You want to take your seats?

Good morning.

Hello.

Hello.

It's coming.

There it is.

Good morning.

May the fourth be with you.

Yes!

I've been waiting to say that all day.

Um, good morning.

Thank you all for coming.

This is a beautiful turnout.

Um, this my name is Tanisha Murphy.

I am the public information officer for the New York State Department of Transportation.

I'm the NC and moderator for this event today.

Um, so this morning we're gonna have some opening remarks from the New York State Department of Transportation.

We'll have urban jobs task force uh talk about their report, then we'll go into a panel session.

Um, and then after that, we'll have some questions from the audience for the panel, and then finally we'll have closing remarks from the City of Syracuse Mayor Sharon Owens.

So let's get started with um the New York State Department of Transportation Regional Director, Elizabeth Betsy Parmley.

Good morning, what a turnout.

So thank you for having me today.

Um I I don't feel like I deserve to be here because so many others did so much work to get us to this point, but I am honored to be here to celebrate this milestone, and certainly on behalf of Governor Kathy Hokel and Commissioner Marie Therese Dominguez, um, thank you for being here.

So I want to start by thanking DECA Danzel and Aggie Lane and the entire Urban Jobs Task Force for inviting all of us here today on this day of celebration, reflection, and really hope for the future.

Everyone's efforts to ensure local higher initiative was implemented on the ID1 Biaduct project and has now become a blueprint across the nation.

I would also like to acknowledge Mayor Sherry Sharon Owens.

Your leadership and partnership is what got us here today as well.

So thank you.

So we talk about the ID1 Bioduct project, and as an engineer, you know, I think of it as infrastructure, right?

We're removing this aging infrastructure, we're connecting a community, but it is so much more than infrastructure, and that's why we're here today.

We are trying to connect the wrongs of the past, removing a literal and figurative shadow over a vulnerable community.

It will reconnect neighborhoods and essential services like health care and higher education.

In the 1950s, a decision was made to just build a highway through a community without thinking about what that community wanted or needed.

And now Department of Transportation, we know better, so we're doing better.

Met with the community a tremendous number of times, and we heard loud and clear that the community wanted to be part of this project.

They wanted jobs on this project.

If we are building something in their backyard, then they want to be part of this project.

So remembering the past injustices that happened during the initial construction of 81.

We worked very closely with Urban Jobs Task Force and all of our community partners to figure out how to get a local higher initiative on the project.

But as you can imagine, DOT, we are a big big government agency, we build bridges, we build highways, we don't do workforce development, so we didn't know how to do this.

But we got to the table and we figured it out.

And so to name a few people we collaborated with.

And we formed the WorkSmart New York Syracuse Build Collaborative.

And the goal of that collaborative was to increase the number of individuals working on the project and making sure they had the support so they could deliver and have a successful career and really remove those hurdles that traditionally prevented them from being on these construction jobs.

So it took a long journey, and we're going back a decade, a decade that Urban Jobs has been working on this.

And it was a we don't need to get into the details.

Maybe you will DECA, but it was uh it was an interesting journey.

There were uh pilot applications that were started on the federal government side called SEP 14, um, which would be a mechanism for federal aid construction projects to have local hire.

That came out, it got rescinded, it came back out, but then all part of the bipartisan infrastructure law.

DOT was allowed to have a local hiring preference put on our construction projects.

Huge, huge deal.

And that was in 2022.

So here we are, 2026.

We commend Urban Jobs House for keeping the pressure on us.

There was not a day where we did not have the pressure on us to deliver, and we now have over 300 local hires that have gone through the 81 project from all over the city of Syracuse on the Onunaga Nation.

This is one of the first programs of its kind across the country, and now we actually work with our counterparts across the country.

In fact, Federal Highways published a roadmap for heavy highway construction workforce development.

Big name, basically to say do what the 81 Viaduct Project did and keep doing it.

So our team regularly gives presentations about the local hire initiative, and we tell them you cannot, this is not just the DOT, we did not do this alone.

It takes so many people.