 All right, we'll go ahead and get started. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Henry Simons. I'm the Assistant City Manager of Operations, of course, for the City of Columbia. And we would like to welcome you and thank you, of course, for your presence as we gather to provide an update on our very own community resource center, which is in progress here at the Belfill Center. I want to thank our Mayor, Daniel Rickerman, also our Mayor Pro Tem, Councilman Ed McDowell, who represents District Two. We also want to thank our City Manager in her absence for her continued leadership and guidance on all city initiatives. We are pleased with our progress on this project. We actually, we are four weeks in to a eight-week project. The renovations to the community resource center will be completed in June, so in June we'll do an official ribbon cutting of the center. Afterwards, we will take a tour and let you see the progress of what's going on. Now it is being renovated, so it's an open space, but a lot of work has been done so far, so you'll get a sneak peek of the actual renovations being done on today. We strongly believe that this will be an asset to the citizens of our community and also the city of Columbia. And what you see behind me is the design of what it will look like, so after the actual press conference, we'll bring those down, so you'll be able to take a look at those as well. At the conclusion of the press conference, you will go to my left, your right, and we'll go up and we'll walk over to the actual center. For those of you who want to take a quick tour of the center, you're welcome to do so, and I'll be led by Mayor and our Mayor Pro Tem. So now this time we'll begin with some remarks from our Mayor, Daniel Rickerman, followed by our Mayor Pro Tem, Councilman Ed McDowell. Mayor. Good afternoon, everybody. It's great to be over here at the Bellfield Center. Again, this place goes way back as, you know, Ms. Bellfield used to summon me over here every time I did something wrong. She would remind me of that tremendously, but also we had a great opportunity to work together to do things. The hood system that's in that kitchen, the first stove, the sinks, all of that came from one of my restaurants as we were doing a renovation and Ms. Bellfield wanted to have a kitchen here which you wanted this to be the center of this community. And it's taken us a long time to get to where we want to be, but we were making investments here. We had an opportunity with the flood, became a blessing. It gave us an opportunity to take an asset here and do something better, open it up so that we could have more people involved in our community. We have so many requests from people about, hey, I'm starting a nonprofit. I want to do something for my neighborhood. I need an incubator space. Well, now we have one right here in the community that folks can use where they'll have access to free Wi-Fi, workstations, computers, presentation screens, copiers, printers, things like that to allow people to take the next step. So they're not incurring those costs and it's a way for us to invest in each one of those and help folks take an opportunity, a dream, a thought and make it a reality. One step at a time. It's the little things that make a difference. This is one of those things. And so we're so excited about it. As we get in there and you get to see it, the conference space, the workspace, a place where somebody, you know, not everybody works from nine to five. People may be working another job but have a nonprofit. They want to come at night, have an unlimited access to get in there and be able to work and be creative and try to improve a community one step at a time. Is what we want to do. We want to continue to invest. We made a commitment that we would invest in our community, in our city, in our employees. And we're going to continue to do that. And this is just one more way that we see an opportunity for us to make a difference but it's not the only. And we're going to continue to work together. As you know, we're working on some housing opportunities here in Booker Washington Heights. We're working on landlords, tenant rights but also a community center, ball field, et cetera to really build up on property that we own, take advantage of assets we have to improve the quality of life in a community. We're also going to be launching here this year little old, what they used to be newspaper boxes and convert those into neighborhood libraries where people can share books, putting those throughout our community, creating a for a public art program specifically here for 29203 and parts of 29204 that we can take some space that we own and create some public part, put pride back in our neighborhoods. Make everybody realize that if you're going to move downtown, move here, we have opportunities right here as we rebuild these communities together. So I just want to thank everybody for being here. I want to thank Reverend McDowell for the support and the rest of council. When we brought this idea forth that we really came from the community and we took what we heard and trying to fill in need. So let's continue to talk. Let's continue to work together and let's continue to grow our community because we are going to be the number one city in South Carolina and the only way we do that is working together. Thank you. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. This is an exciting time. Good morning. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. Oh, you see how changed it too, right? Good afternoon. Other than what the mayor has said, this is an exciting time in the life of the Book of Washington community. We continue to grow. We continue to grow and we're not through yet. I wanna thank our ACM, Henry Simons, and of course our mayor. Several months ago we had an insurance claim that came into, we had a flooding issue there. And of course out of that came, I'm gonna say this, $53,000. Our mayor was resourceful enough to bring before council another $86,000 for renovation of our resource center. Isn't it great to know that this community to continues to grow and expand itself? And it expanded in a way where lives continue to be and will be transformed. Transformation in the communities are important. And this is what we are striving to do in Book of Washington. So isn't that exciting? To know that a center of this nature will be available for those persons who want to enter there in and progress in such a way that our city continues to grow with their participation. A great time in the life of the city of Columbia. And guess what? We ain't through yet. Thank you so very much. Just for a brief moment, I want to acknowledge our staff here that work here at the Belfield Center. If you all would please stand. We wanna thank you for your work. Y'all stand up, be recognized. Those who work here at the Belfield Center, thank you. Y'all are doing some wonderful work here. And the addition of the community resource center will add to all the great work that's already being done. I also want to acknowledge our support services administrator Stacey Dixon. He is not here today, but he is really the project lead that's facilitating this work. We do have our director of general services, Kelvin Kiesler. Raise your hand, Kelvin. Kelvin is also responsible for directing this work. Thank you, Kelvin. Also want to acknowledge Bob Probst, our city architect, the design work that you see behind me was done by our city architect. Also our project manager, Todd Martin was involved in that process as well. I also want to acknowledge our entire Parks and Recreation Leadership Team for their continued support on this project. So thank you all so much for being here on today.