the city of san francisco sfgtv meeting of city and school district select committee occurring january 30, 2014 will begin shortly.good afternoon

and welcome to the special meeting of the joint city and school district select committee. first of all we would like to thank the staff at sfgtv that record our meetings and make the transcripts available on line. and a special thanks and our clerk today and are there any announcements?

>> there are none. >> thank you. and i will have a motion to excuse supervisor avalos who couldn't be here at today's meeting. we have a motion and i want to recognize that we have supervisor farrell as well as president fewer, commissioner wynns and commissioner norton and happy new and it's great to be here and i am looking forward to chairing the process again this year. madam clerk can you call the first item. >> thank you. this is a hearing on the unified school district surplus property portfolio and sponsored by you. >> thank you madam clerk. so this say hearing that our office had last year working with commissioner mendoza and i

worked on many years ago at the board of education when we examined the list of surplus property from the school district and started to look at what are ways that we could utilize district district property in a way that benefits the school district. we had a achievement a couple of months ago. i know the commissioners worked on a resolution which included a swap with the city and county of san francisco to build affordable housing on 1950 mission as well as 1101 connecticut. am i getting that address correct? for sf hope strategy in exchange for the parking lot site on 555 franklin and the school district can develop and has a lease for as well so this is an overall strategy around surplus property to learn a little more about t the mayor of san francisco has

made a commitment to see what we could do on the city's end and how we strategize our surplus property as well and we david golden from the school district here today and i would like to open up the presentation to him. welcome. >> good afternoon commissioners and supervisors. actually i'm impressed how i draw audiences these days so clearly the word was out that i was speaking today. so this is not the first time that the school district has certainly talked about surplus property. two or three grand juries later, a whole lot of school board presentations, a lot of public interest and comment over the eight or nine

years that i have served as the chief facility officer for the district and we have been working diligently on this issue and other property related issues for a long time, and i want to walk you sort of where we are and what we're up to. i think we've had a particularly successful last one or two years after 25 years of general inaction so i think things are finally coming together for a fairly successful strategy. one of the things you should know is the district has a very active real estate working group which is comprised of deputy superintendent lee, chris armtrout, our general counsel, don davis, myself and our business officer joe grasoy and

we meet every week and discuss issues of real property and transactions so there is a continued on going presence regarding leveraging surplus property, generating revenue for the district and trying to make the best possible business decisions we can for some of the finest -- actually property portfolio in san francisco. so to go to the first slide, and i don't know if he's going to call it up on the tv screen, on the projector. can you do that? >> [inaudible] >> okay. so san francisco for those of you that are not familiar -- i know supervisor kim certainly is very familiar. we have over 155 of the finest real estate in our portfolio in san francisco. over 9 million square feet, thousands of

classrooms. once upon a time we served over 90,000 students and today we serve about 55,000 but the number of programs and things going on in our schools has expanded exponentially. there is a perception in the community and in the city that we have lots and lots of empty buildings, and the reality is that's simply not true. currently there are only three sites with structures that are vacant and not in use. 200 middle point road, 1950 mission and the former site on 42nd avenue. we only own two sites with no buildings on it, seventh and loton and on connecticut so

part of the message that the school district is trying to get out to the community, particularly for instance from charter schools who think we have an abundance of empty buildings we actually have vibrant school communities in the buildings and even if the population of those schools is lower we have expanding special needs, expanding child care, we have pre-k and programs filling up these classrooms. for those of you that ausknow the education code makes it hard to sell school property and that's on proper because in the 50's and the 60's school boards popped up and we can have a fire sale and raise money and send it on whatever we want and no one knew what happened and those people were voted out of

office so the education code changed the way you can sell property. they make you go through an incredibly elaborate process to identify surplus to have a committee hear that, to go to the community and hear public comment and have the school board declare what is surplus and what is not and there are defined and difficult steps that one has to go through to finally dispense with a piece of property. in the end that is because our land is actually the heritage of the school district. it's our trust with the students of san francisco and we have no way of knowing 10 years from now whether we will need new schools, whether we need less schools, whether there will be more or fewer children so this is our legacy that we need to

pass from generation to generation and be extremely careful how we leverage it and sell it and to that end fundamentally for the most part the district has developed a over riding strategy better to make long-term ground lease business transactions on our property, retain the ownership of our property, generate long-term and regular revenue that can hit the general fund rather than sell a piece of property, generate one time dollars, and then have no longer that asset in our portfolio, and you will see as we go on that's been our general policy and there have been a couple of specific exceptions to the policy because of other over riding concerns. okay. if you look at the properties that we lease we lease about 11

properties and we generate almost $6 million in revenue a year. all of that revenue can hit the general fund -- excuse me, hire teachers, buy books, do whatever the district would like. the total revenue about 5.9 million and that counts the two and a half million coming online this year with the acquisition of 1235 mission where the city's health and human service department is which is a building that we took ownership this year generates almost $6 million. we take in another 1.3 for short time permits and the district is generating over $7 million a year just from the properties and the three biggest you can see are 1235 mission, 1440 harrison, also leased to the city and the fifth and market property which is where nordstroms is. okay. in may

of 2007 the board of education asked that we convene a surplus property commission that went through all of its steps, and -- i apologize, about six months prior, and in may the board of education declared certain properties actually as surplus at that time, and gave certain flexibility of up to 20% of the district property in its aggregate so every time we identified a surplus property in the future we didn't need to reconvene the entire committee all over again. okay. so these are the 10 properties that originally showed up on the list and let's see what's happens to those properties in the last six years so the former pacific heights new cominger high school building at jackson which at

one point in time there were people that saw it as a potential housing site was reopened as the sf montessori elementary school. it's now no longer considered sush plus. the bond program has spent a lot of money renovating that building as a classroom building. the childrens' center on cook street is occupied by our early learning staff and they are exploding and moving to another building in the bay view so that is an expanding enterprise and no longer surplus and this next one is occupied by the creative chart hart and the gateway middle school and that site is no longer considered surplus. the former florence martin cdc on 1155 page in cooperation with a long-term

strategy working with at that time supervisor mirkarimi and others to produce some additional child care in that neighborhood was leaseod a long-term lease to a french american school. they have demolished the existing building there and they're building a new early learning center on that site and that property is no longer considered surplus. 700 font boulevard you can see in the photograph the school is gone. one day san francisco state may choose to build a classroom on that site. the district sold the site for 11. $1 million to san francisco state. it was sort of one of the last transactions or last events of the out going president of the san francisco state and carlos

garcia as he was ending his term as superintendent. these next two properties on mission and connecticut as supervisor kim pointed out are part of a three party transaction with the mayor's office of housing spear spearheaded by commissioner fewer and commissioner mendoza and will trade the mission site for a affordable housing site and on connecticut for another project in turn for parcel e and where the superintendent is and finally the last parcel was 1340 bush. i was never sure why this one was on the list but it's essentially the play ground for redding elementary school and we lease the garage and generate

$100,000 from the parking garage so if you look at what's left i want to give you some sort of -- a brief glimpse of what we're looking at now, what we think is in our portfolio so what is left we have the hunter view park, and the former bee site at 200 middle point road. it's a vacant building and we can make that part of the redevelopment going on and not just for malcolm x but for sf hope above and we are in conversations with them trying to make something happen. i think the staff agrees that this isn't a property we are concerned about leveraging for revenue but for the good of the community at large. the former

principal center school and actually the former francis scott key on 42nd avenue is kind of a bad tooth in a neighborhood that is not getting -- the neighborhood is getting better and the property is actually getting worse so this is where the principal's union currently has its office. we moved the principal school out to a real building because we didn't feel students should be in a site like that and we have no desire to put money into that building so the goal is leverage that site -- the highest and best use according to a financial analysis for housing. obviously it could be a small school site if we chose to do that. there are private schools in the area that see it as a place to build a play ground or athletic field

and no decisions have been made but that is clearly on our portfolio list and there is a high desire from t supervisor of the district and from neighbors that see it as blight in the neighborhood and i don't blame them and you see a photo here and it's intensely built up around it mostly single family homes and duplexes and there's our property right in the middle. moving on to number three obviously seventh and loton which is currently open space. we know there are people in the neighborhood who will fight to the death to keep it open space. we also know in talking to many people in the city that it's actually a prime site for housing right beneath the met center, right in a

place where good things could happen. it could take fairly dense housing and still maintain some open space as well. the city under the surplus property act also has the right to take it as a public park at fair market value. we had decision wts city and so far they're not interested in adding another park site so the options are many. we have conversations around some that would like this to be the edible school yard like the one in berkeley. we've had conversations with some of our tech partners like zinga about creating a farmville universe at this place because of the open land so there's lots of ideas ranging from crazy to real and right now we know it's empty and we sell christmas

trees and pumpkins, so and by the way there is a deed restriction on this property. when the city gave us this piece of land in exchange for some other things and commissioner wynns knows i know when that was about 15 years ago the deed restriction limits this property to development for uses for educational purposes, so for anything else to happen we would have to be working with the city to lift the deed restriction. and that gives you a aerial photo of the lot at seventh and loton. if you go forward if we successful make the property exchange with mo for the three parcels i described we will actually own a really large parcel at the heart of civic

center both on mccallister and franklin and now the parking lot. it would be great if we were able to purchase the site that was a boys and girls club. that wasn't an option for us. we know that lot has very high value, both as a parcel -- [inaudible] should we want to at some point in time tear everything down and build a new, and we also know that the lot behind 555 franklin has several potential key uses and one is to maintain parking either grade below or on grade and build, up to eight stories which theoretically if we were to construct the school of the arts on 135 van ness we need a new home for the business finance budget prop h offices. we

could build an ad min center above. we could also do that plus three floors of housing, and we could strictly do housing so i think there's a wide range of options there and i think there are a lot of people, developers and others in the city that would be incredibly interested down the road in partnering with us making something happen at that site, and all of this is just sort of coming about now as we're sort of acquiring -- hoping to acquire the land and that transaction has yet to be scheduled for action by the board of supervisors but we hope it comes to you soon and finally one other parcel that i think has some serious potential is if we look at moving the school of the arts to 135 van ness we're looking to carve out the 170

fell lot as a building that is prohibitively expense testify remodel as a school but might be attractive to the members of ballet or the conservatory or the jazz community as student housing or housing for visiting guests artists or for that matter use on floors one, two, three on fell we could sell the air rights there for a housing development so i think there are a number of options available for us there that weren't sort of part of our collective thinking a year or two ago, and new ways at looking land have kind of broadened our horizons, and that's the decision i think that we probably shouldn't make until we determine we're ready to move the school and we have set in stone exactly what the

premise of that project is. okay. so that kind of concludes where i am -- where we are with surplus property. i think it's probably not as exciting as the grand jury when they keep sending me stuff expects to find, but we're awake and working on it, and the days are over where we're not taking our properties and the value and revenue that we could generate from it seriously so with they will conclude and be happy to answer any questions. >> thank you mr. golden. thank you for the comprehensive presentation. it's good to get a relook -- at least from my perspective i know the board of education has probably seen this many times but to see where we have come from over the 12 years with surplus property. i have a couple of questions and then i will open it up for comments and questions from the rest