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My name is Ray Leon, founder and executive director of the Latino Equity Advocacy and Policy Institute, aka the LEAP Institute, and creator of the Green Righteros EV electric vehicle ride share service. The nation's first EV ride share service that provides farmworker families rides to their medical appointments. If not for CMO, this service wouldn't exist. You know, I like pointing out that we are able to resolve five points for the power punch for justice. You know, first of all, health justice and getting farmworker families to their specialized medical practitioners is huge. You know, when they don't have a reliable ride and they miss the appointment, it costs the state thousands of dollars, you know, in remedying that because their health goes down, then additional appointments and the medical charges more and it's just terrible just the way that things are set up, right? But we make sure that folks get there, you know? 

So, first and foremost, uh the health justice, the transportation justice, we get them from their door to get them to the doctor, right? And then we got economic justice. My family used to pay $100 out of their pocket to get a ride to Fresno, right? Now they pay zero. And the drivers, retired farm workers, used to basically exploit themselves, get paid 30 bucks for like 6 hours. Now they get paid $18 an hour. So we're talking about not just improving the health of a farmworker community and communities and actually at this point regions, right? I'll share a little bit more about that, but uh so it's also economic justice, right? And let's talk about environmental justice. So because we use electric vehicles, we're not contaminating the neighborhood. We're not spewing emissions in down the down the street in in in in the VU in in the vecindad right and in the community. Climate justice, of course it's not releasing carbon right as a matter of fact with the frea we have made possible by CMO by the state of California the golden state I'm very proud of being you know from this golden state of California and uh we are able to take down in one here over 300 metric tons of carbon.

So if you want to talk about the solutions for people, planet and pocket, it's happening here with Green Raiteros. We started in Huron, which is considered one of the poorest cities, farm workers cities in the state of California. It happens to be a farmworker city in the county that has the highest ag revenue in the nation. Right? You would think an ag based community wouldn't be the poorest of the state, but that's the case, right? This support has enabled my families to strike down or at least lessen the impact of a poverty perpetuator, which is access to reliable transportation. And in this case, it's clean, thanks to CMO. 

So, I'm happy to share that we've gone beyond just Huron, the Huron area, Fresno County. We service six counties in the San Joaquin Valley now. We got support from CMO on the coast. So, we're in Monterey County, Santa Cruz, and San Benito County. All these are agricultural areas where we have farmworker communities. Farm workers, in my opinion, are the hardest working people on the planet that are always overlooked, undermined, but with CMO, we're able to take care of a good good piece of that, right? So, you know, now with the CMO being able to propel this innovation with new technologies on the ground, infrastructure, you know, and vehicles, it's a beautiful thing. What I've noticed, you know, we've been doing this since 2017, you know, even before we got a CMO grant, but what I've noticed is that legislation has to catch up to the innovation that we've been able to unfold, right? Of course, insurance is a crazy thing. If not for CMO, we wouldn't be in operation because a combination of costs that have not caught up to the innovation of where we should be in the state of California certainly undermine the possibility to keep something like this going without state help, you know, and we have to compete to get the state help. 

You know, I would love to have conversations with the leaders in this call on this panel to talk about what does that look like? I got some ideas so we could set it up so that we just continue the work and aren't wasting time in trying to compete when we have a model that has been effective in improving community health, keeping hundreds of carbon out of the hundreds of metric tons of carbon out of the atmosphere. Employing people in the neighborhood, therefore stimulating local economies. There's some work we got to do. First and foremost, CMO needs to stay alive, right? And there's some legislation I think we should be talking about to make sure that we solidly step into that next level of being the golden state with an innovative transportation system that serves all of our people, especially the most vulnerable. All right, so thank you very much for listening to me and that's all I'm going to say. I could say more, but you know, we'll stop it there.