Good morning.

This meeting will come to order.

Welcome to the May 21st, 2026 regular meeting of the government audit and oversight committee.

I'm Supervisor Stephen Sherrill, Chair of the Committee, joined by Vice Chair Mahmood.

This morning committee clerk is Monique Creighton, and thanks to Eugene Labadia of SFGov TV for staffing this meeting.

Madam Clerk, do you have any announcements?

Yes.

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Number one, Dr.

Carlton B.

Goodly, place Room 244 San Francisco, California 94102.

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Finally, items acted upon today are expected to appear on the Board of Supervisors' agenda of June 2nd, 2026, unless otherwise stated.

Thank you, Madam Clerk.

Will you please call item number one?

Yes, item number one is an ordinance approving amended surveillance technology policies for the Department of Public Works use of unmanned aerial vehicles, drones, and the Department of Public Works use of illegal dumping camera system with automatic license plate reader technology and cameras and making required findings in support of said approvals.

Thank you.

Today we have Esther Lee, Ramsey Alvarez, and John Jones here to present on item number one.

Good morning.

Thank you, Chair Cheryl.

Uh Vice Chair Mahmood.

I am Esther Lee, Government Affairs Liaison with the San Francisco Public Works.

I am joined here today with Ramses Alvarez, Public Works Manager of Community Engagement, and John Jones, Public Works Manager of IT infrastructure operations and security at Public Works.

In accordance with Administrative Code 19B, we are here today to present the department's surveillance technology policy amendments to the Board of Supervisors for approval.

Policy amendments that will enhance the department's efforts to combat illegal dumping.

San Francisco Public Works has two surveillance technology policies for amendment today, a drone use policy, and an automated license plate reader usage policy, the latter of which we aim to rename the illegal dumping camera system policy, among other amendments.

So Public Works drone policy was adopted with Board of Supervisors' approval in 2021.

For the drone policy, the amendments we seek Board of Supervisors' approval will expand the authorized use to identify illegal dumping refuse and for public education and promotion of public works operations.

Drones have been used in the past for inspection of difficult to reach locations, hillsides or tall sides of public assets.

The photo in this slide deck is from 2019.

It's of a drone use on the hillside of Filbert Street.

Drones have been used the following year to assess the O'Shaughnessy Boulevard Rock Sighting for assessment prior to a hillside slope improvement project.

More recently, drones have been used by our engineering team for hillside inspection on Montgomery Street.

The approval of the amendments will provide more tools to public works to identify and clean illegal dumping locations, something that we are very eager to utilize.

And so Public Works also has a policy for automated license plate reader use.

The proposed amendments remove the outdated name that included a defunct vendor.

And it clarifies the business justification for a comprehensive illegal dumping camera system to capture licensed plates of vehicles involved in suspected illegal dumping activities as evidence for enforcement.

The public works illegal dumping camera system consists of a two-camera system at each location, a video camera with pan-tilt zoom capabilities, and an automated license plate reader with a capability to capture license plates of vehicles.

Video footage will capture evidence of illegal activities, and the ALPR will capture the license plate of vehicles used by violators.

The policy allowed the department to continue this policy allows the department to continue working for this purpose, and we intend to utilize this technology to catch violators in the act and cite them for their illegal activities.

For both the illegal dumping camera system and the drone policy, we are requesting approval to allow the department to use clips and footages for public education and promotion of our operations.

We are requesting this authorization because educating and working with the public are core values at public works.

Partnerships with the public, community groups, contractors, uh sister department agencies, and volunteers are essential to the department's success keeping the city clean.

And if I may speak on behalf of my public works team members in this room, we want violators who dump garbage in San Francisco, or violators who come to San Francisco to dump their garbage on our streets to know that with this technology, we will catch you, we will fine you, and we will publicly shame you with safeguards, of course.

So photos of the dumping activity here in this slide, you can see was provided by a resident on uh Ramsey's Alvarez's team, the community engagement team, as an example of drivers who intentionally leave garbage on city streets.

With the amendments to our license plate reader policy, the illegal dumping camera system, video coverage coupled with license plate clips, provide the evidence to lawfully cite um vehicle owners.

The proposed locations for illegal dumping cameras have been identified by our Bureau of Street Environmental Services data for service orders where we're packer trucks, like the big trucks have been dispatched.

Those are the ones that pick large larger items from illegal dumping hotspots and from the work of our community engagement team.

With regard to data security, San Francisco Public Works follows city and county of San Francisco citywide policies and guidelines.

Access to data is limited to specific employees.

Data retention policies are exactly the way city and county of San Francisco policies are 30 days for raw data.

Umly video clips and images will be retained for authorized use in this policy, which is related to illegal dumping.