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, July 23rd, 2026.

I'm Supervisor Matt Dorsey, Chair of this committee.

I'm joined today by fellow committee members, the fellow committee member vice chair Danny Sauter.

We're grateful to our ever capable clerk today, Ms.

Monique Creighton, whom we thank in advance for staffing us and keeping us on track.

As well, we are always appreciative for the entire team at SFGov TV for facilitating and broadcasting today's meeting.

And that is especially true for our producer today, who is Mr.

James Kawana.

Madam Clerk, do you have any announcements?

Yes.

Public please excuse me, 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 M O N IQE dot C-R-A-Y-T-O-N 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.

Goodley, 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 in which you are commenting.

Finally, items acted upon today are expected to appear on the Board of Supervisors' Agenda of September 1st, 2026, unless otherwise stated.

Thank you, Madam Clerk.

And before we get underway, I would first like to make a motion to excuse Supervisor Alan Wong from today's meeting.

Madam Clerk, may we have a roll call on that motion?

Yes, on the in on the motion to excuse Member Wong.

Fleischer Sauter.

Fleischer Slaughter I.

Chair Dorsey.

I have two ayes with member saw with Member Wong excused.

Thank you, Madam Clerk.

The motion passes.

And Madam Clerk, would you please call item number one?

Yes, item number one is a hearing to consider that the person to person premise to premise transfer of a type 48 on sale general public premises beer wine and distilled spirits liquor license to out of sight productions LLC.

Doing businesses, Reggie and Mods, located at 456 through 460 Larkin Street in District 5 will serve the public convenience or necessity of the city and county of San Francisco.

Noting this item may be referred to the full board as a committee report at the July 2026 twuly twenty-eighth, twenty twenty-six Board of Supervisors meeting.

Thank you, Madam Clerk.

Uh, we want to welcome Officer Brandon Erickson from the San Francisco Police Department's liaison unit to the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, or ABC.

Officer Erickson, welcome back to the Public Safety and Neighborhood Services Committee.

The floor is yours.

Thank you.

You have before you a PCN report for Out of Sight Productions LLC as Reggie in Mods.

They have applied for a type 48 license, and if approved, this would allow them to operate in on-sale general public premise at 456 to 460 Larkin Street.

There are zero letters of protest and zero letters of support.

They are located in plot 553, which is considered a high crime area.

They are in Census Track 124.03, which is considered a high concentration area.

Tenderloin Station has no opposition.

AOU recommendation, approval with the following conditions.

Condition one, except as provided in condition two below, no noise shall be audible beyond the area under the control of the licensee.

Condition two, any noise caused by entertainment or amplified sound that is subject to the provisions of an active entertainment permit issued by the San Francisco Entertainment Commission shall be authorized in accordance with the limits established by that entertainment permit, including any limitation on hours during which entertainment or amplified sound is permitted.

A violation of the entertainment permit or amplified sound noise conditions of the entertainment permit, as determined by the San Francisco Entertainment Commission shall be deemed to be a violation of this condition.

Any noise that is subject to or is beyond the scope of the entertainment permit shall be subject to condition one above.

Entertainment permit means any of the following: a just to add music permit, a limited live performance permit, a place of entertainment permit, a fixed place amplified sound permit, or any similar such permit issued by the San Francisco Entertainment Commission.

Condition three, petitioners shall actively monitor the area under their control in an effort to prevent the loitering of persons or any property adjacent to the licensed premise as depicted on the ABC Form 257.

Lastly, condition four, the petitioner shall be responsible for maintaining free of litter the area adjacent to the premise over which they have control as depicted on ABC Form 257.

Thank you, Officer Erickson.

Uh it's my understanding that Reggie and Mods is assumed to open bar and an expansion of out of sight, which is a highly uh regarded pizzeria that the San Francisco Chronicle identified as one of the Bay Area's top 100 restaurants.

Um the business owners have the support of District 5 supervisor Bilal Machmoon, and I look forward to supporting this application.

Madam Clerk, do we have uh representatives of the applicant present?

Uh I don't believe so, Mr.

Chair.

Okay.

Well then Oh then so uh customarily, you know, we welcome if you uh you there's no requirement, but you're certainly welcome to say a few words if you'd like.

Yeah, to the lectern.

Um my name is Eric Yaler, one of the owners of out of site pizza and out of site productions LLC.

Uh standing on behalf of my partner, Peter Dorrance.

Um we are just excited and thrilled to have the opportunity to continue to aid to the growth and positive enrichment of the downtown area.

And we think that having Reggie and Mods, our bar on the corner of Turk and Larkin, will provide an area for people of the community of all walks of life to gather, um, hang out, future World Cups, and to just continue the vibrancy of the area to bring back.

Thank you.

Great.

Thank you so much.

So uh Supervisor Sauter.

Thank you, Chair.

I just like to add my support as well.

Um, you know, I know this team from Out of Sight, um, which uh is uh one of their locations is located in my district in Chinatown Financial District, and I think there's a lot of excitement for this expansion.

And just this morning I was walking by and saw the construction underway.

So something everyone is looking forward to, and I'll be happy to support.

Thank you, Supervisor Sauter, Vice Chair Sauter.

Uh Madam Clerk, may we open this item up now to public comment.

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

All speakers will have two minutes.

Mr.

Chair, we have no public comment for this item.

Thank you, Madam Clerk.

Public comment on this item is now closed.

And uh seeing no further questions or comments, I'd like to move that the clerk prepare a resolution determining that the issuance of a type 48 on-sale general public premises beer, wine, and distilled spirits liquor license to the applicant would serve the public convenience or necessity, and that the resolution be forwarded to the full board as a committee report.

Madam Clerk, we may we have a roll call on that motion.

Yes, another motion directing the clerk to prepare a resolution and forwarding that resolution to the full board as committee report.

Vice Chair Sauter.

Vic Chair Sauter I.

Chair Dorsey.

I chair Dorsey, I have two ayes with member wong excuse.

Thank you, Madam Clerk.

The motion passes.

Congratulations to the applicant.

Madam Clerk, would you please call item number two?

Yes, item number two is a hearing to consider that the issuance of a type 64 on-sale general theater liquor license to uptown Tinderloin INC doing businesses tenderloin museum located at 835 Larkin Street in District 5 will serve the public convenience or necessity of the city and county of San Francisco, noting that this item may also be referred to the full board as committee report at the July 28, 2026 Board of Supervisors meeting.

Thank you, Madam Clerk, and welcome back, Officer Erickson.

The floor is yours.

Thank you.

You have before you a PCN report for Uptown Tenderloin Inc.

as Tenderloin Museum.

They have applied for a type 64 license, and if approved, this will allow them to operate a special on-sale general nonprofit theater at 835 Larkin Street.

There are zero letters of protest, zero letters of support.

They are located in plot 547, which is considered a high crime area.

They are in Census Track 122.02, which is considered a high concentration area.

Tenderloin station has no opposition.

ALU recommendation, approval with the following four conditions.

Condition one, except as provided in condition two below, no noise shall be audible beyond the area under the control of the licensee.

Condition two, any noise caused by the entertainment permit or amplified sound that is subject to the provisions of an active entertainment permit issued by the San Francisco Entertainment Commission shall be authorized in accordance with the limits established by that entertainment permit, including any limitation on hours during which entertainment or amplified sound is permitted.

A violation of the entertainment per entertainment or amplified sound noise conditions of the entertainment permit as determined by the San Francisco Entertainment Commission shall be deemed to be a violation of this condition.

Any noise that is subject to or is beyond the scope of the entertainment permit shall be subject to condition one above.

Entertainment permit means any of the following: a just add music permit, a limited live performance permit, a place of entertainment permit, a fixed place amplified sound permit, or any similar such permit issued by the San Francisco Entertainment Commission.

Condition three, petitioners shall actively monitor the area under their control in an effort to prevent the loitering of persons on any property adjacent to the licensed premise as depicted on ABC Form 257.

And lastly, condition four, the petitioner shall be responsible for maintaining free of litter the area adjacent to the premise over which they have control as depicted on ABC Form 257.

Thank you, Officer Erickson.

Um, the tenderloin museum preserves and celebrates the storied history of San Francisco's tenderloin neighborhood.

I really appreciate the museum's commitment to fostering community as it enters into an exciting period of expansion.

Um I understand that the application also has the support of Supervisor Mockmood.

I look forward to supporting it as well as somebody who has been to many events there.

Uh Madam Clerk, do we have applicant uh representatives present who'd like to any representatives from Tinderloin Museum?

Okay.

Okay, then uh why don't we open this item up to public comment?

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

All speakers will have two minutes.

Mr.

Chair, we have no public comment.

Thank you, Madam Clerk.

Public comment on this item is now closed.

And uh seeing no further questions or comments, I'd like to move that the clerk prepare a resolution making a determination that the issuance of a type 64 on sale general theater liquor license to the applicant would serve the public convenience or necessity, and that the resolution be forwarded to the Board of Supervisors as a committee report.

Madam Clerk, may we have a roll call on that motion.

Yes, and on the motion directing the clerk to prepare a resolution forwarding that resolution to the full board as committee report at the July 28th Board of Supervisors meeting.

Vice Chair Sauter.

Aye.

Victor Sauter I.

Chair Dorsey.

Aye.

Chair Dorsey, I.

I have two ayes with member wong excused.

Thank you, Madam Clerk.

The motion passes, and congratulations to the applicant.

Madam Clerk, may we please call item number three?

Yes, item number three is a hearing to consider that the person to person premise to premise transfer of the type 21 off sale, general beer, wine, and distilled spirits liquor license to Miss Seeing Liquor INC doing business as college market, located at 995 Ellis Street in District 2, will serve the public convenience or necessity of the city and county of San Francisco, noting that this item may be referred to the full board's committee report at the July 28th, 2026 Board of Supervisors meeting.

Thank you, Madam Clerk.

Welcome back, Officer Erickson.

Thank you.

You have before you a PCN report for Missing Liquor Inc.

operating as college market.

They have applied for a type 21 license, and if approved, this will allow them to operate in off-sale general liquor store at 995 Ellis Street.

There are zero letters of protest and zero letters of support.

They are located in plot 546, which is a considered a high crime area.

They are in censor track 160.00, which is considered a low concentration area.

Northern Station has no opposition.

AOU recommendation, approval with the following two conditions.

Condition one, petitioner shall actively monitor the area under their control in an effort to prevent the loitering of any person of any property adjacent to the licensed premise as depicted on the ABC Form 257.

Condition two, the petitioner shall be responsible for maintaining free of litter the area adjacent to the premise over which they have control as depicted on ABC Form 257.

Thank you, Officer Erickson.

Um Madam Clerk, we have representatives from the applicant, college market present.

Uh any call representatives present for this item.

Okay.

As I said, customarily we invite people up.

You there's no obligation, and that's fine.

Um seeing no one on the roster with questions or comments.

Madam Clerk, may we open this item up to public comment.

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

All speakers will have two minutes.

Mr.

Chair, we have no public comment.

Thank you, Madam Clerk.

Public comment on this item is now closed.

And seeing no further questions or comments, I'd like to move that the clerk prepare a resolution making a determination that the issuance of a type 21, offsale general beer, wine, and distilled spirits liquor license to the applicant would serve the public convenience or necessity, and that the resolution be forwarded to the full board as a committee report.

Madam Clerk, may we have a roll call in that motion.

Yes, in the motion directing the clerk to prepare a resolution and forwarding that resolution to the full board as committee report at their July 28th meeting.

Vicher Sauter.

Visher Sauter I Chair Dorsey.

Chair Dorsey, I have two ayes with Member Wong excused.

Thank you, Madam Clerk.

The motion passes.

Congratulations to the applicant.

And Madam Clerk, may we call uh item number four?

Yes, item number four is a hearing to consider the person to person, premise-to-premise transfer of a type 20, off-sale beer and wine, liquor license to H G HJMW Enterprise LLC doing business as Hello Mart, located at 2135 Buchanan Street in District 2 will serve the public convenience or necessity of the city and county of San Francisco, noting that this this item may be referred to the full board is committee report at the July 28, 2026 Board of Supervisors meeting.

Thank you, Madam Clerk, and welcome back, Officer Erickson.

Thank you.

You have before you a PCN report for HJMW Enterprise LLC operating as Hello Mart.

They have applied for a type 20 license, and it if approved, this will allow them to operate an off-sale beer and wine convenience market at 2135 Buchanan Street.

There are zero letters of protest and zero letters of support.

They are located in Plot 531, which is considered a low crime area.

They are on Census Track 135.00, which is considered a high concentration area.

Northern Station has no opposition.

AOU recommendation, approval with the following two conditions.

Condition one, petitioner shall actively monitor the area under the control in an effort to prevent the loitering of persons on property adjacent to the licensed premise as depicted on ABC Form 257.

Condition two, the petition petitioner shall be responsible for maintaining free of litter the area adjacent to the premise over which they have control as depicted on ABC Form 257.

Thank you, Officer Erickson.

It's my understanding that Hello Mart is a neighborhood market and cafe.

It offers coffee, pastries, beverages, locally sourced products, and more.

It's located in uh Pacific Heights and has the support of District 2 supervisor Stephen Sherrill.

Uh Madam Clerk, may I ask if there's any applicant uh representatives present?

I believe no representatives are present for this item.

Okay.

Then uh why don't we invite up public comment on this item?

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

All speakers will have two minutes.

Mr.

Chair, we have no public comment.

Thank you, Madam Clerk.

Public comment on this item is now closed.

And seeing no one with uh further questions or comments, I'd like to move that the clerk prepare a resolution making a determination that the issuance of a type 20 off sale beer and wine like liquor license to the applicant would serve the public convenience or necessity, and that the resolution be forwarded to the full board as a committee report.

Madam Clerk, may we have a roll call on that motion?

Yes, and on the motion directing the clerk to uh prepare a resolution and forward that resolution to the full board as committee report at the July 28th, 2026 Board of Supervisors meeting.

Vice Chair Saughter.

Aye.

Vice Chair Saughter, aye.

Chair Dorsey, Chair Dorsey, aye.

I have two ayes with Member Wong excused.

Great.

Thank you, Madam Clerk.

Motion passes.

And Madam Clerk, may we uh call item number five?

Yes, item number five is a hearing on San Francisco's readiness for extreme heat events, including operational planning slash procedures, infrastructure investments, and progress on risk mitigation.

Thank you, Madam Clerk.

I would like to welcome Board President Raphael Mandelman to today's meeting and to thank him for joining us.

He called this hearing to examine San Francisco's preparedness for extreme heat and take the steps needed to protect uh our residents from these events as they become more um frequent and more severe.

Uh President Mandelman, I will now turn it over to you for opening remarks and to lead us through this discussion.

The floor is yours.

Uh thank you, uh Chair Dorsey.

Uh thank you, Vice Chair Sauter.

Um thank you for uh finding time for this hearing, uh especially when you're down a member, and if anyone needs to take a bio break, please do.

Well, we can it's fine.

Um colleagues, um this hearing is on San Francisco's readiness uh for extreme heat.

Uh two days ago, San Francisco reached 85 degrees, the hottest July day in the city in 11 years.

Four months ago, on March 20th, the city hit 90 degrees for the first time in 152 years of record keeping.

And uh twice, so twice this year, San Francisco's broken records that we're supposed to hold for another century.

We often think of ourselves as a city of fog and jackets, and for most of our history that has been true, but it has also left us unprepared for very hot days.

Our bodies never build a tolerance for heat because our hot days are rare uh still and relatively brief.

Um GPH data shows emergency visits and hospitalizations in the city start climbing once temperatures cross 85 degrees, exactly where uh the thermometer sat uh earlier this week.

The bulk of our housing stock was built on the assumption that it would never need to keep anyone cool.

Just 34% of San Francisco households have central air conditioning against a national average of 92 percent.

And because our nights no longer cool the way they used to, our bodies have less time to recover before the next hot day arrives.

Heat does not affect the city evenly.

Neighborhoods like Soma, Bayview Hunters Point, and Chinatown run measurably hotter than the rest of San Francisco.

And of course, that is the legacy of decades of decisions about where to plant trees and where to pour concrete.

The residents least equipped to cope with heat, seniors, the unhoused SRO tenants, and renters in aged buildings are concentrated in exactly those neighborhoods.

For them, heat is not simply an inconvenience convenience, but can be a matter of life and death.

San Francisco has gotten a taste of what happens when weather goes wrong on September 1st, 2017, the temperature hit 106 degrees, the hottest ever recorded here.

Six people died that day in San Francisco and San Mateo County, each of them elderly, each of them alone.

Paramount paramedics could not keep up.

At the peak of the crisis, 19 people were waiting for ambulances the city did not have.

Cooling centers did not open until after 10 that night, hours after the emergency had peaked.

A later investigation found San Francisco had a decade old heat response plan that was never activated.

So it's nearly a decade later.

In 2023, the Office of Resilience and Capital Planning, DPH, and DEM released the heat and air quality resilience plan.

A serious effort built on input from 23 city departments and researchers at UCSF and UC Berkeley.

One year later, most of the strategies had yet to be implemented.

And last December, at one of the plan zone coordination meetings, participants rated funding as the weakest part of the program.

Today we're going to hear from Dr.

Nita Thakur of UCSF on the health dimensions of this risk, from the Office of Resilience and Capital Planning, DPH and the Department of the Environment on the implementation status of hacker and other plans, including progress on building weatherization.

We're going to hear from DEM on the city's emergency systems would respond to another extreme heat event.

And we're going to hear from Jackie Bryant of Resilient Bayview and Winnie U of Self Help for the Elderly, who are going to speak on what these risks look like on the ground for our most vulnerable San Franciscans.

I want to thank DPH, ORCP, DEM, and the Department of the Environment for their help preparing this hearing.

Dr.

Thakur, Winnie, and Jackie for sharing their perspectives, all the climate groups that are present today, and everyone who's shown up to comment.

I see Brian Strong from ORCP.

I think we were going to start with Dr.

Thakur, but she may not.

There you are.

All right.

Dr.

Nita Thakor, you are the Uh with the UCSF Partnerships for Research and Implementation Science for Equity, that is prize center.

And you're going to talk to us for a bit.

Yeah, thank you and good morning.

Um I really appreciate the opportunity to talk about this important issue.

Um I'm a faculty member at the University of California, San Francisco.

I also serve as a co-chair for research for the UC wide, so all 10 institutions, Center for Climate, Health and Equity, as well as the Prize Center.

Um I also am a physician.

I'm the medical director for our chest clinic at San Francisco General Hospital.

Um in these different roles, I care for patients, trained physicians, conduct research, and partner with community and city agencies.

And these experiences have given me a unique perspective on how climate change and more specifically extreme heat is already affecting the health of those living in San Francisco.

Uh today I'd like to make three points.

First, San Francisco is already experiencing unprecedented climate and heat events with tangible health impacts across our community.

Second, as a climate temperate city, San Francisco was not built for increasing heat, leaving many residents vulnerable during extreme heat events.

And third, our greatest challenge that we have identified through our work is that we need help with implementation.

This includes designing and implementing the infrastructure and systems to ensure that evidence-based solutions reach and protect populations least able to adapt.

So as a physician, I see health consequences of extreme heat every day.

Many people think of hot days as an inconvenience, but for many of my patients who have chronic lung diseases, it can become a medical emergency.

His only solution was to sit in a cold bath with a wet towel around his neck.

This kept him from struggling to breathe and also avoiding a hospitalization.

For him, it was really about staying safe rather than just being comfortable.

This same heat event, as you heard officially was attributed to the cause of deaths for six people in the Bay Area.

But we know that this is a vast underestimation of the true health impact.

Extreme heat is often referred to as a silent killer because it exacerbates underlying conditions such as heart disease, lung disease, kidney disease, and many other chronic illnesses.

And these impacts aren't limited to just older adults.

They really have health impacts across the life course.

My own research has shown that extreme heat also increases asthma attacks in kids across the Bay Area.

As our climate changes, extreme heat are becoming events are becoming more frequent, and compared to two decades ago, we're seeing almost twice as more heat events in the last decade here in San Francisco.

And San Francisco is particularly vulnerable because it's a climate-temperate city.

Our housing stock is old, with almost 50% of people in San Francisco living in homes built before the 1950s.

As you heard, our air conditioning ownership is one of the lowest in the United States.

Many older buildings, including single room occupancy hotels and older apartment buildings, overheat during heat events.

In our own work with Bright Line Defense, we showed that heat in buildings that do not have a central cooling system are about 10 degrees hotter during extreme heat events.

And renters often have little ability to make improvements that would help keep homes safe.

These realities mean that climate resilience has to meet people where they are.

While cooling centers remain an important emergency resource, our research found that less than a third of people report using these regularly during extreme heat events.

It requires investing in the homes, buildings, and the neighborhood infrastructures that allow people, especially those least able to adapt, to remain safe where they live.

To help inform the heat and air quality resilience program, UCSF partnered with SFDPH and the SF Office of Resilience and Capital Planning back in 2022 to form the community climate collaborative with six community board community-based organizations here in SF.

This collaborative is an independent, parallel, community-engaged process that operates alongside hacker, centering residents' concerns and lived experiences, generating scientific evidence, and co-developing data-driven solutions.

Together, this work helps inform and prioritize the hackers' planning and implementation, which advances while also advancing community-led resilience strategies.

Through this collaborative, we have surveyed more than 500 residents from priority populations to better understand both their experiences and challenges during extreme heat events.

We found that 95% of those surveyed reported experiencing at least one negative health impact during the extreme heat events.

While many people were able to take simple protective actions, like drinking extra water or staying indoors when possible, the majority were unable to make the structural changes that would meaningfully reduce their heat exposure, such as improving insulation in their homes, installing cooling equipment, or modifying their home.

The major challenges to implementation were structural in nature.

This includes the high cost of improvements, being a renter, and housing instability.

These findings reinforce what I see in clinic every week.

The problem is not that people do not understand the risk.

The problem is that many lack the resources to act on what they know.

Our work with the community climate collaborative has identified three priority areas for implementation.

First, we need more climate-resilient housing so people can safely shelter in place during extreme heat events.

This includes investing in passive and active cooling efforts as part of our weatherization and housing decarbonization programs.

Our work has shown that cooling is often not included in existing retrofit programs, and that deferred maintenance and older housing can make these improvements difficult or impossible to implement.

We also need to build an evaluation as part of these programs from the start, measuring whether these investments are reaching priority populations and improving health outcomes, not simply counting whether or not they've been deployed.

Second, we need stronger connections between the healthcare systems, public health, and trusted community organizations so that the people at highest risk are identified early and connected to the resources that they need to prepare for and respond to extreme heat and other climate events.

This includes from supporting housing and food assistance to emergency preparedness and other community supports.

CBOs are best positioned to provide these connections.

Yet we often invest in the programs themselves without investing in the organizations that help access them.

And then lastly, more than 50% of those that we surveyed reported a language barrier as a challenge to being able to prepare and respond to extreme heat events.

We need multilingual and culturally responsive communication delivered through trusted community partners, not just emergency alerts or notifications.

So people can receive timely, actionable information that they can use for prepare for and respond to extreme heat.

I am encouraged by the efforts by the city and the cross municipality partnerships that SF has built through the hacker program.

The next challenge is ensuring that the priorities and the strategies identified through the hacker program are translated into meaningful implementation and protections for the communities most at risk.

Thank you for highlighting this issue, and I welcome any questions.

Thank you for your uh presentation.

I got some questions.

I mean, from uh the encouraging part about your presentation is that it sounds, you know, and from what I gathered in preparing for this hearing.

There has been real work over the last 10 years in kind of planning and visioning and thinking about what the right response to this problem is and putting forward strategies to get there.

It also seems like there's a real gap in terms of an actual path and funding to go down that path to implement the strategies that then that have been identified.

Is that basically generally where we are at this point in your view?

Yes, I think that is true.

We've there's been excellent work by the city to really identify where the most vulnerable populations are in San Francisco through using different geospatial analyses.

Um we've been able to identify what strategies actually work across communities and which strategies would be most useful for San Francisco given its um urban and built environment.

The sticking point is that there's not funding and implementation.

And this is both implementation for infrastructure change, and then from our work and serving across the nine counties, there is a lack of funding for supporting organizations with staffing and people to actually do the work.

Is anybody doing this right?

Um there are cities that serve as models.

So I think you know, our sister city in LA recently passed a um policy where indoor temperature maximums cannot be above 78.

And so that sets a target.

Portland has also similarly passed that, and New York City.

And so these kind of policies can really help bring both funding but also resources to center around an issue.

And so I think those are places that we can look to and to try to model what we can do here for San Francisco.

Um of the uh I mean the tough thing for a government like San Francisco's is there's a gazillion different priorities, a gazillion different risks.

Um in the aftermath of an event like the 2017 uh heat day, um, it seems very, very important to move quickly and do something.

But of course, you can't move that quickly.

And and 10 years later, it it does feel like we're not significantly like the planning is good and the we've done a lot of thinking, but are we better prepared if if if we had another another day like that or another series of days like that, do you feel like we are in a significantly better position now than we were 10 years ago?

We are probably better prepared in that our agencies are better connected.

Um we have built better relationships with community organizations, and our notification systems are better than they were in 2017.

Where we lack preparation is really in supporting the buildings and the infrastructures to have people be able to avoid extreme heat.

And I will echo my partners from the community community climate collaborative, and one of them has smartly said is that when we're considering how to support community resilience for climate change, we shouldn't be thinking about one single event, but thinking about how we can build structures that support communities where they are so they're protected through all events.

So thinking about cooling buildings, for example, that can be coupled with the city's decarbonization efforts.

It can also be coupled with efforts to make homes more healthy, which doesn't just protect people during an extreme health extreme heat event, but protects them from indoor contaminants and improves air filtration, which would have the benefit of protecting them through our wildfire smoke events.

And so I think of these as interventions that could have triple benefits.

So decarbonization, health impacts, and then also helping people thrive.

And so I think about the city as not just thinking of these as isolated solutions, but how can we implement solutions that have these triple benefits?

It strikes me that the example that you use from LA of you know setting this goal in terms of maximum indoor heat.

Still doesn't, I mean, the this seems related to me to like the general problem a lot of places in the United States are having around infrastructure, infrastructure planning, funding development.

Like we in this city, I think we systematically underinvest in infrastructure.

We're not where we need to be in a whole host of ways around infrastructure.

And this feels like it's part of it.

Um so it feels just like a piece of and a very significant and important piece of a larger problem of not having not doing the infrastructure work that you need to do over time for the future.

And you know, past generations did.

We are not, and that creates all sorts of problems, including not being able to adapt to climate change.

Yeah, I would I would agree with that.

Yeah, yeah.

I think that's a good summary.

Yeah.

Um I don't know if my colleagues have any other none from me.

Thank you for uh bringing this forward.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Um now I think we have uh Brian Strong's coming back up, Office of Resilience and Capital Planning, and then I think DPH and then environment.

Yeah, thank you very much.

Uh good morning uh chair and committee members and board president Mandelman.

Thank you very much for having us here.

Uh I think as departments, we really appreciate the opportunity to share with you what's been happening and some of the and a lot of the progress that has been made since 2017.

Um and certainly I also appreciate the questions and a discussion with Nitha about uh about what's happening in San Francisco.

And I think you're gonna hear some of that re-echoed in the presentation that we're gonna be providing to you.

Um I think most some of you may not be aware, but he is the number one killer of weather-related um disasters in the United States.

Um it's higher than floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, um, it's certainly earthquakes in in our country as well.

Uh you heard probably about the recent heat events in Europe.

So close to 10,000 people have been um have died as a result of the heat events, and that's really just in Germany, France, um, and England alone.

So that doesn't consider uh the Italian cities or the Hungarian places.

So anyway, that it's it's a really um it's a really big problem.

And it is something that we've really started to think about, and I can you know, since 2017, since we had that really large event where we did see a lot of our infrastructure fail, um and and as was already mentioned, you know, we saw um people who lost their life.

It was it was a very different type of experience.

We've seen other events happen up in Seattle, another city sort of like ours, never having to worry about heat, passive cooling systems, where they had a heat dome effect that impacted them and um and Portland.

Uh we do know in our city, and you'll see some of the data that will be presented that will be presented that you know 911 calls go up by 73 as much as by 73% during heat events.

Um so we know it's significant.

We today we're gonna talk about the heat and air quality resilience plan, the initiatives, you know, the the goal is really to provide clear forecast-driven um emergency actions and longer-term investments.

You'll hear a lot of discussion about mid and long-term investments.

Um these things do take time.

Um the idea is really to promote cooled public spaces, greener streets, safer homes, um, enabling people to stay in their homes with the goal, with the ultimate goal of reducing illnesses when extreme heat or wildfire smoke hits, right?

That's the other thing we should mention.

We do sometimes get that double whammy of having a uh a major wildfire that's impacting heat in that's impacting air quality while heat is also impacting residents.

So uh makes it that much more difficult if you can't go outside and your indoor temperatures are much higher.

Um so we're gonna highlight some of the key data and progress that we've done.

Um we're in some of the sort of cross-sector coordination.

This is something that does involve many different departments.

No one department is sort of responsible for heat.

Um the hacker plan, the hacker, I guess, effort was created in 2021.

Um right now it is really split um between two part-time FTEs, so it's about one full one FTE total with maybe another um half an FTE or so going to sort of supervise and sort of work with those people.

So a lot of the work we're doing with different departments and stuff is just is sort of taking advantage of time that they can give us.

And that's certainly the case with community-based organizations as well, though we have made a very concerted effort through grants and stuff to be able to compensate people for their time.

Um we think that's really important.

You know, if we're gonna expect communities to participate with us, we need to be able to compensate them for that.

So uh with that, I'm just gonna go uh mention the people who are gonna come up and then we'll we'll turn it over to them.

Um so Matt Wolf from DPH is going to start off and talk about some of the various implications and some of the work that's been happening.

Alex Morrison from my team, those are the two two folks that are really dedicated to this effort, uh, is gonna talk.

And then we're gonna hear from Cindy Comerford with the environment department.

Um will talk about some of the efforts that's going on there, especially around decarbonization and some of the uh the heat um that the hub that they put together and some of that type of work.

Uh and then I think we're gonna take a quick break for questions before we hear from Mary Alan Carroll, who will talk, you know, specifically about how San Francisco's um responding to heat events or how we intend to respond to heat events.

So with that, I'll pass it on to Matt.

I'm gonna move over to this one so I can control my slides.

That's all right.

Um, my name is Matt Wolf.

Um I'm a the climate health program manager with the Department of Public Health.

I sit with Public Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Branch and I co-manage the heat and air quality resilience project.

Let me see.

Um next slide.

It did not go.

There we are.

Um as you heard from both Brian Strong and Dr.

Tucker, um, climate change is making San Francisco's extreme heat events happen more frequently and more extreme.

And the health impacts of these events have significant cascading and compounding impacts on public health.

And so over the last decade, since the 2017 Labor Day Heat Event, San Francisco's city agencies and community partners and academic partners have worked together to try to do two things at once.

And the first is to design and execute short-term emergency preparedness and response procedures to address short-term health impacts.

Um we'll hear from the Department of Emergency Management later in this presentation to talk about how the city organizes and deploys emergency messaging and resources during a heat event and immediately before and after.

But these emergency response agencies work works better if there's 3,000 people that get sick instead of 30,000 people that get sick.

So that work needs to be paired with medium to long-term actions to reduce surge in the first place.

And that's the second thing that hackers that we need to do is build a more heat resilient San Francisco with medium to long-term adaptation strategies.

So this slide is mostly to define our terms when we talk about extreme heat.

It's like a vocabulary slide.

Um, extreme heat in San Francisco at extreme heat event is around 85 degrees.

Um but 85 degrees means something very different in San Francisco than it does Phoenix, than it does Houston, than it does in the other direction, Anchorage, Alaska.

So the National Weather Service in 2024 deployed the heat risk tool that identifies every heat wave on a scale of zero to four, with zero being little to no impact of ex heat to four being extreme impact.

And this grid is made up by not only temperature, but what time of the year the heat wave occurred, the duration of the heat wave, the difference between current temperature and average temperature.

So the difference between 100 degrees and an average temperature of 70 degrees in San Francisco is really severe.

And the health impacts that historically has occurred in that location from heat, and this is um compiled by the CDC.

So this is a chart that says that looks at those same five categories and says on each of those five categories within the last decade, how many um EMS calls, emergency medical calls for service, do we get comparatively on those days?

So this chart looks at like on the normal days where there's no heat risk, we have a baseline amount of EMS calls.

So this chart looks at like on the normal days where there's no heat risk, we have a baseline amount of EMS calls, and on days with major heat risk in red, we have 15% higher EMS calls.

On the two days that we've had in the last decade than in purple, extreme risk, we've had 73% higher calls.

And this is uh borne out also in epidemiology.

There was a statewide research in a 2006 heat wave that hit the whole state of California, and they found that emergency department visits increase more in San Francisco and the coastal area than anywhere else in the state of California.

Um just a couple other data points is earlier this year in March, we had a heat event where temperatures only hit the orange category, moderate heat risk, and we saw EMS calls go up 20%.

So this is not so this is just an average graph, but we know that oftentimes our health impacts outpace this.

So these are climate projections.

Um state climate projection resource.

They it's not um exact.

They're saying by the end of the century, we're expected to have between six and twenty-eight extreme heat days a year.

But we know that you know, San Francisco might have a season like last year that we have very few extreme heat days, and we might have a year with a lot of extreme heat days.

So the shading in purple is the range of possibilities that the model put out.

So not only we don't have to plan for six to twenty eight days, we have to plan also for what the maximum could look like, which could be 50, 60, 70 heat days a year over 85 degrees.

So why is San Francisco vulnerable to extreme heat?

And a lot of this has been talked about already today.

The first one is that we have little home adaptation.

Um San Francisco has the lowest rate of cooling out of any city in the United States.

Um built to keep heat in, not to let heat out.

And most of the health impacts of extreme heat in San Francisco happen indoors, where temperatures get higher and stay hotter longer than temperatures outdoors.

Um there's also a significant overlap between the people who are most vulnerable to extreme heat and people who live in buildings that are ill-equipped to protect them from the heat.

The second uh vulnerability is our urban heat islands.

So this is a graph of a surface temperature map from the 2017 Labor Day heat wave.

So it shows the temperature distribution across San Francisco.

And San Francisco's microclimates can vary between 15 and 20 degrees across our city.

Um this is amplified by the urban heat island effect, which is that areas with trees and shade might are warmer than areas with pavement that absorbs heat or buildings that block wind.

And once again, these patterns show that the hottest neighborhoods in the southeast sections of the city are the same neighborhoods that have carry the highest health burden of around heat.

Um the third element is that um we because it doesn't get as hot in San Francisco than a lot of other places, we're less um competitive to many grants.

Like grants that uh are statewide grants, they might give it to places that have more heat days a year than San Francisco.

So we tend to like get passed over when it comes to funding opportunities.

And then the last one is that we just don't have a lot of experience with heat.

Um, our emergency response agencies respond to extreme heat events, but there wasn't any sustained long-term strategy before 2017 to centralize heat.

And our city departments worked on projects that we know have heat-related outcomes, like we planted trees and we weatherized buildings, but these projects were never intentionally targeted towards the communities with the greatest heat-related vulnerability.

So, to address those vulnerabilities in 2021, we established the heat and air quality resilience project.

The heat and air quality resilience project is managed by the Department of Public Health and the Office of Resiliency and Capital Planning with leadership support as well from the Department of Emergency Management and San Francisco Environment Department.

And the idea that underlies hacker is that extreme heat and heat resilience takes many different departments, community agencies, and academic partners all working together.

And hacker is an initiative to do that, to bringing together the stakeholders to plan, identify, and then implement the strategies necessary to support those emergency response actions to bring that amount of people that get sick from 30,000 to 3,000.

And the purpose of this coordination is not to design itself new emergency response procedures or to plant trees, but to empower the departments and community organizations that are doing that work with the best data to make sure they're aware of local and national best practices, that they're connected to all the most relevant stakeholders, and to their collaborating to make their work as effective as possible.

So the first objective of hacker is to de-silo um extreme heat planning so we can do just that.

The second objective of Hacker is then to facilitate the implementation and evaluation of specific heat strategies that are necessary to reduce that health impact surge.

And so over the next several slides, my colleague Alex Morrison will discuss some of the deliverables that have come from our work so far, both on the coordination side and the implementation side.

Hello, just mic check.

Yeah, so as Matt was mentioning, there's been a strong focus on coordination, and through this coordination, we've created the first uh heat and air quality resilience plan for the city in 2023.

Um this plan really represented the largest coordination effort to date around heat and air quality as an issue, and it brought together numerous city agencies in partnership with uh community partners, and it's been the guiding document to set the agenda for what we work on on these issues for years to come.

Uh as you'll see here, the plan contains 31 medium to long-term strategies that, when implemented, will further the resilience of San Francisco.

Um, that's been a constant theme through this uh hearing, but extreme heat is an issue that kind of crosses many sectors and different elements of the built environment as well as emergency response.

So when we were putting the strategies in the plan, we broke them down into these different pathways that reflect that fact.

So in the plan, it focuses on strategies to weaterize our buildings, cool our urban heat islands, as well as strategies around community readiness and emergency response and the data evaluation and governments.

That's really uh essential to implementing the plan strategies as well.

The coordination function at Hacker Serves is the thing that really helps us move these strategies to implementation.

Um, since its inception, Hacker has made progress on many capacity building actions, and this is including uh knowledge exchange.

So we've had these uh 17 quarterly all hands meetings, as we mentioned, and these are spaces that bring together our community, public, private, and academic partners to build connection, provide program updates, share resources when we do find them and identify them, and identify these lessons that we're learning and share them uh broadly to the community and all the city agencies that take part in these meetings as well.

Um we've included in these meetings spotlights for national best practices.

We had some guest speakers, including the chief heat officers of Miami Dade in Los Angeles, um, and we've been able to use it as an opportunity to uplift our local community partners as well, some of the people who are in this room today, uh, including Resilient Bayview, Brightline, Emerald Cities Collaborative, as well as uh many other city partners as well, or community partners as well.

Um, capacity building in community engagement has been really important.

As we've mentioned, we have this standing body in the form of the community stakeholder group that we partner with UCSF for.

Um, we've also been identifying and securing resources.

Um, as Matt mentioned, um, the competitive nature of these grants has been a difficulty, but we've applied for five grants so far.

Um, we've won two, and we currently have three more applications that are in progress right now to try to secure funds to move these strategies into implementation.

Um, data and evaluation has been really important.

Um, we've been able to create new data tools to understand how heat will be impacting the different areas of the city.

As we said, this wasn't an understanding that we had previously, and we've done a lot of work to show how the different interventions that we're trying to pursue can have positive impact in the communities that we intend to serve as a city.

So, on making our city facilities more heat resilient, uh, the condition of our facilities and the amenities offered there is an integral part of that equation.

So the city has invested in renovations to multiple libraries, um, such as the mission district or the mission branch, uh, the Chinatown branch, and these have been done with the explicit purpose of ensuring that residents have access to air-conditioned public spaces as an option for themselves.

Um, the geobond measure investments that we've made in health facilities, ensure that we can remain in operation during extreme hate uh heat events at these facilities.

So, this looks like the improvements we've made to Chinatown Health Clinic and the new Southeast Health Clinic in Bayview.

And as we mentioned before, not everywhere in the city heats up to the same degree.

The Bayview is actually one of the hottest areas of the city during um extreme heat events.

Uh on the policy side, the municipal green building code requires that all requires all electric construction and renovation for city facilities, which ensures that they have resilience to heat through heat pump installations as well as energy efficiency measures.

And Cindy from the uh environment department will be talking more about that in detail later.

Finally, I wanted to highlight DPH has purchased and deployed a temperature and air quality sensor network throughout our libraries and select health centers as well.

And this really allows us to better understand and measure the impact that these events are having and how we can use that to inform future improvements and investments as well.

Increasing the capacity of our community partners is another key objective of Hacker, and DEM has really been playing a central role in that through the extreme weather resilience program, which also started in 2023.

So this program really begins with the understanding that the way to keep residents safe is to meet them where they're at, providing resources through the existing trusted community sites that they already have relationships with.

So this program uh looked at a number of these community sites and provided them with air conditioning and air purifier units as a low-cost measure to create a kind of cool room within their facilities to get uh uh relief from these events.

So there's currently about 86 locations citywide, and the offering was really massively successful to the point of actual over-subscription.

So there were over 200 locations across the city that were vying for the 90 spots that were available.

Unfortunately, funding uh was done with a one-time local, regional, and state source, um, and this included a Bay Area Air Quality Management District grant.

And so, even though it's a really successful proof of concept for what this can look like, DEM currently doesn't have the capacity to kind of scale up the intervention at the time.

So, as we mentioned, meeting residents where they're at is often the most effective uh approach to extreme heat interventions.

Um, for some residents, getting to a resilient community location or even a city owned cool space down the block can have its own share of barriers that are hard to get past.

Um, just for example, transportation is a big one.

Um so being able to uh shelter in place at home uh during these events is something that uh often residents kind of prefer to do, and we try to make efforts to support residents in doing so.

Uh the first step that we've done to try and do that is really to understand what are the barriers specifically and the preferences that residents have around sheltering in place.

Um, as mentioned in partnership with UCSF and the community stakeholder group, we surveyed over 500 residents about extreme heat impacts, what they're currently doing, and what are the largest barriers to being more resilient to these events.

Um, the main takeaway overwhelmingly from this effort was that the largest obstacle that residents face is actually making changes to their living spaces, uh, largely because they're renters.

So, rental units face the most challenges to increase cooling due to approval requirements from landlords as well as other um obstacles as well.

But thanks to DPH and Hacker's partnership with UCSF, we have kind of this research to better understand these barriers, and we'll be turning that into the development of a renter's guide to home cooling actions that don't require landlord involvement.

Um, this will be coming through uh soon as we work through the the deliverables for that broader project.

Um, we're also actively seeking more resources for cooling renter-occupied and low-income housing through the grant applications that we uh submit uh for the opportunities that come across our desk.

And SFE will be going more into detail on the programs that they have that support directly, um, renters and low-income residents in trying to renovate their homes and uh shelter in place more effectively.

So, in addition to cooling and weatherizing buildings, uh cooling our urban environment is also critical to uh reducing health impacts and the accompanying energy demand that we can see spike during uh these heat weave heat wave events.

We've been working to support public works, specifically their Bureau of Urban Forestry and Landscape Architecture sections to better integrate public health data in the decision making on how they site trees.

Um, the image to the left kind of shows the city's heat vulnerability index, and this characterizes the risk of heat-related illness uh by neighborhood.

Um, we've also provided data like this as the information base for a lot of grants that are being pursued by a variety of different departments that are kind of a part of Hacker, and we try to support.

So, Public Works actually recently applied for and received a 12 million dollar grant using data that was produced by Hacker, and this grant will plant 3,500 trees in environmental justice communities across the city, and we continue to look for opportunities to support them while they implement that grant further.

Um, these trees will really be providing essential shade, clean air, and access to greening that we know are really important to improving the public health of these communities.

Currently, the next step for our program is to pursue the grants being offered from the proposition for state climate bond that was passed in 2024.

These grant applications will focus on some of our work on community resilience centers, green infrastructure, and home weatherization to try to push that forward to get more in that implementation side of the spectrum.

We're continuing to do our work on data and evaluation led largely by DPH through updating the heat and vulnerability assessment and further tracking heat related illnesses because we're trying to really better understand what are the specific impacts to the health system so that we can measure the effects of our interventions as they move further.

So after that overview of kind of the scope and the accomplishments of hacker over the last few years, we wanted to dive a little more deeply into one of these topics that we know is of particular interest to this audience, building weatherization.

For that, I'm going to be turning it over to Cindy Cummiford, who is the climate program manager at SFE to go more detail into their efforts.

Good morning, supervisors.

My name is Cindy Cumberford.

I'm the climate program manager at the environment department.

I oversee our six related climate programs.

The two which are most relevant today are citywide climate action planning and building decarbonization.

My team develops policies, programs, and partnerships that help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and also make our homes and buildings more resilient to the impacts of climate change like extreme heat.

So to uh ground everyone today in the environment department's mission, I just want to talk about that.

We provide solutions that advance climate protection and also enhance the quality of life for all San Franciscans.

So climate action isn't just about reducing emissions, it's about improving public health, lowering energy cost, creating safer homes, and preparing communities for the impacts of climate change, which include hotter days and more extreme heat events.

So, what does our department's mission mean in the terms of extreme heat?

The environment department helps reduce extreme heat by building long-term building resilience before emergencies occur.

We implement San Francisco's climate action plan, which sets the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 61% below 1990 levels by 2030, and we plan to be a net zero city by 2040.

A major part of this strategy is building decarbonization.

So building decarbonization addresses those challenges by replacing fossil fuel equipment with modern, efficient electric equipment.

Swapping this equipment is referred to as electrification.

And the technology we primarily use is called a heat pump.

When we decarbonize buildings, we also include better insulation and air sealing, and this is uh referred to as weatherization.

Our homes are where we spend most of our time, and as you heard, this is where we are also most vulnerable to heat.

So building decarbonization is not only an important climate strategy, it's an important public health and resilience strategy.

So building decarbonization provides multiple benefits.

We've heard this throughout some of the presentations.

Um when we install heat pumps in buildings, they provide both heating and cooling capacity.

Uh second, they increase energy efficiency, which keeps buildings cooler longer.

Electrification can also reduce long-term energy cost.

It also improves public health by reducing the combustion of natural gas in homes and sometimes providing additional air filtration.

We can also combine electrification with solar plus storage, which provides long-term resilience during power power outages and helps us maintain services.

And finally, uh building decarbonization helps reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the primary driver of climate change and extreme heat days.

So the next two slides, I'm going to talk about how the environment department builds resilience through our policies and programs.

First, we help develop plans that help guide the city's transition to be net zero.

I talked about our climate action plan.

Our climate action plan has uh 180 strategies over seven different sectors from energy to buildings, transportation, healthy ecosystem, circular economy, water, housing, land use.

Um, and these strategies not only help us uh reduce our emissions, but many of these strategies help us adapt to extreme heat.

Alex said earlier, we also lead on the municipal green building code.

We have progressively strengthened that code over the last six years.

We require all newly constructed municipal facilities to be all electric and major renovations.

We also prohibit the installation of fossil fuel equipment in existing municipal buildings, and we require solar plus storage where appropriate.

All newly constructed private sector buildings must be all electric, and that also includes major innovations too.

But we know policies aren't enough.

We also need to have programs that help implement this work.

One example is the Climate Equity Hub, which Supervisor Mandelman has been a strong supporter of, and I want to thank you for your leadership to make sure this program was able to continue this year.

One, it does direct installs of heat pumps for low-income communities.

Two, it has a workforce training component that actually trains contractors on heat pump technologies.

And three, we also do community outreach and technical assistance with our community advisory groups and different CBOs.

This helps buildings with performance, energy efficiency, and helping homes make a transition to be net zero.

We also help do pilot projects and outreach, which helps us kind of test new approaches.

It helps us engage communities and improve our future programs.

So here's just an example of a snapshot of our website.

This is where residents can get information about electrifying their home, find out about rebates, incentives, and resources that make electrifying their home more affordable and more accessible.

Our goal is to make sure that our residents know that this information exists and how they can take advantage of it.

So to appreciate why this work is so important, we need to kind of understand the scale of this challenge.

The climate action plan sets a specific goal around building decarbonization, and we want to reduce our building emissions by 20% from 2020 levels, which translates to decarbonizing about 18,000 buildings.

And our goal is to be have all buildings be zero emissions by 2040.

So the chart on the upper left of this slide shows the number of residential dwellings currently using natural gas and how many we will need to transition over the coming years.

And that equates to more than 15,000 residential buildings.

The chart on the upper right shows household income.

And while this is not a direct comparison to buildings, it illustrates why affordability matters.

Approximately 42% of our San Francisco households earn below the median income, making equitable access to resources and financing incredibly important.

At the bottom, we show the commercial sector.

So commercial buildings are measured in square footage, not in units, and when we convert the square footage to buildings, we need to decarbonize about 2,000 commercial buildings by 2030.

So this is a significant undertaking, but it's also an opportunity for us to modernize our building stock, to improve public health, and reduce energy costs and increase our resilience as a city.

So this is my last slide, and I just want to talk about what are the opportunities and challenges to meeting these goals.

First, we need to continue advancing key policies.

One important policy that's coming up is through the Bay Area Air District for Rule 9 and Rule 4.

This would phase out the sale of new gas water heaters, furnaces, and equipment in larger buildings over the coming decade.

The Air District is expected to take a vote on this in November.

Second, incentives remain critical to help low-income households participate in this transition.

Also to accelerate market transformation and to reduce cost over time.

Third, education outreach is critical.

We want to make sure that residents have clear, trusted resources about the benefits of electrification and navigating support for these resources.

And then one thing not shown on the slide, you know, San Francisco has the ability to be a real leader in climate technology, making sure that companies can locate here and deploy new technologies that lower the cost of electrification and make it more accessible.

So together, these programs, policies, and partnerships will not only help us meet our climate goals, but they also create a healthier and safer and more resilient communities that can become more resilient in the face of more extreme heat days.

So I think we're going to stop here and take questions for the first part of the presentation before we turn it over to the Department of Emergency Management to talk about heat response.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Okay.

I mean, maybe maybe I'll start with department.

Well, maybe a global statement and then Department of the Environment.

So it's great to hear about the work that is being done.

It seems important.

It also seems to me like there is a significant gap between what seems like the scale of the problem and the level of investment and activity going into addressing that problem.

I mean to sort of start with Department of the Environment, because you're up there, Cindy, and not to pick on you.

But actually starting a step, this is related, but it's not exactly on the central core of the hearing.

But it was occurring to me as I was seeing those goals around uh decarbonization and that first 2030 goal, and it occurred to me like we set these goals in 2016, right?

2021.

2021.

Um we're like halfway to 2030.

And there were particular goals around convert, not just the work we've done around ensuring that new buildings will be electric, but there is this our plans rely on, you know, depend on, expect, anticipate a conversion of existing buildings to um away from fossil fuels.

Are we on track for that halfway to 2030?

That is that is a great question.

Um so we measure And I say that's not exactly I mean because it's not exactly the purpose of this hearing, but it didn't work.

It's an important question.

Yeah.

So you know, we measure, do a greenhouse gas inventory every two years.

There's a two-year lag.

Um we'll be releasing our 2024 inventory uh within the next month that does show right now we are on track, but the pace is starting to slow down in reducing emissions um over the last five years.

The things that we need to do now are harder, they're more complex, and they require more resources.

Um so you know, we're we've heard about just the complexity around heat and the impacts.

Um so we definitely need more investment in the solutions.

And you know, decarbonizing our buildings, for some it can be really easy.

For some, it's more hard, but we definitely need to make sure we're supporting our equity communities in making sure we hit our goals and we provide safe and healthy environments for them.

Um drilling down to a little bit more though.

I mean, you're your measure when you say that we're we're on track but slowing, that's a measure of emissions.

It's we're not what so on your chart you have a certain number of buildings that are supposed to be converted from fossil fuels now to not fossil fuels by 2030.

Are we on track with the most of our emission reductions are coming from the building sector?

The total number of emissions should represent our building goals, right?

So some of the building, you know, we're helping low-income households decarbonize.

A lot of them are doing it market rate housing.

So we are moving towards that, but again, you know, we anticipate kind of like an S curve in the acceleration of decarbonization, where it's really slow in the beginning and then it accelerates as sort as soon as we get more investment in the community.

And so again, more investments needed to stay on track and make sure we can hit those goals.

And at least at the municipal level that we're not ramping up investment in those things.

At least my perception is, I mean, I'm I'm glad thank you, colleagues on the budget committee for restoring 400,000 of uh work on um heat, you know, providing heat pumps and helping folks uh paired with grants, of course, to um to get heat pumps into into homes owned by low-income homeowners.

But um that's like a little bit of a blip.

Yeah.

Um just to give you an example, and I know New York City is a much larger city than San Francisco, but they invested $34 million in heat pumps from their city this year.

And we're doing 400,000.

Which I'm thankful for.

But it's right.

Um and then I mean, on the topic of the hub.

Uh I mean, that 400,000 helps continue some of the hub's work.

The hope, I think, for Supervisors Maher and Haney and me back in the day when we I think we found initial general fund for the hub was that it would grow over time.

And in fact, there was the r the opposite of that has happened.

Like, that was my hope at the time too.

Um we have been able to secure some grants.

So we've gotten uh a grant where we are actually uh decarbonizing home daycares, which is an incredibly important um uh endeavor.

Uh you know, we've we've raised about $800,000.

We've been able to leverage that general fund support for an additional $800,000.

But I think as you said, it's still not enough.

And hopefully people can see that there's multiple benefits to building decarbonization, right?

It's not just about climate change.

Today we're here talking about it in the context of extreme heat and all of the health and safety benefits it will provide for our city.

And there's a level of general fund investment below which you cannot go and get those grants and then implement them.

My understanding is we're pretty I mean at some level we're beneath that level, but we're we're in we're in the neighborhood of like not even being able to go seek out those grants.

I think that's accurate.

Okay.

All right.

Um maybe if uh Matt Wolf and Matt and Alex could come back.

So are you both in DPH?

No.

I'm I'm with the Office of Resilience and Capital Planning.

ORCP and DPS.

And you are like the dynamic duo.

You are the two people in the entire 30,000 person city and county of San Francisco uh workforce who are charged with sty you know with staving off extreme heat calamity.

Yes.

How's it going?

Are we safe?

I would say that um a lot of our efforts around coordination and data sharing have been going like pretty well considering how much time other departments have to dedicate to the us.

So there's been like we've built a big network based on the fact that I think there's belief within the city of San Francisco that this is a threat.

But right now, most of that is like volunteered time that is taking away from other things that the other departments are supposed to be doing.

How worried no, you go ahead.

Well, I was just going to add that um oftentimes you'll see the progress that we've been able to make is on you know the emergency response side, the things that take more research, evaluation, coordination.

But yes, on the building side, the more capital-intensive elements of work, um there is uh less uh ready uh less preparedness in that.

All right, to say that again more slowly for me.

So sorry.

Like your your work you feel like has been more successful.

This coordination, I mean, really what you're doing is coordinating, getting departments talking to each other, and that that has been helpful, you think, in terms of when disaster strikes the city will we hope be in a better position than it was in 2017 to deploy whatever it whatever emergency response resources we have available for that and and maximize that in a way that we were not like not turning on the the plans that we had at the time to deal with the exact thing that was going on.

Uh yeah, that is a correct uh assessment based on and I'm less close to the pub to the uh the emergency response or preparedness side personally, just sitting in ORCP.

But we're gonna say my understanding is that that is true.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.

And Mary Ellen is super excited to come and then we'll we'll give her her moment.

But um okay, so that's the piece that this uh so thank you.

Um but again, it sounds like in terms of the actual like changes to our buildings and to the way like like the big expensive stuff, like two guys, like you can't really make that happen.

And so my question then is like how worried are you about that and how worried should we be?

I think I'm pretty worried.

I think that um I think that one of the things we've seen is like the things that kick cities into action often is having a major event.

Like we've talked to Seattle and Portland since their 2021 heat dome, and we've heard about a lot of the work that's happened there.

We talked to them immediately afterwards, and then we have contacts with the Seattle Department of Public Health about their heat program, but they had to go through a heat dome to get to the point where there was um energy to support a lot of the heat adaptation efforts.

And how is what they're now doing after the emergency different from what we are doing and where we are.

I think that there is um they have more resources to leverage on implementation than we do.

I think they're starting from a very similar place around coordinating their different departments around creating a plan.

I think they're also focused on data and they're doing a little bit more on uh like evaluation, so they have implementation and then they want to make sure what we're they're doing is effective so they're able to use that data to do that at uh evaluation.

I know that there's also a lot of work that they're doing around supporting their community-based organizations because you know, a lot of folks will be looking to their trusted partners as the first line of defense during a heat event.

So it's also how do you build and broaden the network of people that are um impacted by this response.

And do you have a sense of the difference in scale between where they are and where you are now?

Yeah, we actually um Matt and I were able to participate with some folks from King County on uh a national adaptation forum presentation.

So we basically partnered to make this presentation on a national forum about the different work that we're doing.

So we we were able to like hear a little bit more about the specific programs that they have, like dedicated funding streams for getting AC to like identified vulnerable communities, like various uh very specific uh programs that they have that have funding sources that are kind of recurring.

Um so like that is something that I that popped out um in that conversation.

But yeah.

Yeah.

I mean it strikes me.

I mean, of course, uh as you point out, uh uh a terrible event focuses the minds of policymakers and then leads to investment.

Um but when you see awful events helping happening in other places, it would be good to see that.

This is not directed at you, it's directed at the policymakers in San Francisco, like us and the people over there and the 200.

But it would seem like you would learn from those things that are happening in other places and see what they are doing after the terrible event, and then start maybe getting a jump start because otherwise you're gonna be uh justifiably accused of being derelict in your duty.

Um you don't have to but if you're well I mean I just have a thought.

Um I think that when we were conceptualizing this plan, it was honestly way back when we had to deal with both heat and air quality in the guy under the umbrella of COVID.

Um that was actually when we Matt and I started working together and we're talking about.

Summer of 2020.

Summer of 2020, um doing some of this work.

And part of what was important in that moment was feeling like, oh, this is a canary in the coal mine moment, not only seeing that event, but then also the Portland events to be a bit proactive and maybe get ahead of the curveball.

Um so that that I know is something that we think is really important about the opportunity that hacker represents and how we've tried to bring that lens into the work as well.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.

But I would say fundamentally I think that the goal of hackers, so we never see a Pacific Northwest heat dome here, and if it does happen here, we have the resources to not have it impact us.

Once again, I think of the you know, our emergency response systems work better if 3,000 people get sick than 30,000 people sick get sick.

So how do we not have that sort of situation that happened there or happen here?

Right.

And my impression is you've given us the road, like we have the map now, but we don't have the resources to actually go down the path and get to the place we want to go.

I think that's correct.

Okay.

All right.

Well, um that feels like a conversation that uh the policymakers in the city and county of San Francisco should be engaging in at a more sustained and and in a more sustained and deeper way, and uh would certain definitely invite the mayor's office uh to engage with my colleagues.

I know I'm interested in this conversation over the next five months that I'm around.

I hope that my uh that others on the board are also interested and will continue it after I leave.

I'd like to ask a question with the Department of Public Health here.

Um I recall because I I worked on some of these issues uh in a different context that California's deadliest heat wave was back in 2006, I believe.

It was mostly Central Valley.

But the thing that I remember about it was that the initial estimates put the fatality count statewide at something like I want to say it was 140.

I just googled some of this.

Um then there were subsequent subsequently analysts went back and just looking at the excessive deaths realized that it was significantly higher.

That I think it was by an order of magnitude.

Um it did highlight that some of even the horrible numbers we're seeing uh may be under counts and that we may not be fully appreciative.

We may we may not fully appreciate um how deadly these things can be because they're misdiagnosed as other causes of um death.

How confident are we now that we've gotten better or are we?

I think the same pattern exists.

I think that all of our counts because it relies on the way that a diagnosis is happening and whether it's heat-related causes, and some of them will be diagnosed as cardiovascular, and there's only a realm of diagnoses that are even in the heat-related classification.

I think there was a LA Times report on this about the a major heat wave that happened in LA two years ago, and they did a full like uh expose on how heat counts are undercounted.

Okay.

Okay.

Well, thanks you two for um, you know, doing a lot with only a little, and um I I hope that we can get you some more resources in the years to come.

So thank you.

Thanks for having the hearing.

Thanks for inviting us.

Yeah.

All right.

Mary Alan Carroll, Department of Emergency Management.

Good morning.

I think it's still morning.

Still morning.

Um Mary Ellen Carroll, I'm the executive director for the Department of Emergency Management.

Thank you, Chair Mandelman, Supervisors Dorsey.

Chair Dorsey, I'm just a member here.

Oh, I'm sorry, Chair James.

Um I want to thank you for having us all here.

Um I want to thank my colleagues and acknowledge all the work that they are doing every day.

Um I just want to add a few expert uh sort of off uh script comments based on some of the questions that you've had in comments.

Um, I think uh being in being responsible for emergency response for the city um for the last almost eight years.

Um, you know, one of our biggest challenges is that we have it's a challenge and it's and it's a blessing that we have not suffered greatly by any major, major events.

We've certainly um all experienced a global pandemic together, which was made major.

But outside of that, we're waiting for the earthquake.

Our heat the last real, real significant heat crisis was almost a decade ago, as you said.

And unfortunately, the reality with emergency response and management is that all cities are dealing with a lot all the time.

There are a lot of emergencies that are right in front of our face every day.

And so to get the political will, the capital investments and strategies in place that we need to deal with the many emergencies that might hit us is like impossible.

So I think it's important that we do things like this today so we remember.

Um looking at what happens in other places, LA, we've talked about LA and Seattle, and yesterday we were talking about what happened in Europe, which was really significant.

There was significant um deaths that happened during that late this latest um heat wave are really important because we can compare ourselves to that and learn.

Um but you know, you don't feel it until you feel it.

And um that is the challenge that we have.

So I will just jump into these slides quickly because I know we've been here for a long time.

Um, we coordinate uh emergency response, we run 911 dispatch, we activate the emergency operations center, we are the ones that send uh public information alerts and also lead in most cases public information.

Um we're 24-7 operation.

Um the tempo of our activations have definitely risen.

Um we had 17 EOC activations in 2017, and that is the most in any year since 2016.

We've been averaging 14 a year, and a lot of this is driven by extreme weather events.

Um we um, you know, I would say that with every um heat event, every to you know, every department has their lane, but primarily it's really around public information and public health is key.

Um and so hacker, as you've seen here, is like the blue sky day.

Every day they're working on that, DEM is part of that.

Um, but you know, the response is when the heat hits.

So uh going into forecast to activation, you know, we are constantly monitoring National Weather Service, they are our best friends.

Um the heat triggers that you'll see are set by public health, and they're informed by the national um heat risk scale, and we have a clear escalation path.

So, one thing is that since 2017, I think it was mentioned, the city didn't seem totally prepared, we were kind of back on our heels.

That has definitely changed.

I would say from as far as protocols and our readiness and knowing what we do and having a clear prescript for that, it's one of the areas that we are is the strongest for the city.

Um we have prescripted alerts, they are already translated, um, and we make sure that we get that information out.

We have after action reviews, so anytime we do activate for these, we review, we see what worked, what didn't, and our plans keep getting better.

Um then, you know, there are other things around this.

The while San Francisco doesn't get affected directly by public safety power shutoffs, or um even other types of you know, wildfires.

Um there is the impact for us to be impacted by power outages due to the overall grid because San Francisco just doesn't have its own grid, we're all connected, um, and so it's important to learn from that.

One of the most impressive things I saw was I can't remember the year, it's probably in here, but we had um a few years ago the state was in a statewide heat crisis, um, and the grid was really almost about to fail.

Uh the governors, the state put out a WIA an emergency alert on everyone's phone asking them to turn off their lights, don't use your uh air conditioning, and it was in it actually worked.

The entire you just saw the grid go like this.

So it just shows that we do have ability to affect change, and quite frankly, I was surprised it worked, pleasantly surprised.

Um every heat event has a different um component to it.

We forecast, we have our benchmarks, and then we activate.

Um as noted, um, you know, public information is incredibly important.

It's probably our number one tool that we have to help people and to prevent um harm.

We uh have a because of our partnership with ORCP and public health, we know where these heat zones are, and we're able to get both focus our mitigation uh strategies like the extreme uh weather climate uh program or to get information out during an event.

So we know what happens during heat.

We know people drowned at the beach, so that's an important message.

Unfortunately, you have children that fall out of windows, that happens.

We kind of know what's going to happen, and so we're able to proactively plan for that and respond.

Um we rebuilt our public preparedness site, Ready SF last year, and that has been very successful.

We've gotten thousands of new alert SF subscribers from that.

And then finally, probably most importantly is community preparedness because as has been said, our vulnerable vulnerable uh communities are more vulnerable when this happens.

We had a community-based uh conference earlier this year, and we go out to community events all the time to try to get information out.

Um the number one lesson for us from COVID is that community is the key to response.

You have to give community uplift them to be able to provide the messaging and the solutions that are gonna be that best work for communities within San Francisco.

Um, I in just to close, San Francisco.

We are very well positioned to respond to a heat event.

Um we're constantly improving our operational coordination.

But the fact is that it is going to get worse.

And while we plan for climate change, we are living it.

And I think that is the thing that is important to tie with our messaging with our partners at the Department of Environment and ORCP, and for all of our electeds and policymakers.

We are in we are in the crisis.

We are in the eye of the storm.

We are going to continue to have these events, and um, you know, it is important that we prepare.

Um we have other I have I'm very connected with a lot of other emergency managers throughout this country.

Uh we had storms that happened a couple years ago, and my colleague in Texas sent me his protocols.

He goes, I don't know what you call that, but that's what we call a hurricane.

Here's my hurricane checklist.

So those kind of things, we've had tornado warnings.

You know, we just have to be adaptable to these things that occur.

Um I think one of the very first things that happened when Mayor Lori, maybe he was Mayor Laurie elect, we had a tornado warning, and I think he texted me like, what do we do?

And I kind of looked at Jackie.

Do we have messaging for this?

Like we've never done that.

So we're in a constant K uh process of iteration, learning, building our response.

But um that's where we are, and I'm happy to answer any questions that you might have.

Thank you, Director Carroll.

Um I have a I have a couple.

Uh I just want to circle back on the grid conversation because I've heard different things about the grid.

I guess one of the things that can be very bad in extreme uh weather heat events is um you can have the extreme heat event and then you can lose your electricity, and then the people who have air conditioning lose that, and the whole thing gets worse.

Um why don't we layer that we're having an air quality event at the same time?

Because that is very, very likely to happen in kind of our the worst case scenario from a public health perspective, because the what you should do for health or for heat is opposite what you're supposed to do for um air quality.

The answer is you you go with the heat protocols because heat will kill you before bad air does.

But yes, all of those things could happen at once.

Okay.

And um and I and the point you were making is that San Francisco not uh having its own grid, but being part of a larger grid is like it is not that we we have we don't have a ton of air conditioning in the city, which is in some ways some of the problem that would potentially reduce the risk of all these things happening at the same time, except that our electricity use is not just a San Francisco thing, it's a regional and statewide thing.

And so if there's a heat event going on throughout California and everybody's turning on air conditioning in other places, we could still go down.

Yes.

Yeah.

Okay.

Um cooling centers.

I mean, cooling centers are proposed as kind of a solution or uh one response, but do people use cooling centers?

No.

And in fact, that's why they really aren't part of our portfolio.

Okay.

We have instead invested in existing community um facilities that people go to and want to go to.

So that's um community uh senior centers are huge.

Uh community centers where children go because chids and seniors are the most vulnerable.

Um RCP, I'll give them cred for helping us and the library add um components of cooling and air filtering to the uh live to some of the libraries as they were going through their rich retrofit, which is amazing because that's place people want to go.

Um and we also just you know, we do send people to we have huge list of public accessible um buildings like malls and other places that are we know are air conditioned.

Um this is true kind of throughout the country.

You'll you'll find most cities know that cooling centers generally are not um really used often.

Um I think my last question for you is just talk to talk a little bit more about the 2024 tabletop exercise.

It sounds like that was productive, positive.

How do you think about it?

Yeah, I mean I mean anything we we have a um we have a unit within our emergency services, a team that is dedicated to community um preparedness and response.

And really I we s we all see it as a continuation.

No one wants to talk about COVID, but the fact is we ha it has been a goal of mine and and our department to maintain those relationships, those connections and the learning um with the communities that really um were critical to the response in San Francisco, and we would not have had the the success we had without um the communities engaging.

And so um how messages go out to different communities needs to be different.

And it's not just language.

Um there are cultural uh you know indications that are important, and so those are the kind of things that we're constantly trying to make sure we can connect and that we can activate at the time that it happens.

Um, you know, we have tons of alerting that you know that we've talked about many times, but we also know that there are people that need direct outreach.

And so we're not able to do that um to those folks, but what we do is we connect to the existing networks that we have, whether that's through DOS, whether that's for public health, um the community centers, uh Meals on Wheels, those kinds of things.

So we've been able to really um utilize those network, those exist existing networks because they have the longest reach and they are the trusted voices.

Um is that I mean, are you gonna be doing that kind of an exercise on uh some kind of repeated cadence or yes.

Um and like I said, we had a conference um that was really well attended, a whole uh day-long conference that was completely um focused on nonprofits and community groups.

This was like two months ago, um, and did all kinds of workshops and trainings and that kind of thing were hopeful.

That was um when that was grant money when we used to get grant money, uh federal grant money.

So you know, hoping knock on wood that that all comes through again.

It's something we'd like to continue to do on an annual basis.

And I lied because I do have one more question.

So our emergency alert system right now very relies how basically it's text messages, right?

It's text messages.

We can also do um reverse calls.

We can also call people's phones that are listed, yes.

And how confident are we that will work?

That that do we test it, how in a heat event or any event.

In general.

Yeah.

Heat event or otherwise.

Yeah, I mean, we we feel um very confident because we have such a layered system.

And even what I just described to you, you know, tapping into existing networks, that is why it's important to have those connections because we can do that pretty seamlessly and very quickly to get information out.

Um to me, the WIA, you know, that that WIA incident when they were able to affect such change statewide was really a great indication that that system is very effective.

Um we've seen it uh during the tsunami event, unfortunately.

I mean, for better or worse, that uh one of our tsunami events went sort of region-wide, which caused some confusion, but uh that was something that this the state or the feds set out, not us.

But the fact is we can get information out really quickly.

Uh again, for better or worse, we all have these things now.

Um they're on us a lot of the time.

And so for not everyone, but the majority of people, that information can get out quickly.

So it's really the redundancy and the layered approach to notification that we have.

We don't depend on any one thing.

Um and we test those things all the time.

Strikes me, though, that the group least likely to be reached by that kind of an alert system is probably the group, you know, monolingual elderly, like I mean, I assume we send out messages in multi-editing.

And that is why we we do not, that's why I say we don't depend on any one thing, and we really do depend on our community partners that are most connected with those um individuals so that we can get that information to them quickly.

And also that we have a we have a wellness check um capability for people too, because for extended heat um events, we're gonna have to do that also.

Right.

Thank you, Director Carroll, for your presentation and for your work.

I was just gonna I I it occurs to me that the I think the civil grand jury yesterday issued a report about our um alert SF outdoor warning system.

I presumably if when if and when we get that back, um that would be helpful for this kind of outreach.

I would not use a outdoor warning system for this kind of outreach.

Umless it would it would depend.

I mean, outdoor warning systems are good redundancy.

Um and I've always said if if we were if we had the funding and the political will to get that done, I think it would be a good redundancy.

Remember, we've actually really never used them since they were built in the 1950s, so there isn't really a true kind of use case.

Um whenever we use them, we have to follow up with the same kind of notifications that we've been talking about because a siren just tells you something is going on, and you also risk a lot of panic if you don't have an immediate way to kind of notify people why you're screaming at them, right?

Um again, I I do not see it as a number one priority from an alerting perspective.

I think it is a good redundancy if we're able to get it.

But I do have a lot of faith in our existing uh in our existing protocols and and redundant plans that we have now for reaching people.

Okay.

How much would that system cost?

Um it's funny, I was just reviewing this this morning with the director of the Department of Technology.

Um these are a couple years old now, uh, maybe a year and a half, but uh to do the whole system at that time was 20 million dollars.

That doesn't include um probably about three million dollars annually for maintenance and operational uh needs.

If we were that's for the whole system.

It's an amazing heat pump budget.

I would probably add I would probably add another 10 to that at this point.

Um yes.

And that is the that is the issue.

That is why I am not here saying do sirens number one, because I understand that there's a lot of other priorities that we have that I think will provide more help more safety for us as a city than than those.

All right.

Uh thank you, Director Carroll.

Thank you.

And now we have two more speakers.

Um Jackie Bryant from Resilient Bayview.

That was fast.

Good morning, supervisors.

Uh first of all, I just want to thank you, President Mandelman, for reaching out to our offices and bringing this important item to the board.

My name is Jackie Bryant.

I'm the executive director of the A.

Philip Randolph Institute.

I'm joined by Kurt Grimes.

He's my my senior program manager at APRI.

And he's also a Bayview resident, as are many of my staff members.

Um in addition, I served on the building operations task force with the Department of Environment recently.

Um what we have done is worked in a collaborative of organizations with the community youth center, which is a um primarily Chinese American serving organization, the Baby Senior Center, um, which also establish resilient Alice Griffiths.

So not only serving our senior community, but also serving residents in a very low-income housing development.

Um and we we're in partnership with the Bayview YMCA, which serves as one of the cooling centers in Baybiew.

It's also uh we also work within a huge network of service providers.

So you guys have heard many, many times about how CBOs are actually the ones that interface with residents daily.

And it's so important to work in a network of folks that are working with residents every day because we are able to tailor our messaging and connect with people in needs every day, not just when an emergency happens.

But what resilient Bayview is a community-led initiative focused on disaster preparedness and climate adaptation as well as community empowerment.

And we operate through working groups, so seniors, families, local businesses.

What we do is create neighborhood action plans for emergencies, including extreme heat, earthquakes, sea level rise, and we were responding to COVID when we were not expecting a pandemic, right?

And we've worked very closely with Hacker and the city's efforts to research and study much of the data that's helping inform our communities and identify the needs we have during extreme weather events.

So I really do applaud the work that Matt has done, that Alex is doing in connecting with organizations like ours.

A couple years ago, we were very fortunate to receive a three-year grant from the Haas Foundation to support community resilience.

And unfortunately, that funding ends this year.

And as you guys have heard many, many times, outreach is essential.

You guys even heard in this hearing this morning that we have to meet residents where they are.

I've heard that many times today.

And so what we've done is in bringing community together, we've also created initiatives for people to get involved.

Something as simple as passing out emergency first aid kits, makes a huge impact on the folks that are more aware, getting more involved on a daily basis.

One of the initial things that we did when Alert SF was launched was we noticed that District 10 had a very low participation rate.

So one of our first initiatives was to increase participation, increase signups.

And I think that's why you see some of the responses that you see today when there's a traffic thing or you know, a weather-related issue that comes up.

People are just more aware.

It's important to keep this issue top of mind.

With frequent opportunities, we remind residents to get and stay prepared.

One of our other initiatives we have launched was our resilient youth leadership academy.

And those young people actually prepare messaging campaigns.

For example, the posters in the bus shelters.

They have created, you know, their own images with messages about tackling climate adaptation and understanding climate change.

And then they also go ahead and post that on social media just to increase awareness and get even the younger generation involved.

A lot of what we do is also project-based learning.

So I was just here last week talking about the India Basin Waterfront Park Project, and that location is one in which you know we can use an example and really connect concepts to learning for folks that are out there on the shoreline.

They can see water inundation and potentially envision what happens as we continue to address climate adaptation.

But we were also disappointed to find out that no one of those proposed programs were awarded.

So even just preparing the next generation of workforce to talk about and be more aware and tackle climate change.

Now there are statewide resources, but some of the challenges we face is even partnering with the city, identifying the right person at DPW that will give us the okay to work with DPW to implement more trees or you know, continue with a lot of the resilience networking that we've done.

You know, it's hard.

It's hard to kind of cold call DPW and find the right person that'll say, yes, that makes sense.

Let's leverage these resources together.

It's more important now than ever for our city to really focus and invest in climate adaptation measures and protect the most vulnerable.

So, President Mandelman, thank you again for raising this issue, bringing it to the board.

Thank you guys for entertaining our feedback on where we are in the city and understanding that we still face challenges as climate adaptation gets harder and harder.

And so it's just important to make sure we're resourcing community organizations that are already doing the work now so that we will be prepared and we're not just responding to crisis and emergencies.

So thank you for your time.

Thank you, Ms.

Bryant.

Thank you, Mr.

Grimes.

And next we will hear from Winnie Yu from Self Help for the Elderly.

Good morning, President Mendelman and members of the committee.

My name is Winnie Yu, and I serve as the Chief Programs Officer at SelfA for the Elderly.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak today about San Francisco's readiness for extreme heat and its impact on the older adults that we serve.

SOPA for the elderly serves more than 55,000 older adults annually across the Bay Area, including many low-income homebound, limited English proficient, and socially isolated older adults throughout the city.

I like to share two lived experiences from our work every day.

The lived experience of the older adults we serve and SOFA for the elderly's experience as a trusted community-based organization serving them.

I'll begin with the live experiences of older adults.

For many of the seniors we serve, preparing for extreme heat is not as simple as staying cool or going to a cooling center in the community.

Some older adults don't feel thirsty or may simply forget to drink enough water, increasing their risk of dehydration during extreme heat.

Many live alone, have chronic health conditions, mobility limitations, or depend on caregivers.

Others are experiencing homelessness or housing instability.

Many are renters living in older apartments or single room occupancy housing without air conditioning elevators or private kitchens and bathrooms.

These housing conditions make it much harder to stay hydrated, prepare cold meals, or cool down during extreme heat.

As renters, many also cannot install air conditioning or make other home modifications, even if they wanted to.

Sometimes, even when cooling centers are available, transportation, language barriers, mobility limitations, and social isolation can prevent older adults from accessing them.

For many homebound older adults, sheltering in place may be their only option.

Making proactive wellness checks, multilingual communication, and neighborhood-based support essential.

I also like to share self-help experience as a community-based organization.

We appreciate the city's investments through the heat and air quality resistance plan, including portable air conditioning units, air filtration equipment, weatherization strategies, and renters guidance to shelter in place.

These are really important investments.

The next challenge, as mentioned, is implementation.

Many low-income older adults cannot afford cooling equipment or higher utility costs.

Likewise, many nonprofit providers operate in lease facilities or city-owned buildings where we do not have the authority or funding to make the electrical facility improvements needed to utilize this equipment fully.

For example, several of SAFA for the Eldrides congregate meal programs operate in San Francisco Rec and Park facilities, making continued coordination across departments essential.

One of San Francisco's greatest strengths is that we have already demonstrated what successful coordination looks like.

During COVID-19 pandemic, the Department of Emergency Management, the Department of Disability and Aging Services, Department of Public Health, Community-based organizations, healthcare providers, and volunteers work together to protect vulnerable older adults.

In the first three months of the pandemic, the Department of Disability and Aging Services fund itself up to deliver 300,000 home delivery meals with wellness checks, supported by 300 volunteer drivers who make sure that home older adults receive nutritious meals, wellness checks, and a trusted connection during a time of isolation.

We also leverage innovative champs restaurant-based meal program to provide takeout meals for mobile older adults and their caregivers that demonstrates a proven model for adapting existing community resources during emergencies.

We also share culturally and linguistically appropriate public health messages from the Department of Public Health through ethnic media and social media channels.

Working with the All-American Medical Group volunteer physicians and our social workers translating volunteer drivers, we help vaccinate homebound older adults from the city's waiting list, including 103-year-old resident and supported more than 40 vaccination events throughout the city.

That experience demonstrated the value of coordinator coordinated planning, defined roles and trusted community partnerships.

Resources such as multilingual alert notifications can quickly deliver urgent information, while community-based organizations reinforce those messages through trusted platforms and also meal deliveries, wellness checks, direct outreach to their constituents who may not understand or otherwise receive emergency alerts.

We also appreciated participating in the community planning process for the future design and uses of Portsmouth Square Park and look forward to it serving not only as a vibrant gathering place for the community, but also as a cooling center for Chinatown.

By 2030, nearly 30% of San Francisco's residents will be age 60 or older, with adults age 80 and older representing the fastest growing age group.

As our city residents continue to age, strengthening partnerships before emergencies occur may be one of the best investments we can make to provide to protect our most vulnerable residents.

Thank you for your leadership and your continued commitment to serving San Francisco's older adults.

I appreciate the opportunity and welcome any questions that you might have.

Thank you, Ms.

for your for your presentation.

Thank you.

Okay.

So now that the uh presentation portion of our hearing is concluded, I think Madam Clerk, may we invite a public comment on this item.

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

All speakers will have two minutes.

First speaker, please.

Good afternoon.

My name is Susan Green, and I'm with the San Francisco Climate Emergency Coalition.

Thank you, Board President Mandelman, for calling this hearing and shining a light on the risk of extreme heat.

Fortunately, we have good plans.

As others have noted this morning, we know we need rapid building electrification to build heat resilience and to reduce the carbon pollution that's making extreme heat more frequent and more deadly.

About five years ago, the Center for Law Energy and the Environment estimated we would need a half a billion dollars to meet our climate action plan building electrification goals, to spur private building owners to electrify and to make city investments in priority communities.

Since then, the city has done next to nothing to commit its own funding in the ways the CLE report recommended.

No climate bond in our bond schedule, no carve outs for building electrification in housing or other bonds, no new taxes or fees as our peer cities have created.

Very little in public-private partnerships, and just a few million for the environment department's annual budget, annual climate action budget.

But even that has been substantially cut since 2023.

In terms of investment, we've been moving in the wrong direction while heat risk has been growing.

Going forward, we need bond funding for heat pumps in low-income housing, community centers, and other buildings.

We need significant stable funding streams for low-income for excuse me for income-qualified heat pump incentives and direct install programs like the climate equity hub.

We need the public bank and low-interest loan programs to help small businesses and middle-income residents finance heat pumps.

We need the public safety leaders to acknowledge that we're facing a kind of hair-on-fire level of risk from extreme heat, and we need you to demand that the city commit substantial sustained funding for climate action.

Thank you.

Thank you for your comments.

Next speaker, please.

I'm Robin Cooper.

I'm a psychiatrist with over 45 years of practice in San Francisco, and I'm on the voluntary faculty at the Department of Psychiatry UCSF.

Today I represent San Francisco Physicians for Social Responsibility.

I'm an active member with that group.

You've already heard the climate crisis is a health crisis.

There are enormous impacts on health, and it's considered the silent killer.

You already know that.

My focus today are the comments for that I will bring to this discussion about my particular expertise, which is mental health and the brain impacts of climate change.

I'm the president of a national nonprofit climate psychiatry alliance.

Climate crisis is also a mental health crisis.

Extreme heat, heat waves are serious impacts on our mental health in our brains, causing cognition, cognitive changes, decision-making impairments, especially for the elderly, learning difficulties, attention difficulties, risk perception and action, emotional and mood dysregulation, sleep impairment, and behavioral changes.

In fact, extreme heat causes violence and serious violent crime, big concern for domestic violence.

It also causes increase in suicide rates.

Many of these impacts are driven by changes to the brain's structure and functioning, neurologic damage itself.

And I would be remiss if, as a psychiatrist, I did not mention that the severely mentally ill die at three times the rate.

Thank you for your comments.

Next speaker, please.

Hello, my name is Ashley Pack, and I'm with Bright Line Defense and Environmental Justice Nonprofit.

Extreme heat is the deadliest weather-related hazard in the country.

In 2017, three San Franciscans died during extreme heat event, and our emergency response system was overwhelmed.

We know these events are becoming more frequent, yet our residents are still living in buildings that weren't designed for today's climate.

In the least air-conditioned metro area in the country, preparing for extreme heat is essential.

Through six years of community engagement in the tenderloin and SOMA, Brightlines consistently heard the same concerns from SRO tenants who make up around 18,000 SF residents in over 500 buildings.

Most SROs trap heat, lack ventilation, and leave residents with a difficult choice, keeping their windows closed to protect themselves from polluted air or opening them to try to stay cool.

To better understand these conditions, we're launching a pilot that combines tenant surveys, indoor temperature and air quality monitoring, and disaster preparedness training.

We'll share this data with SFDPH to help inform future planning.

The city's hacker project is an important example of how government and CBOs can work together to better understand neighborhood needs and build long-term resilience.

We see three priorities for SF moving forward.

Collect more neighborhood level data, sustained funding for CBOs doing this work, which includes the continuation of projects like hacker and the necessary funds and staffing to keep momentum going.

And lastly, continue leveraging state investments that prioritize communities facing the greatest environmental burdens.

We need to ensure that neighborhoods like the Tenderloin, SOMA, Chinatown, and Baby Hunters Point are accurately recognized as communities facing disproportionate climate risks to support the resilience investments that these communities need.

Thank you, President Mandelman, for your important leadership on this issue.

Thank you for your comments.

Next speaker.

Good afternoon, Chair Dorsey and members of the committee.

My name is Alexander Chen, and I'm a third-year medical student at UCSF with a strong interest in neurology, psychiatry, and brain health.

I want to briefly offer a perspective on why preparedness for extreme heat matters from the perspective of brain health.

Earlier this year, San Franciscans voted to approve overwhelmingly Measure A, authorizing 535 million dollars in bonds to strengthen earthquake safety and emergency preparedness.

That investment reflects an important principle.

Preparing for foreseeable disasters before they happen.

Even with intensive medical care, severe heat stroke can carry mortality rates up to 65%, and many survivors are left with lasting neurologic disability.

These risks are not merely theoretical.

During California's record-breaking 10-day heat wave in September of 22, the state experienced an estimated 395 excess heat deaths.

And uh as uh as Chair Dorsey um had mentioned previously, during the 06 California heat wave, uh researchers estimated more than 650 excess deaths.

Extreme heat indeed disproportionately affects the very patients neurologists care for most often.

For instance, patients with dementia who are at particular risk because they may have difficulty recognizing the symptoms of heat illness and thus and seek help.

As a medical student with a strong interest in urology, I encourage the city to think of climate resilience not only as protecting buildings and infrastructure, but also as protecting the human brain.

Every case of heat stroke prevented is a case of brain injury prevented.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Next speaker, please.

Well, hello, everybody, and thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak.

My name is Mark Pohalski, and I'm the director of facilities for TNDC, which is the city's largest affordable housing provider.

The very vulnerable residents that you're speaking about today and referencing are the residents that I care for seven days a week, 365 days a year.

As director of facilities, I have 38 years in this industry of engineering systems, of maintaining, operating and installing these types of systems, the very systems that allow us to sit in this room today feeling cool and comfortable.

It's a luxury for some, but not for all.

The biggest problem that we've been discussing here, the elephant in the room is finances.

We're all talking about the cost of how are we going to accomplish this.

And I like to flip that around and say, what is the cost of not doing this?

In my business, preventative maintenance is always cheaper than reactive maintenance.

So you are paying for this in the reactivity.

When Matt and I was able to work with Matt and Alex on the hacker committee, I was also able to work with Cindy on the SFE for the bill uh for the decarbonization efforts.

The cost of not doing it, the cost of not investing in preventative care or preventative maintenance or anything preventative is two, three, four times higher in a reactive cost.

If I don't replace and maintain a piece of equipment and air conditioner for $1,500 a year or 10,000 a year, the cost of replacing that is $30,000, $40,000, $50,000.

Um in one of our buildings at 680 Howard, I was able to, when I first started with TNDC, it was brought to me that it was a heat sink building.

The tenants were suffering terribly.

Windows uh from third floor up can only open four inches.

No air conditioning in the building, poor ventilation.

I was looking at bids for two, three, four million dollars to install air conditioning systems with a bit of creative engineering.

I was able to provide air conditioning to every resident for $50,000.

With creative problem solving, creative engineering, we can solve these problems, and it's a cost not to do it.

Thank you very much.

Next speaker, good afternoon, President Mendelman and members of the committee.

My name is Tracy Florida Figadoa with the Sierra Club San Francisco Bay chapter.

I'm also a resident of San Francisco District 6.

Thank you for holding this important hearing and for your leadership on strengthening our city's climate resilience.

Extreme heat is no longer a future threat.

It is already affecting our communities.

While San Francisco has historically been spared the worst impacts, neighborhoods like the Thunderloin and Chinatown are experiencing the city's most significant urban heat island effects.

Climate change is increasing both in frequency and severity of heat events, placing our older adults, our children, people with disabilities, low-income households, and communities without access to cooling at a greater greater risk.

As the city invests in climate resilience infrastructure, and I urge you to prioritize building weatherization and the transition to efficient electric heat pumps.

Heat pumps provide both heating and cooling, helping residents stay safe during dangerous heat, while also lowering energy costs, improving air quality, reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Weatherized buildings also keep homes cooler during heat waves and are more comfortable year-round, making them the most effective resilience investments we can make.

Climate resilience and public health go hand in hand by investing in clean resilient today.

Thank you for your time, and I encourage you to continue investing on equitable community-centered climate resilient solutions that protect all our San Franciscans.

Thank you.

Thank you for your comments.

Do we have any additional commenters for this item?

Mr.

Chair, that completes public comment.

Thank you, Madam Clerk.

Public comment on this item is now closed.

Vice Chair Sauter.

Thank you, Chair.

And first and foremost, I want to thank President Mandelman for your work to organize this hearing.

I think you did a really nice job of bringing together the departments that are working on this.

And it was nice to hear of the details of your work, but also the community members and hearing where this impacts our neighbors the most.

I look forward to finding out more.

But I I will say I hope we turn more attention to inside the buildings.

And you know, we heard about the rental stock.

We heard about the air conditioning.

And I think we're all familiar with the concept of requiring landlords to maintain a minimum temperature in the winter.

And I'm happy to see there's a movement we heard about other cities, there's a movement to do the same, focused on the warm weather and a maximum temperature.

And that is something I would certainly support and love to work on with you.

So again, thank you for your leadership on this work, and I hope we continue to make progress.

Thank you, Vice Chair of Sauter.

President Mandelman.

Thank you, Chair Dorsey and uh Vice Chair Sauter for uh for making space for this conversation today and um uh for your engagement and Supervisor Sauter for your interest in potentially pursuing legislation.

Um I do I want to I I want to have a little one last little bit of dialogue with Brian Strong.

Come on up, Brian Strong.

You are in the unenviable position, sir, of having to kind of oversee um the city's capital planning efforts when we plainly are underinvesting in our infrastructure needs in a host of ways.

Um Susan Green talked about the 2023 CLEA report and uh the identification of a scale of need in the range, I think, of a half a billion dollars, just on um building electrification and having the subsidies available to support doing the work the city needs to do, and then having the subsidies available for the work that needs to happen for lower income folks who might struggle with that.

Um, we have an overcrowded, oversubscribed bond program that does not keep up with the basic needs of our public buildings.

Um residents are frustrated with the state of our streets, but it goes so far beyond that anyone who relies on MUNI knows that we, you know, they they may not know why, but they experience the delays and they're frustrated.

And some chunk of that is about underinvestment in our transit infrastructure and not doing the uh I think it was TNDC's uh uh speaker who who talked about like the benefits of inventing on the prevention side and the maintenance side rather than having to like re- So as a city we just and and this is not unique to San Francisco, I don't think, but we're blowing it on building for our future and um investing in the physical structures of our future.

And this becomes particularly critical and problematic when we know we're facing emergencies that you know, crisis events like an earthquake, um, uh a climate crisis that is going to sometimes combine with the earthquake, right?

Like whatever the things that happen to our seawall and to our uh you know when these things combine will be pretty awful.

I don't know.

Do you answer you have it's terrible, sir?

It's terrible.

And I know.

And it's not your fault, it's the fault of the policymakers.

You're you're not a policymaker.

But do you have thoughts on our systematic underinvestment in our infrastructure needs and especially our green infrastructure needs?

Yeah, I mean, I think I mean what's interesting is that if you look around California and if you especially look at our geobond program, where we've done some somewhere in the neighborhood of $7 billion worth of bonds in the past 20 years, we're actually quite a bit further than any of these other places, but but that is how big the problem is and how big the gap is.

And I think certainly what's happening at the federal level for a long time.

You were saying the Federal Government is going to have to step up.

And they've actually, obviously, with the recent administration has gone in the opposite direction, right, in terms of support.

And now there's even more of a realization that we're going to have to take care of ourselves, and you can't rely on the Federal Government to provide to provide resources after disaster, and certainly not before a disaster, as Director Carroll was talking about.

The Building Resilience and Communities Program has been sort of put on hold.

They're remaining putting it putting it back, but there's there's not enough resources there to really address the problems.

I think our what makes me somewhat optimistic is that we are building capacity.

We are thinking about these things in combination.

So a lot of the heat resilience work that was talked about today at our clinics and some of those places at the libraries, it's related to doing seismic work.

Right.

So when we're doing seismic work, unlike 10 years ago, where we were not thinking about heat.

Now heat is is sort of a central part of it.

And thinking about you know greenhouse gas reduction and those types of things as well.

I do think when we put together some of these, like the tenure capital plan, um, we were not that was taken with with the sort of events that were happening at the time.

So heat was not considered.

Public housing, the housing crisis was not considered.

Um to be honest with you, MTA was sort of doing its own thing.

So all of these have been folded into the Capitol Plan, but we haven't really addressed the need to um to add capacity.

Yeah.

So I think that's where we we have this discussion.

You've been on the Capital Planning Committee now for several years.

We sort of have this discussion every year.

And I think it you know, we're we're gonna need to at some point really think a little bit, to be honest with you.

Part of it is thinking more long-term too.

Um we've been talking about doing 10 years may not be enough time, but thinking out 20 to 30 years because that's how long it's gonna take to really get at the backlog so that we're so following up on what TNDC is doing, so we can confidently say, yeah, we're not letting these things slip.

And then at the same time addressing some of the climate um the climate adaptation and mitigation, you know, measures that that we discussed today, and that are prevalent, you know, we could have a similar hearing to talk about flooding and sea level rise because those are two other things that that we know are coming that we need to address.

So thank you, Director Strong.

Welcome.

Um this is a huge problem as Director Strong indicated, the the larger infrastructure the underinvestment infrastructure is a statewide national problem, but we're seeing it in San Francisco, and it is crowding out our ability to uh respond to critical challenges.

Um it's not gonna get solved on my watch.

But um I do I am interested in spending a little bit of time in my remaining months, like pursuing this conversation about green infrastructure, about infrastructure generally, about um you know getting the city set up, not just to and and to those of you who are in these departments doing this this work under resourced, making good things happen, but not at the scale that you know needs to happen.

Thank you for your work.

Um thank you for uh presenting this today.

But I'm I'm hoping we, you know, to continue this conversation in my remaining months.

I'm hoping that the supervisors who remain on the board will uh continue to engage around infrastructure and especially um uh our our climate needs after I leave.

And I really think we do need uh get um more engagement um from the mayor's office um around setting the city up to sort of deal with this in the in the years and and decades to come.

So what I would like to do, I don't know that I'm gonna want to that I will use this, but I would like to continue this hearing to the call of the chair.

Um it might make sense to bring uh folks from the mayor's office back in here and and hear from them a little bit about their thinking about you know environment, infrastructure, uh climate, what what's you know, what is the plan and where are we going?

Um so uh we will um uh I my my request for the committee would be to continue this to call the chair.

Right.

I appreciate that.

I want to uh express my own thanks to President Mandelman for highlighting this timely and important subject.

I think this was a really excellent and informative discussion.

So for that I want to thank all of our presenters and partners as well as all the staff people who uh support them.

And as President Mandelman's request, I would like to now move that this hearing be continued to the call of the chair.

Madam Clerk, may we have a roll call on that motion?

Yes, and on the motion to continue this hearing to the call of the chair.

Vice Chair Slaughter.

Vice Chair Saughter.

Aye.

Chair Dorsey?

Aye.

Chair Dorsey, aye.

I have two ayes with member Wong excused.

Thank you, Madam Clerk.

The motion passes.

Yes, item number six is a hearing on the vicious and dangerous dog unit, inquiring about the plan to hire a hearing officer, restart hearing proceedings, address the existing case backlog and improve proceedings through dog behavioral course requirements.

Thank you, Madam Clerk.

Uh, this hearing was originally called by Supervisor Sherrill, and I'd like to welcome Lorenzo Rosas from the Supervisor's Office to share some brief remarks about uh this hearing right now.

Uh Mr.

Rosas, welcome to the uh public safety and neighborhood services committee.

The floor is yours.

Thank you, Chair Dorsey.

I promise to be quick.

Um this item was actually heard at the Government Audit and Oversight Committee previously, and we are grateful to say uh due to some interdepartmental coordination that the Vicious and Dangerous Dog Hearing Officer has been hired.

Um we commended her on her retirement earlier in June as well.

So we're excited for the hearings to be restarted.

Um and due to a miscommunication in just clerical aspects, we just needed to file this hearing at the public safety and abroad services committee today.

So on behalf of Supervisor Sherrill, thank you so much for uh to the departments who collaborated on getting a solution here, and please uh file this hearing today.

Thank you, committee.

Thank you, Mr.

Rosus.

I want to thank uh Supervisor Cheryl, Mockwood, Mandelman, and others for their work on the hearing.

Uh Madam Clerk, may we open up this item to public comment?

Yes, members of the public who wish to speak on item six lineup now along the side by the windows.

All speakers will have two minutes.

Mr.

Chair, we have no public comment.

Thank you, Madam Clerk.

Public comment on this item is now closed.

And Madam Clerk, I would now like to move that this item be heard and filed.

May we have a roll call on that motion?

Yes, and on the motion that this item be heard and filed.

Vice Chair Slaughter.

Aye.

Aye.

Chair Dorsey, aye.

I have two ayes with member wong excused.

Thank you, Madam Clerk.

The motion passes.

Congratulations, Supervisor Sherrill and Mr.

Rosas.

Madam Clerk, do we have any further business before this committee today?

Mr.

Chair, that completes our meeting agenda.

Thank you, Madam Clerk, and thank you to all uh for your civic participation today.

Our meeting is now adjourned.