Latest / Conservation Stories / The Dry Side Dispatch • August 14th • Nick Bergfeld

Transcript

The Dry Side Dispatch • August 14th • Nick Bergfeld · Conservation Stories

• 0:00
  Speaker A: Hello, hello, hello, friends. Welcome back to the dry side dispatch. And just Dusty and I in the studio today with our friend Nick. Everybody probably remembers Nick.
• 0:11
  Speaker B: Hey, everybody.
• 0:11
  Speaker A: Andy's all out doing his landman thing today. So he's headed to the courthouse, to a courthouse in an unknown location
• 0:23
  Speaker C: in a secret locale in the courthouse somewhere in the basement of the courthouse somewhere. And you see Andy.
• 0:30
  Speaker A: That's exactly right. He's out there. Not too many courthouses left that you have to go to and do research anymore. No, it's online anymore, which is really nice. Makes it nice not to have to travel to all of the foreign parts where most of our oil is. Speaking of which, I spent the week in Midland speaking of foreign parts.
• 0:52
  Speaker B: How was.
• 0:53
  Speaker A: Was good. Went to the produce Water Society's 36th annual conference in Midland, Permian Basin. I was like, dawning on me that they've been having produced water conferences for 36 years. That's three and a half decades. And we're still waiting on permits.
• 1:16
  Speaker C: Fair. We haven't been waiting for 36 years.
• 1:17
  Speaker A: But it's true. It's true.
• 1:19
  Speaker C: Just like, you know, you think, man, we wish we were a little bit closer to the finish line after 36 years.
• 1:25
  Speaker A: Yeah, it was interesting. I will say, I saw going. I think this was my third or fourth year to go. And interesting. I just to see the development, how much is developed in four years. So, you know, this time last year I was still like, yeah, we're still a ways out, I think. And now I'm like, okay, like, this is the first time I'd ever heard, like, people that actually are saying, oh, yeah, no, we can do this at scale. We can. It's. It works now. It's economical. There's multiple ways to do it. But also, there's all conversations about, you know, lithium and all of the different, you know, things that you can get out of mine, out of the water.
• 2:11
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 2:12
  Speaker A: And I thought, interesting. Senator Perry said that they're looking at legislation to make sure that somehow that those owners, those minerals owners get to benefit from the minerals taken out of the water.
• 2:25
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 2:25
  Speaker A: So that would be.
• 2:26
  Speaker C: Well, they should. I mean, that would be. And that would also be a big. Another big financial driver to it because there's. There is altruism, but altruism. And altruism is fantastic, but altruism is driven by dollars.
• 2:41
  Speaker A: So interestingly, what. What I think is interesting about this is that, like, these are all, you know, critical minerals that are extremely valuable
• 2:52
  Speaker C: because of their scarcity, and they're predominantly Mined in. Under horrible conditions in third world countries. And they're just. I mean, it's terrible.
• 3:02
  Speaker A: So some of them though, like there, there will be so much like you can have so much of it that's mined out that it actually will drop the value of the, you know, and there's only a. There's a few where there's enough space in there that will, they'll still hold that, you know, it'll still be worth. Yeah, yeah.
• 3:23
  Speaker C: I'll tell you what, produce water is one of the things that just fascinates me. I mean, it is really. I mean that to me, that would be. I mean that's like amazing.
• 3:34
  Speaker A: Got to hear a really.
• 3:35
  Speaker C: The upside of that.
• 3:36
  Speaker A: Brilliant tech PhD student discuss her research on the impact of produce water. So completely treated produced water and partially treated produce water, like what they call polished. So like desalinated and then cleaned and desalinated or not cleaned, but that. Polished. That's the word that they use. To me it just means like cleaning it up the rest of the way. But anyway. But she's been using it on soil and looking at the impact on soil and soil health. That's very interesting on the microbial population. Really interesting. And so she is gonna join us. I know. And so we'll have to be ready to ask some really smart questions or translate her smart answers into something we can understand. Cause I do admit like 90% of the time I was sitting there going, this sounds like Charlie Brown's schoolteacher to me.
• 4:35
  Speaker C: I don't.
• 4:37
  Speaker A: This is way, way over my head. Way over my head.
• 4:41
  Speaker B: So it would be, I think, something nice to be able to use the produced water in a meaningful economic way. And I do remember seeing some chatter around the idea that maybe this is something that you can pair up with the data center industry use in that way. And I feel like this is a Tribune article, but when you sort of think of the scale in terms of how much produced water there is versus how much capacity for water data centers require, it's like still not too much. Right. You know, it's like the amount of water that you require, it doesn't really. It'd be cool if it was just one for one, you know?
• 5:17
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
• 5:17
  Speaker C: Right.
• 5:19
  Speaker B: Problem solved.
• 5:19
  Speaker C: Right.
• 5:20
  Speaker B: Produce water can fix all that.
• 5:21
  Speaker C: Well, the problem is data centers aren't necessarily where produced water exists.
• 5:25
  Speaker A: Well, some of them are. Some of them, yeah. And then they're. They're thinking that way for sure. And you know, one of the.
• 5:32
  Speaker C: That was frightening. I'm not.
• 5:33
  Speaker A: Well, something just dropped off the wall. So my goodness, this is my scared face. That was one of the things that was suggested. But what I, I was there speaking on a panel about rangeland restoration with it. And to me, you know, when you're looking at what is, what, what's the thing that could have the greatest long term impact if you look at taking it and using it in the Permian area to restore the grassland in that area and the rangeland? Because they were talking about Eric Bernard, who is also going to join us, I just have to nail him down on a date. He is just an expert. He's just spent his career studying this and he's the landscape architect, which means basically not your yard, it means like huge regions of areas. And so he's really studied like what that would look like and you know, taking that and letting it infiltrate over the course of like 10 years. And so like you could put it into a river and it would, you know, keep the river flowing until there's no more produced water, which it will peak in like the2030s is what they're saying. So you have peak and then, then it's gone. Or you can infiltrate that and begin to really recharge and then that recharge actually eventually is what will recharge those, it will go down and into those streams and it makes it, it begins to create, recreate the cycle of, of especially rain. And so he was talking about a lot, Eric was talking about a lot of different, you know, places that they've done this in China and in Africa where they've just spent the time to do some restoration, like large scale landscape restoration and how it's beginning to change the, just the environment of the surrounding area and bringing back more rain potentially. So that would be amazing.
• 7:49
  Speaker C: I just want to, I just want to feel like I'm not living in a Larry McMurtry book right now.
• 7:53
  Speaker A: Right.
• 7:54
  Speaker C: I would love to have rain everywhere, but I know, obviously was the biggest tease on the planet. We went to, went out to eat and drove through three different places where it had rained. Looked like the second, you know, looks like a Noah's Ark again. And then you go 100 foot and it's like dry as a bone. I'm like, man, yeah.
• 8:12
  Speaker A: I was coming home, watching that from Midland and just thinking, you know, I wonder how long it would have to rain before I would get tired of it now. Right. I will say, like, flooding is scary.
• 8:22
  Speaker C: Oh, sure, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 8:24
  Speaker A: But I don't know, I think I could like live somewhere where it just rained every Afternoon cool things off.
• 8:32
  Speaker C: I can handle that.
• 8:33
  Speaker A: Wouldn't that be amazing? Oh yeah, yeah.
• 8:35
  Speaker C: But on the produced water, one of the things that we talked about, you know, we're talking about how they pump it in. We're running out of pore space. I was, I was. You were talking about running out of produce. You know, produce water peaking in 2000s. I'm like, well why don't we just start pumping the stuff that we've shoved back down into the pore spaces again back out and redo it and then.
• 8:55
  Speaker A: Well, and a lot of it, I mean that's where most of it's going right now is to. It's recycled and used to for fracking. A lot of it is, you know, that's the most, you know, that's the easiest thing for them to do. But I did talk to one company that's looking at excited. I mean this is exciting to me. They're looking out and doing ply lake, putting it in plot, you know, once it's cleaned.
• 9:18
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 9:18
  Speaker A: We're not ever talking about anything that's not cleaned.
• 9:21
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 9:21
  Speaker A: And treated, you know, but putting it back into. And I was like, I love that idea because that is, isn't it under
• 9:27
  Speaker C: the covered under recharge Clean Water Act.
• 9:30
  Speaker A: It doesn't really have any, it doesn't have anything yet. That's probably the problem.
• 9:35
  Speaker C: If you're dumping it out on the ground. That's not something.
• 9:37
  Speaker A: Well, you would think. Yeah, I mean if we were, if it was just the Clean Water act, if we could just use that. We would already be using it. Because you can get. Is literally cleaner than most of our municipality drinking water. Yeah, it is. I mean if people, you can compare the two and it can get that clean, but it can get too clean. You know where. And that's what I learned from this, which I, I mean I kind of knew in the back of my mind that that was true. But like if you used, if you treated it completely and got it, you can get it to the level of distilled water. And so you can't drink distilled water for a long time because it just doesn't, it doesn't provide the minerals that your cells need. And so it will do the same thing to the soil. It just will just deplete eventually. It will just after about 10 years would strip the soil of all of its nutrients.
• 10:31
  Speaker C: Putting it into a plow would be. Seemed like that would be a fantastic idea.
• 10:36
  Speaker A: It would be lovely. I, I was so excited to hear this guy say that. They'd already looked at this and they'd already asked TCEQ if it was possible. And you know, so they're really thinking about it. I'm not saying they're going to do it next week because it's, you know, it's, we're still, there's still a lot of work to do on the permitting process, but to me it's super encouraging to hear someone's thinking that way. And, and anyway, so I'm excited to connect and see what happens here. That's really, really cool.
• 11:05
  Speaker C: That's gonna be, that's. I mean, that's such an exciting, you know, in, in a good way. You know, it's nice to say, oh, this is an exciting deal. And it not be like, it's exciting like a tornado coming at your house. I mean, this is actually something that's, you know, there's optimism out there. There's, you know, there's light at the end of the tunnel that does not appear to be an oncoming train. You know, there's, there's options out there. There are people, good people looking at solutions that are going to be benef that can be beneficial to a broad swath of the populace.
• 11:39
  Speaker A: I think that's the thing to me about when you look at one of the, on the panel that we had on Rangeland, one of them is the president of the South Texas Landowners association. And Charles, who's somebody we should have on, he's really interesting, but he's been really trying to push if we, we can do things that have a short term benefit or we can do something that has a long term benefit, you know, and this is something that will have that long term benefit. And he was like, and I don't, you know what, we know now, like a lot of these data centers, you know, they're gonna use some of that water and it's gonna get recharged. He said, why don't you partner with them? Let them use the first set of it, they clean it up, then we put it out on the land, you know, and I think, you know, and it's interesting now people are finally catching on to like the fact that AG really uses the majority of our water. And, and it's, it's interesting to hear people's, to hear people say that and start to catch and understand that, you know what I mean? So it's not, sometimes I laugh when I'm there because I tell them, I'm like, where are the two. Like ag and oil are the two most vilified like, you know, in ag. It's like we've been raping your soil and poisoning your cereal your whole life. I'm so sorry. You know what I mean? I'm so sorry about that. You know, and so it's like, well, the fun thing. Be nice to see the. These two things. Do these two industries do something together? Because it never is as bad as you think it is.
• 13:14
  Speaker C: I mean, that's, you know, everybody, you know, like that. But I mean, there are huge swaths of this country that would be unpopulated without ag and oil.
• 13:23
  Speaker A: Oh, absolutely.
• 13:24
  Speaker C: I mean, there's a huge chunk of the prosperity of this country would be
• 13:28
  Speaker A: gone without the oil in the Permian Basin. Then that's like, my gosh, is it like 70% or something of the oil in the United States?
• 13:36
  Speaker B: Oh, it's huge. Right. And I mean, it's also just a massive component of the Texas economy.
• 13:40
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 13:41
  Speaker B: And, you know, when you think about, you know, why is Dallas such a large financial center?
• 13:46
  Speaker C: Right.
• 13:46
  Speaker B: You know, and these things, and there's so many even industries that aren't necessarily directly related to oil. There's just so many spillover effects that sort of come with that. It really has shaped the nature of the state. It would be hard to envision what Texas would be if it didn't have oil.
• 14:05
  Speaker C: Yes, Well, I mean, that's the thing. Texas is what everybody thinks about. I mean, that's the number one thing. But the Dakotas, the same, of course. I mean, North Dakota is. They're primarily a harder type of oil to get out. So it's a bigger deal. But I mean, it's. It's not as big an industry. Pennsylvania is one that. Pennsylvania is one. I never remember, you know, that there's actual oil in Pennsylvania. I never remember that. I mean, I'm just think. I just think Yankees and rock coasters and you don't think about that. But, you know, you look at the at. I mean, shoot, I'm in cotton country and I'm wearing a little bit of cost cotton, but my shirt is not. And so we should have a.
• 14:47
  Speaker A: We should have like, some kind of, like, sign on the door that says, no cotton, no entry.
• 14:54
  Speaker C: I would have to replace a lot of my wardrobe because I wear this stuff a lot.
• 14:58
  Speaker A: Oh, my goodness.
• 14:59
  Speaker C: I like the fact that it dries out when I'm water and.
• 15:03
  Speaker A: Yeah, but.
• 15:04
  Speaker C: But I mean, there's a lot. A lot of upside I see in the. In the future of the produced water. And it's, you know, it's 10 years ago, when you talk about producing water, the hills that it had to climb just seemed, seemed insurmountable.
• 15:19
  Speaker A: Oh, I wouldn't say it wouldn't even that long ago. I mean, it was four years ago. I can remember the guy that he, he was, he's the one who moderated our panel and I remember the first time I met him was at a different concert, concert conference. And we were sitting around and he was like, does anybody know if there's a solution? And this was probably four years ago at all. Does anyone know is there a solution that is cost effective? And everyone's just like crickets, total crickets, you know, and he was like, well, you know what? At some point it won't matter if it's cost effective. If we don't, it's going to have to be done, you know. And I think that's kind of leads into like some of the stuff. When I was texting Nick, he was like, what do you want to talk about? I was like, well, I always want to talk about something that's a little bit on the edge, make people think. Like when I was at NASA and I think I may have mentioned this last week. Yeah. About how much the yearly impact, billions of dollars that A satellite from 1970s still brings to the US economy and how, what's the balance and what's the relationship that you know, we should strive for in government oversight and government influence and spending to what we were just discussing before we turned on, on the air of, to promote the general welfare of people, you know, that supports, you know, the ability for people to achieve the American dream, you know, and part of that I think is what do we invest in regulations and what do we invest in? I guess the carrot or the stick, you know, and does that have good returns for us? You know, And I know it's kind of a. On the scale of I guess what different people believe of how much you should spend or not. But I'd like to, that's why I wanted Nick to talk about just like where do you see the benefits? And some of those benefits that can't even be. They're not monitored. You can't, you know, they may actually have. Down the line, you may see and I know this is true, like with green spaces, like in two years after you invested $103 million to Redo Streets and parks and whatever, you're not going to see like some improvement next year. But you can see these long term impacts on health.
• 17:55
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 17:56
  Speaker B: Oh yeah. You know, and it's the, I think the first part there is, you know, you have to have the ability to define, like what the benefit is.
• 18:06
  Speaker C: Right.
• 18:07
  Speaker B: And there are some things where we have data for some things that we don't that allow for us to say, you know what, there's something you can really hang your hat on here, you know, and greenspace is a great example because we have property values. Right. And so you can see the impact of, you know, the percentage of green space in an area investing in green space and the impact that that has on the desirability of the area. Right. Based on a century property value. And so if you're taking a sort of modern approach to thinking about your community, there are a lot of clear arguments that you can make for public amenities and how as a community, that you actually get a return on your investment by getting those. Right. And so one of those argument, or part of that argument was used in the process of, you know, reforming aspects of downtown. And one element of that that I'm very excited about is the downtown park Pickering. Right? Yeah. And the downtown park and what it potentially will do for the surrounding businesses around there in terms of creating activity. Right. There's a really great coffee shop nearby. And just thinking about, oh, how much more walk in traffic are they going to get as a result of that? There's an amazing development that's happening across the street from the park that's going to be Lubbock's first sort of food hall concept.
• 19:31
  Speaker C: What is that called? I think I was down there by it and I saw a sign for it.
• 19:34
  Speaker B: Oh, they put this on. Yeah, it's. What is the name? But yeah, it's gonna be. If you haven't seen one of these in other cities, I want to say
• 19:43
  Speaker A: Denver has a great one. It's called Central Market. Central Market every time.
• 19:46
  Speaker B: And I want to say, if I'm remembering correctly, that the folks that actually helped to design the structure of this one that's going to be in downtown were affiliated to the Denver design of that one.
• 19:58
  Speaker A: Broadway Market.
• 19:59
  Speaker B: Yeah, Broadway Market. And so you think about the investments that the private sector. Right. The people who are developing that property, you think about the investments that they're making. They're huge. That building. Blah. I mean, was.
• 20:13
  Speaker A: Yes, I passed by, well yesterday or I'm sorry, last week. It's down to bare bones.
• 20:19
  Speaker B: Oh, yeah, they're gutting it. And that's the thing is anytime that you think about downtown Lubbock and oh, we've got to do something, look at these buildings. We've got to invest in them, make things change, things like that. The thing you have to take into account is that so many of them have asbestos in them.
• 20:34
  Speaker C: Yes.
• 20:34
  Speaker B: And so your ability to do anything with those buildings is not instantaneous. The price, the price of redevelopment skyrockets. And so as a result of that, you have this waiting game of, okay, I need to see market signals that people are going to come downtown if I do this, if I really take the plunge, because these costs, I don't get them back. Right. If I take out the asbestos in this building and people don't start showing up, what have I done? And so when being able to look at some kind of value, when you have data there, and there's even really great work on bigger picture things, the national parks have value. The national parks have enormous value. But you have to really think about, okay, well, how do we quantify that? How do we quantify the economic benefits of tourism, the things that happen for the communities nearby the parks, the overall sort of benefits to community, things like that. And so it makes it difficult in casual conversation to say, this is something we should have. Right. Because the easy part to look at is how expensive it is. The hard part is to quantify the benefits of it. And that's, I think, where the challenge becomes in society is whenever you're trying to make the case for doing something new, having that ability to say, well, there's, there's a, there, there, there, there's an element to this where we're going to get this back. Right. And to have people feel as though that that is true.
• 22:08
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 22:08
  Speaker B: You know, ends up being part of the cell.
• 22:10
  Speaker C: Because it's easy to say, oh, well, you know, this is going to be good for the, this is going to be good for the, for the city or for the state or whatever. But it's. Then they're like, okay, how? Well, it's just going to be good. I mean, that's, that's not an answer.
• 22:23
  Speaker B: Right.
• 22:23
  Speaker C: I mean, and it's, and like you said, it's, you know, you know, I don't think that, you know, what national parks, the benefit that everybody gets from national park is not, it's from a government standpoint, it's a net loss. Their use fees do not cover.
• 22:40
  Speaker B: Oh, yeah, exactly.
• 22:41
  Speaker C: They're not going to. But what Yellowstone does for Jackson, Victor and all those little towns along the border in Montana and stuff, what it does for them is huge. Right. I mean, you could literally say, you know, on Jackson's got skiing, but I mean, it's still probably 3/4 of the people that come to Jackson don't come skiing because they're up there now and they're not skiing now. You know, and it's, you know, you go down to Jackson in May when there's no snow, and it's still a madhouse.
• 23:13
  Speaker A: But I think there's enough evidence too out there to say that the people that come receive benefits from being there, from being in the outdoors and experiencing those things that can't. Sometimes you just can't even quantify.
• 23:31
  Speaker B: Oh, yeah, right. And these, and, you know, what we're talking about right now are just like, public goods things like having a park. Right. Stuff like that. But even if you're thinking about it more from a market approach. Right. And how to develop that, capitalism only works when there's markets. And whenever you're trying to do something new, supply and demand don't necessarily match. And so in those periods, produced water is a great example. When you get to scale, when you're able to really do these things at large volumes, the cost of producing that water and cleaning it goes down significantly. And you can math that out and show it. But if you don't have the financing to get from here to there.
• 24:17
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 24:17
  Speaker B: You're never gonna get to that scale.
• 24:19
  Speaker C: Well, it's. It. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off. But I mean, it's like when. When MySpace started the first, you know, there was no. There was no market for it until it existed because, you know, how can you have a market for something that's never existed before? You know, and so, you know, it's a. It's a chicken the egg type deal, but somebody's got to step off there and, you know, write the first line of code. Oh, yeah. In it. But, I mean, but there's also. From the journaling back down to a city perspective instead of trying to do a nationwide perspective.
• 24:51
  Speaker A: Well, this park is a good. I mean, this is a good place for us to start.
• 24:54
  Speaker C: Is.
• 24:54
  Speaker A: Is.
• 24:54
  Speaker C: That's.
• 24:54
  Speaker A: Is what I want to know.
• 24:56
  Speaker C: You know, I lean towards the. I lean more towards the Rand Paul side of this. Of the political spectrum versus the AOC side. I figured those are two disparate, you know, far enough apart. And so, you know, I've always been. My joke has always been I want the government to make the roads, deliver the mail, and, you know, secure the border. That's my goal. That's what I'm. But. But I mean, that's. That's hyperbole. That's just talking. But when you look at what the city of what, what the city planners had done, what when you're laying out city in the city and you watch. Lubbock has done a, in my opinion over the last 35 years, has done a remarkably poor job of planning how subdivisions are going to be built in their town, in our town, because we live in. I live in northwest Lubbock. There is a park within a mile of my house, a park. And it is only exists because it's got a playa lake in it that's too deep for anybody to use and that's the only reason it exists. And if I could go back in time and wave a magic wand, every subdivision would be built and said you got to have at least one block sized city park.
• 26:12
  Speaker B: Right.
• 26:13
  Speaker C: And the developer, you're in charge of paying for it. You know, we're, if we're, especially now that we're footing the bill for all the streets and everything, that, giving developers that benefit of that money, you know, the, I mean it borders. It's so bad that it makes me think that everybody that's ever served in city government anywhere is on the payroll of somebody.
• 26:39
  Speaker B: Right. But it's such a good example in that with a little bit of foreplanning. I mean the classic example, and this was, if you're enjoying controversies, this was a controversy recently was the alleyways. Right. So it's a very similar story. You know, cities are empowered to say you need to pay valleyways. Cities are empowered to say if you're building a new subdivision, there has to be X percentage of it, has to be green space. You can do that, right?
• 27:10
  Speaker C: No, no, I believe. Hey, turn around, Pastor. You're preaching to the choir.
• 27:13
  Speaker B: Yeah, right. Like there are absolutely no limits, you know, to those types of things. You know, communities are empowered to make those choices. And the leadership that we have had. Right. Historically doesn't see the value in having, in shaping it in that way. Right. And it even, I mean there's even simpler things. You know, going back to the conservation, when you're building a house, there is not a large financial difference between traditional plumbing infrastructure or setting the plumbing up of that house. For gray water.
• 27:44
  Speaker A: Yes, right.
• 27:44
  Speaker B: For gray water capture. Right. But if you are in a community where your plumbers have never had to do it before, don't know how to do it right. They're not getting right. And developers haven't done before, they're just not going to do it.
• 27:54
  Speaker C: Right.
• 27:55
  Speaker B: But as a community, do you benefit from separating gray water from other water in Order for that gray water to be used for other purposes. Right. To capture it. Right. Separate it, use it in your own home, irrigate with it, whatever, 100%. But in Tao, as a community, you make that choice and say, okay, this is the way that we need to do it. Nobody will do it.
• 28:17
  Speaker C: Right.
• 28:18
  Speaker B: And it's, it's. Those are the sort of the challenges of when you see these types of benefits and recognize, oh, this is something we probably should be doing. But unless there's like a little kick here to get people going on it.
• 28:31
  Speaker A: Right, right.
• 28:32
  Speaker B: Because again, you know, with, with gray water plumbing, it's just which pipes do you connect to which pipes? Right. It's not, it's not different pipes. It's not a right. It's just making sure that when you connect the pipes, you're connecting the right ones to the right ones.
• 28:44
  Speaker A: Right, right.
• 28:44
  Speaker B: And you don't let them mix.
• 28:45
  Speaker C: It's not rocket surgery or even brain science.
• 28:49
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 28:50
  Speaker C: But you know, it's, it's almost like nobody involved in the city in the last 30 or 40 years has ever played Sim City. You know, it's, it's, you know, and you, it's funny because, you know, you did that as a kid. You do that and you're like, oh, well, that's an epic train wreck. And so then you didn't you start over again. Well, you can't delete a city and start over again. You got to function with what you've got. But, you know, you could, we could have put a line in the sand and said, hey, you know what? Neighborhoods look better if the alleyways are paved or seen, you know, put cement in the alleyway. That looks better. Everything looks better. You know, hey, the devil strip, let's, you know, move the sidewalk over there so that we got a continuous lawn. And hey, let's have everybody, let's, let's say, do rainwater capture. Even on a small scale where you've just got a couple of, you know, 55 gallon barrels out there catching water and it's got a spigot at the bottom of it. You just open it up and water your house plants. Think about what you save and you're, you know, you're cutting down on the amount of water that runs off your place. You're cutting down on what's running down the streets. And so I would assume that you're going to reduce wear and tear on your streets to some level, because like my street now, you drive down Milwaukee after a good rain, those out to those two Roads next to the curb are flowing, flowing curb high. Because, you know, we're a flat. This is predominantly flat. So all of our drainage is above ground drainage to a great extent. And so, I mean, you know, there's. There are decisions that could have been made that would have made negligible increases on anything.
• 30:23
  Speaker B: Oh, yeah. You know, and sometimes it's just this idea of leadership. And one of the challenges, right, is mayors are two years, city council people are four. The repercussions of not doing anything about these issues doesn't show up for sometimes decades. You know, in Lubbock, we now have the, what some people consider the highest electricity bills in the state of Texas. And that didn't happen overnight. That was. And it didn't happen immediately because of this transition to ercot. It happened because four decades we used our city utility as a piggy bank. Rather than responsibly reinvesting the money, we used it for a lot of other stuff. Milwaukee as it exists today would not exist if we hadn't used the city's electricity company as a Piggy Bank. Over $100 million came out of the city utility. So when you think about now, the electricity cost that we pay, you know, robbing Peter to pay Paul, when it comes to thinking about city resources. And it's just one of those frustrations. And so, you know, put yourself through the lens of the person who's trying to get the Marsha Sharp freeway done, and they're trying to get the Milwaukee build out done, and they're looking at the city budget and they're saying, well, we can't do a bond raise. We have too much debt. We just did the water, you know, the big water purchase from T. Boone Pickens. How are we gonna do this? We wanna do it. We think the city should grow that way. We should develop that way. The Friendship School District, people like it. How can we make this happen? And so, right. They're just looking around, you know, what. What are things that we can leverage? What are things that we can, you know, get money out of? And the city's utility was. Was the perfect place to find that opportunity.
• 32:14
  Speaker C: It was painless theft at the time.
• 32:15
  Speaker B: At the time, exactly right.
• 32:17
  Speaker C: But.
• 32:18
  Speaker B: And so, right. And so you fast forward years, Lubbock, we reach a crisis point where the Southwest Power Pool, looking at standards, and they say, Lubbock, you're too much of a taker. Your power generation facilities are way too old. You're not producing enough. And we have limits in terms of how big of a load you can be on the system without putting anything back in. And so you either have to pony up a bunch of money to not just simply repair these aging facilities now, but actually build new because of how far behind you have fallen. You've leaned way too hard into other people's generation resources. And so you either need to now responsibly invest like you haven't, or you got to figure out a different route. And in Lubbock, when we looked at the numbers and crunched all those things, the leadership at the time thought, you know, it'll be cheaper for us to just tap into ercot.
• 33:15
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 33:15
  Speaker B: Than it is to essentially re up our commitments to the power pole.
• 33:19
  Speaker C: And that's another thing that you're looking, that you look at and you can. You can make the argument that it's cheaper in the short term.
• 33:30
  Speaker B: Right.
• 33:31
  Speaker C: But 15 years from now, it probably would have been cheaper to build a new nuclear power plant.
• 33:36
  Speaker B: Oh, 100. Oh. If it was nuclear, 100%, obviously that would have been hard to have gotten the money for, but for that kind of stable generation and that type of power generation, that would be amazing. But. Right. It sort of. And then even so we joined ercot, and there was even sort of different ways that we could have done that. Right. And even in those discussions, there was debate around how we should do it. And I would actually argue the way that we did it ended up being the wrong way. There was. There was really two other options to how we could have done it. We could have joined ercot, but we could have kept essentially everybody on the same balance sheet. We could have essentially kept all of the citizens onto one book of business and gone to the ERCOT market like San Antonio or Austin does and bid that out. If you're not familiar, if you hate Austin, totally fine. But people in Austin actually pay some of the lowest electricity rates in the state of Texas in terms of the city, the municipality. Right. And it's because they have great bargaining power. They have an entire city of Austin when they're going to power producers on the ERCOT marketplace and they're saying, hey, give us the best rate. We're giving you volume here. Right. So we either could have came in together as a city and we could have kept using essentially the volume. We would have gotten volume pricing as a community for that. The other option which was on the table was that we also could have sold lp. So most people thought that's what we did. But then all of a sudden, you still get your LP and L.
• 35:07
  Speaker C: What
• 35:07
  Speaker B: could have happened is that LP Ls the wires of LP L could have been sold to one of the big wires companies in the state of Texas. So that's Encore, centerpoint, aep, Texas, New Mexico Power. And there were some of those that had an interest and would have put in a bid if that had been a route that we have chosen to go as community. But there is this idea at the time of we want to hold on to this. Right. Well, what was the cost? So maintaining all those wires being an encore, being a center point being one of these wires companies, there's a lot of overhead to that. And that overhead, it doesn't matter if you service 10 million people or 250,000 people. That overhead, a lot of that's still the same. And so what happened for us in Lubbock is that all of a sudden we have the overhead of a, of a transmission distribution wire company. Right. With the smallest population. Right. To essentially pay for that overhead. And so that's why here in Lubbock we have some of the highest costs in the state is just simply because there's just not enough people to distribute out the cost of the wires part.
• 36:21
  Speaker A: So here's. This is a perfect example of like, how do you. Why do these things happen, like over and over again? Like, is it who, who has the ear of the decision makers? Is it, you know, I mean, I'm sure there's occasions where there's fraud, but I, I think mostly it's, it's just, yeah, this maybe not really understood. Like, is there just a general lack of understanding?
• 36:54
  Speaker B: Well, it's, to me, I put it in sort of this big category of well intentioned people with not enough time. So a city like Lubbock, the decisions that our city council make, even small choices have multimillion dollar implications. And yet they get, what is it, $200 a month for being a city council person. Right. Many city council individuals have said this is a full time job. If I'm truly taking this seriously, if I'm actually doing my duty as being the representative of the citizens of Lubbock. And I'm really trying to dig into the numbers and make choices here. This is a full time job, but we don't actually provide that. Right. And there are communities our size across the state that do. Laredo oftentimes gets used as a good sort of counterpoint to us about almost the same population size, but their city council members. It's a living wage, something like 50K, something like that, benefits and stuff like that.
• 37:55
  Speaker C: The biggest problem you're going to have when you, you start trying to make a change like that, which I am not opposed to that. But I've. You got years and years of history of in the city of Lubbock of them not making. Consistently making poor decisions.
• 38:15
  Speaker B: Oh, yeah, right. But the part for me, because these are just flashbacks of city council meetings and things I've been involved in. But you know, the, the part for me that I never want to hear and the part that me that hurts is hearing a city council member second or vote for something they don't understand.
• 38:34
  Speaker A: Right.
• 38:34
  Speaker B: And I have been in city council meetings where a member will just simply say, I don't even know what I'm voting for. Right. And they vote for it. Right. And it's just as a community, I don't want to be in that position.
• 38:48
  Speaker C: That is so weird because that is like so I can't even wrap my head around. I can't even put myself in the shoes of doing that because I'm like, well, my first thought is, I don't understand this. There's no way I'm putting my name on this thing. That's just the first thing I look at on that. But I mean, we do need to do. We knew it is. I mean you're 100%. I mean, it's not even the point you were making. But it is a full time job when you're dealing with. If you're dealing with 10,000 people, it's not a full time job. I mean, yes, there's problems, but you know, a competent city manager can handle that without any trouble. You get to 250,000 people or more if you figure what comes, you know, you know, that's, that's just the population. That's not what's here on a Tuesday.
• 39:33
  Speaker B: Exactly.
• 39:33
  Speaker C: Yeah. I mean, you know, I just came around that I was coming around the, the west loop on the way here, thinking it's three lanes wide and they need to put another dang lane out here.
• 39:43
  Speaker B: There you go.
• 39:43
  Speaker A: Oh, it's only for 10 minutes a day, though.
• 39:45
  Speaker C: This was at 11. This was at 1120.
• 39:48
  Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.
• 39:49
  Speaker C: Right. I mean, it's wild. You look at that. And Lubbock has outgrown a small town.
• 39:55
  Speaker B: Right, right.
• 39:56
  Speaker C: But. And so then you run into the. How do you keep the small town feel with the big city management?
• 40:03
  Speaker B: Right. You know, and we. That for me is one of the places coming back to this idea of the benefits of how do you make communities? Right. How do you make a sense of place? We're going backwards on that 100%, because the original neighborhood design of Lubbock was Playa Lake Park Elementary School. And the idea was that that was the identity. Right. Of the neighborhood. Right. This is what this neighborhood is about.
• 40:26
  Speaker C: Detect Harrison is a great example.
• 40:28
  Speaker B: Oh, yeah, great example.
• 40:29
  Speaker A: I have a school just two houses down from me and I absolutely love it.
• 40:34
  Speaker B: Right. You know, but the, the challenge becomes, as we've gone through this wave of school closures, is that when you remove the schools from the neighborhoods, what are these neighborhoods becoming? What becomes left there for the. You think about who's interested in owning a home. It's typically families, right, who want to invest and be homeowners when they have the opportunity to, and they make that choice based on schools and access to schools. And so when you get rid of a school, when you get rid of that type of public amenity within a neighborhood, and all of a sudden the idea of, hey, I, you know, I'm. My, you know, we're dual income household, we both work multiple jobs, they're part time. The idea of my kid walking to school safely in the neighborhood. Right. Never crossing a major intersection, the relief, it's incredible to think about that. It's like, wow, this problem for me is taken care of for at least the next six years. Right. In some neighborhoods. The junior highs in your. In your neighborhood too. Right. And it's such a big impact on how people think about sense of place. And so in Lubbock, we have great, you know, evidence of this. When the elementary schools disappear in the neighborhoods, home ownership in the neighborhood goes down. Families. Right. The number of people living in that neighborhood goes down because the families who are typically larger, they go somewhere else. And so all of a sudden you've got less people, you've got less interest, you've got less desirability. Right. And all of a sudden you end up with a neighborhood that's predominantly rental homes. Right. And so what do you have at that point? It's. It's a. You've got effectively a neighborhood that's a dormitory.
• 42:11
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 42:12
  Speaker B: You don't do anything in the neighborhood. Right. Every. All the things that you do, you have to leave it. Right. Kids go to school in the neighborhood, you want to go shopping, you go shopping out of the neighborhood, you go to work, you go to work outside the neighborhood. Right. The neighborhood just simply becomes a place where you happen to sleep.
• 42:25
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 42:25
  Speaker B: Right. There's no connectedness to it. If there was a neighborhood that, you know, you found a better house in or whatever like that, you're gone.
• 42:33
  Speaker A: You know, I wonder if part of. Part of our. You mentioned this, that we're. We're not a small town anymore. And I wonder if part of it is a lack of understanding of how large cities work and that people, general, they live in a community inside that city. And I was completely ignorant to all of this until our kids moved and they moved into the first to leave and to go to a big city. They moved to D.C. and I began to see that they had literally what we had when we were in Brownfield.
• 43:13
  Speaker B: Right?
• 43:14
  Speaker A: And. But it was in this big city, but they had, you know, Eleanor and, you know, all these people and everyone at the, you know, coffee shop over here and at this store here. And, you know, and now they live in Denver, and it's the same thing. Like, people in their neighborhood know them and they know each other. Now. It. They don't know everybody in Denver, but that little neighborhood is just like a little Brownfield, Texas inside of Denver. And I think that. I think it's hard for us that have. Have that still consider Lubbock a small town. Because, I mean, I hear people say all the time, oh, I can't go anywhere without seeing Buddy that does. I know a lot of people, but I go out a lot and don't see people I know. And it's really surprising to me, the
• 44:02
  Speaker C: people, the number of times I've stumbled across somebody that I know. If it's not at United, it does not exist.
• 44:08
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 44:08
  Speaker C: You know, I mean, like, I go to, like, I go to the coffee shop. I know when I'm gonna go to the coffee shop, I'm gonna see these guys, and I'll go there early in the morning and I'll sit down and I'll have coffee with those guys, and it's a great morning. But, you know, when you look at, you know, looking at the school model that you were talking about, one of the things that has hurt the neighborhoods is actually the size of high school. You know, think about it this way. If you could. If. And, you know, I mean, it's. It's pie in the sky, Pollyanna stuff. But if you could take like a June, like one neighborhood, okay, and say, okay, this neighborhood is square mile. Okay, we know where a square mile is because this is a flat country. And you just pick the number street in the name street, and you got a mile, okay? And in the middle of that, that thing, you put a 2A school and you have elementary, middle school, you have high school or junior high and high school all in the same building. And it's a relatively large building, but you have it all in there. It's all administered by the same administration, you know, so you don't have a middle school prince. You know, you've got, you might have a middle school prince, but you don't have like, you know, 18 levels of administration sitting on top of it. Then you've got that school that's right there, and it's gonna be right there. And then as that town grows, you know, it funnels into that thing and you're, you've got you. Then suddenly you don't all, you know, like have schools hopping on buses to drive to Dallas to play a district football game.
• 45:38
  Speaker B: Right. You know, and, you know, not only that, but, you know, asking the question, you know, is that possible? Is it desirable? I mean, yes to both. Right. I mean, that's why people have their kids go to Trinity.
• 45:48
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 45:49
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 45:50
  Speaker C: I picked my house because. Because of the resale value of being in the friendship. At the time it was, you know, it was like right across the street, you know, and so. But I also picked it with knowing that my kids were going to go to Local Christian because that's where my, that's where my nieces and nephews went at the time, you know, and it was, you know, I wanted to. That's coming from that product of homeschooling. I wanted my kids to go to a small school.
• 46:15
  Speaker B: Exactly right.
• 46:15
  Speaker C: That was a hunt. And that was why people sent their kids to Shallow Water and they're sending the new home.
• 46:19
  Speaker A: That's right.
• 46:20
  Speaker C: I mean, that's true, you know, because
• 46:22
  Speaker A: they want that experience. And I think, I think that that goes back to unquantifiable things that you get when you have a community. And you know, people are. We're all, all of us, I think, feel this sense of disconnectedness because of our phones and AI and all of these things. It feels like we're all still together, but we're all pulled globally in a million directions. And so it's so much easier to be consumed by problems that I can do nothing about that are happening across
• 46:59
  Speaker B: the world and that, I mean that alone. Because I think about this, I teach introduction to business courses, honors business courses at Tech. And I'm seeing these are 18, 19 year olds coming out of their parents homes for the first time, moving to Lubbock, all those sort of things, stuff like that, and the impact that screens have, the way in which that we use TikTok and Instagram and sort of things like that, and the disconnect that people have to their own environment. It's only getting worse. Right. And in Lubbock, I'll just give an example and think about yourself. Whenever you try to tell somebody what part of town you live in in Lubbock. Right. And how you describe it, how often do you actually say the neighborhood? Right. So I grew up in. I grew up in Remington Park. If anybody knows where that is, congratulations. Right. I happen to. I happen to know the name of it because I looked it up, you know, quite a long time ago and it stuck in my head. Right. As a result of that. But normally if somebody asked me, like, what part of town did I grow up on, I'd be like, oh, I was just off of Chicago on 76th Street. Right. Or if they're not familiar with the smaller streets, they'd be like, oh, you know, between. Just off of Slide, you know, between the loop and 82nd, something like that. Right. I'm using geography. Right. Of the roads and sort of things like that. Not any kind of identity.
• 48:22
  Speaker C: I don't even know what my neighborhood is.
• 48:23
  Speaker B: You know, most people don't.
• 48:25
  Speaker A: Do you wonder then, like, because this goes directly to. The original question is of the benefit of investing. So we've invested in a voucher system that I, I think that I can say 95% of the people I know did not want to happen. And so we have this voucher system
• 48:45
  Speaker C: that we know different people.
• 48:49
  Speaker A: Well. Yeah, but I. So we. I think the people that know. So the vast majority of people that have been using it now are people that have already been homeschooling and already been in private schools. And the data for that's been published. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think something just came out. So it's like 300 something thousand vouchers have been. Have been applied for. That is a minuscule amount of, you know, if that tells you like most people have said no, thank you, unless they've already.
• 49:18
  Speaker B: Right.
• 49:18
  Speaker A: Can have figured out how to put their kids somewhere else.
• 49:20
  Speaker B: It wasn't. Yet the program has not resulted in being a new entryway for. Well, you know, not in a huge way. Right. In terms of, you know, seeing who exactly has received these. You know, it just sort of ends up being.
• 49:33
  Speaker A: And this is, this is data that's coming out of the comptroller's office. Just so to be clear, like, so it's the state's own data. And you know, I think about what if you took that investment and said, let's try something different and let's try what Dusty has Said here, you know, like, what if instead of closing this school, what if we find a way to invest in this school and make it where the people that live here, they get to be around their community until their kids are 18 years old. They're seeing the same people, they're invested in the same. I know my kids friends so well because I've known that kid since kindergarten. They get to experience those things that a lot of kids, if they don't live in a rural America, they don't get to experience. But you could replicate that in a community.
• 50:31
  Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Right. And you know, I just think of it as these things grow, it's. And become more industrial. Right. I mean even I hear some people even using say the term of like supermax for talking about high schools.
• 50:44
  Speaker C: Right.
• 50:44
  Speaker B: And I'm like, it's a bad sign when we're like using prison terminology.
• 50:49
  Speaker A: So that goes back to what I'm saying is how much of responsibility based on the preamble is it for the government to think our responsibility is not efficiency, it's not to create a factory that just shoots out kids. It is that we are building something that promotes the common welfare of these students and their parents and their family. Because when those people have a sense of, it's that pyramid of Maslow's hierarchy of needs and they have that sense of security of place and they have the people around them, then they have a foundation to live the American dream.
• 51:42
  Speaker C: Yeah. Well, I would say though that the current education system, when it was started, is working exactly as it was intended. It is turning out people that will show up at night at a certain time and do a certain job and then leave at a certain time. That's what it's, it's not designed to turn out a huge volume of very highly educated people that have critical, that have critical thinking. Yeah, well, you know, I mean that's,
• 52:09
  Speaker A: it's, I think that's what, that's maybe what it has become and is moving towards more.
• 52:14
  Speaker B: And it's also some of the controversy around, you know, what are the long term effects of the Head Start program and some of the changes of, you know, no Child Left behind, right? Where this idea of saying, you know, we need more rigorous accountability in our schools. Right. And it became this whole wave of testing.
• 52:32
  Speaker A: When you have a huge school, how do you hold people accountable? Right. But if you, if I see the person that is my second grade teacher, my son's second grade teacher is going to be my daughter's second grade teacher and maybe my third kid Second grade teacher. What better accountability is that? Because I don't want my kid to have that teacher again or I want my kid to have that teacher again. Right. You know, especially if you incentivize teachers to live in that community, you know, and, and I mean I, I'm not like I grew up, Dusty and I both grew up. Like public schools are the, the devil's way of destroying the world. I mean that's pretty much what we
• 53:17
  Speaker C: were taught, could be made for that.
• 53:20
  Speaker A: And some of us, some of us have had enough therapy.
• 53:24
  Speaker C: Some of us don't need therapy.
• 53:26
  Speaker A: Some of us, to some of us, ignorance is bliss. So, yeah, so I, but you know, then putting my kids in public school and going, oh my goodness, these people love my kids. These people like literally get up every day and do for my kids. Even when I just, I, it is beyond me what puts that in the heart. So much so that I have a kid that's a seventh grade teacher now because of the impact him, you know, and he, and I just have, you know, never seeing, never having heard anything good as growing up and then experiencing good and bad, good and bad, but also, you know, recognizing that at the end of the day it's my responsibility as a parent. But I'm in a position where I had the privilege of having the mental space because I, I'm not a single mom with five kids or I'm not working to minimum wage jobs and just trying to get by. And I don't really have the time to think about who my kids are going to, you know, what, what's happening to my kids at school, to me, what Dusty proposed her, which I just have never thought about it, but it's actually just to me such a brilliant idea of rebuilding that sense of community. And you know, and we hate that. What was her name? Oh, Clinton. Hillary Clinton wrote that book, It Takes Village. But we have believed that we've lived that. I mean, you know, growing up, I know I, you, your neighbor is going to call your parents that you did something. You know, people are watching each other, you know.
• 55:14
  Speaker B: You know, and it's, that's the thing is everything that's old is new again, right? This was conceptually, this was how people thought it was supp to be. Right? And that, that was, this is like
• 55:24
  Speaker A: the one room schoolhouse, right?
• 55:25
  Speaker B: You know, your sort of relationship to education. And you know, when you think about this industrial, you know, public school education that we have today, it just shows up in so many ways and in the business world a really big complaint about the Gen Z generation. And if you think about it, so for the Gen Z generation, these are individuals that have only lived in the era of standardized testing. They've only, they've been tested since they were in first grade. Right. Every educational experience that they've ever had has been aligned with this idea of okay, this is a really important test. And everything that we're teaching you is with the goal of getting you to pass this test. And what happens to critical thinking when your educational system is just simply designed in that way. The complaint in the business world is that these Gen Z's, they have to have everything explained to them, everything has to be spelled out. You can't just tell them to go and do something or take the initiative on something. They want a recipe, they want a list of how I'm supposed to do it, tell me the right way to do it right. Rather than trying to figure it out. They don't want to take that type of risk. And some of these things end up getting connected to this idea of, well, when you think about the way in which that they've their whole life learned how to learn.
• 56:45
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 56:46
  Speaker B: How do they think learning happens? How do they. And these things and it's like, oh no, the, the way that I learn is that there's a test at the end and there's this multiple choice questions and I get assessed on these. And this is what learning is and this is how it's determined whether or not I'm good at this or not good at this. And so life, whenever I'm being measured up or assessed or things like that, it's going to be the same.
• 57:09
  Speaker A: Right. Well, it's got to feel like to them, if you've, you're giving them something to do that they haven't been trained to, it's gotta feel like a trick question, like I'm gonna be tested on this, but no one's told me how to prepare for it.
• 57:23
  Speaker B: Exactly.
• 57:24
  Speaker A: Right.
• 57:24
  Speaker B: If you just tell me how to do it right. And this to me is this sort of, you know, there's this tension I think in leadership styles of kind of baby boomer generation wanting to do it one way. Gen Z'ers really respond way better to servant leadership approaches than anything else. Right. And just this sort of unwillingness to want to see it through their eyes. Right. And to think about, just imagine yourself having come through your educational experience all the ways that you've learned how to do something new. It's been ingrained in you that this is how you, how you do it. And somebody's gonna tell you the things you need to know. Somebody's gonna tell you how to write all these pieces, and then you just have to memorize it. You just have to memorize the answer. And there's an answer to it all and there's a right answer and there's. And everything else is wrong. And so if you don't tell me the right answer to how I'm supposed to do this, how am I supposed to do it? How am I supposed to know?
• 58:15
  Speaker A: For us to forget that when we're frustrated with the things that the generation behind us does, to forget that we were the adults making the decisions about the world that they were going to grow up in.
• 58:26
  Speaker B: Right.
• 58:28
  Speaker A: And. But yet we blame that generation, you know, behind us for the way they choose to do things.
• 58:35
  Speaker C: When I'm. Congratulations. Welcome to how it's been since the dawn of time.
• 58:40
  Speaker B: But I, you know, I miss the days where it was just avocado toast, you know, was the, the thing that people argued.
• 58:46
  Speaker A: Yes, yes.
• 58:47
  Speaker B: You know, it's like, don't, you know, it's like you, you'd be well off if you didn't buy Starbucks coffee, right? Or whatever like that. I'm glad we've gotten beyond that. You know, it's. That was a simpler time of gripes.
• 59:01
  Speaker A: Oh, my gosh.
• 59:02
  Speaker C: But I mean, it's, you know, and that's the thing. You know, every, you know, it's. It's so disheartening sometimes to look at it and realize that every pop. Every problem is insanely complex to fix.
• 59:19
  Speaker A: And it is.
• 59:20
  Speaker C: Everybody that's in position to fix it is only interested in a sound bite.
• 59:24
  Speaker A: You know, maybe that's all they know. But I wonder sometimes, too. Part of it is that's all that we are going to listen to. Because let me tell you something. I can put all these things on social media that have good. It's. It's good, valuable information. If it's longer than 30 seconds. If I put a 30 second clip up 10,000 views. Yeah, I don't, you know, and so it's like, how do you.
• 59:47
  Speaker C: It's hard. It's hard for me to. I mean, I, I know. That's the thing. I mean, I know.
• 59:52
  Speaker A: Yeah. But you and I are readers, so
• 59:54
  Speaker C: it's like, But I'm like, yeah, I mean, it's. I was looking back and I was disappointed. I only read 200 books last year. I was like, man, that's.
• 1:00:01
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 1:00:01
  Speaker C: Like falling out of my job. Covid, I hit 400 so I mean, you know, when you don't have anything to do but read and go to the farm every now and then, there's nobody to talk to. But I mean, you go into that thing and you're just like. You look at a problem and you're like, okay, what are the possible solutions? And then he's like, you know, it goes back to defining a value to something. Okay, how do you, you know, you look at everything that I've always looked as a scale. You know, you look at which is my better option. You know, a lot of times that scale is pretty close to balance and it really doesn't matter. But when you're doing something that's going to like, let's just say for an example, the next next subdivision that gets built in Lubbock, the City of Love book in this, in LSD says you're doing it this way. And we're plopping a school right in the middle of it. And it's going to have, you know, K through 12. So I'll be in the same building. You know, we're not going to have gym. We'll have enough gyms for pe, but we're not going to have gyms. Forget to host games that, that'll go, you know, to a central location, whatever. But we're going to be. But. And it's going to be this big. Here's the footprint of it. It's going to have a field out where, you know, they can play, you know, recess. You can have recess and you go back in time and you set that and pop that in there, you know, how do you look? Okay, well, if we do that, that's going to cost how many hundreds of millions?
• 1:01:21
  Speaker A: That's what it always comes back down to.
• 1:01:22
  Speaker C: It's gonna cost. I mean, if I had to pull a completely wild guess out of my hind parts, I'm saying, okay, that school is gonna cost you 100 million to make. The new high school in Brownfield was 23, 35 million, something like that for a high school. A 3. A high school, you know. And so you're like, okay, so we're gonna plop that in there. And granted, you might could do that in that same size of building. You might could do what I was talking about. Don't know if you could, but you might could. But if you did that and then you're like, okay, well we got all the teachers in here and then we've got this, this stuff. And it's going to cost. Overhead is going to be X. Okay, And I think Texas spends what, 20,000 a year student on average. On average, 20,000 a year. It's like, okay, so that's substantially more than a private school. It's twice what I.
• 1:02:17
  Speaker A: Depends on where you go.
• 1:02:18
  Speaker C: It's true. In Lubbock. In Lubbock. In Lubbock. I do not believe there's a private school in this town that costs $20,000 a student.
• 1:02:26
  Speaker A: Wrong.
• 1:02:27
  Speaker B: Well, the other thing I've got to say though too is like, you've got to, when you think about that top line number, you've got to break it down and thinking about, you know, so this has always been a big critique, right? Children with special needs. Right. And accessibility issues, most people that have
• 1:02:44
  Speaker A: turned back their vouchers.
• 1:02:45
  Speaker B: Exactly right. Accessibility issues or things like that. Private schools are under no obligation whatsoever to provide any kind of needs based services or things like that. And so when you see that kind of top line number, what's getting baked into. There are a lot of extra costs which I think are appropriate, which is that the, you know, I, I wish these were things that privates also had to do. Right. And, and I think that would be more fair because you end up. Well, no, what ends up happening, right, is you end up with a family who say, for example, they want their kids to go to private school, but you know, their, their child has ADHD or they, they're in a wheelchair, God forbid. And the private school says, you know what, we don't want to deal with that like, or we can't.
• 1:03:31
  Speaker A: We have to remodel our whole building.
• 1:03:32
  Speaker B: Right, right. We have accessibility issues. So things like that, this is just not like even if we wanted to. Yeah, right. And they just reject that outright. And to me it's sort of like, well, if this is, if we're thinking about this as a marketplace, if there's privates and publics. Right. In a marketplace, there's certain elements here where they should be playing by the same rules when it comes to access. Right. And what it is that people can have.
• 1:03:56
  Speaker A: So, and I think that's, I think that goes back again to the question, original question is should are there some things that our government that we vote in, the people that we vote in, this government that works for us, is there, are there some things that they should be, they should not, we should not be looking at them as through the lens of this is a corporation and it's required to make money or to turn a profit or to at least pay for itself.
• 1:04:29
  Speaker B: Yeah, the classic element here, right. Because the, the the simple statement, right. Is like, why don't we just run government like a business, right. I'm going to run government like a business. Right. Well, businesses don't have forever obligations, Right. A business doesn't have a forever obligation to community.
• 1:04:44
  Speaker C: Right.
• 1:04:44
  Speaker B: If you ran the city of Lubbock like a business, right. What does that mean about the next generation?
• 1:04:50
  Speaker C: Right.
• 1:04:50
  Speaker B: And how we even integrating them into a business model. Right. When it comes to how are we thinking about people who are going to live here 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years from now?
• 1:04:59
  Speaker C: Right.
• 1:05:00
  Speaker B: You know the nature of planning for a community. Absolutely. Should your bottom line balance it out, sort of things like that? 100%. But when you take that concept too far, right. You end up thinking about, I heard this through the grapevine, some of the educational programming that is provided at the day centers here in Lubbock, right. For seniors and sort of things like that. People that were providing services to there. They had a meeting with one of the city staff in community development and they were told that they're not charging the seniors enough money for their services. So these are people who are coming to the day centers doing things like art programming or stretches, right?
• 1:05:47
  Speaker A: Let me tell you something. My mom went to one of those. If they raised the. I mean, she probably won't go back because it was expensive.
• 1:05:52
  Speaker B: Exactly, right. No, exactly right. And that was the thing was, right. So this was, this was not a problem, right. Nobody was having an issue with this. Right. The people who are providing these services knew that they were doing them at a lower rate because they wanted people to have access to them and sort of things like that. Right. And then you had this needs to be run like a business come in and say, you're actually not charging this retiree person with mobility issues. You're not charging them enough money for the stretching exercises that you're providing to them, Right. You either need to charge more or we're essentially going to get rid of this program. Right. It was the same conversation when it came to the city runs a couple summer camps that are actually really well attended and used for low income folks in the city of Lubbock. And some people don't even know this. Right. And they were crunching the numbers and the city was saying, we're not making money off of this. We're not making a profit off of these camps. And it's sort of, okay, maybe you're not making a profit outright, but when you think about the family that is able to essentially have a job in Lubbock and work in the service industry and as a bartender or server, whatever like that.
• 1:07:03
  Speaker A: In the summer.
• 1:07:04
  Speaker B: In the summer. Because they can have their kid right. In a day. In a day program that they can
• 1:07:08
  Speaker A: afford walking the street.
• 1:07:09
  Speaker B: Exactly. Right, right. You know, and it's sort of like the public safety element of that. Right? You, you just, you have to think about the. You have to take into account a bigger picture of what a community is. Right. Than a business does. Right. When it comes to thinking about a bottom line. And there's certainly absolutely parts of a city that should be run like a business. There are other parts of it that if you take that lens, right. The ultimate result of that, you know, the story that's already written, it's. You just get rid of all the benefits, you get rid of all the public amenities.
• 1:07:38
  Speaker A: The other thing too, is that it's different. You have a, you do a customer analysis. Who is my customer? When you're building a business like that is one of the biggest things that you do, and you know this well, is who's my customer? And you've got to know that customer. Well, the government is like every single customer. I mean, it's like, every customer is my customer.
• 1:07:59
  Speaker C: But you, but you, you walk a line in there, though, because you're like, money is a finite resource and money is not generated by the government. The government does not make a dollar. They either. They get it from the taxpayer. I mean, with, with very few exceptions. The NASA deal you're talking about is an exception. They produce a service that is used by private business.
• 1:08:20
  Speaker A: And they, I mean, I think we also own, I mean, now we own like, huge chunks in different businesses.
• 1:08:27
  Speaker B: So I think it's about to switch. The era that we're in now is different. Right? So we, we own as citizens, we own a. A part of Intel. Right. Which is a funny thing to say, but it's.
• 1:08:36
  Speaker C: But, but you're still. But the, the statement still holds in the grand scheme of saying the business. The. The. And so you have historic plan. You. So a city has, honestly, they have a fiduciary responsibility or tax to the taxpayers to be as wise with their money as possible. Now, when you look at it and you say, okay, you are not very wise with their money here on that. And, you know, there are people that have been in Congress for, you know, 40, 50, 60 years, and you're like. And they're complaining about how much spending there is. I'm like, well, dude, you voted for all of it. You've been here since we had a last balanced budget you know, what are you talking, why are you complaining about it now? You know, but you look at us at the city and you're talking about, you know, where does our money go? You know, that's what it boils down to. Where's money going? It costs, you know, like you were talking about the last time we're here. It's a million dollars a mile a lane mile to pave a road. Now it's a million dollars a lane mile. You start driving through the city of Lubbock and hit, get out, get in, hit odometer and just start driving. Drive for half an hour, don't cross it, don't go down the same street twice, see how many miles there is and then start doing the math on that.
• 1:09:48
  Speaker B: Right?
• 1:09:49
  Speaker C: It's a math problem.
• 1:09:50
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:09:50
  Speaker C: And that's, that's the biggest problem is that it's a math problem. And when you get to a point, you say, okay, I have to have a street, you know, we can't not have streets, you know, okay, well that's going to be this huge chunk of it. Well, you know, we've got to have the, the water. That's another huge chunk of it, you know, and then you're like, okay, well do we raise taxes? Well, you know, we're already, I mean, we're not as high as I thought
• 1:10:17
  Speaker A: we were pretty low compared to a lot of other places, you know.
• 1:10:21
  Speaker C: I mean.
• 1:10:22
  Speaker B: Oh, yeah, right. And these are, I'll just say in Lubbock we've had knockdown, drag out fights around road maintenance and because for a long time, and still there are people that will say this with a straight face, is that we should use debt to finance road maintenance, road repairs and things like that. The way we should do it is every 10 years we should do an absolute gigantic bond and take on a ton of debt rather than trying to actually do that through our budget. And the thing about that is, can you do it that way? Sure. The trade off is how much extra you pay in interest.
• 1:11:00
  Speaker A: Trade offs your future.
• 1:11:01
  Speaker B: Right. And this is only getting worse. I mean, the 30 year treasury bond, if you saw this in the financial news just today, highest it's been in decades, interest rates on the 30 year treasury bond. Right. And when the treasury bonds are that high, muni bonds. Right. If you're a community and you're trying to attract interest rates, things like that, Right. That means rates go up for everybody. Right. And so every, you know, in this, in this period and there's really no end in sight for this from an interest rate standpoint right now, right? We're essentially saying, yeah, this is just only, not only is it getting expensive because of inflation and the cost of materials and labor has gone up to make roads, but the financial engineering that is necessary to get this money has become more expensive. Right. And so it just ends up being this sort of double whammy, right? And so, you know, there's. There's been so much pushback because it's not. If you're a politician, it's not sexy to spend money on road maintenance.
• 1:11:58
  Speaker A: Right.
• 1:11:59
  Speaker B: It's not a new initiative. You don't get to cut a ribbon somewhere. You don't get to put your name on a new road or sort of things like that. Right. It is a very unsexy thing to dedicate your budget to. And so, you know, when. Whenever it's something that you know, how are you going to be held account for it? Roads come up for maintenance every 10, 15, 20 years, depending on wear and tear.
• 1:12:20
  Speaker C: Right.
• 1:12:21
  Speaker B: You're a.
• 1:12:22
  Speaker C: Or for the access road off of. Off of the South Loop at Quaker. That one pothole is always there.
• 1:12:30
  Speaker B: And you know, and there are some places where, like, some, some areas that bother me where it's, you know, and you can see it. It's like some, some business has got their sprinklers going and they're dumping into the street all the time. And I'm just like, that I'm gonna have to pay for that, man. Like, stop. Stop having that water in there. Cause it's like, you know, you're cracking the roads, right? You're. They're breaking up the roads, you know, and so, but this is, These are the challenges, though, is because when you're a politician and you're asking like, what are wins? What are things that I can do? How can I show my community that I'm doing things and stuff that's visible and things like that, you know, don't make that list. Exactly. Right. Pothole repair doesn't make that list. Right. And so as a result of that, it's just not something that's really on your radar. And then especially because, you know, every city council from the engineering department, from the city manager, they get to see the numbers on, like, what our road liabilities are. Right? But those numbers are just so startling and large. Right. That it just feels impossible. Right. It just becomes out of sight, out of mind.
• 1:13:34
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 1:13:34
  Speaker B: It's like, well, wow, that's really big. Well, I'm only going to be here for four years, so.
• 1:13:38
  Speaker A: Oh, somebody else do that.
• 1:13:39
  Speaker B: Right. I'm going to. Right. Especially for the mayor, where it's every two years, like, oh, wow, that's an enormous number. That's going to be really bad for whoever's next.
• 1:13:47
  Speaker A: Right.
• 1:13:47
  Speaker C: And unfortunately, that's everybody that does that. Six of them down the road, all of a sudden, you're 12 years down it. And everybody said, man, that next guy's going to have it hard.
• 1:13:55
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:13:55
  Speaker C: Next guy looks at it and says, oh, the next guy's going to have it really hard.
• 1:13:57
  Speaker B: And what. And what happens is you. You lose your. Your Coliseum, right? You. You lose your municipal auditorium, you lose your electric company, right? Because of this kind of kick the can ism around. You know what it is that how are we going to take care of the things that we have? Right?
• 1:14:13
  Speaker A: And I think that's so. I think that is so important because it does tell, you know, when we don't take care of the things that we have, it does say about us, like, we're hurting in some way. Something's not well here, you know, and, you know, it's always great to see, you know, beautiful new things go up, but it's also really disheartening to think, what is that going to look like in 50 years or maybe less? Because are we going to take care of what we have?
• 1:14:44
  Speaker B: Right? And that's why when people, whenever I say, you think like, oh, we should make some types of investments that benefits our community. That's why I'm sympathetic to people that are like, well, but there is this part of who's making the choice of what we're investing in and how we're doing it, and is that responsible and is that for our best interest, you know, because we. Going back to controversy, Citizens Tower, right.
• 1:15:08
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 1:15:08
  Speaker B: Is a really great example that the Omni building, that thing was bad, right. That was falling apart. You can find news articles of parts of the siding falling off that, like, could have killed somebody. Right? Like, just like absolute. What a clunker. And you know, that property had had so many zoning violations, so many ordinance violations, so many liens placed on it that the city could have been within its rights to essentially impound that property.
• 1:15:35
  Speaker C: Right.
• 1:15:36
  Speaker B: They could have effectively been like, this is. We're just taking it off. Right. Instead, there was this whole sort of process of, first off, the person that owned it happened to, had some good friends, right. And such and so forth. Surprise, surprise. Right. But, you know, we end up as citizens paying a very large. A very inappropriate amount of money for the building, as is. Right?
• 1:15:58
  Speaker C: Yep.
• 1:15:58
  Speaker B: And Then we go through the process of, you know, this. This sort of next element being like, oh, we need a new city hall. That. What a great solution to solving that. Well, now. Now with the renovation, stuff like that, that building right in its infrastructure and how it was built, that was not a great design. Right. When you go into city hall and you go into the offices upstairs and things like that, how claustrophobic it is, the pillars and where all they are, that was not a building that we should have renovated for this purpose. Right. That was, you know, there really was sort of a better way to approach this. And then, you know, the planning of it wasn't necessarily great. A couple years ago, the basement of it got annihilated by flooding. If you remember this. It was huge added expense that sort of came from that because, like. Like, what was it, Like a stormwater door or something like that had been left open, and the whole. The whole sort of thing just got flooded. But it's just one of those things. I don't. I don't. I know that there were people at the time that were making these choices that thought this was an amazing win. There's an eyesore downtown. We need a new city hall. This is a big building. We should just renovate it. The simple story that you can tell yourself there is like, oh, this was totally right. You can see why people bought into the idea. But as, you know, as the wheels were set in motion, right. In sort of each stage of that being like, oh, this is not in good condition at all. We are ripping this thing down to beams. Right. Like, we're. There is. There is no. Almost nothing remains of that, of the original building, aside from just a barest of infrastructure.
• 1:17:31
  Speaker C: I mean, I got. When I. When they bought that thing, I remember being downtown and I was looking at it and I think, why would you buy that thing?
• 1:17:41
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:17:41
  Speaker C: I mean, especially if it's like. If, like, the city should have just impound it, leveled it, and then built something on top of it, would have been money ahead and it would have been modern.
• 1:17:48
  Speaker B: Right? Exactly.
• 1:17:49
  Speaker C: I mean, now let's, you know, do some nice architectural work on it and make it fit in and, you know, be something unique and cool, but not like, you know, something that looks like it came from Star Trek. But, I mean, you know, that would have been money way better spent. Oh, yeah. I mean, and that's, you know, that was the biggest complaint about it, was everybody was saying that's not a good way to spend that money.
• 1:18:11
  Speaker B: Right.
• 1:18:11
  Speaker C: But again, it boiled down to who's making the decision and who they know.
• 1:18:14
  Speaker B: Right. And that's why, you know, the golden rule. Right. And Citizens Tower. For me, it's a great example as to why these conversations. Conversations are so tough is because some of the biggest, like, most visible situations that we've been in as a community, in terms of public investment, trying to. Right. Be beneficial to people. Some of these most visible things in the city's history, in recent history that we've done have really backfired. Right. In terms of trying to save money. No.
• 1:18:44
  Speaker C: Fair.
• 1:18:45
  Speaker B: Yeah, Fair.
• 1:18:46
  Speaker C: Yeah. So, like, when we look at this and we're kind of running down on time, I don't know how we've already gapped for an hour and 21 minutes, but we managed to pull it off. So when you look at, like you're talking about that, the Citizen Tower and you know, that was, I mean, that needs to be named after somebody so they have to bear the shame of it.
• 1:19:07
  Speaker A: Oh, my gosh. You know that the. But the funniest thing in the world to me is the fact that there is this horrible toxic lake south of Midland, and it's called Lake Craddock, which is the railroad commission. They've got a big sign out front that looks like TxDOT building.
• 1:19:25
  Speaker C: But where I was going with that was to try to try to bring some cheerful to it. But was what's the. If you could have. If you could point to one thing that has been done and it's like, hey, this is. This is a good use of our money. This is good. What would it be?
• 1:19:41
  Speaker B: Burl Hoffman soccer complex.
• 1:19:43
  Speaker C: Yep.
• 1:19:44
  Speaker B: That was. Some people didn't want it and it was, you know, there was some money had to go into it. But you can, you could see not only just the benefit to Lubbock community, something, you know, if you have kids, you, you know this. But if, but if you, if you haven't had kids in a while, you know, they're gone or whatever, you don't necessarily know that Lubbock is a, like the nexus for youth sports in this area.
• 1:20:07
  Speaker C: Yep.
• 1:20:08
  Speaker B: And the utilization of our baseball fields, our soccer fields or sort of things like that.
• 1:20:13
  Speaker C: Even the private owned volleyball stuff.
• 1:20:16
  Speaker B: Oh, exactly. Right. You know that these things have enormous impacts on the community and they're great benefits to have. And there were people that thought this isn't something we should be investing in.
• 1:20:26
  Speaker C: Right. And that's a relatively low cost. I mean, the price tag was, you know, to me, what is it? The average salary man in Japan salary. You know, it was a big Number.
• 1:20:40
  Speaker B: Right.
• 1:20:40
  Speaker C: But when you look at the bang for the buck on it. Astronomical. That's the best money. That's. I'm out there with you. I think it's some of the best money that the city of Lubbock has spent in a long time.
• 1:20:50
  Speaker B: Another one that I'll give a lot of flowers to former council member Randy Christian on this one. McAllister Park. And so this is like Marcia Sharp and intersection of like Marsha Sharp and the loop that wedge. So.
• 1:21:07
  Speaker C: Oh, yeah, yeah. The dog park.
• 1:21:09
  Speaker B: Dog park.
• 1:21:09
  Speaker C: Right.
• 1:21:10
  Speaker B: There's a very popular dog park. Very popular dog park. You know, and there's another dog park
• 1:21:15
  Speaker C: in this town that I like more than that one. And I'm not. I'm going to stay keeping that.
• 1:21:18
  Speaker B: Okay.
• 1:21:18
  Speaker C: Fair.
• 1:21:19
  Speaker B: Yeah. But it's a very popular dog park. You know, the city does invest in it, try to maintain it obviously gets ripped up all the time. So it depends on when you go, what it looks like. But that area. Right. The investments that are going into it to create that. Right. You've got the baseball fields also there as well. You have an amazing milestones, that amazing facility for kids. Right. And it's developmental needs friendly. Right. They have all different types of experiences there, which is. Right, right. It's really cool. And there's still a couple other sort of big picture things that, you know, to get done out there. And, you know, I love that, you know, seeing that, seeing those developments. Do I wish those. The neighborhoods over there, do I wish that they all had their own little parks? I do.
• 1:22:02
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 1:22:03
  Speaker B: But we can't go into there and, you know, and fix that. Right. And so, you know, to me, you know, this is the next sort of best thing is like, let's. If we are going to have just one big park for the area, let's chock full it with.
• 1:22:16
  Speaker A: Let's make it good.
• 1:22:17
  Speaker B: Exactly.
• 1:22:17
  Speaker A: Right.
• 1:22:18
  Speaker B: Good experiences, you know, for families where they can envision the idea of like, oh, what are we going to do on Saturday? We'll go to McAlester park and we can actually spend the whole Saturday there.
• 1:22:26
  Speaker C: Right.
• 1:22:26
  Speaker B: At least the. The amount until your kids are tired. Right.
• 1:22:29
  Speaker C: Yeah, that's. I mean, that. That is a good one. That's, you know, that. And that's one that's over that I drive past every day. Oh, yeah. And was completely drawing a blank on McAlester Park. No. 1. That's why you're giving directions. I'm not going. Okay. That's there.
• 1:22:43
  Speaker B: Exactly. Right.
• 1:22:44
  Speaker C: But I mean, I used to take the kids when they. When it was the wooden structure before. Before that legacy, before it got completely vandalized and destroyed.
• 1:22:52
  Speaker B: That's a bummer. Yeah.
• 1:22:53
  Speaker C: I mean, that's. That's so frustrating, but that's. Is what it is.
• 1:22:56
  Speaker A: But that isn't a thing. And, you know, I saw that Lubbock Lake landmark is rebuilding their trails.
• 1:23:01
  Speaker B: Yes, vandalism, Exactly. Yeah. Shout out to that Lubbock Lake landmark. Also another wonderful place to take your kids for a little outing. They have these scenic walking trails. They. They have very effectively rewilded parts of it. So you can, you know, you walk through there and you're truly seeing landscapes and animal life that are very similar to what would have been out here before us. Really pretty.
• 1:23:20
  Speaker A: But.
• 1:23:21
  Speaker B: Yeah, somebody vandalized it. They. They took a. A vehicle into that area. Yeah. And they ripped off road.
• 1:23:27
  Speaker A: Was it a. I don't. I thought maybe it was even a golf cart or something.
• 1:23:30
  Speaker B: Some kind of car. Yeah. But they. They just Just really, you know, and just. Just sad. Right, because it's like, why. Why would you do that?
• 1:23:37
  Speaker A: Right.
• 1:23:37
  Speaker B: It's like, it's not easy either. They had to essentially get through the fencing, and then they just went on this sort of very terrible joyride that ripped up, you know, the. The walking trails and things like that.
• 1:23:48
  Speaker C: And did they catch the person that did it?
• 1:23:51
  Speaker B: I want to say that they did. I believe. I believe so that they did. Because if I'm remembering the story correctly, I think the vehicle was left behind.
• 1:23:58
  Speaker A: Oh, my goodness.
• 1:23:59
  Speaker B: And so I think they ended up, like, being able to sort of find it that way.
• 1:24:03
  Speaker C: So it was a smart. So when you're looking at that, you're like, okay, they left the vehicle behind. You're, like, going, okay, so you had an idiot doing idiot things like an idiot. But, I mean, it's, you know, but anyway, yeah. Love. Click. Landmarks. So great. I mean, I don't think I've ever walked the trails, but I've been through the building and just the amount of stuff, which I thought I knew a lot of stuff until I walked in. I'm like, holy crap. I didn't realize that was here. You know, I mean, it's. It's. It's amazing. And there are some. There, you know, there are some good stuff. It's just. It's a shame that the. The errors are just so blatantly glaring.
• 1:24:37
  Speaker B: Right. Yeah. You know, so it's like. And that's. For me, it's. What's tough is I'm trying to find things to love, and sometimes it feels like you're finding them on the margins, Right. Yeah. Of sort of things to love. But now, you know, you can get me excited about a lot of stuff. I mean, I. I love the arboretum. I love the. The pumpkin events. And, you know, in the. During the fall, I like that Moe's Market has set up there. So there's a. There's a. If you don't know this, there's a farmer's market now at the. At the arboretum on the weekends. Follow Moe's Markets on. On Facebook if you want upd. But I just love what, you know, things that's happening there. And it's. But it's like. It's like all this grassroots stuff, right? It's just like, you know, it is because there's.
• 1:25:18
  Speaker C: I mean, honestly, I mean, and I'm not. I'm not gonna throw it just, like, say, with the city council, it's. But Lubbock government as a whole, also,
• 1:25:26
  Speaker A: let's remember how many people voted in the last election.
• 1:25:29
  Speaker C: Hey, I will tell you, I have not missed. Missed voting on an election in the 20 to some odd years I've lived here. So, I mean, I just don't miss them. I figure, you know, me and four other people are gonna elect the next mayor, so let's go for it.
• 1:25:44
  Speaker B: You know, you joke about that. It's so true. Go back in Lubbock's history, the number of, like, 1, 2, 3 vote, right?
• 1:25:51
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 1:25:52
  Speaker B: There is a substantial number of, like, the history of Lubbock that was determined by one vote, two votes. Like, it's. That's true.
• 1:25:58
  Speaker C: But what I was getting at, and I'll close out on this, is saying they've earned the distrust that they have. It's been well earned. And when. That's. That's what makes it so hard. When somebody that comes in that's like, hey, let's do this, and you think, on the surface, that's a good idea. Where's the hook? Where's the sticker in there? Where's the, you know, where's the bat that's coming from the back of my head? Who. Who do you know that's got. That owns this land?
• 1:26:26
  Speaker B: Right? No, I'm sympathetic to that.
• 1:26:27
  Speaker A: Right.
• 1:26:28
  Speaker B: You look on Facebook anytime that there's a new announcement that one of the news groups cover without fail, there are multiple comments being like, who's financially benefiting from that?
• 1:26:36
  Speaker A: Right?
• 1:26:36
  Speaker B: Always.
• 1:26:37
  Speaker C: Exactly right. Well. And it's almost always true.
• 1:26:39
  Speaker B: Right.
• 1:26:40
  Speaker C: That's what's so sad about culture.
• 1:26:41
  Speaker A: Right?
• 1:26:42
  Speaker B: And it's Just like. And it's just. How do we break out of that?
• 1:26:45
  Speaker C: You know how you break out of it? Out of it. You don't let it happen for someday.
• 1:26:49
  Speaker A: A couple of times someday. I want us to have someone on that can talk about why we have so many banks in Lubbock. Someone told me one time from another part of Texas that they refer to Lubbock as laundry Lubbock. I was like, interesting. We do have a lot of bakes. Does that mean we have a lot of money or what?
• 1:27:11
  Speaker C: There's a. There's a. There's an impressive amount of money runs through this city.
• 1:27:16
  Speaker A: There is.
• 1:27:16
  Speaker C: There really is.
• 1:27:17
  Speaker A: You know, there's an impressive amount of money out in the world right now. There really is. And. And I think that it's a good time to find good things to do with it. And there's folks out there that want to do that. So it's just a matter of finding them. But Dusty, close us out. Well, it's 1:30, Nick.
• 1:27:35
  Speaker C: It is 1:30, Nick. Thank you for coming back again.
• 1:27:38
  Speaker A: It's always great. Always. There's never enough time when Nick's here.
• 1:27:41
  Speaker C: Never, ever enough time.
• 1:27:43
  Speaker B: I appreciate you.
• 1:27:44
  Speaker A: And we once again forgot to give the phone number out. We never can remember to give the phone number out.
• 1:27:49
  Speaker C: One of these days, we're going to remember to give the phone number out.
• 1:27:52
  Speaker B: You gotta let me come back. I want. I want some call ins. I want some.
• 1:27:55
  Speaker A: We've got to have some. Maybe we need to do something really controversial so that people will call.
• 1:27:59
  Speaker C: Your kids are banned from calling in.
• 1:28:01
  Speaker A: My kids are banned.
• 1:28:03
  Speaker C: But anyway, we'll be. We'll be back next week with another. Another rousing rendition of the Dry side Dispatch.
• 1:28:09
  Speaker A: That's right. Todd Bauman.
• 1:28:12
  Speaker C: Todd Bowman will be back.
• 1:28:13
  Speaker A: And we are. We'll be. Next week. We'll be officially, like, two days away from some of the highest leadership in NASA visiting Lubbock. And that is going to be super exciting. And everybody's getting all ready for that, and maybe we can talk about that some.
• 1:28:30
  Speaker C: And then we'll be less than two weeks away from the opening day of dove season, which means.
• 1:28:34
  Speaker A: And that's even more important. That's right.
• 1:28:37
  Speaker C: Thanks for listening, guys. Appreciate it.
• 1:28:39
  Speaker A: Bye.