Department of Public Works Gender Analysis of FY07-08 Budget

Department of Public Works Gender Analysis of FY 2007-08 Budget

 

Service Areas

The Department of Public Works (DPW) has two primary realms of responsibilities – the management of the City's Rights of Way and the provision of interdepartmental infrastructure services.

DPW has broad responsibilities within the City's Public Rights of Way. The Department coordinates and regulates private and public construction activity in the public rights of way; regulates physical and commercial encroachments; programs, designs, and manages capital improvement of the City's streets; and cleans, repairs, landscapes and maintains the City's streets.

The Department is the City's principal infrastructure agency. DPW is the centralized resource for infrastructure and facility services within the City. The Department provides custodial, craft trades, design, and construction management services to other City agencies. For departments without contracting authority, DPW provides capital program and project management services.

The Department strives to provide services to San Francsico citizens in a gender neutral manner. We have not tracked or evaluated whether our services, be they street resurfacing or custodial work in City facilities benefit one gender more than another. Historically, we have not considered gender when allocating funds between programs in our proposed budget. We do not believe that any of our services are sufficiently funded to serve the needs of San Francisco's citizens.

 

Budget Development

The City and County of San Francisco develops what are known as baseline, line item budgets. Each year in December, DPW receives a baseline budget target from the Mayor's Budget Office. Since 2002-03 these targets have called for reductions in budget. We have been urged to minimize lay-offs and maintain existing services. The result has been minimal changes to the budget, such as seeking new revenue sources, primarily fees and transfers from other departments.

The following table shows which staff has been involved in developing, reviewing and approving the department's budget over the last five years and shows their gender.

 

 

02-03

03-04

04-05

05-06

06-07

07-08

DPW Budget Manager

F

F

F

M

M

M

Lead Budget Staff

N/A

N/A

N/A

N/A

F

F

DPW Budget Section Head

F

F

F

F

F

F

 

7M

7M

7M

7M

7M

7M

Bureau Managers

1 F

1 F

1 F

1 F

1 F

1 F

Deputy Directors

3 M

3 M

3 M

3 M

3 M

3 M

Director of DPW

M

M

M

M

M

M

Mayor's Budget Analyst

M

M

F

F

F

M

Mayor's Budget Director

M

M

M

M

F

F

Mayor

M

M

M

M

M

M

DPW Board Budget Analyst

M

M

M

M

F

?

Board Budget Analyst

M

M

M

M

M

?

 

9 M

8M

8M

8M

8M

9M

Board of Supervisors

2F

3F

3F

3F

3F

2F

 

Over the past six years, staff that is responsible for managing production of the Department's proposed budget has consisted of both male and female staff, though it has primarily been female. Bureau managers and deputy directors who recommend budgets have been primarily male, and Directors of Public Works, who ultimately decide on what will be requested in DPW's proposed budgets have been male. Analysts and Mayor's budget directors, who analyze and recommend what is included in the Mayor's budget have been both male and female over the last six years. The mayor, the Board's Budget Analyst and most of the staff assigned to work on budget analysis for the Board of Supervisors have been male. The Board itself has had a significant majority of males voting on the budget for the last six years.

 

Capital Projects

DPW is responsible for implementing capital projects in the City's right-of-way and for General Fund departments in San Francisco (Police, Fire, Library, Public Health, etc.). Appropriations for these projects are made by the Board of Supervisors, often after approval of a bond measure by the City's voters. Individual project managers work with their client department's to develop project budgets that meet the needs of the client. A separate gender analysis could be done to analyze the effect on gender of these capital budgets, but none have been carried out to date.

There are, however, a small number of specific projects recently implemented by DPW where gender was considered in developing the project scope. DPW, as the implementing agency, was not involved in defining this scope, but rather implemented projects with elements that were defined by the clients. In the 1990s DPW managed the renovation of over 20 fire stations in San Francisco. Many of these renovations included the addition of separate locker, dormitory and bathroom facilities for female firefighters (the stations were constructed at a time when there were no women in the fire department). In the late 1990s and early 2000s, DPW managed the Moscone West convention center project. This project included an innovation allowing restroom facilities to be flexibly sized depending on the gender registration of particular conventions. Thus, if a convention has larger female than male registration, partitions can be moved to provide a larger number of women's restroom stalls.