 Good afternoon. My name is Paul Kincaid. I'm Associate Administrator for Communications and Congressional Affairs at the Federal Transit Administration. And I'm proud to be one of the four presidential appointees at the FTA from the Biden-Harris Administration. I'm joined by Sean Egan, Director of Transportation for the City of Durham. And I want to acknowledge FTA's Region 4 Administrator, Abette Taylor, and her Deputy Administrator as well, Dudley White, who are on the line. They do a wonderful job managing our federal transit investment in North Carolina and throughout the Southeast. We just announced we are awarding grants to 70 transit agencies in 39 states that will help improve the safety and reliability of America's bus systems. These grants range in size from $50,000 to nearly $23 million, and they're available through FTA's grants for bus and bus facilities. They support modernizing and improving the most widespread form of transit in America, the bus. In addition, these grants will help dozens of communities buy new technology buses, such as electric, that reduce or eliminate greenhouse gas emissions, promote cleaner air, and help the climate crisis. The City of Durham will receive $10.8 million to improve Durham Station Transportation Center, the city's busy transit hub, it's one of the largest grants in this program. That hub has thousands of riders boarding buses every day, and these improvements will add eight bus bays and redesigned bus lanes, allowing transit agencies to add bus frequency while also improving safety. It will also install canopies in the passenger waiting areas to shelter people from the rain. It will allow more buses to run on go Durham and go triangle routes, creating better access for residents and students. And with continued space for intercity buses like Greyhound, Megabus, and Flixbus, it will strengthen a hub that allows more riders to more easily connect to local and regional destinations in North Carolina and throughout the South. All of this will enhance access and mobility, particularly for the two-thirds of people who don't have a car. The project will also further Durham's climate goals by providing spaces for electric bus charging and installing solar panels on new bus island canopies. These panels will generate enough energy to make the energy use of the station potentially a net positive. City leaders introduced two electric buses to go Durham's fleet last year, and they plan to ramp up the electrification program in the months and years ahead. This station upgrade will set the stage for that effort. FTA is happy to play a role in maintaining and improving go Durham's bus service. In total, we're going to award over four hundred and nine million dollars to improve our nation's bus transportation systems. These grants were announced by Secretary Pete Buttigieg and FTA administrator Nuria Fernandez earlier this week. With this funding, transit agencies all over the country are going to be able to support, build, repair, expand and improve fleets and the facilities that support them. This is especially important during the pandemic, which showed us just how many frontline workers and others rely on the nation's bus systems to get to jobs and other opportunities. Importantly, these grant awards will take on the greatest challenge of our time, the climate crisis, by helping transit agencies transition their fleets to electric and other zero emission technologies. When we put more zero emission buses on the road, as so many transit agencies large and small are doing across the nation, we take a major step forward toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Converting bus fleets and buying the equipment to power and maintain them are big ticket items, so the administration is ready to do our part to help offset that cost. Now, before I turn this over to Sean to supply a few more details about Durham, I want to make sure I take a moment to touch on the bipartisan infrastructure law. It was signed by President Biden last November, and it provides a hundred and eight billion dollars for transit over the next five years. It's the largest investment in federal transit in our history. Thanks to the bipartisan infrastructure law, we did announce just the other week more than one and a half billion dollars of total grants for buses across the country, most of them low and no emission buses. This additional transit funding at the federal level will allow us in partnership with local programs like Go Durham to expand and modernize transit, building equity by connecting more people in underserved communities while we take on the climate crisis. Now, let me turn this over to Sean for a few remarks. In the meantime, if you have any questions, please click the Q&A button at the bottom of your Zoom screen, the Q&A button on your Zoom screen, and we'll be able to answer any questions that you have after Sean is done. Thank you for your time, Sean. The floor is yours. Thank you so much, Paul. My name is Sean Egan. I'm the director of transportation for the city of Durham. The city is responsible for the Go Durham bus and paratransit service, and we also coordinate regional and intercity bus offerings that operate out of Durham Station. Combined, all of these services offer 15,000 boardings a day at Durham Station, and we want to provide a high quality experience for our riders at Durham Station. So we began the planning process for this project by reaching out and engaging with our riders and asking them, how can we improve your experience at Durham Station? What we heard from them was they want better canopy coverage. They want to see more of the canopy area so that they are protected from the elements. We're currently at about 20% coverage. This project takes us to 80% coverage. They wanted to see more seating available and more comfortable space while they wait for their buses to arrive and while they're getting ready to transfer between buses. Wanted better customer information on the platform. They wanted to be able to use restrooms on the platform as many of our riders are transferring and have limited time to go into the building for that need. So we started this project also with an understanding that we wanted to grow our system and our service. We want to add frequency. We want to provide better connectivity for our service. And so we are really at the maximum right now of how much service we can run in and out of Durham Station. So this project will enable us to expand that capacity, run more frequent services, and provide better connectivity to destinations across Durham. We're focused on this need and the needs of these riders because we know that investments in public transportation have a strong equity benefit. Over 80% of our riders are people of color. Over 70% have incomes below $25,000 a year. And as Administrator Kincaid said, two thirds live in a zero car household. So transit is their transportation. So as we look at this investment, we're so grateful to our federal partners at the US Department of Transportation, Federal Transit Administration, and also to US Representative David Price, whose letter of support for this project was a key part of our application to the FTA last year. So we're getting ready right now to finalize the design of this project and then looking at construction. We'll be continuing to engage our riders and our community throughout that design process to make sure that what we bring forward fully reflects the best of what we can provide to meet the needs of our riders and our community. And with that, I'm happy to answer any questions. Thanks, Sean. I appreciate it. And we hope to see a lot of great work being done there around Durham and the rest of the triangle by you and the folks who get to ride your service. Again, if you have any questions, click the Q&A button at the bottom of your Zoom screen, fill out the form, and we'll be happy to answer them. In the meantime, Sean, I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about the timeline for this project and when we can expect to see it in service. So we'll be undertaking the design of this over the next year. And we really want to make sure with our community that the concepts that we've developed to date really hit the mark. But assuming that we get that validation that we hear from the community that everything that we've brought forward in the concepts is on the mark, then we could start construction in 2023 and then look at potentially completing construction by the end of 2024. So we want to move quickly. Our riders have told us they want more improvements more quickly, and we aim to deliver this project to address that need. That's great. Kylie Marsh asks, how long will construction take for the new bus lanes and the canopies? But she also wants to know what the environmental impact of that construction will be. So we think that this is going to have a really strong, beneficial environmental impact. As we talked about, this project will provide charging equipment for our battery electric buses, two of which are in service. We have six more on order, and we're looking to transition our fleet away from fossil fuels and to battery electric, and the charging stations that will be part of this project enable that transition. We're also adding solar panels on the canopies to try to collect as much power from renewable sources as possible, and even to have a net positive impact collecting more power from our solar panels than we use to run our facility. So the overall environmental impact of this, we're really doubling down. We're taking a sustainable mode of transportation, which is our bus transit service, and then we're adding battery electric buses that are zero emissions, and we're also adding renewable energy to this. So the net environmental benefit should be very positive. And Sean, while you're spotlighted, I know you talked about it a second ago, but can you address the timeline of when you expect the canopies and lanes to be open? So we'd like to start construction in 2023 and complete construction in 2024. We know that that's an ambitious schedule, but as I said, our riders have told us time and again that they want their improvements delivered quickly, and so we'll be making every effort to do that. Great. Leonata Inge asks if Durham Station will keep its look designed by the former Freelon architect and also wanted to know if the renovation of Durham Station has anything to do with the large number of apartment buildings that have popped up around the station. So the building at the Durham Station Transportation Center was designed by Philip Freelon. He is a Durham treasure, and we celebrate his legacy with that building. So there will be no changes to the building itself, but we are looking at all of the exterior spaces. How can we reconfigure that space, make the best use of that to address pedestrian safety, to address expansion, and to make this a welcoming, open, and inclusive space, all of the exterior spaces so that many folks are visiting Durham from as far as Washington DC or Atlanta, Georgia, and they're riding intercity buses in. And Durham Station is the first place that they see in the city of Durham, and we want that to be an open, welcoming, inclusive experience for our folks coming to visit us, as well as the folks who live here and use our services every day. Great, thanks, Sean. And we'll wait 15 or 20 seconds to see if anybody else has any questions. In the meantime, if there are no other questions, I want to thank Sean Egan for joining us today, as well as our regional office staff, Yvette Taylor and Dudley White. And thank you all for tuning in today to this Zoom to ask questions. If you do have any questions as you write your stories or do your broadcast, please feel free to touch base with the folks who invited you to this session. They'll be glad to answer any questions that you might have. It doesn't look like we have any questions in the pod. So Sean, I'll give the last word to you, anything you'd like to add for the folks there in Durham who are gonna get a chance to have this wonderful facility sometime in 2023, it sounds like. So we are so excited and so grateful for the support and partnership of the federal government. And we think that this is gonna be a project that you're incredibly proud of. We're gonna make our community proud and really focus our investment in residents and communities that have too often been excluded from the benefits of transportation investments, particularly from the federal government. And that's something that is top of mind for us, making sure that this investment really addresses those justice 40 communities that have too often been either underserved or harmed by transportation investments. And that's the focus of our effort is intentionally benefiting those communities with these projects. So we're very excited to be moving this forward and very grateful for the support. Thank you, Sean. I know it's a big time of the year around and we can't quite compete with March Madness, but I hope we've given you a few million things to celebrate there in Durham. And we appreciate you taking the time today. Thank you. And thank you all. Have a great day from Washington.