So hello to Michael Schrader. Hi, Michael. How are you? Oh, I'm doing okay. Just got your coffee
or all set. Got my coffee today. The last time I had one of these, I wasn't allowed
to have coffee because I had to have a procedure. And that was just torture. I never tasted
coffee in my life. But I love the smell of coffee. My parents always making coffee, you
know, jugging it down all day. And I love the smell. I just never tasted it though.
It was more out of necessity because I was 18. I had a class at 730 in the morning. I
had thermodynamics, which is a really complicated subject anyway. And it was somebody who was
teaching it was not English was not their first language. So it was like, man, I got to
have something to stay awake in his class. And once I started drinking it, that's it.
I mean, I converted, you know, a lot of other people into coffee drinkers.
Well, and I'm the, I'm the, I'm the art duck in this. Everybody drinks coffee. I'm
around here too. Got coffee machines. I got everything. I just don't drink it. Michael
Schrader is here because he is running for the fourth district Alder seat, which is coming
up in the election April 7th, which is Tuesday, obviously. Why did they pick Tuesday?
Why does that Tuesday, not Wednesday, the middle of the week, not a weekend when everybody's
off from what made the first people pick Tuesday for election? It must have been something.
I haven't. Maybe they were running out of, are you going to change that if you're older?
I don't have any change over election days. I've seen them on like Saturdays and stuff
like that too though. Okay. Let's give a little background for people that don't know
Michael Schrader. Nine kids, nine grandkids. Yes. Whoa. Okay. Give us some of your background
here. Civil engineering and you're also a teacher. Well, I was a teacher. Okay. Well, yeah.
Yeah. Move a little closer. I want to hear everything you have to say there. Go ahead.
Well, what's civil engineering for one of them? Civil engineering is infrastructure. So we do
fresh water. We do waste water. We do roads. We do buildings. So everything that brings you
life and makes your life better, that's us. We do the, you know, all of it.
So, what do you work if you're a civil engineer who hires you? Well, city, states, governments,
governments do and consultants do. Okay.
Is it a fun job? Everything you always wanted to do in your life?
I've been wanting to be a civil engineer since I was like four years. Really? Why did it build,
huh? Well, yeah. What I would do is I go down to my basement and I'd make cities and I'd even make
buildings out of like construction paper and... Array out the entire city. I even made little
freeways out of my hot wheels, rams. Did you have an erector set? I did have an erector set.
Everybody had an erector set. You know, and the only restriction was I had to keep my city
underneath the ping pong table because if it got, if it, if I had urban sprawl,
the tornado being my father in the size 14s would come and wreck that part of the city. So
it kind of talked you a little bit about urban planning too. There was a, there was a video game
back in the many, many years ago and it was called Sim City. Yes. Do you remember that? We had a
build a city and then things came through and destroyed it like Godzilla, Rodan, whatever.
But yeah, that's Sim City. That was kind of a fun game. So you got a bachelor. You've got a bachelor's
degree. You got a master's degree in a PhD in civil engineering. Correct. And where's Wayne State?
Right smack in the middle of Detroit. Okay. So you went to University of Missouri, University of
Tennessee. You were a volunteer in Tennessee and Wayne State. We're from originally.
Missouri, St. Louis. Okay. Wow. So the University of Missouri is in the middle of the state.
Show me state. Yes, because we're stubborn. They got to show me that that's exactly how they
got their name, though, is because back in the late 1800s, one of the congressmen was like,
you got to show me that this is going to work. And it's because we got a lot of Germans.
Show me. We're skeptical. We view the world with a little bit more skepticism
on there. Now also, St. Louis was the big drop off point before heading out of west back in the 1800s.
We see out west today and, you know, in big cities and everything back then,
they didn't know what was out there. There were no paved roads, nothing. And the big kickoff state was,
well, big city was St. Louis. Well, St. Louis, their problem was, and I see this
in the right now, they didn't want change. So when the railroads came calling,
they were controlled by all the steamboat people. And they said, we don't want to change anything,
take your stinking railroads and go someplace else. So Chicago became the transportation hub,
all the railroads and in Chicago. Is that why? That's exactly why. And that's the connection between
the watersheds, everything goes through Chicago. If you go east and west on the major interstates,
you have to go through Chicago. If you take a train, you have to go through Chicago.
It's where the eastern and the western railroads meet. Everything goes through Chicago,
because St. Louis was like, no, we're good. You know, we don't need to change anything. We're
happy with everything the way it is. We are a great city. And since then, it's just been on
as decline. And even since I left, which was 40 years ago, it's lost two-thirds of its
population. It's really depressing to go back there now and see it and see these places that
were once vibrant that are just gone. But we went there, we traveled Route 66 and we went there,
stopped by the arch and so forth, did they, did they tourist attractions? What brought you to
proceed? Well, when I graduated from Wayne State, what I was doing is I was basically
filling faculty. So faculty will go and they'll take a sabbatical and then you somebody to come in
and fill in. So I went to Minnesota for a year at Mankato as a filling faculty. One winter in
Minnesota was enough for me. You know, my one year contract ended and we'd come from Michigan.
And I said, I got to get back to the lakes. So Gateway had a position teaching fresh water
resources. So I was at Gateway for two years and we looked around and I said, you know, I really
like rescuing. It's kind of this like diamond in the rough, you know, property values are a lot
lower because it's a, it's in the post-industrial phase of its life, you know, the big factories
have shut down. And things have gotten, you know, real estate in, in rescuing is a lot cheaper than
it is elsewhere. And it was right by the lake and living right by the lake, I'm like, okay, cool,
because in Michigan, we lived within a couple blocks of the Canadian border and that was always a lot
of fun. Tip towing put your toes over the border. Tip towing put your toes out of the border.
Oh, we would stay, we would stay in the way with the Canadian. Look at me, I can go in, I can go out,
I can go in. And you'll never see, I know the house you live because you live in back of me,
real old house from the 1800s. 1875. Yeah, that's an old one. The real one,
said it was 1900 and I've done a lot of research, pulling up old, old city maps. And I've
dated it back now. The earliest I've seen it was 1875. And then they did some add-ons to it.
Well, and my, I have a relatively modern house, mine's 1914, sorry to back to you. And the one
directly in back of you, the other brick house is also from the 1800s. Yeah, I think 1880,
so yeah. We're talking to Michael Schrader running for fourth district,
Alder here in the city of Racine. The election comes up April 7th, all the even numbered
districts come up. And you are, let me see if I can get this, it's, you, you have the zoo,
you have the beach, North Beach, that'll be your district, right? Yeah, it's everything from Hamilton,
basically to a block north of Gould. So if I go to Hamilton, I just say, I'm in your district,
I'm out of your district, I mean, you're a district, I can do it. Come in to crime,
and somebody else was district, nope, not your district anymore. Okay, so what do you want to do
here as Alder? I, this is a job I would never want, because I couldn't deal with people come up
to me, a pick and save and saying, hey, I got potholes on my street, what are you going to do?
I couldn't deal with that, because I don't, I don't know how to deal with the public. I just don't
know how to deal. I'd last nine seconds in that job, and they throw me out. So let's talk about
some of the things you want to talk about, transparent traffic and transportation issues. What's going
on there? Well, you know, they just, the alders win against the advice of the police chief and
decided to allow the Douglas Avenue bid to pay for traffic enforcement up and down Douglas.
And, you know, if you go on social media, it's collect parole clutching, always parole clutching.
That's oh my gosh, terrible. This is going to be terrible. Well, there are solutions out there
that do not involve enforcement. I like that phrase. I'm going to use it. Yeah,
I like that. I get it a lot. It's now going to be my phrase. Okay. You know, having worked for
the government and worked in traffic, I would get that a lot. So we're specifically in the
fourth district that we have problems. Well, okay. So they're putting speed homes on Michigan,
and they're putting enforcement issues on Douglas. Well, Douglas, when I pulled up all the data,
almost all of the crashes on Douglas involve rear end. Someone's making a left and they get
rear ended. And then you've got the parking on those outside lanes. So you basically have to
like swallow them down Douglas to avoid either the left turns or the parking lanes.
This is a real simple solution. Milwaukee's been doing this. Larger city Chicago's been doing this.
Take out those some of those lanes. You don't need that much laneage for 10,000 cars today. You just
don't. You can go by it with one in each direction and a center turn lane. That takes care of almost
all of the problems. And then if you get as long as you have people going consistent,
it's all psychological too. Have you ever noticed that when you're on an open road,
I don't care what they posted at. You know, you go to Milwaukee on 94 and suddenly speed drops
55. No one's going 55 when they hit IKEA. They're not all slamming on the brakes because you're
out of wide freeway. You know, you're going to go fast. So it's all based on the design more than
the enforcement and the idea of having private individual subsidized police is very alarming.
That's a slipway slope. We don't want to go down because then where does it stop?
Same thing with Michigan. Let's put down speed homes except problem with speed homes is unless
you put it down on all the streets. What's going to happen? That traffic is going to go for Michigan.
And then I'm going to be eating in on chat home because they won't want to go down Michigan
because they don't want to hit those speed homes. So you've just shoved all that traffic from
one street to the other. So when I spent seven years as the speed home guy in Tulsa, I would have
to do entire neighborhoods. I did I did blanket neighborhoods with these things to keep that from
happening. Let's talk about economic development. Well, right now we have nothing. Sorry,
I got too far away from the microphone. So right now we don't really have anything to draw people in.
And I keep hearing the sorry excuse about where landlocked. Oh, we're landlocked. We can't
annex. And that's a sorry excuse. That's all it is. It's an excuse because what about places like
I don't know New York City is landlocked. It's an island. You know, but yet it seems to attract people.
You've got to have something to draw people in. And it's a good 20, 25 minutes to get from
the lakefront out to the freeway. So you've got to have something that's going to draw these people in.
And you know, we've just heard this what, 443 jobs that you enough I are going away. My son being one
of them. And their reason for moving to Jolly out was it was more easily accessible transportation
because it's at the junction of two major interstates and the railroads and the river. And
it's more logistics. So we've got to think of how do we get people off the freeway to come down.
And what do we got to do to keep them down here? And saying that we're landlocked. That's just
everybody's landlocked. What about the decline of recene and what to do about it? What's how we declining?
Well, we really don't have any jobs anymore. So as a new driver, a lot of my
fares are going down to Kenosha to Amazon. There's a lot of people have to go down there to work.
Or they have to go to one of the other warehousing facilities out along the freeway or up to Milwaukee.
What do you do about it? Well, this is a very complicated issue on what to do about it. And there's
no silver bullet. There's no easy fix to this. First, we got to acknowledge how bad the problem is.
And that's my frustration with a lot of rescindians is, oh, don't say anything negative.
Don't say negative, Michael. Don't say anything negative. Well, you know, you can't address a problem
if you don't figure out what the problem is. You know, if you've got health issues in your
heart's hurting and you don't tell the doctor that your heart's hurting, how are they going to know
if you got heart disease? You know, they're not. You can't, you've got to be realistic.
We got a lot of brown fields. We got a lot of environmental contamination.
And we hire consultants who wholesale adopt ideas from other areas, but they don't work here.
It's completely different contacts. What about the golf course? Let's talk about that.
Okay. You're going through questions really fast here.
Well, you know, there's a lot of pushback on the shoe park course thing, right? A lot of pushback.
And you know, no, that's up by the lighthouse right across the street from the lighthouse.
No, that's all right. It's up, it's actually in wind point, but it was given to the city we're
seeing as a park. And now they want to upgrade it and make it like the third best public golf
course, third best public golf course in the world. We've already got like other golf courses
for people to play at. So to do that, that means ripen down trees, completely redoing things,
and there's a lot of pushback. And when I'm hearing members of the council twisting themselves
into pretzels, then maybe they should open a pretzel stand at City Hall. You know, they get
offended that I call them the clownshole a lot. But when you twist yourself into these logic
nonsensicals, then maybe you know, accept some responsibility. But they're twisting themselves
to say, Oh, we need this. We need this. No, you don't. And your own constituents have said,
we don't want this. So if you're constituents and you're getting a lot of blowback on this,
maybe it's time to put it on pause, just let it simmer for a couple years and kind of see what
happens. You don't need to rush. If you're in a rush and you're doing things behind closed doors,
which is what they did with the golf course, that means there's something sneaky going on.
Because if you really want honest open transparent government, then you can't be doing things
behind closed doors. You've got to be out there and you got to be talking to people and people
say, No, we think this is a terrible idea. Maybe listen and don't say, Oh, I'm the council person.
I'm smarter than you. And it's what I see is a disconnect between the City Council and the people
who live here. The City Council doesn't respect their voters. They act like they're much more
intelligent. We got elected. We don't allow a big deal. That doesn't mean that you're smarter.
It just means you got to like to do a position for who knows why. But don't talk down to the other
people. Don't talk down to me. You don't talk, yeah, I'm just a dumb mover driver. That's why
I tell people, I'm just dumb mover driver. Don't talk down to me. Don't talk down to other people.
We're not stupid. Listen to what we have to say. For example, when I started running,
one of the complaints I heard was, remember, they had the temporary four-way stops at Elm and
gold. Yeah. Yeah. And that solved a really big problem because when you pull on an
area, you can't see because buildings in the way. Right. Okay. So the neighbors asked
my competitor if they could keep the signs up and he took them down. And it's like, these are
the people who live next to you saying, please do this. You know, no, I'm not going to do this.
I'm not going to do this at all. I'm going to do just the opposite of what you want
because I'm smarter than you. And that's needed a four-way stop for years because it's so
has same with Erie and a high street. There's another one. Well, you cannot, you physically cannot see
coming out of there and you basically take your life. I give you a 30-second free commercial.
30 seconds. Why should we vote for you? Because I would bring change. And I'm open. And I'm
open. I'm not going to run from public debate, public discourse. I've been insulted. You can
insult my all you want. That's fine. That's cool. I get that all the time. And it's no big deal.
You know, and you need the outside perspective of things. Somebody who did not grow up here
and spend their whole life here to kind of look at things with that fresh set of eyes.
You want to build a big arch in, Racine? A big arch. No, but you know, I've been kind of
have kidding about building a Racine wall like around Quebec. If you've been to Quebec City,
one of the coolest things that Quebec City is the wall because you can climb up on this wall.
And I'm like, yeah, we could build the Racine wall. That's a maybe you bring the arts to
Racine. No, Arch. Michael Schrader, he is running for the fourth district all day. The election
is April 7th Tuesday. Find your voting spot. And he's asking for your vote to be your fourth
district all day on April 7th. Thanks for coming in. No problem. Do appreciate it. Michael Schrader.