Mark, john, and the mayor all talked about the improvements that have happened in this really, really important piece of open space. Its a dense neighborhoodv. Its in a transit corridor. And thanks to partnership and thanks to Community Support and thanks to the leadership of our elected officials weve made some incredible improvements here in the last few years. Behind us, our new playground thanks to the support of the trust for public land. Behind all of you is an incredible new Skateboard Park which is both a public another Publicprivate Partnership partially funded with bond funds. Behind us even further is balboa pool which thanks to the 2012 parks bond will be renovated with a stateoftheart Swimming Pool in a few years. The theme here is meeting evolving community needs. Skateboarding has become more popular. The needs of our aquatics programs is changing. The needs of our playground is evolving and so, too, is technology. Technology has a very important place in park and park s
Discretionary funding has often gone in to support efforts here and, of course, across the street with the challenges of the both the bart and the muni station. But it is all about our neighborhoods. And i go back to what supervisor farrell said, and i want to again thank and appreciate supervisor farrell, his staff margo kelly, another great effort. This is what innovation does in the city. It gets everybody to actually work at even higher levels in government in a Publicprivate Partnership with Companies Like google and all the rest of the wonderful members of sf city to do what we can do and to do more than we think we can. In order to bring benefits, bring equity, bridge not only the Digital Divide, but perhaps bring the whole innovative spirit to every community in San Francisco. This is what i think this wifi effort of our 31 parks is saying. And the nice thing about it is that when you study what were going to do here and accomplish with the 31 parks, and that we along with our
San francisco has been a leader in our Technology Community and our Technology Economy across our country and now we get to continue to play a role in being a leader bringing Technology Solutions to improve the lives of our residents here in our city. Its been a privilege to work on this project and to lead this effort the last two years and look forward to bringing the Broader Vision of free wifi across San Francisco in the next few years with all the partners behind me today. This has been a strong collaboration on behalf of a lot of partners. In particular, google, sf city, our recreation and Park Department as well as our department of technology, and i want to thank all of those involved. This project started a little over two years ago with a conversation i had with an old family friend from google. And i want to take a moment to thank the entire google team that worked on this project. Its been two years, so, its touched a lot of desks and had a lot of approvals and in particula
Good effort. Its a good project to be able to do that, especially that we have no strings attached, that this is a gift thats actually coming to residents in San Francisco that has a benefit that maximizes the benefit to residents. Im really glad that we have that, private project moving across the city and this park. So, i just want to thank supervisor mark farrell for his great work. Its been a really good couple months for me working with him on the budget and seeing this project come into fruition, to know that he presents some really great leadership here in San Francisco. And more to come im sure. Thank you for being here. Im actually going to be introducing our illustrious general manager of the rec and park department, mr. Phil ginsberg. applause illustrious . Thank you, john. Illustrious . Its a great day for parks and for park users. So, were thrilled. We get to be the beneficiaries of all this hard work and all this partnership. And it is appropriate that were here at balboa
It provides local groups and Community Residents access to the internet they might not have had before, as well for our rec and Park Department as phil knows all too well many rec centers still use dial up service. When we think about registering our children for camps and play grounds, what we need to do in our daily lives, but also our government on a daily basis to use technology, this will be an incredible boone to our rec and Park Department and something we should all be very excited about. In terms of the details of the gift, google is providing a 600,000 financial gift to our city with no strings attached. I think a lot of the prior debate around free wifi in San Francisco that never moved forward was because of different questions about Business Models or so forth, to emphasize this is a free gift of financial benefit to the city of San Francisco with no strings attached. The money will come through sf city which will manage the installation of the wifi network from beginning