storytelling. yes. thank you so much for being here. thank you all for coming to the 10th annual san antonio book festival. i see some familiar faces out there who i know have been supporting this thing since the beginning. so thanks, especially to you all. my name is dan goodgame. i'm the editor in chief of texas monthly and i am the first of those in the 50 year history of the magazine to live in san antonio. i'm very proud of that. it is my honor and privilege. thank you. it's my honor and privilege today to moderate a panel with the honorable henry cisneros sarah below former mayor and former cabinet member is secretary of housing and urban development and one of his co-authors david hendrix. who's a long-time columnist and writer for the san antonio express news who thought he was retiring four years ago, and then henry told him otherwise now before we get started, i want to thank first of all the central library for making this possible and so our sponsors in this venue the han holt family henry and david are going to show a brief slide presentation to summarize. you know, the book's themes. so we'll start with that and then i will ask a few questions to get the party started and then we will turn it over to questions from you all after this conversation. the authors will be available to sign books in the nowhere book shop tent which is just across the street to the east of the library. so this is what you're looking for. you'll get a chance to do that afterwards. so gentlemen start your engines. then thank you very much and it said that every texan has two homes where they live and san antonio, so you're the proof of the way that all works. thank you for the opportunity to be here. and i also want to thank the san antonio book festival and all the folks who have created it. it's a wonderful tradition in our city. it's usually held on the hottest day of the year and it seems like it's keeping up. with that reputation, it's very hot out there. for years i have been working in austin san antonio including during the time. i was mayor. and a lot of time in the other texas cities. then when i became secretary of housing and traveled to 200 different american cities and every one of the 50 states you begin to pick up patterns and trends and one of those that jumped out at me was that there is emerging in texas in these places dallas, fort worth and the north houston galveston in the southeast and austin san antonio in the southwest of this triangle. a mega complex of cities that can hold their own in the country and indeed our gravitating to that kind of pinnacle role that great metros play in the world. the singapore's in tokyo's and frankforts and milan's in london's etc and in this this triplex of metropolitan and economic strength. is a coming reality that we in texas haven't fully appreciated. nor have we interpreted in the sense of what does this mean for the future of texas? we'll talk about that in a moment. i had worked a long time with david hendricks who covered city hall in my time then later went to the business section of the express news. he was business editor there for a time covered austin and when he left the paper and i've been working on several research projects. it just seemed logical to ask david to come over and he said he would do it part-time and that grant grant that gravitated to 75% time and 100% time in due course, but we wouldn't have done been able to do this project without david and you'll see up here the names of two additional people. to additional people column clark who is of us at smu and with the bush school bush center in dallas and william fulton who at the time of our writing was the director of the kinder center at rice university in houston. so we had you know anchors people in each of the parts of the metro of this texas triangle. let me just give you some numbers here real quickly. i'll be briefing going through this because it is numbers, but this is an amazing thing. few texans, i think understand 66% of the population of texas lives in just the 35 counties that surround the triangles metros. so if you take all the counties that constitute the dallas metro area and that constitute the houston metro area and the san antonio metro area. that's 35 counties out of 254 in the state. that's 14% of the counties, but they the population of them is 66% of the people of texas and those folks produce 77% of the gdp of the state. so they battle above their weight in the sense that 66% of the people produce 75% of the economy, and that's because the economy of texas is transforming itself from the land of wide open spaces and ranches and and oil wells being the dominant economy two the port of houston and its role the medical center in houston the airport in dallas and airports in houston the cybersecurity and biomedical here the computer technology and and other similar new media in austin you put that together that that's that's the coming global economy. that's the national economy and it's well represented in texas and that suggests some this growth this is a ranking of something that has happened. only two times before an american history. you see three texas cities ranked in the top 10 houston are number four san antonio number seven and dallas at number 9. that's an interesting phenomenon. it happened once in new york when there was the independent city of brooklyn and new york city and buffalo you see it in california right this minute when you have los angeles and san jose and san diego in the top 10, but if you'll take a look at this what you see is austin sitting at number 11 and frankly. we believe looking at the census numbers, it's probably already passed san jose but certainly will and that will be a phenomenon that has never occurred in american history for cities in the top 10 and when you put fort worth there at number 13 and growing it's a pretty impressive thing what it says is that texas is and urban state for anybody who doubted it. in a moment, i'll show you that in addition to these metros. there are 25 metros in texas overall, midland and texarkana and laredo and corpus christi and el paso. and those 25. are second only to california's 26, so if there's any doubt of texas as a state being pulled by the economy of its cities driven by its metropolitan reality these numbers sort of spell it out. texas triangle is home to 49 of the fortune 500 companies. that's one tenth of all the fortune 500 in one state dallas fort worth has 23 houston has 22 and austin san antonio have four austin gaining recently major moves like oracle headquarters and teslas major presidents. this is a pretty dynamic indication of where we are. the texas triang if measured as a country would have a gdp as the 15th largest economy in the world just those 35 counties so they count in global terms, texas has a whole has a an economy as a number 10, but you can see with the size of the triangle economy that that's a big part of this. this is interesting the dallas, fort worth msa alone has an economy about the size of sweden's. the houston metropolitan area has an economy slightly larger than belgium. and austin, san antonio together have an economy about the size of egypt. so you have major economic forces the size of those countries within about 200 miles of each other in this triangle. this is an interesting aggregation of places. there are other big cities close to each other in america like new york and philadelphia for example or baltimore in washington. but nowhere, do you have three major metro areas within the same state operating under the same regime of state laws and and a policy requirements and so forth with the potential to really harness that and and and support the growth of these. metropolitan areas that are the golden goose for texas today and only will become more so in the future the cities of texas are linked to global commerce, every one of them is ranked in the top 50 exporting places oil and petroleum exports from houston technology through the port through the airport in dallas and out of san antonio relationship with mexico that is of longstanding. i mentioned earlier 25 msa's second only to california's 26 and msa is any metro area that has more than 50,000 people and there you see from dallas. worth at 7.4 million all the way to texarkana at 97,000 are 25 places that create urban texas as we know it. that's 85% of the population of texas in its urban areas. it leaves 15% rural yet just to show you the size of what we're dealing with that 15% is roughly the size of the entire state of oklahoma in the 15% that is our rural population and it is also the largest rural population. in the country more people living in rural areas and it's only 15% of our population. this will be the last slide, but it shows you where we're headed. you see the texas population today is about 29 million, but by 2050 which is less than 30 years from now about 47 million the population i mentioned is over 66% in the angle in the 35 counties of the triangle, but by 2050 it'll be about 75% of the population of texas living within those 35 counties are closed by saying well, i hope we have time to explore what this means. i think it means a lot in terms of our econom. who's what's pulling the the state economy and therefore what ought to be supported. it also means preparing the infrastructure to make these metropolitan areas work. traffic congestion roadways educational support a critical infrastructure of water and power ports and airports that keeps this going we're living in a metropolitan nation. in a world where more people now live in urban areas than ever in the history of mankind and these pinnacle places pull the world economy along and texas is going to be a player. because of the texas triangle so those are those are dan some opening kind of points. i want to credit david with a lot of the research that went into this and ask him if he has anything he wants to say about this before we proceed if that's fair. no, these are the high points and we're trying to change the image of texas everyone around the world think it's just ranch land and oil fields, but it's really a highly intricate to verse urban economy. joe cochin is a famous urbanologist in who lives in california and he calls the texas triangle. he calls it a great urban story. well, thanks david. thank you henry. i think y'all in the book make a really strong case for the power and the potential of the texas triangle with that raises the question, which you also mentioned the book of why so many of our artificials and our legislature seem to be at war with the cities and the elected officials the cities have chosen and with choices voters have made at the ballot box about things like bonds. yeah. i mean the state seems to want a micromanage everything to from whether cities can ban plastic trash bags to whether we can put bike lanes on lower broadway. so, how can we advance the potential of this? well political situation i think that texas has been in a period of sort of economic. i'm sorry political transition and therefore instability, but in recent years we've seen the dominance of red texas republican, texas and it i think they feel that there is a some value in holding the base by going after the cities which tend to be more blue. so recent legislative sessions have seen things like obsession with a bathroom bill or sanctuary cities. restricting the role of local police department. so the cities couldn't use their budget authority to to defund even though none of them intended to but that became a contentious point. and many other things annexation very very opposed to annexation in some measure republican response to the private property movement. that didn't want their land next but annexation has been critical houston and dallas and san antonio would not be this size of places if there hadn't been rational consistent zoning. i mean annexation policies over the years, so i think at the moment that's what's going i think and it's important that we not allow whatever. the they come up with in these wedge policies to damage the impact of of this golden triangle potential and i think what they probably think is that they can separate the politics of the center cities from the suburban areas and the outer counties so that they're not really going to get punished by the cities. my only concern would be that if you undercut the ability of houston and dallas and san antonio and austin and many of these other metros to to grow you're really hurting a very significant segment of the population and secondly your potentially damaging the smooth ability of these places to grow into their full potential but what can the cities in the triangle do to increase collaboration among them without without state collaboration david you want to take a crack at that? there could be a triangle chamber of commerce for example, or a similar type organization that markets the at the three corners of the triangle to the rest of the world for business investment. is there any talk about them? the chambers leaders have met from time to time. there is a functioning collaboration among the leaders of the existing chambers, but i think david's right a structure that was more explicitly of the triangle metros could be very very useful many of the things that make this such a powerful region do need support the port of houston constantly in need of upgrading its infrastructure airports, hobby and george and bush in in houston. love and dfw in dallas our own and now bergstrom which is playing a huge role the bergstrom airport in austin now has direct flights to london frankfort amsterdam. it'll be only a short time i think before we see tokyo and and soul on that list or singapore on list, so there is a need for coherent state policy coherent local identification of priorities. as you suggest did we miss a bit by not building a big airport between austin and san antonio, you know, i i thought for that in my time as mayor and and i had in worked with general mcdermott of usaa in those days. but as i think of it. it may not have been an idea that would work for this reason dallas and fort worth are 30 miles apart and people really kicked and screamed about going 15 miles to the new airport. we're 75 miles apart and you can imagine the concern about having to go 35 miles to get to a flight. i think that and and now it's become a moot question because the land is so covered with with urban development between here and austin and land prices would be untenable that we just have to acknowledge. we're going to be a big metro austin san antonio. in fact, my sense would be everything from i-30 on the east to 281 on the west with heights 35 in the middle is going to build out and you're going to see a big metro from georgetown and pflugerville to floorsville are point south. it's happening. it's happening right before our eyes. and if that is the case if we're part of such a big metro then maybe the model that exists in other places where you have multiple airports within the same metro and the bergstrom airport plays a role. maybe they've absconded with the international role and we play a different kind of role in the southern area of the metro of the big austin, san antonio mega metro and and have a different mission at a minimum. they ought to be about how they're going to split responsibilities. i have worried for a long time that we've not done enough. to make our airport strong. there does seems to be zero political support for a new airport. so i think we're just going to have to satisfy ourselves with building on the present site. enhancing the runways to handle larger aircraft and doing the kind of investment that the city's now proposing to add terminals and gates, but we're never going to have a joint austin san antonio airport in my opinion. so we're sitting here today in san antonio, and i'd like to think a little bit about san antonio's role and in the triangle because it's a little different than the other places. we are the poorest large sitting in the united states as you know out of those 49 fortune 500 companies what two are in san antonio three if you count new braunfels we have what 20% lower a college attainment on average than other other cities in the country relatively high drop out rates. what do we do to help san antonio participate? well, yes, i think the first thing we hire achieving cities. i think the first thing we do is we acknowledge. we're part of the triangle. that is to say we have the good fortune to be a city aligned within this triangle that is growing at this rate and we're going to get our share of the growth. we see that happening now people who are coming out of austin and coming here and coming from other parts of the united states because our land prices are a little less or housing prices are a little less. so that's the first thing frankly. it was part of my motivation for working on this project. i care about san antonio's progress and i think we do best when we align ourselves with places that are on a rising trajectory now in practical terms. what does that mean? we've got to invest in education to raise the quality of the workforce. we've got to deal with our own infrastructure needs. so we have a city that works works internally roadways and mass transit etc. and we got to make sure that the region remains livable, which i don't think we've done enough collaboration with austin to make this a workable metro when i age 35 presently is the only major connection and and people have to drive to austin unable to establish how long it will take because they have to make their way between the 18 wheelers. that's not the spine. of the kind that we need for a long-term workable large metro. david i want to ask you about something you and i were discussing before the session started and i was sharing with you that you know, my wife and i love living in san antonio have been here for 13 years. we my work is in austin. we have a small apartment there. that's not far from my office. my board is in houston, so pretty regularly. we recently bought a nine-person video company in dallas. so i'm up there pretty regularly and you were indicating that you had heard more and more stories about that particularly between san antonio and in austin about people living and working in. oh, yes. well, i mean, san antonio is a 24th largest metro in the country. austin is a few places behind that if they were combined it would be a top 10 metro and that would yield a lot of economic it would bring in a lot of investment if we were a top 10 so what happens so a goal should be is to become one. one single metro like dallas fort worth is and you decides that it's this? i think it's i believe it's a census and what they look at is a statistics of how many people live. what they did in dallas-fort worthy as i saw how many people work lived in fort worth but worked in dallas and vice versa the same thing needs to happen here dallas fort worth has that ratio, but we don't have that yet. that means we need better more efficient transit from one side of this metro area to the other so that this ratio can occur. you know you hearing more of that i guess in your research you finding more people doing that between san antonio. yeah, i think more people are doing it. i think for sure people are doing it within the corridor from san marcos into austin. yeah and new braunfels here new braunfels and come out county are the fastest growing local governments in the country in their size range and san marcos and hayes county are the fastest growing in their size range. so here we have not only two cities that are ranked very highly in job creation between in the last decade. austin was ranked number one. in job creation purpose percentage of job growth and san antonio was ranked number three with nashville. number two so here you have this unbelievable growth of jobs, and then the same thing occurring in san marcos and the same thing incurring in new braunfels. and clearly they need to be, you know better facilitated transportation in time. that will have to mean light rail but we've gotten nowhere with a whole series of proposals. i'm working now with cap metro in austin and via here for at least a starter concept, which is called advanced rapid transit or bus rapid transit, which would be a regularly schedule multiple times a day probably eight times a day back and forth of a bus on where possible dedicated lanes increasingly 35 is going to be double deck. so we'll have the ability to sort of ate some lanes, but somehow we need to start making it possible for people to move back and forth without putting their lives in danger as is the case today. early on you mentioned briefly sports franchises, right? i think that may get a lot of people's intent up in this room. there's all this collaboration between san antonio and austin mean we're going to lose the spurs. no, but i think it what it does mean. is that that very soon the metro as a whole together. just makes sense for the other sports. we don't have major league baseball in this area. we could we don't have an nfl franchise. we could we don't have a hockey franchise we could um, i'm certainly hopeful that the spurs remained the san antonio spurs, but they're gonna play some games in austin. i think that is essentially positive for the interplay between the two cities and sets the pattern for what might be if if the moment moment came when the nfl decided to add austin san antonio because it just makes so much sense to have such a powerful and and growing area in the nfl. my guess is to be a stadium. in the area between somewhere just like the patriots are called the new england patriots. they don't play in boston. they play outside of boston, but but they think regionally, yeah, we might have to hog tide jerry jones before an nfl meeting for that's true below. that is a major problem. yeah, that is a major problem. well that let's open it up to the audience. what questions do y'all have? yes, sir. i always but sorry go. i remind my friends henry that. you were almost tart and feathered when you brought up the concept of an airport in between austin, san antonio, and i always defend you i said, you know this past week, i now do this regularly. i take an uber from here to austin airport a lot of people do to take a non-stop flight. it's 90 bucks. it's what i pay when i fly into bwi to go to dc sure because we have a non-stop flight out of so to me i'm probably like a lot of business people who are starting to do that. i hear a lot of people saying that the flights are cheaper out of austin and it avoids an intermediary stomach. that's right. but but this for me, thank you for for this book and for this analysis because i think it does give public policy folks something that think about and especially here in san antonio, and i think it's really important right now if there was a bus that you could take back and forth to it. the austin airport makes sense to me. i don't understand why it doesn't exist, but part of it is i don't think people are aware. maybe i am but i think your book will help aware of how how much need there is and how there is a market for folks to move back and forth with great with great ease. so thank you for this book and this analysis. i think it's second, i think it'll help policy folks and and san antonio's realize thank you that we need to be more supportive of the those these kinds of efforts for transportation or whatever. thank you. well, thank you and i think in the short run we're going to pursue this bus situation and see where it goes if it really works and it's now working between austin and san marcos because students from austin want to go to texas state it exists. it works daily multiple times a day and goes right into a plaza in downtown austin if we had that working here, you could envision people coming to our medical center which has maybe some different specialties than are in austin. you're right about the airport connection that might make some sense. so i think let's see where this goes. you could see a route that goes on 130 where the tesla plant is going to be or coming into austin from the west on 281. there's all kinds of ways which where we can connect right? so that's job one short-term immediate. project beyond that we need to bring the leaders of austin and san antonio together and say folks. i know your knee deep in your own problems, but this thing is happening right in front of us and it's going to happen badly. it's going to happen with all kinds of of unintended consequences if we don't think about it. i might just say as an aside there are some things happening that i think have long-term implications bringing the region up to common purpose and one of them is this idea called the great springs. i don't know whether you've seen that it was announced a few weeks ago. you can read about it in texas monthly on our website. that's a great spring. it links the blue hole which is the origins of the san antonio river right with barton springs and the springs and creeks and trailways all the way along for 75 miles. so great idea and when we are a big metro and we have a green trail all the way. linking the two places. i think it's a precursor of other things we should be doing. that's a great example. i wanted to ask you about the bus thing. is there anything that the regional governments could do to encourage some of these commercial services like von lane to expand their service because as you probably know you can get from here to houston, but you can't get from here to austin. yeah, there are there's been some discussion about that. i'm focused right now on getting the public entities to do it as the public service so that we can keep the cost down and make it practical for students and others who need to use it. yeah other questions. in the backyard. yes, ma'am. there was someone right back here. what was the rationale for not expanding our airport at the current kelly field back, i guess in 2001 where we could have been had a hub airport to then keep the fortune 500 companies here like at&t. well airports are very complicated thing. first of all. the airlines who end up paying the bulk of the freight on a new airport don't. want you to go to a new airport because they have to come up with a lot a good deal of money. so they're always a factor. then you have in san antonio the politics of moving a north side airport to the south side and suddenly people who are 15 minutes from the airport because they live north of the airport or near the airport suddenly having to make their way through the entire city to get to the south side. so you get the politics of people would say they're moving our airport, right? that's that way that would be an issue. i don't and and kelly has one runway. so we really don't improve on the runway question. that's always been a concern at san antonio international is that we have essentially one runway. we have another one that's perpendicular to it, but they're both order than we would want them to be for the long run for the larger jets. so those are those are objections that have been raised over time. unfortunately as a result of failure to act somewhere. i'm not sure it would have been kelly. my guess is if we were to build a new airport general mcdermott wanted it at randolph. and you co-use with randolph that has two runways. so then you could bring flights in at the same time and such as many airports do. and it would be on the corridor so you get the benefits of new braunfels traffic and seguin traffic and etc or a completely new airport in some place like wimberley or near seguin those have been discussed in time. but as i said, i don't think those are real. i don't hear anybody seriously talking about those because of the mega millions. involved in doing it. most san antonio's like the airport where it is, but the limited size of the acreage will limit the length of the runways and the amount of complete renovation that can be done there. i have long ago resigned myself to the fact that san antonio's. will not be talked into a new airport. and therefore some kind of systemic connection to the austin airport so we get some kind of two plus two equals five dynamic in routes and direct connections and so forth is the right thing to do and maybe maybe high speed rail would play a role in that making it possible. you can imagine people checking their bags at the station in san antonio then zipping out to the austin airport for a flight to london and their bags catch up with them at the plane or in london. there's with the technology that's possible today. things like that are possible. ted well, thank you, dan, henry and a great great talk so the opportunities are puge the growth between san antonio and austin and and the impact it can have with with new braunfels and in san marcos, and then the challenge of the, you know, connecting the two cities, you know, it's it's a real opportunity right now if you if you did have a train as you often, we've all talked about over the years, but the strategic thing is where it goes because it isn't really a you know, it's that the challenges and or the the opportunity isn't just connecting the two places. it's connected in the right way. and so, you know. as much as i'd love the idea of you know, we i'm certainly heard the double decking of the the highway and and and then notion of buses and solving this problem in the interim, but sometimes when the problem is so bad the right solution can happen easier and the rights, you know, so and so i would the the it's not really i hopefully i can turn this into question. the question is you're wondering the question. is there a question in our feet yes, and i know and i am a victim of that. so the question is is it too late to be able to put the train through the heart of all these cities so that we can turn new brauntles into a great town by by having a train stop at that spot. so then that you know that downtown i don't think it's too late good. that's the question. i think that the right the the right of way exists in a real line now. the railroads have opposed it on the grounds. they don't want to make passenger and cargo for fear of having accidents but the rail line exists and there's been some movement toward negotiating joint use so i think that's possible it will cost a lot of money and there needs to be some real priority placed on it in the meantime in the meantime this rapid bus idea may have real legs. it's doable. it doesn't cost that much and the neat thing about it is to get to your point about getting to the right places you get to a node and then you're plugged into the entire system. in each place so the one we're contemplating on the southern end right now would be around randolph and then it would plug into the rest of the via system for the entire city and in austin they're downtown plaza and it would plug into the system that goes to the university of texas and everywhere else. so i think i think we absolutely have to take first steps and show people there's a case here and then and then we can expand to other things. there was a question here. let's get the microphone. two questions, so first in looking at what's happening what is been going on in kyle? from what i understand the developer was going into kyle and basically telling them this is what we're going to do. you're gonna have to be able to infrastructure you can delay us, but we are going to build 12,000 or whatever we're homes. yes. i saw something like that and is that how this area is going to develop? it's just going to have big two rams hitting it because the people in kyle said you don't we have no way to raise this money for all this infrastructure you want for all these homes the schools? yeah anything like that. i think it the area is going to grow. go at that scale. he said he had two questions so he might want to hold on to that. he's not letting go of it. i think his inevitable that the area is going to grow and it's not just the kyle situation, but the houses that have been announced near tesla. or on 130 in lockhart a long 130, colorado at caldwell that's farther over but yes, so think it's inevitable. i see no end in sight because there are no natural barriers that say you got to stop here. there's an ocean. there's a mountain range. it's not going to happen. texas encourages growth pro-business climate people are coming out of california who are frustrated with the small business impediments with the high taxes with the environmental regulations along the coast etc. they're coming here. and and so i see no end to the growth the question becomes. we figure out how to collaborate as governments to add a public interest dimension to that that regulate some of the size or figures out how they can't be done without them providing the infrastructure instead of the public having to provide the infrastructure etc. so i think you raise an important question, but it must be raised in the context of the fact that it is market forces or so strong demographic forces population forces global growth forces national trends that that this area is destined to grow that way. and the other question was did we spend our money wisely on the alamo dome? absolutely, but that's me. i know you're asking the bar. i would tell you to haircut, you know, i was in alamodome this morning. baby, i was in the alamodome. this is gonna slap his ugly baby and spoke. to have spoke at the graduation of $1,000 doctors this morning at the ut health science center ut health with 8,000 of their parents and supporters present about 10,000 people or so, and it was glorious. glorious. i told them we've had 65,000 people in this room in this building but never the amount of brain power accumulated in the 1000 who are graduating today, so i'm high on the alamodome today. we've done a great job of coming to to recognize the value of urban green space and you also mentioned no natural barriers to growth and so other conversations about preserving contiguous wild space as comal county as canal county. just sprawls and kind of eats it up that we've seen in the last couple decades. i think there's some very healthy conversations david. to speak on this. there's some very healthy conversations like what's happening with the water system taking over the aquifer protection purchase of land to buy acreage that will protect the recharge areas that that's a that's that was a national. i mean that was a national significant program and it needs to be continued and it will be continued. i mentioned the great springs initiative that would link all of the creeks and so forth on in a linear way and san antonio my goodness what's happened in our city howard peak had the idea of linking up the the tributaries to the san antonio river salado. apache alison sarzamora martinez etc. there's more and and linking them with bike paths in such a way that we end up with an ability to go. anywhere in the metro area on a bicycle on the river at the river level. all the way down to the missions missions reach and beyond i predicting that initiative which everybody got behind and put a lot of money into including the latest bond issue. that would just passed two weeks ago. i'm predicting that will be at least as big and attraction for san antonio. as the riverwalk or the alamo have been people will come here and they will just enjoy the ability to get. in this natural space right underneath the mainstream part of the city and and traverse it all the way down south and i also predict not only will it be a touristic appeal but it will transform our city into a city that is proud of being an outdoor place, you know kind of a green ethic. yeah. i want to mention the arboretum, you know more about that than well, yeah, we're working on. i just came out of a retreat today working on a san antonio's first arboretum a place where we can really respect the heritage. that is our tree cover which is really important. i mean we wouldn't exist as a as a human settlement if it wasn't for the native american people who came because of the cypress trees and on the waters edge and the pecan trees for the roots and nuts. they were hunter-gatherers. and i've read the journals of the of the canary islanders when they were being brought up through. mexico and south texas where everything stings or bites or -- or burns and they came across this wonderful crystal water surrounded by an oasis of trees and they said this is where we're going to stop. so the heritage of our place as green and wet and and verdant. we need to celebrate that and i think we're doing a pretty good job of it. i'm very very impressed with how fast we're moving on that score. do we have time for one more? there was one on the other side of the aisle. thank you henry, mary alice for all you both have done for san antonio back to mass transit quickly via hasn't been overly cooperative and allowing residents to get around san antonio on the interior and the exterior. is there any movement on that? whereas houston dallas? i know both have light rail to limited success, but we have nothing here where you can travel through downtown without are no plans for any light rail. but there are extensive plans. to jump over the light rail era and go to this advanced rapid transit strategy, which is cheaper. buses on rubber wheels multiple cars but dedicated roadways so they can stay on schedule as opposed to having to wait for traffic. they have their own dedicated system. they have they come to stations where you walk from the station directly onto the bus. you don't have to climb up onto the bus. you can pay in advance and don't have to stop to put money just a card or some of the device that lets you on and they can they're more flexible and that you're not locked in to the rail forever and that and on that route you can add to it. you can they're now talking about one that would go from stone by the airport. to essentially brooks city base north south and then another that goes across from lackland across basically on commerce street to the at&t center and then many branches off of that in time, but those two are almost paid for and will be put in place. in about 20-25 thank you henry. thank you david. thank all of you for coming. don't forget nowhere book tent you can get your copy signed not only makes an important point. but as i was telling these gentleman earlier, it's a great reference work. there's a lot of breaking down of interesting statistics if you're at all interested in in commerce and demography for you know for this whole region of the triangle. so, thank you all for coming. dan thank you. my name is tro
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