way so we can save the ratepayers' money. with that, i just want to thank you guys for this award. thank you. [applause] [applause] >> if you are a consultant or you work for a company that does work for the puc, raise your hand. that's about half the room. thank you, harlan kelly. >> it does not matter just where you're going to go. it matters how you're going to get there. our team came together in 2008 and we started looking at procuring something to navigate us away from paper-based to on- line filing. >> we collect the majority of

the city's revenue. all of those payments were made by piper until we undertook this project. we asked the team -- how do we modernize how we do our work and provide better customer service of the same time? that made for a lot of work in our office. >> the team is an interesting combination of talents and personalities. we have a lot of people who stepped up and became real leaders for the project. >> i've been working for the city for almost 20 years now. i've seen data entry, a paper form scanning, to online filing. we made it easier for the taxpayer to file. we were able to save a lot of money. >> the amount of support in this organization around change and each other is really incredible. you have senior managers who were just so open to the

learning process. it makes the process so much easier. it is such a pleasure to go through. >> we have seen a reduction in paper that has been dramatic. we have converted nearly 100% of all of our paper filings to online filings. this work is critical to the city and county of san francisco. they delivered. they made it work. they succeeded tremendously. it has benefited the city and taxpayers. >> everything we do tgoes to scale. it speaks volumes to what we have to do every day. >> i live in san francisco. i walk down our streets. i take our buses. i make use of the resources here. knowing that the work that i do contributes to everything around me is very fulfilling. [applause] [applause] >> hi, everyone.

in the city treasurer in san francisco. it's my honor to introduce to you the team that brought the treasured tax collector's office to the 21st century. the municipal tax automation team, darrell ascano, tajel shah, and rebecca villareal- mayer, come on up. [applause] >> i've been anointed to speak for us. jose has asked me to use my outside voice. we are so lucky. very rarely in your life to you get a blank canvas with leadership to tell you to find problems and solve them. i want to thank our leadership for doing that and giving us not only the opportunity to make change, but also to really make mistakes. i think that's a rare thing, to be able to make mistakes in this environment and continue to proceed and be successful. i mean it when we say -- what we

end up doing is so different. we work to scale every day. we invite the people that we serve every day. thank you to the nominees. to our leadership, thank you. thank you to all the winners and to all the people we get to work with and serve. thanks. [applause] >> let's hear it for the tax team. [applause]

>> parking is a universal quality of life issue. it touches on so many different parts of the transportation system. we were looking for ways to make parking easier and more convenient. >> in the beginning, we looked at parking throw san francisco, and her desire to price parking based on demand is how it started. >> for 70 years, we've used flat meter rates and short time limits. that did not always work so well. it did not make it easier to find a parking space. sf park has two main components. the whole point is to get them off the road quickly. and to create more of an spaces. we're doing the man-responsive pricing. we're obligated to find the lowest rate possible. generally, most of the time, there is one space available on

every block. >> anything that allows muni to move more smoothly throughout the city is a great thing. if you manage parking effectively, then you've got fewer people circling around. it not only benefits folks that are parking, but it benefits folks riding muni, as well. continuously monitoring occupancy. that's what we used to make our android and iphone apps. it's open to everyone. lots of people can help get that information out there for the broader social benefit possible. the first city in the world to have that kind of data available. >> other cities can take elements of sfpark and implement it in the cities. los angeles is working on it. berkeley is working on a project. washington, d.c. is, too.

cities are looking at parking management differently than the have in the past. >> later this year, we are gathering all the data we need to evaluate rigorously all our expectations of how this can reduce greenhouse gas emissions, congestion, improve transit speed, reliability, reduc. [applause] >> good evening. i'm the director of transportation. for me, this is not the academy awards. this is the all-star game. the folks sitting over here are truly the all stars of the city. i've had an opportunity to work with ed, harlan, and jocelyn. behalf of all of us. we are also very lucky to have a bunch of people from sfmta, many

of them are here. my job is to introduce the awardees. please join me and give a hand for jay primus, george reynolds, steven lee, and lorraine fuqua. >> thank you. this is a tremendous honor. it really does feel fabulous to be recognized. one of the relief fund things about this project is that it is just complex enough and just big enough that it is truly a case where hundreds of people were required to really get it off the ground. there's really nothing -- that's the kind of thing we dream about. working shoulder to shoulder with that many people to make something happen. it has never happened before. what a pleasure. unfortunately, the mfac award is

limited to four people. we are up here representing an entire team. some of that court team is here tonight, including lauren, alex, lisa foster, hank wilson, lesley, jason lee, and brendan monaghan. [applause] those are some of the folks -- those are just some of the folks that really made sfpark happen. i hope you have a chance tonight to meet and congratulate them. these incredibly dedicated, hard-working people. i also want to especially acknowledged the tma'mta's cfo. [applause] without her vision and strength, we almost certainly would not be here tonight to celebrate

sfpark alongside these other achievements. thank you. thank you for this honor. [applause] >> let's hear it for the sfpark team. [applause] >> that ends the awards, but the bar is open. let's give one big round of applause for our sponsors, our award winners, and all of our friends and family. see you next time for the 33rd annual.

. >> so we're here at town hall restaurant in san francisco at the corner of fremont and howard and mitch rosenthal, one of the three coowners and what is your job here? . >> i don't know any more. >> you do everything. you cook and do the menus and mitch and his brother stevie and i hope we'll meet all these

people during the course of today, most people aren't really comfortable when they have a bunch of inspectors come take bunc h of inspe ctors come ta ke pars 3bunch of inspectors comea walk through their restaurant . >> they are all flaking out in there. >> we use this as an opportunity to try to educate the public. what do we look at when we inspect a restaurant. of course when i go into a restaurant with my wife and i sit down and say, well, let's check the exits when we sit down she goes, dear, you're not on the clock right now. so we're on the clock. we have with us captain hardy of the fire department is going to walk through with us, we'll have the health department joining us in a few minutes and we will have a tour around the inside of the restaurant looking at the kitchen, looking at the food prep areas, looking at the dish wash and the cold storage. so this will be really fun. and looking of course at fire

and life safety issues in restaurants. there are particular issues regarding safety in restaurants because you get a lot of people together. basically they are considered assembly occupancy. any place you get 50 or more people together are considered assembly occupancy. the rules go way up. we're outside town hall restaurant. this is a historic building and we believe when the building was built it was installed with a fire sprinkler system and of course you need to maintain the equipment that was installed when the building was built. what do we have here? . >> what we would do on the inspection is start with the outside of the building, take a look at it. this is the automatic sprinkler connection for our fire engines to hook up to so we want to make sure it's clear, it has covers on the inlets so nothing could be put in there to block it. this is a little unusual that we have the fire control panel location noted out here because

it's not at the immediate front entrance of the building, so it gives direction to our fire companies where the fire alarm control panel is so we can take a look at it next. >> fire control panel at rear entrance. why don't we walk around to the rear entrance, see if we can find it. so here we are at the back of the town hall restaurant. they take the first two floors and the third floor is marin day school and the top floor is day space. they share an exit. here we have the control panel and the light is in the green and the system is normal. so that's one of the things we look at first, that the fire alarm system is working as it should be. >> the fire alarm system is connected to what, smoke detectors up in the ceiling? . >> initiating devices, there's a full station here and we have notification devices, strobe type visual alarm devices. >> this will also let us know

if the flow alarm is going off, like if water is flowing through the system we get an alarm as well. >> if a sprinkler head activated we would get an alarm. it is monitored off site and the off site company would notify the fire department to respond. >> i am encouraged that there was a sprinkler head that went off in the restaurant when they were doing some construction work. it's amazing how much water comes out of one head. apparently it made a big mess. flooded through. >> most systems are designed with about 10 to 14 heads would be able to activate. that's the water supply expected for hydraulic calculations. when one head goes off there's a lot of water that goes through. >> i assume restaurants are required to have fire extinguishers. >> there's two types, within 75

foot of travel and kitchens would require their own set of extinguishers there also. >> what type of extinguishers would they have now. >> one for combustibles. this one is a bit oversized for the area, the 4a80bc and what we are looking for, the pressure is in the green. so this is a pressurized extinguisher and it's been serviced within the last year and this one has been and all the extinguishers in the restaurant have been. >> we're going to look in the kitchen at the so-called ancill system. . >> it has the same type of tag that the system needs to be serviced every 6 months. >> we'll take a look at that. one of the really big issues with restaurants, any place we

have an assembly, is letting people know that there's a reason to evacuate a building and being able to get out of the building. we are here looking at a couple things. the first thing we're looking at, tom, is signage. >> we would be looking for their exit signs and that their emergency lighting is maintained. . >> we have an illuminated exit sign and right above the exit sign you have lights that go on in the event of power failure in the building. we have this little device that is a visual alarm and a very loud -- people who have hearing impairment, there is very very bright lights as well. >> we always walk to the final end of the exit and there should be hardware on the door so you just push it and go.

we would check to see it's maintained and that there's panic hardware. >> we have panic hardware. . >> welcome to the town hall restaurant. mitch, what did you think of that food? (applause). usually the inspectors don't actually eat the food, so this is an unusual opportunity. we appreciate that. thank you. we look at other stuff. >> exactly. >> before it gets here. town hall just now celebrating its third birthday, november 6. a wee little thing, 3 years old. we are in this beautiful historic building here at the corner of howard and fremont. when was the building built? . >> 1907. >> right after the earthquake.

>> one of the first five, that's what i was told. >> what do you know about the history of the building, what it was used for? . >> they worked on boat engines here. at the front of the building there's a hoist and you can see they would bring those engines up to the second floor and it was many things. we've seen some pictures of different incarnations of what it was over the years. >> one of those things was a restaurant. >> it was a chinese take out restaurant but it seems like it was more on this side then it was also a place called the old corner, which was a bar-tavern type of place. >> the old corner. that's the place that has the pound and a half burger. >> the snicker doodle or something. was there a ballpark around here? . >> as this building has changed in use it's also undergone a seismic upgrade.

as we look around, you can see big steel braces down along that wall and up in the back, right beside the window you see these big diagonal braces. they did a seismic upgrade and came back and did it again. >> we were fortunate to get the use of that. there was the original pressed tin ceiling that they had ripped out so i guess it's plywood under here. the original floor is under here. they had told us it's just dirt but actually it's an old redwood floor under here. but it would cost about $100,000 because the way it was retrofited they would have had to pick it up and raise it. >> a lot of times when buildings become restaurants, they trigger all sorts of code requirements for upgrades. if you change from office space it a restaurant, you trigger

all sorts of additional requirements because there's an increased hazard in the building code for restaurants. you have special exiting requirements, you have problems with preserving life safety for high numbers of people. a restaurant like this, how many seats do you have in here? . >> 85. >> we don't count seats in the building department, we look at square footage. typically for a restaurant we say 15 square feet per person will tell us -- we can figure it out how many people would be in the restaurant. based on that number, we can figure out how many exits are required but it's a lot more than for an office space. what's an office space occupant load, typically a hundred on the ground floor, 100 square feet per person. so you can see it's a much higher density. we calculate those loads a little differently for bar areas where we say 1 person for every 18 inches, is that right, 18 or 24, depending on the use.

that's right, go ahead. we also calculate reception areas differently. so, for example, where people are standing by the main entry waiting to be seated, we have a very concentrated occupant load so we would calculate that at either 3 square feet per person, about that big, or 7 is the concentrated occupant load. usually the waiting area is calculated 3 square feet per person. that's not very much space. that's packing them in. >> you hope you are packing them in. >> you hope. you are busy all the time here. i've driven by and seen people waiting. >> we are, yeah. >> the building inspection usually look at the restaurant only when it was first constructed or renovated with a permit. we don't go out every year and look at a restaurant.

you are building a restaurant and you are dealing with the building inspector because the building is going on. once that building is done, we will issue a certificate of occupancy. the fire department, however, will issue an annual certificate of occupancy. some of the things they would look at would be an illuminated exit sign. right up here, tom, that is illuminated. you can hardly see it because it's sobriety in here, but it's illuminated. there is an exit door and the door has panic hardware on it and the fire inspector will check and make sure the panic hardware is operational and the door is not propped open or something like that. >> and the exits are clear all the way outside so there's nothing blocking, not used for storage. like i said, this restaurant

was very clear for us just coming in on a somewhat unannounced visit here, it really worked out very well. >> an exit. an exit is interesting. an exit doesn't just get you outside the building. an exit gets you to the street or public way. here we have an exit from the building, it gets you out into this little private area out of the building, this little private area, that's not the end of the exit. the exit has to get you all the way to the street. they could have, for example, put a fence up there that would block your exit to the street. that would be a problem. it's actually open, completely open, which is good. >> any special requirements on wood burning stoves? . >> that's a really good question. about 4 or 5 years ago the board of supervisors passed an ordinance that said you could not have a wood burning appliance, wood burning fireplace in your home or business, unless it was of a certified emission control type that basically has a very high

efficiency, high temperature burn so you don't have a lot of particulate emissions. and there is an exception to that ordinance that says wood-burning ovens are permitted in restaurants, period. so there's an exception to that. there's also an exception to historic buildings where you have historic fireplaces, you are allowed to maintain them and you are also allowed to repair but you can't actually replace wood-burning appliances. what a wood-burning oven has to do to meet the specific requirements of the building code, how to meet the requirements. it has to meet the specific requirements of how you build it. it has to have a hearth of a certain distance, clearance of combustibles, it has to be made of the right materials. it has to have its own chimney, its own chimney. fireplaces, wood-burning have chimneys. >> and the maintenance on those

is much more than these would be. you have to clean those out once a month. >> the code requires that you exhaust 3 different products of cooking. one is heat, one is steam, and one is grease and vapors. heat and steam only need a so-called type 2 hood, it doesn't have to be welded all the way up, but type 1 for grease-laden vapors is welded all the way. this is sheldon lu from the health department. sheldon, he actually was here when they did a recent health inspection, i understand, and alicia is the district health inspector. here is their score, it was 98 down from 100. 98 is fantastic. how many restaurants in the

city have scores of 100. >> we don't have a lot because we have a new program that is similar to other programs in the state of california where there's a, b, c grading, we have a number grading here in san francisco. so, therefore, it's a brand new program, we are trying to get with our operators to participate to do things the same way we do and we will have things, i would say about 10 percent or maybe 15 percent of places are 90 or above. we expect that to be higher as they get used to our scoring system of what is really hazardous, what is not as hazardous and what is low hazard. high hazard you get points off, fairly large pipbts off. next one would be called

moderate, small things like a door closed. we'll seeing how it works right now. if things work well, the state of california will revise, they have some sense of what the restaurant is all about. . >> i remember when that started up, it wasn't very long ago you started scoring restaurants here a year or two years ago. >> about a year and a half. >> there was a lot of opposition. i don't know who was opposing -- has that opposition faded and people --. >> there is still exceptions that people don't like this scoring system, but it was something that was in process of becoming there, it's going to be there. this is the information age, people want to know about the restaurant and so this was natural progression. so there was opposition