Introducing Sam in the City - A Broken Potholes Special
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Hi folks, Sam Stone with Broken Potholes here. Today we are launching a new Broken Potholes special. Calling it Sam in the City. Yeah, okay, if you guys got better ideas for a name, hit me with it. You know, one of the reasons I got into podcasting, got into radio, was because I've spent the last five years as the Chief of Staff to probably the most conservative city council member in any big city in the country, Councilman Sal Vecchio of the City of Phoenix.

And in that role, I got a look deep inside city government and was horrified. I mean, totally horrified at what I've seen because it is a disaster. It's far worse than most people think. And the reason is really simple. We have ceded control of our major cities.

You take a look at the top 20 cities in the country, there's almost no Republicans left in office in those cities. No one's talking about it. No one's talking about conservative solutions to inner city problems. No one is actually going after the voters in these cities and presenting an alternative.

And so I'm really hoping that this part, this little podcast edition that we're going to be doing can hopefully inspire some folks. Maybe some of you out there who are seeing this, pass this around to some of your friends who might be interested in running for some of these seats, who might step up and get involved in local government. Because if we do, as conservatives, if we do that, we're one, we're going to change the environment in our big cities dramatically. I mean, dramatically. The reason, first,

Phoenix has not become LA or San Francisco, New York, Baltimore, any of these other places that have just gone to hell. The reason it hasn't become those, I always say, is two votes in one voice. We have two strong conservatives. One of them doesn't say a whole lot, but he votes the right way. The other one, Sal DeCiccio, will throw a fit. And sometimes that's what you have to do if you're going to fight back.

So today we're going to talk about a couple of things around the country that are happening in local municipalities that probably you haven't heard of. And I'm going to relate some of that back to the city of Phoenix to my own experiences, because I really want to give you some understanding of how city government works. I had no idea. I mean, I showed up there and your first week, you really are a fish out of water and it takes a few years really to learn what you're doing.

And there aren't many people on the conservative side who've done that. So hopefully some of the insights I developed over those years will help you out. And, you know, if you get involved in your local government, they do, and I guarantee they do, what Phoenix does, which is throw 500 to 1,000 pages worth of an agenda for next week that you're voting on, on you on Thursday night or Friday. And you're voting on it the following Wednesday.

you're probably gonna be lost unless you really know what's up. So hopefully this will help some folks navigate some of that and get involved in some of these issues. The first thing on my agenda, I love trains. No, I don't. I mean, I do. I'm a geek, so I do like trains.

But light rail is a disaster, folks. It is a nightmare. It works great in a city like New York City or Boston where you have literally 10 times the density that we have here in Phoenix. But when you're talking about Western and Midwestern cities, it does not work at all. Those Eastern cities were all built around the horse and buggy. I mean, literally designed to allow people to get around by horse and buggy. And so trains, the density that they have, trains work. Out here in the West, our cities are designed for cars.

And this push to get us into trains is simply spending a huge amount of money. The results are crap. They're pretty much uniformly crap. And you continue to have costs that these things bear. So new article up in the Wall Street Journal, St. Louis streetcar may get new life as U.S. threatens to claw back grants.

What's that all about? Well, pretty simple. St. Louis took a bunch of money from the feds, about $37.5 million, to build a streetcar that runs 2.5 miles through their city. It opened in 2018, and they closed it. They're claiming, in some articles I've seen, they're claiming it was closed because of the pandemic, but here's the truth. It closed in late 2019 before the pandemic hit. In the year that it was open, the St. Louis streetcar generated a total of

of $32,000 in fares. Yeah, that's right, $32,000. A project that cost over $100 million to build and they shut it down in late 2019 for mechanical issues because they couldn't even build it correctly.

And by the way, this goes on all over the country in all of our cities. Because we do not hold contractors accountable, why don't we hold contractors accountable? Well, one of the reasons is because contractors donate a lot of money to city candidates. And those candidates don't want to hold them accountable because they're afraid they're going to get less money. Now, I'm running for the city of Phoenix right now to replace my boss who's turned out.

And I don't care. I'm running for you guys. I'm running for the citizens of Phoenix. So I'm just going to throw this out there. This is the kind of insider dealing that we see all the time. So now what happens? St. Louis shuts down this streetcar and you really should go to the Wall Street Journal and read this. I hope you do. They shut down their streetcar and the federal government comes and says, we're going to sue you and take back the $37.5 million we gave you if you don't continue to run this streetcar.

Now, St. Louis does not have $37.5 million to hand back to them now. That's a result of bad management. But leaving that aside, there's things to lose in a bundle. So the federal government is essentially telling them, "Hey, we gave you money, so you've got to keep losing money for years and years to come, or you're going to have to pay us money you don't have." Right. This is the kind of insanity that explains why our taxes go up every year. If you're in the city of Phoenix, for example,

Phoenix has raised your taxes, last time I looked it was something like 11 out of the last 13 years that they've raised your taxes. And pretty much every city in the country is the same. And all of our taxes, whether it's sales tax, property tax, licensing fees, these things are designed to scale. So in other words, as your population grows, and Phoenix has, we've added 50% to our population since about 2008.

So you can see how fast the city is growing. We have record revenues, more than we've ever had before. And yet the people at the city are always screaming broke. And this is a lot of the reason why folks wasted money like this.

And so if you want your city to stop digging into your wallet and start maybe getting that homeless person who is driving everyone crazy and threatening people in the intersection out of the intersection in a treatment, you're going to have to get them to stop blowing cash. On to our next story. And this one comes from a source I highly, highly recommend to all of you.

If you are not, there's very little city news out there that you can access that will really show you what's going on. But there is a new project called City Journal. It's city-journal.org. I highly encourage you to go there. Their feature piece right now is about Marilyn Mosby in Baltimore, Maryland. Oh, Marilyn. She is the state's attorney, and she's got a bit of a crime problem. Actually, she's got two crime problems.

The first one is that her city, thanks to her lax policies on enforcement, the kind of thing we've been hearing about all across the country where they refuse to jail people and take people to jail for any range of crimes as long as they can be considered oppressed in some way, shape, or form. By the way, most of those folks are oppressing themselves.

If they're oppressed, they won't do anything about it. And so what have we seen in Baltimore? Well, what we have seen is murders go up as high as they have ever been back to the bad old crack days of the 90s. That's where we're at. And almost all of those victims, by the way, are black. About half of them are young black males.

So Dick tells you this is not a problem that is tearing up white wealthy communities as much as it is low-income poor and minority communities. And yet these people who claim to be the champions of the poor like Marilyn Mosby are the ones who are inflicting this suffering on them because they failed to enforce the law. When Mosby's problems go further, she brings the law herself. She's going to be indicted. She may go to jail.

Why? Well, she cheated on all sorts of tax forms, and that was after she spent 144 of her first 365 days in office traveling the world, all sorts of lovely places that have nothing to do with city government, traveling the world on donor dimes. Yeah, a bunch of special interest groups and donors sent her around the world for half, basically half, of her first year in office.

And while she was doing that, she decided to break a bunch of laws and she may now be facing jail time. I hope she does.

I hope if these charges are true, she goes to jail for a long time. But frankly, she should go to jail for a long time for her neglect of the law and her putting citizens in harm's way and getting them killed. Frankly, I think that's a lot more significant than the fact that she snuck a loan out of a bank by claiming she was a victim of a COVID layoff while she was still collecting her $248,000 a year salary as the prosecutor.

Yeah, no, government employees didn't lose a dime in COVID, folks. Didn't happen anywhere. But this brings up another problem, and this is something I really saw come in, and when frankly we didn't know that this was going to be as big an issue as it is, a lot of cities had dealt with the public corruption years ago, back when the FBI cared about crime instead of trying to prosecute parents who are upset with their school board for allowing their daughter to be raped by a transgender teenager.

We stopped this out. It's come back. And I'm going to give you some examples. The public corruption in this country has gone rampant since COVID started. COVID just turned into a giant grab bag of cash. And these people are running around handing out money to their friends and associates and political allies and getting payoffs and kickbacks. And it is absolutely a disaster for this country going forward. And I'm going to just give you a couple of examples from right here in Phoenix, California.

of stuff that I saw happen personally. So our illustrious and totally beloved and worshiped by the local news media, Mayor Kate Gallego in the city of Phoenix recently hired the city's first heat mitigation officer.

Well, that sounds like a good idea. And actually, it probably is a really good idea to mitigate heat. In fact, it is a good idea to mitigate heat. We're in Phoenix, Arizona. We have a ton of pavement. If you moved here 20, 30 years ago, one of the nice things about the desert was when the sun went down, so the temperatures. Now we have so much pavement that doesn't happen. You wake up at 6 a.m., it's still 100 degrees. So we do need to take steps. And fortunately, the city of Phoenix was taking steps. There's really only a handful of things you can do.

One, you can treat your roads, rooftops, and that sort of thing with reflective materials instead of blacktop. And we're doing that. Two, you can plant more trees that provide shade off the ground. And three, you can build shade structures with reflective surfaces on the top. And that's really it. There's not a whole lot else you can do to mitigate heat. But those measures work. And Phoenix was already doing them. Then we went and hired a heat mitigation officer who is a personal friend of our mayor.

And we're paying him $178,000 a year salary for this gentleman to be in this role. Now, every time you hear a government salary, by the way, I want you to do something in your head. I want you to double it. Double it. Because that is the actual cost to you, the taxpayer. When someone says they're making $150,000 for the government, they're costing you $300,000. That's how generous the benefits have gotten them.

So this gentleman comes in, he's collecting over $300,000 in salary and benefits, and there's no actual extra money for the heat mitigation. So what is happening? Well, we're actually doing less heat mitigation. That's right. This guy is going to be paid to come oversee programs that already exist and we're working entirely fine without him. And he is going to take a bunch of the money that would go to those programs and be used for those purposes.

Does that make any sense to any of you? Does that make any sense to anybody? I mean, the programs were already working. Now you got to hire some guy? Oh, by the way, you don't have to just hire him. You're going to have to hire staff for him. Because a high-ranking government official can't exist without staff. Then they might actually have to do work themselves. They don't like doing that. And that's the problem. But here's another one. The mayor went out when COVID hit and hired another of her personal friends.

for over $300,000 per year. I think there's actually like $420,000 the first year when you add up all the contracts to be our COVID specialist medical advisor. But here's the problem. The person she hired has a PhD and it's not in medicine. Yeah, that's right. She hired someone who isn't a doctor, who has never treated a patient, isn't qualified to treat a patient, doesn't know anything about treating patients.

who has a PhD in biodefense, which is a really good thing if you want to go work for the Department of Defense. But it's a really bad thing if you're advising city workers and city residents on their health. Because for one thing, the person doesn't know what they're talking about. For two, you never meet one of those people who's not a germaphobe. You will never meet one of those who's not a germaphobe. That's just a fact of life, folks.

And so our response has been overly heavy handed and this person basically took the CDC guidelines and added a little bit to them each way through the process and got paid over $400,000 in. That's what we're talking about. And that's corruption.

It's absolute, unquestioned, unmitigated corruption. And I guarantee you this is going on in your city as well. The culture of corruption, as this article talks about, has seeped into politics across this country once again. And the FBI, which was always the organization responsible for chasing it, has become, in its leadership, totally woke. We're going to get to wokeness here a little bit, critical race theory, because that's what's permeating government and driving a lot of this decision-making.

So next, that leads us to our next article, also from City Journal, because they're doing really good work. There's another site out there called City Lab by Bloomberg that has a lot of municipal news, but you have to understand City Lab is massively, massively liberal. They're just going to echo whatever that line is, and they don't care.

So if you go on there today, there's lots of, there's a giant headline piece on CityLab about Africa hiring its first heat mitigation officer and the challenges they face.

There's nothing on there about crime. There's nothing on there about homelessness. There's nothing on there about education. There's nothing on there about streets. I mean, really, anything on there about transportation is going to be about bike lanes, reducing speed limits and trains. That's all they talk about. It is entirely politicized. But we will go there from time to time to talk about some pieces. And you can go there. You want to check that out.

But this next piece I was reading, it's by Rafael A. Rafael, I really apologize. I am known for mangling everybody's last name, and it doesn't have to do with you being Hispanic. It has to do with you having a last name. My parents, you know, my name is Sam Stone, and thank God, because I would mangle my own last name if it was more complicated. But in the meantime, Rafael A. Manuel. Manuel? I don't know.

Has a great piece in here, soft on crime. A Biden administration policy of weak policing and lax prosecution would be a disaster for the nation's cities. Well, guess what? This is the policies of George Soros and all the DAs that he has put into office across the country, including people like George Gascon in San Francisco, including...

You know, Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, New York, all these cities, the New York DA who just came out and said he won't prosecute basically any crimes that involve minorities in Manhattan. He's a Soros guy. They have paid to put all these people in office and they're tearing cities apart.

I don't know what Soros and his Open Society Foundation are up to. I mean, you can go and talk about all the conspiracy theories. I don't have proof of them, so I'm certainly not going to go into anything like that. The only thing I do have proof of is these policies, these people he's putting into office are getting people killed. They're getting people killed and they don't care. So you have to ask yourself what the motivation for something like that is.

And as this piece talks about criminal justice in America is at a crossroads. And I'm going to quote from it a little bit. The ongoing debate about racial justice and policing incarceration prosecution became a national fixation following the 2020 May 2020 death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis. And it's remained a flashpoint in our politics. Floyd was murdered.

I mean, he was killed by those cops. There's no question about that. That does happen. And it is important to hold police accountable when those things happen. But you're going to have a real hard time making me feel bad for the guy because he's a scumbag. I'm sorry. That's the truth. I'm never going to feel terribly sorry for scumbags.

And I don't think most people do either. And these soft on crime policies are leading to murder rates across this country, spiking up all over the place. In other words, they're getting innocent people killed. They're getting children and women killed. You have numerous examples in New York. You have the mayor of New York, an ex-cop saying he is afraid to ride the subway and go on the New York Post and see that headline. He is afraid to ride the subway in his own city. That's what we're talking about, folks.

Police have to be allowed to do their jobs. This soft on crime policy must go away. The only way we're going to restore our cities is go back to the broken windows. I was about to say broken potholes. You know how I like to trip over my tongue in these things. But the fact is, broken windows policing works. It's not always the easiest thing for citizens. It's a little bit invasive. It makes me a little uncomfortable in certain ways. But the fact of the matter is, is that it works.

And what we're seeing now here in Phoenix, we've had a 64% increase in murders. 64%. We are approaching the worst murder rates we've ever had. We're solving almost none of them. We are down here in Phoenix at one point in 2007, 2008, we had about 3,400 uniformed officers. We are down to about 2,600, I think, and maybe down under 2,500 now. And our city has grown 50% since that time.

So the fact of the matter is our police are doing nothing but running from one 911 call to another. Everything is out of control. And this is the result when you have this soft on crime anti-police approach.

And Raphael Magwell's piece here really does a nice job of outlining it. I highly encourage you all to check that one out as well. I think you're really going to enjoy this read. And I really urge you to follow City Journal because they are doing some great work right now. Raphael is a senior fellow deputy director of legal policy at the Manhattan Institute. So this is a guy who knows what he's talking about. Okay. And, you know, at the end of the day,

I will take over aggressive policing that hassles me or my friends from time to time, even if I don't like it. I will take that over people being killed unnecessarily, innocent people dying. That should be a line that nobody is willing to cross.

It really should. We should not accept those deaths. And yet Democrat and progressive officials across the country not only accept them, they're essentially cheering them on by continuing to promote these policies. And that leads us to another piece. And you may have been familiar with this guy's work in other areas, but Christopher Rufo.

who really brought out the issues with critical race theory, CRT, and education. And he really became a flashpoint. The union guys really don't like him because he brought out what was happening. And first, if you remember, all of our schools across the country and school officials, Democrats, went running around saying, hey, there is no such thing as CRT. This is just made up.

Well, but then people started actually pulling out all the curriculum that they have infiltrated into our schools and pointing out that it's specifically even branded as critical race theory material. And it gets really hard to say that it doesn't exist. So now they're saying, oh, you don't understand it. No, no, I understand it very, very well. Critical race theory is racist. It is bigotry codified. And it is infesting, as Rufo notes in this piece, also, sitting here,

Folks, City Journal, I'm going to owe you a lot of credits on this thing. Sorry. But as he notes, it's not just education. It's infiltrating the corporate world. You probably just saw this thing come out about the M&M characters being rebranded to be more inclusive. Folks, obviously, take one look at me. I think you know I love M&Ms. I will eat the shit out of an M&M. I don't care what their friggin' characters are on TV. Nobody else does either. This is just stupidity.

This is stupidity. You're better off just getting rid of these things. But all across the corporate world, you see these people, one after another, are lining up to bow down at the altar of critical race theory and critical theory, and it is insane. So here's a couple of examples that Rufo cites. AT&T's new racial re-education program promotes the idea that racism is a uniquely white trait.

That one's under white people. You are the problem. Walmart. Walmart versus whiteness. The company's new training program tells hourly employees that they are guilty of internalized racial superiority. Folks, let's be honest. I, if you are working at Walmart,

I honor you. You have the toughest damn job. One of the toughest jobs in America. Mike Rowe ought to be doing a dirty job special on y'all because I've been there. I've seen it. It's dirty. It's nasty. That place is a zoo and you survive it. You're the zookeepers. And now you're

The management is telling you that you have to be sat down and told how you're guilty of internalized racial superiority just because of the color of your skin. You need to tell the corporate masters to go piss up a rope. They don't have anyone else to hire for your job right now. And that's one of the things I'm about to get to here, folks. There's a lot more examples of this. But you have the power, okay? Vax mandates.

Critical race theory. All of this stuff that you do not want. I mean, look, I got vaccinated, but I understand why people don't want to be. And I understand why people want the choice for themselves and don't want to be forced into it. And frankly, I was requested, bullied, badgered, and hassled numerous times at the City of Phoenix over the years to send me and the staff working under me to critical race theory-based trainings.

And you know what I told them? I told them to go pound sand. They actually offered up incentives like cash bonuses and prizes and all this crap if you intended these garbage things. And I told them to go pound sand. And go ahead, folks, tell them to go pound sand and tell them you want to raise. No, I'm not kidding. Tell them you want to raise and tell them to go pound sand with all this stuff because they need you more than you need them. And that is a fact.

Next one, True Privilege. CVS launches a program that forces hourly employees to discuss their privilege. Again, if you're paying me hourly to work somewhere, I'm doing my job and I am not getting roped into any of this garbage, employees need to revolt. Don't be evil. The Google employee program claims America is a system of white supremacy and that all Americans are raised to be racist.

Verizon teaches employees that America is fundamentally racist and promotes defunding the police. Bank of America teaches that the United States is a system of white supremacy and encourages employees to become, quote, woke at work. Amex teaches employees that capitalism is fundamentally racist

Really, American Express? You fucking exist only because of capitalism, you giant assholes. You are built on capitalism. Your entire existence is because of the capitalist system. And somehow you're asking us to tear down the capitalist system and that it's fundamentally racist. And then you ask people to deconstruct their racial and sexual identities.

The deconstruction you're looking for is to get told to get the hell out of here. I'm going to deconstruct it all the way down for you. Bye. Raytheon. Yeah, they're here in Arizona. Raytheon adopts critical race theories and tells employees to acknowledge their privilege. Lockheed, the nation's largest defense contractor, sends key executives on a mission to deconstruct their white male privilege. I wonder if they were being served by minorities at the pop show tell they were at when they were on this mission.

And Disney mounts an internal campaign against white privileges and organizes racially segregated affinity groups. Folks, if your racial training includes segregating people by race, you're being taught racism.

Now here's the problem. I know this is all a corporate world and we're talking about local politics, but I saw this infest the city of Phoenix, as I said. As I know, I'm working with a gubernatorial candidate here in Arizona. I've talked to people in the county and all the other cities. And frankly, these programs are infesting all of your government at every level. Your government employees are all being put through this. In fact, they're spending a huge amount of money, which is going into the bank accounts of people who promote this ideology of hate and is making them more powerful people.

And it needs to stop. You need to be in there. Every time you see any sort of HR program, go look for any...

When they hand out that thousand pages on Thursday night and you have time to read it before Friday morning and send an email to someone at your local city asking for an explanation of what it is, the first email you should send is to their HR department to ask for the curriculum text of whatever they're about to pass. Because I guarantee you, you will be the only one who reads it. No, no, that's the other secret. With two...

Republicans on an eight-member council, plus the mayor, so you have nine votes. You have two Republicans basically in an independent hearing. We've won an awful lot of battles. Why? Yeah, because I was actually the only person on that floor for years who read those things and then asked the questions about them. And I know that sounds egotistical, but it's a fact. Because I spent a lot of time explaining shit to other chiefs of staff, so I know how little people pay attention to this stuff.

Government is run by the bureaucrats, and that's the problem. The control systems, the oversight, the political systems that are over them are now victims of corruption. And once they're corrupted, they're just going to go along, you know, wherever the money goes, that's where they're going to go. And that's what you're seeing.

And so we're seeing CRT in Phoenix government. We're seeing it in our police department. They are being forced through critical race theory training. City of Phoenix employees, new hires are being forced through critical race theory training. All these folks are being taught this stuff and it has to go. Folks, that's about it for today. We're going to be back. I haven't decided if we're going to be back tomorrow. We're kind of playing with this. We're going to see if people like it.

We want to add some more content. If you like our podcast, please share it with your friends. Send them an email. Get them signed up. We're on Substack, Spotify, all the good stuff. Apple Podcasts. Get our show there and contact us. You can contact us through Twitter. You can contact us through email. Our website is brokenpotholes.vote. And I want to thank our sponsor, .vote, for their continued support.

They have made this podcast possible. So thank you. DotVote is a great place to go to get a secured website in your own name. Do that before someone else takes your name. Ask Ted Cruz what happens when you let that occur. It's bad. It's bad. You don't want your name. In fact, don't ask Ted. Just take my word for it because you don't want to throw up, Ted.

So folks, that's about it. I really thank you for tuning in. Please get, let's, uh, you can follow me on Twitter at Sam Nepal. I'm on Facebook. If you just look up Sam Stone in Arizona, Sam Stone Phoenix, and you see my round, smiling, uh, bearded double chin face, that will be the one to click on. And I am always willing to respond to questions, uh,

Yeah, unless it's from cam girls and spammers. But other than that, I do respond to those things. So please get on there. Let me know what kind of content you have. And I'm going to throw out one thing. If you are interested in running for city government anywhere in this country and you want to have a phone conversation, you want to talk about it, I will be happy to talk about it. If there's an issue that's coming up in your local city and you don't understand what it means, contact me through one of these forums. I will absolutely get on the phone with you and walk you through it.

This is really important stuff. Most of the things that are going to affect your life aren't coming from the federal government. They're coming from your local government or they're coming through your local government. And until conservatives take on this challenge and start really accepting the idea that we have to get back in and test these inner cities, we are not going to make any progress whatsoever. And that horn has good timing means we're out of here. Thank you.

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