Coffee Breakfast

The Power Breakfast: it’s a growing component to how public policy at least gets considered. There are two main places where the power breakfast takes place: the St. Regis and the Americano restaurant at Hotel Vitale.

On any morning, you’ll find department heads, port directors and commissioners in conversation with lobbyists and owners and operators of projects under construction, to be constructed or envisioned like the Warriors arena.

You can see people from the Treasure Island project, the Navy Shipyard project, high-rise developers and those who run the Transbay all in conversation. You can see supervisors and even the mayor on occasion at these power locations.

You’ll find representatives from the power industry, the hotel industry and the banking and commerce industry. They are all open and above board discussing what public policy should be.

The ultimate power breakfast this year actually occurred last week at the Fairmont Hotel where I gathered 900 people including Senator Dianne Feinstein, House Leader Nancy Pelosi, Congresswoman Jackie Speier, Mayor Ed Lee, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Democratic Party Chair John Burton and Republican Chair Tom Del Beccaro. We also had more than 20 other elected officials, all surrounded by people from every decision-making facility in San Francisco discussing the November election.

Having breakfast is a lot more fun and normal than most political affairs because there was no booze, no black ties and no companions. So the true networking and contacting could take place.