Thank you, Mr. Chairman. With devolution there were two funds. There was one-time transition money to help us over the course of the year to get up and running and then there was implementation funding where we negotiated a global figure, $65.3 million a year
tied to our formula that will increase as our formula increases and goes into our A-base. It’s out of that $65.3 million that these positions are being funded from. That money will go into the A-base. It’s not coming out of existing government expenditures, nor will it. That funding is covered there. Then the issue is, just to quickly restate, we have a system that hasn’t been looked at in over 20 years, a communications system that has been the target of a lot of concern and unhappiness.
We’ve taken on a lot of responsibilities. We have funding available into our A-base where there is some funding available to help us pick up our game when it comes to a communications system. First we did a review that laid out the things we need to do, areas that need to be addressed. There are four areas: We are under-resourced on a comparative basis, we need to better define the roles and purposes, which we are doing, we need to work on consistent messaging, and we have to make sure that what we’re providing is what is needed by the citizens. All this requires and points to the fact that we’re not as well organized as we should be and we are significantly under-resourced. We think this will address that issue. Thank you.