 Good morning, and of course welcome to our grand opening and ribbon-cutting ceremony for the City of Columbia new payment and customer care center. I'm excited, and of course you are excited, that the day has arrived when we can open this new facility and provide another another level of customer service to our citizens. That just happens to be located in District 2. District 2, I wonder who leads that district. Thank you so very much. This is a wonderful day and a wonderful opportunity for our city to open this customer service hub. In the heart of the city. This new payment and customer service care center will allow the city to expand our services to customers and provide them with not only extended accessibility, but also a drive-through service. Our customers can now conduct businesses, business, right from their vehicles, which will definitely provide the level of confidence and care that this facility will provide. The drive-through service has four lanes. Four lanes. You remember when we used to have that little drive-through center right there on Sumpter Street and how you really had to maneuver and you had to reach up and pay. I remember those days, but look where we are today. I would like to commend our city manager and her team for their insight, foresight, vision and hard work putting together in order to bring this project online and to make this new payment customer care center a reality. This is a major step towards our envisioning Columbia in terms of its goal, in terms of increasing customer service and making it a priority throughout the city. I along with my fellow members of City Council we are proud of their major dis-major accomplishment that will improve municipal operations within this great city of ours. Before closing, I'd certainly like to represent, like to present other members of our council who are here today. I know Howard DeVall is here, we are bringing this here, and if there are other council persons who are anxiously waiting to pay their bill, show your hands. Again, thank you so much thanking our city manager for her insight and work ethic to get this done. So thank you, thank you very very much. We're excited about this grand opening for sure. During the pandemic, there are a lot of things that all of us have had to kind of weather the storm through, and we've all done it for sure. It's to the best of our abilities, all of our citizens, and certainly all of our employees. I'm so thankful for them. And sometimes during hard times, opportunities present themselves. And I think that's what we found with the possibility here with this payment center when it became available, that although we were conducting business in new and different ways and having to make sure that our customers could still pay their bills online and our employees working with them from remote areas at times, but still getting it done, we also realized that many of our citizens still like, and we do too, that first-hand experience. And so when this opportunity presented itself to create a new and better payment center in our city, we jumped upon that in our very forward thinking, thinking mayor and council embrace the idea, and I always appreciate them for thinking that way and knowing that many times that those touchpoints with our citizens require us to move in a different way and think big and figure out how to get it done. And so we embarked upon the opportunity to purchase this property, and that required a lot of work and energy from many city departments. All of the assistant city managers and their respective departments have touched this project from Missy Gentry with development and the opportunity to get the property from Henry Simons to get with operations to get the property upfitted and ready to go as soon as possible. And all of his team was support services and parts and recreation and fleet, so I mean all of them from Clint Shealy and his team who are going to actually have customers here paying water and sewer bills and commercial solid waste bills to Jeff Palin, our assistant city manager and CFO, and obviously his getting the payments, his finance team, and his payment center team to make sure that our employees are in place to do the business of the citizens of Columbia. So I'm so thankful for every single one of them and all of the city staff and team that are here, and we know that police and fire, you know, they touch everything too because they're going to make sure this facility is secure and safe. Today, Monday, October 11th is a soft opening and our staff are prepared to serve customers starting tomorrow, which is Tuesday, October 12th, which will be the first official day of operations here on Hardin Street. We want everyone to note that the services will no longer be provided at 1339 Main Street, Washington Square, the corner of Maine and Washington. Those services are going to be right here, so we're excited about that. This payment and customer care center will be open Monday through Friday from 8.30 a.m. to 5 p.m. The payment center will host 10 employees working here on site. Approximately 2,500 in-person customers are served every week by our staff, and the payment center also processes mail in payments as well. They process drop box payments daily, and our electronic clerk processes six electronic payment files daily. The payment center will now offer drive-through services as Councilman McDowell referenced, and that will certainly be a big convenience for our citizens and customers. Some of the services that will be provided here at the payment center are bills, bill payments for water and sewer, commercial, solid waste customers can take care of their business here, as well as any parking tickets can be paid here. And then we'll also have the customer care center. Three customer service reps will provide assistance to customers at the new center, and one customer service team lead will be on site. So if you have any escalated or issues, problems that you have, issues that you need personal attention, those ladies and gentlemen will be here to help. And on average, they serve 1,200 customers every month. These services by the customer care team include also water and sewer, establishing new services, disconnects, reconnects, bill account inquiries and assistance, and reporting maintenance related concerns. So I'm so excited. I know you're probably going to hear from our two administrators over customer care and the payment center, they can give even more details. But all in all, this is certainly a win win for our community. And we're really excited and really thankful that we've reached this point. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. And thank you for being here this morning for our big day, our grand opening and ribbon cutting. We are really excited about this day. I know when Justin from our PR department interviewed me and Tiffany a couple of weeks ago, he asked me how do I feel? And I think I said I was excited about 10 times, if not more. So I'm excited this morning. And I'm glad that you're here with us to be excited too. I would like to thank our mayor city council, our city manager, Teresa Wilson, assistant city manager, Jeff Palin, our finance director, Jan Alonso, assistant city manager, Clint Shealy, support services, our IT department, public relations and everyone that made this possible. My team, they're in white and blue jeans this morning. And they have on their city mass and they are so ready. The payment center, as Miss Wilson says, takes in water, sewer payments, solid waste payments, parking tickets, and we now have four drive through windows to serve our customers. And so on behalf of our payment center staff, we would like to say thank you for coming out and we are ready. Wave, everyone. We are ready to serve the citizens of Colombia. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. And welcome. I'm Tiffany Latimer, the customer care administrator. I usually say new customer care administrator but my staff told me I couldn't say new anymore because it's been a year and 10 months. But I still have so much to learn and I'm so grateful and delighted to be a part of this great organization. Today, as we celebrate the grand opening of our new payment center and customer care center, I too would like to thank our city council, our city manager, our assistant city managers, and all the staff that put in the time, effort, and energy to make this day possible. We value our customers and today opening this new facility encompasses that in so many different ways. In our previous location, we had three customer service representatives available to assist. At this location, as Miss Wilson said, we actually have four customer care representatives that will be available to assist our customers with their needs, whether that be establishing new service or servicing existing service. They're friendly and excited and just awesome at what they do and I'm so delighted that they are here to be able to serve our customers at this new location. One of the great benefits as you all are aware is parking. So our customers no longer have to look for a park downtown at a meter, easily accessible parking here. Another great benefit, which I am truly, truly happy about is privacy. Our customers can now come in and meet with our staff in offices where they have privacy, where they don't have to feel uncomfortable speaking about certain situations or matters involving their accounts so they can meet in private with one of our customer care representatives. So that's an awesome, awesome benefit that this new facility allows. As Galena mentioned, just as far as the services that the Payment Center provides, being able to come to this location to take care of your parking, pay your water utility bill, customer care services that are provided will be, as I said, establishing new service, but also reconnecting service, disconnecting service. And if you just have questions or concerns regarding your bill, you can definitely come in and speak with us and we'll be sure to assist you, as well as reporting any water-related concerns. So again, these are just some of the services that we provide here at this new location that we're also very excited about. So just again, I just want to thank you all for being here and to everyone who made this day possible. At this time, we will proceed with the ribbon cutting. And after the ribbon cutting, we will provide a tour of the new facility. So thank you all.