Good testing.

Good.

Good.

Not good.

Good morning, everyone.

And welcome to a very special meeting of your Los Angeles City Council.

Today is Friday, the eleventh day of September in the year twenty twenty six.

Public comment for this morning's meeting will be taken in person in this chamber as well as telephonically.

Mr.

Clerk, let's begin our proceedings by calling the role.

All right.

Can we run through our agenda?

Thank you, Mr.

President.

Items one through six are items for which public hearings have been held.

For item six, the planning and land use management committee report has been circulated and posted to the respective council file.

Item seven is an item for which public hearings have not been held.

Ten votes are required for consideration.

All right.

Without objection, those items are before us.

Now is the time for specials members.

The council may now move on to presentations.

All right.

All right, I will kick us off.

Thank you, Council President.

Before I begin, I would like to ask that we take a moment of silence for the people that we lost on September 11th, 2001.

Thank you.

Twenty five years ago on an ordinary Tuesday morning in September, our country changed forever.

Twenty-five years.

For those of us who remember that morning, it's hard to believe it's been that long.

We remember where we were.

We remember watching the second plane hit.

We remember the towers falling one after the other.

And we remember the terrible realization that our country was under attack by terrorists.

Nearly 3,000 people were killed.

Everyday people who boarded an airplane or set off to work, who had no idea the horrors the day would bring.

343 FDNY firefighters and 60 NYPD and Port Authority police officers never came home.

And they went anyway.

Task Force One is an elite search and rescue team deployed across the nation during national emergencies, staffed by LAFD personnel, structural engineers from the Department of Building and Safety, Canine search handlers, civilian personnel, and doctors from the private industry.

They were the very first to head into the danger.

They searched in, under, and around what had been the South Tower.

They crawled through voids of crushed concrete and twisted steel, looking for any sign of life.

That gave their families a chance to bring their loved one home.

When New York needed help, LA showed up.

Many suffered serious health consequences and died throughout the years following.

That too is a part of what never forget means.

And here in LA, we remember our own firefighters who packed their gear, crossed the country, walked onto the pile, and started digging.

New York needed them, so we let them go.

Twenty-five years later, and we haven't forgotten.

We never will.

Thank you, Councilmember Park.

Colleagues, 25 years ago, we experienced one of the darkest days in our history.

Nearly 3,000 innocent people were killed September 11th, 2001, and countless families had their lives changed forever.

But when I think about September 11th, I also think about the people who answered that moment.

I think about the firefighters, the police officers, and other first responders who ran towards danger, not knowing what the outcome of the bravery would be, and whose actions that day might cost them their lives years later.

I think about the passengers aboard Flight 93 who took critical action, knowing what it could cost them.

I think about the thousands of Americans who stepped forward afterward to serve their country, help their neighbors, and support people and families that they had never met.

That kind of courage is easy to talk about 25 years later.

It is much harder to imagine what it takes in the moment when there is no time to prepare and no guarantee of what comes next.

A quarter century has now passed, and with every passing day, more and more Americans know September 11th only through the news, photographs, videos, and stories told by those of us who remember it.