Every county in Georgia is in a regional commission.

So that was they're created by state law.

But so the main reason we exist is to talk about and work on the challenges that don't recognize political boundaries.

Like in this picture, you see the Flint River.

So water, transportation, air quality, the economic development around the airport, none of those things are contained into one city or one county.

It takes a lot of people working together to improve those things and make them better and make them work the best that they can.

So ARC tries to bring the public sector, private sector, nonprofits together around any table you want to talk about.

And try to make things better and make things work.

So that's that's kind of why we exist.

And so this is a quick overview of our board structure.

We have a 41 member board for our 11 core counties.

And that board is made up this is by state law.

The board is made up of the county commission chair.

Or the CEO in the Cabs case of each of our 11 counties.

Then there are 12 mayors, one from each county, except Fulton gets a North Fulton mayor and a South Fulton mayor.

And so there are 15 citizen members.

Our citizen districts are drawn similar to a legislative district, so they don't recognize the county county lines.

So they cross county lines.

Your citizen member who represents the bulk of Clayton County is Charlton Bivens.

I would imagine most of you probably know.

And then we have representatives from the Atlanta City Council and the mayor of Atlanta as the largest city in the in the region.

So that's the makeup of our board.

The map on the other side is a little confusing because it has several different colors, and I'll talk about that in a minute.

But we do have a lot of different geographic configurations based on which function of ARC we're talking about.

I'm getting ahead of myself here.

We'll see if I can do it without my notes.

So essentially, uh because we do a lot of different things, uh, we were created by the state, like I say, for community development.

That's why the state created regional commissions is to help make sure that cities and counties around the state are following the state's rules about zoning and development and updating their plans every four or five years, like they're supposed to.

Um but over the years we've taken on a lot of different hats and a lot of different responsibilities.

Uh so we like to think of ourselves kind of in three buckets of work.

We do planning work, which is mostly focused on community development, transportation, and natural resources.

We do community services work, which uh, and I'm sorry to hear that Tori is leaving.

I know our staff at ARC is sorry to see her go, uh, but we do provide most of the funding for your senior centers and and Clayton senior services comes from the federal government through ARC to Clayton County.

And we also we we do a lot of work with mobility services, primarily helping employers find ways to help their employees get to and from work on buses, van pools, telecommuting, whatever we help them find alternative commutes, and then we also do workforce development work source Atlanta regional uh is in it is managed by ARC, and we help employees find work and we help employers find qualified employees to fill their positions when they come through us.

And then as a resource, uh one of the big things that we do uh in five of our counties is the federal government, I think about 10 years ago came to us and asked us to run a piece of homeland security that's based here in Metro Atlanta called the Urban Area Security Initiative, and uh then we also offer several leadership programs like the Regional Leadership Institute and the Model Atlanta Regional Commission for high school students and a couple of other leadership programs, and then probably the thing that most of our local governments use us for the most is our research and analytics.

We have one of the best data and analytics uh groups you'll find probably anywhere in the country.

We can give you a breakdown of almost any topic you want to look at from the neighborhood level out to a statewide level, just depending on what you need to see.

So feel free to call us and ask us to do that.

Um they might complain to me, but they won't complain to you.

So I'm gonna talk about our impact, I guess, twice because I messed up this slide.

But from a regional perspective, uh the impact that we make is is quite large, as you know.

So between now and 20 between 2024 and 2028, we have about 5.2 billion dollars in state and federal transportation funding going out to our 19 counties that we do transportation planning for.

We've uh in 2023 and again in 2024, we get we put a million dollars out in Livable Centers Initiative study grants, and I believe if I remember correctly, in 2022, we did a grant, a 400,000 dollar grant with you guys for Clayton County, Lovejoy, and Jonesboro to study the Terra Boulevard corridor, and I think those results just came out uh last year.

So hopefully you'll be getting some turning some dirt on some of that before too long.

And then uh we also last year I think did a supplemental grant for the downtown Jonesboro Livable Centers Initiative study.

Uh so we've added a little bit to the pot there to help downtown Jonesboro.

We provided about 30 million dollars last year in senior services in our 10 counties that we do senior services for.

And then we also manage at the state's request, we provide staffing for the Metropolitan North Georgia Water Planning District, which is a 15 county water district that basically the watershed of the Chattahoochee River from Beauford Dam until it leaves Fayette County on the south end of Metro Atlanta.

Any county that gets its water from uh the Chattahoochee is in that water district, and as you can see, we've reduced the per capita water usage by 30 percent since the year 2000.

And uh to me, more impressive, we've reduced overall water usage by a little bit in that same time, despite the fact that we've added over a million people to that 15 county region, but we're still reducing the amount of water that we're using, and that's that's very important because as most of you probably know Metro Atlanta has one of the smallest water supplies of any major metro in the country because most of your major cities were built on rivers, and Atlanta was built on the railroad tracks.

And so we we have the the headwaters of the Chattahoochee River are right here in the North Georgia Mountains, and that's the that's the water supply for 90 some odd percent of the residents of Metro Atlanta.

So we're very careful about water, and uh the main way that we've reduced water usage is through the toilet rebate program where we've uh helped replace over a hundred thousand toilets around the region at little or no cost to residents when they apply for the program.

We replace them with a an old toilet with a high with a high efficiency model.

Um but the main thing is uh efficiency pricing, we call it, or concert conservation pricing, where the more water you use, the more expensive it gets.

So you notice on your water bill, the first thousand gallons or whatever costs X amount if you go beyond that, it costs a little bit more for every thousand gallons that you use, and that helps keep people's water usage down a little bit over time.

Um moving on to what we can do here in Clayton County specifically.

One of the things that our data group does is every year they provide a population estimate to each of our 11 core counties.

And you can see last year we estimated your population at about 300 4,000 people, and we project that by 2050 you'll have almost 350,000 people here in Clayton County.

And even better news for you is that your job growth is gonna almost mirror the population growth.

So that's a great thing and great opportunity for the folks here in Clayton County.