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On behalf of all of us the locallybased independent bookstore books and books in miami florida, its my pleasure to welcome you to an evening with donald cohen and mayor Daniella Levine cava to discuss this wonderful book. Its called the privatization of everything how the plunder of public goods transformed america and how we can fight back. And its published by the new press. Donald cohen, the coauthor is the founder and executive director of in the public interest, unanswered National Research and policy center that studies public goods and services. His Opinion Pieces and articles appeared in the new york times, reuters, the los angeles times, the new republic, the american prospect and manyother online and print outlets. In conversation with donald tonight were joined by someone who has meant a lot to us, has been a big supporter of books and books and independent bookstores everywhere. Mayor Daniella Levine cava who was elected miamidades first woman mayor november 2020. [applause] administration is focused on building a stronger, more inclusive, more resilient miamidade, prioritizing reforms to make our county safer and prevent gun violence through the peace and prosperity plans. Restoring and reinvigorating a private company that delivers Economic Security from miamidade businessesand families and attracts new industries. Saving this game may and protecting our environment and directly engaging with residents to make local governments more responsive, transparent and accountable and your we are and this is an example. Donald and the mayor are going to have a conversation about this book and then we will open up a few questions from the audience. There will be a book signing to follow and remember that we have copies of the privatization of everything for sale and dont forget to grab your copy. Now without further ado i like to welcome our guests to the stage. Thank you so much christina. Its great to be with you and christina and i have lots and lots of book events so this is a great thrill to be here with you live for an extraordinary evening with a wonderful friend and a great mentor and thought leader on some very important topics to how we grow and develop here in miamidade county. This bookstore was founded in 1982 w. Mitch kaplan father and the owner has expanded all over the caribbean and we are very grateful for his leadership and the magic of reading. And of course good food too. My purpose tonight is to give the stage to donald cohen who is the author. This book is quite a page turner. A page turner filled with great examples and will be sharing some of that with you so i encourage you to pick up thebook and congratulations donald for writing the book. It took a while. So the book is verytimely, its very relevant. Here we are coming out, knock on wood of the pandemic which has beenwith us in some form for a while but were getting over the worst of it. We are here anticipating states, counties and cities, billions of dollars in federal infrastructure a. So were going to be building a great deal of stuff. Were going to be upgrading our transportation, electric vehicle charging, all kinds of things are coming our way. Both public and private. Inso on the topic of privatization its extremely relevant. So im here with many friends and i just also wanted to acknowledge that we have a dfew members of my staff and the person responsible for procuring all that stuff would be alex, our chief of internal services. Thank you alex. And hes leading us through a labyrinth and i have also from staff lauren and manny and jorge damien the house. Did i leave anyone out . Matt, always here to protect us. Lets get into it. About you and the book as donald, this is your first book but as weve mentioned you write many Opinion Pieces and dominant publications so what inspired you to actually write a whole d book . I think a couple of things. Ive been doing thiswork for a while. Looking at Public Services, looking at privatization and i think back to when i we were children, we are about the same age i believe and we had trust in our public institutions. We made progress. The food got safer, the air cleaner so the background, and the work i do we get culture around the country today of cities time to figure out how to unpack a proposal to privatize something for to make services more efficient or what have you. And after 10 years dealing with this around the country i realized theres another story to tell. Its called the privatization of everything so it really is a bit of everything. [inaudible] you can take years off. Seriously . [laughter] i live in most los angeles so i have a long flight. So i realized there was something bigger on this and we cover everything. Schools and water and bridges and infrastructure, will talk about social services but there really is a very broad range of things we go with that there are some core ideas that became clear and i thought i needed a book to be able to lift those ideas off. I know youre a great collaborator but collaboration is and natural act among consenting adults. And you found someone to coauthor this. Could you tell us about that, what it was like to Work Together with someone else. What was the decision why this partner . Collaboration is the book, it took about five years. Five or six years. So why this partner . This is my first book, its not hisfirst book. Number two, i could get into the weeds in so many different subjects and it was somebody who could make sure we dont get too far into the weeds so we might be able to tell the story. And my coauthor is a historian, phd historian and wanted the historical context. So like any marriage, there are good days and bad days. But we met every week for five years and he told what i think was a good story. And how you came about starting that area. I started about 11 years, 12 years ago. I have this thing about time now. I say before times because everything feels low that the last few years i started it does i believe in public service. Number one. Number two is the work i was previously doing i lived in san diego and was doing similar work Cleansing Efforts to privatize fundamental Public Services and public assets. And had collaborators and allies across the countrythat were sort of seeing and experiencing the same thing. I started to realize we needed a Research Center writ we share ideas and lessons with one another and then by doing that we would both of our game as it were and help, be able to help better. Im nonprofit so i have to raise the money. We do wresearch, we do policy analysis. We felt in places all around the country. Including you helped me. Lets dig a little intothis book. The privatization of everything. It had another name possibly you told me. Not up for grabs. That was our first title. Anyway, now its privatization of everything and you start out talking about public goods for life. Talk about what you mean by public goods and dhow is it, how does it shape your thinking . If any of you are economists theres a textbook definition of public goods which we dont erase. Heres how i talk about public goods. It is loud back there. They must be drinking. Ill keep it real close. Heres how i talk about. There are things we all need to survive and to thrive like health, like education, like clean air, clean water. And other things as well but its not just that we all needthem, we need everyone to have them. We need everyone, we need an educated nation and we not just children to be educated, we need everyone to be educated. We learned that the health of our oldest depends on the health of each of us so isnt just about me not getting covid or getting health and healthy or boosted or vaccinated, i need everyone to be. Thats the fundamentals that i consider public goodsand that they are things that we can only do if we do them together. We can only get everybody healthcare if we do it together. There will be private involvement as well, we can only create a Public Transportation system if we do it together. So theres sort of the basics, democracy. Its under crap right nowand we can only do it if we really do it together. You mentioned a pandemic which we all know is now two years old at least. And that was an example of an unaffected challenge that might not have for example than expected when we were preparing contracts as a county. So how do you advise local governments or local advocacy groups or even the general public about how to prepare for the future that might be unknown . A really good question so im going to try toanswer. The government iscomplicated. Society is complicated. Thats the first at the 30,000 foot level. What weadvise folks is to do some several things. Think forward and thinking forward implies a certain humility that you dont know whats going to happen. That you dont know the future. Thats really important. Think forward. If youre talking about infrastructureits moving forward. The other thing is to think sideways. When you do hesomething , you pull a project here it will have an impact laterally on other goals youre trying to accomplish and other communities and other people. The third is to interrogate. Ask really hard questions. Thats the most important thing. Ask the hard questions, what if questions i think we will now ask Going Forward what if a pandemic, you will ask what about floods and hurricanes. In california will ask about earthquakes. Theres other things we can think about but its notcrazy to think. We also say we shouldnt think about that because it will never happen. Its important tointerrogate every decision , thinking forward, thinking sideways and finally keep it transparent. Make sure that the only way you get right because to crowd source life. Thats looking into the future and our crystal ball but youve also included a lot of history in this book. Course you had a historian. So you were looking back at some of those great public goods in our country and can youtalk about those that inspired your thinking . Yes. If you go back to the beginning of the 20th century , after Upton Sinclairs the jungle there was a movement to make safer food. It was about slaughterhouse but thats not what hero the book about but it was a movement in food that has lasted since then. Hegovernment doesnt make the food, its our job to keep everybody healthy. The national parks, we realized that nature rand the ability to access nature, we created the national parks. You can kind of walk through the 20th century. Social security, whats that about . Its about security for people sort of our age. And in 65 it was a medicare. These are all sort of decisions that we made together democratically that people should have healthcare when they reach65. People should have a certain level of Economic Security. The Clean Air Act h, the whole set of things that have happened over the 20th century was really 100 years of good law that was increasingly good. Heres an example i like to give. Cars, cars used to impale us on impact. You can think, the paint on that wall used to have led in it and it had led out of it because of public action so its a broadview of public goods when you think about it that way. We are here to talk about privatization and most recently called p3 or publicprivate partnerships. And you say youre always asked what makes a good p3, so if you could give us some examples of things that have really worked out and also maybe an example of something that was not such a strong piece. Im going to run the question and start it in reverse because its helpful. Sorry. I know youre the mayor. Im just a book interlocutor. Ne first off, a3, publicprivate partnerships is a term of art lofor many. Its used in lots of different contexts so i want to start at that level. Public and privateand everything around us. I ntthink i mentioned a moment ago and i still use it in lots of different contexts and were going to focus on because thats the most primary use where using in Public Policy r debates. The first thing to remember, theres a littlebit of one on 101. Were all p3s because every project, every road, every bridge, every water system is built by private contractors so there all p threes and theres different versions of p3. You could have, this might get a little technical. Design buildswhere you have the same designer and same builder as the contractor. Finance, operate and maintain. Where you get private finance and thenraprivate operation and maintenance. Other Water Systems for many years. So i want to set that context. People will use it in different ways. It helps them illustrate the histories of how to do it right, how to move in the right direction. In 2009, there in the great recession. The worst time. Every government was bleeding red ink, great fiscal distress. They responded to a proposal from a private consortium of morgan stanley, the National Parking company and was called a Sovereign Wealth Fund from the middle east, a National Investment firm. That consortium would give the city 1. 1 billion upfront , remember theyre desperate in exchange for control of a longterm lease, the citys 36,000 parking meters for 75 years. So thats till 2083. Now, a couple of things. They voted within five days. They were desperate, they did not do the scrutiny anddid not do the things we will talk about more. So two things. One more important than the other. Terrible deals nobody borrows money. You shouldnt borrow money on 75 years of parking meter revenues. Who knows if willbe driving in 75 years . I know i wont for sure. But thats not the most important, part, terrible deal. Most important if the city of chicago now want to eliminate parking spots to deal with traffic, limited parking spot for a dedicated slain or a biplane or turn an entire neighborhood into a pedestrian mall or Transit Oriented Development or any number of things of land use and housing and transportation and all those things if they want to do any of those things they have to essentially buy the spotsback. On a technical by that but its all that. Ill get it. So think about that. This is why its important to talk about that. You remember the citycouncil or youre the mayor of chicago. And you want to create bus lanes or you want to eliminate parking, create a pedestrian mall in downtown over Michigan Avenue or whatever you want to do. Youre constrained because you have to, its going to cost a lot of money. And so in many cases youre not oi going to do it. I wrote an article a number of years back with a professor from Roosevelt University there in Downtown Chicago who had interviewed city transit planners who could not implement their plans for bus traffic transit. They had a whole set of lines were going to do. So thats the reason i wanted to start with that is not following instructions there. It was because thats when youre Going Forward the question is how do you do it right. So interrogate. Remember, think forward. And interrogate, ask hard questions. A seven impact on our ability to do Something Else we might want to do in the future. Like expand transit and if so, how. What will happen with the parking rates by the way. Everyone in chicago hates the rates went way out. Who has control over theparking rates. Will it have, what would, going down the list grent will we be able to know about the deal because rulers a certain amount of transparency when something goes private so you have to interrogate all of the deals thinking forward. And then when you do a deal, when you are negotiating a contract, when your say you decide to do Something Like that and this is a brownfield deal, its an existing sale, not for a newproject. So you have to decide what oiyour value is and what standards you want to put in the contract whats going to happen to the, is going to advance the solutions for the big things, climates, equality or was going to happen to the jobs . Are they going to be lower wages . Whats going to happen to the rates for folks that may or may not be able to afford it if its a bridge or Something Like that so you have to make sure that you set those tenders and that you have the tools, the legal tools. You have an example what worked well . Miami tunnel. I was once. Im not a big fan of tunnels but it was cool. Came in on time. You have control. Was free to the public. I did not analyze, doug has a different viewpoint. It was a project that was built by privates that you decided you needed there was a road in colorado, us 36 that included unity participation they almost a little transportation that they wanted to deal atwith. T. Ul 1 of the population fully participated and gave us input and cap priorities and plans as a result so how is it that Public Participation can really make sure these deals are instructed in the most favorable way . I think it goes to the name of interrogation, is not an inside game. Ill say two things. Democracy is about more than voting. Its about moving the world together forward. If youre not engaging the public in large decisions, the mistakes will be made in peoples interests ignored. Communitie