Immanual Morritz

Immanual Morritz joins Brian on the Porch. He has run for city council before coming in tenth place. He and Brian speak about the cultural shift that has to take place in Medicine Hat’s city hall to get the city going again. Immanual says we need a council that puts citizens first by providing good leadership.

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Transcript

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And that's one of the things that will have to change, will have to change their culture a little bit so that when somebody comes to the door, the first question should be, how can I help you? It shouldn't be. Here's all the things you have to do for us to approve you. This episode of Bring Back the Porch, brought to you by Bernie Leahy, River Street Realty. Let's get you home. And joining me this morning is Medicine Hat city Council hopeful candidate Emanuel Moritz. Welcome, welcome. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Now, this is not your first venture into the political arena. No, it is not. I ran for council last time and ended up 10th, I think. 1287 votes. I, I did the 12th good math. And I was on the Catholic school board for two terms in 2002 to 2007. So and I've worked on the municipal planning Commission for a decade, pushing a square rock up the hill. I was going to ask you about that because I, I thought you also have a background in construction just as a business person. So you've seen City Hall almost from two sides? Yeah. It's there's a lot of red tape in City Hall compared to lots of places that attract more business than we do. And that's one of the things that will have to change. We have to change their culture a little bit so that when somebody comes in the door, the first question should be, how can I help you? It shouldn't be. Here's all the things you have to do for us to approve you. So that'll be a big step. But it's a cultural change. It'll happen over time. You can have to deal with it as a council and tell or instruct your CEO to get rid of some of that red tape. How much actually can the city get rid of, and how much is imposed by the province, or even the federal government and safety regulations? So if you're looking at, the Department of Municipal Affairs, Danielle Smith sent a missive to her minister that said we should say yes first to development. If the province says if that's going to be the provincial guideline. I think it's something we can do. Okay. So we just have to do it. We just have to do it right here. If you just sitting back on in your seats saying, we can't do this. Nothing's ever going to happen. I know there's a phrase that raises your hackles. We call the forgotten corner. We don't like that. We certainly don't like that. What happens is that we believe it. We truly believe that we're the forgotten corner, so that when we don't get something, we can just say, oh, look, we're the forgotten corner. Yeah, we can try and but and businesses do that as well. And they say here that you're the forgotten corner. That means maybe they can't get all the government services that they need. We're not on the highway or whatever. And they'll say, well, maybe I go to Lethbridge or less, which is not the forgotten corner. We have to get rid of that moniker. We have to believe in ourselves. We have to believe the city can grow. And if we don't, and we keep saying we're the forgotten corner, we'll never get anywhere. We need some economic growth here. It's been pathetic for not only this last council, but probably for the last. Since 2013 or so, we haven't done anything. One of the things that I have said to many of the candidates that have been here is that economic development has been an issue in every election that I can recall going back to 1978. So if we keep talking about it, maybe somebody is not doing it right. Somebody is not doing it right. Right. And that, again, is the culture here. I think what we have to do is it's a sales job. City's just like a business. We have to sell it. You and I have to sell it. Everybody has to be an ambassador for the city. We have to get out there and dig for those businesses. We have to say yes when they come. We have to work on doing face to face. This works. This is where the magic happens. If you're just putting an ad in a newspaper or magazine or a phone call or email, you'll get nothing out of that. So there's lots of places you can find economic development. There's the apartment in the government, right? They make people come to them and say, you know, where can we go? And right now they're saying, let's go to let's bridge. Let's do the corridor from Tabor to Fort MacLeod. And we are not mentioned because we don't go there and say, hey, remember, we're here with Danielle Smith is our MLA. You have to lean on that. It's not going to be your MLA forever. So that's a source for us for economic development, right? During one of the forums I think was Ted Cluxton, who made the comment that a telephone works both ways. Well. We should phone first, right? When I was on the school board, my job was to talk to the Minister of Education. So every couple of weeks I phoned them. Once a month. I drove up on my own dime to Edmonton bottom lunch. Then he knew where we were. We got a school out of that. We got lots of extra things that wouldn't have happened if you didn't talk to anybody. If you just sitting back and saying, yeah, something will happen. It doesn't happen. This last council didn't talk to Daniel Smith the council before didn't talk to Rachel Notley because of some political agenda. But whether it's Rachel Notley or Daniel Smith, you have to talk. You have to say, look, we need some economic development. You can help us. It's all about relationships. Absolutely. Relationships work. Face to face works. Talking works. Your, Your signs as advised by them. And, of course, you can't really read them too well. But I believe it says fiscal responsibility. Actually, it says. What does it say? It says citizens. First. Okay. And it says good leadership and council needs to provide good leadership. That means within council you have to provide good leadership. And citizens first is what council's first job is. They work for the benefit of the citizens of Medicine Hat. If you're not thinking of them first and thinking of the city proper or the city the the business, that's the city first, you're not doing your job. If something comes to you and work for the city but doesn't work for all of us, you shouldn't be on site. You know, should make it work for everybody. But they're not doing that right now. It seems to me they've been working for the city rather than the citizens. And like, there's there will be lots of good leadership with this new council. I think you're feeling hopeful about that. I'm feeling hopeful. Yeah. Yeah. And that's from your interaction with the other 38? Yeah. There's lots of good candidates that some obviously aren't as good. That's how it works. Democracy works that way. I think it was the UCLA foot basketball coach John Wooden. He used to say if we all think alike then nobody's thinking. That's right. You do need to have. We need. A mix. We need to set. So what happens now is they have consensus. They have a meeting ahead of time. They have consensus. They bring that consensus forward to council. And all you hear is what the consensus was. What you need to hear is you need to hear that dissent. So what happens there? I might disagree. If I disagree, you're going to hear that at council. And if you have a point of view, you have to say it to everybody that's there. You say it on YouTube, you say it to the people that are there and just saying, well, we had consensus, okay. Nobody knows what's going on. And that's where the perception of too much business behind closed doors. It is a lot of business behind closed doors. And everybody thinks that it's a team. Well, it's not really a team. What it is, is a collaboration. A team implies there's a coach and we're all following the set agenda, and we shouldn't be. You got nine independent souls there. Nine people thinking different things. Nine points of view. He betters. Better be honest enough to tell the citizens. That's my point of view. Would you be able to work with people who have opposing views? Oh, absolutely. But opposing views make you smart. Do you learn a lot of things from opposing views? If you live in your echo chamber, you never learn anything. You just keep repeating the same mistakes or whatever all the time. You go to the doors, you hear a lot of opposing views and that's where you learn stuff. Just saying to my friends or everybody I know this is a great idea and they'll agree with you. It doesn't work in the real world. You got to find out what everybody thinks and you got to take that forward. I'm pretty good with that. You know, if you've got a better idea, I'm going to ask you first. But I'm going to steal it and I'm going to use it. That happens in politics a lot. A lot, you bet. Yeah. Just take credit for it. No, no, no. I give credit to you. What have you been hearing on the doorsteps from people in medicine? Oh. There's concern. Their concern is taxation. The electrical utility, whether we keep owning it. They were generally really unhappy with two years ago when their prices went through the roof, which was a that was should counsel should have set the rate for us in the city. They were making money at whatever they were selling it at. If we sell to the grid for a ton of money, we're all happy. They're certainly worried about a repeat of the last council. So there's a lot of general unhappiness about the previous council. For whatever reason, it's the past. Let's move forward to something else. Let's not dwell on what happened, because there's if you want to dwell on what happens, read the read the report. There's enough information in there and you can make a decision from there. They're worried about growth. I mean, there were for me, one of the reasons I'm doing this is I have grandkids or I'd really like them to stay. Yeah. You know, but you need growth. You need a job for them to stay. You know, one of them might stay because he's his wife's parents are here. Maybe the other ones. He's going to be gone as soon as he can because he says, well, there's no job for me here, right? The other interesting phenomena that occurred that, you know, I kind of laughed about at the beginning was Division Avenue for everybody, really. You knock on the doors in Northeast Crescent Heights, and one of the things that came up was Division Avenue. And I'm going, okay, I use it every day because I live there. Don't manage to make too many of the corners in my truck. So there's a bunch of black marks on the curb. But, you know, you thought, well, you don't use it very often, but they are concerned that it will happen again. It'll happen on Third Street Northwest. Or it might happen on Kingsway or something like that. It has a plan. You're going. So what did you guys do? You went to a conference. This was presented by somebody and you thought, well, let's try that in Medicine Hat. Well, it doesn't work. Two weeks ago, I was driving down Division Avenue. The fire truck came up behind me. Boy. So what do I do? I got a truck. I just drove on. That was nice. Orange printing that they have. Their fire truck went by in the winter. I won't be able to do that, you know. So now we talked to the fire people. Now we talked to the garbage people. They didn't talk to the bus people. If you have a trailer anywhere in that neighborhood, you can't get off that street. So you're driving on the side streets now. So I'm going. Nobody really thought this through, right? So we need to learn from that. Yeah, we need to learn that we need to never do it again. It's a problem you can't fix now. There's no way you're going to spend another $2 million to take it apart. If you thought about it, you had the. You could have the bike trail on one side. You could have the pedestrian walkway on the other side, and you could have left the roadway because it worked. It's been there for since I've been driving. So that's 50 years, right? Because you just left it alone. It worked quite well. There was no need to change. I get a kick out of. I think the term they used was traffic calming. But I'm not really certain that's traffic calming. I walk my dog and there's this. The pedestrian walkways have the sign at the pedestrian walkway saying there's a there's a crosswalk here. So you're going know that traffic's coming pretty fast, faster than it used to go, because they're frustrated. Yeah. A little bit of that traffic is moving to both of the avenues on the high school side and on Westminster church side, because they're coming too. They're coming to the top of the hill and they're just going to the side just to get rid themselves of the frustration, because I'm not thinking it's any quicker if you're driving had high side, but. Now a project like that wouldn't have gone through Municipal Planning Commission or. I don't think. So. Rubber stamp. No, it's municipal works. So what would have happened is that they they had some open meetings and they said this is what we're going to do. But they present that as a fait accompli. They've got picture boards that look like what it was. When it's done right there. There was no discussion ahead of time. It would have come to council for a budget by budget. They budgetary control is what council does. So if you look at this as a member of council and you're going, well, maybe if we want to do this we have to go somewhere, look at it first. Right. But it was a little bit over $5 million or $5.2 million, exactly what it is. I don't know, but the underground work had to be done. I mean, the sewer and gas and water had to be done, new pavement had to be done. But they spent some something north of $1 million on making it narrow. So that didn't need to have done right. The million dollars or a million and a half dollars we can spend for something smarter than this. Fiscal conservatism is something that you have on your social media as part of your platform. Yeah, we don't need to spend all the money, right? We we have 65,000 people. We spend $400 million a year on the $80 million of that comes from taxes. There's lots of places where you can save$5 million or $100,000 or anything like that. The money is better in your pocket than it is having the city spend it. I mean, we spend millions of dollars on consultants. We have staff at City Hall can do this job. That's why they're there. So instead of telling them you do your job, they say, well, let's find a consultant to Toronto. And then we end up with Division Avenue, right? They can do this work. We don't need to spend all this money on consultants. You know, you have staff. Another head scratcher is, the approval on, $4.9 million for the South Side Recreation design, and they haven't even decided if they're going to build it. Well, let's look at that.$4 million on design you think of in construction design is about 10% of the cost. So now we're looking at $40 million for construction costs. We're going to build an outdoor swimming pool. We're going to build outdoor ice sheet. And we're going could build lazy river and that kind of stuff for $40 million. You got to take a deep breath when you hear that. So if South Ridge, you know, require some rec facilities they've been without for a long time. But let's talk about the Crestwood Pool. Crestwood pool has been on its last legs for a decade. Indoor pool, 25 meter indoor pool. We can build that in South Ridge. It'll take some money, but it's an indoor pool. You can use it year round instead of the four months a year that another swim outdoor swimming pool would be used. We we can work say with the why or we'll get some money from the feds or whatever. It's a well-used pool. People that don't want to swim in an Olympic sized pool go there for swimming. They do rec there, they do exercises there, they do some yoga there. And that's all valuable wellness stuff that we can do and use year round. Right. And I'm in a rink. We spend, if you're into any kind of hockey, I think you spent $300 an hour for ice. You know, it's a lot of money. So another ice sheet could overcome the problem that we had with the big marble go when they added the addition. The original concept was for that. They actually add that second ice sheet and they didn't do that. So a new ice sheet, single ice sheet you could build fairly reasonably. It doesn't have to be the Taj Mahal big tin building. You know, we could do that in the in the South as well. Yeah. You know. Yeah, we did see, money spent on the Moose Rec Center to bring the ice plant back to usability. But you gotta wonder about the heights. The hounds. The hounds is old. Same same age, same age. So tell you how old I am. We play high grade school hockey, adores outdoors, grade school hockey. We played a Saint Francis. We walked over there and it was great when it was minus ten. There's the days when your coach said no, as a matter, we're going out and it's -25 and the winds blow and you're going sucked all air out of you pretty quick. Didn't want to be on the bench. Didn't want to be on the bench, that's for sure. Yeah. But yeah, when we look at property taxes we've heard some promises that 0% increase. Is that actually feasible? Absolutely, absolutely. You got to cut something. Now or. Grow the city. You got to grow the city first. We have north of $700 million in the bank. We just say, let's use that some of that interest every year for that we can in four years we can find some cuts. Right. It's it's it's not magic. You just have to look you have to do your job. You have to be diligent. You have to find this. The information isn't as forthcoming from the staff as it could be. Right? In four years, we can get some business to come. We got to go up, beat the bushes. But let's do something simple or not simple. But let's do something like a data center. Right now, we don't have the energy capacity, which we don't. But if you tell the energy regulator, look, we got a data center coming and they'll say yes to you building another generator. And that's good money for the city. It's a ton of good money for us. It's not like the people that are working at this data center are going to get $10 an hour. It's not a lot of people, but we sell the energy, we make money on the energy. And if you have one, maybe you can do it like we do here right now. And there's one more that whose name I forgotten right off the cuff. But we have two right now. They use a ton of energy and we make money on that. It's not like we're giving it away. So we could do we can do that because we have the we have the ability because we're a monopoly to do those things. Yeah, I understand that the infrastructure doesn't exist, though, to service, the south end of our city. If you were to look out on in the southwest corner. Well, we're we now, we've done a new transformer. They've finally got approval. So they got approval. Now they'll build it. So we'll have that energy capacity in the South, I think. But if you're going to do a datacenter, you're going to do it up by Canadian fertilizers. They've got the generators there. But each they're just building another one right next door. And it's not like you have to design a whole new one. We built it. We'll just do it again and again if we have it right. Yeah. I can hear minds talking to their computers right here. Well, what about the summer solar project? That's right there. It's power. No it's not. I mean, I can't run a datacenter with with solar power, I just can't. So my wife and I were in Germany before Christmas. Went to the, Christmas markets. My wife just loved that. But you look on every house, every apartment, every building, outhouse, barn had a solar panel. You transferred the responsibility for the energy to the user. So if you have a solar panel on your house, you can use that electricity for virtually nothing. You can write and you can sell your excess capacity for to back to the city. Or you can buy a storage system, battery storage for your house and be independent of the grid. Spending 6 or $700 million on a solar field is perhaps beyond the pale for us. That's a lot of money for 65,000 people. For something that's at best intermittent. And then the argument will come up, well, we'll do storage, right? But you go in storage isn't free. The lithium the lithium battery thing degrades over time. The solar panels degrade over time. So you're going so we've invested in a resource that's diminishing all the time. Yeah. Control of the utilities was one of the hot topics in the last council. The idea of a municipally controlled corporation to remove responsibility of some of the decisions from the council who may not be equipped to handle that. I'm sure that not many people that have ever been accustomed are equipped to handle all of that. That's why you have staff. The difficulty with an MC, it's it's like like oil. Remember we bought an oil field at 90 Barry's, so that oil company was 100% owned by the city, but it was separate from the city. And I think that's what the MK wants to do. But you can't make that decision on that little, executive summary or precis that came with it, said, we're going to spend some money. Well, how much money we're going to spend? Well, maybe $4 million, maybe $40,000 for all these guys. We might be better off to split the job. Like we have an administrator, a CEO, we have a an energy person. So we did that before and it worked reasonably well. So you've got two different people providing you with information that would be a simpler, less expensive way to get enough information to make decisions rather than saying, okay, we're going to sell it, we're not going to sell it, you're going to give it to them. You're still going to own 100%. So the ownership doesn't change. Just the people doing the work changes. And it's not like the city said, oh yeah, we're not going to make any money off of us. But they did that two years ago. They made a ton of money off of us. So it's not like, well, they're going to be greedy. You're going to have to tell them, yes, you have to give it some money back to the city. But right now I'm thinking that's not going to be the best way to go. I think divvying up the job, you know, for which will be reasonably be the same amount of money. Right. You going just hired administrative for a couple hundred grand or 250 grand. And the same for the energy person. I think we can do that. We have enough staff, good staff that can do that. Your thoughts on, city contributions to the medicine exhibition and Stampede? I need to see a lot more information before I give somebody 50 or $60 million. Right. I love the stampede. I've been here all my life. I go to the stampede, I watch the trucks and stuff like that. But it's a lot of money, right? So if they're going to do anything, they have to get money from all the other levels of government before they come to us. They have to raise some money of their own. They have to provide financial statements. I mean, if you think about it, you could perhaps move the stampede someplace else. You could do something with that land, you could sell it for housing or whatever. So there's lots of opportunities. It's a big place in the middle of the city, you know. So I don't know how much money they make. So it's it's difficult for me to say yes or it's not difficult to say no unless you have that information.$60 million for the city missing. That's a lot of money, right?$60 million is three years of tax increases.$5 million a year for three years. That's 60 million bucks. Okay. All right. What about the situation we see every day in Medicine Hat with the people who have no place to live. If we had a solution and we could bottle it, we could give it away. They're here. Right? We have to be compassionate. We have to take care of them. Winter's coming. We have to find a way to edge them on with a bigger police presence, you know? So things that have been they've been doing in I duck, I think is that they've started not harassing, but they those people that are involved in the crime. So they've picked them up, taken them in. They get released next time they pick them up, take them in later in the evening. So maybe they stay overnight next time, maybe two nights in jail or in the hoosegow for two nights. And sooner or later they'll say, well, I go back to Calgary or let's make sure they don't do this thing right, so we have to edge them out. I mean, we can't just say, well, we'll throw them on the bus, right? I mean, there's no bus, right? So they're here. We have to do the best we can with what's here. We there's lots of, not for profits and, and those kind of things. The, the thing up at, the old youth hospital hostel was. Yeah. Well, now youth hostel before. Yeah. In the olden, olden days. Yeah. It was a would have been a step in the right direction. Right. You remove them from the downtown. They were going to provide all the services, which was, you know, drug rehab, mental health support. They'd feed them. They keep them warm, you know? So, I mean, it was a different step, really moved them. I live downtown, so we have that traffic all the time, you know, and generally, most of them are stealing anything, but they're out, right? They're drug induced in the night. So it's a difficulty for people. People don't come downtown. Yeah. It actually it's not the only place they transfer out. We did, northeast crazy night again. We did doors out there. And, you know, the lady said last night there was a homeless person in my backyard. So it's not just downtown, it's just concentrated down. You see them all the time, right? So it's it. Every municipality in North America has homeless people, and there's been no. Oh, this is the best solution. This will work if you do housing first. That's great. It works in Finland because they're all Finnish or something. But, you know, if you're going to do that, you have to have support services there. You can't just say, here's a house, go to the house. You have to have mental health service. You have drug addiction services, right? You have to have all those things in place. And then maybe you have to have the province giving you support because that money isn't coming from us. I mean, drug addiction and mental health issues and health, and they should be not downloading it on us. For us, we small cities, they should be doing that work. That's their job. Transparency is another word that's been kicked around a lot. I know you have some thoughts on that. Transparency is a buzzword. Everybody says it, but nobody believes it. Right? If you're going to be on council, you have to be honest, right? Whatever your thoughts are, get out there. Be blunt blurted out, tell everybody what you think. So if you were going to do something on council, you better be forward enough forthright enough to stand in council chambers and say to everybody that's sitting there, everybody that's on YouTube, this is what I think. This is why I think it if you're not doing that, you're not transparent. You're just not. They like again, they're do they do work in the dark and they come out and they say something. But that's not transparency. Transparency. Seeing that dissent right up front. Sometimes you do have to do some business behind. Oh absolutely. I mean contracts. H.R. There's things you have to do, but they're pretty small. I mean, they're pretty. Small. If you're going to, you know, perhaps fire your CEO. That's a closed discussion. If you're having a contract, if you're doing a contract for millions of dollars, where the private company and they don't like you, that's to tell all these things up before the deals are made. That's confidential. There's confidential issues, for sure, but I bet you 95% of the stuff they do is open, and they should be open enough with the citizens that you know what's going on. I mean, sometimes you I read the agendas and it's a 600 page agenda. Yeah. So my wife says, oh, you just like in college, you take a highlighter, you're you're because I print them because I can't do it on the computer, I must admit. So I print them, I do the highlighter thing and then you're listening to them and they're asking questions that counts. And I'm going, you didn't read the agenda. It's in the packet. You didn't read the agenda or you didn't understand the agenda. So if you're going to do this job, you better be able to read all this stuff to swallow. It didn't really quick because it's a lot of information. And if you don't understand the information, ask somebody. There's lots of people where you can get information from. If you if you don't feel the information provided by the CEO is good enough, you tell the CEO, look, we need more information. Find some of your staff to come and explain it to us, because I can't make a decision with whatever information that you've given me. Yeah. Government speak. Government speak. Absolutely. Yeah. When I go into the, ballot box and I have 39 names and I have eight votes, why should I spend one for Emmanuel Morris? Because I'm good at what I do. So I'm a construction guy, and construction teaches all those things. It teaches you financial proficiency. You got to be able to read your financial statement. You got to be able to know where the money comes from. And really, you gotta know where it goes. That's the problem right now with most councils. They know where the money comes from, you and me, but they don't know where it goes. So that's not a good system. You got to be able to do strategic planning because you've got a job right now, but you need a job for next year. So you got to be out hunting. You got to know how much money can I spend? Where's my profit going to come from? You got to be able to collaborate. Because you mean if you got any kind of say how big building you got 20 or 30 trades. Those guys got to work together because they want this job to be finished. They want a good quality job for the owner, and they all want to make money. So there's no goofing around here. So if you have an issue, you talk about it right away. You don't wait months and months and they say, well, we should have talked about this months ago. Maybe we should be hearing this problem now. Collaboration is important. I was on the Planning commission and I was on the school board for two terms. In that time, you can figure out how government works, things that work for government and things that don't work in the government. So that's the background. I think those skills will serve well for any council. It'll make me a good counselor. Emmanuel Morris, looking for your vote on the 20th of October. Thank you for your visit. Thanks, Brian. It was a lot of fun.