Don't want to be an American.
It's got so lun show back on seven hundred Woldy got election coming.
Up to Tuesday.
Levy's in a dozen places, local offices, and there's a big CPS renewal. We've got the mayor's race, of course, and some twenty six people. It feels like three thousand people trying to place in the top nine. So twenty six people looking for nine jobs in a Sea Down council on this and more. Is the person who controls it all. That would be the director of the Hamlin County Board of Elections, Sherry Poland, welcome back.
How are you.
I'm doing well, Thanks for having me.
You always in a good mood.
This is like right now I would be just crabby af you know what I mean, because you got so much coming at you right now.
All right, so we'll start with this.
The polls up on Tuesday, six thirty am to seven thirty I believe correct, that's.
Crack six thirty am to seven thirty pm.
Don't forget the driver's license.
That's correct, that's correct. A few years ago, Hi Ohio changed these acceptable forms of ID for voting, so in order to vote in person, you do need to have a State of Ohio driver's license or a State of Ohio identification card, or a passport or military ID. So make sure it's not expired. Make sure it's up to date before you come to the polls.
Okay, I bring one that's expired, I forget it. What happens, I can vote, no problem.
If you do not have an acceptable form of ID, you will be issued what we call a provisional ballot. It's the same ballot that's issued to every other voter you would market, but instead of scanning it and having it counted election night, it's placed inside what we call a provisional envelope and that has your identifying information on it.
You fill that out after election day. Bipartisan teams verify the information on the envelope, and the voter has four days after election day, so that's the Saturday after election day to come to the Board of Elections and present an acceptable form of ID. If they do, then that ballot will be added to the official count, which occurs a few weeks after election day. I do want to note that if you're in that, find yourself in that situation right now. So your driver's license or state idea
is expired. Go to the BMV before you come to the polls. That interim documentation that the BMB gives you while your identification is being mailed to you, that interim idea that's good for driving purposes, it's also acceptable for voting. So if you have that, you will not have to vote provisionally.
Okay, got it. Let's talk about the early voting numbers. How early voting the absentee ballots, and how does the request compared to previous elections and what does that tell you about what's going to happen Tuesday?
Yeah, So absent te voting, which is that umbrella that contains both voting by mail and early in person voting. We're pretty much right on track as to the twenty twenty one election. So four years ago, once again Cincinnati was voting council members, mayor this election, that turnout is tracking right on pace with that twenty twenty one election.
Okay, compare that to like the presidential cycle, the last presidential election, so one twenty percent.
Okay, what are we talking?
Yeah, so in twenty twenty one, county wide, we saw a twenty six percent turnout. City Cincinnati is slightly lower in twenty five percent. Compare that to a presidential where we see a seventy two percent turnout. So unfortunately, we don't see the turnout in odd numbered years elections than we do in the even years. But you know, we it's kind of hard for us in the business to understand why that happens, because we are voting for our local elected officials. These are the folks that really have
an impact on our day to day lives. So I encourage everyone if you haven't voted yet, voted yet early voting in person is still ongoing through Sunday, and then you know your polls will be open in your community on election Day, get out and vote.
I would say it's simply but it's marketing, I think, right, because in a presidential cycle, it's in your face all the time.
You're getting tons of robo calls.
Social media feed is packed with political messages and bickering. You turn on a streaming show or TV and you're inundated with political messages. President presidential visis front and center, and I think it just the marketing drives more people to polls.
That's my theory.
Yeah. Absolutely. Something else we see is that you know, sometimes controversial issues will bring voters out to the polls. So two years ago, twenty twenty three odd year, you know, election again looking electing local officials, we saw a higher turnout. I think we saw a forty eight percent turnout in twenty twenty three. But that your abortion, marijuana. We're both on the ballot, So the issues can also drive out turnout.
Yeah, yeah, And I think that's probably a good point too, is the more globally issued. That's a state issue. But everyone's like, okay, I can identify with that. You start talking about millage and levees and school boards and dogcatchers, people's eyes glaze over, rightly or wrongly. I think that's how we're programms. Like I got my ballot where we just moved to and looked at and were like three or four things on there, and most of them were
fairly inane. There's a levee issue which I voted on, but the other ones are like, I don't know who these people are. Did some research found out some of them? Other ones I just and the ones I looked at when I have no idea who they are. I can't find any information on them. I just left blank, which is the same.
You kid, you can absolutely skip the contest. That is your right to do that. But I think you bring up another very good point, and that is to become an informed voter. And it's easy to do if you vote by mail, because that ballot is mail to your house. You can fit take your time to the research. However, for this election, voting by mail has ended. That ended on Tuesday. Anyone who wished to vote by mail had to submit an application to the board by this past Tuesday,
Chamber twenty, so voting by mail has ended. But what you can do if you are going to vote in person then is go on to our website vote Hamilton County, Ohio dot gov. Vote Hamilton County, Ohio dot gov. Go onto our website and you can look up your sample ballot on our website so it looks almost identical to the ballot you'll receive when you walk into the polling place. So reviewed ahead of time, do your research like you did, and become an informed voter so there's no surprises when
you walk into the polling place. You can go in knowing how you want to cast your ballot.
Scott's Onland with Sherry Poland she's the director Hamilin County Board of Elections. Got the election coming up Tuesday. If you're in person, at six point thirty relative to that, Sherry, you know, you mentioned the twenty right around twenty six percent turnout right around that maybe twenty five one.
Out every four voters in the city.
And sometimes issues will bring out more people on off year elections, as this one is because you don't have the hype of the presidential I understand that, and I think people are just fatigued too going I'm going to take a knee here this year.
I don't need to show.
But I thought, you know, with the crime issue in Cincinnati, and I know you can't get in and that's not your area concern, you're just managing the election. But I thought, for sure, with the interesting crime downtown and the number of people running for counsel, that would I get I guess, maybe drive more people out.
That surprised me, you know, and it's still a possibility on election day. You know, the majority of voters in Hamilton County still choose to vote on election day, so you know, we might see that higher turnout come.
Then.
You know, I don't have a crystal ball that tells me that, But well I'll find out on Tuesday.
Yeah, exact, we'll find out together on Tuesday. Regarding that too, how many more people this year and I'm sure you're looking at the trend and it's just align almost straight upward. Would guess the number of people taking advantage of the very generous way we can vote early in the Buckeye State, where like me, I just would rather have it mailed to my house. I'd get a cup of coffee, sit there on a Sunday afternoon morning, I guess before football and figure out who I'm and what I'm voting for,
do a little research. Whereas typically you don't have that kind of time. You feel pressured if you're standing there in queue, and then you know, getting into the booth itself to actually punch the draw the little circles. I guess, not punch the card, but draw the circle. This is easier to know how many more people are taking advantge are we see that trend continue upward?
What we're seeing continue to trend upward is the early in person voting. It's just become you know, extremely extremely popular in Hamilton County. It started when we moved the board of elections away from downtown to our current facility in Norwood. You know, it's more centrally located in the county that we serve. We have you know, a large amount of free public parking, and that's that is what's trending upward, is that early in person vote voting every
election we outpass the last similar election. When it comes to that, voting by mail is you know, sort of holding study or maybe dropping slightly. You know, during twenty twenty, we had many many people vote by mail, obviously due to the pandemic, and we thought that perhaps that trend would continue because now we have so many people that were never exposed to voting by mail before, they might have found it to be very convenient. But that didn't happen.
After twenty twenty, we went back to the majority of Hamiltons County voters casting the ballot the traditional way at the polling place on.
Election I hate that's happening.
I don't know, you know, I think one way. You know, we live in the Midwest. We like our traditions. You know, I know a lot of people that say to me, you know, no, I go into my polling place on election day. That's a sacred day. To me, that's what I do and I'm not going to deviate, you know, from that, which you know, I think is interesting. Then we have a lot of people with the early voting. You know, we have voting for almost a month at our Early Vote Center, and it is and people find
it to be, you know, extremely convenient. I will note obviously on election day you must go to your assigned polling place, which is based on where you live, whereas at the Early Vote Center, you know, anyone who lives of matter where you live in Hamilton Counties, your registered voter,
you can come and vote the Early voat Center. So many times we see families coming together so where they might be you know, assigned to different polling places because they don't all live, you know, in the same home. We see a lot of people sort of making a family event and coming together the Early Votes Center, then going going out to eat or something like that afterwards, or sort of the stories that we that we hear
and again it's it's extremely convenient. And the hours that we have I will note we're open today and tomorrow from seven thirty am to seven thirty pm Saturday, eight am to four pm. Early voting ends on Sunday, and it's the shortest hours we have by state law. We're open from one pm to five pm on Sunday, so still plenty of time to come on and vote early in person at the.
Board Cherry Poland with all the event of early voting, and you know, they're still traditional south there. I don't know how young people do that, because you know young people, they'll probably mail it in. I mean, if you could text your vote in the all over that I would guess. Maybe I'd be that way too, I suppose. But how is this changing how you tabulate the elections? And normally you're sitting around waiting for the results to come in. Sometimes it's the middle of the night when they come.
You know, if you're voting early, either in person, by mail or however, you have those votes and of course you have them in hand and you're ready to release those results the minute the polls closed. So you got a lot of stuff done up front, so to speak. How does that changed your job and also when the results come out, Yeah, that's.
A great question. You know, in the state of Ohio, we are permitted election officials are permitted to process those vote by mail ballots as soon as they come in. You have a handful of states that won't allow the election officials to begin those acts of preparation until election warning. But in Ohio, we can verify all the information that's contained on the envelope ahead of time as soon as
we receive it. Once we determine that that vote by mail ballot is accepted for counting, we remove the ballot. It scanned, it's not tabulated, it's scanned, and the cast vote record is what we call it is stored. And then the ballot is stored in a secure facility here at the Ware of Elections. Then on election night, as soon as the polls closed at seven point thirty one PM, we then hit the tabulate button, so the no ballots
are counted until the polls closed. But we are permitted to do those acts of preparation.
Yeah, scam, get him ready to go, so that makes the results come in here. And that's a big question here, Sherry Poland. Is it's not about you know, free and open elections and exercising your constitutional right to cast your vote one person, one voice, and one vote, as the case may be.
This is not about that.
This is about Brian Combs, our assistant news director, wants to know what time he can go home on Tuesday, Tuesday night.
Again, I don't have a crystal ball that would that would tell me that we hope, always hope at one hundred to be one hundred percent report before eleven pm, you know. And again just to talk a little bit more about the election night count and how that works. We mentioned the early votes that's early in person and by mail are the very first ballots that are tabulated and released on election night, and then it's a little bit of a waiting game for those ballots to come
in from the polling places all across Hamilton County. And that's because our voting equipment is not connected to the internet. In fact, that doesn't they don't even have the capability of being connected to the internet. So the physical delivery of the ballots and the equipment from the bipartisan poll workers to the bipartisan teams at the Board of Elections, so it takes a little time for them to come in.
So we'll usually we have a few early pickup locations will actually send teams out from the board so we can have some results trickling in early. You know, usually between eight thirty and nine, but the majority of those ballots arrives at the board around so that's typically when we start to see you know, most of the results come in between nine thirty and ten thirty, and again we always hope to be at one hundred percent, you know, before before eleven o'clock. We know it's a long day.
We know everyone is anxiously awaiting and constantly hitting that refresh button. But you know, a latch and officials will never trade you know, security and accuracy for speed, So I'll just have to be a little bit patient to make sure their results coming in are accuracy.
I know you have last minute preparations. You got to go check the tires, make sure the dipstick has oil in it. You got to go make sure the voting machines everything's ready to go. You're a busy lady. I always appreciate it talking to you and enjoy our conversations and appreciate what you do for Democracy's an important thing, even especially in off years when you have lower turnout and probably fewer workers to deal with, et cetera. So all the best, Sherry poland thanks again for coming on
the show. How about a nice quiet Tuesday. Does that sound good?
That sounds wonderful to me.
It does. You've seen some stuff, yeah, we have.
But we have a great team here at the Board of Election. I cannot praise the staff here and now if it's truly a place where Democrats and the Republicans come together to do the people's work. So got to have a shout out.
To them all the best.
Cherry, be well, good luck, Thank you, Sherry poland that as you're a director Hamiley County Board of Elections and love it.
She's great.
She's just a great personnel, a great person and really cares about her job and the integrity of the election above all else. So six thirty am Tuesday, if you're an in person voter, go get it done. If you already did it, like me, just sit back and wait for results to come in. And I have no idea what to tell Brian Combs. This is all about Colms is like, Hey, you're talking to Sherry Paul. Ask her when she thinks I can go home. It's all about him.
You know, this democracy of two hundred and fifty years still a long time, and we tabulate the elections and sometimes they're contentious, sometimes we fight two thousand comes to mind, and basically they're in the ought So we had a lot of contentious elections. Along came her voting kind of eased the process, made a little bit easier.
You know.
It wasn't like three or four o'clock in the morning. There weren't all these challenges and stuff like that, especially on off here. We're not going to get that. All Brian Combs wants to know, despite all of that history, despite it being the cornerstone of our constitution, of our whal life here in America, one person, one vote, all Brian Combs cares about is what time he can go home and have a beer. Scott's Loan Show, seven hundred
World Slowly seven hundred w welw interesting. Sherry poland director Hamlin County Goe just on the show last half hour.
If you missed, it'll be on the podcast following the show.
Yeah.
The turnout so far, the projection is right around twenty five twenty six percent, which is where we've been in previous elections. I'm not that politically savvy to analyze it and break it down like Chuck Todd and tell you what all that means. And reading the Tea leaves because generally even people like that are notoriously wrong about those projections. I don't know if that helps or hurts the incumbents,
and that would be the members of council. But in particular, this is going to be somewhat of a referendum on AFT have pure vol. Pure Vol most likely is going to win. Right, you have incredible amount of funding. You have the deep blue Democratic machine of Hamlin County and therefore the city Cincinnati even deeper blue because you don't have the outlying suburbs. Uh that in the fact you're the incumbent. It's kind of an off year. There's not
really big issues out there. Yeah, maybe to some degree CPS, but that's a renewal levee. Uh, nobody's really driving the vote out here. Does that help or her to after to have pure vol? But not AFT have because I think he wins maybe a little closer than he'd like, for sure. And it's not an you know, it's certainly not an indictment of Corey Bowman in his campaign. I THO did a pretty good job, but there's baggage there in deep blue Hamlet County. Being the brother of JD.
Vans and being a Republican. But I think though that I would have been around long enough to maybe see this is that you wonder though, if the voters aren't going to take it out on Counsole. So you have twenty six people running for nine seats, something's gonna give, And I wonder what council looks like come Wednesday morning at that point, or shockingly, what if the same nine people or maybe I don't know, one or two change
the body of Counsole. I don't think you're gonna see you know, we'll throw all the bums out kind of mentality, but it's gonna be interesting. But the turnout, you think, with crime being center stage, and I'll have Liz keating on it later on the show, actually ten oh seven this morning, I'll ask her specifically about what she's seeing on the streets, because she's working really hard, seeing a lot.
She's been really aggressive campaigning, a lot of money behind her, a lot of TV ads, a lot of print, a lot of social media signage and stuff like that. So she's really leaning her shoulder in this wan. I'd be surprised if she doesn't win a seat at this point. As hard as she's worked and also the track record and say what she says about all this stuff. And yesterday, of course the drama, the steady direct from city council. It's like, people go, why are you still talking? Why
do you talk about this every day? Because every day there's something new. You know, before the day before it was well, now the city's hiring a law firm for forty to fifty grand to find out why we fired Terry Thigi after we fired her what And then yesterday it was friends and family members of Terry Thigi wearing I Support Chief thig t shirt showing up the council
and having their saying really going at city council. I think there's a thing too for most people, you know, average voters, people show up and that probably maybe just every four years even for a presidential if that is like, don't understand how it all works with council that they essentially control the purse strings. But okay, so Afteb's the mayor and then you get cheer along the city manager and then when they fire Thiji, Afteb says, well that's a city manager.
You're gonna have to hit her.
And then the city manager says well, I can't really comment the personnel issue. So you've got all these people with just ample amounts of cover, and the mayor will blame council, councilill blame the city manager's city manager blames the council and it's just there's no accountability there. And I think the core of it, that's what's frustrating that in the just the dire the horrible lack of communication from this administration on help plowing the streets, fixing the potholes.
You know, they had a what was it in a contest for people to come up with ways to let the city know where the potholes are? Well, what the hell is that? We had the big mac Bridge fire? How is that handled poorly? You can't, of course expect to have the city streets and now to wash with traffic when you close a major artery like that. I get that, but it took two weeks before anybody said, oh, yeah,
we probably should come up with a plan here. And I could go on and on about the violence this summer, and that's what voters are staring at. We'll find out on Tuesday, as they say, and I know that goes without saying, but I'm interested see what the fallout is from this whole thing, if any, because I'll be honest with you, if nothing really changes here and you're in the city and you're concerned about this stuff, and just vote for these same people you've always voted for, you
know what, I don't get it. We just had a no King's protest and there's a lot of overlap. You Now, there are different different beliefs, but there's a lot of overlap between what we're talking about with the mayor of Cincinnati and the President of the United States, And so if you're really anti one, I don't know how this isn't creep in and go, wow, we've got a leadership problem in this country, whether it's Democrats or Republicans for that matter, anyway more than that ten oh seven list
keating Council. I'm looking to get back into council here, and we'll get to her coming up in just a few here on seven hundred WLW. You don't one of my chronic complaints, the bitch and moan factor. I don't know if it's a complaint real, it's observation.
Right.
I went to college, my wife went to colle who met a college, went to university, did what we're supposed to do, because back in the eighties I would not particularly bright as you know back then, but you just needed like a pulse and a number two pencil, like yeah you got those two things. Ah yeah, okay, come on and we'll take you today a whole different thing. You know, even a I don't under say the great point average. Generally a four point is a good perfect.
Now we've got people with above a four point grade point average and still can't get into their core classes or a program to study because we have made college more important than it should be. And I say that not because I think college is a wasted time, waste of money. It is for some people. We still need people in the stems, and there's still doctors and nurses and engineers and mathemagicians and the real fingers out there.
But the problem is when you allowed the federal government to come in and make money off of this through federalizing the loans and the whole scam, and I'll call it the college scam, where you have people coming in not knowing what they're going to do. You know, it used to be go in and change your major eleven times and you know you have your loan paid off in a recentable bond of time. It still took my wife and I and we graduated in the early nine
well late late daies, early nineties, it still took us. Yeah, it wasn't quite ten years, but took us a while to pay those loans off. Now more chance do you have. And I think that's part of the problem. You know, if you go in you're gonna go get a degree in medicine or something, but you're still going to get like a philosophy degree or archaeology or art history or something like that. I mean, why are we still offering those majors? And it's not an indictment of one university.
It's a system. It's the entire system.
But if you don't think it's about money, it's about higher education and the best way I don't know. I got a call like it is. So our friends at Zavier University have changed how the campus living requirement is. So starting fall of next year, if you go to X you need to live on campus now for three years. And that applies to students ages seventeen to twenty one. If you're commuting or living with a parent or Guardian, different story, but they're going to force you to stay
on campus now for an extra year. And unfortunately, students are not happy about this because I think the student body president said it's the most unpopular policy changed by far, because they never asked us. We found about it on social media. Let's just and Xavier says, no, no, no, no, no,
this is not this is not about money. It's this is what future students want and families want, and it's uh, it pays benefits because we tend to get higher graduation rates and there's a sense of community and other school but other schools are doing I always hate that other schools are doing it, you know, Georgetown and Notre Dame are doing it. I'm not quite sure because I'm looking at the numbers going off campus rent is according to the story, about five fifty a month.
Right right around that. That's a sweet spot.
Off campus, and then that's a on campus housing.
They're getting up to like fifty six hund do per semester.
So I add that up.
Okay, that's five to fifty a month, five fifty six hundred for semester. But you're still talking, you know, just basic math, that's ten times more than rent. But all right, so a semesters three fee, Yeah, you know you're still paying a quite a high premium here, and you know it's between twenty seven hundred and fifty six hundred per semester, depending what kind of room you have, versus five fifty a month. And that's a substantial price difference right there.
And you know, I'm sorry when when you know you're dealing with and Xavier's open about this, dealing with an operating budget. They're trying to figure out a new way to address the shortfall and the tuition revenue. When it starts to go in the other direction, though, what does that mean? You've got all these shiny business of these buildings.
You have.
Professors and administrators and staff you want to keep home and pay them and keep the lights. And there's a lot of overhead with this thing. But yeah, I don't know. Now we're going to go going to force students stay on campus because I think it's gonna work, It's gonna be high retention rates.
I don't know if I'm buying that.
I look at it more pragmatically than that, and go, I think it's about money. I think it's about about jault wanting to keep that cash because you move off campus. Now I'm not living the dorm. I'm living I'm doing my and what I went through it. I think at BG, when I was in the back in the day, it was two years and even. And then I thought that first semester, you know, first year school, you're a freshman. You don't know what's going on, especially me. I was the first one in my family to go, so I
had no guidance whatsoever. Just kind of is like feral and back. But after that first year, you kind of like, Okay, I got this down. And by the second, like the first end of the first semester, second year in the dorm, you're like, I, you know, I can't wait to get the hell out of here. I can't wait to get
my own apartment. I can come and go as I please, and there's no ra and I could do we can you know, you can do beer, you know, get a keg and beer bongs and kegstands and smoke weed and stuff you can't do anymore because I think they send you to guantanamo if you sip a beer under the age of twenty one. Nonetheless, that's what we're faced with and so that was like, yeah, two three years is just there's no reason for that builds a sense of community.
I you know what, it's four years of my life, okay, and I have great I still have friends from college, sure that I don't talk to all that often, but still friends, and I probably should talk to them more. But at the same time, it's like, okay, I build that sense of community that was not a dorms. I was like extra cricketer kind of stuff. So I look at this and go, yeah, it just feels like a money grab to me. And I'm kind of with the students on that one. And it's tough enough to pay
for college. I got to pay more because you're forcing me at gunpoint to stay on campus.
I don't know.
And maybe because it's a Jesuit private institution, maybe there's something there, but I don't. At least at a public school. It feels different to me. And we're starting to see, you know, as we have few and fewer people. I heard a story I forgot where I heard this that for the first time ever. I was in news yesterday and I forget who was saying it. But the first time in our two hundred and fifty years of existence
as a country. We have more people aged sixty and older than people I think it was eighteen and older. So you know, we're getting a lot older, agetting a lot gray, or is the point, and fewer people going to college at least for an extended period of time before we start to have more babies or more immigrants with kids. Colleges are going to suffer from this, and you wonder what that's going to look like with the contraction. I would think that, and we're seeing it ready. Some
colleges simply not gonna be able to survive. And you're also going to have to look at quite honestly, and they should and should have done this for a long time when they're fat and happy. Didn't have to now all of a sudden when you're looking for people to show up like it was when I was a kid. Right, because it's about population trends, you're not gonna have to be as selective to go to school. So maybe the days of a pulse and number two pencil are back
in vogue. But it wouldn't be a number two pencil because that's old. I guess it would be a I don't know, a cell phone and a tablet and a pulse. So we're starting to see the effects now of the shutdown. I've been talking about this the past few days, and the SNAP benefits expiring on Saturday, and you know, the political will power standing your ground and Republicans are saying, nope, we're not moving on this.
Democrats say nope, we're not moving on this. In the meantime, the.
Rest of us, the taxpayers, get screwed because our side has to win at all costs. Rather than governing and representing us and doing the hard work of governing, it's easier to simply draw a line in the sand and say we're not going to cross this.
So for principle, but we're starting.
To see the effects going from the eater at the beginning for the first few weeks of this thing, to actual damage or people get hurt anyway, and it would be the SNAP people for sure. And now we're starting to see those members of the federal workforce and contractors that get paid. And now air travel is getting to be a problem here, seven thousand flights today, the delayed nationwide on Monday. Air traffic controls. I mean, look at
it this way. If you say what you want about federal workers, and when we do, we do need some federal workers. We have, for example, right in the listening area right in our backyard here our good friends in Dateon, which I considered just like you know, we're a big radio station. We get a lot of listeners in Dayton as well. You got right pat Air Force Base and all the businesses around there. All those people suffer because people aren't spending money, and that hurts the bottom line,
That hurts the economy, It hurts working folks. The FAA is saying staffing shortages and ground delay programs at Newark, close to Cousin to close Austin. Now I see some of the big it used to be like the little ones. We're like, oh, okay, so you know, maybe Louisville has a little bit of a problem for a bit. I know, Nashal bigger city for sure, but you know, it's not affecting the major airports. And now we're starting to see, Okay, Newark,
which is always jacked up. Newark's the worst headache in America. But Dallas, now we're starting to see this. And yeah, when you start not paying people because of the shutdown, people are saying, well, I'm not going to show up to work. Now. You know, if you're an official, you have to show up. You just have to do that. I don't understand that, Like, wait, wait a minute, a lot. I did the job where you don't pay me, and you don't pay me for a couple of weeks and
then you still expect me to show up. What am I stupid? What was I born yesterday? I mean I might do that for a minute or two, but by and large, I think most people are like, yeah, how many sick days?
I got? How many vacation days? Because this is stupid. I don't even know if I'm ever going to get paid.
And this is important because we're heading into the fall travel season. You're not quite the Thanksgiving yet. We got a few weeks that you just wonder how much longer it's going to go. It doesn't seem like they have the political impasis to get this thing done anytime soon.
But yeah, once you get into and the reason why these things last about thirty days, because then people start to really know it's not just the inconvenience of a park being shut down, or trash not getting paid or a lawn not getting cut now you start to see it. You know, the impact be a little bit deeper here. And when it comes to the snap benef it's simply
a freestore food bank. I occurred riber on the show on Monday and he had his appeal out there, We're gonna have to hand out more meals and we just we're gonna try. We're gonna squeeze our venders a little bit more and try to get more money and more meals out there and more donations.
Hopefully you consider it.
Do Nation of the free store food Bank because they do great work in like twenty counties in our area. But that's not going to be enough to fill the void here. It is simply is not going to And you know it has to do with up politics and dronaline. I get it. You know the ACA is jacked up. Should we be using subsidy to pay for healthcare benefits? No, it just makes it more expensive. But then have an alternative,
have a plan. And that's the problem. We shut down government and we don't have a plan for fixing why we're shutting government down in the first place. So it seems to me like you'd want to get back in there and actually work the problems instead of pointing the finger at the other guy saying it's his, fat, her fault, and actually work for the American people, which is the problem I have with politics, and a lot of people do. It's exhausting and it's painful for a lot of folks,
for sure. There's just no way around it. You can talk about who's getting snapped benefits and the legal aliens, and that's all well and good, but the bulk of people that are getting those benefits are senior citizens. A number of them are veterans, but a lot of them are working families where you're working two or more jobs and you need that assistance to get by. That's the reality of it. So I don't know how this fixes it. But you can say they should be getting it, or
this person should be getting it. That's all well and good. That's the system that's set up. And if you don't like it, then change the damn system. Do you do that by not getting together in meeting? And the answer is new It is not five new arrests now made in connection with a louver heist. We've got enough going on. Had to pay attention without worrying about Paris. But I think it's just just a fascinating things. They continue to make more and more investigations and by the way, still
no sign and what they stole, I don't know. I'm Italian enough to go. They melt that stuff down, they whacked up the those rocks, and they're they're all around the world right now. I want to think that's the case, Like that's why they stole the jewels in the first place.
Instead of artwork. You don't steal the Bona Lisa, you steal the crown jewels and it's you know, once you start breaking those up, yeah, you know they're worth what one hundred and two million dollars with the eight jeels as they stole they ate, I guess settings whatever you call them things different pieces that they stole, I guess yeah, they're gonna be but they're still gonna be worth millions
of dollars because you're talking about rare gemstones. And now they have five people so and now the place are saying, uh, it may not be an inside job after all, which I think is interesting. It seemed like it would be an inside job. But the cameras are turned the wrong way and a whole bunch of stuff you know you got ladders up against the wall. If somebody didn't know something on the inside there, we'll find out. But five more rests of this ring. It's certainly as fascinating, that's for sure.
All right.
We got weather it's going to rain at least for the next few hours here, and then we drive for the kiddos on Halloween tomorrow, and got the time change happening this weekend and so much more so, it's an election coming up on Tuesday. Liz Keating is looking for your vote. And she examined she having been on council. I guess she's a great person, asked this question. It's not about, you know, having her on to promote her agenda what she wants to do, which I think is refreshing.
But this is more about why is some council pushing back on the mayor and the city manager?
Why maybe some answer for us?
Next Scottsland Show on the Home of the Best Bengals coverage seven hundred WWT since then, want.
To be an American?
On Thursday morning here seven hundred ww Good news is we dry up this afternoon. We dry up this afternoon and looks good for trick or treaters tomorrow, right, so we care about weekend looks good? Uh So yesterday the steady drip and it is literally a soap opera.
Down at City Hall.
A couple dozen families and friends of Chief Terry Thiji showed up to council wearing I stand with Police Chief Thigi t shirts and they pretty much read after a pure val sherlong and council the riot Act. So you had family members there and obviously they love and care about Terry Thiji and demand that she get a fair hearing and the city. And the hard part about this is like very few people, I say, Seth Walsh, I had councilperson and Albion yesterday and she was demure about
but you know, she's still commented on it. But by and large it's been really really quiet down there. Family members slam the investigation now, calling into her leadership in the question and after the fact that it's political and secretive, and they're right about that. But the soap opera continues down at City Hall, and one wonders what happens on Tuesday on election day. Liz Keating is a former council member. She's running yet again, and she has been hitting the
streets pretty hard. I keep seeing all her campaign I think Liz keating by the way, Liz, welcome. I see a lot of your ads, and you're spending a lot when it comes to getting the message out.
We are working our tails off. We want to get back there and get things back in order in Cincinnati, so we are doing everything we can to get back. I love this city too much to see it the way it is right now.
You're out campaigning here on the street. What are people saying.
Everybody is talking about crime. Literally every neighborhood does. No matter what neighborhood we are in, people are concerned about the crime. They are concerned about basic services and getting
no response from city hall. And honestly, that's why we're running crime and the causes of crime, and get back to being able to actually plow snow when it snows, and pay the roads and fill the potholes, and get rid of the litter, and take care of city property so it's not overgrown and full of graffiti, which are all things that again attract crimes. You know, just do the basics, the fundamentals of local government.
I noticed that not too long ago, a few weeks ago, there was a summit where they had a contest to come up with unique ways to let people know that the potholes have been filled on.
It's just another one.
It's like, the pothole problem has been going on for a long time, and it's literally decades of neglect, right and we're taking money from the sale of the railroad and that's going to go in the streets and paving over potholes. But right up in like ninety days before the election, all of a sudden, they went gangbusters on fixing potholes.
Do you think that's a coincidence.
I don't think it's a coincidence. But if you look a long term, even the money from the railroad, the city has not been able to deploy that money very quickly to pave the roads. If you have all this money coming in, you need to be prepared. You need to be able to get the RFPs out, you need to be able to get the contract signed, and you need to get the workers on the roads. I mean, these are tons of jobs which again one get paychecks going home to families to support more families, So that's
tax revenue right back to the city. And these are fundamentals that they cannot get right right now, and there's no conversation from Council like where are these special meetings being held? Where are the questions? Where are you holding the administration accountable? Say, why aren't these dollars getting deployed and we've got to hold up and getting these contracts together? Then what changes do we need to make legislatively? You're
just not seeing Council act on these fundamentals. They're just not doing their job, and I'm beyond frustrated by it.
It is telling that so few people are speaking out and questioning the administration how they handle the thig thing. And it's not just that it's you know, there's no crime plan. I have a crime plan, for sure. I think it's too little. It's not aggressive enough that you're looking at outliers or not the root cause of this thing. I mean, when you go after food trucks instead of the criminals, it can continue to ruin our city.
That's telling.
You're punishing good business owners and people that just simply want to taco at two o'clock in the morning. Yeah, you're gonna get a bad element that might show up and do that, but it's your job to separate the bad element from the good element. You know, if I go to a club, or I go to a bar, or I got a concert, whatever it is, and I get out and go damn, I'm hungry.
Hey there's a food truck, it's midnight or whatever.
I'm gonna get a cony dog, I'm gonna get a slice of pizza, a burger, whatever the hell it is, and go home, go to bed, fat and happy and entertain Now they're gonna take that away from the good people all because it's a very small percentage of people causing all this nonsense.
That's what I'm talking about.
It.
It's the lack of a it's not leaning into the resources of the state because the optics that makes it look bad. If crime is a problem, you stamp it out, You send a message we're not going to tolerate this. But the more that the Him and Haw live is keeping the worst crime gets because all you're doing is enabling that percentage of criminals who are looking to take opportunities to the to the to the extreme, and we're seeing that constantly.
Now, you cannot go after small businesses because you've got a crime problem. You've got to tackle the root causes of it. You've got to be tough on the actual crime. You've got to support the police officers and the chief and give them room to actually activate. They are the expertsus is their profession. You've got to give them room. You can't politicize the police department. You can't shut down
small businesses because you've got a problem. You've got to figure out what the real problems are and take care of that. Go after the criminals. And again, if we're sending a signal thing we are not open for business for your small businesses, for these mom and pops, it's saying that we don't want paychecks going home to families, We don't want to support small families. It is just absolutely absurd. And you're not seeing counsel go after this
in the right way. It took them week to start asking questions when they started getting political pressure to do so. You need to enact right away. It is not that hard to ask these questions and committee and you don't have to burn the place down. You can hold administration accountable and have a productive debate and get things moving in the right direction. And you're not seeing that. You're constantly seeing no comment no comment, no comment, no comment.
Why is that?
Why are work Quiest Council is so afraid to point the dirty end of the stick at AFTAB and sure.
Along, I think it's because we've got an election right now, and that's part of the problem. I want elected officials who are willing to face the facts and then start tackling the problems. And right now, no one wants to talk about the fact. No one wants to talk about the problems because they're up for election. When you're in an incumbent and things aren't going well, it's the problem. But we need elected officials at city Hall who are willing to face those facts and get right down to
business to fix them. You have to be relentless in solving problems all the time. You have to be willing to accept the fact that things aren't going to go right because it's never going to be perfect. We do not live in a world where we are where things are perfect. You have to have leaders who are willing to fight and continue to solve those problems.
What are they afraid of.
It's politics. It's politics. They don't want to look bad, they don't want to be challenging anybody. They're afraid to pick their nose out on stuff, and that doesn't enact get.
You elected if I mean, I've kind of been that guy in my whole life. If you stand up for what's right and you have values, you go listen. We're not going to tolerate this, this secrecy, this incompetence. We're not going to tolerate the indecision. We want answers. I thought, yes, counsel this week, they did a great job poking the bear when it came to the food truck thing, saying well, this is stupid. There's no evidence that this is encouraging crime,
and they really push back on it. Why can't you do that when with Chief Thiji or crime or whatever it is. I just I don't know. It's politics. Yeah, but how does that cost you anything? By doing what people sent you to city Hall to do?
It doesn't cost you anything, no what you're supposed to do. But I mean, it took weeks to hear from them on food trucks. The food trucks were shut down. Administration made that what was it like a month ago? And it took this long and this many news stories and this much political pressure to actually get something out of it. I mean, it's insane. This is not how we need
to be operating as a city. We need much better leadership down there, and we need people who are not afraid to ask the tough questions and hold administration accountable. And that's what I did before, and that's what I want to go back and do again.
Liz Keating on that the accountability thing strikes me that I, as a citizen, someone to pays attention to this stuff. And I can't imagine how citizen feels. You've almost got You've got these enemies, You've got AFTAB, puer Vault, you've got share Along, the city manager, and you got counsul No one knows who reports to, who who is responsible. There's all sorts of cover, there's excuse making, there's no accountability because AFTAB goes, Well the chief got fired. No,
that was share along and share along. Well, you know, I don't have a comment because it's a personnel issue. Well what about console don't they have? We don't because it's the mayor. Well, the mayor says it's a city manager. The city manager says it's council. Council says it's a city manager, who then points the finger at city Council and the mayor's who's running the show.
You know what, Council votes on city dollars. They vote on the spending, they appropriate the money. It takes two members of council to call a special session. They easily could have called a special session and say, hey, we are not going to pay for the switch hunt. We are not going to make taxpayers space spend fifty thousand dollars to hire an outside firm to investigate to try to find a reason to fire somebody after you've already asked them to resign, after you've tried to start this.
Council can step in and do this because they have the power to do so, and they have done nothing. They have done absolutely nothing, and so many of them for the first week or two we're constantly saying no comment, no comment, no comment, and again like just exactly what you're saying, pointing fingers. This is council's responsibility, Council's job. They are in charge of spending, they vote on the spending. They can shut this down immediately, and they have it.
Former council member Liz Keening is running yet again, one of the twenty six that seek your vote on Tuesday or perhaps earlier here too, and we definitely need some new blood in city council. There's no question somebody's going to hold folks accountable rather than just you know. I illustrated this before last weekend. Last two weekends ago, we
had the No King's rally. It's all about Donald Trump, a bunch of people with different grievances, and granted, Trump brings out grievances and people, for sure, even Republicans totally understand that that's part of his nature. Maybe also part of his attraction. I'm not quite sure. But all these aggrieved people showing up with different causes and the one thing in common is Donald Trump.
But no kings. He's a king. He's a king.
I don't know, when you talk about cronyism, when you talk about no accountability, when you talk about ignoring problems and focusing other things, how many of those people are going to turn around and vote for the exact same thing they protested against two weeks ago in.
After pierreval I hope not.
I hope people do not continue to vote all one ticket, all one party.
God will, but they will.
Candidates you have to, you have to look at it. If people want the same thing that they've gotten, then go for it. But I think Cincinnati deserves so much better. They deserve so much better. And that's why I'm running, because I am sick and tired of seeing what's going on down there, and I think Cincinnati deserves better. And I'm going to go back and fight and actually do the job that I was elected to do before. And I plan on being elected again and go back and do that again.
Yeah, and I think you know, back to know there's there's no plan, and it is a plan, but it's feckless. The plan it doesn't have enough tooth. The plan doesn't have enough bite. You don't want to execute. You don't want to you're afraid you're gonna upset people like maybe
Iris Rawley that I don't understand. But I think even bigger than that, and the real issue I have, and if I were to maybe articulate a little bit better when it comes to you know, sure along and after a Periodal and Council and everyone's pointing the finger at everybody else is the lack of communication from the administration.
I mean, let's go back. We were talking about potholes.
But what about snowfall, right, how many streets weren't plowed and that took weeks later or finally they'd admitted we're not going to plow every street in Cincinnati. O up, just a second. I pay property taxes. I'm paying my taxes. Those taxes fund snow removal. Now you're telling me I don't get an essential city service because you decided to do something else with the money. Makes no sense whatsoever.
That's Malfeason's big mac Bridge fire. That thing happened. We had traffic gridlocked downtown for a couple of weeks before council and the mayor even acknowledged that we had that problem in the first place. I don't expect the city streets to be fine after you close one a major bridge, a major thoroughfare, But there was no communication on that. People were one Achille. I'm surprised we don't have a
fatal road rage incident over that. Get some cops, get some people down, Get I don't get pull some ambassador off the Fountain Square had people direct traffic during.
Rush How they didn't do that.
The Patrick Herringer thing as another fumble summer slam where we've got a beatdown going viral across the world in downtown Cincinnati, and the mayor decides to go on vacation the day after this thing goes viral and then not be around and then just have the city manager and the chief talk about it. Then the chief thiji incident. It's a steady pattern of incompetence due to a lack of communication.
That's the problem.
Nobody knows what's going on down there, and when they respond to something, either they don't respond and simply ignore it because it doesn't make them look good, or they wait too damn long to have response to it.
That's a fair criticism of AFTAB and sure.
Along and city Council and city council. You are not hearing from council members. Their job is constituent affairs. They should be responding to the community when people are reaching out. You talked about this now storm. I had schools to reach out because the streets haven't been plouned in schools can't open to get the kids back in school for days, and they heard nothing back from city Hall. We heard
from residents. They came back and said there were over six hundred streets that hadn't even been touched six hundred streets and the City of Society hadn't even been touched, and no one knew, and no one at city Hall was calling these residents back when they're asking when they're
finally going to get their streets cleared. There are so many incidents where residents are calling their council members, reaching out to their council members to get help, whether it's trash pick up, or there's litter everywhere or been no legal jumping. They need their streets close that they can get back to work, and no one calls them back.
And that's so for the last nearly two years, since I have been just a regular citizen, I am still fielding calls from resident because they are trying to get help because our elected officials and city council they are not doing their job and solving the problems that they were elected to solve, and so it takes a resident. And that's why I'm getting back in this because you've got to go back. You have to be responsive to the community. You have to be able to take care
of these basic services. And if we are not taking care of the basics, we are going to fail out the big things which we have seen when it comes to crime and tackling crime and the way that we've handled these massive stories whereas a lot of people are freaked out and a lot of things are going on,
things crumble. If you can't take care of the basics, if you can't fill that foundation, you're going to have a big problem later and we've seen that play out now least you have to have council members or responses lis Keating.
As you mentioned, council essentially controls the purse strings. They legislate, they make rules to make laws and all that stuff. Does there need to be some clarity and what the city manager does and what the mayor does because as a taxpayer, if I'm a taxpayer, I have no idea how that works. I think most people don't really follow
the intricacies of it. But there's also a problem there if you have a strong mayor and you've got to start council and you've got a city manager involved, it seems like everyone there's built in cover for incompetency and mistakes. Is that like, well, I can point the finger at the city manager or I can Hey, you know what, I'm going to pull the pin out of the grenade.
And fire the chief.
Even though the chief is the one taking the orders from the mayor and the city manager city, she doesn't dictate what the policy, what the focus is. When she got hired, I bring this up because it's documented. She said, listen the big issue here, and I talked to people by the interview with Iris Rawleigh, for example, and keep
the collaborative agreement going. Okay, that's good, but I think we've taken such kid gloves hands towards criminals and treat them like victims when we victimize the victims even more if that kind of makes sense. In fact, that Terry TJ now is just falling on the sword because of what we talked about. I think there's got to be I know it's a city charter issue. I know it's deeper than just this conversation, but damn it, you've got you've got too many people who are allegedly making decisions.
Do we need a city manager for the mayor and what roles we may need to carve those roles out a little bit more simply to avoid things like this where we know what you're in charge of, what you're going to do.
I'm sorry.
The no common thing is wearing thin for a lot of people, myself included.
I couldn't agree more. But this is where you have to have elected officials on Sincinni City councils that know their role. Right now, we are seeing council members who are not acting in their role. They are they are just they're saying, no comment, It's okay, it's not our job. It's or is that problem? That problem? That problem city councils is. You've got to think of them as the board. They do control the first strings. They can shut down
spending on things anytime, they can pass legislation. They can put in motions to guide the administration in a different direction. If they're not happy with it, they can call special meetings and actually ask questions, ask questions of administration and to at least let the public better understand what's going on. Their job is to hold administration accountable. Their job is to make sure that the tax dollars are being spent
in smart and efficient ways. They are in charge of making sure that government is running smoothly, and you're not seeing that at all. And that's why it's important to have experience down there and people who are willing to do the full job that they were elected to do.
Yeah, totally understandable. And I know a number of member of councils. A number of people come on the show quite frequently on a regular basis, and I hate to see good people and I think they're good wind up losing their job over But there's got it. I would think Tuesday, there's going to be a political price to pay. It's not going to be may or aft have pure of all. He's gonna win reelection for sure, but there's council people are going to be out of a seat.
I think because of this whole thing you feel that.
I feel that this campaign has been a completely different vibe than I've ever seen and heard before. People are angry and that's not the kind of thing that I want to live in. I don't want to live in a city where people are frustrated, people aren't getting the services that we need. We can do so so much better, and that's why we're working our tails off to get back down there and get the city back in order.
Well, if you don't demand accountability with your vote, you're going to get more of the same or worse, because it's going to encourage more of the same misbehavior.
That is what's going to happen. To look at the Terry Fiji thing.
We're going to fire her and then hire for forty fifty thousand dollars a law firm to find out where we fired her in the first place.
Exactly.
I mean, do you want your text bit your tax dollars being spent that way?
I don't.
I don't. And where where is counsel asking this question? Where is council shutting this down?
No, they're not.
Where is council call even talking about this in committee meetings? They're calling a special meeting. This is not take care of the taxpayer dollars. There are so many things that that money could go to that will be far more effective in positive impacts on our neighborhood then spending it on a witch hunt as an afterthought.
Well, we'll find out what happens on Tuesday. I'm interested like anyone else. I got the popcorn to see what happens. I wish all the best.
Liz.
Love talking to you, and I think your ideas are sound. Good luck on Tuesday, right, Thank you, thank you.
Make sure you get out your vote Cincinnati, all.
Right, six thirty am Tuesday, polls open, Liz Keating looking for your vote, among many others as well. I've been members of council on to kind of, you know, want to maybe off the record say these things, but are afraid, for whatever reason, to poke the bear that is AFTAP
peer ball in administration ont way to carry so much juice. Look, everyone who makes mistakes, I understand that, but man, I just ran up a litany of problems just in the last several months, not even a year, and there's probably many more I'm missing as well. There's got to be someone sending a message saying this will not be tolerated. We'll find out Tuesday. Sloaney seven hundred W got folling
back on seven hundred WI old. Everybody was talking about new and fun and exciting things and joining the show this morning. I'm the big one seven hundred W. You're talking about fitness and health and food and all that stuff. And Sanjay shave Crimani's on the show emergency medicine physician, but also he's at Dine Well Dock Health Fitness and medicine guy. I think that we got to come up with a like the brand here.
The Yeah, the problem is the brand keeps expanding more and more and I can't get focused.
But that'll come in time.
Okay.
So as an ear doc, before we get to the topic at hand, which is the flu, and people already going, no, I don't need to hear about it. You just hit the brakes for a second because you don't want the flu.
The flu.
Everyone's like, oh, I don't feel well. It's it's now, you know when you get the flu, it's a week.
Right. We'll get to that just in the second.
But first, as an eart doc, we have Halloween happening on tomorrow as a matter of fact, So a little trick or traders up. When you work a shift in the er in the emergency department, what do you wind up to see?
What do you see?
Who presents with what on Friday and Saturday. So it's it's a lot of things that you can imagine. But I'll tell you my my funniest because this is going to avoid it's like all my kid and what you typically see. Go okay, I won't do that so I don't end up as a patient.
Yeah, well, I mean I'll tell you so, And it's it's all razor blades and can't I'm just kidding. It's it's clearly an urban myth, right, But I've never seen anything like that. I've never seen like poisoning. It's it's stuff you wouldn't expect. So, like, the most number, according to a large study, was pumpkin carving accidents. And you would never think about it, but you know that may not be on the night of trick or treating, but around it, and it tends to be the kids that
are playing around with sharp objects. Never a good combination, and so trick or treating is the second part. But it's actually pumpkin carving the most interesting. Yeah, and I've seen a couple of hand injuries from that, but never on Halloween night itself, because.
People are already you know, done the damage.
You see like fractures and dislocations because kids are running to get the next house, trip over the sidewalk.
Fall.
Yeah, we definitely see the falls.
And the problem is, you know, it's it's nighttime, and then they're wearing these costumes that might be a little bit long, but then they have masks or whatever covering their face, so their peripheral vision isn't good and so you do see the falls. It can get pretty nasty at times, but yeah, I haven't seen anything terrible on Halloween. It ends up being kind of entertaining because everyone's coming in with their costumes on. Yeah, that's it's it's a bunch of stories.
All right.
Pumpkin carving, fall, trips, falls, occasionally, motor vehicle act and probably as well adults. I'm guessing more alcohol related.
You got it so unfortunately, and the alcohol gets behind the wheel sometimes and that combined with darkness and kids in costumes is a bad combination. So yeah, we do see some increase of pedestrians struck on on Halloween.
Gotcha sign?
And okay, alcohol related incidents and I'm sure costume related. Any costume related self strangulation, anything like that.
Decapitation Fortunately, no decapitation yet. No, we don't see any anything crazy like that. Things do happen weird things with costumes, but for the most part, no, Again, the costumes end up being kind of funny at times, especially when they show up in them.
I got a guillotine costume I was walking around is actually you don't actually use a.
Real guillotine for that. It's that's not a good I will tell you though, when it comes to costumes. Remember if you're gonna get really tipsy and spending a hire night in the emergency department sobering up in your costume, remember that the Walk of Shame on November one is not a fun one to take in a costume.
Especially if you got It's seriously, you got discharged like two weeks later. Oh yeah, it's like yeah, and now you have to wear a Halloween costume. Yeah, your whole chicken suit.
Right.
And I'm glad you brought up the myth because I've been on this for years, for decades. Sanjay is the whole And you were around long when they used to bring your candy to the hospital and we'll x ray it for you were like, no one is putting needles and razor blades and can't. It's just that it may be an industrial act and there may be a couple, I know, one offs with really crazy people in the world. I can't say it doesn't happen. But the idea that you have to x ray your candy, it's all you
know what it is. It's big mom and dad? Is what is the industry? A big mom and dad? Because all it's kind of funny, how like when my kids were little, all the Snickers had a razor blade in. Yeah, it's just a reason for me to steal their candy. Yeah exactly, Oh my god, yeah.
Yeah, this is this is how the parents enjoy Halloween too, is just by scaring their children, as if there's not enough scares going on in Halloween already.
Can I have a sugar overdose? Is that possible? Can I overdose?
Can you like like a classic overdose? Can you feel like crap after eating a bunch of sugar? Absolutely? Yes, we all get that. But uh no, Halloween is the time to eat a decent amount of candy and find out where your limits are.
Yeah, that's my problem is. I'm like, I'm like a wild dog. I'm like a rabit dog. I'm just gonna eat it all. Like we get the big Costco candy and I'll pick through them, Like Michelle, quit buying all that Costco candy.
Well, we don't know how many kids. It's a new house.
I'm like, listen, we'll buy one bag and when it's gone, the light goes off next it.
Yeah, stop doing this to me. But then there's no leftover Halloween candy. And that's why we love Halloween as adults is freaking controls my problem. No, I just can't say you're not alonee.
I'm right there with you.
All right.
So that's Halloween. Let's talk about cold and flu season. I uh, five days ago got my received my vaccine for it. Went to my local right eight or no, right eight. I went to right age no more? Is it Walgreens or I don't save it. I think with CBS actually rolled it up. Got my shots all good. I do that every year, and I'm a proponent of the flu vaccine. A few folks in the hospital get it. I'm thinking that's probably a pretty good thing to get.
Yeah, I you know, it's interesting. In training, I it was a optional thing. So you know, this is twenty years ago. The flu shot was optional and I got the flu my fourth year of residency, and so I have never looked back. I I get it every year since then because I just felt like trash for a solid week. As a week I was laid up pretty good. And so I get it myself every year. Yes, because it's mandatory now, but happily.
I've gotten it for years and I think last year I actually still wound up contracting flu and I was sick. I was like three days, I felt really bad past the point and we'll get into you know what that diagnosis is. But I think I got Simpsons that wasn't
and I felt like, like crap. I think for four five six A and i'd like last for like the effects last for two weeks after almost a month after, and I thought, wow, if I got that with the vaccine, what would have happened to me if I hadn't had the vaccine?
Yeah, so the you know, people say, well I still got the flu despite getting the flu shot, And it's true, it reduces cases of flu by only fifty percent, so one out of every two times you're still going to get the flu. But it's obviously much more effective in preventing it. But then when you get it, it decreases the duration for like two to three days, and so
your symptoms aren't as bad, they don't last as long. Yes, you might still get the flu, but it's better than not having it, you know, having a shot.
And tan I think we look at it raw incorrectly.
You hear people is like, well I got the flu shot and I still got the flu, So it doesn't it doesn't work well it does work, it's just not one hundred percent accurate. It's not going you know, boiling water for ten minutes will kill the bacteria. That's science, right, You're going to do that. It's it's still a crab. It's still a fifty to fifty shot. But if you get it, if you get the exact the symptoms ready less. And my point is like, well, god, I still got
the flow. I'm not going to get a shot this year. No, I'm definitely going to my shot because as sick as I was last year, I could I probably go into the hospital.
It could have been worse, it could have been a lot worse. And especially if you you know, very young, very old, those are the people that definitely need it because you know, the hospitalizations come mainly from the patients that are not vaccinated, and so the sickest of the sick are unvaccinated against the flu. So if you do fall into those categories, or your immune system just isn't good at baseline, yeah, definitely think about it.
Yeah, and I look think it pretty healthy. I'm like that that really hit me. But then you hear like I was sick, I was sick yesterday, And back to that because I had the flu. It's like, that's not the flu, right, it's gastrointertis. It's it could be a bunch of stomach flu is, gastinotis.
It's not that.
It's when you know, the diff's in a cold, irregular sickness and the flu is what.
So mainly it's how you present. It's the severity. So you're going to have higher fevers with the flu. Typically you're going to have body aches, You're going to feel like a truck hit you. Yeah, this whole quote stomach flu thing is usually a different virus that just affects your your GI tract. But it's going to be the aches, it's going to be the high fevers. You're going to have a headache usually and just overall feel like not
doing anything. Yeah, kids, especially vomiting Diarrhye are right, they can have everything.
Yeah. Kids, kids will present however they want.
Done, and four and forty eight hours are good exactly.
They bounce back and they're like mom, Dad, play with me, and they're like not for another two weeks, thank you very much.
Yeah, why does it seem like that lingers when you're sick And I don't know if it's the effects of that last for it feels like a month where you're still dichnically breathing your hacking stuff up. What in the older we get it's worse.
Yeah, So the it's the post residual kind of cough. So after you get sick, the virus that's wreaking its havoc for like a week or so. Then it goes away, but you've got all this crud left in your air wings and your you know, in your windpipe, in your in your lungs, and that stuff still has to come up. So actually it's like three to eight weeks after a cold, you can still expect to have some sort of cough.
And yes, it gets a little bit worse when we get older because we're not as good as coughing when we get older, can't clear that stuff, so aile that inflammation is left. We keep coughing, and you know it bothers everyone around you because it's three to eight weeks later, but you're no longer.
Contagious, it's just you're you're hacking up along still.
Fine, is there anything you can do to speed the process up?
So yes, early on there's a lot of stuff sold out there right, like, right, do you take anything song.
I'm a big believer in vitamin supplements, that kind of thing ahead of time. I tried the zinc before when I feel it coming on and I want to find notice this place ebo or not, but it feels like that might help.
Yeah, so you nailed it.
So zinc is literally the only thing that's even shown to have maybe some effects. Zinc seventy five milligrams to one hundred milligrams a day, you know, broken up is the only thing that's shown to decrease the risk of getting a bad virus or at least decreasing the symptoms you have.
That has to be in lozenge form.
Though.
That nasal spray is actually no good, so avoid that because actually you can cause harm. It can you know, affect the way you smell permanently. Oh yeah, so the zinc lozenges is what you're looking for.
Now.
Those can be pretty rough on the stomach though, because it's a heavy metal. You're literally eating a metal it's gutters exactly. Yeah, what we do every week, gun a gun. But the zinc can be tough on the stomach, but it is has been shown to have some effects. The rest of the supplements not so much.
Why does the zinc work? What's it do? Uh?
You know, that's a great question. So I think they're still trying to figure it out.
But you know, so what I heard, by the way, it's son Jay Shiva Cramani. He's an emergency room physician. Balls are a health guy in Scotsland show seven hundred double, always going to pop it on Thursdays.
And it could be you know, working out.
We'll get to that a little bit, and you know, neutrons and dieting and GLP injections and stuff like that. But today we're talking about well, Halloween crazy stuff. You've seen in the hour Halloween carving pumpkins number one and number two is kids running with their mask on and tripping and falling and break in and are Number three is people emulating themselves because they decided they were going to, I don't know, go as human torch.
But that's that's kind of Darwin there. That's a different thing.
I'm talking about the flu vaccine and so the zinc ase I understood it, there's something that it coats the throat and so typically if you ingest if I don't know why it's being swallowing because I think your stomach acid would kill this. But when you ingest, the virus basically slops off down your throat and the zinc allows that to occur, or maybe it kills that something like that.
Right, it's something like that.
It also boosts the immune system in general when our immune systems are worse in the winter.
That's been shown too. So you know what help we can get.
So those people that are like well, I say vitamin C and it works for me. You know, if it if it helps, you go for it. As long as you're not harming yourself. I'm cool with that too. But yeah, the zinc does seem to have some effect, a little bit of an effect. Okay, good, that's good to know. But by and large, it's like you've got it. Hydrate, that's all in rest. That's all you can do.
Hydrate.
Rest.
And yeah.
The other thing is, you know, the annoying cough is another thing. There is no magic bullet for cough. People always come in like four weeks later. If actually this last week, I've seen a ton of patients with this lingering cough. So I don't know what's going on out there. It's not flu it's not COVID right now, it's not RSV.
But there's so many crud, Cincinnati crud's going around and it's leaving people with this like prolonged cough, and unfortunately there's nothing I can prescribe that will make it go away. Honey has been shown as long as you're older than one year old, honey can help the cough. Hydration also helps because it decreases that dryness which actually triggers a cough.
Yeah, and especially this time you're a hydrate is very important because you're inside the dry air. It's gonna hasting that that whole disease pass to whether it's that or something else. Yeah, that's interesting that there's nothing really can do. I mean the cough lingers. There's some over the counters. Sometimes you get a script for it, but it's basically over the counter stuff. We all want to get that done.
It's like, I think, so after four weeks you're like my guy, three weeks you're thinking, Okay, there's something bad going on here, right, that's when you should.
Well for four weeks.
Yes, though, if it's not getting worse, you know it's not to worry about. Or if you're not having trouble breathing or chest pains or anything like that. If you are having something like that, worry if it's more than like eight weeks, which I know sounds like forever. And it is forever to have a cough right because your sleep is bad, everything's bad. Everyone's annoyed at you because all you're doing is coughing. You want to get it taken care of, but usually it's like eight weeks later.
But you know, there are medicines that might be able to help at that point, but there's no magic bullet of.
Yeah, like some of the dm as stand, it's gonna take care of it.
It's interesting because like my mom, for example, growing up, it was like, wow, he's got to this fluke taking the doctor and heahim, get himself, get him on something, get him on the head. Anti viral, you don't want to. There's there's really now there's a virus. There's a virus in bacteria.
Exactly, so you know pneumonia, that's gonna be a bacteria that causes it. Stuff like the flu flu is a virus, but almost every single Cincinnati crud thing out there is a virus. Unfortunately, antibiotics don't do anything. And some people say, well, this zpac works for me every time. This antiotic works for me every time, and it's you know, there may be a little something to it as far as anti
and inflammation, but it's not treating the infection. And you know, it's usually a fact that people have just been sick long enough that they're getting better and it just happens to coincide with the time that they start on an antibiotic.
Right, I gotcha, Sonja on that.
You know, you demand your doctor right that that led us to this whole superbug thing. Right, It's like, we wrote me two scripts for a bacteria Killobacter whensa virus and we knew that, but we did it to shut the patient up. Yeah, And then that dividend with that was, well, we've not got these superbugs out there that are immune to the overwriting of those prescriptions exactly.
You know.
The best story I have of that, or the most unfortunate story is my uncle in India would be like, oh, yeah, I take this this medicine for diarrhea every time. And I'm like, yeah, we're having talks about diarrhea for unclear reasons, and so you know, I'm like what is it?
Is it emodium?
And he breaks out this pill and it is leave a phloxysm, which is a super powerful, you know, antibiotic that we really hold back for a lot of things. But in India that stuff's flowing over the counter really and so we see all these nasty superbugs coming from other countries where there is no you know, no barrier where you don't have to see a doctor for this. So yes, we do want to be stewards of antibiotics as physicians.
We do.
You know this all came out of Yeah, placate the patient, but it's done more harm than good with causing you know, these these resistant infections.
Yeah, and that's that's going to rip evidends for a long time, and not in a good way. He is a Sonjay schevrok ARMANI. He's an emergency room physician here in Cincinnati and he's coming on the show like every Thursday morning, pop in and talk about health and food and in this case the flu. So get the vaccine. I know that we've politicized vaccines now and you know, believe what you want about the COVID vacs.
I mean, I don't get it. Every year.
I'm like every couple of years. My doctor says, you know, you're you're pretty healthy, you don't need it. But I'm pretty religious about that flu vax and I think, you know, you got to look at measles and all those series and okay, there's the politics of it, but don't let that pollute the stuff that's kept well, really kept us alive all these years.
Too.
The same people, a lot of the people who are against the vaccines are the same ones who benefited from for the last X number of years.
Absolutely, so you know, everyone has to make their own individual decisions. We have to respect that too and really understand the drivers of that. If you do have any questions though, you know, talk to your doctor about it, and you know, we just want the best thing for you and your family and loved ones.
All right, sign jail the best. Thanks again. You can get a reach in.
His handle is at dine Well Dock at Dinewell Dock and we'll talk next Thursday.
Appreciate you, good, see you. Thanks for Ben.
It's a Scott Floan show. This is seven hundred clony, seven hundred WLW. More bad news for your pocketbook here. If you're in Ohio, you and your family could be paying more for electricity. Why, Well, the federal government is trying to extend the life of aging coal plants that were once slated for call closure. And those things are notoriously expensive to keep going. And we're seeing this trend
across the country as well. And those expenses too would then be passed on a consumer, So says the Citizen's Utility Board of Ohio. Tom Bullock is here is our executive director, Tom.
Welcome, How are you good morning? Good, good good.
Why would keeping a coal plant open cost us more money? Does it cost more money to open new plants?
Most of these plants in question are very old, seventy years old, sixty years old. They were designed for a different era. The parts don't exist, The facilities aren't designed to power up or power down swiftly or respond to economic conditions. So it's a little bit like if your uncle gave you a nineteen seventy two Chevy and it still runs a leaded gasoline and you're supposed to drive that around. In theory, it's cheaper, but really to operate it, how do you get the parts to repair it? When
nobody makes them? It's difficult.
Okay, So the question be why why are we forcing to keep these plants open?
Then, well, you'd have to ask the White House. The White House believes that it wants to support one fuel source. Now, power is generated by a mix of sources. Coal, nuclear, natural gas is a big, big player, and increasingly wind and solar. Those are low costs. And then battery storage plays a role as well. Those are essentially large versions of the lithium ion batteries you carry around in your
smartphone in your pocket all day long. Those play a role because it evens out the grid and you can use cheap solar or wind when there's extra power and you don't need it, stoor it in the battery, and then release it when you do need it.
Gotcha.
But what's driving this though, is demand. Right as I understand it, we're putting all these AI facilities online. Ohio, for example, Columbus Butler County is getting like a million square foot facility as well, and so they're extending the life of coal plants because we need to meet demand. The problem is the forecast, and I'm sure you know by what twenty thirty nine is allegedly going to go up some forty percent.
That's just demand.
We don't have the infrastructure and the transmission to be able to get that power to households and businesses and residents. Obviously in addition to all of the technology's going online. So it feels to me like an all hands on deck approach.
Is that wrong? Half right, half wrong?
There for sure is data centers that are driving load growth. Part of that is artificial intelligence, part of it's not. There's also new factories coming to Ohio, like we hope the Intel plants. As people also electrify their homes with electric cars or switch their furnest to a heat pump, there's going to be more growth overall. But we do
have power today. What's causing the price bike is the speculation, as you said, about the next five years or so for data center growth, and there's a bit of an arms race by those companies to build out. And if you don't have power, of data center is a warehouse full of expensive junk. So it's a real issue. But it's not coal that is needed. It's power that the market decides is the best, and that gets to the heart of it. Government isn't supposed to be picking winners
and losers. And if the White House picks losing facilities that are closed because they're the most expensive and forces people to use those market losers to drive power, it's going to make losers out of all how consumers, because what you're doing is you're spiking the market. The market is designed to have an auction and the lowest cost
the plier wins. But if somebody comes in and says, hey, market, I'm going to force you to not just take expensive power, but the most expensive power from the oldest and least nimble and least adaptive facilities, it'shews everything. So the issue isn't the fuel source. The issue is let the market function like it's supposed to without tampering.
What does the market want.
When the market wants more power and affordable power, which is there is going to be a little bit of an up and down as you bring new resources on. But if you let the market function, a temporary high price in the short term will level out and decrease over time. The challenge, though, is that our regional grid, it's called pjm Ohio's part of thirteen states in a grid that includes the mid Atlantic, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, et cetera. It's not easy to get new power added to the grid,
and that is worsening prices in their term. So PJM, not the federal government, also has work to do to make the hot prices, which are setting the signal to suppliers. Hey, power producers, come online, we need you. The market's sending that signal. But the problem is PGM has restrictions about adding power and interconnecting with the grid that are too slow and difficult. So the prices are going to be high for a while with no market solutions. So PJM has work to do to lower our prices.
Is this just a case of bureaucracy?
And this is what is It's a choke point in that we have an increasing demand for power, and so you address that by keeping the old technology online, when of course keeping old stuff going, as you pointed out, as always more expensive the future. To me, you should be everything should be on the table. We if wind or solar or whatever works, hydrogen, nuclear, whatever it is, whatever we can get to market more quickly, that's what
we should be favoring at this point. Why isn't that happening, especially with an administration it seems so friendly about getting rid of all the gridlock and bureaucracy and doge and all that stuff that fits right in.
Why isn't that happening?
Well, because I think what's happening is a lobbyist and the political favors are getting involved instead of instead of letting the market, so capitalism as a creative destructive side. What happens is the least expensive old technology goes away and is replaced by a new, better mouse trapper, in this case, a new, cheaper generation facility. But if the people who are friends with the old facilities say, hey,
wait a minute, we don't like the market. If you do me a political favor, well, then it makes everything more expensive for everybody else. There are more than one thousand powered production generation facilities in our regional thirteen state grid. If you say the top fifty or one hundred most expensive power plants are forced to be kept open and sold even when the companies that own them want to
close them, you're going to skew that market. So there's enough out pardon me, there's enough out there that we don't need to tamper with if we need to do what the state of Ohio did earlier. This year sit of Ohio deserves some credit, is leaned into market company technology neutral. It doesn't try to pick winners and losers about which fuel source. It says, we're not going to
have regulated generation. We do want to expand power production so that we have affordable the keyword of suffordable energy to power our economy. And we're going to let the investors in the free market competition do its job, which means when an investor takes a risk on a plant, if they mess up, the losses on them, the loss doesn't get forced to be paid for by consumers, which is what regulated monopolies do. So basically, the federal government is trying to turn back the clock to a regulated
monopoly style of power supply decision making. We don't need that today. We've got all kinds of technology that can be a better solution. I like to say engineers are smart. People are smart. If you can just get the legal and the financial out of the way of the inventors and the engineers, we could do all kinds of cool new solutions. But it's hard to get past legal.
And there's a matter of factors.
It's Tom Bullock, Executive director of Citizens Utility Board, of Ohio because of the high demand that we're facing when it comes to our electrical grid and power and the choke point, which of course is demand and we don't have transmission and supply that's going to drive closs up in. We're adding more and more infrastructure in the forums, will
you know, people buying electric cars plugging in. But the big one is data centers in AI and we're putting plants all over, including Butler County, that just need a tremendous amount of energy and resources for that. Water is another great example of that thing, dude. Now maybe not in our scope here, but some data centers consume up
to five million gallons of water a day. That's about enough for a town of about fifty thousand people, which is an incredible amount of resources dedicated to keeping power that little thing in our hands. Right with AI and infrastrate and information the data center right a tremendous amount of polages.
We should also be careful. Some of this is data center speculations. A bubble that conversed and some of these data center companies are planning to build one or two data centers, but they're filing redundant applications in the Great Plain States in our region, in the Northeast, in the southeast, and they're racing to figure out who gets gives them their permit first. So they're not building ten, they're only
building two. And all of us are scrambling and saying, oh my gosh, we have to add all this power. So there's an important double checking process that we need to do to make sure we're not over building. But one consumer who is in Ohio and talked to the Cleveland plate dealers, let me get this straight. Data centers are increasing my bill today and I didn't do anything to invite them here, and yet their costs are already
affecting me. This is one more example of where business costs get dumped onto Bob and Betty Buckeye and they privatize the Game's real quick.
To what's happening with for example, you mentioned you know they're getting pulling permits and getting ready to build what's going on the Columbus Intel plant, because that's still not where they promised to be at this part. We're pushing operations back another five or six.
Years, are I?
I think that's right. I know that the governor and even the White House has been working to continue getting Intel to move forward on the project. There's such enormous amounts of money involved that you're going to have to have some federal supports for what's called the Chips Act. But that was a change between the previous administration the current one. So I tend to think that it's important for Ohio to pursue and implement these kinds of facilities.
But you also for you know, we speak for small residential consumers. So the you've been making in this conversation a longer than good ones, which is, as you build these very large factories for very large enter consumers, kind to make sure the way that the grid infrastructure is paid for doesn't get dumped onto the daghbles. It's like you'll dump your leaves over your back fence into your neighbor's yard. But that financially happens all the time in
the world of utilities, and it shouldn't happen. That's why groups like ours try to speak up to the little guy.
How hard is it too, Tom, Because it's always there is the effort to get cleaner power, and we need more and more of it. Is it odds with infrastructure building infrastructure because there's right of ways. I mean, look what happened with the Keystone XL pipeline getting shut down.
It's a lot more efficient, easier, and safer than taking all of that fuel that we need and putting out on rail cars where they can You know, look what happened in Ohio, not just a few handful of years ago, and that's transporting stuff over rail, which is a lot more dangerous in an efficient in the system. What about the environmental push back from all this? Is that slowing things up? At that thought those money.
I don't think so. I think there are land used questions any time into power infrastructure, and that's also true if you build a subdivision or a shopping wall. Government has to be thoughtful about how it balances the most competing interest between the new development and the neighbors. Clean energy like wind and solar is increasingly the cheapest on
the market. If you marry it up with battery storage, then it can provide you more of around the clock twenty four to seven solution, especially if you think of it not at one store or one house, but on an average across a statewide region. So if you think of Ohio, Illinois, Indiana together the wind is always blowing somewhere, and the sun is always shining somewhere. So on the aggregate, you could add a lot of inexpensive power, or to add to the mix of more expensive power sources than
are traditional baseload, like nuclear or natural gas. But what you have to do is let one hundred companies or a thousand companies make their everyday economic decisions and investment decisions, and collectively that market will be more intelligent and less expensive than a governor or a president trying to put his or her thumb on the scale. You know. I mean, it's amazing to me that we have to even explain this in a country that's supposed to be a free market capitalist.
But the people who complain about socialism practice socialism themselves. The people who like socialism want more socialism.
Well, there's some truth to what you just said, and there's hypocrisy in all directions. And all of us live in glass houses, so I should be careful about the stones I throw. But I guess because the prices are going up. There's a survey that said from the last week National Survey, thirty four percent of American's sake electricity prices are a major concern.
That's high.
Forty percent think it's a minor concern. This is on our radar and it's not going to go away. And yes, data centers are kind of the first stage of forcing prices up, but there's all these other pressures. For the next twenty years, I think it's going to be increasingly concerned, So we're going to be spending more time thinking about it. You do have solutions on your end. You can insulate
your home air seal with a calking gun. That's nineteen forties technology that's not new, are expensive, just got to do it. But none of us do that perfectly. But we can help ourselves. And then new technology is not everything has to be a giant megaplant. You could do something on your home or business. There's medium tier facilities we're working on. So let's say it's on twenty acres forty acres or an industrial roof. You could put solar, or you could do part solar, part battery, part natural
gas like a microgrid hybrid system. And then it can be back up emergency power for a facility or a factory that has to run it all.
But Tom know a little bit about that business. That's an expensive outlay, and sometimes you know, you get an agreement.
Where they put it on quote unquote for free.
But the veig on that what you're paying an interest basis of payback is pretty extreme. That that might be good if you have that upfront cash or the math works for you, but right now for most people that doesn't.
Well, if you're talking about a business, it's probably easier to get there, true, and it depends if your business is energy intents of like many family owned businesses in Ohio or manufacturing businesses where energy is their second most expensive category after labor, so they pay very careful attention already to that. So you're right, some businesses it will be easier to get there than the other's. Hospitals are
a good use. Even school systems that have let's say five elementary schools, two middle schools to high school you could aggregate all that power draw and then feed it with a virtual net metering system that might be in
the next county over. Yeah, so I think what you'll find is even if you don't power all of the needs, you could do a portion of it, and then that gives you a long term, low price, stable contract, and so your financial people can say we're in a better position to have control over our bills and our risks, and we can plan for the future better. Some of the power will buy from the traditional grid, but some will get from these other systems, so you have options
and nobody should be forced to do this. But I kind of do think we're going to enter a new era where we're thinking more about electricity than.
We fear is my favor I amount of time, but my fear is there's going to be, like anything we don't do anything proactively, do it reactively, there's going to be some sort of energy nine to eleven where our grid shutdown will be a crisis before anyone goes man, we got to do something about this.
That's just what we do in America.
I think we don't inspect a bridge until bridge.
Yeah, exactly.
We need a light at this intersection because some kids are going to get hit on their bike. Don't worry about it. Kid gets on a bike. Politicians out there, why don't we have a stoplight. I think I'm a big proponent and fascinated by many nuclear reactors, small nuclear reactors to power those AI facilities. Just have it on board, and I the problem of course, I think House Bill six and the first energy scandal ruined nuclear in the state of Ohio.
I would I would say there's still possibilities there. It's very expensive, but there could be some business use cases for it, including your data centers. Uh yeah, it's kind of always like, well, twenty years in the future, it'll be it'll be ready. Maybe it's ten years in the future, we'll see, I mean all options of the table. But some of these data centers may indeed be uh a
good category for using that. I'm hearing three Mile Island in New York is going to be reopened by the end of the data center or something.
Like that in trouble.
So so some of those super intensive, high price and they've got to have the power and they can't bu risk their grip cutting out of them, they may do things like that.
I think that's fascinating.
I mean it's to set it in that direction that you could have a reactor the size of I don't know, a filing cabinet or a toaster, and that would power a subdivision or a fact or something along these lines, and that's essentially send it back into the company that makes and get a new one kind of like a battery pack. But Tom Bullock, Executive Director of Citizens, you tell me Borta will have then and keep the call plants open because of the demand, and we don't have altered solutions.
We got to wait for the sky to fall before we do anything. I think that is the too long, didn't read versionless conversation. But I appreciate your time again this morning, Tom, Thanks again.
Let's talk some more. Thank you.
We'll get a news update in this rainy Thursday morning. Good news is that's headed out and sunshine back in store for trick or treating to So full news update, A lot to catch up on. Wife jumps in the show next year. Seven hundred World.
Jeez, the Princess of Property.
The Queen of Closings, fuck touches out Deals. It's Realistic Time With's Michelle Sloan All hailed the bestest Remax time agent I've ever met on seven hundred wl W.
Good morning, how are you?
It's a morning?
It really is something else. It's I'm physical this morning, so I left for physicals. I get a blood drop for my annual physical and got to the blood place at Montgomery Road christ Hospital, which normally does good work and seven o'clock and there's people behind me. I'm the first one there. I thought, Okay, good, I gotta get in. I got a bunch of stuff to do. Yeah, that person, we don't know where they are, so we'll probably never show. Never showed, so oh maybe we'll oping like seven thirty,
well maybe like seven forty. And they had one person that was like three thousand people.
Oh no, that's not good.
Somebody's somebody's gonna get is already either chewed out, fired or.
No, probably not. It's just the way the economy is. I guess I don't know. And then traffic, of course was. But I will say this. Can I goff on a little bit of a rant here for SI please? You know we're almost a because you're almost to that age.
Okay, listen, this is like one of.
Those progressive commercials, and those progressive commercials hit because it's so true that don't become your parents.
They'll become your parents.
Absolutely, if you're a senior citizen, if you're retired, and your joy you've got, you know, you've worked your whole life, raised to family. Uh, did everything you're supposed to do. God bless you. I want to be there some day myself. But could you please, to the love of God, you don't need to be the first person in line at seven o'clock and born in the place. And there are people that work that got to get to work, So why don't you wait till later in the day to do that.
Oh you're saying that people that aren't working.
Correct, It should be people like, Okay, I got to get to work by you know, some people at nine o'clock. I'm a little lower than that. Obviously, they're just saying, you know, and here's when I'm older. I'm not going to be the first guy in line because my my you know, my prostates kept me on.
I wake up at three am.
Wet.
If you're my dad and he's whatever, eighty years old, he's going.
To be the first one in line.
You have to do all in the.
First pew at church, he is in the first one in line because he's up at three am.
He goes to bed at five pm.
Man, man, just you don't need to be there that early. I got the I want to waste the whole day. What is it you have to do that's so damn important. You're retired, You could do it anything you want or nothing.
If I start going to bed at five pm, seriously.
Just well, you're getting closer eight thirty. Last night, she's in bed. What are you doing?
It was cold. I wanted to get under the covers and snuggle.
And now by the time I came to bed, you got the blanket, all the blankets, and the dog gots up and try to pick him up.
He's growling at you. He's like, I'm trying to get my bitch. I'm trying to sleep too.
I stole your bank, all right, all right, Well so that was the day so far.
So everyone's you know, if you're stuck on that traffic stuff to do.
Right now, everything should be you know, rocket.
And roll should be calm, all right. So let's jump into this real quick. Here we have a FED rate cut. What does actually mean for people? I think are thinking like, wow, this is going to go back to three percent sometimes.
Soon, right and there is people are posting on social My lender said.
It's going to be three percent by the end of the year. Don't do anything until then. Blah blah. That is a bunch of bees.
I wonder tell you that they want to get their money.
I don't know who's telling who what. But the Fed cut the fat cut it's benchmark federal funds rate by a quarter percent.
This was expected.
Okay, the markets have already expected this cut. They've already you know, we've already baked that into the cake. So mortgage rates are likely to you know, they've already come down a little bit. They're not too six percent yet, we're like six point one three, depending on your credit. It's still really good. It's better than it was. You know, we were at seven, we were at seven and a quarter an hour at six and a quarter, let's say.
And so if that's for a thirty year fixed rate, you can get a lower rate if you buy down the rate. There are ways for you to get that lower rate, but you have.
To pay for it. So that's just stuff to figure out.
It doesn't automatically when the Fed cuts the rate, everybody in their mind says.
Oh, yay, mortgage rates are going to go down. No, that's not the that's not the case.
Doesn't automatically translate into a equal quarter point drop in mortgage rates. It's the short term policy rate. It affects all kinds of things. Ten year Treasury bonds things that I don't even know about. And so it's good news, that's for sure. But it doesn't do like equal parts lowering our mortgage rate. So that's what you just need to know. If you're buying or refinancing, there is going
to be a benefit to that. And so if you have to refinance, if you are one of the people who a year ago we said, okay, if you find your perfect house and you have the high rate, guess what, when the rate goes down, you can refinance. That's what's happening right now, and we are seeing more and more of that. So that came true when when all the real estate agents out there said, go ahead, you can buy a house as long as you can afford it,
you can refinance. Okay, that's we're getting into that territory. If you have a full point difference, you may want to look into refinancing.
So that's that's a good thing, got it all right?
But somebody hear that and go, well, I keep hearing there's gonna be another quarter point cut, another code there is, and again I'll just sit and wait.
You can wait, but we're at six point one point three right now. It might get to six. It may get to five point ninety nine. That's probably not going to make the biggest of difference in your monthly mortgage. It really isn't. Those teeny tiny little tenths of a point is not gonna make that. It's gonna be like twenty dollars or thirty dollars, maybe maybe fifty bucks. And again, if it ever goes to that, it's never gonna get time.
I'm on a fixed income.
I got to get up early to go to the doctor, and I'm fifty dollars, I'm on a fixed income.
Well, I'm glad for you.
Then you should you know what, this is a lot of money.
Okay, But if you're in a fixed income and you've been in your home for twenty years, you shouldn't have a mortgage payment anyway. You should have had that thing paid off. You shouldn't have refinanced and borrowed the money against yourself a million times.
Oh Jesus, sound like my mom.
No kidding to bed at eight thirty sounded like your mom?
All right?
Anyway?
My wife Michelle Sloan here, not my mother in law. My wife Michelle else long on the show wwill real Estate check up?
Right?
So we're getting rate cuts.
But you know, here's the thing. You go, well, maybe I want to wait till little see if it gets down to five at some point. Now it could be another could be a year, could be longer.
Yeah, now five.
See again, I think you're pushing that territory that if you want to move, if you want to make a move, make a freaking move.
Sorry. Yeah, you know, it's.
It's all about living your life in the present.
So how many things do you have left?
Exactly?
That's why I yet at six o'clock in the morning to get my blood draw I don't know how many of these I have left.
Yeah. So here's the thing.
If you find a house that works for you and you can afford it at the current rate, I'm always going to advise you to go ahead and buy that home because that home may not come around. That home, the particular home that fits your needs, may not come around again for a very long time. I've had some people that have been looking in certain school districts for two years or more because they're looking for the unicorn,
the needle in the haystack that doesn't come along. It may come along, but when you find it, boy, you better jump on it because you may not find it ever.
Again, also may have to compromise as well, and that's something well, that's.
The one thing, you know, you really people some people are just unwilling to compromise. And if you're unwilling to compromise, then you should build. And that's sort of where I will direct you. If I'm working with you and we cannot find the right house for you in a certain area, a certain school district, and you're gonna nitpick every single little tiny thing, Oh my gosh, you know there's a there's a tiny hole in the wall, or the sink drips,
or this is old or what ever. You know what if it's a used home, if it's a home, it's not brand new, it's not going to be brand new.
You just have to accept that.
That's one thing. So and then there then if I say, if.
Here's one tonight. You know, we just talked about this before, because we sold our house over the summer and you did a great job. You're my favorite realtor and you got like, got thirteen showings in one day and a handful of.
Offers, so that was good.
But some people, again, you know, there's people and you have clients like this, and there's certain ethnicities that do this that the door has to be facing the right way. There's fing shwei, there's I don't know whether these super you know, rituals and all cultures have that. But you're like, you know, you've been looking for a house for two years.
This is perfectly except the doors facing the wrong way, like and you want to get in the mason where the schools are really good because you have young kids. I mean, by the time you get that and what you want, everyone's fighting for that where the door is facing the right way.
Your kids are going to be thirty, so you know, are you you know what I mean?
It's like you got to pull the trigger at some point or you just keep renting. You know, if you're renting, you keep renting. And you know, we have I've had situations certainly I'd like to buy a house, Okay, how much do you want to spend?
How much are you able to spend?
That kind of thing, and the numbers don't add up, and so there's there's a combination of things. That's why when you hire a realtor, which is what you are doing, You are hiring a realtor to work with you. And the people that think they can just use realtors like I don't know, toilet paper, use them for a second
and then throw them away. Not the best way, because you want to have a realtor who's going to work for you, with you together to come up with the solution to what you're looking for, and having and hiring an agent is very important part of the process. There's a thousand there's actually thousands of us out there, and so choosing the one that fits your personality, who is available when you need them and is open and honest
and trustworthy. That's the kind of agent that you want on your side every step of the way.
Yeah, my wife, Michelle Sloan is that agent. All right.
So we're getting to that time of year, the some pumps starting to check out. We've talked about this before. Make sure you check your some pump. That's something I want to stress is, you know, if that things, if you're getting all those rain it's not turning on, you got to go down there and check it maybe and hopefully you have you know, a battery backup if you need it. If you have a lot of that, because especially if you have a finished basement. If not, you
got an indoor swimming pool. Don't worry about it. Make sure the sum pump's working. How you test that simply as get a bucket of water and keep dumping it in there until the float valve comes up and then or you can put a little bit of water in there and lift the little ball up kind of like a toilet, and it should engage and get all that water. If not, you got to get a plumber over there and take a look at that. Also, this is the weekend with the time change. Got to mention the smoke detectors.
And also I'll throw this in there too, because you can buy them with a combined thing. And you know, people have habits and while I don't need all that, get the carbon monoxide detector. So many people die from carbon monoxide poisoning, especially this time of year furnace kicks on. Maybe you know there's insects or a bird built a nest, or a bat diet or something, all sorts of stuff in that chimney or and that flu in the vent. If it's blocked, it's gonna you know, it could kill
you and your family. So you can get a carbon monoxide detector for like less than twenty bucks. You know, put put it in and where they recommend it in your house, depending on can't get the details exactly where, not knowing what your house looks like.
But you know, I know that an inspector will be looking for that. You know, over the years, the it's changed and you only had to have one outside of the bedroom. Now you're you're looking at wanting to have a smoke detector in every single bedroom, right so you know while things change, yeah you don't.
That's the thing. You have to just be aware because safety first, Yeah.
Safety first, hit that.
Check your batteries if you still have the old fashioned smoke if those detectors still have the batteries, because now they sell one in the battery lasts like ten years. But even the higher the wired ones that are daisy chained, you know, if you can't tell when that smoke detector is that they won't last forever.
So you got about ten years.
You should really consider replacing them because you'll get some false positives like we have something that are older and you know when you cook they go off, So I got to change os and I'll put some newer carbon monoxide ones And how do.
You adjest that? Do I like put a lighter up to it?
Oh?
You simply well, no, you need just a little smoke from a candle to do it.
But you know, typically ten years because dust collects on the sensors and that, and you know you just want to make sure God forbid you need it at work. So they're really you think about it, well, all the stuff he spend in our hou it's not that expensive. If they're more than ten years old, you should consider getting some new ones anyway, just the PSA there for some safety, for some remodeling safety from me. All right, my watch Michelle Sloan's Loan sells Homes dot com Open
Howse show that is on the Iart radio app. You can listen to podcast and of course catch the visual podcast as well on YouTube. And she's over at Remax time in Mainville. All right, love, you gotta go, gotta go, gotta go appreciate it because Willie is standing byce pacing back and forth. He must have some breaking news. Oh it's electioned, we got what today's Friday at Sherry Pull on the first hout of the show. So Tuesday's election day. So This is his This is his super Bowl right here.
Every four years, it's every two years is the super Bowl. We'll get news in and morte follow Scott's loan home. The best Bengals coverage seven hundred WWDE Cincinnati