Good morning, everyone. This meeting will come to order. Welcome to the regular meeting of the Public Safety and Neighborhood Services Committee of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for Thursday, February 12, 2026.

I'm Supervisor Matt Dorsey, Chair of this committee, and I'm joined today by my fellow committee members, Vice Chair Bilal Mahmoud and Supervisor Alan Wong.

Together, we'd also like to welcome our colleague, Supervisor Danny Sauter, who's joining us this morning.

Our ever-capable clerk is Ms. Monique Creighton, whom we thank so much for staffing and keeping us on track today.

As well, we are appreciative to the entire team at SFGovTV for facilitating and broadcasting today's meeting, and that is especially true for our producer today, Mr. Jaime Echevere.

Madam Clerk, do you have any announcements?

Yes.

Please make sure to silence all cell phones and electronic devices.

Documents to be included as part of the file should be submitted to the clerk.

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.

First, you may email them to myself, the Public Safety and Neighborhood Services Committee

Clerk at monique.crayton at sfgov.org.

Or you may send your written comments via U.S. Postal Service to our office in City Hall.

Number one, Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place, room 244, San Francisco, California, 94102.

If you submit public comment in writing, it will be forwarded to the supervisors and also included as part of the official file on which you are commenting.

Finally, items acted upon today are expected to appear on the Board of Supervisors agenda of February 24, 2026, unless otherwise stated.

Thank you, Madam Clerk. Will you please call item number one?

Yes, item number one is an ordinance amending the police code to delete Article 55 and thereby repeal the requirement that brick-and-mortar businesses accept cash for the purchase of goods and services other than professional services.

Thank you, Madam Clerk.

This item is sponsored by Board President Rafael Mandelman, and we are joined today by his legislative aide, Melanie Mathewson, who is here to present.

Ms. Mathewson, the floor is yours.

Good morning, Chair Dorsey, Members Mahmood, Wong, and Supervisor Sautter.

I'm here on behalf of President Mandelman to ask that this item be continued to the call of the chair.

We want to have additional time for engagement with community members,

as well as President Mandelman's colleagues on the board.

Okay. Thank you, Ms. Mathewson.

I don't see anybody on the roster for questions or comments.

Madam Clerk, may we open this up for 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 two minutes.

Hello, supervisors. My name is Scott Feeney.

I'm a San Francisco resident, and I pay with cash whenever possible.

I do this because it is a way to pay anonymously and avoid being tracked.

when you buy something with a credit card these days.

If you have ever used an email receipt,

you will get an email added to that company's email list

probably for the rest of your life.

Even if you don't ever use that feature,

you're being tracked whenever you purchase things with a credit card.

That is all correlated to you.

That data is sold to data brokers that can do God knows what with that data.

So I support maintaining former Supervisor Valley Brown's legislation

to require businesses to accept cash to protect San Franciscans' right to purchase goods without being tracked.

Furthermore, cashless businesses, I think, are designed and intended and have the effect of excluding certain customers.

I think that's something that is against our values as a city,

and I think it would be wrong to go back to that after having had in place former Supervisor Brown's groundbreaking legislation for several years

that made sure that that wasn't happening here.

I'm also concerned with the timing of this being introduced.

Just a month after, according to recent disclosures,

Visa made a $250,000 donation to Mayor Lurie's ballot committee for his parcel tax.

So it definitely creates a question of why that donation was made

and why this legislation is being timed when it is something that Visa stands to benefit from.

I think if you're trying to help small businesses, I guess I'm unsure why there was not any receptiveness to businesses asking you not to extend the midnight curfew on businesses in the Tenderloin and Soma areas where businesses pleaded with you that that would destroy their business.

So in sum, I would prefer that you keep this legislation in place and require cash to be accepted.

Thank you.

Thank you for your comments.

Next speaker, please.

Good morning, supervisors.

My name is Kylie, Director of Business Navigation at Glecha.

We're a nonprofit that does small business technical assistance.

At Glecha, we have spoken to several businesses,

and they have stated to us that as long as they are allowed to take cash, they don't care.

But you guys would be surprised at how many businesses do not want to take cash.

A lot of our clients prefer to accept cash.

However, not all of them do.

We are in support of this legislation because we believe that businesses whose clients actually do value cash

should be able to continue to accept cash, but also allow business owners to decide which operations work best for them.

Not all business owners prefer cash. A lot of them do, but a lot of them base it off their clientele's preferences,

as well as some small businesses keep petty cash only to be in compliance,

and some of our clients that do not prefer to take cash do so because they are frequently vandalized

or broken into for said cash.

So we are in support of this legislation, so businesses are able to decide which operations work best for them.

Thank you.

Thank you for your comments.

Next speaker, please.

Good afternoon and thank you for letting me have the opportunity to speak.

I'm here today on behalf of our venue and restaurant operations teams to respectfully address the financial and safety impact that mandatory cash acceptance has had on our business.

Currently, less than 3% of our total sales are cash transactions.

However, the operational burden of maintaining cash handling systems is a disproportionately high.

This includes bank runs, change orders, reconciliation systems,

and increased management hours for the small fraction of revenue.

This week alone, our team made three unsuccessful trips to the bank to obtain operating cash.

These repeated efforts consumed valuable management time and created operational disruption.

disruption before service even began, pulling away focus from our critical business priorities.

Beyond inefficiency, there are serious safety implications.

Our staff is put at risk of theft, robbery, and personal harm.

We have also incurred significant financial losses from counterfeit currency and cash

discrepancies, losses that do not exist with electronic payments.

payments, create a secure paper trail, streamline reconciliation, improve auditing accuracy,

and protect our employees from unnecessary risk. We understand that equity concerns raised about

eliminating cash. Those concerns matter. However, modern alternatives such as prepaid gift cards

are widely available and provide access without requiring businesses to absorb disproportionate

operational and safety risks.

Our request is simple, allow businesses flexibility

to operate in a manner that prioritizes safety,

efficiency, and fiscal responsibility.

This is not about exclusion, it's about protecting

our employees, reducing preventable risk,

and modernizing the operations in a way that reflects

the current consumer behavior.

Thank you for your consideration.

Thank you for your comments.

Do we have any additional public commenters?

Mr. Chair, that concludes public comment.

Thank you, Madam Clerk.

Public comment on this item is now closed.

And at the request of the author, I'd like to make a motion to continue this item to the call of the chair.

Can we have a roll call on that motion?

Yes.

And on the motion to continue this item to the call of the chair, Member Wong.

Member Wong, aye.

Vice Chair Mahmood?

Vice Chair Mahmood, aye.

Chair Dorsey?

Aye.

Chair Dorsey, aye. I have three ayes.

Thank you, Madam Clerk. The motion passes.

Madam Clerk, would you please call item number two?

Yes. Item number two is a hearing to receive information on options for shelter services and operations at 711 Post Street

and Urban Alchemy's progress towards compliance with the city's fiscal monitoring and contract monitoring requirements.

Thank you, Madam Clerk.

Once again, I'd like to welcome our colleague from District 3, Supervisor Danny Sauter,

to this morning's Public Safety and Neighborhood Services Committee meeting.

This hearing was convened at his request, and I believe we have staff from the Department of Homelessness

and Supportive Housing here to present as well, and we always appreciate hearing from them.

Supervisor Sauter, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Chair Dorsey and colleagues.

Thank you for welcoming me back to the Public Safety and Neighborhood Services Committee

for this hearing on 7-Eleven Post.

For some brief background before we hear that presentation,

7-Eleven Post is a shelter in the Lower Knob Hill neighborhood of District 3 that opened in the summer of 2022.

It's one of the largest in the city, comprising some 10% of the city's adult shelter capacity and 48% of the city's semi-congregate shelter beds.

It is also the site I have heard the most concerns about across all of District 3.

I've called for this hearing today so that we can have time and space to dig into the performance and outlook of 7-Eleven Post.

I appreciate the robust participation from the Lower Nob Hill community, both in preparing for this hearing and in the public comment that you will hear today.

Providing some more context on the Lower Nob Hill neighborhood, I want to be blunt.

This neighborhood has been ignored as part of District 3 for far too long.

This neglect continued during the pandemic when, within a few years,

approximately a half dozen shelters were opened with little coordination

or commensurate increase in neighborhood investment.

A few years after the pandemic, and with new leadership,

I believe this is beginning to shift.

Two shelter programs in the neighborhood, the Adante and the Monarch,

are closing next month.

We passed legislation to make it easier for these buildings to retain

their tourist hotel licenses so they can revert to that original use more quickly.

And last year, we passed Supervisor Mahmood's landmark legislation,

the One City Shelter Act, which I was proud to co-sponsor.

That legislation identified Lower Knob Hill as a neighborhood

that was over-concentrated in services and made it law that no new shelters would be opened.

But neighbors are rightfully focused on 7-Eleven Post,

its future and the neighborhood's future too. Residents have raised serious concerns with me

and my office about its impact on the neighborhood. There have been regular public safety concerns,

as many neighbors who are attending today will attest to. There have been persistent issues with

drug activity on the street directly outside, as well as issues with trash, feces, and the overall

cleanliness in the surrounding area. The site performs an essential service for some of our

city's most vulnerable. But it is critical that we listen to the community where sites like these

operate and assess the impact they have on the neighborhood. And that is what today's hearing

is all about. Before we dig in, I do want to comment on Urban Alchemy and their statements

regarding 7-Eleven Post. Urban Alchemy is the current operator of the shelter, with their

contract set to expire on March 31st. They recently went to the media and suggested that

they were walking away from 7-Eleven Post. I would state otherwise, however. There were serious

financial concerns regarding urban alchemy. They were placed on tier two of the controller's fiscal

and compliance monitoring for improper wage calculations, low cash balances, insufficient

documentation, reporting, and knowingly overspending on salary increases. Between these financial

warning signs and setting higher expectations for improvements at the shelter, I personally

lost confidence that urban alchemy would be the right partner going forward. I want to be clear

that there are no formal decisions or votes to be made today, and we don't have any contract

before us to consider. But this hearing should shed light on what the current plans exist for

7-Eleven Post and how they should be improved or changed to get better outcomes for everyone.

So with that context and background, I would like to invite HSH, our city's homelessness and

supportive housing department, up for a presentation. And after that, I will have a number of follow-ups,

and then we will go to public comment. Thank you.

Good morning, Chair.

Good morning, Supervisors.

My name is Emily Cohen, Deputy Director with the Department of Homelessness and Supportive

Housing, and I just want to thank you for including us in this conversation and happy

to be here.

I also want to extend a thank you to the Lower Nob Hill Neighborhood Alliance and the other

community groups that have been so actively engaged in this discussion. So this hearing

sort of originally came out of the conversation we had at the board around the Urban Alchemy

contract for 7-Eleven post and the challenges that we were facing at that time. So as the

Supervisor noted that Urban Alchemy was on controller tier two status, and as of November

10th, 2025, they have cleared that status. Urban Alchemy was able to submit all the materials

and documentation required by the controller's office and has been removed from elevated status.

Additionally, at that previous hearing, we discussed an HSH corrective action addressing

Urban Alchemy's overspending related specifically to this contract.

In June, we issued a corrective action letter to Urban Alchemy, and in their response in

July, they addressed many of the concerns, and we did really intensive work with them

over the summer and into the fall to correct these challenges.

And they responded by the end of October and provided all of their documentation that demonstrated full compliance with HSH policies.

And we have closed out that corrective action letter since then.

So while the financial red flags that the supervisor raised have been resolved,

we continue to move forward with 7-Eleven Post and really thinking about how to best make this

shelter work in the neighborhood that we are serving. So a little bit of context about 7-Eleven

Post. As the supervisor said, this shelter has been open for a few years in the Lower Knob Hill

neighborhood. It is a very unique building and makeup. As a former youth hostel, it has a variety

of room sizes, which make it really special in terms of its ability to accommodate couples,

accommodate small groups. You know, some people can have a single room if that's what they need,

or if they could do better in a more communal environment, they might be in a quad or a triple.

And that unique environment helps us serve people really based on their particular needs,

and it also makes it a very attractive shelter for people coming off of the street.

It is a large shelter with currently serving 280 people, although that is scheduled to go down to 250 in the fall.

In the last fiscal year, over 760 unique individuals were served at 7-Eleven Post.

Like all of our shelters, the program has 24-7 staffing, and guests have access to a variety of support services, including case management, substance use disorder treatment, behavioral health services on site.

Urban Alchemy also runs special groups like art therapy, anger management, and self-care classes.

The provider has consistently achieved the service and outcome goals within our program monitoring overview.

I do want to highlight a particularly, I thought, particularly powerful success story about a gentleman named Patrick who was orphaned as a teenager when his father passed away.

and by the age of 21, he was homeless on the streets of San Francisco. He primarily stayed

on Haight Street at the time in a tent and was working landscaping and construction jobs,

worked in the food industry, but with the onset of COVID, he lost his access to work

and spiraled in substance use disorder. The homeless outreach team was able to connect Patrick

and finally talk him into coming inside when he was able to go to 7-Eleven Post.

He jumped at the opportunity to come in, really intrigued by the small room sizes

and the amenities offered at the shelter.

Patrick describes 7-Eleven Post as a place to heal and a place to be safe.

While actively looking for employment, Patrick views the service team as kind and supportive,

people who treat him with respect, and helped him leave his tent behind.

He taps into resources at 7-Eleven, including job training through the Goodwill, and is actively working on his permanent housing solutions.

Supervisor, you specifically asked me to talk about what it would look like to close this shelter.

I have heard several calls for the closure of this shelter.

And as you know, with the closure of the Adante and the monarch in the neighborhood, that this process requires significant time.

Given the size of this shelter, we estimate that it would take between 9 and 12 months to wind it down responsibly, relocating people to existing shelters within the community.

We also have very limited comparable buildings and units to what's offered at 7-Eleven Post.

Given that we really only have one other semi-congregate shelter in the community, there's not a good one-for-one to transfer people to, which can make that even more challenging.

The loss of this number of beds would have a significant impact on the work of the neighborhood street teams to resolve encampments, move people inside, and get people off of the streets.

And without a comparable replacement, I fear that a closure could result in increased unsheltered homelessness in the neighborhood.

So moving forward, the department is, as mentioned multiple times now, we are in the process of closing two shelters in the area, the Adante and the Monarch,

which together have about 195 units that will be coming offline.

That is already a lot for our system to absorb,

and the loss of these non-congregate beds is impacting our work on the street,

but we also recognize that these were intended to be temporary,

open during the COVID response,

and are sort of the remaining COVID response hotels that will be coming down.

As mentioned previously, we have stopped intake into both of these programs already.

The last guests will leave by the end of February, and the sites will be returned to their owners for hotel use by the end of March.

It is our intent to move forward and continue to operate 7-Eleven Post as a shelter for homeless adults.

and we've been in conversation with the community and with the supervisors

and we're committed to working closely with a new provider

and the neighborhood partners to ensure that all city-funded programs

both support our guests as well as support clean and safe neighborhoods

in the surrounding community.

Our goal is twofold, to strengthen services within the program

while also improving conditions around 7-Eleven post as it continues to operate in the neighborhood.

To support this, we're advancing a set of improvements focused on enhanced program accountability,

improving site operations, and supporting healthier streets.

We will continue to evaluate progress along with the community stakeholders

and remain prepared to explore additional changes if further improvements are needed or not seen in the coming months.

HSH is currently in active contract negotiations with a new nonprofit organization to take over operating the program on April 1st.

We anticipate the term of the new contract to be one year, which would back into the shelter reprocurement timeline for our multi-year procurement plan.

7-Eleven post along with the rest of our shelter portfolio will be reprocured at that time.

Through the multi-year procurement process, we will be doing a lot of work to change and enhance the performance metrics that all of our contractors abide by.

And so this is going to be a really great opportunity not just to reshape 7-Eleven, but to reshape our entire system of care.

Some specifics on what we are proposing to do at 7-Eleven.

In addition to changing provider, we will be piloting or testing out a 24-7 public text or call line.

The phone number will be posted on the outside of the property.

And if neighbors have concerns about things that they are witnessing on the block related to the shelter operations, they will be able to text the operator.

This is something we do at the Embarcadero Navigation Center right now, and it has been a helpful tool for getting immediate responses to neighborhood concerns.

Additionally, at the request and urging of the supervisor, we are adding components to

the good neighbor policy, including requiring locked trash cans and requiring dog waste

stations and signage reminding guests of their responsibilities as pet owners.

This has been, you know, trash in the area has been a big issue.

We see this with the trash cans that might overflow.

We see this with dog waste.

So we want to be really proactive about trying to address that.

And as was referenced earlier, this is all part of a larger system review of shelter

and the good neighbor policies within all of our programs.

As the supervisor mentioned, the city passed the One City Shelter Act last year,

which calls for greater geographic distribution of homeless service sites and public health facilities.

and really restricts the siting of new shelters within neighborhoods that are already doing their fair share.

And I think no one would say Lower Nob Hill is not already doing its fair share with several programs in the area.

So we are now sort of under the guidance of this ordinance as we look to site new shelters.

And I think we all agree with the goals and intent of that act.

And then in terms of the good neighbor policy, in addition to these added provisions that are going to be included here, we are doing a system-wide review of good neighbor policies in conjunction with the Department of Public Health to ensure alignment of the expectations of our operators, the expectations of our guests, and enhancing the monitoring tools.

So now we've always had good neighbor policies in our contracts, but more recently we've begun much more rigorous monitoring of the good neighbor policies.

So now when our program monitors audit the performance of any of our contractors, the good neighbor provisions are measured as well and are tracked and can be escalated for contract violation like any other.

component of the contract could be. We've also developed escalation protocols when site operators need additional support from city departments, whether that be public works, SFPD,

neighborhood street teams. We now have a team of people able to support, step in and support the operators in getting increased city services

if there's a particular challenge that the operator cannot address themselves.

I do want to talk briefly about community ambassadors, sort of unique to the 7-Eleven post contract.

Since the site opened, we have funded ambassadors on the 700 block of post, not just a presence outside or inside the door,

but actually have people monitoring street conditions on both the 7-Eleven side as well as across the street.

And that has been, I think, an effective, or I should say, I think it has been a helpful tool in maintaining cleanliness in front of the site.

We want to continue that with the future operator.

And in addition, HSH and DEM together have layered funding into GLIDE to provide community ambassador services throughout the neighborhood.

Given the proximity of homeless service sites, DPH sites, and permanent housing in the neighborhood, we have worked with the community to add that resource over the last few years, and the GLIDE community ambassadors have been a welcomed addition to the neighborhood, and something that we are very eager to maintain and continue in partnership with the community.

I'm happy to take any questions

that you all might have

thank you

Supervisor Sutter

Thank you Chair Dorsey and Ms. Cohen

thank you for the presentation

I want to

ask some questions based on

each of these scenarios that you laid out

you know

first in terms of

the option of shutting the shelter down

why is it that

we were able to wind things down at the Monarch and the Adante, but it seems like that's not the

direction you want to go on 7-Eleven post. Thank you for the question, Supervisor. Demand for

shelter continues to be very, very high. We continue to have the needs of people living

outside. We have pressure on our emergency response systems when people don't have a place to be

indoors. Having sufficient shelter capacity is essential for our city's response, certainly for

maintaining safe and clean streets and getting people connected to long-term care. We have already

absorbed the loss of nearly 200 beds. Taking another 280 out of the system would be detrimental

to our ability to continue to operate our neighborhood street teams and effectively

provide services to people experiencing homelessness. We recognize that we are eager to open

shelter in other parts of the city and to try new and different program models, but taking an

additional swath of beds offline, the system really can't bear it. And then what about in

terms of timing? I think this fall you're looking at all of your shelters and doing kind of a

system-wide RFP or reset reallocation, something of that sort.

But yet, you know, we're considering this new contract right now.

Why wouldn't we wait and do it in tandem with the entire system?

Thank you.

So the contract that we are considering for the next operator would only be a one-year contract,

and it would back into that reprocurement.

So the intent is that 7-Eleven Post would be re-procured in 2027 along with the entire shelter portfolio.

And I think that that is going to be an opportunity to re-evaluate our system as a whole, re-evaluate our metrics, our sites.

And so, again, we are only looking at a one-year contract for the new provider.

Okay. Have you looked at any options to take the current site and break it into smaller sites, either in the same neighborhood or throughout the city? I mean, I think just the sheer number and density of individuals and services is part of what we struggle with, right? I mean, is there an option to break that into two sites, three sites?

Certainly.

I mean, so we have looked at lots of different options for shelter in this neighborhood and

throughout the city, and this is always one of the biggest challenges, I think, facing

the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, is identifying sites that have the

physical infrastructure, the utilities, the ability to shelter people, and to bring those

online in a way that they can be put to the public good and the public service.

It is a huge struggle to find sites.

So to replace one with three, I think, would be incredibly challenging.

It would also be much more expensive to run operations of three smaller sites

than the scale that you get by operating a larger site.

And I know for about a year now, this large site has gotten even larger.

capacity has increased by about 30 beds. Will that continue? Is there an option to

reduce that back to the original? Is there an option to reduce even the original further? I

mean, what do you think about in terms of reduction, even if you don't do a full closure?

Absolutely. So the property itself can hold even more people than are currently at the site,

although we have no intent of going up.

The site will only continue to operate at 280 beds

until the construction at MSC South is completed

and those beds come back online.

And then we will be able to reduce by at least 30 beds at 7-Eleven post.

And when will that happen?

Fall, this fall.

This fall.

Okay.

Okay.

And, you know, I think the other scenario to explore here

is the extension, which would necessitate an alternative operator,

given that we're not moving forward with the current operator.

I heard that is your recommendation and your intent.

That does not yet have my support.

Maybe we can get there, but there's a lot to be done before we consider a contract.

And so in that spirit, if it continues with a different operator, what does that process look like?

What operators are we looking at?

How long does that process take?

So it is our intent to have a seamless transition between operators.

We don't want to shut the shelter down and have to move everybody out.

So we are looking to bring on an operator by April.

Because we're in active negotiations, I can't talk about which provider specifically we are working with.

But it is our intent to bring that forward soon.

I mean, it needs to be in effect by April 1st.

Okay.

And if we go the stratum, we have to have confidence that this new operator can obviously do things better, make improvements.

And to that end, one thing that I want to make very clear, and I imagine this has the support of the community,

is if there is a new operator, one thing that has to change is the weapons policy.

The current operator, we heard, chose not to screen or search guests upon entrance,

and that very much worries me.

And we've seen the data that shows the results of that.

And so as we have these conversations, to make clear to you,

I wouldn't support any provider unless they have a very strict screening policy for weapons.

And I think that is alarming that we had someone who didn't do that in the first place.

But that is absolutely one thing that would have to change.

Supervisor, to that point, all HSH-funded shelters have a zero-tolerance-for-weapons policy.

No weapons are allowed.

Certainly illegal weapons like firearms are immediately confiscated.

Other things that might be a tool that someone might use in their employment, like a hammer,

could also be perceived as a weapon.

And so while a hammer is not illegal to have, we always have guests check them, lock them

in storage boxes behind the front desk, and cannot have access to any of those types of

things on site.

So a bike chain, a hammer, something that is not categorically a weapon but could be

perceived that way or used that way is not allowed into the shelter at any HSH-funded sites.

And the operator that we are looking at in the shelters that they do run actively use metal

detectors and screening. Okay. And I recognize the policy. I think

the enforcement and the reality of that with the current operator, we've seen different. And again,

the data and the neighborhood experience speaks differently. So we would be looking closely at

that. You know, just a few more things here. I'm glad to see the initial commitments on the good

neighbor policy. I think the intent of that is right, and I think those are good improvements,

but small improvements. You know, and I think if we want the policy and the surrounding support to

truly be a counterweight to all of the activity on the site, I think there's a lot more that would

have to happen. And, you know, the list is long and I understand that these are not solely within

your control, you know, purview budget within HSH, but I do think we've done this enough

in enough neighborhoods that we need to get out of a siloed approach and we need to recognize that,

you know, one action from HSH creates a ripple effect where there's more needed from,

you know from DPW and from police and so on and so forth and so you know to that

end just to share some of the things that I've heard you know that could help

there and some of the things I've personally seen walking around the

neighborhood you know again not your purview but something that we would

have to work on to secure together we were able to work with the police

department last year to bring footbeats back to Lower Nob Hill but they are done

in a very limited way, a few days a week, limited hours. That would help if we expanded that.

We were able recently to get a limited commitment on power washing on two streets,

on Post and Sutter on Tuesdays. That has helped, but we could use that. We could double that. We

could triple that. You know, this is a, you know, by all measures, the densest neighborhood in the

city that does not have good access to open space and it is something we've been working on

but also recognizing if you've got 300 individuals there without any open space in that facility

you know there is I think improvements in the public spaces improvement in open spaces something

that meets everyone's needs that should be considered you know the last thing is the

impact of dogs. And I understand, you know, I understand the benefit of lowering barriers

to get individuals off the street by accommodating dogs and pets. But this is something I would want

to take a closer look at. We, you know, anyone who walks the neighborhood has to be very careful

because of the just widespread dog feces. And, you know, so I don't know how many dogs are at

shelter. I don't know if we can limit that, but that is something I'd like to really consider.

I see no further questions from colleagues. I'm looking forward to hearing public comment on this.

I think it's something we need to really listen to. It's certainly shaped how I'm thinking about

this. I think the, you know, for me, this has been in the neighborhood for four years.

And I understand and I've seen firsthand and heard stories firsthand the good that has come from it

in terms of individual residents and clients. But we've also seen the impact on the

neighborhood in some really negative ways and so you know if we were to go

forward with an extension you know I'm happy that it would just be a one-year

extension I'm happy to be reconsidered next year with the whole portfolio

realignment but even for a year you know if there were not a closure if it were

even just a year you know to gain my support it would require a lot more

investment in these surrounding services that I think would help offset some of

the impact. And so, you know, there's pieces here that are a start, but there's

a lot more to be done, especially if you know if you want to get the timeline for

extension that you're mentioning. So that's where I am, and I think hearing

from from the community will help here too. So with that share, I'd be happy if

If you have any remarks, to go to public comment as well.

Thank you.

Thank you, Supervisor Sauter.

And seeing no one else on the roster with questions or comments,

a thanks to you as well.

Ms. Cohen, for your well-informed perspective and thoughtfulness as always.

Madam Clerk, may we invite up public comment on item number two?

Yes.

Members of the public who wish to speak on item number two should line up now.

Along the side by the windows, all speakers will have two minutes.

You can begin.

Good morning. Greg Pennington, 50 years at 798 Post at Leavenworth.

I've voted in every single election. I pay taxes in this city.

I support the local businesses in my neighborhood.

I'm a founder of one of the city's nonprofits, the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society.

I thank the city for the support of the LGBT Museum in the Castro.

Our neighborhood, Lower Nomp Hill, where I've lived the entire 50 years,

It was a nice neighborhood most of the time.

It has wonderful small businesses, inexpensive small restaurants.

It's visited by and depends on tourists.

I see people from all over the world wandering around that neighborhood,

and they're seeing all the filth on the streets.

It has small boutique hotels.

There's a famous bakery on Larkin that I think a lot of the boutique hotels send the tourists to.

When 7-Eleven Post Street opened, there was a dramatic darkness over the neighborhood,

the quality of life in the neighborhood deteriorated dramatically.

I saw four overdoses in one week,

and I was shocked when I saw those special San Francisco ambulances

solely for drug overdoses.

That just really shocked me to see one of those,

that we have to have those.

You see bent-over people on fentanyl walking all over the neighborhood,

crazy people shouting at all hours,

and now I know the bombs that go off all the time

reflecting on the brick buildings, their 200, you know, their huge fireworks, is because

they're not allowed to take them inside.

This city continually fails to help people that will not help themselves.

We have 10 shelters in a 16-square-block neighborhood, and I think the rest of the city should subsidize

our rents, since we have to have all the problems, and we have to pay the same exorbitant rents

as everywhere else.

I call for you to shut down 7-11 Post, move it to other neighborhoods, and make other neighborhoods share the burden.

Thank you for your comments.

Next speaker, please.

Hi, my name is Annette Summers.

I've lived in the neighborhood on Leavenworth between Post and Geary since 2011.

After a divorce, it was what I was left with in terms of my nest egg.

I'm now 66 and live off just my Social Security because of handicaps.

And I've second everything he said, but at the same time, stop attracting people to this city with all the benefits that are drug addicts, dealers,

people who have no respect for our neighborhood.

My partner's been stabbed.

I'm constantly regraded as I walk out of my house.

I'm calling the police at least once a day.

I have to call 311 because of all the trash and the shelters that form.

This didn't happen before 2020.

This neighborhood had recovered from other bad times, was thriving.

50% of the businesses closed down.

There are people in my building who have lost 60% of their housing value and can't now pay their mortgages.

They can't sell their property.

We're stuck, and I agree with him.

We need some subsidies on our side.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Next speaker.

Good morning, Dawn Malaspina.

Thank you for the work that you do to restore common sense to city government,

and thank you for the opportunity to speak today.

By the city's own analysis, Lower Knob Hill is already oversaturated with shelters and behavioral health services.

7-Eleven post-shelter is an ill-conceived COVID-era action whose time has expired.

Please close it down.

Shelter occupants do not stay in their rooms all day.

Many openly use drugs on the sidewalk, exhibit dangerous mental instability, and engage in criminal activity throughout the neighborhood.

It's not just limited to the 700 block.

The 7-Eleven post-shelter is a revolving door, cycling hundreds of reckless individuals into our neighborhood with little to no oversight.

With the dense concentration of supportive housing, shelters, and homeless servicing,

I attest to the adverse impact to businesses and residents.

I have enjoyed shopping, dining, and services in Lower Knob Hill for over 40 years and have

lived in the neighborhood for the past 23.

My residential building staff now log over 100 incidents of trespassing, intrusion, and

other crime every month.

The Lower Knob Hill Apartment Hotel District is in the National Registrar of Historic Places.

It should be revitalized, not destroyed.

Downtown's recovery must include Lower Knob Hill.

Return 7-Eleven Post Street to a use for the greater good,

such as accommodations for tourists, workers, or students.

I took the day off to be here today as a concerned residence.

I'm not a professional activist.

For a change, please prioritize the health and well-being

of the hardworking, taxpaying residents of Lower Knob Hill.

Respectfully, I request that the 7-Eleven Post Street Shelter be closed permanently.

Thank you.

Thank you for your comments.

Next speaker.

Good morning, Barbara Swan from Lower Nob Hill and 36-year resident of Lower Nob Hill.

This is not only a hearing about 7-Eleven Post Street Shelter.

This is a hearing about how we're going to live our lives in Lower Nob Hill.

The decisions the city government makes now affect us in profound ways.

Despite what we've been through in the last five years, the lovely bones of our neighborhood are still visible.

Our beautiful historic architecture, we boast four theaters, SF Playhouse, ACT, Curran, and Alcazar.

We're walkable and close to all major transportation hub.

Our hotels five years ago were filled with tourists.

Despite our proximity to Union Square, the only city department that thinks of us as a prime location is the Department of Homelessness.

Since COVID, the city has placed these facilities in our hotels, and the management has been left up to the contractors.

The city's anemic pet policy has allowed the streets to be smeared with dog waste.

Canine breeding in the shelter has gone unchecked.

More cohesive policies must address the inside goings-on in the shelters.

Ban dog breeding, enforce leash laws,

centralize pet resource information, and get it to the clients.

Collaborate with animal care and control.

For that matter, please fund animal care and control.

To focus on 7-Eleven Post Street,

we have three, soon to be four facilities, four blocks on post.

It seems to me now that we have come to the crossroad.

Five years, 11 shelters in 20 blocks.

The close proximity of homeless facilities has turned our neighborhood into drug-dealing shelter paradise.

We stand before you as taxpayers.

A fact the city seems to forget.

We need the city to hear us to step up.

We need you to employ whole system thinkings to correct our conditions.

Please close 7-11.

Next speaker, please.

Hi.

Morning.

Thank you for arranging this, and thank you for listening to our comments.

Sorry, I apologize if I get emotional in my next two minutes.

My name is Thomas Schneider.

I'm a longtime resident of Lower Nauphill.

I moved here with my wife 28 years ago, and we raised a family on the corner of Sutter

and Jones.

We couldn't do that today anymore, given the way the safety and quality of life situation has deteriorated in Low and Uphill.

I'm here today to strongly urge the city and the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing to not renew the lease for 7-Eleven post street shelter

and to seek a permanent closure of this facility.

Why?

I mean, the impact on public safety is clear.

Since 2022, we have seen a significant and dangerous deterioration of our street conditions.

HSA's own admission, the low bar entry requirements have resulted in unchecked weapons, violence, drug dealing, and untrained off-leashed dogs.

This isn't just a matter of neighborhood character.

It is a matter of basic public safety.

We have four similar facilities in a four-block radius on Post Street.

The concentration of these issues have really reached a breaking point.

Furthermore, there's a lack of oversight.

The facility opened during the COVID-19 emergency, effectively bypassing the normal community review process.

And for four years, neighbors have voiced these concerns to HSH, and yet there has been no meaningful progress in addressing the violence or the lack of oversight.

Continuing to operate 7-Eleven post under these conditions is a failure of policy that serves neither the clients nor the community.

So, in closing, with the current leaseholder, Urban Alchemy, choosing not to renew the city, has a vital opportunity to right these wrongs.

Please do not simply swap in a new contractor for a year or a multi-year lease.

It is time to restore the safety and balance to lower and uphill.

My family asks that you close 701 Post for good.

Thank you.

Thank you for your comments.

Next speaker.

Good morning.

My name is Andy Lang.

Since 1975, my family has operated the Beresford Arms at 701 Post.

which is next door to the Ansonia.

I found Ms. Cohen's comments interesting

because in 2022, she said the exact same thing.

She started out by saying the Ansonia provides a unique opportunity for housing,

and she promised that the Ansonia shelter would be a good neighbor,

that it was to quote her, an exciting experimental shelter.

Well, the experiment's been a failure.

What's happened is the shelter has really become a magnet,

drawing troubled people from the south of Geary up into our neighborhood.

For those of us that are in really close proximity with 7-Eleven,

there's nightly noise, there's commotion out on the street.

That noise and commotion has spilled into the lobby of our building.

At any time, you almost see open drug use.

When I say any time, it'll be 10 o'clock in the morning.

It's not just at night.

But at night, there is an exodus from the shelter.

They don't stay around the shelter very much.

they go down to our corner and on to Jones.

And that's where everybody congregates.

They do their business, their transactions.

And in the process, they freak out the people staying in our building.

Thank you.

I prepared a compilation.

Thank you for your comments.

Next speaker, please.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Next speaker.

Good morning, and thank you for the opportunity to speak.

My name is Scott Russell, and I live on the Lower Knob Hill, less than a block from the shelter at 7-Eleven Post.

Since it opened in 2022, my neighborhood has seen a clear increase in crime and a decline in the safety around the building.

Drug dealers operate near the shelter, and illegal activity connected to the site has become a daily reality for us.

Many of us find ourselves reporting incidents to the police far more often than before.

What was once a stable neighborhood now feels unpredictable, and residents feel that impact.

I believe in supporting people who need services, but the current setup at 7-Eleven Post is not working for the surrounding community.

For the sake of public safety and the neighborhood well-being, I am asking you to vote to close the facility.

and pursue solutions that are better for everyone.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Next speaker, please.

Hi.

I was a resident for 15 years,

and I'm a victim of a resident of one of these facilities,

and they're off-leash dogs, plural.

The dogs got me first.

I spent the better part of the week in a hospital.

The police failed me.

They blamed it on me for being out there.

I live on that block.

These unstable men and their off-leash dogs are on my block every day, 6 a.m. till after dark.

I don't go outside anymore.

I don't run my business anymore.

I'm a prisoner of my own home because I live on that block.

Thank you for your comments.

Next speaker.

Good morning, Supervisors.

My name is Todd Bartell.

My family's been in the neighborhood since 1946,

and I've lived on Lower Nauphill for 20 years.

The argument that we must bear the brunt of all these indignities

because HSH covets our housing stock is bizarre to me, frankly.

Our neighborhood is one of the last affordable neighborhoods for working people, for seniors,

for students.

I manage buildings in my day job and I manage the apartment building where I live and many

of my tenants are single women and they don't feel safe in the neighborhood.

To be clear, I'm literally two blocks away.

The properties that I manage go between here at Civic Center all the way to Levi's Plaza

in the Embarcadero, and my commute frequently takes me by the Ansonia.

And I'll tell you what I see.

When I'm commuting past the Ansonia in the morning,

there are clusters of individuals just around the corner from the Beresford Hotel,

Beresford Arms, just cohorts waiting to meet,

who either are from the 7-Eleven Post or just waiting for them.

So on the block of Jones Street between Post and Geary at 8 o'clock in the morning,

on my way to my first of two jobs, which I work to afford to live in this city,

there are people shooting meth and smoking fentanyl at 8 o'clock in the morning.

You know, that's about the time when the GLIDE ambassadors show up to escort them away.

So, supervisors, if we have an opportunity to wind down this experiment,

I strongly urge that we do that.

Thank you.

Thank you for your comments.

Next speaker.

Hi, my name is Elijah Ball, and I want to say thank you for having this hearing today.

I want to say that shelters and beds are critical for San Francisco and our mission to make sure that we can help the homeless and unhoused.

However, right now, 7-Eleven is not serving Lower Knob Hill.

It is only helping to check off numbers of beds.

I moved to Lower Knob Hill when I was in college.

I was living in a studio with a classmate, and we both had mattresses on the studio floor.

Today, I still live in Lower Knob Hill in a studio bedroom apartment.

Lower Knob Hill is one of the last neighborhoods in this city where people that are trying to gain independence can live due to its affordability.

At the same time, we understand that we are in proximity to areas where people are having really deep struggles to survive.

But right now, what 7-Eleven displays is a lack of understanding how our community is being impacted.

7-Eleven is, like I said, not serving our community.

And we need to make sure that our community can be served so that we can make sure that people can still live in this neighborhood and thrive,

such as myself or people that are on fixed incomes living in rent-controlled apartments.

The concentration of these facilities have displayed that it is not the right route to help house people.

And right now, HSH is showing that there is not cooperation and there is a lack of public trust within our neighborhood.

So even if we extend the one-year lease, we are unsure how our neighborhood is going to survive within the next 12 months.

Right now, I hold a list of over 140 people that are urging the shut of 7-Eleven.

And I urge a...

Thank you for your comments.

Thank you.

Hello, my name is Suzanne Crimmins, and I live on Leavenworth Street in Lower Knob Hill.

And I want to say I think we need to make a distinction between concept and reality.

And the concept of housing homeless people is excellent,

but the reality that having large shelters all concentrated in one area isn't working.

It's creating a bad atmosphere not just for the neighborhood but for the people in the shelters.

is we're putting recovering addicts in a place where there's open drug dealing

and people who are maybe just going through a bad patch living in appalling conditions.

With the lease coming up, I think it's an excellent time to just make a fresh start,

put a new shelter somewhere completely different, and let this one revert to another use.

And even if the organization involved says, well, it's going to be completely different moving forward.

We'll fix all the problems.

Even if they're sincere in saying that, I don't think it's going to work.

Sometimes it's easier to just make a fresh start than to try to fix something that's broken.

Thank you for your comments.

Next speaker.

And I do want to remind the members of the audience, we have a board rule regarding audible expression of support.

So if you agree with an item, you can put your thumbs up.

If you disagree, thumbs down.

Thank you so much.

Next speaker.

Okay.

So I want to say one thing is that we are having a new shelter opening in our neighborhood.

The Swords to Plowshare Shelter is opening, and that's in the 600 block.

we can't thrive

with having a 280 person shelter

in our neighborhood.

It has been, it's made me

and my neighbors who are elderly

afraid to leave our homes.

We're afraid to be attacked by the dogs.

The people who are

mentally troubled.

This is an interesting kind of shelter,

and the people aren't there for a long time.

They're there temporarily,

and they're in the throes of the most horrific times of their lives,

and they're put in a warehousing type of housing.

You know, Emily Cohen told us when we put in that shelter

that we would have all these accommodations in our neighborhood.

And let me tell you, that did not happen.

Our neighborhood became less safe.

It became less clean.

It became less livable.

As we said, this is one of the affordable neighborhoods in San Francisco.

And what's happened here is we've made it unlivable.

We cannot, there can't be a new operator.

That new operator is not going to help.

A 282-person shelter is too big for our community, and we have so many others.

We were known as the donut hole because we were the people with the least amount of community organization.

So you guys put in all these shelters in our neighborhood.

Thank you.

Thank you for your comments.

Next speaker.

Good morning. My name is Lisa, and I have lived in Lower Knob Hill for over a decade.

I chose to build my life here, and much like you, Supervisor Satter, Supervisor Mahmood,

I want to raise my family here in this neighborhood, and we are beseeching you to please help it

remain sustainable for residents, small businesses, and those in need of services.

I understand the proposal is now framed as a one-year renewal while a broader portfolio

review is conducted, but a one-year renewal is still a full year of continued concentration

in one of the most saturated corridors of the city.

Even with the recent closure of two facilities,

this area continues to carry a substantial density of high-needs shelter

and supportive housing sites within just a few blocks.

That cumulative impact does not pause simply because the renewal is temporary.

I also want to address the framing that the renewal is the only alternative

to people returning to the street.

This presents a false choice.

The question before the board is whether this specific site,

in this specific location and at this density, continues to be justified.

The centering of the attention has been on the fact that this is a unique site rather

than the impact on the neighborhood.

Surfaces can and should exist.

No one denies that.

The concentration without measurable stabilization should not be automatic.

I appreciate the HSH has emphasized compliance and remediation efforts, such as an additional

signage and trash receptacle effort.

However, compliance is important.

Surface improvements are helpful, but they do not address whether this site within an

already concentrated footprint is achieving meaningful neighborhood stabilization.

7-Eleven Post sits within the broader Union Square corridor, where the city has just been pilloried nationally across everywhere.

You speak to many people, and they're scared to come to San Francisco, but we want that to change.

The significant time and resources and energy that we have all spent in restoring the economic vitality and public confidence is so important,

and decisions about high-density placements in this corridor should align with that broader recovery strategy.

If the board acknowledges that this neighborhood is already carrying a heavy burden, then this is the moment to act on that recognition.

For these reasons, I urge the board not to approve the renewal of the lease at 7-Eleven Post Street.

Thank you.

Thank you for your comments.

Do we have any additional public commenters on this item?

Mr. Chair, that concludes public comment.

Thank you, Madam Clerk.

Public comment on this item is now closed.

And before sending it over to Supervisor Sauter for some final words,

I do want to just speak a little bit because I was really moved by much of what I heard here,

especially as it pertains to what residents are experiencing at the unprecedented levels of drug tolerance

that we have adopted into our response to homelessness in San Francisco.

I believe that when the history of this era is written,

I think the sin that will get this generation's statues taken down and names taken off of buildings

will be how we minimize the manifest harms of rampant illicit drug use,

how we ignored the plight of residents and businesses

too often beset by drug-driven lawlessness,

and how we tolerated and enabled illicit drug use

at the very moment it was becoming deadlier than ever before in human history.

I think it's appalling and shame on us for how we have minimized this.

If there is cause for optimism coming, I will say, and I think there is,

It is in the Reset Center that we voted on this week.

In my view, this is an approach that reflects the most important drug policy innovation we have seen

since the advent of the fentanyl crisis.

It is a commitment to real accountability that includes finally implementing a strategy to make arrests

and bring accountability for public drug use, to confiscate drugs, to put drug users into custody

for their own good and to make sure that they stay there

until they're medically cleared to leave.

This is about making a promise and keeping the promise

that there are now three options for those who come to San Francisco

to engage in drug-driven misbehavior, get sober, get arrested, or get out.

But the party is over.

And with that, I would like to just send it back over to Supervisor Sauter.

Thank you, Chair, and thank you for those remarks.

I concur and appreciate your leadership to start to steer the city in that direction.

And you mentioned accountability.

Accountability, I think, is what we're all looking for here for this site, for everyone involved in this site.

There's a lot of work to be done.

I appreciate everyone who shared the stories of the impact in the neighborhood this morning.

I wish you didn't have to be here but you know you made it clear that again as

we consider all these options there's a lot more work that needs to be done if

it is a closure if it is an extension there is you know clearly has to be a

different path forward we cannot continue doing what we've done to get us

into the situation we see every single day the impact of that so with with that

being said, I will continue that work with the neighborhood, with the department over this next

critical month, and I would ask that this, well, I'll send it back to you, Chair, to conclude this.

Thank you. Thank you, Supervisor Sauter, and thank you everybody who attended today

at the sponsor's request. I would move that this hearing be heard and filed. Madam Clerk,

may we have a roll call on that motion? Yes, and on the motion that this item be heard and filed,

Member Wong.

Member Wong, aye.

Vice Chair Mahmood.

Vice Chair Mahmood, aye.

Chair Dorsey.

Aye.

Chair Dorsey, aye.

I have three ayes.

Thank you, Madam Clerk.

The motion passes.

Madam Clerk, can we please call the next item, item number three?

Yes.

Item number three is a hearing to discuss the cause, escalation, response, and impacts of the widespread power outages that begin on December 20th, 2025,

and which have disproportionately affected residents and small businesses in the Richmond, Sunset, Presidio, Civic Center, South of Market,

and other San Francisco neighborhoods to understand how a localized substation incident escalated to affect nearly one-third of the city,

to assess communication failures and gaps in emergency response protocols,

to evaluate economic impacts on small businesses and hardships faced by seniors, persons with disabilities, and other vulnerable residents

to discuss and understand the remedies, claims, processes, and support being provided to affected residences and businesses.

Thank you, Madam Clerk.

This hearing was called by Supervisor Alan Wong and Supervisor Bilal Mahmood,

who, like me, represent neighborhoods most severely impacted by the widespread power outages.

In December, those outages disrupted the lives of thousands of San Franciscans, us included, shutting down small businesses, interrupting essential services, and leaving families without reliable power for extended periods of time.

I know our constituents deserve clear answers, so with that, I'd like to invite Supervisor Wong to offer his remarks and introduce our presenters.

Supervisor Wong, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Chair Dorsey.

On December 20th, the Saturday before Christmas and one of the busiest shopping days of the year,

a fire broke out at PG&E's Mission substation.

Within hours, more than 130,000 San Francisco residents and businesses lost power.

Some wouldn't get it back for nearly three days.

This was not an isolated incident.

In December alone, the Sunset and Richmond districts experienced outages on December 7th, 10th, 20th, 24th, 27th, and 29th.

Six outages in one month, and it didn't stop with the new year.

We saw additional outages last month on January 19th, 20th, and 26th.

The same families, the same businesses, the same seniors over and over again.

And now we're hearing about another planned outage next Tuesday, February 17th on Lunar New Year.

Another holiday, another disruption for our residents and small businesses.

The focus today is on the most disruptive of these outages, December 20th.

On that day, many residents and businesses were left without power for well over 12 hours.

And for some, it stretched into the next morning.

Let's be clear, that is not a blip.

that is not weathering a storm. That's a third of the city being told to just figure it out.

It's food spoiling, it's medical equipment without power, it's families sitting in the dark,

it's caregivers scrambling to protect loved ones, workers losing shifts, and merchants bleeding

money by the hour. And the stories we've heard make the stakes impossible to ignore.

We heard, we saw from Sunset Sipper, when the first outage hit, they move fruits and vegetables

out in front based on PG&E's restoration estimates. Then those estimates changed, and then they changed

again. By the time they realized the power was not coming back, they wasted staff time and effort to

open because they did not have accurate information. We heard from a seafood shop owner who slept in

her van overnight, hoping power would return so she could salvage her inventory before it spoiled.

When the power did not return, she tried hooking her car battery to the tanks to save what was

left of the fish. And we heard about a 95-year-old Sunset resident on a ventilator. For that family,

this wasn't a simple inconvenience. It was about whether a loved one could breathe.

These are not abstractions. These are our neighbors. Today's hearing is focused on these

impacts. We will hear from residents, merchants, and city departments about what happened

and what they experienced. We will examine whether PG&E's response, communication, outreach, and

relief match the scale of the outages. Our residents deserve answers. More than that,

they deserve accountability. But let's be clear about what accountability means. It does not mean

a press release. It does not mean a website update. It does not mean an automated text message

with a restoration estimate that keeps shifting. It does not mean bill credits that don't come

close to covering actual losses. It does not mean an opaque claims process that's low,

confusing and difficult to navigate. Accountability means showing up. 130,000 people lose power. You

don't direct them to an 800 number. You don't ask them to navigate an automated phone tree. You put

people on the ground. You knock on doors. You check on seniors. You help small business owners figure

out their next steps before it's too late. That's what accountability looks like, and that's what

I'll be pressing for today. Clear information, concrete commitments, and real steps forward.

We plan to hold a second hearing on root causes and infrastructure.

But first, we need to document the true cost of these outages and evaluate whether PG&E's response and relief have been adequate.

That is the focus of today's hearing.

I want to thank Chair Dorsey for calendaring this item, and I want to thank my co-sponsor, Supervisor Mahmood, Chan, Cheryl, Melgar, and Sauter for their partnership.

To the residents, merchants, and community members who are here today or watching from home, thank you for your patience and thank you for your testimony.

The hearing exists because you demanded it.

Now I'm going to pass this on to Supervisor Mahmood, who also has a statement.

Thank you, Supervisor Wong.

Vice Chair Mahmood.

Thank you, Chair Dorsey, and thank you, Vice Chair Wong, for holding this hearing.

When the lights went out across San Francisco on the afternoon or evening of December 20th, San Franciscans were holiday shopping.

Small businesses were preparing for the Christmas holidays on one of the biggest times before the new year.

but little by little the lights went out across the city and it became clear this was going to

be a dark Saturday for over hundreds of thousands of San Franciscans and this wasn't just one of

those outages where the most difficult consequence is resetting your alarm clock this was an emergency

citywide there was traffic chaos with Waymo struggling with the failing stop lights

cell networks were unreliable. I was on a date with my wife taking the seven,

seeing traffic congestion compound across the street, and businesses shuttered and waiting

for residents to get service. My team heard from business owners in the hate who had to close up

shop on the busiest weekend of the year, checked in with non-profits in the Tenderloin who were

scrambling to serve residents and coordinated with departments and board colleagues to see

how we could best help. As the day wore on and turned into two and for some three days without

power, there were more questions than answers. Why did a fire in Soma cause power to go out in

the Richmond? Why were original estimates for power coming back so inaccurate? When will our

small businesses get the compensation they deserve for lost revenue? And when will something like

this happen again? And when it does, will we be ready? Because I know that there's still some

investigating to do on the substation fire itself, and we'll discuss those specifics at a future date.

But today, I will focus my questions for PG&E and some of the city departments on understanding

what is the preparedness of PG&E to manage this emergency?

How do we address the accuracy and timeliness of communication

with public and coordination with public safety agencies?

And what is PG&E going to do to attempt to make things right

in the aftermath of this incident?

PG&E may be an investor-owned company,

but it's a heavily regulated monopoly

that this city is unfortunately currently reliant on

and is essential as a result to the health and safety and livelihood of every San Franciscan,

they have a duty to be accountable to the public,

and we have a duty to make sure that PG&E hears from its customers.

It's in that spirit of civic duty that I appreciate we're having this hearing,

alongside Supervisor Chan's resolution,

affirming the city's interest in taking PG&E out of the equation

and committing local resources to powering the city.

It's important for PG&E to know that they're providing a public service

and that if they don't meet the basic standards of reliability or customer service,

that we are more than happy to explore other options.

I look forward to a productive hearing today.

Hey, we have representatives here from PG&E to give a presentation and answer questions.

Thank you for coming.

Would our PG&E representatives please come up to the podium?

Good morning, Chair Dorsey and Supervisors.

My name is Sarah Yole, Government Relations Manager for PG&E.

Thank you for inviting us here today to talk about the steps we are taking to improve our service and communications to San Francisco

following the outage that took place on December 20th and the subsequent outages.

We know that during the outage and in the days that followed, we did not meet our high standards of performance.

We must do better.

During the busiest weekend of the holiday season, our customers were without power, and the information we provided was at times inaccurate and inconsistent.

This was unacceptable.

We caused significant disruption and frustration.

We are sincerely sorry for that.

There are no excuses.

We are committed to taking corrective action and getting better.

Since the outage, we have been working nonstop to make it right.

Today, members of our executive team are here, including PG&E Chief Executive Officer Samit Singh, Chief Customer Officer Vincent Davis, Senior Vice President of Electric Transmission and Distribution Peter Kenney, Senior Vice President of Wildfire Emergency and Operations Mark Quinlan, and Jake Ziggleman, Regional Vice President for the Bay Area.

Thank you for this opportunity to participate in today's hearing. I will now turn it over to our Chief Executive Officer Samit Singh.

Thank you, Sarah.

And good morning, Chair Dorsey, respected members of the committee and supervisors,

and our San Francisco customers who are our friends, families, and neighbors

that we have the privilege to serve every single day.

We really appreciate the opportunity today to engage with you today in regards to the December 20th outage that occurred in our hometown and your hometown of San Francisco.

And for more than 120 years, we have had the humbling privilege of serving this city.

And we do not take this responsibility lightly.

I want to be very clear that we take responsibility for the outage that took place last December,

and our response to that outage, as Sarah mentioned, is unacceptable.

Approximately 130,000 of our customers lost power during one of the busiest weekends of the year.

This impacted families gathered for the holidays, businesses and restaurants serving their customers and visitors coming to the city that we are so privileged to serve every single day.

We did not live up to our commitment to serve you with reliable power and to deliver consistent and accurate information to our customers and elected officials.

We are accountable to everyone impacted by the December 20th outage.

Since this incident, we have had an unwavering focus to make it right and are taking immediate actions to improve our local operations and communications.

We are working tirelessly to earn your confidence and trust every day.

Lastly, I want to thank the city staff, the first responders, the mayor, and many other

local teams who supported our work and the resilience of all those impacted by this outage.

We are working closely with the city and local first responders to improve our coordination

and emergency preparedness.

This incident started at 1.04 p.m. on Saturday, December 20th, when a circuit breaker at our

mission substation experienced an issue that resulted in a fire.

As mentioned, we are still investigating the underlying cause of the issue and the fire.

For the safety of emergency responders and firefighters, we de-energized the mission

substation at 2.31 p.m., and this resulted in an outage that impacted nearly 130,000 customers.

Over the next several hours, San Francisco's heroic firefighters suppressed the fire and

made the site safe to enter. We are so thankful to them. By 6.38 p.m., the fire department cleared

the site for us to safely enter and initiate a restoration process.

And within the next three hours, we had restored power to nearly 97,000 customers, about 75%

of those affected, that experienced a total outage duration of approximately eight hours.

When we recognized that this was going to be an extended outage for the remaining 35,000

customers, we left no rock unturned to support our customers. Our teams worked around the clock,

implementing innovative solutions, including temporary generation, to restore all impacted

customers as safely and as quickly as possible. In coordination with the city, we opened our first

Community Resource Center in the Richmond District by 4 p.m. on Sunday, December 21st.

This took about half the time that it usually takes to stand up a customer resource center.

Throughout the event, we continue to restore customers based on our system configuration

successively with 100% of our customers restored by 4.30 a.m. on Tuesday morning of December 23rd.

We recognize and deeply empathize with our customers, businesses, the restaurants, merchants, and visitors that experienced significant impact from these outages.

As part of our commitment to earn your and our customers' trust, we've taken a series of immediate actions in support of our customers in improving our communications.

First and foremost, we have completed the repairs at the mission substation and safely returned into normal configuration,

restoring standard operating conditions and improving electric reliability in the area.

This work was completed on January 20th.

This work was critical because due to the damage caused by the fire,

we operated in an abnormal configuration that caused some of our customers,

including some in the Richmond and Sunset districts,

to experience additional outages as cited by Supervisor Wong in his opening comments.

The service reliability has now been restored.

We have also initiated a third-party expert investigation into the cause of the fire and the power outage,

and as part of the investigation, we are continuing to engage with the city and the California Public Utility Commission

to observe evidence examinations so that they can see and know what we know when we know it.

We will share the initial findings when they become available, which are expected in March.

Across San Francisco, we've performed additional inspections and established a rapid response team that has accelerated upgrades, repairs, and power outage response.

We have strengthened our around-the-clock system monitoring to improve visibility and early detection of any potential issues on our system.

I also want to focus on one major issue that has been raised that we are addressing, which is the inaccurate restoration times that we provided.

This was unacceptable, and the impact it had on our customers and their frustration is not lost on us.

When an outage happens, we automatically issue notification to our impacted customers that we are investigating.

And within 15 minutes, we send an automatic restoration time that's based on similar incidents in the past.

And one factor that affects this estimate is whether the operating conditions across the system are normal

or impacted by broader events like extreme weather or extenuating circumstances.

Once an assessment has taken place, we override the automatic restoration time manually and communicate this new estimate.

And one of the issues we encountered during this event is that our crews were not able to assess the situation quickly and safely

because of the complexity associated with the fire activity in the substation.

And this resulted in multiple inaccurate estimates.

And we own that.

gap in our process. We are bringing in another third party that's focused specifically on how

we can improve our restoration time estimates during large localized events, particularly when

operating conditions are otherwise normal. But in the meantime, we have already implemented

a rapid escalation process for large impact localized events, and we review the estimated

time of restoration for accuracy based on field conditions as part of sending customer

notifications.

We are also reviewing our process around automatic customer notification to improve

clarity, consistency, and accuracy with in-language messages.

Lastly, we also know another issue during the event was our engagement with the City

of San Francisco and your emergency management teams.

We are working closely with local representatives to strengthen communication, coordination, and preparedness.

This includes working with the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management to improve joint planning,

information sharing, and response during outages and other emergencies,

including exercising the response to events such as earthquakes and extreme weather conditions.

We're determined to improve our communication with our customers, local elected officials, and emergency responders

and will continue to review our processes to strengthen our response.

Now I would like to hand it over to Vincent Davis, our Chief Customer Officer.

Thank you, Chair Dorsey and members of the committee.

I want to reiterate what Samit and Sarah stated before.

We know we let our customers down and we're committed to listening and improving and providing

resources to make things right.

Since the Mission Substation event, we have met with merchant groups, hosted merchant

walks through the affected neighborhoods and engage with community stakeholders.

In fact, we have a team in the Richmond District right now taking part in a merchant walk.

We're also providing financial support.

During the outage, we quickly made the decision to provide automatic bill credits to the tune

of approximately $50 million to all impacted customers.

Residence customers have been credited $200 and non-resident customers have been each

received $2,500. We know that some customers may have claims that exceed

those amounts and that's why we've also set up an expedited claims resolution

process for claims above and beyond out of my bill credits. Today we've resolved

more than 2,700 claims which is approximately 90% of the claims that

have been submitted. Again, 90% of the claims have been submitted have been

resolved. The typical processing time to resolve a claim is 31 days. For this

event we've cut that down to 15 days. So our focus on this has been extremely

intense to resolve these issues. These claims total more than a million

dollars and our average resolution is about again 15 days but the key point

there in the 15 days is that we're looking at lenient processes to allow

for those claims to go through as quickly as possible. So that's been the

adjustment. The majority of claims paid range from $201 to $1,000. Customers can file a claim

for losses experienced during the December 20th outage or during any outage that took place after

December 20th and before our repairs were complete on January 20th. So there's your window.

We have in-language support for claims available in Spanish, Cantonese, and Mandarin.

We're also committed to resolving all these claims as quickly, swiftly, and fairly as possible.

Fairness is key here, and we're focused on that.

We know we have more work to do.

We'll continue to support these customer claims, provide resources, and gather feedback.

And I can tell you that the feedback has been instrumental.

We heard directly from our customers that there was an issue with the upload process,

not allowing enough documents to be uploaded.

We changed that process.

We are actively engaged in trying to make things better each and every single day for

our customers.

In the coming months, we will continue to host workshops, events to support our customers.

We'll be using that feedback that we gained from those workshops to improve day after

day for that recovery process.

So I stand here today before you because we care and we want to make things right.

And so with that, I'm going to hand this over to Bob Dean, the Business Manager for the

IBEW.

Thank you.

Good morning, Chair Dorsey and members of the committee.

I'm here to talk about the human response to the emergency.

So my name is Bob Dean.

I have the privilege of representing the most qualified utility workforce in the state,

the 30,000 men and women of the International Brotherhood, Local 1245.

When the power goes out, our IBW members, who are also residents of this city,

customers of PG&E and who work for PG&E, respond.

It is our job to get the power on for any outage, but specifically in this emergency.

In the case of the San Francisco outage this December, our IBW members in the city work safely and quickly to identify the problem, isolate that problem, and restore power as quickly as humanly possible.

They work 24 hours a day from the moment the outage was reported until there was full restoration.

The work is difficult, technical, and requires constant coordination between our crews in the field on all the varying equipments we had to work on here, and our system operators overseeing those operations, engineering at PG&E, and the local first responders in the city.

We know, maybe better than most, how impactful this outage was and the struggles faced by the many San Franciscans we serve.

I want to assure the committee that the IBW workers work together doing everything possible to get the customers back as quickly as possible.

That includes bringing in crews from across our region.

We literally had thousands of people available, hundreds of people here working in the city to reduce the outage time here as much as possible.

So they were there 24 hours a day, but there were thousands more available if needed.

We just brought whatever was actually needed.

They worked long hours and stayed focused on one thing, the restoration of the people of the city.

This was a significant response because the situation absolutely demanded it.

We have an important responsibility to take care of our communities that we work in and live in and are proud to call our homes.

There are hundreds, thousands of trained IBW members available whenever there is an outage, and they were available for this.

We brought in people from all over our region.

Every single technical expertise that was needed was here and provided.

Like you, we are looking forward to finding out what happened

and learning how the IBW workers can help reduce these incidents in the future.

I'm confident that our local IBW team, working with PG&E,

will work together to ensure that all San Franciscans can enjoy an energy system

that is safe and, most importantly, reliable into the future.

Thank you.

I'll turn it over to you, supervisors, for any questions.

Thank you, PG&E, for being here today and for sharing about the outage.

I also want to thank the crews, engineers, and workers represented by IBW 1245 who work

to restore power.

Thank you, Bob.

Please extend our appreciation to the team of IBW Local 1245.

When the power goes out, it is your members who respond, it is your crews who show up,

often working long hours in challenging conditions to restore service to our neighbors.

That work matters.

Our communities depend on it.

Restoring power is complex and technical.

It requires coordination, precision, and a strong commitment to safety.

We recognize the skill and professionalism that goes into that effort, and we're grateful

for it.

We also know that this outage had a real impact on residents and small businesses.

As we continue this conversation, our goal is to ensure we are learning, improving, and

strengthening the system for the future.

We appreciate the workers who did what they could to support our neighborhoods.

With that, I have a few questions for the PG&E team.

Initial reports indicated outages began as early as 9.40 a.m. on December 20th.

We keep hearing from PG&E that issues began at 1.04 p.m.

Can you explain that discrepancy?

Yes.

Thank you, Supervisor, for that question, and thank you for your sentiments and remarks for extending appreciation and love for our IBW 1245 coworkers who we're very proud of.

In regards to the reports, I know this question had previously been asked as well.

Our understanding is there were some small planned outages that happened in the morning of,

but nothing as significant or as widespread as what I mentioned around when the mission substation incident started around 1.04 p.m.

As part of the investigation that's being conducted by the third-party expert,

They're absolutely looking at those details as well to see if there was any correlation.

But at this point in time, we have not identified that there was any correlating issues on the outages on the morning of

compared to what we really started to see at 1 or 4 p.m. and thereafter.

When did PG&E first become aware that there was a problem?

When did the outage begin cascading?

When were city departments notified, such as DEM, FHIR, PUC, and MTA?

Yeah, thank you, Supervisor, for that question.

We first became aware through the real-time monitoring that we have within our substation

that there was an outage at 1.04 p.m. that initially had impacted about 14,000 customers.

We, as part of our established process, have a centralized control center where we have visibility for our entire electric system

that we're privileged to serve across our service area.

And in that service center, which operates 24-7, 365 days a year, we pick that up,

and then that's when we dispatched an appropriate qualified technician to the site.

when that individual got to the site, became clear that there wasn't just an outage.

There was also a fire.

The fire department was subsequently called,

and as I had mentioned in the timeline and the remarks,

right around 2.30 p.m. or so when the fire department got on site,

we started working with them very closely to ensure that the substation is safe,

And for us to be able to do that, we had to de-energize other substations because the electric system is interconnected within the city.

So we had to put that substation on an island so that it was completely isolated and safe for the first responders.

And as they were able to go in safely, suppress the fire, ventilate the carbon dioxide because it's a multi-level building,

It took about four hours to do that work,

and we're so thankful for the heroic efforts of the San Francisco Fire Department.

We were able to reenter right around 6.30 p.m. a little bit earlier,

and then within three hours is when we were able to restore the 97,000 customers

or about 75% of those that were impacted.

So that was a sequence of timeline.

Why did it take such a period of time to notify the fire after the issue was detected?

Because it required one of our trained professionals to safely get to the site, assess the situation, boots on the ground based on the field conditions,

and then as soon as that assessment was done, promptly make the notification to the fire department to be able to request and obtain their support.

Now, one of the things that we have done as immediate actions for some of our critical substations

that provide service to the San Francisco electrical grid,

we do have individuals that are staged at these facilities on a 24-7 basis.

So we're able to reduce that travel time from initial notification to doing a field condition assessment

and enable a rapid response going forward.

Your presentation says approximately 130,000 customers were affected.

What percentage of your San Francisco customer base is at?

Is that the peak at any one time or the cumulative total across the event?

That 130,000 supervisor that I referenced is approximately one-third of our customers that we are privileged to serve.

and the 130,000 was the peak number that I shared in regards to the impact from the December 20th substation outage.

Your timeline shows 75% of customers restored within eight hours.

That means roughly 33K customers waited longer, some until Tuesday morning, possibly nearly three days later.

Who were those customers?

Why did restoration take so much longer for them?

Who are these customers and in which neighborhoods?

Thank you, Supervisor, for that question.

The 33,000 customers were in some of our districts, like the Richmond District, the Sunset District.

And our focus right at the onset was to safely and quickly restore as many customers as possible based on the system configuration.

So given the fire, there was extensive damage to the cables within the substation that are serving these neighborhoods.

So it took a little longer for us to be able to get all of our customers restored in those areas.

We brought in, as you may be aware, temporary generation to be able to help interconnect and restore additional customers,

which we were able to do successively over the next two days.

and our teams were working, as Bob Dean mentioned, around the clock, 24-7,

to ensure that we were able to get as many customers restored as possible.

It had to do with the complexity of the damage,

the complexity of the interconnected nature of the system,

and that's really why there was an extended outage duration for some of our customers.

Okay.

Okay. When was the first estimated time of restoration issued to customers, and what did it say?

So I don't have that exact time with me here, Supervisor, but within 10 to 15 minutes,

there's a notification as part of our process that we are aware that there is an outage that has occurred,

and we are investigating. That is part of our process, and that's the process followed here.

And then subsequent to that, as I also referenced in my opening remarks, there's an automatic estimated time of restoration process that we have,

which basically is a process that's based on historical outages using a machine learning algorithm to put forward the time of restoration.

And then successively from that, as I referenced, there was multiple updates that were provided which were inaccurate because of the complexity on determining the extent of damage when the fire was still active, as well as the amount of time it was going to take to restore.

and we fully take ownership of that.

And one of the processes we've already implemented

is under these types of localized, high-impact type of situations,

we have a rapid escalation process,

and our teams and our executives and the right leaders

with the field conditions that are being assessed

by our trained professionals

confirm the time of restoration before it's pushed out for customer notification.

So that process has already improved.

It did not work in this instance, and part of that reason is because of the complexity of this incident.

But if you look at the process I just shared with you, it works really well on a normal blue-sky day type of an outage.

And in 2025, in San Francisco, 90% of the time, we were able to provide an estimated time of restoration that was accurate.

From the time that we forecasted when we're going to restore to the time that we actually restored, 90% of the time we were accurate.

Obviously, it did not work in this situation, and we've already made some of those process changes.

How many times were estimated times of restoration revised that day?

There were numerous times that occurred, and right around 8 p.m. on that same day, which was about seven hours afterwards,

we were able to suppress that process to ensure we were not continuing to provide inaccurate information

as we were continuing to assess the extent of damage within the substation,

understand the complexity of the interconnected nature of the system

and which of the equipment we were going to leverage.

And what we were going to have to do was essentially build a bypass around the substation,

which is why it took multiple days in some of those communities for that restoration.

You mentioned there were changes to the way that ETRs will be issued.

What guardrails now exist to prevent imprecise ETRs?

Yeah, so the guardrails that we have, Supervisor, is a lot of the reference I made to our automatic time of restoration is based on a trained model on machine learning.

A lot of those tend to be more that are distribution-type outages.

You know, we obviously don't experience the substation outages to this level, which ends up impacting multiple distribution circuits and lines.

So the safeguard, really, that I mentioned as an immediate control and a containment action has been the rapid escalation

and ensuring we've got very tight communications with our control center operators, with our field personnel,

as well as the right leadership that's evaluating and reviewing the information

to ensure that as part of the notification process,

we're providing as accurate of an estimate as possible

based on the information that we have at hand.

How were the ETRs communicated to impacted customers?

What methods were used?

We use numerous channels.

We use text where that information is provided as part of our customer system.

We use emails.

We use phone calls.

So there's multiple methods that we use, and that's another area that I also referenced in my opening remarks that we are moving,

and we've already taken some action on providing more clarity in regards to that automated notification process using those channels.

And one thing we're obviously focused on is also ensuring we've got in-language notifications

based on what our customers are sharing in terms of their language preference of notifications.

So that's additional actions and improvement actions that we're currently working through.

Your presentation said communications were timely and consistent,

but merchants told us the outage map text in the call center often contradicted each other.

Were the ETRs consistent across channels such as outage maps, text email alerts, or call centers?

If not, why not?

Which one should the public treat as the source of truth?

And if it diverges, who ultimately is accountable?

So in terms of the accountability, that accountability rests with me, starts with me,

in terms of ensuring that the communications we're providing are accurate,

and obviously we take that accountability very seriously,

and I speak on behalf of our 29,000 PG&E coworkers and family members.

In regards to your question about the source of truth, to the point you were making,

yes, we identified another gap there that on December 22nd,

there were outages that were still being shown from December 20th,

and in some cases our customers were already restored.

such as in the Richmond district.

So that's another area that we are actively working

and have made progress on closing the gap

to ensure the notification that goes out via an email,

via a text aligns with our outage map as well.

And the direct communication that we provide to our customers

is the source of truth.

What percentage of affected customers were actually enrolled in outage alerts?

What percentage actually received alerts?

I do not have that information offhand, but we're happy to take that back, Supervisor,

to ensure that we provide that information to you and your office.

This is about language access.

In what languages were ETR notifications provided?

The primary language that was used was English, and as I mentioned, that's another improvement

in regards to ensuring we're providing multiple languages

and in languages on things like Cantonese, Mandarin,

depending upon the preferences that our customers are opting in

and selecting on their language of preference for notification and communication.

So that is an action that's already been taken on our part.

I want to know what customers actually experienced

when they tried to get help or information.

How many people called your customer helplines or online chat?

What were the call center wait times?

What was the abandonment rate?

How many people gave up before reaching anyone?

So during the event, we experienced higher than normal call volume.

And so for those three or four days during the event, we were looking at around 20,000 calls that were coming into the contact center specifically related to this event.

Our abandonment rate started off a bit higher than obviously we would care for,

and typically in abandonment rates you like to see those, if at all, between 5% to 8%.

We saw those abandonment rates in the high teens.

As the days trickled by, those abandonment rates dropped, and we were able to handle those calls.

Another challenge that we saw was the average handle time in terms of the actual wait time.

My apologies.

The wait time was averaging around 15 to 20 minutes on average.

obviously you'll see some higher than that some lower than that and so that

goes beyond our standard as well and so one of the lessons learned from that

obviously is that in the event of an emergency like this we have to

reconfigure our staffing plan get folks on the on those calls faster and also

ensure that we have in language support lined up for those types of calls so the

contact center certainly played a role in being able to provide support to our

customers and we saw some challenges in there so those are some of the stats in

terms of our performance and it's not at our standard and again that's a gap that

we've addressed and you know we don't envision that we'll have to deal with

this type of situation again in future but in the event that it does occur we

have an action plan that we can activate on very quickly to ensure that we don't

see that type of performance again early proactive coordination for our

emergency departments is critical during widespread outages what is PG&E

changing about coordination of local offices during that major outages so we

can better support vulnerable residents and essential services?

Yes, thank you, Supervisor, for that question.

We're working very closely with the San Francisco Department of Energy Management,

the lead of Mary Ellen Carroll.

Our teams are very engaged.

For example, as part of the activation that the emergency management had

as part of their emergency operations center to support the pre-event Super Bowl activities,

we had two of our trained emergency response personnel

that were embedded within the emergency department

throughout the duration of when the emergency operations center was operational.

In addition to that, we have also worked on identifying,

through Mary Ellen, the appropriate lead to engage,

to open up our emergency operations center

when there is a major type of an emergency

so that they're embedded directly with our teams,

and there's really no daylight in that space.

In addition to that, we are working with them to obtain the gift of feedback

around their lived experience associated with the December 20th outage

to ensure that they're helping us identify what are, as part of the after-action reviews,

the things that we can do to really help improve that coordination.

Furthermore, we are working on joint planning with them, scenario planning, which we do often internally within the organization,

as well as with many of our state external partners, to be able to simulate major emergencies,

like an extreme weather event, an extenuating circumstance like we experienced with the mission substation outage, an earthquake,

and ensuring that we can build the joint response into our muscle memory as part of this going forward.

So coming up with a scenario, doing the training, doing the exercise.

So these are the areas that we are working very, very closely with them on.

We're also going to be participating at their invitation as part of their life cycle council that they have,

which is the emergency management team within San Francisco.

So these are all the action supervisors that we're taking in that space.

We heard from residents who couldn't reach anyone by phone.

We heard from seniors who also didn't know when power would return,

and also small business owners who made staffing decisions based on restoration estimates that turned out to be wrong.

Is that consistent with what PG&E heard?

What were the top complaints you received from customers?

I'd say that's consistent.

We certainly heard that from customers.

I actually visited at the Richmond Recreation Center as well and spent several hours there

talking directly to customers, and those are the concerns that they were expressing.

Not able to get in contact with people that had information that they needed.

Confusion about the claims process.

All those types of things were swirling around for our customers, and I spoke directly with

them several times throughout the course of the event. I took that information, we fed it back

into our system and started making adjustments on our approach. But I'd say your comments are

consistent with the types of things that we saw and heard from our customers.

I understand PG&E operates a medical baseline program for customers who depend on electricity

for medical equipment. How many medical baseline customers lost power on December 20th? What was

was PG&E's protocol for those customers during the outage?

Were they contacted directly or were they offered any priority support,

such as transportation to a resource center, generator, or wellness check?

Yeah, so we did conduct outreach to medical baseline customers.

We conducted over 400 calls to those customers.

We also leveraged two-on-one in terms of any additional assistance that they required or needed,

and we played an active role in that regard.

Not sure of the exact little stat in terms of the number

where those customers are actually impacted in total from a percentage perspective.

But we were actively engaged with that particular segment of our customer base.

And again, I think there are opportunities for us to improve,

but we did have that channel open,

and we did have people connecting and talking to those customers.

A third of the city was affected by this outage.

Why were emergency generators only deployed in the Richmond District?

Thank you, Supervisor, for that question.

So the intent there, and as I mentioned,

When we were able to get safe access on the day that the incident occurred, which was Saturday, December 20th, within three hours,

so that was right around 9.15 to 9.30 p.m., we were able to restore through our electric grid the 97,000 customers that were impacted,

which was about 75% of the total 130,000 customers.

And as we successively worked on coming up with innovative solutions between our engineering operations,

our field teams represented by the IBW 1245, that's the way that we identified the system configuration

and what we could do to be able to get as many customers restored as quickly and as safely as possible.

And it became pretty clear that we did not have a source in that Richmond district

that we'd be able to restore from our electric system,

which is why we had to bring in another source,

and that's essentially what the temporary generator does,

is to be able to provide that support and a source in a localized part of the system,

and that's why we moved to action,

because we realized we were able to pick up nearly 14,000 to 17,000 customers

by taking that action,

and that's why we quickly and safely moved forward to implement that action.

Your timeline shows the Community Resource Center in the Richmond District opened at

4 p.m. on Sunday, approximately 27 hours after the outage began.

And your slides show that by 4.21 p.m. that day, 90 percent of customers had already been

restored.

How many customers were still without power when the Richmond Center opened?

How many residents did the Richmond Center serve?

So I think two different questions.

We had at that time when the customer resource center opened, as you mentioned, 90% of our customers restored.

So we had about 10% remaining.

So that was right around approximately 13,000 customers.

And at that point, obviously the day before, we realized that for some of our customers, there's going to be an extended outage duration.

And that's why we moved to action to work with the city to open up the customer resource center.

and as Vincent mentioned, we had about 4,000 customers that we served at that center,

and just like Vincent, I also went to the center to engage with our customers,

and their lived experience is still and stays with our heart on the impact that they experienced

as well as all of the merchants on, as many of you mentioned and we mentioned,

one of the busiest weekends before the holidays.

And the customer resource center is a standard that we have in place for areas that are highly impacted on things like a planned public safety power shutoff when we have elevated fire risk, which obviously does not occur in San Francisco.

so we were able to move and work very quickly with the city to be able to get that stood up,

and that happened in about half the time that it typically does

because when we do see a public safety power shut off the type of an event,

we have about 48 to 72 hours of planning time

because we see that adverse weather forecasted in the event,

and this obviously was an unplanned outage that escalated quickly and rapidly

that had a very high level of complexity.

Does PG&E have a formal protocol for establishing community resource hubs during major outages?

What criteria triggers those decisions?

The criteria typically is where we have extended outage duration.

And as I mentioned, Supervisor, with the public safety power shutoff, that is part of our standard.

For these locations and communities, we have pre-identified working with the respective county and their leaders.

on where the customer resource centers would be stood up.

So those were able to move to action fairly quickly

as we see the planned adverse event coming.

And as part of the expansion of that standard,

it's not lost on us that we need to take that same approach

for our communities and cities like San Francisco

that are not necessarily in those high-fire risk areas

to apply that same opportunity,

especially for customers that have an extended outage duration.

So a large number of customers experiencing an extended outage duration is a key input that goes into that.

But another part of the key input is working closely with the city, the leaders,

and then you helping us identify what are those priorities that you are seeing

where we can help and be responsive as a joint partner.

how did PG&E decide where to place on the ground staff and any community resource centers and how

did you coordinate those decisions of the department of emergency management and other

city departments such as MTA or the fire department I don't have the specifics in terms of the play-by-play

of the discussions that took place but I do know that we worked very closely with the appropriate

leads within the city to identify a location for the customer resource center, and it was

determined that that facility in Richmond was the best location to be able to do that. So we moved

very quickly, but it was not a decision that we made on our own. It was a decision that we made

in engagement with the appropriate individuals and leaders within the city.

When did PG&E notify DEM, Department of Emergency Management,

and what is PG&E's standard notification protocol?

Our standard, I don't have that specific time on when we made that notification.

We'll be sure to get you that specific time.

I know it was on that first day when the event happened.

And Supervisor, our protocol for these types of incidents of this scale was to notify,

obviously in this case the fire department, given the support that was needed to safely suppress the fire in the substation,

but to also notify the respective elected officials, which is a protocol that's in place,

as well as ensuring that we've got the appropriate notification to the lead of the San Francisco Emergency Management Department.

And that is an area that we are obviously working very closely with Mary Ellen and that team

to ensure we've got that protocol that's clear on who's going to notify

and what are the appropriate contacts and establishing those relationships on both sides

so there's no daylight and we can do rapid notification as part of our standard protocol.

So we are further tightening that process up as well.

Was the PG&E liaison embedded with DEM during the adage?

If so, why not?

Why not?

We did have an individual, which is our public safety specialist, which is our standard protocol.

We have our lead public safety specialists that are assigned by geographic area across our service area.

and they were embedded just as the reference I made to the San Francisco emergency management team

activating their center as part of the pre-planned activities that occurred for Super Bowl.

We had two individuals embedded during that time, so that is absolutely part of our standard protocol,

and we are further shoring that process up as well with that team in San Francisco.

So your presentation lists extensive community engagement, merchant walks, claims, workshops, senior outreach.

If supervisorial offices hadn't pushed for those walks, what would PG&E have done on its own?

Yeah, you know, quite honestly, I'm not quite sure how they respond to that.

From the kind of counterfactual perspective, what I would say to you is this.

We are all in for our communities.

We're part of the communities.

The method in which we engage, it may have evolved into a merchant walk

it may have been something else but we would have been present with our customers in order to serve

them as best as possible and so it's difficult to say we would have done merchant mocks without

the prompt i feel confident in saying that we would have been engaged in those communities

and been there to support and offer assistance in any way possible how many claims were initiated

or supported through in-person efforts could you let us know what that number is for residents

and businesses? We're in person. We'll have to get back to you in terms of what happened in person.

We've got the total macro number, which we cited earlier in what was on our chart, our earlier

slide, but from the in-person carve-out, that's something I have to get back to you on.

Let me just maybe add to that, Supervisor. So the total number of claims, I'll just

reinforce, that we have received incremental to the automatic bill credits that Vincent mentioned

of $200 for residential customers, $2,500 for non-residential, totaling approximately

$50 million, incremental to that.

So far, we've received 2,750 claims.

That includes residential and non-residential.

And as of yesterday, we have resolved nearly 90% of those claims.

And we've been able to do that in 15 days or less on average, which is about half the

time from a claims processing perspective.

And then the remaining 10%, as Vincent also mentioned, a large majority of those are related

to supporting documentation, but we're working very closely through the in-person engagements,

streamlining that process, making it easier to upload those documents so we can continue

down an expedited process.

And our commitment is to ensure that we do right by every single one of our impacted

customers and leave no customer behind. PG&E committed to bilingual community walks and

proactive outreach to residents and merchants, not waiting for claims to be filed. Will PG&E

treat this as a best practice going forward and commit to deploying it under defined conditions?

Yes, we are committing to that as a best practice. We see value in it. It's in service of our

customers, and it's something that we will continue to do. San Francisco has PG&E power

outages all the time. What caused PG&E to take this step to proactively issue hotel vouchers

and build credits for this outage? Is it a usual PG&E practice for outages of this extent or duration?

Thank you, Supervisor. I would say that when we have these types of outages, and I made this

reference to our public safety power shutoff, which is a planned outage to mitigate the extreme

risk of fires. This is a standard practice as part of that process that we have to ensure that

the medical baseline customers, all of our customers that have extended outage durations,

working with 211, working with the community-based organizations that are very well connected

to understanding the local needs of individual customers. But obviously our recognition here was

that this is a large outage, the impact it had for the residents and our customers in San Francisco,

and these are the reasons why we took these actions.

And we also recognized in that area of Richmond District where we had the temporary generators,

noise was obviously an issue.

The equipment itself had some challenges in terms of blocking access.

So obviously we wanted to make sure that those specific customers that were impacted,

We were ensuring that we were doing right by them in that moment and continue to do that going forward.

Does PG&E have an estimate on how many hotel vouchers were requested, how many vouchers were approved, and at what cost?

I do not have that offhand here.

Supervisor, again, we can take that back, and these are some great questions,

and we'll make sure that we provide that level of detail to you and your office as quickly as we can.

The automatic credits are meaningful, but we heard from merchants that automatic reimbursements often do not match real losses.

Some businesses report a loss in the tens of thousands.

What support is automatic and what requires a claim?

So the automatic bill credit was the first step that we took very quickly after the event started to provide relief for our customers.

that in no shape or form would prohibit customers from submitting a claim all

right and so all the things that's meet and I've been talking about is that

expedited claims process and so the ability for our residential customers

or business customers just mix claims higher than the credit amount is there

and there's a clear channel to do that what we've seen though over the last few

weeks is that we needed to provide more clarity we needed to simplify the forms

We need to ensure that in-language support was present, and we also need to be clear about what hours of operations

those claims support lines would be available to our customers. And so a lot of learnings along the way,

but in short, to answer your question,

our point with the claims was really to provide that initial reaction,

but in no means did that mean that there was not a subsequent claims process available to our customers, and then that's the part that we've expedited.

it you reported two thousand seven hundred and forty four claims received

and eighty nine percent resolved resolved is not necessarily the same as

approved of those resolved items how many were claims approved and how many

were claims denied the 2700 actually represents 90% of the claims that have

been submitted that have been processed right and so that that's the the net

number in terms of what's what's been processed there's about 10% as me alluded

to in many cases it's an additional quest request for documentation you

know we've got our claims process folks working directly with those customers

and quite frankly there are situations where the claims are not within the

scope they're you know perhaps even a bit fraudulent right and so we have to do

our due diligence to ensure that we're paying out these claims appropriately

and in a fair way for all of our customers.

And so that's part of the process as well.

But there are only about 10% of the claims that have not been completed yet,

and some of those claims we simply just need additional documentation,

and we're using our claims process to ensure that customers understand what we need

and they can easily submit that information back into us.

So for the claims that were received,

what percent were approved of credits or financial compensation given to the people that requested?

So, again, the net number of claims that we've processed, we're at 90% of all claims submitted.

I just want to make sure I'm understanding your question.

So there's a total number of claims that have been submitted.

90% of those have been processed and approved.

So you're saying that of the percentage that you mentioned, the 90%, all of them were approved with credits?

Those have been resolved, right?

So resolution shows up in different ways, but those have been processed and resolved to close those out.

We believe that in fairness and equity to our customers, yes.

That's one component.

Then let's separate out the claims component, right?

So you have the claims that were immediately processed through automatic bill credits.

That's the $200 for res, $2,500 for non-res.

To the extent that customers filed a claim greater than those numbers,

they would get the net amount of that.

So if we gave a residential customer a $200 claim, they filed a claim for $250.

If that's processed and approved, they would receive the $50.

I just want to make sure if resolved is the same as approved.

Yes.

Okay.

Yeah.

That leaves to 10% that's not been approved, not been resolved, and those are the ones that we're trying to continue to close out.

And in some cases, as I said before, it matters as additional documentation.

Okay.

You're...

Let's see.

I'm moving to ask some tenant questions.

Tenants in multi-household buildings that share a single utility bill

risk being excluded from relief if they are not the account holder.

In the shared meter buildings and ADUs,

how will PG&E ensure relief reaches the tenants who actually experience the losses,

not only the account holder?

You know, we actually wrestled with that very issue,

and where we landed was quite simple for us,

which is we will offer these credits to the account holder

in the situation where you have a tenant or a landlord that receives that credit

dare I say our hope is that that landlord would do the right thing on behalf of their tenants and

send that credit through appropriately and allocated to their tenants we're not necessarily

in the business of getting in between the actual tenant and the landlord we had to identify the

account holder give the credit to the account holder that should in theory flow through to

the tenants. However, we also see that if a tenant reaches out to us and says that we have not

received that credit, we're more than happy to paying the landlord and have a discussion with

the landlord. But the ultimate decision for simplicity purposes and to get these credits

out as quickly as possible was to go to the account holder. PG&E has committed to reviewing

options so credits, claims, and communications more equitably reach tenants. What specific

tenant relief option will PG&E implement? I'd say those plans are still being reviewed now. I'm not

in a position where we can actually share what those plans will look like, but we recognize that

there's an opportunity for us to serve those tenants that may not necessarily have an account

in their name, and so more work to come on that. That will be a part of our continued process

improvement, but we see that as a gap, and we want to make sure that all of our customers,

to Simeet's point earlier, we don't want to leave any customers behind, and so the opportunity to

engage directly with the tenant who's not necessarily the account holder is a

gap that we've identified that we have to pursue and figure out what's the most

effective and fair way to reach all of our customers whether they are an

account holder or not and quite honestly you have to be there's a slippery slope

there you have to be careful because tenants come and go right and so who

actually you should receive the credit at this point we determine that it is

the actual landlord the account holder and from there we have to determine are

there other things that we can do to ensure that everyone receives a fair share of the credit?

Tenants should be able to apply directly with proof of residency, whether at least ID statements

or affidavits, even if they're not on the bill. Would PG&E create a tenant accessible process

to receive relief directly? By what day and what proof would be accepted?

I certainly think we will take that as an idea and an option for us to consider and pursue,

and we'd have to look at the implications of that across the entire system. But that's

a grand idea that we'll take a look at in addition to some of the other things that we're discussing.

If PG&E credits the account holder, what safeguards are there to ensure that such restitution passes through to residents?

Currently, there are not any safeguards that ensure that that passes to the tenants.

That's the point of the continued work and the improvement that we're looking for.

So there is a gap there.

And the assumption, right or wrong, is that as a good citizen, that landlord, that account hoarder, would pass that savings on, that credit on, to their tenants.

If that's not happening, we need to figure out, is there something that PG&E can do to intervene and assist?

And currently, we do not have a resolution to that particular dynamic.

Thank you.

I'm going to pause and turn it over to my colleagues for the questions.

Supervisor Mike Mood and Supervisor Dorsey, do you have any questions for PG&E?

I don't.

Thank you, Supervisor Wong.

Thank you for the presentation.

I actually want to call up Department of Emergency Management and the Fire Department.

We heard from PG&E that they're claiming that they were coordinated with your team, had someone embedded.

I'd love to hear from you.

What was your interaction?

How would you describe your interaction with PG&E on the day of the blackout?

And when was the first time you actually heard from them during that day?

Thank you.

Thank you, Supervisors.

Mary Ellen Carroll, I'm the Executive Director for the Department of Emergency Management.

On Saturday, December 20th, I was notified by the DEM Watch Center at 1.18 p.m. of a

large power outage affecting multiple neighborhoods.

Initially, it was 15,000.

As we've heard, those numbers grew by mid-afternoon to 115,000.

The max outage number was around 137,000 that day.

Again, it's important to note a customer represents, could be a single residence or a building full of individuals,

and we don't know what that number is.

So we don't necessarily know what 100 and whatever, whatever the number of outage.

We don't necessarily know, but we know that it's going to be a lot more than what that number is.

So our watch center is constantly, we have a screen up there that's looking at outages pretty much 24-7.

So that is how we found out.

I happened to be down the street getting my hair cut on Haight Street, actually, when the power went out.

So I just came over.

I was just a few minutes away from Turk, where we activated the emergency operations center.

And, you know, shortly thereafter was joined by the mayor and chief Crispin.

So we, I would say, because we are constantly monitoring, we knew about the outage before getting a proactive, but we were then proactively reaching out to PG&E to get more information.

We were also obviously, you know, I was on the floor of the 911 center, so we knew that the fire was responding to the substation, so we had some information.

It was pretty clear that both getting information from PG&E, but also from our first responders,

that there was a fire that was impacting PG&E infrastructure.

So we did request PG&E to send a liaison, and that liaison did arrive around 3 o'clock that afternoon.

um so it's almost two hours after the outage that a liaison you had to request

was not proactively offered and it took them two hours to send one someone for a city-wide outage

is that correct yeah and yes that that is correct um people are you know that the person that was

sent is the person that's normally uh assigned to us um and uh had to come across the bridge to get

here, which, you know, at this point we are still unsure what exactly is happening. And within a

couple hours, know that this is a massive impact and outage, but not what the, you know, what the

extent of it was going to be at that point. What are the resources were provided by PG&E across

the cycle of the day? So we obviously were in close conversation with all of the representatives

that we have, and that includes the mayor who was on scene with us. The resources that ended up,

I would say the main resource that PG&E provided was to staff a customer resource center at the

Richmond Rec Center. I do want to note that that was also staffed by Rec Park, by HSA,

Human Services Agency, and also DEM. We had times in which we also requested law enforcement

backup just for, there were times in which the crowds became very large and we needed some help

there. So it's my understanding that you had to ask for that community resource center? Did PG&E

proactively provide that community resource center itself? Yeah, I think we did ask for it. I think

one of the learnings of this that we're exploring is that the community resource center, our

understanding is really was something that was developed out of the PSP and

wildfire response which is of course understandable happens more often one of

the things that we are we want to follow up one of our follow-up items and

discussions with PG&E is about what can we expect from PG&E as far as supports

for residents. Just to say, you know, our position as the Department of Emergency Management

is the coordination of city services and outside services as they're provided.

We have to be able to, and we do, have a plan of our own for extended outages. So we have

triggers for when, you know, whether it's an 8, 12, 72 hour. And in fact, one of my initial,

very initial directives was to my staff was to put together immediately within like an hour of

the outage, 8, 12, 24, 48, and 72 hour plan should, should those things happen. Because I'd each,

as the outages continue and are extended,

we have things that we know as a city we want to provide.

Did PG&E provide you with a similar 8 to 72-hour plan

of how they would deal with this type of outage?

No.

We were more talking to them about what they knew about their infrastructure

and as they learned more about how long that outage would last.

Got it.

Outside of community resources, is there anything else you would expect out of PG&E?

The fundamental reality here is that we're a city that's prone to earthquakes.

We could have fires.

This could be much worse, and this is not the first time we're going to have to prepare for this.

What other expectations would you have of PG&E to help address this in the future?

Yeah, I do want to say this, and I say this with a lot of compassion to people who were impacted,

who probably are in this room, and it did not feel like a small event.

It was a significant event.

We had some people that were out of power for 66 hours.

However, relative to what we might expect,

this was a relatively small event of the larger population of San Francisco.

But as we saw, even on a relatively small event, smaller type event, the impacts were significant.

We had vulnerable populations that really needed support to replace food.

We had medical dependent folks who were vulnerable who needed support there.

We had, as we all know, outages of the lights and traffic signals, which causes dangerous situations.

Our city's underground trains were stopped.

We had our civic center area where we had to close this building and others, which impacts continuity of government.

Hospitals were on generator power.

fire had to modify their response because when these power outages go out they have to respond to

elevator rescues and alarms so all of that is to say what I would like to see out of this

and we have begun these conversations with PG&E is that we need better coordination and

communication with PG&E as the energy provider and with the city because it is our responsibility.

I see it as my responsibility to ensure that our residents, their needs are served in this,

and especially our most vulnerable residents. I spent eight years as the emergency planning

and security director at the San Francisco PUC.

Things happen with infrastructure

and not knowing when something is going to be restored.

We have to assume that's going to happen.

These are complicated incidents,

and I don't think it's reasonable or realistic to say to PG&E,

you have to let us know exactly when this is going to happen.

Things will happen.

We could have an earthquake.

and it's going to be complicated.

What I would like to ask and what is important to me

and for me to do my job for the city is we need that coordination.

And I would just say that we, PGE responded when we called during that day.

What felt to me that was concerning is that within PGE,

it was clear that there was issues within the communication within the organization.

We have a great relationship with our PG&A liaison who is, you know, we get the same person.

He was here during the Super Bowl.

It's helpful.

But if he is not connected within his organization, if he does not have information in a timely manner,

if he is not getting accurate information, then that's where we have the problem.

And we saw instances of that during this event.

And that, of course, translates to the public something.

And, you know, as the city, again, I feel like the buck does stop with us.

And, you know, so what we would ask is that, you know, in order for us to do our job,

we want to understand what PG&E does provide

and that their organization internally is running efficiently so that information gets to us.

Thank you, Director Carroll. I appreciate all the work that your department did during that weekend as well.

I'm going to call it PG&E based in light of some of that conversation we just had and get some answers to some of those questions.

Why did it take two hours before you proactively reached out to the city to notify them of an incident that we were already aware of at that time, apparently?

Why did it take you two hours?

Supervisor, thank you for that question, and thank you for your remarks.

director. That's, as I mentioned, as soon as we identified the issue, we sent one of our

qualified personnel on site. I think that individual got on site within about 45 minutes

of when we first were made aware just, you know, from a safe travel access and be able to get to

that facility itself. The initial call that I understand that was made was to the fire department.

And then subsequent to that, there was engagement with the emergency management personnel.

And, you know, as the director mentioned, one of the areas that we have an unwavering commitment on

is making sure we're working with them and ensuring we've got the right protocols

and the timing of those protocols to make the right notifications very rapidly to them.

So we're taking that as part of our continuous improvement coming out of this.

to answer my question specifically will you work with our departments to escalate that response

going forward rather than two hours later absolutely supervisor so how are you going to do

that so we need help from your side as well to ensure we've got the right protocol established

with the the right leads and you have our commitment to ensure we've got the the right

process in place i don't have those specifics or details people right here will you

contact them earlier next time when you see a response? When we see an issue of this magnitude,

absolutely we will. Okay. And it sounds like during the course of this communication, what we heard

from the director is that there was a breakdown in communication. We were hearing regularly across

the day from your liaison that something bad was happening inside the organization that was causing

a lack of actual outcomes to happen. How are you addressing that breakdown in communication? Yeah,

so those were the things I mentioned, Supervisor, is the complexity of the incident created a

challenge to understand the extent of the damage and how long the restoration was going to take

place. So our field teams were trying to assess at the same time our established process that we

have on a blue sky day was in place. So one of the things that we've already done is put a rapid

escalation team in place that when there's a localized incident of this magnitude, we have

the right people come together very quickly, cross-functionally, and are intervening that

automated process to confirm the time of restoration, making sure that what we know internally

is what we share with our liaison who is embedded and connected with the emergency management

team. Now, this process, supervisor, I'll share with you, it works really well when you don't

have this level of complexity. Ninety percent of the time we were able to provide that estimated

time of restoration. It didn't work here. We own that. And it also works really well when we're

able to see a planned type of a major emergency, whether it's a public safety power shutoff or the

storms that were hit successively, not just in San Francisco, but our entire service area that

happened right after the December 20th outage. And those processes worked really well in those

cases. The place where we've identified that we've got to do more, and we own this in terms of

continuous improvement, I own it, right, to ensure that when we have this level of complexity that's

localized, highly impactful, that we have the right protocols, the right plans, the right leaders,

the right training, so it's embedded in the DNA of the organization, and that is exactly what we're

working on. Look forward to seeing that reorganization, that response. Let's get into

another comment that the director made, which was about the activation of the community resources.

It's understanding typically that you are supposed to lead on that, and in this case, the city had to

ask you for that activation. I'm curious as to why it required us to request you to do the service

that you are effectively required to often as precedent do. And I'm also interested in the

equity of how those resources were distributed because my office had to request that you bring

a center alongside supervisor Dorsey to Civic Center. My concern about equity in this context

is that let's start there.

Why did we have to request it rather than you proactively initiate these resource centers?

Thank you, Supervisor.

So this is the reference I was making, and the director made a reference to this as well.

We have a planned process and a standard in our public safety power shutoff

where we already have those communities that experience these types of outages

and the urban-wildland interface on the predetermined locations,

and it's part of our standard to deploy those.

very quickly. In this instance, since we don't have that protocol set up because we don't do

proactive and planned shutoffs here because of fire risk, we are expanding that process just to

the reference that the director made. And in this instance, when there was a realization on both

sides that there's extended outage duration for customers, I mean, I could tell you that internally

We had those conversations.

I know that was requested by the director and the city, and we responded.

And we don't typically pick the locations.

We work with the respective city and counties.

You guys know your facilities the best and where you would like to have those centers staged.

And our understanding was that the rec center was the first location identified,

so we tried to move as quickly as we could to get that stood up.

But in terms of proactively offering that, that's another area of expanding the standard we have in the urban-wildland interface across our service area.

Let's talk about the equity of that response.

The center near Civic Center didn't open until the day after the Richmond Center.

This is some of the most vulnerable communities in the entire city, in the Tenderloin Civic Center, public supportive housing, SROs.

how do you determine where resources are administered and why did it take me requesting to your staff

that this actually be administered rather than you proactively considering the most vulnerable communities in the city?

Well, again, as I mentioned, Supervisor, when we work closely in these types of incidents,

we obviously take the feedback from you as well.

We don't know specifically which locations are appropriate, which buildings.

You don't have a list of the most vulnerable buildings?

Because, like, I mean, I'm looking at even data of where you restored service.

You prioritize the opera where no one is living to restore service

before you prioritize restoring service in communities and seniors living in SROs.

So I think you were alluding to the temporary generation that was provided on December 21st.

We did not make that decision on our own accord.

we were requested by the mayor to provide temporary generation to that specific location,

and we responded to that.

And by that time, we had about 90% of our customers restored.

So we provide and work closely.

This is why, to me, it's a partnership in these types of events,

because to the point that the director was making as well,

that in an earthquake, that impact may be in a different situation,

in a different community, different location.

the priorities of the city may be different.

That's why it's important to be connected to the emergency management teams within the city

and ensure we've got a joint playbook and a joint standard on that.

So you don't have a protocol of your own that lists which sites in the city.

I know you can distinguish between offices and residential,

but why weren't you prioritizing proactively residential over offices and buildings?

And why within those residential were you not prioritizing or have a list of those buildings

where they're the more vulnerable communities?

Sure.

So we do have a list of the critical facilities in the city.

We have to work through the SFPUC, as I'm sure you're aware of the process.

There's an annual process.

Just like last year, we added 257 specific critical facilities to that list

to update our system and our database.

And in regards to those customer resource centers,

we have that list for those communities in the urban-wildland interface

where we see frequent outages.

That's the work that we're committing to ensuring that we're doing

with the city of San Francisco, pre-identifying those locations

so we're all on the same page.

So if there is a significant type of incident or emergency that exists,

let's say a large earthquake,

we already have a predetermined location that we can move to action on.

We are all aligned, and we need some of those insights

because those vulnerable and medical baseline

and access functional need customers are self-identified.

We're not going to know that until that information is self-identified and disclosed specifically to us

because a lot of this data we have to work with the SFPUC as well.

So it sounds like you're looking at data publicly available.

My recommendation then is that you look into, like the director said,

we could have earthquakes in the future, fires in the future.

It is clear that you are unprepared for those incidents if you do not have a list to proactively address

those communities where people don't have regular access to electricity at this time with seniors,

people living in SROs and PSH, you need to make that change

because we can't be waiting hours or days for those people to restore service in that context.

You make that commitment to actually change your protocols to have that list of residences.

So thank you, Supervisor.

I would not say that the takeaway, I appreciate your sentiments on your experience

and the experience of our customers.

I would not conclude that we're not prepared.

Is there more we have to do to ensure that we're prepared within the city?

With the city? Absolutely.

And that's what we're committing to.

We have our unwavering commitment and my commitment.

That's exactly what we're going to do.

But we also need help from our customers that are vulnerable,

that have medical baseline,

or medical baseline rely on a life-saving equipment for their livelihood to disclose that

because we do that in the areas of a planned public safety power shutoff.

It's the same mask.

We have a protocol.

We have a process.

It's a matter of expanding it.

We have our commitment.

We're going to do that.

Put a needle on this before moving on to the next question.

You're saying you're relying on the customers to provide this information to the residences.

I want to note that California PUC General Order 166 requires that utilities shall set priorities so that critical customers' access and functional needs, populations, and essential customers are the least impacted.

Given the experience of what we saw over this weekend, the most critical customers, from our perspective, in the residences that I designated, were the last to get restoration of service.

Were you in violation of PUC General Order 166?

My perspective is we were not, and here's why I'll share that.

So critical customers also includes hospitals.

It includes first response agencies.

It includes wastewater treatment facilities, and we absolutely have a list of those.

And that's the reference I was making to the work that the SFPUC has done, the 257 specific locations we added.

Those are locations we absolutely prioritize in major emergencies.

The distinction I was making, Supervisor, is that those customers that rely on medical equipment for their livelihood,

it's a process that we implemented in 2019 for the planned public safety power shutoffs.

Those customers typically self-identify, and when they self-identify, we have them recorded in our system, and we provide those services.

So, for example, when Vincent talked about 2-1-1, we will reach out to those customers individually through 2-1-1 to make sure they're supported.

We work with a community-based organization, individual contacts on do you need transportation, do you need a hotel voucher, do you need a meal service.

So those are all the protocols we already have in place because we deploy them as part of the planned public safety power shutoff.

and you have our commitment that we plan to expand that within the city,

working with the director, working with your staff and your leadership.

And our ask and my sincere ask is that it takes all of us

and we are stepping up and we're going to make our commitment

and we're requesting the partnership from the city.

I appreciate the commitment, but again, I think it's helpful to know

that you are complying with this order in the context

of some of the critical infrastructure you've established,

but to me it's still not clear that some of those other facilities have been addressed.

I want to move on because let's talk about the safety of the infrastructure that was already in place.

I know the investigation is still going on.

But I think I want to be clear, the fire at this specific substation is not the first time this has happened.

I want to dig into what investments were made.

So in 2003, for those who don't know, there was another fire at the mission substation.

It was also in December and also on a rainy day.

It's my understanding it might have actually been on the exact same date.

That's correct.

Very auspicious.

At the time, there was a settlement with the city for that fire that was mentioned that PG&E failed to implement the recommendations of its own insurance department from a fire that took place in 1996 at the same substation.

This is the third time at the same substation.

In that settlement, PG&E also agreed to purchase $750,000 in specialized fire equipment for San Francisco Fire Department.

Was that purchase made, and does that equipment still exist to this day?

So in regards to, I think, two parts of that question, thank you for raising that.

I know that's on top of mind for you.

It's on top of mind for us as well.

And what I can share with you, Supervisor, is since 2003, there's been significant upgrades made to the mission substation.

in 2010. More than $200 million alone were invested to upgrade and rebuild, essentially,

this specific substation. As part of the cause evaluation that's being done,

that's a key part of the focus to understand if similar drivers were at play. But what I can share

with you is that the design of the system is very different than what existed back in 2003. Now,

I can't speak to the specific reference you made about the $750,000 of fire equipment,

and we're happy to take that specific action back and make sure we close that out with you and your staff.

But I know there's significant investments made not just in the mission substation,

but over the last 20 years in the San Francisco.

So you put $200 million into this specific substation?

Yes, that's correct.

And it still broke?

So that's part of what we don't know if it broke.

What we do know is...

You said the circuit breaker failed.

That's correct.

And there was an issue with the circuit breaker and there was a fire.

And that's exactly at the heart, Supervisor, of understanding why that happened.

And we're committed to sharing that and being very transparent about those findings with you

and the rest of our San Francisco customers.

I want to move on then to the time estimates.

that Supervisor Wong was asking about as well.

As Supervisor Wong noted, and many residents have noted as well,

that the time issuance estimates were significantly lacking in their specificity.

You mentioned you're using an AI algorithm,

or you were reliant on an AI algorithm to make those estimates,

and you were not intervening to supersede them once you knew they were failing.

That was part of the mistake.

What kind of algorithm are you using and when was it built?

It's been a fairly recent algorithm supervisor.

I'm sure you're aware, I know you've got AI background as well.

It's the light gradient boosting machine model that's based on a regression framework

and it uses the decision trees as the underlying learning model

to be able to help learn from the outages that have happened

And, you know, as I mentioned in my earlier remarks, many of those tend to be those distribution systems that are like a single circuit, single line.

And this obviously had a lot more complexity that's tied to it.

So if you think about the training data, it more relies on that distribution and single line outage.

And that's, you know, an underlying improvement opportunity here.

And that's why I mentioned that there's the team for the rapid escalation that is intervening, looking at field conditions for these types of complex type of outages.

And it's a system that I understand from a machine learning perspective.

The light gradient boosting machine model is not something unique to us in this application.

It's used fairly widely for many different types of applications.

So the underlying issue of the training data is something that we're absolutely working through as well as part of this.

When was the algorithm actually built, though?

The algorithm, we started applying fairly recently in the last year or two years.

You're using about a year or two of training data?

I think we have training data that goes back to about three years or so, is my understanding.

So you built it about two or three years ago, but my question is how much historical data was incorporated into it from prior to that two or three years?

Well, I don't have that specific. I think it's about three years is what I recall offhand.

We can confirm that specific.

Why wouldn't the training data incorporate some of the citywide outages that happened that were more relevant to this case, which is from the exact same substation?

I don't know if we have data going all the way back to that level of specificity because, you know, that data has evolved over time as well.

and as you and I know well, to have an effective, predictive AI type of a model,

you have to have good quality data that we can rely on from a level of confidence perspective.

I would assume given the number of outages that we experienced in PG&E, you'd have better data.

Sure.

But it's garbage in, garbage out.

But I would say, Supervisor, I completely agree with you, right, in terms of the comment you're making.

On the distribution side, that's why I made a reference.

it works fairly well.

90% of the time, it obviously does not work in these cases,

which is why at the moment it does require

that subject matter expertise, that human intervention,

and that's a part of the continuous improvement here

to expand the capabilities of that model as well in that space.

In the software world, which you mentioned I come from,

often what happens is you have multiple models

running simultaneously because of the indication

that you gave, which is that you're only as good

is the data that you're training on. If you're only training on short-scale outages, it's not

a predictive system for the large-scale outages that we in San Francisco have to be prepared for.

So are you going to work on creating a new notification algorithm system that is based

on historical data of actually system-wide or city-wide outages rather than small-scale ones

as well? That is absolutely our intent. You also know that there's limited data sets there,

but we are absolutely committed to expanding that machine learning model to be expansive

and holistic to the point you're making.

And I think the reference you're making

is to some of the ensemble type of an approach.

Yes.

And that is absolutely our intent, supervisor.

And what is the method,

what is the specific changes you're making

to human intervention to overturn this effort?

Because it really requires a human touch,

as we've heard from the department,

that close communication,

that you're not reliant on a software system

to tell people about

when they are going to get their freezer back online.

Yes, sir, and that's the reference, supervisor, about the rapid escalation.

We don't need that rapid escalation if it's one, two, three outages.

This model works really well in that situation,

but when we do have these localized type of complex incidents,

and there was a recent issue that happened on a train derailment in Stockton

that impacted some of our transmission system,

and we were able to put into action right away that rapid escalation team.

And our communications were far more effective because we were sharing with our customers what we knew,

when we knew it, and then they knew it as well.

And that is absolutely our commitment to ensure that we do that here for any such similar type of incidents that occur.

I'm going to close off with that.

But I think I'm just going to say that it is concerning to me that there was a clear lack of an equitable response in the city to serve the residents across the entire city and in the most vulnerable communities.

It is concerning to me that the technical infrastructure wasn't in place to have the appropriate notification system.

It is concerning to me that you've had three fires in the same substation, and despite apparently hundreds of millions of dollars in investment, it still keeps breaking.

And also that we didn't get an adequate response to support our first responders or Department of Emergency Management.

And just know that we will be holding you accountable to make sure that you are making changes to make sure this doesn't happen again, because it's literally happened three times.

Absolutely, Supervisor, and you can hold us accountable.

I expect our customers, who are our friends, families, and neighbors, to hold us accountable,

because on that day, we had shortfalls on the things that you have mentioned,

the things that Supervisor Wong had mentioned,

and we are working every day to earn that privilege to be trusted by you and our San Francisco customers,

and we are going to do better.

I expect you to hold us accountable.

we're holding ourselves accountable.

Thank you, Supervisor.

Thank you, Vice Chair Mahmood.

Supervisor Wong.

Okay.

I still want to resume some of the remaining questions that we have.

What is the source of funds for bill credits, claims, and vouchers?

Do ratepayers pay these costs?

They do not for the specific claims that we have talked about

for this outage that happened on December 20th.

Okay.

PG&E has acknowledged the disruption and frustration caused by outages

and said it needs to do better.

What are the top three operational issues that PG&E has identified from this event?

Can you restate your question, Supervisor?

You may want to get a little closer to the mic.

It's a little hard to hear you.

PG&E has acknowledged the disruption and frustration caused by the outages

and said it needs to do better.

What are the top three operational failures PG&E has identified from this event?

Thank you, Supervisor.

What we've identified is the process that we've been talking about related to the inaccurate estimated time of restoration.

We have already moved to action to make and implement the rapid escalation process,

while at the same time there's a third-party expert doing a specific evaluation on additional improvements

that are sustainable for that specific part of the process.

The second thing we've identified is that we need to coordinate much more effectively

with the director of the San Francisco Emergency Management and their respective teams,

and these are the two specific areas that we have very, very quickly moved to action on.

those are the two that I would put in front of you.

Thank you, Mr. Singh.

I'd like to, some of our merchant presenters

that came here specifically to present

may have to leave soon,

so I want to make sure to bring them up

to be able to present.

So thank you, Mr. Singh.

Okay. First, I'd like to bring up Sean Kim, Vice President, Geary Merchants Association.

We appreciate your time coming in today.

Good afternoon, supervisors. Chair Matt Olsi, Vice Chair B.R. Mahmood, Supervisor Alan Wang.

My name is Sean Kim, owner of Josa Ice Cream in Richmond District,

and I've come here to represent Geary Blubber Merchant Association.

At the same time, I'm speaking on behalf of Balboa Village Merchant Association,

President Eric Lee is out of town, so I'm speaking on behalf of Barbara Merchant as well.

And also, I'm not just speaking only one Merchant group.

I'm speaking for business across the multiple corridors and neighborhoods who experience the same outage, same confusion, and the same frustration.

First, I want to thank Supervisor Alan Wang for his leadership.

He understand immediately this is not just a technical issue.

It was a neighborhood issue.

When power goes out, it affects businesses, employees, residents, traffic signals, and public safety.

And I really appreciate he listened carefully to a merchant and asked detailed questions and concerns

and stepped in to make sure our concerns were not ignored.

And I really appreciate here supervisors, you know, allow us to make a comment.

Normally small businesses like mine, you know, even though we have concerns and issues,

easily ignored against a big company like PG&E.

But today here, public hearing, you know, at least we can share our concerns and issues.

And also, Supervisor Alan Wang, he continued to follow through.

He understands that neighborhood businesses need a clear solution, clear rules, fair processes, and also preventive action, so this does not happen again.

Small businesses often feel like we are on our own when dealing with large systems.

Having someone who understands neighborhood needs and continues to push for accountability gives us confidence that our voices are being taken seriously.

Thank you again.

Simply I'm explaining myself.

You might see the pictures.

You know, power goes out.

Our business stops immediately.

And then it's very simple.

My freezer shut down, and then when the freezer shut down, the ice cream melt like this.

And when ice cream melt, we lose all the inventory, not only for that day, for the whole week immediately.

And there's no recovery. It's gone.

And there's not just product on the shelf.

you know, there's weeks of preparation and inventories,

labors, and revenues that disappears in

hours. Especially Gaudi Boulevard, we are right now

SPUC water sewer replacement project. So, whole

year we experienced, we suffered big construction.

Only November and December, that's the holiday moratorium,

that's the time we have a breeze and then we're trying to recover.

But, you know, what happened?

The holiday season, December 20, and then December 31, you know, evening, EON, and we have a power outage.

So the biggest concern is not only loss from the power outage.

You know, we're losing a lot of customers.

They don't want to visit Gyori Boulevard anymore because a lot of construction after that, multiple times of power outage.

customers are avoiding. We cannot measure those

loss. We cannot measure future loss.

This is why power outage hit food business

especially hard. It's not just lost sales during the outage.

It's the total loss of perishable inventory and at the

same time we are still paying rent, insurance,

internet, payroll, and all of our fixed costs.

The impact is immediate and very rare.

However, PG&E created an eight-page guideline to calculate claims.

In reality, it is mission impossible for small business to follow.

The reason they request an eight-page guideline is because they want to separate revenue laws,

inventory laws, payroll, fixed costs, and owner profit.

it requires to calculate cost of goods sold at level of is unrealistic.

This is the accounting terminology.

Maybe here in this room, not many people know what is the mean cost of goods sold.

This is a different concept of material.

If in a hamburger ice cream shop, if I lost vanilla,

the cost of goods sold, only I'm calculating those exact products.

I have to calculate how many junior cup, single cup, double cup, triple cup.

And then I add even napkins.

Custom use toilet paper.

I have to calculate everything that I tem.

So that day, if I have any product that doesn't sell that day, it doesn't include.

So this is a very technical language.

But PG&E Recast, small business mom and pop, most of them have language barrier.

we have to figure out, count every single item.

This is a mission impossible.

We cannot calculate in a certain day

cost of goods sold.

We not count how many slices of tomato

go into each burger

so we can reconstruct one out each day.

This is not how small business and restaurants operate.

If a freezer falls,

will lose the food and the sales from the food.

And PG&E says they want to avoid overlap.

That's fair, but formula forces us

to complicated accounting exercise

that even large corporations struggle with.

And then this is an unworkable formula.

And then those APG's guidelines,

not only, you know, difficult,

this is a load of law for small business to start

filing claim. They said they received

a couple of thousand claims and a clear

rate is 90%, but we should check how many

business start file the claims. On the way

I make a couple of business, I ask them, none of them start file claim.

Even they didn't start reading eight-page guidelines

yet. And second, the claim process. We experience the multiple OTG and we still do not have a clear

answer. Do we file separate claims? We have each in an area four to five times claims. Do we make

four to five times claims or one claims? There's no protocol yet.

8-page guideline doesn't explain this either.

When we ask questions, we are told to call claim department,

and many staff cannot answer basic questions.

No guarantees response timeline, no written follower,

no accountability, no clear escalation pass.

You know, PG&E in the beginning shows a presentation, so a lot of outreach.

But still, without this answer for this question, even though outreach happened in the commercial corridor, you know, business cannot get proper help.

That's the question.

They have to prepare their staff, field staff, equip properly to help small business file claims.

But so far, there's no clear guideline, which means even though they have more outreach, small business cannot get enough help.

And we submitted a document and wait.

Originally, we could only upload five attachments, but after months of complaint, it changed to ten, which is better.

that shows system was not designed properly from the start.

Small businesses do not have time to change paperwork for weeks while trying to operate.

The third one, there's settlement agreement.

Any small business file claim, and then there's a back and forth with PG&E.

PG&E finally agreed to pay.

PG&E requires small business to sign settlement agreement.

Maybe not many people in this room

doesn't know those agreements even exist.

And after a very complicated process,

I was one of the lucky ones who reached the settlement.

On January 13, I received what PG&E called

their standard agreement.

It includes language like this.

claimant agree to defend, protect, indemnify, and hold harmless PG&E from any and all laws,

including but not limited to past, current, or future claims.

That means something happens again, we could lose our right to bring a future claim as well.

It doesn't make sense.

You know, after this claim, there's two or three more outages happened.

I questioned it.

Then I received a second version with missing section numbers.

It doesn't look like complete document, so I requested it again.

Then I got a third version with different languages again.

But the first version was, truly, if those first versions were truly standard form, why was it changing?

And if it was not appropriate, are other merchants still being asked to sign in?

So luckily I got the last version, which is cleaner.

But what if other merchants, you know, probably only apply to me and then PG&E,

my request in order to sign on.

First one, we shouldn't sign on it.

Small business cannot afford

attorneys to review complex

indemnity clauses.

We should not have to choose

between getting paid

and protecting our legal rights.

There must be one standard agreement

and clear language

written confirmation that future claims

are not being waived unintentionally.

and also independent review for fairness.

The last one, the infrastructure.

This is not just about paperwork.

In early October, my business, Joe's Ice Cream, had an outage.

PG&E found an issue with local transformer.

They reset it and left.

And December 22nd, it failed again.

So you see the picture.

There's a local transformer.

each block has at least one.

And then you can see the circle.

It looks like, you know, lost it.

And then it happened again, December 22nd.

And then same technician came out.

They see, oh, this is very dangerous.

Any rainy day, if leave it like that, it might explode.

So two transformers of the street.

The one went down, half of the street lost power.

Traffic signals were affected.

It didn't work.

The replacement had to be brought from San Jose, so that's why it took almost 10 hours to recover.

So this is the question.

Why wasn't it replaced earlier?

And how old are those transformers?

What is lifespan?

Are they proactively replaced?

Is there any full audit?

You know, all our local transformer, each block, you know, what was the condition?

is probably a lot of them beyond their lifespan.

It is one of the reasons.

No more time, one out, it doesn't matter.

But multiple transformers like this out,

when rainy day, like this kind of situation,

it might create even bigger problems.

So this is my conclusion.

We need help.

We are grateful that Supervisor Alan Wang stepped in

and took this seriously.

From the beginning, he listened.

he didn't dismiss our concern.

He understood that when power goes out,

small businesses don't just lose convenience.

We lose income, inventory, stability,

and even future foot traffic.

He stepped in to push for immediate support,

not just for the one corridor,

but for merchants citywide.

But we are still asking for structural improvement

because this cannot happen again.

So we are asking for fair and workable claim formula and clear and transparent process.

And also a guaranteed response timeline and standardized fair settlement agreement.

And so last, preventive infrastructure maintenance.

Right now, the priority must be fairly supporting small businesses that keep this community alive.

We are the ones who employ local residents, serve families, and keep neighborhoods vibrant.

We are not asking for special treatment.

We are asking for a system that works in the real world.

And finally, I thank you, Chair Metosy and Supervisor Wang, for standing with us and helping bring concern forward in a serious and accountable way.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Next, we have Daniel Ramirez, president of the Sunset Merchants Association.

Daniel, thank you for your time today.

Thank you for having me.

My name is Daniel Ramirez.

I'm speaking as a business owner on Irving Street whose business was directly impacted.

My business was one of those affected for three full days during the December power outage.

The major outage happened on December 20th, like we all know.

But because of the type of business we run and because it was peak holiday week, the disruption did not just last a few hours.

It carried into the following days.

We were scheduled to operate Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday leading up to Christmas Eve.

In our business, it takes about 24 hours of preparation to be ready for the next day.

Because of that, we were not able to reopen properly until Tuesday afternoon when the power came back on.

So December 20th, 21st, and 22nd were all significantly affected.

That week is one of the busiest of the year for us.

Those sales do not come back later.

When you lose that holiday traffic, you lose it.

We also had staff scheduled.

We had nine employees and had to send people home, and they were not able to earn their full paycheck that week.

This does not just affect me as a business owner.

It affects our employees and their families.

Many of our staff come from lower-income households.

They depend on their full paycheck, especially toward the end of the month when rent is due.

When hours are cut unexpectedly because of a power outage, that has a real impact and creates a trickle-down effect.

Behind the scenes, there was a lot of scrambling.

We had to move food to other refrigeration to prevent spoilage.

Even after the power came back, we still had product that had to be thrown away.

There were hours of extra labor just managing uncertainty and trying to figure out how long the outage would last.

When you don't know when the power will return, it makes it extremely difficult to plan or make decisions.

We submitted our claim right away.

Later, we were told the attachments were not received.

Now we have to reconsolidate everything and resend documentation that we already submitted once.

That takes time, and for an owner-operator, that is real-time pulled away from running the business.

Right now, there is no update on our claim because it was waiting on us for us to resend the materials.

So the disruption did not end when the lights came back on.

It continues through the claim process.

The $2,500 credit is appreciated as a starting point, but it is not sufficient for businesses that were down for multiple days.

Claims are absolutely necessary.

and at the same time, the claims process remains difficult and time-consuming.

I do want to thank Supervisor Wong's office for requesting that the PG&E team come to the Sunset

to provide in-person bilingual support.

I was able to process my claims forms myself,

but I know many merchants in our corridor benefited from having that in-person help.

A lot of small business owners do not have time after work to navigate forms online,

and not everyone feels comfortable doing it on their own.

I hope that kind of support continues in future incidents,

And honestly, my real hope is that there will not be more power outages like this in the first place.

But if something like this does happen again, having that direct in-person communication or in-person support makes a real difference for small businesses.

At the end of the day, we need reliable infrastructure, clear communication, a claims process that works the first time, and timelines that we can count on.

Three days during peak season is not minor for a small business.

It is significant.

We need systems that recognize the reality and respond accordingly.

Thank you.

Thank you, Daniel.

And I understand you have two questions for PG&E.

Go ahead and ask.

Yeah, so one of the questions is like Supervisor Mahmoud explained,

we're susceptible to the earthquakes here.

What measures are we taking in place to prevent something like this from happening?

And that's it.

Thank you.

Thank you for that question, and thank you both for your sentiments

and sharing lived experiences, which is not lost on us,

and that stays with our heart,

and we're committed to always doing better.

In regards to the specific question about earthquakes,

as I've referenced, we have made significant investments

in the infrastructure within San Francisco,

nearly $3 billion over the 20-year time horizon,

And you have our commitment, as I have shared, with direct engagement, joint planning, exercising,

making sure that we operate as one team with the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management,

as well as PG&E, because it's hard to predict when the earthquake would happen, the extent of it, the extent of the damage.

but I can tell you that we're continuing to invest in the resilience of the San Francisco infrastructure,

not just on the electric side, but also the gas side.

And we're focused on that in addition to focusing on making sure we're both prepared

for something as significant as a major earthquake that may happen so that we're working together.

Thank you.

I'd like to now bring up our representative from the fire department who has a statement.

Good afternoon, Chair Dorsey, Supervisor Mahmood, Supervisor Wong.

I'm Patrick Rabbit, Operations Chief of the San Francisco Fire Department.

I'm here to answer questions or speak on behalf of our response to the substation on December 20th,

as well as the fire department's overall response on December 20th, 2025.

Thank you.

When did the fire department first become aware of incident,

and what was the first actionable information received?

Location, hazards, access points, shutdown status?

The first notification we had was at 2.17 p.m.

We received a call to our dispatch center reporting fire at the substation.

In the first hour or so, what information did you most need from PG&E that you did not have or did not have reliably?

Immediately after receiving that call, our dispatch center sent out a full fire structure response to the substation

with our initial apparatus arriving on scene in three minutes.

Our incident commander arrived on scene five minutes later, who also happens to be our PG&E liaison.

and during that time our fire department incident commander met with a PG&E rep on scene

and was attempting to gain information and work with PG&E representatives on scene

including determining location of the fire, building layout, gathering building plans.

Contributing to some of the difficulties at this incident was the substation is approximately a four-story,

approximately four stories concrete building it was filled with smoke very

tough for us to get to ventilate that building and get the carbon monoxide

levels within normal limits for us as well as PG&E to enter anything over 30

parts per million requires the use of a respirator and PG&E employees are not

equipped with that and they do not have the training that we have for the

respirators they were in unified command making updates and gathering information it was a rainy

day if you remember and a lot of the building plans that PG&E was able to have on site were

paper and we were out in the rain looking at paper plans we do have some recommendations on

how we could better get these plans in paper and then digitally onto tablets there are many offer

There are many avenues that we could take with this.

A lot of our commercial high-rises downtown have this

and provide this information to the fire department.

Was there a clear single point of contact from PG&E

for the fire department and the incident command structure?

Yes, there was a PG&E representative present.

In fact, once our incident commander arrived on scene,

he was met with a PG&E representative

who gave him information of the fire inside the substation and location.

However, it was still undetermined how deep inside the building it was.

From the fire department's perspective, what worked well in coordination on scene

and what slowed operations or created uncertainty?

What worked well was our PG&E liaison being the incident commander,

who has a good amount of PG&E employees in his personal cell phone that he could reach out to,

as well as the PG&E rep being on scene, meeting our chief officer on scene.

Some of the delays, and this is no fault of theirs,

PG&E is not equipped to respond, Code 3,

with emergency red lights and sirens to an incident.

That delayed some of their support staff getting there,

and we noticed that some of their more trained support staff

who may have more intimate knowledge of that substation.

What were the biggest responder safety constraints you faced,

and what would have reduced risk or sped response?

The general nature of the substation with the fire and the ever-present electrical hazard,

so we had to actually slow down and really determine where the fire was

and work with our PG&E representative on scene.

At times, like I said, working with paper maps and having incomplete information

delayed us locating the fire.

We were able to make entries, but that was limited to going down the center corridor

or hallways, if you would say, because the building was still energized,

we were not going to be touching any of the electrical equipment

that was perhaps burning under the covers there on the side.

How did the FAR department coordinate with PG&E

during the incident and the cascading outage period?

What information sharing worked and what broke down?

I believe as with time, as more representatives showed on scene,

with more intimate knowledge of that substation,

was able to coordinate better with our command.

However, we had to take a slower approach

to clear the carbon monoxide out of the building.

That involved us using positive pressure ventilation set up with fans.

Like PG&E had mentioned, Mr. Singh on his slides,

around 6.30, 6.30, or 6.35 is when we finally got the carbon monoxide levels

to be below zero.

We could enter with PG&E employees as well and really determine where it is.

Looking back, were there points when better real-time information from PG&E would have changed

our department decisions on staffing, staging, public messaging, or resource placement?

In the initial minutes of the event, yes, but that is related to the amount of staff

that they have on site or was responding when we got there,

and all of our apparatus responding from a different location.

What would you want standardized in a city protocol for a major utility incidence,

minimum notification timelines, minimum data shared, or a dedicated liaison function?

We work well with PG&E at our regular structure fire incidents regarding electrical and gas shutoffs

to continued partnership with them and drill with them.

As it relates to their substations located within the city, we have set up some training in March,

as well as in June and September.

Each one of those is three days at substations located without the city to better orient with them.

But I think we could actually have our liaison work with their San Francisco fire rep

and really bring some of the building plans into the 21st century,

and we can get moving forward with some digital plans on perhaps tablets

like some of our commercial high-rises provide for us.

What materials such as pre-incident plans, updated contact protocols, maps, and hazard briefs

should PG&E provide the Fire Department in advance to response?

Do we minimize any sort of hindrances?

To minimize the hindrances of our response, the continued, like I said, collaboration,

these drills that we have is going to be set up quarterly.

Like I said, perhaps going digital, all of our chief officers and incident commanders

having access to building plans, layoffs, emergency shutoffs, utility shutoffs,

That's all very helpful for us, and it saves us time by not having to search for something in a building we may be uncommon with or may be full of smoke.

Thank you.

I'd like to pass on to my fellow supervisors if they have any questions for fire.

Vice Chair Machwa?

One quick clarifying question, and then I'll – or two.

I'd asked PG&E earlier that they had actually settled before, because of the 1996 fire at the same substation,

that they would pay for $750,000 in fire equipment for the fire department.

Do you know if they ever paid you and gave you that equipment?

We have received in the past a CO2 unit, which is very valuable in extinguishing electrical fires.

The last unit we received was a 2008 international model.

However, based on the age, it's 18 years old now.

It has been out of service because our heat exchanger coil in the CO2 tank has been broken,

and we're awaiting a competitive bid to get that fixed.

A CO2 unit also carries a lot of portable extinguishers.

The limitations of a unit like that is the CO2 and the cone and nozzle or the hose.

It's limited by how much is on the reel.

We typically use that for vault fires, especially in the downtown corridor.

It would have been nice to have that in service at this time,

and I'm not sure if it would have been effective if we could have even used that coil,

unloaded that hose off that coil into the building.

Did that CO2 unit cost $750,000, or do you think there's more money that you're owed?

I can get you.

I can't speak on how much it costs,

but I could actually find that through our Division of Support Services and get that information.

Because if there's money left, it would be great if PG&E paid you for the money that you're deserved.

Okay.

I just want to – I'll have one question for PG&E on this context of what you presented.

But I just wanted to thank you again to all of your men who were helping us, men and women who were helping us that day

and making sure that we were getting power restored as fast as possible

and appreciate the fire department's service that day and every day.

Thank you, Supervisor.

I appreciate you letting me speak.

PG&E, I have a question based on what we just heard,

which was that one of the blockers to them addressing this fire once they entered

is that we're in the 21st century, and yet they were provided with paper plans and paper maps.

Why is that the case, and what are you doing to fix that?

So I can't speak to why is that the case for this specific substation.

We have digitized a number of our records for our electrical system.

We're committed to digitizing that for the substations as well as part of the joint engagement that the chief mentioned.

And then one other thing I think you had questioned previously.

Thank you for the team behind me.

I can confirm that back in 2003, as you mentioned, the $750,000 of fire equipment was provided at that point in time.

And then just last year, we also contributed an investment to purchase a fire truck by the City of Fire Department in San Francisco.

Okay. So what other substations don't have digital maps or plans today in San Francisco?

I don't have that specific information at hand.

Supervisor, our commitment is to ensure that we digitize that, we provide that information.

As the chief mentioned, we do work very well, and we do joint training and drills for structure fires on electrical and gas shutoffs.

The opportunity here for us is to expand that to substation fires and substation type of issues,

and that's exactly what we're committed to doing.

And as part of that commitment, we're also going to ensure that we are providing those digital maps as well as reviewing them.

Do you have a timeline for that digitization?

because every second that they don't have a digital map could be seconds

that they could be addressing a fire that could get out of control.

So what's the timeline for digitization?

We are going to commit to getting that done as soon as we can.

Month, two months a year?

Month or less.

Great. Thank you.

Thank you, Vice Chair Mahmood.

Okay, I want to thank, again, Supervisors Wong and Mahmood both for calling the hearing

and for an extremely thorough set of questions that left me without a single question

to ask. We'll have thoughts to share on the next two PG&E related items on behalf of the entire

committee, on behalf of the entire board, really. I do want to express our thanks to the business

representatives whose experience on the busiest shopping day of the year was shared by countless

merchants, restaurants, and businesses large and small, including those in my own neighborhood,

as well thanks to PG&E, our own fire department, and Department of Emergency Management for your

participation in today's hearing. I am very much looking forward to hearing from members of the

public next, and I want to thank all of you for your patience. And seeing no one else on the

roster, I'd like to now ask Madam Clerk, may we please invite public comment on item number three.

Yes, members of the public who wish to speak on item three should line up now along the side

by the windows. All speakers will have two minutes.

Civil Visers, my name is Edward, and I come from the Chinatown Sunset Merchants United Associations.

Today I attend this healing, and I hear a lot.

And the reason for the outlakes is not necessarily have a request about the healing right now,

because I believe we should be waiting for the final investigation from the PG&E to have a report come out.

and then we're going to start the healing, have more detail on it.

And the PG&E have been done on real clear,

the explaining about the equipment, okay, have been a failure.

That's why they got the outage on it.

And also they have been offered the $200 for the household effective,

and also the merchants $2,500 for the effective business.

And also it is, if not enough for that, they can apply for the claim.

More than that, they help their business on it.

I believe they're doing the right thing and also really fair, okay, and also they are really smoothly.

I've been done with them.

I'll talk to the PG&E, work with the PG&E.

They have been coming down the steps, helping us to fill up the forms and also asking us all more help on it.

I believe they explained more enough on it.

In the meantime, and I believe that it's important to clear, they're raising concern about request additional compensation.

It does not mean it is opposite to the PG&E or against the PG&E.

They should be more work together and more smoothly about the claiming on it.

And also, I believe that some of the three people asking for the government or the public management,

I mean the PG&E, the legitimacy.

But I believe that is not right.

Because in San Francisco, we have a lot of problems on it.

We also have the transportation problem, SFMTA.

We also have a homeless problem.

We have the illegal rentals, okay, all kinds of problems.

I believe the city needs to take care of all those business first.

Give us the time on the PG&E to work, okay,

and more enough time to build up the relationship and the trust to the public.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Next speaker, please.

Thank you, supervisors.

My name is Brad McMillan.

I'm an electronics engineer, and I have a company that designs and manufactures devices

for industrial applications, including power utilities.

I have worked with Fiji and E a little bit in the past, and much more extensively with

Southern California Edison, where I designed and manufactured electronics devices that

were used to monitor and control equipment at remote substations through satellite terminals.

These devices were used at hundreds of their substations for over 20 years.

I also have some experience on the political side.

I started a committee that wrote a bill to strengthen patent rights for inventors.

This bill was introduced in the 97th Congress in the House of Representatives as HR 4732.

As a part of this effort, I had the opportunity to testify before Congress in Washington, D.C.,

so I was able to get a glimpse of how these issues are viewed from there.

The outages at PG&E were technical issues where the equipment wasn't properly maintained.

PG&E isn't the only place where we're seeing this.

We also have technical difficulties at BART where it seems like their system stops working for one reason or another every few months or so.

What is happening on the national level is that the politicians in Washington, D.C.

have restructured American industry in the interest of maximizing profits for Wall Street.

and Wall Street has been returning the favor by enriching those politicians through insider trading.

While the managers who run these companies are competent at maximizing profits,

they are completely incompetent at technical issues.

I've seen it myself in my dealings with the California utilities.

There is also a conflict between maximizing profits that please Wall Street

and keeping the underlying technology up to date

because keeping the technology up to date and working smoothly costs money.

This is the root cause of the PG&E power outages last December,

and the only thing that could make it worse would be for the city to take over.

Thank you for your comments.

Next speaker, please.

Good afternoon, Supervisor.

My name is Leon Chow,

and I'm speaking on behalf of Sunset Chinese Cultural District and Wamei School.

The recent unexpected breakout in December came in a particularly difficult time, but our committee occurred just during Dong Ji holidays and during the lead up to the Christmas break.

And when family getting together in Chinese culture, this holiday center around food, fresh seafood, meats and vegetables, which sparred after many hours without electricity.

This also happened during the most closest winter in San Francisco experience, and many residents in Sunset are elderly and children who are especially vulnerable to the cold.

At WAMI, one of our core committee is provided hot and fresh milk for our students because of the food purchase,

we place change manuals and comprise with additional state reporting requirements.

We often source fresh food from urban street merchants, which add another layer,

particularly difficult as we work to adjust plans for our children.

While we're not making excuse for PG&E, we did participate in meetings and local merchants and PG&E representatives to address the issues to make sure it doesn't happen again.

During the meetings, PG&E acknowledged specific concern to improve community.

But however, as I said again, we are the Sunset Chinese Cultural Districts.

We're expecting another power outage next week on Lunar New Year Day.

We really want to make sure that PG&E is more culturally sensitive.

Thank you very much.

Thank you for your comments.

Next speaker, please.

My name is Shona Zhu.

I am 75.

My husband Martin Scott, he is 92. We live in a distance. My husband and me have a little problem.

When he needed a breath, he needed a breath.

On the 12th or 20th day, he didn't have a breath.

He didn't have a breath. He didn't have a breath.

But I knew that when I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew

It's very important.

It's been a lot of time.

I hope PGNC won't stop.

If there's a lot of pain,

please give us some help to help us.

It's a huge loss.

Thank you.

Thank you for your comments.

I'm going to translate for Sarah really quick.

Her name is Sarah Dew, a District 4 residence.

Sarah lives with her husband.

Her husband relies on a breathing machine.

On the day of the power outage, the machine stopped working because there was no electricity.

During that time, their house went pitch dark and he fell while walking around the house.

Sarah called an ambulance and her husband was admitted to the hospital.

He stayed there until January.

After that, she was transferred to a nursing facility and was able to return home yesterday,

but his condition was worsened significantly.

Thank you so much.

Thank you for your comments.

Next speaker, please.

Good afternoon, Supervisors.

My name is Judy Lee with the San Francisco Chinese Chamber of Commerce.

We acknowledge the significant impact of the widespread December power outage on residents and small businesses across San Francisco,

including many in our AAPI and Chinese business community.

The timing of the outage just before the Christmas holiday and the winter solstice celebrations

exacerbated economic hardship and disrupted critical business operations during peak seasonal activity.

While we do not excuse the failures that caused this event, we appreciate PG&E's concrete, direct steps to help those most affected.

PG&E's team proactively reached out to merchants, explained claims, procedures, and assisted with filings,

including providing bilingual support for non-English-speaking business owners.

These actions show BG&E is committed to making proactive corrections.

From our members and small business owners, we are hearing specific concerns about the need for reliable utilities during the upcoming Lunar New Year.

They also emphasize the importance of making the claims process more accessible for monolingual speaking owners and ensuring claims are processed efficiently and without delay.

We urge continued dialogue, transparency, and the expedited resolution of outstanding claims, along with improved reliability measures to prevent future disruptions.

Our AAPI small businesses remain vulnerable to the operational and financial consequences of prolonged outages, and a sustained partnership between the city, PG&E, and the business community is essential for the long-term benefit of Chinatown and San Francisco.

Thank you.

Thank you for your comments.

Next speaker, please.

Good afternoon, Chair and members of the committee.

My name is Vanessa Pimentel,

representing the San Francisco Minority Chamber of Commerce Alliance.

The San Francisco Minority Chamber of Commerce Alliance

represents small businesses across the city's diverse Black, Latino, Asian,

and immigrant commercial corridors,

many of whom were directly impacted by the recent West Side Power adage.

Our alliance remains committed to working collaboratively

to strengthen reliability, protect small businesses, and prevent similar disruptions in the future.

We cannot excuse the disruption costs, but we appreciate PG&E's continued outreach

and willingness to meet directly with our minority chamber members.

These conversations have helped business owners better understand what occurred,

how mistakes are being addressed, and how to navigate the claims and compensation process.

We urge PG&E to keep the claims process clear, timely, transparent, and accessible with language

and technical support for all communities.

We look forward to continuing the dialogue with both the city and PG&E to ensure claims

are resolved fairly and that PG&E remains accountable to minority small businesses across

San Francisco.

Thank you.