 Hey everybody, we're so thankful to have everybody in the community here coming together today to the Paradise Fire Benefit. It's benefiting the victims of the campfire up in Paradise and the Davis community of course not surprisingly has just shown up in a huge, huge crowd here at the Senior Center today to help us celebrate and sort of raise money for the victims and we have two bands, the Catered and Davis Media Access are here. We have a couple of Suedworks pouring beer, three or four different food trucks, Woodstock's Pizza. It's really, really awesome and we are really hoping to raise a bunch of money for the fire victims up in Paradise and up in Butte County. I think the thing that's amazing is this is the second year we've done this last year after the fires in Sonoma and Napa County. We had a similar event. This year we had to have it inside because of the bad air quality but we are so amazed at the turnout. This is such a hallmark of Davis where people just show up and support events like this and are willing to help support our neighbors in need. So we're out here today with KDRT volunteers and a lot of Davis Media Access staff because in times of community need this is what community media does. We come together, we help build bridges and we help get out the word about what's going on. So big shout out to all the volunteers, the vendors who are making this happen and the other organizers. I really think it's about kindness and kindness disappears from the national dialogue. We got to do it at the local level. So thanks to everybody who supported this. First of all, I want to thank Supervisor Don Saylor. He's a longtime friend of mine. When he was a city councilman and I've been a 17 year city councilman in Paradise and so we've been friends for years. I was born and raised in Davis. My dad who's 93 and my brother still live here at the same house I grew up in so this is terrific. In fact Don texted me this morning and asked me if I was going to still be there because there was, POTUS was going to be in town and I said no I'm going to be there. I won't tell you the words I said exactly but the choice was, let's see, Davis, Sudwork beer, mumbo gumbo, plain and friends versus the president of the United States. It was no contest. Here I am. So things are tough up there. It is ugly. Everybody I've talked to is that they've never seen anything so devastating. You'll find one house standing out of 100. Every member of our city council lost their homes. My daughter and her husband who works for Cal Fire lost their home. My movie theater that I own there is still standing but without the population of about 58,000 people between Paradise and Magalia and the surrounding communities that were effectively out of business so it's pretty sad that you can have something that survives and so it's going to be difficult for the next 8 to 10 years really until we can recover but I'd like to say Paradise is not gone it's just closed for remodeling. Hi, I'm John Waterman. I'm in the Paradise Rotary Club and this sign is from Paradise and I want to thank Davis and all the contributions. Our town was totally destroyed up there in the town of Magalia and all of your support today is going to mean a lot to a lot of people and I'm grateful for what you're doing and I don't know what else to say. I used to be in Davis Rotary, do you want that connection? Why don't you tell us about three months from now when we're less aware of what's going on up there, where can people send donations to Paradise Rotary? So in three months when FEMA is gone and the Red Cross is gone, it's going to be the Paradise Rotary Club. We have a Paradise Rotary Foundation. Right now we've got a GoFundMe going on and the GoFundMe is Paradise Strong. Also if you ever shop on Amazon, if you go to smile.amazon.com and pick the Paradise Rotary Foundation as your charity, we'll get half a cent of every dollar you spend and in three months, that's when the real work starts, that's when we start to rebuild, that's when everybody, the Red Cross and FEMA are gone and that's when we're going to need more help. So please consider keeping us in your minds, come Valentine's Day, do something nice for the Paradise Ridge. So my role in this is helping organize some music and some people to come out and we're really excited to get a lot of people involved. That makes everything more fun and brings more people to the table and there's a great generous spirit of creativity in town. So I reach out to our first band, Mike Blanchard in the California's and at the same time I was sending them an email. They were sending me an email asking if they could participate and that's the sort of thing that we've been experiencing all week organizing this, trying to get more people involved and spread the word and make something really positive and joyful out of a really difficult time and hope that should anything happen in our immediate area that our neighbors around us would do the same for us. It's really just about being good humans and that's what we're trying to do. So I'm here at the fundraiser for the Victims in Paradise and I'm really proud to be part of this community. This is what I'm used to the city of Davis doing when there's a crisis. I've had personal crisis of my own and I've participated in other events that the city has done and we did this last year unfortunately and we hope that this doesn't become something that we have to do every year but if it is I can be sure that the community will come together. With the Davis Senior Center, in the last two weeks we've come together as a community here in Yolo County and Davis to help our neighbors in Butte County and the city of Paradise and surrounding areas. It's just so hard to imagine that the whole town is gone. This is not a one week thing, it's something that's going to take years and years for the people to recover if the city ever does. We think about what makes the fabric of community, buildings like the Senior Center here, our high schools, our movie theaters, the places we go to congregate but more than that it's the people and then in Davis here we keep coming together when it's time. We come together to make something happen that's much bigger than ourselves. It didn't take us very long to pull this together, in fact it's Saturday now, just last Thursday we decided to move the event and people are here. We're expecting over 500 people here today. We know that more than 70 people have died in the Paradise area. There's still 600 or more, they're missing. The news is just going to keep coming out for a few weeks, I'm afraid, maybe longer. But here in Davis today we can't change the world but we're going to help those people we can.