Advisory Committee on Supply Chain Competitiveness: January 2021 Meeting Transcript
Advisory Committee on Supply Chain Competitiveness (ACSCC)
Via Webex
Thursday, January 28, 2021
8:43am CT
Moderator: Richard Boll
MEETING TRANSCRIPT
Coordinator: Welcome and thank you for standing by. All participants are in a listen only mode until the question-and-answer session of today’s call. At that time, you’ll be able to press star 1 on your phone. You’ll have a few moments of hesitation, unmute and it’ll ask you to record your name. Your name will be required to introduce your question. And again, that was star 1. I’d like to let everyone know that today’s call is being recorded. If you have any objections you can disconnect at this time.
It’s my pleasure to turn the call over to your host, Richard Boll. You may now begin, sir.
Richard Boll: Good morning, everybody. I hope everything wasn’t - was pretty easy getting into the WebEx. I appreciate everyone coming today. I’ll make some comments later on but maybe we’ll just start with our co-chairs to start off the meeting if we could. Thank you.
Rick Blasgen: Well hi. This is Rick Blasgen. I just want to welcome everybody as well. We appreciate your time today. As with all of these, you know, we’ve got a really good attendance here and we’re heading into a new year so there’s certainly no shortage of things to talk about. We have an action-packed agenda here, so I want to thank Rich and Eugene for putting this together.
Lots of outside speakers here. And as always, feel free to interact. We’ll explain how to go about doing that, but we want this to be very interactive. I think we have some new folks on the phone as well. So, I want to welcome you to our meeting. And with that, let me turn it over to Rick Gabrielson, for any comments our co-chair has. Rick.
Rick Gabrielson: Thanks much. Welcome everybody. We have great attendance today. And as Rick mentioned, we’ve got a new year; lots of new challenges. We’ve got a new Administration coming in. I’m sure that at some point in time today we’ll discuss (unintelligible) as well. And, you know, the last session we had I thought was good. Ideally, we’d love to be together and hopefully, at some point maybe this summer or this fall, we’ll be able to return to meeting in person once again.
So, with that again, welcome and look forward to having everybody participate today. With that, I’ll turn it over to Rich.
Richard Boll: Again, hello everybody again. I just want to thank everyone for participating in today’s meeting. It happens to be our 34th meeting since our inception in 2011. So, it’s been very - good, active group and we look forward to the future meetings with our - with some of our new members that we just basically put on the committee as well.
We have again, you know, great presenters today, to discuss, you know, issues that are impacting our supply chains. I really want to thank them for giving up their time and expertise and most of them are going to be new members. We do have new speakers, but we do have a couple of old friends as well, so you’ll probably be familiar with some of the names.
I also wanted to make sure that everyone knows that this is an open meeting to the public. And as was mentioned before, it will be recorded and, we’ll be able to get transcriptions as well; WebEx will be able to do that, so we’ve been able to put that onto it.
And, along with the members of the Advisory Committee, we also have ten - a little - probably over ten people from the public because it is an open meeting. So, I was able to be able to get confirmations from people outside of the Committee. And also, just want people to be notified that media may be in attendance as well. So, keep that in mind when you’re giving your presentations or speaking.
And you already noticed that we have a WebEx meeting and we have a conference coordinator and she’ll be helping us out through the meeting. For instance, what she was talking about is we’re going to try to get Q&A after each presentation and with the WebEx or this type of a large group, you know, it’s a lot easier if you’re face to face.
But because of that, you know, we’re going to be doing it - she’ll be able to set up a queue for these questions, for our presenters, to make sure that not 40 people are speaking all at the same time. It’s definitely a lot more difficult when it comes to a virtual meeting. So, we’ll be working in that regard.
Now for the - little the - kind of the updates of the committee. We’ve always been active providing, recommendations to our Secretary of Commerce and also during the meetings as well. We provide feedback to numbers of presenters, you know, on different issues that we find important and that’s why we have them on our presentation list or invites to be able to speak to us.
We definitely want to continue to keep doing that and having an active dialog with our presenters and also with the group itself. And as Rick had mentioned, we do have a new Administration in. Commerce itself we’ve got a few of the people in from the Biden Administration. Seems to be coming faster than previous administrations.
I’ve been around a while and it’s pretty interesting to see how fast some are getting in here. And it’s nice to have people coming in as fast as they are because then they can pick up stuff quicker and be able to get work done that we need to - that we’ve been working on or, you know, we pivot and we can be working on different issues which always happens with new administrations.
And many of you have heard or have at least seen, that Gina Raimondo, the Governor of Rhode Island, has been nominated for the position of Secretary of Commerce. And looking at the papers it seems like she’s going through her confirmation hearings up on the Hill. Actually, voting and etc. on that, will probably, you know, guesstimates are probably sometime in mid-February. I have no idea. You never know what’s going to happen up on the Hill.
In addition, I’d like to also note with pleasure, that we actually have a DAS by the name of Christopher Hoff, who will be the new Deputy Assistant Secretary for Services, which is - basically he’s going to be the head of our office. He pretty much came in right after the Inauguration, so he’s been onboard for quite a while. So, it’s been nice to be able to catch him up to speed on what we’re doing and also as an office, what we’re working on as well.
And if you noticed, he is on the agenda. He will be providing some brief remarks before going to our break for lunch. And I know how busy he is with a lot of different things coming on, so it’s great he was able to get some time in for our committee. In future meetings - we’re still in virtual meeting mode. I know we’d all rather, you know, be together, be able to see each other.
We have our scheduled meetings, for April, June and October of ‘21. And we strive to get back to our in-person meetings, but we will continue holding the virtual meetings until it is safe to hold them, as we usually do, at our beautiful library in the Department of Commerce.
And we’re still trying to do an outside of DC meeting as well. And, you know, we’ve been talking about Chicago. So, we just have to see how the vaccinations go and how the numbers of COVID and hopefully starts going down where it can be actually safe to actually have a meeting at Commerce. So, we work and strive to go for that goal and - but as of right now, we’ll be continuing on with the virtual until times that we can.
Pretty much everything I have on my notes for the meeting. Is there anything that anybody else wants to add? Eugene, do you have anything to add or anybody else?
Eugene Alford: Thank you, Rich. I do not. But please go right ahead. Good to have everybody onboard today.
Richard Boll: I’m just trying to find out if we have our speakers first. I’m not sure if Caitlin - Michelle, do you know if there’s Caitlin Hughes is on the line by any chance? She should be one of our speakers. I’m looking and I do not see it. I gave them the code in which to be able to get in, not being muted. Does anybody see - Michelle, are you there?
Eugene Alford: We’re a little early for them. So they may join…
Coordinator: Yes. I am here, sir. I was grabbing one of your hosts. What was your question?
Richard Boll: I was just wondering if Caitlin Hughes was…
Coordinator: Oh, yes. I was just joining her. So she is now available.
Richard Boll: Fantastic. I appreciate it. Let’s see if - I know she’s going to be with another person as well.
Coordinator: They are calling in now. So, I will - as soon as they go through the prompts, I will speak to them and I’ll open their line as well.
Richard Boll: I appreciate it. Thank you, Michelle.
Coordinator: Thank you.
Caitlin Hughes: Hi. This is Caitlin. I did manage to get in by phone. I’m sorry I can’t get in on the Web. I’m having some computer problems today.
Richard Boll: Yes. It’s - I had a little time - tough time getting into - Caitlin, this is Rich. Thank you for getting on. Is Jeffrey onboard as well, yet?
Caitlin Hughes: He will be shortly. If you don’t mind, I can just start us off this morning and give a little background?
Richard Boll: That would be fine. That would be fine. Thank you. And we’re going to be starting with (unintelligible) and I know you were talking that you might be able to - with your additional thing with Jeff you can, maybe extend it - hopefully be able to get it through your time. So, we’ll see. We’ll work and see how it works out for the timing. I appreciate it.
Caitlin Hughes: Yes, that’s fine. We have a PowerPoint presentation that should get us done in 20 minutes. First of all, I want to say…
Eugene Alford: Caitlin, before you start, this is Eugene.
Caitlin Hughes: Yes.
Eugene Alford: Would you like the PowerPoint up on the screen at this point?
Caitlin Hughes: We can wait until Jeff pops on. But if there’s - if you’re just looking at a blank screen you’re - that would be fine to go ahead and load it. Yes.
Eugene Alford: No. We have the agenda up, but I want to - anyway, so when it…
Caitlin Hughes: Yes.
Eugene Alford: When you’re ready you tell me, and I’ll load it up.
Caitlin Hughes: Sure. You can go ahead and load it up and we’ll just look at the cover page while I talk. Because I wanted to mention a couple of other things first. But thank you very much for inviting Federal Highway back to this meeting. We’re happy to give you an update on two of our most recent developments. I also have been asked by Richard Boll, to give an update on a partner agency initiative.
I’m going to just very briefly, tell you I spoke with Joe DeLorenzo, who is the Acting Associate Administrator in the Office of Enforcement for Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. And had asked him if there was any update on the - they have a program for younger drivers and it’s the - let’s see what the - it’s called exactly - the Under 21 Driver Program.
And Richard had asked if we could give an update on that. What I heard from Mr. DeLorenzo is that they - they’re currently reviewing the comments that we’re providing to the Federal Register. So, at this point there’s no change to the status of the Under 21 Pilot Program. Very brief update on that.
The other thing I’d like to do is introduce, when he comes on, my - my employee Jeff Purdy has been working for probably about five years now. And he’s developed this really remarkable tool using existing data that we collect for other purposes, for freight performance measurements. And it - some of you may know it as the NPMRDS data set, the National Performance Management Research Data Set.
And we’ve pulled that plus the HPMS, Highway Patrol Management Set, into a program that was used for internal purposes to look at reliability and bottleneck. But we decided that it would have a lot of utility externally, so we’ve created a more user-friendly way of getting at it. You don’t need Tableau. And it can help you generate a look at where all of the reliability and congestion issues are occurring.
It’s updated quarterly so it’s pretty current by federal government data standards. And it’s very useful in perhaps like looking at geo sense areas that it’s - the layers that we’ve loaded into the map have different networks available. So, you can look at things from an interstate standards; you can look at it from even the National Freight Network layer. There are many ways of looking at it.
Jeff’s going to give you the detailed run through of the presentation with some slides, to show you what I’m talking about because it’s obviously much easier when you have something visual to look at. The second thing he’s going to talk about is our update to Jason’s Law Survey and our Parking Coalition meeting.
We hadn’t met for two years. We did convene in December. We had a very robust turnout. Actually, we had a bit of a technical difficulty there and lost many people. But we had over 250 people stay on for a phone only presentation, for two hours. We have completed - well we completed in 2019 a second survey of drivers and truck stop owners and operators, law enforcement, and even this time went out to ports to get information from the ports about truck parking needs that are generated by port activities.
So, we had a revised survey compared to the 2015 survey. A lot of great data. We have posted all the data on the Web in forms that can be used by states who are doing truck parking plans and updating their state freight plan, if they would like to add truck parking to their state freight plan. It’s not a requirement, but it is trending right now, and probably a good trend. So that’s all now available.
We also summarized the results of the survey in PowerPoint form. The PowerPoint has been - the full PowerPoint on truck parking is uploaded at our Web site. If you Google Jason’s Law and Federal Highway, you’ll - or truck parking coalition, either of those will take you to our area where we post updates in truck parking. And that’s got the key results from the survey.
It’s taking a little while, or had taken a little while to clear some reports out of the agency, so we just released it in this form in a way that folks could go ahead and get the basic results. So, I’m going to check and see if Jeff’s on the line so that he can give the official presentation for today. Jeff, are you with us?
Jeff Purdy: Hello Caitlin. Can you hear me? Hello?
Caitlin Hughes: Yes.
Jeff Purdy: Oh, you can hear me. Good.
Caitlin Hughes: It’s very faint. Is there any way you can get closer?
Jeff Purdy: Yes. I’m - yes, my other phone wasn’t - it wasn’t working so I had to call in on my cell phone.
Caitlin Hughes: Okay. You’re good Jeff. Thank you very much.
Jeff Purdy: Okay. All right. Do we have the presentation up?
Richard Boll: Eugene, are you able to do that?
Eugene Alford: Michelle, I need the - I need the ball here. Michelle? I need the operator to give me the ability to share my screen.
Coordinator: Oh, yes sir. Jeff has the ball right now. He can move it to Eugene.
Eugene Alford: Yes.
Caitlin Hughes: Jeff, it sounds like you’re in control. I believe they can see the PowerPoint presentation so if you just want to charge ahead and advance it yourself, that should work.
Richard Boll: Oh, we can’t hear him. We can’t hear him. He must have it on mute.
Coordinator: I can put the ball to Eugene. One moment. I’ll move it from Jeff to Eugene. There you go, sir.
Richard Boll: Just give us a sec, Jeff, and we’ll have it up.
Coordinator: It looks like Jeff has disconnected.
Richard Boll: Well he - I can still see him - his video is up.
Coordinator: Yes. He disconnected from the phone line.
Richard Boll: Oh.
Coordinator: When he calls back in, he can press star 1 and I can open his line.
Richard Boll: Okay.
Caitlin Hughes: We’re a little more Zoom and Teams-friendly in our office. Sorry for the technical hiccups here on our end.
Richard Boll: No. That’s fine. I know.
Eugene Alford: The file should be up. Is it up…
Richard Boll: It is.
Eugene Alford: …on screen?
Richard Boll: It is on the screen. Thank you, Eugene. So, Jeff’s going to call back in, I think.
((Crosstalk))
Richard Boll: …a lot of MS Teams as well.
Caitlin Hughes: Okay. I could lead us off if I could see the screen, but I can’t see the screen.
Richard Boll: That’s fine, Caitlin. I know this is, you know, this is our - new territory for us too. This is probably our second or third one of these, so sometimes it works. I don’t know, Jeff, can he connect the audio directly in from his computer?
Coordinator: He would need to call into the phone line, sir.
Man: I tried that Rich, on my end, and what I got was it kind of prompted me to call in rather than being able to do it through my computer. So maybe every computer is different.
Richard Boll: Yes. Is Jeff - he’s talking. I don’t know - you can’t - can anybody hear him? Jeff? No.
Man: He needs to call him. Maybe you can ask him to call in on his cell phone and then he can just advance it that way.
Richard Boll: Yes. Well Eugene can advance it. That’s fine. Hey Jeff, can you call in on your phone, your cell phone?
Man: He may not be able to hear us.
Caitlin Hughes: Okay, folks I’m going to try to send him a note here and let him know he’s not being heard.
Coordinator: I see Jeff calling back in. So, I (reckon) - I can see the number he called from previously. So, I’m opening his line.
Caitlin Hughes: Thank you.
Coordinator: Jeff, your line is open now.
Jeff Purdy: Okay. You can hear me now?
Richard Boll: Perfect. Yes.
Jeff Purdy: Okay. Good. Yes, I don’t know what happened. I called in a couple of times and - but yes, let me run through the slides here really quick. What I wanted to talk today about are we - as Caitlin mentioned, we recently completed our truck parking survey update that looked at, you know, truck parking on the National Highway System. And we’ve also developed some tools that allow us to analyze freight mobility and bottlenecks. Let’s see.
Richard Boll: Next screen? Do you want us to do that?
Jeff Purdy: The slides. I don’t see…
Richard Boll: I think you can say next slide and I think (Eugene) can do that for you.
Jeff Purdy: Okay. Yes. Next slide. Okay. The first thing I want to talk about is our Jason’s Law truck parking survey. Now truck parking in the United States is a major issue, a major safety issue with the freight industry. And we have a number of initiatives underway with regard to truck parking. And the Jason’s Law survey is one key element that came out of MAP-21 that we’ve recently completed an update to. Next slide please.
Jason’s Law was adopted as part of MAP-21 which was our Transportation Authorization Legislation that was passed by Congress in 2012. And Jason’s Law was named after Jason Rivenburg who was a truck driver who couldn’t find a safe place to park and had to park at an abandoned gas station for his hours of service rest period. And he was murdered in his truck while he slept.
And so, Jason’s Law is named in honor of Jason Rivenburg but, you know, this is just one example of some of the difficulties that truck drivers experience with regard to being able to find safe places to park. And, we have problems with overflowing rest areas, overflowing truck stops. You know, truck drivers are not only required to - need to park in locations that are unsafe, they also often have to park on the side of the road on interchange ramps and, locations that are, generally not just unsafe for the driver but also unsafe for other motorists on the highway.
So, Jason’s Law required us to go through and do an evaluation of each state’s capability to provide adequate truck parking, to do an inventory of the truck parking and assess the demand for truck parking on the nationwide level. Next slide please.
And we conducted the first survey back in 2014 and the law requires us to do periodic updates to the survey and so we did an updated survey in 2019 that allowed us to be able to track changes in truck parking around the country, you know, over the four years since the original survey. And this sort of provides some of the basic statistics on truck parking. There’s about 313,000 truck parking spaces nationwide, about 40,000 of this is at public rest areas that are owned and operated by state DOTs mainly. But the vast majority of truck parking locations are private truck stops.
Looking at the trends from 2014 to 2019, there was about a 6% increase in the public spaces at DOT rest areas and other public utilities, and about an 11% increase in private truck parking spaces. Next slide please. Now in addition to, looking at the availability and the amount of truck parking that was out there, we also surveyed truck drivers to find out information about where there were shortages in truck parking from their perspective and experience and, looking at the growth in truck parking.
And, you know, we see some, common patterns that, were evident in 2014 and this really just seemed to expand into 2019, in terms of things such as - locations such as the I-95 corridor along the East Coast; the Chicago region in sort of the Midwest industrial area of the United States; and the West Coast not only just California, but extending northward up into Oregon and Seattle. Next slide, please.
And this map right here, shows one of the metrics that we use to measure truck parking supply and demand. And this map right here shows truck parking relative to the amount the daily truck vehicle miles of travel by state. And as you can see, the darker shaded states are the states that have the greater supply of truck parking relative to the volume of truck travel within that state. And the lighter states are the states that have more of a shortage in terms of truck parking. Next slide please.
So, some of the things, some of the takeaways that we have from the Jason Law survey is that truck parking shortages still continue to be a major problem. They’re a problem in virtually every state in the country. Some areas are worse than others. And in particular, major freight corridors like I-95, I-80, I-5, I-10, have problems in terms of truck parking shortages.
Large metro areas where a lot of trucks are going to and from, there are shortages of truck parking in these major urban areas, forcing drivers to park out in rural areas and then get up the next morning and drive in peak hour traffic, to be able to get to the location that they need, to make a delivery. And so, there’s a real acute shortage in a lot of our large cities around the country.
You know, shortages exist at all times of the day but mostly overnight hours. And this can be evident in some of the information that we received from the commercial motor vehicle safety agencies at the state level where state police and other agencies identified a lot of trucks being parked on the highway shoulder, or being parked on exit ramps on the interstate system.
And this creates an unsafe situation for other motorists on the road and that’s just further compounded by these trucks parking at night where you have poor visibility. The one thing that we did see is that since the original survey was done in 2014, there’s much more awareness in terms of truck parking.
A lot more states are addressing truck parking in their plans and including projects to expand truck parking availability. And one of the big areas where we see a lot of activity at the state level, is development of truck parking information systems. And, you know, these are used to inform drivers about parking availability. They can get the individual rest areas and, in some states, private truck stops are monitored in terms of the availability of truck parking.
And through apps or 5-1-1 sites truck drivers can get information on where there is available safe locations for them to park. But funding still continues to be a major challenge in terms of truck parking. I mean we, you know, we all know that, from an infrastructure standpoint we face a lot of budgetary shortfalls in terms of maintaining and improving our transportation system.
And, you know, the development of truck parking needs to compete with other priorities like maintaining bridges and pavements or making capacity improvements. And so, states are really faced with very difficult decisions in terms of where to invest their dollars. But not only the public sector, you know, having problems with funding truck parking, but the private sector also.
I mean truck stop operators; they make their money off of the sale of fuel and sale of items in their convenience stores or restaurants. And truck - constructing additional truck parking at truck stops is very expensive. And so really what we need to look at is some, innovative funding mechanisms or public/private partnerships to really work towards advancing the development of additional truck parking.
And then finally, one thing that we saw very clearly, is that local government and citizen involvement and awareness is very important. We need to look at more integration of truck parking as part of local and regional development. If you have industry in your community, you’re going to have trucks going to and from your community. And so, we need to look at innovative ways to try to incorporate truck parking at distribution centers and other major destinations for trucks. Next slide please.
Now one of the things that we’re doing to help address the truck parking problem, is we have a National Coalition on Truck Parking that is made up by US DOT as well as private sector organizations such as the National Association of Truck Stop Operators, the American Trucking Associations, the Owner/Operator Independent Driver Association, the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance, and the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials. Next slide please.
And so, we’ve been researching and developing and promoting different innovative ways to try to expand the availability and utilization of truck parking, safe truck parking. We’re looking at innovative ways of developing additional truck parking capacity. We’re looking at advancements in technology and data, such as, you know, the truck parking information systems that I mentioned previously.
We’re looking at funding and finance and if innovative public/private partnerships or other ways to be able to fund truck parking. And then finally, we’re looking at this from the standpoint of state, regional, and local government coordination so that we’re better integrating truck parking as part of local and regional development, to be able to meet the demand of industry, to be able to provide truck parking. Next slide please.
So that’s sort of an overview of what we’re doing from a truck parking standpoint. And next, I want to talk a little bit about some of the tools that we have for freight mobility and being able to identify highway bottlenecks or critical locations on the interstate system. Next slide please.
And we’ve developed a dashboard using truck travel time data to be able to measure the performance of the national highway system and the interstate system. And we were able to look at the national level, at a state level, at an MPO level, different metrics of measures of how the system is performing in terms of looking at things such as travel times indexes which give us an understanding of how much congestion we have during peak periods.
Planning time index - looking at how much additional time needs to be buffered into, you know, be able to make truck trips, to be able to factor in the unreliability of the transportation system. And then looking at things such as the amount of delay or congestion on the system or the cost that this congestion is causing to the freight industry and to the US economy at large. Next slide please.
One of the key data sets that we have in order to be able to measure freight mobility is the National Performance Management Research Data Set and this is a nationwide data set where we collect - probe data for passenger vehicles and trucks and make that data available to state DOTs and MPOs for them to do their performance measures and, you know, monitor the performance of the system and identify locations where transportation improvements need to be made. And this is, you know, the data that we use at federal highways at the national level, to be able to monitor the overall system. Next slide please.
One of the tools that we’ve developed as part of our freight mobility trends dashboard, is the bottleneck identification tool that allows us to look at the amount of delay that’s being experienced on the national highway system and the interstate system. And identify, you know, sort of the top locations around the country that are experiencing the most delay, the most cost to the freight industry and by extension the greatest cost to the US economy. Next slide please.
And so, we’re able to, you know, be able to identify these locations. We’ve got some critical bottlenecks to be able to drill down and look at them, you know, at a corridor specific level, to be able to use the NPMRDS and look at the travel time, the speeds that we have along those particular roadway sections to identify the magnitude and duration of congestions along those roadways.
And then we also work with our state partners to look at what they’re doing in terms of freight planning and identifying bottlenecks and identifying, you know, critical corridors in their system, to be able to plan for either capacity improvements or operational improvements or other alternatives to address these bottlenecks. Next slide please.
And so, this map right here, what we’re doing starting in 2017 is we developed a list of the top 100 bottlenecks in the nation on the interstate system. And we’ve been updating that every year. This right here is the map from 2019. The map shows the top 100 bottleneck locations on the interstate system where we have the greatest truck hours of delay.
The list on the left hand side is the top 25 of those 100, but you can see some of the patterns that we have around the country such as, you know, the I-95 corridor roughly extending from the Washington, DC area up through Philadelphia, New York and onto Boston as a major critical corridor where we have a lot of bottlenecks and a lot of delay in these major urban areas.
You can also see on the West Coast, going up the I-95 corridor from Los Angeles all the way up to Seattle. And California has the greatest number of bottlenecks on our top 100 list. But you can also see other critical corridors such as the I-10 corridor along the Gulf Coast. You can see, you know, bottlenecks through Louisiana as well as Texas. And the Texas Triangle is another location where we have, you know, a lot of bottlenecks.
You can see, you know, bottleneck locations in Houston, Dallas, Austin, you know, and a lot of truck travel in this area of the country, this southern area of the country and a lot of bottlenecks in the major urban areas. next slide please.
And when you look at these top 100 locations, these most congested corridors around the country, they only make up about 1.2% of the entire interstate mileage. But if you look at the amount of delay, that’s 21% of the delay that’s experienced by trucks on the overall system. It’s concentrated in just over 1% of the interstate system. And so that’s why these bottleneck locations are really critical from a planning and investment standpoint, to be able to help support freight mobility around the country. Next slide please.
And so, what are we doing with this information? And so, we have a number of strategies that we have moving forward, to try to address the problems with congestion and reliability on the transportation system. Our agency does a lot in terms of promoting transportation system management and operations, as things such as intelligent transportation systems looking at things such as managed lanes on expressways, ramp metering, you know, part time shoulder use, incident response, road weather management, things to try to improve the efficiency of traffic and travel on the existing infrastructure that we have right now.
And where we need to, you know, we have limited funding to be able to make improvements and so we need to be very strategic about where we are targeting those funding, towards major bottlenecks in other areas that investment can be maximized from a transportation standpoint.
Looking at transportation safety, security and resiliency, we have a major focus on addressing bridge strikes. A number of these bottlenecks are at critical bridges on the system, and so we need to look at, you know, being able to protect those - that infrastructure from damage. But then also looking at, you know, coordination between various jurisdictions from the local all the way up to the state level.
But then also coordinating with the private sector through things such as a freight advisory committee involving the freight and industry and transportation discussions. And then, you know, looking at the data and models that we’re providing and being able to look at transportation from a multi-modal supply chain, not just looking at truck trips, but looking at the entire supply chain and all of the other modes.
And, you know, there may be instances where addressing a bottleneck isn’t necessarily best done through making capacity improvements to the highway. Maybe we need to look at multi-modal options - improving short line rail; providing additional options for barge servicing in locations where freight can be moved more efficiently through maritime means.
And so, you know, it becomes very critical to be able to look at these multi-modal investments and improvements in our system, so that we have sort of a seamless, efficient, multi-modal, full supply chain system, from end to end on the entire system.
And so that’s sort of a quick overview of some of the initiatives that we’re working with here at Federal Highways. And I’d be happy to answer any questions at this point.
Richard Boll: Hello, Coordinator, could you set up Q&A please?
Coordinator: Yes. If you would like to ask a question please press star 1 on your phone, unmute and record your name clearly. Again, press star 1 on your phone to ask a question. Thank you. It’ll take a moment for the questions to come through. Our first question comes from (Walter Kempsey). Your line is open.
Walter Kemmsies: Yes. Thank you. That was an excellent presentation. I hope we can get a copy of your slide deck. It was very informative and helpful. I have one question though. In looking at the inventory of truck parking spaces, did that also include the ones that were created at distribution centers and warehouses? Because over at the Agricultural Transportation Coalition, what we learned is a lot of the rural guys were building truck parking areas near where they picked up, you know, a product and even managed in some cases, to get some retail, you know, things like food and beverages, and some actually provided showers.
But I didn’t know if that was included in your survey. And it would be, you know, anyways, please let me know.
Jeff Purdy: Well what we - what we specifically included in our survey were the public trucks - public truck parking that state DOTs operate at rest areas and other truck parking facilities. Some state DOTs, you know, allow truck parking at weigh stations or other locations. And then it also included truck parking at mainly commercial truck stops.
What we did is we used a trucker path which is an app that’s used by truck drivers to identify available truck parking, you know, mainly at truck stops that would use that. But truck parking at private facilities is something else that while it’s not included in that inventory map that I showed earlier, it’s something that we are promoting and we have a number of initiatives that was one of the focus areas of the National Coalition on Truck Parking in terms of our capacity improvement, was to try to promote the integrating of - integration of truck parking at origins and destinations for freight.
You know, I mentioned the problems that we have in the major metropolitan areas where for a number of regions there’s not much in terms of commercial truck stops or rest areas in these major urban areas. And so really, the most efficient way to be able to provide truck parking at these locations, is to integrate truck parking as part of these major freight destinations.
And we’ve got some ongoing studies to develop guidelines on, you know, truck parking generation rates and tools for how to integrate truck parking with development at the local level of, you know, truck intensive land uses. That is a major focus of ours in terms of implementation, you know, alternative solutions.
Walter Kemmsies: That’s extremely helpful. And let me ask another question on behalf of another member who can’t get on the phone. But he wanted me to check on this. But could you tell us what you’re using for cost in truck delays?
Jeff Purdy: What we’re using for the cost of truck delay is based on the driver cost, the cost of fuel, and then also the cost of maintenance of the truck. And that’s - we don’t necessarily factor in the cost of the cargo that’s on the truck, but just the cost of - to the freight industry in terms of the driver, the truck, and the fuel.
Walter Kemmsies: Okay. So, no inventory, carrying cost time, correct?
Jeff Purdy: No. Because…
Walter Kemmsies: Okay. That’s great.
Jeff Purdy: …being that we don’t necessarily have really good data, we know how much - we know generally, the value of cargo that’s traveling along corridors based on models; we know the speed the trucks are moving, the volume of trucks. But we don’t really have the data down to a point where we can, you know, precisely say, you know, the delay that’s being experienced along this section of corridor can be applied to certain commodities being carried. So we don’t…
Walter Kemmsies: Oh, okay. So, you don’t use the inventory carrying cost (numbers) that the DOT used to have on its Web site? Because I’ve used those before. They’re extremely helpful. You know? But I guess…
Jeff Purdy: No. We mainly just use - yes, the cost, you know, the cost to the truck - of the truck driver, the truck, and the fuel.
Walter Kemmsies: That’s great. Thank you very much. That is very helpful.
Richard Boll: And Michelle, how many do we have in queue?
Coordinator: Right now we’ve got four.
Richard Boll: Okay. We might have to go one or two, but we have other presentations. Just open up for the next one, please.
Coordinator: Thank you. Our next question comes from Jonathan Rosenthal. Your line is open.
Jonathan Rosenthal: Great. Thank you. Very interesting presentation and I - so I’m with a private equity firm that does nothing but invest in both logistics companies - functional logistics companies, some of which are trucking companies, which we own several of. And then infrastructure and information technology in the logistics space. So, we should talk offline.
But one of the challenges - I mean we have many challenges in creating truck parking; we actually think there’s a commercial opportunity for that. And we think that with the Biden Administration’s initiatives towards, you know, electrification and the technology that’s coming around, you know, over a period of years; I mean we all know nothing’s available today really, that’s commercially viable.
But when you think about truck parking you’ve got to think about infrastructure required for charging stations, because it’s an enormous amount of power that needs to be, you know, dedicated to that truck parking. But I’m wondering, what you’re doing and I’d be happy to work with you to help, but what you’re doing to encourage or facilitate the commercialization of that truck parking.
Because I think if you got - if you were able to create sufficient commercial incentives it would greatly expand, you know, the private sector’s interest in making these investments.
Caitlin Hughes: This is Caitlin Hughes. I’ll take that question. You may not know this, but for several decades there’s been a lot on the books that bans the commercialization of interstate right of way. And that does have an effect on what our rest areas look like along the interstate system. And for example, why you don’t see paid truck parking reservation systems on the interstate; you don’t see the truck stop electrification offboard technologies like a truck would pull up to a stand and plug in and be able to turn off their engine and get all their power from that.
So, you know, there is a market impact to that particular provision. And I think the needs have changed in different ways across the country. So unfortunately, there’s nothing US DOT can do about that. It’s a - it is a statutory provision. So, it’s also one strongly guarded by the truck stop owners who have businesses off the interstate. So, you know, we’ve discussed in the National Coalition on Truck Parking how these needs could be met going forward, you know, whether the reservation systems and truck stop electrification can become part of those off-interstate truck parking areas.
There has to be a significant market incentive for the - those private sector owners to do so however. So, we’ll have to see going forward, whether public/private partnerships between states and these private sector owners, can be of help. The eligibility for those types of activities is there inherent in the - for example, the National Highway Freight Program Fund that are a federal aid program that goes to the state.
So, there is eligibility to do things that are environmentally beneficial and reduce impacts on communities. But again, we’re limited, and our state partners are limited by this commercialization ban.
Jonathan Rosenthal: Thank you. I’d love to follow up with you later, because we have actually tried to make significant investments in exactly this space, and we don’t even need subsidies or anything else. We’re willing to do this on our own and we’ve encountered, you know, a variety of issues including regulatory issues and union issues that have challenged our investments in that space.
So merely the help with DOT of working through the, you know, the current regulatory scheme would be - could be really beneficial.
Caitlin Hughes: Thank you. And I know we don’t have much time. I’ll just - one more follow up on that. We do know that some states across the country have close rest areas in hard economic times. You know, they don’t have the ability to put anything in there that would help them offset costs because of that same ban. So, there are bigger issues at play here; not just a, you know, desired goal for emissions reduction. But there’s also a need for states to find ways to be able to keep these rest areas open and functioning for the safety of all motorists.
Jonathan Rosenthal: Thank you.
Richard Boll: Well thank you. This is Rich. I know there are some other ones in queue for questions. I think we have - our next speakers are in already for the 10:45 slot. For those that are in queue if you want to, you can send me - if there are questions or I can contact you, to get in touch with Jeff and Caitlin. But I think just because of - we’re running behind schedule, I think we need to - because I think we have the next speakers already on the line.
So, is that okay with everyone? I hope that works out. And just let me know and I can connect, you know, you with Jeff and Caitlin.
Caitlin Hughes: Thank you so much. We’ll look forward to hearing from your folks. And again, sorry for the technical issues this morning. We appreciate the chance…
Richard Boll: No problem. And thank you both very much, for your presentations. We do appreciate it. And thank you very much.
Jeff Purdy: Thank you.
Richard Boll: And I think Craig Clark and Val Nuehart, they are up. I see Craig is on. I’m not sure about Valerie.
Coordinator: Craig and Valerie, if you can press star 1 on your phone, we can open up your lines.
Craig Clark: So good morning. Can you hear me?
Richard Boll: Yes.
Craig Clark: Okay, great. Sorry. I know Val has a very busy week already and this morning I think she may be tied up. But if she comes on, great. So, I just did want to say thank you for having us here at the meeting, to provide some updates on some of these CBP initiatives. This is my first time with you guys, so I’m looking forward to learning more about the issues you want to discuss today and in the future.
My name is Craig Clark. I am with the Office of the Commissioner Office of Trade Relations, the CBP. And so quickly I apologize, I don’t have a PowerPoint to share with you, I don’t know maybe you - in this landscape of telework maybe it’ll be a welcome respite from PowerPoint. But the first thing that I wanted to update you on was the 321 Data Pilot.
So far, CBP has received data on over 116 million shipments in that pilot and then a related pilot, the Type 86, or not pilot I guess, but the Type 86 test has received another 200 million shipments with that. The pilot data accounted for, in this last bit here, just 12.2% of all non-mail 321 shipments in the second quarter of FY ‘20; 17.27% of the same kinds of shipments in the third quarter; and 13.07% of non-mail Section 321 shipments in the fourth quarter of FY ‘20.
Our field personnel have noted that that data has been helping them in a lot of different ways, including providing a bit of a bigger visibility, a broader visibility into some of these complex eCommerce supply chains. And it has very importantly, improved the accuracy of our eCommerce risk assessments including of course, very related to today’s environment; those risks that are associated with potential counterfeit test kits, medical devices, and PPE related to COVID-19.
Trade community has also experienced some facilitation benefits. Some pilot participants have even seen their holds on 321 shipment decrease by 97%. Others have seen, you know, 90% kinds of decreases. And as of this summer, in August, this past summer, in August of 2020 CBP estimated that there had been a total of $867 million in CBP and trade cost savings, associated with the Entry Type 86 test.
We are taking steps to integrate the results of both the 321 Data Pilot and the Type 86 test into a new Section 321 data collection process through a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking. So that was a mouthful, but included in that NPRM is a requirement for mandatory security data elements for all Section 321 shipments and that is going to be agnostic of the mode of transportation and will include international mail as well as additional mandatory data elements if an entry is filed.
There is going to be, within there, a new data collection process that will leverage findings from both the pilot and the Type 86 test to collect more details about the nature and the origin of eCommerce shipments, so that’s going to be things like the seller and the buyer information, maybe photos of the commodity Web site listings, you know, transactional details.
And a single data requirement for de minimis that will clarify eligibility requirements and address trade liability. Now any of you have gone through the rulemaking process know that this is a, you know, protracted processed occasionally. And so, until such time as that NPRM is finalized and implemented, the 321 Data Pilot and the Entry Type 86 tests are going to continue as is.
So that is that for the 321 Data Pilot. If - I’ll throw this to Rich. Let me know, should it be easier to take questions as we go, or - because we have disparate topics, or should we take them after each update?
Richard Boll: I think why don’t we just do it at the end of your presentation? That will probably work out for everything and then we can ask all questions on all three topics.
Craig Clark: No problem.
Richard Boll: Thank you.
Craig Clark: Sure. So, the next topic is this - the Trade Strategy 2025. And that’s something that was published on December 22, 2020. CBP’s Office of Trade published it and put it on CBP.gov. You can find it under the Trade tab on CBP.gov. And it refines CBP’s overall trade strategy into a meaningful and memorable vision of future trade. Our mission - CBP’s overall mission to protect the American people and facilitate trade and travel, has not changed. That remains the same. And OT has built on that by recognizing that we are in an evolving trade landscape and that’s going to require some innovative solutions to address some of these trends like this huge increase in small value shipments, through eCommerce.
The OT vision - OT pardon me, is - sometimes we get lost in the alphabet soup, but that is Office of Trade. OT’s vision is of a sort of a safe and more secure streamlined digital process. And that’s going to be developed through the close and ongoing collaboration with the trade community. They’re going to continue that strategy of course.
The Trade Strategy 2025 outlines five goals that align and support CBP’s mission to protect the American people, safeguard our borders and enhance the nation’s economic prosperity. Those goals are efficient trade facilitation. Thank you for having that up for me there. That’s very helpful. And that goal streamlines those administrative processes so that we can have greater efficiency, lower costs, reduced processing times, which is always fantastic. The first goal is going to require some integrated data platforms and some discussion around updated trade agreements and policies.
The second goal is the effective risk-based enforcement. That goal supports a level playing field. And it’s how we will start using data in - data collection in a smart way and develop a new risk assessment framework that will give us earlier identification of problems and mitigation of those problems.
The third is innovative and sustainable eCommerce. So, this is going to create a new way for us to look at trade enforcement and facilitation, especially considering that unprecedented growth in the eCommerce space. So, this is speaking to those innovative solutions that we’re going to have to develop. CBP helpfully, is the lead in developing these global models. So, this will be working to our advantage.
Trade Operational Insights is the fourth goal and that goal basically strengthens the Office of Trade’s presence in these - among the national, economic, and trade policy makers, industry stakeholders. It just makes sure that OT’s expertise and sort of the knowledge of what’s happening in the real world, makes its way up to the decision makers at the highest level.
And then the fifth goal is the workforce skills and capabilities. And that ensures that Office of Trade can continue to attract and retain these high caliber professionals and that those professionals and other OT personnel have the skills and support that they need to support the CBP mission.
All right. And the third update is a single window update for ACE. So, following the deployment of all of these core processing capabilities in 2018, CBP has focused on sustaining all of the deployed ACE capabilities and ensuring that ACE operates as a highly available and reliable system. There is ongoing demand for additional ACE or I guess we should say there are ongoing demands for additional ACE enhancements, that have emerged from conversations with the industry, other government partners, Congressional stakeholders, about what is needed to support this evolving business and the mission needs, to find that balance.
Major recent ACE deployments include the first release of ACE collections functionality which is focused on updates to statements and payment processing. The creation of that new Type 86 entry type, which automates the paper process for those low value shipments that are exempt from duties, taxes and fees. This new filing capability also improves import safety and security by providing greater visibility into those shipments. So that’s speaking to those complex supply chains.
Enhancements to ACE truck manifest functionality that provide trade users with a faster, more streamlined platform for filing and managing data and including an enhanced user interface and modernized back end to services, and also the implementation of requirements in ACE for processing entries subject to that - the new US, Mexico, Canada trade agreement, (USNCA). We do maintain a notional development and deployment schedule on the CBP site. You can find that at CBP.gov/ACE, A-C-E, which is updated as work commences, and new enhancements are added.
And then I wanted to quickly give you an update on CBP’s COAC activities. We have a next - the next public COAC meeting is March 17th of this year, March 17, 2021. There have been a few significant developments. The COAC Secured Trade Lane Subcommittee in bond working group, has published a 25 page in bond modernization white paper, which can also be found under CBP. It’s a bit of a dig but it’s under Trade and Stakeholder Engagement. And then you dig through COAC, COAC public meetings, and then the quarterly meeting from December 16, 2020, you’ll find under the Secured Trade Lanes tab, this paper.
It’s a comprehensive in bond reference. It’s basically a one stop shop compendium of COAC and CBP’s in bond work, and also a map - kind of a strategic map to a modernized in bond landscape. It’s been turned over, this paper, to the trade support network working group on in bond, to further flesh out some of the technical aspects. And then the COAC working group will continue working on the regulatory and policy aspects of that paper.
Also at the December meeting, the Secure Trade Lanes Subcommittee trust and trader working group, delivered five recommendations that address the Customs Trade Partnership Against Terrorism Trade Compliance Partners, so CTPAT Trade Compliance Partners, and how they are going to be impacted by CBP audits and forced labor issues.
And then I would also like to mention - this is maybe not related specifically or only, to the COAC, but the 21 CCF Initiative in OT has new leadership. Garrett Wright is now the Director over in that shop. And you may know that the 21 CCF, that’s the 21st Century Customer Framework, Initiative is really meant to enable the US government to address modern trade challenges, leverage emerging opportunities and achieve transformational long-term change.
There are several COAC working groups that, you know, had a link to those goals, but of particular note is the Unified Entry Processes working group which has been on hiatus since July 2020. But CBP has plans to revitalize it next month, in February. And finally, I wanted to mention that the Office of Trade Relations recently solicited new applicants for COAC membership, and we are now preparing for notification for interviews. The next term, the next COAC term is scheduled to be effective in July of 2021.
So that’s all I have for you today. And I’m happy to take what questions you may have. And I will preface this by saying if I don’t have the immediate answer I will go back and get it for you.
Richard Boll: Thank you, Craig. Great information. Great updates. Really, truly appreciate it. Can the conference coordinator open it up for Q&A please? I’m sure there will be some.
Coordinator: Yes, sir. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your phone and record your name. One moment. Our first question comes from Norm Schenk. Your line is open.
Norm Schenk: Yes. Hi everybody. And Craig, thank you for the updates. I Chair the Trade and Regulatory subcommittee and I know we’re already behind, so I’m just going to make a couple of brief comments. And again, thank you for the overview. We’ll - later in the agenda we’ll be talking a little bit more in-depth on our work we have going in our committee. Much of it is tied to CBP. So, we certainly, you know, have a lot of interest in everything that you talked about.
You know, the Type 86 certainly has been positive. I will say we do have concerns from a lot of our members with respect to the continued reliance for more data, more data, more data and quite frankly, some of the things being talked about would make a low value eCommerce shipment more complicated than a full ocean container. So, I’ll just leave it for that on that.
You know, as far as the trade strategy goes, certainly there are some good things in, and we can set up a follow up meeting with the - some of our committee members to talk about it. The strategy document comes from OIT and we’re kind of curious as to what kind of input the Office of Field Ops had into that world, you know, the practical side for some of that.
Third, on the single window, glad you’re looking at it again. CBP did your part, but one of the things our group is looking out is quite frankly, CBP did the part to build the database but the other agencies haven’t adapted to the window and again, quite frankly, unfortunately there is more holds related to the use of single window than before single window for some of the members on that one.
So again, thank you for the good update and what we can do is follow up later with you and Val and perhaps have another call with some of our committee members on that. But just wanted to mention that from the Chair of Committee perspective, and there may be others with questions. Thank you.
Craig Clark: Thanks, Norm. I’ll - I’ve made note of that and I just do want to extend to you always that invitation, that if you want to have a bit more of a one on one or a more detailed conversation we’re always open to that. And I can help you arrange that. And then…
Norm Schenk: Thank you.
Craig Clark: …just tangentially, it’s nice to hear your voice. It’s good to hear from you again.
Norm Schenk: Yes. Thanks, Craig.
Coordinator: Are you ready for a next question?
Richard Boll: Yes, please.
Coordinator: Thank you. We have Brandon Fried. Your line is open.
Brandon Fried: Thank you. And hi Craig. Thanks for your presentation today. Could you please go over the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking again, and what it will cover and what its purpose is for, please?
Craig Clark: Sure. I can - it’s also good to hear your voice. I love that I can catch up with old friends this way.
Brandon Fried: Absolutely.
Craig Clark: So yes, if you give me a moment to go back through my own notes, I can hit on those points again. And I’ll apologize for being a little repetitive, but here we go. So some of the stuff in the NPRM is going to be the requirement for mandatory security data elements for 321 shipments and that is not going to matter what mode of transportation it’s arriving through or the fact that it’s international mail. They will all be included.
And that’s also going to include additional mandatory data elements if filing entry.
Brandon Fried: Okay.
Craig Clark: Now again, I’m going to extend to you the opportunity to speak to more targeted, you know, experts regarding this. If you want to set up a call or a meeting certainly, I can do that for you. But the - also included are a new data collection process that is going to leverage the 321 Data Pilot and Type 86 test programs. So basically, taking the lessons learned from those pilots and applying them to a new data collection process. And a single data requirement for de minimus to clarify eligibility requirements and address the trade liability.
Brandon Fried: Perfect. Thanks, Craig. Good to talk to you again.
Craig Clark: You’re welcome.
Richard Boll: Thanks, Brandon. Next one please.
Coordinator: Melzie Wilson, your line is open.
Melzie Wilson: Hi Craig. How are you?
Craig Clark: I’m well. It’s good - I’m really loving that I’m hearing all of you guys.
Melzie Wilson: All the old timers are together.
Craig Clark: I know.
Melzie Wilson: First of all, thank you for the information. One of the questions I have is related to the 321 and Entry Type 86. Sometimes we have a disconnect between what the requirements are in enforcement. Is - in the NPRM can you elaborate if we’re going to see enforcement parameters in the policies in regard to value, origin, and the PGA requirement?
Craig Clark: So Melzie, that is not something that I have information on and I’m not even…
Melzie Wilson: Okay.
Craig Clark: …sure how much can be discussed at this point.
Melzie Wilson: Right.
Craig Clark: Let me reach back and if there is some information that can be shared, I’ll pass that through Mr. Boll and have that distributed.
Melzie Wilson: Okay. A secondary question to that is you talked about the volume. And we know that the volume that hit with the additional data collection of Section 321 and 86, has been a tremendous strain upon the ACE system. What are the plans going forward, in helping support a more robust system to collect all this data and not be subjected to downtime?
Craig Clark: Okay. So that’s - apologies, but I don’t have any specific responses for you, Melzie. But I will - oh, sorry for the dogs guys. Such is the nature of working from home. I will get information from…
Melzie Wilson: Okay.
Craig Clark: …the ACE folks and see what we can tell you about that.
Melzie Wilson: And last but not least, as, you know, you mentioned the OT 2025 strategic plan, the 21st Century Framework, I understand that right now of course we’re putting together - CBP’s putting together their legislative package. Can you highlight some of what, in that legislative package that you’ll be presenting to the new Administration?
Craig Clark: So again, I cannot. And I apologize for not having that kind of info. But you’re asking really great questions.
Melzie Wilson: I should have prompted you.
Craig Clark: I’m so sorry that I don’t have that info for you. But - and ordinarily I would have someone from that office to help support. But apologies for that this time around.
Melzie Wilson: Okay.
Craig Clark: But let me go back to them and I’ll see what I can get you, you know, in terms of an outline of what that may contain.
Melzie Wilson: Okay. I appreciate that. Thank you.
Craig Clark: Thanks, Melzie.
Richard Boll: All right, thanks. Another question, please. We have someone else still in queue?
Coordinator: There are no other questions from this session.
Richard Boll: Okay. Well thank you, Craig, very much for your time and expertise and we definitely got some good questions out there. And we’ll - sounds like we’ll be getting back in touch with you and Val and maybe we’ll have some subcommittee meeting under Norm’s watch, sometime in the future. I appreciate your time.
Craig Clark: Let’s do it. And thank you guys very much. Have a good day. Enjoy your meeting.
Richard Boll: Okay. Thanks, Craig. So, do we have - I think Mike is on the call. Mike, can you give us the update on the Puerto Rico Export Requirements Update? If you can, you know, get him on the line, if you could, coordinator.
Coordinator: Yes. I have opened Michael’s line. So, your line is open, Michael.
Mike Mullen: Hi. Thanks very much. Can you hear me okay?
Richard Boll: Perfect.
Mike Mullen: Is Craig Clark still there? I was trying to get into the queue. I have a quick question for Craig.
Richard Boll: Is he still there? I don’t know. I’m sorry. I didn’t know he was - you were trying to get in on him. We can get back in touch with him though. I…
Mike Mullen: All right.
Richard Boll: I can pass his information to you.
Coordinator: Craig has disconnected.
Mike Mullen: Okay. All right. All right, well thanks very much for this opportunity to talk about where we are with the Puerto Rico EEI problem. I know this group has been engaged on this and we’ve sent some letters to the Secretary. And there has been movement. I mean just to recap a little, the - Congress and the Commerce Department’s Appropriations bill for FY ‘20 included language requiring that Commerce conduct a review of the EEI program with a view towards identifying alternative sources of data.
And Congress required a report answering that question by March 19th of last year which Commerce has not yet produced this report. But as Lucas Hitt from the Bureau of Economic Analysis briefed us last year, Commerce did begin a review of the Puerto Rico EEI requirement and that’s still ongoing. And part of the review is a request for comments from relevant stakeholders and that was issued via an Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking in September.
Census received 94 comments in response to the ANPRM with 42 favoring removing the EEI requirement and 52 against removing it. And 59 of these comments were part of the public docket. The other 35 comments were sent to Census by email and not made public. And I provided an analysis of the 59 public comments received in response to the ANPRM to Census and BEA, earlier this month.
And of these 59 comments, 31 submitters favored eliminating the requirement, while 28 requested it remained in place. And of the 28 who wished to continue receiving the EEI data only two represent valid government users. The remaining 26 are a combination of private sector parties like academics or researchers or businesses who make money off the data.
Or there were several that were just unidentified entities who submitted one to two-line comments with no justification for why they were saying the EEI requirement should be continued. So, one has to question the validity of those submissions, I think. But the bottom line on that is it’s supporting private sector research activities or business operations should not be considered a valid justification for the existence of a federal regulation, particularly one that imposes significant cost on other private sector entities.
And this fact was pointed out by the majority of the public commenters who favored eliminating the EEI requirement. So, the two parties who offered valid reasons to support maintaining the requirement were government entities which indicated the data was necessary to analyze economic activity in the Virgin Islands. And the territorial government of the Virgin Islands said they needed the information to calculate GDP and measure petroleum imports.
But their comment also stated that monthly or annual availability of the data would meet their needs. The other government entity was the Office of Insular Affairs at the US Department of the Interior, and they said they receive an annual report from BEA that’s based on the reports from the Census Bureau - these are known as FT 895 reports - which incorporate the EEI data for the Virgin Islands, and that the - this annual report is used to calculate Virgin Island GDP and other economic statistics.
But in addition to the Virgin Islands, this Office of Interior, is responsible for Guam, the Marianas and American Samoa, but not Puerto Rico. Their input stated they received these BEA reports on these other territories that also are based on Census Bureau FT 895 reports and obviously use non-EEI sourced trade data. So, these other - these reports on Guam and the other territories which obviously are not based on EEI data are critical inputs for the requirements and apparently are sufficient for the Office of Interior - I’m sorry, the Office of Insular Affairs’ needs.
And the office stated that an annual frequency of the FT 895 data would meet their needs. So, there’s two major conclusions from this analysis. One is that Census is producing FT 895 reports on economic activity in Guam and the other US territories, that are adequate for calculating GDP and other economic analysis performed by government users. These reports do not rely on the EEI data. So clearly there are alternative sources of economic data that are available to meet Census’s needs and the EEI requirement could be eliminated.
And two, even if the EEI requirement was maintained the FT 895 reports that Census produces, are provided monthly or annually, which indicates a monthly reporting of the Puerto Rico and Virgin Islands trade transactions would be adequate to support these reports. And that we don’t need a transaction by transaction reporting system.
So, in addition to the Express Association, there were other major associations submitting comments on the ANPRM with collectively, thousands of members who all favored eliminating the EEI requirement. And several individual citizens of Puerto Rico also favored eliminating the EEI requirement because it treated Puerto Rico like a foreign country.
So I suggested to Census that they use the same kind of analysis I went through, to examine the justifications provided by those who wish to keep the EEI requirement, and see how many of those were actually supporting valid functions by a government user. So just to wrap up, the Express Association had a discussion with a member of the Biden Transition Team for Census earlier this month, and she is an official who was a Deputy Undersecretary of Commerce for Economic Affairs in the Obama Administration and she was very familiar with the Puerto Rico EEI issue.
And we discussed the following issues that one, the EEI requirement treats Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands like foreign countries; two, submitting the data is expensive for shippers and carriers, particularly small and medium enterprises; three, the Puerto Rico government has said they want the requirement eliminated; four, Census is producing similar economic reports on Guam and other US territories that do not rely on the EEI data, so clearly alternative sources of the relevant information are available; and five, that the requirement should be eliminated or at least changed to a monthly report from shippers, on their total transactions with these islands.
So, she recognized that the reporting information - the reporting this information is a burden for companies. And we told her about the House report that accompanied the Commerce budget last year. And we - I went through that review of the analysis of the responses to the ANPRM. And we ended up letting her know that there are two key questions - one is does the purpose for which the data is being used to find its cost; and two, why is Puerto Rico treated differently from Guam and other territories? And no one from Commerce or BEA or Census, has ever been able to answer that question.
So, she said the new Administration will be discussing Puerto Rico - the Puerto Rico situation extensively, to include the economy. And the need for the EEI data will be a part of the mix for that discussion. And that the insights she got form the call with us were very helpful and she included the papers we gave her on this in the materials for the landing team that went into Census to support their work during the first 100 days. So, I’m happy to take any questions on that.
Richard Boll: Operator, could you open up for some questions?
Eugene Alford: Hey, this is Eugene…
Coordinator: Yes, sir. If you have a question…
Eugene Alford: …just before…
Richard Boll: Hey Eugene.
Coordinator: …press star 1 please.
Richard Boll: Eugene? Wait one second. Eugene?
Eugene Alford: Just before we start with the questions and folks if you have them, please do join, we did reach out to our colleagues in BEA and Census to see if they wanted to speak today. And as Mike noted, they’ve been going through an - an Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking process. And so, they have not finished that process, so therefore they were unable to speak on this issue today. Back over to you all. Thanks.
Richard Boll: Okay. Maybe take a question or two? Because I know our next speaker is on the line as well. So, can you open it up please?
Coordinator: Yes, sir. If you have a question, please press star 1.
Richard Boll: Are there no questions?
Coordinator: I don’t see any questions at this time, sir.
Richard Boll: Okay. Well thank you very much for opening it up. Thank you, Mike. I appreciate the great update and the insight you had from, you know, working on this issue hands on. I appreciate it. Thanks, Mike.
Mike Mullen: My pleasure.
Richard Boll: So next on the agenda as I’ve told you, our office has a new Deputy Assistant Secretary or I should say a new boss for our office and he’s been able to agree some time for our committee, to give us some remarks. And his name is Chris Hoff. And Chris, I think you are on the line. I’d love to have you, you know, give your remarks. I appreciate it. Thank you.
Chris Hoff: Thank you, Rich. Good morning everyone and thank you for having me here today. As we mentioned, I am the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Services here at ITA and it is my 7th day on the job. So, I’m hitting the ground running and I’m so impressed already with our supply chain office here and the members of the Advisory Committee. I had a chance to look quickly through your bios and I must say I’m very impressed and very honored to be here.
So, let me start by taking this opportunity to thank the ACSCS members, for their tireless work during the COVID-19 crisis. I’d specifically like to commend the tireless efforts to the supply chain workforce from your companies and organizations, because our country like never before, has come to realize how essential these workers are, from the truckers who drive the nation’s highways delivering every type of goods to the store worker who ensure the shelves are stocked and sanitized, to the air cargo pilots who have flown to all point across the world, to bring home critical healthcare products, to the delivery drivers who’ve brought online orders to our homes where we all are stuck and have been stuck, to the port and airport workers who have guaranteed the shipment continues seamlessly, and so many more.
So, we say thank you to all of you. Supply chains are the lifeblood of a competitive economy and a vital link in the services and manufacturing ecosystem which is the foundation of our 21st Century economy. As evidenced by the explosive growth of eCommerce, supply chains are among the most powerful drivers of innovation and growth throughout our economy.
We rely on and are actively engaging with stakeholders in the supply chain industry such as yourselves to identify and resolve competitive pain points whether in a maritime system, air cargo or in trucking to reduce barriers to trade and regulatory hurdles to improve the flow of goods across the United States.
So I would just say in addition to only been here seven days, I would normally say, I would be happy to take questions, but you are the experts — my office has the experts and I’m here to listen and I appreciate you having me again. So, I look forward to sitting in and hearing what all of you have to say during your meeting today.
So, thank you again for having me and I will leave it at that for now and turn it back to Richard.
Richard Boll: Okay. Thank you, Chris. Appreciate your time today. And I guess we will move on with the agenda. I know we are going to be, you know, going off to lunch. Does anybody have any additional comments – my co-chairs, the two Ricks or Eugene does anybody have anything they want to say before we go off to our lunches and then we will be getting back at around 1 o’clock sharp.
Rick Gabrielson: Yes. Richard, this is Rick. I just have one comment if Chris is still on. Welcome to the group. We are pleased to have someone onboard so quickly. And I’m sure this will come up more formally later on but on behalf of our committee and our Chair Rick, I would love to – once the secretary has been is in place and the team is starting to get assembled I think our team would greatly appreciate hearing from the secretary herself on the list of priorities. What’s important to you?
We can share what we have done, what we are working on and some of that will come forward this afternoon. But we would really love to hear (unintelligible) because that will really help our community kind of shape the direction and the missions you want to go after. Thank you.
Chris Hoff: I would love that opportunity so thank you for the welcome and of course you probably all been following secretary nominees among those, senate confirmation hearings and they seem to have been – seem to be going quite well. So, we look forward to hopefully having her in the building soon as well. And so, we would love to be able to do that.
Rick Gabrielson: Wonderful. Thank you.
Richard Boll: Anyone else? Rick did you have anything?
Rick Blasgen: Yes. I just wanted to say – I just wanted to add my welcome as well Chris. We appreciate you coming on short notice. Our group has been around for I guess since 2011 now so and so Richard you had mentioned, and I forget how many meetings 34 or something like that.
Richard Boll: Correct.
Rick Blagen: And over the years we have made a lot of recommendations and that’s our job as industry representatives to do that. So, we appreciate your participation. And I also want to thank all of our speakers and the committee for the work that we are doing.
When we look at the agenda this afternoon it’s pretty action packed as well but I also want to make sure we encourage questions and also have a discussion around the this term chairs where that makes sense as well. So, Richard.
Richard Boll: That’s great. Thanks for all that. And also I know we had to, you know, cut off some of the questions from an earlier person just because of the time but remember if you were in the queue or anybody else, any questions that you want me to pass on or contact information, you know, please send something to me after the meeting and I will be glad to set something up from you.
And also seems like (unintelligible) we already have stuff set up for his subcommittee already with Craig so that will work out too. We can get a subcommittee meeting on that.
So, with that I will let everyone go off for their lunches. Enjoy your lunch and then we will be back at 1 o’clock and we will start 1 o’clock sharp. And as Rick said, we have some great speakers and hopefully some great questions as well for these speakers and I look forward to your engagement on the second half of the meeting. Appreciate it and thank you and enjoy your lunch. We will see you at 1:00.
Chris Hoff: Thank you.
Coordinator: Thank you for standing by. The conference can begin again. Thank you.
Richard Boll: Okay. Well, thank you everyone for coming back. I appreciate it. I hope everyone had an enjoyable lunch and I hope everyone was able to get back on the Internet and on the voice portion of the call. I think we are set for pretty much for the second half of the day’s presentations.
Is there anything the two Ricks would like to say before we get started?
Rick Gabrielson: No. I think we are good. We have got a lot of great discussions going on. And Richard, do we want to change any of the protocols for folks asking questions or are we good to go the way we – the way you…
Richard Boll: I think right now we will just keep it as it is and then we will decide maybe for our next call or something like that if we want to go that route. But I think this way – they have got to go on queue anyway so I think we will just keep it that way. How is that? Okay.
Rick Gabrielson: Okay. I’m good.
Richard Boll: Okay. Reuven and Michelle? Is Michelle on?
Dr. Reuven Pasternak: I don’t see her on the list yet.
Coordinator: We have…
((Crosstalk))
Coordinator: …trying to join so I will open their lines here in one second as soon as they finish (unintelligible).
Richard Boll: Okay.
Coordinator: So, it should just take about one – probably less than a minute.
Richard Boll: Okay. Reuven, would you like your presentation up on the screen now?
Dr. Reuven Pasternak: Yes. That would be fine. Thank you.
Richard Boll: Are you on Michelle?
Coordinator: Michelle has joined the conference.
Richard Boll: Hello Michelle, this is Richard Boll, how are you doing?
Dr. Michelle Holko: Hi, I’m good. Thank you. I’m sorry it took me a long time to figure out how to get all connected here.
Richard Boll: Yes, it tends to be a little landmine getting in and all that, but I appreciate you getting on. I know Reuven is on so we are okay so if you can start off with your presentation, I would appreciate it. Thank you.
Dr. Michelle Holko: Thank you.
Richard Boll: Reuven, are you on?
Dr. Reuven Pasternak: Okay. Ready for us to start?
Richard Boll: Yes, please. Thank you.
Dr. Reuven Pasternak: Okay. Well, good afternoon. I’m Dr. Reuven Pasternak and I’m here with Dr. Michelle Holko and we will be presenting the COVID vaccine, therapeutics, diagnostics, and healthcare delivery enablers supply chain.
Next slide, please.
First to introduce ourselves I will ask Michelle to give her background and I will do the same and we will start going through our slide presentation. Michelle, would you like to give your background, please?
Dr. Michelle Holko: Yes. Thank you so much Reuven and thanks so much for having us here. My name is Michelle Holko my technical background is in Genomics and Bioinformatics, Biotechnology and Bio-security. And I’m currently serving as the Presidential Innovation Fellow, detailed (unintelligible) cyber security and infrastructure security agency to work on healthcare cyber security and the bio economy. Back to you Reuven.
Dr. Reuven Pasternak: And thank you Michelle. I’m Reuven Pasternak. I have several roles on the clinician trade and anesthesiologist, critical care medicine practicing that with an emphasis on doing research in risk factor identification and mitigation for clinical and operational issues. I did that for 20 years in the faculty of John Hopkins and then went into Health System and Health Business management serving assistant CMO, then System Chief Executive Officer and Executive Vice President of Large Health Systems for another 15 years.
And I’m currently a member of the team going on as an Interim Senior Advisor to National Risk Management Center and working with Michelle and others on programs associated with COVID and that’s for a one-year period that started last June.
In our presentation today we will give an introduction to CNRNC, and then an introduction to our supply chain work and (unintelligible) prioritization effort and then ongoing and future healthcare supply chain initiatives with other partners.
Next slide, please.
So CISA is the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. We are designed to secure and create a resilient infrastructure for the American people. And with that we partner with industry and government to understand and manage risks to our nation’s critical infrastructure. (Unintelligible) today and defend against urgent threats and hazards and secure tomorrow so it’s mitigation.
The National Risk Management Center is the planning, analysis and collaboration center working with CISA and we analyze strategic risk, lead public and private partnership, and collaborate with the private sector and other stakeholders to better understand future threats.
Next slide, please. And the next one.
So, when we are talking about high stake supply chain this is not the first time we talked about supply chain vulnerability and its impact on the economy. 1973 — going back to the year I started medical school — we certainly had our challenges then and in that circumstance a group of nations who were unable to match us from a military perspective or necessarily a diplomatic perspective used supply chain interruption to fundamentally alter the economic, social and political landscape.
And in doing so set the tone for the ability to manage supply chain initiative and to look at identifying risk factors and then what can be done to address those.
The recognition of this vulnerability created the drive for MG independence which decades later saw the United States move from the largest net importer to a major exporter of energy.
Next slide.
Now we go to the high-stake supply chain and what we will be talking about today 2020 to 2021.
So even beyond the issue of the economy and the major economic, social, and political disruption this is a matter of life and death. And in this case as of two days ago you see the figures up there for the United States alone greater than 425,000 dead, over 25 infected and multiples of that on the world stage.
So, we have in this case the need to develop a supply chain initiative whose everyday delay and any possible disruption has a profound effect on the health and welfare of large numbers of individuals and nations.
Next slide.
So, this is a war time supply chain to the bio-scientists (unintelligible) is the 21st Century version of the Manhattan Project. We had to accelerate innovation at a stage previously on that to encourage development or production and delivery systems of widely divergent method dimensions with major logistical challenges to meet target populations to include considerations of socioeconomic issues and do so under intense public scrutiny.
In this case the difference in this with the Manhattan Project whereas the former was done in secret at a remote location using one pathway to one scientific solution, the operation Work Speed involved multiple organizations and different countries moving under very intense public pressure and public view to identify a product to mitigate a life threatening risk.
Next slide.
The vulnerabilities and risks we needed to set successful scientific strategies, translated into products and tests and clinical trial required adequate availability of raw materials and production facilities, appropriate distribution facilities, physical supply chain security and something that was new in this area cyber security for the various entities involved.
Next slide.
And I’m going to ask Michelle to take over here because she will take us into the development, how the (unintelligible) and a secure supply chain process ensured. Michelle?
Dr. Michelle Holko: Yes. Thank you so much for setting that up Reuven. So as Reuven mentioned, you know, since the July timeframe we have been kind of all hands-on deck working on security and assurances for Operation Work Speed as an interagency effort.
And one of the things that became apparent within the first week of joining the team at CISA was that NRMC (the National Risk Management Center) we were kind of on the receiving end of a lot of different risks of entities or companies that people thought were important for the COVID-19 response to be successful.
So, these risks were coming from the Operation Work Speed itself. They were coming from our other interagency partners that, you know, entities that weren’t directly involved in Work Speed but that were also so important. They were also coming from our transatlantic partners so our international partners.
And so, it became clear that we needed to do something with this. We needed to be able to instead of just take this list of 1000 different entities and say, okay, we are going to try to help all these 1000 entities at one time because we can’t really do that.
We needed to find a way to identify, prioritize and defend critical COVID-19 entities at which we subsequently called ball bearing like entities throughout the COVID-19 response.
So, we created a decision support tool for entity prioritization, and we were specifically using it for just cyber security services, but the same type of prioritization schema can be used for other applications like procurement or acquisitions.
And really it’s a very simple schema that’s based on criteria developed by (unintelligible) healthcare subject matter experts A.K.A me and Reuven but with a lot of input from, you know, our other colleagues as well as our interagency partners.
And if you go onto the next slide, I will tell you a little bit more about what we decided to include in there. So, this is the overall process for what we did.
So basically, the first step was to take all the risks and make a list universe which ended up being about 1000 entities in this case.
And then after we had decided which factors we thought were important to consider in this schema, we basically just went through the list and we put these factors into that list universe.
Step two was to work with our analysis team to resolve missing data elements and any inconsistencies in the matrix or the scoring.
And then the third was to develop a schema to create a prioritized list. And we were doing inputs on six different factors, but we ended up horning in on these four factors to develop the schema that ultimately led us to our tier 1 prioritized risk list. And those are - product type, scarcity, dependency, and material impact potential.
So, product type gave you some information about what is the product. It is an mRNA vaccine? It is a protein subunit vaccine? Is it a serology based diagnostic test et cetera. And then those various different types of products had different ratings according to what type of product it was.
Scarcity, we were thinking about, you know, is this a product that or a company or a capability that doesn’t have very many alternatives and that’s also very scarce and that’s needed many different times. Or is this something that we have abundant supply for? And, you know, most of these so product types is pretty stable unless a company adds another product type in which case we add that at a different line.
But, you know, scarcity, dependency, and material impact potential they can all change over time. So that’s one of the nice things about this method is that we were able to, you know, come up with a prioritized list but also make changes and adapt over time.
And then dependency tells you, you know, how many other products is this related to. So, something like glass viols that every vaccine is going to need has a high dependency rating.
And then material impact potential is simply, you know, how winning would it be if we had this capability, if we had adequate supply of it in order to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.
So again, those steps led to the just the tier 1 list of – that was the output. And then we decided to focus our outreach on domestic U.S or with our international partners if the company was not in the U.S.
And then for service delivery we were focused a little bit more on products that are either commercially available already or in the later stages of development.
Next slide.
This is just an output of the list with no names on it to protect the confidentiality of that product. But basically, we were able to show that we were – so we went from left to right. The one on the left is obviously the highest priority. And then we tiered them the highest priority and moderate priority and lower priority and we were calling them red, yellow, and green just for ease of use.
And one of the interesting things and it doesn’t show here but, one of the interesting things is that, you know, we wanted to see if we thought this method was working. And, you know, some of the more high priority entities that we already knew were high priority like the Operation Work Speed companies as well as, you know, some of the others that had come over to us. Those ended up falling into the highest priority group. So that gave us confidence that the process was working.
But at the same time, it also did allow us to identify quote-unquote barbarian companies fall into the top that, you know, had previously not been on our radar.
Go to the next slide.
So basically, you know, the team was then able to take that output and work through the list from the highest priority down through into the lowest priority entities — and a lot of progress has been made on that at the regional level.
So regional we just coordinated between CISA as well as the interagency partners — it’s absolutely a team effort with HHS, FBI, DoD.
And for entities with international presence I mentioned before we are coordinating with the international team leads and the national partners.
And next step includes doing analysis of alternatives for critical ball and nuts and ball bearing like entities as well as what Reuven is going to tell you a little bit about in terms of expanding this kind of an analysis, you know, to the healthcare system more broadly even beyond COVID. Back over to you Reuven. Reuven, are you on mute.
Dr. Reuven Pasternak: I’m sorry. Thank you. So, as we go into taking the product and getting it to the point where it’s going to be delivered, this supply chain has been unique as you have probably read about in the news. And the preparation for it requires that we be prepared to deliver two very different products with two very different technical demands.
And it is a system where the federal government delivered the supplies to the states and territories with the states and territories then engaging in a distribution based on recommendations as provided by the CDC with input from Homeland Security and the National Academy of Medicine and National Academy of Sciences.
Then in addition to the supply chain there was a need for a highly sophisticated IT infrastructure to monitor the application of every single vaccine and the recording of every response both at the time of administration and to follow up patients.
So, in contrast to other products which when bought by a consumer then off you go. This required kind of an ongoing cyber relationship as it were between the recipient and the administrative site and the federal government so that we could track any side effects and complications of the vaccine.
Which then led to some competing aspects of the supply chain where it was a public health perspective in terms of placing this into the hands of the public sector and using mass estimation sites and a merchandizing perspective —where it was placed in groups such pharmacies and grocery stores with the idea that these are distributed off to a wider area and closer to the point of administration for populations at risk.
What we are seeing now is that both are being employed and application software and application management by past and current administrations are now expanding the public health perspective as well. And we can go into that with more questions if you like.
And then the next slide.
So, what’s next to this? The application of this methodology is going to be expanded and where we see the ability to do that is to go to healthcare in its broadest sense. Healthcare is the single largest economic sector. It’s also one of the largest national economies of the world at 17% of our gross domestic products.
In the concept of the healthcare sector healthcare supply chain reliability and resiliency has been of increasing concern even before the pandemic.
Prior to the pandemic there was staff shortages of some pharmaceuticals, other supply chains were sometimes being stretched and stressed. And so, in many regards the ability to maintain the smooth flow of equipment and materials to the healthcare sector was facing stresses that the pandemic simply took to the breaking point in a number of different areas.
So, part of what we are doing is to use the lessons learned from the pandemic and the tools developed for OWS to enhance supply chain reliability and security for the health sector and for the buying economy. In doing this we will applying what Michelle has advised in terms of the vaccine which is to identify those stress points with their potential vulnerability and by monitoring the flow of materials and also the buying of materials be able to proactively identify where there are potential problems in the system and address those before they lead to disruption.
Finally, in using this and other methodologies to develop proactive stress test in risk mitigation for health care institutions in the same way we have done with financial institutions after the 2008 financial stress to have a way to look at the health sector, look at supply chain and look at operations and proactively identify those that are dropping into an area of risk and concern and to assist them with active intervention to prevent them getting to a break point.
So that is how we have worked on the supply chain for vaccines. That is where we see a broader application both in terms of breath of the health sector as well as outside the United States and we would be happy to entertain questions at this point.
Richard Boll: Thank you, Reuven. I appreciate both of your presentations. We would like to be able to open up for questions for Reuven and Michelle, could you please do that for us?
Coordinator: Yes. sir. If you would like to ask a question as a reminder, press star 1 and record your name clearly. We do have our first question from Nick Vyas. Your line is open.
Nick Vyas: Thank you. Thank you, Reuven and Michelle. Appreciate it. Great presentation. My name is Nick Vyas, I’m a faculty at the University of Southern California in the department called Data Science and Operations. And I’m also the Executive Director for Center for Global Supply Chain Management.
And back in March we launched a healthcare consortium simply because there was a tremendous confusion across the states about not having an understanding of how source the PPEs as well as just lacking the information overall disruption that was created because of COVID.
Came forward in January what we are seeing is a vaccine distribution. In the State of California, we are seeing massive confusion and failure of people getting vaccinated.
So my proposition here is, the consortiums that we have which is academia industry partners one of the models that we charge here today the industry has really perfected in many fronts a lot of sophistications like in terms of the categorization, in terms of the procurement, in terms of the sourcing to the distribution to the allocation.
Are we planning to sort of collaborate outside of the agencies to reach out and see the opportunities so that we can adopt to these best practices? And if so, how so? And I would like to connect with you guys offline and share some of the work we are doing just to bridge the gap in the short term.
Reuven Pasternak: Okay. Well, fascinating question. First, thank you for your work and congratulations on the work that you have been doing. So yes, there is an initiative to reach out to the private sector. There is an established interface between the private sector and health and human services and in Homeland Security we are a part of that.
And that sector has most for the last two weeks to look at an acceleration for vaccine administration to solicit suggestions from the private sector in terms of what they have observed and what suggestions they have for every aspect of the process. Ranging from how the supply chain is designed, what type of system could be used to reach the greatest number of people, communication.
So, I’m sure you have heard what others have heard which is people calling up and getting busy signals or not being able to get through. What we can do for better communication?
So that has been opened up with everything open for suggestion and interpretation and it’s being done on an accelerated timetable because this is something which needs to be done now and is being done at the request of the administration.
Our email addresses are up there. I think they are on the screen now. So, if you could reach out to Michelle or myself, we would appreciate it. We would like to hear what you are doing, and we can bring that forward to our colleagues.
Dr. Michelle Holko: Yes. I would also just like to add to that. So, I totally second Reuven’s offer to set up a set of time to discuss offline. The other way that we connect with the private sector and, you know, coordinate activities is through the (ISAC) so the Information Analysis Sharing – I’m probably butchering the acronym. But anyway, so we work pretty close with the healthcare and public health sector ISAC. And we definitely have some, you know, supply chain related coordination across.
But, you know, one of the things that’s interesting and fascinating to me about connecting is that we can learn things from what other sectors have done as well so I would absolutely like top connect with you.
Nick Vyas: Thank you. And I think one of the only points – I mean you guys are inner circle of the new administration in the DPA and I know the Biden administration has shown keen interest to use a bigger umbrella of DPA.
My conversation last week with both the media and the Internal within the state has been this whole mind of decentralized planning and execution has caused tremendous chaos on both the supply and demand side constraints that we are dealing with.
Do hopefully we can actually take it offline and talk about some of the findings, solutions and all the academic research work within the industry and some of the findings over the last nine months.
Dr. Michelle Holko: That’s fantastic. Thank you.
Dr. Reuven Pasternak: Thank you.
Richard Boll: Thank you. Next question, please.
Coordinator: At this time, I don’t show any other questions in queue.
Richard Boll: Okay. Nobody else. Let me see. Do we have our next speaker online? I think we do. Michelle and Reuven, I thank you very much. I’m glad we were able to hook up and get you to be able to present at our committee and I’m sure you will probably get some hits on your email on your slide. Now, I appreciate your time and your execution and the work that you have been doing. I appreciate it. Thank you.
Dr. Michelle Holko: Thank you Richard.
Dr. Reuven Pasternak: Thanks.
Richard Boll: And I think I know Nick is on. Nick, do you know if Jonathan has joined us yet or is he on the phone yet?
Jonathan Murphy: Yes, I’m on.
Nick Reese: Yes. He is here.
Richard Boll: Okay. Perfect. Fantastic. Okay. Well, I will just let you guys take it away and you can talk about the National Maritime Cybersecurity Plan and that you again for agreeing to brief our committee. I appreciate it. Thank you.
Jonathan Murphy: Yes. Sure thing. Thanks Richard. I really want to express our gratitude both to you and the entire committee for the opportunity to join the meeting today to discuss the recently releases National Maritime Cybersecurity Plan.
By way of introduction, my name is Jonathan Murphy I’m the Director for Cyber Policy at DHS in our Office of Policy sort of headquarters level sort of working with all of our components on critical infrastructure security issues such as this.
Nick, do you want to introduce yourself real quick?
Nick Reese: Sure. Thanks Jonathan. Good afternoon everybody. My name is Nick Reese. I’m a Senior Cyber Policy Advisor on Jonathan Murphy’s team. And the Maritime Cybersecurity Plan is something that we have been working on for a long-time, so we are really excited to be able to dig in this one to brief it. Thanks a lot.
Jonathan Murphy: Thanks, Nick. Nick is the expert, so he is here to keep me honest today. Now just a little more introduction, you know, our office the Office of Policy again we work very closely with our component colleagues and U.S Coast Guard, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agencies, FEMA in particular on this effort and on other obviously across the department in a range of authorities and responsibilities.
The concepts outlined in the plan for those of you who have seen it is built on an enduring haul of government commitment to support the cybersecurity of the Maritime Transportation System which is of course a top priority for National Defense, Homeland Security, economic competitiveness and a key responsibility for our department and its components.
As you can all and as the supply chain world attest to the U.S is a maritime nation and we depend on a robust integrated and procured maritime transportation system to support our economic prosperity and provide financial defense.
Our ports, terminals, ships, refineries, and support systems are vital components of our nation’s critical infrastructure and national security and the global economy.
But by way of background for this specific plan for those of you who have been following the maritime state for a while, in 2005 we release the National Strategy for Maritime Security. Obviously, the plan is fairly dated, and we have a refresh and we view this as an opportunity to really bring the cybersecurity component of the strategy up to snuff through the development of this plan.
For this corp this plan really just calls for an alignment and unification of existing maritime cybersecurity resources, stakeholders and initiatives with really a focus on gaining better visibility into existing and future cyber and technological risks for the maritime domain and better posturing to support the risk mitigation activity both within the remade of what the federal government can do but also in support of our private sector stakeholders.
So, I think it’s important to know at the outset that nothing in the plan provides any regulatory authority to any entity or anything like that. However, you know, it does aim to advance our collective understanding of the risks we face and identify a means by which the U.S government can both directly support and prioritize cybersecurity in the Maritime Transportation System.
With that I will just run through a few of the highlights from the plan and then certainly open it up and would appreciate any questions at the end.
So, you will see three key things throughout the plan. The first this is sort of risks and standards and really a few priority items and actions directed to departments and agencies to really get at the challenge of understanding the cyber risks on the environment. And then figuring out how we can leverage that better understanding to improve through existing standards some of the activities we have got going on.
So, the first really is the sort of internal U.S government priority action and its really just conflicting roles and responsibilities. Obviously, a lot of players in the maritime space when you start to think beyond just things that move on the water and start to think about other operations that take place in the maritime environment.
You know, the key theme across not just maritime but the rest of the U.S government is really be conflicting a lot of the roles and responsibilities of cybersecurity activities.
Priority two is development of a risk model to inform standards, best practices. And this is sort of an acknowledgement that there is a lot of capability and expertise across the U.S government that we probably aren’t tapping into as deeply as possible.
The Coast Guard in particular has a lot of information. Not necessarily all the risk modeling capabilities within the U.S government so sort of direct department and agencies to work together to better understand the cybersecurity risks in particular that face the Maritime Transportation System.
Priority three looks at the requirements and support services contracts and leasing. This is really a GSA focused action so I won’t speak to it too much but expect that, you know, how do we leverage the relationships we have as a federal government through contracts and other legally binding obligations to, you know, ensure that people who we are doing business with are taking cybersecurity seriously.
And then priority four really looks at procedures to identify, prioritize, mitigate, and investigate risks to critical ships and port systems. Again, an acknowledgement that we have a lot of dispersed activities going on to understand this – that pulling them all together sort of to culminate something that looks like a framework to support security assessments.
Again, I think we have a fairly robust understanding of IT port assessment or IT assessment that be leveraged in the port environment. I think, you know, another piece of this that we want to get out is really the operational technology that exists within the maritime domain and figure out how to, you know, not only understand for ourselves how to assess the cybersecurity of that technology. But also, you know, ultimately to provide some value back to the industry and supporting their risk management activities.
Another one to highlight here, so again, we want to leverage the tools and capabilities that we already have in place. One of which is the port security grants that FEMA administers for the department. And again we do currently prioritize cyber security activities under that grant – awarding those grants but we want to continue to ensure that those entities looking to use that grant money for cybersecurity enhancements, you know, get some benefit priority within the FEMA grant process.
So - the second key theme after risk incentives is information and intelligence sharing. These are obviously key buzz words that the government throws around a lot. But there were some targeted actions in this document and accompanying sort of implementation plans looking at improving, you know, tangible improvements to the information and intelligence sharing relationship that we have with the private industry.
The first, you know, round ensuring that the private industry has access to either downgraded or otherwise sensitive information that they can use for actionable purposes. I think as part of that it’s not just the private sector, I guess it is the domestic private sector and nongovernmental entities as well as international partners. You know, understanding there is a lot of good work going on and, you know, we want to incentivize that open line of communication as best we can.
The second really focuses around creating a specific process by which we can share cybersecurity intelligence, information with appropriate nongovernmental organizations. You know, different groups of private sector entities have different processes by which they partner with the government on classified matters.
We want to make sure that we are streamlining that effort and making sure that the right partners within the industry and outside the government have access to actionable information that they can use. So - it’s really a streamlining opportunity for us within the government.
And then priority three in that area is prioritizing Maritime’s cyber intelligence collection in sort of a deliverable requirement of the U.S government. But nonetheless, we want to just make sure that the priorities are very clear within the intelligence community and are focused on the maritime domain and want to make improvements there as possible.
And then the third key theme really (unintelligible) prior to this again, none of these are I mean (unintelligible) National Maritime Cybersecurity Plan but they are key elements of all of our approach to cybersecurity is really centers around workforce and acknowledgment that the workforce of today is not meeting the need off today or tomorrow. So - we need to continue to adapt and advance.
So you see the priority activities here really center around ensuring that the U.S government has capable workforce who are providing clear pathways for people, you know, within the military services but also within the civilian agencies, you know, that specifically support the maritime domain. Providing them with the skills they need, you know, and port and vessel systems.
You know, priority number two is ensuring that there is a collaborative process by which we can work with the private sector to increase our maritime cyber expertise and whether that’s exchange programs or things like that. I think it’s a little early but certainly all options are on the table to figure out ways to tap into the expertise outside the federal government.
And then priority three is really government action. Develop and deploy capable maritime cybersecurity workforce.
So those are the key themes. Again, nothing earth shuttering here. Really sort of builds upon the good work that’s underway in many cases and prioritizes a few areas that – and just ensure that we are working as efficiently across the board tapping into the expertise within the government and also outside the government that exist to, you know, build a better, collective understand of the risks that we face in this environment and developing, you know, targeted mitigations to address those risks.
So, with that, I don’t know Nick, is there anything else you want to touch on specifically?
Nick Reese: No. Thanks Jonathan. I think that was a really good summary and, you know, some of the really relevant details. You know, if that’s good with you I think we should open up for questions.
Jonathan Murphy: Sure thing.
Richard Boll: Well, thank you Jonathan and Nick, I appreciate it for giving us a little rundown of the cybersecurity plan. I would like to be able to open it up for questions from our committee members or the participants of the meeting.
Coordinator: If you would like to ask a question please press star 1 on your phone. Thank you. One moment while the questions come in.
Richard Boll: I assume we have a few questions for this one.
Coordinator: Yes. We do have several questions. And the first one comes from (Brendan Freed). Your line ids open.
Brendan Fried: Hi folks and thanks for this very interesting and very relevant presentation. We have had some very high profile cyber and I guess ransomware attacks on the transportation industry specifically over the last month or so. What’s being done for other modes at this point? Can you give us some in-sight on those?
Jonathan Murphy: Yes. So - it’s funny you should say that before coming to this position I was a TSA working primarily in our service transportation face. So yes, I know TSA runs a few, you know, government industry partnership councils such as this. They are looking at a lot of the same priority activities, building up capabilities that are very much in line with this.
I should say that all of these priorities outlined in this plan stem from the National Cyber Plan which was released in 20 – either end of 2018-2019. But that sort of outlines, you know, not just cybersecurity but a broad range of cyber priorities for the whole of U.S government. But all of these are subsets of that, you know, the risks and standards, information and intelligence sharing, Maritime Cyber Workforce — these are key elements that are being worked across the federal government for the range of stakeholders.
But, specific to transportation, I know that there are efforts underway at TSA just like the Coast Guard to work through some of these activities. TSA is partnering with CISA on a number of specific and discreet activities focused on the different modes of transportation.
I’m certainly happy to get you in touch with the right folks if you want to shoot me an email.
Brendan Fried: That would be great. Thank you.
Richard Boll: Yes. Next question.
Coordinator: Our next question comes from Bill Hansen. Your line is open.
Bill Hansen: Thank you. And again, thanks for the presentation. We noticed the plan was issued in December. Excited to see that and – however, on a political level I noticed that it was signed by the previous president and I just want to make sure that President Biden also sees this as a priority and will continue to engage with those of us in the Maritime sector this really, really important issue.
Jonathan Murphy: Yes. So, I will say that this plan was developed primarily through support and by inputs from the career, you know, Civil Service and Military Command. So, these are enduring priorities within the departments and agencies irrespective of whoever is in the Whitehouse.
I will say that the 2005 National Strategy for Maritime Security and supports obviously spans three administration and now four. So, yes, the maritime will continue to be a top priority for certainly for the department — really, I can only speak for the department — but I anticipate across all of the U.S government.
Bill Hansen: Well, great. I work for a dredging company and I know the rest of the U.S Maritime industry wants to continue to engage us so you can expect some follow up from us as well. Appreciate it.
Jonathan Murphy: Thank you.
Richard Boll: Next question, please.
Coordinator: Yes, sir. Our next question comes from Brian Hancock. Your line is open.
Brian Hancock: Hi. Thank you again for this presentation. My question is more around the people side of this, you mentioned that you are developing a team to do this. Is there any plan inside of this particular plan to do some type of a rotational program? One of the things we are trying to find from an industry perspective is how do you make sure that somebody is not in their job so long that all of a sudden they become a risk just by the fact that they get disappointed in their career or whatever.
Is there a part of this where you are looking at rotational to make sure that people get exposed to a number of different risks? So, it’s not just maritime, it may be border cybersecurity, any of the other cybersecurity efforts that are going on across the government.
Jonathan Murphy: Sure. Yes. I would say, yes, within the government there are programs and increasingly a focus on those levels of exchanges, you know, giving people exposure to things outside their specific area of expertise, expanding knowledge.
But I would say, you know, even within this trend related to the private sector I know there is a call for DoD and DHS to pursue and encourage cybersecurity personnel exchange with the industry, the national lab, you know, with an approach towards improving that understanding of the risks in the maritime domain but, you know, really trying to tap into the expertise that may – and someone may have a skill set that’s not specific to maritime that could be applicable, you know, the opportunity to bring them in.
I don’t have any additional specifics on those levels or sort of personnel exchange or programs at this point. But it’s certainly something that we are moving out, you know, rapidly as we can to try to establish.
((Crosstalk))
Nick Reese: Okay. This is Nick. I just have one follow up to that. So - everything Jonathan said absolutely. The only addition that I would like to just throw out there is within DHS there is – a lot of this is already happening. And specifically referring to the Coast Guard Cyber Workforce, so in that realm we already had our Coast Guard cyber experts go over to CISA and work and train with the folks at CISA on some of the specific infrastructure and cybersecurity issues that they work on before coming back to Coast Guard.
So - some of those are already happening within the department and then also in addition what Jonathan mentioned about some of the public-private industry exchanges that are envisioned as part of this plan. Thanks.
Jonathan Murphy: Thanks, Nick.
Coordinator: Our next question comes from Walter Kemmsies. Your line is open.
Walter Kemmsies: Yes. Thank you. Excellent presentation. Really appreciate it. I just wanted to follow up with a couple of points. There were some industry wide platforms such as trade winds where originally Musk and IBM got together to establish a shipping platform to share information with the shippers and this has expanded a lot of ports and companies as well as other ocean carriers that have signed up for this. I wanted to know if you guys were working together.
And as a follow up to that, the system background or the platform they are using is also used for cyber currencies, you know, like a bit coin but some other types of trade in the U.S have shifted to using crypto-currencies to settles up payments and get rid of the need for lines of credit.
So since this is all kind of converging as well with the financial industry do you liaise with the financial sectors cyber security agency just to make sure everything is on par and in moving, you know, kind of in a safe direction — because what a lot of people are anticipating is that you will be using crypto-currencies going forward to eliminate lines of credit – sorry, letters of credit to support trade and this expands the usefulness of the trade lines type platform. Sorry, one question but…
Jonathan Murphy: No. No. That’s good. I would start by saying I’m not personally familiar with the trade lines platform. That’s not to say that there aren’t people within, you know, a certain (unintelligible) that are aware of that. I will certainly flag that for them. I think that’s good.
One of the challenges we have had is really, you know, unlike some other sectors or, you know, even other parts of the transportation sector, you know, there is not as robust. And ISAC – I believe there is an ISAC now, you know, for maritime specifically but, you know, there is not as natural a connection point for our information sharing platform especially sort of machine to machine to be having those exchanges.
So, any platforms that are out there are great. I think, you know, one of the things we envision doing through this plan is really promoting and figuring out the best way to engage the industry and leverage the tools that already exist, the relationships that already exist. So, I also can flag that for our maritime specific counterparts.
I will say, you know, certainly understand the connection, you know, transportation is not only multimodal, but it is also very intertwined with the other critical infrastructure sectors.
So, our partners still do a very good job of ensuring connectivity with other sectors like, you know, the financial services sector. We work very closely with the Treasury Department as well as industry partners in finance to, you know, ensure that we are tapping into their level of expertise across DHS.
But we will certainly look to pooling that collective perspective moving forward on the implementation of this plan.
Walter Kemmsies: That’s great. Thank you very much.
Richard Boll: Next question, please.
Coordinator: Our next question comes from Russell Adise. Your line is open, sir.
Russell Adise: Thanks very much. I appreciate that Jonathan and Nick thanks very much. Pre-pandemic – I’m with the Office of Service along with the Office of Supply Chain and work closely a colleague of Richard’s and Eugene’s and our offices involve pre-pandemic and a lot of the table-topping that was done at the NAC level to identify where some of the senior (unintelligible) and gaps were. And I think the strategy - I wanted to congratulate you. I think that the strategy will be - the plan that you put together is the basis of some very good work and some further implementation plans.
One question I had. One of the big issues that came up at the time was the need to be able to downgrade TS, SCI and upper level information to a level that could be shared with industry partners.
And that was debated quite heavily because it was a major concern. If you can’t get information from the industry partners, it kind of blinds us.
Have we looked at - proceeded beyond? How far have we gone since the pandemic started, which is when all of the tabletops stopped in the ability to - in finding a way to move intelligence into a format that can be fully shared with affected supply chain partners?
Jonathon Murphy: Yes, no. The work has not stopped. I will say that. You know, this is a broader effort undertaken by the intelligence community, our law enforcement partners, to figure out how to get the actionable information.
You know, sometimes its classified intelligence. Sometimes it’s sensitive law enforcement information. Sometimes it’s just information that the government has, you know, that’s for official use only but it’s how do we get - you know, how do we protect sources and methods on one hand but how do we balance that with the need to get actionable information into the hands of the people who actually own and operate the infrastructure?
And so, yes, there is still very much a priority around that within the U.S. government. You know, there are a number of efforts underway within the intelligence community to figure out how to do that more rapidly.
You know, we at DHS continue to prioritize, advocating for that and sort of any time we have the opportunity to do so because, you know, again our role really in this space is understanding the needs and limitations of the private sector.
And so, yes, we are still very much advocating and working with the intelligence community on figuring out effective processes for doing that.
Nick Reese: Thanks so much, John. I’m just going to jump in really quick with a little additional there. So, I think this is a really important question. And there’s a couple things in the maritime cybersecurity plan that address this.
So - one of the pieces of it is for the U.S. government to develop intelligence requirements that would be standing requirements that are relevant to cybersecurity’s maritime domain specifically. So that is one of the kind of actions that is written into this plan.
Another action is specifically for threat sharing, just as you described. And I think obviously there are challenges around, as John mentioned, protecting sources and methods but like still getting actual intelligence out.
But there’s also precedent for it, which is, you know, this is something that’s done in the law enforcement community pretty regularly, right, taking intelligence, protecting sources and methods, and taking it to court.
And so, like, I think is it solved? No, it’s not solved. But I think that one, it’s being prioritized. And two, I think we are starting to ask the right questions in terms of how we communicate with our collectors.
And then, you know, the final piece of this kind of goes back to the ISAC. So, you know, even if we do - we, the U.S. government, figure out a good way to do this, we still need a good procedure, a good process, to have that communication.
And I think that, you know, a good robust, you know, maritime domain, maritime sector ISAC would really go a long way to making that real. Thanks.
Man 1: Thanks very much.
Richard Boll: Next question, please.
Coordinator: I don’t see any other questions at this time.
Richard Boll: Okay. Well thank you very much, John and Nick. As you see, we got a lot of interest from the committee on this. I appreciate your time and I hope we keep touch as things move forward.
Coordinator: We do have one question that popped in.
Richard Boll: Oh, you have one more question? Are you okay with one more question, guys?
Jonathan Murphy: Sure.
Nick Reese: Sure. Fire away.
Richard Boll: Okay.
Coordinator: Walter Kemmsies, you’re back in queue. Your line is open.
Walter Kemmsies: Thank you. Just a quick note. DHL has a system called Risk 360 and it reports all kinds of risks to the supply chains across a wide range of things, accident, weather issues, strikes, whatever.
But I think it’s a great platform and maybe that might be a useful way to be able to communicate these cyber threats because it seems to be that a lot of places are hit multiple times a minute.
And so maybe being able to show where the hot spots are getting hotter as well as incident reports, that could all be done pretty efficiently on a platform like DHL’s.
I just wanted to recommend it.
Jonathan Murphy: Great.
Nick Reese: Thank you.
Walter Kemmsies: Thank you.
Richard Boll: Thank you.
Jonathan Murphy: Rich, I was going to say - I don’t know if it’s in the agenda or anything, but feel free to share our contact information if folks have any follow-on questions or want, you know, more information to get involved.
Richard Boll: Okay. I’ll send that to the whole committee if that’s okay with you?
Jonathan Murphy: Sure.
Richard Boll: Okay. Perfect. Thank you. And thank you again and hopefully I’ll get you back in for another conversation with the committee. Thank you. Okay.
I think Steve Hussain is on, correct? And I think, Michelle, you may have to queue him in. I know he’s on and he’s on his phone.
Coordinator: Mr. Hussain, if you are on and can press star 1 or star 0 so we can find your line. One moment. I think he’s signaling. Steven, your line is open.
Steve Hussain: Hi, there. How is everybody?
Richard Boll: Hey, good. Hey, Steven. I know you had a little problem getting on there. I appreciate you getting on for your presentation and stuff like that on workforce development, which is a big issue in our committee.
And I know you’ve spoken to a few people on the committee, or at least I know with Ann, with respect to workforce and how things are going out there in the logistic communities.
So - I appreciate your presentation and look forward to hearing it. Thanks a lot.
Steve Hussain: Thank you. I appreciate it. So, I will get started with just kind of a quick background. I know my colleague, Doug, is on this committee and has shared about Prologis.
But we are the world’s largest logistic real estate company, close to a billion square feet in our portfolio and 5,000 customers. And that is kind of why we are talking about workforce development today.
And my goal is to go through some data with you because I’m sure every single day you’re reading an article about what is happening in the land of workforce development and particularly in logistics.
So, to give you a little more insight, and then I’ll also talk a little bit about what Prologis is doing as an example of what can be done by the private sector in partnership with the public sector.
So, we’ll go ahead and get kicked off with the next slide. So, when we look at our customer base and if you look at customers across the country, the number one issue they face is not access to real estate. It’s not access to customers. It’s access to qualified workers.
And that has been consistent for several years. And it’s across geographies. It’s across industry types. It has remained consistent through the pandemic. Hiring qualified talent is the number one pain point.
And when you look at some of the other, you know, kind of causes of that and you look at the underlying data there, just on this slide, right, demand for faster response times, increasing competitiveness and just overall growth of the sector, that trend makes sense.
And as an organization it is one that we have taken stock of and said what are the things that we can do around that? Go ahead and go to the next slide.
When you look at the current landscape of what does a warehouse look like and what do the operations look like, there is a big range there, of course. But generally speaking, these are still very process driven kind of execution driven operations, so forklift operators, stockers, pickers, packers. That is still the basis of it today.
And the reason I say that is though that’s the landscape that we are in operating today, it’s not necessarily the landscape that we will be operating in long-term. But it is what our customers and partners across the country are dealing with today.
Next slide. So, in just a second, I’m going to dive into some additional data. But we conduct surveys with our customers across the country, actually globally, to understand what their pain points are, what kind of solutions work, what’s working for them, what’s not working.
And the data I am sharing is coming from one of those surveys. And it had 260 participants and represented 12,000 employees across the U.S. and Mexico. So just to kind of give you a frame of the scope and scale of the size of that survey that we’re sharing today.
Next slide. So, one of the first things is we wanted to understand labor intensity by sector. So, you see at the bottom we have retailers, three PLs, manufacturers, wholesalers, and transportation. And just to note that for retailers that includes traditional retail but also e-commerce.
And what you can see is that labor intensity, so labor by square foot, is the greatest in retail and e-commerce and in particular e-commerce. So those organizations and those facilities will have the most employees. And you can see at the far end of that, right, transportation will have the fewest employees by square foot.
And there’s a few reasons that matter. One - it kind of depends on what type of recruiting activities do they have to have but just also helped us frame some other questions which are on the next slide.
So how an acquisition, right, so recruiting was, of course, what we wanted to talk about with customers. But the second - we needed to understand was what kind of turnover rates were they facing? So how many people were they having to recruit per year to replace the talent that they had?
And if you can see again here, e-commerce can have turnover rates of 120% plus per year annually. And that’s a real challenge operationally if you’re basically having to restaff your organization once every year. So, a real pain point for that sector.
And as we think about it, that has been the area of kind of greatest growth over the last 12 to 18 months. So, where we see demands for talent is also where we also have the greatest turnover rates.
And then you see a level of consistency between the other types of sectors and customers that we have so and a stark difference between those and e-commerce, which is quite telling.
Next slide. So, second, we wanted to understand commutes. So, we have been hearing from customers and partners across the country. You know, commutes are a real challenge. Industrial facilities can often be located quite far from population centers.
And what is that looking like for employees? And this also influences wages. So, as you can see, right, the typical employee commute was over 15 miles.
The majority of those drive alone. They’re not taking public transit. And this could be a real barrier to recruitment. And we found that when we were kind of doing more in-person interviews with our customers.
But the commute and the distance can often be an influencer for turnover as well as employees decide to go to an employer that might be a little bit closer if the wage is similar.
So, then we wanted to understand what were the most challenging jobs to fill and retain. So, number one was forklift operators. And this was and is pretty consistent.
So, if you think about it, you all know that these are skilled individuals. So, they’re not taking somebody who just kind of got forklift pass and putting them on the floor. These are people with experience and they’re highly sought after, a very challenging role to fill.
The second was stocker/picker/packer. And that mostly was related to just the numbers that they have to recruit for. So, given just the sheer number of stockers, pickers and packers can be really challenging.
And then you see a mix of machine operators and different types of drivers. You can see C drivers is a little bit low, which will probably be surprising to some of you.
When we look at this, we think it’s just the nature of the customers that we have and whether or not they’re actually running their own trucking operations because obviously CDL drivers are very challenging to recruit and hire right now.
Next slide. So, then we wanted to understand so we have a sense of, you know, which positions are very hard to fill, what are the real obstacles to talent acquisition and retention?
So, the number one response was job scale requirements, so whether or not they can actually find people with the actual skills and training that they need and in particular, again, those skilled positions like forklift operators.
But second with competitive recruiting, so, again, it’s become fiercely competitive. And that hasn’t actually waned much during the pandemic. If anything, it’s become harder to recruit and so competitive recruitment is still very challenging.
And then you see kind of a mixture of challenges but access to transportation is one that we hear quite frequently.
We heard during the pandemic, and so we don’t have survey data for this, but we did certainly hear from customers that child-care became a real barrier, which makes sense. Individuals are not going to school and what do you do with your children? So that became a real barrier.
Then we wanted to understand, again, where do you see skills gap at your site? And then also understand their perception because most of our customers do have some level of training operations within their organizations, which ones were easiest for them to train and which ones were the hardest?
And you can see that, you know, the skills gaps there are serious technical skills gaps that they were saying, forklift operation and other skills, but interpersonal skills and workplace skills were equally challenging.
But particularly the interpersonal skills, if you looked at the chart on the right, that was an area in which our customer said, you know what? This is very hard to train.
And these are what, you know, we all call our soft skills, our essential skills, but those are the hardest to train for but also often the greatest contributor to turnover. And so, a real barrier for them in terms of training and talent pipelines.
Next slide. So, as we think about then the future of talent, right, so we had that slide earlier that was kind of the general landscape today. What we know is that the operations are becoming much more sophisticated. And what will the future of talent look like, right?
So, do they have problem solving? Certainly, with those interpersonal skills but the expectation that there will be more need for people who understand technology and other skillsets, including machinists.
Interesting as we did kind of first-person interviews as well with customers and clients because that was part of our process, comfort with technology was extremely low. And digital literacy and the ability to use technology was really, really low.
So, as we think about the industry becoming more sophisticated with more technology, it could be a real barrier to those employees.
So, the way that we have thought about this initially first was what are the real estate solutions for labor challenges? And there’s really three that we thought about, location, building design and how do you cluster operations and some really outside the box strategies.
Next slide. We asked our customers what do they think is working and what is not working in terms of the approach that they’re having. So first and foremost, financial incentives, right?
So, if you have the right pay structure, you should be able to attract talent. There are times when you have customers who just don’t have competitive pay and that can be a real challenge. They’re going to struggle to recruit because of fierce competition.
Second - they felt that job training programs have been successful for them to attract and retain talent and also advance talent. So, we’re more internal upscaling programs, cross-training programs as a solution for the skill trades that they have.
And then there’s a mixture, right? So, what kind of worker amenities do you have onsite? Are things air conditioned? Is there ample parking or access to transportation? So, it can be a real range of solutions that they think help attract and retain their talent.
Next slide. So, as you think about, you know, a future potential logistics site development, what could that look like, right? So centralized breakrooms and restrooms, proximity to transit, proximity to child-care, access to job training program, clear height, outdoor recreation and walking trails, places for them to go.
These are all things that as we work with customers and as we’re talking to customers we’re thinking about what types of amenities and facilities have to be developed and where should we be developing in trying to connect with transit corridors in particular for employee access? But these are all things that we’re thinking about from a real estate solutions standpoint for labor challenges.
Next slide. Thank you. So, the second piece of that, which we heard, right, are, you know, what are you doing from a workforce development standpoint? And we really took it a step further.
So, yes, we are a real estate company and we are doing all of those things I just mentioned. But how do we help our customers in an additional way and how do we also work with the public sector to think about long-term talent solutions?
So, our first approach was, hey, we’re going to work with our customers. We’re going to work to drive the type of industry training and development programs that we know that they need.
Second, because of our size and scale, we have a unique ability to gather insights just like I shared with you. And we can leverage those with the public sector to start to think about solutions that make sense.
And third, we want to be proactive in thinking about the future of logistics. So, again, the workforce is going to have to change. We’re going to need to continue to think about upscaling and advancement.
And those are things that we need to be thinking about now because the system is slow to change. And so, our approach to that is being now and get ready for the long-term.
Next slide. So, we launched what we called the Community Workforce Initiative a couple years ago. And it’s the basic concept of how do we connect our customers with our community partnerships across the country to really drive outcomes, drive employment opportunities and advancement opportunities for individuals in the logistics sector?
We also wanted to raise the awareness of the opportunities in the sector because people don’t understand what opportunities there are and career pathways are often misunderstood. So those were all things that we hoped to do in different ways.
And Prologis is somewhat uniquely positioned to do that because we do have long-term fixed assets in communities across the country. We don’t develop and leave. You know, we’re in these cities with our customers for a very long period of time. So that was part of our approach.
Next slide. And in 2020 in response to the pandemic, we launched what we called our rapid rescaling initiative. And it was our idea that how do we help lead the industry and develop an abundance of workers and talent while also being very intentional about revitalizing career pathways and creating economic opportunity in the communities where we serve?
Because the industry is growing fast, there’s a lot of opportunities for communities to think about how they invest strategically in talent pipelines and to continue to advance pathways for a variety of workers, a variety of types.
Next slide. So, we have launched actually in eight cities now. And we work with a variety of partners, including workforce investment boards, community colleges, local nonprofits. You can see all of those on the screen.
And we issue grants with them. And the purpose of those grants is to take those who we know have displaced workers, rapidly reskill them for logistic opportunities because we know they are in those communities and then connect them directly with our customers for opportunities for employment. And that’s the approach that we take.
And we’re working with a national nonprofit called Jobs for the Future to help us lead that work. And we’ll continue to scale. So, we’re in eight cities today and we’ll be in 15 by the end of 2021.
One of the ways that we have done this, and this has been a very important thing, is we’re actually using a centralized online learning platform across all of the communities to offer the training for free.
And so, we have built this training with the input of our customers and experts in the logistics sector and written it at the grade level as well, which was important.
And what we did was we deployed this with our partners. They have access to it and then they deploy that.
The reason we did this was we found that as we were launching early pilots, there was a real gap in training programs in understanding what the industry needs where and how would you actually get that in the hands of a frontline employee as well?
So, both for pipeline but also for incumbent worker upscaling, this is a platform that which we think has a lot of potential to continue to advance.
We launched this just last November, so three months ago, and there are 5,000 users on the platform today. So, we are really proud of where we are in a short period of time.
This is kind of what it looks like so you can get a sense. It’s a completely mobile friendly platform. When we were doing interviews with frontline workers and our employers, one of the things they said was you’re really going to have to think about how you train on a cell phone.
That’s how people are learning. They don’t have access to computers or laptops, certainly not at the workplace. And what we have found is 80% of users so far are doing it completely on their cell phones. So that paid off and our investment in mobile first paid off.
This just kind of gives you a sense of what it looks like. One of the things we did with this platform was it’s completely narrated. So, if you have a struggling reader or maybe an English language learner, it is narrated.
And it’s full of a lot of videos. And there are miniature assessments throughout for us to be able to check for learning. But this was one way for us to make sure that it is broadly applicable to learners across the country.
The other thing that we did was we built a level of partner and communication support. So, we actually built slack channels, custom data reports, community of practice and we’re holding biweekly calls.
And the goal there is so that communities from across the country can actually learn from each other and prove what they’re doing and say, hey, Chicago has done this. It worked really well. Could that be implemented in Long Beach or Long Beach is serving this population and they’ve been able to get a ton of enrollments. What can we do and how can we employ that in Atlanta?
So, by bringing these partners together we’re building a network to be able to scale for the entire sector.
Next slide. Behind all this data, behind all this platform is a ton of data. So, we’re able to see where are users logging in? What time are they logging in? Which courses are really effective? Which ones are not effective? Where are they struggling?
So, there’s a ton of data on this. And this is a really important part of where we’re planning on continue to improve the platform itself.
Next slide. Go ahead and skip that one. Next slide. Additionally, when we were planning, and I think this certainly paid off, we found that there was going to be a clear need for advertising and effective advertising.
So, our partners across the country are incredibly good at what they’re doing. But they don’t have the resources to put together really top-notch marketing. And we also knew that people don’t really know about the logistics sector and certainly warehousing.
So, we worked with a firm called Bully Pulpit Interactive to launch a digital advertising campaign across the markets we were launching in. Actually, I just got the report today.
So, there was over half a million impressions on the advertisements. And over half of all of the enrollments that we’ve had today have come from these ads.
They’ve been super, super effective as a way for us to engage learners and as a way for us to also demonstrate what kind of training are we talking about and what kind of job opportunities are we talking about.
Next slide. So, all of this, again, is online. It’s at logisticscareers.prologis.com. It’s totally free. What we’re trying to do again this year is continue to advance in scale and get it front of more partners and more potential candidates.
And so, I wanted to share this with you. And this is really just - this is the Prologis example. We think there is a lot of ways companies are engaging their communities. But this is one way in which we’re trying to develop a talent pipeline for our sector and continue to work with our customers.
So, with that I will open it up for some questions.
Richard Boll: Well thank you, Steven. I appreciate your presentation on the workforce and how you guys are doing things over at Prologis. Can we open up the line for questions, please?
Coordinator: Sure. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 and record your name. One moment, please.
Our first question comes from Brian Hancock. Your line is open.
Brian Hancock: Hi. Thank you so much for that presentation. That’s a great program. My question is around do you have partners that you’re working with like in cities?
You know, you said you were going to be in 15 cities. Are you looking for people to assist with that? Because that’s certainly an incredible program and I’m just wondering if you’re looking for people to help in particular cities where, you know, companies like us may have the same type of issues. That’s a great program.
Steven Hussain: Yes. Absolutely. We are absolutely looking for partners. On the public side we work with a lot of workforce investment boards and community colleges. But in every city we go to we really try to see who are the right partners.
And then from the employer side, we are willing to partner with anybody and happy to partner with anybody, so we’d love to connect.
Brian Hancock: That’s great. Thank you.
Richard Boll: Next question, please.
Coordinator: Yes, sir. Ann Strauss-Wieder, your line is open.
Ann Strauss-Wieder: Steven, thank you so much for that excellent presentation and for the work that you’re doing.
In talking about how you interface with public entities and others, can you tell us exactly how you interface with them with either a workforce development board or a local group? How do you mesh their operations with yours and get an available workforce? Thank you.
Steven Hussain: Yes. Thanks, Ann, Great question. So when we’re seeking partners, what we do is we can kind of weigh out our objectives and get some targets about how many people do we want to engage and how do we want to connect with their populations?
It’s not a one size fits all approach. So, in every community they’re structured somewhat different because organizations are serving different populations and there are cultural differences. And so, we don’t say this is the only way to do it.
But we do try to say, hey, these are the type of targets that we expect you to hit. And with that we then go into a planning phase with them to say, you know, how are you going to reach 500 individuals over the next 12 months?
And then from the employer perspective, what we’re working on with these partners to say who do you already have employer relationships with? And where you don’t have employer relationships, Prologis will engage our customers and try to connect as many as possible to support the placement activities.
But, again, it’s not a one size fits all approach at all. And we really are quite diligent about trying to plan and be open to new ideas and apply that.
From a platform perspective, just so you know, from like the training itself, each community is given access to the training and has a customer account. In there they can manage their students. They can manage the training itself. They can adjust kind of the curriculum.
So, they have a lot of flexibility within the platform that we have. We do also issue grants by the way so.
Richard Boll: Okay. Thank you. Next question, please.
Coordinator: Walter Kemmsies, your line is open.
Walter Kemmsies: Okay. You can skip me. Ann already took care of what I was wondering. Thank you.
Coordinator: Thank you. Sir, we have no other questions in the queue.
Richard Boll: Well thank you very much, Steven. I just want to ask you, is it okay if I can share you email with others? It seems like you might get some interest from some of our members.
Steven Hussain: Happily. Thank you so much for having to me today. I really appreciate it.
Richard Boll: Well that’s great. Well thanks a lot, Steven. And thank you, Doug, for getting us connected and stuff to be able to have that presentation today. I appreciate it.
I think next, we have our in-house, our subcommittee chairs. We have two of them that are going to be coming up. It will Rick Gabrielson and Norm Schenk. Their subcommittees have been working on some issues.
And if we can, we can get little readouts from what they’ve been working on lately and if we could start with Rick, that would be great. Thank you.
Rick Gabrielson: Sure. Happy to do it. Hey, everybody. What I wanted to do is I have two really things to share. One was we had gone through the list of initiatives within our subcommittee group. And we had gone out and started taking a look at 2021, what our focus should be.
And the one thing that came up from a large number of the subcommittee members was supply chain readiness. And so what we’re going to be focused on, and I think Gene is still on and maybe he can jump in here in a little bit, but, you know, the pandemic has really exposed a need to examine all of the overall supply chains from a readiness perspective.
Disruption still continues to take place within the supply chain. And so, there’s really an immediate need to go through and evaluate the overall supply chain network.
And then there’s bottlenecks that are out there and importantly there’s root causes and how they’ve had an impact on the flow of commerce.
The recent surge that we’re seeing in volumes is putting a strain on really affecting the flow of product both in and out of the country. And it’s not just one issue. It’s complex. There’s a number of things that all contributed to what we’re seeing today.
So, our subcommittee will be focused on what actionable recommendations we may be able to recommend to the full committee, hopefully by the time we meet again and to the new incoming Secretary and likely across a number of agencies.
Some of our focus is going to be both short and long-term and I’ll have Gene talk about that in a minute. But we’re going to looking at infrastructure, those lots now connectors that are so important, data and how we share that information through our different partners, technology, again the sharing of that including developing standards, and I’ll talk to that in a brief moment, and to the broader end visibility so we can share that from an advanced planning perspective.
Forecasting is clearly a need, you know, that we’ve seen as the ability to go through and plan properly. And to that point, one of the things some of us have talked about in our committee, and I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this in the broader group, but there is a group out there called the Digital Container Shipping Association, DCSA.
They are a neutral, non-profit group. They’re founded by the ocean carriers. And their mission is to digitize and standardize the container shipping industry through a unified industry effort.
They are systems and platform agnostic. They don’t care whose platform it is or what the system. Their whole issue is developing standards so you can talk.
And the best way to describe it is if you look at the banking industry, they developed, you know, the Swift system, which allows you to go back and forth across the network.
Before Swift was put in place, if you’ve got a bank card at BA and you’ve got one at Wells Fargo, you’re not going to use them back and forth. You can’t use them at major restaurants. And those standards, and because they digitized their network, it allows that to go back and forth.
So, I’ve talked to a handful of the members, including Gene about it, and it’s one that I’m engaged in. And it’s for the betterment of the industry.
So that’s going to be a big focus for us. Gene, if you’re still on, do you want to jump in with both some of the short and long-term things that you’ve been thinking about? I’m not sure if Gene is still on.
Richard Boll: Can you hook Gene up?
Rick Gabrielson: If Gene is still on, can you hook Gene up (unintelligible), please?
Richard Boll: Yes, Michelle, yes.
Coordinator: Just one moment, please. Gene Seroka, your line is open.
Gene Seroka: Great. Thank you. And thank you, Rick. As you’ve outlined, three specific setups here. We’re right now witnessing a pretty heavy bout of congestion. We’ve got 54 vessels at Anchor 34 of the container variety.
So, in the short-term, three pieces. Number one, we have got to get our workers vaccinated. Like much of Los Angeles County and the state, we’ve seen a spike in COVID-19 cases since Thanksgiving and even a higher level in the first part of January.
The last seven days’ data looks good, but we’ve got about 800 longshore men and women out of work due to COVID-19 out of 15,000.
And please remember about 100,000 people come to work at these ports in Southern California every day. We have got to accelerate vaccinations. These folks have been on the job since the emergency orders went out at the beginning.
Two, we have to accelerate the container velocity. These containers on dock are sitting more than six days and in normal times they sit for two before pickup.
Outside on the street at the DC’s warehouses’ fulfillment centers, they’re sitting for 9 to 10 days. Normally that’s about 3-1/2.
I understand that the warehouses are overflowing and because of COVID-19 staffing at those facilities is skeletal. But we have got to start moving on the velocity of this or else the ships will just continue to sit.
And to paint a picture of the 1,600 acres of container property we have, they’re about 95% full with containers right now. We think that capacity is when you have 80% of your property taken up by stacks of containers. So, we’re pretty tight.
On the intermediate side, we’ve got to come up with a new model for truck and gate fluidity. That has to happen with a port-wide reservation system and utilizing the ability to move the 3,000 trucks per hour that we should be based on the amount of activity that we have every day.
Those bottlenecks continue to crunch. This has been a generational problem for us. We’ll also have to repurpose the chassis model.
Fifty to eighty acres of property in Los Angeles alone are taken up by chassis, most of which have not moved in six months off the terminal property.
And then lastly just as you said, Rick, competitiveness around digitization. We created the first port community system in the country. Unfortunately, it’s like doing business with one eye closed.
We need more participants. And we’ve gotten through, I think, all the hurdles of people getting scared that we were going to do something untoward.
Longer term, I think this particular complex needs a consolidated service offering, cross-dependent operations, and the ability to put the right ship at the proper place.
That’s going to take political and private sector inertia to get to that point. But I’d like the opportunity to work with the subcommittee and the entire committee on these areas.
It’s time to break down the political walls and start moving forward. The nation’s economy deserves that. Back to you, Rick.
Rick Gabrielson: Great. Thank you much, Gene. Good comments. So that’s really our major undertaking that we’re going to be working on.
One other item did surface. And, Rich, this is maybe for the entire group, but Joe brought it up and I thought it was good insight. We’ve got a new administration coming in. We’re going to have a fresh set of eyes.
And collectively the broad group has done a lot of great work over the last few years. And Joe thought, and I agree with him, by the way, that it would be worthwhile and a responsibility on our part to prepare kind of an overview document of what’s the collective work that this group has done?
And I think it would behoove us to go through and pull that together sooner rather than later and have it be part of a welcome package for the new Secretary once the confirmation hearings are done to share what great work this group has done so we can continue to move that forward.
And that may then drive some commentary from the Secretary on what’s going to be important to her so.
That would be my update at this point in time, Rich.
Richard Boll: That’s great. Thanks, Rick. And I think those are good ideas in which we should start percolating up in the subcommittees to bring them up, et cetera.
And you had mentioned earlier, talking with our new DAS about what the administration is looking for. And generally, when we do have new administrations, we usually come up with something about what we think they should be or, not we, you guys, think should be the focus going forward when it comes to supply chain.
So that might be something else that we might want to do that we’ve done before in the past as well.
Rick Gabrielson: Yes. I think it’s twofold. I think it’s, you know, one, here’s kind of what this group has done. You know, two, here’s kind of what we’re focused on and what our industries are and what we think is important.
And with that you do a couple things. Does that make sense to you? But at the same time what are those things that we may not have touched on that you find from the administration that’s important for us to look at?
Richard Boll: Exactly. And I think that will work out great. And we should start working on that right away.
Rick Gabrielson: Yes. Cool.
Richard Boll: Do we want to open up for some questions for that? Can we see if anybody has any questions for Rick?
Rick Gabrielson: Certainly.
Coordinator: If you’d like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your phone. Thank you.
Richard Boll: You might not have anybody because with your subcommittee, there’s a lot of people on your committee so.
Rick Gabrielson: Yes. There’s quite a bit.
Coordinator: Leslie Blakely, your line is open.
Leslie Blakely: Yes. Hi, everybody. I don’t know which subcommittee this suggestion might belong in. Rick, it could be yours, but it sounds like you guys have got a lot of work on your plate.
But I don’t think this would be a terribly challenging thing to put together. But I’d like to suggest that there be a letter from this committee to the Secretary recommending that if there is going to be an infrastructure bill - let’s just say in this Congress I think there’s been a lot of talk about the possibility that a large infrastructure package would be sent to Congress by the Biden administration sometime in, you know, possibly in the next few months.
But if there’s to be a big infrastructure package that Commerce work with the Department of Transportation to look at the needs for infrastructure. The really terrific information that was provided this morning by Caitlin Hughes and Jeffrey Purdy from DOT showing the bottleneck and congested corridors and all of the fact that I thought was very interesting that only 1.2% of the road system fell into these bottlenecked areas, but it had only a 20% impact on the congestion factors.
You know, we would save a lot of money for our country if an infrastructure package aided freight infrastructure in such a way that we could really reduce those bottlenecks.
So, I would just like to suggest that we write a letter in the early days here. I think that it’s important to just make this recommendation as the Biden team is starting to ramp-up their legislative initiatives and recommend that Commerce work with DOT to put in a substantial freight infrastructure and bottleneck congestion reduction into the infrastructure package.
Rick Gabrielson: I would agree. Let’s take that one on. We can craft it and then from a procedural standpoint, Rich, we will figure out how do we get that out to the team, the broad team, once we have looked at and to make sure everyone has got input and try to do with a speed of light approach.
So, to your point, Leslie, we don’t take too long, or we miss the opportunity during the early days. I agree with you.
Leslie Blakely: And, Rick, I don’t think I’m on your committee. I don’t know what committee I’m on anymore. But I don’t think I’m on your committee. So, would you mind adding me to that committee for this initiative?
Rick Gabrielson: Sure.
Leslie Blakely: Thank you.
Richard Boll: Okay. And any other questions?
Coordinator: I don’t see any questions at this time, sir.
Richard Boll: Okay. Well then - I think it’s up to Norm. How are you doing, Norm? We’d love to hear what you’ve been working on in your committee as well. That would be great. Thanks.
Coordinator: Norm, if you’re on the line, can you press star 1 or star 0, please?
Richard Boll: Is he still on? I think he is.
Coordinator: One moment. I found Norm. It will be just one second while I get Norm on.
Richard Boll: Okay. Thank you.
Coordinator: You’re welcome.
Norm Schenk: Rich, can you hear me now?
Coordinator: Your line is open, Norm.
Norm Schenk: Okay. Thank you.
Richard Boll: Yes, Norm. Welcome back.
Norm Schenk: Okay. Some people might like it better when my line is muted. Thank you, Rich. And I’ll give you a brief update from the Trade and Regulatory Committee and, again, hope everybody is doing well.
You know, our overall goal certainly is to look at both trade regulatory requirements to simplify processes to improve supply chains to ultimately promote growth without compromising safety and security. And sometimes there is a delicate balance.
And I will say upfront, we’ve got a terrific group, a lot of expertise in there. But we’re always looking for more new talent to join us. So, I’ll put that invitation out there to the group.
One, I’ll just mention briefly that from a global distribution of vaccine, personally I don’t know if (Lee) is on the line, too, I have to say I’m super pleasantly surprised how well the global distribution has worked.
And there really are very few bottlenecks of any significance around the world. And so that’s been terrific globally in terms of that.
I think that also bodes the question of why can, when it comes to global distribution of vaccine, you get everybody’s attention. Quick changes can be made, efficient changes can be made. You know, changes to requirements can be made in a very short period of time and be successful yet in other cases it seems to take forever to do that.
So, one of the lessons learned out of this COVID distribution is, you know, how can we move some of the things that we have faster through the process for that?
And, you know, I think Rick brought up, you know, a good point about some of us have been on this about 10 years now and compared to where we were 10 years there’s certainly been a lot of progress.
And I’ll start off the positive one, which was very recent. And that is there had been an evaluation by the U.S. Government Treasury about possibly collecting 301 duties on low value shipments.
And OMB did their study and everything. And my understanding, knock on wood, is that this has been tabled completely. This is a great story for not just U.S. but international supply chain flowing into the U.S. because the cost and the collection, they would have been counting the pennies on the floor while the dollars flew out the window. So that’s a really good success.
And I will mention Mike Mullen. I know he and the express association have been really active in that. Jon Gold weighed in on that, too. So, we’ve had some of our members on that one.
The second thing is I want to acknowledge Mike, Eugene, and Rich’s help with respect to Puerto Rico. For those of us who have been on our advisory group for some time, this Puerto Rico export requirement goes back a number of years.
And, you know, Mike Mullen has been terrific. It was a great presentation today. But also, Eugene and Rich because, you know, being that it impacts another arm of Commerce to go to the government and say, hey, we want to change this isn’t easy.
So, I think collectively, you know, working together, and we haven’t brought it home yet, but we’re as close as we’ve been that we need to bring that across the finish line. So that’s going to continue to be one of our top priorities.
Certainly, in terms of, you know, the group that has the biggest impact on the international supply chain is Customs and Border Protection, obviously Homeland Security.
And I don’t want to repeat my brief comments for Craig Clark this morning on it but, you know, certainly CBP has a lot of things on the table that really influence the international supply chain.
In our case we need to play offense, defense and special teams at the same time because some of the things that they have promoted have been positive such as, you know, the simplified entry for the other government agencies. That’s been a good success story.
We do have a number of things in our committee that we’re going to continue to work on that are very concerning. Again, our advisory group going back a few years did a recommendation on single window, which in theory is a beautiful thing.
CBP did their job building the single window. But unfortunately, the other key agencies haven’t changed their processes or procedures.
And I’ve spoken to a few companies where actually there’s more holes now and a slower clearance process because of single window than being better by single window. So, we certainly want to revisit that.
Certainly, there was brief mention this morning of the Office of International Trade 2025 Strategy. Again, there’s some good things in there. There’s also some areas of concern on that.
And, you know, from a supply chain perspective, I think as a group we also know that, you know, there’s the philosophical how’s the way to do this, the best way for a supply chain and then there’s a practical side.
So, they mentioned COAC this morning on the call. And that’s a Commercial Operations Advisory Group to Customs similar to what we are to Commerce. And there’s some really talented people on COAC.
Kind of the difference between COAC and, I think, what our role is, COAC is more tactical looking at very specific things for CBP. What we tried to do, looking at it from a broader supply chain perspective is that, hey, great, it’s good to work on individual things.
But at the end of the day they have to make sense and be, when you connect the dots of all the different aspects of the supply chain, they really need to work. So, we’re going to continue to look at that.
The 321 pilots were mentioned this morning. Yes, there are some good things that are happening with that. But, again, I’ll say that, you know, personally one of the concerns is there continues to be too much reliance on data and too much reliance on CBP doing everything.
And they have tremendous responsibility and there needs to be more focus on new technology such as x-ray, artificial intelligence, which isn’t, you know, a pie in the sky anymore. It’s a reality and being used. So how we can kind of bring those things together and have a shared responsibility on that.
But a couple specific things they are promoting potentially for their - I haven’t seen - obviously it hasn’t been published yet, but I know it’s being talked about is potentially having an HTS number for a low value shipment or requiring more data elements from the platform companies.
And sure, it makes sense and might be nice. I don’t know if Mark is on the call from Amazon today or not. But, you know, we looked at it and said, great. It would be nice if CBP could have the data, but at the same time, you’ve got all the other companies that are involved in the movement of the goods of the supply chain are going to be putting those shipments on hold and having to stop them. Because of maybe the data didn’t get from one of the platform companies to customers on that. Certainly, we’re going to, we’re going to look at how, for the US, it’s CT path but overall AEO programs. In terms of more account management versus paid by the drink.
There’s another concerning proposal out there on a legal entity identifier. There are some different acronyms for it and CDP has been considering. I won’t say anything it’s more than that, but it seems to be getting some traction of actually requiring three separate numbers for each shipment coming into the US. And I don’t think I need to explain much more than that for all the supply train experts to think of any International movement. But you’d have to go back and get three different numbers.
You know one could be a Dunn’s number, one could be, I can’t think of the name of the company on that. But it would really concerning that again, adding more burdensome requirements instead of simplifying things. And, you know, again at the end of the day, we need to look at how can we help the Government, CBP, DHS to, you know, do their jobs as effectively as they are but simplifying things.
One of the other things is last year, DHS issued a report on illicit goods. All of us had concerns about illicit goods, whether it’s drugs, fentanyl, fake goods, fake vaccines, take your pick along that line. Again, there was some really good things on that because on the committee, we would like to take a look at that. Probably have to wait a little bit. Again, (unintelligible) made a good suggestion this morning that, you know, once some of these new administrative folks are in place. We really need to find out, hey what are their goals and objectives? What are they thinking and then we can kind of identify where we can, you know, work within that framework to help.
So, wrapping up and then I’ll open it up to the other committee members and/or questions. Is, Eugene, what I think our plans of Eugene and I is to because we’ve have had some calls, is to kind of put these things together since we’re, you know, really kicking off this next term. And then getting with the group and then narrowing the list because we’re not going to accomplish World peace through this, this whole list. But really identify, you know, whether the two, three, or four things that had the greatest impact that we can actually do some things on. So, I’ll, I’ll close.
Oh, one other thing I was going to mention. I, you know, I talked about, you know, we have the different committee groups. But again, I think it’s terrific how well everybody works together and going back to the vaccine distribution on that with Rick and Joe’s freight committee on that. We have several calls talking about it and there might have even been some not specific things that related to what the freight committee was looking at. But there were great suggestions, and we were actually able to take them back, not just from the US, but to use globally.
So, you know, many countries around the world as we know follow the US lead. So, again thinking about offense, defense, and special teams, we’ve got to think about the global supply chain and how we, you know, continue to work together on that. So Rich, I’ll leave my recap at that and open it up to other committee members and/or questions.
Richard Boll: Thanks Norm. Can we please open it up for questions please?
Coordinator: Yes. If you would like to ask a question, please press Star 1 on your phone. Thank you. Our first question comes from Melzie Wilson. Your line is open.
Melzie Wilson: Hi. Just two comments and Norm, I was just kind of sitting here laughing. When, when you do look back in retrospect of how quickly everything was able to change when it came to COVID and how easily, with the force of hand, we were able to adapt to all of this. So, I know a lot of time has gone in by a lot of companies, a lot of opportunities with the Government partnership, et cetera. But different Government agencies but it’s amazing what we’ve been able to do when we consider just trying to get a rewrite of the 111 Regulations or something. You know, relatively straightforward.
The only thing I would add to your summary is I had, with (Eugene) and several members of the team, I had a meeting with them on electric signature. And I think it is one that both the innovation team and the regulatory team need to work together on. As it is already an initiative to move forward with a formal, I guess you could say, directive from CDP if not in the regulations to accept electronic signatures or Powers of Attorney. And that be a platform and then go and move toward all Government agency documents, including Free Trade Agreements. So, I think that that’s a win-win for everyone in streamlining our processes.
Norm Schenk: Thank you Melzie. My apologies. I should have had that it on there. It is an excellent one and, you know, in many cases if something can be built into Trade Agreements. Which would then, you know, force that to happen so I’ll make sure I add that back in. Thank you Melzie.
Richard Boll: That’s great Melzie too. That’s one that we’ve been looking at and looking forward to it and I think that might be the case with…
Melzie Wilson: Yes. And I just got…
Richard Boll: …CBP on that.
Melzie Wilson: I just got the streamlined White Paper last night. So, I just want to go through it and then I’ll send it to you. Okay?
Norm Schenk: Thank you.
Richard Boll: Thank you. Any other questions?
Coordinator: We have no questions at this time.
Richard Boll: Okay. Well, thank you all. It’s been a very good meeting and a lot of information to absorb. A lot of different topics and very timely on all of them and appreciate everyone coming in today. I will forward out some of the emails of some of the people that were on the presentations today. I think some of them, several of you had mentioned that you were interested in maybe following up. So, I’ll send out some of those. I’ll make sure that they’re okay with me sending them out but also going for the subcommittees.
Also, I was all ready to send it out, I just didn’t do it, and my apologies on that. But I’m going to be sending out, you know, the, which ones are the committees and then you can let me know which committees, one, two, three, or whatever. How many you want to be on, but all members of the committees should be on at least one subcommittee if not one maybe two. Just so it will just keep you active on what’s going on within the subparts of the committee. So, I’ll be sending that out hopefully be next week. I had it pretty much set, but a lot of things backed up on me on that point, so I’ll try to do that next week. Any other comments or anything the two Rick’s might have or Eugene?
Eugene Alford: Hey Rich? Am I still live?
Richard Boll: Yes.
Norm Schenk: Yes. If I may humbly suggest something for consideration. I’m not sure it would fit into the realm of our group or not. But, you know, when it comes to International supply chains, we tend to focus on the movement of goods. And with the COVID virus and for many of us on here who, you know, do extensive International travel. One of the big open areas that’s out there still right now is the movement of people around the world in terms of what countries you can get into, what countries you can get out to. What countries you can get into and don’t have to sit there for 10 days before you can leave the hotel to finish your quarantine on that.
And I don’t know if that would be a fit or not for our group, but I can tell you and probably Rich Blasgen and a bunch of others that do a lot of travel. Probably you’re thinking the same thing because, you know, the physical part of the supply chain is really important. But a lot of the work that we do also wraps around, you know, getting out there, doing that. And the back-Part B of that would be, you know, certainly, you know, with the vaccine still relatively in the early stage in terms of upcoming meetings. I’m wondering if there’s any kind of consideration for future meetings as someone, you know, every State has their own vaccine plan.
And you know, as we, committee members, are able to get vaccinating, I’m wondering perhaps if in a subsequent meeting, April might be a little soon. But maybe not if we could do something for those that do have the vaccine and are able to travel to at least get some of the group kind of back together. You know I think you do a great job, you know, over the phone, all that. You and Rick and Rich and Eugene. But if there’s, you know, I’ll just leave those as two possible ideas for consideration. Thank you.
Richard Boll: Well, thanks Norm. You know, we’d all like to get together, that’s for sure. Any other comments? No? Okay. Well…
Eugene Alford: Hey Rich, allow me? Sorry. Let me just, let me just address Norm’s point. You know, we, we, Rich and I would very much like to host everyone back in the library. You know the new members that haven’t had a chance to be with us in person. We’ve got a new member on our staff that has never even been in the building yet. So, we’ve, and of course, you know, enabling you all to meet people, new people, in the administration like Chris Hoff in person is really valuable.
We have no indication on when things will change in that regard and, but we were certainly keep everyone informed. But I, yes. No. April will not, it’s very, very unlikely but, but, you know, I can just tell you that Rich and I very much would like to, to see everybody in person and host you. So, anyway. Thanks. Back over to you, Rich.
Richard Boll: Yes. There’s still no, no way we’re even getting in the building. So, for the time being and we haven’t been informed of anything about the changes of that as well. But appreciate the, the comments, Eugene, and I appreciate that. And with that, I guess we will sign off for this meeting?
Coordinator: Sir? You have one question left?
Richard Boll: Oh, okay. One more?
Coordinator: Yes. Let me bring that, Rick Tucker. So, Rick Tucker, your line is open.
Rick Tucker: Okay. Thank you. I’m not sure where this should be directed? New to the group but I think it’s Norm’s? But I wanted to follow-up with a suggestion similar to Leslie, the one she made earlier about requesting input on the new proposed infrastructure package. I know there are a number of agencies in the supply chain that Federal agencies that are looking at potential regulatory changes. And I just didn’t know if our committee was in a position to write a letter to the appropriate officials within the Administration and request that, you know, if they’re anticipating any of those regulatory changes. That maybe we might have an opportunity to weigh in and provide our perspectives before, you know, those regulations get published.
Richard Boll: Hey Rick, this is Rich. Yes. I see the ideas which you’re thinking of which are great. The, the committee itself sends recommendations directly to our Secretary. So, you know, whenever it has to do with, it has to be with some domain that he can work on or pass it onto, you know, another agency. So, we’ve just got to look at it systematically or process wise in how we can do that. And if we identify what, what types of regulation’s you’re talking about. Maybe we can, you know, look at it and identify that for maybe, you know, future consideration to bring up to the Secretary as a recommendation.
Rick Tucker: Great. Thank you, Rich.
Richard Boll: Okay. Well, thank you. Any, anything else for today? Okay. I think we’re good and appreciate everyone’s participation and we got great turnout today. I appreciate everyone coming on and I guess we’ll probably do the same as we did for this for the next meeting unless things change. And then maybe after that, we can hopefully maybe we can see each other’s faces. And again, thank you for everything and keep in touch, you know, in between and we’ll be keeping in touch with you.
And if you have any other questions, you know, you can get a hold of Eugene and I and we’ll be glad to keep communicating with all of you in between our meetings. Thank you and have yourself a good one.
Coordinator: That concludes today’s call. All participants may disconnect.
Richard Boll: Thank you Michelle.
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