Thank you.

Okay, well, I'm John Barth, I'm the chair of the Vision Zero Task Force.

Welcome to a big crescendo of a meeting.

Before I ask the members of the task force to introduce themselves, I'm gonna make a few comments to get started.

And my apologies to everybody watching at home, anybody who may ever watch this, or anybody here with us, it's gonna be a little esoteric.

I've had a big big day here.

Um due to my day job, I spent the in so two things.

Number one, today is uh giving Tuesday.

So if you um uh are so inclined and have the resources, today's the day to support a nonprofit that's doing important work um in the state or in your community.

Last night um uh during the council meeting, we um recognized all the volunteers at uh food pantries across the city who did so much during the SNAP suspension.

Um I reported uh last night that I visited the um boulevard place uh food pantry um which is in my district, and uh during during the during the time when the suspension was happening, and it was the day that um they had the highest volume of shoppers they've ever had, and also the most new shoppers they've ever had, pointing out that the SNAP uh suspension was having a dramatic and and problematic uh effect on the citizens of Indianapolis.

And um so please remember um all those folks who uh do such important work for us uh every single day.

And then concurrently I spent the or uh as it happens, I spent the entire day visiting community-based organizations in our city who are doing incredibly important work around literacy and working with seniors and working with people with disabilities, and it just reminded me that one of the things that really um matter come on, come right in.

One of the things that really um matters is this network of support we give to each other.

Um not I don't want to bring maybe just a tiny little monicum of politics into this discussion um by referencing what's going down today at the other end of Market Street, which is uh a purely partisan uh situation and uh in a situation that some would describe as as divisive.

And that's why I'm here and I'm happy to be here and thinking about what I just said about being giving Tuesday and these nonprofits working so hard, pulling together, trying to stitch together a universe upon which we can rely on to support those who most need support in our community is so important, and I'm thinking about that in terms of this work.

This this work that has been going on um this entire year has been um a significant challenge, and it takes a lot of um time and effort for a lot of people to be involved in this.

Um Vision Zero is a um initiative that only works, and I've said this many, many times, if we're all pulling from the same end of the rope.

Um of the reasons why I really wanted to do this is because from the time uh majority leader Lewis and I first passed complete streets, um, and then later doing an update to it, and then later doing multiple other um ordinances to address pedestrian and and cyclist safety.

Um we've had these many situations where we've had to recognize that pulling together and pulling these things um, I mean maybe revise it.

When we have done all that work and got those ordinances on the book, that's still just steps along the process.

And there are a lot of other priorities, and those priorities, I use this phrase a lot, are confetti in the air, in that every single piece of confetti in the air is something that's very important to a singular person.

That's their biggest priority.

But collectively, if we're gonna be successful and make the changes that we want to make, we need to have everybody pulling from the same end of the rope.

And the only way we can do that is by having a plan that we all agree on.

And pulling together the somewhat tortured analogy that I've been trying to make is thinking about it in terms of what I was saying earlier about these nonprofit organizations stitching together a vision and an approach for serving people who are most in need in our community.

We're doing a version of that.

We're taking hundreds of people's uh input that we took thanks to Health by Design and the work they did with pop-ups and online and and the online uh collection of data that we did, plus all the experts here in this room, and I'm looking at this group of people who work so hard to help get this done and who took time out of their their day job to be here.

Um all of us worked together to get this thing put in place, and then now we have, and I'm gonna say this with a huge amount of pride and pure celebration, you guys.

We have never had a singular tool um to manage safety for pedestrians, um cyclists, all users of the road ever.

Indianapolis has never had that, and now we have that.

This thing exists.

Here it is.

We actually have this document for the first time ever, where we took all those pieces of competti, we put them together in a plan, and then now it's time to um uh join together, rally behind it, and then execute on it and make it happen.

That that brings me a huge amount of joy and a huge amount of satisfaction.

And I had I want to take a moment to thank every single person who was involved.

Um, one of the things that's really meaningful to me is thinking about the day I spent at the Broader Pole Winter Farmers Market listening to folks who didn't know they would be giving um input into this process.

Um, but they saw uh me and Andrea and they came over and they gave us input.

That this mattered to them as much as it matters to anybody, but they just didn't have the pathway or the wherewithal or the understanding um how to go about giving their input, and they did.

They um gave us that input.

That input is just as important as anybody else's, and it really thinking about that day, it's uh it's really meaningful.

So I thank them, and I also want to thank everyone in this room, everyone who cares enough to be here on a cold uh snowy day, all these task force members.

Um I think something that's really singularly important is how difficult it is to pull something like this together across this enterprise.

Any big entity like this, 1.7 billion dollar enterprise has silos, it has challenges, it has communication problems.

Um having an initiative that requires all the departments, all the leaders to come together and weigh in on it, put it together, and to support it is a huge deal.

Not only across this enterprise, the city enterprise, this building that we're sitting in, but municipal corporations.

Um to my knowledge, this has never happened before.

I in my uh years on the council, which I'm in my third term, I've never seen something like this happen before.

That's a huge amount of leadership from everybody, everybody who's involved in this and making this happen.

I think that's really important.

So I want to continue my thank yous by saying thanking all these city employees, municipal employees, municipal corporation employees who weighed in on this.

Um BNN, um, we're gonna hear from them here in a little bit.

They've done the lion's share of data analysis and putting this together.

Um, I also want to want to thank I know I keep saying it's the entire city enterprise that that pulls this together, and um I think that's really important.

But I uh even though I say this repeatedly, and it's true, this thing doesn't happen unless the entire universe of the city enterprise comes together behind it.

There's one department that has heavier shoulders, a higher weight to bear, and that's DPW.

And and I I have um I don't know if Natalie is here, but hopefully she's watching or should I hear about this?

She did an incredible amount of work both in her previous position and her current position.

Um I if I this is you know, this is a um uh city counselor's version of the Oscars, and so if I start uh uh thanking people, I'm gonna never I'm gonna miss somebody, I'm gonna mess it up, so I'm not gonna continue going down this road, but I do want to thank Todd um stepping in as a new director, um, embracing this and and and and working with us.

And I especially want to thank uh LeAndre, who um is our Vision Zero administrator who um jumped in what May, am I right, Leandre?