My name is Bill Gordon and this is Tall Tails Training and Boarding. And I'm Robin Achey and we've been business partners for 30 years. Tall Tails Training and Boarding offers a residence program for your dog. It's two weeks of training with your dog so your dog learns obedience skills, cooperation, and patience. We teach communication words. We teach real life applications, manners, how the dog wants to interact with the environment. And then there's training for the owners to teach them what the dog already knows. Teaching the owners how to use the commands so that they can create the relationship that they want with their dogs. We also offer behavioral problem solving, aggression, rehab, and all kinds of puppy training and counseling. Bill and I didn't actually start out in this business. 30 years ago I was a graphic designer, Bill was a chemical engineer. At the time, we were married, and we were raising a dog together getting training from a local trainer. We were having experiences that were appalling; bad boarding situations, a trainer that was way too dominant and harsh. We found our dog crumbling instead of thriving. And that's when I got the spark to be like I knew that I had to create something that could help other people find fulfillment in relationship with their pets. Bill at the time was a chemical engineer and he found the same zeal as we worked together with this dog. Bill and I were married at the time. We divorced and as we divorced we raised our business as though it was a child we were co-parenting. We built this business and we had to reestablish new relationships based on what our common goal was. But we used that foundation as the way to solve behavioral problems in dogs with behavioral problems. So our own personal situation became very integral in how we created programs for people. Tall Tails Training and Boarding has hosted several events for rescues and veterinarians where they offer education for the public, fundraising for rescues, blood donations, and other opportunities for people to come in and get education in various aspects of pet ownership. Bill and I really like to emphasize bringing people together learning about animal causes and really creating solutions to what's going on out there. As Bill and I keep growing the business our plans include more workshops for people more one-on-one work with people learning about their pets I've started a program called Imagine Acres where I'm connecting people with animals and nature. We're also big on sustainability and there's a lot of area on this farm for putting up things like solar arrays and possibly wind. So those are going to be places that we look forward into the future. We've been with New Tripoli Bank for 15 years. They provided us with our commercial loan lines of credit business and checking accounts. We've closed our commercial loan twice with New Tripoli Bank. We've refinanced after the initial closing and our loan officer Dave Sherwin just made it easy and put us at ease every single time. I remember being in Arizona making a purchase and my card got flagged because I had neglected to tell New Tripoli I was traveling. So of course it came up as something suspicious and unusual. But the fact that they found it was an amazing peace of mind for me knowing that someone had my back. We are about as small business as small business gets and in order to make this succeed someone needs to really see you. New Tripoli Bank was one of the first groups who saw us. It's the personal service, it's the getting to know who you really are, it's understanding what the professional needs in your business and really seeing who you are and what you're trying to do. If you believe in your business they'll believe in you.

Good morning, I'm John Hayes Chief Executive Officer of New Tripoli Bank. As we come to the end of 2024 and move into 2025, it's a great time to reflect on the past year and also put some thoughts together for the coming year as well. So I'd like to talk today about three things: the economy, local market conditions, and community banking in general. So first to focus on the economy the only thing that's certain at this point is uncertainty. Inflation remains sticky, the labor market has softened a bit while consumer spending remains resilient even with the highest levels of consumer debt in history. Consumer debt at this point totals $18 trillion, up almost $4 trillion since 2020. There are also changes in domestic politics and policy coming and significant risks internationally, with wars in two areas, governments reorganizing and much else happening around the globe. Continued growth or recession? An inverted yield curve ordinarily means a recession is coming, but it's been inverted for almost 3 years now and most economists at this point are expecting a moderate pace of growth in 2025, but there are some who do see a recession on the horizon, so at this point I emphasize at this point we're not expecting much by way of rate decreases in 2025. The Federal Reserve Open Market Committee has reduced the discount rate three times for a total of 100 basis points in 2024 and as indicated it will be extremely cautious in terms of future action. We believe them and we're planning accordingly. So basically I'm going to stick with my opening comment: uncertainty in regards to the economy. So now we've talked about the economy let's move on to local market conditions and the local market economy. The Lehigh Valley is and has been a strong market and we expect that to continue in early December. The US Bureau of Economic Analysis released the regional gross domestic product statistics and the Lehigh Valley set another record at $55.7 billion in 2023. When factoring in inflation, Lehigh Valley's economy grew by 4% from 2022, faster than the state, the Northeast, and the nation. The data measures private sector output and is the most recent available as local GDP data lags by one year. In terms of the housing market, housing remains a challenge. While rents have leveled off, home prices averaged a 10% increase year-over-year according to the Lehigh Valley Realtors Association and that's been driven in large part by low inventory. In fact, Lehigh Valley Planning Commission estimates that we're 9,000 housing units short of demand and the price of housing is a large impediment to first-time home buyers in particular. So overall we are in good shape in terms of the Lehigh Valley. Now to move on to community banking. As I'm sure you all understand, interest rates over the past couple of years have been a challenge for us and most community banks' deposit costs increase significantly more quickly than loan rates which put pressure on earnings. We've managed through this and will continue to do so while remaining very competitive. One of our major challenges and the challenge of the community banking industry as a whole is to maintain what makes us special: the service level. We provide that connection between our customers and our employees and the communities that we serve in a world that is increasingly dominated by technology. Our approach is to do both. We provide incredibly effective tools to take advantage of the latest in technology while always being here here ready to help in answering the phone. An area where we continue to demonstrate our unbending commitment to our customers is in the arena of fraud. Unfortunately, fraud will continue to be a major factor in banking. Advances in technology, computing power, and artificial intelligence have made fraud more sophisticated and unfortunately more lucrative. In fact, fraud is on track to cost $10.5 trillion in damage in 2025 according to McKenzie Consultants. We are working hard to protect you but you need to protect yourself as well. Monitor your accounts closely and use tools such as online bill pay, ACH origination, and positive pay to move more transactions electronically and minimize fraud risk. Above all, if you think there's a problem, call your bank immediately! The sooner we are alerted that there may be a problem the better the outcome will be. So finally I'd like to acknowledge the team here at New Tripoli Bank, our board of directors, and our employees. It's their dedication to our bank that makes it all work and I'd like to thank our customers and the communities that we serve as well because you're the reason that we are here. On behalf of all of us here at New Tripoli Bank, happy holidays!