The Paradyme Shift
Step into the evolving world of real estate investment with "The Paradyme Shift," a podcast hosted by Ryan Garland, the visionary founder and Chairman of Paradyme. This show is your gateway to uncovering the strategies, trends, and success stories that redefine the real estate landscape today.
On "The Paradyme Shift," each episode takes you behind the scenes of Paradyme's groundbreaking approach to real estate investment. Ryan Garland, alongside industry leaders, dives into the intricacies of Paradyme's holistic model—covering everything from direct lending and strategic investments to hands-on development. Discover how Paradyme's innovative crowdfunding platform and investment management software are not just tools but game-changers that are reshaping real estate by bridging housing gaps and nurturing community-driven projects.
Tune in to "The Paradyme Shift" to explore how Paradyme consistently delivers exceptional financial returns while positively impacting communities. This podcast is more than just about investing—it's about leading the charge in real estate innovation. Join us to stay ahead of the curve, gain exclusive insights, and become part of a community where expertise meets transformative ideas in real estate.
The Paradyme Shift
Havasu First: Dave Johnson’s Case for Change in Lake Havasu City | Dave Johnson E51
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In Part Two of this exclusive Lake Havasu mayoral interview series, Ryan Garland sits down with mayoral candidate Dave “River Dave” Johnson to discuss his Havasu First platform and his case for changing the direction of city leadership.
Johnson shares his background in machining, manufacturing, military and aerospace prototype development, sales, entrepreneurship and the Lake Havasu boating industry. He explains how those experiences shaped his solutions-driven approach to government and his belief that city leadership should apply greater business discipline, accountability and performance standards.
The conversation examines city budgets, infrastructure spending, road improvements, airport development, private-sector investment, healthcare, economic diversification, city beautification and attracting new industries and higher-paying jobs to Lake Havasu City.
Johnson also challenges existing municipal processes and argues that many of the city’s problems are solvable through stronger direction, strategic partnerships and a willingness to question why projects cost what they do.
Hear the challenger’s complete case for reform and decide for yourself—only on The Paradyme Shift.
Voting takes place in Lake Havasu on July 21st, 2026
Why This Conversation Matters
SPEAKER_01Hey everybody, Ryan Garland here. As you guys know, I like to bring on very special guests. And today we have Dave Johnson, which is the uh former or soon-to-be mayor, is I think probably the best way to put it, right? So uh yesterday we had Cal Sehee on and we wanted to kind of bring Dave on and just kind of have just uh a different approach that I think most people don't really uh I'd say implement and in practices. Our our podcast has a great following. We wanted to build awareness with what these two gentlemen are, uh what they're trying to accomplish, what their objective is, where their hearts are, and really kind of get to understand these two boys a little differently. And I think what you see online is is completely different than who these two men have been. I've had the honor to be meet them both and spend time with them. And honestly, I just have really enjoyed this time that I've spent with Dave. And uh Dave and I really haven't spent a lot of time together. No, actually, uh other than today, I've you know said hello in passing. That's about it. Yeah. But, you know, so I uh I want you guys to get to know him just kind of the way I do. And uh I really respect this gentleman. Uh he and him and I kind of cross paths a lot on the business side, but um, you know, the fact that he's you know willing to put on a bulletproof vest and step up and and try to make our city a better place is uh is on honorable. And I really respect that because the world's burning and people are worried about where the we're what's going on. And um, you know, for someone to just be selfless and step up and you know want to do better, seeing deficiencies and what's happening with the city, and I do that as well as a builder and a developer. I'm I'm bringing in millions of dollars. And so we get nervous too. We want to make sure we uh we're aligned with the right people and that the the right people are driving the bus. Dave, I really appreciate you. Your outlook on on life has been uh amazing, and I you just you're a good man, and I really enjoy uh the time we spent together so far.
SPEAKER_00Well, it's a that's a heck of a compliment for going to lunch. Yeah, exactly. But I will say uh out of all the speaking engagements, you know, we host our foundry deal at Wednesday, six to eight, every single Wednesday, and we film it, we put it on YouTube, and we've talked to the Republicans men's groups, both women's groups. We even talked to the Democratic women's group, which actually was one of the most fun, believe it or not, it was one of the most fun things I've done. But uh this one is the one I've been most excited about, and I'll tell you why. It's because every single one of these things, they ask you the same questions, you give them the same answers, you know, what are you gonna do? You say, Oh, infrastructure, beautification, this, that, and the other. And everybody that knows me says, Oh, yeah, Dave will get that done. And everybody that doesn't says, Oh, that's impossible. Those are campaign promises. But for once, I get to sit down next to a guy that is a doer and not a talker. And you know, we talked a little bit about that at lunch, but you know, to go out and actually do things and understand how corporate world works and understand basically what's driving the train, right?
SPEAKER_01So you know, I really that that that means a lot. Yeah, I didn't know if we were gonna bring that up, but you know, that's where I think you and I see eye to eye. There is a huge difference between people that say they're gonna do something and the ones that will actually deliver. Sure. And I say it respectfully, but I think a lot of people are, you know, they talk a lot, but they don't deliver, you know, and uh that's what everyone's fear is during uh this particular campaign, right? And and um that's the one thing I've seen about you is you've you've done it, which kind of leads into you know the question. Let's talk a little bit about your background, who you are, how you got here, you know, that fun stuff. And you know, I want to talk about your uh you uh building building in unbelievable large weapons for the military. Sure. That's like close to my heart, man. I love guns and weapons.
SPEAKER_00Sure. So I grew up in Carlsburg, California. Uh I am the son of an engineer. My dad,
From Machinist To 3D Printing Sales
SPEAKER_00uh, when he passed away just from our patent searches, patent searches on surface level through Google, you know, he had 260-something patents. When I was 14, uh, I started machining in the back of his shop. There were two or three machinists there when I first got hired on there. By the time I graduated high school, I was the only one there. So running manual lathe, mills, surface grinders, all sorts of things like that. Uh basically what I spent my youth doing, you know, and then everybody turns 18 or whatever, and F you dead, you know, like you got to have your little rebellious moment. So I wanted to be one of the better machinists in the world. So I left and I went up to Ontario, California at the time, which was a uh injection mold making, plastic injection mold making capital of the world, uh other than China. But you know, in America, that's where all the where the stuff is. And injection mold makers are the best machinists in the world because it's they have to be able to make anything and then make it backwards. Right. So anyhow, I did that for three or four years. Um and I was back then, this is you know, I'm old, right? So this is before the internet and before all that. If you wanted a pay raise back then, you'd go to the boss and you'd say, hey, you know, I want, you know, I think I'm worth more. And if they didn't agree with you, you basically quit and you go to the shop down the street, right? So that's the way that kind of industry worked back then. And you would look to see what shops were hiring in the newspaper. And back then, a top mold maker, and by a top mold maker, I mean, that guy's uh he's got a CNC going, he's running an EDM machines going at the same time, and he's running a you know a manual mill over here, like $60,000 worth of tools in his roll away, they were making about $26, $27 an hour. And I picked up a newspaper and I saw an ad in there for City Bus Driver, $40 an hour with benefits, and I said, Yeah, I'm not doing this anymore. So I looked around and I said, you know, who out of everybody my age is making the most money? And it was a guy by the name of Jay Densmore. And he was out selling stereolithography, which uh for layman's terms for people, it's basically 3D printing today, right? And back then, you know, if you had to prototype something like a pen cap, it would be, you know, 300 bucks and it was all based on size, like this water bottle to prototype that would have been about 1,800 to 2 grand back then out of stereolithography. Yeah, well now you know when a kid's a 3D printer at home, he print that thing for free.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00But that's how you verify designs and whatnot before you actually made the injection molds, because if you have to change the molds, it's crazy expensive. Yeah. So Jay was selling SLA or stereolithography. So I went over to a company called Sycon, and I happened to have a lot of familiarity with SLA growing up in the back of an engineering firm.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So I became a sales rep for them, and I'm not gonna lie, we murdered it. Because sales guys are sales guys, but being a machinist, you know, I could sit down with engineers and say you know, reprints with them. And you know, a lot of these engineers nowadays, especially when 3D printing first came out, they were designing things that you could print but you couldn't make. They'd have big giant undercuts and the molds and things like that. And I'd say, well, if you just ditch that, you know, your tooling costs are gonna go down in half. So all the engineers loved me, and it was a it was really one of life's great experiences. You know, I I told you at lunch, you know, we talked about always answering the phone. And I was staying late one day and I answered the phone and I got a call from iTal Design, which was a concept car company, and they did a lot of concept cars for like Mitsubishi and Nissan and all that. And just seeing how it works behind the scenes, but also from then entertaining some of the VPs for like Mitsubishi at hockey games or you know, Honda. They were the baseball guys that we picked up. We had skyboxes everywhere. Yep. And getting to hang out with with people of that caliber was really, really cool, especially when you're, you know, mid-20s.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, oh yeah.
SPEAKER_00So after that, my family, we have a mental ill brother, and he started getting kind of violent. My mom basically asked me to come back to Carlsbad to help him out with it. And uh she was actually concerned my dad was gonna shoot him at one point.
SPEAKER_02Oh, jeez.
SPEAKER_00And so I went back to Carlsbad and I fired up the machine shop again and met a guy named Steve from uh Lee Aero Systems. They're still in business today. And um, he called me about six o'clock at night and he goes, Hey Dave, you know, do you got machines? I said, Yeah. And he goes, Can you make this? I said, Sure, we can make that. He goes, Can you make it by tomorrow morning? And I said, Okay. And the magic words, I don't care what it costs, out of zero. So I said, No problem, buddy. So I spent all night machining this thing and drop it off at his house, and a couple weeks later it happens again. A couple weeks later, it happens again. Finally I said, Hey Steve, why don't why don't I come over there and we'll just take a look at what's going on here? And so I started quoting their entire prototype deals, you know. So I would did it ended up where I'd they'd send me all the work, I'd sub it out to several different CNC shops, do what I could do manually.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00But we brought a level of professionalism to it that they hadn't experienced before, mainly being, you know, quality control uh reports, material search, all sorts of timelines. Yeah, timelines, you know. So that we were actually delivering on time. And that was a very, very profitable venture for a lot of years.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I can imagine.
SPEAKER_00So then we get to 2010-ish, 2000 mid-2010. I always learned what my future hell was holding by watching the news. Uh, you know, so doing these prototypes, uh, those were all weapons of tomorrow, right? So we quoted everything or built everything, actually. If you Google long shot uh and torpedo, you'll see a backpack that straps on a torpedo. And they'll drop it, they'll drop it out of a bomber and the wings deploy now, they can cruise it, you know. And we did guided artillery, which doubled the range of the bullets, and you could fly them through a window now. We did surveillance blimps, we did some of the stuff I can't even talk about today, believe it or not. But we did all kinds of cool projects. I actually quoted uh my little shop, I went up against General Atomic quoting uh Egypt's drone programs, and I was gonna win. And if that project went through, just even on the minimum scale. You wouldn't be here today. I I would have I would have stood to make about $30 million a year in my mid-20s. And it was I was right there, man, and all the lights were green, and then I was watching the news and oh, Egypt got overthrown today, huh? Yeah.
SPEAKER_01That doesn't look good for me.
SPEAKER_00No. So I'm watching the news in 2010, and Obama gave the speech about downsizing the military, downsizing the military budget by $489 billion to be exact. When they do that, they don't fire the existing troops. What they do is they take all your future weapons. If they have so many bombers or stealth fighters on order, they just scale all that way back, right? And so when they did that, you know, B being in that industry, you only your client list is like two people long, right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, totally.
SPEAKER_00And uh so we hung out for about a year, and you know, I'm paying eight, ten thousand a month, you know, just in rent, and then you have electricity employees, and you know all the stuff you know what it is. And uh so I told my wife, we gotta get out of here, man. This is this is gonna sink us. And so my parents had built a house in Parker, Arizona, in the Moviality Keys in 1976. It's actually where I took my first steps. And I said, Stace, let's just go out there for a minute and catch a breath so we can stop the expenditures. And I'd had a brand new baby, no job. Yeah. You know, I had some, you know, we had money, but it was depleting quickly.
SPEAKER_01Nothing coming in, it's all going out.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So we go and we hang out down in Parker. I got down there and we're there for a month. My wife says, I can't live here. And I said, No problem. So I get to talk to you. I had to Dave Plunkett, and I'm looking for a place where I could put my machines and everything, right? Get them out of California. And he says, Why don't you go up to Havasu and check it out? They got those big RV Garados up there. So we went up in 2011. I moved here and I put my machines in my garage.
SPEAKER_01And uh was your wife for it at that time?
SPEAKER_00She was. Uh, but you know, we were used to SoCal, you know, like you want to go find a job. Yeah, you want to go find a job. It's not hard to find a job, you know. And because I had so much baggage, you know, all this stuff is huge and it requires huge power and all this stuff, you know. And I said, we got to go somewhere it's cheaper. So we came out here and I went and I took a tour of Sterolite and I quickly found out there's no industry in this town and that you know, there was nothing for a guy like me. And so I started literally machining parts in my garage, stuff that I would charge, you know, 10,000 for for the aerospace stuff. I was doing it for like 800 bucks.
SPEAKER_01Oh my gosh.
SPEAKER_00Just to make the mortgage every month, you know. But uh I I quickly realized, you know, I had my personal website, which was River Day's place, and this is the middle of the recession, man. Like, I don't know if you know, but Wojabi County was the third poorest county in the nation in 2011.
SPEAKER_01It got smashed, yeah.
SPEAKER_00And so the boat builders, man, like everybody's just sitting there dying. And I said, Look, I went to all the boat builders and I said, Look, I will go, we'll photo the boats, we'll test the boats, we'll do write-ups. You know, you just got to pay me X amount a month, right? Which was really little money, like three, four hundred bucks, three hundred bucks, right? And it doesn't sound like a lot of money, but when you start adding up 40 of them, now you now you have income again, right? And so I am proud to say that every single manufacturer that advertised with me during the recession survived.
SPEAKER_01That's really cool.
SPEAKER_00And every single one that didn't didn't.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a rough, yeah, that's rough. Well, you had you had a good reputation even then. I remember you know me coming out here back in the day. I'd be coming out here for 35 years. Sure. You know, and and uh and you've been out here the whole time, man.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, down to Parker mostly, but yeah, we used to go about the Havasu and all that. You know, I used to write for Hot Boat magazine. I'd I you know I have my own personal column in it, and I had, you know, I ran Hot Boat the website forum and all that stuff.
SPEAKER_01So you just your roots are here. Yeah. It makes it your heart's here. Oh, yeah. You know, that's really cool.
SPEAKER_00It's always been my favorite place on earth.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, good for you. All right. Well, let's get in uh let's get into uh you know how you kind of got to into Havasu where you are today. And uh, real quick, just to kind of a disclosure for our audience, you know, uh I I shot with and videoed with Cal yesterday. The main objective for this video and for this this podcast is just to kind of again let everyone kind of hear your your world. And I love the fact you just shared your your kind of backstory. And then I just want everyone to know too is that this is set up in a manner where the there's no biased opinion. There's not me coming saying, hey, you know, Dave's better than Cal or Cal's better than Dave. It's just I want our audience to get to know each and every person for who they are and what their uh what their goals are for the city, right? Period end of story. Sure. So with that said, how'd you so let's let's go into like where you are today, what do you have working on separate than you know running for mayor and where and I want to I'm gonna start asking some questions about you know where you where you think the biggest deficiencies are, what are the real issues? And I want to open up that that you know, in essence, mic to just go deep as we can go because I have my concerns. I obviously have been knee deep in development here. There is some massive deficiencies. I'm not gonna go push too hard, but there are things that I like and don't like, and there's things that I think that can completely change the future outlook of Lake Havasu just by a simple, you know, a few adjustments. But with that said, yeah, let's talk a little bit about where you are today. What do you got going on?
SPEAKER_00Well, just to say one thing real quick. I I like what you said there, you know, what the future of Havisu is. And the reality of it is, is it's been a very contentious campaign
Building Tomorrow’s Military Hardware
SPEAKER_00so far. There's been a lot of it's almost like Trump versus Biden. I mean, people are losing their minds, right? But we are literally sitting on the biggest opportunity in Southwest United States.
SPEAKER_01Dude, you're and I are gonna go into a rabbit hole after that. It's like the data supports it too.
SPEAKER_00It's crazy. And it's just not, it's almost like they're pushing it away, right? And and it's not just on development, and it's not just it's on every single front, and it just does not make sense to me.
SPEAKER_01So I you know, you and I were talking, there's there's a point in time where you you know you know something, you know something well, and then there's just there's no logic behind decision making, and you just kind of go a little fucking nuts, you know. You're like, what the hell is what like are you guys not understanding the positive impact? There's no negativity at all, a part of this play. Everything is positive for everybody involved, and you guys are just saying no or not allowing it to happen, or whatever the case may be. It's just it's incredible.
SPEAKER_00Well, I it's I don't think it's intentional. I don't even I just think a lot of them are not familiar with that kind of with that level, I guess you would say, right? And you know, fortunately, I spent a lot of my youth with a lot of very, I mean, big power players, you know, entertaining the VBs a Honda and Matsubishi and you know, some of these people, you know, you get used to dealing with people on that scale where they can say something and and have a dramatic outcome happen just a few years later. So you you're very, very conscious of what you're talking about and what you're doing. Right. And you have to be comfortable with that level of person, right? And so not and not everybody is, you know.
SPEAKER_01So you know, I think, you know, for me, of course, I'm I'm gonna be everyone has their own agenda, but my agenda, just to be completely transparent here, is I want to leave some wealth to my kids, I want to leave my business to my children. I'm really worried about where the world's going. I'm I constantly watch the news. I've written a book on kind of where the world was gonna go, and I was right, you know, six years ago. And this was right when the pandemic, you know, hit and all that money was pumped in. I call it synthetic capital. When that synthetic money was pumped in, that stimulus package and the PPP loans and all that, I saw it coming. I launched a fund to maintain to hedge against that and create cash flow because I was thinking 2008 all over again, right? I think we all did. And I have made massive sacrifices for my family to be out here. I I'm pretty much pushed my entire career into this location, but it's because I believe in it and I see the data, and that's where the wealthy is.
SPEAKER_00People don't realize that, right? Like the normal day-to-day, nine to five, you know, you're if you're you're middle class, they don't understand what it takes to jump off the cliff and start a business. When you when you start a business, it's against human nature. Oh my god, you have you almost have to be a little bit narcissistic to know that what do they say? Uh, you know, entrepreneurs they jump off the cliff and they build the plane on the way down. Totally. Yep, take it to make it the whole thing, man. And if you don't finish the plane, splat, you know, because there is no parachute, you know.
SPEAKER_01But the biggest risks are the biggest rewards.
SPEAKER_00That's correct.
SPEAKER_01And that's where capital comes from. Yep. And you know it's crazy. You I'll we'll just go right into this. Screw it. I want to talk about this. You know, the private equity play, you and I were talking about some of the big money check writers that are out here. It's big the reason why they want to come here and do and invest here, it's because they love the place. Yeah. They're not doing they can go any, they could probably make more money other places. Oh, absolutely. You know, what I'm, you know, what you're the one of the stories you shared with me at lunch was that you know some of the your buddies that have some money, we're thinking about just trying to build something that would be good for the city and line, you know, line a street with you know palm trees. Like, why is that such a bad thing? Why would we say no to that? You know, it's stuff like that. It's just it's things, it's it's like I agree, and that's I know that's a dumbed-down version, but that is that dumb to say no to in essence. Now that there's other reason, I'm sure whatever. But you know, when you when you when you kind of that compounds into other components that I've I've witnessed and and experienced, and as much as I do love, you know, a lot of the people internally and that have helped me in many ways, I just think that there should be some sort of reform. There's got to be an adjustment because the way it's work, it's not working. And they and like guys like me are getting tired and we don't want to keep playing here.
SPEAKER_00There's some there's some basic problems right now. For example, if you're employed by the city, they just have uh an annual pay review and you get a a raise no matter what. And it's not performance-based. And I understand coming from you know private to the municipality that in private, if you have people that are just sitting there collecting paychecks, they're never getting a raise.
SPEAKER_01Or even they're I'm an employer, I'll tell you that right now. I've never I have never had one good employee employee that had was just a you know chasing a paycheck. Yeah. They were they were chasing the clock too.
SPEAKER_00Correct. You know, so you you you I think that's in terms of reform, if you want to see some massive changes here, we have to look at who's doing a good job and benefit them. And if you're not doing a good job, I mean, it's not within the mayor, mayor oral powers to fire people, but it is certainly within my powers and powers of counsel to lean on the city manager who can then make those kind of decisions, right? And that gets into a whole new deal of like what's going on. And actually, our system of government out here, you know, the mayor's technically a ceremonial position. It's not a position of power. And that changed under Mark Nexon. He turned it into a full-time job and way overstepped the bounds of what you're supposed to do, and that continues to this day. And Charlie Cassins was a city manager back then, and Charlie Cassons put in a policy that council is not to talk to staff. And I was actually at a meeting a little while ago, and you know, some, I'm not gonna name names, but I will say two or three of our city council members were there, and they said, We're not allowed to talk to the staff. And I started laughing. And they said, What are you laughing about? I says, and what planet do you live on that you are not allowed to talk to the people that work for you? I said, I would laugh at them, just go talk to them anyways. What are they gonna do? They can't fire you. Yeah, there's the one in the influence, right? Yeah, yeah. So I mean, you know, currently, you know, our city manager, he's a he's a very alpha individual, and he's kind of running through everybody like a hot knife through butter. And I got a great story about that's only humiliating for him, but I got a great story about that if you want to hear it. It's up to you, you know. So you watch all these city council guys and you know, all these they're they're nice people, don't get me wrong, but you know, oh, I scheduled a meeting with uh, you know, the police chief or the this or the that, and you know, they went and told me how it works. I'm not interested in how it works because it's not working.
unknownRight.
SPEAKER_00And so, you know, I I didn't schedule meetings with any of them. I said, I'm just gonna go in and I'm gonna change things, right? And so eventually uh city manager's office calls me and says, Hey, they want to sit down with you. I said, Okay. So I go to his office, he goes, What do you want to talk about? And I said, You called me. I don't want to talk about anything. So we sat there and then we, you know, we had a nice 30, 45-minute conversation, but you already know where I'm going with this. Oh yeah, right? Oh yeah. And uh anyhow, at the very end of it, I says, You get me my 20 million dollars for Rhodes? He goes, 20 million? I don't think so. And I says, You're a smart guy, buddy. You got a couple months to figure it out. Two weeks later, he calls me. Hey, let's go have a beer somewhere. And I says, I don't want to be seen with you, and you don't want to be seen with me. So why don't you come over to my house? He came over to the house, I says, Let me guess. You found my money? And he says, if it's the will of the council, we have your money. I said, That's see, it's not hard to figure out. Yeah, you just gotta lay down the law a little bit, right? And since then I've had several meetings with him. It turns out he's a really sharp guy and I really like him a lot, but you kind of have to give him more direction, you know. And I actually asked him that because when he said that, is it the will of the council and the mayor? I said, What's the current will? I don't know. Part of being in charge is you gotta be a leader. So if you direct that guy, he'll do what needs to be done.
SPEAKER_01And that's kind of the that kind of parallels into the conversation we had earlier was you know, w you know, you you you hit the nail on the head, my opinion, is you said, Look, you know, you never Built a high rise before, but if you if someone tasked you to build a high rise, would you be able to figure it out? And I'm like, absolutely, I would. Yeah, absolutely. I have resources and people and write the whole nine yards I can call upon and put it together, you bet.
SPEAKER_00So to clarify that, you know, we were talking before this, and you know, the biggest thing for people in this election is he has no political experience, right? And so I what I suggested to Ryan here is, well, you've never built a high rise, right? Or in another example, we were talking about a business. And what they could or couldn't do, and we have found the problem to be management. And I said, Well, Ryan, you've never done that industry, but you yourself could go in there and fix that business. You don't need experience to know how to do things. You need balls and intelligence.
Starting Over In Lake Havasu
SPEAKER_01We need common sense and some sort of you know, you just need to you just kind of have to have some sort of business acumen. You know, if you run successful businesses, they're all the same. The LLC filings are the same, opening up the same CPA and tax attorneys and management. Budgets are budgets. Yeah, they're not so and then managing people is all the same, you know, you know, helping your employees, you know, you know, position themselves for retirement's all the same, how to create culture is all the same. Correct. You know, how to how to hire is all the same. Like it's it's all the same. It's just the the maybe the end-to-end, like the little, let's say the the the little details about a business, you can learn that. That's easy, you know.
SPEAKER_00Well, it's just it's it's all the same game, it's just slightly different rules, right? You know what I mean? When you come to a municipality, there a lot of things are governed by the state, right? Like you can't. I would love to have a $303 million budget and that airport and a checkbook and say, we're building the hangers. But there's laws against it. You can't spend more than X, Y, Z. I think it's a hundred grand before you have to send it out to a to a public bid, right? For for various projects. So you just learn the rules of that game and then you manage it correctly, right? So we were talking earlier, and I said, I bet you do you right. I says, you don't build pools, but I'm sure you've built a pool in your in your developments before. And he said, Yeah. What does a four million dollar pool look like to you? I said something you build in Vegas. Yeah, it's like it's like Caesars, right? Oh, yeah. So why is our Olympic pool being quoted at four million dollars? And that doesn't even include a building to put the pool equipment in. That's another like several hundred thousand dollars. And I just look at that and I say, currently, you look at city council, you look at the mayor, they drop these things in front of them and it's yes or no. But nobody's asking why. Me, I would say, why does this cost four million dollars? Because unless this thing is something out of Vegas, it shouldn't cost four million dollars. And when they say, Well, we can't use these businesses because they don't have an engineer. Really? We couldn't just hire an interim engineer to get the engineering done. The city could do that, and then you could use whatever pool company you want. But nobody's, you know, oh no, we got to use this guy. Well, it turns out the guy they picked didn't have an engineer either. You know, it's the the whole thing is like you said, it's not working. And you just have to start asking why and and and really drilling into the issues of why what what about this cost four million dollars? Because I that I can't wrap my head around this. I can't wrap my head around the courthouse. $12.8 million? They'll they'll claim it's $10. But then when you start looking into it, look at the supplies. Really, you need two million dollars with a paper and pencil? No, it's they they stuck it in there that way, right? And that's just looking at a budget and saying, okay, we know what you did here. It's over $12 million. Is there anything about that building that's $12 million?
SPEAKER_01Not if the T if I'm having a hard time. Even with the bulletproof this and bulletproof that, $12 million?
SPEAKER_00I mean, what are we launching? Satellites here?
SPEAKER_01We build some pretty large stuff. I'll tell you right now, I don't see $12 million in that thing. No, but do you know what our IT budget is for Lake Havazil? I can only imagine.
SPEAKER_00I think it's like $12 million annually for an IT budget?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I don't even know how that's even possible. And I deal with high-level compliance in my IT's network. You know, yeah.
SPEAKER_00We keep saying, babe, where are you gonna get all the money to do all this stuff? I'm like, I don't know. We're gonna line out of the budgets and find out where we're launching space shuttles out of here for 12 million bucks. I understand, dude, and I understand. Like, we have a control room that most people haven't seen. You know, I've seen pictures of it. I've never been in it. I actually look forward to taking my kids through it after we win. But uh, you know, there's there's some really cool stuff in like Avisue, especially for emergencies. But $12 million? No. Yeah, no, $4 million for a pool? I mean, on a private side.
SPEAKER_01What does that park cost?
SPEAKER_00The the the Commons? Yeah. I call it the Shehee Park. At the Commons, it's 4.7 million and going.
SPEAKER_01Oh my gosh, 4 million bucks. Yeah, I heard it was four or four and a half million bucks at one point.
SPEAKER_00And the bathrooms aren't work, do they? The bathrooms are in, but they're locked. You know, it's it's a public park in the middle of downtown, and they say they this thing is so far. Actually, uh, like half of some Republicans just posted all the news articles from 2019 through like 23, right? And in 2019, it was supposed to have like an 85-foot screen and the stage, and it looked dude, it was really, really cool, right? Yeah. And then it changed to this, and then it was like, oh, we're gonna have a stage over here and keep it open grass. Then somewhere down the line, we hung a hard left and and we got what we got. That thing looks like it belongs in Portland to me because it's it doesn't shade anything, it doesn't do anything. It's my mom's 83 and she's got a touch of dementia. And every time I drive her by that thing, she looks at it, and because she's got dementia, she goes, that's the stupidest thing I've ever seen. You know, it's it's it's just wow.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, you know, and but that is you know, there is, you know, the you know, we laugh about it, but there's seriousness to that, you know, like because you know, when you when you add it all up, right? It's this problem, this problem, this problem, and you're allocating funds for this pool, you're allocating funds for that, and you look at the millions of dollars that are being wasted, that could have been allocated to something that really would actually, in my opinion, affect the public a whole lot better. Sure, you know.
SPEAKER_00And I and I know, and I think that's the way that's but with regard to that park, just before I let you go, I happen to notice that they finally put in the giant electrical box, they put it right where the stage was supposed to go. So it's I mean, it's literally bang, bang, bang. If you could do something wrong, it's like they're intentionally doing it at this point. If you could flip a coin and it always came up wrong, that's what's happening.
SPEAKER_01So why is everything so ass backwards? I don't know. I don't understand. Well, you know, remember, in all fairness, just so everybody knows that I'm not the best guy. I've only lived here going on like three years. You know, I've been coming out here for 35 years, as I mentioned before. But I don't know, like I was, dude, I'm a hermit, man. I literally just go to work and then I go home, right? I go to lunch, and I was going to lunch every day at Northside Growth because I was building out north, you know, and and so I just and then I would go home, man, and I would be home at like nine o'clock at night. I'm kind of aware, and then I was gone 50% of my time. So I never really got pulled into anything else. But what's happened recently is I've I'm now being forced to really pay attention just because of the level of business that we're doing here. And it's starting to open up the eyes. And I'm like, you know, I have resources and I have an ability. If if people are willing to listen to some of my ideas, maybe it can be implemented. And that's the point, you know. Now, when I mentioned in the last uh in the public hearing, you know, there may be a way to help some of that infrastructure by, you know, and and then we ran into Cameron, and I was like, this is what you know, this may be able to do. You know, and I think those are the things that I just want people to consider because I don't come from here. I come from, you know, I've done $3 billion in transactions, I've overseen a lot of construction development. We have in-house fund control.
SPEAKER_00What that means is that I can't let me ask you some questions real quick. Sure. You've done $3 billion in transactions. You're doing business in Tennessee right now and here, right? And you've done transactions all over the place. Yep. How friendly is the city of Lake Habasu to work with?
SPEAKER_01Oh boy, you know how my all my projects are approved, so I can say it now, right? No, I'm just kidding. Um, you know, everybody individually
Campaign Mindset Doers Versus Talkers
SPEAKER_01I genuinely like as a but I think I don't know.
SPEAKER_00I know.
SPEAKER_01I okay, fair enough. I I'm very disappointed, and it's because my disappointment is only because I've had other experience with other developments in other cities that are much larger, much more complicated than this, the ones that I have now. I work with developers all over the country. Back to backstory, my uncle was one of the presidents of Standard Pacific, left there, went to um Holland Partners, he went to Western National, he built 33,000 apartment doors for Irvine Company. I was working for a civil engineering firm that was doing, you know, DR Horton, uh Poulty Homes, Beezer. You know, I have an extensive background in development, capital funding, and raising. You know, I've managed a hundred million dollar debt fund. I was funding loans for developers all over the country, high-end homes in Beverly Hills and Bel Air. I mean, we went through, I mean, we're talking, you know, um, side of mountains type development, right? I mean, in Laguna Beach. I mean, in difficult times to do this. Very difficult, very strict. I mean, very different, difficult things. And I was sharing one example for you. At the city of San Antonio, if you do a pre-app, right, or let's say we have to, like, I had to move one of our buildings on our apartments, right? Mind you, this is a uh a three-story product. We had to move one of our buildings when we had to resubmit to move that building. There was a $2,600 like uh expedite fee for review. It was like a 72-hour review. Now all we had to do is pay them. That, or we go back to like a whole possible 90-day turnaround. The fact that we just had to pay that review, we asked, what's the review fee go? And then we'll look, we're just paying people overtime to be able to do the review. Well, why aren't we doing that here?
SPEAKER_00So that's good for the people that's that's good for the people that are getting overtime, right? It's good for you, the developer, because it's done and quicker. What happens to your development if you got to sit there and wait 90 days? Oh, so how much money does that cost?
SPEAKER_01So we'll go to the weeds. Look, every time I raise capital for one of my projects, the clock starts when the capital gets deployed. That's correct. So you're looking at a pref, whatever that structure is. When you look at when I have, you know, millions of dollars under management, that burn rate is incredible. And every time the city goes, Oh, well, we're not sure about this, or we're not sure about this, and I personally think they're not taking this very serious, I look at it and go, hey, that you guys have no idea. When you tell me it's gonna take six weeks or three weeks or two weeks, and it takes six months, like it's burning holes into my pocket mostly because I don't take it out of my client's pocket, it comes out of my pocket. And so you're in essence, I of course I kind of get my teeth come out a little bit, and I'm like, You're fucking with my family now. So it makes me look at it, and just to be candid with you, my entire team pulled together and said, we don't ever want to do business out here again. So it's getting to that point. We don't, it's too risky. Like, I love this town. You know, we're bringing millions and millions in. Hundreds of millions. Why can't we be looking hundreds of millions of dollars? Yeah, I was trying to be humble.
SPEAKER_00Don't sell yourself short though.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's hundreds of millions of dollars, and it's private because institutional capital will not do this. We have a line, we had an LOI with a line of credit from JP Morgan for 87 million. They will not allow us to pull that line out here unless we have the project well close to fund it. Like what like we're gonna be sticks in the air to get some capital from JP Morgan, or if we're doing a build-de-suit for a big retail center, something of that nature. But dude, it's so.
SPEAKER_00Without getting too far into the weeds here, the point that I was trying to make you love this town.
SPEAKER_01Oh, I love this town.
SPEAKER_00You live this town, you are trying to improve the town, and there's resistance.
SPEAKER_01Why? I don't understand when someone's bringing in that type of movement, yeah, and I hear through nothing but positive, they love what we're doing, and and they've said it you know publicly that they love what we're doing. Why is it that we're not being treated accordingly?
SPEAKER_00Any other city in America, my one of my really good friends is the single largest independent home builder in Arizona. He builds a lot of homes, needless to say, right? Well, he built, you know, probably 10 specs here just over the years, you know, and he's building houses for himself. And he looked at me one day and he goes, Dave, I have done entire communities, and it was easier to do than to build a house.
SPEAKER_01Well, we just we just learned through paradigm storage, they learned, and this is from my GC and for my third parties, that the city has never phased a project in like the way they did. They just CO buildings, and that's like a full, complete CO. Paradigm storage has multiple buildings and CO in each building, but the whole project's not CO, right? You just see apparently they've never done something like that before, which is great because they cut their teeth and learned it, but like, bro, like that's a big problem. And the amount of shit we had to deal with because they were learning.
SPEAKER_00So this is what we go full circle to. I don't, I I think a lot of these people are really nice people, but I don't think they have dealt with high-level things like this before. And you have to be comfortable in a room with high-level people.
SPEAKER_01Well, and it's facts there and it shows because they are outsourcing the majority of our stuff now for a third-party review out of Phoenix or what have you, which is fine. And we okay with, we're okay in some cases, but that just pushes back everything. Because what happens is they push it out. First of all, they review it, they identify they don't that they don't know it well enough, right? So, how long did that take? Then they go, okay, well, we're just gonna go ahead and offload this out and and to a third party, which now they get to wipe their hands on turn times. They go, well, it's not our problem if it takes forever for it to come back.
SPEAKER_00So they just that that that's the problem. There's your first problem, right? They don't care about time because it's not their money. They don't care about money because it's not their money, right? I care about money. I'm a private guy, uh, you know, entrepreneur. And if you tell me a pool cost four million dollars, I'm not gonna say yes or no. I'm gonna say why? Yeah. Why does it cost four million dollars? Why don't we get out our little budget here and light item that? Because I want somebody to tell me where the four million comes from, especially when that doesn't even house the pool equipment.
SPEAKER_01Well, and I know there's tons of contractors that would come in and just look at that and be like, no way. How many contractors would do that for free?
SPEAKER_00Well, that are free. We couldn't use one of our local companies, right? We couldn't use Mojave pools because they didn't have an in-house engineer and they gave, you know, they gave it Concord, who also didn't have an in-house engineer. But why couldn't the city say, We'll bring in an engineer to engineer the thing? That's well under 100,000. That's like what, 20 grand, maybe, depending on what you're doing there. But you know, 20 to 50, let's call it. Okay. We could bring that in, get the engineering done, and then sub it to one of our own local companies.
SPEAKER_01Why? I think the only thing I can I can think of is it from a liability side. But if the but the in but the the the engineer has its own liability, yeah, right?
SPEAKER_00So they're really you're they're subbed in. That's not that's not on the city, that's the engineering firm. Whoever you hire is still liable for that.
SPEAKER_01Well, honestly, this this conversation is so low level just to talk about a fucking pool, bro. Like, to be real, to talk about engineering on a pool, like it's like, dude, this is so low level, to be honest. And then a four million dollar pool, like I just I yeah, I get you, I'm with you. But it's like but it's there's so many different ways to do that.
SPEAKER_00The reason why I wanted to have that conversation is because it's low level. We don't need to get into roads and infrastructure and asphalt and lifetimes and the fact that we only budgeted two million dollars for roads in 2027, which is insanity. The low-level conversation that I like is it's relatable to everybody. Yeah, and it's everybody's been in a pool. Everybody knows that if you have a million-dollar backyard, you got a resort. I'd like to know how a lap pool comes in at 4 million, because that is insane. Yeah, and it's relatable. Whether you're rich, whether you're poor, whether you're powerful, whether you're homeless. You say four million dollar pool, they're gonna say why. And that encompasses it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it connects to everything. Yeah, for sure. And it makes it just kind of if you so, and then if you dump it down to that, then it's like what else?
SPEAKER_00So, well, that's what I'm saying. So, you know, when that then we get into the infrastructure and the water means, and then you get into, you know, how are you gonna fix all this stuff all the way all the way up to air service, right? But when you ask a basic question and nobody can give you an answer, you got a problem.
SPEAKER_01Let me ask you some of these questions too that I asked Cal yesterday because I want to make sure that we're all on the same page. Tourism. Let's talk about tourism revenue, kind of where you're seeing the world with tourism, what's coming
Budget Waste And Accountability Fixes
SPEAKER_01in right now, um, where's some of that money being allocated? If you know, I mean, obviously it's going towards the budget, right? Um, but what what what let's talk about and I love you would know I think more than anybody else because you run River Dave and you obviously have you know Cat Fest and you know and uh um uh what's it called? Um the other one, the big one. Desert storm. Desert storm. I can never think of the word bad. But anyway, so you got them all back, you know, you kind of control all that, which is where the I don't control Desert Storm, to be clear, but I did help build desert storm.
SPEAKER_00But you did cat, yes, I'm sorry.
SPEAKER_01So yeah, so you but you see all these these bodies coming in because you're knee deep in that type of community, man. Talk a little bit about tourism out here.
SPEAKER_00Okay, so we have a a company called Go Lake Havasu. It's a 501 basically, and what we do currently is we have a 1% food and beverage tax and a and a and a bed tax, right? That brings in $4.2 million, 2.1 of that goes to the general fund under the guise of paying police officers overtime for events and holiday weekends. The other 2.1 is divided. 1.6 goes to go Lake Havasu, $500,000 goes to the PED, the partner in economic development, which I'll get to them in a minute. So $1.6 million goes to Go Lake Havasu. This is gonna go right back to that $4 million pool. But we looked it up, right? I'm sitting there and I'm looking at us, what does Go Lake Havasu do? I mean, they got a website, it's got a calendar, it's pretty cool. They do run our visitor center, which is very nice, right? Uh their total budget's actually $1.8 million. The visitor center brings in about $200K a year and clothing sales and whatnot. And in their budget, it's listed as private, almost like donations, but that's where that money comes from, right? So I start looking at to go like have a sue, and I'm looking at it, and it's you know, static picture of a kid in an open bow of a bay liner, like and it says, go for it. And I'm like, huh. All right. And it in Facebook, you could actually look up and see what your competitors are doing for paid ads and all this stuff. So I just looked up every one of their ads and I looked up Bullhead, right? And Bullhead used to have something similar, an outside tourism board, and they just brought it in-house and they got like a guy with a handicam or whatever, and he's just like, you know, the river's great today, right? And if you look at the stats from Bullhead to what we're spending $1.6 million on, yeah, they're killing us. And we had a Go Lake Havasu work session at a city council. It was anything but a work session, which we'll come to that later again. But I actually found a kid with a jet boat out here that's outperforming them, an iPhone at a jet boat, right? And so I start to question well, how how are these people getting paid? And how, you know, what is all this? So I looked up their contract and they're on a performance-based contract. Problem is, is nobody's ever seen the performance. There's no oversight whatsoever. And the way that they're monitoring their performance is to say Kingman and Bullhead, their amount, their occupancy of hotels is this, and it went down to this, and ours didn't go down, so we're doing good. I am not kidding. That's literally how they how they do this. Now, there are other ways of doing this, right? You can do what's called contract tourism. It's literally profitable right out of the gate. You can go to these trade shows up in Vegas, and they have tour bus companies. And the tour bus company says, Hey, we're hitting the Grand Canyon, we're hitting uh Flagstaff, and we're hitting Winslow, and we want to put the London Bridge on there, we'll guarantee you six bus loads a week, 60 people in a bus. They stay the night. You can literally do the math on the hotel occupancy, the tax, and you can sign contracts with them and be profitable. Game game day one, right? It's okay. I mean, it's it's one way of doing it, it's guaranteed, at least it's guaranteed money, so you're not just throwing money down a rat hole or not knowing where it's going. But the reality of it is times have changed, man. We don't need a tourism board to go out and attempt to compete with River Dave's place because I have a film crew, right? We make boating videos. You're never gonna beat us at that. We don't need a tourism board to go out and try to compete with, I don't know, how many influencers are in this gym right now? Oh, yeah. The thing that changed, everybody's got a film studio, and there is thousands, there's hundreds of thousands on holiday. Fourth of July's coming up. How many videos will be on social media saying I'm having a great time in Lake Havasu? And do you want to know what's better than a sales pitch? A personal endorsement.
SPEAKER_01Oh, yeah, for sure.
SPEAKER_00So when somebody says, I had a blast in Lake Havasu, these are the crazy things that we had fun doing in Lake Havasu, I don't care if you gave me a hundred million dollars, I can't compete with 50,000 kids with iPhones.
SPEAKER_01Social media is a reality TV show that people get addicted to. It's the it's the FOMO, right? So people see it all through social media, it's free to market. And when you have that many people that are, in essence, in one spot that are loving life, that's it's it's word of mouth.
SPEAKER_00So at that point, how much money would you put towards trying to brand tourism?
SPEAKER_01You're not gonna compete with that. You really don't need much at all, if anything. Yeah. I mean, you'd probably want to just build awareness for just kind of to cater to all walks of life out here, but you wouldn't need nearly that much money. I mean, that's insane. Because honestly, even if I if I if I were to, and I'm just really thinking out loud here, and we're we're very stretch strategic when it comes to marketing, as you know. I couldn't even use 1.6 million and sit down and go, I don't even know where I would put that to to try to build awareness for tourism. I don't even know where where where I could get the numbers from for that. I don't even know how to collect the data. I mean, I'm sure if I understood their current situation and how they're doing it, but I mean, I don't even know how to collect that type of data and how it is actually drill really bringing people here.
SPEAKER_00It isn't. That's the first thing it isn't. So one one, we don't need it, but two, you know, one way you can bring in tourism, you mentioned Super Cat Fest West earlier. That brings in more jets than any other single event, right? And there's you know, five, five, six thousand people at any given time, so probably more like ten or fifteen going through the event down at the Riviera on Friday. And Saturday night. The way that that deal works is different than every other poker run. I designed
Why Development Timelines Keep Slipping
SPEAKER_00that to actually be able to track how much money it brings in. And so the way we do our poker run is you bring your receipts to the card tournament, and every hundred bucks is a playing card. Every 500 bucks is a hand, right? Literally the first year I get a phone call. What's the max? So what do you mean what's the max? What's the max? I don't know. 20 grand. They're like, no, dude, we just spent like 70 grand. Well, what did you spend 70 grand on? Well, we're gonna retrofit our center console with all new you know 500 instead of 400. So it's like, you know, we spent 350 grand. I'm like, dude, we're gonna be counting cards till Christmas here, guys, right? But this is how we kind of try to track it. So now we set the max at 10,000. But I usually end up with three or four million dollars worth of receipts, and that's just from the people that bring them that are participants, right? So the total total overall taxable income on that event, I would have to guess at more like 20. Desert Storm is insane.
SPEAKER_01Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_0060, you know, 50,000 people going up and down that street. Every one of them's buying ice, beer, fuel. Whatever. I mean, the the economic impacts of that are insane. Gary, do you want to generate tourism and do it for free? The Martelli brothers are literally at war with crit down in Parker with their with their off-road race. Call them and say, we're willing to work with you and we want to be on the circuit. They'll be here tomorrow.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00I can call Greg Mansfield right now. He puts on uh thun, you know, uh Thunderboats down in you know Bayfair in San Diego. We can have unlimited hydros here for I think they said 60 grand, right? Which actually I'd run GP boats, you know, the big blown alcohol bills are way louder and well cooler. You can do that for like 15 grand in. You can have full-blown races up here, and it's cheap. And that brings people. The Martelli brothers would be free. If you added prize money to that, you'd be the number one race, right? Yeah, you give me $1.6 million, and I tell the Martelli brothers, hey, we'll throw in 100 grand on first place. You would have every race team, you'd have the Mexican teams coming to America. Well, I'll direct. I'll give you an idea.
SPEAKER_01I mean, you know, that this is like your side of the world too, just to kind of give you a little bit that's happening here. Within, and my my contract will vouch for this one. Within the first two weeks when we opened this gym because of our cage, I had four huge promoters that wanted to come in and rent out my space for $40,000 a night, give me $20,000 or $30,000 in additional incentives, move all of our equipment and do this once every quarter. And they would have a pay-per-view, full-blown fight with professional fighters throughout the entire country come here and fight. There, there's that much power from people that have that influence that come out here and enjoy it. They're like, if we can bring that here now, I sponsor two fighters right now that are like nine and no and eleven and no. I have more professional athletes sitting in this gym. And Joe will probably tell you, I we from being in California, I have more professional athletes in this gym than I've ever been in any gym in Southern California. You know, so it's impressive how much is that.
SPEAKER_00Well, it's weird, isn't it? Weird. It's crazy. This little, this little tiny town, you know, it's it's you know, we're in the real estate game, right? And you're reading these these articles online, and it's like, you know, the the best place to buy or invest, right? This is you know, kind of during the COVID area, and you'd see something like the Hamptons or you know, Nantucket, you know, these world-famous places are you know, you know, Houston, right? And then it'll say Lake Havatu. And you're like, really? Our names up with these guys, you know? And then, you know, after COVID, it was like the the biggest property loss predictions is gonna be, you know, this place, this place, Lake Havatu, right? And you're like, oh my god, really? We're on that list too, right? But for such a small town, you're you're absolutely right. There's more players that come through here, and there's so much opportunity. I mean, I cannot tell you. You're talking about the gym, dude. Go over to Chawbones and look around. These people that are in there, if you know who
Tourism Tax Money And Oversight Gaps
SPEAKER_00they are, you know who they are. You know, and it's crazy.
SPEAKER_01It's crazy the people that come through here, and they want to see growth and they want to see things nice and clean and new, and they want resources and grocery stores and restaurants.
SPEAKER_00I told you about my buddy, you know, he nobody knows of it. You know, he's got like 85 million bucks, and he's like, Dave, you know, I'll I'll help fund a gateway down, you know, a gateway down on the south end, and we'll put a hundred palm trees down here, we'll do all this stuff. And and so many of these conversations have happened. And I and I said, Why don't you just go do it? And and well, we're waiting for you to win. And I'm like, Well, that's kind of why don't you just go do it? Well, guys like us want to deal with guys like us, you know. And I'm like, okay, I get it, whatever, you know. And I I can't explain it. You know, I wish they'd just do it anyways, because I want what's best for the town. I don't want necessarily honestly, me winning mayor is not what's best for me. Yeah, yeah. This is gonna cost me a bunch of money.
SPEAKER_01Well, yeah, yeah, this is you know, and that's what I was saying in the beginning, you know, being able you know, you're you're basically taking shots, you're taking votes, man. Right, just why why sign up for it almost, right? I'm sure we've been.
SPEAKER_00You know, somebody asked me that uh at the last foundry meeting. I said, why would you do this? And I'll ask you, Ryan. If you've lived here 16 years, if you love the city through and through, and you had the ability to fix it, would you?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, for sure. And I have thick skin, so I can deal with it too. So yeah, and you can see that. Well, that's part of actually yeah. I know who's gonna back me. You know, the good thing is is I think for me, that's one of the reasons why I want to do this podcast, you know. Not only for the community, but I I want to know too. And and at the end of the day, we I am, I want to be around like-minded people. Yeah, but it's really true. If you really understand who's driving the bus, you know the destination. Correct. And that I think everyone's so worried about the unknown in their own personal life. Everybody's so worried about what do they call that?
SPEAKER_00Analysis, paralysis, and all that, right? They look at something and they say, they they they're not able to envision a 10-year or a 15 or a 20, right? And you can take a look at certain developments, like even your own development, and I'm not I'm not banging on you here, but there's 68 units. I personally feel that if you took about six units out of that thing, it would be a better development, right? And I think you feel the same way. Sure, yeah, we'd be bigger units. But in planning and zoning, they basically forced your hand to do that, right? Yes. Okay, so now we're gonna get to the second part. During the city council meeting that I'm I witnessed, right? That action item was to amend the general plan. That means it is changing the zoning, right? Right? If you're amending the zoning at that point, I'll bet through out the window. You don't have to have 68 units. You could say, hey, we're gonna go have a meeting with planning and zoning tomorrow, and we're gonna do this project because this way it would be better for the community than that way. But right now it's yes or no. Yes or no. No why or we'll look into it. No why or we'll work with you. I want to work with you to make sure that the things that we do are the best for the city, not just yes or no.
SPEAKER_01Well, and this is my concern, right? You know, uh just to be very transparent here, you know, this is being recorded, but there's I'm gonna be honest there, right? So you nailed it. If but why would I why would I feel forced to continue to keep that 68 units? It's because they said that's what they're they won't approve anything else besides that, right? Well, that's stupid. But but it's so if I am general, if I'm a if I'm going there for the amendment, then why do I need to keep that there? Right? So it's it's the same, but they're gonna say no if I don't do what they want me to do. And that's really unfortunate because if you look at any of the videos, even for PN, you know, PNZ, they've given me a lot of support. I've had a lot of support, and I want to continue to, I understand you got to kind of play but it would be a better development, right? And it wouldn't, it's not like it's affecting the thing overall.
SPEAKER_00It's like six units just to give a little breathing room.
SPEAKER_01I was a billion dollar, I was actually set up to build like a really bitching dog park on the corner. Yeah, dog park or maybe some additional parking, just a little bit of breathing room, you know.
SPEAKER_00And I understand as a developer, you might pencil out a few more dollars with a few more units, but legacy, just barely knowing you, I'm willing to assume you'd rather have a project that long after you're gone and dead that you're proud of than a couple extra bucks right now.
SPEAKER_01Oh, for sure.
SPEAKER_00You know, and so legacy for the community is what should be important there.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And if it's if it's if it's somebody like if somebody's trying to ram that down your throat, I'm gonna say, Ryan, we're gonna go sit down there with them tomorrow and figure out why. Because this is stupid.
SPEAKER_01And those are and that's really just the and but that's all the all I'm really looking for is just a logical sit down. Let's just be logical about it. Here's okay, you guys have your ideas of what's better, and here's my ideas of what's better.
SPEAKER_00And just be like they say we will approve this or we won't. Yeah. And then it goes up there and they say yes or no. But nobody's sitting down and saying, why. And I'm gonna keep hammering on that through this whole podcast because by the time, you know what? I got my change order hat on right now. My next one's gonna say, well, the next one's gonna say have a have a two airlines, is what the next one's gonna say. But the one after that's gonna say why.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, you know, so so that's yeah, we'll we'll we're gonna go on tangents forever to know it, but let's wrap up the tourism. Tourism uh is a big deal here. Snowbridge is a big deal, the lake life's a big deal. Just kind of touch on that a little bit, please.
SPEAKER_00Okay, so there is if you want to get tourists to like have so first off, we have the iconic London Bridge. Robert McCulloch had the foresight to buy that. When you go over there in the fall and in the spring when it's not so hot, you will see uh people from Japan and people from various parts of Asia taking pictures of it. To this day, it's a very, very large tourist draw. Secondly, we are putting 1.6 towards something that I feel is doing absolutely nothing. You could, like I said, call the Martelli brothers. Big off-road race. Have you ever been to the Parker 400?
SPEAKER_01I took a helicopter run over it. It's nuts. Oh, yeah, it's nuts.
SPEAKER_00Back when they used to camp over by the airport and all the camp, it's like 30,000 people out there at RVs, right? So now our biggest problem is where do we put all the people? It's not how do we get them here, it's where do you put them here, right? You got a million different ways. We turned down that triathlon thing and they ran away. And I guess we're trying to get them back now because that actually went public. Oh wow, right? Someone's pissed. But that's you know, that's a huge deal. What would air service do for tourism, right?
SPEAKER_01I'm asking you. Oh man, that that well man, I well, you and I talked about it. I actually have a pro forma on all kinds of things when it comes to air service and it comes to expanding that airport, which we'll talk about.
Air Service As A Growth Multiplier
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so if we had air service here, I'm not talking about landing big jets in and out of here. We like our peace and quiet. We're in the desert, but if you had a turboprop that fly from here to any hub, selfishly, I'd like it to be Vegas because I love gambling, right? But realistically, if we flew out of either John Wayne or Ontario, how many people come to Lake Havasu from the riverside or that area, Orange County Riverside?
SPEAKER_01It's what is it, like 50, 60 percent? Probably more. Yeah, that's probably even more. Yeah. So you think they LA, San Diego, Riverside County, insane.
SPEAKER_00They would they would they they would jump on a puddle jumper, be here in 45 minutes and have a have a car stashed at the airport. We tried airlines, everybody's gonna say, oh, we tried it twice before. That's not true. We tried it three times before. The first time was remarkably successful. That was done by Robert McCullough. The second time they did it, it was not successful. The third time was not that long ago. I lived here and nobody even knew about it until it was done. You know, like nobody, I didn't know you could fly out of here or I would have, you know, you know.
SPEAKER_01The way that I look at it is like, you know, Vegas, like, I'm at the point where I'm like, oh I didn't, but I don't really want to go to Vegas anymore, right? But the Vegas was like the spot. You're gonna go eat, shop, whatever, right? Absolutely. I still love it. But I'm not like I'm gonna jump in in a car and go. But the reason why people don't come here as much, which I I have looked at how much revenue you would typically make more if you were able to have those type of flights in and out, you'd have weakeners come out here way more often. This place would swell up all the time, you'd have a lot more tax revenue just because it's easier to get to. That's people this is when you leave, and this is funny because anybody who's listening to this and hasn't been to Havazu because that my following is pretty big, but when you get here, you could feel there's a reason why this place is special. It's special the minute you get here, you decompress. And and so people that are in the race in California and other places, they're gonna want to come out here if they can just come out here for 500 bucks round trip or even a thousand dollars round round trip, they're on it, you know. And that's that's the whole point. So you're gonna have more people come in on a weekend, weekly basis. And I would almost put money on it, it's a 25-30% increase in revenue or in in tourism for so where do you get the money for that?
SPEAKER_00What about the 1.6 for the Lake Havasu?
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Oh, wait a minute. We have another 500 from the PED too. Partner in economic development. Do you know that guy's actually on record in a newspaper from 2015 saying the partner in economic development should not bring new business to Lake Havasu, but should support local business through organic growth? How do you do it? Wild.
SPEAKER_01How do you do that?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, exactly. That means you don't do anything and you take credit for everything. The reality of it is, is if you have air service here, if you're gonna start talking about bringing industry here, and I call you and you're in Tennessee and you're the CEO of XYZ fabrication, right? And I say, I want you to come to Havasu, and you can say, okay, how do I get there? That conversation's over as soon as we say three-hour drive. You bring in air service here, I say, Ryan, you're gonna come to Lake Havasu. We're gonna buy your ticket, you're gonna come in here, we're gonna put you up in the hotel, we're gonna wine you, dine you, show you the land, show you this, show you that, show you what we have for workforce, what we have for living available, you know, all this stuff. And you fly in, you're good. We have a healthcare problem here.
SPEAKER_01Uh we'll step onto that kind of thing.
SPEAKER_00Doctors and doctors, well, I should say spouses. I'm learning how to be more political nowadays, because you know, I can't say doctors and wives, because there are a lot of female doctors. They like to shop and they like to travel. Do you think we would have a higher likelihood of retaining talent here if we had air services? Oh, for sure. Yeah. So what's the downside? There really is none. There is none, right? The only thing that happened before why this air service stopped, it was federally funded. What if we city funded it through some of these wasted monies? Well that is still generating tourism.
SPEAKER_01You can even go one step further and allow allowed the private sector to come in and build it and run their own revenue stream off of it and partner with the city.
SPEAKER_00Key word being partner, you know, right now. We talked just a little bit about that because the hangar situation out there is dire. And I know that, you know, typically the way cities work is, you know, they give them the land and they get this little tiny nut off the side of the rent of the hangar. Me personally, I would rather see the city partner with somebody and whack up that rent because that's real money.
SPEAKER_01Oh, yeah. Well, when you have when you when you really and there needs to be that sophisticated approach when you have the deficiencies in the budget that you guys have.
SPEAKER_00I don't think we have a deficiency in the budget. You just think it's valuations. Yes, yeah, yeah. So you know, 10 years ago, our budget was $130 million. Yeah, which is now it's $303, and somehow we have no money. The problem's the spending and where it's being spent. The problem's not, but we have plenty of money. We just need to really throttle back on on you know four million dollar pools, you know, and that or $12 million courthouses or $4.7 million parks. And you know, we can go down a list here or $1.4 million on a stoplight. How much is your stoplight gonna cost you? We I think we budgeted $6.50. $650. But when we buy a stoplight, it's $1.4 million.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, you see what I'm saying?
SPEAKER_00Like, let's line item some budgets here. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So you know, and that's why we're going in more of a private way. We'll build it, you know, we'll build it. The city takes on a liability, but we'll we'll build it, you know. Yeah, it's easier that way. Yeah, well, I don't care.
SPEAKER_00If I'm smarter for the city to do it too, because if you're gonna have to do it, if I don't have to spend $1.4 million and I can get it for six, I'm gonna do it all day long. Yeah, of course.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and that's the same thing with my four million dollar pool that I could probably get for one. Yeah, and guys like us, we're gonna be penny pinching every edge, every we have to, you know, and uh and that's where it's like, you know, some of the some of the you know kind of things that we want is just uh allow the city to kind of allow us to kind of push forward when you have projects that size.
SPEAKER_00Anyway, so relationships work a lot better when they're symbiotic.
SPEAKER_01And that's the one thing about me. I'm so easy going. Man, I walk I when we had that hearing, I'm just like, okay, guys, just once you know I've already been ahead of this. This we can do what you gotta do, but we we're we're easy going, just say yes and we'll get out of your way. You know, just that's all we need. Um, but anyway, so all right, let's move over to the since we kind of talked about the airport, let's stay on that one now. So, you know, my here's my experience, and I'll we'll laugh about it a little bit, and I'm sure hopefully I don't get sight cited for this. But um, you know, during uh during like some of the bigger weekends, what was happening is a lot of the R44s are like just let's say,
Airport Hangars And Partnership Revenue
SPEAKER_01you know, anybody who's got you know like a bell or you know, what have you, a lot of those air uh helicopters they just don't have a place to park, you know, at in at uh at the airport. So they were calling me to go land at paradigm storage, you know, and I'd like as well as it's outside of city limits.
SPEAKER_00We have an ordinance on that. I have to pull a permit every year for Super Cat Fest because we're the only event that lands helicopters in the event.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, well, we're not doing it anymore because I found out like apparently it was frowned upon, and I want to keep my relationships tight. But they would land, they would land, you know, at paradigm storage and they would actually have cover with air conditioned units, so they're keeping their stuff in good shape. And if I had it's out in county though, isn't it? No, I'm in city, I'm in the city limits, so I didn't know that. So they're like, oh, yeah, as long as it's private land and you say yes, you can, right? So there's no there's actually a we found that out. Yeah, we found that out. You can't land in the city without a permit. So you can't the permit's strangely easy to get, by the way. Yeah, that's what I heard. So yeah, if if we need to do it, we'll do it again. And if if they call me and say, hey, this is you know, I have nowhere else to park this thing, like if it's during my event, I'll pull the permit for it. Yeah, you have them drop it. There you go. I appreciate it. So yeah, so they you know, we we were approached by the old the old um um airport manager. We went in and we were looking at building a helicopter hanger or actual several hangers. Sure. And so we're that kind of monetized into a conversation to build some hangers down on the south side. And then it really monetized when I started talking to the Marinelli's about, you know, 250,000 square feet of hangers on the south side. And, you know, we were just kind of talking about where, you know, how the FAA, and I'm not sure because this isn't verified on my end, this is what I'm being told. The FAA is actually spending money to keep this airport open.
SPEAKER_00I know that our city's spending right around a half million. I don't know if we actually get any subsidies from the FAA on the city. I'm not sure if we'll get into that. Yeah, but I wouldn't have to be able to do that. We're gonna get into a really awesome conversation here in just a second. I think I already know where you're going. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01So I'm looking at this and I'm like, well, look, guys, just to just if you were to look at big numbers, if you're gonna come in with the private sector. Now, as we know, Velocity just bought, you know, their private equity firm um that bought the FBOs from the Marinelli's, right? So the the and and I think they took over the government, the contract too for fuel for the military, if if I if I recall, I could be wrong. Anyways, um, and I haven't really dug in since this whole time about a year ago. The uh that south side, there was about 250,000 square feet of hangers, and it was mixed years. So you had T hangers and you had larger, you know, 100,000.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, but the south side, so I just took a flight in that little bush plane. Part of the reason why I did that, you know, we flipped a Laughlin for breakfast and all that, but part of the reason I did that is I told my buddy Paul, I said, dude, I need to buzz over this airport a couple times to get a good view of it. And we talked a little bit about some of the infrastructure needs and all that stuff down there. But that south side, you need a ton of dirt work. A lot of fill.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's millions. Oh, yeah. You're so for you to even start, probably before you even get a you know, go vertical on anything, just to get infrastructure and dirt work, you're looking at five or five and a half million bucks just dirt work. That's not true. So then, and then now you're talking about all your utilities, and then so you're you're six million dollars into this thing before you even go vertical on your own little tiny T hanger. You know what I mean? Like there's nothing you can really build over there, and obviously nobody's even gonna no, no one's building a hanger anymore without it being temperature controlled. It's just you, it's different nowadays.
SPEAKER_00There's hangers, there's hangers at our airport right now, they don't even have 220 power. It's wild. My buddy Paul, he so if you want to get a hanger at the airport, you can get on the wait list. I have a friend that's on the wait list from 1984. Yeah, five years, and I think he's moved up one spot. He's like spot number 60 or something, right? So the way you if you want to know the great way to get a hanger is you go and you buy the plane and the hanger and then you get rid of the plane. Yeah, it's the way you gotta so that's how you know I have a couple buddies. That's how you know they keep getting hangers. Well, how do you get these damn hangers? I bought the plane and we bought the plane, yeah. You know, just buy the whole thing and get rid of it.
SPEAKER_01So it's a package deal, it's like the truck and trailer and the boat at the same time.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, everything, whatever you gotta buy to get it, and then you just get rid of all the stuff later, right? But I'm in there, I'm like, why do you got a swamp cooler in here, man? He's like, we don't have 220. And he goes, Dave, help me get 220. He goes, We'll all pay for it. We just need the ability to do it. And that's the point.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, the private sector is willing to pay for it. Correct. So five, six million dollars infrastructure at the private sector will pay for it. You just the the reality is is for the payback, you'll have guys that'll come in and build their own hangers, right? If you want to sell the sell the dirt. I got a better idea. Sell the location, better way to put it.
SPEAKER_00You know, and I don't, you know, so there this is part of learning the rules of the road, right? Because I'm sure there's state laws and this thing. But why can't we partner with a builder? And why can't we as a city, you know, I don't know, put up a bond, finance the hangers, and then get the real money on return instead of getting, you know, your 50 bucks a month, you know, if the if the if the rents, what what is the rent on a hanger nowadays? 300, 400 bucks or something. I don't remember what it was critically. It's pretty, it's pretty substantial, right? It's not bad.
SPEAKER_01It's if you if you it's okay.
SPEAKER_00To develop the hangers, what do you figure that would cost on the other pads?
SPEAKER_01Well, it depends on the seven million. Let's just call it, let's say, for example, let's say an average cost per hanger. Now, mind you, these hangers are from small tea hangers to larger hangers. I think their average cost per hanger was going to be about 50,000. But that's we have there was also much larger hangers.
SPEAKER_00So 50,000 times what, 65 hangers or whatever?
SPEAKER_01I I think, yeah, I think it was this, but it was 225. Here, I'll just do the numbers better. I'll put this. So Give me a total budget. Okay, I'll give I'll give it to you right now. Remember exactly the time. I'll tell you right now.
SPEAKER_00But the question is, why can't, you know, as you you you as the builder, right? Not saying that you're gonna be the one building them, but as a typical builder, we typically give you the land, you guys get to make the investment and build the thing, and then you guys get rich. Right? Yeah. Why can't we put up the money and split it with you as an investment? And that way, you know, if we put up 10 or 15 million bucks, but we're gonna make 60 indefinitely. Oh, yeah. You know, like literally, you're gonna you're gonna make money indefinitely off these hangers. Why can't we put up the money into it?
SPEAKER_01All right, so you're looking at 27 million dollars. Yeah, but let's factor let's break it down even more than that. 27 million, and and and everybody's mind's like that's a lot of money. That is not a lot of money, yeah. But let's paradigm storage I did in seven phases. So divide that by seven because you're recouping capital, it's only 3.4 million a phase.
SPEAKER_00So why can't we partner with a builder? We'll put up the money in the land, you guys build it on your dime, and then we split it.
SPEAKER_01Do you know how easy this conversation how far along the this could have been if that conversation would have happened in all of the meetings that I've already been in with other pilots? It's crazy how much the if that conversation on the table, you can hear it in the earbox. Yeah, I'm like, yeah, because I was so passionate about this. Because what it is is like people come to me to fix problems. That was the reason. That's what they're doing. They came to me and they're like, hey, Ryan, this is what we're trying to accomplish, what we're trying to do. What do you think? And I go to them with a solution. And then it's they don't want to hear it. And I'm like, guys, like, you know, because I you gotta remember it, and to be completely honest, it was gonna benefit me too, right? Because all my projects are north. If I can help expand that, talk about the PR for this town and the PR for me that I get to go to my clients and say, by the way, they're expanding this and we're part of it.
SPEAKER_00And by the way, a municipality is successfully working with private industry.
SPEAKER_01Oh, and no, and honestly, nobody else wants to deal with public-private partnerships that much anymore because they're scared of politics. If you have the right people in office, though, and you have a good, healthy contract, it makes sense. It's just you gotta for you to be able to make this happen. You it's just it takes some polish and it takes people to move the needle, but it is actually going to generate income. Like it's it's like would you it will generate income, it's legacy, it's mailbox money indefinitely. Right. And and it's because remember, it's a land lease, and you're making the land, so you're and so then there's all kinds of tax incentives for the owners, and it's just all this crazy stuff. And you have to there's so many benefits to it. Give me one con. You know, well, think about it. So I no, you're gonna let you laugh at this. So I I kind of looked at all the projects that we've had here so far in Habasu. We've employed about 300 people for the last five years. Sure. So you bolt on another 250,000 square feet while we have other projects going on. Yes, you'll use some same subs, but some of our projects we're having to bring outside sources, sure. You're employing a lot of people. Yes. You know, and why else?
SPEAKER_00That is all that is all for our economy. Where are they spending that money? Yeah, and where they they're gonna go rent.
SPEAKER_01They're gonna so you have groups, so you have like subs, which are really doing well right now because they're retaining labor and they're retaining some of their executives, right? They're growing as they as they're building. And when you have groups like me, if I go to somebody and you know some of our subs are already doing this, they're saying, hey, look, I have Paradigm's contract. I got five years with Paradigm. I need 700 air conditioning, you know, mini splits. That's a that changes the game for it. That HVAC company for sure. Yeah. So what's what that means is it's from him as an owner, as a business owner. So the owner of the HVAC company is going to retain better labor because he has consistent business that's not going to fail. So now he can pay his guys a little bit better. He those, you know what I mean? You're just going to have a better polished crew business with better systems, better technology, better trucks, better tools. It just becomes it's a it's a mudslide of positivity, is what it is. It's called capitalism. Right.
unknownIt's called capitalism.
SPEAKER_01That's it. And that and so we so of course I'm passionate about it because I've I'm literally witnessing it every day, and we've been a big part of it. But I would love to see, and it's just I feel like I'm taking the interview over, dude.
SPEAKER_00I'm sorry, but no, I kind of feel like I'm interviewing, I'm interviewing you right now.
SPEAKER_01You're totally just getting to you're making me, you're pulling all the passion out of me, and I appreciate it.
SPEAKER_00But uh my point, like I said, is you know, I'm not a politician, I'm a business guy, I'm an entrepreneur. So I look at this stuff and I keep coming back to the why. So and the what I said before we even started this, I was more excited about this podcast, even though I know it's going all over the country and it's not directly to the voters of Lake Havis. Oh, it's gonna go. I'm driving it there because this I get to sit down with a guy that thinks like me, even though we haven't met before. You understand the basic fundamental point that there is no problem that isn't solvable. It's just a question of how much energy are you willing to put at it until you solve it. And that that goes across the board, right? And if I wanted to say, hey, I'm gonna bring Elon Musk to Lake Havasu, people that have never jumped off the cliff and started a business will say, That's impossible. People like us would say, I wonder what it would take to get it done.
SPEAKER_01That's a fundamental difference between people. Yeah, if you've dumped off a cliff a few times and you've actually been able to build the planes, even though you've dressed a few, you're like, it makes it easier to build that plane on the next time.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, but the point is, what would it take to get it done? It's not impossible. It's just what would it actually take? And I can tell you what it would take. It would take some serious tax advent incentives and stuff like that. But you know, all these things that I've said in my campaign, you know, the infrastructure, city unification, you know, bringing industry, people say, Well, that's impossible. No, it's not. It's not even that difficult if you know how to do it. And these people are already reaching out to me, and all these things are already happening. And looking at a budget and saying, Oh, we got two million dollars for roads. This is not, I mean, this is not rocket science, guys, and these are not campaign promises. I can tell you they're River Dave guarantees we're gonna get this done because it's that easy. And and if I tasked you with any one of the problems that this city is facing, you could solve them.
SPEAKER_01I I I don't know if I'm gonna sign up for it.
SPEAKER_00No, I understand that, but the fact is you personally could do it.
SPEAKER_01I I believe in myself enough. Yeah, I believe and I have the right resources.
SPEAKER_00That's the way that I that I have the right resources. You're not electing me, man. Yeah, you're electing a very intelligent network of people that surround me.
SPEAKER_01And that's we just talked about that when we pulled up, too. It's like you are you're electing somebody that like really cares about the community, of course, has seen the deficiencies and has witnessed bare, you know, one-on-one of the things that you know needs to change. Sure. However, you it's the resources that you really have behind them, right? It's like our current administration, you know, he's got resources back there. And that's really what it comes down to. It's just it's just knowing, you know, who to reach out to and how to, you know, the right guidance and the right people with the right moral compass. All right, so let's move over to healthcare because healthcare is a huge part of Lake Havason. Let's talk a little bit about, you know, and talk about the problem.
SPEAKER_00It's not a huge part.
SPEAKER_01It's it's it's a huge missing it. It's a deficiency that is becoming a bigger problem in conversations. Let's put it that way. The conversation's always been we
Healthcare Recruiting And Real Incentives
SPEAKER_01don't have enough, it's not good enough, the list goes on. Sure. What what's your what's your uh perspective? What do you what can you do? What are you thinking? Let's just go through this go over healthcare.
SPEAKER_00So I have my Wednesday Foundry thing, and there's people from the hospital there virtually every week. And I ask them right there. And that's one of the cool things about the foundry, right? Uh the deal that we're doing, it's actually a back and forth. It's not so much speaking, it's a QA. So we get to listen to what they're saying as well, right? One of the problems that we have is traveling nurses, and I don't know if you know about that whole scheme, but it's crazy and it drives health prices through the roof. Yep. But they're working on fixing that by by upping the pay rates for the locals now. In terms of the hospital, it's 10% private owned. We do not have a lot of control over that. What I can tell you is Grace Hecht was, believe it or not, I've had more candidates come through the foundry thing. I don't know, senators, the pres are said it president. I mean, you name it. Yeah. LD30 candidates, treasurer, I mean, you name it. They've all come through there and spoke on Wednesdays, right? But um, Grace Hecht, she's running for LD30, she's at a bullhead, and I just took her aside and I said, Grace, you guys got that brand new Excel health facility up there. I said, All my friends that live in Bullhead rave about this thing. They say it's the best thing that's ever happened. I said, How did you get it? Right? You would think that I don't know, the people in charge might ask them, how did you get it? Nobody has. They went to ICSE, which is a trade show up in Vegas. They have their little easy up in their little table, and they walked up to them and said, Tell us about your town, and that's literally what happened. Obviously, I love trade shows, I'm a trade show guy, but I'm just gonna call Grace and say, Grace, give me their number. Because I want to fly them into Avisu and talk about our new facility that'll be coming in soon, right? These are not impossible problems to solve if you actually attempt to solve them. Right? So we have our PED again. This is $500,000 that goes absolutely nowhere. You know what the actual biggest complaint is, second to healthcare? Veterinarians. That is we have to drive to Kingman to get vet vet care because all our vets are all booked up. And we had one vet, they moved out of town and they closed down. Why can't we take some of this economic development money? Why can't we go to a veterinary college and say, hey, we'll take a couple of students and one senior guy, we're gonna give you an opportunity to set up shop in Lake Havasu. We had one that just closed down. That building's not leased yet. We'll pay the rent on the building for a year. If it's $7,000 a month, $6,000 a month, we'll call it seven for easy math, right? So you're looking at what is that, $84,000? You call it $10,000 with V. Sure. Call it $100,000. Yeah. Now you've got a veterinarian in Lake Havasu, and they you have a startup business. To me, when you say partnership and economic development and their charter is to bring business to Lake Havasu, way more than $100,000 a year.
SPEAKER_01Way more.
SPEAKER_00So now you argue more. Profitable. Yep. So what is so wrong with being profitable? You know, like all these people nowadays, they they make it sound like poor is the new cool, right? And it's crazy to me. And why do governments always have to just be spin, spin, spin, spin? You know, so we're talking the the big hot potato right now. Actually, you heard a little bit about it in that city council meeting. The splash pad. The splash pad for Lake Havasu has now become it's a $1.5 million project, which I don't even know how they get $1.5 million. Actually, I do know how they get it, I'll bring it up. You know, $1.5
Splash Pad As Profit Center
SPEAKER_00million on a 303 budget, right? This particular thing has become the hot potato of whether you are fiscally responsible or not. The moms want it, yeah, right? So the conservatives are like, we're not spending that money. The less than conservatives are saying, no problem, we're gonna spend that money. And there's this huge argument over 1.5, right? Nobody thinks they asked the question, where'd the 1.5 come from? Right? I got an even better question. So the the answer to that is we looked around at other cities, and that's about what they cost, and we just kind of plug and play, you know, you want your little squirting lizard here and this, that. I said, no wonder we're always coming in second place to bullhead nowadays. You're looking at what they did and just kind of matching it, that's not acceptable. First off, we're gonna build a splash pad, we're gonna build a black the best splash pad you've ever seen. But here's question number two Why does it always have to be an entitlement project? Why can't it be a profit center? And I said that everybody in the room is looking at me like I was speaking Chinese. And they're like, Well, how do you make money on a splash pad? I said, You ever been to an amusement park? Charge a fee. No, what happens at the end of that? You know, that big round tube, the whole family goes through the rapids. Yeah, okay, yeah. At the very back, at the very end of that ride when it's over, they have water cannons, and you literally walk up and you tap your ATM card, and then you get to spray your family. What would happen if you had two rows of water cannons? I have kids, man. If we had that when they were little, my credit card would be on fire from the time we got there to the time we left.
SPEAKER_01I was broke every time I'd leave there on Friday nights, man. That was in 2008. I had the money anyway.
SPEAKER_00I'm talking to Jess, like I said, I really like Jess. I really do. I think he's a really personable guy. I says, Hey Jess, you know, I got an idea. Why don't we do like a six-inch deep lazy river? And he goes, I've never heard of that before. I says, Well, the mom shows up, she's got her inner tubes. When you're floating in an even a big guy like you, if you're floating in an inner tube, you're only drafted this much water, right? I said, You can go a six-inch lazy river all the way around the thing, right? And that way the mom could set up her little deal, have her umbrella, and the kids go around. I says, Oh, you want the rapids experience, which is basically like the jacuzzi bubbles to shake the rafts? Get your credit card out. Oh, you want the waterfall to land on them? Get your credit card out. You know what Tempe does with their parks? When they build them, they put in two concrete pads, sewer, electrical, and water. Then they do it to the food concessioners. They say, Oh, you know, Fourth of July weekend's coming up. We'll rent you that spot for a thousand bucks.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's the way to do it.
SPEAKER_00So now you're generating income. Do you know what happens when the splash pad goes from an entitlement project to a profit center? You think the city's gonna let people vandalize it? Do you think they're gonna let homeless people there? Or do you think they're gonna protect it like oh yeah, like it's the arc? Well, then or do you or do you think they might even build more of them?
SPEAKER_01Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, why does it always have to be money going out?
SPEAKER_01Why can't we recover some money and have them coming back in, right? Yeah, and then police are gonna, you know, police are gonna have their kids and their wives and stuff like that. Everybody dude or whatever, you know, and they're gonna go patrol it all the time.
SPEAKER_00Correct. And you know what? A six-inch lazy river is safe, and I might even get in a tube and float around it with my kids, right? Like it can be fun for the family. It doesn't, you know, nobody thinks outside the box and nobody's asking why does it cost us much or how can we make money on it? It it's just kind of common sense. Yeah, you know, if I told you, hey Ryan, you know, up at your that community you're doing with the 68 homes. What's what's the name of that? Paradigm flats? The flats, yeah. Okay, flats. I said, okay, you know what, Ryan, we're gonna rezone that, we're gonna take out six of the units if you don't want them, but we're gonna put a water park in there, right? I would just say you put a water park in there, right? You're not gonna build some crappy little water park, you're gonna do something cool. Yes, and that's what I'm saying. Why do we always have to be like, oh, they did this, so we can kind of match it. Why can't we do something better?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, well, you get if you if you win, just give me the give me the reins on some cool stuff. I'll do all kinds of cool stuff around here for sure, especially for the kids. Because I'm a big, you know, my son. I don't know if you know this, I have full custody of my oldest son, and uh, he's now a 3.8 GPA for baseball. They just opened up over there that uh split knuckle, yeah, which is cool. And he's got a you know a um a um uh batting coach. Like that's a really funny guy. I've got a chance to meet him, but you know, Shane, my oldest son, 3.8 GPA. We just went up to uh Oregon. He just did a showcase. You know, he's a D1 player. All of his numbers were there. Fat 13th fastest out of 300. But I'm wow. Yeah, 2.0 uh uh pop time. I actually had one of the guys that's here. Apparently, he's a I think he's a scout for the Yankees, if I recall. I think he's reached out to me on social media, wanted to meet Shane, right? And he's here, so it's another testament to people that are here. Well, I that that youth, I didn't know that exist. And so Shane is out here. He's like, Yeah, I have a batting coach now out there. I'm like, wait, what? I didn't even I knew they were building something there, and it was for like that type of stuff for conditioning for kids and youth.
SPEAKER_00But like, that's the stuff I would love to like continue to support because I think that's so super cat fest, it's one of the largest charity fundraisers for like Havasu, and all that money that we raise goes to the youth of Lake Havasu. And so, like we're actually developing a an RC race, an RC complex down in Sarah Park right now. It's about seven acres. Yeah, I heard about it. And I'm super cat, when it's all said and done, we'll put in 50,000 this year, and then next year we'll put in another 50,000 because I want it when it's done, I want it to be the nicest RC complex in western Arizona. I don't want to compete with Phoenix in Vegas. I want Phoenix in Vegas saying we want to come here, right? But uh Split Knuckle are actually gonna be donating to them. I think we're donating 15,000 so they can run uh some sort of scholarship program. Oh, cool. So that's that's one of them.
SPEAKER_01And that's the stuff that I'd love to just continue to see out here too. That type of stuff. Kids, you know, there's not enough stuff for kids. One of the biggest complaints is we don't have you know um child care here, you know, and that's the thing. We just don't have, I don't, dude, yeah, I'm not good at that.
SPEAKER_00We need we we we we can definitely improve on a lot of things. I'm you know, we've done just a little over a million dollars in four years right now. Yeah, but you know, I'm one guy, man. I know, yeah, yeah. And you got all these other things with a good thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01You know, and then it's so you know, to kind of sum up the the together to finish up the airport, the airport I think is something that can really generate a lot of revenue.
SPEAKER_00If that was important, so don't yeah, stop looking at it as a as a as a spending money thing and let's look at it as how do we make money? And I'll tell you, if we were to partner with private and do it correctly, I have to check on some of the legalities of that. But if we could use our city funds, if we could put up a bond, right? And the bond's two or three percent interest, but once it's built, we're making 10 or 15% interest. The people watching this are smart. Yes, you do that every time. If I could borrow money from you for 1% and invest it and make 10%. Oh, that's the most common thing that rich people do.
SPEAKER_01They leverage assets for true capital and they go into play for bigger returns all day long.
SPEAKER_00I have a very, very wealthy friend, and you know, he uh he came home the other day with 50 motorcycles, five zero.
unknownRight?
SPEAKER_00He went in, he went into this guy's garage and you know, the old trail 70 Hondas and all that stuff. This guy had 110 of them in there. And uh, anyhow, he they're all perfectly restored and all this stuff, and he's coming home with 50 of them, right? My wife's like, What are you doing? And he goes, Well, you know, I I I knew about what they're worth, and the guy told me he would take this much for them. He goes, Well, I guess I'm in the classic motorcycle game today. And she goes, What do you know about classic motorcycles? He goes, I don't know nothing about pumpkins either, but if I could buy pumpkins here for a dollar and sell them for three dollars over there, I'm in the pumpkin business. For sure. You know, so it's we just got to start looking at some of the stuff and saying, you know, how do we how do we stop bleeding and how do we start profiting? The airport is a huge opportunity. Huge opportunity. So that guy with that uh G650 flew in, right? And I heard a rumor around town. You know, I heard that guy walked in there, cash in hand, let me do this. Nobody from even reached out to the guy.
SPEAKER_01From my understanding, yeah.
SPEAKER_00That plane flies in here, and I'm the mayor. I'm going up there to shake that guy's hand and say, what can we do for you, sir? Welcome to Lake Havasu. How much money would you like to invest in our little town, and what do we get out of it? Yeah, but we, you know, we did that.
SPEAKER_01Well, I was actually coming out of uh Home Depot and I saw it coming in. Yeah. And I was like, dude, that's a G650. Like, that's a $45, $50 million plane.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's about a $50 million plane. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And so I but I'm and I'm driving down the I get on the 95, I'm watching this thing land, and I'm like, man, someone, there's some money into this town. Then boom, I was all over social media. And they come to find out who it was, and I'm not gonna drop the name, but that this is these are people that love this town that are willing to invest that type of money. But really, to go back to parts of this, you know, you know, and part of our you know, lunch was you know, bringing in um uh grocery stores, you know, bringing in grocery stores, bringing in more healthcare.
SPEAKER_00The the viewers aren't gonna see that, but you know, I'm sitting there saying, hell, hey, all we need is a turboprop. Yeah, that which what is that? It's a it's a little turboprop store.
SPEAKER_01It's like it, yeah. Heck yeah, that thing is.
SPEAKER_00So I'm saying, you know, we need a we need air service with a turboprop, but all these people are telling me, that's impossible, Dave. And I'm like, dude, my buddies own these goddamn things. I mean, that that's not a that's not a true, you know, cattle wagon carrier turboprop, but that's a four and a half million dollar airplane.
SPEAKER_01Well, it but just for conversation purposes, this this you know, look at the look at the steel pieces on there. I mean, look at that hangar. That hangar, that alone, I mean, if you even look how they mounted the HVAC, that's not even close to how much I have in paradigm storage. This would be I dude, he only has one partition here. He has none of his paneling. That's just um insulation. This could this right here, that whole piece is probably 40 grand. Yeah, swipe it left.
SPEAKER_00See another one of his airplanes.
SPEAKER_01Oh, there you go. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's a Cirrus and SR22.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, there's that's actually the most expensive Cirrus I think.
SPEAKER_01But look at that. Look at the steel piece. This is an older hanger, you can tell.
SPEAKER_00That's the one he swants, that's the one he wants 220 in.
SPEAKER_01Isn't that crazy? Yeah, so that that's full insulation. Anyways, the point is that's gonna be dumped pretty cheap. Look, you got a that plane, by the way, is way more expensive than the hanger. Oh, yeah. But you know, they'll give you an idea. But but that's the point, right? And that's the the data comes from where I'm going with building paradigm. The people that are buying these units, like, for example, this is make sure you talk into the microphone.
SPEAKER_00We're getting a little equally.
SPEAKER_01So, right at right at right next to uh in Paradigm Storage, my last building we we built, we built some really big man kids, is what we call them. We just sold it was an 80 by 40 drive-thru. We sold it for 565,000. Nice that which was a lot, you know. But the but the point is the guy who bought it just built a brand new 50-foot center console MTI with five 500s on it. Of course. He's got a gooseneck trailer with a sport chassis, and then he's got some other toys that he's got in that thing. But the point is that people have that type of money, they're gonna spend money to protect their assets. Correct. And that's still an asset because they purchase it fee simple, he's get the write-off, the bonus depreciation. It's like it was an all-around good investment. He was so excited that he was able to own a storage unit rather than just, you know, rather than rent it or lease it forever, right? Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So if you can Well, that's what gets me so excited about the hangers. If we partner, that's mailbox money for life for the city. I'm telling you, dude, if you built that thing out, that amount of money, the city could have its own king air to fly our citizens to and from Vegas.
SPEAKER_01I was looking at so there were some a couple studies done, and I don't remember the numbers, but uh, I'm gonna get I'm gonna back down into it because I think what I was looking at is almost five million dollars a year in revenue after expenses and taxes. That's what I'm saying. If five million dollars on one asset and generate I mean, why not?
SPEAKER_00And that's not even as aggressive a partnership as I'm talking about.
SPEAKER_01If we actually put up the money, it would be more. Well, and that's my point. And that was just Straight up on land leases and some you know, some just revenue and you know.
SPEAKER_00That's just the revenue on the little bit of the land lease. It's not uh when you actually partner with somebody, you can take that number and quadruple it. Oh, yeah, for sure.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So and that's why and again, that's the that's that for but then it actually getting done. And I know there's there's some legal movement, you know, moving pieces to it, but that if someone just really put their energy into it, like all of these other towns around the country are expanding. Why can't we? It's just not that that's why I don't understand it.
SPEAKER_00And do it responsibly, right? Make sure that it's if you're gonna do it, it's first class, you know. And you know, so this is such a refreshing conversation. Every single thing since this mayor thing, what are you gonna do? Infrastructure, city beautification, you know, enforce the laws, this that and you know, I give my standard canned answers, you know, this is what we're gonna do, this is how we're gonna do it, which I always provide solutions. Everybody else, they kind of give you a word salad. I said, This is exactly how we're gonna do it, right? And then everybody that knows me say, Yeah, you'll get it done. Everybody that doesn't know me says, Well, those are impossible, or campaign promises. It's always the same things, but it's so nice to have a real conversation, be like, why can't we do this? Or let's take a look into this. Yeah, or hey, let's do this, or hey, here's a problem, let's go work on it together. Yeah, you know, and and with the case of your your your Paradigm Flats, you know, it truly this election is over in two or three weeks. And if I win it, I won't be the mayor until November, but I guarantee you I'll walk into P and Z with you and say, let's revisit the 68 and see what you want to do there. If it makes it a better project, we could probably get that done. Yeah, this is not you know, and that's and people will be like, oh, he's using the influence to you know threaten pieces. No, it's not, dude. It's just trying to make it better for the town.
SPEAKER_01But there's a lot of really sophisticated builders and developers in the area that would appreciate that type of thinking as well. Okay. I mean, because there's so many guys out here that really have the capacity and they build look at look at Scott Ward. Look at the guy, look at what he's building the Riviera.
SPEAKER_00I mean, dude, there's as long as it's as long as it's beneficial to the town, I will always step in to try to help. You know, if it's one of those, you know, if it's one of those, hey, we're gonna do this, it's not beneficial to the town, but it's gonna be a super high profit margin for this developer, and all we need you to do is change this. I'm gonna say no. Sorry about your luck. And I'm in a real estate business. Yeah, yeah. But you know, I'm I'm the first one. That new development out on the island there, you know, that 88 acres or whatever. I own a real estate company and I went in there and I said, I wish this was more resort and less residential, you know, which that hurts me. Yeah, but it's how I feel. I I want to see this town as it grows grow into something. I mean, we travel all over. You've been to Lotto, you've been to all these places, they are growing, and it is they're the stuff they're doing is super cool. Oh we are growing, and the things we are doing are not super cool.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's it's hard, it's hard, you know, that's the and I think that's the problem, right? It's like when we the amount of people, the amount of exposure I've had to other municipalities and when you look at it, why can't we do the same thing?
SPEAKER_00And these people that are always saying, like, Dave, it's impossible. I'm like, no, dude. I go, I travel. I travel. That's and and it is it's it's we're not inventing the wheel here. We're just looking at what they're doing, and hopefully we can do it better.
SPEAKER_01There's parts in California, I hate to say it, and I don't even want to bring up the California brand, but you know, there are parts in California that it is easier to build and develop than it has been out here. I believe it. It's it's just incredible, and there's so much available, you know, land and so much opportunity, and and it's you know, as far as um, we are driving. I mean, it's just so much we can do here.
SPEAKER_00We are the crown jewel of Mojave County.
SPEAKER_01Eight years ago, have you been here about eight years? I've been here forever. I mean, I've been coming out here for 35 years, but I've lived here full-time going on three.
SPEAKER_00Okay, three. Eight years ago, Bullhead was trash.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I remember. Okay, I mean, literally it wasn't even on the radar.
SPEAKER_00It was just trash. I mean, you go to the Target there, or you drive through the place, you know what I mean. They had a couple of okay Mexican restaurants, but other than that, you're like, really, dude? They switched their city council, they are beating us in every I mean, it's not even close. If this was a heavyweight flight. No, it's not even just that. I mean, their water park. Have you seen it? Uh-uh. Google it on your phone. It's a bullhead, bullhead splash pad image. We have a couple of little things that squirt out of the ground and the homeless bathe in it. Look at this thing.
SPEAKER_01Have you seen it? I'm looking at it right now. Here are images. Holy jeez, dude. They smoke us in every single category. Oh, yeah, this is like super modern.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_01All that water features. I mean, yeah, covered, you know, yeah.
SPEAKER_00They changed their city council, and in eight years, they took that place from trash to surpassing Lake Havasu.
SPEAKER_01It's insane. Yeah. Have you looked at the background of those people that are on the city council?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, they're all entrepreneurs. It's one of the guys needs major dental work, right? But he's just a good old boy that understands business, and they're all business people. They got elected, and they were like, Yeah, we're not doing this anymore. This is what we're doing. And they changed that city in eight years from they were a distant second, distant, to now they're surpassing us in every category, whether it's an Excel health facility, the splash pad. They had ADOT put in those stupid medians in the 95. You know what they did? They took over the 95 and ripped them right back out.
SPEAKER_01Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Every everything that is pissing us off in Havazu, they solved. And I'm just saying, you know, all these people say, Well, you can't do that. Yes, you can. I talked to Leo Biosucci. You want to know what you do? 95 was just paved. You assume responsibility for it right now. We rip that thing out, right? We could either do bird earth berms with decorative rock like they do in every desert town, or we could do smaller medians that actually you know don't encroach on the lanes, and we can do palm trees and beautiful, beautiful landscaping like they do in Palm Desert. These are not impossible things to do. By the way, we assume the 95 in about 20 years when it's due for a repave, you give it back.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and they hand it.
SPEAKER_00Literally, it's that simple. Yeah, you know, Leo's like, you can do it, Dave, no problem. You know, and and all these people are like, that's impossible. No, it's not. It's it's not even difficult. It's not even difficult.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, just because you don't know how to do it doesn't mean it's impossible. Yeah, you just gotta be able to pull the right strings. And like and that's the I think the best um way to understand if it can be done is have other people done it? Has it been a hack? Has the bullhead done it? If bullheads are, why can't we do it?
SPEAKER_00You know, we don't even have to travel far now to see that it can be done.
SPEAKER_01Bullhead's already done it. Vegas is doing it, you know. Yeah, Phoenix is doing all kinds of stuff. Why is it that we can't do it? You know, that's and that's really just as simple as dumped down as that. You know, so okay. So um, what else do we have?
SPEAKER_00I'm waiting for you to put on the hat. I'll put it on right. I've been trying to see if I've earned your vote yet. We'll put it on right here. There you go.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, you know what's funny? I won't even tuck in my ears. So there, how's it look? I'm gonna put it. I'll take a picture of it.
SPEAKER_00I'm gonna take a picture of that.
SPEAKER_01Right. Here's Ryan right there taking a picture of it. Ryan's non-biased uh video here. Love it. A podcast. That's right. Um, so okay, so to sum up, is there anything else you want the audience to know about you? Is there anything that you want to address that's been, oh, you know what? Let me say this before we go there. I do have one request. Sure. All of these platforms
Social Media Attacks And Mental Health
SPEAKER_01on social media that just badmouth everybody, I want to handle that. I want to get in front of this shit. Because that is some dude, people are dying over it. You know, the gentleman that owned what did that uh storage wars or whatever that passed, you know, he shot himself or killed himself.
SPEAKER_00Daryl, yeah, Daryl was actually a friend of mine. I'm not convinced he killed himself, but I mean that's what the that's what the police say. But you know, I just have a hard time believing he would do that. And you know, other social media stuff. The social media stuff, and these dude, they're clowns.
SPEAKER_01But you we even talked about it. There's three or four people or five people or so that are really.
SPEAKER_00So the town's 60,000 people, right? Technically, we're 30% Democrat registered. There's about 20 of them that in in terms of the mare race that are just out of control. You know, Dave lies about this, Dave doesn't even put on Super Cat Fest, Dave this, Dave that, you know. I had one guy claiming I abducted children. And you know what's funny is uh I'll share this with you because it never got shared anywhere else. But I made this video and I thought it was hilarious. I was like, I'm down at SeaWorld, man. I dropped the kids off at the SeaWorld cartel, and it's weird, man. They made me pay. You know, I thought they were supposed to be paying us for this shit, you know, like stuff like that. And I was gonna have um one of my kids, you know, in my in my RV garage, I have a bathroom and all that. I was gonna have one of my kids in there like banging on the door, man, like, help help. My campaign manager was like, absolutely not, babe. Absolutely not. You know, I'm like, dude, they're saying we are abducting abducting children. I'm trying to get rid of kids. I got too many kids, right? But um anyhow, you know, these guys, man, I I feel sorry for them. You know, we've we've kind of tiptoed around it, but there's people that do things and understand the way that the world actually works, and there's people that live with their moms that don't. Yeah, yeah. You know, and and it's a mental health. Yeah, it really is. So, like there's there's like 10, 10 of these guys, and you know, one of them doesn't even live with his mom. One of them actually does. I I happen to know that for a fact. And I feel I feel really truly bad for the guy, but that's not my problem. You know, he shouldn't be out there doing this stuff. But I I you know, I look at the stuff and they you know, I I brought up that I flew up in a bush plane, right? These people would have no concept of the idea that you can fly to a different airport, land the plane, they'll hand you the keys to a car, and you can go anywhere you want, come back and give them back the car, and you don't have to pay for it, right? They don't know about courtesy cards, they don't even know that this world exists. So to them, everything's impossible because they've never done anything, you know. And it that's not to say like all Democrats have never done anything, it's just these 10 or 20 guys. When you when you get that level of hate, it's because you're you're too stupid to breathe, man.
SPEAKER_01Well, it it I like I say, I don't I you know don't want to carry too much into it, but the it's truly a mental health issue. Like it's because they've never met you, what have you, and you're like, you're going so far into like what what's the objective for what? Like, because it just because they're like it's so common.
SPEAKER_00Honestly, so like in in the case of most of them, I think that they're so kind of insignificant in life that they feel if they can affect some kind of outcome that it gives them purpose. You know, but there's that little viral thing going around right now that says, you know, hey, if somebody's you know, if nobody's talking behind your back, you're not relevant. If somebody's you know, if somebody doesn't take try to take advantage of you, you have no value, right? But at the very end of it, it says something very important. Hate always comes from below. That's true, it never comes from above.
SPEAKER_01You know, anybody that I know that really has a lot to just respect in life and has been kicked in the teeth, they just don't say things like that. No, they just don't, they don't get on platforms, they are not keyboard uh workers, they just don't play that game. But that's the one thing I'm like, you know, I'm gonna coalition of that, I'm gonna go after some of these people.
SPEAKER_00I like joking around online, you know, having fun, even talking a little bit, you know, but not dude. I don't generally hate anybody. Like there's just not enough time in the day to do it. Like, how could you even let somebody get inside your head that much that you would care?
SPEAKER_01Dude, I I'll do one step above that. I barely remember people's names.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, just don't remember. Well, every time I open Facebook, if I open my Facebook right now, I can show you the same four or five names, it'll be all the notifications. No, these ones are actually real, but they they it's like a full-time job for them. And I'm like, dude, don't you have to do that? If you guys spent half the effort on trying to make money, improving your life, doing whatever that you're spending on this. If and I'm not even joking, if they spent half the effort towards self-improvement, whether that be financially, mentally, physically, they would be years ahead of where they're at right now. There's a reason why they're all broke, you know, and it's and living that life. Yeah, just living that life, you know. And those are the guys, it's like, oh, you're filthy rich friends. It's like, dude, what is wrong with having money? When did poor become the new cool, man? Because I can't dig that. I don't want to be poor, you know. Nobody really wants to live that way. It's very hard. No, yeah. No, no, you know, and money doesn't, you know, bring happiness, but I can tell you, lack of money sure brings sadness.
SPEAKER_01Well, last thing you want is have money, or you know, you don't have any money and you have some healthcare issues or something. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's just like it's very difficult. You you know, that's where I'm at in my life. I'm trying to store a little nest egg because my son, I he had some really big things happen to him, and it's cost me a lot of money, and I was so blessed that I had prepared for that because our insurance dropped us, because insurance is another big issue.
SPEAKER_00Oh, that's that's a nationwide issue. And I and I, you know, as staunch Republican as I am, and I do not believe in government-run healthcare, but we got some issues here, man. Because that that the number one driver, in my opinion, of middle class going towards poverty right now, fuel prices, healthcare. Fuel prices drive everything up. You want to talk construction costs, materials, they drive everything up, right? And it's food, everything. But healthcare, I mean, for my family, we're spending like $2,500 a month, you know, and same, and it's like normal people can't afford that, you know what I mean? Like if you're working $20 an hour job. Yeah, no, it's a shit, it's not even a great policy. You know, and a great policy is more like six grand a month for my family, right? But you know, if you're making $20 or $23 an hour, $24 an hour, you're not gonna be able to afford that. And and a house, and a car, and a truck, and a and a boat, you know, like and middle class used to mean middle class. You know, you had the the two cars, a couple of toys, a house, you know, the the house with an actual yard and a dog. You know, it's like I think it was like 2.3 kids and a you know what I mean. That was the number. But uh, you know, everybody keeps you know over on the affordable housing thing, everybody keeps saying we gotta make houses cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. You can't you can't. You got an iPhone, right? You know what? You're you're in business, and everybody in your podcast is in business. What happens if you keep trying to make this cheaper and cheaper and cheaper? You end up with junk. If you you try to make these glasses cheaper and cheaper and cheaper, you're gonna end up with glasses you don't want. Wouldn't it be a better philosophy to say, why don't we bring some industry here so the have nots can become haves? Yeah. I would rather bring up the low than try to take something good and make it cheap.
SPEAKER_01Well, bring in good businesses that are able to generate enough revenue that's relevant in the world and to actually pay good labor and pay money.
SPEAKER_00And people say this is impossible. No, it's not. No, it's not. It's not. I I had a guy come to my foundry deal and he's like, Dave, he goes, You're saying this stuff, and people aren't listening. He goes, I lived in this small town, I don't remember what state it was in. He goes, but we had a military installation next to us, and the whole town just lived on the military, just whatever the military installation, that's what they do, right? And finally they got a city council together, and the city council says, We're done with this, man. And they created an industry zone, and they got all these businesses in, and he goes, All of a sudden, that town went from starving to thriving. You know, so I I think I told you at lunch that this guy, uh, Mark called me from Dunkin' Bolt, and it's like a hundred million dollar a year. You guys can Google it if you want. But he called me and he said, Hey, you don't want to set up a distribution thing out there. And I'm like, okay, you know, whatever. And you know, what's that look like? He's like, I don't know, like 20 jobs. And you know, after we talked a couple of times, he's like, I'm thinking about moving the whole thing out there. You know, where's the closest rail service? This is not impossible, guys. These people are actually already calling me. I had a big cabinet manufacturer, not kitchen cabinets, like big metal cabinets. They called me and they said, Hey man, you know, we want to talk about possibly relocating a half-soon. That these are pretty big businesses, man. You know, if you get call it 200 or 300 skilled labor jobs in here that are career paths, right? Like real career. Injection molding, uh, machining, whether you know, Dunkin' Bolt comes, manufacturing and that a company that you could start at, and you know, you start at 18 or 20 bucks an hour, you work there for 30 years, and when you're done, you're making you know 80 bucks an hour, 60 bucks an hour.
SPEAKER_01This is not impossible. Or companies like that that issue stock and plan on exiting. Uh well, Dunkin' Bolt's actually employee-owned, believe it or not.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I know. I started Google it and all that, but because I was like, I started researching the guy, you know.
SPEAKER_01Those are the companies that are really forward-thinking. Like, that's why there's so many roll-ups with HVACs, roofing companies, whatever you have a private equity structure, these guys come in and say, hey, look, it's employee-owned, and employees have that have stock. When I go, that way when they're done, they can tell you. Yeah, and they have a they have a basically retirement plan built in, not just a 401k. It's a big deal.
SPEAKER_00Well, if you actually research 401ks in the history, they were never designed to be retirement again.
SPEAKER_01Oh no, they're so bad. It's uh it's just I that's a rabbit hole in itself. Okay, so let's wrap this up. So, is there anything else that you want the community to know about you that whether it's just you know, uh bring up something that's been negative online, positive online, or just something you want to share? Because again, like I said in the beginning, um, and I said this to Cal too,
Workhorse Leadership And Day One Plans
SPEAKER_01to go into something like this takes, I think, a very special person that really cares about the community and just is really trying to create an impact, but is obviously just pulling at their heart to be a part of something because they want to make change. They need to like you feel like if he doesn't, it's gonna get really bad.
SPEAKER_00I you know, I'm not gonna say that. I'm not a doomsday man. You know, I'm not gonna say if I don't win, the half of going down in flames. It's not true, it's just not gonna get any better. Yeah. Fair enough. Okay, and it's all the things that are being said, you know, by the current regime, we have heard for eight years. If it worked, we wouldn't be where we're at. Right? And so there's there's two things here, right? You mentioned earlier that you know you sacrificed because you're a you're a workhorse. Well, there's two types of horses there's work horses and there's show ponies. Which one do you think I am? Yeah, it's true. I will sit there and I don't, I'm not a politician. If you say we can't do this, I'm gonna say, okay, well, we're gonna sit down and figure out a way to do it, right? And we're gonna get it solved. And if you tell me, well, you can't do that, I'm gonna say, Well, we're gonna figure out a way around that, but no matter what, we're gonna get it done. Yeah, right. And it, you know, so people are we running out of time? Oh, I thought he was saying it doesn't matter what it is, what campaign products, you can pick pick any one of them, right? And I'll say, This is how we're gonna do it. And it may not happen on the first day, but I guarantee you I'm not gonna stop working on it until it is. And that's the difference. I'm not a show pony, man. I'm not gonna tell you what you want to hear. I'm gonna tell you this is what we're doing, and then we're gonna go do it. If I say, like Ryan, try to pick up that hat right there. Okay, you didn't do it. Try to pick up that hat there right there. Okay, so you didn't try to pick up the hat, you picked up the hat. Do you see the difference? There's no trying, there's either doing or don't doing, right? And that's that's a great example. I saw that on social media the other day, so I thought I'd bring it up. Yeah, but that's it. We're not gonna try to fix things, we're gonna fix them. Yeah, and that's it.
SPEAKER_01And I love that because you know, it's just I think that's what everybody wants. The people that believe that the city needs to be improved, they just want to see someone who's gonna do it. You have a tracker of doing things.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. You know, if we started Super Cat from nothing. Now it's you know, one of the premier events on the West Coast. It raises hundreds of thousands. No, it's a pain in the ass, but but we do it.
SPEAKER_01It's not easy, man. People think, oh, maybe it's just fun. He's out there drinking. I'm like, no, yeah, no, it's it's real work.
SPEAKER_00Yes, it takes months. It takes months. And during the event, I get to go to bed at like 2 a.m. and my phone starts ringing at 5 a.m. for five days straight, you know, so that's always a good time. But uh little lethargic days. Yeah, but you know, I mean, literally, yeah, I I do have a proven track record, right? I took a personal website, now it's the largest performance boating website in the country. I started a real team.
SPEAKER_01You showed me proof of how much view it's incredible. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00I I you know, me and my wife started a real estate team. Now it's one of the top five and or top three five and have a sew every single year. You know, we're averaging 75 million in sales. We don't even have any developers backing us. That's all resale.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, right.
SPEAKER_00It's great. Yeah, so do we have track records of success? I would say yes. You know, I've I've like any person, you know, you have your failures, right? You tried something and it didn't work. But those failures make you better.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And after a while, you start figuring out that you don't want to fail and you start seeing the warning sides on the road, and you're able to navigate those things, right? What do they say about captains, boat captains? Everybody wants to be a boat captain until it's time to do captain things, right? And that's that's the same as this. You know, have I ever been a mayor in city politics? No. But a budget's a budget. And as I asked you, you ever built a skyscraper? No. Could you?
SPEAKER_02Yes.
SPEAKER_00You know, so we're just gonna take the certain skill sets that I have and apply them towards this job, and we're gonna take the network of people I I tend to like to surround myself with people like yourself, you know, high, high-level, intelligent people. And like I said, they're not electing me, man. I'm not gonna go in there with a you know, prime example. I'll show you uh Sean Sean Buckley was the CEO of Go Lake Havasu, right? And I've made it very publicly that uh oops that I intend on replacing replacing go-lake havasu. But if you look at that text to them, it basically says, I'm not coming in with a sledgehammer and saying you guys are all fired. It says I want to take a look at the assets that they have, the positive things that they have. I want to look at the visitor center and see how we can keep that going, see how we can retain any of the positive things and reform.
SPEAKER_01That's a great text.
SPEAKER_00Reform and reshape that. Well, that I didn't send that, you know, with the idea of being on a podcast. I'm saying though that we're already making plans on how, you know, people how to make it better, right? When I say I want to scrape go lake havasu, I do want to scrape go like havasu, but I don't want the women working the visits visitor center to lose their job. I don't want to lose the go-lake havasu website. I don't want to lose these things. I want to go in and say, okay, what do we really need to do this? And let's do that. And then how can we make you effective? And then the rest of the money we're gonna put towards something else that is actually effective towards two.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's really important for people to see is that you're already doing work. In essence, you're already kind of getting making those calls and phone calls and meetings or whatever you want. Okay, once if I do and when I do, this is what we need to start right now.
SPEAKER_00I don't wanna I don't want to hit the ground and say, okay, guys, let's have a meeting. I want to hit the ground and say, implement plan A. Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Love it. Cool.
SPEAKER_00So we're already, yes, we're already making plans with several people that either were former or current with the city to say, yes, you know, Sean, if you can bring me contract tourism, prove that you're profitable more than yourself, you're hired by the city. In the meantime, you're in charge of getting all this stuff back into the fold. Love it. Right. And if there's a million examples of that, you know, I've already shouldn't go on record saying I've had a lot of meetings about things that are going to change, but yeah, we've had a few. How does that sound?
SPEAKER_01I would say that things are-coming to you at the foundry, got it. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Well, you'd be surprised they're coming to be all over the place. But yeah, you know, you're in business. And in business, I've always had a philosophy, and I kind of came up with it when I was young. Uh, when you're in business, there's only two states of business that you're in. You're either inspirational or desperate. Desperational, right? Yeah. That's a good way to say that. So, like in the in, I'll take the DCB MTI story, right? Because you're you're you're pretty familiar with that, right? So MTI played in their little corner over here, and DCB is inspirational in Lake Havasu and all the West Coast, right? Well, DCB went out there, started doing the Miami thing, right? Well, MTI responded and they came over here. But the problem is the MTI has the big center consoles and all that. So DCB all of a sudden went from inspirational to putting together renderings of a center console. You remember that? Now they were operating as desperational, right? When their customers would sell and buy an MTI, they would call and be like, hey, what's going on? That is desperate. They finally responded back with their new True Tunnel series, right? And so now they're bringing back inspiration. But if you're always leading from inspiration, you're winning.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And I'm watching the opposite campaigns make adjustments to their campaigns because of me. That is not inspirational. That's desperational. That's how you know you're winning.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's a good way to put it. Yeah. Well, I respect it. Yeah. Cool. Dave, thank you very much for coming, man.
SPEAKER_00You're very welcome, and I appreciate it. I'd love to come back anytime. If we win, we're gonna be sitting down here talking all the time about how we can make things better.
SPEAKER_01And anything I can do to help you and just be a fly on the wall at times, you know. I don't ask for much. I'm pretty easy. I just want to stay in my lane and do good work and
Final Thoughts And Voting Slate
SPEAKER_01improve other people's lives. And this is my focus now, man. Well, it's a really cool place. I think I'm gonna join it. Come on by. I'd love to have dude. It's so cool to see everybody in here because we have some you know prominent people in the city I can join. And I get to see them every day, and that the relationships are monetizing more and more because I see them every day. You know, it's really pretty neat. So, well, thank you very much for all the support, man. I really do appreciate it.
SPEAKER_00No problem.
SPEAKER_01We'll get this out here shortly, and uh hopefully we'll just get this in front of people to get to know you more.
SPEAKER_00So well, if you live in Lake Havasu, check the check the box for Riverdave. My preferred slate, although we're not running as a slate, is Michelle led Sam's Carmano, and Neil Tinsley as well. There you go, buddy.
SPEAKER_02Cool.
SPEAKER_00All right, guys, thank you so much. Thanks.
