This is the VOA Special English Agriculture Report. A drought across much of the United States is forcing farmers to make difficult decisions. Damage to corn and soybeans is already severe in the hardest hit areas. Alan Bowers Jr. is a farmer in the state of Illinois in the Midwest. He explains the situation this way. You get up in the morning and you think it might be another 13 months before we get a paycheck. The corn and soybean crop is our paycheck. The corn on his farm is so dry, the stalks break apart easily. The corn is unusable. So in the middle of July, Alan Bowers decided to cut down his crop to avoid a total loss. He says it can only be used to feed animals. Alan Bowers Jr. and his wife Lori are hoping for a small insurance settlement to help them pay their bills until next year. Lori Bowers says people don't realize we have no boss and we have nobody to help us and it's tough. You have to work together. You have to work with a husband and a wife and family and together try to work through it. Alan Bowers could also lose their soybeans to the record high temperatures and lack of rain in the worst drought in more than 50 years. And Alan Bowers says the farm itself may not survive if next year is anything like this. The farm has been in his family for four generations. The drought is affecting the Mississippi River, the nation's longest and most economically important waterway. Last year, heavy rains flooded parts of the Mississippi. This year the level is so low shipwrecks normally hidden underwater can be clearly seen. Jason Brown is a hydraulic engineer with the Army Corps of Engineers. He says the low water hurts farmers who send crops down the river. 60% of all grain exported from the United States travels on barges along the Mississippi. But he adds that other goods like chemicals and coal need to be transported down the Mississippi as well. An Army Corps of Engineers survey ship called the MV Pathfinder looks for places along the river that are not deep enough for traffic. Crews then either dredge the sites to make them deeper or mark them with warning buoys. The ship's captain says companies have to lighten loads of their barges when the water level is low. To read, listen, and learn English, go to VOASpecialEnglish.com. You can also find our captioned videos at the VOA Learning English Channel on YouTube. For VOA Special English, I'm Carolyn Presuti.


I don't want to speak for very long. I mean, in particular, given that we have a crowded room, I think it's much more valuable to have an interactive exchange than for me to give you 40 minutes of monologue and then have five minutes for questions. In fact, just to give an organizing theme to this, I wanted to, as we're, hang a number of specific issues on the overall theme of big data. The digital agenda for Europe is, as I said, an extremely wide sort of horizontal policy covering everything from investment in broadband networks to research policy for virtual human brains and you could get a long monologue from me if I were to cover all of that ground. I thought it was useful to pick on the big data theme because increasingly I think people are aware that there are massive benefits available from dealing with the avalanche or the tidal wave of data that is generated online and by all sorts of digital activities. But accompanying these challenges, there are obviously, so these opportunities, there are also some challenges and what we're trying to do in the commission and 2012 is actually an important year for a number of those work streams is to obviously promote the good and remove the obstacles or the concerns or the things that would endanger trust in particular that might otherwise slow down this sort of very positive development. And that in particular because now more than ever all commission policies are, as it were, vetted by reference to their growth potential. More than ever we need a growth story to accompany our policies and in order to get them prioritization in the normally relatively slow moving Brussels political machinery. So some of the things I thought are useful to talk about are internet security because of course the security of the treatment of data and of exchanges online in digital form is absolutely essential for trust and to unlock that potential. Perhaps a few words on data protection which is extremely important, I think for trust by individuals in all that is going on and that is enabled by the use of their data online. Perhaps a word on the internet of things, the increasing tendency of devices to communicate between each other without direct human intervention for a variety of useful purposes. And something on public data, namely the unleashing of the more or less dormant economic potential that lies in the filing cabinets or the data centers of public administrations in Europe. I might start on that one because it's in a way the most proactively growth inducing element. There exists already a European directive on what's rather unfashionably called public sector information. This concept has I think got a little bit of a new lease of political life in particular in the UK and the US by being rebranded as open data. And the underlying idea is that a lot of information is gathered for specific public purposes, no doubt well used for those purposes but could be combined or mashed in all sorts of other ways that the public administration doesn't even think of to drive all sorts of social useful and perhaps also profitable applications in the hands of others. The regime that we have at the moment dating to about a decade ago would be improved in a number of ways with a proposal that Nellie Kruse steered through the commission in December and which is therefore now on the table of council and parliament. The key elements of which are, first of all, establishing the principle that any publicly accessible data in the member states should be available for reuse so that the starting point is that if it's there and is not covered by the Official Secrets Act then it should be reusable also by private parties for all sorts of promising social and commercial purposes. Secondly, that in principle it should be available at marginal cost meaning simply the additional cost of providing it to an applicant should be the charge imposed which should again have an enormous stimulating effect but doesn't in most cases involve any real loss of income to the public press. Thirdly, we would argue or we have proposed that it be extended to various cultural heritage institutes but there with somewhat more safeguards on the charging side because their use of their material for self-financing is often rather more central to their continuing activity. Unfortunately, that the material in question should be made available in machine readable formats. That means that you don't just receive it in a PDF of an Excel sheet. You actually get the Excel sheet so you can immediately start manipulating the data in useful ways. Now, this I often find when I talk about it can seem very abstract. There's one or just decide one example very concrete and I think immediately persuasive example I can give. There is an app available here in Dublin based upon information from Fingal Council and the Dublin Corporation and so on which allows you to find handicapped parking spaces anywhere in the city. You just click on the app, it uses geolocation and it finds you the parking spaces closest to you. You don't have to apply in triplicate to the Department of Social Welfare in order to get this information it is fed to you by a service. There is huge potential for this and we would like to enable that. On the issue of data protection, this is again an area where the commission has made a very big proposal just a week or perhaps two weeks ago towards the end of January to revisit the existing European data protection rules which date to 1995. And there we are very much acting in a single market sort of logic. That was part of the logic of the original rules that we would have common rules and data protection in Europe. The reality of things is that the implementation of that old directive has led to a proliferation of different approaches in practice. A very, I think, well-known and recent demonstration of that is the reactions in a variety of member states to the picking up of domestic Wi-Fi traffic as part of the Street View exercise where some data protection authorities required the material to be immediately deleted, others required it in fact to be conserved for the purposes of an inquiry, that there was a degree of variation in how that issue was approached. What is proposed now is a regulation so a truly common set of rules. Companies operating in Europe would have a single data protection authority that they would address based upon their of main business. We would establish a coordination mechanism between data protection authorities in order to, as it were, work out and practice some of the differences of application that can arise. We would also remove quite an amount of unnecessary red tape, prior notification of data transfers when in fact an ex-post enforcement rule may be sufficient. Much enhanced arrangements for companies to bind themselves either within a corporate group or with their contractual partners when they're transferring data outside of Europe in order to get the full benefits of global cloud computing of where the actual place of distribution of data is distributed on efficiency grounds and not just on, as it were, narrow jurisdictional grounds. Some raising of the standard of protection would accompany that. There are some new concepts such as a privacy impact assessment requirements for data protection officers in larger companies which have important data processing activities. What has become known in, let's say, in familiar language as the right to be forgotten, namely a right for individuals to request their data to be removed from places that they had posted publicly at an earlier stage and refinements on important but contested concepts like what is personal data, what is consent. This makes an extremely complex but very important proposal that we do think will, when adopted, and it won't be fast, I would think, will massively enable a truly European if not even international economy of services built upon personal data but with a level of protection that reassures people and which can de facto export high standards as well because a common European market working to that standard will be hard to ignore. I mentioned cloud computing there in passing. There are, of course, fashions in jargon and digital jargon is no exception. Now, there are plenty of people who say, well, this is in fact a concept that was there 15 years ago and was perhaps a little bit ignored when the era of the PC was with us and is now back but it's back in a big way, namely this idea that huge amounts of information can be held much more efficiently and processed much more efficiently for individuals but perhaps more importantly for companies in centralized data centers with much lower capital investment for individual business users, for example, with the use of all the expertise that centralized cloud providers can bring. But it is again like many new business models, something that comes with fears and concerns and uncertainties. We're working under Nelly Kruse's stewardship on a cloud computing strategy for this year, hopefully out by the summer, which would address issues like jurisdictional and liability, uncertainties, things like standard model contract terms that could gain traction in the market. There's a research side to it as well but perhaps one of the more concrete elements which she announced last week is a European cloud partnership between the private and the public sector. The idea here being that public sector purchasing of cloud services represents 20 or perhaps 25% of the market and if public sector purchasers can agree on common specifications, not only technical ones but contractual ones, security specifications, liability specifications, this can be an enormous push to developing more or less standardized approaches in the market and that can itself be an enormous, give enormous impetus to this concept taking off in what is typically in Europe rather fragmented landscape of differing practices in both the public and the private sector procurement area at the moment. I'll close on the issue of internet security more generally because I think I have already broken my promise about not doing a monologue. The commission will bring in autumn of this year an internet security strategy for Europe which will combine a number of elements but one of the most important ones would be to put on a legislative footing what has for the moment been worked out in softer ways between the commission and the member states obligations regarding the setting up of national authorities responsible for internet security, certain baseline or benchmarks that such authorities would need to meet, establishing requirements for holders of data or other major operators online so that would be telecom companies but also let's say banks or energy companies that whose operations are completely dependent on online security obligations for them to notify security breaches to these authorities, something that telecom companies are already required to do but we think it can be generalized and to create incentives for private sector players to take network security more seriously. At the moment, despite the absolute centrality of the broadband network to the functioning of society, government and the economy, in a lot of quarters, security is seen as a cost, as something to be minimized therefore and not as something that is so integral to operations that it needs to be right in the heart of strategic planning. That's a fairly rapid run through but perhaps not rapid enough but on that basis I would be certainly very happy to take questions or engage in discussion. Thank you. Okay.


My name is Susan Reed, and I've lived in Ashland for about 45 years, maybe a little longer. My husband and I graduated from Cal State Dominguez Hills, better known as the Watts Campus in Southern California, and part of our study was in neighborhoods and how neighborhoods decayed and were often raised, were destroyed, and what that meant to communities. We discovered Ashland, and we looked at the railroad district, which was at that time redlined by banks. They weren't loaning money, and unless you tore down the structure and then built something new, usually a multiplex. And so we chose to move to Ashland and brought our two children, two young children, and I was pregnant with a third and had Sarah when we moved here. And we started in construction because we couldn't sell our college degrees, it wasn't like we could just hand them over and somebody would pay us money for them. And I'd grown up in construction, so Rod was willing to work with some contractors, some builders, and learned the trades, and we ran a small company, and we specialized in saving old homes in the railroad district. We'd call in the movers and we'd lift them up and put in a new foundation, we'd do new electrical and plumbing and make them available for money from the bank. And in this small class at Cal State Dominguez Hills, there was another person that proved to be very important to the city of Ashland, John Friganese, who came to us as a planner. He and Rod had graduated in a very small class in geography from Cal State. And he was able to bring federal money to the railroad district, and Rod worked with a wonderful woman, Marjorie O'Hara, and put together a historic district for the National Register of Historic Places. So that was kind of our beginning here. And we would move from house to house, fixing up old houses. Our youngest daughter said she'd lived in five houses by the time she started kindergarten. So that was kind of a picture of what we were doing. We had five elementary schools in the city of Ashland when I moved here. There are three now. And those families said, oh, we have kids, we want a backyard, we don't want to buy a condo. We're going to go to Medford, or Talander, Phoenix. And so I think that we lost a certain percentage of our population just to the fact that prices here for real estate are high, whether it's a small condo, a vacant lot, or a nice home. And I don't know that we can solve that. We didn't solve it in the 20 years. I was on the council. I think we made inroads. I think we made some things better and the possibility of less expensive homes. But I don't know how you solve the problem. Early on, I was involved with schools in the sense that I had children in school. And I went to a school board meeting at the high school. And I spoke out and challenged the board on some decision. After the meeting, a small group of people came up to me and asked me to run for city council, which I had not at all thought about or planned. But I realized in conversations and in reality, and just the reality of taking my kids to Medford to do parks and rec and to take swimming lessons, that although Ashen was very good about putting parks together for tourists, for visitors, and we were very good at looking at our business community and trying to enrich it because it had fallen on hard times in the early 70s. We weren't spending a lot of time as a community for families, for putting things together for families. And I took that as my lead to run for the city council. One of the things I enjoyed about running for city council was walking the neighborhoods. And I would talk to people in their homes. I mean, I was only bitten by a dog once and only saw something that seemed very private that I shouldn't see once. But most of the time, I would see people in their yards. I tried to walk at a time when people would be out watering or working in their garden. And I tried not to walk right at dinner time, but when people got home from work. And I had great conversations with people and learned things about different blocks in the city that I would not have known. And some of the people, and I think with reason, felt that the city council wasn't open to them. It wasn't available for them to approach or to that no one was listening to them. And so being in their front yard with them gave them a chance to tell me things that I don't think I would otherwise have heard. And that made a difference to me. One of the criticisms or compliments that I received was, one, I didn't know how to hold a grudge. And two, that I would change my mind, and it was true. Because sometimes we'd have testimony, and I would think, well, this really conflicts with what I've read and understood before. So I have to back off this decision, at least for now, or sometimes make a different decision. And for some council members who had come to a conclusion before the meeting started, that was very difficult because, you know, but I enjoyed it. On that ballot, Ashton became the first nuclear free zone by a vote of its people. So two things were happening to me. For me, one was my work trying to look at issues that involved families and children. And the second one was taking pride in our nuclear free zone. I'm going to just say that my time on the city council for 20 years, I was really started on the council in November of 81, as soon as the election was over, and to 02, so for 20 years. And that's bookend with work having to do with schools. So lower Walker Street, in front of what is now the middle school, and was then the junior high school, was a dirt road. And we had a son who was running track, and we could see the dust from Granite Street just cover the track as these kids were working out. And that's not good for their lungs. And I came to the city as a new counselor and said, we need to, we need to pave lower Walker.  It's a county road. The school district is on one side and the state college on the other. So you have four governmental entities, and we just, it's too complex. We can't go ahead with this. So I asked Dr. Farquhar, who was then a pediatrician in Medford, and his nurse to come and testify to the city council. We weren't on television, but we were on radio. And I think that it helped that the council members and the city staff knew that their words were going out to the general community. And their words were that this was very dangerous for the kids to be inhaling that small particles of glass. And in a very short time, lower Walker was paved. And I was very happy. I was very happy. And I'll just jump to the bookend, the other end of the 20 years. By then I had a granddaughter attending Bellevue Elementary School. And what I realized about Bellevue Elementary School when I went to pick up Eurasia was that some of the kids that lived on Upper Tolman Creek or in the Green Meadows and the nicer neighborhoods in the Upper Tolman Creek, their parents were picking them up in cars. But half of the kids or more were walking down Tolman Creek to the other side of Ashland Street. They lived in apartments and smaller homes. And their parents probably were working because they were walking down a street that only had ditches on each side. So to get out of the way of a car, they literally had to get into a ditch. There were some little paths that went along by the ditch. And I said, we have to put sidewalks in. Because the kids that are walking down a busy street, Tolman Creek is a busy street, need to be able to walk on sidewalks.  And it was actually completed after I left the city council. But I like to think that my time on the council was bookend by these two things. The city of Ashland is very lucky to be at an electric utility, to be buying wholesale from Bonneville. In a sense, it's not just the college and our wonderful theater, OSF, but it's our electric utility that makes the city of Ashland different from other smaller cities in Oregon. We can take the profits from that and reinvest them in our city. So it's not like an investor-owned utility where the profits go somewhere else. The profits from the electric utility stay here in Ashland. And having that utility provided an opportunity for me to get involved in energy work. Literally the Bonneville Power Authority. Bonneville Power Authority is the entity that the city buys from. And because we had some wonderful staff members here and were able to develop a conservation and energy work, Bonneville used Ashland kind of as a beta project to try things out on. Dick Wunderscheid, who has recently retired from Bonneville Environmental Foundation, was able to put together many of these projects for Bonneville here in Ashland. And as a council member, I got to take part. So it was very instrumental for me to learn not just about electric utilities, but about the conservation that was possible. And how Ashland could really be a model for other cities. And this allowed me. I was asked to chair the Energy Advisory Committee for the League of Oregon Cities and the Association of Oregon Counties, which I did for more than 15 years. And we worked as small cities and large cities and tried to move in a direction that conserved energy. And we fought the takeover of Bonneville many times. And actually Scottish Power tried to come into Oregon and it was that committee and those leaders from the different communities that could turn away Scottish Power. A big mega utility that wanted into Oregon, wanted to elbow their way in. So that was a wonderful experience. I was asked then to represent Oregon Cities to the Bonneville Power Association, which I did for eight years on their consultation team, which took me to Washington and Idaho and Western Montana as well as all of Oregon. And at that same time, I was asked to be a board member for the League of Oregon Cities, which proved to be very rewarding. It was a time when Republicans and Democrats worked together to figure things out, to move ahead. And it was really important to know what smaller cities in Oregon were facing and how that differed from some of the larger cities and to sit with people and try to work things out. I thought it was a very rewarding time for me. And I hope and think that there was good work for the state of Oregon and a bigger community. Some of the things I did in the city of Ashland led to other things. And one of the early things I did was a project called Ed's Trains. And there was a man who grew up here in Ashland who loved trains to the point that he wanted to have his own caboose and cars. And he, as I say, he'd grown up here. So there were some members of actually the Ashland Public Works that helped the man that they'd gone to school with. Ed had some learning disabilities and it took help. He needed help from his friends to move these trains onto his property. Of course, moving these trains onto his property above Gresham was not pleasing to the neighbors. And they were very concerned about it. And it was my introduction to mediation, which I then studied and worked under Kate Geary and mediated for Jackson County. But my first meeting with Ed and the neighbors, we sat around a table and I was determined to have everyone speak, even the people that were reluctant, and not allow the people that wanted to take over to take over. So it was really one of my first times that I didn't have a gavel. I think I had a spoon. And I had a clock and I tried to make it so everyone would speak. But it really showed me that you can come to a conclusion that benefits the whole community. Ed was later died. And I don't think that his death has been resolved. But it was a wonderful experience to kind of enter into mediation as a workplace. And as I say, I enjoyed my work in mediation. Ed's home was burned and he was found dead. He was murdered and the murder was not resolved, in my understanding. And I think the trains were then removed, probably, by the same men that had taken them up to Ed. As I say, Ed was the nice kid in school that was a little bit slower than some of them. And they always kind of took care of Ed. And the same thing about his trains, he would want, and he would buy some, caboose some place. And then he'd get the old timers on the city public works with the heavy equipment to move the train up to his backyard in the alley behind Gresham. And it was wonderful. It was both wonderful and problematic. But we did resolve it. And he promised not to get any more trains. And that was the answer to our meeting. So much was given to me through the city and being a member of the city council.  And I think that when women get together, we're often willing to talk things out. We are willing to share more. And I think that it changed the complexion of the council because we came together, not always in agreement, but willing to talk about how we might move forward. And I'm not trying to exclude men either, Phil Arnold, Don Laws, certainly Greg Williams, who ran against me in a race and then was seated next to me on the council. Coming from different, I was probably more progressive, Greg, a wonderful businessman, more the Republican, I'm more the Democrat. But we saw the goal and we worked together to get there, to get to what was best for our community. And I thought that that was a very important element for the city of Ashton to have a council that was goal-oriented, was listening to the community. We hadn't made up our mind, but we were listening to testimony and then moving forward. And that was a wonderful time to work with the people on the council. And of course, the council changes. The city and the university had a great, of course, and it was the college. But our parks and rec worked with them and took over some of the fields and expanded softball, which was important in our family. So in taking in the state or the college saved money by having our parks and rec go in and take care of some of the fields. And then it provided both for the college and for the community. I thought that was a great idea. Of course, at the time, there was a swimming pool at the college. And when that was lost and they chose not to replace it, that was a loss for our community. We've expanded the YMCA, and that's been very important. But at the time, when you lose the only deep pool, the pool that you can play water polo in, I mean, we had a water polo team at our high school with no pool.  It just doesn't work. So we still have some places to go to expand for families here in Ashton. But we have lost families, too, in the last 40 years. So it's very, it's hard. It's hard. You were on city council when that whole north campus. John Fragonasi played a role there, too. He didn't want them to be all identical. He wanted little roof lines and staggering and just a more interesting complex. And I thought that that was important. I think that the university is really a very important part of our community. It really, in the early 70s, when Ashton was in such dire straits, I'm going to say every third or fourth store was closed in downtown. So to have the college then have jobs that were living wage and encouraging people to move here and raise their families here was very important. And of course, the students themselves are very important to the community, too, because they come out in the community and buy things and go out to eat. And so that's been very important. The expansion of OSF, and I'm talking during a pandemic, which has closed things down tremendously. But we're going to be on the other side of this. And those entities will come back and enrich our city because they have in the past. And that's what enriched our city in the early 70s. And I'm sure that we're going to come back out of this. But we're very lucky to be in electric utility. I'm just going to go back there because I can't tell you on the Board of the League of Oregon Cities how many cities just the lumber mill would close and they pretty much closed down their community. Or some entity would close, something would move, and their community would be gone. But because we can keep that money from our electric utility and because we have the university and we have this theater, we're a very fortunate city. We're located in a beautiful place. We have a beautiful location and backdrop. So that brings people here too. Rod and I were in the lodging business. We had a very small lodging business for 30 years. We went from construction to Rod lectured at the college for eight years in history and worked there. And we had this little lodging business. So we've had to find various ways to have an income to support our family to live here. I went back to school and got a master's in sociology. It was actually an interdisciplinary but I wrote about women who packed pairs. And so I have this one. This poem is called Pretty Packs. And I wrote this in the car after packing on the floor at SOS. Pairs wrapped securely in white paper. Neat diagonal lines. Rows of pretty pairs. Aspirin's at three. Thermos is filled with coffee, laced coffee. The Coke machine, 30 cents. Another Coke. Another break from a two hour race. How fast? How many boxes? 37 cents a box. $50 a day, $60 a day. More pain, more aspirin. More medical notes. More medicine at night. A note from a doctor. Cortisone shots. Another day. How long will the season last? Thank you. The women that packed pairs were just tremendous. I wrote poetry and a friend did some wonderful photography and it was a project that we were able to celebrate these traditional roles of women's work. Because women have packed pairs in Jackson County since World War I. And it's changed, but I was able to get in at a time in the 80s when the old houses were still up and some two or three generations of women would be pair packing. And it was tough work, a competitive work. But I really enjoyed working in that arena with these women with pairs coming down these chutes and going into bins and turning around. And we had to pack a certain weight and a box and a certain diagonal pattern with tissue paper. And the women would tell great stories, wonderful stories. And that was a gift to me to work there. It was my most embarrassing moment as a packer. We were packing out BOSC pairs before a fruit change. The middle bins were running full, but there were no large or small fruit for either the head or the foot of the line to pack. Most packers were sitting on steel roller belts between the lines. I was working foot and had come up to the middle to find fruit. Jenna, a packer with 20 years experience had never spoken to me before. She gave me a hard look and said, who are you? She continued to pack and refused to move up to the bin to allow me a space to park my packing horse and pack. I answered, Susan Reed. She asked again, who are you? I realized everyone on the belt was watching and listening for my answer. Again, I said, Susan Reed. Jenna turned her back on me and continued packing. I knew I had a right to the pairs. Jenna was second to head. Therefore, I had a priority to pack before she packed. Time seemed to stand still before I realized that my answer to her question, who are you? Should have been, I'm the foot. So being on the Ashton City Council kind of opened new doors and allowed me to move into new directions. I mean, there were so many wonderful people that I worked with. Jill Turner, city finance director, Dick Wunderscheid, who worked in several different arenas, but I consider him kind of the leader of conservation for the city of Ashland. Paul Nolte, we had a wonderful city attorney that was the kind of man that you could walk up to and tell me your idea and he would say, nice idea, it's not gonna work and these are the reasons or I'll support you on that and this is how we'll move forward. So we had a dynamic mayor for 12 years, Kathy Golden Shaw, and it was fun to work with her. I think that Kathy ran a very dynamic campaign and she is a wonderful campaigner, wonderful campaigner. And so, and she had a lot of ideas and modernized the city in ways. John Fruganesi, I always credit him with putting the city into computers. I mean, literally I think our finance department was using pencils and ledgers, but between the two, between Kathy and John Fruganesi and Brian Omkwes then as administrator, being a little bit more old school, a little bit more reluctant, but willing to see the future and move forward with it. That was a wonderful time. That was a wonderful time. As I say, we didn't always agree, but I think we always worked towards the best solution for the community. We only crossed swords kind of at the end and that was over a wastewater treatment plant. So our wastewater treatment plant is very high tech. People came from all over the world to see it when it was completed. And my argument in favor of holding on to the water that we've used and cleaning it and returning it to the creek was just something I'd learned as a child. When you borrow something, you return it in better shape than when you had, when you borrowed it. You take a car from a friend and you wash it and you fill the gas tank and then you return it. That's the way you're supposed to do it. That was just what I'd learned as a child and practiced. And we could not take the water and then dispose of it as if it had no value. One, we might need to use it again, but two, it had value to the creek and not just to fish, but of everyone downstream. And it was a big project and it was very divisive in the city. And to be on the other side of an argument with Kathy was a difficult place to be. She's a very dynamic person. She's the person you always want on your side. But I'm very proud of the city moving forward with that project because I think that, one, it allows us to reuse the water if we need it. But we're treating the water as if it has value. And of course, in the 21st century, which we are now well into, water is the gold of the 21st century. Water is so important. So I'm happy to have been part of that project. I think it's a good change and I'm looking forward to it because I think what's happened is that we've, as I say, Kathy Golden Shaw was a dynamic mayor trying to modernize the city. And so she worked with the administrator and had goals. But I think that in the last few years, I have to say I was very disappointed that we didn't have a professional city administrator. Adam Hanks has grown up through the ranks and I think he does a good job. So it's not Adam Hanks, but it's just having a fire chief who might be a wonderful person trying to manage a city. We not only have the electric utility, we own the cemeteries. We have the graveyards. We have the water. We have the streets. We have it all. We have a very complicated system. And to ask somebody that is a great fire chief to take that over isn't fair. And I think that having the mayor who is not a professional in charge of that is wrong. And I think that the step that the city took to put professional management in place was a good step. And I expect good things from it. I think we need a licensed engineer in public works. I think we need a professional in the seat of city administrator. Those are very important roles. One of the things that I learned, the city of Ashton loves to have parks and rec as a separate entity. They have their own budget though, the separate entity. But as the attorney for the League of Oregon explained to me and council members at the time I was on the council, we could elect every board we wanted to. We could have a wastewater board, a street board. We could have as many. The city council is the only entity that's in charge of the budget. The city council has to take full responsibility for every decision parks and rec makes. And that's been difficult because people kind of wanna push off difficult things to someone else. Oh, it's their problem, it's not my problem. And that happened with our senior center and I was very, very sad to see that happen and go through that because we're one community to think that our wonderful community center that John Fragonese brought funds to rebuild didn't have a maintenance budget and has fallen into disrepair after being completely renovated. Okay, it's been 30, 35 years ago, whatever but if we'd had a maintenance budget in place people would still be playing cards and dancing there today and having their wedding receptions which our oldest daughter's wedding reception was there and it was great. It was wonderful. She was married in the park across the street. We walked across the bridge and had the reception in the community center. And that's what I think is wonderful about Ashland that we can really really use the facilities here and that the people feel like it's theirs, that the community center is their community center and I was really disappointed to see it fall into disrepair. One of the things that I learned was working across the table with people that came to the table with different ideas and I can say Republicans and Democrats or especially in this very divided time, it's so important to be able to sit at the table and work things out. And we did do that. And I think that Oregon is pretty famous for having Republicans who were conservationists that cared about the river and people here in Ashland, they were worried about the budget but they wanted to spend money on parks and recreation and have places for the children to be, to recreate and to take care of the community, the larger community. I think that that's really important and I enjoyed doing that with women and with men and with Democrats and with Republicans and trying to find the answer, to move forward together. And that was really important to me. Being on the council opened all these doors for me and whether it was travel to be on this wonderful trip to England and Wales or mediation or working for Bonneville representing cities in Ashland, I mean in Oregon. These were all really important gifts to me and I enjoyed doing it. There are so many things about the city that I really take pride in and still live here and feel pride in the city. So I have, there are three generations of our family now here in the city and I'm very happy to have lived in Ashland these years and to work and to be part of the city.


Moving on to the news, the World Bank and the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and the Food Security have also commended their state's governor, engineer Shane Mckinley, for his effort in enhancing livestock production. Our recommendation was given during our 2D livestock production stakeholders meeting as the event aims to implement our $500 million World Bank project to improve productivity, commercialization and livestock value chain resilience. The state has significant potential in livestock production. The aim of the project is to improve productivity, commercialization of livestock value chain. If you improve productivity and commercialization, certainly the citizen will get more money than we will certainly have a lot of things to do around and we also help in our nutrition, food nutrition that we are talking about. You cannot do nutrition without the livestock so that is the gain of Nigeria, certainly to improve productivity and commercialization of our livestock. So this is another big plus, you know, to his excellent effort. It took a lot for us to be where we are now but it takes a man of leadership with vision, you know, to bring us to the point where we start having project air and air from development organization that suits the strategy and the policies and the program of the state. And this we believe in short term, medium and long term is going to create a major impact on our livestock value chain and the state, especially the livestock area. Less in land here, which will make the implementation of this kind of hope faster in other zones. So our teaming farmers, especially the livestock farmers in Oyesi, should be happy that at least we have the kind of our excellence in engineering and the leadership of Dr. Dibu Akade and everything will fall in place and they will be happy.