 I'm Derek Sieberson, Senior Planner with City of Ashland. I'm here with Tom Humphrey from City of Central Point. Tommy, you might just start with a little bit of background. Okay, well, I was raised in California. I started my planning career after several years in the Navy and became interested in planning when I was at San Diego State. And my first, I became established in my career path in the San Joaquin Valley, in the Merced County. And after eight years there, was intrigued by and interested in moving to Oregon, moved to Oregon in 1994 with my family and started working in Roseburg at the Council of Governments. And I was there about four years. I did some work in Jackson County. Actually, in Josephine County, there's a collaboration with RVCOG, probably in 1994. And so I'd had some exposure to Grants Pass and planning in Southern Oregon. But I was under the impression that some issues could be somewhat contentious down here. But I think I found once I moved that they were reconcilable, that people could be kind of rounded up and not made to cooperate. But I discovered a different atmosphere once I got down here that people could collaborate, could work together, could kind of break out of their silos and start working with one another and actually enjoy it. So I've been here about 21, 22 years, moved down in the early 1990, 1998. I had a couple of advantages in arriving in Jackson County. One is I was invited to interview for my current, well, for the position of planning director because I had worked with the gentleman who was the city manager when I was in Merced. He and I knew one another from Merced. He used me as a reference when he applied for a job as the planning director in Central Point. I was up in Roseburg. He was made city manager in Central Point after kind of a turnover and some up evil within the city structure. But he thought that he should be a manager full-time and was looking for a planning director and he and I happened to attend a benefits fair together in Ashland and he asked me if I'd be interested in applying, which I was. And so I interviewed and was selected as the planning director for Central Point. I had a one employee planner and I shared the secretary. I shared a secretary with the city manager and so there was two and a half of us in the department at the time. And there was a lot of activity in Central Point. There was a lot of growth occurring in the city and it was alarming people. As you know, the city surrounded by prime farmland and some of the land had been included in the urban growth boundary from the mid-80s and was being considered for development. There were a lot of subdivisions that were in process. I think from 1990 and 1995 the city grew by 2100 people, so it gives you a sense of the dynamics there. When I was working, started working, we had probably 30 building permits a month, which is one a day and so you can imagine the people who lived in the city for most of their lives, grown up in Central Point, were alarmed by the fact that subdivisions were taking over fields where people had been farming and the schools were being impacted. There was, the city has part of a school district where there are five elementary schools and two middle schools and high school and they were starting to see those impacted. The council governments, with the assistance of an economic development department of the state, got a grant to do a strategic plan for Central Point. In the fall of 1997, just before I arrived, the city launched into a process to identify the things that people were pleased about in Central Point, things that they were alarmed with and after about four months they conceived this strategic plan that essentially identified four things that people wanted addressed. Now as planners, we often work with comprehensive plans which are institutional documents that are required by the state and that helps us do long-range planning for 20 years. So the strategic plan was something that allowed the populace of Central Point to engage in, identify right away what some of their concerns were and how they thought they should be addressed. And so the four things that were identified were, you know, they wanted something done about the growth, they'd like to see it better managed, they wanted to address concerns about transportation because Pine Street had become a thoroughfare essentially from the freeway to Jacksonville and we had a logging operation, no operation in town and so there were a lot of log trucks moving back and forth down the main street. They were concerned about there not being enough parks or activities for youth and because of the activity, thoroughfare on the downtown, they wanted to see the downtown beautified or revitalized in some way. So these were kind of the broad goals that citizens identified and when the plan was eventually adopted in 1998, the manager handed it to me as I stepped in the door in January and said, Tom, here's the blueprint, why don't you see what you can do to meet these goals and make some of these things happen. Which for me was really an advantage because all the background work had been done, people had expressed their opinions about things and kind of given us an idea as to what they had expected to see and it was a lot simpler than trying to rehab an institutional document like the comprehensive plan. We eventually have gone back and updated chapters of that because things changed dramatically. So one of the first things we worked on, I was able to get some grant assistance and hire a consultant to come in and create a downtown revitalization plan. When I was in San Joaquin Valley, I was on a chapter committee, one of the California chapters of the American Planning Association reviewed work for award recognition in San Joaquin Valley and one of the companies that stood out, one of the awards that I considered and championed was this outfit out of Berkeley, California, who had done some work in LaMoure which was a similarly sized and similarly oriented town in California. It was agricultural in nature, about the same size in population and it didn't have a lot going on in its downtown. So these guys came up and helped us create a plan to address the goal of city beautification, downtown beautification. And interestingly enough, we've used that plan even though it was never formally adopted. The recommendations from that enabled us to acquire property for additional downtown parking, identify facade improvements for buildings, identify what buildings we ought to make an effort to preserve because of their historical significance, how we could improve the downtown in terms of its walkability and accessibility to pedestrians and cyclists. There's a lot of good information in there. One of the other things they did is they tried to create a dimension to the downtown Pine Street was kind of one dimensional and by identifying a cross axis at the center of this little six or eight block core, we created a second dimension and this cross axis was Third Street which terminated at the south in the historic central point elementary at a historic building which is one of the original turn of the century buildings. The north terminus of this cross axis was the high school and they thought that we ought to reorient City Hall to Third Street and we had been talking about collaborating with Jackson County and the library and creating a City Hall that incorporated the county library in it and reoriented it to Third and then the school district when they were successful passing a bond, rebuilt the central point elementary and turned the historic building into their administrative offices and restored that and so and created a performing arts building at the northern terminus on high school. So it started to having had this plan gave us enough structure to collaborate with the county and with the library and coordinate with the school district in its reconstruction of one of the elementary schools. So that plan has been really helpful and it's the pieces of the strategic plan addressing City beautification, identified other things that we should work on in order to get to that goal and I can talk about those in a minute after I address some of the other growth related problems. Having that strategic plan and you'd initially mentioned that you'd kind of before you came here heard about how contentious things could be down here and the objections to growth that were developing in central point did having that strategic plan sort of head off some of that contention and get citizen buy-in? In central point it sure did and part of the things I may have alluded to is that people were kind of isolating themselves from one another, you know, Medford from central point, from Eagle Point, from Ashland, from the county and so for central point having a strategic plan did bring together those entities that provided services to central point. I think the city appeared to be somewhat forward thinking when it dissolved its fire department in favor of collaborating with Fire District 3 to save money, collaborating with Rogue Valley Sanitary Services, Pursuer Services, rather than doing our own work to save money and we've done other things like that, the county justice system and I can't think of some of the other, I think some kind of water delivery and so forth. Those were probably collaborations that ultimately grew out of this strategic planning process because we were we were inviting these groups who we were already contracting with to participate so that probably helped and then once I got to the valley I noticed that we did have an effort being made by engineers and planners in the county to talk about transportation issues and I was familiar with that from Merced because we were a metropolitan planning organization, our council of governments managed these conversations with different entities to get federal funding for city and county road improvements and so I kind of got involved in that process as the city planner and that became a you know I guess it was just working at building relationships is what ultimately led to improved communication and successes with no regional planning projects. I think the the planning, the transportation planning ultimately that was being done in the Rogue Valley was recognized by the state, they created these area commissions on transportation, we were involved in that and because we were at the table with the other cities in the county and some other agencies when issues were being raised about preserving farmland and the concerns expressed by you know local activists, agricultural supporters, environmentalists, it was kind of natural to move into regional planning with some of this with all the same people that were at the table with transportation so of course we got elected officials involved in the regional planning process but yeah I think it and I think being confronted with serious issues whether they were transportation related or or growth related or or land use related it forced us to cooperate with each other. I don't know I just I began to see how you know you just have to be persistent. I think people realize there was there was a common good I mean everybody was interested in themselves obviously but they began to realize there was a common good to working with one another and you know if I can say so I think sometimes the state was viewed as the adversary and we're going to work together to kind of chart our own course. When we got into the land use arena and we kind of piggybacked on on a plan that was being done called our region we saw that the state had made some effort at recognizing that not all regions of the state of Oregon are created equal and so when they created regional problem-solving in an effort to acknowledge that our area took it seriously and I have to say that you know the Rogue Valley is the only entity that really was successful in in using this regional problem-solving framework that the state created. It was tried elsewhere but after a few years some of the entities just couldn't or decided not to hang with it. We I guess were a little more stubborn in the Rogue Valley and decided that you know however long this is going to take we're going to finish it and it took ultimately 12 years which is a long time but we had people who were passionate about it they wanted to see it through. They thought that it would ultimately benefit all of us and that we'd have a little more autonomy when it came to expanding our urban growth boundaries and developing our cities and it also gave us more autonomy of cities to create our own identities without kind of merging with each other and Central Point shares a you know two boundaries with the city of Medford and so it was very easy to just become you know subordinate to Medford on the north and Phoenix experienced the same thing on the south. So this and it was consistent with what our strategic plan had kind of set a goal for us to do. We've actually conducted we're into our third strategic planning process in the city of Central Point. We had the one in 97-98. We looked at it again in 2007-2008 which was our 2020 plan and now that we're in 2020 almost we started into another process to take us to 2040 and the fun thing about these strategic plans is you know because we articulated our goals and subordinate strategies you know I could just take the document and check off you know done done done close to being done and it's really gratifying you know you've got a record of of accomplishments that you knew people really wanted you to work on but that plan was kind of the forerunner to a lot of things it did you know like I say it was the downtown revitalization it it was the precursor to the city's involvement with regional planning and managing growth and identifying our kind of unique position in the valley and it it gave birth to the city's parks and recreation program which we didn't have and so when the people said we'd like to see more parks we'd like to see more opportunities for youth and recreation it started quietly and it's kind of evolved out of the Public Works Department because that's where the park maintenance was was occurring but we brought some people on on the temporary basis and they the parks and recreation program just took off and that seemed to be the the glue that started to hold people together that and and public safety the police department so the police and the parks and recreation program really seemed like it was where the components that started to bind people together and improve the internal communication that we had with our citizens and just as an example our public works director once the parks program or the recreation program got off the ground our public works director who was an outdoorsman conducted a fly tying class and fly casting class and you know was right up his alley and that and those types of things you know you all of a sudden you're getting people volunteering people coming in and serving the community by you know teaching residents skills and and and it really the parks and recreation program today is just it's vivacious you know it's and and it's led to more solid interactions with the the exposition fair grounds because where a lot of events have been occurring out there the you know downtown celebrations that were always popular whether it was a Christmas or 4th of July have just expanded dramatically but it just it's connected people in a way that reinforces what people identified as a small-town feel and central point one of the other things that happened as a result of this rapid growth and our commitment to trying to you to manage growth or to recognize you know the ramifications of land use development was was the Twin Creek's project it was intended to be a transit oriented development or mixed use development it was something that well I have to say you know a lot of our elected officials were brought on the council to address matters of growth people were that alarmed that not only did they bring it out in a strategic plan but they they elected people to office who would stop it or slow it down or or fix it you know to the degree that I guess they would be more satisfied and so some of the people who came on as councilmen didn't want us to approve subdivisions and or annexations and we had made some land use changes in 98 that set set the land up that's just west of the high school for full-on residential development previously it had been zoned industrial and we moved some some land around we had industrial land there and we had residential land over off of Table Rock Road which really made more sense in being industrial so we made that that exchange but the council at the time decided yes we rezone the property there's an application into annex the property but we don't want to annex it and we're not obliged to annex it if we don't think it's timely and until we figure out what we're going to do with the schools we don't want to bring that in well coincidentally the the state came down with one of one of its mandates recommendations to reduce vehicle miles traveled and was insisting that the Rogue Valley come up with some mixed-use developments in order to to contribute to that reduction I guess it was somewhat experimental but it was it was a mandate and so the Rogue Valley Transit District or Transportation District and the council of governments began a study to improve public transit by creating these concentrations of activity that were mixed-use one of ten was the one in Central Point to increase and this was the area that was asking to be annexed but that the city didn't want to annex and so I knew that the players involved in that the developers contractors involved in that so I got them involved with on a committee that was part of this group looking at all ten sites and they began to realize that maybe this transit-oriented element might be a better option for them certainly you saw construction on more units as a possibility but it also was would have involved more open space and address some of the environmental issues that people are concerned about and so where we had about 200 acres that were identified for single-family detached homes that would have accommodated about 500 with a 10-acre park and a railroad crossing with some commercial in its vicinity the master plan ultimately resulted in the creation of 1,600 units 50 acres of parks and open space the open space of which would then put into a land conservancy and a school site and and these mixed use these mixed uses and so it took about it took well as it turned out of the ten sites in the Valley Twin Creek's was one of the top three and so they did drill down a bit and and that's when the owners got more interested and then when the the cog and RVTD concluded their study that the developer hired the consultant to do a master plan and it took about 18 months and it took a lot of money to pull it all together and evaluate you know its success its potential success the council having been brought on to quell the growth and manage it were you know reluctant in fact there was a motion made to go to a voter approved annexation so that the the citizenry of central point decide whether or not the the land should be annexed after all this effort was made to thoughtfully develop it we viewed that as probably more problematic because that wouldn't have meant what wouldn't been isolated to central to Twin Creeks alone but it would have been every time somebody wanted annex it would have been a kind of a collective decision so so we had included one of the councilmen in our planning deliberations over the years and he he suggested as an alternative to this motion that we we do an extensive survey and get an idea from the citizens to see if they really wanted this type of development if they thought it was an approved improvement over the others in the past and 4,000 surveys we sent out we got about it 800 900 survey response which is a pretty good indication of support and you know it was a good it was a good metric for evaluating this and so generally people supported it and so ultimately the council bought into it they adopted a pre annexation development agreement they insisted that the project be phased that certain public improvements be done prior to each phase in order to complete the entire project the other things that were occurring at the same time was a reevaluation of of the elementary school wards or student population areas the school district so I said had five elementary schools two of them were in the county and had declining enrollments and Sam's Valley and in Gold Hill and what we discovered in looking at that more intently is that people we were busting kids from the county into the school system in town and that was one of the reasons it was being impacted and so when they redistrict the elementary school boundaries you know that created some relief to the overcrowding in the city schools and and then we worked with the school district the city worked with school district to ultimately pass a new school bond which they'd not passed in 20 some odd years and they tried three three times third time was the charm and and that did you know the redistricting gave some relief to that the proposal for a new school site if needed in central in Twin Creek's was approved it just things started to click you know and like I say every one of our goals could be kind of checked off you know dealing with managing growth in the city dealing with managing growth outside the city with our partners in the Rogue Valley dealing with transportation issues as they applied to central point a part of this mixed-use development involved with a railroad crossing which we had to work out with only railroad but Jackson County local farmers ODOT we had to take jurisdiction of the entire State Highway to you know put the improvements in that we're needed in order to get the railroad crossing and actually warrants for the signal so the Parks and Recreation program was was blossoming and so those were all those were all really gratifying you know but they still they all still took time and when I was in Roseburg I lived on a farm and for four years and one of the things I I came to appreciate about farming which was one of the many things I was involved in I said some things just you know it's all about timing it's all about timing and the farmer knows that when he plants there's a lot of activity around the planting and and the preparation but then you just have to back off and let let things happen there are other instances where when things grow and and hay needs to be mowed and and bailed and put away and and weather's a factor then you need to you need to act more quickly to take care of that and so and I don't know I guess you can make an analogy to to the planting in some cases where you just you need to you plant the seed you need to nurture it and then then you just need to wait in some cases and I'm on the receiving end now because after 20 years I'm starting to see things that that were conceived 20 years ago come to fruition not without some heartache or some some argument and and and outright fights but ultimately you know we're starting to see see the payoff and and it reassures the population you know once you've you've checked some of these things off we know you're listening taking them seriously and and working as in collaboration with them then they're willing to go the next to the next strategic plan and the next to the next mile post so I've said a lot there are a few other things that are buzzing around in my head you know the the other mandates we get from the state you know have to do lately with providing affordable housing and what are we going to do on you know that score well we think that this mixed use development was a for us was a step in the right direction because it involved integrating different housing types in one geographic area a lot of times in city planning you seem to you tend to isolate the apartments from the single family detached dwellings from you know this entire middle middle area where you've got duplexes and townhouses and row houses and so forth then Twin Creek's has integrated all of those I guess because it was a kind of a 15 or 20 year plan and we didn't do the apartments right away we were we were I guess you kind of laugh about it now because you've got got through the worst of it but the people who went in early and single family homes kind of got established and then we started building apartments they started screaming about you know screaming about that only to be reminded that well you know this was part of the plan when we first conceived it so you shouldn't be too surprised and these guys are making an effort to do it the right way but you begin to see that the value of the integration because it it kind of everybody's proud of what they have and we've seen people you know take an interest in preserving their property and you know the departments don't you know follow the disrepair they're well managed as are the individual lots and then we've done these row houses and we've gotten retirement facilities incorporated into the mix as well so I mean it every time you introduce something new to a population who is accustomed to having things done one way there's always going to be a little upheaval and we've experienced that on occasion with the introduction of affordable housing we have great partners with the housing authority you know some cities are large enough and to have their own staff you know who does kind of the housing side of things I think that's what you're fortunate enough to have in Ashland we know in our on our staff and I've since increased staff from me the plan are in a half a secretary and so if we ultimately combine planning and building and so there are about seven of us now but even with that many people you don't have somebody just identified exclusively to work on housing is not always feasible and so we've worked with housing authority they know what they do they're good at it and we just have to kind of pave the way for them and lobby our council when necessary to support it and once I found where a lot of things were met with skepticism early on ultimately the people want once you kind of got the critical mass of support and the thing was built and people realized well oh well this isn't what I thought it was gonna be this is better than I thought it was gonna be and then they say well build more of those you've got my support now so a lot of things you know my role was just like kind of convincing enough people that this was gonna be a good thing and then once we had you know our democracy at work and you know the majority voting in favor and seeing the construction go up and and realizing the benefit then all of a sudden it was okay all right well that turned out better than we thought and now we have an example we can point to and if we are constituents are resisting this development because they have one perception and we can show them different and we're good and just changing gears a little bit I think my recollection is you take a pretty active role in economic development there too more so maybe than other planning departments and having you work quite a bit in recruiting businesses and and retaining and training them to be successful more so than anyone else yeah I appreciate that question that's years ago well so as part of the downtownization theme I started to get involved in in down the Oregon downtown development association at least attend their conferences and coincidentally I went one year with John McLaughlin who was then your planning director and it was up in Hood River and we we sat in together on a workshop that was led by a gentleman by the name of John Schallert who whose focus was on helping small businesses become destinations and we were both impressed we came back to the Valley and and lobbied then Medford Urban Renewal Urban Renewal Development Director Don Burt to go in together with us and bring John from Colorado out to the Rogue Valley for three days and talk to our businesses about becoming destinations what you know what singles you out from all the other people who do the same thing you do and makes you unique and how do you capitalize on that and so John was a breath of fresh air and the three of us all collaborated to bring him here and speak in each of the three towns and as a consequence people got interested in and I remained interested over the years in having John come to speak or ultimately he created what was called a what what is called a destination business bootcamp in Colorado and so I attended one of those bootcamps with one of our businessmen and when I attended there was a group of people from one city in in the state of Washington who were at the bootcamp and when I asked John you know what's up with you know these seven people that are at this bootcamp they're all from the same town what you know that's part of my community reinvention program and his logic was you know if a community development director or an economic development director would bring six business owners to the bootcamp who would all hear the same thing the logic was they'd go back to their community and they'd support each other in becoming destinations and so I thought it took me like three years after that to assemble six people who were committed to doing the same thing and and I had to keep sweetening the pot because they you know I agreed to pay for their registration ultimately I agreed to pay for their travel expenses and with this stipulation that they just had to take time away from work to go to this bootcamp they wouldn't regret it and and then the you know the bootcamp had a follow-up five or six month follow-up with homework assignments and conference calls with John to kind of solidify things and then John would come out and look at each of their businesses and give them kind of suggestions as to how they could make additional improvements consistent with the things he talked about the bootcamp well once I got that's the group of six and they they came back all fired up and they were actually assisting one another to become destinations ultimately one of those business owners wound up on our city council and I had I had I didn't beg bar on steel but I had a line item in my budget that for professional services that the manager allowed me to use to you know sweeten the pot in this case and but once that that first business owner got on the city council he said you know this thing has been instrumental in making my business more successful Tommy you need to keep this in you know it's a budget item and you need to you know you need to perpetuate this thing so over the years we've taken over the last 15 or so years 15 16 years we've taken about 30 people to the bootcamp and then you know as a consequence hundreds have have been exposed to John either as a result of these people these 30 people or you know John's commitment to come out and talk more about the idea so one of the things that he he encourages people to do is to come up with a unique positioning statement for their business which helps them focus their business you know their their employees their their customer service the people that they market to all of their efforts kind of revolve around you know what is it that makes you unique and so that's often the hardest part is just coming up with a unique positioning statement the city it took me a few years to kind of come up with one for central point but I think I finally wound up with with one for the city and that is where the most cohesive people-friendly community in southern Oregon guaranteed to surprise you but that's that gives you a sense of what yeah so that's the first sentence and a unique positioning statement and I took me about ten years to come up with that so I'm going to try and perpetuate that idea most cohesive people-friendly community in southern Oregon guaranteed to surprise you and so we hope that's what we're doing the things that we've done to keep people to attract other businesses just and it's occurring to me that this is probably somebody asked me this the other day you know what was what are you most proud of now you've been in central point for so long I said well you know I could identify specific developments or plans but I think what I'm most proud of and gratified by is you know this the sense of creating a philosophy or an attitude that's shared by most if not all of our employees the current city manager you know started working for the city the year after I did he was in the engineering department he's risen to become the city manager the public works director was it worked as a temp for me for six months before I brought him on full-time and now he's the public works director the police police chief you know was a patrol officer has risen through the ranks to become the chief of police and and every one of us and the people that we've gone out selectively recruited brought in the finance department and the building department and human resources all are oriented toward helping people achieve their goals how can we help you have a better experience in the city of central point often that's at the expense of other surrounding cities well I get you know this town or this town you know it's so hard to get you know permit approved or or bring a business in or blah blah blah and and so no disrespect anybody else it's just like this is we want your experience with us to be the best possible one you can have we're not perfect we make mistakes but we'd like to think we're not as autocratic as some governments can become and so that's why I'm most gratified by it's like you I know if I were to retire leave that there's a city manager a police chief human resource director finance director building official who are going to you know maintain that philosophy of cooperation and and that's gratifying we have attracted new business we attracted Costco which was a big deal for us we have an award-winning creamery that's 85 years old and you know most people are aware that they've just won an award as the best cheese in the world which which even surprised them and delighted them of course but you don't want them to leave and so what do you do to try and you know make sure they stay and and so that's that's part of it is you know it's attracting new business but it's it's making allowances for and helping these other existing businesses to think about how they can expand and be continue to be successful so we're working on the creamery to make sure they've got a big enough footprint if they after all they're prestige you know decide they want to expand their operation you know want to keep them in central point if at all possible they have Eric's and Eric Crane the Grange co-op has been a great partner over the years the school district obviously is a large business but you know people in the downtown are starting with the renovations in the downtown that we finally figured out how to do or finance with the assistance of Don Burt in his retirement just just reconstructing the downtown and bringing in hardscape and and you know trees which were once there has has gotten people's attention and then we we've made a facade improvement program available where the city matches dollar for dollar up to ten thousand for for people that make an investment in the appearance of their building as well as in the performance of their business so we're trying to hit both and people seem to be pretty enthused at the moment sometimes that change you know the winds of change blow and you can't always predict what what's gonna happen next but right now everybody's pretty enthused about what's going on I'm always impressed with their work and with the efforts Tom's made as I mentioned his efforts at economic development I think vertical housing tax credits to get mixed-use development I actually spend a lot of time in Twin Creeks I had family that live out there and some friends I'm amazed what you were talking about with the parks department the mix of different feeling park spaces that are spread out through there to respond not only to that development but to the broader community that you'll go out there and on one night you'll see somebody doing a huge kinsen year a celebration the next night you have the society for creative anachronism sword fighting in the park and the next night is a church group tug having a tug of war right there in the middle of that development so it's not just their private open space it's really been integrated so well into that community and every time I go out there as a planner I see some different element that I'm sort of amazed you got in there just very well done that's the other things you can't predict you know on the land use side you just try and encourage well thanks well I'm delighted to hear that you can perpetuate the philosophy if you've got you continue to recruit good people and so even though the manager and the public works director have been there almost as long as I have there they are younger there they're under art under this manager we have we try so many different things Chris is so committed to making things better being positive being forward-thinking that it's just it's just a fun environment you know the consultant is working with us on our current strategic planning process is said the same thing it's just you can just sense the dynamism you know and the enthusiasm of the and the department has got along and we like each other you know and that's that can be unique in and of itself you know but you got to work at it you know you got a there's a certain sense of humility that I think is is perpetuated we're fair but we do look for ways to make things happen you know within the rules and I think sometimes with planners or build building inspectors you know if you're a little insecure and in your ability to make decisions or what the what the rules really say you know you don't you don't take risks I've got a building inspector who is so well acquainted with the code that when an issue comes up he says well you might not be doing it this way but here's an alternative that you can use or he's willing to accept an alternative because he knows what the end goal is and so and that happens from the planning department too is like well what's you know what's the spirit of the law and what are we trying to accomplish here and can we make a concession or do we just change the rules you know so that they're more reasonable and we've done both and and we're not perfect we've made mistakes and we're willing to admit our mistakes and and give refunds on occasion but it's so if there were one or two people are doing that and and it's you know that's the culture and that that's something that we we hope will be perpetuated thank you very much