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Business as Usual: Port Authority CEO Katharine Kelleman

We are excited to kick off March by welcoming Katharine Kelleman, CEO of the Port Authority of Allegheny County, back to Business as Usual.

Katharine first appeared on this webcast back in the spring of last year as the COVID-19 pandemic severely impacted ridership across Allegheny County's public transit system. 

Katharine will update us the latest impacts and detail safety measures, protocols and strategies to keep this vital part of our economy up and running.

 

Transcription: 

Well, it's March 1, hard to believe. But I'm glad to be kicking off march with our guests today, dear colleague and friend, Katharine Kelleman. She is the CEO of the Port Authority of Allegheny County. But before I bring her up, I just want to get some housekeeping out of the way. And first of all, thanks to Huntington bank and their ongoing support of the work that we do, telling stories, keeping the community tethered together throughout this almost year, as well as their investment in all things that we try experimentally in terms of storytelling and media. Jonathan, Christine's with us today. As always, he's Vice President of Marketing and media for the tech Council. And he is going to monitor the chat, as well as see what questions there are, that we can ask Catherine because I know there's gonna be a lot. So the other thing is, is that the chat is not for you to sell your wares. That's not what this is about today. This is about all eyes on our guests, all eyes on Katherine. So I want to jump in. And I also want to shout out to 40 by 80. That's a wholly owned subsidiary of the Pittsburgh tech Council. It's our 501 c six, and soon you're gonna hear a lot about apprenticeships and workforce development. But that's also our charitable organization that provides support for entrepreneurs as well as the pipeline for STEM talent. So that out of the way, I want to bring up my friend and colleague, who is doing amazing things for the city in the brief time that she has been here. Katherine, welcome. Thank you. I know this is probably you've probably been up and added since 3am. And this is probably your dinner time. But I just want to thank you for taking the time with us and being on the show again to talk about all things that are buses and ground transportation. Thank you. Well, thank

you, Audrey. Thank you so much for having me today. I have not been up since three. But I I was out at our east Liberty garage earlier. So that's what you got the fancy Port Authority clothing on talking to folks about for instance, what about air filtration unit and enclosed spaces, what's going on with buses popped in on the two electric buses that we have. So if you're in the center city, part of Pittsburgh, you'll see these two blue electric buses are running around. And I just want to say when you are on them, you cannot tell the engineers running it sounds like it's off. And so first, you know, we have our air quality issues. So this is great for air quality. But as far as urban livability, imagine not having that heavy noise of that diesel engine. So I break out an air conditioner, stuff is still on there. But we're really excited about how well those electric buses worked out. We're getting six more later this year. So that'll take us up to eight. And as we wrap up our strategic plan this year, and it's separate from our system plan, one of our components is greening of the fleet. So not just going to electric buses, but working with our suppliers for clean fuel. And again, our T line is 100% Electric. So we've got some cool stuff we can do there. So So thank you, again,

the 25 year plan. Let's start there, you have a 25 year plan, which seems massive. And for those of us that are in attack, I can't think of anyone that builds their company and thinks about 25 years from now.

Right? So I don't think though, that you're buying assets that somebody else is helping pay for and you have to promise to run it for 30 years. So in a nutshell, a rail car, for instance, our light rail vehicles have a 30 year useful life. So the federal government usually will underwrite about 80% of the cost. A new rail car now is about $4 million. She looks at 3.2 million. So they get a lot of saying what you do. And the rule is run it for 30 years. So we're gonna buy something if we're going to put federal dollars into building something we have to keep open for 30 years. We need to make sure we know what we're doing, you know, roughly in that increment. What happens if you don't so the rail cars we have now two thirds of our fleet is from the same year so it's 35 years old. So if you remember Madonna song borderline, right. It was a top 10 hit when we took delivery of two thirds of our fleet. And no comments about how anybody ages but there we go. And we have the other third of our fleet is 15 to 20 years old, put on top of that government bureaucracy to buy new trains. It takes us about seven years from the time we have money to the time we take delivery because we have to go through grants, we have to find our vendor, we have to take over a production line. Lacking a 30 year plan you end up with 35 year olds Cars and no way to to fund the replacements. And right now, funding just the old cars for your places at $200 million price tag. And I don't know a lot of industries where that just drops in your lap. So if we can plan for it, then we can pay for it kind of thing. So that's a little nutshell of why such a long window. Also, what we'll do is we say 25 years out not where do we want lines to be? But what do we want this to feel like? We want it to feel like high speed strong investment transit to the airport, but to the north side, extensions out into East County, I taking maybe the bus ways and turning them into full on BRT or other type of corridors. Are we talking streetcars? What about transit hubs. So right now, everything runs through downtown, I have this joke that I like to wave at buses, I don't like to wait to eight in a row, but they can't come together. Right. So they mess. So until we can bring them together, they run all over the place. And if we had a hub downtown, in addition to bringing together buses, imagine if it was buses close to the tee or an extension on rail. So everything's coming together. And then adding in think about basic shopping, not just a coffee shop, but that thing you need for dinner, pick up from the dry cleaners, if we ever go back to dry cleaners, right? I drop off for daycare knows put together also with some housing investment. I so that's the kind of stuff we'd be looking at. It's great connection, it's good development, it helps with property taxes, and then we get more money back into our local economy. But even you know, transferring on street corners, instead of running two blocks having a hub within this, you know, in the neighborhood. So it's a 25 year plan that also encompasses a lot of technology. What should best practice tech look like? How do we connect neighborhoods a little less traditionally? What what, where do we go, and then we start carving off five piece increments, right. So we say, here's where we are in 30 years. So this is our first five pieces, five years, few years, and we double check five years after that we update. So it's a rolling horizon. But if we don't do it, we will never get

there. It's

the equivalent of when you're in college, and you're like, Oh, I have $20 to eat on for the month. Okay, I'll eat ramen time to grow up and be an agency that says, here's where we want to be at the end of the month or the end of the year? And how do we lay the steps to get there. So it's a bit of a change for us. But it's really exciting because folks, I definitely have opinions. And it's been interesting doing this during a pandemic. So obviously not a lot of face to face. But that's been really democratic for us, because instead of asking people to, you know, pick up their kids and make sure they're fed and take an evening off and sit down for two hours. Now, if you have a smartphone, you can log in to one of our meetings and find out what's happening. And give us your opinion. So we're getting a much better cross section of folks who don't have smartphones. We have a lot of community centers where we can pick up information and we're still doing pop ups at you know, pin Mac or Market Square or the Kingsley center trying to make sure we're getting a lot of information. So where we are Neto

is none others not made it. Okay. Yeah. But I mean, I think I think that's exciting. So all kidding aside, I mean, you have to be able to feel that there's just a huge commitment in terms of making that kind of investment and 25 year plan. And it gets us all aligned. And I and I like that because this kind of shift doesn't happen as if in tech every 18 months. So yeah. And hats off to you on that. And you go to your website, do you have any linkages to the plan B do

we do on the website, Port authority.org always fun to type out Port Authority. But the plan is next transit with one t so any x transit network, any x transit network, and you can go there, I think we have two more meetings this week. In fact, I want to say one tomorrow, maybe early in the morning, not early, maybe 10 ish, one tomorrow evening. I'm sure. You can log on, you can pre register for the meetings, you can see what we've presented previously. Because again, it's iterative, right? So the first issue was, tell us what you think we have to confirm our data set, you know, and then do we agree on what we want to solve? And then how are we solving for and that's where we are now. It's saying, here's what we heard from you. You know, and we heard some that we knew folks want to get to the airport really quickly without thinking about it. Right. We know that there's a lot of need for stronger transit infrastructure out on the east side of the county and in McKeesport. What we we got some interesting things, though, were a lot of people ask, I see the link. Thank you, Alexis. We had a lot of people talking about suburban to suburban connections, right. So right now since we don't have hubs, everything comes downtown. Then it goes back out. And so for instance, here in the South Hills on a tee and you want to go to Oakland, T, and then you catch a bus, but you're still transferring. And what if you're in the South Hills? And you want to go to Mifflin? What if you are, you know, on the north side, and you just want to be able to get over to the Carnegie's of the day. So there's a lot of these connections that folks were telling us that they wanted to see. So that's pretty exciting, too, that we have a chance to sort of revamp things not too crazy, because our typography is a bit, I would say limiting, right. But the cool part is our typography helped us build this really sort of human scale human focus development. So it's a lot easier to get in transit here. Because we're not dealing with sprawl, we're not dealing with people who were spread to the forefront. So we were in a better position to make some good changes.

So let's, let's talk a little bit about Congress their position to pass another relief package in the coming days. Right. So what can you talk about what that means for the Port Authority?

Definitely. So we received care funding back in March. And let's clarify what cares funding is it's not like manna from heaven, magic money that lands on port authority. It's COVID funding where we can build against it for lost revenue or expenses that are COVID related. So this past March 27, last year, so within a few days of the pandemic coming to town, we were not running every single bus two reasons. First, we need to sanitize because remember, in March, what did we know? I mean, it's been a year, but remember what we you know, my mother would bring in her mail and let it sit for 24 hours and then Lysol it. I mean, we had different understandings. But we were sanitizing every bus and train and every station, and that was burning through about a million dollars of overtime a month. And it was also wearing out the folks who were doing that. So by having fewer vehicles, it meant everything could be sanitized. It also let us match supply to demand. So if a route if a commuter route drops 90% of its ridership, we didn't need as many buses. This also meant we had fewer bus operators going out and getting exposed to again, what not. So COVID COVID, funding lettuce bill, our cleaning supplies, and our overtime and then also lost passenger revenue. So about 20% of our budget comes from the fare box from user fees. Now remember everyone in the Commonwealth I don't care who you are you paying a tax sales tax, you're paying rent, you pay someone else's ad valorem. So 80% of this is already covered by the funding that we all pay that comes back from Harrisburg and DC. So this portion of the fare box though, is another 20%. If your ridership goes down by 90%, you're not getting that 20%, you might be getting 2%. So the cares funding lets us build against that. So we continue to run. We are not a scalable economy like we I can't tell 10% of our folks to stay home and run just as much service because I need a person to drive bus. And then we need people to repair them. And even with the technology that assist us monitoring service on the street, we still need folks to go out and handle detours, passengers can wear masks, so on and so forth. So if we cut back on our staff, we cut back on the service, all but one of our route tip to grocery store or a medical facility. Absolutely The worst thing we could do is take that services away when folks are going through this crazy economy. So the the COVID funding cares funding, let us keep service on the street. We project that we should run through that this fiscal year that that cuts in June, we made some budget changes we might push it into next year, December the federal government that Congress passed another bill and we are still waiting for the final numbers. But it looks to be about another 100 40 million. And again, that will help us build against it because we're still it's not just IT folks are writing as often all of our trips are different. We kept our vehicles at half seated capacity. So an articulated bus that during rush hour, but normally have 100 people on it has 70 seats. We're only letting 25 people get on there for safety. So again, we can't get all this fear revenue because of safety. Plus our county funding comes from a drink tax. Now what are we all not doing?

I don't know. I can't speak.

I know I know. So people are not going out to restaurants, even if they were it's this versus that. So I so I want to stress it. Anything that's coming back is a bank account that we can draw against as we see what the world is gonna look like. Pittsburgh's a strong transit town. I guarantee you folks as downtown changes and jobs change any bus that I don't have to run into downtown. I can now run seven days a week on a weekend route because that pays four or 24 hours service. Folks who get off work at two or three in the morning need to get home and folks are going to work at four or five in the morning need to get to work so we can run. So we'll move service around But every dollar that's available for us to build against, lets us keep service on the street. And realistically, the best thing that we can do to help this economy recover, keep people from feeling like they have to get car and running that additional service to you know that so folks can take a new job, and know that their bus is going to be there for the next year or two, or they can sign a lease in a new neighborhood because they want to get closer to family or go to a different school, or they just, they want to go to a different place. They need to know that we'll be there for a couple of years to make these life these life improvements happen. And that funding lets us do that.

That's great. So let's let's go to let's talk about innovation in tech. Okay. And I and you know, the electric piece, obviously, we covered and we'll talk about that if as we have time, but how do you think new technologies and innovations are really going to support your mission? And can you talk about some of the challenges that you face right now. So what might be like a wish list that you might have in terms of technology that

might be helpful, I'm making my little list of things we can do. So I heard this from a Google person when I first came here back in 2018. And he was talking about removing friction. And we thought that was a really awesome way to talk about the role of technology. Now. We in transit, a secondary service, what does that mean? Aside from people who love trains, which are, you know, we love trains, folks don't really normally get excited about us, they get excited about what we make happen, right. And so people aren't trying to get on the bus, because they love the electric bus, and it's blue, and it's fun. It's that bus can help them get where they're going, where it can get their staff where they're going, or one of the worst investments you can make is parking. It's a horrible investment, using transit helps you not have to do that keep our lovely green canopy downtown and throughout the city. But again, folks don't get excited about us, but it's how do we make the rest of their life happen? So removing friction really has baked into that. So what were friction points, you know, knowing how much you're going to pay knowing where you can pay. So we are embarking on our second pilot for our mobile ticketing app, our first pilot was last January, not the best timing. But we're doing our second run on that. And it's removing that friction. So everything a passenger needs to make their choices right there. We've added USB charging points, we're adding info screens on the vehicles or new muscles come in with the info screen to get really dynamic information. So it's making it easier to ride. But also, like with removing friction, the flip side the exact same thing is communicating with customers. Why do we see nationally that people love trains, people love trains, because there is a sense of permanent trains not going to take a funny turn, I if I just get on the train, I can see how much to pay, the whole thing is set up, I don't have to talk to somebody, I know exactly what's happening. The more we communicate with our customers, the more we bring that same experience to every single route that we operate. So you are not out there alone trying to figure it out. You've got a I'm seeing another note up there. So we've got something else that can help you figure out okay, here's where I'm going and whether it's your map that is telling you how to walk there, or it is your your fare that is prepaid or whatever is going on. All of that is in one place, easy for you to get to. If there is a if your bus goes on detour, we can push the notice out to you because you registered for it like so you want to know about route 36 we can push out that there is you know construction on Beverly and so we're detouring down, you know, a different street so folks don't have to wait, they can go find this and control this. You know, we used to say this was generational that Gen Z and millennials were really focused on getting this information. And now it's just everybody. This is our new expectation. So definitely talking with a customer, I'd say our big challenge. We are probably not unique. We generate so many data points in a day we generate millions of pieces of data just on where the buses where's the vehicle? How many people are on where did they get on? Where did they get off? How fast were we going? How How well did we run against schedule to where we too fast in a segment to where we too slow at the end of the line? Were we there for the scheduled time? Do we arrive early level at that? Point being we have scads and boatloads of data analysis on the usage of the vehicle think about the maintenance information which is made available. There's 300 pieces of moving stuff in an internal combustion engine

separate from anything else going on. And there's so much data on how long does it take to do this? How long does it take to do that? One of our maintenance managers Ben Ben Nick Lowe, noticed a trend last summer summer before of one of our garages the air conditioners were restocking Working at like 100 203,000 miles 100,000 mile warranty. So he was able to dig into the information and find out this garage had the most challenging afternoon schedule. So the buses are being run back to back. And it was wearing out the air conditioners, figured out what to do reached out to the vendor built a solution. Now these air conditioners are great. So that's great that Ben could see that, but we need an automated bin. And for every single area, what about, you know, consumption of our benefits? This is a stressful job, we pay me to sit down and eat on the run, can we use appointment? Moving from data to useful information, I think is a challenge. But we're not alone in that we're absolutely not alone. We've kicked off a you know, essentially a data group in our planning area with Ellie Newman, who I think was she assisted the hackathon teams. She'd been very active and saying, Hey, here's our data. Here's where we can go back and forth. So it's it's watching that it also say, so we're not done with COVID. We're not if anyone who says like new normal, I don't know that we're done. I don't know that we will be done with how it impacts our lives and changes for the next couple of years. So it's a lot of it is how can we be flexible now to be as useful as possible. And then position ourselves at when we see a clear path of what the world is looking like. And that might be years from now that we're ready to go. But again, we're not waiting for that. That's why we're doing our system plan. We're pushing forward with a fare improvement. So we should be bringing that to our board next month, I'll help out with fare equity. And then also a big focus on our transit oriented community. So how do we develop our dirt? And then equity too, I think there's a renewed focus on equity. But

technology can help us with that, because it can reveal where our biases are covering our vision, you know, so but if if there are people who are listening now, and they say, I think I have a solution for you, what is the best process for people to let you know that they really think they have some solutions.

If they do not already have a contact at Port Authority, have them to hit you up at the tech Council and push it over to me. And then we can get

together and go from there. I

saw. We have a meeting tomorrow with the runners up for the hackathon. So we've we've talked to them a little bit Logan and his group. And we're in that came up through the tech Council. We're going to be talking tomorrow about what we can do within the bounds of city codes, and so on and so forth. So, absolutely run it over here. And there are probably things with solutions that of course, we would never think of but as we sit down, maybe it morphs into something else. That would be fantastic. I'd say what works for us. We're one of 500 transit entities in the country. We're one of the big ones. But anything that works for us, it's going to have a nationwide application. So we're more than happy to to be the growing point. No,

no, you've been a great partner I want I want to just let everyone know that even during the hackathon, I was able to pull Catherine out on a Sunday night. So she could talk to the team who believed that they had a solution. So in terms of, you know, generating more revenue, how large is your budget just so people can get and understand in terms of top line,

our for our footprint, so we do about 120 230 million in capital annually. And probably we budget about 470 million in operations. So net 600 million. And the way to think about us is we have 2600 active employees, we're paying pensions for about 3000 other families here in Pittsburgh. So that's a lot of financial support. Pre COVID, half the people coming to work in downtown Pittsburgh, we're coming in on port authority. So imagine what downtown would be like if everybody had to find a different way to get it.

So I think that your budget, your top line budget is bigger than the city of Pittsburgh budget. Is that correct?

I don't know. What's the city Pittsburgh budget?

I think it's less, I think I

think we have we have been told anecdotally that we are the fourth largest property owner in Pittsburgh, but we have you know, we have our bus garages.

We have? Yeah,

we have an awful lot of stuff. I couldn't I don't have anywhere to hang our hat back on that. But we're definitely an engine. I mean, according to our economic impact study, every dollar that comes into port authority is two to $3 more here in the local economy. So we are big, we might not have acted like it. But we we have a responsibility also to help build the best community that we can. So that's kind of exciting. It's a budget like that. Imagine what we can

do. Exactly. And so yeah, I just wanted people to understand the span the scope, you know, the impact, because I don't think you you know, we've talked about it enough.

We haven't and we also we brought on our first Chief Information Officer in 2018. That's Jeffrey Devlin, who I think is probably tuning in. So hi, Jeffrey. So not only has it been like a fantastic tech focus, but Jeff Jeffries brought in this Really great focus on change, change management, like we need to evolve to better address what's going on in our communities and, and how do you help an organization where a lot of our folks have been here 2530 years, but they're here because they really, really care. They're here because they want to make a difference. And Jeffrey brought on I want to say, most recently, like a new director of the customer experience, so really doing that focus in, in our, in our tech footprint. So places that might not have seen us previously, you're gonna see us we're, we're, we're gonna keep going on and doing some cool stuff.

Okay, we have one question in the chat. And then I have a question. So which question Dan Griffiths

Yeah. We also have two questions. I got a great question that came in on the personal chat from Bob Boston as well to see if we can get this both. That'd be fantastic. Okay, so

the first one it looks like was question for it. So Oakland BRT, so bus rapid transit, in Oakland, we've been talking about, like, I wasn't even here. But before the birth of my children, I guarantee, we are at essentially final design, we've just concluded our 90% meetings, we have already been told we got this last year from the Federal Transit Administration, that the $99.5 million we seek for the project is ready to go once we complete the paperwork. So this year, we should be completing the full funding grant agreement for that. So we can get started with construction. You'll start seeing improvements out there next year, and the whole shebang and 23. But realistically, anything that we're able to get our dollars, I mean, it's been a long time since Pittsburgh did a big project, the North Shore connector, right, right. We we can use a fifth garage money to help us electrify the fleet. What about you know, updating the rail line? Where should rail line to be extended? There's, there's no shortage of stuff we want to do today. You know, again, going electric, that's a capital cost, but it's the absolute best investment that we can make on those vehicles. So how do we just expand and then once we get down to our system plan, that gives us a whole laundry list of stuff that we can we can plug and play. I mean, we we have bridges and tunnels that we maintain through our agreement with the state, you know, fixing a bridge can be $50 million. And this is a good time for us to get in line. Because we it's just been a while since we've really made that compelling argument. So we're, we're in touch with our friends in DC in Harrisburg, a lot more than we used to be.

So Bob wants to know, yeah, let's do this. Pittsburgh's topography pose any specific challenges for Evie, or steep hills and so forth.

As much as it does for any vehicle, yeah, I tell folks who have not been here that take a city map and wad it up. And that's what you kind of have for Pittsburgh. In our contracts for our diesel buses, we stipulate those vehicles must be able to handle a 16% incline. So just think about that, right. So we've taken the same texts and put those same specs and put those on the electric vehicles. So that's what we wanted to test drive, the first few EBS we have are running in the East Liberty area, so it's a little flatter. They're able to stay out all day on a charge, which is one thing we wanted to make sure we were set, we will be building chargers into the city infrastructure. But we're still making sure that we can get out and we can get up these hills and valleys hills, it's less that they can't handle it and more than if they go, that plus the air conditioning is sort of an energy suck. So we need to make sure that we've got the Chargers out there, but part of the part of the BRT is going ahead and building chargers through the corridor. And then another thing with our hubs is if we have these dedicated places where vehicles are coming, the whole thing can be wired up for for charging stations. So a bus might run for an hour and come back and be able to get fully charged up. But you know, all these private vehicles, you know, Ford, and everyone else is saying they won't be making internal combustion engines after a while. So these these will handle these projects all together.

You know that there's so much there's so much to cover with you. And I think, excuse me, we have a thank you from from one person here, that saying that, you know, thank you for the future. Thank you for looking ahead with such a positive approach. In my time being here in Pittsburgh, I don't think we've had this kind of concentrated focus in terms of ground transportation and transit. But the last thing is, even though people aren't traveling as much in the air, you're still getting a high demand of people who want something to go to the airport. Is that correct?

So the airport conversations start. I mean, they've been they've been ongoing because remember, it's not just the airport, you have a lot of jobs that are going on in that corridor, and then you have this really cool stuff with neighborhood. 91. So, I mean, the the idea of an airport is only a transportation gateway. You know, her Christina kasota is talking about this last week, you know, no one comes here just for the airport. They come here because of all the cool stuff the airport to get them to. And that and cool cool stuff at the airport. You know, and in my perfect world. Maybe there's a small transit center out there. Maybe there's a place where if it was coming from beaver county can connect. I mean, there's so much infrastructure we can support with that. But it is a thriving Job Center. So yeah, we still hear a lot with that. It's been um, you know, I COVID didn't break anything. showed us what was broken. I've heard that so many times. And it's been interesting to watch in the last year, the refinement really people talking about making sure the bread and butter stuff. So Pittsburgh by ourselves 15th busiest bus company in the country 15 busiest. So, you know, we're kind of impressed with ourselves here 25th busiest transit agency overall. And what we heard from folks is, you know, clean, convenient, reliable and respectful folks want a vehicle so fast, they don't need to look at your schedule, they just want to be able to walk out of the door and hop on and live their life without having to get the car out of the garage

and

figure out where they're going to park it and do all that other stuff. I mean, think about it. Isn't that why you love Uber? And what if you could have Uber without having to book an app? And that's public transit? That's what we do. We're the O g, so to speak. If anyone even says, oh, gee,

I like that. No, I think I think you're great. And so I think there's one last thing how can we hear again, how we sit in on patent meetings? Okay, Lexi, put that back out. Again, the posters is out there. So Steve, there's any way? Okay,

I say town is my bestie. Thank you.

I yeah, I think you're one of the original gangsters. It's great. There we go. So listen, we are thrilled. It's 30 plus minutes of just whipped by it's always great to hear from you. It's always great to hear your passion. But you're pragmatic. I mean, that's the thing. That's, that is always really thrilling and elevating the exposure of what the opportunities are here, as well as some of our gaps. Because in the tech community, we want to help solve problems, we want to be a part of the solution. That's why I said how do we get, you know, connected to you? How do we make sure that people are connected and adding value to the work that you're doing? So everyone that was Catherine kelemen. She is the author of all things, buses, see, I didn't even make one bus joke about any no to do like, no, no impressive.

It's impressive. I do want to say a big thank you, though, to our leadership. So our not just our senators, you know, Casey, and to me, then, like locally representative lamb representative,

I Doyle

represent Russian color for the COVID funding. We have excellent local support. Senator Costa, and everybody here has been great, but I can't say enough good things about the focus on transit rich Fitzgerald has brought in and I'm delighted to be here. And he's built this infrastructure that's going to let us save the world before bedtime. So I would be remiss if I did not think these folks for for their leadership.

All right, well, thank you, Catherine, you can get back to work. Now. I know we've shaved off 35 minutes of precious time from you, but really appreciate it. And this is so thrilling to have you kickoff March, hard to believe it's almost a year. But we are still here trying to keep the community together together on all things that affect all of us. And obviously trans transit matters. So thanks, Catherine. Jonathan, what's, what's on for tomorrow?

Tomorrow, we got a great guest stopping by we have Jason James who's the CIO of net health. Most people call him JJ.

Okay, that's great. All right. Well, thanks, everyone.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai