>> good morning, everyone. i'm jennifer mats. i'm director of the mayor's office of economic and work force development. i'd like to welcome you here this morning to the grand

opening of pearls and for announcement regarding our community ambassador program here on central market as well as some increased public safety measures. without further ado, i'm going to introduce mayor ed lee and then a few other speakers to talk about the initiatives and talk about pearl. so mayor lee? >> thank you. thanks, jennifer. >> good morning, everybody. can everybody hear me? all right. well thank you, everyone, for coming to the new pearls delux burger here at sixth and market. thank you. [applause] i want to thank silvia, the owner. jim is the manager here. thank you for managing this place. and also congratulate all 16 permanent employees who have just started here today. that's been a theme of ours. i know david chui is here. kim is here.

jennifer with thank you very much, supervisors. tiffany, director of our redevelopment agency. thank you for being a great partner on this. our chief of police, who is making sure -- because he just signed a lease right next door down the block for the sixth street substation. we're getting that bill! [applause] that is coming onboard next year and it's on its way. he signed a lease. the construction documents are getting in place. we just have to get past the little freeze the governor put on us on redevelopment. but that's not stopping the redevelopment staff from doing their work. thank you very much. all of you for the redevelopment staff, thank you for being here today. we did -- i just rode down here, we did that on the green bike lanes.

we hope everybody gets the chance to do it. we'll have a meeting the next couple weeks to find the patches to smooth over even more of the green bike lanes so people can stop by right here, get their burgers and the shakes and the real shakes, not the ones on the bike. thank you, leah, for a wonderful ride down here as well. and i also want to thank the bicycle owner, whose bike i got to rent this morning, huckle berry bicycles. thank you very much. zack sender. there he is. we're opening up his bicycle repair and maintenance shop, right up the street by the end of the month. they're going to really have a great partnership. i want to thank zack and everybody because they've been offering free bicycle tune-ups for all of the bicyclists that come down market street for many, many months. thank you, zack, for being here. look forward to opening up your place. you need to ride a bicycle to get here because these burgers

are so good that you're going to want to really work them off. i know i'm going to do that as i pick up my burger and go back to my very, very long meetings this afternoon. i want to thank jen, amy co-en, her wonderful staff. they've been working together with our redevelopment agency with the market street, the c.b.d. thank you for being there. carlin diamond from our market street association as well. the c.a.c., i need to thank them. where's john and terry bow guard? thank you. the owners of the building. thank you for being here. thank you for the construction work as well. thank you. you've all been very patient working with us, working with our mid market, our cultural district lone fund with the oewd, with redevelopment and

their funding. there were many months of that when gavin was mayor to put that all together. they had great faith. just like ralph lee does. because he's the owner of a nice hotel up there, the hotel, and he's known that this feeling of the transformation of mid market is really coming, and it's come with today's opening and a lot of people's hope continued to make sure that my office, working with the boozer, continue the positive transformation. so we have two announcements today and i want to get to them. thank you so much for being here. market and tenderloin, randy sharbg tenderloin housing. thank you for being here. we look forward to working with you on the grocery store and

museum and everything else for the tenderloin. thank you very much. with that, i wanted to just brush with you alittle bit of the history here. as i said earlier, it began over a year, year and a half ago in 2010 to really look at this corner, and when silvia and young decided ok, if we've got a little help with redevelopment, oewd, with our cultural district loan fund, all the positive things that are going on here, they made a long-term commitment to being here and they put forth a plan to open up their forth -- at least their third that they manage here right here at sixth and market, and we are embracing this opportunity because it complements show dogs, it complements all the other businesses that have benefited from the loan fund. it also complements and supports the wonderful arts organizations that have started all around here that have been the great catalysts.

all the others that have been taking a little bit of risk but knowing there's going to be a big payoff. the payoff is the constant transition here. i want to thank zendesk for being here. mikhail, thank you for being here. the substation is going to be here. the burgers that will be here as well. but i want to thank just the acumen, the faith that people have about continuing the contribute to the positive changes on mid market. everybody wants this area to succeed. everybody knows it has to succeed. for the benefit of the tenderloin, benefit of soma. and then market. we have a lot of things we want to do here. i'm going to continue moving that effort as much as we can. every week we have something else, whether it's the union on

united nations plaza this afternoon. i want to thank everyone for constantly contributing to keeping the creative ideas flowing and the commitments that we want to make. it isn't just money, it isn't just public safety. it's all of us working combined. it's having the employees walk these streets and spending their precious dollars on supporting the small businesses. it's making commitments and keeping to those promises, however long they have been made, to make sure we deliver on them. all of the community who's lived here for many, many years, deserve us fulfilling our promises. that's what we all want to continue doing. we made a lot of promises in the past. i'm going to keep fulfilling the old ones that we've always wanted to make. we're going to keep bringing more people down here, keep this lively, keep it safe. i want to thank silvia for being

here, all the employees. we're creating jobs. 16 permanent new jobs right here on this street. they signed the papers quickly enough, they'll get the payroll tax exemption. just like sven did. there are 80 employees today. by early next year, there will be 150 new employees, so that difference will take advantage of that payroll tax. thank you very much. the second announcement i want to make in this excitement is that we talked about how to make this area safer and cleaner. while the substation is being constructed and built and the chief's already made that commitment, we've already made the commitment that will keep the mobile van right here in

front of the sixth street site, so that the officers know the commitment is very strong and you're going to see officers walking this beat very visibly. at the same time, we're not just content with police. community policing is not just about them. it's about how the community responds. there's a program i was responsible to help create, when there was some degrees of violence in the third street corridor last year, and we responded with a very positive program called the community ambassador program. and we've taken that idea, working very closely with my very good friend and department head adrian pawn, who heads up the sisk engagement division. she's brought here the current staffing of the community ambassadors program that works on our third street corridor, they're wonderful people. we personally hired them from the community in d-10 and now they're going to also add d-6

residents to their work force and they're going to start the market street community ambassador program with all of you here. and they're going to go for 10 employees working alongside d.p.w., working alongside the community shines program, the community guides that are already here who actually helped clean the streets and they're part of the c.b.d. program here. they're going to work with everybody here, but they're going to be trained through the police academy to be additional eyes and ears for all of the visitors, all of the work force located here, and everyone who wants to be here and the feel -- it's not just being safe, it's also feeling safe. and having additional eyes and ears that are trained very, very well by our police acadny, and thanks again to the police department for training them. they're going to be here from -- i think it's like 10:00 in the morning to 8:00 at night, just making sure -- 11:00 to 8:00,

making sure that three zones from fifth street all the way to 12th street along market is covered, that people feel safe, so if you're preoccupied with your headphones or other things that you're doing, they're going to watch out for you and they're going to be here in the hours in which the employees want to be here and feel much safer. so those eyes and ears will be kind of what we feel is an escort, they'll watch folks, guide them. if somebody says hey, i have a bunch of groceries, i feel a little unsafe, it's a little dark during these winter months and they need maybe an escort to their cars or hopefully the bicycle racks or to where the ultimate park. i want to thank the community ambassadors because they know that working alongside our officers, they're community folks. they want their

they're wrong folks that they live with feeling safe as well. they will be multi legal. multi-cultural. they will be extra sensitive. those announcements i want to make today along with the opening of pearl posted the luxembourgers, and hopefully, all of you will get a chance to have a burger if the lines are not too long. when you get it, you can either each year or join all of us at the latin dance. it starts at noon. you can walk with the ambassadors all day long, too. they get a good work out as well. those are the things we are announcing today, but there is a lot of fights. these are just milestones of things that have been in place. i want to thank all of the residents who have been here. they continue to be patient. they see the changes coming along. they are with us on all those changes, and this transformation is real. it is one that i have personally

committed to. i am going to be down here and tell everybody wants to be down here locates here. congratulations, everyone. thank you very much. [applause] >> as the mayor said, it certainly takes a village to do the work we are doing, but it also requires leadership, and we are lucky to have the leadership of supervisor kim to help us. [applause] supervisor kim: thank you appeared almost exactly six months ago, the mayor, president chiu, and i stood across the street to announce the spirit we talk about a vision we had, which, as many of you know, mid market has suffered the highest commercial vacancy rate of any court or in san francisco for over 50 years. we talked about the hope we had for pearl's deluxe burger moving

in across the street, the hope for twitter. six months later, we have a company that has already moved in across the street. this women of color-owned business has opened on the corner of sixth and market. three things our office has been concerned about. one is public safety. we are happy to say that the sixth straight substation leases science. we have our community ambassador program, and we're working closely with community planning and development to but more crosswalks on sixth street. something residents have talked a long time about. how we make sixth street safer to cross. second is economic revitalization. we want to see businesses come to mid market. that is what market street corridor was created for. we are finally seeing some of i