All right, good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I'm your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly webinar series where we cover a variety of topics that may be of interest to libraries across the state. We broadcast the show live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. And it is recorded, Wednesday is at 10 a.m. central time, and it is recorded, excuse me, for anyone who is not available to watch it during the, on Wednesday mornings. Both the live show and the archive are available, and I'll actually, there we go. Both the live show and the archives are free and open to anyone to watch. So please do share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone you think might be interested in any of the shows we have on. The Library Commission is the state agency for all libraries in the state, for all types, excuse me, for all types of libraries in the state. So we will have things for academic libraries, public libraries, K-12 schools, universities, museums, correctional facilities, anything and everything you'll find on our show here. We do record the show every week, and it is posted here on our Encompass Live website. Here's our upcoming shows and our archives. So I'll show you all about that at the end of today's show. We do a mixture of things here on Encompass Live, book reviews, interviews, many training sessions, demos of services and products, it's pretty much all across the board, just anything that is library-related. We sometimes have guest speakers come on the show to, from outside of Nebraska or outside of the Library Commission, but we also have Library Commission staff that do presentations and that's what we have today. We have me. This morning, we are going to talk about the 2019 Public Library Accreditation Process. And this is for Nebraska Public Libraries, the accreditation program we have here in the state of Nebraska. Now, I know everyone who's with us this morning is here from Nebraska. I'm not for anyone who watches on the archive, just to let you know. This is our Nebraska State Program. There are some other states in the country that also do have accreditation programs and, or certification programs for their libraries staff. Not every state has one. But this is the one that we have here going in Nebraska. It is an annual process for me to see who is coming up for being credited. For libraries, it is a three-year process, so every three years our libraries have to do it. So, we're just going to jump right into what is accreditation, what it's all about, what you guys need to know. I will let you know we did do, I did do longer three-hour workshops of this earlier in the spring this year around the state and online. But this one here for today is a much condensed version of it just to get you the basics and important things that you need to know and what's happening specifically with this year 2019. So, public accreditation will open up on July 1st, which is actually next Monday. Next Monday, all libraries in the state who are up for reaccreditation, they've reached three years since the last time they were accredited, will receive an email from me inviting them to try to become reaccredited. In addition, any libraries out there who have never been accredited but have submitted the public library survey, the annual survey of statistics that we have online and a supplemental survey that we do here in Nebraska will also be invited to become accredited for the first time. Last year for 2018, we actually had six new libraries become accredited for Nebraska, so that was awesome, new libraries joining in with the program. So, next Monday, you receive an email if you're up for accreditation. There is an application form that you will go online to fill out, and I'll show you that in a little bit here, and there is a community needs response plan, a strategic plan is what it used to be called, a plan about what you're going to be doing over the next three years. They also need to submit. Those two things, the application form and the plan are due by October 1st of this year. So, as of July 1st, the application form goes live. You have until October 1st to submit it to me, and then by the end of the year, by the end of December of this year, you will know from me whether or not you are re-accredited and at what level. Accreditation is something, you know, why would a library want to be accredited? It's something that I hear a lot. This is, you know, it's a pretty, it can be a complex program process to go through.  But accreditation is a way of setting standards for libraries in the state. Something for a library to reach for if you are not, have it met some of the criteria. It shows that your community is a measure of community pride of the library services that you offer to your citizens, that you are, you know, comparing yourselves to other libraries or at least looking at what you're doing out there and showing that we have gone through the process of meeting these criteria and these benchmarks and seeing what other libraries similar to us are doing and seeing how we compare to them. Are we as good at doing as well as they are? Do we need to improve in certain areas? And it's a measure of the quality of the community's library services. So, some people do question, you know, why do we go through all of this? And it's a surprising thing. You do get a certificate from us, an actual certificate that you can frame, a window sticker to put on your library's window. We also have now online badges, things you can post on your website around anything that you have that you can hand out that you can say we are in Nebraska Public Library, an accredited library. There are also some of the advantages of being accredited has to do with money. There are certain things that they, certain monetary things that you cannot get unless you are accredited. For example, state aid to public libraries. This is money every year that we have that we can give out to libraries and it's depending, you know, it's doing it up amongst the libraries who submit our survey and who are accredited in the state. You, if you're not accredited, you can't receive state aid from us at the library commission. In 2019, the payment was $565 and I can actually look here, too, to see. I know we just recently did a blog post about state aid, so let's see here. Yeah. The letters, the state aid usually goes out in the spring, there we go. And then you can look on our website to see what the distribution was. So the base price, $565 per library and then it depends on your population if you get more. But then in addition to that, if you are accredited at a certain level, you get an extra $200 for being bronze, $400 for being the higher level. So you get even more depending on what level that you have reached in our accreditation program. So there's a state aid of money that you can receive, so extra funding for you to do whatever you like with at your library. You're also eligible to apply for the grants that we have here at the library commission. On our website here, we have, there's lots of different grants and funding opportunities, but specifically library commission grants that we have, you need to be an accredited public library to apply for these. So continuing education and training grants, that would be for attending workshops or conferences or bringing some, you going somewhere outside the state or bringing someone to your library, or to your organization to do training for you. That's continuing education. Internship grants, if you want to have an intern at your library to work for a summer project or any time, you can get a grant for that. Library improvement grants, we didn't do those this year. We did the internship grants, but that would be for physical things in your library, up to upgrading them, a system or a program, you know, the actual building itself. And then youth grants for excellence, children and teen services. You can get funding for programs or equipment or furniture or things that you need in here, specifically for your teen and youth programs. So all of these grants that we offer through the library commission, you do need to be accredited to even apply for. In addition, there are some other funding sources that we have here that are, have also decided to join in with the accreditation as being a requirement. There are the community development block grants. These are the ones that are through the Nebraska's Department of Economic Development. And specifically, if you look through these, there's lots of different types of grants you can see here on different things. But under public works category, libraries are mentioned there. So you can apply to a grant, for a grant here at the Department of Economic Development, but you do need to be in a accredited public library to apply for that. Crates Bennett donor advised fund grants these as well. There's actually, these are grants specifically for the smallest libraries that we have. You have to have a population of 3,000 or less. There are actually three different grants in this program. And one of them is actually one of these grants you can apply for if you're not accredited. They actually have a grant to help you become accredited if you're not yet. So it will provide funding for anything you might need to spend money on if you need to pay salary, you know, your staff need to go to attend a workshop I'm doing or to run a program or something that's related to accreditation and you need someone else to work at the library. You can pay the salary of that person. If you need to update any programs or purchase new materials or get an online catalog set up or something like that, anything like that, you can see listed here. Anything that will get you accreditation, being able to be accredited, you can get a grant for. But after that, there are two other grants that you have that you have to already be accredited through us. The enhancement grants, this is for programs and services that you might do. And then the facilities grant, this is for the building. So if you need to do an update of something, build a new building or, you know, rehab some building, use some renovation in a building, the facilities grant will be for that. So those two grants you do need to be accredited for. So that's another one. And then the last one we have on here is the USDA community facilities grants. This is also one that public libraries are eligible for. And you can see, there you go, educational services such as museums, libraries, or private schools. So libraries are listed in there. These are also, if you are doing this as a library, if you're trying to do this on the behalf of the library, the library would need to be accredited to receive this funding as well. So there's lots of reasons why you would definitely want to either become accredited or keep up your accreditation. I know some municipalities and cities are unsure about this. Sometimes when the re-accreditation comes up, why do we do it? You know, sometimes you are mayor or you're city administrator or you're city council, maybe unsure about why are you going through all this work to do this. Well, these are the kind of things that you can tell them. This is good for the library. You know, there's all these monies that is available to us if we maintain our accreditation or become accredited. If you lose your accreditation, if you don't re-accredit it, you will not get your state aid anymore. You won't be eligible to apply for all of these grants. And then there is of course just the showing that you are, you know, keeping up with what's going on in the library world and keeping your library on top of things and showing that by becoming accredited. So if anyone has any questions or comments, please do type into your questions section. I've got that over here. So you can let me know if you want to know about anything more. I mentioned that I had done workshops before. There is recording here of the full in-depth workshop. If you do want to go ahead and watch that at some time in a longer format. But today we're going to do a much more, like I said, a quicker overview of everything. All right. So as I said, the schedule starts in July. Everything will be due in October and then nobody December 31st if you are accredited. In order to become accredited, as I said, you have to submit our public library survey, which is usually due in February. So for this year you should have already done that. That was due, that's the federal survey that we do. But we also have a supplemental survey that we do just here for the library commission. A few extra questions that we wanted to ask of libraries that are not on the main public library survey. So you'd have to submit both of those to us online using the online system that we have. Bibliostat is the name of the system, Bibliostat Collect.  To make things convenient for you, you have a specific password that you use to log into your Bibliostat Collect account to submit your statistics. You use that same password to log into your accreditation application forms, which is also an online form. So you don't have to think, you know, have a new, a different password to try and remember or keep track of. Once you've submitted both of those things, then you become, and you are invited to either reaccredit if you've already been accredited or to become accredited. There are, and I'll go into the minimum qualifications and the other things in a bit here. There are three levels of accreditation, Gold, Silver, and Bronze. And yes, this is actually related to the Olympics. You might think it was just, during the, when they were reevaluating, they revamped the accreditation program in 20, between 2011, 2013, 2013, this new format came out. And at the time they were doing it, the Olympics were going on. And someone did jokingly say, you know, what are we going to name the new levels for this new program? And jokingly said, oh, Gold, Silver, and Bronze, wouldn't that be, you know, funny? And they thought it was a great idea. So it is. And the way the accreditation works is on earning points. There's a whole bunch of things in the application form. And we'll look at a live version of the form in just a second here. And you can earn points for having certain things, for how much money you have in your budget for programming that you offer, for doing continuing education, policies, a whole bunch of things. And as you earn these points, you can get up to the minimum Bronze and more points, Silver and Gold. There isn't anything above Gold. You can earn more than 250 points. You see it, so you can earn 275, but we don't have any sort of like, you know, Gold Plus or Platinum level. There's just the three levels Bronze, so three levels, Bronze, Silver and Gold. Previously, the accreditation program worked in a different way. If anyone here maybe had done it in previous incarnation, where for each level, they were called different things there. You had to meet all the criteria to meet the lowest level. And then you can start working on the second level. And you didn't have to meet all those criteria in the second before you could try to earn that one and then on to the third. That was very restrictive, they discovered, to some libraries who mainly were stronger in certain areas, but not in others. Every library is different. Every library has different things they need to focus on in their town and in their community. So, comparing them all across the board to having to do all the same exact things was just not really fair, and it didn't really accurately represent the great things that libraries are doing. So, this new form of accreditation, this new way of doing it, with the guidelines that you can just earn points for what you're good at. You might not earn points in one area that someone other library will, but you'll earn them on doing something else. In the end, each library will become accredited for what they do best. And for what, you know, this is important in their community. So, it's much more personal, I think, and that this really reflects what's going on in your community and what you are needing to provide to them. Just to talk about that, all right. Now, there are 12 minimum qualifications that you have to meet to become accredited. So, these are the basics before you can even get into the form. And you can see here, it says that the process will be in July 1st. So, right now, today, if you tried to go into this form, it's not going to let anybody at you in because it doesn't go live till next Monday. But we'll be able to see a demo version of this in just a second here. So, in order to even apply at all to be accredited or re-accredited, these are the 12 basic things that you have to, criteria you have to meet. A legally established library under state statutes, Chapter 51 of the Nebraska State Statutes explains how to establish a library that you comply with Nebraska's library laws and other local or federal laws that might affect any operations you have at the library. So, this would be like Open Meetings Act would be one that you'd have to be following. You have a library board of some sort, whether it's a governing one or an advisory board, either one of those, you'd have to have a library board. The board is certified by the Nebraska Library Commission and the director is certified by the Nebraska Library Commission. So, these are two other programs that we have here and I am going to go over here to talk about those now while we're talking about them and the qualifications. You'll notice we have here on our menu in the Library Commission's website, accreditation and certification are grouped together. That is because board and librarian certification feeds into library accreditation. You don't have to be accredited if you've done the certification of your board or your library staff, but it is required for the accreditation. For board certification, we have information here about that. Public library boards need to, over a three-year period, have done a total of 20 hours of CE from the last time they were certified. And this is the board as a whole, not each person. So, if you have five people on your library board, that would be four hours for each person. Yeah. So, and if all the board sits together, like all five of your board members sit together during the board meeting and watch a webinar, like one of our Encompass Live webinars or something for an hour. They have, even though they're all sitting together, they've earned five CE credits by all sitting there together. So, it's really easy for boards to earn their 20 hours over the three-year period. We have a list here of things you can earn CE doing as a library board. Webinars online or in person, we've also paid for access for all the Nebraska library staff for United for Libraries, which is the ALA's group for boards and trustees and friends and foundations. Trustee Academy, these are special courses that are available online.  So, we've paid for everyone in the states who is a library employee or board member or staff to have access to these longer workshops and these short takes. There's some shorter ones too that you can watch. So, look through all of these and you'll definitely be able to find things that you can earn credit for.  If you click on your library's name here, it will tell you for the current three-year period what we've already gotten our records as CE's submitted, what your current ones are and how many more you need, by what date and then who we have listed as your current board members. So, you can always double check here and keep track of what your board is doing. For the library director, the other sort of requirement was that the library director needs to be certified through our public library and certification program. This is a more intense program, of course, for the library staff. There are different levels of certification depending on the population of your community. If you have completed your own higher education courses in different levels, you can get credit. If not, we have our basic skills classes that you can take. We know not everybody who's working at our libraries or working as director in libraries has gone to graduate school or for any of these degrees here and that's fine. That's why we have our basic skills programs where we can teach you those things. Librarians, library directors have to do 45 CE credits in a three-year period. So, these basic skills classes count towards that. Other things that you do count towards that as well. We have information on our website all about our basic skills classes. And you have to, for both the librarian certification and the board certification, you do need to submit a form to us letting us know you're going to do this. You don't just start taking classes and then we know you do need to let us know that you're doing this not just for your own education, but why you're attending these things, but for the purpose of certification. So, you as a library director would need to submit a certification for yourself or an application and your board would need to submit an application letting us know, okay, now we're working towards a certification, please keep track of all of our board members CE for that purpose. What kind of things can you get CE for? Very similar for the librarian, webinars, workshops, courses, lectures, attending conferences, academic courses, you can actually take academic courses online, something that some people don't think about teaching yourself. If you present at a conference, if you present a workshop, if you teach, if you are a presenter here on my Encompass Live Show, if you come here to talk about something your library is doing, you can earn CE for doing that as well. So, not just for you learning, but for you teaching other library staff. There are report forms that you can use to submit your CE records, both for the, this is the one for the staff and library director. There's one separate one for boards on the board page. You can also look up your CE record, there it is, to see where you're at, now this, I can't show you one of these, but this is where you'd have a password and you can look up if you need to, but you'll check your own record here to see what we know that you submitted and how many hours you might still need. So, your board certification and your library certification feed into the library accreditation. The board has to be certified, the three year period for the board, for your library director and for your accreditation will not necessarily be all at the same time, it'll depend on when each of these was started up. And that's fine, as long as your board is working to currently certified from the last time and working towards the next one, you're good, as long as your director is currently certified, you may be working towards your next one, but it's not, you're currently all good, that counts for this. In addition, you need to go back to these 12 qualifications, receive local funding from your city, village, township, or county, so it can't just be a donations type library. Yeah, as I said, you have to do the public library survey, the supplemental survey. You have paid library staff during all your regular hours. So, this is, you can't have a volunteer run library either. So, now sometimes you may need to have a volunteer to come in and cover for you because you are going to a workshop or doing something or whatever, and that's fine, you know, on the fly type things. As far as your regular schedule, you need to have paid staff. The director has to have an email address which you use and check regularly, that is how we will be contacting you. You make all your services available without charge. This is actually part in the state statutes as well. So, your basic services, lending materials, coming in and using the materials in your library, it's access to the internet at no charge as well as a separate fee thing here. Now, there are things that you can charge for. This isn't saying everything has to be free. You charge people for a piece per paper that they print out. You charge fees to attend certain programs, extra programs, materials for crafts and whatnot. That's okay. It's just these basic services and your internet access that needs to be free. And then your last of the 12 basic is doing an annual report to whoever your governing body is. That this may be just sending them something once a year. It may be presenting something to them in person, however you do that. Now you see, after you've got those 12, you can apply for accreditation. Now, if I do this now, it's gonna say, oh, it's gonna ask for a username and password. I've already logged into one over here. So this is the user ID and password. Like I said, it's the same one you use for Bibliostats for doing your statistics. If you already have that and know that, you just use that. Otherwise, we do have a look up here for you. But I've logged into one over here already. We're gonna use this as a demo so you can see Wayne Public Libraries. Now, we do have on the main accreditation webpage that I'll go back to here if you scroll down a bit. There's a link to the application that I'm showing you there, but there is a preview application as well. So if accreditation is not live yet or if you just don't wanna go into yours right now, you just wanna see what it looks like. We do have a static preview application whereas all the same questions, but you just can't click on it and none of it's interactive or anything. So you do have that. You can hold on to that, print it out, use it for, just seeing ahead of time what you might need to answer. But here, I wanna show you one that's actually interactive. On the accreditation application form, there's gonna be the things that are data that's already been entered in your public library survey. You do not have to re-answer or re-enter any of that information. We already automatically pull that into the form for you. And you can see here, here's some of the green checks sewing that they've answered those on the supplemental survey. If they didn't answer it or they said no, or they don't meet the criteria of their peers, it would be a red X. Here's one, there we go, a red X. So you can see the difference. This is not anything you can change here on the application form itself. This is already pre-filled in for you based on your public library survey that you submitted. All the other questions on here is the ones that you can start earning your points towards the things that you specifically do in your library. Now, some of these questions also, you are compared to your peers. So here's the peers for Wayne. These are libraries who are within 15% of your legal service area, below and above. Some of libraries will have more that they're compared to. Some will have fewer, depends on how many are available that are really close to you. You can see here also for Wayne because of their size, we actually had to pull in some from Iowa. There weren't enough libraries we felt in Nebraska to make a really valid comparison. So we bring in sometimes. All this public library survey data is free and open public for anyone to look at. So we just look at the neighboring states. So similar types of libraries in the Midwest, similar size to use as a comparison. Those peers will also be automatically compared to you. And here's one here, the local income. What we looked at, what you submitted, what your peer averages and the peer median. And so this is from those libraries that are listed up top. As long as you meet the average or the median, you get the points for that particular item. Doesn't have to be both, just one or the other. As you're going through the application form up here, this is a running total that'll keep track of how many points you've earned. So you can see and it floats along with us. So for the basics of first logging in here, you've got 86 points. But you'll see if we start checking boxes, oh, got to do the first one. All right, the points will start going up. So you can add or delete and you'll just see a running total of where you are in your answering your questions. There is also help built into the application form as you're going through it. In some places there'll be a little question mark that you can click on and a pop-up will come up information about that specific question that links out to useful things that we have out there. This is the full help for the entire applications. You can scroll through all of this if you want to, but it will automatically default to popping you into where that answer to that particular question on the application form is. So as you're going through this form, it'll keep track of your points. At the very bottom, when I scroll all the way down here quickly, you can submit the application when you're totally done or you can save and go back and pick it up later. You do not have to do this entire thing all in one sitting and submit it. If you get interrupted or you need to look something up or you were just getting started with it, you can save and resume. When you come back, it will have saved all of the answers you have checked and you'll be able to pick up where you left off and continue checking your boxes. When you're completely done, that's when you can submit the application which will then go to me. Now this submit, that's your final submission to me. It's not in stone as in you can never change anything if you made a mistake or you discover something needs to be changed or fixed. We can tweak things in the background here. So you just let me know if something was wrong and you need to work on that and we can always do that. So the sections here are just going to go briefly through them, not go through every single question. You got first section here on governance and planning. The first thing is meeting the 12 minimum qualifications that automatically is checked for you. The second thing is the other thing that is required for you to have is a community needs response plan which I'm going to talk about in just a little bit here. This is a plan about what you're going to be doing at your library over the next three years. What kind of policies do you have? Do you have a friends group or a foundation? This is automatically filled in from your survey questions. So that's some basic information about your library. We'll do some policies we have here. Resources of your library.  Now here you can see this is where we were talking about the library director has to be accredited certified. And you can see it's based on population and this director is certified. In addition, you can earn more points if some of your own of your staff are also certified. The director is required to be but if some of your staff are certified as well, you can earn that many extra points for that. And you see they did answer on their survey that they did have some other staff and so they were in points towards that. Here I'd mentioned here's one where they did not meet the peer or median average for full-time employees compared to their peers. They got technology sections. You have an ILS, is it online? How's your broadband? How are your computers? Then the collection, are you weeding? What are your expenditures there? How do you use online websites? Basic things to your collection. And then the services you offer, outreach programs, attendance at your programs, accessing different databases, making available online databases available that we have here through the library commission like our Nebraska access or other databases you have. Do you have wifi? Co-operating with other organizations. Do you attend other board meetings of your city council village up to the county level? Is the county providing you with funds or is that something you wanna work with? Are your staff participating in things like Qantas or Rotary that and then selling the library to them as a resource? Having a teen advisory board. Attending advocacy type events. So NLA, Nebraska Library Association is an annual advocacy day here in Lincoln. Do your staff attend here? Or do you participate in national efforts that ALA does branch potentially? And then you have any of our group purchases that you participate in. And the last section here is about and the form about communications. How are you reaching out to your community about what's going on in your library? On your library website, do you have your policies posted, your mission statement? Do you have Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, whatever social media type program out there that you're using, list them here. This is some, these are things that I will look at. If you tell me some things on your website or that you're using Facebook or Twitter, I will go and search out and find your pages and see if it is actually there to make sure you're, you know, when you're answering these questions. But there are reasons, you don't just promote things online. Non-Internet PR is important as well. Some people still, many people look at the newspaper, look at flyers in your local businesses. You have a community newspaper or community newsletter are using non-Internet related promotion. Do you have exhibits in your library? Do you report to the Village Board to communicate with other business leaders? So all these communications get in the library out there. So you can see on each, all of these different things, they'll tell you how many points each one is worth. And as you keep checking them, you earn those points. If you uncheck something, you don't get those points. When you're totally done, double check. This can, this is pulled from your survey. But if you have a different director now, between when you did your survey in February, maybe in when you're doing this, you can always change that for us before you actually submit. Now I'm not going to submit this or anything for Wayne because I don't want to mess with their coordination. But once you submit it, you'll get a confirmation and then I'll receive the notification that you did the form as well. Any questions about the application form? That was just a brief overview of it. As I said, you can look more closely at some of those questions when you're actually doing it. All right, so your application form is the one thing you have to submit to me. And the other thing of it is very important. It's kind of the other 50% of your grade is this community needs response plan. And as you saw here, this must be checked. You have to submit one of these to me. This does not have to be approved by me before you check this box. You see it says submitted. It used to say approved, I changed that because it was a bit confusing. And we'll go into the details a little bit of that plan now. When you submit your application form and your plan, both to me, I then look at them together. I see what you've mentioned in your plan or what you've mentioned, we've checked in boxes, you've checked your application form, making sure they match up, making sure you didn't forget to mention something in your plan that you checked in the box or you forgot to check a box that you mentioned that something you were doing in your plan. I use them together to then evaluate your accreditation application to us and decide whether to approve it. So the community needs response plan, we have a whole separate page for that. This is an actual separate document that you will submit to me or a document PDF. However you want to send it to me, send it to me in the mail, you can email it to me, scan, fax it, whatever works for you. This is something that they added to the accreditation process rather than just saying, are you doing all these things? Check off all these boxes. Let's get you thinking about working in your community. What is going on in your community and responding to those community needs? Previously, this was called a strategic plan. So if you did this three years ago, you probably have a previous one in your file somewhere that's called your library strategic plan. And that's fine. You can use that previous plan to base your new one on. All I did with this was changing the name of it, the format of the plan, the contents, what you need to have in your community needs response plan is still the same as it was for the strategic plan. So, but strategic planning was confusing to people. Many cities have a strategic plan or your library might have a huge strategic plan for the library. And that has a lot of different things but everything you're gonna do throughout the next, some usually that's a five-year plan type thing. This is a little different. This is something specific to just one part of what your library is doing, looking at the community, seeing what's going on out there, seeing what the library can do in response to the needs. What's happening? Is there some service we should be providing? Is there something we can help facilitate? It's more of a, not a full on strategic plan. So we changed the name of it that it's a community needs response plan. There are some basic parts that need to be in the plan that we list here, but, and we do have a record, this is the link to the same recording about this, but if you scroll down past here, we've got templates and guides, worksheets to help you create your plan. So you don't have to go in with a blank piece of paper and figure out how do I write up all these things? How do I write up a community profile and an assessment of community needs and analyze them and do all this? All you need to do is go down here to our worksheets and use each one of these to help you create each of those parts of your plan. We do also have examples of other libraries plans here. And let's see, let's bring up what I think Gothenburg is, yeah. Here's a new one from Gothenburg, which is their community's response plan. So good for 2018 to 2023. And you see here, they have a table of contents, excuse me. And then they get into who the planning members are. So there's just a bit longer one, but that's not a requirement. You can have a much shorter one. Let's see, Whirl's has a little cover page here. And they don't have a table of contents, that's okay. They just go right into talking about what they were doing on it. I think Honka is a good one here. They don't even have a cover page where a table of contents just go right into it. And that's fine. However you want to format yours and have it look, it doesn't matter. It's what's in there is what's matters. But these are good examples of plans that have answered all the questions, have put all of these parts into their plan. So the different parts that you do need, a mission statement, you probably already have one of these, what is your library's mission statement, vision statement, reason for being, is put that in there. Community profile, this is demographic data about your community. Down here in the help guides here, we have a link to the American Fact Finder. This is US Census data, where you can look up your community and find out all the information about what's going on in your community. They are starting in July, which is just next month, going to be switching to a new website for this called data.census.gov. Hopefully it will go live and work. It's out there now that you can look at it, but you can get, let's look at one of the communities we have here. Let's see who we can look up. Just because it's at the top of my list, Bellevue, there we go. Bellevue City, Sarpy County, Nebraska. I'm only using you as an example because you're first time I'm just chasing this. So, and it'll take some time. This is a, it's got some nice tables and things here. And you can see here, this has got it sourced in the 2017 American Community Survey. And this is important. When you're looking at your demographic data here, as you know, I hope everybody knows next year is our census, our 10 year census is happening. So the last time the full census was done was 10 years ago. That data is in here. You can find the official census data, but for your purposes of doing this community needs response planning and responding to what's happening in your community, you want to use anything that comes from the community survey. You can see here, they do do in between census is they still collect data. And that's what this American Community Survey is all about. So you're gonna want for your plan to me, I don't wanna see something that says, according to the 2010 census, because that's old information. You don't wanna base what you're doing on 10 year old information either, especially when we know there's more up to date info. So first thing, definitely make sure in your plan that it refers to whatever is a most recent of the community needs American Community Survey. Here they have the 2017, I believe supposedly when they go live in July, next month, they're supposed to have this updated the 2018 one. Mostly either one is fine with me. 2017 that's out there now or 2018, if they do get it up before you start working on your plan, as long as it's not the old 2010 information or whatever you use the last time you wrote your plan. Your three year old plan would have been done in 2016 and may be used 2015 to 14 data. That's still too old, because we've got more current info right here. So when you go into here looking for your data, look for whatever the most recent American Community Survey data is. And you can look at different tables of population, in here, they just have, you're just gonna have to kind of play around here and look at, they've got maps of some of the data. So if you wanna look at it mapped out, you can see it there. It's pretty in-depth and has some really good information. Here you can view all the different tables that might be available to you, age and sex, geographic mobility, commuting, feel it more. So you can see you can get a lot of detail. Now, not all of this education, households, poverty status. So not everything in here, income is what you're gonna need for your data for me. You just go through it and find the ones that you think may be most useful. We do have a worksheet here that we created to help you enter in some of the data. So you can use this as just a guide for the kind of things you might look for in there that might be useful to you to decide what's going on in my community to find out how things are going. We also have one that's filled in with state figures. So if you wanna compare yourself to the state as a whole. Something else to think about when you're looking at this census data is do you serve not just your community but other nearby communities or the county? And you might want to do a search here on Sarpy County and get the county data.  So not just looking in here for your specific city but who are your patrons, who are you serving and finding out what's going on in their areas. After you got that data, you need to do an assessment of community needs figuring out what's happening in your area. And basically this is doing some sort of a survey or a focus group or interviewing people or any way of just finding out what's going on in the community. You can do this yourself or if something's been done recently by your city or municipality in the last five years or so you can use data that's already out there. So this is just researching and maybe creating a survey and having people answering it. Not just about the library and this is where we're talking about the community and this is where a lot of people kind of get confused. We're the library, so we should wanna be asking people about what they want the library to do and what's happening at the library. That is true, but for our purposes of this community needs plan we want you to be asking your community members what's going on in our town. Not just at the library what's going on out there. What is something that's the most upsetting you or that needs addressing or we need to work on. So this is not going to be necessarily something that the libraries can even do anything about sometimes and that's okay. People are gonna start mentioning all sorts of things. The streets need repairing. The Don Park is never cleaned up. We need a splash pad, whatever it is. But you're just gathering ideas of what's going on in the community. Somewhere in there something will pop up that'll be something the library can be related to or do something with or about. But the goal is what's important here. There's all these different ways you can do it with specific interviews and surveys and bringing in a group and a focus group. But it doesn't matter whatever works for you. These are just examples. We do also have sample questions that you can ask. So you can see here leading questions. When you come to them as the library saying, I wanna ask you some questions about what you want. They're gonna start saying, well, I want the library to do this and that's fine. Let them get that out of the system. But then have them start answering these kind of questions. What's going on in our community that you want to know, work on. After you've done that, then you're gonna do a SWAT analysis. This is your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. And this is just kind of visualizing a little better what we're good at, what we can do and what we have trouble with. And normally this is done for your organization as a whole. What are the, you know, our business's strengths, weaknesses and our opportunities and threats to us. So what we're asking you to do in this plan though is for strengths and weaknesses, look internally at the library only. For external, for opportunities and threats looks externally outside the library. Any of the opportunities and threats that you mentioned in your plan cannot have anything to do with the library. They might be things you think the library could fix and that's fine. But don't mention them when you do this part of your plan. You can see, I've got some examples of that. What's going on in the economy in town? Is there a new business? Is there some factory closed down? Is there a new group of immigrants have shown up in town and need to now help them?  And, you know, that's fine. Just stop there. You know the library can be the internet. This is the answer to that problem. And that's fine. But don't mention that when you're doing this section of your plan. So internal environment is about the library. External opportunities and threats is gonna be about the community itself. And you can see things here in the library is your typical things.  Do you have the right technology? How's the funding? What are you really good at? And what are you, you know, you need to work on? So just trying to keep those two things separately. Library, not library. Once we've gathered all this information, what's going on in our community? What is the actual demographics? What are we good at? What does this community need? You developed goals. What are we going to do? When are we going to do it? These are some helps. So this is the final goal of this plan is coming up with something concrete. A few things that the library can do over the next three years. Now that's the thing that's stuck between now and the next time you're up for accreditation. Not immediately and everything needs to be done now. I think sometimes this is scared some people of like, we can't institute three new programs, you know, right now, we're too busy. And you know, that's not what we're talking about. It's something that you'll do this year or maybe next year or the year after that. And you can have that as being part of your specific goal. In 2021, the library will institute a book delivery program to the local daycare because they need books there. So it'll be a lending program to the daycare. And that's something you're gonna do in a couple of years because you've learned from your demographics. There's a lot of young families in town. The daycare doesn't seem to have any books that keep coming to you for stuff. Let's do an outreach to them. And that's great. We've got these guides here about writing smart goals, the kind of things you need to think about when you're coming up with your goals and your objectives. Something specific that you're gonna do. Something that you can measure. Smart is the acronym. Specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bring. Is it attainable? Don't go crazy. Don't say we're going to bring every single little kid into the library and all the toddlers will be here all at once. That would be crazy. Something it's actually you can do. Relevant is a pretty easy one. As long as you've done that previous work and you're sitting up to this of your gathering your demographics and your community needs and doing your SWOT analysis, it should be whatever you come up with be relevant. And specific timeframe. Put down dates on. In this year, we're gonna do it and the program's gonna be for this amount of time. This person is gonna be the person in charge of it. That kind of thing in there. So be specific as you can there. And then the last part of your, what you need here in your plan is an evaluation. A plan for evaluating it. That every once a year, who's gonna look at it? Generally, this is the kind of thing I've seen and most of them and it works perfectly is library board will with the library director look at this plan we've put together once a year in their January meeting or whenever to make sure things are still on track. And adjust as necessary. And that's fine. They can be adjusted as you go. If you realize, wait, this project's not gonna work as we laid it out in 2019. When 2021 comes around, that's fine. You can tweak things then. This isn't anything put in stone and you have to do it. It's not like you applied for a grant and you have to report back to me. And if you do it differently, you're in trouble. No, this is just trying to come up with what's going on in our community. What are some things we can respond to? Some people have had trouble with figuring out what can we do about these things? You know, all the stuff going on in town. Excuse me, isn't anything that the library can do? We can't fix the roads. We can't clean up, you know, do certain things. But there are things that you can think outside the box. Sometimes some of these plans is just, we know there's a problem with housing and people need to talk about it. We will, because we are a local gathering place and a neutral space too. It's not at the town hall or at some business who maybe has a vested interest in anything. People can come here and we will facilitate and host a meeting of the community and an open house, a town hall to talk about the housing problems that there's not enough. There's too many empty houses, whatever it is. And you just host the event. That is something the library can do, just reaching out and being that heart of the community and the place that people can do this at. If there is something like the dog park needs cleaning up, you could, if you have a team group, they might say, let's do this as a community service and do it through the library as the being the one facilitated. Just think kind of creatively and outside the box. I highly recommend reading some of these examples, plans that we have here. Lots of these libraries have done some very different things in each of their locations that you might get some ideas about for your library. And it's okay to borrow, totally. Libraries are all about sharing and borrowing and doing things for each other. So check out and see what they have done at some of their libraries if you're having trouble coming up with an idea. But when you're looking at what's going on in your town, the community's needs and the profile, when you look at that demographic data, there's some things are gonna kind of pop out at you and there's gonna be a light bulb moment that you'll see this thing, here's something I can do about it. As far as these goals, these final things, you usually have three of those, three different things that you're gonna do over the next three year period. Something else people have asked, what if we had one we did previously on our previous plan and we're still doing it or it didn't work out and wanna try again? So can we reuse and do the same goal, the same projects that we did before? Absolutely, that's perfectly fine. Just explain in your plan what happened that this is actually an ongoing thing and we wanna keep going with it and we wanna keep it on this plan so we keep thinking about it this way as a response to community or it didn't work out and it was a failure so we've revamped it and we're gonna redesign it or things happened, life happened as we all have been experiences, we were flooded and we couldn't do the thing that we said we would do this particular goal. We're gonna try again in the next three year period and hopefully we won't have more devastation in our communities. So that's perfectly fine that you reuse things in there don't think you have to come up with three brand new things on your plan. If there are certain older things that work for it that is perfectly fine. So once you have all that together and written into a document, you then would, as I said, you submit that to me. I will then use it in conjunction, look at it in conjunction with your accreditation application form, there we go, that you submit to me online and then I evaluate them together. Now as I said, let's get back here, the both of these items are due October 1st to me. So next Monday, I mean you can be working already on your community needs response plan, your document of course. Next Monday, the application form online goes live and October 1st is a deadline to get them to me. You don't have to do them at the same time, you can do the application form right away and then send me in the plan later or the other way around, whatever, but both to me by October 1st. As soon as I have both, I'll start evaluating yours and get back to you as soon as I can. If you have any issues and you need an extension or something's going on, let me know. This program though, this accreditation program, there is no, as I said in the beginning, there are some states that do accreditation and certification programs, but some do not. There is no national program about this. There is no one like from ALA or IMLS who is dictating to us, here's what you need to do. This is just done by each state and here in Nebraska specifically me and my department, library development. So if you can't make that October 1st deadline and reach out to me and let me know what your problems are if you're having issues, we can give extensions. I've done that before, if you need to do it November or December or something, that's fine. If there's major issues, I previously have for libraries who have been doing major renovation or building projects and they got plenty on their plate, I can give you a year extension even and say, you know what, if 2019 doesn't work for you, well let's bump you a year, we extend your current accreditation to 2020 and then you'll come up next year for renewal. With all the flooding and things we did have, just recently, I'm not sure where libraries will be, we're kind of, I know we are past some of that. I do know that some areas are still having problems and issues and recovering. So let me know if you are in a situation that you don't think you'll be able to make it by October 1st, just talk to me, let me know, don't just let it fall because if you just don't submit anything to me and I don't hear from you at all, by December 3rd and December 31st, you'll just be, you lose your accreditation, which means next year you would not get your state aid, you'd not be able to apply for the grants I mentioned, you would miss a year's worth. But if you reach out to me, we can do, I can work with you on all of this. I want you guys to be successful, I want you to be able to get through this and come up with, feel proud and do what you're doing and hopefully use this plan that you're coming up with to do some good things in your library and in your community. So any questions or comments you have? We're a little after 11 o'clock, but that's okay. We started a little after 10 too, so I was doing some setup. So we do have a question that I just saw come in here. It says, our accreditation is due January 2020. Do we need to complete the strategic plan back toward this year? Now, if your accreditation is up for 2020, you'll have to do that in 2020. Let's see, let's see what your library's at here. I don't want to go too fast. There we go. Okay, so accreditation is actually due, it expires. You may have a certification form that says, accreditation form that says expires as of September 30th of whatever year it is. That was the previous expiration and then forms are due October 1st and then it got a little confusing with libraries saying, well, if our accreditation expired and we submitted in October, are we then unaccredited for a month or two while you're working on this? And I found that confusing. For me, so we've changed, accreditation expires the end of whatever year it says it is. So December of the year. So your library's accreditation is actually good through the end of 2020, so next year. If you have a plan that has got different dates on it, like if you mean your plan is only dated through January of 2020, that's okay. When I reach out to you next July, that's when you'll have to start working on getting a plan in place that'll be good for the upcoming time. So if that's what you're talking about, I'm not sure what January date you're talking about. But you don't need to do anything until it's the year that you're up for renewal. Reaccreditation. Oh, your board is due in January. Okay, then you will wanna make sure you, if your board is due to be in January, then you would definitely want them accredited by their date, yes. So that when I come to you in July, they're already certified. If your board has lapsed, when I come to you in the July of a year, there's gonna have to be a discussion about how do we get them re-certified quickly. And if that's possible or not, because that is a requirement. Same thing with the director of being certified as well. If they have lapsed or are struggling, we're gonna have to work on a plan of what you will do to show that you are working on it or you will have it done by October, whatever needs to be done. So yeah, your board is due in January, then you should be looking at what they've done. Let's see, sorry for the quick scrolling here. Yes, January 2020. And if we look and we click on your library's name, we can see, all right, they've done some. A couple of things have just recently been done, that's great. So by next January, which is the January 9th, they need to do 18 more credits. So get all that done by January, and then your board's good for the sort of your accreditation that will come up next year. The plan that document is, so there's like multiple things going on at different times, which can be a little confusing, I guess. But your board certification, just get it done by its date, your own librarian certification, get it done by whatever its date is, and then your plan and your accreditation application form, those both just need to be up to date and done to me by October of whatever year you're up for renewal. The library is. Does that make sense, I hope, no? All right, yeah, great, yes, thank you, awesome. All right, any other questions, anything more you wanted to know about everything here? Go ahead and type into the questions section. I have gone through the basics of what accreditation is, why you'd want to be accredited, what you need to do, the requirements for it, demo the application form for you so you can see that, talk a little about the accreditation, the community's response plan that you'll be working on. So that's all the basics of accreditation. If you are up this year in 2019, look for my email next Monday, come into your library, Monday, maybe Tuesday. If you're in a future year, as the questioner said, that'll be, you'll be getting that next year. All right, if you don't have any other questions about this, then I think that will wrap it up for today's Encompass Life. Thank you everybody for being here today. If you do have any questions about your accreditation, whether you're due now or in the future, let me know. If you want to send me your plan, that community needs plan actually as well, I can look at drafts for you. You don't have to wait and send me just the final version if you have a partially written one or parts of it you want me to give you some feedback on, we can do that back and forth. That is actually what will happen after, whenever you submit things to me, whether it's whenever you do it or October 1st, we will have a back and forth. If I need to ask you more questions or clarify something in your plan, or if I see you mentioned something in your application form, but didn't mention it in your plan or vice versa, I will come back to you and say, hey, you might want to update this here or you might want to fix this in your plan or you've got to add this instead. So there will be a back and forth. This isn't just as you submit to me and then you never get a chance to work on anything. All of these things are still able to, are flexible. As I said about the form, nothing's instill and once you submit it, it's just here's what we've got. I'll look at it and see if I think anything needs to be adjusted or updated or tweaked until we have a final version that gets you your good accreditation at the end. And ideally by the end of December is when everyone will have heard on back and we have everything wrapped up by the end of the year for everybody. So if you are working on anything now, let me know, contact me. You'll get your emails next week. All right, so that will wrap it up for today's Encompass Live. The show is being recorded and we'll be here on our Encompass Live website. Right here is where our archives go. We have our most recent ones will be at the top of the list. So today's will be up here probably today or tomorrow. We will have the recording will be posted. We uploaded to the Library Commission's YouTube channel and then it is linked from here. Here's where we have the last weeks. If we had any documents or presentations or slides, we linked those as well. I don't have one of those anything for this week. Also this is our archives. I'll show you this while we're here. We do have a search feature here. This is the 11th year, 2019 is the 11th year of Encompass Live. So we have a lot of archives here. So we do have a search feature. Now you can search the full archives for anything you want to or just most recent 12 months if you want something just current, just very recent. So do keep that in mind when you are searching and looking at our archives. Everything has a date of when it was originally broadcast. So please, you know, pay attention to when it was originally done when you're watching something. There may be old information in here. They may be outdated. Services or programs or products might not exist anymore or might have completely changed. But we are librarians and archivists, some of us here. And this is what we do. We save things for history. So all this will always be there for you and you can use this search feature to find whatever you want. Let's get back to our main page here. There we go. All right. So, Encompass Live is also on Facebook. We have a Facebook page here for the show where we post when shows are starting, new shows coming up, when recordings are available. So if you are big on using Facebook, do give us a like over there and you'll get notified of things there. We also do post to the, via the library commission's Twitter account. We have on our homepage a blog where we post about the show. Here's the winner writing about this week's show. So lots of different ways to hear about what's going on on Encompass Live. But if you do use Facebook, give us a like over there. And I hope you join us next week. But our topic is pretty sweet tech. Enhance your online security with password management tools. Pretty sweet tech is a new monthly feature on Encompass Live where our technology innovation librarian, Amanda Sweet will be doing something techy related every month. And you can see it in our schedule here. This is the July, August is August 14th and we've got it booked for each month throughout the year. Ultimately, it'll be the last Wednesday of the month will be pretty sweet tech. These first couple of months are starting out with it. It bounces around because we know the thing's scheduled. But if you wanted to definitely know what she's got going on, look for these shows. And next week she's going to talk about password management tools. Why you want to be secure with your passwords that you create and ways that you can keep track of all of these tons and tons of different passwords that we have out there. So definitely sign up for that one or any of our other shows. We've got all of July and August fully booked here. And as we get the September dates filled in we'll start adding those on as well. So please do sign up for any of our upcoming Encompass Live shows. Other than that, that wraps it up for today's show. Thank you everyone for attending. Look for my emails for accreditation. We'll get you all accredited for this year. And hopefully we'll see you in the future on Encompass Live. Thanks, bye-bye.


Yes, Wednesday. That means it's Energy Wednesday. I'm Jay Fidel. I love energy in Hawaii. That's Maria Tomes. She's my co-host. She loves energy in Hawaii. Yep. Okay. And then Shannon Tanganan. She's from a wine electric company. She also loves energy in Hawaii. I love energy, yes. So we have a continuation of our conversation that Maria and I had about two weeks ago, and then we continued that with Peter Rosling of Wine Electric last week, and we're going to call that the energy landscape, come up, continue. But before we get that, we're going to talk about the scam that's been going on, on and off, with regard to utility consumers, utility customers in Hawaii. Yeah. We have an ongoing issue with scam calls to utility customers, and it's not just the electric utility. It's the gas company, border water supply. So our latest wave of scam calls has really targeted, you know, it runs the gamut. We have churches that are being scammed or, you know, called. So called. It's a scam, a non-profit. Yeah. So non-profits, churches, commercial customers, residents, they don't, they discriminate. So yeah, they don't. So these scam callers are, you know, the latest round of scam calls is robocalls.  So we just want to reassure customers that we don't operate that way, and that they really need to just hang up on the scammers, and give us a call. You call the number that's on, print it on your bill or on our website. If you call the number that's on the caller ID, you'll just get back to the scammers. So give us a call and see, check on your account, make sure everything's okay. I think 98% of the time it's just a scam, you know, the other 2%. You know, maybe you are passed due, but we definitely won't be calling and saying you're shutting. You're not going to use a robocall. You're not going to threaten that way. No, we don't do that. So maybe it's 100%. I would be suspicious, greatly suspicious. Yeah. Well, whenever they just, if ever they say we're shutting you off within a certain timeframe, that's the one key, you know, warning that it's a scam. You wouldn't do that. No. Yeah, so I mean, I find that very interesting because it's dangerous business. If you're not Akamai about it, and you follow the program they set for you, and you call that other number out of, you know, sort of a misplaced fear, okay, they're going to say, they could say, I don't know what they actually do.  Exactly. The credit card, it's going to wind its way around the world for scam charges, way more than $39. Definitely. This is very dangerous business. So we just want to tell customers, we don't ever ask for payment over the phone. We have on our website all the different payment options that you have. One of them is not to give us information over the phone. Your credit card information, we don't accept that. So, you know, it's really about educating yourself, going on our website, looking at the payment options, and just make sure, you know, if they're asking you to feed cash into a Bitcoin machine. Oh, that's really suspicious. At some retailer. Just know that that's just really not something we would do if they ask you to go to a retailer and get debit cards, prepaid debit cards. You know, again, that's not something we would ask you to do. It's taking advantage of people who are not Akamaki.  You have small business owners who are, you know, busy trying to tend to other matters.  Especially if you're, you know, you have trouble paying your bills. That makes it even more risky.  I've got to respond to this because terrible things will happen.  You know, I said before, though, it's praying on people who are not Akamaki. Truth is that anybody can be rushed. Anybody can make a mistake. Anybody can pick up the phone when they shouldn't. Anybody can follow the track of a scam when they shouldn't. People make mistakes. And so if they call 10,000 people, you might find a few who actually submit to this. Yeah. So a couple of thoughts on that. One is, seems to me that if you get a call, my smart phone tells me when it's a robo call. Or you can tell it's a robo call. Yeah. You can definitely tell it's a robo call. You know, it's got that certain metallic quality to it. I just hang up. Yes. I hang up. There's nothing anybody can do to stop me from hanging up. And if a guy, if there's a really legitimate thing, which is, you know, like one in a million possibilities, then he can call me back. Oh, shoot. So the best, and I'm speaking now, you can tell me how more electric feels about it. The best medicine for this is just don't take the call or hang up immediately. And the funny thing, you know, Shannon, is that if you do that, they don't call again. No, they don't. They go away. Yeah. They do go away. Until the next person comes around. So you just have to be vigilant. You just have to be aware of what you're dealing with. And when you have those robo calls, you know, telling you to call this number, hang up and call this number. Just hang up and don't do the next step. Yeah. Just hang up. Just hang up. That's the deal. Yeah. Thank you, Shannon. Shannon, take that one electric. We love when you come down and say hi to us. Thank you so much. I appreciate being here. We'll take a short break and we'll see you again soon. Okay. Thank you. Hi, I'm Rusty Komori, host of Beyond the Lines on Think Tech, Hawaii. My show is based on my book, also titled Beyond the Lines, and it's about creating a superior culture of excellence, leadership, and finding greatness. I interview guests who are successful in business, sports, and life, which is sure to inspire you in finding your greatness. Join me every Monday as we go Beyond the Lines at 11 a.m. Aloha. Aloha. I'm Yukari Kunisue, the host of Konnichiwa, Hawaii, Japanese talk show on Think Tech, Hawaii. Konnichiwa, Hawaii is all Japanese broadcast show, and it's streamed live on Think Tech at 2 p.m. every other Monday. Thank you so much for watching our show. We look forward to seeing you then. I'm Yukari Kunisue. Mahalo. Hi, Maria. Hey, Jay. Alone at last. Energy is our thing, yeah. So we're going to continue our conversation here on Hawaii, the state of clean energy, about the energy landscape, the players that are on the landscape, how they interact, maybe how they should interact. It's a continuing discussion, and as we learned already, we did two of these already. It is very important to do this. It's really clarifying to take a look at it and see what the dynamic's on. And as far as we got, I don't think we actually address the utility itself. Well, see, we started, you know, this is a list that was developed by discussion in the Hawaii Energy Policy. It's just a draft. You know, the idea was to take a look at who's doing what, and then look at the policies, and then look at the interaction between the policies and whatnot. It's an important discussion. But since the who does what piece is so interesting, you know, that's kind of where we started. Also, from the PEC perspective, we have a tendency in the orders to always start at the beginning. I don't know if you've read through the orders that are put out by the public utilities division, but you always have the background section, and you know, let's start. So, we started with the legislature setting overall energy policy goals, directions, and so forth, also having funding for anything the administration may choose to do. Then went to the governor, because that is the head of the administration, and you know, that's a very important part of it. And then to the agencies within the state government that are carrying out the directives of the legislature, which represents the will of the people. And you had all sorts of interesting reactions to all parts there. That will probably continue. So, this is the background. And then we got through the energy office over at D-Bed, which is having an interesting time this legislative session. I wish them well, because it really is an important part of this whole puzzle. Can we digress for a moment, and can you tell me what is the interesting time they're having? Well, the legislature has taken a look at their funding, pulled them out of the state budget, along with a bunch of other agencies as well, and said, okay, you're going to have to have your budget looked at separately by your committee errors and whatnot. And so, I guess that has happened, and now those are in conference committee. So, you know, the final form of the bill that tells the energy office how to do what it needs to do and telling it what it needs to do, as well as how much funding it might have to do, is all up in the air. Gee whiz, it sounds like micro-management. And it sounds like non-management, it sounds like.  I start thinking about the potholes. So, the potholes. You would assume that somebody in government, state or federal, depending on, I'm sorry, state or county, you know, you would assume that somebody at some level is in charge of filling the potholes. No, it's like, you know, it's like, I was used to sit on the neighborhood board, and I would say to the representatives of the city every single meeting, you know, who's in charge of filling the potholes, and when is the poth, do you have a list? Have a list of what streets are going to be paved? Let me have the list. Please, I'm a neighborhood board. Let me send me the list. Never, years went by, never. What did they say? They would get it to you, but they never did. And I realized after a while, there was no list, and it was like, who made the loudest squawk sound, okay, and there was really nobody in charge, and nobody wanted to be in charge, and that's why there were potholes everywhere. I don't really think that's changed. So, take energy now. The question is, you know, who's actually in charge? That's the inquiry of our discussion, isn't it? And, you know, it could be that there's actually nobody in charge. It just happens, and when somebody squawks about it, when it hits the front page in some way, then everybody runs around and does something. And I really think that we have got to, the energy office is what we've been talking about. We've got to enable them. We've got to fund them. We've got to, you know, empower them. You got to say here, you know, do it. Do the plan. Build the potholes in energy. Make it happen. This is your responsibility. We're not going to micromanage you. We want you to manage yourself and do a good job. That's what we're paying you for. We don't have that. Okay, so that is exactly the type of discussion, I think, that was behind this whole effort. We even put the list together, because there are different parts to this, and there are different agencies that are in charge of different parts, but if each agency is only aware of their own piece, and there's no understanding of the whole landscape, or let's say somebody new comes into the area, and they're wondering, well, who fills the potholes? Or who has the data?  Who's in charge of what piece? If there was some explanation of at least who's in charge of what piece, it may not be one entity in charge of everything, but at least you'd be able to find the entity in charge of the piece that you're busy working on. Right, but you're never going to have anybody stand up and say, follow me, boys, we're going to do this, let's have some excitement, we're going to actually move ahead on this, this, this, and this, unless you empower that person and fund that person, and give that person staff and credibility and all that person needs. You don't have to create another energy authority about it. You have to take the existing offices that exist by law now, and actually respect them. And that'll help. Here, here, okay. That's my comment on the energy office and do that. I love the digressions. So the pothole thing, if we could go back to that one, so we got this car. We have a car that's not, you know, autonomous in any way, but it does have this lane change, you know, this lane tracking mechanism you can turn it on. And it also has automatic braking, you know, and so I was thinking what it really needs is a pothole detector.  Sorry. You're giving me an idea.  Take pictures of the road? Yeah, we got the technology, we have sensors, we can look at the road. Everywhere they drive within a, you know, a radius of X feet, they could identify the potholes, even potholes that are not so obvious. And they could keep a record of that. He'd send it back. They could send it back by wireless. And you would have the actual location with the geocoding. And it would appear on a map. And then on the map, they would appear a course of action, a track, right, a route for the pothole people to follow. And it could even assign, I could write this code. Assign the date when it's supposed to go and tell them exactly where the potholes are and protect them with necessary police on a heavily traffic road. And they could do the whole thing on an automated basis. Or something that solidifies quickly enough so that, you know, if you just went over it slowly enough, by the time you were off, it would be solid. Kind of like printers.  Or you need an automated pothole or pothole. Yeah. Anyway, sorry. This is why we never get through this list. You have to change the name of the show soon. Okay, so we got through D-Vet on those number four. Office of Planning. You know, Office of Planning. They have the maps and whatnot. We had talked a little bit about that. And then the public. There could be a redundancy there. The Office of Planning sit right next to the Office of Energy. And are they talking to each other? Yeah, all of these are interrelated. Are they talking to each other? Well, that's a question, right? That's a question. So I've seen a lot of discussion because the GIS maps have a lot of the energy resource information. They have a lot of the permitting information, the land use information that the developers of the projects would need. So it seemed like a very useful, jointly developed project. You know, if you ask me cold, if you're totally cold on this, you said who is supposed to do the planning on energy projects? I would say the Office of Energy Energy Office. And I wouldn't think of the Planning Office because the Energy Office knows so much more about it. However, I would say that once the Energy Office makes a plan, they should probably run it by the Planning Office to make sure it doesn't conflict with another plan because they write down the hallway, aren't they? Yeah, yeah, well, yeah. Same building. Yeah, so that brings us to the Public Utilities Commission. We talked about the regulated entities. And you know, the whole theory is if you have a monopoly service, it's an essential service.  Because it's important to maintain your power, to your site, to your company. So it's an important essential service. And if it's a monopoly type of provider, then these essential services, whether it's electricity or gas or water, used to be telephones as well. You know, you want to make sure that it's a reasonable charge for the customers who are captive. Sure. But let's dwell on the utility for a moment. And we really have to talk about more than one utility here because you got KIUC and Kauai, which is a different model because people vote and they have a board of directors that are elected by the electorate and by the rate holders, rate payers, in Kauai. That's very different, okay? And then you've got one electric that covers the other island. And so where do they fit? I'm really asking you this, but I'll volunteer my... Okay. Where do they fit in terms of leadership, of finding new ideas, implementing new ideas, making us energy independent and reaching goals that have been articulated. How important are they in this huge schematic that we're talking about? You said you wanted to answer, so I'm going to give you the opportunity to answer your question. Okay, thank you for that. I think they're really important. Now, of course, they have their constraints and they're surrounded with regulatory bodies, not only the PUC, but also the consumer advocate and all that. And a lot of organizations like to think that they are also regulators, even though some of them are just activist organizations, trying to affect policy within the utilities.  They know more, really, than, may I say, any other hype organizations in this field. We have to give them credit for that, and we have to allow them a wide berth, in my view, how to go forward and how to design and implement plans. And I think sometimes we get into scrapes with them that are not productive. I mean, with next era, that was not productive. And what was the other one? Well, all the complaints by the solar installers and all the activists trying to make hostilities. But the fact is that the end of the day, although the utilities are business organizations, and in the case of Wine Electric, it's not a co-op, it's an actual profit company. Investor-owned utility, yep. The fact is that they are well suited to be in leadership positions. Now, maybe it's subject to discussion, maybe it's subject to regulation, but they are an appropriate place for new ideas to happen, or at least to be thought of. New place for initiatives to be conceived. A new place for understanding and reporting exactly what the effect of those initiatives are. I give them credit, I'm not sure we collectively give them enough credit for being in leadership. After all, I've been doing this for a hundred and some hundred and some odd years. So I see them as the most important, may I say, the most important, both KOEC and Wine Electric, the most important name on the list. Okay, yeah. And they are the service providers. So we started with the concept and all the laws and regulations and whatnot. But within all of those regulations, including being an investor-owned utility, they do have a responsibility to their shareholders, as well as to the public and to satisfy the regulatory requirements. But they are the ones who are building, maintaining and operating the electric grid. Yeah, you don't see the lights are on. This is a notable fact. It is. It is. And we appreciate. And everybody who uses electricity, I'm sure, appreciates. Do you think that we're giving them enough leeway? Or are we constraining them in ways maybe we don't have to? I'm not talking about the regulations of the PUC. Because that's another study. I'm talking about, say, the public and the legislature.  There are always bills in every topic that seek to push the envelope of both policy and economics. Well, sometimes she's excited. Yeah, but that's the nature of the dynamic space in which we operate. We could say that's the nature of democracy. That's what I meant. But the problem is democracy works and sometimes it doesn't work. And I think we always have to be analyzing that. It only works to the extent that people who care and are knowledgeable take the time to learn and discuss in rational and reasonable ways. What can be done and how visionary or how nervous we should be about the opportunities or the challenge. I agree with everything you said. You can't ignore either one. This is very important. I hope people are writing this down. A vigorous debate is essential. This is going to be on the final exam, all of it. So yes, we need to acknowledge the importance and the value of all the parts. And don't just assume that the services that we have today will continue without understanding and supporting the realities of the situation but also the dynamics and the changes that are facing everybody. Not only the large businesses but also the small businesses. The government agencies as well as the public. There are decisions required at every point which is where all these agencies are looking at different aspects because no one human being can understand every detail of every aspect of this energy. No, but you know we're talking about leadership here. Yeah. And the leader does not have to understand every aspect of a technical landscape like this. But the leader has to be able to motivate people continually going the right direction and has to be able to stop them when they're maybe thinking of the wrong direction. And we haven't had that honestly. I'm looking back to multiple governors. I don't think we've had a governor who really understood about energy and I mean on a larger scale. You can come in and say, oh I like this or I don't like that. That's ad hoc. You know, you want some real comprehensive plan, comprehensive understanding, really Akamai kind of view of things where you think about it, you have close advisors who advise you really take their advice. That's what we need because right now I think this whole conversation is operating on the assumption that when you when you put 57 or 157 organizations on the landscape on the chart, you know, it's very hard to reach consensus. It's very hard to make a plan or carry out a plan. So that's what we need. We need clear leadership by people authorized to provide that leadership. Yes, that's very helpful at all levels. Including your leadership in the communication space, getting the word out, getting people in to talk about it. We haven't really progressed on this list yet. Go ahead. We're not done. We got past the background section. We won't be done in this show either. So we talked a little about the utilities commission and the consumer advocate. Very important part of the whole review piece. You know, excellent resource. We really need the consumer advocate. And why? Because they are tasked to look at the concerns of the consumer because you've got the public utilities commission viewing the applications that come in and the information that comes in. And you have sometimes developers coming in and making their pitch and whatnot. If you didn't have a specific role for another agency to come in and say, hey, from the consumer's perspective we're concerned X, Y, or Z, that would be a missing part. Who would make that argument? You know, if the PUC starts making the argument, then they're not weighing the evidence. The other hand, clapping. Right, exactly. So you need all those pieces. And fortunately, the CA is very knowledgeable. Both the staff and their consultants have a long history of understanding of the issues. Not just electricity, but also the water and the waste. And so... I'm always interested though about how the consumer advocate can get into issues that are off the reservation, so to speak. If you've read their statute, there's a lot in there about not just the immediate concerns of the specific consumer being affected by this decision this year, but also a longer term. What's the public interest? So they also have a longer term view. So that's kind of where this winds up. There are arguments about, well, this is going to cost X today, but it'll give Y benefits tomorrow. And it depends on what your view of the future is. What are the opportunities? What are the risks? How do you weigh them? It's not just a naysayer, then. Is it, Maria? No. Because if it's just a naysayer, then that puts it in a certain box. Not a naysayer. No. Does a consumer advocate make affirmative suggestions about things nobody else suggests? Yeah. Yeah, they do. And it's an interesting dynamic between having the information that's presented be complete. And I'm not just talking about electric utility necessary. Just in general. So very often, you can get the information that you need for a complete picture when somebody starts asking the question. Like, you love to ask questions to get the rest of the story. And it's the same thing. In the process of asking the question and getting the answers, everybody has a better view of what the whole picture is and what the impacts might be. As a matter of human nature, though, you know, I remember the effort to develop the portfolio where they call it the... They don't use it so many times. Oh, the PSIP? The Power Supply Improvement? Powers... No, before that. That was Integrated Resource Planning? Yes, that's it. IRP. That went on for like four or five years. Oh, longer than that. Longer than... Sorry, you make my point. It was way long. The first thing they had to figure out what they were going to talk about and then they had to figure out who was going to talk and how. And then they actually had, you know, the utility develop. This was a plan and then it was discussed and debated and so forth. So, yes. I'd like to comment on that because it's very totally relevant to our discussion. So there were, as I recall, this number might be off a few, but it was something like 82 people involved in the committee and organizations were involved in the committee to find out about the Integrated Resource Plan. And it never actually reached a plan. Actually, there were about four of them. There was IRP1, IRP2, IRP3. Thank you. Thank you for that. They were starting an IRP tour. And really, I think it was a, in general, a bad idea, badly executed because nothing happened. And I think we lost precious time over that sort of thing. And my reaction is, you know, it's like having a charity with a board of directors of 82 people. Maybe they're good for writing checks, but they're not good for making policy. It's too many people. And when you have 82 people, on the IRP, all coming in with their own various points of view and no clear way to identify whose point of view is more important than who else and have everybody arguing and trying to get the floor, so to speak, you don't reach agreement.  They reach consensus by making no action. That's the consensus point of action. And the IRP was a perfect example of that. I think it should have been reorganized early on. And I think there should have been some strong leadership there to say, okay, not everybody, not redundant groups, not the same people arguing the same points. Let's move ahead. You know, next point, that didn't happen. And so I think we wasted a lot of time and probably a lot of money given the fact that so many people were involved. What do you think? Well, I think the current power supply improvement plan... I'm talking about the old one. You know, I wasn't directly involved in that back then. So my perspective was different. You know, I saw a lot of the folks who were interested felt they could come into the room and listen to what was being said. And it wasn't all of them speaking at once. And I think the reason for the large numbers was you had different groups on each island. So each island had its own group of people talking about those particular issues. And so you've got heat, one electric, my electric, my electric, my white. So the numbers weren't as that, you know, quite as huge per island. And I don't think it was quite as noisy, but the general point about many discussions happening and it taking a long time is definitely valid. And I remember when they got to the end... There was no outcome. Well, the outcome was very similar, but I think that laid the groundwork for the changes that happened later. You had the ability to find good in everything, Maria. Well, we were moving in the right direction after that effort, because people did say, well, this really isn't getting us to where we need to go as quickly as we need to go there. And so that's when the legislature said, you know, we're going to have a renewable portfolio standard. And I might mention that the energy office was very involved in doing a lot of the research and the groundwork in pulling together the studies to show that that was even feasible at that time. So the IR, you know, you have to get to a certain level of discussion and concern before you're willing to take it to another venue. Oh, yeah. It sounds like entrepreneurship. You have to have some failures before you learn enough to make a successful company. What's another word for failure? Uh, consensus. Experience. Well, you know, we should talk about the renewable portfolio standards, too. And I think that's probably in the next show. Oh, yeah. We're out of time already. Yeah, I think we're almost done. But this is really very productive as far as I can. I really enjoy talking about it. So where is it going to go from here? I mean, we'll do that next time, but there's so much more. Where do you think we are on the continuum of examining the subject? Well, I think we got to the top of page two. Out of four. But the digressions are fun. Yeah, okay. All right. Well, okay. We'll do this more. We'll explore it. I think it's very valuable. I like the idea of looking back at our history over the past what, 20 years, almost 20 years, trying to figure out how this animal, who's in this animal, how the animal moves, how the animal makes decisions. What kind of outcomes we can achieve and hope to achieve going forward. It's complicated. Yeah. It's competitive. And it's risky. And it's important. Oh, it's critical. Thank you, Maria. Thanks, Jay. Maria Tomek. So enjoy our discussion. Thanks for having me on the show.