To be here today.

I am Twila Carter, Chair of the Committee.

We have Councilmember Alcorn and staff from Councilmember Castillo's office, Councilmember Amy, Vice Mayor Pro Tim Amy Peck, Mayor Pro Tim Martha Cassex Tatum staff, as well as Councilmember Julian Ramirez's staff.

I am super excited about the presentation today.

And Richard Celine is our presenter and super excited to see what you have got for us today, Richard.

And he's got quite a presentation.

Said that he's not going to go through each slide word for word, but he's really bringing forth a lot of really good information.

And we welcome you today, Richard.

The floor is yours.

Okay.

We're not going to make you stand.

So you just say advanced slide or next slide, and we'll we'll get you moving.

Perfect.

Perfect.

Cool, cool, cool.

So Madam Chairman, first off, thank you.

Move over to the there you go.

One side or the other.

Thank you.

First off, thank you for your hospitality today and for your encouragement also to Councilmember Alcorn.

Both of y'all are individuals who I uh have gotten to know since coming back to Houston, my fourth generation hometown.

Um, and uh I would say this both in public and private, so since I'll take the the public liberty, uh the two of you have been, along with your other council members, have truly done some major heavy lifting since Hurricane Harvey.

And the sad truth is we're gonna probably, as we'll go through this a little bit, uh need to continue to keep our focus.

But thank you for the work of this committee.

Thank you for your colleagues uh who have kept the focus on that we need to remain uh resilient.

Um you can read faster than I can talk, or according to my wife, I will slow down and talk at a speed that makes sense.

But um I thought what we ought to cover are um some current realities, why we are suggesting a uh maybe an enhanced strategy uh at the city, the county, the regional level, and then some things that we think could be put in place.

Um this is the the agenda that we're gonna cover.

I did cut it down, uh Madam Chairman, from 72 slides and 30 minutes of full motion video to a handful.

So, you know.

So next slide.

Um a little bit about us.

Um we're a Houston-based national organization.

Um we operate like a uh think tank and a do tank.

The do tank is Roar Partners, and the think tank is Future Proofing America.

So it's a 501c3 under Future Proofing America that includes a number of uh firms and individuals that you're you're uh aware of, like Gensler and others here in our own backyard, but it also represents uh a set of national stakeholders.

Um our chairman is the former CEO of Munich Re US, which is the largest global reinsurance firm in the uh you know out there.

Um and I'll come back to the the issues about insurance versus reinsurance.

Um we have a number of individuals that represent insurance, mortgage banking, uh traditional banking and new investment finance, um manufacturing, all of what we felt needed to be around the table because that's really what this has become.

It's no longer just a silo of government.

This is truly a um uh and needs to be and has needed to be uh an integration of a lot of expertise and capital sources.

One of our newest uh board members is David Marstead, who retired about six, seven months ago.

David was the FEMA administrator for resilience mitigation and insurance, meaning the national flood insurance program.

So you kind of see we've tried to bring together a set of stakeholder representatives.

Next slide.

The other part of this is I mentioned this so Roar is the do tape.

That's the one very focused on projects and getting things done.

The collaboration under Futureproofing America is made up of a significant amount of expertise, again in these different silos, but more importantly, what they've been doing, um of it privately, a lot publicly, is if you see on the left-hand side, there are five topics, and these go from how do you move um uh standards of practice, uh let me just make it simple.

We've identified 2600 building codes in the United States.

This is everything from the Institute of Business and Home Safety, which we'll talk about in a few minutes with their fortified roofs.

This is ISO, this is ASTN, all these anachronyms.

There's 2600 standards and building codes, and what we've heard from insurance and reinsurance financial institutions, elected and appointed officials is like like how do we make sense of it?

Um just this past Tuesday, we hosted a national fire side with the global head of infrastructure and public finance for Fitch ratings.

That's one of the three major ratings, FITCH, Standards and Poor, and Moody's.

And Fitch has rolled out a framework starting this year, really in 2026, that essentially uh Chairman addresses and acknowledges that if you make an investment in resilience in your infrastructure, it will change the filter by which a rating is produced.

And why is that important?

You want the better rating because it brings the cost of cash, cost of capital down, but it also creates a somewhat of a headwind for others to participate.

So you see who we have assembled here.

Some of them are based here in Houston, some of them are you know different parts of the United States, but they are all integrated around one simple uh metric, a one to eleven or better cost benefit.

If you and I invest ahead of the curve, ahead of the next event, we want to bring down the cost of recovery and rebuilding by $11.