Micah on Staten Island flag design and symbolism

Thank you, Chair Brewer and committee members, and particularly Frank Morano for inviting me here to talk about this favorite project,

that being the design of the flag for Staten Island, which is...

I promise it wasn't created with artificial intelligence.

It replaced this one, which then Borough President James Otto brought to me and said, we've got to redo this.

We're being represented poorly.

And so happily, we got started on a brand new flag.

We began with the basics.

There was some equity built into the Staten Island seal, which existed, but as far as I was concerned, it looked like it was squeezed out of a toothpaste tube.

So it needed some freshening and some smartening up and crisp graphics.

We began pencil sketches.

We had our colleagues pose for the illustrator.

That's wonderful.

It's Michelle Kakoza, my partner.

And then we took the step-by-step journey to a final design, which was this.

And so.

We got a little bit of press.

We got a story in the Saturday Night Advance and a full page in the New York Times.

So we were quite pleased.

And thank you again for allowing me to speak about it.

Thank you very much.

I like it a lot.

And then I learned from the briefing paper, thank you, Council Member Brown, that Manhattan doesn't have it codified either.

Thank you.

That was very interesting.

I saw other boroughs do, so like Staten Island and Manhattan, they're not.

So congratulations.

Thank you.

You've got great leadership with Frank Morano, and Jimmy Otto is my hero.

He's a lot of folks'heroes.

So anybody, you have questions?

Go ahead.