hired with a specific a purpose of investigating in writing about michigan's emergency manager law which is a law that allows the state to take complete control of financially struggling cities and school districts and counties and as that laws been an applied in michigan the cities and school districts that have been taken over almost exclusively have been majority african american cities and cities with high poverty rates flint one of those cities is fifty seven percent african american population and forty percent of the people living there live below the poverty line the reason at this is such interest to the a c l u they would hire somebody to focus on it exclusively as a reporter is that this law takes away democracy when these emergency managers are appointed the elected school boards city councils mayors only have the amount of authority that the emergency manager chooses to allow them to have  they only get a salary if the emergency major chooses to give them a salary and if those elected officials buck the system and don't go along with the program they get completely marginalized in one of the towns that was taken over the emergency major said yeah the city council can meet this is this is what they can do they can call the meeting to order they can read the minutes of the previous meeting and they existing ordinances they can take away the health care benefits of retirees they can sell off city assets they can void collective bargaining agreements and break contracts the law there's only one thing that the says that they cannot do which is miss a bond payment which i think really gets to the heart of what's going on here which is that it is to ensure that the banks get get paid no matter what the cost and for flint michigan the cost was the poisoning of a city's water supply we're going to start tonight by showing a very short seven minute mini documentary that we made it was released just about a year ago and it was really right before the whole lead problem with flints water began to be exposed and it's sort of  like to show up because it lays the foundation of what was going on in flint the prior to really digging in exposing the lead problem so i think with that we're going to have to show this  video it's called hard to swallow and the reason that we called that at that was that two things one was that the water itself was hard to swallow that the decision was made by one of these emergency managers unilaterally decided that in an attempt to help balance flints budget they were going to get off the detroit system which had been providing clean safe water for fifty years and use was the claims by the city and state that the water was safe to drink the people knew it was not safe and they so they didn't swallow the lie that it was safe and they they fought relentlessly to get the truth out and so with that here's hard to swallow you know maybe i read this under michigan's ok it's in two thousand one the first of four emergency managers took total control of flint a city of one hundred thousand people located about seventy miles northwest of detroit the emergency managers were in charge of all aspects of local government eliminate its dependence on detroit water and sewerage department that's a major step a huge step in the right direction because it now gives you the opportunity to control better control  water bills have continued to rise since the switch to nearly one hundred fifty dollars per month for the average household in may august and november twenty fourth teen flint failed state water tests that found dangerously high levels of carcinogenic chlorine by products called total  methane's city was legally wasn't legally required to inform citizens of these results until january two thousand and fifteen nine months after the t th problem was first  not trusting local authorities residents saw an analysis from a water expert who works closely with the consumer advocate now we've done research network on our website link after link at their study after result we have an old infrastructure when you change your source water you disrupt the biofilm that's already built up in those pipes pipes or even themselves from the inside out out i'm terrified of what you know the outcome of this the aftermath of this could be neurologically for my children we have been saddled with this toxic water live in the third world country we're getting poisoned water and we have no rights in may twenty fifteen michigan governor rick snyder declared flints financial emergency to be over the city's fourth emergency manager vacate his position with one final order flint officials may not reverse any of his previous orders for at least a year the so that was the situation one year ago it's might even be the one year anniversary of when we release that video and i show it for a couple reasons there i think there's some very telling things that short piece one of which is the attitude of those emergency managers toward the people that they're supposed to be serving the meeting where the emergency manger was being question about why they didn't tell the people about the t t h m problem was the first meeting that i went to to start to cover the issue of what was going on with one's water and when he said you know in response to why didn't you tell us and he just said well i'm telling ian now it was such a cold callous attitude towards people you know no elected official would ever talk to his constituents that way because they would not be an elected official very long but that emergency manager didn't really care what the people of flint thought they didn't have any say in what he did he was there because he was appointed by the governor and given complete control  flint that made engines complained that the water was corroding the engine parts before they even made it out of the plant and so they went to the emergency manager and got special permission to return to the detroit system because the engine parts were being corroded but yet when the city council in march of two thousand and fifteen voted to return to the detroit system the emergency manager said no like the fellow in the documentary said if you had a money tree we could do it but you don't have a money tree so that's that so essentially shut up and keep drinking this poisoned water  so i think that this does a good job of just showing the cold callous disregard that these emergency managers have for the people that they're supposed to be serving and like the one person you heard in the video they all doubt do you live in flint well no they didn't live in flint you know they're like hired guns brought in to try to clean up these financial problems and doing anything necessary to make sure that the bondholders always got paid the other thing that is very very instructive the one mom leeanne walters featured in this the one explaining what was going on with the pipes so that that interview was filmed in april of two thousand and fifteen so at that point she was clearly explaining what was going on that the water was too corrosive and it was basically chewing apart the pipes because what happened was that for fifty years they were getting clean safe treated water from flint or from detroit system they switched to the river when they switched to the river the decision was made not to use mandatory corrosion control because it would have cost too much to bring in the equipment needed to put that phosphates are what they use which creates kind of coding in the pipes and that keeps the lead particles from leeching into the water and so she had been talking to people in the water plant they told her that the corrosion control was not being used and so here you have a mom a stay at home mom that in april of two thousand and fifteen was saying exactly what it was that caused her child to be lead poisoned the people who are trained scientist supposedly experts in this issue were at the same time and for months and months and months after that claiming that the water was safe  put out this video right around the same time the video came out there was a water specialist for the u s environmental protection agency named miguel del toro who is really the unsung hero in this story  leon walters the mom after finding out that or child had been led poisoned searched and searched and searched at all levels of government finding somebody that actually cared enough to do their job and protect the health and well being of people and del toro took a personal interest in the case he hooked we end up with a scientists have virginia tech university a guy named mark edwards who is the guy that discovered a lead in washington d c is water in the early to thousands macarthur genius grant recipient one of the foremost experts on this issue in the country  edward sent a sample kits to lead and they tested her water and they found they took like thirty samples one of the samples had lead levels of thirteen thousand two hundred parts per billion so to put that in perspective to start off really zero low levels of lead as the only safe levels  there's really no safe levels of lead especially to young children you know for kids you know lead is a very very powerful neurotoxin you know for young kids who brains are still developing it causes them to have a lower i q it causes learning disabilities and behavioral problems for pregnant women it can cause miscarriages so it's just incredibly  damaging neuro toxin so there's zero safe levels the federal action level is fifteen parts per billion if you have fifteen parts per billion of lead in your water remedial action needs to be taken at five thousand parts per billion lead in water is considered hazardous waste so they found out that going into their house was water containing more than two and a half times the levels of lead takes to be classified as hazardous waste they found this out miguel del toro wrote a memo saying that he found out initially when he asked the michigan department vironment quality about the corrosion control they lied and said that they had a corrosion control program in place when they didn't they weren't using the mandatory corrosion control he he found that out actually and found that out talking to someone from the water department she told me go the gal followed up initially they lied eventually was able to verify that it was not being used he looked at the science and said ok there's unbelievable levels of lead in this one family's home but based on the science this isn't an isolated issue anybody that has a lead service line bringing water into their house is likely to have a severe problem with lead in their water he wrote internal memo but being a long time e p a employee he was concerned that the memo would get watered down and buried in the bra crecy so he gave a copy of it to leon because he saw this as a potential public health crisis and felt a real urgency to get the word out so he gave a copy of that memo to leon knowing that leon was not going to sit on it because we had just done this documentary taken seriously the concerns and frustrations and problems being expressed by the people of flint lee and gave that memo to me and  we published it and we wrote a story about it i talked to miguel i talked to mark edwards to explain the science i tried to talk to the state they refused to answer my questions subsequent e mails show that they they were talking about you know this guy from the a c l u that kept call and want want to ask questions about what was going on he identifies himself as a reporter and they put the word reporter in quotes they they didn't consider me a legitimate reporter and they didn't consider you know worthwhile to answer my questions in the long run it did him absolutely zero good not to answer my questions mera fact the people who didn't answer my questions were among those who ended up resigning in disgrace but at the point michigan radio which did incredible job they they read my story they saw the memo they came in talk to me because  i'm hired as a reporter but one of my job functions is also to assist other reporters so i spent a couple hours with the person in reporter from michigan radio explaining exactly what was going on explaining everything that i had learned from mark edwards and  del toro they followed up about it they contacted the michigan department environmental quality and the spokesman a guy named brad werfel very smug guy with a kind of smirk on his face  said that when it comes to lead influence water there is no problem we have been testing throughout the city and there's no widespread problem so the people of flint can just relax that was his word relax even though keep in mind months earlier this was by this time as july of two thousand and fifteen in april leon walters is sitting there saying exactly what's memo you don't pay attention to it so at that point it was a he said she said sort of story which you know as a journalist i hate those kinds of stories because it's likely going to believe right well the state senate safe and you just got this one guy out there saying it's a problem who are you going to believe and so the answer to that was to we came up with the idea we're going to do our own tests mark edwards applied to the national science  got emergency grant sent three hundred sample kits to flint and i was working with edwards i was working with a group of residents mostly the people in that video the minister and the moms in the so a group of about six or seven of us started calling people in to put now notices hold in public meetings telling people what we wanted to do and why we wanted to do it and but basically said we want to we we just want to find out what's really going on with the water fact at one point we're in the basement of a church in flint called the church of god which is in a neighborhood that's surrounded by vacant houses you know flint used to have a population of two hundred thousand when g m started closing plants the tax base eroded and the people left it's now one hundred thousand people and that's one of the parts of its problem it just has an infrastructure for city of t thousand people and just one hundred thousand people forty percent of whom live in poverty to try to support it so it's just a poor poor city it's not it's not that they're mismanagement or they don't know how to run government it's just that they're put in a really almost impossible situations which is why the emergency managers can't solve the problem it's not a managerial problem it's a structural problem we're in the basement of the church filming for we have these sample kits and we're going to get them out to the people and we're going to find out the truth about what's in our water and that's what our mission was our mission was not to do anything more than to get to the truth about what was in the flints water because we didn't believe what the government was saying we distributed the kits and we did everything we could to make sure that we didn't leave any openings because we knew that the the state and city were going to come after us and attack us for what we found and so we took all sorts of precautions to ensure that we were bulletproof because we were know that they were going to come going for us and we distributed two hundred of the kits and when we did that we sat down because they all took really good notes we had all these no cards with the names and addresses and contact information and the who got the kits and also who handed him out and who collected and we sat there at two hundred and put on map where all the samples had been distributed to and then went out at knocking on doors in neighborhoods that we had hit in order to make sure that we had a wide even distribution  possible throughout the city so they could not claim that we were cherry picking and just going in looking in neighborhoods where we knew that there was a problem even though that the law requires that the state and city tasked high risk homes homes that have either a lead service line or lead plumbing because the whole purpose of the law is to go looking for lead where they know lead exists in order to make sure that the corrosion control is working so we were doing the best we could to make sure that everybody was being tested all throughout the city meanwhile while that's going on i began conducting a parallel investigation to look into how the city and state were conducting their test and through fi a freedom of information act requests i was able to prove that instead of focusing on high risk homes the city after you see even a warning from the state being told that so many of their samples were coming in with lead levels above the action level that the better hope that no more come in that are high and the next thirty tests that they conducted all came in below the actual level which according to mark edwards if you're doing legitimate tests the odds of that happening are almost impossible and the reason it happened is because i was able to prove that they were focusing their testing on areas of the city that they knew was going to produce low results so they were cheating and they were cheating in a  lot of ways in order to make it appear that the water was meeting federal standards and then they were using those tests that they cheated on to assure people that their water was safe we did our tests we found that the levels of lead were much higher than what the city and state were claiming and much higher than what the federal action level was the response of the state just like they attacked me miguel del toro they started attacking the credibility of mark edwards a guy that's that's impeccable ethics you know one of the best guys that you could ever meet a gutsy guy but absolutely ethical brad werfel again said an e mail to reporter saying talking about edwards in this team these people have a habit of pull in this rabbit out of this hat wherever they go basically saying that they were falsely creating heis high lead results in order to somehow gain from it when the truth was just the opposite that they weren't the ones that were cheating it was the government agencies that were cheating but they again there throughout this whole thing the m o of the the state was to deny there was a problem in a tactic credibility of the people who are trying to tell the truth and that's not just my opinion eventually the governor was forced to appoint a task force to look into the through hole source of the crisis and his own task force said the michigan department environmental quality throughout this crisis has spent its time and energy attacking the credibility of people who were eventually proven to be telling the truth rather than actually doing their job which is to protect the health and well being of the people of flint we held a press conference september fifteenth on the front lawn of the flint city hall mark edwards got up there and said this is what we found in terms of lead this is why it's happening and they're not using corrosion control the rivers highly c e anybody who looked at this for five minutes could have predicted this would be the results by using this highly cross of water without having corrosion control i got up at the press conference and said i've been investigating this and you explain the fact that the virginia tech has found these levels and the city has found these levels well here's how you can explain it the city cheated on its test and there needs to be an outside investigation into what happened here september fifteenth state replies our tests are good we're not finding the same results the water is safe one of the persons that listen to what we were saying was a doctor a pediatrician hurley medical center a hospital in flint woman named mona hannah she decided that she was going to look at the lead blood levels of children under the age of five she looked at a nine month period before the switch nine month period after the switch what she found was that after the switch the percentage of kids with elevated levels of lead in their blood doubled in parts of the city where our testing found the highest levels of lead in the water the kids with elevated levels of lead in their blood tripled so she essentially collaborated corroborate d what we found help prove the legitimacy of our test even with that the state spokeswoman for the governor said she  she's and necessarily fanning the hysteria he at this point because the the media was pretty slow mainstream media is pretty slow to pick up on  this but at that point that a trait free press and major daily in detroit asked the state for its data their their data person analyzed it and said guess what your own data verifies what monaghan a teacher has just reported the switch to the river did lead to a significant increase in the lead blood levels and children at that point was pretty much game over they couldn't deny it anymore although they stayed at that they did try to for a little while longer say all the problem isn't using the river it's just as old infrastructure but it was so obviously blatantly not true because showed that it was not until after the switch to the river that the lead was unleashed into the system it was clearly due to the river and the fact that they were not using the mandatory corrosion control so the governor held a press conference and said ok we're going to let flint return to the detroit system he also said at that press conference you know there's no reason to point any fingers of blame assign blame but the public outcry was so great that he was forced to appoint a panel who investigated it and you know his own panel right his own people that he chose to conduct this investigation they're the ones that said that the empty e q swith spending all its energy trying to discredit people tell the truth and that same panel also said at the heart of this crisis is the state's emergency manager law and the fact that democracy was taken away from people is what led to this crisis because elected officials would have not made the choice to use that river you know this was someone that was no connection with the city no responsibility to the residents of the city made this decision you know one of the things that the public officials kept claiming was that they didn't have a choice that detroit canceled a long term contract which was true and that detroit kicked them off of the system so they had to use a river that's a lie i was able to prove that was a lie too by getting a letter through frame of information act request where one of the emergency managers the states detroit wanted to keep selling water to flint a decision had been made to build a new pipeline and when that signal's made detroit did cancel its long term contract but in the interim while the pipeline was being built detroit wanted to keep selling water the emergency manager said thanks but no thanks we're going to use the river because it's a cheaper option and it's it's dirty but you know it's like it's only going to be a couple years and we look at the e mails and as the crisis really became apparent you can tell that the whole think you know part of the state was we just got to ride this out we just got to make it past these two years and then this a problem of be behind us and everyone will forget about it and no one will ever know but through the combined efforts of these residents and the people that stepped up to the plate people like mark edwards and mona hanna and miguel del toro the truth was exposed and now people are being held accountable you know the governor who said there's no reason to affix bla has been under tremendous amount of fire three officials one who works for the city and two who work for the state have been charged with criminal felony charges one of  deal and has agreed to cooperate the u s attorney justice department is conducting criminal investigation the f b i is conducting criminal investigation the criminal investigation unit of the u a is investigating the state attorney general is investigating and the genesee county prosecutor where flint is located is doing a criminal investigation three people have been charged also just this week civil suit has been filed against three of the engineering firms that were involved in this switchover they've been hit with a civil suit that could end up in penalties of hundreds of millions of dollars for their role in the crisis so there is all rot of blame is now being affected and it's by no means over the state attorney general says would certainty that more criminal charges are coming and so the story is is far from over we made a full length documentary of forty five minute documentary and one of the people in it is clear i'm a clinton who i love claire you know she's she's just like s right claire just lays it out and we concluded that second documentary which is called here's to flint after the scene in this where all those officials are raising up their glasses of water saying here's to flint when they did the switch over the person who made the film with kate levy who's very talented filmmaker has a pretty ironic outlook on life and so she was pretty adamant that you know we had a car our documentary  flint we conclude that documentary with claire saying stay tune this story is not over yet they poisoned the wrong town and they did poison the wrong town the people of flint are incredibly resilient but it's also tragic i think that the water still not safe it's more than two years they've been poisoned they've been lied to their property values have been devastated i mean try selling a house in flint who's going to buy a house in a town where the water's poisoned right they've gone through all sorts of financial hardship they've gone through having to live on bottled water you know try try to you know existing on bottled water it's impossible to do in a way and all the guilt of you know knowing that your kids are going to be damaged i mean the damage of late is irreversible these kids are harmed for their lives and their suffering post traumatic stress they're having gone through  it's credibly tragic tragic really beyond words and it's still going on and it's kind of hard to talk about good things having come from a tragedy like that but you know the e p a was on the verge of relaxing its lead testing rules as a result of flint there's been one hundred eighty degree change in our looking at tighten them up and the as essex said in the introduction it's now on the radar all over the country people are asking questions and paying close attention to what's going on with their water they're finding lead in a lot of the water of a lot of schools they're testing so you know mark edwards told me one point is that the biggest concern is not having le your water the biggest concern is having lead near water and not known about it and when we held our of press conference in september fifteenth and told the people flint your water is not safe that was a major milestone and a major victory because really from that point on the people knew that there was lead in their water and it was not safe and so from that point on the poisoning of people was stopped and now throughout the country poison is being stopped so in that way it's it's a very heartening story but it's also a heart in story in that this happened because the people flint were relentless like nigeria said in the basement of that church last summer we're just here to find out the truth about what's in our water and that's one of the bottom line lessons that i hope people take away from this which is the importance of the truth and you know that's why i'm an investigative reporter that's what my job is is to try to help uncover and expose the truth and that's what the people of flint wanted to do which was to uncover and expose the truth and the one of the takeaway lessons from flint is what an incredibly powerful thing the truth is and i think as at that we first let me let me take you back a bit because we've all focused on the flint water story many of us when the national media finally got the story got a chance to see it but finding the flint water story wasn't what you were really after right  my know when i when i started my job the last thing in the world i imagined would be that i would be writing about the lead contamination of a city's water supply my job was to investigate and write about what was happening with the emergency manager law and what were the consequences of this law and what happens when you take democracy away from the people when i first start talking to flint one of the major concerns was the the cost of their water you know you saw one hundred fifty bucks a month for a family of four and you have to remember flint is in the heart of the great lakes you know the great lakes contain twenty percent of the world's fresh service water the largest surprise of fresh surface water in the world is the great lakes flints in the heart of it yet people could not afford to drink it because the problem is this aging infrastructure and having a poor population depleted population that cannot afford to maintain it and so you know all these issues were swirling around but you're right when i first are ri about this it was not set out to to write about the problem with flint the lead in the water but that's where the story took me that's i mean that's what journalists do right you sort of get on the trail and then you keep following the trail and that's where and that's where the trail led me was to write about the this lead issue the your reporting clearly uncovered that there was a very deliberate cover up when they made the switch did they know in advance the minute they made the switch that they were going to be endangering people or is that something that was just a mistake on their part that they did not feel they could correct no there they might i haven't seen anything to indicate it concerns about lead in the water but there were red flags about using the river and they knew how difficult it was going to be to treat and so they warned about the problems of contamination before hand which proved to be precint in because of the e coli problems and they also knew that there was a high likelihood because of that then there would also be problems associated with over chlorinated in the water in order to deal with the bacterial problems which is what caused the t th m problem so that was people within the m d e q a few of them raised that warning and advised against using the flint river because of that they knew that there was definitely the possibility that there were going to be significant problems with using the river also the head of the water treatment plant two weeks before the switchover wrote an e mail to the michigan department of environmental quality saying we are not prepared they were understaffed the staffed was not  adequately trained he said if you go ahead with the switch over in two weeks it's going to be over my objections because we are not prepared to do it but because they were in such a rush to start saving that money they went ahead anyhow and so you know did they know that they're going to lead poisoned people that hasn't been proved yet did they know that the plant was not ready to do the job yes did they know that there was a high likelihood that there was going to be a lot of problems associated with using the river yes did they sed decide to go ahead anyhow because it was more important for them to save money yes interesting that they were cavalier about the bacterial contamination that they may not have known about the lead contamination but dangerous bacteria that seem to be fine you know another problem we didn't get into this and talk about it was legionnaires disease twelve people have died from legionnaire's disease and that's a problem as well partly because you know the used to have all this industry influence it's no longer there so they have all these oversized  water delivery systems and which sits there for long periods of time and while it's sitting there the chlorine dissipates and when the chlorine dissipates that allows for more bacterial  contamination and there was an outbreak of legionnaires disease that the state was aware of that they never disclosed in the long documentary there's this really sort and drove up to flint to do onsite testing is going from house to house to house is not find in any chlorine in the water because part of what they did was they cut back on the use of chlorine in order to deal with a t t h m problem  and the the mom goes what about legionnaires disease is that it possible legionnaires disease for those of you who don't know it is very much like pneumonia and you know the mom goes you know because all four of my kids this summer had pneumonia and at the hospital they said you know kids get pneumonia in the summertime that's that's pretty much unheard is it is legionnaires disease a possibility and mark said yeah and then it turned out that there was the health department knew that there was a significant outbreak of legionnaires and never inform the public about it let's get to some of your questions and a couple of the first questions have to do with the same urgency management law how is it continue to be used has emergency management law been challenged under what authority is it in force any changes to the polls there is a challenge the a c l u of michigan is co counsel in a federal lawsuit that's challenging the constitutionality of this law that takes away the democracy from people but it's it's a difficult it's a difficult case because the state essentially cities and school districts are creatures of the state and so really the state could say this city no longer exists they can can abolish it but but if they were to do that you know those people would end up in another jurisdiction where they would have a right to elected representation what they're doing is the city continues to exist but they're taking away democracy and so there's there's good hope that eventually that they will be prevail but the states fight i'm tooth and nail to protect this law as a result of what happened in flint there's some discussion in legislature about modifying it making it less onerous but  you know it is you know we're nonpartizan organization but the just the fact is that the legislature is controlled by conservatives who are very much supportive of this law and so that's an uphill battle so as it stands now the law remains in place and there is really very little that can be done in terms of stopping it right now it's  on and you know one of the things that the way this law's been applied is that almost with i think one or two exceptions every city and school district that's been taken over by the state are majority african american and high poverty rates so this is very much a racial issue and very much a class issue can you expand on that because that's one of our questions here what role do you believe race played here well i mean it's just on its face it is being applied to cities that are majority african american  there were in the midst of doing a study right now and there is evidence that there were other cities that were majority white cities that met the criteria that they could have been taken  over but they weren't so that's that's one way that race plays a role and here's a here's another way as you know talking about race is a sensitive thing especially for a white person to be talking about race but i can tell you that one of the reasons that this law has been able to go the way it has is that there are a lot of people that live in the suburbs of detroit that are racist and they have the mindset is and i'm sorry if this is offensive but the the mindset is those people those people can't handle their own business right there either inept or or corrupt and so they justify in their mind having the state come in and take it over because of their racism that they believe that people of color are not capable of self government and that's a very difficult thing to say but i think that that is in my experience absolutely true unfortunately what if any progress has been made in retrofitting the flint water system replacing the damage lead service lines from the street to the house it's almost zero at this point so what are people doing they are either either using filtered water or drinking bottled water and if you are a parent of young children or the pregnant you're being instructed to just use bottled water although there are just as a study was done that showed that the filtered water is safe to use but the water itself is still not in compliance with federal regulations it's still lead levels are still too high so you know people are continuing to have to even though their pain is extraordinary cost for this water they're still not safe to drink so just to be clear people have to buy bottled water and they still have to pay their water bill yes yes yes although if so when the governor was can congress held hearings on and the governor said well people are going to get rebated a certain percentage of their water bills because you know we poison them for two years and so so what we did was we calculate d out like how much water is actually used for cooking and how much water is used for drinking as opposed to how much water is used for showering and how much water is used when you flush the toilet so you know we think that  based on all that and you know with a little leeway that people should be rebated sixty seven percent and i'm sitting there thinking jesus if they were to put half the effort into actually making sure the water was safe as they put  into like calculating down to the percentage point how much water is used when you're flush your toilet and decide that you're going to charge people for for that water you know that the city would have been much much better off that was one of the most you know more ludicrous parts of this whole story your story is a story the story you're telling is the story of a city that lost its democracy what do we need to do to keep our democracy you have to be engaged in it you know i often think man if it's people spent one tenth of the time that they spend paying attention to sports teams you know you can talk to people and they can tell you you know everybody's batting average and you know everything that's going on with the line of the seahawks and how things are going with the the defensive backfield or whatever and i thought you were going to bash the car dash you know democracy is not a spectator sport democracy is a participatory thing and i think that the fact that all you who are here tonight understand that and gauged but for we're paying a consequence of people not being engaged you know pain consequences of people who you know take their news from some source and don't go any deeper than that paying the consequences of not demanding more of your media and supporting media that is good work you know the other lesson and take away from this is the importance of investigative reporting you know the founding fathers  you know the founding fathers put freedom of the press in the first amendment for a reason because that that's the other leg that makes democracy work knowing that a free independent press is is there to  hold government accountable but you know people need to support news organizations or as it is now non profits that are doing good investigative work and so if you want to mock proceed to work you have to work at it hurt by it thank you very much thank you