CJ Domingo | Asheville City Council Candidate

CJ Domingo has a particular insider’s vantage of the challenges facing Asheville—until relatively recently, he worked for the parking division of the city’s transportation department. He cites low morale among some city staff as a symptom of a larger void within city leadership.  

Today, in our continuing series looking at every candidate for city council, Asheville native CJ Domingo shares his views on a range of city issues, including frustrations with deferred infrastructure maintenance and his thoughts on the new downtown bathroom the city is investing in for the unhoused. He also points to potential paths forward, such as his views on leveraging tourism dollars and the steps he’d like to see city leaders take with affordable housing. 

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Transcript

Matt Peiken: Now how long ago did you even have the kernel of an idea of, I want to run for office? 

C.J. Domingo: I actually had the idea foisted upon me. Last year, I was very frustrated with some of the decisions I saw the city making, and I had come off of just parted ways with the city just because there was very much the perception that any solution that my department brought up would not get heard, would not get seen, would not get implemented. 

Matt Peiken: What was your department? 

C.J. Domingo: I work for the Transportation Department, Parking Services Division. 

Matt Peiken: Okay. 

C.J. Domingo: And I was their weekend supervisor. What that meant was I would come in the middle of the week, pick up where the weekday supervisor was leaving off.

We would have our big meeting, touch base about what we have going on. And then during the weekend, I was the sole one in the office. And when you call the office, it goes to a cell phone.

I was the only one holding the cell phone that if you had a parking ticket, if you had a question about your account, if you had a [00:02:00] security issue because somebody was following you, we had no other personnel to handle those things, it came to me. And I just realized that wasn't going to work. 

I was very frustrated with that and with the decisions the council was making and Some friends and family told me, you should get on the council, You should make a change. And I was not going to at first, but my friend brought me a little flyer That was a notification he had received talking about the ability to put your name in the hat and he says This is it, man. Either apply and run for city council or shut up because I'm tired of hearing you complain about it. Do something. And I just said, you know what? I always thought it should be somebody smarter. But with my frustration, I probably couldn't do much worse.

Matt Peiken: You said there were certain decisions council made that you weren't happy with. Can you be specific about them? 

C.J. Domingo: So some of these are things that were longer term. For example, deferred maintenances. The city knew that they needed to put about five million dollars into the public garages. I can't remember the [00:03:00] exact year the report came out.

I came into it after that report had been heard. They'd looked at it and decided that they were going to continue to kick that can down the road because the people who are making the decision ask the wrong questions and drew the wrong conclusion. We can see the record of their conversation. Part of the benefit of having a digitized email chain is you can see who talked to who, who is arguing what, when.

I don't want to name names because I'm not about trying to bring somebody down. I'm just saying that as a body, our government is not finding the right solutions to these core problems. And so they decided to kick it down the road and now it's an 11 million dollar problem about five ish years later. We're having to put it on the GO bond because Instead of attacking it as just regular maintenance during the year, we skipped that.

When it came up as a $5 million option, and we had a couple million dollars to where we would only had to ask for a couple million out of the general fund or because parking services is what they call an enterprise fund. And so for anybody listening that's not familiar with [00:04:00] that, Enterprise funds, like parking, like water, they have their own budget, they raise their own funds, and they're supposed to try and aim to be neutral overall.

Matt Peiken: Yeah, a zero balance agency. Do you think, are you using the example of the parking garages and ignoring deferred maintenance, do you think that this is a larger systemic problem within city council, that in general, infrastructure decisions around maintenance generally gets ignored.

C.J. Domingo: I would say that with the one caution, I'm not pointing the finger at any individual, but as a body, yes, I think that collectively as an organization, we continue to miss the forest for the trees. 

Matt Peiken: If that's so, let's say there were more of a mindset of spending money now to maintain, whether it's parks, roads, parking, you name it, where would that money come from? It's not like [00:05:00] this city is swimming in surplus. And without the ability to raise taxes beyond property taxes, the state really handcuffs municipalities in terms of what they can do with money. Where would you re prioritize money, or how would you to cover maintenance costs? Where would you take money away from to pay for that?

C.J. Domingo: When we're looking at it, there is the short term and the long term. In the short term, yes, we're in the hole. That's why there's the GO bonds. They're saying, please, we need to do some debt leveraged financing so we can go and raise the money that we need to get ourselves out of this situation. And, The argument has been made by members of the council and by the mayor that we are going to make this a regular cycle, that we're just going to regularly make this how we pay for things.

But if you are regularly having to take out loans and then ask people to pay, not just the value of the loan, but all the interest on that loan, then it sounds like you're just raising taxes by a [00:06:00] higher degree in a backdoor fashion. Now it gives you the money up front to handle short term problems. I understand the logic. When we talk about how do we fix that longterm though, because short term, GO bond is an answer. Short term, figuring out what sort of projects could be delayed, or where we could find private partnership to help us with certain things. 

To give a specific example for that, because I know that specificity helps when earlier this year we found out that the Malvern Hills pool would not be reopened. There had been a push to ask what if we went with a private partnership like we had for the civic center? And somebody said it as a joke, but I said, unironically, that might not be a terrible idea. Go to a local business like Ingles that could afford it and say we'll let you rename it from Malvern Hills to the Bob Ingle Memorial Pool.

And again, that's not really palatable to a lot of people I get, but the idea is if you can find something where a business could have jumped in, where the estimate was it would be between 400, 000 to [00:07:00] 600, 000 to get the pool back into spec so it could have opened this year and maintained its grandfathered status, We would not be asked to pay three million dollars plus In a GO bond and then have eight years with not actually necessarily eight years It's there's a planning cycle where they said planning could be one to two years Finding the rfp for who could do it could be one to two years actually getting the construction could be One to three years. And so in a worst case scenario, it could be up to eight years. And so the point is that you don't have a generation of kids who don't get to learn to swim in the pool where I learned how to swim.

You could just say, we're going to make this partnership, get it done, and until we pay you back, you can put your branding and your advertising on this space so we can maintain this for the community. And that's a way that we could approach some of these short term problems. Another part is, looking holistically at how we do our fees and charges. So something that drove me nuts when I worked for the parking services division is the manner in which we [00:08:00] devised who to hit with tickets and what areas to pursue ticketing. And how did we shape those prices? 

Matt Peiken: Talk about that a little more. What were you seeing? Were you seeing inequities there?

C.J. Domingo: I think that there is some social inequity. One of the things that changed when we reimagined public safety is we took common ticketing from APD and gave it to parking services division. Parking services division used to only be responsible for basically the downtown area. And so for that purpose, you only need a handful of officers. But now you've added 2 8 8 0 6, 2 8 8 0 4, 2 8 8 0 3, which basically doubled the area by its lonesome.

And so when you add all these other areas, what that meant was when I was working there, There were not officers to both work the beat downtown and to go out into the community. So when there was a problem in the community, if somebody needed city representation, the [00:09:00] managers had to get together in a car, drive to that location, figure out what was going on and see if they could solve a problem. And where Many small problems could be resolved, somebody's parked in your front yard, and you don't want them there, You could go and a police officer can start knocking on doors and say hey Can you please move this car and they have the cachet of being a police officer to get some compliance. You instead have a very nice But very nerdy guy in a polo shirt and a pair of khakis coming up and saying hey You can't park your car there Which is no different than the neighbor saying it.

Matt Peiken: When I first met you back in the spring and we had that Asheville Downtown Association Forum you talked about morale, city employee morale being one of the big issues for you as why you were running. Is that still, now that you've been running your campaign, do you still see that as a prescient issue?

C.J. Domingo: Yes. Anytime that I have come across a city employee at any event, that at which I've been invited to speak or anytime that I've knocked on someone's door and found out that they were a city employee, I have found that they are very glad to find that somebody [00:10:00] who's running actually has heard their issues.

There has been, I would say, 1 in 20 who have just told me I think things are better now, and that's fine. But they also acknowledge it has been bad recently. 

Matt Peiken: Bad how? 

C.J. Domingo: So when you ask different people, you'll get different answers. The biggest one though, is they feel like there is a problem they are facing that could be resolved with something, either whether it's funding for safety equipment, whether it is changing the nature of their mission to allow them to drop something that does not improve people's lives.

Versus if they feel like they could get better distribution on when they are being sent to resolve problems because schedules are set up on high. And so every person I run into has one to five little things they say, if we could change this, it would be better, but nobody's listening. 

Another thing we talked about is core infrastructure. You were talking about roads, parking, stormwater recovery. Do you feel that the city leadership [00:11:00] is prioritizing infrastructure well enough? And if not, what should be done differently than what is being done now? 

So I feel like certain infrastructure gets passed by the wayside. There's the classic argument, you hear this on the national level where they say the least sexy but the most important topic that the government can talk about, infrastructure.

We like to talk about infrastructure when it is something that is flashy, when it's something where we know we can get a win. But when you say we're going to take ARPA funds and we're going to use it to fix the pool or to update the Rankin bathroom to make it in line, that would be far cheaper than going and saying, we're going to build a Portland loo, which is getting underway, but they could have done something to invest in what we have and that would have been a better investment, I feel, than building a brand new thing that may not meet our needs in the long term.

And it would have been cheaper and would have left us [00:12:00] more of that ARPA funding because the toilet ends up being much more expensive than either of those other projects. And we could have possibly done both of those projects if You don't know how much the pool was going to cost until you dug in, that's why it's at 400 to 600.

But if it was the lower number, we theoretically could have done both. 

Matt Peiken: Do you see the need for the public bathroom? 

C.J. Domingo: A public bathroom that is ADA compliant, yes, absolutely. But the Rankin space provided that. It was shut down during 2020 because of the difficulties, there's a couple of conversations about it, but it was something that parking services maintained.

And for the folks who were messing with it at that time, they told me that the biggest problem was trying to maintain cleanliness with downtown staff because they had so much staffing change because the pandemic, we didn't know everything that we know now, but that meant that you had this space that was open to the public, that was a refuge for the unhoused. You also have people who are very scared because we were all were, I was very terrified of the beginning of the [00:13:00] pandemic, but you're running into that problem and you're trying to tell people, Hey, you can't be in this space. You need to move. And then you go in to clean it and you don't have the right tools, equipment.

You don't have the right materials and you don't have the authority to do anything more than saying, please leave. And so that space could have just been updated a little bit to be more ADA compliant. It is already a very good bathroom. I used to use it all the time when I was a kid because it would be part of my pass through, I would take the bus downtown after school. I would go downtown and then I would walk to see my dad. But as I became more confident and a little older, I would go to the pack library. But I never liked the Pack Library bathroom, so I would always stop at the Rankin bathroom and use that one. 

Matt Peiken: We all have our favorites. Yeah. Do you think you would have known this in advance? Hindsight's 20 20, and not to be cliché about it, but do you think when these conversations came up about the 24 7 bathroom devoted to the unhoused and others who need something in a central space, do you think you would have thought of this then?

C.J. Domingo: Would I have thought of [00:14:00] everything? Maybe not, but I have a very strong feeling that there is knowledge from the people who interact with these things on a daily basis that is not getting to the folks who make the decision because when you talk to people in leadership, and again, I don't want to name names because I'm not trying to hurt anybody's feelings.

I'm not trying to call anybody out, but I've talked to people on the council. I have talked to people in the manager's office and they largely do not hear This on the ground information, and that's a part of why I say the machines become a bit blind to getting the answers that we could get cheaply and efficiently for the average Ashevillian.

Matt Peiken: Let's say you do win a seat on the City Council, what would you want to put on the front burner that isn't as much part of the conversation right now? 

C.J. Domingo: I think that we need to make sure we are always looking at the holistic picture. We need to fund core services first. We need to make sure that we are taking care of our infrastructure. For me, my biggest thing is making sure That we are not [00:15:00] forgetting all of that important day to day stuff on the path to getting these other projects because all these other things that we want to do are noble, but we have to make sure that we get affordable housing first because affordable housing affects everything.

And when we were looking at housing, we have a big emphasis on dropping a big apartment complex and that's good in the long term. But in the short term, for example, we could do more to encourage more cottage courts and more ADU (Accessory Dwelling Units) development. There's a really great program that, again, I'm not a lawyer, but my reading of it and my asking some folks who are builders about it seems to suggest that we could be going to people and making partnerships and communities where they say, I don't want a big apartment complex here, but you could go to folks in the neighborhood and say, If you want to build an ADU in your yard, your yards are all very large.

And so what these are is you hear them called mother in law suites or some other type of suite. But The premise for it is it can be either attached or detached [00:16:00] housing that is on an existing property. It's smaller. It matches what we used to call starter homes.

And the idea is they can be one to two bedrooms. They'll have a little living space. They have their own separate everything. But what happens now is if you want to go open an ADU, up until now, if you wanted to go get one, you would have to have a lot of equity in your land. You'd have to have a lot of cash up front in order to get started building. And if you wanted to build it, A lot of banks didn't want to mess with that.

But the rules have changed and so in the last couple of years I think it was 2022, now you can get I believe it's the FHA loan to help you with construction and That is good. And the city is willing to give you the permit to get you out of to get out of the way. But one thing that is a big hang up Is you still have to take whatever design you want to put on your land back to the city And say this is what I want to do.

This is how I want it to look You Can I build it? And that's a long, that's an involved process. But once you get through all of the design development and all that, I've talked to a couple of [00:17:00] builders. The ballpark that gave me is they could get one cranked out in anywhere from four weeks to 12 weeks, depending on how big you want to do it, where you're doing it, all that.

And what that would do for us is if we found a way to encourage that development. So for example, a lot of folks would not qualify for a very good interest rate. The city could essentially act as an intermediary using a grant fund like, I think it's the housing trust fund is the name of the fund but the idea is that they could look at That as a way to provide that loan to people who already have a single family home and want to be a part of building More missing middle housing, and if they act as the intermediary for folks who are in high demand areas, that have very inefficient land use, you come to them and say we want to partner with you. Here's the deal: We will help you to get that, loan that you need but for some amount of time that's agreed upon You have to run that as a affordable housing unit at 50% Area median income. 

Matt Peiken: I think that bleeds into a conversation [00:18:00] about Airbnb and short term rental policies. A lot of people would want to have accessory dwelling units on their property, but they would want to Airbnb them out for a premium dollar. Where's your position on the city's short term rental policy? 

C.J. Domingo: Right now, there's a ban on Airbnbs, and I think that when you have a housing crisis, that makes sense. But I also hear homeowners who would love to be able to run these as rentals because this would give them extra income and help them to deal with the affordability problem that we have in our county.

But right now, that's not really a thing we can do this second because again, we are trying to find ways to exacerbate our biggest issue, which is affordability of housing. Now, Long term, I think that if the people come back and they say, great, we're now at a housing surplus, housing is cheap. 

Matt Peiken: When's that going to happen?

C.J. Domingo: Yeah. The thing is that some stuff is sounds a little utopianesque, but I feel that if we are better leveraging the fact that we have tourists coming to this area and spending tremendous amounts of money and find ways to capture that money For the people of this area, [00:19:00] we can make that a huge boon.

That's the model in places that have found a good balance with their tourism economy, that is capturing those tourism dollars to drive it back into the local infrastructure, the local economy. 

Matt Peiken: Speaking of tourism dollars, so the Tourism Development Authority, we have many millions of dollars every year coming in through them.

City Council really can't do anything to, you know, it's kind of out of their purview in a sense. But there's a lot of pressure to help change the way TDA money is allocated in this community. It now at least it's 33 percent of all TDA funds are somewhat discretionary. They still have to be used for tourism related expenses, but they don't just go back into marketing.

What are your thoughts, if any, if you have any, about how that money can be better leveraged in this community and still stay within the legal framework of quote supporting tourism or having to do with tourism.?

C.J. Domingo: Speculatively, [00:20:00] there's a lot I would like to do with the TDAs money, but the reality is we can continue to petition and I will of course, join in petitioning to say that I would like to see the TDA invest in things, particularly infrastructure and Community opportunities, so that way we can help to make the average Ashevillian thrive better in our economy. But I'm also a realist in recognizing that getting the TDA to the table is also a very long campaign.

And so I don't want to get too in the weeds about what specifically I want them to do. But I think that there are a lot of projects that would be in their mission that would also materially improve the day to day life of people who live and work to make Asheville such a great place. 

Matt Peiken: Getting back to the element of core city services and things you want to prioritize, where would you have voted on McCormick Field? Some people might say, hey, that's not a core city service. We're investing nearly 30 million of city money now to renovate [00:21:00] that park. What's your view on that? 

C.J. Domingo: So McCormick Field is one of those places where, at the end, we expect to make more revenue. This is a place where I think that this debt leveraged financing would have made a world more sense.

We should have taken the money that we know we have and take care of the people who are counting on us. Because when people pay their taxes to the government, they want to know that they're going to get buses that run on time, they know that they're going to get Roads they can drive on. I don't know if you saw the TRIP report from, I think it was last Friday.

They made an estimate saying that the average Asheville driver is taking about $400 of additional wear and tear on their car from just driving on our roads. 

Matt Peiken: No, I missed that. 

C.J. Domingo: Yeah, it's it's a pretty shocking number. And it's Who produced that? Trip. It's a, yeah, so they're an advisory, they're an advisory non profit.

Okay. And again, I don't want to get into the weeds of, oh this is the exact number. I want to say, This is a conversation that people were already telling me beforehand when I first started running for office, people were telling me that they were having a lot of issues because their road had not been resurfaced [00:22:00] in 10 years, 15 years, and they were complaining that if I get on the city council, they want me to make sure that I bring to the attention of management. Hey, my road has not been resurfaced and I have to buy one new tire. almost every single year just because of this one pothole. 

And when we look at things like that and with the water where people had that huge water outage and then there was that blowout at River Ridge a couple of weeks ago, people want to know that fundamental stuff is taken care of. And it's something that I've mentioned a lot on the trail because The biggest thing from the government is that stuff that you count on, but you don't want to think about. You don't want to think about your road. You don't want to think about your water. You just want it to work. And so that stuff should have been funded first and foremost.

And then, I still think McCormick Field is important, but that's a place where we could have said, Alright, we're going to let the debt pay for that because It's going to pay off. 

Matt Peiken: Do you think your same vantage point on that would underscore your view about Thomas Wolfe auditorium and the Cherokee center and the [00:23:00] renovations that have to happen there?

C.J. Domingo: Yes, these are economic powerhouses that we should be looking at ways to use the debt to pay for those things. Though, going back to the thing I talked about earlier, where I was saying we could be more efficient in how we charge for tourists using our city, there's a kind of involved idea I have about Where we do parking and where we do access and where we do these vendors where I think that we could be making a lot more money for Those renovations.

So the quick version for folks who have not heard me talk about this yet. We currently have with the civic center about 400 ish spaces that are divided between people who want to go to the library, people who live nearby, people who work downtown and they have the city's badges and then all the folks who want to go to the arena.

And if you're going to the arena, you could have up to 6000 people wanting to send on it. You've got the largest parking structure right next to them. But when we charge the city Now, it just changed. What it used to be, it would be either a [00:24:00] 7 or a 10 fee. And the 7 fee was for multi day events, 10 fee was for single day events.

This number was meant to be affordable for the average person who's just trying to go to the library, but also raise that extra revenue to help pay because the extra monies, I believe it was 2 out of the additional fee, I can't remember the exact number, but I believe it was about 2, goes to the Civic Center to help pay for their facility.

For But at the same time, our neighbors, our competitors in parking are charging 25, 50, 70 at these very big shows, and they're able to get them filled up very quickly. And I would have people asking me, they would say, hey, I've got this person down here being very forceful. I'd come down and talk to them, and they'd realize I'm a supervisor.

And they would try to bribe me. They'd say, I'll give you 200 if you let me park in the handicapped spaces. And I said, it's illegal for you to park in the handicapped and I can't let you in. And they say, I'll pay the parking fine as well. I just gotta get to the show. I paid, 300. I don't want to miss it.

And I say, sorry, I can't help you and so they would go on their way, but you have [00:25:00] the demand. If we turned around and we just charged more progressively reflecting that, a local show should not have a high fee, but if we said, okay, if it goes above a certain fee or if the fee charged goes above a certain number, we started charging a higher rate for parking because. 

Matt Peiken: Yeah, but what does that do for the local people who are going to that event? 

C.J. Domingo: So what I would like to do is for people who are here locally or for people who don't want to pay that higher fee, what if we actually operated a shuttle? Do a partnership with somebody who's got a lot of land and they're not using it.

In West Asheville, there's the Kmart that I believe is owned by Ingles. They're going to be building there, but they haven't got there yet. Talk to them, say, Hey, we want to use this parking lot during the events this next six months, go to the Asheville mall. Say, we want to use that Sears side where nobody's parking and do like we do used to do in Bele Chere and operate a regular shuttle through there.

And that way, if we do the shuttle and we tell people who are here locally, Hey, you're local here. You can hop on this. You can get to work. You can get home. You're not going to have to fight all that traffic of people getting in and out and try to find your car in the parking [00:26:00] structure. That is better for those people and it allows us to say okay now the people who remain Are almost certainly necessarily the tourists.

One of the other Troublesome things that I got asked to do was folks would want to open up vendor stands Near the civic center because they had merchandise That was related to the show.

And these folks could not get a merchandising permit because frequently they would show up on Saturday and their ability to get a merchandising permit doesn't exist except Monday to Friday. And so there was no way for them to do it and there would be no legal way for me to offer them space in that parking lot.

However, we are also shutting down the road for all these major shows. Flint and Cherry Street gets shut down. What if instead, we took that Streeteries idea that we're doing, a part of the Complete Streets Initiative, and we said to folks, we're going to put somebody who can sell you a permit there, during the weekend, during these shows, and we would open up spaces in the middle of the road there that could be Off to the side, so we can still get the buses down the road to get around the Civic Center.[00:27:00] 

But, about half that road is just not used. It's just empty space. We could be turning those merchandising permits into the money that we need To fund Thomas Wolfe, because people again would try to bribe me and I'd have to say, No, you're in a parking lot that goes to a disabled person who lives in that apartment right there.

I don't have any shuttle to get them from anywhere else, so I can't send that person somewhere else. I need you to move and get your stuff out of their parking space so they can park here. 

Matt Peiken: I think it's interesting that there was a potential bribery racket happening with city parking. I didn't know that that was.

C.J. Domingo: People constantly try to offer, nobody ever. took anything as far as I ever know. 

Matt Peiken: I'm not saying he did. I'm just saying I didn't know that people were even trying to bribe city parking officials for that. 

C.J. Domingo: I will say is a funny addendum because it is Asheville. The folks who were the most aggressive were the folks who tried to bribe me with narcotics.

And I would say, Oh my God, no, I said no, I don't want that. Get that out of my face. I have to, if you show that to me, I have to call the police. Don't show me that because I just want them to get out of my way because again, as a city [00:28:00] employee, even if I call the police. It was still a long wait time. Now things are a lot better now.

I have heard from folks who were there that the wait time is no longer 25 45 minutes. Now it's only, 5 or 10 in the worst cases and they actually do get some quick responses when they need it. But That was something that again, we don't see this conversation happening at the upper levels. It's only down at the bottom. 

Matt Peiken: So it's speaking of conversations that aren't happening, What conversations do you want to see happen more that people just aren't talking about as much when it comes to city government city, leadership in this campaign? What do you want to be more on the frontal lobe of people?

C.J. Domingo: So the long term this is something that we are We all feel it. We know that the world's changed around us, and the average person is sliding behind. The average person living and working in Asheville has struggles trying to afford living here, and some of that is us. Some of that stuff that we could alleviate, like with housing.

But a lot of it is also [00:29:00] national. And when we have these conversations, we are still looking at the way the world was before where we say, okay people will find a way in, they're going to drive over here, and that's why we're having this sprawl issue. Because when we leave people to solve their own problems, They'll sprawl out further and that's why the average Asheville cop can't afford to live in Asheville.

The average Asheville firefighter can't afford to live in Asheville. All of the folks who make this place work are being shoved. And then we say, why are they sprawling? We need to figure out a way to make the streets better. These long term conversations Also affect things like where are our kids going to work?

We spend a lot of time and energy investing in our Children, raising them to be the sort of neighbors, friends, future doctors, lawyers, police officers, firefighters, all of these folks that we want them to be. But their best chance to survive in this economy is to move somewhere else. And as we have people moving in, there was a study earlier this year that said that for every 100 people leaving Asheville, about 300 want to move in.[00:30:00] 

And that is necessarily changing our balance of needing to have young people working these new jobs to try and make the economy work. So we can also have a stable base so we can support the whole rest of the city. And we're missing that conversation now.

That's something that when you asked before, would I know some of the stuff that's coming, it's because this is one of those places where something that is coming that we will need to answer. And as we're having this conversation, we say to fix the problems that we've already made, we need to have debt leverage financing. 

But I also know that if you look at the long economic cycle, maybe it's because I'm a millennial. I've lived through several once in a lifetime economic crises from the dot com bubble burst 2008 2020 maybe I'm a little chicken little here, but I feel like we're due for something and we're talking about taking on a lot of debts.

And At the same time, being a history nerd, I think about, about a hundred years ago, the city had a whole bunch of debts, and then the stock market [00:31:00] crashed in 1929, and that's how we ended up being the weird city we are, because the city suddenly ran out of money, and after they got done paying all their debts, they had only pennies to the dollar to pay their staff to pay for everything, and that's why all the architecture is stuck around.

When we are having this conversation, people are having it in bits and pieces all over the place, but we need to get together and say, Hey, where are we going and are we happy with that? And are we making sure that we have the sort of future that when we get there, we're going to look back and say, Man, I'm so glad that we saw the fork in the river coming and chose the path that we wanted.