The Korda Territory Convention voted Wednesday to establish a joint fact-finding committee on infrastructure, freight, and fiscal transition costs — the first standing body the Convention has created since relocating from Verentum.

The motion passed 27–6. It does not resolve, or move toward resolving, either certified petition. Its mandate is narrower and, by design, harder to object to: gather freight-capacity data, fiscal transfer records, and transition-cost estimates under any resolution the Convention might eventually propose, whether that resolution keeps Korda whole or divides it.

The committee will be co-chaired by Jalen Mire, the lake-corridor delegate who has pressed the Convention not to treat the canceled merger referendum as though it never qualified, and Tomas Rell, the inland delegate who has argued that any decision about one part of Korda changes what remains for the rest. The two delegates have disagreed publicly and often. They also both voted for the relocation to Korda, and Wednesday's motion listed them together as co-sponsors.

"We don't agree about where this ends," Mire said after the vote. "We agree that whoever ends up deciding shouldn't be guessing about freight numbers while they do it."

Rell's statement to the committee's first organizing meeting was shorter. "Facts don't belong to a side," he said. "Put them in one place and everyone has to argue with the same numbers."

Dessa Orin, who has served on the Assembly's Territories and Fiscal Affairs Committee for years and was widely expected to seek a chair position, declined a formal role on the new committee. She said she intended to submit material to it instead. "I've spent long enough being the person who explains Korda's infrastructure queue to people outside it," she said. "Let the committee hear it from people who are still living inside the queue."

The committee has no deadline of its own. Its findings are not binding on any eventual Convention resolution, and its creation does not pause or extend the constitutional clock. Delegates were reminded of that directly before the vote: the Convention still has ninety days from its first session to produce a proposed resolution, and nothing about Wednesday's committee changes that period or what happens if it lapses.

Asked whether gathering shared facts was a step toward compromise or simply a way to spend time the Convention does not have to spare, Mire did not fully disagree with either reading. "Ask me when the committee reports," he said. "I don't know yet whether we're building a bridge or building a record of why one wasn't possible."