 Hi, my name is Lee Deforth and I'm the city's comprehensive planner and I am excited to be able to share some great news with y'all today. The city's comprehensive plan Columbia Compass Envision 2036 was recently awarded a South Carolina American Planning Association award for the outstanding planning project of the year for innovative use of technology and so we are thrilled to receive an honorable mention in this category and we are just really excited to see what Columbia Compass and continue to bring to the city of Columbia and the region. Just to a quick review of some of the reasons we think that it's GAPA, South Carolina American Planning Association, for short, went ahead and gave us this award or felt we were recognizable in this category was we really tested a lot of new technology during the planning process. So, we were lucky to be able to work with the folks in the city's public media relations department to really expand our use of technology, even pre COVID I mean now all these video chats and that sort of thing seem a little bit more normal but when we kicked off the project in 2018. This was not part of our daily planning approach right I mean we this was 2018 2020 and we were pretty much done with the public meeting process by the time that came around so we developed videos early on that we could share in social media the city could share on their YouTube and we made sure that those videos were captioned and it is amazing the number of folks that really commented that that made made a difference whether it was because they were hearing impaired or because they just didn't want their, their phone or their network. Speaking of them loudly. And so that was great. We also were really excited to be able to work with the team of flocking rally and Kate Maloney, creative to develop some really good branding and a very interactive and functional website for the project We're pretty proud of it's it's pretty phenomenal. It's easy to use and and we're able to continually update the content on there and they also suggested that we work with MailChimp to do some e-newsletters so while you're checking out that website if you can feel free please sign up for our Columbia Compass e-newsletter we send those out probably monthly but that's been a really great way for us to help folks stay engaged whether it's on planning efforts that we're working on or that are related to the plan Whether it's implementation at this point so we've been announcing some things in the departments and in other community organizations have been working on. We've also been able to get the word out on other community planning events so or related to the central Midlands Council government recently was working on their long range transportation plan so that's something that we were able to share with folks that were surprised that you might miss kind of in the hub above all of the news otherwise And you know we've also found that we've really dug into social media these past couple years and that's been a great way to reach folks you know just with a snippet here and there to try and keep folks engaged and educated about the plan, the recommendations and how we're moving forward with implementation So if you haven't had a chance, please do follow us at Cola Compass on Facebook and Instagram and we're pushing information out there as well. But just you know we really enjoyed the opportunity to Kind of work outside the box we had interactive online surveys that were online but also available at public meetings with laptop kiosks for people to be able to take surveys where we had streaming videos with captions during public meetings. So folks didn't feel like if they missed the presentation they couldn't just we see it so we could really spend that time getting to know folks and getting to know their concerns. So, and our hopes for Columbia so I guess that's a little bit of a snapshot of what we've done over the past several years to make sure that we were utilizing the technology we had at our disposal and of course now we're using zoom we're using it for public meetings we're using it for Boarding Commission meetings so we expect that with planning efforts going forward that technology will continue to be a huge part of how we reach people and we're just excited to have been recognized for our efforts. Thank you.