the seattle disaster recovery plan, which provides the framework for how the city recovers and rebuilds from disasters, and so we are happy to have you here to learn about that process. and finally my colleague, brian strong is responsible for the ten-year capital plan, it's capital budget and the implementation resilient s.f. plan, thank you, including the earthquake safety and emergency response bond program, the nation's first sea level guidelines, and the first building by building has the seismic assessments. so, brian is going to be here to facilitate and kick us off. [applause] >> thank you, everyone. thanks so much for being here. we really appreciate it. and i'm excited to be facilitating this panel, and

again, i think if there are questions and so forth that pop up, you want to write things down on cards, you are welcome to. but i just wanted to sort of start things off with a little bit of, let me see if this works, ok, it does. all right. a little bit of background here, let me see, that looks like -- where are we with the presentation here. framework -- there we go. all right. so, i think there was some questions already in the first panel about recovery and what do we do about all the different aspects, interdependency, the communities and those folks, this diagram here which was sort of put together, i think may have come out of fema but i think lori has as well, shows what recovery looks like.

we have the different cycles around immediate response, then the midterm and the long-term response and mary ellen and i have had lots of discussions about when does, how do you coordinate your response with your recovery. reality is this longish one, the long low oval that comes over is the recovery process, and this comes from our, not only our experience, you know, with the 2006 earthquake and the 1989 earthquake, but a lot of the other hazards around the world. recovery, if you want it to be effective, needs to start immediately. the response effective, and recovery immediately, and as you begin to recover, you address the response, you'll see the recovery activities pick up more and more but can be there for as long as 5, 10, you know, still seeing recovery activities in new orleans after katrina now 10, 15 years later. so, that's part of the trajectory there, one thing to

keep in mind is that we know the early decisions you make in your response or in recovery have a big impact on the decision later on and i think sean can talk to some of those impacts for what they faced in santa rosa. the other thing is the decisions you make in the community, and i want to emphasize we have talked about building owners, also lots of people that live in the downtowns, as professor deerline mentioned. these are residential places and next to residential communities like chinatown here, or if we talk about mission bay, or soma, central soma, a lot of residents living, and what are the impacts on them and how you incorporate community input and feedback into the process. and then we also know what's critical is the speedier you address the recovery, implement the changes, the faster you are able to get back to normalcy, that economics are able to

recover and so forth. and some of the examples, you know, in northern california, always criticized a little bit, took us after the loma krieta, it took time to replace the freeway, it took us some time to think about and make the decisions. whereas in los angeles when they had the northridge earthquake and the freeway went down, they made that decision almost immediately. i think with in a couple days that they were going to replace it as is, and that freeway was reconstructed extremely quickly. again, those are different approaches. worked well to have it constructed quickly. i think in san francisco it was really important for us to take our time and make sure we got it right. not to say one way is better than the other way, but those are the implications that you have. just wanted to, again, we do have some folks from fema here as well. i know forest landing is in the

audience. somewhere around here, so, oh, there he is, right here in the middle with the knee brace. easy to find. you may have to come to him. and fema has been doing a lot of work in this area, they put together the national disaster recovery framework, it's a guiding document for jurisdictions across the country. describes roles and responsibilities and coordination, and it's organized around recovery support function. we have been looking at these recovery support functions and barb from seattle will talk more about these and about their plan, but that's really what we built upon. we really look to seattle, a lot of discussion, couldn't we just take seattle's plan, and wherever it says seattle, cross it out and write san francisco. that was not appropriate, we are mot going there, naomi, but something that we were thinking

about. seattle has a lot of rules and regulations, and we are a city with a lot of commissions, we have a lot of different for the, and planning commission here, the idea of creating a framework where a decision making can happen separate from the regular decision making is something that we would, it would take a lot of time, potentially a charter amendment, that's something that we in san francisco would need to think about a lot, we want to get going on this. this is the outline for recovery task force, nothing is in place yet, but this is what we are talking about for san francisco and the idea that the top -- you have the community, you have the community members, the city manager, city administrator in our case, head of emergency management are making a lot of the early decisions and then the recovery support functions, we have elected officials, and then we have a lot of the folks here today in the community

organizations, business organizations, private sector, and then the support functions are laid out in the bottom around these different areas that need to be coordinated for us to have an effective response, and that includes community, coordination and capacity, economic recovery, one of the things we note is we are expecting probably 14, $15 billion in damage just from a 7.0 earthquake. and would happen closer to san francisco, economic impacts are significant. health and social services, and housing, we are a housing shortage now, how do we manage the losing of more housing. infrastructure, talked about it with lifelines. cultural resources, we know the cultural resources like the schools are so important to keep people in san francisco, for them to come back and some of

the building and land use decisions we need to make. mary ellen mentioned climate change and do we want to continue to build, subject to sea level rise and so forth. finally the last part of this that we are emphasizing out of of the report was take a look at san francisco downtown. we know it's unique, we know it's different than other parts of the city. we know it plays a critical economic role, not only in the city but in the region and the country, quite frankly, and how can we, how can we do some more work to take this recovery framework and test it out in downtown. so we are going to leverage a lot of the existing work we have. we are looking at some of the recommendations out of this report. we have our life lines analysis work, we have the ten-year capital plan, looking forward, and how can we put some of that information, the economic analysis we have together to

formulate a recovery plan for downtown that we can actually use, we think, as the basis for looking at recovery across the entire city, and then i should also mention, you know, probably come up in the s.a.p. borp conversation as well, how do we test these things to make sure we are ready when the event happens. so, having said that, i can get to our panel to sort of fill in a lot of the gaps that i covered. and one person i wanted to start with was barb graph from seattle and have her talk about their plan and the challenges they face and how they overcame them. and barb, your plan is pretty thick. there's a lot of really good information in it. i know it must have taken some time to put together. >> thanks, brian, appreciate it. so, san francisco has a 72% chance of a major earthquake in 30 years, right? ours is 86% chance in 50 years, so i think mary ellen and i ought to start a betting pool

and whoever wins, pays the mitigation of the other city. how does that work for you? we started our recovery planning work about 4, 5 years ago, and this was a double phase multi-year effort, and mary ellen mentioned in her comments earlier in the first panel, and we spend so much of our time and energy and resource trying to refine and improve our response we never get around to doing recovery planning so i complained a lot about that to the city council who believed me, it helped a lot that christchurch, new zealand happens to be a sister city of seattle and one of the best investments we ever made was to send two of our city council members to christchurch and they came back and said so, how is that for you? and funding started to show up, and council was interested in briefings and we made our way along. it was also relatively the same

time period that the federal government was coming out with its national recovery framework, so we decided since a big share of assistance needs to flow through the partnership that is the federal government, this big government, the county and city, we would like to mimic what it was that the federal government had put in place. i think they put some really good time and energy and planning into that. but we did recognize a couple things that happened at the local level that does not happen at the federal lost so we amended just a little bit. brian talked about the recovery function as being major categories of infrastructure and housing, etc. seattle added education to the recovery support function three, because unless you get the schools reopened, it's a major domino to getting people back to work, and just a sense of normalcy again, as well as a place of safety for the kids in your community. we also added a recovery support

function seven, there are six at the federal level, and that has to do with buildings and land use planning. again, something that does not happen at the federal level dictated at the local level, very important to us, especially because we wanted to take advantage of any opportunity that we get to improve things. when we put our recovery plan together, we imagined what if this is a relatively simple, straightforward recovery process. which really mimicked what we experienced in 2001 with another earthquake. for the most part, we just needed to repair, restore, re-everything. we did not do much reinvention, but recognized the fact because of the three different types of earthquakes that we faced, including possibly the biggest this country will ever see, with the abduction zone, used the recovery framework that takes advantage of the opportunity to

just change mary things that there will never be the emotion or the resource to do until that time period. so we kicked this off with about four different dozen types of agencies, neighborhood groups, the urban league, boma, downtown chamber, etc., and looked back to the past to inspire us about the future. so, seattle like san francisco had a big fire in the late 1800s, burned through the timber downtown, and built back one reinforced masonry, but nothing is going to burn down there. the other thing that the city founding fathers did at the time, which is really interesting for the time, only about 45,000 people lived in seattle at the time, they built back the water system to serve a million people. it was an opportunity -- there's no way in the world any one would have funded that in that time period unless what they had just gone through was painful

enough to make the lesson deep. we engaged in a series of different community conversations and once we put people in that mind frame, the thing i gave them, if you had the opportunity to move i-5, it's never going to happen unless after the biggest possible earthquake. about but is the port of seattle in the right place, or a half mile or a quarter mile way away. so, how can we repair, restore, reopen quickly but also reinvent if need be, and had a series of community conversations just like today, which i'm thrilled to be a part of, where we asked people to debate and discuss with one another, also made sure people did not pay attention to only those areas where they were the obvious subject matter expert, and wound up getting some of the best ideas from people who noodled around the idea in what we called the gallery walk, an exercise you

will be participating later today. that's what we did with the recovery framework. great recovery framework has not been used yet, but we learn from every single disaster. in the creation of this, we learned from hurricanes irene and katrina from superstorm sandy, from the earthquakes in new zealand, chile and japan, and we will continue to learn and refine because framework is never actually done. >> thanks, barb, i know we are excited for sean to be able to come here from santa rosa, because of the devastating fires that happened there, and one of the strongest memories i have was getting up there, sean, and meeting you and learning, i think you sat down with us and said well, apparently i'm the recovery manager. i have authority. and i think you had to wait for

the city attorney to weigh in on that, like we do with a lots of the decisions here, but tell us a little about that, and your experiences and share. >> so, the number i'm going to start with is 3,000, because it becomes the essential part of our question and recovery process. you heard it was -- it's over 2800, it was 3,000 residencies destroyed. we already had as most people in the bay area have, a housing crisis. we had a vacancy rate of 2%. so if you have 3,000 homeowners or landlords displaced in one catastrophic event, and it was a lunar landscape you encountered out there in those neighborhoods, you've got a major problem. we tried to lean into that conversation as quickly as we could, and that became our touch

stone, how are we going to solve this issue, and if you are dealing with a lunar landscape you've got to clear the debris first and foremost. but we also started to ask questions about how we were structured, that's the reference brian is talking to. i had the great opportunity to actually work with lori during those initial months of the recovery process and we also asked the question as it relates to how do we fit into the disaster recovery framework. what we lost in that fire was planned developments, single-family homes for the most part. there was some other damages, there was a manufactured home park, but most of our losses were single-family homes. the question is, what kind of visioning exercise are you going to go through. very quickly we understood the

visioning exercise was about getting people, in that part of the community, about getting people back in their homes as quickly as we possibly could. providing the pathway. we started to understand most of those folks were insured. whether they are insured enough is a slightly different conversation, and we partnered with our friends at policy holders united to try to help those folks understand the gap in their insurance. but our visioning exercise was pointing toward our downtown core. and these are questions you are constantly asking, how you fit into the recovery framework, how you adapt to it. you want to do a visioning exercise but you want to do the right one. we had 3,000 single homeowners, most, remember, only 1% have developed a property from scratch. they have no experience.

they bought into a planned community. and we had to start visioning to understand that. so we restructured in a way to meet our need, which is what brian said, we added work load, or correctly, i added work load to existing staff. the county went out to hire staff to do additional work. i knew if i was competing against the county to hire staff and environment where there isn't housing, there is already diminished resources, that was not going to meet our needs immediately. so, we took the consultant route. we went out and we actually hired firms to help us in this process. and one of the early decisions council made was to help advance and make a bet on those single-family home recovery by investing in a firm to stand up in months after the fires, stand up an office that was solely

dedicated, completely staffed by consultants, we managed the contract, helping those folks in recovery. i will tell you those first two months were tough because only thing that was happening is people were coming in to get advice. they were not starting the permitting process, banking on permits to fund this, but that was a really important part of this conversation. creating space for these folks to have a conversation and actually understand what their options are, and how to move forward. at the same time, we are meeting with the developer community and saying how do we clear the pathway for this, and we are going through at the time, the largest single debris mission in the history of the state of california. we knew we couldn't move until we got the debris issue solved and thanks from our colleagues at fema and the incredible work of the army corps, six months

later almost 90% done with debris removal and really into the permitting process. so, remember that 3,000 number, right now two-thirds of those properties are in the permitting process. over 400 are reconstructed. we are able by focusings on downtown to get a grant from the metropolitan transportation commission to ask the visioning questions around downtown. we are probably not going to go up, you know, 25 stories, but we are looking at between 15 and 20 in the downtown area, they really change the footprint, that's how we will meet the long-term housing need. but again, it's asking those specific questions about your circumstance, your structure, your economic environment to try to find the solutions that best fit your community. right now -- it's a challenge for all of us. it's especially challenging for

mid size and smaller cities. capacity issues exist, experience levels exist, and i'm working with the institute of local government to try to develop some guide posts or cheat sheets to help think about these issues. love my friends at fema, but they are not subject matter experts in management. and that's often the biggest gap that i find when we run into these issues is they can help you on recovery, but they are going to turn around and ask you the essential questions, what would we do if you weren't here and i think what they are saying, what's your management approach to this problem and you have to think through those things, because as was said earlier, those decisions you make early on are going to impact recovery and they are going to impact how you go about things. so, we had a commitment to rebuild. now we are facing issues where we are going to have to update ordinances to allow

construction. some neighbors are complaining the streetlights are not back in. but that was the choice. we will help you rebuild first and our infrastructure second. we still have the community conversations and the first, the first six months we had over 150 public meetings. we are now at a space where we are trying to build resiliency with neighborhoods. partnered with your team down here in the neighborhood and power network to begin the process. every saturday we are having a meeting with a neighborhood, asset mapping around resilience, and then we are trying to get them enrolled in our alert and warning systems. the thing i'll leave you with is, you know, we just completed our after action report on response two months ago. and i will tell you, that's a choice, right? you have choices about what you are going to address. we got a little lucky because

the county did theirs first, which gave us breathing space. by not having to tackle some of those things early on, it actually gave us something to report about all the successes we achieved instead of just having a laundry list of deficiencies, and, but that's not the usual course of action. some people go right for the after action, but that's why i'm trying to say those decisions and where your focus point is going to be are the critical parts on the recovery train and understanding your community, understanding the economic, and having the benefit of having some advice from people like lori really helps, too. >> all right. thank you, sean. [applause] >> really tremendous stories there. passing it on to lori, i think lori and by the way, she won't plug her book but i will, it's up here, and shooting to the top of the "new york times" best

seller after today. but lori and the book, she looks at disasters all over the world, we know we can learn a lot from japan and some other countries, one of the things i noticed the emphasis on process over thinking about recovery as a process as opposed to accomplishment. i guess that's something i would want you to touch upon, too. you know, do we ever know when we -- is recovery ever done after a big event? pass it to you. >> interesting. interesting place to start. at the end. what eventually happens is kind of where new orleans is now, where the landscape looks like it did in terms of activity, like it did before the disaster hit. so, always still going to have the problem areas, the areas with blight or the areas that need some regeneration or redevelopment attention, and

that's kind of where you get to with recovery in most cases, the easiest stuff gets done first and the harder takes longer, and some becomes part of normal planning processes again. but in that immediate aftermath, you know, what is -- i'll first share a few things that are theory about disaster recovery. the first thing is a disaster basically creates a simultaneous loss of capital stock and services. and so what that does is it really changes urban development activities frshgs that moment in time, everything is sort of compressed. you have to make a bunch of decisions, do a bunch of plans for different systems. you'll interconnected, you need lots of money, it's not coming at the right time, so we called it time compression, disasters from the standpoint of urban development and normal you are

bant development and management, the place of disaster becomes different from the normal place in that special way. and so really the challenge for disaster recovery management is to figure out how to manage that time compression, and we feel there are four levers for doing that. the first is, obviously, money. and when that money comes, how it comes, how it gets used and purpose is really important. the second is information. because what really is happening is just a tremendous amount of uncertainty that all of that simultaneous decision making, planning and acting requires, and so the more information that you can provide is kind of like another fuel for the process. and the third is basically collaboration. recovery is very different from response in that you response can be command and control, traditional approach to taking

action. people are willing to suspend governance and allow for the control, but for long-term recovery in a catastrophic event, you have stakeholders, and all sorts of actors like being a symphony duct tor-- director, how to play the very diverse orchestra, and the same way with the stakeholders. so now put it in the context of downtown san francisco. we are going to have a good amount of money because these are fairly well insured buildings, at least the new ones, but also lots of places where there isn't money, or the money is coming from the federal government or, in terms of reimbursement for utilities and things like that, and it's going to take time. the second is information, and that really is going to be informed by the kinds of plans

and thinking we do now and the a.c.t. study has raised some amazing points for the city to consider in putting together some of the requirements or repair standards for different building building types, for building about issues, like whether or not we would have to cordon off a part of the downtown. i love greg's and the study, it shows one tall building and has the huge area around it. that's what happens in christchurch, new zealand, is really, and i think there's an important story there, so i'm going to digress a little bit to tell the christchurch story and come back to my comments about planning. the cordon went up in christchurch after the second major earthquake, and part of the reason the cordon went up is because some of the buildings that were heavily damaged and injured people in the second earthquake had been inspected through the safety assessment

program after the first earthquake and deemed to be ok and occupyable. so that was a traumatic risk management decision, that then played out with 185 lives lost in the downtown area, so the cordon went up in large part because of the uncertainty that was created in that moment of not expecting to have such a large aftershock. not expecting buildings that had been inspected to be unsafe and have collapsed. and the fear these things would happen again and not knowing if it would happen like in the next ten minutes or when. so imagine, if we don't take those steps, now, to begin to think about resilience and retrofitting and the work that we are doing in san francisco, imagine the uncertainty around certain kinds of buildings that we are going to have after an event, and if we are surprised by that. the fear that is going to be

induced to protect public safety. so the cordon in the central business district lasted over two years, and it was essentially the size of downtown oakland. so if you can imagine all of downtown oakland from lake merit to 980, and 880, to i don't know, broadway, i guess 580 almost, that was the initial size of the cordon. and it was eventually shrunk over time so the whole area, people were allowed access, but what that did was it created tremendous uncertainty for building owners. people had insurance and had money, they didn't really know when the cordon was going to be lifted, they didn't know what the repair standards were going to be for the recovery, and they, many people with insurance companies began to have those conversations around should they wait, should they hold that money and wait, did the

insurance companies want to hold the money and pay you once you finally got your repair standards. so a lot of buildings made decisions to tear their buildings down, they felt the standards would be costly, a lot of uncertainty in terms of timing and they could do other things as developers for two years, and many of the buildings were older and no longer attractive in terms of the market. these were not class a buildings for rental anymore. and so this was an opportunity which these kinds of situations create, barb's point, the damage will in part inform the opportunity for transformation. so, without having thought all that through, a lot of the decisions started to happen of people tearing down buildings. so, a lot of buildings were torn down and repairable as well, and we don't have good data on that,

and looking at jack and greg and others, but christchurch in terms of study, could we have done a better job understanding what buildings that were torn down that could have been repaired. so do we want a large massive urban redevelopment project or want to actually replace largely like for like. that goes back to barb's point, or your point about the freeways, in northridge, replaced like for like, and in san francisco we changed any kind of change in disaster essentially as the exponential amount of time if it's not well thought through and planned, it requires information to do that kind of decision making, and then you'll get challenged again and again like you did with the central freeway and flip back and forth in some cases on your decision. so, with that i want to kind of close with what i think is important about planning, which

is written by the first people who studied lots of disasters around the world and said when disasters strike, there is already a plan for reconstruction in the mind of every affected resident. plan of the predisaster city. this is the first recovery plan and all previous plans or new plans made following the disaster will undoubtedly compete for many residents with that first plan, over times intensely. so i commend the city for undertaking this effort, because it's really important to get this stuff right. i also want to caution for everyone, though, the kind of stuff that barb is talking about and the national disaster recovery framework outlines, operational plan, set the rules of engagement but won't be a physical plan, per se. it's not a plan that will decide right now what's going to get torn down, what's going to stay. but hopely will allow us to set up the rules of engagement, how will we actually make those

decisions, how will we transform from the amazing recovery, i mean, response structure that the city has, by the way, took one step after hurricane katrina and expanded the response plan to be a response and restoration plan, so it's getting us a little further down the line in terms of carrying us over, but the awkward transition happens between the response structure and a recovery structure. so that needs to be thought through, the framework will allow us to do, and the tougher decisions. and in terms of downtown, besides the cordon, major issues it's not just about businesses, it's about people living down there, and also about very old infrastructure and i think we have to look at the earthquake, or a major event that has a lot of ground failure conditions potentially with it as being not just an opportunity to transform

infrastructure, but essentially a requirement. we are not going to put back that really old horrible stuff that we have that's undercapacity for the needs of today's financial districts. so, that is a big part of what we have to be thinking about now. >> thank you. yeah, no, thank you, lori, that's great. [applause] >> a lot of food for thought there, for sure. and i think instead of touching on what you ended with there, which is in many ways talking about some of these equity issues and addressing planning and a question about that as well, what are we doing in these plans to include residents and local nonprofits, community organizations, those types of people, many who are not even in our downtown but are coming from various parts, it could be in the bay area, we know it's a regional issue, and also coming from other parts of san francisco that really depend on

downtown for their livelihood. for their jobs. i would like to get some comments on that, and especially, barb, i know we looked at seattle's plan and the number of community engagements, partners in the plan, four pages worth of community organizations. how do you bring community into the process, i think as far as developing the plans, but also in the implementation afterwards? >> first i should say our recovery framework and as lori mentioned it's a framework, we can't detail until we know what the damage is and what has survived. so it's on the web page under plans, you can find it and improve it by sending me your suggestions once you have read the pages, as a matter of fact. we teach over 250 personal preparedness programs to more than 10,000 people every single year, and before we started our

recovery planning, we asked the public outreach staff to start asking the question everywhere they taught, whether talking to big business or the smallest neighborhood or the non-profit. so, once the earthquake is over, what do you imagine your personal role is going to be in recovering? and people usually start with their own personal story, everything starts with stories. but then it became a matter of so how do you get the food bank back open again. how much glass do you expect there to be in the streets on your way to your high rise office, etc. so we started planting the seed early with everyone we talked to. and then the invitation list who we wanted involved in the community conversations, every single person that accepted the invitation, we want great, will you, and we had dozens and dozens of them, give us three other names of people we may not have thought to invite, helped us expand beyond the people we already knew and we had a pretty

good network. the other thing about our particular framework in terms of structure is that if you walk outside city hall right now and let your eyes scan the distance, recovery is not all about publicly owned buildings. it's, critical public buildings, but 75%, 85% of your recovery as we learned from santa rosa is about restoring homes and businesses and other types of infrastructure. so we have agreed for the recovery support functions, those are going to be co-chaired by a member of city government and someone chosen from the community and appointed by the mayor. response is how do you use the resources you own and do the most people for the most, etc., but about rebuilding and reenvisioning community so we need to keep people engaged. and the other thing, the power of story. we invited the christchurch

mayor to our community, public open forum shortly after their second earthquake and let him tell his stories, very engaging person. majored in theater. i think he majored theater because he went into politics. he did a fabulous job of telling the story of what it was like to make tough policy decisions, get people involved, prioritize need, etc. and two years ago we brought back the current mayor of christchurch to say now these many years later, what else are you thinking of and what are you dealing with. people tell their stories, people get it. when they read a document, they might understand. they scratch the surface. personal story makes all the difference. >> yeah, great. and sean may talk about the community input after the event as well. and i know you -- >> ongoing conversation that we are having with the community, we as i said, we are starting

these resiliency exercises in the neighborhood but a long way to go, there's 1,000 -- if you listen carefully, there's 1,000 properties that have not begun the permitting process. and we have to better understand why, what their challenges are, and a lot of them are caught in the -- the, they have insurance but are caught in the cost of rebuilding in the particular type of environment that we have in the bay area. and we are trying to manage through that and better understand how to help them to fill the gap. that is a complicated conversation as lori was saying. timing on when funding flows, what criteria is attached to that funding. we did a cal home program that we kind of knew was not going to be successful, we had to do it so we could demonstrate to the state and the federal government that the criteria that you've attached to our rebuilding

efforts is not going to work in this particular environment. but you have to have the proof to do that, and then conversations with homeowners who are in a great deal of pain about why this process inflicts it on themselves in this particular way. and so we are continuing to have that, we are going through some of the same efforts about how we build our own recovery framework, like fires is one of our disasters, it's a whole series of things we all know in this area. we are changing how we have that conversation with community members and again, it's about, lori says, it's about empowering those folks to have a say and how do they get to shape the future of their community and the future decisions you are going to have, and that's one of the most difficult things that i find as i go and visit other communities in recovery, is

letting go of that power and that decision making. it's a really, really tough thing for subject matter experts to do. and i will say we learned, we had a critical event that happened a month after our fire where we started to experience water contamination, and our team wanted to solve that issue ourselves, and only when we were able to invite the community in and really listen to their potential solutions that it turned from a second disaster and actually into a real community building opportunity for us. i -- i can't say enough, that really changed how we were able to approach problems working with the community because we were, we are running towards a cliff if we kept on our pathway without that community involvement and input. >> yeah, and i should say, i know daniel holmes, he was

around here probably taking pictures for me, a great partner in san francisco and thinking about our neighborhood empowerment network and has worked with various communities around the bay area and around the country, and so forth. and thinking about also our alert programs, and the importance this they've, too, in identifying the different roles that those organizations play and i think the difference between again a residential neighborhood and a downtown neighborhood and how are your commercial property owners, you know, working with the residents that may be right across the street, or may be in the same building as a matter of fact, and do you have floor champions as opposed to block champions and those types of things. lori, you want to add anything about the issue of bringing community in? >> i would add that i was at a meeting yesterday sponsored by enterprise community, national

non-profit housing developer and many other things, simple way to describe them. and they had a number of residents from sonoma county who were there, who are still very traumatized by what happened to them, not just because of the fires and what happened, but because of the recovery and the response and the way in which they were treated. and i think this really kind of goes to the flaws in our national recovery policy, to so speak. i like to say, we have an in-depth -- we passed the disaster recovery reform act, but in terms of the premise of our policy, i like to equate it to the really the first law passed back in the 1970s, sort of written with the idea that everybody has insurance and we

live in suburban florida, and a hurricane is going to hit. and we are going to build back sort of like santa rosa, build back essentially what we had. so, it does not really accommodate renters very well. it does not really accommodate complex, what i call land tenure arrangements which we have in downtown. so, condominiums, cooperatives, commercial, you know, structures that have residential uses and hotels and businesses all in one, mixed use activities, and just the density of -- of urban existence, you know. it really provides the small amounts that sort of, for individual assistance, like filling your deductible on your insurance policy and then provides for public assistance assuming that local governments also have some form of insurance. and so when you don't have insurance, then you basically

have a big gap and so then there is, you know, what santa rosa is still going through, which is lobbying congress and the state and others for forms of assistance. and those take time. like we have seen, with this one, and so you know, people do get traumatized and one of the ways very simply, traumatized by what i call the second disaster, i call recovery and the way we treat people and the simplest way to say that, i think our policy really is focussed on assets, and not on people and well-being. and, and until we begin to kind of think more in that context, and i love the term well-being, which is really a very developed term in new zealand, they tracked it, they tracked dimensions of well-being, psycho social health, access to jobs, your family life, all sorts of things in the recovery. i won't say their policy was really that different, but at least they were tracking it.

so instead of just counting buildings, we really need to count lives and lives restored and that's a different framework than what we have right now. >> i would just like to follow up on what lori said. that is, you know, i'm spending way too much time in d.c. and sacramento and often fema can cover their ears, it's actually the state is talking to fema and they actually are not talking to us. so that's one of the biggest gaps in the system, it's not geared to solving individuals. so i'll give you an concrete example. literally in d.c. arguing for extension of benefits as the benefits expire for renters, and we all know renters are much more vulnerable population. fema extended the benefits for three months for homeowners. one month for renters. that is one of the issues that

you are wrestling through, and i want to heighten that conversation i had earlier about setting up the secondary planning department which was just focussed on it. literally, those two months, for those homeowners, was coming in and having a therapy session with staff. that's literally what's going on in those first two months. no one is pulling a permit. they are going through therapy because there is no support mechanism and that's one of the things, as lori points out, we are still wrestling with, the anxiety, the fear, and the real inability to address individuals, and that's what we have tried to do in our organization is always ask that question of putting ourselves in the place of those individuals going through that process. you don't know how many times i have heard why are we arguing, literally, about ten households. that's the conversations,

unfortunately, you end up in these situations because while it's geared toward the local, it's your responsibility and there's a real gap in how the system meets local need and addresses individuals, and especially the most vulnerable individuals who are our residents. >> right. great, this has been a great conversation. i think we could continue to have this for another hour or so, but we need to wrap it up. i wanted to recognize, you know, we also have a number of private companies here, sales force, apple is here, representatives and so forth, and i hope we are thinking about your employees, you know, as well and i know you are doing work around how you address their psychological well-being of them as well as the people in the neighborhoods. barb, i don't know if you want to throw, have the last word on advice for us, or for people in the private sector in these areas. >> just that planning never

stops. we would be very honored for you to take whatever concepts you can. we took concepts from others as well. like i said, we studied sandy and katrina and the earthquakes in new zealand, chile and japan. also hired subject matter experts. so one of our subcontractors was dr. gavin smith, who in katrina was the mississippi governor's recovery czar, so learned it through personal experience and executive director of a close to resilience center. so, learning as much as you possibly can and then what you commit to the page is not sacred. we have made mistakes and bad assumptions and we always need to amend them and it's a framework is not a contract. it was your best thoughts on that particular day. so, forgive yourselves and get better every day. >> all right. with that, i want to conclude

this panel and a quick word before you give your applause, in your packets, if you have not opened up your binders, your envelope there, there are six or, i think eight different sort of areas. supporters of the eagle plaza. [cheers and applause] this morning, i was honored, my

business partner, mike leon. on this historic day. i want to take the warmest welcome possible to the honorable mayor london breed, supervisor haney, supervisor mandelman. the greatest community, members of the leather and lgbt cultural district and the friends of eagle plaza. we're all here today after a long road. great accomplishments. eagle plaza started as an idea. six years ago my business partner and i met, built and have a conversation about

breaking ground for construct, where we floated idea of the construction of the plaza. between the san francisco eagle bar and the construction. a plaza unique to the world that will honor the leather and lgbt communities, serve as a focal part for them to have events. and now this idea is about to come true. it's fitting this was elected for the first public plaza dedicated to the leather community. it's been the home for this community for decades. a special thanks to supervisor haney and mandelman for introducing and pushing forward the legislation to permit the construction of eagle plaza. [cheers and applause]

without their efforts, eagle plaza would still remain as an idea. i would like to thank all of those who contributed financially to eagle plaza and to my eagle family for their support. and, of course, the most special thanks to mayor breed, who removed road blocks, constantly moved the project forward to where we're here today at the ground-breaking of eagle plaza. i would like you to extend the warmest welcome to our mayor, london breed. [cheers and applause] >> >> mayor breed: thank you so much. i am so excited to be here today. we're going to have one of the most beautiful plazas in san francisco. i remember when it first became mayor and i knew that this idea had started over six years ago

when state senator scott wiener was on the board of supervisors and i know a lot of the work he did helped to get us to this place. but i was really frustrated over the two years of bureaucracy. we already had the support. we already had the plan. and the city bureaucracy continued to delay this project. so two years delay was just really unacceptable. so when i first became mayor, i made this one of my first directives and we got the approvals done in three months. so i'm really proud -- [applause] -- that we were able to work together to accomplish that goal. in addition to that, because this was such an amazing community-driven project, $200,000 from the community college grant was made possible to help fund this project. the work from build inc. and i

want to thank lauren seguin for