 Now, we can get started. Thank you all so much for your patience and for being here for this exciting opportunity to introduce a new development to you. My name is Gloria Said and I'm the Community Development Director for the City of Columbia. And we're excited that we get to kick off National Community Development Week here with you today with this Edistal Court ribbon cutting. So on behalf of the City of Columbia's Community Development Department, I would like to thank each of you for being here. And in regards to National Community Development Week, I would like to say that there are municipalities, counties and towns all across the nation that for one full week from April 11 through April 15th will highlight the many, many programs and projects funded with community development block grant known as CDBG and our home investment partnership dollars, which we refer to only as home, to highlight those projects that, you know, help to invest in communities and to revitalize communities. And so in short order, we do have a program for you today that will go as follows. We will start with the Honorable and Acting Esmeral Pro Tem today. Ed McDowell, he'll speak to us and then we'll hear from Will Brennan. Will Brennan is the Council District Representative for District 3 in the community where this beautiful project is located. We'll then hear from Don Oglesby. Don Oglesby is the CEO for Homes of Hope and he'll give you a lot of history and background on this particular project and, you know, the path that it took to get here. And then we'll hear from Ms. Betsy Watson. Ms. Betsy Watson is the Edistal Court neighborhood president. And without further ado, I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to our Mayor Pro Tem Ed McDowell. Gloria, thank you so very, very much. We hope everyone is, like we're doing, celebrating this week as we celebrate Community Developers Week. It's been great to be on this day, this sunny day, in the life of our city. Don, thank you again for being the, for lack of a better word, the visionary for this project. You've done us well. Our city, as we continue to move in the pathway of Community Development and Homes, it is, we thank you very, very much for what you've done. Isn't it beautiful? Isn't this beautiful? Come on now. Homes for Hope. And of course, if I were to reverse that, I would say thank God for Homes that gives hopeful attitudes and promise for this city of ours. Thank you for being here. Thank you for being a vital contributor of what we are trying to do here in the city of Columbia. Gloria, thank you for your leadership as we move forward, as we celebrate this week, Homes for Hope. Isn't that, doesn't that have a delightful sound to it? Homes for Hope. I think that could very well be a sermon for a preacher somewhere. What's that? I said, good thing you're retired. Yes, a good thing I am retired. I would use that very vehemently, and of course, while I've got such a good crowd out here today and since I am a retired preacher, Homes for Hope, let's take up an offering, amen. Thank you all for being here. Thank you. Good morning. How is everybody today? We're here to celebrate Community and what a wonderful, beautiful backdrop that Homes of Hope has created for us on this special week to celebrate Community. My name is Will Burnett. I'm the City Council District 3 representative, and let me be the first to welcome Homes for Hope and the new residents to the community. Not just District 3, but a very, very, very special community in the Attisto Court community. You're going to hear from Miss Bessie Watson, who loves this community more than anybody else, but hopefully the engaged residents of this wonderful development will come to love it as much as we do. So we're very thankful for that. Gloria and her team, thank you so much for all the hard work that you've put in to this. Don and your team out of Greenville and all over this wonderful state doing what you do for affordable housing initiatives. Also want to thank Fred Delk and his team at the Columbia Development Corporation for the long, long due diligence time they put in to making this happen. Fred, I think you told me 10 years. Hey, that goes to show we're committed, we're innovative, and we're determined here at the City of Columbia to create quality residential offerings in our districts and in our city. So again, thank you to everyone coming out here today. I feel like spring has officially sprung now. And in closing, a community is only as strong as its residents. And so I encourage the residents of Homes for Hope here in Columbia, South Carolina, get involved in your neighborhood association. Come to meetings with Miss Bessie and take pride in your parks. You've got five beautiful parks within a walking distance of here. It's a wonderful community and a wonderful city. Thank you so much. Thank you. Hello. So thank you all for being here. It's really a blessing, a blessing to see people that care about their community that are interested in what's going on. And I want you to know that we're thrilled to be here at Homes of Hope first development in Columbia, first of hopefully many. So thank you all for being here. And really, I want you to know how much this means to us. I would be remiss if I didn't give you a little bit of the Homes of Hope elevator commercial. So I'm going to do that. Since I have the podium, you can't make me stop anyway. So for those who don't know, we've been around for 24 years almost. We have built 675 homes across the state that are affordable for residents of South Carolina. And we're also very proud to have a workforce development program for men overcoming addiction in Greenville. Those two programs are dear to our hearts because they, I guess, invest opportunities for people to change their lives. Affordable housing to us is not the end of the story. A lot of times you see where you hand somebody the key and they walk in their house and everybody leaves. For us, it's the beginning of the story. We're very intentional about making sure we're there to offer relationships with the folks that live in our homes and try to connect them to resources for economic mobility. The end of the day, housing affordability should be a foundational place of stability but not the end goal. The end goal should be economic mobility so that you don't need affordable housing anymore one day so that we can help you become economically mobile and tear down some of the barriers that have held folks back from being economically mobile and successful financially. So this is a starting place for us and we're thrilled to see the houses behind us and we're very proud of what we've done so far but it's just the start, just the start. So there's some folks I want to thank and I have to write this down or I'll forget everybody. First of all, I appreciate that, you know, it was said that we had some vision here but quite frankly, we really didn't. We kind of joined a vision and I'll have to brag on Fred Delkin, Columbia Development Corporation. So 10 years, Fred and I have known each other for a long time. We both know that 10 years is really not that long in our work but it's still impressive that Fred had a vision for this place along with Bessie Watson. Both of them saw what could happen here and I remember when I first met Fred and he started telling me what he foresaw and what was here now didn't look like what he foresaw and now what you see here is really because of Fred and his initial vision. We wouldn't have even known about this without him and his vision and his perseverance and let me tell you, he did the hard work. The hardest work in a project like this is assembling the dirt, taking all the land and purchasing it and assembling it into one piece so that somebody like us can come in and people say nice things about us at a ribbon cutting. But Fred did the hard work and Fred, I want, here's your hand sir, I want everybody to recognize that man right there for what he's done and his board of directors was behind this the entire way. If there's anybody here from CDC Board, there you go, there's one. She's it. She's the most important person on the board. So really for them to help us not only assembling the land but also helping us in the financing of the project, which without which we could not have done the project at all. So thank you sir. Well deserved applause again for Fred please. So I want to thank Gloria and her team and she's got a large team and all of them are so helpful and always been there to help us get from point A to point B to point Z the whole way. They've literally been just one of the best cities we've ever worked with. No, I'm sorry, the best city that we've ever worked with. Now when I'm in another city, I'll tell them that too, but I want to thank the mayor pro tem who is here also city councilman that is here. It means a lot to us that we have support from folks that are in places of leadership. I also want to thank Bessie Watson for her support throughout this neighborhood association president is a key part of the team. Without her, we would not do with you wouldn't see what you see behind me without her because of her vision and encouragement and support. I want to thank my staff who is part of it. If you're on a homesfolk staff, please raise your hand. Let's give them a round of applause. I don't think we have any board members here today. Do we have any board members? Okay. So tell them I thanked them and said nice things about them. There's a part of this development that's really important is called money. So my banker over here, Ken Britton and the original banker in the project, Jay Rattery, who went to Banker Heaven after the project got started. So Ken took it over, but both of them, guys, you all know how much you mean to us and not only being supporters and lending money that we can finish this project, but just being good friends. Y'all really are amazing. So please give First Horizon Bank a hand and we wouldn't have anything to celebrate if we didn't have a really good general contractor to build it. Now I don't know if Michael Rabie is here today. Is he here? Is anybody? So Michael did, he's what I call the dirt developer. He moved all the dirt around and built the streets and roads to get ready for housing. So he's not here. I'll thank him later. But the builder is here, Kevin House. Raise your hand please, sir. And Skyler Satterfield, where are you? I don't see him. There he is. I'm telling you, Great Southern Homes is an awesome builder to work with. They have absolutely been with us as a partner the whole way, been over backwards numerous times to really dig in and be a part of this vision of affordable housing. And I can't say enough about Great Southern Homes and how great they have been to work with. And if you need a house built, please call them because they really deserve your business. They've done amazing work and are continuing to do work for us. So let's give Great Southern Homes a round of applause as well. Two other people I was going to thank. They're not here. So I'll thank them later. Jeff Randolph, in case you're wondering, in case he asked, and Randall Wolford, who were overseeing the development the whole way, really could not do this without them and their expertise. So to me, I just want to close with what I opened with. If what we do here is just building sticks and bricks, then we've failed. We really, if what we do here is help build community and families and individuals can connect to resources for economic mobility, then I think we can celebrate that. Please join me in thanking Homes of Hope, even though I'm at Homes of Hope, because they let us do this. The Board of Directors of Homes of Hope and all our supporters, without them we couldn't do it. So yay, Homes of Hope! And I will close with this, literally, really, I will. Gloria, I'm not kidding. You've been great to work with. And that means so much when we're working with government money. It has government restrictions and government rules. It's not that easy. Not because of her, but because of the other folks. But she has been great to work with in her whole team and staff. And I think Fernando is here somewhere, too. I forgot to mention, there he is in the back. Thank you, Fernando. Anyway, I'll hush now. Thank you all for being here. We're really celebrating this with you, and I'm very thrilled to be a part of it. Thanks. Good morning. And we thank God for this day. On behalf of the Edistor Court community, I would like to thank our Mayor, our current Mayor, our Recurman, and Mayor Benjamin, and City Council members, and County Council members past and present, because it was because of their leadership to bring this day to fruition. We thank Homes of Hope for bringing these beautiful homes to our community. We really do appreciate it. And working with us on this, I would be remiss if I didn't thank Fred Delk and Community Development for all of their hard work and just staying with the project. It has been a long time, but we appreciate it so much. I would also like to thank U.S. Representative Clyburn and Isaac McClinton. They were instrumental in bringing this to pass as well. I would like to thank all of the residents of the Edistor Court community, past and present for their support to bring affordable housing and this project to our community. And we welcome our new neighbors. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Watson, and to all of our speakers today. I told you it was going to be a short program. But before we move on to the ribbon-cutting piece, I too want to take an opportunity to thank a few people. First and foremost, I want to recognize my staff, the community development staff, those of you who are around with the blue shirts on, some of you with white shirts. Would you all please raise your hands? Thank you all so much. You guys, I tell you this couldn't be done without your support. So today I'm telling you publicly thank you so much for all the hard work that you all do to help us accomplish those things that we're tasked with on a daily basis. In addition to that, I'm going to mention a couple of other departments that have been very helpful through this process with being planning and development, because we know we have to work through them to get those permits and things like that that were needed. I want to thank our Parks and Recreation Department for helping us to set things up for your comfort today. In addition to our public relations department, there's so much that we all have to do together to pull these things off successfully. So I do want to say to all of you, thank you so much. And also to our videographer that's here today, which is Seven Sunday, we appreciate you all being present. And you've done so much and you've got a couple other things to help us with this week in regards to community development week and celebrating our successes with using these federal dollars. And lastly, Homes of Hope and First Horizon, thank you for the refreshments. We want to make sure that you all grab a cookie and some water and the brochures just to find out a little more information about all those programs that we offer through the City of Columbia's Community Development Department. So as Don said, housing is one thing. But if we can't do anything beyond that to enrich people's lives, then we're missing the point. So please take the time to capture those other brochures to see what other programs that we do provide through community development. And lastly, I do want to recognize our citizen advisory committee members who are here today. I know that I have this wonderful lady, Ms. Wanda Cannon, sitting right in front of me. Are there any other CAC members here today? We can't do our work either. They're like our board and they get to look at the applications and decide who's going to get funding, you know, to recommend who gets funding to our council members. So I thank you for being here today. And this is your neighborhood too, right? OK, fabulous. So having said that, we're going to go ahead and move into our ribbon-cutting portion of the program. So if I can ask our individuals that's on the program that we can step behind here where you see the ribbon. And once we perform the ribbon-cutting, there are two units open that you'll be able to view. And again, thank you all so much for attending today.