Hello, everyone, and thanks for joining us for the third installment of our three-part briefing mini-series about the transportation sector and climate change. Today we're going full steam ahead and discussing the state of play for public transit. I'm Dan Berset, the Executive Director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. EESI was founded in 1984 on a bipartisan basis by members of Congress to provide science-based information about environmental, energy, and climate change policies to policymakers. We've also developed a program to provide on-bill technical assistance to rural utilities interested in on-bill financing programs for their customers. In our quest to educate policymakers and the public, we hold a lot of briefings and we write a lot of articles and fact sheets. And while we're very pleased to have you join us today, we also want to serve as a resource for you later on, perhaps when you're working on a transit bill or when you're replying to a constituent letter or for the public when you're writing a letter to your representatives in Congress about climate change. Everything we produce is available online at www.esi.org. And to help make sure you never miss a thing, when you visit our website, take a moment and sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter, Climate Change Solutions. We're going to mix things up a little today. We will still hear from three panelists and I will be joined by my colleague Anna McGinn a little later for questions and answers. But most of our time today will be discussion as we learn about this topic, public transit and how transit systems across the country are responding to the challenges financial, pandemic related and others facing their sector of transportation. We just thought if we would do this in person, it would work great as a round table discussion. And so we thought, why not try that? Before I announce our panelists, let me remind you that on Tuesday we learned about efforts to improve the resilience of port facilities. And yesterday we learned about sustainable aviation fuels and new approaches to lower emissions from commercial jets. You can access an archive webcast as well as written materials and slides from our panelists from Tuesday and yesterday. And the same goes for today. After we're finished, everything will be posted online at www.esi.org. And when we get to the discussion, we'd be very glad to incorporate your questions too. If you have a question, you have two options to ask it. You can send us a message on Twitter. You can follow us at EESI online. Or you can send us an email to EESI at EESI.org. We'll do our best to get to everyone's questions during our Q&A discussion. And now I get to introduce our panelists. Chris Leibon, a professional engineer is LA Metro's executive officer, environmental compliance and sustainability. Chris oversees LA Metro's internationally recognized environmental sustainability and energy initiatives. He's a published author and national speaker. He's also very involved in transportation and environmental industry and research activities, particularly as chair of several American Public Transportation Association subcudies. Chris, thanks for joining us from the West Coast this morning for you, for afternoon for us. I'm really happy to have you with us looking forward to your presentation. Thank you so much, Dan. And thank you so much to your organization for having us here today. So I want to share my screen now with the presentation. And while I'm doing that, what I wanted to focus on in here are pretty much not necessarily the successes of our program here in LA Metro, but the challenges along with the successes that we see and have seen over the past few years, as well as, you know, how this has changed through the COVID crisis. So go through this quickly. And I hope that, you know, the questions later on will explore a little bit deeper on what some of the details are during this presentation. So just for those who don't necessarily know who we are with LA County's regional transit planner funder, as well as the system builder and operator. In this particular sense, we're not really a county agency where a state chartered special jurisdiction that builds an operating transportation system here in LA County. In terms of our information and sustainability programs at the bottom of this slide, you know, you can go to that website and there's chuck full sorts of information that you can enjoy reading through. I should go through it. I won't go through this with the, I won't go into detail, but just to give you a flavor of our sustainability program here started out in 2007 and continuing on over the past 13 years, this program has been cost neutral since 2017. It's not just projects, but the whole program itself. And how did we do that? We essentially have looked for alternative forms of funding and financing and allowing us to work through selling carbon credits, looking for private public partners, as well as additional funding mechanisms that allow us not only to pay for the program itself, but over the course of the last few years had over $120 million in net revenue and reinvesting that in sustainability projects. Over the course of the next 10 years, we will essentially be working through our recently approved 10-year sustainability strategic plan. And there's a financial analysis associated with that. We're projecting the revenues generated from the strategic plan to be a little bit over part of a billion dollars. And continue on with this self-sustaining, self-funding program for the next decade. So what I want to mention in this particular slide is everything has changed post-COVID. The assumptions, the baseline conditions, the conditions that we are operating in terms of how we not only operate as a system, not only how we build our system, but how we actually work through the sustainability resiliency and other frameworks in our programs. And it begs the questions, what happens to the things we're already doing, and we're using adequate and correct tools. So within the agency and along the transit industry, LA Metro has a recovery task force. It's looking at some of these issues. In particular, this task force really looking at reimagining the system. Justice, equity, diversity, inclusion principles are being more highlighted, workforce development. And again, alternative funding and financing, especially in this time of reduced revenues and farebox recoveries. I won't go again into detail here, but just want to highlight three things that's coming out of our program. We're investing more in our people. We're essentially looking at partnerships. These are key elements. We have sustainability council in the agency who work through. And then finally, we're looking at procurement innovations so that we as a big agency can not only influence services and goods that flow into our agency, but allow other parties who are participating in their recovery here in LA to work with us to ensure the sustainability resiliency and all of the related items could be realized. A couple more slides and then should be done. This one in particular is in terms of the infrastructure. As I mentioned earlier, LA Metro builds the transportation infrastructure system here. Not only are we considering the effects of infrastructure in the environment, and that's through the three bullets that consist of the life cycle of a project, but also the effect of the environment on infrastructure. You can see on the right side, those are the three plans that we have developed over the course of the last few years. Our resiliency framework on the top, we're moving beyond sustainability. This is already a sustainable strategy to begin with. Using transit and the effects of transit resulting in a net displacement of greenhouse gas emissions. And the programs that we have here, and she will hear from my colleagues as well, is that anything that we do beyond the strategy of transit is moving beyond sustainability. There are a couple more things that provoke some ideas for those who are interested in reimagining infrastructure itself. Even the agency we're not waiting for data science to essentially evolve. We are incorporating the evolving data science. How we do that is through this framework of adaptive design and flexible adaptation pathway. We're doing nothing about it. We're making our systems more resilient and sustainable. Because this has been adapted as a board policy, we're incorporating the new climate science into future infrastructure to make those systems and to make those infrastructures more adaptive to the future effects of climate infrastructure. Finally, on this particular slide, I will go into detail here, but hopefully you would ask some questions in this. Here in California, there's what we call the assembly bill 2800 by some member of the court to essentially ensure that climate science is incorporated into the design in the future. What you see here essentially are the results of a work that I participated in as part of this climate-safe infrastructure working group. This bill has been reauthorized here in California. There's no more sunset in terms of the efforts of this group. And as funding becomes available, additional work coming out of this group would be reconvened and be reported back to the legislature.  The first one is the sustainability road map. There's a standard coming out through the ASEE efforts as well as manual practice in incorporating climate data into science. There is a white paper right now on developing procurement documents and there's a certification effort as well for sustainable infrastructure engineers. I lead ASEE's committee on sustainability and all of these efforts are being done through that committee. And then last but not the least, on the bottom of this slide, we have foreign and international coalitions and sustainable infrastructure that actually focuses on the four bullet items in the bottom. The first bullet is the infrastructure, the private organizations and the organization of the UK called the global covenant of managers, some of you may be members of that in contact information and in the right side there in the right bottom, more information in our programs. Thank you so much again Dan and the rest of your staff for being here today and for me to present this to this delegation and to to the audience. Thank you. Great thanks Chris that was really interesting. As a reminder if you want to go back and look at any Chris's slides you know a lot of them had a lot of detail. So just as a reminder everything that we see today including the webcast will be available online www.esi.org. So if you want to go back and look at those timeline slides a little bit more detail that's no problem. If you have any questions about what you just heard for Chris or what you're about to hear from our next two panelists reminder you can follow us on Twitter at ESI online and ask us a question that way can also send us an email EESI at EESI.org with your question and now we get to turn to our second panelist Cami Horn is the Senior Vice President of Development for Via Metropolitan Transit in San Antonio, Texas. Cami is responsible for service and capital planning, capital engineering, passenger amenities and real estate acquisition and management. She was also recently appointed to represent Via on the City of San Antonio's Climate Ready Technical Advisory Committee. She's currently the Vice Chair of the American Public Transportation Association's Policy Planning and Program Development Committee. Welcome Cami to the briefing today and I'll turn it over to you. Thank you so much Dan and good morning. Good afternoon everyone. We're excited about this opportunity to speak with you today about Via Metropolitan Transit in San Antonio, Texas and our work in sustainability. So next slide please. So this is just a slide showing many of our agency's statistics. Our service area covers more than 1200 square miles and we have a large fleet of over 500 buses and I'll reference those later in the presentation today. So next slide please. So just a little bit about Via and our response to COVID. So Via's response to COVID as many other transit agencies across the country was immediate and very comprehensive. And beginning with the service we mapped the critical corridors to ensure that we were focused on the needs of our passengers and our essential workers. And an interesting fact about our ridership even in the initial stages of the shutdown hovered around 50% and that indicates really the need that we have to serve our customers that did not have and do not have other options. So initially we eliminated fares and that reduced the need for operator and passenger contact and we also added protective curtains in the buses as well and we are now actually putting in permanent barrier doors in our buses as well. And our planning efforts focused on increasing frequency and service to critical corridors and destinations all with an eye on equity to maintain and preserve our service. And as with others our focus changed from increasing ridership to really understanding and then maintaining a physical distance with our policy of no more than 16 passengers per bus and that's about half the seated capacity of a 40 foot bus. And we also focused on the communication of the service schedules to the public and the way that was as easy as possible to understand as we went through those service changes. And this also included the provisions for mask wearing on all of our via buses. Next slide please. So now a little bit I'm going to touch on these topics here. As Dr. Leibann mentioned that public transportation is inherently green and any improvement to make it more attractive and efficient only furthers that goal. So I'll be touching on these in the next several slides. So first compressed natural gas. So via's conversion to C&G began in 2017. And when fully implement this will reduce NOx emissions by 97% from the diesel buses that they replaced. And via actually has the largest C&G fuel facility of any transit agency in the US. And our fleet as I mentioned is about 78% C&G so over 400 buses are fueled that way. And these buses will actually also be able to use the renewable fleet that I'm going to talk about in the next slide. This is super exciting. New news about our partnership with CPS Energy and CPS is the municipal electric utility servicing serving the city of San Antonio. And so we have a partnership now with CPS a new fuel supply partnership that will provide renewable natural gas created by landfill biogas to via's fleet. And that is planned to begin later in 2021. And when used as a vehicle fuel, RNG provides a substantial environmental benefit. It's an 85% reduction of CO2 emissions relative to diesel fuel. And the distribution and use of C&G gas really emphasize both CPS energies and via's goal of reducing emissions and preserving the environment. So next slide please. So just a bit about solar and electric. So we have seven of our transit facilities that are fully or partially operated by solar. And nearly half of our shelters are actually currently lit with solar and we continue to add solar to our facilities. And as we plan and even retrofit many of our facilities, we are including high efficiency LED lighting, native and drought resistant landscaping, white roofs and other sustainable designs. And then regarding our fleet, we now have three electric buses. And as we plan forward with our facilities, including new maintenance facilities, we are planning for more electric into the future. Next slide please. As with others around the country, we participate in the EPA led program. The focus is on green power and there's more information on the EPA website about this. Next slide please. Via also has a permanent pollution prevention plan. And we focus on many other areas of sustainability in our operations, including water, wastewater and recycling. And I'm happy to answer any questions on this as we go forward in the panel. And that's it for me. Thank you. Great. Thanks so much, Kami. Really, really interesting. Thank you very nice bus stations and bus stops in San Antonio. So they were great. If you miss anything, you want to go back just as a reminder, everything will be available online. And it's still not too late to ask questions for the discussion, which will be coming up after our next panelist. And we're having shorter presentations today to really maximize that opportunity to discussion for discussion. These systems have just really interesting experiences that we want to get out there. Our and the way to ask questions is to follow us on Twitter at ESI online or send us an email EESI at ESI.org. It is my pleasure to introduce our third panelist, Eric Johansson is the Chief Innovation Officer for the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority in Philadelphia. In this position, Eric is primarily responsible for business transformation programs through data analysis and corporate initiatives, including SEPTA's award winning sustainability program. Mr. Johansson is a former co-chair of the American Public Transportation Association Sustainability Commitment Subcommittee and Sustainability Metrics Working Group. Welcome, Eric. It's great to see you. Thanks, Dan. Thanks for having me and good afternoon and good morning, everyone. So my presentation is really about how SEPTA approaches sustainability and has really always approached sustainability in a budget neutral way. And I'm going to explain what that means and I'm going to really emphasize that because I think that, you know, we get a lot of questions about how can you continue to do sustainability? How can you continue to do climate action in this era of extremely limited financial resources? And I think actually some of the lessons learned from SEPTA's experience, which historically has been a lot of extreme financial constraints, but still being able to implement a program like this, I think are instructive moving forward into this era of COVID. You know, as Chris mentioned, transit is inherently sustainable. This is a really important point because I think it gets lost in a lot of the technology conversations about how do we make transit greener. Transit has a value proposition that inherently is triple bottom line. We talk about driving the economy at SEPTA. We talk about supporting equity and quality of life. We talk about promoting safety and public health. We can back all of these things up with data and research that's, you know, indisputable. Transit is an economic, social, and environmental net benefit to society. And so inherent in that and shown on this wheel on this chart is that transit also advances sustainability. And on the right hand side of this chart, you can see that, you know, when we look at our four modes of travel, and SEPTA has a multimodal system that serves the five counties in Southeastern Pennsylvania. All of our modes, whether it be subway service, trolley service, our commuter rail, which we call a regional rail and our bus fleet, they're all lower emission intensity compared to a car. And so the more people you get riding transit, the fewer people you have driving their cars or getting around with a with a with a less efficient mode than transit is inherently a way to drive down emissions. So it's a really important point. Anytime I talk about sustainability at SEPTA, I always talk about transit as being inherently sustainable. And, you know, so what we what we the way we think of sustainability at SEPTA is really, you know, putting our money where our mouth is and going taking it to the next level, sort of as Chris said, and we've developed an award winning program that's been recognized by the American Public Transportation Association from the governor of Pennsylvania, from smart growth groups like 10,000 friends of Pennsylvania from industry groups like the energy storage group of North America. A lot of a lot of accolades for a program that really is is founded on this triple bottom line approach, this comprehensive approach to sustainability, which frankly, you know, we started this in 2011, we've been at it for almost 10 years now. I have never requested and we have never received a specific budget line item for sustainability. That's not to say that we haven't made investments in sustainability, we absolutely have. But for the most part, what we've tried to demonstrate is that sustainability isn't just good for the environment, it's good for our people, and it's good for our bottom line. So we have an approach that we call budget neutral. And I say it means that there's no set budget for sustainability. And the way that we've implemented a lot of these programs that have resulted in this award winning approach are things like financing agreements through power purchase agreements, energy performance contracts, P threes, we've gotten a lot of grants, we've been very successful with the FTLA LONO program for, you know, electric vehicles, we've gotten three grants awards for that, CMAC and the diesel, the DERA program, our state energy development development authority or the PEDA. And then we've also embedded sustainability into our core business. And I think you've heard you heard a little bit about that from Chris and Kami. This has been one of the really fruitful ways that sustainability has been advanced at SEPTA by by putting sustainability as a facet within capital projects and within operating programs through things like ISO 14001 certification for environmental and sustainability management. It's how our shops do business now. So we embed sustainability and environmental best practices into the way that we do business. So just some examples, because I think that that's a little bit theoretical and hard to wrap your head around, you know, I talk about, you know, the energy storage award, we have now nine batteries that look like this installed at our substations along our subway and our elevated lines, written up in the New York Times, got 11 megawatts of storage along our system that capture energy created by breaking trains called regenerative braking energy and uses it in the system. Didn't outlay a single dollar of internal support. We did a public private partnership. We got a couple grants and we were able to completely finance that off budget. I mentioned the three FTA LONO grants for battery electric buses, both buses and infrastructure. And so if there's one area that I can foresee in the future, that will be challenging, frankly, to maintain this battery electric, but this this budget neutral approach, it will be a conversion to electric bus technology. And we could talk a little bit about that in the Q&A. So far, we've been able to ramp up our program with grants, but it is a it is a very expensive proposition and one that we're learning a lot about as we go. I mentioned power purchase agreements, we've been able to implement some very large scale onsite rooftop solar is pictured here on the top. This is of our this is the roof of our largest bus maintenance facility. You can see the Philadelphia skyline there in the background. And we've been able to do some utility scale offsite solar, where we've converted 20% of our annual electricity load to solar by partnering through a virtual PPA with a firm out in central Pennsylvania that's building these these solar fields on our behalf. And then I mentioned embedding in the core operations SEPTA was fortunate enough to receive a large FTA grant from the fund that was set up for agencies impacted by Hurricane Sandy back in 2012 to seed fund what we call our our climate resiliency program. And we have a series of power resiliency projects that have leveraged some of these technologies and are now actually providing a direct operational benefit. One of the ones that I'm proudest of is this solar and battery powered signal system, where we have gone across our regional rail system and installed the solar panels, you can see this on top of signal huts along our regional rail system and installed battery packs that have enough power for 48 hours in the event of a signal power failure. These signal power failures happen pretty frequently. When trees fall over onto our right of way when other things knock into them with extreme weather events happening more and more. Having a resilient signal power system is an incredibly important way to make our system more reliable and more robust in the face of extreme increasing trends in extreme weather. So we think that this is a really good example of how sustainable technologies are not only good for the environment, they're literally good for our business. And so this is another way that we've embedded sustainability into our core business, supported by grant funding, but also embedded into our core operations. So with that I will I'll stop. Great. Thanks Eric. Great presentation. Really interesting approach. And when you explain it, it sounds so logical. It's sustainability should just be built into everything. It shouldn't take that much effort. But it's great to have set this example with us today. You may have noticed that while I was making my introductions, I mentioned the American Public Transportation Association three times, because all three of you are affiliated with it. And shout out to APTA. They were one of our panelists at the Clean Energy Expo back at the end of July. So APTA and APTA affiliated panelists might be our most frequent contributors to ESI's briefings in 2020. So pretty cool. And lots of lots of great progress being made all over. If you have any questions out in the audience, streaming us on YouTube or at EESI.org, you can follow us on Twitter at EESI online, send us a question that way or send us an email to EESI and EESI.org. And now we're going to get into the Q&A, the discussion. Really looking forward to hearing this and participating in it, but only slightly, because now I get to introduce my colleague Anna McGinn. Anna is a policy associate with ESI. She is on our policy team. You probably recognize her name on lots of articles, a big part of our climate resilience report, a resilient future for coastal communities that came out a few weeks ago. And she is going to lead us through the Q&A. So Anna, I will turn it over to you. Great. Thanks, Dan. And thank you to Chris and Kami and Eric for your presentations and really excited to dive in here. So as we start the discussion, I just want to reiterate a point that all three of you made, but I think it's really key. And that's that public transit is already a key climate solution. And so kind of starting our conversation from that point, I want to kick off the discussion with something that Eric started to get into, which is probably also a burning question on a lot of our viewers minds, which is how our transit agency is going to be able to continue climate and sustainability work, given the economic impacts of COVID. And so Eric, you already started getting into this, but I'm hoping that maybe Kami we can start with you and then we can go to Chris and look at kind of if you can get us a sense of how the work goes on and provide us some background on how the ways that climate and sustainability projects are funded allows that work to go on. So yeah, Kami, let's start with you. Okay, sure. And I appreciate one of Chris's themes on people and partnerships. Because I think that that's that's what a lot of this is about. And then there was also mentioned of a lot of grant opportunities, talking about things that we often tap into, such as the congestion mitigation air quality program CMAC. So those are ongoing opportunities to tap into funding for for our work and our efforts.  Some of these things are going to inherently actually be cost savings. And as we move into the future with these sustainable options, I mean, that's that's one of the things that that I see as a real opportunity as we move into the future and and continue to to make these upgrades and focus on sustainability in our facilities is the the inherent cost savings, the partnerships with with the cities are our city of San Antonio. We're working on the climate change work with the city of San Antonio. And so all of those partnerships working together and finding other opportunities for for grants as well. So yeah. So you want me to add on to that? That'd be great, Chris. Yeah, so yeah, I just wanted to start. First of all, you know, just wanted to recognize Dan mentioned this already in American Public Transportation Association. There is a sustainability commitment committee in there that pretty much puts together all the best practices that are that other transit agencies are are doing across the country, you know, Petro Millet and Rich Weaver and their staff have done a great job in getting, you know, SEPTA LA Metro, you know, in other public transit and via in public other public transit agencies to actually come together, you know, into a forum and share experiences to make sustainability not only, you know, inherent in the public transportation arena, but you know, as a way of life, you know, in those agencies, in our particular case, you know, we approach sustainability in resiliency here in the agency as a business.  But, you know, over the course of the last few years, you know, 2014, specifically, we approached our board and what we said is that, you know, we'd like to have the authority to explore alternative forms of funding and financing, you know, into our program. They gave us the authority and, you know, in working with our government relations, for example, and working with other groups within the agency in listening to, you know, the community and other stakeholders, we're able to develop a program that, you know, shifted our sustainability initiatives and programs from a cost center to a profit center. So that's really key to where we are right now. And as I mentioned, in one of my slides, you know, we since 2017, you know, we have been contributing to what we call as the green fund here in the agency. And since 2017, this program has been cost neutral. Who programmed itself? And then over the course of the last three or four years as well, you know, through carbon credit sales, through cost savings, through, you know, other similar forms of initiatives, we're able to generate, you know, over $100 million that we put into the green fund. We extract, you know, a few dollars of those funds every single year, put that into sustainable sustainability projects and infrastructure and allow those projects to actually create monetizable values. You know, Tammy's R&G program, for example, has been here in the agency for a few years now. Every year, we generate approximately 100,000 carbon credits, you know, we're just probably lucky here in California, that as a policy, cleaner fuel creates carbon credits that can be sold into the open market. And for those who go and advance their programs into such aggressive initiatives that they financially benefit from it. You know, each carbon credit right now in California, LCFS credit is valued at about $200 per credit. So if you could imagine 50,000 credits, you know, that we sell pretty much every year, $200, $10 million, almost $10 million goes back into the agency. And so, you know, just to conclude, really the point of what I'm trying to say there is that, you know, we draw from the experiences of other agencies across the country. We're a very early adapter in any of these. APTA has been a great partner in this and working through with our agencies here in the LA and the LA area and allowing us to, for our board, allowing us to have this entrepreneurial spirit really makes this program the only robust, but continue on despite the financial challenges that we face. Thanks, that was really interesting. I have a follow-up question that I'd like to pose and this comes from someone in our audience they sent us in. The question is, and this came up, I think, made me think of it because you've mentioned funding and you've mentioned revenues and you've mentioned funding sources. Could you explain the relative importance for your systems with respect to local governments, state governments, federal governments, whether it's a source for grants, source for revenues, sort of how your different agencies are funded, where you get to the extent that you are receiving outside funding, where that goes.  What is that sort of interplay? Maybe Eric will start with SEPTA and go around the horn with you. Yeah, I mean, so that's, it's obviously a very big question. You know, we're primarily actually funded as a state entity. We get the lion's share of our operating funding from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. We get about half of our capital funding from the federal government and the other half from the states with a match from the local counties. And then our board is comprised of representatives from each of the local counties and from the state. So I mean, I would answer that question by saying it's all of the above for SEPTA. I mean, we, we are very aware of the priorities of our local jurisdictions of our of the Commonwealth and of the federal government. And we pay very close attention to all three levels of government. So I can go next. For us in particular, we're really sales tax dependent here in LA, you know, we have prop A, prop C, measure R, measure M. Those are the voter initiatives that have been passed by the voters here in our region to find the transportation systems that you know, people here in our stakeholders here in the region use and see and for us to build. One good one great thing about measure M, the latest one that got passed in 2016, that it has no sunset, you know, for the next 40 years, where we have the opportunity to expand the transit system and allow us to invest up to 120 billion dollars for the next 40 years. And once that's over, we start all over again, you know, so so that's that's a good thing for for the stakeholders that we serve, specifically transit dependent population that we we serve. And in terms of the other of the other levels of government, you know, we lobby obviously, you know, on the federal level for an infrastructure funding that we build here and then, you know, most recently, we were part of an apt consortium to actually look for and ask, you know, for additional relief for transit across the country, including our system, you know, we received a little bit of that in the last stimulus package from early part of this year. It's not enough, you know, it's not enough. You know, we were moving, you know, at our peak, we're moving one almost 1.2 1.3 million people.  And these are mostly transit dependent populations, you know, in the most, you know, vulnerable of our communities here in Los Angeles.  Why not invest more into it and allow economic development, allow, you know, cities like Philadelphia and San Antonio and Los Angeles to really benefit from all of that, you know. And then, and finally, in terms of the state, you know, we, we look at, you know, all of the initiatives here in the state of California that still focusing on sustainability and resiliency. Like what I said earlier, we're an early adapter on what is coming out of Sacramento. We look at that at most of the policies and regulations that come out and we try to use that to our advantage and allow, and working with our government relations, allow those opportunities and relationships to actually seek, you know, any potential monetizable benefit, you know, with transit as a backbone for that strategy. And I can jump in here. Well, the city of San Antonio, I think, has historically had to be very creative because we are primarily funded through, through sales tax, and only a half a cent, primarily half a cent, we'll go into detail there, but as opposed to a penny for the other major cities in Texas. So we had to be very creative and we will continue to be. But, you know, at the city level, we have incredible partnerships with the city of San Antonio. Also, they have partnered with us to help fund our higher frequency routes. We have a great partnership with them on the Bloomberg climate challenge. Also, I wanted to bring that up because that brought in resources for us to work with them on some really creative ideas for sustainable solutions moving forward. And, you know, of course, at a state level, we also have a tremendous partnership with the Texas Department of Transportation, not only through some funding for our capital projects, but we just opened, they just opened, we just opened our first several miles of HVs. And so we are partnering with TechStot as operator and maintainer of the HOV lanes. And that is just, you know, that's a great way to share and move forward all of our combined objectives. And then I would just say on the federal side, we are working towards even more federal funding. So we've had opportunities with grants, as others have mentioned, and we were successful in our Prop A in November, which gives us a little bit more sustained funding starting in 2026. So we'll be able to look forward to more assured local match there. And I feel like this is the game of telephone, I'm not sure if I answered the specific question right, but maybe that's some interesting facts that support it. So Great. Thanks so much. Okay, so I'm really excited to dive into this next topic, because I know that all of you feel pretty passionately about it. So electric buses, there are clearly plenty of challenges and opportunities to move bus fleets to electric. And so I'm hoping that we can spend the next couple of minutes digging into where your different agencies are at in terms of thinking about electric buses, what are the challenges, what are the opportunities and kind of what needs to move for your agency to have even greater uptake with electric buses. And Eric, I know that SEP does one of the agencies with the most electric buses. So let's start with you. And then we can go to Kami and then over to Chris. Yeah, I mean, we were a very early adopter of electric buses at a very at the time, and still actually to this day, a relatively large scale, instead of doing a pilot fleet of two or five or even 10, we did 25. We wanted to learn what the experience would be like to try to convert an entire route. And in fact, in our case, two entire routes to electric. And we've gone through those growing pains. It is definitely a sea change in the way operations occurs in the transit environment. And it has impacts from scheduling to maintenance to operations to, you know, the way that you run your districts. I mean, there's all kinds of stuff that we have learned from running those 25 buses. And what we're doing right now is we're putting all those lessons learned along with conversations ongoing with other people in the industry to understand where this is all headed. Now, I mentioned in my presentation that we have a budget neutral approach to sustainability at SEPTA. One of the problems with electric buses that we're seeing is that it is very is relatively easy to pilot electric buses. It is extremely difficult and expensive to bring electric buses to scale. And so what our master plan is really focused on is what are all of the dependencies and what are all of the factors that need to be considered to truly bring an electric bus service to scale across a 1500 bus 2200 square mile service territory. Talking with our utility, you know, looking at various charging solutions and trying to put all of that in a cohesive document so that when we go beyond the first 25 bus fleet that we're doing so in a manner that is that is building towards an actually scalable solution. And I really couldn't discuss those challenges better than the new Eric. I mean, you really laid it out. And with San Antonio's, you know, funding, when you talk about that expense, we just want to be very cognizant in our planning forward that what we're planning for is a fleet and solutions that are sustainable from an infrastructure standpoint. That's, you know, that's incredibly important. And the one thing that I will say, though, is when we look at the objectives of emissions, and I think that what we're doing not only with CNG, but then additionally with our new partnership with CPS with the renewable gas. I mean, if we look at the objectives, I really think that we are headed down the that path just incredibly well. So I, Eric, thank you for that overview. When you, you know, right now, there's just a lot of changes in the technology, including just the very basic what the range is on the buses that that that they can go. So I'll turn it over to Chris. Yeah, thank you, Anna, for that question. And, you know, can I do more with my colleagues on this? We're approaching this a little bit differently, though, on several fronts, you know, we operate the largest clean transportation system in the whole country, not one of the largest, you know, 20, 23, 2400 CNG buses already running on 100% all of them are running on RNG. You know, so the question gets asked, you know, what is the the ultimate goal, right? Is it zero emissions locally? Or is it zero emissions over the life of of the transportation system? Because as you could sense, you know, while you're running these electric buses, if the if the source of the energy is not clean, it's not renewable, you're literally just transferring the emissions to somewhere else. Right. So so that's one part. The other part is that, you know, we have a commitment to transform all of that fleet, 2300 or so fleet to 100% zero emissions buses by 2030, 10 years ahead of the mandate that here in here in California for transit agencies.  So communities grow around them. And if you go into our community into those bus depots right now, you know, it's barely inches between each bus and barely inches between the bus, right on the front and the front and the side and you know, put in electrical infrastructure in there. And in the transition from CNG to ZBs at some point, it becomes very challenging. And so, you know, for the most part, you know, that's this another perspective that needs to be looked at, right. And then the other part here too is the, again, on the transition side, you know, the workforce development, right, we are a very mature in terms of, you know, age of our workforce organization. And, you know, a lot has a lot of training, a lot of transition into newer technologies. How does that look like, you know, over the course of the next 10 years? We're preparing for it, don't get me wrong. We're ready for it. But, you know, at the back of our minds, you know, how does that physically look like, right.  And that's really part of the problem we have. We operate on 4,800 square miles of Los Angeles County. And I need sometimes to bring a bus, you know, on the other side of the county, and you should get sense, for example, electric buses, you know, that bus is to travel 50, 30, 50 miles one way, just to support, you know, the number of patrons that we need to move in one county to the other. You know, I need to charge the electric bus even before it starts supporting, you know, or moving those people. So it's just some challenges, very high level. I'm very happy to engage with folks offline at some point on some of our experiences here. Thank you. Thanks, Chris. Yeah, I didn't think of that, but the buses are really close together. That's an interesting point. I hadn't really thought of that one. But then again, I don't manage a bus fleet, so why would I? Yeah. Why would I think of that? That's why we have experts in. We are just about out of time, but I want to sort of make one point and I want to give just a quick second, because I think, Kami, I think I'm going to give you the last word today, take moderators prerogative, because I want to kind of circle back to the issue of equity in environmental and climate justice. At the end of all these briefings, I say something along the lines of please take two minutes and fill out our survey. We'd love to hear what you think. We're always trying to do better. Well, one of the comments that we've been, that we recently got was trying to sort of at the end of these briefings frame sort of a takeaway. And this is something that came out much like all of your presentations included the general theme, this public transit is inherently sustainable. Something else I think that I took away from everything that you had to say today, the three of you, was that people depend on these systems. They depend on these technologies. They should be clean. These things are rolling through their communities.  Cami, I think you have something that you wanted to bring up with respect to an equity related initiative with VIA. And so I'm happy to give you the last couple seconds to give a quick overview. And then I'll, well, I'm afraid that we'll have to end there and because we are bumping up against the one o'clock timeframe, but I'll turn it over to you. I'll just say that VIA is constantly looking at the equitability of its service. And, you know, so every time we make a change, we've just been even during the emergency changes, we made sure that the service that we provided was equitable across our region. And I think all the points that you just made, Dan, I can't say it any better that the public transportation provides so many benefits and it actually provides everyone a choice. So I'll leave it at that and thank you very much for this great opportunity to participate in this panel. Great, thanks Cami. And Eric and Chris, my guess is that you would endorse what Cami had to say, but unfortunately we're out of time and we have to wrap up. But you guys did such a great job. This is such an interesting panel. Such a great discussion. It was a bit of an experiment on our part, but the discussion was fabulous and I took a lot away from it. And thanks to Anna for her expert moderation. And I guess you would say keeping the trains running on time. So thank you very much for that. We're going to conclude. This is the end of our three-part series. If you missed, or mini-series, if you missed any of it, of course it's available on our website www.eside.org. If you have a moment to take our survey, we really do listen to your feedback and we even try to incorporate it into our briefings, just like I always say. So if you have a few moments today to tell us what you thought of today, the discussion format, the balance between presentations, discussions, if anything else, topics that you want to see, please let us know. We do take them very seriously. And with that we will start closing out. But I have to say thanks again to our three wonderful panelists and also to everyone else at ESI who makes this possible. Anna, thank you for co-moderating with me today. Thanks to Omri, Dan O'Brien, Sydney O'Shaughnessy, Amber Todoroff, our colleague on the policy team, as well as our wonderful interns, Emma, Joseph, Hamilton, and Karen who are helping us with Twitter and social media and getting us these great questions from our audience. So we will go ahead and there. Thanks again for everyone's participation. Thanks to our panelists and I hope everyone has a great rest of your Thursday.


Give him time, give him time, let him speak, democracy, let him speak. Ya, ya, ya. So, you are the people who are frustrating the GDF, you are the people who are causing free education. You are the same people who are causing the PNG for crossing out Makata. You are the same LPs who are causing the cancer workers. What does the cancer workers mean? We thought to take the cancer workers and these now, the LPs, the members, we are now accused of rhythmic criminal cases. Now, tell me, do PNG members who have been accused of serious cases? Thank you. Thank you, Rafidimon. Thank you, Rafidimon. Your message has been received and Honourable will definitely respond. Now, I'll give you just one last call, then we wind up or two, but we lost that one, but it's 0955-221515. I'll take the last one. Good morning. Zaki, good morning. Morning to you. How are you today? I'm very well, PNG. Great. Ya. My name is Brother Alex. Brother Alex, ya. Good morning to you, Honourable Samba. Good morning, Brother Alex. I'm glad you called, sir. Thank you so much. I'm somebody who has a soft hat for you. As for me, you are a good man. What seems not to work well for you is the pier. The pier for themselves. As somebody who just sits there and watch from afar. I feel that you are somebody who is loved by people. But the issue is that your association with the pier seems to make your work a bit difficult. Not only now, but I think from the onset of the pier. You have worked so hard for the pier and very honest and truthful to the pier. Of course, people differ, but I wonder if the pier itself has honestly forgiven you. If the convention was not so selective as it is, I'm very sure you would win this convention. Now, I want you to tell me, Honourable Samba, how possible is it that you are going to convince your people in the pier to give you a vote for this hot seat? You know, sometimes your association with the pier makes you not to be... I don't know for the lack of a better word, please pardon me. It makes you somehow unreasonable. Unreasonable in the sense that even when we come to the choice of McDonald's which pays. I agree that maybe he could be associated with the pier. But surely Honourable Samba, if you sit there and look at the number one critic of the pier, who could that be apart from McDonald's which pays? Why can't we say that McDonald's which pays is the number one oposa of the pier? Now he has been given the mantle. Let's see how he is going to perfect the issues that he's been talking all these years. Why can't we think like that? Sure if McDonald's which pays is taken to the... Do we think that we believe that McDonald's which pays is going to be the UPN representative?  When you are yourself, Honourable Samba, you are a very good man. You can be the president of this country. Thank you very much Brother Alex. That is our last caller. Let's quickly respond to very few I think of the callers here. And then we close. Okay let me start with the most sincere of the callers we have. He actually touched me from his voice Brother Alex.  Let me start with McDonald's. As an individual I've seen some of his write up. Very good, well researched all along and opinion. But it's not him that is in question here. It's the UPND vis-a-vis the promises they made. They said they will not hire their callers into public institutions. Zesco, ECZ and elsewhere. We are seeing them renegating on that and doing exactly what they condemn. That's the gist of that matter. Then he says I'm the best of myself that I've ever been. As mayor I wasn't because I was being harassed left, right and center by Kada, minister, Zee and there. And I was in a rebellious mode because people were supposed to support me. We were making my life difficult as a mayor. Being delivered the town clerk is not buying fuel. Just so that people can say why haven't you picked up garbage. So everybody it was me against the world. So sometimes that's why I was not myself then. I'm not the best. The best part of my life I'm quite old now. Now I'm... Thank you first the same in this race. I was going to answer him now. First of all, like I said, what prompted me to apply. I did a lot of consultation. In 2014 I just woke up and applied. But now before I did it I consulted all major grassroots officials countrywide in all the ten provinces and all the districts. Of course not 100%. I'm not looking... In democracy look for 51 but from my history I get 70. And then I have also something different now. I've taken time to consult those at the top level. There are many, most of them former ministers and I've interacted with a few. And the ones I believe are key I can see that they will never mind if it's me who takes over.  I mean they don't like anyone junior to them. They're still in that mentality. But let me point out one huge difference between the 2014 convention and the 2023 convention. The 2014, the president of the party had died. Maiko Sata. And there was a vacuum. That's why you saw that confusion. The 2023 elections, the president of PF is alive. President Ed Galungu. And I believe he's the guru, he's the father of the party. He's alive, we're so lucky. I believe he will play a big role and I believe and I know him.