and everyone doing the work, to the ta staff, to the mtc, thank you for all that you're doing. now i had in my talking points a reference that we know you need the central subway if you get on the 30 stockton and apparently everyone else had that in the talking points. through the denser parts of san francisco, as someone who doesn't have a car i have and millions of us have wasted countless hours trying to get through our downtown corridor but i want to take a moment to thank the most important folks who are not here with us and that is the people of san francisco. for years before i joined the board of supervisors i served on with many volunteers the community advisory group to the central subway. with countless volunteers from the bay view, from visitation valley, from mission bay, south of market, union square, and of course

thousands of residents and leaders from chinatown who went to countless public meetings provided tens of thousands of signatures, and stood for years to work extremely hard for world class transportation into the heart of our city, but we know we are building the central subway not just based on our history but for our future. by the year 2040 we will have 100,000 new households and 200,000 new workers and thousands of new daily car trips. we have to prepare for the future. let me close with a couple of quick thoughts. first i believe that our connecting community slogan it is real. we are the greatest city in the united states and we are an incredible city because our communities come together for our subway and for our giants. second, we have to do more. we have to make sure that we're

taking care of not just our daily needs on muni and not just our daily needs for the pedestrians, our sierkists, those in cars, those that walk, but we have to make sure we're investing in the long-term projects, and lafltly i just want to say one thing. we know over the history of time great cities don't regret building subways. they regret not building them. thank you. [applause] >> reverend norman fong has been praying for 20 years. he has been a great champion. he has to collect all of his efforts for so many years to make sure our communities were served well. he's been an advocate and director of the chinese

development center, a center invaluable to the growth of our community to plan affordable housing, transit, to open space, to the care for our seniors. the reverend fong we have been recognizing your voice for wells fargo on the radio and we want to give recognition to your voice again as a champion for the central subway. come on up reverend norman fong. [applause] >> yeah, that's true. i am going to keep this short, but i also need your involvement. i was asked to do a blessing but those that know me we need to bless each other and today i just want you to say these four words. bless the central subway. say that. "bless the central subway". now, whenever

i say this word "this is it" -- i am borrowing from michael jackson. then you did a blessing. okay. this has been the moment we all been waiting for. this is it. >> (inaudible). >> a community dream is being actualized. this is it. >> [inaudible] >> communities from the bay view to chinatown are being connected. this is it. >> central subway. >> affordable transportation is the life blood of all cities. right? this is it. >> central subway. >> from washington dc to san francisco we are here to accept brait a federally supported and grass-roots driven transit project that represents access

for all to jobs, health care, their families. this is it. >> central subway. >> okay. a little extra. in the national play offs of life itself like buster posy we just hit a grand slam. this is it. >> central subway. >> it's been a long and difficult road towards a new and more inclusive transit system for san francisco neighborhoods, but we shall overcome. am i right? this is it. >> central subway. >> bless the construction workers and those that sacrifice so much -- you know who are you -- that san francisco can move towards a transit for the future and this is it and bless all of

you on this wonderful day. thank you. [applause] >> before i invite the final speaker i just wanted to make sure i acknowledge senator mark leno for being here today. thank you very much. big champion for transportation in our state. steve mecher and thank you for being here. ongoing support. got the sf giants hat, yes. mike cureo and thanks for being here and the construction trades and we have been working with you to get the folks trained over the years. it's a wonderful time, and the chairman -- and the chairman of our san francisco metropolitan transportation agency who has been a long time champion of public transit, a regular muni rider, someone who loves the city and has been at the forefront of not only a great transportation but has his head

in our city and programs and wonderful services. please come on up. chairman tom nolan. [applause] >> leader pelosi asked me what is of going to say after reverend frong. i didn't have a chant rate for that. this is a great day for san francisco. this is a labor of love. we know the economic and transit values of this. as an agency we are committed and not only committed to bringing this fruition on time but under budget as well. is that good? and we will continue the vil against of all of our assets and focusing on the priority number one is safety. this day is possible because of so many people that did so much work here. senator leno is here and the assessor. we have a wonderful working relationship

with fta regional leaders and mtc and lazarus from the mtc board and the china chamber of commerce and the san francisco chamber of commerce and the market street association and the business improvement district and joe an hayes and mike from the building and trades construction council. anytime i get a chance to speak on the mta board i say i am so proud of what we do and we move 700,000 people in the city and it's a difficult task. we have a wonderful staff. we are privileged to have the talent of ed of course for his leadership and i couldn't tell you how proud i am to work with the people on the board of directors and christine, the newest member. and the other members

and malcolm couldn't be here today but we are proud to work together on behalf of the people of the city and we are happy to have john fung head this up and behalf of the board and all of us and thank you mr. secretary. mr. administrator. senator feinstein, leader pelosi, congress woman spear and mayor lee and thank you all for being here and now it's time to make it official. it's sign that document. okay. [applause] >> thank you tom. and as we're getting ready to sign this grand slam document let me make sure we give a great appreciation to our county transportation authority who has been administering the funds for this great project and a great shout out to the union square improvement district. i know there are businesses big and

small that will suffer a little bit from the construction but they're going to be patient. they know the result of this is a great future for our great city and thank you to all of the businesses and we will be communicating with them all the time with all of the agencies. decades now ladies and gentlemen city residents and our city will know the vision started 20 years ago to today we built a great transportation system we're going to be proud of and this is part of our success, the greatest city in the world, san francisco. [applause]

>> so nicely here, and very happy that all of you could come out and join us, you know, on this evening. my namey. the director of the night rover challenge. i'm going to kind of be the moderator for tonight, as we go through this first-ever challenge america summit. so i've got just a few things

that, you know, i wanted to do with everyone, before we get into the program. first of all, i just want to take a minute and have everyone just look around this room. in this room, we have amazing people that are corporate, nonprofit, and government, all focused on challenge driven innovation in some way or another. this is a really powerful,interf people that are gathered here to look at how competitions can drive innovation. that's what tonight is all about, is, you know, the next step in creating a real wave of innovation. my job tonight is just to give you a little bit of background on what we are, what we're tiqp)q)s that we have.roup of so just to get going with that, i want to tell you a little bit about this thing called the night rover/< challenge. this is a collaboration between the clean tech open, unoodle,

and nasa. it's a program from nasa's office of centennial challenges. and it's challengin the best innovators in america to create radical new energy storage technology. you know, way above what we have now. this is something very powerful, to be able to keep rovers going on the moon, in mars, things that could be useful, in your cell electric vehicles, something that just is a radical leap in new technology. but i don't want to go into a lot of detail on that. you'll hear more about nasa's efforts later. and what i'm going to do1r is ge a little more background on challenge-driven innovation. and i'm going to do that just by plaijerrizing some people because it makes it a loteasier for me. i want to look at this quote, prize is a very old -- an old idea that is surprisingly powerful in our modern society. this is by a study that by mckenzie and company, back

in 2010. prize is a very old idea, very powerful in our modern society. surprisingly powerful in our modern society. mckenzie also said this, 32,000, in 2010, there were 32,000no competitions, competitions, prizes, awards. that's a big number. it could be bigger but it's a big number, for one year, 32,000 competitions happened. to continue on in myk mckenzie also said this, while tens of thousands of prizes and awards are give out every year, we've been struck by the lack of conferences or professional associations to share best practices and facilitate collaboration. now there's some kind of relationship between what doing here today, and that. i don't know exactly what it is, but hopefully by the end of tonight and tomorrow, we can start j

we're doing here, can really start toqphp having an organization, or, you know, somethingd exactly what mckenzie is saying is missing. so this just brings me to myó last question. and it's why are we here. here inca this room. that's just one side of it. i'm not talking about why we're here in som galactic cosmic sense of theá@ word. what i'm talking about is a more important part of that question. i am missing a slide in there. so the important part of that question was why are we here in san francisco. and we're here in san francisco because san francisco is one of the most innovative cities in the galaxy, and it's a very

great place to be the home of the challenge america summit, the first-ever challenge america summit. so it's now my job to introduce our first speaker of the night, who is going to officially kick off the first-ever challenge america summit, somebody who has been verylfe instrumental in creating a movement around innovation in san francisco. just a few months ago, announced october as innovation month inla whole lot of work on, you know, creating a@g real ecosystem for entrepreneurs, for governments, for everybody to create new ideas and new innovations. please join me in welcoming mayor ed lee to the floor. >> [applause.] >> thank you. thank you, josh. welcome, everybody. now that i know where i'm at, i want to welcome all of you, i

want to of course thank the night challenge -- night rover challenge, nasa, of course, for being here. i also want to thank s.p.u.r. again for hosting it. you know, when i started working with s.p.u.r. many years ago, i knew they were a spacey people. didn't realize it would ultimately end like this. wanted to thank s.p.u.r. because they really have always been host for so many of our great ideas of how to do better planning in the city. i also want to thank -- i know jennifer is here as well -- i told you when i first met you, i love your title, director of prizes? are you kidding? of course she has the longer title, but i thought that when bevan dufty and i were creating the director of hope in san francisco that we thought we had a pretty good title but now i'm going to change over, director of prizes. i may have to adopt that for some of our programs. but that's exciting for you to be here as well. certainly for green tech, open,

for their contributions here, because it's really a neat blend, with the efforts that we're doing, both in innovation, as well as being greener and trying to continue earning the greenest city of america title that we earned just this past year. we've been pretty lucky. as i announced this innovation month, there has just been scores of ideas that has come forward about what we could do, how we could celebrate, and how we could expose a lot more about what our technology companies are doing here in collaboration with so many others. but i'll begin by saying, first, you know, there are some things happening in our city that are just incredible. you know, i didn't declare myself to be, you know, the tech mayor, even though i've kind of fallen into a lot of that. i actually wanted to be -- and earned the title being the jobs mayor. the jobs for the city has been my number one goal.

and we've been doing pretty well. when i first began last year in 2011, unemployment rate here was 9.6. and just a few months ago, we celebrated the milestone that it went down to 7.4. and that's like the third lowest in the state. well, today, we got some even better news. so how about we flip 9.6, a year ago, to 6.9. today, it's 6.9. >> [applause.] >> and technology is leading the way. we're home to now -- just within our 49 square miles, we're home to 1,635 technology companies, still growing, over 225 clean tech companies, more than 100 biotech companies, and we have owncone of those categories or growing more every month. imgetting excited because that means a lot more jobs.

i think we will soon lead the whole state. and i kind of say that too because marin county has traditionally been lower than ours and so has san mateo. i think marin county has been lower because we have their wine, you will probably have some tonight and san ma taiee because it's our airport that emploaxcju everybody there. so we will take credit for all three counties. i told jerry, i'm never going to complain to jerry brown, what he to happen in the state legislature, because i used the first year and a half to insulate myself from all of that, emotionally as well as programmatically to say i'm not going to let the state hurt our city or the federal government. we've got to innovate our way out of this economic dole drum and we are doing so with inviting people here. those of you who take this word challenge, and really can really

seriously bring that to fore with your best ideas, this is what i'm doing with all these technology companies. i'm not satisfied with just hosting a new company in the city, i want to know what they're doing, who's working there, where they're coming from, what they plan for the five or 10 years and how we can help them grow. as they're growing their jobs i want to know technologically how we can help. that's why i love going to accelerators, to find out what are the next five years that we're incubating so when it comes like what happened last week with dr. yam naka working at gladstone institute at mission bay becomes one of the newest nobel prize winners in medicine working with uc-san francisco and the pharmaceutical companies there, they're on the verge of discovering wonderful stem cell research that will cure a lot of cancers in our lifetime. you're going to see some cures

come out of mission bay. we're doing the right thing, we're creating this wonderful, exciting innovative spirit in the city and we're doing it, not just with the companies locating here, with the people that are here, we're asking employees of the company to step up, through our sf city, our tech chamber of commerce, and volunteer their time to improve things that are not working as well as we'd like in the city. we have on-line ability called improve sf that allows people to come on line, tackle a lot of the issues that the city faces, allow for some c)eative thinking, people who can't spend a lot of time in meetings with us, that can actually offer their ideas on line, and we take those ideas very seriously. so we've been working on things on like how to make muni faster, how to bring fresh foods to low income poverty areas of the city, and our newest one, just to given you a sense, we wanted everybody to help us develop and

design a new library card. talk about civic engagement. 2,000 submissions on line for a new designed library card. that leads me to a challenge that i would like to announce, as part of this night rover challenge, and that is we have been asking ourselves a question, along the lines of energy use in the city, something that has been hard for us to figure out. and that has to do with what would inspire you, as someone who lives in the city, to give your data of your own energy use in the city, like your home energy use? all that data about when you use it, what are your hot times, your cool times. how about if we try to find some way to inspire people to give us that]h data, in some coordinated way. because if we understand that 20 to 22% of our

emissions comes from1ar residenl use, you can imagine if we had that data coming from every household use in the city we could break that data down with involvement of creative people like yourselves, and then try o see where there's patterns where we could lessen our carbon footprint and talk about better energy use. that's perfect for us. that's what we're going to ask this challenge to present for our next improve sf challenge for the city. and that's what we'd like to engage people in. and then hopefully, some time after this challenge is announced, and if we can get the best ideas out there, we will be engaged with you to select the best answer. and if there's an idea out there that can answer that question about how to inspire people, then hopefully wq can go into november a hack-athon sponsored by green biz and others to develop an app that everyone can

use. that's a great challenge. that's going to be so worthy of contributing to a goal that we've had about reducing our carbon footprint as a city. it's not just the households. once we get that data out we could look at the data from a community.re level and look at e data from a citywide level to see what we can do. i'm encouraged by that. i didn't want to give my data up to pg&e for various reasons. now iú] want to give it up for this challenge because i know people will be creative in having thisçe challenge to be something positive for the city. i wanted to announce that, get that out there with you, and join this wonderful challenge that you have, and think about how we could work together. meanwhile, in between that stuff and in between celebrating the month and doing things we have to write a proposal to win the superbowl in san francisco. thank you very much. thank you. >> [applause.]

>> thank you, mayor lee.