parking so inconvenient, so expensive, such a bad experience that people, so to speak, capitulate and take public transportation. that is not the way we are going to make it happen. we need to innovate, in my opinion, our public transportation system. we are doing things like the bus rapid transit systems, things like being allowed to pay for your public transportation -- we now have the clipper card. let's talk about putting that on your mobile phone and using that. innovating in ways were people say that public transportation is a great way to go. that is the way to achieve true innovation, not through making it so inconvenient for people to drive. i think it is a fact of life. young families are going to use their vehicles. we need to do a lot in san francisco to encourage young people and young families to stay in san francisco. i think we are missing out on a

lot of our diversity when young families leave our city. we need to do all we can to be mindful of the needs of young families in the city. we mentioned housing. schools are a big deal. but also being able to be flexible with transportation and children. >> what is happening with crime in your district? give me your thoughts on how you think the police are doing with respect to crime in your district? >> i think we are very fortunate in district two. we have a number of great police captains that oversee the stations that touched district two. richmond and northern are the two major police stations that touched the district. we do have a lot of crime in district 2. both crimes against individuals but also against merchants along our merchant corridors. chestnut.

union in particular has been hit. fillmore and sacramento. it is a big deal. we also have the break-ins. we need to be very mindful that people keep their iphones and laptops out of sight. but it is a big deal. one of the things i talk a lot about on the campaign, making sure that we do fund our public safety departments. we have to make some tough decisions this year, but to me, one of the biggest priorities is making sure that we have our police and firefighters and sheriffs' offices and their budgets fully funded so that we can ensure that public safety does not lag during these budget times. again, in district 2, i do not think it is talked about as much. we are fortunate that we do not have a lot of homicides. we do not have a lot of those types of serious crimes. but the crimes that to happen to

matter to the people in district two. so as a local supervisor, it is incumbent upon me, and i take it very seriously to pay attention and make sure we engage with the police and fire department said they are aware of exactly what is happening, but again, i have to tell you that i think we are very lucky with the police infrastructure we have an firefighter infrastructure we have and the officers and firefighters we have on the ground. we are very lucky. >> you mentioned that you are a former athlete. talk to me about the role of sports in the city's economic future, from the 49ers to the america's cup. talk to me about sports in san francisco. >> i was fortunate growing up. i was one that had season tickets to season49ers -- season tickets to the 49ers from what i was 8 years old. one part is economic, which i'll get to in the second, but the other part that is missing is

what it does for the city of san francisco to bring us together as a community, as a city. what happened when the 49ers won those super bowls year after year? that was a huge deal for our city and our community in san francisco. what happened with the world series this year when the giants won for the first time in over 50 years? incredible. everybody was celebrating. and that is a huge deal for our community in san francisco, but i think, economically, not only jobs in terms of construction of stadiums and what have you. economically, you know, for those people who do not believe or do not really fully appreciate what type of economic drivers the sporting events and teams are, go down to soma during a giants game. come to the marina when the blue angels fly in town. what it does to the local

streets and bridges. come to district 3 and district two and districts 6 and 10 when the america's cup comes to town and see what type of influx of economic activity these events drive to us. i think that is something that is not talk about enough. both the community aspect, the intangible fact of who we are as san francisco, coming together around sports teams, that is an incredible opportunity, but then, the economic drivers in our neighborhoods is very real, and i think something that we are lucky right now, certainly in district 2. we have the blue angels every year, but the america's cup will become a large economic boom, and we need to pay attention to how much that benefits us as a city. >> it looks like we are just about out of time, and it sounds like there is a lot happening in city hall today, so we are going to wrap this up. >> there is. >> always. are there any other issues or things you would like to share

briefly with respect to your new position as supervisor, or thoughts you have about san francisco before we wrap up our conversation? >> i touched on it earlier. for me, personally, especially coming from my background outside of city government, i knew my role on all the economic activity in san francisco, focusing on jobs, but also, a lot of quality of life issues. young families, what is like to live here as a san francisco, and what we can do in city hall to make life better for san francisco residents. to me, that is a huge deal. i think we have lost focus on that in city hall over the past few years. it is something i want to focus on. to me, it is a huge priority, why i did this. i will be very true what i talk about on the campaign trail. representing a. 2, but also the city --

representing a district 2, but also the city and county of san francisco. it is such an honor and unique experience, and of just having a great time and look forward to making a big difference in city hall. >> great. we have been talking to supervisor farrell from district 2. thank you for joining us on sfgtv's "meet your district supervisor." four episodes when we come back with another of our city supervisors. thank you very much. >> you bet.

[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