Hi, I'm Cindy Snyder and I welcome you to on the same page your city and youth. Tonight we will meet individuals from city government, Newcastle organizations and nonprofits and hear what their roles are in your community. This is the first of a three-night series of presentation. The next one will be on Wednesday, March 8th and the final one is Wednesday, March 22nd. So this is how the evening will proceed. We have seven to eight speakers a night. Each will speak for approximately five minutes and then we'll go on to the next speaker. There will be no questions and answers between speakers. After the last speaker is done, we will have our social hour where you can meet the speaker and talk with them and ask questions while enjoying the refreshments in the back. We have wine, fruit, cheese, and sweet so please help yourself and take as much as you want. I want to thank our sponsors, the Newcastle Community Partnership and the Newcastle Library and thank you to Library Director Julie Kirk for hosting this program. So now we'd like to start with our first speaker, Mayor Mike Caronta. Well, thank you everybody. I'm Mike Caronta and it's my privilege to serve as mayor of the city of Newcastle. To a level set, let me just say a few things that probably most of us in this room know but I think it's important to start from the same basis of understanding. We've got about 5,500 residents throughout our community but we swell to a number much, much larger than that during the day. Some people exit to go to work but several thousand people come in to fill some of our commercial and industrial centers throughout the day. Some estimates have a sort of about 15 to 20,000 people during the day when those parks are all filled. We have over 10 neighborhoods across our community and our residential housing spans the range of single family, multi-family, condominium, townhouse, row home, etc. We've got several schools in our community, both private, public and charter. I think the largest, maybe the charter school of Lucans Drive which is Newcastle Charter which is I believe a K through 8 facilities. They've got 735 kids at that school every day. You've got an addition of that at home to the Newcastle Vocational Skills Center which provides adult education training and that's in the Twin Spans industrial park. So if you're interested in becoming a carpenter, a plumber, a technologist or getting your BSN in nursing, you can jump out of one career and head right into something else through those adult vocational skills opportunities. We've got a thriving commercial sector that includes a couple of hundred licensed businesses. They're quite diverse. We have manufacturers like Zenith Corporation, JFFD which is just food for dogs. We have service and distribution companies like Amazon, Nixon Uniform, National Retail Operations like Home Depot, Costco and the like and restaurants and shops that's populated are downtown area, the farmers market and along are busy throwways. I mention all this commercial activity because their presence in our community is substantial and the helps keep our water and electricity rates some of the lowest in the state. Simply put, they basically subsidize the residential rates and without them we would be paying substantially higher water and electric rates. They help us, of course, buy at a scale we would otherwise not need with 55 hundred people roughly 2000 residential units. The office of the mayor has got many different duties. I attend council meetings and provide thought leadership serve as a member of the three commission board that oversees the work, the municipal services commission and that is our of course our water and electricity utility. I chair the board of adjustment which is a quasi judicial process which rules on zoning and other local property challenges. The mayor also chairs the board of building appeals and that's relatively a new thing but that is that seems to mitigate the effects of properties that have fallen into disrepair or that have been abandoned altogether and so we meet with the ownership in an effort to improve those properties. Mayor also makes appointments the boards and commissions in our community and I have the privilege of marrying people I did that one time during my four year term. We've got roughly $6 million budget, the city staff of about 38 and that includes 18 members of our city police department. Our utility team has about another 20 employees and as you know and you'll learn from MSC when they present there is a city area, the city of Newcastle. We have many parks so we provide many city services including trash recycling, yard waste and pickup, storm drain maintenance, street trimming, curb repairs and painting and more on a daily basis our city is managed by a full time city administrator. Finally the mayor services the visible presence of our community. It's called on to attend events, offer remarks and the link. How's that meant? How do you do? Time. About four and a half? Four and a half? A hand. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.