Tech Hawaii show, the state of the state of Hawaii. Welcome to you in the viewing audience and thanks for joining us. I'm your host Stephanie Stoll Dalton. Our topic today is serious and it's about Hawaii's safety and solvency. And given the impending COVID-19 lockdown we're likely to have and the unrelenting economic distress across all sectors that we're all facing in one way or another. I think we all have questions about what leadership is enacting and what it needs to enact. So we'll talk about our current leaders with knowledgeable guests to illuminate us in this conversation. And knowing that we have new leadership soon and shortly to come to Honolulu Holi and to the White House. So now we know the cast of the leaders and who would be leaders possibly. And so we need to think about and express views on how do we select leaders? We still have some voting to do. And we need to know how we select leaders we know can make Hawaii safe and solvent again. So I'm pleased to welcome two guests today to comment on Hawaii's conditions, learning opportunities in the crisis and our prospects for recovery and hopefully returning to norm. But both of them know a lot about Hawaii and have worked here for a very long time and they work and think and write about Hawaii's issues and are knowledgeable about the community's needs. So I welcome to the show Reverend David Gerlach. He's the rector at St. Elizabeth's Episcopal Church in Paloma. And he tirelessly works to the benefit of Hawaii's neediest communities like the homeless prison population and Pacific Islanders and so on. So welcome, Father David. So glad you could come. And Dr. Neil Milner is here too. He's a meritous UH professor of political science and a political commentator and writer. And I think you can see him often in civil beat. So welcome to you, Dr. Neil Milner. Thank you. Glad you both could come. Well, on this topic, I wanted to just express one view of what might be happening here in Hawaii over the course of this experience. And my question is, do you think Hawaii and its leadership understand that Hawaii is as vulnerable to a global crisis as any other nation on the planet is? So my question is really about, has Hawaii's leadership been arrogant about what it takes to keep Hawaii safe? Is there something about the ocean around us that's gonna make us saved? So maybe your comments on that related to that would help us understand how this has come to be so serious. Well, I can start. I don't think the arrogant is the problem.  And in fact, maybe the one good thing we did, partially out of luck, was to isolate ourselves as much as possible by cutting off the tourist industry early on. I think everything we've done after that gets a D. And it's not about arrogance. It's about a kind of a sense of basically incompetence and not telling people the truth about how we were building a capacity to deal with this at the next level when things would get more serious. And so that's what I've been more concerned about. You caught me at a good time because I have a column in civil beat tomorrow about that. But, you know. Thanks very much. Yeah, well, what do you mean? Did they have a plan? Are you saying that there was a plan? They just didn't tell us about it at the quote, next level? I don't think there was a plan. I don't think there's a, I mean, here's the evidence that I would go by. And this is not all the fault of the planners. It's the fault of the resources available. We still don't know how to bring back tourists. And I don't think we're any closer to that than we were a few months ago. That's one thing. The second thing, and to me much more scandalously, is it turns out that when it comes to testing, when it comes to contact tracing, excuse me, we got nothing, basically. It's been a kind of Potemkin village that the Department of Health was claiming we had and that we didn't need anymore. And all of a sudden that turns out not to be true. So moving to the next level, which is a level we're at now, which is where there's been a spike, I don't think that we don't have the leadership capacity that has demonstrated that they can handle what is now happening. Yeah, I'm sorry to say that I very much agree with Neil's analysis of this. Just today I was talking with Josie Howard, who's the CEO of We Are Oceania. They are one of the one-stop drop-in places for folks from the marshals in Micronesia to get help on all kinds of things. And one of the things they've been working very hard on is trying to get their population tested. Because as we know, among that population, this disease is running rampant, primarily because of poverty. People live too close to each other, too many in a home. And even culturally, it's very, very difficult for folks not to gather. And they've been turned away for testing. So just today we're trying to set up a situation where we can have a drive-through testing at St. Elizabeth's for free for that population. But why is this happening in August? This should have been happening in at least April and May. And the other side of that is, in terms of our education, we're talking about schools opening up. I've got grandchildren who are going into preschool and elementary school, older kids at the university level. It is astounding to me, the lack of preparation that's happened. The superintendent of schools was on NPR last week and people were calling in about ideas and suggestions like we've air conditioned all of our schools. How are we gonna have the free flow of air with air conditioned roams? And we've sealed up windows. And instead of hearing the response that said, well, yes, and we considered that back in March and this is what we're going to do, the response was, well, that's a really good point. We'll have to think about that. There's been a lot of criticism of the governor and other leadership for the COVID-19 spread even. And certainly the health department's contact tracing fiasco that we've had going on before we even knew it. And the needy community's vulnerability. I mean, it's not like we didn't know these things. So I mean, the question is, do they deserve criticism for this? Just somewhat. They deserve to lose their jobs. Actually, that's my opinion. The governor can't lose it as easily as anybody else can. That the example of contact tracing, and here's one other point I wanna make. I've been thinking about this a lot and I no longer view this as an exceptional example of government ineptitude. It's very much indicative of the way state government generally operates around here. The lack of transparency, the bad planning, all of those things are essentially part of the state institutional political culture. And we are so used to that, that we just assume that that's how things are gonna go, but this is gonna be different and things are gonna be turned around. I'm just astonished at how much people here are behaving leadership the way they usually behave in a kind of mediocre manner. This has greater consequences because for obvious reasons, but that's another frightening thing. And later on, if you wanna talk about how we recover from that, that becomes a factor that's very much a part of it. Well, yes, we wanna say that. We wanna cover that. Yes, Father David, were you gonna say something? Well, I would like to say that the one bright spot, I think in our state government's response to all of this has frankly been in our judiciary. They have been exceptional in getting out clear information to people that when there is a spike in cases, courts are shut down immediately and alternate arrangements are made so that the business of the courts can be done. But they have been from day one, from the Chief Justice on down, made sure that people are understanding what the situation is and they have operated in a way that has been truly exceptional. And in a way that I wish they would be talking to the governor and some of these other department heads to say here is a template you can follow to not only inform, but to safeguard. Well, I think that we had a little preamble to this or premonition or remember when the rocket from Korea was supposed to be here, I don't need to chuckle at all. It was horrifying. But remember, there was absolutely no preparation at all either. And when they went to try and blow any sirens or anything, the system that was set up for that kind of warning had not been touched since 1943 or something like that after the attack. So I mean, we already had this huge warning about how unattentive, inattentive the government is to really important issues about things that aren't ever supposed to happen, but they happen. And so... So if you go ahead, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think a better example was the 30-meter telescope. We heard all kinds of things about how that was gonna be handled hypothetically, right? And all it took was people protesting and occupying a strategic place and everything fell apart. This is not about whether you're for telescope or against the telescope. My own feeling was over time, I came increasingly against it because I could see how badly it was being handled, but it turned out that the governor had nothing. All of the promises that had been made, all of the people who had supported it had nothing. All of the promises that they had made to the public or they talked about the majority of the people wanted, it turns out there was nothing there. And if anybody thought that there wasn't gonna be a protest and if anybody couldn't figure out that if you protest in a strategic place that you're gonna have to make some very important decisions about what you do there, they were naive. And it turns out that a lot of people were naive. Well, my entity is not a qualification for these leadership positions. So I wanted to ask you, Father David, and you may have something to say after Neil has just said that, but I mean, I wanted to ask, will the new leadership we have chosen for Honolulu Holly, for the mayor, are they going to be better at finding ways or preparing ways and resources to avoid and solve problems? That's our citizen question, yeah. Well, I'm gonna back into that by just mentioning one other thing though. I mean, yes, the nuclear missile test was a fiasco. Yes, TMT is a fiasco, but the fact that a pandemic is something that was expected and the fact that we haven't prepared for it. I say January or March, we should have been moving, but the fact is our Department of Health should have had a plan in place for years because this is something we've known was coming. It's happened before, we've been very lucky that it's had a relatively minimal impact in the past ones, but we knew something bad was coming. So it's frankly just inexcusable because that's what we trust government to do is to have the foresight and the technical ability to protect the people that they're serving. And this has really been a Keystone's cops operation. Well, I think in addition to that, Bill Gates was talking about this a long while ago and a couple of years ago, and I was looking at, there's one of these pharmaceuticals that's prepping up a vaccine and they were donated to by the Gates like two years ago. I think it was 2015. So that was when this huge load of money to make it happen. And that was long before there was, I shouldn't say that there was no sign because people have been predicting this, those who have been in the know. And I think that kind of gets back to the arrogance, that these people are just so arrogant and they're on such airheads and they're out there with the ideas and we've got to get on with the business of governing. But this is the business of governing. Is he people safe and from dying unnecessarily, which is what we don't have now. Yeah, so what about the new leadership that we're gonna have coming on? Do you guys see that we've made choices that are perhaps suggestive of an appreciation of skill that these people are gonna have? I mean, like in our mayor, we're now down to two people who have no government experience. So is that gonna lead us into some other competence that will have a better effect on Hawaii's health? And that can work both ways. I mean, I'd start by saying at best, it's a work in progress. There's simply no way to evaluate these two candidates with any kind of extreme confidence because they're so new to the process and because the problem was such an evolving problem. The job is changing because of pandemic. But I think that the other thing that both candidates have to be careful of, it's an advantage being an outsider and it's also disadvantage is that you're going into the same kind of organizational culture that has existed here forever basically. And so you have to, if you wanna be a change agent, you have to be able to do that. And it's very hard. I think the nature of the job, one of the things that's happening with big city mayors whose importance has been increasingly under-emphasized because people become more interested in national politics. But one of the things that's happening is that mayors are starting to make contact with other mayors around the world to share information on how the heck you deal with the pandemic, what's your city doing? And that's a kind of a different job than it was before. So it's not just the fiscal challenges, it's the nature of the work and it's the nature of being able to talk to people in ways that can be candid with them and that can reassure them, which our governor is not very good at. Our mayor called well as better at it. I wouldn't rate him as high as some of the other mayors elsewhere in the state, but he's okay. So that's the hedge answer. Because everything is changing so fast, who knows how good they're gonna be? Yeah, Father David, what do you think about that? I mean, we've got essentially two guys with business backgrounds and I guess that the cheap shot would be is that we've tried a guy with a business background, but that's really not fair to people with a business background. I know both of them, my own sense is that either of them will probably be a fine mayor. I know they're both real smart and I know they're both very linked into a lot of places in the community where they can get help. And my sense is that no matter which one is elected, they will be sure to do that. I was kind of happy to see that we didn't get a rerun of an old timer. And we shall see. I don't know that it can get much worse. I mean, I agree Mayor Caldwell has done a pretty good job, but we shall see. Well, I did see something. I think it was in civil beat about how all of those experienced ones were candidates were tainted by rail and in one way or another. Is that? So unfair. Is that fair? Are you smirking? Or is that something that makes sense to you? Father David. Yes, absolutely. It makes sense. You know, Mayor Hanuman started this.  Colleen sat on the board. So they're all kind of very intimately connected with it some more than others. And it has been a boon to our construction industry. It's probably something that's too bad we didn't do during the 90s when we were in that deep funk, but it's really been an economic disaster from just about every point of view.  And evidently they took on the hard part of it to do instead of starting with an easy part. But on the other hand, having a Washington DC experience and the horror show of the 70s while they were Jack Hammer and down all the streets to get that Metro in, Honolulu has not had a chance to have the experience of what it means to have this kind of a facility here. The Metro went underground partly and that makes it harder. But we haven't had the section that we've done is a walk in the park compared to the section that they have to finish both technologically and politically. Technologically because you got a whole lot of stuff that you have to figure out how to do with relocation and so on politically because you're interrupting the lives of a lot more people including people who drive down Tillingham Boulevard. So I mean, that's gonna be, well, if we get the money that's still gonna be very, very hard. Well, you're supposed to get the money. I mean, the federal government is mostly paying for it, isn't it? It's a matter of managing it. Well, you haven't given us the money yet. I mean, the good news money-wise is that they're in the business, the feds on this, they're in the business of giving this money away. This is not about them trying to hold back on the money. It's about using it to build public transportation. The bad news is that they quite rightly have refused actually to release that huge amount of money because until they see that the plan is in operation and it took the state, it took the city and county and hard forever to develop a plan that got provisional approval. It was like, I didn't do my homework and then I did my homework and okay, you're approved the provisionally but they have not actually written the check and I think they're waiting to see how this next stage is gonna be financed. The one that we're supposed to hear about very soon. Well, I think that your description of the expansion of the mayor's responsibilities and duties is that really interesting because it relates to one of the questions I was gonna ask which is, is government supposed to be able to do all this? I mean, is it that the government can or cannot do it? In other words, what you all do in bringing the community's awareness up and doing this, like what you're doing for tomorrow in the media and getting people to understand what's happening and then Father David with his work with all of his special needs communities and other responsibilities that are contributing to Hawaii and Lulu, but maybe something else has to happen in the way of these businessmen coming on and knowing they can't have the expertise and the deep insights that you all do that they'll put something together. I think one of them has a community of expert citizens or something like that to advise him because without the information coming into them, we kind of get in the situation we are in nationally, right? We've got somebody that's not take, there's no input. It's just output. I think it's pretty well known that there's not much advice and resource that can get through or that's desired and therefore things are happening in ways that are not informed or according to advisors. But maybe that's something that we have to think about that we're expecting too much of government. Are we expecting too much of government? That's the old liberal conservative argument. Let me talk about in the personal standpoint. Although I'm pretty far to the left on a lot of these kinds of questions, I'm fairly conservative. I don't believe, I'm always skeptical about big general plans or blue ribbon commissions that experts develop or when I see the word transformation, I begin to worry because they tend to look too far into the future without thinking about the mechanisms that you did. And I think a lot of people, and I think you're starting to see that with people's response to how we recover from this. So, but you know, this is not, I don't wanna dignify the state's response here by saying if we need something all that new. I mean, there are changes you can make primarily in the political culture actually. But this is, I mean, you have to give people information. You have to keep them safe. You have to follow up with certain things and you have to be whatever it means, some kind of fiscal responsibility. You have to know the kinds of resources you need and so on. So I don't even wanna talk about this kind of state. If the two mayoral candidates wanna set up committees of experts, that's fine. You get some good ideas. I spent my life working with committees of experts. They're called faculty departments. It has its good side and it has its bad side. But that's good. But that really doesn't, I don't wanna dignify the kind of basics or politics by thinking that it has to operate out at that level. You need honesty. You need certain kind of sets of limits on what you can do. And there's basic things that you have to do. And there has to be things. Go ahead. One of the things that we just seem to lack here locally in too many offices starting with the governor is a lack of imagination and just a lack of a willingness to take a stand without worrying things to death. That's what's been so troubling. And I think that's why we're in this mess that we're in. I don't understand why we weren't putting bracelets on people getting off of our planes. And if we saw them on a beach, they get arrested and they'd have to put a $1,000 deposit down when they get their bracelet. And in 14 days, they can show up and get that refunded. There's just all these kinds of simple ideas that we could have used to help keep track of folks who are coming here from the mainland who are probably the initial spreaders. And also, why did we go from zero to 90 with respect to opening and then closing our parks when people began to congregate impermissibly? Why not institute months ago with HPD just instituted, which was roving bands of cops to go break up these groups and arrest people and cite people? Why did that just start in July? Why didn't that start in March? These are the kinds of things that I don't understand why our government leadership isn't seeing and putting into action. It's not rocket science. And not only isn't it rocket science, but it's the nuts and bolts, particularly of city government. One of the hard things about being a mayor is that you can't always talk about being judged in terms of abstractions. Is the garbage collected, did they set up a decent system for picking up the big items or the cops behaving in a certain kind of way? And here was one like that. I think it was partly a lack of political will that they, and partly a kind of sympathy, right? These people are back out there, but yeah, I had the same experience. Driving through Waikiki the last few weeks, you had big gatherings on the beach of people look like family gatherings. We're not talking about rock concerts here. Well, but I mean, it is, they add up. And so I had the same experience going over to Waimanalo all the way over around the diamond head was, it was just mobbed early in the morning. Everybody was out, no masks or anything. That was two weeks ago. But I think that what next question is, has to do with the cost, okay? So whatever you do anywhere is expensive. So we know that the state's credit rating has been downgraded by Moody's investor service. It's gone from, it's been downgraded already from stable to negative. So the impact on our economy is undeniable at every level as I said in the beginning across every sector. But these efforts are expensive to operate. I mean, the roving bands of cops through Waikiki, they're supposed to rope through all our parks and they're supposed to be monitoring for all of this. I mean, I like Father David's idea about the bracelets and all of us promising to give people stink eye if they don't have their mask on. I mean, we need all of that kind of thing. But what we're not seeing deployed are of course the expensive things. That's my surmise that they didn't do that because it was so expensive. So I have the question about the resources that can be brought to make this happen. And I keep wanting to know why the, as I've mentioned before I think to you, Dr. Milder, the golden goose of Waikiki, those hotels are not putting some money in the piggy bank here because they or also enacting the roles that they need to have there.  I mean, so what are our resources given that we're, I know there's lots of federal money from the acts that have already been passed that's come into the state. I don't know how that's being deployed but we do know that we're in trouble in the budgets at the state level and also at the city and county. So what do you see as how we're going to manage to get things to happen that need to be happening even common sense-wise things? Well, I mean, there are two things here, kind of resources that you need to get through the pandemic in the short run. Some of that is a money problem. Some of it is simply a supply chain or lack of will to get them. So we know, and I don't think those are huge expenses compared to what I'm going to say next. If testing becomes more available, if we figure out a way to do more contact tracing, that's not really a big amount of money. The serious thing is the incredible depression that we're going to face here. The estimate I heard today was that the tourist industry would not come back, would not come back to where it was before the pandemic until 2025. And the fact that a lot of people are going to be unemployed and the area where David and I live, which is not usually associated with economic vulnerability, you're going to see people from East Oahu who are going to be out of housing. They're going to be, it's going to be a new population of housing. That's the serious economic problem. What a mayor faces is that there aren't many revenues.  You've got a significant problem. They're calling for more money from government, but it isn't like we can tap into and exist a larger revenue source unless they would really raise taxes. And that raises other kinds of complications. So, and that's part of what the leadership is going to have to be like, making hard decisions, knowing when to encourage and when to be realistic and say, you have to cut back. That to me is really scary. One other thing that's scary to me is that we've been saying that we're an insufficiently diversified economy for years. And we've also been saying we haven't had enough affordable housing for years. Why do people think that all of a sudden that's going to change? I mean, the problem is worse now. And when you try to figure out how do you get out of this, how do you diversify the economy? Well, I think there are ways you can do it, but this is not exactly going to happen the day after tomorrow. So the next couple of years are really going to be tough for a lot of people. Well, I noticed that you said that the tourism isn't going to come back. I mean, I did read that the economic recoveries is certainly three to five years out. It's going to be a struggle all the way there. But I didn't, I don't understand why you say the tourists are not coming back. Are they already beaten down the doors to get out here? No, they're not. They're not beaten down the doors to get out here. And I think, I think you can't, I think the tourists are not going to come back that quickly. And I think it's, and so we rely on it, on it so much. I understand they urge to open up tourism because it's down to basically zero, but you're not going to get that huge recovery. People aren't going to want to travel. If they travel, they're not going to have money. And if they have money, that doesn't mean they're going to have, they're going to want to use it here. So I think that there's going to be a demand issue for a while. And the hook that we were using is that this is the safest place on earth. Well, that's what I'm thinking. Well, yeah. The ocean, of course. Well, yeah, that's, I mean, this is not the British empire back in the day when an island nation was really protected. So I think that I'm kind of, I really am very curious, doesn't do it, but I'm waiting to see what our, what our moves to recovery are going to be like. Well, I think so. And I was just, I was recalling that I did disagree with you while we were still rather low in our spread numbers and in our rates of infection per cases, we're up now, we're getting up there to 10% of positive COVID cases in the testing. Now, this weekend showed us that we're really in the dire stretch here. But before that, people did want out because they were thinking it was safer. So Father David, do you have any comments on that? No, not really. I wish the hotels were doing more to help quarantine people. I wish they were doing more to help house those who are unsheltered. I know there is some of that going on and I'm very grateful for that. But, you know, these are mostly multinational corporations that have very deep pockets. And I think they could be doing a heck of a lot more than they're doing now. Well, tell me what is happening with the, and we're probably gonna have to wrap up in a little bit, but I would like to know, could you share about what they're doing for houselessness? I would really like to know if anybody's doing anything that's been in my head with those empty rooms. Yeah, I don't know that anything's really being done with houselessness per se, but I do know that folks who are testing positive who are houseless are being allowed, some of the hotels are opening up to let them be in basically a quarantine situation. So IHS has some deals with some hotels to provide that service, but it's basically a relatively minor role that they're playing. And as Neil says, once this, you know, I feel like we're still like the coyote that just ran off the cliff chasing the road runner and our feet are still going wildly in the air, but we're gonna fall. And when we do, I think there's gonna be an awful lot of people who are hurt very, very badly. And that's the question of if our leadership can't even do contact tracing, if they can't even tell us the truth about how many people they've got for something like that, how on earth are we gonna deal with this coming catastrophe? That's what worries me. I think that is absolutely the question. Do you have another comment? I was just gonna say when California really first got back the San Francisco City Council, and I'm not sure about Los Angeles, of course, very hard to get more hotels to do what David had just described here as, and that's a very complicated venture because there's certain kind of people you can't isolate because they don't do well alone and so on, but there was the mayor and the San Francisco Board of Supervisors had big arguments because they wanted to put more into that than the mayor did, but the point is it became a significant political issue that did a lot more about it there again. If we kick up, if our rigs kick up, then that could be another more pressure. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's very interesting and it is someplace to go with some inquiry and maybe new leadership can have a fresh approach to looking at what all is already here that we could start tapping in some way, but I know it's complicated and we'll see how it goes and I appreciate both of you being here and your comments have been so informative and you all are so insightful. Thank you very much. This is the think tech Hawaii's state of the state of Hawaii show and I'm Stephanie Stull Dalton and I'll see you again in two weeks and certainly appreciate your attention and Aloha and Mahalo.


Okay, ladies and gentlemen, we're going to proceed now with our next presentation. And this is a particularly exciting one because it deals with the identification of Thomas Kent, who was one of the 1916 rebels. And we have here with us today James Carlson, who comes to us from the University College Dublin.  Thanks. So Jens is a lecturer at the School of Biology and Environmental Science in UCD. He has a PhD in Population Genetics from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Sweden. And his primary research interest is aquatic organisms including fishes, shellfish, and hydrothermal vent and methane sep fauna. So one could ask, what was he thinking when he got involved with the identification of Thomas Kent? But it's quite a simple explanation. He was approached by John Byrne, who was leading an Irish charity organisation about striped hyena biology in Kenya. And I think at that stage I'm just going to leave it to Jens to explain how he got involved in this fascinating project. Thank you very much. Yeah, it's a complicated history. Well, the idea of Thomas Kent actually came out of Africa, which is quite interesting. John Byrne called me a couple of days, came back from Africa and told me how the historic person was interested to identify. And friends at Ireland were not really happy to do them themselves. They're not using the same technologies. They saw problems with their identification. So that's what I'm going to talk about today, how we did it. And I wasn't alone, obviously. So there's a large group over from UCD, and we shouldn't have all the names listed down here. They're coming from Area 52, which is my own lab over there. They're doing archaeology and using genetic tools. We're doing population genetics and using a lot of statistics. And also John Finarelli, who's an expert on statistics. We brought a lot of different people together for this work. I was also supported on a bit different state organizations, et cetera and so on. Now, at the time, which would become obvious, we had the archaeologists working together with the population geneticists and statisticians. I think at the time UCD was the only place in the world that could solve this riddle. It's quite incredible. But nevertheless, so these are the people, a bunch of different peoples here involved. Thomas Kent, of course, and the identification of Thomas Kent. So, 1916, you know this story better than I do. I'm Swedish, I'm not Irish. So it went well and out. But during the rebellion, it was not only happening in Dublin. It was also happening in Cork. And Thomas Kent was supposed to be arrested in his family home, which we have up here near Castle Myles. He and his brothers were fighting the police, the Royal Irish Constabulary, as they came to arrest him. And according to legend, their mother helped them load in the guns. So there were shots fired and the constable was shot at. And this is the actual constable that was shot at, William Rowe. And this is the photograph you will find on Wikipedia, et cetera, or on the internet. This one you won't find in the press. It turns out that our sister school, SBBS, we are known as SBES over at UCD. The SBBS, one of the professors there, her husband is the grandchild of William Rowe. So it was a close connection to the actual research being done there and the researchers over there. So that's William Rowe and his wife. Thomas Kent was arrested. This photograph is allegedly from Castle Myles, as they're bringing him to the cells. The problem with it, it's probably staged. The shadows, they say this was in the morning, and if it was in the morning, the shadows are in the wrong direction. So then they're walking away. Also finding a photo opportunity where you can see all the faces of the guards. It's very, very unlikely. So we and the archaeologists believe this is a staged photograph of Thomas Kent. Well, it was brought to Colise Barracks in Cork, where he was also executed later on. So that was basically it. He was put in a non-marked shallow grave in 1916. And the British military records are often extremely good. But it will tell you who was doing what, how many bullets were fired, what caliber were fired, where the person was sitting or standing, and all of that detail is usually in the records. This was not the case for Thomas Kent. It was unusual in terms of having so very little information about it. So another six years passed and still have the British rules. And in 1922 he gets Irish rule. What they've done then is to have a memorial plaque in the graves around the marks of the reputed location of the burial place of Thomas Kent and in the grounds of Cork prison. So they put up this plaque, but this plaque had been moved around. So they weren't sure about the location where Thomas Kent was actually buried. He wasn't forgotten, though, in Cork especially. Kent station, the railway station in Cork is named after him, and there's also busts here of Thomas Kent. So during Irish rule he was remembered in Cork, but this exact location was unknown. And what happened in 19 or in 2015 is that they were going to do some work when Cork prison is actually not going to be used anymore. So they sent the archaeologists there and tried to locate the grave of Thomas Kent. So this is how it looked in 2015 before the archaeologists started digging. And this is how it looked after Gary Donne. And there are no remains in there, obviously. But the grave had been opened, probably. And you can see a brown mark here in the grave, which means that someone has been digging through the grave before. So they found the remains of a person there. And this is what came out in the news. So human remains believed to belong to Thomas Kent have been recovered in the grounds of Cork prison and the remains were found during an archaeological dig yesterday. And now the remains will be DNA tested. To clarify, if there are those of the Castle of Lyons man who was executed in 1916, that's a very tall order. Does anyone know in here how to do the DNA test to identify a 99-year-old corpse lying in the shallow grave in Cork, which is not the triest place in the world? And the water is a big enemy, a big, big enemy for DNA. It will deteriorate the DNA. So before we begin how we did it, let's talk about how Francis Ireland will do it. And that is how all the forensic forces in the world will do it. And Francis Ireland is the state organization working with the police to do all the DNA testing. The DNA testing itself is not done by the police force. It's done by Francis Ireland. So they use something called micro satellites. I've heard today that they're being called STRs. Those are the same thing. In the field of forensic and genealogy, you call them shock tandem repeats, STRs. We call them micro satellites in the world of biology. It's the same marker. So what we're looking at here is one person here, for instance. This could be a sequence from one person. And those are the four letters from the talk we had earlier. We've got brilliant introduction to DNA. It's ATC. And gee, that's it. That's exactly what we're seeing here. In some areas you've got repetitive motifs. In this case it's TTA, TTA, TTA, TTA and so on. That motif is repeated. That's a micro satellite. So there's one individual up here, or one sequence, and it contains the micro satellites. And it's the number of repeats that we count. That tells us what we call the genotype. That gives us the name, the information about the locus. And the locus is just a specific part of the DNA that you're interrogating. We're looking at the micro satellites here. Probably not even human, by the way. All animals, all organisms have it. So there are just variants in lengths. You can see here, this is a long repeat. This is not as long a repeat. This is short. These are longer again. Obviously we can tell that that's more DNA than from two people. One person can only have two variants. One from the mom and one from the dad. And we heard that repeatedly in the previous talk. It's great. So the police force, they use micro satellites or STRs. And when we look at them, we can see them like this. This is how they look on an automated sequencer. And we look where these peaks are. So we get a pattern, a profile. And that's what they usually call a DNA profile. So there are about 100 to 450 base pairs long. And these are the base pairs. So you can count this one here. It's going from zero all the way up to 120. So that's 120 letters. That's the length in base pairs. The forensic forces uses 15 to 17 different micro satellites. Now for STRs. That is enough to tell all humans on this planet apart. All of you have a unique profile. Except identical twins. Everybody else has a unique profile. So that's why they're using it. The forensic forces have asked the genealogy, invested millions and millions and millions into this type of marker. And that's what they've been using in the police forces. And just now I'm hearing that you're moving into the single nucleotide polymorphism, which I think is a good thing. So that's how forensics are on work. And what they do, they go out to a crime scene, for instance, and they find blood splatter and knife or something like that. So they have a trace. They take that trace and generate the profile. And if they have a suspect, in this case we have a suspect over here, they generate another profile. And if they match, well, there's your culprit. So this is how genetic identification is done by forensics Ireland all the time. If there is a body though, a human remains found. For instance, on the beach you find that a sailor has been beached. You basically have very little tissue left where you can get DNA. They usually take the femur. And I'd like to point out, none of the skeletal remains you will see in this demonstration or this talk here will be in Thomas Kent. So these are just stolen pictures from the internet, basically. So they drill into the femur. And the femur is the thickest bone in your body. And that's why it's traditionally thought to be a good DNA source.  And then you can identify a person for it, in this case, a sailor. In Thomas Kent's case, or Mr. Rex, as we became known in the lab, we had the skeletal remains. And they were laid out in cork moor. And we were supposed to generate the profile. But even if it generated the profile, how did we know this was Thomas Kent? We had no Thomas Kent alive. And we had no clothing or anything like that. We knew that he would be wearing like a toothbrush or things like that, that are good sources for DNA. So we had nothing to compare to. We had a trace. And if we could generate DNA from that, we had no archive. They didn't have DNA testing in 1916. So there was no archive whatsoever of Thomas Kent's DNA, at least not in a form that they put away. The police force also tried to get DNA from the femur, but failed. The bone wasn't in too bad shape. Or rather, the DNA in the bone wasn't in too bad shape. And that's probably coming from 99 years in the shallow grave. So at this time, I'm going to talk a little bit about DNA integration. So Thomas Kent's body has been in the shallow grave for 99 years. That fragments DNA. And I'm just going to do a comparison. Imagine we had to form chromosomes. The chromosomes actually have DNA. The stream of DNA is going around the chromosome. It's compacted into a chromosome. So if you have the DNA and make it a long stretch, you will have, as we heard earlier, we had 22 pairs plus 2. We had 23 or rather we had 23 copies chromosomes. One of them being the X or the Y chromosome. So if you pull it out, you can think about it as a spaghetti. And every year it dries spaghetti. And every year you whack it with a hammer. And you can see the spaghetti pieces being smaller and smaller and smaller the whole time. And if you do that 99 times, you can think yourself about the dry spaghetti. You don't have much left. It's basically powder. So when we work with contemporary DNA, what we do is do our best to make sure it's not degraded. So we're using gloves, we're using DNA preservatives, ethanol and all kinds of things to make sure that the DNA is of high quality. We have freezers. That's a minus 80 freezer, for instance, where you can keep the DNA and make sure it's very, very good condition. This is from Action Thomas Casework. We worked with Math Protection and so on to avoid any contamination because of contemporary DNA. It's so much higher quality than the old DNA. These guys doing the lab work here has actually been working on 8,000 year old remains from Poland. And there's a little bit of a nice story from there which came out of the Thomas Kent analysis. But we're doing our best to work with fresh DNA, to have high quality DNA. What happened here, and that's what the police force realized or our friends at Ireland realized, is that these pieces of spaghetti were too short. They were less than 100 to 450 letters. The pieces were too small to be used for micro satellites or SDR analysis. So they couldn't work with that at all. So micro satellites were not an option. So this is when they contact us. And what happens, and what makes it so unique, is that the Ron Pinhasse lab has developed a way of getting DNA from a specific bone in the human body that it can get from very, very, very old remains. And that was the next generation conference. It was about sequencing. I had nothing to do with Thomas Kent at all. A month before the police contacted me. So I knew about Ron Pinhasse's lab and that they were really good at getting old DNA. And I was doing population genetics. And we got the conditions in Ireland were absolutely right. It was almost a fluke. It was so right that we could do this. We had the people who could get the DNA. We had the statisticians, and we had the population geneticists all talking to each other at the same time. So I brought in Ron Pinhasse's lab and I brought in John Finarelli's lab. And we started working on this bone here, which is called the Petros bone. So I went down to Cork, to the Cork morgue and got the Petros bone. Why the Petros bone? This is the densest bone in your body. What that means is that it has this really, really heavy so the DNA in there lies protected from the environment. And you have to drill this bone in a special way to get the DNA out.  Don't use that powder at all because it's contaminated from the outside and then you use the inner parts of it. But if you drill, it's working at too high speed.  So it's a very, very fine-tuned operation to do. This method has not even been published yet. It was one of the methods that we had to work with for Thomas Cairns. It's only a few people in the world that know how to do this. So, what happens was that the Rompinaceae lab got the DNA out of the petrol's bone and they gave it to us and it was very fermented. We decided to go for something called the mind seed from its next generation sequencing but the beauty of it is this. It's only 65 base pairs. No need for 450 base pairs or so. So only 65 base pairs is what we needed. That's 65 methods, not 450 as the forensics people would need. We also realized that Thomas Cairns actually had a brother that had a offspring. So there were a bit of nieces around them. Two nieces were actually driving this whole Thomas Cairns identification. We managed to get blood samples from the two nieces and we thought, no, we have a template but it's not supposed to be 100% matched because these are not identical twins, obviously, to Thomas Cairns. They're nieces. And then we can do a calculation and if you do that, we use something called Kweller and Wutnikes, Rx and Y and I'll tell you later about that but what it tells you is they should have 25% degrees or 25% relatedness to Mr. X if Mr. X is Thomas Cairns. We chose to use the single nucleotide polymorphism. We heard about them in the previous talk. It was great, so there are single nucleotides that differ. And how they look? Again, we have the sequence here for one individual or two individuals. One individual here, each rows, actually one sequence and they should go down if you find a region with a differ. Most of them have a T in here but in some individuals or some sequences, we get an A. So that's a TA single nucleotide polymorphic site. So that's a snip. So those are the ones we try to interrogate with our 65 base pair shotgun sequencing and on the DNA strand this is basically what happens. They differ by one base pair. So this is what we did. I'm not going to go into detail with this. This is just a library preparation so you can do your next generation sequencing. But what I would say is next generation sequencing has revolutionised the world of genetics completely. When I did my first next generation sequencing run probably back in 2012, we used an old system called 454 but when I got my data back I had generated more genetic data than my university had previously done throughout its history from one row. The second one I did a couple of years later I generated more data than the university had done previously. You think the computers are developing fast but more slow and the number of CPUs you can fit to the number of transistors I think it is on the chip and how they increase. Genetics are outpacing computer development by an order of magnitude. So it's getting faster, better, cheaper and more all the time. I won't go into details about this of course. So what we did was we sequenced the shotgun sequencing it's called shotgun which means we're not targeting specific regions when you run a snip chip that we've heard about before and it's 23 mean so when they use snip chips they're looking for certain parts of the genome we're looking for everything because we have so little DNA to go for so we're basically trying all the sequences we can. So the expected results and you see the share number of data here is expected 8 million sequences from each of these three individuals Mr. X needs one and needs two. So we generated total 24 million sequences and if you did that with Sanger sequencing which is the method previous to next generation sequencing it's about six euros in sequence those six times 24 million is what it would have cost them using the old methods. So what we wanted was this we have all our small sequences here 65 base pairs and up here we should have the human genome which is available so that's available in public repositories and then we would line our sequences up we basically map them towards the human genome and we will find positions where they differ from the human genome on average so we can identify single nucleotide polymorphic sites. So this is what we wanted so we then we should download the SNP specific allele frequencies these are the frequencies of how often do we have an A or a T at a certain position from a thousand genomes project which is also available for the public. The idea was if Mr. Rex is Thomas Kent then Thomas Kent's nieces should have a relatedness of 0.25 to Mr. Rex. As a control the two nieces they were sisters according to old paperwork and according to themselves and so on they should have a relatedness of 0.5 this is using the coiler and goodnight to symmetric our XY the importance of the symmetric is because we share probably what 99 percent of our DNA across all humanity not even more so it's not simply a little sharing if we have a population that's slightly inbred which would be every population in the world this still resets the zero relatedness to zero so no matter how inbred the population is that you're looking at both siblings always have a relatedness of 0.5 even though in reality sharing they probably have 0.98 or something so that's why we use the coiler and goodnight to symmetric our XY and this is what we got we did not get a lot of sequences so we can pull them up like this and this is what we got so Mr. Rex didn't generate eight million sequences only seven million sequences and of those only 26 percent were human the rest of it was bacterial and other things you find in the soil Thomas Cantonese 1 and 2 generated a high percent of human DNA human sequences about 80 percent and they were new samples so this is the difference between working with all degenerated DNA and contemporary DNA and why don't they get 100 percent well your blood has other organisms in it actually more microbial cells in you than there are human cells so there are a lot of microbes in there as well so this is what we got only rarely have we more than one sequence or one spot of the human genome and that's when we started scratching our heads like what have we done all these estimators demand that we have both the fathers and the mothers DNA in you we had the mothers or the fathers and we didn't know which so that was our problem so shotgun sequencing generated very low read depth and with read depth we talk about how often we read the same area of the genome very very low mostly just once it was slightly expected due to the degenerated or the graded DNA that we expected and remains that been left out for 99 years so we only got one read per SNP locus and virtually no heterozygals and the heterozygals we heard about before and the previous talk was great so you can get A A that means that you're a homozygot you got an A from the mother and an A from the father you get an A and a C you got one, the A from the mother or the father and the C from the mother or the father but you have two versions heterozygals, not one the other one is called homozygals if you have CC you're homozygals if you have an AC you're heterozygals so we virtually have no heterozygals so we're thinking analyze as homozygals only half the genome if you just look at this as homozygals do you expect the relatedness because we're looking at only half the genome would be 0.25 between full siblings and offspring uncles, half siblings grandchildren and so on should have a relatedness of 0.125 instead of 0.25 because we're only looking at half the genome so we started working with this and what we developed were statistical and mathematical scripts to what we call forced homozygosity so even if they were heterozygals we randomly picked one of the variants, the A or the C throughout the genome on these individuals so it forced them to be heterozygals or homozygals and then we analyzed them and what we got from that was the relatedness between these one and these two of 0.279 and the expected value for full siblings which they supposedly were and I believe they are is 0.25 so this is a number that was very close to what we expected but lo and behold that doesn't mean much because we're able to say that yes there are siblings and we need that so bring it down to Thomas Kent or Mr. Rex Mr. Rex and these one had a relatedness of 0.134 which is very close to the 0.125 Mr. Rex and these two 0.124 so now these numbers look pretty darn great to me at least but how short are we about this how do we know that if we don't throw anyone else into this system that they show up with the same relatedness so what we ended up with simulations and this is a big part of the project so we simulated two different relatedness related individuals in each of these categories so I'll show you here so this is Thomas Kent and these one and two they're shared on 3,500 SNPs now those are not the same they're shared with Thomas Kent or Mr. Rex they're unique SNPs in each of these situations so they're shared on 3,500 we simulated an unrelated individual using the thousand genomes data set and we made them homozygals and they should have a relatedness of 0 if they're unrelated and they do have a relatedness of 0 so this is just a histogram showing you how many times did we hit the exact number 0 here and the spread of it so the spread of this shows you the statistical power of your analysis the height of it shows you how many individuals follow the relatedness classes and these are all simulated individuals that we forced to be homozygals this is a 0.125 group the second order of the real relatedness is 0.25 but because we looked at half the genome half that's the 0.125 this is the result from that and there is the full sibling group and the sisters go straight into it which was very good we're quite sure we could identify these as siblings so Thomas Kent and niece one they shared some 1,500 SNPs and their relatedness was here so these now we are going down in SNPs we used that over in excess of 3,000 now in half that the statistical power goes down but this is two times an unrelated individual 2,500 siblings both the nieces and 2,000 full siblings were all simulated and we had this and they were falling right in between there's actually no overlap with the others and the last sibling niece number two and again we have some 1,300 SNPs and they fall right in the middle so we were quite convinced that this is actually Mr Rex is actually Thomas Kent and there's an uncle to these two nieces we were quite convinced about that so that's what we brought in the statistician so how sure are we about this less than a million that we were wrong the odds that we were wrong were less than 1 in the million now that's a big number but then we also tested what's the likelihood of Thomas of Mr Rex not being related according to either half sibling uncle or close relatives so there's something about from that it's quite good in excess of 5 trillion times more likely that Mr Rex was related to the nieces to not being related the 5 trillion is a hard number to understand we're about now what 6 or 7 billion people on the planet there will never be and there never has been if you combine all humanity 5 trillion people on this planet it just won't happen that number is too big so we're quite happy with the results we concluded in our conclusions that Mr Rex was indeed Thomas Kent that's it thank you guys that was fabulous this really has been pioneering work because the processes that you used in this identification process a lot of the you actually developed from scratch yourself and Excel is your friend or enemy the first simulations we did took just to do one of those relatedness classes and we hadn't told them mine we had three relatedness classes and we had three different tests one of those would take a week using Excel so take it off a long time we now streamline that and we can do this very very very very well now there's a lot of interest in ancient DNA and already at the conference we've talked about identifying world war 1 soldiers who are found in the green fields of France we've also talked about the Barrymore project where they're actually digging up the early Barrymore from the 1770s and trying to analyse his DNA there really have been some huge advances and I think it's very interesting to see the differences between the work that you have done and the traditional work that forensic laboratories do it's very very different the forensics have invested so much into this STR microsatellite way of doing analysis and they're unlikely to change in the coming 10 years really? because they really should shouldn't they? but microsatellites are brilliant for contemporary data contemporary DNA it's popular and when you talk about the degradedness of the DNA what was the average read length of a segment it was way before below 450 base pairs 65 is what you had pretty much nothing out of Thomas Campbell larger than 65 is so for that kind of read length you're really looking for NGS testing rather than STR testing? yes that's one of the problems that I think is going to face us now the O'Brien's want to dig up some of their ancestors so we'll have to do NGS testing rather than STR testing particularly historic and ancient DNA let's have a few questions from the audience we're going to start with John Reid and then go to Jerry Cork Cork thank you very much this is fascinating I take it the other non-DNA evidence that you had like the length of the bones etc that you didn't talk about was all confirming the evidence and I'm wondering if the kind of technique you're using is now being considered for things like the Richard III case? the problem with Richard III is that we don't have any relatives questions from Jerry Cork? there are two questions if I may firstly I know we couldn't form a link with the MTD because he was the brother were you able to extract MTD DNA or Y-chromosome? Y-chromosome, yeah Y-chromosome is part of the step panel that we use and we can't say that he's in the mail but there are things we can never disclose the actual data because of privacy reasons okay the second question we are familiar with in housey lab and they do extraordinary work and we read all the papers and I think yet about a thousand samples of the lab and we're looking forward to the new papers coming out and those how does the other lab the population genetics lab in New Zealand? how does that work? what type of projects are you working on? we usually work with a variety of organisms but genetics is a wonderful field because it's generic so you can move from fish to birds back to humans and that's not the problem the biologist is the same DNA is DNA so it doesn't matter it's very easy to move in between the fields and I've been doing a lot of studies on relatedness analysis of fish okay we have a question here from Sean Quinn so I'm going to give you the microphone Sean this is a very simple question last week by coincidence I posted a kid off to family tree DNA that person whose great-grandparent was a kid and there's a family story that they're related to Thomas Kent so are these nieces DNA is it out there on a jet match you couldn't persuade them to do so I'm not responsible for that I never met the nieces in person it's been done by the police in which means we're purely scientific lab and stay away from anything else nice try Sean we'll be having a conversation I'm representing court genealogical society I attended your presentation in UCC absolutely below with the methodology what is missing from this presentation is actually the contextual information of the likelihood of a person being buried in that location the condition of the body and the records behind it as well the newspaper articles so I think with Thomas Kent you've got best of both worlds you've got the historical information we were not really identifying Thomas Kent we were confirming but that's what we did there were so much evidence saying that this would be Thomas Kent and the other thing I've actually come to ask you I've been sent to some of our DNA group to see if the DNA will ever be made available and doesn't look like it's going to be it's not very likely at all we've got several people you shouldn't talk to me you should talk to John Burns over at the police that's not my call at all okay thank you very much well I suppose Thomas Kent had he'll have relatives on the direct mail line if you go up far enough on his great grandfather and then coming down we probably could have a direct mail line but did you get why DNA that would be viable for analysis from the samples well we've got snipped there are a number of snips from the white chromosome and I obviously can't tell you how many anything about it you can't tell us how many why steps so what we do is we do confirmation what we do is we get the DNA results back we look for why DNA so we can confirm it's a male then we take the Y DNA away because it doesn't have to relate to this calculation because it's not on the female side at all so we take that away literally so we don't I can't give you that information it's part of our record of course so it is possible to extract the Y DNA from the genome that you're able to recover and then maybe you could potentially this is why this is different than your snip chips your snip chips find markers you don't search for something you interrogate for what you have you have a probe that finds what you're looking for shockwave sequencing finds everything there might be genes in there that have rare diseases that's totally confidential that's why we can't give the data out if it was a snip chip we could do the snip chip but that's not the case for this type of approach with shockwave sequencing I think the question came up particularly with regards to the arrows barring the work it could be extract and separate out the Y chromosome and then look at that genome and look for snips in the Y chromosome to then identify some snips that might also be present in present day descendants along that direct male line I don't think that would have been a problem at all the shockwave sequencing will find your Y chromosome if it's a question of inequality rather than anything else that's very very good to hear one question then how do we persuade forensic labs to change the way they work well for them this is not a high priority no one was going to get brought to court for Thomas count so it has very little use for them and the investment for them would be enormous they spent so much money so much time you talk to me about your STR you talk about all the distributions that's all known that's thanks to all this investment and if you move into another field using next generation sequencing instead talking about 10, 15 years down the road before they would do anything like that how much did all this cost can you give us a figure well this was a total free before the Irish state oh so it's free no it was so it was a lot of money no it sucks me back to the perfectly honest now if you had time to because we had to develop new techniques there were none of them that's ever done this before so that took an awful long time long time so we're talking about salaries for the workload yeah that would be very expensive would have been, it's not now but the consumable costs are probably 2500 euros or something well that's very reasonable really so that means that all of us here will be thinking now what of my ancestors could I go and again I'll take a comment from Patrick Kennedy I may be off the subject but there's another Thomas Thomas M. Kettle he was a Cambodian UCD auditor of the history society he enjoyed for that job and he was killed and he wrote the famous sonnet to his daughter that he was there neither for King nor King King or Heizer but for the sacred scriptures and four days later he was dead and his remains have not been found now the Irish government and people like that would you be able to advise them we wouldn't need them we're doing that a side story here is that John Byrne that police representative is now also a master's student in our lab so we're working very closely with the police and how to develop techniques and how to employ the latest genetic techniques in forensics so we're working with them already the problem we have is that UCD cannot go out and analyze the Thomas camp whatsoever because we don't have the permission and to work with human subjects in the university world is that much of text and form should have to fill in but if the state demands that you do it it's much easier did you hear the excellent lecturers our good friend here I don't think we're here it is something that you should examine it will be up on YouTube at some stage at some stage great well one final question for you gents obviously we are a community of genealogists and a community of genetic genealogists as well how do you think what we do is going to impact on what you do over the course of the next 10 years pedigrees are very important but not only from a human perspective what we're looking at is farmed animals pedigrees are extremely important we do work a little bit we have a couple of pedigrees we have a PhD student from one of these we've got access to all these lip trips and stuff like that fantastic stuff to play around with but also salmon farming for instance where you have anything that has been selected that whole idea of bringing animals into an enclosure and then breed on them to have different traits leads to inbreeding even diary to realize that so the question is can we go in with genetics get good pedigrees and avoid inbreeding as much as possible zoos for instance so using pedigrees is something that's very very important into any care of animals be it for zoos bees for productions and so on and many animals in the zoo for instance you don't know who's doing what with who it's not to do anything that hurts it's not the afterwards that you can find out using genetics who did it with who well listen thank you so much for a fantastic presentation I think we've learned a huge amount from today I think you've created a lot of ideas in people's minds and we're all targeting certain ancestors and our family trees wondering are they very below the ground or above the ground and how many forms will they have to fill in and I think the comments you've made about the methodology are also very interesting and that's something we will take away and work on as a genetic genealogy community so just thank you very very much for a wonderful presentation


What's going on everyone Sam here with late in sports cards? We're doing 21 22 Panini one-on-one basketball hobby 10 box full case break number 23 pick your team style gonna read off the list of names and teams Anthony C Warriors Anthony S Pacers Antoine W with the Lakers Arthur C Hawks Chang S Nets Chin H with the Knicks Chon why W Wizards Derek J Nuggets Eric R Thunder Harper beat pelicans hang Y sixers Jack C with the Bulls Jake H Rockets Jonathan Q Celtics Josiah N Blazers Thank You Josiah Koon Paul P with the Hornets Kyle M Bucks Lee M with the Clippers Matthew X Heat Suns Jazz Pension C Cavs and Timberwolves Ryan C with the Mabs Ryan S Kings Sean M Raptors S Han Pistons Tion key H with the Grizzlies Wendy J magic and Zoran C with the Spurs. Let's do it guys Yes, Steven, I know what you mean. I know you mean I wish it was Wish it was what's it called autographed as well. That'd be cool Sorry Richard Always gets a little loud remember you're close to the Close to the mic here All right box one. Good luck everybody Yeah, just a blazers to go in the next break and then there's like two teams in the 24. Oh, no blazers in 24 Oh nice, never mind just kidding. Someone take the blazers when I was away Yes, thank you there William. Thanks William appreciate him. I'm in We've got nice starting off with the Timberwolves. That's gonna be Carl Anthony Towns. Hey, thanks for the sub there Northcott Ten out of nine, you know, I'm assuming that's Josiah, right? My own case timeless our start of my orange bar. Wow. Oh Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, gotcha gotcha gotcha. Let me go back to my list then we've got a Redemption rookie dual Jersey autographs card number 17 Scotty Barnes Let's go congrats Raptors Sean M There you go, Sean congrats, buddy. It's a second Scotty. We've pulled in two three cases That'll work For sure that'll work right there. Heck. Yeah, another Scotty, man another squatty I'm always watching this and wish for the Magnus You can make that Sean My restream has updated how many watchers we have how many viewers I've got two oh two as well, but that's been two oh two for like a year Got David Duke, Jr. 49 out of 99 for the Nets nice one there not a lot of David Duke cards out there He actually played really well down the stretch last Last season there you go Nets Sean is wrong Nice one here red 18 out of 25 Trey man on the three color two color RPA There you go thunder That is Eric R. Congrats Eric Nice one there man Tray man. He's got a nice sig Florida Gator legend. Nice one there congrats Eric Next one up We've got going to the Wizards. That's gonna be 17 out of 99 Corey Kispert like we pulled like three of these that I so far the Corey Kisper tonight. Yeah, nice one there You say something Yeah, please Nice one there congrats Wizards Rookie Spurs Joshua Primo 73 out of 99 Going to the spurs. I already see what it's not funny because I already see what you wrote so It's already gone. It's already gone. I Already know it's coming. So there's no shock value Very funny That's gonna be Kyle Kuzma who's 33 out of 99 There you go again Wizards nice one there and we've got Kade Cunningham 56 out of 99 There's our first Kade congrats Detroit Pistons is Assam congrats Assam On the Kade 56 out of 99 Kade Now we need a Jalen Green. I think it's the last big big rookie and a giddy I guess too Nice one here going to the Timberwolves De-loading the Angelo Russell 11 out of 15 That looks to be I think that's on the card that print line. We'll send an empty box and wrapper with the T-wolves That looks like a pretty nasty either print line or scratch so Sorry about that T-wolves Send you guys a box All right next hit rookie for the Nuggets bones Highland one out of 49 congrats Denver Denver Denver Denver Where is Denver? I keep going by him that is Derek J congrats Derek Yeah, one of the cards have like a little scratch on it. So we just send an empty box and wrapper there One out of 49 nice bones. We've got pulled another one of these Manu Ginobli that's 11 out of 30 for the Spurs nice one there's San Antonio The San Antonio Spurs picking up a Manu Ginobli where's they gonna go here back to my break There you go Spurs and now we're hit timeless RJ Barrett 44 out of 49 go into the Knicks Congrats, New York Chin H Oh, that's over Tatum too. Oh the disrespect The disrespect. I love it. Oh, we gotta get we gotta get Blake one of these cards. Oh, you love Jason Tatum Oh, that's that's awesome Over Jason Tatum that's awesome nice RJ 44 out of 49 I Love it dude. I gotta I had to bring that over to Caleb. I'm sure he's in the gaming stream Good luck here guys next box Another good case honestly. Oh, yeah, really good case We've got oh nice for the Celtics Kevin Garnett 94 out of 99. Oh, is it a Silverado? Some RJs are blue. Nice. Yeah, Staudemire Waiting in your case you pulled the Staudemire is the Staudemire blue ink or is it silver ink? Cuz we pulled the blue ink on release day. Do you have a silver ink or a blue ink Amari on your timeless? 94 out of 99 Got the Rockets of Clyde Drexler 25 out of 35 Clyde the glide nice one there H town Houston What do we got on Houston? Jake H. Congrats Jake. That's game used on the Clyde as well Jake 23 out of 35 nice Clyde. Oh, still a 20 piece. God, that's fantastic Nothing brings a smile to my face All right, we've got a Jaren Jackson jr. Going to the Grizzlies 42 out of 99 Nice one there for the Grizzlies and then we've got Nice Jalen Suggs 89 out of 99 on the dual at rookie Jersey Auto congrats on that one. That's going to Wendy congrats Wendy J Nice Jalen Suggs All right, can we go three for three on Zion timeless is Right here Zion timeless treasure right here for Thomas moment. Oh 26 out of 99 that's gonna be Jalen Green nice rookie there for Houston again Jalen Green Still need to pick up his auto not a timeless, but for the Celtics Robert Parrish 22 out of 49 that's Jonathan Q Jonathan Q. Yes, sir game used Robert Parrish Jersey Auto nice one there 22 out of 49 Oh Yeah, the chief Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Yes, sir Nice one here. That's gonna be a Jalen Brown 47 out of 99 for the Celtics Congrats Celtics and last card of the break. Good luck here everyone. It looks like it's going to the wizards Corey Kisper 32 out of 99 on the prime rookie Jersey Auto congrats wizards That'll do it for the break everyone. Thanks again for the fill and next up. We've still got a lot of cases this to gum a pump guys


Welcome, Sheboygan. We have another show, the Sustainable Sheboygan Task Force, Sustainability Spotlight. Our guest for today is Aaron Brault. He's a planner with the county. And today's topic will be transportation and more specifically bicycles. So Aaron, if you could introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about yourself and your position at the county. Again, my name is Aaron Brault. I'm the county planning and conservation director. Prior to that position, I was hired by the county to facilitate the non-motorized transportation pilot program grant that the county received in 2006. So that's early on with the county where I spent a lot of my time and focus working. And now I'm the director of the planning and conservation department. So early on, we had dedicated staff working on that project. Now, we don't have dedicated staff. I mean, we still have staff working on that project, but we don't have a dedicated staff position. So I've been with the county now for about eight years. I've been in all sectors. I've worked in the private sector at an urban planning consulting firm. I've owned my own business. And the last eight years now, I've been with the county. And you're also on avid bicyclists, too. I try to be. Yeah, I know it's hard when you have many meetings, but I still see you running around town. Yeah, meetings and kids. So make it a little more difficult. So the Sustainable Cheboygan Task Force has been around for some time, and I know you've been a part of the transportation committee, which this falls under that. As a member of that committee, what is the transportation committee working on and what have they accomplished? Sure. I believe the sustainability task force started in 2008 at the city. I'm technically the county's representative on that committee. The format of that committee, there's a number of different members from you know, private sector businesses, city staff, small, large businesses, nonprofits, things like that. So even though I'm a city employee, I think I technically represent the county on that committee. So for the past few years, as you mentioned, that committee's broken down into different subcommittees that focus on particular things, you know, what may interest people the most. And I sort of have a transportation slant, whether it be bicycling, trains, cars, rail, you name it. So I'm on that committee. Over the years, our primary focus has been really helping implement the grant. So whenever we need support from the city for projects and stuff, me and the other members on that transportation committee work hand in hand to go through the different projects and things like that, that might be looking to be implemented in the city. So that's been our primary focus. Now that the grant is sort of wrapping up and the projects and the dollars have been spent for the projects, I imagine we'll start to focus more on like policy types of issues. In the past we have delved into some of the policy issues. Some have been successful, some have not been successful. One of the successful ones is to... we got the Common Council from a recommendation from our sustainability task force to consider under new, let's say road projects, to consider installing bike lanes or bicycle facilities and pedestrian facilities as part of all projects. It's commonly known as Complete Streets. You have areas of communities. One of the issues when you don't do that is you have these dense urbanized communities, subdivisions and stuff that don't have those facilities and there's a cost to that. Busing costs for schools, busing is much more expensive than providing a sidewalk. So if you don't provide those facilities, there are costs that outweigh the cost of developing those facilities. It becomes a bit short-sighted. And it's short-sighted, yep. And statistically speaking, I'm a numbers guy, so statistically speaking, those neighborhoods that have those amenities sell out quicker, are more stable, the property values are more stable in the long-term. They're more desirable, things like that. So in my mind, I hate to use the cliche, it's a win-win for everybody. It's cheaper for the taxpayer long-term because they don't have to provide long-term busing. The busing companies don't like that, but that's the truth of the matter. It's diversifying. Yep, and again, those areas provide more stable types of neighborhoods. Excellent. So the City of Sheboygan recently published a sustainability plan. Do you know how the plan addresses transportation? Yeah, it's definitely part of that plan. Like I said, the complete streets, considering all amenities like that, all forms of transportation. People forget everybody's a pedestrian at one point. Whether they drive a car every day, they're a pedestrian at one point. And even if it's getting from their car to the front door, you want to have inviting facilities for that. Otherwise, people just won't do it. Other items in that plan, from a transportation standpoint, transit is a big thing. Not only making connections in a bike facility, but an overall function of the transportation system. Transit, even though gas has been going down, according to the local transit director, their ridership has been increasing. Cars are getting more and more expensive to maintain. I believe the statistic, again, numbers are the average family for one car spends about $7,000 of their disposable income to have that automobile each year. So that's including maintenance, everything else like that, payments. The cliche term, are you working to drive or are you driving to work? Right. It's a good one. And that's only one car. So if you're a two-car family, you're probably upwards of $10,000 a year in those costs to have a car. So younger generations are making different choices. Millennials that are out there, more and more of them are using transit bicycling nationwide. Not only in Shboygan, but this is nationwide the trends that we're seeing. And we're struggling as a nation, locally, state, regionally, whatever you want to say, in maintaining all this infrastructure that we've built over the past 60 years. Car became king in the 40s, and since then, that's where everything is focused around. From the design of our houses, like in the 40s and 50s, the porch was the main feature of the house. Now when you drive through a new subdivision, the garage is the main feature of the house. So down to minute details like that, everything has been auto-focused. And the location of jobs and schools. Location of jobs. So building that infrastructure, as we keep going further and further out, there's a cost to the society on that. And so now we're struggling with, well, how do we pay for all this stuff we've built? And the cost of the environment and our health.  I completely agree. That kind of leads well into my next question. And you can help define this. You've touched on it a little bit. Why are multi-modal transportation options important for a community? I guess explain that term. It's kind of a hot term right now. Sure. I'm going to caveat this, that I'm not against the car. I like to drive. I like cars. And multi-modal doesn't mean one thing. It means everything. That's part of the point. You know, I'm a car guy. I get car and driver magazine. I like that kind of stuff. But I guess I'm... I also realize maybe it's because of my background in planning. There's a cost to that. And I guess I'm one of the guys out there willing to pay the true cost of, you know, having an automobile. But back to your question on multi-modals. Multi-modal. Yeah, various options. Again, everybody's a pedestrian at some point in their life. There's no denying that. So bicycling, transit, and the automobile and potentially, you know, in some areas of the country, trains, having a multi-modal system. So, I mean, that's essentially the definition, is that you have different options for you. Right. Yeah. And you touched on this a little bit, but if we can go into when it was awarded in the amount. But Sheboyin County received a large grant several years ago. Can you give an overview of the grant? What did it accomplish and what the status of the grant is today? Sure. We were one of four communities in the U.S. to receive a pilot program grant. Typically in the past, Congress, and even at state granting levels or even at private granting levels, it was project specific. You know, we'll give you some dollars for one project. Going back to the whole maintenance issues and sustaining a transportation system, Congress said, well, rather than having little projects here and there, what if we had a targeted investment in a community? What kind of impact would that have on a community if we had a targeted investment where you would essentially complete the network? If you think about a road network, you know, you wouldn't drive somewhere if there wasn't the network. You know, same thing for bicycling and walking and transit or what have you. If you don't have the network, people aren't going to use it. But if you do, what happens? Right. And so in communities that have invested in this, you know, especially, I hate using Europe as an example, but they've invested in this for some time now. They took a different direction in the 40s and 50s. And, you know, it's one of those, if you build it, they will come types of things. So that was the goal was, you know, what does this targeted investment do? So we had to have your, I think it was a, we had to, per Congress, and this was rare too for our grant, we had to have reporting. So we had to have baseline information. We had to do counts and things like that halfway through. And then at sort of the end, you know, they gave us some time period, even though all our projects haven't been completed and they didn't really fit, we had to have these reports. And even with that, even with the grunt of big push of our projects not moving forward, I think through some of our outreach efforts and things like that, we saw numbers start to tick up in our accounts. So we had eight defined count sites that we've been counting every year, even till now, where we've taken counts. How many people have walked or biked by during a time period. And they were, those eight sites were, you know, they weren't just randomly chosen. They were site specific based on where we knew we had some projects going in. So it was before and after. And then we had 12 additional count sites for three years where we got sort of a more complex view of the entire county. And I should mention that too. It was a county-wide grant. It wasn't just a city of Sheboygan grant. So we have projects in almost all of our municipal communities or incorporated communities, including the city of Sheboygan. So, yeah, so that's, again, it was up to $25 million as what each of these communities got. So Sheboygan County, Columbia, Missouri, Marin County, California, and Minneapolis, Minnesota. They specifically chose four very distinct communities too. We're all different. Marin County is a bedroom community to San Francisco. So Suburbia type of thing. Also one of the more wealthy communities in the United States. Marin County, excuse me, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Big Dense Urban Center, Columbia, Missouri, Big College Town, and then Sheboygan. Sheboygan County. Blue collar, sort of, down home roots type of community. And what would this targeted investment in each community have? And we had to provide back to Congress lessons learned. What worked, what didn't work, things like that, so. Awesome. And I know bike paths were part of it, but also bike racks were another. We're part of the grant. If you still have bike racks available, how can a business request one? Sure, they can give our office a call and we have a few left. We had a, we splattered about 700 bike racks throughout the county. Again, throughout the county and commercial areas, destinations, employers that requested one at that time, churches, essentially destinations. Again, going back to the network, if you didn't have a place to park your car when you got here, would you come? Probably not. Right. Or would you go to that store? Probably not.  You know, they're not going to take their bike, you know, which may have cost a thousand bucks and then... Tie it to a tree. Tie it to a tree. You know, that's just not inviting. So for a very minimal cost, the bike racks don't cost a whole lot. We were able to provide those parking spaces. How many did you receive? We put in about 700. Okay. Throughout the county? Yeah. And I think we ordered an extra 50 just for replacement and things like that. Okay. So we have a few left. Yeah. Oh, that's excellent. So another part of this, I've seen this. I think it's excellent. You organized bike corrals at festivals in Sheboygan County during the summer months. How does that work? Where will you be this summer and do you need help with that? Yeah. So in the past, the bike corrals, really, that was all volunteer-based. We built the racks with our dollars and some of our marketing dollars. But that was it. The rest was just volunteer-based. So bike corrals, bike valets, whatever you want to call them. We had them at different community events. So to promote biking to that event, rather than, again, having a decent space to park and not have to worry about it just like you would on your car. We had these corrals set up where people could bring a bike. You tear off one edge of a card. You'd give the other person the other edge of the ace of spades. And that's how we know whose bike is whose. We shove it in the spokes or what have you. And so we were at a number of events throughout the years. The Kohler Arts Festival we've been at, Earth Fest, Holland Fest, down in Cedar Grove has been a good one. We tried broad days one year, but the crowd tends to bring other kinds of bikes to that crowd. Those were more bikes with motors, but yeah, so this year, the grant's starting to wind down. So in years past, we sort of organized and got the volunteers. Now we've led it up to each of the events. We'll give you the racks. We'll provide you the racks, but if your event wants them, you have to come up with the volunteers and coordinate it. And that's always been sort of a goal of ours, too, with like the bike corrals, bike and walk to work week is, you know, we started it, but the grant dollars aren't going to be here forever to help out with it. So we really wanted to try to promote the community buy-in and things like that. So in communities where they've had successful increases in, you know, bicycling and walking as a form of transportation, that's, you know, the grassroots sort of effort has taken hold and they're running those events. And made a big difference. And they've had a non-profit that's come on board or to be the champion of that, not so you have government pushing it. And so that's always been one of our goals. So the government planted the seed in this case and you're hoping other people. Yeah, and it started in certain instances. You know, we had some events last year for the bike corrals. They used them and that was great. Rebike, one of our more popular programs. Again, I think that the grant provided $100 in seed money in the beginning, or maybe $150. And that's a program in paradigm coffee shops basement. Paradigm donates the space. There's six, seven guys every Wednesday night that are down there that are wrenching on bikes. And it's an earn a bike program. So early up front, they targeted kids from like boys and girls club or big brothers, big sisters, kids who might not be able to afford a bike or have a bike. But they had to learn a skill. So it wasn't that they were just donating a bike. The kids had to work on the bike, had to figure out what was wrong, put on replacement parts and everything like that. And after three or four hours of teaching them that, then they were able to take that bike home or sometimes it took longer. They might have, depending on the bike, they chose to work on. So that's been a great program. And I talked to one of the guys who's down there every Wednesday night. And so far, I think they started in 2010 or 2011 and they've donated or kids and adults. We've worked with Salvation Army families. They have earned over 1400 bikes. Oh, that's fabulous. So every summer or so or spring, we'll have an ad in the paper just saying, hey, if anybody wants to clean out their garage and donate an old bike, bring it down to Paradigm. And it doesn't have to be on Wednesday night. Paradigm's gracious enough to take them throughout the week. They prefer it if it's on Wednesday night. But if you can't get there on a Wednesday night, yep. You know, you can try to get down there and donate a bike and it'll go to good use. Some of the better bikes that don't need as much work, that's how the re-bike, they'll sell those for a minimal cost. 50 bucks or 40 bucks or something like that. You can support it by purchasing a bike also. Yep. And that's how they buy their supplies and things like that. So it's been a great success story. And again, for $150 in seed money, it's been super successful. There are other programs in Milwaukee and Madison that have sponsorships and stuff like that. The logo here has been all pretty much volunteer based. The logo was donated. You know, some artistic person came up with the cool logo. Right. So it's a cool story. And it lives on. Yep. So you mentioned bike and walk to work week happened. It actually does happen throughout Wisconsin. Can you tell us what you've done and what's planned for 2015? Yeah, again in the past, we tried to plant the seed and so we organized the events. We've had everything from coffee stops in the morning to come in and grab a coffee on their way to work, whether biking to work or walking to work. And those were always fun and successful. And again, over the past couple of years, we've had employer challenges, Piggly Wiggly. The headquarters has been great in that regard. Rockline has participated. So there's been good participation that way. Again, the grant's going to go away. So we've been trying to have other champions take it over. And so last year, I know there was a couple of things at Paradigm, I think, had some things. And then also we had an employer challenge last year that we had a website. So I imagine that's what we'll do again this year. We typically do ours in June. I think the national events in May, but with our weather here. I agree. We try to keep it in June. Get more people on board. Yep. Okay. So we do have bike lanes in Cheboygan, which I love. I remember biking in the city before those lanes were there and I would be honked at. And people, there just wasn't this awareness that bikes could be on the road. I just wanted to acknowledge that. So my question, follow-up to that, is how often would those be repainted with the grant going away? We paved or strived about 60 miles, again, throughout the county of bike lanes. And you're right. They provide awareness. It's amazing what that little white line will do. Right. And it provides a sense of space for not only the cyclist, it defines for the motorist who, hey, be aware. And so, again, for not a lot of cost, there's an impact on that. As far as maintenance, that is up to each municipal community. So the nice thing about the paint we put down, rather than just normal paint, is it lasts quite a while. So I think that project went in 2009, maybe, or 2008. And at nighttime, it still has a reflectivity. So we paid a little more upfront for that to have less maintenance. Right. So over time, it's more cost-effective. So the communities will have to pick that up afterwards. That's with almost any federal or state grant. Right. It's not forever. We're not going to do the maintenance. That's the communities buy-in. OK. So as the painting programs in each of the communities, and so far, they've all been pretty good about it. OK. OK. So you mentioned this a little bit, and we know the grant is coming to an end. So what are the long-term goals for Sherwin County with respect in their involvement with multimodal transportation projects? Well, I think you mentioned awareness. I mean, our community is now, there's other options out there, and we're hearing from employers that even from a quality of life standpoint, it's helping them recruit. People want this in their communities. Young professionals. Young professionals, they want this in their communities. So from that aspect, it's provided awareness from just engineers in the local community. Now they're designing these things as a matter of course in their projects. Right. Which didn't happen. Rather than an afterthought. An afterthought, yep. It's much more expensive to put things in retrospectively. So that's been one of the goals, was to provide this long-term, again, awareness. And then the bottom line was, will these dollars increase ridership? And again, we've done those counts and from compared to our baseline, from where we're at now, we've seen a steady progression. There's dips and valleys and just like any kind of graph you normally see, it's not one straight line, but over the trend line has been going up. So the use of our bike racks on the buses, for instance, the first couple of years, we track that. Every time somebody put a bike on the front of the bus, the bus driver would track that and we saw a steady trend line going up. Once people learn and saw how people are doing it. And that's the same for our trails and everything. Moving forward, we have some automatic counters that are on the trails. So we know time of day that people are going by, which direction and the number of counts, the day of the week and things like that. So those are interesting to see too. We have those out on the old plank and the new trail that we built through town a couple of years ago, shortland 400 on the old rail trail, so around the old rail line. So we have data and we'll continue to have data to show that our efforts have been a success and good for the community. That's awesome. So a fatal bicycle crash occurred recently and that's kind of what prompted this topic for me. It occurred on County Highway A and this was the second fatal crash in the same location within the past few years. What is Sheboyton County doing to improve bike paths in our area, especially the north-south paths? Yeah, so I mean, that crash as any crash is unfortunate. And again, as far as what are we doing, that road from the county standpoint, it's a county trunk. We were actually reviewing that road to be redone. It's unfortunate that it will happen too late. But in overall, again, statistically speaking, the more ridership you have on the roads, it's an inverse line as far as crashes and accidents and things of that nature for cyclists. So the more mass you have on that road of cycling or more awareness nationally and it's shown in our statistics in Sheboyton too that as cycling or use has gone up, crashes have gone down. So again, this was an unfortunate situation, but that tends to be what happens. Right. So they are being looked at. There's plans potentially moving forward. Yeah. Unfortunately, not soon enough for the situation, but it is being looked at. And what we look at, we have a comprehensive plan, the county comprehensive bike and pedestrian plan. And it was just updated this year. So the first one we had was essentially out of date, the day we published it, because we had so many projects coming online. So we did an update this year. And one of the things we look at when we're going through that planning effort are the areas of concern we call them. So we look at crash history and things like that at the intersections and we identify those areas as areas that need, whether it's a perceived issue or whether it's a real issue through, again, traffic. Design. Yeah. We look at those intersections the next time they're up for design and things like that. Traffic calming. I know. Yeah. We've done traffic calming around some of the area schools and those have proved to reduce speeds, which was the intended goal. Great. So I just wanted to say thank you so much for your time. I think we can both agree our messages continue to use multimolar transportation, be it a car, be it transportation by bus or bike or walking. It's cheaper. It's cheaper. At the end of the day, that's what everybody's concerned about is what's in their wallets and there's no more efficient way to get around town for short trips. Right. I'm not saying get on your bike. I mean, it's great if you want to go out for 25 miles door to door. But if you have a short trip to go down to the grocery store to grab that gallon of milk, it's certainly more cost-effective and much more efficient. Good for you, too. And the benefits are endless. From a health standpoint, putting less stress on our roads and maintenance and whatever else. I mean, hands down in those short trips, there's no more efficient way to get around. Right, a little more. So thank you so much for your time again. Thank you, everybody, for listening. Stay tuned for our next feature, which will be about water. And until then, it's nice outside. Get on your bike and be safe. Have a good time. Thank you so much. Thank you.