Come back to ThinkTech. There's Energy in America at 3 o'clock every other Wednesday, and we have this show with Lou Pooley-Reece. He's the president of EPRNC, Energy Policy Research Organization in Washington, D.C., and he is joining us from Washington, D.C., which is very special, because today is a very, what do we call it, federal government day. We've had the results of the runoffs in Georgia, and we've had a breach of the Capitol Building for the first time since 1812, make that 1814 part of the 1812 war, he told me. Lou, welcome back to your show. Lou Pooley-Nice to be here, Jay, and the title this evening is to understand how the Georgia Senate elections, which ties the Senate but actually effectively gives the Democrats control of the Senate, what it's going to do to energy and environment policy over the next few years. Before we talk about that, the sort of mundane stuff, we did have a little activity in Washington today. Every time someone is upset, they seem to want to come to my town and tear up the lawns and protest and do things, and so today, as you pointed out, we had a breach of the Capitol, really unusual, because it's a fairly well fortified building. This was, in fact, if you go on the Internet, you can see some character in Nancy Pelosi's office with his feet up on the table. Perfect. Perfect, yeah. And, you know, one of the things is, and today, I think, although President Trump did give a speech today, and he has been complaining incessantly that the election was stolen from him, actually, he might have some merit that the election quote unfair, but all elections are unfair, you know, both sides engage in some shenanigans, the press is sometimes very inequitable in the way they distribute its criticism and praise, but no one can doubt he brought out most of this stuff himself, and in fact, I think one of the interesting things about the Georgia elections is, I believe that it has, it will free the Republican party from Trump as a kingmaker. He has personally, he is personally responsible for losing these Senate races in the way he comported himself, in my opinion. And so before we talk about what this all means to energy and environment policy, I think it's necessary to go back and look a little bit at history and see what lessons there are in these kinds of things. And you know, in January of 1961, Vice President Richard Nixon had just lost a very tough election to Senator John Kennedy. And there was no doubt that in several states, there was some shenanigans on voter fraud, the kinds of very common things in Chicago, particularly, right? And there was what we had today, a vote counting of the electors, right, which is a very procedural process. Nobody ever. And Nixon was in the well of the Senate, right? And the 12th Amendment of the United States requires a joint session in Congress to open all the certificates and count them. And it's a very, it's a session loaded with a lot of pageantry people bringing, you know, they bringing the ballots and a special box. And and Nixon began the vote count because remember, he's as the vice president, he's president of the Senate, right? And when the tally was complete, Kennedy had received like 303 electoral votes and Nixon 2019 and Harry Bird 15. People forget that. But before joining the joint session, Nixon asked the speaker for permission to make a brief statement. And then he declared actually that his defeat, his opponents victory were an elegant example of the stability of our constitutional system and of the proud tradition of the American people and developing, respecting and honoring the institutions of self-government. Remember, this is one of the most vilified presidents of the Trump in American history, yet he had the good sense, the patriotic duty and the an understanding of his historic position and in, you know, his historic position as a defeated candidate on what needed to be done to demonstrate the transition of power is to take place peacefully. And in fact, Nixon, mostly would quite surprised after they finished this huge camp that goes on forever, the whole chamber actually erupted in a prolonged ovation.  So we can even take lessons from Richard Nixon. That's my, you know, the takeaway from this little story. And why it's important for us to have leaders who understand, yes, we are kind of a tumultuous society, we have a lot of huge political differences. But we have to respect the institutions. That's all we have to hold on to. And so I am personally horrified by the breach of the Capitol. I just think this is just, this is just as bad as the riots. I mean, there's been no smashing the stores and stuff, but reaching the Capitol and engaging in this behavior is outrageous. And I hope eventually, these people will be prosecuted. So far, we're not, we haven't been prosecuting anybody in Washington for various crimes against private property, but maybe now we will do so. But one point to mention, in the case of Nixon, maybe he thought he saw into the future, thought later he would run again. And the grace that he exhibited on that day in 1961 paid him back. It served him well. Because if he had done something less gracious, or worse yet, if he had done something along the lines that Trump has been doing, his chances of running again would have been seriously diminished.  There is a group, a very substantial group of people in American society who feel alienated that the system is not working for them. That the, that the acrimony, that is expressing, I think the level, I've never seen this level of people have said this many times. But actually, I think it's true. I've never seen this degree of political acrimony between the two parties in my, and I've been in Washington since the middle 1970s. And I've never seen anything like this. It's, it's just terrible. And I don't, I don't like a lot of the ideas that people come up on both sides of the aisle. But I'm used, I'm, you know, used to you're debating these issues on their merits. Publishing, publishing documents, talking about them and discussing them and then take taking your wounds and go home quietly. Don't you know, that's just the way it works. You can't always get your way. So do you think that Trump's departure will ameliorate that divisiveness? I think there's no doubt about that. And I also think, I mean, I don't know what some members of the Republican Party are up to. I'm not, I think they're making a huge mistake, but there's going to be a sort of come to Jesus sort of set of meetings in the coming couple of years. And I think there will, in many ways, this event today might purge the party of this kind of control Trump seems to have as a king. I mean, look, he is responsible for the loss in Georgia. He is responsible. He has to, you know, he handled that completely wrong. Well, I mean, he's been special in his own right, but he is also fomented all kinds of unrest and incompetence throughout the government. And I don't know if the ordinary schmo reacts the way I do, but I'll tell you this, you know, there have been times in my life when I have voted for Republican candidates. But I will never I'm telling you now on the record, I will never vote for another Republican candidate, as long as I live after what happened in the Trump period. You don't have to worry in Hawaii, no Republican candidate will ever win. Not with my vote ever. And not any national candidates either. Actually, I do think this is something to think about because I can't actually point to a half dozen dozen things Trump did that were actually very good for many of the people who are viewed who may be detested the most is a justice reform, particularly for black Americans, was an amazing achievement. It was a recognition and the justice reform and the and the and the opportunity for lots of people who were put in jail for long term for drug offenses and stuff. He should be given credit for that. And many black Americans do give him credit for that. Well, I give him credit for reform on the pardon in the pardon department. He has given obvious criminals pardons. And I'd like to suggest that he's going to do more of that before he's finished here. And so to the extent that he has demonstrated incompetence and what do I say complete complete violation of all the norms in so many other areas, I must say, Lou, I don't give him credit for anything. If he did anything that had a beneficial effect, it was a mistake. It was it was accidental. Well, yeah, so I do think there were many things having to do with, you know, the tax reform, the I was a really bad bill. Well, that just depends on your perspective. You have to look at the the economic growth we got out of that. Then there is the support for historically black colleges. The point is that all these presidents, even the worst of them, there are things they do that are positive. There are things they do that the regulatory reform, I would say there's a half dozen areas at least in which he had a positive contribution. But these were overwhelmed in my opinion, by his inability to take advice, his sort of narcissistic behavior, and his complete ignorance and maybe not ignorance, but this credit of all the traditional political norms that makes a complex system like the US work. That's my I'm not a I'm not a I don't suffer from Trump derangement syndrome. I don't I see him as who he is, but I do believe that the damage he has done is substantial. I do believe that it's incalculable, Lou. We're going to be paying a price for decades for the things he has done. He was the worst president this country has ever seen by far by multiples and eons far. And to the extent that anything he ever did work, that was in my view, it was completely accidental or coincidental, certain differences.  I don't know if he's the worst, but he'll be close to it. I think it, but it's almost all style. You know, it's almost all style and abuse of the institutions.  And they were just I was chairing a pretty big session in Germany in outside of Frankfurt and Cronenberg. And then Germans were just beside themselves. And I said, look, America has great institutions. And we have had all kinds of presidents, and we've gotten through it. And I think we're going to see here, well, we'll get through it again. We are going to get through it. It's going to be we're going to have a new president. Bobby won't take the press more than a couple of months before they decide they don't like him. But and we're going to, you know, we're going to have, but I think we're going to move more towards what we call regular order in Washington, which is we have a process, we go through it. We debate it. Things are decided.  It's a whole conversation. But I, but you know, I think that we've lost our way on a number of levels. Maybe just maybe, you know, Biden can do better. But the problem with Congress, the problem with the president is that everybody's interested in in gratifying himself. Trump was only, you know, a symptom of that. And McConnell was only a symptom. We've been doing it for a long time where self interest rules. And I think we've got to go back to Mr. Smith goes to Washington with the sole notion of serving the country and the people. So I would suggest your listeners read Majority Leader McConnell's speech today, which was very much in keeping with the Nixon tradition about this transfer of power, complete repudiation of what Trump was trying to do and adherence to the importance of our democratic institution.  They're politicians. And you can't don't fall in love with them, but they're not as bad as we think they are. They're never as good as people say they are, but they're never really as bad as we think. They they they are balancing a lot of interest from their own constituencies, from their own political bases. And out of that comes a comes a unique sort of American solution to a lot of problems. Well, you know, I haven't seen this speech from McConnell, but I'll assume and I will I'll take a look at it, but I but I will see it. Let me let me add, though, that even assuming it was the most beautiful, you know, patriotic, kindly statement of high principles, I would add that it is much too little and much too late because he has been sucking up to Trump the whole time. He has done horrible, horrendous things for as long as they've been together. And I give him no credit at all for some some, you know, fancy high-minded words at the very end. Much too little, much too late. He's a bum. Yeah, well, I mean, it just depends. You know, I guess I've been in Washington too long, but I have a very complex view of these guys on both sides of the aisle. And I would rarely make that kind of judgment on any of them.   It's not like these guys are father or somebody who should be remotely important in your life. Don't personalize politics. Don't personalize all this stuff. It's too, it'll give you an ulcer.   Well, let me, let me, let me say that my conclusion and the conclusion of some of the others who speak on think tech has been that, you know, sooner or later, one way or the other, the combination of Trump and McConnell will get us. They will come to us. They will visit us. They will make us suffer. Now, and some people have already had that experience. Other people have not. Other people don't like to think about it. But I would like to ask you that question, you know, in three months or six months or nine months into the Biden administration and ask you what you think about the long shadow that they have cast across our future and see if your answer is still the same. Let me say I've had plenty of criticisms of Trump and I will have plenty criticisms of Biden, but I will not have the same personal opinion about it. Okay. I believe that Biden will engage in a lot of wacky ideas, but I believe deep down he is a decent person. He is a decent man. I'm convinced he will promulgate a series of wacky policies. And by the way, I have not seen any president not do that. Okay. We're going to have to continue our discussions on this. I hope you remember this discussion so I can hold you to it. All right. I don't have to worry. Who's ever president, they're going to do stuff that just because. Okay. Let's go to our case in chief, Lou. Our case in chief has to do with the elections in Georgia. As you know, last night in Georgia, and actually I was quite surprised. I realized that they lost one of the Senate seats. As you know, there was a runoff election for both the six-year term and also a replacement term. All the candidates in my view were sort of weak. I don't know this guy Ossoff has never done anything that I can tell his whole career. And Warnock had a kind of a checkered history as a kind of fiery, a firebrand pastor. But I think Purdue and Laughler were not that strong candidates either. In any case, the Democrats won. They now have, we now have a Senate starting on January 20th, which will have 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans. And in that particular system, Vice President, which is Kamala Harris, will be able to break the tie. This means that Charles Chuck Schumer from New York, who's very much concerned about a primary challenging challenge from AOC in this Cortez, Ocasio Cortez, will become the new speaker of the new majority leader of the Senate, excuse me. And all the committee chairs will be chaired by Democrats. That's the Energy Committee and the Environment Committee. Now, the Senate has a lot of peculiar rules. And the question is how will that play out in this new session? And I think we've identified four things that these election means in terms of energy and environment policy. One, there's probably going to be less room between the two parties for energy policy consensus, right? There's going to be less likely they're going to reach. There's less stuff they're going to agree on, right? Then, you know, Democrats, I mean, you know, the Democrats might not forgive or forget objections in the past, but basically, the acrimony and partnership is not and partisanship is just not going away. In fact, I've never seen the acrimony, I've heard. Second, when it comes to green fuels in 2022, the Democrats will probably have an upper hand, right? And if you think about it, McConnell will lose his chair and what we're going to have is a very thin Republican minority and it could serve a check on their green agenda for one place only. Senator Manchin from West Virginia is not going to vote for Waco green ideas. He's from West Virginia. People depend on coal and oil and gas in West Virginia. And so everything that happens is going to require all 51 Democrats to vote for the provision, right? Now, with there is something in U.S. law under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and the Energy Policy and Conservation Act and other provisions held by the president in which he could declare a climate emergency under the National Emergencies Act, right? So Biden could try to supersede a lot of the traditional legislative powers of the Senate and by executive order declared emergencies act. But actually and this, you know, we did this in the Korean War where we intervened in energy production and manufacturing under the Defense Production Act. So I think Biden has this authority. He could he could execute it. With the authority under the what is it emerge a climate emergency act? Well, there's no such thing as a climate emergency act. He had to pull user legislation. The International Emergency Economics Powers Act or the Energy Policy and Conservation Act or, you know, the Outer Continental Shells Act. He could try to halt U.S. oil production in some parts of the country. My personal view is that Biden is too centrist to invoke these kind of far-reaching presidential emergency powers and he will not use this to advance his climate agenda. In addition, if you look at the people he's selected, they're not really bomb-throwing radicals, right? Former EPA Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy who's the sort of domestic climates are. She's a kind of, you know, traditional technician rather than progressive politician like Washington State government and climate hawk Jay Inslee who wanted that job, right? And so I think here we're going to see a lot of movement on the margin. I think we're going to see a push for more electric cars. But Biden's also going to be very sensitive to the issue. Well, if you have a, if you ban electric cars, if you try to do that, what happens to people that can't afford electric cars? Because they're too expensive. They're going to have to address, I don't, it's hard for me to think that Biden will not be sensitive to it. And then the other issue that's very important, I think, is the filibuster, right? Now, for people in the audience that don't know about this, the filibuster is really a parliamentary, a legislative mechanism requires de facto 60 votes, right? Essentially a Senate supermajority for most laws, not all, not all laws, right? It was broken by Harry Reid, the former Democratic majority leader, and further broken by McCombs for the Senate, for the Supreme Court. So, what the interesting thing about this is both Senators Manchin and Bernie Sanders are Senate institutionalists and they want to keep the filibuster. So, I'm not really thinking that they're going to break the filibuster to make the U.S., Puerto Rico, and the Solomon Islands states. I just don't see that happening, probably. And I think, and probably takes a constitutional amendment for the District of Columbia. And the other interesting thing about all this is that someone like Manchin, who's kind of a swing vote, if he said, well, maybe he should just switch to the Republican Party, but I don't think Manchin will do that because he is sitting in the most important catbird seat in the Senate. If they want to do anything, they're going to have to work it out with Joe Manchin. And I don't think he's ever, ever experienced such attention. So, as we go forward for this, and you know, and we're, this acrimony hasn't gone away. There's, you could see lots of things happening. In fact, you might see a national clean energy standard. It's a viable thing. You might see multi-billion-billion-dollar transition accelerating stimulus spending on renewables and electric vehicles. So, we are going to be entering a really interesting period in the energy transition and the U.S. role in that. Well, from what you say, I gather that we can say that 50 Republicans and 50 Democrats with a Democratic, what president of the Senate in the front of Kamala Harris, that should give the Democrats the edge. But you cannot assume that the Democrats will all vote for a given initiative. So, it's not as simple as saying all Democrats plus Kamala Harris will vote for everything that comes up from the Democrats. No, but they definitely do the procedural things, right, the committee chairman and all these things. So, I think, but I couldn't agree with you more. And at one level, maybe they can take this lemon and make lemonade out of it because there are lots of Republicans that are interested in climate, maybe not the same level, the same approach, different tactics, and perhaps they can put some grand bargains together to get on the gradient, so to speak, and make some progress in important areas. So, respecting that Biden has, you know, kind of a mandate because he's promised it to go green at least to some extent. And there are people in, you know, the Congress who want them to do that and, you know, are criticizing if we're not doing it enough in his appointments, recognizing all that, and recognizing the problem we just described with the 50-50 Senate, what's your advice to him about how he should conduct himself in terms of, you know, maintaining the relationships and also effectuating good policy? So, I think there is a consensus in the U.S. and among the, you know, there's a lot of high wind states that are run by Republicans. People forget that, like that. You have no trouble to getting the Midwestern agricultural states to vote for wind subsidies. It's not a problem at all because a lot of wind blows there. So these politicians, all politics are local. They do that. And so they go ahead and these things are very much likely to be opportunities for compromise and consensus. And if I were Biden, I would spend some time thinking about, well, how should I think about America's energy security? The vast swath of oil and gas producers in Pennsylvania, Texas, Oklahoma, West Virginia, New Mexico. What should I do to not be too punitive for them so they can continue to be a major supplier to the world oil market? At the same time, get cooperation from them to accelerate renewable strategies in the power sector and other parts of the U.S. economy. So I suspect Biden is capable of figuring that out, whether he can cobble together a kind of compromise here. It certainly is not outside his DNA. He was in the Senate for 40 years. He's got to understand what needs to be done. Well, would you agree with me that we live in different times now? Those 40 years are interesting but not necessarily dispositive. We live in times when climate change is all the more threatening. We live in times when there's a generation of people coming up now who are insisting on dealing with climate change.  Of course, that's up till now the American way. But if you look at the world in general, if you look at the country in general, we really have to do something about energy so that we don't make climate change worse. Now, I grant you there are reasons to be careful about that, not to undermine our economy. But what about the notion of let's try to protect the country in general from the ravages of climate change? Let's try to protect the world and be a world leader in climate change. Although we don't necessarily have to cut out all the fossil fuels, we should take deliberate steps to reduce them. I mean, wouldn't that work? Well, in principle, it sounds like a reasonable approach. But the devil's in the details. There's a lot of and certainly something we can talk about in the future show. What are the elements of this energy transition that makes sense for us? It's a global problem. What we do is frankly, particularly on the local level, is not going to have a very big effect unless China, India, and the major economies in the Indo-Pacific region decide they want to do it. I mean, just think about it. When you talk to people, they talk about climate. They talk about energy. People forget about steel. You can't make anything without steel. All the wood in your fake background there needs a steel saw or a steel, some device to extrude plastic. Well, it takes a hundred tons of iron ore plus a highly dense energy source to produce a hundred tons of steel. Well, what's going to happen in India and China? They have enormous requirements for steel if they're going to continue to grow. And so, yes, I agree with you. We need to get on the gradient and do this. But we need a system that is less wishful and more thoughtful. Well, the thing is that today and now, these are historic times. Georgia runoff elections, that's historic. We could have been stuck with Mitch McConnell for another four. That would have been something bad. And then, you know, Trump lost the election, although he struggles and strains against that and organizes these skinheads to come and bust up the Capitol. The fact is they're out of the Capitol. They demonstrated who they are and I guess the police and whatever police forces were in Washington have demonstrated they had the ability to get them out of the Capitol. So so it's a historic day, Lou. And I want to ask one last question of you. What is your advice? What is your reaction? Why is it historic? What does it mean? What message do you want to leave with our viewers on this special day? So, I would say one thing to remember about first, your politics is very messy. But remember, we actually do have great institutions in the United States. And people don't like the outcomes of the courts often, but we do have and we have accomplished amazing things. And you can go through life seeing everything. I'm not a Pollyanna person, but the notion that this country and I forget about Trump, the notion that this country, the military, our scientists, produced a vaccine in nine months. I can't think anything more American than that. Right? I can't think of anything more American than that. Take a look at the number of bombers and fighter aircraft we made during World War II. I didn't think we still had that in us. The fact that we did this in nine months is an enormous achievement. And I understand everybody's been kind of coddled and complaining and nothing works. But this is an achievement. And you don't even have to give Trump credit for it. Give all the scientists at the FDA, the NIH, the researchers, the army, the army itself, which is handling the logistics. It's something all Americans should be very proud of. And that's the message for the new year. We are still a country with enormous innovative capacity. And we can take that innovative capacity and use it in a lot of different ways. Thank you, Lou. Lou Puliarisi, a fitting message on the new year. Happy new year to you, Lou. I look forward to more of our discussions going forward in these very interesting and challenging times. Aloha.


n I read with Mr. Duncan's office some years ago were miscited and contradictory if you pull those you'll see that some of which they said oh there'll be no problem was contradictory they're based on the stewart report in britain another long extended example of the soak hell creek water department board and its staff not being honest with the technical and engineering facts and the water resources facts and reality in balancing the concerns of your customers the ratepayers who are your customers who in effect own this place and I think they should be ready to have it merged with a regional water management authority probably the state level in sacramento or the u.s. department of interior and do away with all of this waste all of this mismanagement all of these opportunities for corruption influencing apparently this board in prior years approving the aptos village this board approving other things this board caving into developers this board negligently failing to address the water depletion of the aquifer decades as well as recent years and this board not being honest with recognizing there are adequate surface water resources there are adequate rain resources the locker for alternatives available and instead you want to inflict another hundred million dollars in debt on just fifteen thousand customers when this could all be avoided by the consolidations i've made a reference to boxlone soak hell hills yeah i'm really glad i came tonight as child and family rights advocate i can see that there are real issues with the soak hell creek water district not only the water that will be poisoning children but now with the smart meters i hope you've done your research that's been done here in the united states canada and europe on these devices and what damage they're causing to children i will be bringing this issue up with our national organizations that protect children and families so you're impacting them the families negatively with a raise in race that's a financial ding the children are at risk for being poisoned and now they're at risk from these emfs so this is totally unacceptable to children and families i hope you realize that and i'm going to take it higher because this is is a real issue and as a parent and a grandparent let me tell you we are mad as hell and we're not taking this treatment anymore and when it comes to you talk about parts per million when i look at it as parts of corruption you guys really dense really dense well that's uplifting you know it's um we'll move on to the item it just can i say we disagree on some things i will just make a point we do have an opt-out policy that's been in place for a while and that the research is the actual research on electromagnetic radiation is very clear so i'll we'll move on i made a motion for all three of the motions i don't know if anybody had a chance to second i did okay it's moved and seconded all in favor i i posed okay thank you we will move on to the yes the revision of the collection policy page 260 so item 6.7 on the agenda tonight addresses senate bill 998 which was passed into law in september 2018 and for water agencies our size we will have to comply by february of 2020 which is less than a year from now so um this particular policy is taking what um we currently have on the books in terms of administrative order number two um for delinquent accounts and then another procedure number three for our after hours turn on and combining them into a single collection policy and that policy is drafted to incorporate the mandates of sb 998 i won't list them all for you they're there in the memo for you to review but basically um what that um senate bill is asking us to do is asking us to give an extended time frame for our collection process so rather than being able to shut a customer off for non-payment after 45 days we now have to wait until they're 60 days delinquent which means we're going to be probably closer to the 82 day mark before we can actually shut a service off for non-payment and this means they're likely to have two or three bills on file at that point so it's increasing the district's exposure to um bad debt or uncollectible accounts so when we reviewed this we took a look at that timeline process we realized that there were going to need to be some administrative and billing changes as a result that we would need to make some slight modifications to our the format of our bill and since we are now in the process of configuring our new software to go live in may it just seemed to make sense to go ahead and leverage that and make all of these changes at the same time rather than having to go back and hire consultants to assist us in that process at a later date so we're proposing that these be enacted effective may 1st um they will appear in the new billing system then um we're also actually proposing some changes to the fee structure we used to assess a $25 delinquent fee when we were ready to shut a customer off for non-payment and that fee was to cover the costs that that were incurred by staff to follow that collection process through to that 45 day mark and to send trucks out and staff out to a residents and actually shut off the service under this new policy um that's not going to be happening over that won't be happening until 82 days out so we're proposing a delinquent fee instead at the 21 day mark that would be reduced in scope from $25 to $10 and that $10 is just to cover the cost of the notification process and the collection process and it doesn't involve having to send staff out to their premises anymore so we think we can start with a much lower fee for delinquency the service reestablishment fee that the district has always charged to re establish service after cutoff was $40 SB 998 sets a threshold um a maximum threshold of $50 for low income families and that would be low income families whose household um household for a household of four was 200% of the federal poverty level so rather than exceed that $50 threshold and incur additional administrative costs to try and isolate which families meet the low income threshold it makes sense just to keep that at the $50 threshold and not exceed that so we're proposing we move the service reestablishment fee from the existing $40 to $50 keep it under the threshold but allow for the extended um costs that we're going to face with the extended collection timeline then the other proposal is to look at the service reestablishment fee and that fee is uh after hours fee is $60 so if we reestablish service after 5 p.m on weeknights over the weekends or on holidays we're actually having to pay staff overtime and on call time to come out and turn those services on after hours so we re-evaluated the cost of that there is a threshold that they've set under SB 998 of $150 for low income families and again we're recommending that we keep ourselves below that mark so we don't need to try and track those families in our district um so $100 is sufficient to cover the actual costs we believe at this point of sending somebody out and that collection process to get us there the costs of insurance and fuel and um the cost of the vehicles so we think we can cover that with $100 but we can go anywhere from $100 to $150 um $150 would be more of a deterrent mechanism where $100 is a cost recovery mechanism so we're actually um asking the board to kind of give us your recommendation tonight on where you'd like to set that after hours reestablishment fee and we took a look at how the district would compare to other agencies in the area and we're actually pretty conservative in what we're applying I have a hunch once SB 998 goes into effect these other agencies throughout the district or throughout the county will probably be changing their fee structure as well um but tonight our uh possible our board actions would be to go ahead and approve the um amendments to administrative order number two and procedure number three and combine them under the collection policy and then to um give us some guidance on where you would like that after hours reestablishments charge set and then approve the revised fee schedule that would be revised to include your recommendation on the after hours fee thank you questions from the board very clear no questions very clear um any comments from the public on this item thank you Becky Steinbrenner I want to thank you for doing your best to keep costs down for your customers I I talk with a lot of them at the farmers market and I know a lot of them are already struggling and with the increases that your board has improved has approved tonight it's going to make it very difficult for a lot of them so um some of them um had leaks and didn't know it and had their water turned off not because of delinquent fees but um it's it's a tough thing when those the water gets shut off and I really appreciate you're doing your best to keep the costs down and um appreciate that you're doing cost recovery and not deterrent no no penalizing thank you thank you I personally am fine with cost recovery me too I'll make the motions with the hundred dollars instead of hundred fifty all three all three motions all three motions but number two be a hundred dollars okay and I'll second all in favor hi posed great thank you and so now we will go to item 6.8 which is the not too controversial I don't think um we ground water awareness week and um fix a leak week back to back yes that's just to recognize that in this month we have two nationally recognized weeks the ground water awareness week and the fix a leak week are ones that we've traditionally highlighted in the past uh this year we are going to be broadcasting that through our traditional outreach materials and um what our outreach and communications teams like to do is obviously make this a you know a year round type of um outreach and promotion so we will be tying even more of the um ground water awareness um throughout the year questions any comment from public seeing none um what's your pleasure it's a roll call it's a roll call vote moved second moved by um Carlin Bruce second okay director Lather yes vice president Daniel yes director jaffee yes director christiansen yes and president lehu yes ma'am and now um item 6.9 is it's a little more surplus property yes since you approved some uh equipment and vehicles the surplus last board meeting we identified um three desktop scanners um as surplus candidate so we'd like to add that to the surplus sale that we're planning on having later this month questions no okay public comment no all right I'll move approval I'll second well in favor hi hi is a roll call that's roll call well this one's roll call too sorry my bad director Lather yes vice president Daniels yes director jaffee yes director christiansen yes and president lehu yes um last item on uh the agenda is written communications any comments questions public comment this is this is about the written communication yes I've read mrs mcguire's emails to you uh and I concur entirely in it I won't restate the contents but she's totally correct and she's totally correct and accurate in her criticisms of you which you should correct and direct your staff to fix and mitigate failure to do so is continued disregard of your sworn duties okay so we are going to adjourn to a closed session um three closed sessions there's three different items on the closed session if anybody has comments before that this is the time thank you I do have comment um on item 8.1 your um acquisition lease interest in real property located at 2505 shanticleer avenue this is the site for um the pure water so cal advanced water treatment facility and again I do not think you should proceed with this because uh the whole project is under litigation and there has been um some hesitation by director Lather saying she's not real happy about this I um um it's not in your district and the people you you had on on February I forget the date but you had a room full of people here from live oak who had no idea this was coming to their neighborhood and that's one of the sequel violations that I alleged in the lawsuit that you did not um you changed the scope of the project but you did not expand your um scope of public notification and that's violation so you need to stop with this and you need to um back up and pause and and correct this and I know that you have I've heard that you've have had some meetings with some of the live oak people and I did submit a public records act request for I think you said you had 30 meetings or something and I've not had time to look at that information but um I think you need to pause here and uh not pursue at this time acquisition and lease interest in the property and again urge you if you do to do some due diligence about that well that is visible and historic use and so contamination and you're laughing you're you're smiling while I'm trying to give my comment and that doesn't make me feel like I'm being taken very seriously I'm sorry it's a bit disrespectful thank you well my my last comment has to do with 8.3 regarding the litigation that I have against the district case 19 cv 00181 and I urge you to to do take it seriously I do intend to pursue it with vigor and I was disappointed by the um just by the um ex parte judge cunt judge Gallagher's decision today to deny it but um I I do plan to pursue it with vigor and hope that you will honor the sequel process and what it is supposed to allow the public to do and what you are as a public agency required to do thank you very much okay thank you just to follow and comment to miss Steinburner's comment on point uh I observed the proceeding I read the paperwork and judge Gallagher made a decision that was contrary to the california environmental quality law contrary to brown act and other items contrary to the facts and contract to the contrary to the law in general and extremely suspicious and he should have properly recused himself mr basso should have asked him to do so again it's an example of again the fixing that goes on in this county that favors the rich that favors business that favors the swensons that favors others and disregards the interest of the citizens the school children and the taxpayers and the ratepayers of the soquel creek water board why are you so complicit so often on the people who are stealing from your customers water resources and money we are now going to go into a closed session and I will say for one I am very proud to work with this board of directors who's been working for years to try and do the right thing there are always going to be people that disagree and I'm sorry that you disagree but we are all trying to do our best and I I am going to say good night tonight we're going to close session this meeting is adjourned I haven't had the closed session yet


Okay, well, let's get this started. First of all, I want to thank everyone for joining. My name is George Bailey, and I am, in fact, the executive director of the Digital Supply Chain Institute and also the chief research officer. And I'm gonna say a few things about who we are before we get started. It's always important to know the point of view and the perspective of the people with whom you're dealing. So the Digital Supply Chain Institute, DSCI, is a not-for-profit. And we're focused on developing ways and methods to improve the performance of the supply chain going forward. In other words, what should the supply chain of the future look like? What should it be comprised of and how should we start right now to move forward with it? So that's our mission. We're headquartered in New York City, but in fact, we have a global membership and we have people and meetings all around the world. The last one we had was in Belgrade, in Dallas. We have them literally around the world. We had one in Santiago. So it's a Hong Kong around the world. The focus is always about how can global supply chains get better? And certainly we're gonna have a lot of discussion about that today, particularly because this coronavirus has forced everyone in the world to look very carefully at their supply chains and decide, what is it that we can do now to make things improve? And if you do it the right way, you'll be able to improve, not only survive this crisis we're in the middle of, but also make your supply chain stronger and better and meet the needs of the new customer that's out there across the market. And when we do our work at the Digital Supply Chain Institute, we do it with our membership and there's a number of members here on the call today, this collaboratory, but we also do it with non-members with whom we do work and there's probably almost a thousand companies around the world that we've worked with over the past few years. So it's quite a broad set of companies. We do the work based on interviews and primary research, but we also do it based on actually action research. So we actually do programs for a company that helps them experiment on getting better. So one example that is blockchain. You know, blockchain is a technology that has great promise in the supply chain area, but how do you actually use it? How do you actually make it valuable? So we've done actual real-life pilots with that. We've done those pilots around things like algorithms and data-driven decision-making and all sorts of other things that help make a supply chain perform much better. We're having a series now on this whole issue of the coronavirus and how it impacts supply chains. And I think the one good thing about the coronavirus, if there is any one good thing, is that it has forced the world to really recognize the critical nature of the supply chain business process. And the absolute importance it has to driving everything that happens with your customer and with your company. So people really get how important the supply chain is. So we're doing a series of sessions. This is the second one we've had on this topic of what can you do about your supply chain in the middle of this crisis to make it better short-term and also longer-term. By the way, we always have companies present on this from around the world and we have speakers from around the world as well. So you'll get to see today the perspective of some leading companies in India in central Europe and in the US. So I'm looking forward to introducing to these players. If you are a member company or a select company, you'll be able to participate by phone by actually speaking to the participants in the call and to the panelists. So if you are one of those people, please keep your phone on mute. And when it's time to ask a question, please go ahead and let me know. And of course, we welcome as much participation as we can get. If you're not able to communicate via audio, you will be able to participate with using your chat feature. So the chat feature and the Q&A feature are both available to you, please use them. As we go through the presentation or as we get near the bulk of the discussion so that we can understand what you're feeling and how things are going for you. I wanna make sure that you know that we're not gonna talk about the terrible impact the coronavirus or COVID-19 is having on people and on health. That's not our scope, it's not our expertise. We know a lot about how it impacts the supply chain and company's progress. But obviously the biggest issue is the toll that it's taking on people around the world. And we all hope that that works out just as well as it absolutely can. So our way to add value though is about the supply chain and about how companies can behave now to make things better. All right, so you can see right in front of you now the objectives we have this collaboratory. We're gonna have these, as I mentioned, a series of these over time as we have new topics and new presenters. And you'll always get to see people from around the world speaking about what they're doing and you'll pick up some ideas about what you can do even better in your company. So the three objectives here. Okay, number one is to outline the overall impact of the coronavirus on global supply chains. And a special focus of today is gonna be about the supplier link. As you all know, a supply chain is not just your company but it's the supplier to your company as well as also your customers, of course. But there's tier one, tier two, tier three suppliers. And all of that is obviously essential and important to describe and discuss as we go through this overall collaboratory. So we're gonna outline that. The second thing we're gonna do is we're gonna describe what actions companies are taking to manage their supply chain and their suppliers. And you'll hear some great examples from very important companies around the world. And please be prepared to share yours as well as we go through. And the third objective is to develop some recommendations. Now clearly we're not gonna solve all the world's problems for supply chain today, but we will hopefully come up with some ideas for what you can do to make your supply chain even better than it is today and perform at a higher level so that your customers can be happy and you can meet your financial mission and keep your suppliers, keep your supply chain intact as we go through this. So those are the three objectives, outline, describe, and develop. Let's go to the next slide. So here's the agenda we have. So I'm gonna be done in just a couple of minutes here. I'm gonna describe some of our observations that we have as we work with companies around the world. I'm gonna turn it over next to two of our partners from Bain who are outstanding consulting firm are very involved with supply chain and operations around the world and very engaged with helping companies deal with the impact of the coronavirus. So they'll have a 10 minute slot to talk about that a very high level discussion, but very insightful. We'll then turn it over to Saga and if you haven't heard of Saga, Saga is a leading IT firm in Central Europe actually headquartered in Belgrade. So you'll hear from the CEO of that company telling you about what they're doing and some of the exciting work they've done from a technology perspective as well. After Saga, we have lucky to have Juniper Networks from India and Harsh is gonna give you a great description of what's happening with Juniper Networks, how they're coping with the coronavirus and what's happening in India and how they are looking forward. Now we've tried to leave as much time as possible at the end of the meeting for a discussion in Q&A. So about 940, we're gonna start the Q&A process. We'll have your questions, we'll answer them, we'll discuss them. I'll come back and wrap up at 955 AM. This is all New York time of course and we'll end our discussion at 10 AM. So we'll respect your time and make sure we stay right on track. So that's our plan for today. Next slide please. Quick, quick briefing on what some companies are doing. You know that companies are really working their supplier networks. I'm sure all of you are doing the same thing. First of all, they're trying to decide what is the new demand plan and what is needed and when. And there's a lot of uncertainty about this from any companies and people aren't sure when will the impact of COVID-19 diminish? When will we have a market where people are out and buying things that we should be developing for? Of course there's a lead time around this so you have to start your supply chain in action full time, getting things done so it'll be ready for that chance. How do I make sure I don't pay for things I don't need and do I need to change my supplier contracts? A lot of issues companies are dealing with around this and mostly making sure that their contracts that they have are honored by their suppliers to the extent that they can be. So a lot of discussion about that going on. How do I make sure that I'm not out of stock or laid on things that I can sell? It's many companies have a problem where things that customers wanna buy are not available because their supply chain isn't able to produce them because the tier one supplier or the tier two supplier didn't have to stock and couldn't find it to the next stage in the chain. How do I make sure that suppliers prioritize my company? Believe me, this is happening right now. Our members and companies around the world are talking to their suppliers and trying to make sure that their company needs are met that what they have is available for their customers so they can make their customers happy. In addition, there's some prior tradition of customer segments, you know, if we have a shortage, if there's a million other things that we can produce we wanna make sure we give them to the most important customers that we have. So that's going on right now. How do I decide how to price this? How do I avoid paying more even though they're short supply? How can I in fact pay less in certain instances? Then in general, how should I restructure my supplier network? So those are all happening right now real time as we talk through a variety of things including war rooms that are being set up. Next slide please. And there's supplier issues abound. I don't wanna take any more time about this since you know all about this as well as I do probably better than I do around all the companies around the world what you're doing to work their supply chains to make things work better and to have the supplier network actually deliver things that their customers can use. Next slide please. So what are the actions that companies are taking in the short term? Companies are doing an inventory of their tier one, tier two and tier three suppliers, their location, their work process, what threats they have and how they look in terms of ability to supply what's needed. The second thing to do is you're doing a big assessment process of the supply chain and looking at past and current requirements. You know, what we saw last year is not a great guide for what we're gonna sell this year. What we produced last year is not what we're gonna produce this year. So let's have an assessment of what really needs to happen. Third, there's a discussion going on about with all those suppliers and negotiating favorable terms despite the fact that the suppliers in many cases have conflicting demands for what they're doing. The fourth thing is a shift around how you actually modify your logistics and delivery to accommodate all the travel constraints that exist around the world. How do you make things get to the customer or get your distributor? We're talking B or B to C as we go through this process. Next commit, we're gonna make sure we modify our supplier scoreboard, make sure we understand what suppliers we wanna continue using and work forward. And then finally measure, we are big, big believers in measurement. A lot of new measures should be developed for suppliers and particularly in this time of crisis. Those are things that are happening right now and my final slide is the next slide, which is all about what happens in the midterm. So as we're doing that, we've got to really assess our current supplier network, decide what companies we're gonna work with in the future and decide what we're gonna do in-house and also outsource. We secondly wanna make sure we encourage suppliers to use more automated production facilities. You know, driven by technology like AI and 3D, a big push will happen on this as we go through the midterm. Decide how to close the customer you can get. So a lot of people are now saying, look, we need to take our supply chain and move it closer to the customer in some elements. That's very, very possible. And finally, create a, craft a long-term plan for your supplier base that creates lower costs, higher value and minimizes the risk you face. Because for sure, this is not gonna be the only major dilemma that we face with the next few years. So these things are happening now. So this, I've used up my time and I'm gonna turn it out to my partners from Bain. So Bain, will you please take over and I'll put myself on mute. Great. Hi, everyone. This is David Shannon, a partner at Bain & Company. I work in our office in Silicon Valley and I lead our procurement practice in the Americas. And I wanna talk to you a little bit today about what we're doing with some of our clients and what we're seeing our clients do as it relates to securing their supply base and protecting their operations in this crisis. And so if you flip to the next page. So we're working on a whole range of aspects of COVID response with clients and stabilizing operations is one big pillar of what our clients are focused on today. And this is our operations playbook for COVID response. And you can see there's a number of elements to this playbook. Actually the middle of the page here is really focused on what we call our act now playbook. So these are very real issues right now that require a whole set of actions across the disrupted supply base operations and demand uncertainty. And at the bottom is what we call our plan now playbook which is thinking ahead to the recovery and the post COVID world. And what are the things you can start planning now to set yourself up for success in when this crisis, when we come out of this crisis. And so today I'm gonna talk a little bit about focus on the supply base disruption but I just wanted to kind of share that broader landscape of the playbook as all of these aspects are things that companies are thinking about and are very real. So if you flip to the next page, there's a set of issues that and themes that are really important in this time of crisis as it relates to your supply base. The first of those is has to do with having very clearly defined priorities. As you all are facing at the moment, there is an incredibly high amount of activity and work that needs to happen in terms of supply-based disruptions and securing supply. Literally every one of your suppliers we need to think about and evaluate. And not just your suppliers but also the suppliers to your suppliers and upstream all the upstream source of supply and of course all the downstream complexity as well. And so this is also a time where your people are less productive working from home. Many cases have had to take on second jobs as caregivers to their children. And so we're facing a period of time where we've got an incredible amount of work that needs to happen and much less productive workforce that needs to do it. And so having a very clearly defined set of priorities is really important and racking and stacking what's the most critical thing that I need to be working on now. Secondly, visibility is incredibly important. You need to know not only where are critical materials in your supply chain but you also need to know where from a market intelligence standpoint which are the markets and suppliers that are most at risk. Where are their suppliers at risk? Where are the critical materials that are at risk?  We need that at our fingertips now. And so the data availability and the systems are really important. Now companies that have invested in building out their digital procurement systems in the past few years have benefited a lot from that and other companies that are maybe a bit behind from a digitization standpoint are suffering a bit more. And so these are really critical things at the moment given what's happening real time. The fourth point on here is about agility and having a real ability to redirect operations as needed. So companies that have done a nice job of multi-sourcing are in a much better position than companies that are single sourced on many critical components. Communication at the moment is at a premium given how much complexity there is and how all these different puzzle pieces fit together and how fast things are changing day by day. It's really important that you've got good lines of communication. So that changes on one aspect of the supply chain are going to, you're able to coordinate and communicate with other stakeholders. And then the last point on here is that it's very hard to manage in a crisis while also running the aspects of your core business. And so our recommendation to our clients is always that you dedicate folks fully to, certain individuals fully to crisis management and don't ask people to both deal with the emerging crisis day to day and also try to run their day jobs. And a corollary to this is we also think it's important to split resources, folks that are dealing with immediate or act now crises from folks that are thinking about planning for the future because the fire drills that folks have to deal with now are always going to take precedent and you'll never end up having time to plan for the future. So we suggest having two sets of resources that are focused on act now versus plan now. The next page, I just wanted to share kind of our three go dos here that we are advising clients on. First is you need to have a clear understanding of where you're exposed in your supply base. And so this is looking at your suppliers, where are your most critical components, where are the areas where you're either single sourced or where your supply base is in geographies that are heavily affected by the COVID situation. You also need to understand where are there inputs, raw inputs into your supply base that are heavily affected and build out that fact base as soon as possible because that's gonna be a critical component for you to be able to make quick decision and quick action. In the middle, of course, analyze that and prioritize. And so if you don't already have it put in place a reporting and tracking mechanism this could be as simple as an Excel spreadsheet. But you really need to have given how many initiatives, hundreds of initiatives are happening at the moment and how quickly things are changing day by day. You need to have that visibility into what's happening. Many companies are doing daily huddles or Monday, Wednesday, Friday, get together. You're gonna need visibility into what's happening and rapid collaboration. And then of course, do a prioritization. You wanna make sure you're focused on the most important things and not wasting your precious resource on activity that is less important at the moment. And then on the right hand side, of course, there's a set of actions and activities that need to happen. What can you do to actually change things and make sure that you're securing supply and getting it to the right place at the right time. And so that's where the focus is really gonna be. It's getting on the phone, talking to suppliers, talking to customers, making sure that you're having critical materials in the right place at the right time. So I know that was quick, just a bit of an overview of the playbook that we're working with our clients on. And then I'm gonna have my colleague, Ryan Fisher, talk quickly about some of the resources that we've made available to our clients and all of you on what's happening in the COVID crisis. Thanks, David. Ryan Fisher here, partner with Bain. As I mentioned, we've put together a virtual war room as you all know things are changing quickly, happening quickly around the world and with COVID-19 with impacts and businesses. And we're putting a lot of thoughts and insight together of how to react and what to do. I wanna provide those resources to you and references as you go about your business. And so there's a few pieces that are available within this war room. The first is the overall economic impact and implications of COVID-19 across different geographies and across the business. We're tracking that and putting a scale together here in the index of how this moves around in different places of the world and what it means to businesses in that area. The second is in the middle there, which is war rooms. As we're all setting up war rooms in overall war rooms, supply chain war rooms of how, what are the right ways to think about that? And what are the important pieces to have in a war room? What are the plans? What are the actions? What are the important pieces of supply chain and supply base that David just went through? How you actually need to think about that? What's the content there of, that I really think can help facilitate some of your war room actions? And then thirdly is, we've been putting a lot of thought together on both the industry and function specific playbooks. So you're looking across consumer and retail, looking across chemicals, looking across mobile phone, looking across different sectors and those supply chains and how you should think about addressing those specifically and what are some of the implications and playbooks to be able to address some of the risks that are happening there. So please reference these materials. Hope they're very helpful to you. It's at our websites. It's bain.com slash insights slash topics slash coronavirus. Thank you, George, back to you. Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Ryan. Thank you, David. Great, great discussion. And I think this is a resource that the company's on this call ought to take advantage of. Go look at the website and get some tips on how you can improve your performance. And now we're gonna quickly roll to the CEO of SAG. He'll tell you a little bit about his company and about what they're doing. So please take over. I hope you all hear me. Yes, you agree. So thank you. Hi from Belgrade. And thanks for opportunity to present some of the stuff that we are doing. Let us just start by putting us where we are in supply chain. We are generally the guy next to the customer. So towards the end of it, cause we tend to integrate a lot of IT equipment and add some of our own solutions. And my idea today is to present to you some of the, let's say challenges, but also solutions that we presented to our customers and how we behave. Just for the reference is about a month since in Serbia or this part of the Europe, we had first cases and it's about third week of, let's say a high level of restrictions in terms of movement of the people as a response of the government toward the control of this whole situation. So this is putting a lot of strain on everyone from society, from social point of view, but of course from economical point of view. So if you join me the first slide. So this is Belgrade just for you. And then, so next slide please. So we had to start from very beginning thinking about our own people, but also thinking about our customers. Because as you can imagine, as someone who has to go to the customer side, who has to still move, even though a lot of people are trying to be as socially distant as possible, it's a challenge. So we had written a whole playbook about behavior or our own employees, but also behavior of the management that is setting up the customer goals. And it goes into great details as you'll see some of the examples here. And we try to make it in a way that both our customer and our employees feel comfortable about going around and doing what we need to do. And as you can imagine, there was a huge shift from working in the offices to home office. And for some of the industries, this proves to be a great challenge. And for us as a supplier, it was a matter of how we decide how quickly react and how we give priorities. In the end, what we decide as a management in the company is that as long we can help any customer at any point with any request, we're gonna go along and redo it. I know it doesn't sound very economical, but this situation is where we are trying to help any way possible all our customers. So if you could show me the next slide, I took an example of the financial industry. And you can imagine that for years, we've been building together with the customers from the financial industry, especially banks, these fortresses in terms of security, all their online presence of all the tools that they're exposing there to be very sturdy and very secure. And usually they were very centralized to their own buildings, to their own data centers. Suddenly, all these guys came to us in like Thursday evening, Friday morning, saying next Monday, we need to start working from home. All our guys need to be out of our buildings and we need to keep the level of services. So from migrating the call centers to extending VPN connections to people's homes, to completely setting up a new pieces from home to make sure that they are secure to get in touch with the core banking systems and very sensitive banking installations we had to do. And pretty much it was for us, work that was really almost not contracted because at this point, we just said, okay, these are the guys we've been working for years and it's not a time to go into contracts or pricing, but let's get these guys rolling and then we'll see what comes next. And this is just the example of what we did and in one industry, but with the prevailing thought was whoever we cooperated for years, we get these guys set and going and we don't ask for anything additional or make any request in terms of procurement or anything similar because the logic was we need to keep everybody afloat and get things going. And then the next slide is the example that we are hoped to get actually today going as you can imagine when you start closing the society and the number of hours that people can move gets restricted, government needs some ways of issuing permits to businesses to move around. And initially they tried something very crude where people were applying to responsible ministries for permits for their employees to move around, turns out very inefficient. The request were not processed, especially not in time in a manner. So we went along and pretty much donated application for approval of permits during a curfew. And it's kind of funny because we talk a lot about digital transformation, but Corona is kind of earning as a killer app for a lot of government businesses. We are actually a lot of stuff that was built or that was in preparation now as you're rushing toward the businesses in their digital form because no other form is available. And the last point I wanna tell you about if you'll show me the next slide is actually something that we did about a week ago and we are quite proud of this. So as this thing erupted, people had really a lot of questions and government was trying to set up the call centers to respond to all the questions, but it was very difficult to keep these lines open and to kind of come to the society to give the available answers from health questions to questions about government measures. And since we are the company that for the last two years did a lot of work in the area of artificial intelligence and making of the chatbots, we figured out we are going to donate a chatbot to a government. And together with the office of a prime minister in four days, which we thought was impossible just a month ago, we created about 80 scenarios that cover various topics from some instructions of how daily life functions to instruction to certain groups such as pregnant women, to instructions how to wash your hands. Very useful tips that in general, people would go around looking to ask. We did it in a form of a chatbot where you can type your question and then you get the answer. And we're really proud to say that in a country of barely seven million people, we have about 200,000 followers, but what is even more important, we have about three million exchanges. And the way we perceive this is these three million exchanges would be some millions of calls to call centers that would not be able to handle this and level of anxiety would go up. So this is something that it's functioning now in Serbia for about a week and it's showing a great level of usage. Viber is a messaging platform that dominantly is used in Serbia so we cooperate with these guys. And this is actually being quite used on a daily level and we are very proud of it. Besides the Prime Minister office, the Institute of Health started giving us scenarios to add. So now it's getting even smarter. And this is being kind of positive thing in this whole turmoil of what's been going on and something to make us feel good. So it's something that I wanted to share on this call. So this is, let's say a few words, chip in from our side, how we treat the situation in a supply chain, but also what we did for society in a sense of how we use our knowledge to implement some of the solutions that would be useful for this moment and hopefully relevant to the customer but also to the wider elements of society. So that's much for me. Great, hey, thank you very much. That was a great discussion. And I wanna say something about Serbia. We gave our first meeting there a little while ago in Belgrade and it was fabulous. And I left feeling so impressed with the country and especially the level of digital literacy. And one thing I'll share with the group is that in fourth grade, all kids in Serbia learned to use Python, the analytics software. So they really are building a very digitally literate community. And I think the work you did in response to the coronavirus is really, really interesting and helpful. And I should mention this, many of you on the call have said a chat to me asking if there's going to be, this is gonna be available after our session. And it will be. We'll send you a copy and links that you can always show this presentation, these discussions to other people in your organization. But right now I wanna shift gears and move right away to India. India is an amazing country with incredible importance in the supply chain. And I'd like to talk about, I'd like to have the Juniper Networks director please speak up on what's happening there and everybody knows Juniper Networks. I think a worldwide firm, but please go ahead and tell us about what you're doing in India. Yeah, sure. Thanks, George. Am I audible? Just wanted to do a check and then maybe I can start. Yes, you sound great. You sound clear. Perfect, right. So just for everybody's benefit, Juniper Networks, we are a network gear manufacturing company. And it's a global company, headquartered in the U.S. anyway. And I am part of the India team and I manage the partner business here. And by the way, 100% of our business happens to partners. So virtually I manage all of the business. What is happening? So I'm going to be sharing with you more on what's happening and how we are responding to customers more from the supply chain and support kind of initiatives. As I shared earlier, Juniper, since we manufacture networking gear and then there are a lot of our partners who help them put together and provide the solutions to our various customers. Our customers, by the way, are all the B2B customers. We don't have anything where we sell to end customers as such directly. So it is all about the telcos, the internet service providers, various government organizations, government projects, lot of enterprise customers, and so on, so forth. So what we have done when the corona crisis strike is that we decided that it is time to go and support our customers and increase the intimacy from both ways. One is we want to see our customers succeed and that's the only way we can also succeed. But we thought this is going to help us in the long run because we have the sales angle also all the time whenever we talk to the customers. So first thing what we did in response is that all of our healthcare customers, irrespective of whether they have their support contracts on or not on, because sometimes customers don't renew their contracts. So we have open support to all the customers, all our healthcare customers, irrespective of their contracts or not. And then what we have done is that we worked with the governments here because the work from home situation has put unprecedented traffic on the network and all our customers in the telco and the IS internet service provider space, they have seen unprecedented traffic to an extent that there was a risk of something failing down and that could have really created more havoc in the system. So what we have done is we ensured that we build redundancy in all the networks. We provide 24 part support to all of them in case of any kind of failure or so. And at the same time, there was a support services on for them to guide through how to change traffic from one network to other and so on so forth. For example, while the work from home network traffic has increased, but maybe somewhere else, let's say the universities are closed because India is facing a lockdown, complete lockdown for 21 days. Some states are facing it for even more than that, 25 to 27 days. So all the offices, the government offices or universities, schools, everything is closed. So there was some bandwidth which was freed on that end. So we helped our customers to kind of navigate that to ensure that their networks are running. We believe that big crisis are big opportunities as well. And this is a time, supply chain or timely supply is actually going to become a differentiator also for forever when you try and go and sell to the customer. And it's a good thing, more kind of supporting the society. That is also one of the thoughts behind why juniper is doing the way we are doing. So that's largely about what we are trying to do here. We are working with the governments to get permits in terms of some of these are to be classified as the essential supplies. Because as you know, in curfews and lockdowns, what is allowed is only the essential supply. So we have been able to convince the government and as I speak with you a couple of days back, we could secure some of those permits by which our shipments are getting cleared. And as we speak, they are actually doing to all the mission critical customer locations at this point of time. So I think those are few things that we are doing. And back to you, George. I want to share with you more live examples of how we are trying to get to these things. That's great. Thank you. I mean, Juniper Networks is a great company and the work you're doing in India is amazing and especially important to understand how it's impacting the overall network. And so very good, very interesting. And we have another first leader from India as well on the phone. DS, do you have a few words you could share with us about what's happening in that part of the world? Yeah, George. Thank you so much for inviting us on this call. Like Harsh was explaining, it's very unprecedented that we are facing huge crisis in sort of supply chain while the government is very focused on essentials, businesses are down, stocks are down, and we really don't know what would happen in terms of the next few days.  And so the only way in which we can communicate, we can do is the digital process. And so a lot of effort is being done by companies like Juniper Networks to strengthen the digital networks. And we must wait and see. Yes, there are some short-term and mid-term actions taken by the organizations, also government, to ease the situation. But, you know, India is a huge country and, you know, we have a lot of interest, we have a lot of states, you know, 29 states in the country. And then, you know, we have a huge challenge we see, especially in moving things. And some of people whom I talked to, they share that their depots are closed and they're not able to transport, you know, these are the infrastructure challenges are there. So supply chain to that extent is really in a very, very difficult position. Like Hersh was saying, the organizations are coming forward to overcome situations at the same time, trying to help the people in the government. You know, people and the people's safety and health seems to be the most priority item as of now. Well, yeah, thank you for that. That's everyone's watching what India does and sure that you'll deal well with the coronavirus crisis. Well, that's super. So all of our panelists have completed their discussion. As I mentioned before, you will get a copy of their remarks. And there's going to be a live video available as well for this session should you want to share it. But I'd like now to have some discussion going. And I realize there's one, there's several parts of the world that have not yet spoken one area we've done some work in is, is Latin America. And I think Andres, you're on the phone if I'm right. Could you, could you comment on what you see happening and what you recommend from, from your perspective? You're based in Chile and in Santiago. So any, any comments from you or your team? What we are doing is to try to mix, to try to hyper segment and the country. That means that we are treating every region as an independent country because as what is happening in Chile at least the countries is the level of contagious people or the city are different because of that we are the authorities are trying to make different policies around the cities. That means that we are management, the supply change between that policies on that. The other thing is we are trying to contain the most important industries in the country to maintain the GDP on that. Secondly, the entire country is moved completely to digitalize and every aspect about everything we need about science, about documents, about logistic, about everything. And the third thing is we are using a lot of AI to try to make the forecast what is going to happen because we are seeing that for humans this kind of scenarios is so difficult to analyze because you need to put around 500 different outside if you want indicators from the global economy. That means the AI is trying to make more accuracy forecast and recovery all the different industries better because they are committing less mistake than humans on that forecast. That helps George or not? Yes, that's great. Thank you. I understand the challenges are really worldwide and Latin America of course has to deal with the coronavirus as well. And I'd like to now find out about other questions that people have from for the panelists or for the digital supply chain institute. So please type in your questions or go ahead and ask your questions live if you have that capability. Who else has some questions they want to ask right now? All right. Well, you're thinking of that. I'm going to call on one of the people here. I know it's one of our members, a great company named Janice. Brian, what's going on that you see as you work with companies across the world? George, we're seeing the same things that have been discussed here. There's some disruption and now ramp up coming out of Asia. The United States is now in lockdown for the most part from coast to coast. So there's a lot of restriction around movement. And even what businesses are allowed to be open. So if you're not on the essential list, it's really tough to explain, you know, depending on where you're operating. One of the questions that I had for maybe the panelists here is really around some of the funding opportunities that are out there to help with the disruption. So at least in the United States, there's a lot of stimulus discussion. It's a little nebulous for me and other businesses that are out there being affected. And does anybody have any guidance around how to access some of those resources or any advice as to what's available to supply chains that are in fact being affected by the current circumstance? So I'm not sure which one of our panelists can answer that, but Brian's asking a good question. And I'm wondering, I don't know, one of our partners from Bain perhaps hasn't answered that or I'm not sure who could provide some guidance for Brian on that good question. Yes. Let me, this is David Shannon from Bain. Let me just say a couple of thoughts. I don't have a perfect answer to that specific question. But one thing that our clients, a lot of our clients are facing is cash and liquidity issues at the moment, right? They have big fixed cost bases. And yet their demand is dropping massively. And clearly, their cash positions, many companies cash positions are not set up for what we're dealing with now. And so one thing that a lot of companies are really starting to do is have a dedicated stream on cash management. And think about what can they be doing at the moment to preserve cash to keep them afloat over the next coming months as this all plays out? And so, you know, really looking at every dollar of spend that happens today and figuring out, okay, where can we stop cash from going out the door? Where can we freeze activity that is non-critical and non-essential? How can we work with our supply base to extend payment terms where needed and push out investments? Where, you know, a lot of IT investments that had been planned are getting pushed out. And so that typically requires a pretty extensive exercise and a dedicated team to focus on that. But it's really critical at the moment as companies are trying to stay afloat. Yeah, I agree. You're totally right about that. I mean, I do think there's, that Brian's asking a different kind of, different question about how to get, how to get access to some of the other assistance. So we, we'll take that offline and we'll, we'll do a little bit of work research on that and get back to the, at least in the U.S. with people, people can, can do. Let's get some more, more questions here. I think Afimi, you raised your hand. Do you have a question you want to ask the panelists or make a comment? Yes, maybe just a question to the panelists. Thanks, George. I live in a small country called Brunei in Southeast Asia. And I was just wondering, and I sent this question, this question actually to George in the, in the whole overview of where corporations are looking at their future realignment on supply chains. Where is the thinking in trying to bring in the SME into sort of like a cluster base to support more larger companies, especially from a geographical perspective, because you already have the playbooks for it in terms of how to actually set up your supply chain. But is that something that you would consider retooling, re-skilling, or, you know, even franchising the way the operations would work to get them closer to your customer, especially on a, on a future thinking level. It's just a, it's just an open question. I don't expect any answers, but just planting a seed of thought there. Thanks, George. Yeah, thank you. That is a good question. I think one theme that probably all the panelists would agree with me on is that as people look at their supply chain now with laser focus on how we're going to make this work right now, they're also thinking about, and let's think about where we're going to go from here. What, what, what's going to be the groundwork that we lay for a more agile, flexible, close to the customer supply chain. And it's going to have a very different architecture than what we have today. So in some ways it's good that we're having this discussion now. I wish it weren't about under COVID, but it's great that we're having this discussion because it's a, the way people change your supply chain going forward will be, will be quite different. I have a question from Jim Newkirk, who's from Colgate Palmolive, a great member company of ours. It's about what are people seeing as far as bonuses or hazard pay for employees? They're still working or, or, or 3PL. So anybody have observations about that? What happens with bonuses and hazard pay for, for employees? Any observations about that? I personally haven't, haven't seen, I haven't, I don't have a lot of experience to answer that question. Who else has some experience that would be relevant to Jim's question? If, if nobody has any guidance for Jim, we'll put that on the list. We'll go do some research about that. I don't, I don't have a quick answer. If I, if I may jump in, Nevesh from, from Saga. We were, we were thinking about that a lot because we, as I said, we have people who have to be out there and kind of take additional risk compared to the guys we can stash at home. And we did made some financial provision for these guys because in the end they, we are all aware that the reality is that they may, may end up on sick leave. So, you know, we need to give them some compensation now as opposed to later. So we were thinking of that and the guys who are moving around and taking additional risk, we are giving some, you first time I heard of it, but it's good name hazard bonus. So in that sense, I think that that needs to be considered and that kind of gives additional, let's say courage to the people. Yeah, I think, I think you're right. I think that for sure there are frontline people who are do face more hazards because they're the frontline and they're going to potentially receive some hazard pay or some other way of, of compensating them for their, for their work, but we'll have to do some more research on that. And Thomas Gendon has a question about what happens to structural changes with the supply chain. I think I probably all the panelists would agree with me on this, that there will be some real changes to how the supply chains are set up around the world, not just because, oh, we want to have less things in China, but because we want to have agile supply chain with things that can migrate from, from place to place as, as the supply and demand changes.  But you know, one of the things that we really see happening is this new data model that people are creating that allows them to better forecast customer needs and shape them and, and then using algorithms to sort of hard wire that information into decision making. So if you have a new data model, for example, you have data from social media, you have data from sensors, you have data from IOT devices, and it's across industries. This is BWN, B2C. If you have that data and you have an algorithm that allows you to say, okay, if these things happen, here's the move we need to make in our supply chain. You've got a much more robust, much more active digital supply chain. And that's, that's going to be something that happens with leading companies really around the world for sure. We have time for one more question. Who else has a question that they'd like to, they'd like to ask? George, wait, no question. Ryan Fisher here with Bain. I just comment on, on that last question, but I completely agree with you where, you know, the question was around, how do you think about supply change changing after this? Now, supply change will change, but it's not necessarily the underlying, you know, value change or supply chain. I think what changes is, how do you rapidly react to these extreme demand changes? And you're exactly right. And it's, it's how you see the data and have a new data model to identify those early demand indicators that allow you to have a structure to completely change your replenishment algorithms or how you, how you, you use your supply base and move across your supply base. But that's what's going to be the focus coming out of this is how do you, how do you quickly react? It's not necessarily fundamentally changes the supply chain. It's about the rapid reaction. Yep. I agree. I agree. By the way, there's another question that anonymous attendee asked. It says, do you advise companies to repair top management position and succession plan and large companies? And you know, the answer is, of course, you're right, they should, we should, there should be succession plans for all these positions. And one thing I will, I will add and I, this is my prediction. My prediction is that more and more CEO positions and major companies around the world will be staffed with people who have supply chain experience because the supply chain now is the core business process. Without the supply chain, there's nothing to sell. So you have to be to be or be asked to work. And the operational awareness that it takes to run one well is really, really important. Plus, as, as, as, you know, as an institute, we've done a lot of work on this, turning your supply chain into something that not only reduces costs and not only provides continuity, but also generates revenue. That's a really powerful idea that some companies are really working hard on. How can you make your supply chain so attractive that you can do what we call a front side flip, you can actually take the supply chain, have it face the customer and create more demand. That's, that's, that is a model that companies are going towards and will continue to go to us as we get through the coronavirus crisis. So the questions and answers have been great. I'm going to ask my panelists if they have anything to say, and then if, if not, I'm going to close the call. So panelists from, from, from Saga or from, from Juniper networks or from being any, anybody, any closing comments or, or should we wrap the call up? Yeah. Hi, this is Harish. My only closing comment and I completely agree with you. And you know, I also mentioned it is that supply chain will be a differentiator. Probably never was so much earlier, but I think this crisis will make it to the forefront and it will be a differentiator for companies. Yeah, I agree completely. So what we're going to do now is several things. One is we're going to host another one of these meetings in a couple of weeks and it'll be again about the supply chain. It'll talk about, I don't have a worldview. So it won't just be us or just Europe or just Asia will have a worldview. And it will also focus on a specific topic. We know this one was more on suppliers, but of course the whole story, but, but also suppliers. The next one will have a specific focus, but, but also give you some context. So we'll do another one of these. You'll all be invited again. Thank you for participating. We'll provide you with the ability to get a copy of this material and access the information as well as a copy of the actual, the videotape of what, what happened today. But I'd like to thank all of my panelists for participating. You all did a fabulous job, great insights and great knowledge that you shared with everyone. Everybody here, I'm sure really appreciates it. I know that I do. And I also thank you to all the attendees who joined the call, ask good questions. We'll answer your questions when we send out an email to wrap up the meeting, but we want to respect your time. It's at the top of the hour. So thank you very much for joining us. We'll send you the information and we'll look forward to talking to you again in a couple of weeks. So thanks very much and cheers for now. Thank you so much. I know.