 Our awesome leadership begins. First, we want to thank you for representing us here in San Antonio. You stand for greatness. We don't have time to mention everything that makes San Antonio wonderful and fantastic, so people just share one word, the people. We love San Antonio. People don't give up on people. Everyone cares. We love the Alamo and the parks. However, we can use more parks. And there are activities for all ages. We also don't have time to mention everything that makes a man shine, so we will share one word, the people. We show great leadership here. We have the freedom to lead. We volunteer. Carter and I are SOC friends. SOC stands for Service Off-Campus, which allows us to connect and communicate with younger students. All of us help people to do good things, just like you. We are a land-house school, which means we work very hard to learn and lead. And most importantly, Oakmen teaches all of us how to be successful in life. We stand for greatness. Learners and leaders, Mr. Ron Nirenberg. In your school, it's a real honor for me. I don't live too far away, so I get to see some of you driving to school sometimes. My name is Ron Nirenberg, and I'm your city councilman. How many of you know what a city councilman is? Yeah? Charlie, I bet you know. What is a city councilman? A city councilman is somebody who a people can claim to. He goes to court, and they can make some complaints after. Not bad. So I get to hear complaints. Rocko. Working a group to make the city better? Yes, ma'am. Very good. I saw one more hand in the bag. No? Well, you all are right. I'm one of ten city councilmen. We all divide all the city into ten people areas. And then we also have one mayor who oversees the entire city. My name is Ron Nirenberg, and I've got District 8, which is the northwest area of San Antonio. And I've been in office now since 2013. I was elected twice, once in 2013, and now again just last May. And how many of you know who our mayor is? Yeah? Anyone who's long-term? That's right. That's right. Well, very good. Well, you all know who a city councilman is, what he does, or what a mayor does. But I want to kind of dive into that a little bit and talk a little bit about what we do and how we get there. So everyone knows what, when your elections are, and everyone's excited about voting? Yes. Are you excited about voting? Yes. How many of you are excited about voting? Oh, come on. How many of you are excited about when they voted? Okay, how many of you can vote? Keep your hands raised if you can vote. I'll make the teachers in the back. That's right. That's right. That's voting. Well, I want to do a little experiment. How many of you think it's important to vote? Yeah? I want to see all of those hands raised again. And the things that I do at City Hall when I hear complaints or when I try to fix sidewalks or streets or we make sure that there's place on the street to help keep us safe, those are all the decisions that a city councilman has to make. And we deal with the budget, so making sure that we have money to pay for all the services that we provide. But I want to do a little experiment. Today, I've talked to your teachers and they have given me the authority that I get to decide how we're going to have lunch and when we're going to have lunch. And so what I decided to do is that we're going to do a little democratic experiment and it's going to be based on San Antonio. So let me see. Let me count off a few people. I think there are 75 students here. Right around. Okay. Harder. That's three, right? That's four. Okay. That's three. John, Isabella, and Lauren. Okay. I want all of the people I call to sit right over there. Right over there. Right. Now, raise your hand if you have an idea of what you want to have for lunch. What would you like for lunch? Not so much. Okay. Great. Pop it down. Pop it down like that. Okay. All right. Lauren, you know what? Y'all put your hands down. When would you like to have lunch? Right now? Yeah. You decided? You guys don't matter. But these folks sit right now. You don't have to worry about whatever anybody else wants. You just tell me what you want to do and that's what we're going to do. Is that? So what do you guys say now? The reason you're here. These are your serious leaders right now. It doesn't matter. I'm appointing them. So far, it was like that one. You should take one of these. It's whoever wins. It's not yours. So it's my master. Oh. It's a place in the U.S. Oh. So you have all these places. Just need one more home. Oh. No, no, no. Only these people matter. How many of you all think that we should eat at the most expensive place in the U.S.A.? Sounds like a good idea. How many of you like the idea that I'm only asking those folks? No. No? One day in our city. That happens every single day in our city. And for you folks in the White House, you have a really great metaphor for your mission statement where you're trying to get the kindergarteners through the sea to the kindergarten and onto the shores of Pittsburgh. That's a metaphor. What I was trying to do right there is a metaphor for how our city runs. And the reason is, you all raise your hands that you are excited about voting, but you all put your hands down because you picked a vote. Well, let me tell you, how many of you know how old you have to be to vote? Thank you. I heard it. Okay, good. I'll tell you what I know. You have to register to vote. And City of San Antonio has one point, almost one and a half million people in the City of San Antonio. Roughly about a little bit more than half of those folks are old enough, and they've turned in a card that says, I want to vote. Roughly about half. So many about 750,000. Don't fact check me because I know I'm wrong on that number. About 750,000 people are voting. Any idea how many of those 750,000 people who are eligible to vote, who can vote, who have turned in the card and are old enough to vote, how many of those people actually turn out, give me a percent, and actually vote. Forty-five percent. Forty-five percent. Are you dancing, pessimistic? Ten percent. Everybody thinks Ben's right? Who has a better idea? Seventy-five percent. Seventy-five, that would be, you mean 25 percent of people can vote, but they chose not to be part of the lunchtime conversation. They just don't do that. That's even worse than he said. Charlie. Fifteen. Fifteen. Fifteen. Fifteen. Fifteen. Fifteen. Fifteen. Fifteen. Fifteen. You're right. Isn't that shocking of all the 18-year-olds and older people that your parents say and your teachers and so forth, of all the people who can vote and part of that conversation and make the decision about what we're gonna have lunch or what type we're gonna have lunch or how much money we should spend on our streets and sidewalks or how many fire trucks we need on the road only one out of ten do it. How does that make you feel? Okay. Now how many of you are now even more excited when you turn 19 to turn into your regular registration card and vote? Okay. Now here's what I want to explain to you. You don't have to be 18 to make a difference in your community. We've been doing this all year. We go around schools. We try to do at least one every three months. And we come to our schools. We get to listen to what your concerns are. Because there are so many people in our community who don't get a chance to vote because they're too young or they haven't quite registered or they just moved here and haven't been living here long enough to be able to vote. We need to make sure that we're listening to them. And you all have great ideas and I want to give you an example of something that just happened that will hopefully excite you to be part of this process. Last year I went to a middle school called Hector V. Garcia. I don't know if anyone has heard of that. I think they're the Garcia gladiators. They're out in Pilesio Parkway. And those students, much like you all, have to walk to school on a sidewalk. But their subdivisions were built in a place where it didn't have any rules whether or not they had to put in sidewalks. They had to walk right next to the street where cars are going about 45 miles an hour. Very dangerous, right? We didn't know. This is a big place. City of San Antonio has almost 500 square miles and we have 10 people that kind of watch things and look at how they are. The students, when I went to the kids' town hall, they had two presentations and they came up and they said, Mr. Dürerberg, we have a problem with our sidewalks and we need your help. And it was so impressive to me. They thought that if they talked to their city councilman, even though they couldn't vote, that we could somehow get a sidewalk built to be more safer to get to school. Well, just last week me and my buddy Ray who works in our office we got to go walk with them for the first time on their new sidewalk. And that's because they said that this is something wrong with our community and we need it fixed. And being part of a town hall like this is the best way. Beyond voting is one of the best ways that you can be involved in your community. So I want to challenge you that when you go home tonight not only do you tell your parents that you learned that even before you vote, I know it's for some of you, it's maybe seven or eight years away, even before you vote, you can make a difference in your community. And so that's what today's all about. I want to take questions from you. I want to learn about what's important, what's on your mind, what's going on that we can help improve. Maybe some things that are going well in your neighborhoods. But we want to learn what's going on so we can help you improve it. And you have a voice in your community and so I want to be excited by using it and I want to show you that local government people on the city council and the folks that are fixing the streets and the folks that are patrolling your neighborhoods really want to help you live in a great San Antonio. So how many of you are still excited about living in San Antonio? Alright, good. How many of you now think that if you're not quite excited one day, you can make a change and make a difference with that? No? Come on, come on. I'm sorry, maybe I'll be clear. How many of you want to make a difference in your community to make you better? Alright, so you guys ready to do that today? Alright, so let's go. I see that some of you have some presentations or some signs made. I was going to go right into question and answer, but you have some direction for me and who wants to present we can do that too. You want to start? Now what you want to start is a call. Come on. I just find them and nobody would say about them. So leave that that we can fix our problems by using taxes to build more space or to have more citizens to adopt them. That's great. Wonderful, thank you. Is that your idea? Are you working with your classmates? Well just real quick. Let me get the microphone for the next question. That's a very important issue. Back in 2005 when a former mayor of Harvard or came into office, San Antonio hopefully nobody's queuing here, I'll just be factual but San Antonio was unfortunately having to euthanize about 30,000, I believe it's about 30,000 dogs every year because there were so many strays on the street that had to be picked up and there weren't any adoptions and some of them were dangerous animals. When Mayor Harvard or came into office it was the worst and from then on we decided that we wanted to make sure that San Antonio becomes a place that's humane for its animals. So far we've been working on what's called a new kill strategy. We want to try to get San Antonio to become a place where the strays that are brought in are released live to families that want to adopt them. So far we're up to almost 90%. So we've done a great, great job. We built a new shelter so we took some of that tax money that's your money and we built some new shelters so we can have more space to keep the animals but we still need to do better. One of the things that we need to do better on is educate, teach each other about what responsible pet ownership is. Making sure that when you see your friends really want to have a dog that if they're going to go and buy that animal that they're committed to taking care of it I've played loose and you know reproduced with animals that become strays. So it's a great point. Thank you very much for bringing it to our attention. His sisters sometimes babysitter for a cat family too. We have a, I think it's called solar solution. The problem is people don't realize that we're going to run out of fossil fuels. The more we use, the more the environment suffers. The pollution? Pollution for the end of us. Another problem is that a bunch of things cost more than what most people have. Our solution would be solar power because we use less fossil fuels and we could raise fundraisers for the board so they could afford solar power ones. Once we convert this to solar power, other states will get jealous and they will convert so that we could keep the environment and the country. Solar power doesn't work at night so we could use electric solar power is on our solar panels on our house to charge it. We can just plug whatever we need into the wall. Thanks. Good job guys. Great point. I heard a couple things in there. One of them was solar power in energy production which we need a lot of energy to power our city. We go to the factories or the homes and the businesses. But I also heard Eric talk about solar power. And that's one thing that we're working very hard on. In fact, at noon today I'm going to give a talk to a lot of the county judges and the elected officials in the Bear County area talking about what we can do together to help improve air quality. And that's precisely for the reason because we know that bad air quality has a cost to not only our environment like the trees that you were drawing but also our health. We have a lot of cases of asthma and different lung issues when there's poor air quality. We know today our air quality is suffering so much that the federal government is going to call us a city that has bad air. And it's not just name calling it comes with a lot of federal rules. That's a great question. I don't know the answer to it but it does and there have been studies to show that young children that live in areas with the worst air quality, not like San Antonio which has relatively good air compared to other cities, there have been studies to show that some children are born with lung defects because of the air. So real quick on the solar part of it, you will be happy to know that we've been working with CPS Energy which I think for most of you would supply your energy and we're going to be rolling out a solar power program that makes it cheaper and faster for people in their homes to put solar panels on the roof. So when you get home tonight and if you're really excited about solar make sure you tell your parents to watch out for the new program coming from CPS because you will be able to put some solar power on your roof and contribute to improving our air quality and getting us less dependent on those fossil fuels. So that is a challenge. So if Michael was asking is it too expensive for solar power and a lot of people have been concerned about this it has been very expensive to do solar power and that's one of the reasons why we aren't currently doing it right now as much as we could but the new program that I was talking about is going to make it easier for people to put it on their solar power because CPS, our energy company will pay for the units, pay for the equipment and then we get a return back from their community solar power program. It will probably take a few months so you have to put your energy down and get in line. Let me take one more question and then we'll get to the next presentation. I thought I saw a hand in the back. Do you have a question? Johnny has a question. It's not really a question but I know that we have an RV and you used to have a generator and you put solar panels on the top and I mean my dad just went out and bought some solar panels and he installed them like an afternoon on the top of our RV and it's more fun to check them out when you have the energy inside. You don't have to stop the gas as much and you brought up a good point about what happens at night. Well the technology for the batteries is getting much better too so we can get all the sun we can in the daytime hours and in the stormy batteries and put that power to use even when it's not light outside. Alright Tommy you're up. Hi I'm Jamie Boggan. When you cut down 1.2 these trees make the air with breeze so if there weren't any we wouldn't really be alive. Trees make good homes for animals so if you're bothering you or in your gym you can just feel like you're in storage this isn't our district and we saw it go up and we were also very disappointed to see how many trees were cut down. Let me talk to you a little bit about your extremely important Go on Ryan Reed. One more question on this one and then we'll go to the left. The one on the street and when they're speeding it takes a while from the slow down. The only thing cracking it's against the law. It's against the law. To speeding it will get your driving restricted Thank you very much. I think it's Carter's show now. And thank you for asking us to think about our concerns in our city and how we'd like to see them change. This is Habitat. Use your voice and expire others to use theirs. This is what you have done by inviting us to be a part of the Town Hall Challenge. We hope you have enjoyed this unique and ubiquitous school. Unique meaning special because it allows the student to become a better person. And ubiquitous meaning we are learners and leaders everywhere all the time, even when no one is looking. Wrap up by saying thank you very much for sharing your thoughts and your concerns with me. It is inspiring for me to know that you all care so much because, again, you can't even vote. But you have that much care and concern for your community. And make sure that...