 Good evening. My name is Gloria Saeed. I'd like to thank you all for joining us for this public hearing on CBG mitigation. We had a presentation this evening. I'd like to give you some information on the process of the public hearing before we get started. During the presentation, please submit questions by entering text into the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen. After the presentation, we will answer questions submitted through the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen. After Q&A, please feel free to raise your hand by pressing the raise hand button at the bottom of the page in order to make public comment. To make the public comment, raise your hand in the public comment section only for the portion of the public hearing. If you are joining in by phone number, your number will be called upon during the public comment period. Once called upon, please be ready to state your name and give your comment. If you are joining by video conference, please state your name before speaking each time if there is back and forth conversation. Please keep your comments to two minutes or less to allow other attendees the ability to speak. If you wish to speak during the meeting, please ensure your microphone, cell phone, audio is connected. Please know that this public hearing is being recorded for rebroadcast on YouTube and the city's television station. If you would like to submit additional remarks, please email them to citymitigationatcolumbiasc.gov. Or email to community development, 1401 Main Street, 4th floor, Columbia, South Carolina, 29201. All comments must be received on or before April 30, 2020. Now, let's begin the presentation. As I stated earlier, my name is Gloria Saye. I am the Community Development Director for the City of Columbia. Today we'll be holding the public hearing on CDG mitigation. The purpose of today's public hearing is to discuss funding received from the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the amount of $18,585,000 community development block grant funds. These funds are specifically for mitigation. The purpose of today's public hearing is to provide residents impacted by the 2015 floods and opportunity to ask questions about the goals of CDG mixed funding, review the potential projects for the project, provide comments regarding the project, identify to serve and protect the city from future disaster events. The opportunity to ask questions and provide comments will follow this presentation. Comments will be accepted both orally and in writing during the online public hearing. After the hearing, comments will also be accepted by mail. You can mail to Community Development Department, CDBG MIT Action Plan, 1401 Main Street, 4th floor, Columbia, South Carolina, 29201. Or you can email your comment to citymitigation at columbiasd.gov. On the CDBG MIT website, you can make your comments on the comment form that you will find at mit.columbiasd.gov comment form. What are CDBG mitigation funds? The Department of Housing and Urban Development, again, has allocated $18,585,000 in community development block grant funds, specifically for mitigation. So some of you may ask the question, exactly what is mitigation? So the definition for mitigation is activities that increase resilience to disasters and reduce or eliminate the long-term risk of loss of life, injury, damage to and loss of property, and suffering and hardship by lessening the impact of future disasters. So that's specifically what these funds are to be used for. So having the city receiving the CDBG MIT funds presents a unique and significant opportunity to carry out strategic and high-impact activities to mitigate future disasters. The purpose of the CDBG MIT funds are multifaceted. In order to determine what projects would be pursued, we have to do a lot of data gathering. We need support data to inform our investments in high-impact projects that will reduce risk attributable to natural disasters. So from this analysis, we have to look at all of the community lifelines as proposed. Those that apply to safety and security, food, water, shelter, health and medical, energy, power and fuel, communication, transportation, and hazardous materials. The project must support the adoption of policies that reflect local and regional priorities having long-lasting effects on community risk reduction. And also, we want to build capacity of states and local governments to analyze disaster risk and to update hazard mitigation plans through data and meaningful community engagement. So of the $18,585,000, the city has come up with a couple of projects. The first project is our infrastructure project. The Columbia Canal Headgate and Lockgate repair. The estimated cost is $8 million. The second project is also infrastructure. It includes the Olympia Fire Station replacement estimated at $7 million. The planning activities as required, specified by HUD, that can be used during this grant, totaled $2,655,750. The admin cost for oversight and monitoring is $929,250, which totals to $18,585,000. We also note that the funding does require that at least 50% of the funds are used to impact low to moderate income individuals or areas. The first project that we're going to share information with you on is the Olympia Fire Station. And at this time, I'm going to go to Mickey Folson with the Fire Department for Columbia. Greetings to all on behalf of Chief Jenkins, the Columbia Richmond Fire Service. We all hope that all is well with you and we thank you for your participation today. Back in 1996, the city purchased a floor shop that was built in 1974 and retrofitted to serve the firehouse in Olympia and the U.S. and downtown corridor. This purchase was intended to be a stopgap measure to provide emergency service and meet ISO requirements. Although retrofitted, it was not intended to be built, not intended or built for seven days a week, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year for use to accommodate a firehouse. This project we're looking to accomplish is the project served predominantly a low and moderate income residential area. This project will provide a moderate resilience faculty facility that will be able to resist extreme weather events and ensure that critical response services will not be delayed or interrupted. The purpose, the proposed facility will have the ability to house additional emergency response units in times of natural disaster and is positioned to assist with mass evacuation. The current facility will not accommodate a ladder truck or aerial device, which is now necessary given the influx of new multi-story construction. The new facility will be equipped with a backup generator that is able to provide the station with power for extended periods. Also, this doesn't be some of our safety concern when it comes to cancer initiatives dealing with no buffers and exhaust systems, and there's no real for expansion. We thank you for your time. And we look forward to your questions later. Thank you. Thank you, Nikki. So next, we're going to turn it over to Gregory Tucker and he's going to talk to you about the Columbia Canal Head Gates project. Thank you. When we reviewed projects, obviously drinking water is very high on everybody's priority. This project is very worthy of the monies and the ability to mitigate future disasters and provide resilience in drinking water supply for the city of Columbia is very important. Not only is it drinking water, it's also the fire protection water that serves all of our first responders on that. To that end, let me just go ahead and describe a few of the items of the project. The project is critical to ensure the continuing and adequate water supply used for fire protection for city residents. This cannot be understated of how critical that is. The project is critical to the city's ability to ensure continuing supply of safe drinking water for the city residents. As we all know from the flood of 2015, what happens when our supply is in jeopardy and this is just again offering future mitigation to help the resiliency of the supply will continue to be adequate. The project is also doing is critical to ensure both advocacy and supply of safe drinking water and fire protection water for five area hospitals, including the region's only level one trauma center, six major universities and colleges. For Jackson McIntyre joint National Guard base state capital and federal facilities unknown to a lot. The project is a key component in regulating the water for green energy produced at the Columbia hydroelectric plant 10 megawatts of green energy. Again, we believe the project is very worthy of these funds for the resiliency for future related to engine energy as well as safe drinking water and fire protection water for the citizens. And with that, I'll look forward to your questions at the end. I'll turn it back to Gloria. Thank you, Gregory. All right. So now that we are completed, we've completed that portion of the presentation. We like to engage in action plan citizen engagement and timeline. Our citizen, our public engagement thus far has is today, which is April 6, where we're having the public hearing. We look forward to your questions and comments at the end. Once we complete the public hearing today, we do look forward to any questions that you may have that will come up later or any comments. We will talk about various methods where you can continue to provide information on the projects presented up into the deadline. We will present the plan once again on April 21 during the city council meeting, which is scheduled for two o'clock. We will provide info information to you in advance on how you can also submit questions or comments at that time on April 30. That is the last day for any public comments. Again, there are various ways that you can inform us of whatever your comments or questions are about the plan. And we continuously will provide information and urge you to do so, but we must have those comments by April 30. That is the last day to present them. On May 2nd, we will be submitting the HUD, the action plan to HUD for approval, and we expect to hear back on that plan in early July. So now that is the end of our presentation. At this time, we'd like to again go over ways that you can make comments. Today, if you'd like to speak, provide public comments. You will be given three months, three minutes to speak. Those wishing to speak are also encouraged to send a written copy of your comments to city mitigation at columbiasc.net. Written comments, written public comments may also be submitted by email at see mitigation at columbiasc.net. You can also mail your comments to columbia, to community development, 1401 Main Street, 4th floor, Columbia, South Carolina, 2901. Label your comments as CDBG NIT so that we can make sure it gets to the appropriate person. There's also a comment form that you can access on our website, which is https-slash-nit.columbiasc.gov-comment-form-slash. Please feel free to use that mechanism as well to make comments on the CDBG mitigation action plan. As stated before, the deadline for submission of all comments is April 30, 2020, at 11.59 p.m. Thank you. And now we're going, we're at the end of our presentation, and we'd like to ask if you have any questions or comments at this time. Can you hear me? Yes, ma'am. Hi. I'm monitoring the Q&A as well as the raised hands, and there are none at this time. Okay. Thank you very much. So, being that there are none at this time, and we've given information on how to make comments in other ways. This will be posted on YouTube and will also be shown on CDTB. And you can also access it on the knit.columbiasc.gov website for anyone who's interested in making comments at a later date. But prior to April 30, 11.59 p.m. Thank you all very much, and have a great evening.