Published By: Communications and Public Outreach
San Francisco Public Utilities Commission
Citizens' Advisory Committee
MINUTES
January 23, 2006
5:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.
1155 Market Street
4th Floor Conference Room
Members
| David Pascal – Chair | Richard T. Hansen | Alex Lantsberg |
| Robin Chiang | David Hochschild | Steve Lawrence |
| Jennifer Clary | Linda Hunter | Jack Lendvay |
| Ken Cleaveland | Art Jensen | Kimia Mizany |
| David Dawdy | Robert Jung | Ken Monteiro |
Staff: Suzanne Gautier
Call to order.
Roll call: Members present, Pascal, Chiang, Clary, Cleaveland, Dawdy, Hansen, Hochschild, Jensen, Jung, Lantsberg, Lendvay, Mizany, Lawrence
Members absent: Hunter, Monteiro
The minutes of the November meeting were tabled to confirm accuracy of statements. The minutes will be revised and reviewed at the February meeting. The final resolution will be e-mailed as an amendment to the minutes.
Public Comment: none at this time.
Report on Status of SFPUC’s Sustainability Plan – Susan Wade: Members received copies of the Sustainability Plan and schedules.
Highlights of the presentation included:
· How do we make our organization more sustainable? PUC is making up a management tool to make it more sustainable. The purposes of sustainability – this plan will work as a basic process. Staff input will be ongoing as we develop it.
· What kind of sustainable and issues/analysis of issues will PUC be looking at? This schedule’s milestones are end of April – looking at best practices and indicators. July, August, looking at sustainability profile for purposes of baseline assessment. January ‘07 will look at sustainability strategy, and December '07 looking at sustainability plan. We hope to do this in two years. In addition to the stakeholder involvement, we’ll come to the regular forums and will have a website to show external review of our progress. It is an effort on PUC’s part to do a little broader outreach with our draft; this will be with inter-groups, experts, and staff. This draft breaks out the issues we will be looking at. Some of the issues may end up under different categories or themes.
· Why do you call it sustainability? We want to make ourselves more sustainable in how we operate and the effects we have on the triple bottom line.
Now that the PUC has one of these, do other city depts. have them? Dept. of the Environment has done a report. The plan was done in 1997.
Make sure the city’s sustainability plan gets to the whole CAC. Could we ask that the public receive a copy of that?
Your organizational position in the PUC is to look at environmental issues. Now I am in strategic planning, External affairs.
Question: Who in the organization is in charge of the internal business planning and how does that relate to this?
Answer: Each enterprise has its own business plans.
This talks about workplace safety, health & state, policies, turnover (internal issues). This will be much more general, as it covers the organization as a whole.
· The enterprise business plans are all on different schedules are being developed to relate to next years operations. The financial sustainable (expenditures vs. revenues) will have to be looked at. Part of what is important is that the sustainability plan is not intended to show what PUC will do now and forever, rather a framework. It integrates initiatives and priorities. We will have indicators benchmarking issues and priorities. We will be dong a baseline assessment. The baseline will establish best practices and indicators from which to measure ourselves and measure ourselves against others.
Question: Why does it take 2 – 3 years for a sustainability plan to be put together when it should be doable in 2 – 3 months?
Answer: The reason is that we are unique in that we have 3 enterprises. This plan needs to be specific to this unique organization to put indicators in place with benchmarking.
Not sure if sustainability belongs in a utility business plan. A lot of this includes how we interact with the environment.
The process and milestones of the plan follow:
· We are starting on a series of internal interviews to discuss with staff to get their opinions regarding the real issues and work the enterprises have.
· PUC should really think hard how to tailor the general definitions, social, environmental and economic information regarding sustainability, rather than the general mission statement.
We should integrate two – it is a very productive comment.
We will post a draft on the web site and invite comments on them.
· At the end of April we will have the processes and implicators. August will be the sustainability profile. Towards the end of January will be the sustainability strategy.
Question: Is that limited to designated stakeholders?
Answer: We will be asking CAC, with its oversight to PUC. Whatever we
produce will go up on the web.
· There are a number of indicators and best practices out there and PUC does intend to look at those and evaluate what is the most useful for us to put into place.
When was the water dept. benchmark done? Can we get a copy of that?
Long-term/range management plan is a better term than sustainability.
Suggestions from the CAC are:
· Jennifer Clary: Focus on public health, role of CAC, would be nice to get some more feedback from the commission. Notches for stakeholder engagement is at the end of the indicator or development and at the beginning of the benchmark. The indicators we are interested in will differ from what your expert staff is looking at. The notches may need to move over a little bit. The public ideas count regarding what will need to be done. The stakeholder involvement needs to be more active and on the agenda. This committee could work out a schedule at the beginning or the end of the first indicator and at that point have a discussion regarding indicators. Benchmarks can be done in May. Schedule the CAC's input and exactly where our involvement will be.
· Next item. Definition of sustainability is involved…our organization has begun the process of optimizing the organizations performance and we’ll try to tweak the business management performance.
The intent here is definitely to make certain that those come before the CAC the public and everything else.
Chairs Report and Discussion:
Procedural clarification to bring to your attention. The work groups planned for last year, the environmental justice-working group and the other group, they need to turn into subcommittees. There is a procedural thing that they need to come through the CAC for approval. If a group goes to Tony Irons for instance, and those people represent the CAC, it has to go through the committee first. We can gather information to bring back to the subcommittee, however interactive conversation needs to be at a public meeting and need to follow the procedures under the sunshine ordinance.
Art Jensen: Appointment by the mayor to sit on this body does not preclude me from doing my business. If Jennifer is there representing her organization, that is fine. If the room is full of CAC members, and it looks like our meeting is a representative voice/opinion, we need to understand which hat we are wearing when we attend these meetings.
If two or more of us interacts with organization, it should be a public meeting.
Please clarify under the Sunshine Ordinance about providing policy to members of this committee that are not under sunshine ordinance. We have an ad hoc committee.
John Roddy: If the mayor pulls a group of people to talk a bout a certain subject, it is still a public meeting. The Board of Supervisors creates a body.
In the water committee a few of us were asked to work on specific issues.
Jennnifer Clary: can’t work on these things by e-mail.
Art Jensen: Editorial comment - somebody was describing how our social govt. systems have not kept up with technologies. Suppose that two of are in a meeting with Tony Irons and two good ideas are brought out of that. Can we come to the subcommittee and to CAC, can the meeting with Tony work with this body without being noticed by public? Can I as conduct my own business and still be apart of this body, if not I’ll take myself off.
The only privilege we have is to make recommendations to the PUC committee, General Manager, Board of Supervisors, and the Mayor.
Next meeting we can decide if we have one catchall committee, therefore not be subjected to sunshine ordinance constraints.
Concludes chairs report.
Election of officers to serve a two year term starting with the regular meeting of February 2006.
Nomination to Office of the Chair: Alex Lantsberg. Nomination seconded.
Discussion: Chair should be fair, diversity of perspectives should be honored, somebody who listens, somebody who can be dedicated, somebody who can keep the body in depended, who respectfully keeps the body independent.
Chair should insist that they bring information not solutions. Don’t want the facts after the fact. Would like the CAC to advise rather than to consent.
Roll call vote to elect Alex Lantsberg to Office of the Chair: For – Pascal, Chiang, Clary, Cleaveland, Dawdy, Hansen, Hochschild, Jensen, Jung, Lantsberg, Lawrence, Lendvay, Mizany. Against – None.
Nomination to Office of Vice Chair: Richard Hansen. Mr. Hansen declined.
Nomination to Office of Vice Chair: Steve Lawrence. Nomination seconded.
Roll call vote to elect Steve Lawrence to Office of the Vice Chair: For – Pascal, Chiang, Clary, Cleaveland, Dawdy, Hansen, Hochschild, Jensen, Jung, Lantsberg, Lawrence, Lendvay, Mizany. Against – None.
Nomination to Office of Secretary: Mr. Jung declined.
Nomination to Office of Secretary: Kimia Mizany. Nomination seconded.
Roll call vote to elect Kimia Mizany to Office of the Secretary: For – Pascal, Chiang, Clary, Cleaveland, Dawdy, Hansen, Hochschild, Jensen, Jung, Lantsberg, Lawrence, Lendvay, Mizany. Against – None.
Item: Confirmation of calendars for 2006. 3rd Monday of each month, with the exception of February and no meeting in December. February meeting due to holiday, moved to 2/27 but chair can’t make. February’s meeting rescheduled to be 2/28.
Pascal: motion to change meeting time to 5:30 – 7:00 (1 and ½ hours), motion carried.
January 30th special meetings.
Budget meetings coming. There are some information requests that we’d like to make recommendations before action is taken on the budget. Would like to meet Monday to make recommendations to submit to the commission first thing Tuesday morning.
Jennifer Clary: Would like to take all resolutions in the past year about the budget. Would like to know about grant writing, if it were in this year’s budget. The power subcommittee asked if continuation of the Mica (sp?) Account – will it be continued?
The wastewater committee will ask to approve a budget item at this meeting to go to the commission. We should approach the commission with the issues and ask that they include in the budget, or ask why not – get response. These items need to be delivered to them in person.
They will get an updated report on the resolutions and recommendations today with consideration to the perspective budget.
Workshop will be this Thursday, next Monday, and next February 14th.
Can we put PUC's response on the agenda for next meeting so that we know what recommendations to pass to the Mayor’s Office?
We have a role in the decisions regarding the budget; recap all items to the agenda. Get response back to CAC.
Subcommittee reports:
Water as a resource. Storm water was discussed. WSIP committee was discussed.
Specific priorities were to try to understand what the monitoring program was. We are concerned about accountability, with respect to management. We are hoping to get the quarterly report back. Also concerned about ability to implement this plan. Implementation, progress monitoring, employment program implementing, we want an understanding of what their plan is for wrapping up and accomplishing the work.
A discussion took place about the role of the Water Subcommittee WSIP work group and obtaining information from staff. A meeting with DGM had been scheduled for Friday, January 27, 2006. After clarification of the rules governing meetings of policy bodies, it was determined that only one representative of the CAC will meet with DGM Irons to gather information specific to the WSIP.
Motion to authorize Steve Lawrence to meet with DGM Tony Irons. Motion passed.
Suggest that the Quarterly Reports reflect the status of the plan, what progress has been made in direct relationship to the goals set, if things have not been accomplished, what steps are being taken to make sure those things are done, and that the goals of the program are met. The public information should reflect these goals.
Power subcommittee report:
David Hochschild provided a presentation from solar group and energy efficiency group. SF will spend about 75 million on energy efficiency with 6 staff in solar and 6 staff in efficiency. Next will be a tour of the tracker solar system on the U.S. Post Office building on Evans Street.
Request to discuss PUC Daly City transmission line and update on community choice aggregation.
Jennifer Clary asked for presentation on Power issues at a full CAC to understand the above subjects better.
David Hochschild explained estimated solar and efficiency expenditures and anticipated revenue as an income resource for the city.
Question for David: What is the cost of service?
Answer: The cost is 8 to 15 cents per kilowatt.
Solar will be paid for by revenue. Mayor’s Energy Conservation Council.
Wastewater report:
WWMP is now called the SF Sewer Plan? Survey and workshop at last meeting. The guidelines they recommended will be reviewed at the next meeting. The environmental work group should look into this. The commission wants to downplay the importance of the WWMP. The group will be working on the 1st meeting of the technical advisory committee (professionals who will review PUC and consult work, etc.) Update on 150M interim CIP. We had Herb Dang attend, who said the current preventative maintenance program only handles a small percentage of the needs of the enterprise in maintenance. Services are still be farmed out to DPW. The resolutions brought forward for the GM was a 3 – 5 year plan for what the maintenance needs are until July 1, 2009. We asked for accountability in upgrading of it, we want an independent audit of it annually. Motion moved and seconded.
Is DPW getting funds from sewer rates that should fund this maintenance? Yes, it is double overhead.
Minor change eliminate the "Whereas" to read…”the CAC recommends”.
Motion carries unanimously.
Comments on agenda or suggestions for future agenda topics.
Chair, vice and secretary of the committee were commended for their good work.
Southeast Operations won 3 awards.
Announcements from Suzanne:
David presented an article from Minneapolis US Water news regarding black beaches.
Suzanne. Communications has produced a couple of items, a calendar and the history of Hetch Hetchy Water System.
On future agenda, can we have a more extensive of the charges from other enterprises so that we can know what/how SFPUC is subsidizing other city governments?
Meeting adjourned at 6:58 p.m.
