WithersRavenel and Brightly helped the Town of Selma secure $5M+ in public works funding

Hear how WithersRavenel and Brightly helped the Town of Selma secure $5M+ in public works funding

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Good morning and welcome to improve your public works projects securing funds in North Carolina. I'm glad you've all joined us for this fantastic discussion today. First, I have just a few housekeeping items to cover. The phone lines will be muted throughout today's session, so please submit any questions you have at any time during the presentation through the Q&A feature at the bottom of your screen.

The presenters will answer your questions at the live Q&A at the end of the session. Today's session will be recorded and you'll receive a link to the recording in an email. So let's go ahead and get started. Luke Anderson Strategic Solutions consultant here at rightly will be our moderator today. Luke comes from a background in energy, automation and age that controls and has been with greatly software for about ten years.

After receiving his SMP in 2017, Luke is focused on both sides of the asset management world. Day to day operations and long term strategic capital planning links. Current role as strategic consultant allows him to consult with civic leaders, helping to establish clear and justified capital plans. Welcome, Luke. The floor is yours.

All right. Thanks, Jose. I'm super excited to be here. We've got two great panelists. They're going to walk us through some good insight into exactly what we've been talking about. Right. The the need for capital funding. We're joined with Mayor Byron out of Selma. He's got a much nicer room that I knew that I'm doing my conversation from.

So he's got his back background. Their minds are much dirtier. Guest bedroom slash baby's room slash storage room right now should be transitioning soon. And then we also have Amanda Whitaker as well, director of funding with Ravenel, an excellent local engineering firm. And that's really what we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk about funding sources, the challenges with the problems with them, how we prepare for them.

And then we want to talk with kind of how Selma did it and kind of walk through a lot of that, a lot of that process. So we are short on time. So we're going to kind of jump in, give a quick kind of background for our panelists here. Mayor McAllister, I'll move to Selma early 2017, purchased the dream house in their dream town.

His wife, Sarah and him have had a lot of community involvement. It's one of their top priorities, kind of living in Selma, being a part of that community. So thank you for joining us, Ms.. Whitaker. Experience and great writing, great administration, economic development. What else? Community development. Your focus has been really, from what I understand, on on successful projects, writing and administering that grant process really all over the state.

So previously worked for Montgomery County in the Economic Development Office as the director. So again, thank you both for joining us. I appreciate. I'm excited and I'm going to start with you, Amanda. I'm going to give you a two part question, but I'm gonna give you the second part first, and we're gonna work backwards. So the the the it's actually a three part question.

But anyway, so let's talk first the challenges of public funding, specifically in North Carolina. You talked a little bit about how there's some stuff that's opening up. I will give you one rule, though. Everybody on this call doesn't have enough money, so don't don't talk about just having plenty of money because that doesn't count. So challenges of public funding.

Give us a little little background. They're going to follow that up with the importance of being prepared and what it looks like being prepared for those funding process. And so please.

So to start with challenges, most of the time when you think of funding, you think of grants. And I tell folks all the time, people think of grants as free money, and most of the time it comes with strings. So you get that money. But in return, the state or federal government and sometimes the state is acting as a pass through for the federal government to to in order to give you those dollars, they expect for you to follow a certain set of guidelines.

And a lot of compliance comes along with that. Most of you hear all the acronyms for CDBG Community Development BLOCK grant or across the United States, you'll hear SRF. So state revolving loan fund coming out of provision of water infrastructure here in North Carolina. Those are pass through dollars. Those are coming from federal buckets. And they're going to come with strings.

And so you have to be prepared and really ready to accept the the compliance on the back end once the funding is awarded, it's it's not going to be just get the money and get the project started. There's going to be hoops to jump through. There's going to be environmental reviews that you have to do. There's going to be reporting that has to get done.

So a lot of times you need to be prepared for that prior to even applying and how you're going to administer that project on the back end. So that's one thing. Also, timelines and cycles are different for all of these fundings, so you need to be prepared well ahead of time before that project is due. In an application form.

You can't just look and a month in advance and expect to be able to put in a competitive application. A lot of these require public hearings or resolutions to be adopted, so from a local government standpoint, you have to be prepared to get that on your board's agenda. Sometimes you have to advertise these public hearings ten days ahead of time.

So you really have to look at your timelines and these cycles in order to be prepared and put in the most competitive application.

Is that where do people find that information outside of obviously, you guys are working with an organization that publicly announced when, when and how to comply with those grants.

And those prior.

Yeah. So usually you're going to find it on the funders website. That's the best place to start for the state of North Carolina. That's going to be the Department of Commerce. That's going to be the Division of Water Infrastructure through our state website. You can get to those websites. Most of them have an I need funding page or I would like to seek funding page, and you can scroll through there and click on the types of funding that you're looking for.

And you can usually find that guidance. If, if all else fails, there's usually a phone number or an email that you can direct questions to at the state as well. But typically they announce their programs. I would encourage folks, if you are not on these local government, what list serves most folks are, You're going to see these announcements come out through your local government list, serves here in North Carolina.

The Chapel Hill does a really good job with their school of government. They have a good listserv and they try to get information out, but also the state has their own listserv that they you can sign up for. And they put all their media releases and you can get that information from from there as well. In a simple email.

Great. And I'm going to combine this question to it. And Mayor Barrett, I'm going to follow this question up, kind of ask you the same thing from some perspective before we kind of dive, because I want to get both perspectives, but typically, I'd imagine know you're not the only one applying when an organization applies for Grant, you're not the only one.

So I've heard in the past, I would assume a lot of the big challenges are how do we showed, how do we justify our needs? So can you can you talk about kind of what's needed to compete with those for those those funds and kind of what that challenge represents for the for the folks on the call?

Sure. So every funding agency has a certain set of priorities that they are looking for and they want you to show them in your application how you're going to meet those priorities with your project. So knowing what those priorities are, it's usually not a secret. Typically they put all of that in their guidance for their applications and you can read that and matching up your project with that is going to be really important in terms of competitiveness.

It's not a shoe in. Just to kind of give you some context. In the fall of 2020 to our state Division of Water Infrastructure Structure received over 600 applications for just that cycle. So that's a lot of applications. They did have American Rescue Plan Act money, so they did have a bigger bucket of money. But certainly they were not able to find all those applications.

So even if you are able to meet those priorities, it doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to get funded. So that's typically where I want to start with my application is what is what is their priorities and do I have a project here locally that meets those priorities that I can match up with? And then the next step to that is what are the application requirements?

How do they score their application? Are there certain elements that I can have in place in order to get a higher score? A lot of times having plans in place, asset management plans, capital improvement plans, showing that you've identified projects locally, you have some cost associated with that, showing that you know what you need and that you have an associated cost.

And you didn't just pull this project out of a hat. That's really important and a lot of times you're going to get additional points for having done some of that planning work upfront and having a little bit of knowledge about your system really makes a big difference. So being prepared is important, but also and I'll probably come back to this later, being flexible so your asset management plans, your your capital improvement plans, you have a set of priorities.

So at the local level, you may have, you know, a sewer infrastructure project that's really important to top priority, that maybe it doesn't fit as well with the state or the federal government priorities for what their funding source is. That's when you need to take a look and have that plan in place so that you can look at other types of projects and maybe we seek funding for the third or fourth project on your cap, which then allows you to take your local dollars and pay for those other top priority projects.

So just having that flexibility from a local standpoint to say, okay, I can't do my number one project, but there is some funding available and this project meets their priorities and will be the best fit. So being able to have those conversations and be prepared and having that project list and cost is going to be really important.

But awesome. I'm going to go a little off script here. I apologize. Mayor Barrett puts you on the spot. I could talk. Maybe I could talk to you probably half an hour more about about this exact topic. But I want to take that same question and throw at you, Mr. Mayor, and ask, you know what? When you when you think back, think back.

Hurricane Florence, historic lack of funding, you know, everybody else was kicking the can for 50 years. Well, you know, all of that presents a challenge, of course. But but when you kind of go back to where you started, kind of this idea of of going after grant money in public funding, what were some of the challenges, some things you guys faced in Selma?

Well, it.

Was essentially getting everybody to understand why you need to do, quite frankly, the less sexy things in local government when it comes to infrastructure. For us, it was let's figure out what the end result we're looking for is first. So for instance, when it came to searching for funding related to hurricane Florence damage, even Hurricane Matthew damaged. We had to tell our population first.

We need to figure out a way to save money by not spending on the cost of treating I and I $600,000 or more a year to treat I and II in our sewer system. So we're saying first we need to save you taxpayer dollars so that we can do some of the other fun things. So let's start there and then work our way backwards.

So where is it that we need to do the work and make sure that we can display? We know that this happened because of Hurricane Florence and we know that this work needs to be done to fix this and then work our way backwards. And going back to what is, Whitacre said, having an intimate knowledge of your system and understanding what was well before something happened and what broke down after something happened really goes a long way in making sure we get that funding.

Having accurate records and understanding what you had done before and what you need to do to get to where you need to be really goes a long way when you can articulate exactly what your problem is and exactly what your end goal in fixing that problem is. So, for instance, $600,000 savings a year when it comes to I and not problems or for instance, stormwater mitigation so that we can develop an area for industry and commercial.

I mean, that economic development conversation, knowing that first stormwater, then we can get to the water sewer in that area, but you got to get the stormwater problems figured out first, making sure those conversations are clear in that path to get to the end goal is clear gets you a long way in securing this funding.

Did you have any citizens pushback, any any kind of people that. Oh yeah. Like how that. Yeah.

Absolutely. You know, as far as you know, there were lots of conversations, again about doing the fun things. You know, let's build a bigger part. Let's let's refurbish an old building. Let's buy things that, quite frankly, were going to be short term wins. But in the long term, you're going to fall back into the same problems. So you had a lot of pushback about let's let's do the underneath verse and then work on what's on top.

I'd say, quite frankly, the mentality was, is if you clean up just the veneer, you're going to be able to go forward and that's going to bring economic development in. And quite frankly, our philosophy now is you have to take care of the foundation first.

And here doesn't last very long. If there's water leaking down, it starts sinking into a snake oil. Well, that's a good point. So do you think there's been a shift?

Absolutely.

Past few years? Yeah.

There's been a significant shift over the last three years in our thinking as a town. Quite frankly, we get kind of hurrahs when we are mentioning the funding we've secured for infrastructure projects now. And most of the time the community's not going to see the immediate change. But over time we've gotten to a point now where the savings that we're experiencing from doing the right things underneath are allowing us to go ahead and start looking at some of those newer things.

And it's really changing the way our community thinks about all of these infrastructure projects.

Do you have maybe any examples of some of the fun things that you're kind of doing now that you're able to do you don't think would have been done if if you hadn't been able to take care of those infrastructure items? And we just.

We just got eight brand new, beautiful police vehicles because we saved quite a bit of money over the last year by doing the right thing underneath. And so we can clearly have that conversation that this is a result of that pain that we went through, doing the right thing as of the year prior. And now people are like, we'll keep doing more the right thing.

Did the foundational stuff fixed and then some of the neat things will show up. Absolutely.

You made me think that. How do you how do you convey that? Obviously, you don't get a billboard that says, look at our new cars, because we got we got did the right things. And this town council meetings, you have a newsletter. How do you communicate these successes?

You now both of them? Yes, we do. At town council meetings. When we get to having those resolutions to go through with funding for these projects, we go ahead and explain this project is going to save X amount of dollars and we'll be able to take X amount of dollars and move toward doing this other thing. And you keep repeating that regularly.

You have to bang the drum constantly about what you're doing with this funding. And then even then we have newsletters, monthly newsletters that go out that convey the same message. Any time we have some type of public event around a groundbreaking or a public event around new pieces of a new asset like a police car or fire truck, we mention, Hey, these are all the things we had to do to get to this point and celebrate again.

Like I said, the less sexy things of of building proper infrastructure and maintaining proper infrastructure.

So I told the side, no, this wasn't on the script, so you're not know this is coming. I was on Zillow here before this meeting, and I know there's a lot of new construction happening in Selma, a lot of new houses coming in. And those houses, they're not they're not $80,000 houses, right? There's a number that were 400 K and over.

So tax base is increasing, prices increasing, do you think from an obviously you as a leader. Right. You've kind of guided the ship to see this being a long term kind of thing. Do you think as councils turn and eventually your tenure kind of goes, do you think that the citizens of the town have bought into this idea of of asset management doing the right thing, or do you think there's more work to be done?

There's probably a little more work to be done to make sure we are solid in that culture. But we are certainly very close to having that culture ingrained in our community. So yeah, I think we certainly turn the corner from way of thinking in the past to really being focused on laying the foundation for our future going forward.

That's perfect. So I'll take that right back to where we started, which don't go back on the script now. So the actual grant funding that you received in going through that process, the culture has shifted, right? You were kind of juggling two balls at once in your project management and GES and understanding infrastructure. You're also trying to convey to council and everybody else and citizens why you're doing what you're doing.

You've talked a little bit about kind of how you did that kind of you go all the way back to where it all started, kind of what your feelings were and how that how you went about it.

I'll tell you, the best thing that we ever did was actually bring in a fact. We brought in with us right now to our council meetings to say these are the folks that are managing these projects and they could clearly explain exactly what they're doing step by step and exactly what the result was going to be. And in seeing that tangible piece that there are people who are actually working on this and it's just not lip service, that we're giving folks really help push us along in convincing the community this is a worthwhile, worthwhile endeavor.

You know, being able to hear Eddie Staley say this is going to fix 50 to 60% of your own problems was like everybody's eyes were like, wait a minute, we had an eye problem. So then you go from there. But making sure that you put front and center the actual tangible pieces of the work that are happening. We showed the back trucks and the trucks that were working on the slip lining in the streets.

We took pictures and we said, this is what's happening with this funding and this is how much it costs to do a mile. This is how much it costs to do this block And this is where this money is going.

So I'm going to pivot a little bit, Amanda, because because obviously you guys working with them, was that was that the type of information slip line, all that is that was being used on the grant side or just great, How does that what's the order of that kind of how does that all work together?

So it depends on what kind of grant you're you're asking for. There are study grants where you can go in and maybe you haven't done that upfront work, maybe you need an asset management plan, maybe you need to do some inventorying of your of your system. So you can you can ask for dollars for for a study grant, for a water or sewer system or both.

Or if you do have a construction project identified, then yes, that's part of your narrative to tell them what you plan to do with those dollars. So how how many linear feet of line are we either rehabbing, replacing, and what does that look like? Are we doing this look widening? Is it a funded and fix it type project?

What what is your project? Right. And I'll tell you, there are certain types of projects that that are going to score higher in a in an application. Most of the time if you're doing an expansion project, those are not going to score as high as like a rehab and a replacement project. But it may be necessary for you to do that expansion project and you apply anyways the scoring for in North Carolina for water and sewer.

There's different points associated with those projects. And traditionally that's where it's important to have what we call vetting conversations with clients and talk to them about their project to see if it's something that we feel like would be competitive. Based on past rounds of what's been funded. The and the scores ranges that those fall into. So that's important as well, making sure that you can check all those boxes for competitiveness.

And a lot of this is about having a funding strategy. So this is often a long game, especially for small communities that may need to start with that asset management plan and get the funding there and really get that part of the process complete. And then once they have those plans in place, go after the construction dollars. So it's having the strategy and then in taking that strategy even further and Selma did a really good job of this is identifying areas within the town that, you know, you have infrastructure needs and how those match up with certain buckets of funding.

So they have areas identified and some that are really good for a CDBG project which requires them to look at income. So a lot of moderate income is required there. They have areas that are better off for those as RF projects out of the Division of Water Infrastructure, where can we maybe handle a loan and how much how much would that be?

So identifying the projects and the areas that match up is something they did a really good job at and they set that funding strategy and they've been successful at just chipping away one piece at a time of getting these projects done. So that makes a really big difference when you're looking at going after funding, being competitive, having the right plans in place and also having that strategy in place, it still has to be a little bit flexible because there for a while in North Carolina, CDBG infrastructure wasn't available.

So we kind of had to table those projects and say, are there some of those projects that maybe we could go after with other funds? Or do we need to look in other areas and start working on these projects? So certainly having flexibility, having that strategy, these are all the things that come into play. And and in like Mayor McAllister said, oftentimes you're citizens coming from local government background do not see and we and we ourselves take for granted turning that water on and being able to wash our clothes and flush the toilet.

But it's it's when you have that outage or when you have a big stormwater issue or flooding that they they really come to the council meetings and want to speak their voice. So letting them know how these projects are going to rectify some of these issues and what does to your system and how that impacts them on a day to day basis and then how those how those plans that you have in place, that asset management plan very well may say if you don't do X, you're going to have to increase your rates.

So letting them know that we've went after all of these dollars and how that has impacted their their wallet and the fact that they are not going to have to pay those increased rates because Selma's done a really good job of going after funds makes a big difference as well. So pulling all that together makes a big impact when you're writing an application and when you're telling that story.

So even though it might be very technical and there's very technical components to a lot of these applications that our engineers do a really good job at with pulling together the budget and the specifics of what's going to happen on the ground, we still like to tell that story and how it's impacting the community. And oftentimes that that makes a big difference to those that are reading it on the other side, because they can then tell that story of how the the dollars that they put in with these local communities are making a big difference.

Everybody has a boss.

Right, to piggyback on that. You know, you do have to be mindful to understand, are you having an internal town conversation about, say, helping a low income area? Are you having an internal conversation about economic development for your town? And then beyond that, is this a regional conversation where fixing something in your town is going to fix something and improve something for your entire region?

So that's where you also have to bear in mind understanding where your community is in the larger community. That's great.

Now we are getting close to the end. And I have one more question for Rick for for Mayor Byron. But I do want to ask one comment that you mentioned the score criteria. Is that standard in North Carolina or is it going to vary based on the grade?

It's going to vary based on on the grant. And the type of projects to the scoring for a study project is going to be different than a construction project. The scoring for department of Commerce, Economic Development infrastructure grant is going to be different than an infrastructure grant coming out of the Division of Water infrastructure. So it is going to be different and they spell out the scoring criteria in their guidelines for their application.

So you should be able to find that on their website and you should be able to determine if your project would be competitive.

Perfect. All right. Or close to the end. But my favorite question, I always love asking this one. We're going to wave our our brightly magic wand. We're going to reverse and we're going to go back. And Mayor Byron, you get to change one thing, right, and give yourself one piece of advice. What's it going to be?

Oh, study a lot more sooner. If I had been aware of kind of the the infrastructure trouble we had been in earlier, I think we could have done even more. And we did a fantastic amount of work in Selma in a very short period of time. But I'm very competitive with myself. I think we could have done more.

And so, you know, we had a history where we had studies that we got the study done, paid the money and let it sit on the shelf. And that probably happened two or three times over. And if we had gone back and just glanced at that information, we would have more quickly known where to start. Then kind of reinventing the wheel.

Every time we went back to look at actually.

I actually don't want a lot. That's an awesome one. Okay, great, great. Thank you, guys. And I will you have a couple of questions coming in. So I'm just going to ask them both to you guys. I don't know who's going to answer it, but we'll just got somebody else congressionally directed spending requests. Can you guys explain those at all?

Any insight there?

Yeah, absolutely. And that's a very good question. So with your state legislature and even federal dollars, you need to know when you're asking particularly for appropriations, what dollars can be leveraged against grants and loans. And so on. So that's a very good thing to keep in mind when you're going back looking for money and saying, hey, we're asking for this money to leverage it against this match.

We're going for this money to satisfy this percentage of this loan, instead of saying, hey, we're trying to get $20 million for our entire project, it's you're getting money to leverage it against a grant that's out there alone that might be out there for, you.

Know, piggyback on that. Also, part of that funding strategy may be there may be certain pieces or components of your system that need improvements. And maybe they don't need some of these funders priorities and they're not going to score as well. So reserving those projects for those ask and and like Mayor McAllister said, explaining to them, we went after all this funding for for these components of our system.

But this project is a priority. It needs to get done and we haven't been able to secure funding and here's why and here's how this money can help. So reserving those projects that, you know, don't score well for those ask can make a big difference because you're going to have a lot more flexibility when it comes to appropriations, typically.

And sometimes they filter it through different buckets. But usually you have more flexibility with an appropriation interest.

And then this all combined, this next one together. Do you do you happen to have any links directly for places to apply for funding? I know you mentioned the different state websites. Are there other links available or do we have a list established in that specifically? Do you know of any non or both for storm water right now?

Yes. So Brick still is is available for infrastructure, larger infrastructure projects and brick is building resilient infrastructure and that comes out of SEMA. And so that is something that if you're in North Carolina, you're going to want to talk to your emergency management department and we can put together a list of links to send out if if we need to.

But that's going to be on the North Carolina Emergency Management website. They're going to be the first stop. They're going to drive that that project, and then they will make recommendations at the federal level for larger projects. But also, Golden Leaf has a bucket of money for infrastructure projects that are for what we call quantity, not quality projects.

But if you're having flooding issues from stormwater, it's a small bucket, so it's not going to be for your larger projects. The max is $250,000. Golden Leaf has their website, it's their flood mitigation program. So you can also do stormwater master planning and and plans out of that money as well. And then Division of water infrastructure here in North Carolina has still has some ARPA dollars left where you can go after their stormwater infrastructure money in the spring cycle.

So I think that there's likely going to be more funding available for stormwater in the future. I think they're working on how to have a consistent funding stream, but for right now those are the best places to go for infrastructure funding.

And to add to that, particularly for the smaller towns, these consulting firms like Weather Driver now know that answer off the top. You probably don't have the status if you're a town the size of Selma are smaller to actually do all the searching and applying and figuring out where all these things are, reach out to a firm and say, Hey, this is our problem, this is what we're looking to do.

Do you have some answers that they'll do some of the early footwork for you? No problem. And it won't cost you a dime and then they'll come back to you as an answer. This is where just like Miss Whittaker said, this is where these buckets of money are and this is how you can use them. So don't be afraid to ask is what I say is the first and most important thing.

Love it. I've got more questions and parts than were passed past time, so I'll open up to you guys. Any final comments are going to wrap us up here before we we end.

Yes.

Sure. Well, I'll get back to your, you know, waving the magic wand and I'll kind of end on that. I will say for me in my professional career, it's it's really the importance of developing relationships. And so we certainly have good relationships with our clients and other engineering firms and firms that we've worked with across the state, but also the importance of developing those relationships with the funding agencies and the state agencies and the people that work there.

They're the ones that we call on to ask the hard questions for these communities that are our clients and and help navigate the waters of a difficult project and how to get that funded. So developing those relationships at the state level has been really key in the success of our team. And so having done that prior certainly would have been really good for my career in the past.

So that's been been a key thing. But also strategy. I think it's really important for Towns to take a step back and do exactly what Mayor McAllister told us, told them that some did, which is let's let's take this one step at a time. Let's do the planning that we need to do. Let's make sure that we have all the things in place to tell us what we need.

There's asset management plans and psy ops are really important in a lot of small towns, sometimes don't have the resources or take the time to do that, but it makes a big difference when you are looking to develop that strategy around how you can get the most amount of money in grants and low interest loans for your community.

And piggyback on that relationships. I mean, being able to look up and reach out to your community partners, your private partners, and say, Hey, we need help, that's probably the one step. But a lot of towns weren't willing to take is to admit and say we need help. So there are a lot of answers out there and there are a lot of bright people out there who can give you those answers.

But you do have to step out of your comfort zone and say, Hey, can you give me a hand? What do you know? Being part of panels like this really will take you a long way as you figure out where those knowledge resources are.

Awesome. Well, guys, thank you so much. We went a few minutes over items and wonderful conversation. Oh, hey, we've got another question that came in. This one to you of Mayor Barr. And of course, folks, if you need to run, please, Obviously, we're past our time. But can you talk about fiscal responsibility? It's level of priority in the town.

What it means to you guys, kind of how you look at just fiscal responsibility as a topic within Selma?

I can tell you. Exactly. And we've made this very clear, Safety is number one, no matter what. Safety has to be first and then right below it is fiscal responsibility. And so for us it has been saying, look, your entire population might be telling you, hey, we want you to build a roller coaster and you got to look them square in the face and say, we don't have money to build a roller coaster.

We have money to take care of this, this and this which needs to be taken care of first. And then maybe if we do all that right, we can build your roller coaster. But you do fine. Austin and I and I'll be very frank, politicians working to get reelected instead of working to do the correct, saying that fiscal responsibility conversation is not fun, but you have to have it if you want your community thrive.

If you want to make sure you are building the proper future for your community.

You know, unfortunately, I work every day with with community leaders talking to them about these topics. And that is the probably number one or number two reason people don't put a process in place is frankly, I could you know, that's what they say. They say I could do all this great stuff, but it wouldn't matter to my leaders and it just sucks hearing it and it just sucks.

And it's it's that that idea that working towards reelection, not working towards helping out those those those individuals.

And again, being able to show that clear path that fiscal responsibility will get you to where you want to be. It's going to take longer than you want, but it's going to get you there. You've got to be able to explain that and bring that drum regularly.

Everybody does it at home with their own finances, Right? But all of a sudden, people get that leadership, they get that border and all of that goes out the window. In some cases. But that's true as well. Guys, thank you very much. We will follow up with any additional questions that come in. We are at a time of day here.

Byron, thank you so much. Amanda, Thank so much. This was awesome. We do it again and maybe go a little bit deeper. So thanks again and everyone, have a great, great rest of your morning.

Thank you to.