Good evening everyone. Welcome to tonight's Common Council meeting. As you'll notice attorney McLean is not here tonight He is excused. He wasn't able to make it tonight Before we start the meeting. I would ask Madam City Clerk to read the quote for the week Thank you, Mayor For every minute you remain angry you give up 60 seconds of peace of mind Call the 23rd regular 23rd regular meeting of the Common Council order, which please call the roll Warren Sirta Davis excuse graph Hannah Kittleson Clowness excuse Manny Meyer Montemire Radke Ryan Susha Vanderweel excuse and for hassled 13 present Corm is present this time We will pledge allegiance to the beautiful country we live in a woman. Hannah. Would you please lead us? I? Pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America And to the Republic for which it stands one nation under God Indivisible with liberty and justice for all Thank You old Manhattan Approve the minutes President Burke. Yes. I think you know I would move that the minutes be approved Is that it on the record? Motion second to approve the minutes any discussion There'd be a non-old and famous a I I any opposed ocean carries minutes are approved Next item on the agendas public forum. I'm pretty clerk Yes, public forum this evening. We have dimple atoms and can I have your home address, please? 1424 Virginia Avenue Subway again, okay, and you will have five minutes Sue can you let me know when I'm about four minutes certainly. Thank you good evening mayor Perez and City clerk Sue Richards and council. It's nice to be with you tonight I'm here because I'm a taxpayer and citizen of Sheboygan and have been for the last 19 years living in district three and the reason that I'm here as I I attended the Salaries and grievance meetings the last two or three times and I wanted to speak about The table of organization that was discussed this past week Which I think it's a good idea first of all I'd like to say that as a taxpayer as I've been out talking to people and talking to department heads and Talking to city workers and so forth. There isn't anyone that I don't know that doesn't want us to have lower taxes So, you know, we're all on the same wavelength and thinking about that that everybody wants lower taxes or our taxes not to be raised I know myself as a senior citizen on a fixed income. I Can't afford for my taxes to be raised any more than what they already have been and even though Part of my tax bill is from the city I think I also need to you know be talking to the county and to the school board about that too because it is a Three-way tax bill along with the state and others, but those are the three main slices of pie So, you know, let's let's all be straight about that that everybody wants lower taxes Now, how are we going to get there? and in this table of organization as I said in the Salary and grievance meeting the last week and the week and two weeks before that I was at that meeting also I'm seeing What I think is a rush job to reorganize and And and to change the structure of the city employees And I don't have I don't think there's anybody that has a problem with the table of organization being looked at I think that's important. I think that we need to do that. I think that anything that we can do To to save money and talk to the employees and talk to the department heads But what I saw this past week Was something that wasn't done and that was department heads We're not aware of what that table was going to be before they got to that meeting And they were not given a copy of what it was going to be Before they got to that meeting and they weren't given a copy at the meeting When a couple of the department had spoke they had to get a copy from the older persons themselves that were on the committee and I Saw our department had speak I Saw city employees speak. I saw them speak passionately about their concerns and That this had not been done with them and Then I saw them. I Saw this one lady crying From the computer department because there's six employees from the computer department and With this package that was to go through They were going to be cutting the computer department employees in half so, you know that a 50% It is quite a cut and when this lady was saying that they were working very hard and that they Had been taking up the slack from this one that had been on sick leave for the last six weeks Instead of saying thank you for working extra hard for taking up the slack on the six leave sick leave For the one that was absent They were told well, that's Another ray of saying that we can do without less employees Because you've worked so efficiently without them and see I think it's a two-way street Everybody wants to get a little after four minutes already. Thank you from a to b but how we get there and Then I saw a department head speak up and then later learned that he was reprimanded For speaking up. I saw citizens That were not allowed to speak at this committee meeting. These are committee meetings So if we can't do it at committee meetings, where can we do it if department heads aren't allowed to speak and Citizens aren't allowed to speak without fear being You know reprimanded then we've got a serious problem. I think and Now I'm very pleased that this table of organization is coming to you tonight as a report Excuse me, and it's going to one minute. Would you like the additional minute one more second one more minute It's going to go to all of the standing committees. So all of you are going to have time to tweak it and Another thing that bothered me about the table of organization was that it all had to be accepted or none Well, I don't think that that's the way that it has to be I think that you guys can take the time to tweak it and Work with it and take the time to talk to the department heads and the employees and come up with a good Solid table of organization that will save us money. Thank you. Thank you That's it. That's it. There's a point of clarification that needs to be made tonight And that is that at the salary and grievance meeting that was held No one was trying to prevent anybody from speaking But there are standards of propriety standards of respect and collegialness that we all must follow When the committee a standing committee elected by the people When their discussion is referred to as pathetic, I will step in when their discussion is cold ridiculous to their face I will step in Anybody can say and it's free to say anything they'd like so long as they adhere to civility cordial discourse and Utmost respect for the people that have been elected by the people of the city of Sheboygan People may not like what they hear There's a way to address it if it's not addressed properly Folks I've said it once and I'm gonna keep saying it. I will step in Wanted to share some thoughts with you about the city administration It's an issue that came about as I was at a grocery store this weekend and I was cornered by the vegetable section and the question that was posed to me was Why are you and why is the council anti-police? That question struck struck a chord It really did because That's been the issue lately and that's been some of the accusations that are being made out in the community And I wanted to clear some of that ground for you the alderman and I Have an extremely difficult job to do And as we strive to do our job the best we can with the information that we can Do the analysis that we need to do and perhaps at some point come to terms or some general consensus If not a majority vote we make decisions Some decisions are popular some are not But this body and my office We make decisions every single day and folks those decisions impact people's lives In one way or another And as we make those decisions we have to weigh and balance a lot of concerns A lot of feelings a lot of emotions We do the best we can We work as a team and to me team is Contributing we all contribute in some respect to another Some a little more some a little less We have to keep our eye on the big picture. It's so easy to get ill-focused And get personal and focus on one thing instead of the whole picture But we have to be mindful and I've said it before that the decisions we make Regardless of what we base them on impact people's lives They don't impact just your district because when you vote you vote in majority they impact Everybody's lives in the entire city of sheboygan So while you're elected by the people in one district or one ward you're impacting everybody Taxpayer pay for they expect and they deserve basic services. That's what we do We provide those services in an efficient cost effective consistent and timely basis That's what we do folks This structure the government structure that we have now is extremely complex and diverse We have several departments. We don't have one department Some of us may like to pick one department as our best And perhaps promote that department. That's okay But keep in mind. We don't represent one department. We represent a lot of departments Unlike department heads. They represent one department Not a lot of departments My philosophy has been I will treat every department fairly and equal equally I do will not have favorites And if I'm at fault Then I'm at fault But I believe that strongly and I believe the people of sheboygan want me to feel that way The minute I take preference to one The inevitable thing is I will neglect the other I will not have that on my conscience Our problems are mainly attributed to rising costs and the people's pleas for no more taxes Every year you have seen that our expenditures far exceed our revenues Then we have to make decisions nothing different than at home When you have more expenses than money coming in you're going to have to make some cuts or some considerations to make up that difference But as I said earlier this discussion here with you was prompted By me being cornered in the vegetable section And the accusation that this council And that I am anti-police this accusation obviously is unfounded And it's beyond me and it continues to be beyond me Of some people Can be so ugly disrespectful Mean spirited and divisiveness But they're out there folks and not they're out here in sheboygan. They're out there all over the world We just happen to have some ourselves Some of the accusations are very politically charged with high emotions and personal feelings You hear misinformation out in the community about how this administration and this mayor Cut funding cut the funding for a child abuse program in the police department That hasn't happened and we've cut this and we've cut that What we've cut is no secret folks and what we've cut is in response to the people's pleas For tax relief We continue to work towards tax relief Now there's some key things that I think you need to know and the public needs to know About why it is that we're not anti-police because if we were anti-police the first thing we do Is we look at their budget Oh, the mayor's cutting this budget and the council agreed and they've cut the budget One third of our entire city budget general budget goes to the police one third To one department the rest goes to the other departments The increases in the budget starting at 2003 Have been 4.6 2.7 7.0 2.4 increases in the budget for the police department That's not a trend of being anti-police folks And oh six there was a decrease of 0.7 And that was because the council elected to have a zero percent increase in the levy and everybody took a hit then Now another argument is being made that we're anti-police is we're down seven officers In 2002 we had 90 sworn officers In 2003 we had 87 In 2004 we had 88 In 2005 we had 86 In 2007 we had 87 A total difference in five years folks have been three three officers I got these numbers from finance and hr Three officers and that has been because when we had to make the difference up in the police department to comply with This council's request of zero percent increase Decisions had to be made and when an officer is missing they delay the hiring So at that money it can be used to make up the differences elsewhere That's strictly a management department head decision And that was made with that department head The other thing that we could look at if we're anti we pay them poorly My salary and I will announce it to the public because it's public information is 65809. That's what I make a year More than 50 people in the city of shiboyan working for the city make born Barney and I do More than 50 people make more money than I do And I worry about all the departments and get blamed for all the departments About half of those 50 people Work for the police department Of those more than half Of those more than 50 about half of them make more salary than I do In just that department 22 people in the police department earn more than I do with a difference of five to 44 percent higher than I do We pay well 11 of those 22 people are in the 20 to mid 30 percent making more money than I do higher And this does not include the increase in salary of three percent more For this year 2007 A new police officer Earns benefits and wages 41 721 with an additional three percent Of about $1,200 and oh seven We fund our police department well and we pay them well And there's other issues that I've talked to you about about how we are supportive of our police department and how we are not anti police department We could go on and on and on but the biggest one Is that for about 50 years They've needed a police station And you council have made it happen They're going to get one If you are anti police You wouldn't have voted for it And you wouldn't have Decided to build a police station If you hear the accusations that are being made which is what I when I hear them I would ask that you assess the information Consider the source And then refer them to the mayor's office or if you need information, it's easily available And along that same line that this council This anti police comes the accusation that this council is divided Folks you're not divided if anything you're pretty strong. You've got some great talent diverse skills Dedication I've never seen before You work hard for very little money You take a lot a lot of beating because I remember when I was an alderman Calls came in anytime of the day and they stopped you anywhere they can and that's okay. That's our job But you're not divided. This is not a divided council Someone made the comment that We're having a hard time trying to get you to sign document It's because you're talking amongst yourselves. I've never seen it happen before you're actually conversing with each other before the meetings That's pretty awesome You remember when we talked about if this council was divided you wouldn't have Pass a zero percent living You wouldn't have put an end to the wheel tax. You wouldn't have put an end to the stormwater tax You wouldn't have given the people over eight million dollars in tax relief that they don't have to budget for this year because you took care of that You did away with about a little over eight million dollars If you were a divided council, you wouldn't have had in just the city in the in the In the river The development part of the city by south pier you wouldn't have developed over 56 million dollars in additional tax base You're not divided. You're pretty united. Some people would like to have people think that But that's not true And it's been said that a lot of this is politics the same people claiming this politics are the same ones trying to make it politics All I see here is hard-working alderman who come in do their homework Study the issues and vote their conscience That's a good old. That's a good council to me And finally along the lines if we're anti-police We'd have one heck of a problem in public safety and folks. We don't At the salary and grievance meeting Chief Kirk said we don't have a dangerous community. We don't have a dangerous community He asked do we have dangerous situations? Yes Are there problems out there? Yes But he said I take pride in being the sixth safest city in the nation Folks I take pride too and I think rightfully so you should too We have a good city council. We have a good city administration We have great support for public safety departments And saying we don't it's not going to change the picture We're going to continue to do what we do best and that's serve the public And serve them well Thank you very much Next item on the agenda Is hearings We have nine hearings the first one I am going to cancel the City planning commission has not acted on the rezoning and then we have Hearing no notice of the vacation and this continuance of approximately 20 feet of south pier drive from east right of ways of south 8th street to illinois avenue We have a hearing on the proposed assessments of resurfacing for resurfacing of south 7th street from indiana avenue to high avenue Of north 7th street from ghillie to north avenue Of north 3rd street from bluff to north avenue of lincoln avenue from north 8th to north 13th Of north 13th street from merners avenue to ghillie Of niagara avenue from north 4th to north 6th And we have proposed assessments for curb and gutter on semen avenue from north 15th street to north 21st street Is there anyone that would like to address the council on any of these hearings? Okay, we will take you ma'am and then you sir Please step up And we just did your name address in the area that you're going to be talking about Sure, right up to the mic. Would you find which hearing are you speaking on ma'am? Which area are you speaking on which hearing the one third street between uh bluff and bluff and north avenue north Okay, and I just need your name Marion russink, and I live at 2028 north third street. Marion could you spell your last name for me, please? R u e s as in sam i n k Okay, thank you and 2028 is the house right next to the alley Adjust well across from the first congregational church you Got the picture there and the problem is that uh When cars approach or not cars but trucks approach from the north They cannot turn into that alley apparently without going over the lawn at my house It really hasn't bothered me A lot, but now that all this surface resurfacing is coming up I thought it might be a good idea if that entrance was redesigned somehow and if you recall I took pictures On wednesday, and it was after the snow storm that we had a week ago was sunday and I think You'll be I was hoping there was a overhead projectors done can't gathering dust somewhere But if you just pass through us and and look at the truck tracks In the winter the snow is there and that's not a big deal But in the summertime it Packs that ground down so that The lawn gets to be three four five six inches below the curbing Because it's a continuous turning over that corner And I'd like to address another I have the point please do Then the other thing I took pictures of I watch a lot of court cases This is my evidence um When we built our house 50 years ago The snow plowing was always done To the center onto the boulevards I don't know why they somebody thought that was not a good idea because now people that have driveways On the boulevards Have to shovel out their driveways, and I'm sure you've all heard people complain about plows going past and plowing their driveway closed But that too This just shows what happened to my sidewalk After the snow plows went through And As long as I was coming tonight and taking the picture as I decided that I'd like to address that problem also because I'm very fortunate to have the church. They do all the plowing They do all the plowing of the alley they plow the drive the Entrance or exit to the alley So it's not a problem for me, but people that live up the street further I think they do have that problem and it presents a problem even among my sidewalk I have it shoveled and then the snow plow goes through and it throws it right back as you see on the picture Right back on the sidewalk because it that portion Is very narrow So couldn't somebody start redesigning the plowing system and plow it back onto the Boulevard Thank you. Thank you very much just for the public's uh information Notes will be taken of your comments and they will be taken into consideration. Thank you next sir you're up Yes, sir, which one are you talking on I'm I'm here to be heard uh with regard to what's listed as hearing for proposed assessments For resurfacing of north 7th street from geely avenue to north avenue. Okay, hold on north 7th from geely to north Oh, and can can I have your name, please? My name is jay Pursick p as in peter er s as in sam ick and j your home address 2216 north 7th street. Okay. Go ahead. Thank you. Uh, I would just uh I just came to uh urge the council to A vote not to confirm the assessment to resurface North 7th street and to replace carbon grunder in north 7th street from geely to north avenue At the very least I would ask that the council postpone the assessment Um for a few years to allow property owners to save the money for the portion. They'll have to pay Um residents will have to come up with two three or more thousand dollars for a bill that will be due I'm not sure when six months 12 months 20 months at the at the most I gather And I acknowledge that the city offers the five-year financing I just think it would be who the city to Encourage us to be responsible consumers and save up for the work rather than to go and debt and pay Interest on it for five years And of course, I know we need to pay for city infrastructure. It's just we need to be mindful of priorities and As far as the the residents I've spoken to including myself there are a lot um higher things On our list than spending two to Anymore two to 45 hundred for some of us uh then making our street and our curb look prettier at this time when I just don't think it's a high priority It's really not that bad And then the city I understand I gather they have to pay for 50 of the of the project as well and Even if that money is already allocated, I would just hope the city recognizes that it has high priorities The mayor mentioned having to cut back on a number of things And I know one city street is a is a pittance in the In the amount of money it needs But I would just hope that there would be a way to allot this for a few years to some something else that much higher priority things The police health care costs for city employees It's just hard to believe that this money is not urgently needed for other things Then just making our street prettier and um that I can't any longer be diverted even though it may be allocated Finally, I just would again just reiterate that I would hope that you would allow The citizens to spend their money or the money that we have to contribute as frontage owners To more important things and to do the same for the the money that all taxpayers that you've collected from us And to just wait to resurface this section until it's really a high priority until it's really needed And at the very least defer the project for a few years to allow everyone to save and and prepare for the expense Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You're welcome Is there anyone else ma'am please And then you're an exer And which one are you talking about The same one the same one the north seven from geely to north and can I have your name, please joy spritz And joyce. What is your home address 25 22 north seven street? Okay. Go ahead. Okay I must agree with a person who just spoke and I hadn't intended to make that request But if that's possible that would be great to have it procrastinated for a while But in case if it does go through Um, we were wondering Several things that's a long block Each of those two blocks are equal to three blocks each So we are wondering where will we park? How long will the project take and when will it begin? And then will both sides of the boulevard be done at the same time? Or will you say do the west side first and then the east or vice versa? Those were the questions we had And then also I would like to address what the lady next to me said that was on third street about the snow plowing It used to be really good. It made the streets wider the boulevard wider when they plowed and it went onto the boulevard Now that they they do it just like they're doing any other street it if there's a lot of snow It really narrows the boulevard the the street the traffic um on that one side sometimes when we have lots of snow There's not even allowing allowed parking um, no, that's because it's my phone here It it um Makes it that you can't even park safely and have traffic go past So I hadn't intended to bring that one up either, but I just kept listening what she said Thank you. So thank you Joyce And which one are you speaking on sir? I'm on uh speaking south 7th street from indiana on up. Okay, hold on south Indiana to high avenue Indiana to high avenue on south seven. I believe so. Okay, and what is your name, please? George Hoffman It's h o f f m a n or two ends. Okay, and your address Well the property i'm i'm referring to is 1106 south 7th south 7th. Okay, go ahead and What we're concerned about there is that there's an awful lot of Commercial traffic there's a lot of trucks coming down 7th street now And i'm wondering if it's wise to be resurfacing that at this time and since that um roundabout Thing went in on 8th street. We got a truck route on south 7th now And some very big ones and heavy ones, and I don't know if we should be investing that kind of Investment in something that may be torn up in a short while because there's a lot of building Going on on 7th street There's a lot of counters. There's a lot of Garbage being hauled out of there and there's a lot in the future planned yet. I think that's a little premature To be doing that work the other thing I probably Hope you don't throw me out but uh I think I was wondering if the All council didn't make a mistake and that assessment was put on last year's taxes already because uh Our little 800 square foot condo there went up 750 dollars along with the others Secondly We don't have garbage pickup that cost us 156 dollars for the 11 units there every three months And I think it's kind of unfair because those are residences and they're owned by individual people And not only that but we only have five cans of garbage And that's a that's a tremendous extra load for us along with the tax increase we've had These were surprises I think that's all Thank you. Thank you, george sir Hi, and which one are you speaking on sir the same number three mr Okay, and can I have your name certainly it's william. William last name is spelled sch w o c h e r t w o c h e r t correct okay, and your home address william 1106 1106 south 7th Okay, go ahead. It's the same building. Okay. First of all, I'd like to apologize for coming unprepared I just came to listen to see what was going on here tonight, but in Actually picking up your agenda something popped out to me, and I would like clarification on this and something else in the letter that we received About the cost for the repay The first thing that comes to my mind is on the letter it's dimensions resurfacing Curve and gutter resurfacing plus curbing gutter, but in your agenda it only specifies resurfacing And I noticed down one of the other areas it specifies resurfacing and curbing gutter so I'm wondering if My letter is correct that they're doing curb and resurfacing or just resurfacing because the price is quite a bit different So I'd like clarification on that if I could Do you need it because that would be noted down and people can get back to you tomorrow so we can proceed with this Thank you all your comments are going to be noted down. We've got city engineer writing notes right now Okay, and this is recorded too. So all right, um and then furthermore with my um letter for assessment clarification on it It mentions the point one the city ordinance will um Cover half of the cost Now is that half of the cost and this is my half of the cost or is it half of the cost from this amount? We'll answer that too Otherwise, we're going to be back and forth, but we'll we'll get the answers to you sir for for those questions Okay, and that's all of that. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you Sir you're next and which one would you like to speak on the serve? Niagara avenue between 6th and 4th and 6th street. Okay, hold on Between 4th and 6th. Okay, and your name, please gust of sister gust of g us ta v and ph pf ist er In your home address 845 north 6th street That's my I own that house. I don't okay. That's fine. Go ahead The question I have is that right now they're in the process of building this new Uh with the condominiums on 6th street And you have I don't know how many workers there, but you have maybe about 40 50 and They park you down on 6th street. They park on I'm not 60, but on agony Niagara avenue between 6th and 5th also on Washington court. Now if they start Doing this resurfacing You know, they say I don't want to go start this and just say it's April or May That's going to be a mess because where are they going to where are the people going to park? So is there any way that they could start that I guess I don't know when but they could start that after this place is completed That's something we can look at sir. Yes And it's being noted now. Okay. Thank you. Thank you very much Is there anyone else that would like yes, sir Yeah, I got it Please please It's a long way, but Thank you Hi, and which one are you looking to talk on number three seven street Indiana to high Indiana to high Okay, and your name, please red benki be h and ke And your address Is what's 1120 south 7th We had just bought that building and I was kind of one quest. I don't get out of work till five So it's hard for me to get to the to the city to talk to these people When did they decide on doing this? We bought this property in in november or october And uh, then there was no special assessments All of a sudden now there's a 7000 dollar assessment there So I was kind of wondering is Is there somebody that I can talk to you that well there is but we don't the way we conduct the hearings Is it allow you to provide input and then someone will get back to you with a specific Response to you. Okay, and that's being noted. Okay. That's great. And uh, the other thing when they say resurfacing The road that's good They tear the whole thing up. Do they what they do they just start from From indiana avenue all the way to the The high avenue and we'll answer that one for you too. Okay. Is that it? Okay, we'll see you Thank you friend. Thank you very much Is there anyone else that would like to address the council? Is there anyone else that would like to address the council? Is there anyone else peasant burk? Thank you, your honor. I move that the hearings be closed Ocean second to close hearings under discussion There'd be a none all those in favor say aye. Aye any opposed ocean carries Consent agenda. We will refer back to refer to planning commission 23 1 And the consent agenda is from 23 2 to 23 26 president burk Thank you again, your honor. I would move to uh, accept and file all the arrows Accept and adopt the rc's at past the resolutions and the general ordinances Motion and second under discussion President burk. Yes if I could I would move to refer 23 5 through 23 13 These are all the matters that refer to resurfacing Streets that were addressed in the hearings. I would move to refer those documents back to the public works committee Excuse me mayor could could you please leave out 23 6 because that's a different issue Okay, with the correct with the exception of 23 6 5 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 Everybody got that Ocean second under discussion. Yes. Thank you again, your honor. Like this is the first time we've Reinstituted a resurfacing program in our streets for several years And I trust of the 200 or some letters that went out This way this has been an area where there's been a number of questions. I think I I shouldn't say I received my wife ran Responded to about 10 calls and I've got a couple of emails and there's a letter Containing our package that addresses the many issues. I think this is a matter that Rather than having a hearing when we listen to people this requires a dialogue I think this requires the opportunity for people to interact with city staff And get answers to their questions because the the answer to one question usually brings another question So for that purpose, I would recommend referring this back to our public works committee So that the interested parties can convene with public works and hopefully come to some resolution on this and I believe The public work committee meets thursday at 4 p.m And so that's common. I would ask the Chair of city public works to Ask someone at public work department to send all of these individuals that spoke tonight a letter inviting them Some of the concerns that were expressed tonight are good And I think they they merit further discussion And committee and hopefully it'll make our letter that goes out better and clearer for our citizens So thank you very much any discussion further discussion on that Then the motion is to refer five seven eight nine ten eleven twelve and thirteen back to public works All those in favor say aye. Aye any opposed? Motion carries. We will now take a vote on 23 2 through 23 26 with the exceptions of the ones who just voted Any discussion on any of those Please call the roll Boren Berge Serta Hanna Kittleson Manny Meyer Montemayor Racky Ryan Sushia and Verhastle Thirteen ayes. Motion carries communications and petitions 23 27 to 23 30 to be referred The report of officers to 23 31 lies over to april 4th document withdrawn 23 32 has been withdrawn 23 34 and 33 will be referred Resolutions introduced 3 23 35 lies over 23 36 through 23 41 to be referred The report of committee 8 23 42 Finance recommended authorizing a transfer of appropriations in the 07 budget Alderman graph Thank you, your honor. I would move that the rc be accepted and Adopted and that the resolution be put upon its passage motion and second under discussion There is none. Please call the roll Burke Serta graph Hanna Kittleson Manny Meyer Montemayor Racky Ryan Sushia Verhastle and Boren Thirteen ayes. Motion carries Organses introduced 10 23 43 and 23 44 lies over 23 45 and 46 to be referred Matters laid over 11 20 45 resolution number 220 607 by alderman ryan and Sushia vacating the north approximately 20 feet of south pier drive from east right away The south 8th street to illinois Alderman ryan Thank you your honor. Um I move that the uh resolution be put upon its passage motion and Second under discussion There being none Please call the roll Serta graph Hanna Kittleson Manny Meyer Montemayor Racky Ryan Sushia Verhastle Boren and Burke Thirteen ayes. Motion carries 22 43 and 22 44. Alderman gruff. Would you like to take both? Yes, your honor. I would move that both those resolutions be put upon their passage There's a motion and second and both of those Resolutions pertain to a transfer of appropriations in the 06 budget under discussion There being none. Please call the roll graph hanna Kittleson Manny Meyer Montemayor Radke Ryan Sushia Verhastle Boren Burke and Serta Thirteen ayes. Motion carries 22 52 general ordinance number 890607 by alderman radke ryan Burke Boren and Verhastle Repealing and recreating various sections of chapter 50 fire protection of the municipal code alderman radke Thank you, your honor. I move that the general ordinance be put upon its passage Motion and second under discussion There is none. Please call the roll Hanna Kittleson Manny Meyer Montemayor Radke Ryan Sushia Verhastle Boren Burke Serta and graph Thirteen ayes. Motion carries 2262 general ordinance number 90607 by alderman susha clayunas Montemayor Kittleson And Manny amending the municipal code so as to change the job description and job code Of the part-time municipal court deputy clerk and part-time municipal court assistant deputy clerk alderman susha Thank you, your honor. I move that the general ordinance be put upon its passage Motion and second under discussion There being none. Please call the roll Kittleson Manny Meyer Montemayor Radke Ryan Sushia I Verhastle Boren Burke Serta Graph and Hannah Thirteen ayes. Motion carries 2263 general ordinance number 90607 by Alderman Sushia clayunas Montemayor Kittleson and Manny amending the municipal code so as to change the job description and job code of the city assessor Alderman Sushia Thank you, your honor. I move that the general ordinance be put upon its passage Motion and second under discussion Alderman Boren Thank you, your honor. I am looking over this job description for the new city assessor I know that there's quite a few things that are underscored. Are those the changes that are being proposed to upgrade those qualifications if somebody could Yes, I will ask Mr. Ed Sark, please step up. Department head Thank you, your honor. Yes, the other changes are basically minor changes, but the action Marie Alice who has left us went through and kind of brought up to date Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Sark. Any other questions there being on please call the roll. Manny, Meyer, Montemayor, Radke, Ryan, Sushia, Verhaselt, Boren, Burke, Serta, Graph, Hannah, and Kittleson. Thirteen ayes. Motion carries 2266 general ordinance number 90607 by Alderman Vanderweel Serta, Meyer, Montemayor, and Burke relating to stop signs so as to add stop signs on Bluff Avenue and North Forth for east and westbound traffic Alderman Vanderweel is not here Vice President Serta Thank you, your honor. I move that the general ordinance be put upon its passage Would you like to take both? Sure, I'll take both. Thank you, your honor. I move that the general ordinance be put upon its passage Would you like to take both? Sure, I'll take 2267 and ask to that that general ordinance be put upon its passage Your second to that? Second 2266 and 2267 under discussion Alderman Montemayor Thank you, your honor. I think the stop sign that was going on the fourth street is going to help a lot. It was yield previously and yield often means I'll take a look maybe And I think this will help. Thank you. Thank you very well. Any other discussion? Any other discussion? Please call the roll Meyer Montemayor Ratke Ryan Sushia Verhaselt Boren Berg Serta Graf Hannah Kittleson and Manny 13 ayes Motion carries. Other matters authorized by law 2347 will be referred to finance 2349 will be referred to public protection and safety Public Works, Finance, Law and Licensing, and Salaries and Grievances Other matters? Attorney McLean City Clerk Committee and Communications for Multi-Person and VanuWheel along with the Office of the Moisturist, Chronicle, River, and City Oxfam, and Montemayor That will be referred to Public Protection and Safety and Public Works 2350 is the Communications of Glen Tilling Submitting of Proposals for Visitor Signage for the City's Tourism And that will be referred to the Tourism Advisory Committee and Public Works 2351 is an arrow by the City Clerk submitting various license applications for the period of June 30, 2007 and June 40, 2008 That will be referred to Law and Licensing 2352 for the Communication Karen Kendrickson Bauer questioning the purpose of the parking limit in front of the House That will be referred to Public Protection and Safety 2353 is an arrow by the City Clerk submitting a Communication from Jeffrey Tauchik, Chief of Police of the Funding and Police Department stating his concerns with the proposal from the City's Salaries and Grievances Committee to eliminate three of the six information systems personnel at the elimination positions that be detrimental to their operations and seriously delay the response time for technical assistance in reference to the Intergovernmental Cooperation Agreement for technical support services between the City of Chicago and the City of Portland That will be referred to all the Standing Committees of Finance, Salary and Grievance Public Protection and Safety, Public Works, Law and Licensing 2354 is a Communication from Jennifer Mills, President of Bluewater Commons Condo Association stating concerns regarding the plan repair of South 7th Street, Incheboye That will go to Public Works 2355 is a Communication from Public Services Third, the State has concerns about the special assessment they received That will go to Public Works Motion second All those in favor say aye Aye Any opposed? Stand adjourned


Hello, I'm Kain Sue. I'm working on transforming water management practices at SEI in Asia. Water scarcity because of lack of rain and also droughts. This is the issue that persists for generations and I want to help solve this problem through my work at SEI. For example, instead of trying to build more dams to meet the demand from growing populations, perhaps we should look into finding ways to save and use our water resources more efficiently. We also try to engage young professionals as agents of change through summernet young professional networks, which is a safe place for young people to connect and to contribute to innovative solutions for water and climate related issues. It's as easy as turning off the tap when water is not used or finding ways to recycle water as much as possible. You can also try to let initiatives to know more about water resource management. For example, scan here to find more about summernet young professional networks activities.


What's up everybody, Jason here for jaspyscasebreak.com. 2021 Panini Immaculate Baseball just sold out. This is a four box half case break, Pikachu number 35. And again guys, this is a half case break. So here you go. So everybody bobbing straight up, thanks for that guys. Thanks for the fill. Last two spots in last ball modules, Dusty gets the Mariners, and also gets the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. So, good luck guys. So again, I put up already the second half of the case on the website. So if you guys wanna start digging into the next half, you definitely can. And again, fresh case guys. Let's cut this open. I think this case is gonna be fully cut open. Left or right to see which case we'll use here. One, two, three for the left, four, five, six for the right. Three. One, two, three. This will be for the second half, which is gonna be number 36. 36 around there, so you guys know that. And again, it's back in the store already. All right, here we go. Good luck guys. First hit is Ramon Larellano, number 249. That is Oakland A's Grant Ashley. Next one here is for the Mariners, little Kangravy Junior Relic, 23 out of 25. That's a nice little start there for the Mariners, and Dusty who got last ball mojo. We have a blockchain, Tariq. Rookie patch autographs, black. Which again, that's only digital. And I believe Tariq is a Detroit Tiger. We have Nate Pearson, one out of 25 Rookie autographs for Toronto. Next we have is Chimancho, 10.99. Tampa, it's gonna adjust him. And a one of one. Wow, look at that Mariners patch right there. Clutch, RPA's of Evan White. That's a pretty nice hit. Coming in clutch, last ball mojo striking again, Dusty. Very nice. That's a beautiful Mariners patch in there. And last one here is a nice little RPA of Leody Tavares for Texas. Went to Ashley. Very nice. Solid, solid box. We have Chris Bubek, Jersey Jumbo's for KC. We have Harry Breuchen to 25 for St. Louis. Cardinals that is Jared. Dean Cramber to 99. And we have a beautiful, look at that. Little Jumbo Fielding Glove RPA of Casey Meis for Detroit. Hey, Kevin with that one. I think I need a slider box for that. Yeah, I got one right here. Perfect. And it's 10 out of 10 as well. 10 out of 10. Nice Joey Vott, a little Jersey autograph. And last one here is a beautiful nice RPA. Look at that patch. Monte Harrison to 99. Alex Redue over Boston. That's a 10 out of 25. There you go, Boston, that's going to Ed. We have legends that is Dave Winfield to 25. And that's for the Yankees, it looks like. New York Yankees that is Rob Bigdoke. And Isaac Paradez, rookie patch autographs black. I don't, what is black? That's not one-on-one, is it? I feel like the blockchain was black. And so is this one. Let's take a quick look at that. Black is out of 10 actually. And Paradez of course is Detroit. So another one there for Detroit, that's Kevin. But a black is out of 10. It looks like you have a button out of eight, pink out of eight, green out of five, brand logo one-on-one, platinum one-on-one, tag and printing plate. So blacks out of 10. Very solid. Next what we have is an on-card here, Jamiah Jones, little RPA. That's for the Angels, last Bob Mojo Dusty as well. Clark Schmidt for the Yankees to 99. Three color patch. And Tristan McKenzie on-card, little shadow box to 99. Now last box here guys, good luck. We have Raleigh Fingers to 49. That is a Milwaukee Brewer, Justin with that one. We have a Legends Jeff Bagua to 49. Do a relic there for Houston. Houston, Nathan with that one. And our third redemption of the break. That's Breylin Marquez, rookie otter house. Nice one right there, Chicago Cubs. Cubs is gonna Ashley. We have an RPA here of Edward Olivares for Kansas City. We have a little button on Alejandro Kirk, mono-chromatic RPA to six. Very nice little button autograph. And that's going to Toronto, going to Ashley. Nice hit right there. And last hit of the break, we have a Sickdo Sanchez. 27 out of 99. And that's going to Miami, Miami. Donald without one. And there you go, so pretty nice hit here guys. We got a one-on-one, got a little button. Got a nice jumbo fielding glove, a couple nice redeptions out of 10. All in all, too shabby. So of course, there could still be some very, very big it's hiding in the second half. But at least we got some nice ones we're in the first half as well. There's that one-on-one Evan White, that was really nice. So there you go guys. That was the break again, number 36 is on the website. And let's get the next one going guys, jaspyscasebrakes.com.


Hi everyone, Joe for Jasper's case breaks.com coming at you with this is the right one. Yeah, 2020 2021 Panini Donnery's basketball Hobby pack break number three with ten Contenders random team contenders basketball random team spots being given away pretty nice stuff It's that contenders three box break Zion and John Morant hunting You got speaking of John Morant 5.2 seconds left in overtime Grizzlies at Grizzlies in New York Nicks All right, big thanks to this group of people right here for getting into the action. I appreciate it Thanks for the teams for existing as well. Let's roll it randomized names and teams We're gonna do the break first and then a different dice roll for the giveaways five and one six times for each list one two three four five and A one six and final time. We've got Josh down Josh Five and a one six times for the teams one two three four Five and a one six and final time after six We got the New York Knicks speaking of the Knicks down to the Hornets. She was random with another triple double All right, here's the first half of the list right here And the second half of the list right down there Josh with some Lamello opportunities Let's sort by column B. Oh, Nick's half possession All right, no trade windows and stuff like this We're just gonna print and rip and then we'll re-randomize those names and see See who gets what? All right, so here is the final print out right here All right, and right out of the gate is a third year Luka Donchich Nice, he's pretty good Dallas that'll be for Joshua some comments here second year Zion and a Yanis It's pretty good nice Jason Tatum for 50 tonight Marvel's John Morant Marvel's gold press proof Anthony Davis all sorts of fun stuff here Some other rated rookies that'll ship out. There you go. All right So no Lamello Thanks So now let's flip back to this list right here and now let's see who's gonna win those spots So from Dylan down to Brandon everyone in between Let's roll it. Let's randomize it three and a one four times. So it's gonna be top ten after four Right here. Good luck One two three and four So from 11 on down Charles. Oh, sorry Close no cigar. Thanks everyone here for giving this ago. I appreciate it But congrats to so sad times for this crew happy times for this crew Joshua Joshua Josh Joshua Joshua Joshua Raymond Joshua Joshua and Matthew Wow So that gamble paid off elits there you go an X line another Joshua squeezed into that break as well So there you go. Now. This is the only filler we have to do for contenders ladies and gentlemen So we just have to move some spots straight up and then we're in breaksville. So let's go Let's make it happen. Jasper's case breaks calm. I'll see you for that


Hello and welcome to this presentation on seasteading. My name is Grant Roman, I'm from Ocean Builders, and today we'll be talking about how to hack the sea pod. And the sea pod, we'll talk about what that is a little bit later. People usually ask me first though, what is a seastead? And basically a seastead is a home that is engineered to float on the ocean. People have been fascinated with living on the water, people have been fascinated with living on the ocean, and even the idea of building an entire city that floats on the ocean. And this has been an idea for a very long time, but no one has actually done it. No one's cracked the code on this. We've seen some beautiful images, we've seen some beautiful pictures. Like here's some conceptual drawings of images of these whole entire floating communities that were beautiful. The problem with them, the reason why this hasn't happened yet, is because this costs a lot of money to do. This is like a multi-billion dollar project just to get started, not even to really do very much at all. Building a city is a huge thing that is usually done in small increments, where you start small and then it grows bigger and bigger and bigger. And to start something on the water, it actually costs a lot more than doing it on land. And no one's really cracked the code on how to make it affordable to do. And until last year, February 3rd of 2019, something monumental happened and a huge milestone was made. And the first original prototype of the single-home Seastead was launched. I'll just play the video here so you can see it. This was in Thailand, 13 miles outside of the coast of Thailand by Phuket. And it was beautiful, it was amazing. Well, it was a beautiful thing, but prototype itself was not very attractive, it was very pretty. But the technology to do this is the same technology that is used on an oil rig, where you have a deep spar that you can see a metal pole going into the water and the house actually just floats on top of it. But the metal pole goes really deep into the water and creates a source of buoyancy, which pushes the house that's above the water up.  So you don't have to worry about big waves coming and making your house move around. And it's actually very stable because of this, because you're not at the surface of the water level. So it's actually very stable and nice to live in. What I loved when I saw this was that I saw that this could be the new frontier. It's like many years ago, America was the new frontier. It's this new land to be discovered, new opportunities, incredible new opportunities. I believe that if we do this right on the ocean, that the ocean can be the new frontier. So this is really exciting. I think there's so many technologies that can come from this. So I kind of have the philosophy that we should do the ocean first and then Mars. It doesn't make any sense to spend tens of billions of dollars to send something to Mars when we can actually, for a very small fraction of that, we can start building thriving ecosystems on the ocean today. Like right now, the technology is here. So it's really exciting because I think maybe 10 years ago, we didn't have all the technology to do this, to make this feasible. But now like all this technology is evolving, it's coming available very, very quickly. And it's to the point where we can put all these technologies together and make them work and make a home on the ocean that is affordable and is eco-restorative and has all these other incredible benefits. So I think the opportunities are very exciting. But when I first was on the original Seastead by Thailand, it was really ugly. It was a diamond in the rough. You had to have a lot of imagination to see where it could go because it was not pretty. So we've spent a lot of time since then to redesign it, to make it sexy, to make it beautiful, to make it inspiring to want to actually live there. So we have our new design model that is called the Seapod. So Seastead is a basic class of this kind of floating home idea. So with every major innovation, major change, sometimes that is such a dramatic change that it causes fear in some people. And that happened in Thailand. If you hadn't heard, our project became very well known because the Thai Navy actually decided to invade our Seastead. And it was frontline headline news around the world. Most major newspapers, TV shows, radio programs covered the story because we were actually on the run for a long time. The Thai Navy was chasing our team and they were threatening the death penalty and life in jail and saying that this was a threat to, like this was an act of terrorism and all kinds of things. So it was, at the time it was horrible, but now in retrospect, it brought a lot of attention to the whole movement and it's actually, I think it's helped a lot, but just, you know, while it was going through was kind of a little bit scary. So some of the media that's covered us is, like, all the big names that you would recognize and know. So we almost ended up in one of these, which is a Thai prison, which is some place you don't want to end up. It does not look like a comfortable place to be at all. But as Chao said in the movie, the hangover, but did you die? And the answer is, no, we didn't. And here is our hero picture to prove that we survived after the big rescue, which a whole book and a movie is being written about because it had all the elements of James Bond thriller kind of movie. So it's pretty interesting what happened. So now we are in Panama. This is the location where we will be building the first community of homes. And this is the exact island that we will be on where our manufacturing plant is in construction. This is the early pictures. This was back in February. We've gone a lot further now. These pictures have not been, these are the first time these pictures are being shown. This is our manufacturing plant now mostly built. We're still missing the front door, but that's okay because things are going on inside. So we're going to show you during the live part of the presentation here, we'll be showing you some more pictures, some of the things we've been building, some of the things we're putting in the water. And we'll talk about a lot of the technologies we're going to be developing. And that's one of the really exciting things about this thing is that to be able to live on the water, we need to develop so many different kinds of technologies and we need to innovate so many different things that haven't existed before because we haven't had the need to live on the water and do it in a way that's eco-sustainable because the way we've built homes and built a life for ourselves on land has not been good for the environment. We usually clear cut a forest before we put a house up and that's just not good. But when we build something in the water, it actually becomes a habitat for life and we're trying to do it in a way that life can actually thrive and actually add more life to the ocean instead of damaging it. So there's a lot of really innovative technologies we're working on for the Seapod and we're really excited about a lot of these things. We have a huge 3D printer. We'll show you some pictures of that later. It's 20 feet long by 16 feet wide and 8 feet tall. And our goal is to eventually be able to print an entire house with a 3D printer. We're not there yet. We're right now starting with printing molds and then making the houses from the molds itself. There's a lot of IoT technology we're developing, home automation for a home on the water which is very different. We're developing hydroponics so your home can be self-sufficient. We're developing aquaculture systems, coral gardens. So you can actually, instead of having front lawn with a garden, you'll actually have an underwater coral garden potentially as an option.  You'd have an automated drone that comes out and does that. We have desalination technology we're developing. There's marine sensor stations we're developing so we can get advanced notice on what the weather's going to be like and what the marine conditions are like and we can actually monitor what the conditions of the ocean are so we can actually measure over a sustained period of time or a long period of time what the environmental impact of living on the water is. And we can actually show scientifically that our homes are actually helping to restore coral in the area because we're going to be doing a number of different projects to help restore the marine ecosystem, not just one thing is to be able to print, 3D print a coral design that has the optimal shape that coral polyps love to live in. And we can do that by scanning existing coral and see the exact shape of kind of like a little nook that they like to live in so we can recreate that in 3D printing designs. Then there's other techniques, there's like five or six different techniques for doing coral restoration that we're developing as well and we're hoping to partner with other companies that are doing these things because there's so many different things that need to be developed to make this happen. So we're kind of trying to reach out to the community, we're trying to reach out to people and say, hey, this is the new frontier. I think this is the most exciting thing humanity has on the go right now that is possible and feasible for anyone to just say, I want to get involved and actually make it happen and it's feasible. It's not like doing a startup and going to Mars. That's a massive project. It takes a lot of money. This is something that we can do. We can actually decentralize a lot of the development of this technology. So people around the world that are right now on lockdown maybe and don't have a lot to do can actually find ways of contributing to this project. So that brings me to something that I'm really excited. We're announcing it first here on this conference is that we are releasing all of our technology. We're releasing all of the programs we're doing and we're releasing the designs of our C pods, all the software and releasing it to be open source. And we're doing this because we want this to happen. We are not doing this for any other reason than we are passionate about it. We love it. We love the idea of being able to live on the ocean, be able to open this new frontier, be able to develop new technologies, eco-sustainable technologies, marine restoration technologies and all the other things that need to be developed to make this happen. It's really exciting. There's a very big community of Seasteaders.  But outside of that as well, there's a huge community that are really passionate about seeing this happen. So we have like a decentralized team all over the world that we're trying to get them to collaborate and get them to focus on different areas of development. And if we can do this, I think we can make like 20 years of development progress in the next couple of years if we can do this right, if we can really focus and find a way to make it happen. It's really exciting time for us and we hope to kind of put the call out to the community here and say, well, who wants to be involved in this? Who wants to help out with this? Who wants to contribute, whether it's just writing a little bit of software code or maybe making a design for a floating drone or your own floating house design that you think might be better than what we're doing. And you can actually take our designs. You can take our software code. You can take our designs for that I've been sweating over for the last year plus. And you can say, well, that's really beautiful. I love it. But I want it to be longer. I want it to be taller. I want it to be a different shape. I want whatever it is. You can take our CAD drawings, which are being everything's in the process of being uploaded. Hopefully by the time this presentation starts, a lot of our code is going to be on our GitHub account. So you'll be able to go there and download code and start playing with things, which is what we want to see happen. We want to see this progress. We want to see this move. And it's just really exciting. We can do a lot. And I'm kind of inspired by the idea of this lockdown for a lot of people has been horrible. It's been kind of boring. It's been a time of frustration. And I think we can maybe turn things around. And what if we could mobilize millions and tens of millions of people around the world to actually do something productive with their time? If we had millions of people contributing just a couple hours a day to different projects that they're passionate about, put all that together, and we could have an incredibly different world and new ideas, new techniques, new things that we weren't even thinking about before, they can develop very quickly. But we have to just try to find a way to focus their energies into something that is productive. And I think we have a track here for developing technologies on the ocean to build floating homes and a floating ecosystem that can thrive and has a lot of potential, I think, for humanity. So I'm really excited about it. I'm really excited about opening this up to the open source community and having you guys take what we've been looking at and what we've been trying to do and what the seasteading community in general has been trying to do. And we want to move this forward. So I invite you to take part in the whole conversation we're going to be having here today. We're going to be sharing a lot of things we haven't shared publicly before and giving a lot of things away. So yeah, we'd love to have you involved. We have mobile app. All the code for mobile apps is being uploaded. It's probably going to be here by the time we start this presentation. The back end software for controlling seapods, controlling floating homes is all going to be there. IoT software, it's still in development, but we might have something to upload by the time this conference starts. IoT hardware, we have all kinds of things coming together. We'll be posting our plans for hydroponic system that is really cool. I think it's a super high yield technique for growing food that I'm really excited about. We'll be putting, as soon as we have Gerber files for the actual circuit design for our home automation hardware, we will be publishing that as well. So it's very exciting. Lots of stuff going on. We've had drawings for all our models, had drawings for our boats. And once again, we just want to open it up and if you have a better design or newer design or maybe there's parts that we're missing that need to be designed. We're just asking for people to, if they're passionate about this, to contribute and see where we can take this. I think we can take this to something really incredible. We're going to start now a movie that we made to kind of show what's been happening with seasteading, what happened with our event in Thailand and the whole controversy that happened over there. So this is a little presentation that kind of takes you through all that. So I hope you enjoy it. Then we'll come back and we'll go into the live section. Yeah, welcome to Exly, the first seastead. As we come in from this beautiful entrance. And we have this before. Here's the kitchen. We're not used to all of her magic. Anything special about the kitchen? Just fresh water. No problem. We could refill as needed, but we've never had to do that because we have a water maker. Okay. This is the big kitchen table underneath. It is actually where this bar entrance goes. I would lift it and show you, but there's food out there. We have a nice little electric room. You might understand electricity. Okay. There's a lot of little... What's that? There's a little hidden storage all over the place. He's kind of... Oh, that's nice. You have a good size, but also good closet. This is going to be the bathroom. Yeah. This shower and storage room. Pretty decent size. It should be great for all these small home lovers out here. Okay. So we're still called... Yeah, all right. We've got some islands off in the distance. So that's only, he said, 20 miles out. I'm going to go and spend the day on the island. If you're getting a little tired of just floating around. There's plenty to see out here. All within the short sailing distance. All right, that's it. About two days ago, there was an article in the Thai media saying, talk about the sea stand. Basically right out of the bat saying, there was a threat to national security. I can't see how they would see a loving couple letting it in their home on the water. They're basically a mouthpiece for the government. So anything the government needs to do, they just use the media to express it. They just need to set the narrative so that there's some... And they say, yep, they're all up in arms about your sea stand. It's all the military at the top level. Neither chest, they're trying to one-off each other. We can shoot it down the best. Pretty ease out at low tide. All stories are BS. They work in Thailand. It's a military dictatorship. So if they want somebody... If somebody's giving them trouble, they think they're giving them trouble. They just take them out. We're not going to take the chance that there's no due process. They obviously displayed by taking out our sea stand and destroyed our home. I had everything I owned there. I just had a bag with clothes that I was in Phuket. Fortunately, I was in Phuket. Otherwise, I'd be probably just taking us down on the sea stand. Chad Elwartowski's sister says seasteading has been a dream for him, but one that has now turned into a nightmare. Oh my God, I'm sick. I'm just so sick about it. I just want him home. Family and friends of Chad Elwartowski fear his life is on the line. He and his girlfriend are now on the run after Thai police officials accused them of essentially trying to lay claim to Thai territory with their floating house. All the sun changed to where he became a fugitive. It was almost like you're reading something out of a movie. My greatest fear is that he's going to end up killed through all this. They were just living there. They didn't build it. They didn't buy it. They were living on the seastead. And, but now they are hunted as criminals. I used to FaceTime him and be able to see my brother, and now I can't. You know, he's, I can't see where he is. I can't talk to him. He was just killing me. I'm sorry. It's hard. And we're also trying to communicate with Chad ourselves. We'll let you know if he's able to reply. Kimberly Craig, 7 Action News. I'm just expert in ideas. She's, she's Thai. So she's her family. Her son was supposed to start school this, this week. We're trying to sign him up. We had to go in this week and go take care of that but she can't. This is all, all the C-setting has to happen. We're, we're obviously still, I mean this week was a whole hit on freedom. We need to show that we can move up. We were, we were free on the C-set. You can have just for a moment. So far we're safe. We, we're for our lives. 99 year. Very worried. It's been hard for both of us. So far we're, we're still alive. That's, that's all we're trying to do is stay alive. Hey, hello everyone. Well, so hopefully that gives you a good overview of what we are doing, what we're about. And just kind of the plan A to B from, you know, kind of a very high level, but excited to be here today to be able to speak with you all and share with you our vision of what we're trying to do. Like I said at the beginning, we see this as the new frontier. Like this is almost an undiscovered country because people have never really been able to build a home that can float on the water. That can be an international waters on the ocean. And so we kind of cracked the code a little bit with this. And what, what I'm really excited about is just in the last week, like I shared all just before, we are now announcing that we are open sourcing all of the technology, all the software, all the hardware, everything we're going to be developing for making this happen is going to be open source. And it's on our GitHub right now. Hope you guys can hear me right now. And if you have any questions posted in the, either the general text area or the C studying text area, and I'll try to answer your call, your questions or whatever you have while we're on live here. And share my screen. And let's see right here. Okay, hopefully you can see my screen. So like I showed earlier, this is the original prototype. It wasn't anything special to look at, but when we were sailing towards it for the first time and we saw it there, first it was off in the distance. There's this little white dot and it was just getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And it was just, it was an amazing thing to be there because it felt like this represented something that like a whole new thing that's starting from scratch, like the whole new frontier was starting from this, just one little dot. And it was really exciting to get to approach it and see it getting bigger and bigger and then to actually be there and then to actually step foot on the Seastead. That was, that was pretty amazing. I was involved in a project called Freedom Ship about 20 years ago, which was a project to build a floating ship that would travel all over the world every two years and stop at different ports of call as it went along. So it stopped around different cities and different countries around the world. So I thought that was just the most amazing thing because it felt like, wow, this was really an amazing, you get to live at home on your, you know, one of the 20,000 condos that would be on this floating ship. But you could also see the world. Which I thought was really fantastic idea. The problem with that is it was going to cost like seven or eight billion dollars to start. So it just couldn't get off the ground because that's so much momentum that you need to do to get to that point that it's just really hard to do that. I mean, seven or eight billion dollars hanging around to start that kind of a project. So what I loved about this, when I saw this, was that this only cost $150,000 to build the first public hub. That's just building one. So the idea was if we built like 20, the cost would go down, go down and be even more affordable for people. And so when I first got involved, the units looked like this and that was not very attractive and it's not something that really inspires people to want to live there. So we felt it was really important to, I felt it was really important to make it something that when you looked at it, you said, wow, that's beautiful. That's amazing. That kind of inspires you to want to visit, to be able to experience it, to see it for yourself with your own eyes or to just walk on it and see what it's like and check it out and just inspire some curiosity. So that was kind of started the whole spending like a year and a half of major redesign that we've been doing. So now the houses kind of look like something, it's the same kind of general structure, but now it's like something with Jetsons rather than something out of, I don't know, something much more prehistoric. So I think we have a beautiful design now. And so we are in Panama like I shared. This is one of our renderings for the new design. I think it's beautiful. Some people love it, some people don't, but I think most people are, think it's pretty darn interesting and looks a lot better than our project. So I think it's, I really wanted to capture the idea that this is a futuristic thing, that this can be a futuristic and technological achievement because the technology that goes into making this is very, very simple, but it just hasn't been done before. We've had this technology to make this happen for the structure for a very long time. It's the same structural backbone as making the oil rig, where you have this big pole that goes into the ground or not into the ground, sorry, into the water. It's kind of like when you have a wine bottle and you throw it in the water and it'll just float. And then it stays, it stays afloat because it'll just stay there forever. But it kind of bops around and it's very, not very stable. So what we do to make this very stable is we put a very heavy weight underneath, like very far below the water. And that's about 100 tons of weight, like 100 tons, that's a lot of weight. You wouldn't want to have that falling off your foot, but so it's very heavy. And so that makes it very stable. And then we tie it down with three mooring lines. So it's locked in place. It's very averse to bad weather because normally when you're in the water, waves come along and your boat is moved around a lot by the waves. But in our case, you can see from the designs here that the house is about two and a half meters off the water. So the waves pass it. There's only a little bit of interaction between the waves and the poles because it's just a fairly thin area and the waves just kind of go around. So we're excited about it and we're building in Panama. Like I said, we're open sourcing, which is something we're announcing. We're officially here. We started getting all our code on the GitHub account. So you can go there right now and we have software for mobile apps that will be able to control your smart home. Your floating smart home. So it's actually, our code is written in Flutter. So it's can be used for both iOS, Android, as well as for web apps. So it's really nice little platform. So it goes all three ways. And so right now we have the beta there. It's not released. It's released into the Android store but not yet into the Apple store. So you can go there on the Android store. You have an Android and check it out. You can go there for ocean builders. And you can find it. But on our GitHub there's, we created several different repos for different projects that we're really excited about. And I'll show you some of the projects we're really excited about. And for anyone that signs up to do any of our challenges, we're going to give you some exclusive first look details on some of the things we're working on. There's some things breaking right now that I can't talk about yet, but I should be able to in about two weeks. So anyone that signs up for our challenge, we will, you'll get first access to some of those details. And it's, I'm just, my mind is blown by all the stuff that's going on right now. We're making like more progress in the last two weeks than most of the seasteading history has made in the last 10 years. It's really, really exciting to see. It's really moving fast. I'm trying to keep up with it. So part of the reason I wanted to do this conference was to reach out to people like you guys that are passionate about building really cool things, hacking the future, hacking technology, and finding ways to make technology work better for us. And that can be any different kinds, that can be in so many different kinds of ways. That can be from writing software, hardware, figuring out new hardware and building different devices that have never really existed before because there hasn't been so much of a need. Like we've never had a floating city before. So this will create a whole new wave of entrepreneurs that can create all new kinds of technologies. And I think a lot of the technologies that will be invented, that will have to be invented to live on this kind of floating future would be pretty breakthrough and pretty amazing. Oh, there's some text over there. Let's see if you guys have any questions. Okay, yeah. Waterworld. Some people say, yes, this is like a waterworld. And I kind of reply to that. This is more like the Jetsons on the water. So it's really protecting from that.  Do I have log smaller than the part where people would purpose the log serves? I'm not sure what you're talking about. I'm just going to take some live questions here while you guys are asking them. I was wondering a bit about the relationship with the local communities and areas you're building in. For example, outreach and support or support. So that's something we're really trying to emphasize a lot this year. Now, because we've learned what not to do in the past and we're trying to improve and make things better. So we're actually in Panama, like I said, and when this whole pandemic started, we have some very large scale 3 printers. One is 20 feet long by 16 feet wide and eight feet tall made by Rectorbot. Rectorbot.com. And then we have another one that's one meter by one meter by one meter. So they're huge. So we wanted to see if there's something we could do with printing emergency medical supplies. So we're actually working with the government of Panama to help three print emergency medical supplies. We were on it right away at the beginning of the pandemic. The government took a little bit of time to set up all the regulatory procedures for how things would need to be certified for health use and all that. So that took them a little bit of time, but I think they're almost ready to go. So if there is a second wave, we're all set up, all the health stuff is all ready to go. So we're ready to start going into production with making emergency medical supplies or parts for hospitals, for machines in the hospitals, or anywhere else that they might need supplies. So we'll be able to help out there. We're creating a lot of jobs. We're creating high-tech jobs as well, and we're bringing foreign investment into the country. So we're doing a lot. We also, several times every couple of weekends, we do deliver food to communities that have been impacted by coronavirus. So we're definitely doing as much outreach as we can. So 100 tons is feasible to move. There's a couple of different versions we're working on. There's the deep water spar model that goes about 35 meters deep total, and that has 110 weight at the bottom. So that's not very easy to move at all. The other one is a shallow water model, and that is only about five meters deep, and that's much easier to move. They can all be moved, but they're not really made to be moved. Now, we are considering designs that would allow you to fully move your house, but that's an experimental thing. We're actively building tests and prototypes right now to test that. So it's kind of cool. Actually, I had to have a picture of those. One of the prototypes. This is actually one of the prototypes of the movable version. This would be the hull that goes under the water, which is kind of an interesting design. Oh, here it is, actually. So you can't really see too much, but this is a small one-eighth scale size of just a transport vessel using the same technology. So instead of having a normal-shaped boat, this actually is called a swath. So it has two hulls that go under the water. So this is one hull here, and the other one's on the other side, kind of out of focus here. So we have these arms that go down, and the water line would be about here and here, and then the base, the house, or the vessel, the boat, where people, passengers would sit, would be on top. So it kind of rides above the... It's the same kind of idea. It rides above the waves. And the reason we make this is that we found when we had the first seastead, it was hard to get from point A to point B when there's big waves, and it was hard to be able to go to your house and pick people up or whatever. We designed this kind of craft to be able to break through very high waves and still get places where there's not so good. Let's see. We need some more questions. Is it possible without including the ocean? Yes. Our first seastead in Thailand was... It was 13 miles from shore, and what's interesting was, when you're that far away from shore, there's no light in the water. I think the ocean is filled with life, but there's really not a lot of life. There is... It's just water mostly, because there's no place for life to congregate around. So we put our spar into the water. Two months later, there's thousands and thousands of fish around. It was just... There's a lot. It was hard to... You couldn't look anywhere and not see thousands of fish. We have video of that. It was pretty astounding. So can you do without polluting? We're actually creating an environment for fish. So we actually are building our homes in a way that is eco-restorative. We have some ways of composting our toilet water. So it actually becomes compost. There's some methods of using electro-coagulation for treating gray water. Instead of using other processes, electro-coagulation is a fantastic technology that's not really used very much. And we have a version of it that I think is an improvement of what else is being used. So let's see. Jump through some other things here. Some other questions here. Okay, there's... Oh, thanks, Pierre. Pierre Snickles for the SWATH link there. Okay, so we have some projects. I'd like to just go over them. We're actually going through time here pretty quickly. So I'll give you a bit of an overview. This is our manufacturing plant. We started building just before... This was like early February. We just started putting the concrete in for the bases for the poles for the frame for the manufacturing plant. Now this was about two weeks ago, this picture. So now the plant is up, which is... Hey, we got some work done even during a global lockdown. We did little pieces here and there, but it was a lot slower, obviously. So we're about three months behind, but we're forging ahead as fast as we can. This is a pretty huge building. It will house two C pods without the pole, of course, inside at a time. So we can produce two at a time at this location. There's a view of the inside. This is our roller machine. So our ground spars that go into the water that you saw in the pictures, those will be rolled on this machine. You put these big slabs of flat steel, and it goes through and rolls it, and then bends it a little bit, and then you go through it again, and bends it, bends it, bends it, and you keep on putting it through until you get the right curvature on the steel. I haven't seen it in person myself because I'm in Canada right now, because I left before the lockdown so I can get some things done up here. We have a full team down in Pamela working as well. This is our main engineer, Rudiger Koch, who is a German aerospace engineer. He started Seasteading because he wanted to go to space, and he decided that he needed Seasteads to be able to have as a platform to observe the places where he would be launching his vehicles into space or things that he'd be sending up into space. So he's definitely a pioneer. So this is a view of him looking through one of the molds that goes to the central spar inside the house. There are some more images. And let's see, this is our development site where we're actually going to be putting the homes into the water. This is our, we set up a technology incubator. So we can kind of play, I don't know if this video will play. Then, yeah, so we set up a technology incubator where we have people from all over the world coming down to help us figure out really cool technologies to build and to put into these. We have all kinds of really fantastic technologies that I'm really super excited about. I'll talk about those soon. This is a video of me swimming around the underwater spar of the original prototype in Thailand. And there's just thousands of fish there, even more and more and more as the video goes on. So I can't jump ahead on the way it's lined up. It's pretty cool. This is us in Panama. We're launching another prototype. This is a one-third scale, but one-third scale is actually very large still. So we're towing it out to the site. And here we're standing on it. And so this is the spar. So the full scale size would be three times the water, three times taller, three times longer. This is just the pole and then the base to test some engineering principles. So I'm going to jump to talk about some of the projects we are really passionate about. One is the Aquaboy, we're calling it. Names may change, but we'll post the exact details of this. I guess we'll coordinate with DEF CON about all the details of this. But this is the basic idea. The vision of what it might look like and all the specifications may change and be modified and refined. But the idea is that we'd have this, like, a water buoy that would just collect data. And data for us is really important because if there's a big storm brewing a couple of miles away, we might want to know. We might want to get back to our seastead and just prepare for rough weather or do whatever we need to do. Or if we're fishing nearby and you might want to go home and tie up the boats or something like that. So we'd like to have, like, a remote beacon that can check weather, check wave heights. See if there's some big, huge rogue wave coming our way. We'll be able to monitor weather in different locations so it can check wave heights. So movement from this flat, average sea level and then if the sensor goes up two, three feet, then goes down two, three feet below the horizon, then we know the wave height is, like, four feet. And we'll know the time between the maximum heights between the height and then when it goes to the lowest point to the highest point. So we'll be able to measure the time in between the period, the wave period, the wave length as well as we'll know the time in between. So we can get some really valuable data so we can collect data underneath the water as well as above the water. We can collect turbidity levels, oxygen levels, pH levels, all kinds of really cool things we can collect. We can even have cameras under there and collect data on nearby ecosystems and see what the coral is like there and just monitor over time. We can have instruments on the top to measure air temperature and whatever other factors, humidity or whatever. And then what's really exciting about this is also we may look at going into new areas we've never been into before and we might put these boys areas that we've never been that we want to look at maybe before putting a whole community there in five years or in two years. But we can put a buoy there and collect data for a year and just see what the average conditions are throughout a year or two of collecting data. Like is that a good place to be?  And we can get some really good valuable data from that for ourselves for where we might want to use to do sea studying. But maybe there's also useful data we can collect for environmental purposes, environmental monitoring. Share it with organizations that track the effect of different water temperatures on coral and we have cameras and see what the effect is of different water temperatures and different water conditions on coral in the area. So we can do some really cool things I think on this data. We had like 10 of these all over Panama where we're located then we can maybe crunch it with AI and get some really cool, useful information. The aqua buoy would be geostationary. So we'd ideally like to hold it in place and we'd have one of our engineers figure out what the best way of doing that is. Yes, so we have a sign up page pinned on the sea studying chat. On our channel here. So sign up there. We have tons of projects that we're very excited about. We're going to pick a winner for all these different projects. I guess we'll pick that next year at DEF CON in Vegas. Maybe put some of these in the water and see who performs the best and then we'll have some really cool prizes. We'll feature you as a contributor as a winning participant. We have tons of media that's always trying to cover us because we're doing some pretty interesting things sometimes. We want to highlight our partners and people that we're collaborating with. So I think there's some really cool fun opportunities. There'll be some cash prizes and we will be picking someone that wins from participating in similar projects to fly them down to Panama and give them a couple of days on a Seastead so you can experience it for yourself. So I think it's some really fun and cool stuff we have. We're building the future and the future is floating and it's really exciting. So let's see if there's any more here. How do you power? How do you dynamic those? They're tipping on the ground. Is that a Seahouse? Okay, so how are we powered? We will be... The default system of power will be solar. So we have to be pretty conservative with power. We will have, of course, batteries and we're looking at using a propane backup. So if the batteries run really low then we can switch on a propane backup, a propane powered backup. And then hopefully the not-too-distant future will be able to make methane from seaweed. And then we'll use that in our generators as a backup power source. We're also looking at some potential power generation from the water itself. So using OTEC, it's a little bit tricky to use but you may have a way of solving that on a small-scale version of OTEC which is ocean thermal electrical conversion. And wave generators and some other things that we're looking at. We have some people that we're partnering with that have some wave generators that they're developing in St. Lucia. So we may partner with them to bring that to Panama as well. Some of the other projects I'll mention quickly is the Aqua Cycle... No, let's not put that one. So many projects. Identification with ML. So I guess the one that Nina was talking about yesterday would be a swimmer. So we would be doing the Aqua Boy. Yeah, the Aqua Scanner is really, really cool technology. The idea that was suggested originally, and this can change, would be to have a really inexpensive add-on that you can add to any normal drone that would be like an array of cameras that you could dip in a grid over the water. So you could have like a grid like this. Each of these red dots would be a point where the drone, the array of cameras would go into the water. And then that takes pictures with three cameras under the water at an angle. So you get three pictures at this way, 120 degrees offset from that and another 120 degrees offset from that. You can put all these pictures together and get like a 3D image. We would call it photo photometry, I think it's called.  You can recreate a full 3D recreation of the surface of the underwater landscape, which is breathtakingly beautiful. And I think it's really important for research to be able to do something like this because you can see what is going on with the ocean life as it's happening. And you can do it year after year and year after year and compare to see what's going on with the ocean, what's going on with the coral. And you can see if there's improvement in any areas. If there's a reduction in the depletion in any areas. You can also put different sensors on the scanners. We can detect other things like pH or other things that we want to measure. And then we have this incredible database of highly precise data that's mapped very, very quickly and very inexpensively because this really shouldn't cost very much. So we have all these things pinned on our C-Steadyn page, on our C-Steadyn channel. So please check that out. Underwater drones would be great. Yeah, we'd love to have some underwater drones. I'd love to coordinate I think with Dave who was supposed to be on the talk yesterday with Nina talking about how to do underwater IoT. I'd love to be in on that as well. Then let's see if there's anything else. I have just a few minutes left, so I want to make sure I cover as much as I can. So basically we wanted to come here because we wanted to really reach out to people to help because I think this is like the most exciting thing that's going on in the planet right now. Maybe I'm a little bit biased, but I think this is. There's so many technologies that can come from this because we need to develop technology to be able to live successfully on the water. So we're kind of doing a call to action here and we want this to happen. We're excited about this happening and we're so excited about it. We're opening all the technology up to be open source. So anyone, any personal individuals or corporations or anyone else can come in afterwards or come in anytime they want and download our code, download even all of our designs for like our CAD drawings for all our homes and everything we're building is growing up on our GitHub. We're probably going to move it somewhere else eventually but for now because our GitHub is not the ideal place for CAD drawings, but we're starting there. We just threw it all up in a hurry this week so it's all there now. You can all download it for archival purposes if you like. So yeah, we really want to call out to community and see who can contribute, who's excited about this, who would like to contribute in some different ways, help us with packing 3D printers like large scale 3D printers to be able to print. We would like to be able to within a year, we would like to be able to 3D print an entire floating home in like a long weekend. We think it's possible, we have some ideas on how to do it but we need some help figuring it out because we have the hardware but we don't all have the software and things to make it up and figure out what all the materials are going to be. There's some really cool IOT. We love some really cool IOT projects, home automation projects, hydroponics. We have some really kick-ass hydroponics things. We're doing 3D printed coral gardens, aquatic transport drones. There's a lot of things here that are really exciting. I hope you guys got to answer most of your questions. See the person who isn't typing another question. I'll be around on and off for the next couple of hours and then I'm going to have dinner and then I'll be back around. I'll be available to answer questions. Try to put them on the Seasteading chat channel so I make sure I see them right away and it's easy for me to find them. You can get in touch with us. My email is grant at oceanbuilders.com. It's grant at oceanbuilders.com. Please go and sign up for our challenges. Tell us what you're interested in participating in. We'll send out more information on the challenge that we're going to be doing and I suppose we'll be coordinated with hack the sea organizers as well to get all that information out and we'll see you there. So I guess that's the end.


The use of and reliance on space to enhance military capabilities and national security is growing, leading more countries to look at developing their own counter-space capabilities which can be used to deceive, disrupt, deny, degrade, or destroy another country's space systems. Since 2018, the Secure World Foundation has issued an annual report on global counter-space capabilities that uses open-source information to track the research, development, and testing of a broad range of destructive and non-destructive counter-space capabilities across multiple countries. The latest global counter-space capabilities report adds updates and developments through February 2021. Major additions include new Russian and Chinese close proximity operations in low-Earth and geostationary orbits, a new Russian mobile laser dazzling system called PERIASVET, historical U.S. anti-statlite programs and testing, and updates on French, Indian, and Japanese counter-space policy and organizational changes. The report also includes a revamped imagery appendix of major test sites and facilities supporting counter-space activities. The 2021 Global Counter-space Capabilities Report is available from the SWF website starting on April 1. We are also holding a free and open-to-the-public panel discussion on April 8, organized in partnership with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who will be launching their complimentary counter-space document as well. SWF's work was funded by our internal resources and was not directly supported by any source of external or grant funding.


The last semi-response team yesterday averted possible danger in the early hours of Monday when a gas cylinder shop caught fire at Ijai Aege Lagos. Investigations conducted by the last semi-response team revealed that one of the gas cylinders exploded as a result of gas leakage and in the process caught fire affecting a shop while other shops and adjoining buildings were salvaged. No loss of life however for adults sustained various degrees of injuries and have been moved to Lagos University teaching Hospital Asut. The shop has been cordoned off and the inferno has been completely put out with the combined efforts of the LRT and Lagos. Hello hope you enjoyed the news please do subscribe to our youtube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates