Meeting Information

Program & Access Committee

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Program & Access Committee
Minutes of Regular Meeting on December 18, 2001

The Program & Access Committee meeting was held on Tuesday, December 18, 2001 at San Francisco City Hall in Room 421, at 5:00 P.M.

Members Present:          Emi Gusukuma, Chairperson, Isabel Huie, Secretary, Marlene Tran and
          Diana Lau

Guest Present:          Vik Malhotra

Staff Present:          Dang Pham, Director
Staff Absent:          Winny Loi

It was MSC to accept the minutes of November 28, 2001 with the following correction:
Marlene was present that night to attend the meeting. However due to looking around for a vacant room, we missed Marlene who was in another room.

Vik, from Chinese for Affirmative Action, was present to give an update on the progress of the implementation of the Ordinance, how the Ordinance is going to work and what the obligations of the Commission are:

There are 16 Tier 1 city departments who are required to submit annual compliance plan. Preliminary plans were due on October 15, 2001 for review by the Commission to determine the adequacy of the plan. If there are any revisions, departments will have to resubmit their plans by February 1. However, it appears that with the slowness of departments sending in their plans, there is not enough time to review and for departments to make any changes before February 1. William should be contacted whether the February 1 deadline can be postponed. To date 5 departments, DPT, Police, Elections, Human Service and the Rent Stabilization and Arbitration Board, have submitted their compliance plans.

We must make efforts to get the other 11 departments to comply with the Ordinance. However the Commission is not empowered with authority to enforce the Ordinance with any penalty beyond monitoring. The recommendation is to do a 3-step process of sending letters. After the initial letter and with no response, a second letter will follow and with no response again, the third letter will be the absolute deadline. If there is still no response, the Commission can report the department as delinquent to the Mayor and the Board of Supervisors who will take the matter up.

We must also work with Tier 2 departments who have had no communication with the Commission yet. They should be apprised of the Ordinance, as some of them may not even know there is an Ordinance. Some Tier 2 departments may have written translation public notices but they don't have any obligations to hire bilingual staff unless they have at least 30 full time employees.

We should set the following priorities:
1. Follow up with Tier 1 to submit compliance plan.
2. Apprise Tier 2 departments of the Ordinance.
3. Work with Purchaser's Office to expand number of translation vendors to get more competitive pricing of services.
4. Give departments a one-year time line to implement the compliance plan.
5. Research other agencies' efforts to provide bilingual services so that we can make recommendations to improve our work.

Issues raised by Marlene are that application forms for low cost housing are in English; only 1 outside vendor has contract to do translation work who charges 18 cents per word; the Police Department general number, 553-0123, is answered by English speaking personnel; and people living in the Visitacion and Bayview/Hunters Point areas have been stranded many times because buses do not show up. Many of these riders are monolingual speakers.

Other concerns rasied by the Committee are that an annual report summarizing replies from departments and highlighting the ways in which they are going to implement the Ordinance be sent to the Board of Supervisors; how are we going to publicize to the community that bilingual services are in effect; can we get funding from MOCD (Isabel commented that there is a decrease in funding for the city;) and bilingual police officers should be assigned to communities where they are needed.

Winny has developed a compliance plan checklist that she will send to all departments.

Since there has been no word from the Muni Department about their compliance plan, Dang will contact Mr. Michael Burns.

It was suggested that the Muni and Police Departments be invited to the next Meeting on February 4th.

Because of time constraints, it was agreed to postpone detailed review of returned surveys until the next meeting.

Adjournment:          The Committee meeting was adjourned at 7:45 p.m.

Minutes submitted by Isabel Huie, Secretary