QuickBooks Online 2022 bank reconciliation month number two reports get ready because it's go time with QuickBooks Online 2022 here we are in our get great guitars practice file we set up with a 30-day free trial holding down control scrolling up a bit to get to the 125% currently in the home page otherwise known as the get things done page to the accounting view it's something you can do by going to the cog up top and switch to accounting view down below we will be toggling back and forth between the two views either here or by jumping over to the sample company currently in the accounting view back to the get great guitars we're gonna open a few tabs we can put reports in by going to the tab up top right clicking on it duplicating that tab back to the tab to the left right clicking on it duplicating it again as that is thinking we're gonna jump back to the sample company file take a look at where the reports are located in the accounting view on the left-hand side under reports back to the business view we're in the second tab the reports located under the business overview close up the hamburger open it up one of the faves that be in the balance sheet go into the good old balance sheet range change up top from 010122 to 022822 and run it tab to the right tab to the right and then a business overview close up the hamburger open up the P and L profit and loss and do the range change up top from 010122 to 022822 this time gonna change the months over here so I could see the side by side and then run it so we got the month of Jan Feb and tote and we're working on the month of Feb currently going back to the tab to the left we're now focusing in on in the balance sheet the cash account because we're doing a bank reconciliation and we're trying to reconcile this number as of the point in time of February 28th to what is on the bank statement that's what the bank reconciliation is for we were almost done with it last time but we're holding off to push the button so we can review the reports this time now now is the time now we get to push that button so let's go to the tab the left to do that we're gonna go into the bookkeeping item down below if you were in the accounting view it would be in the accounting tab on the left hand side and then reconcile up top and the business view it's in the bookkeeping reconcile close in the hamburger and then we will presume to resume the reconciling process here we are we got the breakout this is where we stand we got the the statement ending balance which is equal to the cleared balance in other words the statement ending balance now equaling the cleared balance is the 101 5905 how did we get there well we took the beginning cleared balance which was the 61 241 85 that matching out to the cleared balance here that's not what was on our books at the beginning that was the cleared cleared items as of the beginning and then we had the payments of the 11 633 that cleared this time frame and the 51 981 20 deposits which make up now the cleared balance which is taken tied off the same thing as we saw up here in our bank statement because everything on the bank statement was on our books and we checked those items off to get to this ending balance therefore the statement balance is now the same as the cleared balance which is represented by the zero on the right hand side however this is not the bank reconciliation report or even a summary of it because we don't see here the book balance neither of these are the book balance the cleared balance is not the book balance you can see here it does not tie out to what is on the balance sheet as of this date February 28th that's what we checked off that's what we have cleared what's included in our books that is not included in the cleared balance the stuff we didn't check off down here including this one which was not checked off last time hadn't cleared in January even though written in January it's still included in our book balance as are this deposit here and this deposit deposit the check that are down here all these items then we expect to clear possibly in the future they're included in our book balance not in the bank balance therefore those are the reconciling items which will be used to compare bank balance to book balance these two things being exact difference we know they're the exact difference because this is at zero let's go ahead and finish this thing up so if we hit the drop down these are options remember that when we finish this thing up this needs to be at zero if it's not you could force it to be at zero by saying I want you to finish it anyways and I want you to enter the reconciling adjustment but even if it's a small reconciling adjustment like under a dollar you are still losing a huge level of internal controls if you can't get it exactly to zero which we should be able to do if our beginning balance ties out because it's just a matter of ticking and tying everything off and it has to reconcile it has to work and if you're if you're off by like a dollar or something it's possible that was from 20 checks and 30 deposits or something like that that happened to net together to be off by a dollar noting that if it was off by a dollar and I just cared about this ending cash balance and I was like even if it was off by you know a few a hundred dollars or you know a thousand dollars I could say well that's in material with regards to the cash balance and I know the cash balance is right because that's what's on the bank it is what it is it's in the bank right now so who cares if it's a dollar adjustment or a $100 adjustment it wouldn't matter too much if it was just about the ending balance of cash as of this point in time but it's not it's about all the activity all the activity meaning all the GL activity that's going on down here we want to make sure that all this stuff is correct because this stuff is involved in the other side of the double entry accounting system each transaction having at least two accounts being impacted and therefore if we omit a couple types of things that happen to net out to only a dollar difference it could be a big difference with regards to the activity in the financial statements so we want to we want to get that to be zero and we should be able to get that to be zero pretty much it you should be able to do it okay rant over let's finish this finish it finish it you reconcile this account see the report let's view the reconciliation report I like to check it out please pour five or and so here we have it to 28 remember this report's a little bit different than any other report you might want to I basically like to take a copy of it so I have a copy of it because if there are changes or something is deleted to the data in the system that it was part of the bank reconciliation this report can't really be updated by the deleted item because if it was you'd be out of balance so so it's possible to kind of mess up the data after you have reconciled and you want to have the bank reconciliation in a static position that doesn't change with anything that happens to the prior data if you delete for example a clear transaction so that you can then see that you were in balance something happened and for try to see what what happened that could that could mess things up so for that you might want to save the report print the report just to make sure so we've got this is happening as of 228 so we're gonna say this is the statement beginning balance 61 241 85 that of course a mirroring what we have over here on the bank statement then we've got the 11 6 11 the checks payments cleared and the deposits to get to the ending balance which of course basically mirrors the 51 981 and the 11 633 to get to the ending balance of the 101 590 05 right there now that beginning part isn't really the bank reconciliation in my opinion that just is a summary of the stuff that's basically the cleared activity that's not what we're really interested in what we're interested in are the outstanding items the difference the reconciling components the things that didn't clear so in other words it really starts right here the 101 590 05 which is the statement balance or the cleared balance same type of thing the bank balance and then we have the unclear transactions of this amount to get to the register balance so this component right here these last three numbers that's the reconciliation that's what we care about this ending number the 95 250 906 that reconciles to what's on our balance sheet as of this point in time 228 the cutoff date so 95 250 906 there it is back on over that's the reconciliation but if you just give this top component this little summary piece to say an auditor they would be suspicious because that's how auditors are they're suspicious they're skeptical and they're gonna say how do I know that you didn't just like make up that 6033 whatever 99 as just like the difference you just said oh well yeah because we don't tie out to the bank statement it's just that 6330 99 I don't want yeah I want more detail so the real component is what is that consisting of what are the outstanding checks and deposits for that we got to go down to the detail down below if we go down to the detail we got a lot of detail which once again is stuff that I don't think we really need but we also have the detail that we do need so we've got the details here checks and payments that clear these are the ones that we ticked and tied off in our books to what's on the banks side nothing really important here or nothing that we don't already have on the bank statement because we're just basically saying these are the stuff that cleared the bank so this isn't the stuff we're totally interested in here's the deposits that cleared the bank then we have the additional information here are the unclear checks and payments as of 228 this is what we care about there's the total in terms of checks and payments the 5 8 9 0 and then here's the deposits the 226 0 and if I was to add those up or subtract them out whoever you want to sit pulling out the trustee calculator to do that we've got the 8 5 9 0.99 minus the 226 0 we've got the 6 3 3 0 that 6 3 3 0 time out to what we have here 6 3 3 0 99 so then we can tell the auditor that's what makes up the difference Mr. Auditor and they're gonna say well why do you have this long report just to give I mean that's just the way QuickBooks does it they give you that all that information it's not my fault so then down here now we've got these outstanding checks and these outstanding checks we can see if they've cleared most likely in the next time period because when we're doing the bank reconciliation for February 28th we're gonna be doing it at some point in March because we're gonna need the bank statement to do it and it takes a little while to get the bank statement so we could check in the bank account and see if these transactions had cleared the bank in March if they have then we can have more assurance that these are valid transactions that are just timing difference if they have not does not mean that they're invalid transactions but we're gonna be more and more concerned the older and older these transactions are outstanding and not clearing for example this first one the the on 126 is something that we wrote in January and hasn't cleared the bank in January or February so it's been over a month now this was an outstanding item last time when we did the bank reconciliation in January still an outstanding item so we're getting more concerned about that we might want to talk to Staples the person we paid and say hey look why I'm showing that we wrote a check did it did you get the check is it lost do we owe you money are you sitting over here fuming that you're mad that we haven't paid you when I thought we paid you look like we paid you on our side we're not trying to should not pay you so that's the kind that's what we want to be able to do that's one of the components that you want to be able to do with the check these items all look like they're here on two on the end of February so we would expect to be fairly normal if it had not yet cleared at this point in time then we have the deposits both of these are towards the end of the month we'd want to check that they had cleared in the following month March which they probably would have because deposits should clear fairly quickly if they have great no problem remember however that the bank reconciliation process is not simply to double check that these outstanding items have cleared although that's a useful tool and something that we'll want to do and keep an eye on but it's also to make sure that we have the exact difference between what's on our books and the banks books because if we can see exactly what the reconciliation is it not only verifies the un you know the outstanding transactions that we can double check on but it gives us their verification that all the clear to transactions are valid transactions to it gives us a lot more confidence assurance faith and the bookkeeping system in general which is what we would call a huge internal control over errors or safeguard against making errors possibly number two internal control second only to the double entry accounting system itself so let's go ahead and print this thing out let's do that shall we let's go up top I'm gonna hit the printing button up top print it let's do the printing and I'm gonna use the cute PDF printer if you don't have one some kind of PDF printer it doesn't have to be this cute one although I'm not sure this is the cutest printer ever they just named it that but it works and I think it's free so check it out get one so that if you don't have a printing option you can print it to a PDF printer and still save it as a PDF like we're gonna do right here I'll show you I'll show you how it works see then it opens right here and it saves it to instead of printing it so it's gonna be I'm gonna say bank rec and then it's gonna be Feb there we have it we'll save it and that should put it in my folder over here bank rec Feb bank Rick Feb right there there we have it now if I if I was to leave this now it opened up a new tab to open up the report I'm gonna go back to the tab to the left and then I've got my cookie trail kind of up top so I can go back to the chart of accounts or the bank register area here or I can hit the drop down on the hamburger go back into the bookkeeping and if I wanted to go into these items notice it it kind of goes into the reconciliation by default but I can go into the summary up top and now I've got my my report the last one being displayed here at the 228 the 228 so remember you want to kind of print those out because like I say the later reports gets more difficult to get back to the earlier reports because these reports do not act the same way as other reports they can't really be adjusted with the data as the data is adjusted because if you were to delete a check it would mess up the bank reconciliation so you probably want a hard copy of the reports I would I would suggest having the hard copy of the reports and you might be able to get into the reports if you go into the good old business view here and into the reports section and then look for the reconciliations I think they're called reconciliation reports let's just do it that way reconciliation reports and there are our reports so we've got both of them here for 228 and 131 let's go into the 131 here and run it looks like it is picking it up and I believe this will be a static report so again even if you made changes like say you deleted a check that had cleared in in this period and we marked it as cleared I believe that this report will stay static and not basically be out of balance after that after that happens but again I still feel comfortable personally maybe it's just me I'm getting more and more techie these days I'm relying more and more on all this all my banking online and bookkeeping online and transferring stuff online that was sensitive information but now secure or whatever but I still I still I still kind of like printing out or saving at least as a PDF my bank state my bank reconciliations maybe it's just me but that's what I recommend so then I'm gonna go back to the tap to the right let's look at our trial balance to trustee TB to see where we stand as of now so we had some changes to the to the profit and loss you'll recall if we go down because we we posted some items during the bank reconciliation process for example to the expense account for bank fees we put some bank feeds in place and we also had an adjustment if we go back to the balance sheet that we put to the draws account the draws account down here in the equity section so there's the equity section at $500 draw so this is where we stand let's open up then the trial balance tap to the right I'm going to go to the to the handbook and let's go to the reports and see that trustee TB type in and trial balance to do so trial balance and then close in the bug ham that is handbook 010122 to 1231 22 there's only two months of data but I just go all the way out to the end of the year just as a matter of habit maybe a bad one but it is what it is and then we're going to go down and say that if your numbers tie out to this and you're following along then if any mistakes have been made I made them too because we got the same stuff right and then so if your numbers don't tie out to this then it possibly is because of a date range issue try changing the date ranges and we'll take a look at the transaction detail report at the end of the section to diagnose any differences


Good evening. My name is Jesse Ramos. I'm a cops leader cops Metro leader with st. Timothy. I'll be one of your co-chairs And I'm Gloria Mota. I'm a leader with st. Leo's cops Metro And I will be one of the co-chairs tonight first of all having the observed certain protocols tonight leaders as You know cops Metro is non-partisan That means we will not endorse a candidate We endorse our community our families and the issues affecting our families There will be no clapping or booing We have a timekeeper. We asked that the allotted time be respected This is a non-partisan assembly Therefore Individually, we will not walk or talk with the candidates This is a public meeting When the session is over We ask that everyone stays in their place Until each candidate is escorted to the door We ask that the cops Metro leaders Stay for an evaluation of the meeting afterwards Candidates I'm going to repeat this. I already mentioned it before Please refrain from political campaigning and attacking your opponents. We have a timekeeper We asked that you respect the time allotted We will ask a series of questions After each question each candidate will have four minutes to answer After each of the series of questions, we will you will have four minutes We will ask additional questions only if time permits Again, we remind you that this is not a town hall meeting This is a non-partisan assembly Hasta que las escoltas previamente asignadas Acompañarán a cada candidato hacia la puerta Por favor les pedimos a los líderes quedarse a la evaluación Los candidatos por favor abstenerse de hacer campaña política Y atacar a sus oponentes Tenemos quien tome el tiempo les pedimos que respeten el tiempo asignado Haremos una serie de preguntas Después de cada pregunta los candidatos tendrán cuatro minutos para responder Haremos preguntas adicionales si el tiempo nos lo permite Nuevamente les recordamos que esta asamblea No es partidista Gracias We have a cops metro. We'd like to welcome each and every one of you and If you all were ever in a meeting with cops metro, you'll know that we're very time oriented So how many of you want to get out of here in an hour and ten minutes? That's the only time you're gonna be allowed to clap go ahead Bienvenidos a todos. Gracias. We will have now the opening prayer led by father Ricardo Guerra Let us take just a few moments of silence that we might place ourselves in the presence of our guard Tomemos un momento así de silencio para Ponernos en la presencia de nuestro Dios. Oh Lord we gather this evening as a community as we work and strive for the betterment of our families and Communities bless us with your wisdom bless us with your prudence that together United we may continue Bringing your love and your grace upon all of us Señor Dios te pedimos que nos acompañes en esta tarde con tu Espíritu que nos concedas pues esta paciencia y y prudencia y sabiduría Para que juntos trabajemos trabajemos para nuestra comunidad y el bien de nuestra comunidad al mismo tiempo te suplicamos que nos concedas paciencia y sabiduría Especialmente sobre la tragedia que estamos viviendo en esos momentos que ocurrió esta tarde en Boston para ellos quienes fallecieron señor que los tengas en tu presencia y Que descansen ellos que están heridos que pronto les conceda su salud Lord we ask that you also gratis grace and strength and wisdom over the experience that we are living at this moment from Boston For those who have died may they be in your presence for all of eternity at peace for those that are wounded that you may grant them health Father we ask that you bless us as we gather this evening. Señor bendicenos al reunir nos en esta tarde Amen At this time we'll have roll call miss Natalia tovar Good evening My name is Natalia Soriano tovar and I am a core leader here with st. Timothy's cops Metro Let's see who's here tonight. We know st. Timothy's here This is one of those levels here conception parchment St. Leo's Our lady of what a look for her lotus Jesus Mission Concepción Sacred Heart City First Unitarian Universalist our Lady of Good Council St. Francis of Assisi ISD school fails. Who else did we miss everybody? Oh Santa Fonso Anybody else st. Patrick's immaculate? St. Stephens Welcome everybody Cops Metro Alliance have a long history of working with elected officials of our city Tonight. We're here to continue that relationship with district five candidates We're here to discuss the issues that affect our families We're here to discuss with you and to ask you of your commitment to work with us to maintain the success We are we have already accomplished and to build on that in the past We have worked tirelessly to put project quest in place To maintain the after-school program at an affordable cost to our parents This are just a couple of examples of what cops Metro leaders have done Currently, we're working to have access to healthy and clean parks to maintain safe neighborhoods curtail vandalism Procure good lighting safe sidewalks and repair potholes organized parents around the children's education, etc This assembly is to begin a conversation with our elected officials I am father Mike DeGerolli, and I am pastor here at st. Timothy's, and I'd like to say thank you for joining us in this meeting Today we have a special guest and I'm going to introduce my name I'm Mike DeGerolli and I'm pastor here at St. Timothy's and I'd like to introduce my name Mike DeGerolli, my name is Mike DeGerolli and I'm pastor here at St. Timothy's and I'd like to introduce Mike DeGerolli and I am pastor here at St. Timothy's and I'd like to also introduce our co-moderator for this evening, Father Walter DeHeden from Sacred Heart Parish. Would you welcome Father Walter. Candidates, we're gonna give you each one minute to introduce yourself. We have you seated in alphabetical order so we'll begin with Ricardo Briones. You have one minute to introduce yourself. Can you hear me? My name's Ricardo Briones. I'm an attorney. I'm a lifelong resident of District 5. I grew up right on Roosevelt Street right across from Roosevelt Park and I went to St. Cecilia's, Central Catholic, UTSA and my bachelor's in finance at UTSA and I'm currently an attorney. I got my law degree at St. Mary's University. The whole time I've lived in District 5, I'm 34 years old. I'm very passionate and I'm very engaged with the community. I wanna thank you all for showing up and I know it's a very important thing and this is just a beautiful thing to see everybody so engaged in the political process so thank you for having me. Thank you, Mr. Bionas. Please introduce yourself, Mr. Cardenas. Each candidate may introduce themselves. Buenas noches. Buenas noches. Soy Richard Cardenas y tengo que ser Richard Cardenas porque cuando jugué a la escuela Ruiz, los americanos me quitaron Ricardo y todos me conocen como Richard Cardenas. Bueno, yo soy un residente del Distrito por 52 años. We are Ruiz, Cooper y Gradela Nier, en 79. Atendí los colegios de Community College aquí en San Antonio. Me casé con una Harlandale Indian. Mi esposa Ana, estamos casados por 30 años y nos casamos en La Parroquia de St. Leo's con la Tava Father Yannish y Father Thielenay. Tenemos dos hijos Ricardo Antonio y Andrea María. Soy un negociante pequeño. Tengo el Avis de Carl Rental. No soy un vendedor de Carlos Viejos. Tengo una agencia de renta. Y estoy aquí porque... Thank you, Mr. Cardenas. Good evening. My name is John Carlos Garcia. I'm a small business owner. I'm 34 years old. I opened an insurance agency at the age of 22. Before that I taught at Southside High School in their music program for four years. I'm a natural leader. I ran in 04. I've been very active in this community for the past several years from volunteering to engaging other people, to bring people together, to work together as a community. I believe I'm the person for this job because I can motivate people and bring their strengths out of them and bring us all together to work towards a better future for the entire District 5. Not just part of District 5, but the entire District 5. I'm here to tell you about myself. I'm a father. I've got two children. I'm very concerned about their future. I'm also a son. And I'm concerned about our parents. I'm concerned about our senior centers. I'm concerned about all the needs that we need to address in order to become the best possible community that we can. Thank you, guys. Thank you. Hola, buenas tardes. Me llamo Shirley Gonzales. Tengo 40 años. Mi familia tiene 52 años, aquí en el negocio de Bill's Pond and Jolrate. Mi mamá nació en México y vino a San Antonio cuando ella tenía 19 años. Y aquí estamos siempre. Mi papá también nació en La Vaca Street. Aquí no muy lejos de aquí. Y aquí está mi familia en San Antonio por mucho tiempo. My name is Shirley Gonzales. I'm 40 years old. I went to St. Mary's University. I have a bachelor's degree and a master's degree. My family has owned Bill's Pond Shop here on the west side for 52 years. And we're very proud of this community and the community that we've been able to serve. I'm a long-distance triathlete. I do Ironman triathlons. I'm a member of Leadership San Antonio and currently a member of Leadership SAISD, which is a group of independent people getting together to work with SAI schools. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. My name is David Medina. I'm your current city councilman here for District 5. And I'm here tonight talking to you because I wanted to be able to come back and share with you the reason why I'm running for reelection for District 5. Having grown up in the district, being born and raised here and been involved in my community at a very young age, volunteering at my church, being involved in different ministries there at the church, just naturally, as I became of age, I decided to get involved in the public service in terms of politics. And going and working at City Hall, I applied and got hired in the mayor's office, also worked in District 5 for councilwoman Patty Radle when she was our representative. In addition to that, I'm the former president of Palm Heights Neighborhood Association and also very active with a lot of the youth recreational organizations here in our community. You gave me the opportunity to be elected four years ago and to serve the district. And I believe that we've done a solid job in the sense that we've been able to respond to our constituency and go out there and work to meet the needs of our community. But it's an everyday battle, everyday work. I'm here standing before you because I know with the experience I have in office, moving forward, we can continue the progress. Thank you, Mr. Medina. Thank you. Good evening, my name is Frank Ramirez. This is my neighborhood. I grew up down the street on 19th Street. I attended Lowell Middle School, went to Lanier High School, eventually graduated from John F. Kennedy, well there goes my name, John F. Kennedy High School. I am a living, breathing story of failure and redemption. I have been in the pitfalls of life and I pulled myself out and have made a name for myself, getting my bachelor's degree, master's degree, working on my dissertation for my PhD in education. That is the focal point of my movement is to bring the importance of education back to our community and to bring redemption back to our community. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Ramirez. Thank you, all of the candidates. In the interest of time, I'm going to read the seven questions that you will respond to. You will only have four minutes, however, so please be careful and succinct in how you respond to these questions. I'm going to ask seven questions. The first question is about public security. We have built a relationship with SAPD Chief McManus around safety issues that affect our neighborhood. What are your plans to improve public safety? The second question deals with desarrollo economico. We are interested with what your vision is for economic development in District 5. Will you commit to include COPS Metro leaders in your economic development plan to improve our neighborhood? Question number three, se trata de los parques. Are you willing to make all our district parks, especially Father Benavides Park right here in front, adequate for use by our communities and make them a priority for improvements? How? Where do you see potential sources of funding for our parks? Question number four, se trata de organizar en las escuelas. We have been working with educators, businesses, and city officials and community leaders to put together a strategy to organize in schools, to bring parental engagement, especially around the Lanier High School cluster. Can we count on your support to bring businesses, foundations around the table to obtain funding to bring this project to fruition? I might add on the issue of the parks, as many of you know, we have been working with Councilman Medina, Councilman Medina. We know we all have busy schedules and sometimes it's difficult to attend meetings, but I will ask each and every candidate if you are committed to attend every council meeting. And if you cannot attend, will you call one of the COPS Metro leaders from District Five so we can represent, we can be present and report to you. We will re-ask this question later on. We, the issue about the parks, we do thank you Councilman Medina for the monies that you are seeking for Benevitas Park and the master plan, but a lot needs to be done. COPS Metro is reciprocal. We respond when public officials work with us, but all of you candidates, please, please know that the way COPS Metro operates is that we will hold you accountable. Right, COPS Metro? We will watch what you do. Please don't just say words, we want action. Now we'll go back to the questions. Back to question number five, acerca de la climata session. This is about weatherization. We've been working with CPS Energy to make the weatherization program successful for the past few years. Unfortunately, we have many families that don't qualify for weatherization because their homes are in need of repair. Would you commit to support quarterly weatherization fairs in district five where families can apply and to find resources to rehab or repair homes so they can qualify for this benefit? Question number six about code compliance and zoning. We have organized around code compliance and city zoning issues, and as a result in the past year, four drug houses have been demolished. One zoning change has been made and over 40 vacant lots have been cleaned up. How are you thinking that you can work with us to develop our communities? And the final question acerca de los programas de nutrición para los ancianos. In the past two years, there have been six senior programs closed. St. Stephen, San O'Fonso, St. Agnes, St. Jude, Christ the King, San Juan de los Lagos. Will you commit to giving enough support from the cities to the churches that are willing to continue the senior programs? Father Walter, do you have anything to add? Okay, thank you. Now we will ask each candidate. You have four minutes starting in alphabetical order. Mr. Briones. I'm sorry, pardon me. In regards to the first question regarding public safety, I think what I do want to do is, I think safety is an important issue. Everyone should be safe in District Five. If you don't feel safe, that it equals a lack of economic development, a lack of neighborhoods, a lack of people talking to each other. And I think that's important. We need to have walkable, livable neighborhoods. What I wanna do is support an 18-wheel mobile SAPD substation that will be planted at neighborhood locations monthly to go ahead and increase safety, increase public awareness of safety issues. In addition to that, I would like to increase foot and bike patrol and that 18-wheel mobile SAPD can be the hub for those foot and bike patrols to increase safety, to get sidewalks better welded. I think that's an important issue. The second thing, economic development in District Five. What we do have to do is come up with a global business strategy that targets opportunities, potential, work around Port S.A. San Antonio, work around the Robert B. Green Center, and bring in those types of businesses as well as work with COPS Metro to know what opportunities are available to small businesses. I wanna host monthly small business lunches where small businesses can get information. They'll know what tax incentives are available for them, what sort of grants are available for them, as well as what sort of information's out there. I am committed to attend every city council meeting. I think a failure to attend one meeting is a failure to you all. I think that's what you sign up for. And if I'm not able to attend, I will have COPS Metro attend for me. I think they're a great organization. Now, in regards to the linear cluster, I'm sorry, the parks, I think it's important to find funding. I think children, public spaces with children in the elderly, it's important to get them out there. It's important to be active. I will look at funding. We have to think outside the box. We can look at county funding. We can look at state funding. We can look at federal funding, but we have to work with partnerships. We have to work with other people that are invested and that other districts that overlap with us. So I think that's extremely important. And what we can also do is maybe look at the private sector. Talk to Port San Antonio and see, look, how can you give us opportunities to increase our parks? The fourth thing is the linear cluster and the weatherization, I'm sorry, the linear funding. Yes, I think it's important to bring businesses and foundations around the table to obtain funding to bring that product. I think we need to increase our relationships. And I will personally increase relationships with SAISD and Edward ISD. And we need to go ahead and get our kids in school. And what we'll do is work with businesses, foundations, and see what they can offer us and see what's available to it. But we need to have everybody on the table and we need to adapt the strategy to get there. Now, the weatherization program, I want to have local monthly energy summits where we actually go to the neighborhoods and let you know what's available for you. And we can get CPS on board, SAISD on board, solar companies. I think it's important to not just have a summit because a lot of people have problems with transportation but to bring them to the churches. We need to come out to you. Also, the code compliant and city issues, I think that's a huge issue. I would love to work with you to develop the community. What we need to do is look at the opportunities, look at the potential and look at our assets. I think District 5 is rich in a lot of potentials and by working together with that, I think we can bring it. The last thing, yes, we do need to bring funding to the churches that are continued, the senior programs. I think the seniors are the most important asset for District 5 and we need to make sure they have their nutrition. We need to make sure they have socialization. Thank you very much for your time. Just a second. I have one question that is related to number five. When we talk about the weatherization, we raise the point that many people cannot qualify because their houses are not to standard. So what would you do to help to fix the houses, repair the houses, rehab the houses so that they also would qualify for the weatherization program? You get one minute to respond to this. That's a great question, Father. What we need to do is definitely work with Habitat for Humanities, work with community organizations to see where is the most need and see how we can best approach that need. We need to work also with the private sector to see how we can repair these houses and bring them up to code so they can take full advantage of the weatherization. And I think definitely, you know, when you have CPS and sales rate increases based on, you know, people with fixed income, you do need to take that into account and looking at any rate increases in the future that I need to advocate for District Five and say, look, it's one of the poorest districts. We can't afford, you know, $3, an extra three or $4 every month because that usually goes to food or that usually goes to gas. So I think we need to be aware of all that stuff and I hope that answers your question, Father. Thank you. Mr. Cardinos. Well, let me start by saying I am committed to meet all the meetings in First City Council. I'm also committed to invite one of the cotton metros persons to be a liaison to my staff and actually be on board in meetings with me. So I will commit that to this organization. I also commit for the first question, working with Chief McManus and Public Safety. I'd like to, one of the things I'd like to do is put a grant right around my staff so we can go out after ATF, DEA grants that are out there. I wanna be proactive in police community patrols. I wanna take officers out of the cars and into our neighborhoods so we can grow those relationships with the residents. The question number two, on economic development. I wanna establish master plans throughout the district. With a master plan, what that causes is the residents to be accountable and tell us what they wanna see in their area. When you develop a master plan, it's a step by step, one, two, three, four, and going down the road as to what you wanna see and going down the road as to what you can accomplish. It's not gonna happen overnight, but if you have a master plan, you can always modify it and you can add to it. But without a plan, you cannot get investors to come in, you cannot get people that are interested. But if you have a master plan, where you wanna start and where you're going, you can definitely accomplish much in the economic development side for the district. Question number three, parks funding. I think that we should extend the venue tax that my eight car agency pays 5% to the city for other parks and extend that tax and use it for the inner city parks, for municipal parks, not just for special funding and sport program, but for the city parks that are needed. That's 5% of the tax from there. I think as far as education and the linear cluster, when I was with the Texas Restaurant Association, we helped convert home economics into culinary arts. So I think it's very important to have a private public venture with the school districts. Not only in the air, Harlandale, Edgewood, and bring everybody to the table so we can develop those programs that are needed for the jobs of the future. Not only here in San Antonio, but just south in the economic impact of the Eagle Forge Shell. Along with that, we also identify small businesses that can participate in those projects and put them in the small business procurement program with major corporations so they can also take part of those things. CPS Energy. Yes, a lot of homes here are in distress. I think we should revitalize the old San Antonio Development Agency program where we went in and rehab neighborhoods by bringing in new houses, purchasing the property, building a new house, a couple of streets down just like they did in Colonia Santa Cruz. My parents benefited from that and I think it was very successful. I think we need to look at that program again and also the same time look at programs to just do rehabs for those areas, especially low income areas. And we need to look at private public funding for that. As far as the zoning and code compliance, yes. I understand that there is a tremendous need for going out and holding absentee landlords accountable, holding vacant lots, trimmed and up kept and making sure that all those code compliance violations don't get ignored, but we get accountability from those landowners. Then the seventh on the Christ the King, the senior for the funding, you bet. The seniors nos dieron mucho los ancianos. Los que están los programes ahorita, muchos eran mis héroes cuando estaba creciendo. Y yo les do el apoyo looking at second servings, the Hope for Harvest and other organizations that are out there to extend those programs to bring you meals and social activities into your neighborhoods. I have just a question is the points that you mentioned, especially like number six, how would you work with cops and Metro to do the things that you, the ideas that you have so that we can work together on those programs? You have one minute. On the code compliance one, Father? Yes, number six, especially number six. But in general. Well, number one, I would have weekly staff meetings with code compliance. And also, I said about inviting somebody from cops Metro to come here.  You're the taxpayers. You're the ones that hold us accountable. And that's what has been missing is the accountability. I'm here so you can hold me accountable. I'm here to serve you. It is not I, but we in the district that can accomplish those things. And I can promise you that I will be there and I will cops Metro has been a rock of this neighborhood fighting for the needs of the poor for many years. And there's no way that I'm turning my back on you because I'm here for the community. Yo soy de aquí. I'm running because I know that I can make a difference and build what we need within the district to bring district five from the poorest to the best place to raise a family. Thank you. All these areas of concern really revolve around one thing in my opinion. And that's organization. We have to be organized and mobilized. We got to know our neighbors. That's how we're gonna work with the San Antonio Police Department and our chief. We've got to get to know each other and not be afraid each other. We've got to knock down walls. We have to build neighborhood associations. And let me be clear, neighborhood associations, not homeowners associations where we can come and address every single one of these issues that's listed here. That's how we get to know each other. We get to know each other. Crime will then start to fall because we start looking out for each other. There's a place where we can develop neighborhood watch programs. We can develop and strengthen membership and youth organizations like Boy Scouts or the CIO. We can use these things as tools. And economic development will follow from that because if there's safety, more businesses will wanna be there. If there's better infrastructure, if we can produce more people at the polls, the city will have to not ignore us. We only got 5% of this last bond. We're 10% of the city. We should demand more of that money. We need to fight for it. We need to come together and get what we deserve as a community to make us stronger so that we can have more money for our parks. If we had more of that bond money, we wouldn't be fighting so fiercely for every little penny of it. We could develop that money and get it to all the parks that are needed, especially the parks on the west side, where the kids need to have a place to go and they need to be supervised. I can jump to another question here because that leads us into developing program to engage our parents. A few leaders cannot do it by themselves. So we can't just focus on the leaders that are currently doing their job and going beyond to help raise all these children from coaches to sponsors. We've gotta create more of those leaders amongst us. And we do that by reaching out to people. District 5 has over 60,000 formerly incarcerated people. A lot of those people wanna change their ways. They wanna become part of their community. We need to reach our hands out to them and tell them you are part of us. We welcome you. We welcome you to change your life and become stronger so that we don't have to worry about having to be armed in our local businesses around the street. Here on, just down the way, I spoke with the business owner, Mr. Correa, and every day he sees it. These are the things that we need to address on a regular basis. And as far as CPS and the weatherization, I think Mr. Cardenas' idea is wonderful. I think we need to look for grants in all sorts of areas. From safety to the weatherization, we've gotta find them. The money's out there, programs are there. And if we're organized, we're gonna find that money. We, together, as a community, can come together, no matter how we say it. We need to get organized. We need to start creating big problems. And a big problem I wanna have is two years from now, when we have this forum, we're gonna need an auditorium because so many people are interested. We've gotta get people motivated. Code compliance, that also comes back to business. If we're not enforcing code compliance and holding the homeowners liable for their properties and leaving them the way they are, they become ice horse, businesses do not wanna come in. They don't wanna invest there if they're not gonna get a good return on their investment. So we must enforce them. And we must also look for ways to help families who can't afford to bring their homes up to code going back to the grants. We've gotta work together to solve all these problems together. And definitely the senior centers. The senior centers must be reopened. We must find that money. There can't be a lot of money spent at one senior center where we're least mobile. This community is the least mobile. We've got to have senior centers that are close in proximity and food must be prepared on site. Our seniors built our community and it's time that they get the respect that they deserve. Thank you. Mr. Garcia, you expressed yourself very well in what you'd like to see do, but many of the programs will require funding. And I'd like you to address that question. How are you gonna find the funding to do the ideas that you suggested one minute? The funding can be taken from a lot of places such as our CPS. We need to find exactly where CPS's money's going. That we need to be transparent on that. We need to get a lot of that and we can save money in for the weatherizations. These things happen over time. They're not gonna happen overnight. They're not gonna happen probably within a year. We've gotta look long term in our budget goals to develop these things. Re-evaluating where exactly the money has gone. In meeting with our firefighters association and our police officers association and listening to them, they tell us that there's places where they could save us millions of dollars if we listened directly to them. With it a lot of times that their concerns go, get brushed aside in favor of what city staff tells them that they need. So these things are places that where we can find funds. Thank you. Regarding question number one, in the business community we have monthly meetings with the police department and they're surrounding different topics. They could be fraud. There's also theft. We have gang discussions where the police meet with us and tell us what the problems are. And we could do something very similar in the business community, perhaps with COPS Metro and some of the other organizations. We can agree to go to their site and they can show us all the new technologies they have that can help law enforcement. And by having small community groups go to them and also I realize transportation is an issue but with the organization we can get everybody over there. And at the same time have people then meet here and explain some of the new policing technologies that they have so we can be informed both ways. I also want to say that I will always commit to attend every meeting. In my 20 years of employment I've never missed a day of work that was unscheduled. I've never been sick. Not one day in the last 20 years. And I know many of you will agree and can say that same thing. So I commit to every meeting and I commit to having a representative of COPS or you'll have plenty notice if I'm not able to attend. Regarding question number two for economic development. When Patty Rado was a council woman she had organized these small business summits. And as a result of those small business summits was what helped inspire and create the WDC. And I would like to get back to that kind of summits where small businesses are supported. And in district five we have businesses that are 70 years old, 100 years old, 62 years old. Many of you have that same experience. And our small businesses need to be supported so they can grow to the next level, hire more people in the area, train more people in the area. And that's my plan for improving economic development. Regarding parks, especially Benavides Park the needs are obvious but most importantly and many of our parks around the district don't have water fountains. And this is a big concern of mine. There's no shelter and shade and there's no water fountains. And when kids are playing hard it's 100 degrees when we're all enjoying the outdoors we need to have a source for water. And I hope we can work with SAWS to put water fountains at every park in our district. Regarding question number five in my team right now in leadership SAISD I'm on a group that has to do with community involvement. And one of the things that I'm specifically fighting for has to do with this corridor, this linear cluster. And I was hoping that my vision is that linear the FOIA, the San Antonio Notatorium and the Culture Arts Center could work together to create more programming because any given day of the week you can go to linear you can see that there's people active kids are training, people are walking and it's a great anyway people are ready there if we could have more programming that would benefit our district greatly. And I'm working that right now with my leadership SAISD team. Regarding weatherization and the quality of our homes I think that this weatherization can be complicated and I think it's very important that we as council people reach out individually to people that are eligible especially regarding some foundation problems that I know many of our residents have. It's really gonna require many different groups of people working together and I would like to see more individual effort not just forums and summits because it can be overwhelming but even going door to door telling people hey we've got this program and you're eligible would you like to take advantage? Regarding question number six regarding code compliance I think it's very important that COPS Metro get together because you are the members of the community they're gonna get together to remind us whenever code compliance when there's issues in our neighborhood that work with code compliance and I hope to have a very strong staff regarding code compliance. Regarding the senior programs food security is the most important. I just a minute. I just wanna Ms. Gonzalez I just wanna ask the same question you have good ideas obviously but I like to see how you're gonna fund all the ideas that you have because it's nice to talk about we're gonna do this and that but the funding for question three and four and five where is the money gonna come from? One minute. Regarding the parks it would come from corporate sponsors similar to what they did at Harburger Park when they got lots of corporate funding together to improve the park $500,000 I think they raised in one day so I hope that we can have that kind of partnership in our district. Also regarding and I think it does need to come from corporate sponsors since we are always working with unlimited funds and many of the small businesses in our community are very willing to help and to participate they often just have never been asked would you like to sponsor a park would you like to sponsor shelter and it has to come from the community as well as from the city but community small businesses I think can help and also large corporations. I know that companies like Boeing have given backpacks to some of the schools maybe some of that money that they invest in stuff like backpacks could also be used for human capital so that the people can be more engaged in our neighborhoods. Thank you. Well as far as public safety I know I've been out to a couple of the meetings they have here at the hall and joined by Chief McManus working with you and Block walking here in the neighborhood. We've been making some progress in that regard working with our safe officers and doing more bike patrolling here in the community and I'm wholeheartedly committed to make sure that we continue in those efforts but it's also gonna take taking a look at the zoning on certain properties here in the community. I know recently we had a zoning request request that had come before council to be able to maintain a property and having multiple units at one location it really didn't fit the zoning for the neighborhood and we had a lot of complaints from the neighbors and a lot of calls to the police department at this particular property. I made a recommendation to deny that zoning request it was denied and the community since then has actually had a better opportunity to be able to sleep without being woken up by flashing lights or sirens in the middle of the night. But that's another way really for us to be able to work on that. In addition, communicating with our churches our neighborhood associations communicating with our nonprofit organizations and working together in a unified effort is gonna be the way that we continue to reduce the crime. Crime is down by about 10% in district five overall. Those numbers have been solidified by the FBI. I'm confident when I say that we are moving in the right direction but at the same time we need to continue in that effort and that's making sure that as I have mentioned all those organizations, neighborhood associations, community organizations, churches, police department, council office are all continuing to work in a unified effort. In addition to that working on economic development and I can tell you as far as economic development we have the WDC which is working hard to help support our small micro businesses but also we had the West Side Economic Development Summits and many of you were probably at the meetings over at Lanier High School and also at the, at Rosedale Park at the YMCA. We had meetings there with the residents and with the community and we're able to actually identify a plan to solidify and prioritize key corridors, identify areas that were challenges in terms of hindering us from seeing economic development. Now we're actually able to see that progress moving forward. Over on Buena Vista you see the redevelopment of the fire station which was an old vacant building before. In addition to that working on key corridors like General McMullen where we were able to restripe the street, General McMullen and Castroville and put in some new concrete and medians and crossing, sorry, pedestrian crossing areas because of the West Side Economic Development Summit and the plan that we had there working in partnership with the WDC and working together with our council office and the neighborhood leaders. In addition to that we're actually right now working at the city of San Antonio to open up Economic Development Office downtown at the Central Library for small and micro-businesses. This is also gonna be a mobile site. So what we'll be able to do is have an opportunity for micro-businesses and small businesses which are well over 90% of the businesses in District 5 to be able to walk in to the library downtown and get access to information for funding, for grants, for loans, for financing, for basic steps in terms of opening up a business. But even better than that, I've been advocating and pushing that we take that out to our neighborhood libraries, Collins Garden, Memorial, Bazan, so that these libraries as well in our community can be able to reach out to business owners in the neighborhood because the reality of it is a lot of our businesses are open late into the evenings and they need those areas where they can get that information close to them. Also, working together with parks, I can tell you that we've been able to fix Martinez Park, put some new amenities there. I've secured over $100,000 of Benavidez Park. We've seen the new skating ramps and a lot of improvements over at Rosedale Park, YMCA. I put lights on the softball field behind Lanier High School. We have over $3 million secured for Elmendorf Park. We're working on Mirasol and working on the project to fix up the parks there and also Palm Heights and Normaio. And we have over, we have more District 5 residents that have been able to benefit from the weatherization program in District 5 than any other council district and I'm committed to funding the churches and working with them to keep our centers open for the senior citizens. Thank you. Second, you're very eloquent but you missed two questions. So would you respond to six and seven? I'll give you a minute. Thank you. Well, as far as the community plan, as I had mentioned, working with the Westside Development Corporation and the, from the Westside Economic Development Summits and John Dugan from the director from the planning department, we will work together and we're already doing that. We've set up those meetings for a community plan right here in the Westside. We've also set up a meeting for a community plan for the park right across the street and in addition to that, working on zoning is very important to make sure that we keep our neighborhood in line in terms of zoning. And then as far as the senior centers, we're opening up the new senior center, multi-generational center at Normaio Park but in addition to that, we're identifying a location right here in the community to open up a third senior center in the heart of the Westside and also work to fund the churches to make sure that the nutrition sites stay open. And then as far as attending the meetings, I'm committed to attending all the city council meetings. If there's any that I'm not able to attend then I will be sure to make sure that I contact COPS Metro and inform you so that we can have somebody there on our behalf and my office will be working with you all the way through. Thank you. That's some great ideas. As far as my ideas go, first off I'm not gonna pretend that I have all the answers. It's gonna be my responsibility to put together a team that's gonna be able to get to these problems. Check, check, check. All right. It's gonna be my responsibility to put together a team that's gonna be able to address these issues and concerns to their full extent. But as far as number one about public safety, I'm a father. I'm a father of four and nothing means more to me besides education than the public safety of my children and the people of my community. What we need to do is we need to get in touch with a cooperative effort with our San Antonio Police Department which includes Chief McManus to create a more stringent relationship between the community and the police department and to look at what's going on, prioritize what's going on in our jail system. We have a lot of nonviolent offenders that are currently incarcerated that don't really need to be there. There are rehabilitative services that are out there that can be used to get these people out of incarceration so it can free up space for the more hardened criminals that have nothing to lose. And I don't know about you but on my street, 19th Street, I have been victim and so has my mother. She has been victim to break-ins, home invasions and this is unacceptable. This needs to be, these criminals are pushing and we have to be able to push back and the only way we're gonna do that is by showing strength in numbers and putting a more strong emphasis on a relationship with the San Antonio Police Department. We can't rely on them to do everything for us. We gotta watch each other's backs, folks and it's only gonna start from doing that. Second of all, the economic development that's going on. We have business districts in our community that are unutilized. We have the Kelly, USA area that has millions of square feet of economic housing that can be used for either economic or educational institutions. Why aren't these used? These need to be addressed because we need to put in that vision. We need to put in the vision the creative ideas to bring in these major employers that can turn things around. One major employer can turn things around into community folks. I've seen it. I've visited Compton, I've visited real destitute, former destitute communities in Los Angeles, in Philadelphia, New York and it takes one solid employer, one solid employer that supports local growth. I'm not talking about the Walmart's.  Number three about parks. What we need to do is we need to reinvest ourselves and reestablish these parks. It's not fair that the former generations were able to enjoy these parks and the future generations may not have them or they're in destitute conditions. You have syringes on the floor. You have thugs that hang out in these parks that intimidate people away. We can't do this anymore. We gotta take our neighborhoods back and that includes demanding more funding from any aspect that we can, from corporate development and including the tourism industry. If we can put, if we can gather revenue from the tourism industry to build a house for the Spurs, then we could do that for our neighborhood. We could do that for our parks. We gotta prioritize what's important. I'm a Spurs fan too, but I got more important things to worry about than an NBA game because these guys are making millions of dollars. I'm barely scraping by. There's something wrong here. We need to get our priorities straight. Four, let's see, the linear cluster. We need, again, we need to reestablish ourselves. We need to reestablish ourselves in our intellect. We need to develop ourselves. We need to develop our minds. We need to get our people back in school. And as far as the linear cluster goes, we need to develop another co-op with jobs that offer technological cooperation where students can go and, sorry about that. You certainly, only you still have three questions that you didn't answer. Moreover, you have some good ideas, but the question is, whom are you gonna bring in to do put those ideas in practice because it's not just the ideas that are gonna make a difference. So, would you get a little bit more specific about one minute? Okay, again, that goes more to, no man upon himself is a castle. You have to bring in the key players that are gonna help you bring this together. We need, I have individuals within that are the same, just like me, who have come up from the ground up, self-educated, who are gonna bring in these, who can help me bring in these ideas, bring in employers that can help support the local communities. Funding is a major aspect of these programs. We need to tap any available resource that we can from any corporate sponsors to community fairs. I'm a musician, I deal with a lot of underground musicians that have music and beautiful art that are there to provide. If we can gather these artists together and create community fairs, we can create the revenue to bring in, to support a lot of the ideas that we wanna do. Hope to answer your question. Thank you, candidates. We're wrapping up our meeting now, but we have another question to ask you. But before that, as we mentioned before, we do recognize officials, and Father Richard Hall from San Juan de los Lagos, our neighboring parish, sends a letter that recognizes Mr. Medina for working with us in securing the speed bumps in front of San Juan de los Lagos. We want to acknowledge you for that. We have one last question for each of you, and it is an easy yes or no question. Will you meet with COPS Metro leaders within a month of being elected or re-elected to continue the conversation on these issues? We would like to again ask you each in alphabetical order. Mr. Briones, will you meet with us? Yes, I will, Father. Thank you. Mr. Cardenas? Yes, Father Nacid. I put a representative on my staff. Okay. Mr. Garcia? Yes, sir, I commit to meeting with you guys. Okay. Ms. Gonzalez? Absolutely. Mr. Medina? Yes, Father, I commit. And Mr. Ramirez? I'm right down the street, Father. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you. Now we have some more. We will now turn the meeting back to our co-chairs, Mr. Ramos and Mrs. Mora. At this time, we'll have Natalia Tavar talk about the next steps that are involved in. Wow, guys. How's this going? Okay. I wanna invite you to come to our next march that we're having, Cinco de Mayo march. It's actually to go out and get the vote out. Everybody has a flyer? And each one of you have received that invitation. So please come out on May the 4th to come and teach your family about how to affect the change in your neighborhood. Since we're holding our candidates accountable and leaders and neighbors, we hold ourselves accountable too. We'll be having a non-partisan march walk out to get out the vote. And again, on Saturday, May the 4th at 10 a.m. We want you to decorate posters, banners, and come and join us. We gather here at St. Timothy's at nine in the morning. We'll be having a short continental breakfast and then we'll take off walking from here to San Juan de los Lagos to Sacred Heart and back to St. Timothy. So we want you people to get out to vote and we're taking voter registrations back here for anybody that's not registered. And we wanna thank the safe officers for being here tonight. And thank you all and let's hear. Yay, everybody. Mr. Ramos, Ms. Mora. We're the candidates and we know what to do next to get out the vote. Is that our job? You're right, and we're all for that, right? Okay. We're joining the meeting with this. We wanna thank all of you for being here tonight. We wanna ask you to please stay seated until the candidates exit this hall. Candidates, thank you very much for being here and for your input. Thank you. Leaders, please stay for an evaluation of our assembly. Thank you. All our COPS leaders, we would like to ask you to stay so we can do an evaluation of the candidates.


When I was growing up, our relatives and our parents, they usually go out to the sea to get our food. So it is very important for our community. My name is Naomi Longa. I am the team leader of the Sea Woman of Melanesia program here in Kimbe, West New Britain province of Papua New Guinea. So my love for the ocean started when I was still a kid. So most of the days I used to spend my time in the sea swimming, looking at the corals, the fish. And I always wonder how they grow, how they, if they are living thing, then how they get their food from and why are they so beautiful in the water. I took out signs from there just to, just to know more about the sea. The Sea Woman of Melanesia started in 2016 by Dr. Andy Lewis. We empowered this woman by training them with basic reef survey technique so that they can be able to find an ideal area for marine reserve in their community. As I was travelling around Papua New Guinea over more than a decade in my work as an ecotourism guide, it was more often than not the young women in the villages which were coming up to me and talking to me about marine life and about marine conservation and what they could do to look after their own reefs. I looked at it and said, okay, what skills that I have can I bring to bear to try and make a difference here for the people and for the reefs and for this really quite important part of the world which really has the last great tract of high biodiversity reef in the world now, it's far too precious to lose. First of all, we usually do the snorkeling training and then once I see that the women are confident in the water then we go on and do the survey technique. After I train them, I can see a very big difference. They can now swim confidently in the water and they can ID the fish, they can identify the corals. Once they finish the training, they're going to go back to their own community and they're going to do the survey in their own reefs and they're going to talk to the village elders about what they learn. It now gives them the confidence to make decisions in their family, in their community and also it gives them the courage to talk about, you know, the resources that we depend on in our daily lives, like coral reefs. The coral triangle is being affected by climate change. There's no doubt we have seen thermal bleaching through that area but the bleaching we saw there in January 2021 was probably the most extensive. The communities were just wondering what's happening on the coral reefs but I knew that the corals were bleaching because they all turned white. And of course at that time there was very few recreational or scientific or expedition vessels in the area. When the event started, there was lockdown in all the provinces. Here in our own area, we have access to the sea, like we can easily go out. And so our Sea Women of Melanesia teams were on the ground, we had them kitted out with underwater cameras and so we were able to deploy them to a range of different locations through the Eastern Coral Triangle. I've never seen bleaching even before. The team in Millen Bay Province and Port Mores Bay and in Solomon Islands, they also went out and do the survey and they have noticed the bleaching. They were able to get really high quality imagery of the condition of the reefs which then they sent back to us and we were able to make an assessment of the severity of that bleaching. It was very important because it was probably some of the only information signed to be information that we had coming out of those areas. There was around about 50% to 60% of the corals on the reef were showing signs of bleaching stress. Looking at the imagery, probably about 10% of them may have gone on to die. After the bleaching, I went back and surveyed the reef and I saw that most of the corals, they survived the bleaching. So I was really happy about that. Climate change is a significant issue but in Melanesia by far the biggest issue is overfishing both by local people and by commercial elements, both within these countries and foreign fleets that are coming in. To create a reserve in my community, the next step is to talk to the communities about the benefits of marine reserve and we will have to hear from their perspective what they think. If they want to have a marine reserve then we're going to tell them that hey, we have the skills, we have cameras and we have GPS that we can do all the necessary things that we need to do to set up the reserve. So in my community, I'm pretty sure that they will be happy to have that reserve. When I go out and dive and see the coral reefs, I hope that we'll have more interest from communities as well. We can help them to get the benefits that the reserve is going to provide.


Hello, everybody. I'm going to be talking about containerizing the operating system and how to do that efficiently. So before that, a bit about me. Who am I? I am an intern on the CoreOS team. And I'm also pursuing a computer engineering at the University of Toronto and here are my contact details. So let's start with the agenda. So why are we even containerizing the OS? This is what I'm going to answer first. And then how do we containerize it? And the more important question, how do we do this efficiently and intelligently? And the third part is, what did I achieve from this? So let's start with which operating system am I talking about? We're talking about CoreOS, which is a Linux distribution specialized for containerized workloads. And how it came about to be was from the merger of two different projects, Container Linux and Project Atomic, which brought together two very important open-source projects, Ignition and RPMOS tree. And they helped solve some of the most important requirements of being a container host, which were the operating system should be lightweight, it should be configurable, it should be up-to-date, immutable, and should work on many infrastructure. So while doing this, we came across several challenges. The first one was obviously configuring the operating system. Now, when you have already provisioned your operating system onto your infrastructure, you need to think about, how do you make changes to this config files? That was the first problem. Second one was, how do you handle adding the packages, RPM packages, or handling unpackaged data to the base operating system after the node has been provisioned? So these were the three challenges we had. And the solutions we initially had, I mean the problems, the solution to these problems exist.  And obviously, this is slow and not the most efficient way to do things. And the second thing was using client-side package learning, aka, RPMOS to install the package name. But now, what this meant is that each of the client nodes needed to basically run like a script which basically handled RPMOS to install. And doing that might lead to problems, because what if one of the nodes gets into an unmanaged state, and there comes problems. You don't want to SSH into one of the nodes and try to fix things over there. And also, there's no one way of testing it, because the customer needs to ship out this new package, and they haven't tested that before. And if something fails, it becomes increasingly hard to manage that. But the solution we wanted now was, what if we could do all of this on the customer side in just one single update? And this update not being delivered from the base operating system, but from the customers that needed it. And also, if there was a way to basically do server-side learning, which means the customer could basically, if they wanted to add a package, they could basically test this already on the base operating system and then deploy it. Basically, the layer part and the building part could be done as a single operation. And thus came our need for CoreOS learning, which means you could manage your entire operating system with the help of Dockerfiles. Any configuration you needed to do, if you want to add any package data and package data, you could basically ship out as an update to your container image. And this is the part when I showed up. Everything that I've told you till now is what I inherited from the team. And this is when I actually came as an intern on the team. And this is the problem that I tackled. How to containerize the operating system efficiently? Now we get to the question. But hold on to this thought again. Let's give us a refresher on how our container images actually stored. So they're stored using this thing called overlayFS, which is a union mount file system. And just to give a brief on this, it contains of two different layers. One is the image layers, which means they are also known as the lower directories, which are read only, which means that they cannot be modified. And there are several of these. And there's only one container layer on the top of them, which is read and write, and which is FML storage. Whatever changes you make to your container is only made to the container layer.  And what you see on the top is the changes that you made. Now from this, we can infer that if we could somehow divide the operating system files into these layers, we could efficiently containerize the operating system. So there are several ways to divide the operating system files. The first of them is to do it arbitrarily, like put random files into one, put random files another. And the second one could be do it using the Linux file structure, like slashboot, slashvar, slashrock, put it into one of those layers. But the one that I chose was using, by segmenting the files to the RPMs. If all the files belong to one RPM, it would form a single block. And why did I do this? Because RPMs form the basic building block of an operating system. And if one of these, like, bash files or one of these binary files within them change, the entire RPM package changes. And OK, so now we tackle the first part of the problem. But how do we do this efficiently? So what does efficient mean? Imagine you have an operating system with just two very simple packages, G-Lipsy and OpenSSL. And you need to containerize this. So let's say you have two different layers on Fedora CoroS, two different layers of the container image. And arbitrarily, you put both of these packages in the first layer. And you keep the second layer empty. And an important part of this is that all of these layers are cached on the client side. But when you get an update, what happens is if G-Lipsy updates, the entire layer needs to be updated because the Shah of the entire layer changed. And OpenSSL will be needed to download again. Which is not efficient. Could we do this in a better way? Obviously, we can. We can split this into two different layers. And now only if G-Lipsy updates, only G-Lipsy gets the needs to be re-downloaded. So essentially, we have created a design requirement for ourselves, which is minimizing layer deltas across upgrades. The other design requirements exist also, which is the function needs to be deterministic. The algorithm needs to be deterministic. The third one is that it needs to be a two-way function. That means you could reversibly go from an operating system to a container image and back to that exact same version. And this is the most important part. When I was talking about the overlay FS, how it works is using kernel mounts. And there is a hard limit. Or you could almost say it's a bug from the kernel that there is a limit on the amount of kernel mounts that you can do, which means there's a limit on the number of container layers that you can put, and which is right now 128. And for people who are interested in academia, this could be boiled down to a multi-objective bin packing problem, since there is a limited amount of bins, and you've got to put a lot of these packages in it. So let's start with the naive approach in our solution quest. Let's put each RPM into one layer, and the next RPM to the next layer, and keep doing this. But obviously, this doesn't work, because we have greater than 400 RPMs in the operating system, especially in Fedora Core OS. And there's only 128 layers. This doesn't work out. So let's try a better approach. Use some data. Let's use size, for example. You sort these RPM by size, so the biggest RPMs never get redowned again and again.  But when we did this, when I tried this approach, the last layer actually becomes really, really big. And if a single package worth about one MB changes, the entire 200 MB worth of layer needs to be downloaded. Again, this is not the most efficient manner to do this. So why not let's go all the way in. Let's use all the data. Let's not even infer. Let's give all the specifications about what the RPM is made up of, and give it to deep learning algorithms. Why not? And it would really work well, because we could define our loss function as the layer delta, and this would work really well. But the problem with this one is it's not deterministic. It is slow and unreliable, and you don't want your package manager or RPMSG to run a deep learning algorithm every single time you do a build. That's not what you want from an operating system. So hence, I came up with this approach, where I made an observation that if you have a layer which has two packages, and that one of those packages are operating at a higher frequency than the other, then these two packages should not be kept together, because one of them would keep updating constantly, another one would just stay there and keep getting redone every single time. That's not efficient, right? So what you do is you can just separate them out, right? So I was talking about what is high frequency package, what is low frequency package, but how do you essentially classify them? The way we can classify them is using simple statistics, mean, and standard deviation. If a package frequency falls below three standard deviations away from the mean, you could classify it as a low frequency. And if it falls above three standard deviations, like above from the mean, then it classifies as a high frequency. Now obviously, there are much more subtleties to this approach, but this is a more boiled down diagram of what I did. Now what we can do once we have developed those high frequency, high size, low frequency, low size, and all of those matrix, what we see when I do a scatterplot is these. And you can see they form these natural clusters, right? And these natural clusters can be seen at high frequency, low size, and all of them, right? And there's a lot of them pushed into this lower frequency, low size caravans. So what we can do, since we have partitioned away high frequency from the low frequency, high size from the low size, what we can do is from each of these partitions, take a few packages and put them into a layer. Now what we have essentially done is that we have separated away high frequency from the low frequency. So if you do this for each partition and sort them by frequency, then what we can assure is that these two frequencies never get really mixed, right? But if you keep doing that for each layer, what can happen is that it might go beyond the limit, right? It might go beyond the 128th actual limit. And then what we can do is just merge some of these layers if they are in the same partition. That way we still avoid mixing these partitions together. And the other problem that I came up with is if you keep doing this for every single build, it'll become highly sensitive to the changes of the RPM, right? So instead of computing this algorithm every single major build, what if we only did it in y and z streams, right? Because if we only did this in the x stream, which means in the major build, and in y and z, just take the packet structure of the major build. And this way we ensure to recompute this algorithm every single time and change the packing structure, which makes it slow, right? So to summarize the approach, you first split the operating system files into different RPMs. Like all of these files owned by a single RPM goes into one of these packages, right? And obviously there are files that belong to none. And they go into one of the other packages. And you basically divide the operating system files like these. Then you use data to basically segment these RPM packages into these partitions. And once you have segmented them, you can put them into layers, right? Simple approach. So let's talk about the results now. So the results were actually good because we found there was a 30% reduction in the redundant data being downloaded across upgrades as compared to the previous data approach, where we only use size. Here we use size and frequency. So we used more data. And we helped optimize the way it was packaging. And it also fulfills other requirements. It's deterministic since we're not using any machine learning algorithm. It's a two-way function. We can reversely go up front and back. And we also adhere to the number of layers, which is the maximum number of layers, which is 128. And now I want to talk about what's next. So I started with the problem of bin packing, right? Because there was a limited amount of bins. But there's this new thing called Compose FS, which is like an extension of overlay FS, which prevents a higher number of kernel amounts being present. So instead of each layer having a single kernel amount, it basically merges them together, which is a better approach. And you wouldn't need to do all of these fancy things just to get across the kernel bug. So it also has other optimizations done to provide file system verification. And yeah, if you want to get involved, there are some of the links that you guys can look at. And yes, thank you. Does anybody have any questions? Yeah, good question. Because the question was, how many layers are we actually shipping right now? So obviously, since this is a feature that allows the customer to efficiently use their operating system as a container image and derive some layers from it, we don't want to occupy all the 128 different layers. Because you still want to keep the leeway for the customers to basically add their own packages, add their own customizations. So right now we are doing with 64 layers, like basically half of the entire limit. So the customer still has the rest of the 50% like container layers left to basically put in their customizations. Next, go ahead. So next. Well, I tried this. Like I tried different. So basically the question is, if you have lower layers in a container image, it performs better. And is that true or not? So I saw some like Reddit articles mentioning that, yes, it does affect the performance. But when I actually tried doing this, I didn't see much difference honestly, because these layers are cached on the client side. So once it's cached, you don't really need to do anything on it. Any time it gets updated, it will just pull that delta from the container registry and do it. So as far as to my knowledge, it did not affect. We are out of time, so I think we can talk about this after.


I was born in the southwest of China. That's a beautiful city with clear air. I get to see beautiful starry night. And I was very interested in astronomy since a very young age. And in elementary school I had a great teacher and he made us get up early in the morning to draw sunspots and stayed late at night to draw moon face. That's a wonderful experience. And then since then I decided when I grew up I wanted to do astronomy. And I'm very fortunate I went to the U.S. I did my PhD in Hawaii and played with a bunch of telescopes and instruments there. And now I'm at ESOL, another great temple of telescopes. My dream is to play with telescopes and here I am. My dream came true. I'm very happy working at ESOL.