From Outer Drive to Mayor of Detroit | Mike Duggan '76

In this episode of Slightly Less Scripted, we welcome Mike Duggan ’76, former Mayor of Detroit and current gubernatorial candidate, as he returns to Catholic Central for a campus tour and conversation.

Mike reflects on his formative years at the Outer Drive campus, his path from law into public service, and the experiences that shaped his leadership style. He also shares his strategic vision for Michigan’s future, with insight into key issues like educational reform, affordable housing, and AI infrastructure.

A thoughtful conversation connecting past, present, and the road ahead for Michigan.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:22

Welcome back to slightly less scripted podcast. We're here with Mike Duggan, class of 1976. Mike, welcome back to campus.

SPEAKER_00 0:30

Well, thanks for having me back, Steven.

SPEAKER_01 0:31

Yeah, it's good to it's good to have you here. When was the last time that you can remember being back at CC?

SPEAKER_00 0:37

Well, my son graduated the first class out of this campus in 2006. And I've been back over the years for various activities, but not since the edition has been put on. This is amazing.

SPEAKER_01 0:47

Right. We we just went for a quick tour. What were your thoughts of the addition?

SPEAKER_00 0:51

You know, the the school that I went to on West Outdoor Drive was three corridors stacked on top of each other. And uh you parked uh in the tennis court parking lot, and then in March, everybody got kicked out of their parking space for tennis season. So I came here and drove around the campus and saw all these cars and all this space. Uh it is uh it's gotta be something you're really proud of.

SPEAKER_01 1:14

Yeah, there's a lot of expansion going on here. So I I graduated in uh 2018, and then I came back to work uh in 2019 as our esports coach first, and then got into digital marketing working with Mr. Sova behind the cameras. So it's been uh something that I've been proud of as an alumnus to see too. But yeah, it's a it's a special place, a lot of things going on right now.

SPEAKER_00 1:37

Uh yeah, the uh the business center, the uh aviation center, uh your racing simulator center. I couldn't have imagined any of these things.

SPEAKER_01 1:45

Did you have a favorite?

SPEAKER_00 1:48

Uh you know, I think uh the the room, uh what do you call it? The immersive theater. The immersive theater was just stunning. Yeah. So I'd like to have gone to class and something like that.

SPEAKER_01 1:58

Right? I know there's a there's a lot of opportunities. Take me back to uh when you were at CC, you mentioned Outer Drive. How how was it? Do you have fond memories of it?

SPEAKER_00 2:07

Oh, yeah. But my family lived in Livonia, and uh they would drop me at six mile in Middlebell, and I would catch a D dot bus, and it would come down six mile and drop you off, and then I'd take uh uh D dot bus uh back home. A lot of folks uh went to uh high school on uh the public buses uh then and uh yeah it was uh we f it was a very close group. Now my class was 140 students, the smallest they'd ever had. And the next year was the year they decided to leave Detroit uh and and went out to Redford. Uh but we were at particularly, I think, tight-neck class because we were so small.

SPEAKER_01 2:48

Yeah. And you did some activities for SC, right? Tennis and debate team?

SPEAKER_00 2:52

I I was in the debate team all four years. I played tennis for a couple of years. Uh I quit the tennis team my sophomore year. I was actually playing like second doubles varsity. And we had a match against Cranbrook, and we went out there, and I had never seen tennis in a bubble before. But Cranbrook actually had an indoor bubble where they played, and uh we won one set against the Cranbrook kids. The rest of our guys got clobbered. But as I was walking out bragging, we took a set from them. One of the Cranbrook parents said, You didn't think you were playing our varsity, did you? And I said, What? They said, You were playing our JV. So when the Cranbrook JV slaughtered the CC Varsity, I said, You know what? I am so far away from competing in tennis, and after that I decided to concentrate on debate.

SPEAKER_01 3:41

Yeah, which you I did a little bit of research. I wanted to show you something that's kind of cool. So this was in our uh in our yearbook from your year. Okay. I just wanted you to take a look at it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:55

Yeah. No, we won the state championship that year. You remember that photo? Oh my god, do I ever? We finished third at the Nationals in Colorado Springs. Uh it was uh it was quite the team. But yeah, we'll make sure to put it in.

SPEAKER_01 4:08

We'll make sure to put it up on the screen. But I was I saw that and I said, wow, the the face has uh quite a resemblance still.

SPEAKER_00 4:13

Yeah, yeah, not the hair. Yeah, those are good days.

SPEAKER_01 4:18

So, I mean, obviously the debate team and then going into um into politics. Did you ever envision that in high school?

SPEAKER_00 4:26

You know, I didn't know. My um my senior year, I had a uh scholarship offer to debate at uh Northwestern, which was what I was planning to do. And I applied to Michigan really, because they came over the loudspeaker one day and said, tomorrow's the deadline. So I threw together an application, which you could do back then, there was nothing to it. Uh and and after uh uh the last year debating, I thought four years of this is enough. And I ended up uh uh just going to Michigan and and uh pursuing English and political science, which was the right decision. But you know, CC gave me the options to do uh whatever uh whatever I wanted to do.

SPEAKER_01 5:08

Yeah. And then from that, uh ended up going to Michigan Law School too, right?

SPEAKER_00 5:12

Right. Cool. Right, seven years in Ann Arbor.

SPEAKER_01 5:15

And then uh past that, for those who don't know, before you were mayor, what kind what was your early career kind of like?

SPEAKER_00 5:22

So uh I coming out of law school, most of my classmates were applying for jobs in New York or Chicago or LA. And I was a ri I originally grew up in Detroit. And I said, I'm only applying for jobs in Detroit. And my classmates said, Are you crazy? Uh why would you do that? But I wanted to be part of the city. And so I ended up for a while being the deputy county executive. I oversaw the building of the McNamara Terminal and the airport that you fly in and out of now. I chaired the stadium authority that built uh Comerica Park and Ford Field. Uh I got elected prosecutor. I had an assistant prosecutor work for me by the name of Mike Cox, uh, who has has done okay for himself.

SPEAKER_01 6:04

Also CC Grant. We had on the podcaster uh earlier this year.

SPEAKER_00 6:07

And now he's running against me for governor, but we're still good friends. Uh and uh and then ran the hospital system in Detroit Medical Center for a while and then got elected mayor.

SPEAKER_01 6:16

That's I mean, an incredible career, and it seemed like almost everywhere you went you were able to help and provide and add value. I gotta say, you mentioned uh DTW. I I was just flying in and out of uh Boston. I really appreciate DTW, the way it's uh laid out and the way it's uh constructed because it's a it's an easy airport to be a part of.

SPEAKER_00 6:35

So well, it's interesting, and CC never leaves you. So I was deputy county executive in the early 90s, and we had the biggest snowstorm blizzard that it hit in about 15 years, and the county road crew worked for me. Uh, and and CC was in in Redford at the time, and county does the township roads. And in the middle of this blizzard, I get a phone call, and it's Father Elmer, my high school principal, uh, on the phone. And uh, so I'm like, okay, what's this? And I get on the phone and he says, Hey, Mike, haven't I talked to you while I said, Yeah, like 15 years when I when I graduated. He says, I got a favor to ask you. I said, What's that, Father? He says, We're deciding whether to cancel class tomorrow. I said, This is an historic blizzard. Cancel classes. Uh, not so quick. He says, I just want to know if you could just get in and plow Breakfast Drive from 96. I could get open. Mike, don't you think as a CC grad? So I call out to the road guys and I said, Look, it may be five in the morning, but we will plow Breakfast Drive. So Father Elmer announces CC's open tomorrow. The next day, I get a call from the Redford Superintendent of Schools. The Redford public schools are completely closed, but the county trucks came in, plowed the entrance to Catholic Central, and left town. The Redford schools were closed for four more days. And CC was opening. Uh, and my boss, county executive at McNamara, who's getting inundated with calls, says, What did you do? Uh, and Father Elmer sent me a pen and said, Thank you. But it doesn't matter how long you're gone, you're still scared of your principal. That's what I learned.

SPEAKER_01 8:17

That is that is an amazing story. And it sounds like him too. Oh my gosh, that sounds just like Father Elmer. I wouldn't put it past him at all. Wow. So when you first dec what made you first decide to run for mayor of Detroit?

SPEAKER_00 8:31

Uh well, you know, I was I was born in the city, and and the city uh that I grew up in was a magical place. Anybody who wanted to work or get a good job in the auto industry, the neighborhoods were just beautiful, the downtown shopping was was special, and in the course of my life, everything that we knew was taken away from us. The auto plants uh moved out, the stores moved out, uh, the banks moved out, Catholic Central moved out.

SPEAKER_01 8:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:56

Uh as did a number of the other uh uh schools in the in the city. Uh and uh and so I was running the um the Detroit Medical Center at the time, which had been in financial trouble, but we turned it around, had a lot of success. Uh the hospital system grew from eleven thousand employees to fourteen thousand employees while I was there. And I'd be at the um uh cafeteria at lunch, and and the city employees would come up to me and say, You gotta run for mayor. At the time the city was in bankruptcy. Yeah, half the street lights were out, the parks were closed all summer, they didn't bother to cut them, the lace and fire didn't show up. Uh and I felt like I needed to do something about it. And there's not been any place in the country where the racial division uh has been greater than in uh Detroit and the suburbs. And I thought um I had a chance to maybe uh heal that and uh I thought I'd give it a try. And people of the city uh have just been enormously supportive of me for for twelve years.

SPEAKER_01 9:58

Yeah. And you know, when you talk about taking over after the financial crisis, what what was that the biggest hurdle that you had to face when you first became mayor? Or was there what was the first problem that you had to tackle in the city?

SPEAKER_00 10:10

Yeah, there wasn't any one thing. So the day I got sworn in in January 1 of 2014, it was the polar vortex. You had the freezing temperatures and blizzards. And so as soon as I got sworn in, I went out to one of the road yards and jumped in the truck with a snowplow operator, which horrified everybody, but I didn't want to hear from the supervisors, and I rode out with him. He had no radio to radio back to the base. He had no map. They told him, Go out, grash it till you run out of salt and come back. Uh and I got to see firsthand uh how completely dysfunctional all the city services were. Uh, and so we had to fix everything. But we replaced 60,000 streetlights, we built uh we bought 30 new ambulances, put them on the street, and got prompt response. We cut the grass in the parks, uh, really recruited heavily. The manufacturing industry has got lots of auto plants back. Uh and uh eventually, you know, we we ended up with you know uh going from a 20% unemployment rate down to six percent. Uh and there's now, as you've been downtown, you know, there's billions of dollars of construction. Uh and that's what happens when you let go of the black versus white city versus suburb fighting and you all pull together.

SPEAKER_01 11:30

Yeah, route for the same city.

SPEAKER_00 11:32

That's exactly what we do. And I think today uh people in suburbs are proud to say when they go around the country, I'm from Detroit. Fifteen years ago, that that really wasn't true.

SPEAKER_01 11:40

Might not have been that way.

SPEAKER_00 11:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:43

So when how are you able to I just saw something on, I think it was Instagram or maybe uh Facebook or something, but I saw you're basically able to leave the city with a surplus budget. How'd how'd you go about doing that uh for a city that was you know in bankruptcy 15 years before?

SPEAKER_00 12:00

So everything i is about um just getting into the details and managing things right. And so I went into a hospital system that had lost a hundred million dollars a year for five years, and the board had voted to close receiving hospital, voted to close uh Hudson Hospital, gonna vote to close Sider Hospital, which was right down from the old uh CC campus. And I was the prosecutor at the time. And they called me up and they said, We want you to come run the hospital system. And I said, Why don't you guys hire a doctor? And they said, We had a doctor, he's the guy that lost the hundred million dollars a year for five years. We need somebody who will change health care. And I went in and I got with the employees and said, you know, every time somebody comes in the emergency room, they're sitting on a plastic chair for three hours before they get to see a doctor. Uh nobody wants to come here. So let's stop complaining about the problems and let's fix the service. And we did a 29-minute emergency room guarantee where we fixed all the processes. People came back in huge numbers. We rebuilt the system uh and we made money nine straight years. And it was by getting everybody going the same direction. At the city, it all starts with a job. And Detroit hadn't had a new manufacturing plant in 20 years. So I sat down with Mary Barr at General Motors, I sat down with Bill Ford, I sat down with Sergio Marchione, who ran what was then Fiat Chrysler, and I just said, the next time you guys switch models and you have to build a new parts plant, I want a chance to pitch you and tell me what it would take for Detroit to win. And they told me we got to clean up your permitting process, you have to make this easy. We went in and made Detroit the easiest place to build, and we started landing one parts plant after another. And and then in 2018, Jeep announced they were gonna build a 5,000 employee Jeep assembly plant. And it basically came down to Detroit and South Carolina, where far too many of those uh plants are being built, and we won. And when we brought those jobs back to Detroit, employment went up, tax revenues went up, we ran the city efficiently, and and as you say, I was really proud, Stephen. When I left, I left my successor, uh Mayor Sheffield, with a$500 million surplus so that she can continue. Detroit's still got a long way to go, but she's doing a really nice job of building on the progress we've made, and I left her behind the resources to be able to do that.

SPEAKER_01 14:23

Yeah, and it we have the companies there that want to invest too. I mean, we had Matt on the uh just last week, and he was telling us about how much Dan has invested into Detroit. But if you if you just go down and walk it, you can see, I mean, there's cranes everywhere, there's construction going on, so it's it's been an amazing turnaround for sure.

SPEAKER_00 14:39

And and Matt, of course, Matt Risick and and what Dan Gilbert's done at Bedrock is amazing. But when uh I was a kid in Detroit, everybody my age, the Hudson's building, which at one time was the largest apartment store in America, everybody remembers the 12th floor. You always went to see Santa Claus. It was a magical uh uh festival. And when Hudson closed in the 80s and then was demolished ten years later, it left a hole in the heart of longtime Detroiters, and that property sat empty for 30 years. Now Dan Gilbert is building a 45-story tower, the second tallest building in Michigan, and he put the old Hudson's display windows out on the sidewalks. And it is bringing people back saying this is what is so phenomenal about Gilbert's done, is he's tied the history of the city uh to the future of the city, and there's no doubt he's had a huge impact uh on our recovery.

SPEAKER_01 15:36

Yeah, I think Matt had said something that, you know, Dan wants to see Detroit become the city of the 21st century, which I think it, you know, easily could do. Uh in terms of uh I I've heard a lot about your your leadership. In terms of leadership, what how do you feel that you like to lead, you know, people that work for you or other people within, you know, the community?

SPEAKER_00 15:57

Um well, everybody has metrics. And so if uh you are in charge of the neighborhood department, you have X number of houses that you have to get uh demolished in a week. Uh if you are in charge of the uh uh fire department, the ambulance has to have to be there in seven minutes, thirty seconds. Every department has standards they have to live up to. And every week they come into a cabinet meeting on Wednesday at nine o'clock and report out. And if they make it, that's great. If they don't, we say, Do you need some help? Uh and uh everybody holds everybody else accountable. Uh and when you do that, you dramatically change uh the quality of life in the city, which is what has happened. People are moving back in big numbers, property values are soaring, businesses are coming back. Yeah. But it was really just everybody doing their jobs.

SPEAKER_01 16:49

Do you have any advice for maybe the the high school students today, not just from here, but anywhere, just some early career advice, some things that you you know you might have taken away from your time?

SPEAKER_00 17:00

You know, I would say just to everybody, do what's in your heart. Uh and when uh I was coming out of uh law school, I could have made more money faster in Los Angeles and or or Miami. Uh, but the career I had, I wanted to be part of Detroit. And uh the career that I had as a result of that decision worked. I came out of law school, and uh I was at a litigation firm and I won big cases my first year, and I was in the newspaper and I had a corner office in the Penobscot building. I could see Tiger Stadium out one window and uh the Detroit River out the other window. And Wayne County came to me and there was a new county executive. They lost a bunch of their cases. I was 25 years old, and they said, We want you to come to the county and be ahead of our litigation. It was a 50% pay cut. And my classmates are, are you out of your mind? But I felt like I could do more good at the county. I was single, I had a Labrador, I could afford the pay cut. I couldn't have done it five years later if I'd have been married with with kids. But that decision led to where I am in uh uh the governor's campaign and where I was as mayor of Detroit. But every decision I made, um I I did what was in my heart, even when it didn't look like it made sense on on paper. And when you're young and you're starting out, yeah, that's your time to ignore what everybody's telling you, do what you uh you want to drive.

SPEAKER_01 18:34

Yeah. Would you say uh following your heart, is that kind of why you are running as an independent now for uh for governor?

SPEAKER_00 18:42

You know, it's for sure. Uh you know, when I when I ran for mayor, everybody said a white guy doesn't have a chance in an 83% black city. And I felt like one of two things would happen. Either I would run and lose, but I would at least change the conversation, or uh if I won, I could permanently change politics in Detroit. Uh and and so I was willing to try it. I'm now at the same thing at the state. This state is so uh i is being so badly hurt by the Republicans and Democrats fighting nonstop and lancing and not solving things that I looked at it and said, I can get elected governor as a Democrat. It'd be a lot easier to get elected as a Democrat than as an independent. Yeah. But if I ran as a Democrat, all the Republicans would be against me because I tried to beat them in their House and Senate races. Sure. There's a faction in the Democratic Party that doesn't like me anyway. And when I left, it'd just swing back to the Republicans every two or four years like it always does, and it'd undo what I did. And I thought, I'm just wasting time in my life. And so I looked at this and said, if I'm gonna have a long-term impact, you know, you know the story. Sixty percent of third graders in Michigan don't read a grade level. It's been dropping for twenty years. We lead the country. And our young people under 30 moving out of state. It's been going that way for 20 years. If we're gonna make a real change, I think we needed somebody who wasn't gonna move the state right or left, was gonna move the state forward. And I thought, let's give it a try uh and see if we can't build uh and and now the most amazing things happen. I got 20 unions that endorse me, yeah, and almost all the business groups have endorsed me. They're not used to being in the same room on the same team, but I'm saying we're gonna work out fair solutions together instead of trying to outvote each other. And uh, I think there's a lot of excitement.

SPEAKER_01 20:31

Was that was was it a little scary coming out and and doing it, or did you know that that was the right the right move for you?

SPEAKER_00 20:38

It wasn't scary at all. So you you just it was one of two choices. When I realized I couldn't accomplish anything as a Democratic governor, I made the decision right away. I'm not running as a Democrat. So there were two choices run as an independent or go do something else with my life. And I've got time that I that I can uh go do something else. So I figured I'm gonna try and and run. And if the people of this state want a third choice, they'll vote for me.

SPEAKER_01 21:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:05

And if they don't, uh, then I will go on to the next phase of of my career, but it's been a tremendously enjoyable experience. I am going to farms and small towns all around the state. High schools. Uh high schools, exactly. I'm but I'm up in Traverse City West, you know, sitting with the high school seniors because I'm trying to figure out why are these young people leaving? I don't need to read a report. I like ask, what are you thinking? And so I'm sitting with 17-year-olds in Traverse City High School, and I said, What's the biggest thing on your mind? And these kids say, affordable housing. And I said, Affordable housing. When I was 17, the most pressing thing on my mind is who's playing in the next concert. And we didn't worry about those things. Sure. But you're they're seeing their older siblings and their friends being forced to move out because they can't afford the housing and they're wondering what's going to happen to them. Then I go up to Marquette and I Visiting the hospital up there and I said, What's your biggest problem? They said, We can't fill our entry-level positions because the young people can't afford the housing. And I thought, I built 6,000 affordable housing units in Detroit. I thought it was a Detroit problem. And it's so interesting as you go around the state to see uh how many different areas of the state have exactly the same uh issues. The people of the state are a lot more unified than it appears. Politicians may be divided, but the people are are actually pretty unified and just wanting solutions to their problem.

SPEAKER_01 22:33

Yeah, for sure. When you you know you announce that you're running and you come up with a platform to kind of run on, what are the the three big kind of targets that you're looking at at solving for for Michigan people that that you've heard concerns of?

SPEAKER_00 22:52

Oh, there's no question that you know we are now 44th in America. In third grade reading, we've been dropping for 20 straight years. Um the solutions in you go to Mississippi where they've gone from 49th in America to ninth in America in ten years. I've sat with the superintendent. Uh uh, Louisiana, Idaho have done the same thing. There was nothing fluky about Mississippi. They teach the kids phonics, they start them out in small class sizes in the early grades, uh, they have intensive tutoring for the kids who start to fall behind, and they don't change the curriculum every year. There's nothing about any of that that's Republican or Democrat. But because the legislators are so busy fighting with each other, they don't actually solve the problem. Um I built six thousand affordable housing units uh in the city of Detroit without much help from the state. Uh but I understand what it takes uh to to cut the bureaucracy, ease the regulations, and finance those houses, we need to do that across the state. And then the big thing is we gotta bring the tech jobs of the future here or we're gonna find in ten years that the exodus of young people is gonna accelerate uh dramatically. The jobs that you are training kids for in your labs here at Catholic Central, if those jobs don't exist in the state of Michigan when they get out of school, uh it's one thing to to lose the kids to Miami or to Silicon Valley, we're losing them to Columbus, Ohio, and Indianapolis.

SPEAKER_01 24:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:16

Uh and and we got to change that and bring the jobs of the future here. And it doesn't matter where I go in the state. But people want to see the jobs of the future here, they want the kids to learn in school, and and they want the housing so that their their children or grandchildren stay in the state. And uh I think we're gonna find those as things we can address.

SPEAKER_01 24:33

Are you a big believer in uh tech and AI and moving forward?

SPEAKER_00 24:36

Well, you if you aren't a big believer in AI, you're gonna get it run over by it. Um and AI is coming, it's gonna take away a lot of jobs. And for those who aren't you know familiar, I explain it this way. My great-grandfather had a blacksmith shop in Michigan Avenue in Detroit in the late 1800s. He made his living shoeing horses. He got put out of business by Henry Ford, the Model T. In fact, family lore is that Henry Ford so admired his craftsmanship, he hired him to work at the Ford Motor Company. My great-grandfather made more money working as a craftsman of Ford than he ever made shoeing horses, built the house, led to the success of our family because the auto industry was here. But if he had been a blacksmith in Ames, Iowa and been wiped out, he'd have been working for wages on a farm. AI is coming. It's going to wipe out segments of jobs, and it's gonna create huge segments of jobs. Sure. Nothing says the same state that loses jobs also gains jobs, right?

SPEAKER_01 25:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:39

Uh, and so if we are not waking up every day saying, how do we make Michigan attractive uh for the jobs of the future, uh, we're gonna we're gonna find that the exit of young people today is nothing compared to where it'll be 10 years from now. And that's the biggest thing I'm gonna do. I'm spending a lot of time in Silicon Valley with those companies. Sure. Saying, what will it take to make Michigan competitive? And we're gonna have a governor who understands it and goes in every day. And I can't tell you we'll beat Miami, but we darn sure are gonna beat Columbus.

SPEAKER_01 26:09

For sure. When you talk about um AI and uh the data centers and all the resources required for it, you know, how what is your take on, you know, the amount that you kind of have to um you have to fund, basically. I mean, it's a large amount.

SPEAKER_00 26:24

So when when I spend time with the big tech companies in Silicon Valley and I say, you know, what would it take for you to come to Detroit, come to Michigan? It's kind of scary what they say.

SPEAKER_01 26:34

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 26:34

They say the the capital investment are all moving into AI. And these AI companies consume a huge amount of data, which means we need data centers. There's no place that's got more chaos in citing data centers in Michigan. These data centers consume a huge amount of energy. All we know about Michigan is every time you guys have a storm, you have blackouts. Why would we be thinking about Michigan? Well, that's kind of scary. I'm sitting with the CEOs of the companies that you would recognize, and they're flat out telling me they're not even thinking about Michigan. And so we do have to have data centers here. But this chaos that we have right now has to stop. The governor has to step in and say, we're gonna have a single standard. People are right to be concerned their electric rates are gonna go up. Uh, and you're gonna have to build an enormous amount of power. We have to have airtight agreements that the developers pay for that. These are the richest companies in the world, Microsoft and Google and Meta and Oracle. They can afford to build out their power centers. We need airtight agreements. All that cost is paid by them. None of it gets shifted onto the ratepayers. Uh, the water that is used to cool the computers can't go back into the rivers and streams and rave the temp raise the temperatures. You have to build closed loop systems with refrigerators to keep that same water to cool them to protect the environment. And the local community has to be able to make its own decision. When I'm the governor, I'm gonna say these are the standards. We're gonna protect the community. If your community doesn't want it, you don't have to have it. If your community does want it, I'm gonna send you legal experts from the governor's team to sit with your local attorney to negotiate against those Microsoft and Google attorneys. Yeah. To say, here's what we did in Celine, here's what we did in Van Buren, here's what we did in Lowell, here's here's how you protect them. Uh, but I do think we can build data centers where they are wanted in the communities and where the people of Michigan are protected, and we gotta get there soon.

SPEAKER_01 28:33

I got one more quick question for you, and it's actually more of a kind of a similarity. I saw one of your Instagram videos about uh cell phone policies in school. So uh here at CC, we actually kind of adopted uh a no cell phone policy for uh freshmen through juniors. Um this year, so it's a test.

SPEAKER_00 28:50

During class time or is it bell to bell?

SPEAKER_01 28:52

Well, they didn't they're not allowed to have them with them, bell to bell, um unless you're a senior. Seniors do have their phones with with them.

SPEAKER_00 28:58

But they can't use them during class.

SPEAKER_01 28:59

Correct, yeah. That makes all the sense. I wanted to get your take on it because I think you uh you have an opinion on it.

SPEAKER_00 29:04

Well, uh, you know, this is this is absolutely classic. And of course, the state of Michigan has now finally done it. Um, but this school year, the the the kids in the public schools in Michigan had their phones during class. Yeah. And this is again what's wrong with Lansing. Uh there was a bill put up by a Republican rep from Rochester Hills by the name of Mark Tisdell that says you can't use your phones during class. You can still have them so your parents can contact you. Everybody was in favor of it, including a bunch of Democrats who were publicly in favor of it. And then the Michigan Democratic Party said, wait a minute, Tisdell's in a swing district that we need to win to get the majority next year. We can't let him get credit as a sponsor. So the day the bill came up to a vote, they ordered all the Democrats to vote no. Nine of the Democrats were so angry, they walked off the floor and wouldn't vote at all because they were too embarrassed to vote against this. The bill went down, and and and the students in Michigan had phones during class time, uh, and nobody was against it. And this year they were so embarrassed, and I made a huge issue of it, that that Tisdell's bill this year got 90-some votes, and next fall uh you won't be able to use your phones during class time. But you say, what is going on in this state when these guys in Lansing are so obsessed with fighting with each other, they're gonna let the children at 4,000 schools use their cell phones during class because it's more important to beat uh the Republican. It's why I'm running as an independent. Uh, but these kinds of issues are coming up almost on a daily basis at Lansing. Oh.

SPEAKER_01 30:41

Well, thank you so much for your time. I just want to get the last thing before we get out of here. You told me a great story about a drive memory. And I just wanted to recap it on on camera once for the listeners. I was gonna ask you about a bazillion story, but you gave me a great Father Elmer one earlier. So now I'm gonna switch it up and and ask about a drive story that you could tell everyone.

SPEAKER_00 31:01

Um well, I was president of my freshman class at CC, and I don't know whether it's still the tradition, but at least in those days on the drive, they put the freshmen on buses, and the freshmen always raised the most money. Is it still like that?

SPEAKER_01 31:16

Uh oh, yeah. Freshmen are historically speaking the winners of the drive.

SPEAKER_00 31:20

So this so I'm the fresh, I'm the freshman class president, and so the first day came in, I think it might have been a Monday, uh, and we reported the numbers, and freshmen were one and seniors were two, and juniors were third, and the sophomores were pathetic. And uh everybody's complaining about how bad the sophomores were. The second day came in, freshmen are first, and the seniors are second, and the juniors are third, sophomores were pathetic again. And Father Donaher, who was the face of the drive, this is the worst sophomore class I've ever seen. So the third day at the assembly, uh, the president of the sophomore class walks up on the stage, and you know, everybody's in the gym and says, I challenge the president of the freshman class tomorrow. Whoever brings in the most money, the other one has to eat a horseradish and Tabasco sauce sandwich on the card table in this gym tomorrow. And I'm the cocky 14-year-old kid I run up. I said, We're gonna make those sophomores eat their words. And the next day I learned the meaning of the term sandbagging. So the sophomores had socked their money away to set me up to this day. This would have been probably 1975. To this day, I can remember the taste of that horseradish and Tabasco sauce sandwich on that card table in the middle of the CC gym. And it talked taught me never to get cocky uh about uh when you think you've got a sure thing. So the lessons you learn at CC stay with you the rest of your life.

SPEAKER_01 32:52

That's incredible. That's amazing. Thank you so much for your time. Uh, wish you the best of luck with everything. Thanks for taking some time and coming out here today.

SPEAKER_00 32:58

Hey, thank you for having me, Stephen. It's been great. Awesome.