Hey guys, welcome to Higan Iruthil. We have an unexpected, an unexpected play banner. Okay, let me address something here. There are a lot of speculation why they're pushing out a lot of banners now. One of them is basically saying that Hongkai Star is coming in. The devs are shoving out a lot of banners to, you know, to get more sales. The other one is actually, sorry. The other one, I think the true reason why they're putting out these banners is these banners already went out in soft launch. So let's say for example, like I do have a Vanguard server account. We already had this a couple of weeks ago. So that is why I think they are putting this out so that both the soft launch server Vanguard and the two other servers, which is North America and Asia Pacific, would eventually go together in terms of this is basically a catch-up banner at this point. So that is what I, you know, that is what I think that they are shoving it out. They are just playing catch-up with the already banners released in the soft launch server, which is Vanguard. So that is my theory. You guys can, you know, couldn't set out all of your theories on why they are sending a lot of banners away, but the important thing now is should you summon for these banners? Are they really good? Okay, so let's go to the pool info. So you have here a rate up for red and for gray big wolf. Okay, so I'm gonna, I'm just gonna be basing this in the file that I gave you, the play guide. This one, gray big wolf, the one that could benefit from this is a ranger, okay? The reason why is it's increased 80 percent and increased attack speed by 5 percent per second's max 10 stacks, losing all stacks upon moving. Usually rangers don't move. They rarely move. They rarely, rarely, rarely move. They have such a long range, especially for Rita, that they don't need to move. So this one I think is good for Rita. Okay, and rangers in particular. Fen could be one target for this one. So take note of that. The other one is critical rate increased by 15 percent. 15 percent take note is not that much. The three-piece set activation is every one meter distance increased with the opponent will increase the damage dealt by 5 percent up to 30 percent. Also again, a nice, a nice set to have for Rita. Another ranger. So I'll leave you to it. Both of the plays that they are, that is in one banner, are ideally for Rita or for rangers. So I'm just gonna put it out there. I'm not saying that I'm I'm not saying that I'm recommending or not recommending it. More on choose wisely. If you need these in your rangers, be my guest. You can actually go for it. Okay, so but this one, this particular one, Rhett, is not particular to rangers. This is also good with casters who need a critical rate increase. Okay, so that is it. Both of them are not really your top tier top tier plays, but both of them are very serviceable.  Ranger for this one, for Big Ray Wolf. This one is going to be a ranger caster that needs a crit rate, plus for every one meter distance increase with the opponent will increase damage dealt by 5% up to 30%, which is not really bad, which is good. So Rhett, I have a selector for Rhett. This is actually, I might get this one. I'm still thinking about it. Not really, not really final, but I'm still thinking about getting Rhett here. I do have a selector. I forgot where I got it. So let's go to my this one. This is a selector for Rhett. You can choose either of the three. It can only get one. So after I get two copies, probably get the last one here. So that is it. Those are my my, you know, my thoughts on this banner. Please put down, if you are willing to pull for this banner, if you need the gear or the play for your ranger or for your caster, please put them down in the comments. Let me hear about your choice. So thank you very much guys. I just, I just, I thought that you need to know my opinion on this one. Thank you very much. Take care. Stay safe. This is The Warden and I'm out of here.


rgest share of the budget is health and human services at about 41% and followed by land use and community services of 26%. On the next slide, you'll see the County 2021 proposed budget. Next slide. And here you'll see the recommendation shows an increase overall and expenditures of about 107 million, primarily from an increase of about just under 18 million for the general fund. And that's primarily to just maintain operations. There was growth there of about just under 3%. And an increase of about 89.7 million for all other funds primarily from the re-budgeting of incomplete projects within the road fund, housing fund and other capital projects. Those are funded from special revenue sources and or grants. Our staffing overall reflects an increase of just under 11 funded positions. So fairly status quo. Next slide, you'll see here the overview of our County staffing. The chart shows you the proposed funded positions by budget category. The details by department and classification are provided in the budget under the personnel summary in the appendix. So this shows an increase overall, like I said, of about just under 11 positions from the two year projection provided last year. But it's important to note that this reflects 13 positions that your board added during budget hearings last year for 1920. It also reflects the addition of eight positions your board added this year during the mid-year from increased funding from various grants. And overall, when you look at the increases being recommended it reflects a decrease of almost 11 positions. Those are primarily within the general fund departments. They reduce their budgets to live within the financial constraints even prior to COVID-19. We'd asked the departments for reductions of anywhere from two and a half percent to 12 and a half percent. So you can see here that health and human services is again represents almost 50% of our staffing. Next slide. So here you'll see a breakdown of the general fund contribution by category. The general fund contribution is the County's most discretionary funding comes from our general County revenues. We also call this our net County cost and it's the matching funds for the various departments. This represents about a $4.2 million decrease over the original projection provided last year. The decrease was originally projected at a shortfall of seven and a half million. You may recall that number. We were happy to report that due to some increased revenue growth primarily from property taxes that was reduced by the 3.3 million in revenue growth. So we only had to make reductions of about 4.2 million. And there you can see in the chart the comparisons and it shows overall that there were reductions in each of the budget categories from public safety to land use anywhere from 1% to 10%. And then we had some minor increases due to some losses in revenue on the debt service budget and a minor increase in contingencies. Otherwise there's reductions across the board. On the next slide, you'll see our primary revenue assumptions that we relied on before the pandemic occurred. So we are seeing declines in our property tax revenue growth but we're still seeing moderate growth. So originally we were seeing six and 5% growth annually and now it's declining down. We're still seeing good growth of 4%. We expect that also to continue. Cannabis business tax, we're seeing about 5% growth. Sales tax is fairly flat in the unincorporated area with about 1% growth and transient occupancy tax is about 5%. Now these four primary taxes make up about 89% of the county's discretionary revenues that are included in the general fund. Okay, so on the next slide, I just wanna remind the board that even before the pandemic occurred, we were anticipating deficits out into the future. We felt these deficits would be caused by some of the rising costs that we know to be occurring in the future related to health, retirement, just sort of status quo operational increases. And we knew that our revenues would be declining as we approach the next recession which is apparently now here. But we expected to be able to meet those obligations and preserve our reserves because we felt these deficits were manageable anywhere from three to four to five, six, seven million. And now, and here we wanna just note that we knew that was gonna even be difficult and challenging during that time. So now I think I wanna go to the next slide. So we wanna give you sort of very preliminarily sort of our estimates at this time. There's new information every day that we're receiving and we'll be fine tuning these estimates and providing your board an update in June at the beginning of budget hearings or if we receive any new information prior to then. We are expecting the state to release the May revise this week, but preliminarily we don't expect a lot of new information until later. So, I won't go into a lot of details here but we did have a few slides. I know the health director gave you an update this morning but if you go to the next slide just as a reminder of what occurred on March 4th California declared a state of emergency related to the health pandemic outbreak. March 13th, the president declared a national emergency. March 16th, the county health officer issued a shelter in place order which was later extended until further notice. And March 19th, California issued a stay at home order which has been extended until further notice. And then on the next slide, you've seen this slide earlier this morning. I won't spend a lot of time on it. The health director reported that we are in the early stages of stage two. So this is the state's resiliency roadmap and it shows us the various stages that we'll be progressing through and our health officer will be guiding us through that. On the next slide, just as a reminder, we have our county response to the pandemic, save lives, Santa Cruz County. You know, we're phase one, we're slowing the spread. Phase two, we're adapting to a new normal. Phase three, we'll vaccinate and phase four, we'll elevate our readiness. You know, so further business reopenings depend on meeting specific readiness criteria defined by the state, including measures of a community's ability to withstand and inhibit the spread of COVID-19. So we just, we're proud of our partnership with the county and the community foundation and created the Save Lives Santa Cruz County Initiative. So they're working hard to increase our local capacity for testing, contract tracing, quarantine and isolation services, which are essential to reopening our workplaces and our community services and schools until the vaccine is widely available. And this is really important as we moved into the next slide because until we can reopen, we're anticipating losses in our revenues and that's how we arrive at believing we will be facing up to a $20 million deficit in 2019-20 this fiscal year. So I'm gonna talk a little bit about those revenues and what they involve, but here you can see in this chart just a brief overview of our financing for the general fund. So we are anticipating in our general purpose revenues will decline roughly just under $8 million based on our preliminary estimates and the information that's available to us now. Those include everything from reductions in our sales tax, reductions in our transient occupancy tax and our deed transfer tax, interest revenue. So we're seeing some of those declines already a little preliminary data has been in for the first couple of months and our projections are right within that ballpark so far, but we believe May and June data will be more telling. So our total financing is reduced by almost the 7.7 million preliminarily. The department net cost before reserves, you'll see a $12.3 million shift there and that has to do with the loss of revenue in the department budgets. So some of our departments we estimate we'll see a decline in their revenues. We know park and recreation is in offering the same services that they plan to offer due to the pandemic. We know that some of our state revenues that are sales tax based will potentially be reduced this year. That includes proposition 172 public safety revenues, AB 109 and realignment revenues. And we do anticipate our construction and permit revenue to decline and some other charges for services county wide. So between the 12.3 million and the 7.7 million, that's about $20 million revenue loss that we're anticipating. We are monitoring that carefully. And as a result of the emergency, we did issue an immediate hiring and spending freeze with the departments so that we could save as much as possible and reduce that 20 million down to something more manageable. But as Carlos said, we've been very fortunate. The last few years we've increased our reserves greatly. And so we're in a much better position to face that kind of a deficit this year than we've ever been. And so we anticipate worst case that we would have to use some of those reserves to cover the deficit this year. We planned in the budget this year to put $6 million into reserves. And your board adopted that as part of the adopted budget. So one of the first things we would do is probably recommend and we'll have more information in June that we cancel that increase to reserves. And that would leave us if we still have a $20 million deficit with about a $14 million problem. So at most we would take another $14 million out of the reserves up to the 20 million in total. So if we go on to the next slide, here we'll give you a sort of a preliminary look of what some of our thinking is and how we came up with our estimates. These are some of the primary revenues heavily impacted by the shelter in place order. So we've provided here sort of the estimates we used in our revenue assumptions for this year and next year. We mentioned sales tax already. We estimated losing up to a full quarter but we knew we would still receive some sales tax revenue from our online sales. And we're seeing so far about a 50% reduction in our receipts for March and April and we hope that we'll still see some decline in May and June. But overall, when you look at the annual amount, we're looking at about a 20% reduction in sales tax revenue. And the following year we estimate if it's a quarter or if it's a 50%, six months, it could be up to 25%. Transit occupancy tax is in a similar situation with the shelter in place order. We're not having our hotels and motels being used. And so we estimate about a 20% reduction this year. What we're seeing so far preliminary is that might be a little low, it could be a little higher. And we estimated up to 45% the following year, recognizing that it will take some time before some of those businesses can fully resume business. Other revenues include interest, detransfer tax, cannabis business tax. The interest revenue is probably the biggest one that's suffering right now decline. So we estimate anywhere from a 20% this year and a 25% next year in the total amount being received for all those other revenues. Proposition 172 may do a little better than this. Actually, the state had estimated roughly anywhere from 10 to 15%. So we're kind of right in the ballpark there at 12%. We haven't quite seen that reduction yet, but our biggest months are coming May and June and there's a bit of a lag. Realignment revenue and AB 109 revenue, very similar to Proposition 172 coming from the state. And then finally our charges for services and permit fee losses are expected up to anywhere from 20 to 25%. So then you'll see on the next slide, we talked a little bit about reserves and we just wanna give you some perspective on our reserves and you can see the growth in our reserves over the last 10 years that we've, they've tripled in size, as Carlos has said. And this final estimate here in the final column there for 2021 shows that if we have to take up to $20 million out of our reserves to solve the problem, this year's problem, it would still leave us in better shape than we were in back in 13, 14 and still leave us with a sizable amount of reserves. However, it's important to note that if we take $20 million out of our reserves, we'll have reduced our reserves by just about a third and that's a considerable amount. On the next slide, this will give you a perspective. We spoke about the different types of revenue losses that we're anticipating. This gives you a summary here for the general fund deficit anticipated for next fiscal year 2021. Here you can see overall the financing. So one of the things that is happening is that typically we save money each budget year and that's money that we carry forward as part of our financing. So in the event we have the losses we have in this current year, 1920, we won't have that carryover fund balance. So that's the first part of our deficit, the four and a half million that we were planning to carry over. In addition, we'll have those general purpose revenues will be reduced. We estimate up to 13 million for next fiscal year. So that gets us to a problem of about 17 and a half million and then we have our department revenues will be reduced as well over the course of next year and that we're estimating at about 23 million. So when you add the two together, you get to about a 40 and a half million dollar problem. And I have to say, it's very difficult to predict these revenue losses right now and they're completely dependent on our economic recovery. We know that it's negative, the pandemic's negatively affected travel, commerce and it's affected globally. And so it's widely expected to continue and negatively affect the economic output within the county. So the other thing that's not modeled here, we talk about the revenue losses is that we have increased costs related to the emergency. We have some money in our contingencies this year and next year that we're counting on to use as the county's match for the emergency, but it's really too early to tell how much of that will be needed. We know that FEMA will be there to help support us and provide 75% of our emergency costs for those eligible costs. So we're hoping our county impact for the emergency costs will be minor compared to the revenue loss that we'll be facing. So the other thing I wanna say about the revenue estimates is that this is based on a U-shaped recovery. There's a lot of discussion about, there's some economists saying it's a V-shaped recovery, we'll bounce right back and then these estimates are based on a U-shaped recovery. The legislative office has just issued a report on Friday and they're modeling also an L-shaped recovery, which means it takes us a while to recover. And so that will be something we'll have to take a look at and present to your board in June. We haven't modeled that quite yet and hopefully we'll have more data. So on the next slide. So the one thing that's hard is we do wanna look at various deficit scenarios. So the scenario we're initially modeling for you is sort of what we call plan A. It's where we have no relief. It models our general revenue losses, our department revenue losses, and it doesn't show any relief from the state or the federal government. And it's important to note, so that's where we get to our 36 million. Plan B shows some relief. So if our revenue estimates are a little better or if we get some relief from the state, then our deficit may only be about 30 million dollars. And plan C is sort of our best scenario right now where we would get some stimulus funding. As a small county, we haven't been authorized any stimulus funding and we believe some money will be coming, but as of yet, nothing's been approved. But in this scenario, if we say we received 24 million in stimulus funding and we wanted to spread that over the two-year sort of recovery period of revenues, we would use about 12 million of it in the first year. And then we would have about a $24 million problem. Important to note that when we talk, and you've heard Carlos say that this is twice as bad, the revenue losses are twice as bad as the Great Recession. And that's true. When we were facing initially the Great Recession, we were looking at a deficit of about $25 million. And that, so if we could get some stimulus funding and when we could be looking maybe at plan C, if our revenue estimates are right on, then we'd be facing a similar deficit of the Great Recession. But right now, we just don't know. And so until we receive additional information, these are sort of our deficit scenarios for you. And we hope to have more information by June and give you an update. So I'd like to turn it back over to Carlos and he's gonna discuss our challenges, solutions and opportunities. Thank you. The challenges we faced before this pandemic will still be with us. And now we have new ones in addition. The housing shortage that we faced as a community, as a state, as a region, will still be one of our biggest challenges. And of course, this pandemic will likely make it worse. We also face rising costs related to health insurance. There's a lot of people predicting that the COVID-19 pandemic will cause great increases in health insurance costs. We don't know yet, but we certainly, that's what a number of healthcare experts believe. So we're bracing for that. We also know that our retirement costs, we're already going up and are likely to increase even further because of PERS's loss and losses that they severed in the stock market. Property tax impacts will, there will likely be some slowdown, continued slowdown in valuation growth. We expect that in 21-22, which is the out-ear, out-budget year. And then we have various deferred maintenance issues. This has to do with our drainage culverts, bridges, road infrastructures, and our buildings. So we will continue to have those challenges and try and find solutions to those long-term maintenance issues. And then our biggest unknown is what relief will we get from the state and federal government? It's critical that we receive aid from the federal and state government. We have the possibility before us of being in a truly horrendous budget situation if we do not receive any aid, in which services to the public will be greatly impacted, in which we would lose many of our staff. And on the other hand, if we receive state and federal aid, it could be alleviated greatly. The state itself is in big budget problems. As you know, they've 40 announced that they're facing combined this year and next year, a $52 billion deficit. It's highest 30 to $40 billion next year. Their rainy day fund is $18 billion. So their ability to help us relates greatly to their receiving federal aid. The way that we relate to the federal government is particular through 1991 and 2011 re-alignment funds, which helps support many of our behavioral health programs, our criminal justice programs, as well as our safety net programs. So those are all big questions that we will find out, I imagine, over the next few months. So in the Great Recession, so this was in 2008, 2009 and it went all the way through, basically through 2014. The recession itself was in 2009. The county in those days implemented reductions of 10 to 20% in net county costs for many multiple years of their departments. And the county also got concessions with bargaining units of up to 7.5%. This included furloughs. And the county also used some trust funds. As we mentioned earlier, this situation that we are facing right now is actually twice as bad as the Great Recession. We are facing very difficult situation ahead of us. As we mentioned, it could be as high as $40 million next year, which is 23% of net county cost. 20, that's hard to imagine a almost a quarter deficit. It's something I've never seen in my 30 years of government service. So we definitely will be asking our employees to help with some concessions such as furloughs. And then we will also be in the cut mode. The current year, as we mentioned is $20 million, which we are going recommending to the board to use our reserves, which is that's what they're here for. We have about $56 million in reserve. We're recommending about 20 million be used for to get through this fiscal year. And then next year we have a potentially somewhere between $24 million to $40 million deficit. Reductions of up to 20% of net county costs for departments. And again, here's the solutions that we had mentioned previously. The opportunities are to continue to leverage grants and public-private partnerships. We're doing that right now with the Community Foundation and the Great Public-Private Partnership where we are helping to fund our save live Santa Cruz County effort. Also hoping for various state and federal grants. Our community safety net partnerships with our nonprofit partners are critical to county services and how we can continue to serve our nonprofit partners at a time when we ourselves are in a very critical financial state is gonna be very difficult, but we're gonna have to try and figure out how to do it. We also have had to greatly expand our telework, teleconferencing, remote work through our employees as most of our employees continue to work from home. But we're gonna have to lean into that in the year ahead and the years ahead. I think it's a permanent change that has come upon our society. And there's many things that could be gained from that. We know that telecommuting, video conferencing, all have benefits from increasing, improving our climate change goals, reducing global warming, improving morale, reducing commutes. There's lots of benefits. There's lots of challenges with it too, but I think that's something we will need to really lean into. And then we will be looking for various other one-time solutions to help us through this crisis. So in summary, that concludes our presentation. We're asking that you accept the 2021 proposed budget, which our staff put a great deal of work into. Unfortunately, because of the crisis, it's mainly a pro forma budget at this point. We recommend that the board direct us to use reserves to solve the 1920 deficit, which we estimate to be about $20 million at this point. We are, have plans for the deficits anticipated in 2021, which include the various solutions that I proposed in the previous slide, including having to potential plan for cuts to our departments, as well as asking for concessions from our labor partners. And then we have also recommend additional direction for special board meetings, August 10th, 11th, 12 and 13, to hold budget hearings and then have the board recommend that the board adopt the revised budget on August 18th, and then come back in September for the final adopted budget. So that concludes our presentation. We'd be happy to take any questions or hear any comments from the board. Well, I just wanted to say a few things. Thank you for the presentation, both Mr. Palacios and Ms. Mowry. It's sobering to look at this information and realize the difficult choices that we're gonna be making in the coming weeks and months. And the need for us to work together with our other legislative partners at the state and federal level to be able to get resources to help us through. The county is a large employer in Santa Cruz County. And so what happens to the county happens to lots of workers. And that is one of the things that makes a big difference when the house and Senate consider federal relief money. I understand this morning, the house introduced a bill that would include a trillion dollars for a local government, state and local government. I think it's about 350 or 355 for a local government and over 500 billion for state government and then some tribal government money. And I'm glad we took the effort coming out of the great recession to build up our reserves. Reserves don't make problems go away. They only provide some stabilizers and cushions when things get bad. And obviously no one would have anticipated 10 years after the great recession that we'd be in a worse economic shape, not through the fault of ours, but through the impact of this pandemic. I appreciate all the work that the staff put in to put it together this budget, which we will review and then work on another budget soon thereafter. I think this schedule makes sense. And I think we're gonna have to watch very closely what happens in Washington, DC to know what level of cuts we're gonna have to make in here in Santa Cruz County, but also throughout the country because local government is a major employer in lots of places. And I hope that there's wisdom and consideration for everybody in the country, not just people in particular states or particular professions, but for all of us because it's gonna take coming together to help us through this very difficult economic period. Thank you for the presentation. Maybe we wanna see if anybody else on the board wants to make any comments. Maybe you wanna ask the public if they have any comments. This Supervisor McPherson, sorry, I have a few issues here, but I wanna thank the CAO and especially Christina Mowry in the office for the team effort and all the departments for their work and for getting to this preliminary response. We are certainly in some uncharted territory. And I think presenting the budget as a placeholder in June for two days and then giving the final okay in August is well thought out, makes a lot of sense. I just wanna make sure that we're looking at the options to reduce our cost to recover the revenue. Certainly our personnel expenses that come out of the general fund in the county provide us with the greatest flexibility. But I wanna make sure that even though all of us will be part of the solution in county government, we can't ask our employees to close the gap on their own. And I hope we, and I think we will be looking at the need to look at operational changes that would improve efficiencies and cut costs. And was stated with our reduction in employees over the years, since our great recession and offering more services. That was a huge effort then. And I hope we can repeat that in some degree as we move ahead when we discuss this in June and certainly in August. And I just wanna thank everyone who's been working in these difficult times to keep the county services available to the community, especially when it becomes to our response to COVID-19. It's been expressed many times by our board, but especially the health services, public safety services throughout. Thank you for your efforts. It's much appreciated. I don't think the general public can understand or understandably not understand how much effort you've been putting into this and what professionalism you've really employed in letting people know how we can move ahead as best we can under this pandemic. So thank you to everyone. And I hope we have some, look at our operational expenses as we move in to June when we discuss the budget on the early part of June or the end of June. Thank you. I'll open it up to the public now for a comment. And is there anybody downstairs also? Okay. No one in the community room. Okay. It's a disembodied voice. Thank you. Becky Steinbruner from Aptos. This is very sobering. And I really appreciate the good report from Mr. Palacios and Ms. Mallory. As a member of the public, I would like to request, and I understand the need to reduce the days of traditional June budgets, but how will you include the public in this? Normally you have an evening meeting both here and in Watsonville with a kickoff of the budget a week. And I really wanna encourage you to keep something like that, keep the dialogue with the public who are very affected and who may have some very creative solutions that staff has not thought of. Use the people, help the people understand what's going on and take their ideas and put them to use. There are some fabulous public-private partnerships available out there. And I understand that Community Foundation is being a big part of that. I do wanna say that I'm concerned how this might affect the county's bond rating. Is that being looked at? I wanna commend Supervisor Caput for bringing to the podium, if you will, the idea that Board of Supervisors and top department heads need to take reductions or deferment of their pay because your pay hasn't been affected at all. And yet here we're looking at this huge deficit and Supervisor Caput, thank you for showing your leadership in that aspect. And I hope that that will be sincerely addressed. I have, I would like to encourage parks to focus on community gardens and victory gardens and helping people with that. We can't supposedly get together at the playgrounds but we can certainly grow our own food at home and share produce over the fence. And that is a very effective way of using some of those funds that they have that will benefit people not only to help with food production, which may be a problem but also the sense of isolation that many people are suffering from. I want to, in my last few seconds here, in terms of the plan for opening up how that does affect the budget, it's very difficult as a member of the public to know what is going on because the Thursday morning sessions are not available to people only on Facebook. So please put those on the counties, can I have just a little more time? Please put those on the telephone conference system that the supervisors have been using that you can be accessed with just a telephone, the 454-222, people can just listen and hear. And finally, I want to say that I'm very much against any forced vaccination which the V stands for, I'm hearing. I am against forced vaccination in this county. Thank you. We have not received any web comments for this item during the meeting. Board members, I'll just note that the schedule in the June continues, still has the evening meeting in Watsonville, Santa Cruz. We may end up having to do that completely virtually depending on what the pandemic scene is. And also it will be mostly about our, depending on what information we have, the covered information will mostly be about hearing the ideas from the public, but also our strategic plan. So for now that is an agenda. If the board didn't want to have them, we could move them. I know in August we are planning to do some evening sessions or some remote sessions with Watsonville and sort of town hall like meetings and in Santa Cruz. Okay, we'll take action. I'd be prepared to move the recommended actions. All right. Do I need to close the public hearing? Nope. It wasn't a public hearing. I'll take recommended action. We have a first. Second. Second. Okay. Okay. I'll do a roll call vote. Supervisor Leopold. Aye. Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. McPherson. Aye. Chairman Kepit. Aye. Passes unanimously. We'll now we have closed session item number 14. Council, will there be any reportable items from closed session? No, there will not be. No, no items to be announced. Okay. Meeting is adjourned. Thank you for.


The next panel looks at the U.S. government response to Haiyan, and we've got a great lineup of speakers. It's a real honor to have these three gentlemen with us today. I will introduce them right now, and then we'll start with Ambassador Marcele. Scott Marcele is the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs. He's well-known in this building in his many roles, working on Asia and Southeast Asia in particular. He was most recently the U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Indonesia, and before that was Deputy Assistant Secretary responsible for Southeast Asia and concurrently the U.S. Ambassador for Ossian Affairs. Next to him is Greg Beck, who's Deputy Assistant Administrator for Asia at the U.S. Agency for International Development. Greg serves as the leader in management oversight for responsibilities for all aid programs in East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific. He is just back from Tacloban and the Philippines, as well as some other places, and will be able to speak very definitively about the U.S. response efforts there. And finally, Brigadier General Yaw Queen Malavet assumed his current position, which is Director of Joint Capabilities Assessment and Integration, Director at the DOD, and helps lead all operations at DOD focused on Southeast Asia at the Pentagon, and has been a great friend and a very proactive leader in this space. We're going to kick off with Ambassador Marseille and ask him to make brief remarks. We will then have Greg Beck speak and Brigadier General Malavet, and then we will open the floor to questions and answer. So Scott, could I ask you to kick it off? Thanks very much, Ernie, and thanks to CSIS for hosting this ambassador and friends, guests. I think General Malavet and Greg Beck will talk more about maybe the details of the assistance operation in response to the typhoon. So I thought what I might do is talk a little bit broader picture. First, obviously this was an enormous disaster when Secretary Kerry was there last month. He said it was like nothing he'd ever seen before. Absolutely huge overwhelming disaster. So I think a lot of people led by the Filipinos responded very well. I think it's fair to say that our response was actually quite good. We were there both on the military side and the civilian side immediately and began funneling assistance in almost immediately and continued that. I think we've provided now the figures. I have our $86 million worth of assistance, but I think the numbers only tell part of the story. It was really the speed and I think the effectiveness, particularly very good coordination, both within the US government, but more importantly, taking the lead from our Philippine counterparts who could tell us what was really needed and where. So a very good close working relationship. You know, I think obviously the most important thing in a humanitarian disaster is to respond as quickly as possible, try to save as many lives as you can and for the people, the survivors help them, A, get through the next, the coming weeks after the event and to begin to put their lives back together. So it's a huge humanitarian event to begin with and a huge humanitarian operation. But beyond that, I think there's a few other things we can learn from the response. And there's lessons learned in terms of the tactical operational part of it, but what I mean is more what does it mean in terms of United States, in the Philippines and in the region? And for me, there's just a couple of things I'd throw out. One is we certainly didn't do this response, carry out this response because of the rebalance. Before the rebalance, we would have done the same thing, I'm sure, but it does highlight, I think, within the rebalance, the very strong commitment the U.S. has to be in the region as a reliable partner and as a good partner that the Philippines and other countries in the region can count on the U.S. as a friend in the case of a disaster or whatever else may be needed. Two is, and I don't mean to sound like we're bragging on behalf of the U.S. government, but I think it showed that we have a pretty impressive capability, maybe not news to everybody, but still it did show combined military and civilian capability that I think was very significant and used to good effect. Third, it highlights very much what we've been saying since President Obama announced the rebalance. That the rebalance means we are gonna be there in the region, we're gonna be there diplomatically, we're gonna show up at the big multilateral events, we're gonna do a lot of engagement on a whole range of issues, we're gonna be there economically, we're gonna be there on a security perspective, et cetera, but it also means we're gonna be there when our friends need us. And one important thing to highlight and General Malavet will probably talk about this a little bit more is when we announced this, things like Marines and Darwin and so on, and we said part of the reason they're there is to be able to respond to humanitarian assistance. There was some snickering in the region, I was like, oh, come on, really. But the fact is you see in the response to this disaster the reason we were able to respond is because we had the assets. If we didn't have our Marines out there, our ships, our planes, et cetera, with the best efforts of our colleagues at USAID and others, it would have been very, very difficult. So being present, I think, is hugely important in there. It also, I think, highlighted the very real benefits of our long-term military relationship with the Philippines. There's never easy to respond to a disaster, but it's much easier when the militaries know each other and are used to working with each other. Again, not only military, civilian elements too, and I think OFTA also has had a long-term relationship with its Philippine counterparts, so building those relationships actually are very important and I think paid off. And the last point I'd make on this is that it also highlighted once again the very important and positive role of corporate America. A lot of American corporations also joined in, as well as a lot of American individuals, including from the diaspora community, but particularly the U.S. corporations have offered a lot of assistance, and continue to offer assistance, including in helping people restart their businesses, their livelihoods, because that's obviously critical. Looking forward, I think there's been a lot of good work done to date by Filipinos, by Americans, and by others. Obviously a huge amount of work to do. Long-term reconstruction, the Philippine government and local authorities and Philippine businesses will take the lead. The U.S. will certainly want to continue to contribute, but it also highlights the importance of continuing to build the trade and investment relationship, because really over time it's going to be the investment, the trade, the business opportunities that bring the economy in the Tacloban and the affected region back to life. So let me stop there, Arnie. Thanks very much. Greg. Great. Thank you, Arnie. And thank you for pulling together this conference today. It's great to be here with my esteemed colleagues and yourself, Ambassador and all our guests today. I'm always worried that after the first month or two, on a large emergency, such as the typhoon high-on, that the attention fades, because there are so many other pressing issues and other disasters around the world. So this is really important to come together and to remain focused on our efforts going forward. So thank you. Yeah, I was in, as Scott mentioned, I was in Tacloban a few weeks ago, and I was able to see the immediate impacts of a long-term partnership with the government of the Philippines. I was also able to see the impact of our initial investments over the last five years in building the resilience, building systems that were helping us to mitigate the effects of these large natural disasters. I also was able to see how we've been working very strongly with diaspora groups, with NGOs, with local groups, and also with private sector, to build those long-term relationships that were preceding the response, but that we were able to then put into action on the first day. And so USAID had been tracking the typhoon and saw that it was becoming incredibly powerful about a week before it hit land. So we prepositioned a number of staff who are normally based in our regional office in Bangkok, brought them down to Manila. Within the first day, they were there in Tacloban and were immediately working with our colleagues on DOD. And I really need to give a shout out to that strong interagency coordination, but especially to DOD, without that air bridge, we would not have been able to deliver effectively all the supplies that we brought in from our bases in Manila, or sorry, from Dubai and from Miami. Over 2,000 metric tons of critical relief supplies were brought out to the secondary and tertiary distribution sites because of the air bridge, because of the C-130s, because of the Ospreys, because of the choppers and the operational support that Defense gave to the government of the Philippines. It was incredibly critical. I've been working in Asia for over a decade and I think I've worked most of the natural disasters that have happened. And I have to say this really was a textbook response because we had been working for a number of years and building out that network and building out those partnerships so that we were building capacity to immediately respond no matter the size of the scope of the emergency. So this was really a terrific response. As I think Scott mentioned, over $86 million was contributed by the US government in the emergency response. Initially, we brought in and distributed plastic sheeting, other non-food items, hygiene kits, food aid, and also began immediately working on transitional shelter. And also I think it's important to highlight that within the first couple of weeks, American private sector alone came together and contributed to its NGO partners over $50 million, which was incredibly important. In addition, I think we need to shout out to the other donors. And I think as of December 31st, $583 million have been contributed from around the world towards this effort. And I believe that's almost 80% of the UN appeal for the emergency response. And so again, I think it shows the importance of the Philippines in the region and to all of us as critical partners. And so I think that needs to be congratulated to all those partnerships. We are now beginning our pivot to the early recovery stage. And we will continue to focus on some critical areas. Transitional shelter, livelihoods, health, cash for work, microfinance, temporary schools, and rebuilding of rural health units will be very important focus for us over the next three to 12 months. And as I think many of you are aware, when Secretary Kerry was there, I think it was on the 18th of December, announced a terrific partnership with Coca-Cola and Procter & Gamble and with USAID that will be rebuilding 2000 sorry sorry's. For those of you who are not aware of sorry sorry's, those are the small stores that are connected to oftentimes people's homes.  But it also creates income and livelihoods for a number of families. And so we'll be getting those up and running very, very quickly. It is a heavy lift going forward. We have some critical areas, especially in shelter, I think as we saw in the Washington Post article over the weekend. We'll be working with Leyte in developing a green plan so that we're building back not only better, but building back safer, building back healthier. And I think again it needs to be recognized that the government of the Philippines has been building their capacity and their ability to respond quickly and effectively over the last decade. We'll continue to work very closely with the government to further strengthen that capacity, recognizing that this is not the last of the emergencies that we're going to be seeing. In fact, when I was in Tacloban, I then went over to Baha'uil where I think many people forgot that there was a devastating earthquake just nine days before. I think it was the typhoon hit that was equally devastating to infrastructure and to people's lives and to livelihoods. So I would also ask us not to forget the people of Baha'uil because there were a tremendous amount of people that were affected by that and we have a lot of work to be done there too. So with that, thanks, Ernie. Thank you, Greg. General. Ernie, thank you again. And in addition to the comments that were made by my fellow panel members, I just want to share, kind of stepping back a little bit, the broader perspective. And Mr. Ambassador, it's good to see you. Beyond my current position as the principal director for South and Southeast Asia in OSD policy, my relationship with the Republic of the Philippines runs deep well over 25 years, both professionally and personally. As a young captain in 1990, 1991, I was involved with the earthquake and mudslide relief in northern Luzon. I was married in the Philippines in May of 1991 and left shortly thereafter and my wife Rose was evacuated from the Philippines when Mount Pinatubo blew up in 1991. So for us, the Malavet family, and certainly for both nations, I think it reflects the deep and abiding strength of our alliance along military lines as well as the strength of our people-to-people ties. And I think that's reflected, and I can't thank you enough, Ernie, for bringing this type of form to light because some of that below the surface is what we need to highlight, the success of this operation and what it speaks to with regard to our past relationships and our military strength, but also for what we can do in the future, both with the United States of America and the Philippines, but perhaps greater contributions to this type of operation in the region. So it shows a lot of strength. I think, quite frankly, for the military, working side by side and with USAID and the country team, a great deal of thanks and respect to the interagency process is due, quite frankly. For the Secretary of Defense, and speaking and echoing what Ambassador Marciel said, for the Rebalance, there are three to four areas that we focus in on, and that is our Rebalance to the Asia Pacific is based on principles of international norms of behavior. There is a reflection that presence matters. Certainly our alliances and our partnerships are growing stronger, in particular over the last four to five years, and there is also the theme of power projection, but power projection in military terms really means that the ability to bring the types of capabilities very quickly with regard to HADR. So for the US response to this tragedy, we bring wholesale capabilities with aircraft lift, medical capabilities, ships, aircraft, and the ability to command and control very efficiently, very effectively. Now I think it's fair to recognize that we can't do that without the spirit and the cooperation of the capabilities that are resident in country. And I'd like to acknowledge and praise the efforts of the armed forces of the Philippines because they were on the front lines every day during this operation, and they have unique capabilities that I think are probably understated with this particular story. And as we go forward and we break out lessons learned, I think you will see a great deal of courage and capability and capacity that is currently resident in the armed forces of the Philippines, and I can tell you with our enhanced rotational presence of forces and the acceptance of those capabilities in the Philippines, the armed forces of the Philippines will grow even stronger over time. It is true that bringing KC-130 side by side with the Philippine KC-130s, bringing MV-22s, command and control, radar systems, and all of that consistent with our enhanced rotational presence to save lives, recognizing that speed is life and speed, maneuverability, the ability to communicate on time on target to save lives is an absolutely essential component, one component of a larger whole of government or whole of governments approach to make sure that we do and execute these types of missions with the effectiveness and the efficiency that is required to save lives. So again, thank you very much. I can get into more detail with regard to what we actually provided, some cutting edge technologies, and some of the things that we hope to bring forward with our relationship with the Philippines. Again, thank you, Arnie. Okay, thank you very much. Thank all three of you for your excellent presentations. This audience we've seen in the early panel is ready to dig in, so I am going to open the floor and invite questions right away, so right here. Hi, my name is Sonny Boussin with the PEFC. A question for all of you, but I only get to ask one. So, Mr. Beck. I noticed that a lot of the efforts towards rebuilding the Philippines are dedicated towards shelter and resettlement. How much of those efforts are gonna go towards convincing some of the refugees that they can't go back to where they were living because it's just gonna create more problems in the next typhoon. And, but I know that a lot of these people have nowhere else to go, but it doesn't make sense to resettle them in the same place where there's gonna be another typhoon. So what are the efforts that USAID is doing to make this happen? Thank you. Thank you, that's a terrific question. And I did see that when I was walking around through the streets of Tacloban. There are obviously a number of low-lying areas that we would not want people to return to. These are difficult times. It's not chaotic anymore as it was, but nonetheless, there is the need to do long-term planning while also doing the short-term, addressing the short-term needs. So what we're looking at, again, as part of that longer-term plan is to work with the government in Leyte. First, we thought it would be Tacloban, but we obviously realized it needs to be larger because there are a number of people who are going to need to move outside probably of Tacloban. So we need to have a larger lens on that. And we'll begin working with the government to develop that green plan so that it is much more of a forward-thinking and resilient development plan in place. In the meantime, we're looking at the transitional shelters that are no longer in the low-lying areas. We don't have yet the full capacity or resources to service all the needs of the people who have been displaced by the typhoon. But we're also working with other donors, working with the government to come together to address those transition on the temporary shelter needs. Again, working closely with the government to ensure that they don't go back to those low-lying areas. There will be some people who want to go back, especially the Fisher folks who lived on the water before. That's where their immediate livelihoods access is going to be. We need to work with them individually. We need to work with them as a community. And that's what we focus in on the months to come. Lady, right here. Good morning, Mr. Ambassador. Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Rosemary Seguero. I'm the president of Hope for Tomorrow. We are an unprofit organization, Pestia, in the district. And we are also a profit organization, Pestia also in the district. I come from Africa. We are working on response on Africa with my organization. Looking at your presentation from the ambassador and you all, we are people who are already in the shelter. The ambassador talked about importing materials maybe from another country to come and resettle the people who are in the shelter. I consider so much money people will give and continue to give, including USID. Why can't you look at the main and major problem of resettlement? We are fabricated, if the Philippines are importing the fabricated material for construction or for shelter, why can't you just take one sum sum of money and bring in fabricated, if fabricated materials, build the shelters, which are not actually shelters. This would be a long-term houses and resettle in people instead of being in the shelter. And here we are looking for, and then people would be looking for other things to support, like humanitarian, like food and other things because people need to live a better life and that's where the lively starts. Look into shelter first and then the other things can come in as we come in as nonprofit organization to support the women and the children and healthcare and education. So I think all the money should first go into the shelter first before we come into dread and other things because those people need help. They need to resettle before they think of going to buy something to eat away. Will they cook the things and how will they cook? You know, it's very sad for them. So let's look at something very important. How do we get the refurbricated buildings and put up the settlement for these people first instead of just assuming they're in the shelter and they're suffering there? Then we come to healthcare, education and then business because the same people are the ones who will do business. So look into the main thing which is resettlement first. Thank you. Thank you for your question. Sure. I agree. You know, from my experience, when people are immediately recovering from a disaster, they're looking for security, they're looking for food and water and they're looking for shelter. The security is there. The food and water is now markets are back up and running. We helped to restore the Tacloban water system within eight days and that brought water back to 200,000 people. Shelter now is really the next priority. I think what we're trying to do is to be sensitive and smart in that rebuilding and those transitional shelters so that they are weather resistant and are able to survive the next storm that comes because we also know that these transitional shelters oftentimes become permanent shelters. So what we try to do is to build the transitional shelter as sort of core that families can then as they generate livelihoods are able to then build on additional rooms to that. But we're trying to again make it context specific so that using locally available resources. There are so many millions of people affected and then displaced and have lost their houses to actually bring in materials from outside. I don't think it's probably the most effective use of our resources because there are a number of locally available resources that I think would be also relevant and applicable for the Philippines. But I agree with you, it is a major focus and it's one that we are looking at. I want to interject a question here directed really at Scott and General Malavet, which is in the talking points for entering the East Asia Summit we said and particularly this ASEAN based security architecture, we said that these ASEAN based, the ASEAN Defense Ministers Forum would be key to humanitarian assistance and disaster relief. Have you seen any implications or has that architecture been able to be part of the response to this situation and what do you hope for the future? And I guess I'd ask both of you to respond. Well, General may have more thoughts on it. I guess what I would say is that ASEAN as a whole, we saw I think a number of ASEAN countries respond quite generously in this respect. I think it does reflect a growing sense of ASEAN community and as well as capacity. I think though what we find, I'm not an expert on disasters, but I think even as a layman you can see, the disasters are so overwhelming. They wipe out the infrastructure and very few governments or organizations have a logistical ability to respond quickly. And so even with the political will to try to be helpful, it's just really difficult. And I have to say, I mean the US military has the greatest logistical organization in the world, as it's often said, and that capacity is almost unique. So I think we're seeing movement, more political will, more desire to help, but realistically it's gonna take some time for I think the ASEANs to have that logistical capacity to build up. Thank you. I'd like to add again, just some thoughts on our alliance with the Republic of the Philippines and last year's bilateral security dialogue highlighted and referenced HADR as a critical mission set, an area of cooperation. And in the writings and the forums associated with that event, we also recognize the Republic of the Philippines has unique capabilities that are critical to the region. And we recognize too that the Republic of the Philippines has also offered assistance within ASEAN for the disasters in the region. And I think that's fair to highlight. ASEAN and the ADMM+, the ASEAN Defense Minister's Ministerial Plus Organization also has expert working groups for the practical cooperation of regional entities. And one of those is HADR. And what we're seeing is different nations in the region bring different capabilities of various forms and sizes, all of which are good. The critical piece is how we bring them together in time and space. And a big component of that is the communication, the command, the control. And then below that is our ability to have the type of interoperability with radio systems and like-minded standard operation procedures, as well as the types of forces that we bring to bear. So I think this event speaks to many positive lessons learned. And I need to highlight too, the Center of Excellence for Disaster Management and Humanitarian Assistance. Because as we collect that up through PAYCOM and OSD policy, those lessons learned, all of the good that we saw in this particular event will be shared throughout the region, through ASEAN and through those regional forums for the greater good. And I think that's a positive sign that we'll see in the coming years. So thank you, sir. Ambassador, I think you have a question. I had a chance to thank the U.S. government through Ambassador Scott Martial, U.S. AID through Greg Beck, and U.S. military through General Malibut for the very comprehensive and immediate response and generous assistance that was extended to the Philippine government and to the Taipun Haiyan victims.  Thank you. Gentlemen, back here. Good morning. Good morning. I would like to address my question to Mr. Beck. My name is Pavlito Alarcon and I'm a video organization here in Washington, Newsy. We call our organization, Feed the Hungry, Inc. I was in Ormuk late last November 28th. We distributed relief mission in a remote area in Ormuk, while generally the relief is on those populous, more known area like Tacloban, where I went, they haven't received anything. And I noticed that you said that you are partnering with NGOs. So I was wondering how we can partner with you so that we can reach those remote areas where we specialize because of our limited budget. Thank you and thank you for your good work. I really appreciate it. We will be shortly announcing an APS for I believe it's around a million dollars or so.  Sorry, it's a call for proposals. Sorry, it sounded like a bureaucrat. A call for proposals that will be focused on diaspora groups who are currently engaged, who have capacity on the ground, that we would like to be able to accelerate your work. We recognize, again, trying to get out to the very rural areas is always a challenge. And so I think certainly the diaspora groups and our local organizations have that network and they have the boots on the ground and those are the groups that we wanna be assisting. So stay tuned shortly. That announcement will hit the street and then we'll be able to get those resources out the door very quickly. Hi, my name is Bob Ottenhoff. I'm with the Center for Disaster Philanthropy. My question is for Greg Beck. We've been hearing in your prepare remarks and with the Ambassador's remarks, talks about building resilient communities. You mentioned that you have been working on this for several years. Can you tell us more about what are the characteristics of a resilient community that you're trying to build? And how far did you get before high-end and what needs to be done going forward? Thank you. I think the characteristics are one, they're multifaceted, obviously, and we really began engaging with the Philippines on this area of work, I think it was about five years ago or so, recognizing that again with global climate change, that we're gonna see an increase of natural disasters in the Philippines and also working generally throughout Asia on this area. So it's really, it's working with individuals, it's working with families, it's working with communities and then within those communities trying to find those structures that are gonna be best able to connect with the people in anticipating and building strong infrastructure, both in schools and in houses, but also building resilient livelihoods, those that are capable of rebounding after a natural disaster. In most cases, that's going to be in agriculture and in fisheries in areas that we're working in the Pacific and in Asia. So we'll be working on those systems, also working very closely with national governments and local governments so that they're able to, again, forecast, they're then able to do early warning and response prior to the disaster coming if it's forecasted and then being able to quickly, to be able to mobilize its networks that are not only in the urban areas, but are also in the very remote areas. So I think it's very multifaceted. We still have a lot of work to do, but I think one of the indications of success in Leyte and especially in Tacloban, the government was able to move 800,000 people and that was impressive. While obviously there were millions that were impacted by it, without that movement of people, I think we would have seen a much higher number of deaths as a result of high on. So that's one indication, I think, of that success, but obviously we need to continue to strengthen those response mechanisms. Okay, let me go to the back here. Mitzi, I'll get to you. Iri Nakimushkina, Global Health International Advisors. Typhoon Haiyan affected the poorest areas of the country. How realistic is with rebuilding efforts to help some people to move out from poverty and what kind of programs could be done in this context? Thank you. Well, what we've been able to do is, for the last couple of years, we've worked very closely with the government of Philippines to begin implementing the partnership for growth and the partnership for growth. We have a number of programs on the ground and a lot of that is focused on developing inclusive economic growth in the country and we've been able to sort of rejigger current programs in the area of health and also in livelihoods. So we're able to immediately deliver those resources, recognizing that people are in the depths of poverty and now have been even knocked back even further. And so I think by, again, having that long-term partnership with the Philippines and then having the resources on the ground with the partnership for growth, we're also looking at secondary urban centers as drivers of growth and so we have our city's initiative. Recently, I was in Manila and we were working with Batangas and we rolled out a program there on our city's initiative, recognizing that it's not just Manila that's gonna be driving the economic growth, but we do need to be looking at those secondary centers and Tacloban could be that. So again, we'll be deploying those resources that we've been able to galvanize through the partnership for growth to be focusing on the issues that you've raised. Mitzi? Oh, sorry. Hi, I'm Mitzi Picard of PAFC, Philippine American Foundation for Charities. I have a question for you, Ambassador Marcelle. Nice to see you again. Anyways, you mentioned the 86 million additional aid to the Philippines and you talked about livelihood projects, hygiene kits, et cetera. How much of that is a portion towards human trafficking as we had a previous question earlier? And also we keep talking about Tacloban, but other areas were affected severely as well like Samar and Cebu, so perhaps one of the other panelists could also address this question about the other areas. Thank you. Thanks, Mitzi. Good to see you too. I'd say the trafficking in persons problem is a problem we've been working with the Philippine authorities on for some time. I mean, it's not specific to this disaster, but one of the things, and Greg knows more about this than I do, but one of the things that we've learned over time is that when there are disasters, unfortunately, there are predators who take advantage of that to try to engage in trafficking or other crimes. And so I think one of the things USAID did early on, very early on, was send out really an expert to deal with local authorities, an expert on trafficking, to deal with alloc for signs. And we've been working very closely with the Philippine government, which also focused, has been very aware of this risk, also very focused on it. So I don't know if there's a dollar figure associated with it so much, but certainly a very keen awareness of the risks and efforts too to try to do everything we could working with Philippine authorities to address that. And you make a good point about it's not just Tacloban. Sometimes I think I'm guilty, maybe we're guilty of referring to Tacloban just because people know the name. It doesn't mean that our work is only in Tacloban. It's sort of, if you will, symbolizes the broader area, but Greg might wanna add more. Sure. Thanks, Scott. Yeah, so OFDA distributed $35 million in grants to our NGO colleagues. Built into each one of those grants is a focus on protection. And so we recognize in these types of circumstances is a huge risk. Families are incredibly vulnerable to many shocks, but certainly to the risk of trafficking. So that is always a central focus of any of our emergency relief efforts. We also, as Scott was recognizing, we have a strong systems built up in the Philippines. The Philippines, the government has been working on trafficking issues for a long time. Many places where we go into and respond to emergencies, we don't have that capacity. So I think that was an advantage for us that we were able to build on and strengthen a foundation that was already there and addressing trafficking issues. On the issue of not just Tacloban, we are looking at SMR, you know, MCC has tremendous resources and investments in SMR. They've built the road around SMR. Those are areas we might be able to look at. And MCC is the... Sorry, Millennium Challenge Corporation, another acronym. Sorry, but we're looking at how we might be able to utilize that resource of the road as possible resettlement sites or as possible future sites for people to move to as the master plan begins building out. Again, recognizing that there are so many low-lying areas around Leyte, maybe that's not the best permanent place that we need to be looking at other locations around the Philippines. So again, working very closely with the government, SMR might be that possibility. I just want to interject a question. You know, one of the things that we're thinking about is President Obama's trip to Asia in April. And I wondered if you could, you have a sense whether he would go to the Philippines and when he's there, would he focus on this issue? These, you know, the interagency response, the partnership with the Philippines, the mil-to-mil relationship, is that a possibility? Yeah, well, National Security Advisor Susan Rice in her speech at Georgetown four, six weeks ago, whenever it was announced that the President would return to Asia in April in part to, you know, because he wasn't able to visit. They haven't announced the particular destinations yet and I don't think any of the three of us want to be the ones to make such an announcement on behalf, much as the White House would appreciate it. But I guess what I would say, you know, were the President to go to the Philippines, I think there'd be a wide range of things to talk about. I was gonna say issues, but it's more than issues. There's a lot of celebrating to do. Celebrating in terms of this long relationship that is unique in many ways and incredible people-to-people relationships. The general mentioned his personal one, I have a personal one, you know, I mean, it's really a deep part of the relationship is this connection as well as, you know, how we can work together on the economy, promoting business. I mean, Philippines is growing at extremely rapid rates now. It's increasingly attractive for U.S. companies, the security relationship, how we can work together in the region. So I think it'll be a really, you know, would be, let me rephrase that, it would be a very broad-based discussion. I'm sure the issue of reconstruction in the disaster area would come up as well. I just wanted to add on a question that was delivered earlier, and I think we would all recognize that out of tragedy comes strength and opportunity. And again, I have to praise the armed forces of the Philippines because working side by side, by, with, and through United States forces, we're beginning to discern lessons learned but assessing the types of needs and requirements down at the local level. I wanna highlight a few things. We recognized during this tragedy that access, roads, bridges, airfields, ports are very, very important, not only to the economy and trade down at the local level, but are really part of a national security element. So side by side with the armed forces of the Philippines, we're looking at ways through our enhanced rotational presence of forces and cooperative training exercises to bring engineers together, to look at areas of opportunity to build out airfields and our ports and our roads and our bridges and those sorts of things together. And I think that's an important element. And two other pieces that I think will be highlighted over time is that the United States military was able to bring in some of the new technologies that we've developed over the past 10 to 12 years. Those associated with expeditionary energy that not only help our US forces, but also have a local element and value to it as well. And then we've recognized that over the last 10 years we have also developed new medical technologies and capabilities, smaller packages of assistance. All of those things have an enduring effect, not only for our relationship with the Philippines, but have real value for the types of things that the US military desires to offer to the region. And I think, again, going back to the common themes, all of that helps to increase trade, economics, and saves lives in the near term, but also for the future. So thank you again, Harry. Gentleman here. Hi, good morning. David Van Lewen, Millennium Challenge Corporation. General, I was wondering if you could comment on the status or the ongoings of the New People Army pre-Taifun Haiyan and also the status or the ongoings of the New People's Army post-Hian, especially with the influx of aid assets and the international presence. Thank you. As you know, we have our JASODE of P elements working side by side with the Republic of the Philippines. And unfortunately, I don't have the information that you seek to offer that for you here today. But again, working with the Republic of the Philippines and the Armed Forces, that is something that we're working very closely with and security is an important element of our relationship. And certainly it's important before and after any tragedy like we saw in Tacloban and other areas. So it's a watch item. Thank you. Eric Weiner, Abandian Analytics, an answer is to focus on the Asia Pacific. Thanks for being here today. All of you have highlighted a lot of the positive lessons learned. I wondered if you could touch upon any possible negative lessons learned. Were there any? Thank you. I think there's always positive lessons learned and also things to watch out for. I would say a good example is I think the Philippine government and local authorities did a very good job ahead of the typhoon of evacuating folks into places that they thought would be typhoon resistant. And few of us, none of us maybe, predicted the surge from the ocean which ended up causing a huge amount of the damage and probably a lot of the deaths. I'm not saying that to be critical. It's very difficult to predict these things. But again, it highlights that just how important it is to understand that these things are unpredictable and therefore not to assume that a shelter necessarily is going to work. Again, very hard in practice to say what else you might have done. But that was I think a, not necessarily a mistake, but sort of next time I think people would sort of ask themselves, what would we do if there's a surge? That's one. I would just, it's a good question. I would just, we normally have an after action review after the first six months. And I expect that we'll find where things did work and where things could be better. So I hate to sort of jump the gun and project what that is. Because I'm really not exactly sure what those would look like. But we do have a system built in so that we're able to step back and reflect and see how we can do better the next time. I think we're still doing the assessments. But I would characterize, we've learned a lot about the importance of, the importance of early warning. The importance of communicating what is about to occur down to the local level. The importance of resilient communications. The importance of very, very strong and established command and control centers. The importance of the whole of government approach, whole of government's approach. The synergy and synchronization of a lot of capabilities and a lot of goodwill combined with the spirit of the people has compounded positive effects over time. And then as an event like this occurs, it's very important with visual capability to discern what has actually occurred on the ground and to get that information up to the command and control centers so that you can deliver what is needed at the right time, at the right place for the right effects to save lives. So really the importance of those factors, I think there are a lot of positive lessons Lawrence coming out of that, so thank you. I'd like to thank the panel. I know there's a lot more questions here. The good news is that we're gonna take a quick break and that we have another panel coming up. So you'll have, if you weren't called on here, hopefully you'll have another chance to get a question in. That panel is gonna look at the private sector and NGO response to the Typhoon. But please join me in thanking our guest from the US. Thank you. Thank you.


Welcome Monet Café and my patrons. This is a sneak peek into some of my sketch books that is actually kind of a part two from a Patreon lesson that I had during our what I call story time. So I'm opening this up for Monet Café as well. All right, here we go. So we're gonna take a walk down memory lane. I don't even know what order these are in. This is an older sketchbook of mine. I try to finish them. There's a lot that I haven't finished, but this one has a plethora of all kinds of stuff in it. Okay, it's just a Strathmore sketchbook. Okay, 100 sheets. I've torn a lot of them out for I don't know what reason, but but anyway, this was just I was literally in a car. This was a trip. I should put dates on all of mine. I've gotten a little better at that to kind of remember where you were or what was going on, but this was just a fun little whimsical sketch many years ago. I was in a car with my husband and there's a little sketch of a girl done in charcoal. Let's see here. Johnny Depp. This was done. Here's the difference with charcoal and pencil. I think this is mostly charcoal. I like charcoal. I think it has more of a, I don't know, just a sketchy artistic quality to it and pencil looks so fixed. Okay, pencil has, I don't know, maybe a little shinier or something. And let's see, there's a started thing of Marilyn Monroe. Remember these are, some of these are much older sketchbooks. This is a little watercolor combination pastel sketch that I did. See, I don't even care like, I know a lot of times we're like, oh, how do you protect that? I don't care about protecting that. This is all for just playing. That's the best word. Play. This is what these are for. This was a little pastel sketch I did. Again, I don't care if it gets all smudged or whatever. I was just playing, okay. And let's see a little more. Oh, this one I did protect. You know, I spoke too soon here. I guess I sort of liked this one. So what I did is I took a piece of glassine or tracing paper and I just put over the sketch so that when you close it, it's protected. Now, this is back when I was still using this blue painter's tape. I like the blue painter's tape. It's fine. It's not archival though, okay. So if you're wanting to do something long-term, this stuff, you're not guaranteed that it won't yellow or something, okay. So, but again, this is an older sketchbook. I didn't even care.  Yes, you can do a pastel sketch in a, on a regular drawing paper or sketch book, okay. So that these were most likely the harder new pastels and maybe some softies towards the end. A tomato. A weird king. Oh, funny dog.  Another watercolor sketch. Some guy. Sometimes I like doing a little square and making people go outside the square. Some guy. I'm going to tell you about where I get these faces from in a minute. A girl. Oh, I better hold some of these up a little closer for you guys. Oh, and also too. Sometimes I flip my sketchbook over because I'm left-handed. I don't want the thing to get in the way of my hand. Sometimes I turn my arm. So I'll often use my sketchbooks upside down or backwards. Some kitty cat with charcoal. I've found too, if you combine charcoal and pencil, sometimes that doesn't work because the pencil is shinier. You probably can't see it here. I had pencil here and then I added charcoal. So I usually like to stick to one or the other.  Oh yeah, here I'm doing a little more pastel. This was later. I didn't use a sketchbook for a long time. So these were starting to get a little better. This is one that I did of a girl. Now I'm going to talk about the app. This is from faces. All these faces. What did I do? Just find random people? No, I used an app called the Sketchy app. Okay, I've talked about it quite a bit, but let me show you if my light will allow me to. It's an app right here that you can use on your phone or you can use. Let me get the home screen. Actually, let me close out of it. Alright, so I'm holding this in a way where my light doesn't get in it, but it's an app called Sketchy. It's SKTCHY. There's no E in it, okay? So if we click that, we go into the Sketchy app. And for some reason on the iPad, it won't let you turn it sideways. You know how usually it'll fix it? It's just vertical, okay? But it's awesome because like if you go to one of, this is my page, okay?   So how do we find that? Let me go back to me again. Let me look through a few others of these. I like this girl's face. She was really pretty. And the cool thing about the Sketchy app is they don't necessarily have to look like the person because it's not like you're doing a portrait commission. You're just practicing. And drawing people's faces, I find, really helps you get better at proportional drawing of anything. It helps with your landscape painting because you really got to get the human face right. So it really forces you to get better. So this was the girl's face and I chose to change a few things. But I loved her general face anyway. So anyway, the neat thing is that you can go to like, let's see this guy's face. Yeah, he was a cool looking dude, huh? So if I go to this is inspiration, okay? So you can search people's faces. It's kind of hooking people up. It's like a Facebook for hooking up people who are artists and people who like to be sketched or want to be sketched.  And the neat thing is you have to attach their face to their image. I like this lady's face, for example. I would love to sketch her face. And when I did, what I would do is I would click the little add button. And what would you like to share? Inspiration or art? I'd say art. I'd find a photo that I did. This is all my mermaid stuff because I'm doing a mermaid painting. I'd say that was her face. I'd find it. I'd click my drawing. I'd say it was my drawing. I'd click it. I wouldn't do it. And it would attach it to here and she can see it, okay? So isn't that cool? That's really neat. So it's the sketchy app and I really, really like it. All right. Okay, so this is a girl's face that I found on the sketchy app. And I decided to do it in pastel, mostly new pastels, but some other pastels as well. This is another girl's face, again, protected by the glass scene that I did in the sketchy app. And she really did have a warm glow on her face. That's why her face is yellow.  Here's another girl's face that I did in pastel. So yeah, you can use sketchbook. Oh, I have this one a different way. Let's see. You can use sketchbooks for pastel sketching too, you know? It's kind of fun. I liked her face. Isn't that pretty? She has how she's looking off into something hopeful, I guess. Another girl's face. This is charcoal. This is pencil and charcoal, I think. Charcoal again. I really started liking charcoal. The more I worked on things.  She was just laughing. So cute. Oh, I love this little girl's face, too.  This is pencil. This is pencil. Various pencils, like I showed you, kind of like the 6B and the 4H. Okay, this is an acrylic painting in the sketchbook, okay? And I wrote down, I wanted to make sure it was reproducing another artist work. I love her bird paintings. So I decided to reproduce. Her name is Angela Moulton. She does lovely bird paintings. So you can learn a lot by representing or reproducing other artist work. These are some little sketches of some landscape thumbnails I was doing. These are little like five minute sketches I was doing. That's why they look really crazy. Let's see how many I did. Oh, this is my little piggy that I did in here. This is some serious looking dude when I did this one. Again, in charcoal.  And this was a really light charcoal. Notice it's not very dark at all. I only had one charcoal pencil with me. This was a really fast sketch. I liked her crazy hair though. I loved this woman's face. She just looks so sweet. I loved her face, too. Gosh, what just so delicate and beautiful. What can you do with youth, huh? This guy's face, too. I like to serious looking face in his beard. Beards are fun for me. I like to paint beards. This was another fast sketch, kind of weird. Oh, this girl's face. I love her face on the sketchy app. I can't remember her name. I need to start writing the names.  Have a good time. Same girl. Different positioning of her head. Same girl. She did something. What kind of go zombie? I don't know. It was kind of weird. I like trying using negative shapes and playing around with the paper and filling it up. This girl, I like to sometimes exaggerate something, a feature on someone.  She had these big eyes, but I thought, how cool to just really exaggerate them. Oh, also too, I have another little sketchbook that is this size. I love these little sketchbooks. This is on recycled paper. The one that I was just using to do a demonstration. I can't find it. I have it almost totally filled up with people's faces from sketchy. And it's great to work small. I love how it forces you to work quickly and not get so serious about it. So small sketchbooks are awesome. Again, I don't have these in any particular order. This is one that I got from Arteza. I've mentioned them before. The company, they send me free art supplies to do demos. It's a nice watercolor sketchbook. It's got a little thing here to hold it closed. I haven't done a whole lot in this one, but I started playing around with watercolor. I think this was watercolor and pastel. Again, I'm not worried about smearing it. This is for practice. This was a little something I did. I wasn't super happy with that. Playing around, being fun, being silly. I like the brightness of the flowers. Those kind of cool. And that's probably all I have in here. Oh no. I started working on Marisa.  She's so sweet. But I did a portrait commission of her little pug, Molly. And this was when I was doing some sketching on Molly. I think that's pretty much it. Yeah. That's pretty much it in this one. So, I haven't done a lot in that sketchbook. Okay. Let's look at another one. I'll think I'll save that one because that's got some other stuff in it. All right. Let's see. What do we have here? I'm gonna zoom in a little bit here. Okay. For this one, I don't even know what, oh, I must have started in this side. Okay. I did a little girl's face here. And this guy. Also too, don't be afraid to get creative. Add some text to your sketches or just have fun. That's the whole point of this. These are in marker. You know, Jackie was saying in the book to use different supplies. You don't have to always use pencil or charcoal. So, and I think I was all actually on a cruise ship when I did these. I did this lady, this one, this one. I only had three values of a marker with me. So, I used a dark. Here's the dark, the dark, the medium. Wait, let me see. Yeah, the medium and the light. You see that's actually a light marker. And of course, I have the white of the paper for a fourth value. So, you can get four value study with just three markers. And this guy's face, I really liked it. Let's see. Do I have anything else in here? Oh, yeah. There's that girl that I had on the sketchy app. This girl. Oh, I thought she was a pretty girl too. And then this girl, I am not a condoning or thinking smoking's okay because I don't like smoking. But I thought her face was really neat and it was kind of neat having the cigarette come out of the the border like that. It was kind of cool. Oh, this was like a a bowl or something that I did. Oh, this guy's face. He just looks so happy. Don't he look happy? He's a handsome guy, huh? Okay, let's see. Did I have any more in here? Yeah, I got to get to work on these and fill in them up. All right, let's see what this one has. I never know if I'm gonna, this is an older one. Okay, this actually was from a movie. I was somewhere and I didn't have any reference images. So, I found a movie with Drew Barrymore in it and I just did a quick sketch of her. Oh, this was a friend's dog. It's another way to get reference images. If you have friends on Facebook, usually the ones that are not artists, they love for you to paint or sketch their their images. Okay, so I have a lot of people that I'll always ask permission first.  It's, there's a deeper story of this that I won't share. There's kind of a creepy guy watching this lady paint.  Again, I had a friend. His this was his little grand baby and of course, he was like, oh, absolutely sketch her. She's so cute. Of course, I did a watercolor of this one too. I did my Lord and Savior. This was a sketch I did as a concept drawing for my book, The Mountain Queen, that I had one of the images. I actually kind of like the sketch better than the painting. One of the images where she has gotten older and she's looking out at the mountain that she loves and she can't go climb and many more. So she's just gotten too old to go do that anymore. I can sort of relate. This was a young boy who someone shared he needed prayer. So I did a painting of him. Then you can you can have fun in your sketchbooks too. I got some stamps and I just did some stamps with some ink and played around with coloring them. I did a little koi fish and some colored pencil. We could be here all day. This was just a sketch of a lion and her little cub. I thought the cub was just cute. Lioness I should say. This was a quick sketch I did of my son sitting on his working on his laptop. That was a five minute gesture drawing. You know how we did the gesture drawings? I know it's light. You probably can't see it. The gesture drawings working quickly and getting the general gesture. I wanted to get how relaxed he appeared. Of course, he's always relaxed. That's him.  Oh, these are some watercolor sketches done on regular paper. Okay? So don't feel bound by your surface because a sketchbook is to play.  I think these are more recent ones. Here's ones that's a watercolor sketches. Oh, let me zoom out a little bit here. This is a watercolor sketchbook. Okay? And I might have might have shown some of these before. This is pastel. I don't think no, I didn't apply clear gesso to this. So this is just pastel on watercolor paper. But I do believe I did a yeah, I did a watercolor underpainting because I can see the watercolor mark. So these I just applied watercolor or I may have used intense blocks or I may have used the neo color wax pastels. You just never know. Here's another one with watercolor and pastel. Another one watercolor and pastel. Which way am I going here? Oh, my Oreo watercolor and pastel. Another one. This girl's face. I liked this guy's face from the sketchy app. A little watercolor sketch. This has a little bit of those micron markers applied to it too. Oh, this was for some of y'all's lessons. I use my sketchbooks for my Patreon page. There's that one. Alright, this is a an Arteza cold press dual sided acid free glue bound watercolor. It's good for watercolor or mixed media watercolor pad. Oh, something for painting that I did. Little birds, little birds.  Watercolor sketches. Alright, these are a little bigger and this I like because it's on the gray paper. I love sketching with charcoal on a neutral gray surface and the Strathmore tone gray paper. I think I've used it in some videos. I really love it. Again, I'm doing it upside down because I'm left-handed and I avoid the spiral binding this way.   Oh, she just looked happy and pretty. Again, most of these are from the sketchy app. I love his face and I love what he stood for. Oh, I like this girl's face. I believe this was from the sketchy app. Sometimes I've had people want to buy the paintings from the sketchy app because you got to remember these are just normal. Oh, I can't get this one off. These are just norm. I have this one all taped up. These are just normal people that usually are not artists. Some of them are that post pictures of their kids themselves. So sometimes you might do a painting if it's good and you share it. They just might want to buy it. Alright, let's see. I started a dog commission here and I didn't finish it. Here is a lesson from the YouTube channel. It was just on using one, two, three, four, five, six, seven pastels, six including white. I liked this guy's face.  I was just having fun with color. This is pastel on gray Strapmore paper. Again, I didn't even worry about protecting it. I liked her haircut. I thought that was really kind of a cool haircut and I liked the way she had it styled. Just some little sketches. Oh, this was for one of y'all's lessons, I think. So I obviously used this for those things too. These were some what I've been working on, I think, not too long ago. I liked her face. It looked very, I don't know, romantic. She did have a really long forehead in the photo so I obviously exaggerated it. This is that girl I said I really like her face. Oh, there's a painting that I did. I don't know how this. Oh, these are some of my older sketches. I did a bigger painting of this and I think I actually like the sketch better. I love the little lamb's face. He was just smiling. Look how cute he is. You got me. That's how I feel. You got me, Lord. I'm in good hands because I'm being rescued. All right, now I've mentioned before that we can do sketching or painting in pastel on black paper. So I've talked before about this black Canson drawing paper. I like it. I like to use it to display my paintings to save them, protect them in between the pages, but I also sometimes just just sketch in pastel on them. Okay, that's just pastel. No gesso or anything. Probably again new pastels. Let's see, that's another one. It was just a neat sky and a beachy cool thing. This is one that I did not that long ago. It's getting a little muddled. I don't know why some of the pastel is getting a little dusty and there are some flecks of the wrong colors in the wrong places. I think that's pretty much it on that one. Yep. A little sketch. These are ones that I was doing while my mom was going through her radiation and I sort of needed the art as a healing time. So just kind of playing around this guy's face from the sketchy app. He just had a smirk on his face, doesn't he? This girl, her eyes were interesting to me. Oh, I loved her face. Another guy loved his hair. Oh my goodness. That's, and I hear you breathing over there. I like his hair too. Love that hair or whispering up there. Oh, there's my cousin. She's so pretty with a little kitty. Cute. I think that's it on this one. Oh, nope. There's my Oreo in the backyard. Sticking her head through the fence. She does that all the time. Oh, I hope you guys enjoyed that. This is the end of the Monet Cafe portion of this. The rest is kind of a sneak peek into a special sketchbook with a special kind of personal project that I'm working on. So I could have just made this a Patreon only video but I thought let me open up the sketchbook portion to my Monet Cafe family. So I hope you liked peeking through some of my sketchbooks and of course feel free to become a patron. Let's end this with our studio mascot, Mr. Bob Ross. Thanks, Bob, for joining us and hanging out with us today. So keep painting. Keep making the world more colorful and beautiful. And until next time, of course, happy painting.