 We're going to follow the program as outlined, and I'm going to take the time now to ask our mayor to come up and give us opening remarks. For those of you outside of earshot, I've been constantly teased in the front two rows, so it's good to be able to come up here briefly and have a word. I'm excited about the work that this city, and I use that word very broadly, our city government, our county government, our wonderful NGOs, our neighborhood associations, all of our incredible civic leaders here, private property owners, community leaders, our fantastic parks and recreation department, and some of our great supporters in the U.S. Congress of Mayors and USDA and NRCS, and everyone just coming together recognizing our role that we all have in helping build healthier, stronger communities. The fact that we're focused on building strong community gardens and pollinated gardens that we're focusing on food insecurity and how we address that across our entire community. We're focusing on living longer, healthier lives by encouraging physical activity, encouraging people to get out and walk and beat the scourges of diabetes and heart disease and stroke, realizing that if we do those things, we can live longer, healthier lives with the people that we love, and it all comes together, and that we can include our children in understanding their role in this process. It's what a great community does together. Thankful to the U.S. Congress of Mayors and all of our other supporters for providing a significant portion of the funding to make this a reality. So I want to say, just say thank you to our neighborhood leaders, our wonderful North Columbia business leaders. This is all coming together so well, and this is a representation of the work of so many. Randy, thank you for you and your team. You guys have to do the work every single day. Jackie, thank you so much. Thank you so much for the incredible work that you've done. You do actually have a very green thumb, something I envy every single day. But this is what happens when we come together, and I'll let someone else go through the bullet points. Maybe Betsy or someone else who's going to speak and go through all the bullet points that highlights exactly what we have behind this. But this is a garden. This is a community garden built with love. We are investing in our community. We're investing in our children. And as a result, we're going to have a stronger, healthier community. So thank you to everyone of you for what you do. God bless you. I agree with everything the mayor said. Now, this, this is, uh, it is a good day because everything has come together for sure. And this area started out with the folks who just wanted a garden, fresh food, and everyone had a stake in it. Everyone had a plot, so forth and so on. But this is an example of making use of everything, all of the square footage. And the neighborhood folks have been the driving force behind behind this, along with staff. But but it's all about the people who live here. Um, it's not a selfish venture. It's a venture that helps to showcase this neighborhood, showcase this area and showcase the efforts to make sure that we all do have an opportunity to not just, uh, do the fresh foods and have the bees be a part of all of this, but to make sure that we're able to share it. And people are going to come from all over the city because this is the only one, the first and only that I know of. Uh, and it's really going to complement what's going to happen across the street. Uh, this is going to be another showcase that complements the redevelopment of Hyatt Park. So keep your ears open and be prepared to come back and do this again. Thank you. Good morning. You know, I'm here for just one reason and that reason is just to simply say thank you and particularly thank you to the Hyatt Park and Keenan Terrace neighborhood. Keep in mind it is your dedication and commitment that really make things happen. You know, when you hold us accountable as elected officials, we were produced, but I think you have to continue to do that. So I'm grateful to you for that and all the other partners. I'm always convinced that we get a lot more done by collaborating working together. And this will not have happened had we not had that type of collaboration. So let's keep in mind the significant importance of us continuing to work together to make things happen for our community. And you know, oftentimes it's important in terms of where you put things. And I say to myself, oftentimes when it comes to this neighborhood, why not this neighborhood? We ought to have a lot of first. You know, of things of significance, you know, a lot of times, you know, you get first with those things you don't design your community, but we need a lot of first for those very desirable things in our community. And I think that is what we began to see in this community. And I'm committed to continue to do what we need to do to make that happen. I'm always impressed with what our conservation commission with the Michigan County does to improve the quality of life in our community. Because what what conservation commission is about is those things that directly impact our health, our quality in our community. So again, I want to just thank you for what you do and encourage you to continue to do it, continue to hold us accountable, make us do what we need to do to improve your life. I'm the oldest one here. I'm agent and I congratulate you because I have been looking for this for so long. I chair the Richmond County Conservation Commission. I'm Carol Kososki. I'm also a gardener. I'm also a community person. And I want you to look out here. What do you see? We see not only beauty, the beauty of these flowers. We see food ready to come to the table. We see cooperation on the part of all the people who made this happen and will continue to keep it up and nurture it. You know, why is this project so important to me? I'll tell you why. The South Carolina Wildlife Federation put out some data on the decline of pollinators not only in our country, but right here in Richmond County and in South Carolina. Did you know that in 2015 2016 alone, there was a 33 and a third percent decrease, a one third decrease in the honey bees in South Carolina. It was that precipitous in just that one year due to disease, due to pesticides, due to herbicides, due to pavement and so forth, which is loss of habitat. This is terrible. It's serious because our food supply is in jeopardy. Okay, so this represents to me a turnaround. It says we care in the urban area. We're going to make a habitat for our honey bees, for our native bees, for our butterflies. It is so important. So I thank you today. Not only do I thank you for making this happen, I thank you for your continuing effort to keep this garden up so that those bees continue to come. You know, that's really, that's really what counts is what the continuation is, what the follow up is. So on behalf of the South Carolina and the South Carolina bees and pollinators, okay, and on behalf of the Richmond County Conservation Commission. Many thanks. Hi, I'm Betsy Newman. I'm the president of the Hyatt Park Kenan Terrace Neighborhood Association. Thank you all so much for being here. Wow, it's great. I wanted to specifically thank a few people beginning with Nancy Stone column who is the she is the conservation coordinator Nancy there you are conservation coordinator for the Richland County Conservation Commission. And she and her commissioners got us started with this by awarding us a grant, a conservation commission grant, a community conservation grant. And really without that sort of buy in and faith in us, I don't think we would have been able to get this started. And that brought in a lot of other partners, the US Conference of Mayors, the USDA National Resources Conservation Service, and of course, the Parks and Recreation Department. And what a great partner parks has been. And I especially want to thank Randy Davis, Jacqueline Williams, who's the head of the garden program, Jackie, and Mary Thurman, Mary, where are you? Mary Thurman, who is the director of programming over here across the street, and who helped us get a group of after school kids together, who helped us to design the signs that that you see in the garden here. So many, many thanks to parks. The members of the Hyatt Park, Kenan Terrace Neighborhood Association, most especially Miss Jenny Nelson, who is the person primarily responsible for the beautiful vegetable garden that we have. That's not only a thing of beauty, but a thing of importance to the neighborhood in terms of growing food to eat. And also Councilman Sam Davis, always our great supporter. We really appreciate it. So Carol really laid out why we need pollinator gardens. We have a decline in native pollinators and honeybees in butterflies and all our insects are really in trouble. And a lot of it has to do with habitat loss. And so we are proud to have turned this vacant lot into a place that can attract and nurture pollinators and add beauty to our neighborhood. I wanted to cite a recent article that was published in the Washington Post that is entitled, when a city's trashy lots are cleaned up, residents' mental health improves. And it wasn't a trashy lot, but it wasn't a vacant lot. It was really just a driveway. And so what we're talking about here is health. We're talking about the health of our fellow earthlings, the insects. And we're also talking about physical and mental health of human beings. And we hope as Councilman Davis said that this can be a model for the rest of the city. And I'd like to call out Ellen Fishburne Triplet who designed these beautiful signs and to tell you that the files for these signs are available. And we'd like to make them available to others. And we worked with a fabricator. It wasn't that expensive to get these signs fabricated. So we have the files for those signs. If you want to make a pollinator garden in your community, let us know and we'd be happy to share those signs with you. They really and I hope you'll take a little time to look and read them. They have a lot of information about the pollinators. So that said, we would like to recognize a few people with a plaque that Ellen also designed. And so she's going to help me actually could someone give her a hand with bringing these over. Okay, we as I said, we worked with the kids in the after school program across the street at the recreation center. And their drawings are incorporated into our wayside signs. So we wanted to thank some of our supporters with a plaque that features the kids drawings. And also, one of our bags our Hyatt Park, Kenan Terrace bag. So Mayor Steve, thank you so much. Councilman Davis. Thank you. Thank you. Councilman divine. Well, Councilwoman divine. We have one for her. Councilman Paul Livingston. Thank you for your support. Losing my papers here. He's here. And Miss Mary Thurman, who is an unsung hero of Hyatt Park, let's give her a big hand. Nancy Stone column. Who the first one to believe in us. Thank you, Nancy. Mr. Lyman Munson, the Vice President of the Hyatt Park, Kenan Terrace neighborhood association and a big supporter. Thank you, Lyman. Okay, we had another members of our association, the Gentinos. Steve Gentino built our little free library, which we think is a nice sort of partner to the pollinator garden. Shonda Cooper about Nancy, do you want to take one for her? Shonda Cooper is works for the county and she led some workshops for the kids. She's terrific if you ever need anybody to teach kids about pollinators. Boy, she's got it going on. We have one we have a plaque for each of the city council members. So maybe Sam, would you mind taking those for us? Okay, and that's it. Okay, so thank you. I'd like to invite everybody to well, we got to cut the ribbon. But after we cut the ribbon, we have some fruit salad over here and some water and also oh and I have a special request. I would like and since we have our mayor here, I would like to suggest that the Gulf Fritillary butterfly be designated the city butterfly of Columbia. It's a terrific native butterfly and it's only food source for its larvae is the passionflower vine growing along the back fence over here and the passionflower is a native flower and if everybody planted one in their yard in Columbia, we would have thousands of our beautiful Gulf Fritillaries. So I'd like you to take that into consider the Gulf Fritillary butterfly mayor Steve. Does the Gulf literary live anywhere outside of district one? Only in district one. Uh, no, it's city wide. I'll show you why. Yeah, it's sort of to make sure. Make sure Mr. Davis knows that too, okay? Yeah, yeah. We're gonna funding for the for the vines. It has to be city wide. That's right. Okay. And Jackie, I'll give it a shot to give it doing some justice. But just so you all know, we have twenty community garden sites across across the city right now and a few other exciting events that I think will probably only be accelerated by the excitement of what you all have done here, Betsy and others and Carol. We're talking about the very first, I guess, and you're gonna have to help me Jackie. First urban seasonal tunnel house we're gonna have here in the city and of course we're gonna expand the Palinetti Gardens next to Lion Street and also a future children's garden in the mini orchard. So we're gonna keep it keep it going.