I got a nice jacket with shirt and tie and I'm dressed in fruit of the looms and well
here.
You're on radio.
You get away with that.
Yeah.
Good.
Well, good to see you again.
Likewise.
Now, nothing's broken on you now.
The alarm is good.
Everything's working.
Yeah.
Always like that.
My shoelaces are kind.
You know, good things are happening.
Did you look?
Just make sure.
Okay.
Before we get to anything here on the list, I get it because I'll forget.
I was talking.
There's some trucks not owned by the city, but it's only a private company inspecting
the sewer lines on Main Street and they've been out there and they don't really block
much of just the center of the street until they keep traffic flowing and the guy out there
well, he was explaining to me, well, what are you doing?
And he said, okay, here's what I'm doing.
He said, there's another guy at the other end there and we're examining the sewer pipe.
Right.
And if we have to make repairs, we make repairs and if we could do it, they want to dig
up the streets.
That's exactly right.
Yeah.
So either, you know, with big pipes that we might have, but even smaller ones, we will send
people in.
We contract with a company to do this.
The utilities do.
And we will do that where sometimes we'll put cameras, close circuit cameras into the
pipes and take a look at it and look for leaks.
And then if we can repair them underground, it extends the life of the infrastructure and
we don't have to rip up the street to do that microphone closer to you.
And I'm going to miss anything you have to share.
Everything's very important.
Okay.
Okay.
Now another question.
I noticed on 16th Street, the barricades wind up.
What are they doing on 16th?
It's a utility work that they've got to do underground so they'll rip up the space there
and replace some water and wastewater utilities they're doing that.
Do you ever see in the future of this city all the lines going underground like in New
York City?
There's no power lines.
They're all underground.
Oh, that's a great question.
I bet that's why.
That is a very expensive endeavor.
I mean, we're building the new community center on Martin Luther King.
All those, you know, putting in a big facility there and building 40 new houses there.
Those power lines are going underground and there are opportunities on occasion when
you do a big road project, they'll say, you know, do you want to, do I want to bury
you?
I know.
It's expensive.
I know.
And you have to wait for each utility to sort of sign off on it.
So it's not just the electrical.
It's like it's spectrum and then it's 18 teeth.
So it's, it is a long and expensive process to do it.
But when it's done, I mean, you look at sort of the before and after is when you see,
you know, those, those poles, I'll go away and you get a better view shed of the sky
and the street boy, it's really nice to do.
But that is something that'll take decades before we get it all done.
You know, if you look at all the pictures of New York City, there are wires everywhere,
poles.
You look at it now.
There's not one pole, not one wire.
All of New York's fallen underground.
They got it done.
Okay.
The other question is, I know it's a county road, but it's still, it may be Mount Pleasant.
What's going on in Spring Street?
The part is in Spring Street again, it's underground utility work that they're doing.
But they're chopping down all the trees.
They are.
They've got to do that to get it the right way to be able to bury the work.
So it's, it's not our jurisdiction.
It's my personal.
I know.
So I'm not 100% around the details.
But usually when they're, they're taking trees down, it has to do with what they've got
to do underground.
She had to get a little sick of probably him in here.
She's a county road.
That's her jurisdiction.
Yeah.
There you go.
She might know the answer.
And we'll get her in here.
Okay.
Let's talk about some other things going on here.
First of all, things that aren't negative.
These are all positive things.
You got the youth employment program.
Yep.
Yeah.
The jeppers.
Yeah.
So we have opportunities for people to do paid internships in the city of Racine.
So if you are 16 to 24 year old, years old and you live in the city and you want to explore
what it might be like to pursue a career in public service, we've got opportunities for
people to do that.
I will take 60 young people and assign them in city departments so they can see if they
want to pursue a career in police or fire or, you know, if they want to do civil engineering
or road construction, we have projects for that.
If they want to, you know, if they're interested in environmental science and want to test the
water of the water utility, we have internships for that.
A lot of great opportunities for young people to get involved.
It's been great.
What's been wonderful from it too is we then wind up hiring a number of these young
people when they finish college or they're ready to go.
So we've already hired a couple dozen people already coming out of this program to be
full-time city employees.
And that's what we want.
We want, you know, for the city jobs, we want to expose city residents to those opportunities
and these are usually good paying jobs with benefits.
And so we want to extend those opportunities to our residents and let young people explore
a career in public service.
So we're excited about that.
It is very good.
Yeah.
I like that idea.
Okay.
Next up, talk about the Harry Wake trial in the verdict now.
This was the guy who did fake ballots.
He did.
And he said it was just, he was testing the waters to see if it was, you know, we can catch
him.
Well, they caught him.
Yes.
He robbed the bank to see if he could rob the bank.
Yeah.
It's actually, it's the metaphor, right?
So yeah, I mean, he decided, this is almost four years ago now that he was going to pretend
to be both me and Robin Voss and ask that those ballots be mailed to his home mind, want
to be there.
They think thankfully intercepted it, but it's, I mean, it's a really, you know, really,
unfortunate and dangerous thing for somebody to, to try to steal somebody else's ballot.
And so he argued, or as, as a lawyer argued that it was, you know, just a hoax or not
a real thing, but the jury disagreed and found him guilty on three of the four counts.
You still did it.
Oh, he absolutely did it.
Yeah.
Well, whether it was a hoax or not, you did it.
Right.
Right.
And so that was the hard part for I think the jury to get around.
I was like, yeah, but, but you still did the crime.
You pretended to be these other people.
You asked that the ballots be sent there and, and you did it.
And so, you know, it's a little bit sad because I think he's stuck in some of the conspiracy
theory that the sum of the, you know, hot government local folks are really animated
about, but there's this belief, this misbelief that there's something terribly amiss happening
in our elections.
And so, you know, he, he tried to prove a point by pretending to be two other people and
trying to steal their ballots.
And the jury found him responsible.
I found that it's like people want to commit the perfect crime if one person knows about
it.
Maybe you can do it.
Two people.
You can never do it.
And the same thing with elections.
If there was some kind of election fraud, everybody, they'd all be talking about it.
The actual people, the elections would say, listen, look, when I found it, but they don't
do that.
Yeah.
And it's tend to be the losers that tend to claim election follows.
I mean, we do have, you know, poll watchers or observers who come in every election and
a lot of them come up from Illinois or other places and, you know, usually they're not even
people from our community, but they come in because they've been convinced by somebody
and something terribly amiss is happening.
And then, you know, they'll sit there and watch it and they're just sort of like, there's
nothing amiss going on here.
And by, but they're, you know, they're concerned.
And so, I think it is an unfortunate thing.
Look, I mean, free and fair elections are a critically important part of our democracy.
And, you know, despite what people, some people might believe, they're very well run.
And the arguments about fraud just don't turn out to be true.
Didn't they have some guy here in Wisconsin, they paid him a lot of money.
I vaguely remember during the one of the presidential elections, and it was his job that dig in
Wisconsin and look for fraud, I, they paid him a lot of money, too, yeah, the state paid
him money.
You gave them in?
Yes, that's him.
Yeah, the former.
Yeah.
That's him.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He's the guy who, he's the former Supreme Court justice, who was convinced that there
was fraud after the 2022 elections threatened at one point to put five mayors in jail.
Oh, were you one of them?
I was one of them.
Oh, yeah.
But he's absolutely convinced that there was this terrible fraud going on and it was terrible
that we were trying to make it safe for people to vote during COVID.
And, you know, how did you distancing and let people, you know, sign in almost like drive
through voting that we did just to keep people separate.
It was a really innovative work that a lot of communities did around, around the state.
There was also the drop box conspiracy.
If you remember, there was that conspiracy that turned out not to be true at all.
But yes, former Justice Gableman was a, a sad, a sad post career from, from the bench,
he really bought into the conspiracy theories.
He also made an appearance at the Harryweight trial.
I'm told that he actually stopped into watch part of the trial.
So he represented Harryweight for an initial part, if I remember correctly.
So an unfortunate thing, I think sometimes people get so consumed by their narrative of
what they believe to be true.
They have a hard time separating fact from their own conspiracies.
His honor is City of Racine, Mayor Curry Mason is here.
That's a curry.
Curry Mason is here.
I got a retire.
No, no you don't.
Okay.
Let's go down to our list here of things we want to talk about.
And we're seeing, City of Racine Easter egg hunt.
What's this about?
I like this.
We're going to do an Easter egg hunt over in one of the parks, but it's an exciting opportunity
for kids to take advantage of it.
Our parks department does a great job of putting, putting this together and the kids really
love it.
So if you get a chance, I believe it's at Humble Park, so we get a chance to participate
in that.
That would be great.
Pierce Woods?
Yes, Pierce Woods.
This woods park.
It is right next to Humble.
I used to live over there on what's long and we didn't call it Pierce Woods.
We just called the whole thing Humble, but it is actually Pierce Woods Park.
April 2.
Yeah.
In a second.
All right.
The Sun Pump program.
And I got a Sun Pump story program.
All right.
Go ahead.
So this is a great opportunity.
We have.
You were talking about those, you know, inspections underground.
One of the things that we really try to avoid is getting too much water into our wastewater
system when we have heavy rains.
And it turns out we have a lot of houses that don't have sun pumps.
And instead of doing big infrastructure projects that cost millions and millions of dollars
one of the cheaper things that we can do to keep the rainwater out of the wastewater
system is to offer people some pumps.
A lot of people have floor drains that just go right into the system.
If you have a house that was built before, I believe 1955.
And so with the utility funds that we have that everybody pays into, if you have a home
that's before 1955, you can get a some pump at no charge to the homeowner.
And it helps keep your basement dry.
So it means when there's rain events, you're less likely to get water.
So it's a great program and a great benefit to city residents.
And if you are interested in that, you should give our, give our offices a call.
And we will set somebody up to come and put a some pump in your basement.
That's a great idea.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So back in the 90s, I lived in Brown deer, it's north of Milwaukee.
And we had nine inches of rain one morning.
Yeah.
That's a lot of rain.
The interstate, there is a, um, another pass there on I 43 was totally underwater.
Two cards were under there.
You could barely see them, but you can see the oil dripping up.
Ooh.
And they were on, everybody's looking at these two cars.
Now, the people got out, but they're totally underwater.
That's a train we had.
And my house was sitting in a little sort of bowl, so all the water was coming in.
And my some pump couldn't keep up with it.
Water was coming into the basement and the some pump was running.
So random in the yards.
And as soon as they opened up, I read everybody who's out there trying to grab some pumps
there were the some pumps.
I knew where they were and I grabbed one.
I ripped a hole in the screen window in my basement.
I put the second some pump in there.
Now it wouldn't fit.
So I had a hold in it.
Oh, my daughter.
Take this hose and run it out to the culvert now because we got to stop this water.
So I found a way to have both some pumps in there running and they were running.
We avert of the tragedy, but it's a lot of water.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
And they were popping through the walls in the basement.
And I had a, I used chewing gum to plug it up temporarily, just keep the water from
coming in.
I get to think on your feet.
Don't forget.
Well, I can promise listeners that if they engage in the some pump program, it will not
involve ripping screens or bubble, but it'll be done professionally by, by plumbers who
know what they're doing.
It worked though.
All right.
Let's talk about this.
The, um, let's just the ballot omission for the April 7th election.
Yeah.
So every year, the county prints the ballots that people use when they go to vote.
This year, they left off the municipal judge race.
So it's an unopposed race that Rob Weber is running for unopposed for re-election, but
nonetheless, they got to fix the ballot.
So the county is reprinting the ballots and we are hoping to remedy that mistakes that
when people come to vote, they will get the correct ballot.
So if you've been mailed a ballot to your home and you're going to bring it in, they might
ask you to fill out a new ballot that has a full and complete list, but it's a little
bit frustrating.
The city doesn't get to print its own ballots.
We have to rely on the county and the county in this case just forgot to put one of the
elections on the ballot.
Do we know the person?
Do we know the person who screwed up?
So when you're Christian since the clerk, it is her job to print the ballots.
Oh, for when, dude.
Um, if that's it, you know, you try to do the best.
You check all your boxes off and then boom, you forget one thing.
Yeah.
I mean, thankfully, thankfully, it's an unopposed race, right?
So it's not regard, you know, the consequences of it not being on there are less, uh, less
dire.
It is certainly no mission.
Um, we'd certainly like to see a position where the, the city, if you're a city of a certain
size, uh, if we could just print our own ballots so we can double check it and prove it before
we get them, but, um, but yes, they are being reprinted and by the county and hopefully
we will be able to remedy the mistake along before election day.
But if you've been mailed a ballot and you come in to drop it off, you might ask you to
just fill out a different one to make sure it's correct.
Um, if you've mailed one in already, uh, we've been told by the elections commission
that your ballot will still count.
Well, it doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't accept it as an incomplete ballot.
Yeah, okay.
Now, let's talk about the, uh, the YMCA side, anything new?
Nothing new there.
Uh, when we have people looking at it, but, um, but I want to make sure you're done with
the YMCA side on the cabinet, because there's several, right, former YMCA down, yeah.
But, um, uh, we do have a few developers that are looking at it and tell us there might
be some proposals forthcoming, but so far we haven't seen anything definitive.
But, you know, we think it's an exciting site for sure.
Anything new coming up that we should know about?
Could we come with all the community center health clinic is, is really coming to
a lot.
Okay.
One more thing.
If you look at, um, the community center itself, it's great.
But you also notice there's 32 town homes that are being built around the community center.
So that's going to be kind of a new neighborhood that's around there.
And so we're really excited about that.
And so it's going to be 32 new homes.
It'll be owner occupied in that neighborhood.
So we're quite excited about what that'll look like.
And this is kind of a tragedy.
But the Seabirds, uh, Cesar Chavez center, yeah, if they change his name,
he was involved for people who don't know.
It came to light that he was an abuser and the people finally, you know, he's been,
he's been dead a while.
Yeah, since 1993, I believe.
And I was white for the woman who was with him for all those years on the protest.
She was one of the people's, yes, he was abused.
And once you do that,
yeah, if people read the full New York Times article, it's horrific.
I mean, it's really, it's not just, uh, Dolores Huerta that he, um, you know,
raped and then, uh, had a child and then gave up the child.
It was terrible, but it came about from women coming forward who said, you know,
he sexually assaulted me when I was 12, 13, 15 years old and it was multiple women.
So it's, it's a horrific story.
If you read the New York Times article and it's, it's so hard because he's been a figure of,
you know, uh, of civil rights and union rights and, you know,
a Latino icon in this country for decades.
And so to see somebody who is held in such high regard who did some good work in other spaces,
do such terrible things, just really, and then his name is Tarnas forever.
And it is, yeah, it's all over the, yeah.
So we've taken his name off the building.
So if you drive past what was the Shava Center, you will not see his name on the building.
So what's it going to be called now?
We're going to meet with Latino leaders and say what would be an appropriate alternative.
I've proposed because other cities are doing this and, you know,
I was actually Angelina Cruz's suggestion or local state representative that maybe naming it
to Dolores where the community center would be a work with him, yeah.
Yeah, I think that I was there for all the marches and, and all the things.
So, you know, maybe we should honor that legacy with, with her name.
People have lots of ideas of what it might be.
So what we want to do is just work with a group of local Latino leaders and ask them
to come up with a suggestion, but it'll take a little bit of time to, to get through it.
It'll go to be referred to the, um, to the council on the 20th and then we would vote on it
sometime in May if we can reach consensus.
But it's a sad, a sad and to what was an important legacy for Latino rights and workers rights.
And this is probably about a lot of famous people and we just don't know it yet.
It'll come out someday and then we'll find out what is, it is the hard part about,
you know, defying historical figures.
You know, you always find out there, um, you know, people are imperfect.
But, but the, the revelations about Cesar Chavez were just devastating.
And so it just doesn't make sense to continue to have a building named in his honor.
Thank you, Mayor, for coming in.
Yeah, my pleasure.
His honor.
We're seeing Mayor Corey Mason.
Thanks for coming in.
