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Foreign. First class streetcar downtown with a fine ladies in the peeps.
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Hi there and welcome to Upzoned, a Strong Towns podcast where we take an article from the news and we talk about it from a strong towns perspective. And I'm excited to be able to share this article from the Axios Des Moines about a park construction project that they are preparing for. Des Moines has approved an $8.4 million first phase construction contract for a long planned $54.4 million overhaul of Birdland Park. They've proposed a multi season skate ribbon and a bunch of other improvements along the way and the bigger project is planned to stretch out over decades. And and as is clear in the article, relies very heavily on external funding with full completion probably taking at least 20 years if not further. And so it is a major long awaited investment for Des Moines, but it is also one that is going to propose and require a significant amount of public infrastructure, public debt as well as, or maybe not debt, but certainly public contributions which is coming from debt based sources and creating the conditions which these large scale upgrades that are proposed for the community are going to need to then be kept up and maintained in perpetuity. With me today to talk about this is Jamie Savick of 110%, a Parks and recreation consulting firm. There's probably more dynamic way to explain it, but Jamie's focus is especially on how to create high capacity, high functioning parks and recreation programming and create the conditions in which communities can really lean into the strength that great parks and recreation services within a community, as well as the cultivation of great assets within the community can really bring about. And also with us is Mitch Durand Wood, the author of you'll Pay for this and a frequent Strong Towns contributor and the host of the Dear Winnipeg blog and participant in the group in Winnipeg that is seeking to really cultivate a deeper sense of your using resources. Well within our places, in Elmwood, within the Chalmers neighborhood, all sorts of other things that Mitch has been involved in. But welcome to both of you.
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Thanks Norm. Happy to be here.
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C
Thanks Norm.
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B
So Jamie, you were the one to share this with us and you have a lot of parks and recreation items on the back burner projects that you're currently working on. I forgot to mention you've also just released a brand new book called the Bison Principle. Maybe start with that. Why don't we right off the top share a little bit about the book and then also what put this article on your radar and something that's worth discussing today?
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C
Sure. Well appreciate the shout out for the book, it was released just a week and a half ago. So very excited about it. I think the subtitle speaks volumes. It's clarity, discipline and courage in Local Government. And then through the lens of Parks and recreation, it's really about us being more thoughtful, more intentional, more intelligent in our investment and spending choices as it relates to parks and recreation. But I would argue the larger local government net that's been cast, there's a lot of expectation, a lot of demand and finite resources. And so we've got systems that are struggling. Alternatively, some of those systems, frankly, just overextended their resources, and they're having a very difficult time now maintaining high levels of service. It's based on philosophical underpinning, certainly, but there's some story, a lot of narrative and frankly, built around my 35 years in and around local government.
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B
Yeah, and then your work, you've been in local government. You've also advised local government and sort of carved out a niche around the questions of how do we ensure a financially sustainable base for our work. What stands out in the. In the Axios article about the Des Moines projects?
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C
Yeah, so this is. It's new. It's hot off the press, as they say, and we pay attention to these kinds of stories. You know, the news lines around systems that are building and growing and trying to understand, you know, what their fiscal realities are and what the conditions of their community are. At the same time, Des Moines is a microcosm of what's happening across the country. There's this pressure, an expectation to build and grow. And at the same time, I think in some cases, there's a dismissiveness around what we already have. We like the bright, shiny new right. We gravitate towards the, you know, the bells and whistles. And we sometimes then dismiss and. Or neglect what's already in place. And I see this on a daily basis, frankly. So this is a. It's a recent story. I understand the draw to want to build for a community and, you know, take advantage of some previous plans that were put in place. I think the plan for this particular park was put in place. I think it was 2021. But as you dive into the article, there are questions around how it's going to be paid for. And there's a focus on the construction, and there's very little reference to how they're going to maintain this park. Not only preventative maintenance, but the ongoing maintenance is going to be required over the life of the asset, you know, 20, 30 years from now. So it's. It's one more story in this novel, if you will, around how we have chosen to invest and spend taxpayer resources and how we're prioritizing in our communities in the face of a lot of pressure.
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B
So I'm curious, would you endorse a strategy of multi phased plans, if only because it means that whenever a ribbon cutting occurs, there's always a cleanup that occurs with it. And so if you slot in every year, we're going to have a ribbon cutting for yet another element of the project. Maybe that's one of the ways in which you make sure that everything is in chip shape condition. I mean, a little bit facetious, but I feel like there is this question of how do we make sure that we have routinely given attention to our spaces and allowed them to mature and thicken up over time.
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C
Yeah, I mean, that's a great question and there's a bit of a loadedness to that. But, you know, we know that we're rather deficient in spending time on how we're going to operate and maintain the assets we bring out, whether it's brick and mortar, whether it's a, you know, a park space, a trail, whatever it might be. And I think when we put that front and center, and we recognize that we've got to do the math around not only, you know, the groundbreaking and the ribbon cutting, but what this is going to cost us in year two and year five and year 10 and year 20, that has to be front and center from the minute we start considering the investment. And I think, you know, we talk, we've talked recently about doing a better job in our profession at least of ribbon cutting for maintenance projects so that we're celebrating the investment in taking care of what we have. There's a great story. It's actually I reference it in the book. A dear colleague of mine teaches at Texas State University and they had actually sat through a program I'd facilitated and they renovated a restroom on campus and they actually put a faux ribbon across the bathroom, which was toilet paper. And they baked poop emoji cookies and had NyQuil glasses full of lemonade. And they publicized the heck out of this, like we're taking care of an asset that's in our system as opposed to building something new. And we're very proud of that. We're celebrating that. And so I've been sharing that story. There's a novelty around it, but the more we can celebrate roof replacements and H Vac replacements and irrigation system replacements, the better off we're all going to be Rather than feeling like the only thing we can celebrate is the new asset.
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And that's a really good point, I think, because rule of thumb, asset management, like 20 to 25% of the total cost of ownership, of owning, maintaining, operating an asset is its initial construction cost. Right. So even in a case where, like, with this $54 million project, even if they manage to get grants and get it all paid for, they're still on the hook for that 75 to 80% of the cost of ownership over the lifetime of it. Right. And that's the part we're not even thinking about oftentimes. And like you said, much less celebrating it. Right. But it is the major cost of owning and operating the asset. It's everything that comes after this construction. And so, yeah, I think if we celebrated it more or at least if we thought about, might be helpful because I think, I mean, in particular for Des Moines, I don't want to pick on them, but like, I just did a, you know, I did a couple, a bit of research and on this and yeah, just last year they did their budget process. They were cutting 9% of their, of their budget because they couldn't afford the money. So they had to make 9% cuts across the board. Every single service was cut, whether it's parks or, you know, roads or whatever, everything was cut 9%. And then the following year, to come out with, you know, a massive project like this to say, yeah, now we're going to build this when you can't, when you're clearly not maintaining what you have, you know, is problematic. And again, not Des Moines unique. Obviously, this is North America wide, but, but yeah, we need to. I think it's a good idea to like, celebrate those, those maintenance projects because. Because those are the things we forget about that are the biggest part of owning stuff as a city or as a town.
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B
Jamie, I would be fascinated to hear, like, from your perspective when you look at a project like this, what are some of the layers that help as like a starting point to analyze what they're doing? Because, you know, they're planning a skate ribbon like the one in Chicago's Maggie Daly Park. There's going to be a playground, a restroom and a concessions building as part of phase one. And those are, you know, those are good things. And I look at it where they, they are doing their best. But even then, that first phase, the winning bid came in $1 million over the city's estimate, which on an $8.4 million contract means that they were off by a fair amount how common is that? And what are some of the ways in which we can sort of alert ourselves when maybe things are going to be more challenging than we expect? And how. How would this become a really good project?
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C
Yeah, well, in my world, it's incredibly common. This is the standard. It's, we want something new. Let's have a master plan. Unfortunately, many master plans do not include the very thing that Mitch just mentioned, which is we talk about construction costs, and we do it in 2021 terms. We forget to calculate a compounding figure of 3% or 4% or 5% year over year. So even if the plan's done in 21, and we said it's going to cost 20 million, 50 million, 100 million, we forget by the time we break ground, it's no longer that figure. That's not static. And so these master plans need to be better, frankly. We need to do a better job of planning. And we're enamored with the notion of master plans. It's a visioning document. We call it unicorns and rainbows in our little team and aspirations. Fine, but it's not enough. We have to address that gap between where we are today, our realities, and the aspirations, and understand what that gap represents. If it's a $50 million project, what is it really going to be in 2025, if that's what it was in 2021? And what are the costs to operate, maintain over its life cycle? Mitch mentioned, you know, we're looking at 25% of the total cost of the taxpayers over the life of the asset. We don't speak in those terms. We don't create narratives around that. We don't put that in the, in the, in the document. We do a feasibility study and we talk about construction only. So I think we need to just start there and do some. It's been used a lot, but we just have to do math, and we don't do it very well. We ignore it and we just say, well, we can get the money for construction. And one of the things that drives me crazy is we'll find the money. We'll just find. We'll find the money. And there's a reference to that in that article. And again, to Mitch's point, I don't want to pick on Des Moines. It's a microcosm. But this is how we. This is how we think. This is how we plan. And we have to understand that where it's gotten us is not in a good place. The gravy train ends, and it isn't going to get better if we don't think about the money on the front end before we say yes.
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Yeah. Especially like. I think you made a good point, too, especially about, you know, also what. What is the opportunity cost? Right. When we. When we promise ourselves that we'll find the money. Well, where are we going to find that money? What. What are we going to be sacrificing to make this happen? Right. And. And even like on. On sort of the. The process where we spend all this money and all this time, all these human resources, on making these plans, to move these plans forward, and then we, you know, then we do a study, then we. Then we do a design study, and then we move to the next phase. Every one of those phases costs money, and every one of those phases costs time in staff time, which also costs money. What could we be doing instead with that money? Right. Instead of spending $400,000 on a design study for a $54 million project. I'm just saying numbers here. But, for example, what could we have done with that $400,000 on the stuff we already own? What could we have we improved? Right. So there's always that sort of opportunity cost discussion that we also don't seem to be having. We have all these discussions sort of in. In silos or in. Or, you know, independent of each other, as though. As though this project isn't also connected to everything else we do as a city. Right. We have limited dollars. Everything we decide is. Is also a decision to not do something else. Right. So that's. That's part of the. Again, the math, I think, like Jamie said, is just. We got to do. We just got to be better at doing the math to get those costs calculated and to compare what else we could be doing.
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B
But you wrote a book, Mitch, that addresses the fact that today's operating dollars are hampered by the commitments that we make into the future or the decisions that, you know, they can be helped by the decisions that we made in the past to squirrel away money or. Or they can be really hampered by decisions that we make for the future and for future residents that we're going to spend their money now. Can you share a little bit more about, like, the real challenge that if we commit future operating budgets to continue to keep up what we commit to right now in a capital budget, you know, it's one wallet that's covering these costs.
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A
Yeah. And so I think. I think that's part of the problem is, I think, you know, 99.5% of North Americans are not Accountants, right. And so when we get told things like capital budget, operating budget, you know, most of us don't know what that is. And when we don't know what something is, sometimes we fill in the blanks. And we've come to sort of as a society or as a community, believe that capital dollars and operating dollars are two separate things, right? Operating dollars are something you got to find every year to pay your librarians and to pay your gardeners. But capital dollars is just something where you find the money once and then you're done, right? It's kind of this idea. We'll find the money and then we'll build it and then we'll be done, right? But the reality is capital dollars and operating dollars are the very same thing. They're just an accounting distinction that tells us when rotate when we're spending them. And capital dollars are essentially just operating dollars that you are committing from another operating year, generally the future. And so it's important to remember that anytime we build something, we are committing future dollars out of our operating budget to pay for it. Whether we pay for it with debt or whether we pay for it with savings, those are all an operating dollar that we are promising or have promised to not spend on something else. And so we can't forget that. We kind of know that intuitively in our own personal lives, right? We don't sort of differentiate between capital and operating in our interpersonal expenses. The example I like to use is you need new tires for your car. That would be a capital expense. And if you want Taylor Swift concert tickets, well, that would be an operating expense. Well, it doesn't matter if you put the tires on your credit card and spend your cash on the tickets or the other way around, that's the same thing. You end up with the same result. And it's kind of the same. It's exactly the same thing. In municipal finance. It doesn't matter whether you're borrowing for capital dollars or operating dollars. And it, it doesn't change anything to the city's finances at the end of the day. And at the same time, you know, as soon as you've bought an elephant or a car or whatever it is, you have expenses that go with it from now on, right? I mean, there's been studies done on this of these million dollar home lotteries where people win a million dollar home that within a year something, 98% of them have all sold their home. Because of course you get a, you know, big house, but it comes with big utility bills, big insurance, big Property taxes. And so people who win these, even if you get it for free off, off the hop, you know, you can't afford to maintain it over time, well then you will need to get rid of it. And so it's kind of the same thing in cities and towns. When we are buying these massive infrastructure assets upfront, whether we got them gifted to us for free by developers or the federal and state governments gave us grants for them overall, we have to look at for the rest of the life of that asset. We are now responsible for feeding it. And elephants eat a lot of hay. So that's part of that. Again, recognizing what those numbers mean. And yeah, part of the reason I wrote the book is that it's actually not that hard. Right. There's not a lot that you need to know to have at least a good sense of where we're headed as cities or as towns. It takes very few skills to just have that overview type knowledge that you can be as the co owner of your city, that you have now enough information to not be an absentee owner. It's really like surprisingly little that you need to understand.
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C
Yeah, and I, I'd add there's an unfortunate reality to all of this which is I think there's a suggestion and, or assumption that this only applies to community members. This applies to those who work in local government that don't understand some of the basics and, and that is problematic. You talk about capital and operating, I will tell you I will face some obstructionists within systems to say we must treat them differently. They're two different buckets. You've placed them in two different buckets. But that doesn't mean they need to be treated as such. And so I face this a lot. We as a team face this a lot in our work where you've got maybe a finance director that their perspective is historic and that's it. It's just because this is the way our system is set up and structured and our funding mechanisms are set up and structured this way and our, you know, our object codes are set up a certain way and our funds are set up a certain way. This is the way we do business, rather than maybe we can think about this a little differently. Right. It's. I've been using this phrase a lot. You know, it's the lens through which we see things. Take these glasses off and put these on. It's a budget. How you've chosen to structure it is how you've chosen to structure it. But how you're deciding to invest and spend in operating the system in contrast to how you're investing and spending in the capital is a systemic challenge for you, but you can potentially change that. And so I feel like we've got some community education, resident education, taxpayer education that certainly is going to be advantageous because they're co stewards and I think sometimes they forget that. But we have professionals who are managing these systems that don't understand. Michelle, what you just mentioned.
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A
Yeah, and I, I completely agree. I think, you know, like I said, 99.5% of, of North Americans are not accountants. Even if 0.5% of non accountants can understand it, that's 99% of people. And that includes not just, you know, citizens, but it includes, you know, public service, it includes council members, it includes local media that are reporting on these things. There's 99% of us who, you know, are not grasping it. I think it is absolutely critical that we reach, you know, that entire 99% so that we have better conversations, not just in the community, but also. Yeah. Around that council chamber, you know, within the offices of the administration and also with what's being reported and what's being asked in our local media who are doing the job of holding everybody to account. They need to be asking the right questions. But you can't ask the right questions if you don't know what you don't know. Right. And so, yeah, so I think, yeah, like, I think you're 100% on point there, that, that a lot of it is, is going to be just education and educating all the people that are in the room that need to be in the room that, you know, touched all of these decisions, no matter how, how, how little or how big. Yeah, for sure.
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B
And it's about expectations, management as well. And Jamie, you're so good about saying, like, there is a very clear distinction between what we need and what we wish for or what we'd like to see. And I'm reminded of a fantastic article that was written a number of years ago by Grayson Johnson about buildings. And I think there's a great overlap here. It's the article is called in praise of background buildings. And she said, I'm here to argue that we need buildings that are not trying to stand out in order to appreciate the ones that are. It's the occup. And then her second point, it's the occupants that make a building interesting anyway. The form of our building shapes the streetscape, but the interesting part is actually how they are lived in and around. And then third, glamour tends to be fussy and expensive if you have wealth to share in the form of cutting edge, impressive architecture. Thank you for your patronage. For the rest of us, humble, timeless and familiar is a better direction. And that. That really stood out to me as, like, you know, Mitch, you wrote about your community that there used to be scores of neighborhood parks. And you emphasize, you know, in the old planning language, they use the word scores with an extra S on the end because there were so many of them that they did many scores to be able to count them. Those are those little back, you know, background buildings or background parks, the spaces that we then fill, not because they're fussy and expensive, but because they're just present and available and malleable and able to be formed and shaped to our needs. And maybe that's the thing. Jamie, can you share some of the challenges that you will be simultaneously able to see? You know, not necessarily, I don't know, Des Moines situation here, but where simultaneously they are closing centers and opening them at the same time and harming communities where that community center that was there for 70 years now is the one that is cut. Meanwhile, the brand new fussy and expensive thing that is not covered by patronage, but is instead covered by, Well, I suppose the patronage of the Commonwealth results in just this gap there. And really, that stood out to me. She said glamour is fussy and expensive. You know, really shiny things have a luster for a while, and then you're moving on to the next thing already. Do you want to share just some of that? Like, how do we get back to the habit of having background parks?
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C
Oh, if I only knew, Norm. I just. We've been. So it's become an issue of organizational aesthetics, but there's a contradiction, Right? Right. We want our facilities on the front of. I don't know if the two of you are familiar with this or anyone that will be in the audience. Architectural Digest magazine. Right. We wanna see our facility on the front of the COVID and we want these awards in our lobbies. And at the same time, if you dive deeper into the system, they can't take care of the 10 neighborhood centers that they have, or they can't maintain their trails, they can't maintain their parks, their irrigation systems are struggling. So we, again, it's a. We're enamored with this organizational aesthetic around the brand new thing. But it's an incredible contradiction and it's hard to make sense of because if you look under the covers, all this other stuff's falling apart. We have, you know, I'm going to oversimplify this because it's so complex, but we have strayed so far outside of our lane in this world, in public parks and recreation, that I struggle to understand if we'll be able to recover before we actually combust. We've got so many systems that have so many assets that they cannot take care of. And we have some systems in this country that have approached a billion dollars in maintenance backlog. I can't wrap my mind around it. And they're massive systems that are iconic systems that are struggling to keep up, they're struggling to survive. The staff are stretched. And I made a comment in the book about doing more with less is not virtuous. It's exhaustion. That is not a good thing for us to go look how effective we are with only this many people in this budget. So we've definitely run over our guardrails and we haven't stayed in our lane. I think pickleball is a great activity, but there's nowhere anywhere that says that government should invest in pickleball courts for everybody. There's nothing anywhere that says we should be building ice rinks in every community. There's nowhere written anywhere that we should have these 150, 200,000 square foot recreation centers. When we have private and nonprofit organizations in our communities providing similar and like services. We have just gotten so far off, you know, we've run off the rails that it's hard to sometimes make sense of it. So when we think about the contradiction of we want all and need all these new things, but we can't take care of what we have. You know, I struggle to make sense of that because to me it's illogical. But we keep doing it. It's like we just keep doing it. And there's a, you know, there's an exhaustion to thinking about it and there's a kind of an insanity around it, frankly, that is just hard. It's just nonsensical. So I don't know what the answer is other than to continue to help people understand the math and bend the ears of elected officials and help community members understand that this isn't a forum for you telling us what else you want. Rather, let's tell you what we have and how we're struggling to pay for it and how your taxpayer money doesn't go as far as you think it does. Right. All those things where we make community engagement a classroom so people can understand these things. I don't know. I think we're all in our corners of the world trying to make sense of this and do really good work and prompt the conversations and the questions to get people to understand more so we don't have circumstances like we've seen in this country. Systems are closing. We have cities filing bankruptcy. I mean, who knew, right? And it is not looking favorable for some major metro, metro areas, municipalities in the United States in 26, 27 who are on fiscal cliffs. I got to do, you know, look on LinkedIn or Google. So there's a complexity to it. And I know that was kind of a roundabout way to address your comment and your question.
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B
But Jamie, to me, one of the things that stands out is there's no mention aside from like where money comes from is, you know, from, from above. But in the parks world, like, we need to think of cost recovery or revenue creation and cost recovery is sort of a negative way to say like, you know, if you have an ice rink, you should probably charge people something for that so that way you can pay for the Zamboni driver. But if we, as I look at a project like that, there's no mention of any kind of like, you know, small scale commercial spaces or, you know, venues that can be booked. It's sort of, that's an afterthought. And I think as a result of it being an afterthought, it's not even plain placed at the heart of it. And from Strong Town's perspective, we would say a good park radiates value in all of the adjacent private structures and buildings and land. And so you do recoup some of that value through property taxes and sales taxes. But in projects like this, would one of the ways to make this more not just palatable but actually functional be to focus more on revenue creation or cost recovery?
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C
Absolutely. I'd say 100%. 110%. Absolutely. We've got to think more about productivity. I know Strong Towns uses this phrase. We've used it for a long time, community wealth. But when people hear that, I think they think about it not with the intent that it's delivered. Community wealth is not about wealthy, it's about creating community wealth. So that we can survive beyond, you know, we want to thrive as a community. We want to have community wealth, physical wealth, you know, mental wealth, all of that. And we don't think about productivity of our spaces. There is some, for some reason, and I don't know when this happened. I've been in, in and around this space for over three decades. We just, it's like, well, the private sector are evil rather than, you know, we have to raise up the private sector because they pay taxes. Right. And we want them to thrive. We want them to not only survive, but we want them to thrive because they're helping support the entire ecosystem in our community. Why we shy away from coffee shops and some of our park areas, why we shy away from some of those, you know, vendor contracts and opportunities. Because we're always suspicious. Like there's a skepticism and a cynicism around these relationships rather than this is a really good thing for everybody. Why can't we embrace it? We've got to think more product, you know, in a, in a. More through the lens of productivity. Alternatively, cost recovery has become a four letter world in local government in the United States because we've simply misused it. We've treated it as we're going to cut services, we're going to raise fees rather than. All we want to do is understand how much stuff costs us and make an intelligent decision about what we need to recover, to be responsible and to make sure that we can keep our system fiscally well. So yeah, ice rinks are the. And outdoor pools are the two most expensive assets that are provided in at least parks and recreation. I would argue for frankly, in government as a whole, and they're in high demand in a lot of communities across the country because people don't simply understand what we ask them in a survey is would you like, would you support. But what we don't say is would you support an outdoor pool if it cost you $108 a year in taxpayer money and you had to pay a membership or admission fees to operate and maintain this thing? We forget that that extra part of the question. Right. So I'd be real curious Mitch's perspective on this.
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A
Yeah, I mean, I think really it comes back to this idea that we don't plan for the future. We're not doing a business plan on any of these. Right. So we're not looking at what it's going to cost us in the future, but we're also not looking at what are the possible revenue sources that can come from that and cost recovery. Also can mean tax support. Right. We don't need to necessarily have it all be user fees. There can be a different proportion, some proportion of user fee and some proportion of tax, tax based support. And of course that'll, you know, that can vary based on the project and based on which town and you know, the different priorities. And we already have a sense of that generally like you know, a water utility is almost, almost always exclusively user, user fee cost recovery. And we understand that because we are trying to manage a scarce resource, we want to discourage overuse and that. And so you, in those cases you tend to go more towards cost recovery on things that you see that have a benefit, a public benefit. Then you can justify being like, well maybe we should actually fund some of this with just general taxes. And oftentimes we'll see that with public transit where the farebox recovery is only a, a portion of the revenue and then the rest is helped with property taxes. One of the things I find funny, I guess with transit is I don't know if it's like this in other cities, but in our city they call that tax supported portion of transit. They call that the transit subsidy. But that's the only service that they call that for. Right. They don't talk about the library subsidy or the police subsidy. Those are just services. Right. So, so it's just an interesting side point. But yeah, to me I think the idea is that the cost recovery portion can be user fee, it can be taxes, it can be a mix of both. What is the exact proportion will depend from place to place. But it is part of that discussion that is missing, right. When we say we're going to build this water park or we're going to build this whatever. It is in the same sense that we're not checking those life cycle costs, we're also not looking at how this is going to impact our operating budget. Like what revenues are we going to need to use to pay for those costs. So I think it's kind of part of that initial business plan that we're not really, you know, not necessarily in a business plan like per se, but that initial sort of analysis discussion of can we afford this and what does the money flow look like over the next 50 or 75 years or the length of this asset and what are the impacts over the other things that we could be doing instead? Right. So yeah, I think, yeah, it's again, part of that missing piece of discussion is not just the expense side but also the revenue side for sure.
- [35:23]
B
Well, in the article it talks about Another park in their system, another feature park or marquee park, Gray's Lake Park. And what prompted the revenue question for me was the fact that in 1993 there was a Holiday Inn and it was pictured in an article I read about it that like there was this interloper on the waterfront, this. In this commercial space, like, you know, this problem, sort of problematic eyesore. And mercifully the flood took care of it. And then they basically had to find a way to, you know, get rid of that encumbrance. So that way the. The place could be purely natural and purely for the community. And I'm like, well, but I'm sure there was some like stored value that was there. With that, we're going to move into our down zone. Partly because if you can hear in the background, my puppy is. She wants to be in and so I will. Maybe I'll start. So that way I can quickly go through it and then I'm going to pass it over to you in terms of what you are reading or taking in in your community. For me, I want to highlight the website fieldofschemes.com partly out of. To correct myself. It's a fantastic website about the racket around pro sports teams and the efforts to basically force arenas into. In down people's throats and to extract as much subsidy as possible. It is stunning. In part, I'm saddened because right now I really want the provincial government in British Columbia to step in and save the Vancouver Whitecaps team. I don't care what they're going to spend on the stadium. I just want them to give them the money so that way my team stays. And then I go and read a website like that and I'm like, maybe I need to be careful. So fieldofschemes.com, neil DeMoss has been writing fantastic stuff for decades or yeah, probably a decade and a half and definitely worth checking out. Somewhat related to the theme as well. Mitch, over to you.
- [37:10]
A
Yeah, well, so I don't know if this is a trend anywhere or if it's just my own kids, but My kids are 15, 13 and 9, 15, 12 and 9. And I don't know, like as a parent you kind of get to an. They get to an age where they start listening to their own kind of music. And in my household anyways, their own kind of music is they've gotten really big into the oldies, quote unquote. And by the oldies, I mean the stuff that I was listening to in high school. And so, yeah, I mean, I Mean, my son was listening to something I said, were you listening to Billy Talent? This is. How do you know about Billy Talent?
- [37:50]
C
I'm like, what do you mean, how
- [37:51]
A
do I know about Billy Talent? How do you know about Billy Talent? And so anyways, it's gotten me sort of diving into my old collection. And so recently I've been listening to a lot of the refreshments, specifically their first album, Fizzy, Fuzzy, Big and Buzzy. And it's really brought me back and is really a solid album that I can listen to, like, over and over and over and over again. So, yeah, that's what's going on in my house.
- [38:17]
B
My. My son, I introduced him to Avril Lavigne's skater boy, and he. He was like, yeah. Which again, is very Parks and Rec cultured. And yeah, he was like, this is fantastic. It's so good. I'm like, and she's a Canadian icon. So what about for you, Jamie in the downtown?
- [38:32]
C
Oh, my gosh, I am boring compared to you two.
- [38:34]
B
Boring.
- [38:35]
C
Capital B, boring. I am rereading Two Doorstops. I am rereading Team of Rivals about Abraham Lincoln's presidency and his life. Essentially. I'm an Illinois kid. I grew up in Chicago, Yolanda Lincoln. So he's been a kind of a staple in my life from day one. And I'm just enamored with his story. So I think I'm on the fourth read of that and then on a second read of the Power Broker. And that one is. It's just. It's shocking, it's visceral in a lot of ways because of, you know, what we do and just the corruption that was laced throughout that entire story I find fascinating and incredibly disheartening and tragic at the same time. So I am toggling, believe it or not, between those two. And now I've realized I need to get out more and listen to some good music.
- [39:39]
B
That's right. That'll help. But two fantastic options. Those, those are great as well. And if anyone's interested, the 99% invisible did a great podcast sort of read through of the Power Broker, and they have great guests on. There's some excellent sort of supplementary material if ever you even feel like your elbow is about to give way from holding the book. So that's awesome. As we close. Thank you both to Mitch, thanks so much for joining us on OPS on today.
- [40:08]
A
Happy to be here.
- [40:08]
B
Yeah. And Jamie, so good to have you here. And, yeah, love it. Really glad that you could do it.
- [40:13]
C
Appreciate it.
- [40:14]
B
Thank you so much and so definitely go and pick up a copy of Mitch's book. You'll pay for this and Jamie's book, the Bison Principle. I'm in such esteemed company. This is fantastic. And three other people that are also part of this esteemed company of heroes are our Founding circle Members of Strong Towns Today. I want to recognize Andrew Price, who has written some fantastic articles on the Strong Towns website over the years. My favorite is his article on places and non places, which actually has a ton of relevance for this conversation as well. Ann Pierce and Becky Fry are also two members of the Founder Circle. They were there from the beginning helping to support what Strong Towns is doing. And as we continue to take stock of the reality that it faces our communities, our resources are limited. Our time is precious. We need to be careful about the commitments that we make for the future, but also safeguard a really strong productive pattern and development. And when we do that, good things follow. We get to enjoy Strong Places and enjoy them. So with that, thanks folks for listening to Upzone. Take care and take care of your places. This episode was produced by Strong Towns, another nonprofit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong towns member@strongtowns.org membership.