 Good afternoon everyone. Welcome to the fourth installment of our five-part Workforce Wednesday Briefing mini series set for the month of September. It seems like only yesterday that we were looking at high school programs, conservation cores, and Western coal country. Actually, it was just last week. And if you've missed anything so far, visit us online at www.esi.org to review the full slate of briefings to date and sign up for future updates. I'm Dan Versette, the executive director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. And as I approach my first anniversary on the job, I've learned a lot, of course. Some things were expected, and some not so much. For instance, something maybe I did not anticipate. It has been made to me, made very clear to me, convincingly and unequivocally that everybody loves mass timber. And that is a good thing because today's briefing is all about growing green industry and innovation mass timber. It literally, I'm not joking, it seems that people have been crawling out of the woodwork, pun intended, to talk with me about mass timber over the last few weeks. People love it. Absolutely love it. And if not for all the love for Zendaya after the enemies, I would say that mass timber is the single most compelling and interesting topic of conversation right now. I guess you could add that to her resume. She somehow stole attention away from mass timber. I kid, of course, Zendaya seems like a genuinely nice person and congratulations on her big win, but a topical joke. So back to mass timber. What exactly is mass timber? Is it a tree that grows in Dorchester? Is it like how big or how much a poplar weighs? Is it a bunch of willow boughs blowing in the wind in the same direction as rush hour? Well, take it for me. This is an up and coming climate change solution of untapped potential. I'm really looking forward to hearing from our panelists today and bonus points to anyone on our panel who manages to reference Zendaya's impressive catalog of work and performances. Mass timber is only one issue covered during our workforce Wednesday briefing mini series. If you've missed our previous briefings and need to catch up or if you'd like to learn about the wide range of climate clean energy and environmental topics we cover, take a moment to visit us online at www.esa.org. The best way to stay up to date on our briefings is to sign up for our bi-weekly climate change solutions newsletter. Once again this week, we are very fortunate to have a special guest in addition to our panel lineup. It is my privilege to introduce U.S. Representative Bruce Westerman of Arkansas, who is joining us today via video recording. Representative Westerman is not only an engineer, not only an expert and not only a leader in policy development to encourage the use of mass timber as a climate change and workforce development and forestry and conservation solution. He is also interestingly a proud Razorback, a four-year walk-on member of the University of Arkansas on their football team. I feel like that needs a special call out in this most unusual football season. So we are pleased to have you join us today to help us tackle this important issue. Greetings, I'm Bruce Westerman. I'm an engineer and a forester and I happen to serve in Congress representing Arkansas's fourth congressional district. I'm excited to be with you today to talk about two of my favorite things, building and wood. And not only building and wood, but building with wood. And I've got here in my hand a really innovative product. It's called cross laminated timber. You can see they simply just took two befores, glued them together on the edge, then turned them perpendicular to one another. Think of it as a big piece of plywood made out of two befores. And you can go thicker than this. You can make wide panels, long panels. But there's a lot of benefits using this kind of construction. You can build the panels in the factory, ship them out to the job site, lift them in place with a crane. You can see erection happening much quicker on the job site with less labor. Plus, this is a big carbon sink. Trees are the natural carbon eater. Through photosynthesis, they breathe in carbon dioxide, give off oxygen for us to breathe. And all that carbon gets stored here in long carbon chains in the wood for as long as this wood remains intact. As a matter of fact, 40 to 50% of this wood by weight is carbon. So when we build with renewable, strong material, like cross laminated timber, we are storing a lot of carbon in the building. Wood is also a fantastic insulator. When you get thick pieces of wood like this, fire won't destroy the structural properties quickly enough to deplete the fire rating. You've got the insulating qualities, and plus you've got a high weight to strength ratio. And it's very elastic, so if you're building in a seismic zone, this is a great material. We've seen this in my home state of Arkansas where the University of Arkansas built two five-story dormitories out of wood. Walmart has announced they're going to build their new corporate headquarters, you know, office complex to house 15,000 people. They're building it all out of mass timbers that will be made at a new mass timber facility in Arkansas. I think the future is very bright for mass timber construction, which is also very good for our forest because we need markets. So that we can do sustainable management on the forest. So excited that you all are talking about mass timber construction. Wish I was there in person to visit with you, but I wish you well and Godspeed as we rebuild America with mass timber. Great. Thank you so much, Representative Westerman, for joining us today. We agree. We wish we could be with you in person today as well. And on behalf of everyone at ESI and our audience, I really want to thank you for your leadership on these issues. Our best wishes are right back at you. Please be well, stay safe and take care. And thanks again for that really excellent presentation. Quick reminder about questions before I introduce our next panelist. If you have a question, we will have a Q&A after our third panelist. You can send it to us via Twitter at ESI online. That's probably the best way. You can also send us an email. EESI at EESI.org and I can confirm we're already starting to get some questions. This is a hot topic and this is going to be a great panel today. Our first panelist is Jennifer Kover. She is a licensed, a California licensed professional engineer and president and CEO of Woodworks, a nonprofit program that is a partnership with the U.S. Forest Service. The objective of this program is to make it easier to design, engineer and construct buildings utilizing innovative wood materials such as mass timber to create a more sustainable built environment. Jennifer's experience includes business development, market analysis, project management, instructor design, all with an emphasis on wood construction. Welcome Jennifer. Thank you for joining us today. I'm really looking forward to your presentation. Thank you. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity to be here today. I'll go ahead and jump right in. I have my slides up. Are you able to see this? Okay, great. All right, so mass timber provides workforce benefits really across the entire supply chain from forestry to manufacturing to the architect and engineering work that goes into it all the way to the construction and installation side of the business. So there really is across the entire supply chain workforce benefits that we can talk to. So as a sustainable natural resource that actually pulls carbon from our atmosphere, the use of wood products have the opportunity to improve our environment and the health of our forest. But the green quality of wood products such as mass timber is not the only benefit to our society. We are here today obviously to discuss the workforce impact of mass timber and how this can impact our communities throughout the entire country. Tyler and Carter are going to be going into much more detail on the manufacturing side. So I won't spend a lot of time here, but I do want to just share a few statistics with you. A recent report was released by Forest Economic Advisors and it highlights the importance of the softwood lumber manufacturing industry on the U.S. economy. And in particular the health of rural communities through both the direct manufacture and via the downstream industries that use softwood lumber as a primary input, FEA estimates that over 775,000 jobs with a total payroll of more than $46 billion are tied to the softwood lumber manufacturing industry. And these jobs found in 515 operating sawmills impact 470 mostly rural communities across 32 different states. So the breadth of this industry is definitely significant. And so that's why we're excited to be here talking about it today. Now, when we talk about workforce education, much of what has to occur in order to grow a market is the education of the specifiers. And the specifiers are the architects, the engineers and the developers who are calling out what material will be used to build a project. And so this is where Woodworks ends up spending a significant amount of time because we have to grow this market in order for there to be demand for the materials that are used on these jobs. And so what we do is we're able to educate about 35,000 practitioner hours is what we award annually. And we also provide support on 400 building projects on an annual basis and we're able to provide the support for no cost. So this is a free service that we offer to the design community to help them successfully design projects. So we try to put sort of this tool in their tool belt. And we're able to do this in great part to the funding that we receive from the U.S. Forest Service. So we receive this both from state and private forestry, as well as the research side of the Forest Service through the Forest Products Lab and also through the USDA Checkoff Program, the Software Lumber Board. So those are two key funders that really allow us to be able to do this to grow the market demand for the product so that the workforce is able to kind of pull this whole thing along by having this demand in place. And we're seeing some really great success. So overall again we provide support in about 400 projects annually throughout the U.S. for all wood products. But when we just look at mass timber, this map here is showing you where the mass timber projects are throughout the U.S. And one of the reasons I like this map is that it helps convey the point that this isn't just in one part of the country. So we are really seeing mass timber take off throughout the entire United States. And the excitement has been really cool to watch. There's been about 384 projects that have been built that utilize mass timber for some portion of their construction. And there's another 537 that are currently in design. So these are projects that we are currently providing support on trying to get them over the finish line utilizing mass timber. So we're looking at about 921 projects that have either been constructed or are currently in design utilizing some form of mass timber throughout the U.S. Now what Woodworks does often is tries to identify where the hurdles. So as we're trying to grow a market, we want to better understand what are the things that are standing in the way of projects going forward. And what we found over the last year was that we may have an architect and engineering team that has an owner who's very excited about trying mass timber. We've helped them understand all the environmental benefits, all the aesthetic benefits. And they're really excited to try to do their project in mass timber and we begin working with them. And what we found was that in a lot of cases these projects would get stopped because of the lack of familiarity on the construction side. So we would sit down with the design team, they'd bring in the general contractor, and the general contractor perspective would be, you know, this is not something I understand. And if you understand construction, you know that risk is tied to dollars. And so a lot of times what would happen is that really large contingencies would be tied to the estimate because there's a lot of risk involved trying something new. And so we quickly realized that this was becoming a significant hurdle. We're seeing multiple projects over and over again getting stopped when we had some great momentum going trying to utilize the material and they would just get halted because the general contractor would prefer to switch back to something they're more familiar with. So we set out to educate this group. So we worked with worked with the US Forest Service and the US Endowment for Forestry to pull together some funding to begin to educate this part of the workforce. And as we dove into it, we realized there's really two different groups. There is the construction management workforce, and then there's the installer workforce. And they each have sort of different needs in order to be successful. And so our goal here is to really take a group that was creating a hurdle to this market moving forward and turn them into champions. And so I've seen some great success so far and it's been really exciting to watch this happen. So on the construction management side, we are referring to the group that needs education related to how to properly sequence trades, how to estimate the cost, how to figure out how the overall project will function and work. And so we created a curriculum for this audience and we've begun doing the education. So Woodworks is smart enough to know that, you know, we're structural, a lot of engineers and architects, and we have definitely a few people on our team that come from a construction background. But we're smart enough to know that we need to bring experts in on this. So what we went ahead and did was actually pull folks who have built these buildings together to build our curriculum out. So this isn't theoretical. This isn't, you know, what we think you should do. We actually have people teaching these workshops and help us build the curriculum that we offer who have done these projects. And so I really feel like peer-to-peer training has been very significant for this workforce to, again, to help them with the familiarity and the comfort level. So, so far we started this towards the end of last year, but so far into 2020, we held four in-person construction management workshops and we reached 216 participants with that. And since things have been pivoted to virtual, we've held two online versions of the construction management workshop and we reached 440 participants with that. So it has been great to see that the interest is there regardless of whether it's in-person or online. Even something as hands-on as construction management is something that people are still wanting and needing the education on and very interested in participating in it. On the installer side of the workforce, what we realized as we began to evaluate, you know, how can we accelerate the knowledge in this field, we decided the best approach here was really to see the training centers that are ready in place. So across the U.S., there's a lot of workforce training centers, such as Carpentry training locations, that are already doing education for this workforce. And so the best way to help them was to partner with them and figure out what they need. So we met first with the Chicago Carpenters Training Center and in discussions with them, it came to light that they needed a mock-up. They needed something that they could actually put together, take apart over and over again in a lot of their training sessions. So we got a mock-up created for them and we had that sent over to them and now they can utilize that in their training. And we also provided feedback on a lot of the content that they were putting together for this training opportunities. So they have already delivered over 2400 education training hours to carpenters through their training center. And then we've just started to begin to work with the Northwest Carpenters Institute. And for that group, we also help procure a number of smaller mock-ups and connection details that they can take apart and put together over and over again. Additionally, we have started to reach out to general contractors who would like to either self-perform or help train installers that might be subs to them. And so from that one example is hit construction where we've begun working with them. So again, the idea is to give them the curriculum and get them out training on their own to really get this workforce developed and to increase the understanding of this material. Now, one of the other things that I realized as we started to look at this is the next gap is, well, how do people find out who's trained? Like, where is the information on this? So what we did was create an online community called the Woodworks Innovation Network. So this is a website that's brand new. We just launched it about a month ago. And the idea here is to help locate people who have been trained in this area. So it includes architects and engineers, but it also includes contractors and installers as well. So folks who have gone through any type of training are listed in this network and you can find them and search by them. So if you are a developer and you're looking at trying to do a mass timber project and you want to find out who potentially regionally could be on your job who has the knowledge needed, you can go to the Wynn website and search on a map by a project, by a discipline and be able to find folks that are trained in that area. So the idea here was to really help people that we've trained that are in these workforces to actually be connected to real jobs and projects. And kind of bridge that final gap to make sure that if they put in the effort to get trained that there's actually a job that they can be connected to. One of the things that I'm just completing right now is what is called a dead lead study. And the idea here is to look at projects that did not go forward and try to understand why. And one of the things that I found very interesting is still one of the number one reasons that we keep running into when I interview people as to, you know, they were thinking about mass timber, they got pretty far down the road and then it just didn't go forward. And over and over again, I keep hearing that it was really this lack of familiarity at the general contractor and installer level, and it really throws a wrench in these projects moving forward. So what we're in the process of doing now is developing a three-year program that will include a mass timber construction manual that can be handed out to companies, a 16-hour installer training package that will be like a self-contained education that we can just give out. And everything we do, again, is at no cost. So this isn't something we're trying to sell, it's just we're trying to get that education out there. We are going to try to seed another 10 training centers, 10 community colleges. We're going to try to do some outreach to to help them get the tools they need to do this education. And we're also looking at engaging about 50 different general contractors and doing workshops ourselves that will either be virtual or in person. So, you know, I think another like to just close the slide that really addresses the market growth opportunity because I think sometimes people are trying to kind of get their hands around, or what are we talking about here? How much opportunity is there for work in this field? And so what I'm showing here is a chart that shows the four building types that Woodworks focuses on in terms of providing support and projects to try to convert them to wood construction. And the green is in each of those building types what we already have in wood, and the whitish gray is what is the opportunity. So this is what is not being currently done in wood, but that by code could be. So you can see commercial institutional there's large portions of these markets that are not using sustainable wood solutions that could be by code. So the only thing standing in the way is really education and perception. And the seven stories on the right there is obviously the brand new seven plus stories is the brand new opportunity that's been brought to the market by the code adjustments that now enable and give the guidance to design to 18 stories using mass timber. So it's a brand new market opportunity for these materials. So overall we're looking at about 17,000 buildings that are built annually that could use wood products that currently are not but by code could. And if you think back to the map I showed in the beginning, we're looking at several hundred a year that are being designed with mass timber and that are going to construction. So the difference between several hundred and 17,000 we got a long way to go. So we are really just at the starting line here is mentioned in introduction. There's a lot of excitement about mass timber. We need to see these get over the finish line into real projects and that's what Woodworks is focused on and that's what we're trying to do. So thank you for the time and happy to answer any questions later on in the in the meeting. That was a great presentation Jennifer. Thank you so much for helping us kick off today's briefing. Our next panelist is Tyler Ferris. He is the Vice President of Sales for Ferris Lumber Lumber Company Incorporated. He has worked directly in plywood manufacturing since 2004 as an executive team member. Tyler takes an active role in determining the long term direction of his company. He's responsible for selling and sourcing all veneer for Ferris. In 2016, Tyler created Ferris's Mass Plywood Panel or MPP. Tyler, welcome today. Really looking forward to your presentation and I just want to respect your wood paneling in your office. It seems very appropriate given the industry you're working in. Well, thank you very much. I really appreciate the invitation to be here and to tell everyone exactly what we do. My name is Tyler Ferris. I'm Vice President at Ferris Lumber Company. Ferris Lumber Company was started in 1922 by my grandfather, T.G. Ferris. We started as a sawmill in North Fork of the Sanyam River in the Sanyam River Canyon of Oregon. We moved to our current location in the 1950s and converted to veneer manufacturing from traditional lumber manufacturing. So now we operate two veneer plants, a veneer drying facility in which we merchandise a lot of veneer from to all the local West Coast manufacturers of engineered wood products. We have our own plywood plant in which we're making commodity grade sheeting products such as walls, roofs and floors for single family, multi-family construction. We also make our structural composite lumber material as a raw material for our mass ply facility there. We run a cogeneration facility in which we create about 7.2 megawatts of electricity that's enough to power about 5,000 homes in our local community. We still run a stud mill in which we're creating dimensional lumber out of the leftover core material from our lathe. We also run a fleet of log and highway trucks and as of December of 2017, we have our mass ply panel facility in between our current facilities here in Lyons. So at Ferris Lumber we employ about 430 full-time employees, but we're trying to hire another 50 people if we can and it's been difficult. We sustainably manage more than 17,000 acres of our own timber land which on a sustained yield basis or what we grow is what we harvest produces about 13 to 15% of our total annual usage of timber. We have a gross annual sales revenue of about $150 million through a variety of products such as residual materials like chips, hog fuel, bark fines that go to nursery stock, lumber, electricity, plywood and veneer. And we specialize specifically in veneer for engineered wood products. So this is a view of our mass timber panel facility and how we lay up our panels into something that is qualified under the PRG 320 code for cross-limit timber so it can be used in structural applications across the United States. These are some of the projects that we've been involved in in recent periods. The picture on the left is a 5-inch panel that's used as a roof element to a local Shemecki Community College egg center that was recently constructed. The one on the top right is a picture of our panels used as beam or columns. And that's one of the unique aspects of our material is that not only is it usable as a flat platform but it is also usable as beam and column elements. At this period of time with machinery that we've put in, we can essentially create every single wood element to a multi-story wood structure. This has been a $40 million investment from Ferris Lumber into our local community in order to create these products. And a lot of people say we're a little over our skis and that it's not typical for a small family company to have patented and developed a new building product for the market. In recent times, if you've been paying attention to the news, you'll see that there's been a lot of devastation occurring due to wildfires within Washington, Oregon and California. In particular, the one that's impacted us the most is the Beachy Creek Fire, which started as a small burn in the Opal Creek wilderness area. But due to really high easterly winds has now grown to about 192,000 acres, and this fire is still only 32% contained. The big red, the big black dot on there is the location of our facilities. So as you can see, we have been directly impacted. The fires were right up on our property lines. Many of our employees lost their homes. And we have been not operating for the last two weeks as we've struggled through poor air quality and the displacement of a lot of our workforce. The amount of timber that's burned up on this, this land has been extreme, especially in Oregon history. 60% of this is generally on federal land. The rest is on either private industrial landowners. On our own land, we estimate there's about 100 million feet of our timber that has been impacted and that we are hoping to salvage in the short term and make use of. This represents about a 15 month supply, if that's all we're using, or about seven years if it's the same typical annual usage for our own timber lands. One of the big things that we've been trying to support that we really think would help as far as forest management within the Northwest. In the 2018 Farm Bill, our Senator Merkley helped insert a section that said that they would allow 20 year long stewardship contracts for innovative producers of masterware products or innovative uses of wood products. And if we had the opportunity to sign on to a 20 year stewardship contract that provided enough sustainable material through our facilities, then they would give us the opportunity to invest in the longer term, not only in our workforce but in the rural communities, as well as providing the opportunities for the local workforce to develop harvesters, forwarders and other type of innovative harvesting techniques in order to thin the entire landscape here across the federal ownership in Oregon. And we really believe that veneer manufacturing is one of the best ways to make use of that. Due to the fact that we're peeling veneer off of a log, much like you would roll a toilet paper, the diameter of the block is less important to us than the quality of the fiber that's included within that log. So the average block size that we use through our small log facility is only nine inches. So we can make use of a lot of that suppressed second growth, third growth understory that is the overgrowth and within our forests and the potential fuel for future forest fires. At our large log facility, our average block diameter is still only 16 inches. So by no means out there looking for a large volume of big timber. It's just not something that we're interested in processing nowadays. And our two biggest hurdles are timber and labor. You know, timber number one in that the amount of supply on federal land from federal land has been constrained and we don't have the opportunity to increase operations due to the limitation of the raw material supply in our area. In addition, we are at the end of a canyon in which, you know, is bordered by federal land. So we don't have a huge workforce to pull from in order to provide positions for all our former 30 employees. We would like to increase employment, but that is definitely a hurdle for us as well. Now, the federal government owns about 60% of the land in Oregon, but they are typically providing less than 15% of the total material harvest in Oregon. Large industrial, large private landowners own about 20% of the state of Oregon forest lands, but they're providing about 63% of the total harvest. Large private landowners are tapped out as far as how much fiber they can provide to the mills on a sustained yield basis. So we really need the federal government and the state government to step up and provide additional volume of timber in order to manage our forest and keep the mills operational. And as you can see, there's a real benefit to that as well. As in relation to private land where harvest is 75% of the total grown volume, the mortality is dramatically less than you would see on federal land. Where federal land is only harvesting about 9% of its annual growth, the amount of mortality on our federal land is increasing quite a bit. And yet again, that's material that's adding to the overall forest fire danger in Oregon. And this is consistent with what the historical harvest levels are in Oregon. Prior to the Northwest Forest Plan in the early 90s, we used to harvest about between 7 and 9 billion board feet of timber. Now in Oregon, we barely harvest 4 billion board feet. If we're growing considerably more than that, especially over the last 20 or 30 years, that type of volume either has to come out via nature or forest fire, or it can be beneficially harvested for our local rural communities. And the chart on the right is essentially the same type of indication. As you can see, the large private land, private forest land harvest has been relatively stable over the last 35 years, while the amount of volume coming off of our federal lands has dramatically decreased. And this has real issues when it comes to employment in our region, as well as to the prosperity in our rural communities. The forest sector in Oregon contributes about 51,000 living wage jobs at an average wage of $50,000, which is higher than the typical wage in Oregon. And there's $12.5 billion in annual sales of timber and wood products, so there's a real contribution from the forest sector into the GDP of Oregon. But as you can see, it's been gradually decreasing since 1990 specifically, in which we've been embroiled in the Spotted Owl Wars and then the Northwest Forest Plan. And now we've gone from almost 10% of the state GDP to only 2%. But when we did have timber harvest prior to the Northwest Forest Plan and the gradual decrease of harvest off the federal land, those timber sale harvests were contributing directly into our rural communities. As you can see on the left-hand chart, prior to the light blue, those were actually dollars contributed to the rural communities via the timber sale program. By law and statute of that period of time, any of the timber harvested in local counties went directly to provide the services to schools and other government services within the county in which they're harvested. The light blue represents essentially the federal government's attempt to make up for the dollars lost in the timber harvest programs via the Secure Rural Schools Act, which is essentially a federal subsidy to our rural counties and communities. And I would argue that it hasn't had that graven effect on the forest as well. If you take a look at the right-hand chart, you can see that the net growth has gradually increased all the way through the end of the 1990s until we stopped harvesting so much. And at this period of time, what we're facing is widespread mortality of trees across the forest and providing very little economic benefit to our rural communities and very little employment. So the solutions as we see it is the 20-year stewardship contracts is something that really needs to happen. It's been signed into law two years ago now, but there has been very little to know implementation of this program in our local areas by the federal government. And frankly, there's very little guidance on how to get it implemented. But as I said, this type of certainty and log supply for the future would give us the opportunity to increase our facilities production and also increase our employment. And we would really like to employ our rural community directly into managing the forest resources that are included within their regions. And yet again, we need to manage our forests. This last forest fire season over the last couple weeks, we have burned up 1.2 million acres of timberland in Oregon. And that is all trees and resources and habitat and ecological sensitive areas that we feel could have been managed not only for our rural communities, but also better for the environment. And the timber availability is still the single largest hurdle and obstacle that we face as an industry in Oregon to growth. In addition, I would say that we also need to encourage locally sourced products by deciding not to manage the forest within the Northwest. We have also made the decision that we will start importing products from other countries right now for the. We import about 20% of the total US consumption of engineered panel products from South America. And this used to be products that were produced in the Northwest when Oregon was the single largest producer of plywood panel products in the world. So that's not the case anymore. We now actually import a large volume from China and from Brazil. We would much rather see a forest to frame ethos in which we manage our local forests for construction with their own local markets. And thank you very much for your time. I appreciate it. Thank you so much, Tyler. That was an excellent presentation and a very strong finish. Thank you so much for staying with us and being flexible. For those in our audience, just this is an opportunity to remind that the briefings that we are briefings are here. They're now, but they're also are online. And so you can always come back and read a written summary, see Tyler's presentation, same with Jennifer, same with Carter, who we're about to hear from. And the way to do that is www.esa.org. Our briefing archive goes way back and covers lots of issues. Not all as interesting as Mass Timber, but, you know, in fairness, they're there too. So thank you so much, Tyler. That was a really good presentation. I really appreciated all of your comments. Our third speaker, speaking of questions, quick reminder from there. We're going to have time for questions and there are two ways you can send them and we're already getting a bunch of them, which is great. The first is by following us online at ESI online and you can send us questions that way. You can also send us an email, www, excuse me, that's the website. Email is ESI at ESI.org and you can, if you have a question for any of our panelists, let us know that way. Our third panelist is Carter Sterling. Carter is the CEO of Sterling Solutions, a leading provider of innovative site access solutions for companies that build our nation's energy infrastructure. Carter and his brothers developed TerraLam cross-laminated timber mats as a response to customers who are looking for access mats that offered consistent quality, as opposed to the non-standard kind. Years of research and development, combined with the resolve he learned from his parents, ultimately led to TerraLam, the innovative, lighter weight, environmentally friendly cross-laminated timber mat that is transforming site access in the power oil gas and civil construction industries. Carter, thank you for joining us today. I'm really looking forward to your presentation. Great. Thank you, Dan. As I go through this process of sharing the screen, I would just like to thank Representative Westerman for joining, but, you know, what I think is really interesting is two of your panelists today. Not only are they family businesses, which is incredibly common in the forestry space, but neither of which are right down the middle of the fairway of what Ms. Jennifer Kover was talking about and what, you know, everybody is thinking about of CLT and mass timber. You have a family that developed a very unique product in a mass plywood panel that nobody was thinking about. And on this side of the fence, we're utilizing and have been utilizing this great CLT product since 2015. With an industry application nobody's ever thought of for ground protection, temporary roads and construction sites. And I think that speaks to the fact that, you know, this industry and mass timber yields itself to a tremendous amount of future innovation. And, you know, Jennifer said it perfectly. We're just at the starting line here. And at the starting line of the opportunities that people can see. We're also at the starting line of all the opportunities people can't even see. And again, there's two really interesting examples of it right here. So, Okay, with that being said, you know, I was asked to come on to this panel and I appreciate the opportunity very much. I am maybe what you would consider a living and breathing example of what can happen, because we started manufacturing CLT panels in Chicago of all places in late 2014. We kind of kept our head down and stayed quiet about it. And so because we've got a bit of a head start in the United States building CLT, we've come to realize and enjoy, you know, a number of different aspects of this business. And what we were talking about today is the workforce development. So not only do I get to share what I think we can do, but I can share examples of what we have done. And so that's what I'm going to walk you guys through is our experience with workforce development. Honestly, I just want you to understand my perspective from my company we do have a vision for our business and that is to foster harmony between environment and construction, which in and of itself is incredibly challenging they're typically at odds fighting each other. And we want to do that with world class site access solutions. I should pause briefly before I go Dan how's my sound and can you see the screen. Well, your sound is great. Thank you. And I was actually just sending you a chat. You are in presentation mode. Yeah, as opposed to screen mode so fair warning in case you have any. Oh, I've got all I've got all sorts of security numbers. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. But otherwise you're sounding great and it's the slides look fantastic. All right, well I'm going to keep going while I try and adjust this at the same time. But our mission statement is really interesting. Let me see. If you go back to where you were I can tell you what to do to put it on normal view. All right, I'm all ears. So just put the slides on at five or before. Yeah, and then the little three but three dots below around a circle click on that and hide presenter. How we doing now. Unfortunately that's brought us back to listen this is this is fine we can you can still see the slides in in the editing mode. All right, we're just going to just enjoy that because that'll get that'll get it done. You know our mission, which is our tactical approach to achieving our vision is such that we want to provide those environmentally favorable access solutions. Most specifically we're catering to the energy infrastructure space pipelines power lines renewable energy solar farms wind farms. But the important part here is we've always believed that in order to build a sustainable and scalable company that has longevity, we need to be very thoughtful and sincere about allowing the four C's to thrive. The four C's are of course the company and the customer which everybody thinks about, but intensely thinking about colleagues and communities. And again, I guarantee Tyler feels the same way because the forest products industry by and large defaults to this force products companies, typically without even thinking about it certainly about putting it on paper, are very engaged in their workforce and involved in the communities that they're in because they're very world. But we've taken this very same mentality and approach from our third generation lumber company and brought it into an urban environment with a very forward thinking technology. Just to level set kind of who we are again in 2014 we started playing with CLT panels we were about 112 employee organization. Today, we're about a 530 person organization, and we've expanded into two beautiful manufacturing plants one of which is in the village of Phoenix Illinois, which is 10 minutes from the boundary lines of Chicago so it's originally Chicago, and the other is Lufkin, Texas, which is about an hour and 45 minutes northeast of Houston in the piney woods of East Texas. And the reason that we've chosen these two locations because when you're going to start a brand new facility you have the choice. And of course you're always going to look at the economic fundamentals. What is the proximity to my raw material supply chain. What is the proximity to my demand, am I am I positioning myself close to my customers. And the third that people don't give enough consideration to often is the workforce. What is the strength. What are the competitive advantages or disadvantages of a local workforce and again, Tyler spoke to this. And so we, we chose to locate in a economically challenged town of Phoenix Illinois in the south suburbs of Chicago, because we believe strongly in that workforce. And, you know, the Southland of Chicago, by and large has been decimated with manufacturing losses. The steel industry has had a very rough go for the last couple of decades. Unemployment numbers are much higher in the Southland than they are in the urban area of Chicago. And the same situation existed in Lufkin, Texas, which was a robust community full of paper plants paper mills and forest products industries that as you can imagine over the last decade of emails and anti paper. They have been all closed and shuttered. And so the town of Lufkin is just full of wonderful hardworking people that are well trained, well educated, but don't have a place to put their skill set to work. So we planted our flag in those two areas. I think that that increase of that 400 employees is evidence of the fact that what we're what we're doing makes sense, right, it works. So what I thought I would share is just a few examples of how we intensify our interaction with those little known to sees the community and the community. So these are just some real simple pictures and stories of things that we do on a regular basis around here these are not exceptional events these aren't things that we go out of our way to do. What's neat is that this is just part of the DNA of our of our organization at this point. Our colleagues, of course, we're developing the skills and habits of our existing workforce which by and large is a little bit more mature. But community is really interesting. You really have the choice of how to engage in the community. So we have chosen to engage, you know, at a very youthful level right. I, I do believe you can teach many old dogs, some new tricks, but I firmly believe that you can teach the vast majority of the puppies, almost any trick you want. What our objective is is to get to the youth of our communities into our high schools and into our community colleges and show these young people that there is a wonderful career to be had right here in your backyard in the Southland in manufacturing. And in a company that cares greatly about you and your families. So, so we spend a lot of time in communicating with the youth that manufacturing is a great place to be the forest products space is a great place to be. And that, you know, we are doing something today that didn't exist five years ago, and the same might be said two more years from now or five more years from now we're in terms of our innovation and our story we're really feel like we're just getting started as well. So these are just images of your very standard sort of high school job fairs. And then on the right, you can see we're touring kids, young, young adults through our manufacturing plants to give them hands on exposure to what we're doing. You know, we all understand this motto, and when the employees in a company believe that this is true from wall to wall. They bring opportunities to us we don't even have to always bring the opportunities to our employees so so that is something that we firmly believe in really empower people with the knowledge and skills to do it themselves. And one of that is has been developing our own sterling University. This is not an accredited two year for your college or sophisticated course but what this is is again a focused intentional effort to empower our workforce to gain the skills and knowledge to be incredibly successful. Not only for us as an individual company, but as people in general and one example of that is teaching English as a second language courses. We do that on our own dime when our employees are on the clock being paid hourly we pull them out, and we enroll them in English courses, we have a very large diverse workforce south of Chicago a lot of different languages. We have the dominance of Hispanic and Spanish. We see that in Lufkin as well. And you have these wonderful minds and wonderful energetic individuals, but the language barrier stops people dead in their tracks. And so we've graduated now over the last three years 185 of our employees through these courses. And that gives them the strength and confidence to grow in our business and also gives them strength and confidence outside our walls when they leave this business, and they can interact with shopkeepers and storekeepers and their banker and all of these people. They're more willing to engage and get involved in the community at large. We take a lot of time training our old dogs as well. They've got a lot of good habits and bad and we know that we can shape that. And so we spend a lot of time empowering these guys and we're teaching them life skills and budgeting skills and things of that nature as well. This story here is just about us taking our workforce and sort of spreading it like like seeds. I mean now that we are in Lufkin, Texas, we're bringing our same culture and mentality from up here down there. You know, we're cross polluting our workforces. They can cross train each other. And, you know, one of the campaigns that I'm on is a renaming of our regions in our country. I mean, as I travel from Chicago down to Texas. The similarities are uncanny. The accent is quite different. And the gun laws are very different. Otherwise, as individual people and characters, it should be the mid north and the mid south because there is a tremendous connectivity between those two. The Midwest as a nickname makes no sense to me whatsoever. Here's another example of how our teams engage. We're always looking after our employees and these are not high dollar costs. These are anything these aren't things that affect the margins of a business that you know you can't pass through any board of directors or any bank or tell me that these aren't meaningful and important. It's all the small things. It's celebrating Halloween. There's an image here in the top right of walking the kids through the office and they're trick or treating from cubicle to cubicle and desk to desk. And I guarantee if you try that the adults will love it a lot more than even the kids. It's a wonderful experience. And constantly engaging our employees, whether it's birthdays or anniversaries, of course the holiday parties, but rewarding them, you know, surprising them on a really hot day with an ice cream truck when they when there was no announcement of it. Things like that, you know, we recognize that we, all of us spend at least as much time if not more time at work than we do at home with our families. And and work can be a very enriching experience if we allow it to be some examples of our community involvement. And I think this is really neat. All of these examples are community involvement that were employee driven. You know there's a number of sort of examples that I can give off of my desk but those aren't the ones that are satisfying the ones that are are satisfying or the employee driven community connectivity. And again, a reminder, this is all a ripple effect of being able to grow a company and add a workforce around CLT and mass timber without that at the core we don't get to add employees we don't get to add this culture and we don't get to impact and affect the communities. You know, a few weeks back we had this really impressive derecho run through the Midwest, and our guys recognize that in our community here in Phoenix, which is a very very small town. We actually had a tornado touchdown and the town was decimated all the trees and foliage were down. Immediately they came and asked permission hey, we've got dump trucks we've got skid steers we've got chainsaws. Can we go help. And it was like, wow, absolutely let's go. That's the type of community impact that is very hard to document using data. Right. And I appreciate data. But those those are the stories that are hard to tell engaged in food drives and clothing drives down to Lufkin, Texas, participating in, you know, tree city with the town of Lufkin and supporting all of their efforts to get the most out of forestry and doing exactly what Tyler was talking about which is really smart management of our forests so that we can enjoy the not the longevity and not be ignorant of the economic prosperity that can come out of it. You know, we recently just partnered with the NFL and we've done a couple of projects in downtown Chicago and these disadvantaged areas where they want to pop up fresh food markets. We did one in Bronzeville we did one in the Austin neighborhood, and the reality is, they don't have a strong connectivity to healthy foods, right. They have terrible options. The trader Joe's and the whole foods aren't locating themselves in these neighborhoods, because that food is typically incredibly expensive so we've been working to support these pop up farm stands, and you can see the CLT panels are quite simply the flooring we can go pop up a farm stand and any park any corner lot that is looks to be overgrown and and and written we just, we just go out there and push them that stuff aside lay down the CLT panels. It's a fantastic stable work platform to get your farm stand setup you can kind of see him in the background there so we've been very busy with that. Just an example again, a final example this was our grand opening in Lufkin, Texas. We built our first CLT panel in November of 2019. And our second plant, and there in Lufkin, you can see on the shirts, the, you know, counter is just spinning to number one, and all of our employees got to sign off on on that first panel and we were, we were honored with a visit from Governor Greg Abbott he came to participate in the ribbon cutting ceremony he signed our first Matt. And just as representative Westerman is recognizing the tremendous opportunity. Governor Abbott, I don't believe has visited East Texas in his term he didn't. I suppose have a compelling enough reason to but he came up to East Texas to help us celebrate the grand opening of the CLT plant. Because he also knows the, the great impact we can have on the community and energize it revitalize it. Well, so that's it. That's the end of my presentation and the summary that I just would like to lead folks with is again, my family my business and company we've been doing this now for a good five to five and a half years. We are also at the starting line and we've added, you know, 400 plus jobs and we've got a lot of families that are really benefiting from CLT and mass timber. And we definitely have some challenges and and we definitely need some help and so I've got it just a ton of respect for folks like Dan and this organization. What Jennifer is doing with woodworks and and the leadership of Tyler and his family bring you this because it's to be the first of anything is, is really challenging, there's more, I think pain than there is gain. So, thanks for the opportunity. Excellent presentation. I really like the t shirts with the county. That's, that's a cool idea. Eventually, those numbers will all be nines and you'll have to buy everybody another t shirt, I suppose. Thank you so much. And yeah, so we're going to go to Q&A now, which is we're looking forward to and we've got lots of questions coming in and I don't know that we're going to get to all of them. 10 minutes, but thank you and we'll, we'll do our best to combine as many of them can to kick off Q&A. I'm going to introduce my colleague Ellen Vaughn. Ellen is our resilience policy advisor here at ESI is a fellow mass timber accolade. I'm new to that world. Ellen's been in it for a while, and she comes from a background in high performance building. So Ellen, I'll turn it over to you for questions and I'll start going through what we're getting from the audience. Great. Thanks, Dan. And I know we probably have a lot of questions that people are eager to have asked. So I will, I have a lot too, but I'll just start with one and Carter, I wanted just to build off what you were saying. All of you presented such inspiring stories. And Carter, you talked about the high school, the outreach to, to the high schools and, you know, the puppies that are that are eager for knowledge, which I love. And, you know, this is a question, I guess, Tyler could answer as well, perhaps, but that is, could you talk more about sort of how these, how these products are made, like the technology, advanced technologies in the manufacturing facility, the skills that that kids that anybody might need to get to be able to work in these facilities, I think that that might be interesting to some people. Yeah, I think it's a great question and we should probably both answer it as our facilities are a little bit different and in different areas and so, but I'd be interested to see if the answers are similar for me. I've had a really neat opportunity again to work with the leaders of our community colleges and high schools and they do ask those great questions and say how can we train our young kids to come into your workforce. And they honestly they never like my answer and you might not like it either. I would encourage everybody to teach children how to be wonderful parents and develop a strong nuclear family, which results in a work ethic and if I am lucky enough to get individuals into my box as I would refer to it with a strong work ethic, with a sense of respect for their co workers and themselves. By and large I've got the rest I can train and teach all of my individuals the, the skills to run a automated CLT line the skills to operate the machinery for shipping and receiving the skills to operate the material handling equipment. That is very trainable and doesn't require extraordinary collegiate you know advanced critical thinking and thought process. I think the hardest thing to teach is is a work ethic, and that really is the core of what I need candidly. Thank you. Tyler just want to add any. I would definitely agree with Carter on that. We have several different areas in which we try to employ people and for the first part I mean just just on you know the manual labor piece of things we need people that will show up on time that will work hard and not do drugs. And that's just the simple aspect of to it and what we generally tell people is, make yourself essential we need you as employers we need all the employees to show up and to work hard and to become a part of this family. We offer all types of progress progression through our facilities, and we'll even send people to school in order to learn mill writing electric electrical trades and whatnot. When it comes to the math timber manufacturing, since we're a little bit more on the structural side of things. Yeah, we've really had to start hiring some educated people that understand construction engineering. We've got two sales engineers on staff now. We've got several BIM modelers and CAD CAD modelers, so that we could start integrating the building designs that are coming from the engineers and the architects and just something that's usable from a manufacturing standpoint. And we've got a 12 foot CNC bridge that, you know, allows us to fabricate these panels in the specific formats that the that the customers are looking for. In addition to that we need skilled carpentry trades that that can process the final panel so they're in a format that our own customers need so we definitely need a little bit more skilled trades to our facilities if we're producing structural wood elements that could go in the buildings at up to 18 stories. Great. Thank you so much. I love it. The mix of the old and skills. Thank you. Great. Jennifer, I'm going to ask you a question from our audience, but I would also like to make sure that Tyler and Carter feel like they can participate as well. If you have any comments. And the question is a little bit more of a clarification. And I'm trying to combine a couple to get the most in the question is premised on the idea that trees sequester carbon when they're alive. The question is whether or not trees continue to sequester carbon after they're cut down and sort of what the relationship between mass timber is to carbon sequestration and what other potential environmental benefits we might see like maybe less transportation west to closer together supply chains, energy efficiency, insulation qualities, properties that maybe the lamination provides or veneers or whatever it happens to be. So Jennifer, like to hear what you have to say and then Carter and Tyler, please feel free to weigh into. I think it's a great question. Thank you. So in terms of sequestering carbon as a tree grows it's pulling like a giant sponge carbon out of the atmosphere and it locks it away into the actual structure of the tree. And so once that tree is cut it stops pulling carbon in but now it's been locked into their kind of to what representative Westman was referring to as far as becoming a carbon sink. So now that that tree has the carbon locked in and as it goes through the life of then being manufactured into a material that we used in a building, example the building that's that's being shown behind me. That will keep that carbon locked in there for the life of the building and even longer if it then gets reused afterwards so it's an amazing way of basically pulling carbon out of the air storing it locking it away and keeping it in a building so it will not be released unless that burns down so one of the benefits overall to the environment is that with mass timber in particular you can use smaller diameter trees. So we are looking at trees that are younger and potentially that are hazardous fuel undergrowth type materials that can cause problems in our force. And a lot of the points that Tyler was making about proper force management being able to thin these these areas and utilize that material in a product that then can be used to build a structure. So it's pretty amazing win win solution we have here to be able to go in sustainably manage a force pull out that material and have a high value end use product that can be made from that material helps that pull through of really making sure that we continue to do that so that's a huge benefit from a Forest Service perspective in terms of managing the force and keeping them healthy. And you can also use alternative species that maybe don't have a home currently in other construction and uses can be bundled up into a lot of these mass timber products. So I know Tyler Carter you want to add to that. But you know from a force management standpoint I would definitely say that, you know, trees add more carbon through the younger growing cycle that it's not to say that we shouldn't have a mosaic of multiple age classes across our entire force landscape we absolutely need to. But the way that that Oregon and Northwest and really nationwide lumber and veneer and panel manufacturers are now we don't take big logs we don't look for big logs. We're looking to try and manage these for us from an understory standpoint and to to assist with the forest management on the longer term. Thanks, we'll go back to you. Okay, great. So, I guess just following up on that do you also can you also use disease trees dying trees, insect damaged trees. Tyler Carter you want to take that or you'll be done. So I'll jump in from the perspective of you know the application that we are using our CLT panels for which are again these temporary roads and construction platforms to protect our soil and not run it up we we do have the option of using almost anything we don't have the structural strength requirements of putting in the floor of the 13th story or the walls of the 17th story. And so yeah we can use almost any species and almost any grade, as long as we do it in a common sense manner. And so yeah we can be very opportunistic as the needs as the needs are us. And take Carter's point yes at some period of time the after a tree has died or if it's disease or has bugs, it will affect the design characteristics of that fiber itself, and we will not be able to use it. That said if you look at the fires that occurred in our region. We believe that we should be able to use most of the fiber if we can salvage log and make use of it within the next 12 months or so. Thank you. I'm going to ask maybe if we just hang on for a couple extra minutes I know we had a little bit of a hiccup there in the beginning and there is a couple there are a couple questions that have come in on another topic that is near and dear to me and also near and dear to Ellen and that is building codes and the question is two two part what is what is the role of the building code in your industry's growth potential. And second is our building codes updated enough to sort of drive market expansion to where you know you think your your industry can go and I know you are coming from different parts of the country and different building codes look different in different parts of the country. So Jennifer maybe we'll start with you if you have any thoughts on that and then Tyler and Carter based on where you're operating and where your products are used interested in what you sort of have to think about the role of codes and then we'll we'll end there. Yeah for sure so the roller codes are huge in terms of the market growth so they really are what open the doors for architects and engineers to be able to design buildings it gives them the guidelines to make sure that there is a comprehensive set of safety standards in place with the adoption of the 2021 international building code that is where we will seek guidance on how to design up to 18 stories. A lot of jurisdictions are already pre adopting this in their regions so if you're interested in information as to what your local jurisdiction is doing feel free to reach out and I'm I can definitely share what's happening throughout the entire US. I think one thing to advocate for is newest codes in your in your state is really important that you have adopted what is the most advanced codes in your region just from a safety perspective as well as if you want to see some of these new opportunities incorporated into your areas of the country. So it's there they're critically important it's really important to move them forward and have the most current version adopted regionally. Yeah I concur and I can tell you so my business here in the mid north is in Cook County and Cook County is a challenging environment to say the least. And what they are not looking to do is advance you know innovation and building codes are looking to take the path that creates the least amount of risk and supports sort of some old old habits. I've enjoyed working with the Chicago Carpenters Jennifer is as you have and we've supplied them with their panels and really impressed at what they're doing and I think for me here in the mid north and they're going to be play a very impactful role. They have a loud voice they've got a lot of respect and if the leadership of Cook County sees that these individuals in these unions really want to promote this and they're gearing up and they're becoming a leader in the entire country to do it that that's going to help a lot. But right now there's there's no indication that our local leadership from the state or the county has any indication of adopting these things and then that requires developers to go out on a limit and request a variance. And that you know you touched on that too that's that's very risky and you've got to have a real severe motivation to do something so it's a big deal. Yeah I would add we've really got to give a lot of thanks to Woodworks as well as the American Wood Council for actually being as proactive as they have and doing the really heavy lifting in order to try and get these building codes approved under the 2021 IBC. We're part we're very lucky on the West Coast and that almost all the West Coast states Washington, Oregon and California have approved a special alternate path towards pre approval under the new building codes. So I think if you remember Jennifer's chart there is a lot of mass timber construction that's being looked at and in process on the West Coast and that's partly due to the fact that they've been very progressive in adopting those codes. Thanks, Tyler, that will be the last word of today. Thank you very much, Jennifer Carter and Tyler thanks for an excellent set of presentations. Apologies for the hiccup there in the middle but we'll figure out a way to fill in anything that might have been missing and certainly they'll be written materials and follow up. Let me close out with a few quick things. The first is to thank Ellen for all the work in the policy team meeting up to workforce Wednesdays. Let me also just, I don't know what's going on with zoom today. I went to full screen I get kicked on. I don't know what the issue is. Let me also thank some of our intrepid interns, including Emma Karen Hamilton and Joseph they're helping out behind the scenes. Emma in fact wrote a web article about this very topic that got posted yesterday. So if you haven't read it yet. You should visit esi.org. You should sign up for our newsletter. It's a really good article and so hopefully you'll like it. And then also, of course, let me thank Omri and Dan O'Brien and everyone else who made today possible. This slide has a link for a survey if you have a moment. We would love to hear about sort of what you thought about the topic today. We might do better in the future. We really it matters a lot to us to for you to take a few moments to fill out that survey we read every response and we do our best so if you'd be willing to do that be much appreciated. So with housekeeping you might remember that last week I mentioned a bonus briefing presented in partnership with the just transition fund that was scheduled for this Friday the 25th. We're going to postpone that. And so keep an eye out for an update that issue is going to be a very important topic for us going forward. But we're not going to do that on Friday. We will, however, have the final installment of workforce Wednesdays next Wednesday, where we'll be learning about low carbon small business and post COVID-19 recovery going to be a great panel once again. And you've heard it from me before the best way to stay involved or stay up to date with ESI and all of our briefings is to visit us online at the sign up for our climate change solutions newsletter, which comes out every other Tuesday. I think we'll go ahead and end it there. Thanks for sticking with us a few extra minutes past 115. Thanks again to Jennifer, Tyler, and where did my thing go? Carter, sorry. I don't know. I made this a full moon. Sorry about that. Thank you for making your wonderful presentations. Thanks for joining us. Thanks to our audience. And hope everyone has a great rest of your Wednesday.