I think we'll get started. I'm delighted to see so many friends, family, members of the historical society and others, library staff, it's a great turnout and we're just thrilled to see you all. My name's Fiji Barnbill and I'm the past president of this organization. And I'm delighted today to introduce Cindy Jones who is the ninth generation of her family to be involved with the Coals Home Farm in North Amherst and she's going to talk today about how they're meeting the needs of, I guess, the present generation. She'll talk about past generations. She's been working through piles of archival records that are in the office in North Amherst. And since I have a long history as kind of an archivist, curator to see someone today in a business setting, sorting through old records just warms the topics of my heart and I think it's great. This has clearly been such an important part of Amherst's history and the region's history that to preserve it and care about it is absolutely wonderful. I think you all know Cindy far better and for many more years than I am, she's going to turn it over to Cindy. Thank her so much for coming. Thank you. Thank you so much. It is funny, the house where my office is has been the home farm since 1768 and everybody left all their stuff.  We have bills from 1898 and some paperwork from 1700s and I tried to take pictures of some of it because I didn't want to go through it. I bought archival albums and we could look at it now without destroying it but it's quite a task that my mom started a generation ago and then she handed it back when she decided she wanted to move so all this stuff just arrived in a big building and I tried to figure it out like she did. So do we want less late? So this is the home farm, 134 Montague Road and this is three carts of hay with two horses. I just got out of school and I thought you'd all be talking and I'd have to wake you up so I didn't wake you up. So this is the home farm with our lumber supply a long time ago. Evan and I, Evan and I are the ninth generation of the family to live in this house but the story starts before that. And there's this guy named Egbert who wrote three volume genealogy and it's at the Field Historical Society and he took from the start of Poles in America to 1900 and there is a paragraph about everybody. So the one John Cole came here and then he had kids and these are the kids had kids and this book they had to go to every 40 pages to find three sentences about our line. So he studied the family and he said we're not all that. Like we worked hard and we were good people and we were respected but we weren't great and we weren't smart. No. He stopped in 1900 and I really do think there are three big blips after 1900 that we would get credit for smart and better than useful. But you can decide at the end if we make Egbert proud. So if we're not all that, okay Egbert how is it that we managed to eke out nine generations of a family business? Almost 275 years. And it's pretty easy for the first hundred years because the oldest boy named Jonathan always got everything and all the other nine kids got nothing and Jonathan never locked it up. So the whole farm got passed down to a whole bunch of Jonathan's until about close to now. But after the Jonathan's from the late 1800s on there's David and there were a couple Walters. And what we learned is to evolve the family farm, the home farm for what our generation needed. We learned to get rid of outdated businesses and we learned to regenerate, to use a forestry term of ours, to regenerate the home farm, to regenerate the family business. And to make it more relevant to the people running it and make it more inspiring for us to be as good as great as we can be. So the values that have been passed down in the family are forestry values. We were taught to grow more than we could to sustainably manage our timberland, sure but to buy more land than we'd ever sell or develop to contribute to the community betterment, to give more than we took with the church, the town, to leave behind something better than what we were lucky enough to be a Jonathan and inherit. So the Conquistadors came to South America to find gold and bring riches back to their part of Europe. And our ancestors came from England to get away from a Catholic king and to find religious freedom. And our first seal is of a naked Indian and a banner that says, please come help us.  So John Cole, C-O-L-E, came on this boat on 1634 and took a picture of it. And there's a second John Cole in Farmington, Connecticut. So he changed his spelling to one that nobody can pronounce correctly. So our name is Coles. So I'm gonna, the first John, because there are like 18 Johns Coles. So the first Cole, I'm just leaving his name that way just so you know we're still talking about one. So he was in Hartford, Connecticut after Farmington and he came north to what's now South Hadley to Summerland. It was the Hadley settlement. And we landed on the other side of the river what's now Hatfield. So we were first settlers of Hatfield with six families. That is, Han Cole's his actual signature. And because nobody else could read it either, they wrote it. That's good. So, Edward says that treacherous Indians were making us not wanna come north. And he doesn't blame us for not coming north because our house was outside the stockade around Hatfield. I don't know what we did to the other eight families that we left there, but we were outside the fence. So, we went back to Hartford for a couple years and we tried women for witchcraft. Yeah, so, Edward is not impressed yet. Edward said that we were threatened that if we did not get our act together and buck up to the Indian threat, we would lose our land. So we moved from Hatfield and came to, we moved from Hartford and came to Hatfield and we were rewarded by three years of massive Indian attacks, but at least our friends, the Kellogg's, weren't as lucky as we were, but they got kidnapped, taken to Canada and they have Indian heritage now. When they returned, they were with childhood. It was a dangerous time for everybody, at least of whom were the more people whose country this was before we got here. So, John Cole was a founder of the town, so he helped build the church and he was one of the select men because there were eight people in town and there was probably eight select men and eight church members. His son came with him from Hartford and he married Deborah Bartlett. My mom and Sheila wrote this really cool, they devised and wrote a lot of this really cool book and they have some copies in the back of the room and Cindy Dickinson here is going to, Cindy here is going to help us hand these out if you answer the trivia questions first. You get a book, okay? And this is about all the Amherst family farms, including ours. So, John Cole named, married Deborah Bartlett.  Brown? What? Brown? So, shout it out. Can you get in the head of my work? Baby, how did he die? Me and his girlfriend. Yeah, Mr. Pell gets a book. Okay. The next, Jonathan, was born in Hatfield and he had 28 children and then he went to Central Amherst and he was a select man because there were probably 18 people in Amherst at that time. And there is a restaurant menu which credits his home. So, where was this house, what house was it and to whom did he sell this property? Did his ancestors sell this property according to a menu? First of you guys, it still gets a book. Okay. Okay, so Jonathan calls, they say his house was the Stockbridge house north of the Homestead-Homingamass campus and records show that Cole sold quite a few acres to Mass Aggie to build the college. But my mom's research shows that Jonathan first lived in the back L of the Black Walnut Inn and that makes more sense for our settling North Amherst but there were a lot of Coles' and a lot of Jonathan Coles' so it's up in the air. This is early map. This is on Hatfield. I think I got this from the Hatfield Historical Society. This is the settlement and the town common in Hadley and the allotment of the road to Amherst. The first allotment, the second and the third. And so we were somewhere in there. And that's an Amherst College copy of a North College map. This is the North Congregational Church in North Amherst. It was formed as the first church of Hadley, the third precinct. Jonathan's son, Jonathan, was the first baby baptized there. My dad was the last person memorialized there when it closed and became a Korean church. So we opened and we closed that church. And Jonathan held a lot of offices and he bought the home farm. So now we're finally like at go. Like all that was just background. Now we're starting the store. So 1741, John bought the first parcels of timberland, one on Pulpit Hill where I hope to live and one on the home farm where we ended up building a house. So this is the deed of John selling his land in Hatfield and coming to Amherst. This Jonathan had a son not named Jonathan, the first one in America to get interesting. So David built the home farm house and it started out as a salt box and it had this back end and it had a whole lot of barns attached to it. But I asked Uncle Denny what all this was when he was a kid, this was the outhouse and this was the kitchen because you didn't cook in the house because you started down. I thought it was just me. After the Revolutionary War, David's brother, so Jonathan's other son, Silas, fought on the side of the Brits and we were on the side of the Patriots. I guess you like Catholic and taxes. So he moved to South Amherst and put an E in his name because he didn't want to be confused with us. And he wanted people to be able to pronounce his name. So that's Andrew Coles. And this is an account book of ours in the office from the 1700s, it's crazy what is in this office. Oh, but there's like, there's one of them? Yeah, this is all prayers. Like he's writing his bills.  He was serious. This place was founded around the church for sure. 1786, more accounts, crazy that we have this. When David died, these are his estate expenses. They paid one guy to build his casket. And his name was Ingram. Yeah, and cotton trimming, that was a dollar. Yeah, it's crazy amazing. So after he left Hatfield and settled at the home farm, where I still had my office, we were located somewhere other than Amherst. Where were we located? For a book. Nope? Notre-Dame? Nope. Is there a night? Nope. Is there a night? Sarah gets a book. Ooh. So Coles never changed locations. He's still Hatley. And yeah, so from 1727 to 1759, this was the third crazy of Hatley and that's where, what we lived in. And today in 1768, I think it became Amherst. This is an early map of Amherst after it became a town. So now they start to have pictures and not just write examples. So John Nicole's continued to manage the timber business. So we had the timberland from the first John Nathan Coles in 1741 and that's what built his house, David's house. And this Johnathan divided Shoesbury House from Amherst. We brought the sawmill to the woods because that was easier than bringing trees to a sawmill. Then after the wood was sawed, we brought the wood to the home farm and that's where it was sold. Their son, Johnathan, was big into the church. And he married Sarah Marsh Dickinson and that's a relative of Emily Dickinson. And he ran the business out of the same home farm house that I run in the same business out of today. And these are his property taxes from the early 1800s. Isn't that amazing? This is a church collector. And Amherst tax bill had three lines. One was for the state, one was for the town and one was for the church. That is amazing. Yeah, look, we've been subscribing to the Gazette for 200 years. No, isn't that cool? And the Amherst record too, Amherst seats for that. And I actually, I couldn't find a documentation but I was trying to find out if we ever owned slaves and I was just horrified to research it. And not only did I find no evidence of this but we have subscribed to the abolitionist publication for a couple generations too.  Walter Dickinson Coles was the child of the last Jonathan and Edward would have loved him. So this guy was born at the right time. He was born at the industrial revolution and he was somebody who could fully take care of that. He became the biggest onion producer and lumber producer in the state of Massachusetts. He went to UMass and learned road building and he had a company called Coles and Tiles which built bridges and roads across the Northeast and in Amherst. He built the rock quarry at the notch because he wanted to build a trolley system and he had the timbers but he didn't have the bedding and he had to manufacture the bedding. He was a state rep and a select man. This is the longest timber bridge in the world after the 38 Hurricane Drew in the last one and WD Coles helped build it in New Hampshire. This is Edda Uney of Shootsbury and she married WD Coles. They helped build the North Amherst Library. Is that a cool picture? And that's Riverside Park on the right. And actually Riverside Park began and the name started because they needed trolley ridership on weekends and this was a destination like the Pellum Orient Springs that you could get on and pay your money and make the trolley viable seven days a week. This is early receipt with some early delivery trucks before blue trucks at the store. Another early truck. I can't, I don't know if anybody knows trucks but this to me looks like it's scooted on a train track but because of the front wheels but I know I knew what I'm talking about. I know, look at the back. That's like, yeah. The front of the tourney. They are but they look like they go on tracks. See this? So Emily bought lumber from WD. This is Austin and it is receipts. Henry Hills bought lumber from Walter and there's one funny one which basically proves that people have been complaining about our building materials for 200 years. Henry Hills says he delivered to be another load of wet lumber. Walter's, stop it. It's gonna dry lumber next time. It's pretty funny from Henry Hills. This is Walter Dickinson. He is in a number of pictures in his suit jacket and hat, pretending to actually work building his trolley alone. Yeah, this is him. This is like the eighth sister before, yeah, before WD's rock crusher took it down and now the Vallejo Grange has seven sisters probably, I'm joking, but where is that now? But this is the notch where Lane's rock quarry is. WD sold that to Lane. This is downtown. So this is the Bay of America. And this is WD Coles. And this is them building the trolley line right uptown with timbers and rocks. This is the same picture from a different angle. So you're looking down, when you just looked up, the town hall is now over here, and this is the common building the trolley line. This is my office, 134 Monogy Road, the home farm, Hobart House, trolley tracks. And when that was redone, WD changed his house from a saltbox to a colonial with an L built a couple of forges, but the front porch was a waiting station for the trolley. And it's nearly in the highway today, but I guess that was intentional because you want it right next to the tracks. So, Sarah, I think we found it the first bit. I looked it up, the North Amherst Village Improvement Society, which you and I researched on a time ago. It was to make North Amherst a more desirable place. They did things like building repairs, sidewalk, shoveling, public lawn mowing, bridge repair, but their biggest thing was they put oil in the street lights and made sure they were on from sunset till sunrise. Pretty cool. First bit. Walter was a slumman. This is uptown, I'm thinking, somebody knows better than I do. Is this a North Amherst common and we're looking toward UMass so this is the store and this is like the house of teriaki now. I'm thinking that's this new store. So, Walter Dickinson-Cole's with William H. Walker, my husband's great-grandfather, valued homes in the cotton together and Chuck's family lost their sawmill and brist mills because they were in the Swift River Valley, but it was a western mass effort to figure out how to flood that Swift River Valley. This is the trolley coming out of the notch and the Joe Larson Memorial trolley stop at UMass. W.E.D. left all his passports in the house. And they're stamped from everywhere. And this is a story that Tarantula's and trekking into the middle of the jungle and going, this isn't the Pamela Canal story, but holy cow, the trips this guy took before it was really easy to do that. And this was in the Boston Globe. The Boston Post is pretty amazing. So, they didn't name their kid Jonathan because it was a girl and Sarah Cole's was, I think she was cool because Uncle Denny says I remind him of her, she was hard ass. And she got things done and I think she's cool. So, she married Jerry Denison Jones who was a mass Aggie student from Nova Scotia and he ran the sauna. Cool. Yeah. She bred Dalmatians and peacocks and sheeps and all kinds of things, but her big thing was cows. She had a big dairy farm that was in my grandson's and teak barn and in the Atkins barn. And she had these giant cans of milk. There's one right back here with a husband's name on it. Right back there is they would ship those self to Holyoke on the trolley. Well, it still ran. And they said it had like whipped cream on the top layer and I just can't even imagine she's shipping milk on the top and not having whipped cream on the top. This is Sarah in front of our barn. She had, I guess she had a locket and on one side was Uncle Denny and on the other side was a dog. And those were her favorite people. I don't know who was first. But she watched her animals. There's a little ball of nuts in the back. This is the reading she went to of the Dickinson family in 1888 and that is some building in Amherst, I don't know where. This might be Sarah Cole's. Walter's on the road. Is he? He's here somewhere. The little boy in the front. Oh really? Yeah, next to her. Cute. So this is Gerald. He was a state rep and he ran the sawmill and he did well at the timber company. Who's Jerry Jones' name for? My cousin. Gerald. Yeah! Forget about that. Lots of books. Gerald. Okay, so Sarah and Gerald helped start with today the Fisher home because Mrs. Fisher was a church and she left her house and money and directions. And they executed them. That house was not handicapped accessible for old people. So they ended up moving it, I think, to the end of Hobart Lane. And it looks like this house, I'm guessing. And building a modern one by Tom Curley in the 60s, which my grandfather, Walter, helped do. And we love them. They're our favorite longtime charity in Amherst. That's Sarah in front of the home farm where I work today. This is her very business. So that is the Atkins Barn. This is the manure shed, which we found evidence of when we built the parking lot at Atkins Barn. This is the Atkins Barn that's falling in that we were rebuilt and these barns don't exist. And this is my office.  And this is a manure shoot, maybe, again. This is a view down to that out of the top floor of the house where my office is, the home farm house. So today the trolley barn is here and I think this is the onion barn that's left. And these are gone now. And this is the Atkins area. So they had a son, they named it for her father, Walter. Edgar would've loved him too because he did big things and he was pretty amazing. Trivia, where is this photo taken? We'll put it on your own, looking for the tour. Yes. And you're probably right over the river. This is the Ellen Story Beach. You guys get to collect books. Am I already on the book? Okay. So this handsome dude is my grandfather and he was amazing. Sarah Hartman, he says he met at church in Ohio but I really don't know if that was true. She came to Mount Holyoke and they got married after she graduated and after she went to faith path secretary of school to get useful and get a job because Mount Holyoke didn't do beads. Amen. She worked for the editor of the Springfield newspaper as a clerk. He is an inspiration to Evan because we have a workforce affordable housing dream for Amherst and he was a founding member of the housing authority in Amherst and he built a great example of workforce affordable housing that's market rate. Naturally affordable without subsidies. He built the first electric sawmill perhaps in the country and he developed the Amherst Water Company which is now your water supply. It was a private business first. So when did it become easier to bring trees to a sawmill than sawmills to trees? Do we have a year or a reason? Trucks. Trucks, part of it. Yeah, so if you look at the sandborn insurance maps of North Amherst at this time, there's a row of electricity in the middle of nowhere. And it was for the sawmill here on Coles Road. Before that, there was an electrical house across the street for the trolley that in the trolley depot. So how did we have electricity starting in 1940 and a trolley before that I didn't do enough research to tell you? That anybody knows. Was the water power generator on no river? No, this was electric but it was Eastern Brook where the, yeah, I think there was a water generator but it could have been, it must have been, huh? On Eastern Brook. I don't think there'd be enough water to regenerate electricity for the trolley. Back today. But it would be, it was the depots, right? And the electric house was next to Eastern Brook north of Coles Road. So that's a chestnut tree cutting the hard way. Still had not invented the chainsaw. That was still rough. So this, I think, is the first example of forced affordable housing, market rate affordable. These are nice, small house slots with branch and gates on them and they are going to be affordable forever. They were World War II by your first house when you're out of the war. And still today, a lot of first time, last time home buyers like it there. I hope in my lifetime, Everest will allow zoning by the bedroom, not by the house. So if you have a two acre lot and you can build a four bedroom house on it, why can't you build four one bedroom houses on that same lot? And those will always be affordable. And we will not have to have to eat restrictions and donations from places to be able to have teachers and firefighters live where they were.  This is a belt from 1956 for the policemen's ball program. And so I told you at the beginning that the reason why we stayed in business is because every generation had stopped the unaffected business of the past and it did what meant more to them, what made more sense for their generation. As soon as Sarah died, Walter auctioned all our cows and cut the timbers out of the Atkins barn. It stored long units of lumber in it. And when we converted it to Atkins, we had to go put posts back under the leaves because it was falling in. Somehow it stayed up all those years. Barns are amazing. That's grand. People in North Amherst Post Office. He had a farm that ran from our home farmhouse to the Hadley Daugher. 116 bisected that in his lifetime. He was a director of the fair and he was one of the partners in Elder Jones Lumber, which is the same location as leader is today, except it was turned around and the head of the store was where the lumberyard restaurant was and that is why it was called the Lumberyard Restaurant. So, Denny, Walter and Sarah had three kids. My aunt and uncle, Denny and Gert and my dad, Paul. And I could go way out with the branches of this family tree. But I am just going to focus on my dad to be an ab because we're close to a half hour. We have to be. So, he died, we have to down his bottom two. This is Denny and dad and Gert and their grandmother's cow on Coles Road. And Chico and she and Denny and dad. That is my dad. He married his high school sweetheart, Ruth Elwin. Congratulations from UMass in the brand new Cape Cod lounge of the Student Union, which is going to be done this year. She is a distant relative because she is from the South Amherstee Coles family. Dad did manage the family timber and real estate business of the same home farmhouse that eight generations had before him. He built Riverside Park, which is on the Riverside Park trolley stop. But today it's a 1970 strip mall and 48 apartments find it. And it's not known to you because there are no behavior problems there because they have graduate students and adults living there and it's off the radar, but it's a beautiful place to live. And a couple of units are available if you're lucky. Dad built Coles building supply in 1980 because he wanted to provide the rest of the building materials people were asking for when they came to the sawmill. And when Aunt Gert came home in 1986, he backed off, went back to the home farmhouse, ran that side of the business and gave Gert his baby. And she did a great job. Dad put a new planer and a timber sizer in and he built a dozen town roads with Bob Patterson, his partner in Patterson Jones, soccer drive area, Cherry Lane extension, Evelyn Lane, lots of those that houses streets in that neighborhood they built. That's Dad and the planer and Dad's sawmill and what the yard looked like. So this is the harp. That's the new trolley garden there. That's Dad, that's my office today. I sit in the same place. This is his Billy's Pie store and his sawmill, the planing mill and the lumbered logs and lumber on Coles Road. That's an ad for everything he did in 1978. That is Bob Boone and he shipping lumber to Ireland for caskets and that little monkey is Evan. You can't tell. That little monkey's Evan. That's me and Andy and Grant. And we grew up playing on foundations and in construction equipment and we found it was so cool and we still do, we have all the sandbox to prove it. But it was so exciting to just understand the past of our family history and what came before us and what was possible in front of us. We grew up working in Dad's store, at a mullet and it was cute. We were told, don't even think about coming back until you get more useful because you're not useful yet. So Evan, we're over the top and got a degree in wood technology for new masks that's super useful, worked at another Billy's Pie company, learned the ropes there before coming home to help Gert and Dad run the retail store and I was working for non-profit organizations in DC. Dad thought I was so good at non-profits I should come home to the family business because the lumber and land company was not making any profits in the early years, yeah. So it was perfect for me. So every kid in the family had to scrape and paint this four-sided wood to get fence right here that is like the one at the North Hammer Cemetery and the first order of business when I got home is I took out that wood fence and I put in these bushes. Many more Evan's kids don't have the joy of learning the family business the same way. They should, thank you. So this is us, right when I came home. So we take our opportunity and responsibility very seriously. We didn't just start cutting trees and building solar farms and bulldozing sawmills. We thought about it. What do we have? What has been before us? What should be in front of us? What are all the things we have to work with? What's the best thing we could possibly do with each one of them? So there are places where there's no broadband or cell service. Let's figure out what the highest peaks are. We have to pay for gravel to build roads. Maybe we have that on our own land. Goshen stone, boy it's worth a lot if you could pay to take it out which you can't but that's an interesting thing to know where it is. There are amethysts on our land. Amethysts work was named because they found purple things in it. Amazing. We thought about what outline open space should be protected and not ever developed. And we worked, Kristen DeBoer of the Kessler Land Trust is our hero. She actually pointed this out and helped us do the right thing in our men land. We're really proud of our partnership with her. There are parcels that we identified on water and sewer in here downtown Amherst and Derrick downtown North Amherst that really should be contributing to the community that all of a sudden we say Amherst needs. War workforce housing, a place for alumni to come back and retire, relive the best years of their life and leave all their money to UMass because every dollar UMass gets, Amherst benefits $16. So our goal, besides workforce portable housing is to get alumni who mostly live within two hours of Amherst to come back and retire here. We looked at wind power and solar power potential, failed with wind, succeeded with solar and we consider, we have a 30 acre parcel half mile north of UMass and it loses money every year. Is this a good thing to do or should we maybe discontinue an outdated business that is thankless and do something that's more productive in this day and age? So after 10 years of fire or rebuild, a lot of effort, instead of waiting till dad died to auction it off, we auctioned it while I watched and he was okay with understanding that this was in the past and that something else was in the future and I think he saw it with us and the benefit of having worked with my dad for 10 years in North Amherst in the home farm that we've been in since 1741 is he never left. I feel like I'm working with my dad every day still. He's just in the next room and it's a pretty amazing thing. So I'm now, he's checking out what we have going forward. So like every generation before us, while we manage the Timberland, we are rebuilding the home farm to meet our generation's needs. So our ninth generation goals, okay, so the internet age, you can get everything online, why do you need a downtown? Well, would you get your date online and what do you do with it? So text. Well, you take your text together, where are you going to do that? So I feel like malls took over downtown and now the malls are kind of dying and now they're becoming amusement parks and we're really missing personal connections and there's an ideal downtown that I remember from living on Amity Street when I was a kid and I want that back. So Evan and I are building the Mill District which is going to be at the center for commuters, for retirees, for young professionals to want to stay in town after they graduate and it's going to be amazing because you can walk to the river rec and watch a baseball game or go swimming, walk on trails to lever it from your door. You can watch the post office library, we have a grocery store right out front and we're opening a general store, Walter's general store right below the new units of the park and it's opening in August. So restaurants, services, everything's going to be there and I think you guys are going to like it. I think Edwards can like it. We also want to increase energy production. So we have a good start on the Mill District. We completed the largest private conservation project in Massachusetts history. I think you're my dad died and we named it for him. We are expanding our sustainable forest products with solar energy and we're really proud of that. There's Sarah in this room and this is the dedication of the Palsy Jones Working Forest. It's the mountain range behind here. It's five and a half acres, five and a half square miles of managed forest that won't ever be developed because it's conserved. This is Coles Road today. So this is the trolley barn. I believe version of, that everybody believes all these new covers are sitting in there. I have lunch in there. Hey, did you know this was a trolley barn? So the center had a 300th or something recently and we built a plywood trolley for the parade. And I asked the town if I could put it as a bus stop and they said yes. So pretty soon we should probably build a metal one because a plywood parade probably won't last forever but it's so cool that there's a trolley, next to the trolley barn. And so we're trying to build this amazing downtown that there's Ice Cream on No Atkins, Sarah Poles' Cow Barn. This is North Square. This building opens in July and this one may be October, November. 130 units of apartments owned by Beacon Community Development who made all my dreams come true in two years and said 30 because we were going a year and a half to build this, a couple million dollars. Year and a half to build this, $2 million debt that maybe other kids will pay off someday. And Beacon said we'll put $49 million into building a town square. 22,000 square feet of retail, which Poles will own and program as the ideal downtown. And we will build 130 units of people who will shop in your stores, about there. And we will target seniors and young professionals. So I called, bingo. So in one year our ideal downtown is being built on the south side of Poles Road. And we are very excited. We were worried at first that the Atkins would lose some customers because of the traffic. So our friend Hannah said why don't we build a mini job site, Sandbox, where kids can get all excited about construction. And we invited the Jones Library to read Sandbox Storytime once a week all last summer. And it was a huge hit. So kids are like totally brainwashed with how cool construction is sometimes. And first responders, they're four subjects that I approved for the library. So it's first responders, diversity, how cool farming is, and how cool construction is. So that's what the books are, this library library, if you take kids. And there's a door so cats can't get in. But if they do get in, it's peace stone so they don't like to poop in it. Sandboxes are bad that way, and this is good. This is great. So there are construction trucks you can put on a hard hat and there are plans for North Square. You can build it with us. No matter how old you are, you can drive Jake's great food. So this is an area of the whole home farm that's close building supply, trolley barn. What is to come? Town Square can be closed off so that all this is a flea market or an art show. We're not just building buildings and leasing them out. We're trying to build community. Building community is the whole goal in this internet age. A place where experiences happen. So we have the library, common read books. These are kids enjoying these places. This is a soil science for the construction explaining how cool it is to be a woman in construction to the kids who get free ice cream for listening to a story time in the library. And the library is a sandbox. This is the opening of Atkins. We still, if anybody needs farm animal and fruit vegetable costumes, we have so many. But we'll bring them out again. And this was a lot of fun. And that's swamming with his rear arm this year. But it's a cat, so that's not quite true. There are 19 farm animals like the couch there that we can find if you go to Atkins. This year, we're gonna conserve 2,000 more acres. And these acres are gonna protect Amherst water supply and the province water supply. We're naming it after Grant. This is the history of our home farm. Add saunel, new saunel. Woo-hoo! This year. This is the history of our farm street. Still doing the same stuff, it's just easier. Same land sustainably harvesting it for almost 300 years. So our plan is to continue to diversify the forest product production with solar farms, finding development partners for more parcels near North Square. We're gonna increase the timber base and sustainably manage it. We will build market affordable housing in my lifetime, in this town. And we are gonna satisfy the needs of our community today without jeopardizing future generations' ability to satisfy their needs. We have been here. We respect the past. Any questions? This is wonderful. Thank you. Do you have a lot of printouts? Sure, there's a John Gennadik's print of what the saunel looked like a couple years before it closed. It's a beautiful art paper and take one. There might be other things back there. I bet you could win a book if you said something to keep to my mom and Sheila. So the point is all this material, and that on the screen, wind up. It's not at the Jones Library, it's not. They're newcomers. We have a really good archive. I have fireproof safes that I'm organizing all this in. I've been told we should have a museum someday. We've given some things to the Jones Library. We've given some things to the Historical Society. I don't think they can handle it. We have too much stuff. Yeah, so we'll figure it out. Don't get thumb drives for sure. What about the UMass Library? They're archives. They're even newer. Yeah, they're pretty hard. Yeah, that's true. We'll work on that. I know mom's donated things to UMass Library, and that's a good idea. You mentioned the count books. How far back in time do they go, and what time span do they cover? 1,700 to 1,950. That's so far back. No, that's a goldmine of local history. What are you going to do with those? I'm trying to archive them. I'm trying to figure out exactly what. Right now, I have Ziploc baggies full of receipts from 1880, 1930, and 1950. Just baggies full. Yeah, UMass Special Collections would be very interested to help out with that. They really need the attention of a professional conservator. That can be arranged. I'm open to it. I would like to work with them myself once they become available. Oh, sure. The cool thing to me, today I was going through looking for more interesting tidbits to share, and there's David Coles listed the value of his property when he died for his wife's inheritance.  Yeah, that's pretty amazing. It is good resource. I'll have to talk to my mom and see what she thinks, because she's my advisor on everything in store. The registry of probates in Northampton might, I don't know how far the deeds go back to the 18th century. I don't know if they have probates, but there might be a fair number of generations of the states there. You're just trying to make your deed research easier. Yes. So Sarah was the first woman who was kind of actively involved in the business, but she probably wasn't the face of the business just because of the time, is that fair to say? Yeah, she ran the farming side of the business, which is her son ran the farming and the lumber side of it. He was an only child too. She was a mom and ran the farm, and her husband ran the scary sawmill and timberland all over the place. So that makes sense that at the time, she was pretty powerful.  Can you just say what one of them is? The Lambs company? Yeah, no, and I was impressed, because my mom raised my dad well. He was, I was brought up to think that I could be a mom president of the United States at the same time, if that's what I wanted to do, and she convinced dad of that, and he felt confident in my ability to manage the timber and real estate part of the company after him, and I don't know that a lot of other dads in that generation would have done that, and I credit mom for making the environment happen.


Hello everybody, hi how are y'all today? My name is Keeman Rowe and I'm the Steer to Fort Worth Director and I just want to thank you all for coming out today, it's such a great energy in the room I see a lot of new faces to join Steer Fort Worth and to make a difference in our community. But that's what today is all about, claiming our seat at the table and addressing issues that we're all passionate about. I'd like to thank a couple of our sponsors, Sundara Center staff, Chesapeake Energy, Sid Richardson and Amon Carter Foundations, they have all underwritten the entire year for Steer Fort Worth so let's just give them a round of applause. I'd also like to thank McAllister's and Soda Springs as well as the Mayor and Council staff and all the countless volunteers that have made today possible. They couldn't have been possible without them as well as the vision of Mayor Betsy Price. She could not be here today but she sends her well wishes and you'll actually hear a video message from her a little later. I'd also like to thank our lovely speakers, Senator Davis and Councilmember Joel Burns. Momentarily you'll hear from the two of them, they have such a passion for Fort Worth and you'll see it when you hear them speak. So let's give them a round of applause as well please. On your tables there's a as a centerpiece there's an unfinished house but it needs items such as a lawn, a sidewalk, a fence, a lorm system, water, gas, electricity and so on. It requires maintenance and upkeep. In fact these homes collectively represent our neighborhoods in our city. The same concept I just used can be taken to a broader scale to talk about the city of Fort Worth. A city also needs sidewalks, streets, art, parks, water, public safety and all the other essentials. All of this defines the character and personality of our city.  What do you want Fort Worth to be? What do you want it to look like in the next 10 to 15 years? That's what today is all about us claiming our seat at the table. What things do you love most about Fort Worth today that you want to see in the future? The welcome mat on the house says it's your Fort Worth, home is where Fort Worth is. Well Fort Worth is our home and the house on your table is unfinished. It's up to you all to determine what the end product will be. So picture yourself like you're on HGTV, Home Makeover, Extreme Home Makeover Edition. You're all going to be doing some serious lifting, rolling up your sleeves and getting to work today. Fort Worth is a wonderful place but we also have a long way to go towards building the city that we want to become. Folks like Mayor Price, Council Member Burns and Senator Davis have already laid the foundation for this house that we're going to inherit. It all starts with that house. Well folks, this is our time to make a difference. Today, this time right now, Mayor Price, the City Council and folks like Senator Davis are giving us a chance to have our seat at the table. And as any of you know me, I always say if you're not at the table then you're on the menu. All right, well in closing, I would like to welcome Council Member Joel Burns to speak to you. Mayor Price always says when it comes to Steer Fort Worth that she's one proud mama. So I technically like to think of Joel as our cool older brother. Thank you Kim and I appreciate that. You know when we start these presentations, they all always want you to start out with a joke and I was at my doctor's office just before this, having my annual physical and it occurred to me that my annual physicals are different than those of you under 40 who are men. And I really couldn't work that joke in very well so I'm just going to let it go. So yeah, it's great to be over 40. I really actually shouldn't have started out that way. It is great to be here. I want to, before I get too further in the whole I'm digging, I want to acknowledge a few folks who are here. Obviously Senator Wendy Davis, a longtime friend of I think all of us is here and I appreciate her taking time out of her schedule. I had the privilege of getting to see her on Tuesday be sworn into the Texas Senate yet again for another term and we're very happy to have Wendy in Austin representing us and we're also happy to have her leadership and you'll get to hear from her in just a little bit. We also have Charles Boswell who is our former city manager who is Wendy's chief of staff and also speaking of chief of staff, we also have Jason Lamers who's the mayor's chief of staff who's with us today and hopefully I didn't miss anyone else but we appreciate these folks being here with us today and Keem and I appreciate the introduction. Thank you very much. So I got to talk to you, I'd say a good chunk of you. I see a number of familiar faces from when we did the kickoff of this organization a year ago at JT Garcia's. How many people were there? Actually not very many. I'm glad to see that we've picked up steam and added a bunch of new faces along the way. That's a good thing. It's a good thing to grow. When I first got appointed to my very first board and commission, my council member at the time, Ralph McLeod, appointed me to the landmark commission. I remember attending my first meeting and thinking I'm 30 years younger than anyone else on this board. That's messed up. Wendy is well aware as are all the council members that we want to have our boards and commissions and the entities and organizations that lead our city be truly representative of our city. All too often though, the pool of applicants for our board and commission filings are old white guys and they are often times the folks who have the time, they have the money, they might be retired and they have the ability to go vote, to go get involved in an organization, to show up on a monthly basis to a board and commission meeting. Those of you in this room have new businesses or new jobs. You have families. You've got young folks. My husband and I were truly blessed. We had the opportunity for one year to have two foreign exchange kids up until this past summer and going from zero to two 16-year-olds who don't speak English very well is a real eye-opening experience. When I was at a neighborhood meeting this past summer and someone said, where have you been for the last year? Are you hanging out with Ellen or something? I said, no, I've actually had two 16-year-olds and your neighborhood meeting falls on my German kid's Boy Scout night and on my French kid's rugby night. That was my priority for the year. I totally get that. It's hard to be engaged and be active in what's going on in your city when you have really personal things drawing at your attention and drawing for your, and vying for your time. When I, since there's very few of you overall who were at JT Garcia's a year ago, I'll tell you a little bit about how I got involved.  My husband and I bought our first house in 1993. We were basically dumb kids who didn't know any better. We bought this awesome, beautiful, architectural, historic landmark in East Fort Worth in Meadowbrook. On the day we closed, we got the keys in our hands.  We had this huge $70,000 mortgage at the time. And yeah, and so we get the keys, we go to the title office, we do the closing, they hand us the keys, we go and we stand in our front yard for the first time as proud, happy homeowners. It's an awesome experience. We're looking at our pretty beautiful house that we need to move all of our stuff into which is mostly plastic furniture from college. And we hear a horn honk behind us and we both turn around and we look. And there's this car that pulled up in front of the house across the street from us, honks again, someone comes out of the house holding a little bag, walks to the car, hands the baggy inside the window, pulls money out of the car, walks back up to the front door, the car drives away. And now we know why our house was so cheap. We bought a house across the street from a crack house. We spent seven years getting that house shut down and it was not easy. We had the fourth police come do surveillance from our house. We're out like handing them cups of coffee in our flower bed at two in the morning. They made multiple arrests, but there was always some family member that then moved in and took over the business of selling the drugs. And so we walked door to door for about a four block radius of every household in our neighborhood and talked to each and every person. And we were stunned to learn that a huge chunk of them had never met their neighbors. And we asked them, and our house was actually the dividing line between, at the time, Becky Haskins and Ralph MacLeod's districts, and had both of them come, had the deputy police chief come, had a number of police officers and invited our entire neighborhood to our house. And they showed up and many of them, like I said, had never done anything more than maybe wave to the person across the street while dragging their trash bins out. I was stunned by that. Many of them had lived there for 20, 30, 40 years. And you had this odd combination of elderly white folks. You had a number of Vietnamese, Hispanic, and African American new families who had moved in. You had a few kind of gay urban pioneers who had moved in. And it was an odd diverse crowd. But we came up with a common purpose of shutting that house down. And through multiple arrests, we didn't achieve the results we wanted. And so we came up with the idea of shutting them down through assessing ongoing code violations. It was something that had never been done in the city of Fort Worth before. And every week, we came up with a committee. And every week, we called in a code violation every Monday morning.  And they weren't going to get rid of the junk pile. So they just had an assessment. Each and every week, they got an additional call for seven years until the fees that they owed the city of Fort Worth amounted to more than the value of the house. And the city of Fort Worth was able to foreclose on that house through our persistence. Today, there is grass in that front yard. And there is a young family that owns that house. I don't live in that neighborhood anymore. We moved from Meadowbrook to Ryan Place about 10 years ago. But I still drive past down that street not only to see our old house, our first house we ever had, but to check in on the house across from us. You have opportunities to make those kind of little victories that will change your street, change your neighborhood, change the families that live around you. I still have little old ladies who used to be afraid to talk to their Hispanic and African American across the street neighbors who still send us Christmas cards. We haven't lived there for 10 years, but still say thank you for getting our street and our neighborhood and our community together in a common purpose. As I mentioned, my getting to be where I could run for the city council is kind of a prolonged inability to say no. After we got involved in that project, I got involved in my neighborhood association. Ralph appointed me to the Landmark Commission. Within a year, I was chair of the Landmark Commission after we moved to Ryan Place. And I was no longer eligible to be on the Landmark Commission. Wendy appointed me to the Zoning Commission. And then one day, Wendy called and said, hey, I'm going to resign here in a couple of days and what are we doing for the next few years? And my first response to Wendy was, Wendy, I love you, but expletive, expletive, expletive, no. I actually like to make money. I want to retire someday. I like to be able to go to the grocery store without someone haranguing me about a pothole. I know, thank you, but no. But the truth was, I didn't realize it, but through the involvement in my street, getting the strikehouse shut down and serving on the Landmark Commission and serving on the Zoning Commission, I'd actually done the things necessary and put in the time and got to know the people and got to understand City Hall in a way that actually made me somewhat qualified to run for City Council. And so I did. And I'm here today. And as I mentioned at JT Garcia's last year, it's changed my life. It's changed my life in ways that I'm so the better for. I wouldn't have ever guessed that there would be much beyond filling those potholes and fixing sidewalks and dealing with people I rate because their garbage cans have gotten knocked over and all that kind of stuff in my service on City Council. We take a lot of those calls and I'm looking at some of the council aides back there who filled a lot more than we filled of those calls of people who are I rate about certain things because City Council is one of the most retail of politics. You're the most immediate there to people's needs and concerns. I've had the opportunity though to talk about things far beyond that that I wouldn't have guessed. Teenage bullying and suicide was not anything that I ever imagined I would have a discussion about. It wasn't on my job description.  But I had an opportunity to talk about it and I did and it changed my life. I made comments about a year or two years ago now, more than two years ago now and ended up doing those things like going on The Ellen Show, The Today Show, etc. But I also, because of being somewhat vulnerable, because of being honest in a way people aren't familiar with, used to or sometimes even comfortable with, it gave me the opportunity to have conversations with people in my own family. I'm 43 years old and I remember 41 at the time, the day after I made those comments, both my brother and sister called me and we had long, really heartfelt conversations. My brother is 15 years younger than me. My sister and I are both adopted from Gladney here in Fort Worth. When they first got married we're told they wouldn't be able to have kids at 40. My parents proved their doctors wrong and I had a brother who was 15 years younger than me. And Cody worked on a ranch south of Stephenville and a big ranching bubba guy he takes after my dad named Butch. And Cody calls me and we had this really long, awesome, heartfelt conversation where he cried and I cried and I hung up the phone and by that I was driving from some meeting or something and by that point I had gotten home and I turned to JD and I said, I'm 41 years old and I've never had a real conversation with my own brother. I mean he was in diapers when I moved off and went away to college so obviously we didn't grow up in the same household but I was 41 and never really had an adult conversation with him and we had that out of my doing something, serving on city council that people didn't really expect me to do. As I mentioned, he cried, I cried, you know, he told me that he was proud of me. I got to attend the president and first lady's first ever summit on bullying prevention a few months after that at the White House and on the day that I flew back from that my brother was killed in a car wreck, he was 27 years old and he, it was a, you know, no one was drunk driving, it was the middle of the day, daylight, his pickup was going over a gravel road and it fished out and he went into a ditch and it rolled the truck and he wasn't wearing a seat belt and it threw him out and the truck rolled over him and crushed him to death. I don't know that I would ever have had that conversation had I not had the opportunity to serve in the way that I have serving on the city council and to do the things beyond fixing the potholes and the sidewalks and the garbage that I've had the opportunity to do. It has been an amazing experience having this opportunity to serve and I will always be appreciative for the gifts that I've received from it that I never would have expected, gifts like having a conversation with my own brother about a serious topic that I'd never had before. There are a lot of opportunities out there. It's hard to know where they are and when they will come and how you can grab them, how you can seize those opportunities but the deal is that you just need to be doing, be active, be involved and people will notice that, people will see that. They'll ask you to serve on the landmark commission because they think you're a crazy old building hugger and you might be and you'll get the opportunity to do that and you'll get the opportunity for leadership. Pick things that you're interested in, pick things you're passionate about, do them, get involved and the opportunities will come. I want to thank you guys for your involvement in Steer Fort Worth, your well on your way. Keep doing it, keep bringing back the good recommendations. I'm excited about there's health and wellness, homelessness and education or the three new ones. Arts and arts, I'm sorry, are the three new ones. I have completely, completely strayed from pretty much everything I plan to say to you. Let me make sure I'm not missing anything major. So we're excited that you guys are coming up with these good ideas. Keep them coming. Oh, I have a reminder here. So Jason was saying he's not a big Twitter guy earlier but there are a lot of opportunities to connect in modern ways that people who are not 100 years old might embrace. The senator tweets, I tweet, the mayor tweets. The mayor's is Betsy underscore price. Mine is Joel Burns, just altogether one word. And the senator's is Wendy Davis, Texas spelled out, Wendy Davis TXAS. Be sure to follow us. It's okay, you can pull out your phones right now if you want to and you can add us. The city of Fort Worth has some great tools that are getting better. In terms of there are a variety of emails you can sign up. You can sign up for one specific to your district. You can sign up for ones like emergency notifications of storms coming, those type of things, trash pickup type things.  There really are some great tools. There's a thing called Nixie or Nixle that also gives you text messages when there's emergencies going on, all kinds of tools and resources. So check that out at FortWorthTexas.gov. Again, thank you for the opportunity. Not only to be here today, but thank you for the opportunity to serve. It is, like I said, been a life-changing experience. One that is far greater in its value than what we get paid to do this. And I'm very fortunate. Thank you again, and thank you for your involvement. Wendy is not only a friend, but she's a mentor. She appointed me to the zoning commission. We've been friends for a long time and really gave me the opportunity to grow in that position and to hone my qualifications when it came time to run in the seat to fill her vacancy. I didn't bring any of my stuff to talk about the committees you serve on or any of those things, but I'll give you one little vignette about Wendy's leadership. Wendy has an amazing ability to not just be a Democrat, to not just be a woman, to not just be someone from Fort Worth. She reaches across party lines. She works with Republicans and Democrats down in Austin in a way that is an example for all of us for reaching across ideological divides. And she stands up for things that she feels passionate about. I think most of the people in the room are familiar with the end, the closing of our legislative session last year where Wendy filibustered on the topic of education funding and we have seen the impact of those cuts to our education funding here in the state of Texas. Cuts that in my opinion and a lot of people in retrospect need to be remedied in the course of this legislative session. Wendy felt passionate about it enough to stand up and to make a statement. It's easy particularly when you're in the partisan minority of the legislature or you're in the minority of any decision making body to stand up when you know it's going to be a tough fight and the ultimate result might not be what you want. It's easy to say, well, we're not going to win this, so why make a big fuss? Wendy did and it changed the course of the conversation on our education funding and I was in Austin as I mentioned on Tuesday and people are still talking about Wendy's action.  Wendy really cares about our community and is not afraid. Fear is a thing that really hampers all of us in any and everything we do. The day that I made my comments about teenage suicide and bullying, I really wasn't sure that I was going to say what I said until I opened my mouth and started because I was afraid. Wendy is very recognizing that that kind of fear is debilitating and she sets it aside every day and goes to work for all of us here in District 10, as well as all of us here in the state of Texas. I'm very proud and honored to call Wendy Davis my friend and I'm happy she served with us today. So did y'all see Joel when he got up on the stage a while ago? He, look at those legs. So he took one big step and got up here and it reminded me of a few years ago I was at a dinner in the mid cities that was honoring Speaker Jim Wright. And a couple of people had spoken at the microphone before Speaker Wright had and they had been doing that, just hopping up on the stage and avoiding the stairs that were on the other side of the stage. And Jim Wright, how old is Jim Wright? 89 is what she said, so he was in his mid 80s at this point. He decides when it's his turn to speak that he's going to arrive on the stage in exactly that same manner. And I will never forget him stepping up and that moment when you realized he was not going to get the momentum to make it all the way.  But he was fine. So Joel started his comments with potty humor in a way. So I thought maybe I'd start my comments with a little potty humor as well. The day of the filibuster in the Senate, I was most afraid of the fact that I was really going to need to relieve myself. And the rules in the Texas Senate are very different than they are at the federal level. At the federal level, a filibuster can occur. People take turns. I think you can even call in your dad gum remarks for the filibuster. It's become a very casual and easy thing to do, far too easy probably. But in the Texas Senate, the filibuster rules that traditionally were in place have continued to be in place. And what that means is that only one person may conduct the filibuster. They may receive questions from other members, which can help relieve their onus of having to talk the entire time. But they must stand at their desk. They may not sit. They may not lean. They may not touch their desk. They may not have a drink of water. They may not excuse themselves for bodily necessities. So I started asking when the thought of maybe doing the filibuster was coming up, well, you know, what do people do? Well, apparently the nurse for the Senate and the House, who is there in the Capitol every day, will hook you up, if you know what I mean. So I was really, really worried that this was going to be a part of what I had to deal with in the filibuster. And thank God the day kept wearing on, because once the word started getting out that I might be filibustering the public school funding bill, the Senate decided they probably ought to go ahead and try to pass everything they could before that started, because once I began speaking, they weren't going to have the opportunity before the close of session to get the remainder of the bills off of the agenda. With every passing half hour, I was so grateful that the time was going on. And fortunately, I think we got to like 10, 15, 10, 30 before I even had to stand up and conduct my filibuster, which meant that the only thing I had to worry about was having flat shoes on, but not being hooked up. So I wanted to talk a little bit about what brought me to what I'm doing now, a little bit of what is happening at the state level, and of course, to add to Joel's encouragement, his beautiful remarks. Joel is always so hard to follow as a speaker, but to add to his encouragement of each and every one of you. I got involved also kind of unwittingly, like Joel did, just getting involved in something that was going on in my neighborhood community. And many of you may have found yourselves here today because of a similar experience. But I lived right above the zoo, the four zoo, for many years, and many of you may remember this, some of you I think maybe too young to remember, the very controversial decision that the zoo engaged in to expand. Prior to the zoo having its current footprint, there were numerous soccer fields there, there was an amusement park there, there were baseball fields there, and it was widely used by a diverse group of people from throughout the Fort Worth community. And so there was a great deal of stress and tension about the expansion of the zoo, even from people who believed that improving the zoo was an important thing. And I stayed pretty much above the fray and out of all of that until it started affecting my own backyard, which tends to be the thing that most exercises people, right? And in my situation, the area behind my home, which had historically been the archery range for the zoo, was going to be paved to create more parking for the zoo. And so like so many people who speak at city council meetings, I went to a city council meeting. I was terrified of standing up and speaking before the city council. The way it's set up is so overwhelming when you're a neighborhood speaker who's never spoken before, a public group before, because the council diocese purposefully raised on high above the speakers. And it just feels like you are so small when you are standing there begging for your issue to be heard. And knowing and feeling how overwhelming that was, I'm very surprised to find myself conducting public speaking and debate on a continuing basis as my future unfolded. But that one first little involvement got me interested. And then when a seat opened up on the city council, when Catherine Barr's father ran for mayor, he was the city council person for that district, I just jumped into the race to run for it. The lesson I learned from that experience was that I really hadn't gotten involved in my community enough to ask for the privilege of serving them there. I actually lost my first city council race, so that's an encouragement for any of you who are considering running for public office and who may not succeed the first time. I know we have a couple of people here who have had an experience similar to mine, but who I hope will remain very, very engaged and dedicated to running for public office again in the future because their contributions will be great. But I didn't win that first time. Three years later I ran again and then began serving on the city council and my passions there really remained very much from the ones that put me there in the first place, the quality of life in the community that I lived in, making sure that we had good transportation. And fortunately I got very involved in the economic development of our community and found a real passion for economic development as well. At the state level, those same tenants, those same values are the things that I am continuing to try to work on. Quality of life, opportunity, investment in our future, making sure that we have created a strong path for our children and the children of others to follow. And in Texas right now, unfortunately, we're slipping back from the place where we once were in that regard. You may be surprised to know that the state of Texas is at almost the very bottom in the amount of money per student that it spends on public education. We actually are ranked 47 out of the 50 states. And our failure to appropriately invest reveals itself in what we see happening in terms of our dropout rates, what we see happening in terms of our SAT scores. And contrary to what Governor Perry said the other day about our SAT scores improving, in the last 10 years our SAT scores have actually slipped pretty significantly in all areas. And when we think about what it is we brand ourselves as as a state, we brand ourselves as a place where doing business is easy. Where we are the state that businesses wanna come to and grow and thrive. But what we're beginning to see and we're hearing more and more from our business community is we can't grow here. We can't attract others to join us here in the face of an ever-growing undereducated workforce or lack of a workforce that we have in Texas. The disinvestment in public education that occurred in the last legislative session was a five and a half billion dollar cut. And that is a very, very real cut. I learned the only difference between my experience on the city council and the state level is just the letter behind the dollar number. In Fort Worth we were always dealing in millions. At the state level we're dealing in billions. At the federal level of course they're dealing in trillions. But five and a half billion dollars cut from public ed is a hugely significant number in terms of the consequence that it wreaked on our school system. We saw a loss of about 18,000 educator jobs across the state. We saw our classroom size waiver requests increase from 2,000 waiver requests in the prior biennium to over 8,000 requests in the first year of this biennium alone. And what that means is for students in our kindergarten through fourth grade classrooms in the state of Texas now, most of our students are in classrooms with many more students than they once were. With teachers of course being tasked with having to teach and excel with that many more students in their classroom. At the same time that that disinvestment occurred the changing accountability system in Texas created an entirely new burden on our educators. The star testing system, how many of you have kids in the public school arena? Quite a few of you. And so for those of you who do I know you know all too well what that testing system has meant in terms of the stresses on your children, the stresses on our educators, the stresses on you. And it was a system that was set up that created a whole new dynamic in terms of how kids were tested, how many tests they had to pass in order to succeed at the same time that resources to the school districts were being dramatically decreased. That isn't the way to invest in the future of the state of Texas and it's not the way to invest in our future workforce for Texas. The former head of the US Census Bureau who has done a lot of work at the state demographic level, he's a professor now I think at Rice University, has done a lot of public speaking about the changing face of Texas, the changing demographic of Texas, what we're going to look like in 2030 as compared to our population today and what that population's educational attainment will be if we continue to track where we are today. And it spells a very alarming picture about the ability for Texas to continue to have bragging rights about a strong economy. As we launched this legislative session, we began it with a revenue estimate from our comptroller that indicated we are in a much better position than we thought we might be. The cynic might say that there was a purposeful underestimating that occurred in the prior two year sessions so that all of these cuts could be forced. The less cynical might say that at best this was a gross miscalculation of where we were going to be on a revenue picture but given that it was a gross miscalculation and now that we understand that it's not the reality, shouldn't it beg the question that we should go back and consider restoring the funds at least in public education and some of our healthcare arenas that those funds were cut. We cut $27 billion out of the state budget in the prior budgeting cycle and it's a huge percentage of the overall budget that had very human consequences, very real human consequences as part of it. As we begin our conversations in this session already there's this dynamic setting up with some, you've probably seen Governor Perry's comments in the paper and I don't think his comments are reflective of the Republican party as a whole but his personal sentiments are that that money, I forgot what he referred to it as. Charles, do you remember? Basically he said we shouldn't see this as easy money for us to grab and go start spending with glee. And of course that's not the situation that we're in in Texas. We're in a situation where we should be having a very real conversation about what the impacts of public education and other cuts have been and whether restoring the funding in those arenas is something that's worthwhile. He would have us for vision that the zoo engaged in to expand. Prior to the zoo having its current footprint there were numerous soccer fields there, there was an amusement park there, there were baseball fields there and it was widely used by a diverse group of people from throughout the Fort Worth community. And so there was a great deal of stress and tension about the expansion of the zoo even from people who believed that improving the zoo was an important thing. And I stayed pretty much above the fray and out of all of that until it started affecting my own backyard which tends to be the thing that most exercises people, right? And in my situation the area behind my home which had historically been the archery range for the zoo was going to be paved to create more parking for the zoo. And so like so many people who speak at city council meetings I went to a city council meeting I was terrified of standing up and speaking before the city council. The way it's set up is so overwhelming when you're a neighborhood speaker who's never spoken before, a public group before because the council diocese purposefully raised on high above the speakers and it just feels like you are so small when you are standing there begging for your issue to be heard. And knowing and feeling how overwhelming that was I'm very surprised to find myself conducting public speaking and debate on a continuing basis as my future unfolded. But that one first little involvement got me interested and then when a seat opened up on the city council when Catherine Barr's father ran for mayor he was the city council person for that district I just jumped into the race to run for it. The lesson I learned from that experience was that I really hadn't gotten involved in my community enough to ask for the privilege of serving them there. I actually lost my first city council race so that's an encouragement for any of you who are considering running for public office and who may not succeed the first time. I know we have a couple of people here who have had an experience similar to mine but who I hope will remain very very engaged and dedicated to running for public office again in the future because their contributions will be great. But I didn't win that first time three years later I ran again and then began serving on the city council and my passions there really remained very much from the ones that put me there in the first place. The quality of life in the community that I lived in making sure that we had good transportation and fortunately I got very involved in the economic development of our community and found a real passion for economic development as well. At the state level those same tenants those same values are the things that I am continuing to try to work on. Quality of life, opportunity, investment in our future making sure that we have created a strong path for our children and the children of others to follow. And in Texas right now unfortunately we're slipping back from the place where we once were in that regard. You may be surprised to know that the state of Texas is at almost the very bottom in the amount of money per student that it spends on public education. We actually are ranked 47 out of the 50 states. And our failure to appropriately invest reveals itself in what we see happening in terms of our dropout rates, what we see happening in terms of our SAT scores and contrary to what Governor Perry said the other day about our SAT scores improving in the last 10 years our SAT scores have actually slipped pretty significantly in all areas. And when we think about what it is we brand ourselves as as a state we brand ourselves as a place where doing business is easy. Where we are the state that businesses want to come to and grow and thrive but what we're beginning to see and we're hearing more and more from our business community is we can't grow here. We can't attract others to join us here in the face of an ever growing undereducated workforce or lack of a workforce that we have in Texas. The disinvestment in public education that occurred in the last legislative session was a five and a half billion dollar cut and that is a very, very real cut. I learned the only difference between my experience on the city council and the state level is just the letter behind the dollar number and Fort Worth we were always dealing in millions. At the state level we're dealing in billions. At the federal level of course they're dealing in trillions. But five and a half billion dollars cut from public ed is a hugely significant number in terms of the consequence that it wreaked on our school system. We saw a loss of about 18,000 educator jobs across the state. We saw our classroom size waiver requests increase from 2,000 waiver requests in the prior biennium to over 8,000 requests in the first year of this biennium alone. And what that means is for students in our kindergarten through fourth grade classrooms in the state of Texas now, most of our students are in classrooms with many more students than they once were with teachers of course being tasked with having to teach and excel with that many more students in their classroom. At the same time that that disinvestment occurred the changing accountability system in Texas created an entirely new burden on our educators. The STAR testing system, how many of you have kids in the public school arena? Quite a few of you. And so for those of you who do, I know you know all too well what that testing system has meant in terms of the stresses on your children, the stresses on our educators, the stresses on you. And it was a system that was set up that created a whole new dynamic in terms of how kids were tested, how many tests they had to pass in order to succeed at the same time that resources to the school districts were being dramatically decreased. That isn't the way to invest in the future of the state of Texas and it's not the way to invest in our future workforce for Texas. The former head of the US Census Bureau who has done a lot of work at the state demographic level, he's a professor now I think at Rice University, has done a lot of public speaking about the changing face of Texas, the changing demographic of Texas, what we're going to look like in 2030 as compared to our population today and what that population's educational attainment will be if we continue to track where we are today. And it spells a very alarming picture about the ability for Texas to continue to have bragging rights about a strong economy. As we launched this legislative session, we began it with a revenue estimate from our comptroller that indicated we are in a much better position than we thought we might be. The cynic might say that there was a purposeful underestimating that occurred in the prior two year sessions so that all of these cuts could be forced. The less cynical might say that at best this was a gross miscalculation of where we were going to be on a revenue picture but given that it was a gross miscalculation and now that we understand that it's not the reality, shouldn't it beg the question that we should go back and consider restoring the funds at least in public education and some of our healthcare arenas that those funds were cut. We cut $27 billion out of the state budget in the prior budgeting cycle and it's a huge percentage of the overall budget that had very human consequences, very real human consequences as part of it. As we begin our conversations in this session already, there's this dynamic setting up. With some, you've probably seen Governor Perry's comments in the paper and I don't think his comments are reflective of the Republican party as a whole but his personal sentiments are that that money, I forgot what he referred to it as. Charles, do you remember? Basically he said we shouldn't see this as easy money for us to grab and go start spending with glee. And of course that's not the situation that we're in in Texas. We're in a situation where we should be having a very real conversation about what the impacts of public education and other cuts have been and whether restoring the funding in those arenas is something that's worthwhile. He would have us for this session say otherwise but I know there are many in the legislature, the House and the Senate on both sides of the party aisle who are interested in trying to get us back to a better place for our future and that's what I hope to be an important part of working on. My experiences in terms of the value of that investment really come from so much of the work that the city of Fort Worth has done and that I had the privilege to be a part of for many years. I chaired our economic development committee here for about eight of the nine years that I was on the city council and so much happened during that time and we got so creative and good at putting together public-private partnerships that helped to grow the city's economy. We learned some hard lessons along the way. We learned that if we didn't write these deals tightly enough the jobs that we hoped would be created by them, the investment we hoped would be realized by them wouldn't occur. And we learned how to write a very tight agreement. We learned how to assure that incentives were earned before they were paid by the city versus having to go and claw those incentives back. And so much of that has helped to develop the city of Fort Worth in a uniquely positive way as compared to many other communities in the state of Texas. If you look at some of the activity that's occurred not just in our downtown core but in other parts of our city as well you can see that there's been a real effort to make sure that all citizens in Texas are benefiting from economic growth. The new Walmart in Southeast Fort Worth off of 287 I can assure you that there was a point in time 10 years ago when no one would have imagined that that kind of economic investment in that community was possible. And not only has it created of course a financial investment there but it's created a human investment by creating jobs, by finally giving so many in a food desert area a place where they will be able to go and buy healthy food for themselves and their families. And I know that's one of the things that you all are thinking about and talking about. The project that some of you did for Dezavala is all about that nutritional aspect of the quality of lives that we lead here in Fort Worth. But it's been nice to take that experience of working on things like that and trying to translate those ideas to the state level. What I would encourage you as you get involved more involved, you're obviously very involved already but more involved in your community here that you grow a passion for carrying the ideas that you generate as part of your work with this group to the state level. I've found that that contact, that very daily constant contact as Joel called it the retail level of politics that occurs at the local level doesn't occur at the level that it should in the state. And it can be far too easy for state elected officials to vote in ways that are reflective of some very narrow and very powerful lobby interests in the capital and that aren't reflective of the very broad, very important, very real interests that should be reflected in the capital. So please pay attention to what we're doing there and make sure that your voice is heard there as we continue through the legislative session. I congratulate each and every one of you for putting your foot on the path of getting more involved in your community. And as Joel said, if you keep your feet pointed in the direction of something that you are coming to feel passionate about or already feel passionate about, I promise you it will take you to places that you never expected you would be. Certainly wouldn't have ever expected that one day I would be worrying about whether I needed to be hooked up to a device in order to stand up and talk to a roomful of people. It's really an honor and privilege to be invited to speak to you all today.  Yes, sir. Yeah, that's a fantastic question for those of you who might not have heard. His question, it was about the redistricting that occurred in the last legislative session, the work that so many people here in our local community engaged in in order to create a successful outcome of that battle. And the fact that there still may be an ongoing battle with regard to the way those lines were drawn and what can we do as a community to be involved, to stay involved in the importance of that issue. I will tell you that from my experience, redistricting has probably played the most important role in the way we see governance occurring not just in the state but across the country today. If you think about what redistricting's purpose is, and both parties have used it for this purpose, this is not to condemn either party, but its purpose is to create very safe districts for particular parties to run in and to maximize those to the extent possible. Over time, generation after generation as redistricting's have occurred and reoccurred and reoccurred and those lines have shifted and tightened and the districts get safer and safer and safer, what we see is that we have dramatically Republican districts and dramatically Democratic ones and very few like this Senate district, this is the only Senate district in the state where it's about 50-50. When you have a district that's about 50-50, as you can imagine, conversations that take place during an election require that the person who is elected is going to be representative of all of those interests, but when you have elections in districts that are very purely drawn, general elections don't even matter. There never is a real general election. What matters are primaries and because primaries become the thing that matters, that electorate or that person who is elected becomes much and much, much more pressured by the need to answer to a particular party perspective on the Democratic side, further to the left and on the Republican side, further to the right. And just in my short time in the Capitol, what I've seen happen is our traditional Republican thinkers because primarily redistricting has been something that's benefited the creation of greater and stronger Republican districts over the last couple of decades, but our Republican members have come under increasing heat by the further right of their party, even though they may not be those type of thinkers themselves and they're having a hard time doing things that they believe are the right things for their community because they're told, if you do that, we are going to run someone against you. We will make sure people believe that you are not conservative enough, you are not fiscally conservative enough, you are not the kind of responsible person and government that they want and we'll run you out of that office. And it's been happening. We're losing very good bipartisan thinking solution oriented members to ideological fringes. So that was a long way of answering your question but that's why these redistricting battles matter so much. Senate District 10, the district that I represent almost went to an extreme and had it not been for people in our community standing up and fighting for their own rights to exercise the ability to elect candidates of their choice, we wouldn't have a 50-50 Senate district today like we do, we wouldn't have Congressional District 33 which Mark Visee was elected to run in and unfortunately the state is continuing to challenge the decisions that were made at the district court level in those redistricting decisions and they may be upended once again. So stay involved in it because the outcome of it has so much more to do than just what a district looks like or who lives in it or who represents it has everything to do with the way we're going to head as a state in terms of our entire future and it's going to have an impact on all of us whether it's the district that we live in or a district in South or West or East Texas. Is that better? Yes. Thank you for your comments today especially regarding public education and healthcare. You know as our committee sets up this program, this pilot program at Dezavala Elementary, first of all we're amazed that we've made it this far to have a pilot program but we realize we're hitting a glass ceiling because right now the Fort Worth Independent School District over 50% of the students are overweight or obese and we're finding that the district has about $1.20 to spend on every student per day which is only about 20 cents more than we spend on our inmates for food in prison. We've come up with a menu that costs $1.80 a student. It's completely healthy, re-engineered, local, fresh but there's that 60 cent divide that's equaling about a $50,000 increase per school for every one of the schools, of the 84 schools in the Fort Worth Independent School District. What would your advice or guidance be? In our committee would love to see this program successful and rolled out to schools across the city and state eventually. What can we do locally or maybe on a state level to really push for working for helping bridge that 60 cent gap for the benefit of our young generation, 14 million of which are overweight, obese in this country and partnering with Fit Worth and other programs to reduce that number from seven hours that students spend in front of the screen every day staring at a TV lower. What can we do specifically? What advice would you have for us as we deal with this glass ceiling at Dezavala for a very worthwhile program that what we're hearing is there's just not enough funding? That's always the unfortunate place that things get bottled up. It's always about resources of course and first of all congratulations for the excellent work that you all have done on that project. I would suggest two things. One, just mentioning it to me today has planted a seed in my mind that this is something I would like to explore at the legislature. So just making sure you're having a conversation with the people that represent you at the state level is terribly important. Whoever your state rep is, whoever your state senator is, engage them. Call their local offices, their district offices and ask for a meeting. You may not get it with the legislator but you'll get it with someone on their staff and it really does help create the kinds of ideas that gain momentum at the state level. I never would have even thought about that if I hadn't heard you say that today. The other thing that I think is terribly important and very possible in the city of Fort Worth, we have such an incredible private community of givers. It's really remarkable. I just met yesterday with the person Michael Radler who invested the resources to save the Forest Park swimming pool which has been a passion of mine for a long time and a passion of Joel's for a long time. And he stepped up and brought forward the private resources to do that. The Rainwater Foundation has adopted an entire school community in East Fort Worth and they are going to build literally that concept of it takes a village around the children in that school community in an extremely innovative and powerful way. So we know we have people in this community that want to do good things for particularly our children. And I would encourage you to begin exploring those avenues as well to see if you might be able to get some matching grants. Maybe if the state would put up X, a private grant would put up Y. And then finally, one of the ideas that I've been kicking around as we go into this session, you've probably heard that there's a move afoot to support vouchers in the state of Texas. And the way the concept is being rolled out is that a business could donate monies for a scholarship slot to a private or parochial school and then they would be given a tax credit against their business margins tax that they owe to the state. So I've been thinking about that a lot in the last few weeks and thinking, well, if that makes sense to do in the private and the parochial arena, why doesn't it make sense to do it in the public arena as well? Why couldn't we allow some sort of a tax credit program for a private business that might, for example, donate sufficiently to allow a dollar 80 to be spent on food for a particular school? And I think that it's the great thing that came out of the voucher conversation. I don't support vouchers at all in any form is that it does sort of lend some great ideas about what we can do in the public arena. So talk to our office about that because that might be an idea that we can float. I've been looking for specific projects that we could tag with creating that kind of an incentive. Okay, thank you all so much.


Russia continued its missile attacks on Ukrainian cities on January 14. One of the missiles fired at the city of Dnieper hit a multi-storey building, according to the information released by the office of the president of Ukraine. As a result of the strike, a part of the building collapsed and the residents buried under the rubble. Five people have been killed during the incident. The head of the Drednopetrovsk Military Regional Administration, Valentina Riznichenko, said that at least 10 people were injured as the condition of three people was serious. Six of the injured persons are children. Employees of the state emergency service are trying to remove this under the rubble.