mark, bill bowen. if you want to come up here -- maybe you left to stand for a few minutes. but that, i will turn it over to the budget director. >> thank you. thank you for your time. can you hear me? do i have an upside down? there we go. ok. as supervisor farrell said, i will talk a little bit about our budget situation and what we will see over the next couple of months and years. i will try not to bore you with the details, but please feel free to ask questions if there is something i do not cover. the position we're in right now is we have a $306 million predicted general fund deficit for the next fiscal year. that is actually a little bit better than in december when we made our initial projection. we projected a deficit of $380 million. it is still a substantial challenge for us to make the decisions about how we're going to balance the budget. just to put that in context, as we often hear people say -- well san francisco has a $6.5 billion budget, billion with a "b." there are several pots of money in our budget. there is the general fund, which is where general tax