helped. in the city, especially, it is a continuing issue. supervisor mar: thank you. >> thank you for your time today. supervisor mar: is there anyone from the public who would like to speak? i have one card. jay edwards. anyone else, please come forward. >> morning. supervisors, on behalf of the board of san francisco, i am the senior property manager. this jurisdiction is my responsibility. i am part of fisherman's wharf community district board. the board enjoys a tremendous working relationship with the benefit district. the board members are highly

they managed two public bulletin boards. many of them looked terrible. they actually clean ait. they take on various projects in that plan. they have a decorative sidewalks. -- sidewalk.

i am going to go over the financial reporting. supervisor mar: duratherm is a marking on the streets for safety reasons. is that what it is? >> deb can explain to you more what it is made of. she is the first one in the city to install it. in noe valley, the corner of castro and 24 has a lot of pedestrian casualties from automobiles. there was a lot of dangerous -- it is a very busy intersection with cars and buses. there is a school. there are the catholic schools. there are children in that area. one of the priorities in the

street scape improvement plan was pedestrian safety. they implemented a duratherm crosswalk, which is a much more visible crosswalk with a special pattern for safety reasons. it adds more character and detail to the street that you normally would not havede. b -- not have. deb brought duratherm. it was the first project where we used this material in the city. the city studied it to see how it worked. since then, other districts have -- in the tenderloin, they have also implemented this. the budget amount for each category was within the 10 percentage points from the management plan.

they also met the requirements to have 5% of their income come from other sources. they have done an amazing job raising money. noe valley association has a relatively small budget. it is a little over $200,000 per year. they fund-raiser a lot of funding to help provide the services they provide. they raised 12% up to 15% of their budget in other sources, which is really amazing. the actual expenses were proportional to the revenues and also to the budget amounts in each category. they did spend more than they originally budgeted. they received actual grants for specific projects. in the beginning of the year, they budgeted a certain amount. they ended up fund-raising and getting more money, so they spent more in those categories,

district improvements. in carry-over funds, every year, noe valley association has those carry-over funds. they have to use them in the first six months of the fiscal year. the assessments are not transferred to the a cbd until january. from july 1 through december 31, they use carry-over funds. for 2009-2010, their budget, the revenues projected are 449,599. the expenses are $253,000. they will have a carryover. this is the disbursement. they have specific projects they

will allocate the carry-over towards. it is dispersed in different parts of their services, sidewalk operation, district identity, administration, contingency, and so on, and so forth. supervisor chu: can i ask why the carry-over was so large? it is almost their entire annual assessment. >> the $196,399, the revenue was -- ok. $253,200 was their budget. they have to cover six months of expenses. if you look at the bottom right -- i will go back. on the item right of the page, it shows how they will spend the money in those six months of operations. do you see that?

supervisor chu: why don't we take a step back? there is as revenue is about $230,000. that includes $200,000 from a previous year. i understand there is a spending plan for where that money will go, but why was that carry-over so large? >> they have to carry over six months of expenses to cover from july 1 through december 31. it is to cover expenses during that time. they do not receive assessment funds for six months. every year they have to carry over six months' worth. supervisor chu: so we will see a consistent cycle where there will be this carry-over from year to year. >> yes. supervisor chu: why is that different from the a fisherman's wharf one? >> they have carry-over every

year as well. supervisor chu: they have the carry-over for the first six months as well? >> yes. >> [inaudible] it looks like we have a lot of money when we file our report because we get the second installment of taxes in june. supervisor chu: it is the timing of when the money comes in. >> yes. >> ok. the annual budgets do need to include carry-over revenue in a detailed plan every year on how these funds should be spent or will be spent. these are our recommendations, to make sure the carry-over is very detailed, how is it going to be spent every year, and the contingency reserve -- in the management plan, there was a contingency reserve line item.

we recommend them adding that into their budget every year just to cover unexpected costs. they do have a plan for carry- over funds. they do set aside funds for contingency, but they need to include those every year in their organizational budgets. we told them that. i would like to allow deb to come up and talk about the services of the noe valley association.

>> morning. thank you for being here. >> i am debra. we go from fisherman's wharf to little noe valley. it is amazing what cbd's can do for the community. i feel like i am here to do a little show and tell. supervisor mar: that is a great logo. >> thank you. if you improve public space, you have to activate it. we worked on a project for 18 months. we are good to go? do i use this one? ok. as lisa said, the thenva was a step -- the nva was established

five years ago. i want to be able to look at the slide. i cannot. great. it was established five years ago. we had a tough time of it. we had to go 25 feet by 25 feet by 25 feet, which is the no small feat. reluctant property owners wondered why they should be paying for this. you had to explain to them that they were responsible for the maintenance of their sidewalks, which not all of them agreed to. let's go back to the other one. we will go to the next slide. the first thing that we did, once we got established, we had a community -- we hired urban ecology. we did a five-year plan. that was the only way we could get the grants and funding we wanted for projects. we had such a small budget, 70% of which was spent on

this is a picture of the community plan. we are about to look for funding that to redo another plan because we have already done everything that was initiated five years ago. most of you are probably familiar with noe valley, a land of babies and dogs. i want to focus on cleaning only because all the work we have done today, the have to start with cleaning. if you create great public space, it starts with cleaning. without that, we could not have done any of the work that we have done today, including graffiti abatement. next to those news stands, there is a lot of graffiti on the sidewalk. we have been so good about graffiti removal, the graffiti artists are frustrated and are now doing it on parking meters and utility poles. this is randy. he cleans the street 7 -- six

days a week. he is part of a program. we had hired two cleaning companies to work with us. i started working with salvation army and other organizations to ask if we could use their workers. we found the jericho project, which takes first-time drug offenders, and puts them through a project and work for private companies. they have been great. the first love letter we got on cleaning after five years. do you get many love letters? it will be in the noe valley voiced this month. with all those dogs thi, you can imagine what kind of mess he has. supervisor maxwell: and he is with? >> khadr project.

first-time drug offenders. -- the and jericho project. -- the jericho project. the second thing we did was plant trees. we worked with friends of the urban forest. we planted 143 trees in the first year. made a huge difference in terms of the streetscape. the thing that people must remember us for, we were the first cbd in the city to do flower baskets. the city did not quite know how to permit us to do this, but it came through and is our most popular item. we worked with folks who run the city parking lot, and they were great. on the left, you will see an image of a typical city parking

lot, a brick wall with a bench in front of it. we invested $1,000 in design through urban ecology and we said we would like the space to look something like this. the folks in that department did a great job. that has now become our street furniture. this is the duratherm you were asking about, supervisor mar. i discovered this when i was doing work in philadelphia and i thought, what is this stuff? i wanted to do a test in san francisco. i got them to donate half of their product and i would grant the other part. this is the intersection of castro and 24th. the first party people had was high-visibility crosswalks. especially at this intersection. you come off of castro hill and you come into a wide space and

people tend to race through this intersection. i did work with dpw. i love all of them. i could not have done this without them. in fact, we had to redo the ramps. it actually came up in the record, do not touch this place until you call me. what do you want to do to my crosswalk? i became very possessive of it. there was money available to upgrade the ramps and the city is still working to reduce the yellow striping, but it all but put back. supervisor mar: the crosswalk almost feels like it is brick. >> it is correct. there are several ways to do this. we could have done something in the middle. in portland, they did a cool

design in the middle of the street. that prevented people from barreling through an intersection. in philadelphia and baltimore, they used duratherm and it worked well. the upkeep on duratherm -- it is embedded in asphalt. essentially, you have to route out four inches of asphalt, and then they embed the duratherm in the asphalt. this is similar to something they do in london. supervisor mar: i think they do this in hong kong, too. >> it has been well appreciated in the neighborhoods. we put cameras underneath the intersection to make sure all

the pipes are working correctly, but if i had to do it over again, i do not know if i would put them in such a large intersection because you are vulnerable when you tear it up, it gets expensive. it is very nice, an improvement, but any time you have to replace something under the street, it is costly. i would only do it in special places. open sidewalks. there was money available for rainwater. the mission gets flooded a lot, so we started opening up sidewalks. we also wanted to get to the news stands. we got those new news racks, and we purposely put them up against the building's. that frees up the sidewalk, so that you can open it and put in plantings and make it look

nicer. with merchants, this was the bench of the city original design, we took our planters, and we work with our merchants to create seating areas. first of all, it has to be clean, and then you can create little public spaces like this for people to hang out, and we have done it around coffeeshops. these are some of the photographs from the events we hold. once you put in the public space and make it beautiful, something that people want to hang around, the next thing is to activate that public space. this is where the public-private partnership comes through. this is sponsored by a bunch of realtors. so this was a midsummer's

celebration called summer solstice. the noe valley harvest festival, we do that in partnership with the noe valley farmer's market. this year, we have done a holiday celebration on 24th street. with the cbd did was enable us to create an infrastructure that was clean and beautiful and green. in doing so, it brought people together locally as well as organizations in the neighborhood together. so you have merchants working with the farmers' market, friends with noe valley, in ways that they did not six years ago. but because we have a beautiful space, we can do all of these things, and businesses also contribute to these events, and it has become very successful. thank you for your time.

supervisor mar: supervisor chu. supervisor chu: the benches with the planter boxes, they look great. the question on logistics. was that on the property owner's property, did it require encroachment? >> no, nick from dpw to care of it. it did not encroach on their property at all, but we asked. supervisor chu: in terms of annual cost, are you paying an encroachment feet? >> sure. are you kidding? nick is very good. who is the person i work with on trees? i am planning on her name. carla shorts. we love her. supervisor chu: we are exploring

in our own areas where, if you can put in a bench, it might be a place for people to gather. you have to convince people that it is worth putting in. there is an annual increase in fee, it becomes a hindrance for a lot of folks. >> it is $300 a year, which is not a lot of money, and not only do you have to install it, you have to maintain it. people graffiti on them, they carve in there, and they take plants. you need an infrastructure in place, which is why cbd is so great. >> with the street trees, you have that issue. some of the property owners were afraid of taken on the liability. cbd got a permit for the entire length of the district, and that allows them to plant trees and

pay for the insurance, take on the liability. cbd's can do things on a street-wide level when property owners or businesses are concerned on an individual level, so they can allow more of a selective approach to this project which takes the stress off of the individual. >> a public-private partnership is what a cbd is. no property owner has said that we could not do it. they have said no to treat because they did not understand how it worked. supervisor maxwell: once they find out how it works? >> yes. it was difficult to get the cbd through. it took a long time. 176 properties on six blocks. it is a difficult selling proposition because it is not easy to understand what it is,

why the city does not do this, why it is good for the property owner or merchant to do this. there are a number of target audiences to convince. but now they loved it. -- they love it. they have to see it. conceptually when you tell them that it is $900 in taxes, that is still an assessment. supervisor mar: what a great model of how a committee business district can bring out the best of a community. this makes me want to come out to the entertainment -- to the entertainment -- hayrides, cable cars, a menora