 cases and structures on the National Register of Historic Places, starting at the local level, gaining state-level approvals, and then reviewed by the federal government. The theme of past forward this year is from vision to action. This panel, including those involved at all levels of this process, will discuss what we need to do to create a National Register of Historic Places that reflects more fully the diversity of our nation. As you will hear, this panel is informed by the work being done by the National Conference of State Historic Preservation Officers to prepare a report titled, A Report of the National Historic Designation Advisory Committee, Recommendations for Improving the Recognition of Historic Properties of Importance to All Americans. It is also informed by other sessions that pass forward, including the session on integrity with Vince Michael, Sherry Freer, and others two years ago, as well as sessions last year on the National Register, and sessions this year, including building diversity into the National Register. Do we need another standard, which suggested a conservation standard that ties the treatment to the values defined by the community? And the session Wednesday on the revisions to Bulletin 38, the power of place, traditional cultural places in the 21st century, which suggested, in part, that integrity could be defined by the community whose culture is present in the place. Others have also made references to the importance of this work, including Salemota Casper, who asked how the National Historic Preservation Act is serving us, the fundamental question in front of us. This session is titled Moving to Action, because the preservation field has been discussing this topic for years, and yet frustration remains about the barriers to listing places of importance to communities in the National Register of Historic Places. Much of the frustration has been focused on the interpretation and application of the concept of integrity and what places retain integrity. After years of discussion, we are hoping that this session can identify actions that can be taken in the near term, the medium term, and the long term to address these concerns. Although many of the discussions over the past years have been focused on the concept of integrity and the interpretation of that concept, there are other fundamental questions that are related from the period of significance concept to considering entirely different criteria. I'm going to quickly introduce this distinguished group of panelists, who I'm very honored to have on this panel. Next slide, please. First, Holly Taylor is a preservation consultant, researcher, and educator. She began her career at the King County Landmarks Commission in Seattle, and in 2003, she established Pass Forward Northwest Cultural Resources, a consulting business specializing in cultural conservation projects. She is also a doctoral candidate in the University of Washington Built Environment's interdisciplinary PhD program, where her research focuses on the cultural significance of historic places. And she wrote an article that I found particularly useful for the National Alliance Preservation Commission's title, Cultural Significance in Preservation, toward a criterion reflecting community values, which is on creating a criterion for listing in the National Register on Culture. Jordan Tannenbaum is the Vice Chairman of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation and was an ACHP staff member from 1972 to 1982. A lawyer by training, he has also held senior fundraising positions of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and other organizations. He was awarded the Army's Legion of Merit Medal for his contributions to the Department of the Army's compliance with the National Historic Preservation Act. He also teaches introductory and advanced courses on Historic Preservation Law in Section 106 compliance for the Navy's civil engineers or officers school. Luis Hoyos is an architect and emeritus professor of architecture at the California State Polytechnic University in Pomona, where he teaches historic preservation and urban design. He is past member of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation and the Landmarks Committee of the National Park System Advisory Board. As such, he was national co-chair for the NPS American Latino Scholars Experts Panel and co-editor of American Latinos and the Making of the United States, a theme study. He is a current member and former chair of the California State Historical Resources Commission and a member of the Board of Directors of the Los Angeles Conservancy. And I'm pleased to say that he has also just completed service as a board member for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and we greatly appreciate his service on our board. Chrissy Curran is an agency deputy director and head of the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department's Heritage Division. She serves as the State's Deputy State Historic Preservation Officer. Chrissy is the chair of the National Historic Designation Advisory Committee of the National Conference of State Historic Preservation Officers and therefore has played a key role in the development of the Trav Nixper Report, recommendations for improving the recognition of historic properties of importance to all Americans. Next slide, please. Before the speakers began, I thought I would share a few quick thoughts. From my perspective, one of the conclusions I had from writing Why Old Places Matter is that places matter to people for a wide variety of reasons and some of those reasons are included in the criteria for listing in the National Register, including history and architecture as provided in criteria A, B, and C. I am, however, a proponent of listing and saving more places through the National Register, which I think is possible even under the existing law. For example, although the National Historic Preservation Act includes the concept that the National Register of Historic Places is composed of districts, sites, buildings, structures, and objects significant in American history, architecture, archaeology, engineering, and culture, we have never developed criteria, a criterion around the idea of culture and a cultural criterion is not included in the regulations. If we were to do this, it could broaden our thinking about how we apply the criteria for listing, as well as the downstream concepts of the period of significance and the application of the Secretariat of the Interior Standards for the treatment of historic properties to projects based on their significance. I think this and other suggestions could help us to capture more of the reasons that old places matter to people. I'm using these images of Shaco Hill in Richmond, Virginia, both because of how timely it is. You see this article came out on October 28, 2022, but also because the listing of the Shaco Hill Burying Ground Historic District, which was listed in the National Register on June 16, 2022, suggests other ways to view significance and integrity. This is a historic burying ground for African-Americans, which is adjacent to both the cemetery for white Christians and the Hebrew cemetery. Yet over more than a century from the 1870s through the 20th century, the African-American cemetery was systematically erased by road construction, an animal shelter, a gas station, and other activities. In preparing the nomination for the National Register, the nominators, and I greatly appreciate their work, and the State Historic Preservation Office, which approved and forwarded this nomination, included the concept that part of the significance of the district was actually the history of that erasure, and that therefore the erasure was part of the integrity of the site. To quote the nomination form, while there is much to admire and enjoy in the well-designed and purposefully curated visible properties of the district, historical significance now resides equally in the partial destruction, often deliberate, of a highly meaningful, emotionally charged, and racially fraught landscape. This nomination seeks both to recognize its full extent and to expose the great disparities that have characterized efforts at preservation and historical valorization across this public space. Whether graves are marked with elaborate monuments or natural vegetation, that ground remains nonetheless both sacred and historic. I think this nomination highlights some of the issues we face as we try to update the National Register process and think of the actions we can take to make this happen. Now, we're going to have each of the panelists share their ideas for action for about three minutes each, and then we'll come back and have them talk about both short-term actions, long-term actions, and medium-term actions. And I'd like to begin with Holly. So if we could turn to the next slide, and Holly will look forward to hearing what you have to say. Thanks, Tom. So I'm going to focus my initial remarks on changes I would like to see in the National Register regulations. So for anyone unfamiliar with the regulations, they are at 36 CFR parts, 60.4. And they are the basis in administrative law for what we see in bulletin 15 on how to apply the National Register criteria for eligibility. So first and foremost, I think we need a new criterion for cultural significance. We have had the same criteria for historical, architectural, and archaeological significance for 50 years. And they are good, but not great because they don't always provide a path for recognizing places that are culturally significant. And by that, I mean historic places that are important to living communities today. I know some folks will say that we have guidelines for TCPs, traditional cultural places, and that's enough. I appreciate the work that the National Park Service is doing on TCPs. And the draft provides guidelines that came out last week, provides some good clarification, but it's still too complicated. And frankly, it's still too peripheral to the way that many of us think about the National Register. The TCP approach should be absolutely central to what we are doing as preservationists in the 21st century, namely focusing on historic places that are identified by community members, places that maintain community identity and express collective values. Those TCP guidelines have been around for 30 years. The preservation field just has not embraced cultural significance in the way that we could. Indian tribes have taught archaeologists how to apply the TCP approach to places valued by tribal communities, and that's important, that many of us just have not gotten the memo that there are culturally significant places in all communities. And to bring the TCP approach from the margins of preservation to the center, we need a new criterion for cultural significance. Of course, many places will be eligible under multiple criteria, historic significance as well as cultural significance, for example, but the process is different for identifying and documenting cultural significance. People are the primary sources, people speaking from their lived experience about their relationship and attachment to places. So I've tried to think about the most targeted policy change that would have the biggest impact, and I think a new criterion for cultural significance is the change that we need. There are some associated changes that are also beneficial, adding use as an aspect of integrity, changing how we think about the period of significance and significant deeds, and changing some of the criteria considerations that present unnecessary barriers to listing. And I look forward to talking more about those ideas in today's session. Thanks. Next. Thank you. I'm Chrissy Curran, and I am going to focus my remarks today on the four main points that you see on the slide in front of you. As Tom mentioned, I was fortunate enough to chair the National Historic Designation Advisory Committee's work over the last couple of years through Nick Schippo. And the final report, which is almost hitting the streets, really what really jumped out at all of us through the process of putting the report together and the stakeholder outreach that we did was that responsibility for change lies at all levels of government, local, state, and federal. And when you see the recommendations, you will note that there's a lot of them that say NPS should, NPS should, NPS should. And sorry, NPS, a lot of that has to do with the fact that NPS owns the program. However, that said, we're finding lots of things to do, lots of critical things to do that can only be done at the state or the local level. So we are not off the hook, those of us at those levels. And furthermore, that solutions should always emphasize the optimizing public access. It's too easy for us to sort of conjure solutions that then inadvertently put up barriers with nuanced arguments that are too nuanced or too specialized and raising the cost. And I also took away from this report that we really need to be looking at, at especially looking at public access for those communities that have traditionally lacked the resources and influence to preserve their historic places of importance. And that's gonna look different depending on what state or territory you live and work in. And that influence piece is really important. It's not just about participation but bringing cultural diversity onto volunteer boards, state and federal agency staff, and in the consulting community. It's really essential and it makes a huge difference and really thinking about leadership roles for culturally diverse participants. And also this is always a tricky one, don't be afraid of new legislation that is sometimes the only way to get things done. You need to be very strategic about it. But what we heard over and over is in the report process is that that is something that will need to be done and there are ways to do it, whether it's rulemaking or regulations or actual legislation. So that's it for me, thank you. Hello, Luis Ollos here. Around 2010, while I was serving on the state commission in California, I was invited through the Secretary of the Interior's Office Salazar to be part of a presidential study group organized on the subject of diversifying and modernizing the National Register. So you see this subject as just knocking around the halls of power for quite a while. That happily morphed into a four-year stint as part of the landmarks committee within the NHL program, which as you know, reviews nominations. With things more or less running in parallel, we reviewed what you see on the screen. The slide you see has two versions, separated by time, of the same building. McDonnell Hall, aka our Lady of Water Loop and Mission Chapel in San Jose, where Cesar Chavez started to organize the local community years in advance of the Grape Strikes, in essence where he became a leader. The time goes on, the chapel is moved, modified, modernized, but still retain the interior space where Chavez spoke. On the right is a contemporary picture. The building was nominated for National Landmark status for its association with Chavez. The discussion was not easy. That was not an easy meeting. There was a split vote turning on issues of integrity, of course, with a bare majority voting yes, due to its association with Chavez, not because of architecture. The building was approved as an NHL in 2017. Since 2012, the big picture has been, the NPS has been making substantial progress under Secretary Salazar and with senior staff, including Stephanie Teuthman, Tony Lee, among many others. Towards diversifying the National Register and the NHL programs, task forces were assembled, professional consultations were organized at various points in time and all over the country. Importantly, new theme studies were written in the aggregate resulting in diverse dominations being processed and approved with a substantial number of them featuring vernacular designs, definitely not high art, and definitely not high integrity. Then the big action. A NPS sponsored rewrite of the NHL Bulletin in 2016 with the participation of a multidisciplinary task force led by an NPS historian, Jamie Jacobs. The idea was to provide clarifying language regarding significance and integrity, calibrating the language, removing the often exalted qualifying adjectives that would only apply to major pieces of art and design. The rewrite in essence would make it easier for resources with less than perfect integrity and with significance associated with underrepresented peoples to gain a foothold in the registers. The new bulletin, the new bulletin draft contains examples of vernacular buildings, tribal resources, and less than perfect historic districts. It has a wealth of descriptive language in terms of guidance, case studies, et cetera. The work is 90% done but got stalled after the 2016 election. The revised NHL document likely sits in the policy section at interior. And there you have it. We all thought that once approved, it would be the model to be followed in modifying the language of the national registered bulletins. In my view, here's my action item, it would be great if NPS would continue the work and issue a new NHL bulletin to be followed after appropriate study and deliberation with a modified national registered bulletin and supporting studies. Thank you. All right, I guess I'm the cleanup batter and excellent presentations all my colleagues. So I'd like to add one other item to my biography. In addition to working at the advisory council way back in 1972, which presumably makes me eligible for the national register, a scary thought. I'd like to just also indicate that since I was appointed to the council in 2016 along with my colleague, Louise, and I am currently the vice chairman and acting chairman of the advisory council. Our main business is ensuring that federal agencies comply with section 106 of the National Start Preservation Act as it relates to what we're talking about here. And we also have a very important job of advising the president in Congress. For those of you on matters relating to a start preservation, for those of you who are not familiar with section 106, and it does have as the register has implementing regulations published at 36 CFR part 800. Section 106 requires of the National Start Preservation Act requires that prior to the approval of any federal undertaking, and that's construed very broadly, that the federal agency take into account the effect of its undertaking on historic properties and they're defined as properties that are on or eligible for the national register. Very important point on our eligible and to afford the advisory council on historic preservation, a reasonable opportunity to comment. I'd like to submit to you that section 106 as I have practiced it and as I have studied it as I teach it and as I know it is an inherently flexible process. And it can accommodate a broad range of properties, properties of all different types as the register accommodates, of course. One of the areas that we are very focused on and that we consider very important is giving due consideration to the views and expertise of Indian tribes, native Hawaiian organizations, and others with direct cultural connections regarding the perceived significance. It's very, very important. And I'd like to add in not only those groups, but any group I have called the hyphenated Americans that have a relationship to this, to the history that's being looked at. It's very important that the community be involved and communities as I just mentioned and that they be involved in our consultation process because through that process is where change happens and resources can be preserved and adaptively used. Well, we believe that it's very, very important to tell the entire, the whole story about historic properties and understand all the areas of significance. That is critical because identification of the significance of a property is the first part of our four step process. And it is essential to being better informed as to the effects on those significant aspects. It is important to know also how the significant and qualifying characteristics that qualify these properties for the register, either on or eligible could be changed. And it's, as I said, very important that all parties participate in the review and understand why this particular property, this particular place is important. Properties that are being considered can come from a variety of, can represent a variety of different uses of different events, cultural associations, et cetera. As you may know, section 106 does not guarantee that a property will be saved. Certainly, and oftentimes as is in C2. And again, using this whole theme of flexibility, consultation process is flexible and very responsive to the variety of different consulting parties that are involved. What we're trying to get at in that process is what is most important to preserve and how might we preserve that? Section 106 recognizes our understanding of why places are important. And it represents, as I said, that places can change over time. In fact, our regulations direct federal agencies to reevaluate properties given the passage of time, changing perceptions of significance or incomplete prior evaluations, all of which we find. Where the full range of significance for historic property has not been articulated, doing so should be and is a part of the section 106 process to ensure that the assessment is complete. As I mentioned, we deal with properties that are not only on the national register, but that are and have been determined eligible. And that can be in a very simple way through what we call a consensus determination where the federal agency and the state historic preservation officer or the tribal historic preservation officer agree that a property meets the national register criteria and they will treat it as such. There is no obligation in the 106 process then for there to be a navigation through the entire nomination process to be able to deal with the property through the section 106 review and consider a property rather, through the 106 review. So the other area that I think we'll talk about and that we feel where you need to be flexible is in understanding and determining whether a property retains integrity. The formula for us is if a property meets one or more of the national register criteria and retains integrity, it is eligible for the national register, but it is important to remember that a property's integrity could be tied to practices, cultural traditions or events that occurred there. And that might eclipse what might be considered a usual approach to looking at the property's physical or architectural attributes. And we have a number of things that we feel can enhance that and can make that a lot easier situation to deal with and perception to deal with, which I will save to now as I believe we're time, it's time for us to get into our larger discussion. So thank you for the time to spend with you. Thank you all for those great opening remarks. What I'd like to do now is I'm going to pose the same questions to each of the speakers. And I hope that people will also respond to these questions in the chat so we can really get some thoughts going. And first I'm going to ask each speaker to spend a few minutes talking about their short-term ideas for how to improve the national register process to be more inclusive. And I'm going to begin with Holly Taylor and I'll also ask Holly to address a question or a discussion that's happening in the chat around use since she suggested that idea. Thanks, Tom. So my short-term idea, I would like to see a process for gathering public comments on revising the national register regulations for eligibility. I give people, this is another, I wish the Park Service would, following on Chrissy's comments, give people an opportunity to have their say about what needs to change. If the Park Service can't do that for some reason, maybe the National Trust or the Advisory Council can take a lead on that. And just to go back to some of the things I mentioned earlier to some of those ideas that I would like to have the Park Service consider in addition to a criteria for cultural significance, I would focus on adding use as an aspect of integrity, meaning that for some places, continuity of use is one of the main ways that a place retains its significance. And any time I talk about this, somebody always says, but you can't preserve use. Well, you often can't preserve setting either, but we still consider that a relevant aspect of integrity for some properties. Adding integrity of use would bring the national register closer to how authenticity is described for World Heritage sites, which include use and function among their attributes. Thinking about integrity of use shifts our mindset in some important ways. Integrity is not only about physical aspects of place, it also includes feeling and association. And it could be a more holistic way to identify the relevant qualities of historic places and whether or not those qualities are so intact. It reminds us that places do not need to have all aspects of integrity. Some places clearly do not have integrity of use. It may be more important for those places that have integrity of design. And it says that adaptive reuse is not always the answer. Use and cultural significance are closely linked. Keeping the shell of a place without sustaining its traditional use may not feel like preservation to a lot of folks. Like turning a working waterfront into a tourist amenity may not be preserving what's important. In addition, the idea of replacing period of significance with just significant dates, I would love to see an end to the arbitrary 50-year cutoff. And I think it's great to see, again, in the new draft TCP guidelines that almost every example of non-native TCPs and native TCPs has a period of significance that comes up to the present. This is how we need to think about a lot of historic places. Their stories don't end. We can document significant dates and eras, but the idea that nothing is significant after an arbitrary point in time is just not productive. And finally, in terms of short-term ideas, eliminating some of the criteria considerations that are various to eligibility. I think John Sprinkel's book, Crafting Preservation Criteria tells us that the criteria considerations were mostly thought up in the 1930s, basically to keep places off the list of potential acquisitions for the National Park Service and to avoid controversy. So we don't need to keep these exclusions, especially for sanitaries and places of worship that are significant to underrepresented communities. I think these extra hoops do more harm than good in terms of preserving places that people care about. So those are my short-term ideas I'd like to see brought forth for discussion. Thank you, Holly. Just to add one thought about use that's a little bit broader than the criteria we usually work with is just the whole notion of authenticity and what constitutes authenticity. And I've seen some discussions around that lately and how much use contributes to authenticity. So Chrissy Mayan, now turn to you for your short-term ideas and I'm also enjoying watching the comments in the chat as they continue. Thank you, Tom. I've got three I wanted to bring up. And my first one has to do with something that Shippos can do. And again, my perspective is very Shippo-based because that is where our report, that was sort of the DNA of our report. And we believe that Shippos can target underserved communities of listening sessions and knowledge sharing to connect a community's preservation goal with the National Register. In some cases, the National Register might not be the best tool for community use. But honestly, unless we go out and ask people what they are trying to accomplish, the best we can do is put our own resources on what we think they ought to be used to. And that is not a really viable way to go. And we think that's what we've done at the Shippo level. Federal and state agencies need to encourage and respect the local designation criteria in federal processes, such as the National Register and such a lot of things. We often go with designation criteria stuck in the National Register. They face off of the National Register criteria. And if we're going to be so reminded about picking up properties that we don't know, common traditional issues in the National Register, those are going to be identified at a local level. The state, Shippos don't know and it's certainly the parts of the staff that are going to be up to local neighborhoods and communities to bring them forward. And they may be broader criteria. Chrissy, I think we're losing your sound a little bit. You may have frozen. Let me just, hopefully you'll come back on in a moment, but let me just emphasize the important role that you noted about the State District Preservation Offices. They really do play a critical role, obviously in this process. And it's essential that some of this good work happens there. The other thing I would emphasize that you brought up is this relationship between the local designations and how they feed up to the state and federal, but then how the criteria also flow back and forth between the two. So while we're hopefully waiting for Chrissy to get back on, Luis, let me turn to you and ask for your short-term ideas about how to improve the national register process. Right, this turns out to be a very difficult question. The country is so big and local conditions vary so much, but I think in the abstract, I would encourage local communities to organize and to participate in surveys and getting to know exactly who they are, what geographic extents they have, what resources they have, and to put it in an organized way in the form of surveys. So that would be really good. I'm reminded of local examples here in Los Angeles, like for instance, Filipino town. Nobody knew what Filipino town was until people mobilized and came up with evidence that it does exist. They do occupy buildings and they should be made a historic district. So how you do surveys is really interesting. Of course, everything costs money. So I would think that localities would do well to pursue funding for surveys. And at the state level, obviously the state could help by providing grants for surveys and maybe also by providing workshops to train people to do these surveys. That's as far as I got. Obviously, as part of my talk, and I'm encouraged someone in the chat that the revised NHL bullets will be released in a year. That's great news. And maybe we can start thinking about revising the National Register bulletins. That'll take years, I'm sure. Thanks, Louise. Let me ask you a follow-up question about surveys. One of the things we talked about in the planning for this session was the professionals who do these surveys and what skill sets are needed. And do you think that should change from what we've traditionally done? Well, of course, professionals exist for a reason. As part of my work with the state commissions, with the state commission, we're always mindful of who wrote the nomination, right? Was it written by a person or was it written by a consultant? And admittedly, I think the standards for review always subjective are calibrated a little bit. I don't think you need to be a professional to do a survey. The, here, right next door to me in Pomona, the Lincoln Park District was very much a grassroots survey that got over 800 households into a district and put on the National Register. So I think the training, such as it could exist, could be done via workshops or via how two documents made available. So I don't think you necessarily need to have trained professionals. Good, thank you. Jordan, how don't we turn to you for your short-term ideas about what to do in the immediate future? Right, so just to respond real quickly to the question you asked about skills, let me just say generally these are good times for folks who wanna get into history and historic preservation survey work. You name it with the Infrastructure Act and the Inflation Reduction Act. There is a dearth of trained, passionate, interested professionals. And so that's another, probably a topic for another panel, but something to keep in mind, I think, as we look at sourcing that. I would say my short-term approach would be all centered around consultation. And that, again, let me hit hard on consulting with Indian tribes and Native Hawaiian organizations. It's a theme that we raise often in our consultations. They are the experts on identifying places of significance to them and assessing how they might be affected. We don't see enough of that. And I think that certainly has to increase as we move forward again in an environment where we anticipate there will be certainly a growth in the need in regulatory activities and so far as preservation and other environmental areas are concerned. The second is that we wanna encourage all stakeholders to be more involved in the consultation process. You have an opportunity to deal with directly with a federal agency. I think we don't see enough people taking it. This is a wonderful opportunity to get your idea and your concerns across and in looking at the community, community-wide for the community to express this interest. We would like to see more of that as well. Let me also say one final thing as to the comment about changing the regs and changing the laws. I believe certainly as an attorney that regulatory and statutory change can in any political environment, any political environment bring unintended consequences. And I think that my advice would be and Tom might be able to agree with this that you should tread lightly when you begin to look at changing the laws or changing the regulations. Just a comment and I'm done with my short term. Thank you, Jordan. And I'll respond a little bit on the law and I appreciate other people's thoughts about it. I do think there's a great danger in opening the process. But on the other hand, when the stars aligned we've had some great changes to the National Historic Preservation Act through amendments that continually broaden the impact of the act and broaden some of the things you're talking about including consultation. So I think as I believe David Finley put it depends on when the stars align and they may not always be aligned. But I certainly think there's a great deal that can be done without changing the law. And Polly has emphasized that culture is already built into the law but would never develop that criterion. And it's not in the regs, although it's implicit in the way the regs have been interpreted and particularly with the traditional cultural prop places now changing my terminology. And Sherry and others emphasized that yesterday. So go ahead, Luis, and then we'll come back to medium and long term. I'm reminded of all those meetings that went on to the retooling of the guidelines for the NHL program. So yeah, making a statutory change, we were told, uh-uh, requires an act of Congress. You don't really wanna do that. But changing the guidelines, the recommendations for people engaging in these programs is fully within our purview and could modify not just the often fraught nomination process but could also, and I'm treading lightly here, could also change the culture within reviewing the review process happening at SHPO's offices. Thank you for that. Go ahead, to Gown. What exactly are the calculations being made given the current rules in terms of what nominations are being advanced, how they're being assessed in these highly subjective matters? I mean, assessment of integrity is subjective, right? So I think if you modify and modernize the rules, that will trickle down and alter the culture in SHPO's offices. Well, one of the encouraging things I've seen throughout this conference is the extent to which people have talked about integrity as being defined by the community to which the resource is important. And that's really a watershed change in a lot of ways. I will also note that this conversation about changes to the law or changes to regulations or what we can do now with the other guidance really is sort of the short-term, long-term and medium-term way of thinking about things. So let me use that as an opportunity to turn to the medium term. And why don't I ask you to combine sort of your medium term and long-term action steps that you would take as a part of this given the time that we have remaining. And the other, the last thing I'll end with is just as the Park Service has redone the traditional cultural properties guidance, I believe we're all looking at bulletin 16 and where it needs to be changed. So let me turn to Holly next. Okay, well, this goes back to what Louise was saying earlier. I agree that the national register process could be much more friendly to members of the public. But I also think we can expand, we can look at expanding the professional qualifications and training in the preservation field as a strategy to move toward a more inclusive national register. And so everybody's familiar with the Secretary of the Interior's Standards for Rehabilitation, maybe less familiar with the Secretary's standards for professional qualifications. And it's a really short list, right? There are standards for history, archaeology, architectural history, architecture and historic architecture, that's it. So there was a draft revision 25 years ago that added anthropology, folklore and other fields. But there was so much disagreement in public comments about the education requirements that the whole thing was shelved. So we still have the same short list from 1977 of who is considered a preservation professional who meets the Secretary's standards. So, and we still have sort of blinders on about what are relevant skills in terms of the full range of preservation work. So this may sound a little esoteric, but I think it matters in terms of research methods. It matters in terms of who is encouraged to come into the field, what kinds of properties are looked at. So I'll just sort of throw that out there. Another, this was mentioned earlier, all the national register bullens need to be updated with or without the changes that we've talked about today. So, broader range of perspectives and expertise among contributors are gonna make those revised bullens more interesting and I'll just, I will leave it at that. Thank you. Chrissy, have you rejoined us? Can you hear us and can we hear you? We're still not, we thought Chrissy had rejoined us, but that hasn't happened yet. So I will just take the opportunity to mention a couple of things that she talked about and emphasized in our pre-meeting. And one of them really was the absolute importance of having a diversity of people on commissions and boards at all three levels of government. She mentioned that when she spoke, but she emphasized it greatly. She also talked about the limitations of state-discord preservation offices to make changes rapidly and how many of them are on two-year funding cycles. So I think these were all things we have to keep in mind as we move through this process. So let me turn to Jordan and ask him for his medium and long-term actions, having already heard his position on not opening up to law. Okay, well, I've become much more conciliatory towards in this area. So I have two medium long-term recommendations to improve the survey information that the local and state levels, federal agencies rely heavily on this information in our section 106 reviews. And so that is an area that I've observed where I'd certainly like to see some activity. Our places of significance to diverse communities included, that's something, again, that Native American, Native Hawaiian, et cetera, or other communities that sometimes we find is left out. And our community values, as you just talked about them, reflected in significant statements. And I think that's important. What are the community values? I see attending more towards that area. So that certainly is important. And one thing I see that we had a task force in the advisory council on this, on digitizing this information, the more digitizing that can go on, the better. You've done a pretty good, I'm not familiar with all the states. I do know, because we looked at in the task force what the state of Washington is doing, very impressed with that. The museum that I'm currently working for, the Holocaust Museum, of course, uses a lot of that. Digitization is the way of the future. That is something that has to increase and will be much more valuable to our federal partners. The other is to be supportive and engaged in any efforts of the National Park Service that they take to update their bulletins, as you just talked about, to provide guidance to them, certainly on significance and integrity. I believe we did assist the NPS in revising bulletin 38. And we're hopeful that they will look at other significant guidance in this area. And we look forward to working with them too. We feel very pleased with our partnership with the NPS and stand ready to help them in any way. So those are my two medium to long-term comments. Thank you, Jordan. Chrissy, welcome back. I'm delighted to see you back. And let me give you the opportunity to talk about your, I combined the medium term and long-term action items. So let me ask you to go. Thank you, Tom, and I'm so sorry about that. I probably blew out our internet. So my mid-term and long-term combined, really like to see the National Registry, or the National Park Service, so I think cost is a barrier as we want the argument to have something listed and more professional help is needed. And for the NPS, bulletins and guidance and for non-professional, how to make the techniques one of the significance of a place is defending or business-based, which is the case for many neighborhoods places. And long-term, we kind of go back to the changes in legislation regarding crime, Sarah's and Ann Karen's systemological injustice, so I just heard about it. I heard that over outreach, boundaries, ownership, being beholden to the National Registry, or not being afraid of the thing that's in there, protecting indigenous sites in places of cultural memory that have a minimal... Thank you, Chris, thank you. You're still a little bit difficult to understand, but I think we caught most of it. And I just want to highlight when we talk about the importance of the State Historic Preservation Offices, we also include the Tribal Historic Preservation Offices, and I don't want that to be missed. Let me ask Louise to bring us home, and then I'll just have a couple minutes of closing comments. Well, very quickly, in the medium term, I visualize, I hope that after surveys comes awareness and that communities will know what they have, and they'll be incentivized to write nominations, hopefully by applying for their grant funding to organizations like the National Trust. I remind people that this session is being supported by the African-American Cultural Heritage Fund. So money might be there, you just have to access it. And I don't like to, following this thread of what happens in SHPO's offices and boards and commissions, I absolutely agree. We have to be, I don't know if I want to use the word vigilant and I'm not pointing fingers, but boards and commissions function much better if they have a diverse composition. If there's a person that's handling the social science, if there's a person qualified to deal with tribal issues, things go so much better. So I'm very disappointed when I see a commission that's not diverse, that might be handling information or making determinations without the appropriate based knowledge. I don't want to end on a downer. Meeting term, I hope that we get a lot more diverse nominations. Thank you, Louisa. I don't think it's a downer to emphasize the importance of having diversity with a lot of different meanings of what diversity means on the boards and commissions because then that expertise is there. So it's really great. Hallie, Jordan, Chrissy, any final comments or responses? And then I'll just do a quick close. I'd love to just respond to something that was a couple of comments that were made in the chat about looking at properties associated with BIPOC communities that have been turned down for designation either at the local, state or national level. And I would encourage folks to take a look at a project that I'm involved in with many colleagues in the Seattle area. It's called Beyond Integrity. We're looking at equity and preservation. And we've had a series of fantastic interns who have looked at many years' worth of data of nominations to our Seattle and Can-Can frameworks commissions, what has been designated, what has been turned down because of integrity issues or other concerns. So we're actually starting to gather that data and kind of do an audit on local practices. So that may be a model for some folks wanting to do that ahead of locations. Thank you, Holly. That's a great way to end. And I just want to thank the panelists for their great comments and your thought that went into this discussion. Clearly, we could have a much longer conversation. And I also want to thank all the participants for the amazing information that's been included in the chat and for the questions and dialogue that's happening there. And obviously we have a lot more to do, but I really appreciate people focusing on specific action steps that we can take. So we'll take this information and see what we can do together to work on this. Thank you all again. And I really appreciate your participation in this important panel.