the march meeting? >> all in favor? aye. >> public comment? item 4 executive session? favor? aye. >> okay. i move that we reconvene in open session. >> second. >> i move to close the session. pledge of allegiance.

>> pledge of allegiance. >> please be advised. use of cell phones of electronic devices are prohibited at this meeting. please be advised that a person maybe ordered away from the meeting room for producing sounds or electronic device. a member of the public has up to 3 minutes to make comments on each agenda item. item a a executive directors report. >> good afternoon commissioners, port start, staff, members of the public. i

have a really fine and exciting directors executive report. we are extremely proud to be joining equity office partners in celebrateing the 10th anniversary of the ferry's building. their anniversary and in the 10 years it's once again returned to its grandeur of the city of san francisco. i wanted to take the opportunity to just walk us back a little bit through what we have done. as you know the ferry building was originally conceived now, well over a hundred years ago, it replaced a building that was for all intents and purposes was more like a barn structure, back in the early 1890s they

determined it need repairs. the methodology for the piles themselves and the tower which is 245 feet tall and it was tallest at it's time. the building finally opened in 1903 and in 1906 we had the earthquake and everything survived except the clock stopped. if you look back in the records through 1907 there was a robust debate as to whether or not to fix the clock and we d unfortunately in the 1960s the embarcadero freeway was built. it lost a lot of it's vibrancy and stature to the city. it eventually came

down and the public at that time determined that the rehabilitation and renovation of the ferry building was the port commission's highest priority and at that point in time the ferry building was the headquarters of the port offices and to make the renovation work, the port relocated it's offices. so i wanted to point out at the time the port commission made the findings that the restoration and adaptive buildings of the surrounding buildings are critical to the city's water front. in doing so they adopted 8 objectives. the first was to restore the structures on the ferry building water front both to recall the area as historic use and accommodate new uses and provide other uses and emphasize the area generating

water activity and encourage san francisco and tourist alike and the major transit center by i am improving transit. in 1998 almost a hundred years after the ferry was completed, with the goals i just mentioned above, there was a lot of competition for that development, but the winning design was presented by the joint venture of wilson and property manager equity office and they went forward to create # 230,000 square foot reuse of the marketplace and the second and 3rd floor office space. today they continue to have the strong partnership with the urban organization with agriculture, that brings 1.3 million people to the ferry

building each year. the market ferry on the ground floor brings that many people and we had 6.6 million ferry passengers. we have over 11 million visitors to the building. there was a joint venture of swm, pagen and they wrote something i found intriguing which was in american cities the second half of a 20th century saw an expansion of freeways and food supplies and transformation of restaurants and cafes by national franchises. by the first half of the 21 century may see a change of tables. focused on local identity and can cultural values. we all

know what happened which is that with the guidance of equity office partners and minnie, the ferry building mass become the new mode for sustainable foods, the new iconic structure and everywhere throughout the bay area and recipes and part of the renounced culture. i hope you can all join me in congratulating and minnie, the port staff. everybody who worked on the land use plan and the whole real estate team that included too many architects, lawyers and too many to name but all who contributed on this renaissance and jane on our behalf, please accept our congratulations and kudos for doing it so well that it is

still a new brand today and we are just really honored to have partnered with all of you. please join me in congratulating them. [ applause ] >> and we have a little plaque to commemorate that as well. please come up. let me introduce james connors, the senior property manager for the ferry building. >> thank you. >> i would love to do a picture. >> yeah. absolutely. the ferry building success over the last teb ten years is the result of so many people's efforts. i want to thank the staff as the port who supported us through so many projects large and small. first to monique moir who answered every late night call from me. and her voice

mail said jane, what can be do to help. she also sent the photos from her office. i have lots of historical photos from that event. i actually started doing the pr marketing for the building when it opened 10 years ago and elliot riley from real estate who patiently answered every question i asked. to byron, diane, phil, and mark and jonathan stern who helped plan our continued growth and all the guys at the permit desk who every time i went to apply for a permit, guided me on all the approval processes finally to manny,

patricia and amy and all of you made this work. thank you. >> thank you very much. >> [ applause ] >> commissioner, can we do a picture real quick. thank you again, jane. this is very gratifying. thanks to your team as well. >> next, commissioners, i want to talk about a new restaurant

coming in at pier 5. we are lucky to be getting celebrity chef michael sharl oh. it's named koekt a. c o q u e t a. you may have known him. he's a celebrity. he's a specialist in italian cuisine. he owns a restaurant in napa valley and host 2 shows, one called napa style and one on the food network called easy entertaining. the new restaurant will represent spanish food but also his first restaurant in san francisco. we are very thrilled he's chosen

to do this on the water front. he's taken out a permit for a wood fired oven. we are looking forward to that. his lease requires him to use sustainable food from the ferry or otherwise. he is has enlisted a farm for specialty items and we are excited about that. he will be offering everything from gin and tonic i hope to see you all there for a little libation in celebration for a great april. that's exciting news. >> the excitement keeps going, as you know the exploratoria um

is about to open it's doors. they were nominated to the san francisco business times list of real estate deals of the year. and the judges which consist of an architect real estate lawyers and developers down to 50 in the exploratoria tourm project and last monday they won the best renovation project deal. which was an amazing cue. they have various reasons probably that you will get to hear in a minute but not the least which was their amazing renovation of a pier that's in its 90s, they managed

to touch those. they have a great video of that. they built it in a way that is in incredibly sustainable and very be fitting of the great bay that we live with. i want to congratulate the exploratoria and their in trickal design group and the exploratoria is a 350 square foot base, it's everything from a public plaza to the promenade itself and a history walk and cafe. we are really very fortunate to have them as you know they are

surrounded by water so we'll have a new birth and water landing and we welcome the exploratoria tourm to their knew home. once you see it you wouldn't want it anywhere but the water front. we look forwards to having you with us for the next 150 years. i would like to introduce the executive director of the exploratoria tourm. he is an internationally known science and education policy expert and sports time director since 2006, a little bit after the selection but has done all the lifting. he holds

a ph.d. from stanford and has received $20 million in grants from other sources and has done an amazing job with the pier 15 project. congratulations on all accounts and please welcome me in joining dennis bartel. [ applause ] >> this has been a great partnership. when we identified pier 15 and 17 as the new home. we are opening in april 17th. it has come to our attention now it's just getting started. when i can borrow a baseball metaphor, we are at the bottom of the 9, 2 outs, 3 balls. we

have one more pitch. we have 95 percent of the exhibits open and ready to go. in fact 95 percent are ready today. we kept this project mostly on schedule and mostly on budget and we'll hit that end of the day and a test to the cooperation that we get from not just the port and staff but from the whole city and community. just a few facts about the project is that we've been dying to play in the outdoors for 43 years since our opening in 1969. we have 2-and-a-half acres to play with. all these years shrinking it down, we get the chance to play with mother nature. 87 percent of that outdoor space is free to the public. it will be experiences happening throughout. in fact if you

noticed already, our explainers don't respect the property lines, they moved their carts all the way down to fisher man's wharf and we feel we own the whole embarcadero. it's ann mated space all the time. as we may have one million people that enjoy the tiktd part of the exploratoria tourm, we may see 3-5 million people a year just for the experiences at the end of the pier and we'll have experiences back and forth as they exit the property. so we are really pleased to offer that free amenity to all the visitors in san francisco. we hope this will help with attendance and not take away from it. we have a beautiful comblas glass building at the

end which will help everybody appreciate this natural man-made landscape with a 360 views and we have provided many tools versus training a microscope on the bay bridge as the world's largest thermometers. 85 percent of the bridge is due to its temperature and not weight. you can look at the elevation suspension bridge and say it's about 60 or 80 degrees. so making things visible including where the land lines used to be and including ships of our 500 new meters within our home and finally goes without saying amazing if not radical this new

sight compared to our old home. one example, many of you know for 40 of our years one of our programs has been hiring 120 high school youth a year to run the museum. they are our operational staff on the floor. we do not have volunteers or -- they do all the work. they were please today learn that historically over 20 percent of the program have come from district 10 and you know as bay view and hunters point. it's taken our employees from that part of town typically over an hour-and-a-half to come to work. here, it's only going to take them 20-25 minutes to come to work now. we are open to the

entire community with this new home which means we are part of the whole community here at san francisco. and finally we just mentioned our business time awards among others that is too a shared award with the ports and commissioners and port staff. i must say that since the day, here, thank you marry so much. in fact here is the award. [ applause ] but i will say what i said that night which is so true, since the day we signed that lease and joined in partnership together formally and broke ground together in 2010, we have nothing but the most fer vernt praise for the port staff

for j edwards, for phil williamson, by ron, jennifer, monique, your whole team has been so responsive, so right there, everything that we've needed including from ken cough man and the fire men's as well as, you are stickler and i do respect that for good reason, but even as sticklers you have been there every time we've asked and fabulous to working out the solutions to open on april 17th which is so very important to us. i have to say that really commend every person who has worked with us and just amazing. everything we call you are there. so what we have learned not too long ago we found out from a trade week,

the exploratoria tourm is the 5th brand than any other place, behind the louver, no. 5. if we were no. 5, just wait till you see what we are doing with pier no. 7 and 8. thank you very much. [ applause ] >> thank you so much and especially to your development committee. thank you for choosing to do this on the water front and congratulations on the award. thank you for coming today. commissioners i have one last item. which i would like to share with commissioner adams and some of the meritime staff and that is as you report, jim maloney

attended the conference in china, it's the largest gathering in asia, it brings porters and anyone involved until ship cargo. i understand it was a phenomenally fantastic trip. i would like you to come forward and say a few words. >> peter daily, deputy director of merit time port of san francisco. and i want to give you a brief overview of this trip we returned about a week ago. i'm just now starting to sleep at regular hours. it was a long trip but very fruitful and successful trip but we have a lot to do and going forward.

as monique mentioned the main purpose of the trip was to attend a trade so but to increase awareness of the merit time industrial activities especially cargo ship and increase volume of pier 80 in the last few years has been tough for all west coast ports and all of that is being sourced in cargo in china. and talked two possible partners in developing an export bulk facility to try to connect the dots in terms of cargo interest and people with capital investing in the project. i want to that can commissioners adams for attending 10 or 11 days on the road and jim maloney did a fantastic job of organizeing the trip and making

our appointments and time well spent. 85 percent of the cargo or in the world is generated in asia and that comes to the oh port of san francisco. it's a huge growing market as everybody well knows and this conference was filled with 5,000 attendees from different ports in the world. >> trip highlights i want to go through them briefly. there were many highlights and the trade show just being one of them, commissioner adams and jim, you have to get up early in the morning with commissioner adams, he works up to two hours before i have my coffee. i had to keep up with

him. we talked to a number of different shippers and shipping lines. most of our leading shipping companies had boots there and agent operations and market staff we had a chance to visit with. there is a lot of interest in san francisco. a lot of the infrastructure projects are going to be sourced in china. we got confirmation of the trip of the tunnel boring machines that are used for the central subway projects. they are coming to san francisco, there will be another ship later in the spring bringing these ships to san francisco. there is interest in the central subway project steel components and construction materials source coming to san francisco, transbay terminal and there is

a lot of interest on the floor, apple computer is building -- many of the components are being sourced around the world and for one san francisco is ideally geographically located for that project. we also met with the port of shanghai in san francisco, our sister ports, it's one of the largest ports in the world. they did last year 32 million. i think the port of oakland did 2 million. that's the order of magnitude we are talking about. in terms of other modes of transport, they are the largest bulk port and largest cruise port. everyday we were there we invested in another cruise ship and their operations. we had a wonderful meeting with the senior executives from the ports. they treated us to a

wonderful luncheon and hope to continue the relationships with them. the government agency, not only do they run the ports, they also run the trains and taxi, everything else that goes on in shanghai. it was a wonderful visit. we visited the office in shanghai and had an appointment with them and they set up a luncheon and with one of the biggest importers and china set another meeting with the china national building materials. it's like who you know in china. amazingly these people came to our hotel. they are the largest in the world. we hat