Thank you, Madam Chair. I guess I'm going to ask a couple questions about leasing.
I understand that due to both a Cabinet-level policy and a public accounting standard that we only enter into leases of less than five years, because after five years they tend to be a tangible or a capital lease which would then be recorded as a liability and go up against our debt ceiling. You know, seeing that there's $134 million in lease commitments here, we don't even have that room in our debt ceiling. So we can't enter into long-term leases.
Can I just get a sense from the department to the extent that that limitation is influencing this habit of kind of doing repeat three-year leases? And I'll note we've been kind of doing this in some buildings for 30 plus years now. Is that one of the limiting factors why we are not kind of negotiating this a little bit more aggressively? Thank you.