mcfarland welcome to conversations with al mcfarlane today's program focuses on predatory lending and what are the challenges facing communities of color in general the black community in particular what are the credit concerns that we have how do we create legislation that protects us how do we create policy that guides activity that is appropriate productive for our community and that dissuades unscrupulous ness that hurts our community and  do we educate inform ordinary people so that they understand their rights their stand the best strategies for being effective citizens in our community around credit around borrowing around building wealth and pleased to have commissioner kevin lindsay he's minnesota's commissioner of human rights and commissioner mike rothman who had been a sort of the department of commerce to talk about these issues also on the program  and scott great president c e o of the minneapolis urban league scott thank you for hosting this program and thank you for being here as well but let me start with commissioner lindsay set the stage about borrowing and credit and the impact of credit practices on our community on black people and then if i may i think there's two kind of aspects to that typically people think of it as relates to being a consumer most of us are consumers at some point in time where he's or buying a car buying a house we're purchasing various goods so it's important for us to be able to understand the choices that we make when we decide to purchase various items through credit and understanding sort of compounding interest what it means to pay on time and to the extent what those potential consequences are if we do not pay on time or if we make the very minimum payment on o credit card and that's critically important within our economic system here in the united states but i was also would say that it's also important if you're an entrepreneur if you're a business owner to be able to have financial literacy and understand the consequences of borrowing and being able to finance your respective business so it's important as a consumer and it's also potentially important as an entrepreneur or as a business owner for the department of human rights there are three primary areas where we do our work the very first is investigating complaints of discrimination so to the extent that you're a consumer and you feel that you're being taken advantage of unfairly on the basis of your race and you're being unfairly targeted with an unfair creditor a legal credit you have the ability to bring claims to the partment of human rights there is an agency which is responsible for regulating those entities day in and day out and that's the department of commerce so i'm very happy to have my fellow commissioner here on the stage so he can explain the role of the department of commerce and what they do day in and day out in those areas the second area for their part but i'm not going to talk too much today about and that is to provide equal opportunity state contracts the third area though for that apartment i will spend some time today talking about that and that's the education aspect and that's trying to eliminate discrimination also try to reach dues disparate outcomes and again as consumers as business owners we need to become better educated so that we do not face disparate outcomes in the area of how we access credit now we utilise credit and so mike rothman commissioner often what's the range of your responsibility in protecting the consumer around credit and finance today to talk about these important issues the department of commerce is role is as a regulator we have been forced mint staff investigations that we do as well as the overriding scope of the department is to protect consumers throughout a lot of financial industries we oversee part of the banking sector the state banks we oversee insurance in minnesota we oversee the real estate agents there are twenty two thousand real estate agents we really license and sort of the mortgage industry at the state level among bunch of other financial services individuals professionals and entities  we also have in their consumer protection area a strong outreach education component and as commissioner lindsey just mentioned financial literacy is a very important component of all that it's i look at it as not only just literacy but capability for us for me and part of my investigation and consumer protection rule is to empower them with the knowledge to help detect scams and never be a part of a fraud and then to help reported to us so we at the department can take action to help stop hearing and understanding that i get released from you all the time about people being victimized or scam so these are great warnings and we try to make sure that we pass that information on to our readers think it's a good service what you do is the public generally aware is that listening and hearing of the warnings that you're sending out  also think there could be more i think that you know for example when we put out a an alert as you mentioned it's to say we have stopped a scam and a particular person to to invite others who have also been scammed by that person or similarly to know and contact us so we can stop people in the future today we put out a an investment alert on you know how people can best understand and work with brokers financial planners there is a lot of complexity and it's most important i think to have the knowledge and education so you can navigate those complexities and then if you don't and you need help call us at the department of commerce we have staff on call they answer the phones every day and we were here to help please let micah said there because i do think that is important that we have more education i respective areas so first off i'd like to commend them for really embracing financial literacy and bringing that to the people within the state of minnesota and also to commend you out for having this type of a conversation too often from a cultural standpoint that we don't it's a taboo to talk about financial literacy and money one of my favorite comedians as this joke about you can talk about what's going on in your personal life as relates to your significant other and that's ok you can talk in great detail about that but once the topic turns to money oh no we can't talk at all so i really appreciate you having this kind of dialogue and also scott at the urban league having this dialogue it's really important if people know what is going on in this area let me ask you to step in here and talk about the community that we serve i have to in the spirit of disclosure indicate i'm a board member and serve the board as the chairman so i'm pleased to do that  experience with the tornado two years ago and the community is reeling from that steel what are our concerns from your point of view well would you start i mean we have some of the widest disparities in this community in the state of minnesota around education around health around wealth and housing and around jobs and so our focus at the urban league is really to advocate in all those four areas but really to create solutions to some of those challenges that we see  are our fellow colleagues in our community facing we're particularly concerned about wealth that you know when you look at what the housing crisis has done to this community and other communities  know african americans have lost approximately half of their wealth and that's a huge that men means that we might send less kids to college because we might use the equity in our home to do that we might create less businesses because we don't have any equity to do that and if there is a financial crisis like a tornado that that rolls through here we might not have the funds to to cash in on equity to help  stabilize our family and so there's a real concern around housing and wealth and you know we when you look at the housing statistics homeownership after the crisis i mean i in and maybe mr lindsey can correct me on this i mean we're almost forty percentage points behind in homeownership white families as compared to black families so we're talking roughly about sixty six percent homeownership for y families and we're talking about twenty five percent for black families and so when you look at a number like that you become very concerned as an advocate for people in this community that we have to ramp this up and we have to really get at this this issue in real time because it so much is integrated into what our community looks like  if we don't have a stable community the result of that is probably there's joblessness there is some homelessness and there is foreclosure going on and at the end of the day we don't have homeowner p we don't have ownership as a community run no would you represent the interests of the poor statewide you've been an advocate and as you hear this discussion scott and i as northside is talking about it you sort of put  in the context of the the problems people experience welfare state and how do you describe that how does it look to you how are the poor being regarded engaged worked with supported in minnesota and what  need to do better than we are right now well thank you allen and again i do thank you for inviting me to participate with this very distinguished panel it's really an honor to be sitting here with mr grey and commissioners roughen and lindsay thank most the wealth disparities it is it is it cuts across income strata and of course racial strata and ethnic strata and you know minnesota is way behind the rest of the country which is unfortunate and it's it should be preventable or at least address has serious consequences for individuals for families and for our economy and it's it's just wrong and we should be doing some about it and and that's why you know the but it's not just isolated to north minneapolis or communities of i think to circle it back you know that is what drains wealth and assets from communities whether it's the north side here in minneapolis or you know morehead minnesota it and  it's and it's something i think you know we've been starting to focus on what can we do to align to create and then align state policies and local policies to foster the ability of folks to start building up those assets and protect them against the predators because you know there's a there's a myth that there's you know poor people don't have any money well there's a lot of wealth and money in the community and if there weren't you wouldn't see all these scams aimed directly right here in river city so that's something that we really have to i think be more cognizant of and focus our collective attention on so kevin let's start with one of one let's define predatory lending what does it mean predatory lending probably better answered by mike but i'll give it a shot here you know ok what we're really talking about is taking advantage of individuals who are not sophisticated as relates to financial information that they have and trying to extract from them in a way to take advantage of their lack of knowledge in that area so to ron's point i was thinking of a recent directive which came out from mike's office concerning individuals who are elderly who receive a call as relates maybe to potentially doing a reverse mortgage to provide them with more and come of a stream directly and failing to appreciate the fact that by entering into a reverse reverse mortgage that they have now put themselves potentially in a position where they may be foreclosed upon were a victim out of the home that they have worked very hard to save for and have paid off they've now put it back at risk so that to me would be an example of a loser let me just jump in and add to kevin's absolutely right predatory lending is a broad category it's not a specific legal violation but it's a bunch it's an unfair lending practice an abusive practice deceptive practice or one that is fraudulent just basically completely fraudulent and not only is reverse mortgage a good example but we have a lot of credit examples where the interest rate is way too high whether that's in a mortgage or in consumer other community or consumer group is targeted by lenders to take advantage of either the high interest rate the equity that people have that wealth we're talking about and it could be high fees  it could be just a deception improper appraisals there's a whole host of these things it's balloons yeah so what i've said and i believe is that you kind of know when you see it if you believe you're a victim of a fraud we should you should report it you need to be educated about it and my my view at the department of commerce as a commissioner is i have zero tolerance for fraud and abuse like that so we'll work together to try to stop it once we know about it and then to educate people on how to help themselves and we're here to help in any way all of us and soul who are of the predatory and when we talk about this we rarely want to name the big companies that are household words that we have mortgages with etc but we should not be afraid to discuss even our friend companies that fail sometimes to do the right thing and so who i mean i'm raising the question because mike rothman you were part of navigating some huge settlements  s department of justice justice settled with maybe ten or twelve major banking institutions a multi billion dollar selamat for various kinds of fraud against consumers talk about that and you're responsible for i think the maybe the nine or ten biggest banks in the country were involved in that so even known quantities are ones that have failed the public good well we all know that a large part of the economic crisis we just went through was the mortgage crisis and meltdown that bubble was burst and once it was burst it showed a lot of practices that were unfair the one you're just referencing included robo signing activities went into the foreclosures and then there were at the national level some investigations in terms of a lot of other practices federal regulators and so when you're talking about that settlement what happened there was we made sure that minnesota's consumers were protected i also believe that was one that involved the attorney general minnesota and a lot of attorney generals around the country stepping up and helping protect consumers as well so it was a concerted effort i do have to say though that one aspect of this is that although we see some signs of improvement in our housing market where we have a long way to go you know just last year the numbers show that there were still seventeen thousand foreclosures or more in minnesota while the rate has gone down it's three times than it was before the financial crisis and it's a rate and it's an impact on that individual homes it's on the communities and all of us so on predatory well if the interest rate is too high if a good exam know the good example we all know the lingo it's a subprime loan which is when it doesn't fit the consumer appropriately meaning you know it's it's too much of a loan either in principle an interest for their ability to pay it back based on their income or on their own financial capability also it involves you know what they were over appraised so home values were high when they should to ben people's incomes were inflated that weren't really there there was fraud there real fraud by the by lending institutions and a lot of that we went after and took after there's a lot of other various examples but that goes those are a lot of good examples of those what have you noticed and the impact of the focal who crisis in iran is the full closure crisis over by no means it is over i think commissioner often hit the nail on the head john there's a lot of headlines every day we see trends a down insoles you know the percentages are lower but i think that paints a very dangerous and inaccurate picture i think commissioner got it exactly right  when when you hear that for closures are three times what they ought to be that is telling you something is still seriously wrong ok so they're not three point five times or four times they're still three times higher eighteen thousand people i mean that's a lot of people and it's too much it's i mean one is too many but but so i think i think the message that we're hearing in the media and all over the  place is is very inaccurate dangerous and misleading because it gives the impression that we don't have to there's nothing we should be doing anything more you know but while of course we always focus on what's wrong i do want to point out one thing that minnesota did ri and several years ago the state legislature enacted the anti predatory lending mortgage law and a predatory mortgage lending law and frankly that became the basis in many ways of the dog frank bill that's now federal its own national across the country and so all of those abuses are now illegal in minnesota and not only are they illegal but if somebody does perpetrate that the individual has the right to go and sue and get relief so i mean that's something that's that's a really important thing and what we're focusing on now is the next wave of all this stuff is those loan mind scams and we will so you know now a helping hand to protect people that were abused by the big scam right and so now you're saying there's a loan not scam where people go in when there's an opportunity to make a buck you know somebody is going to come up with it i just always wonder did they actually sit up all night long and think of this and then wake up in the morning and i got a new way to rip people off because i just amazing to me so so the deal is this of course now that you know there is a free program in minnesota if you're in for closure in minnesota housing finance agency operates a free foreclosure prevention program anybody in the state of minnesota no matter who you are if you're in for closure you can get free help and try to negotiate with the bank to get a loan modification and save your home while there are businesses that craft cropped up and usually individuals actually and they will come and offer to save your home but not for free for two three thousand bucks but really many of them have no intention of actually doing anything so those are the latest things that have i think arrived on the scene and a couple of there is a law that prevents folks from taking the money up front and if folks have been victimized by that they should be calling the part of the commerce attorney general's office or coming to legal aid and we've got a bill at the capitol just that the governor just signed a couple weeks ago actually that  created that tamp down on a loophole that that some folks are slipping through to evade the protections that are in i think it to answer a question that it is not over and i think we still need to be vigilant and continue to and put people in a business for doing this there was an incident where a company scammed one hundred eighteen homeowners out of two to three thousand dollars each promising they would help fix their mortgages well they never did they stole the money and the victims were twice victims one of the foreclosure issue and second the purpose people perpetrators of this so we definitely have to stop women and the other piece about this is i do think it's important for viewers for all of us to reference the minnesota home buyers center the home owners homeowner search the home ownership center and they have terrific programs to help educate  consumers potential purchasers on how to buy a home how to stand on that the numbers are correct and when you go through a program and you learn about that stuff you're thirty percent more likely to sustain long modify your house all i need is your checking account number and let me bill you you know just a little taste like a thousand or fifteen hundred and then we'll start working on that if you hear that watching out for the make sure number one that you're dealing with credible folks you've looked into it done your research in terms of of you know the type of loan that you've talked to if you need somebody with a financial sit assistance we talked about the homeownership center who for free can help you understand that if the interest rates are too high if something doesn't seem right and so make sure you check what they are anything above that you know be a smart shopper is what it comes down to if you if it sounds too good to be true stop i like to tell this to everybody that you know my family my grandmother if it sounds too good to be true it is stop hang up the phone stop the conversation and then if you need help call us at the apartment or commerce call  the phone to anybody we had the story about subprime lending what's what is subprime limit lending and has the crisis and the awareness that it's come from it eliminated sub prime lending i'll talk about that let me just tear it up subprime lending there is a the prime market where standard loans are made for for those people in the industries that have a higher risk level there are lenders who will will lend but at a higher interest rate and the so so that's called sub prime lending and then we learned that that whole marketplace can be very abusive  at the same time there are instances when if you are it may be for just some people the only means to a alone and my my advice is to be extra cautious to know what you're getting in to understand what it is and then again if there's any miss you know if there's discrepancies issues fraud or you suspect just stumbled financially in the past i'm going to get to a different market i'm going to pay a little bit more but the question is how much more and unfortunately this is kind of this this dynamic of education and conversation we don't really want to talk about sort of those situations and what that market is so i really appreciate scott providing sort of an environment for that conversation we had out for you doing that as well because that's really what we're getting at where people feel that because they've made one mistake in the past that they have to pay this exorbitant fee going forward and that's where they get taken advantage of you know one thing that we we need to i mean there's arguments out there for the sides you know arguments that you know this is all a complete fraud on the other side people say you know access to credit at some level is important for some folks the problem is is that some of the credit people get themselves and volved then is bad and it's it can create a cycle that they can't get out of and it can lead to more trouble and and so for example if they should never have been involved in that in the first place it can be real trouble so was raised the question how do you know if you race commission or lindsay is something that's blocking you from getting credit or the right kind of credit i remember of the eddie murphy skit on saturday night live my favorite one where he went into a bank looking for a loan for his business and the white banker black eddie murphy no no no no no and all kinds of reasons it didn't make sense and he walks out on leave white guy comes in and wants to borrow the same money he's almost the same characteristics and the banker just gets up and start shoving money at him that's racial discrimination i think and i think that's what a lot of black businesses say they experience and i think black consumers say they experience the same thing where for whatever reason we're not because they are black that's the reason they get treated differently how do we report that and fight it if we feel it to your agency let you know that they've been discriminated they can call our respective agency and the general number to my assistant so they can get a properly filed a six five one five three nine one one one two there is a recent study that was commissioned with the urban league and the university of minnesota talking about individuals seeking to get a loan and what we found within that respective study is that households which are comprised of african americans which had been in equity of more than one hundred fifty thousand dollars were being denied at twice the rate of a household which was led by individuals who are white not of a spanish origin which only had a third of the equity or income that that couple had so discrimination does happen in the state of minnesota it doesn't explain all of it but it is part of the problem and we have to take that on and face and deal with it so part of it's education if i feel as someone who comparable who makes the same money as my friend am i willing to have that conversation and say that i went to bank x y and z mike is at the rate that you would you got quoted you know and get that type of information and then feel willing to come forward and that's difficult because from a cultural standpoint no one wants to feel like they were taken advantage of but do you how you started this right you can't grow assets you can't grow wealth unless you have that information and man if we're operating a business shame on me once but it's my fault the second time so in this sense we have to be willing to step forward and have that real conversation that's the thing commissioner hit it on the head but i would also add that it's a relationship gap in this town as well in this community and you know far too often that same study that the university of minnesota did with the urban league showed that african americans were six times more likely to be denied for loans and you know i know they can plug our numbers in a computer you know we could take race off the application but at the end of the day when a when you're sitting down with a broker or you're sitting down with a bank you know a lot of it is a relationship and we we have to come to the realization that that in some respects others been able to connect and make opportunity and bill wealth and they just haven't been measured by the same standards and although i like eddie murphy as a comedian this this is real out here people are seeing it i mean we hear so many folks we hear we're bringing a keynote for our our gala damon john who who is very wealthy at this point but when he started his business he was denied ten times by ten different banks his net worth today is about two hundred million dollars he had to take the equity out of his mom's home to basically get his business off the ground and so there are so many people out there that could tell that same type of story and where will we be if someone if more folks like damon john  were able to create these large enterprises and and other folks were to to be able to look at them and say hey i could do this too but it you know when you go into a bank in your denied  bank after bank you know you start to lose your confidence a bit in what you can do and not that i'm saying that we should throw out credit score because those things are important but we look we need to really look at alternative models to making sure that a community that is so depressed at this point has an opportunity to catch up what i'm seeing right now is that homeownership seems to you know we're starting to hear flashes that that that it is getting better that banks are loosening up their lending but we're so far behind to be forty points behind you know you have to have almost a superman effort to catch up and i would ask our governor our commissioners our community our banks to really talk about how can we go from being the large as having the largest disparity gap in housing that leads to some equity issues to how can we turn this around and be number one in the country because we're so you know you look at the paper we're number one at a lot of things and last time i checked this is a very safe community a great place to live great park system but for some reason there is a block when it comes to parity in this community and we you know it has to become our business to figure out how to do  of race and i'm speaking for us i think that we see this as a structural barrier to opportunity to engage meant to development for black people by a white supremacy system that's how i see it now maybe you don't see it that way scott but that's all macfarlane so how do this is really bigger than just black and the same problem which whites in rural minnesota face and feel the same way so how do we get co ons or ideas that link this pattern in a way that we can identify it name it and address it dismantle the sixty four million dollar question i mean if i have the answer you know white minnesotans right here in the twin cities that are that are also experiencing the same thing but the bottom line is though i mean i think you know you've again put your finger on you know the institutional racism is you know  it's still with us and that you know there is no magic bullet obviously i mean but i can tell you one thing that that legal aid has is has catalyzer is catalyzing and whether or not this is the silver bullet i have no idea but you know i talk about the whole idea of asset development and i really have come to believe that that is the holy grail whether you know cutting across all the whether it's racial ethnic and income you know it's the it's the it's the one thing that i think you know anybody who's poor and  struggling if we could if we could create a system where we all have the ability to do that and so legal aid has had the good fortune and very very grateful to the northwest area foundation and they have given us a small sum of money and we have brought on of person to create something that we're calling the minnesota asset building coalition and you know as an advocate at the capital in in these realms and working with you all and everybody else for fifteen years here the thing that is frustrated me the most is our worst enemies ourselves because you know i've been dealing with these these scams you know debt settlement and loan you know payday lending whatever it is you know one after the other and then i go and ask my friends in this community would you sign on my bill and then i go as my friends in the latino community and you know i sign on my bill and this and that but the reality is i'm just asking them to support what i think is important and what we don't do very well is really talk to each other and this idea of this coalition is to bring together organizations that are involved in some way in building assets whether it's providing health care child care you know predator predatory lending protection consumer protection or you know safety net programs job creation it doesn't matter because what we all housing affordable housing all of those are assets that people need to be stable to earn money to get ahead to build wealth and what we're trying to do is go across the state and talk to the tribes and every all every e community every low income community and every all the nonprofits out there who are working on this stuff and instead of asking them to come onto our agenda what we're suggesting here is can we figure out to gather what is the agenda that everybody can support and feel ownership of and frankly i think that's the only way we're going to succeed i know that sounds pie in the sky i know that sounds like don quixote you know or  tilting at windmills and i will be the first to admit that but what it what northwest area was so kind to do they asked us well what you think you can succeed and i told them i can tell you this you know if we don't get somebody to try to coordinate this i can guarantee you will fail i can't guarantee you will succeed but if we don't try i can guarantee you will will we will fail if we lose about it that's what it's about not only financial equity but emotional and political and mental spiritual equity so that you have a sense of complete ownership a sense of being connected to the solver and nature of our nation of our country right of our communities and so that's i think in part what is lacking is a system that supports and encourages identify it's the feeling and the reality of being part of the sovereign of owning that and therefore being a director of community of society and of the governance and of the resources of government so that you can share and also you help build by your participation scott what do you think  think you hit it right on the head we have to believe in america that our most struggling family if we can figure out a way to solve their issue that we become one america a real one america cannot can i just add just one point here one of the things i think it's been overlooked a little bit al is i think our tourney general and others have done some great work in this area of foreclosure but i just pulled up an article that just you know begs the question and to point this whole thing about coalitions i would just add a cavity at that we need to have intentional coalitions that we need to be directed at things to say that enough is enough because when i'm looking at this i see that you know that the ten banks that are living banks or whatever it is that we settle with homeowners are now getting three hundred dollars you know payment for the suffering and pain that they had to go through the two years of misinformation and all that kind of stuff that some of our families were in this whole foreclosure fight and they're getting a three hundred dollar payment to say you know we recognize your pain and this is what you're going to get paid for it to me there's still some injustice in that that you know someone that could be sitting up at one of our big multinational banks here or across this country could be happy with that is you know is just beyond me beyond my thinking and we will not become one america if we continue to think like this well we settled and this was the amount and how can a family bounce back off a three to five hundred dollars after they may have lost their home or they they you know went through a loan modification you know contracted attorney or whatever i mean a lot of these families are in more debt than what they started and they weren't really the cause of this foreclosure crisis so i don't want to harp back on that point but it just seems to me the end result this is not an end result for some of these families getting three to five hundred dollars  these issues are interrelated interconnected and we're not talking about silos it's not just predatory lending not just credit issues not just banking practices but there's also the question your question of equity and wealth creation kevin lindsay i heard you in a great interview this past saturday with the senior program with our friend milford rather milford and one thing that struck my attention was your description of the lay of the land in terms of the population demographics that in minnesota and in the country thousands of people i think you said ten thousand per day or per week are leaving the workforce because of retirement reaching the age of sixty five that's what you said and so that means those thousands of work opportunities may be coming available and the question you raised is how do we get our people organized so that we get the jobs that fill the jobs that are needed to run our country our community our our  state and how do we start with the jobs that we have theoretical control over the state government you said minnesota hires about three thousand people here so the number is a twenty seven hundred i think you said  that what i was talking about was the changing demographics within the united states so every day in the united states ten thousand people will retire today tomorrow the rest of this week this month year and then the balance of the decade and then well into the next decade and the vast majority of those individuals will be white not of hispanic origin and for people of color in this country this presents an opportunity for gainful employment as individuals retire out of the workforce and this is something which is going on in the state of minnesota so when we take a look at all the individuals who are over the age of fifty five if i was able to get them all in the studio it's not really bleak long term you have to look at it as a citizen of one of the richest countries in the entire world with a gross domestic product of fifteen trillion lot of people say china is catching up to us well china's gross domestic product is six billion it's large but our six trillion but it's only it's less than half of what ours us so what does that mean going forward you have a tremendous opportunity to shape your country's direction going forward and this gets to this challenge as relates to it so that in the context of the question of how then we develop equity we develop wealth because it seems to be the first thing is the job second thing is property that appreciates over time and then the third thing is the ability to leverage both of those plus ingenuity and will to create businesses right to serve our populations that which is what the urban league is trying to do so how do we be mindful and aggressive in pursuing and engaging the changing dynamics to the advantage of our people one of the things which i mentioned on our radio program was what was going on at the state so at the state last year we had more individuals retire from state employment and in any other point time except for the preceding year so what is happening now is that baby boomer effect is that we're going to have to three thousand people leave state employment for every year going forward for quite some period of time what that then means is that there's going to be opportunities in a wide variety of positions within the state we may not necessarily replace one for one with those respective jobs but there will be significant opportunities there and there also be at the city of minneapolis the city of st paul ramsey county in hennepin county is a big one and all of those operate in those positions will have an impact on the ability on which policy making decisions are also going forward i really applaud the governor for providing opportunities trying to versified senior leadership within the cabinet level agencies when i was in college i read this book called the power broker and it's about a guy named bob moses in the city of new york and moses at the low quick men yet is that at that point in time not everyone at cars most people got around with double decker buses and he didn't like necessarily people of different ethnicities mixing so what he did is as an administrative official is that he built bridges at such a level that certain double decker buses couldn't get into certain boroughs so that's a bad use of public policy but what would happen if we had more people who saw a more unified country a more unified world if they were in those positions what good they could do and i think that that's something a message that we should be getting out to all people and try encourage people to see these as careers and i just want to commend mr lindsey as well and and we haven't tooted his horn enough and the governors warn about really raising the bar  know to move the goal up to thirty two percent that is what i'm talking about being really being intentional well there's a thirty two percent workforce participation goal for all state funded projects and so i i would say that you and i right somewhere way below that and so i would say that that is an intentional strategy that if we know that the goal is thirty two percent we can start galvanizing our workforces and figuring out a way to create an opportunity to get them to that point if the goal was less than that then you know you know it would not ramp up and when i talk about ramping up thirty two percent gold means you have to ramp up is double what it was before and so if we can continue to focus like that if the state can lead the way and our corporate community can start to fall in behind that as as kevin talked about this this this demographic shift in our community hello there would be jobs waiting and if people know that jobs are waiting they'll get the kind of educational resources that they need to build equity so that they can move to those jobs and you know at the same time we're hoping that they're being you know innovative as well to think about creating business opportunities because that goal is gone you know is going up as well and we think that if we create more business opportunities you know people of color tend hire other people of color or people that look like them and so to me the thirty two percent goal is a real intentional strategy and if others can fall behind and lead the way  as a state is leading the way we could have some real change in this community gentlemen we thank you all for being your final word commissioner let me go back to this this is april april first was proclaim by governor dayton to be a financial literacy month and capability is a big component of all that at the state level commissioner lindsay and i and ten other ten total state agencies have thought outside the box how can we build for natural education capability literacy for minnesotans and some of the nonprofits that are out there we've been recognized by the president's council on financial capability shona a light on minnesota i think it comes back to education department of commerce we've tried to pull together not only state agencies but folks like ron and a lot of other nonprofits to grow so really thank you for having us here today thank you all for being here ron ron thank you for being here commissioner mark rothman and commissioner kevin lindsay scott gray president of the minneapolis or belief thank you all for being here