Campbell Conversations

Program transcript:

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is Melanie Littlejohn. Last December, Ms. Littlejohn was named as the president and CEO of the Central New York Community Foundation, she brings to that position a wide array of previous experience in the private and nonprofit sector, including a long career with National Grid and its Corporate Social Responsibility program. Ms. Littlejohn, welcome to the program.

Melanie Littlejohn: Thank you, thank you.

GR: Well, we're glad to have you on. So, let's just start with some real basics. I'm sure that most of our listeners have heard of the Community Foundation but they may not be, you know, totally up to speed on it. So, let's just start with you giving us a basic overview of the foundation and what it does.

ML: Sure. Grant, I think one of the things I love talking about is the Community Foundation and what it does because it's still in many ways a mystery to people. But in essence, what we do, we take donors dollars and we invest it to do the most good in our community. So we also help donors with their philanthropic ambitions, where would they like to contribute their dollars to make a meaningful impact, and then we also take the investment from those donor’s dollars to deploy very widely on things like our priorities: LEAD (LeadSafeCNY), literacy, scholarship, equity. And it's a powerful moment. And then we support nonprofit organizations who are doing unbelievable work across the region.

GR: So, okay, thank you. So if I were to give money then to the Community Foundation, what I'm understanding of what you're saying, is then you would sort of take that money and make decisions about where it should go and put it together in a pool, do I have that right?

ML: So let me clarify. So, you're a donor and you say, I would like to open up a donor advised fund and here at the Community Foundation, because I want to support, just pick an organization, I want to support the Salvation Army.

GR: Okay.

ML: And I want to support my alma mater, I want to support elementary school education. And so you give us the list of who you want to support and then annually, on an annual basis, we invest that fund so that it just continues to grow.

GR: Okay.

ML: And then we give, so the portion of your fund that's invested, you then allocate to those organizations that you outline. And then when we look at the whole investment pool, a portion of what we then do is set community priorities that are born out of data like LEAD, and then we try to tackle and create impact in those areas by working with organizations or funding organizations that are doing work to address that priority. We invest in priorities as a result of data. You know, my team looks at data and we collect and share data on a wide range of elements for the Central New York region. And as we identify issues, we begin to tackle them through supporting those organizations that are in place to tackle these very issues. And some of those really result in, oh goodness, measureable and meaningful impact in the region.

GR: Okay, great, thank you. So my understanding is when you first came on board, you held a series of listening sessions in the community. It was this past spring to get a better sense of the needs and the concerns I was just wondering if what you learned from that, what conclusions for you that came out of that experience?

ML: You know, that's been one of the most powerful experiences I've had in my work career, because when you go out to people and you do it in a way that you are clearly focused on listening, people share. And so what I heard from, goodness, over 400 people over five different listening sessions, and I still do them, but they're much smaller now. But the themes are very, very consistent, no matter where I go. It's focused on housing and dealing with the housing crisis. It's focused on child care in all forms and facets of child care. It's focused on workforce development, transportation, health care. And one of the other issues that just kept bubbling up was that around mental health, and mental health specifically as it relates to our young people. And I've heard just tremendous, tremendous feedback. But I also heard this whole important notion of collaboration and partnership and compassion and commitment. Those sessions were absolutely powerful.

GR: And I seem to remember a few years ago, prior to you joining the foundation, that the foundation pledged itself to a greater emphasis on social justice, diversity, and as I recall, from the time communities of color and communities that were in distress. Tell me, why was that? Why did the community foundation make that change?

ML: Sure, sure. And I don't know if it's as much of a change as it was as a pronouncement.

GR: Okay.

ML: So when I think about, again, I say a lot of what we do was data informed. And when we looked at data and let's just use LEAD, because LEAD is one of the most pronounced ones that really had us leaning in on the equity lens. You know, the populations or the people who are at the highest end of lead poisoning are black and brown residents in in Onondaga County specifically. And it's also focused on high concentration of poverty and unfortunately, you know, our numbers are still our numbers, right? We have the highest concentrated levels of poverty for black and brown residents. And then we also go and we looked at some of our historical information through the 15th Ward, which has the highest level of lead poisoning. And then if you overlay, say, a redlining map, you see all of the exact same footprint. So, you know, we said, you know, this is a community that, Central New York community cares about driving impact and cares about driving change. I know I talk to people all day long who want us to rise to our highest and best selves in everything we do, including the issues around equity and race. And so the foundation leaned in on that and continues to do, and it was also shortly after the murder of George Floyd that we have to look at things even that give us consternation. We got to look at them in the eye. Because if we look at them in the eye, we know how to deal with it and we deal with it as a community. And don't think the work isn't easy. It is never easy to talk about things that make us wiggle in our seats, ever. But when you do it thoughtfully, and you do it inclusively bringing and inviting in feedback and engagement, we all get better, right? We all begin to get better. And so that's what that DEI and equity lens is about and it’s about all voices, right? Because we do recognize all voices matter, but we also wanted to put a specific light on where we have some warts. Let's get them done.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with Melanie Littlejohn. She's the president and CEO of the Central New York Community Foundation. So are there new initiatives that the foundation has been taking recently that you are particularly excited about that you could talk to us about?

ML: Sure. I think our ongoing work in literacy, right? Is critically important, it’s foundational it’s a part of the ecosystem. I can't talk about workforce development without talking about reading, right? I think about our pipelines in all of our schools, right? And we have to ensure that all children specifically have the ability to read and comprehend information. So literacy continues to be foundational to drive impact. LEAD and the eradication of lead, the foundation actually just, we committed another million dollars to our efforts to get to the eradication of lead. 26% of children in 2018 being tested positive for lead - unacceptable. We're at 11% now because we've leaned in what we got to keep leaning in to ensure that we are doing everything that we can to eradicate lead poisoning. Because that as well is a part of the ecosystem because lead impacts children's ability to read, learn, and it just has a ripple effect, so we are at the heart of it. And then our scholarship, you know, Say Yes, 15 years of Say Yes. And we continue to see how Say Yes changes the lives of people in this region and what a heck of a calling card to the city of Syracuse. If you're buying a house in the city of Syracuse, guess what? If you do when your child goes Syracuse City School system, you can get a scholarship, how terribly important. And then the last thing, Grant, is how we're leaning in and partnering through all of this coalition work, doing what I call the Micron Moment.

GR: Yes. I wanted to ask you about that later, but yeah.

ML: Super, super important. It's a moment and we've got to get it right.

GR: Yes.

ML: And what I absolutely adore is watching the level of collaboration. I've been in this community about 35 years, and what I have seen in the last 2 to 3 specifically has been absolutely tremendous. We get we get we have some big hills and valleys, but collaboration. So that's what we're up to at the foundation.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Melanie Littlejohn. Since last December, she's been serving as the President and CEO of the Central New York Community Foundation. So I wanted to ask you, something came to my mind as you were giving the answer to the last question and you were talking about the things that the Community Foundation has been doing in particular that you think are most important or you're most excited about. And, you know, you were mentioning helping with literacy and literacy with young people, the problems with lead poisoning and lead exposure in Syracuse. Those are important things, but one of the thoughts I had, it's not a criticism of the foundation, but it's a reflection, when I hear that I think, well, isn't that what a responsive government would be doing? And so my question to you is, does the community foundation and other foundations like it kind of, fill in for where government either falls down or has gaps? I don't know if you have thoughts about that.

ML: So I think ironically and importantly, there's so much work to be done in this space that is enough work for everyone to do, right? So, when I think about working with Onondaga County and the city of Syracuse on the whole lead initiative, they have been responsive. They have fueled and supported so many of the initiatives that we're seeing because, you know, I said we started at 26%, we’re down to 11% in the city of Syracuse. The number is still unacceptable, but there are so many different partners, including nonprofit partners, it's community. We did this process that I'm extraordinarily proud of, is for participatory budgeting. And we took the problem of lead poisoning and we worked with the residents of the 15th Ward, Southside Brighton area. We worked with community based organizations, government officials and we did this working session. It took a few months to say, all right, here are the dollars. We want to give a grant of $150,000. How would you deploy it so that we can get to the eradication of lead? Where should it go? What would be most meaningful, most impactful that could drive the greatest degree of change. And the community and all of these partners, and they worked hard, and it wasn't easy, but they worked. And there were four or five organizations that bubbled up as we liked their work and what they're doing and we think it's innovative and it would be impactful. And then ultimately, one did get, the Syracuse Doulas got the large grant. It's because what they wanted to do was to begin to plant seeds with moms. Because most people, believe it or not, you don't think about lead poisoning in your homes, just don't think about it, who thinks about it? Or if you're renting and you go from one location to the next, you don't think about it. So we really had to lean in on the education and outreach as well as our continued work around replacement of doors and windows. The places that lead is most prominent.

GR: And you mentioned Micron a little bit earlier and I did want to ask you about that. Obviously, you know, it's going to be transformational for not only the community, but the area and you know, maybe the state. Has the community foundation been part of the discussions in the planning around Micron? Are you at these tables with, you know, Syracuse University and government officials and Micron officials? Because Micron has been, there's been both a push to see commitments from Micron and then also, you know, Micron, I think, has been pretty open about saying, you know, we want to help and we want to get involved. So it seems like the Community Foundation would be one place they might want to go to figure out how, best way to do that.

ML: Sure. So in two ways, prior to me coming here, obviously, I've worked during and with the Micron attraction process, which was powerful. And certainly, you know, my former employer is absolutely critically important because you got to, you know, power this massive site, which they're actually doing a phenomenal job working to make that happen. But then the second piece is, I had a wonderful opportunity to co-chair a community engagement committee along with Tim Penix. And then 15 community leaders from different backgrounds came together to launch this community engagement process on behalf of the governor and on behalf of Micron, to really get the voice of community so that what we're trying or aiming for that everyone can participate in this moment. We were looking at the right thing. So it was a 13 month process that we did this and we engaged over 13,000 residents in various forms, whether it was town hall meetings, surveys, smaller round tables. We engaged the voice of the community and again, you will not be surprised of all of the things that people said were important. And matter of fact, we just released two weeks ago that Community Priorities document that outlines what was said and what will be focused on. But here's the thing, Grant…

GR: Let me ask you one thing, because that sounds important. Where can people find that document?

ML: They can find that document, you can either go right to the governor's website at newyorkstate.gov.

GR: Okay.

ML: You can go to (www.nyscec.org) and we'll get you the link to maybe you can post them.

GR: That sounds like a great idea. Yeah, go ahead and complete your thought, I'm sorry. I just wanted to make sure that…

ML: No, no, it's important, I'm glad you stopped me. And it has both the executive summary as well as the full 160 page report in terms of the voice of the community. So I'm still the co-chair of it and a matter of fact, tomorrow will be our first meeting that we will have with community based organizations who might be interested in applying for a grant that relates to some of the priorities that were identified in the Community Priorities document. So we're stepping through here’s how you access the portal, here's what it looks like. And so that piece becomes really, really important. And so we are involved in all of the coalitions and all of the work to really get up on all of the priorities to make impact. But what I like people to know, yes, this is a document that was sparked by Micron coming into this community, but we were very careful to name this report. This report is the Central New York Community Engagement Committee, it belongs to all of us. All organizations in this community, big or small or otherwise, this is your document. People of Central New York, this is your document. Yes, we're going to meet the Micron moment and Micron has been a good partner stepping up. But this isn't just a Micron responsibility, right? So I want everyone to know this is your document. Figure out how you want to bring it to life, figure out where you want to lean in to make things happen.

GR: If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media and my guest is Melanie Littlejohn from the Central New York Community Foundation. So we've got about 4 minutes left or so and there are two questions I want to make sure I have time to ask you. I'm going to ask you the bigger question first, and you could talk about this the whole time, but just remember that I want to come back and I want to squeeze something else in. So the first one is, have you begun to develop your idea of future visions for the Community Foundation, you know, both on a sort of like realistic short term scale, but also, you know, thinking big about the future? Or is it too early in your tenure for you to be doing that?

ML: No, I think, you know, I have the benefit of having a tremendous team that really helps me think through what are those core issues and things that we really need to lean into. I have the voice of community, whether it's through my listening sessions or this Community Priorities document. But I think the biggest piece for me is really having to demystify philanthropy, that we're all philanthropists, we all give in one way or another. So really trying to continue to build the culture of philanthropy and whether, I want to really foster: just give. Give time is giving, compassion is giving, writing checks and giving of your treasure is giving. But in this season, I want to create the everyday philanthropist.

GR: Ah, I like that, everyday philanthropist, I like that phrase. So this last question is more personal, and I'm hoping that you will feel comfortable enough to talk about it, we've got a couple of minutes left. I know that the Community Foundation is apolitical and nonpartisan, so I want to make that clear before I ask this question, make it clear to our listeners and to you. At the same time, you're a woman of color and it's looking like the Democrats as we are speaking today, it's becoming a certainty, almost a certainty that the Democrats are going to nominate Kamala Harris for president. She would be the first woman of color to be a presidential nominee from either of the two major parties. So she's making history and she could make more history if she wins. So I just wondered if you had any personal thoughts or feelings about that.

ML: You know, I know a little something about being a first, right? And the pride, Kamala, Vice President Kamala Harris, for me, as having been a first in my career, she reinforces for me the immense pride. The immense pride that I know what she did to get there, right? You know and understand how hard she has worked to be her best self, to be the leader that we know she is. And I'm sure she's got some bumps and bruises and some war scars, right? But I'm filled with this sense of pride because my granddaughter could wake up and understand I, too, can be a president. I, too, can run for office, right? That's what this moment is about, it's bigger than politics.

GR: Yeah.

ML: It's about the power of possibility.

GR: Well that's a nice place to end it. That was Melanie Littlejohn. Ms. Littlejohn, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me, I really appreciated the conversation.

ML: Thank you, Grant.

GR: You've been listening to the Campbell conversations on WRVO, public media conversations and the public interest.

Program transcript:

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is Wawa Gatheru. Ms. Gatheru is the founder of Black Girl Environmentalist, a national organization dedicated to empowering black girls, women and nonbinary people across the climate sector. In 2019, she was named the first black person in history to receive the prestigious Rhodes, Truman and Udall scholarships, all three of them. Since then, she's received a number of young leadership recognitions and awards. Ms. Gatheru, welcome to the program.

Wawa Gatheru: Thank you for having me. I'm excited to talk with you today.

GR: Well, we're excited to have you. Let me just start with one thing, we know already that you're very smart, I think I just proved that. Where did you win all these scholarships? Where was your undergraduate experience?

WG: Yeah, so I'm a proud alum of the illustrious University of Connecticut, Storrs. That's where I did my undergrad.

GR: Excellent, okay. And you did the Rhodes Scholarship, was the one you chose, which makes perfect sense. And I think the Truman was one that you get sort of while you're an undergraduate, is that right? You were able to receive that scholarship at Connecticut, right?

WG: Yes. So the Truman Scholarship is a public service scholarship so it's awarded to undergraduate juniors that have shown exceptional promise in the space of public service and have a track record and hopefully will continue to carry that on throughout the rest of their career.

GR: All right. So the Rhodes is the one everyone's heard of. And what did you study at Oxford?

WG: So I studied major society and environmental governance. So that was a masters where we really focused on environmental governance and have the opportunity to understand what that looks like from a global perspective, it’s very insightful.

GR: Well, perfect for what you're doing, so great, okay. So, briefly tell me how and why you started this organization, Black Girl Environmentalist.

WG: Yeah. So the idea of BGE, Black Girl Environmentalist, was definitely seeded throughout my experience in the environmental space. I was 15 when I really knew in my heart that I had found my calling and I knew that I wanted to dedicate my life to climate solutions. And throughout my time as a young person navigating the climate sector, I had an incredible experience obviously, I'm still here. But there were many instances that reminded me of the leadership crisis that our space really suffers from and even though people of color make up nearly, I think, 40% of the U.S. population, we rarely see a 12 to 16% green ceiling of representation and that is definitely seen and felt when you're in environmental or climate rooms. And so I kept asking myself the question, if we know that communities of color, people of color and women of color in particular, are experiencing the brunt of environmental injustices in our country and abroad, why is it that we're not adequately represented in climate leadership? Why is it that the next generation of climate leaders don't look like a representation of the United States? And so that was a big tension point throughout my journey. And when I completed my master's at Oxford and fall of 2022, I was confronted with the possibility of spending a year turning what, at that point was an Instagram page and Instagram community, into a functioning, fully operational nonprofit that could attempt to address this very unique pipeline and pathway issue in the climate sector. And so I decided to, instead of accepting a job offer that would have provided me financial security, spend a year dedicated to spreading the word on BGE, building out our programing and fundraising. And I told myself that if I wasn't able to fundraise enough to hire myself, then at least two people full time within a year, I would essentially go back crawling to whoever would take me for a job, and I'd keep the organization as an Instagram page. And somehow we were able to do that and we're still going strong with full time staff.

GR: That's great. So, a follow up question on that, but just to underline something that you said at the beginning about the field being dominated by white people. You know, I've had a number of folks on the program in the years that I've been doing it to talk about environmental issues and you prompted me to go back really quickly and think, and they were all white. So you are the first person of color to be on this program to be talking about environmental issues. So it just kind of underlines your point there. You said that people of color bear the heavier brunt of environmental injustices and problems. Could you say a little bit more about that because when I think of some of the environmental concerns, you know, global warming and everything, I don't necessarily think of them in those terms, so help me better understand that.

WG: Yeah, so I mean, there's so many different ways that we can look at this. The origins of the climate crisis in a formal environmental course, we really look at the industrial revolution as being the starting point of the climate crisis particularly, and the rapid increase of greenhouse gases and the way that we really see our economy industrialized in this very specific way and how that launched the US in particular into an era of wealth and really solidified it as one of the most wealthy nations in the world, if not the most wealthy. But I would say, if we took from a historical perspective, the climate crisis did not begin there, right? The Industrial Revolution didn't pay for itself. We think about the abolishment of slavery and what a tectonic economic shift it was. It required the US to really launch itself into a new economic system that did not remove itself from a system of exploitation. So we went from a system of exploiting black and brown bodies to continuing to exploit black and brown bodies, not in the same way, but still doing so while also exploiting the land and our resources at a level that we have not been able to keep up with. And a lot of environmental strands can really trace the legacy of chattel slavery, colonialism, imperialism as being huge, grounding fundamental systems that have led us into this crisis. And because those systems are born out of exploitation, the climate crisis and staying true to its origins and roots, does not impact us all the same. I often say the climate crisis, even though we're all in the same storm that is a climate crisis we aren't all in the same boat, meaning that the climate crisis is a threat multiplier. It does create a lot of new problems for people, and it certainly impacts all different types of people. But depending on your social status, socio-economic status, race, gender, et cetera, your relationship with it is different. We often talk about climate change as being a threat multiplier. And, you know, when we dive into that term, it really means that the climate crisis intensifies all existing social threats. So even if the climate crisis wasn't in the picture, right, we understand that there are communities that tend to be poor. There are communities that have been targeted by systemic inequalities. There are communities that are more likely to experience poverty, and then when you bring the climate crisis on top of that, those issues grow larger. And the gaps between those with and those without continues to grow. And so people of color tend to be on the end of the have-nots when the climate crisis is brought into the mix, again that gap continues to grow larger. A really good example is heat. Right now, we're still in a heat wave. It's kind of crazy to think about, right? We're at day six, I think, to summer. And we are already seeing headlines of people losing their lives to heat. But the thing is with heat, heat does not impact us all equally, right? When we think about the very real legacy of redlining even though redlining is illegal, we still are living out the ramifications of these racist policies. There is research that shows that previously redlined communities that are still predominantly black and brown and low income are actually hotter than communities that weren't previously redlined. And that's because redlined communities were designated for a lot of concrete infrastructure. Warehouses highways, lack of green space. And then if you look at communities that weren't previously redlined and were able to access investment, there's a lot of green space. There is a lot of canopy cover, there's a lot of infrastructure that mitigates extreme heat. And because of that, we can quite literally see that a neighborhood that was previously redlined just a couple of blocks from a predominantly white community that wasn't previously redlined, people are experiencing heat very differently. And that's just like a real tangible example. But, you know, even if we bring in pregnant people into the mix, right? We already have a black maternal health crisis, we already know that black mothers and their babies are disproportionately impacted by our broken health care system. But heat really, really impacts pregnant and birthing people and their babies. And so if you add that on top of the mix, right, a black mother and a black baby in a community that was previously redlined, that is low income, that is hotter, is going to experience that heat differently than a white mother in a neighborhood that wasn't previously redlined, has canopy and tree cover to mitigate extreme heat and likely also has better access to health care in ways that the black mother doesn't have.

GR: Yeah, I could see how the threat multiplier there comes into it. And my mind went to something further back in time when you were talking about this, which was the differential impact of Hurricane Katrina.

WG: Right.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with Wawa Gatheru, the founder of Black Girl Environmentalist. So, what would you regard as your organization's biggest success so far, other than building it, obviously, which was a challenge. But now, you know, now that it's built, what's the thing that you would point to with the most pride?

WG: The thing that I would point to with the most pride is, you know, building it, I would say. And the reason why is I don't think people realize how dire philanthropy is for the climate space. Climate is the least funded issue item out there, which is really scary when we think about organizations, groups that are leading on climate solutions that are simply not able to scale and don't have the capacity to do so because of funding. And youth climate organizations are in a really, really interesting predicament and which constantly, we're told, you are the future, you're going to save us from ourselves. And then simultaneously we receive .76 percent of climate philanthropy of the very little there is, we receive .76, and most of that funding is located within the United States. So, we are an organization that is primarily focused in the United States, right? And even then, there's a disparity where my fellow brothers and sisters that are leading incredible work elsewhere are really not getting any funding. So the fact that we were able to raise enough capital to have full time staff and to be able to lead programing, in and of itself is great, but it certainly has been a burden in navigating. But very specifically, I would see our Hazel and Johnson Fellowship program is something that I'm very, very proud of. It initially launched just a couple of months ago. It's a summer program where we have placed 14 current college students or recent graduates at leading environmental organizations for the summer where they are receiving financial support, mentorship and professional development at a scale that really isn't normal in our space. Unpaid internships are thankfully becoming less and less popular, but there is still an issue around college students or recent graduates being able to access these internships or summer opportunities that are really, really critical and being able to obtain your first early career job. Because, A, if they are paid, they don't always tend to be able to correlate with the high costs of living. Two, if you have to relocate, many of the places that are very popular for internships are very expensive already. And the other issue is that students may not know how to really leverage the experience if they're in there. So with our fellowship, all the partner organizations are paying our fellows at least $18 an hour, and only one fellow is actually receiving that, most of them are receiving at least $20 an hour, up to $25 an hour. On top of that, Black Girl Environmentalists, our organization has equipped the bills with a $5,000 living wage stipend to support those fees as well. We are providing them weekly professional development, 3 hours a week, where we get to introduce them to different topics that are pertinent to where they are in the early career journey, and then also expose them to other things that could help them as they develop, as well as partnering each of the fellows up with the mentor. And we're finishing up the summer with an in-person retreat in Washington State, where we'll be able to really share about the experiences that folks had over the summer. Folks will get to connect in person or be able to plan ahead for how our alumni program can continue to support these individuals. It's been a really, really incredible journey to see the program start from an idea into this pipeline that is being recognized and where folks are participating from all over the country. We have HBCU students, we have state school students, we have Ivy League students, students that are utilizing this platform to really get their foot in the door. And our partner organizations are just incredible. We have everyone from Bloomberg Philanthropies, Beyond Petrochemicals Campaign, Harvard's Salata Institute, The Climate Trust, WWF, Rare (Environmental), across disciplines from renewable energy to environmental justice to policy. And we really wanted for folks to be able to have a wide selection of what type of discipline they wanted to get into, as well as start off in a place that can really help bring them to the next level.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Wawa Gatheru. She’s the founder of Black Girl Environmentalist, a national organization dedicated to empowering black girls, women and nonbinary people across the climate (spectrum). I just wanted to mention before the break you were talking about your fellowship program, and I just want to give you compliments here because I run an internship program at Syracuse University, but the way you've thought this through, inserting the mentoring into it and the big meeting afterward where people can compare their experiences, that's really nicely done. I just want to say good work on that.

WG: Thank you.

GR: What's been your biggest challenge so far outside of building the organization? I wonder whether it was getting people of color more interested in this or what's been the thing that's been toughest to get around for you?

WG: Yeah, you know, it hasn't been that last point. And it's so interesting because I think there is this narrative around people of color that sometimes we believe as well, like as people of color where it's like, oh, like, black folks don't go outside or don't go camping or don't care about the environment, or people of color don't do those things, when in reality it's not true. Like, we have polling that shows that people of color overwhelmingly do care about climate action, do care about how, for example, political candidates are talking about climate change. Actually, more than our white counterparts. In fact, Latin communities are the most concerned about environmental protection than any demographic. So it's always so interesting that when we think about environmentalism, it typically isn't that communities of color that again, arguably do care the most. I find that the issue or the biggest burden that I've had to face in the past several years with BGE and then overall is combating that narrative. And then also really combating that narrative and really asserting why an organization like this is so important. I tend to get a lot of questions about why I focus on what I focus on. People ask, why women? Why black women? Why black girls? Why not stick it to the tree? That's one I get a lot. You know, like race has nothing to do with climate action or climate protection, why exactly are you being divisive? And so I find that a lot of my job is to, specifically when it comes to overcoming narratives, is to really provide a historical grounding into the ways in which people of color have always been involved in our stewardship, have always been environmentalists, and remind folks of that continuing legacy. And then also to share that history with other folks of color and other black folks, because it's always been, again, this moment of a feeling of tension that I have experienced. But as I continue to meet more and more and more black girl environmentalists, I hear the same thing back. Where so many other people also have this lived experience of being like, this is so strange, like at home, we always recycle and like we always talked about how important it was to take care of the planet, we always understood that protecting the planet always meant protecting people, too. But the prevailing narrative has left us out. And so it's been a burden, but then it's also been an opportunity to connect with other people and build community over the fact that so many of us have been exposed to this narrative and yet, in the midst of it, have continued to persevere and continue to really take up space and really show the movement at large that in order for the climate movement to be successful, we need a movement made in the image of all of us and one that speaks to everyone.

GR: If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, and my guest is Wawa Gatheru. She's an environmentalist and she founded the organization, Black Girl Environmentalist. Now, your constituency, as you listed on your website and elsewhere, is black girls, black women, but then also nonbinary people. So I just wanted to ask you why that was part of your focus. Do you see some sort of natural connection between the issues of bringing those first two groups into this conversation and the last one, nonbinary?

WG: Yeah, ultimately, right? Marginalized groups, folks that are made marginalized by our prevailing systems, we experience not just the climate crisis, but a lot of other issues differently than other groups, right? And it's really interesting because if you look at data or information that we have around gender, it very clearly points the fact that women of any race experience climate change with disproportionate severity because enforced gender inequality makes us more susceptible to escalating environmental stressors. At the same time, we know that women, when women are in positions of leadership in the environmental space or at large, we see better conservation outcomes when women are taking up space in national parliaments. We actually see more robust climate policies come through. So that's very, very clear in the research. But what's so interesting is that gender expansive nonbinary folks aren't even included in the research. There is a huge gap in the literature around how gender expansive and nonbinary folks and other gender minorities are experiencing the climate crisis and environmental hazards. And that in and of itself says everything that I need to know, right? If folks aren't even being included in the research, in the metrics, aren't being validated as a demographic, then of course, you know, of course, they're experiencing these things at disproportionate levels because they're not even being understood as people with lived experiences that need to be recognized. And so Black Girl Environmentalist as an organization, we are trying to make sure that black folks that have been left out, black gender minorities that have been left out of environmental leadership, out of environmental narratives, out of being understood as leaders of today and tomorrow, we are reconfiguring what that is. We're saying no, that we are leaders were leaders today we are leaders tomorrow, and we are creating opportunities for these folks to be seen, to be invested in, to build community. So for me, it's a very natural progression and it's a very natural part of our community.

GR: I get a sense of what your organization does and you mentioned the fellowship program and developing leadership and focusing on these groups. What's your long term hope or vision for this movement or organization?

WG: Well, to be honest, my long term hope / vision is that we won't have to exist (laughter). Like ultimately, right? All of us in the climate space, no matter who you are, no matter what your race is, we are trying to solve the climate crisis, right? So a long term goal is that we solve the climate crisis and that folks that have dedicated their life to climate solutions can focus on something else. My dream, if I wasn't in climate, I would have been a jazz singer, that's what I wanted to do my whole life. But, yeah, the climate crisis kind of got in the way of that dream. So maybe one day you'll find me out in some smoky bar singing Amy Winehouse, because we solved the climate crisis. As an organization, right, the goal is that we have a climate movement made in the image of all of us. I want for a black girl to be able to look at the climate space as a viable option for them and not to be deterred because they are going into workspaces or going into rooms that don't look like them and don't recognize how the climate crisis is impacting their communities most directly. And so if we get to that point, then I'd be happy to close the doors on BGE and have us focus on other things, but we're not there yet. And ultimately, our goal now really is to continue to create these pipelines to continue to cultivate communities and ecosystems of care for our members to build alongside each other, to build community, and for folks to know that the green economy space, that climate space is for them, and that there is room for them and that they are needed for the viability of our movement.

GR: I don't want to sound too pessimistic, but I'm going to guess that the climate problem and environmental issues are going to remain challenges beyond my lifetime for sure, but also probably throughout yours. So I don't know whether you're going to get to the jazz singing or not (laughter).

WG: You know, I think maybe there's some future I can do both. But for now…

GR: Okay. I have to ask you this question as a young leader. You may not like it, but I'm going to ask it anyway. President Biden, he's instituted some policies that environmentalists have applauded, and they've involved some fights. At the same time, though, among young people, his age is creating unease and lack of enthusiasm. And of course, that, you know, obviously came to a head with a debate performance. What do you, as a young leader make of the age issue in this regard?

WG: That's such an interesting question. And the way that you posed it…

GR: ...You’ve got to answer quick, I'm sorry.

WG: Ah, it's a big question, right? Because I think there is this narrative around young climate organizers or activists feeling some sort of resentment towards older generations. And I think that is a totally incorrect narrative. It does not speak to how movements work, right? Like, I am in this movement because of older people that have taken me under their wing and have quite literally paved the path for me and I'm on their shoulders. I think this question about President Biden and his age and his performance, I think it's a valid one for people to have. I personally am not focusing on his age when it comes down to me being someone that would vote for him. I'm voting off of climate and reproductive justice and so that's where my vote is. Again, I do think that while it's a valid conversation around the lack of representation of young people in our political system and the energy that we bring, oftentimes because of our youth, I do feel like are some ageist narratives that are going about that, take us away from the issues that we should be focusing on. There are things that we can critique for sure, and age can be one of them. Personally, that’s not my number one deterrent right now.

GR: Okay, we’ll have to leave it there. That was Wawa Gatheru and again, her organization is Black Girl Environmentalist. Ms. Gatheru, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me, I really enjoyed the conversation.

WG: Thank you for having me.

GR: You’ve been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.

This week on the Campbell Conversations, Grant Reeher speaks with Rep. Marc Molinaro, a Republican who represents New York's 19th Congressional District. An independent organization recently ranked Molinaro as the 2nd most bipartisan member of the House of Representatives, and the 5th most productive.

Program Transcription:

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is New York Congressman Mark Molinaro. The Republican was elected in November 2022 to represent the 19th district. It's a large geographic area that spans from Ithaca and Cortland and the west to the Massachusetts border in the east, and includes the city of Binghamton and the southwest, among other political offices and experiences. The congressman was a Republican candidate for governor of New York state, and he has previously appeared on the program. Congressman Molinaro, welcome back and it's good to see you again.

Marc Molinaro: Glad to be back with you, Grant. Thanks. Thanks for having me.

GR: Oh. You bet. Thanks for making the time. So let me just start with, happenings from this week. I was curious if there was anything in the congressional primaries in New York that caught your eye or that you think are worthy of note?

MM: Well, I mean, certainly in my neck of the woods, your neck of the woods, just the, you know, obviously the selection of the Democratic candidate in the 22nd Congressional District of of significance that was a heated, primary. Of course, I support Brandon Williams. But, that that's been settled and now they're off and running. But I think most of the eyes of, of America were focused on, the heated primary, in, in Westchester County, and, into New York City, the Jamaal Bowman seat. George Latimer, you know, I, I don't I don't try to be a pundit. I just would offer that I think most voters want responsible members, of, responsible individuals representing them. And I just think that, they've had enough of, Bowman's antics. And then what was clearly, you know, frankly, anti-Semitic, commentary and even some policy in practice that just, you know, undermines, alienated and insulted, significant portion of his, his district. And it just goes, to, I think make a broader point we are in a moment as a country of choosing and let's let's take the politics out. Let's just, you know, when it comes to our fellow man or woman, the concept that we extend respect, irrespective of the religious, personal beliefs, critically important, the fact that, we in America are almost revisiting some of the, the hate and and anti-Semitism of the 1930s and 40s. It is frightening. it's frightening, obviously, to a lot of Jewish Americans. But it's frightening to, you know, moms and dads and, and everyone else who just want, to be a nation that embraces one another. And I think that that really, obviously impacted that race and that district is likely to send a more moderate, you know, Democrat to Congress.

GR: Yeah. No, I appreciate that. So, let me turn to some of the things that, you've been up to lately and, and you've been invested in. I understand that you have been pretty heavily involved in the Farm Bill. Which I believe, if I understand correctly, would be the first major sort of reworking of that law, since 2018. So, tell our listeners, first of all, about the importance of this bill for central New York and then what we should be aware of regarding it.

MM: Sure. So first, the Farm Bill is America's, agriculture policy. We actually, have to reauthorize it every five years. It's long enough to provide some stability, for farmers, but short enough to allow us to pivot and evolve to, to to address new, new challenges. I'm thrilled, you know, after having, town hall meetings, 11 town hall meetings, three listening sessions, specifically with farmers on farm bill development. As a member of the Agriculture Committee, that we we, developed and adopted a bipartisan Farm Bill that does a lot to help upstate New York farmers. And and so farming in New York is a little bit different than other parts of the country where smaller acreage, acreages, we kind of fit our farms in where we can. Although agriculture remains the largest industry in upstate New York, when you combine it with agricultural tourism, it's the largest industry in the state of New York. and then add to that weather conditions, infrastructure limitations, workforce challenges, and then regulations out of the state of New York. Upstate farmers are really pressed. Now, we obviously specialize in specialty crops and dairy, fruits, vegetables, Christmas tree farms, and of course dairy farms and so the Farm Bill, as has been adopted by the committee, again, bipartisan, includes ten separate provisions that I wrote to support upstate farmers. Everything, by the way, from expanding access to families with individuals with disabilities, to provide support, to enter and remain in that workforce in farming, to enhancing the dairy margin, coverage to ensure that we're providing more accurate and more robust support to dairy farmers, in order to make up those losses. Right. We don't set the pricing. They don't set the pricing for their product. And so there are times where they're just under water and dairy margin coverage provides assistance, to, to issues addressing climate resiliency. So, that's on the farm side. But the bill also includes, support for those who struggle accessing good quality food options. Snap Benefits of formerly food stamps, represent about 80% of the Farm Bill. And so as a former county executive that spent 12 years administering food stamps in the state of New York, the states administer the program and as a as a kid who grew up on food stamps myself, it was very important to me that the bill not only makes smart investments to support farming and farmers, but that we enhance the tools necessary to help people get from, independence, excuse me, from dependance, to a greater level of independence. And so the Farm Bill does not cut food stamps. It actually increases food stamps $6 billion over five years. and, three basic provisions. I just want to point to that, that expand access. Number one helps upstate New York. seniors, bill that I wrote allows for more delivery of food stamp related, fruits and vegetables to to rural and isolated seniors and families that, that may struggle. Secondly, provision that, expands access and support to food pantries and food banks, allowing broader capacity to assist. And then third, increasing the age of a child in home, who can remain, who can gain an income and remain on and supported by food stamps. What does that mean? Currently, when you hit 17 years old, we start to, draw you off of, those benefits. But 17-year-olds, of course, might still be in school. And if you are an individual with a special education requirement, you might be in school until you're 21. So we increase the the limit to to age 21. If you have a part-time job or you're still remaining at home that isn't credited against you, and your family, if you are supported by food stamp benefits. And so what we do here is broaden access, broaden the, the commitment and add more dollars to food stamps. Really in a way, to try to help people get, greater access to quality food product, greater food, and nutritional literacy. And then ultimately, we want to move people from where they are to a level of independence that allows them to thrive and survive, and really, really be successful as individuals.

GR: I want to come back to something that I heard as kind of a subtheme through what you were saying, and that is the concern that you have. And we've talked about for, individuals with different kinds of disabilities, physical and, and mental. And I see how you've woven that into what you write. Well, yeah. you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with Congressman Mark Molinaro. He represents New York's 19th congressional district. the other thing I wanted to ask you about is the fentanyl epidemic and related opioid overdoses. They continue to plague the nation. It continues to be an increasing problem. And it seems like for whatever set of reasons it is, particularly vicious in rural areas. And it's been hitting upstate New York. So I understand you've been active on this front. Tell me a little bit about what you've been, trying to do there.

MM: Yeah, I offer in New York, the 19th Congressional District is the epicenter of the fentanyl and synthetic opioid overdose crisis, with, incidents of overdose on the on the climb. But upstate New York, facing this challenge. And by the way, every family is affected. we many times don't want to acknowledge it, but every family is affected either by, some, mental health related issue that leads to substance use or substance use disorder itself. And so, and so for us, you know, there's a couple of things we've got to do. Clearly fentanyl and synthetic opioids are coming over the border. Yes, they come from entry, but we know that they are they are flooding the border and they're being trafficked by individuals, who really manipulate the system. We've got to secure the border in a very smart way. Technology, physical and staff, and we've got to make clear that if you're coming into this country and you're seeking asylum, there's a process for that. We need that to work. So I do take issue with both the president, creating a crisis, undoing a lot of the protections we had at our border that led to, about 11 million individuals crossing into into the country. But I also take issue with some of the policies in Albany, in New York state, New York City, that that's incentivized this kind of behavior. And again, there are good people coming into our country that deserve to be, in line, go through the, the asylum-seeking process, enter under legal means, and access work and benefits and become great Americans. But then there are those who are simply flooding in without any kind of, background or coordination with, with the federal government or local governments that we're seeing that pour into our, we're seeing drugs pour into our, our country that's not made up. Law enforcement talks about it, border security talks about it. We also, though, have to focus on ensuring that we give resources, why I support, appropriations, new dollars for local law enforcement to advance drug task force. We need to intercede, in our communities and that law enforcement agencies need to be able to work together in order to respond to that. And then with that, laws in New York, like cashless bail, make it very difficult for prosecutors to intervene. So if you make it a lower-level offense, we don't want to put somebody in jail for a marijuana offense. But if we have a lower-level drug trafficker right now in New York, most of that will never find its way to court until they become a higher-level offender. We can intervene early, which will get me my last point. We intervene early. We not only break the cycle of sales and hold somebody accountable for law enforcement, but we could intervene with mental health and substance use disorder, treatment, which is why I support, a robust prevention, intervention, diversion and transitionary programming. Everything from the kind of, treatment centers that we built in Dutchess County when I was county executive, which is now the model, to recovery coaches, access to naloxone, getting the state of New York to approve opvee, which is a new, overdose-deterring drug, and using all of those tools in a coordinated way. I'll close this, this one segment by just saying, you know, there are two things that we have to do better. We've got to talk about the reality. Nobody chooses to be addicted to drugs. There are people who choose to use drugs, but they don't choose to spend their lives addicted to them. And we've got to confront, the stigma associated in our own lives, in our own families, with not wanting to be good interveners. Right. What we we need to be sure that we're willing as individuals to take steps to intervene. And we want our government to stand shoulder to shoulder with us, which is why we also need not only enforcement, but treatment. And those treatment options need to be community-based, they need to be medical and non-medical based. And they need to understand and be available to rural communities, which is why I support broadening access, to telemedicine for everything from, traditional telemedicine to behavioral health, and even, using, Medicaid support easing using, telemedicine, for Medicaid related services, which often provide assistance to those living with mental illness or substance use disorder.

GR: I want to squeeze in one last question before the break, and I know this is something you could talk for a very long time on, but, I want to try to ask you some questions about, Congress and sort of the more national picture n the second half. But the last thing I wanted to ask you about in terms of these things you've been involved in and this is a, something that is close to your heart, I know, and and certainly something I'm interested in too. And I've mentioned that, but you're thinking differently. And instead of just tell me, tell me what's going on with that, why it's important and then we'll get on to some some national.

MM: Stuff I should. So, like you, I'm personally, impacted, and and have a family member living with, with a disability. But in 2014, we launched Think Differently in my home county. Again, became a national model for how to engage the community in breaking down barriers and creating opportunities for those with intellectual, physical, and developmental disabilities. When I came to Congress, I said this was going to be a priority. This is the population, as you know, that have an 80% unemployment rate, those with disabilities, 80% unemployed. Even though they can work, we have to be sure that we provide them opportunity to do so. Access to housing, the challenges for families. And despite the billions upon billions of dollars that we provide for special education and supportive services, it is still a labyrinth and maze of very difficult, policies, and services to access and families are left struggling. And so I make I've made this a priority we’ve proposed, a dozen separate bills with the Think Differently moniker. But but everything from the Think Differently Transportation Act to ensure that we're breaking down physical and by the way, intellectual, barriers, for those who need to access public transportation, to thinking differently about emergencies, which is to arm and enhance emergency response for families and individuals living with disabilities, to agra-ability or Think Differently About Farming Bill, which which would expand the supports that exist within the agricultural industry, to welcome individuals with disabilities to the workforce. I could go on, but I will tell you that, to your point earlier, we weave it in, whether it's the National Defense Authorization Act, which, we wrote language that would broaden support for for military families, with those that are neurodivergent or living with disabilities to standard appropriations, to getting letters with Democratic colleagues, to the architect of the Capitol to to to do appropriate curb cuts where they have crosswalks and we've tried to make it a critically, a large focus of the work we do, because if we’re not, others aren't right? There are a good number of us in Congress who do pay attention to these issues but as a dad of a child now, an adult child, with a disability, I just know that families face these challenges every single day. I mean, you know, every single day from waking up in the morning to going to getting to bed and bathing at night, these are challenges that people face. And this population is often been left on the sideline. I don't want that to happen. And so we've added to all of our legislation, and into all of our initiatives because it's that important.

GR: Well, thanks for that. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Republican Congressman Mark Molinaro, who represents New York's 19th congressional district. So let me ask you this question about you. You were recently ranked the second most bipartisan member of Congress by Georgetown's Lugar Center. In listening to your discussion of food stamps, if we had just taken that little clip and then said, who is speaking? Most people probably would have said a Democrat. So how have you, how have you gone about, your job to earn that ranking?

MM: Yeah. Well, first, I think that government ought to be smaller and more effective. And using food stamps by the way, as an example, as a tool to help people get from dependence to independence is a very smart, way of ensuring people have had the experiences of, of their own rights and their own liberties and their own independence. But, I've said this from the from the day I was elected. I'll work with anyone who's honest and earnest about solving the problems that face the people that we represent. And so, I don't come into conversations prejudging another colleague. If we have a shared goal, I work together, which is why, yes, I've been acknowledged as the second most bipartisan member. And I've been delivering on everything from mental health services, to support for law enforcement. Almost every provision I've written, and we we've had about 37 provisions adopted by the House. 11 now, adopted by the House and Senate, signed into law, almost all of them bipartisan, because I think it's that important. I think most of the challenges we face as individuals aren't left or right, you know, blue or red, they're simply, pragmatic, solutions are very pragmatic, and need to confront the challenges. And, and so, in our case, we just I'll just work with anybody to get the job done. And frankly, we've been successful in doing it.

GR: Yeah, you've already I the other thing I want to ask you about, but, you just answered it was you were also ranked by the Congressional Research Service as one of the five most productive members of Congress this session. So you just explained, why that's the case.

MM: So it is, and I'll say quickly, right. 37 provisions, five standalone bills, 11, of those total adopted into law, either as part of larger bills that we've moved or stand-alone. And, I think the job here is to try to make government respect the people it serves and and try to be responsive to the challenges we face. And I'm working hard to do that.

GR: So so let me ask you this, though. You those two rankings demonstrate that you are both bipartisan and effective. So it can be done. So my question to you is why don't more members of Congress seem to take this approach?

MM: Well many do. They don't necessarily get the same. They don't get it, we don't often get attention. But I listen, I think that politics today is fueled by division. And it's not just the politicians that are divided, it's the public and the public accepting that things are are one way or the other, right? Black or white, left or right. And so I just would say that I think when you keep your head down, your eyes forward, and you just earnestly work toward a goal, it is clear that you can achieve that. We can get legislation passed, we can mold consensus around certain issues, irrespective of ideology, and we can get communities like ours the attention and respect that they deserve. And so, you know, I, I fight hard and people know that if I need to throw a punch, I'll throw a punch. But I also call balls and strikes. And if you're, on one side of the aisle and you're saying or doing the wrong thing, I might. I might say it, but I also will work again with anybody who wants to get the job done. And I think that to the to your point, it'd be good if more people, focused on that.

GR: I think I think a lot of people feel that way. So, the last thing on this topic and I want to ask you about some big national questions. This may seem like a strange question, but when I look at your rankings and I look at the issues that you're focusing on opioids, mental health, and, and put that all together, you remind me a lot of John Katko, who used to represent what is now the 22nd district of New York.

MM: I'm I'm much funnier and better looking. So, no, don't quote me, please.

GR: But I my my question is, do you guys talk? I mean, do you guys do you guys stay in touch now that he's out?

MM: First I will tell you that I take advice from a lot of people. John is among them. And by the way, I will say this out loud, the entire spectrum, I welcome good ideas from from good people. And so, yeah, John and I talked my, my former, my, my predecessors I talked to, Chris Gibson, quite, quite often John Faso, of course, and I'll let you in on a little secret there. Good number of Democrats who, we have my ear as well. And, I think it's important to learn from from others experiences.

GR: Okay. Right. If you're just joining us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media and my guest is Congressman Mark Molinaro. So let me ask you a question. You talked about immigration and the need to secure the border better in terms of fentanyl, among other reasons. Do you expect a renewed effort, on immigration and the border, regardless of the outcome of the November elections, do you think that will be on the agenda for 2025?

MM: This president hasn't shown a real desire, to confront the crisis that that he did create. And so, you know, I, I, I'll be I'll be very, you know, sort of blunt about it. There were protections in place, like them or not, if you go back, all the way to, to George H.W. Bush, this country had certain basic protections at the border that President Biden undid by executive order and then spent three and a half years saying that he had no way of of of fixing that. Well, he he did by issuing executive orders and then, of course, he issued executive orders to undo the damage, but quite frankly, doesn't go far enough. And this isn't about being cruel. In fact, I think the the policy that this president has allowed is cruel. It says to people it is okay to traffic human lives and it is okay to traffic, drugs because we know who's controlling the southern border. It is the cartels from Mexico. And I know this firsthand. When I went down to the border, it was clear from local law enforcement, Republican and Democrat leaders, Border Patrol, the border is is controlled by and we have surrendered this border to drug cartels. And so knowing the game, they know how to manipulate the system and send thousands upon thousands of people in, and sadly overburdened the system. And the president was slow to act to to give Border Patrol the kind of support they need to conduct the the background searches and the asylum-seeking process which could happen, Remain in Mexico and the partnership we had with Mexico allowed that to happen actually at the border and then did one thing that was even more offensive. And I know there are those who who get upset when I say this, but I'm going to say it anyway. I don't like when states put people in busses and planes and transport port them to other countries. So therefore I do not like that the federal government has been doing it in mass. 80% of the people being transported to other cities and states around the country without the background checks, without the asylum review process, or being done so by the federal government at the direction of the administration. That is not right. It is not healthy, it is not safe. And then it puts this burden on states like like New York, New York, sanctuary city policy, is is absurd. On one hand they say, come, on the other hand they say, yeah, we didn't actually mean it. And what that has created is this crisis, that treats human souls with disregard, the souls that are coming across the border. Clearly, if we cared about human lives, we would crack down on that trafficking. And then the the in the communities that are impacted when individuals are indiscriminately transported and settled in other communities without any coordination, communication and resources, all of that is cruel. And so we do have to confront this in a very humane and compassionate way. It starts with reestablishing that relationship with Mexico, to conduct those those kind of asylum-seeking reviews at the border. And I just would close this comment by saying, something in the neighborhood of 75% of those, once we identify them, right, we're not even we're not even screening most people. But when we finally do get to screen the small number, we do 75 to 80% of them don't qualify for asylum. They're not here for asylum, and they're not leaving an oppressed nation or violence, or extreme poverty. And we have to we have to we have to send them back. That just isn't a process that makes any sense.

GR: Oftentimes when we get to this point in an election cycle, you know, we're heading into the final lap. The Congress kind of goes into a temporary freeze on action, you know, and waits until the election sorts things out. Is that is that kind of where you think Congress is right now going into the summer?

MM: Not entirely. We have an aggressive, effort to get appropriations or budget done. As you know, I'd like to say that we I wish we were more successful last year than we were. But but we are organized this year to get appropriations bills done. That's heading into the summer. And then we've got to negotiate with the Senate. That's a pretty aggressive strategy. and thankfully, we're moving in that direction. There's also a couple larger pieces of legislation. But but to your point, yes, it, you know, the fall of, of, of a presidential election year does feel a little bit less, extreme as a fall of, of a non-presidential election year. But we've got our plate full and we're still advocating for a lot of, a lot of good things for the people we serve.

GR: Great. We got about, a couple minutes left. I wanted to squeeze two last things. And if I could. We are talking, you and I, on, Thursday, June 27, I want to just let our listeners know that. And the first presidential debate is tonight. So by the time our listeners hear this program, it will have happened. I want to, but you a little bit on the spot and say, do you have any hunches of what we might expect tonight?

MM: I think that the two people running for president are exceptionally well known to 99.9% of the American public, and what you expect is likely what you're going to get. But but what I will also offer to you, at first it's very strange, right? Early presidential debate is very unusual. I just hope that we hear two people, ultimately who understand that there are a good number of Americans who feel left out. Now, I will tell you that I, the people I represent, I feel, are being left out by a federal government that too often overlooks them. And I do want a president that takes more interest in the rural and upstate, and small communities that make of upstate New York. And so I, I won't get into punditry. I just will tell you that, I think what you expect is what you're going to get, and I hope ultimately, that this, that this nation, pays attention to the forgotten folks who live in communities that are overpriced, overburdened, and overtaxed like the ones I represent.

GR: One of the things that I wanted to bounce off of you, that that occurs to me that I have not heard a lot about, and I was hoping that that debate would pull this out, is neither the both the candidates seem to be arguing a lot about the past rather than the future. And I would like to hear both President Biden's and former President Trump's vision of what they would try to do in the next four years. Do you do you agree with me that that has been missing from the, the dialog?

MM: I agree in that and that elections are always about tomorrow. Voters are always looking forward and do need leaders who are going to be paying attention to what happens next and giving a vision for what happens next. But you, as I both know, we have two entrenched candidates. And by the way, a great deal of animosity in the country, that sometimes needs a little bit of airing. Let's just hope we get to the point where, we're talking about, the future, because I still think and I that's I'm going to sound corny, but I believe it inherently. I just think that, this still is the greatest nation with the greatest capacity to do the greatest things for humanity. And we ought to be about the business of doing that. We ought to do that, by the way, by respecting the people, that pay the bills and this government is supposed to serve.

GR: That's a good note to end on. That was Mark Molinaro. Congressman Molinaro, again, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me.

MM: Really appreciate it, man. Thanks very much. I appreciate it, be well.

GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.

On this week's episode of the Campbell Conversations, Grant Reeher speaks to Ken Block, author of the book, "Disproven: My Unbiased Search for Voter Fraud for the Trump Campaign, the Data that Shows Why He Lost, and How We Can Improve Our Elections."

Program transcript:

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. Almost four years after the fact, we are still hearing about a supposedly stolen 2020 presidential election. My guest today is uniquely positioned to discuss this. He was the data analytics expert that the Trump campaign hired to investigate fraud in the election. Yet he found that there wasn't a case to be made. Ken Block is a political reformer and software engineer. The founder of the Moderate Party of Rhode Island, a former candidate for governor, and most importantly, again for our conversation here today, he's the author of a new book titled “Disproven: My Unbiased Search for Voter Fraud for the Trump Campaign, the Data that Shows Why He Lost, and How We Can Improve Our Elections.” Mr. Block, welcome to the program. Really interested to hear what you have to say.

Ken Block: I am so looking forward to this conversation. Let's go.

GR: All right. Great. Well, first of all, obviously this topic has become so tangled, it's going to be hard to unwrap it in the 27 minutes or so that we have. But we're going to try. I think the first thing that we ought to do briefly, if we can do this briefly, is to establish your credentials as an expert and your political background, because I'm sure that anyone listening is going to be wondering about those things right away. So tell us, tell us who you are in that regard.

KB: Sure. So, I am, a, 30-year veteran of the technology industry. I specialize in large database applications. I have an expert a knowledge expert in my field. I came to politics late in life, and I came into politics because in, 2008 or so, I became very unhappy with the choices that the two political parties were offering up to me. I became, very unhappy with what at the time, felt like a lot of hyper-partisanship. Of course, it's much worse now.

GR: Yeah. Those were the good old days.

KB: Yeah. And, in a spectacular, explosion of naivete, I said, well, the right answer is to start a new political party. And I, was the godfather of, in Rhode Island, the Moderate Party, which was a centrist political party. And, it was quite a fight to create the party. We had to sue the state in federal court, get some laws declared unconstitutional just to be given the chance to try to start the party. And, we, won the court case. We had to collect a huge number of signatures in order to qualify the party for the ballot. Then we had to stay on the ballot once we got on the ballot. And, I was essentially, because no good deed goes unpunished, my executive committee basically looked at me and said, well, now you have to run for governor so we can keep the party. So, that's how I got into politics. And, I, exceeded expectations in 2010, I got 6.5% of the vote, as running as a complete unknown and participating in about 40 debates. I realized that I was good at politics. I was really good at the debates. And I had the bug, and I realized in 2012 that, a third party just is too hard to do. I abandoned the party in 2012. I ran for governor in 2014, as a Republican, because in my state of Rhode Island, it's an incredibly blue state. And if you want to make change in Rhode Island, you can't do it from within the Democratic Party. The machine is, all-powerful. So the only option left to me was running as a Republican. I lost my statewide primary by 3000 votes. And I'm fond of saying now that, voter fraud was not to blame for my loss.

GR: Okay, so that explains then. I'm guessing, then, that the Trump campaign, when they came to you, you know, you were the they thought this this guy's not going to be hostile to a Republican candidate. He's got the data analytics chops to do this. So you were sort of the right combination for them. What were the initial, I'm curious to know, what were the initial stated grounds or the suspicions about the outcome that were communicated to you? I mean, the campaign comes to you and they say, we think this has a problem because of what?

KB: Well, interestingly, the lawyer who approached me to do this work, his name is Alex Cannon, did not come to me asking me for aspecific finding. He actually wanted proper due diligence. We, he asked me to provide an estimate for what it would take to look for deceased voters, to look for duplicate voters, where a voter votes in more than one jurisdiction in the same election. And as we discussed doing the work, I told him that in a decade of looking, very closely at voter data, I'd never seen anything close to what I knew the campaign needed to be found. And his response to that was, well, I appreciate your candor and, I want a straight-up assessment. You know, if you find it, you find it. I said, look, if I find it, it will survive legal scrutiny. So, yeah, you know, it'll be a foundation for, legal action if we find it. I said, if we don't find it, I'm going to tell you I didn't find it, and that's the end of it. And he said, perfect. Off we go. So there wasn't an expectation. And that's always surprising to people when I describe, what the nature of my engagement was, the lawyers I reported to were doing their professional due diligence in every, in every way. Which is a very unexpected thing for people to learn.

GR: So, briefly, what did you find?

KB: We found evidence of voter fraud in small amounts. We found some dead voters. We found some duplicate voters, nowhere near enough to have changed the election result in any of the swing states. And as I made Alex aware, as we were moving through all of this, I said, look, even imagine in Georgia that we found 20,000 fraudulent votes. Even if we find those votes, it still can't change the election result, because we have no way of determining for whom those fraudulent votes were cast. And so, without being able to do that, you can't show the harm the campaign needs to show to claim that something should be changed with the election result. And Alex, as a lawyer, got that right away. Unfortunately, it seems like almost nobody else in the country seems to have figured that out.

GR: Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up, because when I was thinking about this, I was thinking, how would you go about investigate this? I would think that at some point you would need to have individual human testimony, right? Like this person paid me to vote twice or, you know, I admit I voted twice. I was part of a group that tried to do that. Or, you know, we got these dead people to vote. I mean, don't you have to sort of have a testimony of some sort?

KB: Well, I think if you if we had been able to identify again, I am very careful when I talk about these hypotheticals. We didn't identify, but imagine if we did identify 20,000 deceased voters in Georgia. We would only need to be able to show two things. That the person who cast the vote is legally dead, and we have the ability to do that. But what we couldn't show is that, that vote was cast, on, you know, as a vote for, Biden or as a vote for Trump. That's not possible to do in our form of democracy. Who you vote for is anonymous by design and you would never want to be able to trace back who a specific individual voted for. So, had we found 20,000 fraudulent votes in Georgia, you can make a weak argument that you should redo the election because of the number of those votes, but because you couldn't prove the harm that those votes caused. I doubt any judge would have gone to that far to have changed the outcome of the election.

GR: I'm Grant Reeher. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, and my guest is Ken Block, and we're discussing his new book. It's titled “Disproven: My Unbiased Search for Voter Fraud for the Trump Campaign, the Data that Shows Why He Lost, and How We Can Improve Our Elections.” So you come back to the Trump campaign and you say, I didn't find anything. I didn't find what you guys were looking for. Here's what I found. How did they react? You said only the lawyers seem to understand.

KB: Yeah. So Alex did a couple of things besides giving me the freedom to give him a straight-up assessment. He also provided me political cover. Nobody above him knew my identity or the identity of my company while we were doing this work. And that was done specifically to avoid a problem where political pressure from the imagine potentially the White House, for example, would be brought to bear on me or my company, to find a specific set of results. So Alex was very receptive and understanding, of the fact that we couldn't find enough voter fraud to matter. He communicated that to Mark Meadows, who was Trump's Chief of Staff at the time. Meadows accepted that finding of fact as true, and he took that information into the Oval Office. What we glossed over here is that while I was asked to look for voter fraud, data mining for voter fraud, the second day of my contract, Alex started asking me to assess the validity of claims of voter fraud that other people brought to the attention of the campaign. And we looked at about 20 different claims of voter fraud, in the one-month window in which we had done all this work. And every single one of those voter fraud claims, I was able to show Alex why they were false, back it up with evidence and as a result of that work, several lawsuits that were going to be filed based on false evidence were stopped in their tracks.

GR: Wow. Okay, that sounds like that's equally important to the original work. I don't know if you have enough contact with the different people there to get into this, but I want to ask you anyway. So did you get any sense of sort of what the culture of the campaign, Trump campaign was sort of planet Trump in regard to this issue?

KB: So, no firsthand information. I wasn't going out to lunch with folks or anything like that. I was very I was siloed on purpose. My only day-to-day communications were with Alex Cannon.

GR: Okay. And this may be a tough question, too, but I have to ask it. Based on your interactions, do you think that there were people in the campaign that actually thought this election was fraudulent?

KB: Well, I would only. I would simply be speculating, right, because I didn't have the conversations so I cannot give you a firsthand account of anything. Based on the January 6th deposition, transcripts that I read, few people who were actually employed by the campaign, seemed to indicate that voter that they believed voter fraud was prevalent. The people who believe voter fraud was a big problem were external to the campaign. They were lawyers like Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman, folks like that. While they were attorneys and while they were filing lawsuits on behalf of President Trump, they weren't part of the formal campaign apparatus. So, we all know that there were people who, I don't know if they honestly believe that there was voter fraud, but they certainly, spent a lot of time, energy and money, bringing forward claims of voter fraud all over the place.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with data analytics expert Ken Block, who was hired by the Trump campaign in 2020 to investigate fraud in the election. He didn't find it, and his new book is titled “Disproven: My Unbiased Search for Voter Fraud for the Trump Campaign, the Data that Shows Why He Lost, and How We Can Improve Our Elections.” Okay, so Ken, we covered in the first half sort of what you did while you, you know, you didn't find anything, how that interaction went. So if Trump didn't lose because of fraud, why did he lose? You've got the explanation.

KB: Sure. “Republicans In Name Only.” The reason that Trump lost in 2020 through a couple of different ways of proving it was done in by the RINOs that he denigrated for years leading up to the election and whose support he publicly rejected. Trump made RINOs dead to him. And what happened in 2020? On a national, on a state-by-state basis and on a county-by-county basis, almost consistently across the country, across every county is Trump did about 2.5% less well, in terms of his total percentage of the vote won in 2020 than he did in 2016. 2.5% that 2.5% is the RINOs. And in the reddest states in the country, Trump did less well in 2020 than he did in 2016. And you, it's so consistent. This is it's not an abnormality. It's everywhere. It's a national trend. Secretary of State Raffensperger in Georgia, when they were analyzing the election results, found nearly 30,000 Republican primary voters who did not vote in the presidential election in 2020. So they voted in the primary, they didn't vote in the general. Remember, Trump lost by about 12,000 votes in Georgia. 30,000 votes in the Republican primary, voters didn't vote in the general election. Another 30,000 voters in the general election voted for down-ticket Republicans across the board, but left the presidential race blank. That's really compelling. Really important. The other thing, another equally stark fact is in Georgia, the libertarian candidate took about 50,000 votes and Trump lost by 12,000 votes. So there's a number of different explanations for it. Trump's own pollster did an exit poll, which is where they interview voters leaving a polling place, and they interviewed 30,000 voters across all the swing states. And they found that one out of six of those voters were Republicans who abandoned Trump.

GR: Well, the finding on the primary voting is amazing because as a political scientist, I know primary voters are usually the most reliable voters of all. Yeah, but if you vote in the primary and don't vote in the general. Yeah, that's very telling. Okay. So that brings up a question in my mind about 2024. And again, you know, it's speculating here for you. But do you think then that four years of a Biden presidency for those RINOs might make them less likely to abandon Trump as the challenger this time?

KB: Well, Trump has done nothing to try to bring RINOs back into the fold. So, I don't think many RINOs who abandoned Trump are going to simply embrace him again. I think that more has to happen than that. And if anything, Trump has made himself even more less appealing to moderate Republican voters since 2020 then he was going into the 2020 election between January 6th and just the heat behind his rhetoric has gotten so extreme. I don't see how anyone, how any moderates who abandoned him go back. On the other hand, they look at Biden now, and they're not seeing a compelling political figure anymore. So, you know, this election to me is extraordinary because, both candidates have, substantial negative that they carry along with them. Neither candidate is really providing a lot of pull for anybody under the age of 40 anywhere. Right? You just have nothing in common with these old candidates. And they're both misfiring. Young progressives have abandoned Biden right now, just like the moderates have abandoned Trump. Honestly, and this really stinks to say. But, I believe that this whole election might very well hinge on whichever candidate falls down on live TV first is going to lose. I mean, their health is so fragile at this point. It could be something that basic that determines who's going to win this election. And that's not good for us.

GR: Do you think the fact that the third-party candidates that are in it this time around are more of the type that are likely to draw from the left than the right matters?

KB: Well, the libertarian candidates are always going to derive, they're going to derive their votes from the right, not the left. Kennedy is a is an interesting character. With his last name, you would think he's pulling votes from the left. But when you look at what his positions are, he’s very purposely pulling votes from the right. So I don't know that there will be there will be, left-leaning voters who vote for him because they think he's a classic Kennedy. But other than that, I don't see him getting a lot of support from the left. I don't know if the Greens are going to bring forward, a candidate who's going to draw a lot of votes or not at this point. I guess we'll just sort of have to see. I mean, this is this will be an election for the ages. And if ever there was a voter for voting for the lesser of two evils, this campaign is going to embody that. I think for sure.

GR: I don't know if you want to try to venture into answer this. I know I'm asking you to do a lot of speculating here, but based on your experience, with the Trump campaign in 2020, what do you think they're going to do if this November, Joe Biden wins the election on Election Day but it's close again?

KB: Well, they've, the I don't have to speculate. Trump and a lot of the higher-level people within the Trump Organization have made it very clear that they're going to contest the election results. They're going to claim voter fraud was, to blame. Roger Stone has been quoted recently as saying that they're much better prepared now than they were in 2020 to contest the election results. And honestly, they're going to have an advantage because I'm not sure that there's been a whole lot of effort, to prepare on the other side to refute all of these claims of voter fraud that are going to be coming there. You need to do a lot of expensive prep work to be able to turn back, these claims in real time and provide scientific evidence that they're false. You know, we'll see. It's helpful, I think, to democracy that there were no claims of voter fraud that were valid and would have survived legal scrutiny in 2020. So I think that that's an advantage to democracy in general as we come into this new round of claims. But it's going to it's going to be contentious. It's going to be jammed up in the court system again. And hopefully this time around, people will keep a bit of a, saner head on their shoulders as we work our way through the mess that's coming.

GR: If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and my guest is Ken Block. We've been discussing his new book titled “Disproven: My Unbiased Search for Voter Fraud for the Trump Campaign, the Data that Shows Why He Lost, and How We Can Improve Our Elections.” Let's get to the last part of your title there how we can improve our election. So you go through all this and you come up with some conclusions about how we can make the system better. What are they?

KB: Sure. Well, I'm going to start with a statement of fact. The statement of fact is that the two parties have really blown it in this cycle. They brought forward two candidates who really, have more negatives than positives going for them right now. And, as somebody who's tried to start, an alternative political party, the system is designed to make it almost impossible to successfully launch a political party to be able to raise money, support candidates, and do it so hard. And every state has their own obstacles for success of, alternative parties to launch. We really have an unfair, uneven system, and I think we're paying the price for that now. Gerrymandering is one of the biggest issues, I think, that are out there in terms of making our elections unfair. 80% of congressional seats are uncompetitive. We know which party is going to win, which, which of congressional seats, regardless of who the candidates are. And that's largely the result of gerrymandering. And we need to eliminate gerrymandering when the United States helps set up new democracies. I'm certain we don't introduce the idea of gerrymandering to these rising democracies because of the awful implications it has to what the election results are. So, I believe that for strong but not for strong elections with great results. And to get better cooperation in Congress, we need more competitive elections so that our representatives in Congress are more likely to compromise as opposed to collide. And, I think that's probably the biggest thing that we should be doing. Mail ballots are not going to go away, nor should they go away. But really, the way we use mail ballots, when you look at it from a systems perspective, we have the absolute weakest form of identification you can imagine. For those who are voting, in a, by mail and not in person, which is signature matching, we're using a technology that's, you know, a hundred years old. It's rife with its own problems. And, it's not a great way to to confirm identity. Not anymore, for sure. The United States is the only first-world country, certainly in Europe. And, I believe across most of the world at this point that doesn't have a national identifier. when you look at every country in Europe, they all have national identifiers that include biometrics. It makes sense. It's a strong way to prove identity. Here, we don't have any national identifier. We have Social Security numbers. But its purpose wasn't to be a national identifier, and it's no longer confidential. I mean, I could find anybody's Social Security number pretty quickly at this point due to, how many breaches there have been over the years. So, I believe we have to replace Social Security numbers. I believe we should have, voter identification number. That's federal in nature. And I believe that when you're, born in this country or you're naturalized, you should automatically be given your voter registration number. That removes all the headaches with registration, all the problems with state-based registration and people registered to vote, multiple states, all that stuff goes away with a national voter registration number. And I think it should just be automatic. And that would solve 90% of the integrity problems we have.

GR: That's interesting. So we've got about three minutes left, and I want to try to squeeze in two questions more if I can. We did have this organization No Labels this time around and trying to put forward a unity ticket, they called it. But they had done all of that hard work that you described before that, you know, discourages third parties. They had managed to get by a lot of that, despite the fact that the Democratic Party tried to knock them out of those ballot access efforts. But in the end, they didn't get a candidate. So briefly, if you could. I mean, what does that say?

KB: Yeah, it's speaking from personal experience, launching a new political party is a chicken in the egg exercise. Do you build the party around a personality, or can you create the party and then try and attract in the individual or multiple individuals who stand a chance of winning? So No Labels went, and I don't know which way to which which ones, which chicken, which one's the egg. But they just they said, well, let's create a party and then we'll go find a candidate. What I ended up doing, accidentally in Rhode Island was I ended up creating a political party for my personality. Not that that was my that wasn't my intention. But that's effectively the way it worked out, because I then had to run for governor to keep the party going. So I think it's pretty hard to do a party and then try to attract in the candidate to fill the role of carrying that flag, you know, the banner in the battle, basically. which I think is what did in the No Labels thing. And honestly, of all the election cycles to do it, this was probably the worst one because so many people believe so much rides on this particular election.

GR: Last question, and really only about 30 secons for this I apologize, but it is a personal one and I was just wondering of having the role you did for the Trump campaign, having the findings that you did, and then the fallout that may have come to you about that. Has that affected you in any kind of personal way?

KB: Well, I've been subpoenaed by Jack Smith's grand jury in D.C. I've been subpoenaed by Ruby Freeman's legal team in her defamation suit against Rudy Giuliani. And I've been subpoenaed by Fani Willis as prosecutors in the Fulton County, Georgia, matter. So have I been impacted? Yeah. If I have to testify, will that be an even bigger impact? Yeah. For sure. And I actually was compelled to write this book because of the fact that it was going to become publicly known that I had done this work, and I wanted the story told in my framing, not anyone else's. None of this would have been happening had all this just remained a quiet job that was done to no effect. Basically.

GR: Well, the good news is we have your good book that came out of it. we'll have to leave the conversation there. But that was Ken Block. And again, his new book is titled “Disproven: My Unbiased Search for Voter Fraud for the Trump Campaign, the Data that Shows Why He Lost, and How We Can Improve Our Elections.” A lot of interesting stories and interesting ideas in there. Ken, thanks so much for taking time to talk to me. I really enjoyed it.

KB: Great. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Thank you.

GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.

Program transcript:

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. It seems like we've all become busier than we were in the past, from schoolchildren up through retirees. Given that, all the information that's available on the internet, some of it unreliable, how much can we reasonably expect from our fellow citizens to engage the political system and how can we make that engagement easier, more rational and more fair? My guest today is Kevin Elliott. He's a lecturer in ethics, politics and economics at Yale University and he's the author of a new book that tries to tackle those questions. It's titled, “Democracy for Busy People”. Professor Elliott, welcome to the program.

Kevin Elliott: It’s a pleasure to be here.

GR: Well, it's great to have you, and thanks for making the time. So, first of all, before I ask you a question, I'm going to start by putting on another hat, rather than radio host and that, my hat is political scientist and not only a political scientist, but a political scientist who studies and teaches democratic theory. I just want to applaud you personally for taking on this challenge, it's a big one. So thank you for that. My first question may sound obvious, but still, I wanted to ask you anyway. Why did you decide to write this book when you did? And how did you get the idea for it?

KE: Yeah. So you know, when I was looking around, reading in democratic theory, reading in political theory and trying to kind of pick my way through the world that it depicts, the political world that it conveys. I saw an absence of one particular person and this was people like my mother. My mother was a single working parent without a college degree. And insofar as there was a place for people like her in these texts about democracy that I was reading, it was either that she was absent, that is to say that there was no place for her at all, or the place was silent and sort of out of the picture. And so one of the reasons that I wrote the book and I asked the questions that are tackled in the book is precisely to try to make sense of like, where can we locate, within a healthy flourishing democracy, people who maybe don't have a large amount of time, maybe are not particularly familiar with politics and with the kind of ins and outs of all of the, you know, what bills being heard today on the floor of the, you know, people like that. Is there a place for them? If so, what might it look like? So that was one of the big things that was sort of motivating me. This just like absence of people like my mother, of whom it turns out when we look sort of empirically, there are a lot of these people around, as it turns out, millions and millions.

GR: Absolutely, yeah, that's really interesting. So your book is broken into two main parts as far as I gathered from reading in it. And the first one is, what we can reasonably ask and expect from citizens. And the other is about changes we might make to the system to, just as you said, find a place for people like your mother, how can we make changes to the system to make active citizenship more equitable and more accessible? So let me start with the first of those, what we can and should expect from ourselves and our fellow citizens. You write about floors of expectation, and you also write about when we're asking too much. Let me start with the floor. What's the minimum? What's the minimum here for citizens?

KE: Yeah. So let me just clarify one thing about the floor. So the idea here is like, when people do a thing, you know, we typically have a sense of like, what's the minimum level? What's the minimum standard, right? What's passable, what's acceptable, right? And we commonly will mark out that there's like a difference between doing something really excellently, doing something acceptably and then doing something unacceptably like sort of like pass, fail, excel, right? Something like that. A lot of our ideas about democratic citizenship and about what we want sort of out of democracy, kind of elide that middle category it seems to me. We often will just kind of think that like, a good citizen really has this incredibly demanding set of tasks, right? That a really good citizen, being a good citizen is very, very hard and so it's very easy for us to fail. So one of the things that I've tried to do is articulate this like, a minimum, a minimally acceptable standard that will allow us to recognize when someone is being a responsible citizen without being necessarily, while leaving I should say, lots of space for someone to excel to do further, to do more than that, and then sort of demonstrate their like civic virtue or what have you. So on my account, the minimum starts with paying attention to politics, political interest. Ideally, this would be in a critical mode. So we're like observing what's happening in politics and then we're also thinking about it, we're reflecting about it, we're turning it over. Maybe we're talking about it with people that we know, again, in a critical way, in a questioning way. And then on top of that, we also want to make sure that we have the skills, the minimum set of skills that will enable us to step into politics if we recognize, step in actively into politics if we recognize that we are needed, that there's some major issue that is sort of, you know, in play. And it seems to me that when we put those two things together, we have a kind of a surveillance capacity, we're watching. And then we're also able to step in and participate actively. We put those together and you get what I call, “stand by citizenship” and that's the kind of minimum that I articulate.

GR: Okay. Now, we could probably have an hour long conversation about this next question, but briefly if you could, so that does get in to one thing that, you know, you and I know there are both long debates about, which is okay, but do people then have to participate, is it voluntary? Is it, must you at least vote? Or can you just decide to say, I'm going to watch, I'm going to pay attention, but you know what, I'm good with my life, I'm just going to let the thing go.

KE: Right. And so the book is a little bit, I don't take a very hard line on this. I tend to think that you will need to participate actively, sometimes. I do advocate mandatory voting in in the book. I do think that that is a kind of, a sort of a reasonable part of a package of the minimum, in part because voting is habitual and it's the kind of thing that we can come back to periodically. And it's a way to sort of upkeep our civic skills because I know where my polling place is, I have an incentive to touch base with the kind of what's going on in the news, what's going on in the political world. But I don't really take a very hard line on like, you must be engaged in this kind of way. I do think there is a kind of, shall we say, not being fully active that is consistent with good citizenship. One of the examples I give is like, if you sort of observe the political world and you find that people like you are very well represented, basically, like people have heard from people like you very, very thoroughly, maybe it's okay if you take a step back and don't necessarily need to be, you know, heard even more, right? Like, oh, I'm just going to echo what he said and what the seven people before him said. You know, maybe that's sort of okay.

GR: Yeah, it's like a horrible business meeting where eight people say exactly the same thing, but they're all going to say it. (laughter)

KE: Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's like yeah, we know, we know what this view is.

GR: I'm Grant Reeher. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media and my guest is Yale Professor Kevin Elliott, and we've been discussing his new book, “Democracy for Busy People”. Well, let me delve deeper into this in terms of when things might be problematic in terms of our expectations, how much can we expect then? You said you want citizens to, you know, be analytical, be critical when they're taking in this world, this political world. But there's a, as I said at the outset, there's just gobs of information out there. Not all of it is reliable and some of it is deliberately misleading or false. How much can we expect individual citizens to be their own quality control agents in the information they consume?

KE: Yeah, the information environment, changes in the information environment are definitely an enormous challenge. And not just, of course, to the kind of picture that I'm painting here of democratic citizenship. And, you know, I don't have a sort of holistic response to these challenges. These are things that lots of colleagues, lots of people in media and in political science and in other corners of academia have been struggling with for a long time. So there's a lot to be said for sort of, cultivating a rich media diet. That is to say, you know, not relying on any one source. There's also a role to be played here, and this is one of the sort of themes I hope that comes out of my book that, there's a role to be played by basically wider political, the wider political system. So here I think about sort of media regulators, Congress, political parties, that is to say other actors than the individual citizen. So one of the most important insights, or I should say one of the most important points that I make, hopefully it's an insight for readers, is that it's a little bit of a mistake to think that it's up to the individuals themselves to correct for the sort of systematic malformations and pathologies of our information environment. A lot of the work that needs to be done is at the level of, let's say, platforms. So, for instance, it's my understanding Facebook recently changed some elements of its algorithm, which really kind of downplayed political news. And this actually led to an enormous collapse in traffic towards, in particular, very, very high profile sources of political misinformation. And so this was a change internal to the platform. They didn't do it necessarily out of a concern for the sort of integrity of the information environment, they had other interests, but it is the kind of thing where it's like, it should not properly be up entirely to the individuals. You know, it takes a village not only to raise a child, but also to cultivate a healthy information environment. So we as individuals, we should be trying to cultivate a rich information diet, absolutely. But it's also an important responsibility of those who are managing our information environment, who are adding to it through their role as journalists or as sort of the administrators of our platforms to also have in mind what kinds of sources do our algorithmic amplification processes amplify? Who is amplified? Where does this traffic go? Which is just another way of saying the information environment is a broader construction and so we as individuals can only be expected to have so much responsibility on us.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Kevin Elliott. He's a lecturer and ethics, politics and economics at Yale University and he's the author of a new book titled, “Democracy for Busy People” and we've been discussing what he has to say there. So before the break, Kevin, you laid out the responsibility then that the providers of information have to kind of, in a sense, sort out quality control, maybe to some degree pre-digest what it is that the citizen is getting. But of course, it brings up the huge question of what if those folks are deliberately trying to mislead us? And I'm not going to name names here, but we can think of sources in the media and political officials and former officials who have done that and are doing that. So how do we handle that? Is that just a question of those people falling down on their civic morals, or does the public sector have a role to play in trying to make sure that that works the way it's supposed to?

KE: Yeah. So, you know, one of the biggest sources of misinformation is social media. So let me say a word about sort of the structure of social media, probably a lot of your listeners will be familiar with this, but it's useful to have this little bit of a wonky, little bit of a jargony word, but it's very helpful for understanding the dilemma here and this is the word: disintermediation.

GR: (laughter) Wow! Let’s say it again, “disintermediation”!

KE: Yes, say it with me now - multiple syllables, multiple syllabic word, yeah, disintermediation. So, what social media does is it eliminates the traditional gatekeepers in media, right? So traditionally you had editors, you had journalists, to some extent publishers and what these figures did was that they stood between news consumers and the world, that is to say, the world of events and so forth. And so as we've seen, journalism when we see headlines about newspapers closing and journalists being laid off, what we're seeing is the collapse of those gatekeepers. And in the age of social media, the reason for this is because now we are directly getting information through, typically through social media channels and so this has just eviscerated the revenue model of traditional sources of media. So, this is a removal of these mediating these people who are in between, that's why disintermediation. Okay, so that's how it appears, right? And that is indeed what has happened, that is to say, traditional gatekeepers have gone. But with the rise of social media platforms, these platforms appear to be sort of invisible. They appear to be, as it were, neutral spaces, right?

GR: Right.

KE: But of course, they're not, right? They are carefully cultivated, carefully controlled and algorithmically governed. That is to say, the algorithms created by the platform or the company governing them governs the kind of material that's amplified that you're likely to see and so forth. So one of the things that we need to be thinking about, and here is where I do think there is a role for regulators is, what exactly is a platform, how should we understand it? I think we are still lacking a nice, clear firm publicly shared understanding of what exactly a platform is and what it ought to be, and thus how it should be regulated. Is it like, should we imagine it like the public square, right, in like, you know, ancient Athens or something, in which case we would want to make sure that it has also, you know, high, high amounts of neutrality and so forth? Or do we want to make sure that we have moderation policies in mind that are transparent and for which there are various types of appeal processes? If you think that you have been sort of moderated out of a platform in reasonable ways, rather in unreasonable ways. And indeed, like so Facebook has done an enormous, Meta I suppose, has created this like board that is supposed to be making these types of high level policy decisions regarding moderation practices. Here at Yale, there's been a number of kind of conversations between people in political science and people in democratic theory indeed, with some people from these platforms who are exactly trying to figure out like, what's the right model for this internal process? So this is a kind of self-regulation, right? So it's really not regulatory from the state, but in a way they're trying to like get ahead of that, right? They recognize that insofar as there are enormous problems of misinformation, insofar as violence is potentially being, and not potentially we know, in fact, right? Violence has been coordinated on some of these platforms, fast. Like we're talking about like hundreds of thousands of people have been subject to violence, killed through campaigns that have been coordinated on these platforms. They are not, they shouldn't necessarily be treated as these just sort of neutral like an email system or a phone system, right? They are something different than that. So all of this is to say that we should be thinking, we need to have a clear understanding, a publicly salient understanding. So this is an issue that our political parties should be thinking about. This is something that our elected officials should be thinking about. This is something that regulators should be trying to kind of formulate a theory that also allows us to talk about it, you know, sensibly in a public forum like this one and that would allow us to identify what kinds of rules do we not have, what kinds of rules would make for best practices for companies who might be trying to avoid the heavy hand, as it were, of government regulation, and if they can't, right, what should that heavy hand look like? What should they be seeking to establish? And so all of that is in some ways quite distant from the individual news consumer, right? The individual citizen. But in many ways, right. Like we as individuals can only do so much with the direction of our attention. We should try to recognize when news is a attracting us because it's making us feel angry. We should be sort of emotionally aware that that's, infuriating content is the kind that spreads virally. So before you re-tweet or repost or whatever, some piece of news, think about like, why am I doing that? Like, why am I sharing this thing? You know, is this really helpful, is it even true? Like, there's a lot of, there's a role for individual responsibility, absolutely. But it needs, we really want to be thinking also systematically here. We as individuals should be trying to be more controlled, we should be trying to be more reflective. We should approach our posting, as it were, with a degree of understanding that like, I am the gatekeeper, right? For the other people in my feed, other people are connected to me. And take up that responsibility in a way that is defensible.

GR: If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and my guest is Professor Kevin Elliott. And we've been discussing his new book titled, “Democracy for Busy People”. I want to give you some time here at the end to set forward, like your one or two most important changes you'd like to see made in the system. But I wanted to ask you one in particular, and this may sound quirky, but it's something that I think about a lot because I teach in different programs for people who are from other countries trying to learn about the American political process. One of the things that really flabbergasts most of them when I give them a list of this is the frequency with which, and the number of different positions, I, as a citizen am asked to vote on. And so I will do a little exercise and I'll say, okay, let's see who I voted for this year, you know, and it might be like, okay, President, they all understand that. But, you know, 10 minutes later, I get down to, and the guy who is in charge of maintaining the roads in my little town, you know, and in the meantime, we've talked about library budgets and school budgets and school boards and governors and state legislators and local legislators and the list goes on and on and on, not to mention referendums, okay? So sometimes I've admired other systems for being simpler for the average citizen to understand like the British one. Do you think that we should try to consolidate these offices or voting decisions in some way and how might we do it?

KE: Yeah. So you're pointing to what I talk about in the text is sort of regime complexity, basically.

GR: Yes.

KE: So, yeah, as a voter, right? As a citizen, not just a voter, but as a citizen, if you're trying to understand, like, why did this particular thing happen? Why did this, why was this policy made? Why is this problem persisting as the case may be? And trying to kind of sort that out is quite complicated, right?

GR: Yeah, who do you hold accountable?

KE: Who do you hold accountable? Exactly. I think one of the best examples of this is like, you know, Obamacare and the expansion of Medicaid. And so if you're somebody who's in a state that has not expanded Medicaid and you fall into that group of people who would have otherwise been covered under the expansion of the Affordable Care Act, who do you blame for that, right? Because, is it Congress who passed the ACA and did it in a way that allowed, or maybe didn't allow, but, right? They passed a law, the Supreme Court took a run at it and they sort of turned a thing that was supposed to be mandatory into a thing that was actually voluntary, right?

GR: Right.

KE: And then your state legislature chose or didn't choose to expand Medicaid as a result of that. So there's a bunch of different failure points there, right? To say, well, why didn't Congress fix this problem after the Supreme Court? So you could blame Congress, you could blame the court, you could blame your state legislature. And so in this way, responsibility kind of dissolves. And so you as a voter, like I'm not sure who to be mad at, right? This is actually very complicated. So for me, I think one of, you mentioned local government and this is also another feature of our system. We have not two levels of government, but three, right? And this, it's important for Americans to understand in some ways the option set available to us is sometimes invisible. If you were to say, boy, it's kind of weird that we don't understand who to blame for such and such thing. And people say, okay, but yeah, but like, what's the alternative, right? In lots of countries, you know, local governments are appointed by either the national government or a state level government, right? So what if you don't elect your mayor? What if you don't elect your sheriff, right? Why do we have these locally elected offices? It doesn't always make a huge amount of sense. And it's very important that one of the key reasons for being concerned about this is that as the ballot gets longer, right, as the number of offices that we're expected to talk about get longer, the electorate who actually selects it becomes smaller. So we should be looking to de-complexify our politics, I think, as much as possible. I think it's important to locate decisions at a place where we have accountability, where we can find electoral accountability. When we have small electorates, that is bad. When turnout is very low for powerful offices, that's not good. So we want to have accountability at a place that people can identify who is to blame. Federal government, national politics tends to be the right level for this for a lot of things because the most eyes can fall on that level.

GR: We've only got about a minute and a half left, but I wanted to give you a chance to, is there another big, important change that you could describe briefly that you would want our listeners to walk away with thinking about that would help this?

KE: One of the things that I think we want to have in the United States are strong political parties. Political parties tend to be very, Americans tend to be skeptical of political parties for a whole variety of ways. But parties are actually one of the most important institutions for making politics understandable for ordinary citizens. When we try to understand what the stakes are, when we try to understand what the issues are, when we try to understand also just where should we be looking for these important issues, where should we be focusing our political attention and efforts? Political parties help us to convey that. In the post Dobbs world for instance, we've seen a lot of activist energy in the states who have initiatives. So they've been trying to focus activist effort at the level that the change that people are interested in can occur. So I think we want to strengthen political parties. And also we would like, it's good for us to think about ways to diversify the parties that we have. That is to say, if we could have more parties in single party states, this would be a way to enrich our political conversation. And also hold our political parties more accountable. Single party states are terrible for political accountability because the party in power doesn't have to worry about being voted out of office.

GR: Well, we'll have to leave it there. But I just want to add, there are all sorts of other important and interesting suggestions that you make. So I really do want to encourage our listeners to take a look at this book. That was Kevin Elliott, and again, his new book of his is titled, “Democracy for Busy People”. Professor Elliott, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me.

KE: Thank you so much for having me. It was a wonderful conversation.

GR: It was my pleasure. You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.

Program transcript:

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. One of the most closely watched congressional races in the entire nation in this November’s general election will be that for New York's 22nd district right here in the Syracuse area. The district contains all of Onondaga and Madison counties and portions of Oneida, Cortland and Cayuga counties, including the cities of Syracuse, Utica and Auburn. The district is currently represented by Republican incumbent Brandon Williams, who is in his first term. My guest today are the two Democrats hoping to challenge Williams in November. State Senator John Mannion and DeWitt Town Councilor Sarah Klee Hood. The primary election is June 25th. Now, this is an informal debate or a shared conversation of sorts. We have just under a half an hour and we've got two candidates. So I've asked the candidates to be brief and extremely to the point, and I've let each of them know that I'll interrupt if necessary towards that end. I should also note that I help run a program at Syracuse University for veterans who are interested in pursuing public office and prior to serving on the DeWitt Town Board, Ms. Klee Hood was a participant in that program. Both candidates have appeared on this program previously. Counselor Klee Hood, State Senator Mannion, welcome back to the program, it’s good to have you both on.

Sarah Klee Hood: Thanks, Grant. Delighted to be here.

John Mannion: Thank you, Grant.

GR: So, thanks again for making the time. So, here's my first question and I'll start, Senator Mannion, with you. I've been reading through your previous debates, and I've looked at your websites, and it does seem to me that regarding policy positions, the two of you are very similar, first of all, and secondly, you're pretty standard for the Democratic Party I think at this point. There is support from both of you for expanding a lot of public programs to aid middle earners and lower income earners. But I don't really see anywhere either of you that you'd want to cut back significantly on spending. So in my understanding, if either of you get in and you get your way in Congress, the government's going to get bigger. You've both talked about letting the Trump era tax cuts expire, but that would involve raising some taxes, mostly on higher earners, but not cutting back on programs. So. Senator Mannion, I just want to start, are there any kinds of programs at the federal level that you'd be willing to cut back on or restructure in a way that they would significantly spend less?

JM: I think the first thing that we have to look at, Grant, and thank you for the question, is that you did reference, you know, some of our highest earners. And what we've seen over the course of a couple of generations now is that that rate is really dropped. So I think it's reasonable that folks pay their fair share and that we do make that adjustment. As far as the programs, 100% committed to the maintenance and expansion of Social Security and Medicare. You know, I do think that there are efficiencies in government that we absolutely have to look at and I think that we have to hold these federal departments accountable. You know, budgets are about priorities, so I do think we have to take a hard look at some things. You know, there was certainly a great inflation of the federal budget and therefore our debt during the Trump administration. And I do see in the Biden administration that we have a real investment in our future in manufacturing and in infrastructure. But still, I think we have to look at efficiencies in government and we really have to hold those departments and agencies accountable.

GR: Any specific programs that you can point to, though? That was a very general answer about just sort of taking a broad look, any specific programs that would be on your list?

JM: You know, I think there is support for multiple corporations. There's these grant programs or investment in those, particularly in the large fossil fuel industries that we have to look at. We have to look at minimizing that, cutting that down. And that's something that should have been done a long time ago.

GR: And then one other follow up and I'll move to Councilor Klee Hood. Can you point to something in your voting record in the state legislature where you voted to cut a program?

JM: So what we just saw and what's out there in the media is a program that was going to increase costs on individuals as far as utility costs, and that was called New York Heat Act. I voted against that because it was going to disproportionately raise dollars, you know, the costs of utility rate payers of our customers. So in that regard, I voted no on that. An adjustment was made, and then I voted affirmatively so it wouldn't disproportionately hurt the people that I currently represent. I was sent here to make sure that central New York got their fair share and I believe that I've done that. I'm proud to secure funding for programs that are really making an impact locally.

GR: And so Councilor Klee Hood, the same question, what kinds of programs at the federal level would you be willing to restructure significantly or cut back on?

SKH: Sure. So I think I'm going to fundamentally push back against a lot of the Republican talking points as of late. They are looking to find tax cuts or programmatic cuts to deliver, if you will, in quotes, “for the American people”, which is absolutely they are looking to strip away the fundamentals of the pillars of the US government. As somebody who managed a $25 million federal budget while I was an officer in the US Air Force, I believe that we can definitely scrutinize our defense spending. I recognize that in the global picture, the US has a responsibility to its allies, but I also know from my own personal investment and time managing federal budgets for multiple years there is a lot of area where we can start trimming some of that fat away. Similarly, the fossil fuel industry, whether it is through incentives or through government partnerships, we really need to look at divestment there. And at the end of the day, the 2017 trickle down Trump tax cuts, they are not helping Americans, it's set to expire. We have a real opportunity to capitalize on this in 2025. And Grant, just to put some numbers to your comment, we are starting the tax 2017 tax code that really gave folks that were making $400,000 or more significant tax breaks. I firmly believe that if we start taxing the ultra-rich we can bring back money annually year over year. For example, when our taxes such as the tax program we have now is skewed to the rich and to corporations, we're losing less than $350 billion a year starting in 2017, excuse me, 2027 if we don't modify the programs that we have on the tables now. So at the end of the day we don't need to start significantly reducing how we're funding federal programs. We need to have an equitable tax code that truly is proportionate, regardless of how much money you are making, so that we can start bringing back some of that money. And it's through taxes, but it's not through taxes at the middle class or the working class, it's for the ultra-rich and corporations. Let's close the loopholes. The carry tax interest loophole, which is the most sought after loophole in our federal tax code right now, it's allowing $41 million annually to be evaded from the US, from the US government, meaning that we are missing out on over $41 million annually in tax revenue. So I fundamentally believe that we can get there simply by readjusting how we look at our tax structure. And with that we also have to ensure that we are funding the IRS so they can do their job.

GR: Well, let me ask you then also, can you point to something in your voting record in Dewitt, where you have voted to cut a program?

SKH: Sure. I'm proud to be a local elected official because that means I get to implement federal policy with all of the baggage and none of the budget. It means we have to get very creative at the local level. I'm proud that Dewitt has been able to maintain the tax cap. Last year, we went above it by, I think 1% to maybe 2%, still at less than 5% taxes with an increase very nominal. The point being, though, we don't have a significant budget. So in order to make up that lost revenue to ensure that we have the funds for the police department, the highway department, the rec department, all of the services that folks would expect from their community government, we've been looking at public / private partnerships, which is really where there is an opportunity here. Not only does that bolster the services and programs available to the towns within that representation, but it also helps small businesses get a piece of the pie while also having some skin in the game.

GR: Okay, I want to interrupt here because we're going into sort of a different argument about public / private partnerships but Senator Mannion let me come back to you. Councilor Klee Hood did mention something pretty specific there and what she's willing to look at and pare back and that was defense spending. Do you agree with that or is that something that you think should be hands off in terms of looking for cutting?

JM: I talked about, you know, efficiencies in government and that would certainly include the Department of Defense. But I think we have to be very careful about that, I'm talking about efficiencies. As far as funding goes, we have to be flexible. We have to be in tune to what is happening in the geopolitical space. So in regards to that, I would be very careful about taking a hard stance about cutting military spending, considering what's happening in the world and where we might be moving forward.

GR: Okay, and Councilor Klee Hood, any just super quick responses to that response?

SKH: Sure. Through my six years managing a federal budget of $25 million, I can tell you there's a lot of room for efficiencies there. I feel confident that there are rooms that we can maintain our global responsibility as a global leader in the current geopolitical landscape while ensuring that there are cuts to be made.

GR: Okay, my next basic question and I'll stick with you for this Councilor. It's obviously, I think probably the biggest question for the Democrats voting in the primary and for independents and some Republicans as well. But it's, briefly, I know I know both of you could speak for hours on this, why would you be the stronger Democratic candidate in the general election against incumbent Republican Congressman Brandon Williams?

SKH: I think we're all here because we want to win in November. We are uniquely positioned to be able to bring home a win that is long overdue for central New Yorkers through a Democratic victory. But we need to think about this strategically, not emotionally. Yes, we should vote for the candidate that has the federal professional and personal experiences that meet the moment of this day. But what's more important is aligning us to a strategic win in November, and that is me. We need a nominee that is able to contrast and compete with Brandon Williams and win over some of that support. We need a veteran. Veterans give Republicans and independents an opportunity to vote for a Democrat that they normally would never have voted for. In a post-Roe era, women are mad, man, I am pissed off. We need a woman that is going to be able to support women's rights regardless of the political tides. And we need a candidate, let's be frank, that isn't burdened by ties to Albany. We can't forget that Lee Zeldin won this district by a lot last time. Republican playbooks are vetted for anti-Albany politics, if you will. And we need to have a candidate that will be able to both remove themselves from that conversation to avoid the attack ads, but to speak eloquently about the needs of today without it being tarnished by Albany. And we need someone who doesn't have, you know, multiple publicly published material that's at the ready for Republican attack ads. But at the end of the day, it's about a strategic win for the Democrats in November and we have to align ourselves strategically.

GR: Okay. Those are three reasons I heard. Senator Mannion, you obviously are going to get the same question, but I'm going to have to give it to you after the break. Right now, I'll just have to tell folks that you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Dewitt Town Councilor Sarah Klee Hood and New York State Senator John Mannion. They're the Democrats running in the primary to challenge incumbent Republican Brandon Williams in New York's 22nd congressional district in this November's general election. Okay, Senator Mannion, just before the break, Councilor Klee Hood laid out why she thought she would be the better candidate in the general election, that's obviously arguably the biggest question for voters in this primary. So she listed three reasons, why would you be the better general election candidate?

JM: So, thank you, Grant. I'll say that I have a proven electoral record and a proven legislative record. So as far as my electoral record goes, I have flipped a Republican seat that was held by them for 100 years. I currently represent a district that has more registered Republicans than Democrats. Of the 42 Democratic Senators, I'm the only one that has that distinction. There are seven Republicans that have that distinction. And also, I would say that in my last election, 7000 more Republicans have voted than Democrats and I won. I work with everyone. 33 municipalities. 29 of them are run by Republicans, so I have a proven track record. And I believe that it's not just, you know, great campaigning or whatever, it's also the deep relationships that I have in the region. I was a teacher, my wife and I have lived here our entire lives, I was a union president and all of those things are contributing factors. From a legislative standpoint, you know, I'm proud of the committee work I did as the first ever Chair of the Standing Committee on Disabilities. I have emboldened a woman's right to choose prior to the overturning of Roe v Wade with a 100% score card from Planned Parenthood. I have expanded universal pre-K into upstate New York and made sure the funding was there to support our schools. And it was a co-prime sponsor on Green CHIPS legislation to make sure that if a semiconductor chip manufacturer uses clean energy and hits their job numbers, there are incentives. And as a result, Micron is coming here with the largest private investment in the history of this country. I'm battle tested, I have broad based support as I mentioned, including multiple elected officials. So I believe that has positioned me in a great spot. The people here trust me, I know those folks and they know me.

GR: Okay, so I have a follow up question for you. And then I have a follow up question for Councilor Klee Hood. My follow up question for you is, the councilor did mention something that has been on my mind and thinking about this election. And when we look back at the previous election, it was obvious that Brandon Williams linked Francis Conole with Albany, even though he had no real ties there but nonetheless, that was his messaging and it seemed to work. You saw pictures, for example, in his ads of Francis Conole right next to Kathy Hochul. How are you going to deal with that? Because I'm sure that Congressman Williams has got four people at least combing through your voting record right now. So how are you going to deal with that Albany, for lack of a better word, the attempt to put a taint on it.

JM: So I'm proud of the record that I have, Grant, and people are appreciative of the work that I've done. I do believe that I'm a good reflection of the district and I've acted accordingly in Albany in delivering for the district and really making certain things a priority that I've heard at the doors and on the phones for years of what we need to do, accelerating middle class tax cuts, suspending the gas tax, providing property tax relief. But also we need safe communities. So a lot of the issues that we seem to have been attacked on involved bail. In my time in the New York State Senate, I have only strengthened those laws, giving judges greater discretion, making more crimes bail eligible and addressing the reoffending issue. In fact, I had the support of law enforcement all along, including in this election, as I'm endorsed by the New York State Troopers PBA. It was my legislation that helped create the Syracuse Regional Airport Authority to make sure that that location is safe and it could be staffed. It is the first police force created in New York in 50 years, and I'm proud of that accomplishment.

GR: Okay. Councilor Klee Hood, the question / follow up I wanted to ask you is, the senator mentioned unions once, but obviously he has gained a lot of support from different unions. And I wanted to ask you about this because I'm going to put my political scientist hat on now. It is my sense that this general election is going to be a lot about, for Democrats in particular, turnout.

SKH: Yes.

GR: And one of the things that unions do effectively do in general elections is turn out voters. So, how would you address this question of the, what might seem to an outsider looking in that the senator has an advantage there with the unions behind him in terms of turnout in the general election?

SKH: Sure. So I think that there's a difference between union logos and endorsements on a website and the rank and file members. Last cycle, when I ran in this race, despite being significantly underfunded, we came up about 1100 votes short. And that's because of the union support that we have within the rank and file members knocking doors for us. But we're talking about your question (that) was pointedly at the general election, and I have great relationships with all of the labor unions. They're supporting John right now because he was a former labor leader, that's what they should do. I have veteran organizations, women organizations, environmental organizations supporting me because that's where I am. It makes sense. But I can also tell you that, you know, when you get feedback, like, yes, we're supporting Senator Mannion right now, he's our guy, but, man, we're really excited for Sarah should she win the nomination. It just goes to show that the support goes both ways. But if they had to choose somebody, I'm good where I am. I appreciate the rank and file support that we have. But I have zero concerns about their support coming through in a general election.

GR: I see, okay, all right, thank you. So I did want to ask a question about abortion because it has been such a huge issue for the country in the last few years and it's obviously something that the Democrats are going to be running on all over the country. And it seems from your campaign rhetoric of both of you that that you're going to do the same in the general election. But, and I'll come back to Senator Mannion I guess to start with this. In looking through and listening to what you've had to say, both of you, it's a little uncertain to me as to what limits, if any, you would put on access to abortion. So, Senator Mannion, let's just start from scratch here and just say, what kinds of limits are you comfortable with short of on demand abortion until the day of delivery? I'm using an extreme example here, but I want to just try to understand this.

JM: So I'm proud to have been endorsed by Planned Parenthood in every one of my previous elections. And in this election, they have not endorsed and they will not until after the primary. But I have a proven legislative record in protecting a woman's right to choose and protecting their providers. I will say that these decisions should be made between a woman and their health care provider. I have a 100% voting record from that…

GR: …I'm going to interject here because there's no doubt that both of you are for choice. I mean, you're both clearly that way and you've both spoken passionately about it. What I'm asking is, are there any limits on on-demand abortion that you are comfortable with?

JM: When I ran in 2018, I supported the Reproductive Health Act. I was not elected, and then in 2019, the Reproductive Health Act was passed into law. I had supported that, as did many and in fact most Democratic majority members at that time. And I have emboldened that law. So I support that law, and that's where I stand.

GR: Well, can you just tell our listeners what those limits are just so we’re clear?

JM: Sure. That limit is what the Democratic majority voted on in that time and what I support is up to 24 weeks and then beyond that is the health, mental health, risk of life to the mother or an unviable fetus when an abortion can occur.

GR: Okay, and Councilor Klee Hood to focus it on the last thing that Senator Mannion said. Are you comfortable with those same limits or would you like to see fewer limits than that? I'm just trying to see where a difference is here.

SKH: So this is where the difference comes in. I'm a woman, this is personal for me. My rights have been removed and I had to seek abortion care while I was serving in the military. So when we ask about term limits and restrictions, it's fundamentally a flawed question because you're not asking the right question, Grant. So I'm going to say the right question might be, do we as American citizens trust women to make the best decision for themselves, their future and their family in conjunction with their doctor? Yes or no? If we trust women to have that autonomy of self, that understanding of what is best for them, with medical guidance, then these questions are moot.

GR: Okay so let me interject and get clarity here. So, the senator said 24 weeks, so, if what I'm hearing from you is correct is, let's say we get to 27 weeks and a woman has this conversation with her doctor, you're okay then with going forward.

SKH: If there needs to be, I trust the woman to make the decision that is best for her. And I would also like to kind of caveat that and go back to your point. I don't support on-demand abortions until the day of birth. So let's be clear there. That's a wedge conversation that is used by Republicans to drive an issue that simply doesn't truly exist in this space, but I support...

GR: …But If that's the legislation that one would vote for, then that's the situation we would be in, I mean…

SKH: That's not the legislation that's on the table. What is on the table is H.R. 12, the Women's Health Protection Act of 2023. And I adamantly support this, which prohibits governmental restrictions on the provision of and access to abortion services. We need to trust that our women have the cognizance, the understanding, the competence to make the best decision for themselves, their family and their future, in addition with a health care provider without the opinions of politicians in the medical room.

GR: Okay, We're almost out of time, I'm going to have to ask these last two questions as a lightning round kind of thing. So this is going to be sort of like, you know, vanilla or chocolate ice cream kind of thing. Here's the first one, and Counselor Klee Hood, I'll stick with you. John Katko preceded Brandon Williams in this position, and he was by all measures, extremely bipartisan and extremely productive. He had a rule that he would not introduce a piece of legislation unless he could get a Democratic co-sponsor. Would you consider adopting the same rule regarding a Republican co-sponsor?

SKH: Yes, with the caveat to women's rights.

GR: Got it. Okay, Senator Mannion, same question.

JM: (Bipartisan) support is very important and the work that I did in my committee involved, almost every piece of legislation had Republican co-sponsors, and I would commit to that.

GR: Okay, and I'll stick with you for my final question. Again, sort of a lightning round kind of thing. I am going to try to get Congressman Williams on the program before autumn comes around. I have tried before, I have not succeeded, but I'm going to try again. If I am successful, what question, briefly, would you most want me to ask him?

JM: Would he support a national abortion ban?

GR: Okay, and Counselor Klee Hood, what is the one question you would want me to ask Congressman Williams?

SKH: Will he remove himself from the Republican Study Committee?

GR: Okay, all right, those were both succinct. You were very cooperative on that. I want to thank both of you. That was State Senator John Mannion and Dewitt Town Councilor Sarah Klee Hood. Again, these are the two Democrats that are running to challenge Brandon Williams in this November's general election. The primary election is June 25th and early voting begins June 15th. Senator Mannion, Councilor Klee Hood, I want to thank both of you, first of all, for taking the time to talk with me. But I also seriously want to thank both of you for the way that you have made yourselves both available in these kinds of formats in this primary season. I think voters have had a lot of opportunities to learn about both of you. Not everybody does that and you have, so thank you.

JM: Thank you, Grant.

SKH: Thanks, Grant. It was a pleasure, have a great one.

GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.

Program transcript:

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is Bob Keefe. He's a former journalist and currently the executive director of E2, an organization of business leaders who advocate for clean energy. He's also the author of a new book titled, "Clean Economy Now: Stories from the Frontlines of an American Business Revolution". Mr. Keefe, welcome to the program.

Bob Keefe: Oh, Grant, it's great to be with you. Thank you so much.

GR: Well, we appreciate you making the time. So, let me just start with a real basic question about your organization. Just tell our listeners a bit about E2, you know, how it got started, what it does.

BK: Absolutely. So we are a national organization of more than 10,000 business leaders who work or do business in just about every state and just about every sector of the economy. And we advocate for policies that are good for both the economy and the environment. And we've had some great ones recently Grant, that I think we're going to talk about.

GR: That's great. Yeah, I would like to do that. Before we get into that, let me just also ask informationally, where does the organization get its funding? Is it from the member industries or of specific companies?

BK: Well, that's right. Our members are business people, not businesses. And they (leave it to) our organization to let us do our work.

GR: All right, okay, good. So, yeah, let's get into some of those examples. So, you know, your book relates a lot of really good stories that are out there about businesses and entrepreneurs doing creative things to transition to a cleaner economy. But if you had to pick like one or two of the best stories, maybe, maybe there's one in New York State to that you could talk about. But just to give us an idea of what you're excited about.

BK: Well, what I'm most excited about, Grant, is both the volume of the projects that are coming out of the ground are in the works in America now and where they're going. My organization, E2, has been tracking major clean energy projects announced since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act 21 months ago. What we know now is that there are more than 300 major projects all around the country. We're talking about electric vehicle factories, battery plants in Upstate New York, for instance. Hydrogen plants being built by companies that are based in New York, solar panel factories, wind turbine factories. When in the world have we had more than 300 major factories and other projects coming out of the ground in America? I call it an economic revolution. We've had more than $120 billion worth of private sector investment. That's not government loans or grants, that's companies investing in America. And we've had more than a hundred thousand jobs announced because of these projects already and we're just getting started. If, if if we don't go backward and these policies are at threat right now, at risk, and hopefully we won't go the wrong way.

GR: Yeah, I wanted to get into some of that a little bit later, the policies and the political aspect of this. You mentioned Upstate New York. Can you say a little bit more about one or two of the projects that are there?

BK: Sure. Well, for instance, in Massena, a company called Air Products is investing $500 million to build a, what's called a green hydrogen plant that's going to produce hydrogen. Now, hydrogen is new for us, it's not new in the world. It's used in a lot of applications, but it's new in the clean energy space. But hydrogen has been called, for instance, the Swiss army knife of clean energy because it can be used in so many places. I was just in Cleveland, literally yesterday, meeting with the head of a steel manufacturing plant there outside of Cleveland that is converting away from coal fired furnaces to electric furnaces that can someday, that are also equipped to burn natural gas, but also equipped to burn hydrogen. And they are banking a lot of their future on being able to use this clean fuel to produce steel. Hydrogen also can be used to fly airplanes we know, and used in heavy trucking and things like that. So that's an example of a company doing good things. There's another company called Viridi Parente that's building a big factory up in Buffalo that's building lithium ion batteries. Toyota is investing in lithium ion batteries there outside of Rochester, General Motors is as well. Overall, we've tracked since the IRA, Grant, we've tracked a dozen projects in New York, $785 billion worth of investments. 3,000 jobs just in the state of New York. And again, this is just in the past 21 months.

GR: Yeah, that's quite impressive. So I wanted to ask you a little bit later about these social and political challenges, but let me ask you first, what are the biggest technical and economic challenges to transitioning away from fossil fuels?

BK: Well, you know, I spent, before I do what I do now Grant, I spent about 20 years as a journalist, and a lot of that time I spent as a technology journalist. So I covered the introduction of the iPod and the iPhone and the rise and fall of the Internet and the rise again of the Internet and all of this. And frankly, I've given up on guessing where technology's going to take us. But once you have the market signals to business, which is what we now have, businesses can figure this stuff out. And we're going to hydrogen as an example. Nobody thought about using hydrogen as a fuel 10, 20 years ago, but we're on the cusp of that. Nobody thought we'd be driving electric cars by now, but we are. The good news is the technology is here now, the technology has caught up with the problem. The policy has caught up with the problem, the human will has caught up with the problem. We all know we need to do something about climate change and making there a little cleaner and the water a little cleaner. The hope is, again, that we don't go backward on this stuff just when we're getting started.

GR: I’m Grant Reeher, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. And my guest is Bob Keefe, and we've been discussing his new book titled "Clean Economy Now: Stories from the Frontlines of an American Business Revolution". So, then, what I'm gathering from what I'm hearing so far is the challenge is really, are political and social. And so tell me what your take is and what your senses of that challenge and where we are.

BK: That's right. Well, first of all, the fact is there shouldn't be anything partisan or political about any of this. There shouldn't be anything that's political or partisan about creating jobs, driving economic growth, making America more competitive. And when you look at where these projects are going, Grant, as we did at my organization, of those 300 major clean energy projects that have been announced so far, 60% of them are in Republican congressional districts. 70% of all of the jobs that have been announced are in Republican congressional districts. 85% of all the money being invested by these companies is in Republican congressional districts. Not a single Republican passed or voted for the law that's making this happen. And we've already had 30 attempts in the U.S. House, including as recently as a couple of days ago or yesterday, really with the farm bill the House has tried to rollback or repeal parts of the policy driving all of this growth. Now, we all know there's a presidential election coming up, I'm not going to get into electoral politics, but we certainly know where both candidates stand on things like clean energy, on electric vehicles, on offshore wind, onshore wind, on climate change. So that uncertainty over their election is frankly already starting to cast a pall over this progress that we're just now beginning to see.

GR: Yeah, you know, you mentioned that 85% figure, 85% of the investment in Republican congressional districts. And I hope this doesn't sound too cynical, but what popped into my head when you said that was the idea of, well, maybe that suits the Republicans just fine because they can speak to their base and raising concerns about the transition and speaking in favor of fossil fuels to some degree, but then they get the benefits anyway of the transition because all this stuff is happening in their districts. I mean, that's kind of a politically sweet spot to be in, in a way.

BK: Well there's, yes. And folks start to look at this a little differently when, they view electric vehicles a little differently when they're building them in their backyards.

GR: Yeah.

BK: They view solar panels a little differently when it's creating thousands and thousands of jobs. I was recently as part of the book, I went down to Dalton, Georgia. I don't know if you ever been to Dalton but Dalton is a little town, It used to be the carpet capital of the world. If you wanted to have a job in Dalton, you had to work in carpet. Well, right now, a company called Qcells is building one of the biggest solar panel factories in the Western Hemisphere in Dalton, Georgia, creating 4000 jobs in that state. It happens to be in the district of Marjorie Taylor Greene, one of the most conservative, maybe not conservative, but one of the biggest flame throwers in the Republican Party right now.

GR: Yeah, I was going to say flamboyant but… (laughter) Well, you know, I wanted to ask you this bigger picture question about the role of government, taking politics out of it for a minute, but the role of government and the transition to clean energy, because you do talk a lot about that in the book. And it's not new for government to be critically involved in the emergence and the promotion and establishment of new technologies when they come along. I mean, the government subsidized the transcontinental railroads, for instance, they wouldn't have been built without them. So what's your vision of how you see government being involved in this instance with this transition?

BK: Well, Grant, my organization again, E2 got its start 25 years ago in California when California was considering what then were the first ever tailpipe emissions standards for vehicles in the world, the so-called California Clean Car standards. And our founders at the time were businesspeople, they saw what was happening in Sacramento, they saw the auto industry coming into Sacramento, the oil and gas industry coming into Sacramento and saying, oh, you crazy Californians, pass this law and it's going to kill our companies, we're not going to make cars in America anymore, California is going to go to hell and catch on fire and float in the Pacific, and it's going to be the end of the world. Well, our founders stood up and said, you know what? We don't know that much about making cars, we don't know that much about making petroleum, what we do know about is innovation. And what the right market signals from government, from government policies, we can, maybe these, again, 25 years ago, maybe those Prius thingies, these hybrid cars will be more commonplace and who knows, maybe even electric cars someday. And by the way, it's not a bad idea to clean up the air in California. So our founders saw that with the right market signal from government policy, we can drive innovation, we can change the world. And that's what's happening now. We have federal policies, finally, finally, finally, we decided to do something about climate change in this country. And it's creating what I believe is the biggest economic revolution we've seen in generations.

GR: So it's clear from what you're saying that, you know, the businesses have gotten the cues and they're able to make money at this and they see it's the future. So they're going to do the innovation. It may be tough to answer this but if you could imagine that government were not involved, it sounds like the transition would still happen, but it would take longer. Is that fair to say? And my question to you is, how much longer? I mean, do you have any idea?

BK: It would take too much longer is what I would say. And look, the proof is in the pudding. Again, 300 major projects around America, a $120 billion in private sector investment. That would not have happened, Grant, without the policies that were passed in Washington 21 months ago or 2 years ago. And that's again the Inflation Reduction Act, but it's also the bipartisan infrastructure bill and it's the CHIPS and Science Act, which invest in semiconductors that are key to a clean energy transition, generally. But here's the thing, it would take too long from a climate perspective for one thing, because remember, the reason we're doing all this stuff is to create and give us the tools we need to reduce our emissions in this country by 40% to 50% and meet our climate goal, the world's climate goals to keep to keep on track with that. But the other thing is, if we didn't do this, guess what? We would be beholden to other countries in the clean energy transition that is sweeping the world. Right now 90% of solar panels are built by China or other countries. Right now 80% of our batteries are built in one form or another by China. We couldn't even compete in this market before, but today, guess what? We have more than 40 battery factories coming out of the ground, including right there in Upstate New York. We have more than 35 solar panel factories being built in America right now because of these policies. So we're going to finally be able to compete in what is expected to be a $23 trillion global market for this stuff. That's amazing.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Bob Keefe is the executive director of an organization called E2. And we're discussing his new book titled "Clean Economy Now: Stories from the Frontlines of an American Business Revolution". So, Bob, I was glad to see this in your book, you've got a chapter on equity in clean energy. And it does often seem like, you know, when you think about solar panels, you've mentioned those a few times or electric cars, they're almost things that almost seem like luxury items for those who are better off. I mean, you don't normally see solar panels on the roofs of cheap houses, a higher end Tesla costs more than most people make in a year. So how is clean energy related to concerns about equity and socioeconomic inequality?

BK: Well, for starters, you're exactly right, Grant. Look, not only are the majority of purchasers of things like electric vehicles or solar panels affluent white folks, the majority of people who work in clean energy right now are predominantly white men. African-Americans make up something like 16% of the overall U.S. workforce, they make up about 6% of clean energy. Women make up almost 50% of the U.S. workforce, they make up less than 20% I think in in clean energy. The policies that were passed in Washington try to address this in a few ways. First of all, there's something called the Justice 40 program, which means that 40% of all of the government's investments in clean energy projects are going to go into underserved communities and communities of color, for instance. There's also something called Community Benefits programs, which means that any time one of these companies goes into a region, they've got to work really closely with the community to develop that project and address community needs. That's something that's new in government expansion. We didn't have that when the railroads were going through, we didn't have that when the Interstate Highway Program was happening, we didn't have it when the moonshot was happening for that matter. And then finally, there's something called the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund which just got released, I think. It essentially sets aside billions of dollars to help bring some of these clean energy advantages to low income communities and communities of color, but also help the entrepreneurs in those communities get engaged and get up and running with clean energy companies to support those communities themselves. This is a new way of doing economic development in America, and hopefully it's going to finally address some of those issues of inequity.

GR: I wanted to ask you a couple of questions now that I hear when I hear the pushback on some of the evangelists like yourself, you know, talking about the benefits of clean energy, and one is regarding electric cars and other things that have these lithium batteries. For example, I have an electric lawnmower with a battery. I love it, by the way, it's lighter than my gas mower, it's quieter, it's my favorite gadget. But you do hear concerns about what we do with all these spent batteries because, you know, they have a lifespan and they pose certain environmental risks and they contain some pretty dangerous compounds of materials. So, you know, what's your response to that concern?

BK: Well, my first response is, yes, we need to pay absolute attention to that. And if only we would have paid that much attention to when it came to burning oil and gas and coal and the impacts of that as well. But, you know, a couple of things about lithium ion or batteries in general. First of all, as part of the book I went down to a lithium mine and processing operation that's being built in North Carolina. And one of the things that I learned is that not only are they extracting lithium from what was an abandoned mine down there, or they plan on it, you can actually reuse about 98% of what's in a typical lithium ion battery today. And so a lot of these battery manufacturing plants, including some of those in New York I think, are also setting up operations to essentially recycle all of the goods in batteries so you can use it over and over and over again. There's another way you can do this, which is reusing these batteries. So that battery in your lawnmower or the battery in my electric car, when it's spent, I might not be able to go , you know, 200 miles on it anymore, but there's still enough good stuff in that battery to maybe let it go ten miles a day. So we have an E2 member, for instance, in Michigan who takes old Prius batteries and basically reuses them. He puts them in forklifts and forklifts on a factory floor. You can imagine they go all day long, but they don't go more than ten miles. So you can reuse that battery in that way. The last step is that because of the innovation that's being spurred because of these policies, we're starting to see so many new types of batteries and energy storage that, again, from my technology reporter days, I'm not even going to guess what it looks like. But finally, the innovation is moving in this and that's going to be good stuff.

GR: If you're just joining us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and my guest is Bob Keefe. We've been discussing his new book, which is titled, “Clean Economy Now: Stories from the Front Lines of an American Business Revolution”. Another sort of pushback I wanted to put to you is, it is obvious though that even though we're in this massive transition, that fossil fuels are still going to be part of our daily lives and our economy for a fairly long time. And I do think one gets the impression sometimes listening to the advocates for green energy that they don't take that, they don't sort of acknowledge that fully. And I think that sometimes that makes them sound in a way that opens them up to criticism from the other side. I just want to get your thoughts about that.

BK: Well, look, change takes a long time. We know that in every part of society and in every part of the economy. That said, look at when the mobile phone was introduced. That wasn't that long ago, Grant., and I don't know anybody left that still has a wired phone in their house. I know there are a few people that are that do, but not a lot. Look at something like digital music, right? I remember as a technology reporter covering Steve Jobs one day when he walked out and he held up a little square thing and said, someday you're going to have a hundred songs in your pocket in this iPod, right? And then later it was, someday on this cell phone, you'll be able to take pictures and you'll store all your music on it. That wasn't that long ago, look how fast that technology moved along. That's the type of pace of technology that we're seeing now in the clean energy field. No, it's not going to make fossil fuels obsolete tomorrow, maybe not even next year or then the next decade. But it's moving at such a rate that fossil fuels look like they're headed the way of the CD and the cassette tape.

GR: Well, I hope the CDs stay around longer because I still love my CD’s.

BK: I think there's still going to be people that still love their gas powered cars, right? But just like with your lawnmower, I haven't talked to anybody I know of that has an electric car that says, man, I wish I could go back to a gas car and go fill it up at 80 bucks every week.

GR: Yeah. Well, this may seem like a dumb question to someone like you, and it's I have to just kind of warn you, this is kind of a special interest, I guess, of mine. But I can remember when natural gas used to be seen in positive terms. I'm that old by environmental, you know, natural gas is this great thing…

BK: You and me both.

GR: Now, of course, natural gas is the devil. In New York. You can't get a new house with a gas stove, there are certain carve outs, but that's basically the situation So just for someone who doesn't understand this stuff as much as you do, explain to me why natural gas is still really bad.

BK: Well, natural gas is still a fossil fuel and it produces energy by burning it up. And when you burn it up, it produces emissions and those emissions heat our planet and that heating of our planet causes bigger hurricanes and more wildfires and droughts and flooding and all of the things that are really impacting our economy to the tune of $100 billion every single year now. Natural gas was long seen as a bridge fuel, right? To get us from coal to electricity, really. That bridge is getting shorter and shorter now because the technology has finally, finally, finally caught up. You know, today's Tesla is not the EV1, which was the General Motors early attempt at an electric vehicle. The solar panels that we're seeing utilities deploy almost, and by the way, utilities are switching away from natural gas as well, not necessarily because they just want to do the right thing for the environment, but the fact is, solar and wind is the cheapest power available. It's cheaper than coal, it's cheaper than natural gas in most cases. And you can deploy a lot of solar and wind a lot quicker than you can build a new natural gas plant or a nuclear plant by far, that sort of thing. So it's speed to market with clean energy and it's the pricing.

GR: We've only got about a minute left, but I want to squeeze one last question in for you. Any time you have big changes like the ones that we've been talking about, there are tipping points along the way for society. And these are points when the resistance and the inertia sort of decisively break in favor of a new system. Where are we, do you think, in terms of those tipping points, is the tipping point behind us, or do you see sort of a moment in the near future where it's really going to accelerate?

BK: So, I think when it comes to clean energy, we are at a tipping point already. Again, when you look at all of the new power sources that have been deployed by utilities in the past year, something like 95% of that has been solar or wind or batteries. It's not gas anymore, it's certainly not coal anymore. Nuclear is way too expensive and it takes way too long. So we've already seen that tipping point. Electric vehicles, we've got a ways to go, but we're just getting started. Again, when you look at the fact that every single automaker is shifting to electric vehicles, that's a sign of where things are going. Now, do we still need more charging? Absolutely. But the good news is we've also got a bunch of companies investing and putting new charging out there. So that's coming. We're not there yet with EV’s.

GR: Well, it's an exciting time. And there are a lot of exciting stories in your book. That was Bob Keefe and again, his new book is titled, "Clean Economy Now: Stories from the Frontlines of an American Business Revolution". Bob, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me.

BK: Thank you, I really appreciate it.

GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.

The supply of affordable, quality housing is at a crisis point in the United States, including in the Syracuse area. This week, Grant Reeher speaks with architectural historian Victoria Newhouse, and Michael Gecan with the Industrial Areas Foundation. They have edited and contributed to a new book on the topic, called Housing the Nation: Social Equity, Architecture, and the Future of Affordable Housing.

Last month, a number of political dignitaries, including President Joe Biden, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and Gov. Kathy Hochul, descended upon Syracuse to tout the massive $6.1 billion grant for Micron from the CHIPS and Science Act for its massive megafab project in the Town of Clay. This week, Grant Reeher talks about the labor and economic impacts of the project with Syracuse University Professor Tod Rutherford.

Program transcript:

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. Last month, a host of political dignitaries, including President Biden, Governor Hochul and Senator Schumer, descended upon Syracuse to tout the federal government's $6.1 billion in grants through the Chips Act to Micron, which plans to build a microchip mega complex in Clay and has said it will invest $100 billion in the project. There was, needless to say, a lot of celebration on that day. My guest today is an economic and labor geographer who's been looking at the Micron project. Tod Rutherford is a professor of geography and the environment at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship. Professor Rutherford, welcome to the program.

Tod Rutherford: Thank you very much, Grant. Thanks for having me on.

GR: Well, we're glad you could make it. So, as I just mentioned, you know, there are a variety of government incentives for this Micron project and $6 billion from the Federal Chips Act most recently. But there have been other, goodies and incentives that state and local governments have been putting in as well. Could you just briefly summarize some of those?

TR: Yeah, I mean, the Chips Science Act is $280 billion in total, with $39 billion allocated to, supporting domestic manufacturing. and another $13 billion for research and development and workforce development. But this is, of course, been accompanied by a host of other, kinds of, subsidies and, tax abatements and so forth like this. So, I know that the county, Onondaga County has put in a fairly significant, level as well as New York state. I don't quite have the figures to hand, but, it's a significant amount of money on top of that. Yes.

GR: I think it was in, you know, like almost $300 million by the time it got added up..

TR: Yeah over a 20 year period. Yeah.

GR: Okay, that’s important to note, right? It's not all up front. So, thinking about that and also thinking about the promise of Micron, what people are hoping to see out of it. in one way, I guess I could say we've seen this movie before in this region, and there's even a pun in that sentence, in terms of Syracuse's history on this. But it is nonetheless the case when I talk to people around the town about Micron, a lot of them are very excited. But there are others that say, you know, they'll believe it when they see it, and, so they're a little suspicious of it. Do you think that that it's different this time around with Micron when it comes to helping the area economically?

TR: Well, I think, you know, some degree of healthy skepticism is a good thing to have with respect to this, as you say, there is a history. I don't think, though, we've ever had this kind of level of federal and state commitment, through the Chips Act, through the other kinds of, interventions that are being made. So that would, what I would call wouldn't it doesn't eliminate the possibilities that there are risks with this. Nothing will, but it would seem to me that this would, help the project meet, at least some of its at least minimal goals, if not more. Yes.

GR: Yeah. This is kind of a more political question for you, but at least one of the things that seems different to me anyway is I get the sense that that there are some pretty prominent political players that have put a lot on the line here. I mean, you know, I mentioned Governor Hochul, Schumer, President Biden. So that that to me feels a little different than maybe some of the other economic development projects, you know, if you would.

TR: Yeah. And I think that, you know, post-Covid, there's been a really strong sense in which the kind of globalization model that had been adopted from, like the late 1970s onwards was clearly, problematic in terms of the level of resiliency, dependency on complex overseas, supply chains, all of which were, you know, on, just in time systems. So there was no kind of room for error in them. And we found that, you know, in trying to recover from Covid in the economic sense that, these were really, deeply problematic. And so there has been, I think, both an economic and political argument for reshoring on top of this longer-term concern about the level of investments that's required to sustain a viable manufacturing base in the United States.

GR: Yeah. So the country itself has a stake in this project, I guess, as opposed to, say, the film hub or the mall. So, I was wondering, in addition to the confidence level in the project, actually happening, which is what you've just been speaking to a little bit from an economic standpoint and a governmental tax standpoint, are there reasons to think that that will see the government and therefore, you know, we the people of Onondaga County, I guess we'll get our money back from these upfront investments?

TR: Yeah. I mean, assume let's assume that the number of jobs direct jobs that are, said to be created over this next 20-year period are created. So there's something that we, economic geographers talk about, multiplier effects. and that is, for every direct dollar spent in a sector, how many other, indirect, spendings and jobs can be linked to it. And manufacturing tends to have a fairly high level of multipliers. like, you know, the auto industry in particular, but also, chip manufacturing. So, if we say that we're going to get 9,000 direct jobs as, as is, the forecast in this project with Micron, then we're looking up to, an additional 40,000 more jobs being created. And so, if we're anywhere near that figure, then, then it will pay back just in terms of, the multiple ways of spending, tax revenue and so forth. Yes.

GR: Yeah. Those number of those jobs is really mind-boggling when you think of the size of Syracuse.

TR: Yeah, so assuming that we get anywhere near those jobs, that's that's the big thing. Yeah.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with Syracuse University geography professor Tod Rutherford, and we're discussing the Micron project in central New York. So based on your research, Tod, and the things that you've looked at and thought about, what are your biggest concerns about the economic aspects of this project as you look at it right now?

TR: Well, when we have to remember that this is a very cyclical industry. and so it's it's very difficult to forecast in any one year or even a five-year period, you know, exactly if jobs will be created or if jobs that are created don't simply result in layoffs. So we need to be prepared for thinking about the cyclical nature of the industry, even one that's getting the level of subsidy that it that it's getting. The other thing that I'm somewhat concerned about on the kind of economic front is, you know, who's going to be responsible for training, and, and doing those kinds of things, because it seems to me that the model that the United States has followed for about the last 50 years is increasingly, employers expect, either the public sector through the education or some other body to do the training and so it seems to me that there is this expectation and this is certainly happening in the local economy where, you know, Onondaga College and Syracuse University are stepping up the amount of investment and I'm not necessarily against that. But we do have to ask, you know, whose responsibility is it to make somebody's job ready? Where does the the public sectors, responsibility and the employer's responsibility, begin? And it seems like, for a long time, the kinds of training that used to be done internally, are, are now expected to be done either by the individual coming into the job or, through the public education system. And so if, if Micron and other companies are gaining this level of subsidy, is it not fair to expect that they should also pick up more of the training? And that's not clear to me that that's going.

GR: Yeah, that's an interesting point. And and I wanted to ask you about that, that what I mean, what happens if okay, OCC and SU and you know, maybe LeMoyne and other schools around here create programs, and then Micron says after they encounter these people, well, they're really not quite what we need. We're going to have to hire overseas or we're going to have to pull people over from, Idaho or something. I mean, is that what happens then is that is that just the company's decision or?

TR: Well, I mean, and again, we're not sure, exactly what the agreement says about those aspects, assuming that it's just simply the company's decision to make, then, yes, they could bring in people on visa. They can bring that is non domestic workers or they can bring people in from other locations. So that is a concern in the sense that we're not sure, about what the responsibility of Micron should be in terms of, doing that kind of training. I, you know, my other concern is that, you know, if you build this training infrastructure and the jobs don't appear, what's going to happen? There has been some, reports from Arizona recently that they're doing, they're stepping up these trainings and apprenticeships and other kinds of programs for the chip companies that are coming there. But the hiring hasn't really gone on to nearly the extent, that they expected at this point. It may yet come to fruition. But it seems to me that, you know, the risk is kind of on the public and the individual worker to invest in skills and then hope that that's exactly what the firm wants. and it seems to me that there should be some levers of intervention within any kind of agreement that says, you know, you have some responsibilities. We're not we can't train everybody down to the last, bolt to tighten and, and, and screw to, to screw in. Right. You know, you've got to do something on this, you know.

GR: Yeah. On that, on that issue of the levers, are based on, your experience and your research, are there like best practices for that, that the government or, you know, policy instruments that, that could speak to that?

TR: Yeah. Well, there does seem to be some local community benefit agreements, that that have occurred, in other communities that have, received, companies receiving chip grants. And these tend to be coalitions of local labor unions and, community groups. And they were stipulating things about, minority hires. You know, a union neutrality agreements and other kinds of things. And, you know, there's stipulations within, for example, the Federal Chips Act about not engaging in stock buybacks. whether it is, you know, using the money that you get from the Chips Act from the public to very effectively, just simply inflate your shares by buying, buying stocks. And it's not clear that this is being enforced. So, we have the letter of the law and then we have the fact of the law. And it seems to me that so far there's some discrepancy. and I'm not sure who's making that decision. And it's partly in the sense that there, there's different layers of responsibility here. So the Chips Act is passed by, by the, by executive and by the, by the US government, but it's enforced by the Commerce Department. and the Commerce Department may have other priorities. So it's not clear that that's, that's going on in the same way.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Tod Rutherford. He's a professor in the geography and the environment department at Syracuse University's Maxwell School. And we've been discussing the Micron project here in central New York. So obviously, one of the big things that I have read about this project when it comes to the jobs is, that in addition to creating a lot of jobs and you mentioned that multiplier effect in the first half of the program, which, again, is just an astonishing number when you think of the size of the area. But, many of these jobs that Micron is going to be providing are going to be very high paying relative to the Syracuse, market, the current set of jobs in the area. And I was just wondering what effects will that have? Obviously, it's going to have some huge effects on the labor market here in central New York. And I it's just kind of hard to think that through. What do you see happening in terms of ripple effects or broader impacts to the labor market here?

TR: Well, there's a there's a number of different ways to address this. First of all, we need to look at the fact that the types of jobs that are being created, there's differences in terms of pay and skill level. I mean, obviously, you have people who are, graduate engineers. but then about 60% of the workforce, I believe, will be what we call technical workers. The graduate engineers are going to be earning significantly above the average for the predicted, pay, but the technical staff will probably be earning maybe 50 to 60,000 a year, which, you know, maybe 20 to $25 an hour, give or take more with overtime and other kinds of things. So it's a kind of a skewed or bifurcated, labor market. So, you know, let's assume the number of jobs that are being created are being created at the level of wages and salaries that are predicted. Obviously, this is going to, you know, have these ripple effects. You know, they can be very beneficial in the sense that, you know, workers' wages in the United States and elsewhere have been fairly stagnant for 40 years and including in Syracuse. So they'll be probably actually good thing that wages are going to go up. but, you know, on the other hand, you can have things going on like, what they call poaching, where, a big firm like Micron can, can fulfill its skill needs by just simply taking, a worker from an, already an existing, firm that's done the training and so forth like this, but can't afford to necessarily bump up the pay to the level that Micron is offering. And so then, then you can have skill shortages that can come out of that. And so that becomes a potential issue in terms of how that affects labor market. But you know, especially if you also have more equitable and diverse hiring, we have an opportunity here for, you know, minorities and other groups in the Syracuse region that have not been included in a lot of what we would call good and good paying jobs to, to have access to these jobs. But again, it has to be, there has to be benchmarks set by the community. There either is an advisory board, but these benchmarks have to be have some teeth. And in terms of, you know, maybe holding back certain subsidies if, if, they're not being, fulfilled. So, you know, it's not simply up to Micron. It's also the community should have some levers into this particular, impact. Yes.

GR: Well, it's interesting you mentioned that because one, one lever that I was struck by and it's not doesn't really fit the categories you've mentioned so far exactly. But I watched the announcement. of, of the, of the $6 billion and where again, President Biden, Governor Hochul, Senator Schumer, among other elected officials spoke. And I was struck by how much was being made about unions during all of that. Every single speaker hit that point hard, about the value of unions, the fact that these would be they kept talking about union jobs, and they made it sound like most of the jobs at the new manufacturing plant would be unionized, except I was I was left a little confused. Were they talking about the unionization of the construction of the plant, or were they talking about both the construction of the plant and the operation of the plant? Anyway, what's your what's your sense? I mean, how many of these jobs are going to be unionized? Which ones will be unionized? Do we know?

TR: The only thing that I do know is that they have a, an agreement to only hire, union labor for the construction phase. I don't think there's any other understanding, beyond that. And that's why in other communities there are, especially ones that are getting chips money, but other kinds of infrastructure money. There have been agreements to have a union neutrality that is, if Micron and union wants to form their that they're not going to hold compulsory one-on-one, anti-union meetings, they won't engage in arbitrary firings or intimidation of the workforce. They will agree to be neutral during that process. And certainly, there have been other agreements in New York state between, for example, the Communication Workers of America and General Electric, which is also receiving some infrastructure and green infrastructure money for those kinds of things. So it's it's not clear that there will be necessarily a union at all. The point is, is that if workers wanted to have one, will they be able to make a truly free choice in order to do that.

GR: Well, let me push you a little bit on this, and I kind of pushing you into your values a bit, I suppose. But, you know, Micron is this really high-tech company. Do you think it's do you think it's important that a lot of the jobs there at the plant are unionized, in your view?

TR: Well, I go back to I feel that there needs to be a real choice made by the workers. It's ultimately up to the employees themselves to make that decision. But, you know, my values would be that, there is some important, features of unionization when unions work well, of giving workers, voice in the workplace. Also, unions are positively associated with things like investment and training. They often make firms do more training than they would normally do otherwise. They also reduce, the level of employee turnover. So they build kind of the human capital that comes by through learning, by doing. So, you know, in my view, there's a lot of positives that come out of unionization. And I do believe it would be a positive benefit, to the workers there. But as I said, ultimately it's their choice to make.

GR: If you're just joining us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. And my guest is Syracuse University professor Tod Rutherford. Well, let me stick with the unionization, just just a little bit longer. Do you happen to know whether Micron itself has a particular history so far? Have they been friendly to unions, unfriendly or anything else that you're aware of?

TR: I and I must confess my ignorance here. I don't I don't know what their history has been. You know, traditionally, the semiconductor industry is not particularly friendly, to unions. Okay. Like a lot of the high-tech industry, that slowly changing in some areas. There are some unions and, and associated with high-tech industry more generally. But you know, you know, the one reason that they've offshored over those years, the last 40 years is, is to avoid and in some cases, union labor or paying the levels of wages that are typically associated with not just unions, but, but U.S. standards.

GR: Right. Yeah. No, I wondered about that as well. Well, you mentioned something, at the beginning of our conversation about the investments that educational institutions like OCC, Syracuse University and I believe I read about also some things that we're going to be done at the high school level, even about this, to get the students ready to go into those programs. And so it does seem that these institutions are making some upfront investments now in their curriculums and their programs and, and particularly in the STEM areas. And I, I believe if, if my understanding of what I heard, in a, in a faculty meeting was correct, that I believe that that Syracuse University has actually reallocated some faculty lines in to to reflect this. So they're making some real decisions about this. Just your sense is that is that too risky at this point? it's just necessary at all to do this?

TR: They may be privy to more, they may be privy to more information than I have. So, it is it is something of a risk in the sense that there is no guarantee that the number of jobs that are pledged to be created will be created. And there's no guarantee that those workers will stay in the Syracuse region, whether they're skilled engineers, graduates of Syracuse University or whether they're graduating from OCC. I will say that especially for the technical level, it's very important that if any investment is made in training, that workers are receiving a recognized transferable skill, that is, you know, that it's not just simply to the demands of Micron, but are skills that can be transferred to other firms in the region, you know, hopefully that people can stay in the region, assuming that happens so that it's not just simply a skill that is either linked to Micron or is completely unrecognized elsewhere. So I do believe OCC is trying to make sure that they are and as a public institution, they should be. But it is really important that if you are going to make these investments, you can't guarantee exactly that they're going to get those jobs, but you can at least say they've got a transferable skill that could go to another, you know, firm.

GR: Yeah, that's that's an important point. Well, we've we've got about three minutes left or so, and I wanted to give you a bit of time to discuss this final question. And it it's I wanted to get, you know, you you've looked at a lot of these kinds of things in the past and other industries. And you've looked at Micron now a little bit. From your particular perspective and your perch, what do you think are the most important questions that the people who are listening to this program, you know, the citizens of the region, should have at the front of their minds as they're thinking about this, because, again, some of these numbers are just mind-blowing and I think the, I wouldn't necessarily call it a danger, but maybe it's a danger. But I think the, the, the, the inclination is just to say, oh, we have to have this, you know, this is just these are numbers I've never contemplated before. So. But what do you think people here should be have at the front of their minds as they're processing this in the next few years?

TR: Well, you know, as I said, this is an equal parts opportunity and a risk. I think, people here should be thinking about an opportunity in the sense of developing, also a supply base that is not just simply wedded to Micron, but has possibilities of, developing its own synergies with other firms supply elsewhere. And so that we are not just putting all our eggs in one basket with Micron, that we develop a kind of, a kind of a momentum that, that this kind of investment will generate, but not just simply to say we're just only going to supply to Micron, but to develop, independent capabilities in, within terms of research and development and other kind of capacities that will allow, a kind of cluster to develop here that isn't just dependent on Micron, so that we have a more diversified base. So I think that that's critical. I haven't talked about that so much, but I think that's also very critical.

GR: Just a few seconds left and maybe taking you out of your lane here. But one of the things that I've noticed just since this announcement has been made is, the value of my home has gone up considerably, and a lot of people are excited about that, particularly in my neighborhood. But there's a downside to that is that continues. And that's affordability of housing. And it's already an issue in Syracuse. So just in a just in a couple seconds, is that is that a big problem we ought to be thinking about too?

TR: Yeah. You know, in the short to medium term, you know, housing is is not something that responds very well to to market changes. So the supply isn't going to necessarily match the demand if the demand comes to fruition of course. And so we need to think about, how we're going to have affordable housing, and the public sector and private sector need to make some agreements on that too.

GR: Well, we'll have to see how it all plays out. That was Tod Rutherford. Professor Rutherford, thanks again for taking the time to talk with me. It's been very informative.

TR: Well, you're very welcome, and thanks for having me.

GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.

New York's Adirondack Mountains are a precious resource, and within them is the High Peaks wilderness area. This week, Grant Reeher talks with writer and photographer Jonathan Zaharek, who has written a new guidebook on the High Peaks, called "Hiking the Adirondack 46 High Peaks: A Guide to the Region's High Peaks."

Program transcript:

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. Well, spring has sprung in upstate New York, and a couple days have even felt like summer. On this program, we sometimes like to take breaks from politics and the dim news of the world. So today we're going to discuss the Adirondack Mountains and hiking in them. My guest is Jonathan Zaharek. He's a writer and a photographer and a deep devotee of the mountains. And he's written a new Falcon guidebook to them titled “Hiking the Adirondack 46 High Peaks.” Jonathan, welcome to the program.

Jonathan Zaharek: All right. Thanks for having me.

GR: You bet. Well, we're glad you could be here. And we'll talk about the mountains themselves and the book first. And then we'll get into some of your experiences in the mountains, as well as some broader issues. But first, I just want to say I have, read and used a lot of hiking guides, and I thought this one was particularly well done. So, kudos to you and to the guides for that. So really nice work. So let me just start with something very basic here. What marks the 46 High Peaks as being in a certain group? How do you qualify if you're a peak? How do you get to be a high peak?

JZ: I understand okay. Yeah, right. Yeah. So the 46 High Peaks is kind of synonymous with the other high peaks scattered around the northeastern United States. So all in all, there's 111, peaks that rise 4000ft or higher in elevation and so New York state has 48, two in the Catskills and 46 in the Adirondack Mountains, which would be the 46 High Peaks the most sought after mountains there in New York state.

GR: Nice.

JZ: What classifies them as a high peak is pretty much the day elevation above sea level.

GR: I gotcha. Okay. And, and you mentioned the two that are down the Catskills they're not part of the 46. And so. So. Right. Yeah. Right. Okay. And now I understand that there is it a formal or an informal club of people who have hiked all 46?

JZ: Sure. You know, it's started out certainly more formal. Back when, you know, in the early 1900s, because it was very few people. But since then, the popularity has caused it to be a little bit more, informal. There are many people who don't even, you know, you can be a 46er. That's what it's called when you finish. And you don't have to, say, you know, you don't have to actually submit something that you did. You know, some people don't. But if you wanted to, there is a formal process which is not nearly as extensive now as it used to be.

GR: I see okay. Yeah, I've got a I've got a neighbor of mine up the street who, who's a 46er. And so he's, I see him out training in the winter and he's walking around with a backpack on his back. So, you're a photographer and you're a writer. the pictures in the book, I have to say, they're plentiful, first of all. And they're, absolutely beautiful. Are they yours?

JZ: They are, almost, I I'd say there's maybe only 2 or 3 images in there that aren't mine, that are sourced from other people. But, yeah, most of them are mine. And, I'm honestly, I was very, very excited to be able to contribute the photography more than just the writing as well.

GR: Yeah, they're really, really striking. And I have to say again, I guess I'm going to be your chief salesman today. But the book is the book is worth it for the pictures. Even setting aside the helpful guide. Do you have a separate book or a place where people can see your photography in and of itself?

JZ: Absolutely. I don't have a physical photo book yet. I'm actually working on that. Maybe to release, next year, but as of right now, I do have a full-time website that people can, can search at is, jonathanzphotography.com. And Jonathan is spelled J-O-N-A-T-H-A-N. And, and you can just find my website, my portfolio online to see Adirondack galore of all photography. That's all that's pretty much there. even though I've traveled and photographed other places, the Adirondacks are my bread and butter.

GR: So one question on those pictures, then, now that I know that they're all yours. there are quite a few, from the tops of the mountains at sunset, at sunrise. You even got some pictures at night. Some spectacular pictures of the stars in the night sky. So that means that you're doing a lot of coming down and going up these mountains in the dark, right? Is that right?

JZ: You know, I guess one way to put it, and this might make more sense. I was a photographer first, then a hiker second. And so I always brought my camera with me when I was on these hikes. And some of these hikes are extensive enough that whether you like it or not, you're either going to be on top of sunrise or at sunset, or starting your hikes in the dark or ending in the dark, you know? So it was always nice to have my camera with me and photograph as I went along.

GR: I'm glad you did. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with the writer and photographer Jonathan Zaharek, and we're discussing his new guidebook on the Adirondacks titled “Hiking the Adirondack 46 High Peaks.” So, some questions about the mountains. I have read concerns in recent years. I guess they go back a ways, but, that some of the trail's getting too much foot traffic and too many people on them. Do you have do you have observations about that in your experience on the trails or, or thoughts about that that you could share?

JZ: Sure. Yeah. So I, I'm somewhat new to the area. When you look at the whole spectrum of time that people have been hiking. I would say I've been hiking them for about the last ten years or so. And in that short time frame, I have seen the, the influx of people and how trails have certainly changed where I do remember certain areas being a single track, and then now it's like out of nowhere, it's predominantly rocks and mud in so many areas. And so I, I have and now that I live in that area, I have certainly seen the influx of people and the negative environmental impacts it has had. And I would say and from my stance, the, the influx of people isn't so much the problem as it is the infrastructure that's in place and the people in charge of the infrastructure and how fast or slow, things move when it comes to rules and regulations and limitations, because what you're doing is you're combating pretty much the constitution of the Adirondack Park, which is this forever wild, not building upon the land, which means there are certain things you are limited to when it comes to actual trail building. And then there's underfunding. and then there's just the process that it takes to, to work on things. And so we might have the foot traffic, and it looks like, I mean, it feels like a national park sometimes, but we have state funding, right? We're not a national park. And so it's it's the balance is very, it's very imbalanced. And so we're playing a lot of catch up, and you're really just trying to figure out what to do and that, has certainly come at the expense, the, the expense of some freedom, I guess, with that land.

GR: Yeah. The, I wanted to ask you more specifically about it. there's a large state park in the center of Maine, Baxter State Park. I don't know if you've ever been there or not, but I many years ago, I went there a few times, and it's the largest wilderness area east of the Mississippi. I guess the Adirondack Wilderness area is the second largest. And, what they do is they limit the number of people that can come even into the park, forgetting about a particular trail, any given day. Do you think there's any discussion or movement toward trying to do something like that in the High Peaks?

JZ: Yeah. So the High Peaks Wilderness, is the second. And, obviously there's more wilderness zones within the Adirondack Park. So when you combine all the wilderness, it's I don't even know how many more times bigger than Baxter. But most people are going there. Most people are going to the High Peaks Wilderness. And so when you compare that to Baxter, Baxter, I believe, has, kind of written in it that if you are a resident of Maine, you are given Baxter State Park pretty much to you as a right whereas if you're not, then you pretty much are at the mercy of like first come, first serve. And so I would say that how the Adirondack Constitution, I guess because it was, I believe I think it was started in 1892, when that started, they didn't necessarily have an idea of what it would be like today. And so there's a lot of things built upon that. And so we're kind of at the mercy of New York state first of all, just how they do things, because it's a huge state, the dichotomy of populations. And the way politics are is it's very diverse and it's harder because we have more people coming into our park and Baxter.

GR: Yeah, much more remote.

JZ: Much, much more, I believe I think it was in 2021, New York state, the DEC, approximately 72 million people went to the Adirondack Park or through it in some way. So whether they were driving through it or whatever, and that obviously could be repeating people but there was approximately and I don't know how they calculated it, but around 72 million people, which is actually insane, because Maine, it's way up there. So I feel like it's easier for them to kind of restrict the flow, and the basis of it and how it was formed and how it's regulated is already different. So people aren't going to complain. I respect Baxter, I love Baxter, I've hiked there many times. And, I get it. And it's like, if I can't get a spot, I can't get in. I don't I don't blame them. I, you know, I blame myself. You know, I think here, though, it's different because you're starting with something that's already there and then you're taking it away.

GR: Exactly. Yes. It would be hard. Well, another question I had to ask you about the mountains and the park area too, is I've also read that the park, and the state are both concerned to some extent that the visitors to the Adirondacks are not as diverse as the state itself. You mentioned diversity just a minute ago, and there's been some efforts to do more outreach and change on that. I think there was even an office established, a, a director of, of of basically diversity for the Adirondacks. I’m just curious from your perspective, being out on the trails in the last ten years, have the has the population gotten more diverse, or is it, you know, eight gazillion Jonathan Zaharek’s out there. What are you seeing?

JZ: You know, I think there's a lot of people, like we have a lot of Canadians. Right. And there's I mean, there's the whole northeast in general isn't that diverse of a region of the United States. And so probably like 75% of the people hiking in our area are from within a neighboring state or neighboring cities. So automatically right off the bat, when you bring more people in, you're at the mercy of how diverse the cities and states are just surrounding New York, which already at the end of the day, isn't too much but when it comes to the types of people actually out there, I will say there's been an influx of people who might have a passion for the outdoors, but they might be getting in over their heads about it. And so there's a lot more unprepared people, a lot of people who think, oh, these are just hills, you know, it's New York state. It's, you know, it's not the big deal. I'm going to get into hiking. And it's a great way to get into hiking, because you can't get in the hiking without hiking. I mean, it's a great way to learn mistakes, and it's a great way to learn how to do things right. Because I say, if you can hike in the Adirondacks, you can hike anywhere and I think there's a lot of truth to that, depending on how you actually take it. But I do think there's also a way that the people who live there and the people who are in charge of helping people and education and all these other things, it's we're also, kind of we have our own responsibility everyone has their own responsibility, but everyone's playing a different key, a different part. And it's about making sure that people are properly educated, you know, because we want people to come in. It's free. It's public land. We don't want to restrict access, but sometimes that might be necessary for the, you know, for the, for the, for the safety of it.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with the writer, photographer and hardcore hiker Jonathan Zaharek. And we've been discussing the Adirondack Mountains and his new guidebook titled “Hiking the Adirondack 46 High Peaks.” So Jonathan, you're kind of an unusual guy. Let me just summarize some of your physical accomplishments in the Adirondacks. You've logged over 4000 miles hiking there. You've done 11 complete rounds of the entire 46 peaks, accumulating them all up 11 times. Uou've done three winter rounds of that. You've done something called the Red Line in the summer, and the winter. And you've done a solo Bob Marshall traverse in both the summer and the winter. And you've also hiked 25 peaks in 25 hours. Now, I don't know what some of those things are, but I am convinced from all that that, you're a bit of a fanatic in these mountains. And that's probably a good thing.

JZ: Yeah, it’s very passion-driven.

GR: Yeah, I can see that. So. So let me ask you some questions. Based on your experience on this land. First of all, what is the most difficult of the 46 peaks to hike and why?

JZ: This is a great question, and I wish it was a clear-cut answer, but I'm really I'm really I, I, I'm asked this question quite a bit. I think a lot of it has to do with whether, how remote it is or how technical it can be. What I tell people the final boss of a high peak is, I say Allen and I say Allen Mountain, for multiple reasons. Why? Now, Allen isn't very technical, but it does have technicalities to it. When I say technical, I mean there might be scrambling hands-on. It's not just a dirt trail. I would say Allen Mountain because it is the most remote pretty much from like the access road. Everything from as the crow flies, singular high peak in all of the northeastern United States. So it's almost 20 miles to go, car to car, round trip for this thing. So it's almost ten miles, one way out into the wilderness. And so the first thing that you have to conquer is the distance. You have to have the distance. And then half of the mountain, half of that trail isn't even marked. So you have to have good trail judgment. You have to understand where you're going. You have to be able to read your map and know what turns to take and where to go, because it's not all marked. There's plenty of mud, river crossings. And then once you actually get to the ascent of the mountain, there's slides, rock slides that you have to climb that are sometimes very slimy. And so there's a lot of things that could, you know, a lot of precarious situations if you're not careful. There have been rescues on that mountain, and there are other mountains that are more dangerous weather-wise. But I think Allen is like, you need to if you're going to go out there, go with someone who's been, and don't make that your first high peak or it's going to it might be a really, really bad time for you.

GR: Of all of the 46, what's your personal favorite?

JZ: I, I kind of have two, I think, I'll start with kind of like the better view. I personally think my favorite view of any high peak is Basin Mountain. And, I mean, I just think it has the best panoramic view of all the major peaks, both front and back. And then I would say for sentimentality purposes, it would be Algonquin, which is the second-highest peak. If I could only hike one mountain for the rest of my life, it would probably be Algonquin, because it's the second tallest. It's very short. It's like 3.7 miles. It's very steep, but it's short and sweet right from the main hiking trail hub, and it's spectacular. Any season, any time, any weather.

GR: It's funny, we have something in common because that was the one I would pick as my favorite. Although I don't have the extensive experience of all of them that you do. What is I listed all these things at the when we came in from the break of all these, some of them sort of sound crazy. 25 peaks, 25 hours. But what's the most challenging thing that you've ever done as a hiker in these mountains?

JZ: Yeah. You know, I would say the 25 peaks thing. And I know they get probably a majority of the people listening to this probably might not really grasp grasp it. and I would say, like there was a fundraiser that I was participating in a few years back, and the original goal was to do 25 high peaks in under 24 hours, which would have broken the record at that time but I got a little bit too far behind schedule. But still went over the 25-hour mark straight nonstop. And so that was like pretty much a single day, if you look at it really as a single day, continuously, nonstop. It was around 57 miles, and around 28,000ft of climbing, which is almost the height of Everest. So I Everest, you know, from sea level. but, yeah. So it's like things like that. a lot of it's just passion driven and it's like, I think a lot of people look at the things that they want to accomplish, because again, accomplishments are in, the eye of the beholder, right? Because someone doing one round of the 46, they could take several years. And once they finish it, they like I congratulate them because it's like to them, I understand how big of a deal that is for them. For me, it might be a lot easier now at this point. and that's okay because again, it's in the eye of the beholder in a way. And so I think a lot of it is passion-driven. And so, these challenges are not there are not doing them just for accolades like I do them, because it's like I want to go out there and experience this place. For example, the red line, which you mentioned is every mile of every single trail in all of High Peaks Wilderness, which is well over 300 miles. And by the time you finish that, you have done 6 or 700 miles. You have to go to and from places multiple times to go get all these miscellaneous trails that people don't hike for months at a time, in certain times of the year.

GR: Wow. So was there ever a time and all your experiences where you felt in danger of your life, or that something serious could go wrong?

JZ: Yeah, there were two. I can be brief at these. The first time was actually when I had little to no experience with winter hiking, and I thought I was. It was the classic I thought I was better than I really was, and went and put myself in a situation that probably wasn't the smartest, but, I was pretty much like it was I got first-degree frostbite. It was zero visibility. And I went up to the summit of Algonquin, on the coldest day of one winter with incredible winds. And, it was around 75 below zero with the wind chill. And, it was a very terrifying experience. I couldn't I couldn't even use my goggles. And so that was that's something that I reflect on frequently and then the other thing is I've had, I don't want to go because I could have a whole conversation about this, but I definitely have had some very, terrifying, kind of scary things to happen to me. I guess you could consider a wildlife, by myself out in wilderness areas. kind of out north near that Allen mountain that I mentioned. You know, I've had some very, very unexplained things happen to me, like, you know, rocks being thrown at me and trees getting ripped down, and actually feeling like I'm not even joking, like I was going to die. Like, I actually, like, had my S.O.S. beacon ready to go and everything. I was terrified, big things pacing you in the woods. It's, you know, even though they're probably deer or bear or, but there's just very it's it can be eerie at night in that area sometimes.

GR: Yeah. We've all seen the Blair Witch Project. If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. And my guest is the writer and photographer Jonathan Zaharek. So I wanted to ask you, it's obvious from your writing that you have, some kind of, special spiritual experiences when when you're hiking in the mountains and, and I've had those experiences as well. So I'm very curious to hear more about those kinds of experiences for you. What, you know, what are the special things that, that, that or the, that you're experiencing there? Where do you think they come from? What do they mean? Just tell us a little bit about that.

JZ: Sure. So I think the first thing that I know it is every single time I go out somewhere, most of that, most of the time, I've already been there. And so the more I go out into the same place over and over again, I start to compound my experiences, my memories, the way that I've seen it, just how you might enjoy the same thing with a friend over and over again. You keep doing that same thing and you start recounting memories. So from a personal perspective, just being able to take people to other places or go to the same mountain at a different time, I start compounding all these sentimental memories. Because memories aren't planned, right? Memories are things that we have to go and we do and we don't. We don't expect them. and so there's just a lot of, sentimentality for myself personally, and even that didn't exist prior to me hiking in the Adirondacks. But I would say since then, what I've kind of found even to be more profound and you did say, you know, spiritual and I think I believe in creation, and I see these mountains and I like and I kind of almost feel like I'm on a similar, a similar spectrum with them that the, the, the entity who created the mountains may have also created me. And so I almost in a way, I guess you could say you feel one with them in a way, but I would just say, like, I feel like I can actually build a relationship kind of with, with, I guess you could say God in this way and then the creation and then myself, as well as a creation, with a conscience and but the mountains are also kind of being subdued and immovable, and it's just this idea of nature and just like, I don't know, it's just such a unique if for anyone who experiences the outdoors on any spiritual level, will probably feel this in some way and just the grandeur and it's like, wow, how small am I? And like, how great is this? But it's like they stand and they are not moved by time yet. Even though I might have a conscience, I am still this like the mountains let me be here, you know, and, like I'm at the mercy of them, right? I and I like to say I don't use the word conquered when it comes to these, these mountains, because they aren't something to be conquered. The only thing to be conquered is yourself and the journey, you know? So that's my biggest takeaway and how I experience them.

GR: That's a good way to put it. For me, I was curious if you've had this there there are a couple particular moments that kind of were more powerful than others, and I don't really have a good I don't have a good reason of for myself of explaining why it was then, you know, do you have you had that where you was like like, you know, something you just something is much more powerful than the usual feeling of being in these mountains and that's magnificence?

JZ: Yeah, yeah, I think I think a lot of it comes down to my, my personal relationship, with, with God in this way, because I'll go out a lot of times solo. And what I'll do is I'll just I'll just communicate. I'll just I'll just talk. I'll just I'll just speak. I'll kind of almost be in a prayer like state and just, kind of just in the silence. And a lot of the time that comes to reflection on who, who are, what are the things that I might be going through my trials and tribulations. And a lot of people will say, I'm going to go into the woods to to leave that stuff behind me. But with my mental state going into the woods, I'm bringing the outside world, like with me. Like I can't just ignore it and go on there because I'm going to have these thoughts, I'm going to have these things and it's a great time for me to just reflect. And there are certainly been times where, I'll kind of just stop and get on my knees, like in a beautiful moment, and I'll just like, I'll just, I don't I'll just be overwhelmed, like with like, with fear, but, like, in a good way. and just kind of like this contriteness and just being like, wow, this is like, what an experience. Like, I get to be here and it's like, why am I so concerned? Why am I so worried? and all these other things. So I do think it's a great opportunity for people to, to experience those things and, on a personal level as well and it's a great time to develop those relationships with others, too, who might be like-minded.

GR: Yeah. No, I think you're making a good point there. So, more personal question. You know, I'm I'm looking at you. You're obviously a young guy. How did the, how did you and the guidebook come together? You seem very young to have written a guidebook, so congratulations on that. But. Yeah. So how did this how did this happen?

JZ: Yeah. You know, it's very providential. I, I also think it's another, another way to kind of put it, I mean, there's providence, but there's also like, what, what you put in, like, you'll kind of get that back in a way. And so my efforts in creating my photography, kind of publicly and my, my YouTube channel and putting up videography kind of becoming a, I guess you could say this kind of known entity, I guess, within the region and pretty much just trying to exercise, my passion and hope that it inspires other people had, kind of caught the attention of Falcon guides, and they were seeking an author for a guidebook of this, these mountains, which they have yet to do. And so I got an email from them one day, basically asking if there was something that I would consider. So they came to me about it, and I was 24 at the time. I'm 27 now. And, they were looking for someone who was younger, who had a good modern perspective on the mountains, who were in them all the time. And you had photography and you had a social, personal engagement. And, I mean, I fit that bill. And I thought about it, and I was like this to me, this is a way that I can utilize my love and passion for these mountains, even though I was not born and raised in them. I'm not a, you know, a legitimate local by any means, and I'm not claiming to be, but I still feel that they're giving me a voice and I felt confident enough that I would be able to do it justice because I've been able to develop relationships with these people who have been there for generations, and I've been able to get the, the, the lens and the perspective of both worlds. And, you know, I had a lot of people help me in this writing with like, hey, what do you think of this? You know, I got a lot of input from people who I respect, and I didn't just want to throw my own words out there and just, you know, you're like, I wanted to make sure that it was done well. And it being a first edition, like, I didn't write, I haven't written anything before this. And so it was certainly, a feat.

GR: Well, it first of all, your passion comes through in the book loud and clear, and it's very well done. So you should feel very good about it. We only got about 30 seconds left. I got one last question for you. So you got a sort of like the lightning round. But for the newbies listening who now have had their appetite whetted, what's the most important single piece of advice you would tell them?

JZ: Enjoy the journey. It will be harder than you probably think, but make sure you prepare, do your research, pick up one of my guidebooks and, just enjoy it, you know, enjoy it.

GR: Great. That was Jonathan Zaharek. And again, his new book, which really is splendid, is titled “Hiking the Adirondack 46 High Peaks.” Jonathan, it's been a pleasure talking to you and makes me feel good about the park and the future of it. So thanks again for taking the time to talk with me.

JZ: Yeah, no, thank you.

GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media conversations in the public interest.