i want to say to the elected officials, the decision makers of san francisco -- do not give away the store with tax cuts. do you remember the dot-com situation? we could not do enough for those guys. we were building lofts and not charging any taxes for schools. we were so happy that they were here and they were going to generate all that money for us. you know what happened -- those guys went back to live in their parents' basement. [laughter] san francisco -- everything starts here. where is our pride? they should be happy to be here and not have us give them tax cuts all the time. we gave the fisher family $30 billion a while back. where did that go? what good does that do us?

anyway, our muni, our bart brings these employees to the doors of where they have to work. we service them. that money has to come from somewhere, and it should not come from us. they should pay the freight. i mean, because, where is our pride? we have all the good ideas. anybody moves away, what is going to happen is they are going to die on the vine. thank you. [applause] >> [inaudible] you know, we want you all you allsro -- let sro people know what is going on. we did not feel we get a fair representation.

we want to have a better city. an earthquake should not have to come before we all come together. it is time that everyone in this city that brings money to the city and loves this city is a fear it will want to know what is going on at city hall. we need to let people know what is going on. people do not know what is going on. we want people to know that is not free shelter. thank you. >> thank you, everyone, for coming out. i want to thank all the speakers. i want to thank everybody who is here. i am a district 6 residents. i am a parent in this neighborhood. i am a service provider, and it is beautiful to me to see our community here. district 6 is a lot of times the

overlooked community in this city. people forget that families live here, people live here, so it is beautiful to see you all he appeared on april 16, the department of public works is doing a community clean-up in the south of market, so look into that. come out and support, and remember, this is just the beginning of the process. this is just the beginning of the budget process. if you were not able to speak, write down your comments and put them on the wall back there. i'm sure you can contact supervisor kim's office. there are many ways you can continue to be engaged in this because that is what we need, for the community to come out and be at the table. thank you very much. we are going to pass it on to close, but thank you all for being here tonight. [applause]

>> let me add my thanks to everyone here tonight for your time, for your patience, listening to each other. it is very important that we get this information, and i also want to just thank our staff at the office of civic engagement. i see they are working very hard to make sure everyone understands what is going on. the budget is very serious. one of the most important things we do in the city, and i want to make sure everybody is included throughout the city. if it is as smooth as tonight, i do not mind going to seven more of these things. thank you very much for being patient with us and sharing your ideas and passion about how you love to be in this city and to be part of it. thank you very much. [applause] >> again, just want to reiterate, thank you so much for being here. i want to thank our department heads, our budget director for

being here. we asked him to come and just listen. you often get to hear us, and we do not always get the same opportunity to hear you, so they all came knowing that they would not get an opportunity to speak or respond, but they came to get feedback from you as they develop their budget, so we thank you for giving of that tonight. also, this would not have been possible if not for the many community residents and organizers that brought people out, that organized folks and educated people about the budget and budget process, so i really want to thank all the organizers and the volunteers. also, the greeters, the people that provide child care. all the folks out there, raise their hands. paul, chris, tiffany, johnny, diana, chilly -- thank you so much for helping me tonight. and i want to thank everyone because this is a tough and painful and emotional process, and everyone really came ready and also very respectful. it did not have to go like this,

and i just really wanted to appreciate that, and this is just the beginning of a dialogue and process for our office. we will continue to hold budget stakeholders meetings, so please, come up to our staff and signed up so you can find out when our meetings are and continue to engage. i wanted and community members for being irresponsible about what we can contribute to these cuts. we will come out and do more clean up and held out if you can help us bring lights to the victoria park. those other types of solutions. we can all can cheviot to that process as well. we really heard a lot of things that were said tonight. district 6 is home to one of the most diverse constituencies here in the city. we have the poorest residents of san francisco. we have lgbt, immigrants, people of color, youth, and a high proportion of seniors as well. we heard that people want to see more jobs, want to see access to

more jobs for our residents. we want to see more preventative compared to just reactive, so we want to see after-school programs versus the police picking up our youth because they are out on the streets. we want to see more preventative health versus going to the emergency room. those were all things that were said tonight, and we have to come together and support revenue in the city. that is where you can come together to help us put that together. thank you again. also want to recognize security here from tenderloin station. he hosts regular community meetings, so please, though. he has really been a community partner for us. are there any other announcements? >> please return your translation headsets. [laughter] them all right. thank you again so much. i hold office hours were you did not have to make an appointment with me every first friday and first saturday of the month,

said czech our website. and get on our e-mail list. thank you.

[applause] supervisor wiener: we will bring our city family of on to the stage. everyone, thank you for being here tonight. in your district 8 supervisor. [applause] thank you. we are -- first of all, i want to thank mayor lee, who has been doing a series of the town hall meetings in different districts because it is so important, especially in this extremely difficult budget year, to make sure that as a city, we are communicating and interfacing with the community as much as

possible. i appreciate mayor lee being here, and i appreciate all of you coming out tonight. i want to thank mission high school for hosting us tonight in this beautiful building in this great location. susan from the mayor's office disability, for helping us out, as well as the mayor's office of neighborhood services. i will also want to of knowledge the mission high school wrestling team, which was here earlier, which is doing really well this year. was not able to -- the team partnered with the eureka valley recreation center and golden gate wrestling club and went from doing really poorly to be invoiced to when the city championship. so we are really proud of the wrestling team. [applause] this is going to be a really simple format tonight.

i'm going to turn it over to the mayor, and he is going to speak. as well as greg wagner, the mayor's budget director, to talk about the mayor's budget to talk about the budget situation. you will hear briefly from a number of department heads, and after that, we will have questions from members of the audience and whoever is the appropriate person to answer the question. that said, why don't we grabbed the microphone here. turn it over to mayor lee. mayor lee: thank you. good evening, everybody. i am not too prone to give long speeches, so that is probably good for you and me. anyway, i want to thank supervisor wiener for hosting this tonight. and for all the department heads that are here. i know there is probably commissioners here as well and

other friends. by the way, i am a resident of district 8. supervisor wiener is my supervisor, and i always look up to him. anyway, you know, this city has had a few years of pretty hard economic times. you know that. i have known it. there is no magic in the way we balance our budget. we have to do it with both a combination of efficiencies and cuts, and we are trying to identify as much rational revenues as we can, but ultimately, we will have to make some decisions that will affect programs that you might feel very dear about, and we are trying to approach those questions in the most open and transparent fashion as we can, so i do not mind hosting with the supervisors a number of these town hall meetings so we

can get out to hear what you believe would be the core level of services that the city ought to be providing. i do not mind that. this is the fourth of 10 that i have committed to. i think it is important that the mayor be out at every single district as possible, working as closely as we can with our supervisors to make sure that our ears are open and ultimately our hearts are open to all the things that you need to help this city to make it run as well as we can. i gave out very simple instructions to the departments and commissions. i want the city to be safe. not only in a public safety since, but also in the core level of services. i want the city to be solvent. that is, that we pay for programs that we can afford. that also means that we work really hard on making sure that we reform our pension system.

right now, as we face our budget deficit of $6 million, a good third of that is the increased cost in our employee benefits. so we have to mean that in. i do not think we would be here tonight if we had a pension system that was solvent. finally, by what our budget to be reflective of a city that is successful, that is all the things that we enjoy, that attracted all of us to buy our homes here, raised our kids here. a successful city means we can continue attracting people to be year, to have strong neighborhoods, resilient neighborhoods like district 8, make sure we are doing everything we can to make our neighborhoods successful, along with all the other attractions that we can afford to have. a safe city, a solvent city, and a successful city are the themes i have given our departments to work with. and as we go through the

balancing our budget, i said at the outset, there is no magic to it. we have to make some tough decisions coming up. after we make those tough decisions, is like going to be any easier? nope. the governor has plans to realign things that going to hurt us. i do not believe for one second that realignment means it comes with any funding to realigning burdens that will come to us. then the federal government is going to get there. we have already seen the community block grant funds that were going to be heard in many different ways, so we are bracing for that, trying to come up with ideas to make sure our cities survives and survive as well. with that, no more speeches. i am all ears to your concerns, making sure the you know we are working closely with you and your supervisor to make our process transparent and sensitive to all the ideas that you have. thank you very much. [applause]

supervisor wiener: thank you. now, why don't we hear from the mayor's budget director? >> thank you very much, supervisor. i want to quickly go through a quick summary of where we are in our budget and give you a sense of what the problem is that we are facing, which ultimately is the reason that we are here tonight and is the cause behind the challenges that we are facing. so if you could just jump in, melissa. unlike the federal government, we do not have the luxury of operating in a deficit. we have a requirement in our city charter that is ironclad that we balance our budget every year. that means that our sources, which is the money coming into our budget, half to equal the uses, which are the expenditures in our budget. right now, when we look ahead to next year, what we see -- and it

is a little bit hard to see on this screen because the sources is blending into the background, but we had a little bit of good news on our revenue. these numbers are when we compare the current year to what we're going to see next year. about $37 million of improvement in our revenues, and i will talk a little bit about why that is, but on the expenditure side, we see $344 million of increased expenditures if we just continue our current level of operation. the impact of those numbers is that we are facing a $306 million general fund deficit for the coming year. next slide. the big picture for us -- it has been a tough couple of years for the city, as you all know. it has been a tough couple of years for all of us individually in the city, struggling with the economy. we are starting to see some signs of hope and good news out there in the economy, but we are in the very early stages. the city government is, of

course, depended on tax revenues, which are driven by economic activity. when we look out into the economy, we are starting to see things stabilize. we are not seeing the big losses that we have over the past couple of years, but it is the beginning of a slow recovery, so there is some good news out there, but it looks like it is going to be a slow recovery that is going to happen over the next couple of years. also, while our local tax revenues are recovering and while our economy is recovering, we also are taking a loss from the state and federal governments, as the mayor said. they are cutting revenue to local governments as they try to balance their own budget and deal with their issues in washington and sacramento, so that is taking away some of the good news that we are seeing locally. on the expenditure side, as the mayor pointed out, one of the big issues we face in the coming year and that we will continue to face over the foreseeable

future is that we have growth in our city expenditures that is outpacing our revenues, so we will see continued deficits if we do not change things. the biggest single contributing factor is the growth in the cost of employee benefits. pension costs are chief among the spirit as the mayor said, the issue of pension reform is going to be front and center for bringing our budget back into balance over the long term so that we do not have to do this year after year where we're going back to our departments and asking them to make reductions. just to put that in perspective, a $300 million budget deficit -- what does that mean for the city? next slide. within our budget, we have a $6.5 million budget, but within that budget, there are different categories of spending. a little less than half of our budget, or about $3 billion, is

in the city's general fund, and that is where we pay for a lot of the services from the departments that are here tonight. our public safety departments, our human services agency and health departments. that is where our tax dollars go, and that is where we have the spending for those services. but within that $3 billion, we have a lot of restrictions. we have, as i said, our requirement to pay for pension costs, for other employee benefit costs. we have a voter-approved spending requirements. we have a number of restrictions, and when you add them up at the end of the day, we have $1.2 billion or $1.3 billion of truly flexible money left in our general fund budget, so our $300 million deficit, when you compare it to that 14 $3 billion, is a very significant issue for the city. is about a quarter of our discretionary general fund spending. that is a real challenge for the city, and that is why we are here tonight. as i said, the biggest

departments in our general fund and, therefore, those that are facing some very serious challenges, our core public safety and social safety departments, the police apartment, sheriff's department, and fire department. health department and human services agency are our core county functions. those five departments together are about 3/4 of our discretionary general fund city in the city. we have asked the departments to make expenditure reductions or increase revenues totaling 10% and another 10% contingency. none of us or none of the department heads here on the stage are enjoying this process, but those are the instructions that we have had to issue to meet this challenge. we are trying to do it in every way possible to minimize the impact on services to residents as we do that, but it is a big challenge, so we are really hoping to hear your thoughts and feedback on how we can do that

and on the proposals that are out there tonight. just one last point, to emphasize again, even though the economy is recovering, we do have some longer-term financial challenges for the city, and we're working very hard to try to address these as the mayor said, so that we are not back here every year, doing the same thing, going through budget deficit after budget deficit, and that will mean we will have to look at some long-term approaches to our budget. pension reform, as i said, is key among those, but also, we are starting to look under the mayor's direction at a five-year financial plan and trying to take a little bit longer of a view of our financial horizon. with that, i will just close up, and i look forward to your thoughts, and, you very much, supervisor, for the opportunity. [applause] them and thank you.

now, we are going to hear from several department heads who are going to speak very briefly, just two or three minutes, to give you some information so we can get quickly to your questions. we will start with phil ginsburg, the general manager of rec and park, and we are right next to one of our most amazing parks. >> thank you, supervisor. it is a pleasure to be here. you will hear from all of us tonight about a lot of challenges with respect to our budget. rec adn park's -- rec and park's budget has been in the news a lot lately. it is a great joy to have the pleasure to stored our system, but our budget challenges are really profound. over the last seven years, we have been asked to find solutions for over $43 million in general fund support for our department