Bill Meyer Show Podcast - Sponsored by Clouser Drilling www.ClouserDrilling.com - 04-30-25_WEDNESDAY_8AM

Episode Date: May 1, 2025

04-30-25_WEDNESDAY_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 comm and joining me right now Just because he can Hello, crazy gene good to hear from you. What's up? Well, I heard something interesting on YouTube and the guy's name is Stefan burns and and the guy's name is Stefan Burns and he deals with the Sun and he's talking about the Sun acting up here pretty bad lately and he also talked about the electrification of the Earth's atmosphere. Oh, so well maybe that's why they want to pump, Bill Gates wants to pump sulfur dioxide up in the upper atmosphere.

Maybe that's why, maybe that's part of the electrification of the atmosphere. Well, yeah, that's part of it. I know it's not Conspiracy Theory Thursday. We should probably explore this more tomorrow, but what's your main point on this one? Well, he's saying that the power outage they had in Europe was caused by this. So it's not caused by rank and competence? Well that too, that's always got a factor in it. I would always be very careful, anybody that wants to ascribe an ulterior motive to the

stupidity of humans in large groups, okay? I would always go there first. And you have to look at these stupidities. That's showing up every day. Well yeah, you have to consider the stupidity also of the push for Europe, especially. Europe especially has gone down more the the gangrene world and got rid of base load power, and then they replace it with chaotic and intermittent renewables, which you feel really good about. But all it takes is, you know, the right amount of darkness or the lack of wind at one time.

When you listen to the folks in Australia, they routinely have their grids go down. It's quite fascinating when you look at what's going on. And I hope that's not where we're taking ourselves, but it looks like we might. Jean, thank you for the call. Stay crazy. Now, crazy just means you're paying attention, I guess. Hello, Francine. Hopefully you're not crazy either, stay crazy. Now crazy just means you're paying attention I guess. Hello Francine, hopefully you're not crazy either, but welcome. Well I've probably been there a few times but I don't dwell there. I get it, sure. Yeah, so I just want to make one comment about that truckers have to be able to speak English. Yes, that's a new executive order. They're going to enforce it. It's actually not a new rule, but it's a new rule to actually enforce the rules. And

and you know, while I do not disagree with that, I do have to say that anyone who has, you know, a little bit of intelligence, who's smart enough to be able to drive a big rig, is also smart enough to be able to recognize signs for what they are and certain words and things like that without having full full command of the language. I mean, I know if I were in another country and I saw a sign that said Alto, I know that would mean I'm supposed to stop. Yeah, I get that. I think where we made part ways on this one, Francine, is that we're talking about an amazing driving privilege of being able to earn your living commercially driving and I could understand why the United States would wish a bit of a

higher standard for this and it's one thing to let a tourist drive the rental car you know from place to place but it may be another one to take 80,000 pounds down the interstate right well no I don't we don't disagree I'm just saying that you know it's not it's not a matter of like, oh, it's not safe because basically if you're smart enough to drive the truck, you're smart enough to recognize the signage. Well, it's good to know English because in case there are problems, I mean, if Arnold Schwarzenegger were to come by, it's just like that movie, everybody get down, there's a bomb in there.

They need to be able to understand that if that happens. I had an experience yesterday. Oh my God. I was so mad and I'm screaming on the phone. I had to take a package to a UPS place yesterday. And I know there's one in Ashland, but I was on my way into Medford. So I called UPS to ask, where is the UPS place in Medford?

Because I don't really go there, because I didn't know where it was. Yeah, there are a few. And she gives me the address on Center Drive. And it confused me because I know there's a center way over on the other side of town that runs parallel to like, you know, Riverside and Central, or Riverside.

So what happened? Anyway, he said, well, this woman was, she had a very thick accent, it was very difficult to understand her. And she gives me the address and I said, well, can I please have the phone number so I can call them to get, you know, to find out exactly where they're at.

Cause she didn't know how to tell me. And she's telling me, well, I'm sorry, I cannot do that. So what do you mean you cannot do that? She goes, well, there are privacy issues. And I, you know, privacy issues. This are privacy issues. Privacy issues for the UPS number? Okay. Yeah, that's weird. Yeah. I mean, I lost it. I was so frustrated, Bill. I can't even begin to tell you. And I find she finally went and spoke with a group of her co-workers who all told her, yes, it's okay to give me the number. Okay that is well but thank

you for sharing a pebble in your shoe a day light okay. All right. All right we'll grab one more Kim Commandos coming up then Brad Bennington we're going to talk about planning the Greenway and a bunch more here. Hi good morning who's this? This is Minor Dave. And I was watching a business report on YouTube with Gordon Chan. By the way, he's an expert on China. I've talked to them several times over the years. Yes. Yeah, it'd be nice if you could get him on again.

But anyways, I wanted to say was this. They were saying 16 to 24 year olds, Chinese officials saying is a 20% unemployment rate, which is really 80%. And a lot of the Chinese youth are saying, let it rot. I am, I'll tell you what, I'll get in contact with with Gordon. It might be an interesting time to talk to him. Hopefully he's available. I know that I will concur with you though that already in the official statistics, the tariffs are shutting down a lot of China to US trade and that factories are shutting down. So that's not a conspiracy theory.

So with the overproduction, they can't sell what they got now and shipping's down 40% and the tariffs haven't really kicked in all the way yet. Yeah, it's gonna be an interesting time. Thanks for the call. 17 after 8. I'll see if I can get Gordon, maybe we can get him on for conspiracy theory Thursday. I've always enjoyed talking with him. Kim Comando digital update and then the Greenway, the planning process, the eye glazing numbness of it all. Well, actually, we're going to try to avoid the eye numbing numbness or the eye glazing numbness of it.

But Brad Bennington here is on the planning commission has been in a lot of planning commission meetings and we need to talk about what's going on with the Bear Creek Greenway here, the revisioning process. And you know, how did we get this Highway 62 idiocy going on? More of this coming up. This hour of the Bill Myers Show is sponsored by Fontana Roofing. For roofing gutters and sheet metal services,

visit Fontanaroofingservices.com. Freddy's Diner has lots of family favorites on the dinner menu, and there's some new items, including the Hunter's Grounds. What we're gonna be digging into here for the next half hour or so really has to do with how does so much stuff happen here in Southern Oregon and nobody either seems to know about it or if there is a public meeting it's an online meeting rather

than actually being in person and where people can actually hash stuff up and things just happen to go on autopilot and the activists seem to control it all. And I think you can look at a lot of this here in Southern Oregon, everything from the bicycle bumways in downtown Medford, the climate friendly, equitable community rules that have been imposed upon us by a past governor and the various rules

which afflict planning that is going on here too. And the latest ones having to do the Highway 62 Swidewalk, I love that term, someone coming up with the Swidewalk, S-W-I-D-E-W-A-L-K-S, on Highway 62 and we take away from traffic lanes. It's like, wait a minute, this is a truck lane with lots of heavy-duty vehicles that are going in and out of there past the Rogue Valley Mall on their way to continue on with Highway 62 and go on to Highway 238. This is a big deal. How does this happen? And I wanted to talk with Brad Bennington. Brad Bennington, is you okay now? Okay. Okay, you're good.

Good morning. I was just getting him on to the, out of the Wi-Fi here so you can kind of keep us involved here. You are on the Planning Commission. I am. You have... Have been for a while. You are much more of a brave man than I because I've watched some of the planning missions, meetings rather, and much of this is eye glaglazing, mind-numbing, bureaucratic

twaddle. Okay, let's be honest, that's where we find ourselves. So they're doing this and you wanted to come in here and try to help us understand the twaddle and what's going on here. And why don't we talk first off, I think before we dig into what's happening with the the Barrett Creek Greenway and like what happened on Highway 62 and with downtown is how COVID has changed our concept of the public meeting. I think this is very important. Could you break down how this the pandemic, whatever you want to call it, has in some ways empowered the agenda pushers.

Yeah. Yeah. Tell me. Yeah. Bill, thanks so much for taking time to visit about this. I think it's important stuff. You know it's important stuff. So do I have your permission to give a little bit of historic context before I answer your question? Yes. Okay. So I'm an Oregon guy, few generations of my family. And one of the questions that people like you always hear from your listeners and whatnot is, oh my goodness, how did this happen? I didn't know about it. Right? So you go back. So when I was a kid growing up in late 50s, 60s, and into the 70s, there was kind of this town hall thing that went on and there was a buzz and you heard it in the coffee shops. You heard it on radio stations like yours, you read it in the newspaper, but there was kind of a common body of knowledge

that people just kind of knew what was going on. People that just, you know, you heard it in the, when the ladies were shopping at the grocery store, when the men were at the barber shop, and there was this kind of community participation. So we're gonna fast forward to 1972, Senate Bill 100. Senate Bill 100 began Oregon land use planning, codified it into law. Out of that came Land Conservation Development Commission, Statewide Building Code. Statewide Building Code is a good thing by the way.

The Senate Majority Leader back then was the Senator from my hometown, Clamifal's Fred Hurd. And Fred and I stayed in contact over the years. He's been gone for a few years now, but he and I have stayed in touch over the years. And about five years ago, five or six years ago, I asked him, I said, Fred, if you knew that the land use planning thing was going to become what it was, would you still voted for it back in 1972? And he said, he says, Brad, none of us ever

imagined this thing would become the monster that it's turned into. And essentially, it got hijacked by people wanting to use it for political purposes. Now, this is what I just said, it's my opinion, but it's also Fred Herd's opinion. I'm going to speak for him since he can't speak for himself. But what we're dealing with today is we're dealing with 50 years of this Oregon land use law being taken advantage of by people who have ideological agendas that they're trying to satisfy.

So now let's talk about the part that you mentioned, which is the public involvement part. Because the public involvement part is the first part of the Oregon land use goals, right? Of the land use goals. First one's public involvement. So what is public involvement? Well, before 2020, public involvement was people that are doing what you and I were doing right now.

Looking at each other in a common space, looking at materials that we can both see. By the way, I brought something for you to look at regarding the Greenway, and this is from the City of Phoenix. But public involvement meant human beings in a common space being able to look at each other, being able to hear each other, and have a discussion. So what happened in 2020 was the COVID thing. And our governor and a few other governors, they said, okay, public gatherings can't do that anymore.

So now what we're going to do is we're going to have a new thing and we're going to call it a Zoom meeting. And we're going to call this a public meeting. And we're going to deem, we're going to deem this Zoom meeting to be just as valid as an in-person human being meeting. That was a big change. I don't think people still understand what a change that was. I would say what the major weakness of this is that A, it only lies within the technically

available or capable type of people to weigh in. Not everybody does everything on their phone or their computer. Second of all, I would dare say that the radical activists that have taken over land use planning love the electronic public meeting because they no longer have to be a resident of their area and they force themselves into, and I hate the term, stakeholdership by the ability to be able to weigh in on an electronic public meeting before they would actually have to be here and show up. Yeah.

Well, and Bill, you really hit the nail on the head. And the thing is, is that because there's no, generally speaking, as far as I know, there's no locality requirement for participation in most of these meetings, you can have someone or even someone representing a group. Oregon's got 36 counties and we got, we remember that Oregon is a state that's only slightly smaller than the entire nation of Germany, right? Big state takes nine hours to drive all the way across it. So these people can be in their one little place in either Portland or Salem,

and they can zoom in. They don't even need to be in the United States. They can be on vacation in Spain or wherever they want to be. And they can zoom in. They don't even need to be in the United States. They can be on vacation in Spain or wherever they want to be, and they can zoom into these meetings. But they can distort the public process. They can have just as much impact and influence as the people that actually live here,

and that's why you have a situation that you're probably gonna discuss a little bit later, which is how can we have this Bear Creek Greenway revisioning plan seemingly pop out of thin air and all of the, you know, so many people haven't even heard of it and yet here it is on their doorstep and oh my goodness golly, how did this even happen? I have never even heard of the Bear Creek revisioning process until you brought it up

to me and I appreciate you doing that. Let me take a break and we'll get back into this. Oh boy. And I think we're going to avoid the Highway 62 thing for now just because of nature of time. Let's dig into this latest intrusion and who is driving this particular gangrene bus through the greenway. This is the Bill Meyers show. We'll be right back with Brad Mannington. Shake up your Sunday at the Jacksonville Sunday Market starting May 4th and running every Sunday until October 5th from 9 a.m. until 2 p.m.

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sheet metal services, visit FontanaRoofingServices.com. Brad Bennington is on the Planning Commission here in Jackson County and we're talking about how a handful of people, and this is something Mr. X has also talked about, a handful of people essentially leveraging influence and we see things that happen like the bicycle bumways in downtown Medford, the crushing of the ballard type of situation that we have. Highway 62, the widening of the sidewalk, taking away from actual productive transportation needs here under the guise of helping ease the traffic stress. You know, that one of the papers I was looking at.

And you said a lot of this comes from one particular consultant that is quite popular in the state. Was it Kittering Associates? Yeah, so my experience is mostly on planning and planning rubs up against transportation but I don't serve specifically on the Transportation Committee. But it's all connected in one way or the other? It's all connected. Everything rubs up against everything else. In the state of Oregon, and you've talked a lot about the power

of grant fund streams. In other words, if you want the state's money to do this, you gotta do it the way the state tells you to do it. So when people look like, for instance, a couple years ago, they took one whole lane out of Jackson Street going east up the hill for the five bicycles a day that ride on it, right?

And where do these things come from? Where do these crazy traffic striping plans come from? Because it does not come from the local community. It does not. In fact, that's the standard thing people come up to you at the planning commission and say, nobody's asking for this. Who is asking for this?

This is not us. And that's just it. It's not coming from us. Yeah, what ding dong came up with that idea? And the answer is most of the traffic design stuff comes from a company called Kittleson Associates. Kittleson Associates. And they are, yeah, they're traffic planning experts and they are, for lack of a better word, I'm just going to say approved by the state of Oregon DOT to do most of what they

do. And the data that they use to make their decisions is highly curated. In other words, the data, the data points, the metric stuff that they look at typically comes from either Portland State University or Oregon State University, and it's curated through a very, very small group of people. In other words, so here are the sideboards

within which you get to make decisions, right, because that's what they do. They control the gates that you can go through, right? You can't go through... They control what a city council can approve or not, right? Right, so if you want our money, right, and of course, the majority of the state's money for traffic stuff comes from the federal government. About 30% Oregon state budget is about $29 billion out of that $29 billion. About 30% in any given year comes from the federal government. So if you want the state's money to maintain your roads and highways, here are the hoops

that you have to jump through to get that money. And they have to take the money because they can't afford to maintain it otherwise. And most of these designs come through these contractors and the contractors, the sideboards that they live within are curated by a very they can't afford to maintain it otherwise. And most of these designs come through these contractors and the contractors, the sideboards that they live within are curated by a very small group of people and now we're back to what you were talking about. And this includes the state university system influence in Kittleson Associates. Yeah, well, and it's not even the whole system, it's just a few people here and there that are at the top of the food chain. It's a very small group of people.

But even then, planning organizations tend to be hardcore, grainy, lock it all up kind of point of view. Would you agree with me on that? Coming out of the planning organizations? So I have a lot of experience with land use planning and I'm not gonna throw rocks at anybody in particular, but I will say this, is that most of the planning people that I am familiar with have very strong ideological motivation for what they do. I'll say that. They're very, very motivated by their ideology,

and that ideology informs a lot of what they do policy-wise. Well, that's like saying that essentially that planning comes from one ideological spectrum and one ideological spectrum only. Okay? That's really what you're saying without actually saying it. It's fair to say that a lot of the people that get into the professional planning business, especially now in the 2000s, we're seeing more younger people get involved. And it's been my experience. They're good-hearted people. They believe they're doing God's work. And they are very highly

ideologically motivated to do what they do. Are they doing God's work though? Because they ride a bicycle to work to mandate that an 80 year old who lives in East Medford is going to ride the bike to downtown Medford though. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you know, again, it's... ideology is a funny thing, you know. Ideology, if you have a contest between ideology and facts, facts are gonna lose every time. Mm-hmm, yeah, that's what I thought. All right, let me grab another breakout of this one. And because next, now we understand

where a lot of the traffic planning that you've already talked about comes through. And it comes through the grant stream funding. You want the money to repay here. You're going to have to do this and put a sidewalk in or put the bicycle bumway in downtown. This is where this comes from, what we understand. And it's being run by a very few number of people very very small group of people

All right now Next we have to talk about the Bear Creek revisioning plan. All right, that'll be next with Brad Bennington You betcha if you've been injured in an accident, you've got read law firm on your side I'm Shane Reed call us for a, no obligation consultation to discuss your case. We've been helping injured clients get the care and resources they need to get their lives back on track for 27 years. Don't be a victim twice. Put our experience on your side.

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Had a long and storied world in the, well, in the builders world, lots of experience, and has forgotten more about land use planning probably than most of us know. But we wanted to dig into everything that has transpired into how planning from the state especially has has done a great job and especially with the the elimination of the public meetings as we once did or the use of the electronic meeting how a very small number of people have come to even more so dominate public policy decision-making it's true and in the past and we take it up to this point now with the highway 99 Bear Creek Greenway corridor

revisioning project, which I had never heard of until you brought it to my attention recently. Tell us how this is working. A lot of this is back from 2020. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But in the first part of what you just said, Bill, it can't be overestimated the impact that this is having on the ability of people like your listeners just to know what's going on, because where these discussions used to be mandated to be in person,

in other words, if you're going to have a community meeting, by golly, it had to be a community meeting. You're going to meet at the local church, you're going to meet at the local high school, usually the gymnasium, you're going to get everybody there, you're going to see your neighbors, and everybody is going to hear everything that everybody else hears so you know what's going on. So we're going to rewind back to 2020, of course, September 8, 2020, we had the Almeida fire, but then in March, we had our governor, not every governor did this, but our governor basically banned public meetings because of her concerns about COVID contamination, COVID policy, can't have church, can't have gymnasiums, can't have any of that stuff. And she adjusted that scale up and down. You can have six people, no,

you can have 20 people and that bounced around. But what happened, Bill, during that time, which had never happened before, is that the legislature, which was in session at the time, got together and they said, you know what, we are going to deem, we as a legislature, we're going to deem that being at a Zoom meeting is just the same as being there in person. This is public input. This is going back to what Mr. X was always talking about person. This is public input. This is public, this is now, and this is- This is going back to what Mr. X was always talking about.

Yeah. What is proper public input. Right. Okay. Right. And because of this, you have your radical or people who don't even live in your community that can join in and make decisions for you. Yeah, and let's just make this really simple.

Fabricating it, okay? Yeah, let's just make this really simple. Most of the public meetings don't have any, excuse me. Most of the public meetings don't have any locality requirement that I'm aware of. In other words, you can come to a meeting, sometimes there's a security requirement. You know, they want to make sure that you're not there to do nefarious things. But most of a lot of these beings are recorded. But you can have a planning meeting. You can have a public planning meeting here in Jackson County,

and you can and often do have people attending from Portland or Salem or even New York City. They can literally be anywhere through the magic of the internet. And what does that have to do with local communities and local policy? Can you explain that? Yeah, so when it comes to things like planning, planning is a very esoteric activity. I mean, it's data heavy. I mean, the files that we work on routinely have several hundred pages of information in them. Some of it's pro forma stuff, some of it you literally got to read through, but your average guy, you know, your neighbor down the street, you know, they're working hard every day,

taking care of their family, you know, doing what needs to be done. They don't have time to wait through three or four hundred pages, but you know what they can do? Most people have a pretty good radar for human interaction. In other words, if they go to a meeting, they can eyeball somebody and they can kind of size them up and they say, you know what, that guy over there, so they're gonna look at their neighbors,

like your neighbor, your neighbor shows up to me, he's like, you know what, Bill Meyer, I know Bill Meyer, I know what he stands for. In other words, the thing about being in person is that you have big BS detectors. Boy, boy howdy. Okay, that's what we're talking about. And you also have the assurance in a localized public meeting that that person

is actually physically in the proximity of the problem that you're trying to solve. So many times now, and again, going back to 2020 and forward, so many times you have people go into these meetings, they're ideologically motivated, and that's what they're there for. They're not there because they're trying to make your community better. They're trying to make your community look more what they think it ought to look like. Let's bring it then to the Highway 99 Bear Creek Greenway Corridor Revisioning Project, which almost no one, except for a handful of people, even understands or knows about. Yeah. So this goes back to 2022. So after the Almeida fire, there was, which by the way, our community did an absolutely fantastic job of rebuilding after the Almeida fire.

Yeah, and I agree, but we got about 10 minutes. So I want to make sure we hit this. Yeah. Yeah. So nobody in the communities of Phoenix or Talent or Jackson County needs to apologize for lagging a step behind. We really did a fantastic job of rebuilding. But there was a lot of grant money floating around

after that fire, money for this and money for that and so on. When that fire happened, Greg Walden was in office, and by the way, Trump was in office. So Greg Walden, working with President Trump, made a lot of resources available that perhaps wouldn't have been available at another time. So lots of things going around. And one of the grants that was available was for something like this. So the rock got kicked off the hill on this about 2022 and the idea was is well you know we're gonna have to do so much rebuilding anyway and while we're doing it what else could we do? Right? What else could we do? Yeah what utopian scheme can we come up with is what you're really telling me, right? Yeah, I'm not, I'm not going to

throw rocks at it. I will. Well, you can. I will on your behalf. Okay, you can, you can, I'm not, I'm not going to. I believe, you know, I don't, I don't agree with the conclusions that, that some people come to, but. What are they trying to do here, Brad? But what are they trying to do? So there is there is a, this is on the Phoenix City website. So this revision plan affects three jurisdictions. It affects Jackson County, it affects the city of Talent, and it affects the city of Phoenix. So the county doesn't own that much of the area

that's covered in the plan. That's right, most of this is going to be the cities. Most of this is gonna be the cities cities and the cities, there are groups, there are what you might call steering groups that have been involved in these cities working mostly by zoom, I understand, that have been working on this. So this little printout from the city of Phoenix, it's got a little synopsis which is a more common version of what is on the county website. So if you go to the Jackson County website and planning and the land use hearing that we had on the 17th, you can get a larger version.

And it's available for the public. Just go to Jackson County planning and then go to the web session. And it's presented by Chris Green of DLCD and Kathy, oh gosh, I can't read Kathy's last name, but we had- Brad, I will post this. Here's the problem. I got six minutes for you, and we still haven't explained

what this revisioning process does. Okay, so first of all, all the land in Oregon is all under the authority of Oregon land use law. So this revisioning is what I would characterize as an overlay and overlays are not unusual. For instance, in the city of Jacksonville where you used to live, it's also it's under state land use, it's also under county land use, it's also under the Jacksonville Comp Plan, and a big chunk of it is under the historical overlay that goes on top of all that. So in every one of these overlays is what? They're more restrictive, they're more prescriptive.

Okay, so obviously this is going to be something to make it extremely restrictive. Yeah, well, so it's prescriptive, which is thou shalt do this and thou shalt do that, and it's also restrictive where thou shalt not do this and thou shalt not do that. How does it look in your view, given that you've been looking at this plan now for several meetings? So our commission, the most senior members of our commission, one of which includes a retired forester, noticed something very interesting.

He said, I don't see anything in here that addresses fire or vegetation management in here. Is there anything? And they said, no. Well, then all the rest of this is meaningless because you have, you know, the biggest problem that this area has is how you're going to, where are the fire breaks?

Where's the fire safety part? You know, if you don't have that component first, none of the rest of this makes any sense because that's what's going to take all this out. Even if you do all this, if we have another event like we had on September 8, 2020, all of this is going to be gone all over again. How did this get missed? And they, to the best of my understanding, they didn't have an answer for that.

But what kind of, when they revision, what is the revision? What is the vision that they're claiming? Yeah, so the way I would explain it to you or one of your listeners is this way, is that Bear Creek is Bear Creek. It's cute, but it's not the Rogue River, it's not the Willamette River. And if you look at the drawings that they presented at the meeting and the drawings that are in the plan, what these planners are imagining and they're revisioning

is something that you might see along the Willamette River in downtown Portland, almost. It's grandiose, it's wonderful. People are gonna be walking, they're gonna be riding their electric scooters, there aren't gonna be any cars. You're not gonna have any gas stations, you're not gonna have any mini storages you're not gonna have any mini-storages,

it's just all going to be wonderful and unicorns are gonna be strolling down the sidewalk and it's just gonna be great. Now I'm being a little bit tongue-in-cheek and so you'll forgive me for that, but the bottom line on this thing is that I don't think most of the people that are gonna be affected by this have any idea this is going on. That's what concerns me, Bill, is that the people that are most affected, you know, you got about 9,000 people give or take in the Phoenix and Talent community, and I'm betting that out of all those people, there might be 100 of them that know what's going on.

And what is the downside of this unicorn visioning, hey we're all going to be walking in on our and having our electric scooters and everything else on the on the Bear Creek Greenway. What's the downside? Yeah, so all this is going to take money so that the grant, my understanding is that the grant is largely expended on just producing the plan. So OTAC was the contractor that produced it. You got DOC. The county has an awful lot of staff time in it. And the downside to me would be is if this plan, if the city councils vote on actualizing this plan without knowing where the money is going to come from,

without knowing whether the citizens are going to come from, without knowing where the citizens are actually going to support it or not, whether the citizens are willing to look at their city the way that this plan proposes. I think that would be a tragedy because these communities have just come back from just a horrible loss and I think they're still healing. I think they're still trying to heal up. All right. I'm still trying to envision what this revisioning is. And so does this mean no development? Does this mean incredibly dense climate friendly equitable community style development? Could you kind of, what do the world

improvers here from Portland and elsewhere wish to impose? That's what they're obviously trying to do here. So I'm just going to read real quickly the last couple paragraphs on the bottom of this piece from Phoenix. Current zoning and development standards tend to prioritize automobile oriented development, permitting large parking lots, and etc. And then key recommendations for the City of Phoenix include expanded mixed-use zoning,

redefined middle housing standards, relaxed conditional use permits to establish small-scale retail, strengthen Bear Creek Greenway protections, promoting ecological restoration and so on, improve streetscape and pedestrian oriented design. Now that's kind of code talk, improve streetscape pedestrian oriented design along Highway 99, along Highway 99. Highway 99, that's a main corridor. That's an Oregon State Highway. But we're going to improve streetscape and pedestrian oriented. So when we have when we have people saying that we want an Oregon state highway to be more pedestrian friendly, what do you think that's going to wind up looking like? That's it sounds like it's going to be one insane road diet from north to

south. And and and I would guess that you're gonna be pretty accurate. So this is the thing that the people of Phoenix and the people of talent need to really get their heads around is what this is gonna do to the ability of them to use their talent for their families, for their communities, not just now, but the next 20 or 30 years. And it's a picture, and once again Bill, it's really a picture of how these things get done and so many people just don't understand how the process works,

how such a small group of people can have such a large influence over so many other people. How do we as the people in the final couple of minutes, how do you battle this and truly effectively get involved? Yeah, yeah. At this, at this something which has been going on underneath the scenes for years. Yeah, well Bill you do your best three hours every day, five days a week to educate people about what's what's going on, but the reality is there is so much going on so fast, the pace of change is so rapid, nobody can keep up with it. But what I would recommend to people is try to attend at least one city meeting a month, at least one.

Now, in most people, that's going to be about the most they can do. But what you can do is, is along with doing that once a month, get your own little information feed and I'm sorry to say you can't really count on the newspaper in my opinion. Get your own information feed where you and your neighbors, again, maybe once a month, get together and talk about things that are going on. Because this kind of stuff is happening all the time.

I wish I could tell you that this is an isolated incident. It's not. This stuff is happening all the time? I wish I could tell you that this is an isolated incident. It's not. This stuff is happening all the time. When they took the striping on East Jackson Street, when they took it from four lanes down to two, everybody was going, when did this happen? Well, it turns out it happened two years ago under a different city council. That's right. That's right.

And that's why it's important. This is a series as a heart attack and the world improvers, as I put in scary air quotes here, they have a completely different vision from probably what the local residents are looking for when they say, oh, okay, we're talking about a nice vision for Bear Creek. They're thinking about easy access. They're not thinking about turning it into Highway 99 being a pedestrian pathway, you know, north and south. And, but yet that kind of sounds like where they're going.

Brad, we'll have you back on this one here because we took all the time available here. And- Oh, thank you, Bill. We'll be in touch. I'm going to share the information that you left me here and we'll continue this conversation. And I think we're going to have to pay more attention

to what you're doing in this Planning Commission deal. Get involved because the activists do. Show up, make at least one city council meeting a month if you can. All right, very good. It's 8.58, Brad Bennington, and I will install all of this stuff that we've been talking about, including links to the plan, etc., etc., on KME.com. We'll get that done a little bit later on this morning. 8.58 and change. See you tomorrow.