Good morning.

The meeting will come to order.

Welcome to the June 25th, 2026 meeting of the recess budget and appropriation committee from Wednesday, June 24, 2026.

I'm Supervisor Connie Chan, Chair of the Committee.

I am joined by Supervisor Danny Sauter and Shaman Water.

Sorry.

It was kind of long.

Thank you.

Our clerk is Brent Halipa.

I would like to thank Eugene Labadia and James Kawana from Essecuff D fee for broadcasting this meeting.

Mr.

Clark, do you have any announcement?

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Just a friendly reminder to those in attendance to please make sure to sound all cell phones and electronic devices to prevent interruptions to our proceedings.

And do you have any documents to be included as part of the file?

They should be submitted to my uh they should be submitted to myself, the clerk.

Members of the public may still submit public comment in writing in either of the following ways.

Email them to myself, the budget and appropriations committee clerk at B R E N T.

A L I P A HED SFGOV.org.

If you submit public comment via email, it will be forwarded to the supervisors and also included as part of the official file.

You may also send your written comments via U.S.

Postal Service to our office in City Hall at one Dr.

Carlton because the place room 244, San Francisco, California, 94102.

And thank you, Madam Chair.

That concludes my announcements.

Thank you, Mr.

Clerk.

I want to let the public know how we're going to proceed today.

This morning, we will be continuing conversations with administration to finalize items and issues from our deliberations over the past few weeks in order to forward a balanced budget package to the full board.

We will not have public comment today's and on today's agenda since we satisfied that requirement yesterday.

No, madam chair.

Thank you.

And so with that, please call items one, two, three, twenty-three, and twenty-four.

Yes, items one, two, three.

Our items as it relates to the committee's consideration of the mayor's proposed budget for the departments of the city and county for fiscal years 2026 to 2027 and 2027 to 2028.

Item number one is our hearing to consider the mayor's proposed budgets.

Item numbers or item number two is the proposed budget and appropriation ordinance, appropriating all estimated receipts and all estimated expenditures for the departments of the city and county as of May 30th, 2026.

Item number three is the proposed annual salary ordinance, enumerating positions in the AAO for fiscal years ending June 30th, 2027 and June 30th, 2028.

Continuing creating or establishing these positions, enumerating and including therein all positions created by the charter or state law for which compensations are paid from the city and county uh funds and appropriated in the AAO.

Authorizing appointments are continuation of our appointments there too, specifying and fixing compensations and work schedules thereof and authorizing appointments to temporary positions and fixing compensations.

And items 23 and 24 are the um the AEO and ASO respectively for the May Enterprise Departments as of May 1st 2026.

Thank you, Mr.

Clerk.

And first, colleagues, I would like to dispense with some outstanding issues from last week and some uh earlier this week.

Some of these items we discussed, but did not make um a decision or need to clarify our decisions.

In addition, the controller's office has requested an amendment to the administrative provisions, which we will adopt this morning.

First, I would like to read into the record that we have reached agreement with the Department of Public Works, and we'll be rejecting budget and legislative analyst recommendations.

One, two, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen, and these are the ones that the department disagree with.

And then a partial rejection to recommendation three as requested by Supervisor Sauter.

Next is the Office of the Sheriff's Inspector General, where the committee is accepting a recommendation one, which means we are also accepting city administrators' office recommendations 12 and 13.

The budget and legislative analysts though separately will be providing specific information on what a on dollar amount of what for a projected uh budget should the sheriff's inspector general is fully funded.

Um, and so that's a separate information we this body will receive.

We also have reached agreement with the public defender where the committee will be rejecting recommendations one, two, three, and four.

For human services agency, the committee will also be rejecting recommendations seven, eight, and nine.

And the last department we're announcing agreements for this morning is the Department of Public Health, where we will be rejecting recommendations 18, 19, 21, and 22.

Finally, we need to make an amendment to the administrative provisions to the annual appropriation ordinance to ensure the city has legal authority to make a sheatment reserve deposits from all potential fiscal years, which could be both this and the next fiscal years.

So, um, colleagues, you should have this language already from uh Mr.

Clark.

And in the section 32.3, page 59, line nine, adding 2025 through 26, or uh before the 2026-27.

Uh, and that is the section on 32.3 federal and state revenue risk reserve.

So that's a very simple one.

Uh, it's just adding the fiscal year 2526 uh in front of 2627 to allow the um a sheeted dollars to be uh deposit from both fiscal years.

So with that, I know that I need to make the motion to amend um the administrative provision as read out loud.

Second, second by vice chair Dorsey, a roll call, please.

And on the motion by church hands seconded by Vice Chair Dorsey to amend the AEO uh to accept the changes to the uh administrative provisions as so read.

Vice Chair Dorsey.

Dorsey, I member Sauter, Sauter, I.

Member Walton, Walton, aye, member Mandelman, aye, Mandelman, aye, church and I.

Chan, I we have five eyes.

The motion passes.

Um, and then with that, we are still in conversation with the departments, controller, uh, the budget and legislative analyst, and the mayor's and his team.

So, in order to finalize these outstanding issue, uh, we will recess the budget and appropriation committee until noon today, but TV, San Francisco government television.

I want to say happy Pride, San Francisco.

This weekend, hundreds of thousands of people will gather to celebrate one of San Francisco's biggest and best weekends, culminating with Pride with the Pride Parade on Sunday.

I want to recognize SF Pride Executive Director Suzanne Ford and the entire SF Pride team.

This weekend would not happen without your leadership, and our city is grateful.

Thank you, Suzanne.

The LGBTQ Plus community has helped define San Francisco for generations.

Their courage and culture have made our city stronger and continue to shape the values we proudly stand for today.

As we head into the weekend, all of the leaders up here know how important this weekend is, and we are ready.

San Franciscans, we know how to host major events.

We've welcomed Super Bowl 60, the World Cup, the NBA All-Star Game, and more.

Every time our public safety teams have delivered.

Pride will be no different, and our city is prepared.

I would like to quickly acknowledge the disturbing video from this weekend of a car driving through Dolores Park.

And I'd like to thank SFPD who acted quickly to make an arrest.

I want to reassure San Franciscans that whether you are joining the Trans March on Friday, the Dyke March on Saturday, or walking down Market Street for Sunday's Pride Parade during celebrations.

Our city, your safety is our top priority.

Months of planning and coordination have gone into making this weekend safe and successful and fun.

Our police officers, sheriff's deputies, and other public safety partners will be deployed across the city this weekend.

Chief Lou will share more about those efforts and how attendees can do their part this weekend.

My message is simple.

Look out for one another.

Report anything concerning and know that every first responder, city worker, and volunteer has one goal to help everyone celebrate safely.

SFPD Chief Derek Liu, Sheriff Paul Miyamoro, Fire Chief Dean Crispin, District Attorney Brooke Jenkins, Department of Emergency Management Executive Director Mary Ellen Carroll, the SFPD LGBTQ Plus Advisory Forum, and the SFPD Pride Alliance.

I want to thank you all for your partnership and commitment to making this weekend safe for everyone.

San Francisco is ready.

Happy Pride and Let's Go, San Francisco.

And now I'd like to introduce our Chief of Police Derek Liu.

Good afternoon.

This weekend, San Francisco hosts the annual Pride Parade and Celebration, one of the largest LGBTQ plus gatherings in the world, and one of the things this city does better than almost anywhere else on earth.

These events are a part of San Francisco's rich cultural history and identity.

And the San Francisco Police Department takes our role in protecting those who come here from near and far to celebrate, march, or simply watch very seriously.

As always, we're excited to showcase San Francisco and our longstanding status as a safe haven for members of the LGBTQ plus community.

I want to take this opportunity to recognize and acknowledge all the LGBTQ Plus members of our department.

I also want to thank members of our Pride Alliance for joining today.

These officers have been instrumental in building trust and lasting partnerships with our LGBTQ plus community.

You will see many of our officers, including me, wearing Pride patches that support our LGBTQ plus community and highlight our commitment to inclusiveness.

This program was started in 2019 by our Pride Alliance.

This year, funds from the project will go to Open House, a nonprofit that provides housing and community programs for LGBTQ elders.

A big thank you to Officer Kathleen McKiernan, the president of the Pride Alliance for her work and commitment to this important program.

I also want to acknowledge Captain Chris Delgandio who is here with us today.

Captain Delgandio is not only the commanding officer of Central Station, one of our department's most demanding assignments, but he also leads the SFPD's LGBTQ plus advisory forum and is one of our highest ranking LGBTQ plus members.

This forum melds members of the SFPD and the community and has been an invaluable partner in public safety in San Francisco.

While we will be highlighting our values as a welcoming city this weekend, we also have an opportunity to show everyone that San Francisco is a safe city and amongst the safest in America.

I want to thank Mayor Mayor Lurie, our San Francisco public safety team with us today, and our other partners who we've been working closely with over the past months to ensure this weekend is safe and fun for all.

And while this is a big lift for law enforcement, rest assured.

For decades, the SFPD has hosted this event and other major public safety events across the city.

Just like any large gathering of this type, public safety is our number one priority.

And everyone should know that we are ready.

Leading up to this with this weekend, we've been planning and coordinating as a department and with our city, state, and federal public safety partners to ensure this is a safe and enjoyable event for all.

We have a full staffing plan, and we will have officers at all district stations and specialized units fanned out along the parade route and in every corner of the city, ready to respond to any issues that may arise.

And while our officers work to ensure we're all safe, we also need the public to do their part.

Look out for one another.

Keep an eye out for your friends and loved ones and stay alert to your surroundings.

Be mindful of your personal possessions like your wallet, purse, and cell phones.

Drink responsibly so you're not a target.

And don't accept drinks from strangers.

As always, do not drink and drive.

We have world-class public transportation, taxis, or ride share services to choose from.

There's no excuse.

If you see something suspicious, please let us know.

In closing, I want to remind everyone to stay safe and to have fun.

This is a tremendous event for our city, and the SFPD will be here to ensure everyone is safe.

Happy Pride.

I'd like to now introduce Sheriff Miyamoto for Marks.

Good afternoon, everyone.

San Francisco has always been a city where people can be exactly who they are.

During Pride Weekend, we ask everyone to celebrate responsibly.

Keeping an eye on your friends, having a plan for how you're getting home, and being respectful to our local businesses.

Chief Liu mentioned the public transportation, the world class public transportation that we have.

The one mode of transportation we want to make sure all of you avoid this weekend is the party buses that the Sheriff's Department will have out there.

One more piece of advice.

Strut like you're on a runway.

Celebrate like you're among family.

And remember that public safety is here so that the only thing that we have to get carried away this weekend is the glitter on the ground when we're done.

Thank you.

And at this time, I'd like to introduce District Attorney Brooke Jenkins.

Well, that's a tough act to follow.

But no, happy pride, everyone.

Uh I am honored to be here once again because this is one of the most joyous weekends in San Francisco every year.

It's uh one of the main parades that I look forward to participating in each and every year because we know that San Francisco shows up and it shows out for pride.

But what we also know who are in law enforcement, that in the past, this has often been a trying weekend when it comes to street crime.

And so I echo the sentiments of our police chief and our sheriff.

Uh, please make sure to be vigilant, look out for each other, protect your belongings, make sure that you drink responsibly, and most of all, um report to the police or any law enforcement agent that you see out on the street if there is something suspicious that you believe they should be aware of.

This is also uh a time, yes, for zero tolerance for such street crime, but I also want to bring up another important topic, which is hate crimes.

This has been uh a trying time for our LGBTQ plus community in our country.

And just last week I announced charges in a hate crime that was targeted towards our LGBTQ community in the Castro.

And so I want to remind anyone thinking of coming to our Pride festivities with the intent to commit any harm towards our family and our community members that there will be accountability if anything like that happens here.

And so, while as much as we want to be joyous, we also have to take this occasion very seriously, and I take my job seriously to protect San Francisco.

And so let's make sure that we go out and we have fun.

And again, please be reassured that we in law enforcement will do everything that we need to keep each and every one of you safe.

At this time, I will then now uh bring up Fire Chief Dean Crispin.

Good afternoon.

I'd first like to thank Mayor Lurry and all of our public safety partners for their collaboration communication leading up to this exciting weekend.

I would specifically like to thank Assistant Deputy Chief Erica Brown of our Homeland Security team for her efforts in making sure the San Francisco Fire Department is fully staffed and prepared.

As we enter Pride Weekend, the San Francisco Fire Department stands proudly with our LGBTQ plus community in celebrating a tradition deeply woven into the fabric of our city.

Pride is a powerful reminder of the resilience, diversity, and unity that makes San Francisco extraordinary.

Our units will be fully staffed throughout the weekend to ensure that residents, visitors, and participants can celebrate safely.

We are coordinating closely with city partners to support all scheduled events, parades, and gatherings.

While we expect large crowds, our commitment to public safety remains constant, and our teams are prepared to respond quickly and effectively wherever needed.

During the Pride Parade, SFFD will provide chief officers to staff operations positions at all emergency operations centers and command posts.

We'll also provide medical services on the route at fixed and mobile locations.

Please approach and notify one of our uniformed members or other public safety officials should you see anything unusual or potentially dangerous.

If you see something, say something.

Please know that the San Francisco Fire Department will be fully staffed to respond to emergencies throughout the rest of the city all weekend.

We ask everyone joining the celebrations to stay aware of their surroundings, look out for one another, and follow event safety guidance.

Simple steps, staying hydrated, reporting unsafe conditions, and keeping pathways clear for emergency responders.

Help us keep the weekend safe for all.

On behalf of the San Francisco Fire Department, I wish everyone a joyful, safe, and affirming Pride Weekend.

We're honored to serve this city and stand with all who promote equality, inclusion, and respect.

And with that, I would bring to the stage the director of the Department of Emergency Management, Mary Ellen Carroll.

Good afternoon.

Thank you, Chief Crispin.

Thank you, Mayor Gloria, and all of our partners up here.

Pride is one of the most meaningful times of the year to be in San Francisco.

And this year we're also proud because we have visitors from all over the world who are here for World Cup.

So we really get to show off.

We're prepared for a safe and very joyful weekend.

On Sunday, the Department of Emergency Management will operate the Emergency Operations Center for the parade.

We'll have staffing from all of our public safety and infrastructure partners, and we will also be monitoring marches on Friday and Saturday at Dolores Park and throughout the city.

From the EOC, we monitor 911 volume calls, EMS, hospital capacity, and police and fire resources.

We coordinate across city agencies and centralized public information.

So the city speaks with one clear voice.

So speaking of public information, as always, I will would like to ask everyone if you're not already signed up for alert SF that you should do so.

You can text Pride SF to 888-777 and get critical information that will come from some of our partners and to keep everyone safe.

Um I just want to reiterate uh the simplest things will help us to take care of the more complicated things that happen.

So have fun, look out for each other, and stay hydrated.

Thank you.

And it is my pleasure, uh, last but not least to introduce the executive director of this whole thing, SF Pride, Suzanne Ford.

Thank you.

Thank you, Mayor Lurie.

Thank you to all the chiefs behind me, district attorney, everyone that's been involved in coordinating this event this weekend.

Happy Pride, everybody.

Okay, that's where you're all supposed to smile and say happy pride.

Okay.

Um, I'm so honored to live in a city that has a team of people behind me, like I do here today, planning a pride together for this community, for the nation, and for the world.

We want everyone to be able to come to San Francisco, and I think we all have the responsibility of demonstrating that we can all work together to make sure that the LGBTQ community is centered for this weekend.

I would like to thank my staff, Chris, and all of my four other great people, all the contractors, Silverback Productions.

Um, you can't believe all the hundreds of people that are working right now to make sure that we have this event.

Um, I'd like to just run down what's going to happen from here on out as far as events on Thursday, tomorrow, tomorrow morning, starting at 10 a.m., we will have the Human Rights Conference, and it will be at the Commonwealth Club, and that will go all day long.

We will have a block party tomorrow night at a Yoruba district and a watch party for the FIFA.

Um, and then Saturday morning at 10 a.m.

We're gonna have the first ever, we're having a political march, not the parade, but a march down the same course, and that is the Trans Ally March, Indivisible SF along with us, the People's March, the Dyke March, and the Dykes on Bikes will be leading that march.

We will have our two-day street fair at the Civic Center Sunday morning.

I hope there are a million people down Market Street for the parade.

And then Sunday afternoon, we will also have an event at the Asian Art Museum.

You can go to SF Pride.org.

You can still buy tickets for those events, and you can also hit the donate button.

But again, I would like to say thank you, thank you so much to the city of San Francisco, and thank you, Mayor Lurie.

Questions, John.

Thank you.

Okay.

Um, so our and the cards have been mission station told me in the past that the data doesn't support having like um patrols uh like like foot controls in the castro.

But in recent week we've seen a number of disturbing incidents of the hate crimes, uh, the electronic funds that you mentioned, and also um allegedly um, you know, it took several hours for police to respond to an incident at a nightclub where someone was being threatening.

So I wanted to ask what would cause you to reconsider those earlier positions.

Well, I can just say that we're always assessing our resources, how we deploy them, and I can't speak specifically to the incident ins incidents that you're referencing, but uh we're always monitoring and we're talking about how we can best deploy our resources.

So we're we're uh we're not fixed in the way that we do things.

Um, and if there's an issue that we think needs addressing, we're we're we'll be we'll be talking about it.

Yeah, but we're always in a state of of of um improving uh our deployments, um, but balancing that against what our resources are.

So the answer is yes.

I have a question for the sheep.

So we have the problem with the uh license plate readers, the data reach that it's unrelated to this, but many people in these events are afraid of looking at the call 911.

They have they've always been fearful, having their data or the the status, you know, weaked or whatever.

Can you just reiterate that it's safe to go number one and do something that you can't ask for immigration substance that you don't share with immigration federal officials or I?

So I think that's a two-part answer here.

So, number one, unequivocally, we do not cooperate with any sort of immigration agency at all.

There's uh state, city law, our own ordinances, our own rules and regulations uh that is not in our DNA whatsoever.

So please continue to call 9-1-1.

We don't cooperate as far as immigration enforcement is concerned.

As far as far as uh license plate reader concerns, yeah.

As soon as we figured out that there was uh potentially a um an inappropriate access, we shut that off.

It continues to be shut off.

Um it's a very important tool to this city that could constantly contributes to public safety overall, and so we want to protect that, and we want people to know that we're using it in the right way.

Uh there's kind of been a series of things that have happened over the last few weeks.

There's a there's the DA that had filed charges against uh this guy for hate crimes.

This is just last week when those charters filed.

Um, this weekend, knuckleheads driving through Dolores Park, and apparently there's video of them driving through Cashville as well, acting kind of weird, and then there's this controversy around the San Francisco Giants and the scripture on their caps.

Can you talk a little bit about some of those concerns and should people be on guard, or is it you know, people are kind of concerned about what's happening in the city at the moment?

Yeah, listen uh as you can see uh by the uh the men and women uh behind me who are so incredibly focused on public safety and making sure that pride uh uh is comes off safely.

Um Suzanne Ford's leadership uh in bringing people together is another great example.

Uh we live in a big city, and and we're gonna have people uh that uh do things that are not legal, and we are gonna find them and we're gonna arrest them like we did with that person that drove through to Loris Park.

On the San Francisco Giants uh issue.

Uh when you put on that uniform, uh you represent not only the Giants organization, um, but you represent the city of San Francisco.

Uh and the LGBTQ plus community is a critical part of our city.

Um and I have to say the Giants have led the way uh for decades uh in making sure that the LGBTQ community um uh was part and parcel of that team, and what I want to see now is them re-commit uh to the LGBTQ community.

Um, and I think you will see that in the coming days.

Um, but uh you brought up a couple of instances uh of you know, your your words not mine of knuckleheads.

Um I see great things from the people of San Francisco every single day.

I see people coming in uh from uh different countries to celebrate uh the greatest city in the world in San Francisco.

Our values have been on full display uh during this Pride month.

Uh we had uh, you know, uh a pride uh flag raising at City Hall uh that it was incredible in the spirit when you're walking through uh this city is on full display, and you're gonna see it again this weekend.

Uh the great uh the greatness of our city always uh outshines uh those few uh that uh make it about themselves.

Uh we're up here to make sure that everybody uh has a great weekend, has a fun weekend, uh, and that our LGBTQ uh plus community is uh lifted up and front and center this weekend, and I'm I'm looking forward to it.

Another follow up question for you is when you're talking about the pride night, it's obviously been a lot of controversy that has like come out since yesterday.

Mustard Posey, he had a lot of questions from reporters, and a lot of people felt that a lot of questions still remain, that it's kind of just a doubling down on the blanket statement made by the Giants organization.

Do you think it made things worse for those who are concerned about it as we go with the pride, and also have you reached out to the Giants outside to offer your support?

Yeah, I I've been in touch with uh a few leaders uh in the Giants organization, and I understand uh that they have been in touch with leaders of the LGBTQ plus community, and that is good to hear.

That is a good first step.

And what I would like to hear from them and from the front office is that they recommit uh to the LGBTQ plus community.

Uh, as I said before, when you put on that jersey, you're not just representing yourself, you're representing uh a storied franchise uh in the greatest city in the world, and what makes our city so incredible uh is the diversity and is our LGBTQ plus community.

And so uh I am uh very hopeful uh that they will uh recommit uh to the LGBTQ plus community, and and once again, they have been doing this for decades and decades.

Uh and so I know uh there's a lot of people out there that uh you know want to uh say they need to do this or they need to do that.

Uh I believe that this is a moment uh of education in our city, and we can heal and we can bring people together.

Um I've said this before, we were all up uh for the pink triangle event, uh, which is uh uh an ed it was an education event.

Uh it is uh what has happened in the past we don't want to see happen again in the future.

And so when events like this happen, I think it's an opportunity for us uh to educate people here in San Francisco.

We still need to educate people about the uh the importance and the vibrancy and and uh the critical nature of the LGBTQ plus community plays in our city uh and will uh has and will continue to.

What does that look like?

Yeah, I think that's up for the giants to do it, and and like I said, I think uh I've heard uh from them that they are in talks with leaders of the LGBTQ plus community.

I also think they should be in talks with the uh members of uh and leaders from the faith community as well.

I think you know there's a lot of uh divisiveness in this country um uh here in San Francisco.

What we are trying to practice uh is is bringing people together.

Uh and uh and I'm hopeful uh that the Giants will lead on that in the days ahead.

Okay.

Yeah, I mean, just uh didn't hear much about the theme.

I know that it means a lot every theme every year, has a lot of uh background behind it.

So what is resilience and action means you have to.

Before we get to that, I would say I'm one of the leaders that has spoken to the Giants too to register the hurt in the community, and we are waiting to hear from them concrete ways that they're going to address that.

I haven't heard that yet, but we're waiting.

And we did ask also if we could speak to the players.

And that's one thing I never see happen in these uh situations is where leaders, especially trans people, get to speak to the players.

It doesn't happen.

So we're pushing for that, and I'm waiting to hear.

Um just what I just said.

Resistance in action is the theme this year, and speaking to the Giants is one of those one of those actions.

Um, protesting when Phil's coffee was going to low take out the rainbow flags.

That is another example of resistance and action.

Uh San Francisco Pride is not just an organization that throws a parade.

Um, we also represent the interests of the LGBTQ community.

Um, all those events I just listed for you are concrete ways where people cannot just sit at home and say this is intolerable, the situation that we're facing in this country, but you can come out, be in community, and actually do something.

So come out, march with the community, come to the human rights summit that there are concrete ways that you can do something.

Thank you.

Thank you, Suzanne.

Appreciate you.

All right.

Thank you all very much.

Thank you very much.

Thank you very much.

Every day, millions of dollars quietly move through the city, funding parks, buses, classrooms, and everything in between.

Now, behind that flow is a system most people never see, but it shapes every corner of San Francisco.

Welcome to I Left My Podcast in San Francisco, brought to you by SFGov TV.

Now, this is a show where we take you behind the scenes with the people shaping our city, our leaders and representatives across every department.

And we're coming to you from the basement of City Hall.

And today we're joined by San Francisco's treasurer, Jose Cisneros.

We talk about how he came into public service from the private sector, the amazing programs and services from his office, like kindergarten to college, and just amazing successful finance stories that'll melt your heart.

I'm your host Franco Finn.

Let's get to the heart of what makes San Francisco.

Well, welcome to I Left My Podcast in San Francisco.

Literally, we are in the basement of City Hall.

Your home.

This is probably this is your home.

I'm here every day.

This is your second home, maybe your first home, really.

You're here for many days and for such a long time, and your career has been impressive serving our city, you know, the county and the people here in San Francisco, our treasure.

Jose Cisneros, thank you so much for joining.

Thank you for having me.

This is amazing.

San Francisco treasurer.

That is a lot of responsibility.

You are pretty much in charge of the money that is coming in and out.

You're like the chief investment officer, if you will, for the city.

And we'll get into obviously your main role here, but let's dial it just back.

How do you got here?

I want to see the journey because you came from Muskegon, Michigan, and then made your way out west.

Yeah.

What was your first impression?

Like, how did you get to San Francisco?

What was your first memory of San Francisco?

You remember?

Oh gosh.

Well, like a lot of people, um, as a young, younger person, a young adult, I came to visit many times.

And of course, uh loved it.

Um it's interesting, my journey a little bit.

I started in a small town in Michigan, Muskegon, Michigan.

Uh stayed there until it was time to go to college when I went to a college in Boston and really enjoyed Boston.

It's a great town, lots of universities, lots of students, lots of young people, um, very modern, uh lively uh setting for everything you might want to do.

And did a lot of growing up there, got my first couple of jobs there.

First one was in banking, second one was for a technology company.

Okay.

Um, you know, it was there a good while, uh, and then after a while, just had visited San Francisco a few times.

My partner and I visited uh one last time, and we said, you know what, it's time to make the move.

Yeah.

And within a year or two, we had sold the place, moved, and we're living here and haven't looked back.

That was it.

What was the one thing you remember that that you just loved about San Francisco?

That was amazing.

Like, was it the food?

Was it the the you know, just the landscape?

Like, what was the one thing that you said, gosh, San Francisco?

You had my heart here.

It's hard to pick one thing.

There's so much beauty, there's so much culture, there's diversity, of course.

Um, uh, that tops everywhere else in the world.

Probably for me, I have to say the thing that sticks out with me the most, though I love it all, is the weather.

I grew up in Michigan.

Uh, if you haven't grown up as a small child shoveling snow and you're there you go around your house, then you have not experienced winter.

That's my measure.

You know, tell me how many feet of snow you shoveled when you were eleven years old.

Then we'll talk about if you know anything about winter at all.

So it's nice to live, and even Boston does have winters.

Um so it's nice to be somewhere that's nice and wonderful, weather wise.

Pretty much pleasant for the most of the part year around.

You know, right?

Uh, you know, that that's great.

I mean, yes, if it gets to 80 degrees, I think we're all complaining here, and then which is we're spoiled.

We have we are.

Natural fog is air conditioning that crazy.

I mean, we've got a good thing.

No, I think there's nothing to complain about, but it's hard to beat the weather.

Weather is, you know what?

Weather is what makes people move to the West Coast in California.

Especially when you've experienced other places.

Yes, I would agree.

Well, thanks for sharing that.

And so you worked in the private sector for quite a while.

How did you transition into public service?

Oh, that's a private to public.

That's a very great story.

So I was, as I said, when I moved here, I was still working for a technology company.

It was a company called Lotus Development.

It had been around for quite a while.

Um, some great products.

People remember one, two, three, Lotus Notes.

Along the way, I got purchased by IBM.

So by the time I moved here, it was actually uh a division of IBM.

I was I'd been there a long time, probably a dozen years or more.

And I think my opportunities there were really starting to wind down.

And I made a lot of new friends here in San Francisco, and I made some friends that actually worked here in City Hall.

Okay.

And through those contacts, I got the opportunity for the mayor at the time to appoint me to a commission.

And as you probably know, yes, uh, many, if not all, almost all departments here have a public set of members that act as a commission or board of directors.

Yeah.

Which act the same as you would see for a nonprofit, right?

They meet a couple times a month.

It's a board, they make policy decisions.

It's a board, essentially a volunteer board, in a way, and uh they really help out.

So uh the mayor at the time, Mayor Willie Brown, appointed me to the first commission, the parking and traffic commission, and now long retired, it's part of the MTA now.

Um, but I got a taste for city government, and it was fascinating.

People really care about what your government does.

I can tell you how much they care about those parking spaces on their block.

Yes a lot.

And when you want to think about putting a bike lane in and reducing the number of parking spaces, oh my gosh.

Yes, yes, no, and and I'm a film commissioner.

I don't know if I if you knew that yes, I'm appointed.

I was appointed by Mayor Breed about a few years ago, and it opened up my eyes.

It's yeah.

I'm believable.

I'm a San Franciscan.

I'm born and raised here, walking aimlessly through the streets.

Now I I cannot see the city the same way.

I'm talking to people like you and others that make the city run each and every day that you may not hear or see about, yeah, but there's a lot of people.

There are parts.

I couldn't agree more.

I think that the city government, government in general, right, is pretty low on most people's awareness totem polls, right?

Right.

Um, but city government, absolutely the the least uh awareness and and uh paying attention to, but um it my eyes got opened up and then uh it gets even better in in 2000.

The mayor at the time, Mayor Willie Brown, moved me from that my first commission to the newly created Board of Directors of the MTA, Muni.

Muni is massive.

Oh, it's a massive operation.

It really is for all people love to hate about Muni, it is tremendous in many, many ways.

The number of people it moves every day, the operations, the financing, the construction, every single part of it, labor do a tremendous job, a huge service to everybody in this city.

And I was I was just immersed in it and really loved the opportunity uh to be on the board after a couple of years on the board.

I transitioned to actually being an employee of uh the MTA.

I very much enjoyed that.

We worked on getting the funding for what became the central subway, the extension for Third Street up into Chinatown.

That's interesting.

And um I just love doing that work.

And then um another mayor changed my life.

Uh this this Gavin Newsom mayor.

Oh yeah, Gavin, Mr.

Newsom.

He uh he showed up in uh he won his uh election for mayor, he showed up in 2004, and he started, you know, moving some people around um in positions of leadership, and he took the treasurer at the time, uh, gave her uh a much bigger and different job and appointed me to be the treasurer, and um so that was September of 04, and I've been in the job ever since.

This is your sixth term.

Yes.

That is amazing and unprecedented, honestly.

Six terms is amazing.

Congratulations.

That means there's a lot of trust in you to do what you do best.

And I mean, and you've gotten the taste from you've moved your career and it's evolved, and this public service now, you have such a big role.

Now let's get into that.

Like this is the main part.

Because it's there's a lot of responsibility, there's a lot to manage, if you will.

You're the chief pretty much investment officer of San Francisco.

It break it down in kind of in layman's terms for sure.

I may not know this kind of banking finance world and how money comes in and out, sure.

And how to manage Jose, what what is it?

Your job, you know.

Well, first of all, I wanna I wanna uh I want to be open about the full the full name of the department is the treasurer and tax collector's office.

Treasure and tax.

I don't want to leave out the popular part, that tax collection stuff.

Um, it's it's it's it's super important.

Um, because we are both a city and a county, we have the largest uh tax collection job of any local government in California because we have not only the taxes the counties collect, and uh every county in California collects the property taxes.

Usually the biggest revenue source for any county, and in our case it's the bigger biggest revenue source for our city and county government.

Um, that's that is very important and very important work.

But as a city, we have dozens of other taxes and fees that we also collect because we get to do double duty because we're a city and the county.

Yeah.

Um so really what we do is we work all every day helping taxpayers be aware of what they owe, why they owe it, how much they owe, how to file and do everything and do it on time and avoid late fines and anything like that or that type of thing.

So that is a massive job, and it's probably the lion's share of the work that our office does.

And I just want to uh shout out to all the employees at the treasure tax collector's office.

They do incredible work every day.

And I I just want to tell one story.

Um I as an elected official, I do go out in the public, and I'm not the most famous elected official.

I think the mayor still holds on to that job debt title.

But nevertheless, a few people come up to me in my role, and one person came up to me and said, I just need to tell you about uh a visit I made to your office.

And I said, Okay, I want to hear.

And they said, Well, I had this got this bill, and I just I couldn't believe it.

I knew there was something wrong with it.

I there's no way I could owe that much money.

So I came into your office, I walked up to the counter and I said to someone, you know, there's something wrong with my bill.

I need you to fix it or explain it to me or whatever.

She said, the person that worked with me helped me for a good long time.

Yeah.

And what she did was she explained everything on my bill and explained it over and over again and made sure I understood it.

And at the end of it, I thanked her, and I'm here to thank you because while I'm not happy about how much I owe.

Yeah, I'm grateful for the amount of time that that staffer in your office spent and made me understand how much, how we got to that.

And now I understand and I'm happy to know, and I'm happy to pay it.

Well, more or less happy.

But but that I I said, you know what?

And I go back to my staff and I say, I hear those kinds of comments all the time.

And it's a again, a real credit to the work of the office.

Yeah.

A lot of it's customer service, it's customer service, customer service.

Taxpayers are customers, they deserve to be treated that way.

They just want to know.

They deserve to be supported.

Yeah.

We we try and give them all the information they can have.

We uh make sure they understand, which is not always easy because some taxes are complicated.

Right.

But you know, this is the work we do, and I'm really proud of how well we do it.

And we have a huge um on-time um payment uh record and and and that, and and so things are good.

Yeah.

That's cool.

Thanks for uh sharing of that.

And then the other part of the job is the treasury job.

Once all that money comes in and we collect honestly billions of dollars for the city, almost half of its annual budget comes in through our department's work.

We uh invest it.

So that's the uh treasure side of it.

We we keep that money in um where you would think of it, you and I would think of it as money in our checking accounts, short-term money, not our retirement funds.

That's handled by someone else, our long-term money.

This is all our short-term money.

We we make sure it's safe, make sure it's gonna be available when it's needed, and our average daily balances are creeping up towards about almost 20 billion dollars that we hold on to for the city and keep it safe.

Gosh, you know, this is all flashbacks to me.

My first job in college was working for Bank of America.

Oh, worked my way.

Another former banker.

Oh, yes, long time.

And I remember when it's good training.

I will say, I tell you, you know, I didn't realize the business of banking until I was immersed as a young teen.

Right.

I mean, I worked my way from the teller to uh I was doing business, you know, making calls for our our business guys, um, you know, getting leads.

Even supermarket stores are piles.

Remember when they said banks inside supermarkets.

Yes.

And I'd be the young kid, like, hi, what do you what are you ordering?

Oh, would you like to open a check?

But I realize it's a business.

I mean, they're investing your money, and there's just so many things I learned about it.

And it and I remember when online banking started.

I did not trust putting anything out in the in the in the universe back in the I think I can beat you.

I remember the first ATMs.

Oh, wow.

ATMs were new.

And I mean, what are you thinking?

Like, uh, this technology, my I'm gonna put something in this machine with all my money.

I mean, you could go 24 hours a day.

You could go there on, you know, Sunday morning and pull money out.

I mean, you've never been able to do that before.

I was young, I wasn't a big bank user yet at that point, but it was still pretty fascinating technology at the time.

It is, absolutely.

I mean, I'm all right, I just gave away my heart.

No, no.

Well, you know, my grandma used to put money under under her mattress.

Oh, I know.

That was her bank.

I know.

I mean, we all had grandmas like that, right?

No, it's just heartbreaking to think about that.

But some people still do that.

Some people still do that, and a lot of the, you know, a lot of the work that you do, we'll talk about that.

It's education, it's education.

That crabs it's me emotionally.

Just people just don't know until they they're they're told told that.

And I want to help with that.

Yeah.

And speaking of helping, um, talk about this small business relief.

Uh and that's important.

Small businesses, I think the heartbeat of of our city, small businesses.

I couldn't agree more.

It really is.

It's it's it's it's the people here, the businesses that make this city go.

And talk about the implementation of proposition M.

Proposition M.

How important that for those who may not know about that whole uh proposition M.

Please explain.

So um, thank you for asking.

Uh Prop M was on um the last election and uh the one where we elected our new mayor, and uh Prop M was a revision to our business taxes here.

Uh again, our local taxes.

I mentioned to them a minute ago, all these local set taxes that we collect.

Um it took the the basically the the decades-long uh business tax that's uh generally called gross receipts, and modified it a bit to do uh a little bit of better job of I think putting the burden of uh revenue and tax collection uh distributed across the businesses.

But one of the I think the most creative things, and you you just talked about small businesses, was that what we did was we said the gross receipts tax is a business tax that some businesses here pay depending upon their size.

Okay.

There is another tax, it's called the annual business registration tax that every business pays, but it's it's adjust the amount is adjusted depending upon the size of your business.

Well, there's an adjustment is also in the gross receipts tax.

Okay.

But what we found was that we set the gross receipts tax, the the minimum, the minimum you the the max you the amount you would have to pay that you'd earn in gross receipts to start paying the gross receipts tax was two and a half million dollars of gross receipts annually.

Now that's a small business, anyone below two and a half million dollars of uh but they had no gross receipts tax prior to Prop M.

What Prop M did was it doubled that uh lower cutoff, it raised it up to five million dollars.

So now any business in San Francisco that has gross receipts in one year of five million or under five million dollars in that year, they owe no gross receipts tax.

We doubled the size essentially, or the limit or the volume of the number of folks of the people accepted out of paying the gross receipts tax, and I see that as a huge release.

It's huge relief to these still, these still somewhat small businesses.

Because, you know, I mean, businesses even up to five million, they're not very big businesses, they're really the mom and pops we think about here.

They're the much smaller businesses.

Anybody that's that's bigger than that is paying both that that tax and the reg the reg fee tax.

Um now the bus small businesses just pay the low the smaller one and good on them, and good for the city for making that change.

Yeah, that's amazing.

I mean now that of course, all changes to taxes have to be done by the voters.

So that was part of Prop M, and that was voted in by the voters.

So the voters made that change.

The voters made the material, yeah.

Wow, thank you for sharing on that.

That sure you did it by voting for it.

Yeah, I did.

I did.

I I remember that.

Don't want to assume, but I I did actually.

I remember that.

But thanks for expanding on that.

Sure.

Talk about the economic justice center, the economic justice center.

Oh my gosh.

You know, we help basically eliminate debt.

I mean, debt is one of those things.

I mean, some may teach you in college, some not.

You know, you get those credit cards, this and that, and then just piles up the interest.

It's it's a vicious cycle sometimes.

Money is complicated.

I gotta tell you, finances, it really is crazier and crazier.

So this is a story that actually goes back quite away.

Also, remember I mentioned that that mayor Gavin Newsom appointed me.

Well, to his credit, one of the first things he did was invited me in our office to join him to launch a brand new program.

He came in with a lot of fresh ideas when he became mayor.

A brand new program to help low income people in San Francisco take up the federal benefit called the EITC or earned income tax credit.

It's something that's available to folks when they file their taxes every year.

If they have a low income, and particularly if they're working and have children, they stand to get thousands of extra dollars, not just any tax refunds, but extra money from the federal government.

The issue is, which is great, and many people do uh get that, the problem is not many people know about it.

So plenty of low-income people miss this opportunity just by not applying it.

It's one more form when they do their taxes each year.

He wanted to take an opportunity to get more people involved.

So the city offered a small extra benefit, then we just advertised the hell out of it and said, if you'll apply for the EITC, we'll give you another few bucks on top of what they give you.

We got 10,000 people to apply for the EITC the first year we made that, and we offered that all out of our office.

Long story short, uh the tax season ends.

We're sending out 10,000 local match dollar checks to people.

And again, someone smarter than I am came to me and said, you know, there's a possibility that fully half of those 10,000 checks you send out.

That recipient won't have a checking account, which means you just gave them one more paper check they have to take to a check casher, pay an exorbitant fee just to get access to their own money.

And that really, you know, turned the light bulb on for me that said, that's that's crazy.

There's no reason why they shouldn't be able to have a bank account at a bank, or if even they want a credit union.

There's tons of places to get safe affordable accounts that are you know, uh going to a check casher with all your paychecks for a year could add up to being thousands of dollars a year.

And if someone's only making 20 or 30,000, that's crazy, yeah.

That's crazy.

Whereas a bank account, maybe a few hundred bucks, maybe a hundred bucks, maybe less if you're getting direct deposit and your checking account is free.

Yeah, so I mean, we launched, so that really spurred me to launch one of our our first other programs, which we called bank on San Francisco.

Bank on San Francisco.

We we convened all the banks and credit unions in town.

Um, and we said, look, we're gonna use our voice, the city's voice, um, to tell folks to go get bank accounts.

Go and become your customers.

You know, not something the city does very often, oh, advertise for uh, you know, a for-profit industry, but I said we do that because they're getting ending up in a worse situation by working with the check cashers, and we want to see that better outcome for them.

We uh we use the same voice the city has because remember city cities governments come out with all sorts of messages.

Police say to lock your doors at night, fire fire fire department says check your smoke detectors, health department has great health benefit messages.

Why can't the city say, keep your money safe and stop getting ripped off by the check cashers?

Here's a list of banks and credit unions that um will offer you low cost, maybe even no cost accounts, and your money will be safer and you'll stop having to get ripped off.

We launched that, we still have that program now, um, 20 years later.

And in the first initial years, we had our participating banks and credit unions report.

They were opening as many as 10,000 accounts each year for folks who were previously never had a bank account.

I mean, it's crazy.

We were talking about just the grandma's putting, you know, money in the in the in the but now you're well.

It's funny you should say that because the Chronicle actually at that time wanted to do like a follow-up on our program.

And they went out and said, you know, so has anybody heard this?

Is anybody benefited?

They found a woman named Miss Virginia, uh, older lady who lived in um an SRO, uh low-income property, with her um disabled grandson who she cared for full time.

Yeah.

Every month she would take her social security check and her grandson's disability checks to a check casher, cash them, and then pay her rent and things like that.

Our program got her connected to a local credit union, Northeast Federal Credit Union.

They opened up a free checking account for her, and she saved hundreds of dollars that she now could spend on her grandson.

And I mean, this is a person who is living on the lowest income movement.

And it's life changing in ways.

Now they have this money.

First time in her life, this elderly one, first time in her life she'd ever had a bank account.

I mean, that's the kind of outcomes we were looking to see.

And we know we were able to do that for thousands of folks who lived here.

Low-income folks, folks that need the help the most.

Yeah.

And I mean, you have to think about every San Franciscan of every demographic in the internet, making it equitable, you know, and accessible.

And everyone, because not everyone's at the same level.

Of course not.

And I think people assume that, you know, to live in San Francisco, you got to have a fair amount of money, which is largely true.

No one's gonna deny that.

But that doesn't mean that low income people don't live here.

They do.

They live here, they work here, their kids go to school here.

They see their doctors here, they do all those things.

I want to see what we can do to help them because they need the help the most.

Yeah, they really do.

We do well thank you for sharing that as I but I can imagine my grandma like opening an account I mean because she was so old school but she finally ended up dead down the road.

You know well we we started another program can I tell you another story that happened though and it's again it's kind of a sad start to what turned out to be an excellent piece of body of work please we um I'm sure everybody knows this but we have we offer affordable housing we administer affordable housing resources and but um this affordable low income uh below market rate housing there's a long waiting list for it long people are on that waiting list for years sometimes the mayor's office of housing or whatever department of the city manages that list and as you move up the list you finally can get assigned to an affordable housing affordable housing unit this was another uh chronicle newspaper article um and what happened was this was like 2012 13 14 um there's a beautiful family a husband a wife and two children um they had been on the list for years they were they were finally at the top of the list they got a notice they said NEMA that new building on Market Street and whatever it is 10th or 11th 10th or 11th yeah um just had been built and they're like you you're you're ready for an apartment in this brand new building get ready and move yeah when they finally finished to do the paperwork their credit score didn't meet the cutoff to move into one of these affordable housing units and be trusted to pay the rent and it just broke my heart because we had known this comp this family was on this list for years.

We should have been working with them to make sure that when their time came up that they would be able to be eligible fully eligible for that unit.

So we uh jumped on a bandwagon that a number of other cities across the country to launch a program called financial counseling we offer for free an opportunity for any low-income person or family to meet with a financial counselor and have financial counseling sessions the same kind of counseling that wealthy people you know undertake right if if they need help managing their money low income people need help managing theirs too we offer this for free you can go to the library you can get these kind of things maybe so through some other departments and through the mayor's office of housing we specifically make sure that the folks who are on that affordable housing waiting list do not end up in the place that that family ended up in and what we do is they meet with a counselor one-on-one in person uh they look at all their finances they they talk to them about what that kind of debt they have what kind of savings they have if they have a bank account or if they don't um things like that and what happens is with the practices they learn there's often a really a real ability to either um pay down or even shrink some of the debt yeah and increase the savings and the majority of the folks we counsel their credit scores rise significantly in less than a year and that that is the kind of work again that I think is important for us to bring to residents of San Francisco.

Absolutely I mean it that education is power and financial literacy like for free though they they don't have to you know uh pay all these crazy fees to get to get a professional advice right and the city is providing this and this is amazing this is all on our website by the way all the all the programs I've talked about and sure maybe a couple more I might talk about yeah no there's a lot uh sf treasurer.org sftreasure.org go on that site go on that site is a whole lot they can also see how to pay their taxes there but there is a way where you can find out about these uh financial empowerment programs and these other programs I appreciate you sharing these stories too these are real stories real San Franciscans and people that every day that it changes that's awesome um can I try to save the best for last though well it was okay what do you got children saving college savings accounts that is kids in San Francisco from the little kids to college I mean it's amazing so we knew for a long time that there is forever been a real difference between the kids that graduate high school and pretty much all those kids go to college and another group.

Yeah um in our in our in our school system, I think they're called represented versus underrepresented.

The underrepresented group um steadily has far fewer kids that end up going to college.

There's a lot of research around that phenomenon.

There's a lot of of of thinking about what how to tackle it, what to do it.

A lot of it really appeared to be that there's just a whole way that some kids are raised where you know college is important and you're gonna go.

Um, and there's another set of kids where they never hear about college.

It's just it's just not in the picture.

Um anyway, so then based around that at the time, this was uh over a decade ago now.

There was a lot of research.

And what research showed that if a child grew up in a family where they had opened up a college savings account, that just having the account caused conversations to happen that put the idea of college into the kid in the family's minds, and they more often followed up on it and went to college.

And what the research also showed was it didn't matter if they saved a lot of money or a little money, it didn't matter if their income was high or low.

It didn't matter really where they went to school or any of that, the impact was still the same.

Even a modest amount of money saved in a in a little college savings account in the child's name made a difference in whether or not they went to college.

That's amazing.

So we built, so we took that model, we worked with uh some nonprofits that were studying what's the best way to administer this, and lo and behold, they thought the best way might be for a government to do it because governments are kind of neutral, you know.

People are gonna trust them more than a private corporation or a company.

And if a bank tried to tell them, oh, you really should do this, this sounds a little self-serving, that type of thing.

Right.

So anyway, um, we kind of followed their recipe and well again with the with the partnership of Mayor Gavin Newsom at the time and the Board of Supervisors at the time in 2011.

We created the first uh local government, really, I think gov any government run automatic kill children's savings account program um in the country.

Wow.

We called it kindergarten to college, and we we called it that because here's how we implemented it.

We worked with the San Francisco Public School District, which by the way is majority kids uh on free and reduced lunch because they're legitimately low-income family from low-income families.

And we said every child when they enter kindergarten, we're gonna do the list of kids from the school district, and we're we're gonna open up a college savings account automatically in their name.

No paperwork, no going anywhere, nothing.

Boom.

And in the fall of their kindergarten class year, we would send a letter home to the parents and say, we already opened up a college savings account for your child, Susie, Billy, you know, whatever the name is, we've already given him or her a college savings account.

That's huge.

We put $50 in the account, so it's not even a zero balance account.

There's money in the account already.

And opening that account.

It's really easy for you to add more money, including you could walk right into a bank branch and put uh walk up to a teller window and hand over whatever you want, five or ten dollars or more.

Or you could go do it online, or you could do an automatic transfer or whatever.

And every year we've opened up um accounts for every incoming uh kindergartner in the public school district.

The public school has been our tremendous partner in this effort.

We couldn't do it w without them.

Yeah.

And to date, we have over 60,000 accounts that have been opened.

And, you know, 10 plus millions of dollars had been saved in those accounts.

That's huge.

It's huge.

It's absolutely huge.

As I said, not all families have huge balances in there, but we just want to see the activity.

We want to see them in the world.

Starting on the right track, right?

Because what I like to say is those millions of dollars that they've saved more importantly, represent millions of conversations that those parents have had with their kids about, hey, I put 20 bucks in your college savings account today.

I want you to get that message.

You're going to college.

You're going to college.

This is something that's meant for you.

You're like forecasting it.

You're putting it.

You're manifesting it.

You're manifesting it.

Like you're going to go to college.

It's going to make sure.

So let me jump in.

That's a good use.

So that sounds fantastic, right?

It's a very promising, great program.

Let's jump to the end.

We've now had three different high school classes graduates uh with the accounts that we had opened up in kindergarten.

It's been that long.

And um, and so we did uh research on the first uh class, and I think we're doing it now on the second class.

But what we showed, remember I said there's a group of high school seniors every year that graduate, and almost all of them, like pretty much 100% of them go to college.

There's another group, underrepresented group, that far fewer go to college each year.

That underrepresented group, we increased the number that went to college by 12%.

More than a 10% increase in those kids going to college, and we're starting seeing that pattern, hopefully over many years, but over the first couple of years already.

So we're excited that, you know, this modest little program, it does cost the city some money to open up those accounts and put that money in.

But we're seeing real results.

And that can change lives.

That will change lives.

It does change lives.

Absolutely.

I mean, you're planting those seeds, and it's growing to see how far it can grow.

But sometimes people don't realize it until they get, you know, maybe jump started somehow and said, hey, it's it's here for you.

We're gonna make it happen for you.

And that is what, you know, our city and our government has been doing for our citizens.

And those are things behind the scenes that I I I love to share on this program because a lot of people don't know about that, you know.

And uh and this is great that I did not know about that.

Uh you know, and then this is.

I want to thank you for the opportunity to share it because not enough story.

Not enough people know about, you know, the opportunity they might have for their child in the public school district.

They could be saving money in those accounts.

Yeah, they could be going with their child to the bank.

We actually do um deposit days.

We've even done some here in City Hall or in different uh library branches.

Yeah, and I'll tell you, I should bring you to one of those.

They're amazing.

Watching these fifth graders show up and make their own deposits in person.

Oh my gosh, that's a year.

That's so cute to see that.

So adorable.

And you're like, oh my gosh, it's heartbreaking.

It's really just the most exciting thing you've ever seen.

But it's a big deal, like to many of these families to have like this that that power to control.

I will put money into my and invest in my future, and anything's possible, really.

Absolutely anything.

Yeah.

When I get a chance to talk to these kids, I always ask them, you know, what do you what do you want to be when you grow up?

Too many people not too many, but you'd be surprised how many of them want to be basketball players.

Well, the the rise of the warriors and the championships.

No, I can't blame them, of course.

I think it's a fantastic goal.

Yeah, that's so funny.

Um, but they want everything from astronauts to police to fire to the sports.

Is this that that's the kind of thinking we want in a dialogue?

In a first grader and in a 12th grader.

That's a that's a huge success for you for sharing that.

It's been really exciting, and and uh what I like, and and I think this has been possible because I've been here very bloody long time, is to understand how the city works and to be an elected official, you know, it gives you some degree of freedom.

I can work with the forces that make the real decisions here, like a mayor or members of the board.

Um I can also work outside uh with partners, banks, financial unions, the school district, and and with good ideas and some some real work involved.

Yeah, we can hopefully change the landscape.

We can hopefully make things better for some people out there.

Absolutely.

Um, yeah.

So I'm excited about that.

Then I sorry, one last story I want to talk about.

Okay, no, you've got a ton of you've been here quite some time, so you have so many good wins and stories that you'd love to share.

Well, there's one last story that yeah, really it really took me by surprise.

Okay.

I don't know if you remember, you know, there was this um a number of years back, um, Ferguson, there was this really bad incidence that went on there with low-income people getting pulled over by the police for unnecessary tickets and fines and things like that, and it was a lot of it was racial-based and low income oriented and real bad outcomes.

And a lot of it was based on um really um punishing fines and fees that the local governments were putting on low income people as a way number one to gain revenue, but maybe for other bad motivated reasons.

Someone came to me and said one of my staffers came to me and said, I think we should look at how our fines and fees are affecting low-income people.

And I said, He said, you know, like what's going on over there, and I'm like, San Francisco, San Francisco's not like that place.

We wouldn't do that here.

And they were like, we really should look.

So we convened uh um an uh a committee that met with members of the public and members of the city government, yeah.

And all the departments that issue fines and fees and all the enforcers and the sheriff and all that kind of stuff, and we said, let's just talk about what the that landscape was like here in San Francisco.

And after six months, what did you find?

That we were doing much of the same thing.

We were we were we were putting unnecessarily oversized burdens on low income people and other people didn't feel the same.

I'll give you a couple examples.

Um a parking ticket or a uh uh, you know, not a moving violation, but uh a parking or is the whatever ticket.

The biggest parking ticket and mistake you can make is leaving your car parked in a place that has to.

Because I think we've all been there.

I don't know.

We have been there, I'm the mission.

Don't ask me that question, but um I've been there many times.

Um, but if you park in the wrong place and you don't know that that it becomes um no parking at certain time, the city will tow your car.

And you have to go to the tow lot and pay, you have to pay for the ticket for breaking that rule and and pay for the money retreat.

Well, in San Francisco, it's nearly $500 day one, not storage fees, day one to get to be able to testify to that if this has happened to you.

Hard way, yes.

Five hundred dollars is a lot of money for a low-income family.

Many don't have that amount of money, so many a low-income family would just lose the car.

They couldn't afford to get the car back.

Well, let me ask you this.

If a family loses their car and uh a job wage earner can't get to work, does that mean that warrior general will lose their job?

And if that wage owner loses their job and loses their income, does that mean they can't pay their rent?

And if they can't pay the rent, does that mean they'll end up evicted and homeless?

Does anybody think that parking in the wrong place at the wrong time should cause a family to be impacted such that they end up getting to be homeless just because of making that one mistake?

Absolutely not, is my answer.

And what we took a look at was a number of the penalties.

While you still deserve a penalty for breaking a rule, of course, I mean, they need to be adjusted by according to one's ability to pay.

To many people, five hundred dollars is nothing, it's a nuisance.

Yeah.

But to some people, it was not life ending, but live their living, ending their living.

And it was an impossible amount and it had impossible kinds of outcomes uh for them.

With the partnership of the MTA who who handed manages that that activity and that fine, we worked with them, and now um, if someone is low income and truly low income, we can verify it.

It's anyone who gets public assistance or who gets food stamps, we know they're low income.

They've already been checked.

It's true, they're low income.

That $500 amount drops to $100, and now everyone's able to get their cars back.

Still paying a fine for breaking the rule.

And we implemented that across a number of different parking tickets and other types of fines and fees, and and now we see that we're causing less pain and harm in our city for people that really deserve, you know, some consideration and some understanding and just some adjustment that says, yeah, you may have to pay something because you broke a rule, but it doesn't have to.

And you're considering they're they're where they are in their life, right?

And you're you're you're factoring that and caring about that said, hey, you gotta pay the fine, you gotta do this, but you might not have that.

Now you've adjusted it and you and and you've how long's that been, you said?

We did that about four or five years ago, four or five years ago.

But we're still working on making sure that any new fines or fees are adjusted and and made appropriate sized.

The one more uh fee that we found, it wasn't even a fine.

Uh-huh.

Somebody was um let out of jail or prison.

They come back trying to enter the community, they're on probation for a while.

I promise you, nearly every government charges a fee for being on probation.

We charged a fee.

It was $60 a month for being on probation.

Okay.

Um, we also had for some reason the brilliant idea that that fee should be paid up front.

So we billed for three years in advance and send a uh a bill for a few thousand dollars to a person just coming out of prison, trying to stand up themselves on a life and and away.

You well, probably won't be surprised to hear that over 90% of those bills never got paid because that person doesn't have three thousand thousand dollars sitting around.

And they were just trying to stand their lives back up and looking for a job and looking for a place to live.

Not only were sending them this bill they couldn't afford to pay, we were reporting to it to the credit union to the credit agencies, and we were lowering their credit scores by showing unpaid bills on their credit report.

We went to the Board of Supervisors and the mayor at the time, and uh we said this is only harming people.

And I don't know that we really and if 90% of them aren't getting paid we're not going to lose any money by really you know just eliminating them and stop doing this practice.

So the board and the mayor at the time did exactly that they um eliminated those so nobody was getting that um anymore and they actually looked back over prior years they erased all that debt from people's credit reports and people's credit scores jumped overnight because what do we want for someone leaving we want them to make it easy to find a job make it easy to find a place to live in the find them a way to stand up a successful life for themselves back in our city or wherever they decide they want to go but we were standing in the way of that success so we're no longer doing that just some things in that okay and then some things you just I would have never dreamed that this the liberal city of San Francisco city and county of San Francisco would do that.

But you know things have just been in place for decades.

A long time who would have thought to look there and that's what we did.

Thanks for sharing those stories let's talk about the your upcoming initiative stop scam s oh yeah okay let's transition to that uh helping San Franciscans you know from financial fraud uh I mean that that there's so many scams out there I mean every single day now with technology in place and whatnot.

Yeah talk about stop scam SF in particular.

We're really excited about this program because I think all of us are violently aware of how prevalent this is we all I I and I know everyone I know gets messages, text messages, email messages, stuff I mean they're so sophisticated filter it out but it's crazy.

Phone calls you know that that that's the most heartbreaking you know someone who's unsuspecting gets a phone call someone lies to them says I'm your coworker I'm your relative I'm your niece I'm your this I'm your that I need $10,000 please go do it.

Don't hesitate, just go and they they go and they they lose this money and sometimes massive amounts of money.

And it doesn't feel like people really have an ability to to validate is this real or is it not and and I and we what we're gonna try and do with this program is we're gonna again do we did I said we started doing way back at the beginning of our programs which is just use the city's voice that trusted voice.

We're not any kind of a profit making company we're not um any anyone else that's that you might be suspicious of we're just the city's voice and that voice is going to say whatever we know about what to be suspicious for.

If we have alerts about something we'll share it.

But mostly it's going to say you know if somebody approaches you if a message is is is reaching you that says do this or do that and you're not familiar with it.

Pause pause check it out check with us check with someone and before you act yes and and just it you won't hurt anything the only thing will come out of that is is a better result.

Yeah.

And and so just don't follow the impulse don't just take knee jerk action.

Just pause a minute check our database check other places talk to a friend talk to a relative and think before you do something and we're hopeful that that's going to save a lot of folks who otherwise are turning into victims.

Yeah and there's so many uh out there and we're trying to reduce special amount huge amounts of money.

I know and and it happens every single day.

Every day you know there's so many victims and targets especially a lot of some of the elderly folks I know uh when my dad was around he got so much he almost got into some of those in a seriously it's heartbreaking.

Talk to us a little bit let's let's reevaluate don't don't don't rush into stuff well you know someone who's getting older you know some of our faculty start to diminish and uh not speaking from experience yet but who knows someday and you know we're we're we're just we're accustomed to just kind of acting and I think our primary message is slow down, maybe pause for a minute, talk to someone, check our database, check our resources, give us a call.

Yeah, whatever, and just see what someone else thinks before you take action.

So, Jose what what is the best part of your job that what did that that it's up in the day.

I mean, you've been doing it for so many years.

I mean, you shared some amazing stories of, you know, success stories of these some of these programs you've implemented, this and that.

I gotta I gotta imagine that that's what it is is.

It's seeing like the the end, like like the possibilities for people in the end, right?

There is a lot of that.

There is really a lot of that.

I am, like I said, I I can't stay I'm a broken record about how great the staff in our department is.

They work with everybody, from the folks that implement the programs I just talked about to the folks that collect taxes, the folks that manage our the city's portfolio and keep billions of dollars safe.

This is important work, it's serious work, uh, it's it's consequential work, and every one of them is is a true hero and and does the work very, very well.

Personally, I just love who to know, but I love city government.

I love what we're able to do for people.

I I I love I realize that we're kind of the hidden treasure.

I think most people that live work and visit here, they have no clue, uh next to no clue about what city government does.

Really, how it keeps the streets clean, if they are clean, if they keeps the water running, he keeps the lights on or whatever that we do are able to do and and and and makes this a nice place to live, visit, uh, or work in.

But but I just, I think from my my bandage point as an elected official, I've had some opportunities to do wonderful things.

And this was before actually I was the treasurer.

I was an employee working at the MTA.

But again, in that first year of uh newly elected mayor Gavin Newsom, you might recall that one day he decided to start performing same-sex uh marriages back in the February of 2004.

Huge.

And it was huge.

It rocked the world, it rocked our world.

And I was uh a lot of city employees were given the opportunity just because the volume was so huge to come and get sworn in and perform weddings.

And on that first three-day weekend, I came down one day and got sworn in and I performed 36 weddings in one day, and there were thousands of people here lined up to get married.

Now, unfortunately, those marriages did get uh reversed over time, but you I wish you could have been here.

The the joy on their faces, the the excitement.

Oh, only imagine validation.

The these folks were saying, you know, I never dreamed I'd have this opportunity in my lifetime.

Uh the this couple showed up.

These ladies had been together for 38 years, and they said we thought we'd never have a chance to do this.

Another couple showed up.

They flew in from North Carolina.

Wow.

And they had their family of friends on their cell phone listening to us perform the ceremony, and at the moment when I finished the ceremony, the phone started screaming with happiness from all the families.

And I was like, you know, this is amazing.

That this is the kind of stuff that happens in San Francisco.

And to be part of the city government that's got a hand in much of that has been a real joy.

I'm proud of our city for that, you know.

I am too first and so many things, uh, trendsetters, right?

Like, we're we're doing this, you know, and and this is what's special about San Francisco.

Uh this is well, so much insight.

Thank you so much.

I've been coming to this building for over 20 years.

This is my day job, you know, and I still come in five days a week.

But I think that was my happiest day.

That was a pretty darn happy day.

That was a wonderful thing.

That's a big moment in our history, too.

So credit to everybody that was involved with it, and of course, the mayor at the time for being.

So, what what kind of advice?

Let's, you know, for the listeners that are tuning in right now and watching this, uh, what kind of advice would you give them?

Any young people if they want to get into this kind of work that you do, uh, you know, finance, public service and that kind of combination, whatever.

Well, what's the what's like the biggest advice you can give to young people about it?

I would hope they would do something that I didn't do uh when I was younger, which is learn just learn about what's going on around them.

Yeah.

Learn about how do those buses show up every day and these trains.

How does this happen?

How, you know, who decides where the bike lanes go and and who makes those choices and and how do maybe, you know, would I have a chance to have a say in that?

Is there a way for me to be heard?

I think people don't realize there are plenty of ways.

The city wants to listen to the people that live here, work here, and even visit here.

We want to know what we can be doing better, but most people assume that they don't the people don't want to hear from them.

I think the one thing I would tell people is we do want to hear from you.

And you can go to your local supervisor's office.

You can uh talk to a bus driver, you can come into the tax collector's office.

You can go anywhere you like, but you know, don't be shy and just if you have questions, ask them.

Ask questions.

If you're not curious, you could be curious, exactly.

Let me ask you to be curious about how does all this happen.

And um, you know, it's confusing.

There's no doubt about it.

But how do the parks I I heard a statistic that every residence in San Francisco no is nowhere than 10 minute walk away from a park here in San Francisco.

I love that.

How did that happen?

And who keeps them all looking as beautiful as they are?

Where did all those playgrounds come from?

Exactly.

Well, there's answers to all those questions, and they're darn good answers most of the time.

And there's probably things that questions that still need better answers for them.

You know, what can we do about this or what can we do about that?

If you live here or work here and have ideas, this government wants to hear about it.

I promise you.

Yes.

You just have to get grab one of us and ask.

If it's not that if we're not the person in charge of that, we know how to send you to the person.

Right.

And um, and I I tell you, our job is to listen.

To listen.

It really is to listen and to understand, and then do what we can.

Okay.

Well, that has been great as we wrap up this amazing uh interview here.

I mean, there's so much to to talk about.

I know we've only scratched the surface.

I know taxes would be this exciting.

Hey, but I have learned a lot.

Me as a San Francisco, I'm like, wow, okay.

That's amazing for sharing that.

Um, let's talk about.

Let's bring it back to San Francisco and our and our love for this city.

Uh is there a shout-out um that you want to do?

Like a neighborhood, like, is there specific or you know, business, anything that you just want to shout out?

I was talking to a friend the other day, and and I'm I'm I don't have a lot of like uh, you know, uh stuff that I get hung up about, but I miss Don Ramones.

You ever go to Don Ramon's restaurant?

It was a uh as a Mexican restaurant in the mission.

They went away a few years ago around the pandemic time and they unfortunately haven't come back.

But I just it the feeling inside that restaurant, like so many places, it was like going home.

That was your go-to spot.

It was it was a family kind of feeling.

It was family run, always from day one, and and the founding family still ran it.

Yeah, and you know, it was a great feeling, a great, a great menu, a great location.

Um, sometimes a lot of city hall people ended up there because it's not very far away from our present location right now.

And but in spite of that, it no matter what you think about that, it was still a fantastic place, held many an event there and um just missed that place and missed that.

Don't I've heard of it never been.

Oh, I love it.

Well, hopefully there's another restaurant out there that can uh match up and then I'll do some research and I'll let you know how's that.

Uh well we do have some great foods here in San Francisco.

Without a doubt, great things.

Okay, so uh we always ask our guests uh as the part of the close, like the headline in the newspaper the next five years.

What would you like that headline of San Francisco to read in five years?

They pick up, you know, we don't think of the paper anymore.

But look at on your computer screen online, whatever it is.

What does that say?

San Francisco, San Francisco kids all ended up in college and and ended up doing what they want to do with their future.

There you go.

I want to see every kid that grows up here, comes here, lives here, graduates here, have every opportunity they need.

Too many kids feel shut out, right?

Too many adults do too.

But I think if we can grab them when they're children and make sure they understand they have every opportunity the same as everybody else, it's just up to them.

That's the kind of success I think really builds our city and our love.

Yeah.

That's a good way to close.

It's inspiring.

Thank you.

Thank you for your time.

Yeah, that's a good headline.

And so one last thing.

You know, we normally ask guests to bring something to add uh uh here.

But uh, you know, is there anything cool here that you like to point out from our guests that brought a variety of things?

There's a bunch of I actually can already spot a couple of things I think I brought, and one of them is that square um uh square at the top that's your garden to college.

There it is.

That's uh that's a little piggy bank, not in the shape of a pig, but it's a piggy bank.

Ah, there you go.

In the shape of a Lego, and it's got the garden to college uh logo on the front of it.

Yeah, and it's got a uh, you know, a coin slot in the top.

Who carries coins anymore?

But anyway, it's still the whole idea is to bring the idea of savings into the families.

So every time many times when we do an event, we'll bring things like giveaways like that to tell the family.

I love that.

You know, this is just one more reminder.

We're making it as easy as we can to save for your kids' future.

Five, ten dollars, whatever you can do.

And talk go home and talk about it and tell your kid how important it is that they have ch all the chances in the world.

Well, this has been amazing conversation.

Okay.

Thank you, thank you.

That that's the the centerpiece, right?

That actually, we were building this uh podcast studio, and you did uh contribute that early on.

We'll take the center spot.

You're right there.

But that it is it's about kids' futures.

It really is.

It's amazing.

Thank you so much for very nice to meet you.

This is an amazing uh learning experience.

And then one more time.

How can people find out more information, drive it back on the website?

Um, all the information we talked about today, uh whether it's on the business and tax side or on the services side and the programs.

SFtreasurer.org.

SF Treasurer one word.org.

Um just go there and find your way around to the place you have question about.

If you're a business paying taxes and you have questions we want to hear from you, you can also just pick up 311.

As with the other programs too, just dial 311 and folks there can answer basic questions or send you to the folks that can give you more complicated answers.

Thank you so much, San Francisco's treasure, Mr.

Jose Cisneros.

All right, we are officially you.

Whoa, done.

There you go, the gavel.

I'm very proud uh to lead the Polski Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of Chicago.

And welcome to this very historic day as we officially ribbon cut the Third Coast Foundry.

What started as a demo day 12 months ago uh with a few of our universities has now led to a truly historic partnership between eight great proud world-class research universities from the Midwest.

And let me just give you a few statistics of the Third Coast Foundry.

You see the eight schools uh behind me, but those schools educate 300,000 students, they do 10 billion dollars of research a year, they've led to world-class innovations uh that have really been, you know, industry altering.

Um, and if you were to just take the regions where those universities are uh economically, they'd be in the G7.

Uh so you know, the the graduates of Third Coast Foundry institutions represent over 30% of the engineers, scientists, and AI builders in this country.

Uh, I'd like to thank especially our team at the Polski Center for helping make all of this happen.

Um, and for those of you who know me, you know that I served previously uh before at U Chicago as deputy mayor in Chicago.

So I truly have a unique amount of appreciation for Mayor Lurie and the job that his team has done.

Uh they've been tremendously welcoming of all of us and have embraced us here in San Francisco.

Um, you know, we said that when we did the soft launch, it wasn't actually official, it was on his Instagram.

Uh so we thank you, Mayor Lurie.

Um with that is my pleasure to introduce the 46th mayor of San Francisco, Mayor Daniel Lurie.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Uh this is an exciting day in San Francisco to Northwestern Carnegie, Mellon, Ohio State, Purdue, University of Chicago, University of Illinois, Urbana, Champaign, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wash, you and St.

Louis.

Welcome to San Francisco, the greatest city in the world, and you are gonna make it even stronger.

Uh, we all hope that while you're in our city, San Francisco feels like a home away from home, just a little cooler during the summer time.

I I want to thank you all, uh, all the leaders for choosing our incredible city.

Uh, I I've already expressed my bias, um, but there's no better place to be than here in the global center of innovation.

But innovation doesn't just belong to one city, it happens wherever talented people are willing to tackle hard problems and think differently.

Looking at the work represented here today and what you just mentioned with all of the talent at these incredible universities, it is clear that the spirit is thriving across the Midwest and across our great country.

That's why we're excited to welcome you here, not just visitors, but as partners.

Third Coast Foundry will become a home for collaboration between some of the nation's leading institutions and one of the most dynamic innovation ecosystems on the planet.

Through demo days, seminars, workshops, and receptions, this space will help students, researchers, and entrepreneurs turn ideas into opportunities.

Universities, we all know, bring incredible energy.

They bring new ideas and new people into our city.

They strengthen the culture of innovation that has divined San Francisco for generations.

And that is exactly what we want more of here in downtown San Francisco.

Right now we are building a downtown that is a vibrant 24-7 neighborhood where people can live, work, play, and learn.

A place where students are learning, founders are building companies, residents are raising families, and visitors are discovering what makes San Francisco so special.

And with today's opening, we are moving closer to that goal.

I also want to thank each university for your commitment to our city.

We are excited to partner with you and build the future together.

And to every student and entrepreneur who walks through these doors, this city is behind you.

And president, it's good to be with you and to know that you've got some uh bears' roots to you.

So with that, I will say, let's go, San Francisco, and thank you all very much for having me.

Thank you, Mayor Lurie.

Thank you so much for that welcome.

I'm Paula Basados, president of the University of Chicago, and I'm so happy to be here with representatives from eight truly world-class great universities from across the Midwest.

Americans across the Midwest are helping to sponsor these amazing universities where we care deeply about creating new knowledge, about educating people, and we're also we have a spirit of innovation that runs very deep.

We have students and faculty who are great founders of wonderful companies.

And what's special about today is eight truly great universities from across the Midwest have come together.

We've come together, not separately, but all together to bring our founders here to San Francisco to work with the community of technology innovators and people who are able to sponsor companies and people who will work in those companies to help us bring our the benefits of that knowledge creation to the future of America and to innovation in general.

So we're so excited.

We're also feeling keenly that this is a place of a lot of experimentation.

People try new things here.

We are going to have faculty and students trying to do things in entirely new ways together, and it's going to be very special.

I hope that people across San Francisco will see this as an important moment and one of great success.

So thank you very much for welcoming us.

Good morning.

Thank you, President Alavasaros.

It is such a pleasure to be here on behalf of Carnegie Mellon University.

My name is Meredith Meyer Grelli, and I'm here with our vice president of research, Dr.

Teresa Mayer and our senior director of partnerships in Retro Banergy.

So we all know talent, excellence.

It exists all across the country, though I will admit to visit the number one AI and cybersecurity programs in the country to visit the largest university robotics program in the country.

You've got to travel to Pittsburgh.

I've been.

Yeah.

Maybe not the greatest city in the world, as you stated earlier.

Certainly the Paris of Appalachia.

So I took a driverless wheel this morning from my hotel to here.

And what you may not realize is that technology has a straight line back to Carnegie Mellon.

The car that won the DARPA Urban Challenge was a Carnegie Mellon car.

The engineer who built that car, who led that team, would go on to found what we now know as Waymo.

And so when you grab a Waymo in this glorious city, you can rest assured that you are being ridden driven on Midwestern research.

As the pace of innovation accelerates, our shared future economy will be built company by company, and by people who back research early.

They need to back research.

We need to back research often when it still fits in university labs.

This is where our most novel technologies are originating.

For example, when we think about physical AI, which we think about a lot at Carnegie Mellon, we know that nearly half of the most successful physical AI companies, those that have raised more than 30 million dollars in the last five years, are PhD founder, founder-bled.

You already know some of the companies that have come out of the CMU research ecosystem, many of whom populate San Francisco.

If you know about Duolingo, which may be how you learn languages, you may know about Aurora, which is running the first driverless trucks on America's highways.

A bridge, which is the leading medical scribe company in the country and is really at the forefront of ambient AI, and skilled that's building brains for any kind of robot and is currently valued at something like 15 billion dollars.

These are just Carnegie Mellon companies.

The potential that exists in this collective ecosystem of eight leading research universities is simply astounding.

And we are so glad to be a part of this group putting it on display here in San Francisco.

What we're doing here together with University of Chicago's leadership and vision is hot wiring our connection between our collective founders and the capital mentors and talent that live in this extraordinary Bay Area ecosystem that we know will help turn our groundbreaking research into world-leading companies.

So congratulations to Samir, the entire Polski and University of Chicago team, and to all of our partners in this collective, we are so honored to be in this glorious mix of talent and commercialization potential.

Thank you.

Good morning.

Good morning.

Thank you all for being here.

This is such a pleasure.

My name is Rashid Bashir.

I'm proud and humbled to be the Dean of the Granger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Banachamp.

And on behalf of my other co-dean here, my other dean, Brooke Elliott, uh Dean of the Geese College of Business and other colleagues.

We're really delighted to be here.

It's a privilege to be especially here with our eight partner universities, opening this third course foundry.

And I will note, I think as many of you know, it is not easy to get eight universities to agree to one thing and voluntarily, as Paul said earlier.

So this is a pretty big and so this is a pretty big deal for all of us to come together.

And you should have heard the earlier discussion we were having about how everyone is already thinking about how to amplify this partnership.

So but uh I would say that this has really been uh nothing but uh uh a social engineering uh miracle.

So thank you, Samir.

Um, but we do pull these miracles off in the Midwest quite often.

Um let me start with just one simple observation uh that the Midwest has the research, the talent, uh, and the institutions to innovate.

Uh what it has lacked is uh startups that scale.

You've heard some great examples, but we need more of them, and I think that's the opportunity, and that's exactly what Third Coast Foundry will help accelerate.

So consider what's what's been gathered here under one roof, eight universities.

I think this was mentioned this morning.

Over 350,000 students across these eight great universities right here, uh, over 10 billion in annual research expenditures.

So no single school can command that.

And we believe in these radical partnerships, these transformative partnerships.

Um, and I think this is really what you're gonna see here.

Uh, and this combination is the whole point because we, as I mentioned, we believe in deeply in radical collaborations.

Uh the biggest problems and challenges uh don't respect institutional boundaries.

And we have put that conviction, by the way, to, for example, the Chanzer Caberg BioHub, the second one that we won in the Midwest with U Chicago Northwestern and UIUC, just one example, or now what's happening in the Chicago Quantum Exchange with many of the institutions here are partners, and also the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park, for example, where we hope to build the first Vault August and quantum computer in the world.

Third course foundry is the same instinct now pointed in the Bay Area.

And as I will say that now we're quantum mechanically entangled with the Bay Area.

The co-founders of YouTube, PayPal, Mark Andreessen, who built the first popular web browser, Mosaic, now sits at the center of Silicon Valley Venture, co-founders of Oracle, Tom Siebel, and C3 AI and SIBO Systems, and everything has been done.

So we're we're not, I mean, we're not hoping to break in.

We have built build this place, so it's really amazing now that with the leadership of Paul and Samir and others, we all are coming together.

We have tried to do things individually, and now we're coming collectively.

So that's really the power of this enterprise.

We're so excited, and our strengths, I think today are exactly what the world needs.

You heard about physical AI and robotics, world-class research and AI, quantum information science, nuclear, whether it's fission, micronuclear reactors or fusion, biotechnology, agricultural technology, combining with the business, education, all of these great disciplines, we can bring it all together, and we have a portfolio that I think no single coast could match.

We want to enhance, expand, and collaborate.

So this is really exciting to be here.

And in some, so in summary, in closing, I think Third Coast Foundry is this bridge.

We hope it'll be this bridge between the Midwest innovation and the coastal capital and talent, and build on the belief that the best things get built together.

It's like, again, in the quantum lingua, it's the Einstein-Rosen Bridge, this connection between the Midwest and getting a little too technical, but that's exciting.

And I think this is really exciting.

So I'm really just proud to be here today with all of my partners.

Thank you so much.

Thank you for the stress.

Okay, we're not going to cut the ribbon.

So if I could get all the institutional representatives up here and mayor, we're going to bring you an oversized pair of scissors.

And we do have a little given bag for you, the inaugural swag bag from the very closest.

Okay, so I'm gonna count, but everybody hold the ribbon time.

Maybe squeeze in.

There's some room back here if anyone wants to get back.

My name is Sean Ellsburn, CEO of Spur.

Thank you for being here this afternoon.

You know, there are many, many reasons why I love my work at Spur.

There are many reasons why I love the organization.

Um, but really much at the top of the list is this event this afternoon.

As a former city employee who is nominated many colleagues, who has been at this event many times and celebrated nominees, celebrated winners, and admittedly, as a city employee who is very jealous of never winning myself.

I do know personally how inspirational this afternoon is and how rewarding this recognition is.

So it's really a great honor for me to be a part of the event today.

And I would like to put today's event in the context of something that happened just last week.

Last Thursday was the annual, I want to make sure I get this right, Samuel Heyman service to American Medal Ceremony, known as the Sammies.

What are the Sammies?

The Sammies, anecdotally, are what are known as the Oscars for Federal Employees.

It's an event that is very similar to this, but for our hundreds of thousands of federal employees.

But last week, unfortunately, we saw what happens when we have an atmosphere of distrust, when we have an atmosphere of disrespect, and we have an atmosphere of, frankly, doji condescension towards public employees.

In a typical year, you'll have over 400 nominees.

You'll have nearly a hundred winners.

This year, last week, there were less than 200 nominees.

There were many nominees who raised their hand and said, please withdraw my nomination.

The fear of distrust and the fear of bringing attention to their work scared people away.

Thankfully, we are not the federal government.

Thankfully, we are in San Francisco.

And thankfully, here in San Francisco, we celebrate our public employees.

We celebrate the work of public employees who way too often go unrecognized.

Even as their work shapes the health, safety, and opportunity of our community every single day.

That's why this afternoon matters, because it gives us a chance to honor the individuals whose commitment to integrity keep this city running often behind the scenes.

At a time when trust in institutions is being tested, and our communities face complex challenges, good government is more essential than ever.

It is the foundation of a just, resilient, and functional society.

And the people we are honoring tonight exemplify what that looks like in practice.

I'm proud that we get to shed a light on their contributions and to say very clearly, their work matters and it is valued.

So please, collectively, let's recognize all the nominees and winners.

Now, this is the portion of the intro where I usually get in trouble because I'm supposed to recognize the elected officials in the room.

As a former elected official who more often than not was ignored during this part, I know how that can kind of feel.

So what I will say collectively, even though I know all of the elected officials in the room are far more mature than I ever was, maybe for my own embarrassment, let's recognize all the elected officials in the room.

But the one elected we will, of course, name.

It is my honor, it is my privilege to welcome to the stage.

There he is.

Our mayor, Mayor Daniel Lurry.

Is it chief of staff?

Is it supervisor?

Is it CEO?

Sean.

Sean.

When I was walking down here, uh, my incredible chief of staff, Stacey Slaughter, said, Yes.

She's right over there.

Uh who everybody in this room has always been kind to her.

Sean, you have been incredibly kind to her.

I thank you for that.

Said that this was her favorite awards ceremony writ large across the city because of what you just said.

Because we honor and we owe it to every San Franciscan to make sure their government works, and you all are making it work every single day.

Making sure the government works for the people of San Francisco has been our focus from day one, breaking down silos, fostering collaboration across departments and staying laser focused on results.

At a moment when confidence in public institutions is fragile across this country.

Today, that number is sixty five percent.

Thank you.

We are reconvened and welcome back to start.

We have reached more department agreement.

Um also um this morning in the Department of Public Works, I neglected to announce that the committee also rejected uh rejects recommendation fourteen, and as uh for the department of public health, we're also rejecting recommendation twenty.

We also uh want to be more explicit that for the Academy of Sciences, we are accepting recommendations one through six.

Uh this means that we're putting uh fifty percent of their first year uh of funding, and then second year full funding on reserve.

Six, seven, eight, nine, ten, and eleven.

We have also reached an agreement with the department of homelessness and supportive housing, and we'll be rejecting the budget and legislative analyst recommendations five, six, seven, and eight, and current year recommendation one.

But we will be placing those amounts on reserve.

I believe, um, and with those reserve is with the intent that when the department returns for the release of that fund, they will report back their capital plan for their police stations, in inclusive of Arctic, as well as their fleet management plan.

And so with that, we concludes the outstanding budget and legislative analyst recommendations.

Thank you, Chair Chan.

Devin Macaulay, Citywide Budget Manager.

I just wanted to make sure I heard Sheriff Six, the action taken.

That uh, yes, the recommendation the committee rejects recommendations one, two, three, four, five, and six.

Thank you.

Thank you.

And so, with that, we also need to dispense with the outstanding trailing legislation.

Mr.

Clark, please call item eighteen.

Yes, item number eighteen is a resolution concerning uh or concurring.

Would the controller certification that department services can be performed by private contractor for a lower cost and similar work performed by city and county employees for the materials testing and inspection services for the Department of Public Works?

Madam Chair.

Thank you.

Colleagues, um it is my intention to make the motion to table this item with the understanding that when we reject this uh contract for material testing, it means that we also have reached agreement with the Department of Public Works that they will restore these positions within their department.

So I make the motion to table the item, second by um supervisor Walton and a roll call, please.

And on that motion by Chair Chan, seconded by Member Walton that this resolution be tabled.

Vice Chair Dorsey, Dorsey, absent member Sauter, Sauter, aye, Member Walton, Walton, aye.

Uh member Mandelman, aye, Madeline, aye, Chair Chan.

I um my apologies.

Oh, uh Vice Chair Dorsey on the motion to the table item number 19.

Dorsey, aye.

And um Chair Chan.

Aye.

Chan I.

We have five eyes.

And the motion passes.

And then um, with that, I am trying to understand.

Um, we will now go back on recess, containing the conversation, and that I'm looking at the controller to see if 3 p.m.

or 3 30.

Greg Wagner controller, either way is fine with us.

Colleagues, I think we will return at three o'clock.

Um, and so we will go on recess now.

Thank you.

San Francisco government television.

Everyone, it is an honor to be with you.

I want to say happy Pride, San Francisco.

This weekend, hundreds of thousands of people will gather to celebrate one of San Francisco's biggest and best weekends, culminating with Pride with the Pride Parade on Sunday.

I want to recognize SF Pride Executive Director Suzanne Ford and the entire SF Pride team.

This weekend would not happen without your leadership, and our city is grateful.

Thank you, Suzanne.

The LGBTQ community has helped define San Francisco for generations.

Their courage and culture have made our city stronger and continue to shape the values we proudly stand for today.

As we head into the weekend, all of the leaders up here know how important this weekend is, and we are ready.

San Franciscans, we know how to host major events.

We've welcomed Super Bowl 60, the World Cup, the NBA All-Star Game, and more.

Every time our public safety teams have delivered, pride will be no different, and our city is prepared.

I would like to quickly acknowledge the disturbing video from this weekend of a car driving through Dolores Park.

And I'd like to thank SFPD who acted quickly to make an arrest.

I want to reassure San Franciscans that whether you are joining the Trans March on Friday, the Dyke March on Saturday, or walking down Market Street for Sunday's Pride Parade during celebrations, our city, your safety is our top priority.

Months of planning and coordination have gone into making this weekend safe and successful and fun.

Our police officers, sheriff's deputies, and other public safety partners will be deployed across the city this weekend.

Chief Lou will share more about those efforts and how attendees can do their part this weekend.

My message is simple.

Look out for one another, report anything concerning, and know that every first responder, city worker, and volunteer has one goal to help everyone celebrate safely.

I want to thank our public safety leaders.

SFPD Chief Derek Liu, Sheriff Paul Miyamoro, Fire Chief Dean Crispin, District Attorney Brooke Jenkins, Department of Emergency Management Executive Director Mary Ellen Carroll, the SFPD LGBTQ Plus Advisory Forum, and the SFPD Pride Alliance.

I want to thank you all for your partnership and commitment to making this weekend safe for everyone.

San Francisco is ready.

Happy Pride and Let's Go, San Francisco.

And now I'd like to introduce our chief of police, Derek Liu.

Good afternoon.

This weekend, San Francisco hosts the annual Pride Parade and Celebration.

One of the largest LGBTQ plus gatherings in the world, and one of the things this city does better than almost anywhere else on Earth.

These events are a part of San Francisco's rich cultural history and identity.

And the San Francisco Police Department takes our role in protecting those who come here from near and far to celebrate, march, or simply watch very seriously.

As always, we're excited to showcase San Francisco and our longstanding status as a safe haven for members of the LGBTQ community.

I want to take this opportunity to recognize and acknowledge all the LGBTQ Plus members of our department.

I also want to thank members of our Pride Alliance for joining today.

These officers have been instrumental in building trust and lasting partnerships with our LGBTQ community.

You will see many of our officers, including me, wearing Pride patches that support our LGBTQ plus community and highlight our commitment to inclusiveness.

This year, funds from the project will go to Open House, a nonprofit that provides housing and community programs for LGBTQ elders.

A big thank you to Officer Kathleen McKiernan, the president of the Pride Alliance for her work and commitment to this important program.

I also want to acknowledge Captain Chris Delgandio who is here with us today.

Captain Delgandio is not only the commanding officer of Central Station, one of our department's most demanding assignments, but he also leads the SFPD's LGBTQ advisory forum and is one of our highest ranking LGBTQ plus members.

This forum melds members of the SFPD and the community and has been an invaluable partner in public safety in San Francisco.

While we will be highlighting our values as a welcoming city this weekend, we also have an opportunity to show everyone that San Francisco is a safe city and amongst the safest in America.

I want to thank Mayor Lurie, our San Francisco public safety team with us today, and our other partners who we've been working closely with over the past months to ensure this weekend is safe and fun for all.

And while this is a big lift for law enforcement, rest assured.

For decades, the SFPD has hosted this event and other major public safety events across the city.

Just like any large gathering of this type, public safety is our number one priority, and everyone should know that we are ready.

Leading up to this with this weekend, we've been planning and coordinating as a department and with our city, state, and federal public safety partners to ensure this is a safe and enjoyable event for all.

We have a full staffing plan, and we will have officers at all district stations and specialized units fanned out along the parade route and in every corner of the city, ready to respond to any issues that may arise.

And while our officers work to ensure we're all safe, we also need the public to do their part.

Look out for one another.

Keep an eye out for your friends and loved ones and stay alert to your surroundings.

Be mindful of your personal possessions like your wallet, purse, and cell phones.

Drink responsibly so you're not a target.

And don't accept drinks from strangers.

As always, do not drink and drive.

We have world-class public transportation, taxis, or rideshare services to choose from.

There's no excuse.

If you see something suspicious, please let us know.

In closing, I want to remind everyone to stay safe and to have fun.

This is a tremendous event for our city, and the SFPD will be here to ensure everyone is safe.

Happy Pride.

I'd like to now introduce Sheriff Miyamoto for marks.

Good afternoon, everyone.

San Francisco has always been a city where people can be exactly who they are.

During Pride Weekend, we ask everyone to celebrate responsibly.

Keeping an eye on your friends, having a plan for how you're getting home, and being respectful to our local businesses.

Chief Lou mentioned the public transportation, the world-class public transportation that we have.

The one mode of transportation we want to make sure all of you avoid this weekend is the party buses that the Sheriff's Department will have out there.

One more piece of advice.

Strut like you're on a runway, celebrate like you're among family.

And remember that public safety is here so that the only thing that we have to get carried away this weekend is the glitter on the ground when we're done.

Thank you.

And at this time, I'd like to introduce District Attorney Brooke Jenkins.

Well, that's a tough act to follow.

But no, happy pride, everyone.

I am honored to be here once again because this is one of the most joyous weekends in San Francisco every year.

It's uh one of the main parades that I look forward to participating in each and every year because we know that San Francisco shows up and it shows out for pride.

But what we also know who are in law enforcement, that in the past, this has often been a trying weekend when it comes to street crime.

And so I echo the sentiments of our police chief and our sheriff.

Uh, please make sure to be vigilant, look out for each other, protect your belongings, make sure that you drink responsibly, um, and most of all report to the police or any law enforcement agent that you see out on the street if there is something suspicious that you believe they should be aware of.

This is also a time, yes, for zero tolerance for such street crime, but I also want to bring up another important topic, which is hate crimes.

This has been uh a trying time for our LGBTQ community in our country.

And just last week I announced charges in a hate crime that was targeted towards our LGBTQ plus community in the Castro.

And so I want to remind anyone thinking of coming to our Pride festivities with the intent to commit any harm towards our family and our community members that there will be accountability if anything like that happens here.

And so while as much as we want to be joyous, we also have to take this occasion very seriously, and I take my job seriously to protect San Francisco.

And so let's make sure that we go out and we have fun.

And again, please be reassured that we in law enforcement will do everything that we need to keep each and every one of you safe.

At this time, I will then now uh bring up Fire Chief Dean Crispin.

Good afternoon.

I'd first like to thank Mayor Lurry and all of our public safety partners for their collaboration and communication leading up to this exciting weekend.

I would specifically like to thank Assistant Deputy Chief Erica Brown of our Homeland Security team for her efforts in making sure the San Francisco Fire Department is fully staffed and prepared.

As we enter Pride Weekend, the San Francisco Fire Department stands proudly with our LGBTQ plus community in celebrating a tradition deeply woven into the fabric of our city.

Pride is a powerful reminder of the resilience, diversity, and unity that makes San Francisco extraordinary.

Our units will be fully staffed throughout the weekend to ensure that residents, visitors, and participants can celebrate safely.

We are coordinating closely with city partners to support all scheduled events, parades, and gatherings.

While we expect large crowds, our commitment to public safety remains constant, and our teams are prepared to respond quickly and effectively wherever needed.

During the Pride Parade, SFFD will provide chief officers to staff operations positions at all emergency operations centers and command posts.

We'll also provide medical services on the route at fixed and mobile locations.

Please approach and notify one of our uniformed members or other public safety officials should you see anything unusual or potentially dangerous.

If you see something, say something.

Please know that the San Francisco Fire Department will be fully staffed to respond to emergencies throughout the rest of the city all weekend.

We ask everyone joining the celebrations to stay aware of their surroundings, look out for one another, and follow event safety guidance.

Simple steps, staying hydrated, reporting unsafe conditions, and keeping pathways clear for emergency responders.

Help us keep the weekend safe for all.

On behalf of the San Francisco Fire Department, I wish everyone a joyful, safe, and affirming Pride Weekend.

We're honored to serve this city and stand with all who promote equality, inclusion, and respect.

And with that, I would bring to the stage the director of the Department of Emergency Management, Mary Ellen Carroll.

Good afternoon.

Thank you, Chief Crispin, thank you, Mayor Gloria, and all of our partners up here.

Pride is one of the most meaningful times of the year to be in San Francisco.

And this year, we're also proud because we have visitors from all over the world who are here for World Cup.

So we really get to show off.

We're prepared for a safe and very joyful weekend.

On Sunday, the Department of Emergency Management will operate the Emergency Operations Center for the parade.

We'll have staffing from all of our public safety and infrastructure partners, and we will also be monitoring marches on Friday and Saturday at Dolores Park and throughout the city.

From the EOC, we monitor 911 volume calls, EMS, hospital capacity and police and fire resources.

We coordinate across city agencies and centralized public information.

So the city speaks with one clear voice.

So speaking of public information, as always, I will would like to ask everyone if you're not already signed up for Alert SF that you should do so.

You can text Pride SF to 888-777 and get critical information that will come from some of our partners and to keep everyone safe.

The simplest things will help us to take care of the more complicated things that happen.

So have fun, look out for each other, and stay hydrated.

Thank you.

And it is my pleasure, last but not least, to introduce the executive director of this whole thing, SF Pride, Suzanne Ford.

Thank you.

Thank you, Mayor Lewie.

Thank you to all the chiefs behind me, district attorney, everyone that's been involved in coordinating this event this weekend.

Happy pride, everybody.

Okay, that's where you're all supposed to smile and say happy pride.

Okay.

Um I'm so honored to live in a city that has a team of people behind me, like I do here today, planning a pride together for this community, for the nation, and for the world.

We want everyone to be able to come to San Francisco, and I think we all have the responsibility of demonstrating that we can all work together to make sure that the LGBTQ community is centered for this weekend.

I would like to thank my staff, Chris, and all of my four other great people, all the contractors, Silverback Productions.

You can't believe all the hundreds of people that are working right now to make sure that we have this event.

Um I'd like to just run down what's going to happen from here on out as far as events on Thursday, tomorrow, tomorrow morning, starting at 10 a.m.

We will have the human rights conference, and it will be at the Commonwealth Club, and that will go all day long.

We will have a block party tomorrow night at a Uruguaina district and a watch party for the FIFA.

Um and then Saturday morning at 10 a.m.

We're gonna have the first ever, we're having a political march, not the parade, but a march down the same course, and that is the Trans-Ally March, Indivisible SF along with us, the People's March, the Dyke March, and the Dykes on Bikes will be leading that march.

We will have our two-day street fair at the Civic Center Sunday morning.

I hope there are a million people down Market Street for the parade.

And then Sunday afternoon, we will also have an event at the Asian Art Museum.

You can go to SF Pride.org.

You can still buy tickets for those events, and you can also hit the donate button.

But again, I would like to say thank you, thank you so much to the city of San Francisco, and thank you, Mayor Lurie.

Thank you.

Questions.

Okay.

So your sort of current top of the mission stage informed me in the past that the data doesn't support having like time patrols like like foot controls in the castro.

But in recent week we've seen a number of disturbing incidents of like the crimes, the election, if you have mentioned.

And also, allegedly, you know, it took several hours for police to respond to an incident at a nightclub where someone was being threatening.

So I wanted to ask what would cause you to reconsider those earlier decisions.

Well, I can just say that we're always assessing our resources, how we deploy them, and I can't speak specifically to the incident ins incidents that you're referencing, but uh we're always monitoring and we're talking about how we can best deploy our resources.

So we're we're uh we're not fixed in the way that we do things.

Um, and if there's an issue that we think needs addressing, we're we're we'll be we'll be talking about it.

Okay, so I'll look into it again.

Yeah, like I said, we're always in a state of of of um improving uh our deployments, um, but balancing that against what our resources are.

So the answer is yes.

I have a question for the chief.

Oh, I'm not offended.

So we have the problem with the uh license plate readers, the data reach that it's unrelated to this, but many people in these events are afraid of the call 911.

They have always been fearful, having their data or the status, you know, leaked or whatever.

Can you just reiterate that it's safe to call number one and do something that you don't ask for immigration status and that you don't share with immigration federal officials or I so I think that's a two-part answer here.

So, number one, unequivocally, we do not cooperate with any sort of immigration agency at all.

There's uh state, city law, our own ordinances, our own rules and regulations.

Uh that is not in our DNA whatsoever.

So please continue to call 911.

We don't cooperate as far as immigration enforcement is concerned as far as far as uh license plate reader concerns.

Yeah, as soon as we figured out that there was uh potentially a um an inappropriate access, we shut that off.

It continues to be shut off.

Um it's a very important tool to this city that could constantly contributes to public safety overall, and so we want to protect that, and we want people to know that we're using it in the right way.

Uh there's kind of been a series of things that have happened over the last few weeks.

There's a there's the DA that had filed charges against uh this guy for hate crime.

This is just last week with those cards filed.

Um this weekend, knuckleheads driving through Dolores Park, and apparently there's video of them driving through Cashville as well, acting kind of weird, and then there's this controversy around the San Francisco Giants and the scripture on their caps.

Can you talk a little bit about some of those concerns and should people be on guard, or is it you know people are kind of concerned about what's happening in the city at the moment?

Yeah, listen, uh, as you can see uh by the uh the men and women uh behind me who are so incredibly focused on public safety and making sure that pride uh uh is comes off safely.

Um Suzanne Ford's leadership uh in bringing people together is another great example.

Uh we live in a in a big city, and and we're gonna have people uh that uh do things that are not legal, and we are gonna find them and we're gonna arrest them like we did with that person that drove through Dolores Park.

Um on the San Francisco Giants uh issue.

Uh when you put on that uniform, uh, you represent not only the Giants organization, um, but you represent the city of San Francisco.

Uh and the LGBTQ community is a critical part of our city.

Um and I have to say the Giants have led the way uh for decades uh in making sure that the LGBTQ community um uh was part and parcel of that team, and what I want to see now is them re-commit uh to the LGBTQ community.

Um, and I think you will see that in the coming days.

Um, but uh you brought up a couple of instances uh of of you know your your words not mine of knuckleheads.

Um I see great things from the people of San Francisco every single day.

I see people coming in uh from uh different countries to celebrate uh the greatest city in the world in San Francisco.

Our values have been on full display uh during this Pride month.

Uh we had uh, you know, uh a pride uh flag raising at City Hall.

Uh that it was incredible in the spirit when you're walking through uh this city is on full display, and you're gonna see it again this weekend.

Uh the great uh the greatness of our city always uh outshines to those few uh that uh make it about themselves.

Uh we're up here to make sure that everybody uh has a great weekend, has a fun weekend, uh, and that our LGBTQ uh plus community is uh lifted up and front and center this weekend, and I'm I'm looking forward to it.

Another follow up question for you.

It's when you're talking about the pride night, there's obviously been a lot of controversy that has like come out since yesterday.

Mustard Posey, he had a lot of questions from reporters, and a lot of people felt that a lot of questions still remain, that it's kind of just a doubling down on the blanket statement made by the Giants organization.

Do you think it made things worse for those who are concerned about it as we go with the pride, and also have you reach out to the giants outside to offer your support?

Yeah, I I I've been in touch with uh a few leaders uh in the Giants organization, and I understand uh that they have been in touch with leaders of the LGBTQ plus community, and that is good to hear.

That is a good first step.

And what I would like to hear from them and from the front office is that they recommit uh to the LGBTQ plus community.

Uh, as I said before, when you put on that jersey, you're not just representing yourself, you're representing uh a storied franchise uh in the greatest city in the world, and what makes our city so incredible uh is the diversity, and is our LGBTQ plus community.

And so I am very hopeful that they will uh recommit uh to the LGBTQ plus community.

And and once again, they have been doing this for decades and decades.

Uh and so uh I know uh there's a lot of people out there that uh you know want to uh say they need to do this or they need to do that.

Uh I believe that this is a moment uh of education in our city, and we can heal and we can bring people together.

Um I've said this before, we were all up uh for the pink triangle event.

Uh which is uh uh and it was an education event.

Uh, it is uh what has happened in the past we don't want to see happen again in the future.

And so when events like this happen, I think it's an opportunity for us uh to educate people here in San Francisco.

We still need to educate people about the uh the importance and the vibrancy and and uh the critical nature of the LGBTQ plus community plays in our city uh and will uh has and will continue to.

Comments are not a lot of education.

Do you think what you think we commit, and then what are those?

What does that look like?

Yeah, I think that's up for the giants to do it.

And like I said, I think uh I've heard uh from them that they are in talks with leaders of the LGBTQ plus community.

I also think they should be in talks with the uh members of uh and leaders from the faith community as well.

I think you know there's a lot of uh divisiveness in this country um uh here in San Francisco.

What we are trying to practice uh is is bringing people together.

Uh, and uh and I'm hopeful uh that the Giants will lead on that in the days ahead.

Okay, I wonder if you have awful.

Just uh didn't hear much about the theme.

I know that it means a lot every theme every year, has a lot of uh background behind it.

So, what is resilience and action means you have to.

Before we get to that, I would say I'm one of the leaders that has spoken to the Giants too to register the hurt in the community, and we are waiting to hear from them concrete ways that they're going to address that.

I haven't heard that yet, but we're waiting.

And we did ask also if we could speak to the players.

And that's one thing I never see happen in these uh situations, is where leaders, especially trans people get to speak to the players.

It doesn't happen.

So we're pushing for that, and I'm waiting to hear.

Just what I just said, resistance and action is the theme this year, and speaking to the giants is one of those one of those actions.

Um, protesting when Phil's coffee was going to low take out the rainbow flags.

That is another example of resistance and action.

Uh San Francisco Pride is not just an organization that throws a parade.

Um, we also represent the interests of the LGBTQ community.

Um, all those events I just listed for you are concrete ways where people cannot just sit at home and say this is intolerable, the situation that we're facing in this country, but you can come out, be in community, and actually do something.

So come out, march with the community, come to the human rights summit that there are concrete ways that you can do something.

Thank you.

Thank you, Suzanne.

Appreciate you.

All right, thank you all very much.

Thank you very much.

Thank you very much.

Every day, millions of dollars quietly move through the city, funding parks, buses, classrooms, and everything in between.

Now, behind that flow is a system most people never see, but it shapes every corner of San Francisco.

Welcome to I Left My Podcast in San Francisco, brought to you by SFGov TV.

Now, this is a show where we take you behind the scenes with the people shaping our city, our leaders and representatives across every department.

And we're coming to you from the basement of City Hall.

And today we're joined by San Francisco's treasurer, Jose Cisneros.

We talk about how he came into public service from the private sector, the amazing programs and services from his office, like kindergarten to college, and just amazing successful finance stories that'll melt your heart.

I'm your host Franco Finn.

Let's get to the heart of what makes San Francisco.

Well, welcome to I Left My Podcast in San Francisco.

Literally, we are in the basement of City Hall.

Your home.

This is probably this is your home.

I'm here every day.

This is your second home, maybe your first home, really.

You're here for many days and for such a long time, and your career has been impressive serving our city, you know, the county and the people here in San Francisco, our treasure.

Jose Cisneros, thank you so much for joining.

Thank you for having me.

This is amazing.

San Francisco treasurer.

That is a lot of responsibility.

You are pretty much in charge of the money that is coming in and out.

You're the chief investment officer, if you will, for the city.

And we'll get into obviously your main role here, but let's dial it just back.

How do you got here?

I want to see the journey because you came from Muskegon, Michigan.

Yeah.

And then made your way out west.

Yeah.

What was your first impression?

Like, how did you get to San Francisco?

What was your first memory of San Francisco?

You remember?

Oh gosh.

Well, like a lot of people, um, as a young, younger person, a young adult, I came to visit many times.

And of course, uh loved it.

Um it's interesting, my journey a little bit.

I started in a small town in Michigan, Muskegon, Michigan.

Uh stayed there until it was time to go to college when I went to a college in Boston and really enjoyed Boston.

It's a great town, lots of universities, lots of students, lots of young people, very modern, uh lively uh setting for everything you might want to do.

And did a lot of growing up there, got my first couple of jobs there.

First one was in banking, second one was for a technology company.

Um, you know, it was there a good while.

Uh and then after a while, just had visited San Francisco a few times.

My partner and I visited uh one last time, and we said, you know what, it's time to make the move.

Yeah.

And within a year or two, we had sold the place, moved, and we're living here and haven't looked back.

That was it.

What was the one thing you remember that that you just loved about San Francisco?

That was amazing.

Like, was it the food?

Was it the the, you know, just the landscape?

Like, what was the one thing?

They said, gosh, San Francisco, you had my heart here.

It's hard to pick one thing.

There's so much beauty.

There's so much culture, there's diversity, of course.

Um, uh, that tops everywhere else in the world.

Probably for me, I have to say the thing that sticks out with me the most, though I love it all, is the weather.

I grew up in Michigan.

Uh, if you haven't grown up as a small child shoveling snow and you're in your around your house, then you have not experienced winter.

That's my measure.

You know, tell me how many feet of snow you shoveled when you were 11 years old.

Then we'll talk about if you know anything about winter at all.

So it's nice to live, and even Boston does have winters.

Of course.

Um so it's nice to be somewhere that's nice and wonderful weather wise.

Pretty much pleasant for the most part year round.

You know, right?

Uh, you know, that that's great.

I mean, yes, if it gets to 80 degrees, I think we're all complaining here, and then which is we're spoiled.

We have.

Natural fog is air conditioning, it's crazy.

I mean, we've got it good.

No, I think there's nothing to complain about, but it's hard to beat the weather.

Weather is, you know what, weather is what makes people move to West Coast in California.

Especially when you've experienced other places.

Yes, I would agree.

Well, thanks for sharing that.

And so you worked in the private sector for quite a while.

How did you transition into public service?

Oh, that's a private to public.

That's a very great story.

So I was, as I said, when I moved here, I was still working for a technology company.

It was a company called Lotus Development.

It had been around for quite a while.

Um, some great products.

People remember one, two, three, Lotus Notes.

Along the way, I got purchased by IBM.

So by the time I moved here, it was actually uh a division of IBM.

I was I'd been there a long time, probably a dozen years or more.

And I think my opportunities there were really starting to wind down.

And I made a lot of new friends here in San Francisco, and I made some friends that actually worked here in City Hall.

Okay.

And through those contacts, I got the opportunity for the mayor at the time to appoint me to a commission.

And as you probably know, yes, uh, many, if not all, almost all departments here have a public set of members that act as a commission or board of directors.

Yeah.

Which act the same as you would see for a nonprofit, right?

They meet right a couple times a month.

They make policy decisions.

It's a board, essentially a volunteer board.

Yeah, in a way, and uh they really help out.

So uh the mayor at the time, Mayor Willie Brown appointed me to the first commission, the parking and traffic commission, and now long retired, it's part of the MTA now.

Um, but I got a taste for city government, and it was fascinating.

People really care about what your government does.

I can tell you how much they care about those parking spaces on their block.

Yes a lot.

And when you want to think about putting a bike lane in and reducing the number of parking spaces, oh my gosh.

Yes, yes.

No, and and I'm a film commissioner.

I don't know if I if you knew that.

Oh, yeah.

Yes, I'm appointed, I was appointed by Mayor Breed about a few years ago, and it opened up my eyes.

It's yeah, unbelievable.

I'm a San Franciscan.

I'm born and raised here, walking aimlessly through the streets.

Now I I cannot see the city the same way.

I'm talking to people like you and others that make the city run each and every day that you may not hear or see about, yeah, but there's a lot of people.

There are parts.

I couldn't agree more.

I think that the city government, government in general, right, is pretty low on most people's awareness totem polls, right?

Um, but city government, absolutely the the least uh awareness and and uh paying attention to, but um it my eyes got opened up, and then uh it gets even better.

And in two thousand, the mayor at the time, Mayor Willie Brown moved me from that my first commission to the newly newly created board of directors of the MTA, Muni.

Muni is massive.

Oh, fascinating, it's a massive operation.

For all people love to hate about Muni, it is tremendous in many, many ways.

The number of people it moves every day, the operations, the financing, the construction, every single part of it, labor do a tremendous job, a huge service to everybody in this city.

And I was I was just immersed in it and really loved the opportunity uh to be on the board after a couple of years on the board.

I transitioned to actually being an employee of uh the MTA.

I very much enjoyed that.

We worked on getting the funding for what became the central subway, the extension for Third Street up into Chinatown.

And um I just love doing that work.

And then um another mayor changed my life.

Uh, this this Gavin Newsom mayor.

Oh, yeah, Gavin, Mr.

Newsom.

He uh he showed up in uh he won his uh election for mayor, he showed up in 2004, and he started you know moving some people around um in positions of leadership, and he took the treasurer at the time, uh, gave her uh a much bigger and different job and appointed me to be the treasurer.

And um, so that was September of 04, and I've been in the job ever since.

And this is your sixth term.

Yes.

That is amazing and unprecedented, honestly.

Six terms is amazing.

Congratulations.

That means there's a lot of trust in you to do what you do best.

And I mean, and you've gotten the taste from you've moved your career and it's evolved.

And this public service now, you have such a big role.

Now let's get into that.

Like this is the main part.

Because it's there's a lot of responsibility, there's a lot to manage, if you will.

You're the chief pretty much investment officer of San Francisco.

It break it down and kind of in layman's terms for sure.

You may not know this kind of banking finance world and how money comes in and out and how to manage.

Jose, what what is it?

Your job, you know.

Well, first of all, I wanna I want to uh I want to be open about the full the full name of the department is the treasurer and tax collector's office.

Treasure and tax I don't want to leave out the popular part, that tax collection.

Um, it's it's it's super important.

Um, no, it is because we are both a city and a county, we have the largest uh tax collection job of any local government in California because we have not only the taxes the counties collect, and uh every county in California collects the property taxes.

Usually the biggest revenue source for any county, and in our case it's the bigger biggest revenue source for our city and county government.

Um that's that is very important and very important work.

But as a city, we have dozens of other taxes and fees that we also collect because we get to do double duty because we're a city and the county, yeah.

Um, so really what we do is we work all uh every day helping taxpayers be aware of what they owe, why they owe it, how much they owe, how to file and do everything and do it on time and avoid late fines and and anything like that or that type of thing.

So that is a massive job, and it's probably the lion's share of the work that our office does.

And I just wanna uh shout out to all the employees at the treasure tax collector's office.

They do incredible work every day.

And I I just wanna tell one story.

Um I as an elected official, I do go out in the public and I'm not the most famous elected official.

I think the mayor still holds on to that job that title.

But nevertheless, a few people come up to me in my role, and one person came up to me and said, I just need to tell you about uh a visit I made to your office.

And I said, Okay, I wanna hear.

And they said, Well, I had this, got this bill, and I just I couldn't believe it.

I knew there was something wrong with it.

I there's no way I could owe that much money.

So I came into your office, I walked up to the counter and I said to someone, you know, there's something wrong with my bill.

I need you to fix it or explain it to me or whatever.

She said the person that worked with me helped me for a good long time.

Yeah.

And what she did was she explained everything on my bill and explained it over and over again and made sure I understood it.

And at the end of it, I thanked her, and I'm here to thank you because while I'm not happy about how much I owe.

Yeah, I'm grateful for the amount of time that that staffer in your office spent and made me understand how much how we got to that.

And now I understand and I'm happy to know and I'm happy to pay it.

Well, more or less happy.

But that I I said, you know what?

And I go back to my staff and I say, I hear those kinds of comments all the time.

And it's a again, a real credit to the work of the office.

Yeah.

A lot of it's customer service, it's customer service, customer service.

Taxpayers are customers, they deserve to be treated that way.

You just want to know, they deserve to be supported.

Yeah.

We we try and give them all the information they can have.

We ought to make sure they understand, which is not always easy because some taxes are complicated.

Right.

But you know, this is the work we do, and I'm really proud of how well we do it.

And we have a huge um on time um payment uh record, and and that, and and so things are good.

Yeah, that's cool.

Thanks for uh sharing of that.

And then and then the other part of the job is the treasury job.

Once all that money comes in and we collect honestly billions of dollars for the city, almost half of its annual budget comes in through our department's work.

We uh invest it.

So that's the uh treasure side of it.

We we keep that money in um where you would think of it, you and I would think of it as money in our checking accounts, short-term money, not our retirement funds.

That's handled by someone else, our long-term money.

This is all our short-term money.

We we make sure it's safe, make sure it's gonna be available when it's needed, and our average daily balances are creeping up towards about almost 20 billion dollars that we hold on to for the city and keep it safe.

Gosh, you know, this is all flashbacks to me.

My first job in college was working for Bank of America.

Oh, worked my way to their former banker.

Oh, yes, long time, and I remember when it's good training.

I will say, I tell you, you know, I didn't realize the business of banking until I was immersed as a young teen.

Right.

I mean, I worked my way from the teller to uh I was doing business, you know, making calls for our our business guys, um, you know, getting leads, even supermarket stores are piles.

Remember when they said banks inside supermarkets.

Yes.

And I'd be the young kid, like hi, what do you what are you ordering?

Oh, would you like to open a check?

But I realize it's a business.

I mean, they're investing your money and there's just so many things I learned about it.

And it and I remember when online banking started.

I did not trust putting anything out in the in the in the universe back in the I think I can beat you.

I remember the first ATMs.

Oh wow.

ATMs were new.

And I mean, what are you thinking?

Like, uh, this technology am I I'm gonna put something in this machine with all my money.

I mean, you could go 24 hours a day, you could go there on, you know, Sunday morning and pull money out.

I mean, you've never been able to do that before.

I was young, I wasn't a big bank user yet at that point, but it was still pretty fascinating technology at the time.

It is absolutely.

I mean, uh All right, I might just gave away my heart.

You know, my grandma used to put money under under her mattress.

Oh, I know.

That was her bank.

I know.

I mean, we all had grandmas like that, right?

I know.

It's just heartbreaking to think about that.

But some people still do that.

Some people still do that.

And a lot of the, you know, a lot of the work that you do, we'll talk about that.

It's education, it's education.

Right.

That crabs it's me emotionally.

Sometimes it's just people just don't know until they're told that.

And I want to help with that.

Yeah.

And speaking of helping, um, talk about this small business relief.

Uh, and that's important.

Small businesses, I think the heartbeat of of our city, small businesses.

It really is.

It's it's it's it's the people here, the businesses that make this city go.

And talk about the implementation of proposition M.

Proposition M.

How important that for those who may not know about that whole uh proposition M.

Please explain.

So thank you for asking.

Uh Prop M was on um the last election and uh the one where we elected our new mayor.

And uh Prop M was a revision to our business taxes here, again, our local taxes.

I mentioned them a minute ago, all these local taxes that we collect.

Um it took the the basically the the decades-long uh business tax that's uh generally called gross receipts and modified it a bit to do uh a little bit of better job of I think putting the burden of uh revenue and tax collection uh distributed across the businesses.

But one of the I think the most creative things, and you you just talked about small businesses, was that what we did was we said the gross receipts tax is a business tax that some businesses here pay depending upon their size.

Okay.

There is another tax, it's called the annual business registration tax that every business pays, but it's it's a just the amount is adjusted depending upon the size of your business.

Well, there's an adjustment is also in the gross receipts tax.

Okay.

But what we found was that we set the gross receipts tax, the the minimum, the minimum you the the max you the amount you would have to pay that you'd earn in gross receipts to start paying the gross receipts tax was $2.5 million of gross receipts annually.

Now that's a small business, anyone below two and a half million dollars of uh but they had no gross receipts tax prior to Prop M.

What Prop M did was it doubled that uh lower cutoff, it raised it up to five million dollars.

So now any business in San Francisco that has gross receipts in one year of five million or under five million dollars in that year, they owe no gross receipts tax.

We doubled the size essentially, or the limit or the volume of the number of folks of the people accepted out of paying the gross receipts tax, and I see that as a huge release.

It's a huge relief to these still these still somewhat small businesses.

Because, you know, I mean, businesses even up to five million, they're not very big businesses.

They're really the mom and pops we think about here.

They're the much smaller businesses.

Anyone that's that's bigger than that is paying both that that tax and the red the reg fee tax.

Um now the bus small businesses just pay the low the smaller one and good on them.

And good for the city for making that change.

Yeah, that's amazing.

I mean now that, of course, all changes to taxes have to be done by the voters.

So that was part of Prop M, and that was voted in by the voters.

So the voters made that change the voters made the material, yeah.

Wow, thank you for sharing on that.

That's sure.

You did it by voting for it.

Yeah, I did.

I did.

I I remember that.

Don't want to assume, but I I did actually.

I remember that.

But thanks for expanding on that.

Sure.

Talk about the economic justice center, the economic justice center.

Oh my gosh.

You know, we help basically eliminate debt.

I mean, debt is one of those things.

I mean, some may teach you in college, some not.

You know, you get those credit cards, this and that, and then just piles up the interest.

It's it's a vicious cycle sometimes.

Money is complicated.

I gotta tell you, finances it really is crazier and crazier.

So this is a story that actually goes back quite away also.

Remember, I mentioned that that mayor Gavin Newsom appointed me.

Well, to his credit, one of the first things he did was invited me in our office to join him to launch a brand new program.

He came in with a lot of fresh ideas when he became mayor.

A brand new program to help low-income people in San Francisco take up the federal benefit called the EITC or earned income tax credit.

Okay.

It's something that's available to folks when they file their taxes every year.

If they have a low income, and particularly if they're working and have children, they stand to get thousands of extra dollars, not just any tax refunds, but extra money from the federal government.

The issue is, which is great, and many people do uh uh get that.

The problem is not many people know about it.

So plenty of low-income people miss this opportunity just by not applying it.

It's one more form when they do their taxes each year.

But he wanted to take an opportunity to get more people involved, so the city offered a small extra benefit, and we just advertised the hell out of it and said, if you'll apply for the EITC, we'll give you another few bucks on top of what they give you.

We got 10,000 people to apply for the EITC the first year we made that.

Long story short, uh the tax season ends.

We're sending out 10,000 local match dollar checks to people.

And again, someone smarter than I am came to me and said, you know, there's a possibility that fully half of those 10,000 checks you send out.

That recipient won't have a checking account, which means you just gave them one more paper check they have to take to a check casher, pay an exorbitant fee just to get access to their own money.

And that really, you know, turned the light bulb on for me that said that's that's crazy.

There's no reason why they shouldn't be able to have a bank account at a bank, or if even they want a credit union.

There's tons of places to get safe, affordable accounts that are, you know, uh going to a check casher with all your paychecks for a year could add up to being thousands of dollars a year.

And if someone's only making 20 or 30,000, that's crazy.

Absolutely.

Yeah, that's crazy.

Whereas a bank account, maybe a few hundred bucks, maybe a hundred bucks, maybe less if you're getting direct deposit and your checking account is free.

So, I mean, we launched so that really spurred me to launch one of our our first other programs, which we called bank on San Francisco.

Bank on San Francisco, we we convened all the banks and credit unions in town.

Um, and we said, Look, we're gonna use our voice, the city's voice, um, to tell folks to go get bank accounts.

Go and become your customers.

You know, not something the city does very often, oh, advertise for uh, you know, a for-profit industry.

But I said, we do that because they're getting ending up in a worse situation by working with the check cashers, and we want to see that a better outcome for them.

We uh we use the same voice the city has, because remember, city cities, governments come out with all sorts of messages.

Police say to lock your doors at night, fire fire fire department says check your smoke detectors, health department has great health benefit messages.

Why can't the city say, keep your money safe and stop getting ripped off by the check cashers?

Here's a list of banks and credit unions that um will offer you low-cost, maybe even no cost accounts, and your money will be safer and you'll stop having to get ripped off.

We launched that, we still have that program now.

Um 20 years later, and in the first initial years, we had our participating banks and credit unions report.

They were opening as many as 10,000 accounts each year for folks who were previously never had a bank account.

I mean, it's crazy.

We were talking about just the grandma's putting, you know, money in the there, but now you're well it's funny you should say that because the Chronicle actually at that time wanted to do like a follow-up on our program.

And they went out and said, you know, so has anybody heard this?

Is anybody benefited?

They found a woman named Miss Virginia, uh, older lady who lived in um an SRO, uh low-income property, with her um disabled grandson who she cared for full-time.

Yeah.

Every month she would take her social security check and her grandson's disability checks to a check casher, cash them, and then pay her rent and things like that.

Our program got her connected to a local credit union, Northeast Federal Credit Union.

They opened up a free checking account for her, and she saved hundreds of dollars that she now could spend on her grandson.

And I mean, this is a person who's living on the lowest income.

And it's life changing in ways.

But now they have this money.

First time in her life, this elderly one, first time in her life she'd ever had a bank account.

I mean, I mean that's the kind of outcomes we were looking to see.

And we know we were able to do that for thousands of folks who lived here.

Low-income folks.

Folks that need the help the most.

Yeah.

And I mean, you have to think about every San Franciscan of every demographic in the internet, making it equitable, you know, and and accessible.

And and everyone, because not everyone's at the same level.

Of course not.

And I think people assume that, you know, to live in San Francisco, you've got to have a fair amount of money, which is largely true.

No one's gonna deny it.

But that doesn't mean that low income people don't live here.

They do.

They live here, they work here, their kids go to school here.

They see their doctors here, they do all those things.

I want to see what we can do to help them because they need the help the most.

Yeah.

They really do.

Well, thank you for sharing that.

That's the way I I can imagine my grandma like opening an account.

I mean, because she was so old school.

She finally ended up dead down the road, you know.

Well, we we started another program.

Can I tell you another story that happened though?

And it's again, it's kind of a sad start to what turned out to be an excellent piece of body of work.

We um, I'm sure everybody knows this, but we have we offer affordable housing.

We administer affordable housing resources.

And but um this affordable low-income uh below market rate housing, there's a long waiting list for it.

Long people are on that waiting list for years sometimes.

The mayor's office of housing or whatever department of the city manages that list.

And as you move up the list, you finally can get assigned to an affordable housing, affordable housing unit.

This was another uh chronicle newspaper article.

Um, and what happened was this was like 2012, 13, 14, um, there's a beautiful family, a husband, a wife, and two children.

Um they had been on the list for years.

They were they were finally at the top of the list.

They got a notice.

They said NEMA, that new building on Market Street and whatever it is, 10th or 11th, 10th or 11th year.

Yeah, um, just had been built.

And they're like, you're you're ready for an apartment in this brand new building.

Get ready and move.

Yeah.

When they finally finished to do the paperwork, their credit score didn't meet the cutoff to move into one of these affordable housing units and be trusted to pay the rent.

And it just broke my heart because we had known this comp this family was on this list for years.

We should have been working with them to make sure that when their time came up, that they would be able to be uh eligible, fully eligible for that unit.

So we uh jumped on a bandwagon that a number of other cities across the country to launch a program called financial counseling.

We offer for free an opportunity for any low-income person or family to meet with a financial counselor and have financial counseling sessions.

The same kind of counseling that wealthy people, you know, undertake, right?

If if they need help managing their money, low-income people need help managing theirs too.

We offer this for free.

You can go to the library, you can get these kind of things, maybe suit through some other departments and through the mayor's office of housing.

We specifically make sure that the folks who are on that affordable housing waiting list do not end up on the place that that family ended up in.

And what we do is they meet with a counselor one-on-one, in person, uh, they look at all their finances.

They they talk to them about what that kind of debt they have, what kind of savings they have, if they have a bank account or if they don't, um, things like that.

And what happens is with the practices they learn, there's often a a really uh real ability to either um pay down or even shrink some of the debt and increase the savings, and the majority of the folks we counsel, their credit scores rise significantly in less than a year.

And that's that is the kind of work again that I think is important for us to bring to residents of San Francisco.

Absolutely.

I mean, that education is power and financial literacy, like for free though.

They don't have to, you know, uh pay all these crazy fees to get to get a professional advice.

Right, and the city is providing this.

And this is all amazing.

This is all on our website, by the way.

All the all the programs I've talked about, maybe a couple more I might talk about.

Yeah, no, there's a lot.

Uh, SFtreasurer.org.

SF Treasurer.org.

Go on that side, go on that site.

They can also see how to pay their taxes there.

But there is a way where you can find out about these uh financial empowerment programs and these other programs.

Well, I appreciate you sharing these stories too.

These are real stories, real San Franciscans and people that every day that it changes.

That's awesome.

Um, can I try to save the best for last though?

Well, it was okay.

What do you got?

Children saving college savings accounts.

That is huge.

The kids in San Francisco.

Okay.

Oh my gosh.

From little kids to college.

I mean, it's amazing.

So we knew for a long time that there is forever been a real difference between the kids that graduate high school and pretty much all those kids go to college and another group.

Yeah.

Um, in our in our in our school system, I think they're called represented versus underrepresented.

The underrepresented group steadily has far fewer kids that end up going to college.

Um, there's a lot of research around that phenomenon.

There's a lot of of thinking about what how to tackle it, what to do it.

Uh a lot of it really appeared to be that there's just a whole way that that some kids are raised where, you know, college is important and you're gonna go.

Um, and there's another set of kids where they never hear about college.

It's just it's just not in the picture.

Um anyway, so then based around that at the time, this was uh over a decade ago now, there was a lot of research.

And what research showed that if a child grew up in a family where they had opened up a college savings account, that just having the account caused conversations to happen that put the idea of college into the kid and the family's minds, and they more often followed up on it and went to college.

And what the research also showed was it didn't matter if they saved a lot of money or a little money, it didn't matter if their income was high or low.

It didn't matter really where they went to school or any of that, the impact was still the same.

Even a modest amount of money saved in a in a little college savings account in the child's name made a difference in whether or not they went to college.

That's amazing.

So we built so we took that model, we worked with uh some nonprofits that were studying what's the best way to administer this.

And lo and behold, they thought the best way might be for a government to do it because governments are kind of neutral.

You know, people are gonna trust them more than a private corporation or a company, and if a bank tried to tell them, oh, you really should do this.

This sounds a little self-serving, that type of thing.

So anyway, um, we kind of followed their recipe, and well, again, with the with the partnership of Mayor Gavin Newsom at the time and the Board of Supervisors at the time in 2011.

We created the first uh local government, really I think gov any government run automatic children's savings account program um in the country.

Wow.

We called it kindergarten to college, and we we called it that because here's how we implemented it.

We worked with the San Francisco Public School District, which by the way is majority kids uh on free or reduced lunch because they're legitimately low income from low income families.

And we said every child when they enter kindergarten, we're gonna do the list of kids from the school district, and we're we're gonna open up a college savings account automatically in their name.

No paperwork, no going anywhere, nothing, boom.

In the fall of their kindergarten class year, we would send a letter home to the parents and say, we already opened up a college savings account for your child.

Susie, Billy, you know, whatever the name is, we've already given him or her a college savings account.

That's huge.

We put $50 in the account, so it's not even a zero balance account.

There's money in the account already.

And opening that account.

It's really easy for you to add more money, including you could walk right into a bank branch and put uh walk up to a teller window and hand over whatever you want.

Five or ten dollars or more, or you could go do it online, or you could do an automatic transfer or whatever.

And every year we've opened up um accounts for every incoming uh kindergartner in the public school district.

The public school has been our tremendous partner in this effort.

We couldn't do it w without them.

Yeah.

And to date, we have over 60,000 accounts that have been opened, and you know, 10 plus millions of dollars had been saved in those accounts.

That's huge.

It's huge.

That is very absolutely huge.

As I said, not all families have huge balances in there, but we just wanna see the activity.

We want to see them in the right track, right?

Because what I like to say is those millions of dollars that they've saved more importantly, represent millions of conversations that those parents have had with their kids about, hey, I put 20 bucks in your college savings account today.

I want you to get that message.

You're going to college.

You're going to college.

So this is something that's meant for you.

You're like forecasting it.

You're putting it in.

What's that?

You're manifesting it.

You're manifesting it.

Like you're going to go to college.

So let's make sure.

So let me jump you.

So that sounds fantastic, right?

Very promising, great program.

Let's jump to the end.

We've now had three different high school classes graduates uh with the accounts that we'd opened up in kindergarten.

It's been that long.

And um, and so we did uh research on the first uh class, and I think we're doing it now on the second class.

But what we showed, remember I said there's a group of high school seniors every year that graduate and almost all of them, like pretty much 100% of them go to college.

There's another group, underrepresented group, that far fewer go to college each year.

That underrepresented group, we increased the number that went to college by twelve percent.

More than a 10% increase in those kids going to college, and we're starting seeing that pattern hopefully over many years, but over the first couple of years already.

So we're excited that, you know, this modest little program, it does cost the city some money to open up those accounts and put that money in.

But we're seeing real results, and that can change lives.

That will change lives.

It does change lives.

Absolutely.

I mean, you're planting those seeds, and it's growing to see how far it can grow.

But sometimes people don't realize it until they get, you know, maybe jump started somehow and said, hey, it's it's here for you.

We're gonna make it happen for you.

And that is what, you know, our our city and our government has been doing for our citizens.

And those are things behind the scenes that I I love to share on this program because a lot of people don't know about that, you know, and uh, and this is great.

I did not know about that.

Uh you know, and then this is.

I want to thank you for the opportunity to share it because not enough.

Not enough people know about, you know, the opportunity they might have for their child in the public school district.

They could be saving money in those accounts.

They could be going with their child to the bank.

We actually do um deposit days.

We've even done some here in City Hall or in different uh library branches.

Yeah.

And I'll tell you, I should bring you to one of those.

They're amazing.

Watching these fifth graders show up and make their own deposits in person.

Oh my gosh, that's a year.

That's so cute to see that.

So adorable.

And you're like, oh my gosh, it's heartbreaking.

It's really just the most exciting thing you've ever seen.

But it's a big deal, like to many of these families to have like this that that power to control.

I will put money into my and invest in my future, and anything's possible, really, absolutely anything.

Yeah.

When I get a chance to talk to these kids, I always ask them, you know, what do you what do you want to be when you go off?

Too many people, not too many, but you'd be surprised how many of them want to be basketball players.

Well, the the rise of the Warriors and the championships.

No, I can't blame them, of course, right?

I think it's a fantastic goal.

Yeah, that's so funny.

Um, but they want everything from astronauts to police to fire together.

But hey, sports.

Is this that that that's the kind of thinking we want in a fact?

You want that dialogue.

And in a 12th grader.

That's a that's a huge success.

No, thank you for sharing that.

It's been really exciting.

And and uh what I like, and and I think this has been possible because I've been here very bloody long time, is to understand how the city works and to be an elected official, you know, it gives you some degree of freedom.

I can work with the forces that make the real decisions here, like a mayor or members of the board.

Um I can also work outside uh with partners, banks, financial unions, the school district, and and with good ideas and some some real work involved.

Yeah, we can hopefully change the landscape.

We can hopefully make things better for some people out there.

Absolutely.

Um, yeah.

So I'm excited about that.

Then I sorry, one last story I want to talk about.

Okay, no, you've got a John.

You've been here quite some time, so there's so many good wins and stories that you'd love to share.

Well, there's one last story that really it really took me by surprise.

Okay.

I don't know if you remember, you know, there was this um a number of years back, um, Ferguson, there was this really bad incidence that went on there with low-income people getting pulled over by the police for unnecessary tickets and fines and things like that, and it was a lot of it was racial-based and low income oriented and real bad outcomes.

And a lot of it was based on um really um punishing fines and fees that the local governments were putting on low income people as a way number one to gain revenue, but maybe for other bad motivated reasons, yeah.

Someone came to me and said one of my staffers came to me and said, I think we should look at how our fines and fees are affecting low-income people.

And I said, He said, you know, like what's going on over there, and I'm like, San Francisco, San Francisco's not like that place.

We wouldn't do that here.

And they're like, we really should look.

So we convened uh um an uh a committee that met with members of the public and members of the city government, yeah.

And all the departments that issue fines and fees and all the enforcers and the sheriff and all that kind of stuff, and we said, let's just talk about what that landscape was like here in San Francisco.

And after six months, what did you find?

That we were doing much of the same thing.

We were we were we were putting unnecessarily oversized burdens on low-income people and other people didn't feel the same.

I'll give you a couple examples.

So yeah.

A parking ticket or a uh uh, you know, not a moving violation, but uh a parking or is it whatever ticket.

The biggest parking ticket and mistake you can make is leaving your car parked in a place that has to be, because I think we've all been there.

I don't know.

We have been there.

I'm the don't ask me that question.

But um I've been there many times.

But if you park in the wrong place, you don't know that that it becomes um no parking at certain time, the city will tow your car.

And you have to go to the tow lot and pay.

You have to pay for the ticket for breaking that rule and and pay for the money or cheaper.

Well, in San Francisco, it's nearly $500 day one, not storage fees, day one to get to be able to testify to that if this has happened to you.

Uh, hard way.

Yes.

Five hundred dollars is a lot of money for a low-income family.

Many don't have that amount of money.

So many a low-income family would just lose the car.

They couldn't afford to get the car back.

Well, let me ask you this.

If a family loses their car and uh a job wage earner can't get to work, does that mean that warrior general will lose their job?

And if that wage owner loses their job and loses their income, does that mean they can't pay their rent?

And if they can't pay the rent, does that mean they'll end up evicted and homeless?

Does anybody think that parking in the wrong place at the wrong time should cause a family?

But that to be impacted such that they end up getting to be homeless just because of making that one mistake.

Absolutely not, is my answer.

And what we took a look at was a number of the penalties, while you still deserve a penalty for breaking a rule, of course.

I mean, they need to be adjusted by according to one's ability to pay.

To many people, five hundred dollars is nothing, it's a nuisance.

Yeah, but to some people it was not life ending, but live their living, ending their living.

And it was an impossible amount, and it had impossible kinds of outcomes uh for them.

With the partnership of the MTA, who who handed him manages that that activity and that fine, we worked with them, and now um, if someone is low income and truly low income, we can verify it.

It's anyone who gets public assistance or who gets food stamps, we know they're low income.

They've already been checked.

It's true, they're low income.

That $500 amount drops to $100, and now everyone's able to get their cars back, still paying a pa a fine for breaking the rule.

And we implemented that across a number of different parking tickets and other types of fines and fees.

And now we see that we're causing less pain and harm in our city for people that really deserve, you know, some consideration and some understanding and just some adjustment that says, yeah, you may have to pay something because you broke a rule, but it doesn't have to.

And you're considering their their w where they are in their life, right?

And you're you're you're factoring that and caring about that.

Hey, you gotta pay the fine, you gotta do this, but you may not have that.

Now you've adjusted it and you and and you've how long's that been?

You said we did that about four or five years ago, four or five years ago.

But we're still working on making sure that any new fines or fees are adjusted and and made appropriate sized.

The one more uh fee that we found, it wasn't even a fine.

Uh-huh.

Somebody was um let out of jail or prison.

They come back trying to enter the community.

They're on probation for a while.

I promise you, nearly every government charges a fee for being on probation.

We charged a fee.

It was sixty dollars a month for being on probation.

Okay.

Um we also had for some reason the brilliant idea that that fee should be paid up front, so we billed for three years in advance and send a uh a bill for a few thousand dollars to a person just coming out of prison, trying to stand up themselves on a life and and away.

You you'll probably won't be surprised to hear that over 90% of those bills never got paid because that person doesn't have three thousand thousand dollars sitting around.

And they were just trying to stand their lives back up and looking for a job and looking for a place to live.

Not only were sending them this bill they couldn't afford to pay, we were reporting to the credit union to the credit agencies, and we were lowering their credit scores by showing unpaid bills on their credit report.

We went to the Board of Supervisors and the Mayor at the time, and uh we said, this is only harming people.

And I don't know that we really and if 90% of them aren't getting paid, we're not gonna lose any money by really, you know, just eliminating them and stop doing this practice.

So the board and the mayor at the time did exactly that.

They um eliminated those, so nobody was getting that um anymore.

And they actually looked back over prior years, they erased all that debt from people's credit reports, and people's credit scores jumped overnight because what do we want for someone leaving?

We want them to make it easy to find a job.

Yeah, make it easy to find a place to live in the a way to stand up a a successful life for themselves back in our city or wherever they decide they want to go.

But we were standing in the way of that success, so we're no longer doing that.

Just some things in that okay.

I would have never dreamed that this the liberal city of San Francisco, city and county of San Francisco would do that.

But you know, things have just been in place for decades.

A long time.

Who would have thought to look there?

Yeah.

That's what we did.

Thanks for sharing those stories.

Let's talk about the uh your upcoming initiative, stop scam S.

Oh yeah.

Okay, let's transition to that.

Uh helping San Franciscans, you know, from financial fraud.

Uh I mean, that that there's so many scams out there, I mean, every single day now with technology in place and whatnot.

Talk about stop scam SF in particular.

We're really excited about this program because I think all of us are violently aware of how prevalent this is.

We all I and I know everyone I know gets messages, text messages, email messages, stuff.

I mean, we try and filter it out, but it's crazy.

Phone calls, you know, that that that's the most heartbreaking.

You know, someone who's unsuspecting gets a phone call, someone lies to them, says, I'm your coworker, I'm your relative, I'm your niece, I'm your this, I'm your that, I need $10,000.

Please go do it.

Don't hesitate.

Just go.

And they they go and they they lose this money.

And sometimes massive amounts of money.

And it doesn't feel like people really have an ability to validate, is this real or is it not?

And and uh and we what we're gonna try and do with this program is we're gonna again do we did, I said we started doing way back at the beginning of our programs, which is just use the city's voice, that trusted voice.

We're not any kind of a profit-making company.

We're not um any anyone else that's that you might be suspicious of, we're just the city's voice.

And that voice is gonna say whatever we know about what to be suspicious for.

If we have alerts about something, we'll share it.

Yeah, but mostly it's gonna say, you know, if somebody approaches you, if a message is is reaching you that says do this or do that, and you're not familiar with it.

Pause.

Pause, check it out, check with us, check with someone, and before you act.

Yes.

And and just it you won't hurt anything.

The only thing will come out of that is is a better result.

Yeah.

And and so just don't don't follow the impulse.

Don't just take knee-jerk action, just pause a minute, check our database, check other places, talk to a friend, talk to a relative, and think before you do something.

And uh we're hopeful that that's gonna save a lot of folks who otherwise are turning into victims.

Yeah, and there's so many uh out there, and we're trying to reduce special huge amounts of money.

I know, and and it happens every single day.

Every day.

You know, there's so many victims and targets, especially a lot of some of the elderly folks.

I know uh when my dad was around, he got so much, he almost got into some of those.

And it's like seriously, I suspect it's heartbreaking.

Talk to us a little bit.

Let's let's re-evaluate.

Don't don't don't rush into stuff.

Well, you know, someone who's getting older, you know, some of our faculty start to diminish, and uh not speaking from experience yet, but who knows?

Someday, and you know, we're we're we're just we're accustomed to just kind of acting.

And I think our primary message is slow down, maybe pause for a minute, talk to someone, check our database, check our resources, give us a call, yeah, whatever, and just see what someone else thinks before you take action.

So, Jose, what what is the best part of your job?

They would that that it's up in the day.

I mean, you're doing it for so many years.

You I mean, you shared some amazing stories of you know, success stories of these some of these programs you've implemented, this and that.

I gotta I gotta imagine that that's what it is.

It's seeing like the the end, like like the possibilities for people in the end, right?

There is a lot of that.

There is really a lot of that.

I am like I said, I I I can't stay I'm a broken record about how great the staff in our department is.

They they work with everybody from the folks that implement this the programs I just talked about to the folks that collect taxes, the folks that manage our the city's portfolio and keep billions of dollars safe.

This is important work, it's serious work.

Uh it's it's consequential work, and every one of them is is a true hero and and does the work very, very well.

Personally, I just love who to known, but I love city government.

I love what we're able to do for people.

I I I love I realize that we're kind of the hidden treasure.

I think most people that live work and visit here have no clue, uh next to no clue about what city government does.

Really, how it keeps the streets clean, if they are clean, if they keeps the water running, he keeps the lights on or whatever that we do are able to do and and and and makes this a nice place to live visit uh or work in.

But but I just I think from my bandage point as an elected official, I've had some opportunities to do wonderful things.

And this was before actually I was the treasurer, I was an employee working at the MTA.

But again, in that first year of uh newly elected mayor Gavin Newsom, you might recall that one day he decided to start performing same-sex uh marriages.

I remember that in February of 2004.

Huge.

And it was huge, it rocked the world, it rocked our world.

And I was uh a lot of city employees were given the opportunity just because the volume was so huge to come and get sworn in and perform weddings.

And on that first three-day weekend, I came down one day and got sworn in, and I performed 36 weddings in one day.

And there was thousands of people here lined up to get married.

Now, unfortunately, those marriages did get uh reversed over time, but you I wish you could have been here.

The the joy on their faces, the the excitement validation.

The these folks were saying, you know, I never dreamed I'd have this opportunity in my lifetime.

Uh this couple showed up, these ladies had been together for 38 years, and they said we thought we'd never have a chance to do this.

Another couple showed up.

They flew in from North Carolina.

Wow.

And they had their family of friends on their cell phone listening to us perform the ceremony, and at the moment when I finished the ceremony, the phone started screaming with happiness from all the families.

And I was like, you know, this is amazing.

That this is the kind of stuff that happens in San Francisco.

Uh it and to be part of the city government that's got a hand in much of that has been a real joy.

I'm proud of our city for that.

You know, I am too first in so many things, uh trendsetters.

Right.

Like we're we're doing this, you know, and and this is what's special about San Francisco.

Uh this is well, so much insight.

Well, thank you so much.

I've been coming to this building for over 20 years.

It is my day job, you know, and I still come in five days a week.

But I think that was my happiest day city hall.

That was a pretty darn happy day.

That was a wonderful.

That was a big moment in our history, too.

And credit to everybody that was involved with it, and of course, the mayor at the time for being here.

Of course.

So, what what kind of advice?

Let's, you know, for the listeners that are tuning in right now and watching this, uh, what kind of advice would you give them, any young people if they want to get into this kind of work that you do, uh you know, finance, public service and that kind of combination, whatever.

Well, what's the what's like the biggest advice you can give to young people about it?

I would hope they would do something that I didn't do uh when I was younger, which is learn just learn about what's going on around them.

Yeah, learn about how do those buses show up every day and those trains.

How does this happen?

How, you know, who decides where the bike lanes go and and who makes those choices and and how do maybe, you know, would I have a chance to have a say in that?

Is there a way for me to be heard?

I think people don't realize there are plenty of ways.

The city wants to listen to the people that live here, work here, and even visit here.

We want to know what we can be doing better, but most people assume that they don't the people don't want to hear from them.

I think the one thing I would tell people is, we do want to hear from you.

And you can go to your local supervisor's office, you can uh talk to a bus driver, you can come into the tax collector's office.

You can go anywhere you like, but you know, don't be shy and just if you have questions, ask them.

Ask questions.

If you're not curious.

If you could be curious, exactly.

Let me ask you to be curious about how does all this happen.

And um, you know, it's confusing.

There's no doubt about it.

But how do the parks?

I I heard a statistic that every residence in San Francisco know is nowhere than 10-minute walk away from a park here in San Francisco.

I love that.

How did that happen?

And who keeps them all looking as beautiful as they are?

Where did all those playgrounds come from?

Exactly.

Well, there's answers to all those questions, and they're darn good answers most of the time.

And there's probably things that questions that still need better answers for them.

You know, what can we do about this or what can we do about that?

If you live here or work here and have ideas, this government wants to hear about it.

I promise you.

Yes.

You just have to get grab one of us and ask.

If it's not, if we're not the person in charge of that, we know how to send it.

No, someone else.

Right.

And um, and I I tell you, our job is to listen.

To listen.

It really is to listen and to understand, and then do what we can.

Okay.

Well, it has been great as we wrap up this amazing uh interview here.

I mean, there's so much to to talk about.

I know we've only scratched the surface.

Who knew?

Hey, but I have uh learned a lot.

Me as a San Francisco, I'm like, wow, okay, that's amazing for sharing that.

Um let's talk about let's bring it back to San Francisco and our and our love for the city.

Uh, is there a shout-out um that you want to do?

Like a neighborhood, like is there a specific or you know, business, anything that you just want to shout out?

I was talking to a friend the other day, and and I'm I'm I don't have a lot of like uh, you know, uh stuff that I get hung up about, but I miss Don Ramones.

You ever go to Don Ramon's restaurant?

It was um uh as a a Mexican restaurant in the mission.

They went away a few years ago around the pandemic, and they unfortunately haven't come back.

But I just it the feeling inside that restaurant, like so many places, it was like going home.

That was your go-to spot.

It was it was a family kind of feeling.

It was family run, always from day one, and and the founding family still ran it.

Yeah, and you know, it was a great feeling, a great, a great menu, a great location.

Um sometimes a lot of city hall people ended up there because it's not very far away from our present location right now.

And but in spite of that, it no matter what you think about that, it was still a fantastic place, held many an event there, and um just missed that place and missed that.

I've heard of it never been.

Oh, I love it's some good blocks.

Well, hopefully there's another restaurant out there that can uh match up and then I'll do some research and I'll let you know.

How's that?

Uh well we do have some great foods here in San Francisco.

No, it's without a doubt.

Great things.

Okay, so uh we always ask our guests uh as the part of the close, like the headline in the newspaper the next five years.

What would you like that headline of San Francisco to read in five years?

They pick up, you know.

Uh we don't think of the paper anymore, but look at on your computer screen online, whatever it is.

What does that say?

San Francisco, San Francisco kids all ended up in college and and ended up doing what they want to do with their future.

There you go.

I wanna see every kid that grows up here, comes here, lives here, graduates here, have every opportunity they need.

Too many kids feel shut out, right?

Too many adults do too.

But I think if we can grab them when they're children and make sure they understand they have every opportunity the same as everybody else, it's just up to them.

That's the kind of success I think really builds our city and our love.

Yeah.

That's a good way to close.

It's inspiring.

Thank you.

Uh thank you for your time.

Yeah, that's a good headline.

And so one last thing, you know, we normally ask guests to bring something to add uh here, but uh, you know, is there anything cool here that you like to point out from our guests that brought a variety of things?

There's a bunch of.

I actually can already spot a couple of things.

I think I brought them to the that square um uh square at the top that you're into college.

There it is.

That's uh that's a little piggy bank, not in the shape of a pig, but it's a piggy bank in the shape of a Lego, and it's got the ball garden to college uh logo on the front of it.

Yeah, and it's got a uh, you know, a coin slot in the top, who carries coins anymore, but anyway.

Um the whole idea is to bring the idea of savings into the families.

So every time many times when we do an event, we'll bring things like giveaways like that to tell the I love that.

But you know, this is just one more reminder.

We're making it as easy as we can to save for your kids' future.

Five, ten dollars, whatever you can do.

It is.

And talk go home and talk about it and tell your kid how important it is that they have ch all the chances in the world.

Well, this has been amazing conversation, say thank you, thank you.

Thank you for your that's the the centerpiece, right?

That actually we were building this uh podcast studio, and you did uh contribute that early on.

We'll take the center spot.

You're right there, but that it is, it's about kids' futures.

It's about kids' teachers.

It really is.

It's amazing.

Thank you so much for very nice to meet you.

This has been an amazing uh learning experience.

And then one more time.

How can people find out more information, drive it back on the website?

Um, all the information we talked about today, uh, whether it's on the business and tax side or on the services side and the programs, sf treasurer.org.

SF Treasurer, one word dot or g.

Um, just go there and find your way around to the place you have question about.

If you're a business paying taxes and you have questions we want to hear from you, you can also just pick up 311.

As with the other programs too, just dial three one one and folks there can answer basic questions or send you to the folks that can give you more complicated answers.

Thank you so much.

San Francisco's treasurer, Mr.

Jose Cisneros.

Alright, we are officially you.

Whoa!

Done.

There you go.

The gavel.

I'm very proud uh to lead the Polski Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of Chicago.

And welcome to this very historic day as we officially ribbon cut the Third Coast Foundry.

What started as a demo day 12 months ago uh with a few of our universities has now led to a truly historic partnership between eight great, proud world-class research universities from the Midwest.

And let me just give you a few statistics of the Third Coast Foundry.

You see the eight schools uh behind me, but those schools educate 300,000 students, they do 10 billion dollars of research a year, they've led to world-class innovations, uh, that have really been, you know, industry altering.

Um, and if you were to just take the regions where those universities are uh economically, they'd be in the G7.

Uh so you know, the the graduates of Third Coast Foundry Institutions represent over 30% of the engineers, scientists, and AI builders in this country.

Uh I'd like to thank especially our team at the Polski Center for helping make all of this happen.

Um, and for those of you who know me, you know that I served previously uh before at U Chicago as deputy mayor in Chicago.

So I truly have a unique amount of appreciation for Mayor Lurie and the job that his team has done.

Uh they've been tremendously welcoming of all of us and have embraced us here in San Francisco.

Um, you know, we we said that when we did the soft launch, it wasn't actually official, it was on his Instagram.

Uh so we thank you, Mayor Lurie.

Um, with that is my pleasure to introduce the 46th Mayor of San Francisco, Mayor Daniel Lurie.

Thank you.

Thank you.

This is an exciting day in San Francisco to Northwestern, Carnegie, Mellon, Ohio State, Purdue, University of Chicago, University of Illinois, Urbana, Champaign, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wash U and St.

Louis.

Welcome to San Francisco, the greatest city in the world, and you are gonna make it even stronger.

Uh, we all hope that while you're in our city, San Francisco feels like a home away from home.

Just a little cooler during the summer time.

I want to thank you all, uh, all the leaders for choosing our incredible city.

Uh, I've already expressed my bias, um, but there's no better place to be than here in the global center of innovation.

But innovation doesn't just belong to one city, it happens wherever talented people are willing to tackle hard problems and think differently.

Looking at the work represented here today and what you just mentioned with all of the talent at these incredible universities, it is clear that the spirit is thriving across the Midwest and across our great country.

That's why we're excited to welcome you here, not just visitors, but as partners.

Third Coast Foundry will become a home for collaboration between some of the nation's leading institutions and one of the most dynamic innovation ecosystems on the planet.

Through demo days, seminars, workshops, and receptions, this space will help students, researchers and entrepreneurs turn ideas into opportunities.

Universities, we all know, bring incredible energy.

They bring new ideas and new people into our city.

They strengthen the culture of innovation that has defined defined San Francisco for generations.

And that is exactly what we want more of here in downtown San Francisco.

Right now, we are building a downtown that is a vibrant 24-7 neighborhood where people can live, work, play, and learn.

A place where students are learning, founders are building companies, residents are raising families, and visitors are discovering what makes San Francisco so special.

And with today's opening, we are moving closer to that goal.

I also want to thank each university for your commitment to our city.

We are excited to partner with you and build the future together.

And to every student and entrepreneur who walks through these doors, this city is behind you.

And president, it's good to be with you and to know that you've got some uh bears' roots to you.

So with that, I will say let's go, San Francisco, and thank you all very much for having me.

Thank you, Mayor Lurie.

Thank you so much for that welcome.

I'm Paul Alabasados, president of the University of Chicago, and I'm so happy to be here with representatives from eight truly world-class great universities from across the Midwest.

Americans across the Midwest are helping to sponsor these amazing universities where we care deeply about creating new knowledge, about educating people, and where also we have a spirit of innovation that runs very deep.

We have students and faculty who are great founders of wonderful companies.

And what's special about today is eight truly great universities from across the Midwest have come together.

We've come together, not separately, but all together to bring our founders here to San Francisco to work with the community of technology innovators and people who are able to sponsor companies and people who will work in those companies to help us bring our the benefits of that knowledge creation to the future of America and to innovation in general.

So we're so excited.

We're also feeling keenly that this is a place of a lot of experimentation.

People try new things here.

We are going to have faculty and students trying to do things in entirely new ways together, and it's going to be very special.

I hope that people across San Francisco will see this as an important moment and one of great success.

So thank you very much for welcoming us.

Good morning.

Thank you, President Alavasados.

It is such a pleasure to be here on behalf of Carnegie Mellon University.

My name is Meredith Meyer Grelli, and I'm here with our vice president of research, Dr.

Teresa Mayer and our senior director of partnerships, Nimratopenergy.

So we all know talent, excellence, it exists all across the country, though I will admit to visit the number one AI and cybersecurity programs in the country to visit the largest university robotics program in the country.

You've got to travel to Pittsburgh.

I've been maybe not the greatest city in the world, as you stated earlier.

Certainly the Paris of Appalachia.

So I took a driverless Waymo this morning from my hotel to here.

And what you may not realize is that technology has a straight line back to Carnegie Mellon.

The car that won the DARPA Urban Challenge was a Carnegie Mellon car.

The engineer who built that car who led that team would go on to found what we now know as a Waymo.

And so when you grab a Waymo in this glorious city, you can rest assured that you are being driven on Midwestern research.

As the pace of innovation accelerates, our shared future economy will be built company by company, and by people who back research early.

We need to back research often when it still fits in university labs.

This is where our most novel technologies are originating.

For example, when we think about physical AI, which we think about a lot at Carnegie Mellon, we know that nearly half of the most successful physical AI companies, those that have raised more than 30 million dollars in the last five years, are PhD founder, founder led.

You already know some of the companies that have come out of the CMU research ecosystem, many of whom populate San Francisco.

You know about Duolingo, which may be how you learn languages.

You may know about Aurora, which is running the first driverless trucks on America's highways, a bridge, which is the leading medical scribe company in the country, and is really at the forefront of ambient AI, and skilled that's building brains for any kind of robot and is currently valued at something like 15 billion dollars.

These are just Carnegie Mellon companies.

The potential that exists in this collective ecosystem of eight leading research universities is simply astounding.

And we are so glad to be a part of this group, putting it on display here in San Francisco.

What we're doing here together with the University of Chicago's leadership and vision is hot wiring our connection between our collective founders and the capital mentors in talent that live in this extraordinary Bay Area ecosystem that we know will help turn our groundbreaking research into world leading companies.

So congratulations to Samir, the entire Polski and University of Chicago team, and to all of our partners in this collective, we are so honored to be in this glorious mix of talent and commercialization potential.

Thank you.

Good morning.

Good morning.

Thank you all for being here.

This is such a pleasure.

My name is Rashid Bashir.

I'm proud and humbled to be the Dean of the Granger College of Engineering at the University of Lenoir Ban of Champaign.

And on behalf of my other co-dean here, my other dean, uh Brooke Elliott, uh Dean of the Geese College of Business and other colleagues.

We're really delighted to be here.

Um it's a privilege to be especially here with our eight partner universities, opening this third course foundry.

Uh, and I will note, um, I think as many of you know, it is not easy to get eight universities to agree to one thing, and voluntarily, as Paul said earlier.

So, this is a pretty big thing.

And so, this is a pretty big deal for all of us to come together.

And you should have heard the earlier discussion we were having about how everyone is already thinking about how to amplify this partnership.

So, but uh I would say that this has really been uh nothing but uh uh a social engineering uh miracle.

So thank you, Samir.

Um, but we do pull these miracles off in the Midwest quite often.

Um let me start with just one simple observation uh that the Midwest has the research, uh, the talent uh and the institutions to innovate.

Uh what it has lacked is uh startups that scale.

You heard some great examples, but we need more of them, and I think that's the opportunity, and that's exactly what Third Coast Foundry will help accelerate.

Uh so consider what's what's been gathered here under one roof, eight universities.

I think this was mentioned this morning, over 350,000 students across these eight great universities right here.

Uh over 10 billion in annual research expenditures.

So no single school can command that.

And we believe in these radical partnerships, these transformative partnerships, and I think this is really what you're gonna see here.

Uh and this combination is the whole point because we, as I mentioned, we believe in deeply in radical collaborations.

Uh, the biggest problems and challenges uh don't respect institutional boundaries.

Uh, we should neither.

Um, and we have put that conviction, by the way, uh, to, for example, the Chanzerka Burg BioHub, the second one that we won in the Midwest with U Chicago, Northwestern, and UIUC, just one example.

Or now what's happening in the Chicago Quantum Exchange with many of the institutions here are partners, and also the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park, for example, where we hope to build the first Vault August and quantum computer in the world.

Third course foundry is the same instinct now pointed in the Bay Area.

And as I would say that now we're quantum mechanically entangled with the Bay Area.

The co-founders of YouTube, PayPal, Mark Andreessen, who built the first popular web browser, Mosaic, now sits at the center of Silicon Valley Venture.

Co-founders of Oracle, Tom Siebel, and C3 AI and SIBO Systems, and everything has been done.

So we're we're not, I mean, we're not hoping to break in.

We have built build this place, so it's really amazing now that with the leadership of Paul and Samir and others, we all are coming together.

We have tried to do things individually, and now we're coming collectively.

So that's really the power of this enterprise.

We're so excited, and our strengths, I think today are exactly what the what the world needs.

You heard about physical AI and robotics, world-class research and AI, quantum information science, nuclear, whether it's fission, micronuclear reactors, or fusion, biotechnology, agricultural technology, combining with the business, education, all of these great disciplines, we can bring it all together, and we have a portfolio that I think no single coast could match.

We want to enhance, expand, and collaborate.

So this is really exciting to be here.

And in some, so in summary in closing, I think Third Coast Foundry is this bridge.

We hope it'll be this bridge between the Midwest innovation and the coastal capital and talent, and build on the belief that the best things get built together.

It's like, again, in the quantum lingo, it's the Einstein-Rosen Bridge, this connection between the Midwest and getting a little too technical.

Uh, but that's exciting.

Um, deep at heart, and I think this is really exciting.

So I'm really just proud to be here today with all of my partners.

Thank you so much.

Thank you for the support.

Okay, we're not gonna cut the red-end.

So, uh, if I could get all the institutional representatives up here, and mayor, we're gonna bring you an oversized pair of scissors.

And we do have a little gift bag for you, the inaugural swag bag.

Yeah, we'll put that in this.

It's a big group.

Okay, so I'm gonna count, but everybody hold a ribbon tight.

Maybe squeeze in.

There's some room back here if anyone wants to get back.

Everybody's got it.

My name is Sean Ellsburn, CEO of Spur.

Thank you for being here this afternoon.

You know, there are many, many reasons why I love my work at Spur.

There are many reasons why I love the organization.

Um, but really much at the top of the list is this event this afternoon.

As a former city employee who has nominated many colleagues, who has been at this event many times and celebrated nominees, celebrated winners, and admittedly, as a city employee who is very jealous of never winning myself.

Um, I do know personally how inspirational this afternoon is and how rewarding this recognition is.

So it's really a great honor for me to be a part of the event today.

And I would like to put today's event in the context of something that happened just last week.

Last Thursday was the annual, I want to make sure I get this right, Samuel Heyman service to American Medal ceremony, known as the Sammies.

What are the Sammies?

The Sammies anecdotally are what are known as the Oscars for Federal Employees.

It's an event that is very similar to this, but for our hundreds of thousands of federal employees.

But last week, unfortunately, we saw what happens when we have an atmosphere of distrust, when we have an atmosphere of disrespect, and we have an atmosphere of frankly doji condescension towards public employees.

In a typical year, you'll have over 400 nominees.

You'll have nearly a hundred winners.

This year, last week, there were less than 200 nominees.

There were many nominees who raised their hand and said, please withdraw my nomination.

The fear of distrust and the fear of bringing attention to their work scared people away.

Thankfully, we are not the federal government.

Thankfully, we are in San Francisco.

And thankfully, here in San Francisco, we celebrate our public employees.

We celebrate the work of public employees who way too often go unrecognized.

Even as their work shapes the health, safety, and opportunity of our community every single day.

That's why this afternoon matters, because it gives us a chance to honor the individuals whose commitment to integrity keep this city running often behind the scenes.

At a time when trust in institutions is being tested, and our communities face complex challenges, good government is more essential than ever.

It is the foundation of a just, resilient, and functional society, and the people we are honoring tonight, exemplify what that looks like in practice.

I'm proud that we get to shed a light on their contributions and to say very clearly, their work matters and it is valued.

So please, collectively, let's recognize all the nominees and winners.

Now, this is the portion of the intro where I usually get in trouble because I'm supposed to recognize the elected officials in the room.

As a former elected official who more often than not was ignored during this part, I know how that can kind of feel.

So what I will say collectively, even though I know all of the elected officials in the room are far more mature than I ever was, maybe for my own embarrassment, let's recognize all the elected officials in the room.

But the one elected we will, of course, name.

It is my honor, it is my privilege to welcome to the stage.

There he is, our mayor, Mayor Daniel Lurry.

Is it chief of staff?

Is it supervisor?

Is it CEO?

Sean.

When I was walking down here, uh my incredible chief of staff, Stacey Slaughter said, yes.

She's right over there.

Uh, who everybody in this room has always been kind to her.

Sean, you have been incredibly kind to her.

I thank you for that.

Said that this was her favorite awards ceremony, writ large across the city because of what you just said, because we honor and we owe it to every San Franciscan to make sure their government works, and you all are making it work every single day.

So, on behalf of Stacy and myself, we also want to recognize everybody in this room.

So thank you very much.

Making sure the government works for the people of San Francisco has been our focus from day one.

Breaking down silos, fostering collaboration across departments, and staying laser focused on results.

Nearly a year and a half in, I can say that we're making progress.

At a moment when confidence in public institutions is fragile across this country.

San Francisco, we're doing something different here.

In 2024, 22% of San Franciscans thought we were heading in the right direction.

Today, that number is 65%.

That is thanks to all of you in this room.

The strength of this city does not come from any one person.

It comes from the people who wake up every single day focused on solving problems.

These are the people who keep the buses moving.

Process emergency response data, modernized systems that no one will ever see, and coordinate crises before the public even hears about them.

Tonight's honorees show us that good government is not abstract, it is measurable, and it can and does change people's lives.

And before I announce the winners, I want to recognize all the nominees.

I want to thank you for tackling incredibly difficult challenges with professionalism, creativity, and persistence.

San Francisco is better because of your work.

Now, announcing this year's Good Government Award recipients.

First, are we doing this one by one?

One group at a time?

Yes, we are.

First, Charles Drain.

Charles, come on up here.

So, congratulations.

Charles is the chief maintenance officer at SFMTA whose leadership and fix it week initiative help improve reliability, reduce delays, and strengthen collaboration across one of the nation's most complex transit systems.

Every San Franciscan who gets home faster because of Muni is running reliably because of you and your leadership.

And I'm coming out there with you on Tuesday night at 11 p.m.

We're gonna go out on the overnight.

You're doing this all week next week, right?

It's fix it week.

So we'll report back together.

Maybe we'll do a video together.

Congratulations.

Thank you very much.

Do we have a week here?

Okay, next, Dr.

Luke Roda.

Luke, come on up here.

Oh, you got cheering.

Luke is at the office of the chief medical examiner, and you have transformed San Francisco's forensic laboratory into a nationally recognized operation rooted in scientific rigor, efficiency, and public accountability.

Yes.

That work strengthens trust in our justice system and our public institutions, and our city is better for it.

Thank you, Dr.

Roda, and your entire team.

Thank you.

Tonight, also we're honoring the extraordinary team from the human services agency.

Come on up here, you three.

Rod Faneri.

Rod Fanetti, Teresa Young, and Cindy Lin, the CalFresh grocery card team.

You also are all coming up good.

Rose, John, Shane, Ballinanin, and Cindy Sanchez.

Cindy, come on up here.

You all remember this.

Last year, when SNAP disruption occurred, this city pulled together.

Tens upon tens of thousands of San Franciscans suddenly faced food insecurity or the possibility of that.

And this team's exceptionally fast emergency response helped thousands of San Franciscans maintain access to food during that incredibly difficult time.

You all led the charge.

I couldn't be more proud to have partnered with all of you and your team.

Thank you for making San Francisco shine and doing such great work last November.

Thank you.

I'm sure I was not supposed to call everybody up all at once, so I messed that up.

But that was fun anyway.

All right.

Last, I want to recognize the SFO integrated operations center team.

Come on up here.

Anthony Wen.

Anthony Wen, Ralph Rocco Schauson, Nancy Bion Ryder, Andrea Corporal, and Jacob Ehrenberg.

Come on up here.

Your innovative model for real-time coordination has improved operations at the airport, the efficiency and the traveler experience at SFO, and I have to tell you, Mike were Mike and I were uh traveling to Asia a couple of weeks ago, and everyone would tell us how incredible SFO is, and it is true, it is the best airport in the world.

And these honorees, all of these folks, all the people I named, you represent the very best of public service here in San Francisco.

You represent the government that the people deserve.

Please join me in congratulating all of the award winners tonight.