I'm losing in the morning.
That who you are, Jay, and David Mack, our fourth district alder is here.
And trick-or-treating, what do you get to rest up as when you were a kid?
We had those.
Was it a vinyl vinyl thing just slip off with a mask?
Yeah, the plastic mask.
And you stick your tongue in, it gets ripped off and that's like a razor blade.
And exactly.
And it sounded like this.
Try that thread.
Try it.
What did you get here?
And your guys, you couldn't see.
First of all, it's a dark.
It's a night and you can't see at that little slit where your eyes are supposed.
And a little band is, you know, the staples coming out.
They're on the holding mask on.
My mask is getting all sweaty or whatever.
Yeah, the mask on.
The condensation building up on the mask.
What are you talking about?
You're right to go wet on the end.
And your face is all wet with your own spit.
Right.
My mother, I got this great costume one year, when I was a little kid, Dracula.
I had the cape.
I had everything that she made me wear a winter coat over it.
Nobody can see anything.
I look like a regular guy going to school.
And it was like 78 degrees at Halloween and Don Rosen's wearing a winter coat because
mommy doesn't want him to get a cold.
No, we don't have a cold in that, where I live.
We used to trick a treat from when we went to school in the morning on the way to school.
And you stopped when, you know, they really shut their lights up like 10 o'clock, 11 o'clock
at night.
It was all day long.
We used to have a big hall, my brother and I, but we had one guy in a neighborhood.
He worked from Nabisco.
And he used to give out big boxes of Oreos and you looked in his house when he came to
the door and the living room was stacked with, they were all expired.
That's what we got him.
But who cares?
Yeah, they were on cookies, you know, they're good.
The last are 20 years.
20 years.
They'll go through the next armageddon.
They don't care.
When the nuclear war comes, Oreos will still be there.
So we used to go back again and again, he did not need somebody kids in the hundreds of
kids.
We used to go back and go into the box of Oreos.
And we had a woman who used to put two pennies in our bed.
What am I going to do with two pennies?
So what do Carlos Gambino give you when you went to his car?
Carlos Gambino.
I was showing David Carlo Gambino somebody posted a, um, on the article, article when he passed
away at the age of 70, 71, 72, you look like he was about 90.
I thought he was.
And he was the, um, the, uh, better than New York mom.
He was in the family.
He was on the, he was the inspiration for, um, Marlon Brando's character in the Godfather
Carlo Gambino.
And he lived right down the street from Don Rosa, when I down the street, about four and
five minutes away.
He lived on the other side of town, it's small town, massive, and he lived there.
That's where he passed away.
Well, you lived in mass of people, right?
Mass of people, yeah.
Yeah.
So did you go to his house?
I don't, I probably passed it, but I, you know, now we got a serial killer who lived,
uh, the 10 blocks from me, that guy, the Gilgo beat serial killer.
So did Jerry Seinfeld's mom give out full-size candy bars?
Probably not.
Yeah.
He lived, uh, about six houses from me.
Yeah.
We went trick-or-treating in his house too.
Everybody went over every house, but they gave way good candy back then.
Now you get the little, right, that even bite-size house, nibble size.
Oh, yeah.
They keep shrinking.
I, I still remember as a kid getting that full-size Milky Way or three musketeer bar.
And before we get to the, I got a thing here, and this, I never realized about M&M's.
Did you know what colors do you think are in the M&M's?
Do you know what I'm saying?
Blue, orange, brown, yellow, green, and red.
Good for you.
I could have sworn tan was in there.
No.
Never.
Oh, yeah.
It was in there one time.
Really?
M&M's got rid of the tan color.
I remember tan.
Uh, they gave the public three choices at that time, blue, purple, and pink, blue, obviously
one.
It's been almost 50 years since orange was introduced to replace red because, remember,
the red scare?
Oh, yeah.
The red, uh, die scare, which turned out to be nothing.
Um, my wife got a picture with the orange M&M up at Mall of America, because orange
is her favorite color.
I remember the tan M&M and I could have sworn they were in the package now.
I remember tan M&M's, because it's, uh, why would you, why would you put a neutral color,
like beige when the rest of them are nice and, uh, that's what they had, that's what
they had.
We'll get to the, um, uh, before we get to that, I got to wish my son, David Elmack,
the second, a very happy birthday.
He was born 31 years ago.
So today is his golden birthday.
So he just missed the tan M&M's, because that was 30 years ago, he just missed, no,
he didn't.
No, no, he made it the last year, the first year of his life, there were 10 M&M's.
Good for him.
Yeah.
That's what we fed the newborn kid, 10 M&M's, didn't have teeth.
They melt in your mouth, not in your hand.
I always said, is Eagle, was it Eagle Scout?
He was an Eagle Scout.
Yeah.
He is an Eagle Scout.
Yeah.
I instituted VVMC.
Yeah, I was, uh, I just, um, what do they call it in ceremony, ceremony?
Yeah.
It would be Eagle Scout.
That was pretty neat.
So congratulations to your son.
Yep.
Yeah, so far, so good, proud of him.
I am.
He was, uh, he's a good kid, works hard, very talented.
He's been helping out with the six, six, six street theater.
How was it a play earlier this year?
He had to play like a hundred characters and people that, uh, went to see it were like,
wow.
Your son was really good.
I mean, to play one character is hard, but you know, like 200 characters, he's playing
through the course of the play.
I was there to see misery at the six street theater.
Misery.
Misery.
That's my middle name.
Yeah.
Misery, bolster middle.
So misery and the lead actors who played, you know, the Kathy Bates, um, at one point,
she made eye contact with me because I was in the first row and I guess frightened because
she was very, she's a great actress.
She scared me in the show.
I mean, just had to have the Kathy Bates character was a frightening person and she looked
at me.
She just scared the audience and she made eye contact.
Don't look.
So at six street theater, they do that, um, in the, in the winter time, it's at a snow
dance where they have like 10 different shorts, short plays and they're all hilarious.
And then the audience can vote at the end of the run.
They give out prizes and they solicit these from all over the country, maybe all over
the world.
I don't know.
I am the only person to ever go to snow dance who has never laughed.
I almost laughed once inside, but I have been able to maintain control every time I've
seen snow dance.
Why don't you want to laugh?
Not that I got this street going, you know, laughing, fun, got it, yeah, but I'm laughing
on the inside.
Okay.
Let's talk about a few things here before we get to the one we got to take a break here
in a second.
You just have on your list here, Henry Winkler's 80th birthday, you got to meet the
fans.
Yeah.
We met.
He doesn't look 80.
No, he does.
Well, my dad turns 80 next week.
I'm like, holy cow, the fans is my dad's age and I'm watching happy days and he's playing
like a high school guy and all along, he's the same age as my dad and my dad clearly
wasn't in high school.
You know what?
I was 9, 10 years old.
Wow.
Yeah.
What do you hear?
Henry Winkler had to be like 30 years old when he was hanging around Richie and the
boys.
He did look about 30.
Well, he was supposed to be older.
Yeah, but not that old.
I mean, that's kind of creepy.
That 30 year old guy is hanging around with a lot of the movies in the 60 year old.
They have teenagers, you know, guys, you know, and they're late 20s playing teenagers
in the movies.
You know, so what do you like?
I'm 25.
I'm, I'm going to guess here.
72.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Kind of a little game going on.
So I take my grandson number one to meet the fans.
We go to Iowa Wisconsin at the Iowa Auto Show on a whim on a Saturday morning.
And it's like one of the hottest days at summer and it was miserable.
And we had a wait in line and he's whining because, you know, why do I have to meet the
fans?
Who he is.
Well, you know what?
I come to find out that two days before him is dad, grandma, they all watch the Henry
Winkler movie.
Oh, yeah.
He's met a couple of them.
So then we found out.
So Henry Winkler sees Kai and he's real passionate about reading because he had dyslexia
and he's written some children's books and he gets down to Kai's level and he just starts
to ask him questions like, how old are you?
Where do you go to school?
You know, it starts encouraging him to do well.
And then he he's charging for his autograph and he's charging to get a picture with them.
And he takes a little postcard size picture himself and he signs it to Kai and he hands
it to him.
Didn't charge us for that.
And then I saw one of the postcards.
He was the voice of one of the monsters in Monster's Inc.
I said, Kai, see, you know who he is.
He was that character monster's Inc.
And so Henry takes one of those cards and he signs that hands it to Kai.
And overall was a fun experience.
I mean, I grew up with Henry Winkler and the fans and then later in life, it was at
show where he played, no, not Dexter.
He played the acting coach with the, there was another serial.
Look at that.
Last night, the council had a long meeting six and a half hours, huh?
Yeah.
We didn't get all this stuff.
I break a dinner break.
No, look at that.
When did you get offended by that line?
All right, it was breakfast.
I went out to the snag me.
I'm trying to eat healthy and I go out to the snag machine, not once, not twice, but
three times because my blood sugar was dipping and it's like, oh boy, what was going
on for six and a half hours?
We have been discussing the budget and our first night was presentations by the department
hats.
We have never done it that way before.
What we had done is we would call each department up.
We'd give a short overview and we'd jump into asking questions and the powers to be
decided that this year, we would have questions on the first night.
So you know, our an half later, we're darn, we're going home.
I fought that night that we just jump into, you know, asking the questions.
Have the department had come up, give their five minute presentation and then let us
start asking questions about their budget and start moving through this methodically.
And as a result, the next night, we were there till 11 o'clock at night and they wanted
to jump into doing the ordinances.
So the mayor has put a whole bunch of ordinances into the budget book.
Ministers are things like making no more may permanent, creating a municipal or city
versin ID card, there are some ordinances on illegal dumping, things that really could
be handled elsewhere, but not in the budget process, but they're in the budget.
So we ran out of time last week to discuss those ordinances.
Last night, we had a public hearing on the budget that should have been it, but we had
to go through, I want to say there were 12 ordinances, maybe 14 different ordinances.
We went through them one by one, but last night, I suggested that these ordinances be sent
to the standing committee, the appropriate standing committee.
There were a couple of them that the public works committee could have handled.
There were several that public safety could have handled, a few that finance could have
handled, and this would allow the public to come in, have input, because a lot of these
ordinances have an impact on specific groups.
There was one on adult daycare homes, and I have no problem with us setting up a registration
locally for that, having some sort of regulation for it.
But those adult homes, residential homes, they should be a part of the process.
They should be able to have input, and well, you know, we noticed the public, the notice
last night that was we were going to be discussing the budget, including ordinances.
There wasn't a specific line item, if it would go to a standing committee, there would
be a line item saying, we're going to discuss ordinance 0015-25 regulation of adult homes,
residential homes, that sort of thing, so.
I have the press release here about the budget, and the real rate was dropped from $2.10
to $11.75 per thousand dollars of assessed valuation, which means your property taxes
go down.
The problem is when you get your, and the mayor was pointing this out yesterday, when
you get your tax bill, it's not just the city on there.
You got the county, you've got the whole bunch of other things that didn't go down, so.
And if your assessment went up, your taxes aren't going to go down either.
Right.
And so it looks like it's going up, but actually for the city it went down, so that's
good news, I guess.
Spending is still up and spending will never go down, it will never go down because things
are more expensive and people want what they will if you cut it, but they're cutting
doesn't work all the time, you know.
We have an issue next year.
This year's budget was balanced using ARPA funds.
That was what the feds gave us to help get through COVID, and we have been dipping into
the savings.
Our city finance director keeps telling us we have a structural deficit of $5 million,
and this is only going to get worse next year.
So something's going to give next year's budget is going to be a very difficult one for
that council to deal with.
So Brett Hoppin for Marcus Thaders coming in, we're going to talk about a whole bunch of
things, spooky movies, no movies that are out scary things, all kind of stuff here.
And David, you're sitting with us when Brett comes in in just a moment.
