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Am I right?

Hey, Wendy Weise is with us, one of the all-time greats, the media veteran herself, one of our founders, Bill McClellan from the St.

Louis Post-Dispatch, from St.

Louis Magazine, the 314 podcast, her daily newsletter, NPR in St.

Louis, and on and on and on, Sarah Fenske, and we welcome also another king of all media, Mr.

Alvin Reid, Alvin Reed, from the St.

Louis American and Beyond.

All right, hey, Bill, thank you for not laughing.

I want to ask you about a real tough audit of the St.

Louis public schools by the state auditor, Scott Fitzpatrick, who last week gave the schools in St.

Louis the lowest rating possible, a poor rating.

After two years of auditing the schools, he found that officials didn't sell property following state law.

They didn't run tornado drills.

The buses weren't operating properly, and they didn't do enough about that.

They went to conventions that were paid for by the taxpayers, and they didn't follow rules there either, a lot of problems.

And he suggested it's a possibility that the schools in St.

Louis will be taken over by the state.

Good idea?

No, no, it's not.

We've tried it before.

I mean, the schools have been a mess for many, many years, and we've tried lots of things.

There was a big business firm.

Then we decided the state took over.

And these things, if they helped at all, they helped at the margins.

And many of the problems that Mr.

Fitzpatrick talked about, the new board is hopefully addressing.

You know, we had a terrible board a couple years ago with Tony Cousins and Matt Davis, and they hired Dr.

Scarlett and then Dr.

Burrishade, and they went to all sorts of conventions.

But it isn't like the voters reelected them.

Tony Cousins ran and wasn't reelected, and Mr.

Davis read the room and didn't run for reelection.

So might as well give the new board a chance.

You know, the state takeover didn't work last time.

And the board that was appointed by the governor that now runs the police department, I mean, how's that working out?

You know, I've said that I just don't think the state has the city's best interest at heart, and I think the same would be with schools.

I think this would be turned into, hmm, mysteriously, a lot of charter school, voucher backers would have a lot more say in the city school district.

And also the problems that you listed are for real problems and need to be addressed.

I don't know about any other school district in the state, but if SLPS was not one of the lowest achieving, you know, academically, then some of this other stuff you might just say, like, you need to clean this up.

But it really should be about our kids learning or not.

And that's, I mean, when you think of the laundry list that you just ran down, Charlie, this is as serious as it gets.

He says they're on a path to bankruptcy by 2031.

Not to interrupt you, but he said that, like, two years ago.

Last year.

But now he's got the audit to back him up, and they're $41 million in debt.

And that, to me, it still seems like we're kicking the can down the road.

It's kids.

They did not take advantage of what happened with those school buses.

They could have apparently sued for they didn't pursue that.

That was a $3.1 million loss.

So I just, I think he's, I do think he's serious.

And he was talking about putting the onus on the mayor's office.

And she's got enough going on right now.

It's not really his decision.

No, I understand.

And the kids are not performing.

And so the level of attainment is called provisionally accredited.

And if they lose accreditation, then the state's over.

These problems have been going on for so many years.

It's why my wife and I left the city.

It's why people have left the city for decades.

And I think it's a cultural problem more than we just need a new board by the state.

And I like Myra Berry.

I like Myra Berry.

Yeah, we do.

But she's the fourth superintendent in four years.

That's not her fault.

She's seen different.

Don't you remember years ago when we had a school board member who poured an orange juice on top of somebody else?

Oh, yeah.

That's always bad.

That's why I hired Bill Haas once to be on the school board.

You know, the voters aren't always doing the right thing either.

Here's the thing.

I mean, you know, the voters have gotten many things wrong in these instances.

But right now we have a board that seems to be sincerely grappling with these issues.

It feels like this audit would have been very helpful two years ago.

And I get that, of course, it takes time to audit.

You've got to pull the records and all this stuff.

But where we were two years ago was the situation where state officials could have really come in and said, like, look, you guys got to get this straight.

They are already dealing with this, doing this, and getting rid of these people on their own.

But three members of the existing seven-person board are from the administration.

Yes, and several of them that were frequently in opposition to what was happening.

To Tony Cousins and Matt Davis.

Let me say something that's really wrong with the system.

There are 64 or 68 schools in the St.

Louis Public Schools.

So let's say you do have seven members of the board.

There's no way they can oversee things.

If they don't have a literacy program, how can a person run a seven-person board?

What is a state board going to do?

Hold it, Charlie.

They didn't have a literacy program.

In fact, a literacy program was started by Scarlett, who is now gone.

But that was one of the few things that she actually started while she was here that is a positive.

It's too big a task.

68 schools for 12,000 students and seven members of the board.

Cleveland just reduced its schools from 90 to 60.

And they have 33,000 kids in that school system.

And that needs to happen.

But it's impossible to think that Governor Kehoe getting some of his friends who own local pubs to run this thing.

We don't know that, but we don't know that.

I mean, we don't know that that's the way it's going to happen.

They could be censured.

They could be.

I mean, all right.

All right.

But, Alvin, you mentioned the police board.

Crime is down.

And it had been down.

And it's even lower.

It's down all over the country, Charlie.

There's a whole lot of reasons that it isn't that the governor took over the police department.

And Chief Tracy had an op-ed piece in your paper this week.

Chief Tracy was hired by Tashara Jones.

He argued against a state takeover.

So, I mean, I wouldn't put too much credence to that.

Yeah, that commentary had like 75 holes in it.

Misspoken history.

Well, you can rebut it in the same way.

You know what I wonder?

I do wonder this.

I'll put it out there.

I wonder if he applied for the open job in Chicago because I wouldn't be surprised if he did.

It's possible.

I don't know.

I don't know either.

We're going to go to another topic with you in just a moment.

But we want to thank Deanna Nash, a great local artist, for sharing her artwork with us this week.

We have a rotating art program here on the set of 9PBS.

And this month we thank Ms.

Nash.

And you can learn more at DeannaNash.com.

Alvin MSD, which oversees the sewers in the city and the county, is now threatening to shut off sewer service to those delinquent accounts.

And apparently, this is amazing, there's $100 million in arrears that large companies and maybe residents have not paid MSD.

I looked up Houston.

You know, they've got 2 million people in Houston, 2.5 million in the city.

They have a $15 million problem.

Ours is $100 million.

First of all, I thought when you say Houston, I thought you were going to say I looked you up.

No, I was going to say I have the automatic billing.

I've been paying.

So let me ask you this.

You know that shutting off a sewer is going to cause some serious health problems.

Should businesses see their sewer being turned off if they don't pay the bill?

Well, one of the things that's out there that I guess maybe a lot of people don't realize is that businesses get a lot more leeway as far as the electricity and MSD than residential does.

Because, you know, a municipality or somebody, they don't want to see their business not open because they haven't paid the MSD bill.

Now, with that being said, there's no way that $100 million should be out there floating around.

But I really, I don't think, I mean, I'm not telling people to call MSD's bluff, but I can't see MSD shutting off people's sanitation.

I think that would be so, so terrific for our national profile.

I've always wanted to be Elizabethan medieval England with a sewer system that's not working.

But Houston and Dallas do shut them off.

But you know what?

I am with MSD on this.

I am actually with MSD on this.

Everybody else, whether it's the cable company, satellite radio, everybody is getting very real about the fact that, okay, we've given you guys from all these different generations a lot of time to catch up to the way it's going to be.

But if you want to play, you have to pay.

And that goes for the MSD.

I'm sorry, that goes for everything, including the MSD.

I find this very convincing, and I think it's like, you know, as a parent, if you keep threatening your kids, oh, don't do that again or I'll take away your privileges, your kid's just like, this person has no teeth.

You need to just like cement out two businesses' sewer systems, and everybody's going to be like, oh, man, I got a baby.

They also said they will have to start condemning buildings if they don't have sewer service.

So that's basically like, okay, you're moving out.

Well, if you cut the sewer system, next thing you know, they're going to start enforcing temporary tags.

Believe it when I say it.

I think you do.

And she's right.

I think you do have to pretty much cement the thing up to stop it like that, or else you would have to just turn the water off.

Now then, you know, like what is this?

MSD go to the city water and say you have to cut their water out?

They don't say that's a possibility.

It's very complicated.

Just the fact that you have those numbers that are people in arrears, businesses in arrears, that's not acceptable.

I mean, we would be screaming if other businesses were being treated like this, you know, and just, oh, don't worry about it.

It's MSD, so who cares?

I was shocked.

I thought that it was all part of the cost of doing business, and that businesses didn't fall way behind on all their bills unless they were headed toward bankruptcy.

Yeah, I bet you all the wrong businesses will be on that list of having to pay their bills.

I think the mayor's father was behind on his sewer bills, was he not?

The former mayor.

I have no idea.

The former mayor, that's correct.

Sarah, I want to ask you about an August 12th meeting of the city's planning commission, and they were debating, like everybody else in the country, data centers.

And at one point, Don Rowe, an administrator in city hall, said, hey, please reconsider all your positions.

Just got a text from an elected official who wants you to reconsider.

And people were kind of upset.

They go, what elected official?

And the mayor said that she never directly contacted Don Rowe, but it was reported this week in the St.

Louis Post-Dispatch that her chief of staff, Casey Milberg, did contact Steve Davis, a member of the planning commission, and said, hey, please reconsider some of your ideas here because we want this data center bill to go through.

Well, what's going to happen with the mayor now?

It looks like she wasn't being entirely transparent in the process.

Yeah, I mean, I think she takes an L on this one.

I think Casey Milberg, the mayor's chief of staff, she has a really good reputation.

People really trust her.

And she said, hey, we just meant this procedurally.

We felt that they had to do like an up-down vote on this alternative plan as well.

We were suggesting they should see that happen.

We weren't trying to change the outcome.

I wish they had just come out and said that the next day.

You know, my reporter, Ryan Kroll, was all over this.

The Post-Dispatch was all over it.

And we kept saying, okay, who texted Don Rowe?

And the mayor was like, oh, ask Don.

We did ask Don.

Don wasn't talking to anybody.

We all put in sunshine requests.

They denied half of these sunshine requests.

And people are telling us, oh, well, you know, that's not why.

There really aren't any messages that have anything to do with this.

Don himself came out and made a statement and said, I didn't hear from an elected official after all.

They made this into like a two-week story when it could have been so simple.

And if you go back and listen to the actual tape, it makes total sense that they might have just been procedural concerns.

Like, should we have an up-down vote on this?

It sure doesn't feel like it after two weeks of trying.

The mayor lost a lot of credibility with this.

I mean, that stuff about, go ask Don, I don't have any, you know, is crazy.

But a good thing is the city really seems to have handled this well.

I mean, you know, coming together, Ann Schweitzer and Tom Oldenburg and the aldermen doing a difficult thing, they acted like grownups as opposed to what we're seeing in the county council.

And the mayor kind of tarnishes it.

But overall, this data center thing has been good for the city.

Is nobody concerned that Steve Davis, a member of the commission, during a meeting is getting texts from City Hall?

No.

Isn't this an open meeting where all communication should be public?

Well, no.

It's not like I should be on my phone.

Charlie, the meeting was five hours.

You're telling me people aren't checking their phones during a five-hour meeting?

Influencing the meeting?

That's not very open to me.

It wasn't.

And they said that they were monitoring the meeting.

And so they can watch it like every other citizen in the city of St.

Louis and around.

I think the mayor.

It was live streamed.

They were participating as it turns out.

No, they were.

But I don't have a problem with that.

I just think the mayor should have said like, look, I called and told them.

Right.

And you know what?

Sometimes I got to call people.

And when I say jump, they better ask how high.

I'm the mayor.

And this wasn't going the way I wanted it to go.

Let me ask you this.

The regulations, which I think the board is going to vote on September 11th, Sarah.

Yes, it is.

They allow for data centers in downtown.

What is it?

Micro?

Well, there's different sizes you can do in different zoning.

And yeah, they're going to do a bunch of like the biggest ones.

They have to be in this industrial swath.

But there are some you can do in downtown.

Really?

Or Silicon Valley doesn't want to pay for them outside of that convenient swath.

Well, they like to be by the big transmission lines.

Exactly.

It's less expensive.

And you know what?

You can just tell because so many people in this city have been against this.

The lobbyists and others have really had the conversation beyond the ears of the media.

They've been talking to people and saying, hey, there's a lot of money in here.

I know there's a lot of problems with A.I., but forget that because there's a lot of money.

Well, I'm against artificial intelligence, so I don't like the data centers.

But I think the city has handled it very well, Charlie.

And the idea that the mayor wouldn't be texting people at the meeting.

In the middle of a meeting?

From the public?

As much as I hate to say it, we've left the 20th century behind.

And it's been difficult for me, but people text each other all the time now.

It should be public then.

Let's just have telephones there so people can contact their lobbyists.

Why even have the lobbyists in the room?

I kind of like this.

We should have telephones there.

We'll call it the telephone bank.

But I don't think you're going to expand downtown by expanding data centers.

I mean, we already have data centers downtown.

That is a fact.

And look at our downtown.

Isn't it nice to have your apartment building next to a huge building that's full of humming computers?

I just go back to the original plan, which we all thought would be good because it had some green elements to it, and that's just gone now.

So basically they've already capitulated.

So what's going to stop them from, ah, you know, that mini data center?

That's actually the macro data center, and it can go next to Bush Stadium.

It seemed to be, didn't it?

Like the progressives were, oh, no, that's not going to happen.

And now it's just sort of, yeah, hey, welcome.

And I wonder what's going on too.

I want to tell you something.

The New York Times today said that teachers complained that kids can't write an essay without AI.

And do we think it's going to get better as we keep on doing genuflecting in front of Silicon Valley?

I actually think it is going to get better.

I've been talking to friends, and I've been talking to friends in education, and they are horrified by what has happened, and rightly so.

But they are now taking action to figure out ways around it.

They're giving oral exams.

They're doing blue books.

Teachers are not going to stand for kids coming out of school completely uneducated.

Okay, well, how about what Bill Gates said this past week and that AI is moving so fast.

That's more troubling.

We're not going to be able to stop the bioterrorism because AI is going to be creating them.

And there are other problems as well that are just on the horizon.

But we have to be realistic.

I mean, St.

Louis is no longer the prom queen.

There are not a lot of people beating down our doors who want to be.

And I think Kara Spencer is, she's being realistic.

It is not popular for a mayor in a democratic city to take this position.

You know what?

I'm sorry.

The governors of Texas and Florida have put moratoriums on them.

They're Texas and Florida.

And so has Maine and Massachusetts and New York.

Okay, that's Maine and Massachusetts and New York.

Why are we like the one city in a state that comes to St.

Louis?

Wait, wait.

We have problems with letting a restaurant and a bar stay open until 3 o'clock, but we're just welcoming data centers.

That's reversed.

If we want to save the city, let's just save the city.

Why are you going to give in to data center builders because they just got a bunch of money?

Where's the money going to go?

And where is the money?

I keep coming, oh, it's going to do this, it's going to do that.

All right.

What's going to transform is everybody's electricity bill.

Alvin's right.

The little food vendor can't be at the corner of Washington and Tucker.

Exactly.

The data centers.

Exactly.

You know what I think is interesting?

You do have the lobbyists for big tech that are like trying to get this happening at city hall, but you also have very strong voices from labor saying we need these construction jobs.

Do they really?

In this labor shortage, they really need these.

We can't find enough labor.

I share your skepticism on all of this.

Right, right.

I mean, the unions, of course, they're going to back more work.

Charlie likes that.

I am against artificial intelligence, but I think that the city is handling this very well.

And I've been very impressed.

I mean, I remember when the county council used to be the grownups and the board of aldermen with the children.

All right.

Okay.

All right.

You're right.

That's a great way to look at it.

Die on that hill because the city will probably happening right now.

Right.

Okay.

Let's move on to another topic, shall we?

Wendy, I want to ask you about Josh Hawley, the senior senator from the state of Missouri.

Speaking of things that people love, he is taking on flock cameras and wants to have some congressional hearings with the people who are in charge of these surveillance cameras, thousands of them across the United States.

And he wants to make sure that there are safeguards against abuses.

Is he just jumping in front of the parade?

Yes, I think he is.

I think he continues to want to be the man of the people.

He and Bernie Sanders are on the same side of this issue.

And so he's definitely got some kind of a game plan here.

But I still am struggling, even though we are all taken to task on social media, I'm still struggling trying to figure out, and I know you'll tell me how, but when they say it rises to the level of the threat of the data centers and AI, I'm sorry I don't see it.

I don't either.

It's a terrific crime-fighting tool.

You're talking about a couple of really bad actors, bad private investigators, bad cops, whatever.

But to flush an entire effective licensing, you know, number-gathering, data, whatever it's called, data center.

But, yeah, but just to do away with that because of a few bad actors, I just think it's really sad.

I agree.

So I'm about to take Josh Hawley's side here.

I know you will.

That's crazy.

Well, I wouldn't say Josh Hawley's always my boy, but in this case, he is right to be raising questions about this.

And he's not saying shut it down, although I am ready to go that far.

He's not.

He's saying, I want to know, like, where is this being held?

Who is it being shared with?

What you have is a technology company, a private-held technology company, that is creating a coast-to-coast network where it can track any American where they're going.

And, yeah, we used to have these systems where, like, police had some ability to do this.

This is now in the hands of a privately-held company.

If that doesn't scare you, you're not paying enough attention.

You don't think that Apple isn't following you on your phone?

A privately-held company.

Sure.

But that's not data that just anybody can see out there.

Oh, really?

Well, I don't love it.

Apple can see it, but we're supposed to be okay with that.

But, look, they're sharing this now with law enforcement.

Apple has taken a hard stance.

It's almost impossible, even after people commit murder, to get inside their iPhones.

This is totally different.

There appear to be thousands of people who have access to all this data about where we're driving and what we're doing.

Sarah, if you start talking about widgets, in five minutes, on your phone, there will be advertisements for widgets.

Right.

They're listening to you.

They're seeing you.

And now, okay, so you bring the flock people in before the Senate to testify, and all they're going to do is say, like, well, you know, why don't you ask Officer So-and-So who caught this criminal?

Or, you know, the chief of police that says this is why we use it.

Well, and then I'm going to say, why don't you ask So-and-So who was stalking their ex-wife and we caught 300 unauthorized users?

There's all sorts of anecdotes here.

But like Wendy said, so they're going to grill some police chief captain like they did Dr.

Fauci?

I mean, no, they aren't.

That's why I said he's just showboating because they are not going to come in there and, like, go berserk on anybody's police record.

What we should do is punish anybody who misuses it.

Exactly.

There you go.

But the idea that we're going to throw it out, I'm with you, Wendy.

I mean, you know, it used to have the regis system where the police could look up records, but nobody was supposed to use that except for professional reasons.

But all sorts of people did.

Exactly.

But you can't stop that.

I mean, the IRS, you don't think people are looking, who work at the IRS, even though it's against the law to see what your neighbor makes, that if they can get a look to see what people are making, they don't do it?

Well, I think Josh Hawley's right.

Again, I can't believe this is coming out of my mouth, that we need to put in as many safeguards as possible so it's harder to abuse it because people will.

Sarah, they started the safeguards in April with AI, and they found out if one license plate's being searched a zillion times by a small department, that's why we see all the abuses recently because the AI used by Flock just started a couple of months ago.

But you know what?

We had 30 churches ransacked recently in North St.

Louis, and in the reporting of it, the reason is they're taking the air conditioners and the copper wiring and everything else.

There's no cameras.

There's no cameras.

And they made them vulnerable to attack.

Well, today I saw some surveillance footage from one of those same churches that got robbed.

They somehow figured out there was a camera there.

So I don't know that we need to be all in bed with Flock just because of that.

Okay, so some police officers drove their car into a gay bar last year.

Let's get rid of cars.

How's that?

Yeah.

Hey, I want to ask Wendy about Stan Kroenke.

Why are we so fixated on this guy?

This week he bought the Los Angeles Angels, and you would have thought that he invaded Ukraine.

Actually, we don't care about that either.

Why are we more upset with him than we are with Vladimir Putin?

I would be such a happy person when I shuffle off this mortal coil if we can stop telling other people how to react to things.

No, no, no, no, listen.

These people waited a very long time to steal another city's team, and that's exactly what we did.

We did it the American NFL way.

We stole the team from Los Angeles, okay?

We were very excited about it, and then obviously there was a breakdown in communication, but people felt like there was a chance.

I think let people be as upset as they want to be.

Brooklyn is still mad about the Dodgers.

They are.

It's generational.

It's just healthy to have an enemy.

Yes, exactly.

For the town to unite on something.

Nobody likes Stan Kroenke.

That's not a bad thing.

He kicked us in the face when we were down.

And the California Angels, people who play for the team, and the fans are exhilarated because they couldn't stand Artie Moreno.

We should just let that go.

That's because you're a Dallas Cowboys fan.

That's all the time we have for this segment.

You can always write us, careof3655, Olive Street, 63108.

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And listen to us on your favorite podcast source, wherever you are this September.

We also hope that you listen to our program.

It's called Last Call.

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And this week we've got a lot of topics that we didn't get to in the first 30 or so minutes.

So we hope you join us for that.

That's Last Call.

Thank you very much for joining us.

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See you next week.

Donny Brook is made possible by the support of the Betsy and Thomas Patterson Foundation and the members of Nine PBS.