 Hey everyone, welcome to the city of Columbia, my hometown. So I am a native. I'm always excited to share that fact. And I have to go off script a minute because looking at the pictures from 1994, Irene and Matt, I was a college co-ed pledging my sorority in the spring of 94 at the University of South Carolina having a really good time. And who knew that I would end up going to law school here, stayed here for that. The law school did not look like the picture that you saw. So that's another fundamental thing that shows all the change, all the growth, all of the building that has occurred since my time growing up in Columbia in a suburb of Columbia, but chose to stay here. And I know that you will hear me recommend talk a lot about what that means, that impact and retaining talent and maybe not growing up here but keeping people here like he chose to stay here when he was in school at the University of South Carolina as well. So that was a good little memory moment for me. So thank you, Matt and Irene. And thanks to all of the participants who've come here today from Georgia to Maine is what I was told. Again, I'm Teresa Wilson, the city manager for the city of Columbia. And we are here to welcome you. We want you to enjoy yourselves. I heard you had some great tours, some of you did today to see all of the wonderful things happening in our city. We're here to share the information and learn, continue to learn so that we can continue to improve and grow. I hope the information that you gather and the relationships that you're able to build during this three-day conference strengthens your knowledge of the industry and guides you to do great things in the future. And in turn, I hope you come back to the city of Columbia to be a part of all the great things again that are happening right here, right now, and in our near future. One of those great things is a new mayor, my friend, Daniel Rickerman, who brings a new energy and a new focus on development. We want everyone to know. And he will talk about this as his brand, his language. And he is the most energetic person that I see be bopping up and down city halls. Sometimes I'm in my office, and he'll come in, because I see it in his eyes. He's having another idea. And I'm like, hey, I didn't get this word done. Here he comes. But he's back and forth across the hall, because he's just so excited about the possibilities. But he's going to tell you that we are open. That is something that he says a lot. He means it. That was the brand he wanted, the tagline he wanted that from day one. Mayor Rickerman is a longtime resident of Columbia, South Carolina. Once he attended school here at the University of South Carolina, he fell in love with this city. And it really changed his life. He found his bride, Dr. Laura Rickerman, a wonderful person and friend. And they never left. They decided to start their family here. They have two beautiful daughters. And they started their businesses. She started her practice here in Columbia. And it led to even more opportunities in our ever-growing business community for them. Mayor Rickerman has served on city council twice before becoming mayor this year. Previously, he represented the city in an at-large role and more recently in his home district, District 4 here in Columbia. Mayor Rickerman has always been an advocate for business, owners, and the business community. He has a passion for economic development and wants Columbia to develop, grow, and to continue to retain and attract, as I said, the best and the brightest in every community of our city. I'm seeing with him of late and in our discussions, his passion, not just to continue his focus on economic development, but to push that towards true community development initiatives as well. You will sense his excitement, as I said, and his energy when you hear him speak. And with that, I give you the 45th mayor of the city of Columbia, South Carolina, Mayor Daniel J. Rickerman. Well, welcome. Come on, y'all can do better than that. Y'all have some coffee, come on, let's welcome. I gotta get some formalities out of the way. First of all, I wanna welcome each and every one of you on behalf of the city of Columbia. All my fellow council members excited to have you here. I do wanna find out the person who's here from Maine because we have this thing in the south, you're supposed to bring something, and I've been looking for lobster rolls all day long, and I haven't seen them yet at my office. But I did wanna thank y'all all for being here today and being part of this in here, especially in Columbia, South Carolina. This is an exciting time for us. I'm excited about the opportunities we have before us. You know, as a capital city that has struggled with growth, we're really excited about the opportunities and the excitement that came along and people in-engage in being part of the process. You know, we know the southeast is the fastest growing region in America, but we wanna grow healthy, we wanna grow smart. We wanna bring jobs, we wanna create wealth, we wanna lift up every corner, every part of our community. But we have to do that with smart growth. We have to think as we move forward and how we plan and how we move forward and adapt with each one of those situations. You know, investment in our community means that we end up with better roads, better infrastructure, connectivity, but most of all, better schools as well. Here in Columbia, as the city managers, I've embraced openness. Openness to me is the key to everything that we're moving forward. We're open for business was our tagline, but we're really open for collaboration. We're open for ideas. We're open up for investment, and we wanna be open arms for anybody who wants to locate or be part of that. And part of that is helping us get over the struggles that we've had and the hurdles that we have. We're trying to be transparent. You know, we're identifying our problems. We're talking about them, but we're also talking about how we see there are resolutions to that, but also harvesting and using our community. We're embracing. We're in a city right now, like most cities, which is having employment issues, but we also realize that we have an incredible opportunity to embrace small businesses, to fill those gaps and grow those businesses. So what a better way for us to grow a business, make an investment, but also solve a problem for our customers, which we've learned that our constituents are our customers. Most importantly, we're open to new ideas. Embracing collaboration and partnerships in a government town has been a struggle in the past. But right now, there's this new spirit out there. They're folks engaging. We have tech companies here looking. We're talking with our builders and our friends in economic development going, how do we fill these gaps? How do we end up growing? How do we take the hurdles out of the way? Reduce that red tape that makes it easier for people to do business. You know, we've worked with ULI in the past to come up with plans to make Columbia more connected. Past efforts have been brighter statewide discussions around identifying our problem areas, but we've talked about east to west connections between our neighborhoods and how communities that compliment each other get connected. There's discussions about proving the connectivity from the VISTA and the university to neighborhoods in the north. I think you heard Irene talk about our commitment to finish so that you could leave here one day from right here and end up at Lake Murray and then go to dinner in Lexington and then be back at your hotel room that evening with never being on a major road. That's the kind of connectivity that we're invested in. We're talking about issues broad, national panel drilling down to our problems, updating our zoning ordinances, revising our tax structure that has made us uncompetitive, but we've identified the problem. We invested in a tax study, so we know what our problem are. Now we're working together with our community partners to face that and fix that. We're moving forward. It's a new day. The neon lights on. It says we're open. We got new attitude, new energy. Part of it is an election. We have four changes in council and a seven member count city council. We have four new members in positions which has really uplifted the city and the engagement, y'all. I just, I can't begin to tell you. Every day it drives me when I wake up. Every day I get up and I've got more energy than I did the day before. It's because every phone call I make, every person that comes to visit has an idea or they wanna help. I haven't felt that in 35 years that I've lived here. And when I came to school at the University of South Carolina, I didn't plan on staying for us four years. I ended up staying here because the conditions were really right for young people. People were jobs were abundant. People were starting businesses. I think the majority of my friend group either started a business like I did or they were working here. So we had this real sense of community. I want that same opportunity for our kids and our grandkids. We're working with the contractors as we talked about working on modernizing our business regulation and our processing. But we're also really focused on how to unite and make our city stronger. And that's the engagement part. That's the connectivity. Now you heard everybody talk about Assembly Street. Well, let's talk about Marion Street. Why do we have a side street that's four lanes long? How are we connecting the businesses on one side to the other? How do we connect the historic neighborhoods of Elmwood and Cotton Town to Bull Street and everything in between? How do we make North Main the place that a young business guy or gal would like to go and invest in their business? There's not too many places in America that you can stand on Main Street, own a business as a young person and point at the state capital. We have these type of assets. We're trying to tell our story. You heard about the University of South Carolina. Well, the University of South Carolina is one of our college and institutions. We have two historic black colleges, Allen and Benedict. We have a women's college, Columbia College. We have a seminary and a Christian university. We have 60,000 plus students. You heard about Fort Jackson. That's 40,000 recruit, 45,000, excuse me, the Brigadier General corrected me yesterday, 45,000 recruits that come through there. We have almost 6,800 families that are part of the training and permanent. So between those two, you're adding 110,000 people that are here and taking part in our community. But we haven't engaged them. When I talk about engagement, it's engaging those students, using them as a tool for our growth. As a matter of fact, when I leave here today, we're announcing our Mayor's Council, an advisory group made up of students from each one of these campuses. Because one of the things that we recognize, we're losing a lot of raw talent. They're going to Charlotte. They're going to Raleigh. They're going to Greenville and Nashville and Atlanta, Lexington, Kentucky, Columbus, Ohio, all cities that have seen double digit growth. We want to engage them. We want them to have the opportunity here to be part of the process, to help us make sure we retain that talent. That we're focused in understanding what their long-term expectation is the need for them to stay here, to either start a business, be part of a business, raise a family, and be part of this community. And we can't do that without conversation. We're excited about the brightest days being ahead, folks. The staff here in Columbia is helping us move the ball forward. Since we've been here, I've only been here 45 days in Mayor's office. So I have to tell you, I'm fresh in the hot seat. As they say, I'm still drinking out of a fire hose. But every day that I come to City Hall, I have an opportunity to have a discussion with our staff and everybody's open to ideas. They're bringing things, they're embracing that we're looking at things from a different lens and an angle. That we're looking how we can uplift the community, take out the hurdles, and move things forward. It's not the way we do business anymore. Even how we recruit, we're looking at how we recruit employees differently. You know, recruiting for the job, not for the criteria. Making sure people know the benefit about working with a great city. Working under a city manager that actually cares about not only their citizens, but their employees. We've made a commitment to invest internally at the city because if our service is not good and we can't provide an easy way for people to invest and do business and have a clean, safe, investment-ready city, then we're not gonna be able to compete in the future. Look, 6% growth in the Sun Belt. Expected double-digit growth. We wanna have every part of that here in Columbia, South Carolina. And I can't thank you all for enough for coming here and choosing and being part of this because it gives us excitement because we like to show off. We don't tell our story. And so part of that theme of being open is telling our story, exposing folks to what a great quality of life we have. But we're always learning. We always wanna improve. We don't have one path. I live by the rules when given choice, take both and makes it a lot easier. But again, I wanna hope you enjoy your stay here in our city. I hope you'll embrace reaching out and going to see those four corners. If it's a go to five points. Most of you who've been in college in the Southeast have been there at two in the morning. Don't lie, I know you have. Everybody knows it. Take a look at North Main and see what's going on there. Our Main Street, when I came to school here in 1988, you could bowl down Main Street on a Friday evening and nobody would be in your way. Now you can barely walk down it. This weekend we had an incredible weekend where we had not only three days of concerts, some of you widespread panic fans maybe still be here from that concert. But we also had home basketball game, we had women's basketball, college game day. We had parents here for parents weekends for various sororities and fraternities. And if you had been at Soda City, y'all saw a picture of it earlier, you've been amazed at all the people that were there embracing all the different cultures represented all the different foods, the small businesses all up and down four blocks of Main Street. This is what Columbia is about. We're going to continue to tell our story. We're going to continue to improve. We're going to continue to be open. So any ideas you have, believe it or not, my cell phone is on the website. You can call me directly. I do answer my own phone. I made it real simple because I have a 13 letter last name. My email is just plain, mayor at columbiasc.gov. I'd love to hear from you and I appreciate you being here and thank you for you organizers for setting this up. This is really exciting to be here. And I hope to see all of y'all again. We have 15 million visitors that come through Columbia, South Carolina, five million stay overnight. I'd like y'all to be part of the next five million so we can get to 10 million. Thank you.