Let me welcome everyone for coming out to this great kickoff event. Mayor lee, supervisor chiu, distinguished guests from the community, city family, all of us coming together. Last year we held a Pilot Project on stockton street to help the merchants and support the merchants in selling their merchandise. We were able we were very successful. We got a lot of great feedback from the pilot. So this year again, we are doing the second year of the pilot. All the agencies and the community and the merchants, we got together, and talked about how we can do better. And without further delay, i will ask the mayor to come and say a few words, who is a big supporter of this project. Mayor lee. Thank you mohammed. [ applause ] i am very happy to be here. Is this okay . All right. All right. [ laughter ] all right. First of all, happy new year to everyone. This is what im looking forward to every year and i know the merchants and residents and all the Small Businesses are excited. A year ago board of supervisors president david chiu and i and members of the community discussed how we can continue the Economic Vitality of the city and clearly we registered a big support for Small Businesses. I wanted to make sure that everybody neighborhood in the city has a chance of cultural celebrations. When it comes to chinese new year, there is a huge celebrate in chinatown. Were a huge destination for visitors, a lot of people come to chinatown to celebrate chinese new year. As people come here, we wanted to help our small businesss with offering some Additional Space for them, but also make it even safer for our pedestrians. Because if you have ever observed chinatown during the chinese new years, and david and i have been quite specific observers about this. You will see families and kids walk into the street in the middle of big buses and cars coming in. We didnt want that to happen. We didnt want anybodys safety to be compromised as we celebrate this new years. Because that would obviously be a serious hindrance. Our Public Health director Barbara Garcia and transportation director ed reiskin, public works agencis, our wastewater management, our police department, we have all gotten together to say how can we do this smarter with our Small Businesses, our chinese chamber, our stockton Street Merchant Association and all Work Together to make this a safer experience for everybody . We came up with the idea that maybe we could simply expand the sidewalk by allowing everybody to use the sidewalk properly, but that the storefronts could have some Additional Space to offer their goods, when the chinese new years is happening, and when people are wanting to buy all the things that they want to do to celebrate the new years and to come down here and be safe. So this pedestrian expansion of our sidewalks was the idea that came forward. We piloted it last year as mohammed explain and thank you to dpws great work, the pilot was successful. It was successful all around, particularly with our Small Businesses, particularly with our Chinatown Youth Center and the people who are here to protect pedestrians. All the agencies got back in a very enthusiastic way to say we can do it better this year and get everybodys involvement. So it isnt just the pressure on the police department, that says we got to be safe. It is everybody wong