Sudbury Ward 8: Shawn Rossi on Fixing the Problems We Keep Paying For

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So where are you on taxes for the whole,(...) the whole city? Should we increase them? Are they, is it the city have their house in order? What do you think? Well, the taxes are, listen, we got to pay our bills.(...) So the problem here is the taxes should have went up more and they had to, they had to dig in the coffers. So it didn't go up because it was an election year. So now we're in this problem. So I think the counselors and the city should have at the end of the year, of a full fiscal year, a plan on things like I'm talking about, on things we need to address and how we're going to address them. And then by the following year, start implementation.

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So if we have to raise the taxes a bit, we're going to have to, but we have on my website, a goal. You can go, not my website, but the city have goal where you can see where are we sitting.

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Because you can't be done in a year. We can't, I can't say let's not raise the taxes. All right. Well then let's not do the roads. Let's not fix any parks and let's do nothing. If you say, let's not raise the taxes. Okay. Let's completely cut all that stuff for the meantime until we figure stuff up. And that'll just get worse. So the roads, apparently it's about $81 ish million(...) to maintain the roads at the status quo. They've been spending less than that. And now there's a gap. There's a gap. It's been years. It's been years. It's not just the last couple. How does this happen?

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And what would you change? Like(...) previous council wasn't spending enough money. Where was the money going? Well, this is my point.

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We need to look, we need to look over. We have to have accountability that at the end of the year, we look at it. We have a plan. We have it all written out. I find there, I will look. I will go through every single thing. I've already gone through it for four years. This is not rocket science for me. When you've dedicated four years before you start a job, how to do a job, you pretty much didn't know how to do the job. Didn't just throw my hat in. I'm going to do this. This is going to be great. I'm going to be best at this. No, you got to go. You think before I became a doctor, I didn't have to do four years. I'm just going to do it. Bow. You know, like think about it.(...) Of course you have to.

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You know, I can see someone who's never thought I didn't get elected. Well, okay, then you need to learn over your four years, but then you do another term and you still screw up. Oh,(...) but me, I didn't want to be that guy. I didn't want to be that guy who didn't understand. Does it look like I want to be that guy? Look, I did(...) a whole other teaching degree just to know. You think I'm going to do that? There's no way to help. I'm going to do that. I don't want to look like an idiot. I'm not going to go do this to look like an idiot for whatever. $40,000, $50,000, whatever they pay, 20. I don't know. I'm not going to go do it for that.

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So Sean, why did you throw your hat in the ring anyways?(...) Well, again, I spent the first 10 years of my career focusing on fixing health. Yeah. When I got here, they didn't even know you could do a diagnostic ultrasound on a limb, a shoulder. Oh, we need an MRI. We need to see-- what are you guys talking about?

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I did my studies in Toronto, so I saw it there. So then I said, we need to do continuing education. So at NOSM, I used to do continuing education and try to bring in new technology. I helped create the low back pain care pathway. So I spent a lot of time. So now we have that here. So I focused a lot on health to bring it up to snuff. Hey, I'm not perfect, but I did what I could. Bring the bar up. Know how to do car accidents, how to do everything. So I brought that on. Then I started, like I told you, I started working on buildings because it's like, OK,

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I'm not going to do this forever. I love construction. I've loved building since I was a kid. I've been built by camp. When I was 18, I started building stuff. So everyone said, you should have been a builder. I said, you're right. I'm a good doctor, but I'm also a really good builder. So I said, my plan was I'm going to work hard and make money. And then I could start building because I like that too. And I'll continue that when I retire.(...) So then I started doing that.(...) And that's when I started seeing the problems. I saw the problems in health. Now I start seeing them now in construction. And I have this I have this problem. When I see something that's screwed up,(...) I'm drawn to have to fix it. And then I take it to heart.(...) So then I get upset. And then when I get upset, I get passionate. And then I don't like being pretty wrong.(...) So then I said, it's not going to happen. So then I keep going like going back to school for education. I've been told I didn't know what I was talking about. It's fine. I'll go do a whole other degree. Now you can't tell me everyone talking about. So did you do the teaching degree? Yeah, I did the full French because I went to French school, except for my Toronto was in English because we couldn't go to the French one in Quebec. It was only for Quebecers. So but most of all, my degrees were all done in French. My doctoral degrees were done in English. But yeah, I went to French school my whole life. And then that's why I was able to do it here at Laurentian. So when you get into building, like you like to build stuff, what kind of issues are you seeing with red tape, city hall, all that bundle of joy? Well, again, it's always that repetition. First, like I said, when you have the red tape, it takes forever to move through a problem. But it's also because the hugest problem is the person you're dealing with want to make it a problem. They're not looking at how can we make this better? How can we help this go through or oh, yeah, we see this problem all the time.(...) And you reported it to your manager.

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Yeah, but that's the way it is. Well, if you see this problem all the time, and you see everyone has problems, you bring that to your manager, you bring it to the director, you bring it to console saying we're having problems with this rule, please change it.(...) And does anything change? No, because no one does that.

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They don't they don't report it up. They say, well, that's the way it is. Because it's easy just to follow the rules where you don't have to do anything. So then you have contractors and citizens, it's not just contractors. You want to build a shed, you're going to have the same problem, right? So they go and say the same thing happens to them. So in the end, you keep going through the same problem. So(...) you need to you need to change that system, you need accountability. You need you need someone over viewing everything like that. And then it's also your counselor, you go to your counselor and say you have the problem. They go to the department, they tell them it's the way it has to be.

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Your counselor should say, what, I don't agree. I've consulted with other companies now in other cities, and they do it better, which is more efficient. We're just coming to get your opinion on how we're going to do it. We're going to change the rule now to make it more free flowing. But you have to have either the counselor who goes and looks for things, like looks around, or one like this is why I wanted to run because I know this. I don't need to go ask. I'll go. I know that we need to fix it. And I'll go ask the appropriate people because I have the background because I built. You learn infrastructure. Like I said on my website, why do we keep I go drive over the same pothole?(...) Well, not right now because they just resurfaced. I don't know why supposedly just this year that got done just for election, but I'm not going to surmise, but you're not going to connect the dots. No, I'm not connecting those dots.(...) But, um, Joe with the same pothole on Falcon bridge road for years and every year and I have people say this every year, the same thing happens. They look at the, uh, the whole then it's, it's springtime. I understand the, the, the summer saw the thaw in the winter starts coming up. So I see this crew come and then they have this little asphalt that's in this little tub. And they take it and they tap it down. Sometimes they use this little tamper that you could buy at princess auto, or sometimes they use the hand tamper. So by the next week, the car in front of me is throwing chunks of asphalt into my windshield(...) because it's all coming up.

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And I understand there's a cost and you keep saying, oh, it's because we don't have our hot asphalt(...) plants are closed. Okay.

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But number one, it doesn't help anything if it only takes a week and it's being launched in my windows. You actually made matters worse because now it's in the holes coming back and now you're launching little chunks of asphalt everywhere. So this doesn't get any better. And you look and you look at there's ash and I've looked online how you repair a pothole. So first you cut it square. You don't try to patch a weird circle that's broken up everywhere to have loose edges. You cut it square. Simple. They got a little bit of the extra material, tamp new stuff in. If it's water, you got to remove the cold, but most time you could get rid of it just with the torch or little move the water over. Then you have to put hot asphalt and they say it can't be done. Well, listen, we live in Northern Ontario. We always have problems in the spring. Buy a small kiln. There's small, you don't have to have the whole asphalt plant turn on for little patch holes. Get a contractor to buy the kiln. Or we buy a kiln. This is not super expensive. This is just something you take old asphalt in and you heat it really good and tumble it. Then you bring that in containers and fix the holes. And then don't use a tamper. This what you could buy at Princess Auto. Bring the bigger tamper and tamp it in good.(...) So I would like to at least do a pilot project for a year to see if we did it right, how much more it would cost and time-wise. Because some will say that's just too costly.

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Maybe. I don't think so because we're not repairing it 10 times. And then when you don't repair it well in the summer, the water starts in the fall. The water starts being able to go into what you didn't repair well, sinks below freezes and more of the road pops up.

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So I'm sorry. Then what are we doing? It's a bigger hole. Then it's bumpy and then it's a repayment because water travels. I don't know if people don't realize that, but water travels. You know, it saturates underneath. It's going to go where it's got to go. It has to go where it has to go. So I mean, really, do you think just(...) fixing it right would be that much more?(...) And I know they've always used the hot asphalt plant as an excuse, but like I said, yeah, I think it's that expensive to buy at Kiln.

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You know, or one of the asphalt places buy it because we need it and we'll buy it from you. So is this something that they can do in the winter?(...) You can always patch in the winter. In the winter, you wouldn't really have the potholes like we do in the spring because the snow is over it. It's the thaw that really that really pushes it up. And it's because what's underneath is no good. You don't create a pothole doesn't happen in the middle of a road that doesn't have a problem.

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It's created where it has a crack or something's wrong in the waters being able to penetrate and not leave. So if you're going to fix it, you have to fix it right the first time. So that won't happen again. Keep the water out.(...) Well, I mean, as much as you have a crack in your basement. Are you just going to put like a piece of duct tape on the wall and say, it'll stop it. And next year, the piece of duct tape comes off. Yeah, no problem. I wanted to put another piece of duct tape. It'll hold for a year. That's okay. I'll just put a piece of duct tape or why not just put a little bit tar.

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So enough with the bandaid solutions. There's a lot of them.

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And it's both feasibility and the bandaids don't always work. But you know, sometimes you need a bandaid just to get over the hump.

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Let's get into the(...) the homeless, the open use of drugs, that sort of thing. You're in the downtown ward or not downtown, but you're in Ward 8, New Sudbury, the heart of New Sudbury, basically.(...) Are there any.

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Do you have how much homeless is happening in your ward? Like I'm always around New Sudbury because my clinic is there. I'm driving in. My parents are there. My cousins are there. My friends are there because I've always been there. So I drive around. I personally don't see(...) near the amount of homeless you see downtown.

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It's just because it's further away in the resources. There's not like areas where they hide between buildings where it's warmer. They don't have that comfort here. You'd have to hide in someone's backyard or the bush. I've seen encampments when you drive around in the bush when you go for a walk. Someone set up a tent and they're back there. But that's a little bit different than downtown. Okay.

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For the(...) amount of people.(...) So what would, you know, for the homeless that are downtown, what would you want to do? What would you want to change?

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There's all these people talk different games on how you could change it to rule jail them, but there's human rights. Like there's certain things you just can't do. You can say that you're going to do that, but you can't violate our charter of rights of Canada.(...) You can say what you want. You can't do that. It's the rule. It's our main role, our philosophy of our country. So there's things you just can't do. Now, like I'm a healthcare practitioner. We all know the two biggest problems that are causing the problem downtown(...) of the homelessness is mental illness and drugs.

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If you took those two out, you dealt with them. It would be gone because who, who would want to go sleep on the road(...) in the middle of nowhere when we have public housing, you can get O.W. or O.D.S.P. if you're sick. They're probably receiving it.

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Some because governmental who would want to go do that? Who doesn't have a friend that they can't sleep on a couch somewhere? Who would want to do that?(...) If you were not under drugs, how could you even survive without the drugs? They'd freeze. It's easy when you're completely what we call stone. You don't feel it as much. If you took that away, this is horrible. You want to go in the middle of winter with a jacket and go sleep on the road? Not really. Who would want that? It doesn't make sense. They're not doing it because they want to be there. They're not doing because they want to stay there. It's because because of the mental illness, which is a huge part. And the drugs, they're staying there because if you're a family, if you have a friend that's there, you can't bring him in your home because I'm sorry, but this is what probably happens to them. So they're stuck there. So can we stop the drugs coming to separate? No.

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Like it means think about it.

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This is horrible. It's true facts(...) from a couple of years ago. Anyway, someone will quote me saying, "Oh, it's changed." That's fine. But this was a fact. Canada as a whole consumed more opioids(...) than any other country in the world. Not per capita.

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The most. We took more opioids in Canada than the United States of America. I think it was like 65,000 milligrams versus 58. But again, these are just numbers. So we actually took more, our little population, which would have been 35 million at the time, took more than the population of all the states combined. So who's taking them and why? Well, it's just there's reasons why we had more in Canada and it's funneling through and the markets around the world and that gets more complicated. But(...) then you have to ask yourself,

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Sudbury is the worst user per capita in Canada, one of.

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So if we're one of the worst users per capita in Canada and the Canada is the worst in the world,(...) what are we?

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Stoned?(...) We're the worst consumers in the world.

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So do we have a problem?(...) Yes. Sudbury? Sudbury.(...) So yes, we have a problem, a huge problem. So people need to address where this is coming from. They're like, every city's bad. You're right. A lot of cities are bad. But we're the worst in the world. One of the worst in the world. So(...) you can't stop the flow. You can't, mental illness is difficult to deal with. Actually, I've had one of my long term concepts, which I've had with a few doctors in town that we're trying to promote, is we want to create a new day hospital.

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We have our big mammoth hospital,(...) which is huge but can't expand. We need a day hospital,(...) which is a smaller hospital, doesn't have overnight. But you could go there for your elective surgeries, you could go there for your medical exams, so you don't have to go into the big hospital. That also release some room in the big hospital for people who need to stay overnight. But you also in a day hospital, that's where you start taking care of the mentally ill and the drug(...) problems, because they go in and they spend the day and you deal with them, you help them there. This is how it's done in other countries.

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So what's preventing that from happening here? Well, we're trying now. Trying? We're trying.

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It's a step. And I go, that's a provincial thing. But like me running for municipal, people are like, well, that's provincial. And if you have a municipal partner saying we need to push this as a backer, not pay for it, but push, we want this too. It helps.

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So people were asking how we're going to deal with the downtown. I'm like, the way you deal with it is you can't stop the drugs. You got to fix the problem. And the fix of the problem is what I said. And they need a place to go. You can't just, you're not going to throw them in a big building and just, oh, that'll be okay. Or build these big complexes for them. And it'll be full of, they'll be in and out. They'll be full of disease, rampant, be burnt down. You can't. You got to help them. And the way to help them is you need a place to bring them to help them. And what do they do in the best countries, best health countries ran like Denmark and the world? This is what they do. They help them. So it's already working there. Of course. Of course. Of course. All my ideas, I wish I, like I said before, I wish I came up with all of them.(...) But I'm more worldly. Be it that my doctoral studies was healthcare efficiency and interdisciplinary and that, yes, I did more. So I know where to look. You know, I have a degrees behind me. So I know easier how to look, but they're there.(...) You know, does it cost money? Yeah.

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Well, money is being spent regardless. So is it being spent in the right places when it comes to just, you know, mental health and homelessness addiction? It's not. But the problem is(...) mental health and addiction(...) doesn't make anyone money.

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If you have a surgery, you can bill for it. The problem here is dealing with them. There's no pharmacy. There's no backer, no industry that's going to make money off of it.

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It has to be completely funded by the government. There's nothing. No one gains but the government, like the people, but the government.(...) So if you have a drug company that or something that makes a prosthetic or something that pushes it, there's a whole industry that will put money into it for it to go. This doesn't have anything.

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There's no magic pill. There's no magic place you can give. So there's no industrial partner who will help you in this field. And that's why it's always neglected.

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I know it's a little deep there, but this is because of my background. But think, think hard, think strong. And now look at the construct. Everything moves because of money. That's more of a root cause that you're getting at.

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Okay, so let's just go quickly to the arena, the event center.

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This sounds like a broken record, but they've budgeted $200 million. They're sitting at like $275 million as of a few weeks ago.

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What's the overall cost going to look like? Are(...) you, you know, it was a good idea, bad idea to catch it. It had happened. Where are we in this big, in this big mess?

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Well, I mean, anyone would try to say that that was before I was around. Yeah.

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I had my opinion back then. I mean, even if, if you could go back to when we were doing the discussions, when we were doing the polls online, I could make comments about how they would vote for yes or no. If they keep those in, you could read what I wrote, saying this is what my opinion was at that time. And it's still now like we have it. First thing, we have an infrastructure collapse. Roads are being paid for. Everything is not happening very well here. Yeah. So(...) I really would have liked to look at the budget a little more. How much do we need this? From what I could see, arenas are always a loss, never a gain. So that's a problem. And(...) I'd like to have gone through it a little bit better for that reason. I was more of a fan. Actually, way back in the day, what I wanted was(...) keep the arena, fix it a little bit. And I said, you know, Bell Park that the old, because back then the hospital was still going to be for sale. I said, city by the hospital. It's not, it's on land that wasn't even ours. It's part of Bell Park heritage.

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So I go build, let them, let's build a let them build a condo concert hall, restaurant, and it would be there where you would have a nice five, six thousand seating. You could have sat there, had a nice supper, go for a walk. And that would have been our concert hall. Because if you want to bring acts in(...) arenas are just, okay, we'll use an arena. But look at the casino, the casino ram. You go there and that's nice. So I think we would have been better off even having it in a partner that would build somewhere, the hall. And I thought for me, like what I would have done, if feasible, I would have got rid of Minto Street, which is the one right beside I guess Minto, the road that goes in front of the arena. Yeah, yeah. In the parking lot. I would have probably got rid of the doghouse, bought a couple of those businesses there, and then expanded the current arena onto Minto, onto Minto, and across a little bit. And have that as a big open area where when you come in now with your tickets, you would walk inside, not outside. And then would have like a bar area somewhere you can eat. And then the escalator is going up to each level for accessibility.

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It would have been that costly to do that. Into the current arena? Into the current arena. But they say the current arena is old.

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Yeah, old, solid concrete, never sank in all the years it's ever been here.

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Versus some new buildings are sinking like you wouldn't believe. So(...) old, big chunk of concrete that hasn't moved or cracked in all these years.

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I don't know.

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Yeah, okay.

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Sure.

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Let's put micropiles and build a whole new building right beside it. Versus one that hasn't moved an inch. The problem with it was accessibility. The problem with it was getting in and out because how do you do it? I thought in my head, well, if you just add something that's not weight bearing, like what we're adding is not heavy. It's not stadium seating here. It's just a big open area with nice windows around, nice big ceiling where you can walk in. You can have, and that's where you can have your food and everything. And then escalators moving up from that point. So you're not, you're not talking about big micropiles, sheet piles, 100 feet down. It's not holding weight.

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But I would have to analyze it better. This is just a concept that came to my mind. I could be wrong.

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Interesting. Just different than what everyone else thought. And I approached the city. I approached them. All these ideas I gave to them. You can't, council, maybe do this.

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But it just goes unheard. And maybe I'm wrong.(...) I can't say I'm 100%, right? I didn't see all the budgets. I can't see it. None of us can. Give it to me and I'll give you an opinion. I'll run it through my system. I'll look it all over, but I can't say because

for some reason the public's not allowed to look.

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why I'm doing this is like, again, I've spent 10 years and last four years analyzing this. You want change. I want change, but I want someone there who actually put the time in and has the resource, not the resource, the mental ability where they've done the research and looked at it all and can actually address and ask questions. And you don't have anyone on council who could do that.

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Find me someone.

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the questions have to come from yourself. Yeah. Okay. It has to come from your knowledge and what you want to ask. You can't be a puppet in the background and you can't just say things people tell you. You need to have analyzed it yourself and you need to be able to ask the questions because then you have intelligence behind you, have knowledge behind you. You can't just throw things out if you don't know what you're talking about. And does it make sense? Does it make sense? Does it make sense? How's it going to work? And take criticism, constructive criticism. Well, you know, when I did my master's degree, my professor, like I was, I would fuck at him a bit. Well, how about this and that? And he would tell me, Sean,(...) you're doing your master's. You think I'm here to give you a hard time. He goes, you need, he goes, when you go to conferences and you start presenting your material and people are asking you questions, you think they're asking you questions to put you down. They're not. They're asking you questions to see if you could validate what you say so then they could believe you and actually try to do what you're doing.(...) This is how you increase your knowledge is not by rejecting good ideas, not by fighting with people. It's by listening to people. You're never 100 percent right, Eric. No one is. But if we're having a discussion, maybe I'm 80 percent right. Maybe you're 20 percent right. So I'm not going to take. I'm not going to agree with you. But I'm going to take your idea because you just gave me 20 percent extra on mine. So why would I steal it? You were 20 percent right. You had a point there. I'm going to steal that. There might have been something in there that's helpful. Almost always.

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So it's like when you're combating, well, basically combating with the city on a bylaw or building controls or whatever, and they just come back and say, well, that's how it's always been done. Can't change it, which is a farce because it can be changed by a simple policy update. Yeah. And some of the policies, I'm sure, are ancient.

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They are. Some.(...) Some things just don't change, you know, over time. Yeah. So it is safe to say the old mindset.(...) Something's got to happen.(...) Well, that's where we have to change that old mindset on certain things. And it's because it's always easy just to do what you did the next day.(...) Oh, yeah. You're just repeating. Repeating. So if it's a rule or a thing we did, what would just keep redoing it? Very easy for your job. And again, there's a lot of people who do their job really, really well. Where do I get most of my ideas? This does not come from the managers. This does not come from the directors. It comes from the 6,000 patients I've seen in my 20 year career where I sit down and everyone knows Sean loves to talk. So if you ask any patient, he talks too much, actually. So I sit there and I've listened to them. So I talked to this is a, these are the ground floor, the people who do the job, you know, the pothole idea. Let's I went research the real way, but I already knew because they told me, like, I'm not making this stuff up. It comes from them. What do they say about how to get new business into Sudbury? Like new business is,(...) I mean, that's not ground floor. It's about making things(...) easier. Like we have, like I said, the red tape, the issues we have, you know, so(...) like I have even one weird concept and it's not impossible on my platform. And it was the joint venture with, and this is crazy. It's almost like a pipe gene, but what if it would work, you know, like it's so what we have now, we have the newest thing is called small modular reactors, SMRs. Yeah. And we're building one in and down south at OPG and they look like they could, they don't really need to be manned. They're really simple. They're not going to blow up and they seem to be productive and they can make power. How big are they physically? They're not that huge. Size of a car? Oh, no, bigger than the car. Bigger than that? Bigger than the car. It was a house. Oh, size of a house. Yeah, they're buried underground. Okay. So, so you have your SMR and there's different sizes for different power, but okay, but they're not huge. And what you do is so did it people don't know this Glencore, Falkenbridge.

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It's the highest consumer of electricity as a single company in Ontario. Okay. Because it has an arc furnace, an electric furnace. So, valets don't like that. They use the natural gas and use the sulfur. It's a different mechanism for theirs. Glencore uses an arc furnace, which means it can, it can melt anything. It doesn't just have to be nickel with sulfur. It can melt down like a foundry, anything it wants. It doesn't rely on the sulfur and the rock to cause the heat. It uses it to its benefit, but it can melt anything you want. So, the electric furnace goes and it draws that much power.(...) When it's really, really hot in the summer and the grid is slowing down and there's not enough, the air conditioners are going. It uses so much power that Glencore gets a call says, shut down your furnace. You have enough power on the grid. You're pulling too much.(...) So, if we have that big of a consumer and we want to make things feasible for companies to promote this electricity is costly. Why? Like just, just a thought. Maybe it's not feasible. Why wouldn't we partner with Glencore and say, why don't we put an SMR here?(...) You're a huge consumer.

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You can buy off it. We own it. You own it, but you're going to get cheaper electricity, which makes your feasibility to stay here as a mining company much better for long term.(...) So, this way here you'll invest more because you'll know we got this. Even if we wanted to found just regular steel, we'll be able to. So then, and then sub-brae, that's the other half at a reduced cost. Because why are we going to pay OPG more money for the same reactor? Why wouldn't we just get it cheaper? Now we'll lower some of our costs. Is it possible? There are in other parts of the world, other provinces are buying them. Has one city bought one yet? I don't know. But we're different than other cities. We're in the middle of nowhere and we have the biggest industry partners in most provinces. Like our industry powers use more power than Prince Edward Island, the whole province.(...) So,(...) if they want one, why can't we have one? I know it's different. It's out of the realm, but it's something different. Yeah, but it seems like you've actually put some thought into it. Some thought into a lot of the things that you've spoken about here. Which, which, you know, I look at it from a practical point of view, how would it work?

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It's not that far fetched. Like it could really be reality. Even when I said I have another thing on my platform, it comes from traveling and being down south. And I've talked to people on when I dorked Canvas. I've talked to my patients. Mixed reviews on it was the,(...) look, I own some apartments. People pay me rent. That's great. I make money off of them. But what's sad is they can't buy a house because they'll never be able to afford enough money to buy the house.

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In the bank, they won't give them money. So why not start building more, more homes in areas or retrofitting some old ones where it could be three floors and you all own(...) each floor or a row of townhouses, which are actually owned, not by the developer who owns it and makes money off you. You own it. So a three bedroom where you have a parts big place to park and a bit of a yard. You can afford that because that would be under 200,000. You can afford that and put your equity in it. And then maybe after that, sell that and then buy a small home.

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This is done in Europe all over. When there was housing crisis, it's there. Same as in Montreal. Same as in Quebec. Same as in Toronto. You get a developer has to build a whole building. So you have the commercial on the main floor and then they own the top floors above.(...) Well, why don't we allow the person who wants to build, they might want to have business, but they only want to own the main floor. But shit, it's pretty expensive for the piece of property to just buy the main floor because of the parking. So can we afford it if the company won't build it and rents it? Well, that's kind of expensive. And then they got, they have no equity. And then in 10 years, if it's sold, they get kicked out. So they'll have nowhere to stay because with commercial leases, once it's done, you can kick them out. There's no, they're gone. You can bring someone else in.(...) So they have no securities. That's why they like owning the property. So if they want to stay for long periods, they know they own it. They can never get kicked out, but it's costly. Build the property. It's just one floor and you have to have a massive lot. So what they do in other places, they say different partners. You own the commercial above could be condos or it could be rentals. That's owned by someone else. So now that person can buy the lot, own that commercial property, and someone else can make the money above. Maybe it's a smaller lot where you have three, four apartments, three, four condo style that people can buy, but affordable.

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So it's just a different thing. But yes, people are like, I'm sorry, we can't bring the prices down of the homes where you can all buy homes. You know, I wish it's possible, but it's not complete. We can't, but why not find ways that some people can have an entry way? If you're a senior and you're living in your home, time is getting tough. Can you stay there? I don't know if it can pay the bills, but my kid needs a home, but I can't really help them because I got to stay in the home. Why can't you get that retrofitted that the basement becomes their kids? The kids could actually get a mortgage by the basement. Mom, Pa, could stay upstairs. Now they have the help. They could stay in their home until they die. And then maybe by the time the kid has enough saved up and paid enough to the base, they can move upstairs and rent the downstairs or sell it to someone else. Now it keeps the senior in their home.(...) We have to worry about nursing homes. (Blank Audio)

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Wrapping up any last words that you want to get into the, to let your constituents know, award eight? I don't know. Like if you watch this, just know that I'm doing this because I care. And I put a lot of thought over this many, many years. And I'm not just saying let's do this and let's do that. I have sincere plans. Are they perfect? No. Can we make them better? Yes. Can we come up with new ideas? Yes. And it's the people who will be able to have the good ideas because they're the ones who gave me all these ideas or the rest of the world. So I'm smart. People say I'm smart. It's because I listen and I actually remember everything and I try to make it better. I don't know. It's up to the, it's up to the constituents if they believe in me and they want me.(...) John

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