 Hi, this is the Portland Media Center Civic IQ project. I'm Greg Kessich, and I'm here with George Rowe as part of our conversations around the mayoral election of 2023. Unlike the other people who we've interviewed in part of this project, George's name is not on the ballot, but he is a candidate for mayor using the writing system. And he is one of the most dedicated and critical followers of city government and somebody who we thought would be worth talking to. So thanks for coming in, George. Well, thanks for having me. I definitely, a lot of people enjoy my commitment, my civic commitment, but a lot of people obviously don't enjoy it or wish I would stop. So this escalation is maybe good and bad for some people. So quickly, tell people what your status is as a candidate. Well, I had a busy summer, like most people. I have an 88-year-old mom who has had a couple of health hiccups in July and August. And so I was a little distracted, be quite honest, on the mayoral race. But I was looking, as most people were, to see who would jump into the race. But at the same time, the homelessness situation has been deteriorating in the city. Basically, it's been a long, hot summer, even though it's also been a long, wet, and somewhat meteorologically speaking, cool summer. But I ultimately was dissatisfied that we didn't get more candidates from different sectors. And after Labor Day, things in my neighborhood had continued to be. And what neighborhood is that? So I live just a couple blocks down the street here on the Bayside side of Congress Street. I consider myself basically a central downtown Portlander. But geographically, my neighborhood has been sort of walled off as this West Bayside or Bayside neighborhood. If you go two blocks that way, you're still part of downtown. You're still part of the old port. And you're not in your still considered part of Portland downtown. But you go two blocks that way, somehow you're like in a different neighborhood, which is sort of absurd. But my wife and I, eight years ago, came to Maine from we were living in Los Angeles at the time. But I grew up in Southern New Hampshire. So it was kind of like coming back to the Northeast. But we chose downtown Portland because it really appealed to us. Like so many people, it had the vestiges of the 19th century city. But also, it felt very modern and contemporary. And there was a lot of activity and energy. And so we jumped into that. And the difficulty, though, is Portland loves its history. It loves its character. It loves what it's been able to preserve. But there's also real hesitancy to changing anything. And that has kind of, I think, paralyzed the city for decades. I mean, I think. Let's address the candidacy. Sure. So you're a writing candidate. What does that mean? So I'm a writing. So under state law, 60 days before an election is the deadline for someone to declare themselves a writing candidate. And that effectively means just basically going to the city clerk's office and signing a form. But as a result of that, and I did it on the last, literally the deadline day, I did that partly because just a few days before the city council had had their first September meeting. And they also had had the encampment clearing out of the Four River Parkway. And on the eve of that, the day before, the three members of the city's Health and Human Services Committee, Tori Pelletier, Anna Trevarro, and the chair of that, April Fornier, had sent a letter to the city manager, the three of them, asking for the city manager to postpone that. And there was some merit in what they were asking the city manager to do. Is this the right thing? Is this the right time? But they did it literally with no time, no real heads up. And the backdrop of that was that that committee had not even they had taken August completely off. They had not even really discussed these issues in depth during their June and July meetings. And so they were basically asking for an extraordinary change without having done their homework, without having built the ground for them to be able to take that position and expect somebody else, i.e. the city manager, to take them seriously and to do that extraordinary change. Because that deadline, as you probably know, the Four River Parkway trail clean out, whatever sweep, that had been announced months before that deadline. And so if you were going to be, everyone was going to be working towards that deadline, whether it's social workers, whether it's police and parks, but also the neighborhood around it had been given this notice that we would get some relief to make that switch kind of on the 11th hour. I mean, you have to have a really, you have to really prepare for that, right? And they didn't do that. And so it wasn't successful. But I'm not sure why that results in an extraordinary mayoralness. Well, because there is frustration. I mean, I think you know that I've been participating in civic affairs, mostly public comment, for most of the eight years that I've lived here. And beginning mostly with the India Street clinic closing, that was sort of one of the big moments when I sort of came onto the scene and started getting really publicly involved, like speaking up. And so these, I mean, it's been a long eight years, right? And a lot of people are like, why do you keep doing it? What are you trying to achieve? And what I've always told people is that we get the government that we deserve. If we are not paying attention, if we are not keeping a close watch, if we are not participating, then we really don't. And that can be, I mean, fundamentally it's about voting, right? That's the baseline participation. And for people on property, maybe paying your paper property taxes on time. But there's a lot of ways to participate and get engaged. But if you're not following city business and you're upset with city business or you're dissatisfied with city business, you ultimately might have your own self to blame. It's like, you can't expect good things when you're not even paying attention. And so I've kept that going. But there's definitely diminishing returns, right? I mean, I'm a known quantity at City Hall. I speak up. Everyone takes notice when I speak up because they usually think that I have a lot to offer. But they know that after my three minutes are up, I have to sit back down. And I'm not really a threat to them, right? I'm not usually, I'm not having built a big coalition. I haven't tried to create a nonprofit or some kind of a media presence online or something to follow city business. I've kept it fairly restricted. But at some point I need to, as I said when I announced it at the city council meeting the other day, you have to kind of put up or shut up, right? At some point. And so to me it was seeing our city yet again fumbling on the issue of homelessness which has been a specter for my wife and I all the eight years that we've lived here. We lived in Los Angeles and we saw the acres of tents on sidewalks in Los Angeles, the Skid Row neighborhood and in other parts of the city, Venice Beach and other parts. And that's what we were leaving. And when I came here, I said, hey, we're gonna have that soon. If we continue with gentrification which has a lot of positive aspects, if we keep up with gentrification, if we keep refusing to adjust our land use regime so that we can actually have capacity for growth and have capacity for the people who are here today to continue to exist on some basis that they don't have to always be competing with the person with the money from out from away. If we're not fixing those things we are going to have tents on the sidewalk. We're gonna have tents in our parks. And this is the year when it finally all came to a crescendo because of, you know somewhat to do with our judicial system, right? Let me go one more run at this. Isn't the role of mayor building coalitions and the process of running for mayor demonstrating that you have the ability to bring people together or either to raise money or even just to get your signatures signed. And by circumventing that process aren't you failing to show people that you have the ability to do what the job requires? Well, and I jumped in here because I think most people know that I haven't chosen camps. I haven't chosen camps over the years. I have been sympathetic to a lot of policy ideas on both sides of the aisle. I mean, you know, I was not a big fan of John Jennings and John Jennings style and his approach. But you know, there are a lot of things that he did. The former city manager who had departed under a big cloud here went to Clearwater, Florida and lasted about a year before that body, the city manager or the city council of Clearwater ousted him because basically I think they were concerned when they hired him that he might turn into what people experienced in Portland in terms of him trying to control, overly control things and not share and be a collaborator. And as soon as he started exhibiting those traits I think that they said, okay, well, this is what we were worried about and so we're not gonna spend years trying to work with this. We're just gonna change ships. And so, but Portland city council over the years did give him a long leash and he accomplished some things. I didn't agree with all of it, but the point is that, you know, Ethan Strimling was somebody that I also thought that he was sincere and earnest and had a lot of things that he was trying to accomplish that were legitimate. And so both sides know that with George Rowe you get hard questions. You know, do you recognize that there are competing interests about what you're trying to achieve? I mean, a good example is... Mark, the mayor is primarily a hard question answer. I think that fundamentally that is the only real power that the mayor has is to ask questions. And that's why I think I'm... Low down here, what are you trying to do? I think that, you know, and this is why I think I'm uniquely qualified because effectively I've been following closely city business. I read in my spare time just about every agenda of just about every body that the city makes available to the public. And what that does is I kind of see the landscape. I see the full landscape, the full constellation of all of these committees and all of these bodies. A lot of them are advisory, but a lot of them have tremendous power. I mean, the Land Bank Commission is a good example and that colors our land use. I mean, we have literally hundreds of people in our public parks, but we also have this little body, the Land Bank Commission, that has been over the course of Mayor Snyder's term has been able to bring in literally dozens of acres of land across the city into our, effectively our open space and park system. And in each of those cases, there were opportunities for housing to be included as part of those land transactions. And this goes way back, I mean, basically for decades we've been doing this and we always, because it's Maine and it's very hard for someone to object to green space and to object to conservation and object to making more parks, we don't balance that. And what the consequence of that is if that's our land use and we completely privilege open space and green space and conservation and we don't do the hard work of making a place for more housing, then ultimately we have the crisis that we have, which is lots and lots of indigent people, lots and lots of people that are a capitalistic system has basically ejected, right? These are basically our policy failures and we don't have a robust enough safety net in our country for those folks to be able to find their way again. I actually hate the way that we term a lot of our emergency shelters and our transition, they call it transitional housing where people are maybe able to spend, six to nine months trying to get back on their feet. I would like to rebrand it as standup housing because I think a lot of these folks have been knocked down. They've been knocked down by life. They've been knocked down by sometimes family, friends, drug addiction obviously, mental health, but the system itself is pretty brutal, right? I think most of us who have managed to get a middle-class hold on things or even more privileged than that, we know how fragile it is, right? I mean, a lot of people are literally one paycheck away from not necessarily destitution, but homelessness or extreme precarious existence in our system and that's the system. And I think we forget when we're successful and I've been lucky enough to be successful in my life that we forget that there are a lot of people who just, the system is going to create unsuccessful citizens and it's our obligation to try and get those folks back on their feet. You can't have big winners without somebody losing, right? Well, true, exactly. Well, true, but I think we also want to be, I have a system that is not, this is not Calcutta, right? This is not, we have a very wealthy society and we have a society where if we work together, we can not just have a safety net, but we can have people who recognize they maybe either made bad choices or did not get the full advantages that they needed to succeed and we will give them opportunities to go back and maybe get back into the system and hopefully either adjust their expectations, which sometimes is the case, right? A lots of people when you're young, like what do you want to be when you grow up? I'm president and senator, astronaut and what do you end up becoming? You become a plumber and it's like, there's nothing wrong with that. Yeah, exactly, but so. So I've been here for a while and I've never seen the unhoused population the way it is now, not just the tents, but you go up in that Congress street at night and there are people sleeping in doorways. Just it's clearly, it seems to be connected with COVID. That seems to be about the time when things really exploded, but it's with us and you talked a little bit around this, but what's your sense of what are we experiencing here and as a city, what can we do about it? Well, again, you know, back to the mayor. I mean, the mayor's job fundamentally, and if you read the city charter, the mayor has no power to order anyone around except in one place. The city charter is very clear that the mayor shall direct and that's literally a quote, shall direct. It's about the clearest command in the city charter shall direct the city manager in the preparation of agenda. And so basically that allows the mayor to control what comes before the city council. And it's a delicate dance because there's another part of the city charter that says that the day-to-day administration of the city is under the city manager's rubric. So we have to reconcile those two things because they often can be in conflict, right? If I want to put some backup material into the record for our city council meeting on agenda topic X and the city manager says, oh, I don't have a staff member available right now to help you do that. Well, that's an issue, right? Like, okay, so his day-to-day administration is blocking me from directing the city manager. And of course, you know, Daniel West is a woman and I'm glad that we have a woman in that position now. But, you know, whoever the city manager is, that individual has the opportunity to interfere with that city charter mandate or the mayor to have that power over the agenda. And the rest of the city council also has power because, you know, we have council rules that are allowing the city council members if they have a supermajority to place things on the agenda as well. But the focus has to be on what is before the city council, you know? We typically meet two times a month and sometimes there's special meetings and things like that. But, you know, you really need to get into the weeds of how are we spending our time? And I think for sure, and this is again one reason I decided to run, the last couple of years, I don't think we've used our time well for those limited opportunities. But one of the most important things, and I'm sure in your professional life before your retirement, you know, most of us have game days of some kind, right? Where, you know, for the city council, it's the city council meeting. But a game day is where you perform at a high level and do your job. But you have, if you're doing that job well, you have all this back end prep to get to game day, right? And so, you know, it's almost like an iceberg, like when the Patriots march out onto the field on a Sunday, that's 20% of their life. But 80% is practice, is watching tape, is going over, you know, game plans. It's all that back end work. You do that back end work, and of course, you know, Bill Belichick, that was his, you know, in the last couple of decades, he supposedly prepared his team better than anybody else to make game day as impactful as possible. And that is, I know that if we do that 80% well, that we won't look like a city council that's flailing. We won't look like a city council that doesn't know how to work with city staff and parry and thrust with city staff. Because the city staff often has a different agenda than the city council. And that's fair, because they see things, they have a different, you know, sometimes different proletives, different view, different mandates. And so they are not always gonna see eye to eye. But how we deal with that is by doing the hard work to sort of burrow in and basically be prepared to stand toe to toe with city staff. Your critique seems to be, tell me if I'm wrong, that the elected officials are not doing their homework and that's the flaw in our response and other issues, but particularly we're talking about homelessness. Exactly, I mean, I am very excited that we have such a diverse city council today. I mean, it's extraordinary, we have youth, we have energy, we have people that really want things to be better in our city. And they mean very, very well. But the mayor is the only full-time position, right, of the nine members. And if you add up, if you do the numbers, the mayor gets paid a salary. I've actually been trying to find out what the latest salary is. And the city hall hasn't been very forthcoming about that, even though the city charter requires them to state that at the beginning of the nomination process. The cancellation based on the area being. Well, exactly, they bury it in the budget. And I think they're getting around the city charter requirement by saying, well, we folded it into the budget that we passed for the next fiscal year. But the fact is the city charter requires them to sort of make that a little bit more open and focused and transparent. But the key issue is the city council members each get a stipend too. But that stipend is, I think, probably somewhere in the range of $6,000 to $7,000, might have creeped up to eight because I think they get a little escalator too for cost of living. But if you add up the other eight members, you add up all of their stipends, it's still less than what the mayor makes. Because the mayor's salary has been escalating a lot. It's a full-time job. So a part-time council, the eight part-time members, they basically need that full-time mayor to be working very, very hard for them. And to be doing, to running around Monday through Friday and sometimes maybe beyond that, doing the work that they can't possibly do well in their positions being part-timers, having other parts of their life, I love livelihoods that they have to family that they have to address. But the thing that's key is, if you've watched Ethan Strimling sort of be undercut, frankly, by the Jennings administration and you've watched, to some extent, even that's applied to, I think, Kate Snyder too, but certainly the other members of the city council, they often are in charge of city council committees. But then these city council committees are basically sort of very fragile. They're not really able to accomplish very much because they ask staff for things and the staff does one of two things. They either come up with elaborate excuses why that would just take so much time and they don't have that time or they need to get an instruction from the full council before they go and do that. But they also, a lot of times, are in the position of basically saying, well, that's not our job, you know? And so you have to be creative. If you're the mayor, you have to figure out a way, I trust our department heads. There's no department head in the city right now that I think is unqualified or incapable of doing their jobs, but they have to believe that the city council is a meaningful partner and a partner that they have to heed on a regular basis. And so my job, one of the things that I would do, I would do two things. And first of all, I would like to make 20 because I think our mayor salary is a little bit on the high side for the job, but I would take 20% of my salary and put that into a mayoral special projects fund so that the city council and I would have a little kitty that we would be able to basically hold a reception, for example, or convene a summit in one of the city hall rooms. You can rent city hall for a wedding, but the city council right now, if they wanted to do any kind of event, they're at the mercy of the city staff for all of the logistics. And that is troublesome, right? Because if the city staff and the city manager is on the same page with the city council for an initiative, then it's easy. But if they want to hem and haw, they can find ways to prevent that from happening in a timely fashion. So that 20%... I want to go back a little bit because you talked about the streaming years and I think maybe my observation was a little different than yours. Yes, he wasn't conflicted with the city manager in a way that I don't think anybody anticipated was possible when they wrote the charter. He also had, when I could see a lack of support on the council, and he was kind of going solo one-on-one with somebody who was, by statute, much more powerful than him. And I think this gets back to the original question about whether mayor is an organizer. You sort of described maybe something like a football coach, but why should other council members side with an elected mayor who doesn't have the ability to fix a pothole in their district or doesn't have control of the mechanisms of city government the way the manager does, if there's, how do you get them on side? Well, it's difficult and it's a daily battle, but partly it's understanding exactly what the city does. And again, I think that one of Ethan's problems is I didn't think that Ethan actually had a good command of what the city does on a daily basis. I think he needed to do a lot more listening and a lot more homework. And if he had done that, he might have chosen his battles better. But I think I was not here for the Brennan era, but I did arrive when Ethan was being elected in 2015. And it was pretty obvious that the city council majority at that time had grown tired of Mayor Brennan sort of not always engaging. A different set of conflicts, but yes, it was the same kind of thing. So Ethan who had been, he tried to be mayor in 2011, he, that was unsuccessful, but they brought Ethan back because he was kind of, in their view, kind of a fusion candidate. He was going to bring everyone together. But the real goal there, and I think Ethan was sort of forgot why he was chosen and given a lot of the endorsements and support was that he was simply just not Mayor Brennan. And so, and I think everyone, this is the short termism that I think affects a lot of communities, but Portland especially is people just focus on the next step and the next thing. And so Ethan was, he solved the problem of you don't have to worry about Mayor Brennan anymore, but no one had ever probably really gotten into the weeds with Ethan about what Ethan had a mind to do. And so Ethan quickly established some independence and also the council changed. I mean, Ed Slasovic lost decisively in 2016 and Pius came on, Pius Ali came on as well. And those were both, well, John, exactly John Hing kind of fumbled. He was gonna go to the state legislature and that didn't work out. But he, and that basically made him an ineffective candidate against Pius, but Brian Batson stood up. Well, a young man who came out of literally nowhere. He had only been in Portland for a couple of years, but Ed Slasovic decided not to really run a campaign. He just assumed his incumbency and his long service in Portland politics was enough and he lost. And so I think you see in 2016, everyone getting angry at city hall with the independence of Ethan Strimling. And then you had the next election, Ethan gets two potential allies. And so that's when the bells really went off. And at that point, it was all about, we have to crush Ethan. And Ethan unfortunately sort of stumbled. He had a very small window to be able to not be isolated. And that window closed very quickly and he was isolated and it was a terrible slog after that, the rest of his tenure. But again, if you fast forward to Ethan's reelection effort, basically again, the same dynamic. It was we want a mayor that basically won't get in the way, won't get in the way of the staff, won't get in the way of really anything and won't be ambitious, won't be really creating any initiatives. And that's why we have mayor Kate Snyder is that she basically was a few people who have described her frankly as a ghost mayor. She doesn't have a presence. She has been basically a caretaker and she's had an extraordinarily rough ride. I mean, when you become an elected official, you don't get to pick, whether the Great Depression happens, whether World War II breaks out, whether worldwide pandemic hits. So you kind of have to take what happens. And so what happened was she immediately after a few months of a honeymoon period, things got really complicated. And to her credit, she probably recognized that ambition and she had her own personal issues. I think her father passed away, I think, during her term, which probably wasn't easy and probably something that was made it harder for her to engage. She said at the library the other night, the charter gives a very prescribed role for the mayor. And she held up the charter and her council rules. But one time the mayor has these Zoom calls, these little sort of town halls and I've been trying to attend them pretty regularly because I learned things, but they're not well attended. I don't think most people, even if they know about them, even bother with them because they're fairly modest affairs, usually like 45 minutes. But I asked her earlier this year, I pointed out that provision in the city charter about the mayor shall direct the city manager. And she actually didn't understand that language and she recollected that it didn't say what I said it said. And she basically it revealed to me, I'm like, wow, this is her fourth year of her term. And she is not even really aware of this weapon, the only weapon that the mayor has. And that weapon has to be, it's like any weapon, you have to be very careful how you use it, right? I mean, obviously, if you are willy-nilly and you aren't careful with how you're wielding it, you will lose it. And so the city council, it's a partnership. I think that our city council is a Ben Steinmeet. I think they've been neutered. They're on really key issues and homelessness is another good example. They're deaf, dumb and blind, to be quite honest. And that is sometimes by design because it's convenient for city staff to have our city council not be able to project any sense of competence or control over anything. They want them to be dependent on staff because staff that makes them more amenable to do what staff wants them to do when they want them to do it. But we have to really push back on that. And the only way to do that is through soft power. The only way to do that is to be up on your details read every agenda, know exactly what's going on in the city. And I'm a bit of a paper tiger my current just paying attention to what's going on in the city because I only get usually a couple of minutes of public comment or a few emails here and there. I don't bother about your staff because I know that there's over 68,000 people in Portland. And if everyone was emailing questions all the time, it would be pretty overwhelming and I don't have any expectation that somebody should be answering my email on a regular basis just because. But the point that you have to recognize is that city staff pay attention to me now. And it's because they're like, he's gonna put us in the hot seat. He's gonna ask the question that no one else is asking. He's gonna make us do our jobs. And he's going to have us, the famous movie stand and deliver. There's a stand and deliver when George says something. But they also know I'm a paper tiger because I don't have power, I don't have authority. So when I sit back down, they're like, whoo, that's over and we can march on. But I've tried to get our city council to recognize like this little modeling of behavior is what you guys could be doing as a body of nine. And you could really make a difference because the city staff, if you wear them down just like they've worn you down, they will recognize that, okay, you are a partner that has to be reckoned with. And if we don't, if we aren't a partner to be reckoned with the city council is on the sidelines. And eventually, I mean, I want every city council member to be successful. I want you to feel like you're serving your constituents. I want to feel like your constituents believe that you have a handle on city business. And I want them to make them look good. Give me a scenario. Let's say we have a functioning city council with a mayor who is communicating with everybody and keeping people prepared and asking the tough questions of staff. How could the city be dealing with a problem like the homeless encampments? Sure. Well, what could we be doing that we're not doing now? Well, we had a workshop about this and at one point during the Q and A with city officials, one counselor asked what is the intake process at the homeless services shelter? This is the middle of September of a homelessness crisis that the city has had ongoing for decades and it's gotten worse. And it's sort of been aggravated and amplified. But that to me is that is exactly what I'm talking about. The city council should have had that information a long time ago. That should not have been, that should not have wasted our time in a workshop about encampment solutions and encampment progress. But we're dealing with basic information that still hasn't been put on the table after literally months and months of ferment. So to me, that encampment workshop was almost a waste of time because it was like basically like ABCD when we should have already been doing calculus, right? And so it's hard for people on the outside to have faith what the homelessness situation is gonna take time. I mean, first of all, I mean, I think everybody acknowledges all five of the other candidates, but also everybody in this town knows that you can't take a decade's long crisis of poor land use choices, hyper gentrification. Those with the most get to kind of control the agenda and those with the least are basically out defend for themselves. That's not gonna change overnight. But there are things in my neighborhood. I mean, I've been attacked on my front porch by three young men in their 20s who two of whom had been criminally trespassed from the Preble Street teen shelter. I had to prosecute them because I wanted to make sure that there were consequences. But I also know that each of those three individuals had a story and our system failed them and they ended up on my front porch trying to intimidate me and almost seriously hurt me. So I'm as frustrated as anybody. I didn't wanna be in that position, but I also wanna basically say this is my house and this is my neighborhood and I would like you to respect my neighborhood. That is how we need to basically, I think people forget because we've created this encampment task force. It sounds really impressive, right? But it's basically when you look underneath the hood, it's basically the same small group of agencies and social workers that have been doing this work for years. We're trying to be a little bit more deliberate, a little bit more systematic, but it's not really anything, first of all, that we should have been doing for years. In 2017, I wanted the city council to appoint a homeless czar for lack of a better word. We love that from the 70s and 80s. So czars this and czars that was a lingo, but at the national level. But the point is, is that we needed someone who's job. Before there was an ascended Russia. Exactly, exactly. The Cold War is over, even though it's back again. But anyway, the point being that we needed a coordinator who did nothing but try and help bring data and what people needed and what people were doing. Also in 2016, this is another little factoid. One of the council goals was thrown out to create five housing first developments. And this was just after the Houston Commons project was underway. It was in construction at that time. And I don't think it had opened yet. But basically everyone was excited that the housing first model had real potential. If we could just find some small scale locations for these small 20, 30 bed opportunities, we could manage these folks. And help them have the stand up opportunity that I was talking about earlier. But the city council got distracted. They didn't follow that path. And they might have had some good reasons. Obviously the Page Limit Administration was probably not very amenable to that. And there was a lot of work in the legislature to do that. Some of that work has been done more recently. But the time for housing first to really move the needle in this city for new housing first opportunities, it's two, three, probably four years away before they open their doors. So that's tragic, right? But you have to start somewhere. But what I wanna make sure is that the goal setting opportunity, which at the beginning of every council year, the city charter mandates a goal setting. And that's a great example of what I'm talking about. I've watched these goal setting workshops happen year after year after year. What happens is the city manager, whether it's Danielle West or as interim or permanent now, or John Jennings would sit basically in the corner and let the council sort of have these sort of vague, very high level discussions about work on affordable housing, work on homelessness. Those aren't goals. Those are like high big aspirations. But at the end of these things, the manager often would be like, well, I'm not sure we have time for this or a time for that. They never had to come forward, basically at the beginning of that goal setting workshop and lay out their agenda. What do you think, because you're the guy or the gal who has all of the authority and administrative power here, why are we trying to shoehorn in or having this sort of wide ranging discussion about our goals when we have no idea how they're supposed to plug in to the roadmap that you have laid out. And actually Danielle West recently during one of the city meetings, she sort of offhandedly was like, look, we have a 30 day roadmap and a 60 day roadmap and a 90 day roadmap. And she just sort of went off and moved on to something else. But I'm like, how does the council think they're gonna get anything done in the city if they don't have that same roadmap from the city manager in front of them? They have to make choices. Nobody ever has a goal. I'm gonna deal with a global pandemic. I'm gonna deal with a worldwide protest movement on police violence. I'm going to deal with unprecedented anything. So you've gotta have to work from where we are now. But that's the leadership, right? Because what's the leadership role in dealing with the homeless situation that we have now, which as you said, is resolved from decades of bad policy, not just on the local level, on the national level, economic forces that are beyond the control of any elected official in the city of Portland. What are we gonna do now? Sure, well, I mean, the most enormously complicated work that the city is doing is the recode process, right? That is this sprawling effort to sort of somehow reimagine all of our land use relationships across the city. What that's turned into is basically a very tiny, small ball kind of changes. And that's all that I think the city staff feels that politically they can pull off. And because of that, there hasn't been much energy to move it forward. And that is a really frustrating thing because we are, what we do today is going to establish everyone's expectations for the future. And zoning is incredibly sticky. Once it's in place, people feel like it is like, basically like a sacred constitution, even though it's just literally, every other ordinance in the city is just like zoning. You can change it quickly if you wanted to. It doesn't, you don't even need the planning board. We can go around the planning board if we wanted to. We need the political willpower to do that. But if you have people who, when you live on Munjoy Hill, Munjoy Hill has been walled off both with historic preservation and of course, through just basic zoning for years. And this was traditionally the place that was a very modest place for people to live. And there was a whole historical reasons for that, including pollution. It stank to high heaven to live up there and nobody wanted to live there. And if you could avoid it, you did. You know, the wind, every East end in every city in the world, the prevailing Westerlies bring the noxious fumes to the East end. And that was the case here too. So, but on the, on the- That was a big foundry at the bottom of the hill. Exactly. And lots of rail traffic traveling now. Yeah, no, I mean, you know, when you have a rail car, when you have a thousand rail cars a day with cattle from Canada. Immigrants from Europe, going to Canada. Yeah. So, it was a disfavored neighborhood. Then it became hot after we built our sewage treatment plan. And then now it's hot real estate, the hottest real estate probably in Maine. And so- Just because it doesn't smell bad, but also because there's a lot of competition for that kind of life you can have there. Sure. Walkable neighborhood, where you can ride around on a bike. There's public access to public transit. And the irony is that like this working class neighborhood has become a upscale neighborhood. Exactly. It's so desirable. It has all the attributes that if you- Another neighborhood. Exactly. That's where the land comes from. Beautiful views, access to some of our best, you know, waterfront opportunities, amenities. And again, the architecture up there, obviously is very, you know, it's 19th century. It's all over the place. But though, but the thing is, is all development basically in that area has been stopped. In fact, in my eight years, there's probably been almost a dozen lawsuits, project by project or referendums that have tried to stop. Literally everything from as modest as like a six unit condo building, there was an affordable, the Marata Adams school site generated a lawsuit. Even though what ended up being proposed for that site was the most unambitious. I mean, the only, they were like one step up from putting single family homes out there on a one and a half acre site that used to be a trolley barn at one time. And so my point is getting back to, you know, where we were is Munjoy Hill has basically made an impossible to participate in creating the housing that we need. Right now across the street from me, a four unit, very modest, two and a half story, 19th century era building which probably just a little bit more older than my 1850s house, it was emptied out a year ago. And there's an investor from the Boston area that is trying to convert into condos. I don't know if it's financially it's gonna be a success. I don't know who's gonna end up living there. But basically four households, some of whom had lived there for over a decade had to empty out. Why? Because somebody saw an opportunity and the rent control and stabilization rules gave those tenants all a little bit of power, a little bit of leverage, but it didn't keep them in that under those roofs. So what happened is we now have a Boston investor who wants to create some higher end housing. I mean, they've literally had to probably spend hundreds of thousands of dollars because that house had not been invested in for decades. It was a mess. There's like rats running in and out of the basement. So no one's gonna pay for rats running in and out of the basement, so you have to fix it up. You have to make that investment. The only way to get that investment back is you have to sell it to somebody who can afford to pay the price that gives you. So George, I'm hearing a lot of critique, but I'm not hearing any program. What is that we could do? Well, it's focused, it's focused. It's talking to each one of the counselors about their agendas, right? And what I would do is to avoid the isolation of the council. One of the things that I would suggest is, like I said earlier, about the 20% of my salary I wanna dedicate as a fund to give us some room to maneuver and to generate some ideas and some opportunities for ourselves. But also I would ask each counselor to make me either the vice chair or the chair of the committee, of each committee. In each committee is basically the city council committees are where most of the work is done. Typically issues will come up through a city council committee before it goes on to the agenda. And this is supposed to help us generate these opportunities. But what happens is the same stonewalling at the council level happens at the committee level. So if the, but that typically happens because you have the city counselors who are chairing these committees, they're one step removed from the mayor and they're one step removed from that ability to control agendas and to get the flow of information from staff. If we could get each of these committees, working transparently across all of the business of the council, we will be able to make better choices because if one committee wants to create an initiative or is having an initiative imposed on them by city staff that's gonna take a lot of time, that should be balanced with all of these other committees that are doing work. We need to see the whole landscape at the same time, literally every day, because that's how life works. I mean, a major newspaper doesn't let silos operate completely independent of the bigger print operation. Somebody has to bring it together. That's what leadership and editors and department heads are supposed to do. But if we work together, we will not be isolated. I know for a fact that a lot of city counselors are extremely, find their chairing duties of their committees extremely unsatisfying because the staff is able to undercut anything that they wanted to do. And if you bring in, because you know about the open meeting laws, if three counselors are trying to sit down to talk city business, that's officially a public meeting. It has to get noticed, it has to be witnesses. And so, but two counselors can sit down and work through stuff. And then each one of those can go off and have conversations with others. But if you have the mayor as either the vice chair or the chair of every committee, then they can work collaboratively with the other counselor who is either the chair or the vice chair. And those two people are in the loop and they make sure that the city staff and the city manager make sure that everyone stays in the loop. And so the isolation, so the system we have now is all of these city counselors are trying to create these little independent, I don't think they view it this way, but arguably little fiefdoms, right? They're trying to get on the finance, Mark Dian, on the finance committee chair. And so he often is unable to really assert himself other than through basically deferring to staff. And to me, I think that if the mayor knows what each committee is doing on a daily basis, that enables the part-time counselors to work together effectively and they can leverage their time and kind of sort of sally back and forth to what do we need to do on any particular, we have a landscape ahead of us, how do we wanna play that? How do we wanna make choices that make sense? I mean, one initiative from the Health and Human Services Committee this past year was possibly thinking of ways to make some advancement on reproductive rights. There's these pregnancy crisis centers that a lot of right-wing conservatives who are anti-abortion have created across the country, including in the state of Maine. And I think there was a desire to try and make sure that any of those institutions existing here in Portland have some parameters around which they operate. This is incredibly worthwhile objective. But is it appropriate for the city of Portland to be able to take that on? Is it appropriate for us to spend a lot of health and human services committee time doing that? Could we have a forum on a Saturday evening? Could we have experts who maybe get a travel stipend from the Mayoral Special Projects Fund that I would like to set up come in and visit and have a panel? Even the folks that run the pregnancy crisis centers, they will give them an opportunity to give their point of view. But the issue I think that the counselors wanted to address was raise visibility about this issue, figure out what's going on in Portland and also start to prepare the ground for whether the city can be in some way intervening in that to either make it better or to at least address whatever public policy concerns. To me, that is not something that is illegitimate to have attempted, but you have to factor it in into all the more important things that are going on. I don't know that it should have been a big focus of our health and human services time for that committee this past year. Could we have made sure that those committed city counselors and wanted to see progress being made on that issue? Could we have found a way to make sure that they were fulfilling either if this was a campaign promise or if they had engaged with their coalitions that brought them to the city council? Could we have figured out a way to get that visibility about this issue without having to soak up critical time that has literally taken us away from some of the homelessness issues? And I mean, we just had the homeless services center open up in the end of the winter. We have no idea about how it's really functioning on a day to day basis. We haven't even seen the numbers of what we're spending on an operational basis. And yet right now, the proposal for next week that we're having another workshop from the city council is to basically have a proposal to expand the capacity of the homeless services center with it's been an operation like barely like six months we're already gonna increase dramatically its capacity but we have had no good examination about even what the first few months of operations look like. And I never was a big proponent of the mega shelter out there because I knew it was far enough away that if a lot of folks who had a choice didn't need to be there, they would find a way to stay away from it because it's completely on the edge of everything whether it's service providers, panhandling opportunities, family and friends. It's just, it's way out there. But most of the thing that I just was unhappy with was we spent over $25 million and there were a couple little line items we have to kind of connect that. We spent most of that money on the foundation. It was an incredibly expensive site to build on. I don't know if you ever went out there when it was being constructed but for much of its construction, there was these giant like three story high piles of dirt because that entire area was basically landfill. It was not, that was not the original topography there and to build it, Kevin Bunker and Ciambro had to build these elaborate like geo textile like foundations just to make sure that the building didn't slide off like it did in Westbrook a year or two ago. Remember that big landslide? So anyway, my point is we spent an enormous amount of money to build a world-class foundation. That literally helps no one and that makes no sense to me. And if you don't have a lot of money and every single conservative Portlander will talk about how limited our resources are and the property taxes can't go up anymore. I agree with that, except you guys just wasted a lot of money on the most expensive foundation that Portland has built in probably decades. Why are we putting all the money underground when the people above the ground are what matter? Right? So let's go back to the race. I think what I hear you saying is what you would bring to the job is a level of tension and working with the other counselors, get people on site and able to take all these issues in an informed way. And it's probably a relief to hear that all five of the other candidates also said that they're gonna be collaborative workers and they're gonna get the council together and work as a team. So why is it that none of the five candidates who qualified for the ballot will meet their requirement? What made you have to get into this race? Well, I mean, I think that the camps kind of break down. I mean, for lack of a better word, Ethan Stremling was considered sort of the leader of maybe a progressive left block in the city. I don't think everyone subscribes to him being the leader of that block, but if you wanted to just broadly think of team Stremling or sort of our progressive left, I think Andrew Zorro and Pius Ali sort of fall into maybe that side of the spectrum. And then you have the more conservative, and they're all Democrats, if I'm surely right, because we're a Democratic town. We were one newspaper town and we're a one party town. And there's a lot of consequences to that, right? Which means there's not a lot of accountability, but if you want to have a political career that starts in Portland, you have to be a Democrat. The perspective of the center left in the farm. Exactly. So Justin Costa and Mark Dion are basically two versions of the same brand, which is I'm a conservative Democrat and I'm gonna watch the pocketbook and I'm gonna make sure that when I have to say no to fiscal imprudence, I will put my foot down. And supposedly their message is, Mr. Zorro and Mr. Ali won't do that. But the fact is on both sides, these are versions of the same story. I think I cover both bases. And I think Pius has had, he's in the seventh year of his city council tenure. As an at-large counselor. So effectively he's the same voting base that puts the mayor in is the voting base that's put him in. But he's never really had a real opponent. And I don't think even though he's had that kind of glorified lack of opposition, I don't think he's done much with it. And I think Andrew as well, I mean, Andrew talks a lot about land use reform, but like on things like the Manjoh Hill Historic District, he waffled about maybe there's not being a good idea, but he ended up voting the same way Mark Dion did, which is kind of funny because Mark Dion and Andrew Zorro, both of their votes were critical to getting the Manjoh Hill Historic District across the goal line. Neither of them represent Manjoh Hill, right? Their districts are somewhere else, but it was a very potent symbol of we're gonna protect our neighborhoods in district four and five from any kind of development pressure. We're gonna make sure it happens somewhere else. And so they had a very hard time saying no to that because it looked very similar to what their constituents probably want from them in their districts. But so we basically ending up in the same place. We're not making progress. I mean, Andrew had thought that he had negotiated for this like elaborate in-depth study of historic preservation impacts across the city. And that was a very nebulous effort to begin with, but that study still remains undelivered. We haven't even seen it. There was been controversy about it, but that controversy just kind of kept pushing it. Staff now has had no incentive whatsoever to even see it, have it see the light of day, right? Because nobody wants to touch that hot button issue. But the thing is, I believe- And it's done. The district isn't, it's kind of been- Sure, and with every passing year, it's gonna be harder and harder to ever, ever change the contours of that. And that's what happens to our city year after year is certain things get baked in and it's a straight jacket. We don't get that kind of flexibility that a growing city needs. We didn't have zoning in Portland until 1926. And it was an elite project, the John Calvin Stevens and his allies, the same allies that put us, that gave us the city manager system. This was one of their first initiatives. The very first thing that they wanted to do was to institute zoning. And it- Progressive politics, this was seen as taking things out of the scrum of the market and using professional management and- Well, I mean, you know, progressive politics was, I mean, the prohibition was all linked up in this too. And it was like, you know- It's also a progressive, thank you. Yeah, but progressive, the progressive, you know, impulse in America was largely an elite effort. And it had elite interests, first and foremost. And zoning, first and foremost, had, you know, this new crazy automobile is causing noise and, you know, somebody might build a commercial garage near me. It's all these immigrants are packing into, you know, my neighbor's homes. I'm worried about these landlords that might be, you know, trying to change my neighborhood without my consent. And so I want protection. And, you know- The irony is that those pre-zoning neighborhoods are the most desirable in the city. Exactly, because they've been frozen in Amber. But the thing about zoning in 1926- It's scary. When it went, it had to go to referendum and it passed by 30 votes. It's probably the closest vote on any major issue that the city has ever engaged in, 30 votes. And then it got thrown out by the main Supreme Court in the 1930s and they had to do another referendum. And in the height of the Great Depression, guess how many votes it passed? It was overwhelmingly re-ratified because at that point, every homeowner in Portland that hadn't been foreclosed on or lost their house or had their mortgage re-negotiated by the New Deal, which was a big part of the New Deal, every single person suddenly had a real deep interest in making sure that their nest egg, their home, was protected from change and from anything happening around them. And that's the system that we have today, which is, you know, used to buy real estate or a home as an inflation hedge. You were just, hopefully your home would appreciate and your mortgage obligations would stay just a bit ahead of inflation. But then when we had OPEC and the oil crisis, suddenly real estate and like high interest rates sort of upset that apple cart. And there was a tremendous fear that we weren't able to, you know, the value of my home is dropping. You know, I'm spending all this time going to work to pay my mortgage and my house is worth less today than it was when I bought it three years ago. Like, oh my God, that's an upside-down system. So people became even more hyper-invested in making sure that nothing in their neighborhoods changed. But the consequence of that is when your city doesn't change, you don't have a real city, right? You have a city that is not responding to what's happening around it. And, you know, between the census in 2010 and 2020, the national census, there was like 30 mains, the amount of population growth across the country, it was like 30 mains worth, right? Why did Maine see a tiny fraction of that population growth? It's because Maine sort of institutionally and legally through zoning and through other state-mandated anti-growth policies basically can't, even when we wanna welcome people in, it's incredibly hard to figure out a place for them. And so it's no surprise. I mean, I don't want blood money. I mean, I've seen tremendous appreciation in my home since I bought it in 2015. But I figure I feel like pretty guilty to some extent about that appreciation, you know? I mean, it is, you know, it might offend some people to call it blood money, but the human misery that it's a great investment, but it has a consequence. Which means that a lot of people are shutting out, are being shut out. And if you wanna do something about climate change, if we, I mean, in 2000, there was a report by the state planning office before, this was before LePage eliminated it, but it basically talked about how southern Maine and other parts of Maine that are urbanizing and that have seen development are pretty much the most sprawling parts of America. That the sprawl that we see, and because we have a lot of trees in Maine, it's sometimes kind of hidden, but our sprawl is as bad as Los Angeles. It is bad as the sunbelt, as bad as Florida. It is terrible land use. It is exactly why we have climate change, but we are so invested in that in Maine because we've been working on this, creating this geography and this landscape for so long that basically we're just doubling down on it, you know? And so in every time we've refused to build in Portland, we are basically saying the development should happen somewhere else down the road. And that is basically, you know, I don't care how many solar panels you have on your public buildings, if you're creating five, 10,000 cars a year in the hinter regions of Cumberland County, you're not doing anything about climate change. In fact, our one climate future report that came out that was worked on by a lot of people and was presented with much fanfare, that doesn't even acknowledge in that report all of the people that come up for day trips and for tourist trips and all the back and forth between the rest of New England and the I-95 corridor that comes up into Maine, that's our artery, right? Without that, we're dead. But all of that, we decided to just ignore that. We just completely said, well, those aren't our cars, we can't control them, so we don't have to count them in our calculation of what we're gonna do about our climate budget, our climate impacts, our climate mitigation effects. So it's a little bit crazy because I don't know how you do, I don't know how some of these city council or other candidates are talking about climate change when you basically have eliminated most of the generating of the climate change that our city does as a regional economy and as a local economy. I think we need to be honest and there's no magic wand here. They are population triples every day, right? Like we're 67,000 people. Absolutely, and we have these giant car sewers that run through our downtown, which isn't healthy for our downtown and it's unsafe, but those are critical. I mean, if Cape Elizabeth and the people who have nice, expensive single family homes can't easily get to their jobs in Falmouth by driving through Portland, and this is one reason why John Jennings a few years ago, there was the idea to reverse the one ways on high and make them two way streets again, like they were fairly recently, actually, like within our lifetimes. They basically, he didn't wanna fight that battle. And so he did as a staff, again, as a city manager can do, he got it off the agenda and he pushed it off everyone's radar and the city council had no, even if they wanted it back on the agenda, they were flummoxed. And to me, if you care about trying to improve basic things like our traffic landscape, you have to fight literally in the trenches every day to make sure that if you want that back on the agenda, you have to prepare. It may not happen right away. It may be, I mean, a four year term can go fast. It can probably feel pretty slow too, as I'm sure current mayor may feel, but you have to be able to anticipate where I can slot this in. And you do that by constantly recalibrating, literally every day about where are we at? What can we accomplish? What do people want? What do people need? Because I want my fellow councilors to look good. I have no incentive to be like my ideas or the highway because you're right. It will slow things down. At some point, there will be some kind of conflict butting of the heads. And if that opens and comes out in open warfare like it did with Ethan Strimling and his fellow council members, everyone just, it's just you take hard positions and you buckle down. I mean, Justin Costa was one of the major consigliaries of taking down Ethan Strimling. And so I think it's ironic that he's talking on the campaign trail about being a conciliator and being a collaborator and all of that. I'm like, you have a very progressive city council right now, Justin. If you get elected, you're walking into an environment where none of those people are really all that mindful of listening to you and all they have to do is take a page from your city council career, which is isolate the mayor, cut him out, take him down, push him into a corner, shut him up. And he's given them that roadmap because that's what he did. He literally, he and Belinda Ray and Spencer Tibido and the other folks in that era, that's their job. That was their job. They were tasked by the city manager to basically do his dirty work out in the council arena while he was working hard behind the scenes to undercut. And if that's the dynamic that you've already laid out, I don't know how you get, how you basically make a case to the citizens of Portland. Like I helped undercut a mayor and I will be. There was eight to one all the time. Well, but that's the thing. I don't know that, I mean, it would be great to get some of the other counselors to weigh in. We'll see what the endorsements shake out in the next few weeks. He has a big hill decline, I think, to be taken seriously. And this has been really interesting. And I have a lot of other questions. Maybe some other time we can get a cup of coffee or something. You've been watching this very closely, but ultimately where we end up with each of the candidates is the ultimate question. Why should people vote for you and why are you running? Yeah, well, again, there's a lot of city business to absorb. I've absorbed a lot of it. I'm gonna be able to hit the ground running. I know a lot of the players. I know the ground that's been covered and I'm learning all the time. So I'm, I don't know everything, but I want to be here from, I want our new mayor to be starting with a position of knowledge and understanding and also be taken seriously from day one. I mean, the staff knows that I'm to be reckoned with. And I don't want, I want respect. I don't want fear. I want respect. And they will know that we're gonna have to listen to this guy. And so I don't want, I want my council that I'm gonna be sharing the room with to feel like they have an ally and that I don't have, I haven't taken positions in any camps that make it impossible for me to shuttle back and forth. Then we've heard other candidates talking about shuttle diplomacy and whatnot. I mean, that's America, right? Like, you know, that's been America forever. They were shuttling back and forth in the constitutional convention. And that's how we ended up with a crazy constitutional constitution. But the point is, is that is the essence of government, right? Is you're always shuttling them back and forth. And I believe that nobody has to take a chance on their candidate losing. You know, because if you go with me, you will get experience, you will get knowledge, and you will get an opportunity to be heard on both sides, on the progressive camp and on the more conservative, maybe a little bit more, you know, you can describe it in various ways. The law and order camp, I know that Mr. Dion has been really, you know, I'm gonna take care of these camps. But the reality is the district attorney, their office is also completely under overwhelmed. I mean, the district attorney herself was taking cases in a courtroom. You know, I mean, that doesn't happen very often. She was literally just trying to keep the fire hose of cases that her office is dealing with because she too has staffing issues. She too has issues. So if somebody thinks we're gonna arrest our way out of this magically, like overnight, I mean, you know, I'm sure there's gonna be a lot of pushback at the county level that says Portland, deal with us in another way, because you're not gonna flood our jails and you're not gonna flood our courts. And if you do, you're gonna probably break the whole system. And that's completely irresponsible. So this idea, this hope to everyone in Portland that's been impacted by this, I mean, I've been dealing with this for eight years. I clean up human excrement off of my foundation a couple of times a week because I, you know, it is what you have to do. I mean, you just have to keep going. But the fact is like, there's no easy answers here when you've created a decades long backlog of good choices that haven't gotten done. And again, other people are saying the same thing too. I mean, I'm not like, you know, I'm not come down from the clouds with the only one that sees this but as the whole nation is dealing with this but we have to really make good choices about how we focus our attention. And, but we don't have, I mean, a lot of the counselors, the newest counselors, they will acknowledge, and you often see them in some of their committees basically saying, look, I'm learning a ton. I had no idea. And no one writes on their little palm card for the election season. I will take 18 to 24 months to figure out what I'm doing, you know? And, but that's basically what they're acknowledging and admitting and behind the scenes or even in open and openly in public. I mean, I love Dylan Pugh seems like a tremendous like neighbor and citizen, like I'm glad he's getting involved. But, you know, I don't think that he has a handle on the minutiae and the firehose of information that's gonna hit him on day one. And, you know, if voters wanna trust his, you know, aspirations with their vote, great, do it. But recognize that you're probably gonna get someone who is immediately pancaked by the reality. You know, I mean, we've been watching buses go by during this, you know, if he's gonna get hit by a bus and it's gonna take him a while to get back up. And before you know it, there's gonna be a lot of angry people saying, why is city hall even more paralyzed after Dylan than before Dylan, right? And I wanna avoid the paralysis. And we have to make choices very deliberately, very carefully based on a lot of information all in front of us. And that is the Monday through Friday job. And you need somebody with skills. I'm a transactional attorney. I'm not licensed in Maine. I've never wanted to have clients or anybody in Maine that I've, but you know, I'm licensed in California and New York. And my experience is about deal-making, right? And deal-making, no deal that happens. In fact, the first law firm I worked for in New York City, we only got paid if the deal got done. And so if the deal doesn't get done, that's my failure, right? I could not figure out a way to help my client and help the other side understand that do you guys wanna do something here? Cause you're gonna have to figure out something has to change. Cause if you have all the leverage, you can sometimes just steamroll past somebody, right? But if you think that there's some parity, then you can be like, okay, well, what's reasonable? What are the goals? What can we give each other that helps us move on? And I am not saying that my legal skills, I mean, a lot of people are good at this. You don't have to be a lawyer to do that. But I do think that I have some real experience and that's what we have to do is like, get the information in front of us where can we move? Where can we give? Where can we stick to our guns? Because no politician wants to look like they're giving up something important. But often that's rhetoric. It's often testing out and educate public education. So it's a multi-pronged process. You have to be firing on a lot of cylinders to do this well. But the idea that this is easy or that somebody who doesn't have a lot of experience doing this or somebody even that has been a counselor in a very part-time isolated manner is gonna be successful at that. You know, I mean, it's a leap of faith, right? And that's every voter is gonna be engaging in a leap of faith of some kind between now and when the polls close. I want them to- The lawyer wants to make a leap of faith deal. What do they do? They, so it's, I as a writing candidate because there are no other writing candidates, you will write my name in and- I hope it's spelled it incorrectly. No, the voter intent is liberally applied in the state of Maine under the Secretary of State and the state law. So as long as it doesn't look like another candidate and it's not confusing, they don't, they could spell, my name is pronounced like R-O-W but it's spelled R-H-E-A-U-L-T. But if you wrote R-O-W or R-O-W-E, if you wrote George, if you wrote something that is at least distinguishable in terms of understanding, G-O-R, that probably has to be accepted by the city clerk. The next thing is you have to fill in an oval as you do with a named ballot and you have to rank me. So, again, I get, because there's no other writing candidates, I get the benefit if you do put my name down and write my name in a way that's cognizable by the city clerk when they're counting the ballots, you will get to rank me as long as, I could be the first choice, I could be the second choice, I could be the last choice, or I could be just, you know, I won't show up at all. But I think that I add a lot and I wanted to make sure that voters had another choice and a choice of experience and understanding and knowledge. And I was very concerned that our city in the next four years has to do some really hard things and some really important things and we don't have four years to fumble that and to wait for the next mayoral election, right? So, or wait for someone to resign in frustration because they're not making any headway. So, that's where I'd like to be is you will, you'll take a chance on me, it's a little extra work, but you will get to a better place in our city by voting for me. And these other gentlemen are excellent folks and I want to keep them in the loop, but I think that we have more to gain, obviously, from me, so. All right, well, let's leave it at that and thank you so much for coming in and good luck. All right, well, thank you so much. I really appreciate the effort and including me. So, thanks.