I'll call the meeting to order.
I'm going to welcome our guests in a moment, but first, I want to go through a couple of quick things. The first is to apologize to everyone for the late start. It was business of the House that kept all committee members until just now.
I wanted to outline the time that we have today. We've lost half an hour because of this. I've heard a number of committee members and others express a desire to finish on time at 5:30, so we're going to have to absorb the loss of time within our allotted period.
I don't want to take any time away from the presentations from our guests. The way that the afternoon was intended to roll out was that the first group would present for 10 minutes, followed immediately by the second group for 10 minutes, leaving 40 minutes for the committee members to ask questions. That would be an hour, and we would have repeated that again for the second two groups.
Because we've lost half an hour, we're going to have to remove 15 minutes from each of the 40-minute question periods, leaving 25 minutes for questions. I'll ask the committee's preference on this. Last week, I tried to accommodate time loss by shaving minutes, and that didn't seem to go over very well, so it's my intention to stick to the minute allotments that we adopted in the routine motions until we run out of time. In other words, we'd let that run for 25 minutes and then simply stop, and move on to the next group of presentations.
Does that sound okay to folks? Okay, thank you. That's what we'll do.
I'm also going to get a little stricter about timekeeping. For the benefit of our guests, the committee members agreed ahead of time on seven minutes per question for the first four questions, followed by five minutes per question. This is a way to maintain fairness among all members. I will be letting you know when you have a minute left in the seven-minute period, and then again when there are about five or 10 seconds left, so you can finish up. I'm really going to keep it to those seven- and five-minute segments.
I would invite committee members to try to keep the opening soliloquies prior to the questions as short as possible and get right to the question so we can hear the most that we can from our guests.
With that throat clearing and introductory comments, I'm very pleased to welcome our first presenters, who are from the ITK.
Thank you very much for being with us. I guess it's Natan Obed, the president, who will be presenting to us today. At your pleasure, please, we'd love to hear from you.