i'm the president of friends of mclaren park. it is one of the oldest neighborhood community park groups in san francisco. i give a lot of tours through

the park. during those tours, a lot of the folks in the group will think of the park as very scary. it has a lot of hills, there's a lot of dense groves. once you get towards the center of the park you really lose your orientation. you are very much in a remote area. there are a lot of trees that shield your view from the urban setting. you would simply see different groves that gives you a sense of freedom, of being outdoors, not being burdened by the worries of city life. john mclaren had said that golden gate park was too far away. he proposed that we have a park in the south end of the city. the campaign slogan was, people need this open space. one of the things that had to open is there were a lot of people who did a homestead here, about 25 different families. their property had to be bought up. so it took from 1928 to 1957 to

buy up all the parcels of land that ended up in this 317 acres. the park, as a general rule, is heavily used in the mornings and the evenings. one of the favorite places is up by the upper reservoir because dogs get to go swim. it's extremely popular. many fights in the city, as you know, about dogs in parks. we have 317 acres and god knows there's plenty of room for both of us. man and his best friend. early in the morning people before they go to work will walk their dogs or go on a jog themselves with their dogs. joggers love the park, there's 7 miles of hiking trails and there's off trail paths that hikers can take. all the recreational areas are heavily used on weekends. we have the group picnic area

which should accommodate 200 people, tennis courts are full. it also has 3 playground areas. the ampitheater was built in 1972. it was the home of the first blues festival. given the fact that jerry garcia used to play in this park, he was from this neighborhood, everybody knows his reputation. we thought what a great thing it would be to have an ampitheater named after jerry garcia. that is a name that has panache. it brings people from all over the bay area to the ampitheater. the calls that come in, we'd like to do a concert at the jerry garcia ampitheater and we do everything we can to accommodate them and help them because it gets people into the park. people like a lot of color and that's what they call a park. other people don't.

you have to try to reconcile all those different points of view. what should a park look like and what should it have? should it be manicured, should it be nice little cobblestones around all of the paths and like that. the biggest objective of course is getting people into the park to appreciate open space. whatever that's going to take to make them happy, to get them there, that's the main goal. if it takes a planter with flowers and stuff like that, fine. you know, so what? people need to get away from that urban rush and noise and this is a perfect place to do it. feedback is always amazement. they don't believe that it's in san francisco. we have visitors who will say, i never knew this was here and i'm a native san franciscoan. they wonder how long it's been here. when i tell them next year we'll get to celebrate the 80th the biggest issue

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man: 60-inch screen, high-definition. football season is coming up. you can watch it right here. what do you think? i'll take it. huh! huh! now, that's what i'm talking about. you're right. i don't need it.

>> i work with the department of environment and we are recycling oil. thank you. we can go into a refinery and we can use it again. they do oil changes and sell it anyway, so now they know when a ticket to a. hal>> to you have something you

want to get rid of? >> why throw it away when you can reuse it? >> it can be filtered out and used for other products. >> [speaking spanish] >> it is going to be a good thing for us to take used motor oil from customers. we have a 75-gallon tank that we used and we have someone take it from here to recycle. >> so far, we have 35 people.

we have collected 78 gallons, if not more. these are other locations that you can go. it is absolutely free. you just need to have the location open. you are set to go.

supervisor kim: captioned by the national captioning institute --www.ncicap.org-- supervisor chu: welcome to the regular meeting of the budget finance committee. today is the first day that we are expanding to our by person committee. today we have two items before us. before we get into those, our clerk is mr. victory young. are there any announcements? >> please turn off all cell phones and pagers. if you wish to submit public comment, please fill out a

speaker card in provided to myself. documents for the committee should be duplicated for the file. supervisor chu: thank you very much, mr. young. just a bit of information, the office has put out a schedule of hearing dates for the upcoming budget season. primarily we will be seeing a number of enterprise departments in the month of may as well as a number of general fund departments in the month of june. i believe that that schedule is posted on the boat -- on the board web site. the two months before june we will be having a number of hearings relevant to understanding the budget that we are seeing before us for 2011- 2012. if we can, please go straight to that. please call items one and two.

>> item #one. hearing to receive information regarding budget instructions issued to departments and plans to close the budget deficit for fy2011-2012. item #two. ongoing hearing to receive updates on the state's budget for fy2011-2012 and its impacts on the city and county of san francisco. supervisor chu: mr. wagner is here from the budget office and the comptroller's office might add a few words. >> thank you very much, madame chair. members of the committee. i will walk you through the high level picture of where things are right now. kate howard from my office is going to talk to the state budget picture. just to kind of frame where we

are right now in the process for the last several years it has been an ongoing process, balancing the budget in the budget year. where we are right now is the apartments have submitted their budgets and have been going through the submission process for the last couple of months. they have submitted their budgets to the mayor's office. i guess that this marks the official starting point of the process of digging into those department proposals and policy implications and what they mean for the budget. right now we are still looking at things at a very high end broad level.

the chair had asked if we could summarize what we are receiving in submissions, although i think it is early for me to be able to paint an accurate picture of that for you. we will dig through that as we do our submissions. we will continue to share information on where we stand. i know that the supervisor has invited the departments to talk more in depth of their proposals. i will walk through what the big picture looks like today and what we will be trying to set in the background for what we will be talking about with you. repeatedly for the next three months. as you know, no surprise, we have to balance the budget. our budget instructions, which we submitted in the winter of

2010 included the mayor's office deficit projection. as you know, it showed a reject -- reduction year-over-year by and revenues and a growth of $293 million in expenditures. our projected budget deficit has been $380 million for the coming year. since then, a number of things have changed. there are all of these moving pieces. expenditures to grow. revenue that changes. we have had revisions to our estimates. let me go through a couple of those quickly to give you a sense of what is moving. we will have a formal update to the deficit projection and a joint report coming out late in march. in a few weeks we will have all

of the pieces put together for a better sense of what the full picture is. also, just very high level and not new information to any of you, but put in perspective, as you know we have a $6.5 billion city budget. about 45% is in the general fund. within $2.9 billion we have other significant restrictions on our options to take to balance the budget within that period a large and growing contribution to our pension system. an obligation we are required to make. other approved requirements locked in a portion of those expenditures.