Executives: At Saronic, our welders have the opportunity to become engineers

PORT ISABEL, Texas - Saronic Technologies, the Austin-based defense technology startup that is considering building a shipyard at the Port of Brownsville, places a big emphasis on developing a young workforce. 

So says Chris Johnson, director for the company’s shipyard in Franklin, Louisiana.

“Saronic is really, really good at is bringing on younger talent and training it,” Johnson said, during a presentation he and three of his colleagues made to Point Isabel ISD.

By way of an example, Johnson told the story of the shipyard in Franklin.

“Louisiana has long had a problem with young graduates in STEM, specifically engineering, electrical, and mechanical. Many different types of engineers have to leave Louisiana…  because there aren't good jobs for those professionals. But we're helping reduce what they call the brain drain, where young professionals leave because there's not enough jobs for them. Saronic has done a really good job of addressing that in Franklin. I suspect we'll do it here again in Brownsville, given that chance.”

Johnson said there is a “buzz around Saronic” because “our culture is different.”

Doug Lambert, a co-founder and COO of Saronic, agreed.

“We've up skilled that workforce (in Louisiana). We have welders who are becoming engineers. We have pipe fitters who are growing in their careers. And that's something that's incredibly important to Saronic. We have a robust kind of jobs skill training pipeline that we've been prototyping here in Louisiana, and could potentially bring here to Brownsville, Texas.”

Lambert said the company thinks about manufacturing differently to most. 

“These are not dirty jobs. We think about them in a way that is incredibly, incredibly tech-forward and people-forward and process-forward. So we tend to invest in our employees. We like to up-skill and create new opportunities that folks otherwise wouldn't have gotten in the area. And that really is reflected in how we build out infrastructure,” Lambert said. 

Editor's Note: To read the full story go to the RGG Business Journal website. 

Go to www.riograndeguardian.com to read the latest border news stories and watch the latest news videos. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_07 0:00

Okay, the next item on the agenda is the public hearing regarding the application for taxable information on eligible property filed by ceramic technologies under the Texas Jobs, Energy, Technology, and Innovation Grant. Texas Government Code 403, subchapter. The Percival Independent School District will conduct a public hearing pursuant to Texas Government Code Section 403.611B regarding an application for taxable value limitation on eligible property file by Seronic Technologies Incorporated, Texas Comptroller Public Accounts Applications J0024, J0025, J0026, and J0027 under the Texas Jobs Energy Technology and Innovation Act, Texas Government Code, Section 403, Chapter D. As required by law, a notice of this public hearing was posted, and this hearing will be conducted in accordance with the provisions of Texas Government Code Section 403.611. The board welcomes and encourages members of the audience to participate in this public hearing. If you would like to speak during the public hearing, you will have had to have signed up on the sign-in sheet prior to the hearing. The hearing will proceed as follows. First, there will be a presentation by Zaronic Technologies. Second, members of the audience who have signed up on the sign-up sheet prior to the hearing will be called one at a time to speak and will have each have a total of three minutes. The board will then adjourn the public hearing. Do I have a motion to convene the public hearing?

unknown 1:39

I have a motion made by Mrs. Galbash. A second by Ms. Wiglock. All those in favor? Aye.

SPEAKER_07 1:49

We are now convening the public hearing at 5 33 p.m. Suronic Technologies may now present.

SPEAKER_04 2:21

Natalie, where did you want this right now from?

SPEAKER_06 2:24

Um right there is actually where the right in the front. Maybe where it is standing. All right, good evening, everyone. We have uh we have four of us here today. Um first I'm going to go over the project team for this initiative. We have myself, Navy Egan, APM Expansion, and I'll let the uh three others introduce themselves as well.

SPEAKER_04 3:00

Yeah, Doug Labor, one of the co-founders and chief operating of Saronic Technologies.

SPEAKER_03 3:05

Um, Chris Johnson, I'm the director of Saronics Louisiana, should we have? Bib Alticar, uh co-founder and CTO.

SPEAKER_04 3:13

Awesome. This is Saronic, so just as a heads up, you know, I recognize that there's two very handsome servicemen on the left. Unfortunately, you have the nerds on the right, myself and Bib. Um, but what I really want to emphasize here is that this is an important conversation for us. And more importantly, we're very excited and very honored to be here and to be participating in your community in this way, which is why Viv and I decided to join. And we're really excited to show what we could do here at Brownsville and the ways in which we could impact your community in the near future. So, who is Saronic? So, you know, as we think about different sites and how we think about exploring and expanding, um, for us, you know, we want to get back to the community, we want to build infrastructure, we want to create jobs. I'll talk about it a little bit further in the presentation on how we've done that both in Louisiana and in Texas and Austin. But I'll highlight here that yes, we've raised a lot of capital. We have the ability to go and mobilize that capital in a way that's impactful to communities like Groundsville. But more importantly, we're not SpaceX. We don't have an unlimited budget. So conversations like this are really important for us. Participating in the JETTI, having the opportunity to go and engage with folks like yourself, that's what allows us to be successful in communities. And more importantly, that's how we've been able to demonstrate it both in Louisiana building out the program, as well as expanding almost 700,000 square feet manufacturing, so job-creating workspace in Austin, Texas. So, thinking broadly, we think of ourselves as both a shipbuilding and a technology company. This shouldn't be new to you. You've been adjacent to the Port of Brownsville for most of your lives. We live and breathe salt water. This is something that we're very passionate about. More importantly, we're marrying technology with the maritime industry, so bringing autonomous ships into that space, really reinvigorating the manufacturing process of the process, as well as marrying software, hardware technology, engineering, welding, pipe fitting, everything you can think of that goes into creating a ship. We obviously use here when we build our unmanned unsurface vehicles. And then more importantly, we're looking at growing that scope here in Bratzel in a way that really builds out large-scale commercial vehicles. So I mentioned it, we're headquartered in Austin, Texas. We are a Texas company through and through. We've been expanding in Austin for the last three years. I'll jump in there. It's all good. Just to give some context here, we think about manufacturing differently. You know, these are not dirty jobs. We think about them in a way that is incredibly, incredibly tech forward and people forward and process forward. So we we tend to invest in our employees. We like to upskill and create new opportunities that folks otherwise wouldn't have gotten in the area. And that really is reflected in how we build out infrastructure. You kind of see the high, white, and bright nature. You could think of that same approach. If we were to join you here in Brownsville, that's how we would approach building out a ship construction there as well. We are global, so for context, we may be stationed here in Central Texas. We have test facilities on both coasts in the United States, and then we're also expanding internationally in Australia and the United Kingdom. That's really important to us for a couple different reasons. One, we sell both into the defense market, but we also sell commercially. Because we're a commercial company, and I'll talk about that philosophy a little bit later in the conversation. It allows us to export that technology outside of the United States as well as take some of the lessons that we've learned in Finnish yards or Korean yards and really improve the way in which America is doing ship production. Cool. These things are real, so I'll talk about the products that we developed today and I'll kind of speak to the future on the different ships that we're planning on producing potentially here in Brownsville. But they've been out in the ocean for the better part of three, four years now. A ton of nautical miles traveled, so as mariners, Chris and I in particular, we have a high degree of standards for safety, so all these things are driving towards that goal to be able to create reliable, robust platforms that operate in a way that not only do manned systems that are participating with them be able to predict and understand and interact with them, but also kind of bring a level of safety that I don't think is possible in a manned ship in the ocean. From left to right, smallest to largest. So Corsair, you can think of this as our flagship boat. If ships carry boats, boats are significantly smaller. We build boats in Austin, Texas. We'll be building ships both in Louisiana and potentially here in Brownsville. Corsair, we manufacture hundreds of these. They're all over the world. They have thousands of hours worth of real-time use and kind of field-proven reliability. Movement up in size scale, so we we continue to build anything that's fiberglass in central Texas. And then Chris will talk a little bit about our Louisiana facility and our shipyard that builds the large 180-foot aluminum router. That's a good proxy of obviously something much smaller than what we built here in Brownsville, but it's a real proof point for Ceronic and hopefully a measure of confidence that we understand how to build ships and how to take that technology and scale it to something that's much, much larger. Roder in general is phenomenal, so I'm really proud of it. Chris has done a remarkable job of bringing that product to market. For context, we started that product in April of 2025. Mr. Johnson here was renovating that yard. We went from 23 employees to 223 in the better part of six months. Those first bulbs landed in June, so less than two months after we acquired that yard. And then more importantly, this last December, the first marauders clashed. So we plan on bringing that rapidity and that really fervor for production to an opportunity here in Brownsville. And most importantly, I'd like to highlight that we wouldn't have been able to do this without the expert shipbuilders that we found in Louisiana. And we're very excited. We believe that that same level of skill and talent exists in this geography, and we couldn't be happier to engage and find those folks and bring them into the cerotic family. For context, we've been expanding our shipyard in Louisiana. We understand infrastructure, it's something that we've done before. Obviously, Port Alpha, which Natalia talked to you about in a bit, is a different level of scale and complexity. But this gives us an opportunity to really try out some of these advanced manufacturing techniques in a smaller scenario to then bring them to an opportunity like Brownsville to build larger, larger, and Animex sized ships in a way that is kind of novel to the United States to really re-industrialize the marathon industry. Things a little bit more of the same. So we've been focusing in four different areas. One, you know, when we chose the Louisiana yard, we were looking for the location that really worked for ceramic, but also worked for the community that was there in place. So how do we find something that is protected from weather, that has good access to the Gulf? And then most importantly, when we were looking at an aluminum yard, that's a really unique skill set. So we're kind of canvassing the demographics across the Gulf Coast and trying to figure out who has the best aluminum welders. In this particular case, we wound up in Louisiana and couldn't be happier to work with those folks. Similarly, as we've got an upskilled workforce, we have welders who are becoming engineers, we have type cutters who are growing in their careers into foremans. That's something that's incredibly important to Ceramic, and we have a robust kind of jobs skill training pipeline that we've been prototyping here in Louisiana and could potentially bring here in Texas. And then last, this is really just a nod to how we think about doing business. So we certainly are a defense tech company, but we also consistently develop commercial technology. And the reason why that is important is for a couple different reasons. So if you think about the defense space, it's often very spiky and surgy in the context of work products, contracts, those different things. The reason why Saronic engages so heavily into logistics, offshore oil and gas, bathometric data, oil, offshore wind, all these different places. One, not only is that a phenomenal use for our technology, but two, it actually allows us to consistently keep people employed, keep them active, keep producing shifts, and then for America, keep those forges high and keep those production lines running in a way that one supplements the workforce, encourages further investment, and then last but certainly not least, brings a level of prosperity to the places that we go about infrastructure and be happier to provide. Well, pass it off. So one of our secret sauces is very much so the software. Viv is the pioneer of this here at Ceramic, and I think he'd be happy to share what he's built.

SPEAKER_01 12:47

Thanks first of all for having us here. Super excited to talk about the technology that drives our vessels. I'll just start off by saying that no amount of the software that we built or can build in the future is possible or even makes a difference if it's not for every single hardware component that came before it. So we are reliant on every welder, every pipe fitter, everybody that designs HVAC systems. All of those things are critical because at the end of the day, software sits at the very top of the stack. So you don't have a boat, or the boat's not working, the software doesn't really make a difference. But where our team comes in is focused on how do you operate these vessels, how do you build a good user experience for our customers, and ultimately how do you turn something that historically has been focused on human operations, human-centric, and turn that into a place that's safer, have one human do a lot more, rather than having very serial operations that typically happen. So I'll talk a little bit about what that means. So we start off at the top. You know, this is when I say platforms, we're really talking about the hardware systems that Chris and Doug and their teams build. When we think about the autonomy, we really think about the software that runs on the device. So, how do you teach a computer or teach an autonomous boat what people look like, what dolphins look like, what sailboats look like, so we can make the right decisions and have a human operator to go and make sure that the system is taking a decision that's observable and transparent. That bleeds into the command and control side. We build user-facing applications that allow both our commercial customers as well as our defense customers to operate the vessels at scale. If you think about it, the ocean is a very, very large portion of the planet, right? There's more ocean than there is land, 70% of the world's surface area is the ocean. You have a lot more area to cover on the ocean than you do on land. And so, in order to do that, you really need to be able to build at scale. That's where the manufacturing side comes in. And then our job at the end of the day is to sit on top of that, build a software layer that allows humans to easily and intuitively control all of these systems. So I'll talk a little bit about what this looks like on Marauder, and it's this is probably a reasonable glimpse of what we would be building here in Brownsville, a similar, a similar large autonomous ship. Um, so you know the first component here is the autonomy control system. This is the eyes and ears of the product. How do you see, how do you understand what's going on around you, how do you communicate with other manned assets? Super, super critical from an autonomy perspective, because ultimately we're going to start off in a world where there's a lot more manned crafts than unmanned crafts, and so all of the manned vessels will need to have the ability to understand when an unmanned vessel is approaching it. Similarly, there's a bunch of cameras, radar systems, and other sensors to allow for significantly more coverage and understanding of what's going around the vehicle. If you think about a manned craft today, if you take an OSV or even a small fishing boat that's out in the ocean today, you typically just have about one radar and a lot of focus is on the captive. Our systems kind of think about that in the opposite sense, where you want the user to feel comfortable, not stressed out, while they're using the platform. So it has a ton of cameras, so you can see really, really far and wide. You have multiple radars for redundancy and different frequencies that allows you to see different kinds of assets in different weather conditions and allows you to have a lot more control and stability over the platform. The second part of this is the machinery control system. This is really orchestrating the floating power plant that an autonomous ship really is. You have generators, fuel tanks, fuel pumps, and fuel transfer systems, jet drives, all sorts of internal machinery that typically a human has a very difficult job of watching a switch forward or watching a fuel pump and making sure it's doing the right thing if it's not manually going and moving a switch, manually going and pumping something. The way that we think about designing our crafts is software native, so that one human can actually start to control all of these things from simply the click of a computer. What this allows for is that we can build numerous of these, so you can have one sailor start to manage multiple systems, and again, we have not scratched the surface of covering all of the ocean, right? The ocean is massive. And so we really need to build a lot of these in the physical hardware space and then build the right software tools so that a handful of humans can really orchestrate these at scale. The last two pieces, Ship OS and Fleet Manager, those are software products that we build that really focus on the maintenance and operation side of these vessels. Today, if you look at large ships, they spend a lot of time in the dry docks. And the reason for that is that there's so many different analog components with high failure rates. The focus of our software is to make sure that a human operator can understand when a particular system is about to fail before it actually fails, so you can predictably understand, okay, I need to go and schedule my maintenance for this day, this week, make sure I order the right parts on time, and really build a more efficient process for all the maintenance and repair operations that usually happen in a shipyard. I'll talk a little bit about the insides of what a what a vehicle that we build actually kind of attempts to understand or process. Humans are incredibly efficient at this. We have 20 watts of power in our brain, and we're quite good at understanding everything that's going around us, from depth to playing tennis and catching footballs, all the way to really understanding the specific dexterity of writing. It's a very complicated task for computers, though. And so one of the things that we try to spend a lot of our time on is how do we teach the computer to see the world the same way that a human does. And so for that, once we require a lot of compute, and so that's what edge processing really refers to. Think about putting graphics processing units and large-scale compute into the boat itself. And then the second part is we're really targeting, collecting enough data so that we can teach the craft to see how a human does. And so humans are intimately involved in teaching our vehicles. This is everything from our mission operations team or people who are boat operators, often ex-military, to even just people in the shipyard as they're assembling different components, really need to understand how the system at the end of the day will work so they assemble the product in the right way. I think I have a video right after this just to give you guys a glimpse of what this looks like in the real world. So what you're seeing here is a glimpse into our command and control interface. I know it looks a little crowded, uh, but we'll walk through it. So on the left side, what you're seeing is a small chip out or a small image of some of the surface targets that we've picked up. In the middle, what you're seeing is a map, and so we'll zoom out here in a second, and you'll actually get to see a much larger aperture of what the vehicle and what the operator actually sees. On the right side, of course, you have your video stream. In the middle of the ocean, network conditions can be challenging. You don't have cell towers, you don't have necessarily uh from cell service but all the way to even satellite communications can be quite challenging in the ocean. Every time salt water hits your antennas, uh, you lose tackets. And so it's a really challenging engineering problem. And so on the right side, you're seeing as consistent of a video stream as we can deliver, so then a human operator can sit thousands of miles away and still do the same things that a human typically would be in a very dangerous environment doing. Um, other things that you're seeing here, so the the vehicle is actually automatically avoiding a buoy in that channel. And you can kind of see that little white line is that trajectory that it's taking. If any of you have been in a Tesla or Waymo recently, that's the same user experience that you usually see inside that car. It's very similar to the technology that we developed for our self-driving boats. The last thing that I'll just highlight here is that there's a lot of dependency on the actual infrastructure in the region. So we are looking at electronic navigation charts, we're working with the Coast Guard, we're also making sure that we're communicating via AIS, via very high frequency channel 16, uh, and other methods over the internet to make sure that all the manned assets in the area are aware of what we're doing and we're aware of what they're doing. This allows for safer operations, it allows for more focus on any sort of environmental concerns, um, and just gives us the full transparency and visibility of everything that's kind of going on in the sea. As a manned operator, you would not be able to see that far. Your radar systems usually aren't as performant, and so all of these things end up in building simply safer maritime operations. Again, the last thing that I'll just highlight here all of this working well, of the boat driving itself and being able to understand the scene around it, and you'll see it picking up sailboats and detecting buoys and detecting all sorts of things around it. This only works if the hardware platform is stable. And so one of the things that's really critical as we build our systems and kind of push the forefront of what these AI systems look like, really, really critical that we bring that back to our production facilities, our manufacturing facilities, and the hardware design. Because ultimately, nothing that my team does, excuse me, nothing that my team does on the software side is possible without the hardware being built, without being built reliably, without every single bolt being fastened and the pipe being fitted in an appropriate way. And I think a lot of the folks on our team really understand that, and so we get the luxury of having all of these three kind of departments operate in one house. We have software, we have manufacturing, and then we have the operation side. And this synergy allows us to build the best products in the market. You know, we're just seeing a little sailboat go by our Corsair as we're driving by, drive driving back to driving back to our dot. So um, I think I think that's any other slides, Natalie? No? Cool. Move over to Port Alpha.

SPEAKER_06 22:02

On to Port Alpha. So you might have seen this project referred to as Project Gondor, Project Hercules, Port Alpha. Those are all the same thing. Internally, what we've named this port is Port Alpha. But due to confidentiality and keeping this project under wraps, we have had multiple code names. Originally it was Project Gondor that leaked, so then we renamed Project Hercules, but just know that all three of those things are the same thing, and you might hear it referenced interchangeably in this presentation. So this render has been online for quite some time. I'm sure you've seen it before, it's on a lot of slides. We created this render over a year ago based on nothing but conception and ideas of what it could be. So I have a couple renders in here next, which are much more accurate, a much more accurate reflection of what we can expect from Port Alpha. I can't promise this is exactly what it's going to look like, but these are real engineered renders that have been given to our director of Port Alpha in planning the building of this site, depending on where it lands. So we have two potential images. Again, no no no promises or guarantees, but you can see the models and how our team is thinking about this. Like Doug mentioned earlier. It's very clean, it's very safe, it's very it feels very respectful of the worker and the employees that are on it. So Port Alpha Project Gondor. I go through these details in much more detail on future slides, but the gist of what we're looking at, actually, could you put the map back on that? Is a little over 600 acres of development, a$3.2 billion investment, over 10,000 direct jobs that we would hire as full-time employees, and we'd be breaking ground as soon as possible this year. So why Port Alpha is important, obviously the commercial side, which Doug mentioned earlier, but on the defense side, this is what the disparity looks like between U.S. shipbuilding and the shipbuilding capabilities of China. So they outpace us by a factor of 230. They're making 23 million gross tons of ships annually, where we're making 100,000. So you can think about every year that this goes on, the range, the distribution of what China is capable of versus the United States is getting dangerously, dangerously wide. So bringing on port alpha, we close that gap very quickly and by matching 45% of the Chinese capacity. So that's increasing the United States building to 10 million gross tons annually, which you can see it doesn't necessarily make us equivalent with them, but it certainly gets us closer to the game. So this is the site that we're looking at. This red triangle here is the actual site that we are looking to lease directly from the port. This is about 605 acres. You can see everything that is in blue is a potential expansion site. So we're not directly looking to lease it or operate it today, but one of the big reasons we were so interested in Brownsville and interested in this site is that opportunity for expansion. So when looking at the map, we can see this is Highway 48, here's where Saronic will be, and you can see how far it is from each community. And just for context as far as daily life, when we drove out here to find Isabel, we drove this stretch onto Highway 48, and Viv has never seen the site, so I was actually really looking forward to being like, hey, look across the water and you'll see our site. You actually can't see it because it is blocked by all of the industry on the north side of the canal. And when you get here, this is where the LMG plant is, which also blocks the site from view. So it's it's you can see it from highway four down here, but you actually can't see the site from the north shore. Here's a closer look at where the specific triangle is that we're looking to lease. So the point of this slide, you can read this is the ramp of both capital investment and head count. The reason I wanted to show this, people frequently ask, well, when does this start? Like, are you leasing this property in order to sit on it for five years? When does it when does the investment start flowing? When do the people start landing? And as you can see, all of this starts immediately. We can't control when we get permits and when we're allowed to start construction. But if if permanent, we would be breaking ground this summer as soon as possible in construction. As far as hiring goes, and when we would start hiring the first people, we have already started. We have our director of Port Alpha on the team. We're hiring for HR, we're hiring for EHS, we're hiring for project managers, engineers across the board, and for now we're just having them all live in Austin temporarily until we decide where Port Alpha is going, and then they will relocate to wherever that site is. But as far as hiring, it's already started, and the capital investment is ready to go as soon as we're able to break ground. As far as community impact, we're looking at 168 billion in fact just in Cameron County. When you look at the state of Texas, this number goes up to I think it's 264 billion, with not just the 10,000 direct jobs that we're hiring as full-time employees, but an additional 9.5,000 in indirect labor and indirect jobs within the community. Total wages earned will be$1.4 billion through support or through support jobs. Um and total wages will be$830 million. Um on the fiscal side, you can see here it's um we have over$1.5 billion for the state of Texas, uh, Cameron County,$601 million. This is just the construction, so this is just the building of the facility, not counting any of the work that we're going to be doing there. Environmental impact. We know this is very important, and this is a this is a place where ceronic has a huge advantage over traditional shipyards, um, or really any heavy industry. There's been a lot of improvements made in production, manufacturing, advanced manufacturing that reduce emissions, make the manufacturing floor more safe, and it's very difficult to overhaul a current manufacturing facility to implement these standards and implement the new equipment. To do that, they have downtime on the production line, they have to train their employees on new practices. Um, it's it's a huge investment because they've already spent money on their infrastructure equipment. So with Port Alpha, because we're building in these standards from the ground up, we're not trying to bolt them on after the fact, and we're not trying to renovate the facility, we're building it for the first time. We're able to install, um, we're able to build manufacturers around what's best for Saronic, what's best for the community. So, as you can see, these numbers are significantly lower than traditional shipbuilding, mostly by using advanced systems and containment filtration systems built into the manufacturing process. Um, here we have some of the water and hazmat. The general theme that you'll see across these slides is that we use closed systems when we can. Um we don't do open-air welding or painting, we keep everything contained, we use very engineering practices. Uh, just like Doug uses first principles engineering on the products, the EHS team uses first principles engineering on how you build it. The very, very loudest our production will be. Um, let's say it's 120 decibels inside of the maintained building, as you saw on our in the render, everything is within the buildings. Um, when you get to about a mile away, that is reduced to zero. So there should be no noise pollution from neighboring communities. Um, so Franklin community impact. I'm gonna be back with you guys after this. I'm not done yet. But Chris flew here from Franklin specifically to talk about the impact Seronica's had on that community. It's easy for us to say in Austin, like, this is what we're gonna do here, this is what we're gonna do there. So he came in just to really speak to what it feels like to be an employee in a shipyard separate from headquarters.

SPEAKER_03 30:24

Alright, so I don't have words and numbers on the slides, I have photos. Uh, this first photo are the original 28 employees that were at the existing shipyard, plus some folks from Saronic and Austin. Um the previous shipyard was called Gulfcraft, and the owners were retiring, and so the august for sale. So, what does that mean? That means they were preparing to deliver their last ship, which they did, and they were going to close the doors. Saronic came around, saw it, loved it, loved the workforce, and retained all of the workforce in the transition. Why did they retain that workforce? Because they're skilled. Right? We have a lot of skilled labor in Louisiana, similar to in this area. And Saronic provided a home, not just for those original 28, but also folks who had left the shipyard as it sunset. Additionally, Saronic has provided a home for many more folks in our area who were into the oil and gas industry, which has been in decline for some time. Um so, yeah, next photo. Thanks, Natalie. Sorry. All good. Um, one of the things that Saronic is really, really good at is bringing on younger talent and training them. Now I'm gonna talk about labor force and professional. So I love this photo. I actually took this photo Thursday last week. Um, the guy there kind of on the left in the white hard hat, his name is Tristan, and he's been in that shipyard for over 10 years, and he is one of two people who are allowed to operate that big blue machine called the travel lift. That travel lift can lift up to 500 tons. And he's been running that machine for a good while. That young man in the middle in the green hard hat, his name's Tyreek. He's about 20 years old. He just came in, he showed a great work ethic and a desire to learn how to do more. So Thursday, we taught him how to run that travel lift. Alright, we have many, many examples of this. Bringing up young folks into the workforce, training them, getting them more skills so that they can continue to better themselves. Another fun story, the guy all the way on the right, you can barely see in that Wi-Fi pad over there. His name's Corey. He was hired, he just started last week. He is from the area, South Louisiana, but had worked in shipyards, but had moved to California for his job because he was moving up in the world and there wasn't there wasn't anything available in South Louisiana. So the position he was in, he wanted to move up, he had to go to California. Well now he's back. And we have quite a few examples of that as well. One thing I'll talk about as well, I mentioned professionals. Louisiana has had a long problem of young graduates in STEM, specifically engineering, electrical, mechanical, not so much patrol to have that, but software. Many different types of engineers have to leave Louisiana, even though they want LHU or other universities in the system, because there aren't good jobs inside Louisiana for those professions. I can tell you now, there are. Part of that 233 now we have in Franklin, about 10% to 20% are engineers, depending on how you look at engineers, right? The traditional mechanical electrical software. We also have production engineers and manufacturing engineers, which some of those are STEM degrees, some of those aren't. It depends on your specific talents. But we're helping reduce what they call the brain drain, where professional, young professionals lead because there's not enough jobs for them. And Saronic is really doing a really good job of doing that, and frankly, and I suspect we'll do it here again when Brownsville give it a chance. Alright, so this photo is from Mardi Gras, and it's about half of our current staff workforce. Right? Those are kinkakes, if you've ever heard of those. So we have um two lunch shifts, so this was taken during one of them. We also have a uh a later shift that came later and enjoyed their Eden coffee. Um and you know, you saw that first photo. Let me see this photo. Those are less than a year apart. Right? We're growing, people want to come work for us. I see 30 new applications a day for various positions in the labor force and in the professional side. Now, why do people want to come work for us, especially in the labor force, but also throughout job security? Saronic leans in to doing what we do. For example, I'm just starting our fourth 180-foot ship this week, basically. We're already purchasing long lead time materials and equipment for number 12. Right? It doesn't take weeks to build one of these, it takes a few months. So you can imagine how long out that is. That's job security for folks who, during the holding class, oil and gas up and down, now they see a steady job that's well paying, has good benefits. And then the final thing I'll say I don't have a picture, but you know, being in and around Franklin, and you just go around, there's a buzz about ceramic. You know, we showed the kind of the photo of breaking ground and the expansion. That's happening right now. There's dirt moving, there's pilings going in. People are talking about ceramic. Hey, I see what y'all are doing, I'm excited to see what y'all build. Hey, my son just got a job over there, his name is this, you know, how's he doing? Etc. Right? Restaurants. Um I think now I might talk about how we provide lunch for every employee up to a level. But you go to a restaurant, hey, how was your lunches yesterday? You know, was it good? Was everything good? I'll go to the grocery in my saronic shirt. Someone comes up to me, hey, I work at this restaurant, I did y'all's lunches yesterday, how were they? Um, and that's just one example, right? There are many examples of things we do in the community. Again, I think there's a final slide now that shows specific examples. But we really leaned into the community and having the impact. And then bringing people from Austin and other sites, uh, both national uh domestically and international folks, over into Franklin to see Mirar's being built. Our culture is different. Like, I can't speak for the culture here, but in South Louisiana things move a little slower than in Austin, right?

unknown 36:31

It's just a different feel.

SPEAKER_03 36:33

And I think we've had a pretty big influence on ceramic from our Franklin folks. People come down, people want to come to Franklin, you know, out of the buzz of Austin. They want to come to Franklin because it's just a little different. There's that unique South Louisiana culture, just like I'm sure the culture down here in South Texas is unique, right? So it's been it's been quite a journey. Um working for Saronic, it's been quite an opportunity. Um it has been exciting and it's going to continue to be exciting. And I think it'll be exciting here too. Really good tempo when you buy it into those forcakes have little babies in them, and yes, that's part of our very plastic.

SPEAKER_06 37:13

So now we'll talk about employee and community benefits and really what it feels like to be an employee of Ceronic. And before I get into this, I'm just going to share some commentary. Uh, things I hear daily from the team and from people that come and get to know Ceronic. Um, I I actually I'll keep going. So we offer roles across the entire gamut of the technology field, and this is very unique for a manufacturing company to like bringing software in-house, being vertically integrated. It's fairly rare to have one single large company where you can hire thousands of welders and fairs, instructural fabricators, and CNT operators, and also be hiring and employing the top AI robotics engineers in the country, autonomous systems, very, very advanced RD engineering, both in mechanical and electrical and label architecture. And this is really important for crafting the benefits package because we have one benefits program across the entire company. So, Dino, our CEO, goes into his, you know, the RHR system and he elects for his benefits from the same exact portal and the same offerings that every single role on here gets to choose from. Um, and I'll speak to those benefits a little bit more, but this is where the marrying of extremely high tech and manufacturing creates a beautiful environment where a welder or a production assistant has the same benefits package as a software engineer for Google or Meta in the Bay Area because that's where we're recruiting a lot of talent from. And we need to have the best software engineers in the world. They're coming from places like Apple and Facebook and Google and Tesla, and they're not going to join a company with a lacking benefits package. So we're we created the package to entice and appeal to the most specialized niche roles in the world, and then we're floating that into that same exact benefits package to every single employee of the company. So again, some of those benefits, we have national salaries, an average salary of$90,000, which is extremely high for a company that's as heavy industry as we are. Um, we also give equity to every single employee. So what this means is every employee, again, there's no there are no exceptions here. If you are an employee of Ceronic, you receive options, uh stock options in the company. So what that means is if Ceronic succeeds, you succeed. And if Ceronic wins, then you get money from that. It's not just a hypothetical, like, I mean, of course, we want people that are working for the mission of the company, but also you think like if I take a short pick here and it hurts the company, I'm hurting my own financial future because every employee stands to win. And this is the kind of wealth that can become life-changing wealth. It's very hard to save money from education. I think most people agree that it's it's very, even if you're not paycheck to paycheck, even if you're making more than that, it's very difficult to save a retirement, save for education for children. It's hard to build wealth off of a paycheck alone, and this equity gives every single employee an opportunity to share economic success. Um, some of the benefits are very forward thinking. I'll list a few of them. Um, our medical package is extremely strong. We have a platinum program that's 100% paid for for every employee and 80% paid for for dependents. Same with dental envision, 100% paid for for the employees and 80% paid for for dependents. Um, we offer a very robust family care package. We have six months fully paid maternity leave, eight weeks, or actually, I think it's 12 weeks now, fully 12 weeks of fully paid paternity leave, with again no exceptions. You don't have to apply for disability, um, and it's and it's eligible from day one. So there's no waiting period for medical benefits or these fertility benefits. Um, another example of leaning in, we work with a benefits company called Carrot, uh, which does fertility benefits. So whether that's fertility preservation, every employee gets up to$15,000 to help create whatever family they would like to. Um as far as building that workforce, like uh like Chris had mentioned, we do get a lot of applications and people generally do want to work for Ceramic, but it's not enough just to take just recruit from inbound. We're really taking the opportunity to build the workforce holistically. So things we do are partner with schools, we offer a very robust internship program. From day one, I think I remember when we were we were maybe only 15 employees when we hired our first intern, because um our perspective is always great to be bringing in new talent, giving people opportunities, and it's just a win-win across the board.

SPEAKER_04 42:00

We had our first round of interns that went back to school for two years and then give back to some road.

SPEAKER_06 42:06

Yeah, absolutely. So, partnering with different trade schools, higher education groups. I think I have a fun photo slide here just to show that we are already doing this. This is not something that we're saying we're going to do if we come here to Brownsville. We're already doing this because this is a core value of who we are. So here we have a couple fun photos. Um, up here, this is one of those internship groups that came through. We've got a cute photo. This is Dino, our CEO. He went and spent time at the Entrepreneurship Club at UT Texas. You can see them doing the longhorns. Um, we have a hackathon that we're actually hosting next week. So if you know any, if you want to refer, you know, if you have software engineers in your homes, tell them to apply and to join some hackathon in Austin. Um, and then we have Viv and Abby, a software engineer on the team, again, speaking to a classroom and really hoping to garner a new generation of software engineers and encourage them. So, Viv, I'm not sure if you want to speak to this a little bit.

SPEAKER_01 43:02

Yeah, I would say like the two big things here: one for the hackathon, and then two the kind of clubs and communities that we speak to on campus. Um, you know, in the in a in a world in which like your democratization of knowledge via AI and via the internet is so much faster. You can learn so many things faster with a lot of these tools. Um, we've we've actually changed the way we think about who applies to these things. So our barrier to entry is simply if you're interested. And if you're interested, you can show up, we have tools, we have data, we have a bunch of different applications and toys and hardware to play with, so that when you come onto the coupon site for the hackathon, there's the entire entire aperture of anything that you want to build is available to you. And we have mentors that are people on our team that come and help you, spend time with you, understand like what things are talking well, what things aren't, and then we try to fill that gap. And then really just have like a nice healthy competition of what's the coolest thing that we can build today. Um, and there's food and snacks, and at the end of the day, we're all gonna head over to our to our lake and see one of our. Autonomous codes drive around. So it's really going to be a pretty awesome, awesome hackathon. So feel free to invite folks that are folks that are interested in that kind of engineering.

SPEAKER_06 44:09

One of my favorite.

SPEAKER_03 44:11

Can I add?

SPEAKER_06 44:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 44:12

I'm sorry. I did not give you this photo. I completely forgot. That's my fault. In Franklin, we also just had our first round of interns, an eight-week program for shipyard management interns. And they loved it so much that it ended two weeks ago. They actually stayed up till 3 a.m. making cookies for the entire shipyard. I mean, tubs of cookies. And they could not be more thankful, and we were thankful for them too. We had a nice little party with lots of cooking.

SPEAKER_02 44:39

Yes, we also do not just, you know, standing internships in other offices, very important, we get internships in the shipyard as well.

SPEAKER_06 44:45

One of my favorite things that I actually heard Vib say the other day that he didn't mention just now is that now we're probably in the first generation of seeing someone go from welding to being a software engineer. Because truly you don't have to have a degree in computer science anymore. You don't have to have formal training. Like Vib said, if you come up and you're interested and willing to learn, you can be a software engineer. So do you want to?

SPEAKER_04 45:09

I was going to say if you all come to Louisiana and you all theme. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_06 45:18

So this is the last slide. We know how important community is. Um as I I'm VT of Expansion. One of my personal philosophies, what I try to bring to expansion, is that everywhere we go, I want them to be very excited that we're coming into that area. So rather than like every time we announce whether it is we're going to Virginia Beach or we're going to San Diego or Galveston or Brownsville or wherever that is, we want the community to think, wow, ceramic is coming here. This means good things are coming. So here's a small example of what of things that we have already done in the past. In Franklin, we participate in, for example, the River Cook Shrimp Oil. We've sponsored charter students to go up to their field trip to Italy. We're a sponsor of the boys' baseball team and the girls' softball team in Austin. There are a couple examples up here. Something I'm particularly proud of, proud of the team for is how Ceronic responded to the flood relief last year, which was absolutely devastating. And when we heard about the floods, it took about an hour for a large team at Ceronic to mobilize. We sent, I think, six trucks to HEVs, to various HEVs, and Dino gave them all corporate credit cards and said, go buy whatever it is for you, whether it's diapers, food, medical equipment, whatever it is, fill the trucks to the brig, drive it out there. Also made a sizable cash donation. And we have we have such a strong, competent team of people who are so service-minded, many are veterans, that we have two members in personate in search and rescue, in cleanup, support the cataloging things, and it was it was just a really beautiful moment to have an opportunity to give back to the community in such a in such a trying time. This is by no means a reflection of everything. There are a lot of fun things. We're actually sponsoring Wounded Warrior 50 at a 5K in San Diego. We're working with a surf camp in Galveston right now, which supports wounded veterans and children with disabilities in the community. So the main thesis is if Ceronic has a footprint in the location, we're going to invest in that community and try to give back. So that wraps up our presentation. We really are excited about this opportunity. Like Doug mentioned, we we are evaluating multiple sites, but as a Texas company, we see the possibility here, we see the opportunity, and it's it's programs like this, like the Jedi, that helps make it feasible to be here.

unknown 47:48

Thank you.

SPEAKER_07 47:49

Thank you. Okay, thank you for your presentation. We will now hear from community members who are finding that to speak. We have one person that has signed up, Dr. Christopher Bosaldiff. You want to step forward? We'll give you the mic and call it.

unknown 48:15

Okay, we have three minutes, and I just asked that you can hear comments. Good evening, everyone.

SPEAKER_00 48:31

I'd like to point out that this company wishes to make autonomous AI weapons designed to murder and kill human beings. I want you to remember that. They also want to have commercial applications, which means that they wish to have investors, not only from the United States government, but from private sources as well. You must also remember that the United States government, in its long history of genocide of native and indigenous people, and its unjust wars across the planet, the United States seems to have infinite money to invest in weapons of war and destroy human life and human dignity. So I'm perplexed as to why they think they need to take tax money away from schools for our children to educate themselves.

unknown 49:23

For our children to be educated, they want a tax break from the school district.

SPEAKER_00 49:28

I ask the board to vote no on this tax abatement so that any industry that comes to this area pays their fair share in their operations here. Because they, if they are successful, they will create a lot of wealth for themselves, their investor. But that doesn't necessarily mean that that wealth will trickle down to the school district, to the Cameron County, or to our children.

unknown 49:58

All industries are polluting and dirty. And you must keep in mind with all the industries that are trying to come here, there will be negative impacts to the air and the water and the land.

SPEAKER_00 50:08

I also want to point out that locating a facility like this next to LAG facilities potentially and how explosive SpaceX is, we're just increasing the explosion and death risk, mass casualty events here in Cameron County. I also want to remind you that all of these companies are already polluting the air and water in the land. And this company too will pollute the air, water, and land cumulatively with all these other companies. But having weapons manufacturers here, which will make us a military target for as long as they would be here, I want to remind you, having military technology here and a company making military weapons to kill people for the United States Navy will be pollution to our souls. Thank you.

SPEAKER_07 51:05

Thank you for your comments. Since no one else has signed up for public comment, this time the board may ask any other of my questions resulting from my presentation. Are there any questions from board members at this time? Okay. If there are no more questions, we will close this public hearing. Do I have a motion to adjourn the public hearing? A motion made by Mr. Douglas, a second by Ms. Hoffman. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Motion carries unanimous. Public hearing is adjourned at 6.23 p.m.