Hi, this is Congresswoman █████████████, and I'm calling to invite you to my telephone town hall event taking place in just a few moments. Please stay on the line and you will be automatically connected. If you have any questions after the event or if I can assist you in any way, please call my office at ████████████. To be added to our do not call list. Please press █ now. Please hold while we connect you to your Access Live event. This Access Live event is currently in progress. Please note, this call may be monitored, recorded or rebroadcast. If you would like to ask a question during today's event, press Star three on your telephone keypad at any time. The Congresswoman has had ██ town halls in the year of ████, and we will be having a lot more this new year as well. And in terms of constituent cases, we have closed over ███████ constituent cases and will continue to do that. Good work. I just want to let you all know if you'd like to ask a question, Please press star3 on your phone keypad and you will be placed in line to speak with a member of our staff. They will take down your name and your question. If you'd like to join the Congresswoman's newsletter, please press star six. To provide your email address to our team. And if your streaming event on our website, you can simply type your name and question into whatever streaming service that you are watching it there. So once again, Stars three on your phone pad if you'd like to ask a question. And in Star six if you like to join the E. Newsletter. At this point, I'm going to hand it over to our congresswoman. ████████████, the floor is yours. thank you so much ███ and thank you to the over one thousand neighbors who were on this call tonight i greatly appreciate you taking the time on a monday night to join this teletown hall now as eva mentioned we hosted over twenty town halls in my first year in congress and we very intentionally hold them in different formats we've had very large over a thousand people in person town halls we've had smaller town halls at libraries across the district we do virtual instagram live and of course this telephone town hall where we can get to as frankly as many people as possible to answer their phone and we do this to make sure there's a constant communication loop between the constituents and myself and vice versa and so i greatly appreciate you taking the time tonight we're going to get to your questions in just one moment i also want to share that we will be holding an in person town hall very soon we tried to hold these at least one different town hall a month so please stay tuned for information on the in person town hall i want to take just a moment to introduce myself quickly for those who i might not have met in the district or had the pleasure of meeting in person yet i'm █████████████ i have the great privilege of serving as your member of congress i was sworn in one year ago but before i came to ██████████ i served for six years in the maryland state senate where i was an appropriator i currently serve on two committees on the house armed services committee and i know we're going to talk about some really relevant issues around armed services or military personnel what's going on internationally tonight and i also serve on the house natural resources committee which is very important of course being so close to the chesapeake bay