have to make sure the right staff with the right skills are in the right position.

So I appreciate you highlighting that.

And then kind of building off of that, one of the things that stuck out to me, I I personally agree with the skill level of the staff there, but I get the sense that they lack the overall capacity to be able to really let's say be as effective as their skill level is.

That's a terrible question.

Yeah, no, I think.

But really, what I just want to ask about technology, because my sense is that they are underserved by the resources they have and technology and software is a big part of that.

What are you doing and and what can really we do here on the board of supervisors to augment the technology capacity of our contracting teams?

I this is a great question.

So I'll give a couple anecdotes.

First, uh, there are four or five departments who use a particular software system for grants management.

Um because of the particular funding streams of each of those departments and the rules and regulations that come with the funding that they have.

They have each customized that particular software so much that we have found that people who move from one department to another in a new job in the same job classification or or you know a slight promotion, but the same general job function using the same software need to be entirely retrained on that system to understand how it works because it looks so different.

Um similarly, and kind of getting to some of the monitoring questions.

Uh, you know, I think we've seen that with some of the bad actors that we've seen over the past few years in nonprofits, um, there is an inclination to ask for additional documentation for for invoices that get sent so we can kind of figure out, you know, are people submitting receipts for what they say they are billing for, and and kind of how do we catch some of that?

Um, and to move from kind of like a spot check of receipts and documentation at around what we've currently do in many departments, which is is a small percentage of backup documentation, really kind of like as a as a spot check, moving towards full backup documentation for every invoice would require a 10x staff increase for our for our granting.

Um and we can't afford that, right?

Like we just can't.

And so I think what we what what the mayor's office is is working with um granting departments with the controller's office um with some outside partners to understand is what technology is available.

You know, auditing is not a new function.

There's no way there isn't technology for auditing.

How do we leverage technology tools to move that burden off of our again highly skilled staff that just has a workload that that is untenable and that we cannot afford to add additional staff to?

How do we use technology to do that?

Um to be circuitous, back to the first one on the grant management software.

Um one thing that the budget and the mayor's office is looking at is how do we create principles for software systems like grant management software that say these are the things we need you to be able to answer.

Um you don't need every software to be perfectly perfectly attuned to exactly what you need.

We need things to be interoperable, and the first principle should be an interoperability and and um and basic functionality rather than kind of like hyper spending a lot of money, frankly, to hyper tailor everything to exactly what we need in this exact moment, if that makes sense.

Am I explaining myself?

Well, it sounds like you're suggesting that this update and software uh approach would be both cheaper for the city and more efficient in administering these grants across departments.

That is my hypothesis.

Great.

And and how would you recommend that the board of supervisors consider supporting this?

Or maybe that's a step too far to ask.

I mean, I think that we will need to have a lot of conversations about what procurement looks like, about what um what rules and we put on uh how we make rules and whether that the legislative process is the best way to make procurement rules and kind of I think we would really value your partnership in thinking through what does need what does need to live with a centralized procurement office versus what really should be um in the code, for example, and kind of where we draw the lines on those.

I think um helping us think through how procurement runs through this body and and when we bring things to it and when we don't, um uh they they're all very like high-level esoteric questions.

Um but I think the interest is the first question, and and and recognizing the problem is um is a great first step.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Do any of my colleagues have any further questions for drilling?

Just really quick, you know, um I appreciate that there's there's thought about how technology can um can help with the demand of the workload.

And I wonder if the mayor's office is willing to explore the feasibility of building a kind of process accountability portal that's available to um nonprofit contractors or the public to track status, on how we put money out the door.

Um I think that that is absolutely something that as we centralize kind of our grant processes and look at our procurement, that that should be a feature.

How we you know how we build that into the system, it's it's gonna again need to be a grounds up rebuild.

Um, but yes, I think the mayor's office is very interested in exploring that and and um is absolutely something we've heard from our nonprofit partners that that accountability on the city's side on how quickly or slowly we get dollars out the door is a massive problem.

And and if we can't get it out faster, we should at least be able to tell them where in the process they are.

And we would like to get it out faster, and they have the right to know.

Thank you.

Absolutely.

Um, I'd love to talk about finding number four, and specifically um recommendation 4.1.

Is there a member of the controller's office here I could direct a question uh towards?

Great, thank you.

Um, so finding four, recommendation 4.1, the board of Supervisors should direct the BLA to repair to prepare a report on elapsed time from when nonprofit monitoring programs identify management problems.

It's my understanding maybe that the controller's office already does these annual reports in some form.

Can you talk a little bit about that?

Tori.

Hello, Laura Marshall from the controller's office.

We do an annual report of our monitoring, our fiscal monitoring process, and have for um quite a few years.

And so we are doing a monitoring, or the departments who are doing the monitoring are going out in the spring, usually, looking at documents, reviewing issues and assessing whether there are findings.

In many cases, they may assess that there is an initial finding and we provide a time for response within the monitoring cycle itself, and so the nonprofit may submit additional documents or fix some documents, and may we may resolve the finding in that uh within the cycle.

And so we may end the cycle saying they're fully in conformance or they they have come into conformance on summer uh some of their findings.

And so the time it took in those cases is not necessarily clearly documented because it's still part of that point-in-time review, but we're we're showing where they ended the cycle as of June 30th when the when the cycle ends.

When we do our reporting, which is usually it takes us a while to analyze all the data and pull it together, so we issue it in the winter, um, a few months later, and um so we're documenting the results at that time uh that occurred in the prior spring.

Often when there are findings, the way our cycle works, because it's point in time, we will say for most cases we will say you are you are at final status having a finding that is not in conformance with our standards, and we will review this finding again the following monitoring to assess where you are.

Here are the corrective actions you need to take during that time.

You need to update your budget documents or you need to, you know, um correct certain issues in your um in your uh organization.

If it's pretty serious or severe, we'll we'll escalate it um further and have more of a touch point on it.

But in a lot of cases, um there is a basically a year to for them to address the issue, and we'll look again at the next uh monitoring visit.

So the time it took, we we don't actually know when they corrected it.

We know that we monitored that them again the following spring and assessed whether they were able to address the issue in that time.

Again, these are for the more minor issues that are not um what we would call serious or severe.

And in many cases, even for these minor issues, the departments are as part of their normal contract management following up on some of them.

If there's a uh payroll issue or a timesheet issue, they may be collecting that in just as their part of their invoicing or other things.

So they may be working with that contractor along the way, but that's outside of our point-in-time visit.

And so the time, it's it's tricky to say how long some of those more minor issues take, um, but we can say whether issues addressed in one year have been corrected in the following cycle, and we do say that in our annual report every year, um, whether there's a repeat findings or multiple years of findings, etc.

Um the uh longer term, more severe issues that we're correct we're working with them on, where we have a citywide corrective action plan, we're able to create more um nuanced milestones for those.

Thank you.

Um I have one last question really on on finding four overall.

The city's monitoring and audit processes often take multiple years to correct even serious cases of nonprofit mismanagement, undermining public trust and government efficiency.

Um, you know, generally this subject, I think this is very much a few bad apples spoiled the bunch.

Um, I think uh your office may have mentioned that the 70% of nonprofits are are aligned here.

I think maybe the answer is even potentially even higher.

A huge, huge majority of the nonprofits that work with the city do excellent work, and their employees, I think it's 99.9%.

But over the last several years, we had to double down on analogy, a few bad apples spoiled a bunch, and that really does undermine public trust.

And so I am curious that many of the blowups we've seen recently have been with nonprofits who've been on some sort of a watch list or missed an audit.

The Barks Alliance most recently, they'd missed an audit.

Where is the gap between us putting a lot of these nonprofits on a watch list and and not being able to prevent these blowups?

And I will caveat this by saying it is a relatively small number, but the blowups are big and they really affect public trust.

So if we have them on a watch list already, what is the gap between getting them on that watch list, being aware of problems of some form, and not being able to prevent the subsequent blowups?

Uh thank you for that question.

It's a not a it's not an easy question.

Um I think one of the things I will say is when we put some an organization on corrective action.

Our main intent with that is providing technical assistance.

And so for those organizations where we have identified them, what what you call a watch list?

If they're on a tier two designation, for example, or tier three, we are actively action planning with them, giving them support and trying to work through these issues.

That doesn't prevent necessarily a blow-up, but it may be happening as that blow up is happening also.

Um, and so but there is some active work with those organizations.

I think the gap may be the ones where there's uh where the it's the blow up that happens that then leads to the corrective action.

So we're seeing it takes more time.

I will say that there is a for these cases, the corrections are often very um hard and uh long term.

They take a while to resolve.

Um, and so that process uh to kind of get the right staffing in there, that uh can maybe they need to change over CFO and kind of redo some financial documentation and kind of do some forensic work and understand stuff that is can be a long process, and we may not fully understand the the depth of the issues until that as you know until that process has been fully carried out and we're working through some of those changes.

So I think I think that these issues are so varied.

The things that are blowing up are tend to be different in many cases, and so being able to spot them and intervene quickly and get them on that watch list and then start the um corrections can can occur in a bunch of different ways, and so that might speak to some of the gaps we're seeing in sort of when did we know, how did we help, and how long did it take.

Great, thank you.

Um, if we can thank you.

Um, I understand a representative of the city administrator is here.

Oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, Chair Fielder had a couple questions.

I apologize.

All good.

Um, do you have a couple questions for the controller?

So when a nonprofit receives a tier two designation indicating that they're facing serious issues requiring correction.

What's the average length of time before a nonprofit resolves this issue and is downgraded to tier one?

That uh I don't have a specific average length of time.

I will say I will say that the reasons for tier two are still varied.

Um we have seen in recent years a uh the last couple years, one of the most common reasons why an organization has been placed on tier two is because they have not timely conducted a financial audit.

Um so that is a pretty big risk factor.

Those are important um tools for understanding what's going on in the organization, so we treat it pretty seriously when they haven't done that.

So that's a big bulk of uh the last years and uh probably moving forward and the coming year as well, sort of issues that we're seeing around um auditing.

And so uh the resolution is both conducting that audit and getting onto a um more regular schedule for conducting them in the future, right, to kind of keep them timely.

And so that can vary for different organizations.

A lot of them already kind of are on track and they kind of had a gap in some way that led to the the lapse.

Others are really struggling to get their their financial systems in order, and so it can take them, you know, some of them are still missing an audit from a prior year because they're really doing a lot of forensic work to get their their financials in order.

So even with something as um the similar as missing an audit, we're seeing a pretty big variance in the time it takes for different organizations to resolve on that issue.

Thank you.

And then in the controller's response to finding for recommendation two, the office states that when a nonprofit has tier two designations, city departments are still allowed to contract within, but city departments have different evaluation standards for that.

Do you find that departments are routinely ignoring tier two designations and awarding contracts to nonprofits with clearly identified capacity issues?

Um I can't speak to departments' sort of solicitation procedures necessarily and what they're evaluating in their solicitations for awarding contracts.

We would um want them to take into account the financial performance of an organization if they're going to award new funding in their solicitation procedures as normal course of action, but the kind of that process and how it plays out is not part of our our monitoring, which is after the contracting has happened.

Um I think the um intention with tier two not impacting uh it in and of itself not being a limiter for new funding is that these are often the goal of our corrective action policy overall is to sustain services and address the financial gaps that are occurring so that services can be continued.

Um departments uh have opportunities to terminate contracts outside of corrective action if they're seeing um uh issues in the performance of their contractor in different ways.

Um but when they want to sustain services, we want to make sure that they're being sustained appropriately and that we're we're kind of they're on that watch list that we're making those adjustments to their performance uh that are needed.

Thank you.

Those are my questions.

Um, um I'm cute sorry, I thank you.

Um I'm curious how the work we're talking about might involve or overlap with the future role and work of uh general inspector general.

Um, the voters passed that last year for this creation of this new role, and I believe it will be in the controller's office.

I know it's being formed, um, but do you have any sense of how that future role might interact with this?

I I don't explicitly that it's being formed outside of my purview, but I can say that our office um our internal to our office, our audits group and our performance group or monitoring sits do interact closely and and coordinate around um sort of the uh approaches we use on nonprofit oversight.

Um, so it might be an audit approach, it might be uh monitoring approach or a capacity building approach, and we're we're actively engaged when there are issues of investigations, our audits group is engaging with the city attorney's office, for example, and if there are sort of um uh capacity building needs or other kind of needs in the the monitoring side, we're we're uh trying to understand those and coordinate accordingly.

So uh TBD, what the inspector general role will add to that.

Thank you.

Great, thank you.

Um so for the city administrator.

Um, hi, welcome, thank you for um, thank you for being here.

There was a recommendation that the city should enact an ordinance specifying procurement policy improvements um across a variety of of items.

It sounds like perhaps you you're already doing that, but could you respond to that recommendation and talk about some of the steps you're taking?

Sure, absolutely.

So, Stephanie Tang here, deputy Center.

And thank you for being here.

Absolutely, thank you for giving me the minute to run down here.

Um the team that that I work on, which works on contracting and grants.

We think about this universe of how to simplify and make the city accessible and competitive and transparent and effective through both the contracting through all the different ways the city contracts, both through construction contracts, through general services contracts, but then also through granting contracts.

And the reason why I mentioned those specific entities is that there are actually three different areas of the code.

So this specific recommendation is primarily talking about nonprofits through what we would call 21G, but we're also looking at overall how do we simplify and make contracts more simple, and so that we can get the best quality of services.

Most recently, the city administrator through uh with President Mandelman, in response to one of his inquiries, and it actually was heard this earlier this week, which was file 250192, which is the open for business legislation.

And part of the idea of this legislation is to make the process of contracting with the city and the experience of somebody in that process simple.

And it does a couple of things that that affect both nonprofits but also any other business seeking to work with the city.

In particular, it included both repeal of some areas of legislation, streamlining other areas of legislation to make it more sensible, as well as implementing thresholds.

And the reason why this thresholds piece matters is that for many pieces of city legislation, they come in at different dollar amounts.

And what happens is that only an expert knows well, does it happen at 5,000?

Does it happen at 200,000?

Does it what when do these different social policies apply?

And part of the piece of the legislation that we worked with Supervisor Mandelman is to have a have numbers that rather than having a bunch of different numbers, having common sense thresholds so that it can be more simple for somebody experiencing contracting with the city.

And so this recommendation, we're excited, of course, to make streamlining and make contracting with the city easier for nonprofits, but there's also a lot of other businesses, both large businesses and small businesses, which also have the same goal.

Great, thank you.

Do any of my colleagues have any further questions?

Um, well, Chair Fielder, seeing no other colleague uh questions uh from us, um, would you like to open for public comment?

Sure thing.

And Madam Clerk, can we open public comment?

Yes, members of the public who wish to speak on this item should line up now along the side by the windows.

All speakers will have one minute.

Hello, supervisors.

Hello, everyone here today.

Thank you all so much for addressing this really important subject.

My name is Rocio Molina, I'm the director of the San Francisco Human Services Network, which represents over 50 nonprofits that work with the city to deliver some of the critical services we are talking about today.

First, I'd like to thank and commend the controller and the mayor's budget office for making themselves available to engage with our nonprofit members and fellow associations in a discussion about how to update the contracting system in a way that's more efficient and can truly serve all of the goals that we share.

Um, you know, long-term vision planning is a long process, as we all know here.

And while this is going on, there are realities on the ground that our nonprofits are facing as they face escalating costs, escalating you know ongoing um administrative costs, and some of that includes increased scrutiny and reporting.

Sophia mentioned that um it would take 10 times growth in admin staff to kind of meet the burden of monthly and every single reporting requirement.

And that is something that some of our nonprofits are now facing with limited funding.

So I love to continue this conversation more, and we are kind of engaging with the controller and the budget office, and please feel welcome to reach out if there are any additional questions about these realities.

Thank you.

Thank you for your comments.

Do we have any additional public speakers?

That concludes public comment.

See no more speakers.

Public comment is now closed.

And back to you, Supervisor Cherrill.

Thank you, Chair Fielder.

Um, I wouldn't normally comment on public comment, but I thought that was extremely salient for us all to remember that in many ways uh the burdens of procurement are borne uh uh most heavily by the nonprofits themselves who are simply seeking to help the city.

And so I think it's really important for us to consider the amount of work that they have to do just to be able to help people.

Um so I just want to thank you for that comment.

Um I would now uh like to move to amend item four, directing the clerk to prepare a response to the superior court.

Um I'll go through each resolve clause individually, starting with the first resolve clause on page three line 19.

Regarding finding two, which reads San Francisco's capacity building efforts are insufficient to create an ecosystem of well-managed nonprofits with the organizational capacity to use in total more than a billion dollars per year of social services funding effectively.

I'm proposing that we direct the clerk to respond with the following quote, resolved that the board of supervisors reports to the presiding judge of the superior court that they agree with finding number two, unquote.

Regarding finding three, which reads city departments responsible for making grants as well as those responsible for approvals, often do not have enough staff skilled in navigating the grant making process and do not have appropriate software tools to assist them.

This worsens grant making delays and uncertainties and distorts grant making practices.

I am proposing that we direct the clerk to respond with the following quote, resolved that the Board of Supervisors reports to the provide presiding judge of the superior court that they disagree partially with finding number three for the following reason.

The Board of Supervisors concurs that the city does not have enough overall capacity to navigate the current grant making process.

However, the primary burdens causing undercapacity are an overcomplicated grant making process and the lack of software tools to assist staff, not understaffing itself, end quote.

Regarding finding four, which reads, the city's monitoring and audit processes often take multiple years to correct even serious cases of nonprofit mismanagement undermining public trust and government efficiency, unquote.

I am proposing that we direct the clerk to respond with the following quote, resolved that the Board of Supervisors reports to the presiding judge of the Superior Court that they disagree partially with finding number four for the following reasons.

The Board of Supervisors finds that the current monitoring system supports contractors to comply with city standards a majority of times, but the Board of Supervisors does concur that our oversight systems should be more agile in responding and correcting the most serious extraordinary cases of noncompliant nonprofits.

End quote.

Regarding recommendation 2.3, which reads, by March 31st, 2026, the city should enact an ordinance specifying grant making uh excuse me, specifying procurement policy improvements that apply generally to social services grant making.

The ordinance should address streamlining processes for nonprofits to qualify to bid for social services grants, clarifying and reducing reducing the number of reviewers required for social services grants and the time within which they must complete reviews.

Clarifying and generalizing soul sourcing authority for appropriate social services grant procurements and accountability for unbiased soul sourcing decisions.

I am proposing that we direct the clerk to respond with the following quote, resolve that the Board of Supervisors reports that recommendation number 2.3 has been implemented through varied or through varied ordinances that streamline contracting processes and through operational reforms at the mayor's office and the city attorney's office continue to implement.

Unquote.

Regarding recommendation 3.2, which reads, by June 1st, 2026, the mayor's office should present to the Board of Supervisors a budgeting and staffing plan for ensuring procurement efficiency as it applies to social services grants and if appropriate, other grants and contracts.

The plan should identify appropriate funding sources to scale reviewer staffing with demand and address known succession and retention issues for procurement staff.

I am proposing that we direct the clerk to respond with the following quote, resolved that the Board of Supervisors reports the recommendation number two uh three point two 3.2 will not be implemented because it is not warranted to solely discuss staffing increases within with regard to ensuring contract procurement efficiency, but instead the issue should be explored more holistically, taking into account technology capacity and continued process reforms, end quote.

Regarding recommendation 4.1, which reads by December 31st, 2025, the Board of Supervisors should direct the budget and legislative analysts to prepare a report on the time elapsed from when the nonprofit monitoring program identifies management problems to when the problems are corrected.

The report should be published by June 30, 2026.

I'm proposing that we direct the clerk to respond with the following quote resolve that the Board of Supervisors reports that recommendation number 4.1 will not be implemented because it is not warranted given the controller's office conducts annual reports every fiscal year, in which the data referenced in this recommendation is already collected and reported.

Madam Clerk, that concludes my amendments for item four.

I'm gonna call the motion.

Yes.

And on the motion to amend.

Thank you.

The motion passes.

Um this is a really, really critical issue.

Um I think the civil grand jury members themselves did excellent work here, and I really appreciate how hard um and how diligent they were.

I look forward uh to more work done uh amongst this board to ensure good governments and nonprofit accountability.

And with that, I move to file item number three, the hearing, and to send item number four with the recently approved amendments to the full board with a positive recommendation.

Yes, and on the motion to for the amended item to the board with a positive recommendation.

Vice Chair Sauter.

Vice Sheriff Sauter aye.

Member Sherl.

Member Sheryl, aye, Chair Filder, aye, Chair Filder, I have three ayes.

Thank you.

The motion passes.

All right, thank you so much, Supervisor Sherrill.

Thank you, Director Kittler.

Thank you to the civil grand jury for this report.

And with that, Madam Clerk, can we please go to items five and six?

Do we want to do a motion on the hearing?

Ah, correct.

And on the motion to uh continue the hearing item to the call of the chair.

Vice Chair Sauter.

Vice Chair Sauter, aye.

Member Sheryl?

Member Sheryl, aye.

Chair Filder?

Aye.

Chair Filter, I have three ayes.

Thank you.

Motion passes.

All right.

Now please call items five and six.

Okay.

Item five is a hearing on the item five is hearing on the 2024-2025 civil grand jury report entitled text in the city government's opportunity to seize the AI moment.

And item number six is a resolution responding to the presiding judge at the superior court on the findings and recommendations contained in a 2024-2025 civil grand jury report entitled Texts in the City, government's opportunity to seize the AI moment and urging the mayor to cause the implementation of accepted findings and recommendations through his department heads and through the develop development of the annual budget.

Thank you, madam clerk.

And we will have Mr.

Cameron Parker presenting on behalf of the civil grand jury, and Director Kittler will once again be presenting on behalf of the mayor's office and city departments.

My thanks also to Jeremy Pollock, Jane Gong, Edward McCaffrey, Sumea Calra, Sophie Hayward, and Janice Levy for being available to answer questions.

Please go ahead.

I'm sorry, before you start, we need to rescind the motion to continue the last item.

I'm sorry, to the call of the chairs.

Actually, a motion to file that item.

Understood.

I think Supervisor Sheryl has stepped away momentarily.

Yes, he did step away.

So we can um we can do the vote and he can be and he'll be absent listed as absent on the vote.

All right.

So I move to rescind the motion to continue the hearing to the call of the chair.

Yes, and on that motion to rescind the motion to continue the uh item to the call of the chair.

Item four to the call of the chair.

Vice Chair Sauter.

Vice Chair Sauter, aye.

Member Sherl.

Member Sherl absent.

Chair Filder?

Aye.

Chair Filter, I have two eyes.

Member Sheryl absent.

Thank you.

The motion passes.

And I'll move to uh to file file the hearing.

Yes, and on the motion to file um item three.

Vice Chair Sauter.

Aye.

Vice Chair Sauter, aye.

Member Sherl.

Member Sheryl absent.

Chair Fielder?

Aye.

Chair Fielder, I have two ayes.

Thank you.

The motion passes.

All right, we will resume.

And please go ahead.

Mr.

Cameron Parker.

Okay, thank you.

Um thank you to everyone for your time today and giving us some opportunity to expand a little bit on our report and some of the findings and recommendations.

I think whoever put the uh agenda together uh was very prescient to make this report last.

I think it was very interesting hearing some of the comments around the solutions we were proposing around how to better manage nonprofits, how to solve some of our vision zero challenges.

Technology is really a through line through a lot of the things that the city is facing.

Um, and the the goal of this report was to think a little bit about what is the opportunity that emerging technology and artificial intelligence is presenting.

How can the city parse the signal from the noise and seize those opportunities as the technology continues to develop?

Okay, so um why artificial intelligence?

Um, first I think the the jury noted that um there's been very rapid public adoption of this technology.

Um evidence suggests that workers and the public are adopting AI as rapidly or perhaps even more rapidly than the PC or the internet.

Um so this adoption is being very rapid.

Uh people are incorporating uh use cases and expectations around technology, incorporating AI into their lives, and they're going to expect to engage in interaction models with the city and government using that technology going forward.

Obviously, AI has certain uh pitfalls, but it also has transformational potential.

Um it could be a step change in how humans interact with technology, and there could be very positive productivity impacts if it's utilized correctly.

This is a big challenge for the public sector.

Government needs to adapt technology to align with the needs and expectations of a broad public.

Um, one thing that was noted earlier was thinking about uh traffic citations and tickets and and the delivery, the way that needs to be delivered to people to achieve full accessibility.

Um government serves a lot of different people with a lot of different unique needs, and so it has to do that in a way that is broad and equitable.

Um obviously San Francisco is the AI capital, as uh former mayor London Breed noted uh during the Apex summit a year or so ago.

Um, there's a deep pool of talent and expertise here in the city.

Um the mayor has an innovation office who's whose mission is in part to partner with some of that local talent on different types of initiatives.

So the city is aware of it, um, but it's incumbent on the city to utilize it.

And then of course, there is um there's obviously a lot of social, environmental, and political challenges that AI poses, a lot of things we're trying to understand as this technology evolves related to labor and workforce and the environment.

Um these are not things that should be brushed aside or overlooked.

Um, they're things that the city and um and the polity should face head on and have some serious discussions about.

Okay, so I'm gonna go through the four main findings of our report and then talk a little bit about some of the highlights and lowlights, and then the reaction from the city.

Uh so finding number one uh was around concerns um over uh the uh the risks of AI have led to an overly cautious approach we found toward emerging technology, and that um there is a price to inaction.

Doing nothing is a choice, and it does have costs, and so the city could be missing opportunities to seize this technology and to orient itself to take advantage of opportunities that arise as the technology advances.

We found that procurement of technology in the city is hindered because of a federated management structure.

This federated model is something that came up in all of our interviews around the city, and almost no one seems particularly satisfied with it.

It hinders the ability for centers of excellence to be created for people to work and collaborate across departments on technology strategy and creates probably a lot of cost waste in the way that technology is bought and procured.

In a similar vein, governance of the technology is hindered because of this federated management structure across departments.

Over time, a lot of the technology governance that would be steering the ship of San Francisco government toward seizing new opportunities, was devolved away from the Department of Technology to department levels.

Sort of fiefdoms have arisen across the city, not just in the enterprise departments, but even within some of the core departments around the mayor.

And we find that this hindrance has slowed or impaired the ability of the city to identify pilot, test, and deploy emerging technology.

I think there was broad agreement on these first three.

Certainly, you know, some desire to evaluate further or to study some of these, but we were very pleased with the response that we received from the city.

The fourth finding is one that I think there was less receptivity to from the city, and this was around the Committee on Information Technology, which we found is comprised mostly of non-technical leaders and has insufficient authority and influence over departments technology plans in order to have a really impactful role in steering technology.

We find that it's falling short of its objective to streamline ICT policy and road mapping, and we think that that is going to work against the city as it evaluates emerging technology and future opportunities.

We recommended eliminating or substantially revising that body in a way that would correct these errors.

So to talk a little bit about the first finding, this is the finding that really is the most centered around the opportunity for AI.

I've broken these up into not so positives and positives.

I don't want to use negative language here, because I think that what we really found fundamentally is that there's a lot of enthusiasm in the city, and that some very positive steps have been taken, and we just want to help nudge and orient the city in the right direction to make sure that it catches the tailwind.

So the not so positives were caution on promotion and adoption of AI technology.

There were some guidelines that were published in late 2023.

People were told about some things that they could do and a lot of things that they should try not to do.

I believe it's Section 22J in the administrative code that kind of lays out questions and things that need to be answered a lot around the bias in certain models and equitable goals for the city and things that need to be researched, not disputing that, but uh were not things that were necessarily encouraging AI adoption.

So a lot of the guardrails that need to be in place, but not some of the nudges.

There was an over six month delay in a contract with Innovate US, which sort of sat with the board for a while, got uh got tabled and pushed aside.

Then we had an election and didn't really get picked up again for quite some time.

It was a zero dollar contract, cost the city nothing.

I think ultimately that contract was approved, which is great, but not a great sign that it sort of just sat on the sidelines for a while and a lot of time was lost.

Obviously, two really big positives that we highlight in our report.

The ChatGPT pilot was great, and I think the city has built on that to continue to roll out LLMs to city workers for use and hiring the director of emerging technologies and preserving some head count for that role, even in spite of budget cuts.

I think is really good.

So our recommendations, which the city I think is carrying forward, were to continue to promote champions internally, create communities of practice, increase education and technology access, and to really adopt a more comprehensive roadmap and vision for what the city's AI strategy needs to be.

There's so many functions across city government, so many services being provided to people, and so many challenges that technology needs to be brought to bear.

We highlight some of them in our report.

We highlight some case studies from other parts of the country, some of it's around permitting or public safety.

These are all things that we know the mayor is focused on, the city's focus on, and everyone agrees that technology is an important part of the solution.

So how can we be forward-looking and make sure that AI is involved?

Finding number two.

So the not so positives, I think again, de-evolution of authority, diffuse resources.

Our broad recommendation is to review and consolidate governance.

There is a department of technology for technology, it's the department of technology, promoting shared services across the city and a shared services model.

Very quickly, this is in our report.

I think this gives you a sense in red, these are technology-related head count in DT versus technology-related headcount in other departments.

It gives you a sense of a lot of these roles and job classifications, they just don't even exist in the department of technology.

It's very diffuse.

And giving DT more authority to direct those purchases, not just from a cyber risk standpoint, but from a strategy standpoint, could be helpful.

Lastly, on COIT.

We did a number of interviews across the city.

We did not have a single interview where people were enthusiastic about the way COID is structured today.

It's not solving the problems that led to its creation.

Executive authority is lacking.

It spends a lot of time producing an ICT report every year that really is just feels like a suggestion.

Departments can use COIT to try to get some budget allocation, but they don't have to, and they often go around it.

So we think there's an opportunity to make that body something better, something more directed, make departments provide genuine roadmaps to a body that steers ICT policy in the city, and that's gonna really redound to the city's benefit as it approaches emerging technology.

I'll just go straight to my conclusion.

I think my 10 minutes are up.

So again, shaping the future of AI and San Francisco government, three things I want you to take away.

Strategic leadership, effective leadership is crucial to guide AI's integration, governance reform, updating policies, ensuring AI is used ethically and responsibly within government operations, and workforce development, training, leveling up, making sure employees are using AI, keeping a human in the loop using AI, not outsourcing to AI, and making sure that they're improving the level of their service to the public.

I'll stop there.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for presenting this on behalf of the civil grand jury, and I want to extend my gratitude to the civil grand jury for the thought and research that you put into this report.

I think we're all aware of San Francisco's role in the tech economy and the surge in the adoption of AI, which makes this report incredibly timely.

And I appreciate that the report identifies possible improvements for our adoption of AI, such as reforming the management structure of technology across departments, centralizing procurement and use of emerging technologies, and enforcing standardization, privacy, and interropability of AI.

And I want to hand it off to Director Kittler now, who will present on behalf of the mayor's office and city departments.

Good afternoon, supervisors.

Sophia Kittler, Mayor's Budget Office.

Again, I want to thank the civil grand jury for another very thoughtful report.

I appreciate it.

As a slight aside, I found the title very cheeky.

And as another aside in the spirit of how we are continuing to improve our technology, an earlier report noted the PDF unreadable nature of some SFPD data at SFPD.

That avail information is available on Data SF in a readable format.

So it kind of points to the fragmentation of our systems, but but we are, and kind of the federated nature, but we are there in a lot of places.

And I think the word overly cautious is obviously a matter of opinion, but one that the mayor absolutely would share.

The foreman earlier used the word took having an impractical approach.

And I think that your average, not your average, many San Franciscans would disagree as to whether we have been overly cautious or whether we should have been running forward.

But I think the job of our our role as implementers and operationalizers of policy is to not spend so much time agonizing about it and spend more time kind of create a path through that works for all of our residents and keeps us safe, but but allows us to kind of leverage these technologies well rather than kind of sitting around and talking about it.

And so that's where I think the spirit of this is really, really appreciated.

Further, we really do agree that the governance of emerging technologies not just AI, but a lot of our technology spend, our technology procurement, our technology, like how we think about when we use technology, does live in many places.

And again, whether it is too many places kind of comes down to the level of how well we are doing at coordinating those bodies.

I don't know that it is a structural problem, but it is a problem.

Thirdly, our procurement and policy frameworks are outdated for AI oversight.

I again would push that beyond just AI.

I think technology oversight and procurement is generally way behind, and our system kind of doesn't really know how to deal with things where the price changes so quickly, where the technology changes so quickly, where the use to our workforce changes so quickly.

And that is something that we are grappling with in real time.

The city is preparing an updated procurement guidelines to kind of address some of these issues.

We have our procurement leads meet in regular forums.

We are working through all of these issues, but the civil grand jury absolutely hit the nail on the head with a number of these.

We do not believe it should be eliminated.

We do not believe that the members have the wrong skill set.

Um I will say that the code and the names the department heads as the people who need to attend COIT, but in reality, it is usually the CTOs or the CIOs of departments that actually show up and do the work, and they are well versed in technology.

A process body.

And I think that over the years it has had a lot of things with the word technology kind of thrown in its direction, and is um speaking for the mayor's office, not for the city administrator or coit's office.

Is perhaps having a for lack of a better term, an identity crisis and trying to think about like which of all of these streams of work that has been thrown at it, should it prioritize?

Should it be a process body?

Should it be a decision, a governance and decision body?

Um is it an advisory body for thinking about the future of technology?

Can it do all of those three things well, or should it pick a lane?

And I think that these again are conversations that we are actively having with the city administrators's office, one that the mayor is very interested in.

Um but in general, we do not we believe that it serves many functions rather than no function, and we would like to think work with you all and with um the city administrator's office to think about how how we best utilize all of the tools that we have.

Um we do not believe that additional reporting requirements on how people are following their ICT roadmap or additional process here is really where we need to be.

Um, but but I think having a decision on where what what we are doing and who is responsible is absolutely the correct question to be asking.

Um we have addressed some of the things in the report, like as noted, um adding an emerging technologies director.

We will then add them to COIT.

Um we have rolled out Microsoft co-pilot chats to over 30,000 employees.

Um we are running AI pilots in three one on three-one one response time and on language translation.

Um so we are, you know, we have been cautious, we have been slow.

Um we have spent a lot of time thinking and maybe sometime agonizing, um, but we are ready to move forward with kind of all of the tools and and and with the eyes wide open about kind of all of the limitations of the tools and the technologies, and uh we're mayor is very excited and thank you again.

Avail um many people are available for questions.

Thank you, Director Kittler.

And now I want to invite back um Mr.

Cameron to the podium to answer any questions, uh on behalf of the civil grand jury.

Colleagues, do you have any questions?

I think there's obviously disagreement on the uh on coit.

Um, could you give a little bit more detail on your, you know, why you made your recommendation?

Uh around COIT?

Yes.

Yeah.

Um look, I think um again I was sort of speeding through my presentation, so I will I'll say it again that um we we spoke with a lot of people across the city who are involved in technology policy.

Um, very little enthusiasm for the way that COIT operates today.

Um, and so I think um thanks, Michael.

Yeah, we can put that uh I've got a slide around COIT if we're able to project it.

But um look, I think the I I agree with what Ms.

Kittler said that um the the city needs to think about is COIT a process body, is it a governance body?

I think if you look at the administrative code, what is said explicitly is that there were findings that there wasn't enough collaboration across the city and enough of a unified approach on technology policy.

And so COIT was supposed to solve that.

I don't think COIT has solved that.

Um everything is still very federated in a way that um is inefficient and probably costly and is gonna make it really hard for the city to execute an AI strategy or or any other technology strategy.

Um and so um our thought was that uh and we also we also interviewed people in um in other jurisdictions um and reviewed governance documentation around how other departments of technology were organized in cities where we could get access to that.

Um there's a lot more centralization in other models outside of San Francisco.

Um and so I think whether it's eliminating COIT entirely or it's trying to find a way um to make it so that there's more DT governance and oversight um and that um there is it's less of a deliberative body producing uh a series of suggestions around what ICT or information communication technology could be and actually making it a little bit more of an executive function.

There's really no reason why departments should go to COIT unless they would like to be included in the annual budget recommendations, but they don't have to be.

That a lot of your focus has been on procurement and adoption.

Did you start to look into utilization, like as this is being adopted by different departments or individuals, you know, how we're tracking that um, you know, annual reports, scorecards of like adoption by department.

Did that come up?

Yeah, so we know, when we were really producing the report, I think the um the the chat GPT pilot, which I think included around 2,000 people, um, was coming to a close.

You know, we talked to people in the department of Technology around what the the uptake was around that.

Uh, it seemed like it was it, and this is self-reported, so but I don't think people had an incentive to necessarily lie about it, um, that people were very enthusiastically using it.

I think the amount of hours saved per week that people were reporting would have implied about a 12.5% productivity bump.

Um we note this in the report.

Now, again, it's self-reported, maybe people were a little enthusiastic, um, but uh, you know, productivity increasing by 2 to 3% a year would be considered a big win.

So if if it's even anywhere in the realm of 12.5%, like that's a huge benefit for the city.

Um so I do think it's it's important for DT now that they've rolled out a broader um um co-pilot uh suite of access to most of the city employees to develop those KPIs and really make sure that that the technology is being used.

Like that there's a lot of hype around AI, right?

And so as I said in the beginning, separating the signal from the noise, like this technology can be very useful.

We need to find substantive ways to do it and actually demonstrate that.

Um the last thing I'll say about this is we note in the report, and I think it's in one of our recommendations as well, that as the city pilots this technology um publicly reporting on identifying those KPIs.

What would actually tell us that this technology is working for the city and publicly reporting on it is really helpful.

It's good for accountability, and it also develops trust with the public that we the city is doing this for responsible reasons and that they're measuring it.

Thank you.

Um I think it's fascinating.

It's this seems like the type of report that we could do, you know, every year for the next two or three years, and it's gonna be uh completely a different focus based on where we are.

So thanks.

Again, I appreciate this report.

I think it's extremely timely and puts us one step ahead of where we were before and without this, and I do think that the recommendations um are going to inform policy that will be made for years to come.

And I did want to ask some questions just about the the premise of this report um for the civil grand jury.

You know, a uh there's a McKinsey report from June of this year that nearly eight in ten companies have deployed generative AI in some form, but roughly the same percentage report no material impact on earnings, and many AI use cases like co-pilots and chatbots for employees have been widely deployed but delivered diffuse benefits.

And furthermore, I do want to come back to what Director Kittler was talking about as far as the public's uh embrace of AI.

According to uh Pew Research report, the public were generally more wary of AI compared to experts, and that makes some sense.

They might not know enough, um, with set 47% of AI experts surveyed saying they are more excited than concerned about the increased use of AI in daily life, and that share drops dramatically to 11% among the public.

And according to the jury's report, a big motivation for the city to speed up adoption of AI is based on the rate of adoption by the general population, and a failure to adopt AI technologies can quote lead to distrust and loss of confidence in a city.

I just want to understand how the jury reached this conclusion.

Obviously, AI is an incredibly new technology, but I wonder if there's any research conducted by the civil grand jury into any loss of confidence in government by conversely, irresponsible use of technology, for example, a loss of trust in the criminal justice system.

Yeah, no, those are those are all great.

Um I'll try to try to take those uh in the order that you brought them up.

So, um, is there phantom productivity?

Um, how are companies actually realizing benefits when it comes down to brass tax on AI?

Um I think it's uh it's clearly very early innings.

Um, so the research that you mentioned makes a lot of sense.

Um I think one thing the report tries to do is take a broader uh view of AI and emerging technology.

I think it's great that the city has a title for emerging technologies director because there really is a suite of things right that are what we call AI has evolved into thinking about generative AI and large language models.

There's obviously other technologies related to that around machine learning and other things that are it's not chat GPT, but it's also developing at a rapid clip and presents a real opportunity for advancement.

So I think if you look at a broad suite of those things, there seem to be um real opportunities for the city.

Um and we try to identify some of those in the report just in a tabular format of like you know, giving people the ability to um to live transcribe or take meeting notes for them, or doing live translation, right, which could help city workers who are communicating with the general public, and maybe there's not a translator available.

Um there's these some of these like sort of mundane tasks, but like this technology is already extremely good at doing that, and then there's more complex tasks that you know we'll we'll see what happens in the next few years.

So it feels to the jury unlikely that rapidly upskilling people to use and incorporate some of these even clerical things that AI can take off of their hands could be a really big benefit for people, and that's just where the technology is today.

Um, as far as public trust and and government, you know, in general, the um the public does not have a view that government is always on the forefront of or the frontier of technology, which is totally fine.

It doesn't necessarily need to be.

Um, there's valid reasons for being cautious and making sure that things are implemented well.

Um, but I think um our conclusion on the jury was that as this technology continues to progress.

If we think back to the way the internet was being sort of proliferated through public life, um, it's if you're still having to send faxes to departments because they are not implementing email, right?

Like these are the types of things that the city could very easily find itself in this position in a few years' time, just at the rate that the technology is moving if it's not trying to keep in lockstep with that.

Um, and so we see this shift into AI and the opportunity of AI being very similar to the type of step change that we saw with the PC and the internet rollout.

Um, and so it's hard to necessarily envision exactly what it's going to look like, but it's one of those things that you don't want to wait till you're already there, and then you're like, oh, you know, what are we gonna do?

Absolutely agree that it behooves us to understand what we can do to keep pace with the times and um not be behind the curve.

And I think also in San Francisco, um, there's a shared city value on deploying technologies and implementing policies ethically, and I appreciate the civil grand jury has acknowledged that as well.

And that brings me to my next question, which is around the energy demand.

Um, so A energy demand is predicted to exponentially increase at least 10 times the current level and exceed the annual electricity consumption of a small country like Belgium by next year.

Data center energy consumption is projected to account for about six percent of the nation's total electricity usage in 2026.

Importantly, the power demand for AI data centers is growing faster than both grid capacities and renewable energy growth.

And so clearly there is a massive environmental impact and a resource capacity constraint that we have to consider when deciding what technologies we embrace and how.

And many experts have argued that policies should require comprehensive consideration of all the environmental and societal costs of AI, as well as detailed assessment of the value and its perceived benefits, and in finding one recommendation for the civil grand jury recommends that the city should agree upon key performance indicators and a cost-benefit framework for AI technology.

Do you think that any KPIs and procurement standards should include a comprehensive study on the environmental costs of AI technology?

Yeah, I mean, look, I think from the civil grand jury's perspective, we want to make sure that we're we're speaking more to how to improve the process of government rather than trying to prescribe exactly what all of those KPIs should necessarily be.

But I think it you're definitely keying in exactly where you should.

This is another pitfall of having a very fragmented procurement and purchasing policy.

If there are specific standards around what types of technology the city wants to purchase from vendors who meet certain sustainability requirements that align with the city's goals, it's important to make sure that you're buying from them and you're not giving people a lot of latitude to go purchase from people who maybe you're not aligning with those goals.

So there's a number of strategic reasons why you want to centralize your purchasing.

Some of them are economic and some of them are social and environmental.

I would say the city, you know, clearly has goals around its you know, scope one, two, and three, you know, emissions and the environmental impact of the people that it's entering into economic commercial arrangements with.

Um, and so the city has a valid interest in exploring that.

Um, I don't the it's outside of our report to say exactly what that needs to be, but um uh I think you're you're certainly valid in bringing it up.

Um, we do note in the report that this is an important thing for the city to consider.

It's one of the pitfalls that we mentioned.

Um, you know, we noted that um 10% of the increase in demand over the medium term for electricity is likely to come from data centers.

Um, there's a lot of parts of the economy that need to be electrified in order to have a sustainable future, and so data centers are a part of it and they're gonna play an outsized role in that.

Uh, obviously, that's all cloud services and the internet, a lot of what we use today plus artificial intelligence and other applications, and so it's something for the city to consider.

Um, and and certainly a broader outside of San Francisco, a broader state, national, and international problem around making sure we have sustainable sources of energy and and we utilize our resources appropriately.

Thank you.

And then my last question is related to COIT.

The jury found that COIT as it's currently structured is not achieving its governance goals, and there are few carrots and no sticks when it comes to enforcement of shared policies and standards around technology and especially uh emerging technologies like AI.

And the jury recommends disbanding COIT or failing that suggests reforms to increase courts' effectiveness.

I'm curious about the structural improvements that COIT could conduct to improve its effectiveness in enforcing standards for adopting emerging technologies.

If you can share more about that, yeah.

Um so I I think it goes back to what does the city want COIT to be.

From the jury's standpoint, COIT should be a governance body and it should steer the ship of technology policy.

If that is what the city agrees with, then I don't think the way it's currently structured is really achieving that.

So what we would recommend in that vein is to think about the representation on COIT.

Currently, there's sort of a rotating representation of city departments that are not really technology related, but I think the goal was to just give them a voice in sitting on a body that manages technology that they use.

Is that necessarily helpful to the body?

Unclear, but I think making sure that departments are really putting forward and not necessarily putting forward just in practice, but are actually required to put forward their technology personnel into the body to weigh in.

And so it's great if you know, like the technically it should be the head of the department, but they they delegate it to their CIO.

But why not?

If that's the way it should be, then why not make it that way in the text of the administrative code?

So making it more a body of subject matter experts, including the emerging technologies director, which I think the city did agree with doing and making departments answerable to COIT.

So again, departments can come to COIT, but they don't really, they're not required to deliver anything to COIT, and they're not held to an account if they don't.

It was actually a recommendation in an ICT plan from a few years ago that departments provide an annual technology roadmap to COIT.

Well, that's a great idea, but it's someone spent a lot of time writing the ICT plan.

Actually, a lot of people spent a lot of time writing it, but there's actually no reason why anyone necessarily has to follow it.

And that recommendation just sort of like went by the wayside.

If these things are important, then departments should actually have to adhere to them.

There should be some consequences for not following them.

So I think creating that executive authority would be a big part of reforming it in a way that makes it a little bit more potent.

Thank you so much.

Colleagues, any other questions?

If not, we thank you so much for answering all of our questions and your presentation.

We're gonna move on to the mayor's office and city departments for any questions.

I have questions for Department of Technology.

Good morning, supervisors.

Jane, sorry, good afternoon.

Jane Gong, Director of Emerging Technologies, Department of Technology.

Thank you so much for being here.

Um in response to finding one recommendation for the Department of Technology in coordination with Coit will work to develop a framework for evaluating the value of an ongoing AI investment or tool toward achieving a cost-effective service delivery goal.

But individual departments will ultimately be responsible for determining the effectiveness of AI technology.

I wonder if DT will incorporate elements of environmental social governance governance, for example, evaluating environmental impacts, potential of plagiarism, privacy violations, etc., in evaluating the cost and benefit of adopting any any AI technology.

Absolutely.

We want to take advantage of this amazing technology that is helping our staff.

But at the same time, I you know, 16 years later in city government, as a proud union member myself, I worry about the labor impacts.

I worry about the environment.

But this is something that I think we can't shy away from.

So I do remember working with Supervisor Cheryl actually, or actually, you were part of MOI at the time, when we were working with Supervisor Um Ronan's office to devise Chapter 22J, which is our AI transparency ordinance.

And it was amazing, and I'm so glad it's there because it actually gives me a little bit of authority to reach out to the departments and hold them accountable.

So having that, I think it's really important, but it's not enough.

I think that what it's what's what's missing is that it kind of it comes at the tail end of the process.

And what we need is to think about the environmental impact, the labor impact at the front end of the process.

And that's exactly what my team and I are doing.

We're a small team within DT.

There's four of us, two engineers and AI policy analysts and myself, and we're building a citywide AI playbook.

And what I want this to do is help departments, because people come to me, department heads will say, hey, I've got this vendor that sent me an email.

They have this magic wand that they can wave.

It's called AI, and it's gonna solve all their problems, right?

And then I ask them, so what is this problem that you're trying to solve?

Oh, well, you know, let me think about it and get back to you, right?

So let's help them identify the right problems.

At the same time, let's help them evaluate.

Do you need AI to solve this, right?

Let's think about it.

It may not be AI, it could just be good old fashioned machine learning.

It could just be another automation workflow tool that we build.

Um we want to help it with this playbook, help them think about how to prioritize equity, labor and environmental impact.

I want to work with our amazing um chief data officer to evaluate the data quality that's needed to solve these problems and metrics, right?

Let's set up these metrics before we get into procurement and let's decide whether we build it ourselves or buy.

And so, all this, sorry, long-winded way to answer your question.

Yes, I would love to see this adopted, but at the front end of the process.

And let's continue to work to evolve 22J.

This public inventory for the purpose of transparency is so important.

And I think right now it's the only way that the public can see what we're actually doing.

We've got 28 tools that are published on the open data portal right now, and we have more to do, more work to do.

And we'll be back in January of 2026 to present a full report to the board on all of the um the inventory.

So I'd love to work with you and your office and other supervisors to develop these um mechanisms so that they're at the front end of the process for both environmental concerns and the labor impact of AI.

Thank you.

And kind of on that note, the civil grand jury recommendations 3.2 and 3.3 are for city departments to complete a review and update of policies and resources to facilitate procurement of emerging technology that meets city standards and objectives, and also to provide recommendations for whether existing AI technologies should continue to be purchased and are moved to a different vendor.

Mouthful.

But the city's response is that this will not be implemented because it's not warranted or is not reasonable, and the OCA already has a robust procurement review process.

I just given what we have seen in reports on, for example, Flock camera usage and specifically the SFPD using Flock cameras, unfortunately, Flock systems allow other agencies to see our license plate data, and was found through this report in the standard.

I believe that outside agencies were conducting searches on our data on behalf of ICE.

And that is extremely concerning.

I don't think anyone in city government is um is looking at that and and thinking that we we are at a loss and we can't just sweep it under the rug.

And with the acceleration and centralization of the use of these technologies in, for example, SFPD's real-time investigation center, it feels reasonable to me that we should review our existing AI technology inventory and make sure that they meet our city standards and objectives.

Um, what guidance already exists regarding procurement standards for AI?

And does that include ESG standards specific to AI?

Right now, I think 22J is my tool to kind of that stick that I hold people accountable.

Believe me, getting those 28 um tools to be reported uh right now was a challenge.

Um we're actually putting out a survey to all the departments we worked with to see how we can better help them make sure that they're transparent about their tools.

So right now I don't have all of the answers, but it is something that we'd like to continue to work on.

Um, along with OCA and DT, we have our CRA cybersecurity review and CIO review process at the moment.

And I know that um with um COIT and implementing 19 chapter 19B, the privacy and surveillance ordinance.

It is all these are the tools that we have today that we can hold folks accountable and make sure that they're being transparent.

But I'd love to continue to work with you on this so that we can strengthen these tools.

Thank you.

And absolutely open open to do to that.

I'm just wondering which which departments have responded to the 22J requests.

Police department.

I do have a list.

Let me find that for you.

One moment.

Okay, I'm gonna go off memory, can't find it.

Um PUC.

They have been there day one.

I have biweekly check-ins with my PUC partner, my counterpart at the PEC, police 311, um DPH, I believe those are it.

Um, it's on our SF uh open data portal, and we can pull that for you, and I can give you more details after this.

Thank you so much.

Yes.

And for I'm wondering if OCA and DT will commit to evaluating existing technology for potential violations to city policies or any future AI procurement standards.

We might be able to use AI to help us do that.

Um, yes, I think going forward, um, as we strengthen 22J, I think there's opportunity to maybe lessen, I I definitely, you know, having been in government for so long, I know procurement is a dirty word, and it's absolutely something that every single public entity is trying to um uh revise and and um make easier.

Um, and I want to make sure that we continue to strengthen 22J by eliminating the burdensome questions, but at the same time adding things that would really make this um useful, the information that then gets reported to the public.

Thank you so much.

My next question is actually for Coit.

Thank you so much.

Good afternoon, supervisors.

Edwin McCaffrey, director of the Committee on Information Technology, more commonly referred to as COIT.

Thank you for being here, Director McCaffrey.

So as I understand it, COIT currently develops San Francisco's five-year strategic technology plan, creates policy to guide the adoption and use of tech, and reviews technology projects above 100,000.

Despite the administrative codes specifying that COIT is to approve recommendations and monitor compliance with relevant um ICT policies, there isn't a directive on how COIT is to do that, nor is there a mandate for COIT to report back or seek approval of recommendations from the board of supervisors.

I'm wondering if COIT will commit to regular report backs to the board on the city's investments, strategic plans, and policies around the use and adoption of technology.

Thank you for the question, Supervisor.

Short answer is absolutely always willing to work with you all along with your colleagues around bringing forward greater transparency, bringing forward a stronger idea of what COIT dollars are being utilized for to kind of explain a little bit around the process.

Um really do appreciate uh what the civil grand jury put forward with regard to what the process does look like right now.

We heard Director Kittler talk about the committee members, we have department heads, we have CIOs, we also have um policy leads.

There's a good group of folks that come to not just what we call as Big COIT, but also some of our subcommittees.

Um Big COIT does have uh a member from the board, uh Board President Mandelman on that large COIT committee and is part of the board um budget process.

We bring forward recommendations uh that receive funding from COIT projects that we feel are a part of the prioritization for technology investment on an annual basis.

So there is uh an opportunity that currently exists to your question around the ICT plan as well.

The ICT plan is on a biannual process, and so we look to kind of reach out to individual departments throughout the calendar year, take input from them separate from COID to understand what are their own technology priorities, what are the key tools, softwares, projects that they want to kind of put forward, but also what are they currently funding and making sure that that is not just taken into account as part of the ICT plan, which I'm in agreement with has a an opportunity for improvement, but trying to bring that conversation, threading it together with the COIT formal process and ensuring that the board budget process, which includes you know COIT, the mayor's office, along with others, that we're bringing you as much information as possible.

So again, looking for opportunities to improve that and happy to work with you all.

Thank you so much for answering my question.

Colleagues, any questions for the departments, COIT.

All right, thank you so much.

And now we'll move on to everything else.

Uh once again, I want to thank the civil grand jury for taking a year of work and more than a thousand hours to put together this report as our society is experiencing an unprecedented expansion in AI technology.

Uh, in the first half of 2025 alone, more than 29 billion dollars was invested in AI companies here in San Francisco.

Given the rapidity of its adoption, it's all the more important that we in city government set the standard for how to act carefully and in the way we adopt and utilize and procure AI technologies.

And here's why that I don't want to uh glaze over.

And I really appreciate the civil grand jury for noting some of these at the top of the report.

Um, first, with respect to the public's sentiments, I think it is very important to bring the public along.

According to a poll of 1400 California adults conducted earlier this year, 55% of Californians are more concerned about the future of AI advancements than excited.

And while only 33% are more excited than concerned, which is a 22% difference.

Nearly half think that AI is advancing too fast, while only 32% believe is advancing at the right pace.

The majority of Californians are concerned about AI fueled job loss, wage stagnation, privacy violations, and discrimination.

70% of Californians think we need strong laws to force companies to make AI safe and secure.

And again, I mentioned this earlier.

We've already seen reports about SFPD officers using AI to write their police reports and automated license plate readers like Flock, which utilize AI, exposing us to violating state law on data sharing and our own city's sanctuary policies.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and other organizations have warned about the threats this technology poses to civil liberties in an already flawed criminal justice system and a flailing democracy.

I'm concerned also about the premature displacement of jobs by AI, and many experts have acknowledged that humans are still needed to manage AI.

As famously noted in an IBM training manual from 1979, a computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision.

I think it's important also that we're not moved to rapid adoption of emerging technologies simply by the motivations and hype of corporate interests.

And as much as we should adopt new technologies to make our city government more efficient, we cannot absolve ourselves of the responsibility we hold as civil servants and elected representatives to ensure that any AI tools are used in an ethical, responsible, and transparent manner.

A misuse of these emerging technologies doesn't just lead to a distrust of the technology, but more dangerously leads to distrust in our own city government.

And we know that once trust is broken, it is very hard to win back.

And in an era of move fast and break things, I take seriously our role here in the government audit and oversight committee to ensure that San Franciscans can trust their city government.

And I would consider legislation to strengthen government oversight and policies to prevent the misuse of AI and use it ethically.

All that said, I want to thank the civil grand jury once again, Mr.

Parker, for all of the thought that you've put into this report, and I am confident that it will lead to uh policy changes in our city government the way we adopt this technology.

I also want to thank Director Kittler and Mr.

Pollock and Ms.

Gong for answering questions from the committee.

And with that, Madam Clerk, let's take public comment.

Yes, members of the public who wish to speak on this item should line up now along the side by the windows.

All speakers will have one minute.

At the close of our meeting today, I'd like to thank uh the Board of Supervisors, uh GAO subcommittee, uh, Chair Fielder, uh represent uh supervisor Sauter and Supervisor Sherrill for holding these hearings.

We do appreciate it.

I would remind you that under the state uh constitution, we are restricted to solely focusing on process and procedure.

Many of the questions related to AI that you raised, Chair Fielder, are policy oriented and very much in your domain, not within ours.

So again, thank you very, very much for the time and attention and the preparation uh that the entire group has made for today's discussions.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Do we have any additional public comment?

That can please public comment.

Thank you, Madam Clerk.

Public comment, seeing no other speakers is now closed.

And thank you, Mr.

Carboy.

Very much appreciate it, and certainly this is the first of many discussions and appreciate the civil grand jury for focusing on procedures and absolutely it is this body's responsibility to discuss policy.

I will take any chance to talk about policy in this policy committee, so I appreciate that.

All right, colleagues, I'm introducing amendments for this item six as follows.

On page three, line four, adding the following sentence, quote, partially disagree before quote with finding F4.

On page three, line five, adding the following paragraph after, quote, for the following reasons, quote, members of COIT are appointed through the administrative code, and the individuals that routinely attend COIT and relevant subcommittees are departmental CIOs or other technical leads.

Furthermore, COIT already publishes a coordinated technology roadmap in the form of its annual information and communications technology ICT plan, unquote.

On page three, line seven, adding the following paragraph after, quote, recommendation number R 4.1, quote, will not be implemented because it is unwarranted and or unreasonable for the following reasons.

COIT plays a valuable role in coordinating city citywide IT projects and expenditures.

Rather than eliminating COIT, we recommend focusing on structural improvements such as clear mandate definition, regular engagement with the Board of Supervisors to promote on ICT policy goals, and enhance authority to set standards for the deployment and procurement of emerging technologies, unquote.

On page three, line nine, adding the following paragraph after recommendation number R 4.3, quote, has not yet been implemented but will be implemented by December 31st, 2025, unquote.

My staff has emailed the amendments to you, and they should be in your inbox, and there are also copies here as well.

Thank you, Madam Clerk.

I now move to amend item six as presented.

Yes, and on the motion to amend Vice Chair Sauter.

Vice Chair Sauder, I, Member shirl member shirl aye chair filter aye chairfielder I have three ayes thank you the motion passes I now move to send item six to the full board of supervisors with positive recommendation yes and on that motion to forward item six to the full to the board of supervisors with the positive recommendation vice chair solder vice chair solder aye member shurl member shurl aye chair filter aye chair filter I have three ayes thank you the motion passes and I now move to continue item five to the call of the chair yes and on the motion to continue item five to the call of the chair vice chair solder vice chair solder aye member shurl member shurl aye chair filder aye chair filter I have three ayes thank you the motion passes uh once again I want to thank the civil grand jury for all of your work on these three reports all of the time you took thank you to the departments director kitler um for speaking on behalf of the departments in the mayor's office and we are now madam clerk please call item seven and eight yes item seven and eight are resolutions authorizing an approving settlement of lawsuits and unlitigated claims against the city colleagues any questions or remarks all right seeing none madam clerk let's open up public comment yes members of the public who wish to speak on this item should light up now to speak along the side by the windows all speakers will have one minute it appears we have no public comment thank you seeing no other commenters public comment is now closed I now move to send item seven and eight to the full board of supervisors with positive recommendation yes and on the motion to forward item seven and eight to the full board with a positive recommendation vice chair solder vice chair solder aye member shurl member shurel aye chair filder aye chairfielder I have three ayes thank you the motion passes madam clerk is there any other business before us today and that completes our meeting agenda seeing no other business we are adjourned