DATE: December 17, 2019
SUBJECT: Meeting Confirmation, Location and Registration for the January 2020 CRRT Meeting
FROM: Steve Touw, EPA CRRT Coordinator
TO: CRRT Members and Participants
We are pleased to confirm that the next Caribbean Regional Response Team (CRRT) meeting is scheduled for January 28-30, 2020. The meeting will be held at the Puerto Rico Department of Natural and Environmental Resources, 4th floor conference room, which is located in the Environmental Agencies Building. As many of you will remember, this was the location for our January 2017 meeting. The address for the building is:
Edificio de Agencias Ambientales
Cruz A. Matos
Urbanización San José Industrial Park
1375 Avenida Ponce de León
San Juan, PR 00926
If you enter the street address into Google Maps, it will put you in the general vicinity of the building, but if you search for “Edificio de Agencias Ambientales,” it should pinpoint the actual building. I’ve also attached two maps which provide an overview of the general San Juan area, and a close-up view of the building location. A picture of the building is posted on the Eventbrite meeting registration site, which will help you identify the building when you get there. There is a parking garage located behind the building, and building management asked us the last time to park on the upper levels. There is a cafeteria on-site, as well as several lunch options located within a short distance.
We expect our schedule to encompass full days on Tuesday through Thursday of that week, so please make your travel plans accordingly. This will include a coastal area committee meeting on Tuesday morning, followed by the start of the standing CRRT meeting on Tuesday afternoon. Our tentative plans envision the CRRT meeting continuing all day on Wednesday and continuing into Thursday afternoon.
We have established a registration website for meeting attendees. Please note that while registration is not required to attend the CRRT meeting, it will assist us in ensuring adequate seating and other meeting logistics. If you plan on attending, please register by Monday, January 27th, at the following website:
https://january2020crrt.eventbrite.com
The draft agendas for both the area committee meeting and the CRRT meeting are currently under development and will be distributed in the next few weeks. If you have topics of interest or suggestions for the CRRT Meeting agenda, please contact me by phone at (732) 906-6900 or email at touw.steve@epa.gov, or Mr. Richard Lavigne, USCG CRRT Coordinator at Richard.J.Lavigne@uscg.mil, or by phone at (305) 415-7138.
January is a busy travel time in Puerto Rico, so we encourage you to look into travel plans as soon as possible. Please note that we will not set up a block of hotel rooms for this meeting, so I encourage you to consider making hotel reservations at your earliest convenience in order to obtain good rates. There are numerous hotels in Old San Juan, the Condado area and Isla Verde which offer government rates, and are located within a short driving distance of the meeting location. Please feel free to contact me for additional information on lodging options.
As a reminder, federal government and US Military employees can receive a tax exempt letter from the PR Tourism Company for their guest room charges, by sending an email and a copy of your travel authorization to roomtaxpr@tourism.pr.gov with the following information:
I am a federal government employee with ___(full agency name)___who will be attending the Caribbean Regional Response Team meeting in San Juan. I will be staying at the _______Hotel on _(dates)___. I would like to obtain a tax exempt authorization from Puerto Rico Tourism.
Additional meeting information will be posted on the CRRT website and disseminated by email. If you are not currently on the email distribution list and would like to receive future meeting and other CRRT-related information, please contact me by email. Likewise, if you no longer wish to receive CRRT-related emails, please let me know and I will remove you from our distribution lists.
To ensure that all interested representatives are made aware of this meeting, please pass on this notice to any other members of your staff or agency/department, and to your local counterparts as well.
We hope to see you next month in Puerto Rico.