[This transcript was generated automatically from audio using AI and hasn't been reviewed by a person -- it can contain mistakes, including plausible-sounding sentences that were never actually said. Treat it as a starting point, not a verbatim record.]

[0:00] All right, call the meeting to work. We'll start with the pledge.
[1:12] Then thank you. You just need one more person you've got. You've got to come on one break person. I promise I'm not infected
[1:27] Great
[1:30] All right, now we're going to do the
[1:36] play
[1:39] And to the republic for which stands one nation under the visible liberty
[1:59] And obviously, this is a highly irregular meeting of the vis-a-vis the woodlands board.
[2:04] Obviously, very conscious of the issues surrounding the coronavirus.
[2:08] I want to thank all the board members for making the effort to be here today.
[2:12] And we'll make this as brief as possible.
[2:14] I'm going to take the roll quickly, I don't even have a script for me,
[2:26] just like I don't
[2:27] want to.
[2:31] We just make one out.
[2:35] No, I just need, I just need a director, Taylor, director Brown, here, director of
[2:42] Shelley Secula Gibbs, here, director Harris, here, director Cameron, JJ Holly, and Fred
[2:52] Dominic, here, and I'm obviously here in the board, you know, we have a
[2:56] a quorum to conduct business public comment there's no public comment received
[3:04] consider an act on the minutes from last board meeting
[3:09] okay right well we need to
[3:15] we need to adopt a agenda so yeah so I'm going to ask that agenda be limited to
[3:22] I am, well, a lip, which isn't even on the, that's on the back page.
[3:28] Item 12 of our agenda.
[3:30] I have a moment.
[3:33] Second.
[3:34] All in favor say aye.
[3:35] Aye.
[3:36] Aye.
[3:36] Any opposed?
[3:37] Motion carries.
[3:39] Okay.
[3:40] Item 12.
[3:41] Receive concern act upon agreement with World Triathlon Corporation regarding its Texas Iron Man event.
[3:46] It's
[4:20] township, the township, or discuss host venue agreements, and they basically have asked for
[4:28] consider chairman
[4:37] that you want to get to speak about that, or have a report on my
[4:40] handbook.
[4:41] So essentially, the reason why it's back is that the township board in an effort to treat
[4:53] all nonprofits and corporations that have events in their woodlands on an equal footing,
[4:59] As I asked, the visit of the Woodlands Board to take over the task of deciding who actually,
[5:06] what events actually have, enough commercial value to be considered for a host
[5:11] value.
[5:12] And as such, the Board can decide on how we decide to fund those particular events.
[5:20] And so, that's why the thing is back to us, because they're asking, visit the Woodlands
[5:25] to essentially fully fund the financial aspects of the contract and the in-kind services
[5:37] of the township.
[5:38] And I'm out still about $100,000 in total spend for the event.
[5:45] This event is fully compliant with state law regarding the use of hotel taxes.
[5:50] Even if we were a municipality that would qualify.
[5:53] It's obviously the most important event that the township holds each year with an annual economic impact in excess of $13 million.
[6:03] And I would recommend that the board except the contract has written and the obligation to fund the necessary amount in order to bring the event back to the Woodlands for five years.
[6:18] Any question?
[6:19] Yeah, sure, Hitchie.
[6:31] This is 2024.
[6:33] Yeah, this is.
[6:35] Yeah, this is.
[6:36] 2020-2021.
[6:37] 2020 is.
[6:38] It's not okay, right?
[6:39] Yeah, it has.
[6:40] Now, on
[6:52] there, there also have a, to cancel a whole lot of events as well.
[6:56] So we, we're not sure exactly what all's going to, how things are going to happen this year.
[7:00] But we're billigly working on the circumstances.
[7:06] Right.
[7:07] Yes.
[7:07] They would like to produce an
[7:20] either.
[7:21] No, no, it's a valid question.
[7:23] The short answer is, it has no bearing on what's going on this year, whether they produce it or don't produce it.
[7:30] It really comes down to nobody in this room knows what's going to happen over the course of the next three months for sure.
[7:39] And obviously we'll be into June. There's only so many dates left in a year.
[7:46] So some events that they're being postponed now will not come off this year.
[7:51] You just won't happen. We're currently holding space on October.
[7:55] Okay.
[7:55] For Iron Man.
[7:57] Good.
[7:58] What I would say, the sense of urgency on this meeting is that when Iron Man is ready to make their announcement,
[8:05] we want to be ready to say that we just
[8:13] make something happen.
[8:15] And so that's why we had the urgency of this meeting today.
[8:22] Second.
[8:23] All in favor say aye.
[8:25] Aye.
[8:25] Any opposed?
[8:27] Motion's carried.
[8:27] Thank you.
[8:28] Okay, unless there are any board announcements to have,
[9:13] that's great, and I just-
[9:14] Yes.
[9:15] They just announced on television was I was driving up here that the federal government is
[9:21] going to relax their enforcement of any kind of delays on payments for rents and their
[9:29] properties and they're not going to execute any kind of forced elimination of renters.
[9:37] So all sorts of things to make sure that people don't lose their homes and lose their apartments during this issue during this crisis.
[9:45] There's a lot of a lot going on. I just encourage everybody, you know, that, you know, what one of the strategies for our family is we are, you know, we are ordering out in restaurants every single night, you know, until, you know, until, you know, we can't do it anymore.
[10:00] You know, because we know how important all these small businesses are to our community and, you know, people, when people say things like, let's just lock down the entire population for 30 days, folks, that's just unrealistic, it's impossible.
[10:14] I'm assuming that you still want the doctors and healthcare people to work in hospitals and the police to patrol the streets and the alignment to be up to the power back on, so the internet will be on, so your kids don't drive you crazy.
[10:24] You know, those sorts of things, it's impossible to lock, you can't lock down everybody.
[10:29] You know, use your head, follow the guidelines, keeps the separation, wash your hands, regularly.
[10:35] Try not to touch your face as much as you can, but really, you know, just understand the financial issues, facing these small business owners.
[10:46] They lose their businesses, they probably end up going bankrupt.
[10:49] And they probably lose, and a lot of them lose their houses.
[10:51] And I'm just telling you, this is a much broader, more difficult issue to deal with than simply
[10:59] tolerate everybody to go home and stay there.
[11:02] It doesn't work, but I agree that taking the measures that we've taken in order to try to
[11:10] reduce the spread or the rate of spread of the disease is prudent, but it still has to be balanced
[11:17] against a complete and other economic shutdown of the country.
[11:23] So, they know from there, yeah, there's a number of things going on.
[11:28] We're not entering occupied guest rooms for any reason.
[11:33] And we're rolling every room at least 24 hours before we service it, as a safety precaution
[11:39] to our associates.
[11:41] The convention center is virtually shut down and will be barricaded off.
[11:47] We're closing the West Grudge and barricading that off today, turning the power off and
[11:52] going to lock it.
[11:54] The sky bridge is going to be locked on both sides.
[11:56] The loading dock will be locked down.
[11:59] We're prepared to, as we did during IIT to secure the perimeter of the building entirely.
[12:07] occupancies in the single digits for the next couple weeks, 7 percent. Roughly, we have two
[12:13] arrivals today. We've laid off 120 employees, which is the first time in my 39-year history
[12:21] that we've had to do that. And we furloughed more than 50 percent of our management team until the end
[12:27] of May and probably going to be adding more to that list. There are cost modeling going on for
[12:35] hotel closures nationwide, including air hotel. Right now it's not cost-effective. We're
[12:44] looking at a three-month window, but if things continue into June, into mid-May, into
[12:51] June, it'll become cost-effective to close the building. We still have a lot of things to
[12:57] power down power up, and we have to keep security and engineering and a manager on the
[13:02] So there and somebody's got to answer the phones and you got a forward call to the sales office and to
[13:10] Accounting and things like that. So there's still costs involved even if you are shut down
[13:15] But we're getting very close to that point if things don't begin to improve mid-May
[13:23] Virtually everything is canceled through April. There's nothing
[13:29] And I was on a conference call on Monday with the United Airlines just in the first three weeks one point five day in dollar loss.
[13:40] So we're talking, we're talking about, you know, and like it or not, it's going to be travel and hospitality that's going to take the brunt of, you know, of what we're, of the measures that are being implemented.
[13:52] And so we're just going to, we're in for a rough ride for the next probably for the balance of the year.
[14:00] The director of CMS advised that all elective surgeries be postponed and that includes dental and probably will overlap into the veterinary world too that to preserve the personal protective equipment and that.
[14:18] So you say impact, that's great to have an impact on the health care professionals as well.
[14:23] And probably that a lot of that was already voluntarily happening anyway, but but it now is coming from the top so CMS has advised that.
[14:32] And I would like to say that tomorrow when we have our board meeting at six o'clock that if all goes well, Charles Sims, Dr. Charles Sims, who's the health authority from Montgomery County will attend and give us an update and I think that will be reassuring.
[14:47] and informative for us.
[14:50] Well, it might not be very assuring,
[14:51] but it will be a formative now.
[14:55] Most of the news that we're getting right now,
[14:57] I would not say is anyway.
[15:03] We're not there yet. We're still going to see a spike.
[15:11] I prefer to be realistic about it.
[15:15] More people are going to get sick.
[15:18] Well, but the reassuring part, Chairman, is that flu is going to kill many more people this year than coronavirus.
[15:26] I certainly have to keep things in perspective.
[15:30] Dr. Shelley, I don't disagree at all.
[15:32] I'm a matter of fact, I'm 100% in agreement.
[15:37] And the fact is that when we start getting into this argument about
[15:42] every life, you can't put a price on the life.
[15:45] We do it every single day.
[15:47] Unfortunately, people die.
[15:50] It's part of the life cycle.
[15:52] I want to sound, I'm not being, you know, who we'll call about this, but we've got to be careful
[15:58] that, you know, that we've got to keep these things in perspective.
[16:00] We kill more people from traffic accents than we do from the flu, but we can't stop people
[16:05] from driving.
[16:06] It's just good.
[16:07] We just need to be smart.
[16:09] We need to follow the guidelines and try to, you know, try to get through this.
[16:13] I agree.
[16:13] I agree.
[16:15] Mark is great.
[16:17] You know, things are changing hourly by the moment at Market Street.
[16:20] And I've got 37 tenants closed, another roughly 28 with modified hours of some description.
[16:30] And some that are trying to maintain some sense of normal.
[16:35] Most of our restaurants are curbside or very limited-dined in, if you will.
[16:42] You can still get a drink of Jasper, so if you need one.
[16:45] So it's yeah, obviously nobody's ever seen anything like this and we're taking it an hour by hour.
[16:56] You kind of just off that.
[16:59] I was a little big enough.
[18:43] Yeah.
[18:44] Yesterday started working from home.
[18:45] Our entire office.
[18:46] They're working from home.
[18:48] They're still a
[19:03] little fortunate that our schedule this year.
[19:05] Just if I have the stance, it is later.
[19:08] It's not even time for anything.
[19:10] only one one nation show, which was still determining what's going to happen with that
[19:14] that the 19s of the right.
[19:17] But a few events outside of that, Jimmy Buffett has decided to
[19:21] respond to a later than June, and then we have some extraordinary events, and then we lead
[19:26] into graduation.
[19:28] And so, in this funny stance, and then June's really when the light nation shows
[19:32] certain are going to be.
[19:34] We have information has created a task force with ADG.
[19:38] The majority of them launch large concert promoters in these four world, and they are also working with CAA and many other artists, agencies,
[19:48] even when you get outside that eighth time green, and you can have them in that the next day.
[19:54] We are working out by hour and updating as we can,
[19:59] but we are so hopeful and I think the artist wants to start.
[20:02] to play, and when this is safe to do so, we may have to have the tail end to be here, but
[20:09] the longer.
[20:13] Sorry.
[20:14] I think we need to.
[20:16] Certainly going to have stories to tell our grandchildren.
[20:19] Yeah.
[20:19] The news is our renovation is still still ongoing.
[20:27] That's not impacting your occupancy rate.
[20:30] Well, if it was up to me, we'd close tomorrow and start now.
[20:33] But they can't mobilize the crews that quick.
[20:37] So we're still on for May 17 to take our first floor out.
[20:41] Jimmy Buffett is a bad move, though.
[20:44] Bad move.
[20:46] I have more than half my inventory out during the new Buffett date,
[20:50] plus a convention that may or may not happen, but it is what it is.
[20:56] I'd like to share with other neighbors.
[21:00] Well, I mean, what it points out is that the measures that are being taken will not instantly
[21:08] reverse themselves, and it's going to be a longer ride than people are really prepared
[21:14] for at this point.
[21:16] I think my personal view anyway.
[21:19] Okay.
[21:19] We don't have a staff standpoint.
[21:22] Okay.
[21:22] From a staff standpoint.
[21:23] Nothing else.
[21:24] Okay, great.
[21:24] Well, in that case, I think we'll take a motion for adjournment.
[21:28] Second.
[21:29] All in favor say aye.
[21:31] Aye.
[21:32] Any opposed?
[21:33] Thank you.
[21:33] Thanks again, Board.
[21:34] Thank you.