00:00Well, Austin, listen, congratulations on your announcement. Thank you for everything that you have done so far. I would amend what you said. In my experience as governor, I've never seen a community or a foundation respond faster at literally getting the resources donated to the people who need it the most.
00:23Let me kind of walk through the standard process that we go through in responding to a disaster like this and then comment about what you guys are doing. So any time when we see what happened either here in Kerrville or what happened in Hurricane Harvey, name the disaster. The first thing we focus on is saving lives. And that includes the ongoing search and rescue operations.
00:48The second thing that we focus on is things like removing debris. Then we work through that process on legislation. And by the way, as we are speaking right now, the Texas House of Representatives has taken up multiple pieces of legislation that fully respond to all the needs of the Kerrville,
01:12but also the other areas affected by all of these devastating floods. I am told that just as I arrived here, the Texas House of Representatives passed out of their chamber the camp safety bill to ensure that the camps in the state of Texas will be safer from flooding events that cost lives like this one did.
01:36Then all along the way, what's necessary is the rebuilding process. There are so many people who are displaced that we need to be very empathetic to. These are people who lost their home, people who don't have a place to live, people who are waiting to get back into their homes. And we need to really feel the pain that they are struggling through, knowing that they have to get back into their home as quickly as possible.
02:04Corresponding to that, we have donors, so many generous people here in the state of Texas who have supported that effort. And they had the donor intent to make sure those dollars are going to be used to get those people back into their homes, to see what you've done today with this announcement of $40 million, to know the extent to which it is going to help people actually get back into their homes.
02:31And let's aggregate this together. He talked about this new $40 million grant in addition to more than $15 million already granted. And in addition to that, many of you are familiar with what the George Strait Foundation provided. Two weeks ago, we handed out checks to people who are homeowners who were very devastated. We'll be back again this coming Saturday to hand out more checks. The first round of checks there were $25,000. There will be more money provided. The point is this.
03:00The George Strait Foundation is helping about 75 families, 75 residences be able to be fully paid for for the rebuilding process. When you look at the money that the Community Foundation is providing to these other local organizations, in addition to the money that would be available after that, I see no reason whatsoever why all of the residents who lost a permanent
03:30residents in this region are not only going to be able to have that permanent residents fully rebuilt, but rebuilt at record speed. There's construction projects going on right now. And this is able to happen because of the charitable donations that have been provided. Let me give you a contrast example.
03:48A contrast example. And that is when Hurricane Harvey hit, there were literally hundreds of thousands of homes that were impacted and destroyed. And it was far more than what charitable contributions would be able to pay for. As a result, it got stuck into a process that goes to the federal government, that goes through HUD. And it literally takes years, years, maybe even a half a decade, to get people back into a permanent residence. What these people
04:18are doing are doing, they are ensuring that the people of this community will not be going through that experience. They're getting people back in homes this month, next month, very quickly. And this is not only a record amount of money being provided to local residents, I think it's going to be a record speed at which these homeowners are going to be able to get back into their homes. And so I just wanted to be here and say, Austin, thank you for your leadership of this, but also for everybody at this table who will be
04:48the local partners involved in the process of making sure that this community is going to be able to execute on the promise of these funds to get into the hands of all the right people to ensure that everybody who is displaced from a permanent permanent residence will be able to get back into that home as quickly as possible. So thank you for doing such a great job. Thank you. Thank you.
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