And his honor the city we're seeing mayor Corey Mason is in here when I get drink of water first.
Yeah, please I Don't want to dry dry memory.
There you go.
Yeah.
Oh wait now.
I'm almost good morning.
Good morning.
Good morning and Let us start.
We got a list of things to talk about here first.
Let's talk about let's get to the big one flock cameras.
Yeah, that's what everybody's talking about What I don't understand is that we had Rocco de Marquin here yesterday 12th district older.
Yeah
And there are cameras everywhere.
I cannot walk down a street or even in my neighborhood.
Right.
The other day we had kids on my lawn at three o'clock in the morning banging on my window.
They were on skateboards three o'clock in the morning.
I called my neighbor across the street.
He had the camera footage.
Right.
And there I could see the guy banging on my window.
Yeah.
So there's cameras everywhere.
What makes these cameras different?
than the thousands of cameras all over the neighborhood.
Yeah, it's a
great question.
I mean, it's a classic security versus freedom question that's been around really since, you know, the start of the Republic.
So what's different about it is it's something that the police use, that the state use to sort of take pictures of people's license plates and cars as they move through the community.
And by having multiple points around the community, you can track people's movements and identify people as they come in and out of town.
So the difference between the Ring doorbell is
If you decide you want to put a ring doorbell on your front door, you can decide to do that, right?
And you can decide if you want to share that information with the police if they're in the midst of of doing a criminal investigation.
And to be clear, ring doorbell cameras have to solve a number of crimes since they've been introduced.
It has been helpful to have them there.
I think the difference is a couple of things.
It's now the state using to track that information.
But then as concerning, so there's two big concerns that have been raised.
The first one is that we had two officers using it inappropriately.
There's investigations ongoing, but flock cameras shouldn't be used to track somebody you as a police officer might want to know where they are personally, right?
Like, because you've got a personal interest to know where somebody's coming or going from.
And so that's under investigation now, and that's disconcerning.
And if it was just that, I would have confidence that the police department, which is already
audited the process and found out about this from their own internal investigations, that we could do something about it.
As big a concern to me is you now have a company, not the city of Racine Police Department that's keeping all this data, but a company, a third party private company that takes all that data and stores it in the cloud somewhere, wherever that, you know, at some data center somewhere, I believe in Virginia.
And then they share that information with other people who might want to buy it.
or use it or other government agencies that might want to access it for whatever reason.
And so then people start saying, well, wait a minute, what do you mean they're sharing it with other government like does the police department sign off?
No, no, all the data is held by this third party company that has the data.
And so they're going to get to network around the country with all the flock cameras they have about where people are coming and going.
And again, to be clear, this has helped us catch some bad guys, right?
I mean, it's got some real use to it.
But it also has a space that's made a number of people in this city, across the state, across the country, very uncomfortable about what level of government surveillance that leads to, and not just government surveillance, but a private company surveillance that they can then sell to third party actors that we have no idea who they are and what they're doing with it.
Are we taking down the cameras and we're seeing so in 30 days So it was a very close vote.
It was a 7-7 tie that I broke But the motion was to remove the cameras in 30 days and terminate the contract then the The big debate that I think will happen in this year's budget is I think some people who voted to remove the flock cameras did so because they were Uncomfortable with reports they'd read about how flock was sharing this data with other companies and other
and other entities, but then said, but maybe we should get just another company to do the same thing, which to me is a bit of a head scratcher, but I think there's some people who are like, well, maybe keep doing plate readers, but not with this company.
I think other people on the council were like, don't do it at all.
And then other people on the council were like, look, if this is a tool that the police need, we should just give it to them.
I think, I mean, the way I've tried to think about it is, you know, to start 250th year as a country, right?
And we've got these,
this bill of rights that was enshrined in the Constitution.
And look, I have no doubt that if police didn't need to get warrants to go into people's houses, we could make more arrests.
No doubt about it.
Right.
If they just had any sort of suspicion, break down the walls, you know, the door, go in at any time, make an arrest, do all kinds of things.
But we live in a country where like, you know, you can't do that.
They did it one time.
Nazi Germany.
Sure.
Right.
Yeah.
And North
Korea.
Right.
But here you would say, yeah, you got to go in front of a judge and get a warrant.
Right.
And and the.
The law that the courts have come up with is this phrase that citizens have a reasonable expectation of privacy, right?
And so that was certainly extended to people's homes.
Then in 2018, there was a case that said, you know, that that actually extends to people's cell phones.
Government can't just dip into a phone conversation on somebody's cell phone whenever they want without getting a warrant.
People have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
I think.
This is one of those questions where the law hasn't quite caught up with the new technology.
Where do people get to have a reasonable expectation?
Are we really going to live in a country where if you drive around town, you have to know that the police, along with some third party company, is going to track your whereabouts and sell it to some other entity?
I mean, I'm old enough to be sort of a Cold War kid.
I grew up at the end of the Cold War.
And I remember we used to say, boy, in Soviet Russia,
In East Germany, they read your mail.
They track where you're going.
And we were like, thank goodness we live in a country that has freedom and doesn't do that stuff.
And here we are a generation later.
And I feel like out of a convenience for the technology that we have around us, that we're slowly slipping into the space where I worry for my kids, whether or not privacy is even going to be a thing that they understand anymore.
So it's a real question.
Then you add on to that.
This week, we're also hearing
the the tech titans of AI are saying oh my goodness this might just destroy everything if we don't slow this down a little bit.
I couldn't wrap my head around that though.
I didn't know what they were talking about.
I mean they're basically saying that the robots that they're creating these AI things are getting so creative that we're asking them to create the next smarter version of AI and then the next smarter version of AI after that and after that we won't even understand what's happening anymore.
If nothing else, I would say why don't we push the pause button on this for a year and figure out what the heck is going on and give people some expectation that if they drive around that the state isn't tracking their every move, right?
That's not too much to ask in a democracy.
And again, there is no doubt that being able to capture the image of every car that comes and goes from the city limits is an effective way to solve crimes.
It is.
But we also solve crimes before we had this technology too.
And it is a tool that we have, but we still have 180 some police officers that are sworn in fighting crime every day and a good bit of other tools that are available too to be able to do that.
So I just think until we have better clarity on this and this sort of sorts itself a little bit out a little bit better, it's an important thing to say, maybe this isn't what's best for the city.
I'll also say,
I hear what people are saying, but we solved a crime this way.
This was helpful.
I hear that.
But again, you could strip away every liberty that people have and move us into a police state.
And we might have very, very little crime.
And you could go the other direction and say, look, we're going to have no policing whatsoever.
And people can do whatever they want and have very high rates of crime.
But somewhere in this democracy, you've got to find a balance between freedom and security.
And right now, to me, these flock cameras
Lean a little bit too much against people's liberties and freedoms and so that's why I voted To terminate the contract and we will no doubt have a robust conversation about this when we introduced the budget I've made it clear when I introduced the budget I will not have money in there for flock cameras, so we'll see what happens Talk about AI.
Did you ever see the movie 2001 a space Odyssey?
I was just explaining this to my son.
This is from 1968 this movie and there's a computer in there how 9000 yes
What are you doing, Dave?
It takes over the spacecraft because it thinks that it's going to be disabled.
So it somehow gets the astronauts outside the spacecraft, kills one of them, and then we'll let the other one in.
Yeah.
And he's going to kill him, too.
And he said, sorry, Dave.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that was 1968 that AI was taking over outer space.
Yeah.
I mean, who would ever thought that that would have been a reality someday?
And for people that don't we're tired go get the movie 2001 is space Odyssey they run an internal classic movies from time to time and the computer takes over and starts killing the astronauts because it thinks it's going to be disabled.
Right.
Right.
Wow.
And the stuff and that always seemed the stuff of far, far away science fiction.
But just in the last year,
the
pace of the AI progress, it should give everybody pause.
And look, when's the last time you heard Titans of a particular industry saying, somebody should regulate us.
I mean, we're kind of out of control here.
If somebody doesn't stop this, we don't know what's going to happen.
I mean, I can't think of a time an industry was asking the government basically, good, please regulate it for us.
Otherwise, we don't know what's going to happen.
That that should be enough to give everybody pause to say, why don't we pump the brakes on this a little bit before?
we go much further.
Even the AI companies, they're saying the same thing.
That's what I'm saying.
These are anthropic and all these open AI, they're all saying the same thing.
Yeah.
His honor, city received Mayor Corey Mason is in and we were talking about the flock cameras and we, we did have someone here who wrote a message and I'll read it.
Okay.
Says, I agree that the misuse of flock cameras by officers is disconcerting, but it seems like the exception, not the rule.
I don't agree with flock selling information to non law enforcement entities, but as a citizen of Racine,
I appreciate the fact that the police have a tool to track people who have done or are doing bad things to keep me and my community safe.
I don't care if cameras log my license plate because I'm not doing anything wrong.
I can't imagine the police even caring or even looking at where my car has been.
Please find another comparable system that protects data better.
It will be interesting to see crime statistics and what goes unsolved once there is no more access to this.
This happened to me recently.
got a letter from the city of Milwaukee saying they're going to suspend my driver's license because they didn't pay a parking ticket.
I hadn't parked in Milwaukee in over 10 years.
So my wife went online, found the citation.
It was for Mercedes Benz with my license plate while I don't drive in Mercedes Benz.
So I called the city of Milwaukee, very nice lady.
She said, oh, I see.
We transpose two of the numbers on the license plate.
And we'll take care of this in six weeks.
It'll all be done at six weeks.
I got, you see, it's suspending my license in two days.
I put a hold on that.
A week later, two weeks later, I got a letter from the city of Milwaukee saying, we strained it out, there's nothing more you have to do.
I kept that letter and the citation in my glove compartment so it doesn't rear its ugly head.
It's smart.
People make mistakes.
They do.
And they can do it with your information and try to, I get out of it real easy.
Yeah.
People don't get out of it that easy.
I was to go down the list here because we got some other things to talk about.
Shared revenues on the list.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, this
is an ongoing debate that I think we'll see.
But, you know, people will understandably ask, you know, what is the deal with how cities and schools and counties are funded?
And for really the better part of two decades, the aid that comes back from the state, from local taxes that are collected, is supposed to come through and has for 80 plus years through a formula called shared revenue.
But for like 20 years, that dollar amount has been frozen, right?
And so we get literally the same amount of money in actual dollar terms that we did in 2003.
Well, costs have gone up substantially.
So that money is worth like 45 cents on the dollar.
If our state aid in 2003 when it was frozen and then it got cut in 2011, but if that had just stayed paced with inflation,
The city of Racine would have received over $300 million more in state aid in the last 23 years.
So the end result of that is, what the city has been asked to do, and our city is not unique in this, it is a little bit because our property values are lower, but every city has had to struggle how to figure out how to fill the gap as the state stopped sending money back to local cities and counties and school districts.
So we've been in this position where we're either making cuts,
or raising local property taxes at the same time.
It's a terrible trend to be in.
And so it's the reason why school districts have to go to referendum.
It's the reason the city of Racine had to go to referendum just to keep nine firefighters on staff last year.
The state's sitting on a $3 billion surplus.
There is no reason a good chunk of that shouldn't go to actually fund local units of government the way that it used to.
So it's a critically important piece.
This is the last
budget that we will put together that has the federal aid that we received under the Biden administration, under the American Rescue Plan.
And so our budget will be pretty static from this year to next.
But next year, when that money's gone, if we don't see an increase in shared revenue, it is gonna put more stress on services, more stress on local property taxpayers, and it really shouldn't.
I mean, we really need the state to pay its fair share towards these local services.
I mean, that was the deal that was cut years ago.
It used to be that local units of government actually collected the sales tax.
They kept it all local, right?
And the state said, no, no, no, no.
We'll collect it for you.
We'll be much better at it.
And then we'll share some of that back with you because we've collected it.
And just over time, it's come to be seen as the state's money and the local units of government and schools and everyone else is pleading with the state, well, please give us a little bit.
And so,
To me, it is one of the most defining issues that the legislature is going to have to face coming up with a new governor.
Are we finally going to get to a place where we can do something about making sure that cities and school districts and counties who provide human services can actually thrive and provide the services that they need instead of pitting local units of government against their taxpayers or we're constantly like, well, we have less money than we did last year, but the
police and firefighters wanted to raise the last couple years.
So we got to do that.
So how do you do that if the aid that you're getting from the state remains flat or even gets cut?
So one of the most important things that we'll be doing this fall in the spring, in addition to putting our own budget together, is going to be talking to the next governor and the legislature about making sure that we get our fair share of state aid.
And maybe do
a little repair on the roads.
Yeah, I mean, all these, I mean, fix that bumpy roads.
We have a
a fire station that we're going to build a new one next year, we have to build a new one.
And you could argue that where are you going to get the money and the levita pay for it?
We literally got the west wall of that fire station held up with steel braces.
And when the fire truck goes in, the wall shakes, right?
We are we are past the point of being able to do patchwork repairs on it.
If you go to the fire station or the police station parking ramp, we have nets underneath the the ceilings because the concrete is literally crumbling.
onto the squad cars, right?
I mean, this is two generations of not funding local units of government.
You defer the item, you defer the item, you defer the item, and then the roads get bumpier or the services remain cut.
And then at the same time as we're getting less funding, we have to go to referendum and say, can you help us taxpayers keep these nine police officers?
Because our fire fighters, rather, because our calls for service are going up.
People have to be able to get to the hospital when they're sick.
We need to put out those fires.
So it's just put cities in an impossible situation.
And my hope is, with the new legislature and a new governor, they might finally hear what we're saying, that you can't put all of government funding onto local property taxpayers.
I don't know of another state.
There might be one, but I don't know of another state that puts so much pressure on property taxpayers to pay for government services compared to other places that do it differently.
What does our humble little city have to do with Canada?
Great question.
So, you know, the Wisconsin's number one training partner is Canada, like by a lot, right?
And so, and we're also on the Great Lakes.
And so we share these Great Lakes with with our friends in Canada, including Lake Ontario, regardless of what the president might want to rename it.
But, you know, everybody is understandably talking about affordability.
And we are
You know, in this space, the city of Racine is part of this Great Lakes Cities initiatives where we're part of a group of more than 100 cities on both the Canadian and US side.
And we've just gone from scratching our heads to outlight just being perplexed about why on earth would we be in the middle of a terrible trade war with our biggest and longest trading partner that we've had for, you know, more than 100 years.
And so.
So a number of cities in that space became sister cities.
Our sister city in Canada is Brantford, Ontario.
We just made that visit, that first official visit this year from, I went to go visit them and they came to visit us.
But part of that was, at its best, what sister cities are supposed to do is when national governments are sort of having these spats with each other and talking about wars, whether they're trade wars or actual wars,
The Sister City program is meant to be an ability to sort of cool that down a little bit and to do some things to say, hey, whatever the national narrative might be about how your leaders don't like our leaders or vice versa, we have this relationship at a local level with our community and your community.
And when you repeat those twinning of cities or sister cities again and again, it can help stave off some of the worst effects of it.
But candidly,
You know, this is President Trump's fault, right?
I mean, there's this whole sort of picking a trade war with Canada.
Canada is where we get a great deal of our energy.
It's where we get our lumber.
It's where we get these things.
And these tariffs are essentially taxes that we're going to put on our own residents to have to pay for these things.
So given the number of jobs that we have that are based on our trade with Canada and the number of things that we import and export to Canada, it's not helping at a time when we really
really need things to be more affordable.
And it's just one of these things where I thought it was important for the city to take a position on what our country is doing and just really to call out the absurdity of renaming Lake Ontario.
That's just petty and childish and it doesn't reflect well on Americans or people from Wisconsin or people from Racine.
And so we thought it was important to call it out.
So we passed resolution at Council of Doing So.
I know Alder Weiner wanted to remove the parts that were critical of President Trump, but the rest of the council felt it was important to leave that in.
And so we did.
And so I think it's one of these things where it should have some sort of nexus with Racine if we're going to take positions on it.
But there's a lot of companies that have a footprint in Racine and a lot of products that we export into Canada that it felt like it was an important thing for us to take a stand on.
Dear friend of mine has a friend from Canada and I saw on the other night I got to meet him and I said oh from America to Maybe I shouldn't have said that that's a sensitive issue.
I maybe should have kept my mouth shut
and not say something like that I mean I can tell you from being up there and talking to our Canadian friends with the Great Lakes City's initiative.
They are deeply deeply offended They don't find it cute at all.
I know after I said it I said maybe I shouldn't have said that no there I mean there is No, I mean look if you
We have had this great relationship with Canada through the Great Lakes and the great trading partner for a long time and really since the war of 1812 we've had this really really strong relationship with them that has just been critically important that and I you know The the tensions between our country literally haven't existed since the 18 teens, right?
That's the last time we had an issue with it I should tell you a story when I took a legislature I was part of the Great Lakes legislative caucus and we went to go visit
the province of Ontario.
So it's the eight Great Lakes States and the two provinces and we're there.
And they tell the story of, you know, in Canada, they still do the British Parliament thing where they wear the robes and the wigs and do the whole, you know, Prime Minister's questions, but they have this pomp and circumstance when they walk in and they hold this wooden oak mace that they walk in with and sort of a ceremonial thing to open ceremony.
And when we get back out,
Um, there's the original mace that's in this display case.
And he said, well, let me tell you the story about this.
So during the war of 1812, um, at some point, some, uh, some Americans come into Canada and steal this Ontario ace and take mace and take it back to to the U. S. The.
The argument that the, uh, the excuse, if you will, that the British used to then burn down the White House in the war of 1812 was that.
They've got our mace.
They've got our mace.
We don't have your mace.
We don't have your mace.
Fast forward, it's the end of World War II.
They're in Canada at some conference.
Roosevelt's there meeting with the Canadian Prime Minister and they're talking about how they're going to save Europe and all these things.
And FDR says, by the way, you can have your mace back.
We've had it the whole time.
So, you know, we've managed to have this great longstanding relationship with Canada based on trade and mutual friendship and a shared responsibility over the Great Lakes.
I don't know why the president would want to antagonize their relationship and make things more expensive and harder for us to keep our economy going.
So with any luck, we can get back to loving our neighbors to the north, but we shouldn't joke about this 51st state thing.
It's not.
I know after it came out of my mouth, I wanted to say, you grab your words back because I don't want to offend people.
Yeah.
All right.
Thank you, mayor, for coming in.
My pleasure.
Boy, that
was a long session.
One last thing.
If I can just one last thing.
So during the council.
Flock debate, really important.
It was great.
At the same time, my son, who's a freshman at Case, scored his first goal at the JV soccer team.
So I just wanted to give a little congratulatory shout out to my son.
Sorry I missed the game, but congratulations.
All right.
Congratulations.
Shout out to
your son.
Yeah.
All right.
His honor, the mayor of Racine, Corey Mason.
Thank you for coming.
See you next month.
Absolutely.
All right.