Something that I've been thinking about for a while now is why every time Miles Boykin name is brought up amongst Ravens fans, they seem to have this huge problem and issue with their 2019 third round draft pick. Miles Boykin, he's been called so many different things like soft or he doesn't play to his sides or he's nothing but a blocker and some people just flat out say that he's not a good wide receiver. Now I'm not here to tell you that he's headed to the Hall of Fame or anything like that but I just don't think he's been given a fair shot and I feel like so much of Ravens fans' anger towards Miles Boykin is actually displaced and I'm gonna tell you why. So you two team keep it clean, what's going on is saying Raven here with another video and again with Miles Boykin I feel like he has been misjudged about his career with the Baltimore Ravens because when you look at it, we can look at the numbers, it can look sort of underwhelming. He's caught in 2019-13 catches for 198 yards, three touchdowns, 2020 he had 19 catches for 266 yards, four touchdowns but then last season he only had one catch for 6 yards and of course we know that he was hurt last year, he had the hamstring injury then he had the finger injury later on but he was mostly relegated to special teams. So with Miles Boykin, I just feel like all this displaced frustration that a lot of people have been pointing towards Miles Boykin, it should really be pointed to the Ravens. And the reason I say that is because the Ravens have a history, especially even a recent history, when it's come to both the drafting and development or lack thereof at the wide receiver position. I've been saying it so much throughout this offseason, even last offseason too, if you're not a first round draft pick at wide receiver, if you're not a first round pick, you're not going to make it. The odds are already stacked against you before you even step foot on a football field for the Ravens. And this is not, oh man I hate the Ravens, no it's nothing like that but that's exactly what it is, that's exactly what it's been. So many fans, they can be so dismissive of so many wide receivers that have come through for the Ravens. But I always say like I feel bad for those wide receivers because they never got a fair shake. They never did. Let's just go through this list of wide receivers that the Ravens drafted since 2008. And no this is not to make you feel like oh man Harbaugh just been so bad at drafting wide receivers because this issue with the Ravens and wide receivers has even been before John Harbaugh. But since we're in the John Harbaugh era, let's start right there. Let me read you some of these names and tell me if you remember these wide receivers. I'm sure y'all remember plenty of them but a lot of them y'all probably forgot. All right 2008, they drafted Marcus Smith and Justin Harper in the fourth and the seventh round. What did they do for the Ravens? Yeah, nothing. 2010, they drafted David Reed in the fifth round. Now he was a good kick-returner but as a wide receiver like you never really saw anything from him. 2011, Tori Smith. He was drafted in the second round. Now with Tori Smith, it worked out for him, initially it wasn't looking like he was going to because they had traded for Lee Evans from the Buffalo Bills to pair him with Anquan Bolden and Tori Smith, he ended up getting his shot a lot earlier than expected because Lee Evans, he got hurt and Tori Smith certainly made the most of it. They had that connection and of course the rest was history. So shout out to Tori Smith for making it out alive and even being one of the few Ravens wide receivers drafted by the Ravens who get a contract with another team after being with the Ravens. That's crazy. But in that same draft, Tandon Doss, he was drafted in the fourth round and we know that was one of Flacco's picks, Flacco's like give me Tandon Doss but it didn't work out for one Tandon Doss. 2012, they drafted Tommy Streeter, 6-5 fast wide receiver from UM. We know how that went. In 2013, they drafted Aaron Millett. He was like 6-4, 6-5 wide receiver but yeah, that was the last you heard of him. Then the following year in 2014, they drafted Michael Campanero. Oh, that dude could catch anything. He could catch anything but he was just injury prone and it was so sad to see and even the literally the last play of his Ravens career. He was walking off the field and slipped I think on a trash bag or something and he got injured again and I was like, oh man, that was a tough way to go out. But then 2015, this was very interesting because in 2015, they drafted Brashaw Perryman in the first round and Darren Waller in the sixth round, both wide receivers. Now we know Brashaw Perryman, his draft stock went through the roof when he ran his 40 time and that's going to happen to some more players as the combine is going on right now. But it's funny because with Brashaw Perryman and Darren Waller, it just wasn't working out with the Ravens. Now both of them had their off field stuff that they were dealing with. I know with Brashaw Perryman, his dad had passed, which was unfortunate with Darren Waller. He of course had all his stuff going on with the drugs and whatnot. But now his team keeping clean. So that was great. But with the Ravens, it just didn't work out. But it worked out for both of them once they left the Ravens. Once they left the Ravens, that's when things got so much brighter. Of course, Brashaw Perryman, he went to the Browns, spent some time there and also went to the Bucks. And then Darren Waller, he went to the Raiders and he became one of the best tight ends in the league. Now the conversion to Titan, it started with the Ravens, but he went on to the Raiders and the rest was history. Then then in 2016, they drafted Chris Moore. Great special teamer. But as far as wide receiver, it was shaky there. It was shaky. 2017, they didn't draft any wide receivers. 2018, they drafted two wide receivers, Jaleel Scott and Jordan Lassley. Jordan Lassley, amazing route runner, but the hands weren't there. Then he got released from the team, like I think maybe a year later. And Jaleel Scott, it's just like he disappeared. I think he went to the Jets and son, I don't know what happened after that. Then in 2019, first round pick, Marquise Brown. Certainly has worked out for him thus far. And yeah, while he does need to clean up the drops a bit, he has had plenty of opportunities with the Ravens. And they are very invested in him as you can tell. So shout out to that. And then that was also the draft where they drafted Miles Boykin, but he was in the third round. So again, you're not a first round pick, then opportunities ain't coming. And as you can tell thus far, everybody who we named who hasn't been a first round pick, they disappear in a thin air. And then in 2020, Devon Duvenay and James Proshay, they got drafted in the COVID year. And with Devon Duvenay, he was all pro this year. Not as a wide receiver, but as a returner. But hey, we'll take it. But with Devon Duvenay, he just seems to be a gadget guy for the Ravens. It does not seem like his career is going to really explode in a good way as a wide receiver with the Ravens. And with James Proshay, we see all this potential. We see potential, potential, potential, but it doesn't seem as if the Ravens are ever going to bank on that potential. Now, of course, I hope that I am completely wrong, but based off of recent history, as we've gone over, it's not looking good for either one of those two in the long run. And then last year, first round pick, Rashad Bateman. Oh, Rashad Bateman, he got a lot of opportunity last year. More than the average Ravens wide receiver, especially more than the average Ravens rookie wide receiver. And you can expect him to get plenty more opportunity. He's a first round pick. He's a first round pick. And then you have Tyler and Wallace who was drafted in the fourth round. So he was primarily on special teams and there were a lot of receivers ahead of him. But he was on special teams. He got a little bit of action on offense, but not much.  So I say all that to say this. Again, if you're not drafted early by the Ravens, if you're not a first round draft pick, then your chances of making it as a wide receiver are slim to none. The odds are stacked against you. So this is why I say, this is not necessarily a Miles Boykin issue. It's not because I know there can be some people too that say, oh man, well, Miles Boykin, oh, it all starts in practice. It starts in practice. That's where you gotta show your stuff and really get your chemistry and your rapport, your quarterback and whatnot. It's true, it does start in practice. But what about all those other guys that we named? Not named Rashal Bateman, not named Holly Will Brown and not named Tori Smith. What about all those other guys? Didn't it start in practice there too? Well, you could say that, but none of those guys made it. None of them. None of them had a crazy impact for the Ravens. None of them. And only one, I remember Tandon Dawes, he got a little contract in Jacksonville with the Jaguars for a little bit. But most of them just, they didn't make it out alive. Their careers started and ended with the Baltimore Ravens. And that's why people say that Ravens are where wide receivers' careers go to die. Now of course, Eric DeCosta, he's changing that. He's trying to change that because he's been going younger at wide receiver year after year after year. He's getting a bit younger and younger. And that's a good thing, we appreciate that. But as far as Miles Boykin, he's, like they're in the midst of this change, that this change is happening, but he's in on the back end. And what I mean when I say that is he's not necessarily part of the change. He's already part of the past. It's just not working out. And now I'm afraid that it's too late. I feel like it's too late. So hopefully for whatever happens on Miles Boykin, I would hope that he would get more opportunity with the Ravens, but I just don't see it happening. I don't, I really don't. And I'm fearful for the other guys that are on the Ravens roster, because you hit amongst fans so much. Oh man, this guy did that in college, this guy did that in college. Whenever you hear them talk about James Pro Shae and Devon Duvenay, these dudes don't drop in college. They did not drop. They had the most receptions in college without drops, broke records. But then you look at their usage on the Ravens, it's like, oh, what, what records did these do again? What was that? Huh? Miles Boykin, he was the number one receiver at Notre Dame and Chase Claypool was the number two. He was the number two. But you look at the situations. It's so important to look at situations. Chase Claypool went to a team where the development of wide receivers is extraordinary in Pittsburgh Steelers. Oh, we've seen it plenty of time. Well, so many wide receivers have come and gone there and they do an excellent job there. But Miles Boykin, he went to the Ravens and that's not their thing. Now we know that every team's not gonna be able to develop every single position. And I get that. And this is why I love that Eric DeCostis trying to change that narrative when it comes to Ravens wide receivers. But my point in this video is just to make sure that you realize what it is instead of what it isn't. And so many people say, oh, Miles Boykin, he's this, he's that, he's that, da, da, da, da. So were all those other wide receivers not drafted in the first round by the Ravens? Were they all just so bad? Or does this have something to do with the team itself and the lack of development? Team Keep It Clean, I love y'all. I appreciate y'all. And just like most wide receivers when it comes to being with the Ravens, if they're not drafted in the first round, then.


This is Think Tech Hawaii. Community matters here. I'm Marcia Joyner and we are navigating the journey. Navigating the journey is dedicated to exploring the options and choices for the end of life care and to assist people to talk about their wishes. It's time to transform our culture so we shift from not talking about dying to talking about it. It's time to share the way we want to live at the end of our lives and it's time to communicate about the kind of care we want or don't want. We believe that the place for this to begin is not in the intensive care unit, but together as we explore the various paths to life's ending, together we can make these difficult conversations easier. Together we can make sure that our own wishes and those of our loved ones are expressed and respected. If you're ready to join us, we ask, navigate the journey. And today we have a very special person with us, Joe Merchant, whose organization, believe it or not, is navigating the journey. It's the perfect person to have today who has spent a lifetime with people navigating the journey. So, welcome, Joel. Thank you very much. It's a delight to be with you. Tell us about Joel and how in the world did you get into navigating the journey down this path? Tell me about Joel. It's too big. Okay. We'll start wherever you want to start. I've been here 52 years. I've been in education and I've been in business. And following business, I developed my own consulting practice, which morphed into working with end-of-life issues. I think the reason, at least that I did that, is because death was present in my life. I think some people overlook that when it is. They try. They try, but I couldn't overlook it. And it appeared to me when I was 10, and it has appeared regularly since then. And it just stayed there until the time came when I could do something about it. One of those issues was having had a son born with birth effects here, who was Marchadom's poster child. And I helped develop the spina bifida association of Hawaii. It was very active with organizations that advocated for people with disabilities. During that time, we had 46 members, and among them some of their children died. The time my son spent in the hospital in the pediatric ward that I spent with him, I noticed that it doesn't matter whether it's a pediatric ward or not.  Ah, so I tucked that away. Between the time I started working professionally and about 10 years ago, I'd say, but who's counting? 25, 30 friends of mine who have died, all prematurely defined as they were younger than me at the time. They are with me. And about 8 to 10 years ago, I began working with end-of-life issues. One way in which I do that is that every semester, Tony Lenzer, a retired professor at the University of Hawaii and I, put on a facilitated course in end-of-life issues for the Osher Life-Long Learning Institute at the University. I also facilitated a course at Kaupelani Community College. The point of those courses is that it gathers a group of people, we limit it to 10 to 15, who don't know each other, who come in very hesitant. And typically, not virtually everyone, but many of them say, I don't want to talk about this, but I know I need to, and so I'm here. That's an important factor. During we have seven or eight sessions with weekly or biweekly, the group decides with this group. And it's extraordinary to see them bond. Much the same thing happened when I worked with organizations that represented people with disabilities. People who would have nothing else in common would gather to talk about, once a month, would gather to talk about their child and their child's disability. And they'd start very cautious and hesitant because they didn't know each other. And as they do that, they realize they're talking about a very intimate topic. In this instance, we're talking about the end of life. And when they come together, the first conversation we have with them is, tell me about a death in your life, because they all have one. And they all have that story. They haven't thought about the story necessarily, and they haven't thought about telling the story. But by the end of just the first session, they realize they're bonded because they have something in common in a very intimate. As a result of the groups I facilitate, it's been an interesting experience. After we're done, periodically someone who happened to be in the group will call. And I think the reason they call is there's some issue related to end of life for them. And they look around for people with whom to have that conversation. And people back away from that conversation. They do. And they know I don't. And so they call me. And they describe the end of life issue in their lives that they're facing. And I work with them individually, quite a few. How do you, so many people, have fear of dying? Even the word death is one of those that is listed as one of the no-nos that you don't say because people have these strange fears. So how do you get a person, okay, so we know there's a fear. How do you get a person past the fear of talking about it? About internally saying, well, yes, this is real. And there's nothing to be afraid of. How do you get them to that point? As a facilitator, I'm with a group of 10 to 15 people and I've asked them to talk about a story about a death in their life. They may not want to, but that's the beginning. What they discover is talking about it makes it feel better. Talking about it, they often tell me makes them less afraid. It's as simple as that. That's essentially what happens. They get over the first hesitation, which is talking about death doesn't mean I'm going to die.  But perhaps I'll experiment. I'll show up in this course. I'll walk in and say, I don't want to talk about this, but I know I have to. For whatever reason they think they know they have to, they start to talk about it. They start to talk about it from their own experience. They discover that others have had similar experiences. They don't feel isolated. And that isolation is part of what's behind the, I'm afraid to talk about this, and so maybe I'll just ignore it. What is it that people fear of dying themselves? What is that about? Is it just the unknown? For me, of course, because of my sense of adventure, I'm sure there's something else out there. I like that a lot. I kind of looked for that. But so many people are afraid for themselves, not just talking about it, but what happens to me, the Christian church has spent forever teaching about heaven and hell, and people are scared and all of that. How do we get past that?  How do you get past that? They may not get past that, but what helps is the conversation. They realize by having the conversation that they're having it at an appropriate time. The time for conversation is not when a person comes to the ICU or the ER and may be not able to talk. And we play scenarios. And one scenario is a member of the family appears desperately ill, no longer able to make medical decisions for herself in the ICU, in the ER. The family gathers. The first discovery is, I don't know what she'd want to do. We never talked about it. The second issue, and so now it's up to them to talk about it, the second issue as they begin to talk about it is they disagree. Of course. Oh my, do they disagree? When you lay that out as a scenario, and you say, look, there are lots of different possibilities for how you might come to the end of your life. We can cover a lot of scenarios, and in that scenario, we could say, what would you do if? And for you, it may be a different scenario that plays out, but you'll have practice doing scenarios. You have opportunities to say, these are the wishes I'd make. You have an opportunity well ahead of time to have the conversation, like Ellen Goodman's Conversation Project. It is wonderful. Backs it way up. That's the important part. And let it become part of the conversation, a daily conversation. I don't know if that answered the question, but that's my experience with people who, they'll say having these discussions has made me less afraid, but that doesn't mean they've necessarily given up the fear. When we talk about fear, and it seems to me, when I hear people say, oh, what am I going to do without you? And then it becomes more about me than about your passing. If you pass, what happens to me? And you hear people all the time, oh, I love you so much. What am I going to do without you? And it's about me. So how do we do it? I'll tell you what. Think about that. Think about that. We're going to take a break. And when we come back, we'll see if we can figure that one out. Okay. We'll be right back. This is Think Tech Hawaii, Raising Public Awareness. You can be the greatest. You can be the best. You can be the king, conveyin' all your chess. You can be... My name is Mark Shklav. I'm the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea. Law Across the Sea comes on every other Monday at 11 a.m. Please join us. I like to bring in guests that talk about all types of things that come across the sea to Hawaii. Not just law. Love, people, ideas, history. Please join us for Law Across the Sea. Aloha. I'm Marcia, and we are having a marvelous discussion with Joel Merchant, who has an organization called Navigating the Journey. So of course we want him with us today. Of course we do, to see how other people navigate the journey. And I had asked Joel about this. I think it's the elephant in the room. The part of it that we don't talk about is I love you.  What am I going to do without you when you pass? So how do we deal with that one? Because that's really the biggie. What am I going to do? You're right. It is... We are of the nature to say it's all about me. We're not to realize it's all about me. And I think that having the conversation assists in that. A lot of the people who call after they've been through the course I facilitate say please come over because they're facing exactly that. One of them has been declared terminally ill. They're both struggling with that. They're both looking for some magic medical event that will extend life. And one of them will say I may even be a life counselor but I don't know what I'm going to do. I think it's not different except it's so irreversible. It may not be different from the fact that we respond to change the same way. We're not sure of it because we don't know what's on the other end. But I think that in the conversation people have a chance to listen to somebody else say that and say oh, I didn't realize that. I think that is a lot of help for them. To hear it, really hear it and to recognize this is about me. I'm not a terrain psychotherapist. No, of course. But I can engage in the conversation. I know the questions to ask. I don't have any of the answers. They might think they're looking to me for answers but they're the only ones who have the answers. I'm there to listen to them figure out what the answers are. Now when a person is in hospice or let's deal with hospice simply because that's where I have an experience with my mother in my house in hospice which was a wonderful experience. I'm not selling hospice. I guess I am selling hospice. But for me I am so glad to have had that opportunity to be with her. Yes, yes. I made, as you may suspect, I make a big deal out of everything. So I made a big deal out of she was with me when I took my first breath and I need to be with her when she takes her last. So I had crawled into bed that day and sure enough I was with her when she took her last. It was marvelous. It wasn't scary. It wasn't all of these things I had made up in my mind, you know. It was wonderful. And so my daughter is an RN hospice nurse and she said sitting right where you are that it is such an honor to be with the person at that moment. Yes. And when we look at it from that point of view then it's not scary. But when you look in the hospital and the person is lined up with all these tubes and that is so undignified and then someone has to pull the plug and all of that, it just takes all of the wonder out of it. That's what's scary. It's those moments, that place, to me. Yes. The fear might be exactly a matter of this might happen out of my control. Yes. And that happens often. There was a study recently at the University of California Medical Center that said only 23% of terminally ill cancer patients were referred to hospice by the medical staff before they died. We're not doing as good a job at hospice as we can. Medicare covers hospice for six months. Right. The average amount of time people spend in hospice is 27 days. We're not being certified. We're not facing it early enough. Well, and of course at $10,000 a day in the hospital, at least that's what the average is, $10,000 a day, to be hooked up to all this stuff with people you don't know and very impersonal, you're not going to get well, they're not going to cure the cancer, but they are making money. The hospital is making a lot of money. So if they refer the person to hospice early so the person can be with their families and it's a smooth transition, then how much money? Because we're paying for that $10,000 a day. In Hawaii, there are 330,000 people on Medicaid. That means we pay for that. But the hospitals are making a killing on that $10,000 a day where if they referred them to hospice where they could be comfortable with their families, with their loved ones, some of that fear is gone for everybody on both sides. Yes. And when you see somebody in the hospital that you describe, tubed, it's likely because they haven't had the conversation ahead of time. Right. They haven't chosen medical power of attorney to make decisions when they cannot and they're going to stay there. And I don't think... I'm not sure the hospital is... Yes, it's making money, but there's plenty of stuff the hospitals can make money on. Now, I don't know. I've never been a doctor. However, I think doctors are trained to cure, to help. And so if they give up early, is that part of their psyche that I can't give up on this patient? If I send it to hospice, I have given up. I believe that the reason the average number of... the average time we spend in hospice is 26 days despite being eligible and we could be certified for six months has to do with the fact that doctors... nothing against doctors. I have ten of them because of my own chronic medical condition. But they're trained. They're trained well. They're trained to fix things. Right. And when I appear, they want to fix things. Fix something. Yes. And every once in a while, they get somebody who says, No, thank you. And I've been with a person and a doctor in that situation with a doctor. He said, Do you understand what you're saying? I'm so... this is the road I go down. Right. It wasn't until 20 years ago that palliative care was introduced in the medical curriculum. That doesn't mean nobody died without being in pain prior to 20 years ago. There are very few palliative care specialists or geriatricians. And so we focused on fixing and making better when the real conversation, which I have often with people, is here's the difference between curative care and palliative care or comfort care. And you reach the point where it's important to make the decision before you become in the hospital with tubes. And they're not aware of that. It's not until that conversation which sort of charges them to think about the difference between the types of care and say it's time for comfort care. What do we have to do to have the doctor feel okay, I can let go? That he can, the doctor, he or she, doesn't, this person is not going to get well, this person is not going to be fixed. What do we have to do to get the doctor to let go? Because he's trained to fix. What do we have to do? How do we train them to let go? You and I earlier agreed that the conversation project was very important. Yes. It's important not just for us, it's important for doctors. In their humanness, they've got to go through the same conversation. They've got to go through the same groups. They've got to talk about death in their life. And I think slowly it's coming around. We are running out of time and I can talk to you forever. So please know that we'll have you come back. But before we do, you have been working on this bill to pass medical aid and dying for what, 20 years now? For as long as we've been trying. Yes. And it comes up regularly. Last early part of this session, the 2017, it got within, what, three votes. The Senate passed it. And then the House deferred. Yes. Well, we're back. And it looks like it's going to pass this time. However, in a Civil Beat editorial, and I'm going to read just part of it, but terminally it'll have a fundamental right to end their suffering. It's time for the legislature to do the bidding of the vast majority of Hawaii voters and legalize medical aid and dying. Now, of course, I can't read the whole thing because we're just about out of time. But do, from our audience, do read Civil Beat editorial today. Yes. And the hearing will be sometime this week. Go to Hawaii Legislature and online and do vote. Do cast your term... Cast your... Call your legislator. Do whatever you have to do to make sure it's time to make sure that this happens. Okay? Thank you, Joel. You're welcome. Thank you so much. Please come back. I'm delighted to be with you. Aloha. Thank you.


I'm totally, we're totally happy to claim Harris is part of our session. It just makes us look even better. Alright, so I think there was a lot of discussion in the early talks about the value of chromosome level assemblies and certainly the technologies are improving in terms of the ability to generate that data at reasonable cost. I wonder if there's anybody has thoughts on does that become a new standard and what would it take to make that a new standard? I would say that in my experience what I'm finding is that cost has been a huge driving factor in decisions that are made because I think almost 99% of scientists want more accurate higher quality data. They don't even like to hear the word low quality and so forth. And so because what I found is that from a psychological standpoint, if the cost ratio of generating a chromosomal level more contiguous higher quality assembly is three times more than a draft one, okay then people open up their pockets, whether it's the funding agencies or the scientists themselves and do it, but if the cost ratio is five times and more, even if it's five dollars versus one dollar, they're going to spend the one dollar. It's just been my observation. Beth and then Aris. I just wondering, Carlos, you seem to be promoting this idea that the funding for this can come from outside of these traditional avenues of looking for funding, but not really for this early fundamental foundational work that needs to be done that plants and animals need. Would you have any recommendations about how to go about getting this infrastructure built but not coming from these traditional sources? Yeah, so great question. I'm going to sort of punt and say that, you know, read the book, not my book, but one and it's about process. I think it's easy for us to pick examples and cherry pick examples, which obviously what I did in terms of a wonderful anecdote. I wish all eager grants and SBIRs had that kind of a trajectory. Ultimately, if you're making the case to investors, there has to be some economic return. That economic return doesn't need to be today, right? When Fauna started, it was clear to us that this isn't going to be a profitable company for the next five to 10 years, right? That means that you need the kind of speculation to come in. And obviously in that case, the wins are the potential pharma that comes out the other side, right? So in pharmaceutical investment, you're exchanging market risk because you're going to get a monopoly for technical risk, right? In the case of these kinds of technologies, part of the big issue is the market risk, right? You feel like, yeah, I can get a company that's going to standardize the technology, but are people going to buy it? So I think part of the issue is understanding what the research market is ultimately going to look like. And in that sense, the funder's drive, right? So NIH, NSF, Chang Zuckerberg, Welcome Trust, all of these coming in and saying, we're going to place bets on this is going to drive the technology development because then the investors will say, well, maybe there is a business here to be built, right? If the federal funding goes away, then that becomes extraordinarily difficult. And that's actually one of the things that Jane Way talks about. You can't have any one element on its own do this and accelerate the development of technologies as quickly as the three-party game does. But you also have to be willing to take some of the losses, right? There's a reason why in sequencing, it's just been a brutal game, right? Every technology just continues to crush the next technology and it kind of has to or else you're not going to make the shifts in putting money behind that, right? Eris? Hey, I'm Eris Aiden and our team has developed things like high C and juice box that you've heard a bit about and we also have a consortium called DNSU, we're doing things like together with Eleanor assembling about 10% of a million species. I wanted to comment about this cost issue and also specifically the use of long reads because I think everyone is on the same page that long read, you know, you know, assemblies coming from many technologies are phenomenal and that we should be doing that, we should be assembling everything. But I did want to highlight why, for instance, DNSU by and large, we've shared about 100 chromosome-length genomes mostly in mammals so far, why we have mostly been avoiding long reads and there's two reasons. One is cost. Today, a short read chromosome-length assembly, roughly human genome project quality is about 500 bucks. If you want to do it diploid with chromosome-length apple blocks, that's about 2,000 bucks. So you can start to imagine doing things like large fractions of the mammals at the scale of a couple of R01s. The second thing which is actually a much bigger factor and which really wasn't addressed at all this morning is acquiring samples. Acquiring samples that have good high molecular weight DNA that you can reliably use without having sort of a blowout where you do tons of experiments and end up with crummy data is incredibly hard to do. Whereas, if you're doing short read-based techniques, it's possible to use fecal samples, incredibly badly degraded samples, museum samples, biobanked materials. There's extensive biobanks, as we all know, that have thousands of species in them. All this stuff can be mainlined if you're using short read-based methods. So I think that there needs to sort of be a complementation to efforts like VGP with efforts that are going to take critical target clades, like, for instance, primates, mammals that are really key for NIH, and says, okay, let's just assemble all this in a couple years for a couple million bucks so that everyone has it while we wait to get all vertebrate genomes done at incredibly high quality. Yes, so I'll argue that, well, I think short reads will be useful for something that won't generate errors, and that's fine for some, and it should be. If it's cheaper, but I will argue that there is a bigger need for long reads than what you might be saying, is that a lot of genome assembler folks generate assembly and then pass it on to biologists to do analysis, and what they don't realize is the downstream cost in the amount of effort in time and monthly salaries you got to pay students to correct gene structures. And so the downstream costs are actually much more expensive with a draft assembly than it is with a higher quality assembly. So I would say if there's new generations of short read assemblies, that simply solve those problems today. Suzanne had her hand up first. So we heard a lot about the different technologies that are being used to short reads and long reads and advantages and disadvantages. I was wondering for the big projects like the Earth Biogenome Project, whether there's a push to have standards to use kind of the same sequencing technologies and protocols, and if not, do we need new tools being developed to kind of have fair comparative genomic comparisons to avoid biases and, you know, the different reference assemblies and how they were created? Thanks for your question. In fact, that's one of the primary things the Earth Biogenome Project is doing. There are five committees that are dealing with various aspects of standards from the early stages of the sample processing and collection, how you store tissue to make sure everybody gets the high quality DNA. We already heard what a problem that is. And it is the biggest limitation. It's not the technology. Ira's pointed this out. The biggest limitation is on getting the samples, voucher specimens to do this. And there are subcommittees on sequencing and assembly. There are shared subcommittees with the VGP, since VGP has been leading the way on those. But there are very specific things to the different tax that have to be accounted for. So we're trying to agree on a set of standards. It turns out to be relatively easy to do that when you can get enough DNA to do what you want to do. But if the organism is small or their single cell microbial eukaryotes, you need to think about it in a different way. And we're beginning to think about it in terms of the amount of high quality DNA you can get. So if it's less than 100 nanograms, you're really forced into other strategies. And if it's less than 10 nanograms. But we know the progress with PacBio has been quite amazing, five nanogram protocols now, a half a mosquito, a full mosquito. So things are really progressing well. But there's a whole world of eukaryotes out there that are single cell. And you won't be able to apply a uniform the same standard that you might be able to get 100 micrograms of high quality DNA to something that's a single cell. And we recognize that. So we'll probably do it on the basis of the availability rather than an individual tax up. Just to add to that point, I think if you look at the most successful federal projects, they've all had that kind of a flavor of standards production so that you could turn around the day after the project is over and redo the project for a tenth of a cost. That was the case for the Human Genome Project. That was the case for the HapMap Project. When we started the HapMap Project, we really didn't know how to genotype at scale. And the whole purpose was it wasn't to get the 270. By the end, you could just throw away the data and you could regenerate it super quickly. Same thing with 1,000 genomes. When we started 1,000 genomes, it's like, let's sequence 170 genomes. It kind of sucked. And by the end, you had GATK and all these processes that made it far, far cheaper to do it. So if you're going to tackle this, the other thing is that the design is important. So if you only start with crummy samples, then you'll learn how to do crummy samples. But if you want to learn how to do end to end really good genomes, then you have to have the right design and be able to do that at scale so that you could turn around and anybody else could do it. That's how you really democratize the technology. So it's not just we well-funded investigators, but rather you want the real community to be able to use it. And that's so true of Earth Biogenome Project because most of the collections are in natural history museums where the samples are not frozen tissue. They're dried leaves or carcasses. And we've learned this on the medical genomic side. How many times have we just started with the samples of convenience? I'm going to go study these cohorts because they're the ones I know how to get access to. And that's what leads you down the road of like, oh, well, all of the investment's going into this small pocket. It's like, well, that was a bad idea, right? You have to do the hard work in the beginning to set it up right. I'll just say one. I know there are questions here, but I'll just say one thing about that. We need the funding agencies and others to invest in getting the high quality samples. These animals exist on the planet. You can take an airplane and get to it or something like that. That's much cheaper than it is to have to sequence a low quality sample that then causes a lot of money downstream. And I'll just add one anecdote to that. And it's a great point. And when we look at the amount of money that's being invested by the Welcome Trust and the Sanger Institute's new project, 50% of the funding is going on the sample collection, acquisition, and DNA isolation, 50% recognizing the importance of this point. And you could also make the case to your institutions as to why they should invest in it. All right, I'm cutting off the panel and asking other people to talk. Susan, we love your question. So I think, Rachel, you had a question a while back. Yeah. So my question is sort of a two-part question based on one phrase that I hear used quite liberally. And it hasn't really been defined well. And that's the idea of a chromosome level assembly. So we have two problems here. One is that we don't necessarily know the chromosome complement for many of these species. And as we've already heard about platypus, odd sex chromosome complements, it's actually not that uncommon in a lot of lineages like marsupials, for example. And so is that part of this initiative? And number two, is this initiative actually going to be bold enough to tackle T2T? Are we going to include telomeres and centromeres, which really are critical components of chromosome evolution when we think about it at a chromosome scale? You've definitely touched on a hot button topic. For the vertebrate genomes project, EVP, and others. And so starting with the last point there, actually, there is a telomere or a telomere consortium that involves some people that overlap with the vertebrate genomes project, including myself and Adam Philippi and others. And so yeah, our goal is not only to try to reach this G10K metric that we talked about earlier, but also to eventually get the telomere or telomere perfect, hopefully, assembly. We're not there yet for most organisms. So when do you define a chromosomal level assembly? One is defined as chromosomal level. That is a hot button topic. But I would say there are two camps. One camp is you need fish-carry typing mapping and you need cytogenetic mapping underneath the microscope for all the species to do, or any species to define as a chromosomal level assembly. And the other is the high seed, like the approach that errors and others have developed. The high seed mapping profile can help you identify whether you have something that's arm-to-arm chromosome, regardless of the number of gaps, one gap 100 or 200 gaps. But is it a scaffold that is arm-to-arm and has no other scaffolds mapping to it, then some of us are defining that as a chromosomal level assembly? I think there was a question at the back. Yeah. Yes, you. Sorry, I can't see your. I'm Hans Cheng with the USDA ARS. So it's great that we're trying to get a lot more quality genome sequences. But one of the bullets there is on the annotation. So I'm wondering if I gave you all the sequences on every species in the world, what's the limitation? And the next step then is I would think the annotation has to be very important or critical. So I mean, Eric's done this and Robin, I guess I'd like to hear what your message is. So I would say annotations come a long way from when in a rapidopsis every gene was looked at. There are proven methods. And I think one issue for the community to decide is to do conservative annotation so that you don't overanitate, but also give the community different levels of annotation. So you may identify potential gene models and they should be there, but you can have a high confidence set and then you can have your working set. And I think part of its education, because there's lots of tools to annotate now. I think a lot of communities overanitate. They use every piece of transcriptome data they have. They get a lot of incorrect gene models. They present them to the naive community, I think, as bona fide models. And instead, there should be a high confidence set with this is a rigorous gene model. Here's some other ones for you to consider if this is your favorite gene of interest. And I think there's some education in there and there should be some defined standards as well so that the community understands, like, there's a gene here. This is the most probable gene structure, but here's some other evidence for you to look into. I guess I'd go beyond just predicting genes. I mean, that's low hanging fruit. I'm thinking, you know, regulatory elements and et cetera. I would just say for the vertebrate genomes project, I mean, this is a big black box unknown, but we're starting out with using NCBI and EBI have been pushing us to try to get transcriptome data for every single species sequence instead of just relying on homology-based annotation on other species. And we're starting out with brain and gonads for as many species as possible because you have a greater diversity of transcripts there, no epigenetic mapping yet or other type of annotation you're mentioning. Some predictions up to five tissues is maybe what's sufficient to give, let's say 90% of the genes annotated. We don't know that yet and we're gonna discover over the next several years, but it's a real big unknown. Okay, please. Common. So. Annotation. So I think that's a great area, you know, because basically for the DNA sequencing, you only know about the structure of these, what a real name function of each of those are the regular elements because there are really a teacher-specific and different development stage. They're also acting differently and even different physiological stage are different. That's how, you know, there's a huge of the effort need to be taken to generate more of those epigenomic data in order to understanding what is the real name function of those elements, you know, in different species, how conserved, how they're involved, and to understand a real biology of how they're regional of the genes. Steve, I think you had a question. So my name's Steve Ellison from the Division of Biological Infrastructure at NSF and your comment before about NSF-like hypothesis-driven research is spot on, but as I point around the room, you guys are the PIs, you're also the reviewers. And so my question is, how do you get the reviewing community excited about infrastructure support to push these things forward? So the eager story you told, that's a program officer making a call absent peer review. So it's not that the agencies are averse to infrastructure. We need the community to get excited about it and point us in the right direction. So how do you gin up some support for that? I would turn that question around and ask you that because the community is really supporting this in many different ways. We're getting behind, the community is getting behind each of the individual tax on projects and the larger projects. So I think NSF really should be involved in convening the community because I think the community support is there. There is no vehicle to support a project. If you look at the infrastructure projects at NSF, I was just talking all about this, they're in the break in terms of biological infrastructure. Large-scale sequencing would not be eligible for a grant for the infrastructure, for one of their infrastructure awards not, right? You're agreeing with me, Carlos? Yeah, absolutely. So I think it's all about special programs. I think you will never get this kind of stuff funded through investigator-initiated R01, kind of vanilla funding. There's a reason NIGMS didn't build the human genome, right? And NHGRI has always been extraordinarily strategic about this. They've punched well beyond their weight. It's a $500 million budget on $34 billion of spend, yet it imbues most of what NIH does, right? And part of this is that it's very strategic in how it sets up the mandate for the review. NSF has done very smart things in this regard, too, often partnering with NIH. So I would point to the Mathematical Biology Program, where I had the privilege of being funded and also sitting on the committee. And the reviewer instructions for that NSF Biomath Program was very, very specific. You had to be able to meet both NIH criteria and NSF criteria and sort of push in this direction of getting mathematicians and statisticians interested in biomedical research. And the reason that that whole mechanism was put together is because we're in enough of them, right? It's the direction you wanted to drive. And so I think from the Fed level, you know, this is kind of on the feds to be able to really carve out the strategic kind of funding that we need in order to get there. Because it's not gonna come from the vanilla set of funding that we've gotten so far. This is really where the interagency working groups kinda come in and can formulate what I think we need, which is a national sequencing strategy. Okay, so we're gonna take a few more comments from the audience and now the panel needs to be quiet. Cause then we're gonna let you guys all go to lunch and we can keep the discussion going after that. I think. So I saw Mark Ernstine. Mark, yeah. So how one thing I was keen to get some of the panelists to comment on while your folks are at the side? Nope. Yeah, Mark Ernstine from Yale. So one thing I was keen to get some of the panelists to comment on is in the human genome community. There's a lot of interest in alternate structure so that you don't like graph genomes and so forth. And when we're talking about comparative questions, a lot of the most interesting things talked about today were duplications, SVs, rearrangements. And do you think that will be meaningful in the framework of the grass genome? All the stuff that you're talking about for a comparative point, will you be able to understand that graph-wise? So we're gonna, yes. We're gonna, it's a great opinion and we're gonna go to the next person now and we'll discuss it more. Yeah. Okay. Charles Ernstine. Wow. An opinion. Yeah, I'm Charles Denko from Cornell. I'd like to get us back to the whole question of functional annotations and adding that to these genomes because I think it's a really critical point. And several of the panel have made the point that this is a really hard problem because of how tissue-specific these elements are. And the number of assays that you have to do to really annotate these things well makes this very costly. And so I would like to make the point that we need to really pick out these assays carefully. If there's one thing we've learned from in code is that there's a ton of shared information between these assays that people have already applied in human and we can use that information to learn what is the minimal set of markers that we need to completely annotate a reference genome and scale up those assays for production across a lot of tissues in a lot of species. That's a great point. Thank you. And Sue, in the back. Yeah, I just wondered how much thought is going into some of these selection of the individuals that are being used as reference species because it sounds like in the plant world that's a big consideration for obvious reasons, potentially in agriculture. But if you're talking about wildlife, you may just be opportunistically selecting. And I think understanding the phenotype of the individual from a very heterogeneous species that you're selecting can be really important when you're referencing that as the prototype. Excellent. And then, John Lou. So I think we all think that comparative genomics is really fascinating, going to provide a lot of important questions and the issue has been raised about the samples for this and especially about high quality samples and the need to do annotation. The infrastructure would benefit greatly or has benefited greatly from the establishment of collections of high quality samples. I'm Oliver Ryder from the San Diego Zoo for 40 years. We've been banking fibroblast cell cultures and now these are being used for generating reference genomes and they're being used in the original genome 10k white paper. There's a phrase in there, there's a couple of sentences in there about we should be making induced pluripotent stem cells from these for the species that we're banking so that we can study their development in vitro so that we can have complete, potentially complete transcriptomes for them. And there's been no support for the infrastructure for these kinds of samples. I'll just echo what Harris's point on infrastructure. I think many years, quite a few years ago, NIFA was about to set that genomic tools and the reagents program and we collectively decided not to. Just imagine a small investment in that area and the impact is huge and all the sciences are conducted basically on the basis of the infrastructure. Otherwise, it's all the wrong sciences we are doing. It's really liberations of man powers in many other fields, including agricultural medicine and the entire sciences in general. So I would say National Science Foundation and the USC are to be really worked together to invest in that infrastructure making sure high quality investment in sequences and so on. Otherwise, all the comparatives, all the related downstream research is just low quality.  Well, maybe these last two. Last two, okay. Hi, I'm Eric Lyons from the University of Arizona. One point that Robin brought up was data release and one of the things I'd like to hear more about both from the panel, from this audience and the community at large is how are we doing on that front? Do we need to continue to do more to ensure the timely and accurate release of data, especially in view of the varying levels of quality that can be associated with this data? So for example, how quickly do we want things out in a very rough draft form versus how long do we want to wait in order to get further up that quality tier? And the last person, I think Ed, yeah. So it's really a follow up on what Carlos said came out of that squirrel project that it became an attraction for the VC folks. Do you see NHGRI say funding PhD MBAs at some point? That'd be a great topic for discussion. I'm happy to bring in some NHGRI folks who want to talk about that, so. Thank you, everybody. I'm sorry for those that we couldn't get to. I suspected this would actually be a problem with this audience, so we would have too many opinions. So thank you for at least validating that. Everybody, for working hard to get us back on schedule, we're gonna be back here right at one. If you've ordered a lunch, it should be, if you go around to sort of behind here, it should be waiting for you with your name on it. If not, go find lunch and come back. You're welcome to join us in the lunch room there for more discussion. I can't hear you, Lujeda. What?


How can I explain PDA to my seven-year-old in an age-appropriate and positive way? Does the child know that they're autistic already, knowing that PDA is exclusive to autistic people so they are one and the same but you know expression and presentation can be different? Do they know already that they're autistic? What is their autistic identity and culture already like? And they're quite young so I think that it's really really normal and common place and almost a rite of passage for children and teenagers to reject any kind of labels or identity that we put onto them. If our children don't want to hear about PDA or they don't want to hear about autism they don't even want to read anything that you've found for them especially PDA as this is PDA nature to reject anything that you show us. So if you're trying to show your child a video on YouTube of a PDA or look at this it's really positive they may still reject it because that is their PDA nature it's very normal for our children to not be interested in learning about being a PDA because it's a label that we are putting onto them. If a person is ready and willing to learn about PDA then I think the complexity in this is the groundwork that we do as the adults. How do we consider autism as a foundation? How are we talking about autism already? How are we considering autism? What are the conversations we're having within our family culture? That is the groundwork. If we are immersed with narratives that are doom and gloom or narratives that are centered around medical disorder then it's going to be very hard to convince our child that any form of neurodivergence is a positive thing. So really putting in the groundwork first and making sure that our family culture is already one of positive identity and culture. What kind of language do we use if we're teaching our children or telling our children that they're PDA is? If they're ready and willing and they want to learn more about it I would probably put them on the path of finding YouTube channels from other young PDAs. It might be that we just casually say yes you are a PDA autistic and the language is not great because we've still got a long way to go and then we leave it at that and we trust that because our child is a PDA and they are autodidactic in nature which means they're self-led in their learning and interest driven that they may go away and figure it out for themselves. It may take time but the more that we bring it up and talk about it the more we may create resistance around that. So knowing that we need a very different approach as PDA maybe just mentioning it once is enough. Bringing it up all the time or insisting that we read about it or talk to people that a PDA can create resistance around the topic. I had very honest conversations with my children because we are a completely PDA autistic family as well. A positive autistic identity doesn't mean denying the fact that there is disability or that there are struggles and this is really important. Positive doesn't mean we ignore the fact that being a PDA is really really hard and that we live inside systems that don't often cater for us or even believe in our experience. I have ongoing evolving discussions with my children but the way that we do that is that I tell stories about my own experience. We just own our own experience. It's a form of declarative communication. Whenever we're talking about things together I never say oh you should or why don't you read about this thing. I just tell stories. I remember when I was eight and I could not for the life of me look up from the floor because I was so incredibly anxious and that was a part of my PDA profile. Sharing experiences like that normalizes even the really tricky hard parts about being a PDA out because we don't just want to celebrate it like there's nothing hard about it. We want to neutralize the terminology where PDA is and this is another variation of human being.


he public. Jeff, you should be able to unmute. Yeah, I just unmuted. Boy, okay, the previous unit count was 117. Our parking ratio, I'm sorry, Chairman, I... It's okay, I looked it up. I'm trying to drag it out of my memory here. I think it's 192. Parking ratio was like 1.6, something like that. Yeah, it's 197, I pulled it out. I just was hoping you would do it. Okay, thank you. It's 197, yeah. Okay, 197. So this project is 136 units and 174. As I said, in our current planning, we're looking at 178 and 179. So we're looking at the difference between 16 and 13. I think that's accurate, Chairman, but don't hold me to that. No, I totally get that. And here's the reason I ask. So the project as currently approved has less units, but more parking. But it only has like 19 less units, right? Right, yeah. 19 is right, yes. Right, and then you have maybe 20 less parking spaces. So then my follow-up question is, because this is an affordable project, what we have seen with a lot of affordable projects is deed restrictions in terms of rental agreements, whereas you may or may not get a parking space, right? Do you guys have any plans for that in terms of, if you rent a studio apartment and you don't have a car, you don't have to pay for the parking space kind of thing, thus effectively reducing the car need, I guess, at the property? We have no studios. So no, we haven't really looked at, and I might defer to Chelsea and Con Am on this, but we haven't looked at exactly how that will work, other than that we have one per unit plus some extra. But how that actually gets allocated, I would have to defer to my affordable housing people as to how that gets done. Yeah, totally. I'm just, I guess what I'm trying to tell, mentioned to I think the public is, many of these affordable housing projects have some sort of item written into their rental agreement about what kind of parking space they get, if they get one, if they don't get one. And if you guys that don't have that figured out right now, that's totally fine, but I just wanted to point out that that's kind of how parking can be controlled, like car usage, things like that. So there are ways to do that, to kind of make it less car intense. And Leah, thank you so much. Can I please maybe ask Sherry Hoffman or somebody on her team to weigh in on that, please? And I would point out also one thing that these are, this is specifically a family oriented project. So the idea is families with kids, okay, not five working adults living in these units, not to say that couldn't happen on an occasion, but that's not the intent of this project. The intent of this project is put kids in beds. And that's what we're trying to do here. So there are more bedrooms for sure, but we see kids in those bedrooms, not the other thing. So Sherry or somebody from the Chelsea team, can you guys chime in on this, please? Sherry, you should have a prompt allowing you to unmute. Hello, good evening. This is Sherry Hoffman from Chelsea. I don't know if Ken from ConAm is on our professional management company, but I will respond as best I can. And to comment on Jeff's comment about the household sizes. Yes, it is true that these will be families with children. We would not have five separate adults living in an apartment with five cars. This is four families. And regarding the cars, we do have parking management that we can put into the leases, which is why I would defer to ConAm. And again, I don't know if Ken is on the call. We do require, we have have given permits to the households so that they have to record the number of cars that they have. Each tenant must put within their lease the number of cars they have. And we can authorize, we can allocate parking permits to the residents so that we keep guests out of the project. We manage that very well with ConAm, keeping guests out of parking at the project. We do find in our affordable housing, Chelsea's developed over 120 projects. I've been with Chelsea about 25 years, currently on and operate about 94 projects, 8,200 units. And we do find that our average parking count is about on a family project is about 1.2 parking spaces. So we believe this 1.3 ratio is sufficient to meet what we commonly have at our projects. Again, we own and operate about 94 projects now. And so we believe that these ratios are appropriate because there will be families living here with children. Cool, thank you so much for answering. I think those were kind of the big ticket items from the public that I heard, that I thought that we could try to plow through there. So now I'd like to go to questions from the board. It looks like Michael's chomping at the bit over there. So I'm gonna let him go first. I had one question to tack on to yours. I did not see the original application. It was during my hiatus. So my question was, did I hear that there were garages in the original, in the current? Yeah, in the original one, it looked like there were, I think there were 17, it was either 77 or 17. I can't, I looked it up and then I pushed it away. Just cause I wanted to show you. If I might defer to Kirk on that, but there were, yes, there were garages, yes. They were taking up basically the livable space, I guess you would call it, but there were garages. Many garages, I'm just, I'm trying to say that effectively, a number of those garages may or may not have had cars parked in them. So the 1.6 may really have been 1.3 by the time you, by the time you factored in unparkable garages due to those being filled with storage or. You try to control for that, board member urge, but yeah, you're right. I'm just saying, effectively, it may have been the same, same rate by the time you were done on an ongoing basis despite your best efforts. So. As far as, are we on questions or? Yeah, I was trying to get kind of the big questions from the public kind of out of the way. I thought that would be helpful for, for the public and the board. Cause I imagined some of those questions from the public perked up your ears as well. So do you have any other questions of either the applicant or staff? I don't. Okay, awesome. So we'll go to John. Any questions of applicant or staff? No, I have no questions at this time. Thank you. Perfect. Thanks, John. Adam. No questions. Cool. And Sheila. Just a couple. I'm curious and maybe this is for Sherry Hoffman. If there is a manager or manager's unit on site. And then my second question is on the building plan exterior elevation. We have a schematic front elevation A and schematic front elevation B. And on both of those, there are these horizontal bars. And I want to say they're, they're stucco, one's orange, one's white. And I'm wondering if those are decorative pieces or do those have a functional purpose? And those are my two questions. Thank you. Okay. So Sherry gets one and Kirk gets the other. I believe. Yeah. Okay. And this is Sherry. Yes, there is. There is. I don't want Sherry answering the second one. Okay. Thank you. Okay. Yeah, I'll take the easy first one. There is on site manager that lives at the property and we'll be working in the office daily. Well, they'll have a day off or two, but we operate the leasing office and on site manager does live on the property. And then the architectural question to the architect about the orange and white. I think they're porches potentially, but I don't know. I think is that what you were asking Sheila? Yeah, I think that's porches, but he'll know better. Yeah, I just need to understand exactly where it is. We do have siding on the front of the building, which has horizontal lines on it. I don't know if that's what you're talking about on the base of the building and it actually pops up with the second story, but the other horizontal lines would be the balconies with handrails above them. Maybe that's what you're talking about. And so we did want, we did want to, Board Member Wolskie, we did want to make sure that the residents did have some outdoor space and some outdoor storage opportunities in each unit. And that's what we've done. Okay, so these are the frontages of the balconies and they provide maybe like a privacy screen. If I specifically knew where, but generally speaking, we did not try to make. So I had staff throw it up on the screen here. So I think what Sheila's talking about is the C-shaped kind of backwards and forwards banding on both elevations. Yeah, that's the backwards C-shaped. Oh, that's actually like a shadow box. It's built out from the face of the building by about a foot and it creates some form on the outside of the building and brings up some of the flatness of the character of the structure. It's similar to what we did on the previous approved scheme. Okay. All right, thank you. So it actually builds out from the more yellow background. It's actually built out a foot from that. And I think you might be able to see a little bit more in the perspective. Yeah, go to the first page of the applicant presentation. I think that you can definitely see it on that. It's very clear on the 3D view. Yeah, it's actually a pop out on the face of the building. Sheila, I'm seeing it now. Okay, yes, yes, I see it much better now. Thank you. And there are some balconies, I think tucked behind it in some instances and then it's also just proud of a, you know, a wall. Yeah, in those windows and stuff. Okay, perfect. You good, Sheila? Okay, any other questions from the board before we go to comments? Okay, seeing no more questions. Sheila, would you like to start on your comments on the project or do you want to go last? It's up to you. Yeah, I can go. I'm in between my computer glasses and looking at things. Okay, well, we were just talking about, you know, the shadow box effects for me. And this is, you know, board member McHugh will probably find this nitpicky, but I'm not a huge fan of that C shape. I would prefer that we had, I guess it's the horizontal wood siding going vertical that whole way. That for me, it's a little disruptive to have that piece go vertical there. That's just me. I really like that there's a manager on site. I think that we'll make a world of difference. So I appreciate learning that information. Like that it's an affordable housing project and that you're taking advantage of the incentives that are available right now. And let's see, I appreciate the separation from the neighbors that you're having this, putting the parking next to the neighbors to the North and the West. I know there was some concern about shadowing, but it would be much greater if these buildings were next to them.  There was, it looks a little bit gabled and then we're going into this modern flat roof style. I'm almost wondering if it might look better. Most of the architecture here looks a little more modern and flat roof and maybe it might look better just to keep to one style. I don't know how everyone else feels, but I felt it was a little disorienting to go from gabled to flat. Let's see if there's anything else. So I noticed on the landscape plan, some of the gathering and seating areas were near the trash enclosures and we're a concept review, but I would just encourage you to put those, locate those more in the open space areas and the community area and not near the trash enclosures. So those are my comments. Thank you. If I might just say, can I just say one thing? Yeah, totally. Yeah, go ahead. Something I didn't mention, nobody mentioned was there was a 75-foot PG&E easement that borders our West property line between us and the nearest home to begin with on Manhattan Way. And so back when we did all this originally, we did a shadow study and it turned out that there was no significant, there was no impact on the properties to our West. And that was when we had a building on our West property line. So I just want you to be able to visualize this as we are a property with a 75-foot buffer between ourselves and our neighbors on Manhattan Way. So the idea that we're taking light in the air, we did that study and we were very sensitive to that and it turns out that that just was not an impact. That's good to know. I appreciate that. I also forgot to mention, I like the opener hallway I think that adds a lot of light and natural ventilation and I like that aspect of the project. Thanks. Thank you. I had forgotten about that 75-foot easement. I remember we talked about it in depth. Yeah. It's a big, it's a, it's a big one. Just we're very, we're very offset from our, from our neighbors to the West, very offset. Yeah, absolutely. And so now you have both the easement and the parking area. Right. It's all very, very far away. Exactly, cool. All right, board members, Sharon, you're up. Hey, great. Yeah, and I'm glad first off that that easement was brought up right away, Shilin, that that was part of that because I was gonna bring that up just to remind the process that that is there. Cause that was a big point of discussion in the first, it was two times that this came before us. You've got good memory, good memory, by the way. We had to come back. We do not wanna come back again, by the way. That's exactly. Well, it's funny because one of the, one of the board member Wolskie's comments about the Gables, I wish Warren Hedgebest was here also for this meeting because that was one of the things he wanted to, he commented upon and wanted you to bring into the second iteration of your design. So, but that was highlighted again. Cause it was, the first iteration was very modern. But it was all the modern design that you were looking at, Sheila. And then now it's got that, you know, elements that kind of softened it. And so my first comment is that I enjoyed the, I was a proponent of your design when it was the previous iteration. And I still am a proponent and enjoy it now. And also appreciate that you mentioned that you were, you kind of residentialified it to become a new word, that you've taken it and have kind of a, you know, you brought in some of that playfulness and are emphasizing that livability as well. I, yeah, kudos for taking advantage of the incentives to look at affordable housing. That's great. You know, we need all types of housing, but for you to kind of, you know, switch gears and to take advantage of some new incentives and looking at some new energy.  And it's nice to hear about your, also your other projects about doing affordable housing as well. Because I think this could be a real asset, you know, with this new iteration. So thank you for that and kudos for going the affordable route. The design itself, as I said, I think this is a great evolution with what you brought before. And so I won't comment too much upon it because it did get to sort of comment on the original design a couple of times, but I think it's still a good design. It's innovative. It doesn't look like all other housing, you know, it's got some real new feel to it, which I enjoy. Let's see. I'm also glad that the Suzy Planner Murray, thank you for the great explanation and mapping out of the process, moving forward with this because this site, it certainly does, it's a very complicated site, you know, you're wedged between residential area, schools and a shopping center and West College Avenue, which is a complicated road. Certainly a racetrack. Yeah, my son's preschool was just down the road from here, down across the street from the family center. So I know this area very well. I would like this area also take my life into my hands. So I hear all of these comments and the concerns and I do hope and I do know that the city is going to be looking at that as this project moves forward. Traffic calming, certainly street lights will definitely be taken into understudy. And so that's gonna be very important and especially with the neighbors concerns about Manhattan Way. And we didn't really have anyone commenting from across College Avenue, but I'm certain neighbors across there are concerned and should be concerned as well. So thank you, Planner Murray, for really laying out the process for us because I think it's gonna be good for people to feel secure in knowing that all these concerns are going to be brought under that purview. As far as the, so I talked about the architecture, the layout, yes, I appreciate that you're really thinking in terms of livability, in terms of family. I would want to push that a little bit more in terms of the site layout and really I think Sheila mentioned the gathering areas near the trash enclosures, kind of thinking about where they are. I think there could be some thinking about really how to create spaces for this very dense development to really create spaces for people to be, to have some livability and some ownership outdoors. The two central gathering areas, the teen hangout area, glad that you called that out. It's always taught lots that are specified, but I like that. So thank you for that, Christine. And along with the play area. Another area that it seems kind of tacked on a bit is the community garden area. In terms of outdoor spaces and livability and ownership there, I wonder if having that be more of a multi-purpose area could be a real asset to the site gardens and being able to, when you live in an apartment to get your hands in the dirt and grow things is very much an important thing to have for a lot of people. But there's a lot of people on here. And so thinking about ways that we can really multi, have a lot of people be able to use these areas all at once. So the areas to be able to use the outdoors are limited though. And so I understand those constraints as well, but I'm interested to see how the design thinking evolves and the, in terms of the layout. Also, I really appreciate the leafiness and trying to bring shade and minimize heat island like we talked about in the last project. I think this is well on its way. And as I think in some great iteration and a great evolution of this project. So thank you for this and best of luck with the process. Thanks, Adam. Thank you so much, Board Member Charron. John, you're up. Board Member McHugh, sorry. Oh, I'm sorry. I'll defer my comments to, I'd like to hear more from our fellow colleagues on the board. Oh, sure. No problem, John. We'll go to, do you want to go after me or after both Michael and I are done? You just want to go at the end? Would that work for you? Yes, please. All right. No, no problem at all. Michael, you're up. Great, thank you. Yeah, this project is very well thought out and a great presentation tonight. I missed the first round here. I'm glad to hear from Susie that several of the comments that were addressed by the public are yet to be approached by the city. And I'm certain that the city will do a great job through its review around traffic and safety issues and lots of other things. So again, coming back to the purpose of this board, I think that your roof drawings are incredibly sexy. So they are appreciated. Thank you for bringing them to the table here. Oh, that's very, very fascinating. Yes, I love the roof drawing it says. What they illustrate to me is... I don't understand any of them, but go ahead. They illustrate to me how well thought through the entire project business and to be able to take a look at those and be able to understand the project and its context is really important. I think that the design is fantastic. I love the Gable Roof piece and the traditional character that that brings forward in a clean contemporary way and the contemporary, I love the way that the roof that runs over the second and third floor bridges pulls those things together. So I think that your eye never stops moving around these elevations. I think there's gonna be a great deal of shadow and that we don't see looking at elevations. Design professionals can look at a rendering like this and understand it with a level of detail that you've given and understand what's gonna happen. So it is, I just think this is a very well thought through project. Obviously it's been through a good deal of review here before. I think that if the commitment to the amenity spaces that are in the landscape drawings can be met and maybe improved with some of my colleagues' comments, this is a project that will not be difficult for the zoning administrator to pick up on a positive review from the Design Review Board tonight and be able to see it through to the end. So my office has been near this area for decades and I know the area very well. I do understand the changes it's gone through from being a sleepy leftover agricultural area to a patchwork development, to now trying to form this into something that's a really livable area with great schools, good attachments to transit, et cetera. I wanna throw out a hope that over time the State Utility Commission and the City of Santa Rosa and SMART can work out the Jennings rail crossing not far from here so that there's a walkable path. It's a long walk from here, but a walkable path to the station on Gernvill Road. I've been a big proponent of that for a long time. So I wanna see this part of town succeed. I would like to see more residents. I'd like to see more vital commercial space. I think this project is a great step toward that. So those are my comments. Thanks, Michael. I guess the only thing for me that would, I agree with everything that's been said, but I think the only thing for me that's maybe that could amp this project up maybe just a touch would be the introduction of an additional gabled element on like the front elevations. And so, Susie, would you mind throwing up the applicant's presentation and going to, I think it's page seven maybe? No, I need a floor plan. Page eight, page nine when you get a chance. Basically what I'm trying to say is so that the gable elements that you have are nice because they're bumped out, right? So you're doing some sort of relief by providing additional space or you're doing it artificially by just building it out and cladding it. Either way works for me. I think it would be nice if you actually built it out a little bit, but whatever. But I think you can do the same thing on the, what, go back one, go back one. Nope, what the heck? Floor plan, not a roof plan. Maybe the next one. Okay. Hey, there we go. Okay, so what I'm pointing out is so the gable relief exists where the porch and the bedroom are in kind of what's called plan one in the middle there and that's where you're getting that additional bump out. I think an additional bump out could happen on the plan twos where the two bedrooms exist facing out. So you could create an additional gable element similar to the main one. And I think address also Sheila's comment about the banding and how it potentially kind of interrupts the sighting that's coming down. I think I liked the banding when it was on the more modern building. I think now that you've made it more a residential vernacular that kind of C-shaped banding doesn't fit as much as it did previously. So I would be in favor of just getting rid of the banding completely and then pulling the horizontal sighting all the way down to the ground and adding an additional gable element. Does the architect understand what I'm saying? I think is the question I would ask. If you could maybe unmute him. No, I'm just, yeah, I'm here. Actually, the floor plans don't represent we're actually popping that element out on the gable ends. Yeah, I saw that. It's just, I think, yeah. It's not shown on the plan, you know, because you don't see the build out, but we are building that out. And we actually have looked at putting gables on all of them, but we felt it got too repetitive. And too similar. And so we kind of backed away from that, but we could take a look at it again. You know, I think I could go either way, right? I mean, I think it potentially, I understand what you're saying about it being kind of a little bit too repetitive. I mean, I think you could change it up materially in terms of how that gable is expressed as opposed to using panels or stucco as you've kind of indicated. You could use something else. Maybe in that way, it's not repetitive in that sense. So I just think that little C, the C banding shadow box doesn't, it doesn't relate to the kind of the new modern, kind of modern house vernacular you're establishing elsewhere. That's all. I mean, take a look at it. I'm cool. Like I said, I'm cool either way. I just think it's a way to potentially create a little bit more cohesiveness. And then also I think address, just to kind of drive to the finish line, some of those original comments about making it more quote unquote residential. But like I said, I'm cool either way. And sorry, there was one other thing I had. The way that the gable that runs, I guess, longitudinally, the long gable and how that transitions to the flat roofs on either side, I think that could be kind of looked at. I don't know if it means bringing the Eve line up a little bit so you don't have that little like kind of triangle nugget of the flat roof. I think that was what was bothering me on the- Yeah, it's kind of a detail issue. Yeah, it's kind of a funky little detail. And you know- We've actually done it before on other buildings and it actually comes off really nicely. Oh, okay, cool.  You're talking about this little, yeah, I know we're talking about dimensions. Yeah, the little transition. Yeah, so I mean, I would just maybe take a peek at it. If you think it's good to go, then we're probably okay. I just think it just feels a little fussy. But yeah, beyond that, I would agree with Sheila about pulling us down. We talked about that. And then the last final things, there's no trash enclosure details. Obviously, we would encourage you to make whatever trash enclosure you make feel like the architecture of the buildings. Sure. Since you didn't have anything submitted. Everybody loves a good looking trash enclosure. Let me tell you. And then obviously no lighting package was submitted. So that would obviously be required for the zoning administrator. But those are all of my comments. So I think we'll turn it back over to John now for him to pull up the rear here. Well, thank you. Thank you very much, Drew. I appreciate that. I support the comments of my fellow board members. And for me, I like the design. I like the color palette. I'm supportive of what my fellow board members have said with respect to comments. And therefore those are my comments.  We desperately need it. It's a project that we have to have and I'm very supportive of. Excellent. Thanks, John. So that brings us, I think, to a close unless anybody has any final thoughts. Michael? No, okay. I saw you getting ready to maybe press a button. So that brings us to a close. I would encourage, I think if you have some of the comments we heard from the public, particularly I think the Safeway folks, it sounds like staff is probably going to get in touch with you guys. Do you guys have any other comments? I would just like to request that the applicant be given a chance to ask any clarifying questions or just verify that they understand what you're looking for. Sure. It sounded like we already kind of had that, but do you guys have any questions? Is the applicant team or are you good? Jeff Johnson here. I think we're good. I don't have questions myself. I appreciate all of the comments and the enthusiasm that you have for this, which we share to bring this to the community. But I will defer to my design team as to whether they have any comments or questions about the input. And if they don't, they don't? Yeah, well, if they raise their hand, maybe if they have a question. So it looks like we got a question from somebody, so. No, there's a problem member. It sounds like it might be a member of the public. Oh, okay, sorry. So typically we wouldn't do this. Is it somebody that has spoken previously? Do we know? No, so it does look like we have two hands raised, one that has not spoken and then one that has spoken. Okay, so typically what we've done because concept design is kind of loose, I guess is what I would say. And we do like to offer the public the chance to speak. Unfortunately, the person that has already spoken, we will not grant them that right because they already got to speak. But the person who hasn't spoken, let's bring them up and give them three minutes here. We'd love to hear your comments. Thanks. Okay, Trevor, you should have a prompt allowing you to unmute. And if you could please state your name for the record.  Yes, but if you could please not use that type of language, we would appreciate it. No, no, that's fine. I'm just, you know, the water, the energy blackouts.  You keep cramming people in the sand. I'm sorry, sir, I'm sorry.  That type of language is inappropriate. I apologize. That's really inappropriate in a public forum. Thank you very much. So with that, I think we're pretty much done. Does staff have any other comments? Okay, so I think that's it. Everybody have a great weekend. We will adjourn the meeting. Have a great night. Thanks so much. Thank you. Thank you, everybody, for your time. I really appreciate it and your input. Thank you. Thank you all. Thanks, Drew.