>> when stephenr

died, he was working on one of the biggest shows of his career, matter and spirit. it is a retrospective look at the many faces and faces of the life of an innovative artist from the california clay movement. stephen de staebler's developed in an area dominated by abstract expression. even his peers saw his form. >> he was able to find a middle ground in which he balanced the ideas of human figuration and representation with abstraction

and found it even more meaningful to negotiate that duality. >> another challenge was to create art from a meeting that was typically viewed as kraft material. his transforming moment was an accident in the studio. an oversized vertical sculpture began to collapse under its own weight and spread onto the floor. he sought a new tradition before him, landscape sculpture. >> you feel this extended human form underneath the surface of the earth struggling to emerge. eventually, it does. it articulates his idea that the earth is like flesh, and the archaeology and geology in the earth are like the bones, the structure of the earth. this tied in with his idea of mother earth, with the sense that we are all tied to nature and the earth. >> a half dozen bay area museums

and private collectors loan the massive sculptures to the museum for its matter and spirit retrospective. but the most unusual contributions came from stephen himself. a wall of autobiographical masks and hence from the early decades of his private study. >> he had one of the most beautiful studios i have ever been in. when you walk in, your first impression is of these monumental figures that you see in the exhibition, but if you went into the back corner of his studio, there was a series of shells with these diminutive figures. he told me, these are the heart of my studio. these little, and held intimate study is that he referred to as his sketchbook. a painter might make drawings. stephen de staebler made miniature sculptures. >> during the 1970's, he was inspired by the monuments of egypt. he assembled a large rocks of

clay into figures that resembled the ancient kings and queens. he credited a weathered appearance by rubbing glazes' into the clay while still wet. the misfires from his killed were brought in his backyard in his berkeley home. he called it his boneyard. in the last year of his life, he dug up the artifacts from his own history, and the bones were rearranged, in the were slimmer figures with wings. >> even if you knew nothing about his life or career, you sensed there was an artist dealing with this fundamental issue of life and death, the cake, netting back together, and you feel there is an attempt to deal with mortality and immortality. there is a seeking of spiritual meaning in an existential stage. >> during his 50-year career, stephen de staebler worked to form and out of the clay of the ground and give it a breath of life. matter and spirit gathers the

many expressions of his meditations. and gives the viewer and insight into the artist's life. learn more about the retrospective on line at

[gavel] supervisor mar: the meeting will come to order. this is the land-use and

economic development committee meeting for this february 6, 2012. with me is supervisor cohen and supervisor wiener. ms. miller, please read the instructions. clerk miller: items will appear as on the agenda unless otherwise unnoticed. please turn off all cell phones. supervisor mar: ann i want to thank sfgtv. please read item number one. clerk miller: item number one, public infrastructure improvements, mission bay south. supervisor mar: thank you. and we have barbara from the department of public works. >> thank you.

this is for public infrastructure improvements of mission bay. those blocks include portions of four streets, mission rock street, china basin street, mission bay boulevard north, and mission bay boulevard south. as you can see, there are streets that have now been redone. fourth street years ago did not go all of the way through. it went on a diagonal. fawhat you have is mission bay n a new grid pattern. fourth street now formally over there. what we are asking the board to do is to accept public infrastructure that includes

sidewalks, other things. the department of public works has determined that the project has been completed and was done in accordance with the city standard and is ready for its intended use. the director of the planning department has determined, and his staff has determined, that it is in conformity with the general plan, and the agency has determined that it is in compliance with the mission bay south plan. if you have any questions, i am here. supervisor mar: seeing there are no questions, let's open it up to public comment. seeing that there is no public comment, colleagues, can we move this without objection? thank you. [gavel] ms. miller, could you please read items number two and three together? i believe that mr. chiu is on

his way. there he is. clerk miller: item number two, the planning code for the chinatown transit station, and item number three, the zoning map amendment. supervisor mar: thank you. president chiu? president chiu: thank you. i would like to ask to have a continuance. i would like to ask that this item be continued until next week and that we have it listed next week as a committee report so it can come out to the full board on tuesday. we do have a tight time frame for that, but i want to make sure that we got our eyes -- we dot our i's and cross our t's. if you would like to make any presentations at this time, it

is up to you? >> thank you, supervisor mar, president chiu. i think if we are going to be coming back, we might as well just wait until next week. we will be working with staff to make sure we have any unanswered questions answered that we are able to present and move things forward next week. if that is ok, we will do that. supervisor mar: if i can just add for some other residents from chinatown that have raised issues, i hope that we threw mou's -- through mou's we can address the people being displaced. >> that is the intent, but and we will perhaps be able to confirm more clearly for those who have those concerns, but that is our intent.

we are working with the mayor's office on housing to make sure that that happens. supervisor mar: great. set to continue for one week. president chiu: to do public comment? supervisor mar: yes. is there any public comment? seeing none, president chiu, to continue this. president chiu: and to have as a committee report. supervisor mar: as a committee report to go the following tuesday. [gavel] thank you. and that was for items two and three to be continued. ms. miller, could you please call item number for? clerk miller: a hearing on improving the taxi service. supervisor mar: thank you, and i

think this one is sponsored by supervisor wiener. supervisor wiener: thank you, mr. chair. but think our goal is to have a city where not everyone wants to have their own automobile. we have prioritized giving people other viable options for getting around the city. of course, muni is a key part of that, and many of us were very, very hard to make sure that muni is as good as it can be. but regardless of how excellent we make muni, regardless of how much bicycling and walking we have, there will always be situations where people need to get somewhere quickly or need to go somewhere where muni does not go as regularly as they need. in other words, we need a compliment to the muni system.

taxicabs, in addition to car sharing, or a critical component for having a true transit first city. people need to know that they can get a taxi cab when they need it and that the cap is going to get them where they need to in an efficient and safe manner. we have many, many great taxicabs and a cab drivers in the city, but we need it to be better. taxicab service is not adequate to meet demand, and, in fact, i believe there is a hidden demand of people that if they believed they could get a taxi cab when they needed it would probably get rid of their car tomorrow. people actually do not believe that now, and too many people have had too many terrible experiences when they simply cannot get a taxi cab when they need it, and they do not think of doing it anymore.

last year, i submitted a resolution that the board passed unanimously that indicated that the board has a unanimous belief that the taxicab service is inadequate. i believe that when the taxi cabs were merged into the mta, at least for a while, taxicab's overshadowed muni, and muni is the 800 pound gorilla in the agency, but recently, i believe the staff at the mta have refocused and are working very, very hard to try to improve service in the city, and in my personal view, improving service means two things. primarily, 1, increasing supply of taxicabs. we do not have enough in my view in the city to adequately serve our residents, our visitors, and our businesses, and number two, improving our dispatch system, either by a centralized dispatch

or a coordinated dispatch to make sure that taxicab's can officially be sent where they need to go, including to the parts of the sitting that are not saturated, whether it is parts on the west side or the southeastern part of the city where it is extremely hard, even harder to get a taxi cab than in some of the more central geographic areas. so as part of the resolution last year, we requested quarterly updates from the mta on where we are with the taxicab system, what progress we have seen, what the plans are to increase service, and this is the first of those quarterly hearings, so i want to welcome the mta. i look forward to the presentation, and i know you have been focused on this a lot, full time, for a while, and i

want to thank you for your work in helping to improve our system, so mta, and, colleagues, i am sorry. were there any introductory comments? no proof of thank you. -- no? thank you. >> good afternoon. i just want to introduce the item here. i want to thank the supervisor for is leadership for bringing forth the resolution in the first place. i know it is one that is felt by all of the members of the board and really anybody that was elected by people of san francisco, because i think as a unanimous vote by the board indicated, while there may be a lot of different ideas of what needs to happen in the taxi industry, i think one area of not just consensus but unanimity is that it needs to be a lot better, and from our position,

the agency that is charged with implementing and realizing the city transit first policy, i think supervisor stated very well -- i think supervisor wiener stated very well, having a good tax in service. we should have a good tourist destination based on the geography and density of our city. we should have excellent, world- class tax and service anyway, but the fact that we are endeavoring to be a transit first city where people do not feel the need to or desire to use or own their own cars, we need to have the transit, and cycling and walking rethink can cover a significant number of trips in san francisco, but there will always be a place for an automobile, times where the other modes of transportation will not meet the needs, and

taxing services is one of the main ways we can fill that gap, so while there are many both perhaps inside and outside the mta that might prefer that taxing services were not brought into the mta a few years back, i think it makes all of the sense in the world that it is there because it is absolutely part of realizing transit first, and it completes this as a full- service transportation agency, so as supervisor wiener said, we are an approved budget we are working on improving the tax and service and improving this in san francisco. it is extremely complex. there are often diverging viewpoints, and you may hear some of them today in terms of what will make the tax and service work better, and one of the things i found during my short time at the mta is not

only are there very strong but often diverging opinions on what will improve the tax and service or what needs to change in the taxi industry, often the voice of the taxicab user is absent in that conversation, and you will hear in the presentation a few ways how we are trying to address that. so i guess what i would say, finally, is that the request for the score with reports was made quite some time ago, so i want to apologize we have not got years sooner, and we look forward to starting a regularly -- a regular quarterly reporting. it is not -- there is the complexity of the industry and the limits of our staff and resources to be addressing it that we have not been able to come sooner, and the first thing you will find it is about baselines, because there was the quantitative reporting, and an

order for us to do quantitative reporting, we need to establish a baseline of data from which we can compare and report out on, so that is the first thing that you are going to hear about, and then we are going to walk through a sampling of the highlights of the various things that our tax and services provision is working on, focused on those that are directly related to taxi service. there is a whole host of other things that this unit is doing to deal with other aspects of tax and service and regulating and providing for tax the service, but we are really just focusing on those with the most direct service in packs that we are working on, and i will say that despite the divisiveness within the industry and the overall consensus throughout the city that tax and service needs to be improved, it is,