Thank you, Mr.

Chairman. The

department, like all departments, was requested to come up with a budget reduction target, and we went through that process.

As we went through it, we had two objectives. First, the level of service that Transportation provides to the public was important. We wanted to find reductions that would minimize or not have any negative impact on the level of service that Transportation provides to the public. The second issue we wanted to address was that we didn’t affect the long-term integrity of our infrastructure. We wanted to make sure we could maintain the funding we have available to us now so that we wouldn’t be sacrificing some short-term budget reductions for some longer term issues. Of course, as part of that, we went through the process, identified a number of reductions and then tried to find those that would also have the minimum impact on employees, on the HR factor.

For ’08–09 there are actually four positions to be reduced. One of those positions is currently filled. You’ll see on sheet 9-7 that there’s a net reduction of three. We also added in one other position. It was an historic double-fill, and we just had to correct some of the accounting on that position. That’s why the net is three on that.