Wed like to take over the show. I just want to say its a great honor and its a really great event. If you havent been to the portola garden tour, 2013 will be september 28th, mark your calendars. Get your tickets early. And if i could, there are so many people involved in this, id like if all the gardners that have shown their gardens and the people on the committee could stand up for just a second so you could see how many of us there really are. applause thank you very much. Wonderful, what a great award that is. Id like to take a moment and acknowledge Supervisor Scott Wiener has joined us here this evening. Someone who we all know. applause has done an amazing job in district 8 and making that a wonderful place to live for thousands of residents there, including my father. So, thank you very much. He thanks you. Fourth generation, you know . Without further ado id like to invite someone who was standing on the stage just last year wearing a different uniform, stunning us all with h
Were looking for grant money for more beautification. If anybody is interested in starting a Neighborhood Watch and getting involved, call me and i can help you get started. Its a great thing to know your neighbors, even the ones who are a pain in the neck. Its a great thing to know your neighbors. [laughter] applause i would just like to say thank you to all of our neighbors because we have lived in that neighborhood for 37 years and its just been such a joy to meet people who live right across the street and never knew what wonderful neighbors i had until we started the Neighborhood Watch group. So, i would strongly advise everyone to start a Neighborhood Watch group. Its great. And thanks to patricia, shes done an outstanding job and im so happy she took over as block captain for me. I appreciate it. Thanks a lot. applause applause our next award is for the best Community Green community project. And id like to just sort of jump forward a little bit and invite darlene zane to come u
Can i just tell you how good it feels to be up here, to look out to see all the people that make everything possible, that really makes San Francisco wonderful . And i just have got to give a special shout out. You knew i grew up in the portola for those that dont know. [cheering and applauding] right there at the intersection of silly man and colby, my parents still live there. Thats where it started for me. But tonight is a night that we have abopportunity to up lift and support and say thank you to all the people that certainly provide me support and provide me the motivation to get up and come to work every single day. This is an opportunity to thank and praise the people that call me stop, that email me, find me on facebook, send me a twitter and pick, found me on next door. I tell you, this is your day. Put your hands together. Hang in there, were almost done. But this is the day that we get to celebrate applause im calling it the neners. You know whats interesting . Ive been aro
Enough to watch the nen awards grow and mature into what it is today. So, i also want to give a special shout out to daniel homesy who is the originator of this. Thank you, daniel. applause also i want to acknowledge his right hand christina palone, the new director, mon, Mayors Office Neighborhood Services over there in that corner. applause and for those of you that dont know, i represent district 10, thats the southeast neighborhoods. Thats bayview, thats potrero hill, visitacion valley, its a little hollywood, its dogpatch. It used to be the portola, half of it. My heart is still with you, but im glad like the speaker said, it is whole. And that is whats important, is that that neighborhood remains whole so that our city will be whole. You agree . [cheering and applauding] cheers so, a few years back there was this little idea to take back the bayview and really began to rewrite the history and the narrative that we often hear about in bayview. And it actually started, ironically,
applause our next award is for the best Community Green community project. And id like to just sort of jump forward a little bit and invite darlene zane to come up and give the award. Here she comes. [cheering and applauding] hello, everyone. So, for years the portola and its the portola, foster recognition. And, dan, things started happening. One of the things that gave attention to our neighborhood is when we decided we were going to have a new branch library. Ruth wallace came up with the idea of a garden tour and a lot of us thought, a garden tour . Our neighborhood . Who is going to come . Well, we had every weve done it for six years. Every year weve grown incrementally. After the first two years of raising money for the library theres our new library we then it was such a Great Community builder that we recently decided to keep wanting to volunteering and do it. We established a scholarship at city college for the horticultural department. And we have just gone gangbusters. We g