Bill Meyer Show Podcast - Sponsored by Clouser Drilling www.ClouserDrilling.com - 04-22-25_TUESDAY_8AM

Episode Date: April 22, 2025

04-22-25_TUESDAY_8AM

The Bill Myer Show podcast is sponsored by Clouser Drilling. They've been leading the way in southern Oregon well drilling for over 50 years. Find out more about them at Clouser Drilling.com. Meadee and Krantz Pass on 1059 K290 AF Rogue River in South Jackson County on 1067 K294 AS Ashland. Ten minutes after eight, Bedford City Councilor Ward 4 Nick Carr joins the show. Nick, great to see you. I'm glad you took the time this morning. Welcome back. Absolutely, Bill. Great to be here. Thanks for having me. You know, a lot of people write me all the time and I

imagine they probably write you too and sometimes expressing frustration. Sure. Frustration. And the funny thing is is that while you and I were having a conversation in between, well, during the news break, it had to do with why are so many things being done to the city of Medford, and I would imagine Grants Pass and Ashland and everything else. And you were telling me that the biggest frustration is the amount of cram down from the state? Yeah. And so, you know, I'll give you one example. We've talked a lot about CFEC, the Climate Friendly Equitable Communities. This was done through executive order. And you might be going, how can the governor single-handedly decide that this is how we're

going to build our cities? Well, the state has given, the legislature has created a lot of rules and controls around the way land use works in this state, and they've given a lot of that authority over to the governor and so it's really esoteric but like why do we have to comply with CFEC? Why can't we just ignore it? Where's the teeth in it? Well CFEC, if you don't follow CFEC, they take away your TSP, your transportation system plan. Well who cares about a transportation system plan? Well you have to about a transportation system plan? Well, you have to have a transportation system plan

to build anything in your city. To build anything. To build anything. So essentially not complying with CFECT means that you have to shut it all down. Yep, no more new building, no more new development, it all goes away. And so it's through these very esoteric,

very bureaucratic levers that our state is able to exercise a tremendous amount of authority over what we do for our local community. And of course, as we know, people in Salem seem to think the state ends south of Eugene, and so the needs of southern Oregon or eastern Oregon never factor into these programs or plans. What's good for Portland is not good for the rest of the state. Try convincing a bunch of legislators from the Portland area that that's the case. And so we're constantly stuck with these certain rules and restrictions on how we plan our cities, what we have to do in order to achieve certain things, what that means for new development.

You know, I've heard from a lot of developers where they're going, man, I have this project and it totally pencils, but it's like, hey, great. In order for you to build that project, you have to put in $5 million worth of infrastructure to fix this interchange and build this sewer line and build this water line and all these other things. And then I would imagine very quickly, the person who has that great plan says no thanks.

Exactly. These are some of the reasons why if you look at like Centennial and the golf course, that was a project that was designed a long time ago and it's still just a golf course surrounded by empty fields. There are lots of development challenges that have faced that project. And I think we're getting close on that project, which is really exciting, because I'd love to see that development happen on sort of the southwest side of town

or southeast side of town. And there are some other projects that are currently, as we inch forward, we've seen a lot of stuff, but one of the benefits of a lot of the affordable housing stuff is the state and the governor including Governor Koteck have seen some of the error of their ways I don't want to get too excited now but we're seeing some of these things being loosened being reconsidered we saw with Governor Koteck one of her big bills pushed through

last session was expanding urban growth boundaries. This has been a sore point for a lot of communities. Because you can't build unless you're able to expand into that. Yeah, exactly. You want to say, hey, like I've got this great piece of land out in the county and it's in a nice area and let me split this. It's like 360 acres.

It's up in the hills. I want to split that up and turn it into a few housing site parcels and maybe have a little neighborhood there. Oh, no, you can't do that if it's in the county. Did you get grandfathered in a home site approval back in the 1980s filling out form 73F? That's the kind of situation it is. And so if we can get it into the city, we can do a lot of stuff, but we have to comply with the transportation system plan and the master plan. And the climate friendly equitable community. All right. That's how it comes out.

Now, what about other city policies, though, which I kind of look at as kind of self-inflicted gunshot wounds? We have our own share of self-inflicted wounds, for sure. Okay. And I wanted to bring this up, baby, because one of the big things that we always hear is that, gosh, we want people to come into downtown Medford. And I get that. We want people to come into downtown Medford and experience it and go to the restaurants and do these kind of things. And I have to tell you, the latest road plans of 20-mile-per-hour speed limits and thousands

and thousands and thousands of tickets being generated I think have worked at cross purposes I can't tell you how many folks have just saying you know it's like I feel like I'm not really all that welcome unless I'm coming down here on a bicycle you know that that seems to be the the feeling and Southern Oregon is an older community I don't think you're going to get people to, you know, come and meet in a downtown record Downtown restaurant in December and riding their bicycle from East Medford into downtown. Sure. But yet the planners seem to operate from that viewpoint. Well, I think, you know, the 20 mile an hour speed limit, I hear a lot of the same feedback and it's something that, you know,

as we've discussed before, sometimes there's an advantage that government works slowly, sometimes there's a disadvantage that government works slowly. Sometimes that means if you have an idea with really good intentions, it's hard to undo those. And so, you know, slowing traffic through downtown, in my opinion, is a good thing. We want it to, we don't want people racing through our downtown, people shouldn't be driving past it.

We want people driving into downtown and driving slow to be able to see businesses. We want it to be safe for pedestrians. There's a difference though between having a downtown where you have encouraged slow traffic because that's part of the downtown feel and what feels like, and I hear this complaint from a lot of constituents, a ticket program through the speed cameras and the concerns that are around that. That is not the intention of council to create that.

In fact, it's not like we generate a ton of revenue as a city on those programs. So we're not doing stuff like writing a bunch of speed tickets because the camera company that operates those cameras basically captures the vast majority of that, you know, what comes off of it. Then why have it? Well, I mean, the reason to have it is to try to encourage better behavior.

I mean, it's not like we're writing tickets to people who aren't speeding. I'm happy to have a discussion with somebody who wants to say speed limits shouldn't be 20 miles an hour. We did make speed limits 20 miles an hour. And so if you're going 11 miles an hour over that speed or faster, then those cameras can ticket you for that. So we do have to acknowledge that people who are getting tickets are driving at least 11 miles an hour over the speed limit. Separate from that is we want to make sure that people aren't running red lights. We primarily are putting these intersections at places where we've had a number of serious

injuries including fatalities at people who've run red lights. Research shows that people who, when you put in red light cameras, that tends to cause people to be safer. Now, it doesn't necessarily reduce the total number of incidents. There are a number of rear endings that, depending on the studies you look at, you can see increase in rear endings because people slam on their brakes because they don't want to run through the intersection. But I'd much rather have a rear ending incident than a fatal t-boning incident.

So that's a trade-off that, in the grand scheme of things, I'm comfortable making. Okay. Well, that's why I'm asking. And so when you put all of that together, that's where I think you really want to say, hey, are we doing the right thing with speed limits? The fact that we have speed limit change right before a speed camera, is that the right thing to be doing? Are we being overly paranoid about speed through downtown?

Are we doing the right thing from a commerce behavior perspective in terms of those speeds? That I think is a much better conversation. And the feedback that I'm hearing is that there's a lot of people who disagree with that or that would say that council has done the wrong thing, that the city has done the wrong thing. And I think that's important feedback. And it's definitely something that I'm going to be engaging with. We've been talking, or I'm currently engaging with in terms of other officials in the city.

The other piece of this that we have coming up is we have some emergency preparedness town halls on the end of the month and the 15th of May, April 30th, May 15th. This is kind of in that boat. I mean, come talk to us. We'd love to hear your feedback and your questions on this stuff.

We are not a council that operates from the dark. We are a council that wants engagement with the constituents. Well, all I would say though is that the impression that I get is that the only way you're truly welcome downtown, and I know that part of this is CFACT though, and I can't help but wonder if some of this is due to CFACT, the changing of speed limits and making it more vehicle unfriendly, individual vehicle unfriendly or not. The vehicle unfriendliness is specifically a function of CFECT. I mean, CFECT is trying to take away parking, it's trying to make it harder to drive a

vehicle. Speed limits specifically are not a function of CFECT. We could revert speed limits today if we had the study for it. But then you look at the striping of Main Street and this has been quite the debacle, I think you'd have to admit. Now that was a past council, I want to be fair. I appreciate that, thank you. And even when it came up when I was on council, again, it came back to us and we were not

able to – there's a few of us who opposed it, but we weren't able to shut it down. Well, the feedback has been clear and council is looking at what we're going to do to replace it. So basically, we just had our last study session on this topic. We directed staff to look at three different alternatives. Alternative one is – and all three of these, by by the way are removing the cycle track as it exists today. Alternative one is to put Main Street back to a more traditional bike lane. So you have lanes of travel with a bike lane on the side.

It will retain basically the same amount of parking we have today. And there is... Life is good. And life is good. It'll get rid of some of the visibility concerns that some constituents have voiced that's sort of your very traditional approach we've also looked at an increased parking approach where we would take and do an angle in parking option along one side of Main Street that option would potentially dramatically increase the

amount of parking if people have driven through downtown Bend, you'll be very familiar with sort of that Engelan style parking. And the third option is to look at what if we take Main Street and turn it into a two, go back to a two-way street. Main Street and Eighth were turned into one-way couplets when that was the primary route to Jacksonville. There was a lot of traffic that moved on those roads

and we needed the extra lane capacity to make that work. That is not the case today. The entire volume of traffic that lives on 8th and Main would fit on a typical two lane, one lane in each direction road without any kinds of concerns. Doing something like that could potentially allow us an opportunity for some downtown beautification. We could create more parking. I mean there's a

lot of potential benefits but that's also a lot more expensive of an option. In fact I think that option is like about 10 million. That's what they're thinking. Probably more than that. Yeah, this is like making the tree line plaza kind of thing. Yeah, all right. So we'll expect the KMED checks and community checks. Okay, you got it. All right. So anyway, so we're gonna look KMED checks and community checks. Okay, you got it. So anyway, we're going to look at these three options and then my goal is to take that to the community and then get the community to be engaged in buy-in and that way we can set the path.

But we are looking, I mean we heard the feedback. It's clear that this was not a thing people liked. I could have told you that from the beginning but... I know, I know. It's kind of like... Speaking of the obvious, all right. Nick Carr here and Medford City Councilor Ward 4. I'll tell you what, let's take a quick break here

and help out some businesses and then let's play ball, okay? Let's find out what's going on with the ball stadium proposal. It's a homerun. Continue the conversation now with Nick Carr, Medford City Council Council Ward 4. Now, my imagination has been stirred greatly by the reports that the Eugene Emeralds wanted to come to Southern Oregon and wish to have the taxpayers

build a $90 million stadium. And my opinions have been pretty pointed. I've shared this with you. And especially when I hear from Bill London, my colleague in Eugene, who has been dealing with this for a number of years and that taxpayers turned down their $100 million stadium plan. And now they come with – well, seeing if we can get Medford to bite, I guess, is it. And so they presented to the city council a couple of weeks ago at a study session. So I was wondering if you can kind of break down the overall proposal and maybe what your thoughts are, maybe some of the other council members.

Yeah, just to give you a little bit of background, what basically is happening for them right now is Major League Baseball went through a reorganization a few years back and they took a lot more control over their minor league teams. And one of those controls includes standards for stadiums, dugouts, and locker space, all of this kind of stuff. They're really, Major League Baseball is really using minor league as an important feeder and training ground for their major league teams and so they want facilities and scheduling that sort of match to that standard. Today, the Emeralds play at a stadium that they share with the Oregon Ducks college team

and that doesn't meet the requirements for Major League Baseball. It doesn't have the dugout facilities that Major League Baseball requires and it doesn't have scheduling because Ducks, turns out, are actually pretty good at baseball. And so you end up with postseason scheduling conflicts and there's a whole host of issues that they have sharing the stadium with the Ducks. And so what's happened is Major League Baseball has come to the Emeralds and said, hey, you don't meet our requirements for a stadium, you need to fix those. So whether that's, you know, make improvements and have stronger contracts with the ducks, so they have first-rate refusal on scheduling, or go build out their own stadium. Their plan in Eugene was to build out a new stadium. Part of that plan required 20, 30 million dollars, I can't remember the exact number, that went to the voters

of Eugene. They turned down that option. Currently they're dead in the water as far as their Eugene option goes. So they're looking for a new home. So they're looking for a new home. And if they don't find a new home, then Major League Baseball will take away their minor league franchise. So the Emeralds will be no more

and Major League Baseball will then decide find somewhere new and it'll be up to them. However, they're gonna manage that franchise. So they're motivated, obviously, to try to find something different. And so they have been in talks with, the Emeralds have been in talks with a number of other cities trying to find options

for where they can put their team. Medford is, you know, they may be blowing smoke, but according to them, Medford is their top option. I would believe that Medford would be their top option, in part because Medford has shown a history of being able to build significant sport facilities. We've done it twice with Rogue X and Lithia driveway fields.

We have built a culture of sports and sports tourism, and we have, excuse me, we have a hole in the sense that we don't really have any professional sports teams of any sort that are in Medford. We have, you know, like with the Rogues, which is a collegiate team, we have had hockey on and off, like with Spartans and some others, but again, those are sort of younger,

it's not that same sort of professional tier sports. So there's a lot of opportunity here and plus Medford serves in an area of about 350,000, 400,000 people depending on exactly how you slice the area, people who come in and rely on Medford for services, healthcare, travel, and so there's a lot of advantages to bringing a team like the Emeralds to Medford, if you're the owner of the Emeralds. But as to your point, Bill, you gotta have a stadium. So this is where really the rubber meets the road.

This is the challenge of this whole proposal. And of course, the way the Emeralds wanna frame it is, hey, we will bring you guys a team, you bring a stadium, it's a match made in heaven. And that's not exactly the way I look at it. You know, we just don't have $90 million burning a hole in our pocket right now. Bingo. We don't have $90 million.

So then the question becomes, can we build a stadium? How do we do this? There are a couple different ways that we can do this. Obviously, we could just go to the taxpayers and say, hey, do you want to do a property tax bond? I'll give you one guess about how that's going to go, and I'd give you 100% odds on you. Exactly.

Down in flames. So the way I look at this is we cannot rely on sort of Joe taxpayer to build a stadium if we're going to do this. We have to come up with a way to be able to look at the kind of economic development, economic activity that a stadium would bring. Can we put taxes or fees on that activity and basically make the stadium pay for itself? That is a tall order and it's made extra difficult because of all the faffing about that the Emeralds did with Eugene.

The timeline for them before Major League Baseball will pull their franchise is like now. We would have to put something, if something has to go to the voters related to some of these taxes and fees, which they may, even though the voters may not have to pay for them out of pocket, the lot of taxes and fees have to go to the voters,

we have to get them approved out of pocket. The lot of taxes and fees have to go to the voters. We have to get them approved. It would likely be this November that we would have to have those things on the ballot. That's pretty quick. It's pretty quick. So this is one of those things that we may not be able to make this happen, but I'll tell you, Bill, I really hope we can.

And so the economic activity that you can get out of a stadium in a minor league stadium is significantly different than what a lot of people look at from a major league stadium. If you look at their study after study after study, that's looked at major league ballparks and they're like they don't create the economic benefit, the economic revitalization. The impact is not what is promised. It's a lot of hot air and it doesn't really come out. Well, Cheryl Atkinson, the reporter on Channel 10 just a few days ago, did a kind of a blowup of the sports stadium socialism plan, which is usually... But you see, here it is, we have relatively wealthy people coming into town saying, hey, we'll give you this wonderful economic activity.

Why can't they build their own stadium? Because I can't think of any other business here that expects the taxpayer to build them a venue other than in the in the sports world. Sure and so on the minor league side though and this is where the difference is because on a minor league side that like USF for example looked at minor league ballpark activity and those have shown real economic value for the community. And so that to me says maybe there's an opportunity here where we can, again, tax the increased economic activity and make the stadium pay for itself in a way that once the stadium is now paid off, the city, the community is going to continue to benefit from that increased

economic activity. I mean, this isn't, there are definitely private businesses out there that have the same sort of expectation. It may look a little different, but you know, Amazon builds a new headquarter outside of Washington, D.C. What happens? That is not something that Amazon paid a lot of money

out of pocket. They may have received tax credits, they may have received free land, they may have received a whole bunch of hosts of incentives. Now, whether or not you agree with that as as a general principle, the reality is that is how a lot of that stuff happens, whether it's here in Medford or anywhere else. There's a lot of public-private partnership that enables big projects like $100 million dollar stadium to be constructed that also return benefit back to the people back to the community and can help us.

Yeah is it returning to the community or returning to specified politically favored business interests? Well so like both maybe I don't want to get too into the weeds on this because I think there are ways we can split hairs and then we're going to spend too long defining terms. But you know, creating economic activity, as you and I were just talking about during the break, I mean, we want to create jobs. We want to create strong economic community. We want there to be a reason for people to go downtown. We want the seniors driving in off the hill to have a place to stop at and better restaurants and better activity. I mean, downtown has struggled for decades to draw in strong culture, restaurant,

business activity, I mean, all that kind of stuff. And so how do we, you know, why do we want that? Well, because that's part of what makes a good downtown. And then we have now better restaurants that feed better jobs that feed more interest. And now we have more people who want to move to our area and there's more housing, that's more construction jobs. And the cycle of economic impact is a positive one. Doesn't the cycle of economic impact get short-circuited by what we were just mentioning though a few minutes ago, the climate-friendly

equitable community? It can. That doesn't mean that it stops at all. It means we have to be more creative about how we work around some of those limitations. So we have a ball stadium but we have to get to it with a rickshaw? Kind of. I mean... You know, maybe I've got to of Kind of half kidding. I just remember years ago and a comment Oh, we need to stop traffic in Jacksonville, right? And we'll hire former timber workers and have them tow around rickshaws seriously comment That was a comment it was in one of their vision plans, but I don't I don't want to get off into the end of the weeds

on this Where are we on this because there's numerous places one of them in the Hawthorne Park area. We've been looking at a lot of different places in downtown and so you know we also looking at you know we have currently a bunch of baseball stuff out at Lithium Driveway Fields and so there's opportunity to put something in over there that's a growing part of town. Downtown, we have a lot of old commercial or industrial use land that has been sitting idle for decades. And so we've got to be in that old Larsen's furniture kind of area. Exactly. Yeah. So there's a bunch of these different places

that we've looked at. We have land that's over by City Hall and the courthouse that could potentially be developed into something like that. Though, of course, you know, you got to find the footprint and this parking. And so there's a whole bunch of different variables that are going in. And so one of the challenges for this is the timelines here are so tight. We got to do a lot of work and come up with a lot of really interesting sort of finance options and then figure out what is even, you know, first off, you got to figure out the universe of what's possible,

and then we've gotta narrow that down to the world of like what we could actually make happen. And again, I am not gonna support something that goes to Joe Taxpayer and says, hey, you need to pay to build a stadium for somebody else, just because that's gonna create some economic benefit that might trickle eventually around to you. Because I've been suspicious that this was something that was just going to be magically

put on parks and rec utility fee each month, just like Rogue X was. Yeah. Well, Rogue X was also paid for by transit lodging tax, so hoteliers stepped up and put a lot of money into that. Yeah, but still everyone, every home is on the hook for about $1,000 in cost to pay off Rogue X, okay? It's just bottom line over the year over the life of the bond so and the vast majority of people are never going to go on inside rogex nice piece of infrastructure though not yeah

not not criticizing this but but you know me I wanted individual pools in neighborhoods but we digress so sure we're not gonna go we're not going to the utility fee model here I don't think that there's any appetite for council I'm one of eight so okay if five of them say we're gonna do it on a utility fee that could happen. I just don't think there's an appetite to do that and I think heads would roll if that was the decision that the city made. When you're talking about a hundred million dollars ninety ninety point five million dollars I mean depends on the exact what you're looking at we could be

facing a significant fee if that's the only way we're gonna do it, I mean, depends on the exact what you're looking at. We could be facing a significant fee if that's the only way we're going to do it. And I mean, it's going to be noticeable. One of my comments that I made during the study session was we cannot ask taxpayers to fund this, especially when there are pieces of necessary infrastructure like a wastewater treatment plant, which we have no choice in the matter of that's a DEQ permit requirement that we have to do. Otherwise, when you flush, it ain't going to go down. So that's something we all have to live with. And so those are the kinds of things that we already, we have to ask of the taxpayer. Building a fun stadium is not that thing. So can we look at that economic impact that it's going to have and capture taxes and fees revenue off of

that impact to pay for the stadium. That's the $90.5 million question. Does it not give you concern that even the Eugene Emerald's own numbers are indicating that it would take more than 20 years before money coming in to the stadium project and to the team would be greater than the expenses? So usually when you bond, like a 20 year bond is not uncommon. So what you typically design these projects around is whatever the revenue you can capture, that is, you know, you what do you need to I should say, what do you need to build? How much money do you need for that?

Then you figure that out over 20 year payback period and that becomes the amount that you go after from a taxes and fees perspective. So 20 years is a very typical frame for that sort of a thing. We could pay off stuff sooner, you just have to have a larger tax, you know, you have to have more revenue.

Well, I'm just saying that their own numbers said that they didn't think that it was going to be the revenue generator for more than two decades before they were going to get more coming in than was going out. And that's a, isn't that a, doesn't that indicate kind of a challenging business model? Well, one of the advantages of government, I suppose, is that we can set whatever that revenue collection is because it's if it's through a fee or a tax we simply set it and so that 20-year target is the typical bonding timeline that you'll see on these kinds of construction projects you pay it off in 20 years and then after 20 years the bond is paid off and now you have extra

free cash flow that you can then do whatever you need to do with it. All right and who would be in charge of maintaining the stadium? That's also an important open question because who creates that liability? If the city ends up in any way taking on the responsibility of maintenance for the stadium, I'm a hard pass because that is a huge burden to the city to take on unless there is a significant guaranteed revenue source that can fund that. I mean, I am a hard pass on the city having to maintain this. And we have Medford City Councilor Nick Card with me.

Nick, can you hang on for a couple more minutes? Absolutely. All right. I really appreciate him taking the time this morning. We'll grab some calls on this in just a moment. And Nick Card, who is Ward 4 Medford City Councilor here. And Nick, we're just gonna grasp the calls and see what people are thinking.

And Mary, you are up first. Hi Mary, good morning. Hello, Mary? No, I think you got David on. Oh, David, oh well, David, go ahead, go ahead. Thanks. Nick, thanks for being there. Where's the location proposed

and how do you see the current streets and surrounding businesses and where people live in that area? What does it look like just as it is now? Can you describe that please? Well, we don't have a specific location yet selected for the stadium. We are looking at a number of different locations. My vote would be a downtown location, though we're also looking at, you know,

down by the Lithium driveway fields, because there's already a lot of baseball that's down in that area. So it really depends on where that specific location goes in terms of the impact to that surrounding community. Now, downtown you were talking about already in that area, which has the industrial area. Hawthorne Park is that a potential area also.

Yeah, I mean, there's pros and cons to that location, as there are with every location. Again, I would like to see us in a downtown area in general, because I think that would help, again, draw more people to downtown. There'd be more activity downtown. Wherever that happens to be, likely, draw more people to downtown, there'd be more activity downtown, wherever that happens to be. Likely, wherever that is,

you're gonna see increased traffic on Riverside or Central Main possibly, depending on whether you're on the north or south end town. So those would all be considerations that we'd have to take in when we determine what location we're gonna choose for this, what location is even feasible. And so those are all things that we've got to rapidly make decisions on and we're working with the emeralds on that process right now. All right, very good. Thank you for the call David.

Mary's up next. Hello Mary. Hi Bill. Listen, I'm so happy that you have Nick Card on so I can personally tell them what a lousy idea I think this is. I'm disingenuous of him to sit there and say, the taxpayers won't pay for this. He was the one ballyhooing the rogue ax, and people were going to come from all around the country to swim there, and it wasn't going to cost us anything. Now that turned out to be a private swim club. What did we attract? The International Cornhole Championships.

Then a couple of years ago, it was like RVTD, let's put a parcel tax, I can't recall what I pay, 500 to $1,000 every year on my property taxes. And guess what? They came around with their hand out the other day and said, they need more money. I mean, this is not San Francisco, this is not LA, this is Medford, and pay off that stupid swimming pool you built out there

before you start talking about more pie in the sky. If the emeralds were so good, they would have stayed in Eugene or some other town in Oregon would have snapped them up. And I just don't know who Nick Card thinks he worked for, but he certainly isn't working for me and the thousands of other people in this valley that go to work every day

and just don't like these pie-in-the-sky things. Okay, Mary, I think we got your message loud and clear. And I don't know, Mary, were you? So first off, Mary, thank you for the feedback. Not all of that is accurate about my positions, but I will absolutely take the concern about the Emeralds on RogEx. I don't ever think I was I'm supportive of RogEx. I think it was a good program. I never claimed that it wouldn't cost taxpayers anything. That was always part of how RogEx was funded. I mean that was a decision that was made before I was ever on council and so I never spoke out

about it in this capacity. But we I would say we have had success with attracting people to the event center. We've got cornhole is a national thing. And we are Medford. We're not San Francisco. It's not like we're going to bring in, you know, Major League baseball to play at the event center. So we have I think we've done really well with Rogex. We have all but two weekends we have an event at our event center for this year for 2025. So I would say that's a pretty successful thing. It's cost us a lot less. It's cost taxpayers a lot less than the initial model. So I'm pretty pleased with Rogex and

I have never really been a huge fan of RVTD. So that is, I'm not sure where that came from because I have a struggle with us paying for things like public transit, not using use fees. So all right. I appreciate the call there. Steve, you're on. Hello, Steve. Hey, I've got a crazy idea, but we need a jail.

So why can't we build a stadium with the jail underneath of it and make the inmates take care of the land. I wish that were the first time I were hearing this idea, Steve, because I mean I've heard people seriously refer to this as like, well, instead of having the Eugene Emeralds, we'll have the Medford inmates here and we can have the jail built. Well, since we're having fun, all right. I mean, realistically, you know, one of the things that we always look at when we're trying to build public infrastructure is how do you put more pieces together?

I don't think we're going to have jail plus stadium. That's I think a bridge too far. But those are interesting kinds of things. We've talked about maybe, you know, there's some interest in other sort of corners of the private sector. Lithia has approached us about trying to put together a convention center and so those are things that may get married to the stadium. There's actually models of minor league baseball plus convention center around the country. I can't believe they keep flogging the convention center.

A little bit of research shows you that the convention center of business, unless you were in some adult play land like Las Vegas, is is a dying dead industry. I should say conference center I just shouldn't have said convention center. Well convention, conference, conference. To be clear those are different. But they've been flocking this for years Nick. Oh they have. Nick every time. Let me go to Brad. Hello Brad you're on with with Nick Card go ahead. Hey Bill great great session with Nick. Three things about Nick Card some people don't know. First of all, counselors don't get paid anything. All the work that they do, all the time that they invest, they get paid nothing

for. They do it out of the goodness of their heart. Second thing, he is a transportation professional. Born and raised right here. Yeah, we get that. I understand the trucking industry. Here's the problem. It's 11 before 9. We've got to get to the point, Brad. Thank you. Please. Yeah. And there's a rumor he might be a valedictorian, so he's smart. So since he's smart, RVTD, we've invested hundreds of millions in RVTD, maintaining it there. For some reason, this model isn't working. Is this something that the City Council is going to be looking at in the near future? Interesting.

Fortunately, that's not my problem. RVTD has its own separate district, its own board. Because of CFEC, we are intimately married to RVTD in that sense that we need to have certain kinds of transit corridor things that tie into those CFEC programs. I would like to see a successful public transit system. I think public transit is a good thing. I just struggle with the cost of operating public transit. So if I got to wave a magic wand, maybe I would get to do something really special.

But frankly, Brad, that's not something that I've put a ton of time into in terms of thinking about or trying to come up with solutions because we have an elected RVTD board and that's their job. All right, very good. Let me grab another caller too. Hi, good morning. You're with Nick Card and Bill, who's this? Good morning, Bill.

Good morning, Nick. Bob Shandon Medford. Hi, Bob. Question is, how much money thus far has the city spent on studying the ballpark? How much taxpayer money is the city spent on studying the ballpark? How much taxpayer money is the city going to spend and maybe end up with a no in the long run? How much are they putting into looking at all this? That's a really good question. Bob, we did a study

looking at some of the economic activity in order for us to get some feasibility for financing scenarios. So we spent 20-30 thousand dollars looking at that option. There's definitely staff time that's involved so there is other sort of indirect costs that comes to the city and the taxpayer. I think if you added it all up we're not going to be spending more than probably that amount again on this process until we are able to get to a financier. Again, there's only so much time we have. We have to have, if there's something that has to go to the voters, it has to go to the voters for this November ballot. The most likely scenario is that it will be some form of transient lodging tax which means that heads and beds will pay for this stadium in the sense of there will

be some increase on the hotel fee and so if you stay in a hotel in Medford you'll pay some amount of tax which you already pay that's a big part of how we funded rogac and other projects in the past and so it would likely be that sort of a fee that fee has to go to the voters and if the hoteliers are supportive of the fee, if they see the benefit, then I hope the voters will be as well. But there's a long way for us to go before we can get to a point where we can even figure out what that looks like. The financing stack is complicated and our options are complicated.

And so there's a lot for us to look into. But I think, Bob, your point's really well taken that it's important that we're not dumping money you know good money after bad in terms of looking at a stadium if it's not gonna work. All right very good Bob appreciate the call and thank you callers for the rest of it Nick I appreciate you coming in here to be able to support about it. What happens next now in this process? So the next thing is we got to figure out how, if, how can we pay for this? Where can we put this? And what models, you know,

I think that as an opening salvo, Eugene Emeralds came in and are like, we're going to bring a team, you bring a stadium, it's a match made in heaven. The reality is that the Emeralds are going to have to pony up some more cash in order to make this work. So we're going to have to have conversations with the Emeralds to figure out how much they're willing to put into the stadium. Because the

Emeralds are not willing to put anything into the stadium. I just don't see it ever happening. There's just no way it's going to get off the ground. 90 million is too large of a number. All right. Nick Card, Nick Card, Medford City Councilor. We appreciate you coming in. Thanks so much. With Siskiyou Pump Service and I'm on KMED. 855. I think tomorrow on Wheels Up Wednesday, we'll certainly have some conversation about what we heard today with Nick Guard and we'll dig into some calls and that'd be great fun. Pro-con in between, you know, hey listen, you'd like to see more economic activity?

Do we prime the pump this way? We'll find out, okay? Have a good conversation. Other local businesses in need of your attention because they're going to give you a good conversation. Other local businesses in need of your attention because they're going to give you a good deal. This is Open for Business, Open for Business sponsored by this time, Charisse over at NoWiresNow. Hello, Charisse. Welcome back. Great to have you on. Good morning, everybody. Charisse, of course, you are here to help save money on everybody's, it's their internet, it's their television, it's their cell phone is there anything you're not covering give us the spiel you don't mind well I

am going to be a hunter retailer so I also gonna be so you're gonna be selling the fiber too huh yeah they called me in and signed me up and I'm gonna be selling hunter now too so if you know you can get hunter call me and I'll sign you up and you can come in the store and I'll help you cancel your old stuff and lower your other bills. And if you have Spectrum that's okay you can then get that free cell phone deal through Spectrum if you have Spectrum internet right? It's all sorts of deals. Why don't you tell me what some of your better offers right now if you don't mind. Yeah right now you know we offer the free cell phone

service for the whole year and We do have free phones. If you do need a phone, we do have some phones. They're not the best, but they're free. After that is $30. But free is good though. Free is good. Yeah, free. Free cell phone service.

Yeah. Have you seen them talking about the tariffed cost of a new iPhone could be like $2,300? Woo! Man. Oh my goodness. I just can't even imagine that. And then I can help you get your internet to $30. So that's a really good deal. And then if you're getting those $500 gift cards in the mail from Dish, don't call them. Call me. I'll help you cancel your old stuff. I'll

send your old equipment back. And let me give your number out so that people could call or text. It all starts with getting in touch with Charisse. You can call or text message. She does everything out of her cell phone and you can just take a picture of your bill if you have an existing bill that you're not real happy with and you send it to 541-680-5875 if you can do that if you have a cell phone right now. Otherwise you just call her 1-541-680-5875 and you go to work, right? It's that simple.

Yeah, or you can text me. I love text messages because sometimes I'm so busy I can't answer the phone. And if you guys have ever called me and I didn't answer the phone it's because I was so slammed. Please give me a second chance, you know. Call me again. I promise I'll take good care of you. I'll lower your bill, save you some money. All right. And get in touch with her. 541-680-5875. Now, what about those visa gift cards when you get those from Dish? What do you do with those? So I'm still honoring the $200 Bill Meyer Visa gift card. So sign up with Dish through me. You don't qualify for the $500. I will for sure give you the $200 visa gift card.

That's a lot of money. And then, you know, I'm going to probably save you 100 to 200 bucks a month on your bills. Yeah, absolutely. Find out more. No wires now. It's at 1560 Biddle Road, Suite B next door to the well, just down a little bit from the cigar cave and pretty close near people's bank in Medford. 541-680-5875.

Hey, Charisse, before we take off, last time you were on the show, somebody called in and was talking about the garbage people that had dumped some garbage on MoDoc. What happened? You went out there and picked it up or tried to pick it up. What happened? Yeah, I went home.

It was still there. I was so bummed. I thought somebody else might get it for me. And so I was like, oh crap, I got gotta go get it. So I put my gloves on. And my husband's like, no, you are not doing it. It's too dangerous. So I felt like a total loser. And the next day I get home from work and someone had picked up the garbage. I was so excited. I was so happy I get home. And my husband's like, did you see the garbage was gone? I was like, yeah, someone grabbed it. He goes, I did.

Oh, your husband did it for you? Yeah, he's my hero. See, that's why you have husbands, you know, to do stuff like that. That's why I'll even talk to my wife, Linda, and I'll say, why is this my problem? She says, because you're my husband. I said, oh, okay. Yes, dear. He did say he was sad. He said it was all just full of diapers. Oh, yeah. I wish, why can't we help low-income people have free garbage? I don't understand that. Why are we allowing them just to dump their garbage in the woods? Why can't we, like Turtle Creek does it?

They give free garbage. We're not allowing it, but yeah, I guess we would have to tax ourselves more on a continual basis I think in order to do that. We can give them free food. We can give them free everything else. Why can't we give them free garbage service? I would. I think, in order to do that. We can give them free food. We can give them free everything else. Why can't we give them free garbage service? I would. I'd pay a little more for that. Well, talk with Nick Card over on the City Council, okay? Hey, Sharice, I appreciate you coming in. I wanted to find out what happened, though, with the garbage debacle last time. All

right. No wires now. Sharice and Kyle O'K Kerr a number is a 541-680-5875 that's Charisse and Kyle that's your hubby right it's Lyle it's Lyle that's right with an L not with a K you got that hey thanks so much on open for business we'll catch you next time okay okay thanks Bill all right this is KMED KMED HD1 Point, Medford, KBXG, Grants Pass, ran a little long, we'll join Town Hall News. Currently in progress.