There are three scanning committees because of the break we just took.

We also have a full city council meeting uh tonight, but before we call the role for uh codes and regulation committee meeting, um we will um entertain our five public speakers, and um before that we will have invocation and pledge of allegiance, and the invocation will be given by uh Pastor Cory Whitford from Bethany Presbyterian Church.

Thank you.

Heavenly Father, we thank you for this invitation, invitation to serve such a fine city.

Father, we ask that you would bless us to God in our hearts so that we can listen and learn.

Father, you would guide us, guide us to the insurance of the peace and hold forever here.

We pray all this in the name that is above all names.

That name is Jesus Christ, we pray.

Amen.

Indivisible.

Okay, so if you are uh signed up for public comment, uh you have uh three minutes to uh address the council.

Um you will hear an alarm uh that goes off uh when your time is up, and um you can approach either of the two microphones in the back of the room and address the council from either one of them.

Our first uh speaker this evening is Prophet Youssef.

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and happy new year.

In the book of Psalms, 133rd chapter, the first verse, it says how good and pleasant it is when brothers live together in unity.

What I want to speak about tonight, hurricane rescue show how quickly division washes away.

Tragedies like the one unfolding in Texas, as rain continue to fall and flood water rise, have a way of peeling layers off people until only their humanity remained.

Just the bare essence, the good stuff, strip away of the things that bog us down so much.

Things like fate or skin cover, sexuality or political beliefs.

A few days before Hurricane Hobby began unleashing his fury on the coast of Texas.

My good friend, Senator Tammy Duckworth, an army comeback veteran, who lost both her legs in Iraq, released a statement reacting to a proposed ban on transgender men and women serving in the military.

When I was bleeding to death in my black hawk helicopter, after I was shot down.

I didn't care if the American troops risking their lives to help save me, were gay, straight, transgender, black immigrants, white or brown.

All that mattered was they didn't leave me behind.

When it comes to life or death, bias, hate, prejudice, bigotry, and bitterness tend to wash off rather quickly.

So it has been in Houston and Rockport and Dickinson and other Texas cities and towns.

You don't you don't see videos of people squabbling.

You see regular people becoming heroes and stranded people accepting help with tears and elation.

A story by Matt Pearson of the Los Angeles Time describe it this way.

Across Texas, there were reports of citizens mobilizing with walkie talkies, boats, and booths to help pull people from the rising water.

Social media lit up with a video posted by a reporter for CORK News, in which a man from Texas City, Nick Gabson, was preparing to pour his small boat.

I'm gonna go try to save some lives today.

He said that man is black.

I don't imagine that made a lick of difference to the people he went on to help.

There's a singularity about these folks.

They're good people doing good things, and there isn't anything else about them about the people that rest that matter.

It shouldn't take a tragedy to remind us how cable we are of cooperation.

It shouldn't take a storm to wash away our prejudice, bigotry and hate and grief and get us to grass land.

Hurricane Hobby brought out the works of Mother Nature, but it also brought out the exceptional goodness of American people.

I want to thank God for them American troops who saved my good friend, Senator Tammy Duckworth.

I want to thank God for the good people in Texas who saved the people there.

I also want to tell my brother Cedric this who made 92, and he's still not through.

And Pastor Melbourne Brown, Brother Yukobi's wife, and Brother Henry's wife, this for a long time.

And I'm going to get it off my chest tonight.

I don't like you.

I love you, and you can't do nothing about it.

And happy birthday, my good friends, and I wish you many more.

Thanks for allowing me to speak.

Thank you.

Our second speaker this evening is Denzel Winter.

Good evening, City Council members.

And I decided since uh we have the shortest month for black history, that I'm gonna go from January to February.

And my first one today is fighting on two fronts in the World War II.

And a count of American soldiers, black American soldiers in World War II, who combat racism in a segregated military on the home front, and then uh and in April 1945, some of the black soldiers were among the first to go in to some of the camps and liberated some of the prisoners in there.

And uh the thing that was that was troubling to me was the fact that everybody thought that the black soldier was a coward.

But if you look, look at history and look at where they were at.

They were some of the first ones on on the front line.

They had some of their the so-called uh officers, rather than being with their troops, they're in the back line talking about well they're they're gonna run back here pretty soon, pretty soon.

But that never happened.

They fought and they liberated.