>> good morning, every one and welcome to the beautiful park side! [cheers and applause] thank you all for coming out on this historic occasion of a once in a 100 years, major repair of a street and all of its underground utilities. we are here today to celebrate the completion of the l.a. taraval project on time and on

budget, not that has not taken a very long time. we're also here to celebrate this extraordinary community neighborhood that is so vital to our city and to the city success and to muni in general. thank you all for your paishs and for joining us. i'm jeffery tom land i'm the directer of transportation agency, and i want to start by expressing my gratitude for so many people who made this possible and i will not have a chance to thank all of you, in fact i should thank every one who joined us today. this project was a collaboration from the very beginning and the first and most important people that we need to thank are the people of the parkside and all the sunset community, along with our city and state funding partners and the elected officials many of

whom are behind me. i rally want to offer profound gratitude in particular to the merchants and neighbors of taraval street! [cheers and applause] really, thank you. you have, you have worked with us hand and hand from the very beginning, this project was terriblely disruptive, we had to dig out the entire street and replace all the underground infrastructure while still allowing you to flush your toilet and turn on your faucet, this work was not easy and we're very grateful for your patience and engagement. you through your engagement made this project so much better, thank you so much for your persistence. in particular, i want to thank the people of park side sunset who were critical partners with us every single day insurance that the places of residents

and places were heard. we'll hear from pop's president, albert chow who was texting me at least every week and pushed us in exactly the right way in order to make the project better and the construction less impactful. [applause] we also appreciate the persistent of ed sue of merchant united to made sure to uplift the voices, particularly the voices of merchants who do not speak english so thank you to ed sue. we want to thank the western neighborhoods project who is here and i hope you visit their table to catch the history of el taraval and how it vaped this neighborhood as it ran its

tracks across the sand dunes across this neighborhood before the businesses were here and you'll also see the photos of the infrastructure that was sitting on sand and almost collapsed. so thank you. so and i want to thank the advocate too many to name, transit riders, walk sf and jamie velaria who is here to help push to make taraval street safer for everything, particularly for seniors and kids and pedestrians and transit riders. i want to appreciate all the elected officials who helped shepherd this project from the beginning. we'll be hearing from mayor

london breed and engardio and i want to thank gored an marfor his partnership as well as former supervisor katy tang who is here who is part of this project making sure that it got funded and, and also thank katie tang for her role as the direct of small business helping to make sure that merchant voices were heard and we were engaged on helping to engage mini backs. through, though this project of course is called the l.taraval project and we're cutting a ribbon on a train behind us. this was not just a muni project this was a major update on a corridor that was neglected for decades. this is a modernization of

every aspect of infrastructure from ten feet below ground to 30 feet above ground. as a result of i would say modest work that muni did all cities agencies banded together to catch up on maintenance and deliver a project that will benefit this neighborhood and san francisco for another 100 years. so thank you to the public utilities commission for working with us to completely replace all of underground water and sewer lines, thank you to the office of economic examine workforce development for helping the merchants in this corridor navigate the process and help us get smarter and mitigating. many of our crews are here today for making this project safer and more dutiful for every one and making the curve grants and for putting out

trees and repaving the entirety of the street from one end to the other. and a special thanks to our regional state and federal partners who funded all of this work, particularly to the san francisco county transportation authority, tracy trang here. [applause] for allocating funding for this project and for their strong funding support and to the public utilities commission for helping us make sure that the rail service is safe and ready to go. and en last but certainly not least, i want to thank the entire l.taraval team, we have folks who touched every aspect of this project here today and i'm so grateful for your hard work and technical expertise al as well as your participation.

nearly 30,000 passengers per day. those folks endured a bumpy ride on old and absolute tracks, there were traffic signals that didn't respond to the train and all of our crews came together in order to figure out how to make the train service work better every one while the infrastructure worked better as well. so way too much people to name but a special shout out to sean kennedy for your role and bringing the improvement through the process and coordinating with all the other agency to see make this project come together. i also really want to thank our lead construction crew nt k for your collaboration and your cret i havity and professionalism that allowed us to deliver this project on time and on budget. and i want to thank all of the

technical crews who are out there in the street, day after day, replacing 5,070 new power lines, water lines and train tracks and 22 new and extended and much safer and accessible boarding islands, 11 new bow bouts and 71 new street lights and over 175 new street trees all of that work was done thanks to the incredible skilled work of hundreds and hundreds of laborers with whom the city would simply not work. so thank you to all of the crews who made this happen. [cheers and applause] today muni is faster, cleaner, safer and more reliable than it has been in decade and that is

thanks to projects like these that includes the sacrifice of thoz along the corridor who have endured the construction period. when we invest in muni success, we invest in san francisco success, to ensure that you can count on muni and enjoy. now to share a little bit more about the benefits of this project, i would like to invite up somebody who has been a champion for project and for supporting businesses across our city, san francisco mayor london breed. [cheers and applause] >> mayor breed: thank you, jeff. jeff just summed up everything about this project but let me give a shout out for those who live in the avenues and sunset

and, and that's all the same. and we're so happy. i really want to reiterate our thanks for your understanding and patience. i know that this has had a tremendous impact on the community and it has been of course inconvenience. inconvenience for those who rely on the, and so many of our merchant that's have been here for decades and have struggled and we want to appreciate albert chow and ed su for all of their work to make sure that we provide the support necessary to at least deal with some of the challenges that they had at this time. but we especially want to thank the people who live in this neighborhood because you still showed up for those businesses. you still helped them survive this challenging time and now we are coming out of that time with hope, and excitement for what this new system means for

the future. i know everybody here with agree on one thing, that we like running water. and we like it to come when we turn on the faucet and we sometimes will drink it without a filter because san francisco has some of the best water anywhere! [cheers and applause] and when we flush our toilet, we want the stuff that is in there to go down. we can all agree on some of those things, and what happens with projects like this, all of the different technical things, you don't realize something is wrong until something is wrong. when you have to deal with the sink hole like what happened in pacific heights and in parts of this time in this area when we've had intense flooding and other issues. you don't realize the problems until you the lights go out or something happens. and what we have done, with our dig once policy, when we go

into the ground and we try to not go back but we try to go in there one time and ten feet below ground and get into the roots of the system and really upgrade with a system that will last for the next 100 years. so then, none of us will be alive examine somebody else problem it will be by that time. but the fact is, this is incredible. and it was hard, and it was inconvenient and as san francisco continues to grow and continues to change and as we build more housing, we need to make sure that our infrastructure, the things that we don't see are developed in a way that protects the homes and the things that exist here. and so i'm really excited about what this is going to mean for the future and the decline in the number of complaints about those particular issues. and ultimately, we all know and

katie kang is hiding, i see you in the back, she's running the office of small business and people would step out and some folks had been hit. and it was not safe, you were taking your life in your own hands and we had to change that. we also have so many seniors who live in in community who rely on public transportation to take them from one end here at the ocean at the zoo all the way in the avenues and all the way to the other end and embarcadero and now with the central subway that transferred to china town and just how excited people are to be able to use this system to get to city hall to get to work to get to where you need to go safely and efficiency and these new 22 islands will provide an opportunity to board and unboard safety. that's part of our vision zero

project and even these cables are replaced, it's an energy efficient system and we're doing so much with this one project. so i'm excite beside what this means for the future. and emigrateful to each and every one one of, the folks who participated in building the system, the folks who are contractors and architects especially our muni operators who are going to be the ones riding the system down the street. so make sure you smile and don't give them any problems. show them some love, they work hard! [cheers and applause] so it's all of that, and it's why san francisco is special. when it comes to putting things together and making systems work and building for the future and thinking about how it meets the needs of people, no one does it better. so i'm really excited to be here to say thank you for every

one who played a role and for those who have lived through this challenging time and my hope is that this system is so good and it feels so great, that you don't even remember all the problems that existed. and i know, jeff has said, we have delivered this project on time and on budget, but at the end of the day, the folks who are part of this community are the ones who really wept through this, no matter whether or not it was delivered on time and on budget, it was an inconvenience and now we hope that it's so good and so impactful and to so* transformative that it makes you say, it was worth it. thank you all for being here today. and it is my pleasure to introduce the chair of the county transportation authority. but let me clear, mta all of this money from the feds, it's all of your tax dollars at work. so thank you to every one who

is here who pays their tax to see san francisco and the state and the feds and that includes me too, so welcome rafael mandelman. [applause] >> thank you, madam mayor and thank you jeff tumlin, the mayor and i were in an event a few months and willie brown as he sometimes does, was joking about fixing within 120 days and he didn't do that. but i would say that madam mayor and jeff tumlin that 20 years later, you're managing to fix muni everyday, you have achieved the best performance in decades and you are making an investments that are going to last not just a couple of years but carry san francisco for decades and even centuries in our transportation system and in our infrastructure, so congratulations. you know, i, i, i like the

mayor, i grew up in san francisco and sometimes i think about our transportation system from the perspective that i had when i was a kid. for me, i know the l.is important to lots of people, but i still think of it as the way you get to the empire movie theater with grandma and you know the empire is not there anymore but there is still people that need to get across to the city who just need to get from neighborhood to neighborhood work and fun and this is just one of those workhorse lines that we have that is so critically important for san francisco. great congratulations to the mta and public works and all the partners who delivered this. i'm here to represent the board of supervisors in the transportation authority. i'm the chair of us, when and

transportation. to voter approved sales tax, thank you san francisco voters for renewing that in 2020. and our vehicle registration fee, double a program and till got a little shout out but i want to give our ta director a big shout out, she's shaking her head no, and i'm because i'm a chair i'm going to go a deeper, but our deputy directer of policy programming and she is amazing and thinking through all of these projects and how we can best help them and emilia and emilia's team some of them may be here as well. and emilia is our senior analyst, thank you, thank you all. today marks the return of l.taraval tain and half the decades work to deliver access

and safety and art trees and other improvements to the community. of course we all know public transit is the backbone of san francisco's economy and at the core of a more livable city. we heard about the burden that this project s and businesses. these projects are tough and happening all over the city and in a city na is 100 years old with infrastructure that is crumbling underground. these projects are going to have to get done from time to time but so many thanks to all the folks who will survived and now going to thrive. so many restaurants and activities and with the delivery of these robots enhancements, our people with arrive with new roads and enhanced pedestrian safety features and underground infrastructure upgrades. thank you thanks again, every

one who works in those departments every level all the way for all that you've done to get us here. this is a great way to celebrate transit month and i ■k get to introduce my colleagues, supervisor of joy, representing this district joel engardio. [cheers and applause] >> thank you, everybody. >> this is going to set us up for a renaissance in the sunset. who is ready for the renaissance?

it's coming, because of all the these businesses that are choosing to come and locate on taraval because they can see the future, this train is going to take people to the coast, to the zoo, to the panda and all the amazing places in between and it's just the sunset is a wonderful place and so so much is happening here. i see angie in the from the crowd. she is putting our next sunset market is going to be tomorrow, 20,000 people. let's hope for more, we're going to have a great halloween celebration at the end of taraval that you can take the train to. we're going to have movies and in this park, so take the train come to the movies dress up as a favorite character.

because it's happening on taraval and thank you for being here, and i look forward to seeing you in all the amazing events and all the business that's will thrive here in taraval. and i would like to introduce my colleague supervisor imelda melgar who serves with me in district 7. >> thank you, i'm supervisor mirna mell began. my colleagues was elected in 2022 and i was elected in 2020 and since we were supervisors this train has not been running but here we are. we went through a worldwide pandemic and changes to the way we live. and nevertheless, we have managed to do extraordinary things, thank you mayor breed.

for taking us through and manage to mack a better west side. this is an incredible opportunity imagine al opportunity that we will have something that was not there before the pandemic and now it is better! so our businesses will be better, our kids will be connected to educational and work opportunities. things will be better! and this is a testament of how working together even through our challenges and problems we can come out ahead and make progress. i'm excited that businesses will have both come to our city as visitors and now they'll bring specialist and go to the ocean and do the things that we know are magical for the west

side. thank you so much for being here. this is very exciting. let's keep going. i want to also highlight the amazing work of our director of mta, where is sean, the team has managed to not just do this but also make improvement to the cross town tunnels that manages the l, the m, taet as west portal elementary school was doing construction and also make ing improvement to the m and k to make the entire system better. again this is how we make for a better west side. this is better our transit geeks, it's very sexy and i hope you agree. again i'll say the backbone of our community is small businesses and nothing, more to support their success than to have a transportation system that works, that can get

customers here efficiently, easily, cheaply so it is my great pleasure to now, introduce one of the pillars of the small business community, here on the west side, the president of the pops and our wonderful albert chung. [applause] >> oh wow. i just want to say thank you to the people who have spoken before me p our elected official, london breed, joel engardio, supervisor melgar and tumlin and whew, we're done, my god we're done! i still remember this started october, 2015 somebody walked into my store and showed met plans and i thought this is crazy. and i feel like i had black hair when i started, i've grown old with this project. and i have to say, you know,

muni, sfmta has gone through vanness, central subway and some other projects that were problematic. and when it came to taraval, he started evolving, we start today work together, started getting result some help that we through our merchants, our community suffered through this experience but because of sfmta because of the people that reved out to the mayor's office and so forth and supervisor office, we made it, we made accommodations that made the project at least a little easier to go forward. i want to say shout out to ntk, awesome company, they did a great job for us. they were to cooperative, so [applause] so now that the project is done, i hope our street can be back to where it should be. and even better! okay, i do want to say that we're going to have starting

october 4, movies at mcarthur every friday in october, we're going to have movies out here so please come. free food, popcorn, bubbles gifts and a movie. okay, so i want to say i'm a little sorry because now i'm out of a job because there is nothing to explain anymore. so i'll be sending some resumes to sfmta for a job. thank you very much. [applause] >> thank you so much albert for your excellent partnership. now, let's get this show on the road! while regular--the mayor wants me to tell you which we will demonstrate later when you board the train that the train is going to be quieter! >> yeah! >> meantime we're rerey to make some noise, so firstly we're ing to do a little ribbon cutting.

then for those who would like to jane us, we're going to take a train ride so the zoo and back to west portal, you can get off where you want and get on where you want or you can stay here and enjoy some dim sum or a cocktail. [laughter] sometimes i just need to edit some things that the mayor tells me to do. so we're going to go to ribbon cutting but in the meantime i want you to listen to some noise of the marching band and coast guard as we go down to cut the ribbon. congratulations, every one and thank you. [marching band music]

>> 5, 4, 3, 2, 1! [cheers and applause] [marching band music] >>ime autumn looijen andeme polk running for district 5 supervisor. i have a track record getting things done. i run the school board recall and brought algebra back to middle school. our schools are on the-mind but city in crisis. running for supervisor because i came home and found