What systems are resisting those actions. But the scope is usually a seismic scope. And in current practice, the peer reviews are generally structured with a chairperson. The chairperson i think is required in this city to be practicing and registered Structural Engineer. There is typically a geotechnical engineer or engineer with seismology background who is skilled in issues related to the Foundation Design. Geotechnical parameters, earthquake ground motion. And then there is generally an academic who is brought in. The academic is not so much to bring an academic perspective, but to bring to bear the Specialized Knowledge that might be required to understand the design of a particular building. So, i might be brought in as an academic reviewer or as a reviewer are academic background as my related expertise in concrete construction. In steel, someone might be brought in with a structural steel kind of background. And the review is is in the city and county of San Francisco. Lets step back, you had many questions in your question. One of the questions was how is the Peer Review Panel assembled. Its been done in various ways. I have never been part of the assembly process. I think in the past there is very often been discussions among the Building Department, the Structural Engineer of record and perhaps the developer. And i think such discussions are not inappropriate. I think they are appropriate because the Structural Engineer of record has the best knowledge of going into the project of what are the special conditions that have to be addressed in this peer review. And also the peer reviewers and the Structural Engineer of record have to work extensively over a period of 612 months typically in the review process. So its good that they have some rapport in doing the work. But eventually the city makes the final decision. The Building Department makes the decision who the reviewers should be. Each of the reviewers are contacted. Do you have Time Available and do you have time to spend on this activity and do you have a related context to this project. That is the more recent question. In this city, the practice has been that the individual peer reviewers write a proposal to the developer, and the developer in some cases will take that proposal and simply sign it and date it and say approved. In other cases, depending on the Corporate Structure of the developer, they may have attorneys that rewrite everything and it coming back in some different form. So the process varies. But, i think invariably in the past, the contract has been between the individual peer reviewers and the developer. The responsibility for working is between generally its between the peer reviewers and the engineer of record and commonly involve the representative of the department of building and safety in San Francisco to review various details. We go through what a typical review entails. But invariably each project has special conditions that the peer reviewers have the skills identified to ask questions to identify modifications, to check spot some of the details the engineer is proposing and make changes in the design because the design isnt suitable for the performance intent. The performance responsibility is a very serious one. I know i take it very seriously. And the reporting is strictly to the department of Building Department of San Francisco. All responsibilities for writing letters for reporting go to the representative of the Building Department. Its really a safety first kind of mentality. Although the developer maybe paying compensated for the time spent and a lot of the work is between the Peer Review Panel and the Structural Engineer of record. The responsibility is really the city of San Francisco. The reporting is done there and thats where my allegiance has always been except when the developer decides to take his or her independent inhouse peer review and the report goes back to the developer. In the case of 80 natoma, what was the relationship . With 80 natoma, it was one of the first of the high rise Performance Based designs to come into this city that utilized what we would call a hoer only, all the seismic resistance is contained in the elevator hoer. No moment frame. When they consider the height, that falls out of the prescription for the Building Code and the Building Department would invoke a peer review. 80 natoma was the first of those. So 80 natoma was a 3person review panel. I was one of the members. It was way early in the process. I was the chair. You were the chair which was interesting because you were not a licensed structural but playing the role of the academic but you were the chair . Right, back then the rule to be a Structural Engineer wasnt in print anywhere. So i served as a chair in more than one such panel, but in the last 10 years i have not chaired a single Peer Review Panel anywhere and thats fine with me. So there was a practicing Structural Engineer, license Structural Engineer who was a member of the Peer Review Panel, and there is a geotechnical engineer who was also involved with that panel. We were hired by, i think the developer was jack myers. That is correct. I havent heard the name in a while, but he was the developer in that case. So i presume our contract was through him and the maintenance of record was clav chic and ron was the i dont remember the plan checker. The plan checker was tom huey. Quite possible. Thats how that project was set up. I can give my own version of the firsthand history of what happened there. Going back to the role of educators in peer reviewers, back to the case, the peer reviewers were paid by the developers, but in the case of 80 natoma, your duty, i dont want to put words in your mouth was related to the department of building and safety even though your client was the developer . Yes. The duty is really to the city, but the reporting line was the Building Department, yes. And then relative to the findings that happened in the 80 natoma case relative to a concrete building albeit without moment frames, but within a similarly situated geotechnical area, the substraight is very very similar, but a few hundred feet away, what was the Peer Review Panels determination . The Peer Review Panel was, its a complicated logic determination. Its not a thumbs up or thumbs down. Its a very gold project. The peer review was satisfied with the design of this project. Lets talk about the history. Okay. I dont know, supervisor peskin if you saw the exhibits that i brought in today. The reason we started late is because they were copied and as i have been trying to speak i have been looking at them. But yes, we have them. These are all of my documents of these projects. They are fairly old projects so the number of documents is limited. But for ease of reference, i put a little exhibit number on the first page of each of these. One of them is jpn, my initials. Yes, that is the letter from dbi to you, as long as mr. Donny was part of that project. Before mr. Ladd and mit came involved. Mr. Vadoni became involved from the very beginning. I will point out some things of this letter in a moment. The project was under review. It being the first of these tall core only reviews. There was a lot of time spent going through the details of how the engineers were handling the design of the reinforced concrete system. There was as well although i am not an expert in Geotechnical Engineering. I recall that shaul vedanta was also with the text graphic issues early in those days. As i recall, they expected settlement in this building from the geotechnical engineers who had written a report based on this was that the expected longterm settlement was on the order of 5 inches. My understanding was that vadity was on the Peer Review Panel. I dont want to put words in his mouth. Just as we ended the peer review process something remarkable happened. Nothing like this has happened since i have been involved. If you turn to page 10, and look at what is contained here. Ken harrington is the city writing to verdana at berkeley saying we need another independent review because we have received these 15 reports. And the remarkable thing about this is that report no. 1 is the report of the technical engineering firm. There is a report no. 2 from me on behalf of the Peer Review Panel. On april 2nd. And then may 9, may 12, may 14, may 25, may 31, june 2nd, june 3rd, june 11th, june 14th, june 17th, june 24th. There is a series of 13 reports that came in from geotechnical engineers. I think they are all geotechnical engineers which, of course, told me something strange and different was going on with this project from anything that i have ever reviewed before because we never saw such interest. Somebody has hired all of these people, these experts, recognized experts to write reports. And i think the report that has been noted previously is one from professor whittle from mit, a recognized expert in geotechnical experience and also a professor ladd had written an independent report as well and had claimed the expected settlement was not 5 inches but 11 inches. Of course everyone was concerned including the panel. We asked shaw verdani to review the technical reviews of the project. I thought it was reports both by ladd and whittle which were very similar. To find out the source of the discrepancy five verses 11 inches. Shau went out and looked at the detail of the two sets of reports with different results. As i recall he cited two main sources of the discrepancy. The first one is a little complicated to explain, but if a soil is precompressed lets say by an over lying ice sheet which doesnt happen here, or by over lying soil sometime in the geo logic past. That soil is decreased and it compresses to a certain point with equilibrium of the soil and due to a process, that soil might be removed. When a new building is built on such a soil deposit, that soil deposit is initially very stiff until you get the previous pressures of the over pressures burden has been and then it gets pressed very significantly. So one of the whittle reports is that one had assumed one precompression ratio and the other one a slight different one. It was minor but a. 4 or 5. Relatively minor change. The other was the assumed weight of the building. And according to shau verdani and we verified the same in the Peer Review Panel. The report by andrew whittle used the percent of the building by 25 or greater. Im not presuming that for mr. Whittle, i presume someone gave him the weight. The conclusion of our Peer Review Panel was that the weight used in mr. Whittles report was about 25 too high. Shau verdani documented that in this report. I presume its report no. 15 listed here. With that information at hand, the Peer Review Panel, excuse me, backing up. Shaus conclusion as i recall it was the prospective settlement was about the right number when you had the correct building weight in there. And so, again our Peer Review Panel was on the verge of again approving the design, and thats when all of these series of meetings began to be called at the Building Department. The Building Department invoked, is it called the sunshine law or sunshine clause, that i think it requires all the meetings to be publicly announced 24 hours ahead of time and allows for the public to come and speak, and we suddenly found ourselves having peer review meetings that instead of being the three peer review ers and the engineers representatives and the Building Departments representative included now geotechnical engineers, tunnelling experts, many attorneys and the general public. The meetings were very interesting and i was required to chair those things. I was ill equipped. Those meetings went for a short while. Almost finish. This is summer of 2004, is that what we are talking about . Yes. Please proceed. I think the peer review work on this project was picked off in january of 2004. And so this had run its course sort of about 56 months review process when everything blew up. And what seems to have been at issue was that the Transbay Transit Center was planning the Transit Center. This was the early days of the Transit Center so we were not aware of any of the details that that was going to be, but there was a train tunnel there was a train tunnel alignment that was going to be in the front of this building. The concern was if the building was built with the Foundation System that it had, that one of several things had to happen. Either the train tunnel alignment had to be changed which i think tjpa wasnt keen on that, this is just speculation part of it. The tunnel could be reconstructed. I dont know if the planners were far along to know to do that. The soil where the tunnel was located could have been treated in such a way that the tunnel could be constructed without dewatering the site. Like grout injection or excavation and replacing with something else, but it would probably be some injection system. Or the tunnel replacement would be after it was built but you would have to completely dewater the site. There has been a lot of discussion about dewatering such an effect. If the tunnel is dewatered, then the settlement in the building would accelerate and that would cause problems probably for the building as well as for the tunnel. Right about the time that that came to light and we brought in tunnelling experts as part of the Peer Review Panel and had a few meetings with them, sometime right around then through the process of Eminent Domain somebody acquired the site from jack myers. I was instructed to write to the sort that at some point it was compromised. I dont remember exactly the details of that letter. Your instruction in that was mr. Myers or the city and county of San Francisco. It was the city and county of San Francisco. It was lets put this thing to rest. The property has been acquired. The belief of the Peer Review Panel was that it was designed to construction. My recollection back then is the interest in the city was dont put the details of what the extenuating circumstances was. I appreciate your candor. Lets talk about the 301 Mission Street tower. Give me a moment, please. Take your time. Okay, where shall we start . Let me talk about a few things that i have observed and this has been very helpful and i appreciate you coming today. In terms of timing it is interesting that 80 natoma is happening at exactly the same time that 301 Mission Street is happening, and i just say that because the documents that you brought and i really appreciate having a copy of what is your contract with Millennium Partners dated 12 july 2004, that is the letter which you brought is interestingly enough is almost exactly the same times as the letter that you referenced with the 15 exhibits which is dated july 26, 2004. Its all happening at the same time. Im not alleging any great conspiracy between these two projects, but the fact that they are happening at the same time is interesting in so far as while it is true that 301 Mission Street was not a Performance Based, but was, or i should say became a code prescribed project as originally envisioned by partners it probably was a Performance Based project but eventually by the time july 2004 comes around its a codes prescribed project and you were retained. Can you tell us how you were retained, how you were selected. This document shows that you work for Millennium Partners which is consistent with the way peer review is done a decade or 13 years at this point. Can you give us some recollection about that . Yes, so youve noted already the contract with millennium which i marked as jpn one. We started at the end this morning and coming back at the beginning. This contract, is one of the few documents i retained because it lays out what my scope of work was and i like to keep those things so that its clear. Going forward and into the future of what i was designed to do and what i wasnt designed to do. This project is different from the Performance Based projects in that the peer review in this case was not initiated by the Building Department. It was to the best of my knowledge initiated by Millennium Partners. I recall a meeting with the representative from Millennium Partners very early on. A guy name Scott Patterson, the guy who signed this. And his int